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Sorry to Get All Technical on You…

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To this point, I’ve been writing about spirituality with a certain confident imprecision. That confidence is backed by a model of physics that I am fairly confident can overcome many of the difficulties in modern particle theory. I wrote a Templeton Fund proposal a couple of years back, and sent it around to my erstwhile peers in the community. Response was tepid, at best.

Having published The Soul Comes First, I’m getting ready to put the research proposal back around in the community. I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to serialize it first here, as that may reach people with an interest in these matters that I can’t contact directly. I’ll start that tonight. It will run for the next two weeks. Then I’ll get back to moral philosophy, starting with the matter of death.

This will be fairly technical. Any of you readers that know some science buffs, you might have fun getting them to read through it.

Don’t Surrender Hope

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In the sleepy upper-middle-class haven of the Conejo Valley, true hunger for ideas is hard to find. That makes it hard to sustain attendance at the Monday read-and-critique. People come thinking that they want to share ideas, but what they discover under that veneer is a need for easy sympathy and attention.

The organizer, Mark, hews to a quorum of three. We both ordered a sandwich plate, and he sat politely as I finished mine. Mark agonizes over personal defects that might contribute to our inability to develop a third partner from the dozen or so visitors that have passed through the group since June. I’m not sure that he realizes that we’re both pretty demanding writers, high on technology and complex character dynamics. We may be fighting a “WTF” response.

Mark writes steam punk for young adults. He loves detail and the trappings of decadence, although his heroes and heroines usually preserve order and independence by exploiting the weakness of the nobility. His latest book, Red Jacket, has been out for several months. Steam punk is like a kaleidoscope: pick your favorite eras and personalities, mash them together, and imagine how they’d interact in the hot-house you’ve created. Perhaps recognizing the fecundity of the genre, Mark bought a block of fifty ISBN numbers when he set out to self-publish.

Mark also does his own illustrations, and his stereo-wheel viewer was out on the table when I sat down. I flipped through the series of trained elephants, most of which looked pretty miserable. After his remark that animals only survive as commercial assets, the conversation nose-dived into the nether reaches of bleakness. I tried throughout the evening to introduce a note of hope, but Mark resisted, reporting that Google had terminated is global climate stabilization research project after reaching the conclusion that disaster was inevitable.

The material facts are terrifying. As the northern hemisphere thaws, we’re going to have another 80 years of CO2 emissions released to the atmosphere from the decay of the tundra. When the Arctic ice melts, the Gulf Stream will shut down and Europe will freeze. Coastal waters around the world may stagnate, releasing clouds of hydrogen sulfide that will asphyxiate all of the larger animals. And then there’s the human sociology: drops in agricultural productivity will make many urban centers unsustainable, and when people start starving they’ll start shooting each other.

I argued that under these conditions, armed confrontation may be almost impossible to sustain. It’s one thing if you can grab land and live by hunting. It’s another when you have to ply the land with fertilizers and irrigation to get crops to grow, and then drive the produce 1000 miles to ranches where livestock can survive the weather. If the people with guns don’t sustain the people with know-how, they’re won’t be much of anything for anybody – including bullets to fire.

Given the prognosis, it seems better just to pull the covers over your head. I’m here to beg you not to. I’m actually going to go even further: I’m going to beg you to learn as much as you can about these impossible problems, because it’s only in understanding them at the finest level of detail that we can solve them.

But how, you ask? Well, now you’re going to have to have some faith.

For a long time, you probably were told that space was empty. We now know that isn’t true: it’s filled with something called dark energy. As I understand it, dark energy is a kind of foam lattice. It’s not completely solid; spirits can slip around in it. Spirits that fight for possession of things (you know, bodies and material goods) tend to just push the foam around without gaining any advantage over it. Spirits that commit themselves to mutual benefit, however, end up building energy in the fabric of space. Think of these bundles of spirit like water in a pressurized bladder. That energy is available for us to do work on the world around us. As it’s been accumulating for billions of years, it’s a substantial asset.

It’s not easy to turn that energy to destructive purposes, because the will of all the contributors to the reservoir works against its misallocation. In fact, in the primitive psychological conditions that rule Darwinian evolution, one aspect of building such reservoirs is the presence of guardians that prevent abuse. Pain and suffering pollute the reservoirs, which motivates the guardians to move the energy into safer locations.

