Healing America's Narratives

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Healing America’s Narratives: And That’s Not All

This essay is adapted from Chapter Eight of Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow — Now available.¹

Both beyond and within the narratives explored in the first five essays in this series — selected excerpts from the histories of women, Native Americans, African Americans, the Vietnam War, and the post-9/11 “war on terror,” other manifestations of our collective American Shadow beckon. Each, as with those first five, deserves more consideration than it gets here.

Again, we are exploring denial and projection — those tendencies to deny both historical and current American manifestations of ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, bullying, excess, and untrustworthiness and to project them onto others. Until we recognize, own, and begin the work of integrating these denials and projections, we will continue to unconsciously embrace the underlying elements of our national Shadow and repeat the horrors of the past, if not exactly, then in some new manifestations.

The narratives touched on in this piece are interdependent, in varying degrees, with each other and with the longer narratives in the previous five essays. This interdependence plays out in how the historical subjugation of women impacts the foundational infrastructures and cultures of government, business, education, and other disciplines. We can see it in that the trillions of profit-producing dollars spent on making war are not available to be spent on healthcare (or anything else), even as this war-making renders quality healthcare essential in order to address the physical and psychological injuries that war produces. We can see it in how our ambivalence about and feeling separate from the planet impacts our sense of connection and how we relate to each other — across beliefs about religion, economics, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation and identity.

Ambivalence About the Planet

Every other narrative may be moot if we don’t address this one. We express our ambivalence through our stances on a variety of not necessarily synonymous but inevitably interrelated issues that include climate change, global warming, pollution, resource depletion, over-development, species extinction, and disease (in the broadest meaning of the word). While these are global concerns, the U. S. contributes to them, suffers because of them, and inconsistently works to resolve them. As ‘once-in-a-century’ storms, fires, and floods arrive every few years if not yearly, and as glaciers melt and sea levels rise, the only ignorance we can claim is vincible and willful — and it is underwritten by greed, excess, arrogance, and untrustworthiness. Our ambivalence about the planet arises from our remarkable misperception of being apart from it rather than an intimate living part of it.

Lack of Health and Caring

At least three distinct and related issues intersect here: the physical and mental health of each individual American; the general health of our American culture and society; and the details of if, how, and to whom healthcare is delivered in the United States. If the quote attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” is accurate, how might we assess the health of American society, how well-adjusted are we to it, and what are we to learn from and do about our assessment and adjustment?²

The statistics are not reassuring. What might it mean to be well-adjusted in a society in which 51.5 million adults (20.6% of our adult population) suffer from “any mental illness,” and 13.1 million (5.2% of adults) suffer from “serious mental illness”?³ Or, what if “half of millennials and 75% of Gen Zers have left their job for mental health reasons”?⁴ More generally, workplace stress and “burnout” are estimated to cost the U. S. economy over $500 billion annually, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that changes in the workplace culture and environment, and not just helping employees practice better “self-care” are needed.⁵ These statistics relate only to adults and the workplace. Anxiety, depression, and “behavior disorders” impact our children and adolescents as well.⁶

Prioritizing Money, Power, Things, and Beliefs Over People (and Other Living Beings)

The desire for and the importance placed on money, power, and things are connected to, if not the driving force behind, much of what manifests as American Shadow. Our theft of both land and life from Native Americans emerged from our placing a higher value on the profitable use of stolen land than we placed on people and culture. Slavery dehumanized those enslaved and provided free labor so landowners could make more money with limited effort. The attacks on Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq made billions of dollars for weapons and infrastructure manufacturers and cost millions of Vietnamese, Iraqi, Afghan, and American lives. Limiting women’s roles to child-rearing, housekeeping, and selected professions devalued their full humanity.

Such prioritizing has led to an unequal distribution of wealth. Many Americans voice a non-rational fear of the words socialist and socialism whenever prospects are raised for using government funds (taxpayer dollars) to help our less fortunate fellow citizens. They don’t want the government deciding who wins and who loses. They don’t want those “other people” to get what they didn’t earn. They seem less vocal when the government provides trillions to the already wealthy and fortunate in moments of difficulty. Recipients of government handouts and bailouts, often called corporate welfare, include: General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, Harley Davidson, Apple, Goldman Sachs, the entire airline industry, Citigroup, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Lockheed, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, PNC, American Express, Capital One, and many more needy corporations who could not make it without taxpayer assistance.⁷ The argument is that some of these companies and industries are too big to fail — helping them helps the people who work for them and the national economy. That’s both true-ish and partial. The other side of the argument seems to be that some people are too small to help. The unhealthy masculine manifestations of independence and greed trump the healthy feminine traits of compassion and care.

Others Being Othered

Ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, and violence inform every instance of harmful discrimination, including but not limited to that directed at Asian, Latinx, Middle Eastern, LGBTQ+, and other groups — and the many discrete communities within each of them.⁸

Increasing Confusion About Truth and Falsehood in the Real and Virtual Worlds

Instantly available streaming news, entertainment, information, and “content creation,” along with deliberate mis- and dis-information make truth-and-knowledge-seeking a full-time job. Jonathan Rauch gets to the heart of the matter in The Constitution of Knowledge. Where pre-social-media-age propagandists spread false information to discredit opponents or their views, current social-media-age propagandists and trolls intentionally “flood the zone with shit” in order to “degrade the information environment around the reality-based community.” They use a “cacophony of wild claims” in order to foster an “inability to know where to turn for truth,” and they “exhaust your critical thinking,” “not to persuade but to confuse: to induce uncertainty, disorientation and attendant cynicism.”⁹

Our American Culture of Violence

From 2014 through 2019, on average, an American killed another American with a gun 40 times every day, another 63 Americans killed themselves with a gun every day, and another 62 Americans killed themselves by some other means. That’s 103 gunshot deaths and 125 suicide deaths, on average, per day¹⁰ — all before the additional stressors of COVID-19. During the pandemic, 2020 saw the largest one-year increase on record in homicides (all causes), with 4,901 more than in 2019,¹¹ and the highest number of gun violence homicides, 19,436, in the last twenty years, complemented by an additional 24,156 suicides by gun.¹²

