Thank-You Card

I met a therapist at a convention I had given a presentation about military culture. Recently we spent a few hours in a cafe discussing points about military culture and barriers to healing. I loved it, a chance to discuss ideas and hopefully shed some light on some of our inner struggles we veterans sometimes face when undergoing therapy. Recently I got a ‘thank you’ note in the mail which prompted a reply.

Thank you for the card. I thought I would share my feelings in hopes that it aids with your client.

I read, somewhere, of a positive psychologist who kept all the thank you cards he received and had them on a wall. When that person had feelings of sadness and alienation and doubt about his self, looking over the cards bore witness to the actions that he’d done that showed otherwise. I started keeping the little cards and such, here and there, that I’ve gotten from the many wonderful people that I’ve interacted with. There are times when I catch myself, too, thinking I’ve done nothing and where I have made no contribution and that if I were gone, the world wouldn’t notice. I remember, once in therapy, when my therapist/guide/friend told me that if I were to cease to be, the world would feel it, even if it didn’t know the source of its pain. At that time I found that hard to hear.

I deflect recognition. Whether it is ‘good job’ or ‘you made a valuable contribution’, I find a way to deflect it from me. I point out the contributions of others, I diminish what I’ve done, I change topics. Not that this is all bad, for contrary to Nietzsche, I believe a dose of humility to be good for the soul and the community. Yet within the ‘selfless service’ that is found among the values of our military can hide the parasite of ‘self defeatism’. What is it like to go through life where we are, at our core, ‘unworthy’?

And so it is that I contemplated these things while listening to the rain patter my roof and watched young black-tailed deer at play outside. I can hear the words of my therapist/guide/friend tell me ‘lets sit with this emotion, without judgment, for a moment’. Sitting still, finding center, looking inward… fortunately I have strong tendencies of introversion for there is a great amount of me that drives outward, looks beyond me, and then is in shock and denial when my blood pressure is constantly high.

There was once a veteran that I had regular dealings with in helping him with his PTSD and emotional control. He saw my beads around my wrist and he made a joke about them, pointing to them, asking me what they were about. I told him that they were my centering beads. I will go from bead to bead, focusing on a breath, and telling myself a mantra. He asked about the mantra and I told him it was little phrases like “I am a good person” and “I love”. He looked at me with a curious expression on his face, almost laughing, and said it sounded like some ‘fluffy bunny stuff’ to him and I readily agreed. It was. I told him that our military culture is filled with violence, whether through action, voice, language, or tone. It needs to be on good terms with violence because we must sometimes do violence. But I cannot live my life on one end of the spectrum. I want to be in the middle, so I do some obviously ‘fluffy bunny’ stuff from the far other side in order to bring me back to the middle. He was intrigued and asked me where I got my beads. I told him that I bought the supplies at a bead shop and that I made them.

All of this crossed my mind while I gazed upon the thank-you card you had sent me for something I am so readily and easily able to dismiss as my doing something that is part of the mission to help others. And if one were to draw attention to the last part of the statement, ‘to help others’, as indicative of my character it is received as a blast of light that is too bright and I must withdraw from it.

We are tragic heroes in that at the drop of a pin we are there, ready to sacrifice ourselves for others, and we’ll do so with the ferocity that fills others with discomfort and sometimes hate. When working with the veteran, what ‘hurts’ is good, because only good people feel bad for doing bad things. We cannot let go of any guilt, real or unreal, because it is the only true witness of what we are. Civilians haven’t walked our streets and don’t have the same moral compass, in our minds cannot pass judgment or excuse from blame. So we hold on to our guilt. Using this same approach, that drive of penance, is powerful. For love has many sides to it, among them is ‘duty’ and duty has, in our mind, a component of hardship and pain in it. Therefore if it is painful to do, it is more appealing to us at a deep level. Therapy is painful, but in the light of penance it is sacred to us, our souls fill with meaning. Without this it is symptomatic of our weakness and mortality.

Thank you so much for the card. I am pulling for the veteran’s healing.

The fox, the dog, and the chicken.

fox and chicken on Etsy.com

The quick fox jumped over the lazy dog. However the poor thing misjudged his leap and landed on top of a chicken. The chicken, in its panic, began squawking and carrying on. It ran around in circles, flapping its wings, and the fox hung on for dear life. The dog, meanwhile, pulled out his mobile device and started recording and laughing. The Fox was not very happy and he grabbed the chicken’s neck to maintain balance. With the fox’s paws hanging on around its neck, the chicken could not breath very well in its excited state and it soon collapsed with the fox on top of it. The dog posted the video on YouTube and updated his FaceBook status while the fox stood up and looked down in horror at the still form of the chicken.

‘Get up’ he said, nudging the chicken with his paw. There was nothing from the chicken. The dog was busy typing in a Twitter update when he looked up and saw the look of worry on the fox’s face. ‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘The chicken’, the fox gulped, ‘I think its dead’. ‘I never liked that bird anyway’, said the dog. ‘Always running around and pecking at other people’s business. Kept getting out in the road, going back and forth, back and forth. Do you know how hard it is to try to keep a chicken in the yard?’ he asked. Just then his phone beeped with a Facebook update. It seems that rabbit thought the video was funny and gave it a resounding ‘lol’. The fox, however, was still worried and starting to grow more and more anxious. His fur started to itch and his tongue came out of his mouth (foxes can’t sweat and have to loll their tongues).

The dog continued his rant. ‘Why is it that people automatically assume dogs to be gaurdians of things? I mean, seriously! Whenever something goes wrong, who do they yell at?’ he paused for some unknown observer to chime in with likewise righteous indignation. After recieving none the dog continued ‘US!’ and poked his paw into his chest. ‘Why, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a bad sort. I try to play along, do the good deed, and so forth. If I have to save one more kid from some forgotten well then so help me…’ he growled. ‘I mean, how hard is it to mark your territory? If you dig a well, mark the nearest bush!’ he said with outstretched arms. ‘But nooooo, humans are always losing track of their wells and their little offspring. It is a wonder they are still on the planet and haven’t been eaten out of existence.’

The fox had stopped listening to the dog, who had started onto one of his sermons about justice and inequality. He had continued to stare at the still form of the chicken, hoping for a miracle.

In all truth the fox could not remember the last time he ate a chicken. Indeed he was struggling to remember exactly what it tasted like. He was sure that there was something that chicken tasted like, though he couldn’t remember. Eggs, however, were indeed a different story and the fox loved chicken eggs. He would, truth be told, steal into the chicken coop to procure an egg or two for his breakfast. He was, after all, training for a race with a tortoise. Normally he wouldn’t consider training for a race with the tortoise but since the unlikely defeat of the rabbit in the Tour de Forest last Spring, the fox didn’t think that he’d underestimate the tortoise who obviously had some secret he was keeping hidden from his competitors.

The chicken was still not moving and the dog had started pacing in circles now, throwing out exclamations of this and that in his excitement. The fox’s thoughts turned back to the chicken’s unmoving form in the dirt before him. What to do? He was unsure. Could he get rid of the evidence? He did know where some forgotten wells were. He could easily dump the chicken down a well. But that wouldn’t last for long because it was summer time and that meant visits from other children. With an increase in the number of children also meant an increase in the number of lost children in wells. It was only a matter of time until the chicken would be found. Yet why do anything at all? No matter where the chicken was hidden, whether it was discovered or not, the fox was sure to be the first to be blamed for the missing chicken and they’d come after him with their bugles and beagles. What annoyed him the most was that the beagles ran around yelling ‘hey foxy foxy foxy, we’re gonna give you a haircut’. The fox didn’t like those uptown beagles who lounged about in their country club estate, eating the best food and keeping warm, only to come out to the real country whenever a fox hunt was on. Nope. The fox thought and thought, what to do with the chicken.

