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Lost Girls

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My friend over at Insanity Bytes has taken on caring for the Lost Boys – the angry and abusive cohorts that populate the gaming sites. Recent studies suggest that these are vulnerable men. They identify with the leaders of their communities and so take pride in their success, but are those most likely to be displaced by new competitors. They combat that vulnerability with abuse that drives away those that don’t match their social profile.

This generation of boys has much stacked against it. Automation is chewing up many of the entry-level jobs. And as resources have been drained from our educational system, tolerance for “out-of-the-box” thinking has decreased. Girls mature socially faster than boys, and (at least until puberty) tend to sustain harmony. Girls also mature faster linguistically, and so benefit from renewed emphasis on written communication. Boys in my sons’ generation are seen by the educational system as defective girls.

But that doesn’t mean that girls aren’t challenged by technology. One aspect of the problem manifested for me through an introduction to the “surnamepending” forum here on WordPress.

Women generate and thrive in social structure, and that structure is being obliterated by the proliferation of new choices. Predatory men wander the globe, whether the Slavik slavers that hunt the Russian hinterland or the foreign sex tourists that invade Thailand. Young girls raised with the expectation that survival depends upon bonding to a man don’t realize that pattern was sustained by regulation of a stable community. The predators exploit this disconnect, offering promises of devotion while flaunting their wealth. Vulnerable girls are swept up by passion, and drawn away into evil that consumes them.

I didn’t understand the psychological drive that motivates women until I read “Raising Ophelia.” The author, a therapist and counsellor, observed that little girls are perfectly rational creatures, as are crones (women after menopause). In between, women are driven by the need to become a “we.” Biologically, this originated as a tolerance for the nine-month parasitic invasion known as pregnancy. When allowed to enjoy it, the spiritual bond established in the womb is indeed beautiful and uplifting. The procreative impulse is buttressed by the benefits of social networks that help weak women weather a crisis – whether the loss of a breadwinner or illness in the home.

Back in the ‘80s, the Wilson Quarterly published a report that indicated that the American epidemic of anxiety coincided with the rise of suburbia, and the isolation of women behind fences. If the devil makes work for idle male hands, he preys more insidiously upon the isolated female mind.

It is often through religion that women reconstruct their social network. I have observed previously that many of the spiritual communities I navigate are in fact dominated by women – even when a man stands in the pulpit on Sunday. But those communities famously lack the intimacy of the 19th-century village or borough, often drawing people together only on weekends. The mega-church attracts young women because it offers a smorgasbord of suitors, but actually getting to know someone well requires observing them in relationship with others in an informal setting. Modern “worship-as-entertainment”, with everyone rooted to their seats, is much too structured for natural interaction.

So where are the answers? I have asserted that most modern religion – Christianity not excepted, although one can point to recidivism – originates in practices that help us liberate our spirituality from emotion into reason. Understanding is essential to our psychological survival. As I finally encapsulated it:

The heart guides the head, and the head protects the heart.

The wisdom that I have to offer young women begins with that received from F. Scott Peck in The Road Less Travelled: recognize that “love” is different from “cathecting,” the latter being the uncontrolled merging of personalities that we know as “falling in love.” The confusion arises because we feel really wonderful while cathecting, particularly in the intimacy of sex. Trying to achieve that state is naturally part of loving ourselves. However, it’s not necessarily loving the other person.

So when a man finishes masturbating in you, there’s a reason that you feel empty afterwards. And when he leaves you with a “broken heart”, it’s because you’ve let him make off with a big chunk of your soul. Then when you recover through a relationship with somebody that actually loves you, the bastard shows up again to suck more energy out of you. Yes it feels good in the short term, because there’s always a rush when two spirits choose to make way for each other, and certainly it’s nice to be reunited with all those missing pieces of yourself, but the purpose on his side is to rip your soul apart (literally) so that he can feed his ego.

Given that warning, my sense of what finding yourself in love should be like was encapsulated (along with a lot of other wisdom about science and Christianity and raising my sons) in a poem called “Yearnings.” It began:

The Earth, at night, dances with the moon
Cadence and rhythm, their persons speaking
Of love, with power, purpose and strength,
Fluttering towards kindred recognitions.