I specifically addressed our American culture of violence in 2018 with Killing America. Violence is at once a foundational element of our national Shadow and a primary manifestation of it. We are immersed in it. It is and has been our status quo. Civilized nations that kill less easily and less frequently than we do look at us with sadness and incredulity. Our national denials and projections recognize violence when it is perpetrated against us, but not the violence we perpetrate against others and ourselves. Much of our post-9/11 rhetoric bears this out. This is from Representative Eric Cantor on September 14, 2001:

“I rise today in support of this resolution [to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States]. Civilized society has long sought to end the use of violence, but the perpetrators of terrorism and states that harbor them are the enemies of civilized society. They only understand the use of force, and the time has come to speak to them on their terms.”¹³

How, then, might we reconcile this language of civilized society with our killing of civilians at Wounded Knee, in Tulsa, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, in Littleton, Atlanta, Orlando, Charleston, Newtown, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Red Lake, Annapolis, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Buffalo and Uvalde — to name just a few? What will it take for us to acknowledge and own this part of our American nightmare? How, exactly, do we qualify as civilized amid these increasingly normalized violent acts?

And that’s not all, indeed.

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¹The full chapter from which this essay is adapted, along with relevant endnotes, is available here: https://healingamericasnarratives.files.wordpress.com/2022/09/r.-marra-healing-americas-narratives-promo-excerpts.pdf. Sources for all statistics cited above can be found in the endnotes.

²Jiddu Krishnamurti, https://jkrishnamurti.org/. The quote is ubiquitous and attributed to Krishnamurti. I was unable to find any verifiable written or spoken source.

³Numbers are for 2019. “Any mental illness” (AMI), can vary from no, to mild, to moderate, to severe impairment. “Serious mental illness” (SMI) results in “serious functional impairment” that interferes with or limits one or more major life activities.” https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness Accessed September 28, 2021.

⁴Todd Wasserman, “Half of millennials and 75% of Gen Zers have left their job for mental health reasons,” CNBC, October 11–15, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/11/mental-health-issues-cause-record-numbers-of-gen-x-z-to-leave-jobs.html Accessed September 28, 2021.

⁵Jennifer Moss, “Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People,” Harvard Business Review, December 19, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/12/burnout-is-about-your-workplace-not-your-people Accessed December 20, 2019.

⁶Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Statistics on Children’s Mental Health,”https://www.cdc.gov/childrensmentalhealth/data.html Accessed September 29, 2021.

⁷“Bailout Tracker,” ProPublica, https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list; many corporate recipients do not repay the loans in full; for a brief, humorous synopsis of this not-really-funny issue, see Jon Stewart’s October 2021 clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXZoO-FjJyQ

⁸Labels such as “Asian,” “Latinx,” “Middle Eastern” and “LGBTQ+” fall short of discriminating among the unique cultures and individuals they attempt to capture (as “American” itself is a woefully inadequate, but sometimes useful label). Some of these labels may already be outdated by the time you read this. I appreciate your generous, healthy it’s-about-all-that-is understanding.

⁹Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge (2021), citing Trump strategist Steve Bannon: “flood the zone…,” 163; Rauch: “degrade the information environment,” 164; citing The Economist, April 19, 2018: “cacophony of wild claims,” 165; Rauch: “an inability to know where…,” 166; citing Russian dissident Gary Kasparov: “exhaust your critical thinking,” 166; Rauch: “not to persuade but to confuse…,” 165.

¹⁰2014–2019: 14,515 gun deaths/year avg. (not suicide) = 40/day avg; 23,094 suicides by gun = 63/day; 37,609 total annual gun deaths = 103/day: https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/ Accessed September 28, 2021. 2014–2019: 45,835 suicides/year avg. = 126*/day: https://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/leadcause.html Accessed September 28, 2021. Search criteria was: 2014–2019 / all causes, races, genders and ages. *Due to rounding, the suicides per day on the two sites differ by 1. I used the lower, 125, in the text.

¹¹Neil MacFarquhar, “Murders Spiked in 2020 in Cities Across the United States,” New York Times, September 27, 2021,https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/us/fbi-murders-2020-cities.html Accessed September 27, 2021.

¹²Reis Thebault and Danielle Rindler, “Shootings never stopped during the pandemic: 2020 was the deadliest gun violence year in decades,” Washington Post, March 23, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/23/2020-shootings/ Accessed September 28, 2021. Gun violence ties directly to the unhealthy masculine: Mike McIntire, Glenn Thrush and Eric Lipton, “Gun Sellers’ Message to Americans: Man Up,” New York Times, June 18, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/us/firearm-gun-sales.html Accessed June 18, 2022.

¹³Representative Eric Cantor (VA-R) on September 14, 2001. From Netflix, Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror, Episode 2, “A Place of Danger.” Not to pick on Mr. Cantor — many similar statements were made by members of both parties.

²Jiddu Krishnamurti, https://jkrishnamurti.org/. The quote is ubiquitous and attributed to Krishnamurti. I was unable to find any verifiable written or spoken source.

⁶Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Statistics on Children’s Mental Health,”https://www.cdc.gov/childrensmentalhealth/data.html Accessed September 29, 2021.

Healing America’s Narratives: Background and Foreground, Context and Content

[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Chapter Eleven (So, Now What?”) of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available.]

In the context of the history¹ of the United States, of the nation’s collective national Shadow and state of affairs in the third decade of the twenty-first century, and our reflections on who we are, the stories we tell and embrace, who and what we impact or impacts us, what we might be missing, who our people are, our inevitable death, and how we’re in relationship with all of this, what might we do individually or collectively in order to engage this healing and Shadow integration? Good question. Thanks for asking.

Our exploration of this question in forthcoming essays will necessarily revisit some concepts and practices that we’ve already acknowledged (cultural givens, skillful means, healthy development, intentional practice, silence, openness, truth, and love) as well as some that we have not explicitly addressed, such as resistance, trauma, self-discipline, self-compassion, empathy, and community.

