Seeing Meaning

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2012-01-28T14:41:00.000-08:00

Self Help

2012-01-28T14:40:00.000-08:00

I never really thought of what I was writing as self-help until my
independent student saw it as fitting that category. Her insight got
me thinking about knowledge as self-help, appealing to us not just for
the new information and increased perspective, but because so much of
it is concretely useful in navigating the world. Maybe that’s why
philosophers say pursuit of knowledge is the greatest happiness. It’s
not just how understanding increases with a broader point-of-view, but
how the new piece of the puzzle changes the picture and how that bears
on other ideas. What I’ve studied about the brain has been so useful
to me that I want to spread that knowledge around, along with the
connections I’ve made in how to apply that information. As one
neuroscientist put it, “Neuroanatomy illuminates psychology.” Learning
how different regions of the brain relate to each other demonstrates
their neural significance and how we can utilize it. Knowing more of
the map offers more flexibility about how to get where you want to go.
As our models of reality expand so do the choices we have about what
the possibilities are and what we want to accomplish.
By spending a long string of days cleaning and sorting through
all the piles of papers that have been accumulating for months I not
only got rid of the burden on my workspace, I stimulated lots of
reward chemicals for the activities along the way. It was the thing
that helped the most after my dad died. Using executive functions like
sorting and problem solving, how to better organize, drew my mental
energy to the front of the brain, site of the most connections to the
reward areas. That’s why journals are so helpful, putting thoughts
into words involves areas in the front. Comprehension is farther back
near memory, which is more associated with negative moods. Any action
helps you feel better because it moves the energy forward in the
brain. It affirms a sense of agency, the opposite of the helplessness
associated with depression. The beauty of mundane activities like
cleaning to fight unhappiness is they have concrete results as well as
the beneficial brain chemistry. It doesn’t really matter what the
action. It happens in the present and is organized by a purpose, moves
mental energy forward and stimulates dopamine production. Action is
rewarded because it’s good for survival.
Knowing what the brain has evolved to do clarifies how to develop
its capacities. Most dramatic of the still untapped potential is the
power of visual intelligence. Cultivating the wisdom of the big
picture as understood by the right hemisphere could be key to solving
some the problems mired by an old way of seeking solutions. Treating
the universe and everything in it as a machine is an outdated
orthodoxy that ignores the multiple variables of actual experience.
Since vision is central to understanding it makes sense to visualize
and represent our situation in ways that illuminate important
underlying patterns. The ability to see patterns in complexity is a
function of the visual right side of the brain. Imagination and
insight are among our highest powers. Naturally they’re at the front
of the brain, which is why its so exhilarating to create and invent,
explore and discover.
People are largely unaware of the power of art to help them do
just that. They think that art is something you do or don’t do, when
it’s always been more about what you see and feel. Just looking at the
art that draws your attention activates personal emotional themes that
can function as a mirror held to the inner world. Art resonates with
emotional patterns. It stimulates feelings and the ideas connected to
them. Since we’re attracted to what shows something we need to see,
it’s an opportunity to reflect on the personal inner reality. This is
where the wisdom of personal experience lives. Building visual
intelligence starts with seeing your feelings. Find artists you like
on the Internet or in books. It’s never been easier to find
sensibilities that speak to your own emotional core. For some fun
self-help give art books as presents. Look at them with friends. Enjoy
the conversations stimulated and the endorphins that reward new
experience.

Reclusion

2012-01-11T10:22:00.001-08:00

Regaining Bearings

2012-01-11T10:21:00.000-08:00

In the time following the memorial service for my father a steady stream of past memories have surfaced. He’d been sick for so long that the demands and image of his condition blocked any broader view of the relationship, particularly involving the formative first two decades of my life. And as it comes to me now, I realize how much there was about growing up with a man like Dad, creative and involved in all things, that shaped the person I am now. It was more because of who he was and how he lived than how we were raised that showed my brother and I what meaningful life was all about. With so many other demands on his time, full time job and writing his dissertation, he would manage to teach me card games when I was sick, focusing my mind on something other than being sick, and, he spent every Saturday over an extended time teaching a paralyzed man Fortran computer programming so he would be able to earn income. Giving himself so completely to whatever he was doing, there were no better or worse things to do.
As such a visible and assertive point of reference, parents are, first and foremost, models for how to be a person. Dad demonstrated the relationship between goodness and happiness, the joy of living as the reward of full involvement in whatever is happening.
Watching how engineers solved problems with diagrams seeded my deeply held belief that images are the best tool for figuring things out, that solutions had to be seen. A monument to inventiveness, resourcefulness and ingenuity, he was always there in my field of vision.
Without that point of reference, lost would be the best word to describe how I’ve felt since Dad died. Lost about how to continue with ideas that preoccupied me before. Lost in the changed emotional dynamics now missing a significant field of influence. A big area of my psychic landmass just slipped beneath the water and the map of everyday life will never be the same. It’s disorienting. Searching for that point of reference, it’s as though a mountain has been wiped from a familiar landscape. Navigating without that landmark will take some getting used to. The old map of ordinary living is wrong.
But I AM the accumulated layers of all the maps. Future layers won’t include Dad but the layers beneath them will mold their shape. The deeper the layer, the stronger the influence. The shape of my past life with Dad goes forward with me and influences my own way of being. In what I admire and in all that guides me I am grateful for what I’ve been given. Looking for deeper understanding I use images to externalize the obscure emotional dynamics within. Frequencies and fields of influence, vibrations and wave properties in my own visual language are so clearly layered onto to the appreciation of electromagnetic fields that grew from my father’s work with radar. The work continues and expands, and the idea flows onward. Ripples and influences are everywhere I look.

Swelling

2011-12-12T07:11:00.000-08:00

Body Language and Dogs

2011-12-12T07:10:00.000-08:00

One of the great things about walking outdoors everyday is meeting people in the neighborhood, most of whom are walking dogs. Up until a few days ago I thought I got along fine with all but one of the dogs. Then I had an experience that made me rethink my own behavior and what I’m communicating to the various dogs of my acquaintance.
This particular Jack Russell terrier had been looking at me with what I interpreted as distrust and worry since I first started talking with his owner on my walks over the last few months. I thought it might have been because I took attention away from him. Then the other day a woman who obviously adored little dogs asked if she could say “hi” and when she stooped down he was so clearly delighted to meet her, licking her face and putting his front paws on her, I was amazed at the immediate bonding. I said something to his owner about Alyosha knowing a dog person when he saw one. He said, “He always knows” then added something about her getting down to his level. It took me a minute to digest this, but when we resumed our walk, I stopped and stooped down to greet him like she had done, and he immediately came over and licked my face like he was glad I’d finally gotten around to noticing him. I was pleased and touched by his generous welcome in the face of my months of bad behavior. By not going down to his level I was disrespecting him, maintaining my superior position and not recognizing him as a little being in his own right. To be “beneath notice” is painful and that was what I saw on this dignified little dog’s face. I realized that the looks I’d seen previous to this moment were his puzzlement at my lack of acknowledgment, which may even have hurt his feelings. I always said “Hi Alyosha” but a dog knows that’s not really taking him in. This is a big lesson. I can’t let my uneasiness around dogs make me impolite. These are behaviors associated with the cingulate cortex where social interaction is processed in all mammals. So it makes sense that the various ways we acknowledge and don’t acknowledge each other could communicate across species. It’s also is a reminder that this occurs preconsciously, but as humans, becoming conscious of it gives us a choice.
Though I may feel vulnerable getting down to eye level it communicates faith in the dog’s good intentions. And he was happy to come up to meet me. Face to face is where communication takes place. And Jack Russell’s are known to be particularly sensitive to facial expression and perhaps even more subtle social protocols.
Just like in my interactions with squirrels, I was inordinately pleased after finally meeting Alyosha. Communication is healing, and there’s a purity in the non-verbal exchange with friends from a different place on the animal spectrum. Interacting with animals is good for our health. An article in the mainstream health site WebMD cites studies showing that having pets reduces blood pressure and anxiety and boosts immunity. Relationships with animals are sensory, rich in touch, smell, vision and action that communicate with our right hemisphere and tune our own intuitive behavior. Because they’re not trying to name or symbolize and break down what they experience animals are better at seeing the meaning of the whole. They know when something’s wrong with the scene or out-of-synch with the pattern. So much of what we call intuition is the result of right hemisphere impressions of the whole picture unfolding in time and how it relates to us.
Like any good lesson, awareness of the implications of my behavior to animals gives me the chance to change a habitual pattern that was interfering with communication. Now I’ll be able to get to know them even better and enrich my perspective with their way of being.

Cycles

2011-11-11T12:48:00.001-08:00

Numbers

2011-11-11T12:47:00.000-08:00

Numbers like 11-11-11 demand attention. It’s a visual alignment that seems to signify without us really knowing what. Advertisers play on it, movies are released, armistices have been signed (though without that final 11). Sure, it’s easy to remember if you’re scheduling an event, but myself, I’ve always found beauty in numerical arrangements, with particular appreciation for symmetry. A palindrome on my odometer is a small moment of grace, a glimpse of order happening by itself, reminding me of the many changes unfolding all around me, most hidden from perception. Repeated numbers convey a unison, all in accord, and though this is personal symbolism on my part, it has the concrete effect of Zen’s bell of mindfulness in meditation or daily life. It brings me back to the present and for the time the number is present with me, until 3:33 turns to 3:34, I stay right there.
At the grocery store the other day the woman exclaimed “Four Forty-four” as she handed me the receipt. The correspondence gets our attention whether we ascribe meaning to it or not. And she was smiling. As visual form there’s a beauty that’s enhanced by its unlikeliness. If the receipt said, “forty-four, forty-four” it would be even more noteworthy. That underlying sense of the probability factor is the only real connection with mathematics itself, which often finds the right solution by its elegance. We experience our awareness of probabilities when we notice the rare coordinance of numbers or planets. And with both numbers and planets we know it will happen again, the numbers on the clock will do the same thing tomorrow and for the most part we don’t notice, but when we do it’s like we’re in alignment too and in that moment of awareness our perpetual motion, mind and body, slows down. Manmade patterns are built on the cyclic patterns of nature and like the pleasure of all beauty; it’s a pleasure of connection.
In the case of accidental alignments there’s also a sense of personal discovery.
As hard as it may be to believe, I just walked into the kitchen and the clock over the stove said 11:11. So it was 11:11, 11-11-11. So cool. I experience these moments as little blessings, am always surprised, so maybe my pleasure is not just the endorphins from beauty but also the dopamine of the unexpected. In any case the delight is a temporary release from the things that wear us down.

Underview

2011-11-01T14:23:00.002-07:00

The Personal Map

2011-11-01T14:23:00.001-07:00

From the beginning, reading “Infinite Jest”, I’ve been fascinated by David Foster Wallace’s use of the phrase, “ eliminate his/her/your map” to refer to death. At first it seemed like a kind of slang- the obscure phrase that a particular in-group will use to define themselves with private language. But the more I thought of it, particularly in relation to all of the brain science I’ve read, the more it seemed like he had struck upon the one truly unique feature of every human being’s individual self. From the beginning we create our own inner map of the world that includes not just all we’ve done and experienced but also how we feel about it. And what we recognize in our surroundings, spring from memories seen in the places of our lives, which clarify the meaning of the experience that’s conveyed by the feeling. We map not just where we are, but all we know in time and space. Since my father’s lost so much of his memory, I’ve found that when we do discover remembered areas it’s always in relation to places. Talking this week about weddings, he couldn’t remember my brother’s until I mentioned Hiss Avenue. The reception was in the back yard of my sister-in-law’s childhood home and given the scene Dad’s memory came drifting back to what a great guy her Dad was and the boat her brother Woody built and their fish pond. This place in his map still had its connection to the sights, sensations and feelings of his past experience and I could tell he enjoyed remembering and re-experiencing his connection to life. He got his mind moving by finding a way into his map.
This map, primarily in the hippocampus, but riding up against the parietal lobes (where we are in space) on one side and the feeling centers on the other, establishes our sense of ourselves in space/time and personal meaning. Where we are forms the core of who we are. The brain is full of maps that correlate one kind of experience with another. The map is the hub of what we know, the hippocampus the trigger point of all the rich associations spread throughout the brain.
This is a concrete reality and not a metaphor, but as a metaphoric image it helps us comprehend the notion of an Akashic field, where all the information of all that’s happened and been thought continues to accumulate, enriched by our very own thoughts in the here and now. Though an ancient idea its appeal is growing. New experience adds to the field and enables us to tune to information already there. In a state of flow the field of information moves through us unobstructed, but filtered through our individual frequency. I used to resist the idea that what’s experienced by me as my mind is not necessarily all in my head. That the modification in my brain as I have new experience might be simply expanding the reception of my tuner. Like a radio filtering out a particular broadcast to pull in we receive information through our highly sophisticated personal brains. Likewise we send it out, add what we know to the field of information. This is the model proposed by Rupert Sheldrake. That even our own memories aren’t in our brains but are in the information field impressed with those experiences and the shape of the energy that rippled from it; this was an idea that was headbashingly difficult to take in when I first read it. In his book, “The Sense of Being Stared At,” Sheldrake writes, “Trying to understand minds without recognizing the extended fields on which they depend is like trying to understand the effects of magnets without acknowledging that they are surrounded by magnetic fields.” Broadening our idea of what constitutes mind will require images to shape a new model of how we conceive of it.

Chinks in the Cavern

2011-10-20T17:04:00.001-07:00

To See Or Not To See

2011-10-20T17:03:00.001-07:00

With seeing as the most common metaphor for understanding, it’s not surprising that there would also be many different metaphors that describe ignorance as what interferes with it.
Originally put on horses so things on the side of the road wouldn’t distract them, “blinkers” had a useful function. The metaphor “blinkered vision” could be seen as a positive, a focus on the goal that ignores everything else. It suited the verbal, linear, single cause and effect view within the twentieth century idea of progress and propelled its machine. With the field of variables pruned so far down, the illusion of control is created. But any realistic view of a situation includes variables in all directions. Though excluding things to learn more about a single area can have value, does what is learned have any meaning without the role of that area in a larger context?
My blog community (those that visit this site) is from all over the world, from the Ukraine to the Philippines, India and Germany, Sudan and China, people joined by ideas. And one of the central ideas that weaves through visual philosophy is the value of a bigger picture. A larger perspective is the route to the wisdom necessary to change the world. When the camera pans over the demonstrators on Wall St. there’s more variety of individuals than I’ve ever seen at a protest. Those interviewed all have different angles on what’s happening that give dimension to our understanding. So many kinds of lives have been damaged by the blinkered vision and unchecked greed that’s ruining this country. A few people hoarding all the money will lead us back into a technological feudalism. When work can be done anywhere we’re almost always working. Making profits as the only goal means not caring who gets trampled on the way. When we keep from seeing the impact of our actions we can convince ourselves we’re not responsible. Seeing changes our view. Tightly held views are threatened by the challenge of open eyes.
Words are blinkers. As we walk the street the word “beggar” keeps us from seeing the specific individual. The word “fool” or “dupe” keeps us from being the compassionate human we could. We find “enemies” to be responsible for our dissatisfactions and make demons and “bad guys” out of people who see the world with different blinkers. We build the words into creeds and the blinkers get bigger, enable more damage to be ignored, more people not to see, for the sake of a bunch of words.
Scientists suggest that blinking when lying represents a minute retreat from what’s about to be said. Finding this out made me start counting blinks when politicians were speaking on camera. In slow motion it was like some had their eyes shut the whole time. I started watching in slow motion after learning about Paul Ekman’s work on microexpression. He said we could control our primary facial expressions but that underlying motives and attitudes would show in the transitions between them. Watching presidential primary debates in slow motion showed an entirely new persona in some cases, underlying psychology that was sometimes scary in it’s zealotry or condescension. Without the words to distract me their stance toward the world and other people could be seen as far more complex and enlightening.
We can see more and better without the screen erected by verbal language. Turn off the sound and wipe it clean to perceive more of what counts.

Material Dimension

2011-09-29T16:48:00.001-07:00

This is a detail of a brand new drawing I started in 2009. Graphite and paper with two layers of duralar.
It's now on display in the Faculty Show in MICA's Decker Gallery until October 16.

