After I took some time in December to visit with friends, family, and wade into some unexplored spiritual waters, the year Two Thousand and Eight on the Gregorian calendar finished itself in short order.

Two Thousand and Nine jumped in quick-like, much akin to a popped clutch, and we’re almost already one twelfth of the way through it. I can’t tell if time is moving quickly or slowly but it seems to be mattering less and less to me.

On the other hand, for yours truly there is something that is mattering more and more. Casual observers will note the productivity and posting levels on this blog have been quite slack. They seem to be suffering from a terrible drought and sadly things around here have really withered on the vine (and frankly I’ve never been a big fan of raisins). So in the interest of carrying the botanical metaphor too far, let’s splash some droplets of water on our thirsty mental roots and see if anything perks up.

And so…

Here’s an interesting video on the concept of the “multiverse” courtesy of Google and the BBC.

“Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe” –Alan Watts

I was planning on incorporating this video into a blog filled with my observations but instead I think I’ll let it speak for itself:

 “In fact, one thing that I have noticed . . . is that all of these conspiracy theories depend on the perpetrators being endlessly clever. I think you’ll find the facts also work if you assume everyone is endlessly stupid.”  -attributed to Brian E. Moore

700 Billion Dollar Bail Out.  WaMu eaten (only the white meat) by JP Morgan.  Lehman Brothers.  AIG.  As US intelligence officers and offices would say there’s currently a lot of dire “chatter” on the US’s financial front.

Just about the time the media and bloggosphere began running around with themselves on fire like a gasoline doused pig, Mike Jones and JoeyB and I had various brief conversations about the possibility of having a global depression resulting from the latest in the series real and potential subtractions in the US Treasury’s checking account.  We pondered what this kind of depression might mean, and what it might look like.

Always willing to entertain a conspiracy, we considered if it was intentional.  Another step in the NWO/ Illuminati/Free Mason plan, perhaps?  Was it a way to further debase the currency and citizen confidence to implement the dreaded Amero?

What I like about entertaining conspiracy theories is that doing so opens the door to a form of critical thinking that can be exceptionally useful to cerebral development as well as increasing one’s odds of survival.  In a way, they exercise that part of our brain that we are often content to allow to wither and atrophy into a flaccid mental appendage – an appendage whose only heavy lifting consists of gaping wide to consume what others are motivated to feed us.  It’s a disturbing notion for one to envision if they have a vivid imagination and they extend the imagery to its metaphorical ends.

On the other hand, the consumption of conspiracy theories can contribute to mental impotence just as easily as it encourages intellectual vitality.  Balancing between the two seems to require high degrees of vigilance and discipline.

“Regard it as a Conspiracy only if you enjoy living in a script where you are one of the underdogs or victims.” –Robert Anton Wilson

I invite you to jump up a dimension and look at this subject from a meta perspective for a moment.

As an evolutionary device we developed memory and time perception to help us make effective use of understanding cause and effect.  This understanding is plugged into a feedback loop that enforces a perception of linear time.  From social skills emerges society and culture (both of which reinforce each other) which helped with, among other things, tribal coherence.  Over the last ~50,000 years, as we moved from a tribal existence to globalization, extending the social group has complexified matters for us with additional inputs and abstractions, but the underlying scaffolding on how we interact with our environment is still being used.

In the West, this evolving tribal coherence has gifted us with a culture steeped in Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam); it is embedded in our individual and cultural psyche.  If you were brought up from the age of 0 to 7 in the West, even if you’re not a Jew, Christian, or Muslim, Western culture marinates you in conspiracy mythology thanks to the Abrahamic roots we share here in the United States.

Right there in black and white it is all about good versus evil, chaos versus order, sin versus salvation…Satan versus God.  Satan, if you’ll remember, is the ultimate conspirator who’s always doing things to undermine God’s will.  This archetypal myth extends itself in very real ways as soon as we begin identifying with our family at the core and country at the edge.  Indeed, I use the term “myth” advisedly – in the spirit of Joseph Campbell and Carl G. Jung.  In the US, conspiracy is a part of our cultural programming and heritage.

Whenever “someone” is out to get us (the liberals, subversives, the government, aliens, the aliens who control the subversive liberal government corporations) the victim/underdog template gets fired up, applied, and then the game plays out.  And it is a game - a game in the sense of game theory.

“If you don’t contradict yourself, your position isn’t complex enough.” –Terrence McKenna

Nevertheless, all that said, I do believe there are forces out there resulting from the intention to control, subjugate, and or manipulate in the quest for power.  My opinion is that reality is much more complex than we can comprehend and that conspiracy theories don’t go broad, far, and/or deep enough.

So let’s assume that your conspiracy of choice is in fact a “real” and clear and present danger.  You are up against an opponent who has more knowledge, resources, and power.