In preparation for what’s to come, as you read this now, consider the previous paragraph and get a sense of — perhaps write down — one or two (or more) of the concepts and practices listed that you feel you would like to work or play with and develop further, and one or two that you feel you are in a good place with — that don’t need your immediate attention. Feel free to add your own if there’s something in your awareness that’s not listed above. And you can always change your mind and revise your list.

Another way to do this, which I find more challenging, is to prioritize the list: #1 would be what you feel you’d most like to work or play with and the final item you list would be what you feel is in pretty good shape right now. Again, none of this is etched in stone; just playing with the list might bring an insight. Stay open and curious.

Be kind to yourself.

_____

¹The brief histories explored in the book include women, Native Americans, African Americans, the Vietnam War, and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — all in the context of the book’s title and subtitle.

Healing America’s Narratives: How Am I in Relationship With Everything in My Life?

[Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available.]

In an earlier essay, we considered six questions and statements that are important for the healing process. Here they are again, with the first five linked to a brief overview:

Who am I, really?
Everything is a story.
What’s my impact & what impacts me?
What am I not seeing?
Who are my people?
I am going to die.
How am I in relationship with each of the above questions and statements — and the rest of my life?

We’re focusing on that final question here. Another way to ask the question is “What is the nature of my relationship with…” who I think I am or whether or not everything is a story or what I might not be seeing. Underlying the importance of relationship is the context of healing, which, as we discussed earlier, begins with coming to terms with things as they are. More to the point, when something happens — whether it is expected or unexpected, or considered “good” or “bad” — how we relate to it is as important as — perhaps more important than — the thing that has happened. What is my relationship with the positive or negative test result, the new job or job loss, the argument with my friend, the election result, the stubbed toe, the spilt milk?

This is nothing new. Teachings on our relationships with our minds, events, and stories have been around for millennia:

“It is true that the mind is restless and difficult to control, but it can be conquered… through regular practice and detachment” (6.35) — The Bhagavad Gita, c. 500–200 BCE.

“What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.” — Epictetus, The Enchiridion¸ c. 0–200 CE.

“No one finds it easy to accept the lot Fortune has sent him….So nothing is miserable except when you think it so, and vice versa, all luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity.” (II.iv) — Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, c. 522–524 CE.

“Be grateful for whoever comes, / because each has been sent / as a guide from beyond.” — Rumi, from “The Guest House,” c. 1240–1260, CE, trans. Coleman Barks.

“[E]verything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” — Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.

“The question we should be asking is not ‘Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?’…. A better question would be ‘Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?’” — Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

“I want to … encourage you to think about the creative responsibility involved in the fact that there are different ways to tell your stories. It’s not that one is true and another is not true. It’s a matter of emphasis and context….The choice you make affects what you can do next.…what I want to emphasize are the advantages of choosing a particular interpretation at a particular point in time, and the even greater advantage of using multiple interpretations.” — Mary Catherine Bateson, “Composing a Life.”

“I don’t mean to say that my diagnosis makes me special. Life, as I’ve said before, is a terminal condition. Those of us with terminal illnesses simply have been blessed — and I mean blessed — with having the facts of our own mortality held constantly before us.” — Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life

“Even more astonishing was the realization that, as sick as I was at that moment and as preoccupied as I was about the task awaiting me in less than ten minutes, there was still some kindness, serenity, and compassion inside me to send to others on the out-breath….[Tonglen] took me out of my small world.” — Toni Bernhard, How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers

“Expressive writing is a self-reflective tool with tremendous power. By exploring emotional upheavals in our lives, we are forced to look inward and examine who we are. This occasional self-examination can serve as a life-course correction.”
— James W. Pennebaker and John F. Evans, Expressive Writing: Words that Heal

Indeed, our relationships with what we perceive as triumphs, disasters, successes, and failures determine and are determined by the stories we choose to tell about our lives. What stories are you telling such that your relationships are as they are? How might your relationships (and you) shift if you revised your stories?
_____

Bateson, Mary Catherine. “Composing a Life.” Sacred Stories: A
Celebration of the Power of Stories to Transform and Heal. Eds.
Charles & Anne Simpkinson. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco,
1993. (42- 48).

Bernhard, Toni. How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the
Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers. Somerville, MA: Wisdom, 2010. (99).

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. V.E. Watts. New York: Penguin, 1969. (63).

Easwaran, Eknath, trans. The Bhagavad Gita. Tomales CA: Nilgiri, 1985. (108).

Epictetus, The Enchiridion. https://gist.github.com/romainl/d67523aae35c34d36ad5

Frankl, Victor E. Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. 4th ed. Boston: Beacon, 1992/1946. (75).

Kushner, Harold S. When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Avon, 1981. (136).

Pennebaker, James W. and John F. Edwards. Expressive Writing: Words That Heal. Enumclaw, WA: Idyll Arbor, 2014. (21).

Rumi, Jelaluddin, “The Guest House.” The Essential Rumi. Trans., Coleman Barks, with John Moyne. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995. (109).

Simmons, Philip. Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life.
New York: Bantam, 2002. (14).

Healing America’s Narratives: I Am Going To Die

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Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available.

We’re returning to Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives after our departures in the previous two posts — the inevitability of the current state of the country and the apparent belief, shared by both Democratic and Republican leadership, that they need never-ending millions of advertising dollars in order to win elections and defeat each other (for the good of the country).

“I am going to die” is the fifth of six statements and questions that frame Chapter Eleven, which explores some approaches to manifesting the book’s title — Healing America’s Narratives. The statement is ‘simply’ an acknowledgment of what is — what’s true — that given enough time, we all die. No one knows how, when, or where, but with each breath we take, we get closer to our final breath.

Our responses to the some of the earlier questions and statements from Chapter Eleven inform how we might respond to this acknowledgment of our mortality. If who we think we are is simply an assembly of flesh, bone, instinct, thought, and mood — nothing but separate animated objects with a few shared traits and some noticeable differences — then the horrors of the histories of women, Native Americans, African Americans, the Vietnam War, the post-9/11 war on terror, and other significant histories, while still horrific, make sense in an ignorant, arrogant, fearful, bigoted, violent kind of way.

