An Essay Complete

I just finished the most difficult essay of my academic career thus far.  It wasn’t really that hard.  It was just a second year paper on a Celtic myth.  In fact the prof even gave us a list of questions we could choose from to answer–and as a cognitive science student I haven’t had it that ‘easy’ as long as I can remember.  But it was not something I could deal with.

I never understood myths.  When I was very young I could never understand the parables in the Bible. I learned in Sunday school that one of the most amazing things about Jesus was that he spoke to the people in a way they could understand—but that always confused me, because he seemed impossible to understand: “Why did he not just say what he meant?” I used to wonder.  All this about seeds on paths and in thorns and in good soil, why not just talk about people who were or were not open to hearing and accepting the word of God? The Trinity was not a difficult concept for me even as a child, but Jesus’ sermons were impossible. 

Then as I got older my mother used to try to share her love for Roman and Greek mythology with my brother and I.  Again I was baffled.  All these stories about all these people doing all these different things and I just could not understand what any of it was supposed to mean.  Addition, subtraction, eventually algebra, biology and physics I could do, even philosophy and philosophy of religion—but myths, and legends no way.

Last year I took a psychology course in personality that opened my mind to a whole new world of understanding.  Relatively unconventionally Jordan Peterson taught us personality from a historical perspective.  In a field where many have stopped actively teaching the thoughts of Freud and Jung, Peterson took us even further back.  He showed us slides of artifacts from Egypt and medieval Europe exposing us to fundamental notions underlying the religions and myths of various cultures and how they could be related to Freud and Jung and modern personality theory.  He made us watch Pinocchio analytically, pausing it every few minutes to discuss archetypal characters.  Peterson helped us to understand that evolutionarily speaking the mind has not changed much in the past 250,000 years—and that we have a lot more in common with the ancients or those living in the middle ages than we may have previously thought.  We began to look at myths as people’s attempts to explain their experiences in life.  Just like the art of today, we began to understand myths as people’s insistence to struggle to put the ineffable into words.  He uncovered for us the wealth of information myths communicated to people within the societies they became popular in, as well as the wealth of information they have the potential of communicating to us if we look deep enough into them.

And it got me all intersted and stuff.  So I’m trying–my damndest.  And I’m learning alot.  But I think Peterson’s courses on the psychology of all of this will always remain my strong suit.

Polish Goalkeeper Cautioned against Catholicism

First read this. Then tell me: am I missing something? I mean, generally speaking I fall on the side against the Catholic Church, but in this case I don’t think I even understand the problem–and until further clarity is shed on the situation I am definately siding with the Church.

How could crossing yourself be provocative?

Feeling blue

I had an interesting day yesterday.

I had one of those days where the angst wins: where I question everything until I feel guilty and worthless in just about every facet of my life. One of those days where eventually your mind pushes your body so far that it’s all you can do to not to cry–and then suddenly you just have to give in anyway and the tears come hard.

I have had an incredable life-changing summer. I have just moved into a new home which I will share with wonderful new roommates and about which I am extremely excited. I signed up for and got into all but one of the courses I wanted for next year. I’m healthy, I have food on my plate and enough money in the bank to keep it that way.

But I hate how much stuff I own, and that my clothes and posessions don’t represent the person I want to be. I hate that I haven’t been going to yoga. I hate that I don’t eat purely organic food. I hate that I haven’t been spending any time nurturing my spiritual side in years.

It’s time to try to make some changes.

Omnipresence?

“How lucky are we?”
“God must like us.
“I thought you didn’t believe in God?”
“…I don’t…But he still has semantic value…”
“Despite his lack of existance?”
“Yep.”

The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-up in History

The Jesus Papers is a new (apparently) non-fiction book by Michael Baigent explaining that Pontius Pilot did not kill Jesus, but only pretended to, in order to pacify the angry masses that wanted him dead. …

…I don’t have much to say about that really. To me it’s much like what was in the Da Vinci code–interesting as hell*, but entirely beside the point when it comes to my faith in God and my belief about who and what Jesus was.

The reason I’m writing about it is just that I wanted to share what “The Voice” just said about it on CBC: “This pretend crucifixion is a bit of a relief, because all this time I’ve only been pretending to feel guilty for my sins.”

Brilliant, frankly. …this is me laughing heartily.

