A Life Well Lived

The measure of a life well lived is arguably one that was at least aimed at rendering something constructive in the wake of the numerous sacrifices that the larger community of life has had to make for us to have lived at all. This delivery of something more than what is taken from the community that we collectively depend on to nourish us is the very essence of “bearing fruit”. This lesson is well crafted and clearly communicated through the structure of nature in so many ways – that we can count the seeds in an apple, but not the apples in a seed, as long as those seeds are cultivated in a nourishing environment to their mature potential. Fruit, in many forms, including social, can pay endless dividends that are greater than the sacrificial investment that must be made to bring them to fruition. Recognizing, and tending to these opportunities is the essence of life.

Some few of us humans get recognized as monuments of constructive contribution (whether deserved or not). Still others of us are also well known, but for another reason; because we have left a notorious wave of destruction in our wake. The overwhelming majority of us also get to express significance, either fruitful or notorious, in another way – not as individuals, but by way of participating in something greater than ourselves – by being part of some collective effort that either strengthens our chances to remain coherent and to thrive as a community going forward, or that threatens that hedge against chaos we must maintain so that we do not get swallowed by the antagonists that would destroy the ordered economy of relationships that renders integrity that we all depend on.

The significance of what we do in these larger bodies of influence, and the fruit they bear upon maturity, is not necessarily understood by those of us that participate in them as individuals. We may be completely oblivious to the significance and power of our contributions, constructive or destructive, yet we still play our roles. We can be an example of one of these collective efforts that has the capacity to pay constructive dividends, if we passionately search out and cultivate that opportunity over time. We can also be thankful for thousands and millions who have played roles in making our potential future little more fruitful by way of discovering and cultivating these opportunities.

Our preparedness, and in some cases, our willingness to bravely face and adapt to the challenges the environment places upon us as a species will determine whether or not it will endure, or sink beneath the threshold required by nature to maintain our integrity over time. Part of nature’s inherent demand is that we we find and cultivate the routines that produce the fruit that nourishes us. Part of facing this challenge is a willingness to face the unknown – to be explorers, and make this effort part of what drives our flexibility to turn the formerly unknown to an advantage, rather than continue to fear and avoid it until it devours us in our ignorance. It is this blend of flexibility and rigidity that we are best prepared to endure the waves of chaos that would otherwise erode our integrity.

We owe a committed debt of gratitude to those of us who make the sacrificial effort to illuminate the darkness and make it part of where we can dwell – those willing to search for and cultivate these undiscovered fruits. This ode to the many unsung heroes among us that are the lifeblood of our strength and vitality may not be praised in song often enough, but they nonetheless deserving of our thanks. Thank you to all you who are out there doing things to give back to this community we share and depend on for life.

Self Inflicted Cultural Wounds

From my perspective, as long as medicine is a for profit business, and not held as a high social value that is geared to attract people motivated by the act of service toward the strength and well being of the population it will have a parasitic and predatory edge to it. This edge will, like cancer skew both research and practices to incline toward generating income over wellness, eroding the strength of the people it is supposed to strengthen. In other words, we author our own poverty due to a self inflicted cultural values problem which leads to destructive symptoms, including institutional structures that feed on, rather than nourish the strength that comes from having each other’s backs rather than being on each other’s backs. The pill dependent marketing driven culture, as well as the high priced profiteers of the industry are symptoms of that failure to recognize where our bread is really buttered.

Bonus irony points: The article about this is in “Vanity Fair” http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/09/health-care200909

Dealing with the after Effects of Trauma

If we look for a common property in a wide variety of mental dysfunctions that arise as a result of trauma, we could say they reflect a hijacking of our capacity to use our higher order thought processes to govern our lives in proportion to the current circumstances. They put our thought processes on a more reactionary, less rational level. People with short fuses, or those who respond out of proportion to the reality of current events, or obsess over people, topics or things out of proportion with reason are typically expressing the after effects of trauma.

The traumatized brain is characterized by the thinking center (frontal cortex) being underactivated and the emotion regulation center as well as the fear center being overactivated. With this in mind, we can see the challenge to assist someone suffering the echoes of trauma or to cope with them if we suffer from the effects.