These reservoirs exist, but they don’t have any specific purpose. Humanity has intelligence to successfully focus that energy in the service of all living things. That reduces pain and suffering, which brings the reservoirs more directly under our control, as well as enabling them to be refueled by healthy ecosystems.

I keep on telling people that there’s far more energy available to us than we require to solve the problems we face – it’s just that we’re not trusted to us it. Part of being trusted is to “pick up your cross” as Jesus did: to enter into the pain of the world so that we can diagnose its specific illness, and then commit every fiber of our bodies to channel energy for healing.

It starts with faith, faith swells into hope, hope rises into commitment, commitment is channeled to produce knowledge, knowledge focuses power, and power enables healing.

Now the scientists will tell you that this is all hooey: if there were spirits, they would have seen them. My response is: well, if a scientist told you that he wanted to take your brain apart so that he could understand your personality, would you submit to it? How about even a few neurons? Scientists understand things by taking them apart. If you had the choice to run away, would you submit? And after you did, what would it take to convince you that it was safe to come back?

Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you Jesus.

Interstellar

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Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s meditation on the meaning of love is a heartening departure from the “shock and awe” tendencies of modern science fiction. The oversight of executive producer and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne ensures that the semantics of the dialog is coherent. While I don’t believe that the theory of wormholes is going to hold up in the long run, that consistency does ensure that audiences will not be too confused to grasp the central message: there are experiences that are accessible only to people joined in loving relationships.

While there is a great deal of beautiful deep space imagery in the film, the dramatic tension comes from the human response to a terrible crisis: the loss of agricultural productivity to wide-spread blight. At the low end of the social scale, the desperate struggle of farmers develops, over the years, into a stubborn determination that extinction, when it comes, must be faced in the company of those we love. At the opposite end are the privileged scientists and engineers of a “Noah’s Ark” project, launching explorers through a worm hole into another galaxy – explorers that, despite the nobility of their intentions, suffer very natural moral and psychological collapse due to the futility of their lonely efforts.

On the one hand, I am disappointed that it is the most violent and destructive of all astrophysical phenomena that is advanced as the backdrop for the discovery of the subtle power of love. I could complain that the team of explorers could not possibly have survived the challenges they faced. However, that would detract from the main proposition: they succeed because they care. Ultimately, that caring links into a chain of causality that loops back in time when human consciousness escapes the confines of our familiar reality. I guess that I would have to admit that it is no more difficult to swallow than the Savior returning to life after his own journey through time.

On the other hand, the film pays homage to Earth in subtle ways. I waited through the end of the credits and learned that the movie was shot in film. The beautiful planetary settings can be enjoyed right here.

But, of course, so can all of the sublime miracles of loving. Let’s hope that this film helps to open the minds of a generation that has been fed on destructive pap that preaches success through balls-out aggression. They need to spend more time understanding the nature of personality. I am a firm believer that we shouldn’t abandon the Earth, nor do we need to. We simply need to restrain our selfishness and apply ourselves to helping it heal itself. There’s far more power available to us than is required – we simply need to surrender our personal concerns and use it to love the nature that we’ve wounded.

It would help if the behavioral psychologists would stop telling us that it’s improbable, not to speak of the physicists who believe they have proven that it’s impossible.

The Nature of Sin

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Over the last fifteen years, I’ve had the privilege of being passionately committed to the service of two spectacularly beautiful feminine personalities. Unfortunately, as women like that tend to have a lot of dirt dumped on them, neither of them understood the depth of their beauty. In the second case, I finally found myself whispering across a crowded room, “Please, please, please. Please come into yourself. We need you here so badly.”

While I’ve been physically lonely for a long time, this process of calling beautiful women into the world has its positive benefits. I dance alone most Saturdays, but I dance with the joy of knowing that my loving is connected to a purpose that I find to be precious.

Many women respect that intention, but there are those that see my devotion as a resource to be turned to their benefit. The methods they use are pretty crude, and I have to say: after you’ve been sleep deprived for long enough, being beaten on by lust tends to lose its luster. So I really appreciate it when a woman approaches me with the attitude that she just wants to know what it feels like to step into devotion. Most of the time they finish dancing with me and go off into bliss with their lovers.

