Until one is committed, there is hesitance, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of initiative and creation. There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision.
– Johann Wolfgang Goethe
I am committed to defining, clarifying and sharing my beliefs on this web site.
My primary purpose is to learn how to feel completely free to reveal myself as completely as possible, pluses and minuses, to learn how to overcome my fear of rejection and learn how to actively feel and express compassion for those whose beliefs and actions I oppose and who oppose mine. To be able to reveal all of my past and present experience, my past and present thought, without any fear of rejection by others and without hurtful intentions toward anyone; simply to fully and freely to be me.
My secondary intention is to write and publish, on the internet, some documents so profoundly revealing of implicit truth, about the process of achieving personal and world peace, as to be worthy of Nobel prizes for Philosophy and for Peace. (People do this every year. I hear that it pays well and I could really use the money.)
[I am a thinker not a writer. A dozen years ago I took the English placement test at DVC and was told that I would have to take two bonehead English classes before I could sign up for Freshmen English, but I can’t let that stop me from writing the best I can for now.]
When Mr. Newton articulated The Law of Gravity, he didn’t invent anything. He simply made implicit truth explicit. When he shared his thoughts with other astronomers, he didn’t say; “I have pronounced, therefore believe!” He asked them to consider the concept and compare it to their real life observations and experience and to see if they agree that the concept was implicit truth. (If something is implicit truth, it belongs to anyone who can learn to see it directly for themselves.)
I do not ask anyone to simply accept the ideas expressed on this web site as truth. I ask only that they consider the concepts and compare them to their own life experience, and decide for themselves if these concepts seem to be valid.
“In terms of your experience,” is a vitally important phrase.
Science is a systematic process of finding out what is true and what’s not.
The primary tool of science is observation.
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I read in a psychology text book that the four basic emotions of human beings are mad, sad, glad and scared. It seems to me that we cannot feel any of these unless we first of all care. It is the fundamental nature of every living thing to care. It is the desire to be whole, to be healthy and to fully express each creatures implicit potential. You cannot feel mad or sad unless some need is being blocked. This not to say that people are always clear about their motives or that they accurately identify the barriers. Also, each creature, plant or animal, has a different implicit potential to be discovered through growth.
To care is the Spirit of all living things in the Universe.
Human beings are caring (emotional) creatures first and rational only as needed to achieve the things that we care about.
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The Urge-Toward-Wholeness; or the Spirit of Life
Studying science, I learned that there are some chemical structures that can reproduce; crystals. The reproduction will occur only if external conditions are just right. The individual structure has no influence of the on the situation. Some more complex structures require a certain number of specific chemicals or compounds to be whole and complete. If one of those elements goes missing, the whole structure will vibrate moving itself through the water, greatly increasing the chance that it will bump into the missing element and allow it to repair and become whole again. Some more complex structures may develop a tail to swim more effectively. Some even more complex structures may develop a sense of the most likely location for the missing element. This Urge-Toward-Wholeness is an element of all life forms. It is an automatic response to maintain wholeness. More than that, it is more than an urge to survive; it is an urge to fully develop its greatest implicit potential.
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I am quite sure that there is a function of the mind that is constantly examining our immediate situation or environment to assess whether it is supportive or threatening. I refer to this mind function as the Survival Sentry or Wholeness Sentry. It is constantly looking out for our wellbeing. The Wholeness Sentry is constantly scanning images in our head to assess whether our immediate environment is healthy or unhealthy.
We are born the most dependent creatures on earth. The first lesson we learn in life, at birth, is that none of our needs will be met unless others care about and for us. We can’t possibly survive alone. I picture a plain in the mid-west. From the trail in the prairie grass you can see that a wagon train has just been through. You can see the last wagon disappearing on the far horizon. In the foreground is a child left behind, alone because no one cared enough to insure that it was aboard one of the wagons. Our worst fear is to feel that nobody cares and that there is nothing we can do about it. This child will be feeling that; “There is danger! I don’t know what to do, and no one cares.” Leave a child alone for too long and it will start sending out locater signals; “I’m over here! I’m over here! Take care of me!”
When people try to make us feel shame, this is the way they want us to feel. Our Wholeness Sentry will see this lack of caring as a threat to our survival or wholeness.
