Meditations on Collective Unconcsious

In the end what you don’t surrender, the world just strips away.  – B. Springsteen

We’re flickering flames – here now, gone tomorrow.  What of that?  What to do with this idea of impermanence.  Put it out of our heads?  Is it immaterial on a daily basis?  And what of purpose?

If the final outcome of living is death, how should we consider our accomplishments?  What of our hopes and dreams?  What of our legacy?  What of our visions?  What of our sown seed?  What of our worth?  If eighty years we have, what moves us, when we know that at eighty years end, we exist no more?  With death on the horizon, with our destination known, what focal point do we choose in the middle distance?  What difference does it make?

We, who are uncertain as to what, if anything, may lie after death – may not be able to say anything about the point of life.  Can we say the point of life is living?  To live?  To be?  To experience… what?  To be what?  And without a single signpost except our desires, our urges, our feelings, our fellow traveler.  And how do we see the human panoply, spread about us in its splendor?

I can empathize with some who come to see this as a cosmic experiment, a universal joke, a giant simulation.  What purpose in creating something completely without purpose, except to see what it does on its own?  Of course, that last sentence speaks of a creator.  What if these woods sprang from nothing, creating themselves, existing without any purpose but existence?  In that case whatever perseveres would be the purpose.

And so, thinking of existence, experience, and ephemera, I come to consider eternal existence.  If I were that existence, what would I do with myself?  If the ephemeral creatures of the earth were my body, my eyes, my hands, my heart and my head, how would I consider them?  Would I take part in their experiences individually, or collectively?  Would I have fragmentary awareness, a gigantic consciousness, a combination of both, or nothing similar at all?  Would the idea of interfering in the lives of men have any meaning if those men are me?

How would I endure?  Would my consciousness divide itself, and move from one mind to the next, weaving exotic new networks of understanding and comprehension?  Would I weave narratives from the fabric of lives within which I were ever entrenched?  Would the pathways of my learning be the lives of children?  Would I want to see my existence in another’s eyes?  Or would I leave it largely to be?

For what of suffering?  A tool to design?  Vision manifest?  An agony to remind us of what we are not?  A creation to encourage forgiveness, divine intervention, relinquishment, atonement?  Or self-created, self-fulfilling, self-correcting self-improvement?  Chance?

For that’s the crux – in conceiving something greater than we, we conceive of it letting us be.

A Subtle Awareness of Shifting Beliefs

It’s simplistic and misleading, but it’s also perfectly true that everything is an idea.

Especially in the human realm, everything that we see, every thought that we think, every relationship that exists, every moment of time that occurs in contemplation, or in reminiscence exists or is reflected in the mind.  If it doesn’t, we are not aware of it, and therefore, to us, it does not exist.  Its effects may still exist, and so we may posit it as a thing, but the thing itself must exist in our minds, or to us, it doesn’t.

It is probable that there is an existence independent of our awareness of it – but what difference does it make to us?  And if this is true, there is much that we can also gain a deeper appreciation of:  Human systems are created by us – therefore each and every human system would never have existed without our awareness of it.  Importantly, what does that mean for the creation of future human systems?  It means that they must begin with human awareness.

It’s tempting to say that we can imagine a new reality – and in one sense we can – but there is more to it than that.  There is consensus that must be created.  There is awareness, reflection, discussion, transmission, assimilation, and finally, the action of creation.  Change, on a great scale, can seem overwhelmingly, breathtakingly, fast.  But that is only because the only part of the change that can be easily seen is action.  We may see a few of the memes cropping up here and there within the media, or sense reoccurring patterns within communication.  We may experience a subtle awareness of shifting beliefs and ideas, but in the millions of individual reckonings, the thousands of deep conversations between influential opinion makers (who may not even realize that they are) there is a cultural dialog through which emerges a new concept of our world.

