Category Archives: cognition

The Elusiveness of Truth

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Trump is again demonstrating his alienation from what most of us know as “truth.”  He foolishly claimed a few days ago that he and Vladimir Putin discussed a joint cyber security unit but was immediately confronted with how the rest of us saw this as complete nonsense.  So he changed his tune yesterday, suggesting…and I paraphrase…”You must not take me literally.”  His handlers found the temerity to challenge him privately and let him know just how completely inane and foolish a “cyber security unit” with the Russians sounds.

Trump definitely believes in “truth” but he reserves the prerogative of getting to define the notion without reference to what others think.  He sees “truth” as a static quality and to him it amounts to whatever whim and fancy courses through his brain.  He reserves the prerogative of defining the term…and all other terms…without regard to how the notion is seen in the context that he lives in, that context which most of us call “reality.”  This arrogance resonates with many of his followers who also see truth as a static quality, some “thing” which they have certainty about without any consideration to the rest of us.

I increasingly believe in “truth” and I even have the temerity to spell it out as “Truth.”  But this Truth is an elusive quality which can best be described as a process, a “process” which the Christian tradition sees as a person, illustrated with the words of Jesus, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”  But this “Truth” lies deep in our hearts and, while always seeking expression, it denies the objectification that would permit any mortal to say that he owns it, objectively.  Those who claim to know “the Truth” objectively always do so with a certainty, a certainty which always betrays itself in real time as specious.

Here I wish to let poet Carl Sandburg present this notion beautifully in a poem entitled, “Who am I?”

My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of
universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I
reach my hands and play with pebbles of
destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs
reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
in the universe.

The Intoxication of Lunacy!

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Colorado has a group of people who are apparently serious about the notion of a flat earth.  When I started reading this I suspected it was a spoof but the more I read I realize that these people are serious.  They really do believe the earth is flat and they have “proof” that this notion is valid!  )  I have often in my “career” as a blogger used the flat earth notion to illustrate complete lunacy, a private world view for people who have lost contact with reality and created their own little imaginary world which, at the extreme, is collective psychosis.  Ideas can carry us away and because of their intoxicating effect on our mind-set we can lose all critical capacity, believing our pet “idea” even when all evidence suggests it is self-delusion. (See Denver Post story at following link:  (http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/07/colorado-earth-flat-gravity-hoax/)

I have my own personal spoof of this lunacy in which I facetiously and sarcastically postulate a world in which “the moon is made out of cheese.” Yes, suppose during the night I am the victim of a neurological convulsion in my brain and awakened the next morning to know, with great passion, that “the moon is made out of cheese.”  If this should happen, I might take this very seriously and suddenly realize that it is the truth, that the darkness I’ve lived in has finally lifted, and I see clearly that, yes, “the moon is made out of cheese.”  Furthermore, some friends might try to intervene and set me straight but they would make no progress because, “when you know the truth, you just kinda know the truth” and no one is going to dissuade you.  Of course, finding truth always requires that others be convinced so I would start evangelizing and before long I would have a congregation of like-minded souls and we would then have the solace of validation, a solace which would be enhanced by the realization that only we saw the truth and that any “truth” is always rejected by those who are enlightened.  This insight would give us the comfort of borrowing a theme from fundamentalists of every stripe and sadly and piously understand that “we are being persecuted for His sake.”

I am here addressing one of my pet themes, best described as a toxic version of group-think, a private referential system in which validation is found only in those who have found our view of the world amenable to theirs.  When this toxicity infects any idea, ideas which might otherwise have value to others is immediately rejected by these “others” as they have no meaning to them whatsoever.  The resulting ideology, a passionate belief system that has become delusional becomes a private prison guaranteed to repel anyone who looks on from the outside.  But the rejection itself is perversely rewarding as it leaves the “true believers” with the smug satisfaction of owning “truth” which only they have apprehended.  What has happened is that very unhappy people have crafted a belief system which isolates them even further than they were to begin with and they slowly die from the suffocation that always comes from what Paul Tillich called “an empty world of self-relatedness.”  Emily Dickinson described it as “a mind too near itself to see distinctly.”

In my clinical career this phenomena was known as “insanity,” succinctly capsulized in a clinical bromide, “Mental illness is a reference problem.”  The individual who is completely mad…and we are all mad to some degree…has cut himself off from all external reference and finds great comfort in his delusional system.  For the intoxication of self-delusion resists any sobering-up that critical thinking would afford. It is easy for an out-sider, i.e. a non-believer, to quickly isolate the premise of a delusional system but just dare try to challenge that premises and you will meet great resistance.  For this “premise” represents an emotional investment the person/persons have made which cannot be relinquished without great pain.  Hypothetically, if one could reach into the heart of these people and surgically extirpate the premise, one would witness a complete melt-down.  For this premise is an existential anchor which holds its victims prisoners in a fortress from which they dare not escape.