The Appeal of Symmetry

2011-09-29T16:46:00.000-07:00

Recently NPR reported a new study that looked at babies’ preferences for different artists. Given the choice of Leonardo da Vinci, Andy Warhol, and Picasso, they consistently preferred Picasso. When it comes to taking interest in the outside world, nothing is more important to babies than facial expression. A balloon with a smiley face will hold their attention until the face is turned away. Other recent research showed that caricatures that emphasize certain features elicit a stronger response than the face itself. The exaggerated expressions in Picasso would obviously be most appealing. The information given by a face is the most important early information we learn because it enables us to see how others are feeling. Mirror neurons fire in simulation of the expression inside so we feel the state we see. A contempt face on another person will make our heart race whether acknowledged or not. It may be that the appeal of symmetry in the human face has more to do with the expression than the features. We’re all pretty symmetrical in the arrangement of our features when we’re relaxed or happy, content and focused. Negative emotions tend to twist the face out of shape, the sneer that raises one side of the mouth, disgust that pulls one side down. Faces that are critical, skeptical, angry or sad each twist the natural symmetry of our features. Thich Nhat Hnan wrote, “Whenever anger comes up, take out a mirror and look at yourself. When you are angry you are not very beautiful…Hundreds of muscles in your face look very tense”. He advises us to breathe and smile mindfully to return to natural beauty. Often when I talk with a class about this, pointing out that negative emotions are what make people unattractive because the tension in those muscles pulls the face out of symmetry, someone knows a person with the features to be beautiful, but isn’t, because the person was mean or paranoid or some other unpleasant characteristic that pinched up the face. Pain also distorts our symmetry. I was intrigued to read in a “Scientific American-Mind” magazine that early pleasure in symmetry connected to health. What is too much off symmetry and out of balance is associated with disease.
The approach to symmetry underlying my recent work begins with the intersection of wave fronts that create interference patterns. Thinking about vibrations and formative influences as much as I have over many years I’ve come to think of matter as a very condensed and complex interference pattern. A picture of a swimming pool during the earthquake showed waves that form at the sides meeting in the middle and becoming an interference pattern of standing waves where they appeared to hold still, frozen until the energy pattern that stimulated it changed. Like the eye of Jupiter maintains its shape even though it’s a clot of churning gases, so we humans could be a constant flow of energy not as solid as we think, a density in the continuous field of energy that includes everything.
We humans and most organic life are slightly off symmetry, but balanced around an axis that holds its shape until the supporting systems break down. If something is too ordered it stops moving. Excess in any area will throw off the balance. Playing with that tension is a way of exploring what may be a primary principle of visual philosophy. The symmetry in our bodies is a model for the mirroring of external expression. Accurate internal mirroring of what we see is the essence of understanding and foundation of communication.

Opening

2011-09-09T07:35:00.001-07:00

Spatial Intelligence

2011-09-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

Oliver Sacks in Musicophilia discussed a syndrome some are born with where even with fully developed frontal and temporal lobes, considered primary to intelligence, and often with extensive vocabularies or outstanding musical skills, were unable to take care of themselves, to perform simple actions like tying shoes. The undeveloped part of the brain was the parietal lobe, home of our understanding of ourselves in space, our sense of where we are, our position and direction in our surroundings. Parietal intelligence is the intelligence of Einstein. (That was the part of his brain that was discovered to be bigger than other people’s.) He said his ideas came to him as images and indeed, much of our own use of language depends on metaphors based on moving in space. I think of parietal intelligence as “deer consciousness”; precisely aware of distance and speed, the vectors of movement, that when abstracted and symbolized at the human level become higher mathematics. At the visual level, a broad awareness is attuned to every shift and change in the surroundings. Assessments of ongoing change are the business of daily life.
Spatial intelligence reaches its pinnacle in tennis. The level of focus combined with alert awareness, heighten by anticipation, application of everything observed and known, into spontaneous response crafted by years of dedicated effort is a heartening thing to witness.
Listening to the TV commentators I started to realize how much of the language they were using was also the language you might hear from a coach in the practice of Zen. They talk about the virtues of taking it one point at a time, use phrases like “Staying in the Moment” that illustrate the present-centeredness true of a genuine spiritual state. And it’s easy to see how the mental chatter in the mind of any player is what defeats them and not usually a failing of the body. Throughout the game the unreturnable shot is called a “winner”. Winning is not something reserved for the result but happens throughout the game. Perfect placement and execution is a triumph in every instance it’s achieved. Attention to the moment, acting at the height of personal capability is the state of involvement we call flow. In the language of sports, to be in the Zone is to be continuous with the game, purified of the self-doubt and inner narration that keep us from doing what we can.
Watching Donald Young, a player I’d never seen before, I had so many opportunities to say “Wow!” and “Yesssss!” I was feeling really good, what with all the dopamine and endorphins flowing; when another outstanding shot was hit it left me laughing with pleasure. Our mirror neurons, following high quality action, stimulate the same brain chemistry ( to a lesser extent but still, we’re sitting on the couch). David Foster Wallace put it this way in one of his essays on tennis. “Great athletes are profoundly in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate, but televisable.” I can’t help thinking about Roger Federer when Wallace writes, “There is, about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man.”
The embodiment of ideals and the privilege of being able to watch their peak moments is an elevating experience. I don’t think Wallace overstates it. Incarnation is manifest spirit. There can be no charlatans. You can’t get there unless your dedication is genuine. All the training and hard work, perseverance and focus culminate in the championship moments that we get to share. Human beings need these models of human possibility to remind us of the power of attention to whatever our being in space is doing. It is this full attention that makes an activity autotelic, a pleasure in the doing itself. Pursuing excellence in anything feels good because we’re increasing our power, focusing on the action in the world through our embodied being. Emulating what we admire is how we become what we want to be. The qualities that make a great tennis player demonstrate virtues useful to any attainment.

Layers

2011-08-30T16:08:00.001-07:00

This is a detail of an earlier image that changes the emphasis.

Picture Power

2011-08-30T16:07:00.000-07:00

The old adage “One picture is worth a thousand words,” understates the case. There are so many levels of information conveyed by an image that the linear trickle of words can’t begin to approach. Not just the facts of what’s there, but the relations between them, the state of balance that leads us to expect motion or stillness, the feeling tone our processing of the image creates within us. We are always in a picture complete with weather and the psychology of other people; a complexity that no theory created with labels can touch. Looking at the videogame “Halo” with my nephew, I felt I was seeing the future that young people fear, the dramatic scenery of a long gone technological civilization that left behind demons for the survivors. The training of visual responsiveness offered by games and the “look and choose” nature of the Internet are leading us away from verbal dominance. Just in time. Power uses labels to create enmity, divisions that can be exploited and strengthened by repetition and careful choices of inflammatory pictures. The big world of cyber connectivity, and interactive challenge, could neutralize old word-based power because future generations will simply stop paying attention. The practical ways that images contribute to understanding is leading the growth of infographics with sites like EnvisionFinancials.com showing budgets and financial relationships as a 3D nested pie chart. I expect a cascade of innovative applications coming as the visual thinkers raised on sophisticated video games come of age.
Recently, I participated in an “English as Second Language” class at MICA. The discussion of self-portraits they had done clearly showed how much meaning was communicated by each image. They suggested stories, worlds changing, the passage from childhood to this transitional state of independence, attitudes, feelings, so much that is truly beyond the power of words to show so specifically. They may not have felt confident with the language, but because they were being asked to say what the picture did for them individually, it offered the opportunity to use the language creatively and find words that could reflect their own take on each image. With a range of different life experiences there was a rich variety of associations to each, and different sensibilities picked up on different qualities. The structure of the image resonates with similar structures within each of us and we were free to use the words that best show where the image took us. Jung’s statement “Image is psyche,” emphasized the correspondence between archetypes and visual structure. We can see stability or upheaval, dominance or submission. Images convey the depth of us. When we talk about them we discover how the differences in the specifics of our lives connect in the pattern beneath the surface. This particular discussion was a clear illustration of how the communication that happens in pictures transcends words and connects people around the shared understanding of it. When someone made an observation the rest of us hadn’t seen, the reaction was usually pleasure. We saw it once it was pointed out and the comment enlarged our understanding. Offering the aspects of a picture that we respond to enlarges the perspective for everyone. It’s this unifying aspect to visual communication that is most needed now and in the future. People are unnecessarily divided by labels. Our natural state is embedded in our environment and the flow of events around us.

Puzzle

2011-08-18T08:30:00.001-07:00

Ongoing Change

2011-08-18T08:29:00.000-07:00

“The Book of Changes” was the translated title of the ancient Chinese book “I Ching” that first attracted me. In my twenties at the time, it seemed like the scale of uncontrollable factors in the churning world around me overwhelmed the strategies for living surrounding me in the culture. Taoism and I clicked instantly around the foundation understanding that movement and change and adapting to shifting circumstances while in motion myself was the only useful image for balance. Being aware of patterns of movement is far more helpful than the names and definitions of things. Labeling and weighing numbers of things, though useful in certain spheres of life, can’t be an image of life itself. Every category and box one is sorted into comes with an attached judgment that, if one is dependent on thinking with labels, takes the place of the actual, in-front-of-your face reality. Naming something is a way of controlling it and creates an illusion of knowing that can be highly destructive to making real contact with the world. One of the benefits of video games is the degree to which it uses sophisticated instinctual visual assessment and banishes verbal thought. And because it depends upon complete attention, all the time, it can be an exhilarating involvement we have lost the art of in the real world. Because we’ve substituted labels and judgments and the spill of theories that grow from them we’ve built walls of ideation that limit our capacity to pay attention to the movements of life. When walking becomes fitness, a treadmill and set of numbers, we miss the relation to outdoors, the fact that every day is different, that we are always responding to the wind and temperatures, a bird or squirrel. The automatic part is there, but the narration of life in our head, the piles of verbal thought all around us keep us from seeing the life in which our body participates. Make a game of the walk, note how many changes you see in the same neighborhood every day. Our bodies are always doing this. We just aren’t paying attention. Our response to the world is a dance, a natural adjustment to the movement around us that makes us part of it. Paying attention is the key to enjoying it.
A book that gives advice about how to handle the different states of change is better than a list of unchanging rules. It helps us see the overall dynamic in which we’re embedded and see realistically what can be done in such a state. Handling the situation well always emphasized cultivating character and virtue. Today’s research shows that the reason it feels so good is because we stimulate endorphins when we are virtuous. It’s good for our survival because it harmonizes us as a collaborator with the moving world.
Looking back on my recent posts I realize to what degree the philosophy in the “I Ching” pervades my thinking. Seeing the world as a dynamic whole, it uses the imagery of nature to express the cosmic intelligence that underlies all phenomena.
A mechanical view of the world leaves out contextual pattern. We don’t learn that much more about life by stripping away all the variables that make it life. A world of multiple variables needs a philosophy based on adjustment, metaphysical homeostasis based in the understanding that the metaphors of striving for balance can apply to any living system. In the midst of so many uncontrollable changes it makes sense to “not be led by hopes and fears”. Like the yang-yin symbol, each contains a bit of the other. Our ideas about them are what make us suffer.
More than thirty years of regular reading in the “I Ching” has created an underlying approach to life that invigorates each moment of being. Names and labels reduce the richness of continuous being to desired points along the way, where we can only enjoy results and not the pleasure of doing. Erich Fromm wrote about the many ways that an attitude toward life based on having- possessions, accomplishments, problems, a body, a life, a goal, was less satisfying than an attitude based on being- living, doing, feeling- participating in an unfolding process. We are what we do. We do it better when we’re paying attention.

Reconfiguring

2011-07-27T15:12:00.000-07:00

Building New Structures

2011-07-27T15:11:00.001-07:00

Motion traces a path in the surroundings. The excessive focus on the identity of things obscures the importance of how we move among them. Over time our movements create an image of the intertwined pattern that is the clearest expression of the meaning of our lives. Alfred Adler first coined the word “lifestyle” over a hundred years ago to place the emphasis on the movement, the style of life and way of being in the world that builds our satisfaction or unhappiness. When I see someone clinging to their resentments, it’s not hard to see how that way of looking at things creates problems. So many have become confused by the messages of consumer culture that try to identify meaning with what you have accumulated. In the depths of the heart we know that we are meaningful through our actions in the world, the way we behave, how we affect others, the functions we perform and how that changes according to context. It is through understanding our own life-in-action that we understand others. Though the specifics are not the same, the structure of the pattern is what tells us they’re headed for trouble or triumph. We’ve seen it before. This is the basis for our attunement with the world.
So much of what we experience has parallels in other areas. We’re tuned to primary patterns that we can recognize in other areas to help us decode the unfamiliar. The gestalt psychologists of the 1940’s and 50’s used the word “isomorphism” for this structural similarity. That we can apply knowledge from one area to patterns in another is the essence of reasoning. The pattern shows us where to look for the next step or what might be missing from the whole.
The Internet is isomorphic to the brain. Every site (neuron) is the hub of many other connections. The web abounds in terminology of location. We create sites and navigate within them. These similarities may allow us to better envision the idea of consciousness as continuous, shared, something expressed through each of us. Since the structures are similar we can look at the evolution of knowledge on every subject like a wiki in the collective mind, where all views and life experience inform the development of the whole. The principle of life is growth. That’s why contributing to the store of knowledge gives us pleasure.
I would love to see a game experience that made me fell connected to the universe in exhilarating and insightful ways. Immersion in a game of pure beauty might be found to be far more refreshing than day-time naps, now being explored in companies hoping to decrease mistakes due to long days.
A game format could be used to develop our self-awareness of deeper level patterns in our psyche. Creating a range of places to explore we could learn about our inner world by seeing the choices we make about where to go. Imagining entirely new places to be may allow us to develop capabilities not even dreamed. The acts of identifying and classifying chop our true continuity into parts. Though it’s a way of thinking that has its usefulness, it has wrecked our connection to all the wonderful different kinds of people who share our patterns as living human beings. We need to remember that our categories are tools and are not the reality. Eating and sleeping, togetherness and loss, being born and dying, are the patterns of being we share, isomorphic to each other, a reality deeper than the ideas, labels, theories and ideologies we mistakenly let divide us.

Holding to Center

2011-07-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

Playing the Day

2011-07-17T12:38:00.000-07:00

Living my day like a game has been fun, mindful and illuminating. I thought that after three weeks of giving myself points for behaviors I wanted to encourage and subtracting points for negatives, I’d have internalized the new habits and could leave the game behind. Not so. Bad habits and old thought patterns crept back, and without my imaginary penalties I had no weapons to fight them. This seemingly minor incentive was still a structure for accountability. Calling it a game pulled together all the different parts of my day so they affected each other. Working hard on my drawing all day, something that had always been among my ultimate values, wasn’t enough to get a high score for the day. I needed to include other things, other people, which I knew were important to encourage when I first set up my scoring system. I couldn’t let myself lose ground with nervous habits. I would have to think twice before expressing irritation. After paying such close attention to every little thing, by evening I would feel excited about the day, vitalized. In fact it occurred to me that what I’m measuring and stimulating in the act of accounting is the flow of life force through me. I often think of myself and others like tubes through which the life force flows. We are happy to the degree that the flow of energy is unimpeded. Life problems clog our ability to let it flow so my scores are aimed at keeping the passage clear. Dwelling on the sad past is a big minus. In the game, I don’t do it. Turning a negative into a positive is a big plus, and the times I’ve managed to pull it off it have been very satisfying. Taking something that upset me and finding a way to twist it into something else has been gratifying on many levels.
When I started keeping score again, I had a stretch of really low scores and wondered why. As I thought back over the day I saw I’d left out all of the small nice acts and even one big one that I knew should be rewarded when I set up my system. I took that part of what I do for granted. The game made me notice them again. The happiness of games is the fuller awareness, the full involvement in what we’re doing. The fact that our pleasure chemicals are stimulated for full involvement is because it’s the way we’re meant to be. We pay closer attention because it feels good. And any game offers that happy feedback loop. Playing the day pulls everything onto the screen, and time is experienced in its full richness.
My urge to evangelize is strong. Everyone could create their own system of points and penalties that push them to be who they want to be. Brains are malleable, our habits ours to program. In my game, there is always a way to score. When I’m not producing new ideas, I can refine labor-intensive parts of my drawing, or water plants, or write something in my “Book of Gratitude”. Creating a personal scoring system is a way of looking directly at what matters and equalizing the acts that make us more human with the acts that society recognizes as useful. Balancing what we want from our lives through our own values is like writing the score for the music of our day. To make your day into a game is to take a new stance in relation to it, to add another level, build in an overview.
Jane McGonigal is right. “Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential “. In “Reality is Broken” she cites a University of Rochester study tracking graduates. They found that “American dream” goals, which focused on money, sex appeal and fame, didn’t contribute to happiness at all. The graduates that had been working hard at self-development were happiest in whatever they ended up doing. Emerson wrote, “Our chief want in life is someone who will make us do what we can.” Playing a game makes you better at it. Playing your day may well do the same thing. To create a structure for our own coherence unified by our own values is to take back the power over our lives.

Extending Influence

2011-06-30T07:55:00.002-07:00

Beauty in Sports

2011-06-30T07:55:00.001-07:00

The theme from Wimbledon always gives me a catch in my chest. In the early years of my enthusiasm I would wear white and get up early singing along trying my best to sound like a fanfare trumpet. Long before I knew anything about endorphins giving us pleasure for what has survival value, I knew that watching tennis was good for me. Seeing something so well done is exhilarating, a stimulus to higher achievement. Mirror neurons get a healthy workout, reflecting the facial expressions of concentration and focus, the body language that pushes the envelope of physical capability. The positive feelings we experience show that we’re meant to push our abilities. We understand and participate in the international language of gesture. When players show frustration, it’s a sign they’re taking it personally, have lost the sense of their mission. It doesn’t take ESP to see that’s not a winning attitude. We know what it feels like and how it can drag us down.
Watching Wimbledon is a superlative visual pleasure, tennis in its most jaw-dropping beauty, on grass and framed by the elegant English aesthetic. With crowds gathered to witness the best tennis in the world, it is the level where sports can be high art. We’re drawn to the style of the player that expresses something our soul yearns to reinforce. Everyone has their own expression of excellence. I don’t tend to root for a particular player until they clearly deserve to win. The ones I like best have to do with their style and attitude toward the game, how they handle setbacks and the winning shots of their opponents, staying focused when things aren’t going their way. Marion Bartoli drew me in with her earnest determination, her movements both balletic and fierce. Then there’s the fact that she beat Serena Williams, a tremendous player who only a few years back inspired me to call people up and say they should turn it on immediately. She looked like sculpture in motion. Her sister Venus was even more graceful in her heyday. When sports becomes art there are no wasted motions, the grace and attunement can only be achieved with high level skills pushed to their limits. It has so many followers because of our attraction to what we admire. Not only does it show us what “the zone” looks like, but through our inner mirroring, what it feels like as well.
The enjoyment for the spectator is not just about the competition the but seeing the sport taken to new levels, to feel that heart swelling admiration for the hard work and intense discipline it takes to get there that stimulates the best in ourselves. It’s the mindfulness that a game requires that draws attention around the channeling of pure life force and makes us feel more fully alive. If you haven’t experienced what watching tennis can make you feel, give it a try this weekend. The Finals are Saturday (Women’s) and Sunday (Men’s), 9am, NBC.

