Life Changes

Life has taken some unexpected turns in the last couple of years. It has kept me busy enough that I haven't had the presence of mind to write in this blog for a LONG time. In just over 2 years, I have gone through three job changes, and we moved our family from Georgia (where we had lived for 18 years) to Arizona.

The changes have been good, and we're enjoying our new home. We have all made new friends, and the kids are doing really well with the transition. We left our oldest in Georgia where he's going to college, and our second child is living at home while attending college nearby. The younger two are in high school and stay incredibly busy with friends, school, and extracurricular stuff.

Each job has taught me a lot, and I'm grateful I've had each opportunity. I never intended to change jobs so quickly, but for different reasons, each change seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I started my current job about a month ago, and I'm really excited about the opportunity. It's a startup, and the company is poised for growth, so things are getting exciting there.

I'm really glad I learned to meditate several years ago. My practice has been really grounding for me and has helped me to meet these changes with stability of mind. I've realized more and more how little control I have over my life's course. I think my meditation practice has also helped me to let go of the illusion of control and the need to control.

Life is funny. It's unexpected. It's always surprising me and teaching me. And it's a really fun ride.

Etty Hillesum

I recently discovered the life of a Dutch Jewish woman, Etty Hillesum, who was killed at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 29. Her life seems to have been one of self-discovery and spiritual awakening at a time when the dark side of human nature seemed as if it might completely blanket the world in its shadow. I'm reading her diary and although I'm only about 1/3 the way through, I've already come across a wealth of spiritual and psychological insights, and I'm excited to read the rest.

Etty Hillesum in 1939

This morning, I read a snippet from her diary that I'd like to share. It's beautiful in its simplicity and humility. I'm in awe of people who, living through such darkness, can shine a light inside themselves and sidestep the urge to hate. The text below came directly from her diary as part of a single paragraph. I have added paragraph breaks to enhance readability, but the text is otherwise unchanged.

"What is it in human beings that makes them want to destroy others?" Jan asked bitterly. 

I said, "Human beings, you say, but remember that you're one yourself." And strangely enough he seemed to acquiesce, grumpy, gruff old Jan. "The rottenness of others is in us, too," I continued to preach at him. "I see no other solution, I really see no other solution than to turn inward and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we have first changed ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned from this war. That we must look into ourselves and nowhere else." 

And Jan, who so unexpectedly agreed with everything I said, was approachable and interested and no longer proffered any of his hard-boiled social theories. Instead he said, "Yes, it's too easy to turn your hatred loose on the outside, to live for nothing but the moment of revenge. We must try to do without that." 

We stood there in the cold waiting for the tram, Jan with his great purple chilblained hands and his toothache. Our professors are in prison, another of Jan's friends has been killed, and there are so many other sorrows, but all we said to each other was, "It is too easy to feel vindictive." 

That really was the bright spot of today.

From "An Interrupted Life" by Etty Hillesum

It's All One Energy

I just heard a quote from a guy named Alan Watts. I've been listening to him on various youtube posts, and I find him fascinating. Here's one of the more beautiful quotes I've garnered from this video. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find out when and where he said it.

Thoughts, you see, belong to the world of symbols. What we experience with our senses is, of course, the physical world, the real world. You may ask me, ‘well, isn’t there also a spiritual world?’. But you must understand that the spiritual world is the same thing as the physical when the physical is not confused with the symbolic. There is no real difference between the spiritual and the physical. It’s all one energy.

Alan Watts

Psychology and Religion

I recently finished reading extracts from several of Carl Jung's works. The following is a rather long quote from his book "Psychology and Religion". I think it's profound in what it says about mass psychology and the history of religion. I don't know that I agree with the cultural and psychological reasons he gives for the Protestant Reformation. But for the rest of it, I think he has some excellent points. The emphasis below is mine.

