The Look We Give and the One We Get in Return Are Two Sides of One Reality: The Mirror that Makes Civilization Possible

I remember being told by my father not to catch anyone’s eyes when walking down a big city street. If we catch another person’s eyes, we might truly see who they are, but we’d also be seen by them; we’d become vulnerable. Seeing and being seen are linked. The look we give and the one we get are two sides of one reality.

 

Likewise, most of us have experienced yawning when we see another person yawning. Or felt tears coming to our eyes when we saw someone weeping– or felt bad when we noticed someone else feeling bad. Maybe for a similar reason, simply smiling can make us feel more like– smiling. Why is that?

 

In the book Ethical Wisdom: What Makes Us Good, the author, Mark Matousek details how “a newborn baby, barely able to see, can imitate the facial expression of adults within one hour of delivery.” When the child imitates a caregiver, this creates a coupling between the baby’s expressions, its emotions, and the other person. When a baby sees its mother or guardian, it waits for the other to see it. And when she does see him, her, or them, the baby lights up.

 

Science fascinates me. Or maybe it’s the ability to closely study reality and recognize patterns and connections underlying what drives us to do what we do or feel what we feel. It can help us perceive the universe more “objectively,” meaning relatively free from the enclosure of ego, or without too many of our biases and personal stories getting in the way.

 

When I was teaching Psychological Literature for high school students, we read chapters in books by neuroscientist V. S Ramachandran, especially The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. This book exemplified what I loved about science. It talked about so many topics that expanded our imagination and understanding of our humanity. It introduced us to imposter’s or Capgras syndrome, where we look at a person we know well, like our spouse or parent, and experience them as a stranger. Or synesthesia, which is when we blend our senses, so we might taste colors, see sounds, or hear shapes.

 

Students both loved the reading and yet had trouble believing the power of our brain to both expand our sense of ourselves or distort how we experienced the world.

 

It introduced us to one of the most fascinating discoveries in recent memory, the discovery of cells in the brain called mirror neurons. This discovery so captured the imagination of many people that it led to intense speculation; both scientists and non-scientists drawing conclusions before the science could catch up with our yearning for answers. I felt if the discovery hadn’t been made, someone would have had to make it up. As a result, attacks on the science began, and the whole subject went from the bright lights of headlines to the darkness of doubt and anger.

 

In the 1990s, a group of Italian scientists led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, at the University of Parma, discovered something weird. They were studying monkey behavior. When a monkey noticed an object, or interacted with it, for example reaching out their hand to grasp a peanut, certain sets of neurons fired. These same neurons also fired when the monkey watched other monkeys doing the same thing. In other words, they were understanding what the other was doing through having their own neurons fire as if they were doing it. They were “reading the other’s mind” by modeling themselves doing the action. Ramachandran described these neurons as virtual reality simulators provided by nature to help us understand the intention of others. They were natural empathy generators.

 

One of my students asked, if we can so model the actions of others, how come we don’t repeat them? Why don’t we constantly walk around imitating others?…

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project:

If We Can’t Be Silent, How Then Can We Hear Deeply? Expecting God to Send a Text

How often do we look up to the sky, or sit at our desk or in our bed, and we ask a question, or want to, of a God or the universe?

 

We want the universe to be like AI, or social media. Or we want God to speak at the other end of a text but never get Her, Him, It, or Them. Or we want a voice in a cloud to speak to us, in English or whatever language we prefer. Or maybe we engage in one of those conversations with ourselves that so occupy our time, and we divide ourselves in two, into a questioner and a responder, but all we get in response is a repeat of something old and familiar. The universe then feels silent to us, even empty. Oh, or something happens to us, and we think the universe is sending us the event as a message.

 

As I was thinking about this, one of my cats, then another, went to the glass outer door in my den and intently stared out the window. One, our girl, looked slowly from side to side, as if following something, while the other stared straight ahead. I don’t know if it was her eyes that were tracking something, or her hearing, but whatever it was, it was invisible to me. They were both seeing with more than their eyes. There was no distraction for them from looking, just attention.

 

Maybe the problem is in where we look, or how we ask. In Exodus 3:1-6 God says to Moses, from a burning bush, “Moses, Moses! Here I am.” Or in the 1950s classic religious movie, The Ten Commandments, Charlton Heston stands over the Red Sea, parts his arms, and speaks “Behold His mighty hands.” And God answers by parting the sea. Maybe we’d like such a clear and dramatic response, but it’s a bit much to ask. I’ve never personally seen seas parted by command or heard God’s voice in a bush.