Transformation

2011-06-06T08:27:00.001-07:00

Fondly remembering my month in France two years ago.

Making a Game of Self-Improvement

2011-06-06T08:26:00.000-07:00

Almost by accident, but surely as a result of reading the book “Reality is Broken”,
I found myself assigning point values to the various things I do. What I valued the most I gave the highest scores, but everything I wanted to encourage from smiling to creative breakthrough was matched by a certain number of points. I was surprised at how much fun this was, comparing the relative values of not just the obvious stuff like taking my walk or doing an errand, but more nuanced behaviors like asking someone a good question or transforming a negative experience into a positive are encouraged by high scores. The highest scores are for creative breakthroughs, starting something new and doing something entirely different. Visiting my parents and getting my car’s emissions tested have the added satisfaction of contributing to high scores as well as feelings of satisfaction.
When I was in the hospital a few years ago, Union Memorial used a pain scale that helped patients put a number on the degree of their pain. A strip with faces numbered one to ten registering mild unease at the low end and screaming pain at the other not only helped me pinpoint the pain, it gave me a chance to compare and see how I was doing. It was satisfying to be able to measure my descent from nine to four over a period of days. Putting it on a spectrum, even though quantifying, gives a sense of perspective. Studies have shown we’re happiest when our left front hemisphere is active. That’s why the act of putting thoughts and emotions in words feels good. It’s encouraged by our reward system. Analytical abilities are there too, the good feeling is a sense of knowing what something is, a small act of pinning down the difficult to express.
Giving points to all the behaviors I want to encourage uses a game mode to fulfill the “I Ching’s” advice for being a happier person by cultivating my best qualities. Additionally I consider the modern happiness research and give points to whatever encourages a happy state of mind. Every smile counts. Negative points subtract from the total. These are for behaviors I want to discourage like mindless habits. Higher negative scores are given to anger and impatience, yelling at other drivers and careless accidents according to degree. The process of quantifying stuff like this is entertaining in itself. Living it through the day can be outright funny. When I forgot to put the whistling cap down on the teakettle, my husband called my attention to it when it had almost boiled down. After setting it right I came out of the kitchen and announced that I’d penalized myself five points. We both laughed.
In the time I’ve been playing this game it’s been especially effective with mindless habits. I have a few nervous habits of which picking at the skin around my fingernails is most intractable. At minus two points per instance, I’m amazed at the power of that little shift to make me more aware and resistant to the automatic. And when I do catch myself, I chuckle when I write it down and maybe the pleasure is partly in having some small penalty to exact. Looking at the day as an opportunity to beat a previous days score clearly adds mindfulness where it wasn’t before. I enjoy tallying up the previous days points when I write down my first scores the next day. Right now my highest is seventy and my lowest, twenty-eight. That shows how hard it can be. A day spent watching TV or daydreaming earns no points so would likely end up in the negative values after the nervous habits, angry voice and extra glasses of wine are added up.
One feature of happiness concerns how something becomes more meaningful when tied to a bigger picture. Putting separate routine actions into the larger score of my day, pulls together all the isolated acts that were difficult while separate, but became meaningful when tied to the whole. For a person not usually given to quantification, I think what I like best about playing this game with myself is that instead of counting up stuff- money, possessions and the externals of our lives, we’re counting our interior wealth, focusing on our actions, the behavior that creates our character. It’s a game that encourages us to live with the person we want to be.

Anti-Attention

2011-05-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

This is a still from one of the thirty different areas in my 2002 interactive piece "CAVE" which I'm in the process of modifying into a video.

Where We Are

2011-05-25T08:42:00.000-07:00

A central metaphor applied to human life is the metaphor of where we are. We use descriptions of location not just for the physical place we inhabit, but as a metaphor for anything that might happen to us. We naturally express our state of being as a relationship to our surroundings. When someone says, ”I’m in a tight place” or “I’m in the clear” we get it. We understand how it feels to be in that place. What gives the metaphor substance is the way movement is affected. Being thwarted by obstacles, being lost or unsure which way to turn, are nuanced opposites of smooth passage. A clear unobstructed view is equated with understanding. The more we see the more we know. Universals of being human are constructed by our shared experience of moving in the world. These are the archetypes, felt patterns of being that guide perception. Having more space is generally a positive, equated with freedom of action, thought, emotions. Having less space tends toward the negative, less freedom of movement, less space on your calendar, less room in a relationship, less mental space when the mind is cluttered. Though we might like it cozy, we don’t like being confined and resist what binds our movement. We build our concepts with this shared understanding of what moving around in the world feels like and it’s mapped in our hippocampus, gatehouse to long-term memory. Memories are tied to where they happened. Whatever tools are used to interact with the world are woven into the patterns of behavior that build around that space. What scientists call our peripersonal space includes whatever we can use to explore the world, mapped as extensions of the limbs involved. Cortical space grows with whatever we do most. If you spend a good part of the day dialing your cell phone with your thumb you would likely see an enlarged area for your thumb in a scan of your brain. Whatever capabilities you’re using have corresponding parts of the brain that are growing with that use. And the presence of the phone is mapped in as the location of the behavior. The size of our space has increased in the age of computers. Now where we can be extends into cyberspace. Though virtual, as a new location for our minds to go, it is also mapped in our brain. Now the options of our various actions in relation to the computer and phone create an intricate network of branching connections, personal maps of growing complexity. Since the brain developed to its current size because it needed inner maps to move around, having an enlarged space for movement, even if virtual, could lead to another level of evolution for our minds. Our inner model of reality would broaden and deepen. When I created my interactive piece, “CAVE”, my hope was to create a psychological space where fears and anxieties could be explored and gently recognized without judgment. It was meant to encourage curiosity and reward it with surprises (dopamine). Video games offer so many possibilities for places that could encourage positive qualities. As the computer links with the wide screen TV, game channels could become as widespread and varied as the passive channels that mesmerize and offer no challenges. Real learning channels and discovery channels and think tank channels could combine multiplayer game learning with collaborative problem solving. What kinds of places can be imagined offers the potential for tremendous growth in the perceptual understanding that underlies wisdom. Where we are is at a threshold of unity.

Dynamic Stillness

2011-05-05T07:45:00.002-07:00

Simulation

2011-05-05T07:45:00.001-07:00

The first book I’m putting on my summer reading list is a new book with the wonderful title “Reality Is Broken: How Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World”. The optimism of the title was expressed enthusiastically by the author, Jane McGonigal, in a recent radio interview. She described how games can change behavior, treat depression and anxiety, and tap into skills that young people have developed through the games they’ve already played. Instead of just shooting, games can be designed that engage problem solving skills, creative thinking and shift emphasis from competition to cooperation. There is a realm of possibilities here that we probably haven’t begun to imagine. The author describes new games that develop our minds and abilities, and open better opportunities for learning in a venue where anything can be simulated. This raises the fascinating question of where we could go that we can’t in reality, and by the repeated training through technology, developing powers we humans don’t currently have. Anthropologists have pointed out how the brain jumped in size after we started using tools. They provided a new level of involvement with physical reality that included building, modifying, weighing and counterbalancing. Each new physical act brought with it new metaphors for thinking about building our future, modifying our plans, weighing our alternatives and counterbalancing risks.
Given the complexity of the new tools in our midst, it seems reasonable to expect another jump in the capacities of our brains. It might give us a chance to cultivate values that could lead to a more harmonious society. This may be the most important area where imagery can foster a more positive evolution in our human minds. We can reshape the foundation that guides thought from a model based on separateness and competing ideas and values, to one that shows the interconnectedness of everything and our participation in intelligent organization seen in everything around us.
Video and computer games offer the possibility of expanding human consciousness.
The entertainment goals of the industry have used most of the development dollars thus far, but in the realm of education there’s plenty to still be explored. Classroom games that feature collaboration could develop the sense of pleasure we get from working together. Rewards for discovery of what’s new can help people out of old mindsets that distrust what’s unfamiliar and cultivate instead a taste for difference. The brain is already designed to support novelty seeking, producing dopamine to stimulate even more interest. The visual nature of screen based media opens the way for development of visual reasoning that would build on abilities favored by video games, discerning the significant detail, the inconsistency in a picture, the anticipation of the next step in a pattern, which could lead to skills in perceiving deeper level more complex patterns. The military has long used simulation for training. It should be possible to use it to add sophistication to our ability to conceptualize.
Most video games now are spatially organized but can do all kinds of things that real space can’t. Since memory is spatially organized we might be able to introduce difficult concepts like multiple dimensions in a way that makes sense to the visual brain. One Superbowl commercial had a character walking from room to room and the wall becomes the floor in each successive room, regular gravity is ignored. And we adjust with it. There was a remarkable experiment at the end of the nineteenth century where the subject wears prism glasses that turn the entire visual field upside down. By the end of a week wearing them, the wearer saw the world right side up again, adapting to whatever it has to do to function in the world. This capacity could be used to understand deeper level interconnection in the patterning we participate in. What kinds of simulations would encourage a deep sense of interconnection to the world? Seeing everything as extensions of ourselves we would naturally care for it.
It’s a potential that can only be played out visually, finding representations that can help us see the linkages between complex systems and the constants in their functioning.
Today’s young people have been conditioned to the attitude that easy is good, robbing them of the pleasure of really getting lost in something that demands full attention. The state of flow in the peak experience occurs with the maximum challenge we can handle. Self-consciousness and time disappear in the ongoing response to feedback which keeps attention completely in the here and now of the action. When you’re deeply involved you feel most alive, experiencing the very best brain chemistry. Video games have provided a version of this experience for young people and are an ideal format for new kinds of challenges. With the rising popularity of playing with many others on line, it’s not hard to envision game designs that help us finally make the shift from a machine model of reality to an organic, multiple systems one that could in fact “change the world”.

Heaviness

2011-04-22T12:31:00.001-07:00

Doing It Well

2011-04-22T12:30:00.000-07:00

The conversation I just had with my brother ended with our appreciation of the care my mother got from the people at Union Memorial Hospital when she had her heart attacks. The first took her in and the second, that weekend; doctors came in and did extensive open-heart surgery into the night, saving her life. Throughout the hospital any of the staff would stop what they were doing to answer your questions and help you any way they could. Bill said whoever was training the people who worked there was doing an excellent job. I credited the personnel department for the qualities they look for in hiring. For both of us, it boosted our faith in human nature, affirmed the essential goodness that comes out in times of crisis. You could see that the people there were happy in their work in an atmosphere devoted to doing the best job possible. It’s something that applies to all areas of life. When your try to do your best in whatever it is, that means you’re involved, and if you’re involved it feels better. It’s how we’re meant to be, paying attention in the here and now. It feels good, endorphins flowing. As the Zen saying goes, ”The secret to happiness is to live your life as though you’re interested in it.” “Beginner’s mind” sees everything fresh, unclouded by preconceptions and the ideas about reality that we take for reality. Be in whatever you’re doing and the most difficult times can be important lessons. Over time we build skills in living, which are our reward for cultivating the right qualities. More skillfulness, with an instrument, a sport, any area of expertise leads to more pleasure in the doing.
Stretching our abilities is how we grow.
With the media too often focusing on what is bad in people, we feel uplifted when we see people doing it well, involved and attentive to what they do. The mirror neurons of satisfying action stimulate our own impulse to growth.
Seeing the spirit in action kindles the spirit within. Mary Baker Eddy reminds people to identify with the spirit because all good is of the spirit whereas pain and weakness are not. Identify with the best and you become it.
The fact that my brother and I are trying our best to do this well, working together to resolve some very complex life circumstances, is another comforting aspect of this time. Even when what’s going on is really awful, being present instead of running away, facing it honestly instead of hiding, is better than having it pushed aside in the unconscious, a demon to sabotage you later.
We give attention to what we care about. It’s the outer expression of love. Giving attention to every aspect of being let’s love flow through unhindered. Our culture encourages negative qualities that divert people’s attention from what might be truly satisfying, then provides pills to dull the ache of being someone you don’t respect. Doing something well is satisfying in itself, experiencing the life force connecting us to the web of being. It’s pleasure for all involved.

Thorn Eruption

2011-03-30T12:38:00.000-07:00

Staying In The Dance

2011-03-30T12:37:00.000-07:00

“Whenever there’s some ax to grind or something to prove, there is no dance.”
Alan Watts
I always liked the dance metaphor for expressing the art in life, the pure involvement and pleasure in doing, but the way I thought about it was always connected with individual action and attitude toward one’s circumstances. It wasn’t until recently, when I felt under attack, that I realized the more fundamental, participatory meaning of being in the dance. Under attack, it’s easy to fall into “something to prove “ mode. Ignoring the attack can create an “ax to grind” later on. But the goal of the dance is to stay in harmony with the others, to be part of an overall flow of interlaced patterns in motion. To insist on pushing the personal dance is not the cosmic choreography. So when the unexpected adversary stomps onto the scene, new steps must be learned that respond to the truth of what’s now happening. Finding the steps that acknowledge and move with the changing rhythm is staying in the dance. Like with music, when the dissonant note enters, the important thing is to stay with the passage until it resolves.
Many times I’ve made the mistake of taking the most passive role when faced with conflict and thinking that’s being in the dance because it’s not fighting. But it also gives up creative participation and the chance to handle danger gracefully. It avoids learning the skills necessary to face inevitable conflicts in the course of life and the sense of accomplishment when they’re handled successfully.
A Japanese theatre group, Yoshi and Company was in Baltimore for a theatre festival many years ago, and the aesthetic power of its martial arts based dance/performance art has stayed vividly with me for decades. The dance of combat is a focused drama that when enacted artfully plays out to a satisfying end. Danger requires intense attention.
This level of attention is missing when you just go along and allow yourself to be led. Passivity is denial of what’s actually happening and the truth of your own reactions. Moves must match previous moves and use the energy of the attack to redirect the flow of events in recognition of the preceding move. It is creative because attacks are often unexpected and take unfamiliar forms. If it’s approached as something to win, the ego’s in charge and the dance is lost. Attentive response doesn’t fight fire with fire, enlarging the blaze, it fights fire with water in proportion to the fire, an act of balance that ends the destruction, cools the heat.
In his book “The Only Dance There Is” Ram Dass writes, “Honor everybody you meet as your teacher.” Respect the adversary as offering a particular kind of lesson. An attack is information.
We can’t get away from the many fibers of life, the weave of which affects our own direction. Anything that works against the overall pattern will look like a mistake, a disharmony in the larger design. Willful rebellion against the choreography adds to the friction. All that’s happening is the dance being offered. Participation is our choice.

Distracting Matter

2011-03-06T13:18:00.001-08:00

Oscillation

2011-03-06T13:17:00.000-08:00

She said, “ A lot of people are down.”
And I’m thinking,
Including myself.
I can tell from her face that it’s hard on all of us. Others agreed, blamed the quick change back to cold weather. But maybe it’s not a causal relationship; maybe we’re part of the same overall movement.
Riding the same field of being, we’re exhilarated on the crest of the wave, but apprehensive in the trough. At the top we feel we can handle everything, and in this dip at the not-quite-end of winter, every little thing threatens to overwhelm. Trapped in the gully we can’t see what might be coming and our fears rise to the surface. The climate of fear may have called up older thoughts and memories that resonate with it, and we often make the mistake of thinking an old drama or worrisome uncertainty is why we’re sad now. But it may be that we’re not depressed because of those reflections, but thinking about them and the mood associated with them helps us recognize the feeling we have in the present. A memory may serve as an image that helps clarify the current state of mind. Attributing a cause is a relative of blame and stokes embers better left to fade.
The cycle of tides, of dark and light, the seasons and the motion of planets, all are the movement of the universe. Why wouldn’t we be in accord with them? They are the large scale oscillations at one end of a spectrum with the vibration of subatomic particles at the other. Our bodies have a universe of rhythms that are measured regularly to monitor our health.
Oscillation could be thought of as a primary universal motion. So we should be more accepting of the yin with the yang. Times of darkness must be endured and examined. They turn us inward because we can’t see out of the valley. We’re deepened and softened by our dark times, become more compassionate and empathetic. We may have been weakened by the absence of light and are better off close to home until our strength grows with the length of the day.
Competition in today’s world puts too much emphasis on getting somewhere, and that “where” is never down. We want to speed across the tops of the waves, never synchronizing with them. Without knowledge of the trough we lose sensitivity to its presence in others. Too much focus on the goal obscures the rhythm of life and our awareness of the damage we may be causing along the way.
My mood began to shift toward the beginnings of the upward motion, when I recognized that we were riding the wave as a group, and could feel the bond of being in it together.

