I Despair....

It was in the news this week that  Stephen Fry the actor, comedian, raconteur, author etc. tried to commit suicide last year, because of his depression. He is the President of the charity ‘MIND’ and, in that capacity, felt it was important to talk about what happened. There is still a lot of shame, mystery and misunderstanding generally about the condition, and he hopes that the more the whole subject is brought out into the open, the better the situation will become.

For sufferers, and no doubt many others, depression is a miserable subject to talk or hear about.  When I was urged to attend a self- help group with other depressives, I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it. The thought of spending a whole evening with other people suffering like myself was too much. But it does help to read about other people’s experiences, and to know that one’s own experience is not unique.

However, I think it’s even more important to have non-depressives understand the condition. I am an ‘endogenous’ depressive which means that, even though life can be going swimmingly with everything I ever hoped for, I will experience bouts of depression, because of the way that chemicals in my brain seem to have been programmed, or perhaps wrongly  programmed.  (Exogenous depression, as opposed to endogenous, is caused by external events, such as a death in the family. One in four people will experience endogenous or exogenous depression  in their lives.) 

Recently a friend who I had known for some time accidentally made my condition temporarily worse when she heard I was having what I call a ‘flat’ day (with life feeling as if it has no meaning, but is just one long struggle). I think she thought that my depression that day was down to the situation my husband and I are in at the moment, with him having been made redundant and searching for another job (it wasn’t, it was just those chemicals not behaving as they ought again.) In an attempt to cheer me up she told me about a friend in a much worse position, somebody who had just discovered that her husband had stage four cancer. I know her intentions were good, but endogenous depressives like myself have very porous boundaries, in so much as we’re not always sure where we ‘end’ and other people start. So this other woman’s agony became my agony, and life seemed even more of a meaningless, painful struggle.

One night, 25 years ago now, before I knew that what I was suffering from was depression, I had an experience of this ‘boundary porosity’ that nearly did for me. My baby son had very bad nappy rash and had woken screaming in the middle of the night. I took him into the bathroom to wash and change him when I suddenly had a vision of all the women, both then and down the ages, who had heard their children screaming and couldn’t do anything about it. I saw mothers in famines with starving babies, mothers having their children wrenched from them by soldiers….it was all over in a second, but literally knocked me backwards against the bathroom wall, so overwhelming was the despair.

I thought I was probably going mad, and it’s only now that I know that depression isn’t just severe sadness, it’s more to do with extreme fear and hopelessness, the sort of fear that leads to despair; and it’s to do with a porosity of boundaries (see above) that means that one is trying to cope with the ordeals of the entire world.

My search for ‘God’, for meaning, is probably born of an even more instinctive need for self- preservation, coupled with an intuition arising from my own experience and intellectual reasoning that the materialists who dominate our modern culture seem to be overlooking and dismissing whole chunks of reality in a way that doesn’t make sense. (For more on this see my post ‘Betwixt and Between’.)

Like many people with endogenous depression, I suffer from other ailments, which doesn’t help. I have a heart problem which means that I have to take tablets which worsen the chronic fatigue I suffer because of my Fibromyalgia. For a long time my GP thought that I didn’t have ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Fibromyalgia; she thought that my lack of physical stamina was purely a result of my depression. It has been suggested to me that the depression is actually a side effect of the Fibromyalgia/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but I am fairly sure now that I was born with depression. I know of lots of people with this sort of confusing diagnosis and, believe me, it doesn’t help!

My brother once remarked that it’s depressed people who see the world as it really is- that is, unpredictably and potentially horrifying, and that it’s ‘normal’ people who have been born with rose- tinted spectacles that screen out this awful truth. Scientifically we know now that it’s not rose- tinted spectacles that keeps the majority of humans struggling on, it’s serotonin and, although I’m against testing on animals in general (especially for cosmetics) I bless day and night every  animal who died to help produce paroxetine without which, I’m very sorry to say, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far.

As always, I would love to hear the views of others. Lots of people find it difficult to make the ‘comments’ box below work, so please feel free to email me at helenjdavis@hotmail.co.uk with your observations, which I will reproduce below.

A Soldier Murdered in Woolwich, and Gandhi's 'Way Out of Hell'

After the awful events of the previous day, yesterday I had the pleasure of listening on-line to the Harvard professor, Bob Kegan, giving a talk at the RSA. It will be available in a few days in both audio and video versions (http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2013/the-further-reaches-of-adult-development-thoughts-on-the-self-transforming-mind)

Professor Kegan is interested in how the human mind goes on developing even once adulthood has been reached, and has spent a lot of time researching this subject.

