Promised Land

                             Musing paths taken… Ones left behind … Wondering beyond… 
 

Sometimes alone, surveying the woods, a sense of things distills, and a hard chill penetrates—the social/political world appears to have gone so cold. Are people much less caring now? Is this freezing coming off a world of fear? Or of an icy emptiness that’s warning an avalanche of hate? Perhaps in the pain of life’s losses, folks who might once have been more tolerant of differences now lash out like an ice storm or like a sudden crevice made when hearts break. And eyes lose sight when hit by bitter sleeting wind—when dreams are disappearing and hope dimming.

Once, in a time remembered, the look-ahead viewed down into a promised land that glowed golden with scientific progress, with warm expectations of happy grandchildren, sure of sufficient material wealth to make it to the end. But now, it’s more a mirage that evaporates to nothing. Over the edge, prospects shimmer as a barren desert that’s threatened by financial insecurity, shattered homes, selfish lies, and environmental disasters. 
Such conditions are sometimes related to “postmodernism.” But attempting to make sense of that term often feels yet more mind-numbing, like wandering further in a fog. Rather surprisingly, I’ve found this postmodern heaviness to be eased by reading works that talk about “the death of God.” Hold on. Take a breath.

The phrase does not have to mean that there is no God. 
Instead, it may offer the shock that’s needed to break a frozen conception. Maybe our view of “God” got stuck, leaving behind a faith that’s no longer of the living God. A living God gives vibrancy and renewal. A living God nourishes capacities required in order to pass through the traumatic experiences of life. Stories of God’s people remind us again and again of individuals and groups who lost faith when their religion turned into idols, particularly when caught in the love of status, materialism, and/or power. 
Mark C. Taylor gives a condensation of the complex called “death of God.” His summary packs in too much to take in at once; but when read without expecting to “get it,” the overview may be helpful. Taylor writes regarding “Death of God theology,” God

“does not simply disappear; rather, a particular notion of God—more specifically, neo-orthodoxy’s wholly other God—dies in an act of self-emptying that issues in a realized eschatology that totally transforms the present. Borrowing Nietzsche’s description of the ‘moral God,’ who is the negation of the religious vision of Jesus, Altizer argues that the distant God of neo-orthodoxy is the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes!’. . . The death of the transcendent neoorthodox God is, therefore, the negation of the negation of life, which allows the true God of Jesus (rather than Christ) to be born anew.” 

[pp. 200-201 in Mark C. Taylor’s After God; Taylor quotes Nietzsche, “The Anti-Christ,’ from The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Kauffman, p. 585. He references Thomas Altizer’s Gospel of Christian Atheism as well as his History as Apocalypse and others. For elaboration on “realized eschatology,” see Altizer’s Contemporary Jesus, p. 61 particularly.]

Postmodernism can also be better comprehended when considered in the flow from classical (pre-modern) into modern and on to postmodern and by making comparisons and contrasts among them. Don Cupitt’s Creation Out of Nothing (1990) has helpful material.

We have three visions of the world to compare, classical, modern and postmodern. They are related as thesis, antithesis and synthesis. In the classical vision the world was God’s work of art, produced by God’s almighty Word. In the modern vision the world was constructed as a machine operating in accordance with general mathematical rules, a machine of whose workings we might gain complete understanding and control. In the postmodern vision the world is represented as our expression, our fiction, our communally-produced and ever-changing work of art. We need a new kind of religion for this new world, an objectless, abstract practice of life as expressive religious art (p. 195).

The contrast involves leaving the distant All-Powerful God Who gives laws that humans follow as prescriptions for getting to Heaven, shifting to a God (of the modern time) who guides His people to making a better world, and adjusting further on to the postmodern loss of control with its overwhelming ambiguity, paradox, multiplicity, and uncertainty. Cupitt elaborates on these world changes concerning religion and related across fundamentalism and mysticism. 

“Unable now to look either to the past for legitimation or to the future for justification, we are forced to find and affirm the meaning of our life in the here and now. 
… it must be insisted at once that this does not imply any mystical regaining of Presence in the present moment. On the contrary, there is no mastery of the presence of the present moment. We always arrive a little too late, just as self-consciousness always gets there too late. And there can be no going back on the realization that self-expression is death to the speaker, whether the speaker be the Self or God. I am my life, I am my communicative expression; but as I go out into language I lose my self-identity and become nothing but the many different things that people make of me. Like God, we are nothing unless we give ourselves. Our destiny is to give ourselves by going out into communication, but in so giving ourselves we lose control of ourselves. That self-giving is religion, is love, is God and is death.“ (Creation Out of Nothing, pp 147-8)

In his book written a few years later, Cupitt develops further the possibilities of religion moving into and beyond postmodernism:

“Will the religion of Being be a religion of personal salvation? The old religions promised to the individual person an eternal life and a perfected selfhood. The religion of Being cannot promise that much. It promises only two things—aesthetic joy and happiness in death. (p. 140, The Religion of Being, 1998.)

