Sink or Swim: thoughts on philosophies and dogmas

I think a lot about beliefs. Amd I enjoy talking about beliefs, especially with people whose beliefs are different than mine. Though they're often held up as opposites, I think that understanding belief is a vital part of the pursuit of truth.  When the Jahovas Witnesses come to my door, for example, I often ask questions like “How much of your beliefs come from the Bible and how much from a direct relationship with god?” or “Why do you feel that the Bible is an accurate representation of God’s word?”  I’m not as confrontational with these well-meaning folks as I used to be, but I do still like to ask what I see as the core, challenging questions. I think it's important for all of us to be clear on the roots of our beliefs, since those same beliefs cause so much of our biggest conflicts.

Through all of this thinking and such conversations, I have come, I think,  to a useful distinction between holding a philosophy and a dogma.  I find that many people hold dogmas, beliefs that they have inherited from some other, often written source.  Particularly in the case of text-based religions like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and even Buddhism in some cases, these beliefs never come from the text alone, but are further framed by the clergy of that religion, who select the passages they find most important and endorse a specific interpretation of those passages.  There are also the kind of folkloristic,  metatextual influences on religions that shape the way groups of people in certain places think about their religions.  (The common Christian notion of Mary Magdalen being a prostitute, for example, appears nowhere in the Bible.)  The point here is that a dogma is a relatively fixed and rigid set of beliefs that people hold to that are based more on obedience to an authority than independent thought, whether that authority is a priest, imam, rabbi, a parent or even a book.

Conversely, a philosophy is a belief system that a person comes to from their own logic or experience (usually both).  While a philosophy can still be rigid, depending on how much of the person’s identity has been formed around it, it is inherently more flexible because it is based on personal values, perceptions and conclusions.  It is idiosyncratic, subjective and therefore something that can be discussed and argued.  Where dogmas tend to be mooring posts that people cling to in the stormy seas of doubt, fear and intellectual laziness, personal philosophies tend to be skills and practices that people develop that allows them to tread water, or even swim, on their own.  Though I understand the need many feel for dogmas, since it is far easier and seemingly safer to let others in authority do the thinking for us, I clearly favor philosophy as an ideological construct by which we steer our lives.  Not only do dogmas require us to abdicate our own critical thinking, they anchor us to a fixed line of belief that may be and probably is wrong. And when the seas of changing knowledge rise, as they always do, I would rather be free to swim than stuck to a dogmatic mooring post and sink.

Democracy and Education: the Inextricable Bond

As an American, I often ponder over the nature of democracy.  As a student of history, philosophy and theories of politics, I regularly find myself coming back to central questions like "What is the essential purpose of government?"  This question I find ever more pressing in the current age of complex nations and massive populations of people with apparently competing interests (perceived conflicts like that between environmental security and easily accessible employment come to mind).  As I write this, on the anniversary of the birth of my nation, of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, that great testimony to progressive ideals, I find myself in Athens, where ideals of democracy (demokratia) began to take root.

Human history is characterized, across many national and cultural boundaries, by the fundamental question of whether people are (or can be) responsible, clear-minded and wise enough to govern themselves, or whether we need an ostensibly wiser, more responsible, more clear-headed ruler to tell us what to do so we don't destroy ourselves.  In the Republic, for example, Plato argued that the ideal republic is led by a "philosopher king," wise, beneficent and well-educated, but with clear authority,.

Underneath this question are of course other questions like "Is there a population or geographic size limit that affects how efficiently people can govern themselves?"  Or "Do we need to create fail safes to guard against rash decisions on the part of a general public which may not be privy to all of the facts or potential consequences of one course of action or another?"  (This consideration, by the way, was exactly what led the Founders of the US to include the Electoral College into our otherwise democratic process of choosing a President: the fear that a poorly informed public might choose an unqualified candidate out of sheer popularity-- the process which this past November achieved precisely that result, ironically).  So even the Founders of the United States, which is so often heralded (mainly by us, recently) as the paragon of Democracy and Individual Liberty, had some reservations about the extent to which the general public could govern themselves.  They did, after all, refer to the enterprise of founding a nation based on the will of the people as an "Experiment."  At least, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are both cited as having referred to their new Republic as experimental.  Let's also leave off the table for now the obvious caveat that they excluded women and non-whites and non land-owning whites in the parameters for this experiment.  The point here is that it was a work in progress and there was some faith that the essential ingredients were being put in place to form a "more perfect union."