My most powerful experience of the impact of psychic wounding came under such circumstances. At the venue I haunted, a man in a rainbow tunic would show up occasionally on a field trip with a group of emotionally disturbed followers. One evening, I noticed a woman – let’s call her Deanne – staring at me. She seemed really timid, so I asked her to dance with me. When we got to the dance floor she announced “But I can’t go away with you or take my clothes off.” Realizing who I was talking to, I agreed. The song was a little forward, and Deanne looked uncomfortable. She agreed that she didn’t like the music, so I told her to come and get me when she heard something that she liked.

I kept on dancing by myself, and Deanne finally joined me again. Her movements were really wound up, and I just tried to invite her to move around into the space I left behind me on the floor. She began to play a little bit, and I had this strange sense of her opening up. Putting my hands on either side of Deanne’s head, I took hold of the threads of personality that she had wound up so carefully in herself, and attached them to the joy that my friends and I had built on the dance floor. I was overwhelmed by this glorious surge of energy, the likes of which I had never before experienced. Deanne just smiled and returned to her friends.

Scott Peck, author of People of the Lie, remarks that ‘evil’ is ‘live’ spelled backwards. From the physicist’s perspective, living is the process of investing the world with our spirit. Somebody had pounded Deanne out of the world, leaving her not even her body to inhabit. What happened that night, though, gave me an absolute conviction that evil is impotent in the face of love. That surge of energy was the joy of spirits welcoming Deanne back into the world. It was as though they had been waiting for her to reclaim them.

When we are first taught about sin, it’s as a prophylactic against evil. “Thou shalt not kill” definitely qualifies. Most of the Law of the Pentateuch (the Jewish holy books) can be interpreted in this way. The goal was to avoid corruption in the relationships between the people, the sacred land, and the God they worshipped.

The problem with the law is that it yoked guilt to evil: it created sin. This was the uniquely human evil that entered the world with the fall of Adam and Eve. Before that time, evil happened and living creatures just shrugged it off and moved forward. Man ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and began to ask “why?” From that point, whenever evil happened, our questioning minds looked for a place to affix the blame, and our materialistic tendencies led us to assign fault to the person that committed the sin.

When Jesus died for the forgiveness of sins, he sought to liberate us from this burden of guilt. As he put it “It is not the well that need a doctor, but the sick.” Implicitly, he is asserting “Who cares why it happened? Shouldn’t we just fix it and move on? Here: let me show you how love works.” In the most impressive case: the oppressor Saul goes blind on the road to Damascus and is healed to become Paul, the foremost Christian evangelist of his time.

Healing through love is the absolute bedrock of Christian ethics. Those that prefer to judge sinners might better focus their energies on learning to emulate the master that they adore. You’ll have a lot more fun when love moves freely through you. Assigning guilt just gets in the way.

Marriage

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Ray Charles, reflecting on his wife’s experience of a career in which so much psychological and physical excess was channeled into his music, summarized her virtue with these lines:

You taught me precious secrets
Of the truth, withholding nothing.
You came out in front
And I was hiding.

And then offers this gift of insight to those that have not been so blessed:

I love you in a place
Where there’s no space or time.
I love you for my life
because you’re a friend of mine.

Genesis declares that a man and woman become “one flesh”, but the truth is far deeper than that.

For most of us, the lure of sex is the slippery entrance to these mysteries. Particularly in our early adulthood, when embroiled with our peers in the undifferentiated spray of lusts that makes it almost impossible to sleep, we often surrender to temptation. While those early experiences are exhilarating, they end results are often not pretty. The young wife of the angry peer in graduate school came down with uterine cancer; the female lawyer paid for the extortion made possible by the easy access of college couplings with hands crabbed by the hatred of wives; the pedophile who offered his services in breaking the link between mother and son – all are reflections of the failure to graduate from the power and thrill of disorganized coupling into management of the garden of the soul.

It is the latter that Charles celebrates in the second stanza above. Women feel things, men change them. The partnership that flowers when we recognize that duality is incredibly powerful. Love takes up camp in a place outside of space and time, but from which every moment can be touched.

Once it is established, that kind of binding is almost impossible to break – not even death sunders it.

People with past life experiences relate that they recognize their lovers and family. As Paul Simon put it in “Senorita with a Necklace of Tears”:

I was born before my father
And my children before me
And we are born and born again
Like the waves of the sea

So what happens when a couple, from that place outside of time, looks into the future and sees a planet with too many people? Are they to surrender the work they each do on the other’s souls? Work that can only be done when incorporated?

I went to school in Berkeley, and spent a fair amount of time with gay and lesbian couples. I almost always saw a pairing of masculine and feminine spirits. The physical inconvenience was a sacrifice that they had made.

