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Ripples in the Pond
Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow Robert Hunter
How significant is each human being in the world? Most people probably don’t feel significant at all except to a few friends and family. Gandhi said “Almost everything you do is insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” I like the attitude in that, but there’s a
sense in which the opposite is true. Everything we do is significant, because whatever we do or say registers on people around us, consciously or unconsciously, and ripples through the world. We don’t hear of or see most of those ripples, the majority of which are small. But we continually send out ripples of energy and emotions and thoughts all day, every day, and thousands of even tiny ripples add up in their cumulative effect. We don’t know how much we’re affected by others’ ripples because so many of our perceptions and decisions happen with minimal or no conscious awareness and reflection. Maybe Gandhi was saying it is “very important that you do it” because our “insignificant” actions add up to ripple subtly through the world around us. Certainly he knew how to create ripples that generated the actions of masses of people.
History is replete with social movements of the masses that have overwhelmed the efforts of the strongest leaders: Christianity taking over the Roman Empire without an army, the mass printing of Bibles people could read themselves stimulating the Reformation, the Jazz Age of the early 20th century, the Civil Rights movement, the mass migrations of black people to northern cities and of rural people to cities everywhere, the explosion of rock and roll music created by kids ignoring mainstream music.
We don’t have to do great things. We’re affecting history every day, even as we think right now, because what we think leads to other thoughts that become the chain of thought that leads to the choices we make, the actions we take – and the unseen and unacknow-ledged effects on others. We are each of us part of the flow of history, however small we believe our impact is. I think we would be surprised at the significance we each have if we knew all the ripple effects we generate. I think a poem from my first poetry book, In Another Skin, says it better:
A Ripple in the Pond
An earthquake triggers a tsunami
and we all see the news and the numbers,
the faces and the bodies.
A beaver slipping into a pond
doesn’t make the news, but it makes a ripple
that spreads out in all directions.
It’s a wave to a mayfly that takes flight
from the reed that the ripple disturbs.
A trout leaps to swallow the mayfly,
sending out a larger ripple,
and a fisherman casts a fly in its direction.
Many ripples ensue from landing that trout.
Everything I say and do
in hope or cynicism, in anger, love or fear,
makes a ripple in the world around me, however small.
What other ripples are started by mine I may never know.
Alone I matter little in the world.
I hold no position of power.
But I’m not alone –
in everything we say and do,
together we create and re-create every day
the culture we swim in, for better or worse.
We don’t have to be extraordinary.
Individuals make events happen,
but culture only changes by ripples
that merge together to become waves
that merge into currents.
I may stumble frequently
but perfection is not required.
Life continues to ask me every day
if I'm aware of what I throw into the pond
as we all go on creating the culture,
whether we know it or not. BN
Clearly, not everything I say and do has beneficial effects. Part of being human is that each of us does a some damage in the world, since our desires sometimes conflict with those around us. But we can try to live with awareness of the lights that others shine into
the darkness and to move in their direction to spread beneficent effects when our hearts and wills are galvanized. Joseph Campbell’s recommendation was to “lean a little toward the light.” We can choose what we expose ourselves to and spread back out into the world: sources of cynicism and despair and hate, or sources of love, compassion, generosity, hopefulness, courage, and inspiration.
I collect lights that others shine on the darkness. The following are a few lights offered by wise people that fill my heart and soul. I’ll never fully live up to them, or even try to (I’m not that virtuous), and I don’t have to subscribe to every word. But I can lean a little toward the light. I keep visions like this in my heart, and I revisit them from time to time to reorient my compass.
________________
“I believe in the brotherhood of man and the uniqueness of the individual. But if you ask me to prove what I believe, I can’t. You know them to be true but you could spend a whole lifetime without being able to prove them. The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there . . . The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity.”
Albert Einstein
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had
to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to route all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“This is the true joy in life: to be used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap, the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it, it is my privilege to do whatever I can. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle for me. It is a sort of bright torch, which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
George Bernard Shaw, A Bright Torch
________________
I was given these three quotes a couple decades ago and I’ve held onto them ever since. Occasionally I reread them to refresh my spirit with their light. But they’re just examples, and I’ve collected many others. The world’s literature and recorded public speech are full of visions that give us direction, lift our hearts, and fill our souls. Keep these, or find your own bright torches and hang onto them. It’s much more satisfying and enjoyable than cynicism. The point is not to use visions like these as a measuring stick to grade myself with, but instead to allow my spirit to be drawn toward a brighter sun so that I live with a fuller heart, for a moment or a day. Throw your own words and actions into the pond with awareness and an acceptance of your humanity, considering and not underestimating the significance you might be surprised you have.
The seemingly unrelated topics of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder on the one hand and conspiracy thinking on the other have been
in the news a lot over the last eight years. Awareness of PTSD has mushroomed over the last two decades, but it really began to develop and spread in the 1970s and 1980s with news coverage of the aftereffects of combat on veterans of the Vietnam war plus the awareness of the effects on family members of alcoholism and addiction, including trauma from various kinds of child abuse, domestic violence, and family instability that resulted in symptoms similar those seen in many combat veterans. Those symptoms include hyper-reactivity in response to stimuli that remind someone of a traumatic experience (being “triggered”), a general and chronic numbing of emotion in the absence of triggering stimuli, a heightened and chronic level of anxiety, feeling “on edge” with hypervigilance about potential danger in the environment, sometimes resulting in non-psychotic paranoia, a heightened sense of vulnerability, mistrust and suspiciousness in relationships, angry outbursts and rage, hopelessness, grief, and depression.
A further increase in awareness of PTSD and its symptoms occurred after the national trauma of September 11, 2001, when the
whole nation experienced the shock and disbelief of seeing on television, over and over, a scene that looked like something out of a Hollywood disaster movie that we’d go to the theater to see for entertainment. But this was not The Towering Inferno. The sudden deaths of 2700 people and the visual shock of watching the tallest structures in New York collapse like a house of cards was a horror almost impossible to imagine. The experience of war, something that was “over there” on the other side of the world since the Civil War, Pearl Harbor excepted, suddenly became something that was “over here” and a potential for every American – especially if you lived in one of the major cities of America, or near a military base or manufacturing or storage site related to a critical industry. Folks all over the country were in shock and on edge – even people in Iowa and New Hampshire had a taste of PTSD. National institutions went on “red alert” for the next possible attack.
Conspiracy thinking is an intellectual and emotional phenomenon related to the hypervigilance and paranoia of PTSD. Those of us who are old enough can remember all the conspiracy theories that proliferated for decades after John Kennedy was assassinated, up to Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. Conspiracy thinking is a paranoia reaction with its powerful shudder factor on the one hand, and an exciting side on the other that makes it attractive for many people, especially if you believe you know things other people don’t. And it seems to be very contagious. Another part of its attraction is the feeling that things which were confusing and perplexing now have an explanation, even if it’s wrong.
Of course, conspiracy thinking isn’t always paranoid – there are real conspiracies. It can be entertaining, as in the movie All the President’s Men where we know the outcome but are fascinated with the how of the details of the conspiracy itself and the way the process of uncovering it unfolds in the investigation by Woodward and Bernstein. The congressional hearings on the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and subsequent investigations revealed a conspiracy with elaborate planning by the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, as well as Trump’s inner circle, apparently Trump, and even some members of Congress. For another interesting example, see pp 160-161 in Bill McKibben’s The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon where he recounts Lewis Powell’s “confidential memo to the US Chamber of Commerce” outlining what’s been called “a corporate blueprint to dominate American democracy,” the summer before Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court. The ultimate result was the Koch brothers and Citizens United.
The darkest side of conspiracy thinking can be seen in the almost universal paranoia of despotic rulers throughout history who imagine that others are as unscrupulous and power-craving as they are, from Nero to Lenin and Stalin to Saddam Hussein. We’ve seen it in American political life in LBJ and particularly in Nixon, as well as in Donald Trump, although we see more evidently Trump’s manipu-lation of others’ conspiracy theories such as Q-Anon to co-opt voters’ paranoia into passionate support for him. The classic behavior of such leaders is the systematic assassination and imprisonment of people around them who they fear want to take their place, as with Stalin’s purges, and the elimination of anyone who offers unpleasant truths or advice. Think of Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” and Trump’s repeated dismissals of cabinet members and other staff who disagreed with him – “You’re fired!.” The problem is, noted by journalist David von Drehle “The curse of totalitarian governments is that they kill people for telling them the truth; do that enough times, and you end up with a nation of liars” – or an administration of liars.
