Wisdom from a World Traveler

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NOW vs THE MIDDLE AGES

Middle Ages.  Primitive?

Scenario 1 (2013):  Ahhh, I've got a tooth infection cos I got lazy with brushing my teeth (after all, there are too many other things to do).  I drive to the dentist, who prescribes me antibiotics, and I'm hunky dorey in a week.

Scenario 1 (1413):  Crikey, I've got a tooth infection cos humanity hasn't yet figured out that flouride prevents cavities.  I'm in agony and the doctor decides to drain my veins to let out the bad blood.  It may have been a demonic attack because of my sin.  I'm dead within the week.
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Postmodernism.  Advanced?

Scenario 2 (2013):  Consciousness barages me at 5:45am with beeps from my alarm.  I subconsciously tap around on my iPhone to turn it off.  Simultaneously, a myriad of concerns of the upcoming day flood my half-asleep mind.  I snort a goodbye to my family while I bustle out the door, bagel in hand.  I'm running late as traffic encloses me a relentless obstacle around me.  I honk at the guy who's trying to push in.  Someone behind me honks at me.  The audacity!  All the while my emails fill like a boat with a leak in it, perpetually threatening to drown me as I bail out one bucket of a task at a time.  I need sleeping pills to counter the caffeine at night.  Then I wake up to Tuesday.


Scenario 2 (1413):  My favorite rooster's familiar crow alerts me to the blossoming of the first rays of light.  This is the day that the Lord has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it.  I roll over and hold my wife for a little while longer.  As the sun gets stronger, our family sits together eating boiled eggs before the day's work commences.  My neighbors and I are busy helping Mr Brown harvest his field.  When that is done we'll share the profits and rest.  I've known these guys since I was born and the comradery towards a common purpose is perfect.  Everything has its rightful place in my world; everything is a manifestation of God's plan.  (Even the magical fairies that the Brown children spot periodically).  As the sun dips below the edge of the earth, God has ordained that our work day is to close.  I walk across the field to get back to where my wife and kids have spent their day.  My eyes close in a mysterious peace.  Then I wake to the next day's rays.

Comments:
We tend to think of history as linear - ever progressing onwards towards truth.  Time certainly has eliminated a lot of tragedy from the world.  But in it's process, has it eliminated wisdom?  

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God Can't be a Luke-Warm Cup of Tea

     We can’t escape responsibility.  Each generation is responsible for inheriting the world, modifying it and then passing it on.  We only have temporary custody of this planet, but what we choose to do with it will have eternal consequences.  Pondering the profound and ambiguous may seem like trying to read in the dark – a futile attempt to extract meaning in a sphere where our senses are far too inadequate. 

“YOLO; Live for the moment, as long as you’re happy, it’s all relative.”  The acceptance of this apophatic existence may be mere excuses that justify living the way we want to.  “God may or may not exist...who knows, so why let it affect your life?”

See it can’t be a black and white issue.  Either this Entity/Force/Being/Power exists and the structure of things is the way that the prophets, saints and mystics have said it is…

…Or it’s not. 

Like C.S. Lewis said, either Jesus is a madman or real.  If he’s either then a vague respect for Him is inappropriate.

Sure there can be variation on what you see God as, but all the major religions advocate the fact that, since God exists, our lives should be rearranged fundamentally.  That’s the path to true peace.  The amazing thing is that this God, although infinitely bigger and deeper and transcendental, penetrates our lives.  Hello there ants, let’s have a cup of tea.

Boil that tea so that the substance transmutes to a higher state - from liquid to vapor.  Please.  If not, then ditch the tea and get your kicks from drugs.

“What is man that you are mindful of him, the Son of man that ...you set him a little lower than the angels”.  But God prefers human worship to that of angels because we have free choice.

Yes, I know you’re Mommy’s little angel.  Now what are you going to do about it?

 

True Happiness in this Life?

What's the meaning of life?  What is the meaning of that sentence?