“Under the new order, things are rather different. Our lives are not pre-planned, and there is no hidden puppeteer pulling wires and managing the plot. Faith in Being feels subjectively very like an artistic vocation, or an addiction to writing. Creativity has become an habitual way of life. All day, every day, a bit of you is listening, waiting for it to come. But how does . . . ‘it’ … ‘come’? It comes when the words that have been whirring in our heads all day, and the various forces struggling for expression within us, suddenly click together. Just for a moment, it all ‘comes right’, Being comes forth and there is a moment of creativity. That’s it. That’s what we live for—the moment when Meaning and Being meet, and something new is born. Our own personal struggle for wholeness in expression has met with Being’s own forthcoming into expression. We are briefly one with Being, and we know what it is to be a son of God and an agent of Creation.” (p. 151, The Religion of Being, 1998.)

As we participate in creativity, Cupitt describes our expression as “fictionalism,” as the making and joining in the play of good stories.

“Now, in religion, I have no new dogma. I am teaching play, I am teaching fictionalism and holy-common religious humanism, and I am saying that the move to these ideas is therapeutic. We come at them on the rebound from the failure of the old quest for transcendence, for reality and for dogmatic truth. The quest, its failure, the rebound and the return into immanence and play have all to be constantly renewed: that is fictionalism. And the return from them into hold-common religious humanism—that is Incarnation.
(p. 141, What Is a Story?)

 

Golden Snowflakes

I recently dreamed of two men, probably one young and the other old, with each “purviewing" (see note at end) his map for moving forward in life’s journey; and either in the dream or in the liminal edge toward wakening, I considered the young man’s roadmap as the exoteric pathway while the older one viewed an inner mapping of the esoteric journey, that of his heart/soul. S.H. Nasr explains “the basic distinction” between these pathways, the outer/exoteric and the inner/esoteric: “Religion has an outward aspect concerning everyone destined to accept its teachings, but it also possesses an inner dimension accessible to the few who are able to penetrate from the realm of outwardness to the inward” (pp. 15-6, Religion and the Order of Nature). He continues by noting the interdependence of these two and affirms the importance of honoring the exoteric forms required in following the teachings of traditional religions alongside the personal esoteric movement into inner meanings. This connection keys the hope for “religious harmony” among religions:

“The insistence upon the esoteric as the only means of penetrating beyond the veil of distinct formal worlds of various religions to the inner meaning or transcendent unity—binding them together, and wherein alone can religious harmony be found in the deepest sense—has in fact been one of the major impediments for a wider appreciation of the approach of the perennial philosophy to the study of religion in academic circles. Esotericism, traditionally understood, does not negate the significance of the exoteric. . . On the contrary, it [esotericism] insists upon its [exotericism’s] importance, for it is only through forms that one can transcend the formal plane, and one cannot surely throw away what one does not possess.” (From the section,“The Outward and the Inward in the Cosmos and in Religion,” pp. 15-17 in Religion and the Order of Nature.)

While there’s value in exploring exoteric and esoteric separately, in the fuller picture they overlap and perhaps in an absolute frame do so almost completely.

The dream did not, unfortunately and yet not surprisingly, reveal the mapquest details on either of these pathways, but I suspect it’s affirming the direction I’ve been taking that honors the sacred in nature and art. As evident in recent postings, my reading and photography show devotion to spending time walking more slowly and with more gratitude among woodlands while also reflecting upon the beauty with more creative attempts. The collage of images at the top suggests the exoteric-esoteric play as witnessed through the window above my desk. In Light on the Ancient Worlds, Schuon offers guidance for choosing the pathways to walk and for the destination to strive for: “The mission of man is to introduce the Absolute into the relative” (p. 82). 

The “relative” in the collage comes from approaching nature with reverence and with an expectation of revelation at any moment, even in a landscape of muted tones.

Perhaps in the small steps of my personal walking, I’m making a gesture toward “the resacralization” of nature. Nasr’s opening of his final chapter in Religion and Order of Nature addresses this:

“Nature needs to be resacralized not by man who has no power to bestow the quality of sacredness upon anything, but through the remembrance of what nature is as theater of Divine Creativity and Presence. Nature has been already sacralized by the Sacred Itself, and its resacralization means more than anything else a transformation within man, who has himself lost his Sacred Center, so as to be able to rediscover the Sacred and consequently to behold again nature’s sacred quality. And this remembrance and rediscovery can only be achieved through religion in its traditional forms as the repositories of the Sacred and the means of access to it.” (pp. 270-1)

The second image, taken with a special effect available with the camera, might suggest an attempt “to introduce the Absolute into the relative.” 

