The Times Quotidian

How to Survive Our Own Success
by Guy Zimmerman

In Santa Fe dramatic thunderstorms are common late on summer days. Afterwards the massive banks of purple clouds will often part, allowing shafts of intense sunlight to angle down, creating sometimes vivid rainbows. At a house near downtown last summer I saw a rainbow like this, clear as a Technicolor dream. I was with a group of young scientists and I watched as their wonder shifted into analytical mode – here is an example of water molecules interacting with rays of refracted light – and then back again toward a more embodied appreciation. The sequence reminded me of the Buddhist saying in which a mountain becomes, for the meditator, something very different …and then, at a later stage, returns again to being just a mountain. Then, as the rainbow faded in the sky, we trooped inside to watch Charlton Heston chew the scenery (and a few other things) in the Sci-fi flick Soylent Green.

“Charlton Heston is an axiom,” said Michel Mourlet, the film critic, in 1960. Mourlet was a member of the French New Wave, and one must never argue with the French New Wave. “He constitutes a tragedy in himself,” Mourlet continued, “his presence in any film being enough to instill beauty.” This serenade comes as a shock to us today, given the political causes Heston shackled himself to late in life. But think of Heston playing Vasquez in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, or the title role in Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, the film that inspired novelist Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian. And on a more iconic level there’s also, of course, the latex miracle that is the Planet of the Apes series, not to mention the be-sandaled epics Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments.

In all these films, Heston serves to emblemize aggrieved masculinity, the strong and righteous father-figure who recoils in disgust as evil and injustice are unmasked. As soon as the Hestonian visage enters the frame all problems, apocalyptic or otherwise, begin to whither of their own accord. If evil has flourished recently, it’s only because this man’s attention was occupied elsewhere. Even when Heston himself goes down to death and defeat, we know the forces of good will prevail in the end…because man, in his essence, is like this. If ever there were a man to teach us how to survive our own success as a species, wouldn’t it be Heston?

On a mythic level I would make the case that the iconic appeal of Charlton Heston is linked to the essentially Protestant archetype of man as a fixed and separate instrument of divine providence, taming unruly nature. With the Reformation, God was thought to be an immanent presence in this world, as well as a transcendent deity. Man’s destiny was to make God’s will manifest in a perfectible happiness. The Enlightenment was animated by this mythic ambition, and the scientist remains the most significant embodiment of the world-conquering, Protestant impulse. From Galileo forward, the view of science has been reductive, oriented toward locating the indivisible units of matter and energy upon which an edifice of fixed values could be erected and against which all things could be measured. This reductive inquiry culminated in the great discoveries of 20th century – General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics – which seemed to deliver us, paradoxically, into a world defined by non-local, spooky effects our minds are not set up to comprehend in any direct way.

This breakdown of the Heston effect occurred to me at the screening of Soylent Green in Santa Fe. In case you don’t recall, the film takes place in 2022 in New York City, a time when overpopulation has resulted in frequent food riots and other horrors. Loosely based on a book by Harry Harrison, the film features Heston as detective Thorn, dispatched to investigate the murder of a wealthy industrialist named Simonson played by Joseph Cotton. Gum-shoeing his way through sweltering streets, Thorn discovers that Simonson was murdered before he could go public with a shocking truth: the new food product, Soylent Green, is made, not from a highly nutritious form of algae …but out of dead people.  Driven by insurmountable environmental problems, the species has turned to cannibalism in its corporate form.

Dennis Meadows

Doyne Farmer, who hosted the screening, has devoted his career in physics to the new field of complex systems. After exploring this terrain in various contexts, including Los Alamos National Labs and Wall Street, Farmer has come to focus on the arena, rich in complexity, of environmental sustainability. The screening of Soylent Green closed out the second week of an annual Sustainability Summer School, organized by Farmer and hosted by St John’s College, to catalyze new research and debate. Presenting lectures were a roster of heavyweights in various fields, including economist Samuel Bowles, anthropologist Lisa Curran, paleobiologist Doug Erwin and the seminal environmentalist Dennis Meadows. In his presentation, Meadows looked back to the Club of Rome “The Limits of Growth” report of 1972, which he co-wrote. Surveying the forty year interlude since that talk, Meadows underscored how resource depletion and over-consumption have unfolded pretty much as predicted, with the most challenging patches coming at us now around the next corner.

The screening of Soylent Green was attended by young working scientists and post-docs, roughly the same demographic mix that would have heard Meadows speak 40 years ago. I had been wondering how they were bearing up under the steady barrage of dire predictions, and the screening was my first chance to meet outside the St. John’s lecture halls. When the lights came up there was a good deal of amusement about the costumes in the film, the sexual morays and the cheesy dialogue of the 1970s. But there was also an uncomfortable, deflated silence. Among the few comments people managed to make was the sobering notion that, given the problems that confront us, eating each other might turn out to be a decent idea.