When we look at the array of thought disorders that commonly plague human (and animal) culture, we can see this common thread. Obsessive compulsive disorder, for instance, is expressed through repetitive thoughts and behavior rituals that crop up to the point where they invade the cognitive real estate we need for dealing with reality on reality’s terms. This can cripple the individual (or group’s) capacity to see what is currently going on clearly. As a consequence, the behavioral response may appear rational to the individual (or group) experiencing the effects of distorted vision, but the perception and response are not proportionate with what is currently going on.

Hoarding disorder is another example involving an extreme reluctance to separate with possessions to the point of the hoarding increasingly closing that person off from the outside world because of a perceived, however irrational need to save things. The common core of this, and many other thought and behavioral disorders is that our cognitive processes, the ones that, if functioning well, help us perceive and respond to the world in a proportionate and rational way, are either taken over, or diminished because an exxagerated proportion of mental energy is being devoted to reactionary faculties. In other words, we’re reliving the trauma over and over in symbolic form.

Whenever we see someone responding out of proportion, either by not being concerned about serious dangers, excessive dominance or cruelty, or in any way exaggerating unimportant things to monumental proportions, we are probably seeing the echoes of trauma.

Here’s some resources that offer deeper look at the symptoms and potential approaches to begin helping with, or working these things out.

https://www.unh.edu/counseling-center/dealing-effects-trauma-%E2%80%93-self-help-guide

http://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/four-steps-to-erasing-trauma-of-painful-memories-061214

https://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/ptsd-overview/basics/symptoms_of_ptsd.asp

 

A Small Glimpse at the Memory Pathway in Our Immune System

Our immune system has to detect and effectively deal with a wide variety of destructive agents, known as pathogens. Many of these come in the form of invasive viruses and parasitic organisms. It must be able to tell the difference between pathogens and healthy tissue and this is sometimes be difficult. It must learn to effectively differentiate friend from foe.

Immune systems learn. Like human beings, immune systems have critical periods where they are particularly sensitive to learning. If they are not exposed to the typical environmental pathogens at these critical periods the immune system may not respond properly.

Asthma is less prominent among farm children because they are exposed to native pathogens during this critical period. Children brought up without exposure to these things can develop an overreaction. In addition to this supercharged learning capacity that lasts a short time, the immune system also has a less powerful, ongoing learning capacity to combat novel pathogens. This learning process involves what are called B Cells. These are a type of blood cell, part of the immune system, and secrete antibodies in response to perceived pathogens. These antibodies are in effect tattletales. They mark the invader as an enemy so that T-cells (Another type of immune cell) can deal with them. Thanks to way b cells can learn and remember, our body then gets a head start fighting repeat offender pathogens. This memory process is what makes vaccinations work.

This article in this link explains how “naive” immune cells transition into memory cells. Click Here

Here is a brief overview of both the innate and adaptive immune system:

Earth is Our Tribe

We are social creatures far more than we are rational ones. The same way raindrops form on the backbone of a particle of dust, our abstract identities are an interpretive dance of interconnected values based on the particulate backbone of imperfect perception faculties coupled with what is communicated through our environment and the established cultural ideas we nurse from in youth. As social creatures, we’re wired to sacrifice accuracy on the altar of belonging. This isn’t because we’re more inclined to intentionally lie in order to belong to a group. Lies are a semi-irrelevant extension of our social nature. Our perception is geared to see what we need to see to cement the social bonds we depend on to live.

We ride aloft on the thermals of our innate social hungers, interpreting imperfect sensory data through a distorted cultural lens that was forged by environmental factors largely beyond the reach of our time, place and capability to influence. Once established, this lens becomes much more an inward projection of installed prejudices than an accurate interpreter of outward events. This is why what looks like common sense to one group looks completely insane to another. Our connection to ideas is an emotional one founded on the intimacy driven by the dependency of social hunger, it is not a rational one based on objective evidence.