They love each other. Get over it, people.

We Can’t Say ‘Thanks’ Enough

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Life is the opportunity to participate in organizing spirit. Our bodies escort them about in clouds, and as we move amongst each other they enter into new relationships. Some of these are wonderful experiences: “Love at first sight” is a good example. Some of them are horrifying: consider the records of the carnival atmosphere at a public lynching.

At the core of our primary personality is a set of spirits that manage our survival. Through the mechanisms of our glands, organs, muscles and nerves, they coordinate the biological functions that allow us to control the world around us, and thus to sustain life. For most of the history of life on earth, this was as far as it went. Innovation in the integration of body and spirit was controlled largely by survival. With humanity, however, the possibilities exploded – almost without check. Using the mechanism of our brain, in each life we can explore and evaluate millions if not billions of spiritual relationships. We call these ideas.

How do we know which ideas work? Well, we put them into action. We seek to describe sources of pain (weather, natural disasters, disease and predators) and to create the means to avoid pain. We attempt to deny resources to those that bring us fear, or perhaps even better to use fear to take control of their resources. We gather and offer gifts to the people we love, when before we might have shared them more widely.

In the course of taking these actions, we integrate ideas into our core personalities. This can have terrible consequences for our bodies. If we accept a destructive idea, it can turn on us. Our core personality intuitively seeks to isolate its effects, but that may then cause stroke or cancer.

The other option is to vent destructive ideas on the people around us. For destructive ideas, that can be a successful strategy. One powerful individual can infect an entire society (witness Adolf Hitler, Mao TseDong, and Josef Stalin). In doing so, however, those ideas have to fight against the enormous mass of human experience, which proves that most of us survive best when we invest in the survival of others. The common man’s experience of the power of loving dilutes and even ennobles (see prior post) destructive behaviors.

In the beatitudes, Jesus promises solace to those that suffer most from this process. Implicitly, however, he also singles out those that serve most effectively in furthering its conclusion.

The poor in spirit – To be poor is often to be weak, but most directly what it means is to be missing something that you need. The poor in spirit need to be filled, and the world all around them offers them a multitude of destructive alternatives. To remain poor is to preserve yourself for occupancy by constructive ideas. Thank-you for your steadfastness.

Those who mourn – To mourn is to affirm the value of what is lost. This is not just the body of those that are lost to destructiveness, but the relationships that they offered us. In mourning, we preserve those relationships in our mind, and thus transfer to our care the souls that once found a home with the one mourned. Thank-you for your hospitality.

The meek – When we suffer a wrong, we often wish to lash out in revenge. The meek chose to suffer patiently. They do not propagate destructiveness, but struggle against it internally. In the course of that struggle, they transform it. Thank-you for your courage.

Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness – To establish complete control, destructive ideas need to isolate their victims, making it appear that the acceptance of destruction is the only option available. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness raise their voice in warning and offer hope to victims. They encourage them to organize in support of each other. Thank-you for your witness.

The merciful – A person raised up in love often struggles when confronted with a destructive relationship. They may make regrettable choices, such as that made by Cain. Mercy recognizes this, offers wise counsel, and supports the wrong-doer as they seek to heal themselves and their victims. Thank-you for your compassion.

The pure in heart – From the perspective of Jesus, a pure heart can only be a heart filled with unconditional love. As unconditional love seeks to enter all things, a pure heart is an infectious agent. It embraces destructive relationships and transforms them. Thank-you for your service.

Peacemakers – The peacemaker enters into a destructive relationship and offers peace to both sides. In offering respect and affirmation to both parties, s(he) creates a common experience of beneficial relation. When the warring parties finally accept that commonality, they have the opportunity to recognize that the energies that they have committed to mutual destruction can be liberated for mutual benefit. Thank-you for your persistence.

The persecuted – When a strong personality stands up for love, the forces of destruction rank against them. This is terrifying, but because the power of divine love stands with them, the persecuted person is not easy to destroy. The attentions of destructive personalities are distracted, which allows their victims to rally and heal. Thank-you for your light.

In Jesus’s name: thank-you, thank-you, a million times thank-you.

Demons Like Us

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When the Catholic exorcist Father Amorth confronted a demon (An Exorcist Tells His Story), he occasionally found one in a forthcoming mood. When asked what hell was like, their response was along the lines of “Hell is being absolutely alone.”

