Censored 2014

by Mickey Huff

  THE NEW STORY

  What we have lost in the modern desacralization of nature and the degradation of the human image—and what we stand to gain by reversing it—can be thrown into relief by this passage from a fourteenth-century text of Christian mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing: “Beneath you and external to you lies the entire created universe. Yes, even the sun, the moon, and the stars. They are fixed above you, splendid in the firmament, yet they cannot compare to your exalted dignity as a human being.”6

  Seven centuries later, University of California-Berkeley’s quantum physicist Henry P. Stapp wrote:

  Rational arguments lead to the conclusion that all aspects of nature, including our own mental aspects, must be interacting parts of one mental whole. This conclusion opposes, and therapeuti-cally so, the materialist message that each of us is a separate and isolated collection of mechanical parts that, in some incomprehensible (and useless) way, can think, know, and feel. Perceiving oneself to be an integral part of the mental whole can elicit a feeling of connectivity, community, and compassion with fellow sentient beings, whereas the materialist message of isolation and survival of the fittest tends to lead to selfish actions.7

  Present-day visionaries frame this new narrative in terms of three inter-related stories: the Universe Story (which is also the title of Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry’s excellent book);8 the Earth Story, some-times called Sacred Earth or the Gaia Hypothesis; and finally the Per-son Story. Although these stories overlap, it is the third story, about the new image of the human being, that is critical for significant social change. Unfortunately, it has been the least studied. But, to appreciate all fully, we must start with the biggest picture.

  The Universe Story

  For our purposes, the postclassical or quantum-era story of the universe can be summed up in two propositions:

  1. All reality is an interconnected whole. It is “nonlocal,” in the language of physics; but in the plain words of Swami Vivekananda, “The whole universe is one.”9 Nothing that we do, say, or even think is without effects, whether measurable or not, that extend everywhere. This interconnected perspective resonates with the observation of Martin Luther King Jr. that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”10

  2. All of evolution has been a steady unfolding of consciousness.

  The two points are clearly related because unity, or “nonlocality,” is utterly impossible in the material realm but begins to be imaginable as a feature of consciousness.

  But two things must be added to the second point. First, “unfolding” means just that.11 Consciousness itself, the underlying reality in both quantum physicists and the Vedantic and other traditions, did not evolve: it always was and still is, unchanging and indivisible. “I regard consciousness as fundamental,” physicist Max Planck wrote in 1931. “I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. . . . Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”12 Consciousness has been there, Rabbi Michael Lerner has argued, “[n]ot from the emergence of brains but from the very, very beginning of everything. . . . There never was a time when the universe wasn’t equally conscious as it was physical.”13 Indeed, pursuing Lerner’s line of inquiry, we may consider whether the universe is more conscious than physical.

  What has evolved is not consciousness itself, then, but life-forms with greater abilities to use this consciousness—climaxing, as far as life on this planet is concerned, with the uniquely human (though not often fully utilized) capacity for self-awareness. This long process has been beautifully brought out by the popular meditation teacher, Sri Eknath Easwaran: “If we take the Gita’s view, that God has become the world and mind and matter belong to the same field, we get a much loftier view of evolution: the eons-long rise of consciousness from pure energy until the simplest of life-forms emerges and the struggle for increasing self-awareness begins.”14

  Second, and even more significant: evolution will continue to be an unfolding of consciousness. As physiologists and sages alike say of our cognitive capacities, they have not begun to reach any known limitation. We nonetheless experience at least one serious limitation in our consciousness, which Albert Einstein, in a famous passage, identified and pointed out how to transcend:

  A human being is part of the whole called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.15

  Here is the twentieth century’s greatest scientific genius describing nothing less than the purpose of life, to “shatter the chains of egotism” that create the feeling of separateness between ourselves and others, as Gandhi put it.16 This would seem to be the great leap that humankind has taken beyond other animals.

