Tribute to My Dear Momma!

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Mother’s Day in my chlld hood always meant wearing a white rose to church, announcing to everyone that our mother was still living. Wearing a red rose was what those would do if their mother had passed on. (I might have the colours reversed.) And the event was always successful in its purpose, as it brought the attention of myself and my five sisters to how wonderful our mother was.

And, she still is today; for, she does live in our hearts even now and always will as her presence is etched deeply in our memories, even pre-conscious memories when she was the source of everything good. And, even everything bad—I remember vividly crying obsessively, “Momma why’d ya do it, momma why’d ya do it, momma why’d ya do it” when I pulled a boiling cup of tea off the table and inflicted third degree burns on my four-year old chest and arm. Of course, momma did not “do this” but at that age “cause and effect” are being burned into our hearts as this time-and-space continuum that we live in demands. For, in a developing mind, if momma is responsible for everything good then it stands to the developing linear reason that she is responsible for everything bad!

But that occasion was one particular moment when momma employed such skill and good judgment, drawing on her memories of life on the farm in central Missouri and then covering my wrinkling skin with lard before she went out to tackle starting, and then driving, an old pick-up truck when she had not yet learned to drive. But she figured out how use the hand-crank on that old jalopy, fire it up, and drive me and my younger sister and I to a neighbor’s house who would then drive us to a physician. During the whole trip my refrain of “momma why’d ya do it” continued but she did not allow her own personal anguish to interfere with the task at hand and, with the help of a neighbor, got me to the doctor.

This is but one demonstration of what I call momma’s faith. I don’t know what went on in her heart at the time, but I know that she often called upon the Lord to address difficulties in life and I’m sure she did on this occasion, even as she simultaneously called upon her inner resources. And she faced many, many crises when raising her six “needful things” and at times found it overwhelming. But, even when seriously ill, she would rise up from the bed and “gird up her loins” and get the job done…and this is faith! Now, she does not have my style of faith which includes the wisdom of various spiritual traditions and quotations of the likes of Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden. And even today, sitting up there in the comfort of heaven, she will often smile and chuckle when I’m knee-deep in my ethereal faith and whisper to me, quoting Hamlet’s mother, “Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown.” But it has never even crossed my mind to dismiss her faith…or that of anyone else…knowing that faith is expressed in different ways through different people. But I remember so clearly the courage she demonstrated in difficult situations and the affirmations of her faith and see so clearly the value and validity of a faith unlike that of “literarylew.” She showed me so clearly that one dimension of faith is doing what needs to be done in one’s day to day life, an employment of the “Will of the Species” which is very much related to what my spiritual tradition calls “the Spirit of God.”

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Anti-intellectualism and “Mindfulness”

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I find the current anti-intellectualism craze in my country fascinating though my fascination is mitigated by fascinated by the worry about its consequences. As indicated earlier this stems largely from my past life in an hyper-conservative Arkansas community when conspiracy theory was one of my favorite “comfort foods.”

But epistemology is relevant. These anti-intellectuals are not without intelligence; in fact, some of them are very well educated and have powerful posts in our government. But intelligence is not a static phenomena, or shouldn’t be. For intelligence to be meaningful it must be accompanied with the capacity to view things critically, even belief systems that are near and dear to their own heart. Without that critical capacity, one will find himself in a closed mind which does include the “comfort” of not knowing one has a closed mind. And one who lives in this prison…self-imposed in some manner…will automatically dismiss anything that threatens his view of the world. This is the “epistemic closure” or “confirmation bias” that I address here so often.

Intelligence is not objective. With the anti-intellectual crowd, they have intelligence but they have used that intelligence to formulate a comfortable world view and then said to themselves unconsciously, “Ok, that’s enough. I don’t need to know any more” and will spend the rest of their life viewing the world and themselves through that narrow little prism. Instead of “thinking” they will be spend their life “thought” by a body of ideology comprised of preconceptions which have never been questioned. Their thought life will be a daily regurgitation of these preconceptions. And having that narrow view of the world pierced would be extremely painful so most who are within its “safe” confines just will not allow it to be pierced. For this “penetration” by reality would evoke a deep sense of being existentially “wrong” which is related to why so many of them often avow a deep conviction of being “right.” And this “wrong” that they fear is not a conscious “wrong” of having done something amiss but of “being” wrong which would evoke what I have posited earlier is the experience of “the judgment of God.” The experience of “being” wrong is at an extreme unmitigated terror and that is why we have been given a persona without which we could not function.

