Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Metacognition and faith

I stumbled across an old note to myself. It was Stanley Fish's 2009 review of Terry Eagleton's book, in which examples of "theological questions" are proposed, such as: “Why is there anything in the first place?” “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?” Eagleton's position (as Fish portrays it) is that these questions are valuable as a sort of art form. They are not intended to address matters factually and attain an instrumental goal; we have science for that. Religion is not after facts. It is trying "to tackle what is at stake” (in Eagleton's words); it has something to do with humility and hope that properly ought to come prior to the search for facts.

It occurs to me that a question like "Where do our notions of explanation...come from?" is difficult to answer by any method — never mind the science-vs.-religion debate — because it is an attempt to use consciousness, reason, and language to interrogate and defend itself. A living being can't pick itself apart to learn more about how it thinks and moves. It has to take certain basic parts of itself for granted.

I wonder if what is being said here is that religion pursues a type of metacognition? and that "faith" is a type of humility that exposes the metacognition we do or don't have and can or can't develop? Here is "metacognition" explained by Tom Nichols:

Students who study for a test, older people trying to maintain their independence, and medical students looking forward to their careers would rather be optimistic than underestimate themselves. Other than in fields like athletic competition, where incompetence is manifest and undeniable, it’s normal for people to avoid saying they’re bad at something. As it turns out, however, the more specific reason that unskilled or incompetent people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack a key skill called “metacognition.” This is the ability to know when you’re not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you’re doing, and then realizing that you’re doing it wrong. * * * The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious loop, in which people who don’t know much about a subject do not know when they’re in over their head talking with an expert on that subject. An argument ensues, but people who have no idea how to make a logical argument cannot realize when they’re failing to make a logical argument. In short order, the expert is frustrated and the layperson is insulted. Everyone walks away angry. — Tom Nichols. The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Oxford University Press, 2017.

(Overestimating one's own ability has been called the "Dunning-Kruger effect," but independently of the psychologists who studied it, it might simply be called a lack of metacognition.)

But often these primary assumptions cannot be questioned very thoroughly or for very long, and what we end up with as the product of "faith" is not humility but arrogance. Partly because: We begin with certain identities, and as a result we see what we want to see in the world. Even when we say we're trying to interrogate our beliefs, sometimes all we're doing is massaging data to reaffirm them, and we are deluding others and perhaps even ourselves.

Another passage from Nichols' book:

...a 2014 study of public attitudes about gay marriage went terribly wrong. A graduate student claimed he’d found statistically unassailable proof that if opponents of gay marriage talked about the issue with someone who was actually gay, they were likelier to change their minds. ... It was a remarkable finding that basically amounted to proof that reasonable people can actually be talked out of homophobia. The only problem was that the ambitious young researcher had falsified the data. ... As Konnikova put it in her examination of the fraudulent gay-marriage study, confirmation bias is more likely to produce “persistently false beliefs” when it stems “from issues closely tied to our conception of self.” These are the views that brook no opposition and that we will often defend beyond all reason, as Dunning noted: Some of our most stubborn misbeliefs arise not from primitive childlike intuitions or careless category errors, but from the very values and philosophies that define who we are as individuals. Each of us possesses certain foundational beliefs — narratives about the self, ideas about the social order — that essentially cannot be violated: To contradict them would call into question our very self-worth. As such, these views demand fealty from other opinions. Put another way, what we believe says something important about how we see ourselves as people.

The "foundational beliefs" might be some identity, intrinsic or cultural. They might be tied to an organized religion. But, I imagine, they might also be a set of assumptions that are harder to pin down to any one "thing." We sometimes try to prove a point for the sake of proving a point, and the way it forms and buttresses our identity is a downstream effect.


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abstract-style image of multicolored staircase

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

On deciding to act (quotes)

"Unawareness is the root of all evil."
Anonymous Egyptian Monk. Quoted in Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham. The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning. (1992) New York: Bantam, 2002. p. 68.


"Although self-awareness, by itself, does not lead to behavior change, it is foundational."
Doug Silsbee. Presence-Based Coaching: Cultivating Self-Generative Leaders Through Mind, Body, and Heart. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008. p. 51.


"One simple criterion for distinguishing authentic intuition from ego projections or wishful thinking is that the real stuff is delivered as invitations, not demands. The words 'You should do...' or 'You must do...' are not part of intuition. Rather, intuition is your soul saying, 'Please consider...' or 'Will you...?'"
Sharon Franquemont. You Already Know What to Do: 10 Invitations to the Intuitive Life. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000. p. 5.

As a character decides whether to jump into a well:

"Khalil is listening; he hears its whispers; he thinks its soft enticements are his own wise thoughts. He believes he's deciding — but all he's doing is listening to the whisper of the well."
John Speed. Tiger Claws. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007. p. 162.


"You sit down at the computer and say, 'What am I supposed to do?' The regular gamers in the room have to explain: 'You're supposed to figure out what you're supposed to do.'"
Steven Johnson. Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. p. 42.


"What's intellect?"
"Well, intelligence. Aql." I nod. "Aql nazari. A talent for imagining. And aql amali. A talent for doing."
Uzma Aslam Khan. The Geometry of God. Clockroot Books, 2009.


"Yet when the time comes, I am not able to pull the trigger. I tell myself that the strategy works generally, but might not work with this hand. I cannot, by thought, generate the feeling of conviction that the laws of probabilities are actually in effect and that betting a bad hand occasionally is preferable to always folding. I cannot convince myself that what I know to be correct is actually correct."
Robert A. Burton. On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2008. p. 114.


"...if people do things for lunk-headed, backward-looking reasons, why wouldn't we also do things for significance-seeking, self-actualizing reasons? If we're predictably irrational — and we clearly are — why couldn't we also be predictably transcendent?"
Daniel H. Pink. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Canongate, 2010.