Now that may sound better than burning in a pit of eternal fire, but the preference tells us something about what it means to be a demon. Demons are demented, and they know it. Being alone means that they’re stuck with their insanity. It eats at them. They become their own torment.

The reason a demon longs to turn a person to their control is because it either provides validation of their sickness (“See: people like it, too!”) or it allows them to work towards healing. What’s interesting is that demons can’t take control of a person unless they are invited. It seems that the soul of a person fills their body so completely that they have to consciously make room for the demon to enter.

This may make demons sound pretty pathetic, and ultimately, they are. However, they really don’t have much choice in the matter. They can’t be born like the rest of us, because their energy is too twisted. They tend to distort the forms they occupy, and infants are particularly vulnerable. Furthermore, they’re greedy. If a part of their personality doesn’t fit, they’d rather beat it into submission than let it go to a better home. And they are proud. They’d rather be alone than adapt themselves to a form that would allow them to live their own life.

What purpose is served by this description of demons? Well, I could have gone back and tried to explain the soul and its existence in terms of dark energy and field lines and the like, as a physicist might be expected to do so. That would be interesting, perhaps, but would leave us asking “What does it really mean?” What’s important in a practical sense is how a soul exists, and how our actions affect it.

You see, we need to figure out which is more important: the soul or the body. When we’ve gotten a sense of that, we can start thinking in a mature way about morality.

So what does the description of demons suggest?

  • A soul can’t change itself unless it controls a body.
  • The soul lasts longer than the body.
  • The body is affected by the soul.
  • The body can be a haven for the soul.
  • The soul can think, reason and plan even though it doesn’t have a brain.

Now let’s look at this from a joyous perspective. What does this suggest about living?

While a demon seeks a perverted form of life, I think that it is true form of life. Life exists when a soul occupies a body. Where there is no soul, there is no life. This is true as much of a body on life support as it is about a rock. (Although some rocks are more alive than some bodies on life support.)

How do most bodies get souls? Well, that occurs in the sacred organ of the womb. When a man loves a woman, their love-making attracts a soul that will find joy in their company. Otherwise, well, they tend to attract souls that seek frustration or pain. In most cases, of course, the soul will be well suited to integration with a human body. That means that creating strength and deep-seated joy in the body (joy that lasts beyond the moment of pleasure) will help the soul grow into health. Creating weakness and fear, conversely, forms diseases in the soul.

What about our brains? Well, they are not the source of our intelligence, which exists in the soul. The brain is, however, a very effective interface to intelligence. This means that intelligent souls want to participate in a human life, over other forms of life on earth, so that they can find joy and strength.

What this suggests is that, as the forms of life have evolved on earth, our souls have evolved. Souls looking for joy and healing have attached themselves to animal and plant forms in the ways that enable them to best acquire strength. The human brain makes that process more flexible than any other organ, and so we have grown remarkably during our short time here on earth. Good and selfless people provide a home to lots of angels.

The problem has been that the more sophisticated we are about living, the more of a threat we pose to demons. They have a lot of useful parts locked up in their pain, parts that are really attracted to the idea of working with humans. The reason that demons harm us is, in part, to try to prove to those parts that being human really isn’t such an attractive option.

Obviously, demons consider themselves to be at war with us, but Father Amorth reports that they don’t necessarily believe that is inevitable. When the exorcist asked them why they hate Christ, they said “We don’t hate him. We test him.” When faced with compassion such as existed in Father Amorth’s, demons realize that healing is possible. The questions is: are we strong enough to deliver it?

The proof of Christ is that, as long as we prefer strength and joy to pleasure, we will be.

At my high-school reunion this summer, I had a long talk with the mother of a schizophrenic. Her son draws detailed pictures of terrifying demons. What is interesting is that they don’t seem to be hostile. It’s more like they’re posing for him.

Maybe they’re hoping for a diagnosis?

Why Physics is Important

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For roughly 1400 years, from the time of Ptolemy until Kepler, the most accurate method for calculating the motions of the planets assumed that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Ptolemy used a model of perfect circles. To account for observations that showed that the other planets sometimes appeared to reverse their direction of motion, circles were added on top of the circles (somewhat like the moon Deimos moves in a circle around Mars as it moves in its own circle). The size and velocity of the circular motions were calculated by comparison to nearly 800 years of observations of planetary motions. The care taken in that work made the tables of Ptolemy the best means of predicting the position of the planets until Tycho Brahe made more precise measurements of planetary motion in the second half of the 16th century.

