{"id":106331,"date":"2018-02-12T12:00:01","date_gmt":"2018-02-12T12:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=106331"},"modified":"2018-02-10T16:03:04","modified_gmt":"2018-02-10T16:03:04","slug":"try-learning-not-to-ride-a-bicycle-so-we-can-save-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/02\/try-learning-not-to-ride-a-bicycle-so-we-can-save-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Try Learning Not to Ride a Bicycle So We Can Save the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWho would study and describe the living, starts \/By driving the spirits out of the parts: \/In the palm of his hand he holds all the sections, \/Lacks nothing, except the spirit\u2019s connections.\u201d<\/em>
\n— Mephistopheles warning to the student in Goethe\u2019s Faust<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd how far would you like to go in?\u201d he asked and the three kings all looked at each other.\u00a0 “Not too far but just far enough so\u2019s we can say that we\u2019ve been there.\u201d <\/em>
\n— Liner notes to Bob Dylan\u2019s John Wesley Harding<\/em> album<\/p>\n

\u201cThe shadow is what I am but will not admit I am.\u00a0 For the shadow of the psyche involves me in a deepening self-recognition which is more humiliating and emptying than the normal limits of endurance.\u00a0 In the end, acknowledging the shadow means acknowledging a bottomless void within me.\u00a0 The initial question of truth-force is: How deeply will I acknowledge my own emptiness?\u201d <\/em>
\n— James W. Douglass, Lightning East to West: Jesus, Gandhi, and the Nuclear Age<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

9 Feb 2018 – <\/em>We are haunted by a specter.\u00a0 Strange as it may sound, I was reminded of this when I saw a photograph of the quarterback\u00a0 of the Super Bowl winning Philadelphia Eagles, Nick Foles, looking and pointing up to the heavens.\u00a0 Or to be more precise, the roof of the aptly named U.S. Bank Stadium, a fitting venue for a national celebration of violence and the warfare state.\u00a0 But if we can assume Foles\u2019 gesture was meant to penetrate the roof and travel up to heaven, then you too may find it a bit odd, if touching.\u00a0 Most people, as the poet Czeslaw Milosz has said, are ashamed to ask themselves a question about the implication of such a gesture.\u00a0 \u201cThey have experienced the collapse of hierarchical space,\u201d he writes, \u201cand when they fold their hands and lift up their eyes, \u2018up\u2019 no longer exists.\u00a0 Let no one say that religion can manage without such primitive directions to orient people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Modern science has brought this about.\u00a0 And together with its models of reality, it has given us its technological child: nuclear weapons.\u00a0 So now we live haunted by the shadowy thought that human beings, having assumed God\u2019s mantle, can bring this world to an end in a flash. \u00a0As William Butler Yeats said in another context: \u201cAll changed; changed utterly.\u201d\u00a0 But while we live in these end-times, in a new symbolic universe, our sense of spiritual power to stop the nuclear madness has been sapped by our refusal to venture deep into the interior of this enigma and change our minds and spirits enough to change the world.\u00a0 We seem stuck riding our bikes when we need to stop the world we think we know and experiment with truth at the deepest level.\u00a0 We need a revolutionary spiritual transformation to give us faith and courage to counter the nihilists who wage endless wars for the American empire and threaten nuclear destruction at every turn.\u00a0 Where can we find this inconceivable spiritual energy?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I was thinking of this not long ago when something very strange happened to me. Six days previously I had written an article subtitled, \u201cIn Light and Shadows.\u201d\u00a0 On this particular morning I was sitting at the kitchen table contemplating that piece of writing and whether or not readers had grasped what I was trying to say by linking three very short stories that undulated like the flow of consciousness in waves of light and darkness.\u00a0 The phone rang, and as I answered I stood up and looked out the window at a flaming red bush, it being the height of fall\u2019s display of colors.\u00a0 I heard my wife sobbing on the other end.\u00a0 \u201cMy mother\u2019s dying,\u201d she cried.\u00a0 \u201cOh no,\u201d I replied, as I had an immediate flashback to my own mother dying five years earlier, and an inexplicably dark foreboding feeling gripped me. \u00a0For some reason I looked at my watch; it was 10:58 on Thursday morning.\u00a0 In that instant, as I raised my eyes back to the blazing bush, I saw a sliver of a crescent dark shadow creep into the inner corner of my right eye as I listened to my wife tell me through her tears how her mother, who shared the name Rita with my mother, had turned a corner toward her death.\u00a0 When she was done, I told her something strange had happened to my eye.<\/p>\n