I conclude with, still again, my favorite bumper-sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

“Within be Rich, Without be Fed No More”

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Shakespeare knew that life was a spiritual enterprise, that the essence of life was buried inside what Hamlet described as “this mortal coil.”  The Bard knew that human nature was to avoid this inner essence, preferring instead to invest in the external where sensual experience offers a ready deterrent from the excruciating labor involved in delving into the heart.  In his 46th sonnet he encouraged us to overrule those “rebel powers” that encourage arrayment in the gaudy apparel of this ego-driven “mortal coil.”  He knew that the accomplishments and accouterments that culture entices us with to avoid our inner essence gives us a sense of fulfillment that is illusory, leaving us with an inner emptiness gnawing away at our soul.  He suggested a different emphasis, “Within be fed, without be rich no more.”  I do not think that he would say that cultural contrivances have no value.  But when these superficies become predominant and we become the “Hollow Man” of T.S. Eliot or Willy Loman in the Arthur Miller play, “Death of a Salesman,” we have allowed superficial accomplishments to predominate at the expense of paying attention to our own soul.  This is what Jesus had in mind with his famous question, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?”

And, with the quotation of Jesus, I think Shakespeare was quite aware of false piety and hypocrisy which facilitate a gross misinterpretation of that famous verse from the Bible.  Even spirituality can become a “thing” purveyed by a “thing-oriented”, objectifying culture and we can miss the danger of letting “godliness” and “piety” be merely a thing of the external, a matter of adherence to creeds and dogma while allowing the “stillness” of our heart to go untouched.  Thereby we reduce this teaching of Jesus to the superficial cognitive grasp of his teachings and disallow them penetration into our heart, failing to realize that in keep his teachings and the whole of our life on that superficial cognitive dimension we are “losing” our own soul.  This is the truth that Ralph Waldo Emerson had in mind when he expressed fear of coming to the end of his life and realizing that what he had lived was not life at all but a mere facsimile of life.  And that can be readily done under the guise of spirituality.  As Shakespeare noted, “With devotions visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself.”  Shakespeare was the most astute teacher of the human soul since Jesus.

 

Sonnet 146, Shakespeare

Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth,
Thrall to these rebel pow’rs that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.
  So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
  And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.
*******************************************************************************

ADDENDUM—This is one of three blogs that I now have up and running.  Please check the other two out sometime.  The three are:

https://wordpress.com/stats/day/literarylew.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com

Do Trailer Parks Cause Tornadoes?

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I really miss David Letterman though his most able replacement, Stephen Colbert is brilliant!  Letterman was wry, bizarre, and even weird and in his early years even more so than later.  One quip from the early years has stuck with me because it put a dimension of reality on the table that I’d like to “cuss and discuss” today:  “Trailer parks cause tornadoes.”

He dropped this bizarre witticism probably 25 years ago when I was just beginning to stumble into some faint grasp of the time/space continuum and its offspring causation.  Even today I don’t “understand” it because time/space and cause/effect bring one right into the guts of life…if one dares to go there.  Or perhaps I should say, if one is foolish enough to go there!

And, like the whole of life, there is no “understanding” of it.  It is part of the mystery of life.  But my faint grasp of this phenomena has made me less apt to cast blame and more apt to see my own agency in my life, how that I have had choices where in the past I have thought I did not.  We live in a world of contingency and in any of these daily array of contingent moments we have choices.  Sometimes I make a good one.

Here is an e e cummings poem which is relevant, though the first stanza is beyond my grasp:

when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circustent
and everything began

when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because

 

ADDENDUM–I have diversified this literary effort of mine.  In this blog I plan to focus more on poetry and prose.  Below you will see two other blogs of mine relevant to spirituality and politics which have lain dormant for most of the past five years.  I hope some of you will check them out.  However, the boundaries will not be clear as my focus is very broad and my view of life is very eclectic/inclusive/broad-based.  Yes, at times too much so!

https://wordpress.com/posts/anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com

The Peril of an Unexamined Life

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This bumper sticker, actually the title of a book by Thubten Chodron, probably summarized what life had to teach me in 2016.  This wisdom has been percolating in my heart for several years and primarily with the Presidential election in my country I finally “got it” fully, seeing how much lunacy I’ve subscribed to over my lifetime merely because I subscribed to every idle thought that fluttered through my mind without giving any of them much scrutiny.

