epic musings

Just as the truth about the future would be attained only if man were in touch with a knowledge wiser than his own, so the truth about the past could be preserved only on a like condition. Its human repositories, the poets, had (like the seers) their technical resources, their professional training; but vision of the past, like insight into the future, remained a mysterious faculty, only partially under its owner’s control, and dependent in the last resort on divine grace.

Thus E. R. Dodds in his excellent 1951 book The Greeks and the Irrational, which I'm still reading.

This extract is from chapter 3, "The Blessings of Madness", in which Dodds discusses the different kinds of madness as understood by the ancient Greeks. Some types of madness were known to be ordinary and pathological--disease in the same sense that the body can be diseased. But others were regarded as divine, and conferred special superhuman powers on those visited by these states.

Two of these forms of divine madness were conferred by Apollo and Dionysus. But a third was regarded as bestowed by the Muses; this form of "madness" was poetic inspiration. In contact with a Muse, the poet received special knowledge not available to anyone else, and was able to express this in his verse.

As Dodds points out, the epic poets, when they supplicated the Muse for inspiration, were looking not for the technical ability to express themselves, but for hidden factual knowledge of the past. In an era without recorded media, the all-seeing, all-remembering Muse was the repository of the truth about the past, and it was this precious truth that the epic poet needed above all in order to fulfill his task.

I find this idea fascinating and, yes, inspiring. At this stage in my own epic work, I feel that I understand exactly what my great forebears were asking for, and why.

The past is a great unknown, as is the future. We have memories of our own lives, but as psychology has shown, memories change. What we remember, if we remember, and if that memory has any relationship with fact at all, is colored and shaped by our need to account for the present as we understand it. Our personal memories are mainly a kind of personal mythology that explains and supports our current attitudes and actions. Very broadly, we remember what we want to remember--the way we want to remember it.

And when we look back to times before our personal memories, we move even further onto mythological ground. Textbooks of national history are notorious for showing an edited, self-serving view of the past. Their aim is to create generations of patriots.

The epic poet, then, prays to the Muse for the truth about the past. What he gets is what he gets--whatever she decides to give him, if anything.

Now we have a long tradition of recorded history, as well as an actual science of the past in archaeology. Does this mean the Muse is obsolete, retired?

I think not. For the poet--and here I mean poet in its broad literal sense of "maker"--is still a limited being, who has only so much time and energy in his mortal frame. Confronted with a sea of recorded information, how is he to find what he needs?

You can call it chance, or method, or association--but I think that a research process that relies only on these things will come up empty. Speaking for myself, I have a certain feeling of being guided. Not all the time--in fact, not usually. But nonetheless. And after all, it takes me time to collect and read through the material to which I'm guided. I just need to be nudged and steered a little from time to time. I do get these nudges, and they must come from somewhere.

The "unconscious" would be the usual explanation. But what is the unconscious? By definition it is the great unknown, what is outside the field of consciousness. Because we claim not to believe in gods, we take it to refer to essentially mental processes happening below the threshold of awareness. But the entire notion of an unconscious mental process is quite mysterious, if you think about it. And to the extent that it exhibits purpose and knowledge, well, then, it's all the more mysterious.

I say: the Muse is as the Muse does. The gift of Calliope, the Muse of epic, is not poetic prowess but knowledge. The epic poet knows things that other people don't--and then he tells them.

O Muse, thanks for your help thus far. Please don't abandon me now.

genius

Our word genius has an interesting background. In Latin it means "that which is just born". To the ancient Romans it meant the collection of traits and potentials that came into being or manifested at the birth of a person or anything else. They deified the concept as an entity that accompanied a man from birth to death (a woman was accompanied by a corresponding being called iuno--the same as the goddess Juno).

The genius was visualized in the form of a bearded snake that had its locus at the forehead. So it was an active, living principle, not the same as one's ego, but representing one's powers and one's destiny. The psychologist James Hillman has made use of this principle in his thinking, seeing in it a correspondence with other ideas, such as that of the guardian angel.

The image that just sprang to my mind was that of the strand of DNA that we regard as encoding our uniqueness as living beings. Being materialists, we tend to imagine this as a dumb thing, a record like a strip of magnetic tape that passively undergoes chemical operations in the course of our biological functioning.

But to me this is a silly way of looking at it. Our DNA is not dumb and inert; everything about it and its functioning suggests purpose and unbelievably brilliant design--a work of, yes, genius. Every one of us has a unique set of DNA, and its operation is purposeful, even relentless. This combination of uniqueness and forward-pushing purpose would be recognized by the Romans as one's genius.

We tend to reserve the word genius for exceptional people whose talents and achievements set them far apart from the norm. But even those who are closer to the norm are still unique, even if they are not famous.

Our task is to tune in to our uniqueness, and get out of its way. The serpent of our genius is always dragging us forward, and we spend much of our time, perhaps, fighting it mulishly, digging in our heels, perhaps out of a desire to be hitched to someone else's genius--to be doing things their way.

Possibly the people we call geniuses are simply those who don't do that. They have stopped fighting their genius--or they never started. Where their genius tugs them, they go. And when you run with your genius, you can run fast and far. It sees farther and knows more than we do. Why not just give in and enjoy the trip?

welcome, stranger

In the 1970s or perhaps the early 1980s there was a British documentary TV series called The Infinite Search, in which the presenter (forget who he was) visited practitioners and authorities of the various major religions of the world. In one of the episodes he visited a Zen monastery in Japan and interviewed the abbot, who could speak English.

At some point the presenter asked the Zen master what spiritual advice he could give to the Western viewers of the show. The Zen master answered, "I think it is important to know thyself."

In the words of my friend Brad, who first described this interview to me, it was a masterful reply. The dictum "know thyself" was of course the famous motto of the oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece, so with those two words the Zen master bridged East and West in one go. The deceptive simplicity of the advice makes it like a Zen koan in the sense that the more you reflect on it, the more provocative and bottomless it becomes.

According to Buddhist doctrine, of course, there is no self to "know"--but understanding this is far from easy. For from the Buddhist point of view, even though things are not real, neither do they lack reality.

In East and West, we're enjoined to investigate this unreality called our self and get to know it. The biggest obstacle is the complacency of thinking that we already know. Once you admit that you don't know, you open the door to the greatest mystery we can find. To a greater or lesser extent, we're all strangers to ourselves. And how do we treat strangers?

I feel strongly that my work relates to this quest, but I'm darned if I could tell you how.

your date with...

Yes, I'm having a hard time coming up with ideas for blog-posts (even if it doesn't seem like it). I think it's at least partly due to the fact that my sense of my own work is changing. I feel less and less that what I'm doing makes me part of any kind of identifiable group--even of "writers". Like a dreamer or a psychotic, I wander ever deeper into a solitary world, from which communication can serve no purpose except to indicate just how separated from my society I have become.

Does that sound depressed? I'm not. Far from it: I feel quite good. How about psychotic--am I that? I don't think so, but then, it's probably not my call to make. As a citizen I seem to be functioning OK, which should keep me free from involuntary hospitalization.

The journey, then, is long, and it is solitary. In a way, though, it is thrilling, for what could be richer and more exciting than to be off any beaten track, away from any conventional path? Of course there are no social gains to be had on such a journey--no fame, no prestige, no riches--for these accrue only to those whose status, whose position, is recognized. There's no audience for the solitary trekker in the forest: only the trees, the birds, and whatever creatures move through the dark brush, still innocent of human contact. You trek into the woods for your date with reality, with your self.

surprise!

In my last post I raised the topic of what the experience of literature, the experience of reading, actually is. To the extent that we read for pleasure or at least on our own initiative, we must feel we're having a positive experience from it, maybe several positive experiences. Can these be identified?

At some basic level I sense the interplay here of the Familiar and the Strange. Words, in order to communicate, must be familiar--we have to know them. But in order for them to tell us something new, something we didn't know before, they must, in their combination, present us with something strange: a new idea. There is something mysterious about this ability to combine familiar things in new ways to present us with things that are not only strange and new but also relevant and illuminating. The source of the power of literature lies somewhere here.