Just then a door shut behind the house. The farmer’s wife must be on her way to feed the chickens. The fox quickly wondered where the other chickens were at during all of this? No matter, for the farmer’s wife was walking toward the coop, her singing was growing louder and louder as she got nearer. The fox looked over at the dog and said ‘you are absolutely right! It is an injustice the conditions of the working dog!’ The dog, goaded by a the fox, erupted into a high frenzy. He moved around and stamped his paw and moved his arms in wild abandon, all while detailing the oppression of the working dog and the injustice of having to wear stupid holiday outfits. Already having a condition of excessive saliva, the dog’s excited state caused even more saliva to run and soon his entire mouth was a foamy mess and it dripped down his front onto his chest. It got everywhere. There were spit trails in the dirt and on the chicken. The fox, quietly slipping behind some farm equipment, gave another ‘power to the dogs!’ and disappeared. The dog was spurred on even further and started howling. Just then farmer’s wife came around the barn corner and stood facing the spectacle of the dog, covered in spit and with frothy mouth, howling and barking and standing over the unmoving body of the chicken.

The fox, however, was nowhere to be seen.

Rambling thoughts in the morning

It is a rough thing being there for someone who wants to kill themselves.  I feel lost, like I am trying to be the lawyer to their prosecuting attack, offering up the excuses for why a life should live, and which ever side has the most rational argument it will sway the judge and jury.  But there is a flaw in this, and that is that the thinking that is involved in suicidal thoughts are not a rational lawyers thoughts.  Perhaps I shouldn’t say that, for I don’t know any lawyers and why should I ascribe superhuman rationality to a group while the rest of us struggle with our human nature?  Still, I am impressed by the thinking that goes on in Supreme Court hot seats.  I LOVE listening to that stuff on the radio, with the thoughts and arguments and counter arguments.  But back to my earlier thought.  I am a thinker and I love to connect ideas, find those hidden trails between thoughts.  To one thinker I am mad for trying to connect Spinoza with Aristotle.  They say that if I try to do this then I am an idiot and do not understand either.  Very good point.  And were I to seek to claim that they share something in common, perhaps I would be, or not, depending on what I sought to prove and my evidence for/against it.  However I am not so much concerned with that.  I do not really wish to be a Spinoza or Aristotle scholar, able to tell every nuance of those great thinker’s thoughts and ideas.  While it may be true that a thinker outlines a system via a series of definitions and conditions and so forth, much like a cooking recipe, and one can spend much time learning that recipe, I am interested in the cluster of… what is the word… its quality… its general feel.  My mind is not allowing the appropriate word to surface from the murky depths.  But in a recipe a person of skill adds various things to achieve effects, and ze is mindful of the way that they all work together, like cinnamon and ginger, and so forth.  It might be said that one should only use a 1/2 cup of sugar on something, but perhaps another person like sugar more/less.  There are things you can change that will change the item’s tastes, just as there are thing you can change that will change its alchemy, how the pieces fit together or not, where a subtle change in one of those items will change the recipe all together.  A bread will not rise, a crust will not bind, and so forth.  They are the building blocks of the recipe and have different rules for change than one’s for taste.  That is how I view philosophers.  Perhaps a philosopher might like to view zer system as a recipe for reality or truth or Truth or whatever, where every piece is a finely tuned support beam in the whole.  Yet I’ve not found it as such.  My problem has been, in the past and still today, in treating everything within a system as a structural component, when it isn’t.  What is more is that if one were to read Aristotle and think of everything as a support system to zis argument as the whole, then one mistake or falsehood could bring the entire thing down.  And we’d lose out on so much by doing so.  It is like finding out that mint causes acne (it doesn’t to my knowledge) and so we toss out the Mojito drink recipe without looking at the 2 parts strong, 1 part sweet, 1 part sour ratio to classic cocktails.  Ah… there is the hummingbird now.  Ruby-Throated hummingbird male.  So in philosophy I look for the structural parts and do they work with other system structures.  For example, three philosophers that I admire do not seem to work together at all, and yet I keep them in my heart.  They are Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Spinoza.  They don’t seem to fit together at all, are at times used as polar opposites of each other, and so on.  On disciple of Kant called me nuts in a discussion board because I cited that I liked those three.  But I’ll explain it this way… I love music.  Many days I am of such a monkey brain that my attention is in a variety of places, my mood has been shifted by the dominating thoughts of the day, usually of a pessimistic nature, and my automatic reflexes have kept me on the edge of the whirlwind, for example there has been a recent study that shows that checking one’s Facebook brings out reward responce in the brain.  I’ve not read the study, but reading the headline alone got enough questions going into my mind and shifted the spotlight internally for a bit.  I’ve monitored myself when I check facebook or some other thing.  Last night I watched myself with amusement and wonder while I pulled out my phone as I was walking between the refridgerator and the computer and checked facebook.  It was easy to rationalize, the Mississippi State game was nearly over and I wanted to see what sort of trash talk the Bulldog fans were talking.  The program has been lousy for a while and I liked seeing them make improvements in recent years.  If I had stayed in Mississippi after high school I would have wanted to go to Mississippi State.  I almost moved back to Mississippi ten years ago as I missed my nephews very much and I was looking at Ole Miss as a college to finish up at.  Its proximity to Memphis and some more woodsy outdoors was a draw to me.  I prefer North Mississippi to Southern portion, geologically speaking.  I noted, as I pulled out the phone and checked on the status, what I was feeling and so on.  It was a small twinge of pleasure, just enough.  it doesn’t take much to reward.  This is something that is much overlooked by many, and I often forget, the importance of rewards.  I knew a person who gave herself rewards for doing things.  At the time I scoffed, a warning sign, for whenver I scoff it us usually because of some ignorance on my part or a failure at thinking with as clear a mind as I could.  But I told her that it seemed a matter of… ding… email went off again… it seemed a matter of discipline.  If you need to do it, just do it.  If you want to buy that book, just buy it.  If you need to control something in your life, then do it.  I see now how grossly wrong I was at the time and in my training for three marathons in the past I noticed how sometimes it was the little things that got my unmotivated butt out the door on a run.  I used all manner of tricks before and during a run to make it happen.  But back to my thought, I like music and on those rare times when my brain is able to listen I can do so.  I can listen to opera, bluegrass, hip hop, jazz, new age, funk, metal, and others and find something appealing in it.  There are people who look down on a genre of music, hyping there own as the best genre, and they make passionate defense of their position.  Yet in looking at the basic building blocks of music, of what connects the different genres together, for there are far more in common than there is not in common, I can appreciate them.  This is no special gift that I have, millions of people do this.  And classifying certain types of music, the difficulty of doing so, is a testiment to this other approach.  Wanting my music organized on iTunes I’ve created groupings and genres and subsets, and this, for the most part, allows me to narrow in on a group of music that might not be normally classified together but for which fit a certain mood I want to listen to in the moment.  Some music is more difficult than others to classify and I’ve read internet debates on where Enigma, for example, goes.  Are they new age? World Beat?  What?  The interesting things happen on the fringes, on the borders, where two genres come into contact.  Example, AfroCelt Soundsystem, a blend of African and Celtic music.  Miles Davis might be Bebop Jazz, until you listen to some of his other recordings and then you hear Acid Jazz and so on.  Yet Miles was looking for ‘truth in one note’ and that truth is a matter of the note’s context, of the notes around it, before it, after it.  Whether it is bebop or acid, it is Miles.

Dream

This morning I got up at 04:00 so that I could drive to Portland to attend a suicidality conference.   I rarely remember the dreams that I have.  This morning I had one that was filled with lots of emotion.

