The New Normal

The best and worst of times.

If a person is born into bondage and is never exposed to anything other than bondage, they won’t know they are in bondage. Instead, they will accept their condition as ordinary. Only one who has become set free will be able to look back into the time when they were imprisoned and know the difference. 

But this escape to emancipation presumes the person desires something better. “Something better” will remain a rational illusion. This hope will never get out of that box unless the person accepts the possibility, however small, that the vision may have an element of worth and be reasonably likely. Having a sense of being normal is a two-edged sword: It may provide a sense of communion with others in the same condition, but it does not hold out a carrot for a better way.

Plato’s Cave (e.g., The Allegory of the Cave) is a story from Book VII in the Greek philosopher masterpiece The Republic, written in 517 BCE. The cave allegory tells of prisoners, chained since childhood, in a position within a cave so they can see nothing except shadows of themselves projected onto the cave wall in front of them. Consequently, the prisoners have no sense of anything other than the shadowy illusions before them and come to think of the shadows as their normal world-view. 

Few escape to learn the truth and when confronted with the difference between reality and falsehood, the few choose their ordinary falsehood—to which they have grown accustomed—over what is real, yet foreign. A key point in the story is that people prefer old norms over new ones, even when the new is real. 

While written 2,537 years ago, this story resonates with the convictions of “fake news” of today and echos the principle of a psychological back-fire effect. Nothing is more powerful than belief, even when such belief is false, which says much about attempting to persuade those away from false convictions. They will harden their convictions in the face of evidence to the contrary. Human nature changes little over the span of time. Tightly held beliefs “Trump” the hand of truth nearly every time.

That is indeed a thorny conundrum, particularly when the very thought of ordinary is becoming abnormal. Such is the case today when everything ordinarily considered to be normal has been turned on its head. One of the few advantages of being old is a perspective that comes with the passage of time and changing circumstances. If you live long enough, you’ll have lived through a range of conditions that provides a frame of reference that is lacking without tenure, and that gives you a memory of the way things could be, but aren’t.

Without expressing a cliche, the times in which we are living are unlike any within my lifetime. And I am not alone in that observation. Our times are an admixture of the best, and the worst, much like Charles Dickens wrote of in his Tale Of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” On the one hand, we are advancing so fast that the technology we create is obsolete as soon as it comes off the line. On the other hand, we seem to be unraveling as a human society even faster.

A while ago, a political commentary appeared in the Huffington Post, that contained the following: “What used to be the lunatic fringe is now called the House of Representatives. And what used to be at least controversial is now the mainstream.” 

In just a flash of yesterdays, has emerged a man as the most powerful leader of the Western World. This would have seemed impossible only a short time ago. No longer. Now an entire political party champions a man who is an acknowledged pathological liar, peddler of vile racism, a misogynist, cheerleader of xenophobic ravings, and sneering trampler of those who disagrees with him, not to mention our most fundamental American values.

The mood of the American public is, to put it in superlative terms, explosive. And, from a particular perspective, understandable when we consider how dysfunctional our cherished government has become. Time after time, our elected officials have danced to a drummer of self-serving greed with little, if any, responsiveness to the wishes of the constituents who elected them. Now we almost expect another week (or day) of “normal” chaos, violence, and behavior that used to be routinely unacceptable. And to add insult to injury, our elected officials are experts at one thing only: Nothing. And in consideration of such a state, it would be delusional to not expect anarchy. The new normal of today has become the abnormal of yesterday. And if it is true (and it is) that our tomorrows are the result of thoughts and actions taken today, it is terrifying what tomorrow will bring.

Surrendering from vengeance.

Tit-for-Tat

Quite a while back I wrote of post called, “Surrendering from inflexible positions” and a reader responded with a suggestion that I write about surrendering from vengeance. I didn’t take the advice at the time but given the current state of affairs, with so much at stake, maybe it’s time to track this human tendency through to its logical conclusion. 

I don’t have much wisdom to offer on the topic since the downside seems rather obvious. However, since the dominant forces today seem locked into this pattern of back and forth violence, perhaps the downside isn’t so obvious after all. Antifa and White Supremacy have locked horns with clear political spin. Curiously, Antifa is getting labeled as “radical socialists.” Nothing could be further from the truth, but nowadays political spin outranks truth. 

And then I recently wrote about the findings of Peter Cathcart Wason, the English cognitive psychologist, who discovered that we humans are much more interested in our egoistic desires to protect our preconceived opinions than to seek truth. So maybe vengeance has more to do with covering our vested flanks than anything else. If so, then this post probably won’t succeed in chipping away at that crusty vest. We seem to be slow learners and our collective ignorance leads us all to more suffering.

In one of my books, More Over, I wrote about this idea called kleshas (or afflictions; causes of suffering). The five following kleshas were described by Patanjali at the beginning of Book 2 of the Yoga Sutra (1, 2, 4). So I don’t claim any special knowledge. I just took the time to read because learning about the causes of suffering seemed like a good thing to do. When these kleshas are laid out end-to-end the logic of vengeance can be fathomed.

The first of the kleshas was called ignorance of the true nature of reality (avidya in Sanskrit). However, Patanjali’s perspective here is contrary to Mark Twain’s advice who said: “To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” Perhaps so, but thus far evidence is lacking.  Then comes misidentification (asmita), attachment (raga), anger following a loss (dvesha), and finally misunderstanding life and death (abhinivesha). Having identified these five, Patanjali makes it simpler yet by saying that all of these five are contained in the first: ignorance of the true nature of reality. 

