Willing Change (4/4): the first rule of holes

It has proved impossible in a few short posts to feel I have done justice to all that ACT has to offer. I have barely mentioned mindfulness at all, yet it is a key part of their approach. Perhaps this is not so important given how much literature there is around dealing with that reflective skill.

Less forgivable is the fact that I have only hinted at one of ACT’s most powerful antidotes to stuckness. They are very aware of the ways that language can be a trap (page 71), and very aware that most of us don’t see it like that:

Language is an extremely important element of human existence, but it is not everything. Perhaps more than any other behavioural domain, language products have been cultural sanctified to the point that seeing language itself as a problem is quite unlikely.

Hayes et al feel language deals very well with practical realities, but it has major limitations:

The fact is that language has a very limited capacity to apprehend and decipher personal experience, but we are taught from the moment of first consciousness that language is the tool for developing self-understanding

(Acceptance & Commitment Therapy: page 151):

In discussing their clinical work they write (page 183):

Most clients are initially so thoroughly trapped by this conceptual prison that they do not know and do not believe that they are imprisoned. The conceptual world in which they live is taken to be a given.

This is something very important of their own that they bring to the mix of other ingredients that are not unique to them. The way they have combined what is often found elsewhere is powerful and appealing in its own right: this lifts their recipe for change to another level altogether.

From a Bahá’í perspective this view of language makes a great deal  of sense. Paul Lample, in his excellent overview of the current work of the Faith Revelation & Social Reality, writes (page 18):

It can be argued that social reality emerges through the vehicle of language and, at the same time, language is a component of social reality. In essence, social reality is made up of words and meanings that human beings have agreed upon.

What words do not give is a complete and accurate description of reality (page 173):

. . . .reality does exist, but human beings are limited in their capacity for understanding and, therefore, must struggle over time to derive more useful descriptions and insights about reality that can guide more effective and productive action in the world.

One of the ways that ACT uses to help people free themselves from language traps is the liberating power of metaphor. It is using a richly evocative non-literal form of words to loosen the chains prosaic words have shackled us with. The Man in a Hole is a good example (pages 101-102)

The Man in a Hole Metaphor is a core ACT intervention in the early phase of therapy.

The situation you are in seems a bit like this. Imagine you’re placed in a field, wearing a blindfold , and you’re given a little tool bag to carry. You’re told that your job is to run around this field, blindfolded.  . . . . Now, unbeknownst to you, in this field there are a number of widely spaced, fairly deep holes. You don’t know that at first – you’re naive. So you start running around and sooner or later you fall into a large hole. You feel around, and sure enough, you can’t climb out and there are no escape routes you can find. Probably what you would do in such a predicament is to take the tool bag you were given and see what is in there . . . . Now suppose that the only tool in the bag is a shovel. . . . [Y]ou try digging faster and faster. . . . Oddly enough the hole [just gets] bigger and bigger. . . .  [D]igging is not a way out of the hole . . .

This metaphor is extremely flexible. It can be used to deal with many beginning issues.

And they go on to discuss how the need to understand the past can be a form of digging. They imagine an exchange with a client (pages 103-103):

“I’m not saying your past is unimportant, and I’m not saying we won’t work on issues that have to do with the past. . . . . [but] it is only the past as it shows up here and now that we need to work on – not the dead past. . . . [D]ealing with the past isn’t a way out of the hole.”

They also explain that the scariest step is stopping what doesn’t work before you know what might (page 103):

“Suppose someone put a metal ladder in there. If you don’t first let go of digging as the agenda, you’ll just try to dig with it. And ladders are lousy shovels – if you want a shovel you’ve got a perfectly good one already.”

What’s needed here, they say, is a leap of faith (pages 103-104):

‘[Because you are blindfolded] notice you can’t know whether you have any options until you let go of the shovel, so this is a leap of faith. It is letting go of something, not knowing whether there is anything else. . . .  [Y]our biggest ally here is your own pain. . . because it is only because this isn’t working that you’d ever even think of doing something as wacky as letting go of the only tool you have.”

This, as they put it, is the ‘opportunity presented by suffering.’ It needs to be added here that ACT distinguishes between pain and suffering. The latter is what we add to the pain life inevitably brings, and in general in their view (page 79) ‘suffering is the intrusion of language into areas where it is not functional:’ in other words we add to our pain with the suffering thinking, usually in words, can bring in its train.

So, where does all this leave us?

In previous posts on this issue we have seen how powerful a force for change acting courageously on our values can be. We have seen how important it can be to persist in the face of discouraging and uncomfortable experiences. We learnt the importance of distinguishing between the values we hold and the steps we take towards goals we believe express them: these may or may not be the same thing. Only a dispassionate look at the results will tell us whether we are moving in the direction the compass of what we truly value points us towards. All of this, I feel, is useful in deepening our understanding of the implications of what the Universal House of Justice is seeking to communicate to us.

In this post we have looked at how language can betray us into traps from which metaphor can release us and we have touched on the importance of being mindfully aware of what we are experiencing. We have already seen, in many other posts, how mindfulness of that kind can allow us to step back from inhibiting ideas of who we think we are and release energy to go in new directions.

This too is helpful. It seems to me that the Universal House of Justice, in its latest message, is re-emphasising once more how important reflection/mindfulness is (paragraph 10) when they describe how those working towards a vision of community building should operate:

. . . it is only through continued action, reflection and consultation on their part that they will learn to read their own reality, see their own possibilities, make use of their own resources, and respond to the exigencies of large-scale expansion and consolidation to come.

Consultation, as we have seen in a much earlier post, is a group process of reflection complementary to our work of reflection as individuals. Mindful awareness and detachment is at the heart of both ways of experiencing our inner, outer and social worlds.

In its exhortation to us to grasp the total vision, not just fragments of it, the House is also pointing up the traps of language we could fall into by turning guidance which is rich in implications into one-dimensional slogans. They are, in a sense, reminding us that we could end up in a hole as bad as that from which we wish to climb and as a result fall far short of the whole to which they are urging us to aspire (paragraph 37, already quoted in full in an earlier post):

. . . . achievements tend to be more enduring in those regions where the friends strive to understand the totality of the vision conveyed in the messages, while difficulties often arise when phrases and sentences are taken out of context and viewed as isolated fragments.

