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The Abuses of Tyranny

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As I considered in The Uses of Tyranny, communities lacking experience in self-management often call forth people with over-sized egos to lead. Even when they are reviled, as was King Juan Carlos in Spain, the psychological bond is deep. Many Spaniards wept upon learning of his death, for fear of what the future might bring.

In the case of monarchy, at least there is some institutional structure passed on from generation to generation, which means that the monarch is bound, at the very least, by dependency on people who actually know how to get things done. This is something seen in growing up, and helps to check the ego of the ruler.

For nations undergoing dramatic social change, such as occurred after the retreat of the colonial powers, no such institutional checks exist. Leadership is established through visceral struggle, and held largely through intimidation and fear. Once the opposition has been beaten down, there is no brake upon the ego of the ruler, who may even imagine himself to be a divine favorite. Witness, for example, Idi Amin of Uganda.

Of course, it is rare for such nations to be able to project much power on the international scene. This can make them dupes for more sophisticated partners, such as negotiators from multi-national corporations. The convenience of the dictator as single point-of-contact are tempting to those negotiators. It is little known that militant Islam actually was born in Northern Africa, where the people used the ethics of the Qu’ran to structure their criticism of exploitative resource extraction. When Western governments and multi-nationals propped up the abusive regimes, jihad was declared against the West as a whole – and deservedly so, under the circumstances.

So perhaps the grossest abuse of tyranny is the tendency of tyrants to form privileged clubs that prop each other up. The ultimate downfall of such clubs is that they devolve into echo chambers, with the tyrants agreeing upon self-serving policies that cannot actually be implemented by the communities they control. This occurs in two parts: first, the tyrants become divorced from reality, and then they destroy social cohesion and resilience in their attempts to coerce their impossible outcomes. Such was the downfall of the planned economies in China and Russia.

It was this realization – that institutional structure was the ultimate victim of tyranny – that prompted Western philosophers to concern themselves with the creation of institutional forms that mitigated against tyranny. This has manifested not only in the constitutions of governments, but in the legal framework of corporate governance. Separation of powers is visible in the three branches of US government, but also in the allocation of responsibilities between corporate boards and executives. One of the primary benefits of these arrangements is survival of institutional memory, which means that situations that seem new and exciting to the surging tyrant are just old hat to the grey-beards in the institutions.

It is amusing to watch this psychology unfold in Putin’s relationship with the West. Putin paints Obama as his primary adversary, and broadcasts propaganda that projects the image that tensions will dissolve when he leaves office. As a tyrant, Putin does not understand that the West has a huge number of historians and policy analysts in corporate, academic and governmental circles that have studied Russian history, and recognize this view as the view of Stalin and Kruschev and Brezhnev and Andropov. Attack Obama all you want, and circulate as much propaganda among the European public as you want: our institutions have played this game before, and will win it again.

Understand, Putin: you are who you are because Western nations agreed to trade with Russia, providing you with the opportunity to siphon hundreds of billions of dollars into your personal accounts. Do you really think that they don’t have the means to discipline your international adventurism?

And what our institutions also remember is that, following Juan Carlos and Stalin, their nations adapted to the experience to establish systems that regulated tyrannical behavior. When that occurs, the tyrant’s legacy is erased. Yes, Vladimir, you are a big noise now in the world. You’re able to force a lot of people to think about you. But you’re on the wrong side of history. Your destruction and perversion of the institutions of the Russian state ensure that you will leave no lasting mark.

And hear as much, Koch brothers! How much money are you spending to force people to do what makes you money? And how much more could you make if you invested, as did Henry Ford, in their capacity to participate in new markets and opportunities?

Jon-Rolled

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When I first put The Soul Comes First in front of readers, one was a young Jew working in the coffee shop at Barnes and Noble. I began summarizing the book, and got as far as Moses before he broke in to challenge, “Yeah, well, I’ve concluded that no Bronze Age religion has anything to offer us in the 21st century.”

A couple of months later, he agreed to read the book (it’s only 70 pages or so), and came up to testify:

This is the only thing I’ve read that makes sense of the Bible.