So what to do?  I’d like to submit the first step to confounding conspirators is to stop playing the game.  Once you get out of power dynamics (top v bottom) you’re free to move laterally and even three-dimensionally.  Break the script and the old rules stop applying.  James Carse wrote required reading and rereading for all adults over the age of 7 called Finite and Infinite Games.  His book is the bible for monkey-working conspiracies and really does a fantastic job of synthesizing fluid Eastern thinking into an easily digestible form for linear/binary Western minds .  Through reading Dr. Carse’s book, you’ll discover that breaking a conspiracy isn’t really the correct way to think about it.  Instead, it is more like allowing the conspiracy to defeat itself.  Let Chaos be your ally (more on this in a later blog).

A short excerpt with conspiracy “defense” in mind (the full excerpt here) :

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.  There is no game, finite or infinite, unless the players freely agree to play it. No one can play who is forced to play. This is an invariable principle of all play. Whoever must play, cannot play. If a finite game is to be won by someone, it must come to a definitive end. It will come to an end when someone has won. Winning is determined by agreement of the players.

Other than the principle of voluntarism, infinite games are the opposite of finite games in every way. Infinite games have no spatial, temporal, or numerical boundaries, and no winners or rankings. Finite games are externally defined; infinite games are internally defined. The time of an infinite game is determined in the game itself.

The rules of a finite game are predetermined and fixed. The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play, to avoid a finite outcome. The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning and to bring as many persons as possible into the play.

To be playful is not to act as if nothing of consequence will happen. When we are playful with each other we relate as free persons; everything that happens is of consequence. In fact, it is being serious that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is the dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion; to be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself

Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as determining the present/future, they have no way of knowing what has begun in the past. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning. Inasmuch as the present/future is always surprising, the past is always changing.

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees that is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads to a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition. Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.

My Favorite part:

Rather than assessing the power or weakness of earlier play, infinite players look forward toward ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpretation. Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own. Where the finite player plays to be powerful, the infinite player plays with strength.2 A powerful person is one who brings the past to an outcome, settling all its unresolved issues. A strong person is one who carries the past into the future, showing that none of its issues is capable of resolution. Power is concerned with what has already happened, strength with what has yet to happen.

Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.

I contend that by understanding the nature of play in this context, we avoid the trap of the victim script.  Once that albatross is shed, a wide spectrum of options and world views become available to us.

A note on the word culture.  Carse and I use the term culture a bit differently.  He views society as a species of culture that is finite.  I use the term culture to represent the artifacts that are created by a society.  I think my use needs revising - but I figured I’d note it in case you picked up the book and noticed discrepancies between our uses.

For further inoculation here’s a video of Carse in action:

During some research for my next blog post I came across a book that I was evidently not ready for until now (thank you for posting Dedroidify).  Sweet Synchronicity bless her heart.

The book is called:
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are By Alan Watts

It ranks up there with Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising - and yet somehow came out in 1966.  My parents grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  I’m baffled as to why didn’t they tell me about all this cool stuff.

Here’s a sample:

“The Book I am thinking about would not be religious in the usual sense, but it would have to discuss many things with which religions have been concerned - the univers and man’s place in it, the mysterious center of experience which we call ‘I myself,’ the problems of life and love, pain and death, and the whole question of whether existence has meaning in any sense of the word.  For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at on end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing and in the long run wears them out.  So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other.  At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow.  As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus engery by wiggling in complicated patters, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering togetehr in groups to fight with other groups.  In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms.  There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube.  All this seems marvelously futile, and yet when you begin to think about it it begins to be more marvelous than futile.  Indeed, it seems extremely odd.
     “It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd - uncanny and highly improbably.  G.K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros, or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t.  This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense  wondering about the sense of things.  Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of different tube-speices playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of ‘doing it’ from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?”

 Here’s another sample:

“For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.  There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy.  When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond.  you will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, ‘Now, I’ve arrived!’  Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.”

 Alan Watts: A new hero of mine.

There’s a new field of psychology that is emerging that appears to be rediscovering what has been taught by larger-than-life spiritual philosophers thousands of years prior.  It’s being presented at the University of Pennsylvania by a man named Dr. Martin Seligman.

Dr. Seligman has done a great deal of work in learned helplessness (a subject of great interest that describes a condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to act or behave helpless in a particular situation, even when it has the power to change its unpleasant or even harmful circumstance).  More recently, however, Dr. Seligman is working on something called Positive Psychology – which studies strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.

In his website’s own words:

Dr. Seligman’s main mission has been the promotion of the field of Positive Psychology. This discipline includes the study of positive emotion, positive character traits, and positive institutions. Dr. Seligman is now turning his attention to training Positive Psychologists, individuals whose practice will make the world a happier place, parallel to the way clinical psychologists have made the world a less unhappy place.

I watched a presentation of his at the TED conference and once it settled into a place of comfort, some dots began connecting for me.