The interpretation as a father to a daughter was:

When you find yourself moving in the same circles,
Creating success for yourself and others,
Then you will know that you have found your man.

Until then, as Sarah McClachlan put it “Hold on to Your Self.” And if it’s too late, open your suffering heart and proclaim, “That’s my energy, meant for my future, and I’m taking it back.”

Warriors and Healers

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In The Soul Comes First, I interpret the Bible as the story of the investment made by unconditional love to organize matter with the goal of allowing spirit to purge itself of selfishness. That process is manifested in all of the physical processes of this reality, spanning history from stellar evolution to the knowledge economy.

The apparent contradiction is that these processes appear superficially to reward selfishness. The most impressive lights in the sky are the giant stars. It is the massive dinosaurs that capture our attention as the pinnacle of pre-human history. And civilizations are recognized for the geographical extent that allows them to acquire resources to support promotion of their culture, with limited weight given to the degree to which the benefits of power were distributed to the common citizen.

The antidote to selfishness is rapid energetic collapse. The stellar giant, in a fraction of the time allotted to its lesser peers, exhausts its nuclear fuel and collapses, ejecting its hoarded mass in a supernova that populates the heavens with heavy elements that become the seeds of planets. While the dinosaurs (and other giant life-forms) are prolific consumers of biomass, the biophysics of large life-forms ensures that they are vulnerable to ecological stresses, among which include the global effects of asteroid impacts and ash spewed from volcanic vents. In human history, great civilizations collapse when vulnerable urban populations face the collapse of agricultural and energy supplies, whether due to the accumulation of clay on irrigated land, loss of soil following destruction of natural flora, or the burning of energy stored in biomass faster than the rate of replenishment.

Humanity has been granted two great boons that allow it the opportunity to escape this course. The first is the mammalian amygdala, which includes among its affects social bonding that causes us to mourn the loss of our intimates. The second is the intelligence that allows us to understand causation, and thus to manage our lives to minimize painful experiences, extending to the loss of our intimates.

In The Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin posits the possibility of a transition from predatory consumption to empathic sustainability. Rifkin catalogs the technological capabilities that make the latter possible: global information systems that expand the geographical reach of our intimacy, materials science and engineering that will allow us to tap into reusable sources of energy, and modelling methods that will allow us to design economic systems that are sustainable given the known limits of raw material supplies.

In my experience, the manifestation of that potential collides in the tension between the warrior and the healer. As I explain below, these are behaviors that both support the transition to sustainability but that often contradict each other’s expression.

In the early stages of cultural development, the natural context is dominated by predators. Survival of a species lacking either prolific breeding or natural armaments requires tools that can be used to defend against predation. Naturally, these same tools, sufficient to protect against species that survive by destruction of weaker animals, empower the wielders to become predators themselves. As technology advances, the destructiveness of weapons makes organization of their deployment a source of social power. There is no great civilization in human history whose origins cannot be traced either to a monopoly on weapons technology or to superior military organization.

The warrior culture is a domestication of the primitive predatory impulse with the goal of protecting access to the resources required to sustain civilization. A true manifestation of this culture dates only to the Cold War era, when military planners in the West realized that generalized conflict, always guaranteed to produce a loser, no longer even produced a winner. Furthermore, the complexity of modern weapons systems ensures that maintaining and deploying military dominance requires the involvement of a citizenry firmly committed to the survival of the society. In fact, while the warrior is often the recipient of sophisticated training in the use of destructive force, they rarely possess the intellectual skills to design and manufacture modern weapons. Thus the Cold War was not just a struggle over the efficacy of planned vs. liberal economies. It was also proof that in the modern military-industrial economies, nations that turn military force against their citizens (tyrannies) cannot compete with nations that cultivate a warrior class.

The problem with this social contract is that it preserves our focus on the dominant threat to the stability of civilizations – homo sapiens sapiens itself. It simply ensures that our predatory impulses remain focused on those parts of the ecosystem that lack political representation. Thus, while Europe responds to Russian adventurism in Georgia and the Ukraine by seeking alternative supplies of fossil fuel, still the world failed to control effectively carbon dioxide emissions that some predicted (as far back as 1950) would undermine ecological sustainability all across the globe (much as did the asteroid that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs). Even now, most of the larger wild species have been decimated, being replaced by domesticated herds.