So my jaw fell open when, following an advertisement from the Freedom for Religion Foundation, Jon Stewart introduced a satirical skit on Christianity by saying “I can do this because, as a Jew, my religion is thousands of years older than yours.”

An appropriate comment, because in the entire skit, the only serious criticism of Christianity was a reference in Exodus to ownership of slaves. Argh! Christ promised to fulfill the law, which means that the old contract with God was concluded, and a new one begun. The covenant of Christ supersedes the Covenant of Moses, and it says simply:

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

As for the Freedom from Religion Foundation, the ad draws upon the authority of the Founders, many of whom drew their moral and ethical philosophy from Jesus, which includes:

Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s.

I find satire to be a lot funnier it is rooted in understanding of the basic tenets of the culture. So, if the FFRF and Jon Stewart show really want to have an impact on Christian fundamentalism, they could try teaching Christianity while making fun of the way it’s presented to society. As they have succeeded so well in attacking the political hogwash served up by the elitist, libertarian right, that might actually get Christians to recognize and challenge false teaching.

As it was done, they merely come off as tediously shallow.

The Battle Over Personality

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In attempting to penetrate the cultural prejudices against spiritual experience, I sometimes feel a certain historical sympathy for those arguing against flat-earthers. The doubter could argue against the roundness of the earth by insisting that he has never had any reason to believe that the world isn’t flat. That his experience was limited to a ten-mile radius around his place of birth didn’t matter much.

Against declarations of faith in the existence of God, the scientific materialist will often say things like “Well, I know that when I jump off a bridge, I’ll fall into the river. You can’t say that about God.” When I describe my experience of spirituality, including events that can’t be explained by accepted scientific theory, I am told “Well, it’s OK for you to believe in God.” That these events are just as real to me (and others that have witnessed them) as jumping off a bridge seems to escape their grasp. I really don’t need anyone’s permission to have them – and as scientists shouldn’t they be at least at little bit curious as to why I do and they don’t?

I have suggested that Christ doesn’t create faith through force – but rather by posing people a problem bigger than they can solve, and then giving the power to solve it. When my children worried to me about my financial circumstances, I always said to them “Well, money is only a means of storing power – and all my power is wrapped up in trying to solve a very, very difficult problem. There’s just none left over to save.” But because love does not wait, I am confident that if the problem can be solved at this point in history, it will be solved. Otherwise, well, I’ll have left some bread on the water for when I come back to try again.

So I might suggest that the difference between me and those that judge my faith is humility. Scientists are really proud of their science, and of the skills and strength of mind that allows them to apply it. Conversely, my experience includes being told by a fortune teller one night “Brian, we know that you think that you’re failing, but try and remember what it would have been like if you hadn’t been here at all.”

So if the problem for the scientist is pride, do they have no basis for their pride? I would say that, yes, they do have a basis for pride. We have turned the world into a garden, and so tend to forget that nature is just a terribly destructive place. Science – which is the study of the behavior of things that don’t have personality – has allowed us to mitigate against disease, predation and the elements, and helped us to anticipate and manage natural disasters. That success is obtained with theories that completely ignore personality. So we think of the animals in a stock yard as simple meat factories. The trees that we chop down are just wood.

The value of the scientific pursuit is, of course, to extend our lives, but it does so at the cost of our spirituality. Living is the opportunity to do work on our souls through the experience of having a body. We need to reclaim that ground from the scientific mindset that sees us as simple flesh popsicles, dancing on the axonic threads that originate in our brains. We need to reclaim our personality – which is to say the conscious engineering of our souls through engagement with the physical reality around us.

And when we have surrendered our pride and greed, an even greater adventure awaits us: calling out of hiding those spirits that we have terrorized with our science, and bringing their skills to bear in creating a garden that serves all the forms of life on Earth, rather than just humanity.