Seeing things as a whole is a right-brain gift that our left-brain culture in the West has taught us not to value. It seems to me that a book like the one about ACT can help us redress that imbalance if we are prepared to make the effort, and enable us to reach behind the wall of words and touch something closer to reality. If we do not make such an effort the complex coherence of texts such as those the Universal House of Justice creates will forever be beyond our understanding in practice, and, if so, we will be handicapped in our most important work and this will seriously delay us in helping to heal a broken world.

This is work that will not wait. I am hoping that writing my way towards understanding, on top of trying to put it into practice, will speed up my learning process. I also hope that by sharing it in this way I am at the very least not slowing you down in this work as you read.

A Wall of Words?

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Cultural Creatives (3/3): Consolidating Gains

Generation after generation of believers will strive to translate the teachings into a new social reality. . . . . . . . [I]t is not a project in which Bahá’ís engage apart from the rest of humanity.

(Paul Lample: Revelation & Social Reality – page 48)

As we saw in the previous post, Ray and Anderson’s book, The Cultural Creatives, tracks the way that the drops of personal aspiration from millions of separate individuals first combine into several different streams before beginning to converge into a massive river of increasing power.

They quote from many peoples’ diverse stories, illuminating what they have in common. This example is typical of many in its feeling of not belonging (page 101):

‘My family was so happy on the golf course, and gossiping round the pool, but I felt like I was in some plastic prison. I finally took my dad’s rental car and spent all of Sunday at the ocean. Sitting on the cliffs watching the white pelicans soar over the Pacific, I felt like I was finally crawling back inside my own skin, breathing the fresh air, at home.’

When this feeling of isolation eventually gives way to a sense of common purpose with millions of others, an awsome power will be released. The authors retell a version of the myth of Amaterasu Omikami, the Great Mother Sun, who, because of a great hurt, hid herself in a cave and plunged the whole world into darkness until the spirits of all living things each brought a tiny fragment of a mirror with them as they danced and sang outside the cave. When she peeped out to see what was going on, they wanted to be able to lift up all their tiny mirrors at once to reflect back to her in all its glory the brilliance of her light to break her gloomy mood and return her to the heavens. The plan worked (pages 345-346):

The power that can be focused by a compound mirror is vast, while that reflected by uncoordinated individual actions has little effect. . . . [I]solated actions can’t make the kinds of changes that are needed now. . . . Our new story is one that requires ten thousand tellers and ten times more to be inspired by it. Our new face needs ten thousand mirrors, each with a unique angle of vision to catch the creative energy available now.

To achieve this kind of concerted action will not be easy even if we manage to achieve a strong clear sense of our need for it. It has always required great courage and huge sacrifices in the past, for groups of people to combine together to right even a single wrong or lift society to a higher level of understanding about one issue only. People have to do what they are afraid to do. The freedom movement in the States is not alone in providing innumerable examples of this heroism and the power of example is of central importance here (page 124):

You do not ask someone else to do what you aren’t willing to do yourself. But they did the things they feared most – they went to gaol, faced fire hoses and men with clubs, took responsibility for their friends and fellow protesters. It swept them into the deepest fear they  had ever known – but then it lifted them  beyond that fear into a strength and steadfastness they never expected.

The rewards of such courage are beyond price and its long term effects incalculable. Paul Begala testifies to that when he speaks of John Lewis (page 125):

‘I live and work in a place and a time when courage is defined as enduring a subpoena with dignity. So it is humbling to be in the presence of a man who aced down Bull Connor and his attack dogs, armed with nothing more than his courage, his conscience, and his convictions. If that ain’t a hero, I don’t know what is.

A key aspect of this kind of courage is practising what you preach (ibid):

‘Walking your talk.’ In the all-night meetings and councils of the freedom and peace movements, and the consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement, this specific insight about social action evolved into an even more basic conviction about living authentically. What you believe in your heart has to match what you do in your life . . . .

There remain other significant problems which, the authors make clear, have dissipated the painstakingly accumulated rivulets of activity in many isolated places before they ever joined all the other brooks to make a stream. These problems pose key questions.

First of all, how do you build on the experience of others who are engaged in basically the same enterprise but in widely separated places. Networks, whose ability to operate is increasingly facilitated by the internet, are part of the answer (page 128):

Most social movements have two arms: the political and the cultural. . . . . . Contrary to the convictions of the political arm, the cultural arm is at least as important, and sometimes far more so, in its effects on the culture. . . . . But the spell-breaking power of the cultural arms takes place in submerged networks.

Secondly, how do you pass down what you have learned to those who come after you? Part of the answer to this second question lies in the power of persistency (page 203):

In the consciousness movement, the people who can persevere for ten, twenty, and thirty years are the ones who can have a dramatic impact on the culture – because that is the true time horizon of effective action. Those who need fast results and instant gratification had better go into some other line of work. As a number of Cultural Creatives told us, you have to enjoy the people and the process, and you need the maturity to work in a longer time frame.

Anyone involved in working to change the culture in which they live will have to face the intense discouragement that all too frequently comes when results fail to match up to expectations. A choice point torments us: ‘Do I keep faith with my vision or do I break faith with it?’ Keeping faith beyond what feels like its breaking point is often what brings about a break through, healing the testing breach between vision and reality, at least until the next time.

Much of the power of these processes is invisible, which is partly what makes the work so testing, but it can be calculated to some degree once you understand the typical dynamics (page 109):

To understand the true size of a social movement, think of a target with three concentric circles. The centre is the hundreds of visible leaders, demonstrators, and little organisations. Around the centre is a circle of many thousands of active supporters. and around those two active circles is the circle of the sympathetic millions who are touched by the events, and may simply read the arguments, and as a result make different choices in some part of their lives.

