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PART TWO:
SYNERGY OF PERSON DIMENSIONS
Virkler also agrees with the concept of characterizing humans as holons, i.e., that people are both a
whole and part of a system simultaneously. This is the point of this entire
work being titled “Human Holons: Power-Packed
Synergies” and the last part being titled “Walking Nuggets and Magnets.”
As a “walking nugget,” each human being is a very valuable
synergy by itself, of value almost infinitely more times over than that human
being’s “weight in gold.” On the other
hand, as a “walking magnet,” each human is affected by magnetic fields all around,
and creates one’s own magnetic field to affect all else, and the total picture
is one of dynamic interaction among humans that create and characterize their
synergies such as their families and friendships, their neighborhoods and
communities, and commercial systems and arrangements for collective
self-governance.
Each human is an organism, a cluster of differentiated
cells, acting in a smooth symphony with the least intellectual supervision
necessary. Cell colonies are clusters of identical cells that can cohere
together for survival but are very unstable as groupings when compared to
organisms.
As far as common turn-of-the-millennium reckoning is
concerned, each human is a synergy of three person dimensions, namely, the
body, the mind and the spirit. I have frequently described the human as a soul
wearing a matter-energy body. This, until a student of mine countered by saying
the human is the synergy of soul and body, and I had to agree. I
still maintained, though, that the soul has apparently been the more decisive
of the two elements because of these two elements’ respective developments
across a stretch of time where the soul is immortal and the body, the very
useful tool of the soul for experiencing earth life, grows old, dies and
decomposes after it is left by the life-composing force of the soul.
J J J
The Live Body-- A Synergy of Active
Bio-Systems
THE BODY
itself is a great synergy of dynamic systems (like respiratory, circulatory,
skeletal, muscular, digestive, nervous, etc.), each of which is itself a
synergy of organs (like the heart, arteries, veins, etc.), which are made up of
widely varying tissues, each of which is a synergy of cells, with each cell
being a synergy of molecules of organic elements and compounds, etc., etc.,
down in size to the atoms, atomic nuclei, protons, positrons, and so on. The
body is also a synergy of electro-chemical and bio-physical systems.
Information lodged in the DNA of every cell carries as
memory the evolution of each cell, or tissue or organ or system and therefore
embraces a synergy of evolutionary processes, in dynamic interaction with
widely varying kinds of climates and terrain.
1. A Crucially Vital Connection
One has only to breathe consciously while feeling her bloodpulse to be challenged to see the vital
connection between the two ever-ongoing body processes we are, usually,
totally unconscious of. We are sure to
see the connection once we reaffirm the obvious fact that we do not breathe
only so that our lungs could live, and the obvious fact that we do not eat only
so that our stomachs and intestines could live.
The whole set of intertwined systems is orchestrated so that all the
living cells of the body, every single one of the millions and millions of
cells of our bodies that we have mostly forgotten all about, could eat, drink,
breathe, and continue to live. Let us contemplate all our bodily systems, and
pause for a moment of appreciation for them—could the body survive if any which
one of these basic systems were not there?
Even with our knowledge of the larger holons
synergizing to form our body, I dare say we are all still almost absolutely ignorant
about our body synergy. Even physicians
have had the tendency to approximate working comprehension of very specific
functions and systems which are their respective specializations. Teachers of Biology tend to focus on making
sure their students get to memorize names and workings of very distinct parts
but not really the living orchestration.
Before I came across the essay of Dr. Phillip Bishop,
professor of exercise physiology at the
“What are you doing right now? If your first answer was,
‘nothing’ you are badly mistaken. Right now while you sit quietly, a myriad of
wonderful events are taking place necessary for your survival. Right now your
heart is beating. If you're in average physical condition, it beats between 60
and 70 times per minute, 93,000 times per day, 655,000 times per week, 34
million times per year, and 2.4 billion beats in the average lifetime. What's
so amazing is that, most of the time, it fuels itself, paces itself, repairs
itself, and alters itself in response to lifestyle changes, with no conscious
effort on your part. In addition to your
heart, your liver is detoxifying your blood, your brain is storing away information,
cells are being formed and cells destroyed, energy is being used and produced,
and many other tasks vital to life and function all carry on in a wonderful,
harmonious way.”
Further Bishop says:
“Your eyes, your ears, your heart, each of these together
with its intricate function should inspire awe. The heart of man, from a
functional viewpoint is a miracle of performance. Through a complex nervous and
hormonal feedback regulation system, the heart and circulatory system maintain
the exactly correct rate and output to supply the correct blood flow for both
the marathoner and the couch potato. The parts of you that are functioning at
any particular time receive a share of blood in proportion to their need, and
those that are resting quietly receive their carefully metered due.
“Your nervous system, too, is marvelously complex. It has
the ability to communicate the feel of pain resulting from intense pressure,
yet adapts appropriately to the pressure of sitting or standing without
distracting neural traffic. A nervous system just like yours precisely controls
the muscles of the concert pianist playing Chopin, the baseball slugger making
contact with 98 mph fastball, and the gymnast performing a triple somersault to
a precise landing.
“Your red blood cells, which ‘incidentally’ happen to be
the ideal shape for transporting oxygen, are manufactured and destroyed at an
incredible rate. Approximately 10 million red blood cells are made every hour,
and an equal number destroyed. If either supply or destruction becomes out of
synchrony by as little as 1%, before long, your life ends due to anemia, or polycythemia, which is to say, your blood gets so thin that
oxygen transport is insufficient or it gets so thick that it can no longer
circulate. Blood clotting is similarly complex requiring coordinated function
of at least 11 chemical factors. Should blood clot too readily or should clots
which are formed fail to dissolve, you die. Should it clot too slowly, again
the result is death. Our body contains hundreds of complex feedback loops whose
precision and reliability are vital to life. Even the most talented design
engineer would be reluctant to undertake such a complicated project. Too, the
margin for error isn't very great. Without knowing it, we tread a very narrow
path where the smallest error produces death. Fortunately, the vast majority of
the time, we are not penalized for our ignorance.”
This wonderful orchestration, which I call body synergy, is
established at conception, when the mother’s ovum, with only half of the
mother’s DNA is penetrated and fertilized by a sperm cell carrying only half of
the father’s DNA. The two halves join up
in a single cell, and a new person emerges in that physical merger. We return
to discuss further this miracle of the emergence of a new life incarnation towards
the ending of Part Two of this book.
What powers this synergy?
In The Complete System of Self-Healing: Internal Exercises
(San Francisco, Valifornia, Tao Publisjing,
1996, p. 32), Dr Stephen Chang likens the human body itself to an electrolytic
battery, composed of three parts: (1) the structure, referring to
the cells, tissues and the organs, and all other physical structures that they
form; (2) the intra- and inter-cellular liquids that play
important roles in the phenomenon of generating and conducting electrical
energy; and (3) the electric charge that activates the body and
its structures, and is called different names, like, “life force” or “Chi,”
“life energy,” “spirit,” or “electromagnetism. “Of the three components, the
last – electrical energy – is least understood since its presence is not
immediately obvious to the naked eye,” Dr. Chiang says, adding that:
“Electrical energy is detected only in a roundabout way. Because
it is most obvious when it is absent.”
If there is a partial absence of energy in the body, weakness or disease
invades and grasps hold of the body. “When there is a total absence of vital
energy, there is death.”
