Thinking a lot about the 4th dimension. It’s not easy to think about the fourth dimension. What I do is think about the second and third dimension and imagine expansion. In the book Flatland, (readily obtained from your local bookstore) a sphere lifts a polygon out of his two dimensional world, “up”, and the polygon can see inside his friends. I imagine if I could be lifted (what would the word be? Nothing in my vocabulary for that direction!) I could see “inside” my three dimensional friends. Our three dimensional world would be to the fourth dimension like the flat circle is to the sphere. If you slice the sphere, you get a flat surface. Perhaps we are slices of a fourth dimensional world that stretches out all around us in an unknowable direction.

I’m thinking about the fourth dimension because the hypnosis course got me thinking about consciousness, and also I recently proposed an experiment to some researchers in mirror neurons to demonstrate non-auditory, non-visual perception at a distance (NAVPAD). Bob Woodruff’s recent reporting of his own and others’ ”near death” experiences, and the latest issue of The Sun, devoted to dreams, have also contributed to my renewed interest in this question. I’m wondering if what we think of as “consciousness”, Sheldrake’s morphic field, Yoda’s Force, are all manifestations of the larger fourth dimension existence within which we are as flat slices.

So why think about the fourth dimension anyway? Perhaps it will help untangle our ideas about three dimensional good and bad from four dimensional holy and evil.

July 15, 2011

Tomorrow, well, it’s today now, I have to say how I will be using these skills of hypnosis when I go back home, as part of an exercise in which my fellow students will hypnotize me and tell me a story which will indirectly allow me to access learning and confidence.

I realize I have no idea what I am going to do with this hypnosis when I get home, other than that I will await further instructions from the universe. I can see how my current earning-a-living work might be improved by being able to help patients have a better experience in the hospital, access their innate healing powers, be less afraid, more confident and assertive. There may be some other earning-a-living opportunity, some palliative care or pain management work, or work with youth impacted by violence, but I can’t help feeling that it has more to do with the overall goal of planetary liberation, though I don’t see how right now. I know I don’t want to go back to the kind of integrated mind-body practice that I had in the 70’s and 80’s, mostly because my understanding of the political causes of illness makes it hard to go back to the idea that the locus of illness is in the patients themselves. I see medicine and psychiatry as part of the system that keeps people’s attention focused in the wrong direction.

But it’s the art that is my main contribution to planetary liberation, and maybe that’s where the hypnosis might be most helpful. Can I understand trance well enough to demonstrate it in sculpture? Can I get out of my own way well enough to put my work out into the world? Can I even, at the end of today’s session, give postcards to everyone? Put the Trust is Your Birthright DVD on the DVD table? I need a lot of help with that.

June 28, 2011

Hypnosis

So I’m going in July to Phoenix, Arizona to take a three week training in hypnosis. I used to do hypnosis with patients when I first was in private practice, back in the late 70’s. For me it was/is the most accessible strategy to bring together mind and body. In an altered state I feel most receptive to whatever it is the universe wants me to bring forward, and the universe has been taking such good care of me, I really want to return the favor.

I think there are some important things I need to learn about trance. I think that the current social organization, based on violence and domination and the hallucination of scarcity, is maintained by a community-wide trance, a trance which is induced generation to generation by violence against children.

In this trance, an addiction-like state arises, in which the citizen associates the oppressive cultural structure with normalcy, even pleasure. Why else is militarism so celebrated? Why else are our children inundated with violent video games?

The truth is that the social structure is horribly damaging and in fact feels terrible. The trance phenomenon of dissociation allows a citizen, like an addict, to remain in denial about the disintegration of body and mind. The phenomenon of displacement allows the citizen to direct any vague feelings of not-quite-rightness onto convenient scapegoats.

What I think would be really helpful would be to learn how to release people from this trance, and enable them to feel, not only the reality of how this world feels, but the various possibilities that exist to organize ourselves differently, in nonviolent, harmonious and mutually nurturing ways.

I’m not sure if this is what the organizers of the training are planning to teach us, but it is one of the things I am hoping to learn.

June 20, 2011

The Army

Well, I have been a little behind in keeping up my blog entries. The last one I was thinking about had to do with the comparison between what was happening in Egypt and in Libya in response to the courageous uprisings of the Arab people. The big difference, obviously, was in the response of the army. In Egypt the army seemed to believe itself to be on the side of the people, the nation, while in Libya, most of the army has remained loyal to the ruler. When we Americans begin the difficult work of recovering our country, I think our best chance of succeeding will be if we have been able to get the message to the soldiers, the police, even the paramilitary, that they are a part of us all. We will succeed to the extent that those who hold the guns refuse to turn them on us.

