Author: Shona

Engineering consultant by day, science fiction writer in off hours.

Faceless

via Daily Prompt: Faceless

I have somedays felt that faceless is the preferable condition. Lay low.

But I read all of C.S. Lewis’ ‘Til We Have Faces” without figuring out what the title means, or meant. A fantastic story about the struggle to know what the gods want from us. The ancient chthonic dieties didn’t have faces. We moderns are aware that in normal human interactions, the words may carry as little as 7% of the meaning. The rest is conveyed by our tones, expression, even what we wear!

The faceless deities of course were not human. And thus also not from any particular racial group of humans. A faceless stone shaped in the female  (round) or male (elongated) version, no wonder  people had trouble knowing what these deities wanted from them. All we got was words through multiple layers of priest’s interpretations.

But we have faces, don’t we?

C.S. Lewis wrote this book late in life. He had a Jewish girlfriend, and maybe was softening his ideas that Christianity was the only true way. To me, even his Narnia books imply that.

Is Lewis struggling with the fact that the truest religion can only emerge when humans all see each other the way that the most spiritually enlightened Hindus do.

Which is also what Mother Teresa found to be the most important teaching in Christianity.

Learn to see the Divine in every face you encounter.

Then we will all truly have faces.

Admire

It’s important to remember that the point of admiration is inspiration. That’s inspiration, not imitation. It’s difficult to discern the difference. Humans are primates and primates have a system of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are part of the system we have evolved to help us understand other people’s experiences. Mirror neurons provoke emotions in the viewer. When the system is working properly, the provoked emotions are like the emotions of the viewed. Thus, mirror neurons are the biological foundation of empathy.

This is a necessary and useful part of the system we have developed to maintain social structures. Even those of us who feel like hermits couldn’t survive if we’ve never been conditioned by society. Humans have too many degrees of freedom for that. Too many options to respond to the impingements from the world. We need to imitate before we can become inspired, thus lighting the candle of others’ inspiration.

The way to distinguish imitation from inspiration must be a function of the emotions. If the imitation provokes upliftment, joy, bliss, peace, it becomes inspiration, and then admiration follows.

Tilling the Fields of Compassion

In order to flourish, we must have a clearly functioning ability to distinguish pleasure from pain.

That is the rock from which the more difficult discernment between good and evil may be constructed.

The thoughtful are surely capable of understanding that pain and pleasure are micro versions, in duration, size and significance, of evil and good.

Thus, it is imperative to the optimal functioning of higher beings, to whose family we claim to belong, that culture minimize, or even attempt to eliminate, using verbal reinforcement, while necessarily protecting the immature from pleasurable danger.

Perhaps this is the ultimate end of culture.

In so doing, the fields of true compassion are tilled.

Daily Promt: Fabric

Double woven Indian silk

via Daily Prompt: Fabric

 

Isn’t fabric a

better metaphor by which

to live than coin?

Events can be strands

in individual lives,

lives, strands of world cloth.

Both have two sides, but

fabric is flexible; can

be folded, or crumpled, and

so become

multi-dimensional. We

can hold it up to the light

and see right through to

the weaver’s skill.

The dark, the hidden portions

of the strands are just as important

as the clear or easy to spy.

 

Failure and Success

Merwegon says:

Failure and success are two sides of the same coin. When all self-conscious  beings give up the very idea of using the coin as a metaphor to understand and manipulate  the world around us, we, and all sentient beings, will have a more enjoyable experience.

Failure and success, embodied and spiritual, male and female, hot and cold, high and low, crazy and sane are merely convenient labels for conversation. Longer reflection often reveals the transparecy of the coin.

Then we see them for the unity they truly are.

Think, meditate, see.

 

Story Fragment 1

“You might as well call me Omar. It’s my name. So when you get here, ask for Omar.”

The line then went dead. Of course it wasn’t a line anymore. The sound went through the air as electromagnetic waves for most of its journey. Furthermore, the air itself was irrelevant to the electromagnetic waves. That wasn’t the case as they exited the speaker of the phone handset. The air had to be present to convey the sounds to my ear, and the air had to be there to maintain my body in a condition to be able to receive the sound waves.