But before you start measuring your neighbors for the tureen, Soylent Green, in its very dated-ness, revealed where we might look for the expansive energies of optimism. The bleak city-scape of the film seems dated when compared to the more prescient production design of, say, Blade Runner, which was made only a decade later. Working in the 1970s the filmmakers failed to anticipate the explosion in the speed with which human beings are able to process information, the computers and digital imaging technology that decorate urban landscapes today. This exponential increase in information processing – commonly known as Moore’s Law – is ongoing, and while it’s unclear how much it will weigh in the balance against large scale threats such as global warming, its transformative effects remains a wild card in a deck which is otherwise stacked against us.

The rapid spread of internet communications is itself an “emergent” aspect of the steady increase in our capacity to process information. No doubt political authorities are working overtime to figure out ways to put the genie back into the bottle, but our sudden ability to communicate with anyone on this planet, is a powerful and unpredictable force. We may discover that it’s harder to demonize people when you’ve friended them on Facebook. Also the Solylent company is going to have a substantially harder time hiding its tracks when one whistle blower is all it takes. In the era of complex systems, perhaps connective wealth will come to replace material wealth as the signifier of social value.

The internet has other surprising effects as well, including rich cultural cross-pollination. Insights from Asian wisdom traditions, for example, have been integrated with Western psychology and brain science in ways that shed new light on the psychological dynamics that are fueling over-consumption. Readers of this column will sense the approach of a plug for the “revolutionary” Buddhism historian David Loy advocates in his work, and they would be right to do so. I subscribe to Loy’s diagnosis of our root malady – that our problems arise from an inability to make peace with our fundamental groundlessness with respect to being. From this point of view the vast array of problems confronting us can be viewed as a single mistake we are making in a vast array of contexts: seeking to ground what can never be grounded.

Techno-pastoralism – the idea that salvation will arrive via new technology – is a dangerous tendency, no doubt. But in the view of some, the science of complex systems reverses the reductionist focus of the material science that first ignited uncontrolled industrial growth three centuries ago. Something may have shifted at the source of the problems of over-development, in other words.  And looking back some years from now we may discover that this shift has transformed the scientific establishment into a powerful ally in the effort to reverse the dangerous trajectory we are traveling…and all Charlton Heston needs to do is get out of the way.

The Face Outside the Window
by Guy Zimmerman

It’s hard to know what to say about Charles Koch after reading Jane Mayer’s astonishing expose in the August 30th issue of The New Yorker. American politics have been running hot for decades; finally we can name the source of the fever. Together with his brother David, Charles Koch owns Koch Industries, the second largest private company in the US; only Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are thought to be wealthier. In a remarkably narcissistic and anti-democratic act, the Koch boys long ago anointed themselves the heroic duo who would “rip government out by the roots.” In the grip of this wayward intention, they have, for the past four decades, pumped billions of dollars worth of high-grade hatred into the bloodstream of American politics. From the PR campaigns against Jimmy Carter in the 1970s to the anti-Clinton crusades of the 90s, to the faux populism of today’s Tea Party, the Kochs have pushed the envelope on right wing propaganda while their corporation rakes in mega bucks on the progressive policies they have thwarted.

Until the New Yorker article the Kochs accomplished all this from the shadows via front groups with deceptive names like the “Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE)” and “Americans for Prosperity.” Now that they have been revealed, hissing, serpent-like, behind the drapes, it’s worth pondering what it is, finally, that has gotten them so pissed off. Forget about David, who plays the submissive role in the relationship; it’s Charles who emerges as a poster child for the neurosis of the Protestant male in its aggressive, active mode, a cartoon version of daddy Warbucks villainy, a caricature of the malignant oligarch in full bloom.

Feeling compassion for a man like Charles is challenging when you consider what his actions have done to working Americans…or why the nation is slipping from the first world to the second…or why our roads are pitted, our health care a global joke and our prisons over-crowded. Given the grandiosity and malice that have animated Charles’ mindless assault on our collective well-being, it’s hard to draw close enough to see clearly what exactly is being acted out. But only by drawing close will we see a way to ease the pointless suffering in the situation, Charles’ as well as everyone else’s.