If, however, we all share an origin, a common ancestry — whether through a religious or a scientific story — and if we each have a unique ecological niche — our ultimate place in the world, our Soul, expressed through mythopoetic identity as a one-time-only manifestation of Spirit, All That Is, God, Source, Ground of Being — then it becomes a tad more difficult — it makes no sense at all — to proclaim the supremacy of any race, to declare you’re either with us or you’re with the enemy, or to in any way dehumanize others. The stories we choose about who we are, really, make a difference.

Each of us has our own dying and death stories. If we’re lucky we get to bury our parents and older siblings, our grandparents, aunts and uncles, and others from the generations that precede us. Some of these deaths, while sad, are expected and feel natural; sometimes they are unexpected and feel tragic. What is the story each of us tells, what is the story that you choose to tell, about the inevitability of death? As Mary Catherine Bateson told us, “The choice you make affects what you can do next.”¹

The late surgeon and author, Sherwin Nuland, wrote that death results “all too frequently [from] a series of destructive events that involve…the disintegration of the dying person’s humanity,” and that he had not “seen much dignity in the process by which we die.” Nuland, however, complemented his surgeon’s intimacy with the sterility, knowledge, precision, life, and death of the operating room with his philosopher’s view and his poet’s heart. “The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it,” he told us.²

If you want a dignified death, your best bet is to live a dignified life. If you want a dignified country, your best bet is live, and help others live, a dignified life by coming to terms with things as they are, being the change you want to see in the world, and at the very least, doing more good than harm through your words and actions.

_____

Mary Catherine Bateson, “Composing a Life,” Sacred Stories: A Celebration of the Power of Stories to Transform and Heal. Eds. Charles & Anne Simpkinson, (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 42–43.
Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die, (Knopf, 1993), “all too frequently…,” xvii; “The greatest dignity…,” 242.

Healing America’s Narratives: Money, Elections, Democrats, Republicans, & Money

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Part of a series, this essay explores aspects of the idiocy that characterize America’s two-party approach to political campaigns. Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available.

Note: I am an unaffiliated voter — I am a member of neither the Republican nor the Democratic party. I used to be a member of one of them, and am still more generally aligned on most issues with that party. This essay captures the essence of why I dropped my membership with one party and why I would never become a member of the other party.

From October 20, 2022 through the publication of this essay, I received over 500 emails asking me for money in support of candidates for office in states in which I do not live. More than 300 of those emails came after election day, November 8, and specifically asked for money regarding the Georgia Senate runoff. I also received a significant number of snail mail documents — all of which were focused on local elections for the town, state, and national districts in which I actually live.

Between October 21 and November 5, I made four modest (two-figure) contributions to the campaigns of candidates whose positions on most issues I generally agree with. Despite the 300-plus emails that arrived in my inbox after election day, and despite my strong support for one of the two Georgia Senate candidates, I did not contribute to the runoff campaign.

Here’s why, and this is equally applicable to the Democratic and Republican parties and their leadership: if you really believe that the only way you can win and govern is by telling me multiple times a day you need another $250,000 by tonight’s (and tomorrow’s and the next day’s…) deadline — amounts and deadlines that you conjured within a system that you created— and that you’re counting on my $35 or $45 or $75 (which you’re willing to quadruple!!!) in order to outspend the other party’s extensive fundraising; and if you’re going to continue to ask me for money multiple times a day WHETHER OR NOT I MAKE A CONTRIBUTION this time; and if your requests are characterized by BOLD AND CAPS and yellow highlights (which I can’t reproduce here), then you must think I’m an idiot (I’m not, for the most part). Those highlighting tactics are consistent with what used to be used on late-night television commercials for kitchen gadgets, pain-relief gadgets, and OTHER important and REALLY good DEALS! They may still be used, but I don’t stay up late anymore.

Plus, if you can actually quadruple all those modest contributions, why do you need them at all? Just use the cash you already have on hand for quadrupling. The problem is that you (Republican and Democratic leadership) make the case that what’s needed to save the country (from each other) is more money from me and other citizens. You use this money for advertising. You advertise using hyperbole, insult, and distorted photos of your opponents (i.e. each other).

What the hell is wrong with you?

Yes, I understand that you wouldn’t be behaving as you do if you didn’t have research-based evidence that it works on American voters who suffer from civic (and other types of) ignorance.

Here’s one specific example — my views on a letter I received from a candidate in a race to represent me in Congress. The lowlight of this particular letter was the candidate’s (or his handlers’) attempts to associate his opponent with the “defund the police” folks. His opponent’s spouse is a veteran police detective. That’s a rather tame example, but it makes the point.

So again, I ask, what the hell is wrong with you?

Healing America’s Narratives: The Inevitability of the Current Mood of the United States

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Part of a series, this essay explores the inevitability that surfaced amid the research for and writing of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.

If we begin with Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 and work our way forward through each day since then, especially those days not included in some of the more (in)famous years like 1619, 1776, 1787, 1830, 1865, 1868, 1920, 1945, 1964, 2001, 2003 (et cetera)¹ and into our current state of affairs in the third decade of the twenty-first century, where we are as a country is inevitable. Said differently, our ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness are not surprising.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan wrote this about the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam:

“What Calley and others who participated in the massacre did that was different was to kill hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese in two hamlets in a single morning and to kill point-blank with rifles, pistols, and machine guns. Had they killed just as many over a larger area in a longer period of time and killed impersonally with bombs, shells, rockets, white phosphorous, and napalm, they would have been following the normal pattern of American military conduct. The soldier and the junior officer observed the lack of regard his superiors had for the Vietnamese. The value of Vietnamese life was systematically cheapened in his mind…. The military leaders of the United States, and the civilian leaders who permitted the generals to wage war as they did, had made the massacre inevitable.”²

Sheehan’s words indict the worst of leadership that arise through unhealthy masculine energy. Be it military or civilian, local, state, or national, such leadership renders inevitable, or at least highly likely, horrors such as My Lai in 1968; the mutilation and slaughter of Cheyenne men, women, and children at Sand Creek in 1864; the massacre of Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in 1890; the more than 6,000 lynchings of blacks between 1865 and 1950; the incineration of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood district in 1921; the degradations of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in the post-9/11 war on terror; and the incessant gun violence in the U.S. Among other examples.