Paranoia was originally a psychiatric describing pathological mental conditions now classified under paranoid schizophrenia or paranoid personality disorder. It’s filtered down into the language of everyday speech to become a description of fairly common distortions of normal human thinking. “He’s just being paranoid.” “I’m feeling paranoid about my job.” In its nonpathological sense it’s actually a very human trait. We were likely to be killed and eaten if we didn’t think there was a tiger in the bushes but there really was a tiger in the bushes. But nothing happened if we thought there was a tiger in the bushes when there wasn’t. So there was some real survival value in being a little paranoid, or a lot, when we lived outdoors, depending on the density of the tiger population in the area. We also had to be on guard against other human groups who might resent our presence when the human population became dense enough that we started to compete for hunting territory and food.
Our brains developed neurological networks that have evolved and been refined for hundreds of thousands of years to quickly respond to perceived danger. The speed of our response was critical if we wanted to survive an attack by an animal who was stronger than us and stealthy. We needed to be able to react quicker than our conscious minds could think. Animals have sensory networks that are alert to potential danger which activate to make them nervous and hypervigilant when they feel vulnerable or something alerts them. So the development of this instinctual wiring no doubt began even before the human species evolved. That instinctual and neurological inheritance hasn’t disappeared with the safety most of us feel in what we call civilized society. We can’t reason those neurons away. Our brains are still watching for that tiger in the bushes.
So as a species we have a default tendency to be fearful and suspicious, and a little paranoid. If I think I’m seeing signs of danger in the environment or just sensing potential danger and feeling vulnerable, I’m somewhat comforted by the belief that if I’m alert and ready to run or to fight (hypervigilant), I won’t be taken by surprise, and I’ll be able to avoid being “eaten” by running away or gripping my spear ready for use. My muscles tense a little and I grip my “spear” tighter to protect myself against whatever that metaphorical tiger might be. It’s what we call the fight-or-flight response, an instinctual physical and biochemical response to perceived danger. PTSD comes from the chronic arousal of the fight-or-flight response, an instinct very useful for dealing with a situational, short-lived physical threat but damaging to both physical and emotional health when it’s turned on all the time. In PTSD the switch gets stuck in the “ON” position.
Have you noticed how many mystery novels populate the bestseller lists? It’s the most popular genre of fiction, and mysteries are virtually all murder mysteries – stories about violent death at the hands of another human being. There seems to be a huge market
for “whodunit” books that many people must be reading one after another, judging by the size of the mystery section in your local bookstore. Humans, including myself, love the aspect of mystery in life and art, something that also motivates the research scientist. We admire the who recognizes that a few things “don’t add up” and pursues the clues until he or she unravels the mystery to reveal the truth. We identify and would like to be like them.
There is a catharsis we vicariously experience in seeing a mystery solved and the murderer caught and brought to justice, making
our imaginal world safe again. A mystery produces a state of uneasiness, uncertainty, and perplexity that can only be eased by the discovery of the explanation or solution that will clear up the mystery and relieve the tension. Remember gripping the arms of your seat in the last suspense movie you watched in a theater, or the tension and sense of urgency reading a suspenseful book? One of the “higher” needs in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is the “need to know and understand”, which becomes active when more basic needs for food and shelter, safety and social connection are largely satisfied. But I wonder how the need to know and understand relates to the need for safety that is so compromised in PTSD. Does it have something to do with the need to know if there is a tiger in the bushes or not? I would say it probably does.
This is where conspiracy theories like Q-Anon and the “deep state” come in. Besides the safety factor, there is a certain ego appeal to the belief that you know truths that other people don’t. The conviction that one has the answer to the mystery that explains everything is especially seductive when the confusion and uncertainty of life seems overwhelming. A traumatic experience that results in PTSD is an experience of loss of control over the conditions of one’s existence. The conviction that you have the knowledge of “what’s really going on” behind the official story is exciting and ego-boosting, and it gives you a feeling that maybe you can control the situation by dodging the bullets and escaping the danger. Maybe you can even help fight the enemy by spreading the word to expose him to the light so the people will turn away from him and stop him from carrying out his designs – hence Fox News network.
So is the size of the mystery section in your bookstore an indicator of the prevalence of PTSD in the American populace? Conservative and rural Americans feel like their way of life is threatened by the rapid pace of change in modern life. Rural and small-town America have not experienced the growth and progress that many metropolitan areas have, and they’re seeing more and more people of ethnic backgrounds that are unfamiliar. They don’t know what’s coming but they fear it will be strange and foreign to them. So all kinds of claims may become plausible, and they’re publicized by those who want to spread fear that they can manipulate to keep power in their hands, a la Trump. There was a similar kind of suspiciousness and tendency to believe in conspiracies in the 50s’ fears of communism exploited by Joseph McCarthy, and in the counterculture of the 60s and early 70s, when it was revealed that the American people were lied to by their government about Vietnam body counts, the progress of the war, and Watergate.
I remember the conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination, from the Mafia to the CIA to Khrushchev to LBJ to Castro. They all seemed farfetched, but the official story was seriously questioned by serious people as well. There were so many things about the Warren Commission Report that didn’t seem to make sense and were disputed, and the thought that something so serious could be done in secret without the American people knowing the whole truth was very disturbing. In November, 2023 PBS aired a recent discussion with more than half-a-dozen doctors still alive that were in the operating room trying to save Kennedy’s life, who universally agreed that the autopsy report from Bethesda Naval Hospital by doctors not trained for autopsies was inconsistent with what they saw in the Dallas hospital. Then we had the Pentagon Papers, followed by the Watergate burglary, the Woodward-Bernstein investigation, and the Watergate hearings, ultimately revealing a real conspiracy in the White House and much uncertainty about how deeply Nixon was involved, never clearly resolved. There is a degree of sanity in being a little paranoid when there is so much uncertainty and secrecy in the world.
Much of the current state of political affairs in America seems to revolve around these themes of trauma, PTSD, paranoia, and conspiracy, with the attendant fear and the euphoria at the excitement and drama. These issues seem to fit together like pieces of a puzzle. We need to understand how they are tied together if we want to understand the times we live in and address them -- and not get lost in paranoid fantasies with no factual grounding . Seeing them through the lens of PTSD and our fight-or-flight instinct gives us some insight to understand ourselves and the current dynamics of the American social and political scene.
Brett Nelson
Myths We Live By: Explicit and Implicit
. . . whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, whenever it has been dismissed as mere priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the other door.
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God
Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe.
Marcus Aurelius
Reading Joseph Campbell's Myths to Live By was the first time I heard the word myth used in a positive context. A light turned on in my head when Campbell said that religious myths lose their spiritual power when they're literalized. He claimed that it's happened to some extent with all the major religions as they became institutionalized and dogmatic, which then became a basis for argument that often led to war or at least the rationalization for war with the believers of a contradictory dogma. Campbell believed that the spiritual power of a religion was in the metaphor of its "myth" that gave a culture meaning and an attitude with which to view existence and the world. He studied and taught mythology all his life, deeply convinced of the meaningfulness of myths as "untrue stories" that contain profound wisdom, to paraphrase a poet, evidenced by the title of his book The Power of Myth. Keep in mind that I'm using the word "myth" as meaning a mythology or system of belief in this article, not in the common sense of something that isn't true.
I suspect some people in all cultures take their myths as metaphors rather than literal truth, perhaps most people in some cultures. A man I know who emigrated from India to America at the age of twenty-two when he finished his engineering degree told me none of his family or fellow students, including a surgeon father who trained at Walter Reed Hospital, believed in the existence of Hindu gods literally but thought of them metaphorically like Campbell, and they still found Hinduism meaningful . Hindu myths tell of a hundred or more gods, but many Hindu wise men say that they are all aspects of one god, who for some is the life-force of the world.
I went through a very religious phase from about 13 to 15 years old after my confirmation in the Lutheran Church and being given my own bible, which I read with great interest in what felt like profound wisdom, wondering all the while what to think about stories of God turning stones to bread for the Israelites in the Sinai desert, Moses having a staff that turned into a serpent to threaten Pharoah and meeting the Lord in the presence of a burning bush that was never consumed, Jesus being born of a virgin impregnated by the Holy Spirit and turning water into wine, and so on. When I read the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday in church, I felt moved by it, but I couldn’t swallow some parts of it in a literal sense. That’s the point Campbell was making: I was moved by the myth even though I was skeptical of its literal meaning. I left the church and Christianity as a result of being disillusioned with the dogma at 15, but I know intelligent and reasonable Christians who I imagine don’t concern themselves with the literalness of the “myth”. Their religion is very meaningful to them anyway.
Carl Jung visited Taos Pueblo in the 20s and talked with Taos chief Ochway Biano and another very old man who told him that if
they stopped praying for the sun to rise every day it would not rise. Did the old man believe that literally, or was that an attitude that motivated adherence to their myths that told them how to live? When I read about Tony Hillerman’s character Jim Chee studying to be a hatathli and telling the Navajo story of the Blue Flint Boys, and pair that with Chee having an anthropology degree from the University of New Mexico, I suspect Hillerman thought of his character as someone who believed in the myth as a profoundly meaningful metaphor supporting a way of life that has sustained the Navajo people for centuries, probably millennia. Hillerman's books show a deep knowledge of Navajo people, including the range of literalness in their beliefs and of their degree of adherence to traditional ways of life.
