Occupy

I’ve been watching with hope, amazement and a measure of curiosity this thing called the Occupy movement. No one, it seems, really knows what is happening. As Dylan sang in, “The Times They Are A Changing,” “ the wheel is still in spin.” I don’t have the magic that might be required to capture the meaning of this timely movement, but I do have the desire, and the audacity, to give this moment words.

Occupy seems to be a new, refreshing phenomenon. The focus upon economic justice, the non-heirarchical way of operating, and the radically democratic impulse, all seems to give hope to those who would speak truth to power. I sense a social movement away from the rut of the past. I also am aware that what I see are just the outside manifestations of a movement, that Occupy has an inside dimension. It is this, the inner aspect of Occupy, which I want to explore.

I have heard, and seen, placards which say, “Occupy the Heart!,” or, “Occupy Your Self!,” and I wonder at these words, these sentiments. What could it be, that joins these ideas with a demand for economic and social justice? What is coming to the fore, in this time of instability, uncertainty and economic hardship? I sense that the 1%, that is suspected of having too much of everything, doesn’t have much heart, or self. What gives? What is really at play?

I can’t claim to know.  I can only ponder. Like everyone else, I add my voice to those calling for a new social compact, a new more humane arrangement, one that makes room for genuine caring. This caring, it seems to me, starts within, and that is why I’m paying so much attention to the inner landscape of the Occupy movement. You see, if I’m going to be associated with picketing, with any kind of movement, then I want it to promote actual change, and I live with the prejudice that real change occurs from the inside out.

What does it mean to occupy your self? What does it take to free your self, enough to be involved in freeing someone else? Speaking as a psychologist, this question is relevant to this moment, if there is going to be any kind of historical change. Speaking as an active observer of culture I’m looking for more depth rather than a quick fix. The refusal to bow to the media, and those others who pressure for a simple message, is reassuring.

 “Occupy Your Self,” that sounds right, but what does it mean?

I don’t know what it means to you, or anyone else, but to me, it means something about being comfortable in your own skin. There are a lot of dimensions to that comfort. There is the refusal to use another (in any capacity). There is the tendency to make others responsible for your well-being. And, on a more positive note, there is a capacity to responsibly place the self vulnerably in the hands of another.

Capitalism isn’t just exploitation of the masses. It is also capitalizing on our own internal resources (including development). I have found that the tendency to be outer-directed, and to use others (capitalize on them), is related to exploitation of the self, to an anti-democratic desire for power.

For me, “Occupy the Self” means placing an encampment within. It means staying put, not being run-off by the authorities, the beneficiaries of a self-imposed system that is corrupt. It is the effort to know fully, to get educated about, the tyranny perpetrated inside. It is having general assemblies and letting minority voices be heard. It means demonstrating, by drawing attention to, the practices that diminish humanity. Occupying the self seems like a prerequisite to true justice. Such a form of occupation seems like a rare, and welcome, form of activism.

The democratic impulse, it seems to me, is an expression of the self. We are only as free as “we the people” can tolerate. That means, like the oxygen mask that appears in a crisis on a plane, it has to be fixed on one’s self, before anyone else can be helped. Re-ordering economic reality means re-aligning our values, it means re-dreaming the American dream. I think this is a deeply personal process that really requires a re-defining of the self. For this to happen it would be helpful if we had a Self-September, or something, that was as news worthy as Black Friday.

Who is consuming everything? It’s too easy, although it’s mostly true, to say it is Americans. Really, it is everyone who participates in the wrong-headed idea that the source of freedom, fulfillment and salvation, is out there somewhere. Occupy means thinking locally, and in this case, so locally as to look and act within your own skin. Occupy, if that is true, represents something fundamentally radical, something so old that it has come around again,  “Know Thyself.” That is all, in the final analysis, that any of us truly does occupy.

Childhood's End

There was a book I read when I was a teenager. I went through a bunch of science fiction stories in my desire to escape from the world I was slowly coming to know.  This book scared and delighted me. Looking back on it, as is my elderly want, I see it a little differently. At the time I was horrified that adulthood, assuming the real powers that Life had endowed us with, meant the destruction of our home planet. The book was named Childhood’s End (by Isaac Asimov), and even today it is making me think.

I think we have come to the time where, as a species, our childhood is ending. In the book, the planet Earth was destroyed by teenage exuberance. Human children had inherited, in an evolutionary leap, mental powers that they could not contain. In a spasm of discovery, they destroyed their beginning place. In the book this wasn’t that traumatic because it was clear that this destruction was just part of these children discovering they were made to inhabit the Cosmos. Today, I am less certain this is a good thing. Is it possible we could grow up, as a species, without destroying everything we’ve been?

I don’t know about you, but this question haunts me. I can’t say that I feel optimistic. I don’t rule the possibility out. I count on Mother Nature having something up her sleeve. I know, from my time amongst the elders, that we, as a species, can be changed. The right kind of hardship could alter us, could grow us up. I live with a certain amount of dreadful hope. I look forward to what I think will be too difficult to imagine. I don’t expect to survive. I want to, not to pass my genes on, but because I would like to be part of a world where I felt us pulling together, counting on each other, caring about the miracle we’re part of.

