Category Archives: mindfulness

A Thoughtful Football Player & “Confirmation Bias”

Leave a reply

 

Rashard Mendenhall, Pittsburg Steeler’s running back, made news last year when he was critical of our country’s response to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. But at least he was thinking. In a more recent episode of “thinking”, he wrote an editorial re the need of open mindedness in the Huffington Post. His observations reminded me of the “confirmation bias” about which I recently discoursed. He also used the term “narcissism” to describe our refusal to become self-aware as a culture. Here is the link to the editorial:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rashard-mendenhall/having-an-open-mind_b_1933942.html

 

Quelling our “howling appetites”

Leave a reply

Our life task is calming the savage beast that lives within, that dimension of life which W. H. Auden described as, “our howling appetites.” This is a battle that we fight individually and collectively. As a nation, for example, we should ask, “How can we satisfy our hunger without becoming rapacious?” And with our colonial past, we definitely have a history of rapacity as does most of the rest of the “developed” world.

The 8th century Indian poet Shantideva put it this way:

Where would I possibly find enough leather
With which to cover the surface of the earth?
But (just) leather on the soles of my shoes
Is equivalent to covering the earth with it

Likewise it is not possible for me
To restrain the external course of things
But should I restrain this mind of mine
What would be the need to restrain all else?
(Shantideva)

The writer of Proverbs captured the truth in these two verses, “He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls” (25:28); and, “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city” (25:28)  Or, as someone else has said, “We can’t change the world, but we can change the eyes through which we view the world.”   And I conclude with my oft-quoted word from Auden, “We wage the war we are.”

Rabindranath Tagore’s Prayer for His Country

6 Replies

 

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; whee words come out from the depth of truth;where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action–into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

This beautiful prayer from the thoughtful Indian artist/poet/musician of the early 20th century reflects such wisdom and insight about the human predicament.  I really liked that thought about the “stream of reason” needing to not “lose its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.”  Reason is such a gift but it can sure be misused and often is; in fact, usually is.  When reason is devoid of Spirit, “dead habit” always takes over and we then become arrogant, overbearing, and even violent.  This reminds me of a word of caution from W. H. Auden re the peril of “mere habits of affection freezing our thoughts in their own inert society.”  And then Goethe noted, “They call it Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

 

The elusive captivity of Truth

Leave a reply

Several days ago I quoted a Carl Sandburg poem about the elusiveness of Truth, a poem which concluded with, in fact, “My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.” (I will quote the whole poem again shortly.)

I’m captivated with the notion that Truth is an “elusive captive.” Sandburg recognized that Truth is a process that is always underway, that it is always present, but it always eludes our grasp when we attempt to own it. This makes me think of something Roland Barthes (I think) said, referring to someone who is “in love with the thing which recedes from the knowledge of it.”

Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.” He did not say, “Blessed are those who find righteousness.” The “blessedness” comes as we hunger and thirst for that elusive prize, desperately seeking to own it, only to realize at some point in our life that there is no need to fret and stew, there is only the need to surrender to it. There is only the need to realize that, though we don’t have Truth, it (He) has us and is at work in our lives.

We learn to live with the anxiety of “not-knowing” as with the gift of faith we confidence (and hope) that we are Known. We then proceed with the task of “working out our own salvation with fear and trembling” (i.e. anxiety and doubt).

Yes, this elusive Truth is actually a captive! We have it and always have had it. We can’t escape it though we can escape its efficacy in our day to day life by desperately trying to avoid the doubt without which faith is not possible. We can opt for a specious certainty which is only a delusional system.

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’ve talked to 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.

Boundaries and “I and Thou”

2 Replies

On Friday a man in New York City demonstrated his belief that we are one with nature by jumping into a lion pit, explaining afterward that he wanted to be “one with the lions.” Well, he almost accomplished this purpose as one of them proceeded to chew on him.

I also feel that boundaries are a nebulous construction and that we do need to realize that we are one with the world, with the animal world, physical world, and the human world. But we must never carry it to the extreme that he did and will do so only at our great peril.

One dimension of this “object separateness” issue is drawing the social distinction between “me and thee.” Where do I end and you begin? If I err on either extreme there will be major psychopathology. In the early months of our lives we begin the process of formulating a “me” (and ego identity) and if this task is impaired, our life will be very challenging. But if our “me” is defined too rigidly, it will also pose problems. Ideally, it will have an age-appropriate rigidity at first, a rigidity which can be relaxed with maturity so that our “me” can recognize that the distinction between “me and thee” is not as rigid as the social contract would have one believe.

Martin Buber wrote a marvelous book about the process of discovering this boundary subtlety—I and Thou. He also delved into the spiritual nature of the process of making this discovery and the spiritual nature of life itself. Our Source, he suggested, is found only in the “In-Between”, in that space between “I” and “Thou”, in what Deepak Chopra terms “the gap.”

Here is a marvelous poem by Edgar Simmons about this matter:

THE ART OF BROTHER KEEPING

the instant you can

accept the colon

you are christenened

in the right compromise

that no things are alike

but are related.

the greatest

the necessary

the most powerful leap of metaphor

is when I decide

I am you

the result is

a birth

a

metaphysical differentiation

carried out and on

not in flesh but in spirit–

prophetic fact in time

more than children of our flesh.

