metonymy4u

These days we should be just as concerned with the very question that was asked 2500 years ago by both the Buddha and Plato of Athens: How can we understand human suffering (emotional pain) and alleviate it? The Buddha said that pain is caused by 3 things: being alive in a mortal body, being separated from things we want or need, and awareness of change. But the good news is that in this awareness is also the relief of suffering, for as we become aware of habitual desire and avoidance, we can develop a different relationship to pain and suffering and respond more effectively to the way things are. One of the things that humans need, as a social animal, is connection. Connection reduces stress hormones which can damage the brain and body, increases helpful chemicals like oxytocin and helps us recover from suffering. In this way what modern people might think of as “therapy” could be transformed into a fulfillment of humanity’s age old dream: how to create healthy connections between people? The modern world is a world beset with challenges our brains were never designed for, and in this world we are more separated, more depressed, more anxious, more intoxicated and more aggressive than I bet we ever have been in our entire history on this planet. It seems to me that we desperately need just this sort of adaptation of effective emotional coping and connection building tools. The ingredients of modern “therapy,” it seems to me are readily adaptable to a more vernacular dissemination. People readily understand the stress of the constant barrage of bells and whistles, the intrusions of TV, of worries about not so distant war and injustice, and the suffering of isolation. Books like Daniel Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence,” and the work of the Dalai Lama have paved the way for teaching emotional coping and connection skills. I think all we need to do is to redescribe what we’ve learned from 2500 years of science in order to bring the benefits to more people.

What is it going to take for us to grow as a species? For us to begin to understand our brains, our bodies, our minds, our souls? I believe that we require a growth of understanding across traditional disciplinary lines the likes of which we cannot even begin to comprehend. The feeble advances made over the last 20 years in neurology and psychiatry are only just the beginning. When was the last time we had a true advance in the treatment of schizophrenia for example? Probably with the introduction of risperdal in the early 90s. Since then there have been no significant changes or advances in the treatment of this devastating disease, despite the frequent re-packagings and re-issuings that have certainly supported the coffers of corporate big pharma. I believe that to truly advance in the treatment of human emotional and mental suffering, we are going to need advances in the realms of statistical modeling, computer simulation, ethics and spirituality beyond anything we can currently imagine. Take the simplest unit of psychological analysis: stimulus and response. What do we really know about neuro-psychological stimulus and response? Not much. Probably someone some day someone will have to volunteer to have a nano-scopic neuron surfing telemetry unit injected into their brain to help us gather truly illuminating data about the stimulus response event. And I suspect the volume of data collected will be so massive as to fuse the circuits of the most sophisticated computer storage device currently in use and will require stochastic heuristics more advanced than the brainiest of our most academically nerdy nerds can even dream of. And of course this will challenge us ethically and spiritually in ways we cannot conceive. The human mind peering into itself in ways unimaginable: What will we find? How will we have to grow as a species, a community, a collectivity? Will we be ready for that?

To understand the nature of the phenomenological patterns that I collectively experience as “rationalism” consider the following passage by Shakespearian scholar and Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt as he reflects on his mother’s experiences of living with anxiety and panic disorder:

I understood early on that my mother’s “heart”—the palpitations that brought her and everyone around her to a halt—was a life strategy. It was a symbolic means to identify with and mourn her dead sister. It was a way to express both anger – “you see how upset you have made me”—and love—“you see how I am still doing everything for you, even though my heart is about to break.” It was an acting-out, a rehearsal, of the extinction that she feared. It was above all a way to compel attention and demand love. But this understanding did not make its effect upon my childhood significantly less intense: I loved my mother and dreaded losing her. I had no resources to untangle psychological strategy and dangerous symptom. (I didn’t imagine that she did either.) …Lucretius’ words therefore rang out with a terrible clarity: “Death is nothing to us.” To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death, he wrote, is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed. He gave voice as well to a thought I had not yet quite allowed myself, even inwardly, to articulate: to inflict this anxiety on others is manipulative and cruel.

Notice how his language confuses, through a logical fallacy called “affirming the consequent,” effect with intent and concludes with the common post-Freudian assumption of “unconscious motivation,” even as he himself struggles to extricate himself, on the basis of Lucretian philosophy, from the darkened pit of despair built by this notion. The resources to untangle “strategy from symptom” are exactly what I believe our culture is wanting so badly in this war-weary, conflict ridden, perfection mad and power hungry culture we breathe in and around us every day of our lives. What indeed is the antidote to the poison of the western world? On this question hinge our lives, our fortunes, our several and tenuous honors.