We are said to have reached adulthood once we have developed a ‘socialised’ mind. Many of us do not develop further than that, though some of us do go on to develop what Kegan calls a ‘self-authoring’ mind. Some adults, though a small percentage at the moment, go on further to develop a ‘self- transforming’ mind. Over the years Kegan has never come across anyone who has gone back a stage, though he has found many increments within each stage.

The socialised mind,  the stage at which the majority of adults in the world remain, seems to me to correlate with Maslow’s ‘need to belong’ (in his ‘hierarchy of needs’ model, which is taught widely in business schools as a tool for understanding the various motivations of workers.) I would also correlate it with Spiral Dynamic’s ‘blue’ or traditional stage.

The socialised mind  is a wonderfully civilising level, where the individual’s focus shifts from ‘me, me, me’ to ‘us’. The good of one’s ‘tribe’ becomes paramount here, and it’s where loyalty to one’s family, religion and country springs from. The rule of law is accepted, even when it inconveniences the individual, for the greater good. There is a reliance on tradition for deciding how life is to be carried on.

I think the correlation in Kabbalah would be the so called ‘vegetable’ person (although I really hate that term) because those of us who have developed to the socialised mind state, though not beyond, are happy providing we can lead comfortable lives – eat, grow, reproduce, and feel the sun on our skins (the simple things for which so many of yearn!) See my earlier post on this: Vegetable,Animal and Human People.

Those of us who go on to develop a self- authoring mind also need those things, especially a set of laws which apply to all; one doesn’t suddenly start driving on whichever side of the road one feels like, when it’s much more sensible to stick to the left like everybody else in the UK. However, people moving into this stage find a new capacity for independence, especially independence of thought. “Emotional life seems to be more internally controlled” as well. (Kegan, 1982, page 102). At this stage the individual’s ‘sphere’ of loyalty tends to get wider, going gradually from ‘ethnocentric’ towards world-centric’. Kegan himself, in the book quoted above, “The Evolving Self”, equates this level with the ‘need for self- esteem’ stage in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs model, and talks of people at this stage exercising “personal enhancement, ambition or achievement” (page 120).

In Kabbalah, I would correlate people at this stage with those referred to as ‘animal people’.

The next development is that which most excites Kegan.  He says that he has not yet encountered a stage of development beyond this, though he admits that this may be because he isn’t able to recognise it. (It is widely accepted that up until and including the self-authoring level, the level before is seen as ‘backward’ and the next level as incomprehensible and threatening. People generally have a nasty habit of killing other people who stand out at or represent a level or two above.)

A person with a self- transforming mind is able to hold multiple interpretations of one situation at the same time, more and more comfortably as they develop further into this stage. Strange, confusing and even irrelevant as this would seem to many of us, this is ‘a way out of hell’. In last night’s talk, Kegan referred to an incident in Gandhi’s life – particularly relevant as I write this, a couple of days after the brutal murder of a soldier in Woolwich. 

A Hindu comes to Gandhi to tell him he has killed a Muslim child by hitting its head against a wall, because Muslims killed his own child. Now he was ‘in hell’. Gandhi (a Hindu himself) suggests a way out of that hell – to adopt an orphaned Muslim child, and bring it up in its own faith, while continuing to practise Hinduism himself. This is a suggestion from a self-transforming mind. In Kabbalah I’m presuming that a person at this level of development would be called a human person.

Kegan reported last night that he had never come across this stage fully developed in anybody who had not yet reached mid-life. (Can I throw in here that I think I may have met younger people who were well on the way? But I’m not an expert.) He pointed out that two thirds of the people who have ever lived / are living into their sixties are alive now, life expectancy having grown that much in the last few decades. He assumes therefore that many more people will develop self-transforming minds and this is most propitious, because socialised and self authoring minds cannot solve the problems on this planet caused by socialised and self authoring minds! Only from the next level, which includes and goes beyond the two previous levels, will that be possible.

But what am I for??

Those of you who’ve read the first few postings on this blog will know that I took voluntary redundancy last July from my job as a lecturer at a University in London, at the age of 56, (calculating that the redundancy sum would see me through to when I could start receiving my pension without too harsh a financial penalty.)