Coffee and Coaching PodCast Recording

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Caryn FitzGerald had me on today for her inspirational author series at http://www.coffeeandcoachingradio.com. I told her it was an honor to be her guest for “Render Unto Caesar” day (which brought a gracious laugh), and she prompted me to share the greater journey that led to the creation of my web site (www.everdeepening.org), my four books, and this blog. Reconstructing that experience – and reflecting on how they all support each other and the purpose I serve – was really valuable to me. It’s been a long intellectual and emotional journey.

The podcast should play in a month or so. I’m just worried that (as is typical, I guess) I had a lot of surprising things to say. When Caryn remarked that I was a very complex man, I had to admit that was why I am single – I’m just too much work. And then I turned around and remarked that it all seemed pretty simple to me.

Love is like quantum mechanics – it applies to everything, which can be confusing until you understand how it changes things. So while I was rattling on about corporate management, men and women, raising children, and Jesus, it was really all about one thing: let’s make life simple, people. Let’s just love one another.

Caryn is a gracious and affirming host, and the questions she asked were a powerful force in shaping the interview. She invited me to come on again, and I’m expecting to face interesting questions – and continue to benefit from the learning that entails – when I do.

The Relative Incoherence of Special Quantum Spirituality

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We in the West see the attempt to reconcile physics and spirituality as an Eastern concern. Indeed, it is the Vedantic philosopher Deepak Chopra who most vigorously engages Western science in that debate. The Western prejudice, however, is supportable only for those with a selective memory. Following the discovery of magnetism in the 19th century, “Mesmerists” were popular in Europe. The practitioners would demonstrate their mind-control abilities by touching the cranium of a susceptible assistant. When one was brought to trial for fraud, the scientists of the era actually testitfied in his defense.

Keeping in mind that history, I tend to be sympathetic to Chopra and his partisans. Unfortunately, they are chasing after rainbows, and creating a lot of confusion as a result.

Richard Feynman, brilliant quantum theorist, observed that quantum mechanics was a mathematical procedure without philosophical foundation. That’s pretty unique to 20th century physics. Prior to that time, the scientist could always build mental pictures of the interactions between the elements of the model. This was a practice that they attempted to apply to Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity as they evolved, with unfortunate results.

This desire to provide explanations was carried forward during an era in which the basic tenets of the theory were still being worked out. Sometimes the preliminary theory would be applied in way that later scientists would consider incomplete, but a sensible answer would be obtained. The answers were published, often with popular interpretations of what was going on in the underlying reality. What is perhaps not surprising is that the popular interpretations are more widely known today than the actual theory itself. Because the interpretations were based upon bad science, they create confusion in the public mind.

To illustrate: in Special Relativity, Einstein held that clocks appear to tick more slowly when they move rapidly with respect to the observer. Based upon this, a thought experiment was constructed involving two twins, one of whom travels to a distant star and returns much younger than his sibling that stayed home on Earth. The calculation assumes, however, that the traveling twin reverses instantaneously his speed and direction upon arrival at the distant star. Obviously, if this was the way that the space ship was designed, the traveling twin would be just so much pate upon returning to Earth. No, the ship must decelerate and accelerate. When that part of the mission plan is included in the calculations, it turns out that the special relativistic effects disappear completely. The twin paradox is a hoax.

In quantum mechanics, we have the famous “wave-particle duality” and “wave function collapse”. Wave-particle duality was “proven” by electron self-interference: an electron impinging upon a screen with two closely-spaced slits will not be seen in two spots on the far side of the screen, as though it had passed through one slit or the other, but instead be distributed over numerous islands of intensity, as though it was a wave that had passed through both slits. The problem in this calculation is that in quantum mechanics, the behavior of any one electron can only be understood by considering the behavior of all the electrons in the system. The failure to include the electrons in the screen in the calculation leads to at least one paradox, and precludes alternative explanations of the observations.

