The Formative Myth of Humanity (Video Podcast)

The Formative Myth of Humanity: Who Am I? Who Are You? And Where Are My Trousers?

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Mark Twain, once proclaimed, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

From our first breath to our last, we are continually faced with the fundamental questions: Who am I and why am I here? At birth, our identity begins in our mother’s gaze. We see ourselves through her eyes. If she is happy, we are happy. If she is anxious, we are anxious. Our sense of safety is merged into the existential haze of parental protection and fallibility.

As the calendar ticks off days, months, and years, we begin to differentiate from our parents, discovering our own needs and values apart from them. We learn to set boundaries—initially in the power of a cry, and then eventually, by the force of the word “no”. Often, we do not even comprehend the import of setting boundaries beyond the discovery that it gets a reaction from our caregivers. We begin to develop a sense of our own power as an independent organism that, at the same time, is dependent on others for our well-being. As we grow, we experience joy and laughter, hunger and pain, comfort and fear--uncertain of the source and meaning of this ambiguous existential dilemma called “life.”

Developmentally, we are in a primal dance between our separateness and relationship--between our individuality and community. As we inculcate a sense of our solitary vulnerability in relationship to the world, we find meaning and purpose in a societal narrative that either reinforces a bias towards or away from one another.

On one hand, if we experience the world as dangerous, insufficient, and combative, we may develop a conservative view of power, which effectually defines a political hierarchy of the powerful exploiting the powerless. This develops into an immature morality of selfishness, greed, and immature competition.

In this dysfunctional social hierarchy, one’s identity will either become conflated in some uneasy narcissistic bubble of the perpetrator or deflated in a fog of perpetual victimhood. If we identify with a narrative of powerlessness, we become easy prey to the powerful--those who identify power as the ability to control others by exploiting their fears and vulnerability. However, this thirst for power and control is merely in compensation for a deeper unacknowledged fear of powerlessness.

Relationally, an exclusionary narrative of scarcity, fear, and paranoia leads to separation and isolation. Our assumptions of authority may alternately become fixated on ourselves, or others, or even some specific cultural, religious, or political ideology dictating our “place” in society. Our personal power and authority become objectified in a belief in our separateness—that we are forever alone in a dangerous world.

On the other hand, if we experience the world as safe, adequate, and supportive, we may develop a liberal view of power based on the shared value of each member within the whole of society. This principal framework of security, competency, and symmetrical responsibility develops into a mature morality of compassion, generosity, and cooperation.

In community, we see ourselves as adequate within a reasonable sense of our own capabilities, supported in our limitations by the capabilities of others, and replete in our own capacity to help others in need. We consider ourselves as committed participants, members of a larger organism, a community of diverse individuals with valuable skills and interests.

Relationally, an inclusionary narrative of sufficiency, hope, and empowerment leads to cooperation and community. Our power and authority are internalized in a belief in our mutual responsibility towards the common good, inclusive of ourselves in relationship to others. Safety emerges from the adequacy of shared resources and accommodation.

Thus, we have two diametrically opposed mythologies of humanity--one based on scarcity and the other based on sufficiency. And yet in practice, we innately hold them both in an uneasy détente within our psyches. There is a non-linear developmental path from the juvenile myth of our inadequacy and dependency to the adult myth of empowerment and interdependency.

In life, there is one certainty--growing up is hard. It takes time. It takes work. A five-year-old child doesn’t just decide one day to put on a suit and tie and head off to get a job as an aerospace engineer. Becoming emotionally, spiritually, and morally mature is no different.

It takes curiosity and education to internalize the rational and moral narratives that define a practical vision of what personal and relational maturity might look like. It also takes practice and experience to develop healthy relationships, inspired by a history of both failures and successes that breeds humility and empathy towards others, and a sober assessment of ourselves and our own limitations.

Love versus control circumscribes this developmental journey. On one hand, Love inspires a commitment, acceptance, and openness to the truth, whatever it may reveal—to breathe life into one’s essential being and the essence of others. On the other hand, Control compels the refusal to accept what is, and then, forces an inauthentic dogma or foreign ideology upon ones moral or relational framework. Control takes life away from what is true and feeds some authority construct in order to transact favor or benefit, or else to remove a deeply felt curse or wounding.

As such, in ancient times, humans would carve images of wood or stone representing whatever they feared or desired, those powers above and below that one perceived had ultimate authority over one’s life. They, then, offered up food or other valuables to transact the benefits of these gods.

Archetypally, humans, in modern times, haven’t changed. Religions haven’t changed. And Politics haven’t changed. Our methods of controlling our sense of fate are given a veneer of modernity and a contrived sense of potency but are still essentially the same. The worship of wealth and power, sex and control, life over death, are all still at the heart of modern idolatry—the attempt to control the unfathomable and mysterious powers that we perceive control us is still at the core of modern life.