We build our identity from the ideological breast milk of the culture we’re baptized in from youth. This ideological perspective is largely constructed at critical periods in development – prior to developing the potential to critically question the premises on which these perspectives stand, much less the discipline to do so. Along with an installed perspective forged on social dependency and how ideas serve as social glue, we also develop an ideological immune system to protect that same identity because, in so doing, we protect what it is we conceive of as our self. In aligning this ideological profile with how it serves to bind us to a group, we become an integrated part of a larger tribal body and thus historically more resilient, adaptable, and by extension, able to survive. An examination of accuracy is not as important as an evolutionary axiom of utility. It is what is useful and arguably essential to belong that trumps accuracy.

Allegiance to local sports teams is one of the recent manifestations of tribal instinct, as is allegiance to organizations, scientific and religious ideologies as well as abstract notions like property and nationalism. So powerful is this social currency that an abstract idea can form the basis of membrane to distinguish an in-group and out-group so powerful that people will fight and die over it. This tribal social attribute has served us well in a world where we needed to navigate some almost impossible adversity over the years. At times, without these kinds of uncompromising bonds to our local tribe we would have literally died off. Social currency is the coin of the realm that outwardly symbolizes the innate values that have been structured into our human cognitive frame over the years by nature to increase our potential to endure.

Along with every advantage conferred by some innovative structure born out of nature comes a potential downside. Our emotional-social attachments to abstractions along with our social hungers can become manipulated such that they are cemented to destructive things by the same engine that once drove our survival. Our innate traits can and have been exploited in some cases to drive emotional attachments to such things as corporate brands and causes which are in opposition to our best interests. People now routinely back causes that are destructive to our individual and collective well being because of ignorance, accidental appropriation and the deliberate and artful massaging of these natural social traits to serve narrow agendas.

The wealth of any local tribe has always come from it’s capacity to cultivate its people such that they lived within their means and continually cemented the bonds of unity and awareness of that which sustained their future. Each member carried the torch for and passed it to the next generation. Finding a harmonious equilibrium with the environment while cultivating and maximizing the fruits that nourish the community is the foundation of wealth. While desperate times have called for desperate measures, from the larger perspective, tribal wealth is a byproduct of how much the members of the community give to the community, not from how much power and resource they extract from it. A vested interest in the entire social and environmental ecosystem, including each other, is the life blood of the tribe.

Over time the sharing of resources and ideas is what led to our current capacity to no longer be bound as tightly to the whims of nature’s irregular bounty. We have the capacity to steer with far more intention and have far more impact through technology, but that does not mean that we have always chosen to steer wisely. Technology has provided the capacity to greatly enrich our lives, but only if it is appropriately applied. Our technological sword comes with two edges. We now have the capacity to greatly improve our lives, but we also have the capacity to destroy our future on the altar of now. Because of overpowering tools, we are faced with the new proposition of needing to apply our capacities judiciously and from a global community perspective to ensure our survival. We cannot afford to leverage our capacities capriciously without risking the destruction of the very channels that we depend on to nourish us.

Our local success now depends on the success of the many interconnected entities that collectively form our global body. We are no longer capable of operating as separate entities – different bodies. Each of us is a vital organ in the collective body. Together we are a singular whole. To strangle one part of the body for the sake of another is not only not effective, but can only be justified on a foundation of ignorant or wanton destructiveness. It is now a matter of self interest and sustainability to have, and actively cultivate, a stake in each others success and to cultivate the environmental channels that nourish us. Each of us is individually limited to the confines of that which we collectively decide we are. A world where we nourish each others potential, instead of exploit each others weaknesses, is a world that maximizes its capacity to unlock the fruit it has to offer itself. To strengthen our voice to its full potential we must strengthen each other. To effectively raise the experience of life we have as individuals, we need to recognize how contingent each of our success is on the success of the entire tribe.

A strategy that serves well in one context can be disastrous in another. We once lived in a world where local tribal unity was essential for survival -a world where we could leverage every tool at our disposal without concern for the backlash. The environment was the primary influence that shaped our ideologies and culture. If we didn’t listen to and change with the message delivered to us through the environment, we dissolved back to the soil from which we came and no longer have a voice. We now live in a world where technology has erased the need to bend to as many aspects of the environment. Along with this capacity we have effectively eliminated the protective membrane of local geography. We now all swim in the same pond and it’s a whole lot smaller than it used to be. What we do affects us all, and to survive and thrive, we need to shift our tribal perspective from the narrow set of ideological anomalies that are metaphoric echoes of a local people’s relationship to local environments over time to see the entire earth as our tribe.