“Wave function collapse” was an extension of “wave-particle duality” to scattering problems. In classical mechanics, when two billiard balls collide, we can predict the final state of the balls from the initial state. Not so in quantum mechanics: scattering objects spray about more broadly. However, the rules of energy and momentum conservation still apply. Therefore, measuring the final state of one of the scattered particles determines the state of the second. The first measurement causes the possible final states of the second to “collapse” to a single allowed result. This led to the idea that the conscious act of observation affects the behavior of physical systems. The “Schrodinger’s cat” thought experiment is the popular expression of this idea. But there are many types of uncertainty in quantum mechanics, and just because the observer doesn’t know the final state of the particles doesn’t mean that they particles don’t have a definite state. They may “know” perfectly well what their direction and speed of motion is.

The weak practice and explanations offered by early quantum and relativity theorists open the door to mystics seeking to explain their experience of reality. The acausal connectedness of mystical events (what Jung called “synchronicity”) seems to correspond to the complex structure of time in special relativity. The interaction between consciousness and physical events in Schrodinger’s world corresponds to the mental powers of the guru.

But the fact is that the theories, while describing unfamiliar behavior in fundamental particles, are completely inapplicable to the behavior of macroscopic composites such as people. The probability of seeing quantum behavior in a macroscopic object is so minute that the Eastern mystic must hold his experience as a refutation of quantum mechanics. That leads in the direction of new physics.

At this point, I would argue that the most powerful laboratories of the modern era will be our minds, rather than the billion-dollar observatories that the scientific-industrial establishment insists the public must fund. The ultimate proof of the power of a theory will be not in how it empowers us to manipulate objects without personality, but rather in the degree to which it makes us transparent to the flow of Divine Love.

In God’s Hands

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My book signing on Saturday started off slowly. The venue is a wonderful place to browse, though. (If you live in the Thousand Oaks area, please stop by and check out The Open Book in the Oaks Mall.) So, to avoid filling the air up with anxiety, I tried to find the second part of The Tales of Genji (alas – they had sold the collection of vintage books that I had pulled it from), and ended up perusing a collection of 19th century horror stories.

Being clever people, the staff had set my table up in front of the New Age and religious inspiration section. I had a few chances to say “hello” to those that stopped to browse the blog posts I had reprinted or look at the book covers. The reactions weren’t always encouraging: one man simply scowled and went around to the New Age section. Another woman engaged me with a hostile tone of voice, asserting “Love works because people make it work.”

This was beginning to feel like my first book signing, when I spent most of the day dealing with the baggage brought by people who had found reasons to stop believing. Feeling a little food coma along with the disappointment, I stepped out to buy myself a coffee. When I came back up from the lower floor, I found the scowler with a new book, sitting in an armchair across from the store. I smiled and remarked “Well, you found something!”

A little uncertainly, he said that his brother had survived a near-death experience, and while he wasn’t quite sure about the whole business, he wanted to investigate. As we discussed religion and spirituality, I learned that he had been raised Christian, but was an atheist. Without prompting on my part, he explained that he suffered from a form of spinal arthritis. For most of his life, he had prayed to God for relief, and never received an answer. Then he had found a doctor who took interest in his case, and received treatment that made life bearable.

I couldn’t preach in the face of this testimony. There is nothing more difficult to bear than suffering that has been laid in the hands of God. But I did offer that God works through people, and that I was glad that his doctor had shown the compassion to take interest in his case. Then, hoping that somehow he’d find his way back to the source of Divine Love, I encouraged him to continue to study spirituality.

We parted amicably, and I went back into the store. When I reached the table, all of his loss and pain came pouring down on me. All I can do in those situations is try to breath, and let it settle through me into the floor. It passed in two great waves, and then I looked back into the doorway. He was staring at me, and I lowered my gaze to the floor. When I looked back up, he was gone.

For those in similar situations: don’t keep your eyes turned up to heaven. Yes, leave your suffering in God’s hands, but understand that, as Paul experienced in Damascus, his response is often to allow a compassionate person the opportunity to receive your gratitude. That is the great gift that the meek offer to those that bring them respite. Don’t deny it to the world!

How Christ Tranforms Evil

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In “Christ is Risen”, Matt Maher encapsulates the message offered by so many celebrants at Easter:

Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling over death by death!
Come awake! Come awake!
Come and rise up from the grave!