Flow

2011-02-22T07:49:00.002-08:00

Incarnation

2011-02-22T07:49:00.001-08:00

Of all the many wonderful ideas I’ve absorbed from Alan Watts, the one I return to most often is the way he looks at incarnation. In “Behold the Spirit”, a book he wrote while he was still an Anglican priest, he discusses incarnation in terms of full attention to the present moment. The complete attention of mind to the unfolding experience, unclouded by personal ideas, is the way we open ourselves to the flow of spirit. The divine is experienced when we get ourselves out of the way and allow the extended consciousness to flow through us undistracted. The conditioning we call self can be endlessly preoccupying, patterns of response, constructed by many years of personal life, tend to dominate our awareness. We worry about our plans, where we stand with others, why we feel a certain way, straining to understand this construction made from our body’s participation in life in our place in space/time. Watts and other philosophers speak of the pronoun “I” as referring to location. Each of us is a particular place through which consciousness flows. We identify with the story we narrate about who we are. Yet when we can focus on immediate experience as it unfolds, the One Mind of the mystics and quantum theorists is allowed unobstructed access to living human experience. We are a source of knowledge, which may be why we are happiest when we’re deeply involved in activities that direct our attention beyond our own person. Pursuit of knowledge is the highest pleasure as we participate in the growth of the whole. Peak experiences occur when we’re fully immersed in what challenges us to exceed our previous limits. We lose awareness of our personal self and are fully engaged in active being. Brain chemistry assures that this state is its own reward.
Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us, we’re mistaken to get wrapped up in the problem of self because there’s no self there. There is no more experimental evidence for an isolated consciousness than for a shared One. Neuroscientists have not found a pilot in the brain. We incarnate intelligent consciousness when we release the conditioned clot of ideas we think of as ourselves. All the drama and tension in the individual life story can be very absorbing and throughout history a central them of art. Even in religious art we’ve focused on the story, and though parable can be an excellent tool for making images in the mind, we lose the symbolic intent and become attached to the characters, miss the fact that it’s all within us, not out there. The challenge to the twenty-first century artist is to envision the incarnate spirit free of a divine protagonist. The reason we’re happiest when we’re most involved is because we’ve shed the narcissistic ego always evaluating itself. In full attention to immediate experience we incarnate spirit in awareness of non-personal intelligence.
The philosophical implications of quantum physics need images that show what it can mean for a new world view. Rather than a world of isolated objects and separate realities, how can we show being a part of an intelligent unbroken continuum, and the exhilaration of using whatever training our life has given us to participate more fully from the coordinates of our “I”.

Personal Torus

2011-02-02T14:58:00.002-08:00

Free Will

2011-02-02T14:58:00.001-08:00

A new book on the neuroscience of magic offers many fascinating insights on how perception is put together. One of their conclusions however got me thinking about what William James once said about how we use our information to make theories that explain something we already feel. The authors saw the active brain pattern occurring in a certain region before we actually said we were making a choice as evidence we weren’t really making a choice and concluded that there’s no free will.
Does this mean that the unconscious is not us, that free will is only a product of conscious choice? The part that we are conscious of is a tiny amount of the neural activity at any given time and the fact that we can automate so much, including complex learned skills is one of the remarkable features of the interwoven processes that could be called “mind”. The whole brain/body complex is always adjusting and moving in directions that will balance us. Our friends can read our body language even while we’re unaware that we feel the way they see us. To say we think with our bodies as well as our brains is not just poetic. Pioneer neuroscientist Candace Pert in her groundbreaking work with endorphin receptors and expansion of our understanding of “information molecules” was surprised to find a large percentage of serotonin receptors in our stomach. We have gut feelings that get the attention of our rational minds. As neurologist Antonio Damasio showed, feeling directs thinking. Without the whole mind’s assessment of the big picture, we wouldn’t know where to turn. There’s too much there to sort through piece by piece.
The movements of the unconscious are happening on circuits built by the values of the individual. We shape our whole brain with our experience, and the overview it creates builds the stance we take in relation to what happens in our life. In the I Ching anyone can be the “superior” person by the choices they make in regard to what parts of themselves they choose to cultivate. Overall intentions organize the focus of unconscious decisions. Thus when I think about my intentions for the day before getting out of bed, I later remember that intention when a conditioned response begins that works against it. And then there’s the question of whether the awareness we really mean when we think of ourselves is really ours. Like if the television claimed to be the creative source of the programs. David Bohm used the analogy of separate cameras on the same scene for what we think of as individual consciousness. The different point-of-view feels like the identity shaped by the capabilities and position of the camera. Brain science has not yet found the knower that sees the scene through the separate cameras. Today’s metaphor might be the smart phone, much more connected and flexible in its ways of processing. Our brain is there to be molded. Free choice is the ongoing development of it. Throughout life we can add apps and increase its capabilities and as biological systems our reward system is set up to encourage that.
Nathaniel Branden wrote that awareness is the essence of morality. Once we become aware of something we feel more responsible in relation to it. Modern life has endless ways to escape from awareness, and where we aren’t aware we act according to our conditioning. The first choice in the exercise of free will is the choice to be mindful, to pay attention to the mind we create and condition future choices by conscious values and intentions.

Clear Channel

2011-01-22T08:05:00.000-08:00

Exchanging Looks

2011-01-22T08:04:00.000-08:00

Some of the best moments with my nieces and nephews are the least concrete. The events that precipitate them are lost to memory, no words were exchanged, but for some reason a particular meeting of the eyes and mind can be recalled with all its initial vividness, rich solid moments of knowing. We’ve all had those times when a clear accord in understanding is communicated in a barely perceivable expression, yet it feels as clear and wide open as a billboard. Having nieces and nephews offers the pleasure of seeing growth through every stage, and the moments when that eye connection happens span the years. Part of the larger organism of the extended family, we are actors and audience in the play of family events, our roles determined by biology, so every moment of personal connection is a moment of grace, a transmission of understanding that can happen with any age since it relates to the ageless mind beyond the face.
It happens with my students as well. Something comes up that I know will have personal relevance to someone. I look at them and they see in my eyes that I know their connection to it. And it can be much more diffuse than that, but the moment of understanding feels true in the way that verbal statements never can. Graham Green wrote in his novels about how as we got to know a person better we couldn’t help but love them. Often people can have a long history of time spent together and yet grow in understanding. To really see how another reacts to something, what things attract and repel them, requires attention. Too often vision blocked by an inner narration that’s already decided who the other is and tends to see only what supports the ideas of the character created.
In the class discussion last night my students said their peers often preferred relationships at a distance to actual meetings, preferred Facebook friends to friends in person. It seemed clear that was felt as a loss. Though we may not recognize what’s missing because it feels so much safer, the visual dimension is where we really connect, not limited by the words at our disposal or prechosen images posted on a website. In the realm of embodiment, friends mirror each other. The more closely they pay attention, the more still they become. Endorphins are released. Understanding grows and is communicated through the eyes. It’s a realm both subtle and deep, more available to memory. Without physical presence, experience becomes less vivid. Like a personal fog, this loss of vitality is isolating.
Human beings recognize thousands of facial expressions. It may be the first knowledge we accumulate as infants. Once we’ve moved on to words we forget how much is communicated through the body and face. If we get too involved in our inner narration, too isolated within our technology, we may lose the most important channel for understanding we have. Seeing.

Cosmic Evidence

2011-01-11T12:58:00.000-08:00

Expanding Knowledge

2011-01-11T12:57:00.000-08:00

In our long-standing concept of knowledge there are vast realms of information that are not considered. Most education focuses attention on specific sanctioned bodies of information that everybody is supposed to know. Educational disciplines have their own vocabularies that signal the focus of that course of study. Success within any particular group is narrowly defined and staying within its boundaries is necessary to be accepted in that group. Boundaries between groups haven’t been very permeable. With the focus on external motivators and measuring up to limited standards, many cognitive capacities go undeveloped. The last two decades’ dramatic increase in the understanding of the brain have given us guidelines for how to develop our intelligence that it would be irresponsible not to use. This will involve a reconstruction of some core concepts.
The separation of body and mind is an illusion that restricts our growth. We think and understand through the body’s experience of living in its environment. Physical experience underlies our knowledge of weight and balance even philosophically. It’s the body that knows what weight and balance are. Our perception is constructed of expectations like gravity, and light from above, which we are unconsciously adjusting in relation to as we move through the world. The more we move, the more we educate our potential metaphors. Knowing the degree to which we think with our bodies, how much sense does it make to sit all day focused only on text based learning. Project based learning can reach into all disciplines making connections between them. Making use of the interests and predispositions of individuals enables them to align what they learn with existing knowledge and integrate it with their overview. Since so much of memory is spatial, having more varied learning environments wouldn’t ask so much of a limited visual space.
Even on a chemical level, specific kinds of exercise create optimum mental health. As John Ratey’s book “Spark” points out, physical education should be focused on fitness to improve brain chemistry and ability to learn. Cardiovascular activity improves mental and emotional health, not just physical. The dopamine stimulated focuses interest and attention. The research is there and all schools should be paying attention.
Our entire conception of what is considered knowledge should be overhauled to proceed by the understanding that, though we are structured on the same principles, each brain is a highly plastic structure with circuits constructed from the individual life experience. This means it grows and strengthens with use, just like the body, and more important, it means one’s own experience is the primary knowledge, mapped spatially in the hippocampus. Whatever adds to the map is useful information. Personal tropisms develop the natural ability of the individual and create highly specific circuits of reference. Pain and pleasure, fear and hope should be seen as knowledge. They are information about the state of balance in the body/mind in regard to what is happening to it. The culture allows only some kinds of emotional information even though the presence of feelings signals an unconscious appraisal that might be utilized. Repression of pain and fear disregards its information and potential for guidance.
Why are we stuck in the idea that everybody should know the same things? We can learn more from others with different backgrounds than our own. We benefit from their primary knowledge, the lessons of life particular to the individual. The enlargement of knowledge should include sharing what we learn and how we got there with others.
People with different perspectives are far richer in information that can enlarge our own sense of the big picture and how things work in it.
We’ve been held back by the fixation on a prescribed body of received knowledge that often lacks the inner context that will help the information stick. Having success in life determined by how well you learn the same thing as everybody else doesn’t make use of the wealth of individual capabilities in the human population. If knowledge can be allowed to grow organically, intelligence would be the birthright of every individual.

Turning

2010-12-21T11:23:00.000-08:00

Thinking Solstice

2010-12-21T11:21:00.000-08:00

My interest in ritual began when I heard about the research that showed that those who had longer sleep rituals went to sleep faster than those who jumped into bed and hoped for the best. If you take your time turning off lights, brushing teeth, fluffing pillows, the repetition of the same sequence sets the completion of the pattern in motion- falling asleep. The research focused on how the familiar sequence of steps triggered the associated brain chemistry, but I also remembered my early studies of perception, which emphasized pattern completion as one of the most basic organizing principles in seeing. Memory’s focus on prediction depends on recognizing patterns and anticipating what comes next. It’s a component of higher reasoning, and the more I thought about it the more pervasive it seemed to be. Since the sleep researchers were recommending that that people lengthen their sleep ritual to set the proper brain chemistry in motion, I added new steps setting up when I go to work in the studio. It’s effective and is one concrete way to make conscious use of the capacity to build patterns to get things done. In the creation of the right spatial temporal atmosphere, the act of preparing is sending signals through the brain that build a pattern that guides us into the rest of it. We create a form in space by our regular travels in any context, in the car, through grocery store, at work, within our home. Whatever becomes automatic moves to the cerebellum to free up more cortex to learn new things. The spectrum of human pattern making runs from the mundane to the sublime. The difference has less to do with the kind of pattern as much as the quality of our attention to it. Routines tend to be mindless. Rituals are mindful, bring attention and purpose together for the purpose of transforming a mental state.
When they took the ritual out of religion, it was robbed of its power. It may be one of the reasons that megachurches have caught on, using the rituals of rock-concerts, with lights, smoke, and music, to establish mental states of heightened brain chemistry, receptive to the sermon and unifying to the group. Ritual is behavioral alchemy, an engaging of the whole consciousness, of making one’s intentions concrete, demonstrating them by our actions. A ritual is an enacted image. If it’s repeated enough then a circuit is formed, that helps us enter the proper state of mind for the fullest experience.
Lining up with the solstice, holidays are an assembly of individualized rituals that pull us out of our regular actions so they don’t degenerate into mindless routine or burnout. They use lights to ward off the darkest time of year, have their own music and traditions and enact our connection to our larger community and the history associated with the holiday. Beyond the holiday the lesson of ritual is to live with reverence. Using the shape of our day we can build personally meaningful sequences of actions that train our capacity for attention. With every day shaped by an intentional pattern dedicated to being centered and in harmony with what’s unfolding around us, each stage is wide open for variation and conditioned for mindful attention. It’s one way we can consciously employ the natural functions of the brain.

Coming Change

2010-12-12T11:19:00.000-08:00

An Integrated Model

2010-12-12T11:17:00.000-08:00

Whether we acknowledge it or not, our knowledge is mapped in an inner model that’s responsible for how we see reality. The layout of what we know was constructed by what happened to us, things we did and experienced and where. We laid down particular patterns and aligned new experience where it matched known relationships. This recognition of similar relations between parts, the matching calculus of unfolding events, is what we experience as understanding. New knowledge is layered in where it best fits the underlying patterns we already understand. Complexity theory tells us that as a system becomes more complex, the organizing structure either collapses under the weight of too much information or undergoes an overall reorganization. The crises we see all around us reflect the collapse of the guiding inner model.
The prevailing image of an isolated self, standing outside of a separate world, can’t hold the volume of new knowledge growing rapidly with technology. Technology’s abundance of informative pictures needs a new overview, a model that integrates and clarifies a better way to see reality.
The body itself might be a good starting point. We are multiple entwined systems, a weave of nerves and veins, muscles and organs, on the complex armature of the skeleton. It doesn’t stop there. For our digestive system to do its job we have to feed it. This entwines us in vast systems for the production and delivery of food. In food and sheltering ourselves we are woven into a system of roads and jobs and conveyances, cars, buses, trains, planes, and depend upon all of them being in good working order. There is interdependence between these systems and ourselves. We can’t do without them and we have a part in keeping it working. As much as heart and lungs depend on each other the group of systems that we are depends on the larger group of systems within which we’re embedded.
Our ego based image of an independent self must be shed. It pretends we’re self-sufficient. The idea that we are separate from our environment is a dangerous illusion that disregards the many systems we need for our survival. Even possessed of the skills to live in a cave and hunt, if the water is polluted you die. In a mindset that piles up goods for oneself, taking up space and draining resources, the image looks like a cancer on the larger system, growing recklessly, sucking health from the surrounding areas.
The intersect and interweave of systems information exists on all levels. Homeostasis is the way living systems adapt and adjust to keep balance. It provides insight into harmonious functioning within the model of reality as a complex multivariable organism. We are not in control of the systems that support us so must be flexible to survive. The art of adjustment, the ability to move fluidly through ideas, adapting, filtering and restructuring as necessary is the life art of a living system.

Open Sections

2010-11-22T09:47:00.000-08:00

Structure and Creativity

2010-11-22T09:46:00.001-08:00

Recently Jon Stewart did an interview on Fresh Air. Talking about the “Rally To Restore Sanity” he referred to the rally as a beautiful “format”, an “outline that could be filled”, as though it was a drawing. He referred to “The Daily Show” as first and foremost a structure. A structure with a composition, a set of segments that could be used for whatever was currently important. These metaphors emphasize organization as visual structure. Every area of life could be organized more artfully, which could open more areas to creativity. It wasn’t until I had the format of this blog that I could release the ideas unfolding here. They were roiling around in my head but resisted being locked into a specific book, which would have restricted their scope. Applying a point of view and personal philosophy to what seems important at the time of writing keeps it tied in to the rest of my life. A good structure releases creativity on a whole new level. The brain’s reward system loves the prefrontal cortex, the newest evolutionary level, where imagination and analysis work together, finding connections and correlations. The use of our highest powers stimulates the pleasure system, which pushes ideas and invention even further.
People are unhappy and dulled when they aren’t making use of what they can do. The life-force wants to bloom, for us to extend our capability. Stewart’s emphasis on the program’s structure points out the freedom afforded by working with a preset format. The personality and character of a TV show is created by starting with an idea translated into a format, a composition, then within each segment anything can happen.
The consistent form with specific proportions is evidence of a visual component to any structuring. Just recently someone on the radio was talking about the need for a multi-disciplinary structure to look at climate change saying “We do it in a dry journalistic format when maybe a picture would suffice.” Paolo Soleri was an ecological consciousness decades ahead of his time, designing whole communities as integrated wholes. He felt we needed to re-envision our whole strategy for civilization. “Rather than a mad prophet ranting in the wilderness, Soleri has proved to be a voice of reason.” as the Guardian wrote not that long ago, “Nobody wanted to hear his diagnosis of the ills of US society, but it has been proved right - the car-centric, inefficient, horizontal suburban model has left us in poor shape to cope with climate-change problems.” In science beauty is the guide to a good theory. Our inherent aesthetic sense could guide us to a more beautifully functioning whole. Artist Mel Chin shows us an aesthetic for healing the wounds of the planet. Using plants that are hyperaccumulators to leach heavy metals from the soil he created a living mandala to focus our attention on what is possible. It’s time to heal the disharmony in the United States by creating a well-composed format for considering all problems in relation to the dynamics of the whole. Where proportions are ugly, the solution is wrong. We’d avoid all kinds of damage if we used this basic human capacity.