*reference not intended. It was noticed by the author during editing and removed, but has been resurrected in virtue of its ironic value

A little bit on blasphemy, a little bit on heresy

Rob Cordry of the Daily show pointed out this wonderful little anamoly. First on the topic of blasphemy:

“He who blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall certainly be put to death and all the congregation shall stone him.”
-Leviticus 24:16

Then he went on to say: “You may ask why an all-powerful all-seeing diety needs mortals to carry out his punishments for him…
and asking that is heresy.”

Don’t forget to come back to Sunday school next week kids!

Classes this term, stepping out into the unknown, and scorpion suicides

So I’m back at school, and beginning light therapy, and things are good. I’m almost ridiculously excited about my classes this term, which look a bit like this:
Personality and its Transformations
Bases of Cognition
Modes of Reasoning
and
The Phenomenon of Religion

*sigh*…life just doesn’t get any better than that.

I think, though, that it is definately the course on the theory of personality that I am most excited about. The professor seems like a really brilliant man, with a philosophy on teaching that I respect alot. He ‘invited’ us not to take notes in lecture and told us to treat the readings for the class like pleasure-reading, not to bother with highlighting or memorizing, because we’d never memorize it all anyway, and he wanted us to have a general understanding of what we were talking about that would stay with us rather than an ability to regurgitate facts that would get lost a week after the final.

The course is about how the personality develops throughout an individual’s life, and how that process has been transposed during differant times and cultures throughout human history. Pointing out that we haven’t changed much genetically over the last 150,000 years or so he likes to explore ideas about the human condition (stories, myths, etc) from people in as many differant eras as possible, believing that they were all dealing with the same personality development no matter what their technological awareness or scientific knowledge.

For example, on the first day he helped us explore the ancient Egyptian concept of Freud’s ego, super-ego and id. For those without much background in Freud, the idea goes that the ego (individual) is stuck trying to balance the id (basic and profane impulses from hunger and thirst to greed or sex) and the super-ego (the over-arching moral sense), and that life is a struggle as the ego attempts to hold the balance in place. In the case of Freud’s analysis we see a very individual and scientific (by which I mean observable, or at least defineable) division. The Egyptians had an idea which was much more abstract, but was equally brilliant, and perhaps more insightful (or helpful). They had three God’s which can be seen together. The first God is Osiris. Osiris is made of stone, but is old, crumbling and blind. The next is Isis. Isis is associated with the moon and the underworld. And the last is Horas, a falcon, with the single penetrating Egyptian eye. So how does this relate? Osiris represents society. He is solidly in place, but he is blind, and behind the times, and crumbling to pieces. Osiris is like the super-ego, the moral sense we’ve developed about what we’re ‘meant’ to do. Isis is like the id. She represents the underworld and the unconcious–the part of us which is most natural but most hidden from us. And Horas is the ego, stratifying the two. What makes this so brilliant, is the penetrating eye. To the Egyptians the question went like this: betrayed by society, and susceptible to the conditions of nature what is the individual to do? Pay attention! Keep your eyes open. And you will maintain a balance.
(…oh…and while on the various representations of this idea. Trinity anyone? Or in the Catholic tradition: Mary, God and Jesus anyone?)

The next story he told was one of a scorpion. We were talking about the human tendancy to flee from things they don’t understand. Novel people, places and things represent a potential threat to us–not just ideologically, but on a fundamental biological level. This is why the 3 year old is afraid of the monsters under his bed. He’s just old enough that his amygdala (responsible for core emotional responses, like love or fear) and his hippocampus (responsible for his map of the world) are starting to develop fully. He’s starting to get a sense of the world he understands as it is seperate from the world he doesn’t know anything about. When the light goes off, he doesn’t know anymore, that he understands the room he is in. He becomes scared, and in his fear he begins to associate everything he knows to be dangerous and bad with the dark places in his room. Monsters (usually reptilian, because of our innate fear of reptiles) MUST be under his bed! Eventually he grows out of this particular fear (hopefully) but the process of associating his greatest fears with the unknown is unlikely to ever leave him (….has anybody started thinking about the Western Capitalists tendancy to demonize Muslims yet? Or vice versa for that matter?). So anyway, this tendancy is very natural, and helps to protect us. But the unknown doesn’t just represent threat, it also represents the potential for reward, or the discovery of something new. So the healthy well-developed personality doesn’t just flee from novelty, it keeps its eyes open and cautiously explores it to see what benefits might be inside. This means stepping out of the world the individual understands, and may open the individual up to a completely new way of looking at the world (which can be scary) but if all goes well the individual will arrive at a new and better established understanding of the world than the one he began with. The story of the scorpion is the story of the individual who never tries this.