Oh, death, where is your sting?
Oh, Hell, where is your victory?

It is a message of conquest.

But those that have survived a near-death experience tell us that as they drifted into the light, they saw all their loved ones reaching out to call them forward, and behind them shone the loving embrace of Christ.

Jesus did not conquer death: he entered into our greatest fear and transformed it into a conduit through which love is brought to us.

Understanding that conflict justifies evil, I have been negotiating with sin for the last fifteen years, offering the exhortation that love will not destroy it, but bring it into greatness. In that process, I have been assaulted psychologically, night and day, by people that exercise sin to gain power over others. The struggle has been exhausting.

This morning, I find myself in a different place. I turned the problem around: rather than resisting them, I envisioned the light of Christ shining through me, then through them and onto those that they oppress. The closer they press against me, the closer they come to the light, and the more brightly it shines from them.

Maher begins his song with this exhortation:

Let no one caught in sin remain
Inside the lie of inward shame.
We fix our eyes upon the cross
And run to him who showed great love.

Those that rely upon sin for power run in the other direction, of course, and build their castles to wall out the light of Christ. Death is their final tool – the means by which they weed out those that insist upon loving. Every Christian that keeps his eyes upon the cross defeats that strategy: they make death the means by which Christ enters into the darkness, bypassing all the walls of the citadel.

How does Christ protect his faithful? Because even thinking about bringing harm to a true servant of Christ calls him closer. Those that would sin against the faithful must flee their ramparts into the wilderness.

At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus offered this counsel:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.
[NIV Matt. 5:38-39]

And for those strong enough, even more:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of heaven.
[NIV Matt. 5:43-45]

What I see now is: it is the miracle of the cross that guarantees the efficacy of this conduct! Death was not vanquished, it is the very tool by which we redeem one another!

Speak Your Truth in Love

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But remember – it is your truth, not God’s.

And remember that, as love creates peace and joy, speaking from love is always without anger and fear, and creates neither anger nor fear in the listener.

Rather, as love heals the wounds of sin, always speak words of hope, and have faith that the hearer, in loving themselves and you, will reveal their truth in turn.

And if their truth is that a different love guides them to a deeper hope, have faith that God makes a home great enough for all of our truths.

Dawn of the Soul

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Midi Berry’s newly published Nights of the Road examines the mystical power of feminine devotion. The nominal protagonist of the tale is Sarah, a British refugee from bad relationship mojo, taking up a life as a psychotherapist in Los Angeles. The power driving her spiritual awakening, however, arises from the 17th century, where her ancestor Frances Coke earns the regard of those surrounding the Stewart court as its excesses succumb to Parliamentary discipline.

When I was a child, my father declaimed modern music by observing that it was the discipline of classical forms that allowed composers to create pieces that challenged listeners without alienating them. This seems a suitable metaphor for the structure of Midi’s work.

In both time streams, Berry injects the theme of a woman committed to a natural love with a devoted partner, but challenged in her course by the passionate attentions of an unstable and possessive creative genius. In the Stewart Court, Frances is frustrated in her love by an arranged marriage, albeit to a man who – as long as the forms of the relationship are honored – kindly accepts her devotion to another. In modern Los Angeles, Sarah escapes a political marriage through emigration, and falls captive to the reborn creative genius whose attentions were frustrated by social strictures in the Stewart Court.

The novel evolves through a series of tetes-a-tetes between the romantic interests. Sarah employs the language of modern psychology as a shield against strong emotions, eventually drawing her two competitors – both previously members of a band called Nights of the Road (whence the title, in part) – into collaborative reconciliation. As for Frances, I found myself thinking that her attitudes were entirely too modern, but then realized that so were the attitudes of Beethoven and Brahms. Frances makes a decision early on in the book to believe in herself, and thus speaks her mind honestly throughout, and so perhaps reveals wisdom of the feminine heart that has been long suppressed.

I found myself at times wishing that Berry would bring us into some of the historical experiences discussed by Frances and her lover Robert. However, the emphasis of the book is on transformation of relationships, and there is a lot of valuable relationship modeling in the story line.

