AUTONOMIC PATIENCE AND WALTER CANNON

Neuroscience and especially psychophysiology have many reasons to thank Walter Cannon (1871-1945), a renowned physiologist in his day and a popularizer of scientific concepts stemming from his research into the autonomic nervous system that keeps all of us alive. His book, The Wisdom of the Body (1932), paved the way for the ongoing interest in the mechanisms by which the body self-regulates. His initial studies involved the regulation of digestion but later spilled over into other aspects of homeostasis and the processes of which we are not usually aware but which have their own autonomous functions.

The autonomic nervous system has two main components: the sympathetic branch and the parasympathetic branch. Each is a counterpoint to the other in the back and forth that characterizes our normal daily metabolism. The parasympathetic system is composed of four branches: the vagus nerve, the facial, oculomotor, and glossopharyngeal nerves. Cannon recognized early on that there were many layers to the functioning of these two branches, processes of which occurred in response to stimuli external to and within the body. He initially researched the mechanisms of digestion from chewing and swallowing to elimination. And he also determined that psychological states could impact the functioning of the autonomic system as a whole, thus implicating the mind and the body as a holistic system. We now take much of this for granted because of all the work that has been done by those scientists standing on Cannon's shoulders.

What fascinates me is how autonomous the intricate systems are but also how our knowledge of them now allows us to have some conscious effect on how they operate in certain situations. Cannon characterized the sympathetic response as “fight or flight” (“freeze” was added later) and the parasympathetic response as “rest and digest.” Most people don't recognize the connections present day techniques involving the body have with our basic physiology. But how could they not? What we experience as input from our senses is relayed to sites in our bodies, sites that are intimately connected with one another. These connections are the subjects of contemporary research. For instance, the functioning of the parasympathetic branches other than the vagus moderate responses we have to other sentient beings by way of facial expressions (facial nerve), tone of voice (glossopharyngeal nerve), and eye contact (oculomotor nerve). In these times of persistent social isolation, our need for physical contact in some form (actual or virtual) becomes a forceful impetus in the calming and restoring process of emotional stability. When face-to-face contact and communication is absent then we experience an increase in stress leading to frustration and sadness as well as depression.

What we recognize now, too, in relation to the vagus nerve is that the flight/fight/freeze response is an instinctual response to threat or trauma. We are hardwired to respond to danger as a way to avoid death and a way to promote survival. Of course, we are no longer confronted with the dangers faced by our primitive ancestors, but the primitive neural response is physiologically intact as far as can be determined. So, we might not be in any danger from marauding saber toothed tigers, but we do confront traumatic situations nearly every day in one form or another. It is now known that repeated or persistent stressful situations can have deleterious effects on the heart and vascular systems. Blood vessels constrict sympathetically in order to divert blood flow to the organs that will extract us from danger; the muscles, the liver, the lungs, and the heart. Over time, with exposure to stressful environments and situations, we layer on a more permanent and disabling functioning of our bodies. There is even evidence now that this underlying adaptation to stress can be an inherited tendency in our offspring without actually changing the underlying genetic code, work done on Holocaust survivors and their children, for instance, and called epigenetics.

Cannon's research was on the cutting edge of physiology at the time but many of his experiments and insights are still the basis for our understanding of how complicated the mechanisms of our bodies are in their totality. The physiological systems that maintain their own homeostasis within the complex of interrelated systems and of which we are usually unaware are integrated to provide the body with the means of normal functioning. As they go about their work, they support not only the body but also what we call the mind, not a surprise, as all systems are interrelated and interdependent. Normal physical health manifests as normal mental health. The distant effects of the gut microbiome, for instance, are the subject of contemporary research into how physical systems impact brain function in both the waking and sleeping states. Enzyme systems and protein metabolism in the bowel are significant contributors to brain blood flow and this effect has implications for conscious thought, including instinctual emotions. Cannon's research focused on the effects of epinephrine and other obvious chemicals on fight and flight. The fight/flight response occurs, it seems, on an instinctual, hardwired, platform of cascading effects throughout the body when one is challenged with danger or any other fearful circumstance. This effect occurs prior to any conscious recognition of the threat and exists to avoid extermination and to support survival. Survival means that reproduction and persistence of DNA can be preserved in the population. So it is with the survival instinct of most animals.

The countering effects of the sympathetic response (fight/flight) are those of the parasympathetic nervous system. Whereas the gut clamps down during a survival challenge, it opens up to “rest and digest” when the threat passes and the parasympathetic nervous system is predominant. This functioning is also at a subconscious level and trades off with the sympathetic nervous system response. We could not survive if all we had operative was a constantly turned on sympathetic response. We could not tolerate the constricted gut, the constricted heart with its rapid heart beat, blood vessels constricted producing hypertension, the steal of blood flow to the muscles at the expense of the brain. We would be in a constant state of high alert without any way to calm ourselves.

