Tomorrow’s Child

What is hope?

It is the pre-sentiment that imagination is more real and reality is less real than it looks.  It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress us is not the last word.  It is the suspicion that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe.
That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual; and in a miraculous and unexplained way, life is opening creative events which will light the way to freedom and resurrection.

But the two  — suffering and hope — must live from each other.  Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair.  But hope without suffering creates illusions, naïveté and drunkenness.

So let us plant dates even though we who plant them will never eat them.  We must live by the love of what we will never see.  That is the secret discipline.  It is the refusal to let our creative act be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience and it is a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren.  Such disciplined hope is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints the courage to die for the future they envisage.  They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.

— Rubin Alves

My Father

Sing God a simple song

Sing God a simple song, lauda, laude
Make it up as you go along: lauda, laude
Sing like you like to sing.
God loves all simple things,
For God is the simplest of all.

In 1971, for the opening of the Kennedy Center in DC, Bernstein took the traditional Catholic mass and embedded in a theater piece that explores the contradictions and ambiguities in the role of the church in a rapidly-changing, pluralistic America.  The believer confronts the counterculture, the warriors and the war protestors, the scientists and the businessmen, and is challenged the find the core of his faith.  In the end, the value that emerges is community. 

Orchestration includes marching band, bongo drums, electric guitars, organs, electronic keyboards, childrens’ voices, in addition to 20 solo voices, 2 choirs and an orchestra.

Listen to Simple Song from the theatrical Mass by Leonard Bernstein
Listen to Marin Alsop talking about the Mass in an NPR interview

‘Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction.’
         — Paul Simon

Pharmaceutical help for the insufferably cheery

Are you insufferably ebullient? Do you beam if a stranger so much as looks your way? Do you see the silver lining in even awful situations? Well, there’s help for you! The FDA has recently approved a new depressant called Despondex. Although alternative natural treatments exist (TV, high-fructose corn syrup, sedentary lifestyles), these therapies put the onus on the victim.  Medical help is available now that de-stigmatizes joie de vivre.  Yes, even you can be socially appropriate.

video from TheOnion

‘Full understanding can come to you
 only through an inexpressible mystery.’

— Huang Po (c 800 AD)

Stop trying to change

In order to change we must quit trying to change and simply be who and where we are.  The Gestalt Therapy notion is that awareness and contact bring natural and spontaneous change.  Only by being who we are can we begin to grow into something else.  Self-discipline can be as counter-productive as externally-imposed coercion. 

‘By rejecting the role of change agent, we make meaningful and orderly change possible.’ — Arnold Bessler

Transition does not require that you reject or deny the importance of your old life, just that you let go of it.  The process begins with surrender (of avoidances), awareness (of who and where we really are) and release (of the old ways of being).

— article by Reg Harris

‘In the Confucian tradition it is said that the mark of a golden era is that children are the most important members of the society and teaching is the most revered profession.’

— Peter M Senge, Society for Organizational Learning

Solomon Asch and the Power of Dissent

 Solomon Asch, with experiments originally carried out in the 1950s and well-replicated since, highlighted a phenomenon now known as ‘conformity’. In the classic experiment, a subject sees a puzzle like the one in the nearby diagram: Which of the lines A, B, and C is the same size as the line X? Take a moment to determine your own answer...

The gotcha is that the subject is seated alongside a number of other people looking at the diagram - seemingly other subjects, actually confederates of the experimenter. The other ‘subjects’ in the experiment, one after the other, say that line C seems to be the same size as X. The real subject is seated next-to-last. How many people, placed in this situation, would say ‘C’ - giving an obviously incorrect answer that agrees with the unanimous answer of the other subjects? What do you think the percentage would be?

Three-quarters of the subjects in Asch’s experiment gave a ‘conforming’ answer at least once. A third of the subjects conformed more than half the time.

Get it so far? People tend to defer to what the herd thinks.

But here’s the good news:

Adding a single dissenter - just one other person who gives the correct answer, or even an incorrect answer that’s different from the group’s incorrect answer - reduces conformity very sharply, down to 5-10%.

Why is this important? Well, it means that one person who publicly speaks the truth can sway a group of people away from group-think.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, blogging on the Overcoming Bias web page

Change should breed change

NEW doth the sun appear,
The mountains’ snows decay,
Crown’d with frail flowers forth comes the baby year.
My soul, time posts away;
And thou yet in that frost
Which flower and fruit hath lost,
As if all here immortal were, dost stay.
For shame! thy powers awake,
Look to that Heaven which never night makes black,
And there at that immortal sun’s bright rays,
Deck thee with flowers which fear not rage of days!

— William Drummond (of Hawthornden)

“I study myself more than any other subject; it is my metaphysic, and my physic.”

Was there life before cyberspace?

Inside, outside, there’s a conversation going on today that wasn’t happening at all ten years ago and hasn’t been very much in evidence since the Industrial Revolution began. Now, spanning the planet via Internet and World Wide Web, this conversation is so vast, so multifaceted, that trying to figure what it’s about is futile. It’s about a billion years of pent-up hopes and fears and dreams coded in serpentine double helixes, the collective flashback deja vu of our strange perplexing species. Something ancient, elemental, sacred, something very very funny that’s broken loose in the pipes and wires of the twenty-first century. There are millions of threads in this conversation, but at the beginning and end of each one is a human being. That this world is digital or electronic is not the point. What matters most is that it exists in narrative space. The story has come unbound. The world of commerce became precipitously permeable while it wasn’t looking and sprang a leak from a quarter least expected. The dangers of democracy pale before the danger of uncontained life. Life with the wraps off. Life run wild.

— from The Cluetrain Manifesto
A dramatic history of open source

There is only one story.  You already know the plot.  Live it now.

Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time.

Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out.

This is it. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. 

— Joseph Campbell, born this day in 1904

‘Follow your bliss.’

The poem that took the place of a mountain.

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

— Wallace Stevens

History of human rights: a one-way street

‘Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.’

— Cesar Chavez, born this day in 1927