Psychology – Page 3 – Brimmings: up from the well

Human Evil and Its Genesis: ISIS

All man’s troubles arise from the fact
That we do not know what we are
And do not agree on what we want to be
–Vercours (You Shall Know Them)

Like all of you, I’ve been reading and viewing with horror the crimes of IS (Islamic State). Recently, for example, there was the video of captured Iraqi soldiers being herded in crouched chain formation, later ordered to get down in a shallow ditch, hands tied behind their backs, then shot. Human Rights Watch estimates between 560 and 770 were executed, though IS boasts it executed nearly 1700 soldiers after overrunning Camp Speicher near the city of Tikrit in Northern Iraq.

And then there have been the two recent IS videos showing the beheadings of American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff. In the latter, the video ends with displaying Sotloff’s severed head lying beside his body.

IS has also been killing minority Christians and Yadzidis who refuse to convert along with Shiite Muslims, whom they regard as heretics. In one instance, 500 Yadzidis were buried alive.

IS atrocities are not isolated phenomena in the long list of “crimes against humanity” (International Criminal Court) in recent decades. Consider, for example, Rwanda in 1994 with the Hutu majority’s massacre of 800,000 Tutsis in just 100 days. Or Cambodia with its 2,500,000 dead at the hands of the communist Khmer Rouge regime in the late 70s.

But what makes for the forfeiture of humanity in atrocities such as those I’ve noted here? How is it that we can lose every sense of identity with our fellows? Is aggression, singular or collective, something innate, a legacy of evolutionary genetics compelling us to eliminate any perceived threat? Are we any better than warrior ants, the most warlike of any known insect group, who instinctively pursue extinction or enslavement of rival insect communities, are territorial, have a caste system, and are often suicidal in their assaults?

Here I turn to sociobiology, with its emphasis on biology as the catalyst in shaping social behavior among all organisms, including humans.

To begin with, things are not all bad about ourselves, genetically speaking. Yes, we seem to have genes that dispose us towards altruism, and we see such behavior demonstrated repeatedly in daily life right down to the motorist who allows you into his lane. At its most acute level, we see it played out on the battlefield when a soldier falls on a hand grenade, for example, to save the lives of his fellows.

The problem with genetic altruism is that self sacrifice would seem to run contrary to the notion of natural determinism, or the survival of the fittest, ensuring the likelihood of offspring, or evolution’s ultimate purpose. Surely, culture also intervenes here and refines genetic disposition as well.

Overall, however, altruism among social organisms is primarily carried out through “kin selection,” including ourselves. The net result is that the group, or family, survives. In short, even altruism can have its selfish component. Altruism, then, isn’t necessarily the angelic side of ourselves. But at least it’s a better option.

As for there being genes that prescribe aggression, as with altruism, none are known to exist . Behaviorally, however, genes confer a capability to develop a repertoire of aggressive responses, given stressed environments. Otherwise, aggression isn’t likely. For instance. the social history of the Hopi Indians, an agricultural tribe, exhibits minimal aggressive behavior, In fact, hopi means “peaceful.” On the other hand, the Apaches were often given to battle to protect their land and buffalo herds from intruders.

Similarly, I surmise that genetic disposition, or capability, might help explain the high incidence of crime among some marginalized, or disadvantaged, groups in a given society.

While culture can modify genetic attenuation, it cannot eliminate it. Evolution ultimately imposes limits on malleability of behavior.

The diabolic, however, breaks loose when a fanatical few entice the many to exact violence in contexts of societal duress such as in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia following upon the end of the Great War.

In the hands of ideologues, often in political or religious guise, all bets are off when it comes to humane resolution of social tensions, given–not genes as such–but their genetic disposition for either peace or war. Set loose, humans are capable of every vile act conceivable.

And so with IS and the danger it poses for all of us.

–rj

Jung, Archetypes, and A Parrot: The Legacy of Nature’s Genius

I’ve just finished Joanna Burger’s The Parrot That Owns Me: The Story of a Relationship. Funny, I had this book sitting on my shelf, unread, for twelve years. Looking for something to read while eating my breakfast, I pulled it down and started what turned out to be a fun read.

