Tag Archives: self-reflection

A Further Sojourn Into Hannah Arendt’s Prophetic Work

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I continue to explore the work of Hannah Arendt from which I shared in in recent posts.  And, from this blog-o-sphere that I participate in I have received nice feedback as well from friends I know in real-time.  Arendt’s work details how the absence of critical thinking will leave one mired down in the unacknowledged recesses of the mind and heart.  This venture into the heart’s machinations is disillusioning and frightening. Arendt offers us a powerful exploration of totalitarianism and its impact, individually and collectively on critical thinking. Without it a mind-set emerges and marches on, grim faced and determined to cling to preconceptions and biases that harm themselves and others, lacking any “interior dialogue” or self-talk.

In my morning sojourn through the cyber world today, I discovered related wisdom that I would like to share.  The first is from Gene W. Marshall in his book “Jacob’s Dream,” in which he writes from what I would describe as a post-modern view of Holy Writ:

Spirit freedom is not the same thing as the so-called free will that is often written about. The ego (as I have defined it) has free will but the ego’s definition of free will is limited by the ego’s definition of itself.  The ego is a construction of the human mind.  This construction may allow for the presence of some elements of our essential Freedom.  But because it is a human construction, the ego also restricts the full expression of our Spirit Freedom. (As I noted in last week’s blog, “We want only what we want.” and cannot see beyond our narcissistic view of the world. “The world is my oyster”!)

Here, Mr. Marshall’s thought leads us directly into the abyss that I shared from Arendt’s observations about Hitler and totalitarianism.  My vein of thought was very convoluted and even involuted as I tried to put into words that which cannot be put into words. This effort can take us into a murky world which is very “Zen like,” a state of being which I used to formulate in terms of “the working of the Holy Spirit.” And this biblical formulation still has merit for me.  The Apostle Paul described this process as the “Spirit” furrowing into the depths of our heart where we can “discern the thoughts and intents” of our heart, individually and collectively. (I recall a note by Rumi pointing this truth out in 13th century Iran, “Out beyond the distinctions of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”)

In the on-line journal, “The Mind Matters” I also discovered this morning a paragraph from Andre Gorz that is relevant:

For society is no longer to be found where it institutionally proclaims its existence…Society now only exists in the interstices of the system, where new relations and new solidarities are being worked out and are creating, in their turn, new public spaces in the struggle against the mega-machine and its ravages; it exists only where individuals assume the autonomy to which the disintegration of traditional bonds and the bankruptcy of received interpretations condemn them and where they take upon themselves the task of inventing, starting out from their own selves, the values, goals and social relations which can become the seeds of a future society.”

Gorz, who was a Marxist philosopher, captured the dynamic dimension of a social body and described bringing it to life, paralleling the process of a“human body”…an individual… self-reflect ing itself into “coming to life.” His term, the “interstices of the system” in sociological thought parallels our own individual heart in which components are roiling about in an effort to come to grips with our interior life, aka those “thoughts and intents of the heart’ that the Apostle Paul wrote about. This process can produce “life”, aka “Life” that is beyond the pale of the perfunctory life that our world offered us as a child. This makes me want to scrutinize further the bromide from my youth, “being born again.””

I know that my thoughts here are again convoluted and involuted.  I am trying to summarize that life is more than we know it to be.  I am more than I “think” that I am and I live in a world which is more than it “thinks” it is.  I am exploring a dimension of life that is mysterious and incomprehensible.  I can never “figger it out,” I can only pay attention to what is going on in my heart and what is “going on” out there as I “chop wood and carry water” for another day. Presently, I can only “pay attention” to the glory of a beautiful doggie lying here beside me, the cup of coffee I’m sipping, and the crackling of the fire in the wood stove. Shortly, the morning will begin to dawn and I will saunter outside into the cool of the morning air, pay homage to the plants and flowers that are thriving, and bow before the majestic tapestry of morning stars that linger before disappearing for another day. One poet described this as the mystery before which we can only, “glory, bow, and tremble.”

 

Hannah Arendt And the Importance of Critical Thinking

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Hannah Arendt is visiting me this morning!  Yes, she dropped by in the form of one of her books and I am fully taken by her grasp of the Hitler era and the workings of the mind. In scholarly culture, if you think of totalitarianism you inevitably think of this woman because of her book, “Origins of Totalitarianism.”  But her visit this morning is via another book of hers, “The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation of How We Think.”