As I edit the images, I’m caught by the notion that these remaining autumn leaves appear as golden snowflakes, and I’m touched by the Love manifesting in nature. I believe the time spent in nature looking, appreciating, and playing in a creative manner can be a form of remembrance and contemplation in the tradition of spiritual contemplatives. Many writers emphasize the importance of contemplation to our bridging the exoteric with the esoteric. Schuon offers crucial insight regarding the terrible risks and the possible Gold marking our human journey: 

“… it is impossible to contemplate a nearby object and at the same time the distant landscape behind it, so it is impossible—in this connection alone—to contemplate and act at the same time.” Footnote 21 which states: “This is what the tragedy of Hamlet expresses: there were facts and actions, and demands of action, but the Shakespearean hero, seeing through it all, saw only principles or ideas; he sank into things as into a morass; their very vanity or unreality prevented him from acting, dissolved his action; he had before him, not this or that evil, but evil as such, and this inconsistency, absurdity, and incomprehensibility of the world thwarted everything he wished to do. Contemplation either removes one from action by causing the objects of action to disappear, or it renders action perfect by making God appear in the agent; now the contemplativity of Hamlet had unmasked the world, but it was not yet fixed in God; it was as it were suspended between two planes of reality…the drama of the contemplative who is forced to action but has no vocation for it… (p. 39, Light on the Ancient Worlds).

Note on "purviewing": I’m playing with the word “purview” as the dream might suggest a person’s reach across the two worlds, the inner and outer, with the purpose indicated in the meaning of “purview: “the range or limit of authority, competence, responsibility, concern, or intention.”

The World Turning Gold

About four in the afternoon on October 25, 2018, when I look through the window over my desktop, the world is turning gold. The alchemy of autumn.

unedited photo in "landscape"

The image shown above does not, of course, show exactly what I beheld, but neither does the one represented in the unedited “landscape” setting on the camera.

         A representation that is closer to the vision revealed might be forced in a slightly edited version of this second image—but I’m not showing that because a few moments later, sunlight drizzled the woodland forcing a third or fourth viewpoint to be considered.

unedited image taken in “aperture priority”

         If we’re looking for the Truth through our encounters with nature, our journey might lead into works such as S.H. Nasr’s Religion and the Order of Nature. Progressing slowly in order to absorb the rich material, I’m now about halfway into the book. Nasr details and interprets the modern framing of our world as it

“moved away from the almost universally held view of the sacredness of nature to one that sees man as alienated from nature and nature itself as no longer the progenitor of life (the very root of nature being from the Latin nascitura, meaning to give birth), but rather as a lifeless mass, a machine to be dominated and manipulated by a purely earthly man. It also divorced, in a manner not to be seen in any other civilization, the laws of nature from moral laws and human ethics from the workings of the cosmos” (p. 4).

Nasr’s opening paragraph asserts quite explicitly his concern for human destruction of the environment: 

“The world of nature is being desecrated and destroyed in an unprecedented manner globally by both those who have secularized the world about them and developed a science and technology capable of destroying nature on an unimaginable scale and by those who still live within a religious universe… (p. 3).

         In the 4.5 acres that my wife and I tend, we’re able to participate in eco-friendly stewardship, and through this our lives continue to be blessed both physically and spiritually. But a related and somewhat different focus seems to take a higher priority for me. My intended direction, especially in this late stage of life, focuses on capital T Truth which I find turned a different way from the one quite well known from the academic career.  Now retired, I seek devotion to Truth, and this requires a kind of knowing that differs from the truth needed to publish in academic journals, including those of the “arts and humanities” as well as those of “mathematical and scientific disciplines.” Academic truth has its role and importance. I don’t intend disrespect for that work; it’s just that I find it necessary to demand, for myself at least, a distinctly different take on truth.

         For one thing, this different track requires a tolerance for imprecision. Language for this Truth always falls frustratingly short, often calls for teasing paradoxes, and even lapses into significant silences. Yet words have been put to the pathway that sound right enough, although they must be handled with considerable care. A few titles gleaned from my bookshelves illustrate: Knowledge of God, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, and The Secret of the Love of God. 