What recent neuroscience has revealed is that there are emotional states and physical states associated with our present lifestyles that exhibit this chronically turned on sympathetic response. Not only soldiers from war zones, but also anyone subjected to chronic stress are now known to have what is described as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). The triggers for this response are often obvious, such as those related to combat in war, or repeated sexual abuse, but many are now believed to result in very subtle versions of PTSD. It is much too early to tell, but it is suspected that the chronic political, economic, and social disruptions manifested over the recent years (poverty, food insecurity, coercive and oppressive political regimes resulting in large scale migrations) have created situations of chronic sympathetic overload. The high alert activity of the nervous system has translated into emotional fragility with a loss of dependable sources of stability, a loss of meaning, and a subsequent loss of hope.

What is true for the functioning of the sympathetic nervous system as a silent engine is also true for the parasympathetic branch. However, unlike with the sympathetic branch, it is possible to consciously engage the parasympathetic system and to use its calming effects to short-circuit the effects of the fight/flight response and return to a more stable emotional state. We are not necessarily at the mercy of the survival instinct because what challenges our survival now as a species is no longer represented by the saber tooth tiger or the marauding lion. We have more complicated threats like climate change, economic collapse, a viral pandemic—all of which are so complex as to be almost incomprehensible and inchoate. Fight and flight don't make sense in the face of these threats but our nervous systems don't make the distinction between the threats we see before us and those that we perceive “out there” somewhere in the surrounding universe. As a result, we are on high alert more often than is good for our physical/mental health.

The interventions we can enlist to bring us back to a state of calm and emotional stability are now known to include various practices that include body movement (tai chi, qigong, yoga, or other forms of exercise) and a focus on the breath which also engages the parasympathetic system and has been used as an entry point to contemplation, meditation, and prayer—all ancient methods of conserving focusing attention (mindfulness), and calming. In these ways we are making way for a mindset that promotes greater expansiveness and openness of perception. This is how we open our hearts and minds to our own miraculous metabolism and that of others. By starting with our own bodies and minds we are able to bring into our awareness the bodies and minds of all other beings and things.

One of the remarkable aspects of this greater openness and acceptance is how this can lead to the virtues we now find so elusive in our culture imprinted with the signs of instinctual survival. We have the ability to trade the primitive fight/flight response for one of intentional care, patience, love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. In this way we can control how we respond emotionally by staying in contact with our bodies, cultivating those practices that assist us in calming and in seeing what life offers less as a threat and more of an opportunity to share. We begin to see that what we share as humans in all cultures and groups is greater than what separates us by ideology or dogma.

We have Walter Cannon to thank for the wisdom of the body he was able to define by research. His experiments provide the background even today for the knowledge and simple techniques that support our best selves in our daily endeavors because we can approach them with greater calm and perspective. We don't have to decipher the scientific data in order to benefit from what Cannon discovered. And we have the ability and the capacity to make the most of the beneficial aspects of a body system devoted to our well-being, just as its counterpart sympathetic system supports us when we need it in different circumstances. We have some control over what the body provides us. It is a useful intention to live life as much on the parasympathetic path rather than on the sympathetic one to promote our individual health as well as to bring us into common cause with all others in all corners of the globe. What is universal about the adaptations of our species could become the universal response we need at this point in our evolution. The universal response would be to support the parasympathetic path for all of us as a path towards patience, peace, and prosperity.

10-31-20

JULIUS/GHOST

Ghost: the spirit of a dead person, especially one believed to appear in bodily likeness to living persons or to haunt former habitats.

the center of spiritual life, the soul

a returning or haunting memory or image.

“Ghost” is the word I am looking for here. Jacob sent me an article to read on Robinson Jeffers in which there was a reference to his Tor House and Hawk Tower, all built by Jeffers of native stone. I replied to Jacob that I had a memory of the rock cottage at Mesa Vista, also built of native stones by dad and his brother, Uncle David, when they were young. And I mentioned Julius, my mentor in stacking dry wall stones at Mesa Vista. Jacob asked for more of a memory about Julius. That is what turned my thinking to ghosts.

As you will see as you read along, there is much here about stones and building with stones and what that might mean to those of us who have experienced this obsession. Even though the subject has a more recent reference, there is a thread to it that winds back in time to another stone building, that of the Tower that Carl Jung built for himself over many years. I will start there before going on with my own story.