We usually do not think about “thinking” because we are too busy thinking, too busy with the white noise we are accustomed to. To “think about our thinking” is to bring to bear thought upon the very process of our “thinking,” or cognition. This complicated involution of the mind is one dimension of the thinking process and is commonly called, “critical thinking.”  Arendt’s work posits the notion that if we are not willing to employ  “critical thinking” there is a sense in which we are not thinking at all but are “thought” by what are merely the machinations of our unconscious mind.  As a result of this, we are carried along life’s way by a subterranean conglomerate of unacknowledged premises and assumptions which do the “thinking” for us. Someone once said, “Our thinking is but belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”  In simple terms, “We think what we want to think.”

This is a very complicated vein of thought I am presenting here and merits further explanation; but that would take me too far from what I am trying to present.  In simple terms, Arendt teaches us that if we never get beyond “thinking what we want to think” we become easy prey to totalitarianism.  There is sense in which we are imprisoned by our very thinking and will make decisions that can be catastrophic in the long run.  This is what Socrates told us about in his famous “Cave” allegory, a delightful summary of which can be found in a cartoon—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWOpQXTltA

Here is a brief selection from Arendt’s “Life of the Mind”:

Non-thinking, which seems so recommendable a state for moral and political affairs, also has its perils. By shielding people from the dangers of examination, it teaches them to hold fast to whatever the prescribed the rules of conduct may be at given time in a given society.  What people get used to then is less the content of the rules, a close examination of which would lead them into perplexity than the possession of rules under which to subsume particulars.

The “non-thinking” which Arendt’s work explores relies heavily on that term, “subsume particulars.”  This refers to taking in what we read or hear and “subsuming” it into “categories” which lay unexamined in the realm of perception.  Here in perception, as opposed to cognition, one can reject anything coming his way that is antithetical to this perceptual field.  Within the perceptual field lies unquestioned assumptions and biases which almost always “dictates” our thinking, ruling out anything not consistent with our view of the world.

Back When I Knew I Was Right….

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I got saved when I was eight years old and I knew that the Holy Spirit came down, “like a dove”, and entered my soul and was then guiding me in “all truth and righteousness.”  I had been taught that this was the truth, and the Bible clearly told me that was so, and the Bible was the Word of God.  I knew that no one could quarrel with God.

But now I have grown up, some six decades later.  “When I was a child, I spake as a child,” but now I see just how I had self-deluded.  I do not blame this on the faith tradition I was born into; they were doing their job, offering me the rudiments of a faith, one in which I still find great value. When I began to grow up in later teens and then in my twenties, I could have found the courage to think for myself but I refused to do so, opting to draw the blinders even more tightly around my consciousness.  The notion of my finitude, that my very view of the world was a flimsy, a cauldron of the timidity and insecurity that characterized my life at that time, was a vein of thought I could not handle.  The specious “certainty” offered me a citadel that I was not able to discard at that time.

But now, as I view the tragedy that is gnawing away at the soul of my country, I see so clearly how that certainty is deadly.  It is deadly in that it is so effective at thwarting the vulnerability that is intrinsic to being an “alive” human being.  As long as one can cling to certainty, and whatever contrivances that give him that certainty, he will be “fine” in his deluded sense of reality. And when this certainty is not checked, is allowed to metastasize, something like Trump is likely to happen.  If we are lucky Trumpism will be checked before it reaches its full-flowering with an expression of Isis lunacy.self

Republican Party Stymied by Its Own Self-Referentiality

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Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is not “playing fair.”  The House has impeached Trump, but she is refusing to formally passing the formal impeachment document to the Senate where it has already been determined, and announced, it will not go anywhere.  The Republican Senate is now crying “foul play” as according to them the protocol clearly calls for this impeachment referral to be simply passed on to them.  But Pelosi is refusing to do this until she has the reassurance that a “fair” trial will take place, including one with witnesses. It is very ironic that the GOP is now diligently calling for protocol and “the law” to be followed though they have systematically followed the bidding of Trump to over ride such niceties when it serves their own interest.