 Activists who organize along class and race and gender and sexual orientation and disability lines would do well to look at the possibility of organizing within the army and the local police. Who joins the army or the police?  I think they range from people who joined looking for economic opportunity, or out of a desire to serve, or to be a part of something larger than themselves, or out of family tradition, or to give back for some lifesaving act on behalf of themselves or their family, and then some are sadistic opportunists. Then they go through the training/conditioning process and come out as the weapon of the 1%, not the shield of the 99% that they went in thinking they were serving. That the ideology and pomp tell them they are serving. The 99% that they themselves are a part of.

None of the people who have actually attacked advocates for human rights on the ground have been members of the 1%. The 1% hire people who hire people who use force or money or entrancement to get poor people to do their dirty work for them. Skillful organization, undertaken before the uprising (like now, in our country) might be able to awaken the enforcers to their class and economic best interests, kind of like how white people need to understand they have more in common with economically similar black people than they do with the 1% white people.

Appallingly difficult, but if we are serious about empathy, that's where we have to go. I like the work of  Paul Chapell,  a soldier who writes about nonviolence in the army and the need to wage peace. According to Chapell, the military training of officers actually encourages  the kind of critical thinking of American foreign policy that might allow an alliance with the citizens instead of the politicians.

I say this as someone who has studied the perpetrator. I recognize that my despair about political change has its roots in the futility of my resistance to my father. But my father did his own dirty work and I was small and weak. The 1% depend on others, they do not have actual power themselves. The 99% in fact have all the power, we are much larger, and we include the army and the police.

March 19, 2011

In our body, blood circulates to every cell and organ, bringing nourishment and oxygen. If our legs need more blood because we are running, if our womb needs more because we are creating a child, our body is designed to meet these needs, for the benefit of the whole.

In our body politic, wealth is like blood, bringing resources that are needed to all of us. In a healthy society, areas that need more resources, such as children; the elderly; artists, inventors and entrepreneurs; green spaces, water and air, receive priority, but the distribution of wealth has only one purpose, to keep everyone in the society healthy.

In an otherwise healthy body, however, sometimes a cancer begins to grow, consuming resources without contributing anything in return. It suffocates nearby cells. It creates new blood vessels to divert more blood to itself. It takes up space that normal cells need to carry out their function, for example, a lung cancer will convert the spongy, airy lung into a solid mass.

In our social body, the cancer is that top 1% of wealthy individuals and corporations. Money that could fund child and elder care becomes profit for insurance companies. Money that could start a small business becomes the bank president’s bonus. Land that could feed the physical and spiritual needs of all our citizens becomes one person’s private property.

As a cancer devours every resource, the body becomes wasted. Normal cells begin to consume one another to stay alive. Cities and states sacrifice our children to pay dividends to the 1%. How could anyone believe that unions or teachers or immigrants are to blame for this mass starvation?

Our body is defended by our immune system, which protects us from bacteria and viruses. But cancer cells look just like the rest of the body, and the immune system doesn’t see them as the enemy that they are. The 1% has us so confused that many of us think they are just like the rest of us. Some of us actually aspire to become these obscene cancers.

The system that allows the 1% to devour the rest of us is killing us. What can we, the 99%, do?

The first step is to be willing to open our eyes and name what we see. The 1% buys politicians as if they were yachts. We can call this corruption.

Laws define corporations as persons, with the rights of persons: we can change those laws. Taxes are the way we circulate the wealth we create, directing it where it is most needed. We can change the tax system.

These are just the first, easy steps. As we make these changes, we will find ourselves  thinking more deeply about our society and its structure. Our body functions in an effortlessly cooperative, harmonious way. None of our organs attempts to control any of the others. But our social structure is rooted in violence and domination, distorting our ideas of power, work, love, and human nature itself.

So the second step in saving our lives is to choose between violence and harmony, to recognize our interdependence and innate capacity for empathy. Working together to create a new world, we will re-define power and re-imagine work. We will recover our health.

12/8/10

Thanks to Momsie for her question about forgiveness. ( See Options, 10/23/10 ). I think that forgiveness is like therpy. It may be lifesaving for some people, by helping them deal with the rage, grief, pain and terror that are the natural results of being traumatized. But it doesn’t deal with the trauma that caused those feelings in the first place. It’s kind of like the cardiologist putting a stent in your heart, when the reason your heart is broken is because you live in a domination-based system which is profoundly toxic to human beings and the planet as a whole. If forgiveness, therpy, or angioplasty are not explicitly connected to planetary liberation, then no matter how crucial they may be to individual survival, they are little more than a bandaid.