"To come to man's estate it is not necessary to get oneself killed around Madrid, or to fly mail planes, or to struggle wearily in the snows out of respect for the dignity of life. The man who can see the miraculous in a poem, who can take pure joy from music, who can break his bread with comrades, opens his window to the same refreshing wind off the sea. He too learns a language of men.
But too many men are left unawakened."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Wind, Sand and Stars. (1939) Translated into English by Lewis Galantiere. London: The Folio Society, 1990. p. 195.

"The angel was thinking of its mission to find Essie. It had generally relied on its instincts for this kind of thing, as it had relied on its instincts for the less complex, but no less important, mission of saying Kaddish and some blessings.

Little Ash was the one who got caught up in details, and made what humans would recognize as plans. The angel simply expected that its mission would be fulfilled until, eventually, it was. Little Ash was always telling it this was an inefficient way to do business, but the angel felt doing business was a terrible, demonic way to describe the feeling of being needed. It wasn’t doing business. It was being a mitzvah. The demon was too caught up in being Little Ash to quite understand what was so satisfying about that.

My name, the angel insisted to itself, is Rescue. I am finding Essie. I know what my task is, and I am my task."
Sacha Lamb. When the Angels Left the Old Country. Levine Querido: 2022.


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a young woman swinging on a pole in the woods

Swing by Lars Nissen from Pixabay

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Faith: Its purpose and limits (Quotes from others)

Hegel said: “With this possibility of knowing God the obligation to know Him is imposed upon us.”

But it may well be impossible to know God.

Some people say that faith is a type of certainty. An Israeli man quoted by Amos Oz: "You cannot separate faith and certainty. They are one and the same. In my vocabulary they are synonyms." Simone Weil: "In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God."

Others steer away from certainty. Jim Wallis, an evangelical pastor with the social justice organization Sojourners: "Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not -- not ever -- to the thing we as humans so very much want: Easy certainty." Frank Schaeffer puts it this way: "atheism and fundamentalist religion," though "ideological opposites," nevertheless "often share the same fallacy: truth claims that reek of false certainties. I also believe that there is an alternative that actually matches the way life is lived rather than how we usually talk about belief. I call that alternative "hopeful uncertainty."

It isn't to the benefit of any ideology or practice to allow us to achieve certainty, for then we would abandon the quest it had assigned to us. If we achieved certainty in faith, religion would have made itself obsolete. "Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ... But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion..."

But what can religion do for us? Does it tell us that we are broken — and then try to fix us, or inspire us to fix ourselves, or give us the tools to make things better? G. K. Chesterton: "When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified not because her children do not sin, but because they do." As stated by someone Christopher Phillips quoted: "Socrates tried to do the right thing at a time when everyone else was doing the wrong thing. And you know they were all doing the wrong thing in retrospect, because their civilization crashed and burned. As long as just one person is willing to do the right thing amid a sea of badness, there’s reason to hope. Socrates’ life and death, from what I’ve been reading, were modeled on a sense of duty that was ‘faith-based’ — he had faith in people to do the right thing, at least over the long haul, even if over the short term most are acting foolishly. If we don’t all act out of a similar faith, how can we ever hope to see light again in dark times?"

Is the project always incomplete? Leslie Dewart: "For faith is always coming-into-being, it is never quite fully faithful, it is always on the way, hence never perfect and achieved. And if faith is a mode of existence, then Christian theism is a way of life."

And we are never introduced to the whole God?

Frederica Mathewes-Green: "People newly coming to church should have an unfamiliar experience. It should be apparent to them that they are encountering something very different from the mundane. It should be discontinuous with their everyday experience, because God is discontinuous. God is holy, other incomprehensible, strange, and if we go expecting an affable market-tested nice guy, we won't be getting the whole picture. We'll be getting the short God in a straw hat, not the big one beyond all thought."

We are always seeking? Deepak Chopra: "Many doubters have said that God was invented so that these ferocious instincts can be kept in check. Otherwise our violence would turn on us and kill us. But I don't believe this. The oldest hunter lurking in our brains is after bigger prey, God himself."

The quest is difficult. It is had to do what we are doing, to find what we wish to find, and to retain it and act upon it as if we really believe it. The character Pi says in Life of Pi: "Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?"

We don't always control the process. Cary Tennis: "faith can neither be argued into or out of someone but must arrive and depart according to its own capricious schedule."

And the history of religion and faith, too, is ongoing. Nicolas Berdyaev: "Everything existential is history, dynamic force, destiny, man, the world, are history, God is history, a drama which is working itself out." Working itself out, or perhaps not working itself out, or working itself farther into a hole, but in any case, ongoing.

Where do beliefs about God — God's existence or nonexistence or anything else we might think about the subject — come from? Do they spring from a preexisting philosophy? Or do religious opinions come first, and do those opinions produce our other kinds of philosophy? We don't know. Dale B. Martin: "It seems to me that all arguments about priority — that one's theology is simply a reflection of one's ideology or vice versa — are fruitless. How can we possibly know the answer to such a question? How could we ever sort out so exactly the intricate workings of another person's mind, when we can never be sure why we ourselves believe certain things?" It seems safe to say that everything we believe influences everything else we believe, even if we cannot identify a first cause. For that reason, we should be careful about what beliefs we cultivate. John A. Hardon: “[Vladimir] Solovyev's [1853-1900] fundamental premise was that Orthodox (true) doctrine about Christ is the only sound basis for truly Christian society. What a person believes about Christ determines his concept of the human community.” Judith Plaskow: “Once images become socially, politically, or morally inadequate, however, they are also religiously inadequate." The explorer Freya Stark said: "There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do."