Since the dawn of time our species has grappled with questions about the point of our existence.  Sometimes we have driven that point into other people in wars designed to further the interest of "us"; sometimes we have poked ourselves in the eye with that point repeatedly, causing pain and a certain kind of blindness.  "Oh but we've advanced far beyond those primitive days", you say?  Ok well what does our "advanced" culture tell us about what it means to be fully happy in this life today?

"The meaning of life is to be happy, and to cause others to be happy.  Set goals, work hard towards achieving them, accomplish things, prove to others your worth and thereby gain their respect, nurture your family, find your soul mate, live in the moment, get a white picket fence and an iPhone..."

Each of these bombs separated by commas above is a complex, lifetime quest toward achieving a dream that may or may not be in line with Reality.  Ok the iPhone acquisition doesn't necessarily take a whole lifetime, merely the majority.  Fun fact: the highest rate of depression is amongst the rich (money makes you happy?); the highest rate of suicide is amongst psychiatrists (education makes you happy?), and half of the uniting of "soul mates" ends in utter despair.

Don't mean to be cynical here, but let's define the problem.  Maybe the very problem is the lack of a definition: a definition about what it means to be human.  We are very aware that to be human means to have a body, to be of the species Homo Sapien, to be in relationship, to work.  These are objective facts that have been labeled so by the uprising of Rationalism in the Enlightenment of previous centuries.  Verifiable stuff = true, non-verifiable stuff = false.  Is that assumption verifiable?  Never mind. 
It's important to understand the historical context when we talk about things like happiness, because we are not an isolated moment.  In fact the very word moment has been produced by a series of historical interactions, and to ignore where we come from is to ignore where we are going.  We could pass all this up if the issue of happiness wasn't so pressing, but the fact of the matter is that there are more diagnoses of depression than ever before, and the highest incidents of this syndrome are in the developed first world countries.  Ok, maybe the developed countries develop these definitions, and then put themselves in it, but let's set that aside for now.

Quickly, because we need to talk about concrete things in the remaining 100 words too, let's take a step back and look at our progress historically.  We used to live a much more static life, where identity was defined by the role you played in your family and society.  The world made sense because it was all God's mysterious working.  We had our place in the cosmos, and cosmic peace had a place in our minds.  Don't get me wrong, these were barbaric times in other ways, but hear me out.  These people didn't strive under Western Individualism to validate their own worth.  They weren't competing in their own minds against a myriad of other options which they could be doing. 

Ok that touches on where we find ourselves today based on where we have come from: clearly it's the opposite in terms of how we achieve our identity, meaning, and thereby happiness.  That will have to suffice for now.  Let's get to the practical stuff:

We are body, mind, and spirit.  In order to be fully happy in this life, we need to feed each of our constituents. 
The body:  Feed it literally, with good stuff.  It's obvious what is good - things that we were created to eat like fruits, vegetables, nuts, natural meat...and chocolate (lots of it!)
The mind:  Question everything.  Don't accept the paradigm that was fed to you as a child.  That worldview is a product of our parents, the desire for organization that our society has conjured up, and previous thinkers.  Dare to question the very assumptions that they have been based upon, and do your own research to verify the facts.
The spirit:  Look, love is not just a series of neurochemical reactions, and meaning is not just an evolutionarily adapted survival mechanism that makes us feel special.  Don't buy into the rationalists dualism.  Look where they came from and then their reduction makes sense.  But you'll never find true happiness unless you feed your spirit with purpose and a relationship with the Transcendent.  How to do that is another article completely.

Hey, I'm not trying to preach here.  But as someone who is truly happy, and is a mental health counselor by profession, I feel my two cents is worth at least 1.5 cents.  Take it, spend it, invest it, or throw it into a pool and make a wish.  I bet you'll wish for true happiness.

On God and Philosophy

Evolution is self-correcting and so is faith. Evolution needed the big bang and faith needs a first step. Martin Luther King said “you don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” It’s only through the transmutation (tranfiguration) that occurs through the renewal of our minds that we can start to fathom these things. As Aquinas asserts, faith is not a way of knowing that leads to believing, but a way of believing that leads to knowing. Empirical philosophy is trying to put the cart before the horse and then whipping the poor equestrian!