And this brings me to my central question here:  Where the hell ARE we with this experiment, exactly?

I see our Congress members embroiled in cronyism and bought off at unprecedented rates by private interests (thanks to a Citizens United decision that has Divided Citizens from the governmental process like never before.)

I see an electorate that is easily convinced by patently fabricated news stories to accept as fact anything that reinforces our pre-existing prejudices.  (What? Not me...)

I see an increasingly rigid set of cultural and political identities that allow people a deep and dangerous kind of self-righteousness, creating a kind of Football Team party loyalty.  The level of dialogue concerning the real issues-- and more importantly our common values-- degrades rapidly when the conversation becomes "My team is better than your team."

So what are the solutions to these deep issues?  What are the saving graces of democracy that might yet make the experiment result in that more perfect union?  If you ask me, it comes down to education.

In 1820, in a letter to William Jarvis, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"I know no safe depositary[sic] of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education."

A democratic institution, even an imperfect democratic republic, is only as good as the education of the people who choose their representatives.  In an earlier letter in 1805, he went further to say: "I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree." It is thus more critical than ever that we double our best efforts to offer ourselves an education that is real, critical-thinking, culturally inclusive, which requires funding and in which trust in our teachers and accountability for good practices are not mutually exclusive. I would also suggest a couple specific subject areas that are not included nearly enough in the regular curriculum:

1)  Conflict Resolution:  we must deepen our ability to have dialogue about the ideas we disagree on, without storming off or unfriending each other or beating the crap out of each other (or worse).  This requires a fair amount of humility, by the way, to hold to a curiosity in order to understand a different point of view rather than immediately trying to defend our own position.
2)  Media Literacy: we must develop better skills for critically examining who is trying to convince us of what and why, and which assumptions we might be starting from.
3)  Social and Environmental Justice:  we don't all have access to the same resources, we don't play on a level field, and some groups haven't even been able to get into the ball park.  But if Truth and Justice really are the American Way, then we need to be scathingly honest with ourselves about our own biases and work toward real justice for all.  Did I mention humility?
4)  Service Learning:  service to a cause greater than ourselves is so often held up as one of the great character-building benefits of military service, and I think it can also be applied to many more peaceful kinds of service to our larger world.
5)  Travel:  nothing gives us a clearer perspective of where we come from than to travel some distance away from it and look back.  To see that people think differently from us, and are still people.  Our ways are not the only ways.  These insights don't have to be threatening, but they can help us to refine what is good about our own customs, and throw away the things that aren't working.

Lastly, I will say this, on this 4th of July:  I love my country (and by that I mean the land and my other relatives living on it), and I choose to continue to believe, against any odds, that the great Democratic-Republican experiment can some day become what it set out to be.  But if perchance it doesn't, I'm also a citizen of the world.  And so, at last, are you.

Rainbows and Bathwater

maintaining old metaphysics in a new world

In the human apprehension of the world, there are many layers, many membranes through which the raw information is processed, categorized, contextualized and judged for value, that by the time we as humans perceive anything at all—be it the visual image of a tree, an unfamiliar sound in the darkness of the night, the intentions of another being—the information itself may indeed hardly be considered the same.  It is for this reason that philosophers through the ages, from Plato to even Baudrillard, have urged us to use reason to temper our perceptions.  And yet, as Baudrillard has argued most recently, we have become so enraptured by our illusions in the modern world that those illusions have come to contain as much reality as any reality that may (or may not) be objectively provable.

In that same vein, I assert that our eye is as much the projector of reality as it is the perceiver of it (as long as we include within our definition of reality the beliefs, opinions and perspectives of others) and in such case we must conclude that reality is not a static but a co-created artifact. 

I have argued elsewhere for a model of the universe that includes five dimensions (the 3 dimensions of physical space, the 4^th dimension of Time, and the 5^th dimension of Consciousness), and I wish to offer here some further texture to that model, as well as some anticipation of resistance from what I like to call the Cult of Rational Nihilism—that modern edifice of positivism, that has been born of the scientific paradigm and has come to dominate Academia.  I call it a cult because it bears at its root a metaphysical assumption that if a thing cannot be explained by reason and replicated in a lab it cannot possibly exist.  This is perhaps a misperception or even a prejudice of mine, but more and more I find within the halls of the Ivory Palace that the requirement for externalized evidence and replicability, the foundations of good science, which are perfectly appropriate within that field, have become the judiciary even for fields which attempt to reach beyond the physical world.  Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, I might quote, and thus the innate human desire to exceed our previous bounds of perception becomes sicklied o’er with presumptions of a void that may be filled with new worlds.