But if we live our whole life knowing ourselves only as the ideology-based persona that we trot out every day, we will not have understood the question posed by Jesus, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?” Our persona can survive, and even thrive on self-scrutiny but our ego will always tell us that it can’t. And therefore, when threatened, we cling even tighter to our persona rather than experience some version of the aforementioned terror. And for most of us the “terror” will only be some degree of discomfort, i.e. “cognitive dissonance.” But usually we “cling in panic to our tall beliefs” when “Truth holds our her hands” and proceed to “shrink away like an ill-treated child.” (Auden) We prefer the comfort of our ideas rather than addressing the “Reality” that lies beneath and beyond these ideas. We cannot bring ourselves to declare like W. H. Auden, “Oh blessed be bleak exposure on his sword we are pricked into coming alive.”

It is no accident that the fundamentalist Christians who are the driving force of this anti-intellectualism vehemently oppose meditation and yoga, often denigrating it as “Of the Devil” or “Straight from the pits of hell.” And, they are right…in their way of looking at the world! For the “mindfulness” that is in the vogue in our culture with many of us “damn liberals” emphasizes awareness of one’s subjective experience that precedes our “fall” into the realm of cognition. The “awareness” that mindfulness disciplines offers is frightening to one who is an ideologue and trapped in his ideological “comfort food.” This “awareness” frees us from the bondage to our thinking.

—-AFTERTHOUGHTS—-

“Words,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”

A very thoughtful assessment of this current anti-intellectual craze is found in the magazine Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201407/anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-america

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President Obama Invading Texas!!!

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American politics is so much fun these days with the lunacy running amok in the extremist wing of the Republican Party. Their latest insanity is a paranoid fear that President Obama is plotting an invasion of Texas. That is right! The routine deployment of federal troops in six southwestern states, including Texas, has stoked fears that it is a ruse to get the populace accustomed to seeing Federal troops on the roads and highways so that when the sure-to-come invasion does occur the people will not know what is going on until it is too late

But, the significant feature of this story is the even the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, stoked these fears when instead of dismissing the paranoid concern, he wasted tax-payer resources and ordered the state guard to monitor these activities so that the rights and freedoms of Texas citizens would not be in jeopardy. Even a Republican candidate for President, Rand Paul, responded to a question on the issue with the promise that “I’ll look into it” rather than dismissing the issue.

Abbott’s and Paul’s response reflected their dependency on the lunatic fringe of their party without which they would have no hope for election. Mollification of these “low information voters” is necessary for these politicians who bow to their God of “Maintaining Electibility.”

A mature response on this type of lunacy was demonstrated by Republican Senator John McCain in 2012 when he was campaigning against President Obama. When “working a crowd” with a live microphone, one “low information voter” female asked McCain to address her concern that Obama was a Muslim. McCain politely and calmly took the microphone from her and told her, “No, President Obama is not a Muslim.” He then adroitly shifted the focus to legitimate territory, “President Obama represents a different approach to governing this country” and then proceeded to address the GOP agenda. Here McCain politely set a limit with this woman and with all who were watching. In recent years many Republican politicians have gone to embarrassing extremes to avoid honestly answer questions re Obama’s citizenship and religion, knowing that to answer candidly would possibly alienate them from the base of their party.

Now, this kind of “stuff” always gets my panties in a wad because I grew up in that kind of madness and it is still buried somewhere deep in my heart…I guess. And looking back on it I realize and remember how it appealed to a mother lode of fear in my young heart remnants of which are still present, unfortunately. And fundamentalist religions of all stripes are always fear-based and thus thrive on perceived threats to their integrity and freedom. But they are failing to remember that Jesus said that, “Perfect love casteth out fear.” (My panties, btw, are pink chiffon with black polka dots!)

I do not blame these “low information voters” for this phenomena. They cannot help it in some way for they have not been blessed with the opportunity for an education. But I do blame politicians who have exploited the fears of these people merely for the sake of electability. One other illustration of their pandering is that many of the leading GOP politicians have a stock-answer to questions about whether or not they believe in global warming: “Well, I’m not a scientist.” They know that the ill-informed, uneducated basis of their party thrives on an anti-science and anti-intellectual currency and so these very intelligent and well-educated leaders of our country embarrass themselves by refusing to answer the questions of that sort directly.