Sources

G. W. F. Hegel. Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Translated by Robert S. Hartman. Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1953. (Originally 1837.) p. 16.
Amos Oz. In the Land of Israel. (1983) Translated by Maurie Goldberg-Bartura. USA: Harcourt, Inc., 1993. p. 153.
Simone Weil. Quoted in Deepak Chopra. How To Know God: The Soul's Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries. New York: Harmony Books, 2000. Introductory quotation.
Jim Wallis, quoted in "Without a Doubt." Ron Suskind. New York Times Magazine. October 17, 2004. pp 46ff.
Frank Schaeffer. Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism). Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2009. Prologue, p. xiii.
Ursula K. LeGuin. The Left Hand of Darkness. (1969) New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004. p. 72.
G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1925. p xiii.
“Tarah,” quoted in Christopher Phillips. Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Die-Hard Romantic. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007. p. 173.
Leslie Dewart. The Future of Belief: Theism in a World Come of Age. New York: Herder and Herder 1966. p 64.
Frederica Mathewes-Green. At the Corner of East and Now: A Modern Life in Ancient Christian Orthodoxy. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999. p 149-150.
Deepak Chopra. How To Know God: The Soul's Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries. New York: Harmony Books, 2000. p 14.
Yann Martel, Life of Pi, p. 297
Cary Tennis. Answer to the question "I'm a Christian turning agnostic" in his advice column "Since You Asked..." Salon.com February 24, 2006. Accessed February 25, 2006.
Nicolas Berdyaev. The Divine and the Human. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. Foreword, 1944-45. p v.
Dale B. Martin. Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990. pp. 145-146.
John A. Hardon. Christianity in the Twentieth Century. New York: Image Books, DoubleDay, 1972. p 182.
Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990. p 135.
Freya Stark, quoted in the Columbia, Mo., Daily Tribune, quoted in The Week, Oct. 14, 2011. p. 21.

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Monday, October 12, 2020

Do we perceive things as they are, or as we are?

Reviewing some passages I transcribed 10–20 years ago on this subject.

One possible worldview is: The external world exists as exactly-whatever-it-is, and we perceive it and interpret it.

"Here is the argument. Outside our heads there is freestanding reality. Only madmen and a scattering of constructivist philosophers doubt its existence. Inside our heads is a reconstitution of reality based on sensory input and the self-assembly of concepts."
— Edward O. Wilson, Consilience

"Consciousness, by which I think [he]...means apprehension, is a state of a mind, and does not include its object (say, a body) as a part of itself."
— W. D. Ross. The Right and the Good. (1930) London: Oxford University, 1946. p. 71.

This arises in distinctions like "ontological" or "metaphysical" (what exists) against "epistemological" (what we know).

"These are the four elements present in awareness: metaphysical, epistemological, mystical, and moral dimensions — four ways of revealing, or "translating," the mystery of the Divine and applying it to our human condition. First, the metaphysical, as grounded in the transcendent One, is limitless vertical truth. The epistemological, or what we can know, is moment by moment a horizontal reality pointing to its vertical Source. The mystical, from the horizontal into the boundless, is the spacious verticality of the Divine. Finally, the moral combines transcendent vertical awareness with the horizontal — appropriate attitudes and actions in everyday life. In its spiritual expression, developing from its moral character, awareness is love in action, and the attributes of limitless sensitivity, kindness, compassion and mercy — actual acts of living.
Wayne Teasdale. A Monk in the World: Cultivating a Spiritual Life. Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2002. pp. 198-199.

"She spoke about that common problem of journalism, 'parachuting in.' A reporter from the big city drops into a small town to collect color at the local diner. Why, I'd done it in Rifle. The opposite of such a practice is immersion, rooting yourself in one place, one story, for a duration. Parachuting, immersion — these are metaphors of the vertical. I was on the horizontal, cutting a line. Not an immersion, a cross-section. An incision. Draw a scalpel across the country, see if it bleeds."
Jeff Sharlet. The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War. W. W. Norton & Co., 2023. p. 236.

Or: Facts need to be supported, not only because we need to justify why we believe them, but because the facts themselves depend on that support.

"In a series of controversial books in the 1970s and 1980s, he [Bruno Latour] argued that scientific facts should instead be seen as a product of scientific inquiry. Facts, Latour said, were “networked”; they stood or fell not on the strength of their inherent veracity but on the strength of the institutions and practices that produced them and made them intelligible. If this network broke down, the facts would go with them.

Still, Latour had never seen himself as doing anything so radical, or absurd, as calling into question the existence of reality."

Ava Kofman. "Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science." New York Times. October 25, 2018.

Or, everything is nothing specific:

"To explain the notion of primordial essence in Chabad metaphysics, he [Elliot Wolfson, in Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson] cites 'Schelling's notion of the 'absolute indifference' of the being or essence (Wesen) that precedes all ground and is thus referred to as the 'original ground,' the Ungrund, literally the nonground,' which is to say that it is something like Aristotle's prime matter, which becomes all things without being anything specific in itself." — "The Chabad Paradox," Abraham Socher, in Liberal and Illiberal Arts: Essays (Mostly Jewish), Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2022. p. 87.

Another possible worldview is: The sensations, emotions, and values we attribute to nature might be not in nature itself but in ourselves.

"We think that the grass is green, that stones are hard, that the snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow, are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our own experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of a stone upon himself."
— Bertrand Russell. Quoted in David Berreby. Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind. New York: Little, Brown, and Co. 2005. p 141.

"Nature gets credit which in truth should be reserved for ourselves, the rose of its scent, the nightingale for his song, and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self-congratulations on the excellence of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless, merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly."
— Alfred North Whitehead, quoted by Robert Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness (1972)

"The spiritual and emotive quality of nature does not reside in brute facts but rather originates from the transmutation of these facts into new values by human imagination and fantasy."
— Rene Dubos, Beast Or Angel?: Choices that Make Us Human. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974. p. 197.

But what are we?

We could have evolved without consciousness.

"Consciousness, in survival terms, is an irrelevancy. It is perfectly possible to conceive of a world inhabited by all sorts of life-forms, from the simplest bacteria to the most spectacularly cerebral of creatures, in which there never stirred a single conscious feeling or experience. In fact, such a world could be imagined that was outwardly indistinguishable from our own. It might appear to be full of diversity, sophisticated behavior, intelligence, and even wit and charm, and yet involve no subjective experience, no inner feeling of being, whatsoever.
Many attempts have been made by evolutionary biologists to explain why consciousness should have come about and what possible advantage it might have bestowed on its owners. For example, it has been suggested that being conscious allows us to understand how other members of our social group feel so that we can better interact and communicate with them. Consciousness, it is sometimes said, helps us to see the world from each other's point of view. But the circularity of this argument is readily apparent. It might indeed be a survival advantage to appreciate how the other fellow feels if conscious feelings and experiences are already a fact of the world, but this offers no explanation of why consciousness should have come about in the first place. Exasperated by their failure to discern an obvious purpose for consciousness, some researchers have dismissed it as peripheral and almost accidental — an inconsequential spin-off of the brain's other activities."
— David Darling. Zen Physics: The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. p 172.