I think about something I read in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, something that he mentions in passing: that in Shakespeare we find, for the first time, the phenomenon of the character discovering new things about himself in the course of a monologue. We watch a character following a train of thought and coming to novel insights about himself and his world. As I recall, Bloom was saying that the character discovers or forms himself through this process. It's like the old saying, "tell me something I don't know", but applied to ourselves: I tell myself something I didn't know.

Thus the basic experience of literature, the fundamental emotion, if you like, associated with reading, is surprise. My Webster's gives this as sense 3 of the verb surprise:

to strike with wonder and amazement esp. because unexpected

All right, so surprise itself is not the emotion, but rather the trigger for the emotions of wonder and amazement.

Here I'm using wonder and amazement as general terms that have degrees of intensity. I'm referring to our reaction to novelty of all kinds. Novelty attracts our attention and sparks our interest; it engages us. I think about Paul Holinger's assertion in his book What Babies Say Before They Can Talk: that we are born with nine forms of emotional expression hardwired in us. Three of these he calls "signals of fun": interest, enjoyment, and surprise. (The other six he calls "signals for help": distress, anger, fear, shame, disgust, and "dissmell".) I'm saying that a properly functioning literary experience evokes surprise in us, leading on to interest and enjoyment. We may not gasp and gurgle and raise our eyebrows as we did when we were newborns, having learned to internalize our feelings and not let on so transparently. But nonetheless the impulses to do those things are still there, and, I say, can and should be triggered by reading.

Friends, there you have it. The experience of literature is (potentially) the gateway to the full suite of all our positive feelings. What more could one ask?

Back to creating mine...

the brain and I

Earlier this month something prompted me to an ad in Scientific American (one of the magazines I read fairly regularly) and order a lecture series on DVD called Understanding the Brain. Published by an organization called The Teaching Company, it's a set of 36 half-hour lectures delivered by Dr. Jeanette Norden, a scientist at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, accompanied by some simple computer animation instead of the usual lecture-hall overhead-projector transparencies (at least, that's what they used to use back in the days of my, uh, formal education). So now I've added a half hour of brain lecture to my daily diet of study.

What's with me? I felt a bit conflicted about ordering this series, since it cost money: even as a special promotion, the total package, with bound transcripts of the lectures included, came to something like $165. And when the package arrived at my door, I was also stung with GST and PST, plus a $10 service charge from Fedex for paying those taxes on my behalf at the border. (Not quite as offensive as the fee charged by our own federal government for levying GST on packages coming from the U.S.--that's right, they charge a fee for collecting tax.) It costs money to get smart--and in my current incarnation as an artist, money is in relatively short supply.

Still, once I make my decision I feel happy about it. I seldom suffer from buyer's remorse for buying books or other educational materials (except for fiction--there I find that buyer's remorse is my usual response, such that I rarely buy fiction nowadays).

I remember years ago--it would have been 1977--standing in Duthie Books on Robson Street, down in the subterranean section of the store called the Paperback Cellar, accessed by a spiral staircase of wrought iron. Having been hugely impressed by reading Joyce's A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man, I was keen to read more Joyce. I stood there, staring at the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Ulysses--an oversize trade paperback priced at $5.95, then a much higher price than the average paperback. I felt conflicted about spending so much on a book. But then I thought: What the hell, I'm employed, and this is one of the world's greatest works of literature. It's cheap!

I bought it. No regrets. (In fact, I eventually bought another copy, for complicated reasons, and now have two copies of this same edition in my shelf--one weathered and beaten, the other pristine.)

So yes: the brain. I've long been interested in it. Back when I was a student I was interested in computer science and especially in artificial intelligence--the effort to get computers to simulate (or actually achieve) conscious life. (In the end I realized I was more excited about writing fiction about such things, and abandoned my school career to work on a novel--later aborted--centered on an artificial-intelligence project gone awry.) At one level it makes sense: if our experience of consciousness depends on a physical thing, the brain, and its mechanical processes, then why should such mechanical processes not be reproducible in another form?

Back then I was quite afraid of the idea that my mind, my actions, were perhaps determined by fixed laws, physical mechanisms. Reading about the brain could make me anxious. But the interest was there; it remained strong, and is still strong.

So this course on the brain is one of my forays into "general knowledge"--it is not directly related to research on my project The Mission. It will no doubt have a bearing on future projects of mine, though. And meanwhile the organ that I think with seems to want to know more about itself. Why not indulge it a bit?

musings of a braided stream

I've been staring at the screen here for a few minutes now. What to write about?

One of the books I'm reading right now is The New Larousse Encyclopedia of the Earth. I've finished the chapter on "Running Water" and have started the chapter on "Oceans and Lakes". In his discussion of running water, Bertin describes the different kinds of streams--for there is a great variety of types of river. In Buddhism, the mind is sometimes likened to a river, the stream of which shows many different manifestations, from rushing gorge to placid pool, without changing its essential nature.

Right now I feel that my own mind is like a "braided stream": a river that, having dropped a great deal of sediment on a comparatively flat ground, has broken into multiple intersecting channels, weaving across the landscape. There doesn't seem to be a "mainstream", just lots of parallel channels moving along together. My mind lacks its usual focus; it feels dispersed and unenergetic.

Astrologically this corresponds with a major transit of the planet Neptune, which is running over my natal Venus and square to my natal Mars. Neptune is a boundary-dissolver; it represents the yearning for perfection and bliss, which cannot usually be attained in the limited frame of an individual body and mind. Therefore Neptune symbolizes the desire to merge with something greater, to lose one's burdensome identity, to recover the lost bliss of the womb, before separation was discovered.

The transit of Neptune to Mars is always difficult, since Neptune represents the urge to give up and transcend ego, while Mars represents our selfish side: how we seek to assert our individuality and satisfy our personal wants. A common Neptune theme is sacrifice, giving up something we value without getting any obvious personal benefit in return. Our Mars nature generally finds this idea most unsatisfactory.

To a great extent, life is about giving things up. For one thing, being born means that death inevitably awaits us; we will all have to surrender our lives at some point. But along the way, other things have to be surrendered. Scott Peck talks about this process in his famous book, The Road Less Traveled. What we surrender in the process of maturing are the beliefs and goals of our youth. He provides a list of six or eight typical ones. One is the adolescent belief in omnipotentiality--the idea that I can do or be anything I want. As time goes on, we make decisions and close off avenues. When I was 10 years old, for instance, it may have been possible to aspire to be a professional athlete or a chess champion. Now, even if I wanted those things, I couldn't have them.

Omnipotentiality is not a reality in any case, I don't think. It was probably never an option for me to be either an athlete or a chess champion, not just because of lack of native talent, but even more importantly because of lack of desire. I didn't want those things. Fantasizing about them is like a giraffe fantasizing about being a cheetah. If you're a giraffe, you've got to go with that--there's no choice.

Surrendering such beliefs or fantasies is, I suppose, technically, disillusionment. We use the term in a negative way, usually--but what's so bad about losing your illusions? What do we have against reality? Isn't that just a drug-addict's view of life?

In Buddhism, disillusionment is seen as a good thing. Chogyan Trungpa Rinpoche, in teaching the practice of meditation, never made any promises to his students, except perhaps two: boredom and disappointment. Every student could look forward to those. We generally avoid those experiences like the plague, but Trungpa Rinpoche was enthusiastic about them both. Why? Because they're anti-ego. They're exactly what ego is continually seeking to evade and prevent.

But this is also the message of Neptune. If you identify with your ego and its desires, you're going to suffer anyway. If you can see your ego and its wants as not a big deal, then you suffer much less.

Easier said than done. Like many people, I tend to take my desires and hopes seriously, and feel about surrendering them the way Charlton Heston felt about surrendering his gun: you'll have to pry them from my cold, dead hands...

the new racist

Yesterday I talked about reading Sven Lindqvist's book "Exterminate All the Brutes", which I continue to enjoy very much.