Powerful as these processes are, even when political alliances reinforce them, they are almost certainly not enough (page 154):

To change the culture, you cannot depend on the terms and solutions the old culture provides. . . . Leaving the heavy lifting to the political side of the movements, the cultural side started drying up, and the submerged networks began to lose touch with one another.

They pinpoint the missing link (page 187):

No one knew, or even thought about, how to create cultural institutions to support the work that was so important to them. The first generation practitioners  . . . . . could [hardly] manage their way out of a paper bag. . . . There really was a hole in the culture – the old ways didn’t work, and the new ones hadn’t yet been invented.

And why exactly, in their view, wouldn’t the institutions the United States already had do the trick (page 227)?

The three Bigs – big government, big business, and big media – have difficulty dealing with issues that cannot be isolated from other issues and solved with tools at hand.

Even progressive movements themselves could be rendered ineffective by the same tendency to atomise everything (page 229): ‘Activists, too, are Modernism’s children, believing that they must become specialists.’

Too many people pick off parts of the problem unable to see or agree that they are all interconnected. In the end the core issue cannot be evaded (page 246):

Cultural Creatives may be leading the way with responses directed towards healing and integration rather than battle. For these responses to contribute to the creation of a new culture, grassroots activism and social movements will have to evolve into new institutions. . . . [W]hile new social movements are transitory, institutions can turn the energies of these movements into everyday action.

Rainbow Bodhisattva by Vijali Hamilton

They strongly suggest that this might well involve something much more than a merely materialistic approach. They quote Joseph Campbell (page 299):

“You do not have a myth unless you have an opening into transcendence.” . . . If we cannot recognise the universe and the nations and ourselves as manifestations of “the grounding mystery of all being,” he said, we have nothing we can really trust.

And this quote is not in isolation. They also refer to Vijali Hamilton (page 311):

The true story is that there is a luminous, spacious energy that flows through everything all the time. It’s within matter, within things as well as within space, and you can tune in to it at any time . . . . . It is not otherworldly. It is right here, closer than our own flesh.”

This is so close to the idea that the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith describes:

“O My servants!” Bahá’u’lláh Himself testifies, “The one true God is My witness! This most great, this fathomless and surging ocean is near, astonishingly near, unto you. Behold it is closer to you than your life vein! Swift as the twinkling of an eye ye can, if ye but wish it, reach and partake of this imperishable favor, this God-given grace, this incorruptible gift, this most potent and unspeakably glorious bounty.”

(Shoghi Effendi: The Promised Day is Come – page 16)

So it’s not surprising that leaps of faith are required of us if we are to undertake these kinds of transformative processes effectively. To use Will Keepin‘s words (page 279):

“The work I’m doing now,” he told us, “is all based on faith.” . . . The crises he went through “led to a whole new gift that I never would have guessed. It developed a quality of trusting in the unknown.”

From a Bahá’í point of view this all makes complete sense. Bahá’ís believe that we are living on the cusp of massive changes in society and civilisation. We believe that, in the words of Bahá’u’lláh, ’the world’s equilibrium’ has ‘been upset.’ We can sign up to the vision expressed in this book (page 230): ‘When a force for change moves into an inherently unstable time, the potential leverage is very great indeed.’ We believe that science and religion are not at odds. We can see how they could work together for the betterment of all humanity as these authors can (page 318): ‘New technologies may give us solutions to many global problems, if they are brought to life in settings with cooperative, constructive values.’ Our vision is often summarised in the words ‘The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.’ Ray and Anderson appear to resonate to that as well (page 302): ‘The sense of “one planet, our home” is inescapable.’ Their conclusion is (page 314): ‘It’s a matter of moral imagination, a wisdom of the heart.’ (For more on ‘moral imagination’ see an earlier post.)

And the core of that vision, that wisdom, is captured towards the end of their book (ibid):

[Cultural Creatives] say that each of us is a living system within a greater living system, connected to each other in more ways than we can fathom. If we focus on that wholeness, we can begin to imagine a culture that can heal the fragmentation and destructiveness of our time.

I feel that there is the possibility of huge reciprocal benefits here.

In our Writings Bahá’ís are described as ‘catalysts.’

What is called for is a spiritual revival, as a prerequisite to the  successful application of political, economic and technological  instruments. But there is a need for a catalyst. Be assured that,  in  spite  of  your  small  numbers,  you  are  the  channels  through which such a catalyst can be provided.

(Universal House of Justice: Turning Point - page 124)

(For more on what being a catalyst means for us see both links.) I think we could learn much from the Cultural Creatives about how to play that part more effectively. Bahá’ís on the other hand have a model of how a world wide network, possessing a clear vision of the oneness of humanity, can strengthen its influence and consolidate its learning with the help of an appropriate organisational structure. There is therefore something significant that Cultural Creatives can learn from us.

An urge towards unity, like a spiritual springtime, struggles to express itself through countless international congresses that bring together people from a vast array of disciplines. It motivates appeals for international projects involving children and youth. Indeed, it is the real source of the remarkable movement towards ecumenism by which members of historically antagonistic religions and sects seem irresistibly drawn towards one another. Together with the opposing tendency to warfare and self-aggrandize-ment against which it ceaselessly struggles, the drive towards world unity is one of the dominant, pervasive features of life on the planet during the closing years of the twentieth century.

The experience of the Bahá’í community may be seen as an example of this enlarging unity. It is a community . . . drawn from many nations, cultures, classes and creeds, engaged in a wide range of activities serving the spiritual, social and economic needs of the peoples of many lands. It is a single social organism, representative of the diversity of the human family, conducting its affairs through a system of commonly accepted consultative principles, and cherishing equally all the great outpourings of divine guidance in human history. Its existence is yet another convincing proof of the practicality of its Founder’s vision of a united world, another evidence that humanity can live as one global society, equal to whatever challenges its coming of age may entail. If the Bahá’í experience can contribute in whatever measure to reinforcing hope in the unity of the human race, we are happy to offer it as a model for study.