Inherently, we continue to be anxious idolators bowing to the performative gods of modern society, transacting our souls for a falsified promise of peace and safety. Our modern sensibilities want instant gratification and instant responses. We look to substances and stimuli to change our immediate frame of experience—a perpetual celebration of sex, drugs, and rock’n roll. We look for self-help books that give us ten easy steps to happiness. We read blogs and follow cultural and social media influencers to tell us how to live our lives. We see pastors, priests, rabbis, mullahs, and even therapists as people who will just tell us what to do to become free of our demons.

In fact, we are prey in a dangerous world looking for some authority, some guru, to give us meaning and purpose. Propaganda, dogma, and cult narratives are easier to accept when the Masters of Media tell us who is the villain that makes us feel diminished and afraid. But what each of these perpetrators of despair has in common is that they each take power from us; they release us from the struggle and responsibility of our own work to grow and mature. So we become prisoners of our own devices, and the master becomes our jailor.

In the course of opening up our boundaries to others, to experience our authentic empowered selves, it takes time and deliberate engagement with our own fear-based narratives to facilitate healing of our past woundings and acceptance of our vulnerabilities.

Fundamentally, the landscape of our soul is suffused with festering pitfalls of past incongruities and woundings that prevent us from traversing directly and deliberately to some idealistic notion of adulthood. In our life’s journey, we develop experiential triggers in response to our past wounding that habituate our response to stressful circumstances. Inevitably, we predictably and ineffectually repeat the same stories over and over. The deeper the wounding lies within our subconscious, the less choice we have in responding to these triggers. The force of existential terror, the monsters from deep within us, grow as we associate our vulnerability with violence, death, and destruction. We are driven to protect and to control our vulnerabilities at any and all cost, counter-intuitively, even at the price of destroying ourselves in order to hide from them.

The harrowing story of Nick Cutter is an American tale of a hardworking man with a simple dream of building a home in the woods, settling down, and marrying his girlfriend Nimmie. However, the tale takes a dark turn when Nimmie’s jealous employer is unwilling to lose her hardworking employee to this anticipated idyllic life and so she pays a local witch to curse Nick’s work tool, his axe that he is using to build a woodland home for his beloved and himself.

The next day, when Nick swings his axe to chop down a tree, he, instead, chops off his arm. Fortunately, a magical tinsmith is able to fashion a new functional arm for Nick out of tin. Nick goes back to pursuing his idyllic dream only to cut off his other arm. The tinsmith again fashions a new prosthetic arm out of tin. Nick is undeterred. He is focused and determined to pursue his plan to build a house and marry Nimmie.

As the story continues, this cycle of self-destruction repeats itself with Nick losing both his legs and his torso. Each body part, in turn, is replaced by the magical tinsmith. Finally, Nick swings the cursed axe only to cut out his heart. This time the magical tinsmith is not able to fashion him a new heart. Without his heart, Nick’s simple dream of an idyllic life with his beloved melts away and he is left alone in the woods to rust away.

In the end, Nick becomes a victim of a larger system of exploitation and greed that jealously guards its industrial machinations. He paradoxically loses himself within his obsession to attain a simple life, progressively sacrificing his body for a dream that was doomed to fail.

In the human struggle to find a home, a place to feel safe, secure, and comfortable, we inevitably suffer frustration and disappointment. We begin to replace our vulnerable dreams with the artifice of impenetrable armor, a false identity. As we obsessively work towards a distant fantasy of a life of leisure, we progressively lose ourselves, never living an authentic life in the here and now.

Thus, in the face of this perceived sense of adversity, we are continually faced with the fundamental question: “Who am I?” However, our identity does not evolve hermetically in isolation, but rather it emerges in response to our vulnerabilities, and in context to the quality of our relationship with family and community.

Ultimately, the path to safety, our salvation, from these intrinsic forces cannot be dictated by an outside observer, but rather, is founded in a unique personal narrative of what experiences makes us feel unsafe or vulnerable.

The journey to health and safety begins when we become honest with ourselves as to what these vulnerabilities are that we spend endless amounts of time and energy to protect. These insecurities ultimately knit together our personality strategies that define our identity.

For a few, there may be some prior revelation, or experience, or self-reflection that enlightens them to what motivates their foremost fears. But for many, this remains hidden in the dark recesses of the subconscious, buried by their rational defenses, motivated by an overwhelming fear of facing one’s fears. Thus we ignore, and we hide, developing impregnable personas to face the world. Even those who think they know, quite often don’t, for this very same instinctual dilemma buried deep within the subconscious.