 This is very revealing about the heart of this matter, and all matters of any magnitude involve the heart.  Yes, the GOP is correct that the Democrats have an agenda here, an “ax to grind” if you please, but then who doesn’t?  The Republicans have hoisted themselves on their own petard, hypocritically accusing the Democrats of the very thing they have assiduously practiced throughout the Trump administration…and before.  The GOP does not see that it too, like all humans, has “intentionality” though they readily see it with others.  But to those who lack “self-awareness”, the gift of at least rudimentary meta-cognition, there is no “intentionality” with themselves there is only the proclamation of what “is true.”  They fail to see that what they see as “truth” is a self-serving perspective and subject to the review of the rest of the human race.  But if you are locked in your own narrow little view of the world it is frightening to loosen the lock a bit and come to find that there are other viewpoints that need to be considered.  The more rigid one’s “narrow little view of the world” is the more difficult it is to loosen this lock a bit; at times for some it is not possible.

 Poet Emily Dickenson has a little quip that is so relevant, “The mind too near itself cannot see distinctly.”  She realized that a mind that is knotted into a self-referential ball of yarn, pulled tightly, it cannot see clearly.  It can only see what it wants to see, even if it is harmful to themselves and to those around them.  This is clearly seen in a religious cult; it is very telling that many people are seeing the Republican Party as very “knotted,” comparing the predicament of that party to cultic behavior.

Language is Nuanced and Contextual

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Ben Carson is now on stage with Trump, playing his part in the daily clown show.  He almost immediately made a splash when in his first speech after taking office as Housing and Urban Development Secretary described slaves on slave ships as “immigrants.”   When he was immediately criticized over this statement, he responded with, “Look up the definition of immigrants.”

Carson is another demonstration of the Trump administration’s lack of appreciation of nuance in language, reminding me of the former Supreme Court jurist, Antonin Scalia who argued, “The constitution means just what it says.”  Conservative politicians, and theologians, are literalists and do not consider the contextual dimension of words.  Though these very same persons will readily argue that one who cries “Fire” in a theater does not have the right to do so, that venue being one one “context” which is relevant to the use of words.

Carson replied in response to critics of his observation, “Look it up in the dictionary!.”  He is right, “immigrant” means someone moving to another country.  However, the notion that a black person in the bowels of an 18th century slave ship was an “immigrant” is just absolutely ridiculous.  And, though this is only obliquely related, let me show you a photo of Ben Carson and Jesus in his household, the nuances of which are highly comical.

If only I was skilled with photo-shop, you would soon see a picture of myself with Jesus and Buddha on either side of me, arms around me and myself with a beatific smile.  This photo is such a stunning example of how Ben Carson, and so many of the Republican Party, have no idea of how they are coming across to the onlooker.

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

Emily Dickinson & “Internal Difference”

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In one of my favorite Dickinson poems, quoted a few days ago, she describes a descent into the interiority of one’s soul where is found “internal difference where the meanings are.” In modern terms this descent is an openness to one’s unconscious which is given us if we start paying attention to the whims and fancies that pass through our mind…including those that are unsavory…as well as to dreams.  It also involves enough “self” awareness to begin to ask, “Why does this always happen to me” as we recognize repeated patterns of behavior in our life and find the courage to tolerate the suspicion that it is not necessarily someone else’s fault. But focus on this subterranean dimension of life is dangerous to those who have spent their life on the surface, busying themselves with the baubles that life tosses their way, “like kittens given their own tails to tease.” (Goethe)

This adventure was described by Dante at the beginning of The Inferno as a journey into “the deep forest” for in the forest conveys a childhood fear of getting lost; and, on this journey one pretty well has to “get lost” at sometime.  Here is an excerpt from a W. H. Auden poem which describes this risk:

Heroic charity is rare;
Without it, what except despair
Can shape the hero who will dare
The desperate catabasis
Into the snarl of the abyss
That always lies just underneath
Our jolly picnic on the heath
Of the agreeable, where we bask,
Agreed on what we will not ask,
Bland, sunny, and adjusted by
The light of the accepted lie.

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ADDENDUM–I am about to diversify with 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

 

What is Going on with Evangelical Christians???