Any thoughts, I now realized, were able to distract me from my task. The truth was I didn’t want to ask for Omar. The bigger truth was I didn’t want to do what asking for Omar was going to enable. The more eternal truth was that I knew this was a moment where I could continue my karmic circling, or I could try to escape from it.
But maybe Omar was caught in the same loop. I didn’t know Omar. At least, as far as I recalled, Omar and I had never come in contact with each other in the bodies we were currently inhabiting. Somehow, I felt a warning this time, that I am pretty sure I had never gotten before. But the warning was late. I was already far down the path of decision. Pulling out now would inevitably disappoint, irritate, anger and infuriate at least a dozen people.

I folded the flip phone, put it in my pocket, and headed off to the subway station, intermittently sipping my coffee.

Halfway through the journey on the Red Line, I noticed a sign.

“Mind the Gap!”

It kept flashing. First in bright red letters, then black. I figured that was for the benefit of any color-blind people. Red doesn’t stand out to some of them like it does for the rest of us. I caught myself drifting from my upcoming decision. “Focus” I whispered to myself. “Focus.”

And then I saw it. Between the red and black versions of the Mind the Gap warning were smaller letters, which lasted an extremely short time. A nearly subliminal message. It took me at least a dozen flash sequences to make it out.

Merwegon Says: The purpose of all spiritual work is to extinguish your habits, thereby allowing yourself the chance to respond, rather than react.

www.merwegonsays.org

Hmm. Was Omar acting out of habit? Was I? Was this a clue? Was this the information I needed to end my slow dance with karmic determinism? Was it?

A Picture of Grace

Never a picture of grace, despite that being the hopeful meaning of my middle name, Ann, I don’t suppose I have become nothing more than littered rubble yet. That time is somewhere in the future. Maybe not far though. You never know. I do find it helpful to keep a raven on my shoulder, to remind me of my death. That’s an improvement over Jiminy Cricket. I will allow myself to to go with my stream of consciousness. Stating that I am so allowing myself is an exercise of my yoga practice, the essence of which is to allow the witness to become established in itself. The witness is the truest version of the self. The witness is the one who calmly observes the activities, and even the great dramas, that every little self has to experience. So back to the blackest of black ravens on my shoulder, reminding me of my death. Death reminds me that the toil of life, the fog of memory, will not endure forever. Even if my soul is one of those who get to reincarnate, allowing a new effort to share hints of how to get by in the human condition, I think that the major portion of the dark, clinging fog of bad deeds will be left behind. Birth is a new start. By fact and rightly by human tradition. We might hold that parents, grandparents, and even more distant relatives cause pain to their descendants, but humans have never been punished by the law for something done by an ancestor who died before their birth. For better and for worse.

Subject to curse, subject to social reality, subject to group karma, but not punished by the law.

Lecture

Prompt a Day

Last month I didn’t give any lectures, but I taught two short courses.

On my favorite topic. Failure.

On meeting new people, I  always tell them that I am a failure…..

Long pause….looking for their confusion. And then they start to argue…

So I rush to add “ANALYST.”

But the fact is that the human condition is very challenging, and I do feel that I have failed to live up to my hopes.

As my mother said, my expectations were unrealistic. Oh well. Now I know better than to have expectations.

It’s only my hopes that are failed.

This seems true even as many of my specific small hopes have been fulfilled.

Thus ends my mini written lecture on failure!!!

Stochastically Enhanced Automatons

This little piece was from the prompt “Cleaning” in my writing group this morning. I am not generally a fan of cleaning! Here goes!

(Be sure to check out the links shown in underlined blue hyperlink color.)

The house is almost always sorely in need of cleaning.

But she doesn’t care. She’s more interested in cleaning the doorways to her perceptions. No matter what Plato thought about the matter, it is pointless to act like humans can divorce knowledge entirely from perception. The best we can do it to learn to disentangle the layers of interpretation from the bare facts. Without the integrated, advanced automatic interpretation features incorporated into our brain/mind, we humans would merely be another species of stochastically enhanced automatons.

But our rational minds allow us to think in a self-referential manner. We can, or we are capable, that is, or knowing ourselves to be both embedded in the fabric of reality, and apart from it. The lion, the amoeba, and the dust mote don’t have the ability to move out of the binding ties of Indra’s web.

See also this link for a beautiful image of Indra’s web.