When the wealthy embrace the principle of weak government there’s the obvious motive of greed, government being that which, via taxation and regulation, impinges on the pure sovereignty of wealth. Rich libertarians are simply feathering their already well-feathered nests when they espouse such “ideals.” In the case of the Kochs, Jane Mayer does a good job showing how their libertarian advocacy dovetails neatly with their financial interests. As one of the top ten US polluters, for instance, Koch Industries benefits directly from the fake controversy Charles Koch has rustled up concerning global warming. Mayer cites other flagrant examples, such as one Koch lobbyist making the ridiculous claim that air pollution reduces the risk of skin cancer by obscuring sunlight. She also cites how the Koch brothers, shortly after contributing twenty-five million to the American Cancer Society, began lobbying hard to prevent formaldehyde being named a carcinogen. She points out that Koch Industries had just become the nation’s largest formaldehyde producer, and stood to gain much more than twenty-five million if regulation could be derailed.

But to point out the transparent fallacy of libertarianism as a political “philosophy” is actually to fall into a tar baby trap. Libertarianism is not a coherent political theory at all – it is a tantrum masquerading as a political theory. Like all tantrums, its true intention is simply to generate opposition. Why the great need for opposition? Once again, David Loy provides an answer:

“… since the sense-of-self is a psychosocial construct, it is ungrounded and ungroundable—hence always insecure. The self is inherently anxious because it is not a “thing” that could ever be secure. We identify with things that (we think) might provide the grounding or reality we crave: money, material possessions, reputation, power, physical attractiveness, etc. This means that if, for example, a preoccupation with making money is my way to become more real, then no matter how much money I may accumulate, it will never be enough.” –Self Transformation, Social Tranformation, Tikkun Magazine

Afflicted by the groundlessness Loy describes, the libertarian strikes out aggressively at the dominant value system, generating a response that seems to provide, albeit in a negative way, a firm foundation for his existence.

Reading Mayer we learn that the Koch’s father, who was among founders of the John Birch Society in the 1950s, made his fortune building oil refineries for Joseph Stalin. The Koch patriarch was harsh with his boys, traumatizing them in the classic authoritarian manner. One way to view the Koch trajectory is that Charles has devoted his adult life to exporting the pain of this emotional abuse on the rest of us rather than experiencing it himself. The anger at the father is split off and projected outward onto “government” that can be campaigned against. And victory is not really the point of the campaign because with victory would come the realization that this Other was just a stand-in for a battle long since lost: the pain waits in the wake of every triumph and the conflict begins anew with ever-higher stakes.

But mixed in with the self-exonerating contempt wealthy men like Koch seem to feel for those less fortunate, one detects an odd element of resentment. In extreme cases this resentment manifests, bizarrely, as a form of envy. To understand what might be at work here, let’s zoom in on a specific imagined event. Let’s imagine Charles Koch being driven through downtown Wichita toward whatever moated sanctuary provides his head with a pillow for the night…and let’s imagine at a stoplight Charles glances out through the tinted glass…and catches the eye of a homeless veteran begging with his cardboard sign. It’s easy to understand why that glance that might trigger in Charles’ heart feelings of disgust, annoyance, contempt, even guilt…but envy?

Perhaps the answer to this riddle lies in the different ways these two men relate to the experience of our common mortality. After all, there will come a time, in the dead of a night not so far from now perhaps, when death steals in through Charles’ bedroom window and makes a bee-line for that delicate, beating heart. There will be no bargaining then. Money will have no currency. And though that night has not yet arrived, Charles’ sleep is troubled already by the dark mystery of his inevitable death much as the vet’s sleep is troubled by the idea of dying. It’s not hard to imagine Charles lying sleepless disturbed by the realization that there will be no difference, finally, between the death of Charles Koch and the death of his newfound acquaintance crouching in his plywood shelter.

The insidious aspect of wealth is how it supplies an ability to arrange things in a way that encourages the delusions of the self. To a narcissistic personality this ability to arrange things seems to imply a control that he does not have, and can never have. When such a man encounters the “less fortunate” he discovers, in the moment, that the story of wealth is just that: a story. Having money does not, in the end, address the feeling of lack that we all hope it might address. As Loy points out, the homeless man on his street feels himself to be, in the moment, as “real,” as Charles does looking out his window. The vet is, if anything, more likely to be reconciled already to his own vulnerability such that he experience his life with some amount of presence. And this is why it’s not hard to imagine Charles looking out and feeling something like envy toward the vet…and being bewildered, scandalized even, by this feeling of envy.