I think that time could be now, but it isn’t.  So, I live in a world where I feel an impending something, there is a storm cloud on the horizon, a shock-wave coming, a last moment of daylight, a gathering of the hopeful. I teeter on this moment of uncertainty. I am sometimes happy, sometimes sad, and always expectant. I want so desperately to see a way forward. What I see instead is many people coming forward with solutions. I’m skeptical, although I want to believe.

Teetering is a hardship. Maybe recognizing what we have wrought will bring us to our senses. Maybe the danger we pose to each other, to ourselves, will shake us. Do things have to get worse before they get better? Aren’t things bad enough now? I’d like to think it is possible to wise up under the present circumstances. I suppose that is part of why I want to hang out with elders. Certainly, my life has been enriched, by rubbing shoulders with those who have suffered and grown. But, we (elders) are still so unknown, and our kind remains so undeveloped. The last one billion of us were only born in the last 12 years.

I don’t know what to think. I want to, but I can’t shut off my mind. I know many have. I envy them sometimes, but I know my heart really depends upon my keeping my ear to the ground.

I can feel that there is an earthquake coming! The terrible thing is, that despite all my awareness, despite the loved ones I cling to, despite the efforts of others that care, I sense that none of us is really prepared. I console myself with thoughts of initiation, social metamorphosis, a general awakening, but I don’t see it happening yet. The Occupy movement seems to offer some hope, but hope for what, economic equity in a time of economic chaos, social justice in the face of massive social distrust.

Change, it is here, impacting everyone. Do we have to destroy this world to grow into another one? I don’t know. There is that much I can hope about, what I don’t know. Surprise! That is what is left to believe in, to prepare for, to be transformed by. That, and knowing, that this, is the time of childhood’s end.

I have also added a link. I don’t usually recommend websites but I have long felt that we (society) needed a vision of a future worth having and this short film points in that direction, Check it out http://www.ted.com/talks/nic_marks_the_happy_planet_index.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2010-08-31&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

Apoptosis

I awoke early in the morning thinking about apoptosis. There is some precedent for me waking up early. I’ve had the repeated experience of waking up early on Friday mornings with a kind of incredible mental clarity. I seem to know things. I’ve awoken thinking about people, relationships, groups, ideas and the world. I have what I have come to call a kind of truth sense, I know things, things I wouldn’t have guessed I knew, things about how I should act, things I wasn’t aware I was thinking about. This morning it was apoptosis.

I am somewhat familiar with the word: it stands for voluntary cell death. I don’t know how it came to me. What made that word, which was not in my conscious thoughts, suddenly come into my awakening mind? I don’t know. This exegesis is not about that strange occurrence, it is about the mystery of apoptosis, and what it’s appearance brought into my life.

Let’s start with a true story. I had an accident last month (9/15). I lost control of my car and drove into a tree. I totaled my car, hurt my passenger (not too seriously, Thank God!), and scared myself. Since then I have been wrestling with the idea that my driving career is over. I don’t want to face this possibility, but I cannot be sure that I can keep anyone (myself included) safe on the road.

For about a month I’ve been without a car, and researching the possibility that I could avoid the termination of my driving career by acquiring an electric street vehicle. I found a vehicle (a street legal souped up golf cart with a top speed of 25 mph), someone who would customize it for me (and my wheelchair), someone who would even store it over the winter, so I could qualify for a federal tax break, and convince my community to put in a few charging stations. My mind went to work, and found a viable driving option that would allow me to maximize my freedom. I was pleased, imagining a locally expanding orbit, compensating for the inaccessible world I was coming to.

Then I awoke thinking about apoptosis. I knew apoptosis was an evolutionary breakthrough, the voluntary death of some cells enabling multi-celled beings to grow new and more capable. Death led to new life. I wasn’t sure what this thought was doing in my mind, or how it got there, but I noticed something unexpected: I was ready to give up driving!

Apoptosis, I later learned is the voluntary, “programmed” cell death that lets larger organisms survive and evolve. I discovered, to my chagrin, that I was willing to let this capacity (driving) go for the sake of not feeling anxious that some other part of life was going to be put in jeopardy. I realized, that if I could let this imagined freedom die, I, and the rest of life, would be free of one more possible threat. My beloved community would be a safer place to be part of.

This was just the beginning of how apoptosis is affecting me. I have been concerned about death, harboring some fear that this unknown transition would be painful, debilitating, and the end of the road. In my depths I’ve been fretting about how my fear of death has been shaping how I show up in life. Then I began to think about how apoptosis represents the awareness that cells have. Life for the larger organism, to which they are a part, their larger self (if you please), is aided by their voluntary death. I began to think of death as a part of a larger life-form.

I don’t know about how you deal with your personal death, but for me, the idea that my death might be part of life, that my death could be a service to the larger whole, is changing everything. I am not a suicide bomber seeking some kind of paradisiacal solution to end all problems, instead I am willing to live, and surely to die, for the sake of helping Life find a way to go on. I find re-assurance in the sense I have; that this life is not mine, it is Life’s, and that my death insures that Life has what It needs to keep going, and to keep evolving.