After writing my post, during the day, I came to a realization. Something in Lindqvist's book has caused me to look at things in a new way. The specific event was this: I discovered my own definition of the word racist: "someone who believes in the existence of races".

This was a further step in a series that was launched during my investigation into the thematic ideas of my story--specifically the idea of identity.

Before I started that research, I took it for granted that races were real--that something called race actually exists in nature. What could be more obvious? There are groups of dark-skinned people, and groups of light-skinned people, and groups of people sharing similarly formed eyes and hair-texture. They're strikingly different from each other.

Three things budged me off my conviction (which I held quite strongly) that races exist:

1. Reading about the discovery that all human beings currently on Earth are descended from a single woman--a literal Eve


2. Reading in Scientific American and other places that no clear genetic basis for race has been found--nor is it likely to be


3. Reading the book Us and Them by David Berreby, in which Berreby shows that race is a mental category created, like any mental category, to fulfill a purpose. And in the case of race, that purpose has always been to rationalize unjust treatment of others

Plus there are the obvious holes caused by the simple fact that people of different "races" can have children together--who then belong to which race? They have to choose one, like Barack Obama!

Those things pushed me away from the belief that there is such a thing in reality as race. I still assumed that the idea of race was a useful tag for certain purposes, and certainly it's a widespread notion.

Yesterday that notion too dropped away for me. Lindqvist in his book documents the long debate that existed in the European scientific community of the 19th century in which anthropologists wrestled with the question of why contact with Europeans led to the extermination of native populations everywhere: Australia, Africa, the Americas. The consensus came to be that it was "natural selection": that the strong "races" were killing off the weak--a natural and inevitable process.

Lindqvist's key point is that genocide, blame for which is now customarily laid at the feet of the Germans under Hitler because of the Holocaust, was actually already a firmly established process, if not policy, of colonialism, starting, he maintains, with Spain's colonization of the Canary Islands in 1478. The indigenous people were wiped out, every last one of them, in what was to be the type case for colonization.

In short, Hitler did not by any means "invent" genocide. Rather, he was jumping belatedly on a bandwagon that had already been rolling for hundreds of years. What made it shocking to Europeans was that it was carried out right in Europe, and not far out of sight and out of mind in the remote wilderness of other continents. The Jewish "race" could be identified, isolated, branded "inferior", and selected for extermination. The "Slavs" were also an inferior race--and likewise slated for destruction, so that their farmland could be taken over for the benefit of the master race.

Berreby shows in his book that our "tribal mind"--the part of us that divides the world into them and us--is very deep-seated, and not really liable to simple reprogramming by conscious decision. It seems to be more automatic, more visceral. But nonetheless, it's not supported by either facts or logic, and still less by the idea of justice. We put people into races when we want to control them or exploit them.

In Bernard Knox's excellent introduction to the Iliad, he refers to the writer Simone Weil's characterization of the Iliad as the poem par excellence about force as the center of human history. And Weil defined force thus: "force is what makes the person subjected to it into a thing."

The concept of race helps turn people into things. And things we can push around, move, destroy, and dispose of as we choose.

So I intend to stick to my new realization: there is no such thing as race, and anyone who believes that there is, is, by my definition, a racist.

inquiring minds

It snowed again overnight, so I went out first thing again to shovel. There was less snow than yesterday, but I found the job harder, mainly I think because of the unaccustomed work for certain muscles--surprisingly, my thigh muscles. Then it was inside again to make the coffee and start keying research notes.

It feels as though my study has, if anything, intensified over the past few weeks. No doubt study, like everything else in life, follows a basic pattern of alternating movement and rest. You feel yourself in motion, trying to learn something, trying to understand something, and conscious of the fact that you're not there yet. At some point you understand. Something clicks and you get it. A light goes on, and you achieve a state of rest or tranquility. If you were rock-climbing, this would be a ledge--a place to stand or rest between stretches of scaling vertical rock.

This image is not bad, because it emphasizes the partial or provisional nature of the insights gained along the way. The rock-climber can't hang around forever on the ledge; he has to get going again to the next station on his journey up. Only at the summit is the task finished.

Sometimes, to me, it feels as though the ledges are few and the vertical stretches of rock are long. Long, long. Whenever I "arrive" anywhere in my studies, I'm conscious of how most of what I want to know remains obscure, unaddressed.

Maybe that's because the question that interests me most is the last and hardest one of the five that journalists are supposed to be concerned with: who, what, where, when, and why. Any of those questions can be a mystery, but the last one, why, tends to be the biggest mystery. Answering that question depends mainly on the questioner's notion of what constitutes an answer. When do you regard something as explained?

It's the philosopher's question. Even a simple version of it opens up avenues. Why do I live in North Vancouver? Well, I grew up here. All right, but is that a reason to live here now? Well, I actually left North Vancouver when my family moved from it in 1977, and I returned here to live with my girlfriend, who happened to have an apartment here. We kept living here because, in part, we were working here. From another point of view you could say that I live here because I bought a house here in 1987, and once you've bought a place, you need a good reason to sell out and leave. Or at least, I need a good reason--put that down to my character. Looking back further, you could say that I live here because my parents, both unlikely immigrants to Vancouver in the 1950s, happened to get together and at some point chose to move to North Vancouver, imprinting this place as my home.

More than the other questions, the question why requires a sense of purpose or direction on the part of the questioner: you need to know what kind of an answer you're looking for. In short, it points back to the question of why the questioner is asking this question! It's a two-edged question.

I suppose that the main reason my research seems endless is that the question I'm always most interested in is this why. It's the question that keeps on breeding offspring. And the answers you accept reveal your belief system: they show up your mythology.

An example: I'm reading Sven Lindqvist's excellent little book "Exterminate All the Brutes", an investigation into the phenomenon of genocide. He mentions the mass deaths of natives that resulted from the incursion of Europeans in the Americas. Lindqvist says that when the 16th-century British asked why so many Indians had died in South and Central America, the answer was not far to seek: the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Spanish. Then, when Indians died in vast numbers in North America as a result of contact with the British, a different explanation had to be found: divine intervention. God was clearing the land for the European settlers.

The explanation--the answer to why--depends sensitively on one's already existing beliefs, and also on one's level of objectivity and maturity. Once you become aware of these factors, it becomes hard to answer the question why satisfactorily. Am I just reaching for an easy prejudice? Am I accepting a cover story? Am I simply justifying my own selfishness? These are all likely possibilities.

In psychology, why is known as a hostile question. Usually, when someone asks us why we've done or said something, there is an element of challenge: we're being asked to account for ourselves. The implication is that our behavior needs accounting for, and that our challenger--our accuser--has a right to this account. It's a "scientific" attack: instead of saying that I don't like what you did, I call on you to justify it, leaving my own motive unstated. There's a sense of ambush.

I suppose the question why is a kind of attack, even when made not on a person but on the world. It's a challenge to the world to provide an answer--and the world pushes back: "who wants to know?"

Well, I want to know.

And who are you?

Hmm. Good one...

no gum-chewing

The spoken word has power. The written word has, perhaps, even more. In many ways I find this to be an unfathomable mystery.

It's as though humanity reached as eagerly for writing as a child does for speech. I recently saw a wonderful documentary about how infants learn. Of all the sounds that the developing baby hears in the womb--and it hears plenty--the most audible to it is its mother's voice. At birth we're already very familiar with our mother's voice: its pitch, rhythms, and other qualities.

Experiments show too that at birth the brain is a general-language machine, in the sense that a newborn infant can distinguish between sounds in just about any language. A one-month-old baby of English-speaking parents can clearly distinguish between two different sounds in, say, Hindi, that its parents cannot tell apart. Among adults, only Hindi-speakers can hear the difference in sound. The baby, immersed in the language of its household, loses this universal sound-distinguishing ability soon, by about six months, as I recall. Now habituated to its mother tongue, it too can no longer tell the foreign sounds apart.

Babies work ceaselessly to speak, as they do to walk. As extremely social animals we thirst to communicate. The baby's survival depends in part on its ability to communicate its needs, and babies get very frustrated at the barrier they experience in getting their message across. The acquisition of language has the strongest possible motivation behind it.