If visualizing a homeless man introduces distracting issues for you, feel free to substitute any working American into the above scenario. The point is that the problem with wealth, adorned as it is with false promises, is how it can seduce us away from our true humanity…sometimes so far away there is no path back. Then we must confront our death alienated from our fellow man and feeling as though we have not been truly alive. This knowledge may be buried deep at the level of dreams, but it consumes our hearts with bitterness and regret. Spiritual leaders have understood this quite clearly. Remember, for example, Jesus’ famous dictum that it’s easier to “pass a camel through the eye of the needle” than to bring a rich man into heaven. Such statements point to how corrupting wealth can be when it is allowed to fuel the delusions of the self.

On one level, the levers of power must be removed from the hands of Charles Koch, and men like him, as quickly as possible. The power wealth gives these deluded souls will only add to the sum of human suffering, theirs included. But accomplishing this task will be easier when the curtains around Charles’ little Oz machine have been pulled aside. Then we will recognize how his affliction is just an amped up version of our own struggles with delusion, malice and longing…and we can move on and devote our common energies to the very real problems that confront us.

The Century of the Non-Self
by Guy Zimmerman

Talk to people about sustainability and you might notice them recoiling into a resigned stoicism. The momentum in the direction of over-consumption seems vast and formidable, as indeed it is. Better, when caught picnicking between the hi-speed rails, to avert your eyes from the onrushing bullet train, and focus instead on how the honey drips off the baklava. You can invoke Thomas Malthus while you do so. Malthus, the 18th century economist, who, extrapolating food supplies against population growth, predicted mass famine in Europe in the not-too-distant future. The resourcefulness of human beings in their economic activities has proven Malthus wrong again and again, and perhaps we will sidestep disaster this time too.

Indeed there are many places where human ingenuity continues to show bright magic – the sustained, exponential up scaling of our ability to process and convey information, for example. With such dramatic increases in interconnectivity, un-guessed at solutions to challenges like global warming and peak oil could be right around the corner. But perhaps we shouldn’t count on it.

Speaking of interconnectivity, right now, on your computer, you can find “Century of the Self” and watch a riveting four-part BBC documentary by Adam Curtis that sheds light on how we got here. Curtis illuminates a vast, decades long campaign, begun by Edward Bernays in the 1920s, to reshape human behavior so that it suited the aims of a vanguard elite. No, Bernays was not a Bolshevik. Rather, “fast Eddie” was the American nephew of the great Sigmund “Uncle Siggy” Freud, and his field was public relations, marketing, advertising. Bernays, working with colleagues equally schooled in how to manipulate unconscious drives, used psychological insights to shift America from an economy based on need to an economy based on desire.

As you might guess, Bernays and company did not lack for funding; Curtis quotes Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s: “We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” Creating the churning engine of the consumer economy was every inch a conscious project, which also suggests it can be consciously reversed or, at least, seriously revised.

The Century of the Self follows the evolution of Bernay’s ideas as the post war paradise of an oil-fat America proceeded. The reductive Orthodoxy of the circle around Anna Freud and the crude behaviorism of BF Skinner gave way to the deeper, eros-based critique of Reich and Marcuse. And marketers hung on for the ride, reaping the benefits as the generation of the 1960s shifted from social rebellion to the life-style consumerism of the famous “me” generation. The series concludes with the focus group-based politics Bill Clinton and Tony Blair brought to the world in the 1990s.

While as a whole quite strong, Curtis’ series can only cover such a large historical arc by engaging in historical shorthand. There’s the issue of Curtis’ starting point, for example. While Bernay’s certainly seems to have engineered a huge economic pivot toward desire, America was from the start pre-disposed in that direction. Amor is the root of our name, after all, and we have always been a land of desire, a garden of dreams. When the Enlightenment cut the roots of religion, heaven toppled westward and unfurled toward the blue Pacific, and all the hungry souls of Europe felt the sudden tug of self-invention. Happiness, freedom from lack, could be theirs, if not tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow. The secular religion of progress was born long before clever young Eddie climbed up onto Uncle Siggy’s knee.

What Curtis does very well in this series is to underscore how responsive entire populations can be when their dream lives are massaged and stimulated in the right ways. Here we encounter the plasticity of social relations I mentioned in Part 1 of this post. It’s a correlate, on the collective level, of the plasticity of the neuronal structures in our brains that determine how we behave and the choices we make in the world. All the experts agree: change comes through steady persistent effort lit up now and then by shattering, transformative breakthroughs.

At the science writers workshop in Santa Fe a generational shift seemed clear to me. There was Tanya Elliott herself, speaking with focused passion about new approaches to the issue of sustainability. And the younger people in the group seemed to react differently to her presentation. About Elliott’s dire prognosis many older attendees expressed skepticism tinged with an oddly anxious condescension, while in private comments a number of the younger people spoke to me about how large the problem looms for them. They seemed more than prepared to re-examine established habits in return for a new and more sustainable paradigm. Sensibly enough young people want to know that their choices make sense in terms of irreplaceable resources. And the shadows of Exxon Valdez and BP are never far from their minds.