It is rather astonishing ... that the Protestant schism could not have been avoided. But since Protestantism became the creed of the adventurous Germanic tribes with their characteristic curiosity, acquistiveness, and recklessness, it seems possible that their peculiar nature was unable to endure the peace of the Church, at least not for any length of time. It looks as if they were not yet advanced enough to suffer a process of salvation and to submit to a deity who was made visible in the magnificent structure of the church. There was, perhaps, too much of the Imperium Romanum or of the Pax Romana in the church - too much, at least, for their energies, which were and still are insufficiently domesticated. It is quite likely that they needed an unmitigated and less controlled experience of God, as often happens to adventurous and restless people who are too youthful for any form of conservatism or domestication. They therefore did away with the intercession of the Church between God and man, some more and some less. With the demolition of protective walls, the Protestant lost the sacred images that expressed important unconscious factors, together with the ritual which, from time immemorial, has been a safe way of dealing with the unpredictable forces of the unconscious. A vast amount of energy was thus liberated and instantly went into the old channels of curiosity and acquisitvieness. In this way, Europe became the mother of dragons that devoured the greater part of the earth.

Since those days Protestantism has become a hotbed of schisms and, at the same time, of rapid advances in science and technics which cast such a spell over man's conscious mind that it forgot the unpredictable forces of the unconscious. The catastrophe of the first World War and the extraordinary manifestations of profound spiritual malaise that came afterwards were needed to arouse a doubt as to whether all was well with the white man's mind. Before the war broke out in 1914 we were all quite certain that the world could be righted by rational means. Now we behold the amazing spectacle of states taking over the age-old totalitarian claims of theocracy, which are inevitably accompanied by suppression of free opinion. Once more we see people cutting each other's throats in support of childish theories of how to create paradise on earth. It is not very difficult to see that the powers of the underworld - not to say of hell - which in former times were more or less successfully chained up in a gigantic spiritual edifice where they could be of some use, are now creating, or trying to create, a State slavery and a State prison devoid of any mental or spiritual charm. There are not a few people nowadays who are convinced that mere human reason is not entirely up to the enormous task of putting a lid on the volcano.

This whole development is fate. I would not lay the blame either on Protestantism or on the Renaissance. But one thing is certain - that modern man, Protestant or otherwise, has lost the protection of the ecclesiastical walls erected and reinforced so carefully since Roman days, and because of this loss has approached the zone of world-destroying and world-creating fire. Life has become quickened and intensified. Our world is shot through with waves of uneasiness and fear.

Protestantism was, and still is, a great risk and at the same time a great opportunity. If it goes on disintegrating as a church, it must have the effect of stripping man of all his spiritual safeguards and means of defense against immediate experience of the forces waiting for liberation in the unconscious. Look at all the incredible savagery going on in our so-called civilized world: it all comes from human beings and the spiritual condition they are in! Look at the devilish engines of destruction! They are invented by completely innocuous gentlemen, reasonable, respectable citizens who are everything we could wish. And when the whole thing blows up and an indescribable hell of destruction is let loose, nobody seems to be responsible. It simply happens, and yet it is all man-made. But since everybody is blindly convinced that he is nothing more than his own extremely unassuming and insignificant conscious self, which performs its duties decently and earns a moderate living, nobody is aware that this whole rationalistically organized conglomeration we call a state or a nation is driven on by a seemingly impersonal, invisible but terrifying power which nobody and nothing can check. This ghastly power is mostly explained as fear of the neighboring nation, which is supposed to be possessed by a malevolent fiend. Since nobody is capable of recognizing just where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, he simply projects his own condition upon his neighbor, and thus it becomes a sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas. The worst of it is that he is quite right. All one's neighbors are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear, just like oneself. In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.

I love how he talks about the collective insanity of the human race. I visited Auschwitz about a month ago. I am still working through the pain of that experience, having seen so much tangible evidence of our collective insanity and the violence and suffering that it can engender. The quotes in this blog post come from a series of lectures Jung gave in 1937, so he does not refer to the second World War and the holocaust. But his analysis seems very prescient of those later events.