In his book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), Jung has a chapter on “The Tower.” He originally conceived of this tower as a place of simplicity, something resembling a primitive hut. But as time went on, he found that he needed something more substantial in which to live. He added several annexes over the subsequent years and with each one the stone structure took on deeper meanings for him. There is an underlying appreciation for the building materials, the stones, themselves. He mentions one stone in particular that was intended to fit into the structure but which hadn't been shaped that way and he saw that it had a different role to play in the overall plan. When I was working on my own stone walls, I never picked stones for a particular place in the wall I was working on but always felt there was a place for every stone somewhere and so I took the next stone off the pile and worked it into the wall. Jung's original structure was a place of maternal and familial care (the hearth) and was built after the death of his mother. After his wife died, he added a tower that symbolized his maturation into old age. In each case, the stones selected and the buildings built had specific meanings for him, almost a dedicatory practice. That is the way I felt about the walls I built.

“It might also be said that I built it in a kind of dream. Only afterward did I see how all the parts fitted together and that a meaningful form had resulted: a symbol of psychic wholeness.”

He believed that his stone structures were inhabited by different spirits, one of which was Merlin.

“His story is not yet finished, and he still walks abroad.”

At one point in his story he is certain he hears a parade of people singing, laughing, and talking but in his waking/dreaming state he doesn't find anyone after a search of the tower. It was only later that he made the connection with another spirit from his classical studies.

“Such phenomena demonstrate that premonitions or visions very often have some correspondence in external reality.”

Interestingly, he makes a final statement about his own version of history and it echoes now a recurrent theme in our present circumstances. His history is, of course, tied intimately with his own past and the history of all those whose roots we share.

“Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the 'discontents' of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.”

“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass ….”

I think Jung is bringing us back to the very complicated formulas that define humankind. His own experiences are informed by the history embedded in his memories and dreams and reflections. He makes the case that our visions, our apparitions, our ghosts are as real to us as the reality of every day experiences. In that light, let me take up my own story of one ghost that appeared in my own personal reflections.

Ghosts are sometimes thought of as frightening apparitions that visit people in sleep and sometimes, as in Dickens' A Christmas Carol, bring messages of admonishment or warning. My ghosts have never been frightening and when they come to me they encourage my memory of them in many ways. And that is never anything but something of a mentoring spirit, very supportive and encouraging and persistently inspiring. So it is with my Julius Reinig ghost. And that is how I will develop the memory of him for Jacob and the rest of you in this week's letter.

This entry gives me a chance to document some of the thoughts I have been having about him and around him this past week. Thoughts around anything other than politics at this point before next week's election indicate something at a different level of perception and that is a welcome relief from the relentlessly dismal reporting on politics. So, this is a matter of substituting something wonderful and inspiring for something toxic and penetrating. But what are ghosts for if not for bringing to someone a message of inspiration and deep connection?

I have many ghosts of this kind, like Julius. They visit me when I am reflective and separated by degrees from the surface din of activities on Main Street. They come to me and are reminders of one of the nuanced and deeper levels of love. As I have thought about Julius and his effect on me and my life, love is the word that settles emotionally. There is nothing academic about my ghosts. They appear as they were in real life, teachers of enormous lessons. Often, the ghosts were my teachers when I was very young. They were available to me in ways that people closer in the family, mom and dad, were not. All of them saw me as a fleshly person, truly saw me for who I was at the time. For them, I was not a clinical specimen (as with dad) or part of a blur of children (as with mom). I was noticed and nourished by the connection, each ghost in a separate and different way, but always genuinely regarded with kindness and, yes, love. I don't believe one can genuinely regard someone else as they truly are in a state other than love. I felt embraced in a substantial and warm way by each.

Julius was one of these ghosts. He and I worked together several summers at Mesa Vista where he was a groundskeeper. I was too young, maybe 13 or 14, to get a regular job, even though most of those early summers were also times to mow neighborhood lawns, which I did in addition to working with Julius. The rock cottage was still standing at that time, even though it had not been used since all the adult Navajo natives had returned to the Navajo Nation, a time when they could be treated for their tuberculosis on the reservation. The rock cottage, then, was a place to store the tools and small equipment Julius needed for his outdoors work. It was there that he and I shared our lunch times together in the cool of the cottage basement during those hot summer days.

I was assigned to Julius to work outside doing whatever he wanted me to do. This was mostly mowing or moving hoses to water the lawns and flower beds, all of which he kept with such precision and care. As the first summer wore on, he had me helping him with some of the stacked rock work on the terraces he was building around the front of the nursing home. They were to eventually blossom into masses of irises, one of the few flowers that didn't require extensive watering but which bloomed resplendently in mid-summer under his care.

Julius collected the stones for the walls from the fields around his house which was some distance out of town. He would load them into the trunk of his passenger car, the only vehicle he could afford. And he did that over many years, one load at a time, a few stones in each load. The work of handling the stones was a welcome task for me because I was at that time a fat kid. I admired my classmates at the time who were athletic and in good physical shape. I thought the stone work would help me to be more like them. The work of laying stone under Julius's tutelage turned out to be more than an act of physical conditioning for me. I look back on that time now and realize how porous my emotional life must have been to have been so affected by his mentoring attention. I'm not sure what he saw in me but he trusted whoever I was.