Here’s his talk (and a link incase the embedded feed doesn’t work):

The key points I want to focus on are how he defined three types of positive living.  From a Western culture perspective, they increase in depth and fulfilment as you go down the line.  They are:

1. A Pleasurable Life
2. A Engaged Life
3. A Meaningful Life

Most of us in the US seek a distorted form of the Pleasurable Life.  Before the distortion this used to be the 1950’s version of the American dream: when family values were values instead of the punchline in some campaign slogan.  We’ve diviated even from the most surface level of happiness as we’ve become more materialistic - primed by our friends in advertising.  More mature cultures generally encourage family and friends as the superior source of “juice” for the Pleasurable Life.

After I saw this video I spoke with my brother about the three types of life I’d seen discussed in the Seligman video.  He paused momentarily and then suggested that most Buddhists are seeing living in-the-now as a form of amplified detachment; done in an effort to eliminate suffering.

Interesting.  Maybe these “happy lifes” warrant some closer consideration…

A Pleasurable Life – This state is a place where you are having or seeking as many pleasures as possible.  You are also learning how to amplify these pleasures.  This is partially heritable and it also is can be fleeting because it’s kind of like acclimating to a drug – you need more to feel the same.  While most of us target the pleasurable life, those who are “successful” at this level, are so because they have emphasized the creation of a broad and probably deep social network.

An Engaged Life –This is a form of intense concentration that results in a sensation of flow.  You become unaware of emotion, effort, and time.  It might even be considered the opposite of the pleasurable life, if there is such a thing as “opposite”, because in a pleasurable life you are seeking to experience stimulation and in the engaged life you are using specific kinds of stimulation to seek a form of detachment.

As my brother duly noted, there is a heavy emphasis on this type of life when you research Buddhism.  Buddhism is oriented toward the realization that suffering exists (1st Noble Truth), it is caused by ignorance/attachment (2nd Noble Truth), that the cessation of suffering is attainable (3rd Noble Truth) and that in order to remove suffering you follow the 8 fold path (4th Noble Truth).  The 8 fold path is a list of specific steps you can use to attain enlightenment: generally a form of detachment/engagement existing with the adherent experiencing an absence of suffering (or anything really).

Buddhists are masters at maintaining because they become experts in manipulating their attention through their consistent practice of meditation and adherence to the 8 fold path.  More fulfilling than seeking the Pleasurable Life, it requires attentive focus.

A Meaningful Life – Using your strengths in the service of something larger than you are - the hallmark of the meaningful life.  Christianity more-or-less points its compass here as its magnetic north.  With a modicum of study, it becomes clear that Jesus is teaching people to pursue something larger than themselves – with a heavy emphasis on compassion. 

It is true that most religions provide this sense of something-greater-than-oneself, but where the mark is missed is in connecting with purpose - religions fall into the trap of bequeathing purpose when instead an individual really needs to uncover it on their own.  Purpose is a cornerstone here and according to Dr. Seligman is one of the most potent ways to get fulfilment is to operate altruistically towards your fellow man.

But wait…there’s MORE!

There is another spiritual philosophy that does a beautiful job of incorporating and balancing all three types of happy-living.  It’s called Hinduism.  Like most religio-fied philosophies there’s some wayward misdirection woven into it, but when you synthesize it to its core – it holds up unsurprisingly well.  I say unsurprisingly because the founding fathers and mothers of Hinduism, the Vedics, have been kicking around and refining these concepts for 7,000 years (by some accounts).

For comparison:

• Judaism clocks in around 3,000 years.
• Buddhism ~2,600 years
• Christianity ~2,100 years
• Islam ~1,600 years
• Mormonism ~250 years
• Scientology ~55 years

It is interesting to note that when you study Hinduism (the 3rd most populous religion at 1 billion people), that it has extensive instructions for a path to an enlightened and spiritual life - as well as a pleasurable, engaged, and meaningful life.  From what I’ve studied so far, the elements of Hinduism seem highly practical (like Buddhism) and heavily metaphorical (like the New and Old Testaments in Christianity).

Is it the “best” philosophy?  I don’t know.  I just bring it up because it’s one that Western folks know little about (Buddhism is making some progress in the hearts and minds).

All religions are complex and complicated constructs; being neither good nor bad but what we make of them.  They are the result of centuries of billions of souls adding their own twists and interpretations as they saw things or wanted to see things; practice mixing with rituals folding into parables blending from history.

What is clear from Seligman’s work, is that the seeds where the religions grew from demonstrate the intent to provide adherents with a purposeful and meaningful life.  The early spiritual explorers must have gotten happiness from meaning, and meaning from finding happiness.

I find two things satisfyingly ironic about the search for the meaning of life:

• We can’t truly discover meaning until our life is over (we create meaning until the very end)
• Once our own life IS over, we don’t get to decide what its meaning is anymore…others get to do that for us

That said, I am happy to see Dr. Seligman’s Positive Psychology coming full circle in the process of rediscovering what’s old and making it new again.  It is a good start if discovering meaning has previously been obscured in the esoteric.