(Universal House of Justice: The Promise of World Peace – 1985)

Just as I have drawn immense encouragement and inspiration from reading this account of the Cultural Creatives, which I wholeheartedly recommend, hopefully increasing numbers of people will draw similar inspiration from the Bahá’í community to which I belong. We have a model which contains a crucial missing dimension in the work of many Cultural Creatives – and I don’t mean a belief in God. Many Cultural Creatives share that perspective in their diverse ways. I mean an institutional framework, centred around a vision of unity in diversity, through which to disseminate and consolidate the gains that have been achieved through effortful experience in different places and at different times.

So, definitely read the book but don’t just stop at that. Come and have a look at what we are doing too. There are, almost certainly, Bahá’ís near where you live. We’ll all be immensely more effective working in synchrony.

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Cultural Creatives (2/3): Movements of Mind & Society

How Models get Muddled according to Transactional Analysis

‘A worldview is to humans as water is to fish.’

(Cultural Creatives by Ray & Anderson: page 93)

Human beings are not passive observers of reality and our personal reality, our thought, is not simply imposed upon us. In a very specific way we may consider ourselves – collectively – as co-creators of reality, for through the power of the human mind and our interactions, the world undergoes continued transformation.

(Paul Lample: Revelation and Social Reality - page 6)

The end of the previous post discussed the need for a new world view. More or less the same points are captured on page 341:

If a culture lacks a positive vision of the future, [Fred] Polak showed, its creative power begins to wither and the culture itself stagnates and eventually dies out. Negative images are even more destructive, leading to hopelessness, helpessness, . . . . [and] “endgame” behaviours, with people snatching and grabbing to secure something for themselves before everything falls apart. This behaviour brings about the very collapse they fear. . . . . . . [Cultural Creatives] say that each of us is a living system within a greater living system, connected to each other in more ways than we can fathom. If we focus on that wholeness, we can begin to imagine a culture that can heal the fragmentation and destructiveness of our time.

The book examines the context in which Cultural Creatives emerged and exactly what they represent in detail.

The Moderns, contrary to how it often seems, constitute the largest of three main groupings at 48% of the U.S. population (page 25) and dominate the media. They have great faith in the ‘technological economy’ (ibid.) and ‘accept the commercialised urban-industrialised world as the obvious right way to live’ (page 27).

On the other hand, Traditionals, who according to the authors can be found almost everywhere and have invented Fundamentalism (page 84), constitute a measly 24.5% of the U.S. population. They can persuade themselves often, and the rest of us sometimes, that they are really the top dogs as a result of their noisy and vociferous responses to all they regard as the moral shortcomings of current society.

Alongside, or rather hidden somewhere behind the spotlights wielded by members of those two highly visible groups, stand the Cultural Creatives at 28% of the U.S. population – something like 50 million people in all. Quite a crowd to be so invisible. There’s about the same number in Europe apparently.

The quickest way to get a handle on what Cultural Creatives stand for is to look at the questionnaire on the Cultural Creatives website. It’s not so much a questionnaire as a list of things that distinguish Cultural Creatives from the other two groups.

The authors’ analysis of the various sub-groups their surveys detected within the Moderns as a cultural group is intriguing as is there account of the Traditionals. However, it would expand this post into an even longer series of posts if I were to attempt to do justice to their explanation. I’m afraid I shall just be focusing for now at least on the Cultural Creatives.

The questionnaire on the authors’ website will cover the basic description of their characteristics. As a Bahá’í I can sign up to all of them, I think. They map onto our social teachings almost down to the last coordinate. The key differences are in what they leave out, but more of that later.

What I found most interesting about the Cultural Creatives, after I had got over the shock of how closely what they stand for mirrors my own position, is the authors’ account how they came from apparently nowhere to become such an invisible but influential force in American society. While opinions about them amongst both Moderns and Traditionals are dismissive – for example, they’re put down as ‘New Age’ by Moderns and as ‘political activists’ by the Traditionals – this misses the point. The authors quote Sarah van Gelder (page 93):

‘The New Age sterotype is that it’s all about changing ourselves internally and the world will take care of itself. The political activists’ stereotype is that we ignore our inner selves to save the world. Neither works! . . . The Cultural Creatives are about leaving that dichotomy behind and integrating the evolution of the self and the work on the whole.’

Perhaps I find all this so compelling because I lived through the same splits myself on my particular fairly undramatic variation of the road to Damascus. After I left the religion of my childhood I drifted until I became, for a time, what the international socialists I mixed with called a ‘fellow traveller.’ I explained some of this in a previous post so I won’t rehearse it all again here but disillusion set in fairly quickly because of the violence and lies that seemed an unavoidable ‘side effect’ of the socialist/communist rhetoric in practice.

Then I launched into self-exploration with gusto, dynamiting myself out of the prison of an habitual emotional deep-freeze by means of an encounter weekend followed by several months living in a commune that practised Reichian Therapy after the school of David Boadella. This was not as barmy as it might sound as we didn’t use an orgone box, though someone I knew had made one that I sat in for a whole afternoon with no discernible effects.

We just did the breathing exercises. Two factors caused me to move on.

One was that, although I had blown out the door of my dissociating cell, I had also blasted a hole right through the floor of my psyche and kept falling into the lake of tears that lay underneath without ever finding, in the commune’s approach, a psycho-Babel fish capable of translating the experience into intelligible terms. I was never helped to reach an understanding of why the lake was there or how I could have related to it differently. I just got drenched from time to time, climbed back out dripping and carried on.

The other reason was that I could see that we were so far beyond the pale of mainstream society that I would never be able to have an impact on all the things in our culture and practice that I still wanted to change. In short, there were no ways to heal my mind or my milieu from where I was standing at the time.

I came back into the mainstream, joined a Transactional Analysis/Gestalt Therapy group, studied psychology, practised Buddhist meditation, and threw myself into Dreamwork Ann Faraday style, until, just after I’d qualified as a Clinical Psychologist, the Bahá’í Faith offered me a way of effectively integrating personal growth, social action and spiritual understanding into a sustainable way of life that offered my best hope of systematically influencing our society to heal itself.