During lunch times we would chat and once I asked him how he could keep his shirt sleeves rolled down all the time when it was so hot to work that way. He rolled up one sleeve and showed me his sharply tattooed identification number of many digits (we were then only 14 years beyond the Holocaust and the end of World War II). He said he kept it out of sight but could never keep it out of his mind. Over time that summer he told me many stories about his experiences as a Pole coming from an area of Poland that had suffered invasion, occupation, and reversals over many decades. He explained about Auschwitz, just an angry and sterile blot in my own educational experience. Most times I would have to ask a specific question but he would always answer. His memories were never couched in bitterness or anger. And, in fact, he could recite verbatim the speeches of Hitler broadcasted over all inmates in the long buildings that housed the prisoners. I could never understand how someone as evil as Hitler could so mesmerize his victims. Even now, it is hard for me to understand this part of brain mechanics and history but such a thing is made more believable with our present circumstances.

Julius had his own ghosts that visited him all the time. He recalled some of them for me. He told me about how he and several of his fellow prisoners would accompany the sickest to the filthy communal bathroom and tend to them as they lived out their abbreviated lives soiled and starved, just doing what was possible and called for in the midst of impossible circumstances. His stories were graphic but unlabored and not told in any way to make his efforts there to sound anything more than they were for him—one human helping others. The least sick tending to the dying. He survived and attested to the role of chance in his survival. Yet, his ghosts never troubled him in ways a thirteen year old boy thought they should.

I suppose I made a subconscious connection between this man of integrity and kindness and the stone walls he was building. I suppose it occurred to me deep down inside someplace that the solidity and elemental permanence of stones was a way for him to participate in a memorial of sorts to his lost comrades as well as his own incomprehensible memories. Perhaps he dedicated each stone to them as he placed them on the walls, stacking one upon the other as if in a community of his ghostly lost kin. And there are so many stones that are required for a sturdy wall. There was not a day of stacking stone here at the farm over 45 years that I didn't recall the ghost of Julius. And the walls I built hold within them some small measure of what I imagined his walls contained—a devotion and a dedication to goodness and the rightness of kindness towards one's fellow human beings.

I believe that we are visited by the ghosts in our lives when we need them. They come often unbidden but always willingly. They bring to us the messages that their lives held and, in this and in present moments, they continue their mentoring and teaching. Perhaps it is something of magical thinking to believe that our ghosts appear in this way, but I will entertain a full dose of this magical thinking in these perilous times when there is so little in the way of inspiration and loving kindness. When Julius comes to me now I see that he comes with his message of acceptance and care out of his life of trauma, darkness, and wretched circumstances. He transforms my moments of dread into moments of hope, survival, and even endurance. He says that if the Holocaust can be opened and let to bleed its life, then this wound that can bleed and eventually heal can also be every wound we know.

All of us are in an eternal lineage of ghosts. We do not know when our lives will end here in earthly circumstances. We do not know for whom we will be living ghosts when we give up our skin bags. What I do know is that I will be wandering about as beggars do and I will appear to someone when I am aware of a call from them. And then I will appear, just as Julius appears to me when he has been wandering at the edges of my memory. All of us will some day be living memories. And we will not have lost the love for one another that our beating hearts once held so warmly.
 

8-31-20 SOURCES OF HELP: SELF-HELP AND BYPASSING

These seem to be the times of self-help as illustrated by all

 the books presently available in bookstores and the popularity of the genre in our culture. But what do we make of it and is it a useful category for us in navigating what we encounter on a daily basis in our lives? There is a certain allure to the beckonings of the self-helpers. We think we can attach ourselves to the methodologies someone else has worked out for themselves, assuming that what ails us and in need of help is identical to what ails the author of the book we are reading. Our hopes are predicated on a close match-up of their lives and ours. Yet, experience reveals that all of us are in need of help in some form and that our challenges are not identical to everyone else's. But there may be some processes by which we can begin to understand our own needs and challenges and that is where sources of help might be valuable. There are aspects of our behavior that are universally human and so we hope that we might gain some insights into and even some solutions for our own problems.

I am presently observing protest movements around the world but especially here in the United States and from a comfortable distance. My environment is of a rural nature in a state of a very homogeneous white race with the exception of many indigenous tribes scattered throughout. The protests have the character of “other,” of “over there” and not here. I am separated from what the protesters shout and their placards and posters say. I am sympathetic to many of their causes and yet puzzled by what their noise and violence achieve. I have these questions about protest movements throughout human history and especially my own lifespan that includes the protests of the 60s. Is it possible to draw a straight line between the vehemence of the protest, its apparent basis, and a defined outcome or result? Were the people who were drawn into the protest movement as sympathizers aware of the genesis of the movement itself? Were the energies of the protest shared by all?