Consciousness — or, at least, the 'I' who is conscious — may be an illusion.

"If the ego were to disappear, or rather, to be seen as a useful fiction...the thinker would be seen to be no more than the series of thoughts, and the feeler no more than the feelings."
— Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, p 70-71

And maybe these "things," these other beings that we perceive in nature, are part of us.

"[Among the foragers,] only a fool would imagine himself as somehow exclusively a human being. Through language and artifice one could recall and vivify the primal linkage (we might call it an evolutionary connection) to other forms of life, animal and plant. Language and art underscored Homo's bestial and vegetal identity, a hyphenated identity: 'I can be a frog or a fox and still be a person.'"
— Calvin Luther Martin, In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. p. 18.

Here is another angle to tackle the question: The world includes that which is and what we perceive about it. Is there a distinction between what-exists and what-we-know? Maybe, maybe not. The other angle is that there is something else beyond these matters, outside this world.

"Kabbalah invests these two words with cosmic, metaphysical significance. Yesh comes to refer to the created world, this one in which we spend most of our time. But yesh connotes much, much more than merely the material or the physical. It includes spatial, temporal, intellectual, even emotional reality also. The key notion here is that all the things of yesh have definitions, beginnings and ends, and, above all, boundaries. Living in the world of yesh is not bad — indeed, it's obviously inescapable and often beautiful. Yesh is only dangerous if you think that's all there is."
Lawrence Kushner, "A Kabbalah Lexicon" in I'm God; You're Not: Observations on Organized Religion & Other Disguises of the Ego. Jewish Lights Pub, 2010.

Do we co-create reality?

“Even if we think of religions or psychedelic ideations as little more than fictions, fictions have a self-engendering power to shape reality,” Erik Davis writes in High Weirdness. If a weird alien biomorph dragon shows up in your hallucination, it must lead you to ask “whether such cultural markers have been added to the account after the fact or in some sense erupted within—or even shaped—the experience itself.” Davis’ position is that, if you’re having a “high weirdness” experience, "the causal relationship between cultural codes and ‘experience itself’ gets twisted into a loop," meaning you don’t know what causes what, and that very instability of not-knowing is in charge. "Within this questioning current, the object of weird fascination is folded back into the subject, constructing a strange loop of cultural play, recursive enigma, and extraordinary encounter that makes a raid on the real."
See: Erik Davis. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2019.

Complex or simple?

"Intelligence is: (a) the most complex phenomenon in the Universe; or (b) a profoundly simple process.
The answer, of course, is (c) both of the above. It's another one of those great dualities that make life interesting."
— Ray Kurzweil. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York: Penguin Group, 1999. p. 118


"These changes in the retina correlated with changes in parts of the brain called the entorhinal and temporal cortices, a hub for memory, navigation and the perception of time."
Maya Koronyo-Hamaoui, a professor of neurosurgery and biomedical sciences at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, as quoted by CNN, 2023.


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

seabird looks at reflection in the water
Tern by Jon Pauling from Pixabay

Monday, July 13, 2020

Two books on the Italian castrati singers

Two books about the castrati.

Francis Toye (1952)

Toye finds "no necessity to discuss the physical aspect of the operation" but says it "was introduced into Italy either from Spain or from the Orient, was known in the twelfth century and common in the sixteenth when, owing to the difficulty of polyphonic music, castrati were preferred to boys in church choirs. They were associated with opera from its very beginning [in the 17th century] and the title-role of Monteverdi's Orfeo was sung by one of them." (p. 18) At first they played masculine roles; later, feminine. Goethe came to approve of castrati in feminine roles because they "emphasized the artificial conventionalism of the stage." (p. 19) Their singing voices "represented nothing effeminate but the tonic attributes of perpetual youth..." (p. 19) By the mid-eighteenth century, women were participating in opera nearly equally with castrati. "...the attainment of perfection in the art of singing was a castrato's whole life, and it was usual for him in old age to take pupils and thus hand on the experience." (p. 21) They did not provide merely "acrobatics" and "vocal fireworks" but also "the emotional and expressive element in opera seria." (p. 21) Toye adds that "many of the castrati lived normal and exceedingly active lives." (p. 19)
"In Elisabetta, Regina d'Inghilterra, Rossini "first established the innovation of writing down exactly what the singers had to sing instead of conceding the latitude of embellishment and improvisation which they had for so long enjoyed. Rossini is said to have come to this decision after hearing the male soprano Velluti in Aureliano — almost the last appearance of a castrato in opera. Not apparently that he was so much dissatisfied with Velluti's performance as frightened by what might be the result had his music been left to the mercies of a singer with inferior musical training, one of the new now all-powerful tribe of primadonnas for instance." (p. 40)

Francis Toye. Italian Opera. London: Max Parrish and Co, 1952.


Patrick Barbier (1989)

Barbier opens his book by reserving judgment on the historical castration of boys (which was "never performed before the age of seven and rarely after twelve" (p. 12)):

There is no point today in reopening the case so often brought in the past against castration and those who practised it or underwent it. How can we judge a medical procedure which influenced the whole of western music for more than two centuries, now that we are so far removed from the conditions prevailing in the baroque period? How can the 'modern' mind, moderately influenced by the nineteenth century, understand how a particular period dared to seek pure and 'gratuitous' Beauty through a mutilation so 'costly' to the individual who was subjected to it? Above all, how can we adopt an attitude towards emasculation when no great castrato has confided his deepest feelings to us? Was the operation inflicted on him felt as a tragedy? Was it not sometimes sanctified by a voice and a 'nature' which overturned the traditional plan of the masculine or feminine condition? We know, for example, that when people expressed pity for them the castrati Carestini and Salimbeni burst out laughing: were they exceptional or fairly normal?

