Object/Subject

I'd like to start out with something I said yesterday in Buhdy's essay.

If we are going to put an end to the MICMC, it means finding another way to structure our lives and our relationships. It means getting rid of greed/power over/hierarchy. And I think we are just in the infancy stages of learning what the alternatives might be. We have a lot of work to do in our own lives to recreate the cultural myths and memes that have predominately served the interests of the MICMC.

To me, one of the "memes" that needs to be identified and challenged is the tendency to "objectify" others. Once we have created distance from someone's humanity and given them a label, its easy to dismiss them. It also leaves the door open for hatred and violence. We've all recognized this use of objectification in a time of war. In order to kill someone up close and personal, its easier if you think of them as a kraut, gook, or raghead.

I'll never forget reading "All Quiet on the Western Front" and coming across this scene. Its a powerful example of an object - the enemy - becoming a "subject" in the heat of the battle.



But my concerns about objectification in our culture go beyond its ability to justify war. Certainly racism and sexism could not exist without the distance provided by making someone an object rather than a human being. And the very notion that capitalism has become our god in this culture has too often reduced human beings to nothing more than producers and consumers.

But I'd like to give you an example of this struggle in my own life and the questions it raises for me. I've been the Director of a non-profit organization for 17 years. Its pretty small - there are only about 25 of us all together who work here. In the last 7-8 years, I've felt pretty good about my success in figuring out how to do this job (Yeah, that means it took me almost 10 to get there. I'm a slow learner). Many have questioned when I'm going to move on to the next challenge and that usually means they think I should take a similar job with a larger organization. There's a whole message there about our assumption that we all should be "moving up" all the time, but that's not my point right now.

One of the reasons I have chosen to stay in the same job is that I don't know if its possible to work in a large organization and still embrace the mission and staff with a sense of the subjective. At what point do those you serve and those you work with become objects rather than human beings? I see this happen all the time with my counterparts in large organizations. Perhaps its not inevitable, but fighting the tendency would take a lot of focus.

Overall, I think our culture has swung into a huge embrace of objectification. I even see it in the staff I work with. Some of them can be prone to see a client as a "problem to be solved" rather than a human being to be engaged. It is in that kind of practice that too many of our social and human services have failed to have an impact. It sometimes leads to people not having their real need addressed and at other times to the kind of dependency that social services are rightly criticized for developing.

I have lots of questions about how subjectivity can be maintained with the scale of systems we've developed in our world, especially in our government, schools, and social services. It seems to me that the bigger these systems get, the more there is a complete lack of subjectivity until ultimately its gone from the system altogether. And the more people are treated as objects, the more easily they loose their humanity and can be dismissed. It can me messy and complicated to treat someone as the individual that subjectivity demands, but if we are going to be effective in addressing the needs of people, we've got to figure that out, don't we?

Wondering

I've never been able to separate my spiritual quest from the political. And I expect that both will be journeys that will take up my lifetime.

I often find myself at odds with those who seek only a political solution. That usually means playing the same old game in the same old way when I'd rather be learning to fly.



On the other hand, those involved in a spiritual quest can be so inwardly focused that their journey doesn't seem to have any real impact on the world around them. I once heard someone describe his wife's experience at a spiritual retreat this way, "She's fallen in love with humanity, but she doesn't like anyone in particular."

In their book, The Great Cosmic Mother, Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor sum it up this way:

In this world, at this point, no political revolution is sustainable if it is not also a spiritual revolution - a complete ontological birth of new beings out of old. Equally, no spiritual activity deserves respect if it is not at the same time a politically responsible, ie, responsive, activity.

Here is how Robert Frost describes a coming together:

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

from Two Tramps in Mud Time

Now you all know why I've found a blogging home at Docudharma. As RiaD so wonderfully captured in her essay Pair o' dig 'em, there is a synergy happening among and between us that is changing me. I don't know where this journey ends, but I see the path laying out in front of us as we go.

Its about a coming together...of people...the political, the spiritual, the philosophical, the historical, the intellectual, the emotional, the artistic, the personal, and yes, even the sexual. We've been carved up and isolated for so long - for literally thousands of years. It will take some time to heal those wounds. I just hope we can be patient in this process of putting it all back together. We might not have all the answers, but at least we're coming together to ask the questions.