Harmony in fully-functioning synergy is like the very quiet
purr of a machine where no parts are worm-out or misaligned. This quiet synergy is the status of ease in
healthy bodies; malfunctions in the system brings about the gasps, wheazes, coughs and knocks an engine makes when it is no
longer a “new and well-oiled machine.”
And without smooth and quiet ease, there is dis-ease.
3. Dead Cells and Living Things
Living cells are the ones that actualize the properties of
being alive in the classic biological sense.
The cells, and their synergies called tissues, and the synergies of
tissues called organs, and so on, are the ones that breathe, eat, digest,
reproduce, and eventually die, all activities that are exclusive to what we
call “living things.” But wait! The living body combines both the living and
the dead. (You may want to read that last sentence again.)
Now, what makes me say that? Because some
important parts of your living body are dead cells. All your hair, apart from the roots, are dead cells. So is the epidermis, the outermost layer of
the skin. So are fingernails and toenails.
All these have protected members of the animal kingdom either from the
elements or from their predators or from both. Neither is this confined to the
animal kingdom. Tree barks are dead cells. Pushed outward by the growth of the
living cells in the meristematic region, they get all
cracked up while staying together among themselves and with the living cells in
an obvious synergy of functions.
But isn’t the whole tree alive? And would a living tree be complete and
survive without the dead cells that make up its armor called bark? Would any
animal be alive if there were no “non-living” water at all in its stomach,
apart from all that water making up the bulk of its living cells?
This is where the nature of a part is essentially
determined by the nature of the whole, in the quantum context explained by Fr. Nzamujo as quoted extensively in an earlier section. To be an essential and working part of
a living system is to be alive.
In this same quantum context, we can see the blurring of distinction
between what high school Biology simplistically classifies as living and
“non-living” things. Why do I put the latter term between quotation marks? Because its supposed status as “non-living”
is, at best, controversial and increasingly getting debunked.
If in this sense, therefore, we can consider to be alive
the oxygen in the cells and the oxygen in the lungs, because these form part of
a living animal, what about the oxygen that has left the exhaling plant but has
not yet been breathed in by that animal? Do we say that the oxygen is alive
while inside the plant, then it dies after it gets expelled by the stomata, and
then begins to live again in the animal’s nasal cavity? No! We
can say that it never left the living thing, which is the synergy between the
plant and the animal. The two organisms
in life-partnering synergy, called symbiosis, make up a system
the same way a pair of stars so “far apart” make up a single binary system.
This symbiotic system is actually part of a much larger and much complex living
system called the “ecosystem” or “web of life.” The web of life does not merely weave
together living organisms, the web of life is itself alive! The
entire, contiguous, synergetic, ecosystem is alive!
According to inventor-scientist
James Lovelock, Earth is alive and functions like a superorganism
in which living things interact with geophysical and chemical processes to
maintain conditions suitable for life. Lovelock's theory, named the “Gaia
Hypothesis” after the ancient Mother Earth goddess of Greek mythology, is a
revival of the theory first put forward by James Hutton in 1785, with one major
difference: at the time Lovelock was heard out and given a standing ovation by
the American Geophysical Union in 1988, science was already in possession of
tools to explore some of the vast interactions that govern global systems. (Source: Eugene Linden, “How the Earth Maintains Life,” Time
Magazine, Nov. 13, 1989.)
As an organism, Earth is said to have all its waters --
contiguous in all three forms -- as its grand circulatory system, the ground
which harbors all the animals as its digestive system, etc. etc. And what has
the Earth got for its mind? Let’s
save that for later.
Yes, I firmly believe that the ecosystem itself, and all
its component and dynamically interacting parts, is alive! The planetary ecosystem called Earth is
alive, and we have also named her “Gaia.”
5.
‘Electro-Chemical Machine’
To be an essential and working part of a living system is
to be alive. It is however foolhardy to
conclude that we can conclusively extrapolate the essence of life of the living
body by analyzing from the perceivable charactertistics
of the parts of that living body. It is foolhardy to view electro-chemical
processes in the functioning of a healthy heart, for example, and view the
electro-chemical processes of the brain and the nerves, and then confidently,
even arrogantly, conclude that the live body is simply an “electro-chemical
machine.”
Even if we were to acknowledge the somewhat mysterious
workings of magnetism and various fields and energies, we cannot afford to be
that dismissive of the still-unknown but consequent realities behind the
workings of the living body and say with an air of total certainty: “the living
body is simply an electro-chemical machine.”
After all, the most advanced of our bio-technical sciences have not
fully understood what, precisely, is the “life force.” We can only describe it, acknowledge whether
it is still there from one patient case to another. But we still don’t know
what “makes it tick.”
Mentally reducing a partially-perceived reality to the
confines only of those parts of the reality that are perceivable is
reductionism. Both the noble attempts of
medical professionals to palliate, to manage uncomfortable or destructive
symptoms, and the noble attempts to “cure the root causes” of those symptoms,
may all just be in the realm of symptoms, after all, of palliation of shallow
symptoms and deep symptoms. Without
fully understanding the life force, we cannot really know for sure. So while I thank the doctors for all their
efforts, I cannot easily go along with the belief within the profession and in
broader society that they cure me, that they are the ones curing me, or that I
am really getting cured.
In his book, A Guide to Creative, Responsive
and Self-Reliant Medicine (Manila: Anvil, 1995), Joaquin G. Tan observes:
“The root problem orthodox medical science faces then is
directly connected with this reductionist image of
the human being. Since we are all affected by this reductionist
view, we must think through and take a stand on what kind of being we truly
are: a biochemical one or a four-fold interweaving being…. The first image
cannot heal and will ultimately reduce the human being into its limited
chemical material image. The battle for the 21st century is then a battle for
the true image of the human being. Medicine is only one arena of human life
where this battle is raging. In agriculture, psychology, sociology and other
sciences involving life, a revolution in thinking and practice is underway.
Whatever we discern ourselves to be will determine not only
our disease or health tendencies and the kind and conduct of therapy but also
the way we will bring the rest of humanity towards a certain direction in
evolution. Clearly, the biochemical image of the human being (if we allow it to
continue as the leading thought of development particularly in medicine), will
bring humanity towards self-mutilation and self-destruction. Thus this identity
crisis is critical and each one's stance is equally crucial. Once this
direction is resolved in each individual, he or she must militantly stand by it
and live it or else others will push for their own version, consciously or
unconsciously, with all their power and might.”
“For those who have the will to take a stand, this true
image must then guide one towards adjusting one's lifestyle, work situation,
and relationships to be worthy of such an image. It should give one the insight
to help others to get rid of their blinders and together work in dismantling
the illusion-making structures that exist. We should replace them with new
structures and relationships worthy of the true human being.”
There are indicators that Humankind is going in that
direction. Large groups of people are
rediscovering the wisdom of indigenous knowledge systems and traditional health
care modalities, paying more due reverence to the “primitive” tribal guardians
of these modalities, and increasingly wisening up to
the lucrative business angles behind well-funded campaigns to discredit
holistic health practices that no longer depend on diploma-carrying
professionals or on factory-made and chemical-based medicines.
More and more people are increasingly prepared to pay full
heed to these words of
Tan in his work just cited:
“For those who have the will to take a stand, this true
image must then guide one towards adjusting one's lifestyle, work situation,
and relationships to be worthy of such an image. It should give one the insight
to help others to get rid of their blinders and together work in dismantling
the illusion-making structures that exist. We should replace them with new
structures and relationships worthy of the true human being.”