When I look closer at protest movements in general and the specific ones we are witnessing today (BlackLivesMatter, police brutality, racial injustice) and try to answer some of the questions that arise for me, I am challenged to look closer at what universal elements they might contain that would help me understand why they exist in the first place. And I wonder, too, if the protests are expressions of a clear motive or if they might be bypasses for what is more fundamental and complex. What I mean by bypassing is to avoid either overtly or covertly the root conditions that lead to the eruption of a protest with all its noise and demands. In these situations I wonder what hard work is being bypassed.

Hard work is a concept that applies to just about everything we think and do. It implies that we engage the brain in ways that interrupt its comfortable default to a low energy state. It seems to prefer to languish in this low energy state unless called upon to do hard work, to think, to calculate, to discern. This is a natural state for the brain as it prefers to let its energy store up in preference to the needs of other vital organ systems that will probably require energy for metabolism in more immediate conditions, perhaps those of fight, flight, or freeze. Hard work is a conscious demand on the brain and awakens it to a condition of being available to dissect and deconstruct and reorder. This applies to solving mathematical puzzles as well as to understanding the causes and conditions of white supremacy and racial injustice.

Resmaa Menakem, in his book My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017), explores what it is to act on implicit biases and how overt and covert oppression is stored in the body. This implicates Whites and Blacks, police and security officers and their victims, historical transmission, and the epigenetics of trauma. Epigenetics is a new frontier in genetic science and is opening up new avenues to the exploration of how the experiences of trauma are passed down in generations and how they affect genetic transmission but don't seem to change the underlying DNA codes. For instance, studies on Holocaust victims and their offspring indicate that the traumas directly experienced can be transmitted to their offspring and expressed in such conditions as chronic depression and social dysfunction in numbers higher than predicted based on the general population. There is growing biochemical evidence that this is a real phenomenon and one directly related to how traumas are embedded in the body. Menakem highlights this with the issue of race as it surfaces in the Black community, among Whites as White Supremacy/White fragility, and among the police forces and security forces originally configured to maintain peace and order but now heavily militarized to resemble an armed contingent. While his focus is on these elements of society, his expanded theme is on how trauma of any cause can create the conditions in our bodies that lead to chronic physical and mental diseases. He also offers some specific psychological and behavioral methodologies that can assist us in managing traumatic situations of any cause. In this regard, he echoes many of the same methodologies attached to spiritual traditions, where cultivation of bodily responses is the source of calming, settling, and grounding—the methodologies Menakem recommends for those confronting hostility, stress, and even violence in traumatic situations.

Sometimes, I believe we assign far greater authority to gurus of all stripes than they deserve. We are so eager to attach ourselves to anyone who offers us ways to bypass our suffering and to avoid the hard work of confronting the traumas that affect our daily behavior. Menakem could be one of those gurus, except he offers only the possibility of hard work to make progress on the underlying implicit biases that run us into trouble. His formulation of the difficulties with racialized trauma lead to strategies, exercises, and practices (he prefers “practices,” as that implies an ongoing commitment of intention) that depend on individuals doing the hard work of discernment of basic causes of trauma, whatever the source and whatever the manifestations. If one is intent on doing such intense work, then he says to begin with the body because that is where the trauma is stored. Anything less than that will be to invest in another layer of bypassing. And the trauma will continue to lie dormant and surface in myriad ways that are unhelpful at least and very harmful in full armor.

This work, this hard work, is a call to us to be awake to those aspects of our lives that cause us tension, stress, frustration, anger, and outright violence. Think of any corner of your life and look at it hard, asking the questions: “What is this? What do I notice? Am I bypassing the important elements to just feel better about a difficult situation?” Maybe there are stresses in a personal relationship, with impending retirement, with financial problems, with the loss of physical ability or the death of a loved one. We need to look deeper into our own personal sources of strength and abilities to find internal resources that will give us courage to do the hard work required. Any one of us, all of us, can do this. What it means is to first adopt an attitude of willingness to explore. Next comes the intention to go further and then the inquiry begins. Along with the nuanced questions there is a practice of somatic calming and grounding that prepares one for the hard work of discernment. This body work is a resource if practiced often enough to become a habit of self-care. Once a habit, it is available in situations of stress or conflict.