  Scientists have calculated that the likelihood that this universe and its most spectacular achievement—life—came about by chance is about that of a strong wind blowing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 707. Clearly, as Nobel Prize-winning biologist George Wald said at a recent conference, this universe has been “headed for life from the Big Bang.”17 Heading for life and raising consciousness are two ways of looking at the same phenomenon. There is also a third. Since higher consciousness means an enhanced awareness of unity—because as evolutionary biology has discovered, cooperation has played a more potent role in evolution than competition and, as neuroscience has discovered, we higher animals are “wired for empathy”—then the universe exhibits what Buddhists call mahakaruna or “vast compassion.” It exhibits what we might call—to paraphrase an expression from the sterile debate between creationism and science— “compassionate design”; and we participate in that design when we carry out projects of social change through nonviolence. This would explain why solving problems with nonviolence leads to more lasting solutions than doing so in the “traditional” way—with violence, which, from this perspective, is counter-evolutionary.

  While animals exhibit many behaviors of appeasement and conflict transformation—far more than were recognized before the birth of “positive science”18—it would seem to be a human prerogative to consciously choose suffering as a way of opening the heart of the opponent for his or her own welfare. In Gandhian or “principled” nonviolence, we are never against the true well-being of the other even when we’re compelled to resist their attitude, behavior, or institutions: in Christian terms, “We hate the sin, but not the sinner.” Gandhi stated very simply: “Nonviolence is the law of our species,” a spirit that “lies dormant in the brute.”19 Without a framing narrative to rationalize this law, nonviolent activists have nonetheless discovered it in their own experiences.

  Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) is one of some twenty nongovernmental organizations that is now actively applying nonviolence across borders in situations of impending or open conflict—a development of Gandhi’s Shanti Sena or “peace army” idea that has been expanding throughout the world beneath the radar of the mass media. Recently, a CPT field team member was conversing with an activist in Iraqi Kurdistan who announced his intention to use nonviolence in their struggle. The CPT member, perhaps to test his friend’s resolve, pointed out that nonviolence can be dangerous (which is true, though not nearly as dangerous as violence), that sometimes nonviolence doesn’t yield the hoped-for results right away (which may also be true but again is even more true of violence).20 The activist replied, “Sometimes you are happy in nonviolence because you are not losing your soul. You might lose hope, or get tired, but you are not losing your soul.” He does well to repeat the phrase; “I lost my soul in Ir
aq/Afghanistan” is frequently on the lips of veterans who, numbering in hundreds of thousands (actually, 1.7 million from Vietnam alone), are suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, which drives increasing numbers of veterans to the point of suicide.21 A retired US Army psychiatrist recently said that the response to this tragedy of the Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs is to not talk about it, because to acknowledge the existence of this widespread phenomenon would be “to pathologize an absolutely necessary experience”22—namely, war. But there is another reason the military doesn’t talk about it: it lies beyond the vision of the prevailing paradigm, with its assumption of alienation and separateness.

  More positively, Aram Jamal Sabir, the executive director of the Kurdish Institute for Elections, reported: “I can’t tell you exactly when I started to believe in nonviolence—sometime during all the wars and violence here. . . . I saw that violence didn’t change the situation. In any person there is some humanity. Nonviolence tries to develop that part of a person.”23

  In other words, nonviolence, being perfectly in sync with human destiny, not only conveys a deep sense of fulfillment on the activist but also helps to awaken the opponent and the broader public.

  The explosive quantitative and qualitative growth of nonviolence in the few decades since Gandhi and King24 thus takes its place beside the birth of new science and the recovery of ancient wisdom as a potent factor in the change that David Korten, Joanna Macy, and others have referred to as the Great Turning.25 Now that political science has begun looking at this phenomenon, we already have some impressive studies of its efficacy to dislodge oppressive regimes. But the growth of nonviolence, and knowledge about it, has not only political but also cultural and even evolutionary significance.

