Human beings have become estranged from their intuition and empathy for nature. I'm not sure how it happened. Some say we must be the descendents of alien life-forms inbreeding with native creatures, but certainly before the age of grain, we had found a way to exist much like all other animals on the planet, roving over areas that were capable of providing enough food for us to survive, living by the seasons and within a bio-region that was able to assimilate all that we cast off. Just as choices for cultures have been constrained, individuals face the same constricted limits to our own growth, development and choice. Over time, just as we have learned the mantras, "Man does not live by bread alone." and "To the victor go the spoils.", we have come of age accepting certain inalienable rules for behavior, socialized etiquette and a host of other limitations on our thoughts and actions. A great friend, and popular figures in literature and the arts have described a fallacy inherent in the idea of freedom of choice. The harder you look into it, the more true their position seems to be confirmed.
When we have the urge to reach out, there are phrases in our language that override free will. "Don't make eye contact." Whether we have heard it stated explicitly that succinctly or not depends on whether our parents or friends were completely honest about it, or whether we learned by example to furtively avert our eyes from those worthy of our compassion. I have seen people turn their heads with such a snap that you would think they had been slapped by an irate parent, to keep them from seeing what would cause a normal person to respond. Each of us in our own specific way, tailor our learning and use of language to a style, a vocabulary, a palette of understanding and experience that is unique, but often we adopt large regions of ideation from the predominant culture. What we think and say are often colored, to large extent by our peculiar past, but even so, we share similarities based on having similar experiences. Even though we experience being able to express ourselves because of the shared experiences as helpful, the definitions themselve act as limitations on experience and understanding.
Standardization has two effects. On one hand, functionality over a broad range of experiences is fostered, but often there is a swirl mixed in of functional fixation. This term is loosely translated from the field of psychology, but I like it because it describes so clearly, how many of us will limit our experiences based on prior experience and this is a good way of describing it. Take something as simple as a scissor. Two blades cutting against on another. Boom! Into your imagination pops an image...The infinite variety, types and styles of scissor are not in your head, banging around in a confounding cacophony of possibility. Be honest, you "saw" a specific one. It represented a best case scenario about what I had described. I know it, because it is what I do too. Sort, sift, winnow and in an instant, the ATM of meaning in my brain, fueled with the energy broaching synapses, informed by prior experience and only able to converse in the abstract has spit our the result of a conversation between infinite possibility and something I can use. This making of "choices", even in translating the minutia of life into meaning, or memory, is a drive, essentially to death. What flows from the dissected and generalized scissor in your mind might even limit how you "see" this device used. I have seen scissor collections that were designed to be art. I have seen scissors used to decorate cakes, to cut pizza and to make tiny plastic bags to contain illicit drugs. I have seen them used like tweezers, garden bed borders and to build sculptures for yard art. All of these possibilities can live within the image, depending on our experience, but none are inherent in the shared experience that we use the word to stand in for. When we slice and dice something down to a useable form, we often kill the life that had been in what we are describing.
Jung was the first person I "read" who posited a death drive, equivalent in power to the drive to life that all creatures exhibit. I had seen dozens, perhaps hundreds of people on their road to ruin before I read that statement. Could I have been a Jungian analyst prior to age seven? I knew plenty about the death drive described by Jung, even by age seven. After reading the words, I had a pigeon-hole to "fit" my experience into. Many years went by before I took that "bauble", the rough translation of an idea that filled that region of my experience, out of the pigeon-hole and examined it further. I know now that we must each wrestle the angel of death from time to time, I have learned that dancing with that angel can have profound influence on who we become later in life, both liberating and constraining our future choices (if we make it through the dance) and I have come to terms with the possibility that we must become intimate with that angel if we are to truly live the life that we are called to...all of these things are possible if we relinquish the hollow shell that contained meaning that Jung's words brought, once my own metamorphosis had been completed. Breaking containment in the realm of ideas can be as hard as escaping a fortress.
Let me return to the example of scissors. When I was a child, I grew up using right-handed ones. That was what was available to me. When I went to school, they had something called "left-handed scissors". Because it had been duly noted that I was left-handed, they gave me a left-handed scissor that was useless in my hands. To make them work, in my hands, it was awkward, different. I had adapted to the standard world already and to this day, using a lefty scissors feels alien to me. This same handicap can occur when we learn that "bread" is made from the staff of life, or that it is the staff of life. In standard practice, that may be true, but in a wider scheme, that we most often do not discuss, it is a covering, a husk of a shell that "protected" us centuries ago. Grain based agriculture is predated by a much more sustainable system, an infinitely more energy efficient one and one that we need to talk about if our species is to survive beyond the modern era.