The key value in the consumer economy is progress, for which you need energy. To shift to sustainability, we must move toward balance as a core value. Respecting the motivational energy of desire while insisting also that the needs of the future must also be kept in mind? Call it the “middle way” economy. And just as the psychology of Freud fueled the shift to a desire-based economy, the neurology of happiness may be what fuels the shift to an economy of balance. Delusions of all kinds need to be left by the wayside. Elliott, for example, cited plenty of empirical evidence that, beyond a relatively low threshold, wealth ceases to provide well-being. Being the object of other people’s envy and seeing yourself as part of an elite – these emotions may feel good, but only if you presuppose an underlying neurosis of chronic, soul-consuming lack. This is the great, dirty secret of La Dolce Vita – it’s full of empty calories and leaves you unprepared and flabby in the face of death, which is, famously, no picnic.

So where then for happiness? The pragmatic approach to mindfulness practice that is flourishing in the West is based on empiricism, the direct observation of sensations, feeling, thoughts – the content of experience moment-to-moment. Stripped of unnecessary cultural baggage, it turns out that the wisdom traditions of Asia share a core value with scientific inquiry, an underlying faith in the world, and an embrace of the notion that we have to start any form of engagement with what is verifiably true. Both traditions have a healthy regard for how our picture of the world can be deeply distorted by the brain-structures and biases laid down by prior experience. As meditation teacher and writer Ken McLeod puts it, science and awareness practice both begin with the faith that we need to look at the truth and open to what we find there.

I began this two-part post describing being haunted by a memory of the cement stairs of the apartment complex my family rented in Santa Monica right before my parents split up. As a child I could already read how the patterns at work in my life might play out. It was certainly cause for some alarm. Indeed, for many years our summers came to resemble the close of one of those Antonioni films, full of mute devastation, the catastrophe extending out toward a distant, flat horizon. Or like a Joan Didion essay right at the end, when she has rolled you out into a thin ribbon of alienated sensitivity exposed beneath a hot SoCal sun. Divorce and dislocation, as we all now appreciate, can be hard on youngsters.

But there was also, standing there looking up at the stairs, already the recognition, hard to articulate but always close by, that on a deeper level I was entirely unaffected by what was unfolding in my family’s life. The sun was shining. The August sea was warm, and if you dug down into the sand with your toes you could feel the small sand crabs there, burrowing away. The world was alive and everywhere vibrant, and at moments I knew myself to be profoundly free. Comfort, for me, would lie not in some remembered security, but in the possibility of a more complete connection to that energized field of experience. This sense of being non-separate is what thinkers like David Loy and Francisco Varela describe as the actual truth of our situation. Learning to embrace the mystery of how this non-separation could be true opens toward an energizing sense that we are, moment by moment, participating in the story of how the material of the universe emerges upwards into self-awareness.

And so I have to note in passing that, wherever you are right now, whatever you’re doing, the world around you is luminous. In the name of social progress, Loy asks us to recognize that this luminosity is a crucial part of what we fundamentally are. We tend to forget this fact more or less completely, and identify instead with what limits and constricts us. Such limitations are, of course, real enough too, but we need to continue to investigate how they may be expressing themselves in the larger dysfunctions that threaten our common future.

No doubt correcting this massive imbalance seems unlikely…but then from the start life itself is utterly unlikely. As is the fact that a collection of splitting, looping protein strands would give rise to the kinds of thoughts I am expressing now, or to the fingers that tap these thoughts out into words…or to the optic nerves that, many miles away, carry these improbable symbol-marks up into your neocortex where they bloom out into something that approaches meaning. If it is miracles we need, we might begin noticing when they arise around us. It’s a task that might keep us surprisingly busy, and that might balance somewhat the other efforts we are now called upon to make.

Slowly we discover how we are.
By Guy Zimmerman

On a visit to Santa Fe recently I read up on neuroplasticity and found myself haunted by the memory of a set of cement stairs. These stairs I encountered briefly when I was eight years old and my parents were hurtling toward their final separation. The stairs belonged to a monthly rental in Santa Monica where we had traveled for the summer from the East. They led up to a hallway and, at the far end, an apartment I never wanted to enter. At night the thin walls would shake with my father’s wounded bellowing and the sound of things breaking. We children would gather in the corner of the bedroom, the three of us, around our youngest sister as she cried from an ache in her chest that wouldn’t ease. There was no safety in the world for us, huddled there in the dark, and we knew it and were filled with fear.