 

Maybe we expect the answer to come in a certain way, and the expectation blinds us to the answer. We might look, for example, outside ourselves, or to some authority or a defined being not ourselves. Or to the thoughts and images in our minds, not the feelings and sensations in our bodies.

 

Maybe we’re hearing the speech of the Burning Bush wrong. Maybe, as some scholars say, we could hear God’s “Here I am,” as “Look Here;” see all this, see this right here.

 

Describing Buddhist practice in his book, You Have to Say Something: Manifesting Zen Insight, Dainin Katagiri, a central figure in the early transmission of Buddhism to the US, says that to truly see a teacher, or see anybody, you cannot maintain an expectation of a certain response. If you have a preconceived idea of a meeting, there’s no meeting.

 

We often create such noise in ourselves. We know this. We know people who can’t stand silence and constantly play the tv or listen to their earbuds or search social media and suffer from FOMO. The world right now is bad enough, so terribly frightening. So, silence, if we can hear it, can be so healing. We need to give ourselves a break, a pause, a bit of kindness. If we can’t be silent, how can we listen deeply?

 

Maybe we’d hear more if we asked ourselves a question and then just listened, listened not just to words, but to the entirety of the moment when we heard the question in ourselves? We ask and then feel the asking. Maybe then we’d hear our own mind more clearly….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

Reflections on The Drive to Know: Reality is More than Words and People are Not Just Concepts

The urge to know, to have an answer, to understand, to explain— this is such a powerful drive in our lives. So many writers, philosophers, fellow human beings have thought and written about this. And we feel it all the time. We don’t hear from a friend or loved one and we send a text, and worry-wait for a reply. We get in the car in a snowstorm yet want to know if we’re being stupid driving anywhere. And when we listen to the news lately, we might wonder what will succeed in making things better? What else might be taken from us, or what will be revealed that will assure democracy and our humanity will prevail over autocracy and cruelty? There can be such pain and discomfort in not-knowing.

 

Many of us can recall a time we felt some new pain and wondered what the cause was. A pain without an explanation is a pain doubled. Sometimes, not-knowing can be fun and add openness, excitement, and anticipation to our lives. But often, it’s just another source of worry.

 

We have this sense of ourselves, of what it’s like to reflect on our feelings or experiences. I think I know what it feels like to be me.

 

But there are times that I’m not so sure. For example, when I realize my attitude, energy level, or what I enjoy doing has changed. Or when so much is going on inside my mind it seems like foreign territory, and I have no idea where it all came from or where it’s leading me. Our inner world can feel so vast and elusive. Or sometimes someone says something about me that shocks me. And as I get older, this rate of change intensifies. I never know from day to day how I’ll be or, of course, what will happen. This is another dimension of not-knowing. We might feel we don’t even know ourselves. How can we control what we don’t know?

 

And then there’s the negativity bias, where we imagine the worst so we’re ready to take action to prevent it. And we develop a theory about ourselves that’s just too awful to face and we cease to care about the reality; we catastrophise and paralyze ourselves. In this case, friends can help us perceive and face what we need to face but haven’t.

 

The same is true if a neighbor, friend, or loved one is in pain. If we don’t know the cause, we worry twice as much about them. We want to help. This is part of our natural compassion. If we have an explanation, a reason, even a mere theory of a cause, we worry less. We have a way to help. Even if the reality is bad, there’s often a sense of comfort in knowing.

 

But sometimes the suggestions we offer others can be hurtful. We can unknowingly imply we’re superior in some way, or that the person is ignorant, or doesn’t know what we think they should know. We can’t totally get into their mind with ours and maybe we don’t want to use our empathy and imagination to even try do so.

 

One issue here is feeling hurt and helpless in the face of another’s pain. We can feel a loss of control in being powerless to help. So, we reach for something to give us that control. But I wonder about control. What does it really mean?

 

We might also expect there to be reasons for things. Not just causes, but something like God delivering prizes and penalties. When something awful happens to a good person, and to ourselves, we might try to figure out “what did we do to deserve this?” But I think God is too big or the intelligence of the universe too inclusive to think in terms prizes and penalties. Maybe, the teaching about Karma is correct, and one thing, one action, one intention simply sets up the conditions for other actions and intentions.