Falling out with a myth or religion for some leads to the collapse of meaning and a sense of how to live, evidenced by the prevalence of addictions of all kinds – to alcohol and various drugs, gambling, sex, money, the stock market, food, power – perhaps the ultimate drug. But many people who lose their belief in the religion they were taught find a belief in something else that gives them meaning and direction and a way of life – democracy, science, ecology and environmental concerns, professions like medicine, counseling and social work, and the law - or find spiritual nourishment through the arts. In fact, Campbell’s fourth volume of his series The Masks of God, Creative Mythology, proposes that the primary mythmakers of the modern era are artists – novelists and poets, musicians, painters and sculptors. And we need to add scientists, as when Carl Sagan framed our world, the planet Earth, as a “small blue dot” in the photo from 3.7 million miles away and commented “it’s all we have,” as the Voyager mission team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena watched Voyager I fly off beyond the last planet, Neptune,.
There are many myths we live by besides those of a particular religion. A pervasive myth in Western, particularly American, culture is the myth of "The Game," the mythology of contest where there is always a winner and a loser, and only one ultimate winner, as in the Super Bowl, the NCAA Basketball Championship, the Wimbledon Tennis Championship, or World Cup Soccer. Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers epitomized the ethos of the myth when he famously said “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” This is a myth that extends itself into business and even the waging of war, or maybe it starts with war as practiced by the nation-state when it first developed. Another myth of modern society that began long ago in ancient Egypt as far back as 3000 BCE is the myth of The Rule of Law, which like science also depends on the idea of evidence but uses the force of logic through reasoned argument, liberally seasoned with appeal to the emotions to determine truth. It’s also similar to the myth of The Game in that there are winners and losers, perpetrators and victims, guilty and innocent.
A nonreligious mythology that is powerfully current today is the myth of science with its ethos of observe, test, and observe again to determine truth. Its ideal is the scientific method of hypothesize, testing, and acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis based on the results. But in fact many scientists, maybe most, start with a conviction or an idea of what's true, then design experiments or collect data that tests what the results indicate about the truth of the idea. Some scientists design experiments or collect data in such a way that is likely to support their idea, and sometimes scientists have doctored results to support what they hoped to find. But the overriding idea is to test and draw conclusion from the results. This was a huge shift in consciousness from the tradition of Greek philosophy through the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, especially influenced by Aristotle, which held that the only path to truth was through reason and deduction by logic, actually mistrusting "evidence" as misleading and illusory.
A wonderful example of practical science in action is the fifty-some years of field research on forests done by British Columbian
forest ecologist Suzanne Simard recounted in her memoir Finding the Mother Tree in which she recounts her research career demonstrating that a forest is not just a collection of individual trees but an organism functioning much like a brain with neuron-like connections of fungal fibers between the roots of all trees that carry information, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, amino acids, water, and sugars back and forth according to the needs of each tree, directed by mother trees that care for the forest as a whole. They even use glutamate, the most common neurotransmitter in our bodies The forest itself is intelligent, and it’s an ecosystem in ways that even Rachel Carson didn’t know.
I wrote a poem called “Blue Dot,” prompted by a book titled Microcosmos telling the story of how microbiologists in the 60s uncovered the story of the dawn of life in the first bacteria three-and-a-half billion (not million) years ago, disproving the accepted theory that microbiological life on the planet began two billion years ago. The first bacteria metabolized carbon dioxide for energy, producing oxygen as their toxic waste. As toxic oxygen built up in the atmosphere, driving bacteria into the ground and below the surface of the oceans, a new bacterium we now call mitochondria evolved inside the earliest bacteria that learned to metabolize their host bacteria’s waste oxygen for energy, producing carbon dioxide as its waste to feed the host bacteria in a symbiotic relationship. That relationship kept Earth’s atmosphere from eventually becoming 100% oxygen and ultimately killing all life on the planet. Instead mitochondria regulate oxygen to the stable 21% of the atmosphere which allows animal life, including us, to exist. As a result we carry mitochondria in every cell in our bodies to provide us with energy. In fact, we each carry ten trillions essential “germs” in our bodies, as well as the mitochondria in every cell, that are essential to our survival.
So it occurs to me that rather than being an individual, I’m more like a vast ecosystem, like the ecosystem of a tidewater marsh or
the Chihuahuan high desert I live in – or the ecosystem we call Earth. Extend that concept (myth) further and we can talk of the ecosystem of the solar system containing the sun and the planets plus asteroids and the Kuiper Belt, the ecosystem of the Milky Way galaxy or the swarm of galaxies it belongs to, even to the ecosystem of the universe itself. This ecosystem concept, of a web of interrelated parts in which the loss of any one part has an ultimate effect through chain reactions on every other part of the system, is gaining ground in world consciousness. It’s a myth that has the potential of becoming a dominating myth of the 21st century. We need that consciousness, a consciousness which indigenous peoples around the world have had for countless ages and have been telling us “civilized” people about for at least a couple of centuries. They lived this myth every day, before "civilizations" began seeing nature as something created for us to subdue and conquer.
The ecosystem myth is science, what we think of as observable fact, but all science is theory supported by evidence, never final truth. A theory is the best metaphor we have for some phenomenon at our particular time, which will likely be replaced eventually by
a better theory, a better metaphor, because it describes truth even more accurately. Just as "evidence" told us the Earth was flat. Just as in a later age we believed the sun revolved around the Earth because we could see the "evidence." Just as gravity and other Newtonian forces were discovered to not work at the subatomic level. Just as atoms were considered the smallest building blocks of matter until protons and neutrons and electrons were discovered. Then quarks and neutrinos and other particles were found, and now I read that protons, neutrons, and electrons are made of quarks. The science is fascinating, to the extent I can understand it, but what is most meaningful is the myth, the emotionally inspiring and motivating idea of the ecosystem and its profound implications for our existence and survival. That’s a myth we can live with, that can give us meaningful direction to guide us through the 21st century and may have the potential to save us and save the planet, if enough people start to believe in the myth. Maybe we need to induce Ken Burns to produce a documentary on ecosystems.
Brett Nelson
__________________________________________
The Wilderness and Time
When I would go into the wilderness for days, time would become only a shadowy presence for me. I generally had a schedule in the back of my head – I would plan on being out for a certain number of days, but maybe only a tentative number – 3 or 4, maybe 5 or 6.
I may have planned to get to a certain spot to make my camp, definitely so in Canyonlands National Park’s Needles District where campsites are reserved. In the Pecos Wilderness or Gila Wilderness camping is at large, so my destination for the day could be flexible or only a general area. I would have an intention to follow a certain route as well, usually a loop to cover trails I hadn’t hiked before or to cover ground I enjoyed hiking enough to travel it again, although that could change with circumstances or if some alteration appealed to me.
But in spite of any plans I’d have, the wilderness has always had a timeless feel about it, I think because it endures unchanged for years, decades, even centuries if you could live long enough to witness it. Trees may fall and new ones grow, and plants may spread or retreat, but I know if I returned to a place I’d been before I wouldn’t know the difference unless the change was dramatic, and usually it wouldn’t be. Stone always has an aura of being virtually unchanging, being eroded only imperceptibly, grain by grain, in any human time frame. Stone is what carries the sense of timelessness most surely, because when I’m hiking on slickrock on the Colorado Plateau, I’m very aware that my feet are treading a surface that was formed hundreds of millions of years ago and has changed very little for millennia. If one of those first humans to tread the very same surface 15,000 or so years earlier would have had a camera, the pictures would show the scene looking just about like it does today except for perhaps different vegetation.
In the awareness of that kind of expanse of time, it almost feels like I’m experiencing this part of the Earth like it was thousands of years ago, because erosion and uplift may not have changed the contours of the landscape much even in that stretch of time. It’s almost like time has ceased to exist, making the events of my life, my disappointments, desires, and anxieties seem like fine grains of sand swept away by the wind.
I felt something like that when I stood on top of the Santa Barbara Divide in the Pecos Wilderness of New Mexico above 12,000 feet. As I looked out over the vast bowl of the Pecos River watershed surrounded on three sides by ridges 11,000 to 12,000 feet high, I had the thought that I’m a link in the chain of time with my last step already in the past and walking into the future with the next step I take, a link in that chain no less than the coral polyp that became the tiniest grain of limestone under my feet.
The world wasn’t going to take notice of my backpacking trip, but we’re all part of the march of history in our own small ways because whatever we do has tiny or not so tiny effects on others around us, if only from telling our stories, and others’ reactions to what we do have ripple effects on the people around them and so on. We are all making history as we go. Standing on the divide, I felt that sense of simultaneously being in the present time and being in the time when those mountains were first made, and that it’s all one time, the same time suspended in the timeless flow of the unfolding natural world. Just for a brief moment before I moved on it was a potent feeling, and I still recall the sensation.