For the historian only one thing matters: the presence and triumph of the castrati for nearly two hundred and thirty years on the stages of Europe, and still longer within the Roman Catholic Church. The Italians were of course the promoters and the greatest 'consumers' of these singers. (pp. 1-2)

The Byzantine Empire began employing eunuch singers in churches (per Theodore Balsamon's 12th century Commentary on the Nomocanon) and subsequently it conquered Constantinople which had many eunuchs in the harem. (p. 7) There were also eunuch singers in Mozarabic Spain in the 12th century who increasingly influenced Catholic liturgy. (p. 8) Later, however, they were "an essentially Italian phenomenon in the sense that they were recruited and trained only in that country." (p. 174) In France, they were sometimes derided as "cripples," and in one instance "Luigi Rossi was forced into hiding, Torelli, the famous producer and creator of theatrical machinery, was imprisoned and some castrati only just escaped lynching." (p. 191)

The Pietà taught music to uncastrated boys (integri) and eunuchs (non integri), and one day in 1782, the boys rebelled against the eunuchs in the dining hall because the eunuchs were given equal privileges. (p. 57) If students ran away from the conservatory, they would not be allowed to return. (p. 58)

He says: "The castrato voice differed from that of the normal male singer through its lightness, flexibility and high notes, and from the female voice through its brilliance, limpidity and power. At the same time it was superior to a boy's voice through the adult nature of its musculature, its technique and expressivity." (P. 17) However, boys were generally castrated first and then sent to musical training to find out if they could sing. "Castration," therefore, "was like a lottery from which very few emerged victorious...Some castrati in fact had horrible voices, shrill and strident." (p. 29)

Farinelli sang every day to Philip V, the Bourbon ruler of Spain, at the request of the Queen, who hoped that the music would cure the King's mental illness. The King seemed to recover, and Farinelli became his confidant. (pp. 203-204)

None left memoirs (p. 3), and they received quiet funerals. (p. 222)

He points out that eunuchs were regular human beings. Performers in general "had their moods, their weaknesses and their financial demands. The much talked about, long-standing image of the castrato as arrogant and capricious by nature [emphasis mine] makes no sense..." (pp. 107-108) (He adds that "if you didn't like the castrati that was enough to transform them very quickly into monsters" (p. 108), though it is unclear whether he means that people would portray castrati as monsters or if the castrati would behave in monstrous ways in reaction to being hated.) Similarly, some artists "knew each other well, appreciated and respected each other, while others were jealous and hated each other." (pp. 147-148) And "they were often accused of corrupting morals" despite being "no more inclined to sexual crime than other men." (p. 152) It is strange, then, that his final sentence is: "This adventure lasted for three centuries, defying all the laws of morality and reason to achieve the impossible union of monster and angel." (p. 242)

Chapter 6 (pp. 122-135) is about how Popes regulated the castration of boys.

Patrick Barbier. The World of the Castrati: The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon. Translated by Souvenir Press and Margaret Crosland. Souvenir Press, 1996. (Originally: Histoire des Castrats, published in France by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1989.)


Also:

"The principles of bel canto were well established before the rise of castrato singers, and the best pedagogical descriptions of bel canto techniques were written by Garcia and others at a time when the castrati were in a state of decline.  It is likely that bel canto singing techniques would have developed even without the castrato phenomenon, but this is not to suggest that the castrati did not epitomize the bel canto ideals in a way that no other singers could."

James Stark.  Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy. University of Toronto Press, 1999. p. 198.

"Anthony Milner maintains that the presence of 'sacred capons' in chapel choirs dates back to 1553, and was authorized by a papal bull in 1589 (Miler 1973).  ... However, by the 1580s, Duke Guglielmo employed several castrati at the court of Mantua.  One of these, apparently, was a dreadful singer whose only notable quality was that he was a castrato--his upper register was weak, he was not precise, he had no disposizione di gorga, and he knew no pieces by heart. 'These animals,' wrote Guglielmo's secretary, are 'extremely scarce' and 'very fickle.'  Their pay was no higher than that of any other singer." (Stark, p. 198)

"But by the mid-eighteenth century the tide was already turning against them [castrati].  The rise of the comic intermezzo and opera buffa, which required natural singers to play the stock characters drawn from the Italian commedia del arte, left no room for castrato voices." (Stark, p. 199)

"In 1702 Francois Raguenet praised the Italian castrati over either male or female French singers, saying that the castrati expressed thoughts of love better than the hoarse voices of men, that thier voices were stronger than those of women, and that they were easily heard over the orchestra.  He compared their passaggi to the singing of nightingales, and noted that their voices lasted for thirty or forty years." (Stark, p. 200)


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Saturday, June 27, 2020

Coming to recognize interdependence

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please," said Marx; while, said Joseph Chilton Pearce, "to be fully 'human' is not just to survive physically, but to survive as a cultural creature."

In some cultures, this is more difficult and less obvious than in others. "Most contemporary Americans possess no stable identity," said Diana Butler Bass.

Nothing is inherited from the past, few family ties bind, and all forms of personhood must be chosen and, often, chosen again. It is not uncommon for an individual to live in several states, marry more than once, change religious traditions one or more times, and switch jobs or even careers. Because of this open-ended quality, life is an unfinished and unfinishable project, which leaves many wondering if meaninglessness is life's ultimate meaning. Human beings might be, in essence, homeless wanderers, aimless and without final direction. And this wandering, the constant roaming for identity and vocation, fuels random busyness — doing tasks, burying oneself in work, or becoming addicted to hobbies and sports to cover the sense that life may well be without purpose.