  The Earth Story

  Of the three intersecting stories that comprise this new narrative, the ecological has been the most recognized and thus requires less review here—not that solving the problem of global climate disruption is not urgent! In fact, it’s the most urgent task in the category Joanna Macy identified as “stopping the worst of the damage.” But its primary urgency is to preserve the nourishing capacity of the Earth so as to cradle the continuation of the great experiment called life. Indeed, as Vandana Shiva has stated, “If you stop the pollution in people’s minds, they will stop their pollution of the environment.”26 While we must stop mountaintop removal, the Keystone XL pipeline, etc.—and quickly!—the “worst of the damage” has been industrial civilization’s damage to the human image.27

  The desacralization of Earth that Carolyn Merchant called the “death of nature,” which began at the dawn of the industrial revolution, meant that the ancient myth of a living earth was deliberately, if not always consciously, deconstructed. This process must be reversed, for even if the modern mind cannot reimagine earth as actually living, we can at least regain a respect for life, and by extension, for our planet’s exquisite life-support system. Along with that reimag-ining must come a change in the collective psyche that creates our vulnerability to greed by propagating a misleading image of ourselves as empty physical beings in need of fulfillment from outside objects. When he was only twenty-two years old, the great modern Indian sage Ramana Maharshi replied to a questioner: “Happiness is the very nature of the Self. There is no happiness in any object of the world.”28 Fuller awareness of this fundamental fact of our nature, which is at present rigorously obscured by advertising and other aspects of our culture, would point us to the end to our extractive economy and the way we’re despoiling the Earth to service it.29

  The Person Story

  We now begin to see through the critical lens: our human image. As Huston Smith said years ago, “For our culture as a whole, nothing major is going to happen until we figure out who we are. The truth of the matter is . . . we haven’t a clue who we are today.”30 Or rather, we have imposed on ourselves a theory that violates our deepest intuitions and is ultimately a travesty of what science, wisdom traditions, and our own best judgment are saying. Ancient Indian tradition offers a set of potent formulas called mahāvākyas (“core statements”), which encapsulate the vision of reality that the Vedanta had created— for example, prajñānām brahma, “All reality is consciousness.”31 We might try to set out a few core statements for our present age even though we may not be able to match the mahāvākyas’ brevity; that takes time, and genius. Supported as they are by science and wisdom, and offered here with confidence, we nonetheless treat them as hypotheses to be lived and tested in the living.

  ▸ We are not merely material beings. To use a popular formula: we are body, mind, and spirit, but spirit (consciousness) is our first and fundamental identity.

  ▸ We are not separate, despite appearances. All of us—for that matter, all of life—is one, and this oneness can be discovered in the depths of our consciousness.

  ▸ We are not violent by nature. We have a capacity for violence inherited from our evolutionary past, but just as cooperation is a more potent driver of evolution than competition, compassion in us leads to more long-lasting change than hatred. Injustice and cruelty are not absent from our world, but they are not fundamental to it. Life doesn’t punish; it teaches.32 We are not determined by our DNA, our hormones, or our neu-rotransmitters any more than we are by the position of the stars or anything outside of us: we make our own destiny primarily with our will.

  ▸ We are not a finished product. The miraculous human body that has taken five billion years to evolve (since the emergence of life-forms on this planet) may have reached a plateau—for instance, it may not be possible to run a three-minute mile— but we are far from realizing the full potential of our consciousness. (Except that some of us have: Jesus, the Buddha, and, as thought by many people in our own age, Mahatma Gandhi, and a handful of other women and men of realization, who represent what each of us can become.)

  WHAT’S KEEPING THE OLD STORY ALIVE?