Jung continues:

The Protestant is left to God alone. For him there is no confession, no absolution, no possibility of an expiatory opus divinum of any kind. He has to digest his sins by himself; and, because the absence of a suitable ritual has put it beyond his reach, he is none too sure of divine grace. Hence the present alertness of the Protestant conscience - and this bad conscience has all the disagreeable characteristics of a lingering illness which makes people chronically uncomfortable. But, for this very reason, the Protestant has a unique chance to make himself conscious of sin to a degree that is hardly possible for a Catholic mentality, as confession and absolution are always at hand to ease excess of tension. The Protestant, however, is left to his tensions, which can go on sharpening his conscience. Conscience, and particularly a bad conscience, can be a gift from heaven, a veritable grace if used in the interests of the higher self-criticism. And self-criticism, in the sense of an introspective, discriminating activity, is indispensable in any attempt to understand your own psychology. If you have done something that puzzles you and you ask yourself what could have prompted you to such an action, you need the sting of a bad conscience and its discriminating faculty in order to discover the real motive of your behavior. It is only then that you can see what motives are governing your actions. The sting of a bad conscience even spurs you on to discover things that were unconscious before, and in this way you may be able to cross the threshold of the unconscious and take cognizance of those impersonal forces which make you an unconscious instrument of the wholesale murderer in man. If a Protestant survives the complete loss of his church and still remains a Protestant, that is to say a man who is defenseless against God and no longer shielded by walls or communities, he has a unique spiritual opportunity for immediate religious experience.

I feel like Jung is saying that we have an opportunity to wake up, to bring into conscious awareness the unconscious forces that drive us. If we have stripped away the ritual, the symbolism, and the dogma, we have a risk and an opportunity of facing our unconscious demons head-on. This could drive us insane or it could be the catalyst for a spiritual experience, a profound awakening, and a deep transformation.

I think that's worth thinking about. And worth experiencing.

Insecurity

The reason why we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind the scenes with everone else's highlight reel.

- Steven Furtick

The Present Moment

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.4311

Humor Quote

"A sense of relationship and copartnership with God involves the concept of universal brotherhood and that will help to develop intelligent tolerance, open-mindedness, and good-natured optimism. Life is really a battle between fear and faith, pessimism and optimism. Fear and pessimism paralyze men with skepticism and futility. One must have a sense of humor to be an optimist in times like these. And you young women will need a sense of humor if you marry these young men and try to live with them. Golden Kimball once said in a conference, 'The Lord Himself must like a joke or he wouldn't have made some of you people.' But your good humor must be real, not simulated. Let your smiles come from the heart and they will become contagious. You may see men on the street any day whose laugh is only a frozen grin with nothing in it but teeth. Men without humor tend to forget their source, lose sight of their goal, and with no lubrication in their mental crankshafts, they must drop out of the race. Lincoln said, 'Good humor is the oxygen of the soul.' And someone paraphrased, 'The surly bird catches the germ.'"
-Hugh B. Brown

The Seen and the Unseen

I just posted a tribute to Ron Paul, so in that spirit, here's a quote from French economist Frédéric Bastiat from his essay in 1850 entitled "That Which is Seen and That Which is Unseen".

In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.

Portrait of Frédéric Bastiat from Wikipedia

Hugh B. Brown on Truth

"Sometimes during solitude I hear truth spoken with clarity and freshness; uncolored and untranslated it speaks from within myself in a language original but inarticulate, heard only with the soul, and I realize I brought it with me, was never taught it nor can I efficiently teach it to another."

- Hugh B. Brown

Einstein on Miracles

I found a great quote hanging on a wall at my kids' school.

There are two ways to live your life.

One is as though nothing is a miracle.

The other is as though everything is a miracle.

-Albert Einstein

Einstein has some really good quotes. I was going to post more, but I think I like this one all by itself.

I taught a lesson in church several months ago that has really stuck with me. In it, I defined a 'miracle' as something that fills us with wonder and awe. Even though we may come to understand some of the mechanisms of natural phenomena, that doesn't have to destroy the wonder we feel when we step back and look at something wonderful. Einstein was a better physicist than I am, so when I read that quote, it really resonated with me. A man who had a phenomenal mind and a well developed mental model of many of nature's workings seems to be telling us to preserve that sense of wonder and awe we feel when we observe or experience something worthy of such feelings.

I used a couple examples in that lesson I gave to illustrate the point. One was my broken ankle, which I had resting on a table in a cast as I sat at the front of the room. I understand how electromagnetic waves propagate and interact with various media. I understand how X-rays are generated and how they leave an image of their intensity on certain types of film. I understand how those rays interact with the tissues in our bodies and how the bones shadow those waves and attenuate the signals passing through them leaving a clear image on the film at the other side. I understand all that and I can even write the equations we use to model electromagnetic wave propagation ... but it still fills me with awe that a machine can take a picture of my bones allowing a doctor to diagnose and treat me.