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Donald Trump continues to give my clinical mind plenty of “stuff” to play with though much of what he does and so is very scary for the sake of my country. One thing that staggers my imagination is how that he is handily winning the evangelical Christian vote over a much more egregiously Christian candidate, Ted Cruz, and in spite of stances and statements which are anti-thetical to everything Christians stand for. It is as if evangelical Christians have said, “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.” He can so or do anything and his numbers will continue to rise. In fact several months ago, he brazenly declared that he could stand in the streets of New York city and shoot somebody and “my numbers would still go up.” And even with that contemptuous observation about his constituency, he numbers continued to rise!

Two significant evangelical pastors have endorsed him. Jerry Falwell Jr, the son of the founder of the Moral Majority and the present founder of Liberty University, declared Trump an “outstanding Christian” as he endorsed him at Liberty University and then proceeded to listen to Trump use expressions like “What the hell” several times in his speech before the student body. I was thirty years old before I used that expression! And the pastor of First Baptist of Dallas, Robert Jeffress, endorsed him early in the campaign but did not cover his awkwardness real well. When Trump opened his arms to embrace the pastor, I remember noting that the pastor looked like a girl at the high school prom who was forced to embrace a disgusting football jock who she found repulsive.

But I think I understand why the Christian constituency is willing to overlook basic teachings of their faith and support such an unsavory man. Early in the campaign I was listening to one of Trump’s speeches on TV and had to share with my wife, “Wow, I understand why he is so popular! I want to give him at ‘atta boy.'” For his populist fervor and rhetoric appealed so readily to memories of my past when his simplistic solution to complex problemsappealed to me. “Make America Great Again” appeals to me still on some unconscious level though my reptilian brain is now countered by self-reflection.

Several evangelical voices have dared to confront their “family” and pose the question, “What about simple decency?” For example, Trump has publicly made fun for one of his critics for having a physical deformity, a physical deformity similar to what Jesus described as a “withered hand.” (This man’s entire arm was “withered”.) And on another occasion, he ridiculed a Fox commentator who is disabled from the waist down for not being able to stand on his own two feet. I was, and still am horrified with these two events. And evangelical Christians merely overlook it! And, furthermore, Trump has repeatedly revealed on TV that he has incestuous thoughts about his beautiful daughter but we never hear anything about that…other than Trevor Noah!

I can just imagine what other countries are thinking now as they witness this spectacle. And, the amusement and horror are justified as this phenomena does reveal something about our character, not just that of the Republican party.

“Apocolypse Now”—Always Near to Some

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Two days ago Senator Ted Cruz presented his stock-issue tale of woes, wrapping it up by saying, “Your world is on fire!” An alarmed three-year old girl in the crowd innocently asked, to no one in particular, “Is the world on fire?” As the crowd chuckled, Cruz tried to soften the blow with an answer but he had done his damage. This young sweetie had implanted in her innocent little heart the knowledge that the world is a dangerous place and doom is near at any moment.

Well, the world is a dangerous place and “doom” is possible any moment in that misfortune or even death is always a possibility. But Mr. Cruz and his fear-mongering allies know that trotting out a litany of woes and emphasizing impending doom is a perfect way to impact the old-brain fear-base that we all have and is especially predominant in his party’s base. Now three-year old children are very impressionable but so are these “low-information” voters that predominate the extreme of Cruz’s party. I, too, have a fear-base but I also have a neo-cortex that allows meta-cognition and the ability to formulate a hopeful scenario even in the face of apparent “doom.” For example, I am aging and the River Styx is fast approaching but this dreadful notion is not as frightening to me as I’m able to approach the end of life with hope. (So far, anyway!)

Being a Christian like Mr. Cruz, I subscribe to the notion that “Perfect love casteth out fear” but I think this should disallow fear as a political ploy. Though not a politician, I do not have any reason to subscribe to, much less constantly promulgate, a litany of woes when there is so much to be grateful for and so many opportunities before me. But, if I was a politician in the Republican Party, I too would probably have “drank the kool-aid” and know that fear-mongering…or “catastrophizing”…was the sure-fire way of winning over the base of my party. Certainly the ills of our society and of the world need to be addressed, but focusing on these issues to roil the masses is cheap and even tawdry.

 

GOP Facing God’s Judgment!