Here are two links relevant to this insanity:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/us/conspiracy-theories-over-jade-helm-get-some-traction-in-texas.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=0

http://bigamericannews.com/2015/05/05/obama-plans-to-invade-texas-kidnap-george-w-bush-and-create-a-new-kingdom-of-liberal-darkness/

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The “Unity of All Things” in a Poem

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I love the way poets can bring things that are totally disconnected together to make sense. Of course, that is because we, and everything about our lovely world, is very connected in the first place. But lost in our illusion of separateness, it takes poetic courage to “Dive into the Wreck” and put the unity of all things into words so that pedestrian traffic like “moi” can appreciate it:

Trinity
Small things have a different logic to them.
Drop an ant from fifty times its height.
It survives. But a man, a mammoth, a bomb …
well, quantum particles tell us, size is fate.
So when Robert Oppenheimer gathered
those great minds, each with his specialty,
they chose a boy’s schoolhouse in the heart
of an enormous nation, its sons at sea.
Those days were never simple: the squeak of chalk
against the darkness, the dread of failure,
of success, inside each uneasy thought
the dull knowledge that, hell, if not here,
then some other hell, and so they worked
against the clock, the hammer of its hours.
Trinity. That was their goal, their test site
that drew its name from a line by Donne,
who invited God to batter his heart,
God who was three-person’d, and so one
conscience split into ravishing light.
The way men long to be that usurpt towne,
no doubt it frightens them: the blank slate
that reason fills for all the wrong reasons.
What Oppenheimer saw there, God knows.
Perhaps it was the words knocke, breathe, shine,  and seek to mende. Perhaps the overthrow
of one god for another, for one who blinds
the doubt, so we might lie against our shadows
and fall, too deep to fathom, too small to find.

BRUCE BOND
For the Lost Cathedral
Louisiana State University Press

http://poem.com/today.php

“Quintessence of Dust” We Are!!!

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Emily Dickinson is one of my soul mates. She was a spinster, living in her father’s attic, making observations about life with her brilliant poetry which would not be appreciated here on earth until she got to heaven. One of her pithy little quips that I really like is, “Life is over there, on a shelf.” Cloistered there in Puritanical New England, she dared to explore her own soul and at the same time pay attention to what was going on out there “on the shelf.”

I can relate so well. For, I too am an “observer” and in some way I too have spent my life cloistered in some spiritual attic. I think Shakespeare also lived in one of these little self-imposed prisons and from that vantage point could offer such brilliant wisdom about the human condition. He referred to humankind as the “quintessence of dust” and that pretty well sums us up, though considering our “dustiness” is very difficult for our ego. It is for mine. I am DNA’d to take myself way too seriously which is what we little dust bunnies tend to do.

One of my Facebook friends is apparently also one of these observers though he is blessed with brilliant poetic skill. He lives only five hours away (in Denver) and one of these days I’m gonna meet this kindred spirit. I want to share with you here one of his poems which so astutely captures the essence of being a human. His name is Randy Welch and you can find him on Facebook.

HUMANS
(BEING HUMAN)

Being Human
Is As Far From Being A Spider
As It Is From Being God
It Is To Live In The Past
While Fretting About The Future
Barely Aware What’s Going On Right Now
Being Human Is Feeling Alone
Amidst A Crowd
Yet Crowded By The Presence
Of Just One Other Human Being
Being Human Is Wanting
To Save The Children
To Save The World
But Being Too Busy
Getting The Car Tuned Up
Or Spreading The Latest Gossip
About Other Human Beings
To Actually Do Something About It
Being Human Is Being
The Most Glorified Presence
On The Planet
Yet Constantly Wishing
We Were Anything But Human
It Is Having The Gifts Of
Conceptualization And Visualization
Of Logic And Reason
And Refusing To Use Them
In The Face Of Raw Emotion
Being Human Is Knowing
The Beauty Of The Ocean
And The Fear Of Drowning In It
It Is The Tragedy Of Living
In Complete Ambivalence
Most Of The Time
Being Human Is Something
That May Not Continue
For Very Much Longer
On Account Of
Humans Being Human…
-randini- (aka Randy Welch)

Shakespeare’s View on Madness

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One of my readers responded to a recent post about collective insanity with the observation that “we are all crazy but some are crazier than others.” And Shakespeare certainly felt this was so, describing life as a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

I have studied and taught history and practiced as a mental health counselor. These experiences have given me an opportunity to utilize my Enneagram 6 “observer” skills and I often pine, “Why do they do what they are doing? Why don’t they see they are making such poor choices and simply ‘stop it’”! But fortunately I have always been self-reflective and turn the same focus on my own self and see that I too am my own worst enemy and, when practicing as a therapist, should have taken the advice of Jesus who told us, “Physician, health thyself.” But I knew that I couldn’t and that I, like my clients, was doing what W. H. Auden said we would do, spend our life, “Waging the war that we are.”