I also learned a great deal about birds and, especially about parrots, surely one of the most intelligent of animal species, though we normally think of primates (gorillas, chimps, orangutans, etc.), dolphins, elephants and pigs as honorary Mensa candidates among our animal kin.

Burger, one of the world’s leading ornithologists and Rutgers University prof with over twenty books to her credit, tells how Tiko, her Red-lored Amazon, practices a repertoire of tonal warnings to distinguish varied predators, most notably, hawks, cats, and snakes.

She writes that “when Tiko gave his hawk call, Mike (her husband) and I would invariably spot a Red-tailed, Sharp-shinned, or Cooper’s Hawk flying overhead or perched in a nearby tree. Tiko’s response was so consistent that there was no question that he recognized hawkdom” (167).

Likewise, Tiko doesn’t like snakes, one of which Burger kept for a while, much to Tiko’s dismay. Only when the snake went into hibernation could he be content in the same room.

But how does Tiko pull this off? After all, he seems to possess a genetic memory of jungle predators, even though he’s been totally reared in captivity and has never had any interaction with hawks or snakes?

Years ago I had started reading Jung, who has impressed me more than Freud as being on the mark when its comes to the seminal sources lurking behind human behavior. Jung proposed the theory of archetypes, or “primordial images” (Man and his Symbols, 67), reflecting instinctual urges of unknown origins. They can arise in our consciousness suddenly and anywhere apart from cultural influence or personal experience. Often they take shape in our consciousness through fantasy, symbol, or situational pattern.

And so with Tiko as well as ourselves, the instinctual responses perpetuating survival have become wired in the brains of sentient creatures. Untaught, they’re automatic.

Today, science overwhelmingly confirms the accuracy of Jung’s prescience. Take, for example, the eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson, who attests that monkeys “raised in the laboratory without previous exposure to snakes show the same response to them as those brought in from the wild, though in weaker form (In Search of Nature, 19).

The explanation, of course, lies in evolution’s conferring differential survival value through natural selection. Those who learn to respond to fear quickly simply pass on more of their offspring with their response mechanisms.

Wilson goes further, arguing that human culture itself is considerably biological in origin, or genetically prescribed, supported by analytical models (123-24).

A Jungian at heart, I found Tiko’s innate capacity to respond to elements of danger another in a long line of evidence supporting Jung’s pioneering perspective; on this occasion, by way of one of the world’s most astute animal behaviorists, Joanna Burger.

Nature never ceases to amaze me!

–rj

Internet Ghouls Among Us: The Robin Williams Aftermath

I haven’t any doubt that the vast majority of us mourn the tragic death of Robin Williams, who brought laughter into our hearts and with it, wisdom too. And yet there are always a few, the ghouls I call them, who surface in such tragedies to verbally vandalize our grief with mindless, and often, acerbic commentary.

Recently a bicyclist was killed here in Lexington KY by a speeding motorist, only to have one Facebook reader comment that bicyclists shouldn’t be on the streets. Pray then, where should they ride? On sidewalks?

But it gets worse than such obvious, and silly, over-generalization. We’ve all come across those who practice a calculated meanness in exploiting social media for personal whim. These ghouls cannot tolerate an opinion different from their own, particularly when it comes to religion or politics, subjects notorious for generating heat.

But ghouls also show up in Amazon book reviews, for instance, or even in discussion forums that, more often than not, are dominated by one perspective. Cross the line, and you get personal attack rather than reasoned argument. I saw this recently in a forum perusing the effectiveness of a low carb vs low fat diet. When one reader contended graciously for the low fat approach the forum became a piling on of verbal abuse. I dub this the cascading effect, or the tendency of one negative comment to generate others.

But returning to Robin Williams, his daughter Zelda has just closed her Twitter account. She had been receiving photo shop images of her father’s body along with obscene commentary.

What transforms otherwise ordinary folks we rub elbows with everyday into Internet ghouls?

It goes back to anonymity, or the disconnect effect. When we lose face-to-face contact replete with body language and verbal cues of tone, we drift perilously close to abandoning the etiquette of meaningful communication in losing connection with our readers. Mental short cuts take over and we say dumb things. We forfeit empathy.