 

And when I try so hard to find an explanation, I could simply be enjoying expanding my knowledge. I love reading and learning. But it can also be an attempt to turn reality into words and people into concepts. A word is so much smaller than the reality it purports to explain. And a concept of a person can describe at most a tiny particle of them. A little bit of humility about what we think we know can go a long way….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

The Message of the Stag: If we Don’t Exercise it, We Lose It

I was 18. It was early spring, with just a little snow left on the ground. I was in a forest, taking a walk, while a deep fog was emerging from the ground itself, covering everything, turning the world gray, indistinct. Hazy. And suddenly, ten feet or so away, the head of a deer appeared before me as if it had been born from the fog itself; as if a brand-new dimension of the ordinary had shown itself. It was startling. Unexpected. It stared at me, and I stood there with it, rooted to the spot. Not one thought in my mind. The whole universe had become just us, just this.

 

And then it was gone. The deer was gone, but the beauty of the fog, of the moment remained.

 

Last fall, another encounter with a deer. I was once again on a walk, this time it was fall, in the late afternoon, on our rural road, and I saw a deer crossing about 300 feet ahead of me. I continued walking and when I got closer, I noticed it was a stag, with maybe a 2-year growth of horns. Instead of running off, like deer usually do, it stopped, turned, and walked at a strong pace toward me. I stopped. He stopped and looked right at me.

 

I wondered if he was confused and mistook me for another deer, or if he was sick. Was he preparing to approach further to see what I was, or to attack? I got my cellphone out and took a quick photo. Only then did he run off.

 

What was the message here, if anything?  How do I understand this? Surely, one way is to read about and carefully observe deer behavior and figure out why deer act as they do. But each deer, not that unlike each human, is similar to but different from any other. Unique.

 

After he ran off, I took a breath and took time to enjoy what had happened. A wild animal had studied me as I had studied it. It was a beautiful moment, a gift of nature.

 

How we understand an event or sensory signal is at least as important as the initial stimuli we’ve experienced. I’ve talked about this in blogs about dealing with pain. If we interpret chest pain as a heart attack, it becomes crazily more intense than if we interpret it as indigestion.

 

The principle is the same in relating with other people. How we respond to comments from a teacher or friend, an event in the news or a statement of a politician, can be more consequential in our lives than what was originally said or done. Despite all the ugliness and fear in our nation right now, we don’t want to become ugly and always afraid. Despite all those who aim to make us feel small, isolated, and powerless we want to look at life as broadly and honestly as possible. What we see is obviously influenced both by what we look at and the attitude, or mindset we bring to it.

 

And how we interpret an event can determine how much we inhabit that moment of our lives. We evaluate stimuli, occurrences in terms of approach-avoid. Helpful-harmful. Pleasurable-unpleasurable. Good-bad⎼ or neutral. This is built into us. And we can subject ourselves to this same propensity, of looking for threats, dangers, mistakes before we see anything else.

 

Psychologists and others say we humans have a “negativity bias.”…

 

**To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.

When We Turn Reality into Myth: Supposed Mythical Beings Now Walk the Streets and Stop to Stare Us in the Face

In the past, it seemed that the mythical meanings of events were more subtle and hidden, but no more. They walk the streets with us and often stop to stare us in the face. Myth can mean a traditional, sacred, or universal story, a story of heroes and heroines, creator beings and destroyers⎼ a story revealing a more intuitive way of viewing life, an invisible realm that parallels our usual one. And it can also mean an untruth or false belief.

 

And today, our president illustrates both meanings. He has taken lies, corruption, a lust for power and vindictiveness against opponents to such historic levels he has created for himself an image of a being larger than human. Many recognize his behavior as that of a wannabe deity, a destroyer being walking the halls of our capital. But for too many others who follow him blindly, he’s an angel of vengeance.

 

But instead of this mythical being living only in story and legend, he’s very human and all too real. And what we, the rest of us, are called to do can feel like something only a hero could accomplish. But usually we don’t feel heroic; we feel like ordinary beings facing a reality that is extraordinarily unbelievable, frightening, and despicable.

 

For example, the DT administration is planning to destroy or abandon satellites that collect information about pollution and carbon build up in the atmosphere, as well as terminate the collection of weather data that collects vital information on hurricanes.

 

And why such enmity for something as basic as weather information? Why terminate the satellites unless the goal is to end scientific research into⎼ and proof of⎼ human-caused climate change? He’s blocking the availability of information that can be used to protect the environment and sustain human life on this planet. And instead, he’s empowering private entities and corporations to abuse the environment our lives depend on.