The book Cultural Creatives teems with examples of similar trajectories to an amazing diversity of different targets that somehow in the end come to seem members of the same family.

The authors are well aware that the consciousness movement had more than a touch of self-indulgence. May be it still has.

Eat Pray Love, the book and the film, are linked to consciousness raising and have come in for their share of criticism on this basis. A Sunday Times review (there’s no point in giving a link as they charge for the privilege of reading their material on the web nowadays) of Eat Pray Love states:

Liz is the Carrie Bradshaw of spiritual enlightenment – a selfish new-age narcissist who can think only of her own needs and desires. The film is full of gross national caricatures and trite self-helpy wisdom.

An interview with Margarette Driscoll in the same newspaper (19.09.10) shows a different possibility:

The key to it all lay in connecting with something spiritual inside herself, something we seem to have lost in our secular, materialist age. ‘We feel the lack of the spirit but there’s the idea that if you have faith it’s a little foolish, that you must have shut your brain off at some point; but there must be room in our lives for a brain and a soul,’ she says . . . .

We have to decide for ourselves whether the contempt of the reviewer is all part of modernism’s automatic sneer in the face of what it regards as flaky way-out alternatives or whether it’s a well founded reaction to a genuine element of self-indulgence in the film at least.

Ray and Anderson are well aware that not every cultural creative got to where (s)he is by some kind of religious experience. They write (page 103):

Practically everyone we interviewed for this book told us that they had been involved in the new social movements and the consciousness movements that began in the 1960s and continue today.

They are not unsympathetic to the consciousness movement (page 173):

The premise of the consciousness movements was that the achievements attributed uniquely to saints, poets, and great thinkers are in fact our common inheritance.

But are aware (page 174) that the spiritual quest can be hijacked by the ego:

In the long view, the first generation of the consciousness movement was focused on what might be called personal waking up. Its questions were individual. Often painfully honest and intimate, they appeared from the outside to be astoundingly egocentric.

They quote Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (page 189):

‘[S]piritual materialism’ . . .  means . . ‘deceiving ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques.’

They realise this was out of step with the true purpose of such disciplines as meditation (page 175):

The purpose of inner work, in the East, had never been only for the benefit of the individual. All that effort could not be just for yourself.  [It was] for all beings.

On balance though they feel that the consciousness movement played an honourable part in the combination of social forces that has led us to this point, where 50 million people are working quietly for radical cultural change of an essential and benign form.

They look at the other dimensions to this process, including the movements for peace, for women, for freedom and for the well being of the planet, and examine in depth how they have developed and converged over time mainly since the 60s. All I can do here is give some brief extracts to convey the flavour. They describe (page 210):

.  . . a growing worldwide political convergence: . . . the cultural arms of these movements have been growing more similar for a good twenty years. It’s the political convergence that is the latecomer. . .

Part of this is facilitated by a shift from a negative approach to a more positive one (ibid.):

The old political movement pattern that was evident in the 1960s was built around opposition and conflict, Some observers still talk about protest movements as if what defines a movement is what it’s against. . . . . Gradually, the basis of collective identity has shifted from protest to a positive agenda and a vision of the future. It took a decade or two for the antiwar movement to redefine itself as a peace movement, and for the women’s movement to outgrow blaming, even hating, men and decide what it was for. One of the pivotal influences in this change was the consciousness movements. Spirituality and psychology brought in new ways of thinking . .

This indicates the constructive role of consciousness movements in spite of the reservations about their possible self-centredness.

There are also social structures in the mainstream that are contributing, such as NGOs (page 214):

. . . each group is learning to work with others and to leverage their efforts. This makes NGOs very successful in getting public attention when there’s an outrage. At long last, the moral conscience of the world is slowly being awakened for people who are not one’s own tribe or nation.

Slowly becoming apparent is a core of common value and purpose within all these diverse trends (page 216):

The evidence of convergence is almost everywhere. . . . .[Ralph H.]Turner believes that the conviction underlying all the new movements is that “a sense of worth, of meaning in life, is a fundamental human right that must be protected by our social institutions.”

What is even more fascinating, if that is possible, is the way that these movements interconnect and overlap and the role that Cultural Creatives have in that (page 218):

Each of the five movements we examined shares from 40-80% of its support (both sympathisers and activists) in common with the others. Wherever the movements share a common population, that population contains proportionately far more Cultural Creatives than you’d expect. Cultural Creatives stand at the intersection of these movements. In effect, they provide the cultural glue that hold the movements together. . . . . .What does all this mean? Are the Cultural Creatives shaping the movements, or are the movements shaping the Cultural Creatives? It’s both.

And there is probably a shared realisation that, for each of them, (page 221):

. . . . the interconnecting concerns shaping [a] movement reach even wider, revealing once again that the problems are simply too massive for any narrow solutions to work.

This has brought us to the point at which we can attempt to look at where all this leaves us now. But that must wait for another post.

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Cultural Creatives (1/3): People of the Parenthesis

Metamorphosis

[We are also facing] a breathtakingly dangerous tipping point for our civilisation and our planet. Our need to discover a way through is the most urgent, most central question of our time.

(Cultural Creatives: Page 236)

In the consciousness movement, the people who can persevere for ten, twenty, and thirty years are the ones who can have a dramatic impact on the culture – because that is the true time horizon of effective action.

(Op. cit.: page 203)

Recently I reviewed a book I hadn’t even been looking for before I bought it. It was Where on Earth is Heaven? Towards the end Stedall mentions a couple of books that ignited my interest. The first of these I’ve now finished reading: The Cultural Creatives by Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson. I did a post in November as a taster, promising to follow it up if the book as a whole proved as good as its beginning. It did and here’s the follow up.

It’s a fascinating analysis, based on detailed surveys, of how the balance of American culture, and by implication Europe’s as well probably, has shifted since the 60s. There will be much to say about that later.

When I decided to do a full review of the book I thought I’d do just one post and that would be enough. The more I thought about it, the more impossible that seemed. I felt that its compelling fascination would be conveyed better if I took my time. Of course, that could well be the wrong decision and terminal boredom could have set in for everyone else long before I get to the last post on the subject. It’ll be more of a last post in a different sense in that case.