We begin to ask the questions that pry up the boards that have been hammered together to cover over the painful basic problem. With the adoption of this attitude and this intention, it is important to recognize that all of this comes without any assurance of success in getting answers to the questions we ask. And if we are fortunate to get some answers, there is no guarantee that the answers will translate into a successful outcome such as a promotion or marketable insight or enlightenment, such as a self-help guru might promise. At every opportunity in this excavation we refer to our bodies and what we are experiencing there. What comes up inside the body? What are you feeling just now? Is there constriction or relief? Is there some history that helps me understand how I feel? How does my body practice help me now?

Returning to the social protests that are now so present to all of us all around the country, what might be the hard work with them that could lead to a better understanding of their importance? It might be the approach Menakem takes in his examination of racialized trauma and to dig into the history of the idea of race itself. It might be to read the memoirs of those manacled in slavery or the details of the recent killings of Black men and boys to get a better understanding of how traumas are experienced by the victims. It might be to study what neuroscience tells us about how traumas are embedded in our bodies and then transmitted to other individuals and how they are inserted into social norms and habits over time. There is no doubt that we can learn from scientific experts and from people who have ideas about human behavior based on their own experiences. But the truth is that what hard work we do must begin in our own bodies. That is personal work to which we are all called.

Menakem has a number of quotations from James Baldwin, among others. James Baldwin was a public witness to issues of race many decades ago and wrote most eloquently about the Black experience. He was not taunting in his approach but certainly challenging. He called on both Blacks and Whites to do the hard work of reckoning with the trauma done to bodies, the trauma that we are now learning has a historical basis as well as a contemporary version we see in the protest actions in many major cities. He was aware that individuals as well as communities, societies, and nations were stuck in their progress for a healthier life of interdependence if they did not work through the trauma of racial oppression and its ideations. He was aware of the ease and comfort of bypassing, only to be haunted by the demon long kept dormant. Baldwin is also an eloquent and unsettling voice for the Black experience in America. Menakem, too, lets no one off the hard work hook and documents the White-on-White traumas inflicted over the centuries, long before race was a concept, as people of color were not part of the cultural make-up of early societies. So, traumas of oppression have existed as long as humans have been on the earth. Isn't it time to do the hard work of confronting such an ancient legacy? What could the future look like if we did? How could humans continue to flourish in their lives if we committed to hard work?

The confluence of individual, community, societal, and world wide traumas are part of our shared lives in the first century of this new millennium. The hard work of their realities is the call we can answer if our intention is to bring to light what ails us. Only in this way will we be able to work through and not bypass the most essential aspects of what it is to be a human being. It is to acknowledge the pains and suffering, the joys and sorrows that all of us experience. In this we are one.

7-17-20--PARADIGMATIC LOVE

Eventually it is love that I return to in my thinking. It is a vexing subject and one that recurs enough for me to notice and work with it. Considerations of love emerged in my coincidental readings into the works of Thomas Merton and William James. It is in the spirit of pragmatism that William James described in his many writings that I turn and face this powerful emotion that shadows me. In the recent past I have avoided using the word love as being too complex to be used as a single word. It is loaded with so much baggage for each of us, yet we know what nuance we intend when we talk about it or use it. Yet, the nuances are so complex and varied and we don't have enough words to delineate all of them. So, we are left with using one word for what we intend. Recent reading has put love front and center in my thinking. Reading Thomas Merton puts a different emphasis on love compared to reading William James or some of his pragmatist colleagues (Josiah Royce, Charles Sanders Peirce, Ernest Hocking, for instance). It isn't a word now commonly used in everyday parlance. It doesn't seem to be expressed in our present crises of pandemic, economic collapse, social activism, or perverted politics. There is a harshness and coarseness to public conversation that doesn't admit love as a descriptor for what motivates us in times of trauma or difficulties. We are more often caught and held by a more primitive set of emotions and reactions.

But, in the spirit of pragmatism, I begin with the bedeviling conditions of our common life in these times and work with what brings them forth just now, the strains of their genesis from history, how they are transforming how we think about human behavior and what they are telling us to do in a society rife with problems. It has always been that we have had societal problems but perhaps it is the layering of many of them just now that has brought us to a situation of reckoning, a forced need to look at them more closely. Looking and thoroughly and thoughtfully witnessing them opens us to an examination of their parts and their interconnections. The competing demands of each of the interest groups, the ways in which they are depicted in the media, the ways in which they are used and manipulated, make discernment of the truth of them difficult. And we are confronted with the granularity of life in so many ways if we look closely enough. But we must consider the graininess of most days if we are to venture out into the world.

