The Californian's Open Salon Blog

Breaking Out of the Mental Prison

Sun, 4 Jan 2009 16:01:20 -0500

One of the most astonishing sights of our day is that of the fixers and answer-mongers who deal with the multiple crises facing the world by trying to generate solutions. It's like watching inmates repainting the bars of their cell without ever questioning why they are there.

In my own attempt to break through the premises that hold the collective consciousness hostage to the world-wrecking status quo, I've compiled a short list of assumptions that keep the dark machinery going. This list is preliminary rather than explanatory, and it comes with the suggestion to make your own.

Why do this? Because we cannot change unsustainable and violent cultural habits until we step back from and challenge the habits of thought that support them. We stand no chance of building a peaceful, life-serving civilization on the ruins of the old until we get clear about what doesn't work.

Here, then, are a few of the premises of cultures in decline:

The laws of ecology do not apply to our species.
Infinite expansion is good; being happy where we are is bad.
Primitives must be civilized and their territory made “productive.”
Epidemic violence and insanity must be excused as the price of civilization.
Nature is there to be conquered and ruled.
Animals have no needs or intrinsic worth.
Destroying nature has no inner consequences.
The best way to control something undesirable is to repress it.
War, greed, and ecological destruction are “human nature.”
Rejecting religious excuses for aggressive and irrational behavior is somehow intolerant.
Buying techno-crap and eating processed food can soothe us.
We should go on trusting the leaders and experts who are burning down the world around us.
Paranoid war-mongers should continue to be allowed into positions of power.
The best course during a calamitous time is to numb oneself and remain silent.
Imagination, wisdom, love, and imagination cannot change the world.

Exercise for the reader: compile your own list of premises to reject, then start a second list on what does keep human beings vital, loving, and alive.

Wanted: Wisdom in Leadership

Fri, 2 Jan 2009 12:01:20 -0500

I spent time this morning watching online videos of Californian politicians speechifying about the deepening budget crisis.

At one news conference Schwarzeneggar, ever the macho posturer, hammered away about "fiscal responsibility"--he meant not taxing the wealthy, an obvious source of revenue--and backed off when questioned about his threat to veto every bill on his desk. He seemed to be unaware or uncaring of the loss of the trust of his colleagues this implied. The hard negotiations don't succeed inside sealed government buildings: they unfold in small, informal conversations between people who know each other and who can come together in spite of their differences. Our action-hero governor seems not to have learned about or acquired this important skill. His worldview rests on a belief in will power like the sky sits on the shoulders of Atlas.

The Democrats responded not singly but in a group clustered around the mike as though huddling for shelter. I sometimes think the Republicans and Democrats ought to rename their parties the Bullies and the Bullied.

Most would agree that the system is broken, but public discussion about why nearly always focuses on the surface immediates: regulation versus deregulation, this law or that stopgap.What no reporter asks out loud is: Why so little wisdom among our leaders and experts?

"Wisdom" comes from words that mean "to see" and "to know." Through education of the widest kind--not just test-taking but lifelong love of learning--wisdom sees up ahead and around corners. It knows multiple perspectives and levels of discussion: not just the financial and political but the ethical, social, cultural, psychological, and even spiritual. A wise person is one who goes beyond surface explanations in order to address the problem at its roots.

Unwise leadership has over time produced a fiscal crisis in California so tremendous that solutions which hurt no one are no longer possible. If we expect to prevent this from happening again--as it has for the past several years--we had better be ready to question the basic premises under which money is managed: what it's for, who manages it, whom it serves.

Further cuts in education have been proposed by some of the same "leaders" who throw the word "socialism" around whenever the kind of redistributions of wealth advocated by Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King come up for discussion; but a glance at history reveals that organized selfishness has never worked as a philosophy for anything but controlling the masses from the top down. Our purposes might be better served by a recruitment campaign for wise leaders who spend more time educating themselves and us about how to see farther and deeper than at feuding and fiddling while Sacramento burns.

Can We Save the World?

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:12:04 -0500

After reading the latest dismal news about crashing economies and ecosystems, I went to bed and was visited by a remarkable dream.

Most of us don't take dreams very seriously, raised as we were in a culture that dismisses them as more or less random brainwave activity. Having studied dreams for twenty-five years or so, I knew them to be rather accurate statements about the personal or collective psyche once their symbolism was deciphered.

The symbolism is what make dreams difficult to unravel, but failing to have a go at it is like leaving a letter unopened, as the Talmud suggested long ago. In dreams the larger dimensions of the psyche tell us what they are thinking about.

I have been rereading Gnostic scriptures, so it makes sense that this dream would select familiar spiritual symbolism--for in the dream I was on the coast watching the sun rise, and the sun was the face of Sophia, goddesss of wisdom and sacred half of the divine. Unusual and important, that detail of a sun rising over the coast of California rather than setting there as it does every evening: something illuminating being born where the light usually goes out.