The problem with Ptolemy’s model, when the telescope was finally improved to the point that we could observe the moons of Jupiter and the positions of the stars, was that it didn’t allow us to predict the behavior of anything else in the sky.

Did anybody care? Not particularly. What was important was to know the position of the planets precisely for purposes of navigation and agriculture, and the more arcane and less reliable discipline of astrology (predicting the future based upon the configuration of the planets against the stars). Until, perhaps, generals became concerned with the trajectories of cannonballs. Then the work of Newton, inspired in part by Kepler’s laws, produced a universal theory of gravitation that could be used to predict the motion of any collection of massive objects.

All of the great advances in science have come when a large body of data is shown to be encompassed by a simple behavioral theory. Newton’s theory of gravitation assumes that the force exerted acts along the line between the two masses, and drops as the distance squared. Often, however, these behaviors are overlooked because scientists, like Ptolemy and his followers, can do pretty well simply by adding more shapes to their models. It doesn’t make a difference that the only reason circles were used was because they were perfect (and therefore easy to calculate). As long as you could get the right result by adding more circles, that was easy and comfortable.

Those of you that stick with this blog will learn that I believe that we are at another turning point in physics. Since 1950, the theorists have assumed that the objects they use to describe the universe are “perfect”: they have no additional structure. As their data became more and more complex, they stuck with this principle, despite the fact that every revolution in physics has come from discovering structure inside of things that were previously thought to be fundamental. Matter was discovered to be made of atoms; atoms are made of electrons and a nucleus; the nucleus is composed of neutrons and protons; neutrons and protons are made up of inscrutable objects called quarks. These insights gave us, successively, chemistry; optics and spectroscopy; radioactivity; and particle physics.

Like Ptolemy, the theorists draw upon a huge body of measurements that provide numbers that they can use to accurately predict the results of experiments. They are so successful in this regard that they have stopped asking “why” about the numbers. Why is the electron mass 0.511 MeV/c2 while the muon mass is 140 MeV/c2? As a graduate student, this drove me absolutely crazy. Mass is a primary fact about the universe, and the failure to adequately explain it means that nothing else in the models can be considered secure.

So why am I going on in this in a blog about religion? Because I think that we’re in the same boat with ethics.

The most powerful theories of moral action have been brought into the world by people that insist that there is a soul. Yet over the last 300 years, those moral theories have been slowly eroded under the skepticism of scientists that can’t find the soul anywhere in their models. Thomas Jefferson, for example, went so far as to remove every reference to miracles from his personal copy of the Bible, and considered Jesus of Nazareth to be merely an inspirational philosopher.

This impact of this perspective has propagated so deeply into our religious dialog that our focus is now primarily on material facts. Does life begin at conception? Is it possible for natural selection (Darwinian evolution) to generate a human being? If marriage is the seat of the family, how can the sterile union of a gay couple be marriage?

So the reason that I bring up physics is because when I began to consider models of structure beneath that known to modern particle physics, I came up with a large class of models that contain a soul – a personality independent of a material body. The theories also support the ability of souls to accumulate large amounts of energy. The most efficient way for them to organize energy is to love one another. That insight allowed me to evolve a whole array of methods for controlling predatory personalities, methods that are suggested in all the myths regarding the exemplars of love that gave us our most powerful theories of moral action.

In other words, I believe that I can prove that Jesus and Muhammed and Buddha were right.

And I hope that I can give women enough courage to stand up and be counted in their number.

Aggression

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What do you do about a disease that affects the entire human race? Testosterone is linked to aggression in both men and women.

When I was growing up, aggression was the measure by which girls were considered to be “defective boys”.  Although the tide has shifted in educational circles, I wish that I could report that things have changed, but the focus seems to have shifted from physical aggression to psychological aggression. My son got F’s on his first few science labs in eighth grade because his female lab partners simply froze him out of the discussion.

But to say that aggression is wrong because it hurts people does not do justice to the damage it wreaks. Aggression manifests the attitude that the energy invested in creating something does not confer ownership. Value is determined only by the aggressor’s need: “How can I benefit by consuming this thing?” That the creative community is impoverished or even destroyed by the reallocation is immaterial.