11/25/10

John Calhoun did an experiment in the sixties in which he put ten rats in an enclosure with sufficient food and water. The rats reproduced, became extremely overcrowded and began to show very un-rat-like behavior, including rape, murder and infanticide. He concluded that space was a biological necessity, like food and water.

When I picture this experiment, I can easily imagine the desperation of the rats attacking one another, and the terror of the females being gang raped. I can imagine wiser rats encouraging their fellows to remember their social rat nature, to practice compassion and the golden rule, despite the difficult circumstances. I can even imagine some rats trying to persuade the others that these violent and rapacious behaviors were  true rat nature. What I can’t imagine is that any of the rats might be able to look up at Calhoun and his colleagues and come to understand that their misery is being deliberately inflicted on them by beings who understand perfectly well how miserable it is to be overcrowded. 

Leaving aside the species difference (because, after all, if there were significant species differences, what would be the point of animal experimentation in the first place?) I think there is a qualitative difference between the violence of the manipulated rats and the violence of the humans who manipulated them.

I think there is a qualitative difference between human beings who hurt others because they have been hurt, who hurt others as a pain management strategy, and those who hurt others because they want to, out of pleasure.

To the child being raped, it may not matter so much. But to those of us seeking planetary liberation, it may matter a great deal.

Thanks to Momsie and Sandy and Beth for their comments. I actually have spent some time thinking about what would happen to psychiatry if it were discovered that depression or even schizophrenia were caused by a virus. Maybe some retrovirus, like HIV, that attacked the serotonin and dopamine system cells, but remained hidden in the DNA. Maybe someday, in the middle of a flu epidemic, people will notice that schizophrenics who take Tamiflu no longer hear voices. If that happens, remember, you read it here first!

But I think there are other more fruitful ways of looking at what is happening today. It's important first to get clear on what kind of society we think we have now. Many of the people for whom I have the greatest respect believe that everyone is pretty much the same, we all want the same things, and that the problems we have are mostly based on miscommunication and fear. They propose nonviolent communication education, conflict resolution skills,  respectful childrearing and collaborative, rather than competitive work environments. I believe these strategies are essential and I strive to practice them as best I can.

I can't help feeling, though, that this description leaves out some important details. The "we" of this world view (I'll call it the "we are all the same" world view: WAATS) is just us, down here in the shacks, the sharecroppers, working harder and harder,  bringing in the harvest, and wondering every season why we are poorer and poorer, the schools underfunded, the roads full of holes, ragged people on street corners with signs asking for help and blessing us. People who look a lot like us, if we had to sleep in our clothes on the street for a few days.

The WAATS world view doesn't seem to notice the big house, hidden behind the row of poplar trees, where massa lives.

To be fair, the WAATS world view does acknowledge that there are people who act in violent and non-cooperative ways. The explanation is that they have been injured, and certainly down here among the shacks there is enough pervasive misery to injure anyone, although only a small handful of us turn violent. 

But what about massa in the big house? What about the health insurance executives who paid millions of dollars (probably representing a half-hour of profits) to Congress to prevent single payer health care, even though it would mean a much better life for us down here in the shacks? What about the agribusinesses that sell modified grains that require huge inputs of petroleum based fertilizer and pesticides, calling it the "green revolution" and driving indigenous farmers to suicide? What about those banks?

In the WAATS world view, people who devise policies that impoverish entire nations are just like us, only more damaged. In my opinion, this is an unproven hypothesis, one which is fundamentally disrespectful of massa. It may be true, but there is no evidence to support it. 

More important, I'm not sure that it is an hypothesis that is helpful to the goal of planetary liberation. 

So I would like to explore some other ideas in blogs to come.

10/29/10

Watching and waiting for the election, I feel the way I imagine a person might have felt watching and waiting for the plague to come to her village before the discovery of microbes: Surely some combination of right living and spiritual devotion will turn this scourge aside.

10/25/10

I am working on a piece now that has to do with the Pacific Gyre Garbage Patch. It was inspired by Chris Jordan’s photos of baby albatrosses, their dead bodies decayed down to feathers and bones and the heaps of plastic trash their innocent parents fed them. When I see these images, I think forgiveness is as irrelevant to these birds as pi.

The material in this piece comes from a creek which I helped clean up in a community clean-the-creek day. I didn’t realize until I started making the sculpture how much of the trash was food, or rather, non-food (funyions?) wrappers. The non-food kills the people, and the wrappers kill the birds and fish.

We are all starving.

This is not a law of nature, like gravity or the rings of Saturn. This something human beings created. Human beings can change this. We can create something better.