Imagine a large circle drawn on the ground. A scorpion, representing the human individual, is placed within this circle. He runs around inside of it, mapping it, and declaring it his home, and refuses to step outside. A division is made. The circle is seperated in half, and the scorpion traps himself on the one side. He scurries around within his newly defined border. Again the circle is divided in half. Again the scorpion scurries. Again it is divided. This process continues, each time driving the scorpion to scurry faster and faster, until finally he is trapped in a space so small he can’t move. So he stops. He lifts up his venomous stinger, and stabs himself in the back.

If we are unwilling to challenge our ideas of the world or broaden our perspectives over time they will get smaller and smaller and fold in on top of us. Eventually there will be nowhere to turn but onto ourselves. Unfortunately, however, if we’ve spent so long denying ourselves the process of exploration and learning, and refusing to open ourselves up to the worlds of others, when we turn into ourselves all we will find is hatred and fear and emptiness. And there will be nothing to do but die.

Frightening, and dark. But brilliant (sort of makes me think of Nietszche actually–who I’ve always been a fan of pretending to be able to psychoanalyze)–keep your eyes open. Explore the world carefully. It’s exciting. And if you keep moving outward, farther into it, you will become a stronger, wiser, more resiliant, more independant individual. But if you hide within the world you already know, you will become more and more hollow, right up until the end…
…that’s how the personality works…

Human Nature, Evolution and Conciousness- part 1.

To start I would like to say that nothing is more discouraging to me than very intelligent cynics. Not even because they are able to talk me out of my beliefs about human nature but because their very existence means we are a long way (generations or even millenia…) from ever being able to band together and realize our potential.

The other night I was visiting my hometown and I was drawn into a discussion with a guy I knew in highschool. I’d never spoken with him that seriously, but did know him well enough to know he would fall into the category of a very intelligent cynic. We ended up in an argument that began with anarchism, quickly progressed to the problem of poverty (first in our own countries then in Africa), then touched on racial struggle in the US, and finally actively analyzed the similarities and differances between Hitler and Jesus. To his credit he could out-do me any day on a test of historical trivia. He was able to recall exact dates and names for historical events in a way I could never hope to. His style of argument, however, was incredably disconcerting. Not only would he refuse to award me points we both knew were valid if I couldn’t come up with a solid historical date (even if he knew exactly the event I was thinking of), the entire bit about Jesus and Hitler was nothing more than an attempt on his part to wind me up into a frenzy trying to defend ‘my savior’ at the expense of rationality. It wasn’t until long after I had successfully communicated the fact that I simply wouldn’t get riled up trying to defend Jesus’ holiness because it wasn’t an idea I was attached to that he finally admitted the whole thing was ridiculous (or rather that no parelells aside from the involvement of Jews in both stories and maybe a Nietzsche’s superman complex could really be drawn).

(to anyone who is relatively versed in philosophy, some help on a particular point would still be appreciated: we covered the fact that i viewed jesus as a human man who was kicking around 2000 years ago, and he viewed him as a mythical figure whose story was very relavent today. i didn’t think it made any sense, given our varying stances to compare jesus to any historical figure since one person would be comparing two historical figures while the other compared a symbol with a historical figure. ….thoughts?)

No matter which topic we were on two things (not unrelated) were very clear to me: 1. He just enjoyed the oppurtunity to try to mess with people’s heads, and 2. He had no faith in the intellectual ability (and thus, overall potential) of humans.

Both sort of made me want to cry. 1. Don’t mess with people. Deal with people openly and honestly or go home. Really.
2. ….*sigh*.

Another friend I know from high school responded to a post I put up a while ago on the fact that it was time to stop dividing ourselves and time to approach the problems facing the world together. He said he understood that it was evolution that made us form alliances and be competitive in the way that we are, and I have to agree with that 100%. It is survival of the fittest that has made us group all together, and be afraid of ‘the other’, both of which lead to nationalism and racism in today’s date. What I refuse to accept as fact is that this part of human nature can be used as defense for the idea that we have no potential to choose to live another way.

Evolution has provided us with far more tools over the past few million years than we currently use very actively. Back in the day it may have been necessary for us to make little armies and compete with each other, but today we have the mental capacity to look at the world we live in, see the destruction that violance and war cause, and choose instead to work together toward solutions to the world’s problems that would benefit all of us. We may well never choose that route, but don’t give me that it’s human nature not to. It’s the biggest, most destructive cop-out I’ve ever heard (…and for the cynics in favour of conspiracy theories among you: it’s exactly what they want you to think ).