Here's a passage from Alice Walker's book "The Color Purple" that I love. Its a conversation that takes place between Celie and Mr.___ towards the end of the book when they have reconciled as friends:

Anyhow, he say, you know how it is. You ast yourself one question, it will lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love. Why us suffer. Why us black. Why us men and women. Where do children really come from. It didn't take long to realize I didn't hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don't mean nothing if you don't ast why you here, period.

So what you think? I ast.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.

The water separating us from each other, ourselves and the answers to our questions does sometimes feel wide. But...

Prisoner of Words

It took me over 30 years to learn to speak with my own voice. Before that time, I did what others thought I should do and said what others thought I should say. This poem by Marge Piercy captures what that feels like:

Unlearning to not speak

Blizzards of paper
in slow motion
sift through her.
In nightmares she suddenly recalls
a class she signed up for
but forgot to attend.
Now its too late.
Now it is time for finals;
losers will be shot.
Phrases of men who lectured her
drift and rustle in piles:
Why don't you speak up?
Why are you shouting?
You have the wrong answer,
wrong line, wrong face.
They tell her she is womb-man,
babymachine, mirror image, toy,
earth mother and penis-poor,
a dish of synthetic icecream
rapidly melting.
She grunts to a halt.
She must learn again to speak
starting with I
staring with We
starting as the infant does
with her own true hunger
and pleasure
and rage.

By learning to trust myself, I finally began to speak my own truth, however fumbling it may be at times. And I learned what a fierce and wonderful thing my own life can be. Now I've made a pact with myself that no one will ever shut me up again. This causes its own challenges at times, but I'll take it over silence any day.

The Opening of Eyes
by David Whyte

That day I saw beneath dark clouds
The passing light over the water
And I heard the voice of the world speak out.
I knew then as I have before
Life is no passing memory of what has been
Nor the remaining pages of a great book
Waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
Seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years of secret conversing
Speaking out loud in the clear air.

Who are you?

I have often thought that most political disagreements break down along the lines of two slogans:

If you're conservative you believe that everyone lifts themselves up by their own bootstraps.

If you're liberal you believe that a rising tide lifts all boats.

We who are liberal tend to look at our collective responsibility to one another and cannot separate our sorrows, successes, failures and joys from those of others. I'd like to take a deeper look at this notion, something that was prompted by an essay written by Edger this week titled This Is Me in which he quoted Alan Watts:

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.

The idea that we are "isolated egos inside bags of skin" is something that has permeated our culture so deeply it becomes manifest in almost every facet of our lives. I am reminded of a book I read not too long ago that challenged this kind of thinking and left me forever uncomfortable with the notion of isolation. The book is No Boundary by Ken Wilber.

In the first chapter titled "Who am I," Wilbur asks us to think about how we define the difference between "me" and "not me." Where do we draw that boundary? Seems like an easy question to answer doesn't it? But Wilber shows the complications involved as he walks us through the various "self" boundaries we have created.

The first place most people draw the boundary is the one Watt's referred to - our bodies. The line between myself and the rest of the world is drawn by my skin. But Wilbur asks the following question:

Most individuals feel that they have a body, as if they owned or possessed it much as they would a car, a house, or any other object. Under these circumstances, the body seems not so much "me" as "mine," and what is "mine," by definition, lies outside the self/not-self boundary.

This drives the question inward then to a postulation that the boundary of "me/not me" lies between the body and the mind or ego. This form of disembodied self is not as obvious to us all, but does play havoc with our sense of self. So many of the breakdowns between medicine and psychology are based on this unnatural boundary that we so often draw. And, as Wilbur says,

The boundary is drawn between the mind and the body, and the person identifies squarely with the former. He even comes to feel that he lives in his head, as if he were a miniature person in his skull, giving directions and commands to his body, which may or may not obey.

But psychologically, there is yet another boundary that is often drawn even more narrowly in the attempt to answer the question "Who am I?" That is the boundary between the part of our mind/ego that we are willing to accept, and the part that is often called the "shadow." We want to wall off from consideration those parts of ourselves that are unacceptable and only embrace the good in our self-definition. This boundary causes reactions like repression and projection of the negative onto others; something often seen in the authoritarian personality.