With all of that understanding combined with an understanding of digital communication theory, I understand how computers, smart phones, and other devices communicate with each other. But it still fills me with awe when I step back and think about punching in a request for information in a search engine and being able to pull up data from computers all over the world from a little handheld device in the comfort of my living room.

I know how light propagates and refracts through our atmosphere, but a sunset can take my breath away.

I know how water waves propagate, but a beautiful lake or the waves on the beach fill me with joy and peace.

I wonder how God reacts to some of His own creations. Surely He understands them better than I do. When He creates something wonderful, perhaps He steps back and says, "I like that. That's good." and maybe that's one of the things that gives Him joy.

Walt Whitman

I've been reading Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' in recent months. It's slow going; you can't digest Whitman too quickly. He has an incredible gift for expression. He makes beauty and emotion and passion for life come alive. His work is truly beautiful. Here are some examples I read tonight.

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Roaming in Thought
Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality,
And the vast all that is call'd Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.

Beautiful Women
Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young,
The young are beautiful - but the old are more beautiful than the young.

Thought
Of obedience, faith, adhesiveness;
As I stand aloof and look there is to me something profoundly affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who do not believe in men.

O Me! O Life!
O me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew'd,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring - What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here - that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

I Sit and Look Out
I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame,
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done,
I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate,
I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer of young women,
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be hid, I see these sights on the earth,
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd to preserve the lives of the rest,
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these - all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.

Hast Never Come to Thee an Hour
Hast never come to thee an hour,
A sudden gleam divine, precipitating, bursting all these bubbles, fashions, wealth?
These eager business aims - books, politics, art, amours,
To utter nothingness?

Recognition

Ronald Reagan had some really good quotes. I like this one:
"There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit."

If your objective in life is to be praised, patted on the back, or to win fame, glory, or prestige ... you will probably get what you want, but ultimately you won't be as successful as you could have been. You'll also probably find that obtaining what you want leaves you feeling hollow. Fame is just not a satisfying motivation.

If we can clean up our motivations and start doing things for the right reasons (what those are, I'm not always sure), I believe we'll obtain our desires and we'll often find we obtain other byproducts ... like recognition for our efforts. But as soon as we turn our attention to obtaining recognition, or any of those other ultimately unsatisfying things (like money), our ability to obtain it is impeded. And when we do succeed in obtaining it, our success eventually turns to ash in our mouths.

Don't work for the sake of recognition; it only makes you a slave to the person from whom you desire praise. Be self sufficient. Or better yet, rely on someone whose praise is worth obtaining. Work to please God. Maybe that's the right reason for doing anything.

Gandhi on Exercise

In reading Gandhi's autobiography, he has written several times of his habit of taking walks. He wrote once of a conversation he had with a friend and mentor named Gokhale, who was extremely busy with public service. The conversation follows.

" 'But you do not even go out for walks,' said I. 'Is it surprising that you should be always ailing? Should public work leave no time for physical exercise?'

" 'When do you ever find me free to go out for a walk?' he replied.

"I had such a great regard for Gokhale that I never strove with him. Though this reply was far from satisfying me, I remained silent. I believed then and I believe even now, that, no matter what amount of work one has, one should always find some time for exercise, just as one does for one's meals. It is my humble opinion that, far from taking away from one's capacity for work, it adds to it."

When I was in school, working full-time to support my family, attempting to engage in other activities in my Church and community, and trying to be a decent husband and father, I felt like I didn't have time for exercise. After finishing school some months ago, I began to work out two or three times a week. I started swimming mostly and I LOVED the feeling of getting in shape again.

Recently, I've been so busy with work that I've neglected to exercise again. When I neglect it, I find my body and mind become stagnant. It's harder for me to focus and get work done. Everything starts to suffer when one part of my life gets out of whack. Physical exercise is so much more important than I've often imagined. I love the feeling of energy and vitality that flows through my body when I've had a good workout. I need to be more faithful in doing it.

