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January 3, 2008
Hello everyone,
In the previous issue we spoke about the different usages of language: how language can be both descriptive and prescriptive, describing things as they are and calling worlds into being. Additionally we have examined the idea that “We see the world not as it is, but as we are” in a variety of different forms for at least the past two issues. Our interest this week of Epiphany will be in seeing how these ideas overlap and speak to reality and what can be known of it.
Let’s begin with an extended excerpt from the second chapter of Time, Conflict, and Human Values, a well-written book by J.T. Fraser that presents an evolutionary theory of time:
For the poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) reality was malleable, a creation of the mystical musician in all of us.
They said: “You have a blue guitar
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”You make the music yourself, says Stevens. Listen to it without worrying about what the tune “really” is. For Wittgenstein (1889–1951) reality was what our language said was real, and hence the boundaries of a person’s language were the boundaries of his or her world.
A scientific version of Stevens’s blue-guitar model, combined with Wittgenstein’s language model (where “language” is any mode of communication), may be found in the work of the German theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Early in the twentieth century he drew attention to the fact that for each animal the world as perceived and acted on is determined by the animal’s receptors and effectors. Its receptors determine all possible stimuli it may experience; he called this universe the animal’s Merkwelt (perceptual universe). The totality of responses of which the animal is capable is its Wirkwelt (universe of actions). These two universes form a functional loop that carries information. External signals become internal signals, which are processed, evaluated, and then passed on as commands for action that has the external world as its target. Through that action the external signals become modified and reenter the loop. The dynamic content of this loop forms the Umwelt of the species.
The word Umwelt became naturalized into English. Fortunately so, because its translations—“species-specific reality,” “self-world,” “phenomenal world,” “perceptive universe,” “world horizons”—are all awkward. Umwelt is now defined as “the circumscribed portion of the environment which is meaningful and effective for a given species.” Since the information-retaining, -processing, and -transmitting capacities of the perceptive-cognitive and motor loop of any species is bounded, it follows that for each of its members, the umwelt of a species appears as a complete world that contains everything there is or can be known.
Note that the environment of which an animal’s umwelt is a “circumscribed portion” is our human umwelt. It is our human reality. (Time, Conflict, and Human Values 22–23)
Every species has a certain number of sense organs—eyes, ears, antennas, tongues—and can respond in a variety of ways to the sensory information these perceptors communicate back to them. The totality of what these sense organs communicate and the ability of that species to accordingly react consists of that species’ umwelt: this perceptual universe is the world for that species, the only world they can or ever will know.
Imagine being born blind. How would someone communicate to you what it was to see something? You would lack the sensory apparatus to understand the aspect of the world that corresponds to the visual spectrum. One whole aspect of ordinary human reality would for you be permanently blacked out. In its place, you would likely have uncommonly heightened perception in one or more of the remaining senses, but you would never know what it was to see. Your reality would lack that entire range of experience, and even if it existed for the rest of the planet, it would never exist for you. The human umwelt consists of sight, but your personal unwelt—your merkwelt and to some extent your wirkwelt—does not.
Fraser speaks of butterflies who are able to discern each other based on ultraviolet markings on their wings. One can picture a puzzled scientist perplexing over this phenomenon: how do these creatures tell each other apart as they do? We can further picture this scientist one day discovering that an ultraviolet camera suddenly makes light a startling hypothesis well supported by further testing: these winged beings can see what our human eyes cannot. They can tell one another apart by their unaided senses. Commonplace examples abound of dogs with incredible noses and sharp ears, though apparently colorblind. Or bats with their sonic means of collecting a late evening’s dinner while avoiding low-lying hazards. These creatures experience reality from their own umwelt, which is different from ours. We experience sensory perceptions that they do not, just as they experience sensory perceptions that we do not. The totality of these perceptions—what their eyes, ears, noses, mouths, antennas, and other sensory organs can detect combined with their ability to respond to these perceptual stimuli—form their umwelt. Quite literally, these creatures perceive their world not as it is, but as they are. We too, as one such species among many, also perceive our world not as it is, but as we are as human beings, outfitted as we are with five fingers and five toes and two eyes and two ears and one mouth and one nose but two nostrils.