Language, as a skill, comes under the heading of technology, and it may be our oldest one. The technology called writing is much more recent, dating to maybe 4000 BC or so. But that too was reached for eagerly by cultures who felt the need for it. And now it would surely be the worst sign of disaster for a culture to slide from literacy to illiteracy: the social equivalent of Alzheimer's disease.

In this culture we're inundated with words and we take writing for granted. There seems to be too much of it: marketing "messages", political campaigning, the disposable chatter of text-messaging. If television is, as Steve Allen put it, "chewing-gum for the eyes", then almost all writing today is chewing-gum for the mind.

Almost all. For man does not live by chewing-gum alone, and it was not as chewing-gum that writing was originally created and valued. In the first place, someone must have had something important enough to say that he wanted to record it, so it would not be forgotten--or altered.

Writing reflects the cast of thought behind it. It is an expression of the values and intentions of its creator. All writing is intended to influence others--this blog is so intended. The question is always, influence people how? in what direction? to do what?

Lying next to my keyboard is the latest statement from my phone-service provider, Rogers. Across the top are emblazoned the words, "Welcome to Rogers"--a typical example of automated and meaningless commercial "friendliness". A more honest headline would be: "We rely on your money for our profits, but in most ways you are a nuisance to us, especially if any of our employees has to pay any individual attention to you. Then you become a cost center. Please don't do that." (Indeed, if they put that message on there, I would gain respect for them--something I have very little of right now.)

Those of us who make an art of writing have a special duty not to be false. The deluge of chewing-gum writing is characterized by its manipulativeness, hypocrisy, and frivolity. Writing as art should be none of these things. But most of all it should be truthful: telling it like it is (or was!).

I don't even like real chewing-gum.

the interior battleground

Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us--they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle. If the individual be of tender conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and of standing in false relations to the author of one's being and appointer of one's spiritual fate. This is the religious melancholy and "conviction of sin" that have played so large a part in the history of Protestant Christianity. The man's interior is a battleground for what he feels to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal.

I typed those words, first spoken in 1901, yesterday from William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience. I was struck yet again with his powers of perception and his ability to summarize complex and profound aspects of life, and dish it all up in a single paragraph.

As I typed, I remembered my feeling when I highlighted the passage while reading it last spring: I recognized myself in his words. And I cannot but feel that he must have been describing himself as well, having survived the soul-conflicts of youth to look back on them as a unified soul of age 59 or 60 (he will have had his birthday in the course of the lecture series).

As an astrologer, my first thought is that it's simple to distinguish these psychological or spiritual types by looking at the birth chart. The conflicted soul James describes is one whose chart is dominated by squares and oppositions: planets in stressful aspect, indicating psychological or instinctual drives in conflict--people for whom, as he says moments later:

spirit wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes.

At least, that's the most visible case. Astrologically, this would be the person with squares in the so-called cardinal signs--Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn--which express themselves more impulsively and spontaneously than the other signs. For them the "war between spirit and flesh" will be acted out physically and dynamically, with real and obvious casualties--more like World War 2 than, say, the Cold War, which might be how the "war" manifests in the life of one, like myself, dominated by the "fixed" signs: Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius. The conflict here is relatively hidden and quiet, but nonetheless real and still behavior-determining. More like arm-wrestling than like ice hockey.

I'm glad that I've not had a life of outward chaos, like, say, Britney Spears, famous now for for a life of wayward impulses, misdemeanors, and mistakes. But those conflicting, tectonic forces of the soul have always been at work in me, and still are.

If unhappiness characterizes the period of order-making and struggle, and much of one's life is given over to order-making and struggle, then--well, you fill in the blank.

Not that my life has been unhappy--far from it. I would say that I've led a happier life than most people (no way of measuring this, of course), even if I have spent much or all of it wrestling with contraries in the soul. It has led to a feeling that life is, in some deep way, a problem--but I always liked problem-solving.

I haven't solved this one, and at this stage I don't really expect to. It's enough to be engaged in the task of "forming a stable system of functions in right subordination." Once you start cleaning out that storage room, it doesn't really matter anymore how much of a mess it's in: you're working on it. The work itself is healthy, the right thing at the right time. At first you don't know where to put stuff, but gradually order emerges; you discover what you value.

What do I value? I've got to take the car in for regular maintenance--then some breakfast.

if it feels good...

My musings yesterday about Abraham Maslow's psychological ideas were prompted by thoughts about motivation, or more generally: why do we do what we do?

As long as you don't look at it too closely, the question seems simple. I'm hungry, so I go into the kitchen to pull a slice of cold pizza out of the fridge and eat it. And yes that is simple: an instance of keeping one of the most basic survival needs satisfied. Without food, you can't pursue your other goals for very long. Before long, more and more of your attention and effort will be applied to the problem of getting fed, until that becomes the first, last, and only thing on your mind, and all of your ingenuity and effort are bent on it.

As we satisfy those more basic needs and move up Maslow's hierarchy, our behavior becomes more subtle and indirect. The higher needs involve other people, first singly, then as groups. The needs for belonging and esteem are social needs that can only be satisfied by numbers of people around us, each of whom is an individual and must be treated in an individualized way. You can't just go to people and say, "respect me" or "esteem me", and expect them to comply. On the contrary, you'll lower yourself in their esteem by doing so. Respect and esteem are gained only by reading the norms of one's society accurately, and consistently directing one's behavior to meet or exceed those norms.

At least, that's my first stab at suggesting how to gain respect and esteem--the need for which, according to Maslow, is innate for us all.

But, as I mentioned yesterday, Maslow was interested most of all in the needs that exist in us beyond those innate "deficiency" needs (D-needs): the holes in us that we try to fill up in order to feel healthy. When they're all (more or less) full, we're free to pursue our "being" needs (B-needs), which are unique to each of us. Just as our face and our fingerprint are unique, our purpose on Earth and our path to maximum fulfillment and self-expression are unique. I cannot follow your path and find fulfillment for myself; you cannot follow mine. We might travel together for a way, but at some point we must part company and go our own way.

And how do we know which is our own way? According to Maslow, our path is essentially the path of enjoyment. What we truly enjoy is our path forward to unique personal fulfillment.

Isn't this just the old 1960s ethos of, "if it feels good, do it"?

Well, yes, it is. But won't that just lead to a society of blissed-out drug addicts? Everyone getting their rocks off every which way? No, it won't.

Why not? Because (by the way, this is me talking, not Maslow--at least, as far as I know, being only 40% of the way through this first book!) being a drug addict is not really enjoyable. It might feel good to get high, but if one gets out of control with it, consequences ensue that feel very un-good. I remember the addiction expert Vern Johnson's description of the difference between the proto-addict and the non-addict. When the non-addict wakes up with his hangover, and is confronted with the fact that while drunk he embarrassed people by, say, hitting clumsily on the hostess, he feels remorse and resolves never to let that happen again. The proto-addict, on the contrary, rationalizes his behavior, or simply doesn't believe that he did anything wrong. In short, he resorts to the defense mechanism of denial--laying the groundwork for hanging on to his addiction.

The addict is stuck, with an ever-thickening wall of denial between himself and the misery of his existence. He has become estranged from himself, and clutches at short-term physical gratification as a compensation for having lost the path to his own actual enjoyment of life.

The kind of enjoyment that Maslow really means is the enjoyment of the "peak experience"--an event that particularly interested him. He conducted surveys, asking people questions about their experience at the most wonderful moments of their lives--times when they had felt most happy, joyous, and fulfilled. Everyone (or almost everyone) has such experiences in their lives, but people on the path of self-actualization--those attending to their B-needs--have them more often, and also regularly exhibit many of the mental traits that the rest of us take on only during those peak experiences.

I want to tune in to the wavelength of my own enjoyment of life. As I go about my day, I check my response to what I'm doing: how do I feel about it? Really, honestly? When I do certain things, I think, Yes, this is what I want to be doing; this is what I enjoy.