But in all fairness, the disconnect effect isn’t confined to the Internet. I have known this first hand as a English teacher at the college level. It’s the writing act itself that submits us to this danger, whether an email, a letter, or an opinion piece in a newspaper. Accordingly, the fundamental axiom of all effective communication, written or oral, is maintaining awareness of one’s audience, which should spill over into our selecting our words carefully, monitoring our tone, shaping our transitions, being open to a reader’s perspective. Mindfulness is the seasoning of all effective communication.

And yet my counsel hardly proves sufficient to hold off the myriad ghouls who troll the Internet, unleashing their venom abetted by anonymity, or what Stephen King once aptly called “the alligators resident within human nature.” Frustrated with their own lives, envious of others, low in self-esteem, they seek to empower themselves by verbally dismembering others

While the social media can be invaluable in consolidating humanity for good ends, by its very nature, it is not without risk, so best be careful where you tread and cautious in what you reveal about yourself.

The vast majority of Internet users are motivated with good intent; but it takes just a few to spoil things for the many.

–rj

Teach me….

Teach me to love all things, big and small; clean and dirty: the burr oak massive with age; the silent worm that threads the earth; my fellow beings, rich or poor, sung or unsung.

Teach me to be patient, learning first to forgive my own infidelities, that I may love others more.

Teach me the wisdom of the past, of hope invested in the future–but best, the gift of this new day.

Teach me to persevere up the mountain, to resist the stitch in my side that urges quitting and with it, forfeiture of the runner’s prize.

Teach me never to love anything so much that I cannot accept its loss; the inevitability of change and ending and, someday too, my own.

Teach me the right of others to discover themselves and walk a road different from my own; to listen that I may hear and not judge.

Teach me what true freedom means: to choose without the weights of culture or tradition; the courage to revoke what inhibits happiness; the right to self-knowledge and to live in accord with it; a resolve to accept the bottom line cost in living free

Teach me to discern between having and being; to know the folly of the former, the ecstasy of the latter.

Teach me courage in a world with dark valleys; boldness to speak for those who grieve, the excluded poor, oppressed minorities, women and children, and the animals too.

Teach me to love our wounded earth, to nourish it wherever I am as though it were my own garden.

–by rj

A lingering malice that kills

To be happy in life comes down to feeling good about yourself. It isn’t about money, popularity, power, or other commonly assumed indicators of success. In fact, these may actually be forms of over compensation, masking our sense of unworthiness or inferiority.

Unfortunately, most of us think we have to earn our self respect by proving ourselves worthy in ways others will approve. Consequently, we allow others to become monitors of ourselves and miss living authentic lives. We are what we think about ourselves.

Where does it all begin, this failing to accept ourselves? Clearly, much of it comes from our childhood experiences, or the voices of the past, as these lay the foundation for self-esteem and the confidence it fosters–our ability to view others as friends, not rivals; colleagues, not conspirators; ourselves as lovable, attractive, and admired; not difficult to like, be around, or embarrassing.

Surprisingly, these voices often find their sources in the “friendly fire” of parents, teachers, siblings, and even playmates, who label us as unworthy through physical abuse, verbal assault, neglect, abandonment, and the social apartheid of cliques.

As a consequence, it’s been estimated that nearly 50% of us suffer from anxiety in its myriad forms–worry, panic, dread, phobias and defensive rituals. Unsure of ourselves, we relive our childhood trauma whenever we encounter people or circumstances echoing the voices of our past, or what we’ve assumed to be true about ourselves. The past colors our perceptions, often resulting in a paranoia that we aren’t liked, are being talked about, even plotted against.

Ironically, our negative attitude may turn our suspicions into reality, driving away the very people whose friendship can reassure us that we have worth. We can’t chance our being rejected yet again.

I’m struck with how many of those who get caught up in violence, frequently mass shootings, are unable to handle perceived rejection and, accordingly, act out. The recent killings of six young people in Santa Barbara by Elliot Rodger, age 22, can be added to a lengthy list. The focus of his anger shows the pattern–he aimed to get even with the women who had rejected him and the men they chose instead.

I’m aware that it can be argued that a good deal of such violent outbursts stems from mental illness. What normal person could possibly do such things? The fact is, they do, and what constitutes mental illness is often shrouded in legal ambiguity with court appointed experts often unable to agree. The vast majority of those with mental illness do not commit such acts anyway, and every day people we often live or work with often do.

