Punctum Saliens

Tim Freke uses the term “lucid living” to describe a state analogous to lucid dreaming but lucid living is the balance point between our mundane life (the “dreaming” state) and a state of higher consciousness. Ram Dass states that the highest mother, student, therapist, lover, &c. is the most conscious one. So, what is conscious living? What are some attributes of a person who is living lucidly or consciously? Here are some initial thoughts.

Conscious living is …

• … not letting my mind, thoughts, or eyes wander when someone is speaking to me.
• … not focusing on what I want to say next to the exclusion of listening to others.
• … not letting my mind wander to work, blog posts, &c. when playing with my daughter.
• … being in the present and not the past or the future. This pretty much sums up the three ideas above. If I’m playing with my daughter, I’m not working or writing so any work or writing that I may think about is either in the past or in the future. If I’m concentrating on what I’m going to say next in a conversation then I’m focusing on the future and not the present in which the other person is speaking.

But with that short list, I’m realizing two things: 1) that I don’t really have much of an idea what conscious living is and 2) that I have more questions than answers.

If I’m at lunch with a friend and he’s talking (as happened a few days ago) and I get a text, do I look at the text? It’s most likely my wife who is wondering where I am since lunch is taking longer than either of us expected. This dilemma seems trivial but I think it represents a much larger class of dilemma that exists because of technology. Cell phones that we carry around with us all the time make it possible for the “present moment” to span physical space. If I did not have a cell phone, my wife could not be “present” with me at lunch because she is not physically there. But a text message from her can bring her into my present moment with my friend. So, I have the dilemma of being conscious with my friend and his conversation versus being conscious with my wife and acknowledging her text. Of course, the same questions arise with email, phone calls, &c.

Is multi-tasking not conscious living? An email just came in for me and I checked it on my phone then came back to this post. Again, this is a representative of a larger class. Say I’m on the clock writing code and a thought pops into my head about a blog post or an idea for a writing project or whatever. If I am living consciously, do I take a few moments to move over to my personal computer and start a draft so that I don’t forget the idea? Should the thought have even come into my head in the first place? Is conscious living synonymous with completely focused, one track thinking?

Not acknowledging another human being seems to be a very unconscious act. So does that mean you have to make eye contact with everyone you pass while walking down the street? But what if you live in NYC? Are you really supposed to make eye contact with everyone?

As I’m working on this post, it’s getting harder and harder to concentrate and to write and I’m feeling a lot of resistence. My initial reaction is to save the draft and come back to it later. But I know that there is a large possibility that I’ll never return to it because it’s difficult. It’s difficult to think about these things and come to realize how unconsciously I am living right now, how much work I have to do on myself. So, I’m going to publish this post as-is, un-finished, mid-stream. Please leave some comments about what you think conscious living is. Perhaps some interaction will lighten my load a bit and help me get back to the self-inspection that this topic needs. I will, hopefully, some back to this topic and write more later.

caveat lector: I am an engineering Ph.D. with a Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (complete with a Dictionary of the Greek New Testament) and Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon and I’m not afraid to use them! So, therefore, I would appreciate input on meaning and nuance from anyone who has actually studied ancient Greek.

I want to bring in a later definition of faith from Hebrews 11:1 which reads, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This definition seems at odds with Jesus’ definition because it emphasizes the future and the unseen whereas the people Jesus credits with faith have faith in something happening right now because of what they’ve seen Jesus do in the past. On the one hand, this seems perfectly reasonable because we have not witnessed Jesus perform a miracle and so our faith must be based on things unseen. But on the other hand, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus defines faith relative to things in nature—the birds and the flowers—which we do have the ability to witness even today.

The first half of the definition in Hebrews 11:1 is rather pedestrian and obvious. Faith—πίστις (pistis)—has the meaning of persuasion or conviction and derives from πείθω (pĕithō) which means to convince by argument. The Greek word, ἐλπιζω (ĕlpizō) translated as hoped also means expected. Indeed, in English, hope implies “reasonable confidence” that the desired outcome will occur. So we have faith as the assurance—ὑπόστᾰσις (hupŏstasis) also means the support, foundation, or ground of hope—of what we expect to happen. This is very nearly a tautology: we have been convinced of something and this conviction is the basis, the ground of our expectation, that that thing of which we are convinced will come to pass. If we are convinced of something, of course we expect it!