And here, then, is the point I wish to make: in the post-Enlightenment world, in which the dangerous fundamentalisms of religion have terrified most reasonable folks, in which the pragmatism of science has provided us with such profound and luxurious command over our immediate physical surroundings, we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, and are busily forsaking the magnificent potential to bridge the two.  Religion—at least the mystical religions I have always held the most fondness for—explores the deeper senses of the human being in an effort to better perceive firsthand the subtler forces of cause and effect that work through the interstitial space between particles, as it were.  Religion is fundamentally unprovable because it relies upon idiosyncratic experience.  For instance, I could tell you that god speaks to me all the time, and she generally does so with the voice of a Southern Black Grandma.  I could tell you that I have had visions in shamanic journeys that have led me directly to resources in the waking world and to answers for some of my most challenging puzzles.  I could describe in great detail the vast worlds that unfold in my inner universe (and yours) and the numinous blanket of loving presence that exists there.  But if you have not experienced that reality yourself, it is quite easy and reasonable for you to say that it does not exist.  You could describe a rainbow to me in great detail, but if I have always been blind, it would be quite simple for me to argue that the whole thing is your imagination. 

But I ask you this: what is the imagination in the first place?  We often think of the imaginary as the opposite of the real.  And yet, just as Plato argued so long ago, the world of Ideas is the very source for so much of what is now real, if not all of it.  This paper that I am writing now.  It has existed only in my mind, in my imagination, you might say, up until this very moment.  And yet, does the simple act of transcribing my thoughts into digital form that you can then read and share in—does that act confer upon this treatise more reality than it had before?  Or does it simply change the nature of its reality, bringing it to a lower branch upon the Kabbalistic Tree of Life from crown toward kingdom?  In the mystical traditions, there has never been any doubt that the Imagination, the realm of Kether, the world of Platonic Forms, inheres to its own brand of Reality.  The Aboriginal Australians even go so far as to say that the Dream world is the real world, and the waking world the Dream and how can you contradict this assertion without making a metaphysical claim?  Many eyes have gazed upon this rainbow, and describe it in such similar terms, and yet the blind continue to refuse even to humor an attempt to explain.

Perhaps in my blindness, I could be convinced that rainbows do in fact exist if enough people tell me about and describe them in similar, replicable ways, or offer me a reasonable explanation for the refraction of the light spectrum through water.  But only because I am willing to remain open to considering such possibilities.  In other words, only because my inner universe is receptive to the perspectives of others am I able to use the scientific method well.

This then, is my final conclusion:  The Cult of Rational Nihilism has its place in the pantheon of Earthly religions. Science is a profoundly important and useful tool and it has enabled us to cast off at least in theory the old gods of Dogma and Religious Imperialism.  But I hold that consciousness, the experience of being aware, is a dimension unto itself.  It is an a-priori, already-existing universe that we, as conscious beings can access, but only idiosyncratically, only by peering back behind our own eyes.  And because of this fundamental nature, it is inherently unmeasurable and (at least superficially) unreplicable and therefore represents an entire sector of the cosmos that is by definition unapprehendable by science.  There are of course practical dangers in drafting public policy according to idiosyncratic experience.  We have to let the old gods remain dead.  If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him, say the Buddhists.  If I try to convince you that Jesus was white and he told me personally that white supremacy is god’s plan for humanity, please feel free to shoot me.    However, there is a baby in that bathwater.  There is a conscious spirit that animates each of us, and it is participating in a vast universe that is knowable, but not in the rational, replicable ways of knowing.  We must turn our backs to that bathwater raining down, turn our faces again to the Sun of our imagination, and a rainbow awaits. 

Mater Sancta

Imagine Darkness.

Utter, tangible, swaddling Darkness.

Perhaps there was an Otherplace before (I believe); perhaps not. 
Perhaps that darkness is salted with memories that out-bubbled 
Cerridwen’s Cauldron, outswam the currents of Lethe.

