Yes and Yes and Yes and Yes

I am in the midst of conflicts in Occupy Seattle reading a continual stream of this and that and yes and no. Rhetorical oppositions. Polemics. Trying to be reasonable. Fears. Often talking past each other. Words as weapons. Trying to understand. Refusing to understand. A few years ago I read the dissertation of a friend on the word "understand" which took many many pages to show how understanding did indeed mean standing under pairs of oppositions in a way that connected them.

I read and I say "Yes!" s/he is right. And the other is right. "Yes!" Each is right about their own strengths and each is right about the weaknesses of the other. Yes! and Yes! and Yes! and Yes! And I cannot choose between because each is right and each is mistaken or not seeing the shortcomings of their own position. It is the problem of seeing from only one position or perspective or worldview.

A few years ago I began a spiritual practice of "and." If I thought of one thing then the practice was to think also of its opposition and sit with that with the hope of something new and beyond either position emerging. Before that time I found I had a science mind and a faith mind and I would switch back and forth between them, either quickly or over periods of months and even years. I practiced "and" for a while--a few years--and now what I find is I no longer separate science and faith. They are both within something larger which has no name of its own and they are no longer at war.

One of my favorite stories as a child was The Emperor's New Clothes where the emperor in fact had no clothes at all and only the child would say anything. Greg is right on when he says the churches have no clothes in relation to Money. In fact American churches are sorted out not only by race (whatever that is) but also by class (whatever that is). They have been from the beginning. And they don't want to talk about it. Though there are some prophets who do.

One place I think Greg is not right is in keeping all the Marxist rhetoric which is in opposition to the Capitalist World but very much a part of the Industrial World. I believe it is treating that industrial world as the container rather than reducing industry to one among the tools of a post-industrial earth-honoring world based on reintegrating with natural systems until we as humans are once more part of the world instead of its Masters. And we the colonizers of the Western World have a lot farther to go in this realignment than what is left of the indigenous peoples or of peasant peoples who are still close to the soil. And I include among the colonizers the many urbanized peoples in the West (rich, poor and everything in between) who are totally dependent on cities (and their factory farms) which cannot exist without the oceans and the forests. Even the colonized can be colonizers.

Josh F. is right to honor process and to bring out the opposites clearly even when we cannot yet hold them together and fully allow the emergence to happen. I believe he is right to stand strong in opposition to Greg's rhetoric because we need them both on our way to going beyond them both. I think Josh is not right to rely so much on reason. Both Greg and Josh are trying to speak from science mind which I am going to identify also with an aggressive and instrumental masculinity. I feel strongly that the quieter, more collaborative feminine voices are being drowned out. "Nothing is more valuable than the voices of the quiet."

Many of us, both men and women, are doing discourse, reasoned speech, and missing the graces of spirit (whatever that is but it is surely much more right brain than left) and the Mother voice of the Earth which non-colonized people know first hand and even without naming into categories which can only be done as part of separation. Christian theologians might call this separation alienation or might call it sin. Buddhists might say that it is the result of attachment and results in suffering. Or there may be hungry ghosts which keep us off kilter and separated from what is venerable and true.

I think the urban landscape is full of hungry ghosts and we are all inhabited against our will so we are tearing at each other rather than feeding each other. We are colonized by them and so we colonize others. Every one of us. What do we need to do to cast out the ghosts and heal?

Night Play

It is about 6:30 and I have not looked at the clock since a little after 5. More than an hour of play and it has passed delightfully as if it were only 15 minutes. Before I went to sleep last night I watched a TED talk by Evelyn Glennie on listening to music with your body. I woke from a dream of playing a duet, improvising with the mallets and with an invisible partner on a small marimba. Now (to go back to the warmth of my bed) I am lying breathing into my body. I have earplugs in to soften the city sounds and a sleep mask for darkness and I am hearing from inside, the breaths jetting in and out as I pull and push the air more insistently. I am a resonator and my throat is now the pipe connecting the screen of the theater in my head to the often neglected caverns of an imagined hollow body. I pull a little harder and the rushing air strokes my vocal cords into life a warbling chant pouring out into the darkness.

A rush of warmth and trembling and joyful excitement softens all my body edges and boundaries and I expand into the disappearing bed. It is the same light-filled and life-filled sacred space which shakes me in prayer and also the nurturing darkness of a star-filled innerverse into which I disappear at other times my limbs no longer compactly discernible but dissolved deliciously into utter spaciousness.