Unfortunately, a good many of us are passive-aggressive, hiding our inner turbulence, only to have it spring like a panther into the open, suddenly, surprisingly, and vehemently. “But he seemed so quiet, always said hello, and sometimes offered help.”

By the way, you can find a good deal of what I call “angst poetry” online. Take this poem, for example. Appropriately, it’s titled “Rejection.”

What are we so afraid of?
Afraid of wanting, but not being wanted
Afraid of feeling, but not being felt
Afraid of asking and being denied

We all need love–and some of us, because of our childhood ghosts, require it even more.

–rj

Our Survival at Stake: Do We Have a Future?

As much as we can do it, we should avoid living our lives on assumption that a belief is true simply because we’ve been told it’s so by family, government, religion, politics, economics, or the collective culture in which we’ve been raised. The only fixed verities are those within the scope of natural law with its defined predictability confirmed by replication. Our responsibility should be to explore those verities affecting our well-being and allow them fullest scope. We never escape the inexorable operation of those laws, for whatever we do, there is always a consequence. But sometimes we get to choose.

There is no inherent purpose to life, though many moralists like Tolstoy have implied one in asking, How ought we to live? Nature works through selection only, reinforcing those causal elements promoting regeneration. Often it works with infinitesimal numbers, a million seeds to effect a single germination. It has no ethics. It is devoid of Mind.

We pride ourselves on our freedom, but we are overwhelmingly conditioned by biology and complex behavioral repertoires sanctioned or extinguished by environment. It is not the future that shapes us, but what has happened to us that defines what we think and do. Conversely, this defines our tragedy that may doom us on this earth.

We were not born into a preset regimen other than one genetically imposed, so Locke was right about the tabla rasa, or clean slate, notion of our infancy. Preconditioning is what happens as we make our journey. It follows that each of us needs to recover that initial state; that what I believe or do should be based on immediate consequences rather than because I am told to do so by law, government, religion or individuals. We do need laws in a world of many to ensure equal access to the trough in the context of safety, but there is nothing sacrosanct about any law, belief or opinion that allows it to go unexamined.

One of the inherent drawbacks of the human condition is superimposing belief and practice on others. History, accordingly, is often bloodied with the cruelties of absolutism forced on others, often in the context of religion or secular ideology. This week, the Ukraine remembers its 3 million dead, starved to death in 1932-33 by a Stalinist regime bent on enforcing collectivization of that nation’s farmland.

Other than climate change, humanity’s greatest threat comes from Islamic extremists bent on returning to the way of the sword, or Jihad, in imposing their beliefs. The danger lies in Islam’s not merely being a set of beliefs, but a whole way of life regulating every human behavior, codified ultimately in Sharia mandate.

I alluded earlier to the behavioral quirk in us that may cause our doom. Conditioned as we are by immediate consequences, we often cede the future for the dividends of the present. Such is our present circumstance with meeting the exigencies of global warming, declining resources, and burgeoning population.

In short, unless we can render the future more palpable, allowing us to help shape it for those who come after; indeed, assure its livability with reasonable happiness, then we may be moving into our final chapter. While altruism is a tenant within humanity and perhaps, in evolutionary vein, promoting survivability (see E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology, 1975), we too often exercise our limited freedom for the immediate. Like the heroic soldier forfeiting his life on the battlefield to save the lives of his fellows, we need to emulate a consciousness of others that may often conflict with our personal happiness and achievement.

Evolution, paradoxically mindless, has always arbitrated for the future over the present as denominator of survivability and made you and me possible.

The Renaissance philosopher I’ve admired all my life, Francis Bacon, summed it all up in saying, “Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.” Do not base your life on the beliefs of others. Live for the world of ideas and sort out those verified by the best science. Live in the fullest moment of today, but not without regard for the future of your fellows.

–rj

Medicine discovers meditation

Funny how the poets I read and taught in college have a way of popping up in my mind, even though I’ve been away from that scene for seven years now. Take, for instance, the English poet Wordsworth. He’s famous for his nature poetry and talks about “wise passivity,” by which he meant suspending the thinking part and simply letting the senses imbibe the stillness we often find in nature and arriving at the things that really matter. I’d say he was right on the mark, especially with our modern way of living crowding our space to be ourselves, muffling the intuitive stream that fosters coherence and confers tranquility.