Over the next day or two I’ll post more about what I think that other option could look like, and the realizations I think we would need to get to before turning that way. …but I need some time to sort me thoughts .

Dave Matthews Band–Everyday

Music makes me a happy camper, and this week I am going to post about some. When I was away in Montreal I was sitting listening to Gabe mess around on the guitar playing some Dave Matthews Band. I think that instigated a bit of a Dave Matthews kick for me, because I’ve been listening to him all week.

I’m very self-concious about my lack of music ability so I generally avoid commenting on a band’s sound but considering that my friends who listen to Dave Matthews Band are all of the extremely musical persuasion, I feel comfortable saying that they’re quite brilliant. Personally though, it’s the man’s lyrics that I am struck by. He weaves together songs whose lyrics flow smoothly through the music (rather than sounding like they’ve been dropped on top–if that makes any sense) and are comprised of gorgeous poetry.

Everyday is probably his album that I like listening to beginning-to-end the most. There are two songs in particular that I love from a philosophy/way of life perspective. “What You Are“, firstly, is a beautiful call to trust and live life for yourself:
They look straight through me, these eyes
Seeking more wisdom than I have to give away…
Realize, realize what you are…
Don’t you know
When you give life
Then you become what you are?
Don’t trust me
Trust you…

And “Mother Father” is another really great one. “Mother, Father please explain to me why a world so full of mystery…a place so bitter and still so sweet…how this world has come to be” it begins. It goes on to outline some of the darker dichotomies in the world we live in and then goes on to say:

We got the freedom
There’s no God above
And no hell below
Oh, it’s here with us
It’s up to us
To keep afloat

I think it’s this philosophy that I love so much. Athiesm generally frightens me in its tendancy to breed moral and spiritual apathy. But when people can believe in the necessity of our working to make the world a better place without relying on the idea of a God who will punish us if we don’t I find it intensly inspiring.

Personally I do believe in a God. I believe him to be the ultimate realization of, or energy behind creation. I don’t think he is seperate from, or above us, watching down passing judgement on what we do. I don’t even believe he has a seperate will, in the way we think of it. I think instead that it is up to us to use our will to use his energy to guide us to use our gift of life in a beautiful way.

Looking back to “What You Are” there is a line that says, “hoping to God on high is like clinging to straws while drowning. Realize what you are”. It’s not that God isn’t a very real force but using that force, making decisions and taking action…that’s on us. We need to realize our role in the playing out of creation.

…um…so ya.

Right. Back to Dave Matthews.

He’s got a love song or two on the album that I really like as well. Firstly “Fool to Think” is fantastic “Look at me dreaming of you…was I a fool to think, the way you looked at me…I swear you did, but you looked away to quick…was I a fool to think that you would take me home? Was I a fool to think at all?”

Finally “Sleep to Dream Her“, a song about unrequited love is absolutely gorgeous:
I know I’ll miss her later
Wish I could bend my love to hate her
Wish I could be her creator
To twist her arms now

She stares up at the stars when
The stars fell from her hair then
I bent down to collect them
And then she was gone
…yep. Love it.

Really the whole album is great.
Point in case: if you haven’t gotten around to checking them out yet, do so. It’s important .

I’m confused…I thought we were going forward…

I stumbled across this blog this morning. First actually, I stumbled across this one, and thought his bit about Swearing like an Englishman was brilliant. So, intrigued, I checked out his profile, finding myself at the aforementioned Kosher Salmon.

This second blog also started out by interesting me. “People like to understand things”, he begins, and then proceeds to talk about how we are all so quick to ask what people do, so that we can categorize them in our heads and make it easier for us to understand them. He then moved on into a bit about how, for kids, we even were silly enough to ask “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, as if they didn’t have better things to think about. All in all I thought it was a relevant train of thought. Why is it that we are so eager to categorize people? Couldn’t there be a better way of dealing with those around us?

…but the way the train of thought went. …I dunno…I was very abrubtly left behind (perhaps on purpose?–my Irish blood wasn’t meant to understand?).

He went into a bit about love, as the reason we get up in the morning. …which I had to agree with. Then (here’s where it took a turn for the ‘padg is lost’), he talked about love meaning preferance. About how love was about choosing something and holding it up above something else.

?…My concept of love is so differant from that. My concept of love is as a force of energy that flows through all of us inspiring us to live. It seems to me that it’s only when we haven’t learned to let love out in its unbridled form that we find ourselves dividing and handing it out selectively. The most virtuous goal, seems to me, to be that of learning to love every grain of the world, and the people in it, with an equally strong passion.