A common misperception is that all we need to do then is to shed light on the darkness, to become aware of the monsters, and this intrinsic terror and dysfunctional behavior will magically cease to exist. But healing is a process that takes time and effort to integrate and rebuild the dysfunctional narratives.

The genesis of discovering “Who I am” begins with the willingness to unravel the false identities that we have developed to help in coping, in surviving, against the insatiable hunger of these protective demons.

So “How do we face our demons?” This is the ultimate paradox. How do you un-defend that which you are most invested in defending; that which makes the safety of the lie, the false self, more desirable, seemingly more powerful than the truth of the authentic self. While we often perceive ourselves, the product of empirically founded modernity, as “rational beings,” it is precisely this same drive to make sense of the world that perpetuates our selective biases, our rational defenses against that which threatens our self-perception as being rational and moral entities.

We isolate and encapsulate anomalous ideas and experiences, those enigmas which cannot be integrated into our prior beliefs about ourselves without letting go or reforming our identity. We push these experiences deep into the darker recesses of the subconscious--out of sight, out of mind… except this doesn’t actually work. Rather than one integrated personality, a bastion of rationality and truth, we are actually fragmented beings, an aggregation of multiple sub-personalities, any of which may become dominant at any moment, triggered by some unintegrated narrative from the past.

At this point, if you were hoping that I would give you three easy steps to enlightenment and relational maturity, you will be disappointed. I don’t have any simple answers for you. I am not an expert on your life—in fact, nobody is. However, as a fellow human being searching for answers, it is my intention in this series of presentations to build maps to a suggested destination of psychological health and well-being based on both contemporary and ancient studies on human nature.

As such, a map does not fundamentally dictate a path, it merely shows the many possibilities. The traveler must choose their own path to their own subjective destination. In reality, there are many possible destinations, many dead-ends, many roundabouts, and many directions to get somewhere other than where you stand now. Inevitably, many folks will choose to remain in the safety of some familiar whereabouts, regardless of a better future beyond the horizon, what Henry David Thoreau described as lives of quiet desperation—resigned to the continuity and predictability of a mundane life. Lost to the potential of life’s heartfelt adventures and concealed beyond unconscious despair, they never venture further than the portals of the castle walls they have built to protect themselves--and yet, which also paradoxically constrain them.

In contrast, the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell encouraged, each adventurer to follow their own call to fulfillment, explaining:

The heroic life is living the individual adventure. There is no security in following the call to adventure. Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be. To refuse the call means stagnation. What you don’t experience positively you will experience negatively. You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.

Some may already be on their own adventure to discover who they are. Others, while not ready now, may eventually respond to a deeper calling to adventure at a later time. While no path is prescribed and no solution solves every problem, this is resolved, as Campbell points out, if we each engage our own calling—our own dynamic path.

In the previous story of Nick Cutter, he was left to rust away in the woods. His girlfriend had moved on and married another guy. His dreams are buried and forgotten. But that is not the end of Nick’s story. Eventually, the time comes, when Nick is called to a new adventure, set on a path to rediscover his heart.

Initially, the focus of Nick’s new journey is a powerful magician, a legendary wise man who can solve any problem. Nick trusts that this sage magician can give him a new heart. He joins three other adventurers who likewise hope that this sage magician can resolve their most fundamental vulnerabilities.

As their journey unfolds, the team of adventurers encounter numerous trials and tribulations. In the course of these challenges, what they perceive to be their vulnerabilities unwittingly become their greatest strengths as they work together to support one another down the colorful road they travel, ultimately bringing them to safety.

However, when the adventurers finally reach the “all-powerful” wizard, they discover that he is a powerless fraud, hiding behind a false persona created to maintain power and control over his dominion, the land of Oz. The wizard’s real name is Oscar Diggs, or Oz for short.

Oscar succumbs to his unveiling. Letting down his own false persona, he helps the adventurers realize that what they truly need was already deep within them, buried by their fears, doubts, and false expectations. What they were looking for, they already had.

Nick realizes that he is more than just a Tin Man. While the dreams and expectations that had enveloped his earlier life ominously collapsed, buried underneath his Tin Armor is an authentic heart filled with genuine compassion and empathy.

My opening screed is but a sketch of a much larger picture that requires a greater investment of time and intuitive engagement by the individual seeker. I am but a fellow adventurer—an artist, writer, technologist, and student of both depth and experiential psychologies. My focus has been on the spiritual quest to open up the deeper dimensions of the narrative psyche, the soul, in relationship to others and our essential humanity. There are certainly many paths for the adventurer to explore to assist them on their journey.