This realization was what made the German philosopher Kant’s (1724–1804) ideas so revolutionary. In his Critique of Pure Reason and resultant Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics primer, Kant demonstrated that there is a boundary to what we can know by reason. This boundary exists precisely because, though he did not use the term, we perceive the world through a human umwelt. Interestingly, it was because of philosophers like Locke, Hume, and Kant that we have modern psychology: they sought to sound and circumscribe the limits of reason and a field of independent study was born. These thinkers sought mainly to put an end to the pompous and idle speculations of philosophers making dogmatic pronouncements about ultimate realities and beginnings and ends of universes as though they could somehow deduce such teachings by rationalism, and these thinkers did so by probing the reliability of human reason, seeking to uncover what its logical limits were in fact. If reason has a demonstrable limit, those who tried to push pass that limit in the name of reason could be silenced.
Kant showed that reason could carry us up to the edge of reality, but no further. Perhaps faith could carry us beyond this threshold, but reason is itself bounded because we are ourselves bounded. This world of the human unwelt he called the phenomenal world, a world of (sensory) appearances. Quite certainly there is a reality producing these perceptions we experience from moment to moment via our sense organs, but we cannot ever get to that apparently outer world to perceive what it might be like in itself because we are ever and always at the mercy of our own sense organs: we perceive nothing without them and perceive with them only what they allow. If we have no eyes, one whole aspect of reality is not to us known nor can it ever be recovered. We have no idea if the five or six senses accurately presents to us reality as it is: in fact, if butterflies, bats, and dogs are any indication, we can be quite certain that at least unaided, our senses do not speak the entire truth. When we begin to probe around into ideas like our eyes interacting with light to “color” the world, we cannot even be certain if the various shades of the rainbow are a part of reality as it actually is or merely a perceptual phenomenon. Contrary to common sense, it seems quite likely that color is something only known to eyes, something “painted on” in the interplay of light and perception. We cannot ever know what it is to know a reality other than a human one; for that matter, we cannot ever know what it is to know a reality other than our own personal one, for all external voices and skins still must pass through our personal perceptual universe. The ultimately unknowable world existing beyond our senses Kant called the noumenal world. Only God has access to this world, for only God knows how things are in themselves without the mediation of sense.
To speak of ultimate truth is to speak only about the world as God perceives it, because truth is necessarily different than reality: truth is what we call the phenomenal world, whereas reality is the noumenal world thus “re-presented.” That the world out there exists is quite certain, but how it exists has to be mapped out in my own mind. I like to hold up a chalk eraser and tell my students that I do not literally have an eraser embedded in my head. Yet I must get that eraser inside my head somehow if it is to have meaning. A knowledge of that eraser—the truth of its existence—is apparently “re-presented” via a neurochemical change in my axon and dendrite connections such that now and ever afterward I accurately perceive and identify this thing called “chalkboard eraser” (that sound and those letters also apparently neurochemically encoded for safe-keeping). The knowledge of the eraser is not the eraser itself, else (as is always certain to draw a few scattered laughs), I likely would not live through the ordeal.
Notice that I used the term “mapped out” a moment ago. That choice of words is telling, particularly if we return to an earlier newsletter where we spoke about atlases and maps.
So then, the earth is too big for Ray and me to “get at” all at once, so a much smaller-scaled version helps us considerably in “getting at” its essence. And “getting at” its essence means forming some kind of accurate knowledge about the reality of the earth. The knowledge corresponds or in some way represents the reality, but it is not the reality itself.