The opportunity to retire early came at an opportune time. I was so exhausted because of fibromyalgia, depression and heart problems, that I was seriously doubting I would manage to work through to 60. When I first gave up work I slept.  And slept.  Sometimes for 20 hours a day. It wasn’t what I had thought would happen; I’d envisaged that once I gave up work my energy would immediately start to come back, and those first couple of months were very frustrating. But then  I did start to regain energy. I started to learn to pace myself and, by early December I had joined a local choir and had started attending a fortnightly kabbalah meeting- both wonderful sources of mental and spiritual nourishment.

In January of this year, however, a financial problem, which had been unforeseen when I took voluntary redundancy (that of my husband also being made redundant), led me to consider going back to work part time. There was plenty of work  for what are known as ‘visiting’ or ‘hourly paid’ lecturers in my subject. And so, buoyed up by my increasing energy levels, I agreed to go into a University in the City of London and teach all day one day a week. Looking back now, I don’t think that decision was purely financial; I think I was also seduced by the notion of being wanted again, by contributing something to society that others thought was worth paying for.

It is easing our financial situation but, from the point of view of my physical, emotional and mental health, it is proving disastrous. I'd forgotten that even perfectly healthy lecturers my age would try to avoid doing 3 hours teaching with only one hour’s break before the next 3 hours, followed immediately by one hour of seeing students with individual queries. Within a fortnight I had to give up choir and kabbalah, and was not getting up out of bed at all the day after going into London.

To many of my friends and relatives, the solution was obvious: my health was more important than money. We’d learn to manage on whatever money we had. My GP, who for years had told me that there was nothing I could do about fibromyalgia other than pace myself, finally referred me to a specialist consultant in fibromyalgia/ chronic fatigue syndrome/ ME and he told me that he thought he could alleviate the symptoms of my condition, but not while I was commuting in and out of London during rush hour one day a week.

And yet,  and yet. I have a contract until the end of July which I do not intend to break, but saying no to offers of work for succeeding terms and semesters, from various sources, has proved to be profoundly difficult. You see, if I’m not working….. what am I for??

It’s not that I have identified so completely with my work persona that I don’t feel as if I exist unless I’m working (though I have had that problem in the past.) The problem is around what I really want to do instead, which I’m now very clear about. I want to know, I want to understand everything I can about the human condition, about human potential. I want to read every book I can lay my hands on about psychology, philosophy, spirituality, watch every programme on TV, attend every talk at the RSA, listen to every radio programme and join every internet group concerned with these topics. I know my understanding will necessarily be bounded by my own level of development intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, but it is hard to describe the pleasure I get from coming across a writer or speaker who makes sense of something that has hitherto been a puzzle, who resolves a paradox, who enables me to expand the area of my understanding, to see the bigger picture.

But isn’t this all just dreadfully self-indulgent? I didn’t think it was, when I could pass on some of the more relevant things I had come to understand to my students, but when I finally give up teaching for good, for the sake of my health, I no longer have that ‘justification’. Although I suppose it’s not so much justification I’m seeking, as doing something  with what I’ve learnt.

Do many people my age feel this?

In terms of justifying these pursuits,  I know I can use what I’ve learnt to decide how best to vote, and which shops to avoid if I don’t want to be exploiting other people or participating in cruelty to animals. I am slowly learning to balance discipline, boundaries and structure with tolerance and mercy. I hope I am learning how to live a better life for myself and the good of others generally.

I passionately want to avoid leaving this planet having taken more than I’ve contributed. This is not just because I have a son, who will probably have children of his own, and I don’t like to think of leaving them a degraded planet (I know of people who have chosen not to have children because of their concern about over- population). There is an even more basic force at work, which those of you who have read my earlier postings will know I put down to the imperatives within my soul (for those who haven’t, please see 'Honouring the Gods')

But here’s another thought. We all know that a wave of anger, or of love, or of any other emotion, is as real in terms of their force as a wave of the sea. Many of us know how the material world can hold on to emotions that seem to have soaked into the physical fabric – for example, the peacefulness within many places of worship, or the feeling we get when we walk into an unknown place that something dreadful has happened there. Some people claim that if you can get a certain critical number of people meditating within a certain geographical area, that area will enjoy a reduction in crime and various other positive outcomes, because the altered brainwaves of the meditators are not confined within their own brains. (For those who don’t know from earlier postings, this is not a blog for materialists, see my post "A Sense of Being Stared At"  .)