         As suggested by these titles, movement along this pathway finds guidance from dynamic interactions, especially among Truth, Beauty, and Love. Each person engages these qualities in accordance with his or her God-given nature. My personal walking gets animated by looking into nature and playing with representations in an artistic and alchemical way, with consideration for realism but also letting the magical possibilities come through. To do this, I believe I must see and engage nature more in line with Nasr's radical direction away from the modern view. This, perhaps, opens more of the “imaginal” world (using Ibn Arabi and Henry Corbin’s terms) and allows for a closer walking with the beloved. I’m looking forward to the delight of wondering with photos taken during our week in Australia because the rain forest captivated me with my full consent toward an imaginal world. For this moment, a glimpse might come through a playful look in today’s window.

Proximity to Truth

     This past week I finished reading a book that a few years ago I’m pretty sure:

a) I would not have selected at all.

b) If I had started it, I would have shelved without finishing. 

c) And, if I somehow read to the end, I’d have trashed it—as I recall doing with only one book, a highly-rated novel with a similar plot line.

     Perhaps I’ve become able to appreciate the power of the way this author troubled the waters and in doing so reworked my thinking, feeling, valuing, and maybe even transformed conscience/consciousness. For this to happen, the novel was not working alone but was interweaving with other books that are especially contributing to my development, particularly Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying; John Dominic Crossan, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges; and Attar’s Conference of the Birds (translated by Peter Avery and by Afkham Darbandi/Dick Davis).

     Rather than explaining, I’ll show portions of the book; but first, here’s the Spoiler Alert: these extracts might mess with the experience of reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle. If you plan on reading it, consider stopping now! 

     In the opening pages, Murdoch’s main character is portrayed: “He believed profoundly in complete truthfulness as the basis and condition of all virtue.” So, in the early chapters, he persists in telling the full truth to his wife even as he realizes “He could not now make his knowledge of her into love.” Soon enough, however, as he falls in love with another woman, he experiences that “truth” about the new relationship is a phenomenon he cannot express in words that will be comprehended by his wife. He’s perplexed in feeling unable, even if he tries, to tell the truth. Through the second half or so of the book, I am led (but not forced) by the author into a hard acceptance of truth as congruence instead of romance. His lover tells of the spinning (truth or lies or paradox) of the telling of their relationship this way:

“But now I can see. I see that it was you that tricked me—and I too that deceived myself. I saw it all so simply, with nothing to it but you leaving your wife whom you didn’t love and who didn’t love you. But a life has so much more in it than that. I had not seen that I would break so many many things.”

“If you love me—“ he said. 

“That word cannot guide us any more.”

     In other Murdoch novels, the congruence of parts includes the break-up of a marriage. Murdoch is not prescribing a case law in the sense noted by Crossan below. The truth of the full trajectory of the relationship of the lovers is best forecast in metaphors; in this novel, it’s in the title, The Sandcastle, and in lines spoken during the collapse of their romantic structure, “You are a growing tree. I am only a bird. You cannot break your roots and fly away with me.”

     The reason I’m compelled by Murdoch’s work may be explained in Peter Conradi’s biography:

“It could be said that all her fiction, and much of her moral philosophy, are acts of penance for, and attacks upon, the facile rationalistic optimism of her extreme youth, when she thought that setting people free was easy, that ‘socialism (of which we had no very clear idea) would bring freedom and justice to all countries, and the world would get better’. . . Her work explores, among other matters, those ‘irrational’ psychic forces within the individual which make Hitlers possible, and freedom problematic.” (Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch, pp. 78-79)

     Concerning freedom, in a somewhat similar manner, I’m reconsidering my position in relation to the presentation of narrative, particularly in the fable and in the parable. When teaching Good Stories, I wanted students to realize freedom in constructing meaning. Going against the usual approach to the fable as having an explicit moral, we worked at considering multiple possibilities so that each individual could attempt to discern one that fit for himself or herself. We followed the direction of Lloyd Daly’s Aesop without Morals and made interpretations of narratives that did not force a specific moral. Now, I want to be careful in giving freedom, especially in view of Crossan's treatment of parable.

     In his take on narrative truth and freedom, Crossan develops the parable with emphasis on the distinctive features in texts of Jesus and Borges. He articulates “the core elements of parable” in a way that shows the shaking up of a person’s thinking/feeling/valuing and then leaving the person with the freedom to reach into the beyond:  

"... the core elements of parable. The first is paradox. The second is story. This is accomplished by effecting a structural reversal on a traditional or expected story at the deepest levels… 'symbols which through their paradoxical form expressed the inexpressible without betraying it.'" (pp. 94-95 building on and quoting from Heinz Politzer’s Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox)

But Crossan also stresses the danger in the extension of freedom: “to abide with the Holy is more fundamental than any case law and is itself original ethics and fundamental morality. It is also much more dangerous” (p. 69). This radical activity of parable in Jesus and Borges circles back again to Murdoch’s realization that freedom given to person unable to “see,” unable to discern lies, allows the rise of Hitlers.