We may need to challenge ourselves to contemplate and commit to our duties to each other. Placing ourselves in a cultural context, developing a sense of solidarity, and committing ourselves to a collective project is an important task. Christopher Phillips wrote: "Both Socrates and Oedipus believed that self-discovery was always related to the goal of advancing their respective societies. Digging into their past with no greater purpose or objective than past-dwelling introspection would have made no more sense to Sophocles' Oedipus than it would have to Socrates." The pursuit of feeling good about ourselves is not an end in itself. Someone might profit off luring us into that activity, but the broader society does not benefit. "I think self-esteem is a white invention to further separate one person from another," said Terese Marie Mailhot. "It asks people to assess their values and implies people have worth. It seems like identity capitalism."

Religion, too, is not only a goal for individual but for collective development. “The idealism of the young...if it becomes life-long commitment and action,” Jewish tradition holds, according to Eugene Borowitz, will “create a religious self.”

Of a Buddhist interpretation, Stephen Batchelor wrote:

Letting go, even momentarily and unintentionally, of that desperate and obsessive grip on self does not obliterate you but opens you up to a fleeting and highly contingent world that you share with other anxious creatures like yourself. This can be frightening; for the only certainty in such a world is that at some point you will die. You realize that your self is not a fixed thing or personal essence but a tentative and confused story hastening toward its conclusion. * * * ’Contingency’ is a concise and reasonably accurate translation of the Buddhist concept paticcasamuppada (usually rendered as ‘dependent origination’). Whatever is contingent depends on something else for its existence. * * * In eroding this sense of our own necessity, we come to see how the unprecedented and unrepeatable person we are emerges from a sublime matrix of myriad contingent events—no one of which need have happened either. Insight into the emptiness of self is achieved not by eliminating self but by understanding it to be contingent rather than necessary.

Our humanity, Joseph Chilton Pearce said, depends on accept[ing] the "tension of form and content" that is part of all being. We are terrified of our mortality and we withdraw into what we think of as a detached intellect. From this, what we call "culture" is created. But the denial of life is simply the victory of death; there's nothing "spiritual" to celebrate about it. We don't need "to abolish the ego, which would be like killing one's horse in the middle of a race." Rather what we need is "a shift of dominance, the true turning."

"Temptation," said the rapper Kendrick Lamar, "is just the feeling that you’re the most independent person on planet Earth." How will we resist that temptation and move toward interdependence?


On collective identity, Gary Younge wrotes:

"Today people will say 'we won the war', even if they didn’t fight and even if they weren’t born. They will say 'we won the World Cup', even if they didn’t play or weren’t born. Nobody takes the 'we' literally. It signifies a collective identity that can span centuries and experiences. But when you mention slavery or colonialism, the same people will say: 'I am not responsible. I wasn’t alive. I wasn’t there.' The collective, historical British identity that people would otherwise embody in moments of victory and national pride becomes suddenly and urgently estranged and elusive when it comes to less flattering periods in our history. This contradiction is clearly unsustainable."

Sources

Marx. Quoted in "Prep is Dead, Long Live Prep." Benjamin Schwarz. The Atlantic. October 2010. p 112.

Joseph Chilton Pearce. Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg: Split Minds & Meta-Realities. New York: Washington Square Press, 1974. p. 84.

Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. pp. 228-229.

Christopher Phillips. Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Die-Hard Romantic. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007. p. 46.

Terese Marie Mailhot. Heart Berries: A Memoir. Counterpoint, 2018. p. 27.

Eugene B. Borowitz. Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew. (1991) Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996. p. 94.

Stephen Batchelor. Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil. New York: Riverhead, 2004. pp. 8-9.

Joseph Chilton Pearce. Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg: Split Minds & Meta-Realities. New York: Washington Square Press, 1974. pp. 213-214, 216.

Rapper Kendrick Lamar, quoted in The New York Times, quoted in The Week, July 11, 2014.

How Britain Buried Its History of Slavery,” Gary Younge, The Guardian, March 29, 2023.


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.


the words 'we' and me' made up of other words in smaller print
Image by John Hain from Pixabay

Saturday, June 6, 2020

'Surviving Autocracy': A search for new language

Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar said that "autocratic transformation" happens in three stages: attempt, breakthrough, consolidation.

In a new book Surviving Autocracy, Masha Gessen (they/them) says these terms apply to the current American situation. (Gessen was citing a 2019 prepublication manuscript of Magyar's The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes: A Conceptual Framework.) These terms, Gessen says, are better than "using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe." What we are experiencing under Trumpism is not an ordinary political debate within the existing system. A new system is crushing the existing system, and we need new language to describe it.

These ideas, and very much more, in this book:

Masha Gessen. Surviving Autocracy Riverhead, June 2, 2020.


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Thursday, March 12, 2020

What's the brain? What's the mind? A journey told through quotations

The purpose for which the brain evolved

"...the very consciousness that enables us to probe the workings of our cells may have been born of the concerted capacities of millions of microbes that evolved symbiotically to become the human brain. * * * In a sense we are "above" bacteria, because, though composed of them, our power of thought seems to represent more than the sum of its microbial parts. Yet in a sense we are also "below" them. As tiny parts of a huge biosphere whose essence is basically bacterial, we—with other life forms—must add up to a sort of symbiotic brain which it is beyond our capacity to comprehend or truly represent.
"
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. Microcosmos. California: University of California Press, 1986, 1997. pp. 34, 152.

Human brains continue to develop after birth

“The simplest means [to evolve larger brains while still giving birth through a narrow pelvis] was to give birth while the baby’s head is still small, then let the head and brain develop outside the womb during a period of intensive neonatal care. This is in fact the solution that humans developed. Whereas the newborn brain weight of a nonhuman primate is already around 42 percent of its adult weight, a human child’s is a mere 29 percent. The human infant continues its basic cerebral development for eighteen months after birth, during which time the rapidly growing brain is not held in by a firm case. Fusion of the cranial sutures is greatly delayed. The downside is that the human baby is far less physically and mentally autonomous... the development of the baby-sling removed the crucial factor limiting the efficiency of postnatal care and allowed hominid females to bear underdeveloped babies that, with postnatal brain growth, could subsequently catch up and—crucially—overtake australopithecines in brain development.”