When I’m out there in the wild, the “real” time of life in Albuquerque, NM seems unreal compared to the sense that I’m living in a time frame of hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. There is such a freedom in being outside the passage of time on the ticking clock, as well as being free of the noise and traffic of the city, the schedules, and the lists of things to do. It’s an entirely different reality, and the feeling of timelessness is as much a part of the sense of being in the wilderness as is the place. I can still conjure up a bit of that feeling even sitting in the armchair that’s my favorite spot in my living room. I’m a different person as a result of the years I spent backpacking and hiking all over the Colorado Plateau and in New Mexico’s mountains.
So my past experiences are present in me now, and I treasure all those memories of time I spent outside of time. Like Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.” It’s alive in me today as I make my way through life in new experiences, and my memories
are a rich background of reference that adds depth and color and meaning to what I experience today. Even when I’m not aware of it, it’s the unconscious background I filter all my current experience through. It also helps me not to take this world so seriously. That’s clear to me right now as I write words that crystallize an awareness I had only vaguely when I started writing. I don’t know how much of what I’m saying I consciously thought when I had those experiences, but I certainly had the sensation I’m describing, and I loved feeling its richness.
Brett Nelson
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The Tyranny of “Good Enough?”
There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of a sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
Scottish essayist and philosopher Thomas Carlyle
The society we live in isn't just an agglomeration of individuals but a living organism with a life of its own and its own agenda, and even the movers and shakers of a society are almost certainly not fully aware of how they’re affected by the collective data stream that washes over us. Fads, herd behavior, and mob movements have a power and cumulative contagion all their own that sweep masses of people up in their momentum as people become intoxicated with the collective energy generated. This happens with everything from fashion and pop music to “mean girls,” Facebook likes and dislikes, lynch mobs, and political movements like Trump’s base and “Stop the steal!” There are 15 million military assault rifles in the hands of civilian Americans. How did that happen?
A person's self-worth tends to be a reflection of what they feel is society’s collective judgment of them, even if most of us are largely unconscious of how we learned to feel and think about ourselves. So we expend a lot of energy trying to live up to the amorphous image of what we feel society thinks we should be as we watch the images in TV commercials of impossibly beautiful women, professional athletes with bodies few will ever have, women who have both brilliant public careers and families, and people who have wealth beyond our reach but not beyond our dreams, while we take “vacations” at casinos and buy Powerball ticket after ticket, sometimes handfuls at a time, hoping to hit the jackpot.
Am I “good enough”? I spent a few decades of my life feeling doubt about the answer to that question. I wasn’t exactly asking myself that seriously, but the feeling of not being as good a man as I should be would hang around like a cloud and come up in all kinds of specific situations. I was full of self-doubt. The culture we live in encourages us to constantly ask that question, to be daily measuring ourselves in one way or another, playing on a fear that maybe we might not be as good as we “should” be. We get messages about not being good enough from parents, peers who are friends and unfriends, teachers, ministers, bosses, plus the constant barrage we’re inundated with from TV commercials, magazines, and billboards inciting worry about our worth or presenting fantasies of perfection that few if any of us can come close to. Many of us tentatively know they’re unreal, but the constant media barrage and sometimes frequent criticism from people we interact with infiltrates our unconscious psyches with a steady stream of messages creating doubt about our worth, and maybe even a conviction that we aren’t who we should be, regardless of what we profess to ourselves on a conscious level. Maybe it would be saner to ask “Good enough for what?” or ”Good enough for whom?” How good do I need to be and why?
Some of us step back and ask ourselves what we’re doing it for. Why are we so susceptible to the advertising that we know on some level is a lie and an illusion? I read a book a few decades ago called The Imposter Phenomenon by Pauline Rose Clance that gave me some critical awareness that helped immensely. It helped me realize the illusion that the way to feel good about myself was to
get better or be better in some way that I thought I was falling short of was a trap, because the sense of not being good enough is
for many of us an identity, an often subconscious conviction that we don’t question on any objective level. So if I feel like I’m not who I should be, when I achieve what I think will finally make me feel good enough, it doesn’t last. If I have a “not-good-enough” identity,
it won’t be long before I start to find other ways in which I’m inadequate as that negative identity is projected onto my present exper-ience. So the game is rigged because I always raise the “should be” bar. Achievement, though it’s satisfying, only changes how I feel temporarily.
The answer to this dilemma seems to be to become conscious that I’m unknowingly rigging the game against myself so I can’t win. I’m doing it to me! But I didn’t know that before, so there’s no cause for blame or shame. I have to be aware of it and how it works to change it. Then I can step back and realize that there is no there to get to that will give me the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that stamps me as “good enough.” Instead I’m a reasonably decent human being, a more or less average person who is pretty good or very good at some things and not good at others, one who is in a process of lifelong development that means I always have the potential to become a little better, and that’s good enough – always. Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes better. If some-one is better than me in some way, more power to him, because I’m probably better than him in some other way.
The kicker that cemented this awareness was learning that Robert Redford once said that when he looked at Paul Newman’s life and achievements he wanted to go out and shoot himself (no doubt exaggerating), and that Marlon Brando once said “If there are 200 people in a room and one person doesn’t like me, I have to get out.” If Redford and Brando can struggle with this kind of unrealistic-ally negative self-judgment, then I’m clearly vulnerable to a similar distortion of my self-image that has no basis in reality. There are those too who’s distorted view of themselves is inflated and grandiose, our 45th president being a prime example – but that’s another story. Even Michael Jordan didn’t turn out to be a great golfer, and he apparently didn’t do well at gambling either. Nor has his pro basketball team been very successful. But he was pretty damn good on the basketball court himself.
Good enough has no objective definition in any area of life. I’m OK and you’re OK as a now ancient book professed, and we can all continue to grow and develop. I’m just another shmuck doing the best he can. We’re all like characters in a novel with our own set of weaknesses and strengths and our own story to tell. Which brings us around to what Thomas Carlisle was saying. A hero or heroine is not some shining white knight or pure angel, but someone like the main character in a novel or movie who has flaws as well as virtues, who propels the story and develops into someone who is altered by his or her experience. We are all that hero or heroine in the story of our own life, flawed but to be admired for weathering the storms we face and developing into a more and more mature version of ourselves. If you have trouble seeing that, read an honest biography of your hero and heroine that documents their flaws and faults as well as their virtues and achievements. The biographies I’ve read have shown me the subjects achieved what they did in spite of who they were as well as because of who they were, and knowing their faults didn’t change my admiration.
Brett Nelson
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Folk Music - What's That?
The term folk music covers an indeterminate territory with shifting boundaries depending on who's using the term and who's hearing or reading it. I have a friend to whom folk music seems to be music composed and played by common people never heard on a radio who were not professional musicians, most of whom lived a long time ago. They sang and played songs whose composers were generally unknown that have been handed down for generations, sometimes centuries, because they touch universal chords in generation after generation. They’re usually songs from English, Irish, or Scottish traditions such as “John Riley,” “Pretty Polly,” “Jack-a-Roe,” “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” “Wild Mountain Thyme,” and “The Water Is Wide,” or from the Appalachian and southern regions in America, such as “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “House of the Rising Sun.” It can include slave work songs such as "Ain't No More Cane" and acoustic country blues, usually “traditional” or “public domain” songs with anonymous origins like “Goin Down the Road Feelin Bad,” “Midnight Special,” “I Know You Rider,” and “Deep Elem Blues,” In America, these songs were collected and recorded in the 1930s and 1940s by John and Alan Lomax and Harry Smith. If not for those three men, many of the songs may have been lost forever. The music they recorded was issued in comprehensive album collections by Vanguard and other companies in the 50s, resulting in the folk music boom of the that era. The modern “folk musicians” of the fifties and early sixties mined these collections for their repertoires.
The broader conception of folk music includes any music made by “ordinary people,” average Joes and Janes like ourselves, who compose and play music that expresses the attitudes, sentiments, joys, griefs, and concerns shared by people without status. It aspires to be a voice for those without a voice – often irreverent, sometimes political, often nonconformist and outside conventional mores and attitudes. Today they usually try to get their music recorded and published by mainstream record companies or not-quite-mainstream companies to preserve their ability to continue a life of playing, recording, and composing music and preferably make a living at it.
Sometimes they produce songs that become hits on popular charts. “City of New Orleans” by Steve Goodman, a modern folk song
if there ever was one, became a hit for Arlo Guthrie. Are Arlo Guthrie, John Prine, and Steve Goodman folk singers? I would be hard put to classify them as anything else. To me, pop music is music made with commercial values with a commercial intent – What will sell? What will be a hit? It’s music produced by a “music industry” to generate a “product” and make money, made by people who want a hit to sell records. The musicians are generally looking for fame and/or money. In that sense, the electric-era Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, Steve Goodman, John Prine, and Bonnie Raitt are not pop singers, even though they may have sold a lot of records at some point in their careers. Dylan repeatedly broke away from popular trends as soon as they caught up to him to make music in directions no one else was headed that were by no means guaranteed to produce hits, including John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, and Slow Train Coming, not to mention Highway 61 Revisited, although he says his move into electric rock music was a reaction to the Beatles’ rock and roll. But he was a rock-and-roller as a teenager long before he became a folksinger.