A few days ago I was rummaging through the Tao Te Ching, which I like to do every now and then, since it’s densely packed with wise counsel, and came upon this passage that got me started on this present blog entry:

Act by not acting,
Accomplish by not straining
Understand by not knowing. (63)

Simple but profound, such counsel promotes understanding and, with it, healing. We need to teach ourselves to be still that we may intuit the essentials and practice mindfulness, something the East with its contemplative traditions discovered several millennia ago, anticipating poets like Wordsworth and, now, contemporary medicine. The ancients were right all along about meditation as essential to our best selves. In a time of ever increasing stress, we need its solace more than ever. Consider this sober warning in the Harvard Newsletter (March 2011):

Over the years, researchers have . . . gained insight into the long-term effects stress has on physical and psychological health. Over time, repeated activation of the stress response takes a toll on the body. Research suggests that prolonged stress contributes to high blood pressure, promotes the formation of artery-clogging deposits, and causes brain changes that may contribute to anxiety, depression, and addiction. More preliminary research suggests that chronic stress may also contribute to obesity, both through direct mechanisms (causing people to eat more) or indirectly (decreasing sleep and exercise).

With available electroencephalogram testing of alpha brain waves along with pulse rate monitoring and even MRI brain scans focusing on “gray matter” in the brain areas responsible for memory, self-awareness and empathy, we now have empirical data gathered by professionals that can be replicated. In sum, we know meditation works, which means that it can assuage pain and prevent or heal some of our entrenched ills, whether physical or psychological. The paradigm of medical reliance on medication, surgery, diet and exercise is expanding. In short, a quiet revolution is underway as medicine discovers the ancient axiom that mind and body are one.

Perhaps its seed was planted most notably in the fascination the Beatles showed for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation. Luminaries such as film director David Lynch; TV notables, Ellen Degeneres and Oprah swear by it. Hey, George Stephanopoulos is into it too. TM prides itself on research findings, at this juncture, some 700 plus, allegedly confirming its effectiveness in reducing stress, depression, high blood pressure and cardiac risk.

Medicine started to look seriously at a supplementary role for meditation with Harvard’s Herbert Benson putting it to the test via the rigors of refined imaging, using TM volunteers. As he put it, “Three decades ago it was considered scientific heresy for a Harvard physician and researcher to hypothesize that stress contributed to health problems and to publish studies showing that mental focusing were good for the body.” Benson opened up medicine to meditation’s possible inclusion with his best selling (four million copies) The Relaxation Response in 1975. “With meditation alone, the T.M. practitioners brought about striking physiologic change.”

Benson subsequently converted TM into a simple two step approach: repeat a word or phrase of your own choosing and disregard distracting, every day thoughts by returning to your word or phrase.

Benson’s work was soon popularized in the public world through Norman Cousins, physician Dean Ornish, and a Barbara Walter’s ABC interview. Still, the medical community for nearly 15 years dismissed Benson’s findings as largely a placebo effect. That changed as other universities took up their own research, supporting Benson. Today, Harvard has launched an endowed professorship dedicated to continuing research and treats thousands of clients seeking relief from stress with the Benson method. Relaxation Response therapy is, in fact, incorporated into specialized programs at Boston’s Harvard linked Beth Israel and Massachusetts General hospitals, with fourteen affiliates nationally.

Today the meditation mainstream seems to be shifting to what’s called “mindfulness meditation,” an adaptation of the Zen approach to medication pioneered by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts to treat patients with debilitating diseases and chronic pain. Like relaxation response meditation, mind-based stress reduction, or MBSR, is science centered, except it differs in how it approaches meditation. Instead of a word, or mantra, and returning to it when your thoughts wander, you allow your thoughts, noting them, though not analyzing them, returning to focus on your breathing. The idea is to objectify rather than personalize your thoughts, enabling you to better deal with them. It’s been shown to activate the gray matter in those areas of the brain responsible for memory, a sense of self and empathy. It inculcates self acceptance and helps us see that memory belongs to the past and isn’t real.