My specific bias, based on training and background as a psychotherapist, is in depth psychology as well as creative arts and drama therapies. As such, I have endeavored to engage the non-rational channels of transformation through intuitive and embodied techniques already embedded in the psyche, as well as in culture and society. There are many other types of therapists and techniques that may facilitate opening up the personal narrative and experience of the individual, which one may explore. Historically, there is also the individual path of the spiritual quest—the hero’s journey into the calling of the unknown—archetypally, wandering down the untrodden path, stepping beyond one’s fears and expectations.

And then, unfortunately, as I alluded to previously, there is the more common path of spiritual entertainment, blindly following a path set by others, at a safe distance, to experience a figment of some truth, without actually getting your feet wet. For some this may be as far as they are willing to risk straying from the familiar. Yet still for others, the testing of the waters is an essential step to some future immersion into the psychic backwaters stirring deep within their soul.

In this series of presentations, at best, all I can I do is stir the waters, to help the adventurer imagine different possibilities in their life. Psychological growth and repair are not passive tasks—it takes an investment of time and effort by an individual to develop their personal and relational narratives.

Initially, I have committed to develop ten episodes, and then, I will reevaluate whether there is an audience that finds the subject matter interesting or useful, and whether I have anything else to say. This series of presentations is an expansion of a blog I started over a decade ago with the same name “Notes Between the Lines.” I will subsequently use this older blog to post the transcripts of these presentations. Some of the material in this series will be a simplification and amplification of matters I have addressed more academically in my book “Serpent in the Cellar—Love and Death in Life and Myth.” But I do not feel constrained by any previous exploration. I may traverse any incongruous rabbit hole that I find intriguing at the moment, wherever my disparate curiosities may lead within the general subject matter of psychology, creativity, and spiritual growth.

In this esoteric role of “stirrer of waters”, as I have previously stated, I am not and cannot be an expert on your life. And I have no experience or interest in being some sage guru, some mysterious authority who sits upon an ominous stage, or on top of a lofty mountain, dispensing wisdom, which seems to be the hallmark of many podcast gurus, social media influencers, and other self-proclaimed pundits.

I am, however, quite fond of sitting on top of mountains that I encounter along my own path, both proverbially and in actuality. There is much beauty and truth to be found gazing out beyond the horizon that brings a renewed perspective on one’s life—to see beyond the walls that enclose one’s mundane expectations, while deflating the immensity of one’s struggles and issues that seem to loom so large in their everyday world. These are moments we are meant to share between one another as fellow travelers.

As the lowest clouds envelop the highest peaks, we are drawn into a much larger universe. There is a moment in the depths of the traveler’s journey where they are invited to let go of their fear and false expectations, to step beyond the horizon, beyond what is known, beyond what one can see. I recognize that many will choose to step back down, below the clouds, to retrace their steps, retreating to the concrete world from which they came. But a few will choose the untrodden path of their own hero’s journey. It is for these few that I dedicate this series of presentations. Whether or not you have reached this fork in your path yet, I commend your courage, whether or not you realize it yet. May you find the depths of truth you seek, and the quality of relationships you desire.

 

Podcast: Notes Between the Lines with Tom Strelow

Searching for Humanity in a Postmodern Age of Technology, Paranoia, and Propaganda

The Power of Narrative to Build Community

A common parlor game asks: “If a genie were to grant you 3 wishes, what would they be?” A typical answer might be to have more money, more authority, or just more stuff. Or else more charitably, one might wish for world peace or an end to world hunger. Typically, our answer comes out of our personal sense of scarcity or limitations—what is overwhelmingly lacking in our life? What makes us feel powerless and afraid. 

As a primitive psychological state, this sense of Scarcity quite often overshadows our life story, defining the dominant or privileged narratives that make up our identity. On the other hand, Sufficiency, as a counter story to Scarcity, is a sense that comes from a mature developmental resolve that we are empowered to engage our needs and problems competently and constructively. To find an authentic answer to our need for safety, we must look beneath the narrative of "Scarcity and Sufficiency"—to examine what it is that makes us afraid, or to feel vulnerable. 

Archetypally, vulnerability in story and life has often been symbolized by nakedness. In the biblical myth of Adam and Eve, eating the fruit of morality did not, in fact, make them naked. It merely made them aware of their vulnerability, inspiring fear that some imagined adversary might harm them, which then drives them into hiding. Within the Scarcity narrative, vulnerability is intolerable. It constitutes an existential threat that drives us to protect ourselves from whatever dark forces lurk in the shadowy recesses of society, nature, and our souls. The transformative dynamic at the heart of the biblical mythology is the personal power to let go of our fear of imperfection, insufficiency, or failure—to accept our own vulnerability as we accept the vulnerability of others—which then draws us into community, to find support and safety in the diversity of the common good. Over the course of history, this capacity for humans to cooperate and work together has been essential to our survival. Contrary to the modern libertarian ethic, rugged individualists rarely survived alone against the world. 