I can’t fully explain how my life ever took the course of getting out of the echo-chamber variety of thought that I was born into and indoctrinated with, destined to continue for my allotted “three score and ten” years.  I do remember in my teen years posing a question or two in Sunday school that challenged some of the premises of my belief system but I readily overlooked my realization that my questions were not being answered and continued dutifully along my charted course into my twenties.

But critical thinking flirted with me, gradually finding a home, and I discovered the wisdom of the Greeks who told us to avoid “the unexamined life.”  For if we never mature to the point of using the metacognitive skills that our neocortex blesses us with, we will live our life in a very narrow world of unexamined preconceptions.  This is what prompted the fear of Henry David Thoreau that he would come to the end of his life and realize that what he had lived was not really life at all.   And this is very much what Jesus had in mind when he warned us about “gaining the whole world and losing our own soul.”  Jesus knew that we are only a soul, a spiritual being having an earthly moment, and to never engage in the “working out of our own salvation with fear and trembling,” as the Apostle Paul would  put it, would mean never knowing that Inner Essence that seeks so desperately to find expression.

Thinking itself is never the problem.  The problem is our ego’s attachment to our thinking which too often blocks us from the realization that other people might have equally valid ways of thinking about the world.  This is only too apparent in my country now as the division between drastically different ways of viewing the world has been exposed by the arrival of Donald Trump and the phenomenon of Trumpism.  And there can be no resolution unless these contrasting belief systems employ some transcendent reference point and get beyond themselves long enough to focus on a common good. I sometimes facetiously suggest to friends that what we need to have is the threat from an alien life form that threatens our very existence!  Perhaps that would encourage us to overlook some of our petty differences.

Danger of “Thinking Outside of the Box”

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As one who “thinks outside of the box,” I must admit that it is not necessarily a virtue.  I’ve had that aptitude since early youth and since my late teens I’ve been exploring its riches.  So, in a way, it is my “comfy zone” and at times I demonstrate my obnoxiousness and arrogance, those very qualities which I see residing in “box dwellers.”  As one dares to venture “outside of the box,” it is always very tempting to ensconce oneself in still another “box’ and there demonstrate the same arrogance that one is deriding with great contempt from his/her “comfy zone” outside of the box.

For, “the box” that I’m referring to is not merely a conceptual formulation but it is the gut-level orientation to take one’s view of the world as primary to the exclusion of others.  And those of us with “enlightened” and “noble” ideas are often the ones who pose the greatest challenges for civilization, witness The Crusades and Isis.  In each of these instances, they are whole-heartedly intoxicated with their world view and are willing to bring to those who disagree with them great displeasure, even death.  That is because those who are “intoxicated” with this delectable nectar of the gods (even though they are dark gods) cannot see beyond their limited perspective.  They have taken an “idea” and run it into the ground even to the point where they are willing to kill for it and to die for it themselves.  When you have reached this point, you are approaching the dark, demonic depths of being an “ideologue” regardless of how noble your idea might appear to be.

And ideologue always seeks to escape his own emptiness by glomming onto some “idea” which he naively thinks is “the answer.”  Been there, done that.  Now I realize that this obsession, even with an idea as noble as Jesus Christ, was just an escape from reality and an escape from my own spiritual depths just to hang on desperately to my illusion of reality and my illusion of myself.  As Jesus, and many other spiritually enlightened men and women have tried to teach us, there is a “spiritual” dimension to life which lies beyond the grasp of our finite, conscious mind.  But that “finite, conscious mind,” being an ego contrivance, resists this awareness and insists that we hang onto the world of appearance, the shadow world of Plato’s famous cave analogy.  And Jesus provided us a vivid example of just how gut-wrenchingly painful it is to give up this world of illusions and “climb the rugged cross of the moment and let our illusions die.” (Leonard Cohen)

Obama to Serve a Third Term!!!

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President Obama has finally put on his big boy pants and solved our current political mess, suspending the election and declaring he will served a third term.  I know this is true because I saw it yesterday on Face Book and…seriously…it was posted by a woman to whom I taught civics and history 35 years ago! My point here is how quickly we succumb to the temptation of “red meat” in a heated political season, often not able to pass up a tasty morsel that fits so nicely into our view point.  I know.  I’ve done it myself, even from the Face Book platter of delicacies, and I really felt foolish when I realized how stupid and naïve I’d been.  But all of us love “red meat” for it confirms our biases and we have at our disposal the neurological gift/curse of “selective attention” to facilitate this process.  In epistemology, it is described as confirmation bias or epistemic closure, that tendency to live in a safe little cocoon of whims and fancies that confirms our view of the world.  I do it, you do it, we all do it, “even birds and bees do it.”