As such, it works well as a backdrop to the now widespread cognitive approach in counseling. You can actually practice “mindfulness” anywhere, or while walking, listening to music, taking in conversation. Allegedly, it can, with time, help you become more empathetic through your heightened awareness of your own responses and thus a more diligent listener in social contexts

Whether you use a mantra or mindfulness approach doesn’t really matter since both result in a relaxation effect, though in my very limited experience I find the mantra version easier than mindfulness, which by its very nature can sometimes be distressing. But there are many kinds of meditation formats, so you may want to search for what makes you most comfortable. What’s worked especially well for me is known as Restorative Yoga, a derivative of Hatha yoga combining breathing, imaging, muscle relaxation and mild body postures. I was introduced to it through Nurrie and Rick Stearn’s helpful book, Yoga for Anxiety: Meditations and Practices for Calming Mind and Body. Yoga might just be the most integrative of all approaches, administrating to both body and spirit.

I have to be candid: meditation does have its skeptics, some of them arguing that the alleged empirical effects can be attributed to advocate or placebo causes. Personally, I’ve always found the latter untenable, since if it promotes healing, then the placebo response actually validates the psychosomatic power of the mind, which is ultimately what meditation is all about.

Others argue that random controlled trials (RCT), the gold standard, are lacking, and I’ve found this to have validity; for example, if you turn to the highly regarded Cochrane database, combing scores of medical journals, only one study turns up and it’s equivocal, recommending more randomized testing.

For all the claims that meditation can reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke, the American Heart Association has reserved judgment. While its definitive report, published in April of this year, does indicate that TM can reduce blood pressure, it urges more research and assigns a lower rating to alternative meditation therapies. I don’t see a problem here. Meditation shouldn’t occur in isolation, but in concert with medication when needed, surgery when required, healthier food choices, and regular exercise as constants.

Meditation enthusiasts will rave about its benefits, how it’s made them calmer, more relaxed, better able to deal with both themselves and others, etc., but this is the stuff of anecdote, not science, Just how do you quantify happiness? And yet if we see behavioral change such as freedom from drugs; a happier disposition; a gentler, more loving person, we may not be able to measure it, but we know something is going on.

Frankly, I’m impressed with what doctors like Benson and Kabat-Zinn have uncovered. To be sure, it’s a new science with bumps that need smoothing out, but its future lies in its promise and the empirical base on which it rests.

It seems The American Psychological Association APA) is on board, giving a resounding endorsement to MBSR. (See Davis and Hayes. “What are the benefits of mindfulness?” Monitor on Psychology. July/August2012. Vol. 43, No. 7.)

Of course, you can resort to SSRIs like Effexor, Zoloft and Lexapro, or quick fixes through benzies like Xanax or Valium, but they come with baggage, or side effects, sometimes worse than any proffered cure. By the way, research has demonstrated that MBSR is at least half as effective in treating stress as SSRIs. It’ so effective that the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has listed MBSR among primary therapies for depression.

As a final caveat, do you remember James Randi, skeptic extraordinaire, debunker of the paranormal? Though he dismisses TM for its lavish claims that include levitation and psychic prowess to influence social behavior, he nonetheless can accept a relaxation response as ameliorating physical and psychological health, whether through meditation or some other means like music or just plain rest.

That makes sense to me. After all, isn’t this what meditation comes down to–indulgence in time out? We all need that.

Teach us to be still.

–rj

Meditation May Slow Age-Related Cognitive Decline (psychologytoday.com)
Relaxation and Sleep (psychologytoday.com)
your brain on meditation (cittavrttinirodhah.wordpress.com)

Memory: Something to be Cherished

Do you ever get something tossing around in your head that seemingly you can’t get rid of no matter how you try? I get that way when I listen to music, for example, the lyrics wearing down my synapses like “We had it all/ Just like Bogie and Becall/ Starring in our old late, late show/Sailing to Key Largo.” But sometimes it’s a memory that pops up, crazy like, since there’s no triggering context, maybe reaching way back into early childhood’s opaque alleys.