The dream was set somewhere in the East.  It could have been Thailand or China… I am unsure.  The countryside was a forest of giant bamboo.  I was in a stilt house, up in the bamboo, with a friend, a woman.  I do not remember the beginning the dream, I have the feeling that I am forgetting some important aspect, yet what I can recall now, sixteen hours later, is that this woman friend and I were fighting another couple.  The couple was a native of the country that we were in.  I cannot describe much more of them than this.  We were fighting the other couple, woman versus woman, man versus man.  My fight had moved around the room and up onto the straw roof.  The other man had a long spear and threw it at me.  I managed to duck and to return a killing blow upon him.  This freed me up to go downstairs where the other fight was still carrying on.

When I re-entered the room below the woman adversarie looked at me.  She knew that her partner was dead by my hand and she dropped her weapon, overcome with grief.  I don’t remember if she explained it to me, but somehow I knew her fear in the dream.  Her fear was that the soul of her mate would wander the earth as a lost spirit, tormented, unless it could be guided to the next plane.  With a look of worry, fear, and deep sadness she begged me to kill her so that she could be that guide for her beloved.

Instantly I felt her pain.  I was so overcome with sadness and shame at the action that I had done that I leapt to the ground and grabbed her feet, begging for forgiveness for what I had done.

I awoke.  In therapy we ask people to try to localize their emotions in their body, to describe the sensations they feel in their stomach, their arms, their legs.  What does joy feel like?  Guilt?  Sorrow?  I awoke in my bed, in the dark, and I felt a heaviness as though I were filled with sand, an entanglement as though all of me were tied in knots.  I was dense and lethargic and it seemed as though my very blood had stopped its flow.  Lying in the bed I felt a very deep sense of grief, loss, sorrow, and guilt.  And I cherished the rich emotion.

What this dream means I do not know.  It isn’t a theme that has been coming up for me lately.  It seems as though it is random from out of the blue.  Yet it was surprisingly coherent and quite powerful in its emotional strength.  It was nice that I had this on Mabon, the Autumn Equinox.  Perhaps there is something there in the mythology when the Oak King dies, when Persephone returns to the Underworld.  I do not know.  But I am grateful for both the rare, remembered dream, and the feeling heart that felt the grief and pain.

My attack on Christians… unless you are one.

What defines a Christian?  Are you one?  Take a moment right now and jot down a sentence or two, or simply gather some thoughts what this means to you.  Done yet?  For many the answer is the party line “I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my savior”.  This common answer is shortcoming.  What does it mean?

I was raised in the ‘Bible Belt’ and was sent to a variety of Christian summer camps, bible schools, and attended some churches.  The ‘Protestant work ethic’ was prevalent in the culture that I was submerged in.  I did not know any Catholics or Jews or Muslims.  And I certainly did not know any Atheists or any other religious followers such as Hindu, Shinto, Taoist, Buddhist, or Pagan.  Anything other than the variety of Protestants around me in Southern Arkansas in the 70’s and 80’s was completely unknown.  It never made the news, radio, t.v., and were only featured comically in the odd movie (For example Hare Krishna’s in the movie Airplane).  This near total immersion in this Protestant culture, whether Pentecostal or Baptist or Methodist, helped to permeate another belief system of a fear of a place called Hell.  The only church services that I can remember are those that played upon fears of the unknown, the hereafter, and Hell.

During my deployment to Desert Storm I saw a culture that was also totally immersed within a religion, only this time it was Islam.  The parallels were striking to my young mind.  I had always been looking for that deeper connection with the Source, Creator, God, whatever… and seeing this Islamic culture helped me get through the notion that perhaps our views on God were cultural.  I could see that if you take ANY fervent believer in Christianity in America and have that person born in the Arab world, chances are that they would have grown up a fervent Muslim.  This is not a claim against the beliefs of the religions, just illustrating the incredible gravitational pull of a culture’s total immersion within a religion.

I eventually found myself able to rid my mind of the shackles of the hellfire and brimstone fears.  It has been two decades and I am free of the abusive manipulation of a belief in Hell.  The Bible is not a singular document, or a single book as we tend to think of one.  That is to say that it is not a book where a single author started to tell a story from start to finish.  It is filled with a very large number of not just inconsistencies but also outright contradictions.  It is, simply put, a collection of writings by a variety of people in a time when the great majority of the planet was illiterate (including the authors of some of the books of the Bible) and stories were passed down orally.  In the first hundred to two hundred years of the Christian history almost all Christians were illiterate and, in the Roman Empire, met in houses and did not own any of the texts that would become the Bible at all and relied on orally transmitted stories and passages.  The Christians were, at first, another offshoot of the Jews, which had several where some would consider themselves ‘more holy and devout’ than others and disagreements were rampant.  The Christians, however, began to consider themselves NOT Jewish at all.  A variety of beliefs and interpretations concerning the Christian cosmology were growing here and there, some at odds with others, and there would be large fights between the sects.  Riots would break out at times and the Roman Army would step in to quell the fighting.  Diocletian, one of the last Roman Emperors, had gotten tired of the Christians always fighting, meeting in groups, and their refusal to follow Roman custom of the Imperial Cult, along with simply being good neighbor to other religious temples as the Christians tended to decry other religions as false and evil.  Not good for civic peace and stability, so he regularly sent in the troops and proclaimed Christianity illegal.  Dying as a martyr was an instant way to Heaven and Christians were subjecting themselves to such a fate at alarming rates.  So much so that many ‘Bishops’ (a term for a wealthy Christian who had a lot of pull, the Roman Catholics were not in power as of yet) started to spread a new belief that trumped the martyr belief, lest the fledgling religion lose all of its followers and die out.

It wasn’t until Constantine, the celebrated first Christian Emperor (though he was more a Pagan that was playing a political game than a ‘believer’) called a council of all the Bishops and others around the Roman world.  There they would hash out their beliefs, as some believed in the divinity of Mary, others did not, some that Jesus was God, others that he was a prophet, some that there were 3 aspects of God, others that there were 1, others that there were infinite, some that we had sin, others that we didn’t, and so on.  Simply put, there was simply NO consistency in Christian belief in the slightest from the very beginning at all.  Constantine, tired of all of the fighting and failure to agree at the council, finally put down his foot and said “This is how it’s going to be” (I’m paraphrasing) and the documents that were gathered at the time for the Bible were in, those that were not on the table were out.  There are versions of the Bible that have entirely different and extra books added to it, a fact that was interesting to me when I first discovered this as I was raised with only the King James Version (itself a re-write in a very, very long line of re-writes).  It seems as if this contradictory history of Christianity, and the irregularities within the Bible, help to foster a strong reaction in many Christians.  To better understand this one needs an introduction to what is called Cognitive Dissonance.  That is, if a person believes A and finds out that A is not true, this creates a dissonance, two tones that are out of tune with other.  It is a mental discomfort that doesn’t sit well.  The person must then either live with the dissonance, nearly impossible, or adapt by disregarding the belief or disregarding the evidence and whichever is disregarded is then attacked and whatever is kept is elevated.

The story of Noah’s Arc is impossible.  There is no vessel large enough to carry two of each animal, not enough supplies for food, logistical support, manpower to build such a vessel, and there is not enough hydrogen and oxygen to create enough water to cover the entire planet.  If there was that much hydrogen in the atmosphere we’d be crushed under the weight.

But what was your first thought when you read that Noah’s Arc was impossible?  If you are going on the offensive, feeling your blood pressure rise, then you are experiencing a side effect of your coping with cognitive dissonance.