As a result, we are faced with a future that is going to require extensive investment in healing of broken ecologies. This requires another huge leap in human culture. The psychological force that motivates the healer is empathy, or compassion.

Working ecosystems are enormously complex. The biogeneticists struggle even to control the metabolism of the cyanobacteria in flooded iron mines. The biochemistry that leads to cyanide production has a multitude of pathways – remove one protein catalyst and another pathway springs up in its place. The only means of control appears to be annihilation – make the environment so poisonous that even bacteria cannot survive. But that would be to introduce poisons to the environment worse even than cyanide.

Given this overwhelming Rube-Goldbergesque complexity, accreted through billenia of random trial and error, the only means of assessing the wellness of an ecosystem is to engage spiritually with a sense of its workingness.

The fundamental disconnect is that, while western economies proclaim the domestication of war, the forces that drive conflict – scarcity of resources that make the daily lives of most humans a desperate search for basic necessities – have not been resolved. Desperate people adopt predatory behaviors, stealing sustenance from one another, and the surviving communities celebrate the strength of the predator. This is visible in Russian idolization of Vladimir Putin, and in lionization of third-world potentates all across the globe.

In the framework that I have defined, we cannot escape the reality that the workingness of the ecosystems that sustain human life are irretrievably broken. This spawns predators, which the warriors of the West beat down in order to secure access to resources needed to sustain our unstable societies. But the healer recognizes that the problem is one of sustainability, and the only way to ensure peace, over the long term, is either to annihilate the exploited populations (a la the Third Reich) or provide them the resources to create a sustainable society.

Of course, the warrior looks at the latter proposal and says: “But we just finished destroying this threat, and now you want to go and stand them on their feet and give them the power to attack us again? Do you understand how many of us have surrendered our futures to protecting you? And you want to do what?”

And of course the healer says: “But have you been to see these people? How can you ignore their suffering?”

In America, to this point the warriors have been given priority. The era since the Vietnam War has seen a steady erosion of the influence of the Department of State in deference to the Department of Defense. This slide was reversed only recently by the Obama Administration. There is some justification for allowing the leaders of those sacrificed in military conflict to control the adventurism of inexperienced civilians. While Muslim extremists make much of the revelation that the Bush Administration asked military planners to chart the conquest of the tyrannies of the Middle East from Iran to Libya, my understanding is that the carefully couched response was, in effect, “Are your out of your fucking minds?!?”

While I celebrate the ascendancy of economic containment over military conflict, I attend still the creation of institutions that extend that practice to cultures that exploit ecosystems. It is only then that healers will have the opportunity to address the root cause of predatory behavior, and thereby justify the reallocation of resources from military competition to cultural development. Predation is not the only urge that destabilizes ecosystems – so too does procreation. It is only when the vast majority of humanity has the psychological strength to subject all such urges to rational control will the ultimate goal of global sustainability be secured, and the healers be able to succeed in their essential work.

Until then, warriors, please recognize that it is for your children that healers assume these risks. And healers, recognizes that the warrior’s anxiety has a rational basis.

Purging Psychopathy

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When I was on travel in Portland a little over a year ago, I encountered a woman in recovery from an abusive relationship. As she described it, the most terrifying part of the experience was being abandoned by her family and friends.

While the most visible of our psychopaths seek temporal power, I think that this evidence confuses our response to them as personalities. The mechanisms of temporal power are useful only in that they can be used to induce fear in the victim. The victim, believing that there is no escape from their prison, ultimately surrenders their soul to be infected by the psychopath.

I have myself felt abandoned on more than one occasion. The ties of love, unfortunately, are a two-way street. Through them comes solace, but if we aren’t strong enough to keep the predator out, venom can flow back the other way. Often, it is those who have been most secure in their relationship that provide the most productive target to the predator. They lack defensive skills, and their personality is deeply embedded in a rich field of supportive relationships. The lady in Portland was ostracized by those seeking to protect themselves. In more primitive societies, the victim of rape might be “put out of her misery.” (The movie “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” explored this in a more contemporary context.)