Look, your conception of God is wrong, as are all of ours (courtesy of our finite minds). Although there’s proof that babies and animals have very different frames of consciousness than we do, any ENCULTURATED conceptions of God present in adult rationality are almost certainly flawed from genesis (as in both from the beginning AND also cos of Genesis the book). As usual, the finite symbols of language that we paint our rational consciousness pictures in are too dualistic to accurately speak of esoteric principles. The word “truth”, for instance, has been hijacked by empiricists and applied to a very narrow range of observable phenomena. This wasn’t the only conception of truth that philosophers originally pondered over. Truth is also a way. Its what is meant to be and, beyond human distortion, IS (ie. truth). Scripture says “test the Spirits [cos many can seem wise but aren't] and that “a tree is judged by its fruit”. So you KNOW that you’re experiencing God when the ongoing encounter produces the following:love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and self-control. It may sound cliched but these “fruits of the Spirit” are profound and empirically verifiable (at least psychologically) frames of mind. Seek and you’ll find bruv. It’s philosophers’ prerogative to conduct these kind of mental/spiritual/abstract experiments. You can’t see it as testing GOD (remember He’s not a fan of that). But test the power of prayer and the application opportunities that it produces (by following the inner promptings when the situations arise), and then check for increases in these Spiritual fruits in your life. And walla, you’ve found God. (For yourself at least, it’s a secondary concern to try and prove it to the empirically-obsessed who’s hearts are hardened.)

Specsavers Need to Employ Paul...Just Like We All do

So psychology talks about a concept called “schema”. See humans are efficient (ie. lazy) creatures. Exerting GREY-power is a second preference to exerting STAY power! Our brains all aim to be on those fabled holidays to ROMANIA (remain here)! Generating electrical current in order to make everyday decisions takes more time and effort than our chilled-out psyches are keen for. So lo and behold we’ve figured out a handy shortcut - sticking things in boxes. Have you ever questioned why there are so few items in the exact shape of boxes? Neither have I. Oh, you have?…you weirdo!
See things weren’t meant to fit neatly into four 90-degreed sides. The world’s too diverse and strangely angled for that. But we shove these poor conceptions into their brown-sided Alcatrazes and tape them up. We label these boxes, or “schema” as them psychological people call ‘em, and put them away to be pulled out at an appropriate opportunity. Next time we see a dude with pink spikey hair (usually every third Wednesday of the month) we whip out the punk box and try to neatly place the guy in it. Imagine how the brother, in his fanatical attempts at individualism, would resist being shoved into four brown corners! I mean if they were orange or pink corners that might be a different story but brown’s for frikken SQUARES man!
Look out! You’re likely to get a spikey pink chunk of hair to the eye!

Anyhoo, these schemas can be activated, or “primed” by exposing someone to a relevant stimulus beforehand. They did this experiment where they asked people to solve word anagrams. The group who had words relating to aging were proved to walk slower down the corridor on the way out of there than the control groups! In a huge way, the framework that we use to interpret the world affects our behaviour (including inducing the need for a FRAME!) This behaviour, in turn, affects people’s reactions to us, thereby creating self-fulfilling prophecies!
Same thing with watching violent movies. “They” (you know, those enigmatic yet official academics) proved that being exposed to violence promotes, say, reacting more aggressively towards someone who steals your parking spot. Come on man, has this recession made you too stingy to give a brother the benefit of the doubt?! (Ok ok, you’ve got me. This is all a big conspiracy to get you to chill out so I can nab your parking places!).
So its all about frames…lense frames. If the lenses we view life through colour it to such an extent that it defines our reality, then our trip to Specsavers may need to be taken more seriously as its outcome will form the foundations of this trip called life.

Now how much wisdom does Paul’s passing comment imply when he tells us to meditate on the true, honest, just, pure, lovely and good. etc.? Meditate on it, chew it, digest it so that it becomes part of your being. You are what you eat. Such wisdom…and from a world two millenia before psychology reared its inquisitive head!