The most significant flaw in the story – and this is nit-picking – may be the lack of forecasting of Frances’s mystical ascension as her death nears. For those familiar with such events, this is foreshadowed by the affirmation by a noble protector that Frances’s beauty, compassion and devotion have brought her unsuspected admiration from the royal entourage. Unfortunately, for some the connection may be lost, and so her wandering down the psychic road as she nears death (whence again the title) may seem a little jarring, if not deus ex machina.

But the book’s final chapter is golden. Antony, the creative genius of Nights of the Road, manipulates masterfully Sarah’s emotions, and precious are the lyrics sung as reflections upon her impact on the men that love her.

Berry’s heart-felt tribute to reconciliation and redemption casts light on the challenges of being a muse, and presents wisdom that readers will usefully apply when seeking to understand and deepen their relationships. As the Brits would say: “Give it a go!”

Robbing Peter to Play Paul

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In an era in which the Law of Moses had been corrupted as political tyranny and religious hypocrisy, Jesus would not have been expected to write a Gospel. Scripture is offered to us as a method to open ourselves to the love of God, but words change meaning over the course of time, and eventually the weight of our cultural prejudice stands as a barrier against the Divine Presence. As Jesus experienced, even worse can occur when the meanings are manipulated intentionally.

It was in recognition of this outcome that God proclaimed through Jeremiah [NIV 33:34]:

I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,
For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.

Jesus was the implementation of this promise. The proof was not in his words, which are always ambiguous, but in his actions.

In The Soul Comes First, I explain Jesus’s promise that his generation will see the fulfillment of his prophesy: On the cross, Jesus was unbound from time, and worked his way through the future until his will for Humanity is manifested. Then he returned in the glory of his realm to return to the Father. In that process, Jesus had no need for words – it was through his flesh itself that the work was done.

But, for those stuck in the flow of mortal time, how were those moments to be bridged? That requires propagation of the message of salvation. The original Apostles, fishermen and tax collectors, simple men of Galilee, had limited reach for this purpose – but they had direct experience of Christ, and had been humbled by their lack of faith. This is reflected in the kindly advice of Peter, in his second letter [NIV 2 Peter 1:5-9]:

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is a message of personal redemption through direct relation with Christ.

How was such a message to spread in the face of a culture of tyranny and hypocrisy? Long and slow it would have been. So this is where Saul of Tarsus comes in. Roman citizen and temple persecutor of the Christians, like Moses, Saul understood the mindset of the ruling classes, and the processes that would avail to bring him into direct dialog with them. As a Temple priest, he also understood institutional practices. Reborn into faith as Paul, this apostle was a traveling consultant to Christian communities in formation. As a philosopher, Paul also provided the early Christians with a framework for understanding the events that had transpired in the Holy Land, including clear statements regarding the implications with respect to past teachings.

Obviously, these are incredibly powerful works, and a source of rich guidance for pastors trying to manage diverse congregations and reconcile Old and New Testaments. In many non-denominational congregations, I find that Paul’s writings are preached more often than the parables of Jesus. Paul is clear and direct, while the parables of Jesus often leave me wondering “WTF?” (until I work out that Jesus wove in three meanings for three different audiences).

But is the voice of Paul the voice of Christ?

I would argue “only mostly.” Paul has a terribly serious defect: his religious roots rest in a framework dominated by sin, and his personal redemption occurred as a result of his sin against Christianity as a whole. Paul carries a guilty past around with him, and so his theology is dominated by a concern for forgiveness, and the miracle of redemption.

Peter, on the other hand, offers this promise [NIV 2 Peter 3:8-9]:

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

I much prefer the simplicity and directness of this promise. It is echoed in Paul’s writings, but as Peter says [NIV 2 Peter 3:16]:

His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

Sometimes less is more. I’d lay aside the rules offered in Paul’s letters, and focus on the progression defined by Peter. Leaving much to be discovered, it is harder work, but comes from one who learned most painfully from a more immediate experience of Christ.