     Murdoch does not turn against freedom; instead her work pushes us to face the lies we tell ourselves and to engage the hard truths. Our thinking, our moral sense, needs to include paradox, and our realities marry imagination. The most important truth comes in a person’s approximation to discerning the touch of the divine in oneself. As Sells develops in the Unsayings, that’s what the mystics try to show us.

   It’s now early Sunday morning 

in pre-dawn meditations on dreams 

of marking the path, 

reflecting on Attar’s parable 

of surrender to the guide

reading time inside and out

eternal now. Time

is simultaneous line and circle

the eternal return.

Being/doing, identity & ?

Living this

as the game of labyrinth,

and whether there is a center or an exit does not matter so much

as the quality of the player, unending purification.

There is only the dance 

as Eliot sings for us & realizing

all this a poem not a line,

and a story not imitative rhyme

and not just a tale told by an idiot

but some beauty composed by

Imagining a Better World

     The last day of August. Sensing a liminal space, feeling this seasonal threshold, I was lured from the luxury of the back porch, camera in hand, in search of the image that invited and scaffolded the glimpse beyond. The bold flowers, richly colored and so soon to fade and fall, captured the shutter. Often, the image recovered on my computer screen invites further meditation, a doorway opening imagination.

     The phenomena of images widens enormously, amazingly, in the writings of Henry Corbin. 

 “when a thing manifested to the senses or the intellect calls for a hermeneutics (ta’wil) because it carries a meaning which transcends the simple datum and makes that thing a symbol, this symbolic truth implies a perception on the plane of the active Imagination. The wisdom which is concerned with such meanings, which makes things over as symbols and has as its field the intermediate world of subsisting Images, is a wisdom of light (hikmat nuriya), typified in the person of Joseph, the exemplary interpreter of visions” (p. 190, Alone with the Alone).

     In addition to the ending of August, this week marks the beginning of another school year. It’s the first time in over sixty years that my vision is not focused in a school room. Not preoccupied with planning and presenting lessons, my mind finds space and time for reflection. It’s like looking into the photographic image to see beyond. My teaching career culminated in the Good Stories course.

     Reflected in eye of my mind and imagination, Good Stories served as a playground in the symbolic world. The importance of this kind of activity, taken seriously, goes mostly unrecognized in our age characterized by scientific proof and material values. The extinction of spirituality traces to many trends such as the triumph of rationalism (at least back to Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum , ~1637) and more than a century of nihilistic ponderings about the “death of God.”

     In Good Stories, we imagined the land of fairies, the flight on the firebird, the possibilities of the “water of Life,” the beast to beauty transformations, and other happenings beyond the surface level. Was Martin Luther King, Jr. crazy to dream of a world able to see past skin color on into a world with love for all God’s children? Was the academy right to treat dismissively any course dedicated to developing the human lens for seeing through story? Is the truth only found through the microscope, through behaviorism, the world as it is? The events and implications of hurricane Harvey and the monsoon in south Asia push us to wonder how policy makers and voters might expand vision beyond immediate and personal gratification, further than literal dogma, the denial of God. 

Winning and Losing: The Marriage

early April 3: the play of light and dark

Have you noticed in the sports world how many #1s there are? While this might seem ludicrous, almost a parody on excellence, I wonder how this claim toward the top might signal a positive pathway.

         Let’s not be naïve about it. The reach for the crown carries a dangerous aspect. Given the dominant paradigm that offers only one ultimate champion, the multitude of claims for being the best often leads to disappointment and heartbreak for everyone but the one winner, generating despair and broken dreams. Viewed rather cynically, this championship enterprise markets gambling, along with drinking and drugs to distract from the pain of loss.

         Yet these dangers do not disqualify seeing a multitude of teams chanting “We’re Number One!” as an opportune moment. In Good Stories, we explore this paradigm-changing potential through teaching-narratives when we probe the depths of archetypal constructs, especially marriage and treasure. As we all know, fairy tales often build to the climactic wedding. This motif opens consideration of the “marriage of opposites.” How, then, do we marry winning and losing?

         Before we move directly into that question, let’s also note a companion theme that helps open the mystery: the treasure. But treasure is also a polyvalent window; it’s a threshold or opening to another world where the prize shifts shape and where what has been lost gets found. Or, in other words, trash turns to treasure.