Sometimes something sticks because we associate it with an event or person that brought us great happiness or, alas, considerable pain. Maybe we never forget anything really, the mind simply archiving everything that makes us who we are. While time may soften the edges of past experience, its essence remains

Freud built his formidable psychological schema on memory, which he argued was always latent, and thus influential on what we do and say, want and fear. His former protégée, Carl Jung, contended memory transcended time and individuals, ultimately taking on evolutionary status as archetype, or primordial pattern, shaping both our thinking and behavior. According to Jung, the repository of memory is defined best in myth, which reenacts the human repertoire of experience. Its roman a clef lies in symbols compressing our individual and collective destinies.

On the literary front, some of our foremost fiction writers like Joyce, Proust and Faulkner have made a legacy of memory in works like Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, and The Sound and the Fury. In poetry, the English poet Wordsworth famously defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” building his poetic artifice on reflecting past experiences. Perhaps the bottom line modus operandi latent in literary creation is to keep memory, or human experience, alive.

Often memory over time embellishes or distorts as we add or subtract. It’s a good reason to keep journals. Verbal photos I like to call them. Poor recall is the nemesis in legal matters when witnesses can’t accurately recall what they saw or heard or when witnesses prove contradictory.

Too often we take our ability to remember for granted, when the truth is it begins to decline as we age and increasingly we can’t find those damned keys, or forget what we came to the store for, or that doctor’s appointment. Nothing to be worried about, save when forgetfulness takes on habit such as:

1 . We repeat the same questions.

2. We struggle for common words.

3. We find it difficult to follow directions

4. We lose our way in our neighborhood.

5. We put things in odd places.

6. We can’t recall something recently learned.

If I lost my sight or hearing, this would be debilitating and surely grievous, yet I think not equal to the loss of recall, condemned to an eternal present and essentially returning me to an infantile state as in dementia and its acute species, Alzheimer’s, that wipes away everything defining my humanity and lending my life significance.

I don’t know, nor do any of us, what Fate holds, but in the meantime, I choose not to take this gift of memory for granted but to cherish it by nurturing it through learning new things, exercising regularly and vigorously, and eating nutritious foods.

Doctors who specialize in aging increasingly report that dementia may not necessarily happen if we keep our brains healthy by doing the right things. Dr. Majid Fotuhi, Chair of the Department of Neurology at Johns Hopkins, informs us that Alzheimer’s has only a limited genetic factor. It can be delayed and even prevented with lifestyle changes undertaken in midlife.

I choose to run with that hope,

–rj

What Being Centered Really Means

True peace is achieved
By centering
And blending with life (Tao 22).

You hear a lot about being centered, but just what is it?

The ancient Greeks advocated “the golden mean,” or middle way.

Roman writer Vergil based his Aeneid on Pietas, or something akin to self-control.

Perhaps drawing on his Hellenic education, St. Paul advised moderation in all things.

Excess is always dangerous in any pursuit, for it forecloses on alternatives that may prove more tempered and thus wiser than those fostered by our passions.

Unfortunately, indulgence, or excess, defines history with its repeated accounts of obsession gone astray for power and possession. History is narcissism writ large.

At the everyday level, we hear continually of people who have ruined their lives and hurt others simply because they were unable to rule themselves.

Because self-interest especially dominates in politics and religion, I generally am suspicious of them both. As I write, there’s the rancor in Congress over raising the debt ceiling so government can pay its bills. Currently, however, a persistent few are willing to shut down government unless they have their way. As I’ve written in an earlier blog, political parties lead to narrow partisanship, as President Washington so wisely observed in his Farewell Address.

In religion, we needn’t dial back to the Crusades or Inquisition to access the violence of fanatical fundamentalism. If you look at a worldwide map, you’ll find religious mayhem abundantly distributed, whether in the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Burma, the Philippines, and Indonesia. As for Africa, there’s last week’s heinous massacre at Nairobi’s West Gate Mall in Kenya by Somali militants, who selectively shot non-Muslims. Nigeria has its own ongoing debacle with Islamic extremists. These things happen because without centeredness we lack balance and thus forfeit stability and often our humanity, too.

On the other hand, fraudulent centeredness can possess its own rigidity if focused merely on ourselves. True centeredness serves as a reference point that proffers balance, always its marker, between extremes. Think acoustics. Think harmony.

Centeredness promotes equilibrium, a check on ego, a capacity to not confuse the parts with the whole, enabling us to respond more patiently and thus more wisely. A state of being, it isn’t found in having.