The second half of the definition is more interesting although just as unsatisfying. The Greek word for conviction—ἕλεγχος (ĕlĕgehŏs)—has the connotations of reproof, a cross-examining, testing for the purposes of disproof or refuting. The Greek word for seen—βλἐπω (blĕpō)—implies “simply voluntary observation.” So, our faith allows us to examine, to test, with the end goal of being able to disprove things that we have chosen to not observe. But if we are persuaded of something we do not need to observe it. I am convinced that electrons exist so it does not matter that I have never seen an electron. The real, unanswered question is, “in what does our faith, our persuasion, consist”? This definition in Hebrews does not answer that question. But, taking Jesus’ definition of faith, we are persuaded by seeing what God has done. There is no “leap of faith” involved. Our faith is based on past experience.

[ Parts I, II, III, IV, V ]

via The Rev’s Rumbles I found the Germatriculator which rates my blog as balanced exactly, yet precariously, between the two extremes (at least as of right now). I’ve achieved my goal of holding the tension of the opposites!! The universe now has an incrementally greater amount of consciousness. My work here is done (but I’ll still probably continue blogging anyway).

God is real. The Christian life is about a relationship with God as known in Jesus Christ. It can and will change your life.

– Marcus Borg via The Rev’s Rumbles

What I want to emphasis in the above quote is the word Christian. It is the Christian life that is about a relationship with God as known in Jesus Christ. It is not life in general, but specifically the Christian life. It is not the Muslim life or the Buddhist life or the Zen life or … it is the Christian life. Other lives are also about a relationship with God but as known in or through other people or ideas and not Jesus Christ. But they are still about a relationshop with God.

Continuing from my last post, I have not totally thought through the “why” of the ultimate observer doing no action but, taking that as an assumption to be “proven” later, I think there are two answers to “Who, then, created?”

First, as some spiritual traditions suggest (and I can’t, at the moment, recall which one(s)) it was a demiurge who did the creating. The Old Testament God, Jehovah, was not the ultimate observer but a “lesser” god, more akin to a child with his fits of rage, anger, jealousy, &c., and it was this god who created. It reminds me of that Star Trek episode (the “real” Star Trek with Captain James T. Kirk) where the Enterprise crew is trapped on this planet by a “god” which turns out to be a child playing. The child’s parents come in at the end and save everyone from annihilation and apology for their child’s behavior.

Second, there is no creation — it’s all a dream, maya, an illusion. This fits in with Eastern tradition, especially Vedanta and Hinduism.

Vedanta has an aphorism which states: “I do nothing at all.” Our true “I,” our true Self, is the ultimate observer and does not act. If our true Self were, itself, observed, then it would be the object to another’s subject. That other subject would then be the ultimate observer (unless, of course, it was observed by yet another subject). To break the infinite chain, there must be an ultimate observer which is not observed by any other subject. This ultimate observer is “God” and our true “Self.” This is the “I” in the above aphorism. However, if “I” do nothing, i.e. “God” does nothing, then who/what created the world that we see, feel, hear, taste, and smell?

I feel like I’ve been harping on this a lot lately but this is what I’ve been thinking about and trying to deal with in my life. MysticSaint at, Inspirations and Creative Thoughts, has another excellent post from which I’ll pull a couple quotes that he quotes:

… the mystic is known only through the fact that he brings opposites together, for all of him is the Real. Thus Abu Said al Kharraz was asked, “Through what have you known Allah?” He replied, “Through the fact that He brings opposites together,” for he had witnessed their coming together in himself.

– Ibn Arabi

Praise be to God who hath given His creatures no way of attaining to knowledge of Him except through their inability to know Him.

– Abu Bakr

Things lie hidden in their opposites, and but for the existence of opposites, the Opposer would have no manifestations.

