THE SPIRIT OF SHAMELESS IGNORANCE

Years ago I witnessed shameless ignorance innocently modeled at a conference in medical school. A visiting professor asked questions for which everyone thought they knew the answers. It was about red blood cells. Even the first year students were laughing. I guess everyone, I included, thought these were rhetorical (theatrical) questions.

But the professor was serious. He didn’t know the answers to his questions. Many of the rest of us thought we did!

Perhaps this was nothing new for him, asking questions unabashed. Think about it though. What a resource he had in the conferences he routinely attended, of  many bright also resourceful scholarly types.

He succeeded in bringing the conference to what was for me a previously unreached and important level of arousal. Something about his manner led us to put our minds together in a kind of mutually respectful dialogue in which no one, it seems, suffered from stage fright.  Several curious, respectful people contributed to the conversation that followed.

Shared perspectives create a super or meta mind, one that brings significant discovery. When shy people venture to share of that which only they are aware, doors are opened.

Now I am thinking that what happened was his making it safe for everyone else to be vulnerable.

I think most of us can remember groups at reunions, marriages, and funerals pooling what we remember and creating something  like putting a puzzle together.

The hunger we have to recreate and realign and be happy and be sad, without prompting, arouses in the the whole being  the spirit of ignorance that over rides shame.

How we value our personal emotional experience and making it known begins when we are babies, and is determined by the responses we receive from the other human beings in our personal world. Everything we do when with another person, whether or not we are doing it in an attempt to relate to that other person, has potential consequences for shaping our mental development.

Emotional self-acceptance is a critically important part of what it takes to seek, discover, and create a universe that affords confidence, courage, judgment, passion, and curiosity.

A satisfying of curiosity might have some necessarily scary aspects, since as you satisfy your curiosity you could be leaving the prevalent culture making you different from others, in aspects that might lead to your being at least looked at askance. Taking care about what you express with whom you consider making yourself vulnerable, in these respects, will mitigate this danger.

Healthy judgment depends on learning from our own as well as others’ successes and mistakes. Emotional arousal--- mental alertness, is necessary to increase the amplitude and frequency of past as well as current reminders that point to possible or probable current and future danger. What is boring puts us to sleep, where we can dream something interesting.  

What is interesting wakes us  up.  Sometimes the difference in whether something is interesting or boring depends on whether I understand, can make sense of what I am attempting to comprehend.  Many times it is necessary to stay in a situation for a while, to understand the language or the jargon.

With mathematics you can’t just jump into the middle of something, for instance like calculus or differential equations, but first learn considerable background.

If your curiosity is sufficiently aroused and if you are confident and willing to clear a space in your life for it, you will learn the background necessary for you to grasp and understand calculus or molecular biology or how to make a nine layer cake without the top layers sliding off as you serve it. ( I gave up!)

THIS IS MY HEAVEN

THIS IS MY HEAVEN

As I was working in our back yard this morning I was as close to the earth as I might be. I had protected my skin from bugs and sun with appropriate substances.

I was wearing skinny protective elastic plastic gloves to protect my hands, knee guards, and my favorite sun protective shirt. An old pair of running shoes and my Tilley hat. The sun was barely up, but a little later than the day before.

The humidity was lower than usual and the temperature was in the low 70’s. I knew I only had a few hours until it would be too hot to be working outside. I knew it would be above 105 degrees by early afternoon.

 

I had finished planting all the pieces of sod that I had. I had my eyes on the row of Knockout Roses to the right, northwest of the back yard, but not completely. My vision was blocked by a population of nut sedge grass, crab grass, and lespedeza. It had invaded all that to my right in the yard including the roses and lantana.

There was a single zinnia plant that had been slow to recover from last year. I think it most likely came from a seed. It had a pretty violet-like bloom that turned out to be too heavy for the slim stalk holding it up. It was a little sad for me to discover that it was lying face down on the soil outside the line of bricks helping me to constrain the centipede grass.

Most of the time with my nose to the ground I remembered my kinship with the spiders, worms, grubs, and other creatures whose level I was searching to attain.

It would probably have been more economical to have just killed all the old grass with its hodge podge of crab grass, goose grass, lespedeza, and several other varieties of botanical growth that seem to be working intimately to retain as much of many spots in what they obviously consider their own real estate.

Several times I realized that I was having much more fun, learning much more about my connections with the universe, than I would have, had I killed everything possible  in that thousand square feet of what is only legally mine, cleaned it up, and replanted it all with fresh centipede sod.