Now then, Ray may very well be walking around with a globe in his head—that is, he may well have a global representation that helps him “get at” the reality of the earth. By contrast, I may have a sixty-four page atlas in my own head that helps me “get at” the earth. My atlas is no more the same thing as the earth than Ray’s globe; my atlas is no more the same thing as the earth than my thought is the same thing as your face. Ray may go on to point out the reasons why his globe is superior to my atlas. For one thing, it is round and thus is not subject to the same distortions that creep in when one tries to represent round objects on flat surfaces. “Ah,” I may chime in, “but your map only shows the most cursory of topical details where in my full sixty-four pages I have so much more information about the specifics than you ever could on that small surface of yours.” He may then remind me that he has raised mountain ranges you can feel with your fingers and I may tell him that I have visual blow-ups and expansions of these same mountain ranges that provide even more accurate and refined data about the actual height, say, of Mt. Everest at any geographic coordinate along its extremity.
Now then, for those of us on the outside looking in on Eric and Ray, we might think to ourselves: well, Ray has some good points and Eric has some good points and if we combine their thoughts then we may come closer to having gotten the entire earth inside our own heads. (The Color of Emily’s Bedroom)
Since truth is not the same thing as reality, there may be many, many different ways to tell the truth, even if the reality to which this truth corresponds remains the same. Which method of truth-telling is best may fit both the circumstances (an atlas or a globe?) as well as the persons involved. For example, I recently began reading further into Frogs into Princes: Neurolinguistic Programming by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. This 1979 classic about Neurolinguistic Programming (or NLP for short) has proven every bit as controversial as Bandler himself, a man whose life story may best be described as a real piece of work. The claims made in the book suggest several different and interrelated things. First, if you are a psychotherapist or counselor and you want to learn how to communicate even better than you do, try to find people whose skills at communication are greater than your own. Then model their behavior: that is, physically move your body the way they move their bodies, raise and lower your voice the way they raise and lower their voices. Physically model what they do, the book claims, and in a fraction of the time it took them to learn these skills you will have acquired them for yourself. Bandler and Grinder also suggest that if you ask people a question, they will unconsciously communicate the answer through their facial movements, even if they choose not to verbally respond. Specifically, the authors detail general principles—in particular concerning the movements of the eyes—that help consciously uncover what we already tend to notice unconsciously about people’s nonverbal communication. Last, they claim that as human beings, we have one of three basic tendencies: we either tend to hear things in our heads, see things in our heads, or feel things inside our heads. We all use all three to some extent, but we favor one, according to Bandler and Grinder.
If I ask you to describe standing naked under a hot shower, according to our authors, you will automatically assume one of these methods of formulating your answer. Perhaps you will feel the water as it nuzzles against your skin. Or maybe you will hear the sound it makes inside your head or see the coursing stream of water as it scrambles from the nozzle. Depending on whether you are accessing your memory or your imagination—whether you are remembering something (eidetic images) or imagining what something would be like (constructed images)—you tend to access a different hemisphere of your brain (left and right respectively, but reversed if you are left-handed). If I ask you how you would react to a fountain of lava flooding your front porch, you would likely have to reach into your imaginative faculties, your eyes briefly flitting up and off to your right; if I asked how a cup of hot tea would taste, many of you would recall generalized or specific memories, your eyes fluttering up and off to your left. A general principle, not all of you would respond as expected, and those of you with “south paws” (like my father) would be looking just opposite to everybody else (as though being at odds with everybody else is anything unusual—smile).
If our authors are correct, the best way to tell the truth would depend on the person. For you, putting things in visual terms might be most effective. For her, however, putting things in terms of feelings might go further. On the other hand, he hears things, and thus calling on his learning style would best aid his comprehension. In one way or another, reality, which is “out there” has to be be gotten “in here,” which is the realm of truth. We can talk about truth as though it really existed “out there,” but that is to confuse the question, in much the same way that talking about “sound” as though it were “out there” is to confuse the question. When the vase falls from the table, vibrations are sent through the air whether there are any ears in the room or not. The magic of sound only happens, however, where there are ears to hear: otherwise, there was no sound, simply the transference of energy from one surface to another. A tree falling in the forest with no ears nearby to track its fall produces vibrations, but it does not make a sound: ears are required for that. Just as sound requires ears though vibrations exist regardless, truth requires minds though reality exists regardless. And we perceive the world not as it is, but as we are: reality is what it is, but the truth and falsity are relative to the perceiver.