Portent

2010-11-11T07:41:00.001-08:00

Disharmony

2010-11-11T07:40:00.000-08:00

All forms of organization require an overview, a proportional distribution of forces and resources. Good organization creates a balanced structure where the various elements are mutually supportive and in harmony. The composition of the whole should be the goal throughout.
The size of the windmill at Lewes, Delaware made me rethink my attitude regarding wind for energy, particularly where the context has not been considered. It so dwarfed the little buildings around it, it was like it had been placed by a race of giants and was totally out of harmony with the historic coastal town. I have read that residents are having health problems and there are complaints about the noise.
If the effort to reduce global warming creates disharmony in the whole, it’s not a good or lasting solution. The prospect of a line of windmills off the Delaware coast worries me.
I’ve taken refuge in the healing power of that unbroken horizon for decades. It’s an antidote to the constant visual activity of daily life. We respond physically to the space around us, our bodies in constant unconscious adjustment to where we are, particularly wherever there is motion.
The way the soothing repetition of the waves extends into the stillness of the horizon stretching the whole width of the visual field is deeply healing. Before we rush headlong into to solving a problem without thinking of the less tangible but more important repercussions to our collective mental health we need to step back and think of the aesthetics of the overall picture. I was startled to hear that it’s against the law to argue against windmills or cell phone towers on aesthetic grounds as though such considerations are frivolous and irrelevant. The look of the windmill at Lewes is an image of humanity as insignificant, worker bees at the base of a monumental shrine to a megalomaniac technological consciousness. The structure of a windmill may be beautiful in itself but to put it in the wrong context can be grotesque. Competition and the priorities of material gain interfere with creating an overall harmonic structure. It doesn’t have to be that way. In France I saw a cluster of windmills in a large empty plain with no villages nearby for them to measure against and the proportions worked. The land was big around them and empty of reference. Seeing it from a high-speed train was all the more appropriate to the picture. The modern can co-exist with history. Progress doesn’t have to dehumanize. Everywhere I went in France I saw consideration of beauty and harmony of form, thoughtful proportions and plantings, even in traffic circles. If we’re going to learn the art of living, attention must be paid to our integration with our surroundings. David Bohm wrote that creativity was an act of “fitting”, looking for what works best with the existing structure.
The restorative power of the ocean coast is not just in the waves and smell of salt water, it is the continuous horizontal line, its stillness that is so restful. To break that up will not only destroy that healing power it will create a new visual wound.
Art would not have existed throughout human history if it had no deep-seated value.
Modern culture underestimates the human need for harmonic form. It heals by entrainment, infiltrating our perception with a beneficial order. Thinking in categories shields us from the requirements of the whole. But the blatant disregard of the harmonic integration of all involved systems is irresponsible. Our pilgrimage to a place of beauty is led by the wish to heal and fortify what is best in us. Whether an individual is drawn to
the coast or the mountaintop (also endangered) the human need is clear. Destroying what visual beauty is left is an assault on the soul of the species.

Broken Whole

2010-10-22T08:05:00.003-07:00

Image Ideas

2010-10-22T08:05:00.001-07:00

An image idea proposes a way of looking at things. At its most artful it can change the way we see. A painting can trigger a personal emotional insight by illuminating some aspect of feeling. Creating a picture of information can facilitate a more perceptive analysis. A visual explanation gives an overview that shows relations and thus meaning. It avoids the limitations of words that separate ideas better thought of as intertwined. I was reading through definitions of philosophical categories that treated them as opposites when it really felt that they were more often intertwined or contained within another. Picturing them as sets or Venn diagrams would show these relations and not amplify distinctions that can inhibit understanding. As William James wrote, “Language works against our perception of truth.”
What we call the differences in philosophy are issues of focus. Categorical definitions, often separate ideas unnecessarily, interfering with our understanding of a bigger picture that includes them all by making us choose a “right” one from what can easily coexist. Images can hold more sophisticated ideas than words since images can contain and even reframe seeming contradictions. Visual philosophy sees ideas in relationship not in opposition.
Most important, images show the interconnections between elements of information. As the complexity of information increases more people are turning to images to communicate the meaning of the data. One example is an intriguing site that creates a three dimensional computer model to represent a company’s financial picture and shows in a glance how the complexities of budget and cash flow interact. (http://envisionfinancials.wordpress.com/) Peoples’ jobs are evolving in the front of this trend. A web designer I know began to map all the data for a corporation. An architect began to design an adaptable system for deploying a firms resources.
College students can now choose to major in Environmental Design or Social Design, a recognition of visual thinking in a larger context as a hope for solving complex
human problems. ”Metadesign” may be the thinking of the 21st century. Metadesign takes into consideration all of the processes involved in a given area, both concretely and metaphorically. Holistic solutions don’t overlook any parts of the problem. Not just about separate objects and spaces, the whole range of systems and functions are woven together, what has been compartmentalized seen as part of a whole much bigger than the sum of its parts. A student in Environmental Design had been given an assignment entitled “Reconciliation” to apply to a fragmented area of the community and I found it interesting to think about what reconciliation looks like. Considering the big picture helps us find the real issues underlying multiple problems. The need for a holistic approach that visualizes solutions seems obvious now that ecological consciousness is more mainstream. A re-visioning in the way cities work could stimulate positive growth in every area. People brought together in cooperation facilitates healthy processes as opposed to divisions of areas into self-fulfilling prophesies of deterioration and isolation.
Programs like Harlem Children’s Zone and Visual Learning Systems are designing new systems for education. HCZ understands the importance of the whole life experience and education from birth. VLS uses discussion of art to stimulate the minds and creative thinking capacities improving children’s scores in all subjects.
The design of spaces, systems and processes that facilitate cooperation, discovery, and appreciation of difference focuses on how we move through the world together. Creating a better global feng shui depends on seeing the potential harmony and designing a world that enhances the flow.

Co-Causal

2010-10-10T15:00:00.002-07:00

The Visual Revolution

2010-10-10T15:00:00.001-07:00

For every person, the creation of inner images is fundamental to understanding. It’s how we put information together in our minds. By putting what we learn in relation to what we know, we construct it’s meaning for ourselves. Technology is shifting more of our conscious thought to acts of looking, finding, matching, comparing, balancing and other types of visual reasoning. It ‘s providing the necessity and the mechanism to make an important shift from verbal language as the dominant communicator of information, to image based approaches that show what’s significant in data by the way the it’s arranged. The possibilities of a visual approach to all levels of thinking offer the promise of greater clarity in our understanding of any subject. Verbal language is always partial, and extraordinarily bad decisions can be made when just a few facts are stripped of their context. Through the synthesizing knowledge offered by infographics and other visual presentations we can transform the parts into wholes, integrating information into understanding.
Barbara Stafford sensed just how profound would be the shift initiated by the computer regarding display of information. She felt that in the near future, the artist would be responsible for the design of knowledge as the visual potential of the screen is better utilized. Showing the relations of information enables the viewer to recognize key patterns and relationships. She wrote, “Perceptually combined information… avoids the intellectual limitations of linearity.” For Stafford, this means that the artist will change how information is understood. This shift is still in its infancy. The Internet still has a lot of words, but its structure is well described with the image of a three-dimensional web with every site the center of a constellation of other choices. This empowers every individual to develop a personal picture of information of in terms of location in space.
Young people have grown up interacting with animation and developing their spatial intelligence while playing video games. Recent studies have shown that this has improved scores in other subjects as well. Winston Churchill said one reason he liked to paint was because it reinforced and educated the mind’s best faculties- things like sense of proportion and balance, spatial concepts so important to all reasoning.
Communication depends on our shared responses to visual form. Paul Ekman’s decades of work studying facial expression in all cultures underscores the universality of visual understanding. Ekman is one of the teachers thanked by Edward Tufte in his book, ”Visual Explanations”. In this, as well as in his other books, he demonstrates how clarity of thought corresponds to a clear visualization and representation of the information. He wrote, “When principles of design replicate principles of thought, the act of arranging information becomes an act of insight.”
Education in visual thinking emphasizes how things relate rather than what they are. Philosopher Susanne Langer took the position that if we want to improve our capacity for insight we should look at art. She felt that the field of psychology could build its understanding of human feeling from the arts, as she wrote, “Art looks like feelings feel.” Art gives us a way to recognize our responses to visual form, and a means to reflect on how they underlay the rest of our thinking. How much clearer the understanding of a person’s emotions might be if asked to choose a painting from an art book instead of trying to describe a complicated inner state in words. As Joseph Campbell said, “The eyes are the scouts of the heart.” Perception is not passive. It is always searching for whatever will help us with our ongoing understanding of our unfolding being.
This approach to understanding may meet resistance because it relies on a model of reality created by each individual to determine the correct course, rather than the correct course being directed by external ideas of what’s right. But both the study of semiotics and quantum mechanics take us to a place where objectivity disappears. The observer affects the observed. The personal directs reasoning. William James pointed this out in the nineteenth century when he said a person builds their philosophy on the basis of what they already feel. Around the same time, John Dewey said that when the personal was taken into account it would revolutionize philosophy. Today the work of neurologist Antonio Damasio has shown that feeling directs thinking.
Broadening our ideas of intelligence to include and cultivate visualization could rescue us from a trail of woes resulting from dependence on language. Nobel laureate David Bohm’s work in quantum mechanics led him to conclude that the structure of language itself was responsible for many of the world’s problems. He saw the attention focused on nouns as placing too much emphasis on separate things, fragmenting the essential reality, which is interconnected, relational and dynamic.
Emphasis on more visual understanding could shift our approach to verbal discourse. Instead of disputes over the right idea, we could shift to a model that accumulates different ideas and finds relationships between them. In contrast to fixed opinions about the world, building a broader personal overview would include the full spectrum of views on any subject being considered, to see what’s most relevant to decisions to be made. Rather than reject what doesn’t fit our current view, we could welcome what’s different as an opportunity to enlarge our picture. Dogmas that exclude certain areas will be seen for what they are, barriers to an overview. Using intelligence to defend one way of thinking seems to resist learning, and have more to do with power than with understanding.
Thomas West wrote that the skill of the future would not be having the right model of how things work, but having the ability to continuously adapt and change our model, adjusting it to new information. He saw image based thinking as essential for coping with the sheer volume of information that verbal language would not be comprehensive enough to handle anymore. Technology creates new ways to use art as a tool to strengthen our understanding and develop skills utilizing the visual brain to imagine the form of knowledge and the abstract ideas constructed on its matrix.
Art extends our visual awareness and ability to think in images. Conscious visual reasoning may give us a way to understand the mind itself. It’s a resource to be tapped in the project of evolving our intelligence.

Healing Images

2010-09-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

My brother Bill is a true contemplative, can see deeply into nature and appreciate its soul nourishing beauty more than anyone I know. He can step out of the “hurry-up” pace of modern activity to watch the birds, or the movement of the wind in the trees, currents of water in the stream, and enjoys being part of where he is and giving it his full attention. When he pulled over to see the field of sunflowers blooming in bright sunlight, the pleasure was extended by seeing so many other people doing the same thing, pulled to a stop, arrested by beauty, taking pictures to send to their friends. We want to share beauty and the pleasure we take in it. And we have more ways than ever to share things with others. He said the people who had stopped were talking to each other about it. It was an experience that unified strangers. He and I had a wonderful conversation about the power of beauty to demand attention and to bring people together in wonder. It got me to thinking about how we can all be each other’s gurus, sharing whatever makes us feel and think more deeply. People are tired of the superficiality being emphasized by so much media and welcome opportunities for more satisfying life experience.
When we feel pleasure at the sight of sunflowers it’s evidence of the endorphins, our natural opiates reinforcing what’s good for us and combating our pain. Connecting is good for our health, drawing attention out of ourselves and into our surroundings. We begin by connecting to the beauty we see and extend the connection as we share it.
I heard Dr. Herbert Benson on the radio recently discussing his newest book, “Relaxation Revolution”. An enormous part of the body/mind reciprocity is the way we visualize our condition. Diagnosis exacerbates a condition because its definition creates a set of expectations, images of the form the disease will take. He used the phrase, “remembering wellness” for picturing the healthy condition you know from experience, visualizing a time when the problem wasn’t there. He emphasizes the need to do it every day to rework long held negative images. Even more effective might be our memories of moments of connection, people talking about a field of sunflowers. Pain separates us. Remembered experiences of beauty in all of its forms restore our connection and can be used for self-healing.
Images of growth, in particular, fortify our vitality, and are a favored subject for artists and photographers. The process of growth is the experience of extending of ourselves, reaching beyond our previous limits, applying our learning, experience and outlook in our interaction with the physical world. Emerson spoke of the value of work as in, not the results or profit from the work, but the increased power as our skills are developed and improved. As Erich Fromm wrote, “Living is growing” which may be part of why we’re attracted to growth in nature. Images of nature reinforce our participation in cycles of growth and our identification with the life-force that could also be seen as spirit. Dylan Thomas imagined spirit so beautifully as “that force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Remembering the images that pulled our attention out of ourselves and into the world may be more restorative than we realize.
(Sunflower photo by Bill Waters)

Convergence

2010-09-12T12:00:00.002-07:00

Safety

2010-09-12T12:00:00.001-07:00

I recently read in “The Body Has A Mind Of Its Own” by Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee that for the Himba tribe in Namibia, each person is born with a self-space like a bubble extending beyond the body that is always mingling with the self-space of others in the community. Because of this they felt they were never alone, and felt very sorry for westerners who thought of themselves as isolated in space. Our cultural mindset of an individual consciousness encased in a body creates a painful separation between our environment and ourselves.
We think of personal space as something that can be invaded or trespassed. Keeping the body and personhood safe is a high priority. Though people generally think of safety as physical, avoiding threats to the body, psychiatrist James Gilligan, who has spent his life working with prisoners, said that a threat to one’s dignity is just as serious. Since punishment is a threat to both he sees the increase in violence as due to the increasingly punitive nature of American society. He said a common statement among repeat offenders is, “I never got so much respect in my life as I did when I pointed a gun at somebody.” Feeling respected is part of a sense of safety, deeply rooted in our physiology. Just seeing a contempt face or someone rolling their eyes in relation to something you’ve said or done will make your heart beat faster. Physiologically, ridicule and mockery have the same effect as violence and can be the cause of violence. Nietzsche said, “Distrust anyone in whom the desire to punish is powerful.” The media revels in the thought that Roger Clemens might go to jail for lying, and that violates my sense of proportion. Obedience has become more important than justice, mechanically applying the same penalty, regardless of context. As the amount of rules increases, more and more of us find ourselves lawbreakers, transgressing codes designed to protect us. I’m often guilty of not wearing my seatbelt, but I feel I’m a better driver without it. If I do what I feel is right I can get a ticket.
Overemphasis on rules implies disrespect for the common sense of the populace. It communicates dangers that might not have been worried about before. It increases walls between people and stirs negative mental states like suspicion and worry. The labyrinth of barriers and limitations is part of a way of seeing built on separation. Every protection is another wall in the fortress between ourselves and others. Our safety is secured by our greater isolation. A new way of visualizing our place in the world might relieve this estrangement.
To envision ourselves as a part of a field of consciousness that includes us would help us accept the life lessons that are thrown our way as part of the knowledge we’re best suited to provide. We are, after all, unique places in space and time with a particular view that adds to the big picture. Trust is a precondition of safety and if you trust the overarching order as instructive you can be aware but not over vigilant. David Bohm, from his perspective in quantum physics, talked of beauty, art and creativity as acts of “fitting”, discernment of what’s works with the larger pattern unfolding in a given context. Since at a quantum level we’re all a continuous field, it might be time to let go of the cultural idea of ourselves as so separate. A change of image would lead to a change in attitude toward the world we’re immersed in, our systems and patterns of movement intricately woven through the totality of life experience. As part of our environment, it would be natural to act in harmony with it.

Building the Picture

2010-08-30T08:44:00.001-07:00

Perspective

2010-08-30T08:43:00.000-07:00

As I start to think about this year’s classes one of my chief excitements is meeting new students and learning more about the students I’ve had before. Working with students is an endless process of discovery, each a new source of knowledge. I often say that every person is a library, with different subjects in different areas housing the knowledge from personal experience. There’s a physical movement area, one person plays tennis, and another can’t get off the couch. Tastes and experiences in food vary widely. One might have been in and out of the hospital with serious medical problems. Another may research world affairs and agonize over injustice. Educational background tuned certain priorities. The personal mental life has a path all its own. The trail of choices each person makes in the cyber-realm, through phones, game consoles and computers, reflect what a person cares about and craft a highly individuated point-of-view and network of connections. And then there is a philosophy about being I can sense in a student’s art, that may have an intellectual or emotional history and cultural background that reveals a way of responding to the world. This perspective is the truth from a particular place in larger being.
Understanding that everyone’s perspective can add to our own, and that “gaining perspective” is always considered a good (even when it hurts) offers a way to have constructive discussions with people of widely differing views, appreciating what each has to offer our common understanding.
The competition to have the right idea is a construct of linear verbal thinking. Visual thinking can be cooperative because its hallmark is perspective. Building perspective is a goal that increases wisdom. In a wonderful talk by Dave McCandless on “The Beauty of Data Visualization” (http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html) he points out how well designed charts of information can reveal importance and meaning far better and quicker than other methods of presentation. It’s an idea that’s time has come. The word “infographics” is starting to pop up in general conversation. We’re grateful when someone combs through mountains of data and designs it in an understandable form on a single page like McCandless did with health supplements. Amounts can be shown as size and instantly compared. Understanding is led by our sense of proportion, similarity and difference. Huge advances in the understanding of world problems could begin with visualizations of information about the most complex issues. Our visual skills are there to be tapped. Multiple maps within our brains record our personal history so we instinctively understand the one-to-one correspondence in terms of location. We can be shown what something means and point others’ attention to what we think needs it. We’re on the threshold of a visual revolution that will provide the necessary tools to navigate an increasingly complex world.
And in my personal world I’m looking forward to a new landscape of ideas created by the different views of a range of new students and what each has to offer our common understanding.