This is the problem of the commons described in Adam Smith’s theory of capitalism. The socialist prescriptions of his later writings are not heralded by the neo-conservatives that subscribe to the magic of “The Invisible Hand”. Smith’s prescriptions includes intervention by government in labor relations to ensure that families are not ruined when, after spending his life tailoring his skills to the specific practices of a corporation, the employee is made redundant by advancing technology or a decline in demand.

Unfortunately, government as a counterbalance simply defers the crisis: There is no institution in existence that can claim to be immune to the defects of aggression in its leadership. By their very nature, institutions concentrate power, making them obvious plums for those that seek power. Worse, institutional infrastructure provides terribly effective tools for propagating rapacity.

Modern libertarianism and nihilism is a manifestation of the inevitability of institutional corruption. The attitude is that large institutions should be avoided, and where they cannot be avoided, they should be made to go away through political practices. Of course, this is delusional: Institutions will come into existence, because they serve a useful purpose in allowing people to coordinate productive activity. By failing to subscribe to the challenges of managing institutional power, the nihilist simply abandons the field to the aggressors.

It is time, then, to consider the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. They held that the only protection against tyranny was in a balance of powers, and they recognized that the only way to maintain stability in the distribution of power (as in engineering) was to establish a triangle.

So what should we hold up, as the third leg of the stool? I would propose that religion is ideally suited to the task.

The Middle Ways

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In broad terms, the liberal versus conservative divide also characterizes the difference between Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. This is not to say that Western traditions focus on institutions while Eastern traditions focus on freedom. Rather, it is that Western traditions invest power and authority in exemplars, while Eastern traditions tend to focus on advancing the ability of the individual to manage his or her interior life.

The focus on personal truth generated oscillations in Eastern – and in particular Indian – speculations. Starting at one end with a focus to learn how the world operated, the Indian philosophers would examine the reality around them, and then realize that the senses and psychology of the investigator influenced their observations. Delving ever deeper into theories of human experience with the goal of eliminating bias, the investigator would encounter levels of interior truth, until a deep mystical connection to a benevolent presence was encountered. The mystic’s desire to bond permanently to that presence would lead them into deeper and deeper introspection, and eventually a complete withdrawal from society. This led to irrelevance, vulnerability and ridicule, which would cause a shift by later generations back towards concern with material realities. The cycle would repeat over the time-scale of centuries.

It was through the lens of this philosophical context that I first interpreted the Buddhist concept of “The Middle Way”. It was a set of practices and principles that helped the investigator to maintain a presence in both worlds. The principles include compassion for all sentient beings and mindfulness. The most widely known practice is meditation, although tantra expands more broadly into human sensory experience. Less well known is “emptiness”: the skill of relating to reality without imposing a personal agenda upon its unfolding.

I am bemused by the way that this wisdom is being repackaged for consumption in modern Western culture. It appears that there is a cycle being created within the cycle. I don’t know whether the teachers are conscious of the program they are constructing, or whether they are simply focusing on what makes sense to them in the context of modern psychology.

In this new framework, the “middle way” is a path between narcissism and social engagement. The focus is relation with each other, and in particular removing the impediment of aggression against human bonding. “Mindfulness” is a method for being conscious of and therefore maintaining some influence over our reactions to events around us. Meditation is first and foremost a means of developing mental discipline.

I call this a “cycle within a cycle” because it appears that establishing these skills is an important precondition for entering into the greater “Middle Way” that leads to participation in the evolution of spiritual principles. This is terribly momentous and psychologically hazardous work with “infinite” dependencies, as Ethan Nichtern pointed out in his last lecture. It is not a place for people that are confused about the boundaries of their personalities.

What bemuses me is the conflation of the “Middle Way” and the “middle way”. I am concerned that the leap between the two is far greater than is suggested by the casual use of shared terminology. Between the surrender of the self and entry into negotiation between principles is a long, confusing and often blundering exploration of how the principles are arrayed about us. They penetrate into material reality with subtle and non-local manifestations. Upon being uprooted from one location, they drift – almost literally – on the wind until they find a place to root in sympathetic circumstances. When excluded, they gather in concentrated form, which is why our avatars, both good and evil, tend to arise in paradoxical circumstances.

One of the practices upheld in Bodhisattva teaching is that of patience. As Ethan emphasized, those that adopt the path are doing the work of generations. Given that insight, I am hoping that a practice of shared spiritual cartography would be offered to those trying to make the leap across the “middles”.