Writing is one of those. Even with the difficult struggle of a large, uncertain creative project, I still feel that it's what I want to be doing. If I were doing something else, no matter how "exciting" or rewarding in other ways (such as, say, financially), I would feel that was playing hooky. Something would nag at me, urging me to get back to what I want to be doing.

I feel the same way about reading. When I sit there with my highlighter, reading, I feel that I'm doing the right thing--right for me. I feel natural, at home, and I enjoy myself. For me, that's exciting.

In reading I also feel a big difference between different books. When I feel a book is not really taking me where I want to go--is not part of my path--I get a feeling of distaste and revulsion. Reading starts feeling like forced labor. Now, when I start feeling that, I put the book aside. That's why I leave so many books unfinished.

So that's today's hot tip: If it feels good, do it.

the psychology of health

I continue to read Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham Maslow. I find it fascinating, provocative.

One of his points is that he believes that Western psychology has missed a huge dimension of human nature in focusing on "motivated" behavior. He says that psychology takes it for granted that all behavior is motivated, in the sense of being done in order to attain some aim--to fulfill some need. But Maslow disagrees.

He says that motivated behavior (in this sense) occurs only to fulfill what he calls deficiency needs (or "D-needs"). This behavior is driven by a sense of lack: we lack physiological necessities, or safety, or love, or esteem, and do things to achieve these ends. But when all these needs are met (and for many of us, they seldom are), we don't stop doing things. We don't just like back on a couch waiting for another D-need to surface. Rather, at that point, we shift into the spontaneous expression of our nature. We follow our interests and curiosity, and our experience becomes deeper, more aesthetic, and less instrumental, less "means-to-an-end".

These self-expressive behaviors arise from what Maslow called our Being needs (or "B-needs"). When we're not driven by lack, our life becomes joyful and more fully human. We tend to do things for their own sake, and relate with others in a more total way--appreciating the individuality and totality of other people, rather than trying to use them as means to secure our own needs.

This is what Maslow means by a "psychology of Being": a psychology that looks at and comprehends this vast field of normal, healthy, fulfilled functioning. It's natural that psychology has focused on psychopathology: how to recognize and treat mental illness. But this focus has subtly enshrined the notion of "normal" (that is, not ill) as a mere lack of symptoms. And, to be sure, when you're ill, a lack of symptoms sounds great: you'll take it.

But the psychology of health is a field in its own right. And this was the field that interested Maslow, at least toward the end of his career (he died in 1970). What are the features of mental health? What are its aspects and behaviors?

As I read, I find many things that remind me of what I've learned from Buddhism and Shambhala Training. For example, when Maslow talks about how the experience of a person living according to his or her B-needs becomes more aesthetic--they appreciate experiences for their own sake--I remember reading in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa that the "warrior" (that is, one practicing the path of spiritual fearlessness) experiences the world as an artist does: in his sensitivity to his world, he finds the sound of raindrops hitting his coat to be almost unbearably loud.

When we're engaged with our B-needs, we hear the raindrops hitting our coat. When we're engaged with our D-needs, we're too busy worrying about making it to the presentation on time and making a good impression on the client. The rain is a threatening nuisance, wrecking our hair and damaging our chances of "success". We do hear the raindrops, for they trigger our worries and preoccupation with what we lack. But we don't tune in to them as an aesthetic experience. Instead, they're mere signals or alarm-bells alerting us to problems in our quest to fulfill our needs.

All of this is good news. First, Maslow is saying (and for that matter so is Chogyam Trungpa) that the "normal", fully human estate is one of joy and presence to life. And second, that you don't have to be completely fulfilled deficiency-wise in order to experience your Being nature.

I know this. For I myself have neurotic traits and behaviors, no doubt brought on by problems in dealing with my D-needs. And yet, nonetheless, I feel I have enjoyed a great deal of Being in life: in important ways I have done what I wanted, and enjoyed the ride.

But I'm eager to learn more about the psychology of health. Among other things, I suspect that this will be one direction in which East and West can fruitfully merge their outlooks.

It's raining out there. I must remember to listen to those raindrops hitting my coat.

do your own thing

Last night: half a Sleep Aid, followed by a much better night's sleep. Do I move thus down the treacherous slope of drug dependency, as so many artists (and others) have before me?

What a difference to my outlook it makes, though. Instead of being buffeted by feelings of helplessness, inadequacy, pessimism, and guilt, I feel a kind of composure and even enthusiasm for my life and its quirks--warts and all, you might say.

Apart from the Sleep Aid, another source of uplift yesterday was reading further into Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham Maslow. This book came out in 1962 as a follow-up to his seminal Motivation and Personality, published in 1954 (a copy of which is now winging its way to me via the mail). It's actually a compilation of lectures on various aspects of his psychological thinking, fleshing out and extending some ideas from the earlier work. My copy, a 1968 Insight paperback, is in bad shape--two edges have been blackened with felt pen in an effort to obliterate the name of a previous owner, a certain Kratz; and the glue on the spine has turned brittle so that the pages snap away from it as I turn them--indeed the worst of any book I've bought online, such that I think the seller misrepresented its condition and should not have offered it sight unseen. But the content is excellent, and I'm drinking it in avidly.

"What makes people neurotic?" With this question Maslow launches chapter 3, "Deficiency Motivation and Growth Motivation". He sketches in the answer he found:

My answer was that neurosis seemed at its core, and in its beginning, to be a deficiency disease, born out of being deprived of certain satisfactions which I called needs in the same sense that water and amino acids and calcium are needs, namely that their absence produces illness. Most neuroses involved, along with other complex determinants, ungratified wishes for safety, for belongingness and identification, for close love relationships, and for respect and prestige. When these deficiencies were eliminated, sicknesses tended to disappear.

Maslow does not use the word need to point vaguely at our various wishes, hopes, demands, or cravings. Rather, it points to a specific thing the lack of which results in characteristic types of illness, in exactly the same way that a lack of water, vitamin C, or calcium leads to characteristic illness in the body. We need water, vitamin C, and calcium in order to be healthy; the Buddha and Jesus also needed them. Maslow says we also need safety, belonging, love, and respect in order to be healthy. If these needs aren't met, then we develop deficiency syndromes which broadly can be called the neuroses.

When we lack any of these things, they motivate our behavior. If we're not loved, then our lives become shaped by that lack, how we seek to fill the void, or compensate for not having it.

But these "deficiency needs" are not the whole story. When they're all satisfied, we don't simply come to rest and do nothing. Rather, a new set of motivations or needs opens up: what Maslow calls the "being needs"--the drive for self-actualization. These needs are manifested by psychologically healthy people, and they are never gratified in the sense of "plugging a hole", as are the deficiency needs. With being-needs, the more gratified they are, the more intensely the need is felt, and the more it serves as motivation to go further with it.

In addition, while the deficiency needs are generic, or "species needs", in the sense that they are needed by everyone just by virtue of being a human being, the being-needs are highly individual; their exact direction varies according to the talents, interests, and vocation of the specific person. With the being-needs, it's really different strokes for different folks. You might be fulfilled by tightrope-walking across a canyon; I might be fulfilled by designing origami airplanes. These interests arise from the peculiarities of our individual natures.

Maslow goes on to list 13 characteristics of psychologically healthy people--those who have (more or less) gratified their "D-needs" and are attending to their "B-needs":

1) Superior perception of reality.

2) Increased acceptance of self, of others, and of nature.

3) Increased spontaneity.

4) Increase in problem-centering.

5) Increased detachment and desire for privacy.

6) Increased autonomy, and resistance to enculturation.

7) Greater freshness of appreciation, and richness of emotional reaction.

8) Higher frequency of peak experiences.

9) Increased identification with the human species.

10) Changed (improved) interperonal relations.

11) More democratic character structure.

12) Greatly increased creativeness.

13) Certain changes in the value system.


Here is a cornucopia of things to think about. I'll single out three items from the list: spontaneity, privacy, and resistance to enculturation. Briefly put, the healthy person, even while feeling more fellowship with the human race as a whole, seeks autonomy from it in order to pursue his own interests and passions. The healthy person, recognizing both the uniqueness and the validity of his particular interests, engages with them fully and unapologetically, while acknowledging and appreciating the right of everyone else to do the same.