The Wisdom of the Tree

A tree simultaneously stretches itself downward into the soil to draw the water and nutrients as it stretches up and outward toward the sky to capture the glow of sunlight and drink from the atmospheric delights that waft past its swaying branches. In so doing, the tree stitches the elements at its disposal together and if they are sufficient, it uses them as a vehicle to propel itself toward its full potential. A tree breaks the prior symmetries of certain structures, not for the sake of destruction, but to reassemble them into its own likeness – in its own form.

At its crest, the wave of self assembled organization that is the tree matures to relate with other trees and the creatures that call it home, and to cast its offspring to the wind in the hopes of making even more like itself. Like the tree, we need draw from places of nourishment to realize our potential. Like the tree, if we do not stretch ourselves to reach those nourishing places, we are destined live beneath the threshold of our full potential.

We have some measure of choice in where we stretch ourselves. Let’s make sure these places we cultivate our own assemblies are also those that nourish our potential – that contribute substance and strength to the canopy we all live beneath – this community of life we both live in and depend on.

Our Invisible Friends

We have to be very careful about the invisible friends we make. The invisible friends, made with words and ideas, stitched together with faith. These abstract concepts that live inside us and yet are, by nature, separate from objective reality because they are only real by virtue of our belief in them. Depending on their nature, they can guide us to cultivate a nourishing relationship climate and elevate us to the pinnacle of ecstasy, or drain us of all vitality and leave us gasping for life. We make them coherent and breathe life into them through our individual collective belief.

The ideas that become real when we respond to our belief in them would die without that breath of life we breathe into them. They ride the thermals of our faith and we put them in castles made of stories. We allow them to govern us as monarchs that must be trusted feared and worshiped to wield the power they do over our lives. Once believed, these abstractions form a lens that bends what we see into their image. A mixed lens of fact and fancy shapes the currents that steer our experience of life.

Abstractions are neither good nor evil, they simply are what they are; the verbal currency we use to give form and substance to our values, whatever those values may be. Hate is one of the fruits of abstraction. Belief in hate can lead us to exact the violent worst from ourselves and spread it like a virus, to beget more hate. The idea that humanity can be carved up with abstractions used as justification to artificially divide the “worthy” and the “unworthy” when the real truth is closer to poverty spawned by apathy dressed in self-righteous abstractions.

Much of what we call religion and politics is built on the currency of abstraction floating on faith. The battles to control the abstract narrative by manipulating the cultural winds of faith can ensnare us in the crossfire of heated poverty inducing battles that are founded on faith and made real by our actions. These invisible friends that ride the thermals of faith and give birth to behaviors can be the source of freedom or enslavement.

Some ideas can combine to become thought stopping prisons made with bricks of abstraction, others can be the source to freedom and greater depth perception. They can help us to know our nature and navigate more effectively through these murky waters of reality. We can use our invisible friends to form nourishing social bonds, bring vitality to community, protect us, and help us weather the storms and cope with terrible circumstances that might have otherwise been unbearable. They can enable us to embrace beauty, truth and many other heights and forms of intimacy and ecstasy.

Let’s choose our words wisely with an eye toward how they collectively serve to bring about constructive and nourishing behaviors that help us grow and realize our full potential. Our words,  combined with our faith in them, are the currency that powers what we do to and for each other. They powerfully shape the nature of the waters in which we all swim.

How Experience Affects Social Development

How we develop our sense of “self” and “other” is a prime factor in whether or not we can function effectively in an adult social environment. This video looks at the role our sense of “self and other” in how we experience life, culture and what it means to our future. It also throws in a little science and a couple-few speculations… just for spice. Enjoy!

Living an Intentional Life

This video is an blatant attempt to be slightly entertaining as well as informative on the topic of living an intentional life.

Discipline is The Power of Intention

It’s not easy to break free of the gravitational pull of our developmental environment, but  for some of us it is a necessity because the alternative is to become both guardian and cultivator of poverty.