J J J
Mind—Energies Comprehending
and Appreciating Experiences
The mind has
been compared to a precisely configured bundle of energies functioning as an
energy distribution and utilization system, a mobilizer
of certain physical body substances into the body which register as emotions
and feelings, a datafiles storage system we know as
memory, a data analysis center, and an analysis-reprogramming center.
As a
precisely-configured bundle involving electric, electromagnetic and
electro-chemical triggers for these and for our densely-physical body
functions, the mind or psyche resides in our psychic or ethereal body,
where the energy patterns create definite markings and emit wave patterns in
the etheric medium.
1. The Energy-Ethereal Body
This
ethereal-energy nature of the psychic body also includes the aura, which
is usually seen as a faint glow of color extending some inches outward from the
densely-physical body beyond the skin, chakras
or centers of energy, from which points we make our choices and decisions (we
go back to this later), and the energy channels that have been throughly mapped for acupuncture healing.
About the aura, W.E. Butler in How to Read the Aura,
(Northamploshire, England: The Aquarian Press, 2nd
edition, 1979, p. 10), tells us of at least two that a person can have: the
more commonly seen and what relatively is practically unseen.
Interpreting the dictionary definition of aura (as a “psychic
electro-vital and electro-mental effluvium,” Butler says: “It is now well
established that all activities of our physical body are associated with
electric currents which circulate throughout the organs, and which actually
form a definite electric ‘field’ around us. …
So we have in and around us an ‘electrical field of force’ which make up a composite emanation which we call the ‘aura.’ Although the term is one which is objected to
by those who have had training as physicists, there is a name already in use,
and this is the ‘etheric aura.’”
Further down (p. 13),
Dr. Stephen Chang (The Complete system of Self-Healing:
Internal Exercises [
Butler (p. 16) also talks “what we may describe as the ‘spiritual
aura,’ and here the area over which it extends beyond the (densely-physical)
body varies from a few feet in the case of (spiritually) unevolved
people to yards or even miles in the case of highly developed people. It is
said in the East that the spiritual aura of the Lord Gautama
Buddha extended by two hundred miles, and they say that this whole planet is
held in the aura of the very great Being. This is also Christian teaching,
though it is usually restricted to the presence of Deity: ‘In Him we live and
move and have our being.’”
Let’s talk about the chakras.
Butler continues: “In ordinary theosophical teaching,” “there are
said to be seven of these chakras or
‘centers,’ namely, the center above the head known generally as the ‘thousand–petalled lotus,’ the center between the eyes, the throat
center, the heart center, the solar plexus center, the spleen center and the
sacral center at the base of the spine.
In the western teraching, the centers are given
as the center above the head, the center at the throat, the heart center, the
sex centre, and the center below the feet. (In both systems the center above
the head is located in that part of the aura which extends above the head, and
in the western system the center below the feet is also said to be in in that part of the aura which extends downwards below the
soles of the feet.)’
The mind also
carries the “data files” in the crudest form simply for storage
purposes. But absolutely thorough this data-storage function is. All data fed
by all the senses are stored in the memory banks of the brain (memory is also
stored elsewhere, like in the DNA sequence, as discussed in chapter 10), but
there are varying degrees of facility in memory retrieval due to a large number
of intervening factors including age and particular state of mental alertness
(whether or not sleepy, intoxicated, or mentally exhausted), but everything is
stored and can be called forth by speaking to the psychic body through hypnosis
or other means.
The mind also
carries feelings and emotions in the form of
understood thoughts or of half-conscious thoughts. Butler (1979, p. 16) shares this insight on
the interrelationship of mind’s mental operation and the matter of emotion
which we associate with separate parts of the body, that is, respectively, the
brain and the heart, but are actually “all in the mind”:
“I think we
may safely say that seldom indeed do we think without some admixture of
emotion, and seldom do we react emotionally without some thought entering into
the process. The two aspects of consciousness, emotion and mind, are closely
linked together….”
The mind is a
basic human faculty for “making sense of” one’s own experiences and
appreciating each one negatively or positively. With the mind, one somehow
understands and appreciates one’s own direct experiences and other people’s
experiences shared by various means. There can be appreciation with deep
feeling, as in direct experiences, and also appreciation in terms only of
considering an experience (usually a vicarious one) a chunk of information just
important enough to store on file under an active folder in your hard drive.
And yes, the human mind also stores (memorizes) and analyzes (it thinks),
things that human-made tools like computers and calculators can do much faster
and more accurately, but without appreciating. The mind is also the basic human
faculty for experiencing appreciation.
Computers can
never learn appreciation. Moreover, the mind is wont to value more the person’s
direct experiences than all other sorts of relatively irrelevant data a
computer operator makes it process (“garbage in”) and has no capacity for any
such valuation. All professional
assurances that “This won’t hurt one bit” cannot convince the mind of one who
had earlier actually experienced being traumatically hurt by an injection
needle. You can make him read all the
books and InterNet downloads telling him the shot is
not supposed to “hurt one bit” and his past experience will still dominate his
mind.
He adds:
“This brings us to the need to redefine the term ‘intelligence.’ True
intelligence certainly can not be measured, and the term ‘I.Q.’ is a typical
example of verbal delusion. The intellect only appears to have intelligence,
much like a computer. It has no intelligence of its own, like the moon does not
have its own light but merely reflects light from the sun. True intelligence is
creative consciousness. It expresses itself on a practical level in creative
work, in unconditional love, and in knowing how to live in unconditional
happiness. However much they know, those who can love or be happy only if
certain conditions exist cannot be said to have intelligence. They are enslaved
by conditions and consequently, by fear, pain and suffering. And if that be
intelligence, then what use do we have for it?”
2 Synergetic Accumulation of
Individual Thoughts
Ayn Rand speaks about “Conceptual Integrations.” She writes: “Philosophy is a system of
ideas. By its nature as an integrating science, it cannot be a grab bag of
isolated issues. All philosophic questions are interrelated. One may
not, therefore, raise any such questions at random, without the requisite
context. If one tries the random approach, then questions (which one has no
means of answering) simply proliferate in all directions. ….The difference between an
infant’s mental state and yours lies in the number of conceptual
integrations your mind has performed. You have no choice about the
necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge
into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles.” (underscoring
supplied)
And R. Buckminster Fuller says: “Children conduct their spontaneous explorations and
experiments with naive perceptivity. They have an innate urge first
subjectively to sort out, find order in, integratively
comprehend, and synergetically
memory-bank their experience harvests as intertransformability
system sets. Thereafter they eagerly seek to demonstrate and redemonstrate these sets as manifest of their comprehension
and mastery of the synergetic realizability of the
system's physical principles. Consequently children are the only rigorously
pure physical scientists. They accept only sensorially
apprehensible, experimentally redemonstrable physical
evidence.”
I would add that the intellectualization of the separative ego comes to a child being applauded by current
society to have reached the “age of reason.”