Bandler and Grinder talk about modeling as a means of learning; the Eastern sages have long known and practiced this kind of mind-body wisdom. In fact, some time ago I started a newsletter about the advances in animated films and the technology upon which it is based—the time stamp of my draft reveals a date of June 26, 2006—and then got sidetracked. I saved the relevant paragraphs, however, and would like to take a moment to excerpt them here:
In the 1960s, psychologist Paul Ekman was newly out of graduate school when he met up with Silvan Tomkins, who taught psychology at the New Jersey Universities of Princeton and Rutgers. Until that time, most psychologists concurred that emotional expressions were learned and thus culturally determined, though Tomkins disagreed. Ekman set out to investigate Tomkins’ claims, packing photographs of men and women displaying varying states of emotion to remote villages in the Eastern jungles, to Japan, Brazil, and Argentina—in short, wherever he went, the response was always the same: contrary to what had previously been believed, people universally agreed on the meaning of the emotional expressions. But Ekman did not stop there: he and his colleague Wallace Friesen at the University of California, San Francisco, began to compile a taxonomy of facial expressions, grouping them into action units, as they dubbed them, discovering that the human face is capable of making at least forty-three discrete muscular movements. As part of their research, the pair would carefully isolate the muscles on their own faces, exchanging simulated expressions with one another and with their reflections in the mirror for hours at a time, cataloging their perceptions and the many subtle differences they noted. So then, what happened when they found themselves incapable of isolating a particular muscular group at will? The friendly doctor in the anatomy department was always ready to provide electric stimulus with his trusty needle, an effective, though not particularly pleasant, method of bringing those recalcitrant muscle groups into docile submission.
Once this phase of their research was complete, the pair spent the next seven years layering action unit on action unit, noting that for a mere two muscles, there are three-hundred combinations; for three muscles the total exceeds three-thousand variations. Their project layered five muscles and cataloged some ten-thousand facial variations. The vast majority of these appear to be meaningless, amounting to little more than the contortions children screw their faces up in when they are being quirky. However, Ekman and Friesen determined that approximately three-thousand of these make up the basic repertoire of human emotional expression, which the pair then compiled into a five-hundred-page binder dubbed the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS for short. This extensive project has become a sort of de facto standard and is used not only within the field of medicine and behavioral sciences but also by companies like Pixar (if you visit their site, be sure and move your mouse over the profile pictures: they too are animated) with Toy Story and The Incredibles. Their rival company DreamWorks, responsible for the recent Shrek movies, made use of the FACS as well. The second page of Raising The Bar . . . Again (what amounts to production notes regarding Shrek 2), alludes to this fact when it reports:
The basics of the facial animation system did not change from the first movie to the sequel. The character technical directors, supervised by Lucia Modesto and Lawrence D. Cutler, essentially built a head in the computer, beginning with the skull and then layering on muscles and finally skin. The skin is programmed to respond to the manipulations of the muscles beneath in different combinations, enabling the animators to capture the desired expressions.
For “Shrek 2,” the technical directors added more muscles to the faces—Shrek’s face alone had 218 muscles—and also applied what they call “mega controls,” which allowed for such complex expressions as clenching the teeth, which subtly alters the entire face. Additionally, the TDs put more anatomical detail on the neck, which before had been little more than a tube beneath the skin, even giving the men an Adam’s apple that moves when they swallow.
What Ekman and Friesen began to notice during their seven years of research for what would culminate in the FACS employed by medicine and film animators, was that they often felt awful after the days in which they were simulating the facial expressions of anger and distress. Curious, they began to monitor their bodies’ physiological responses as they were modeling the various facial expressions for their research. In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcom Gladwell documents the pair’s research, noting what the team discovered as they tried to get to the bottom of this physiological reaction:
Ekman, Friesen, and another colleague, Robert Levenson . . . decided to try to document this effect. They gathered a group of volunteers and hooked them up to monitors measuring their heart rate and body temperature—the physiological signals of such emotions as anger, sadness, and fear. Half of the volunteers were told to try to remember and relive a particularly stressful experience. The other half were simply shown how to create, on their faces, the expressions that corresponded to stressful emotions, such as anger, sadness, and fear. The second group, the people who were acting, showed the same physiological responses, the same heightened heart rate and body temperature, as the first group.