I, like you and the rest of our brothers and sisters, are driven by forces that we can never truly understand and we are often merely “the toy of some great pain.” This subterranean energy that pulsates through our lives at its deepest level contains a dimension of sheer insanity. But, most of us are lucky and are able to sublimate this madness into mere neurosis and muddle through our lives and keep this “idiotic tale” under way. We seem to follow the mantra, “The show must go on!”

I have come to realize that Shakespeare understood madness so well because he had a “tad” of it himself. “You spot it, you got it!” Hamlet noted, “What’s mad but to be nothing else but mad.” Shakespeare knew that to be truly mad there was only madness without the “pauser reason” which could check thoughts and impulses that are beyond the pale. He knew all of us are mad but some of us have that gift of that “pauser reason”, that neo-cortical capacity to self-monitor and give consideration to other people. Without it we are “nothing else but mad.” And to be “nothing else but mad” is really very comfortable; for those ensconced in that self-imposed prison are cut off from concern for external reference. Criticizing them is, to borrow an expression from my dear mother, “like pouring water off a duck’s back.”

A Perspective on “Enlightenment”

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WordPress and Facebook introduce me to so many interesting people from different walks of life who I would have never met otherwise. I would like to introduce you today to a young Korean woman, Wanyoung Kim, who can be found on Facebook and is stunningly intelligent and erudite.

Recently she declared on Facebook, “You can be mentally Enlightened, but it is really the power of Christ that heals a person.” I was puzzled as this declaration reflected a dimension of Christian faith that I had not noted before with her postings. So I responded, “I agree. But, I’m curious how you would define ‘Christ’? This is not a cynical question. I just know that you are a very thoughtful person.”

Ms. Kim responded with:

A friend of mine (name omitted here)once described Him as the Internet of all hearts and minds- I cannot say it more succinctly than this. To believe is to know that his suffering accounted for all grievances of every heart and mind that walked upon this Earth in world history. ‪Christ is a man of sorrows himself like me, one can say. The heart of Christ is to see Him in every human being including myself- to empathize with the pain I see of a stranger in the street and this empathy is a healing act where a collective feeling of sharedness which in itself is a unity to the Other reassuring them we all are part of this suffering of Christ. I become Christ my self.

Ms. Kim does not see Christ through the narrow prism that I was taught as a child in conservative Arkansas as a Baptist in the fifties and sixties. And as I read her insightful observations some ancient part of my soul…which I often refer to as “literallew”…wants to denigrate her thoughts immediately. But “literallew” is increasingly buried under the Light of what I now see as Spirit of God which wants us to interpret the scripture and not merely regurgitate it as we have been taught. And this is not merely an intellectual enterprise but a gut-level enterprise that cannot be taught with “book learnin’”. It requires a willingness to have a heart that is “petal open” as Toni Morrison once put it; or, in the words of Shakespeare, a heart that is full of “penetrable stuff.” And this is scary for it subjects one to the flow of life and deprives him/her from the cold, sterile “certainty” that I was told was available and strived for so desperately and never was able to obtain.

Christ is not a “thing” that can be reduced to our “ideas” and thus captured by our ideology, as noble as that ideology might appear to be. He was, and is, an expression of the “Wholly Other” and can be known only when we are willing to experience our own finitude which can only occur when we come face to face with the Otherness that faces us daily with each one we meet and even with this beautiful world itself. Eckhart Tolle reports He is the “Presence” which is the only thing that “is” if we can separate ourselves from our compulsive thinking.

But seeing Christ in non-linear terms requires an ability to see ourselves in non-linear terms which for most of us requires a radical transformation in self-definition and view of the world. It requires a transformative shift of perspective which brings to my mind the notion from the Apostle Paul, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” It is much easier to just tenaciously hang onto the way that we have always seen and experienced our world. As W. H. Auden put it, “And Truth met him, and held out her hand. And he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

But I’m aware that what I’m writing now is “nuts” to nearly anyone from my youth that might happen to read this. This does not make any “sense” to a linear mind that is confined to the time-space continuum. But I have learned that it is very possible to escape confinement in that prison and still respect it and those that live in therein. And I, too, can still live within its confines which is known as “reality” even as I revel in the freedom which Christ represented and offers today.