At this age, the child imbibes a rationality that rejects the reality of
anything that is not measurable and perceptible by any of only five of the
human senses. With human civilization having gained confidence in the
collective mastery of these only five senses, the level of confidence has grown
to the level of absolute certainty that whatever cannot be so perceived by any
of these only five senses are not real and that whatever cannot be understood
and established by human science cannot be accepted as real. A child then
learns to take her or his individual self as a completely separate entity that
interacts with everyone and everything around him or her, being wary of some
and being friendly to others, only on the basis only of self-interest, and to
look at human groupings only as human-created mental cionstructs
for purely practical, basically-self-centered, interests.
Upon reaching this so-called “age of reason,” the child
begins to stubbornly reject the reality or importance of all that society’s
only five senses and finite brain-use cannot grasp and consider as acceptable
reality. In short, we can say that when a child reaches the “age of reason” he
or she becomes unreasonable. Honest admission of reasonable levels of
uncertainty without the drive to find out fast, and the appreciation of
exhilarating experiences without intellectual comprehension, are discouraged. Wonderment and imagination, and appreciation
of what is indescribable in society’s very limited existing vocabulary, are to
be ignored or at least increasingly “outgrown.”
No wonder Peter Pan has refused to grow up!
There is this novel, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which has been described as a mirror held up to
us, telling us how far we have strayed from the in-born wisdom of the
child. Since
recently, the pejorative term “childish” has had an appropriately positive
twin: child-like.
3. Synergetic Accumulation of Collective (Social) Thoughts
Ken Wilber (A Brief History of Everything, Second
Ed., 2000, pp. 15-16) offers this explanation of a profound process:
“The human at birth is not yet socialized into any sort of
moral system—it is ‘preconventional.’ The human then learns a general moral scheme
that represents the basic values of the society it is raised in—it becomes
‘conventional.’ And with even further growth, the individual may come to
reflect on his or her society and thus gain some modest distance from
it, gain a capacity to criticize it or reform it—the individual is to some
degree ‘postconventional.’
“Thus, although the actual details and the precise meanings
of that development sequence are still hotly debated, everybody pretty much
agrees that something like those three broad stages do indeed occur, and occur
universally. These are orienting generalizations: they show us, with a
great deal of agreement, where the important forests are located, even if we
can’t agree on how many trees they contain.
“My point is that if we take these types of
largely-agreed-upon orienting generalizations from various branches of
knowledge—from physics to biology to psychology to theology—and if we string
these orienting generalizations together, we will arrive at some astonishing
and often-profound conclusions, conclusions that, as extraordinary as they
might be, nonetheless embody nothing more than our already-agreed-upon
knowledge. The beads of knowledge are
already accepted, it is only necessary to string them together as a necklace.”
Victor McGill shares his own insights on Wilber’s basic
concepts. He says, in this portion of a download from McGill’s website.
“Aristotle first developed the idea of thesis, antithesis
and synthesis. Hegel later rephrased this as a “Dialectic.”
Whenever something new arises (thesis), such as when we arrive at a new level
of being, a shadow will also develop that seems to contradict it (as its
antithesis). These two opposing aspects must be understood from a more
encompassing understanding that embraces both the thesis and the antithesis
(synthesis). This process describes how growth along the spectrum of
consciousness happens.
“We begin on something new. We struggle to understand it.
Wilber calls this stage pre-conventional. As we do come to understand it we
become conventional. But, as we come to understand it, the antithesis appears
and we realise the thesis was not fully correct and
we must move on to the post-conventional when we go beyond the previous
understanding - and the synthesis.
McGill gives as an example the entire epoch since slavery
first appeared in the pre-conventional stage and it appeared to be a wonderful
new innovation, much better than simply killing fellow-humans defeated in war.
Slavery, he says, enabled structures like the pyramids to
be built and was unquestionably accepted as an integral part of the social
fabric of societies for several more millennia - it was conventional all that
time. Eventually we came to realize that slavery was not a good thing – the
human race reached the post-conventional stage -- and slavery was abolished,
albeit not quite easily (it caused the American civil war), but decisively and
permanently.
The unifying, embracive and empowering paradigms or frameworks of thought and behavior are being proposed to the Philippine academe and society as a whole by the Lambat-Liwanag Network of Centers for Empowering Paradigms. These are promoted as alternatives to currently-dominant paradigms that are divisive, eclectic, and disempowering. They were earlier collated and created by the SanibLakas Foundation, which convened this mainly-academe-based network under its program thrust for Human Development and Harmony. By the Foundation’s act of collating these as underpinned by the principle of synergism, the movements and organizations separately advocating equivalents of these paradigms are given the basis for pursuing their separate efforts together, thus synergizing them to pack more power than they separately ever had before.
It has long been observed that
the currently-dominant paradigms tend to divide people, things, and human
concerns into disconnected or even conflicting groupings or categories. The currently-dominant paradigms restrict the
growth and actualization of the human potential in most people. Thus divided
and stunted, these people are vulnerable to domination and exploitation.
The Empowering Paradigms remove
artificial and unnecessary walls of division placed among people, things, and
human concerns. They promote strong synergies among diverse factors/elements
with commonality as basis of unity and diversity as the enriching dynamic force
(not at all as a problem to solve or as anything to tolerate). They support the
return of total human growth toward the full rediscovery and realization of the
human potential. Thus the Empowering Paradigms are deemed most helpful for the
full flowering of the human potential, for individual self-actualization and
the continuing collective evolution of human civilization. They promote total
human development and harmony.
A few examples: “Holistic Health
Care,” instead of the currently-dominant eclectic, overspecialized or narrow
health-care systems; “Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature,” instead of wanton
environment destruction or, at best, purely human-needs-centered, utilitarian
view of environment; “Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education,” instead of
the current data-focused, teacher-centered, grades-indicated,
competition-driven, purely-intellectual educational approaches; “Civics and
Democratic Governance” instead of the condescending accommodation of token
“citizen participation” in the affairs of government.
Lambat-Liwanag Network did not invent these
paradigms, but merely tried to sharply articulate certain ideals that are both
achievable and very desirable, in contrast to the currently-existing
paradigms. The Empowering paradigms are
therefore nothing new. What the Lambat-Liwanag
Network may have been able to contribute is pointing out the threads of consistency
among these and also among the paradigms that we want them to supplant.
One afternoon in October 2001,
the
Beyond using words, the best way
to fight for freedom is to will ourselves to be free and start
behaving accordingly. Beyond explanations,
the best way to promote any ideal is to joyfully live that ideal.
Beyond all our work, as the Network Council, paradigm task forces,
member-entities, etc., the best way really for us to refine, propagate and
mainstream the Empowering Paradigms is to write them out daily, from moment
to moment, with our very own thoughts, words and deeds.
The titles and component points
of all the “15 Empowering Paradigms” are presented in the Appendices section of
this book. But I want to underscore here that all these titles uphold and
describe synergies and that is what makes each of these paradigms empowering.
They either show tandems, where I underline here the conjuction
“and”, or place crucially-important synergy-oriented qualifiers (which I
italicize here), in these examples: “Sense of History and Sense of
Mission” (Paradigm 4, which should not be allowed to bore us with historical
details, because the point is, and only is, the dynamic relationship between
sense of history and sense of mission, not either nor both of them separately);
“Gender Sensitivity, Equality and Harmony”(Paradigm, 8, where
the term gender harmony is not supposed to be mistaken simply as a substitute
for women’s liberation, although the paradigm should include that); “Holistic
Health” (Paradigm 2, where even the word health consciously revives the sense
of wholeness that should be intrinsic in it); “Human Dignity and Harmony:
Human Rights and Peace” (Paradigm 14); Associative Economics,
Social Capital and Sustainable Development”(Paradigm 10); “Synaesthetics:
Art From the Heart” (Paradigm 15). The paradigm title “Mutual Enrichment
of Families and Friendships,” is not referring to families or to
friendships as separate topics both of which have already been discussed and
belabored to death, but is precisely referring to the dynamic mutuality
of enrichment.