A few may feel that they understand the broad strokes of this process – possibly some even feel they have gone further than this.  These people may seek to influence the culture through media, advertising, and subtle memes.  But the property of emergence and the understandings of complexity hint that there may not be any possibility of predicting emergent behaviors with certainty.

So when the “unthinkable” happens, a few surely saw it coming.  A few were in the way of the swing – and they almost surely felt the tension building as the sea of opinion rocked them.  It can as easily be understood as a person coming to understand a new belief, but replicated and magnified across the spectrum of ages, beliefs, genders and culture, subtly or greatly changing each person who learns this new idea or behavior.  If we could see these shifting beliefs from a height, we would see them sweeping as wind across fields of wheat – spreading through print, video and conversation, igniting small understandings and occasionally culminating in massive shifts of culture.

Meditation and Discontent

After taking a break from working as a corporate executive, I found it difficult to change pace. The sources of motivation that allowed me to work 16 hour days – the sense of pride in fortitude; the pleasure of exhaustion after giving what I felt was all I had; the sense of camaraderie created with our team; the self confidence from praise; the sense of responsibility for my team members; the sense of accountability to a larger purpose; even the sense of losing myself within a piece of work – these all seemed to be gone. And all of these feelings, beliefs and desires were still within me. For months I threw myself into personal projects, crafted new business ideas, worked on an old truck, wasted time with any number of diversions. I held firm to my original intent - to map the borders of my discontent, and root out the sources of unease. Eventually, I began to get a feel for it's shape. Tending occasionally to stubbornness, I met it head on. I meditated for hours about feelings, purpose, worth. This was a difficult exercise. At times, I felt that the entirety of my conscious awareness was urging me to move, to work, to add value, to do anything.

Actually, let me say it this way: When I meditated, at times, every fiber of my being was screaming at me: “Move! Get Up! Do Something! There are a Million Things you could be Doing! Do Anything!” My muscles twitched and writhed, my breathing became shallow, my heart raced, my mind paraded endless distractions with emotional hooks and alluring invitations. Slowly, oh... so... slowly... I came to a greater awareness of the flavor of my own being.

After months and more of meandering and backtracking, I began to accept the release of some of the more damaging beliefs I had embodied. At times I grew very sad. I found that my deconstruction of myself was leaving me without the comfort of many things – old beliefs, habits, opinions, desires. At times I felt I had forgotten what I was seeking – and so as I removed parts of who I was – I ocassionally went too far.

During this time, there were a few things that kept me engaged, motivated and moving forward. My loving and supportive wife certainly among these. My belief that existed with value, my desire to find meaning, a hope to be better, happier, more true to some indescribable feeling of wholeness. I held on to the belief that I could add something of value to the world – that I was enduring to gain an understanding of what was good – of what value was – I hoped.

Those with a scientific understanding of the placebo effect, the results of the Stanford Prison experiments, or the concept of self-fulfilling prophecies may feel that I was flirting with finding only what I wanted to find. I too was concerned - that I would bend evidence to fit belief. I found through my research that the western scientific tradition has long had an uneasy relationship with internal verification of beliefs, feelings and ideas, with the source of new hypotheses and with the nature of intuition. I understand that feeling. I still question everything through the lenses of rationality.

The exciting evolution for me, and what allowed me to add an additional set of lenses to my toolbox, was to realize that science itself provided some guidance through these territories. I found great joy within the ideas of System Dynamics (first introduced through Donella Meadows excellent book, Thinking in Systems). When I realized that the rational premise of reducing to parts really did, scientifically speaking, obscure essential qualities of the whole, it gave me permission to explore neglected territories within my brain.

I finally was able to release my inhibitions and explore the ideas that I had first found so intriguing within Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Where before I had felt that I might be betraying some of my intellectual inheritance, I found convergence. Where I had been teetering on an abyss, I was straddled a canyon. (Not necessarily a comfortable position, but better, and with additional tools to bridge the gap.)

I hope this speaks to some of the places you may have been. It's been an enlivening journey.