My coach has suggested I play with my body postures this week opening where I am tending to close and rounding in where I tend toward outwardness. I think of it as a form of integration similar to the yin-yang integration of Dylan Newcomb's 16 ways which I am also practicing as part of my program to release the constraints which often stop me from moving. I am afraid of losing my equilibrium, afraid that I no longer can respond gracefully to those things which might push me out of a comfortable balance, far too enamoured of the familiar and clinging to what I remember and have solidified as me while I feel the power of the waters of life rushing through uncharted canyons and out into open ocean. May I please have just a small pool to play in while the sun warms it and turns it to salt. I will end up a statue on the plains of Gomorrah if I do not engage more fully in the evolutionary rush. So I breathe and write and allow each day to morph into a slightly different shape.

There is always a pile of books by my bed. They are for transitions: into sleep, into the day, to be taken on my bus rides from one place to another. One of them now is Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel. He is a philosopher interested in the discoveries of neuroscience and in this book he is asking the question, What is the self? What he describes is the way in which we filter what comes in from outside and what we generate ourselves internally to construct or create a continuing sense of self. He calls it the ego tunnel because of its limiting nature. We never see all of what is around us, the matrix in which we live, but must create from the wealth inherent in that matrix a manageable shell, a safe container that is possible. Yet in the plenum of the matrix are infinite unformed possibilities.

In a paper titled "Life in the Interstices: Systems Biology and Process Thought" Joseph E. Earley, Sr. suggests "that what Whitehead calls 'empty space' should be considered to be a metaphorical space of indeterminacy, rather than some gap in extension in Newtonian absolute space." Monday I realized I was imaging my interstitial space visually and by doing that I was falling naturally into a Newtonian conception. Now I am asking myself what other sort of imaging I might practice so that I can realize the experience of a fuller plenum and expand my range of possibilities. I believe this is not only an individual journey but I trust that others are on similar journeys and that we are sharing a larger play space as well, one very much needed for breaking out of the cultural limitations which keep us from responding to our planetary anguish. What may enter my consciousness as abstracted onto a headspace screen needs to be breathed into my body and there co-create liberating action even while the abstract symbolizations may fade into a nurturing darkness.

What is my palette of possibilities and what new mixtures can I discover or create? Right now I have improvisational and compositional music. I have my life with plants and with foods. I have words. I need to dance more. I can sketch and create my living space. I recast my imaginal possibilities as I read science and philosophy and a scattering of ideas gleaned from across the net. I have my small group of friends I can throw these ideas around with. I have my night play and dreaming which ties it all together in sometimes kaleidoscopic ways. And this play space. Hopefully some more companions will join me so we may play together.

Welcome to my play space

Yesterday I sat in the stacks of the University of Washington library reading a small, faded blue copy of collected essays by Alfred North Whitehead. In an essay title "Harvard: the Future" Whitehead wrote: "The important characterization of knowledge is in respect to clarity and vagueness...The world is not made up of independent things, each completely determinate in abstraction from all the rest...Our experience is dominated by composite wholes, more or less clear in the focus, and more or less vague in the penumbra, and with the whole shading off into umbral darkness which is ignorance. But throughout the whole, alike in the focal regions, the penumbral regions, and the umbral regions, there is baffling mixture of clarity and vagueness."

For many years I have been saying, "I live in the interstices, in between rather than enclosed within any particular thing..." When I was in seminary earning a Master's in Theological Studies (the impractical, academically-oriented version of seminary degree) I toyed with the idea of the Eccentric Christ. Even as a much younger person I envisioned my older age to be one of eccentricity not as a pastiche of odd and quirky behaviors but as someone who follows the different drummer into many less explored lifeways.

Now I am entering into that older age in its fullness as a 65-year-old rewriting once again the story of my life so I can understand my own map within the much larger maps of family heritage and engagement, of social movements (not only political movements but all of the shifting activity of larger human groups I participate in), of professional and personal commitments (I teach piano and am active in the Seattle Music Teachers Association and I am committed to a small group called Walk your Talk within the local integral movement within the global integral movement)... And in each of these I feel both somewhat in and somewhat out perhaps perfectly embodying the Chinese image of doubt, one foot in each of two boats floating in the ever moving water.

But yesterday I realized that the mental image I have been carrying has been that of two circles with a space in between and that even if I overlap the circles in a Venn diagram and if I inhabit the oblong intersection I am still constricted by the absolute boundaries. How excited I was to realize that those sharply-drawn boundaries could disappear into Whitehead's penumbra and that clarity and vagueness not only could but do coexist within and without. And just as important, in reading Whitehead's graceful prose and while playing with his ideas I remembered how important and how intensely pleasurable intellectual activity is for me. It is a joy to be graced with good-quality thought and to think well and I am moved.

Ah, an intersection between mind and body! A deep pleasure which unites them. It is I think this coexistence of pleasure and value which is the true context of original hedonism, not a falling into a half-sided, only body-oriented version which has passed for hedonism in a detached and materialist modern age. My play is to bring together all the aspects of my highest being into my (and our) play space, the place of the holy play we call creativity.

Welcome to my playground.