Stretch

Un-Classification- The Circle of Humanity

Recently a CNN news bite at the bottom of the screen said “Republicans say the bombing (Boston) came from the Muslim community” suggesting “they” need more scrutiny. Millions of people that live normal day-to-day lives side by side with everybody else are grouped for suspicion because of two deranged individuals. This seems like such a primitive fear response. Perhaps it is the left hemisphere verbal analytical classification that we use for so much conditions people to stick with their own groups, to limit ideas to what’s already believed and see only what supports their existing worldview. Perhaps it’s the conditioning in right or wrong answers that designates different as having to be wrong. Either reflects a highly limiting mindset. a rigid skin that needs to be shed. The human reward system is designed to encourage behavior that extends our boundaries, that embraces novelty. We wouldn’t get that extra dopamine from what’s new if it wasn’t good for us. Our brains are designed to reward what we should do more of, which includes stimulating curiosity about what’s unknown to us. This interest in the new is the action of learning rewarding us with endorphins to encourage continued growth. The cycle of seeing the new, becoming interested, then learning, is the action of the brain’s development, of feeling alive in the world while finding out what is possible.

The desire to tame the dangers of the world with labels and laws creates more separation between people. It creates an attitude of suspicion and mistrust that makes it hard to fully invest ourselves in participating, cooperating and appreciating. When you look at pictures of the earth from space there are no divisions, no national boundaries or political/religious states. We are a single species on a single world and its time to grow out of species adolescence and its cliquishness into a mature humanity, not so easily threatened by the unfamiliar, not so sure of our own right answers. The beauty of thinking in images and looking at them is that images are fluid, the whole seen at once, everything in relationship, rich with action and function and qualities that categories leave out. Thinking too much in categories misses the fullness. Ultimately we can’t even see the depth in ourselves, hidden beneath all the classifications, boxes we check on the forms.

Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist who speaks out against the practice of drugging people into the acceptable categories, wrote in his book “Beyond Conflict”, “Wisdom grows with the size of the group with which you identify.” The right hemisphere of the brain sees the whole, the more perspective that’s included the more accurate the whole. More time with imagery and less with words might help us break out of the shell of fear created by the cultural obsession with enemies and “Bad guys”, as adolescent a terminology as I can imagine that stirs the very few dangerously unstable among millions of peaceful people to dramatic acts of violence that can be more fuel for the media fires. The act of classification obscures the individual and substitutes the existing association with the categories contaminated by whatever media permeates the day. It blinds the classifier not only to people who could teach us something but also to personal dimensions not acknowledged by their own category. We are all the human species embedded in the world of living things. Some use their category to claim more than their share or the absolute right of their ideas for all. Brain science shows how thin those claims are. Each life strategy grew from what it had to experience. It involved knowledge and skills for a particular way of coping. What the authorities say may not fit the circumstance. From the beginning of life, for better or worse, we learn by example. Self-improvement is emulating who we admire, not what somebody says.

The Production of a Free Workforce

This is the left side panel of a three panel painting to be auctioned for the benefit of CASA of Baltimore this Sunday, April 28, 2013 from 3-6pm at Area 405, 405 East Oliver Street in the
Station North Arts District.

Prison

In the panorama of life going on around us we notice what helps us see ourselves, search out what’s relevant to where we’re going and affirm our sense of the beautiful and ugly. The choices we make regarding where we look are a window on deeper motives and can expand self-awareness. We may or may not get the point. On a psychological level, the thing the eye is scanning for is something that will clarify things about the self that need to be seen. Marcel Proust and Willa Cather are just two of the many writers long before modern psychology to have pointed out the human tendency to criticize our own faults in others. It’s not just on a personal level. It’s easily seen at every level of human interaction. This came to mind today listening to a man on the radio demonizing North Korea for its extensive prison system. Since the US is known world wide for the growing private prison system housing a higher percentage of the population than any other country, his statement was an excellent example of projection regarding our own national pathology. There are lots of things he might have criticized North Korea for but the one he chose was the one he recognized from the inside. And since he didn’t get the point, what could be changed doesn’t. He talks about extensive prisons as a problem to be solved, not thinking to turn that energy to the problem in his own sphere. Our society is too punitive. Rather than celebrate positive qualities we limit behavior with the threat of punishment. We’ve become more focused on obedience than justice. Anthropologist Jean Liedhoff observed that the Yequana people of Venezuela had no word for “disobedience”. They looked at children as children and didn’t get into a power struggle making them into little adults. The children don’t hurt others because adults don’t. 

If kids are bullying others there’s a good chance they are being bullied at home, whether or not the parents realize it. They’re just imitating the behavior of the adults they see like their parents did before them. Teasing shades into ridicule then into humiliation, which is institutionalized by the prison system where brutality is common, a national symbol of the mandate to obey enough laws to make everyone a lawbreaker. And everyone is immersed in a culture where ridicule is entertainment. Too much damage has been done by dominant cultures forcing their worldview on people with entirely different life experience. It happens at every level of society. It’s time for us to transcend our national ego and learn from all that’s good in the world. The hyperconcern for safety only cultivates fear and distrust of others, a population of isolated individuals cowering in their houses with only their screens for safety. We should start to notice and question the coercive systems that disrespect the variety of individuals by labeling and diagnosing from childhood, when a world of talents could flourish in each one.

Overload

Assembling Reality

“Reality is a construction with which we actively participate.”

                                         Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977

Much of what we see as we move through the world is already in our heads. The degree to which what we see when we look around is built up and constructed over time is amazing. Hold up an index finger and keep your focus on it, then slowly bring the other index finger in toward it until it’s equally clear. It’s shocking to realize that so little of the visual field is in focus at any one time. The clear picture we think we see is an illusion, is not the same clear picture another person sees. It is the result of the eyes scanning and accumulating details that supply the background for what hits the retina at any given moment. This is one example of the efficiency of the brain, which only needs the general feel of the surroundings to know where to focus. It also makes our picture of reality very personal, a creation of our own mind based on the information our needs select. The central illusion in all human perception is that personal reality is the Reality.

Everything we see is represented in the brain and informs what we look for and what we expect. Though there is correspondence between our image and reality, it is never complete or without inaccuracies. Yet we trust and rely on it.  From the beginning of life we construct this picture of the world based on our own experience and use that inner image as the basis for comparison to new stimulus as it arrives. A representation of the territory is necessary to remember where we’ve been and what happened there, an inner map that enables us to find our way to what we need and be alert to signs of trouble. This internal image supports our image of the scene in the present with what we’ve already seen. The sense of recognition comes from the new matching similar situations in the past.  It’s like the pattern resonates with a similar chord in the patterns of our own experience. When a pattern unfolds over time we can anticipate what’s coming and be better prepared for it.

The demands of movement require an understanding of where we are in relation to what we need. Imagery of locations is part of most memories. Brains evolved and grew larger as more experience needed to be represented. The folds seen in pictures of the brain are always different because every life is different. The varied personal experience of each of us creates the brain, develops some parts more than others depending on what we use the most. Awareness of these differences liberates us all from absolutes seeing how the variety of contexts changes the equation. Guided by what best fits a given situation, harmony is achieved without coercion.. The better we understand our inner model the more we can learn from the rich variety of other worldviews and break down barriers to our own expansion.

Looking at art is one tool for self-awareness. When we respond to art the chord that runs beneath the surface signals deep concordance with individual emotional themes. It offers a glimpse of the personal substructure so crucial to how we understand the world. Then we may recognize them when they turn up in our relations with others.

Giving Way