In response to a school shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan, two members of the U.S. House of Representatives³ created Christmas photo cards, posing their families holding assault rifles in front of Christmas trees in 2021 in support of the weapons commonly used in U.S. Congress-enabled mass shootings. Evidently, these folks were channeling the intersection of what Jesus meant when he said “Love one another,”⁴ and what the framers had in mind when they penned the Second Amendment.

That’s a small sample of evidence regarding the inevitability of our current culture of violence. What about greed and excess, you ask? A country built on slave and peasant labor, sweatshops, migrant workers, and now cheap international labor renders inevitable a 2022 second quarter report that the wealthiest 1% of Americans own 31.1% of the nation’s wealth; the top 10% own 68%; and the bottom 50% own 3.2% (the 40% of Americans who fall between the bottom 50% and the top 10% own 28.9%). Said differently, the top 10% of Americans own more than twice (68%) of what the bottom 90% own (32%). This is like saying that the folks in Texas and Montana (together about 10% of the nation’s population) own more than twice as much wealth as the rest of the country. In a nation where owning and having things is important, this is a big deal.

Here’s one more juxtaposition: the defense industry — those companies that build and maintain the weapons and infrastructure of war and everyday violence, and the insurance-pharmaceutical-medical-government-finance-lobbying industry (euphemistically referred to as healthcare in the U.S.) are both for-profit endeavors. Need more deterrence, want to go to war, or choose to keep assault weapons available to our huddled masses? Cha-ching. Need to attend to the physical and psychological effects of war, everyday violence, and active shooter drills for school children? Cha-ching. Need to make sure none of this changes? Have more lobbyists in D.C. (more than 700) than there are members of Congress (currently 535 when all seats are filled).

The above are selected, limited examples, painted with broad brush strokes. For more specific information, see Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.

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Briefly: 1619 (initial delivery of enslaved Africans to what is now Virginia by the British); 1776 (U.S. Declaration of Independence); 1787 (U.S. Constitution); 1830 (Congress passes “Indian Removal” Act); 1865 (Civil War ends; 13th Amendment passed); 1868 (14th Amendment passed; Second Fort Laramie Treaty); 1920 (19th Amendment passed); 1945 (U.S. drops two atomic bombs on Japan; World War II ends); 1964 (Civil Rights Act passed); 2001 (September 11 terrorist attacks on U.S.); 2003 (U.S. preemptively attacks Iraq).
Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, (New York: Random House, 1988), 689–90.
Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky): https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/christmas-card-guns-lauren-boebert-thomas-massie-start-new-culture-ncna1285709
For younger readers: Christmas began as a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ and had nothing to do with retail sales, garishly decorated real and fake trees, and assault weapons.

Healing America’s Narratives: Who Are My People?

Photo © by Brittani Burns on Unsplash

Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.

Who Are My People?

In the perfectly integrated, comprehensive, inclusive, and balanced universe in which most of us do not (think we) live, we can hear the mystical cheerleaders’ rhythmic, enthusiastic, and obvious response echoing around the arena: EV-ree-one! Where most of us do think we live, it can be helpful to have a sense of who our people are — not in the unhealthy us-against-the-others sense that governs most finite games, but in the sense of realistically assessing how and with whom I might do the most good in the world as it is, with what I have to offer, without harming others, to the benefit of the whole shebang. Taking care of my, or our, little niche is often the best way to serve the greater good.

Often, the answer to this question lies not in some definitive choice we make but in our authentic attention to the intersections of who we think we are, the stories we choose, the impacts we both have and receive, and what we are able to uncover and own that we previously had not seen. While “my people” may be superficially identified, or at least narrowed down, through blood, geography, and chronology, they are inevitably found and known through experience, belief, and worldview. They include those I learn from and learn with and those who learn from me — whether the learning emerges in the classroom, on the street, at the checkout counter, in the healthcare office, at work, or at the kitchen table. Consider the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates, as his writing led him into “contact with more human beings”:

“I had editors — more teachers — and these were the first white people I’d ever really known on any personal level. They defied my presumptions — they were afraid neither for me nor of me. Instead they saw in my unruly curiosity and softness something that was to be treasured and harnessed.”¹

The friends we choose and who choose us in childhood and adolescence, the groups we align with when we choose a craft, profession, or area of study (or one chooses us), and the individuals in our chosen craft, profession, or discipline towards whom we gravitate may provide insight and evidence about, but don’t necessarily define, “our people.” Many folks will come, stay for a while and go; others will come and stay. We begin to recognize some who stay, and even some who go, as our people.

As tempting as it can be to espouse an all-of-us perspective and claim everyone as our people (as those mystical cheerleaders did above), if we’re operating primarily from a Body-Mind identity, it is difficult to embody and live up to that claim — despite its value and attractiveness. Better to live in a healthy embodiment of who our people truly are right now, than to delude ourselves with an espoused, but not yet embodied and lived, self-aggrandizing claim.

Still, part of our intentional practice might be to “act as if” all humans are our people and to see how such practice impacts our sense of self, our beliefs about others, and our behavior.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, (One World-
Random House, 2015), 62.

Healing America’s Narratives: What Am I Not Seeing?

Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.

In our previous three inquiries into subheaders from Chapter Eleven, “So, Now What?” we explored identity, story, and impact. Here we’ll consider what any one of us — or millions of us — might be missing with regard to our own lives and/or our country. “Shadow,” as it’s referred to throughout the book, is one reason, among others, an individual or a collective might not be seeing something.