Now it becomes clear why Wilbur titled his book "No Boundary." His prescription is to get rid of the boundaries and find the "transpersonal self," which he describes this way:

As the individual begins to reflect on her life through the eyes of the archetypes and mythological images common to humankind, her awareness may begin to shift to a more universal perspective. She is looking at herself not through her own eyes, which are in some ways prejudiced, but through the eyes of the collective human spirit - a different view indeed! She is no longer exclusively preoccupied with her own personal vantage point. In fact, if this process quickens correctly, her identity, her very self, expands qualitatively to these more or less global dimensions, and her soul becomes saturated with depth.

I am way too much of an amateur to go much farther with all this. But somehow I feel that this distinction is critical for us to begin to grasp and that our ability to do so would revolutionize how we treat each other and the planet. Our feelings of loneliness and isolation are fed by these false boundaries we create for ourselves. And that, in turn fuels the fear, greed, and addiction that keeps people so blinded and numb to what is happening in our country and in the world.

So I'll leave you with Wilbur's question, "Who are you?"

One Good Word

Loaves and Fishes
By David Whyte

This is not
The age of information.

This is not
the age of information.

Forget the news,
and the radio
and the blurred screen.

This is the time
of loaves
and fishes.

People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.

I suppose you can call a poem "great" when it rings in your head asking questions months after you've read it. That's why I think this is a great poem. I can't really be sure that I know exactly what Whyte meant, but these words regularly challenge one of the major struggles going on in my life these days.

Like so many of us, I want to change the world. My problem is, no one elected or appointed me "Queen of the Universe," so I'm having a little trouble getting that done.

But then, there is this quiet and persistent voice inside saying, "Slow down and pay attention to the people right in front of you." I think that one of the things Whyte is saying is that we need each other more than we need information. Its the person to person connection Daniel Berrigan talks about:

Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for the meeting of your eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to loose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.

Something powerful happens in the "meeting of the eyes" in this sharing of the word or bread. It is not just the bread or the word that is being exchanged. This human to human connection is something we all need to survive - its hard-wired into us. It feeds our souls the same way that food feeds our bodies. And like food, the more nutritious the connection, the healthier we become.

People are indeed hungry for that human connection and are all too often trying to feed it with the "fast food" of mindless consumption and superficial pablum (ie, Brittany Spears' travails). As the hunger mounts, the fear sets in and people become susceptible to manipulation and propaganda. And we who are trying to change things too often offer them information and data. These are worthwhile and important, but they don't assuage the fear or fill the void left by the hunger.

There's no way to "mass media" this kind of connection. It happens person-to-person and that means it takes patience and persistence. But eventually I think the ripples will start being felt exponentially.



Its hard to know every day that there is so much wrong with the world and feel like I have so little to contribute to change things. But I think about Nelson Mandela spending those 27 years in jail while his brothers and sisters died fighting apartheid and oppression. I've read that while in prison, Mandela didn't just rail against the injustice. He reached out to those around him, both prisoners and guards, and touched their souls with his presence and wisdom. He knew they were hungry, and he realized the radical notion that "one good word is bread for a thousand."

Criminalizing Kids

We often talk about a possible future of gestapo-like tactics coming to our shores if things don't change - and quickly. I share those fears and feel the mounting fascism that fuels them.

But today I'm thinking about places in the US where this fear has already come true. I hope everyone is aware of places like T. Don Hutto: America's Family Prison in Texas and the increasing number of privatized prisons being used to house thousands of detained immigrants.

And then, there's the fact that, according to Children's Defense Fund, black boys have a one in three lifetime risk of going to jail, and Latino boys a one in six lifetime risk of the same fate. Of course, for many of these young ones, getting to jail would be better than becoming a victim of the violence they live with every day on the streets. As Bob Herbert pointed out last year, 34 children were killed on the streets of Chicago in less than a year.

So often these days, we live by anecdote. But a situation last week brought much of this home to me. Did you hear about 5 year old Dennis Rivera who was handcuffed by police and taken to a psych ward for having a tantrum in kindergarten? I heard about this particular incident at Jack and Jill Politics where dnA had this to say:

This problem escapes national attention because Americans are conditioned to rationalize people of color as being meant for prison from birth, and therefore there's little outrage over treating a five year old child like a criminal if he or she is black or Latino.

The children most likely to attend a school where they can be treated like a criminal in a prison rather than a student in a school tend to be poorer and not white.