         We entered a Good Story this week about twins who initially appear as opposites: beauty and ugly. But, in the way of story, it’s the  unattractive, troublesome one who deals with the trolls. And it’s the loss of beauty’s head, a saving transgression, that empowers their travel under the edge of the world and on into the double wedding, the marriage of opposites in a dialectical transcendence where new vision recognizes beauty beneath the superficial.

         Can we imagine a world that sees beauty as the power to deal with dark forces instead of the number of zeros after the dollar sign? The teaching on treasure is continued redemption. Talents are to be wisely invested in the purification and renewal of life, not hoarded and buried away.

         Playing games that mean for us to lose puts us in the face of our fear of ultimate loss, dying. Rilke resonates this in our wrestling with the angel, asserting, “This is how we grow! By being defeated, decisively by constantly greater beings.” John Dominic Crossan in The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story tells: “game is a very serious practice session for life and death, or, more precisely, for life towards death” (p. 5).

         When we and our athletes have to absorb the loss of the dream of being national champion, do we find redemption? Among the variety of possibilities, let’s consider the world of multiplicity.  To struggle with the marriage of winning and losing builds a world with space for paradox. How do we learn to continue to live as if winning is the only thing at the same time that we accept defeat by constantly greater beings? How else do we learn to go under the edge of the world? We must move beyond the world that wins at small things because we realize the loss when winning gains the whole world but loses the soul!

         Crossan says that we live within story where myth and parable shape us “to be human and to remain open to transcendental experience” (p. 39, Dark Interval). In this paradoxical world formed in the Winning-Losing wedding, our treasure chest stores the liberating role of not-yet-sense.  Storytelling’s redeemed from the poor-box where it’s often relegated in contemporary academics. Instead of the singular presumption of objective reality, the gold coins become Uncertainty and Indeterminacy, affirmed even by quantum physics (e.g., p. 116, Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.)

         There is no closing to the mystery wedding of Winning-Losing, but a few lines may serve to keep us going:

“And the wonder and mystery of art, as indeed of religion in the last resort, is the revelation of something ‘wholly other’ by which the inexpressible loneliness of thinking is broken and enriched.”  Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, p 237. (Quoted in Crossan, In Parables, p. 2.)

Advancing Peace & Justice through Teaching-Story

      We want to continue to emphasize the subtitle of our Good Stories course: Teaching Narratives for Peace and Justice. When we work with Good Stories, how are we advancing our prospects for moving further in capacity for building a peaceful world, both inside ourselves and with others? Several concepts developed in our textbook, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction by Brian Boyd, are especially important in relation to this.

Explanation of Four Themes

1. Let’s continue focusing on metarepresentation. This concept explains how we are able to move across the levels as we translate from the story images to the local and individual levels. For example, in Buried Treasure, we abstract an archetypal image like the “tatema” that Luis is given.  For another example of the treasure archetype, we imagine a representation for the “water of life” in Golden Water.

         As we move from the detail in the story to the abstract idea, we are doing meta-representation: the box with silver coins is recognized as “treasure” which could also be seen as the coin Jack gets, as the puppy Epaminondas receives, and as the golden water found by the youngest sister. This amplification enriches our ability to see the treasure in a variety of forms or representations. Each of us has access to treasures, but they are easily missed unless we develop vision to see them in varied forms and to see potential the way the Creator does with the speck of mud retrieved by Little Coot in Beginnings.

          When we have the abstract image (in other words, when we “meta-represent”), we are then prepared to translate the quality across into the other levels. For example, look at how we are finding the “treasure” in our selection of a college major. If we make the fitting choice, this field of study provides riches for ourselves and for others. One treasure comes in the joy of learning (Individual Level: Inner), another is the ability to earn a living (Individual Level: Outer), and a third could be the benefits that the knowledge and skills provide for others through the applications in the world (Local Level). If a person makes the right choice on engineering, he or she should love learning about it and the projects he or she develops could provide valuable structures for others.

         Working with stories exercises our capacity for metarepresentation, and we can use that developed capacity throughout life in ways that support peace and justice.

2. The theme of cooperation is perhaps the most important component needed at our time in history in order for the advance of peace and justice. Working with stories contributes by showing us examples and by developing our ability for empathy. The story about Kanu and the Strangers is a prime example. We see the chief of the village model the ability to anticipate strangeness as virtue, and when we identify with one of the strangers we befriend aspects of ourselves that have been isolated and devalued (cf, Daniel Deardorff, The Other Within). This modeling and inner development enables us to participate in social change that reduces hostility and enhances equal opportunity.