Sounds good to me. It puts me in mind of a quote attributed to Einstein that I found recently:

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Summing up: My worries and angst are symptoms of neurosis which is the product of certain deficiencies. The inspiration, interest, and passion I feel for working on my creative projects, regardless of how strange, implausible, or irrelevant they may seem from a culturally normal perspective, are signs of mental health--following the path of self-actualization.

I do have to see to my deficiencies. But never should I stop actualizing myself!

And friends, that goes for all of us. Do your own thing, and I'll do mine.

sanity-check, global and personal

After taking half a Sleep Aid I slept through most of the night, and feel much better this morning. I felt freshness and enthusiasm in opening up the books from which I'm currently keying notes over my morning coffee (The Roman Conquest of Italy and The Pagan God). As Robert McKee says, knowledge increases a writer's choices, and therefore makes possible an avoidance of cliche. Tappity-tap-tap.

What I'm doing might be insane (laboring over a gigantic and obscure project that may or may not ever see the light of day)--but then, what counts as sane? How do people spend their time, and should I care? And if so, why?

In the evenings Kimmie and I are watching disc 5 of the documentary series Planet Earth. This disc contains three episodes that form an addendum to the main series, which focuses solely on wildlife and is narrated by David Attenborough. The extra episodes have an advocacy mission, and discuss problems with the environment and our global management of it. They feature interviews with various scientists, policy thinkers, and some of the Planet Earth filmmakers, including David Attenborough. Last night's episode was "Into the Wilderness", which examines the human effect on the quantity and quality of wilderness in the world, and the future of wilderness.

One of the experts interviewed (I forget his name) made the crucial point that our high-consuming Western lifestyle does not make us happy. We behave as though heavy consumption were itself how happiness is attained or expressed, but it's quite plain, for anyone who looks at it, that this is not the case. Beyond having a certain level of material security, surrounding ourselves with more and more possessions does nothing to make us happier, and, if anything, appears to make us less happy.

And yet almost all of economics and politics assumes that the goal for humanity is to promote ever more consumption as a sign of increased quality of life. "Consumption" means, ultimately, consumption of energy. The food chain is based on the transfer of energy from one level to another: sunlight and carbon are photosynthesized by plants; plants are eaten by animals; those animals are eaten by bigger animals; and so on, up to us. When we consume products and services, it's the same thing: if I buy, say, a bottle of wine, the grapes derived their existence and quality from the sun, while the harvesting, processing, bottling, labeling, and transportation of the wine consumed (mainly) fossil-fuel energy. Fossil fuels are the geologically transformed remnants of plants and animals that existed millions of years ago. The energy they derived from the sun way back then is still latent in them, and when we extract the fuel and burn it, we are consuming that solar energy. In this way we "eat" the corpses of life that lived long ago.

We make our livings in a busy economy based on relentless consumption. Economists and policy-makers worry about "growth", which means the continuing growth of consumption. The belief is that to prevent poverty, we have to keep consuming more and more. More and more and more, without end.

To me, the obesity epidemic, which is becoming global as developing countries adopt a more Western lifestyle (burgers, pop), is the living image of this mindset. Consumerism is the psychology of obesity.

Everyone wants to be happy. We expect to derive happiness from success. Success we take to mean worldly achievement, as reflected mainly in our material wealth. Material wealth is expressed as consumption. Therefore happiness = consumption.

It seems logical, and yet experience gives it the lie. For anyone who looks at it, it's plain to see that happiness does not equal consumption. Are billionaires happier than millionaires? I doubt it. I strongly suspect that Bill Gates is starting to truly enjoy his money now that he's giving large amounts of it away.

Where and when have I been happiest? Certainly one time was in 1985, when Kimmie and I were first going out. We did dine out and do some shopping together, but it was not a time that had very much to do with consumption. It was about a relationship.

Other happy times have been when I was involved in Buddhist retreats and programs, such as Seminary in 1994 or when I took temporary ordination at Gampo Abbey in 2002. On all those occasions, part of the happiness lay in the attention we paid to not overconsuming. As a monk I lost 10 or 15 pounds, and I enjoyed doing it. I still had my pleasures: I drank coffee in the morning, and loved it. And after a crammed day, your simple, cozy bunk feels mighty good.

But consumerism has become our spirituality, and it will be replaced only when another inspiration takes its place. The happiness of monasticism is possible only for those who are inspired by its vision. Nietzsche said that "someone who has a why to live can put up with almost any how." This is really the issue. In our materialist society, consumerism is the best that most of us have been able to come with for a why to live. It's not adequate--it fails even on its own terms. We're ripe for change.

Where does this leave me? I mentioned my sanity. Sane means sound, healthy. (Just looking it up in Webster's, I see this interesting note: "able to anticipate and appraise the effect of one's actions".) Sometimes, to be sure, I feel like Captain Ahab, obsessed with Moby-Dick--not exactly a poster-boy for good mental hygiene. People close to me have sometimes commented that I am uncompromising. There is certainly truth to that.

Ahab didn't compromise, and he went down with the whale. But what is a compromise, anyway? You give up something to get something else. It all depends on how much you want that something else.

So far, I suppose I don't see a need to give up anything. A comfortable bourgeois life and "success" do look tempting, but not enough to make me give up. Not yet, anyway. I want that whale.

megaphobia

I'm an insomniac.

In truth, I'm not sure when one becomes entitled to use that label--how many wakeful nights qualify you?

Certainly this last one was wakeful. I woke around 1:30 and felt my mind drawn into the vortex of concern. By 2:30 I knew it was hopeless. I donned the sweats I'd left on the chair against this likelihood, and took myself downstairs to read. I cranked on the heat in the living-room, poured myself a scotch, opened up Asimov's Guide to the Old Testament, and got highlighting.

With my mind drawn to issues other than my own life, fatigue and befuddlement set in. But I could tell there was still a sharp edge in it. I returned to bed at around 4:00 to wait out the time till the 5:30 alarm. Then: up and at 'em!

It's not unrelated to my post yesterday about Pluto and Saturn. One of the points that caught my attention while I was typing notes from Howard Sasportas's The Gods of Change was a reference to Abraham Maslow's concept of "the Jonah complex". This was the term he gave to the fear of one's own destiny or calling--the principal obstacle to self-actualization. Sasportas continues:

Why should we fear our own greatness? One reason is a fear of responsibility. If we fully acknowledged our potential talents, we would have to shoulder the burden of doing something to develop them. Another reason for denying our full potentiality might be the fear of the power it would give us. We wouldn't be able to be "little" anymore. Would we use our power wisely, or would we mishandle it? Or maybe we are afraid that if we were truly in touch with living our greatness, other people would be envious and resentful of our achievements. Transiting Pluto, in making us more aware of what is buried in us, may ask that we confront these fears in order to grow into the self that we truly are.

Jonah (whose name means "dove"), ordered by Yahweh to prophesy to Nineveh (capital of Assyria), tries to dodge the task, catching a boat to Tarshish. A violent storm comes up, and the sailors, casting lots to discover the cause, find out that it is Jonah. Jonah confesses that this is the case, and that the sea will calm if he is thrown overboard. Jonah would rather die than face his mission. The sailors, in desperation, take his advice and chuck him over. He is swallowed by a "great fish" and remains in its belly for three days before being vomited ashore, safe and sound.

I'm not sure what I think of the Jonah complex, but I know it relates to me, because I felt a cold finger move into my core when I read about it.

One decision I came to was to read some Maslow. I ordered a book by him yesterday.

Fear of one's own greatness. Hmm...how about megaphobia? Yes: I offer that term to psychology--as well as a basket of symptoms.

Pluto and Saturn

After a fast cold snap over the weekend, which saw snow burying our city, warm rain now drums relentlessly outside. Only a white dot of snow remains here and there, and they will be gone by the time the sun is fully up. Wind speeds of 70 kmh are forecast for today--just like this time last year, when many trees in Stanley Park were blown down, shutting down a section of the seawall until just a few weeks ago.