So folk music can mean these polarities and anything in between. There seem to be many definitions of folk music and much disagreement about what the term should mean. The boundaries between definitions are fluid and overlap. Genres often blur, as with Creedence Clearwater Revival, Van Morrison, Jerry Garcia, and the Grateful Dead. Even the Rolling Stones are at their core
a blues band which has, like CCR, recorded traditional blues songs that are definitely folk songs. Modern musicians considered
true folk musicians like Gillian Welch have played rock music songs by such groups the Rolling Stones. Van Morrison has been a fairly successful rock and roll and rhythm and blues musician, but his music has ranged over a wide variety of genres including jazz and blues and hymns. He also recorded folk songs such as “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More”, a soaring version of “Purple Heather”
(“Wild Mountain Thyme”), a Scottish folk song called “I Wanna Roo You,” and an album with the Irish folk band The Chieftains of mostly traditional Irish folk songs plus a poem written by Irish poet Pat Kavanagh called “Raglan Road” that as it’s sung sounds for all the world like a traditional Irish folk ballad. The Grateful Dead were a rock music band, but they covered every kind of American music, including traditional blues and folk songs, sometimes in acoustic versions, like “Goin Down the Road Feelin Bad” and Elizabeth Cotton’s “Oh Babe, It Ain’t No Lie”. Even Linda Ronstadt recoded the traditional “Old Paint” and a wonderful cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Ramblin Round”.
John and Alan Lomax‘s archival recordings of over 17,000 folk songs for the Library of Congress, Francis James Child in Britain, Cecil Sharp in Britain and America, the eccentric record collector Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Robert Winslow Gordon’s Archive of American Folk Song, and even Carl Sandburg were all instrumental in preserving folk music, including blues, from rural America, most of which would have been lost without their efforts. These collections were the resources for the folk revival of the 50s. Folk musician Dave van Ronk was quoted in the 60s saying of the folk music community and Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music that “We all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated”.
Bob Dylan, who would move on to electric rock and roll in the mid-60s, was said by other folk musicians to know more obscure folk songs than any folk musician they knew. He was reported to be able to listen to a song once and remember all the lyrics and the chords and be able to play and sing it later without hearing it again. In the early 90s he went back to his folk repertoire and recorded two albums of traditional folk songs, with only his own acoustic guitar as accompaniment, that displayed the range of his potential songbag, many of which I had never heard of. His songs “Boots of Spanish Leather” and “Tomorrow is a Long Time” could slide in with dozens of 18th century English and Irish love ballads and never be noticed as something from another era. The Grateful Dead have routinely played versions of unfamiliar if not obscure folk and blues material, in both electric and acoustic versions. I’m often surprised to find songs labeled “public domain” or “traditional” on albums made by commercially successful musicians, often songs I’ve never heard of.
If folk music is traditional music composed by unknown musicians passed down orally over generations, does that mean folk music doesn’t exist today, that it’s a dead genre? That makes no sense to me. If folk music is the music of the common people, then what is the music of the people today? One example might be the advent of rock and roll in the fifties first played by youngsters in their garages and basements in songs written by themselves expressing what mattered to them that they didn’t hear on commercial radio. That was certainly music of the people before the zeitgeist swept them up and made their music pop music. Then many of those groups and singers and songwriters scored commercial hits and started having managers and producers and record company executives influencing what they wrote and played. How was that not folk music in its most basic sense? Much as I disliked what little I heard of punk rock and heavy metal, those genres started as expressions of kids who had no commercial prospects at all, just playing in dance clubs and other teenage hangouts frequented by friends. I know virtually nothing of hip-hop, what was originally called rap, but that was music that began with black teenagers voicing what was original and creative for them, with little commercial potential at first. Now hip-hop musicians play the Super Bowl, but it didn’t start that way. Neither did the Beatles – they were just a struggling band playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg for years, barely getting by.
When I read liner notes on albums, interviews of musicians, or music reviews and articles about musicians, I’m struck over and over how deep an awareness musicians I listen to have of the history of traditional music in America and Britain. I’ve absorbed a large measure of my awareness of traditional music from reading about well-known musicians who refer to their broad and deep sources of inspiration that almost always include traditional blues and folk sources. Rock and roll covers a broad range of music styles, but it’s universally described as being a stew with elements of country music, blues, and black gospel singing styles.
The musicians I listen to are not people who are gearing their music to popular taste in order to make a lot of money, though many of them have made a lot of money in spite of going against the grain, because their music was original, thoughtful, expressive of genuine experience, and poetic – so they created their own audience. Neil Young, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, John Prine, Steve Goodman, Ry Cooder, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Leon Redbone, Bonnie Raitt, The Band – all of them made music that was uniquely theirs and stayed true to their personal vision of the music they wanted to make, never following popular trends. If they became to some degree pop stars, it was because their authentic expression resonated with a vast audience.
I’d never heard anything like Creedence Clearwater Revival when they first hit the radio, or when I first listened to the Eagles debut album (even though the Byrds had made rock music with a country flavor,) so they weren’t catering to the current musical taste. Linda Ronstadt took huge risks with her music that record company execs tried to discourage her from, including Great American Songbook albums, mariachi music, and Pirates of Penzance, genres she grew up listening to in her home as a child. Leonard Cohen’s audience only started to catch up with him in his 60s. Dylan changed course in his career over and over, often at the peak of his popularity, to take off in a very different direction – folk to rock music, rock to the acoustic and the contemplative John Wesley Harding, to straight country music, back to rock and then to gospel, later back to pure traditional folk music, even a Great American Songbook album (surprising well sung in spite of his gravelly voice, with the sense of timing that the great crooners all had) – never coinciding with the direction of popular taste.
Most words in the dictionary have multiple meanings, sometimes half a dozen or more. I think we need to let folk music have all its definitions and just be clear what definition we’re referencing when we talk about it, instead of debating what’s folk music and what isn’t. It’s a rich well of artistic resources that has more than one legitimate meaning, covering a wide range of musical styles. And it informs virtually all good vocal music made in America, evidenced by the broad and deep knowledge of traditional music carried by musicians from Bob Dylan to Linda Ronstadt and Emmy Lou Harris, to the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead to Sam Bush and Rhiannon Giddens, to Bonnie Raitt and the encyclopedic repertoire of Ry Cooder. Hopefully ordinary people will continue to express their experience through music in fresh new ways that will be the folk music of our time, and very likely a few of those songs will strike chords universal enough to continue to be sung and played a hundred years from now, or more.
It’s been said that the ego is an excellent servant but a terrible master. I’m talking about the ego as a fundamental part of the psyche, our conscious decision maker and action originator, and the sense of who we are consciously aware of being, rather than the sense of worth and power ("getting a big head" is an inflation of the ego). Psychologist Robert Moore likened the ego to the general of the psyche, rather than the Commander in Chief, as in the US president who has the ultimate authority in the US government to approve or direct what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense do. Who is the Commander in Chief in the human psyche? Carl Jung believed in and provided extensive evidence for a part of our unconscious mind which he labeled the Self that is a source of intuitive wisdom that we all have, if we know how to relate to it and read what it tells us. It’s become custom to capitalize it to distinguish it from the self we are aware of and consider ourselves to be, more akin to the ego or self-image.
Virtually everyone has probably had the experience of having an intuitive thought that provided an insight or solution to a problem without having a sense of where the thought came from or how it was arrived at, because it wasn’t something that was reasoned or “thought out.” The Greek mathematician Archimedes is reported to have had an instantaneous scientific insight as he stepped into his bath and saw the water rise. He may have reasoned out the language to state his scientific principle later, but the insight apparently was an instantaneous reaction to a visual experience that legend has it made him yell “Eureka [I have found it]” and run naked through the streets proclaiming his discovery. Such an insight may come in a dream or a daydream. The German chemist Friedrich Kekule said the structure of the benzene molecule came to him while daydreaming as an image of a uroboros (a snake eating its tail}, an ancient symbol in many cultures from ancient China to ancient Egypt and Greece. Again, the idea wasn’t a product of deliberate thought but a spontaneous, sudden insight when letting his mind wander in a state of reverie.
I recall recently waking up with an instant recognition of how judgmental I can be of people who have different values without any reflection on what might be valid in their point of view, in spite of thinking of myself as a nonjudgmental person who is rarely black-and-white in my thinking. I woke up with the insight immediately in my mind, without any memory of dreaming anything related to it. I’ve also had experiences of having a memory I was trying to retrieve, the words I was trying to find for a line of poetry, or the answer to a problem or decision come to me hours or days later when I gave up thinking about what I was searching for and focused my mind on other things or let my mind wander.