So, what’s the solution?  Well, there is no “solution” that would put us all on the same epistemological page so that an objective reality was created.  Perhaps a sci-fi fantasy of an additive being added to the world’s water supply????  Then we would all think in the “right” way, huh?

I’m going to be succinct here as this subject of epistemic closure always gets me going.  Those of you who read this blog regular…both of you…know that it is a favorite subject of mine.  The “solution” is to allow that neo-cortex that we gifted with to wield its magic, a “magic” that we are often averse to, and realize that our view of the world is not as “objective” as we might think.  In an earlier historical era it would have meant to toy with the notion that the earth was not flat.  And if today we could introduce even a tinge of this meta-cognition to this current political maelstrom, we possibly can dial back some of the venom that we often feel.  If you want to see what it looks like when this meta-cognition is drastically lacking, just look at Isis, a group which illustrates what happens when iron-clad certainty reaches its logical conclusion.   Or, think about the Crusades when Christians, empowered by the good news of the gospel, were okay with leading people to Jesus at the point of the sword.

Shakespeare described neurological gift as “the pauser reason,” that god-given ability to filter our thoughts and not say the first thing that comes to our mind and certainly not act on it.  Red meat is dangerous!  And the same gifted soul offers us hope in this crucial historical moment, “There is a Divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.”

The Tyranny of Labels in Video

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This video brilliantly illustrates everything I have been obsessing about with my emphasis on “distinction-drawing” and actually everything I’ve been trying to say for the past five years on this blog.  If we live our life in the tyranny of the narrowly defined world our ego has carved out for us, individually and collectively, we will always have conflict for there is no end to the need to draw distinctions between “us” and “them.”  Here again we see here the curse of religion…all religions…the ego always tends to take the spiritual wisdom provided there and turn it into a weapon under the name of whatever god we worship.  And, of course, there is the temptation to make this point accusatorily, “You do this but I do not” but the luxury of this self-deception is no longer mine. Losing that “luxury” is relevant to something said this morning in The Guardian about Donald Trump’s narcissism, “Trump does not have an interior life.  He ‘had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury…an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.’”  This “rumbling” is what my spiritual tradition calls “the Spirit of God” and if there is no “rumbling” there is only ego-ridden certainty which is devoid of any Spirit.

And when the ego’s tyranny metastasizes to a certain point, there will always be violence.  For the ego’s need to know that we are “right” can reach the point where we will to express with action the repressed experience of being “wrong,” a feeling that cannot help but arise when we are introduced to a world which is based on the tyranny of labels.  I do think that religion often offers the opportunity to dive into the depths of our heart and acknowledge this feeling of “wrongness” but it entails the willingness to face the pain of disillusionment, in Christian doctrine described as “being lost.”  This is why Aeschylus described the grace of god as “awful” centuries ago for he knew the agony of being disillusioned of the unquestioned certainties of our ego-constructed world.

“And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”  Aeschylus

 

The Tyranny of Being Right

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One of the earliest “distinction drawings” I learned after becoming conscious was that the world was divided into two categories—“saved” and “unsaved.”  And from that font of binary thinking I learned there were Baptists and then there were other religious denominations who did not understand the Bible “right.”  And even worse, there were the “Mary-worshipping” Catholics and also the Jews who weren’t even Christian!  And even within Baptist ranks, there were my particular brand of Baptist (Landmark Missionary Baptists) and then those “liberal” Southern Baptists from which we Landmarkers had split off from in the late 19th century.  And even within Landmark churches there would often arise doctrinal squabbles which would lead to a split and the start of another church.  Note that the phenomena of needing to draw distinctions was a fundamental premise.  And in my denomination, there was even the phenomena of the Bride of Christ which was an honorary place in heaven for Christians who had belonged to the church which most closely adhered to the gospel and could trace their historical roots back to Christ.  Yes, I was honored to learn that this was my church.  Yes, even in heaven there would be distinctions drawn.  Gawd it was comforting to know that I was so special.

And please note that this “distinction drawing” was not the exclusive domain of Christianity or even fundamentalist Christianity.  It is merely part of being human and is toxic only when we never mature enough to make the need of drawing distinctions less important than finding common ground.  It has always been present in human history and will always be present as it is inherent in cognition itself.  BUT, it is possible…I am finding…to be a thinking human being and realize that some of the distinctions I have drawn with such rigidity in my life are not quite as black and white as I had been taught.  But for those who are stuck in what Richard Rohr calls “binary thinking” cannot help but obsessively seek for distinctions which leave them separate from others and thus “right.”