Timothy Taylor. The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture. New York: Bantam, 1996. p 47-8.

When last year's Nobel prize for chemistry was awarded to the discoverers of green fluorescent protein, the pages of newspapers (this one included) lit up with photographs of 'brainbows.' ... Dr Lichtman hopes to use his brainbow mice to answer questions about neurological development, such as why the nerve cells of babies have far more connections than do those of adults.”
"Wired." The Economist. April 11-17, 2009. p. 82.

You can look at a picture of a brain...

"Researchers are now trying to better understand what constitutes a "normal" brain by studying a newly compiled atlas that contains digitally mapped images of 7,000 of the organs. A decade in the making, the brain mapping project quietly debuted this summer. ... Dr. Arthur Toga, says the plan is to quantify the differences between brains. Understanding the variations should provide "a good index between normal populations and a diseased population." This brain atlas — freely available to registered users over the Internet — maps the brains in multiple dimensions. It charts brain activity, pinpointing the seat of functions such as speech, memory, emotion and language and highlighting how those locations can vary among individuals and populations.
"
"Brain atlas to help define what's 'normal': Thousands of brains digitally mapped to aid researchers." CNN. August 6, 2003. [URL no longer works] http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/08/06/brain.atlas.ap/index.html

...but no one can understand the way you think just by looking at a picture of your brain

“Moreover, if it were suggested, as occasionally it is, that the body itself or the brain is that substance [which has the two aspects of brain and mind], and that mental activity IS brain activity, but ‘viewed from within’—from the inside instead of the outside—then the appropriate comment would obviously be that the word ‘inside’ as so used really means nothing at all. For, if one wishes to observe what goes on literally inside the brain, what one must do is simply to open it up and look. Such an operation might, in a then facetiously etymological sense of the word, be termed ‘Introspection,’ but would anyway be something radically different from what in fact is denominated Introspection.”

C. J. Ducasse. The Belief in a Life After Death. p. 73.

“I can imagine a time when, after getting an answer to a question from your Web browser, neither you nor your computer will know for sure where it came from. After all, do you know where the letter A is stored in your brain?”
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. New York: Plume, 2003. p. 158.

“I have often encountered motifs which made me think that the unconscious must be the world of the infinitesimally [physically] small. Such an idea could be derived rationalistically from the obscure feeling that in all these visions we are dealing with something endopsychic, the inference being that a thing must be exceedingly small in order to fit inside the head.”
C. G. Jung. Aspects of the Masculine. (Collected Works.) Translation by R. F. C. Hull. New York: MJF Books, 1989.p. 147-148.

The brain is busy even when it's not working on an assigned task

"During early functional MRI studies, researchers noticed that a certain set of brain regions would activate together whenever subjects were not performing the task they were assigned. Originally this was assumed to be some sort of daydreaming or rest network, but eventually, scientists realized the network was involved in thinking about the self, thinking about others, remembering the past, considering the future, and making social evaluations.
That brain network, now known as the Default Mode Network, is associated with creativity and imagination. If you think about it as a light switch, it comes on whenever your task-oriented networks shut off. So if you and the internet are constantly performing “productivity” together — it stays dark."
Jacqueline Detwiler. “How to Think Without Googling.” Forge (Medium). October 22, 2019.

Information arrives in pieces

"Nothing enters consciousness whole. There is no direct, objective experience of reality. All the things the mind perceives...have been assembled piece by piece by the processing powers of the brain..."
Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, and Vince Rause. Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001. p 36.

Thought occurs in pieces

"Who or what within the brain monitors all this activity? No one. Nothing. The scenarios are not seen by some other part of the brain. They just are. Consciousness is the virtual world composed by the scenarios. There is not even a Cartesian theater, to use Daniel Dennett's dismissive phrase, no single locus of the brain where the scenarios are played out in coherent form. Instead, there are interlacing patterns of neural activity within and among particular sites throughout the forebrain, from cerebral cortex to other specialized centers of cognition such as the thalamus, amygdala, and hippocampus. There is no single stream of consciousness in which all information is brought together by an executive ego. There are instead multiple streams of activity, some of which contribute momentarily to conscious thoguht and then phase out. Consciousness is the massive coupled aggregates of such participating circuits. The mind is a self-organizing republic of scenarios that individually germinate, grow, evolve, disappear, and occasionally linger to spawn additional thought and physical activity."
Edward O. Wilson. Consilience. p. 110.

We are aware that we're thinking...

“Like it or not, we humans are flawed spiritual creatures peering from biological brains. By ‘spiritual’ I mean self-contemplating and/or self-loathing. I think that our spirituality is best defined as our awareness of our own consciousness. Rats, mice, amoebas, and planets aren't self-contemplating and/or self-loathing. We're different. So there is a tension between what we are, material beings living in a material universe, and how we feel about ourselves. We feel that we are more than the sum of our parts. We try and bridge this spirit/body gap. We look to religion, science, faith, psychology whatever [sic] to answer the question: Why are we self-observing, or, to put it another way, who am I?”
Frank Schaeffer. Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism). Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2009. p. 4.

...but chemical signals direct our thoughts without our awareness of that process

“‘You're probably 99.9 percent unaware of dopamine release,’ says Read Montague, a professor of neuroscience at Baylor University. ‘But you're probably 99.9 percent driven by the information and emotions it conveys to other parts of the brain.’”
Jonah Lehrer. How We Decide. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. p. 41.

”Why People Gamble: It's an old idea that levels of dopamine in the brain rise when gamblers win, giving them a rush and pushing them to gamble more, but it turns out things are not quite as simple as that. David Zald of Vanderbilt University found that while this is part of the story, losing also causes a drop in dopamine levels--something never seen before. Part of compulsive gambling may be an attempt to restore lowered dopamine levels after losses.”
Stephen Reucroft and John Swain, Fast Facts, Boston Metro, July 28, 2004, based on Discover, August 2004.