This doesn’t mean that directed, logical process thinking isn’t important and extremely valuable. It absolutely is. Our reasoning powers are used productively for most of us on a daily basis, but they don’t always work to give the answers we’re after, or they give us “answers” that don’t work for us. Our military strategies based on successful World War II tactics did not work no matter how much we bombed North Vietnamese supply lines on the Ho Chi Minh Trail or burned Vietnamese villages we suspected of supporting Viet Cong. We didn’t think the “hearts and minds” of the people were important. The idea that consumers are rational decision makers that would act in their own economic self-interest has often given us policies that didn’t produce the economic results we expected. Economic patterns appear to operate from emotional factors and at times don’t even function in a person’s own best economic interests. Maybe that’s why economics has been called “the dismal science.”
This raises the question of how much we can rely on what our intuition and unconscious minds tell us. But consider: the human unconscious is the result of billions of years of evolution that reaches ultimately back to the beginning of cell specialization in bacteria that resulted in the development of separate cells into different organs. So the brain is the network of all the connections that have evolved in successive species over all that time that proved advantageous for survival. As a result, it includes many instinctual functions that do not involve conscious deliberation as well as neural wirings that don’t dictate specific instinctual reactions but give us the potential for a range of possible behaviors that had survival value at some time in the past. It helps to understand that Darwin’s concept of natural selection was not the “survival of the fittest” in the sense of who could kill and eat or outrun whom, but that our evolutionary development proceeded on the basis of who survived long enough to produce offspring, along with mutations which helped that. Some think that social skills involving cooperative behavior were the most important factor that allowed human evolution to progress.
We’re therefore endowed with mental networks which facilitate behavior patterns that had survival value at some point in our evolutionary development but may not always be helpful now. We live indoors protected from large predatory animals because we've exterminated them in areas where most of us reside. We also have highly organized, mostly cooperative societies with police to enforce generally agreed on rules for acceptable behavior – the "social contract" – primarily to govern the tendencies toward violence and theft that humans have.
In spite of that we have instinctual reactions to perceived threats which may or may not be real and so don’t always work to our advantage – the fight-or-flight response. If I think there’s a tiger in the bushes along my path but there’s no tiger there, I survive if I avoid that path, even when there’s no need to. But if I think there’s no tiger in the bushes and there really is, I'll die. So there’s a degree of survival value in being a little paranoid, which also operates in us now in response to threats to our economic well-being, to our social status, or to our sense of self-worth. And if I have a history of experiencing violence, I may be hypersensitive to perceived threats and often perceive danger where there is none, or have an inordinate fear response in innocuous situations, fostering a chronic anxiety that interferes with living an effective life. This is what we call PTSD.
Our unconscious minds are networks of neural patterns that give us perceptual and behavioral tendencies with various degrees of accuracy and usefulness, as well as instant information that comes from the biological wisdom of eons of natural selection which has proved so advantageous that human beings have incorporated it into genetically programmed wiring in the nervous system. It’s no accident that we have the unconscious wisdom to know things that we don’t know we know and that surprise us when they rise to the surface of consciousness.
The problem then becomes: 1) how do I access the wisdom my unconscious mind has? and 2) how do I sort out the messages that tell the truth from the perceptions and impulses that were once reliably accurate and helpful but are no longer or rarely useful in my environment today? This is the point where the human ego steps in to play its role. After all, consciousness has developed through natural selection too. Jung and the psychologist Julian Jaynes proposed that humans did not always think the way we do, perhaps not until ancient Greece in the West. Jung believed that until that time, mental functioning was mostly a matter of perception -- a passive reception of information from the environment, combined with mostly unconscious decision-making, reacting from instinct in behaviors which were not consciously chosen or reasoned out. We mostly perceived and reacted rather than deliberated and made conscious choices. There were surely exceptions evidenced by the development of technologies like the bow and arrow, the wheel, planting for food, etc. But those would come from people with a reflective consciousness outside of the norm, much like the Da Vincis and Einsteins of modern times. The inventors of those technologies were the geniuses who could “think outside the box” and “dream of things that never were and ask ‘Why not?’” instead of just reacting without reflection.
We carry in us all that neural wiring for primitive perception and reflexive decision-making as well as our higher-order mental abilities. Sometimes they show up when we least expect it and may not be helpful. The most important functions of the ego are 1) to act as a filter to sort out what messages and impulses from the unconscious are useful wisdom and which are not and 2) to act as a mediator between the unconscious and the imagination on the one hand, and the objective environment we live in, on the other – the reality function. The unconscious dreams of possibilities. The ego deals with practical realities. We need both.
For many of us, our feeling-self resides largely in our unconscious minds, though this also depends on personality type. Most men and some women are more conscious of their thinking processes than their emotions. Alternatively, most women and some men are more conscious of their emotional reactions and deeply felt values than most men and some women, although there are men and women of both types and neither preference is more natural or effective even if more common. When stressed, we will usually give precedence to values which are most emotionally weighted, sometimes wondering why we did something we didn’t plan to do or intend. Under normal conditions, we rely on our preferred mode, either our thinking or feeling function.
We have intuitive reactions that “feel right,” even though at times they may go against what our rational minds tell us is true or what our values tell us to do, if we are open to them. It’s the ego’s job to decide when the “still small voice” is right. To do that, it needs an openness of mind and degree of flexibility. Rigidity breeds stagnation. The person who can’t change his mind is like the boulder that water simply flows around. It doesn’t stop the water from reaching the sea. Rigidity comes from categorical thinking – “this is always right or this is always true, and that is always wrong or false.” Rigidity also comes from what we’re taught and what the norm and custom in our culture is, and from “habit.” And it comes from fear of the unknown and fear of the judgment of others for straying from custom and the conventional – “That's not the way it’s done.”
Just as there is a degree of truth in a cliché, there is usually a degree of effectiveness in custom and convention. But conditions of life change, and old ways of doing things may lose their viability and require a different response. New technologies and new understandings in science require trying new ways of thinking and doing things. As William Blake said, “What is now proved true, was once only imagined.” If we only did things the way we’ve always done, we’d still be living in caves or pit houses. But we’re not, and we’re deeply indebted to those who had the flexibility to use their intuition and think outside the box of received wisdom and convention, and then figure out how to apply their intuitive insights in a practical way.
The Dance They Do: Consciousness and the Unconscious Mind
Do you trust your conscious mind or your unconscious mind more? Most people would say they trust their conscious mind, since it’s what we know. We know our unconscious mind, if we have an idea of what it is, mostly through its negative manifestations: slips of the tongue, intrusions of old habits we’re trying to outgrow, and actions that are uncharacteristic and puzzling to us – “I don’t know what came over me!” Our unconscious minds are a murky mystery that’s beyond understanding because it’s what we aren’t aware of and what we generally don’t know as ourselves.
Artists, writers, athletes, and musicians often have a different experience of the unconscious. Abstract painters and writers, including songwriters, often say that something beyond their conscious intent dictates what they paint or write. What they end up writing down was not what they intended when they picked up the pen, or they recorded thoughts they didn’t know their minds contained. Especially with their best work, they feel like they’re a vehicle for some unidentified thing that uses them as a channel to express what it wants – a description that’s not an idea but a statement of what it feels like when in the midst of the creative act. For these people the unconscious is a friend and an ally.
Athletes and professional musicians have another experience of the unconscious. Most will say that if they’re consciously thinking about what they’re doing they don’t perform well. They practice and practice and practice until the action becomes so automatic they don’t have to think about it when they’re performing. Though certainly conscious of what they’re doing, they let their unconscious muscle memory take over so they’re free to play with the intensity and spontaneity that produces a good performance. They’re not consciously thinking about how to do what they’re doing and not monitoring whether they’re doing it right. They trust their spontaneity to guide them to do what has become automatic, allowing them to play with great effort and passion without the hesitation that comes from watching to see how well they’re doing. When they lose confidence and start doubting themselves, consciously monitoring their performance to see if they’re doing it right, the performance suffers.
Psychologist Robert Moore described the stages of learning a skill in the following way (think of learning to ride a bicycle or drive a car). The first stage is unconscious incompetence: I have no ability to do something, but I don’t know that there is a skill that can be learned to do it. I’m not aware of any incompetence. This doesn’t mean I should be able to do it – it’s just something I have never learned. The second stage is conscious incompetence: I’m aware that there is a skill that can be learned. but I don’t know how to do it, The third stage is conscious competence: I’ve practiced and practiced until I’ve become skilled to some degree, but I have to pay close attention to what I’m doing if I want to do it with any degree of effectiveness. The last stage is unconscious competence: I’ve practiced and trained myself to the point that I can perform without consciously thinking about what I’m doing, free to put my full energy into it in spontaneous action.