Suggesting Volumes

2010-08-14T07:38:00.000-07:00

Envisioning

2010-08-14T07:37:00.000-07:00

Anyone who doesn’t think of themselves as imaginative has only to look at the content of their minds when they worry. A big component of worrying is visualizing bad outcomes, from minor elements out of order to large-scale disaster. Worst-case scenarios are part of planning, whether intentional or of the self-doubt variety. On the positive end we daydream, and try out pleasant situations and invent new relationships. Clearly both are creativity at work. This capacity to project ourselves into the future and invent scenarios that develop the events that are currently unfolding is a triumph of evolution. A person who worries about the worst that can happen doesn’t think of it as creative, but the combination of future awareness and multiple possibilities is pure imagination. A certain amount of worry is an important aspect of planning. We need to visualize complex tasks and prepare for what’s needed. When we worry too much, we’re using our highest human powers to torment ourselves. I’ve read that excessive worrying is connected to superstition, reflecting an underlying belief that to think obsessively about a situation in advance can somehow deflect the adverse outcome. Though superstition is considered a thoughtform left behind in the course of mental evolution, its patterns persist under new names. We express our fears in mental images. My sister-in-law said she envisioned the worst so that whatever happened if it wasn’t the worst would seem good, and if it was then she’d be prepared. This is just one way we are always tempering, treating and modifying our emotions with images in our mind. Many modes of therapy have been developed that utilize this capacity, focusing on producing positive and healing images. What we see in our mind’s eye can have as powerful affect on the body as actual experience.
Imaging information aids intellectual understanding as well. I recently heard a woman on the radio who made her living fishing in the Gulf of Mexico call into a show about testing fish for oil contamination. She asked if they would publish where they’ve tested on maps, putting it “in layman’s terms”. Looking at a map one can see in an instant which areas have been declared safe. The endless stream of numbers that had been published so far did not make the overall situation clear. Since knowledge is mapped by location in our minds, seeing is understanding. I’ve heard visual thinking referred to as common sense. It’s the day-to-day life intermingling of the images in our head with the images in our surroundings. Plotting a new route to work when the regular road is blocked, sensing when an argument between friends is about to get out of hand and shifting their attention to other things. We can retrace our steps to find something we’ve lost because we have the space of our lives envisioned within us. Our ability to hold many relationships in our mind at once depends on locating them together in images.
We aren’t able to evolve this powerful capacity because, not happening in words, it goes unnoticed. A student said to me with assurance, “All conscious thought is in words.” But these mental images are conscious and affecting. We understand the meaning a situation has for us through the images we produce in relation to it.
The dominance of verbal language is diminishing as our connection to the cyber realm of information becomes more visual. Linear menus shift to sitemaps because a sitemap shows the relationship between the options – and seeing is faster than linear processing. Looking at art should be part of visual literacy. Since so much of the instant assessment we make with our eyes has to do with the feeling of things – what’s harmonic or off-kilter- attention to art will sensitize us to deeper levels and larger archetypes than we get from commercial media. Every one of us has a powerful imagination we’re using all the time. Cultivating it is a crucial part of developing minds that can cope with the future.

Changing Distinctions

2010-07-29T07:51:00.000-07:00

Sixty Today

2010-07-29T07:48:00.000-07:00

A commercial I saw yesterday had a guy saying “I know sixty is the new forty” then going on about how young he felt inside. What bothers me about this is the clear underlying assumption that younger is better. I found myself thinking back to a conversation with friends when I was a young adult where we speculated about the age we felt we were inside. Most were saying younger or a little older, but I found myself saying sixty. Maybe I’d always felt older inside but there was also the feeling that it would take me a long time to do what I wanted to do (not that I had any idea of what that was). I’d read that philosophers didn’t come of age until their sixties, so that seeded the belief that some aspirations took longer than others. My grandfather was my favorite person throughout my youth, and age seemed to be a part of the radiant equanimity I admired so much in him. Gaining in years led to the achievement of a state of mind and approach to living that couldn’t be rushed.
The claim to feeling young is a tacit agreement that young is better. I feel energetic, excited about life and more full of love than I ever was when young. Not only was young not better, young was being lost in the woods. It puts unfair pressure on young people who are supposed to be having the “best years of their lives” before they “waste their youth”. In such a complicated world, we might expect that the necessary skills for living would take time to acquire.
Our culture creates fear of age with terminology of loss as a marketing tool. When people are convinced that aging means losing something, their attention is focused on what will give it back. It’s a strategy that debilitates people’s attention to the actuality of their present life and the new experiences and meaning of the moment. Running after youth is a form of regression, not growth. The cultural view of aging focuses on what’s lost, as though the natural fading of some faculties is something to be fought rather than something that can be learned from and understood in an entirely new way. To me the losses are minor compared to the gains. I look at aging as a process of accumulation. Everything we’ve been is still there and available to us as past experience. Like the rings on a tree record the history of the tree, and the tree grows wider and stronger and taller, our memories and accumulated knowledge make us stronger, enable us to rise, to gain perspective through our increased experience. This helps me feels more comfortable and at ease in the world. I’ve increased my “clearing is the forest” in the words of Joseph Chilton Pierce and understand myself more as active patterns in the world than as material being.
So today I come of age. Maybe I’m a real late bloomer, but it’s taken me this long to begin to synthesize what I’ve learned into some coherent ideas, and twenty years of meditation to calm the tangle of anxiety that characterized my youth. I’m excited about the possibilities I’ve prepared for myself and rejoice to see my grandfather’s attitude toward life coming into reach. I’m happier and more engaged than I’ve ever been. What could be better than to be here now?

Moving Up

2010-07-17T08:16:00.000-07:00

Current Choices

2010-07-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

The action of selection is what we call “free will”. Riding multiple currents beyond our control, we are constantly making choices that determine the nature of the ride. Choices about direction are as simple and automatic as where we look in any given situation, what gets our attention. Once engaged we choose among the potentials of that situation as it unfolds. This is where self-awareness comes in handy and increases the available choices. If you’ve been paying attention to your patterns of reaction and the situations that result, you can choose a path that is not the automatic one of the past.
The new mammalian layer of the brain flows into the neocortex, so named because it’s the newest. It is where the perception of the future begins, and with perception of the future comes anxiety. There are two ways we handle anxiety. One is retreat into older layers of the psyche that deal with fear. This means withdrawing or defending. The other is to do something—anything- to move forward. As Alfred Adler said, the important thing is to get moving. That’s why exercise alone will improve general mood and mental function. But a bigger group of connections to the pleasure center is from our most human powers, the prefrontal cortex in the front of the brain. Evolution has built in an appetite for challenge and novelty, more reward response as we move the mental energy toward to front of the brain. We’re meant to use and develop our capacities, whatever they are, to grow as individuals. It’s the growing that feels good, extending our abilities, without thinking of the outcomes or results. Envisioning the future shapes the goals, but getting too attached to the outcome disconnects us from the process- being present to what’s happening at the time. And the current of time includes plenty that we can’t envision in advance so attention to the actual is a very important first choice.
Many fields of action influence our position in the current. The circumstances of work, family, friends, are each unfolding in a location alive with patterns. Our connections through computer networks, the moods and health of our mind and body all are factors in the place we find ourselves and from which we navigate via the selections we make about where we’re going. We adapt to the changes in the current or it wears us down. When conditions are bad the only choice we may have is the attitude we can take, but we can keep the energy in the evolved intelligence, the front of the brain if we’re looking for what’s to be learned and how we can use that knowledge. When Viktor Frankl was working at forced labor in horrible conditions, he envisioned himself standing in front of an audience giving a speech about how he survived. Imagination into a future that makes use of the current lesson created a brain chemistry that stimulated his ability to survive.
Increasing our freedom in the realm of ideas depends on having more possibilities from which to select and construct our own. The battle of right and wrong ideas is about who has the power to impose their ideas on others, the power to limit the scope of ideas.
Every time you hear someone cut off a topic of conversation as beyond discussion they are trying to assert power over what we’re allowed to think, but it is only through discussion and the hybrid thoughts that grow there that we can gain perspective and break free of the limitations of rigid, right/wrong categories and the anxiety that comes with them.
Helpful ideas spread from all parts of the globe. I’ve been enriched by Tai Chi and Lao Tzu, yoga and my neti pot, France (the country), and philosophers and thinkers from everywhere. The range of perspectives allows me to see more patterns and create a personal view that depends on having that many choices. If we drop the stultifying barriers inherent in fixed ideologies and allow the full range of the human mind to influence us, how could we not evolve as a species.

Dangerous Remedy

2010-06-30T12:00:00.002-07:00

Organic Intelligence

2010-06-30T12:00:00.001-07:00

Since the sixties, thinkers have been suggesting it’s time to shift our model of reality from the giant machine to the image of the universe as an organism. Fritjof Capra talks about the shift in worldview that came with quantum mechanics in his wonderful book “The Turning Point”. He writes, “The universe is no longer seen as a machine made up of multiple objects, but has to be pictured as one indivisible, dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated and can be understood only as patterns of a cosmic process.” Seeing the whole is essential to understanding the significance in a situation and is the essence of ecological consciousness. We understand the big picture through concrete vision as well as within our spatial embodied imagination.
The heartbreaking pictures of the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico can be seen as our body bleeding. The globe that supports us all is pierced and hemorrhaging. All the images taken from space that show the growing damage hurt my heart like damage to my own body. Which it is, given I am absolutely dependent on it. A caller to the Diane Rehm show was the first to express out loud the fear this oil spill could kill the whole planet. The satellite and helicopter pictures are the diagnostic scans of our global body. The compartmentalized, rapacious way of looking at the planet that grows from the machine model avoids seeing the interconnections. It may suit the corporati and greed-driven, but an attitude of seeing the planet as a giant reservoir of resources to be exploited interferes with the balance of the all-inclusive organism. Chief Seattle said, “The earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth.“ Stabbing oneself in the hope of riches expresses reckless self-loathing.
Organic intelligence is alert to the health of the whole. Since everything is part of an intricate network of interrelated systems, we’re happiest (best brain chemistry) when we’re developing our abilities and finding challenging ways to make use of them. This adds our health to the health of the larger organism in which we participate. Moving in harmony with the flow of being around us is natural if the underlying model of the universe has ourselves as part of an organic whole. If we’re disrupting other aspects of the larger being we’re like a cancer, growing without heed of the damage we cause, sucking up vital resources without regard to the host. Much of what divides us and keeps us from acting together is imagery that places us outside of things, casting us as the one that tinkers with the machine. This is the same image as the large scale Maker, which also puts the traditional God outside us.
The Gaia Hypothesis came out decades ago. James Lovelock’s conception was of a consciousness within the earth itself. Just like the adjustments made in our own body, it responds to imbalances. This universal motion of homeostasis exists on every level and in every system, adapting to change to restore equilibrium. Persisting in the belief in man’s dominion over the earth may lead to the earth itself wiping out the source of destruction.
The materialistic world of separate things has resisted seeing our interconnectedness because it’s a threat to a competitive attitude. Accumulating and controlling more of the planet does not serve the good of the whole. But there’s evidence mounting of the grassroots shift to a more responsible way of seeing. Two website groups that have contacted me recently are dedicated to positive change. The Superforest site
( http://teamsuperforest.org/superforest/ ) sees the essence of problems and solutions in the world as revolving around manners. Treating everyone and everything with respect means being aware of the consequences of our actions. As they say in their Humanifesto, dumping pollutants in a river is bad manners. The narrow sight lines of a competitive stance focus on the end result and miss much of what’s happening now and the consequences of single-mindedness. A cooperative attitude is tuned to the moment because cooperation is all about adjusting to the circumstances and harmonizing with others. The current most popular entry at The Truth Contest site
( The Truth Contest ) focuses on the Present and the nature of consciousness. Their site is committed to an ongoing attempt to articulate truth, to search out the universals that bind us. They turn the idea of a contest on its head since there’s no competition, no prizes, just an on-going dialogue that features the entries that generate the most interest. Extending themselves for the good of the whole, these sites are examples of healing forces, the action of Gaia’s immune system. They give me faith in the goodness of human nature and optimism about the future. I’m happy to now be connected to both efforts.

Warm and Fuzzy

2010-06-12T08:12:00.001-07:00

More Love

2010-06-12T08:11:00.000-07:00

In the June Discover Magazine is an article about epigenetics; in particular, the way genes are turned on and off by the way a rat pup was raised. When the mother licked the pup many times over the course of the day, the pup became a more confident adult, open to new experiences and to being with other rats. If the pup had a mother not given to licking, as adults they were more anxious, less open to the new. When the pup of a non-licker was given to a foster mother who was a licker, the rat had the same outcome as the pups genetically related to that mother. It was a more confident, less startle-prone rat. This study made clear how strong the effect of early upbringing is on the personalities of the adults. In Harry Harlow’s research with monkeys, young monkeys would choose a cuddly surrogate mother over a wire one that had milk. Comfort and touch were more important than food. Untouched monkeys in his research became psychotic, or violent sociopaths. This has to make you worry about cultures that are very reserved regarding physical contact, who don’t touch each other even in families.
I remember reading that baboons carry their babies around for months after they are born, easing the shock of separation from the mother’s body. It makes me sad to see a mother carrying her infant in one of those V-shaped baby-buckets, an idea born of marketing. The pediatrician that used to live upstairs always carried her baby on her hip, and it was a very confident baby.
People can go to psychiatrists for years trying to understand the reasons for their anxiety, and though they surely gain in overall self-awareness they may never know that they were seldom held as a baby, that being out there alone in the world too soon was scary. The attitude of vigilance is shaped right then by the customs of the group into which they were born. The particular way this attitude manifests may be genetic, but the disposition of fear is conditioned.
The good news is the brain is malleable, always reordering in relation to the environment to which it adapts. Every time we touch a friend we perform a little act of healing. The problems due to lack of touch in the past can be soothed by caring touch in the present. Touch is a powerful antidote to stress chemicals. Temple Grandin, uncomfortable with touching people as part of her Asperger’s Syndrome, made a hug machine, a bed that bent to push on her sides to reduce the tension in her body. I feel that comforting sensation whenever I lean back on my very soft couch. It may not produce the oxytocin that creates long term bonding but the pleasure tells me it definitely produces endorphins, like it probably did for the monkeys choosing the cuddly surrogate mother, and endorphins reduce stress.
Wilhelm Reich thought that sexual union was necessary for people to have enough independence of character to think for themselves. Without it he felt that people turned to the group and the attitudes and thinking of the herd. They found their connection to others in agreement with the cultural norms. Thinking about the rat study, it would seem that caring touch of any kind, creating connectedness, builds the confidence necessary to embrace difference, in oneself and others. A light touch on the forearm is enough to get good chemicals flowing. Every time we touch we create a physical image of connection and build a more connected self-representation in the brain. Even when we weren’t raised to touch others, it’s something that can to be developed. Our physiology needs it and more confident independent thinkers can change the world. More love, right from the start of life, in every cultural group, is the force that could turn the global trajectory from the fear-based attitudes of greed and domination that are ruining the planet to a place where cooperation and caring can begin the process of regeneration.

Uncertain Procedure

2010-05-25T11:55:00.001-07:00

Protection

2010-05-25T11:54:00.000-07:00

Behavior is an image in motion. Remembering that Jung said, ”Image is psyche”, we can see how symptoms create an image that reflects what initiated the reaction. The things that cause us psychological pain are rooted in conditioned patterns created by past threats, and show the lingering expectation of more. I’ve found that one of the clearest indicators of the trouble a person has had is in the degree of their self-protection. The need to protect oneself shows a background requiring protection, of being conditioned to relate to a threat pattern with an adaptive response. When we think of a person’s behavior as defensive, we should keep in mind that the fortress was built to protect from attack. Slumped shoulders are not just about posture; they are about cowering. Anyone that was hurtfully punished and humiliated in childhood has been convinced they deserved it. And so they expect more of the same and create what they expect. Alice Miller, in her many books, emphasizes the crippling long-term effects on adults who were mistreated by their parents. The names of her books, “Banished Knowledge”, “For Your Own Good” etc. refer to the broad range of parenting styles that deny the child’s individual reality. Accepting the practice by refusing to see how one has been hurt, the wounded individual passes the behavior to the next generation, debilitating a large chunk of the population with defensive antagonism upon which the worst aspects of modern society build.
The cultural appetite for meanness, expressed in news reports of torture and bullying, media humiliation of celebrities, radio hosts that ridicule others, feeds on people who have suffered this treatment and now need to vent the distress on others. A scene in the old movie of the Charles Dickens book, “Nicholas Nickleby”, shows an obviously poor young boy in the school watching gleefully as another of the children is beaten harshly by the school master. The image of violence as a way to solve problems is retained by the body no matter how many layers of rationalization and denial shield it.
The disregard for cultures with different values is one result of the emotional blindness that allows these conditions to propagate. The need to release pent up feeling is satisfied by subduing those who don’t share a particular way of seeing with all of the righteousness of parent smacking a child into obedience. Unexpressed rage is channeled toward whatever is being demonized at the moment. Drawn into an accepted outlet, the hurt caused is invisible, blocked by the protective shell around the ability to feel.
The shell was constructed in reaction to assaults of the past. The culture reinforces it creating a perpetual aura of danger requiring our vigilance, and we layer on our personal defensive strategies, built in childhood, to counter the behavior of the adult(s) that made them necessary. The tension creates symptoms in our bodies. Pain and discomfort isolate us further. Instead of judging ourselves for our lack of self-worth and all the behaviors that go with it, we should look squarely at what molded those behaviors so we can release them. If we’re not in touch with our own pain, the Golden Rule doesn’t work, because when we don’t understand what hurts us we can’t use that as a marker for what not to do to others. Throughout the Bible and the I Ching as well as other religious texts are many statements to the effect that we teach best by example. Getting into power struggles with children about who is boss lays a foundation for adult struggles that extend into international politics. Using punitive measures teaches a child to do the same and creates a violent, intolerant world.
The wonderful work being done in the Harlem Children’s Zone shows what’s possible when the growth of children is approached the right way. What they call “Baby College” is an effort to give young mother’s help understanding their babies and what kinds of childrearing will stimulate healthy psychology and intelligence. In a Newsweek article, “What We Can Learn From The Harlem’s Children’s Zone”, Raina Kelley writes, “the HCZ is another kind of proof that the playing field can be leveled.” They rightly see that developing and supporting the child’s intellectual development is the best way to build a road out of poverty. Key to the philosophy is eliminating corporal punishment and humiliation, which diminish empathy, and developing skills that allow empathy to flourish.
All of the recent brain research supports the need to change the way children are raised. Putting the emphasis on love and understanding will enable the young to trust themselves and grow into their full potential. Only then will we see more understanding in global communication.