A few years later, a German team of psychologists conducted a similar study. They had a group of subjects look at cartoons, either while holding a pen between their lips—an action that made it impossible to contract either of the two major smiling muscles, the risorius and the zygomatic major—or while holding a pen clenched between their teeth, which had the opposite effect and forced them to smile. The people with the pen between their teeth found the cartoons much funnier. These findings may be hard to believe, because we take it as a given that first we experience an emotion, and then we may—or may not—express that emotion on our face. We think of the face as the residue of emotion. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the opposite direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process. (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking 207–208)
Not only is our unwelt fully human, but it is not merely limited to the senses as we typically conceive them. Even the way we hold our face and the muscles we tense or relax can affect the way that we perceive our world. This idea is the basis behind theories of medicine that talk about disease as “dis-ease” and the need to work out not only tension in the back and neck that creates hypertension, but also realize and accordingly remedy the mind-body correlation behind all forms of illness.
Method actors have learned something of this same concept as well as pertains to their art: modeling can lead to more effective acting (and as reported in interviews, can also lead to learning and insight as well). The Greek word for “actor” (hupokritēs) readily springs to mind, for it is the basis of our word “hypocrite.” A hypocrite says one thing and does another, but it is entirely possible to act our way into a new way of being, if we take pains not to perpetuate living in dual worlds in the process. Becoming something is not the same as being hypocritical: if it were, in many instances to change from one state to another would be an act of ongoing hypocrisy—smile.
Like all forms of knowledge, the realization that we perceive the world not as it is but as we are can be humbling or it can be liberating depending on our perspective. Imagine if a man was born with a rare sight condition in which everything took on shades of green. That the world was not literally green—that is, that the world as we perceive it was not literally green—would not change the fact that for this man the world might as well be green: his personal reality would be green even if he was the only being in the universe with that particular affliction.
Of all the statements that Jesus made, one was that the truth would set you free. If truth and reality are not the same thing, just as sound and vibrations are not the same thing, then this could call for a bit of reflection. If sound requires a perceiving ear to be called “sound” and truth requires a perceiving mind to be called “truth,” then truth must be something capable of existing inside of a person. But what is truth? Is it a blue guitar? We do, after all see the world not as it is but as we are (as we have said a hundred times now in different contexts).
In writing the previous issue, I linked to Eating is the Proof of the Pudding. Written in the spring of 2005, I mention in it a conversation with a Jewish classmate in my New Testament course who recommended that I read The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz. He was crazy about the book, and said that it had not only permanently changed the way that he viewed spirituality, but that he had re-read it several times. Skimming over that newsletter again as I was preparing Life in the Present Tense, I suddenly became interested in reading the book, and two days ago it arrived from interlibrary loan. A slim 138 pages, almost double spaced, and in a six-by-eight binding, the book is not that much longer than one of these typical newsletters. I am halfway through at present and have been involved with many other things that have allowed no time for reading (writing this newsletter one of them). In effect, Don Miguel Ruiz presents the metaphor of human reality as a dream in which other dreamers constantly reference their own dreams as they interact with ours. They try to “hook us,” convincing us to see reality as they see it in their own dream. But in order to “hook us,” we have to be in agreement with their words. The result of listening to and agreeing with so many other dreamers is that we often have completely conflicting views of how the dream actually is and ought to be. It takes tremendous energy to deal with these inner conflicts and the invariable result is suffering. To be set free, Ruiz posits The Four Agreements that will in time and with enough practice crowd the other harmful agreements out and set us free by unifying the dream into a single reality. These four agreements include: (1) be impeccable with your word, (2) don’t take anything personally, (3) don’t make assumptions, and (4) always do your best. Put simply, he advocates a life of integrity, a life of wholeness:
The first agreement is the most important one and also the most difficult one to honor. It is so important that with just this first agreement you will be able to transcend to the level of existence I call heaven on earth.