Sophia's face looked ill and feverish (global warming?), but these were her exact words: "Thank God there is still so much light in the world!"

At this point the dream turned lucid, meaning I knew in the dream that I was dreaming. This was my chance to ask the big question, and I didn't hesitate: "Can we still save the world?"

Her response: "Yes, you can," in a definitive tone.

Of course, this dream will not be authoritative or even interesting to readers who don't take the deep psyche seriously. Those who do might recognize the ray of hope it offers in a darkening time. Such dreams are meant to be shared and have a way of stimulating more dreams, something a culture alienated from its inner sources always could stand a few more of.

Finally Naming It: Hatred of Earth and Nature

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:12:34 -0500

As President Bush makes a last attempt to gut environmenal protections, a strange silence continues about the psychological motivations behind ecocidal behavior.

Counseling violent men taught me that actions say more than excuses. A husband who beats his wife or kids "because they deserve it" or "because I'm master of the castle" is actually exhibiting not only psychological immaturity, but malignant hatred no matter how much he says and believes that he actually loves his family.

Nobody seems to be applying the same psychological logic to those in our nation who make it their business to destroy entire landscapes while remaining beyond accountability. The usual reason given for their behavior is greed, but if we consider their behavior, what we actually find is hatred: deep, culturally conditioned hatred of what's left of the natural world. It's time we understood this behavior for what it really is.

We have been told for two thousand years that Earth is either a stage for some spiritual drama leading to an apocalypse (a prophecy that could end up taking itself literally) or, since the Industrial Revolution, that Earth is just a "resource," uncaring and exploitable. Add to this the pioneer waste-it-and-go-elsewhere mentality of American culture and the result is a nation of people who feel at home nowhere. My colleague Linda Buzzell refers to this state as "dysplacement."

Some of us feel so alienated from the world as to actively despise it, and these are the people who want to blast it, pollute it, crush it, and leave it lifeless. The hatred implied by this is terrifying, as is the irrationality set loose by all forms of undiagnosed rage. No quantity of scientific proof can convince such people not to harm the planet, any more than studies on family happiness can convince a batterer to stop battering. To dismiss what they do as a policy priority is hopelessly naive.

If we hope to stop the ongoing destruction of Earth, we will have to be clearer about the deadly, red-hot psychology involved--an internal combustion that consumes the human heart--and quit making excuses for those who suffer from it. Nobody lets an angry teen throw bricks through a window; neither should we allow anyone to go on despoiling our home, whatever the reasons they hide behind.

Thou Shalt Not Be Discerning

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 13:12:25 -0500

A while back some Bay Area acquaintances invited me to a meditation circle to send "positive energy" to President Bush. A single question got me uninvited: "Why not send some energy to his opponents?"

I have noticed an eerie incapacity among certain spiritually inclined people for telling the difference between discernment and judgmentmentalism. As a result, they decline both, often with rather comical results. In another group a frustrated participant sputttered her ire at the "negative" talk about corrupt politicians and greedy CEOs by branding it "judgmental." I wrote "ire," but I also mean "anxious." My impression was that her inner judge had caught her by the throat.

If all the "positive thinking" proponents got their way, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky would have to disappear: far too gloomy, angry, sad, and real. Mark Twain would depart in their wake: the master of satire who, posing as the devil, thanked one of the Rockefellers for a paltry contribution to charity. One collection of Twain's writings bears the menacing title A Pen Warmed Up In Hell. Camus, Hesse, Baudelaire, Goethe, Baldwin, Haley, Steinbeck, Hemingway: all would be found wanting in uplifting moods and intellectual pleasantries.

Come to think of it, so would Buddha, Muhammad, the unknown writers of the Vedas and Upanishads, and of course Jesus, who compared the respectably corrupt of his day to fashionable coffins filled with dead men's bones.

As an alternative to personal and cultural self-mutilation, I suggest getting clearer on the difference between discernment, which sees things as they are even when unpleasant, and judgmentmentalism, which condemns out of hand. To fail to see a scoundrel as a scoundrel, a tyrant as a tyrant, or a psychopath as a psychopath enables these antisocial characters by cloaking their misdeeds in euphemism and ignorance. Soon the worst of us end up in charge while the rest of us scratch our heads wondering why.

This ostrich policy often originates as a childhood defense in abusive families: "Don't you talk about Dad that way! He wouldn't have hit you if you weren't so negative!" Too often the family cheerleader and enabler grows up to cheerlead and enable destructive agendas that multiply surreptitiously. No destroyer succeeds without a horde of self-blinders pretending things are fine and telling the rest of us to cheer up.

And none sits on the throne for long among those unafraid to suggest that the emperor get a new tailor.