Fear is an incredibly effective tool for acquisition of temporal power. Apart from certain privileged elites, almost every human society has been dominated by this dynamic. Even where established, the fragility of that privilege is evidenced by the tens of millions of people displaced by insurrections around the world. Guerrilla armies that do not seek to establish and defend fixed boundaries are almost impossible to control (witness IS, al Qaeda and the Boko Haram).

So how is the religious avatar to deal with this situation? The approach advocated by most is to “Render unto Caesar.” They surrender temporal power and gather to themselves the “weary and burdened,” those beneath the notice of fattened predators. But as that cohort grows, sooner or later the predators are enticed to feast on the spirits of the protected community. The avatar is then confronted with the reality that his charges are not strong enough to keep the predators out.

The challenge is faced by any individual seeking to sustain a blessed community, even if that be only a family or kindergarten classroom. This has been my challenge over the last twenty years. For a long time, I fought against the predators that surround me. They feel the power of my mind and the strength of the loving associations that I evolve through my writing, dancing and meditation. They create conflict in my life and then plead innocence as I fight back against their influence.

For the last seven years, I have woken up every night in the wee hours of the morning to take up consideration of this dialectic – the dialectic of “blame the victim” that becomes so convincing as the history of a relationship with a psychopath evolves. The psychopath focuses on the wrongs that have been done to them in the recent past, attempting to bury the seeds of the evolution of conflict behind a psychic wall. They use that wall to fence out the beloved community, to suck away the energy that we have accumulated through loving.

So two nights ago I took up a different tack: I simply announced, “I’m really tired of thinking about you.” I listened to praise music as a means of re-affirming the principles that guide my loving relationships, and I pushed methodically against the massed predatory presence. I forced them to the outside of my mind, and re-established the connections to my beloved community. When the poison began to seep back in, I visualized the arrival of guardians to turn the tables on them.

And last night, for the first time in seven years, I slept peacefully.

Dissolving

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I began blogging back in 2003 at Zadz/Gaia/A New Gaia. That early writing I characterized as my “spiritual travelogue.”

We all carry history forward from our past lives. I have brought a deep reticence regarding the influence that I have over people. My father asked me one day “Brian, do you understand how you keep on finishing people’s sentences for them?” When I said that I did, he asked whether that wasn’t a talent that I could use to accomplish a lot in the world. I replied, “Well, but that wouldn’t be fair.”

And I was focused on other things. I didn’t understand why until I was about forty two, but I spent most of my life pursuing knowledge of the world. While I was working on my Ph.D. thesis, I was reading the Christian Science Monitor and Science cover-to-cover every week, as well as the monthlies Scientific American and Foreign Affairs. I told my father that I was trying to reduce the world to an integral to be solved. There was a certain anxiety about it, and when I came into my spirituality, I realized that I had been running as hard as I could to find a way around, under or over a wall of pain that was crashing down on us.

As the millennium turned, I became frustrated with my failure, and began to express derision and anger about the people that possessed the power to make a difference. That led to some paranoia about my relationships at Gaia. I said some things that weren’t helpful, and spent a lot of time trying to understand my spiritual landscape. We move through time together – powerful events bind us into spiritual clusters. Sometimes to take the next step forward we have to reorganize ourselves. I have done a lot of that over the last fifteen years. I suppose that to the people around me I appeared narcissistic.

The wisdom that I brought out of that period was this: People that hurt others are often walking around the world doing unto others as was done to them, hoping desperately that they will find someone strong enough to show them how to heal. And so I try now to focus on offering the best wisdom I have regarding the power of love that I have been given to experience.

Over the last seven years or so, I have been struggling against fear of love. It’s sad to me, but people do the most terrible things to themselves in the name of material success. They try their best to ignore it, surrounding themselves with shallow diversions. Then along comes love, and they see all these great big, gaping wounds in themselves. It’s kind of like a soldier in shock looking down and realizing that he’s missing both legs. They become frightened, and often simply try to make the love go away.

So I’ve been struggling with that fear and anger, and it’s been brutal. Again, I’ve said a lot of things over the last seven years that haven’t been helpful. I’ve been really fortunate to have had my Shia colleague at work. He’s finally given me some affirmation.