”The dopamine system is a kind of accountant: keeping track of expected rewards, and sending out an alert — in the form of lowered dopamine levels — when those rewards don't arrive as promised. When the pack-a-day smoker deprives himself of his morning cigarette; when the hotshot Wall Street trader doesn't get the bonus he was planning on; when the late-night snacker opens the freezer to find someone's pilfered all the Ben & Jerry’s — the disappointment and craving these people experience is triggered by lowered dopamine levels.
The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp calls the dopamine system the brain's ‘seeking’ circuitry, propelling us to seek out new avenues for reward in our environment. Where our brain wiring is concerned, the craving instinct triggers a desire to explore. The system says, in effect: ‘Can't find the reward you were promised? Perhaps if you just look a little harder you'll be in luck — it’s got to be around here somewhere.’”
Steven Johnson. Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. pp. 34-35.

A human individual is both body and mind...

"And actually man is not a pure spirit at all, nor a sage; man is not, as Spinoza said, an automa spirituale, or, as we would prefer to say, a "rational automaton." Man is a psycho-somatic amphibian, that is to say, a symbiosis of soma and psyche, which is to say, a mixed being."
[Vladimir Jankelevitch. (1903-1985). Forgiveness. Translated by Andrew Kelley. University of Chicago Press, 2005. Originally Le Pardon, 1967. p 82.]

...or does the mind consist of the physical brain?

"...it is an error to use two different sets of words, concepts, and feelings when considering our brains (on the one hand) and our minds (on the other)....The brain and mind constitute an inseparable unity. * * * Thus we are portrayed as mindless brains or brainless minds, and never the twain shall meet."
J. Allan Hobson. The Chemistry of Conscious States: How the Brain Changes its Mind. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1994. pp. 6-7.

“Neurologically speaking, then, the mind cannot exist without the brain, and the brain cannot exist without striving to create the mind. The relationship of mind and brain is so intimately linked, in fact, that it seems most reasonable to consider the terms as two different aspects of the very same thing.
Consider, for example, that the existence of a single human thought requires the highly complex interaction of hundreds of thousands of neurons. In order to separate mind from brain, it would be necessary to think of each neuron as something distinct from its function, which is a little like trying to separate the seawater that provides the substance fo an ocean wave from the energy that gives the wave its shape and motion. The existence of the wave requires both elements: without energy, the wave would fall flat; without water, the wave energy would have no expression. In the same sense, it is not possible to separate individual neurons from their functions; if it were possible, then a thought could be freed from its neurological base, and the mind could be seen as something separate from the brain, a free-floating consciousness that would be considered a ‘soul.’"

Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, and Vince Rause. Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001. p 33.

'Brain sex' is on a continuum

To the extent we can even talk about brain sex, it's on a continuum.

A human mind and body shares something with its community

"The idea of commonality between minds is not new. It is found in Jung (1964)’s collective unconscious; in transpersonal psychology’s transpersonal realm, and in Teilhard de Chardin (1959)’s noosphere, to name but three examples. Possibly group analytic literature take site concept of a common area of mind operating between and amongst individuals in a group more for granted than anyone else. Foulkes has designated this as the ‘group matrix’ (Foulkes 1964)."
[Isabel Clarke. “Psychosis and spirituality: the discontinuity model.” Printed in Psychosis and Spirituality: Exploring the New Frontier. ed. Isabel Clarke. London and Philadelphia: Whurr, 2001. p. 141.]

“...The thing called the human body is divided from other things in its environment by the clearly discernible surface of the skin. The point, though, is that the skin divides the body from the rest of the world as one thing from others in thought but not in nature. In nature the skin is as much a joiner as a divider, being, as it were, the bridge whereby the inner organs have contact with air, warmth, and light.”
Alan Watts. Nature, Man, and Woman (1958). New York: Vintage Books, 1991. p 55.

A relaxed mind can open up

“Maslow found that when humans have satisfied their basic physiological and social needs, they frequently have ‘peak experiences.’ These experiences are especially intense moments in which individuals are overwhelmed by the sensations of ecstasy, wonder, and awe.”
Robert C. Fuller. Spiritual, But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America. Oxford University Press, 2002. p 139.

The way we train ourselves to think creates our possibilities

"The mystical experience itself is in part a function of what the mystic thinks can happen. No experience of transcendence ever happens to a person who inhabits no culture or thinks in no particular language."
Denise Lardner Carmody and John Tully Carmody. Mysticism: Holiness East and West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. p. 9.

"An entire academic field has its origin in the idea that we are computers. Further, the computer comes to represent an ideal, in light of which real thinking perversely begins to look deficient. Thus, when the postindustrial visionary reasons from the fact that complex systems involve 'the interaction of too many variables for the mind to hold in correct order simultaneously' to the conclusion that 'one has to use algorithm, rather than intuitive judgments, in making decisions,' he argues from the fact that the mind does not do what a computer does to an assertion about the incompetence of the mind. This seems to express an irrational prejudice against people. For, in fact, highly cultivated human minds can get to be pretty good at sussing out a burning building, playing chess, chasing down intermittent gremlins in a car’s electrical system, and who knows what else."
Matthew B. Crawford. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. p. 171.

"Under these conditions [of post-atomic attack], some high percentage of the population is going to be nauseated, and nausea is very catching. If one man vomits, everybody vomits. It would not be surprising if almost everybody vomits. Almost everyone is likely to think he has received too much radiation.”
Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961, p. 86 Quoted in Arthur Herzog. The B.S. Factor: The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America. (1973) Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books Inc., 1974. p. 90.

Our own consciousness is determined by the way we think about it

"...consciousness, like love and money, is a phenomenon that does indeed depend to a surprising extent on its associated concepts. Although, like love, it has an elaborate biological base, like money, some of its most significant features are borne along on the culture, not simply inherent, somehow, in the physical structure of its instances."
Daniel C. Dennett. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1991. p 24.

What have we learned?

"What does this mean concerning our personal lives, to which, at last, we now return? The microcosm of our consciousness is where the macrocosm of the universe is known. It is the fearful joy, the blessing, and the curse of man that he can be conscious of himself and his world."
Rollo May. Love and Will. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1969. p 324.


If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.