When I’m driving a car on a six-lane street, rarely do I consciously look to see if I’m within my lane because my unconscious mind is monitoring that and making constant slight corrections to keep me in place while my conscious mind is thinking about other things most of the time. But when I was first learning to drive, I had to watch closely and concentrate to stay in my lane and not oversteer. There are probably things that all of us do besides driving a car without having to think consciously about what we’re doing. I learned to shoot a basketball much better when I began to trust my muscle memory and release the shot quickly instead of trying to feel whether I was aiming right as I was shooting. When I was watching myself and trying to feel if I was doing it right I didn’t shoot as well.
One type of evidence for the existence of the unconscious part of the psyche is in optical illusions. A famous black-and-white picture in psychology books can look to some people like a white vase on a black background or a picture of the black silhouettes of two faces looking at each other. If people who see a vase look at the image long enough, they usually see the two faces and are surprised at what they couldn’t see before, and vice-versa with those who see the image as faces first. So there’s good evidence that we have a part of our psyches and our mental functioning that exists and operates below the level of consciousness. Much scientific research has been done that tests for and demonstrates the existence of unconscious contents and processes in the human psyche.
One interesting example comes from Carl Jung’s theory of personality types, widely used in couples counseling, organizational settings like businesses and in other work groups like nonprofit organizations, and even governmental agencies. It groups people on four pairs of opposites: extroversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving, all of which he calls functions. The sensing/intuition axis describes two ways taking in information. Sensing types tend to trust what their senses tell them and stick to that, mostly what they see and hear. Intuitive types tend to “read between the lines” and “look below the surface” of things. They tend to think there is “more than meets the eye” and look for underlying relationships in what their senses tell them. The thinking/feeling axis describes two ways of making choices and decisions. Thinking types evaluate choices based on a reasoning process, while feeling types make decisions based on feeling-based values. None of the axes are either/or pairs, and people can have preferences of varying degrees. And none of the preferences are better than their opposites. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Understanding their own personality type and others’ types can help people communicate and work together better. One of the most interesting things about type is that Jung believed we all have all eight functions in our psyches, but our non-preferred modes tend to be mostly unconscious and less developed. When type is used in group situations, it helps people of opposite types speak each other’s languages and feel more understood by people who don’t operate the way they do. And there are characteristic mistakes that each type is prone to, so people can learn from others with a different type what they may not be perceiving or considering in their decision-making.
A person’s unconscious, nonpreferred function tends to become active when a person’s conscious standpoint is fully understood by the person of opposite type, or when a person’s conscious preference fails to deliver the desired result. So a sensing type person will begin to look for what’s not readily apparent only when what their senses tell them don’t explain what’s happening. A feeling type person may engage their thinking function when they sense their feelings are fully understood. But if a person’s preferred function satisfies the need of the situation, the person won’t engage the opposite function even though the ability lurks below the surface of conscious awareness.
While twentieth century science mostly ignored the unconscious, it treated consciousness itself as a subject unfit for scientific inquiry. Science has long been dominated by materialism – the philosophy that everything that exists is composed of matter, and mental processes were simply functions and actions of brain cells using electrical and chemical communication. The brain existed – the “mind” did not, or it was a phantom that could not be studied scientifically. But in the latter part of the century Francis Crick, the decoder of DNA, became involved in the scientific study of consciousness. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, the author of The Consciousness Instinct and many other related books, has researched the subject for over fifty years.
The interaction of consciousness and the unconscious mind is even more difficult to examine and understand than the study of consciousness. There is a mysterious dance between them that may be the quantum physics of the psyche, a fascinating phenomenon to contemplate, perhaps ultimately unknowable. But Jung definitely felt that the human psyche had a meaningful structure with a dynamic relationship between its parts. He thought the brain was a network of neural connections with an unconscious base that includes autonomic and instinctual wiring, neural connections from habit development which can operate unconsciously, as well as wiring that enables conscious reasoning and imagination. Much of the brain’s activity is likely automatic with neural pathways that we’re born with that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, even going back many millions of years into pre-human animal evolution. If we had to be conscious of all our psychological functioning, we’d be so paralyzed with thinking we’d have no time to even feed ourselves.
Besides a lower-case self that usually designates a person’s conscious image of who they are – a function of the ego (the conscious director in the psyche, not the person’s sense of their worth), Jung postulated an upper case Self, which he described as a center of organization and integration in the unconscious psyche, and also as source of unconscious wisdom and spirituality. Jung cited one source of evidence for the Self in the pervasive presence of mandala images in cultures throughout history and throughout cultures all over the modern world, in developed civilizations and in primitive cultures, which he gave extensive examples of. He believed those images were expressions of the harmonious and balanced integration of the psyche. Jungian psychologist Robert Moore describes the ego as the general of the psyche, in America embodied in the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is subordinate to the President as Commander in Chief. So in Jung’s view the ego, especially in the second half of life, serves the Self. The ego is also the mediator between the internal world of the unconscious, with the Self and the deep imagination, and the external environment. The ego is what translates the deep wisdom of the Self into practical terms to function in the external world.
So that is the dance we do, and we do it unconsciously or with some degree of awareness of what is going on. Part of the ego’s job is to know when to listen to the “still, small voice” coming from below in the unconscious that runs counter to the ego’s inclination, and when to dismiss it as a voice from such things as unrealistic fears, greed, or a desire to feel superior, rather than the Self. Jung believed the unconscious was vastly more than the repository of repressed unpleasant contents the ego rejects that Freud said it was. Still, those contents are definitely a part of the unconscious, and they always try to reassert their influence in what’s called “the return of the repressed.” Jung never thought the ego was insignificant. Its essential function is to somehow manage the squabbling menagerie down below and know who to pay attention to and who to tell “Thank you for sharing, but I don’t think that’s helpful right now.” The ego is the adult in the room, but it needs to pay attention to the wise old man or woman who lives in the back of the house. The dance between consciousness and the unconscious is how the human psyche operates, whether we’re aware of what we’re doing or not. But it does help to have some idea, as much as we can, of what’s going on.
Me and You
It’s just me and you here in this moment,
you who are always with me,
faithful and true like skin, like my breath.
I didn’t always know you as myself,
didn’t always think of you as an ally.
But I’ve learned,
though I sometimes don’t like what you bring me.
When I was young, I thought it was just me,
although in the beginning it was only you
until I was conscious and aware.
I walk through this life mostly aware of only me
but in truth I grew out of your invisible depths
in the dawn of my being while you remained silent.
It’s hard to grasp that I’m your child.
Most of the time I believe it's me driving the car,
but from time to time you rear your head
and let me know you’re there,
and it’s often your hands on the steering wheel, I think.
I’m a bit in awe of you, but I’m wary
because you’re not exactly benign.
You’re the depths of my being,
but you’re a little scary,
because I don’t know what’s down there.
I feel you walking behind me, sometimes at my side,
Much of the contemporary poetry I read seems to be a string of unrelated images thrown together as a poem, often with beautiful phrasing and imagery but unclear to me what it’s trying to say or even what it's talking about, even making me wonder if the poet is conscious of what they’re saying or whether they’re attempting to say anything. The images may be related, but it’s hard to grasp how and what’s being said. When I read a poem, I want to read something that’s roughly intelligible, not a string of word surprises that leaves me groping in the dark for any meaning, even if the meaning is ambiguous.
William Butler Yeats’ famous poem “The Second Coming” dug deep into my unconscious psyche when I first read it, setting off archetypal depth charges that took me years to absorb, though some no doubt grasped them quicker. Even on the first reading we aren’t left with no idea at all of what the poem is talking about. In spite of mysterious words and phrases, its straightforward language with complete sentences tells us we’re being addressed in standard English with meaning that we should be able to grasp upon reflection, not cryptic code that we need labor over for days to have even a vague sense of what he's talking about. He’s saying something about the state of civilization shortly after World War I.
I first read the poem in freshman English class, and I recall being grabbed by its dramatic charge, even though I was mystified
by it. I understood then that the title, “rocking cradle,” and “twenty centuries” referred to Jesus and Christianity. But clearly Yeats was talking about a more ominous second coming than the one Christianity anticipated, which creates the dramatic tension of the poem. His news was not proclaimed in comforting terms but in unsettling images that suggested a dark vision for the future.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again, but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? W B Yeats 1920
The image troubling his sight is half “beast” and half human, with a primitive aura and “A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun . . . moving its slow thighs” “somewhere in the sands of the desert.” It’s reawakened after “twenty centuries of stony sleep” out of “Spiritus Mundi,” the spirit of the world, which is in Yeats’ vision a repository of all human experience and unconscious memory, much like Carl Jung’s collective unconscious. That it’s clearly not good news is forewarned in the first stanza as “Mere anarchy
is loosed upon the world . . . and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The famous line “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” dramatically mirrors our current political polarization. The lines “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity” sound a familiar echo in recent times.