I feel that period of my life coming to a close now. We take anger and fear into us and it can erupt unexpectedly when we’re tired or frustrated. I’ve just kept on pushing it away, and it’s been slowly dissipating from my relationships. I realize that a lot of the people around me have been simply the tip of the spear. Many of the behavior patterns they manifest are ancient. I’ve just made it steadily clear that the love that they want won’t collaborate in those behaviors, and tried to describe the alternatives as I see them.

That’s been the thrust of my writing here. There are so many wonderful, caring people in the blogosphere. They are passionate, and sometimes that flares up in expressions of anger and frustration. I do my best to express the alternatives, and to share my confidence that there is an enormous reservoir of good will waiting for Humanity to grow up and learn to play nice.

This has been coming to a focus for me. I went out to a new social venue on Thursday night, and had to rise above some unwanted attentions in the early morning. When it was over, I felt this beautiful glow in my heart, and the world appeared next to it. I wasn’t entirely awake, which always leaves me open to suggestion. For whatever reason, I began making circles around the world with my heart: around the equator, and two circumpolar passes that divided the globe into eighths. It was just the most beautiful thing – my heart was filled with warmth and peace.

But now I don’t know how to describe what I am about or why. It’s a raw energy that courses through me. I can explain why I do what I do, but that explanation means nothing without the axiom of that relation. I don’t know how to describe it, and I can’t prove that it exists. When I feel it moving through me to someone else, the common reaction is one of disbelief.

So I feel like I’m dissolving, adrift in this deep ocean in which food and cars and buildings simply sink out of sight. There is nothing left but the raw flame of the friends that have chosen to draw close to my heart.

Thank-you all for your company!

Women: Being Loved by Christ

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When Jesus first taught in the synagogue in Jerusalem, his neighbors received him with skepticism verging on outrage [NIV Mark 6:2-6]:

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing? Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.

This contrasts with the events just prior with a woman who had bled for twelves years, and was healed simply by touching Jesus’s clothes. Shocked by the experience, the woman hid in the crowd, but Jesus persisted [NIV Mark 5:33-34]:

Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

How does this work, spiritually? The aura that forms around the head of a saint is generated by souls pressing against their minds in the hope of discovering meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose are discovered most readily in the saint because they have surrendered themselves to love of the world, and the world in turn reveals itself to saint’s examination. It is as said by Tagore:

Power said to the World, “You are mine.”
The World kept it prisoner on her throne.
Love said to the World, “I am yours.”
The World gave it the freedom of her house.

The saint looks into the world and sees its spiritual needs. Among the souls that surround the saint are such that can fulfill those needs. The saint has the privilege of facilitating the union of the two parties. But where the party in the world (the soul currently “living”) seeks instead power, the union fails. The souls choose to remain to the company of the saint. That saint, honoring the compact of their company, accepts them back.

Spiritual union can be ravishing, having many of the aspects of intercourse. For this reason, Catholic nuns once referred to themselves as “brides of Christ.” But the union can be a tenuous thing. If Jesus had not been present to voice his approval, would the hemophiliac woman have maintained her cure?

When I encounter woman struggling with this dynamic, I offer the encouragement, “Believe in yourself!” There are angels in the air wishing to enter into you to heal the world. Yes, it feels wonderfully sensual, but you don’t need sex to receive them. You don’t need the approval of a father. Spirits becoming angels yearn only for the spiritual union we know as “Christ” that found its steward when Jesus took up the cross. To receive them, you need only their approval, an approval gained most powerfully through a commitment to love and heal the world.

Deadly Meaning

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From Herbert’s Dune Trilogy, among the most disturbing images is that of a Fremen Mujaheddin crashing his flitter into an Imperial troop transport. The observer recognizes it as the completely rational act of a warrior in the service of a greater purpose.

IS is reliant, it appears, on similar behaviors among the ranks of its elite fanatics. Infiltrating as civilians, they kill indiscriminately, and then detonate a suicide charge when security forces arrive. The ensuing chaos is exploited by a conventional assault that seizes the target.

The common refrain in public media is that religion is the common thread in such events. Certainly the Fremen were incited by faith in their Messiah, Maud’Dib, born Paul Atreides. IS fanatics surrender themselves in the belief that they are engaged in a jihad, their death thus gaining in the afterlife the boon due to a holy martyr.