 

Politico reports that DT has stopped information from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program from being distributed to users. This includes data on hurricanes that has been crucial in protecting people who live on the coast from dangerous weather conditions. Weather collection has greatly improved since Katrina, but DT’s actions can put that at risk, and put lives at risk. Will free weather reports and all regular weather satellites be destroyed next?

 

When I was teaching high school, students wanted me to not use the word ignorance. They disliked anything that sounded like bullying, abuse, being unfair; and calling someone ignorant can do just that. And I loved that concern by students. But ignorance can also serve a powerful descriptive purpose. The root ig means not, opposite of. And nore comes from the Latin gnarus, meaning aware or to know. Ignorance is not knowing, not-seeing what’s right there to see and know. It has a connotation of willful not-knowing.

 

In the past, ignorance was considered a detriment, even dangerous for a politician. Now, we have a president working to create a reign of ignorance, particularly about who he is. He’s pushing ignorance and greed over accurate knowledge and favoring the advancement of a few wealthy and politically powerful individuals over protecting the health and safety of all of us on this planet.

 

Unbelievably, instead of protecting our health, he’s directly undermining it….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

The Deeply Personal Can Reveal the Universal Patterns that Empower Us to Act: Curiosity & the Transformative Power of Awe

I so enjoy writing and reading about subjects and experiences that are deeply personal, or that bring me greater insight, more than ones about hate and inhumanity. And I don’t think this is just me; it feels clearly true for most of us. When there’s so much in the news about DT and his fear and hate-filled executive orders and pointless cruelty, I need to also discover and support what feeds my sense of love and demand for justice and humanity. But it’s an awareness of the deeply personal that strengthens this sense of ourselves, this sense of connection with others and this world of ours. And it’s this awareness that fuels our ability to face what is most difficult to face.

 

One experience and emotion that particularly feeds and strengthens this deeply personal strength in ourselves is awe. Awe brings together a need to feel and preserve our sense of beauty, love, and wonder so we can face the destructive and horrible around us, to face realistically our fear of hardship and death.

 

Our brains are hardwired to worry, to perceive negatives, threats first. And according to research from the Greater Good Science Center, there are good reasons for that. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to be aware of any danger that might emerge from the world around them and prioritized this awareness. But to do that, they had to be ready, open to search beyond themselves, so they could discover ever more about themselves and the world. They had to let go of what they thought they knew to accurately perceive what they hadn’t known. In other words, they had to be curious.

 

And part of curiosity is that feeling we have before a discovery, that sense of not-knowing, worry, anxiety, and possibly fear of what might be there. Science has shown that our reward centers of the brain, and dopamine, our happiness and reward neurotransmitter, is released not only when we get the pleasure, the goal, but when we seek it. And when we feel wonder, awe at what we notice, the memories of and ability to be curious, is strengthened.

 

What is awe? Dacher Keltner, researcher and Professor of Psychology, writes about this in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. One definition of awe that he gives us is “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding.” It can transport us back in time or to a sound or aroma, or an epiphany that de-stabilizes our past understanding; that takes us out of our sense of being separate from everyone and everything else, and reveals the vastness around us, reveals an awareness of the mysteries of life.

 

Everything, every experience, says Keltner, originates in how our minds process information. Our emotions are those feeling states accompanied by thoughts, expressions, physiological responses which enable and direct our actions. When we’re locked into emotions about self-preservation or being selfish, feeling totally separate, this undermines our ability to adapt to present circumstances. Awe does the opposite. The sense of vastness, of something beyond ourselves integrates our scattered beliefs, and all the unknowns we experience, so we can create a thesis about the world, a deepened understanding of whatever we need to face….

 

*Please go to The Good Men Project and read the whole article.

Sometimes, the Mind Reveals its Depths: Maybe We Carry Ancient Caves in Us Even Today, as We Sing Our Moments onto Their Walls as We Live

I was talking on the phone with a friend who was concerned and anxious about the psychological health of their child. After I hung up, I felt how vulnerable he was and I am ⎼  that we all are. That we are all, every minute, so close to psychological and physical pain, to suffering. We have our routines, beliefs, and understandings, our relationships that create and maintain our sense of normalcy and reality. But that sense is not always as secure, nor as complete and skillful as we’d like.

 

And then I felt, no, I could see something almost indescribable. In my mind, along with the reality of my home, and the trees, bushes, and plants outside, appeared something like a tunnel, darkened by countless ages of humans and the earth. And the suffering of my friend and their child seemed to fit so readily in that tunnel; all our fears, worries, suffering fit in that tunnel as if it was made to do just do that. There was so much emotional pain there, and so much more in addition. Joy? Insight? So much of what all of us shared.