Talking about friendships alone
without relating this topic to family dynamics, or talking about families
alone, without relating this topic to friendships, or talking about aesthetics
without the need to break down two sets of divisive walls, or talking about
culture without bringing in the role of the community itself as its ultimate
creator, have all been ongoing for the past decades, comfortably within and
even in support of the disempowering dominant paradigms. Doing any of that does
not even touch the empowering paradigms.
This view may have started off as
my own personal view long ago, and I am glad that it has very long ago
stopped being a personal passion that can die completely if I were to die
tomorrow morning or even within the next hour, something none of us has any
control over. The very good news
is that this sharp clarity, along with the needed passion to pursue it, has
been categorically adopted together in the very first and in the
succeeding meetings of the Lambat-Liwanag Network
Council, which has collectively adopted adjustments in the paradigm titles and
component points, the only body authorized to adopt such changes for the
network. The Council does not meet
often, but when it does, all its members commit to devote quality time in
passing upon the policies and recommendations on the agenda because the whole
network is officially committed to what the Council approves.
We have indeed come a long way
from the time the passion for pushing these paradigms through was perhaps
mostly a personal one, for Lambat-Liwanag as an
organization has turned this determination into a movement of the “expanding
we.” To mistake this as a personal view
of this author is therefore to insult the Network itself. And my very recent formal exit from the
Council as Network convenor (to continue relating
afterwards only as lead consultant, while focusing on other synergism-oriented
networks) should underscore this point.
This is the reason why efforts
have had to be exerted to make the Lambat-Liwanag
paradigm-specific conferences and the task forces they create very much aware
of this crucially-important point: that the living application of the principle
of synergism in these areas of human and social concern is the niche and raison
d’etre (reason for being) of Lambat-Liwanag,
the mainly-academe-based alliance, and of all the research work it seeks to
dynamically-direct and orchestrate. All
other purposes of the alliance are to be merely supportive of and secondary to
this focus. Otherwise, Lambat-Liwanag will become
still another addition to the already overcrowded world of “do-everything-good”
and “research-everything-worth-knowing” entities, and Lambat-Liwanag
would have no unique value for human development and harmony, and no reason to
exist.
Since the sub-culture within the
academe can be expected to be already accustomed to the disempowering state of
affairs, and considering the state of the educational system in most countries
including the Philippines (as discussed by Alvin Toffler in his The Third
Wave), the academe as a social institution is expected to confront our
efforts with multifaceted and even subliminal resistance. For example, the
academe or individual academic institutions or individual professionals, for
example, may choose to meet the concepts of challenge of “phenomenological
research” or even the quantum paradigm, with a closed mind, even with
self-righteous contempt, and continue to uphold the Cartesian-Newtonian
frameworks making hard statistical data the only indicator of acceptable
truths.
Such a heavy task, therefore, of
seeking to inject the empowering paradigms into the academe challenges all its
leading proponents to have two things: (1) very sharp clarity of mind and heart
on the essence and basic points of the empowering paradigms (which they might
at any point overconfidently feel they have already known fully from the very
start), and (2) much patience so that the work, despite all the big and small
sub-cultural, institutional and personal obstacles, can be pursued, even if
gradually, on the basis of firmly uniting on such very sharp clarity.
Aside from relating with the
academe, all researches and social conclusions collected by Lambat-Liwanag
ought to be viewed in living synergy with praxis on the personal level.
This is the synergy of the whole LightShare program
of the SanibLakas ng Taonbayan Foundation in partnership with the Lambat-Liwanag Network which was spun-off to full
organizational autonomy from the Foundation in February 2003. The Foundation’s
“Mandates of Program Thrusts and Programs: Clarifications, Refinements and
Updates,” issued in January 2003 states:
“Develop (research, collate, refine) and popularize the synergism-oriented
paradigm shifts for human development and harmony for personal
application, and for academic adoption and social application. Both the personal and the academic components
of this process and of all its sub-processes have to be intertwined in synergy,
the personal component being the experiential basis and ultimate usefulness of
the output, and mobilizing the academic component as the broad and prestigious
social-mainstreaming mechanism, which would otherwise remain in the full
service of effectively perpetuating the dominant (restrictrive
and divisive) paradigms.” (emphasis in the original)
This mandate is in a much broader
synergy-oriented framework of pushing forward human development and
harmony. The same document quoted above
says the following about this thrust:
SanibLakas shall seek to “(e)ducate
and facilitate for synergy as many people as possible, in the shortest time
possible, to popularize and apply the synergism-oriented paradigm shifts
for personnally-rooted
human development and harmony,” thus promoting human individual and
collective actualization, empowerment and harmony. (underscoring in the
original)
Yes, the synergism principle and
its empowering applications in the various areas of human concern can only be
valuable if active and felt in personally-rooted human
development as the underpinning for broader and broader human synergies.
5. Value of
Experience in the Learning Process
Conventional Christianity had many defects, in the view of
Martin Luther, so he had not just one but as many as 95 new theses nailed to
the church door. Teilhard de Chardin
had his own new theses. Both men had to suffer the antithesis in the form of
expulsion and persecution from the powerful Church organization, before members
of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council saw the light of synthesis and much of
what the two had said has since been officially integrated in the contemporary
teachings of the Catholic Church.
One cannot simply lament the terrible mistakes of the past,
as in the record of the Christian Church in, for example, persecuting
Copernicus and Galileo for opposing the “flat-world” geocentric dogma, or wish subjunctively that human wisdom could leap directly toward
the correct perceptions and analyses.
The period of official ignorance, once such darkness of ignorance ends,
adds to the profoundness and weight of the lesson learned. Publicly admitted or not, the debacle must
have taught many powerful people the value of honest humility.
Swedish tennis player Bjorn Borg, who won six French Opens
and five-straight Wimbledons (1976-80), once said:
“My greatest point is my persistence. I never give up in a match. However down I am, I
fight until the last ball. My list of
matches shows that I have turned a great many so-called irretrievable defeats
into victories.”
These are happy stories. There are tragic ones, resulting
from inability to get over traumatic failures in childhood and youths. Some of these stories involve trained
animals. Jim Dornan,
initiator of the super-successful “Network 21” alternative marketing and
education system, said this in one of his inspirational tapes, titled Posture:
“The world is full of stories like this. In the circus
world there’s a story of the elephants in their early youth chained with big
chains to big stakes so they won’t leave. And you know,
circus elephants are then able to be kept in captivity with small little ropes
and small little sticks. Because they had learned so well as babies that that
they couldn’t free their legs from this chain that they will not try as grown
elephants to free their legs when all they’d have to do is take a step and it
would break. But they are so conditioned And there are
stories written about elephants that have died in circus fires, chained only by
a small rope and a small stick. And all they would have has to do is to walk
out But because they were so sure it
wouldn’t work, they just stood there and allowed themselves to perish because
they had been conditioned in their youth it was not possible to move that leg,
because they tried before.”