Bruce Jenner, Trans-Gender Identity, & Culture-Wars

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Bruce Jenner, the former Olympic gold medalist and former husband of Kris Kardashian formally announced last week that he is a woman, explaining, “It is who I am.” Our culture provides great liberty with declaring and acting on the choice to “be who I am,” a choice that is not available in most places and never has been. And this is certainly the case when it comes to gender identity. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/arts/television/bruce-jenner-transgender-diane-sawyer.html?emc=edit_th_20150426&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=71726985&_r=0)

Culture has one primary intent—to perpetuate itself and the “certainties” that constitute its bedrock. These certainties provide a culture’s children a template through which to view the world and this template tends to always legitimate the values of the particular culture into which one is born. And one of the simple little “certainties” that one quickly learns is gender identity and this originates when the child learns that his/her “plumbing” distinguishes himself/herself from roughly half of the population. Once that distinction is ascertained, the child then begins to learn what it means to be a “boy” or a “girl” in that culture and then has the task of following the mandate to “get with the program.” Yes, early on there are some children who have “contrary” impulses with respect to gender identification but the cultural mandate historically is overwhelming so that they dutifully obey the “law of the father” and subscribe to “proper” gender identity, repressing any impulses that might be “contrary.”

But Mr./Ms Jenner illustrates a huge cultural shift in my country and in the West. Certainties of the past are now often less certain, even those of gender identity. We are learning that the distinction between “male” and “female” is more nebulous than we were taught as children. And this is a frightening experience to those who cannot handle ambiguity and nuance and are accustomed to seeing things in black-and-white terms. And for many of those in my culture they have an immediate contrivance to rely upon—“It’s of the Devil!” It reminds me of the label ancient cartographers applied to regions of the map which had not been explored—“There be the dragons.”

The unknown is frightening. When faced with the unknown it is human tendency to retreat to what is already “known” and to “hunker down” with that little view of the world which one of my readers recently described as a “querencia.” With this “hunkering down” mentality, one clings even more desperately to what one has always believed and often will merely affirm it with more vehemence. This vehement affirmation often even leads to action, even violent action. Change cannot be tolerated to a hyper conservative mind.

Ultimately we must deal with human finitude and this gender aspect of our current “culture wars” provides us another opportunity. We are finite, fragile little critters running around on this little ball of granite, our frantic activities amounting to nothing more than the Shakespearean “tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.” But if we have the courage, and a healthy dollop of meta-cognition as Shakespeare was blessed with, we will be able to counter the nihilistic despair with the affirmation that, “There is a Divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.” In other words, there is always Hope. But hope is not mindless clinging to the dogma we were brainwashed with as children but to truth that has withstood our heart-felt, Spirit-led, mindfulness-inspired self-scrutiny.

Human Belonging and Connection: Addendum

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One of my readers sent me two responses to my earlier blog about “Belonging and Human Connection” which I want to share.

The first is a poem which reminds me of a young lad I noticed a couple of years ago when sub-teaching in elementary school. He was about seven or eight and by appearance alone was very “troubled.” And then during recess he wondered aimlessly around the playground clutching a large teddy bear. He never said a word or had an interaction with anyone. He just roamed like a zombie.

THE CROWDLESS MAN
By Michael Leunig

See him wandering alone,
The crowdless man,
He has no group,
He has no tribe,
He carries his identity in his pocket.
His pocket has a hole in it,
His story has a hole in it,
His tragedy is not a tune you can hum.
His suffering and sacrifice,
They have no handles;
His persecution has no logo,
No shrine, no yardstick.
His joy has no credentials,
His observations have no fixed address;
There are no awards whatsoever.
His gaze and yearning are way outside the loop,
His pilgrimage has lots of holes in it.
See him wandering alone.
Beaming to himself.
The second contribution from this reader is about creating welcoming space for others by extending our boundaries to those who might otherwise be excluded:

One way of measuring whether our love is genuine, however, is to examine how far we’ve extended the boundaries that determine whom we are willing to be in relationship with. When these borders reach out as far as they can go, there will be no one left outside, there will be no one cursed. There will be no more strangers. Everyone will be welcome.