Poles Together

2010-05-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

Contradictory Truth

2010-05-10T08:18:00.000-07:00

I recently heard a man on the radio insist that where there are contradictions, one thing is wrong and the other is right. In his mind, to believe that there are things in common among different religions is, to use his words, “silly”. That contradictory things can be true is an issue of perspective. Pull back and everything has an oppositional state equally important to keeping the whole thing moving. Alan Watts wrote of the “familiar tension between law and grace, works and faith, discipline and spontaneity, technique and inspiration, a synthesis of which is of the utmost importance for the living of the moral and spiritual life.” The issue is balance. Favoring one side over the other is untenable. The views of different cultures can at first seem contradictory, but each expresses a truth of its own context. To impose a standard from another context invites disharmony and misunderstanding.
On the mental plane of right and wrong, the fear a being wrong inhibits creativity. After all, creativity is by its nature trying something new. How could that ever fit a pre-existing idea of right? Depending on how past instances of wrong were treated, this can be paralyzing. With satisfaction in life dependent on growth, the inability to grow curls one into separateness. Though every specific instance may have right and wrong choices, it’s something we know in our heart at the moment. The more general the categories of absolute right and wrong the less likely there will be justice and understanding.
I found it interesting that in the wonderful talk by Jill Bolte Taylor describing her stroke from the inside, she said she couldn’t find the edges of her arm. Since her left hemisphere was the one not working, this suggests that the whole motivation of absolute boundaries is part of the fabric of this analytical and symbolic, verbal and numerical side of our brain. The right is the hemisphere of full perception of wholes. As soon as the brain starts to delineate, the first stage of symbolization begins. Once we define an arm as an arm we’ve already begun to substitute our representation, the thing we think of as an arm, with the living, active arm that’s carrying out our purposes in the world. The right side recognizes that we are in the world and part of it, whereas the left side sees it as something observed from the outside and manipulated. The excesses of left-brain dominance and this tendency to see the symbol and not the reality, exacerbated by digital menu culture, may be part of a detachment that seems to be affecting so many people today. We locate, separate and label, and this offers an illusion of control.
The right side sees the arm in motion, participating in a dynamic universe that we don’t control but navigate. For the right hemisphere, building a bigger picture of the whole increases our overall perspective and ability to function within it.
The idea of pooling knowledge, going beyond simply acknowledging different views to actively seeking them out, allows us to enlarge our picture of the world, reorganizing our worldview at a higher, more comprehensive level. Organized properly the new image will regain simplicity offering an ease of understanding that includes the full range of ideas and their context of relevance.
More attention to imagery will help us build the neglected right side of our brains. Finding artists whose work strikes a chord, spending time in nature and looking at the world around us, exploring new places and looking carefully at a friend’s face as they talk, are just a few ways we can begin to balance our minds and develop our perceptual wisdom. The skill of seeing what’s important in the picture may diminish our anxieties about the world by building our capacity to respond from within the whole.

Puzzle

2010-04-28T11:24:00.001-07:00

Dreaming

2010-04-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

The purest experience of imagery in mental processes occurs when we dream. Visual language is the medium of dreams. We are shown the way to look at something where the goals of waking life may obscure an important ingredient. Dreams are a mechanism in our ongoing adjustment for balance. The current idea about the dream compensating for the one-sidedness of waking life dates back to early Taoism, which has many passages where the dream functions as a counterbalance.
Since many researchers connect dreaming to learning and solidifying memory, this would reinforce the idea that what we learn has to be integrated into our inner model, connected to our existing representation of reality. Ulrich Wagner of the University of Luebeck, Germany, says sleep develops our capacity for insight as adjustments are made in the hippocampus, consolidating new information within that organizational center. The hippocampus is considered to be the headquarters of our internal model of reality and these nightly revisions and additions include the felt significance of our experience. With conscious purposes focusing most of our attention during the day, subtle feelings about experience are missed. In his book, Travels with Charlie, John Steinbeck wrote about the dramatic nightmares Charlie had the day he saw his first bear. The dog enacted the movement and sounds of terror during REM, establishing his sense of the danger. Dreams reinforce circuits and display unconscious evaluations. They show us how we feel.
Dreams almost always occur in settings, drawing from and developing the existing inner model. Just like none of the individual objects is symbolic without the context, the setting itself can stay the same but host a range of different feelings, an ordinary living room shot with feelings of terror.
Judaism has always regarded dreams as important to deep level understanding. One of the many passages about dreaming in the Talmud states, “Dreams that are not understood are like letters that are not opened.” Rabbi Jonathan said, “A man is shown in his dreams what he thinks in his heart.” Psychiatrist Erich Fromm was saying the same thing when he wrote,” A dream is the true picture of the subjective life of the dreamer.”
Having a dream journal, even if I only remember one dream every few months gives me the opportunity to reflect on a dream at a distance. Looking back at dreams, seeing a larger context with more development over the intervening time, the picture can seem much more understandable than the morning after having the dream. My persistent nightmares of quicksand as a child, I now can see as a fear of suffocation, and the horror of disappearing completely from the surface world.
Most of us are pretty good at suppressing our fears, but to ignore them altogether is to not see a danger apparent to the unconscious mind. The dream insures these evaluations will be integrated into overall memory. Researchers have found that two-thirds of dream content is unpleasant. So bad dreams don’t mean something’s wrong with us, they show how we feel about what’s happened to us, or what we fear might happen. The idea that the unconscious mind is broader and smarter than the conscious mind is certainly supported by the many stories of dreams solving problems or predicting outcomes. There’s a rich history of predictive dreams (Lincoln dreamed of his assassination the week before it happened) and a parallel history of dreams showing solutions that eluded the waking mind (Mendeleyev’s organization of the Periodic Tables of the Elements). We are all artists at night, creative imagination unbound by the assumptions in our ideas about reality.
I think when we don’t remember our dreams it’s because they did their work, the adjustments have been made in the image that underlies the way we think and doesn’t need conscious attention. When we do remember, just by the act of remembering in the day, we perform another act of reinforcing the circuits and weaving it into the fabric of conscious memory. I remember some of my childhood nightmares more vividly than any particular episode from waking experience.
The correlation of sleep problems and depression shows how a lack of time sleeping and dreaming deprives us of the opportunity to balance the negative feelings. Understanding the value of this nightly development of our perceptive intelligence, we might value sleep more, and appreciate that important work is being done.

Sharing Light

2010-04-14T07:24:00.001-07:00

Images and Humor

2010-04-14T07:23:00.000-07:00

At the top of my list of favorite funny lines was a crack made by Michael Feldman on his radio show “Whaddya Know”. During the first Gulf war, he asked the audience if they’d heard of the new smart bombs--- that refused to drop. Immediately a cartoon like image formed in my mind of two bombs hanging below the plane looking at each other with a caption like ”No way. There are PEOPLE down there.”
The inner image is important to humor because so often a joke depends on a shift of context. We think of “Smart bombs” as technology that can better find it’s target, then the punch line shifts our attention to human smarts and knowing better than to want to hurt others. This crossover from what was expected stimulates dopamine. It gets our attention and reminds us we can be wrong in our assumptions. I find it interesting that our reward system encourages us to recognize our mistakes. Optical illusions also give us pleasure with contradictions in visual expectations. In the right context, watching a magic show or looking at a mural that fools us into thinking there’s a door, is pleasure from being fooled. It’s good for our survival to be reminded of our illusions.
One of the things that delighted me in Umberto Ecco’s novel “The Name of the Rose” was the discovery that the medieval monastery’s book of forbidden knowledge was Aristotle’s book on humor. The idea that rigid ideology most feared humor made wonderful sense since humor depends on contradictions, on shifting conceptual contexts and an irreverent attitude. It can break us loose from conditioned mindsets. Humor is the enemy of dogma.
The area in the front of the left hemisphere that’s triggered when making a joke is an area associated with optimism and happiness. Humor lightens the heart, stimulating endorphin production. Clearly evolutionary forces are encouraging it’s use.
Norman Cousins, in his book “Anatomy of an Illness” credited watching funny movies with pulling him through a serious illness. He actually checked out of the hospital and into a hotel and healed himself with the Marx Brothers. His book “Head First” was one of the first to compile the research showing connections between mental habits and attitudes to health. In a more recent book, “Mind Wide Open”, journalist Steven Johnson noted that laughter suppresses stress hormones and stimulates immune chemicals. Laughter even strengthens ability to remember. Joan Didion once wrote that one of the important factors in a long-term relationship was “finding the same things funny and the same things absurd”. A shared sense of humor is one place we can feel a deep connection to another. This sense of connection frees our thinking from bondage. The need to go along with the crowd is often based on the drive to connect with others and without a strong personal bond people seek refuge in unifying ideology.
Humor often needs no words at all. Early cartoons were pure visual events that were free from the constraints of reality in the crazy situations depicted and the exaggerated expressiveness of the characters. The New Yorker is famous for its cartoons.
The funny home videos shown on TV and You Tube depend on watching an unexpected visual twist. Laughing at ourselves can save us from exaggerated self-importance. So often it’s the brutal honesty of observational humor that allows us to see delusional personal patterns and we laugh with recognition. The imagery of humor is a powerful corrective that helps us see a truth that our ideation may have blocked.

Building Gravity

2010-03-31T08:35:00.001-07:00

Weight

2010-03-31T08:34:00.000-07:00

Riding to the eastern shore with my husband, a big car whizzed by us to the traffic signal and idled with a powerful growling sound in the lane right next to us. The elaborate painting, specialized bodywork and big tires reminded me of reading Thorstein Veblen who developed the concepts of “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste” as aspects of the human form of display that were evident in other cultures prior to our own. Modern consumer materialism may be more elaborate than what he described but display precedes even human cultures. Bowerbirds make elaborate platforms with all kinds of things woven in including daily changes of flowers. They try to outdo the other birds in creating a stronger visual impression and thus attract the female. The degree to which something gets attention is the degree of its attraction. Visual power creates its own gravity, gives weight. Power could be seen as the ability to command others attention. An effective display gives greater visibility. Display grows from a mindset of competition. With a competitive approach to life, whoever is most visible, whose satellite representations can be seen far and wide, wins. The dark side of being a “heavyweight” is the pressure of having so much attention, how the media jumps on every imperfection, the more visible the personage, the more airtime. The gravity we’ve created pulls so much into us we can be crushed by it.
Weight pushes us down. To carry it is a burden. It puts emphasis on the material world and all the separate things in it. It focuses on substance, admires what is substantial. The metaphor of weight builds on accumulation; weight grows as stuff piles up. The ego loves this because we are enlarging on our sense of our scope by building our bower of visibility. In a way, the life story that comprises our ego, the way we identify ourselves, is a weight that can drag us down, is the rock that Sisyphus pushes endlessly up the hill.
What keeps us from feeling light is weight. To feel light may be necessary to joy, to liberation. Weight expresses attachment and desire. Lightness releases self-importance and is in harmony with present being. D. K. Chesterton said, “Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.” To “take ourselves seriously” is to hold protectively to the identity described by our story. We struggle with our attachment to the things that weigh us down. It’s part of the human drama and not something we can reject and stay alive. The dualities of light/dark, light/heavy are cyclical conditions, part of a whole that oscillates. Whether the metaphor is applied to moods, or the smooth and difficult times in life, clinging to one end stops motion. They are the crests and troughs of an all- encompassing vibration, which we should acknowledge and accept as the experience of being human. As Milan Kundera wrote in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, “The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar to the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real…. the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.”

Mistaken Identity

2010-03-13T11:19:00.001-08:00

Light

2010-03-13T11:18:00.001-08:00

In the course of my search for imagery that might assist a more comprehensive understanding of our spiritual nature it occurred to me that the image of light is associated with the all-encompassing universal intelligence in most if not all religions. Arguments between different faiths overlook this shared central image and I wondered why didn’t we see beyond the human-like god with its warring dualities to the inclusive light beyond it. A conversation with Kris Hjelli the night before he died pointed to the answer. He was very concerned by all the problems created by our anthropocentrism. The human mindset of being separate and better than the planet and everything on it was for him the root of the problem in our ecological dilemma. That humans think that only humans are important leads to disrespect and disregard for everything else and encourages an underlying selfishness. This started me thinking about whether the anthropocentric mindset might be behind our inability to go beyond human-like images of the divine. By putting an emphasis on the human image, it becomes other and separate. The Image molds the viewpoint and the viewpoint leads us to see a multitude of individual separate beings with a separate god outside of ourselves. Arguments break out around which separate supreme entity and codified book is the right one and none of that feels very spiritually focused.
The image that encompasses all of the separate views and is part of many references to the Infinite Intelligence is the image of Light. It’s a part of mystical experience in all faiths. It’s always been present, but our focus on what’s human kept us on the level of distinctions. Perhaps Islam’s distrust of images had to do with their focus on what is manifest, on what can be seen. But since imagery is so important to understanding, a better image may be necessary to get us to a place that includes us all. Since light includes and envelops all that is around it, it makes sense to go back to Light. After all it was there in Genesis, in the Clear Light of Buddhism, in the radiance of the saints. Darkness is ignorance, inability to see clearly. The metaphor of increasing our light makes the pursuit of learning a spiritual path, since it moves toward greater light. Knowledge illuminates.
Beyond the religious image of light, light has long been a central metaphor for intelligence. We bring a new issue to light, we cast light on a problem, something is seen in a different light. The light in the heart enables us to see our deepest meanings. A person might be referred to as bright, a prophet called a light to the world. When I say a person is full of light, it’s not so much a particular quality I’m feeling, but an outward directed interest, a lively curiosity that connects to what’s seen. We feel it as a level of attention and are more fully in the light in someone’s attentive gaze. The light of receptive attention feels like love. Words of love can betray. Responsive, accepting attention IS love. It doesn’t just represent it. We always have the choice to offer that to others, to be Light. We are drawn to the Light because it offers greater awareness.
What we see becomes known in a deeper way than what we hear or read. Envisioning something in relation to our existing inner model is the only way we can integrate our accumulating perceptions into our worldview. We all have these associations with light. It’s been so close we couldn’t see it. We couldn’t see beyond the human intermediary.
What is all encompassing suits me better. Learning, meeting people with different backgrounds and views, seeing and experiencing different places, all increase my light.
It’s something we could head toward together.

Looking For Kris

2010-02-28T11:22:00.001-08:00

To My Drawing Class- In Memory of Kristoffer Hjelle

2010-02-25T08:35:00.000-08:00

In the time our class has been together we’ve become a community and a group mind comprised of many different ways of seeing. Losing Kris is a tremendous blow to us. His way of seeing and expressing itself broke boundaries in every direction.
In the community organism our class has become we need to stop and digest how the way Kris thought has influenced the way we think. As I write this I’m listening to a sound piece he made for me with binaural beats and nature sounds. He addressed my interest in meditation and the brain and combined it with his own sensitivity to nature. His ecological consciousness, including a compassion for all beings, turned up throughout his work. He pushed experimentation with media and the structure of drawings and ways to think about art that we can in some way metabolize, build into our own creative being. He broke down boundaries between different disciplines, combining imagery with sound and interactivity. We can build our own possibilities by the inclusion of his.
We can develop the neural circuits that were affected by his presence in the class, whether it was identifying with his ideas, his sensitivity, his use of media, or his willingness to structure drawings in entirely different ways. There was a boundlessness to his creativity that we can reflect on when we feel restricted.
Thinking about how he influenced us, remembering how our lives were touched, on some level makes him more present through the focus of our attention. Last Thursday night, looking at the hand stitched book he was making, I told him that some of what he’d written represented deep spiritual insight. He was very wise about the pitfalls of the human mind. This showed clearly in some of the papers he wrote for Amy Eisner’s class. He wrote, “We must not always look to etymology, history, or any other established approaches to find understanding, because the truth is that in one word, there is a bible of meaning and although an artist makes his own path, so will the reader. I say ditch the path and create your own.” This was his challenge to us.
When we reclaim the complete life of a person, we can feel all of the ways their way of being affected us and extended our understanding of how people look at the world. We may have shared an opinion and felt affirmed that someone as smart as Kris was thinking along those lines. He and I had conversations that I thought about long afterward and often changed the way I was looking at a subject. His ideas will have reverberations throughout the rest of my thinking. The length of a life has nothing to do with its value.
Recognizing how Kris has affected us enables us to deepen and grow and be grateful to him as the source of greater light.

