Narrative glue

While I was professor of English I spent some time wandering around the precinct of Lit. Theory. This is a very conceptual place to ponder. What's more is that if you dare to say or write anything, someone is bound to argue, criticize or even worse, ignore you on purpose. Nevertheless, I learned valuable things. Having put some distance between that time of theoretical analysis and the more concrete purposes of coaching at this time, the amazing dynamics of narrative have impressed me more and more. People like Dorian Haarhoff have made huge contributions by introducing so many individuals and groups to the power of story, not on a theoretical basis, but concretely, practically, creatively, therapeutically.

Narrative glue holds a narrative together. Narrative glue also draws narratives together. Narrative glue is to be found integrally in the human mind, not as an objective substance, although a trip to Bodyworlds and a working knowledge of neurotransmission will do much to amplify the physiological dynamics of this magical glue. I discovered narrative glue after thinking about Freke and Gandy's book The Jesus Mysteries for more than a decade. Recently I had the cheek to write to Tim Freke via facebook, because this is possible, and to comment on his work. His encouraging remarks about my remarks made me stop to think a bit more. His take on the Gnostic gospels is that they can be better grasped if not taken literally, and probably shouldn't be taken literally at all. My take is that the gospels are not merely to be understood, but are living myths requiring participation. All stories with heart are like this.

I think this is why Lord of the Rings, The Narnia Chronicles and Harry Potter have proved immensely attractive. People don't merely read (or watch) stories. They actually enter the stories. Well, I do. I have entered stories since very early childhood, listening to Aunty Carol making it up, with all the fairy tales intertwined, begging her to make the train go into the tunnel, so that the predictable mayhem could mayhum.

In "real" life, we have ways and means of separating stories from each other, virtually enforcing categories of truthfulness (intensities of feeling and understanding) with escape holes so that return to "reality" remains possible.

Well, it seems to me that each human organism is a nexus for all stories. The ones that remain close are family narratives, cultural mantras, dramas of immediate history, from the very personal to the larger contexts that are the moving backdrops. Then the living myths, dressed up in stories of faith, impressing with the need for decisive living, and commitment to the deepest stirrings of the heart.

The "dreams that come" are stories too, though not as controllable or predictable as the laws of physics and chemistry. Narrative glue is weird. (Weird acutally means the experience of change while growing from a recognizeable place to an as yet unrecognizeable place.) I have a story in mind that I have come to fear. It takes place one hundred and fifty thousand million years from now, when not one human will be left, because the mountain ranges, the earth itself, the sun, the entire solar system will have changed because it has all gone. I may have the time line wrong, but you know what I mean.

What will have happened to the memory of the entire human race? Will the Akashic record still breathe life into something that remote, or will there be a gentle turning of the page, and a new thing, that will utterly replace the old? Here I come to my limits, and don't know what to think, or feel. . I don't know if deep affection is allowed an eternal home, although it asks for one. I don't know if human awareness and consciousness is precious enough to it's own genesis to carry on forever. When I was five, my dear Irish friend made me grasp that eternity isn't a long time: it's forever. Forever is serious.

The narratives to which we make commitments are important because they make commitments back to us. The glue is real, though not easily read, because it is the ink with which we write our lives.

Of this I'm sure: not one of us is alone, ever. In my most solitary moments I have felt a great crowd watching me intently. I have felt the swirls of many, many stories making mine what it is. I have also felt intimations of the grand metaphor, and have not dared to approach this holy ground with words. I'm not sure we should. I have also come to distrust the first personal pronoun, which I think is a linguistic misappropriation. In my Zen moments I don't mind not existing, but I prefer the Jungian moments of the eternally emerging self. And then I get utterly impatient with all this word-wringing, and wonder who ever wants to be themselves forever? How boring can it all get?

I used to write stories, but it got scarey. As I wrote, they came to life and actually happened, around me. My wife said I should quickly write about making lots of money, but that impulse doesn't work out.

Narrative glue. The stories you allow come to you. The stories you want, well, all I can say is that I have achieved every dream of my life, so far, and am checking out what is yet to come.

Something there is that draws all stories together, and creates a highway of words. If you know this, and walk on, your being will begin to sink, rise and respond to the the gift of language, the key that regulates freedom.

Humans have language. They also make stories. Additionally, they can add all manner of stories to their repertoire of understanding.