Socially, however, fear can spur us inward into an exclusionary moral dynamic of ”us vs them"—founded in political and religious institutions and hierarchies overseen by authorities and systems of control. It is often cultivated by a deep-felt sense of victimhood—that there are strange or foreign powers opposing, attacking, or diminishing us in some way. As long as one is captive to this dynamic of fear and victimization, there is no real path to authentic or mature realization of love for one's fellow man. A prosocial morality founded on an inclusive communal relationship—a "universal human family"—is broken down by fear,; dividing us into cliques, tribes, and warring factions. This is the paradox of the religious traditions that idealize "love" while tearing down our sense of personal power that is necessary to love and accept one another in all our perceived differences, imperfections, and vulnerability. 

Psychologically, humans are by nature storytellers. We transform our experiences into intrinsic narratives that identify who we are. The psyche can be imagined as a stage upon which these identity stories are triggered by new events and reenacted. Many times, our fears cause us to privilege certain conservative narratives that hold us captive to repeat the same stories over and over, like familiar spirits that haunt our souls, unable to move on. We become our disabilities, never able to progress, to find our intrinsic power, to become mature human beings in all our potential to love and relate to one another. 

The construction of the psychological narrative, or storytelling, is the fabric that knits us together—the collected stories, built upon a lifetime of experiences, that define our identity. This, then, is the power of narrative, as we shift from an identity of scarcity to sufficiency, to realize that we need one another to be sufficient. Community is the responsibility to support one another-—reaching out to others in need, and then allowing them to support us in our own limitations. Acceptance of our own vulnerability, letting go of our fear, is the foundation of mutuality and community—being empowered to love one another.

The Power of Uncertainty

The paradox of uncertainty--calling out our fear and vulnerability in the face of the unkown while offering us the possibility of something new and suprising in an unexpected episode of our lives.  A door creaks open to a dimly lit room.  We see something in the shadows barely detectible.  Between memories and imagination we entertain the multitudes of phantoms and specters of fables and foibles drawing us inward to the shapes hidden in the grayness.  We project our fears into the darkness and are rewarded with the chill of our own nakedness staring back at us in a foggy embankment.  It is in this moment we can choose to turn away and return to the relative safety from whence we came or to reach forward to embrace our naked selves to bring warmth and comfort to that which stands exposed, to encloth our uncertainty with an openness to what is possible.  When we cease to try and control or reject that which we fear, it begins to have less control over us; we begin to see ourselves in the darkness and with each step forward we see the brokenness that rises in the mist. 

The power of uncertainty is the power of possibility just as the power of certainty is the power of disillusionment.  When we fail to dream, we fail to live fully and truly honest lives.  The walls we build to protect us eventually imprison us. We are doomed to lives of despair having failed to challenge the steep walls which surround us; we crave their sturdy protection and they give us the cold comfort of carefully crafted stone stacked one upon the other until we can no longer look out to the world beyond.  Our isolation makes us safe.

Love is not possible without uncertainty; it is wholly dependent upon it and cannot exist without it.  When we try to control others, our emotions, or our situation we destroy the possiblitily of love.  Love and control are opposites.  Love is the possibility of the uncertain happening in relationship to another.  It is the doorway through the walls we have built for ourselves.  It is a window into the soul of our shared humanity. 

Life is by nature uncertain.  No matter how many times our heart has beat in the past there are no guarantees that it will beat in the next moment or next after that.  We can accept that uncertainty and live moment to moment; or we can refuse to accept it and build a fantasy world of our own creation to retreat into, hiding our emptiness behind material and sensorial splendor.  We can shut ourselves into castles of solitude or catherals of religious devotion.  We may relish in our victimization at the hands of powers not of our own accord to explain away our inability to find satisfaction.  Or we may huddle with the masses doing what we are told to do and believing what we are told to believe.  Living our lives in quiet desperation.

Creativity is living in uncertainty; reaching out into the liminal space just beyond the known to embrace the treasures buried in the darkness and making it our own we share it with others.  For creativity cannot happen in walled fortresses; for it is an expression of our naked selves given to the world not knowing what will come back to us in return.  It feeds off the joy of uncertainty and discovery taking us further down the road into the deep forest we were warned not to tread by the timid gatekeepers and stallwart custodians of social convention.  Uncertainty is chaos and from chaos comes creation.

