The Direction of Intention

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In high school biology I remember dissecting frogs. We had a worksheet that guided our dissection, identifying internal organs, muscle groups, and the skeleton. We analyzed the component parts of a frog’s body, reducing it to smaller and smaller parts, reducing the small parts to even smaller component parts until we were looking at cells beneath a microscope. The lesson was designed for us to understand how all of those components, when reassembled, combined to be the body of a frog. Even then I was aware of how dependent my education was upon dissection and reduction: we diagramed sentences, we divided history into centuries, into decades, into years, into months, and so on. Synthesis, an action that is the opposite of analysis, was rare and generally discouraged.

As Joe recently said, “analysis is comfortable.” It leads us to believe that we know, that we are competent. If we can reduce it to its component parts then we can talk about it. We can agree on the functional purpose of the heart of the frog. The road of analysis leads to the city of Rules in the county of Doctrine in the state of Objectivity. It is useful, practical, and only half of the picture.

Synthesis is a walk in the other direction. It leads to greater and greater questions. It is to step toward uncertainty, to entertain possibilities, to have differing perceptions and points of view. To synthesize is to engage. To synthesize is to step into the picture and experience the frog hopping through your fingers. It is to touch life. It is another way of knowing, the kind that cannot be isolated or contained. It is the kind of knowing that requires poetry to articulate.

Our bias is our blind spot: to contain is not the same as to comprehend. There are many ways of knowing. To fully grasp what has value and what does not requires both analysis and synthesis. Our analysis bias is the line tripping educators and business alike. The test can tell you some things. The data can describe some things. There are a myriad of other things that tests and bottom lines can’t illuminate.

The same tenet applies to you. How much time do you spend analyzing your self, dissecting yourself, reducing your life to the component parts, focusing on the outcomes? Do you ever see your life as an ongoing process, as a miracle of connectivity, as a step into the unknown (do you really believe that you are containable, knowable)?

Think on this: To analyze the component parts of the frog it is necessary first to kill it. Do not be surprised when analyzing yourself that you wonder if you really matter or are confused about the greater meaning of life. To reach those experiences you first have to put down your scalpel and step into the dance.

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This is an image from Mark. We’d just finished eating a ton of great Mexican food and were entertaining the last of our margaritas. We were talking about E.O. Wilson’s book Consilience, an amazing thinker thinking about the unity of knowledge. Mark loaned it to me a few months ago and I’d just finished reading it.

Just as physicists are searching for a unity principle, E.O. Wilson writes about the possibility of a similar discovery or revelation that might unify the totality of knowledge, a unifying the theory of everything. That is a huge undertaking and it is a book that warrants multiple readings.

Unity is the human impulse. Every culture has their tree of knowledge, the story moment when we slip out of the garden and into duality (separation), and every culture has their return to the tree of everlasting life, the return to unity, oneness. If you have a purpose, you are separate from the whole. If you seek, you are distinct from what you seek; you are separate. The desire for unity is the desire for self-knowledge, to know your self in wholeness. Perhaps the yearning for unity is the impulse beneath all knowledge (this is one of the ideas that drive truly powerful people).

This was the image that Mark offered: he said that consilience is like the Big Bang. When we talk about the Big Bang theory the question that always arises is, “What happened in the moment BEFORE the Big Bang?” Our search for unity, for wholeness progresses to a finer and finer point, simplicity that is possible when the separation consciousness begins to drop away. And, like a moth in a flame there is one brief moment when you know yourself (you must be distinct to witness yourself enter oneness) and in that brief moment, the moment of unity, the moment of being consumed by the whole, like the Big Bang, it is too much and explodes again into a zillion pieces and the pieces will begin again the search for wholeness. It is a cycle; to reach your fulfillment is to return to the beginning.

With every inhale there is an exhale. With every birth there is a death. Like the tides, the distinction of the water being in or out, of birth being separate from death, is only a trick of language, our attempt to contain and describe energy in motion that knows no distinction. Why not imagine the moment before the Big Bang the moment that consciousness finally approaches knowing itself as unity, and the experience of unity is such a powerful force that it blows itself out of the garden? Again. Like Sisyphus, it is not the arrival that matters but the engagement, the quest for wholeness that makes life sweet.