 

And it was so vast; anyone could easily get lost in it. I could easily get lost in it. It could be fearful and yet somehow comforting, intimately, infinitely comforting. And then it was seemingly gone. The birds sang. The food my wife was cooking sizzled.

 

What was it? Was it a revelation or like a waking dream? Did I imagine it, or see something that rarely shows its face? Was it a glimpse of something always with us, but beyond our grasp or control? Or maybe a random image or delusion?

 

Maybe it was related to the collective unconscious that Carl Jung described, filled not only with our own memories and the memories of all beings, but archetypes, the universal or innate patterns of imagery and thinking that have appeared throughout human history? Maybe it was related to what Australian aboriginals call the dreaming, or other cultures call the great dreaming of the earth.

 

In his book The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin describes creator beings who sang the world into existence; song being the original speech of humans. The origin songs were called songlines, or dreaming tracks, and mark the routes followed by creator-beings as they carved the earth during the Dreamtime, or time of creation.

 

But dreaming tracks are not solely about the past. They mark both a where and a when, a time and all time, or the continuous process linking the Aboriginal people to the land and heavens. According to Wikipedia, a knowledgeable person even today can navigate vast distances, cross deserts and mountains, by singing and following the directions in a songline.

 

Even in the daytime, it seems there’s an underlying stream of imagery running through our minds of which we’re only partly aware. It’s dream-like, in that it’s more emotional in organization than rational. All thoughts can share this dream-like quality, in that they can appear as real as day but be more of a personal fabrication, like a dream of night. So, there’s a bit of dreaming in the day and a bit of awake awareness at night….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

 

How Do We Find Peace in the Noise? How Can We Understand the World and Our Lives More Deeply?

I went to see an orthopedic surgeon about hand pain, which comes to me in a great variety of forms and places; just to keep me interested, I guess. Before I left home, the pain was mild. But once I arrived at the office, it was very notable, showing it’s face in 3 or more places, dressed in different clothes. Often, when I see a doctor, whatever is bothering me seems to run and hide. Not this time. Why?

 

Some might say the body has its own wisdom, and that’s certainly true. But it doesn’t help me very much. Even worse, the high level of pain continued, on and off, for a day or two afterwards. Did this occur because I was trying to understand the doctor’s recommendations for treatment? And with the pain so clear, it was easier for me to analyze what might be the best way to proceed?

 

Understanding the more subtle messages our body-mind constantly gives us can be tricky.

We are often more concerned with comfort or security than truth, or with preserving an old viewpoint than checking its accuracy. Recognizing contradictions in our beliefs and beloved stories is not always at the forefront of our minds. But all views are fragile. They’re intellectual constructs, and once created, we might be tempted to treat them as prized possessions, or personal works of art. We must be careful not to cover the walls and windows of our intellectual home with them so they’re all we see.

 

One book I love is The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin by Idries Shah. The character of Nasrudin, with his humor and deep insight reminds me of stories from the Zen, Taoist, Desert Fathers, and other traditions. One famous story might be relevant here. Nasrudin illustrates how we often search for answers in the wrong places.

 

A man saw Nasrudin searching on the ground and asked, “What have you lost, Mulla?”

“My key.”

The man went down on his knees and they both got involved searching for it.

After several minutes, the other man asked: “Where exactly did you lose it?”

“In my own house.”

“Then why’re you looking here?”

“There is more light here.”

 

Muscles, senses don’t speak in words; but they’re an inherent part of the thinking process. In making decisions or thinking critically, questioning assumptions, researching with multiple reliable sources, and thinking logically are all important. And so is self-reflection, mindfully reading ourselves and pausing before final judgment, maybe by taking a walk, sleeping on it, or taking a breath or two.

 

An awareness of our internal and external, moment by moment sensations helps us better discern when we and our thinking feels “off.” When we feel a clenching in our stomach, a rush to judgment in our breath, or a grimace in our face we might be lying to ourselves.

 

We might become aware of how our perceptions and emotions are constructed in stages….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

It’s Too Easy to Be Judgmental: Finding the Communion Beyond Calamity

It’s so easy to judge ourselves, isn’t it? ‘Judge’ in the sense of putting ourselves down. We do something we think is wrong and we suffer regret. Or we wonder: am I a good person?

 

Is this self-judging a flaw in our character? Something conditioned by culture? Maybe, a way we hurt ourselves? Or something entirely different?