Apoptosis —“ voluntary programmed cell death that gives a larger, more complex organism, the capacity to grow and evolve.” That seems to me to be an excellent description of human death. Life benefits, it goes on, and confers upon all of us, who’s passing enables It, a little taste of being as eternal as It is. Ripening, like I think I have been doing, especially in these latter years, seems to be a way of becoming as richly endowed with the complex stuff of Life, so that with my passing something of this life goes on.

I also like the feeling I have that comes with apoptosis being somehow in my mind. I seem to be more connected than I realize. Apparently, probably like everyone else, I know more than I think I know. That now makes sense to me, I am connected, a part of a larger organism, that knows things, I can only marvel at, and sometimes be informed by.

A Dilemma Story

Every now and then I get an urge.  This is one of those times. I have been thinking about something for a couple of months now, and I want to explore this thought more. Usually I would do this kind of inquiry in my journal, but the subject of this thought is so unusual and social that I feel it would be better to explore it publicly. You see, what I want to explore, is a kind of story that was designed by indigenous people to look collectively at difficult moral and social issues. The story–form is called the dilemma story, it was invented in Africa to get groups of people (in their case communities) sharing with each other their best thinking about the thorny issues that haunted them.

I think we, as a species, are in a similar situation. I have this idea that we know (collectively) what we need to know to overcome what threatens us, but we are having some difficulty talking, in any real way, about it. I’ll pose what I see of the threat in a moment, but I want to say more about dilemma stories, and why I think they could be useful to us.

A dilemma story always ends with a question. There is no moral or answer. It represents no particular ideology, or worldview. It is highly unsatisfactory to the part of us that wants a clear, concise solution. Dilemma stories are designed to pose true dilemmas that have no correct solution, but vex us anyway. They ask us to put our heads and hearts together and see if “we” can put our collective arms around something that challenges all of us, they ask us to share the best of ourselves to come up with some things that could help us all.

As a psychologist, with a developmental orientation, I have been aware for some time that different stages in the growth course of the typical human being have different perspectives on life. These stages are invisible, inevitable and troublesome. People at different stages, talk with each other, using the same language, and assume they mean the same thing. They don’t.  This phenomenon, which I call the Babel Effect, leads to a lot of misunderstanding, confusion, heartache, mistrust, and social gridlock. The dilemma story, by virtue of having no right answer, bypasses this problem. It invites out the truest insights of everyone. In that way dilemma stories are trans-developmental, that is, they provide a means of getting to the wisdom present in any group.

For these reasons I have begun to think that dilemma stories might offer us, human kind, a way to approach a difficult topic and share the accumulated wisdom present. It seems to me that discussions, shared explorations, which don’t happen very often, could help. I know action speaks louder than words, but words are powerful, and can lead to unified actions. I suspect a course correction lies ahead. We are already in an era that is challenging.  I have the idea that the more methods we have for sharing the best thought available in the collective mind, the greater likelihood there is of responding to challenge wisely.

I’ve set for myself the task of writing a dilemma story for our times. I’m having a hard time with this task however. I am afraid the story exceeds my writing capacity. I’ve only come up with the opening. “Once upon a time a person was born into an unbelievable world at an incredible time.” I think I know the course of the story, but I haven’t yet found the words for it. The dilemma is clear to me. We, as a species, have come to a place with ourselves, and each other, where we are realizing that we pose a great danger to ourselves, each other, and this our only home. We are up against ourselves, and our on creations.

That is the situation, but it isn’t the dilemma, the real wonderment that haunts me. The question that beguiles me, isn’t how to stop the situation, which may or may not be inevitable, but how to live with a knowing of this challenge. For me, at the moment, the dilemma is, what form of consciousness best serves in an age like this? I can feel the uneasiness, the grief, frustration, uncertainty, anger and dismay. I am also touched by the poignancy, hope, desire, wonder and determination. I don’t know what is going to happen. I don’t think anyone does. But, I can feel the depth of the uncertainty, the unlikelihood of it all, the vulnerability of the times, the looming of a storm-surge of change.

I find myself longing for it and fearing it. I find myself desiring to meet this change, this wave of Creation, with as much alignment as is possible. I also want to run away. But, in my best times, I stop eating chocolate, and wonder how? Is it enough to be open, to engage in what I presume to be the changes to come, to prepare for death, to grieve for all that is passing, to praise all that is, to live with a sense of how precious and unlikely it all is? I don’t know. What I do know is that I have a great desire to be as prepared as possible, not for protections sake, but to serve. The dilemma story, a kind of ancestral shared inquiry, appeals to me now. It seems to offer a way we can help each other face what we know is coming.

Finally, I think I am drawn to the dilemma story because it is truthful. This life, with all of its fragility hangs upon the thread of our choices. We are confronted, like any mortal animal with our own death (our own lives), and we are conscious that Life asks something of us (while we are here), and we wonder. Is any of this life, this planet, these others — is any of it ours? I think not, but we still have a great responsibility, that is our dilemma, at least to me, and that is why the dilemma story compels me like it does.