This sounds incredibly harsh and mean and arrogant and attacking against Christians!  Yes it is.  Why?  Because many so-called Christians have been incredibly arrogant and mean and harsh against everybody else and continually to push their agendas in all areas.  Whether they clearcut a forest, drill for oil, destroy a wetland, or stripmine a hillside, they claim that their God gives them the right to do so.  When a hurricane ravishes a coastline that is without its barrier wetlands and flooding reaches yet another level, when sickness spreads among the poor, they claim it is God’s judgment on the wicked.  They claim that all life is sacred and will kill (or express sympathy for the killer) of abortion clinic workers, and support death row executions, while cutting funding and crying foul at every social service aimed to aid the poor avoid those situations.  They will cry that they are persecuted and aren’t allowed to have ‘prayer in school’ while they continual push for Dominion (Christian based government… a lot like Sharia law if you ask me).  Everywhere in the military we have Christian prayer at events, before ceremonies and award ceremonies, and yet it takes a long legal fight to get a simple headstone recognition for Pagan soldiers (Christians say that Paganism is evil, a falsehood, and devil-worshipping).  Every now and then a news story comes up where someone might have lost a job because he or she was a Christian and the story is picked up and sensationalized, yet the harassment of non-Christians trying to practice their religion goes unnoticed and they are told to deal with it and not make a fuss.  Pagans have lost child custody, their jobs, been imprisoned by jurors because they were ‘devil worshippers’, and been attacked.  I know from experience that it is not at all easy to be a pagan in Southern Arkansas.  Thankfully for me, not many people want to tangle with a former Marine over the matter, so I got a lot of mean stares and harassing phone calls.

But let us stop for a second and take a drive.  It is a nice day and the sun is shining.  We come around the bend and see a Christian church off to the side.  It has a wooden cross atop its roof.  We go inside to investigate.  Since it is a weekday there is no service at the moment, but the doors are still open and the door creaks a little, echoing through the large room filled with pews.  Stained glass windows of various scenes line the room and the sun’s brilliant rays shine through, painting the room with a variety of colors.  It is very peaceful here.

Out walks the local ‘Shepherd’, call him a priest or a preacher, but he is still a shepherd.  He has a warm smile and welcomes us.  He has oven mitts on and he explains that he was helping some of the church youth with their bake sale.  They are in the back kitchen baking a variety of breads and cookies they intend to sell in the community to raise funds for the homeless that come to their afternoon service.  Every afternoon they have a short service preaching love and hope and giving out food to the homeless in the community.  Amazed, we ask them how many are drug users looking for free food?  We ask because another church we know of had a once a week service for the homeless but quit it (and the free food) because of the drug use occurring in the parking lot and that some of the participants were simply taking the handouts without ever trying to get better (lazy).  The preacher looks at us and smiles and says that this church were followers of Christ. For some, he explained, this means to subject oneself obedient to some dogma and a fundamentalist version of the Bible, always living in the fears of a Hell, and viewing with paranoia the world around.  Yet for his church they instead looked at the example that Christ lived.  The preacher said that Christ said that “he was the way”.  This is interpreted by some to mean obeying the dogmas of churches, but instead it means that the way to a happy and fulfilling life, a life that must included justice, he says, is to live a life ‘in the way of Christ’.  That is, to love your neighbor as you would love Christ himself (look it up in the Bible), and that as psychology research shows, when we give of ourselves to those around us, we are happier than when we live purely for our own desires.  It was true, he said, that there were drug use among those that came to the homeless outreach, and that some of the ones who came might be considered lazy by some.  He reminds us that Christ loved all, no exceptions, and that the church did so as well.  Charity, he said, sees the need… not the cause and that they exercised their faith through their actions.  It wasn’t the role of the church, he said, to dictate the actions of others, but to be an immovable foundation of love that others, no matter how lost in self hate, abuse, or disease they might find themselves, can always… always turn to.

We were amazed.  Such a rare message it seems.  The preacher, reading our mind it seems, turns and points to the cross at the end of the chapel.  The Christ, he said, was taken and crucified upon a cross in a horrific fashion.  This story has been taken and melded with other belief systems and influences into one big story of fear about hell and a price of sin form Adam and Eve that someone had to pay lest all of mankind go into Hell, as though there is a price-tag that even God must pay (when he was the one who made and own the store, it seems).  Instead of this interpretation, the preacher says, this church follows an alternate view in that instead of paying for sins it was an example of the ultimate love.  Not for all of humanity to come, but instead love regarding those who vilified him, arrested him, and crucified him.  Throughout it all, Christ showed the way to love everyone.  There will always be someone who offends us or attacks us or seeks to do us harm.  Yet it is possible to still love throughout all of this.  The Church is the embodiment of this principle.  Though people will attack it, take advantage of its programs and food and shelter, the church will continue to provide, to give assistance when it can, and to always… always love.

Don’t trouble yourself with large moral issues

from page 64 of “Fire in the Belly” , written by Sam Keen.  One of the unwritten rules of professional and corporate life:

Don’t trouble yourself with large moral issues.

The more the world is governed by experts, specialists, and professionals, the less anybody takes responsibility for the most troubling consequences of our success-failure.  Television producers crank out endless cop and killing tales, but refuse to consider their contribution to the climate of violence.  Lawyers concern themselves with what is legal, not what is just.  Physicians devote themselves to kidneys or hearts of individual patients while the health delivery system leaves masses without medicine.  Physicists invent new generations of genocidal weapons which they place in the eager arms of the military.  The military hands the responsibility for their use over to politicians.  Politicians plead that they have no choice- the enemy makes them do it.  Professors publish esoterica while students perish from poor teaching.  Foresters, in cahoots with timber companies, clear-cut or manage the forest for sustained yield, but nobody is in charge of oxygen regeneration.  Psychologists heal psyches while communities fall apart.  Codes of ethics are for the most part, like corporate advertisements, high soundings but self-serving.

honoring the dead and the earth

For just a moment tonight I will close my eyes and think about a stretch of forest near Gales Creek, in the Tillamook Forest, in the Coastal Range, in the Northwest region of Oregon.  The world has turned upon its axis and the inhabitants on this side of the planet are now given the treat of witnessing, one more blessed time, the sight of jewels hanging in the depths above their heads.  That is where this view is not obscured by the garments of clouds and the arms of the forest canopy.

To some the forest is quiet.  But life explodes at a glacial pace and fades away like lightning in the night of a forest.  A tiny brook babbles crisply over stone before once again embraced by thick undergrowth of fallen leaves, moss, flesh and bone, returning to the cauldron of life and decaying anew as soil, nourishing the current generation of plants and animals.

In between stalks of nettle glides a black shadow.  Intently, calmly and with the patience of a seasoned hunter, the small black cat stalks her prey that is feasting upon the mushrooms under a nurse-log sprouting new hemlocks.  A break in the clouds and the light of the moon spirals down between the douglas-fir and spruce; the little cat’s eyes shine like tea lights in a dark alcove.

I once had a little black pug-nosed cat with big owl-eyes named Pandora.  This little cat was left behind in a parking lot in Houston by a family that no longer wanted her.  We found each other and a friendship was quickly formed that lasted until her sudden sickness and death six years later.  We ran every test there was on her and could find no answers to her dramatic loss of body weight.  Two days later I consented for the injection to ease her into that final sleep and I watched the light go out in her eyes that had always looked upon me with love.  I took her home, placed her wrapped body on my altar, and I laid on my bed in deep grief and sadness, feeling such a painful loss.

I buried my beloved pet, Pandora, out in the Tillamook State Forest.  I took her body out to a spot by a stream and dug a deep hole.  A friend who had come with me placed a can of opened tuna fish beside her body.  With heavy heart I filled in the hole with dirt and built a small cairn over the top with rocks from the stream.