Overture

2010-02-12T11:53:00.001-08:00

Art Showing Feeling

2010-02-12T11:45:00.000-08:00

√ It was after completing a series of very simple drawings in 1976 that I began to think art could be a useful tool to help people recognize their feelings. They were exhibited that spring at the Image Gallery in Stockbridge, MA. I was pleased and somewhat surprised at the reception they received, since my work is usually very detailed and I thought that was part of its appeal. Stacks of lines in varying degrees of balance, the drawings seemed like shorthand for expressing feelings difficult to describe in words. Anyone could immediately recognize how they were “stacked up” at that moment, how balanced they felt at any given time. When I went to work in a short term counseling facility, I quickly saw their potential usefulness. Often the reason it’s so hard to tell a counselor how you feel is because there aren’t really words that fit. Each word puts the feeling into a definition that may not really match. I adapted my series to hang in one of the counseling rooms, nine drawings ranging from total collapse to perfectly balanced. They seemed to make a difference, enabling counselor and client to get to the point more quickly and lay out the situation contributing to that state. Though I left after two years, the pictures stayed in use for the next seven. (The ones I’m posting are from the original series). It occurred to me after posting my last essay that anyone who wanted to reflect on their inner state could draw a stack of sticks and see how they feel, what mood they’re in, how they stack up that day. I thought I’d offer these up by way of encouragement to try your own.
Talking with students about my own drawing process I emphasize that I don’t know what’s going to happen when I start. I lay out big shapes and color fields in a way that feels right until the whole page is divided into a particular state of balance. When I look at it I’m often surprised at what it shows me. I’ll think, “Hmmm, I’m in worse shape than I thought.” Usually that thought makes me snicker at the immediate insight into my whole circumstance.
For the deep psychological strata, nothing is better than looking at great art. To look at a portrait by Rembrandt you can see your own deepest questions looking back. Current art challenges aspects of our immediate culture, and it can be deeply reassuring to see others pointing beyond the surface descriptions. In every case, it’s not just the recognition that we’re more than the boxes we’re put in, but the enlarged perspective we gain that is the best kind of learning. Since learning produces endorphins, the acquisition of more perspective makes us feel better. Great art shows us how much bigger we are than the world makes us think. When an artist hits my current state of mind dead on, I laugh out loud.
Drawing is a way of thinking visually. Whether your doodling during TV or depicting the detail on a dead leaf, you are showing yourself something your brain is trying to see. The doodle may have a musical feel in the repetition of similar shapes and have the same soothing effect. Drawing what you see develops powers of observation as well as showing what in your surroundings you care enough about to want to see better. Observation is the foundation of art and science. Building that skill serves you well in every way imaginable. It shouldn’t be reserved for artists. It develops a hemisphere of the brain long neglected by the dominance of words. Everybody should get a pad and see what they feel.

Communion

2010-01-31T11:41:00.000-08:00

Art and Neuroscience

2010-01-31T11:40:00.000-08:00

A recent article in the Baltimore Sun described a collaboration between brain science and art that I was glad to see happening. Working with Charles Conner, director of the Mind/Brain Institute of Johns Hopkins, Walter’s Art Gallery director Gary Vican said, “Artists are instinctive neuroscientists. They’re always looking for new ways to stimulate perceptual mechanisms. When we’re involved in looking at art the whole brain is fully engaged. It’s one of the most sophisticated things we can do.” The writer credited Clive Bell with coining the term “significant form”, but it actually traces back much further. When Susanne Langer used it in her writing in the 60’s she credited “ aestheticians of a previous generation”. Her magnificent and thorough work on the relation of art and feeling is especially relevant now as neuroscience shows that feeling directs thinking, is our filter for importance. In her book, “Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling” she writes, “Feeling is a dynamic pattern of tremendous complexity. Its whole relation to life, the fact that all sorts of processes may culminate in feeling with or without direct regard for each other, and that vital activity goes on at all levels continuously, make mental phenomenon the most protean subject matter in the world. Our best identification of such phenomena is through images that hold and present them for contemplation; and their images are works of art.”
The complex dynamics of feelings and the structure of art make art the best way to learn about feeling. This complexity cannot be reduced to one variable at a time since the meaning is in the whole and the relationships presented. There are correlations between the balance of a surrounding structure and the feelings we experience, and we seek out the structures that best express our own inner world. Art serves others by translating the dynamic patterns of feeling into significant form that can help us recognize our own obscure felt states. In the Walters study a questionnaire that asks about the mood of the subject before they pick the shape could add an important level of information since what we find beautiful can vary with our state of mind. Rudolf Arnheim’s work analyzed qualities in the composition of paintings, and building on the work of the gestalt psychologists, concluded that balance and change are central to how we respond. The edge of the spiky shape changes very abruptly and we respond as we respond to abrupt things. Smooth curves change gently and that’s how we feel them.
Today at University College in London is the Institute of Neuroesthetics. On their web site they write, “Artists are, in a sense, neurologists who study the capacities of the visual brain with techniques that are unique to them”. Neuroesthetics is a word coined by neurobiologist, Semir Zeki, which refers to the artist as observing and abstracting general patterns, finding general abstractions. All brain science began with the study of perception. It studied how the brain organized wholes and recognized patterns.
Art gives us images that help us understand the structure of feelings. As Langer said, “Art looks like feelings feel.” The work that stirs the most people engages the most universal felt states of being human. Like facial expression it can speak across cultural boundaries because we’re physically structured the same way and our patterns of response build on our embodiment.
Art can help science create synthesis between disciplines, find correlations between bodies of information that give perspective to the knowledge. One of the problems with the methods of science is that by limiting variables you may strip away essential context.
MacArthur winner, Richard Powers said he was headed into science as a career, but once into it the narrowness of the discipline shifted his attention to the possibilities of novels. His books weave connections from many fields finding parallels that illuminate how thought itself is structured. Throughout the sciences, artists could facilitate insight into important relationships through their perceptual understanding. In a multivariable world, the artist helps us discern what’s significant in the whole.

Emergence

2010-01-11T12:30:00.000-08:00

Forward

2010-01-11T12:29:00.000-08:00

The word “forward” has generally positive connotations. It is the direction you’re facing, attentive to what’s in front of you. We think of “forward” in relation to what’s unexplored and “backward” as what’s already happened, suggesting nothing to be learned from that direction. Unlike “ahead” which implies a relationship to what’s behind, or a competition with another, “moving forward“ is pure direction, a more open present-centered state that keeps us in action, learning and developing.
As I learn more and more about the brain my tendency to try to visualize the gestalt helps me to consider what might be general principles of the mind and how they could be useful. One of the most significant is the idea that we are happiest when we move the energy forward in the brain. When researcher Elena Korneva massaged the front of a cat’s hypothalamus the cat purred. When she rubbed the back it showed signs of terror. Reaching from the frontal lobes to the older functions in the back, the hypothalamus is thought of as the brain’s metaphoric thermostat, mediating between body and brain mechanisms to keep us balanced. Our fear responses send energy to the back of the brain where memory and fight/flight responses are centered. When we take action on a problem the energy moves forward. Speech is an action. Studies have shown that happy emotions are associated with activity in the left front hemisphere. This is the location of Broca’s area, where we put our thoughts into words, an action the brain reinforces as good for our well-being. Perhaps the most helpful thing about keeping a journal in difficult times is the act of putting the troubles in words. Psychiatrist / novelist, Walker Percy wrote, “We tame the world with descriptions.” Naming something makes it feel more known. It is one of the uniquely human powers. Imagination and analysis, reason and discernment, all of the specialized abilities evolved to enhance human survival are in the front of the cortex. These mental actions are clearly in our interest to develop. Right behind the forehead in the prefrontal cortex, they are densely connected with our primary source of dopamine, the nucleus accumbens, considered a major pleasure center. Action utilizing our highest powers stimulates dopamine, which stimulates focus and attention. Nature builds incentives to keep us evolving. We are meant to use our capacities and are happiest when extending them. Nothing feels better than acting, because through our actions and their effects we fulfill our being and discover who we are.
As Howard Gardner has repeatedly emphasized, many of our higher powers are not developed by current education’s focus on left hemisphere abilities. More time is spent breaking knowledge into small units. Very little attention is given to synthesizing and comprehending relations between one area and another, the abilities that images educate. The concept of “forward” itself has been twisted by the linearity of left hemisphere thinking. Forward is really outward. When we shift our body position, facing a new perspective, then that becomes forward. Backward is the land of memory and the known. It moves energy to the back of the brain and taps into conditioned patterns.
Outward and forward is the direction of learning. Growth moves in all directions. Direction itself has been found to play a part in happiness. Energy that is directed pulls the mind’s energies into harmony. Direction is often equated with purpose, when we’re directionless we’re confused and ultimately depressed because there are so many human faculties going unused. When we don’t act, it’s often because early negative messages have made us fearful of doing what we really want or of our ability to succeed at something. But growth is much simpler than the grand plans that accompany external definitions of success. To take an interest in anything, to investigate, observe, inquire, and pay attention to where we are and where we’re heading pushes energy to the front of the brain. All directions outside of the self enable consciousness to become aware of itself within the whole. We can choose to direct our energy forward, in our brains and in our lives.

Mental Formation

2009-12-24T07:26:00.001-08:00

Giving

2009-12-24T07:24:00.001-08:00

Putting aside obligation, which changes the pleasure of everything, giving can be one of our most pleasurable experiences. Since the brain produces endorphins to reinforce behavior that’s good for our growth, the fact that endorphins are produced for giving underscores the importance of relationships that weave us into the fabric of humanity. It feels good to help others whether it’s giving a gift, or helping clear the snow off a car or even simply taking an interest in what they have to tell us. The pleasure is a message about our interconnectedness. Social isolation is a serious risk factor contributing to illness. Contributing to the good of the larger whole is good for us as well. Edgar Cayce used to say something to the effect that all of life is the body of god. Contributing to the well being of any part expresses our connection to the creative life force that links us all.
Showing appreciation for others fosters the health of the whole. Making a gift is a way of offering a symbol of the attention given to that person and ultimately attention is love. In whatever form it takes, attention is the greatest gift we have to offer. People feel seen and connected just through the act of response to them. It also liberates us from the competitive materialism that stains the holidays. (Negative attention is not really attention to the other but a projection of the mind from which it arises.)
When I had fewer relatives than I do now, I used to make each one a personal gift. Everything about the process was pleasurable, the time reflecting on the relationship, the particular person’s interests, the ongoing consciousness of giving from inception to completion of the gift and even the building of my skills and capacities. In the act of giving, the holiday itself is more alive with the awareness of offering something of myself rather than the mass-produced purchases that never seem personal.
Now with so many people in my life, though I make a few personal presents, each year I do bookmarks, drawings invented out of that year’s moods, that can be reproduced and laminated, and given to everyone. I get special pleasure out of bestowing them on people who would least expect it, who affected my life in some positive way even though I might not know them very well. It’s clear that I expect nothing in return, that it’s not a trade of presents, but an act of appreciation.
The fact that people have been reading what I’ve written here has been a tremendous encouragement. The motivation for writing this blog arises from the feeling that I may be able to offer some thoughts and a way of looking at things that could be helpful to others. So, to express my gratitude, this year one of my bookmarks is being offered to you, to print and laminate (I use clear contact paper on both sides) as thanks for your encouragement of my project.

Formative Fields

2009-12-12T08:06:00.002-08:00

Connectedness

2009-12-12T08:06:00.001-08:00

The theme of connectedness is emerging all around us. It’s not hard to see why.
Our shared environment is a conspicuous truth in the digital “noosphere”. That was a word that philosopher/ theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin used to refer to the atmosphere of consciousness in which we participate. He saw individuals as thinking molecules in this larger whole, contributing our perception to a larger inclusive awareness. The Internet mirrors this, is isomorphic in structure. Every individual mind is the hub of a wheel of connections and life experience that creates a personal viewpoint that influences and is influencing the whole. Similarly, in the physical world, just as we are always adjusting to our surroundings, our surroundings are always adjusting to us. I walk down the path and the birds fly off. Leaves and twigs are displaced by my steps and the air currents my presence initiates. Squirrels that know I have peanuts run toward me. There is no way of standing outside, and those are just the visible reverberations. Whenever new ideas start pouring from me. I say an inner thanks for the creative source for which I’m privileged to be a conduit. The role of the being I am with its accumulation of knowledge and unique perspective are the material that tune me to new meanings and are my language to communicate. Increasing my learning increases what is available to me to access, like familiarity with the music played in a concert can increase appreciation of the meaning given to it by the musician. I’ve heard my husband Michael play the same jazz standards uncountable times, but they still have the power to stop me, make me listen and sink into the expression he gives it at that moment. I Ching speaks of the holiness of music and its power “ to loosen the grip of the obscure emotions.”
There’s a purity to our connection with music. It can capture us. As Peter Gabriel said recently in an interview,” I love music because it plugs right into the emotions.” He felt it was more of the spirit than the other arts. John Dewey said, ”vision is a spectator, but hearing is a participant.” Vision can support the illusion of something outside of us, and we can choose to look the other way. Hearing seems to happen right inside us and is harder to shut out. It seems to merge with our personal awareness.
David Bohm used the word “artamovement” for the continuous act of “fitting” that is the essential quality of the whole. Rather than building blocks in the world machine, we are melodic lines in the symphony of consciousness. We fit what we have to offer into the structure unfolding around us like jazz improvises around the shape of the tune.
Thinking of many modes of vibration in harmony would be a better image to contemplate Bohm’s conception of individual elements as abstractions from an unbroken wholeness. The worldview that sees reality comprised of separate building blocks leaves us alienated. The emphasis on competition for resources creates opposition and antagonism. With an image of a deity outside of ourselves, this separation underlies everything. In a worldview that sees all as continuous movement in which we participate, we are naturally inclined to cooperate, to add our bit to the ongoing creation. Guided by the image of music, we try to blend with the group, work together, harmonize, fit what we have to offer into a larger whole. We feel a greater sense of responsibility toward each other and our environment when we feel like part of the same thing, the body of life, and the entirety of consciousness.
A Muslim reader wrote to me about how the Christian image of God could get in the way of seeing the deeper, more comprehensive view of the Spirit. Even images can begin to operate like labels, replacing the reality of a subject with the definition and dogma that builds up around the image/concept. “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
Just as Viktor Frankl concluded that the specific meanings are not as important as the search for meaning, we might be better off not clinging so tightly to the current images that emphasize separation and search for new images, lots of them, to help us reflect and gain access to the pleasure of our connection.

Release

2009-11-22T13:44:00.002-08:00

Questioning Definitions

2009-11-22T13:44:00.001-08:00

There are a few famous lines that each of us hold close to our hearts, that came to us at just the time we needed to hear them and seemed novel and revolutionary. A transforming phrase is a work of art in a concept. When Malcolm X said,” You don’t have to accept anyone else’s definition of who you are”, I was stirred to my foundations. For someone who had been defined by others at every turn, others’ plans and expectations meant to fit me into a narrow cultural slot, it was a shocking thought that took hold and shook me out of the hardening mold. In varying degrees we all grow up surrounded by cultural templates to which we must conform. Serious labels with ominous definitions are slapped on behavior that doesn’t fit the template, doesn’t fit into the cultural machine. This is one of the problems with the old machine paradigm that holds that everything can be explained by the limited actions allowed by the particular function of a part in the machine. It reduces the complex human person to a mechanical function in one of the accepted roles the society and culture has scripted. Parents are agents of the culture and do what the culture says must be done, but in the process young people are bound, limited by standards that signify their unimportance. In Susan Sontag’s novel “In America”, after a young man kills himself the protagonist thinks, “How I wished I could have explained to him that he didn’t have to be what he thought himself sentenced to be. For isn’t that why one thinks of ending one’s life?” and later she wrote, “Happiness depends on not being trapped in your individual existence, a container with your name on it.”
A theme that is emerging in some students’ work right now is emancipation from these limitations. They are creating new images for spirituality, trying to enlarge their view of being in the world that includes vast space, the universe within and without, commingled with ourselves. This is exactly the shift of values that can bring us back into harmony with our environment. Once we are identified with a larger whole it becomes difficult to violate any part of it, because it’s part of us. It makes us joyful (stimulates endorphins) when we help others because we are interdependent. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it so eloquently, “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated nature of existence.”
Discussion of art in class is richer because multiple minds thinking together can arrive at ideas that depend on the interstimulation. The web is the metaphor, and the capacity to weave new connections infinite. Not limited by the definitions of a profit driven society we can experience the beauty of being within and throughout an interconnected whole.
James Hillman said that he often thought it wasn’t that his patients were sick but that they’d failed to adapt to a sick society.
The age of competition has made a mess of things, an arms race, war after war, corporate subterfuge, steroids in sports, the proliferation of cheating on every front because winning is seen as the highest value. Apathy and cynicism are pervasive. Because of the limitations of the roles within this system, human beings haven’t begun to realize their potential. They’ve been locked in a conditioned mindset that sabotages growth.
Just like art can change the way you see something, one sentence can be enough to unlock our chains. Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” It’s the first step to building new ways of seeing ourselves. If you think people should be kinder, more sensitive, then be kinder and more sensitive. The young people of today are the front lines in a change in consciousness, and a shift to an age of cooperation seems inevitable. They know there is more to being human than the definitions they’ve inherited, and I’m excited to see the changes they will contribute to a new way of seeing our potential as a species.

Transformation

2009-11-11T08:12:00.000-08:00