I feel storm warnings within me as well: clouds darken over the scene of peace and composure built with such diligent effort over the years. Dark feelings swirl like whirlpools in the apparently calm water of my soul.

As an astrologer, I link this feeling to the impending (indeed already underway) transit of Pluto over Saturn. Those of us born in 1959 are collectively feeling the effects of this transit, for we all have Saturn placed between 0 and 8° of Capricorn in our birth-charts--the place in the sky that Pluto is now approaching. As I type these words, Pluto is crawling through the end of Sagittarius, and will enter Capricorn by the end of January 2008. After that, it will soon retreat again as it turns retrograde and moves backward in the sky, shifting forward again in September, and reentering Capricorn in late November 2008, where it will then stay for some years.

Pluto, god of the underworld, was lord of the dead. He only ever came to the surface of Earth on two occasions: once to have a wound healed, and once to abduct Persephone, the virgin daughter of Demeter, goddess of grain, to force her to become queen of the dead. The themes of death, wounding, and the compulsive aspect of relationships are all germane to Pluto's activities.

An excellent guide to the psychological aspects of transits of Pluto (and the other outer planets, Uranus and Neptune) is The Gods of Change by Howard Sasportas. Among other things ruled by Pluto are what Sasportas calls the "belly emotions". He gives a great illustration of what these are.

Imagine that you have a date to meet someone you really want to see. The appointed time comes, and the person does not show up. Minutes go by, half an hour, an hour. How do you respond?

For many of us, the first response is at the "head" level. We rationalize to ourselves why our date has not yet shown: stuck in traffic perhaps; or unavoidably detained in a previous meeting.

As time passes, we may move to the "heart" level: concern for our missing date. Has something happened to him or her? An accident? A family emergency? Gee, I hope she's okay...

But beneath these are the "belly" emotions: primitive, instinctive feelings linked to self-preservation--feelings that civilized, cultured people seldom exhibit or even acknowledge. Anger, resentment, and yes vindictiveness: "She can't do this to me. I'll show her--she'll pay for this..."

Sasportas, trained in psychology, describes how such moments connect us to our earliest life, when survival was not something we could take for granted, utterly dependent as we all are on someone else's care at that time. When you're helpless, a "no show" of food or attention can mean death, or at least severe suffering. The emotions connected with that type of experience are, let's face it, rage and hatred. "If I get out of this alive, I'm going to make those bastards hurt. Let's see how they handle being starved and abused. They'll think twice next time..."

These sentiments aren't polite. But they are real, and they form a system of subterranean rivers underlying our interactions. And the less in touch we are with our "belly" emotions, the more likely that their eruption will cause us severe distress, and the more likely that they will run our lives covertly, shaping our destinies without our real knowledge or consent.

All Pluto transits are stressful, since they tend to represent situations in which the belly emotions are aroused: the fight for life. A transit to Saturn is especially stress-prone, since Saturn represents the structure in our lives. In particular, it shows where we feel insecure, and how we adapt to feelings of weakness and inadequacy. Threats made to these spots provoke the strongest reactions of fear and resistance.

I think about chess, a game I used to play a lot as a teenager. In chess, all the pieces can move anywhere on the board, except the pawns: these foot-soldiers, once advanced, can never go back. A pawn only ever has three options: advance, hold, or die. As a player, when you move a pawn, you're irreversibly committed. As a game progresses, the pawns, through movement and casualties, form into more or less rugged patterns, often referred to as your "pawn structure". They form living shields, protecting each other and the more important pieces behind them. One chess strategy is to "attack the base"--going after the pawn that anchors a pawn formation. Having your pawn structure attacked and liquidated is generally catastrophic: an agonizing stripping of your defenses.

I think of another image: the cruel way in which conches are removed from their shells. A hook is passed into a part of the animal that cannot retreat far enough into the shell, and then the conch is hung by this hook, so that its shell is slowly pulled from its grip by the force of gravity. The home and protective covering of the conch is inexorably ripped from its grasp, leaving it naked on the hook.

This focused and inexorable attack on one's defensive base is, I think, the pattern I would associate with the transit of Pluto over Saturn. Emotionally it will be the feeling that comes from seeing someone raise a hatchet over your fingers where they cling to the edge of the cliff from which you're dangling.

Where we build these defenses is different for each of us. Astrologically it's shown by house placement. I was born with Saturn in the 3rd house of siblings, neighbors, thinking, speaking, and writing. Saturn is our career planet: I'm a thinker and writer. I can hear the Jaws theme come up as Pluto makes its way to my Saturn, dug in and entrenched from long years of effort and consolidation. Who will win the confrontation?

That answer is easy: Pluto always wins. Pluto wins because whatever (and whoever) is born necessarily dies, and no force in the universe can stop that. Even mountain ranges, high and jagged, eventually are worn away to flat desert. Stars are formed, only to become, eventually, cold cinders. Death and life feed on each other.

One prediction I can make: for those of us born in 1959, the coming few years are going to concentrate our minds on issues we find to be grave and important. Pluto and Saturn share one quality: that of being serious.

Can we let go of things that, without our realizing it, have outlived their usefulness? When a wrecking crew suddenly shows up to tear down the house where you've lived for decades, how do you take it? How does it affect you? How fast do you recover--if you do recover?

In the end it all depends on your attitude. The more you identify with your house, the more painful the demolition will be. The more you can let go, the sooner you can breathe the air of a free man or woman.

the strangeness of dreams

We take most of our lives for granted.

Things that are already in our experience, in our environment, do not arouse our curiosity. In general, we're not really any different from, say, a herd of cattle who come upon a flying saucer resting on a field: they would walk around it to get to the stream to drink. They might glance at it, but it's simply there, not affecting their concerns, so there's no need to pay more attention to it.

In a similar way, many aspects of our lives seem familiar and not worthy of special attention; but if you look at them more closely, they become deeply puzzling.

A prime example: dreaming. This universal and familiar phenomenon, like that of sleep, we take for granted. It just happens. No halfway decent explanation for why either one exists has been suggested, as far as I know. Some people study them, but these things are a profound mystery. Virtually all creatures sleep, but it is inexplicable in our world of Darwinian natural selection why all these animals, who are someone's prey, find it so urgent to make themselves completely vulnerable for long periods each day, and that no creature has appeared which has dispensed with this programmed vulnerability.

This morning I had a long, complex dream. In one part of it my mother's driveway, which in the dream (unlike reality) was long and straight, collapsed, as though it were the roof of an underground chamber: the old asphalt fell in to a deep rectangular trench. In the dream I'd been using an outhouse next to the driveway, and narrowly escaped falling in with the collapse. Then I recalled that my own driveway at home had collapsed in the just the same way, the same day, and in the dream I realized that this must be very significant--an impossible coincidence. It confirmed my sense of the meaningfulness of events.

There was much more to the dream: it involved old coworkers at ICBC, scriptwriting, guitar-playing, and other things. I went through feelings of fear, depression, and hope. But why do I have such a diverse and mysterious--as well as fictitious--other life? What can natural selection ever have to say about that?

I'll tell you what: nothing. The phenomena, real and universal though they are, lie outside the realm of discourse of life science. They're addressed by psychology, but there is no really satisfactory account there either. If we're honest, we have to admit it's a mystery--a flying saucer in the field that we walk by en route to the stream.

I know that the dream-imagery was influenced by my watching another episode of Planet Earth last night: "Caves". I felt awe and wonder as I watched, and could feel the images falling like seeds somewhere deep in the dark of my soul. How strange the world is: huge lightless caverns filled with bats and cockroaches and translucent eyeless salamanders. Huge flocks of birds navigating in pitch-darkness by using clicks like bats, and building nests for themselves on the vertical walls made from their own saliva. Deep, deep into the Earth go the caves, cut by water etching its way through limestone: blind underground rivers and waterfalls and lakes, populated by creatures that have never seen sunlight...