The chorus of the anti-religious is composed of people with many good reasons to want to live. They have people that want to listen to them. Among that audience are those seeking to understand IS, primarily for the purpose of destroying it. Others simply wish to disengage from the problem – if Muslims do not hold any value in life, what are we to do? All too often the answer is, “Go to the Met and pay someone to keep the evil out.”

The talk show hosts, ushers and garbage men protect us from becoming cut adrift. They create a sense that we mean something, that the world will order itself to our needs. They make life worth experiencing. But what of them? Do we really imagine that they find deep satisfaction in serving that purpose for us? Does the garbage collector sweeping the streets of Los Angeles at 2 A.M. float in visions of the latest triumph at Disney Hall? Or does he just see a used condom in the gutter?

It is from those forgotten by the elites that IS recruits in the Western world. A house-bound girl recounts her experience of posting a question about Islam online, and being taken into a community of people that were devoted to her psychological needs. There was nothing concrete exchanged – she was brought in simply by the ready attention that provided a sense of meaning something. She abandoned her church and converted.

Strangely enough, that is what religion is supposed to do. People are supposed to take the time to be present for one another. Ultimately, that simple human attention is overtaken by direct relation with the divine presence. Our need for human validation decreases. We become, instead, a refuge for others.

But those initial stages are terribly vulnerable: the hope of receiving love is formed in the soul of the seeker, but not yet anchored to God. In that state, tyrants can enter and substitute their purpose. The sacred community, threatened from without by reprisal for violence organized by their leaders, spawns martyrs committed to protecting the source of meaning in their lives. The immediate and practical realities of conflict drown out the tenets of scripture written by people wiser but at the remove of centuries.

As the gap in wealth yawns ever wider in this country, I wonder whether the elite sees beyond their immediate circle of servants to concern themselves with how to connect the society as a whole to a sense of purpose. Herding people around with fear isn’t enough. Neither are the theories of capitalism or science, no less mysterious to most than the Qaballah. If we fail to fill this vacuum with meaning, sooner or later people will grasp for meaning in the only act that any longer has significance – their death.

Planning Your Mid-Life Crisis

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To be blessed is to receive gifts before knowing that they are needed. I’ve survived several mid-life crises thanks to wisdom I received from Delorese Ambrose back in my mid-forties.

Ambrose wasn’t speaking about mid-life crisis, although the context may have warranted it. My employer, a large national laboratory, had discovered that scientists might be motivated to master project management, but very few of them mastered human relations. During an era of declining budgets for basic science and a reduced role for nuclear weapons in national security, people needed to learn how to work together so that new missions could evolve.

Ambrose came in as a management consultant, which in part involves providing an organization with a framework to facilitate selection and support of leaders. In a plenary session, Ambrose spoke about the cycle of power. Her model had six stages, each stage involving a ground-breaking shift in perspective that made it almost impossible for people at one stage to understand the behaviors and priorities of those at the next. In many respects, the structure echoed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but the cycle as Ambrose presented it illustrated the dependencies of those at the upper reaches on the strength and success of those below.

When I sent Ambrose an e-mail, I was given to rue that I had passed the “sexy” part of the arc she described. The cycle begins without power, an existence in which almost every waking moment is concerned with the basics of survival. It ends with wisdom, in which enormous influence is contingent upon the continued success and good will of the community we serve, and thus power again is (paradoxically) elusive. The “sexy” stage – the stage at which we can be assured of getting things done – is at the half-way point of personal achievement.

Achievement evolves from association when our peers recognize that we have unique skills and traits that can be supplemented to create a competitive advantage for the community. This is the first true stage of leadership, and the leader often believes that it is due to their initiative that the organization succeeds. But the reality is more subtle. Success grows from the meshing of behaviors acquired through years of adaptation and compensation. The uniqueness of the leader’s innovative drive requires that others adapt that urge to the rest of society. In that process, they gain unique insights of their own, and become qualified to take their own turn in the sun.