I recently watched Bill Murray’s movie “Groundhog Day” again on netflix for the first time in what, almost 20 years now since it was released? (I had to look it up…). In this movie a man is doomed to live out his life over and over again on the same day. At first he believes he has discovered heaven on earth. He can apparently do anything he wants, anything at all, and not suffer the consequences because the very next morning the clock is literally reset and all is forgiven and forgotten. But then, alas, he realizes that life with no uncertainty is actually a living hell. He even tries unsuccessfully to commit suicide over and over again, but like some tortured, irredeemable Christ-Gandalf-Comedian figure, reincarnates every morning at 6:00 AM to start all over again. So he is forced to innovate. To start to learn things about the small Pennsylvania town he is trapped in so as to manipulate his reality into something just barely tolerable. He robs an armored car. He takes piano lessons. He tries to cheat death and save an old man. He takes up ice sculpting. He contrives to learn everything he can about his love interest Rita, played by Andy MacDowell, so as to lure her into satisfying his carnal cravings. However a curious thing happens on the way to the bedroom. Life actually gets interesting again. Of course his contrivances to land unsuspecting Rita in the sack backfire, leading to more and more contrivances and correspondingly more and more interest in Rita as a person. It is an interesting modern parable, isn’t it? I mean, alongside the scheming, contriving, cynical, wanton and cavalier Phil is also the dedicated, unyielding, stubborn and creative Phil who wins the day (of course) and in the end gets the girl. What a fabulous redescription of our modern Faustian dilemma! Think about it as an allegory: alongside our driven, contrived, draconian, comfort and perfection mad society perhaps we also have the makings of a culture of curiosity, commitment and honoring which can someday break out of this endless repeating cycle of pain and suffering – what the Buddhists call samsara –and help us to discover the healing power of authentic connection.

when you the reader encounter a fiction, you have to do some work. you complete the work that the author started. but sometimes that work is the work of no-work. the work of observation. notice what effect the work is having on you. just notice and get curious. who am i in relation to this experience? buddhism is often mis-perceived as a passive practice. but this is mis-informed. was galileo being passive when he observed the moons of jupiter? investigation into the way things are is not a passive process. wise observation is an active process. though it may not appear to “produce” anything, it is an integral part of wise effort.

hegel and marx were the philosophers of history who thought that history would end with their understandings. i rather agree with derrida and rorty that history has no end and that metaphors are the interminable events with which we realize our future now. every poem, every image, every event constructed in the manner of what the zen tradition calls “silent illumination” is a throw into this unconfirmed future. believing that, as dick allen observed, “if you talk to nowhere long enough…meanings are reduced to surprises,” i think we all ought to contribute.

So it’s no secret that for most of my life I’ve struggled with my relationship to relationship. Relationships have been what I’ve craved most and been least able to sustain or achieve. And the suffering has been such that at times I have not wanted to continue living. Recently I’ve decided that seeking “romantic” relationship is no longer helpful or wise. And so I’ve decided that it is time for me to explore a different relationship to my desire for relationship. To that end, I’ve taken down all my online dating profiles and hope to actively cultivate a different relationship to my desires for relationship with others, whenever such desire arises. I have lots of doubts about these decisions. I’m not sure if my behaviors are wise or not. My brain is giving me arguments on both sides of the fence. Therefore I am committing only to awareness. My goal is nothing more than to increase awareness of my desire, and to “speak without involving listeners.”

you may have noticed from my postings that i am a kantian agnostic with regard to theological matters. what this means is that i see the idea of god as something that we are commonly led to contemplate as the result of our musings about good and evil, but that divinity itself is not anything that can be given in experience. wittgenstein and kierkegaard taught me what it means to be an agnostic: to live in a place of uncertainty, what existentialists generally would call abandonment or facticity. it is an uncomfortable place to live, because it means that i must confront the very real possibility that my suffering has no meaning or redemption in this empty, boundless universe. in the end i cannot depend on the affirmation of a supreme being or beings, and am left merely with the occasional kindness of strangers such as yourself.