To convey why the book resonated so much with me it made sense to start, not at the beginning of the book, but nearer to the end. It’s towards the end that the authors convey a sense of the exact nature of the cultural change we are all experiencing but from the point of view of the Cultural Creatives.

A Tipping Point

This group, who constitute 25% of the population of America (i.e. about 50 million people), feel we are in a period of transition. The authors call it the Between.

The Between is the time between worldviews, values and ways of life; a time between stories. The transition period, [John] Naisbitt concluded, “is a great and yeasty time, filled with opportunity.” But it is so, he added, only on two critical conditions: if we can “make uncertainty our friend,” and “if we can only get a clear sense, a clear conception, a clear vision of the road ahead.”

(Page 235)

Ray and Anderson (page 236) are cautious and see this period as a ‘dangerous tipping point.’ They describe the position of Cultural Creatives (page 40) as seeing ‘an antique system that is noisily, chaotically shaking itself to pieces.’

This is not all negative (page 33):

. . . this era is at least as much about cultural innovation as it is about decline and decay of established forms.

This, for Bahá’ís, has echoes of what our Teachings repeatedly emphasise. For example:

“Soon,” Bahá’u’lláh Himself has prophesied, “will the present-day order be rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead.” And again: “By Myself! The day is approaching when We will have rolled up the world and all that is therein, and spread out a new Order in its stead.”

(Shoghi Effendi: The Promised Day Is Come – page 17)

And the similarities don’t end there. They contend (page 244):

The creative response to today’s Between is going to be one that bridges differences. . . . . .

Building Bridges

They draw support from William Ury’s Getting to Peace, which describes pre-agricultural societies as having worked hard at preventing and resolving conflict.

He feels that in our increasingly interdependent world, we have “the most promising opportunity in 10,000 years to create a co-culture of co-existence, cooperation, and constructive conflict.”

This issue of interdependence is key for Bahá’ís as well:

“The well-being of mankind,” [Bahá’u’lláh] declares, “its peace and security are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.”

(Shoghi Effendi: The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh – page 203)

Ray and Anderson, thinking along the same lines and quoting Mary Ford, write (page 21) :

You have to have a definition of self that’s bigger than [society's] definitions, that’s grounded in how connected we all are to each other.

The how of course is easier said than done, and we’ll be looking at that in more detail later. They describe at least one of the obstacles very clearly (page 222):

Moderns and Traditionals don’t see themselves as members of an interconnected planetary community, and don’t see their problems as interconnected either.

(We’ll be coming back to Traditionals in the next post.) Whereas Cultural Creatives, and Bahá’ís of course as well, do see themselves very much this way, Cultural Creatives (page 94)

. . .  want to see the big, inclusive picture, and they want to work with the whole system, with all the players. They regard themselves as synthesisers and healers, not just on the personal level but on the planetary level too.

The authors spell out what they feel the fragmentation of the dominant worldview of Modernism means for us all (pages 226-227):

As individuals, we know that we are part of a living system and that what we do to part of that system affects all of us sooner or later. But as a society we don’t know this.

I’m not sure how true the first part is for all individuals but it’s certainly true that our society as a whole has not grasped this holistic view yet. They place much of the blame for this on the fragmented perspective of modernism (page 92), which they see as the dominant worldview in the States, both in terms of the percentage of the population who strongly subscribe to it (48%) and in terms of control of the media:

Cultural Creatives are sick of the fragmentation of Modernism.

Even more damningly they write (page 294):

Modernism lives with a hole where wisdom ought to be.

Cultural Creatives strive for a more integrated perspective.  They think of themselves ‘as an interwoven piece of nature’ (page 9). In ways reminiscent of  Iain McGilchrist’s descriptions (see review on this blog), they have a right-brain feel about them (page 11):

. . . . they want the big picture, and they are powerfully attuned to the importance of whole systems. They are good at synthesing from very disparate, fragmented pieces of information.

The writers quote Parker Palmer approvingly (page 20) when he states:

. . . . that movements begin when people refuse to live divided lives.

But they acknowledge it is hard to see how this can be applied to building a new society (page 64):

. . . we are in the midst of a transition. Mapmakers must be content with seeing the new territory from afar – which means their map will have serious limits.

But we cannot simply leave it there (page 234):

. . . because all of us now are ‘people of the parenthesis,’ as Jean Houston calls us, we must break free of our restricted worldview and make our way into new territory.

And those are the ideas that are developed throughout the book as a whole. Consideration of them must wait till next time.

Bahá’ís share this perspective and these aspirations while recognising that Bahá’ís alone can never bring about such changes:

To say that the process of building a new civilisation is a conscious one does not imply that the outcome depends exclusively on the believers’ initiatives. . . . emphasis on the contributions Bahá’ís are to make to the civilisation-building process is not intended to diminish the significance of efforts being exerted by others.

(Paul Lample: Revelation & Social Reality – page 109: see review)

It is hugely encouraging to feel that there are up to 50 million people in America alone working towards broadly the same ends, manifesting the spirit of the age

working through mankind as a whole, tearing down barriers to world unity and forging humankind into a unified body in the fires of suffering and experience.

(Universal House of Justice Messages : 1963-1986, page 126)

Even at this stage then it should be clear why I was excited to find this book. Whether I have made it as exciting for you as yet remains to be seen.

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Musings after an Encounter with Montaigne

The ideas in this post have taken a long time to reach the light of day. The fact that they are doing so now is down to reading a fascinating book about someone who was blogging before blogs were invented.

Montaigne

Sarah Bakewell’s book on Montaigne picks up on this (page 6):

He was the most human of writers, and the most sociable. Had he lived in the era of mass networked communication, he would have been astounded at the scale on which such sociability has become possible: not dozens or hundreds in a gallery, but millions of people seeing themselves . . . . . from different angles.

She points out that his attraction is that we find ourselves reflected in his account of himself. And sure enough I did when I came to Chapters 6 & 7 in her book. She writes of his debt to philosophy, particularly the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Sceptics.