So, then, maybe what I’m learning and understanding  is not confined to my own brain? Maybe it doesn’t all disappear when I die? Perhaps by just making the effort to learn and understand, I’m boosting the general learning and understanding level within the local population? No man (or woman) is an island......

The Righteous Men

I’ve been reading a book by Sam Bourne (a pseudonym for Jonathan Freedland, the journalist) called ‘The Righteous Men’. I didn’t know it when I purchased the book, but it has kabbalah at the core of its story (and a very good story it is too – Da Vinci Code-ish without quite so many terrible factual errors)

I don’t want to spoil the story for anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of reading it yet, so won’t go into too much detail, except to say that ‘a righteous man’ is one who does good things for other people anonymously. The recipients never know who their benefactor or helper is. The righteous men do good for others because it is the right thing to do. They are not trying to win a place in heaven, or the admiration of others, or simply following rules. They are often in very ordinary everyday occupations, or even in occupations scorned by others.  They are not necessarily religious, or even spiritual. But they are regarded by some Kabbalists as the holiest of men.

(I’ve kept using the term ‘men’ here though I have no doubt that there are righteous women. I expect the concept was first solidified in a time when women weren’t considered evolved enough – or given enough freedom – to exercise free will.)

In the past religion has been mainly either consoling, (i.e. it gives people hope for the future, and a meaning, plus guidance); and/or a form of social control. Most forms of spirituality seem to come about as a result of glimpses of, or a yearning for, the transcendent. Spiritual revelations however are often shattering; they tend to turn one’s world upside down and inside out. As St. John didn’t quite say ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free. But first it will make you bloody miserable.’

One of the first things one has to let go of in the wake of many spiritual revelations is the idea of the 'ground of all being' as a personal God (though one often discovers intermediaries between humans and the no-thing- which-is-the-cause-and-essence-of-everything which/who are very personable indeed.)

But it doesn’t even take a spiritual revelation for something to start to happen which society, especially those in charge of it, consider very dangerous. People look at the rules contained within their local religion and state laws and start to make choices about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ rules based on their own rationality and feelings of fairness and goodness. And so there were the women who kept vigil at Greenham Common, and CND supporters breaking the law (and accepting they had to pay the penalty for that.) In South Africa and in the south of the USA you had people breaking the segregation rules. Many modern Christians turn a blind eye to the bible’s injunctions for women to obey their husbands and slaves to obey their masters.

Often these law breakers are ‘righteous men’.

Karen Armstrong (see my post 'Who is this God person anyway?') talks of the need for the rituals which produce a sense of ‘other’, of awe, and which religion has often provided in the past. But in the Guardian today was news of a new sort of ‘church’ that has set up in Islington, where the ‘services’ include inspiring music and sing-alongs, talks on the wonders of nature, and discussions on the best ways of helping other people. The service includes an opportunity for people to meet and mix, in order to engender a feeling of community. But God is not mentioned. It is a service for atheists.

 I would call this a humanist meeting, but humanists are materialists, and I don’t know if the people who attend these meetings in Islington are all also materialists (though at least one of the organisers is.) If it is an essentially materialist approach, that would discourage me from attending, but I applaud the idea of such meetings. Indeed I consider that they are probably a fertile breeding ground for ‘righteous men’, the ‘most holy’,  and when it comes down to it, as Helen Titchen-Beeth said (see my post Goodbye-meditation-hello-spontaneity.) loving, kind behaviour towards others is more important than any dogma, or any cosmology.

Another seeker shares her experiences

The following is an email I received from a friend, Shree Iyer, discussing the various posts on this blog. It was so interesting and helpful that I have got Shree’s permission to reproduce it here. Thanks Shree!

“I was reading about your blog on meditation with great interest. I used to meditate quite regularly before I had my son. But I struggled a lot with keeping my mind quiet.  I would accomplish 10 seconds of silence only to start drifting off into my usual mental chatter. Funnily it would primarily revolve around people I disliked strongly!
I tried some Kundalini yoga exercises which I learnt from a book.  I found them more interesting.  Of course I have never done these long enough to reap any real benefits.
Some 9 years back I practised visualisation consistently over a long period and did see some real results. I visualised living in a beautiful house(I hated the flat I was sharing) every single day and ended up living as a paying guest in a grand mansion!
You mentioned about Ken Wilber surviving an illness because of Vipassana.  I don't think I would have that level of perseverance.  But I have always found solace (and some miracles) in simple prayers and reading holy scriptures. Just as Christians sing choirs, Hindus do similar kind of singing called bhajans.  There have been many great Hindu saints who have spent their lives singing the name of the Lord which was their way of meditating on the Divine (Not sure if you have heard the ISKCON devotees singing on Oxford Street). Some of them chant the Lord's name a thousand and odd times (Again ISKCON devotees do that, they carry a bag with beads) or write the Lord's name on paper.