My main point here is that I want to keep myself  healthy. I want to contribute to  helping my family and friends be as healthy as possible.

I like that in the past couple of years I have discovered in greater depth and breadth the fruits of humility.

I have many to thank. If I start naming them all you would perhaps become as bored as winners of Oscars often do. I will just thank them quietly to myself.

  

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in November 2008. The main plank of his platform was a plan for national health insurance. In March, 2010, The United States Congress passed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Obama was re-elected in November 2012, reaffirming the will of a majority of the American People. No amount of money or sick racial hatred would have hindered us. On June 28 2012 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of this twice-mandated decision by the American People.

It is interesting that those opposing the Affordable Care Act quite often cite the rising costs of healthcare in the United States as a result of our government’s spending on healthcare. It is true that medical care isincreasingly expensive. This has several root causes. One is that there are dramatically effective diagnostic treatments newly available, but which require longer hospitalizations and re-hospitalizations. A second root cause is that there has been nothing to prevent insurance and pharmaceutical companies from raising their prices in anticipating the implementing of the Affordable Care Act. Let us not blame the President for their having done this.Third, it is  true that inflation, with the Consumer Price Index, has increased astronomically. According to the following chart (I don’t know how reliable it is, but I have lived through most of the increase that it shows, and can vouch for it in general) 5000 dollars in 1956 would take 42,900 dollars in 2013:

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Of course we might expect quality to account for a considerable amount of the increase. If the technological achievements in medical care parallel those in technology in general, we might anticipate a lowering of these costs over the next few years. I am thinking about the cost of chips, circuit boards, computers, cameras and TVs. You can hold a 4GB SanDisk memory card in the palm of your hand now for a couple of dollars. In  1956 that might have been more memory than all the computers on earth would need. Remember the IBM cards, the many stacks of them and the room their gear required, and how little was accomplished with them that you personally had access to, or knew about? What would all that have cost in 1956 dollars?

Gravity: A review

Gravity

Gravity is a down to earth movie. Gravity holds us together. The closer we are the more powerful its influence. Gravity is sorrow. Sorrow is our grounding emotion. Avoid it and you avoid who you are. Gravity is a grave word.

Did Sir Isaac Newton invent the word? I don’t know. I do know that gravity is a humbling influence, since it can make us aware of our cosmic smallness, no matter what our height and weight on this Earth.

Small, humble, tiny do not make us inferior. When we incorporate the Universe into who we consider our selves to be--owning what we can reach by looking and sensing both outwardly and inwardly with our minds--we become a part of God. Only by claiming our own infinite smallness might we do so.

A sick culture encourages us, successfully to believe that sad is bad. Sad is good because its stimulus, the pain of loss, is also the ground for joy.

A sick culture makes us think that if we sparkle we are more valuable.

I live very close to the cemetery in more ways than one. Better able to deal with mortality if I accept that I am mortal.

When you go to see Gravity, consider crying with Sandra Bullock's character, Dr. Ryan Stone, and have empathy for her and your own situation.

Don't miss the opportunity to have a good cry. Being grounded in grief is absolutely necessary for a substance-free sense of exhilaration. I am happier this morning that the Braves won last night than I would have been had I choked back my sorrow that they lost night before last.

You will be glad you wallowed in this movie, getting it all over you and letting it sink in. You will walk out healthier than when you walked in.

Ray L. Johnson

I Am One of the Dots: An Ecological Perspective of Self

Wednesday July 18, 2012 5:40 am

How am I myself plus my circumstance?  If this plus were literally a plus I would not have comprehended the math, for it, I, the essence of I, am not only who is centered in me, but also the ever shifting, gliding, and complex entity with all the delightful, scary and horrifying possibilities and realizings with whom I am or have been bringing, or might in the future, meet and bring to life inside my being. 