Gandhi on Journalism

Gandhi published a weekly journal for years called Indian Opinion. His description of that experience reminded me of my hopes for this blog. It also contained some wonderful thoughts on journalism in general.

He writes, "Indian Opinion ... was a mirror of part of my life. Week after week I poured out my soul in its columns .... I cannot recall a word in those articles set down without thought or deliberation, or a word of conscious exaggeration, or anything merely to please. Indeed the journal became for me a training in self-restraint, and for friends a medium through which to keep in touch with my thoughts. .... For me it became a means for the study of human nature in all its casts and shades, as I always aimed at establishing an intimate and clean bond between the editor and the readers. I was inundated with letters containing the outpouring of my correspondents' hearts. They were friendly, critical or bitter, according to the temper of the writer. It was a fine education for me to study, digest and answer all this correspondence."

Later, he says, "In the very first month of Indian Opinion, I realized that the sole aim of journalism should be service. The newspaper press is a great power, but just as an unchained torrent of water submerges whole countrysides and devastates crops, even so an uncontrolled pen serves but to destroy. If the control is from without, it proves more poisonous than want of control. It can be profitable only when exercised from within. If this line of reasoning is correct, how many of the journals in the world would stand the test? But who would stop those that are useless? And who should be the judge? The useful and the useless must, like good and evil generally, go on together, and man must make his choice."

Once again, the emphasis is mine. I can't claim to have the wisdom of a Gandhi, but I hope that my attempt to publish my thoughts will be found useful and good. And although popular opinion is almost never a just judge, I hope that you, dear reader, will make a positive judgment of my work by your choice to continue to read my thoughts ... and to share yours with me.

The Doer and The Deed

I started reading Gandhi's autobiography a month or two ago. The whole book is incredible. Almost every chapter has a piece of wisdom that I find profound enough to mark and plan to study later. A few days ago, I read a part that I thought was the most powerful yet. I'll share it here without further comment, though the emphasis is mine.

"Man and his deed are two distinct things. Whereas a good deed should call forth approbation and a wicked deed disapprobation, the doer of the deed, whether good or wicked, always deserves respect or pity as the case may be. 'Hate the sin and not the sinner' is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practised, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.

"... It is quire proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself. For we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite. To slight a single human being is to slight those divine powers, and thus to harm not only that being but with him the whole world."

The Power of Truth

In thinking about the content of a previous post on this blog and the central idea of an ancient prayer I quoted there, I did some research and came across the following quote, which is, I think, a great expression of faith in the power of truth. I believe truth will ultimately emerge triumphant even if it loses a few battles here and there. The prayer I mentioned is also found at the end of the quote below.

The quote is by Hugh B. Brown, who died before I had a chance to know him. I've researched him a little since finding this quote and I have been extremely impressed with him as a man. I may have more quotes coming from him in the future, but this is one of my favorites so far.

"We are grateful in the Church and in this great university that the freedom, dignity and integrity of the individual is basic in Church doctrine as well as in democracy. Here we are free to think and express our opinions. Fear will not stifle thought, as is the case in some areas which have not yet emerged from the Dark Ages. God himself refuses to trammel man's free agency even though its exercise sometimes teaches painful lessons. Both creative science and revealed religion find their fullest and truest expression in the climate of freedom.
 
"I hope that you will develop the questing spirit. Be unafraid of new ideas for they are the stepping stones of progress. You will of course respect the opinions of others but be unafraid to dissent—if you are informed.
 
"Now I have mentioned freedom to express your thoughts, but I caution you that your thoughts and expressions must meet competition in the market place of thought, and in that competition truth will emerge triumphant. Only error needs to fear freedom of expression. Seek truth in all fields, and in that search you will need at least three virtues; courage, zest, and modesty. The ancients put that thought in the form of a prayer. They said, 'From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, from the laziness that is content with half truth, from the arrogance that thinks it has all truth—O God of truth deliver us'."

-Hugh B. Brown, speech at BYU, March 1958

Quote from Walden

I don't plan on posting nearly this often, but I just got started today and I guess I'm a little excited. Here's my quote for the week ... or maybe for the year:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." - from Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Talk amongst yourselves.