Confirmation Bias and Emily Dickinson

4 Replies

 

A friend recently introduced me to the concept of “confirmation bias” which refers to the human tendency to accept into his/her reality only that which is consistent with a pre-existent bias. In other words, we see things as we want to see them. We see only the “small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.” (Conrad Aiken). Decades ago I read someone’s observation, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”

Now, of course, being a mere mortal I would like to say that this no longer applies to me, that I have gone a step further and see things clearly, that I see things objectively. But I’ve afraid that I can no longer “lay that flattering unction to my soul” (Hamlet, to his mother). This is a human problem and we cannot escape it. We only see things through a prism, we do not see things objectively.

But, if we understand this notion, it can humble us a bit and we can be a bit less arrogant about our certainties, we can be a bit more accepting of people who are different than us. We might even be a bit more accepting of people who respond to this notion with a blank, bewildered stare!

Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about this tendency to construct our reality and then shut out everything else:

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

We do tend to “close the valves of (our) attention like stone” and shut out any further feedback from the world. “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.”  This is called insanity.

 

St Augustine Opines on Being and Nothingness

4 Replies

 

St. Augustine and I are pals!  I never would have thunk it!  This is a profound observation about the majesty of God and his creation.  (This was posted this morning on (http://lowellsblog.blogspot.com/)  By the way, I intend to do a better job of giving credit for where I “steal” some of this stuff!

 

My brothers and sisters, where does time go? The years slip and slide past us, day by day. Those things which were, no longer are; those things yet to come, are not here. The past is dead; the future is yet to come, but only to pass away in turn. Today exists only for the moment in which we speak. Its first hours are already over and behind us, the remainder do not as yet exist; they are still to come, but only to fall into nothingness.

Nothing in this world has constancy in itself. The body does not possess being; it has no permanence. It changes with age; it changes with time and place; it changes as a result of sickness or accident. The stars have as little consistancy; they are always changing in hidden ways, they go whirling into outer space. They are not stable, they do not possess being.

Nor is the human heart any more constant. How often it is disturbed by various conflicting thoughts and ambitions! How many pleasures draw it, one minute this way, and the next minute, that way, tearing it apart! The human spirit, although endowed by God with reason, changes; it does not possess being. It wills and does not will; it knows and does not know; it remembers this but forgets that. No one has unity of being in himself.

After so much suffering, disease, difficulties and pain, let us return humbly to God, to that one Being. Let us enter into that heavenly Jerusalem, that city whose citizens share in Being itself.
Augustine,Commentary on Psalm 121 (Hebrew Ps. 122); CCSL 40, pp. 1801-3; quoted by Robert Atwell,Celebrating the Seasons, Canterbury, 1999, p.416

Lowell

 

Auden on the Incarnation

Leave a reply

The Incarnation is the story of the Word being made flesh, the “enfleshment” of the Holy to provide us a model for our life. This incarnation has many dimensions. I like to think of it as the process of “coming down” from our head into our heart, dwelling in our flesh, the mind-body duality finding some degree of resolution. In some sense “coming down from on high” is coming down from our head into our guts, the Word being woven into the fabric of our day to day life. The Gospel becomes experience, no longer consisting of mere dogma that we have imbibed from our Christian culture. Read the following excerpt from W. H. Auden about this process, especially that powerful notion of “flesh and mind being delivered from mistrust.”

If…like your father before you, come
Where thought accuses and feeling mocks,
Believe your pain: praise the scorching rocks
For their desiccation of your lust,
Thank the bitter treatment of the tide
For its dissolution of your pride,
That the whirlwind may arrange your will
And the deluge release it to find
The spring in the desert, the fruitful
Island in the sea, where flesh and mind
Are delivered from mistrust.
(W. H. Auden “The Sea and the Mirror)

Perfect Love Casteth Out Fear

6 Replies

Fear abounds today. I see it in the news, I sense it in my day to day social life, and I feel it in my heart. I’m made to recall my early youth when fear really abounded, intensely, when I did not have the grounding that I now have in my life. At times that childhood fear beckons but I’m able to resist.

There are so many who have not been as blessed as I have been and who do not have this “grounding”. With them I see their fear abounding even to the point that paranoia rears its ugly head. And then I see how politicians, with the help of the media, exploits this fear to accomplish their goal—election. It is very sad. I’m made to think of the words of the New Testament (1 John), “Perfect love casteth out fear.” I think of that verse often when this fear besets me.

A favorite blog of mine (http://lowellsblog.blogspot.com/) shared an old story I’ve heard from my youth which is so relevant:

I’m reminded of the old Cherokee tale. A Cherokee elder is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil — he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good — he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you — and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Reason has its Limits!

Leave a reply

 

when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began
when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because (e e cummings)

 

This is another one of those poems that I cannot explain but completely love. It is so complicated and inexplicable. To some of you it will probably be nonsense. And it is about “non” sense in that it is about reality that lies beyond the grasp of reason. It is about reality that lies beyond the time-space (i.e. “cause-effect”) continuum.

And to take a quantum leap…as I am wont to do…it is about God for He lies beyond our paltry little world, our rational “dog-and-pony” show. And, yes, He was “made nigh by the blood of Christ” but that doesn’t mean we can apprehend Him with mere reason, with Christian (Biblical) syllogism. We apprehend Him only with faith which means we apprehend him in the context of a whole lot of doubt. We “have Him” only when we “don’t have Him”. This is to allude to the Zen koan from the ‘60’s, “First there was a mountain, then there was no mountain, then there was.” God is present only in his absence.

(AFTERTHOUGHT: Goethe noted, “They call it Reason, using light celestial, only to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”)

(COMIC AFTERTHOUGHT—Quip from David Letterman, re cause-effect, “Mobile home parks cause tornadoes.”