The first agreement is to be impeccable with your word. It sounds very simple, but it is very, very powerful.
Why your word? Your word is the power that you have to create. Your word is the gift that comes directly from God. The Gospel of John in the Bible, speaking of the creation of the universe, says, “In the beginning there was the word, and the word was with God, and the word is God.” Through the word you express your creative power. It is through the word that you manifest everything. Regardless of what language you speak, your intent manifests through the word. What you dream, what you feel, and what you really are, will all be manifested through the word.
The word is not just a sound or a written symbol. The word is a force; it is the power you have to express and communicate, to think, and thereby to create the events in your life. You can speak. What other animal on the planet can speak? The word is the most powerful tool you have as a human; it is the tool of magic. But like a sword with two edges, your word can create the most beautiful dream, or your word can destroy everything around you. One edge is the misuse of the word, which creates a living hell. The other edge is the impeccability of the word, which will only create beauty, love, and heaven on earth. Depending upon how it is used, the word can set you free, or it can enslave you even more than you know. All the magic you possess is based on your word. Your word is pure magic, and misuse of your word is black magic.
. . . . . .[Ruiz recounts the story of a mother who arrives home with a headache, only to be greeted with her little daughter’s joyous singing: “Shut up! You have an ugly voice. Can you just shut up!” Forming an agreement with her mother’s words, the girl not only ceased singing, but froze up when called upon to speak or use her voice in public as well. The mother’s dream was predominated by a headache; the daughter’s by the surface content of her mother’s words.] ... People who love us do black magic on us, but they don’t know what they do. That is why we must forgive them; they don’t know what they do.
Another example: You awake in the morning feeling very happy. You feel so wonderful, you stay one or two hours in front of the mirror, making yourself beautiful. Well, one of your best friends says, “What has happened to you? You look so ugly. Look at the dress you are wearing; you look ridiculous.” That’s it; that is enough to put you all the way down in hell. Maybe this girlfriend just told you this to hurt you. And, she did. She gave you an opinion with all the power of her word behind it. If you accept the opinion, it becomes an agreement now, and you put all your power into that opinion. That opinion becomes black magic.
These types of spells are difficult to break. The only thing that can break a spell is to make a new agreement based on truth. The truth is the most important part of being impeccable with your word. On one side of the sword are the lies which create black magic, and on the other side of the sword is the truth which has the power to break the spell of black magic. Only the truth will set us free. (The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom 25–27, 36–37.)
Every day there are voices upon voices that surround us. We turn on the radio and there are voices. We pick up a newspaper, a letter, a magazine and there are voices. We pass billboards, we talk to our friends, we turn on the television. We have the voices of parents and coworkers and friends and lovers and teachers and enemies in our head, embedded there from years of living life on this planet. We have a lifetime of voices all competing for our attention, trying to get us to dream the same dream they are dreaming, trying to validate their own dreams. Lots and lots of voices and some say do this, and others do that, and some say don’t touch, and others say do, and one says go right and another says no go left. We have voices inside ourselves that conflict. Our world is often a jumble of confused voices. These voices all represent reality as it perceived by those around us in their own dreams. We have been socialized to act certain ways and do certain things all largely the result of voices.
However, there is something important to remember: when somebody says something to us, they are seeing reality not as it is, but as they are. They are speaking to us from their own dream, their own perceptual universe. If our friend says to us, “Gross, you have something stuck in your teeth,” we most likely will listen to her voice because, as we both share human eyeballs, we can be quite positive our perceptions will overlap. But if, by rate of contrast, another friend says to us, “Pink is definitely not your color,” “You would be better off without her,” “All he ever does is talk bad about others,” “Get a life!” we must remember that he sees reality not as it is, but as he is. Sometimes his perception of reality may accord with our own and sometimes it may not, depending on how he has been raised, what experiences he has had, and on and on. Opinions are reflections of personal unwelts, and unwelts are like belly buttons: every human being has one.