When that time ripens, the leader feels abandoned. I observed several people wandering through this period of their lives, and the experiences were terrifying. It is to watch an individual in the prime of life, at the full height of their powers, watching the end of a life that they have struggled valiantly to obtain. It is like dying, and some will go so far as to destroy others in their attempts to avoid the inevitable. Among our commercial captains are those that are masters of this art, methodically exploiting middle layers of management in order to sustain reputation and position.

The end, when it comes against such resistance, is crushing. The individual is left without support or purpose. Those that studied their methods no longer need them. Lee Iaccoca was inspired to run for president while thus adrift, wandering the halls of his mansion. My mother spoke of retired businessmen who, working as fundraisers for the American Cancer Society, had never learned to book their own travel.

The exit from this stage is self-knowledge. It is, ultimately, the realization that it wasn’t simply the things that we did that brought us success. It was rather our ability to adapt to the constraints of success. When first mounting the ladder of achievements, that process happens organically. The changes in ourselves occur one step at a time as needs are presented. We often fail to recognize that those changes were indeed choices. We could have chosen to take that second honeymoon, rather than flying to Singapore to open a new market. We could have coached the little league team, rather than staying late in the lab to perfect a new fuel mixture. While these choices may have been formed under pressure, our decision to respond and adapt to those pressures was our choice, and the outcomes reflected our capacity to control ourselves.

Self-awareness is a taking stock of who we are, with the purpose of preparing ourselves to become the person that we want to become. From that place we enter the last two stages on the path of power. Given that we have complete control over ourselves, what is it that we want to do? What purpose do we wish to serve? And once we have entrained a community in the wake of our purpose, they then turn to us for wisdom.

So my advice to those entering mid-life crisis is, “don’t fight it.” Yes, resist it. Get as much as you can for your achievements. Allow people the time to envision a future without you. Force those that replace you to become as good as they can be.

But attend also liberation from the tedious requirements of a life that chose you into a life that you have chosen. Take advantage of the good will that surrounds you to ask “What moments with me were most inspiring to you?” Trace the evolution of those moments to recognize the strength of the choices you have made. Prepare yourself to enter again into the furnace of self-creation to rediscover and reclaim all the passions and dreams that were surrendered so that others could share in your success.

But for heaven’s sake, don’t succumb to the sad spectacle of trying to repeat your unreflective youth!

SCOTUS on Marriage Equality

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The Supreme Court rendered its decision on Marriage Equality, finding for the petitioners in Obergefell v. Hodges. I have expressed my spiritual views on this matter. Suffice to say that I am broadly sympathetic.

What is curious to me is the content of Roberts’ dissenting opinion, in which he ends with the pouty “Don’t celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.”

Roberts’ argument is that the Court was acting in a legislative role, redefining the meaning of a term of legal parlance (“marriage”) in a way that was not supported by the 14th Amendment. He references precedents concerning just compensation that the court later recognized overstepped the bounds of the 14th Amendment. Roberts also accuses the majority of undermining the process of democratic debate that was slowly turning the tide of public opinion in favor of same-sex marriage.

I find Roberts’ interpretation of judicial activism in the application of the 14th Amendment to be manipulative. As he asserts, certainly in the precedents he cites the Court should not have been trying to determine what is “fair” compensation. However, the 14th Amendment was established to address the issue of lack of compensation (slavery). Compensation for labor is a fundamental right.

In reading the majority opinion, I find validity in the conclusion, reached through detailed analysis, that marriage is such a fundamental right. They also establish clearly that denial of the right imposes burdens, both psychological and material, on same-sex couples. I believe that their opinion establishes a sound philosophical basis for application of the 14th Amendment, which exists precisely to overthrow long-held social prejudice that denies rights to minorities.

Roberts also makes a hysterical reference to the First Amendment, warning that religions that fail to perform same-sex marriage may lose their tax-free status. However, the establishment clause actually, in this case, applies in the other direction. There are religions that perform same-sex marriage, and no one has suggested that they be denied their tax-free status. The existence of laws that deny legal rights to same-sex couples joined by such religious authority is actually a form of establishment, and should be repelled.

I would be impressed if the dissenters addressed the substantive reasoning of the majority. As it is, I am afraid that they are simply going to fire the anger of those that find the definition of marriage to be a fighting matter.