As I mentioned last time I enjoyed your blog 'sense of being stared at'.  I was very intrigued by your experience.  I had a similar experience 7 years ago, although I don't know if I should call it trans- rational- (i'm not good at Physics!)  I was in UK at that time and my mum in India had been diagnosed with cancer and was to undergo surgery. She had not mentioned this to me. Just a couple of days before her surgery I had an unusual dream where I was at a social gathering with my dad and my mum was missing.  I generally don't give much importance to dreams. But that dream really upset me and I cried incessantly. I for no reason felt she was going to die. It's only later did I find out that she was diagnosed with 4th stage oral cancer and she died 6 months later.

In one of your blogs you had mentioned about observing the breath to check for the nostril you were breathing through dominantly.  I read about that somewhere.  If you breathed strongly through the right nostril then you get out of bed putting you right foot down first. The same was to be followed when getting out of the door. I religiously followed the practice for maybe 2 weeks before forgetting about it completely. Going back to your point about paying full attention to your body, I read a book written by my spiritual guru wherein she talks about consecrating every task that you do to the Divine.  She meant not just major projects but even simple tasks like brushing your teeth. I haven't tried consecrating my brushing but I did try it with getting my son to brush. (My son hates brushing and will scream and put up a fight as though he's having a tooth extraction every morning) And the few times when I did consecrate my efforts in getting him to brush, the whole process did seem less onerous.

I also liked your blogs psychic phenomena and hungry ghosts. I had read a book by Bruce Goldberg about spirits and the other world. I was quite fascinated. It’s really great that you have had the chance to experience it first hand.

In your other blog you had mentioned about Providence and about who it works for.  In my personal experience I feel that it's all about Karma.  Because I see some really insensitive, materialistic people who never get touched by even an iota of grief.  And I've seen good hearted, well-meaning people go through immense calamities.

I'm sorry, this has turned out to be a rather long discussion! I tend to get overly enthusiastic when it comes to topics on spirituality and occultism.” 

"Maybe so, maybe so..."

You may be familiar with the following story:

Once upon a time a farmer eked out a living from the land with the aid of his son and their big strong horse. One day the horse ran away. ‘Oh dear’ said friends and neighbours ‘What a disaster!’ ‘Maybe so, maybe so,’ said the farmer. The horse returned, bringing with him a mate, which the farmer also set to work on the land. ‘What good luck!’ exclaimed the neighbours. ‘Maybe so, maybe so’, said the farmer. Then the son, trying to ride the new horse, fell off and broke his arm. ‘Oh dear’ said friends and neighbours ‘What a disaster!’ ‘Maybe so, maybe so’ said the farmer. The army came by, press ganging new recruits, but wouldn’t take the farmer’s son because of his broken arm….. and so on and so forth.

I tell this story now, because here in the Davis - Birkett household we’ve been having a similar set of up-down-up experiences, and this story reminds me not to get too down about anything, because you never know what’s around the corner. However, the story suggests that you should never get too ‘up’ about anything either, for the same reason. 

Rudyard Kipling suggested that you’re mature only when you can look disaster and triumph in the face and ‘treat those two imposters just the same’ and Buddhists would talk about the supreme importance of non- attachment. Attachment is what keeps us re-incarnating in this painful world.

But do I really have to give up feeling joyful about certain occurrences, in order not to get down about others? True, if I were less attached to my husband or son I probably wouldn’t get as upset as I would now if anything were to happen to either of them, but people who won’t commit to relationships or allow their children close for that reason are usually considered damaged!

Perhaps I need to practise feeling joyful without getting to attached to that feeling...

I would like to know what others think. As this site seems to have trouble accepting and publishing people’s comments, you can always email me at helenjdavis1955@gmail.com, and I’ll put it on this blog.

Goodbye Meditation; Hello Spontaneity

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I have had quite a revelation.