I had suffered a detached retina.<\/p>\n

While I was fortunate to have excellent doctors for whom I\u2019m very grateful, they were not very interested in my story of when the detachment occurred.\u00a0 Their job, as they rightly saw it, was to repair my eye and the rest was speculation since they operate within a materialistic paradigm.\u00a0 But as I recuperated, lying face down with my eyes closed for a few weeks, I had a lot of time to speculate (Latin, specere<\/em>, to look at, view; pursuit of the truth by means of thinking).<\/p>\n

As I lay there hour after hour, day after day, eyes closed, I found that what began as thinking turned into contemplation.\u00a0 I had come to a dark place.\u00a0 I had been stopped in my tracks.\u00a0 The world I took for granted, my routine, my habitual way of seeing, my known world was stopped, and while shocked, I realized that I was given the gift of a revelatory experience if only I would accept it.\u00a0 With my eyes down and closed, I had entered the temple of contemplation where images rose to my inner eye, and if I paid enough attention, they would lead me to a place of insight.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

As a sociologist, I teach my students that sociology is the study of our social<\/em> habits of thought, speech, and action.\u00a0 These habits or routines, which often become crystalized into myths and institutions, imprison us in ways we are loath to admit.\u00a0 Our collective mental habits are so powerful because they lie far deeper than mere thought can reach, and therefore to break them is as difficult as learning how not to ride a bicycle after years of knowing how.\u00a0 Where does one begin?<\/p>\n

George Orwell once observed that \u201cwe have sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.\u201d\u00a0 Today restating the obvious doesn\u2019t seem to make much difference.\u00a0 At the level of the habits of group think and political and cultural propaganda, many of us have been trying to do that to little avail as the lies and deceptions of the U.S. power elites seem to win the day, day after day.\u00a0 It is blatantly obvious that these people lie endlessly in their pursuit of an empire built of sand saturated with the blood of innocent victims at home and abroad.\u00a0 Yet despite the obvious, and despite it being pointed out again and again, vast numbers of otherwise intelligent people continue to imbibe the myth that the \u201cother side\u201d (now the Democrats) will change the nihilistic trajectory of an evil capitalistic system leading to nuclear annihilation.\u00a0 The naivet\u00e9 is frightening as these people calmly ride their bicycles down the primrose path of death denial.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