  It’s interesting to observe how the new story is struggling to be told in the shell of the old. For example, Barbara Fredrickson, developing an important aspect of positive psychology, has written an important book called Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, but the headline of a review on AlterNet tells exactly the opposite (and depressingly familiar) story: “Your Brain on Love: The Fascinating Biochemical Reactions That Make Sparks Fly” (emphasis added).33 Even on this otherwise quite progressive blog, the categories used to frame this scientific finding are taken from the old, materialistic narrative.While it is virtually ubiquitous in public discourse, the most effective medium imposing this inhibiting and demoralizing narrative is modern advertising. Examples abound: an old advertisement touts a brand of cigarettes as “alive with pleasure,” or a more recent picture of some diamond rings carries the label, “This is what extraordinary love looks like.” Bear in mind that, according to recent studies, we are ex-posed to between 3,000 to 5,000 of these commercial messages a day; their cumulative impact—including their underlying “story,” or message of a self that is empty, needing fulfillment from the outside world, separate from others and the environment—cannot be ignored.

  The six-part BBC documentary Century of the Self demonstrates the power of advertising—including, for example, how the Nazis enthusiastically adopted advertising techniques in their propaganda with devastating clarity that we needn’t elaborate on here. Those who have become alarmed by Citizens United, the Supreme Court-approved doctrine that corporations have the same rights as natural persons, have mainly been roused by its baleful consequences for democracy, as well they should; but even if corporations never take advantage of this court’s ruling to sway political decisions, the decision still does serious harm by propagating a shallow, inert image of personhood, which has come to dominate our collective sense of self.

  An earlier version of Century of the Self was called Happiness Machines, borrowing from a quote by President Herbert Hoover, who fell all over himself to offer this fulsome praise to a grou
p of advertisers: “You have taken over the job of creating desire, and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines—machines which have become the key to economic progress” (emphasis added).34

  Since Hoover’s time, as audiences have become more and more desensitized and indoctrinated to this message of their own dehuman-ization, advertisers have become increasingly forthright about transferring humanity to inanimate objects. “Meet Gwen,” invites a billboard. Gwen likes music and good restaurants. But there’s a problem: “Gwen” is a smartphone. This is not a joke. Recall that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were given the cute, euphemistic, and equally pseudo-personal names “Little Boy and “Fat Man,” while the cities they destroyed were referred to not as cities but “targets.”

  Reviewing Nick Turse’s Vietnam War book, Kill Anything That Moves, Chris Hedges describes how “the god-like power that comes with the ability to destroy . . . along with the intoxicating firepower of industrial weapons, rapidly turns those who wield these weapons into beasts. Human beings are reduced to objects” (emphasis added).35 The degradation inflicted by these messages is double-edged, injuring first oneself, and then the intended victim.36 Conflict scientists have long recognized that dehumanization is a fundamental precondition of violence; indeed to deny the humanity of another and/or oneself is a kind of spiritual violence in itself. From dehumanization to inhumanity is a short step.

  Dehumanization begins long before an army recruit shouts in unison for his drill sergeant that the purpose of a bayonet is to “kill, kill, kill without mercy.” As is well known, before becoming California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in a particular type of action film. According to a New Yorker profile of Stan Winston, whose special effects studio designed monsters and robots for these movies, Winston found it exciting to “scare the crap out of people.”37 This sounds uncomfortably similar, does it not, to the way governments try to keep us cowed and in line? For instance, in 1947 when the American people were turning from militarism in disgust, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg told President Harry S. Truman that if he wanted to rearm he would have to “scare the hell out of the American people.”38 But the Winston studio team was convinced that their projects were humanitarian. The New Yorker account also quoted Donald Norman, a professor of computer science and psychology and “an influential writer on technological design.” According to Norman, “Robots need to display their emotions so that humans will be able to tell at a glance what’s going on inside them.”39 Emotions? Inside them? And, according to Cynthia Breazeal, an MIT computer scientist who collaborated with Wintston, in countries like the US and Japan where demand for elder care is projected to surpass the supply of caretakers, “The solution could be a sociable robot, something that lives with you and that you can have a meaningful emotional relationship with.”40