Those of you who, like me, have tried to introduce some spiritual discipline into their lives, such as meditation, prayer, contemplation of spiritual matters, and ‘right action’ will probably know that there is a lot of confusion around the whole concept of meditation. Far from there just being the main two types of meditation, ‘concentrative’ and‘mindful’, such as the likes of Wikipedia maintain, there are all sorts of other practices going under the broad heading of meditation.

For example, there are ‘guided meditations’ which use visualisation, (this is used a lot in Kabbalah and also in transpersonal psychotherapies.) I have also seen ‘kenosis’ – self-forgetting – referred to as meditation, which always struck me as being the opposite, at least in day to day practice, of ‘mindfulness’, though it does sometimes involve intense concentration.

As you might know, I set up a daily routine of prayer,meditation etc. when I left work last July, - I outlined it in my blog post ‘Daily Practice’. I used an online tool for meditation which made it about as easy as it could be. This is not the first time I have tried to meditate regularly and even before Christmas I was finding myself dreading this daily 20 minute meditation (again), and finding all sorts of reasons for not doing it (again).

The problem has been that, even when I have managed to meditate regularly, for over a year, I have never found the process beneficial, either in the doing, or the outcomes. I had been trying to resign myself to the fact that, tedious as meditation was, it was just something that had to be done.

 At the same time I was discovering that singing in a choir, which I started to do in November, was resulting in a ‘kenosis’ that was immediately giving me all the benefits that meditation is supposed to;- nourishment of the soul, positive emotions, and physical relaxation which I hadn’t experienced since an hour’s silversmithing as a teenager.

When I mentioned to one of my Kabbalah teachers that I intensely disliked meditation he said “So do something else” but that was just before term ended, and hasn’t resumed yet, and I haven’t had a chance to ask him if self-forgetting would be a good ‘something else’.

So today I put the question out on the London Integral Circle’s list and got the following enlightening and uplifting reply from HelenTitchen-Beeth, to whom I am profoundly grateful. I reproduce it here, and hope that others find it as liberating:

“Sufi teacher Llewelyn Vaughn-Lee distinguishes between masculine and feminine spiritual practices, and classifies meditation among the masculine, ascending approaches. He suggests that the masculine needs disciplining, whereas the feminine needs to be allowed to love what it loves and go with her appetites and inclinations of the moment. This could be one reason why meditation doesn't work for you and immersion in embodied practices - like silversmithing or singing - does.

I must admit that I have moved away from any specific spiritual paths, and towards the practice of direct, unintermediated immersion in the kosmos - which is tantamount to saying that I do what I feel like, when I feel like doing it, and I no longer bother to 'should' on myself about things - either spiritual or mundane. Whatever relieves your anxiety and brings you joy brings you closer to your natural state of being - as you were born to be in order to fill your unique function in creation. It also increases the likelihood of your inspiring joy and elation in others. And what else is spiritual practice for, ultimately, if not for our individual and collective flourishing?”

Many thanks to Helen Titchen-Beeth for this insight.

I would be interested in the views of others on this topic.

"Who is this God person anyway?"

‘God’ – as in ‘Do you believe in God?’-  is a hard worked little word, and can be taken to mean many different things.

I mostly use it in this blog to refer to an unseen sacred numinous principle, an ultimate reality; not a being, and certainly not possessed of any qualities that we could imagine. But I’m aware that I do also use the word to refer to the aspect of this numinous principle to which I pray. (For more on this see the post 'Full Circle - Thou, It, I, Thou')

Karen Armstrong, (whose book ‘The Case for God’ should be given free by the Government to everybody attaining the age of 35, and anybody younger who asks for it,) maintains that in earliest times many humans were well aware that no ‘being’ could be responsible for all they experienced, but worshipped and respected ‘Being’:  “a fundamental energy that supports and animates everything that exists…. You could not see, touch or hear it but could only watch it at work in the people, objects and natural forces around you.” Whatever this was, it was impersonal and transcendent.

Perhaps this is why the natural forces thus animated were themselves anthropomorphised as gods and goddesses in many societies, for example: Agni, the god of fire, Apollo the sun god. I used the term ‘gods’ in this way in my post ‘Honouring the Gods‘, and modern psychotherapy makes much use of these as a way of identifying the unconscious driving and pulling forces within human nature. Buddhism, which is unconcerned as to whether there is or isn’t an unseen sacred numinous principle – Buddhism is an agnostic religion- nevertheless makes reference to the ‘realm of the gods’. These gods are powerful superhumans, enjoying a life of luxury, rather like most the Greek gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus. Like them, they can interfere in the life of ordinary people but, also like the Greek gods and many other pantheons of gods, they are neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

When I was taught Christianity, I was taught that those who worshipped pantheons of gods, or one in particular of a pantheon of gods (Zeus, for example) had got it wrong, and that only monotheism was right. However, one couldn’t help noticing, as one made further investigations into this, just how like Zeus or any other ‘sky god’ or ‘high god’ the Christian God seemed to be. 