Reflect for a minute on what it feels like to be welcomed. The word means, simply, ‘come and be well’ in my presence. It’s a fundamental human experience, and a very crucial one. When I am welcomed, I feel good. I can be myself. I relax and feel unself-conscious, energized, happy. On the other hand, when I am not welcomed, I doubt myself, turn inward, shrivel up. I feel excluded, not accepted, and not acceptable. This is painful. If it happens often enough, I will question my own self-worth.

Hospitality means creating welcoming space for the other. Henri J. Nouwen notes that the Dutch word for hospitality, gastvrijheid, means ‘the freedom of the guest.’ It entails creating not just physical room but emotional spaciousness where the stranger can enter and be himself or herself, where the stranger can become ally instead of threat, friend instead of enemy.

[…] That precious experience — when contemplated, cherished, and celebrated — enables me in turn to welcome others: I begin to be less fearful of the other; I start to see the stranger as gift. I become willing to create space in myself to invite the other in, and I open myself to the possibility of being changed by the presence of the other.

I invite the reader to sit with any of the wonderful hospitality stories found in the traditions of all the great religions. Mull them over; ask God for insight into them. Then ask for courage to take small steps in expanding your own circle of hospitality. These might be as tentative as smiling at the stranger in line with you at the grocery store, as deliberate as hosting a get-together for all the strangers in your apartment building, or as dramatic as volunteering to foster an unaccompanied refugee child in your own home. It might not cost you much, or it might mean going out on a limb: Can you imagine yourself during Thanksgiving dinner speaking up to your brother-in-law in defense of the undocumented, pointing out that, really, everyone is kin to us, and everyone has a human right to live where they can support their own family?

(Marilyn Lacey, R.S.M., is the founder and executive director of Mercy Beyond Borders, a non-profit organization which partners with displaced women and children overseas to alleviate their extreme poverty. Sr. Lacey is a California native, and has been a Sister of Mercy since 1966. This piece is excerpted from her book This Flowing Toward Me: A Story of God Arriving in Strangers.
– See more at: http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=1034#sthash.McJ3H2UK.dpuf)

Belonging and Human Connection

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It was morning recess in the 2^nd grade in Magnet Cove, Arkansas and the “BMOC” of our class of 32 announced to the boys, “Alright, everyone with high top boots come with me and let’s chase girls!” Oh I was so proud as I was sporting a brand new pair of high top boots and could join the chase in this customary recess activity in the fall of 1960. It was delightful to realize that I “met criteria” and belonged and I’ll never forget that moment, certainly revealing that “belonging” issues have always been present with me.

Making connection with fellow humankind and “belonging” is a basic human need and we are hardwired to do so, allowing us to form tribes that are the basic unit of human culture. And to establish “belongingness” various “criteria” are always announced, sometimes overtly by decree but more importantly in subtle manners as it is the “subtleties” that really constitute the bedrock of tribal unity. These “subtleties” are the premises which are not questioned, and for the sake of tribal coherence should not be. But the converse of this group dynamic is also present—someone must be excluded as otherwise the group identity would not have any meaning, its “identity” would be tenuous at best. This group dynamic is not “bad” it is just how we function, it is just being “human.” And the same process of identity formation takes place on the individual level, with certain things being accepted as part of our identity and others excluded and often projected “out there.”

But focusing now on group dynamics, the goal for a group is that it will be composed of individuals mature enough to recognize that in the passing of time some of its defining parameters can be relaxed and some persons who have been excluded can then be included. At least the focus of the group’s psychic energy will not be merely on boundaries that constitute its self-definition but on some purpose beyond itself which reflects respect of and value for the world at large. If the focus is merely on what sets a group apart, the group will eventually become a self-enclosed fortress whose only purpose is to perpetuate its mythology. When this happens, the group will find itself at odds with the world “out there” and will often be quite proud of this. This is often found in sectarian religion.

literary lew

prose/poetry/philosophy/religion

Tribute to My Dear Momma!

Anti-intellectualism and “Mindfulness”

President Obama Invading Texas!!!

The “Unity of All Things” in a Poem

“Quintessence of Dust” We Are!!!

Shakespeare’s View on Madness

A Perspective on “Enlightenment”

Bruce Jenner, Trans-Gender Identity, & Culture-Wars

Belonging and Human Connection