I was first reading the poem in 1967 as the Vietnam War was escalating and beginning to head toward its disastrous conclusion with its lies exposed, the cities plagued with riots, and a new counterculture making its assault on the established order. Yeats wrote the poem in the aftermath of World War I with the insanity of that war’s genesis and horror of its bloody stalemate lasting years in lines that rarely budged, punctuated by helpless and suicidal charges out of the trenches in the face of machine guns and more advanced and deadly artillery.
The poem appears prophetic when we think of how fragile the peace was after the Treaty of Versailles, leading to WW II coming only twenty years later. The words “the center cannot hold” are a haunting echo in our current political extremes, as well as the question of “what rough beast” is being born in the terrorism, the resurgence of nationalism and authoritarianism, and the racism and ethnic violence of the 21st century. In my college days in the late 60s many of us were filled with the optimism of a youth-fueled culture that would lead the way to a more humane world with progress against poverty, and racial injustice, hate crimes, environmental contamination and destruction, censorship of the press and political corruption – the Age of Aquarius that never came. I didn’t want to think a “rough beast” was waking up.
All of this is not that hard to work out even for someone who’s not a literary scholar, but the poem and its images still seemed mysterious to me at first. I filed it away and even though I liked it, I rarely read it or thought about it. So it took a long time before
I formed some clarity about what it meant to me. I’m still not sure what “vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle” is saying to me about “twenty centuries of stony sleep.” Still, when I first read it I did have a sense that it was speaking to me in a language that was meaningful, and certainly thought-provoking.
There seems to be a trend in much of modern poetry to write straight from the poet’s unconscious speaking to the reader’s unconscious, with an apparent intention to communicate purely on that level without any concern or interest in the reader having a conscious understanding of what the poet is talking about. The art of language is communication, but this sort of poetry feels like a code that has to be deciphered to be received, or not meant to be deciphered at all. I want a poem to enrich my awareness or move my heart. What I’m left with after reading these poems, even if the poem’s images are captivating and beautiful, is the uneasy feeling that we just talked about something, but I have no idea what that something was or what the poet was trying to say about it. It’s poetry that at times sounds to me like another but different form of pretty words than “Sometimes I think I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree.” And some poems seem to be just lists of images, which is an easy kind of poetry to write.
There are other poets who have poems I love that are more mysterious than Yeats’ “The Second Coming” but still leave me with the sense that they are saying something intelligible. A short poem titled “A Land Not Mine” by Russian poet Anna Akhmatova is a good example:
A land not mine, still
forever memorable.
the waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.
Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine,
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.
Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again. Anna Akhmatova, translated by Jane Kenyon
It’s not clear what land she’s talking about that’s “not mine” but “forever memorable,” perhaps the land of her muse or the country of the collective unconscious that we are all heir to. But I love the line “the secret of secrets is inside me again.” Who in the world would not want to have that feeling? It sounds like it’s talking about something I’ve felt, not that I have knowledge of secrets no one else has, but a feeling that I’m once more in touch with something from my depths that I’ve known before but am not often conscious of. I want to know that “secret of secrets” feeling because that’s when I feel most alive.
The poem is clearly a spiritual poem in the sense of expressing an excitement of her spirit at meeting with a territory whose unfamiliar nature is a mystery to her but holds tantalizing possibility. It leaves her uncertain whether it’s just the end of another day, or an apocalypse, or the recovering of a treasured awareness or understanding she has known before but had lost, because it may be inside her “again.”
Another example, also a short poem, is “I Live My Life” by Rainier Maria Rilke:
I live my life in growing orbits,
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song. Rainier Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly
It’s a poem about dedication to a spiritual quest, “circling around God,” who or which he refers to as “the ancient tower,” “for a thousand years.” He’s serious about this, folks! He’s clearly on a mission, but you have the feeling that it’s a labor of love, not a sentence. He has no assurance he will reach his goal – maybe he doesn’t even expect to, but he’s committed to the quest.
The poem has the feel of touching mysterious archetypal springs, but it’s not clear what Rilke is talking about. “Circling around God” sounds conventional enough until he equates God with “the ancient tower,” which has archetypal overtones that would make the meaning pre-Christian, perhaps even pre-Judeo-Christian. He says he has been circling “for a thousand years,” which perhaps just means “a long time.” The only thing historical it could relate to, like Yeats reference to the birth of Christianity, would be the development of the code of chivalry roughly a thousand years before, but that doesn’t fit.
His quest is taking him into “growing orbits,” which sounds like a metaphor for expanding consciousness or wisdom. They “move out over the things of the world,” suggesting a flight above the practical business of life. Like the Akhmatova poem, however, the nature of the experience is uncertain, though none of the possibilities are foreboding as in Yeats’ and Akhmatova’s poems. He still doesn’t know who he is – “a falcon, or a storm,/or a great song,” which is an unsatisfying state, but it points to a yearning to know himself.
All three of these poems are written in straightforward sounding language that leaves the reader with the sense that something intelligible is being communicated, with the possibility of being understood, but they all have mysterious elements that are not at all obvious in their meaning, and intriguing for that very reason. They’re poems of questioning.
I’ll add a poem of mine here titled “Cold Fire” because its words came to me out of nowhere as if it wrote itself, and I was simply a temporary channel for something speaking through me in words I sometimes didn’t understand, an experience many writers much better than myself have described.
A wino in a heavy coat
shuffles along against the wind,
trailing a dirty green blanket
full of holes and dead leaves,
with the ends of Christmas
in the hands of the boy
who could not hold
the feeble thread of his father’s love.
A voice swallowed,
a soul encased in a heart grown stiff
for its own protection, scaly, fishlike,
to live in the darkness
where no other hearts go.
Smoke rising from the dying ashes
of a fire once bright but fading,
with no fuel to feed it, no air to breathe,
become hellfire now.
Human passions named the steps to hell and damnation –
humanity twisted crooked into gargoyles,
to sit on the roofs of churches
and scare the bejesus out of devils. Brett Nelson
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. “The Gospel of Thomas”, in The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels, 1979.
Those words just rolled out of me as if I was a vehicle for an unknown consciousness. It took some time before I felt clear about what I was saying. But it’s intelligible language that’s open to interpretation. A man who was emotionally wounded as a boy by a father who’s love was a “feeble thread,” swallowed his voice and withdrew into himself, numbing his loneliness with alcohol to protect a “heart grown stiff.” His inner fire is almost extinguished from lack of oxygen, resulting in a kind of living hell for him. The final stanza was a spontaneous expression of what a certain kind of religious teaching does to people – maybe part of what happened to the man in the poem. The Elaine Pagels quote just seemed to belong with this poem, a quote that has always had the ring of truth to it, even without a Christian reference.
It’s open to interpretation, and it may have different meanings for others because of the psyches and experiences they bring to it. It was a mysterious poem when I wrote it, and its sense only gradually became fully intelligible to me as I read it again and again in the process of editing and rewriting. As that happened I slowly became more clear about it and more satisfied that it definitely had meaning for me and wasn’t just a string of random words and images thrown out by my unconscious. It’s another example of how poetry can be full of imagery and mystery, even for the poet who writes it, and still have intelligible language the reader can grasp hold of and wrestle with. In fact the mystery in these poems comes from intelligible language that prompts the questions embodied in their mystery.
Mystery is the child of ambiguity, and the best poetry and best literature are usually ambiguous, leading to varied interpretations that allow many different people to find meaning that is personal to them. On one level it gives the academic community material to argue about and publish papers to satisfy the “publish or perish” mandate and enhance universities’ stature in the intellectual community. On a more vital level it stimulates in the reading public a heightened and broadened awareness of ourselves and our culture, enriching and evolving the culture we all swim in and collectively create.
A culture is created and evolves more from the general populace than by academia. It’s true of music and film as well: look at how Oppenheimer portrayed the ambiguity over the development and use of the bomb and the ambiguity of Oppenheimer’s complex character, raising questions about the moral complexity of America’s history. Then consider the number of Americans who saw it and the publicity and number of awards it got. Think of the evolution of jazz in the 20s and 30s, rock and roll in the 50s, and hip-hop in the 80s and 90s that were all born from a populace that invented them rather than academic or established professional musical traditions. The public always fills in what the established culture is not expressing, living out the culture’s shadow.
Is the poetry I don’t find appealing filling a void in the culture that I don’t understand and know how to appreciate? Perhaps. Time will answer that question as forms of poetry that fall flat with me either grow in richness and appreciation or wither on the vine and produce a meager harvest in the long run. The culture is an organism in itself, having a living and breathing life of its own that’s only created collectively by all the people in it, for better or worse, not by an elite who guide its direction and progress. Where it will go is anyone’s guess, but it will certainly be a surprise. And poetry will always be there to reflect it.
Ripple in still water