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?