I’ve come to Santa Fe to attend a workshop in science writing and I have been reading the recent books authored by the instructors. Sandra Blakeslee, one of the country’s top science writers, is leading the workshop, the 15th of its kind. Working with her is George Johnson, a writer duly celebrated for his ability to explain things like Quantum Chromodynamics in elegant, simple prose. On the first night the attendees gather in the courtyard of the Ghost Ranch for dinner and drinks. As I say hello I keep catching little glimpses of those cement stairs, the somatic charge of old remembered fears traveling up through my body.

You can’t pursue a meditation practice nowadays without bumping into a book on neuroscience. Advances in the technology of brain imaging have opened the inner realm of meditative states to empirical study. The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosche, first published in 1991, was a seminal text. A Buddhist himself, Varela, along with his co-authors, reviewed recent developments in the neuroscience of perception to buttress the core Buddhist concept of non-dualism. After The Embodied Mind, the stream widened considerably. Psychopathologist Richard Davidson began hooking Tibetan monks up to brain scan machines and recording the results. Davidson was soon joined by a growing circle of accomplished scientists and meditators including Jon Kabat Zinn, Daniel Goleman and more recent authors such as Daniel Siegel. Sensing the opportunity, the Dalai Lama lent his considerable weight to the endeavor, helping to create the Mind-Life Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where these investigations continue today. The controversies surrounding this research will continue for a time, no doubt. In the end we will arrive at a closer understanding of the underlying reality of how experience and neurology interweave. Also significant in this ongoing inquiry are non-Buddhist researchers into mind-body issues and brain science, such as Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran and Jeffrey Hawkins.

Dan Siegel’s book, The Mindful Brain, published in 2006, begins with an overview of the emerging field of contemplative neuro-science. Siegel then focuses in on how negative emotional experiences get hard wired into the brain, and how this wiring restricts our freedom and insures neurotic suffering. He presents a new explanation for how specific social and emotional circuits in the brain can be harnessed to transform our experience through basic meditation practices such as mindfulness. Here, I note in passing, are the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths – suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the way to achieve its cessation – in modern dress.

Change comes hard, but it can come, is the message. Affective Anxiety disorders, like the one that sends images of the cement stairs reeling through my mind, can be addressed through concerted effort. When somatic emotional charges are fully felt in the present they release their grip. We no longer confuse such strong emotions with who we are in any real sense, and after a while the conditioning ceases to express itself in neurotic behavior. Engaging with experience in this kind of non-dual mode begins to cultivate within us a sense of inter-connectivity with other beings, and an authentic concern for their welfare. And over time the momentum of practice calls upon us to engage with a larger effort to ease suffering in the world.

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On our first day together the group of us visit Santa Fe Institute which overlooks Santa Fe on a hilltop just outside of town. Founded in 1984, SFI is devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems. This study of “emergent” phenomenon widens the scientific gaze to include those complex processes that arise out of the interactions of much simpler elements. SFI’s Nobel-winning patriarch Murray Gell-Mann has summed up this view with elegant concision: “you don’t need more to explain more.” Whatever mystery there is in the universe resides below, in other words, in the basic particles and forces and how they interact, giving rise to miraculous complexities such as Gell-Mann’s intelligence.

At the Institute we gather around a very long table to hear Omidyar fellow Tanya Elliott talk about her current efforts to construct a model for sustainable development. Elliott is an inter-disciplinary researcher with a doctorate in theoretical physics and an on-going interest in language and cognition. The subject of her talk is how patterns of dysfunction have been hard-wired into the economic and social structures that are reducing our chances of survival. The coordinated, sustained effort required to undo this collective “wiring” clearly echoes the efforts we make as individuals to liberate ourselves from neurotic patterning. The tension between reductive patterning and expansive opening holds true across different scales, including the one where we live and breathe.

In his TED talk on Beauty and Truth in Physics, Gell-Mann points out the remarkable fact that beauty is actually a very successful criterion for choosing the right theory in physics. By beauty, Gell-Mann is talking about the distillation of complex phenomenon into equations with an elegant simplicity to them, E=MC2, for example. Our gradual approach toward a unified theory is like the peeling of an onion where the successive layers resemble each other. The equations derived to make sense of the last layer come close to explaining the new one: approximate self-similarity holds true across the different scales.