Part of this is that the school system has given up on these kids, and these schools often end up not being schools but overcrowded warehouses for human beings the city doesn't want to deal with. The appearance of order in the city's schools takes precedent over educating its students.

They don't want to teach these kids. They just want to stick them somewhere they can control (police?) them until they turn 18 or drop out, whichever comes first.

I can feel dnA's anger in this post. We all know that there are good people doing great things in some of these schools. But overall based on my experience, I think these words speak loudly and truthfully to what is happening to our African American and Latino kids in urban areas. Just as many of us needed to be awakened to the prevalence of racial profiling by law enforcement and the dangers of "driving while black," I think we now need to recognize that thousands of children every day in our urban public schools, libraries, parks and streets are being criminalized for "growing up black/brown" and doing things that previously would have resulted in detention at school and/or grounding by our parents.

Unfortunately we have grown accustomed to the idea of armed police officers and metal detectors in our schools. And I recently wrote about this kind of thing being imported to our public libraries as well. One of the bi-products of these choices we're making out of fear is that we increasingly criminalize the behaviors of our children (especially those of color) and fuel the Cradle to Prison Pipeline that the Children's Defense Fund is talking about.

From what I have seen, the problem with changing these circumstances is that the parents of these children do not have a voice in our systems. Some of that is due to things like addiction and mental illness. But a lot of it is also the result of a complete lack of trust that any of us will listen or that anything better can happen. We've recently been talking to staff at our local office of the Children's Defense Fund. The national office that published the report I linked to above is trying to work with local chapters to raise awareness about this problem and mobilize coalitions to get busy trying to change things. If you'd like to get involved, I'd suggest you call the CFD office nearest you.

Enough

Many of you might have already seen the video by Annie Leonard titled The Story of Stuff. If not, I highly recommend it (you can watch the whole thing at the link). She walks us through the extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal of stuff and what its doing to our world in a way that is both informative and engaging. But I'd like to focus on the stage of consumption.



The quote from Victor Lebow really grabbed me:

Our enormously productive economy...demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and using of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption...we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.

It seems that Lebow may have been being more descriptive that prescriptive with that statement, but in either case, I think his words hold true for our culture today. He also hints at the idea that the consumer addiction that is destroying our lives and the planet will not be challenged until we understand its roots in our spiritual and ego satisfactions.

A couple of years ago I read a book that had a profound impact on me. Its by Lynne Twist and is titled The Soul of Money. The basis of the book is a contrast between the mind-sets of scarcity and sufficiency.

Here's how Twist talks about scarcity:

Whether we live in resource-poor circumstances or resource-rich ones, even if we're loaded with more money or goods or everything you could possibly dream of wanting or needing, we live with scarcity as an underlying assumption. It is an unquestioned, sometimes even unspoken, defining condition of life. It is not even that we necessarily experience a lack of something, but that scarcity as a chronic sense of inadequacy about life becomes the very place from which we think and act and live in the world. It shapes our deepest sense of ourselves, and becomes the lens through which we experience life...

This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life, and it is deeply embedded in our relationship with money. In the mind-set of scarcity, our relationship with money is an expression of fear; a fear that drives us in an endless and unfulfilling chase for more, or into compromises that promise a way out of the chase or discomfort around money. In the chase or in the compromises we break from our wholeness and natural integrity. We abandon our soul and grow more and more distanced from our core values and highest commitments. We find ourselves trapped in a cycle of disconnection and dissatisfaction.

In contrast, here are some of Twist's words about sufficiency:

We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mind-set of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don't mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn't two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn't a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn't an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, and a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough...

When we live in the context of sufficiency, we find a natural freedom and integrity. We engage in life from a sense of our own wholeness rather than a desperate longing to be complete...

When we let go of the chase for more, and consciously examine and experience the resources we already have, we discover our resources are deeper than we knew or imagined.

emphasis mine

In the context of sufficiency, we find beautiful music playing just one flight down.

There in this place
where your arms unfold
here at last
you see your ancient face
now you know
now you know.

And when we find that music, we also find compassion and generosity. Here's Twist again:

The human hand must be open to receive, but also to give and to touch. A human heart must also open to receive as well as to give and touch another heart. That openness and reciprocation, that image of the open hand and heart, connects us not just to others, but to the feeling of fullness and sufficiency in ourselves.