In the Between--Trying to Find a Way Out

I live in the in-between. The world is typically viewed as quite cartesian in its cosmology--things are black or white, right or left, up or down.  But that’s not the world I live in--I live in a world of neither and both. 

I wanted to be an architect at an early age because it was both technical and artistic.  We live in a world that likes things to be well classified, one or the other.  Often the question is asked in bemusement are you right-brained or left-brained, more logical-verbal or spatial-nonverbal.  We like right brained, reality based thinking, they are the technicians that make the world happen.  Artist are the left brained, weird spatially groovy creatively inclined types.  They are a minority in our world but nevertheless an accepted archetype and function in our society.  Obviously, the two don’t mix well.  Yet, I am both.  (In the process of pondering this point, I even took a quick online Right-Left Brain test and came out a statistical tie at 51:49 percent.)

As an undergraduate I got my Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science (at UCLA we called that South Campus, the hard sciences) but I spent much of my time studying history, psychology, architecture, and art (if you hadn’t guessed that was North Campus).  Later I went back and got my Masters of Arts in Depth Psychology and then postgraduate certification in Drama Therapy and Experiential Psychologies.  Professionally I ended up as a technical consultant in Information Technology, the more lucrative choice for someone with the capability of comprehending the big picture, communicating that with the stakeholders, and then breaking it down into byte size computer code.  Although with my bi-spherical orientation I have the distinct sensation of Doctor Frankenstein, feeling every sinew and nerve of my glorious creature (yes I know I am whacked, but I really do get off on it--I sometimes wake up late at night overcome by an effervescent mad-scientist chortle... oops did I say that out loud?)  On the other hand, in regards to our right brain world, we don’t really value psychological health that's what drugs and alcohol are for, the comparative economist early on said, not a good career choice; but for me it was a necessary field of study.  It was not a career path as much of a life path, which I am still trying to figure out.  If nothing else, I just needed to understand me (a rather expensive form of personal therapy I might add.)

So on one hand I don’t fit into either world but because I am in the middle I actually fit into both, as long as I try to keep my big mouth shut.  I have the unique opportunity to co-exist, to disprove the primary hypothesis of things must be black or white, right or left, up or down. 

However, I guess at times I feel like I am hiding, no matter who I am present with.  I feel like sort of the Ugly Duckling, a misfit in the middle of duckdom.  It doesn’t matter if you see both sides, if no one really cares or wants to understand that the world isn’t the way they want it to be.  People want it to be just the way they see it.  Anyone who doesn’t see it their way is stupid, ignorant, foolish, fill-in the blank.  I can argue both sides of the argument, and lose them both.

What makes it worse is that I am a deep intuitive.  I go in between the between.  I see what is and what it will become; projecting the possibilities out.  Try mixing that with an expertise on personality theory and psychoanatomy on a date with someone you just met.  Needless to say I am still single.

Of late I am exploring what this all means.  How I fit into the world.  How I make sense of it.  How do I explain myself in terms others might understand.  How do I arrive where I think I am suppose to be.  How do I complete what I have started.  I think they call this a mid-life crisis.

I am a successful businessman.  I have accumulated more than most people have in an entire lifetime.  I am in the middle of a number of projects that express my enjoyment and purpose in life—including building my dream home (I never became that architect, so I am building me my own version of what a 21^st century home was suppose to be ala a futuristic 1960’s George Jetson meets Star Trek by way of Frank Lloyd Wright.)  I am halfway through writing a book that expresses my passion and advocacy for psychological and spiritual health laid out in what I hope is a creative manner.  I have a great community of friends who I trust and believe in.

 Yet time ticks away and I feel stuck.  I feel at odds with a world that I both understand and don’t understand.  A world I guess I am suppose to help change for the better according to some subliminal voice that attached to my cerebral cortex sometime around the age of 5, but somehow it still looks the same as it ever was. 

I suppose the big lesson is don’t drink two glasses of wine (actually I think I am gonna top this one off before I finish this sentence) and then try to make sense out of life in a pretentious format like a blog.  I am sure none of this will make sense tomorrow.  Or then again, maybe it will all make sense….  I guess it just depends on which side of the bed I wake up on whether the right or left.

If this is the last blog I write it's because I figured it all out.  I will be waiting for you on a exquisite precipice somewhere in the Himalayas where you will find me sitting on a modest but impressive stone pedestal.  You may then approach humbly and ask me one question...  ahh...  I said one question only, so think carefully...

Otherwise tomorrow morning I will be sitting in a booth at Woody's Diner and you can ask me whether I think the Daily Special is all that good....

