I woke up this morning and although the weather sucked, and I felt incredibly unmotivated to do much as a result, I felt an urge to start writing again. It's kinda been ironic in one sense that since I wrote a final entry for my Blind Heart blog I've had an issue on my mind that I wanted to write about. So I guess that's a good sign that it's time to move and and start up my new blog and see what happens. But instead of starting to write this morning I braved the ridiculous humidity to head out on my bike to hunt out some cheap bike parts I need to complete my tandem bike project. This summer I hope to have a tandem bike up and running for fun times at the beach, and a possible income source renting out the machine for $10-$15 per half-hour or something like that.
I was talking a with a friend of mine this morning on Facebook chat, who started the conversation with a phrase I've heard from a few people over the past few months: “Mikey, we never talk online anymore!” And it's true, I've had a busy six months, and I'm always filling my days up with living, with the result being that when I am online I'll often not sign into chat anymore, and although I always have Skype open the criteria for getting onto my Skype contact list is unachievable for everyone in the world, aside from my immediate family. But life is busy, I have filled my days up with active living. Yet somehow I still feel itches to write from time to time.
This morning while talking to my friend on Facebook, even within that conversation of typed words I felt the itch of creative, or expressive writing. We talked a bit about the seasons, how I am not liking the heat and humidity of Auckland at the moment, everything feels damp all the time at the moment. My friend was talking about the white winter in their part of the world, and I felt jealous at the prospect of a white Christmas. I mentioned that my favourite season has always been autumn. I know that spring has always been the season that people paint as the season of birth and growth, and autumn is often the season of death, and dying off. But for some reason I always see autumn in a much different light. I guess it might have something to do with the fact that while growing up we would start each new school year at the beginning of autumn. As a result I have a strong sense of autumn as being the season of change, the season of breaking the old shackles that held us back before, the season in which we prepare and strengthen for the struggles that may lie ahead in winter, and the season in which we clear the foundations which will turn into the brilliant growth that spring allows. In some ways that is what I see as the purpose of this blog “Change of Season”.
New Zealand is a unique country in a number of ways. Because NZ is a sub-tropical country the native trees here do not lose their leaves for winter, however all of the introduced native European trees do shed their foliage over the winter months. By the school of business building at the University of Auckland the sidewalk is the home to a number of oak trees, which dump loads of leaves onto the pavement each autumn. I've always loved walking through piles of leaves on the sidewalk, kicking them with my feet as I take each step. One year in particular I made a little game out of the leaves by the school of business. I carefully gathered up the leaves into two large piles, one on each side of the sidewalk. I would stand nonchalantly by one of the piles as someone approached my trap, and when they were in range I would begin either throwing or kicking leaves at them. My plan was to encourage them to take part in a spontaneous leaf fight directly outside the school of business building. For the most part people would just kind of ignore me, some would laugh, but there was one person in particular who got into the spirit of things. At first he started picking up leaves from my pile and throwing them at me, but I pointed out the pile I had already made for him, and the leaf fight began in earnest. Part of me hoped that that one leaf fighter was a student at the school of business, and that perhaps, just maybe, by his having a leaf-fight that one day he learned something important about stepping away from the bleakness of the business world, and that he developed a greater understanding of the interconnectedness of everyone, especially those who walk past you down the sidewalk each day. Although I hope that that is the case, I really hold zero expectation that our leaf fight made one inch of difference in the future direction of his life.
I have many hopes for life. I have many hopes that somehow I can use my life to positively influence the lives of others. That is why I am studying to be a nurse, that is why I have always been interested in social justice issues, and why I've found myself spending more and more of my spare time dedicated to helping the more vulnerable members of Auckland city. I often hope that I can help people see things from different perspectives, in a way that allows them to be more understanding of points of view that differ from theirs, and take on board the reality that perhaps we don't have everything figured out perfectly in our own little worlds. I think this last reason is why I feel inclined to write. At the same time, I know that people will read something according to what they want to see in it, or according to their pre-conceived notions about something, and being able to change those things is not in the power of the writer, but solely property of the reader.
I worry greatly about a trend that people have in adopting philosophical world views which minimize the experiences, lives, actions and opinions of others. I get very nervous and somewhat sad when I encounter a world-view which incorporates a mechanism whose sole purpose is to explain away any dissenters or critics. I find it to be an incredibly human-denying act to minimize another persons opinions, to simplify them to the point of absurdity and then criticize the simplification or to dismiss anything they say using one world-view to dismantle an unrelated world-view.
I think it is an important point to note that knowledge is state-specific, a phrase that gets thrown around a lot by the NZ Krishnas, often without a full grasping of the connotations of the phrase. Essentially, what you go looking for you will find, or what you are aware of is all you will be able to perceive. I think it's almost ironic as well that when one is subject to the experience of being dismissed by a mechanism someone has received through their world-view system, it is easier to see how similar mechanisms world throughout society.
While writing my last entry in my previous blog project I did a little bit of reading of a few things I knew to be online which illustrated a mechanism used to dismiss the things I expressed within that blog. I know, from personal experience, that people cannot hold onto doctrines and dogma which they constantly fight against inside their heads whenever faced with them. I was recently very privileged to have the opportunity to hear a presentation of sorts from an ex-pastor, ex-youth-pastor as part of an Advent in Art series at Cityside Baptist Church in Auckland. His presentation gave me a lot to think about.