There are various ways to work with Shadow.¹ One hint that an element of Shadow may be clamoring for our attention is if we notice a disproportionate emotional response to someone or something — especially if that response recurs. So, a recurrent, disproportionate, emotional response to someone or something we experience as being angry or lacking in compassion may be inviting us to explore our own anger or lack of compassion. Likewise, if we have such a response to someone or something we experience as exceptionally creative, generous, or successful, we may want to explore our own as-yet disowned creativity, generosity, or success.

Whether what we’re not seeing is considered positive or negative, recognizing, owning, and integrating it into our sense of self leads to a more integrated, “wholer,” fully human being.

Questions such as these may begin to uncover what might be repressed, denied, and projected:

1. What is it about this situation, person, event, issue, idea, emotion, or dream, such that I respond as I do?

2. What is it about me, such that I respond to this situation, person, event, issue, idea, emotion, or dream as I do?

3. To what extent do my reactions or responses feel disproportionate?

4. What might I be projecting onto this situation, person, event, issue, idea, emotion, or dream that I need to explore in myself?

The first question engages through an external locus of control. It helps begin to identify the source of the disproportionate response by looking toward something out there. Getting clearer about what that something is moves us closer to identifying Shadow — what we don’t yet see or know about ourselves.

The second question engages through an internal locus of control and is more challenging. It implicates us. What is it about me such that I respond as I do? Ooh, is my discomfort with his ease in expressing anger related to my unowned anger? Is my admiration for her success in the art world the result of my own as-yet-unrealized creative potential? What is it, exactly, that brings up my disproportionate response? Now, I’m curious. Repressing and projecting parts of ourselves requires energy. Owning and integrating what we repress and project frees up our energy for other aspects of life.

The third question invites us to authentically consider the extent to which our response is disproportionate to the reality of the situation, person, or thing. Honest, challenging, trusted friends may be helpful here.

The fourth question explores the quality, emotion, trait, or characteristic that may be repressed, denied, and projected. Sometimes we recognize it immediately, and perhaps experience a mix of relief, guilt, or simply, oh, THAT! Sometimes it may be slower to emerge — harder to see and even harder to own and integrate. Oh. That. Me? Lacking compassion? Nah. No way. For that one particular colleague/friend/sibling…? Um, perhaps, yes.

Working with Shadow can be discomfiting. Be kind to yourself.

Among many, see Bill Plotkin’s Wild Mind (207–34) and Soulcraft (267–80); and Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, eds. Meeting the Shadow (65 essays from a variety of authors).

Healing America’s Narratives: What’s My Impact & What Impacts Me?

Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.

What’s My Impact & What Impacts Me?

What’s my impact — what’s the nature of the wake I’m leaving as I swim, paddle, sail, or otherwise make my way along the river or across the ocean of life? How does my wake impact other vessels and the water itself, and to what extent am I aware of this impact?

What impacts me — what is the nature of the impact on me of other vessels, the wakes they leave, and the river or ocean itself? Less metaphorically, what beliefs, behaviors, habits, cultures, relationships, environments, systems, and people affect me; to what extent, large or small, do they affect me; and what, if anything, am I doing or can I do about it?

With such questions, it helps to explore the broadest, deepest view available of my current beliefs, behaviors, relationships, and environments. Shining the light of awareness on my current awareness — witnessing myself as I am — is a significant practice. What interiors and exteriors impact who and how I am? Whether, when, where, and how I choose to shine this light of awareness emerges from the story I hold (or that holds me) about who I think I am, and the worldview — focused on me, us, all of us, or all that is — that holds my story.

The world of experience continues to offer additional givens throughout our lives. The concrete manifestation of our earliest and ongoing givens are the literal infrastructures and systems — the natural and human-made environments — in which we live our lives, from the tablet, computer, or phone you’re using right now, to the physical space you’re in, to the electricity or to the sun itself that lights that space. Cultural givens and environments co-arise, co-relate, and impact each other and each of us. Beliefs and values lead to things and systems, which in turn revise and create beliefs and values — which in turn lead to new things and systems.

Intentional fire, writing, the wheel, horticulture, agriculture, gunpowder, the printing press, steam power, trains, electricity, internal combustion, the automobile, paved roads, airplanes, the assembly line, the radio, television, space travel, atomic power, computers, robotics, the World Wide Web, smart phones, social media and many other technologies shaped and shape our environment, and, in turn, they shape us. Way back in the previous century, Neal Postman proposed six questions that are worth exploring each time a new technology is being developed or emerges:

1. What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?

2. Whose problem is it?

3. Suppose we solve the problem and solve it decisively, what new problems might be created because we solved the old problem?

4. Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?

5. What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies and what is being gained and lost by such changes?

6. What sort of people and institutions acquire special economical and political power because of technological change?¹

The importance of these types of questions occurs at the intersections of everything is a story, technological impact, and who we think we are. Here are some variations on a theme:

1. How does who you think you are impact what stories you are telling yourself about the impact of the technologies you choose to use or must engage with every day?

2. How do the stories you tell yourself impact who you think you are and the technologies you choose to use or must engage with every day?

3. How do the technologies you choose to use or must engage with every day impact the stories you tell yourself about who you think you are?

The above is not an attempt at cleverness. Consider spending some time with these questions in the context of what you believe is true, first in your own life, and then in the history and current affairs of the United States. Identity, story, and impact matter.

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1. Neal Postman, “Staying Sane in a Technological Society: Six Questions in Search of an Answer,” Lapis, (New York Open Center, Issue 7, 1998), 53–57.

Healing America’s Narratives: Everything Is a Story

Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.

Everything Is a Story

Note your immediate response to this premise. Is it, ‘What do you mean — please explain?’ or, ‘Bullshit…?’ or ‘Du-uh, tell me something I don’t already know?’ Perhaps it’s ‘Thank you for confirming what I was beginning to see?’ Is it something else entirely? Whatever it is fine — it’s your story about the suggestion that everything is a story. Consider that if your response was in the general area of Bullshit.