Dornan used the parallelism to underscore that in the business
system he started, that has grown worldwide and made thousands of people in
various countries happy millionaires, the difference between those who
succeeded in the business and those who failed was that the latter ones quit
after initial difficulties they were dead sure they could never recover from.
Initial failure should always be a challenge to learn more and do better the
next time, Dornan said. Apparently Bjorn Borg became
what he is in the world of sports because he took up such a challenge instead
of letting himself be drowned by early difficulties.
Some of a novel’s episodes can really be tear-jerking
dramas, but the entire novel can be a happy one; in the same vein, some parts
of a process may indeed look ugly, sound ugly and feel ugly, but the entire
process, a “synergy of episodes,” may well be very beautiful. Such may be the
process of learning, the process of moving from not knowing to knowing, a
process that may pass through long periods of earnestly mistaking some
falsehoods for the truth.
Experience has a crucial role in
the learning process, in fact I would dare say it is
the only real teacher. For example, experience is the only factor in the
discernment of reality through the smokescreen of perceptions.
As the last speaker in the
launching lecture series of SoPHIA (SOcial Praxis Holistically Integrating Asia), held in
commemoration of the Ruby Anniversary of the Asian Social Institute (ASI) where
I teach in the doctoral program, I said:
“We need to help the Academe grow well beyond the confines
of school campuses the better to gather, process and spread a unified and
unifying Wisdom instead of mountain heaps of supposedly-objective raw
data. Let the Academe earnestly embrace
into its ranks the masters and doctors from the kulandong
(a Filipino word for a makeshift tent), from the University of Real Life,
the organic intellectuals who are active practitioners of profound human
actualization and whose knowledge is, therefore, “really real.” Let such a
drastically expanded Academic community seek out, observe fully, earestly embrace and respectfully synthesize the actual
experiences of the ordinary people, learn well from them, and spread far and
wide the Light of Wisdom from them. Let
this growth be reflected in the breadth and depth of its research and community
service activities as well as in the enhanced content-worthiness of its
instructional endeavors. Let the Academe, thus greatly improved,
learn well to heed, to think, to speak, and even to breathe, in the language of
the ordinary people’s very own daily lives.”
This was in response to the first lecture in that series,
titled “Theorizing from Experiences: Focus on a Research and Pedagogical
Approach for Social Transformation” delivered by Dr. Mina M. Ramirez, ASI President. Under the leadership of
Dr. Ramirez, SoPHIA seeks to move the academe into a
paradigm shift to empower and uplift the people. This is, indeed, a big
challenge. But one that can really be done and must be done. My level of
confidence that this can indeed be done, even if painstakingly, was explained
in the third to the last paragraph of my talk:
“We are not alone. Some have started out before we
did. Last year, ASI joined six other
schools who had earlier come together to work together in developing, refining
and mainstreaming about a dozen empowering paradigms. That network, called Lambat-Liwanag, which is the Filipino equivalent of Network
of Light, is committed to suppoprt the efforts of ASI
and each one of a growing number of other member-institutions. Just this week, up to yesterday, a conference
was held in
Earlier, during her launching talk for the series, Dr.
Ramirez lamented the obsrved lack of impact of the
Philippine higher education system:
“We have five hundred graduate schools and two hundred
universities, 95 percent of which are Christian schools. In these schools we
teach the language of the monetized economy; we teach democracy; we teach
religion; we teach all the skills and competencies to be able to be on par with
our Asian neighbors and our western counterparts. Yet there is empirical evidence
of a long-standing monetary poverty, of voiceless citizens in a democracy, of
rampant violations of anti-graft laws.”
That same SoPHIA Lecture-Forum
Series received well the inputs of Dr. Florentino Hornedo, the leader of Filipinos working with the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), who spoke
about Culturally-Rooted Education.
Dr. Hornedo described the
present-day (“now”) thinking of Filipinos about Transcendence/Divinity; Nature;
other people; and Self, and contrasted all this with
their equivalents in an empowering/desirable (“not yet”) mode. That would spell a profound paradigm shift in
viewing these realities, from the “now” to the “not yet”: From viewing
Transcendence/Divinity or God as a patron to run to for help, to viewing God
as a horizon by which one discovers countless opportunities for self-upliftment; from viewing Nature as a simple resource to
viewing Nature as an organic system one belongs in and blends into; from
viewing others also for patronage to viewing others as an organic structure of
human interrelationships; and, finally, from viewing oneself as a cut-and-dried
artifact, into a project, a work-in-progress that can welcome, undertake and
enjoy real changes within.
Dr. Hornedo also declared that he
favored the Oriental consciousness of Truth as “not something to learn, but
someone to become.”
These paradigmatic shifts he presented before the emerging
SoPHIA movement resonate well with the Lambat-Liwanag empowering paradigms discussed earlier in
this chapter.
Towards the end of her abovecited
lecture, Dr. Mina Ramirez, who heads ASI and it’s SoPHIA projects and sits as a Network Council member of Lambat-Liwanag, enumerates the following recommendations
for transformative education:
“The extension program in our schools is not to be considered
just an appendix to academic studies. Immersion of both the faculty and
students in the reality of marginalized communities and indigenous groups is
more than ever called for now. Local contexts where community organizations
become successful should be exposure and immersion sites. This immersion
experience should be material for reflection in all pertinent courses.
“Quantitative approaches in research should be complemented
by qualitative ones such as the phenomenological and other culturally rooted
research approaches, such as, for instance, the Kulandong.
“The Philippine School System should be able to keep the
bi-lingual system of education. Each language should keep its discipline and
grammatical correctness. More importantly, we should be able to take pride in
the underlying life-values and world-view of the Filipino language. The best
elements that will promote life for people must be consciously integrated.
“At a time when we are bombarded by negative images of the
One of the most-remembered lines
from The Little Prince is that “It is with the heart that one
sees clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Of course the “heart” in this quote is just a
metaphor for the viewpoint of the Real Self which viewoint
is often distracted by what the eyes and the others of the “only-five” senses
perceive. As is well known to all
illusionists, to be distinguished from magicians with real magic, these
only-five senses are very easy to trick and confuse. Their hand is quicker than our eye.
Still, it is in the interest of
the mind’s overrated intelligence that its getting fooled become
rare and short instances. The mind’s
unreformed tendency to simply process signals from the sensors of the
“only-five” senses has consistently challenged the human claim to deserve the
term sapiens in the species name, homo sapiens. To be of real wisdom, the human mind has to
be ever-alert not to be misguided and led to error by total reliance on the perception
of the “only-five” senses.
Let us review that passage from
R. Buckminster Fuller quoted in one of the previous sections above: “Consequently children are the only rigorously pure
physical scientists. They accept only sensorially
apprehensible, experimentally redemonstrable
physical evidence.” (underscoring supplied) Note that Fuller qualifies the term
“scientists” here as purely physical and connects them to the acceptance only of sensorially
apprehensible physical evidence. Such a
qualifier implies that Fuller could not inflict that sort of very limited rigor
on all scientists and on science itself.
Human knowledge is now much broader than what the human eye can see,
what the human ear can hear, what the human nose can smell, etc. Two things can be checked out here for the
purposes of this book. The first is the matter of “seeing to believe,” demanding
evidence to be seen, touched, heard, tasted, and/or smelled before believing
anything. And the second is the matter of the credibility of the senses –
whether what your “only-five” senses can actually see, hear, etc. is a credible
reflection of reality.