As I lay contemplating the images that crossed my inner eye, I saw that we wear our social mental habits like shrouds that conceal the waking dead those habits have rendered us, sleepwalking prisoners marching toward oblivion.\u00a0 \u00a0But why?\u00a0 Sure, the political propagandists are skilled at their work, having learned from and greatly superseded their mentor, Edward Bernays, in the tricks of the trade.\u00a0 And the technology has made their job much easier, and the CIA and other intelligence services have their people throughout the mass media.\u00a0 Yet something was missing in this explanation, a deeper explanation.\u00a0 It was then I again realized that there are different paradigms or experiences of reality operating in the world.\u00a0 The prevailing one today sees only a world of things, a material world that includes people and animals, a billiard ball world where surfaces without centers careen around in physical cause-and-effect determined movements.\u00a0 In this world the story of how my retina became detached is perhaps somewhat weirdly interesting but \u201cjust coincidental.\u201d\u00a0 I suspected that my good doctors, if we met for a drink, would still hold firm to their habitual paradigms of physical cause and effect.\u00a0 They would have a very difficult time trying not to ride their bikes.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Another way of seeing is provided by Owen Barfield, English philosopher and poet, one of the most neglected and original thinkers of the twentieth century, who countered the superficiality of our materialistic collective thinking with these words:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The real world, the whole world, does not consist only of the things of which we are conscious; it consists also of the consciousness and subconsciousness that are correlative to them.\u00a0 They are the immaterial component of the world.\u00a0 But today the only immaterial element our mental habit acknowledges is our own little spark of self-consciousness.\u00a0 That is why we feel detached, isolated, cut off not only from the world as it really is, but also from those other little sparks of detached self-consciousness we acknowledge in our fellow human beings.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Imprisoned in our isolated minds and failing to grasp the interpenetration of mind and matter, thought and feeling, a sequence of forms and patterns changing into other forms, Barfield argues that we end up treating not only other people and ourselves as things, but all of nature, including animals, as inanimate objects to be used.\u00a0 The world becomes a place for necrophiliacs, not the home of living interconnected spirits.\u00a0 In such a world schizoid experience becomes commonplace.\u00a0 In such a crazy world, \u201cwhat the self of each of us feels isolated from<\/em>, cut off from<\/em>, by its encapsulation in the naked physical reality presented to it by contemporary culture, is precisely its own existential source.\u201d\u00a0 Such a physically encapsulated self is a false self without reality.\u00a0 It is no wonder that the use of drugs of every kind has risen exponentially, the earth despoiled, wars waged constantly, and nuclear weapons prepared to blow the planet to smithereens.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I had been thrown off my bicycle and then my doctors got me up again.\u00a0 Of course I was so thankful for their medical expertise, but I needed to try to not<\/em> ride the same old bike.\u00a0 How could I break the habit, and of what did the habit consist.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t want to say that I had gone not<\/em> too far in but just far enough to say I\u2019d been there.\u00a0 In where?\u00a0 During the days when I strictly, almost obsessively, followed my doctor\u2019s advice and, despite the great discomfort, lay immobile, face down, eyes closed, I found myself deep in a prison that seemed to open out into a place of fear and freedom simultaneously.\u00a0 Although I wasn\u2019t looking around and needed help with simple things, which my wife so kindly provided me, I experienced a weird sense of concentrated power from within the terrible vulnerability I felt.\u00a0 I am trying not to exaggerate, but this sense of power in vulnerability was very real.\u00a0 I had no interest in listening to the two books on tape I had; Tolstoy and James Baldwin seemed like intruders.\u00a0 They would distort the vision of what I was sensing.\u00a0 I think at its heart was a core of emptiness and powerlessness, which in the oddest of ways made me feel very powerful, as though all my teaching and writing and efforts to help others and make the world a better place and give advice and try to change people were useless and arrogant, but that their uselessness was their usefulness, and in accepting that I was embracing an essential truth.<\/p>\n

Earlier in my life I had numerous very profound experiences with synchronicity that had convinced me that our consensual reality conceals a level of truth rarely felt because of the power of habit.\u00a0 But these experiences had been all positive and had left me feeling amazed but powerful.\u00a0 One even involved the power of a look I gave another. The power of my eyes. \u00a0This latest one was different since it frightened me and made me vulnerable.\u00a0 Telling you all this makes me feel doubly vulnerable, but now I don\u2019t care.\u00a0 I now know why I have long wanted to make a word my own but never could.\u00a0 The word is insouciant.\u00a0 Somehow it has become me more since this latest experience.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

We are ruled by people who think they have everything under their control, including the nuclear weapons that are the ultimate expression of the hubris emanating from Einstein\u2019s equation of E = mc2<\/sup>, the unimaginable amount of energy contained in a particle of matter.\u00a0 Those who brandish nuclear weapons operate within a consensual reality that is a form of madness, and these madmen will incinerate us all unless they are opposed by a force equal to that they brandish.\u00a0 How can we stop them?<\/p>\n

In his extraordinary book, Lightning East to West, Jesus, Gandhi, and the Nuclear Age<\/em>, James. W. Douglass, suggests that there is such a force and a way to stop this holocaust.\u00a0 It lies within you and me.\u00a0 He says:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb?\u00a0 Einstein discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single particle of matter into enormous physical energy.\u00a0 Might there not also be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world?\u00a0 I believe that there is , that there must be, a spiritual reality corresponding to E = mc2<\/sup> because, from the standpoint of creative harmony, the universe is incomplete without it, and because, from the standpoint of moral freedom, humankind is sentenced to extinction without it.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

***<\/p>\n

I believe it too.\u00a0 It arises in the hearts and minds of those totally committed to the truth no matter where it leads, and the passion to suffer it, even when it makes them look foolish.\u00a0 \u201cA man needs a little madness, or else\u2026.he never dares cut the rope and be free,\u201d Zorba tells the boss in Nikos Kazantzakis\u2019s Zorba the Greek<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s try learning not to ride our bicycles so we can save ourselves and the world.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>.\u00a0 He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. <\/em>A former college basketball player, he teaches the sociology of sports, and writes on a wide range of topics.\u00a0 His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cEinstein discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single particle of matter into enormous physical energy. Might there not also be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world? I believe that there is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}