The cultural givens handed down by our parents and earliest communities and experiences are stories. As (or if) we grow up, wake up, clean up, and show up, some stories hold up and some don’t. Sometimes the givens that don’t hold up were false when we received them and sometimes they were true — as far as anyone knew at the time — but the larger, always evolving community of truth learned more and disproved them when new evidence was found.¹ Doctors no longer recommend smoking cigarettes as a way to relax. Planet Earth is no longer considered the center of the universe.

The stories we choose to believe and tell, as well as the stories that choose us, are powerful. Being in the position to choose our stories and not be chosen by them carries power. Mary Catherine Bateson encourages us to exercise this power:

“…think about the creative responsibility involved in the fact that there are different ways to tell your stories. It’s not that one is true and another is not true. It’s a matter of emphasis and context…. The choice you make affects what you can do next.”²

So, let’s be thoughtful about the stories we choose to tell about who we (think we — and they) are. The choices we make and the stories we tell matter.

Consider the specific stories that inform(ed) your cultural givens. What holds up? What’s the most recent revision you’ve made, or that was made for you, where revision actually means re-vision — to see again? Look at the sweeping revisions, many ongoing, in the earlier essays in this series, and the specific, personal revisions shared therein, such as Robert McNamara’s ‘re-visioned’ view that owned the extent to which he and the other architects of the Vietnam war misjudged, underestimated, failed, and did not recognize a long list of people and ideas.

Such seeing again is never easy and always valuable when it moves the seer toward a more comprehensive, inclusive view. Malcolm X’s life stands as an exemplar of re-visioning. Two of his major re-visions — becoming a Muslim and joining the Nation of Islam while in prison and then leaving the Nation of Islam while remaining a Muslim after his 1964 Hajj — follow the developmental trajectory from a focus on me to a focus on us to a focus on all of us. In each case he changed his name and publicly recognized and owned his seeing again.³

How we tell our stories is as important as which stories we tell. Focus only on what’s wrong and get an “illness” story. Open up to the possibilities of moving through and beyond what’s wrong and tell or write a “healing” story. Adults model both of these for children: if the child who falls down the stairs and breaks an arm is confronted with parental overwhelm, blame, anger, and fear, an illness story emerges in which stairs are dangerous and the child is careless or clumsy; if the child is met with parental support, concern, acceptance, understanding, and love, a healing story emerges in which accidents can happen, stairs are useful and fine and best engaged with care, and the child is curious and open to experience.

Illness stories limit us, narrowly focus on a sense of wrongness, keep us stuck, and can reinforce trauma; healing stories open up the context in which we understand what happened (wrongness may be relevant, but not primary), they can expand and free us, and they can contribute to trauma recovery. Because they focus on what’s wrong, illness stories are often tidy, brief, stagnant, partial, and consistent. Because they emerge through and invite increasingly larger contexts, healing stories are often messy, ongoing, progressive, comprehensive, and paradoxical. Explore your stories. Be kind to yourself.

Writing can be engaged as a powerful process⁴ that helps open us up to increasingly larger contexts that allow us to see and feel as others see and feel — to go beneath all the individual differences, see another soul just like ourselves, and at the same time deeply understand and embody those differences. Going one step further, learning to embody and tell or write someone else’s story, both helps us understand the other and often provides clarity into our own narrative.⁵

Finally, if I’m truly playing an infinite game,⁶ some questions may arise at the intersection of “who am I, really?” and “everything is a story.” Try these questions on for size: Without the stories I hold and that hold me, who am I, and what’s true in this moment? Who am I and what does this moment offer without my story/ies? Ram Dass’s channels four and five point toward a prospective answer. John Tarrant, in Bring Me the Rhinoceros, put it this way:

“Everyone knows that some events are just bad and make you sad or angry, and some are good and make you glad. Yet what everyone knows might not be true. For example there might be a certain coercion to the attitude that weddings must be happy, funerals have to be sad. It could prevent you from meeting the moment you are in. What if events don’t have to be anything other than what they are?”⁷

We owe it to ourselves and each other to create and tell our stories with care.

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1. See Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings Institution, 2021) for an expansive and passionate exploration of his book’s title and the “community of truth.”

2. Mary Catherine Bateson, “Composing a Life,” Sacred Stories: A Celebration of the Power of Stories to Transform and Heal. Eds. Charles & Anne Simpkinson, (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 42–43.

3. M.S. Handler, “Malcolm Rejects Racist Doctrine,” New York Times, October 4, 1964, https://www.nytimes.com/1964/10/04/archives/malcolm-rejects-racist-doctrine-also-denounces-elijah-as-a.html; Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley, (New York: Ballantine, 1992).

4. James Pennebaker has led the way in decades of research that back this up. See his Expressive Writing: Words that Heal, co-authored with John Evans, (2014); and Opening Up: The Healing Power of Emotions (1990), among others. See also John Fox’s Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making, (1997). There are many more resources available.

5. See Marra, Enough with the Talking Points, (2020), 79–82 for more on truly embodying another’s story. For a deeper dive into telling another’s story as if it were our own, see the work of Narrative 4, which uses “story exchange” to help young (and old) people develop empathy. (Some meeting “icebreaker” exercises skim the surface of this experience: two strangers briefly share who they are and then introduce each other to a group — speaking in first-person, as if they are the person they’re introducing. Narrative 4 goes deeper): https://narrative4.com/.

6. Inspired by James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (Free Press-MacMillan, 1986). An infinite game is one in which the goals are to invite everyone to play and to keep the game going. A finite game is one in which the goal is to limit the players, win, and end the game.

7. John Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros, (Shambhala, 2008/2004), 113.

Healing America’s Narratives: Who Am I, Really?

Part of a series, this essay explores a question raised in Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.

Who Am I, Really?

If you’re sure you know and are ready to dismiss the question, what follows may be a waste of your time — or exactly what you need. Here are five prospective responses. They are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive. Add your own.

1) I am a mystery that I explore more deeply every day.

2) I am a mix of elements that’s worth four or five bucks.

3) I am the result of the exploits of God, Adam, Eve, and that horrible snake.