How bring what to life? There is a brick in the wall outside our back door.  I am connecting that brick with an actual person who put that brick there and secured it with mortar, many years ago. His having put the brick there is the extent of my knowing the big Who of him, but I do indeed know some other facts about him.  Or was she a Her?  Probably a he, because women didn’t do that kind of work many years ago, and Joy and I haven’t even had women do any work on the outsides of the house. I know that the person was breathing, was beating his heart, pumping his blood with it, and he was filtering his blood with his kidneys, helping to clean his blood.  I could go on and on about what is true and what could come to mind about him.  He was once a baby thumping inside his mother.  I know that he and I have this in common. I could even make up a fictional story about him, having to do with his philosophy of life at age five. And I am standing on the grass that is growing beneath my feet.  Grass that some actual person planted there.  These knowings are developing in me, curious in more ways than one. I am creating and sharing with you these limited but expansible bits of connecting with my mind and its searching spirit.  And I find myself asking how many put how many bricks where, and did they know that I would be sitting here imagining, in a limited way, that years after the fact I would have them in my heart, appreciating and enjoying imagining that they were doing it for me?  That is just one brick that didn’t just shazam appear in the mason’s hand.  Someone made the brick from what ever bricks are made.  How many of the neighboring bricks were made by how many people? Are some of them still living?  My point is that there is life and its spirit in these imaginings. There is life and spirit in that brick and all the others, from countless angles! They are particular examples, possibly boring to some, appreciated and enjoyed by others, that I am happening upon through what I am sharing with you, and incidentally, with myself!

I don’t stop with my skin.  That is my main point. And what is my meta-point, the point of my point? What is the big deal about my I and my me not stopping with my skin? There is life in the connections I make. Even the ones I just imagine. They are, to say the least, a rehearsing for making actual ongoing and more deeply nurturing, healthy connections with you, and my family, including ancestors and strangers and a praying mantis clinging to our outside rear view mirror. And the family of armadillos that saunter across the street in the pre-dawn, dead set on fishing for grubs in the pine straw bordering the grass in our back yard. And the Tom Hanks character making do with Wilson: Is that a healthy connection he is making with the bloody He and the Him of that volleyball?

When I realize the possibilities that open up to me with making my circumstance come alive, in how it and I interact and reverberate, I have no longer any need to imagine myself better or worse than anyone else. I don’t need to rise in a hierarchy. I don’t have to achieve anything in order to be acceptable to myself.  When I interact with you my essential sense of who I am is not at stake. If our connecting is healthy, then both of us are nurtured by it. Neither of us is cast away.

Moreover, we might be the little boy who was the first to share his loaf and fish, use our music to breech and help take down the walls of hatred of Jericho, bring the Lazarus back to life in our healthy dialogue of shared memories, and not have to worry about the wine running low at the wedding feast.

Being in the Cemetery at Two O'Clock PM

I was running in the cemetery this afternoon, was at my parents' and my mother's parents' graves a little before two P.M. I let my attention focus on my breathing, but my mind wandered to why I was there this time. It was to celebrate my humanity, my biology even, with my Collective Conscious Breath at two o'clock. Warm and slightly cloudy.  I always let my imagination take over while in that sacred spot.  I let them know why I was there, what the Collective Conscious Breath is about.  I have the idea that a significant part of their Heavens are in me, in my mind, in whatever goodness they might have instilled in me. Not only in me,but also in everyone they have loved. I included them in that breath. I could imagine the happy sounds of their breathing.  I had to remind my grandmother not to hyperventilate. I endowed the event with Holiness.  I imagine myself with the authority to do just that!

Collective Conscious Breath Event

My friend Shawn Puller had an extremely significant experiencing of a particular idea a few days ago:  The Collective Conscious Breath. You may find understanding of his inspiration at his Facebook page.  You might plan to participate; moreover you might decide to spread it around, even all over the world if you have access to contacts abroad!

What comes to my mind about the Collective Conscious Breath? The word spirit and the words respire, admire, aspire, conspire and inspire spring from the same root, what Carl Gustav Jung called the rhizome of the 1 million year old collective unconscious, which he spent most of his life making us conscious of the importance of making conscious. It is still a work in progress, both the concept and the grasping of it. 

The Collective Conscious Breath is not only a symbol; it is an actual collective activity which can spark a further process: not only an end in itself, but also a means toward the end of an animated collective loving and healthy universal mind, a Collective Spirit.

R. W. Emerson in his essay entitled Love said:

“For it is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.”

So, might we have other thoughts as we breathe together, maybe even sneak in another breath?  I plan to start my mindfulness of my breath a couple of minutes or longer before 2:00 pm on the 26^th of January, and treat each breath as though it is the  breath we are all anticipating! . The idea that we are breathing together will influence and morph my breathing into an interval of mindfulness meditation, which I already do on a regular basis. Even in anticipation I can enjoy this coming event, the joy of being as a part of something deeply meaningful and infinitely larger than I am, The Mysterium Tremendum of Rudolph Otto.

Even if we don’t capture the heart of everyone the first go round, word of mouth will ensure that we will before long touch the strong possibility of an all inclusive epidemic of trust, respect, goodwill, intimacy and healthy judgment.