Yet, it's a glue. What dreams may come, what stories feel to be true: the mystery of our involvement goes, I hope, beyond that one hundred and fifty million thousand years. Not many of us have the gift of anchoring our words to this world while sailing the seventy-seven seas of eternity.

It doesn't matter. Not much does. Glue is glue. You feel it, you know it, it sticks, it takes over if it's strong. You can't wash it off easily.

Linked to the strength of narrative, it's forever. This is a really amazing call. We feel it in music, we know it in dance, we understand it in art. We perform it in faith.

There's a gate, a door by which we enter, by which we leave, also by which we return, then from which we move on. This is the here and now. Then there's the forever. For a human mind it's all a bit scarey, because, like a hobbit, we aren't that brave. Yet we have it all within our understanding.

The glue is fine, you can trust it.

Simple emotions and existential meaning

For some, losing an argument can be life-threatening. For others, tending a flower-bed into full bloom can be the epitome of heaven. One look of intense recognition can be the turn-around you'll never get again. We're told to beware of using cruel words. One of them could be the last straw.

We encounter simple feelings every day on an unexpected basis. Someone came up and interrupted the conversation between a colleague and myself. I was deeeply angered. On the internet I saw a funny picture which made me giggle for hours. I heard a bird-call and was given an immense peace that not only was all well, but that all will be well. I hear a quote from the Bible read in a particular tone, and fall into a deep depression over human folly, and then I hear the same quote in a different tone, and my soul grasps a truth for which I have been thirsting for a long time.

Simple emotions can reach very deeply, and the pattern for this is set largely in childhood. It was put to me, very early in childhood, that I was excluded from God's mercy unless I went through the correct initiation part of which had to be intellectual surrender. I don't mind surrendering, if that's the right word, to God in this way, but I never surrendered to the people who were demanding this of me. They weren't speaking of God, in any case, but of their own needs. The point I'm making is that I connected certain kinds of emotions with an understanding of God which automatically took me to deep places of understanding and feeling. Deep, intense feelings and daily activities connect very easily, as road rage shows us.

What we deem to be understandings are living patterns of emotions. If you still feel the trauma of watching a squirrel getting run over when you were a child, that's no feeling in a museum. That will link to many, many emotional triggers and expectations on a daily basis. Experiencing a regularly and violently drunk father, or a usually vacant mother, or a daily bully results in complex patterns of a base state of self-awareness. In general a base state of self awareness has to be complex.

So the argument goes that all simple emotions are short cuts to the existential platform which is a turbulent well. Yet the well can be read. The book Time Light by Bryan Hubbard is helpful in respect of doing this. Thank you, Bryan.

For me, emotions veer from one intensity to the next, the intent of which is truth-seeking. I am not a good light conversationalist. Each momentary event is a direct two-way path to the core of awareness.

The core itself is peaceful, yet the affective effects of the core are not, because we have to learn how to align ourselves to the core.

More on the core in blogs to come...

Who am I?

They say that this is an important question that few can answer directly and truthfully.

Okay, here goes: you can accept the cold, clear touch of living water in the very quick of you;

you can accept the deep peace of the pattern of music that holds you;

you can relax in knowing the unknowingness of knowing;

you can sense, directly, being part of the infinite circle;

you can put your livingness into the next second of every minute;

you can lose your unnecessary identity, easily;

and assume, with all the grace your imagination supplies

that which is given to you

as a special path

to nothing more special

than two or three details

that fill the next moment

fully.



They will tell you

who you are.

Pre-history and the sense of purpose

Imagine pre-historic humans, unshaved, unwashed, uneducated, but far more alert to natural signals and intuitive communication. How quickly did they invent shoes in whatever form? The need for protection of feet has always struck me as priority, since movement must have been a key factor for survival. And survival must have been the first strong sense of purpose, instinctive protection of life.

In this year, 2013, we do not think of humans hunting for breakfast. Cereals, yoghurt, bacon, eggs, tomatoes, tea, coffee, champagne are all easily obtainable, and can even be kept overnight in fridges if necessary. We have survived so well that we have turned into a market of consumers.

Increasingly, we lose out on having an urgent sense of purpose. For less affluent people, the purpose is often about becoming more affluent. For affluent people, the purpose becomes the need to look after investment carefully. And then there's career development, social justice and spiritual imperatives.