The forest has always been a special place for me.  It is where I go to grow or retreat to from fear.  It is where the horizons and depths of my soul have yet to touch its limits.  Now this stretch of forest, along the Gales Creek in the Tillamook State Forest, is sacred to me.  Because it was somewhere that I buried my memories and love, that my feelings and experience transformed it from a location to a place.  I remember when I first heard the term place in reference to a genre of literature.  It was an alien concept to a male that has moved a lot over the years, never setting down roots with either a location or a people.  Now, I get it.

Americans, by and large, are a nation of people without place.  Our families are constantly on the move against a backdrop of the great story of movements.  Our histories are those of immigrations and movements for fortune and escape, for chance and expulsion, hope and despair.  How many of us know the place around us?  I am ashamed that I cannot describe my watershed, know the patterns of life around me, when different animals are born and where, or the different seasons of plants.  I must consult books and charts, like a good modern academic.  Somewhere there are people who know how to plant and hunt without the aids of an almanac.

Part of the debate around forest logging is on the logging.  It is summed up as logging = bad, not logging = good.  This is not only a false dichotomy, that is to say, that to assume it is one or the other as the only way is a false choice, but is not worthy of who we are as magnificent beings with deep, rich experiences.  It is not a question of to log or not to log, but a question of relationship with the forest.

For just a moment, think about your loved ones who have died before and who are buried in a plot of land that is peaceful and tranquil, perhaps with some walking paths and some benches among the shade trees.  Now imagine a very solemn ceremony is to be held, commemorating their memory and the feelings of family and friends.  Everyone is present and paying their respects to the departed.  And then the digging begins.  The caskets are raised up and brought once more into the sun’s light.  Then it is loaded onto a vehicle and a procession takes place to a stretch of land outside of town.  A quiet meadow or a deep forest beneath a ridge.  The body, wrapped in natural linen, is solemnly, or perhaps joyously with song, taken down a path to a selected place.  Everyone has a shovel of their own and people take turns digging.  Some are quiet, others cry, and some tell stories of memories past.  At last the hole is dug and the body is laid gently down, the hole is filled, and the only markers left on the top are from the natural world.  Some are stones from the nearby area, others have stones with etchings on them with something of meaning on them.  Everyone has a bit of the earth on their clothes, the sacred earth to which the body of their loved one was just returned to.

Imagine for a moment that there are plans to utilize some of the land for its natural resources, whatever it may be.  What are the guiding principles in your heart now?  We need water, farmland, timber, and other things from the world around us.  Yet it isn’t a question of whether farming trees is inherently bad.  That leads into a maze of ethics where battles are fiercely fought and still no answers are found.

We bury our dead in a separate place called a cemetery that is cut-off from the rest of the world, manicured until we believe it is something else all together.  Through the rituals of church it becomes hallowed ground while their teachings continue to tell us that the rest of the earth, the very nurturing soil, deep and rich, moist and giving, is sinful and dirty and of which one must be cleansed from.  Yet this ball of dirt is filled with organic matter.  Organic is life in cycle.  Dirt, with all its decaying organic matter are now nutrients for this generation of life, until we too take our place in the cycle.

What would our attitudes toward the forest, plains, and wetlands around us be if we buried our honored dead there?  Not only from a position of spiritual depth, but also it is the only place fitting for an organism so exquisite, so beautiful, so amazing as a human being.

I hope that I will be buried in the wilds where I might return to the cycle from which I came.

Loss

A man stands in a large cavern underground.  The feeble light of his lantern brushing gently against some of the nearby walls before it disappears into darkness.  A feeling of an immense space weighs down upon his head and darkness is heavy.  A shuffle of his feet calls echoes from the corners of the vast space around him.  He feels as though he is in the womb of the Earth.  A word that comes to his mind is ‘depth’.

A man stands in the middle of a grand colosseum.  Arching high over his head are the supports for this architectural feat.  Impressive, gigantic, and immense it encompasses a very large wide-open space that can easily accommodate thousands of people.  A word that comes to his mind is ‘grandeur’.

A man stands in the middle of a large warehouse.  He remembers the past when the warehouse was full of equipment, of bustling people and constant activity.  Now they are all gone and only the walls of the building stand, its windows are silent witnesses to the quiet and solitude that has taken the place of industry and energy.  The building is now a husk.  A word that comes to his mind is ‘loss’.

@

I was reading “Stranger in a Strange Land” earlier.  As I lay in bed, awaiting sleep to drift over me, my mind goes to something I read the day before.  One of the characters described kissing the man from mars as wonderful in that he did so with his entire self and that he tried to experience just the person he was kissing, with no distractions, no time, nothing else but her.

As I thought of this I remembered a time back in early 95.  There were three or four of us in my car and we were returning from a short drive in the country and going back to the UAM campus.  The topic of kissing came up and I had made the declaration that a kiss was when one tried to experience every molecule and fiber of another self, a cherished self, a self that is separate and to whom every fiber and molecule of one’s own self tried to merge with.  The kiss was the bridge in an attempt to dispense with me/you and instead make ‘we’… though even that is wrong, for a we is a plural of two individuals and the drive, the hope, in such a kiss was the loss of individual.  One knows one’s own body intimately, and to be able to know one’s beloved body as well, every detail, every breath, every heartbeat, would bring alongside another consciousness like that of another self-consciousness.  No separateness, but only one where there were earlier two.

As I remembered this very real drive and belief of mine, I remembered such kisses on my part.  It wasn’t a drive to do away with, or discharge, pent up sexual energy.  It was a deliberating, an experiencing of the fullness of one’s beloved, honestly in an attempt at such, and not just a passionate kiss born of one’s libido.  The thought of my last great love, a remarkable woman indeed, came to mind.   I had seen her again recently after several months of separation after my break-up with her.  After seeing her I’ve noticed odd stirrings of emotion, though I am unable to name what these emotions are within me.  I commented at the time that I could not name these emotions.  Still cannot.  Though something stirs beneath the waves, for what else would cause the surface to stir as such?

In my near lucid state, drifting close to sleep as I was, I imagine sitting before her and contemplating her face and her looking back at me.  It is quite easy to imagine her face beaming with patience, love, and joy, and asking me what I felt.  It is all she has ever given to me.   And sitting there, in this imagined place within my mind, I told her a story.

@

A woman cried her eyes out and wailed in anguish on the phone.  Finding it hard to breath she choked back sobs and clutched her phone as though she could squeeze oxygen from it.  I approached her and talked her through some exercises to calm her down, center her awareness onto her body.  And she began to settle a little in anxiety.  Her broken heart, however, did not abate.  Tears streamed down her face she let her broken heart sink lower into the depths of her being.

I looked at her and told her that she had a precious gift.  Looking at me with eyes of disbelief, she sobbed a “what is that”?  I told her that she was feeling deep pain, loss, love, anguish, feeling what it was that makes us human and gives life meaning.  Meaning is not arbitrary values given in the tally of a book, life is not binary, but deep felt emotions that saturate the marrows of our bones and colors the skies of our horizons.  We may be proud about our self-consciousness, as though this were what separates us from animals, and yet this is nothing without meaning, without emotion.  Even a machine can tally items into binary.  A dog has a felt meaning to things around it.  Which has the better existence?  To be able to feel is a gift that should be cherished.

She cried more, not believing what she was hearing.  Pain is not a blessing, she thought, not something to be cherished.  It was anguish and anguish was to be done away with.  And yet I told her that I know people who found it hard, if not impossible, to feel pain and anguish.  Would that I myself could feel as she did, to cry as deeply as she did over the loss of a love.