She describes stoics (page 114) as being ‘especially keen on pitiless mental rehearsals of all the things they dreaded most.’ They sought to achieve equanimity by confronting sources of discomfort head on. Epicureans were more inclined to avoid unpleasantness by turning ‘their vision away from terrible things, to concentrate on what was positive.’ The sceptics, she claims, sought to get to the same destination by a rather different route (page 124):

The key to the trick is the revelation that nothing in life need be taken seriously.

The way the trick is worked though is the really interesting bit. You deal with problems by what the Greeks termed epokhe. That triggered an immediate frisson of recognition in me because I recognised behind that unfamiliar Greek word a more familiar French one: époché. I’d seen this in books on existentialist philosophy and psychotherapy where it is used to mean ‘bracketing’ when referring to assumptions and beliefs (see Spinelli). This meant placing them in brackets to put some distance between yourself and your operating assumptions so that you could inspect them in a more detached way. Epokhe, according to Montaigne, meant suspending judgement, a very similar concept.

It’s beginning to be obvious why this latter version of scepticism meant something to me as I have always been taken by the power of suspending my identification with my ideas so that I could reflect on them and maybe change them, including my ideas of who I am. Reflection is a word also used in existentialism to convey this concept of disidentification, about which I have written at length in other posts. My encounter with Montaigne even at second hand in this way was rather uncannily mirroring me. He evinces the same kind of doubt and uncertainty about the validity of his preconceptions as has been my default position for as long as I can remember.

Interestingly Montaigne did not find this kind of scepticism at odds with his Christian Faith. This is a point to which I shall return.

Before we lose the initial thread completely I need to go back to why I resonated to Montaigne’s version of Stoicism and Epicurianism as presented by Sarah Bakewell.

The emphasis I derived from the stoic position was endurance, facing discomfort down. For me this connects with the idea in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) that you need to develop the capacity to enact your values in the face of discomfort and not use discomfort as an excuse to do nothing of use or value. For me this is closely allied to the idea of duty. Epicurianism on the other hand seemed to value avoidance and distraction as a means of defusing unpleasantness. Seen this way these two philosophies capture an apparent polarity that splits my mind on many occasions.

Duty calls me to exert myself which I might do until fatigue and stress flip me into escapism: I then distract myself with something less demanding. Initially it may seem as though duties and distractions are genuinely opposite. However, whether something seems a duty or a distraction can shift depending upon my point of view and most importantly what value I detect as in reality underpinning the activity.

A duty undertaken not for its objective usefulness or moral value but as a means of making a good impression on others suddenly becomes suspect. An apparent distraction such as watching Hamlet or Lark Rise to Candleford on television may inspire a deeper understanding of people or rekindle a strong sense of community that makes me a better person capable of greater empathy and kindness: what was despised as a temptation from the path of duty becomes the means of enriching my sense of common humanity.

So what seemed initially the clear contradiction between duty and distraction turns out to be a false dichotomy. My encounter with Montaigne via Bakewell has suddenly become not just a mirror but a microscope. It has brought a subtle problem into clearer focus.

This shouldn’t really have come as such a surprise to me. Since my teens I have lived with and partly through Shakespeare, and Shakespeare and Montaigne are kindred spirits.

Shakespeare

Jonathan Bate describes this in his brilliant book on Shakespeare, Soul of the Age (page 410):

If there is a single book that . . . brings us close to the workings of the mind of Hamlet, it is Montaigne’s Essays. Scholars debate as to whether or not Shakespeare saw Florio’s translation before it was published in 1603. The balance of evidence suggests that he probably did not, but rather that his mind and Montaigne’s worked in such similar ways that Hamlet seems like a reader of Montaigne  even though he could not have been one.

And I’ve known of this connection for a long time but been too lazy or unwilling to grapple with Montaigne directly even in the most recent skilled translation of the complete essays by Screech which I bought in 2003. One of the reasons  why I have been unable to convince myself that I should invest the necessary effort in reading its 1200 pages is that I cannot make up my mind whether to do so would be enacting a duty in the face of discomfort or succumbing to a distraction that would lead me away from the path I ought to be pursuing. You see the problem? It’s also clear why I find Montaigne’s tentative scepticism so appealing. I’m like the old joke about the man who went to the psychotherapist saying: ‘I have this terrible problem. I have to qualify everything I say. Well, almost everything.’

Time to return now to the problem we mentioned earlier: how is such doubtful dithering compatible with faith? A possible key to this is touched on in Bakewell’s book (page 130). She quotes Montaigne:

We must really strain our soul to be aware of our own fallibility.

She goes on to say:

There was only one exception to his ‘question everything’ rule: he was careful to state that he considered his religious faith beyond doubt.

While this went down well during his life time, it’s interesting to note that sometime after his death he ended up on the Vatican’s list of prohibited books where he remained for a hundred and eighty years.

Clearly this is not a stance without its complications. In an age of evangelical atheism and creationism how does this idea that we can doubt everything but faith hold up?

For Bahá’ís this is an interesting issue in that our scriptures give us some hints about how this apparent contradiction might be managed in our own lives. Bahá’u'lláh tells us:

All that I have revealed unto thee with the tongue of power, and have written for thee with the pen of might, hath been in accordance with thy capacity and understanding, not with My state and the melody of My voice.

(Arabic Hidden Words: Number 67)

Our understanding is therefore never going to be the same as the truths the Revelation is seeking to convey. Bahá’u'lláh also seems to distinguish between the sort of cast-iron certainty we sometimes have about our understanding and Certitude which is the highest form of faith.

When the channel of the human soul is cleansed of all worldly and impeding attachments, it will unfailingly perceive the breath of the Beloved across immeasurable distances, and will, led by its perfume, attain and enter the City of Certitude….

(Kitáb-i-Íqán: page 126 UK Edition)

And He explains what exactly the City of Certitude is:

That city is none other than the Word of God revealed in every age and dispensation.