The images became braided with other things in my soul, and served up as a personal adventure in my sleep. It's all so strange and purposeful at the same time.

It's a mystery.

denial, habit, and the cliff

Last night I finished reading Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, a sketch of our global future in a warmer world. The final chapter, in which he discusses the challenge of preventing the global temperature from rising more than 2°C, I found especially interesting because of his treatment of the major stumbling-block in our path: the psychological defense-mechanism of denial.

There are many different defense mechanisms (Anna Freud made an extensive study of them in the 1930s) that we use to protect ourselves from potential emotional pain. Among them, denial is a key one. According to one explanation, when we experience cognitive dissonance--the conflict in our minds between two strong but irreconcilable beliefs--we feel such discomfort that we deny the truth of one of the beliefs. The classic example is in the behavior around addictions, such as smoking. A person with otherwise healthy self-esteem is confronted with two data: smoking is damaging to the body; and nonetheless, I smoke. Denial in this case usually takes the form of "smoking is not really damaging", or "it won't damage me." But sometimes a smoker might assert, "I"m not really a smoker--I smoke less than a pack a day." Either way, one is spared the pain of confronting one's own self-destructive behavior.

Lynas is saying that this is the dominant mechanism preventing action on the problem of global warming. He says:

One study used random-sample focus groups in Switzerland to investigate attitudes to climate change. Its results showed how the "tragedy of the commons" is reflected in people's belief "in the insignificance of individual action to change the order of things," with the result that perceived "costs to the self are greater than benefits to others." However, the researchers found that the most powerful motivator of denial was more straightforwardly selfish--an unwillingness to abandon personal comforts and consumption patterns. People would complain that public transport is late, dirty and overcrowded, therefore they "need" their cars. Or they might argue that their lives are busy and difficult, so they "need" foreign holidays for a couple of weeks a year.

Lynas goes on to list eight specific expressions of denial catalogued by the Swiss researchers:

• the "metaphor of displaced commitment" ("I protect the environment in other ways, like recycling");


• denial of responsibility ("I am not the main cause of this problem");


• condemning the accuser ("You have no right to challenge me");


• rejection of blame ("I've done nothing wrong");


• ignorance ("I don’t know the consequences of my actions");


• powerlessness ("Nothing I do makes much difference");


• comfort ("It is too difficult for me to change my behavior"); and


• "fabricated constraints" ("There are too many impediments").
  

Quite the list. I recognize pretty much all of them operating in my own psyche (my special favorites are the last three). Together, they form a powerful bulwark against behavioral change.

I had another thought while I was reading the chapter: denial may have a large share of responsibility in preventing change, but let's not forget good old habit. Habits by definition are behaviors that have become automatic, and they have become that way because we find them to be effective in achieving our aims. Most of our behavior is habit, with or without any psychological defense-mechanism running alongside it. William James stresses its powerful, even paramount, role in our mental lives.

But recently I read another interesting take on habit: it was by Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation. He says that it's easy to form new habits. What is difficult is to break old ones.

This is because all of our mental apparatus is programmed precisely to form new habits. We automate our behavior in order to free up attention for the novelties in our experience. When we're learning how to walk, it ties up our attention. We have to concentrate on where to put our feet, how to balance ourselves. Once it's learned, it becomes automatic, so that normally we can walk without giving it even a moment's thought. Only special conditions, such as walking on an ice-rink, or across a stream via stepping-stones, or when we have pain, force our attention back to the task. Otherwise, we can walk, talk, and yes chew gum all at the same time.

What does all this imply about our common future? Will we be able to give up the herd mentality and status-seeking that have us moving ever farther into remote suburbs and commuting to work in ever larger carbon-spewing vehicles? We have to cut through the layer of denial, then through the layer of habit. Will we? Or will the lemmings plunge dutifully off the cliff, secure in the knowledge that we didn't break ranks?

Not to dodge personal responsibility, but much does depend on leadership. Even though we believe in freedom, we follow leaders. After all, one of those lemmings has to be the first one over the cliff.

acts of creation

Well bless me, there is sun out there and blue sky. Kimmie sent me an e-mail, two floors below her (she can do that now), commenting on the beauty of the sunlight touching the orange leaves of the maples on the boulevard. The deluge is over.

Yesterday I had the fun of receiving a book in the mail. If you order enough books online, you don't know what has arrived until you open it, which gives the experience more of a Christmas feeling--it's fun! It was a used book, not a purchase from Amazon. I saw a Chicago postmark, but didn't remember what book I had bought from there--and didn't want to remember. I tore open the envelope, and unwrapped the hardcover book, which someone had carefully shrouded in pages of the Chicago Sun-Times' sports and metro sections. Then it was revealed: a compact, quite pristine 1969 copy of Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation--a book I'd forgotten altogether that I'd bought.

I subjected it to my usual process for receiving a used book: I carefully wiped down its (surprisingly intact) dustjacket with a damp cloth to remove the grubbiness and organic flecks that accrete on book covers. This made the book feel clean and new. Then I inscribed my name and the month and year on the inside.

I forget now exactly what prompted me to buy the book. It may have been part of my research into the phenomenon of identity. In this book Koestler examines the psychological phenomenon of creativity, more specifically the event of creation: the individual creative act. Where do new ideas come from? How are they formed or discovered?

These questions fascinate me for several reasons. For one thing, I'm a creative type. I'm interested to know more about this aspect of myself. For another, I want to look into the mysterious borderline between the mechanical and the free. For as living beings, we are combinations of the two: the great majority of the processes of our lives happen automatically, by reflex. But floating on that automatic flow is a free agent, an entity who chooses--and who creates. Where is the border between the automatic and the free? How does it work? How does it change? I expect Koestler to examine those questions.

Then there is the fact that creation, in the words of religious scholar Mircea Eliade, is "the divine act par excellence." Creation is finally the prerogative of the gods. When we humans create, we partake of the divine.

The kicker for me was the fact that I had so enjoyed Koestler's later book The Ghost in the Machine, actually the third book in a trilogy of which The Act of Creation is the second book (the first is The Sleepwalkers--a copy of which I've owned since 1986 but have not yet read!). I've talked about The Ghost in the Machine before. I found his ideas powerful and persuasive. I admired his boldness and originality as a thinker, as well as the clarity, vividness, and passion of his prose--that interesting and humbling phenomenon of the foreign-born (Hungarian in this case) writer taking up English and beating most native writers in its use. As an explicator of scientific ideas, he belongs in the pantheon along with (in my opinion) Isaac Asimov. (Interesting side-note: all the writers I've mentioned here--Koestler, Eliade, and Asimov--were polymaths and creators whose works spanned both fiction and nonfiction in various fields; plus they were all of East European birth, with Eliade born in Romania and Asimov in Russia.)

In The Ghost in the Machine Koestler developed the powerful new idea of the holon--a unit of spontaneous organization in an "open hierarchical system", which means any "system", including especially living organisms, that behaves in organized, purposive ways. In this theory, any such system is made up of relatively autonomous parts, which in turn are made up of other complex and relatively autonomous parts, and so on down the line. For example, we, as living beings, are made up of organs. The brain is a relatively coherent unit, although it forms only a part of the whole person; likewise the heart and the stomach. But the brain is made up of substructures, each of which has its own comparative autonomy within the system. There are structures specifically devoted to processing visual information, and for coordinating balance, and regulating speech, and so on. Thus, each "part" is also, from another perspective, a "whole" in its own right. In Koestler's terms, each is a holon: a neologism signifying something that is a "whole-part".

I've taken up Koestler's holons as part of my own developing theory of identity. Another thing I enjoyed about The Ghost in the Machine was how Koestler did not merely suggest a few new ideas, he boldly explored their implications as far as he could. He developed a whole system. In short, he took the ball and ran with it all the way to the end-zone: no timid half-steps for him. The book does not stretch a couple of thoughts into book length; it is a banquet of well-worked-out ideas, a feast--and I love that.

Given the author and the subject-matter, I have every reason to expect much enjoyment from my "new" used book. I started it yesterday at tea-time. So far, so good.