@

In my imagined meeting with one of the loves of my life, whom I walked away from, I could look upon her and see her joyous face looking back at me.  Such a beautiful person to sit with me, beaming her love for me as a person back at me with no demands placed upon me.  She asked only to know me.  And as I sit there, struggling to understand this feeling within me, the herculean effort to simply name the feeling that I might be having, I think of the image of the vastness of the empty warehouse.  It feels lonely to the man only because he can remember what it once was, how it once felt, even if it is only the ghost of an echo.  It is enough to make the empty warehouse feel deteriorated, cold, lonely, and empty.  Contrast this with two other spaces of immense size that do not feel empty.  The feeling in the warehouse isn’t one of size, but of loss.

Looking upon the face of this beautiful person, even though the meeting occurs in my mind, I am acutely aware of the sense of loss.  But it is a pain and a pain is a feeling.  So I will hold onto this beautiful ache and hope for more.

I wish that I could have a broken heart.

If God Was Dead Then Everything Would Be Permitted

Much of the debate on the role of religion in our country’s laws contain a cluster of associated ideas.  It is enthusiastically asserted by some that if God was dead then everything would be permitted. While it cannot be adequately stated what this sentiment means for everyone who utters it, for some it may very well be an utterance of fear, others an odd argument for the existence of God, etc…, for our purpose here we’ll start with that it appears to be a vocalization of one’s belief in that morality is essentially rule-based.  Where there are rules there are rule givers and without God present we would not have any adequate rules, nor likely any rules at all.  Contrary to helping us in our moral understanding, a reliance upon a belief in God actually hinders our moral development.

First the question of God, for it is not proven that God exists, and it isn’t possible to prove a negative, that God does not exist, which isn’t a burden for the atheist at all to embark upon.  The problem with the statement is the word “if” (as it is used today), which seems to presuppose that God does exist.  Another presupposition of the statement is that we do indeed have a sense of morality today.  It is therefor framed for the atheist to determine how we could define our current state of 1: God exists, 2: we have morality, without one of its defining characteristics.  There are a number of answers to this, two of which we will employ here.  First is to rewrite the premises as 1: There is no God, and 2: we have morality.  The existence of morality itself is counter to the notion that everything is permitted.  In plain terms the atheist says ‘there isn’t a god and we have morality, why bring God up?”

The second concern here is the assumption as to the need for a God.  There are a variety of reasons within this, and within this I’ll look at two.  The concern here is with the part of the phrase which states everything is permitted.  Firstly, it appears to mean that, without any ultimate authority on right and wrong action, then there will be nothing to distinguish the two from each other.  Without distinctions then all morality ceases and everything is permitted.  Arguments along these lines can be seen in answers from Aquinas and C.S. Lewis in that it through the perfection of God that we finite beings, with imperfect minds, are given insight and direction as to what is the good.  The good is one of the attributes of the perfection of God.  Without God from where is there a good?  Without the good then labels of good and bad become arbitrary, any system is just as good as any other system, and anything is permitted.

Secondly, there is the Hobbesian need for the judging authority to preside.  This itself has two aspects to it.  It can be thought that the original state of Nature is, as one philosophy professor at PSU has stated, like Danny Devito, short, nasty, and brutish, and for which there is a need to have an ultimate authority to keep everyone in line.  Supposing that our morality, without God, is arbitrary in its delineation, then there would be wide disagreements as to what laws are better, higher, more ‘just’ (if justice could exist without God) and we would have chaos.  God, being the ultimate authority, would be to that which everything is referred to in arbitration.  If God did not exist then we would have to invent God, it is sometimes said.

On this need for God it is problematic on a number of fronts.  There is widespread belief in God today which does nothing to lessen the disagreement as to what is right or wrong.  For one, there is nothing at all approaching consensus as to what the nature of God is or is not, as exemplified by Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion where the premise there is a God is accepted but which nothing can be known about.  This widespread disagreement in application of morality with the supposed existence of a God is problematic.  Yet this is answered by the need for the judgement to occur in a supposed afterlife.  This belief itself has two functions; first, it is beyond reproach (you cannot not prove the afterlife) and secondly, as such it is useful by the use of fear in controlling the populace (in much the way of Hobbes’ Leviathan with a spiritual twist).

One damaging assertion to those who maintain a need for God in our current morality is that they drop their particular religious affiliation and for them to take up another.  For example, for a Christian to instead become Muslim, or vice versus.  The similarities between the two are more than than their dissimilarities.  The basic actions of a good person are really the same thing.  And in both God functions as the ultimate authority, a final judge, and the wicked are punished.  The requirements of satisfying reciprocity, an ultimate authority, and a universal are all met.  Therefore, everyone in the world ought to convert to Islam (or Christianity, or whatever) and the matter is settled.  That this is violently offensive to the sensibilities of many people, that anger and hostile reactions instantly arise, that violence is perpetuated between these similarities is proof enough that these underlying reasons are not truly the reason why one might argue for the position of God as the ultimate judge of morality.  What is really meant is that my God is  the ultimate judge, and your God is a falsehood, which we see everywhere around us today, the atheist would point out. If the need for a spiritual Leviathan were the true need, then any Leviathan that fulfilled the job requirements would work. This is obviously not the case, so we can drop this argument as sophistry intended to distract us from the real concern, and that is the conformity of others (others meaning ‘those different’ or ‘those outside of a social group) and the lessening of of angst which is derived from the condition of ‘other’.

The counter to this is to reaffirm the point earlier stated that is through our understanding, or rather being influenced by God, that we come to know what is right or wrong.  God informs us through revelation of sorts of what is good and bad, right or wrong, just and unjust, and so on.  There are disagreements between what God is said to be, which is a poor argument against there being a God.  If we all have different answers to the question what is 1 + 1? it would not change the fact there is a correct answer (2).  Likewise, because there are different answers as to what God is does not change the fact that there is a correct answer.  Understanding this correct answer to what God is will inform us in our morality.  Any angst that is felt toward the other is rightfully done so, for the other is one not touched by God, that is not informed with God as moral compass, and to which we can be rightfully distrustful of.  Were they to be truly touched by God there would be no other and there would be agreement upon morality.

At this point the matter becomes one as to the proof of God and the nature of such, which sidetracks us from our immediate concern.  However, such a question is important in asking of what use is God in morality?  The premise that God is that which guides us in our morality, that is that which gives us a sense of what morality is, such as argued by Aquinas, is problematic.  It does not prove the existence of God but relies upon such, and if it is given that God exists it is explanatory but not necessarily prescriptive in that it tells us anything about what is the good.  Aquinas wrote from a Christian perspective with an emphasis on love and other Christian virtues.  Yet what if one were to take his arguments and substitute Hume’s vegetative or generative nature of God, or perhaps a war-like God, such as Thor, into the equation.  It is common that at this irrational part of faith that the believer is asked to turn away and to make a blind leap of faith.  If we have knowledge of something before hand it cannot be described as blind faith, and if we are in the condition necessary for a blind leap then we are not in a position to truly judge between arbitrary religions.  All that is had is the emotionally based proclamtions of the religious follower as to the feelings that they enjoy as they walk with God.  It becomes problematic immediately when one considers that there is no shortage of devout followers of nearly every sect, religion, belief, idea, group, or inclination.  We suddenly find ourselves back at the earlier problem of the arbitrariness of determining the good that is supposedly guided by God.