         Boyd emphasizes this theme throughout his book because fiction (story) gives us practice with taking on the role of others who model character traits we need to build. For example, we may better appreciate patience by empathizing with Psyche; we may build capacity for courage and the judgment needed to meet with dangers by joining Kanu’s team as they accepted and enacted the challenge of bringing back the daughter of the village. This quest can be seen as bringing back the emergent feminine qualities such as cooperation that are essential for sustaining collaborative life.

         Boyd elaborates on the theme of collaboration:

We need to infer others' predispositions and their likely intentions and actions, which may in turn be based in part on their attempts to guess ours. If this hypothesis is correct, higher intelligence emerged primarily as social intelligence, through a cognitive arms race to understand conspecifics and to reveal to or conceal from others our own beliefs, desires, and intentions. Because theory of mind was first opened as a field to explore within primatology, the social intelligence hypothesis was first called the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. Chimpanzees seek to understand one another especially in order to compete, sometimes by deception, for food, sex, or status. But researchers have begun to realize that we have probably reached our unique human level of theory of mind through pressures to cooperate more closely against other groups: we understand one another so much better because unlike chimpanzees we have crossed a cooperation divide and from infancy have a greater motivation to social engagement and shared attention than any other species.[note 68 Wilson, Evolution for Everyone; ] (p. 141-2; Kindle Locations 1597-1603). 

         During their fifth year, children grow into a distinctively human theory of mind, capable of metarepresentation--of understanding the process of representation--and involving beliefs as well as desires, goals, and intentions, a state that no other animal appears to reach. At this higher, exclusively human level, theory of mind becomes not only an intuitive psychology but an intuitive epistemology. No wonder it is hard to attain, even though as adults we employ it effortlessly. (bold emphasis, mine; p. 145; Kindle Locations 1640-1647). 

3. The empathy we develop through feeling with a character in a story can expand our understanding of the attitudes, values, and behaviors needed to cooperate, to accept differences (like Kanu does), and to expand our value system in ways that extend justice. Boyd elaborates on empathy: Empathy arises from recognizing others' goals and desires, a capacity necessary in an individualized social species.  (p. 138; Kindle Location 1561).

A third aspect of the theory of bonds is social exchange. In the human case this extends far further than in any other individualized society and has led to the evolution of a complex suite of moral emotions to solve problems of trust and commitment.[note 55] We can observe the basis for human moral emotions in other animals, especially primates: empathy, which as Darwin noted makes individuals much more able to live in groups; [note 56] a sense of fairness and self-righteous indignation, recently found experimentally even in capuchin monkeys,[note 57] and demonstrated cross-culturally in humans;[note 58] forgiveness and reconciliation, needed to repair relations, observed over the last twenty years in many species;[note 59] emotions like generosity and gratitude; and a capacity for detecting cheating in social  relations . . . Nature has endowed us with a moral capacity "much like a gyroscope at rest," and culture's role is "to spin it and establish its orientation."[note 64]  (p. 140-141; Kindle Locations 1584-1591).

4. Stories are true but they are true at a level of abstraction that has to be translated into “real-life” situations if we are to manifest these truths into our individual and social worlds. In order to translate the archetypal images that resonate within us, we need the resources of imagination, play, and creativity. Boyd emphasizes how these elements have been vital in the movement of culture and civilization.

They [Darwin machines] cannot find the right answer beforehand: there is no single right form of life, no single right antibody, no single right synaptic link, no single right move.(note 32) But they can generate possibilities that the environment tests. Survivors generate new variations and face new rounds of tests, so that even without preplanning, success accumulates.  (p. 120; Kindle, 1387-1389).   

In art understood as a Darwin machine, works are not somehow created to fit the cultural environment. Instead they are generated, unpredictably, in the minds or actions of artists, and selected first by them in accordance with their intuitions about their social world, and then by this world itself. (note 40)(p. 123; Kindle, 1414,)

Art develops in us habits of imaginative exploration, so that we take the world as not closed and given, but open and to be shaped on our own terms. In and through art, we readily turn the actual around within the much larger space of the possible, the conditional, and the impossible. Art opens up new dimensions of possibility space and populates it with imaginative particulars.

Art builds our confidence, at the individual and the group levels, in shaping our own destinies.   (p. 124; Kindle,1427-1429, 1435)

         The connections among the four themes from cooperation to creativity are shown in these excerpts from Boyd:

But a system of unconscious emotional contagion [that works before language and below conscious awareness and has evolved along with sociality] allows us to coordinate genuinely cooperative intentions. Mirror neurons, [whose function was discovered only in the early 1990s,] fire when we see others act or express emotion as if we were making the same action, and allow us through a kind of automatic inner imitation to understand their intentions and attune ourselves to their feelings. 