I think about levels and intensities of urgency. What drives and motivates us, and what the implications are when we achieve our purposes. What really matters at the end of the day. Many would say that what matters at the end of the day relates to family, friends and the fulfillment of desires. I have the idea that if we unpack the sense of urgency to understand what it means and where it comes from, we need to re-read Brian Weiss for a start, to understand how all emotions connect,  and then the gnostic gospels to put matters in context. The Bhagavad-Gita and the major and minor prophets of the Old Testament would also help.

From a variety of sources we are told that the universe and experience are holographic. If this is so, then let's assume that one human death affects all human awareness and see what happens. My grandfather died young, perhaps quite suddenly and unexpectedly, and my mother's side of the family was traumatized. She was traumatized till the day she died, and that trauma still fills my heart with the urgent need for resolution. So I, too, will die relatively traumatized, and who can tell when and how this trauma is going work itself out? And all this trauma is merely personal. Wars, natural disasters and economic collapses have created wave upon wave of trauma that sweep through human memory. How will it ever be possible to resolve such a situation which revisits human awareness with every birth and death?

There is a gospel song "Call the man" popularized by Celine Dion that provokes the answer. The hero's courage to stand in stillness in the chaos and confusion is in each of us. The path to this strong, peaceful platform is by prayer and meditation. Prehistory had no sweeping concepts of mankind. Purpose was largely instinctive and has since gained almost unimaginablyin creativity. Choice of purpose implies less urgency of purpose, and less urgency implies less real. If I break a tooth, all other urgencies subside: my need to get to the dentist rules.

As I think about it, purpose and urgency overlap. The grander the purpose, the more deeply felt is the urgency. My grandfather on my father's side had the fervent urgency that took him to Spain, Chile, Argentina and Patagonia to convert the Catholics to Protestantism. He failed, and because I never met him, I don't know if this failure traumatized him.

I think that all the trauma of and in human history can be resolved by cosmic communication, and the meaning of that, so far as human awaresness goes, is by engaging with that which is spiritual. Prehistoric people argued less about defining what is spirtual, I should imagine, and tried harder to avoid the trauma of hunger, hurt and death.

In 2013 we have the amazing luxury of choosing purposes. This means not that our instincts have disappeared but that they have become clouded. It's not that we do not feel our innermost and profound urgencies but that we have a very useful array of distractions.

Why should anyone engage with the depths of human pain when there are cars, cookery courses, advertising campaigns and sport competitions?

If you move through all your layers of make-believe that this world is a comfortable, comforting place and revisit pre-historical awareness, there should a re-sharpening of awareness to the extent that certain urgencies become inescapable.

I enjoy comfortable and conforting things like single malt whiskies and first class international travel as much and moire than anyone else, and yet I realize the danger: if you lose the sense of vulnerability, you  lose the edge.

Every time I drive past Century City, Cape Town and read the billboard "Don't leave a will, leave a legacy" I really feel the meaning of that. I like it. Not many are in a position to do that. Many will die wondering what happened and why. I feel that, also, each and every time I think about it. I want none of us to have lived or died in vain.

So, "in vain"? We're not in prehistory anymore, we're here in 2013. How do you get to be born and to die in vain?

By not making your own attempt, however small, to contribute to the larger sense of spiritual context.
Ridley Beeton, a South African poet who is now in heaven entitled one of his collections "The Landscape of Requirement". Requirement makes sense. All are asked and few respond. (Check Zuma and cabinet.)

The sense of chosen purpose makes sense when it correlates with the sense of being called. Each one of us can change the evetual nature of human history by responding to the urgencies recognized in our individual souls.

I prioritize accomplishment over bliss, and I would like to see many resolutions to various traumas before I'm willing to trade in victorious and triumphant announcements.

Shoes are precious, you can't walk far without them. Holy ground says you take them off, out of respect for something greater than survival.

When I know I can walk no futher, shoes or no shoes, I am forced to my knees.

I think this posture teaches us once and for all who we are. No shoes. An emergency of need. An attitude which is ours to choose. An utter inevitability that takes us to the hearts' cry, the answer to which is not guarranteed to be what we want. Yet it's good, when by grace we accept it.

In 2013 the sense of pre-history is good for refining and re-defining the sense of purpose that creates real movement and direction.

The mind's default is a pinball machine.