As a human species, this simplicity seems to be lost since we proceed to go forward with this tit-for-tat practice of violence (otherwise called vengeance). The downside is rather simple when viewed in terms of one person in a relationship with another. If someone strikes you, the immediate response is to strike back. This response leads to their response to a strike back at you, and this unending pattern leads to where we are today: nowhere. The lure to right all wrongs is magnetic and we gnash our teeth struggling to find wisdom for solutions to raging conflicts around the world. The carnage is unquestionably awful but the essential question is this: How does meeting violence with more violence lead to anything other than more responsive violence? 

According to Patanjali, the entire flawed tendency can be reduced down to the first klesha: a misunderstanding of the true nature of reality. The untrue nature of reality is what we have today (and apparently have had all the way back to a beginningless beginning) and that understanding is that every person on earth, and beyond, views him or her self as purely an individual with no meaningful connection. We have a term that fits the bill for this view. It’s called mutual discretion and is the basis of the entirety of human failings.

Just for the sake of consideration, let’s think about the consequences of this view. If I am mutually discrete from you, then I will do as Patanjali suggests and misidentify myself (and you, and all others) as an image, which we call a self-image (otherwise known as ego). The nature of an image is unreal and the nature of the ego is individual self-preservation. And we have an infinite number of ways of preserving a separate self. The number one way is to attach our sense of identity to stuff we like (power, material possessions, other people, ad infinitum) and bulwark ourselves from stuff we dislike. The problem is that stuff doesn’t stand still. It moves and changes, one moment here, gone the next. And with the demise of what we have clung to (or resisted, which has the nasty tendency to find its way to us anyway) comes a sense of loss or precarious identity, self-worth and power. Then we get royally ticked off, blame others for our pain, and strike back at the perceived source of our suffering, thus vengeance.

So if that is the pattern (and who can deny that it is) then what’s the alternative? Simple: That we are not, at the core,  mutually discrete. Feedback loops define our existence  Instead we are essentially united with everything. That, of course, is easy to say and very difficult to experience. Just saying it is not enough. Unity must be experienced to be of any worth, otherwise, it remains a figment of our imagination. The experience of unity is what goes by the handle of transformation or enlightenment: where the sense of being an individual, separate identity melts into an irrevocable unity with everything. And when that happens the image we previously held of ourselves (self-image) evaporates into thin air.

From that point forward vengeance becomes an impossible matter because we realize that striking another, or destroying our world, is the same as destroying ourselves and we come to understand, in a new way, a commandment offered by Jesus when asked which commandment was the greatest. He answered by saying, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”

There is just one tiny, yet all-important issue here. All of these: God, soul, mind, neighbor, and self are single, never born, never die, united entity. If this is not so, then the commandment falls apart and we are left with mutual discretion, all of us claiming, with self-righteous indignation, that individually each of us is justified in preserving our egocentric identity and never-ending vengeance continues forever. The arms race never ends, nor does the associated cost in blood and money.

Laws and Order?

Law and Order?

In 1970 Alvin Toffler wrote and published Future Shock, a book many considered to have caused a paradigm shift in how we think about and react to an unfolding future, particularly a future that speeds up and disrupts fixed societal standards. He followed with The Third Wave and Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century in which he further delineated the plight of those who resist inevitable change. 

His solution? People who learned to ride the waves of change would be most likely to survive and do well. And those who didn’t adapt would be drowned by those waves of change.

Toffler was unusually prescient and precisely defined the turbulence of the present day. The short takeaway of Toffler’s thesis is this: We humans resist effervescent conditions that disrupt the status quo and thus cling to fixed standards, even when such measures may have never existed. Or if they did exist, we tend to imbue them with inflated and idealized values. In short, we don’t embrace change and end up trying to bulwark thin air. Furthermore, when such changes wash away set standards, we yearn for the “good old days” when law and order prevailed and seemed to ensure stability.

Another ancient sage by the name of Lao Tzu said this in chapter 57 of the Tao Te Ching:
Therefore the holy man says: I practice non-assertion and the people reform themselves. I love quietude, and the people of themselves become righteous. I use no diplomacy, and the people of themselves become rich. I have no desire, and the people of themselves remain simple.”

Some years earlier, Alan Watts came to mainstream attention with his book The Wisdom of Insecurity. He therein observed that our lust for stability was grossly out of kilter since nothing in the phenomenal, mortal world is stable⎯all is changing each and every moment, and to cling to the idea of stability was a sure-fire prescription for suffering and failure. I offer these two summations for a reason that is particularly germane today, and what it should tell us about the value of fixed standards, otherwise known as “laws.”

We, humans, are creatures of habit, and once we have made decisions, we are reluctant to admit the error of our ways. That peculiar habit has a name and a well-founded pedigreed in psychological terms. It is known as a “confirmation bias,” which means we are much more inclined to seek confirmation of our preconceived ideas than to seek the truth. While it may be understandable and even desirable to live with laws, it is likewise a problem when we try to box in change. It can’t be done, since no measures, or set of laws, can ever counter continuous change. So what to do?

The Buddha offered the perfect solution, which he called “upaya,” a Sanskrit word that translates as “expedient means,” where justice is built into the premise of change. Instead of inflexible laws, upaya is flexible guidelines that allow for the nature of change. Upaya is rooted in the inherent wisdom of all of mankind, whereas the desire for inflexible standards is rooted in the opposite incorrect thought⎯Because we are by nature immoral, the lack of laws will result in anarchy, thus we must have a crutch to compensate for our lack. Ultimately this issue boils down to what we think of one another: An extremely critical issue when wrestling with matters such as racism or xenophobia. Are we naturally moral? Or naturally immoral?

“The more restrictions and prohibitions are in the empire, the poorer grow the people. The more weapons the people have, the more troubled is the state. The more mandates and laws are enacted, the more there will be thieves and robbers.

Given the vector in the world today it is high time we reconsider how we understand one another, and rethink how we relate. This may seem like a risky venture but how much greater is the risk of the direction in which we are now heading?