Amartya Sen on the Necessary Distinction Between Austerity and Economic Reform

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Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998, Sen is widely recognized as the leading moral voice in the field of economics. The New Statesman carries his analysis of debt and its relationship to economic reform and growth. He points out that debt levels were far higher in the aftermath of WWII, but confident and intelligent investment in growth steadily reduced debt even while social services expanded.

The New Statesman has published his remarks.

Sen’s most heartfelt cry is against the destruction of human capital: in Kansas and other “austerity” states, educational levels and consumer spending are collapsing. In Greece, half of all young adults have never had a job (or at least a job that generated tax revenues). As Adam Smith pointed out in his writings, it is human capital that underpins the ability of nations to generate wealth.

While Sen decries his inability to influence policy-makers imposing disastrous austerity on their constituents, I don’t have any need to be politic. I’ll just follow the money.

As described in The Grand Pursuit, the Great Depression was an existential threat for free market economics because it revealed that the financial elite would not invest in long-term growth when falling prices guaranteed increased purchasing power for their accumulated wealth. It was in their short-term interest to exacerbate unemployment, thereby reducing both demand and wages. It was Keynes who convinced the governments to stimulate demand with deficit spending that brought Europe and America out of the Depression.

In the current era, government debt is in the short-term interest of the financial elites. It is the ready stream of bond placement and foreign exchange fees that fuel the financial system. Reducing debt is against their interest. That they fund candidates that have implemented policies to reduce tax revenues while expanding debt is no mystery.

Sen points out that most electorates suffering under austerity are beginning to recognize that growing poverty proves those policies wrong. Whether they can organize themselves to restore intelligent fiscal policy is another question. There are so many other issues to distract them, and voter restrictions in many states disenfranchise the working poor. (Fundamentally, I don’t see why elections should be on a weekday: anyone for a constitutional amendment to move them to Saturday?)

In the United States, we have been propped up by the Federal Reserve, which has kept interest rates low and pumped cash into the economy. However, that is no substitute for governmental action: when interest rates rise, that cash must be soaked up lest inflation run out of control. This will suppress growth. However, in Europe things have been far worse: the Central Bank has been part of the system of austerity, and is only now beginning to follow the lead of its American counterpart.

It’s in the Cards

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Father’s Day and the Summer Solstice coincided for me down at Ecstatic Dance LA on Sunday. My devotion to that practice is encapsulated in this wisdom from Devdutt Patnaik, from Seven Secrets of Shiva:

Lord Shiva taught through dance because words are too literal to capture the essence of the intangible nirguna. One needs symbols that dance is best able to communicate. A book occupies space but not time, a discourse occupies time but not space, a dance occupies both space and time.

The workshop was an introduction to sensual Salsa that was focused with a declaration of spiritual intention. We were asked to choose from a deck of the feminine avatars. I waited, torn, until the other participants had settled back to their mats. Then a card called clearly to me, and I found myself holding “Isolt”:

Undying Love: No matter the situation, the love that you share is eternal.

When I read it to the facilitator, all she had to offer was “Thank-you.”

From that moment of clarity, the dance unfolded into the usual confusion and chaos. Whether the sexy temptress that tried to attach me to her sister, any of five young ladies crying out for love in exchange for passion, or the woman that reminded me of the lost love I offered to Persephone’s manifestation, I found myself wondering why it is so hard for women to understand that the power that surrounds me is not intended to make people feel good, but rather to make them stronger. That became clear in my interaction with Atasiea – after we finished rolling over each other on the floor, I touched his crown and suggested timidly “Say hello to my little friends.” With their affirmation, I then knelt to take his skull in my hands and ordered, “Now say hello to my bigger friends,” as I raised his mind to the sky. Trying to make certain that he didn’t get detached, I pressed my thumbs into his palms and feet and pulled on his arms, stretching him to his full extent so that they might clearly apprehend the limits of his body.

So it was only at the end that I was able to refocus. As we sat in a circle, each affirming in turn the joys found in the dance and the glory of the light, I hesitated before offering:

I came here today to plead with the light. To plead with it to be gentle with us. To be gentle with us through the summer and winter. To be gentle with all the living things.

A terrible sorrow filled me then. While Robin took the time to say that he liked what I had said, it is clear that we haven’t learned our lesson yet. It will unfold as it must.