(Op. Cit.: page 127 UK Edition)

So certitude is about our relationship with the Word of God itself, not about our relationship with what we think Revelation means. In the first section of the Íqán Bahá’u'lláh has made it very clear how wide of the mark of divine purpose the understandings of mankind can be. This maps closely onto the distinction Paul Lample makes in his book Revelation and Social Reality between religion and Revelation. There is a crucial distinction, he feels (page 21), between Revelation as the undiluted Word of God and religion as the way the Word is applied.

Therefore a deep scepticism about my own understanding can be quite compatible with an unswerving faith in the Scriptures of a religion. Such a position is in fact preferable to a cast-iron commitment to our current interpretation of our religion which will either crack under the hammer blows of the tests life smashes into us or be used as a weapon with which to crack the skulls of our so-called enemies.

How amazing that the blogs of a sixteenth century Frenchman resonate so strongly with my 20th Century mind. We still have a lot to learn from him it seems. Perhaps I should tackle Screech’s book after all.

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Humanity is our Business (5/5): (b) What can we do for our children?

THE BAHÁ’ÍS MUST WORK WITH HEART AND SOUL TO BRING ABOUT A BETTER CONDITION IN THE WORLD

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Paris Talks, page 99)

What do we do?

We have looked at the plight of children. We must face the truth. We are all responsible and we all need to respond to the challenge: we must all do everything in our power to change this situation for the better. The same message already quoted from our world centre states:

Our worldwide community cannot escape the consequences of these conditions. This realisation should spur us all to urgent and sustained action in the interests of children and the future.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

Obviously the whole problem cannot be fixed overnight but we have to start somewhere. This need to do what we can sustain over a long period, however small a step that may seem, has led to a concerted attempt to provide classes for children in as many localities as we can using all the resources currently at our disposal, though these are as yet inadequate to the task that faces us:

Aware of the aspirations of the children of the world and their need for spiritual education, they extend their efforts widely to involve ever-growing contingents of participants in classes that become centres of attraction for the young and strengthen the roots of the Faith in society.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2008)

Young people, on the threshold of independence, have comparable needs which we are seeking to learn how to meet:

[We] assist junior youth to navigate through a crucial stage of their lives and to become empowered to direct their energies toward the advancement of civilization.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2008)

How should we treat them?

We must appreciate fully and whole-heartedly

. . . the imperative to tend to the needs of the children of the world and offer them lessons that develop their spiritual faculties and lay the foundations of a noble and upright character. . . [and] the full significance of [our] efforts to help young people form a strong moral identity in their early adolescent years and empower them to contribute to the well-being of their communities.

(Universal House of Justice: 20 October 2008

Character building and society building are inextricably linked. The positive results of doing it properly are beyond dispute.

But how do we do it?

The House of Justice seek to define the qualities a community should possess:

An all-embracing love of children, the manner of treating them, the quality of the attention shown them, the spirit of adult behaviour toward them – these are all among the vital aspects of the requisite attitude. Love demands discipline,  the courage to accustom children to hardship, not to indulge their whims or leave them entirely to their own devices.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

It is perhaps worth dwelling a little on what they might mean by discipline and hardship, not positive ideas in many people’s thinking today.

Layard and Dunn, in an article in the  Sunday Times on 1st February describe four styles of parenting and point out what they feel is the optimal. These are: disciplined, authoritative, neglectful and permissive.

Researchers have studied the effects of each upon the way in which children develop. They agree that the style that is loving and yet firm – now known in the jargon as authoritative – is the most effective. In this approach boundaries are explained, in the context of a warm, loving relationship. Without boundaries and the management of frustration that these require children to learn, it is hard for them to develop the kind of impulse control that the work on emotional intelligence suggests underpins a successful life in society. All too often childhoods are  seriously warped by indulgent neglect, though it is the cruelty of an abusive background that more often hits the headlines.

They also refer to other things such as mutual respect, commitment and education in parenting:

An atmosphere needs to be maintained in which children feel they belong to the community and share in its purpose. They must lovingly but insistently be guided to live up to Bahá’í standards, to study and teach the Cause in ways that are suited to their circumstances.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

The Needs of Young People

They describe the special needs of a sub-group of young people:

[Those between the ages of, say, 12 to 15] represent a special group with special needs as they are somewhat in between childhood and youth when many changes are occurring within them. Creative attention must be devoted to involving them in programmes of activity that will engage their interests, mould their capacities for teaching and service, and involve them in social interaction with older youth.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

Paul Lample explains that this has led to

[a]n effort to endow youth with the capacity to conquer the word and unravel its meaning both for their own spiritual upliftment, and as a basis for social action. The work with Junior Youth broadened beyond efforts for SED to become a fourth core activity.

(Paul Lample: Revelation & Social Reality page 135)

Parents

The role of parents is clearly critical:

. . . parents . . . bear the prime responsibility for the upbringing of their children. We appeal to them to give constant attention to the spiritual education of their children. Some parents appear to think that this is the exclusive responsibility of the community; others believe that in order to preserve the independence of children to investigate truth, the Faith should not be taught to them. Still others feel inadequate to take on such a task. None of this is correct . . . . ..

Independent of the level of their education, parents are in a critical position to shape the spiritual development of their children. They should not ever underestimate their capacity to mould their children’s moral character. Of course, in addition to the efforts made at home, the parents should support children’s classes provided by the community.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

In the end where does all this leave us?

For Bahá’ís the message is clear. In capital letters on page 99 of Paris Talks we find the quotation at the head of this post:

THE BAHÁ’ÍS MUST WORK WITH HEART AND SOUL TO BRING ABOUT A BETTER CONDITION IN THE WORLD

The words immediately above that are:

Let your ambition be the achievement on earth of a Heavenly civilization! I ask for you the supreme blessing, that you may be so filled with the vitality of the Heavenly Spirit that you may be the cause of life to the world.

There’s really nothing else that anyone can add after that and it seems to me that it applies to everyone, Baha’i and non-Baha’i alike, each in his or her own way inspired by the purpose of God in this age which is to make us all act upon the realisation that we are one family — the human family.

The whole of humanity is indeed our business.

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