4-22-22, Friday

VIEW FINDER

What I understand about systems thinking are the biologic organic processes underpinning anything having to do with Mother Nature. And it is from those underpinnings that we humans derive our poetry, music, theater, relationships, changing life contexts, thoughts and ideas, emotions, physiological processes, technological advances, novels, sense of history, and even our politics and wars. I was reading a few excerpts from poet Ross Gay's Book of Delights in which he records a “delight” every day of the year from one birthday to the next. And what he often records is process, a spin-off of thinking in terms of systems. He sees one part as confluent with a larger whole, a stream of observations and inspirations. And it is this view that makes his book so compelling and so right for Earth Day today. And so appropriate for deeper explorations.

This leads me into recording my own ideas about processes and systems as they emerge from pondering one of the Buddha's Eight Fold Path. The traditional reference is to the Buddha's “path,” but I find it a bit more organic and illustrative to think of it as a stream where one element merges with the next and all are commingled, just as a stream would be. The first element in that stream is “right view.” And what I think “right” refers to is “appropriate” context. There is nothing fixed or prescriptive about it. (I recall Rilke's “You must change your life,” the last sentence in his poem Archaic Bust of Apollo) It is a fluid concept that is as contemporary as it is ancient wisdom. While we are not meant to invent contexts we are to probe our imaginations in light of the reality of our own lives and experiences. The right view is the one we discern for ourselves and which serves to establish a mindset that we use as a tool for our thoughts and actions. Of course, this is a changing and evolving proposition and something of a moving target, but if we are able to separate out any particular idea or response then we can use the mindset as a grounding space, a base from which to think or act. His “right view” is the first element in the process of exploring how to think but not what to think, which comes later.

Sometimes, when I am talking to someone, I hear myself saying things I have said just that way once or many times before and I wonder why it is that I can't find new language or a new metaphor to use. The sound of scripting reminds me too much of partisan political rhetoric and how unimaginative that is in general. However, when I think back to the most potent lessons of wisdom I have read from wisdom elders over millennia, I see that the best teachers scripted their teachings for disciples and for the unschooled alike. I return to the Buddha's Eight Fold Path and know that this is one of those infinitely revealing and universal scripts. The Path/Stream is an invitation to all of us to explore the root causes of our suffering as a way to mitigate the effects of it. The Buddha never promised that his Way would cure or eliminate suffering, given that suffering is an ongoing condition of being human. Just as we all suffer, so we have the option of changing the conditions of our mental lives that offer some relief from the burdens of suffering.

These conditions were on my mind when I read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. This is a book of far-reaching influences and effects when read in the light of the Buddha's teachings. Frankl experienced a hell in Nazi concentration camps that most of us can't begin to imagine and so categorize it as marginal (perhaps not so distantly now with the tragic and evil acts of the Russians in the war in Ukraine). But hell it remains now in history and in contemporary acts of oppression and torture across the globe. What are we to make of all of this? What is relevant today? How can we begin to think about the events? What mindset is appropriate?

The title of Frankl's book lets us know that it is about finding meaning. It is said that humans are meaning makers and that we construct narratives from the pieces we have at hand as a way to make sense of situations that may or may not reveal themselves in an obvious way. Certainly, we are not living in the hell Frankl did for a few years. How did he survive mentally when he survived physically? He describes the mindset he adopted to survive the incomprehensible conditions of the concentration camps, even though he had no idea that he would, indeed, outlive the treachery, evils, and suffering that permeated every aspect of his life.

Frankl:

“In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people … were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom.”

“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in live.”

In another reference that is contributory here is Muriel Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry, written in 1949, just after the great war that had incarcerated Frankl in his hell. What she says about poetry is this:

Rukeyser:

“The search of man is a long process towards this reality [finding meaning], the reality of relationships. One meaning of that search is love; one meaning is progress; one meaning is science; and one is poetry.”

“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world—so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal—all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”

“In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions.”

And isn't this similar to what Frankl is saying?

Frankl:

“The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. ...man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”

“...everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”

“What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.”

The poem is not one thing, one object. The right view is not a prescribed view, just as there is no single meaning to what life holds for any one of us. All are processes in a state of flux, no matter how static they may seem to us at any given moment. What we witness is open for our interpretations and we get to change them as often as the elements themselves change and stream. I don't know if everything is relative, that there is nothing that is the fixed point for all of this. Might it be love or Spirit or God or even the singularity that is said to have existed before the Big Bang? What I sense is that we can have a defined mindset that allows for all of this change. We can invest in knowing how to think. We can adopt a view, a mindset, that allows us to put random pieces and incomplete phrases into a narrative that makes sense in the given moment. And we can change our minds. We can enlist memories and history, personal experiences, and sensory information and add them to how we see the present world.

I am writing this on Earth Day and nothing speaks to process and systems living more than the natural world. Today is a day that should be celebrated more widely by more people, especially in light of the real possibilities of climate change, most of which we can't anticipate just yet. But we do know some of the associations and still can't manage any collective action to curtail some of the more obvious consequences. That said, our mindset that accommodates change and flux may open up imaginations to explore solutions to problems that contribute to our unhealthy planet. Frankl might say we can choose a new attitude. Rukeyser might say that we will find meaning in poetry, in science [she wrote Willard Gibbs: American Genius, 1942, about a physicist and referred to a work by Darcy Wentworth Thompson, Growth and Form, 1917, about the processes of morphogenesis in nature], and in what amounts to a complicated love. The Buddha many centuries ago suggested a means of discernment in our quest for meaning. As with all great teachers, he has left it up to all ages to make of right view what is appropriate for any given context and for any resultant interdependent relationships. He has offered us a portal on freedom. Are we smart enough and bold enough to walk through the doorway? Or will our view, our mindset, be fixed, rigid, and eventually the source of our prejudices and dogmas and ideologies?

Mindsets have been shown to change meanings. Fixed mindsets lead to the stagnant thoughts and ideas that infiltrate all corners of our lives. Growth mindsets are more experimental and work with uncertain outcomes but lead to more creative ideas and, perhaps, a broader perspective about life and its vicissitudes, its joys and sorrows, and its great diversity of cultures. The growth mindset can alter our acceptance of human failings and the beliefs of those different from us. All of this entails engaging processes and systems thinking. It hinges on a healthy sense of curiosity and a willingness to discover something new in the world and a new way of seeing.