 

Maybe we’re judgmental of others. We might feel another person is too blind to see the truth. Or they’re trying to undermine us. Or that they think they’re “better” than us.

 

Or maybe we sometimes feel we’ve wasted time, or our lives. When it seems we’re wasting time, what’s wasting away? It’s wonderful we don’t want our lives to be meaningless. But maybe we know this yearning not to be meaningless because we thankfully know meaning; we know moments when we’ve done something that feels glorious, that make a difference.

 

Or we feel vulnerable. Being alive means we’re vulnerable. When we love, we’re vulnerable. But our vulnerability, although frightening, is a life-giving gift. Because we’re vulnerable we can learn; we can feel. We can act. Vulnerability can reveal our need for and our essential connection to others. It can reveal our sincere presence right here and now.

 

Sometimes, we get competitive with our ideas and turn a discussion into an argument we feel we must win. But what is it we think we lose if we don’t get the other person to accept our viewpoint? Underlying the passion of this competition is often a feeling we could be mistaken. The more insecure or wrong we feel, the more vigorously we might defend our position. When I was still teaching, I noticed the more experienced and comfortable I was in my profession, the more open I was to a diversity of ideas⎼ and more capable at helping students be themselves.

 

Or we see ourselves as “bad” because we so want to be “good.” Or, when we judge others, or ourselves, it could be because we feel, deep down, there’s something more to us; there’s such a wonderful possibility in us of living more deeply and kindly.

 

Recently, I became anxious about a medical procedure I needed to undergo. One doctor reminded me of a mindfulness teaching I thought I already knew: we often feel anxious because we know calm and want to live. This was a helpful reminder.

 

Right now, we’re all suffering from a divisive world, and from wars and other unbelievable horrors. But our understanding of how threatening divisiveness is to our survival is aided by knowing the need for cooperation and peace. We might know, somewhere inside us, a communion sits waiting beyond the calamity.

 

Because what’s not often seen in our perception of division, competition, duality, self-judgment is there’s something distorting our thinking process or conclusions about the world, about life….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

The Darkness Closest to Us: Don’t Get So Absorbed in the Universe of Words that We Lose the Universe of Being

One thing I love about many of my good friends is that they’re honest with me and willing to find and kindly tell me about holes in what I’ve said or argued, and to hear what I didn’t speak.

 

A great friend and college roommate found a point in a recent blog of mine that I had left unexplained and that had filled him with questions.

 

The lines were: Black holes the shape of trees, buildings, and hillsides stood silhouetted against a gray sky, a massive gray cloud filled by moonlight, yet with no moon visible. And the darkness appeared to begin in close to myself and lessen as it spread out into the distance. And he asked: “How did the darkness appear closer to yourself?” Or “why did it appear darker the closer you came to yourself?” Did you realize the implications of what you said?

 

Perceptually, the world was darker closer to myself because the only physical illumination was far off, from the lights of a nearby city, or from the moon itself.  But I rebelled against my own first understanding of the psychological or metaphorical meaning of the line. I heard “dark” as meaning sinister, something negative or evil. But I didn’t mean sinister or evil.

 

I later realized other meanings of dark, as in unknown or unknowable. As in beyond words. As in unrealized possibility. As in the unknown before from which everything after emerges. Before we speak there is an emptiness, a silence. Buddhists, Taoists, mystics speak of this.

 

Lao Tzu spoke about the emptiness out of which the universe, or fullness of life, emerged:

“In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,

Words came out of the womb of matter…”

 

Of course, since we don’t know what will happen or what will emerge from the womb of time and matter, we can feel frightened. We don’t know if what emerges will be helpful or hurtful. We don’t know if we’ll have the ability to face the unknown or do something with it we can be proud of.

 

We often think we know so much about ourselves, maybe too much. We might think we are so clear, obvious, unchanging. In fact, we can never fully know or fully capture ourselves or be contained in any number of words, thoughts, judgments.

 

Each word, each thought is an abstraction, a recording, or occasionally, as philosopher J. L. Austin argued, a performance or action. Think about an officiant saying. “I now pronounce you man and wife.” Or when we are overcome with beauty and all we say is “wow.” Words facilitate remembering and can help us evaluate, analyze, think about something. They can be so beautiful⎼ or painful to see or hear. They can lead to rumination or take us out of it. There’s so much that just can’t be spoken. Yet here we are talking.

 

In every moment, we have this choice….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

 

I hope you have a wonderful celebration of Juneteenth, and a Happy Father’s Day.