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Matthew 12:36-27 “I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”

I used to interpret these words of Jesus to mean that some time in the distant future I would stand before God and listen to Him remind me of ugly and stupid things that I had said and done in my life. But now think that one dimension of the “judgment of God,” occurs at those moments when “reality” confronts me with the lunacy of a particular vein of thought that has preoccupied me, influencing my speech and my behavior. Some of these “judgments,” especially from my youth, still make me cringe with the realization, “How could I have said that? How could I have done that!” Sometimes the angst is so intense it is even visceral. These are my “Rick Perry moments” when I realize I had completely made an ass of myself; and, yes, I often respond with Perry’s famous, “Oops.” For, our words reveal what is going on in our hearts, that unconscious domain which we can never “know” in the sense of “wrapping out head around it.”  But these “Rick Perry moments” have helped me to learn that this region of my heart is ever present and offers many opportunities to learn something about myself.

The Republican Party in the U.S. Congress is currently being exposed to this same “judgment of God” as the “The Letter” they impulsively wrote to Iran is being deemed “ill-advised”  by many.  Some of those who signed this letter are voicing second thoughts about the decision and criticism from outside the GOP echo chamber is mounting. But having “second thoughts” about our thoughts, words, and deeds, individually and collectively, is part of being a human and the self-reflection can lead to modifying one’s agenda. This is listening to “reality” rather than stubbornly and blindingly continuing on a course of action or with a vein of thought simple because it is too painful to acknowledge to oneself and others, “Oops! I was wrong.” This simple self-reflection is a God-given neurological gift if we have the courage to use our forebrain to monitor old-brain impulses.   But for those moments when we fail to do so, we have the T. S. Eliot wisdom, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill-done, and done to others harm, which once we took for exercise of virtue.”

The unconscious fear of being exposed is intrinsic to human nature. But I have learned that the pain is more bearable since I found the courage to acknowledge that I always have so much I’m hiding and that when bits of it surfaces I should see it as a gift, albeit a painful gift!  I think it was Ranier Rilke that said, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.” The God-given gift of self-reflection makes the moments of vulnerability less intense and allows me to say, “Oh there you go again, being human!”

Having the “thoughts and intents of our heart” exposed often evokes the feeling of being “wrong.” But this feeling of being “wrong” is ok as we are all only human and will always find ourselves subscribing to ideas that are self-serving and ultimately counter-productive for everyone. But when we are trapped in our ideas…when we are ideologues…we are so invested in our ideas that we cannot allow them to be modified by the feedback of others. People who cannot acknowledge and experience this fear of being wrong, i.e. the “judgment of God,” will likely spend their lives projecting their anguish onto others, seeing the “wrong” out there and often seeking to obliterate it. As psychologist Martha Beck noted, “You spot it, you got it!” People obsessed with attacking and condemning others for being “wrong,” are merely diverting their attention from the painful challenge of the Apostle Paul to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

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AN AFTERTHOUGHT—Well, the Apostle Paul’s suggestion is a good one but after thinking about it, I’ve decided, “Bah humbug! I’m gonna continue to blame those dang Republicans!!!  Listen, I’m “preaching” here and don’t think I should have to “practice what I preach!”

(For more info on the backlash the Republicans are experiencing, see the following link—http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/14/gop-iran-letter-criticism_n_6868398.html)

 

 

 

 

“Beastly Little Treasures” of the Heart

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“Your defects are the ways that glory gets manifested. Whoever sees clearly what’s diseased in himself begins to gallop on the way.” (Rumi)

It is not fun to acknowledge our limitations, the minor ones and certainly not the major ones. Jesus noted that it is easier to focus on the mote in someone else’s eye than pay attention to the beam in our own. But spiritual teachers throughout the centuries have taught us that staring our demons in the face, “naming them”, is the way to deliverance. But, it hurts like hell! And, if you approach spiritual literature carefully, you have to wonder if one dimension of hell is living in the anguish that lurks beneath the surface when we refuse to “name our demon.” Or to phrase it differently, hell is refusing to acknowledge the anguish of our inner torments. This deliberate ignorance of these torments does not make them go away and probably makes someone near and dear to us pay for them.

I think it was Ranier Rilke who said that the heart has its “beastly little treasures.” In one of his essays…or poems…he said that if one has the courage to confront this “beast” face to face, stare in down, he/she will discover that beneath it lies the Pearl of Great Price.