Anthropologists have now found evidence of civilization before the advent of mono-crop grain production. The difficulty in finding it has been that there were no administrators, no records of the harvest, no large storage facilities, no police force and administrative cadre whose only work was not in production, but the protection, doling out and rationing of that "staff of life". One may claim that we are better off for our hoarding nature, or the standardization of carbohydrate sources, but science would lead one to question that. We have found a nearly infinite number of ways to divert our eyes from looking deeply into what the nugget we call "food" is, what it really means, and where it even comes from. Earlier, when I said scissor, what I had in my mind was one I saw once at a museum. It was ancient and came from a culture in which the elephant was revered. The one handle was fashioned to look like the head of an elephant, with jewels for eyes and tiny ivory tusks above the cutting part. The second handle nested inside the flawlessly sculpted ears, down "inside" the handle. When operated, the bottom shear looked like a rigid trunk, going up and down. The top blade was also fashioned and wrought to look like a trunk from the other side, so when not in use, the entire apparatus looked like a spectacular, miniature trophy, exuding the countenance of the great beast. Now take this description of the scissor and compare it to the minds-eye vision that the word conjured in your head.
This same difference lies in the word food. For many, the four letter word has become an expletive, bereft of subtlety, meaning, relationship, etc. When we are young, many of the constraints that we place on ourselves are based on survival. One typically stops doing certain things when they cause pain, or have impacts on our quality of life. Most often, we prune off thousands of possible behaviors by the time we reach kindergarten. Even when we begin to experience a standardized educational experience, our choices are being made from are a small fraction of possibility. In the end, who can claim true freedom of choice? When I went to college, I can say that I was free to choose between several institutions, but the idea that I had to go to college was so thoroughly ingrained in my experience that I did not make a choice about going. In the end, I didn't have a choice about the individual school that I ultimately went to. I already knew that coming out of school with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, was unacceptable, so the expensive schools were not an option. Like water, I flowed through points of least resistance. The eccentricities and other possible routes forward were reduced beyond recognition by the time I graduated high school. The sieve of what I believed thwarted primal drives and prevented big ideas from coming to the front of my mind, where I could focus on them. As sensitive as I was, when I did catch a glimpse of possibility, it would make my laugh simply because of the novelty of it. Even being trained as an artist, my creativity was guided and my freedom constrained by "projects". The further out we stretched, our realm of possibility, the more we were constrained by convention.
When we humans supplanted sustainable agriculture for large scale mono-crop grain production, it was touted as a way to avoid the vagaries of living off the land. In the end, it has spawned horrible greed and a googleplex of wasted calories. Whatever we wanted out of this sort of agriculture, whether we got it or not, was it truly worth what has come of it? This week I learned that the amount of energy contained in a gallon of gasoline is roughly equivalent to three hundred humans working for one hour. Can we begin to revise our experience in ways that we can appreciate the possibility of "scissor", or "food"? What about the possibility of turning our meaning of the word ethics into the bejeweled version of "scissor", or changing the meaning of "food" to something without empty calories and mega-doses of carbohydrates, sugar and oil? Please remember that the less we think about anything, even our manufactured meanings, the more likely we are to ignore what is truly needed at each moment. Just as averting your eyes from those who need our compassion, turning our heads away from global catastrophe assures that what we really need to do will remain undone. As the rock band, Rush said, If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. We need to become painfully aware of the limitations we place on our understanding. We may never be able to combat our severely protracted "freedom of choice", but we might benefit from getting more involved in defining the terms that work to limit our experiences and understanding.
When we have the urge to reach out, there are phrases in our language that override free will. "Don't make eye contact." Whether we have heard it stated explicitly that succinctly or not depends on whether our parents or friends were completely honest about it, or whether we learned by example to furtively avert our eyes from those worthy of our compassion. I have seen people turn their heads with such a snap that you would think they had been slapped by an irate parent, to keep them from seeing what would cause a normal person to respond. Each of us in our own specific way, tailor our learning and use of language to a style, a vocabulary, a palette of understanding and experience that is unique, but often we adopt large regions of ideation from the predominant culture. What we think and say are often colored, to large extent by our peculiar past, but even so, we share similarities based on having similar experiences. Even though we experience being able to express ourselves because of the shared experiences as helpful, the definitions themselve act as limitations on experience and understanding.