God as rule giver is therefor a primary problem in the modern moral discourse.  God does not exist (or cannot be proved one way or another).  Whether God exists or not is beside the point for there isn’t anything to which it has been shown that can be the ultimate arbitrator in matters of morality.  Whether this is God, or a Law of Nature (which such an informed morality might entail the strong eating the weak, a predator/prey relationship), or something else is of no use to us.  In all of these systems, God included, everything is permitted precisely because everything that can be imagined can be attributed to an imagined system of ethics.  Put in another way, it is like describing the laws of physics in an alternate, hypothetical universe that is different than ours.  Without anything real to hang a hat on, without anything to show empirically, there is no basis for anything else to be known and everyone brings their idea of an alternate universe to the table with fervent belief that they know one true way.  It rarely occurs to some that there is no such thing as one true way but that there are multiple answers.  As the saying goees, theres more than one way to skin a cat, and skinning cats is not as messy as the day-to-day lives of humanity.

What we do know is that we are capable of making choices based on our ability to rationalize.  We are capable of being rational agents, some would argue, and as such we ought to approach morality as such.  Whether it is Kant’s search for a Categorical Imperative, or Rawl’s position of ignorance, or a host of other methods,  we can better begin to approach morality.  It might be argued that there is still widespread disagreement and angst.  It is as unlikely that a Marxist would adopt the philosophy of Ayn Rand out of a concern for order and common morality as it is a Muslim or Christian to change their stripes and among adherents of Marxism and Capitalism we find the same religious, dogmatic zealots.  We would do well to remember that one cannot truly judge a religion by the actions of some of its adherents.  If this agreed, then we can look directly at the claims of religion as lacking, and ignore the idiocies of political activists in the merits of an ethical system.  However, with religion the ultimate definition of good is unknowable, and with the philosophy we at least have some starting point to work from, human beings in this world using our attributes of rationality and others, such as emotion, self preservation, etc… which can all be ascertained through empirical observation, more than can be said to any supposed characteristics of a supposed deity(s).

Returning to the opening statement, we can apply empirical methods of observation to the world around us.  It seems clear that there is a lot of self interest, as well as feelings of altruism, a need for reciprocity, a positive regard for those we admire, and other values and conditions.  It also seems unavoidable that everyone lives without contact with anyone else.  That is, a person does not live in a vacuum, and the close proximity of which requires some agreed upon rules of conduct, such as ‘take your trash out on wednesday’ and ‘drive on the right side of the road’.  There is no necessity for a God for such rules to be devised.  Human beings, it seems, are quite capable of devising rules themselves.  Concerning other matters of morality, for example the wide spread use of meth and other destructive drugs, is this an issue that needs a God to determine if it is harmful or helpful to a person’s life?  What rational person can defend the use of meth as anything but destructive?  Concerning murder, thou shall not kill, again is God necessary in this black/white case of morality?  Is a person’s answer to why they do not commit murder truly to rely on a fear of an afterlife judgement?  Such is the mark of truly poor character, not a good person, but a criminal who has yet to break a crime.  What sorts of things would this person commit if given the chance?  The answer is of no surprise to anyone who’s left the bright lights of society and had to make their way in the back alleys of life.  It is quite possible that a grouping of people, a community, a society, come to the consensus that killing one another is detrimental to their stability (or that in some instances the killing of people is a stabilizing force) and will be dealt with by the force necessary to instill such a respect among its citizenry.  This is not a comforting idea to the mind used to believing in a father-figure God.  It is realization that the world is dangerous, not fair, and that the good suffer while the bad succeed.  Yet this is a vital step to take in the maturing process, a lesson that every child needs to learn, and that we as a society, as a race, needs to learn.  It is time we put down our linus blanket and take an honest assessment at or place in the world and the tools we have to live.

God is neither necessary for morality or our understanding of it, and such a concept may even hinder our development and application of morality.  It is more profitable to rest our system of morality, our laws, upon empirical evidence and rational thought.  The original statement is better suited to read everything is possible, it is up to humans to determine which ones we will permit.

 

Berkeley and Bagels

Berkeley and Bagels

Sitting one night at a community coffee shop, re-reading once more the Introduction to Berkley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, I was interrupted by a friend named Ellie who inquired as to the subject matter of the book.  I informed her that was it was a book whereas the author claims that matter does not exist, that things exist only when perceived, and that it made clear everything.  The skeptic in me had been quieted and I could go about my life, secure in the knowledge of how things are, devoting myself to more timely pursuits.  I also recommended the coffee.  Ellie, it seemed, was not convinced.

Ellie: What are you getting on about?  Have you lost your marbles?

Eddie: Not at all.  I’ll start from the beginning.  What is that you are holding in your hand?

Ellie: A bagel.

Eddie: How do you know that it is there?

Ellie: Have you stopped at the pub on the way here?

Eddie: No really.  How do you know that what you hold in your hand is actually there?

Ellie: Duh.  I can feel it in my hand.

Eddie: Right.  And if you were to move your nose closer to it you’d smell it also.  And you can also see it with your eyes.

Ellie: So the bagel exists.  I guess it’s a thinking bagel if it exist.  Right?  Get it?  Descartes?  Sorry… a poor joke.

Eddie: Quite.  We’ve established that this bagel exists because you can see it, smell it, feel it, and soon you’ll taste it.

Ellie: That’s the plan.

Eddie: Yet can you tell me about the bagel that is on the roof?

Ellie: What bagel on the roof?

Eddie: Exactly.  We don’t know if there is or is not a bagel on the roof because it is not perceived by our senses.

Ellie: This sounds like that cat in a box.

Eddie: I’m not going there, mainly because I never understood that.  However, bear with me for a moment.  How do we know that the bagel is here?  Senses.

Ellie: So what.  This bagel isn’t going to disappear if I no longer perceive it.

Eddie: Well yes and no.  We seem to experience a permanency of things in the world around us.  The desk in your room when you entered appears to be the same as when you left.  Yet the bagel would disappear if it were not perceived by something, because perceiving is a thought, and thoughts occur within thinking things.  I think Berkley would say that the larger thinking thing keeping everything in place while we are not looking at them would be God.

Ellie: Okay, wait.  You lost me.  What did you mean when you said that the bagel would disappear if it were not perceived because perceiving is a thought.

Eddie: It has to do with abstract ideas.  Tell me, what is a sensory experience?

Ellie: You mean the five senses?  Touch, taste, smell, feel, hear.

Eddie: Yes, they are that, but they are impressions, thoughts, or happenings in the mind.  Let’s do a psychology test.  You’re familiar with JND, just noticeable differences right?

Ellie: Yes.  Thats when slight changes in something are made until the person being tested notices a difference.  Those thresholds are measured and vary according to a variety of factors.

Eddie: Fine.  Now suppose that we blindfold you and I take a small pin out and slowly move it toward your finger and await until you tell me that you feel it.  Until you actually feel the pin, it hasn’t touched you yet, correct?

Ellie: Okay.  But what if you are poking me on a less sensitive patch of skin?  Perhaps it would take more pressure for me to feel it than in other areas, though in all you are actually touching me with the pin.

Eddie: But how would we know if I were indeed touching you?

Ellie: You could use a magnifying glass to look closely.

Eddie: All of which supports my point.  We know nothing unless it is perceived.  Yet this just begins to get to the heart of the matter.

Ellie: Which is?

Eddie: Abstract ideas are impossible.  In knowing whether the pin touched you or not we relied upon some sort of sensory data to inform us that it was so.  Berkley writes that we cannot abstract an idea from a perception, and since perceptions are all ideas, we cannot separate an idea from an idea.  Can you imagine the pin touching you without thinking about it touching you?

Ellie: Wait.  You just made me choke on my bagel.  What do you mean think about something without thinking of something?  That’s absurd.

Eddie: Exactly.  We cannot think of something without having a thought about it.  Go ahead and try to think of the pin touching you without any sensory idea of it.

Ellie: That’s cheap.  You’re telling me that I’m not to imagine the thing I’m told to imagine.