4) I am a ___-year-old, ____-generation _______-American ___________ [ your occupation] from _________.

5) I am a child of the stars.

The identity story I choose (or that chooses me) provides a unique view of myself and the world and a wildly different array of possibilities for my need for healing, my views on Shadow, and life in general. Every human being in the history of humanity had a sense, clear or vague, conscious or unconscious, of who they (thought they) were. We’ll engage this question through three distinct, interrelated perspectives — Body-Mind (aka middleworld), Soul (aka underworld), and Spirit (aka upperworld).

Body-Mind, or middleworld, as used here, refers to our conventional, everyday lives. We do, think, and feel, and we recognize, to various degrees, the connections among doing, thinking, and feeling. Our thoughts and feelings impact what we do and vice versa. In terms of our who-am-I inquiry, the Body-Mind perspective encourages us to assess skills, strengths, likes, dislikes, and aspirations in order to identify with a job, social role, or occupation. We are educators, plumbers, nurses, stay-at-home-parents, and truck drivers, etc. From a Body-Mind perspective, our job may be a valid response to that pesky question famously asked by Mary Oliver, “…what is it that you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

Turning toward Soul, we learn from eco-depth psychologist, Bill Plotkin, that our “soulwork…does not correspond to a job title.” Howard Thurman directs us to find “what makes [us] come alive.” Frederick Buechner refers to “the place where [our] deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Harvey Swift Deer speaks of “sacred dance,” and William Blake wrote of being “organized by Divine Providence for Spiritual communion.”¹

These various takes on a similar theme begin to move us beyond job descriptions and earning an income (each of which has its place) toward a somewhat deeper inquiry. Plotkin and Swift Deer differentiate soulwork or sacred dance from survival work or survival dance, which, in no way deprecatory, simply refer to “our way of supporting ourselves physically and economically….”² Aptitude and career tests and other Body-Mind assessments can be useful for matching us with survival work we might enjoy, and rarely, if ever, address soulwork, sacred dance, deep gladness, spiritual communion, what brings us alive, or what poet David Whyte calls the “one life / you can call your own.”³

Plotkin works with Soul as an ecological, rather than a psychological or spiritual, entity, referring to it as one’s “ultimate place,” or one’s “unique ecological niche” (“eco-niche”).⁴ Discovering one’s ultimate place or unique ecological niche in the world feels very different from getting a really good job with good pay and benefits. Our task from a Soul perspective is to find and create delivery systems that allow us to “offer our unique gift to the world.”⁵ These delivery systems change as we develop and are not who we are. They may manifest as survival work, soulwork, or both. For example, writing, teaching, and coaching are among my delivery systems.

From a Spirit or upperworld perspective, self-inquiry has been around at least from the beginning of the Advaita Vedanta tradition as a means of exploring this question. One iteration guides us through asking and returning to the question, “Who am I?” in a way that gradually eliminates who and what I am not. When I notice what arises in awareness (externals like clouds, sore muscles, job title, and cars, and internals like emotions, thoughts, concepts, and beliefs), I objectify and eliminate what I am not, as in “This cloud arises in my awareness, but I am not this cloud,” “This thought arises in my awareness, but I am not this thought,” “This pain arises…but I am not this pain.” Eventually I may get curious about “in whose awareness does all of this arise?” Who is this observer/witness? Who am I, really? Of course, this observer, or witness, or awareness itself is just another thought or concept until and unless I directly experience it. Then all heaven can break loose, until I get distracted again.⁶

Body-Mind, Soul, and Spirit perspectives each offer something of value. The center of gravity of our democratic, capitalist, American culture privileges the Body-Mind, replaces or dilutes Spirit with conventional, middleworld religious beliefs and requirements that usually protect us from any direct experience of Spirit, and generally ignores Soul — as Plotkin has developed it — or uses it in a variety of often disparate ways.

Ram Dass, in his teachings on change, aging, and death, shared a metaphor for waking up through these who-am-I perspectives or states of consciousness: he asks us to imagine that we each have a built-in receiver that picks up planes of consciousness. Most of our American receivers are tuned to pick up just one or two of the available channels — channel one’s physical traits (shapes, sizes, and colors, etc.) and channel two’s moods, emotions, and social roles. We don’t pick up more because middleworld culture doesn’t teach us (or know) how to fully tune our receivers. Said differently our American culture’s center of gravity holds a Body-Mind/middleworld perspective. We have not, as a culture, learned to tune into, nor do we seem to value, the Soul- and Spirit-based perspectives available on channels three, four, and five.⁷

Of course, amid our cultural attunement to channels one and two, some individuals do have access to additional channels. What channels are you attuned to? What’s your view on all of this?

Which leads us to story…in the next essay.

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¹Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” New and Selected Poems, (Beacon, 1992), 94. Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World, (New World Library, 2008), 316. Howard Thurman attribution: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/09/come-alive/. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, (HarperOne, 1993), 118–19. Harvey Swift Deer, in Plotkin, Nature…, 258. William Blake, The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, David V. Erdman, ed., (U of California P, 1981), 724.

²Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, 258.

³David Whyte, “All the True Vows,” The House of Belonging, (Many Rivers, 1997), 24.

⁴Plotkin, “ultimate place” in Nature and the Human Soul, 35–38; “unique ecological niche” in The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries, (New World Library, 2021), 6–17. A 52-minute interview with Bill is available here (there are more): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOTaKXHMabM

⁵Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation, 18.

⁶This paragraph is meant to be descriptive, not instructive. My encounter with self-inquiry began with the writings of David Frawley and Ken Wilber, which led me to Ramana Maharshi’s work. Here’s a link to Frawley’s writing from 1998: https://www.vedanta.gr/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Frawley_SelfInquiry_ENA5.pdf. Online references to self-inquiry are abundant and unequal. Inquirer beware.

⁷Ram Dass, “The Art Form of Dying,” Conscious Aging: On the Nature of Change and Facing Death, CD, (Sounds True, 1992), Disc 2, 2:50–6:25.