Imagine--A Day of Remembrance and Hope

In the middle of an ideologically based war against an enemy that some would argue intended to destroy Western democracies, capitalism, and the ideals upon which America was founded, one wacked-out hippy had the audacity to invite the world to imagine a different kind of world, a world of peace, tolerance, and acceptance; in his words to "imagine all the people living life in peace...  the world will live as one."  Ironically, shortly thereafter a gunman put a bullet in his head, and it seems a dream died with him; an end of an era of soul searching and idealism that was John Lennon.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the tragic events of  September 11, 2001 when some 3000 victims of various nationalities, citizenship, and religions lost their lives due to an attack by "Islamist Terrorists" a term used to identify a group of self-described revolutionaries bent on purifying the Islamic world of Western influence and restoring a medieval Islamic caliphate throughout the traditional Islamic Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and South Asian crescent.  While a few Islamist mullahs did espouse broader worldwide ambitions, the main focus was on the medieval Islamic territories which predated Western colonization and territorial demarcation.  America was not the target of the jealousy of  impoverished stone age peoples lusting after American wealth and freedom as Bush shortly after 9/11 tragedy absurdly and naively declared, in his own words, "America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world."  Rather America was attacked because American foreign policy has been instrumental in maintaining a system of oppression and impoverishment that pervades the post colonial Islamic world by direct economic exploitation of regional resources and by support of corrupt dictatorial regimes that actively and brutally suppress their own peoples.  The truth is that we Americans are often hated in these third world parts because of our history of deception, exploitation, and at times violent intervention; including our political support of Israel, whose dismal human rights record in the takeover and homesteading of the Palestinian territory after the British receded in the 1940's, has instituted a decades long struggle between competing views of who did what first.   More accurately, the attack on America was a strategic salvo to repress or destroy American infuence in the world in order to bring down the regional powers of the Islamic crescent in a worldwide revolution which these Islamists hoped would rise up in the aftermath.  However, the religious and social basis and support for such a military take over of the Islamic crescent is dubious at best and universally denied by the majority of Islamic (and non-Islamic) peoples in the region.  They may still resent American meddling and abuse (usually making a distinction between American policy and American people) in what they perceive to be helping to institutionalize their suffering and oppression, but most have no desire to replace one authoritarian state with another in the model of the repressive Afghani Taliban.

In the middle of another ideologically based war against an enemy that some would argue intended to destroy Western democracies, capitalism, and the ideals upon which America was founded, a contemporary of Lennon's would famously reimagine peace entirely in a great example of Orwellian Doublespeak stating, "I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."  The statement was made in 2002 by then president of the United States, George W. Bush, after having just gone into Afghanistan to ostensibly find and punish the leadership of Al-Qaida who claimed responsibility for the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks on 9/11.  Eventhough the Taliban had nothing to do with attacks and offered to gather up Osama Bin Laden with others in Al Qaida and send them off to be tried in a Muslim country, the Bush Administration reimagined the war as being against the Afghani Taliban which they argued had provided safe haven for the Al Qaida militants while they were preparing for the attack.  Shortly after that Bush would reimagine the war on terror as including Iraq eventhough they also had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.  When the original flimsiness of the Iraqi terrorist argument fell apart (though the propaganda was very effective as years later the majority of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks), the Bush Administration invented the idea of a "preemptive strike" based on contrived and unfounded evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction which was firmly disputed by most regional experts including the inspectors who were on the ground in Iraq.  Ultimately the predetermined invasion was architected by Bush's Neoconservative administration based on long standing principles laid out in their Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century policy written in September 2000, which argued that:

We must restore the foundation of American security and the basis for U.S. military operations abroad... The current American peace will be short-lived if the United States becomes vulnerable to rogue powers with small, inexpensive arsenals of ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads or other weapons of mass destruction. We cannot allow North Korea, Iran, Iraq or similar states to undermine American leadership, intimidate American allies or threaten the American homeland itself.  (p.75)

The document goes on to recognize that the Neoconservative policy of rebuilding American's military preeminence as the unchallenged superpower "is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." (p. 51)  This poorly veiled attempt to justify the predetermined military opportunism resulted in arguably the greatest public backlash in world history with as many as 36 million showing up to protest the impending invasion in the early months of 2003.  Somewhere in the process "truth" took a bullet, lost in the middle of a war of propaganda and deceit to win a war that quickly lost track of the identified reasons that those who supported it, claimed justified it.