For starters, he talked about some of the less-healthy social mechanisms which he saw occurring within the charismatic church setting in which he acted as a youth pastor for some time. He talked about how his uneasiness with some of these mechanisms resulted in accusations that he was not 'in the spirit'. I personally felt a strong sense of understanding that painful situation. I left a religious community after having to finally acknowledge that many of the tenets of that religious philosophy made me feel very uneasy. It is not possible to hold on forever to something that you cannot accept, and the stress of attempting to do so is horribly unhealthy. Yet, instead of accepting and acknowledging that people will process their world-views over time, and sometimes their world-views will progress and change, sometimes they will cast off the old shackles of one world-view to allow for another to grow up and mature in it's place, instead of accepting their very real, human, personal process of growth and change that takes place in people's lives, many world-views will contain mechanisms to prevent from allowing recognition to the changes of others. I heard from an ex-pastor who experienced the accusation of not being spirit filled enough, and that was the reason for his changing faith, while I personally have had the accusation of being influenced by the power of illusion which draws us away from God. While every internally consistent world-view has the right to form explanations for occurrences, it does no one any favours when these mechanisms are used to dismiss the personal developments, experiences, growths and doubts of other people. In fact, by dismissing these doubts, by dismissing a person who undergoes a change of personal understandings the dismissers misses the opportunity to learn from the experiences of others. Believe it or not you CAN learn from the experiences of those who hold radically different world-views than yourself.
It is incredibly sad, I think, that many religious and spiritual communities, which should have love, acceptance, compassion and understanding as the guiding principles of their practices instead often take to criticism, blaming, dismissing and de-personalizing those who change courses and take on or accept a different path or a different understanding. I think that religious world-views that do not acknowledge the fact that people go through different stages of faith development is an unhealthy world-view.
But listening to the developing story this former-pastor continued to tell I began to feel another sense of sadness. As I listened I realised that maturity and growth that this former-pastor possessed as a result of all that he had been through, as he finally found himself voted out of his role as a pastor under a situation that he found to be rather troubling, and I think rightfully so. This former-pastor now seemed to hold a faith that he had moulded in a personal way, in a way mature way, and in an honest way. And for some reason I felt struck with a sense of sadness thinking about this. The sadness I felt had to do with the fact that many of the critics of religion and spirituality, in their over-simplifying and de-personalising spirituality would dismiss the incredibly heartfelt experiences and maturely developed faith I felt and saw within this former-pastor. I felt a sadness that some people hold a world-view which dictates to them that all religious people are less-intelligent, immature and lacking in some way, and therefore whatever religious sentiments they express should be dismissed; another wonderful mechanism granted by a world-view to depersonalise the experiences of others. Yet I sat and found myself feeling humbled by what I saw in this man, his growth through his struggles, and how his faith had matured and developed away from a more dogmatic stage of faith, and more into a flexible, accepting yet firm understanding and relationship.
Everyone has a right to hold their own world-view, but when these world-views develop mechanisms which restrict the holders from acknowledging not only the validity of other's world-view's, but also dismisses their very personal experiences in life, and minimizes the maturity, intelligence and emotions which form the basis of their developed world-view, then there is a failure which restricts the possibility of loving others fully, and gaining greater perspectives by understanding where they have come from.
I wish I could write something that would actually make people see the value in other people's lives. I wish I could write something that would make people dismantle the mechanisms they hold in their lives which restrict them from appreciating the paths people have taken in their lives, and the way their world-views have developed so organically in their lives. But I know that writing isn't that powerful of a tool as to be able to dismantle the mechanisms that people use to protect themselves. Those mechanisms can only be dismantled from the inside out. As I dismantle mine, and through that process gain a deeper understanding of love, and a deeper confidence in my developing stages of faith, I hope that others would step forward into a deeper understanding of what compassion truly means.
The seasons are changing in life all the time. Although it's nearly 10 at night now the humidity and heat are still ridiculous, and I feel a longing for a whiter Christmas, or for a pile of oak leaves to throw at someone in an attempt to bring deeper thoughts into their life. As I finish this first of hopefully many entries of my new blog project I'll leave you with two quotes I have always loved by Schroedinger, the famous physicist and biologist, who thought deeply on the philosophical issues of life and the experience of the person within this world:
“I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity.
Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.” (Schroedinger 1954, 93).
“I shall quite briefly mention here the notorious atheism of science. The theists reproach it for this again and again. Unjustly. A personal God can not be encountered in a world picture that becomes accessible only at the price that everything personal is excluded from it.
We know that whenever God is experienced, it is an experience exactly as real as a direct sense impression, as real as one’s own personality. As such He must be missing from the space-time picture. ‘I do not meet with God in space and time’, so says the honest scientific thinker, and for that reason he is reproached by those in whose catechism it is nevertheless stated: ‘God is Spirit’.” (Schroedinger, as cited in Moore 1990, 379; see also Schroedinger’s Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press, 1958, p. 68).