The challenges for individuals are many, not the least of which is to know what we trust. It is a practice of daily reflection and to recollect the basis of “right view” and “right idea” in the spirit of the Buddha. The reminder is about what lies at the foundation of a compassionate view and idea. For me, that foundation does, in fact, return me to love. The power of love is too great to ignore. Love is not easy. Love is not always visible. It is for this insight that reading Merton and James makes sense. Love is ephemeral and elusive from the human perspective. Merton states this in many of his writings. He writes about “darkness” and its role in our relationship with the transcendent, with what he calls God. Light does not eliminate darkness but sometimes makes it more intensely what it is. The contrast between what humans expect and what is made available by the transcendent spirit is forced by our expectations for enlightenment. Yet, he assures us that we must continue to trust that God's love for us will never, never, never be withdrawn. It is to this notion and assurance of divine support that I turn in these times of tension and turmoil—and at all times. It is to love that I turn. And it is in a relationship that love has its most intense and true meaning and life and power.

The juxtaposition and interplay of light and darkness figure prominently in Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation (1961) and probably in one form or another in the works of most philosophers where light designates truth and darkness the shadows where humans stumble about seeking the light. The darkness is a reality for many and especially in what we incorporate into our consciousness from childhood where the dark was inhabited by frightening spirits made real. In adulthood we are “in the dark” in our confusion and traumas, even when we go about the daily tasks of living. The dark is an existential space in which we attempt to sort out conflicting emotions and ideas. Merton lends a richness and depth to the darkness when he says: “He Who is infinite light is so tremendous in His evidence that our minds only see Him as darkness.” We who are caught up in our conceptualizations and dualities fail to see that darkness is enveloped by the light, that there is a universal wholeness to the sacred, however one imagines it. Darkness is mystery for Merton, as it is for most human beings. Mystery is a vitalizing force that brings us to sensory experience where we shudder and crouch and surrender to what is inevitable. There is an inevitability to the darkness every day/night cycle. We emerge into the light when darkness recedes and it is this trek we reproduce every day of our lives on earth. Merton says: “The more perfect faith is, the darker if becomes.” Mystery deepens the more we are immersed in its exploration.

The idea of sacred darkness is what the mystery of love is all about. Love is a darkness into which we peer obliquely. Working with the confusing nuances and ambiguities of both love and darkness draw them together in my mind all the time. Losing one's way in one is like losing one's way in the other. And it is possible to view the darkness of love as a space surrounded by the universal light that Merton describes in his own faith. As we become more conscious of the darkness in which we find ourselves, we are awake to what makes the darkness possible and real. Merton says God is in the light and in the darkness. He is in the mystery and what is beyond and surrounding the darkness. Of course, this is a very Christian version of what humans have experienced in all of their history. However, there seems to be a version of the mystery in darkness in all traditions and cultures.

The love we have for one another is love transcendent and a part of the holistic love that pervades the universal light Merton sensed in his contemplative life. We are only dimly aware of such transcendent love in our daily lives, as much of our experience is enmeshed in habits and routines and pressured by events that come to us as fragments of perception. We do not realize that we are living within the darkness of the mystery that propels us forward. It is interesting that this search for the light transcendent often comes at the end of life for many, as it did for James. His Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) was an exploration of what was for many people part of their reality. Here he is in a letter to his wife:

“The moon rose and hung above the scene before midnight, leaving only a few of the larger stars visible and I entered into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description. The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people around me, especially the good Pauline [Pauline Goldmark, a much younger acolyte], the thought of you and the children ….the problem of the Edinburgh lectures, all fermented within me till it became a regular Walpurgis Nacht [a reference to “Witches Night”, a gathering of spirits to celebrate the onset of springtime].”

Context and relationship, two states we humans can understand from both an emotional and rational point of view. These states pull us into what is “right” about them in Zen Buddhist terms. What is right about a loving relationship with another human being? With someone outside our world of color and belief? With a contentious world? With a God of love? Don't those who seek a deeper knowledge of human life eventually fall onto a path and a search for God's love? And isn't there a reward in this search, if only to feel that the search itself has deep value and some ultimate meaning? This search seems to have had more reality for Merton than it did for James, even though James was fascinated by those whose lives were inhabited by the reality of God, the transcendent. He documented this in The Varieties of Religious Experience and other writings later in his life. This was also true for his fellow philosophers, some of whom began the search earlier in their careers, as with Ernest Hocking in his The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912). John Kaag, in his book American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016), connects the philosophical search for God in American culture with the stories of love relationships in the lives of the philosophers themselves. And he includes his own story of the pursuit of love and the discovery of its power in his own life. In almost every instance the power of love was to give meaning to existence in the lives of the philosophers. It was the development of the pragmatism school of thought in philosophy that prepared the groundwork for insights into the eventual transcendent power of love. It was a long and hard trek to love, as it is for so many humans. These times of muddled interests, intentions, and tensions are a perfect workplace for love's search. It is out of this darkness we are experiencing that love's power can be more deliberately manifested. We cannot know the power of love unless we open ourselves to the possibility of love's energy. We cannot be shaped by that energy if we do not acknowledge the vastness of love's expressions. We cannot be effective in love's dispersion if we cannot open our hearts and minds to the necessity of change and the acceptance of others' points of view. In a way, we cannot begin to understand love's power if we do not begin the search for it within the dark structures and contexts of our lives lived every day. We know those dark structures the best. We can tell what ails us in the moment and it is from this “platform” of suffering that we can begin the hard work of loving. Aren't we hollowed out, emptied of the day's belongings, and visited by the spirits in the dark? And aren't we then refilled, refreshed, renewed by the dawn's light as we become more wholly ourselves once more?