But even so at best those images lost their light
and swim now in a Darkness that rushes on ears not yet formed
but listening, always listening.  And out of that Darkness,
the first sound of a lifetime, a sound not heard but felt…

Thum-thump.  Thum-thump.  Thum-thump.

It’s a cadence that you’ll match your deepest rhythms to,
the master metronome for the symphony that is to be a Life. 

Sacred Texts have told us much about the Father, about hands that shaped clay and into it breathed life, about a bearded mouth that smiled for It Was Good.  And blessed be the fathers, for their gritty hands have hewn out homes from solid rock and chiseled language on Eternity.  But slowly, surely, as trembling and determined as a foal’s first steps, we’re remembering the Sacred Space that circles Holy Mother, Mater Sancta  For when we look for clay, we find it not in books but in the Earth, and not so deep that our spades raise blisters on hands that seek the stuff of life.  And while the sperm may offer sparks, the stem-cell clay that forms our Form is fashioned by maternal hands.  

Blessed be the mothers, for they are the Shapers of the Future.

Imagine Darkness.

Warm, inviting darkness—not the darkness of oblivion, for that is cold and empty as Terror.  Imagine the darkness of becoming, the darkness that fills a kettle before the water spills in to brim it.  The darkness of a cave where bears and groundhogs sleep.  The darkness of the Womb.

And in that darkness drums a drum, thum-thumping a rhythm of comfort and love, making promises whispered and sung.  In the darkness hums a Voice.  A voice that explains, from the earliest inklings of Knowing, in the sturdiest depths of Foundation, that you are not alone.  Before the world is round, or gravity found, before hot is ouch or milk is yum, there is “You are not alone.”

And that is Everything.

Blessed be the mothers, for they are the Hummers of the Sacred Truth.

Blessed be the mothers, for they are the Voices in the Darkness of Becoming.

Blessed be the mothers

Darren Reiley, 2004.

Particles and Waves, Stars and Galaxies, Forests and Trees

If you've read any of my posts on this site before, you have heard me harp on the notion of Identity.  While I feel inclined to apologize for repeating myself, I feel equally impelled to keep harping.  I am convinced that looking closely at our notions of Identity is a crucial step forward from this tribalist, nationalist, whatever-ist quagmire we seem stuck in.  Today, however, I have a slightly different chord to play as I harp on the issue.

The old idiom that accuses us of "not being able to see the forest for the trees" is a good one.  And I ask you to consider its meaning for a moment.

For long stretches in the history of human consciousness, people have been stuck in particularity—in focusing on the small disparate particles, rather than the whole.  Instead of looking at the vast network of connections between us, people often choose to look more often at separateness.  In measuring time, for example, we tend to focus at hours and minutes and markers, like ticks on a clock, rather than a seamless wave of interwoven cause and consequence.  

In social relations, people often focus only on those who participate in the same social group identity, whether that be race, religion, political affiliation, township, sports team, neighborhood or nation.  The particle (the small self) is easier to perceive, and therefore it dominates the viewpoint.  In medicine, chemistry and physics, scientists have attempted to understand the whole by understanding the constituent parts, and so they have broken down the fundamental relationships between all that is into tissues and then cells and then nucleotides, molecules and then atoms and then particles.  And meanwhile, the whole of the greater system is often ignored.  (Quantum Theory gives us a beautiful opportunity to reconcile this, though, with its clear demonstration that at the sub-amotic level, particles are indistinguishable from waves.) 

But the issue, of course, is that we cannot understand the whole by looking at the parts alone for a number of reasons.  First, the most obvious, that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.  We cannot understand the spirit of a dog companion, the value of its friendship, the relationships that it has with others, by chopping it up and studying its organs and hormones, or even its DNA-- not completely.  We cannot understand the mysteries of human consciousness by looking at individual neurons in the brain as if they were stars in a constellation-- we can't even say for certain that consciousness exists in the brain.

Particularity is a fact of reality, no question: the things of the world are made of smaller constituent parts,  but allowing one’s consciousness to become limited by those smaller parts is incredibly dangerous, both metaphysically and socially, especially as long as humans continue to keep their sense of identity small.  If we only identify with the particular groups that share obvious traits with us, our perception becomes stunted, we create conflict with or even vilify the Other, but worse, we become so focused on the individual pixels that we cannot see with resolution the vast spiral galaxy of our shared life together.