?…but he said that “those who want everyone to love everyone and everything the same wish nothing more that the removal of all love from this world”, and that confused me. I put alot of thought into it, and I still came out pretty sure that I did not wish the removal of all love from this world.

Then he said “if you’re willing to die for Israel as much as you are for Kamchatka, then you’re not willing to die for anything of value, you’re just willing to die”, and I thought: ‘wait? die for Isreal? Die for a country?….that’s love? k…see now I’m really lost’.

…anyway, I guess, at this point, you’ve either read the Kosher Salmon blog, or put together his point. To summarize, the main idea was that being Jewish means you are part of a religion “equal to or greater than any other”, and that that made you special…and that you should celebrate that by being actively Jewish. You should be proud, you should do the whole birthright thing. …etc. etc.

The levels at which I’ve been confused at this point are staggering.

First of all, we are definately labelling and categorizing people again (which I thought was what we were trying to get away from). That is definately my smallest complaint, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Secondly, dying for Isreal? Can we talk for a moment about nationalism? Can we talk about the atrociousness of the World Wars?

When I met exchange students from Europe when I was abroad in Japan, we often talked about flags. In Japan, you do not often see flags flying. For those North Americans among us, this was a little surprising, but the Europeans quickly brought us up to speed on the fact that for countries actively involved in WWII flags had become a little bit of a ‘taboo’. Nationalism had become a bit of a ‘no-no’. …and rightly so wouldn’t you agree? I mean that was allllllot of blood spilt over the concept of being Aryan, or Japanese, as the case may have been. And forgive me if it’s politically incorrect of me to say so, but shouldn’t Jewish people know this better than anyone else?

Thirdly, love being expressed through death? This is completely foriegn to me. I understand that there are situations in which you must fight for what you believe, and that such fights could lead to your death…but surely that is differant from love? In what circumstance could love and death really be equated? I mean there are those among us who believe that Jesus’ death was the ultimate expression of God’s love for us….but even in that (very extreme) example, I would have to argue that Jesus’ death was much less about love, and much more about a bunch of angry and confused Romans and Jews.

…and actually, now that Jesus is on the table, I’d like to use him for another point. Jesus was Jewish. 2000 years ago, he grew up learning all the things that you learned back in the day in Jewish culture, and he mulled it over and went: “Hey guys! I have a thought. We’re all God’s children. Let’s love everyone as children of God”. Two millenia ago it occured to him that maybe it wasn’t the greatest idea in the world to be dividing people into sections and labelling them. ….and yet, 2 millenia later what are we doing? Dividing people, and labelling them. Infact he even gets a bunch of labels of his own (I’m sure he’d be realllly impressed by that too).

Guys. It’s the year 2005. Globalization is making the world smaller than it has ever been. Whether we like it or not, we (all of us) are going to have to start to learn to work together. The population is still growing dramatically, the environment is suffering from the unreasonable pressure the mal-developed nations put on it, people are starving and dying. …we have alot of important things to deal with…and we have to do it together.

The fact of the matter is: the future is scary. And God knows if we’re going to get it right (all the puns you can make with that sentance are valid). All that is clear is that there’s no where to go but forwards. Now that a place like North America exists, where languages, and cultures blend together, now that you can fly around the world in less than a day…now that it’s easier for me to get a hold of family in Ireland, than my brother 45 minutes out of town…we just can’t pretend to be segregated into little groups anymore. There is alot to be learned from history, and we certainly shouldn’t be turning our backs on our cultures and ignoring them–but we can’t go back. It just isn’t one of the options on the table.

“Be proud that you’re not the same as everyone else, because if everyone was the same there could be no selection, no love,” the guy said to Jews reading his blog. And I’m thinking, ‘I’m all for embracing your background, and being aware of your culture…but the time has come to acknowledge what we all have in common…what it is to be human, and to learn to love everyone for that’.

I believe in a really powerful love, through which people’s eyes could be opened to understanding one another. I believe that if we work together we could discover that starvation and hunger are unnecessary and that every human being, of every colour, in every culture, and of every religious tradition is equally deserving of a happy and comfortable life, through which they can explore their own potential.

Most importantly I believe that we are all God’s children, all “chosen people”, all worthy of enlightenment….that every one of us has the unquenchable energy of life and love flowing through our veins, and that no matter how much we choose to divide ourselves, and no matter how many times we die trying to prove otherwise, that that truth will ring clear over and over again.

…if you’re with me on any of those points…let’s move forward together eh?