Listening to Tanya Elliott I wonder again what self-similarities underlie the long elaborate drama Freud called “Civilization and Its Discontents.” Psychologists often act as if emotional trauma were the exception to the rule, but perhaps trauma is, quite literally, our birthright. More so than any mammal we are dependent on our mothers for survival. The huge neocortex that provides our capacity for awareness is to blame. We can’t stay in the womb a moment longer than we do or our heads would grow too big to emerge. And so our sensitive brains are immature when we enter the world. A colt can get up and run at the end of its first day, while we must cling for dear life to our mothers into our second year. Whenever this external life-support system is unresponsive, even for a brief interval, we are viscerally traumatized, literally in fear for our lives. As they form, our brains are flooded again and again by this intense emotion, which shapes our neural pathways. Our sense of being an independent self is infused from the start by anxiety, and is perhaps entirely an expression of this anxiety.

Unflattering though it may be, embracing this view allows us to understand how the pursuit of “normal” happiness might lead to the collection of ills – nuclear proliferation, peak oil – that currently darken our horizons. Perhaps we need to redefine the paradigms of what constitutes “normal” if we are going to gain any traction over the large scale imbalances that threaten us. Perhaps it is this “background” anxiety hidden behind the “normal” self that is expressing itself in environmental degradation and our addiction to unsustainable levels of consumption.

In books such as A Buddhist History of the West, historian David Loy unpacks the issue of “lack” as a historical and cultural force driving human history. The history of the West, to Loy, is defined by our ongoing attempt to escape or explain away our experience of groundlessness in the world. We are not “real,” in the way we long to be, Loy writes in a remarkable essay titled “Self Transformation and Social Transformation” (Tikkun): “the sense-of-self is a psychosocial construct, it is ungrounded and ungroundable—hence always insecure… we try to bolster an illusory construct by focusing on something outside ourselves, which cannot provide the grounding we seek from it…no matter how much money I may accumulate, it will never be enough. The same is true for fame, power, beauty, and so forth.”

The foundation of Western political thought is the recognition by the ancient Greeks that political systems were themselves social constructions. Loy points out that this is, in fact, an invitation to rearrange our collective life so that it works better for us. Surveying our current situation Loy laments the mass suffering that arises when the “three poisons” of greed, ill will and delusion provide the foundation for social interaction. “Today,” he writes, “our economic system has institutionalized greed, our militarism institutionalizes ill will, and our corporate media institutionalize delusion.” Such a situation might seem daunting and unworkable, but, as many of us know from direct experience, change truly is possible if we first have the courage to look at dysfunction in all its lurid glory.

Hidden in Plain Sight
by Guy Zimmerman

Revolutionary Road is a film centered around the emotional state referred to in Buddhist literature as “lack.” Leonardo DiCaprio, working with Kate Winslet and director Sam Mendes, made Revolutionary Road as an homage to the novel of the same name by Richard Yates. Showing the same restraint the Coen brothers brought to the filming of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, the makers of Revolutionary Road get out of the way and let Yates’ text have it’s say. And, again like No Country, Revolutionary Road concludes in an enigmatic way that indicates the presence of a rich vein of meaning.

Set in the stratified social hierarchy of 1950s America, the story begins as Frank and April Wheeler move into a new home on Revolutionary Road in suburban Connecticut. Already the Wheelers are afflicted by a nameless malaise; behind the breezy, self-confidant banter, lack casts its corrosive shadow. Ready to seize the day, April pleads with her husband to move to Paris and pursue his literary calling. Frank agrees initially, then balks at the last minute, choosing instead to climb the corporate ladder at his firm, which is devoted to the selling of business machines. Cycling through episodes of rebellion and self denial, April spirals down until one day Frank arrives home to find medics out front and a pool of blood in the middle of his living room. On foot he races for the hospital, the camera tracking with him as he runs through the placid streets, arriving just in time to hear news of April’s death. We are given a glimpse of Frank  some months later sitting in mute incomprehension on a park bench in Manhattan where he has moved with his children. The film then veers off, returning to Revolutionary Road where the Wheeler’s realtor, Helen Giving (played by Kathy Bates), is showing their former home to a new pair of up-and-comers. Later that night, Helen gossips unmercifully about Frank and April to her husband Howard. The camera moves in slowly as Howard, a peripheral character up to now, reaches down and slowly turns the volume on his hearing aid down to zero. Through his eyes we watch as Helen’s lack-infused slander is slowly engulfed by the deep silence that underlies the false solidity of this world.

I happened to be reading David Loy’s A Buddhist History of the West when I saw Revolutionary Road and I realized that the novel’s central focus is the feeling of lack that Loy views as a defining feature of our collective life, the Rosetta Stone of Western history. You can think of lack as original sin if you want to be pre-modern about it; or you can adopt Marxist terminology and call it alienation; or free-floating anxiety if you’re a psycho-analytically inclined. In Loy’s view, this sense of lack is linked to our fundamental groundlessness in the world, and our inability to make peace with that groundlessness. Contact with other people only fuels the emotion. From the outside others seem so effortlessly rooted in the specific, so solid and grounded, that we fear we alone are deficient. For some the resultant feeling of lack is a nagging doubt, for others a consuming fire, but we all suffer from it to one degree or another, and our history of domination and social inequity can be viewed as an expression of lack.