Unlike ours, many societies did not (and do not) have a problem worshipping a pantheon of gods, while being absolutely clear that these gods do not represent ultimate reality. To quote Karen Armstrong again “There was no ontological gulf separating these gods from the rest of the cosmos; everything had emerged from the same sacred stuff.” 

I should say here that I do think that Christianity in this country, the UK, tends towards fundamentalism (inclined towards a literal reading of the bible). I remember the outcry when an Archbishop expressed the view that it really didn't matter whether Jesus was born to a virgin or not. However, I consider myself a Christian, because I use Christian symbolism and myths in my meditations and prayers, and I'm completely happy to pay my dues to any number of  'archangels' representing various principles such as 'truth', 'compassion', 'courage' and 'serenity' without ever getting these confused with the sacred unseen numinous principle; the ultimate reality. I think that fundamentalists have completely failed to grasp the actual point of religion.

Millenia ago it seems the "Upanishadic sages [in India] were among the first to articulate another of the universal principles of religion....The truths of religion are accessible only when you are prepared to get rid of the selfishness, greed and self-preoccupation that, perhaps inevitably, are engrained in our thoughts and behaviour but are also the source of so much pain." (Armstrong.)

I would be very interested to know to what others reading this are referring when they use the word ‘God’.

Antifragility

Soon after I wrote my last post, Dr. Edward Kelly posted a précis and critique of Nassim Taleb’s latest book ‘Antifragility’ on the London Integral Circle’s list. With Ed’s permission I have reproduced this below, because it describes an attitude well suited to an understanding of life as an adventure and a chance to learn and understand more, rather than as a search for predictability, stability and comfort, (or fame, power and/or wealth).  I think Taleb himself might be surprised to see I've linked his concept with certain aspects of kabbalistic thinking. However, having accepted that Providence and our individual souls can be quite ruthless in what they will put us through to achieve God's purpose, Ed's raising and considering this concept seemed quite timely.

Ed writes:

“I have reviewed and briefly summarised Nassim Taleb’s book ‘Antifragile’ from three different perspectives; ‘what is antifragility, what can we learn from it and what do I think about it’? I have made these distinctions in order to not confuse ‘what is antifragile’ as he describes it with ‘what I think it is’ as well as providing space for ‘us’ to consider what we can learn about it.

            What is it? Antifragile is a state of mind that prepares us to deal with randomness, uncertainty, disorder, risk, shocks, the volatility asymmetry and non-linearity of life. This is the central argument in the book. Someone is antifragile when there is more upside than downside in a situation where volatility, randomness, errors, uncertainty, stressors and time arise. Time is here considered the same as disorder. Taleb says however that antifragile is more than just the opposite of being fragile, i.e., being able to withstand the shock of uncertainty, disorder and ‘black swan’ events, rather antifragile is about being able to thrive in a world of randomness, uncertainty, disorder, risk, shocks and the volatility of life.

 Being in an antifragile state however will not help improve your ability to predict uncertainty but it will help prepare you for when uncertainty happens. The challenge becomes then, ‘can we just accept that there are things that we can’t understand and therefore can’t predict’? Most of us fail in this because we reduce what we don’t know to what we do know which in turn makes us fragile when things go wrong. He adds that probability is primarily a qualitative rather than quantitative construct. Our tendency however is to quantify the unquantifiable which he equates with naïve rationalism, i.e., the modernist scientific tendency to believe that everything is knowable. His recommendation for thriving in a world of uncertainty is not however to become ‘more robust or resilient’ but to become more antifragile. [I asked Ed what the difference was. He confirmed that whereas a person's robustness or resilience is important when reacting to something,  antifragility seems to be more about preparing for things which haven't happened yet and cannot be seen coming. To be antifragile is to be strengthened by life's knocks]

            What can we learn from antifragile? Another way of asking this question is what are the consequences of Taleb’s insights that might be relevant to the rest of us? Perhaps the principle thing we are reminded of is the limits of linearity and how much of our experience of life is ‘non-linear’ and unpredictable, i.e., there is much more chaos, disorder, uncertainty and change in our world than our scientific rational mindset might have us believe. For instance a good example of non-linear effects exists, “when you double the dose of say a medication or when you double the number of employees in a factory, you don’t get twice the initial effect, but rather a lot more or a lot less”.