Quoting Goleman:

When people are in rapport, they can be more creative together and more efficient in making decisions ... Shared attention is the first essential ingredient

Animals learn best to attune themselves to one another through the pleasures of play, taking turns, checking to see that their partners still seek the "high" of intense mutual engagement.(note 19) Humans, more flexible in behavior and dependent for much longer in childhood, broaden and lengthen social play, not only in childhood but right throughout adult life. And they extend it, crucially, into the cognitive play of art.  (p. 103-4; Kindle, 1186-1195)

And through pretend play and fiction we learn to try out the positions of others, we attune ourselves spontaneously to the shifting emotions of an unfolding story, and we encounter story after story that embodies prosocial values in memorable, emotionally compelling images, actions, and outcomes (p. 106; Kindle, 1214-1215).   

Application of the themes

As we move into planning our second digital media project, these themes are the stepping stones:

1. Through resonance, we each identify the metarepresentations that are worthy of development because they connect with the unique talent and gift given to each person. In other words, the authentic “hits” made in the experience of Good Stories, of teaching-narratives, offer the source of the archetypal images capable of advancing peace and justice.

2. Just as we are doing in the journal assignments, Digital Media Project 2 translates across the levels so that the point of resonance (such as Psyche opening the treasure chest or Chameleon looking like Ruler-Above) gets applied in our individual character and at the social level. For example, DMP2 could include a comic with an inner dialog where a self-doubt is challenged by the way a divine ruler would see the situation. Another part of DMP2 could show a photo of an experience though UMCP's alternative breaks program where a home is being made for persons living in sub-standard conditions. The voice track could tell how this is like anteater’s work in the Kanu Story and how it expands the chances for peace and justice.

3. In order to extend the understanding and the texture of the key archetypal image and the related quality, DMP2 amplifies by showing drawings and photos connected with several stories. For example, let’s assume that my points of resonance tended to relate to the points where someone received guidance: the youngest brother stopping for the small voice, the young sister listening to the old woman and to the talking bird, Psyche getting help from the reed and from the tower. Through metarepresentation I connect these points of resonance with the archetypal figure of the Guide. My project amplifies with images representing the stories just named and then translates the Guide across levels so that I creatively play forward my developing understanding of Guide/Guidance.

         The empathy needed to recognize the guides we might otherwise miss out on can be developed by amplification of this theme. In the Grimms’ Water of Life, the guide was a voice that was perceived by the older brothers as too small to be worthy of their attention. In Golden Water, this is shown as a person who could be missed as just looking like a haystack. Psyche needs to listen to the reed alongside the river if she is to recover the golden wool. When we amplify the archetypal them of “guide” with these stories, we develop empathy needed to value small voices and to look into the hidden places.

         Also, the Golden Water story shows a progression of the guide archetype as it suggest development of an inner voice (some call this “gnosis”). The youngest sister is in search of the “treasures” (figured as golden water, singing branch, & talking bird) that would make her home complete. This could represent the development of her complete being, personality, or wholeness.  She gets guidance for this from the figure that was initially hidden in the mass of hair, like a haystack and then later from the talking bird. As the guide changes from human to the bird, we might understand this as developing more independence from outside mentoring and more reliance on an inner voice. In addition to gnosis, this kind of knowing has been elaborated as “felt sense” by Eugene Gendlin, as “feeling” in natural horsemanship, and as a sense of destiny. http://dochorsetales.blogspot.com/2014/10/destiny-directions.html

4. As just illustrated, the making of this second digital media project invites us to nurture and practice our capacity for imagination, play, and creativity. A sense of humor is often the best tonic to get through difficult experiences. Lazy Jack’s bumbling attempts in his slowly developing ability for adaptation in moving day to day resulted in the laughter that connected with the beloved.

         Imagination also allows us to connect with resources such as the ones given for Psyche’s tasks. When Psyche loses contact with Eros, the stage is set for bouts with Depression because Eros represents the source of creativity and vitality. Our well-being depends on our nurturing our relationship with play, and play deserves to be taken seriously along the lines of the way that Vivian Paley portrays it in her accounts such as A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play and You Can’t Say You Can’t Play

Questions to think about:

1. After viewing “Beginnings,” name and illustrate your point of resonance.

2. Explain how the Beginnings story, preferably the place in the story that you just named, connects with Boyd’s explanation of the importance of creativity. See excerpts from Boyd in part 4 above.

3. Use your creativity to make a visual that you could use in DMP2. The image should show a photo of you in a place where you are getting creative ideas. Put in a thought bubble that tells about an insight or a wondering you are making based on the Beginnings story. For example, it might say, “Like Little Coot this idea I have about [fill in your idea] looks like just a useless speck of mud, but…”