We start off with a linguistic problem with the definite article. "A" mind,"the" mind or just "mind"? I would prefer Mind's default since I am fairly convinced that the problematics of identity, solitude, agency and individuality are overcome by the perspectives gained from holism. But of course we can't escape from the privacy of our own bodies, so here we are each one of us thoroughly bound to a sense of self.

That's the sensory default. The default of being physiological beings in a physical world. The question of whether mind arises from or is the ground for the physical universe is a matter of decision. You decide how to think about this.

The logic of intuition tells me that mind creates the physical world. The basis of this kind of logic is that although I am thoroughly immersed in a physical universe I have a strong sense of the eternal. I am not prepared to argue either of these away. I am not prepared to deny the table in front of me, nor am I prepared to dismiss intimations of immortaility.

A key aspect of awareness that helps to confirm a default setting is imagination. Free-focus experiential, existential play. It's part of daily pattern, fully switched on in dream mode, suppressed during operational mode unless your work uses it.

You're free to imagine anything, act on it, work it through, make things real. The light-bulb didn't always exist, neither did the rifle, glass, internal combustion engine, paper, or tablets, either the medical or electronic version.

You may not be an inventor, but you do create your own mind on a minute by minute basis. Elsewhere in these blogs you can read about how I decry formal education. For most of us, the default relates to conforming, compulsion, compliance and obedience to what appears as decency. Our mind's formation is shaped but not freed by these imperatives. These are not the whole of the default.

Imaginative open-ness is crucial to following more of mind's default. Arresting one's logic for the sake of allowing greater awareness in any given moment will always allow you to hear more, see more, sense more, grow more.

Is that "more" physical, in the sense of seeing more green in the grass, more liquidity of the water? Or does intutive acutensess itself grow? How does the focus work?

I accept it when people tell me they see angels. I accept it when others explain algebraic solutions. I know the difference between vision, conviction and belief, and like Jung, I prefer not to believe but to know. I do not believe that the chair will hold me up, I sit on it and know that it does hold me up. I do not believe in God, I trust holiness in whatever form holiness comes to bless me. I am blessed over and over, and know it.

Not only am I blessed temporarily, in this life, with this food, that beauty and more friends, I am also blessed infinitely and eternally to catch glimpses of the human heart, full of desperate desires, wild affection and aspirations to beauty.

To seek mind's default is to approach poetic language. There's nothing neat or clever about it. It's not reducible. My experience leads me to think that courage is one of the first steps, also conviction, but not of the dogmatic kind. Conviction that leads to kindness works. Conviction that results in pietistic cruelty does not. Then clarity, which baffles me when so many people fear what clarity feels like. Becasue clarity is a feeling,not a concept. Perhaps I can alliterate even more and pull in carefulness as well as communication.

Once you open your mind, you can't close it again. This is what reason does. I don't argue because I want a particular conclusion. I argue because I want to find truth. I know I'm on the way when I get that sense of truth, that holiness isn't far away, and if we can hit the right speed of communication, take good care of the details in our intent, test our clarity, and utter our convictions, the default is working for fruitfulness in spheres that might surprise us.

Checking mind's default is very much like playing pinball. The ball wants to go one way, you want it to go the other way. The last thing you should do is get angry or desperate and tilt the machine because then the lights go out and you lose the game to the extent of having to pay again. There are rules, desires, inevitability, irreversibility. Even skill will never grant ultimate victory. There is not supposed to be ultimate victory. It's just fun.

Modelling thinking

Childhood experience would usually sort this out at an unconscious level. Growing up, you absorb, adapt and extend the patterns of your experience, speaking the way your parents and friends do, aligning your emotional patterns to the text of your context.

I was more fortunate than this. My parents didn't speak the same language. My dad was a Scot, my mom Swiss. To this day, I think in a meta-language somewhere between languages. Being exposed to Afrikaans society has made it clear to me that cultural alignment influences communciation entirely. When studying applied linguistics, I read Jerry Fodor's work on private langauge, wondering if there could be such a thing. I didn't reach a satisfactory conclusion, and am left with the sense of having a private awareness that communicates either by default or on purpose.

The crux, of course, is how I communicate with myself. This is baffling. "Conversations with God" I, II and III ad infinitum goes in this direction, if you have the time.