One result of this emphasis on my early life was the need to be right.  I quickly learned that there was “right” and “wrong” and learned that “right” consisted of basically adhering to the rules that constituted “right.”  I now realize that existentially, in the bowels of my young heart, I had perceived myself to be intrinsically bad but that I could be “good” and be “right” if I followed the rules, if I would be a “good little boy.”  This put me on the path of being a very good hypocrite, for the word hypocrite merely means “to act.”  I am not denigrating myself in the least with this point.  I was only a child and had learned how to find validation and that was in “acting” right and I did so with utmost sincerity.  Richard Rohr has pointed out that most of us spend the first half of our life as an actor in all respects and only then begin to wrestle with the under-lying dimension of life which always involves opening Pandora’s box in some way.  But it is hard to impossible for a guilt-ridden Christian to admit they have been “acting” for doing so would be to acknowledge and embrace the feelings of “wrongness” which have always tyrannized them into outward compliance with rules.  They would have to realize they have been living in bondage to “the law” albeit a “Christian” version of bondage.  They have been socialized or enculturated into their faith…which is a necessary stage of faith…but at some point it is important to acknowledge the “act” they have been putting on and allow the “Spirit of the Law” to begin to flow.  James Alison, who will share the stage with Richard Rohr in a couple of weeks, has written a book entitled “The Joy of Being Wrong,” describing the release he found when he no longer had to be constantly trying to be “right.”  And of course, in the need to “be right” I constructed various constructs in life in which I could be “right” and “they” would be wrong.  Oh, how comforting it was.  And how hypocritical.

Drawing Boundaries in Religious Experience

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After another long hiatus, I’m resuming my blog with the intent of pursuing a theme for periods of time.  Beginning today I am introducing the notion of human beings as “distinction-drawers,” a notion that I broached casually months ago.  And this is a very personal issue as “distinction-drawing” is very close to the core of my ego identity though now I am apparently in “recovery” from this death trap.

We are born into a world that was “always already underway.”  Even before we started to venture toward consciousness, this pre-existent world was beckoning, a gentle beckoning which would become more demanding as our journey through infancy continued and we approached the threshold of consciousness.  Becoming human depended on acceding to the demands of this “exterior” world and formulating a template through which we would view the world, a template which must be shaped so that it is consistent with the world view of the tribe into which we were born.  This template is a narrow prism through which we view the world and we will never completely leave it behind…even when in the “recovery” mentioned earlier.

One primary feature of this “template” is thinking itself which is a carving up of the world into discrete categories, providing escape from that matrix into which we are born and in which we spend the earliest months of our life.  This matrix (i.e. mother) is a womb, the mythological Uroborus in which there is no distinction drawn between me and the outside world.  It is the Garden of Eden from which we must be banished.  And if we fail to escape that matrix (i.e. “mother”) we will not be able to “join” the human race.

I will admit that there is some sense in which I have never made this escape as I’m still deeply rooted in that primeval world where distinctions are not as clear as they are to most people. I have spent most of my life “pretending” to have escaped by imprisoning myself in a conceptual world which has allowed me to function well in the “real” world.  This “real” world is a world of reason, a highly structured world which we call culture.  Without this fabricated world we would still live in that Ouroborous which means we would not really have a world at all, living in an undifferentiated state of unity with all things.  Having an “object world” is necessary for the creation of culture and our own infantile development of an “object relationship” with the world is necessary if we are to participate in the world into which we are born.

Joining our “object world,” our tribe, always means subscribing to reason and the “rational world” of the tribe is a “necessary evil” that we will need to gain some freedom from when we mature.  And that certainly does not mean we will need to become “un” reasonable only that we learn to see that the distinctions that we have learned to draw in our early tribal life are not as pronounced as they were seen, and felt, to be.  Early cognitive development turns us into a “distinction-drawer” and that is a developmental imperative.

Problems come, however, when neurophysiology creates too great of a reliance on this “distinction-drawer” and we never learn to see the world in terms other than black and white, us vs. them, good and bad, Republicans and Democrats, right and wrong, etc., etc.  And another dimension of this infantile imprisonment is that sometimes the social “norms” are so rigid that the developing child is basically tyrannized into his/her “distinction drawer” which helps the tribe to perpetuate its collective “distinction drawer.”

In my next post, I intend to explain how my Christian faith contributed mightily to the development of my “distinction drawer.”  And this is not the fault of Jesus Christ but merely an illustration of how human nature tends to use everything at hand to formulate a “distinction-drawer” early in life.