Remember the man who perceives the world in shades of green? Even if the world is not green for all the rest of us, for him it certainly is. Likewise, if my friend says to me, “You can be pretty stupid sometimes,” I have a choice whether or not to accept his words. If I do accept his words, even if I am not at all stupid, I might as well be, because my world will forever afterward be green, at least for as long as I agree with his words. My friend has called a world into being with his words: he has put a spell on me. On the other hand, if I am reflective person I will most likely weigh what my friend says: “Yes, sometimes I can be a little silly I’ll admit, but honestly, he was feeling peevish when he said what he said—he had expectations of our time together that were not met and he responded with frustration and annoyance. You have to consider the source, and in this case, he was just irritated with me and blowing off a little steam. I am not really stupid, at least not most of the time, and when I act silly sometimes, it is all in harmless and good-natured fun. I did not mean to annoy him, and while I am genuinely sorry he feels as he does, I am not stupid.” Do you see what I have just said about my friend? “He sees me not as I am, but as he is.”
The theme of these last few issues is simple, but poignant. With our words, we have the ability to water the earth or to scorch it: we can speak worlds into being in which the blind see, the deaf hear, and the lame walk again, or we can speak worlds into being in which the seeing are blinded, the hearing grow deaf, and the perfectly agile are reduced to a limp. That is what all forms of negativity tend to breed—jealousy, gossip, grumbling. The truth will set us free, but the truth is far more than just saying that A corresponds to B: that “he looks a little blue today” because he normally smiles and is talkative and today he is withdrawn and downcast. A correspondence theory of truth—a descriptive view like that of Plato’s—certainly captures one aspect of truth accurately enough, particularly if we are interested in measuring material reality. But the truth also involves our ability to speak into being life and healing or its opposite, to create worth where none currently exists or to devalue, and to bind in heaven what is bound on earth and to loose in heaven what is loosed on earth. This concept of truth is every bit as real as holding measure A up to B, and if a match results we say “true” and if not we say “false,” the one corresponding to the other and the other to the one. There is another correspondence theory that suggests that what you do to others will be done to you, that what you forgive others will be forgiven you, that what I sow I will reap, that when I do A to B, C results. This view of truth seemed to be the one Jesus was most concerned about teaching us, for eternal life may last forever, but if it is life twisted and depraved, it is no longer eternal life, but eternal damnation. The quality of life seemed very much on his mind: he taught that it is possible to operate out of a higher sphere and live in a deeper reality, but that the gate is narrow and few find it.
Archive note: See also the discussion forum thread regarding this newsletter.There are many aspects to the truth that can set us free, but one of the first is to recognize that reality is, for all intents and purposes, how we perceive it if for no other reason than because as human beings we forever look out through eyeballs, smell with noses, taste with tongues, feel with fingers, and hear with ears. Reality may very well be entirely different than we perceive it or even than we are capable of perceiving, but we are the ones who have to live in the world thus perceived, whether a world of heaven, of hell, or a limbo in between. If our eyes can only see green, the world may as well be green: we’re stuck in a green reality. As human beings, the only world we will ever know is the green world of the visually impaired man, but we can make of that green what we will: it can be for us either the green of nausea and envy or it can be the green of fertility and lush pastures, glowing with health and life; it can be the green of greed and “clutchyness,” or it can be the green that feeds families and put smiles on children’s faces.
God bless,
EricFor the Buddha, the present moment is the only moment that is real.Only this moment actually lies within the spiritual reality that is present and available to us. The past is only a memory, and memory only exists in the present moment. The future is only anticipation, and anticipation, too, only exists in the present moment. Be attentive, then, to the present moment, for all else is illusion, a spiritual darkness in which we lose our way.
Here are three questions, and their answers:
What is the best time to do each thing? This present moment, now.
Who are the most important people to work with? The people you are with, right here, right now.
What is the most important thing to do at all times? Most important is to seek the happiness of the person who is with you here, who is present to you now, for this deed contains the whole purpose of life.
George Kimmel
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