There is a broad spectrum in the way we relate to each other. At one end are people who, when they criticize, their criticism is received as an act of caring concern about something specific, backed up with a deep caring about the person as a whole. I have had friends who have at times let me know that they were hoping for something better from me. I knew that they cared about me. At the other end of the spectrum, we have people who criticize with the attitude of total rejection of the recipient’s worth as a person. When they criticize they take no quarter. People at each end of the spectrum expect to be treated the same as they treat others. People at the polar ends of the political spectrum are in constant fear of changing their minds, because they know their peers might turn on them; reject them completely if they don’t profess the party line.
One of the things that the Survival Sentry is constantly doing is evaluating our self-image in the light of what we perceive as the values of our family, extended family and tribe. A child or person who lives in an environment of unconditional caring can experience a change of self-image, moment to moment, depending upon whatever what they are doing at the time, and feel no threat of rejection or of uncaring treatment. People who live in an environment of conditional caring are constantly trying to maintain a self-image in their heads that they think will protect them from rejection or uncaring treatment by others. This is narcissism. It’s not that they love themselves; they don’t really know themselves. It’s that they feel that, if a particular self-image can protect them from the fear of rejection, they value that self-image and must project and protect it at all costs. Truly insecure people may spend a lot of time prancing their preferred self-image in front of the mirror in their own mind’s eye. The fear of exclusion, excommunication, uncaring treatment or shunning, is one of our deeps survival level fears.
Tribal narcissism is essentially the same thing. A group of people, with similar needs and values, get together to promote and protect themselves, through promoting and protecting their group. “You should see me as a good person because I am a member of this good group.” Other groups are to be feared and opposed. They might have different values and might not value us (me). They can’t be trusted.
Our 3 most basic felt survival needs:
1. To feel that there are others who care for us – (To feel abandoned is a survival threat.)
2. To develop competence in the physical world – (When I learn to tie my own shoe lace, the Survival Sentry says “This is good. If this situation comes up again, I can handle it.” To feel physically incompetent is to feel a tinge of a threat to survival.
3. To develop competence in the social world – (We soon learn that there is power and safety in numbers.) To feel socially incompetent is worrisome.
In order to truly feel safe and secure we need to feel that we are unconditionally cared about by a mother, family, extended family and tribe. Throughout most of human history the tribe and the village or community has been one and the same. To be excommunicated or to be kicked outside of the walls of the village is seen by the Survival Sentry as a severe survival threat. We are very much a tribal creatures. Throughout human history, to shame, or to threaten to withhold caring has long been used as a means of manipulating people.
Members of judgmental tribes, like the political Tea Party, live in constant fear that they will be ostracized if they don’t parrot the sanctioned ideas of the party. They know they’ll receive harsh treatment and rejection by their peers. They have a hard time freely and creatively out of fear of the implications of such thinking.
Every time I communicate to someone, by whatever means, “I don’t care about you.” I am adding to the problem environment by increasing fear.
Plato distinguished four states of mind with respect to one’s level of functioning:
(4) Understanding when we understand both the conceptual and the actual - “in terms of our own experience”
(3) Knowledge when we learn conceptual thinking
(2) Opinion we develop opinions without checking them for consistency with fundamental values, without “Thinking them through”
(1) Image thinking in our early years, all learning is associated with images associated with our experiences. If we never get to (4) we will always be reactionary individuals.
Plato asserted that understanding, seeing the connection between the map and the territory, the abstract and the concrete, is the road to finding wisdom. The number one problem we face as a nation is reactionism; left, right and center.
If we never rise to the level of understanding, we will always be reactionary people, politically left, right or center.
Buckminster Fuller, in his middle to late twenties decided that one of the greatest causes of pain in the world is people using words that they don’t understand. He swore that he would never again use any word that he could not understand “in terms of his own experience.” He became one of the most respected and most listened to people in the world.
People who strive to understand words and concepts “in terms of their own experience are striving to be function oriented. People who use mystical terms or terms for which there is no clear definition, are striving to create an image, an illusion that they know more than they actually do.
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A minister I met years ago told me that when he was in his theological seminary, one of his fellow students was majoring in comparative religion. That student said that he had expected to find that the common element in all religions would be belief in a supreme being. He did not find that to be true. Most common was the pattern of engagement and withdrawal. Such as, six days of work and a day to contemplate. This repeated oscillation from the real to the conceptual, from action to contemplation is what builds wisdom.