Centered people aren’t dismayed by the fallout of time or chance. They see the evolving pattern and not the ephemeral circumstance. They’re grounded in the Eternal, not the transitory. Thus change and loss and disappointment don’t throw them off balance. In touch with themselves, they live in harmony with nature’s artifice. .

Writing from a jail cell and facing imminent execution, St. Paul could cogently advise his friends that they pursue “all that is noble, all that is just and pure, all that is lovable and gracious, whatever is excellent and admirable–fill all your thoughts with these things.”

This is centeredness. This is harmony. This is the fabric of Eternity.

–rj

Musings on Freud

At the beginning of one of Freud’s most perceptive works, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud discusses what he calls that “oceanic feeling,” or sense of connectedness to something larger than ourselves. He had borrowed the phrase from his cherished friend, French writer Romain Rolland, who while accepting Freud’s rejection of anthropomorphic religion, still retained a notion of kinship with an enervating source permeating all existence.

Freud hadn’t ever experienced it and derisively equated it with notions of a deity serving as an avatar need for a surrogate father. In doing so, I think he erred in narrowing its limits. I’m not religious, but I’ve experienced this sense of connectedness, and found it both transforming and moving in the mystery of that sudden moment when I am become clairvoyant, my hand on the pulse of all things.

I would use the word mystical, despite its usual religious context, to describe it; that is, an intuitive moment in which one comprehends a reality normally denied to the senses. Perhaps epiphany gets at it as well, or immediate apprehension of the essence of an experience. I think this is how James Joyce employed the latter term so central to his notion of artistry as defined in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

It happened for me many years ago in the Indian state of Kerala, bordering on the Arabian Sea. A place of velvet green mountains and palmed jungle laced by myriad canals, it smacked of Venice, howbeit, in tropical mode. I had come to India to give a paper at the University of Delhi, but allotted extra time to see a bit of its wonderfully different culture. I chose Kerala simply because I had worked with a colleague who came from there and my Lonely Planet guidebook abounded in promises. Unwittingly, I wandered into a good choice.

One of the things I wanted to do in Kerala was visit a tiger sanctuary in the hill station countryside famed for its sprawling tea and coffee plantations. (This is where the Brits hung out to escape the heat.) I had been staying in a humble hotel in the port city of Kolchi. That first evening I hired an Indian lingering at the door, hoping to glean some earnings from tourists and businessmen as a guide. Since he had a small boat, I asked if he could take me across the bay that evening so that I could take in one of India’s most exotic traditional dances, the Kathakali, in a town on the other shore. I marvel now how brave I was back then, perhaps governed more by naïveté than any wisdom. He waited for me after the dance as he had promised. Otherwise, I don’t know what I’d have done. As it was, we returned to Kolchi in total darkness–no stars, no compass.

He asked if I had any plans for the next day, so I shared my thoughts about the tiger sanctuary. He offered to take me there, only we would need to leave before dawn because of the long journey it entailed.

I pulled myself out of bed in the wee hours accordingly and found my waiting friend outside. Again, we would have to cross the bay before catching a bus into the hill country. This time, he had a fifteen year old boy with him to help with the oars. I wish I knew their names still, but no matter. I see them before me as I write: the one, a slender man perhaps in his early forties with five children at home; the youth, dark haired, good natured, eager to please.

As we moved across the bay, suddenly we passed long hulled fishing boats, their crews singing rhythmically as they stood, flinging their large nets into the water. Behind us, the western sky with its tenacious blackness; eastward, the groping soft fingering pinks of dawn.

Here we were: the three of us, specks silhouetted against the early light, one of us a Christian; my guide, a Hindu; our young man, Muslim, and yet we were one, diverse in creed and culture, linked by the humanity we shared. In that moment, a peace descended and I was at one with the universe, transcending time and space; a seer granted entrance into that “oceanic feeling,” knowing that we are all parts of a Whole, or like individual leaves upon a tree.

How petty our quarrels, the enmity fostered by individual ego, that annuls our linkage and with it, our duty to each other as finite creatures sharing the same dreams for love and peace and joy in this brief interval of light.

I haven’t experienced any occurrence of oceanic feeling since, but it doesn’t matter, for I have sampled its existence and drunk its wisdom and its peace abides with me still.

–rj

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