Standardization has two effects. On one hand, functionality over a broad range of experiences is fostered, but often there is a swirl mixed in of functional fixation. This term is loosely translated from the field of psychology, but I like it because it describes so clearly, how many of us will limit our experiences based on prior experience and this is a good way of describing it. Take something as simple as a scissor. Two blades cutting against on another. Boom! Into your imagination pops an image...The infinite variety, types and styles of scissor are not in your head, banging around in a confounding cacophony of possibility. Be honest, you "saw" a specific one. It represented a best case scenario about what I had described. I know it, because it is what I do too. Sort, sift, winnow and in an instant, the ATM of meaning in my brain, fueled with the energy broaching synapses, informed by prior experience and only able to converse in the abstract has spit our the result of a conversation between infinite possibility and something I can use. This making of "choices", even in translating the minutia of life into meaning, or memory, is a drive, essentially to death. What flows from the dissected and generalized scissor in your mind might even limit how you "see" this device used. I have seen scissor collections that were designed to be art. I have seen scissors used to decorate cakes, to cut pizza and to make tiny plastic bags to contain illicit drugs. I have seen them used like tweezers, garden bed borders and to build sculptures for yard art. All of these possibilities can live within the image, depending on our experience, but none are inherent in the shared experience that we use the word to stand in for. When we slice and dice something down to a useable form, we often kill the life that had been in what we are describing.
Jung was the first person I "read" who posited a death drive, equivalent in power to the drive to life that all creatures exhibit. I had seen dozens, perhaps hundreds of people on their road to ruin before I read that statement. Could I have been a Jungian analyst prior to age seven? I knew plenty about the death drive described by Jung, even by age seven. After reading the words, I had a pigeon-hole to "fit" my experience into. Many years went by before I took that "bauble", the rough translation of an idea that filled that region of my experience, out of the pigeon-hole and examined it further. I know now that we must each wrestle the angel of death from time to time, I have learned that dancing with that angel can have profound influence on who we become later in life, both liberating and constraining our future choices (if we make it through the dance) and I have come to terms with the possibility that we must become intimate with that angel if we are to truly live the life that we are called to...all of these things are possible if we relinquish the hollow shell that contained meaning that Jung's words brought, once my own metamorphosis had been completed. Breaking containment in the realm of ideas can be as hard as escaping a fortress.
Let me return to the example of scissors. When I was a child, I grew up using right-handed ones. That was what was available to me. When I went to school, they had something called "left-handed scissors". Because it had been duly noted that I was left-handed, they gave me a left-handed scissor that was useless in my hands. To make them work, in my hands, it was awkward, different. I had adapted to the standard world already and to this day, using a lefty scissors feels alien to me. This same handicap can occur when we learn that "bread" is made from the staff of life, or that it is the staff of life. In standard practice, that may be true, but in a wider scheme, that we most often do not discuss, it is a covering, a husk of a shell that "protected" us centuries ago. Grain based agriculture is predated by a much more sustainable system, an infinitely more energy efficient one and one that we need to talk about if our species is to survive beyond the modern era.
Anthropologists have now found evidence of civilization before the advent of mono-crop grain production. The difficulty in finding it has been that there were no administrators, no records of the harvest, no large storage facilities, no police force and administrative cadre whose only work was not in production, but the protection, doling out and rationing of that "staff of life". One may claim that we are better off for our hoarding nature, or the standardization of carbohydrate sources, but science would lead one to question that. We have found a nearly infinite number of ways to divert our eyes from looking deeply into what the nugget we call "food" is, what it really means, and where it even comes from. Earlier, when I said scissor, what I had in my mind was one I saw once at a museum. It was ancient and came from a culture in which the elephant was revered. The one handle was fashioned to look like the head of an elephant, with jewels for eyes and tiny ivory tusks above the cutting part. The second handle nested inside the flawlessly sculpted ears, down "inside" the handle. When operated, the bottom shear looked like a rigid trunk, going up and down. The top blade was also fashioned and wrought to look like a trunk from the other side, so when not in use, the entire apparatus looked like a spectacular, miniature trophy, exuding the countenance of the great beast. Now take this description of the scissor and compare it to the minds-eye vision that the word conjured in your head.
This same difference lies in the word food. For many, the four letter word has become an expletive, bereft of subtlety, meaning, relationship, etc. When we are young, many of the constraints that we place on ourselves are based on survival. One typically stops doing certain things when they cause pain, or have impacts on our quality of life. Most often, we prune off thousands of possible behaviors by the time we reach kindergarten. Even when we begin to experience a standardized educational experience, our choices are being made from are a small fraction of possibility. In the end, who can claim true freedom of choice? When I went to college, I can say that I was free to choose between several institutions, but the idea that I had to go to college was so thoroughly ingrained in my experience that I did not make a choice about going. In the end, I didn't have a choice about the individual school that I ultimately went to. I already knew that coming out of school with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, was unacceptable, so the expensive schools were not an option. Like water, I flowed through points of least resistance. The eccentricities and other possible routes forward were reduced beyond recognition by the time I graduated high school. The sieve of what I believed thwarted primal drives and prevented big ideas from coming to the front of my mind, where I could focus on them. As sensitive as I was, when I did catch a glimpse of possibility, it would make my laugh simply because of the novelty of it. Even being trained as an artist, my creativity was guided and my freedom constrained by "projects". The further out we stretched, our realm of possibility, the more we were constrained by convention.
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