Eddie: It isn’t cheap.  Its a contradiction.

Ellie: Wait a minute.  I’m going to need a lot more espresso if I’m going to keep up with this foolishness.

Eddie: Grab some for me also.

Ellie: Okay.  Let’s leave the pin prick and go to something else because I am finding it impossible to think of something and not so at the same time.  Let’s instead talk about bagels.  Is this a bagel?

Eddie: Though it looks a little different than the bagel you had before, I would say that it is a bagel.

Ellie: Why is that?

Eddie: Because it seems to fit a set of objects that fit within the classification of bagel as I understand it.

Ellie: This set of the word bagel, is there a particular bagel that it refers to?

Eddie: No.  The placeholder for the set, ‘bagel’, is a general term.  It refers to all of them but yet none of them specifically of itself.

Ellie: Is there an archetypal bagel?  Or perhaps a form for bagels?

Eddie: I don’t know about forms… never did understand Plato.  Yet no, there is no archetypal bagel that exists anywhere.  The term bagel acts as a general term to which anything resembling a bagel, as understood as such, might be referred by the term.

Ellie: So there is something that we can imagine and yet doesn’t exist.  The abstract idea of a bagel works. There are abstract ideas.

Eddie: Wait a minute.  The placeholder term bagel is a general term that refers to many particular things, but this isn’t to say that it is an abstract thought.  Suppose the only bagels you ever knew of were in this cafe.  Made and sold here.  Nobody outside of this shop makes bagels.  There are twelve varieties of bagel in the display case and constitutes our set of of the term bagel.

Ellie: I could imagine a thirteenth variety.

Eddie: You could.  Yet you’d be thinking of thoughts that are instances of combinations of things known.  You’d just be putting together possibilities, thoughts, but nothing abstract.  At the dawn of human existence nobody said “someday someone will invent the wheel” because at the time he did so it was invented.  The concept of a wheel is a thought, just like seeing one when he made it.  Likewise, the concept of a novel bagel is a thought, the same as perceiving a bagel is a thought.  Yet back to the point.  Suppose you went to another country and visited a coffee shop there and within there were some new bagels, almost completely different but similar enough that you call them bagels.  Your set has enlarged with more particulars.

Ellie: The point?

Eddie: The point is that wide variety of things generally referred to by the term bagel was increased, not some abstract notion of bagelness that is separate from descriptions of bagels.

Ellie: But wait, what if I want to use this notion of a bagelness.

Eddie: Okay.  Go ahead.  Tell me about it, what constitutes bagelness?

Ellie: Doughy, slightly tough on the outside, chewy on the inside, made with wheat, or perhaps barley, or rye, baked in a oven, and…

Eddie: You are describing perception ideas to me but not an abstract thought.  You’ve told me nothing about bagels that is not discerned from looking at a lot of particular bagels, and those qualities being sensory perceptions on top of that.

Ellie: So what, you want me to give you some sort of understanding of a bagel without any sensory description words?  What, a vulcan mind-meld like in Star Trek?

Eddie: That would be quite a trick if it were possible.  Since it isn’t it isn’t worth wondering about as it is one more example of how supposed abstract ideas can lead us astray.

Ellie: Okay.  Hold on.  You were pretty angry at some election results recently, going on and on about justice and civic duty.  Justice is a thing that exists and yet we can’t smell it or taste it.  Justice isn’t a bagel in a case.

Eddie: So what is justice?

Ellie: It is the quality of being fair and reasonable.  That’s what the dictionary says.

Eddie: Nice definition.  Now every argument about justice, from Socrates to Mill has been settled.  I’m sure that we’d all agree we want a just world and that the U.N. would benefit from your definition.

Ellie: Don’t make me throw a bagel at you!

Eddie: Sorry, not trying to be mean, just making a point.  Your definition doesn’t help us know what justice is and isn’t.  It sounds good, but then there are a lot of messy situations in life where it becomes quite hard to determine if something is just or not.  There is a heated argument four tables down on the war in Iraq where one side says it American actions there are a just cause, and the other side saying the war is never just.  Who is correct?

Ellie: Well, I’d know it when I see it.

Eddie: You know you just said…

Ellie: I know, I know.  But there must be justice in the world.  Right?

Eddie: I don’t know what Berkeley’s opinion is on Justice.  However, perhaps we can better understand if we return to bagels.  You see those baked goods in the window to your left?

Ellie: You mean the donuts?

Eddie: I say that they are bagels.

Ellie: Now you’re just trying to pick a fight.

Eddie: No, I’m trying to show the arbitrary nature of language.  The term bagel is a placeholder term denoting a set of particulars.  There isn’t any abstract bagel property independent of thought that latches onto bagels because there isn’t any bagel independent of being perceived.  There is a term we use to generally denote meaning toward things we commonly understand as bagels.  We both disagree that that particular pastry is a bagel or not.   Our discussion of whether that is a bagel or not would then likely continue along the lines of comparing various similarities and dissimilarities of particulars within and without the set commonly understood as bagel.  The term bagel itself is gibberish without the particulars.  We could easily change our placeholder term from bagel to gabel instead and it would be okay.

Ellie: So there is no justice other than what we all agree as that being within the set of particulars we all agree as being justice?  That isn’t particularly comforting.  But surely we can see a novel action and determine whether it is just or not.

Eddie: Can we determine if something novel is round or not?

Ellie: Yes.  Round could be said to be a universal to which we refer to in determining if something is round or not.

Eddie: I think there might be something in the talk about universals, particularly if we look at whether or not ‘same’ and ‘different’ are universals.  But I don’t want to get sidetracked.  Going back to our earlier point, can you judge something to be round without perceiving it to be round?

Ellie: Are we back there again?

Eddie: I’m afraid so.

Ellie: So if I’m to understand you correctly, we only have ideas.  Our senses are all ideas.  If there is no sensing thing, whether it be brain or spirit or soul or whatever, then there is no perception, and then nothing.  Otherwise, how’d you know it?

Eddie: Right.

Ellie: And to abstract a thought is to have a thought about something in which I cannot see or feel or sense it in any way.

Eddie: As far as I’ve understood the Introduction. I’ve to tell you… I’ve read this thing several times and had much coffee.

Ellie: And you’re sure that an abstract thought cannot be a something else?

Eddie: What would that something else be?  Something separated from sensory description?  How would you describe it?

Ellie: With a lot more coffee, that’s for sure.

Eddie: You cannot say X and not-X at the same time.

Ellie: What?

Eddie: You cannot say that is coffee and that is not coffee at the same time.  It is a contradiction.  Likewise you cannot say that you can imagine a thought about something without using thoughts (senses) about it.  That too is a contradiction.

Ellie: Why are you reading this book again?  Did you lose a bet?

Eddie: For class.  And also because when I got to Berkeley’s position on there being material substance he called it an abstraction and dismissed it as such.  Because this belief was a contradiction, it couldn’t exist, which meant that everything wasn’t material substance but the substance of the thing we do have…

Ellie: Bagels.

Eddie: Funny.  No… perceptions are by thinking things… perceptions are thoughts… and since things cannot be material substance they must be of the substance of thoughts.

Ellie: So what of this bagel?  Did I create it?

Eddie: No.  God created it.  You, me, the bagel, everything, are all thoughts in the mind of God.

Ellie: Well you’d think that God would be able to make tastier bagels.

 

Berkeley’s thought experiment was summarized in a limerick by Ronald Knox and an anonymous reply:

There was a young man who said “God

Must find it exceedingly odd

To think that the tree

Should continue to be

When there’s no one about in the quad.”

“Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd;

I am always about in the quad.

And that’s why the tree

Will continue to be

Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.”