Anticipation 1

Bernie Sanders

 Whenever I tell someone I support Bernie Sanders, the first thing they say is he can’t win. This sounds to me like people who’ve compromised, who have resigned themselves to a system that if allowed to continue its current course will stomp everyone that’s not already rich down to gravel underfoot, because the rich already have too much power. With an army of PR companies strategizing about how to keep people distracted and acquiescent, corporate messages flooding into every relevant source, the public is convinced there is no other course. Competitive aggressiveness is tearing the world apart.

The morning after the first democratic debate I tuned into NPR to see how they were playing it. The point that stood out for me was that it was the highest rated Democratic debate in many years. This had to be because of Bernie Sanders. Everyone else was a politician and politicians are the reason people have become cynical and uninvolved. His message came from the heart. He sees the big picture and what most needs to be changed about America. Control of the country is being bought up by the few. In a documentary almost entirely made of uploaded individual footage of the Occupy Wall Street movement as it spread, the range of people marching together is the most diverse of any march I’ve seen.  The courage and creativity felt more true of America than the glitzy soul-killing media version. These are people with principles who care about other people. The title “Rise Like Lions” was drawn from a Percy Blythe Shelley poem quoted at the beginning encouraging people to stand against oppressors. The power of this movement is behind Bernie Sanders because he’s getting at the roots of the problem. It’s not a fluke that he’s getting such big crowds. The Seattle demonstrations against the WTO drew over 40,000, which then fueled the Occupy movement. When the mainstream media mocked the movement saying, “Occupy What?”the answer  seemed obvious. People want to occupy their country again. Our police are no longer the smiling Andy of Mayberry sheriff protecting the people of the town, they are the guns that protect the new polluting factory FROM the people of the town. That capitalism has become pathological is shown by the soaring wealth of some while a growing number struggle and do without, a gigantic shiny tumor hanging off the side of the shriveling body politic.

Young people today are beyond being swayed by labels. The media may think enough shouting the word “Socialist” will make a difference but the generation coming up is smarter than they think, multisensory. While the elders are yelling, they may have the earbuds in listening to DemocracyNow and scanning world wide articles on reddit. If the mainstream media can’t see what’s happening it’s because they are too close to the 1% themselves.

There is still time to have a just and humane world that respects everything in it. Having a mission to make it happen can unite across surface differences and stop reacting to what the media wants us to be upset about. They say he can’t win because of their own fear, not knowing what a just America would mean to those now on the winning end. Taking the incentive out of greed might be a relief for everybody. If anything over a certain amount goes in a 90% bracket the competition to have the most might be defanged. Without so much extra money, the extremists might not get funded. The best in people could be allowed to flourish without self-interested parties telling them who to hate.

Bernie Sanders is visible because of the lions. Let’s join the pride.

Behaviorism

Variety and Enrichment

What made talking about the art from my “Imaging the Idea” class such a pleasure was partly due to the wonderful variety of approaches this semester’s class represents. It was stimulating to go from paintings and constructions to photography, animation and video collage, stuffed objects and reconstructed prints offering a thorough exploration of expressive iconography. That combined with the interesting and perceptive responses from the group got my own ideas moving into brand new territory. This is serious enrichment. I can revisit any one of the works mentally and get to know the mind that created it, feel their humor and priorities, the particular gifts each brings to the things they need to show us. Perspective is enlarged by the accumulation of many ways of seeing. This was the reason I created this class and the “Imaging from Current Events”, as a way of spreading a variety of visual and verbal ideas on the table so everyone gets a sense of the range of the ways others come at a topic without dispute. No idea has any more claim to being truth than another. Building the skill of moving through and pooling ideas rather than using mental resources to defend and prevail offers a more interesting, open journey through the field of ideas, the extended mental space of collective perception.

Variety is enrichment at every level of biology. When people are threatened by difference it can often be because they aren’t attuned to essence. The idea that everyone has to come around to one way of
thinking is an archaic remnant of colonialism. The availability of multiple points of view needs a more open-ended orientation toward belief that allows for growth and change. Understanding underlying relationships, how things function and the patterns of behavior formed in early development provide a platform for understanding all that is shared. Every human being has the experience of being a helpless baby that then begins to sit, to crawl, to begin the struggle to stand and
walk, and these shared early experiences are an important component of how we respond to gravity, position, obstruction, imbalance and their analogue in the composition of art. Art communicates through the human response to space. The metaphors based on functioning in the world are universal.

Understanding this essential responsiveness should enable us to transcend superficial physical descriptions and appreciate the ways in which human beings are varied as valuable. A restricted gene pool and monoculture weaken a species and make it more vulnerable, whereas interbreeding takes advantage of the best genes on both sides to makea more vigorous next generation. When Picasso saw African masks it opened a new creative direction for him. Whatever is new and different stimulates dopamine in the brain, which is represented in behavior as curiosity and focused attention. This is not something to be suppressed.  One way to make use of the untapped potential of the mind
is to expose it to more difference and find the novelty that most inspires creative thought. If as so many are now saying, we are moving into a post-knowledge era our tools for depth understanding and creative thinking will be essential to the future.

Behaviorism (detail)

Unconditional Attention

It was back when I was in my twenties working at a mental hospital that I learned the two most important lessons about the mind even after forty more years of study. The first was that the labels put on people’s misery told you very little about individual reality and nothing at all about the situations that led up to why they were there. We who worked there and the patients weren’t that different as human beings, the ones inside were more overwhelmed by their circumstances, but we that were the aides were there as part of a searching led by our own psychological fragility. It was while I worked there that I heard Thomas Szasz speak on “The Myth of Mental Illness” as something used by society to standardize people.

The other thing I learned is that what really healed people, at least on my hall, was Katy Phair. She was a wonderful woman who listened with wide-open acceptance and I could see people relax in her presence, even when they weren’t talking, because she was so totally with them. And she included the aides in her generous attention. Her look seemed to value me and helped me accept myself. One day in regard to something I was saying which I don’t remember she said, “Susan, you can’t have expectations of others.” Now this was the most revolutionary idea that had ever been said to me. I’d been brought up in a web of expectations. I couldn’t imagine not expecting things of others and couldn’t accept it at the time. It took me years to shake off the baggage of expectations when it comes to other people. The brain works by predicting, so expecting what happens next is part of its method but projecting the “shoulds” that are part of our own conditioning is a hazard to healthy relationships because expectations put conditions on how you pay attention.

What does it mean to say something given is unconditional? The obvious answer is to need nothing back, have no expectations resting on what’s given. Less obvious are the automatic internal judgments triggered by the receiver’s reaction. To give unconditional attention means to have no agenda, to take someone in as they are, really observe and learn the individual background and personal sensitivities. Taking someone in and learning about their reactions gives an understanding of what something means to them. People protect their insensitivity by saying the other over-reacted, that it was not our intention for them to react that way. We don’t learn our lessons when we say the other took it wrong.  To dismiss another’s reaction is disrespectful and refuses to learn about the legitimate response of another. The I Ching says if you want to know what kind of person you are look at the effects your actions have on others. The ripples started by the action are the messages left in the field around you.

Practice attention as a gift to others. Like a plant grows and flourishes with careful tending, true attention feels like love. It’s the concrete evidence of love that words alone can’t show.

Setting Limits