Another bit of good fortune, although it didn't seem like it at the time, was that I had to sit and listen to preachers, preachers and preachers as soon as I could sit. This very valuable extended experience taught me physical self-control and stillness, to be sensitive to rhetoric, freedom of imagination because what else could you do? and critical conceptual agility because the whole purpose of the sermons was to enagage dogmatic purity, existential honesty and infinite salvation. It was my habit, from a tender age, to rush up to the preacher as quickly as possible to make acquaintance because I wanted to hear his "real" voice and sense who the person really was. More often than not, I was disappointed. The words of the sermon that promised so much failed to deliver a real person. The urgency of my curiosity amused, then irritated and finally enraged quite a few preachers who then complained to my father about my disobedience to God's word. They failed to realize that I genuinely wanted to understand. Needless to say, I refused to model my thinking on the style they offered.

I am still amazed that so few of my school-teachers had styles of thinking and being that suggested themselves as models. Frank Rumboll and Malcolm Andrew made lasting impressions on me, the former in terms of exactitude of wise analysis, the latter for being able to reduce complexities to essentials.

The humanities section of UCT's library was a smorgasbord of models. I read and re-read Satir and Perls without ever hearing of NLP. Hegel I liked, too. I can't remember why I was intrigued by Patrick Suppes, but I was. I would not able to make a list of the ten most influential books I have read. They would run into thousands. Neville Shute would be close to the top of the list. He was no academic. C.S.Lewis would also rank up there, for being a sane Christian. Hans Kung, whose books and lectures came to nothing more startling than realizing that faith and trust aren't far apart. I came to realize that I liked the "academic" model. I threw my energy into that vast pot, and tried to taste what I was cooking. There was one essential ingredient that still eluded my knowledge: my sense of self. I knew how to think for myself, but not what to think of myself.

This is going to sound like a snake with its tail in its mouth: what you communicate to yourself is how you think of yourself. When the brain is pushed towards cogitation at the expense of decision and emotion, the snake will swallow itself.

NLP deals with the balancing of decision, emotional states and intellectual constructs. I'm not sure if it takes one in the direction of being free to choose models, or if the essential model is freedom itself, which is a spiritual insight, but too intangible for easy access. My guess is that the former contains steps to achieve the latter.

I have come to the unsurprising but happy conclusion that I resonate with the models that resonate with me. The saving grace is that I am also happy to learn new chords.

 

 

 

The fluid moment.

Does entering the moment bear any metaphor at all?

I enter the moment and find that even I am not. It is like vast space. Nothing is there, and there are no possible boundaries. Even infinity does not begin here. No lightning speed will strike, though quickness abounds: here but not here, presence eludes and dances without ever being caught. Yet the echo bounces just out of range and the touch retains an eternal imprint.

Then again I enter the moment: the richness of this world, filled with animal affection and wild inverted wisdom comes to sit in my heart and makes all my experience so light that everything floats.

I enter the moment and make all meaning to find that meaning unmakes me. I have never properly existed.

To enter the moment is to cease as a single drop and become the river. The ocean is not far away. The rain falls. All flow is related.

Entering the moment is a short step within eternity. To grasp that being alive is no threat to the sense of self. One sharp, clear bird call. Sea-smell, with coal, drizzle and a steam-engine's hoot directly out of childhood. A pair of eyes, another and another, and such a promise within all these. That all possible moments are in this moment, yet none will ever be owned. That presence is not about my presence. That questions fade in the light of one real answer.

I have moved from one human mind to another to another. Having spun the web, I have gone into hiding to await the prize and have been eaten. The web quivers imperceptibly, invisible until lgiht finds it. The human web waits in its own history, delicate with dew, cruel in intent, wordless. No concept escapes from the clasp of time. Too much carefulness loses the sensitive touch of freedom.

We have told so many stories to enter the moment. None hold for longer than the narrative does. Indeed, the truest stories hide the truth of the moment.

Is the most precious thing to touch the truth of another? That also is a metaphor. To touch another's truth is to touch your own grief, and vice-versa. We have to open that door wide, and pass through, to arrive beyond joy and grief, which are pointers that we mistakenly take as purpose.

We can't approach a real sense of purpose until we pass through the door of joy and grief.

An open door is open on both sides. The fluid moment is extremely porous. All points of exit and entrance co-incide.

The fluid moment kills philosphy and hounds philosphers. Composers hear it, artists see it, poets say it.

Faith bears it, again, again and again.