Richard Yates

Richard Yates, the author of Revolutionary Road, was no stranger to suffering. The product of a broken home, Yates struggled all his life with alcoholism, isolation and marital difficulties. His burnished, understated realism delivers knowledge earned the hard way, breath by breath, face pressed hard into the rough surfaces of experience. A Yates sentence feels as though it has been dragged shining out of a crucible where each moment has been reduced to molten silver searing to the touch. If you want to understand lack and what to do with it, read Trungpa, Pima Chodron or Stephen Batchelor. If you want to experience it directly, read Revolutionary Road, or, if time is short, rent the movie.

The image of poor Frank Wheeler on his blind run toward the hospital came to my mind a month ago. Driving home from delivering my daughter to school I got a call from my wife. The results of the fine needle aspirant, she told me, indicated that the lump beneath her ear was malignant rather than benign. Blood pounding in my ears I drove fast along side routes through the burnished, sunlit world to get home faster. I felt as if a large hand had taken hold of a branch of my nervous system and given it a good strong yank. Neurons entangled during the twenty years we have shared experience with each other were being pulled apart emitting bursts and tiny screams of light. All my self-centered ambitions, my trespasses and infidelities large and small, my many imagined glories, shames and failings seemed to trail behind my speeding mini-van – the meaningless streamers and confetti of the ego. There is no safety for us in this world.

In such times I give thanks for the various awareness and asana practices that help me stay open and present in the face of fear and despair. I’m fortunate to live in a time and place where the fruit of the great Asian wisdom traditions are readily available, often in a pragmatic, practice-based form that has been distilled by capable Western-born teachers. In January, for example, I was listening to a series of pod casts the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod gave recently as he worked out a new translation of the Ganges Mahamudra. This is the song the great 11th century renunciate Tilopa delivered to the scholar Naropa after suitable period of instructional abuse. One section of McLeod’s presentation in particular had a powerful impact on me, and the sense of stability and peace has continued to unfold through the stressful weeks since Jenny’s cancer was diagnosed.

But I also give thanks for a tradition that is equally transformational in its dogged way, an awareness lineage so secret it remains unrecognized even by itself. I’m talking about the tradition of modern art and literature as it has unfolded in protest against our prevailing materialism since the end of the 18th century. While the Ganges Mahamudra has been a source of strength in crisis, for example, the story Errand by Raymond Carver has also been coming to mind. The most beautiful description of dying I can think of, Errand recounts the final moments of Anton Chekhov’s death at the age of forty-two of tuberculosis. Carver wrote the story while he himself was dying of lung cancer. Like nothing else I know Errand captures the sense presence and ease in the face of whatever is arising that is the aim of mahamudra practice. To stay open and entirely present, at ease, even as death approaches is to give life its proper due.

It would not be so difficult for me to compose a list of eighty-four literary and artistic masters to hang alongside the traditional depictions of the eighty-four Mahasiddahs of the tantric traditions. Kafka and Beckett would be on that list, no doubt. Proust and Joyce would be included. Duchamp and Van Gogh. Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Milosz and Celan. Rilke, certainly. Juan Rulfo, Harold Pinter, Isaac Babel, Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Bernhard. Raymond Carver, Richard Yates…I could go on (and on) and so, probably, could you. It’s easy to forget how radical the Romantics were, Byron and Keats in England, Holderlin and Novalis in Germany – these artists were filling a gap that had opened in the West when the Industrial Age began. Bereft of a viable means of engaging with Being via religion we developed a new mode of making art, a mode oriented toward forging new paths to the open ground of experience. Confronting an essential vulnerability, these pioneers opened new doorways into Being. There we can find timelessness and joy, which are the experiences lack can open into if worked with correctly.

There are times when I believe this movement reached its conclusion in the 1970s with Burroughs, Warhol and Ashberry. Now, as this new mode of Being percolates out into the population (we’re all artists today), the role of art itself moves around again in the Classical direction. In a world full of YouTube-auteurs simple skill – craft – becomes again a relief. Be that as it may, I want to close with the image of Frank Wheeler on his park bench in Manhattan. Devastated by the sudden loss of the familiar emotional coordinates of his life, he is unable to recognize himself in the luminosity that surrounds him. What he needs at that moment is an eloquent and convincing bodhisatva …or at least a good novel to point out where to look, how to stay open.