In our desire to be more rational, itself a noble objective, we may forget what Pascal said, ‘that the end goal of rationality was to show the limits of rationality’. We moderns suffer from the illusion of control, which Taleb says is making us more fragile and susceptible to unpredictable black swan events. Taleb goes on to talk about responsibility and the skin in the game/captain of the ship rule. One of the big problems he mentions is that our bureaucrats and bankers (and indeed our academics which he reserves some choice comments for) tend to share in the upside from their words and actions but none of the downside. This should be addressed with a, “no opinion without risk” approach, particularly when dealing with the public.

He also mentions how doing something is often not better than doing nothing. We are very familiar with this concept where in the build up to the recent financial crisis the bankers took all the risks and where now after the crisis the public have taken all the responsibility. Taleb call this a tendency to Iatrogenics, the harm done by the healer as when the doctor’s interventions do more harm than good. Stopping to think about the potential harm from an intervention helps us to think in reverse, to reason backwards or as Charlie Munger encourages us to do with all arguments; to invert, always invert.

There are a number of other interesting terms that Taleb introduces such as Neomania, a love of change for its own sake which can result in forecasting the future by adding, not subtracting. He says that predicting the future by removing what is fragile from it is better than naïvely adding to it. He also speaks about Opacity and how things remain opaque to us, leading us to suffer form illusions of understanding. Technically he speaks about looking for convexity effects rather than concave effects; convex is good [J], concave is bad  [L]. Convexity affects emerge from nonlinearity and are generally considered good. The more nonlinear, the more the function of something divorces itself from the something (p.298). More generally, he also makes interesting references to the lack of correlation between educational spending and GDP growth. Money spent on education may be good for society but is not correlated with GDP growth.

            What did I think about it? I liked the book and while I found parts of it difficult to read and understand and therefore need to return too, I nonetheless found it stimulating, thought provoking and informative. Perhaps most of all though, I thought it was courageous. Taleb pokes his stick at many of the sacred cows of modern economic and social thought and reminds us (drawing from the ancients such as Seneca whom he greatly admires) of some common sense ‘home truths’ of human behaviour that we have perhaps forgotten.

He particularly mentions the Robert Rubin violation, the Alan Blinder problem, and the Joseph Stiglitz problem, as examples of people who had options for the upside with no exposure to the downside – i.e. they had no skin in the game and no consequences to their actions.

There are however some things I think that he misses. For instance, the attachment to order management and linear thinking and it’s corresponding lack of preparation for randomness and non-linearity, is addressed in Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary; the divided brain and the making of the Western World which Taleb doesn’t refer too. As McGilchrist outlines, the left-hemisphere has a narrow focus and seeks order and certainty. It lives in the world of the known and in ‘how things work’. The right-hemisphere’ on the other hand has a much broader focus. It is more comfortable with uncertainty and the world of the unknown. It wants to understand ‘what things mean’ in context. While both are needed, the naïve rationalist and scientific worldview is associated with the former whereas the broader more embodied worldview is associated with the latter. The naïve rationalist is perhaps the ‘half-knowledge’ that Taleb talks about (p.257) which itself can be integrated through development which is something else he doesn’t talk about. As outlined in Kegan’s The Evolving Self and In Over our Heads or in Torbert’s Development Action Inquiry, as individuals break through the conventional ceiling of naïve rationalism and begin to see the ‘subjectivity behind objectivity’ and the constructed nature of reality, including their own, they can also see that it is not a case of either or but ‘both and’. Both hemispheres working together are required to function in a complex, changing and uncertain world. Taleb doesn’t necessarily express it like this, but giving him the last word that he perhaps deserves, this maybe the kind of integration he is hoping we can achieve in becoming more antifragile.

Finally, this book has caused me to reflect on how antifragile I am and how in following the ‘barbell’ strategy he recommends  I may become better prepared for the kind of second-order effects that inevitably arise from randomness, uncertainty and change.”

One more thing to add. This post and the last has dealt with the 'severity' pole of existence. The other pole is 'mercy', and running between them, holding the balance, we have 'grace' and 'compassion'. I shall return to mercy, grace and compassion in my next post.