6. A Dialogue on Reality
Allow me to present here
partially a dialogue (I’m not sure if it is an actual conversation or it was
literally composed to deliver a strong message). We can actually derive lessons from both
sides of the conversation here. It was shared with members of the
light-sharing e-mail list group by a special friend of a special friend of
mine. It begins with a professor debating with one of his students about the
existence of God. The professor, a self-proclaimed atheist, was proving God
does not exist because none of the five senses have perceived it and because
“evil exists in this world” created by an “all-good and almighty God.”
The old man shakes his head sadly. "Science says you have five senses that you use to identify and observe the world around you. Have you ever seen him?"
"No, sir. I've never seen Him."
"Then tell us if you've ever heard your Jesus?"
"No, sir. I have not."
"Have
you ever felt your Jesus, tasted your Jesus or smelt your Jesus... in fact, do
you have any sensory perception of your God whatsoever?"
[No answer]
"Answer me, please."
"No, sir, I'm afraid I haven't."
"You're afraid... you haven't?"
"No, sir."
"Yet you still believe in him?"
"...yes..."
"That takes faith!" The professor smiles sagely at the underling. "According to the rules of empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, science says your God doesn't exist. What do you say to that, son? Where is your God now?"
[The student doesn't answer]
"Sit down, please."
The student sits...Defeated.
Another student raises his hand. "Professor, may I address the class?"
The professor turns and smiles. "Ah, another Christian in the vanguard! Come, come, young man. Speak some proper wisdom to the gathering." The Christian looks around the room.
"Some interesting points you are making, sir. Now I've got a question for you. Is there such thing as heat?"
"Yes," the professor replies. "There's heat."
"Is there such a thing as cold?"
"Yes, son, there's cold too."
"No, sir, there isn't."
The professor's grin freezes. The room suddenly goes very cold.
The second student continues. "You can have lots of heat, even more heat, super-heat, mega-heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat but we don't have anything called 'cold'. We can hit 458 degrees below zero, which is no heat, but we can't go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold, otherwise we would be able to go colder than 458 degrees. You see, sir, cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat we can measure in thermal units because heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it."
Silence. A pin drops somewhere in the classroom.
"Is there such a thing as darkness, professor?"
"That's a dumb question, son. What is night if it isn't darkness? What are you getting at...?"
"So you say there is such a thing as darkness?"
"Yes..."
"You're wrong again, sir. Darkness is not something, it is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light but if you have no light constantly you have nothing and it's called darkness, isn't it? That's the meaning we use to define the word. In reality, Darkness isn't. If it were, you would be able to make darkness darker and give me a jar of it. Can you...give me a jar of darker darkness, professor?"
Despite himself, the professor smiles at the young effrontery before him. This will indeed be a good semester. "Would you mind telling us what your point is, young man?"
"Yes, professor. My point is, your philosophical premise is flawed to start with and so your conclusion must be in error...."
The professor goes toxic. "Flawed...? How dare you...!"
"Sir, may I explain what I mean?"
The class is all ears.
"Explain... oh, explain..." The professor makes an admirable effort to regain control. Suddenly he is affability itself. He waves his hand to silence the class, for the student to continue.
"You are working on the premise of duality," the student explains. "That for example there is life and then there's death; a good God and a bad God.
You are viewing the concept of God as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, science cannot even explain a thought. It uses electricity and magnetism but has never seen, much less fully understood them. To view death, as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing. Death is not the opposite of life, merely the absence of it."
The young man holds up a newspaper he takes from the desk of a neighbor who has been reading it. "Here is one of the most disgusting tabloids this country hosts, professor. Is there such a thing as immorality?"
"Of course there is, now look..."
"Wrong again, sir. You see, immorality is merely the absence of morality. Is there such thing as injustice? No. Injustice is the absence of justice. Is there such a thing as evil?" The Christian then pauses."Isn't evil the absence of good?"
The professor's face has turned an alarming color. He is so angry he is temporarily speechless.
The young man continues. "If there is evil in the world, professor, and we all agree there is, then God, if he exists, must be accomplishing a work through the agency of evil. What is that work, God is accomplishing? The Bible tells us it is to see if each one of us will, of our own free will, choose good over evil."
The professor bridles. "As a philosophical scientist, I don't view this matter as having anything to do with any choice; as a realist, I absolutely do not recognize the concept of God or any other theological factor as being part of the world equation because God is not observable."
"I would have thought that the absence of God's moral code in this world is probably one of the most observable phenomena going," the Christian replies. "Newspapers make billions of dollars reporting it every week! Tell me, professor. Do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?"
"If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, young man, yes, of course I do."
"Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?"
The professor makes a sucking sound with his teeth and gives his student a silent, stony stare.
"Professor. Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor, are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you now not a scientist, but a priest?"
"I'll overlook your impudence in the light of our philosophical discussion. Now, have you quite finished?" The professor hisses. "So you don't accept God's moral code to do what is righteous?"
"I believe in what is - that's science!"
"Ahh! science!" the student's face splits into a grin. "Sir, you rightly state that science is the study of observed phenomena. Science too is a premise which is flawed..."
"Science is flawed..?" the professor splutters.
The class is in uproar. The student remains standing until the commotion has subsided.
"To continue the point you were making earlier to the other student, may I give you an example of what I mean?"
The professor wisely keeps silent.
The young man looks around the room. "Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the professor's brain?"
The class breaks out in laughter.
The Christian points towards his elderly, crumbling tutor.
"Is there anyone here who has ever heard the professor's brain... felt the professor's brain, touched or smelt the professor's brain?"
No one appears to have done so.
The student shakes his head sadly. "It appears no-one here has had any sensory perception of the professor's brain whatsoever. Well, according to the rules of empirical, stable, demonstrable protocol, science, I declare that the professor has no brain."
The
class is in chaos.
Relying
on perceptions as reported to the brain by our “five-only” senses is actually
imprudent. The subject of perceptions as
poor reflections of reality has been the focus of Surf Reyes in presenting his
paper at the Lambat-Liwanag Conference on
education. According to his paper, titled “Learn
to Experience Appreciation and to Appreciate Experience”:
“As all communicators know, there is a world of difference
between perception and reality. If there was a thick piece of rope in the
grass and one perceived it to be a snake, in reality it remains a rope, but his perception
of it as a snake becomes his reality and would affect his feelings and his
actions toward it. He would avoid it in fear, and maybe have sleepless nights
worrying about its slithering into his room. Perception is an intellectual
interpretation or judgement, and due to its inherent
limitation and vulnerability to distortion is subject to error. The lack of awareness, or experiential
knowledge, of the truth of reality tends to make one dependent on perception.
“To illustrate further, let us use another experiential model. Most of
you have probably experienced viewing stereovision pictures in books entitled
‘Magic Eye’. To those who haven’t, these are computer generated pictures which
when you learn to view with a certain unfocused look, you suddenly discover
beautiful 3D objects within.