– Al Alawi

I’ve written elsewhere about the anthropomorphism of God but another parallel with Jung’s psychology has suggested itself. This time, it is the concept of transference. Again, from The Theory of Psychoanalysis: Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, No. 19:

Freud calls this process transference, owing to the fact that the images of the parents are henceforth transferred to the physician, along with the infantile attitude of mind adopted towards the parents. The transference does not arise solely in the intellectual sphere, but the libido bound up with the phantasy is transferred, together with the phantasy itself, to the personality of the physician, so that the physician replaces the parents to a certain extent. (p. 102)

A little later, Jung discusses the role of transference:

Through the transference to the physician, a bridge is built, across which the patient can get away from his family, into reality. In other words, he can emerge from his infantile environment into the world of grown-up people, for here the physician stands for a part of the extra-familial world.

Now, I would like to suggest an analogy where the “patient” is us and the “physician” is Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament. The transference was initiated by Jesus when he taught his disciples to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven.” We now view Jehovah as a father figure, i.e. we have transferred to Jehovah the image of a parent. What this transference provides us is a way to “grow-up”; to shed the “infantile environment” of the Old Testament and enter a more mature world with a more mature view of God. However, there can be a downside to transference:

But on the other hand, this transference is a powerful hindrance to the progress of treatment, for the patient assimilates the personality of the physician as if he did stand for father or mother, and not for a part of the extra-familial world. If the patent could acquire the image of the physician as a part of the non-infantile world, he would gain a considerable advantage. But transference has the opposite effect; hence the whole advantage of the new acquisition is neutralized.

How often have you seen this exact symptom? Someone, or a group of people, “assimilat[ing] the personality of the physician.” Think of all those Christians filled with “righteous anger” who condemn (or worse) sinners “in the name of God.”

There are two end results of transference:

The more the patient succeeds in regarding his doctor as he does any other individual, the more he is able to consider himself objectively, the greater becomes the advantage of transference. The less he is able to consider his doctor in this way, the more the physician is assimilated with the father, the less is the advantage of the transference and the greater will be its harm. The familial environment of the patent has only become increased by an additional personality assimilated to his parents. The patient himself is, as before, still in his childish surroundings, and therefore maintains his infantile attitude of mind. In this manner, all the advantages of transference can be lost.

Transference can lead to either greater maturity or a continued infantile attitude. In the latter case, Jehovah maintains a strongly human father image and we continue to take on the personality of the Old Testament God, the only result of which is a wallowing in our childhood and immaturity.

A follow-up to my Knowing God post. In that post, I wrote:

God is in us, God is that part of us that is unchanging, God is our “I,” our knower, our true self. And the way to know God is to look within. To look for what in us does not change; what in us says “I.”

I was a little unsure about that conclusion; I was unable to justify it. However, now I think I can.

When you know or perceive something you are the subject and the thing is the object. The subject knows the object. The object cannot know the subject. Now, God is — by definition, I dare say — the ultimate subject since nothing can know God as object as that would require something to be unknowable to God. So, how can we know God? The only way possible is if we are God.

Does that make sense?

Typical of neurotic people is their attitude of disharmony towards reality, that is their diminished capacity for adaptation.

– C.G. Jung, The Theory of Psychoanalysis:
Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, No. 19, p. 102

When I read this, I immediately thought about Fred Phelps. Pat Robertson, George Bush, the Kansas State School Board, &c., &c., &c. That is, everyone who vehemently defends that “old time religion” but doesn’t realize the “old time” for which they are nostalgic was populated by people vehemently defending that “old time religion” but didn’t realize their “old time” was populated by people vehemently defending …

Christian Fundamentalism, fundamentalism in general, is a prolific source of neuroses. Regression is one of the central dynamics in any neurosis. When confronted with an obstacle or conflict, the neurotic reverts to pathways that are old and outdated, hence infantile. These old pathways have nothing to do with the current obstacle and offer no effective means of resolution but the neurotic’s energy gets “backed up” due to the obstacle and spills over into these infantile, regressive pathways or thought processes. That is why they seem so irrational and downright childish — their current ideas, actions, and conclusions are being motivated and rationalized by ideas and thought processes that are irrelevant to the conflict at hand and are outdated. It is impossible for them to adapt to a changing world because they are still living in the past.