Where does love come from? Is it an instinctual default the way anger and lust are? Is it a capacity unrealized until we are psychologically attuned to its need? These are questions that are of some importance, especially when observing that love's absence is so acute in these troubled times. It seems that anger and frustration leading to violence are the emotions that force themselves into the behaviors we are witnessing now. Perhaps love is that fundamental, elemental emotion that does not manifest until more dominant ones abate. Or, perhaps, it is an emotion that is only manifest when it is consciously tapped from a transcendent source (God?). In any case, it seems that love is hard to have and to hold, even in its most basic expression, that of its role in reproduction. The nuances of love are even more difficult to account for when we humans resort to our defensiveness and fears.

What is the meaning of love? By this I am wondering about what the purposes of love might be, given the above impression that it is a dormant powerhouse. Beyond the reproductive urge that we assign the term love, what makes love worthwhile? If, in fact, it is energy consciously gleaned from a transcendent source, how do we intend to use it? Is possessing it enough or does it have some constructive, creative uses? Is it a higher functioning of our human psychology that we are in the process of losing? Is this a withdrawal of a vital force from our spiritual lives? If this is so, then are we at risk of becoming more grounded in behavior patterns that reinforce divisiveness and selfishness? If we do not look to the heavens for some connection with spiritual sources, then the contexts of our lives are thinned out and we inch closer to our primitive state of survival.

William James developed a new way of viewing human behavior, of describing from experiences he observed what motivates individuals. He provided us with categories and patterns that have been used since his time to explain why humans act the way they do. It wasn't until later in his life that he entertained the idea that spiritual experiences might also be a way to describe the spiritual element in human psychology. Grounded as he was in experimental science (as we are ever more so today), he had to loosen the grip of the scientific method to accommodate a vital force that he, and we today, surmised was outside the analytical and measurable parameters of science.

Thomas Merton, on the other hand, recognized early in his adulthood that there was this realm of experience that escapes the technologies and experiments of science. Thomas Kuhn, in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), writes about “paradigm shifts” in scientific thinking in which a new idea springs up without obvious tethering to the slower and more gradual processes of experimental science. These shifts produce a new way of viewing the discipline and provide a new plateau from which to progress. Merton and wisdom sages over the centuries exhibited just this same sort of dramatic shift into a spiritual life that can't be accounted for by any process of evolution or accretion, as in the processes of science. Zen Buddhists write about this experience of sudden enlightenment (satori) and it seems to conform to the paradigm shifts of science. I believe even Merton was aware of the transient nature of such shifts in perception because he refers many times to the usual experience of peering into the “darkness” and being in a dialogue with God, even when it is not possible to know that God is even present. Yet, devotion and faith are the elements of the substrate (a scientific term applied to the spiritual realm) that form our spiritual lives and it is this substrate that gives meaning to our lives over and above what science and technology may offer.

It seems the meaning of love is nuanced and includes constancy, trust, vulnerability, devotion, the notion of emptying of the self's perceived needs and wants in favor of those of another, and the willingness to experience the darkness of not-knowing (another Zen obligation). It is to hold mystery ahead of certainty and control and to hope for clarity and light, even when they are not obviously available. In these times, we are somehow satisfied to possess the risks and dangers of anger and hate without questioning their efficacy and meaning. We do not look beyond the primitive reactions that define our only basic human character. We do not look up to the heavens. We do not admit that we are often without answers to the great questions posed by the cosmos about our own survival and inevitable demise. We are selfish with our emotions and claim them in the face of universally shared suffering, pushing away from what is uncomfortable for us to notice and acknowledge. We act on our individual needs and wants and do not see that they often compromise what we can only obtain from making a paradigm shift into higher psychological/spiritual ground.

Shouldn't we seek this space, this unbounded realm, to accompany us on our journey through life's vicissitudes and travails and vast triumphs and joys? This is the leap of faith, a paradigmatic love, a love that is not easy and that asks of us the hard work of finding it and keeping it. Merton and James illustrate how an individual life may be the ground upon which love may be husbanded. Both writers offer us different ways of how to think about a meaningful life that begins with the laundry and ends with a gaze into an infinite and loving cosmos, every day. And, as we gaze, we surrender individual wants and our leaping faith makes our lives whole in the presence of a universal community.