“It is not easy to learn the method of diverging
the eyes to experience this unbelievable visual phenomenon. And you need to
keep that altered way of looking or you lose the vision when you focus on the
surface picture. People without experiential knowledge of the phenomenon would
see only the flat outer picture, but those who have learned the “magic eye”
look, see through the surface and into the inner 3D image. In the same way,
perception can only see the outer surface of this world of appearances, but
there is a way of seeing through the outer appearances and being aware of the
inner core reality. To borrow from The Little Prince, only with the heart can one see rightly, what
is essential is invisible to perception and the intellect. This
experience has changed my life. It has provided me with an experiential model
to realize that all of the saints and ascended masters actually see a common
core reality that they have difficulty in describing to those who have not yet
learned to see with ‘magic eyes.’ And so they talk in parables, in profound
abstractions. But how else would you describe light to those who, blindfolded
from birth, have no experience of it?”
7. The Psychic and the Spiritual
People have their own respective
ideas and confusions about the relationship between the psyche and the
spirit. The controversies are expected
to remain for as long as there are divergences in direct experiences (which
accounts for a wide variety of intellectual interpretations that the intellect
cannot possibly resolve with authoritative finality). Then there are divergences
in the use of language (based on cultural and personal specificities in
vocabulary choice and other nuances of language, which should caution us all to
resist being bogged down in semantical debates).
Some people mix up spirituality
with psychic capability, and I personally believe there is a clear line of disctinction between the two: psychic powers pertain to the
special control of energies in order to do certain things in violation of the
rules of classic Newtonian physics (including such “mind over matter” feats as
telekinesis or moving things by mental command from a distance) or perceive
realities not available to the “five-only senses” (thus, the term “sixth
sense”), like psychometry (which my late wife Cita had learned to practice with impeccable reliability)
and mind-reading (which has been enough basis for many to believe the claim of
some practitioners to be divine beings, regardless of behavior). Spirituality on the other hand is the
effortless praxis of Awareness of the Oneness of All.
In an article written for a
magazine’s issue promoting the “First International Psychic Congress in Manila”
a few years ago, I had reason to talk about what to me is a very important
distinction. The article says in part:
“What at least some of the psychics
might be missing out on is the matter of interconnectedness and interdependence
of all realities (the unity of all with Godhead), which the spiritual people,
whether developed psychics or not, really experience and fully respect.
Heightened intuition is not the same as spirituality, although these are
closely related. Psychic powers can
therefore be developed even by a person who has yet a very long way to go in
one’s Soulgrowth path and has not essentially slain
one’s separative ego.
This results in vulnerability to the temptation to use one’s (psychic)
powers in divisive competition and in selfish commerce.
“Of course, we have reason to be
confident that the collective positive consciousness of the cosmos, which the Star
Wars series calls ‘The Force’ has its
‘Celestine’ ways of educating these persons further.”
The point of spirituality, I dare
assert, is full, active and consistent awareness of the oneness of all, that we
are all unique and beautiful members of the Glorious Oneness of
the Great Whole. When we forget this, we behave as separate skin-bound or
aura-bound egos in competition and even antagonism with one another. When we re-member, we are members
again, as Walsch puts it, and behave
accordingly. After all, all that we do is a Statement of Who We Are,
reflecting our Level (“Tallness”) of Awareness.
Add to this my very own “I think, therefore I do.” (which
I explain in the next section) and my own personal version of the Our
Father, where I substitute for the word “evil” this entire passage:
“(deliver us from) all alienation and separation from You and from one another.
(Amen.)”.
8. ‘To be is to do’: Awareness Growing Taller
I’ve been toying in my mind to
compose a reminder inspired by liquor ads: “Think moderately.” Brightest insights often come when our
rational mind is quiet and our greater mind, ironically called “sub-conscious,”
is afforded more opportunity to listen to, and discern well, the whispers of
the Real Self (discussed in the next chapter).
But the classic philosophical quote from Descartes is “I think,
therefore I am.” I have my own sharply different version: “I am, therefore I do.”
I do. I’m doing some
thinking, and I’m doing some moving, and I think doing some thinking, just like
the physical acts, may either be voluntary or involuntary. Voluntary thinking
is when I knit my brows in conscious search for an answer to a problem;
involuntary when my mind retrieves from active memory the “current file” of the
accumulation of conceptual
integrations (Ayn Rand’s term) my mind has performed on the basis of direct and direct experiences from birth,
including unconscious prejudices and traumas. Such reflex thinking can benefit
from spending even a flash of time running through the Hegelian dialectical
process of thinking of a thesis, and then having this thesis challenged by an
antithesis, and finally arriving at a quick tentative synthesis. Knee-jerk
reactions to instant and unchallenged thoughts have often caused us trouble.
Developing the habit of challenging one’s own thoughts by activating reminders
that one frequently is actually uncertain about many things, one can develop
effective thinking and more prudent decisions and actions. In my experience,
the biggest obstacle to continuing learning is my mistaken thought that I
already know everything I need to know on the subject at hand.
On the basis of my idea of who “I
am,” I do things the way I do things—that is, I think the way I think and I act
(move my body or parts of it) the way I act.
So, when I feel myself as a noble and exalted being, no less than an
embodied spirit, I do (I behave) accordingly. And whenever I forget that Truth
(as I believe it now), I behave like a body that has a soul that
I do not feel, and decide all my actions on what will give the best benefits,
immediately or eventually, for my body and its living extensions (in this case,
my family), and I indulge in a lot of sulking over past hurts and failures and
worrying over the perceived likelihoood of future
ones.
Self-observation is very
important here, and we get help from Dr. Serafin Talisayon of the Asian Social Institute and the University
of the Philippines.
In his lecture for the SoPHIA Lecture-Forum series in March 2003, Dr. Serafin Talisayon shares with us
an insight on how we help other people to be aware of the way they think, how
disconnected their thinking is deom how nature
actually works. “How do we discover our mental models?” he asks, before
sharing this quote from Fr. Anthony De Mello, SJ:
“The only way someone can be of
help to you is in challenging your ideas. If you’re ready to listen and if
you’re ready to be challenged, there’s one thing that you can do, but no one
can help you. What is this ost important thing of
all? It’s called self-observation.”
Talisayon continues: “Our school system
does not teach us this most important skill. The academic system that produced
our development specialists, development workers and development policy-makers
is focused teaching students skills in understanding and manipulating the
outside world, but hardly the world inside themselve.
… In short, the academic and empirical system had by-passed the most important
skill of self-observation.
Who I really am has already been
an established fact at the instance of my being created; the entire problem is
in my lack of consistent awareness of it. Awareness is something discussed by Walsch a column item carried in the July 1999 issue of Magic
Blend magazine. He does it with a lot of play of words:
“Awareness is a State of Being in
which you may choose to live. …
“Awareness has many levels.
“When you live a life of
Awareness you no longer do things unconsciously. … It is not difficult living a
life of Awareness when you are aware that it is not difficult. Awareness feeds
on itself.
“When you are unaware of Awareness,
then you cannot know what it is like. You do not even know that you do not
know.”
For this “awareness of awareness”
thing, let me give what I have come up with as a simple interpretation. Do you
sometimes recall your own behavior in some past incident and as you recall,
with the benefit of later realizations, new wisdom and time-lapse distance, you
are able to see imprudence and weaknesses in your own behavior in that
incident? If you could time-travel to
that incident, you might wish to coach your earlier self for better behavior.
If you try to do the recalling, watching and coaching on incidents more recent,
as just a few days earlier, or just a few hours, minutes or seconds earlier,
you can slowly develop your capability to do the watching and coaching in what
we now call “real time” and abort a bad start and so very quickly shift to
better mode.
Something like these lines will almost be
simultaneously coming out of at least six awareness levels of you:
