Withhold

In Defense of Love

The first time I saw Marianne Wlliamson speak on a news show, it was exhilarating to hear someone pierce the skin of approved narratives and speak a deeper truth. Whether it was about going to the roots of what was happening in the countries the migrants were leaving, or questioning the tyranny of medical authority, she championed freedom of thought and awareness of our need for connection. She spoke articulately with insight and courage. So after the first debate it was disturbing to hear one of the talking heads call her candidacy an embarrassment. Maybe ratings depend on binaries and which side is right, but to solve today’s problems we need to get beneath the polarization that keeps everything on the surface. There is a bigger picture to be faced and today’s young people know it.

Where Williamson uses the term love, news commentators call it woohoo, proving just how far the news media has been dragged into Trump’s sphere of negativity. They seem much more comfortable with hate, showing their attachment by how much they talk about it and demonstrate their derision with raised eyebrows and sneering tones. They deride the territory of love because they don’t understand it. Family life today is shaped by standards to be met, judgment, criticism and control, that puts tremendous pressure on children, some start thinking about college in middle school. Many levels of fear are formed by the habits of avoiding punishment and trying to measure  up. Attention is focused on the surface, people are divided deliberately because so much power would be available if they’re unified by their common core.

Human striving for connection is built in. I heard in a Ted Talk, that Oxytocin, thought mainly to be associated with touch and the creation of bonds, is part of the stress response, prompting us to seek out others. People naturally help each other in a crisis and superficial differences don’t stand in the way. Chronic stress is a global condition. We need human contact to rise to the demands of our situation. Cultivating cooperation, choosing a place that’s out of balance to work with others restoring, builds a habit of behavior that stimulates good brain chemistry, even on a small scale. Oxytocin feels good, makes us want to do more of what stimulated it.

Ignoring attempts to put us in categories and pit them against each other, we are able to see the value from different ways of seeing each contributing a particular view that is true from that position. Studies show we become more creative when working with people from different cultures. No one has the right to lay their template on another. With different insights from a range of backgrounds we can stop putting band-aids on problems and see what’s causing the wounds. Active choices are how we discover ourselves, learn what works and what doesn’t.

It’s time to rethink the cultural legacy of opposition and competition and find ways to solve big problems with cooperation and compassion.

Measure

Virtuosity

This year’s Wimbledon was awash in pleasure chemicals as my mirror neurons got to experience the pure joy that comes with hard-won achievement. My admiration accumulated throughout the tournament, impressed by the physical intelligence and determination. It’s one of the reasons I watch tennis, for the uplift that comes from watching people who invest it all, a visible commitment. When I first discovered tennis by accident, it was the expression on Bjorn Borg’s face that caught me. I felt honored to see so deeply into a face exposed by intense concentration. This year, when Coco Gauff, at 15, beat legendary Venus Williams at 37, I got choked up with her, stirred by high grade empathy through the mirror neuron system.

This year’s Wimbledon ended with a historic match between legendary Roger Federer and the current number one, the intense and explosive Novak Djokovic. Five hours of such high quality tennis, it could have gone either way. Djokovic came out on top in an amazing battle between the best. As is always the case watching a great match, I felt improved by the opportunity to experience the sensations of triumph and the quickened urge to strive in my own work.

Whenever I watch tennis I find myself thinking about virtuosity, the places the culture encourages it and the places it doesn’t. No one would argue with the authority of winning a championship. Sports excellence is part of our cultural ethos so I wonder what it means that individual skillfulness has been discouraged in schools in an effort to equalize. This ignores the capability of every student to achieve in their own way. Each student should be able to experience for themselves a sense of genuine achievement, starting with finding things they love to do.

Improving at something and all the attendant good brain chemistry is available at any level.

There are unexplored layers of skills in the spectrum between knowledge of computer systems to video games and that’s just one area. The increasing use of visual organization of information is enabling us to juggle larger concepts and use mental capacities that have been ignored.

I remember a study done at a time when time watching TV was at its height showing that a person’s mood worsened the longer they watched. The same would also be true of watching YouTube. Today’s knowledge about brain chemistry shows that dopamine is stimulated by activity, that challenge is best of all because it commands full attention and full attention is the zone. Good brain chemistry comes with effort, building skills, learning new things, extending understanding of who we are by what we choose to do. The ability to get better and better at something stimulates a general confidence no matter what it is.

Data

Sharing Consciousness

Roger Penrose- “Seeing is the essence of consciousness.”

When we open our eyes, we let in a vast channel of information. What we know we recognize, what we don’t we compare to other things until we find revealing similarity. In this way, the brain accumulates information for identifying and anticipating what happens in our surroundings. Our life experience builds layers of analogy on similarity of form. Perception of form is the first layer of understanding.

Explaining the brain does not presume to explain consciousness. Much is understood about the brain’s plasticity, creating circuits, strengthening those reused, while unused paths wither. How we store and retrieve and associate our personal library of life has been thoroughly investigated. Not consciousness. Though there are scientists that argue that consciousness is a phenomenon that arises from the brain itself, a localized consciousness inside a particular body, it’s a theory with nothing yet to back it up. But those not locked into a mechanical model, like the late David Bohm (quantum physics) and Rupert Sheldrake (biology) see the brain more like a receiver, the medium through which consciousness flows, just like the heart pumps the blood but didn’t make the blood and the lungs breathe the air from outside. We are vessels through which all the elements of life flow. Experience crafts the frequencies we receive so individuals experience consciousness according to the brain’s tuning occurring as a result of personal life, and learning may tune us to a broader spectrum of information in the overall field of consciousness.

When Sri Aurobindo says the “practical currency of (one)self” is not “the thing itself” he’s encouraging us to look beyond the body/mind to an enlarged realization of consciousness.

 Alan Watts says the Christian “good news” Jesus delivered was that we had God within us, never separate, the actual seeing Self. The awareness within may be a feature of the animating life force. Many artists have a sense of being a conduit for ideas that may flow from beyond the personal self. To consider ourselves as collaborators, participants in a larger mind is humbling but opens us to our connection to the human species, offering what we see to the whole.

Without a philosophy that unites us, we drift apart. Chaos theory suggests that what appears chaotic will show a beautiful order if we step back to see a bigger picture. The encompassing metaphors of various religions should not be barriers when stepping back shows the universal structure beneath them. Just like we all share the earth we may also share the consciousness that flows through us.