After ten years, however, the same ignorance that led us into this mess still pervades the public discourse in news, blogs, and commentaries.   The great American philosopher and pacifist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, insightfully stated, "Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding."  Yet, ten years in to this venture,  Muslims are still viewed by many Americans as enemies of the good Christian American people in spite of the fact the Muslims are inclusive of the American social fabric making up around one percent of the populace and, moreover, very few of the one billion Muslims worldwide support the Islamist agenda.  The fabled take over of America by Islamic fascists under Sharia law has paralleled a more real militant form of Christian fascism bent on taking over the American government enforcing a Christian fundamentalist agenda and practice in law and government conduct.  The Islamic battle cry "God is Great" (Allah Akbar) has been supplanted with the Christian battle cry "God Bless America" in an overt attempt to weaponize God, invoking the Almighty to destroy one's avowed enemies.  Hopefully there are many who have come to understand the facts of the struggle we face, to build bridges of tolerance and acceptance, but on the street level the evidence is that the American mob mentality is still ridiculously committed to the war propaganda that  9/11 was an attack on Christians by Muslims who envy America's freedom and want to take over the world, and furthermore, that all Muslims are hate-driven, co-conspirators.  Any modest attempts to try to rebuild relations with the Muslim world by the current Obama Administration have been characterized as traitorous and un-Christian.

After ten years, then, are we any closer to peace?  Mother Teresa once remarked, "If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other."  Aside from the aforementioned distrust of all things Islam, America, today, is more divided internally than it has in decades, if not ever, with the rhetoric and propaganda reaching monumental proportions.  Hatred fills the blogosphere with obfuscations, ignorance, and shameful accusations and attributions, with no light at the end of the tunnel.  The clear leader in the demise of the American commons, is Fox News with their absurd self-description as "fair and balance" while unabashedly proclaiming their advocacy of what they describe as conservatism.  Yet theirs is not a conservatism that is founded in Jeffersonian democratic ideals of respectful discourse yielding to a greater public good based on value judgments of a defined set of facts and evidence.  Rather it is a authoritarian conservatism  devoid of any intelligent discourse of conservative principles or respect for the majority of Americans that disagree with their perspective which they argue should be foisted upon the American system under the simple argument that "well the other side is wrong so we should just do it the right way, our way."  As with all authoritarian propaganda their arguments are based on deliberate distortions of the facts to manipulate an emotional response to a crass compendium of juvenile name-calling, fear-mongering, and overt distortions of a polarized straw-man universe of their own disturbed creation.  It incites a breakdown in civil discourse that preempts and prevents any discussion of the public good necessary for a democratic society.  It condescends any attempt to find the obvious middle ground that benefits the majority of the citizenry while protecting minority rights.  It is purely a world of "us and them," in the most ugly and despicable displays of partisanship and arrogance, in the aphoristic tradition of "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face" in which everybody loses.

Ten years ago, in the moments right after the attack, the world was for a moment unified in its resolution and disgust for the perpetrators who in many cases had killed many of their own nation's citizens in the World Trade Center.  Those who were traditionally critical or even antagonistic of America throughout the Western and Islamic world were prepared to unite and cooperate with America in changing this unsavory world order that had just raised its ugly head.  Sadly, Islamic terrorism probably could have been stopped dead in its tracks at that moment cutting off public and material support and bringing the perpetrators to justice through broad cross-national cooperation.  But this was the defining moment that the Neoconservatives were waiting for to push forward their plans to build the military preeminence of the United States.  This was quite literally their "Pearl Harbor" that justified the policies and programs they had been promulgating for years.  In transforming the human tragedy into a political strategy, they alienated the world forum and instead justified the hatred upon which perpetrators were fueled, turning the perpetrators into heroes in many parts of the world as icons of resistance to American hegemony.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. once remarked,

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction... The chain reaction of evil — hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars — must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

Ten years later, certainly many things have changed but we are still at war on two fronts.  After years of torturing and humiliating thousands, the resentment burns deeper than ever.  After trillions of dollars spent in support of our best and brightest military strategists, we have succeeded in boxing in the foes, killing many of their leaders including their chief leader Osama Bin Ladin.  But even from the beginning it was known that this is not a winnable war; there is no final humiliation or domination of the enemy that ends in any peace treaty or resolution.  The only exit strategy is to break the cycle of war and violence; to go back to the first few moments of the human tragedy of 9/11 and reclaim our common humanity.  This was not an American tragedy although it effected us profoundly and deeply as a nation.  But in the truest sense it was a human tragedy and horror that included victims from nearly every region of the world, a tragedy which we shared with the world; and which can only be resolved when we recognize that very connection to the world.  Imagining the most basic quality of our shared human vulnerability--trust and respect.  Imagining a world where all the people live life in peace; in the dream of which John Lennon spoke--"the world will live as one."

May God  bless those who have striven to peacefully rebuild America's spirit and community through compassion, tolerance, and hope.