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The day started early. I took a walk to watch the sunrise and found myself captivated by the ducks diving for food in the Sound just at the end of my street. It was one of those rare moments when the water of the Sound is glassy and quiet. I stopped at the water’s edge because it was so quiet. No gulls, no crows, no ducks, no waves, no wind; I could hear my breath and my heartbeat. The water was steel grey and cold as polished iron. Suddenly, like popcorn, a dozen ducks bobbed to the surface. And, as if on a single breath, they disappeared again, diving for whatever breakfast snack was found beneath the water.

It was like watching a ballet. When they next appeared they came in shifts. 3 popped up, then 2 more, then 4 disappeared as 5 appeared. The sun decided to enter the dance: as the sky grew pink and hot orange the iron grey shimmered, purpled, and played chase with the ducks. I was dizzy with wonderment when the gulls sang their part and the crows strutted to and fro in comic approval.

Of course, I was the only one who knew this morning ritual was really a dance. But, after the final curtain as I walked away I wondered what eyes are sometimes looking at us in our morning rituals, thinking, “This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen!”

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Someone once told me that many people come to the Pacific Northwest to heal. It is a magic place. It inspires quiet in the winter months. In the dark of winter it can be like going into the belly of the whale. When the sun returns or breaks through the winter clouds, all work stops as we pile out of our office buildings and stand with eyes closed, palms open absorbing the heat and the light; we are sun worshippers here.

I have been here for over a decade and there is a particular phenomenon that continues to take away my breath; the first time I saw it I almost crashed my car. Mountains surround Seattle though you could live here for months and never know it. The clouds and fog and rain are like a magician’s assistant – they make the mountains disappear; they hide them until we forget that they are there. And then, one day, the magician sun parts the curtains and the mountains, glowing pink and orange and purple in the early morning step forth reborn. We say, “The mountains are out today.”

I took a walk early this morning. It was raining and grey and cold. I felt something looming over my shoulder. I turned to look at what was behind me and the mountains were there, close enough to touch, staring back at me. Just for a moment. And then the magician’s assistant, said, “That’s enough,” and pulled the curtain, and they were gone.

Of course, I am self-centered enough to think the curtain was pulled back just for me. Just for a moment as if to say, “Don’t take this – any of this – for granted. The magic is always there and available at a moment’s notice. You never know what is coming just around the corner or walking just behind you. Pay attention. It is magic. Don’t forget to look.”

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About a year ago I was doing research for a performance project and bumbled into a notion, an aspect of belief in some cultures that has intrigued me: hungry ghosts. Hungry ghosts are not the same as other ghosts.

In many traditional belief systems people become ghosts when they die. Shadows, shades, wisps, or spirit without a body – all are variations on the theme. Generally it was thought that ghosts did not have an eternal life as a ghost, but slowly weaken, dissipate and eventually dissolve into mist; essentially ghosts are a transitional step toward unity.

Hungry ghosts are different. Hungry ghosts are exceptional cases! When a person no longer appreciates their ancestors, when in life they do something very bad to others (all crimes against others dishonors the ancestors), if they are greedy or the worst possible crime: forcing people to move from their ancestral home, thus disgracing both families of ancestors (the ancestors of the forced and the forcer), then this person will die and become a hungry ghost. Desire, greed, anger and ignorance all are factors in causing a soul to become a hungry ghost because they are motives for people to perform evil deeds against others. So, the bottom line is this: do something bad to others = shame to the ancestors = become a hungry ghost.

There is no eventual unity for a hungry ghost. There is no rebirth in the cosmic cycle, no resurrection, do not pass “Go,” do not collect $200, go straight to hungry ghost. It is not a transitional phase; it an end result. It is forever.

Here’s the kicker: there is a single get-out-of-hungry-ghost card but it is very, very hard to achieve. The ghost must convince a mortal to feel compassion for it, to show compassion for its choices, its crimes. This is not forgiveness and certainly not absolution. It is a search for that rare person capable of looking beyond the fear, the greed, the horror, the hunger, the cruelty and see, truly see the essence of the soul. This person has to be able to see the unity even in the hungry ghost – and then the ghost can see it, too.

Sometimes as I walk down the streets of my city I see people as hungry ghosts seeking for that one rare mortal capable of seeing beyond their weakness, their yearning, their flaws and humanity; people who want to be seen. Sometimes, I refocus my eyes and see everyone as that mortal, not so rare, capable of seeing beyond the mess; people capable of seeing. Either way, the action is the same: the hider seeks the seeker, the seeker seeks the hider, compassion ensues and unity becomes a possibility: the ancestors welcome both home.

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