Café Philos: an internet café

I blame my mother for teaching me three truths about youth.

The first of her truths is that all girls are pretty and all boys are handsome. I used to hate being taught that one by her.

She taught it to me throughout my childhood and adolescence. She did it simply: Merely by praising the beauty of myself and my young friends. I hated it when she did that because it sounded false to my naive ears. Especially during adolescence, I couldn't believe she was anything but a lunatic when it came to beauty, because I had a markedly different standard of beauty than hers.

I had internalized the standards of my peers. Among ourselves, we had no sense of the universal beauty of youth. We didn't see that truth. One of us might be beautiful, but certainly not all of us. Certainly not our classes' ugliest girl nor most homely boy. So I would shrink in fright each time my mother pronounced that one or another of my classes' "less attractive" boys or girls was beautiful. I'd think, "Has anyone overheard her besides me? I'll die if they discover my Mom is an idiot! "

Roughly around 40, I discovered for myself the universal beauty of youth. That is, I finally saw what my mother had been talking about all those years. The beauty of youth transcends whatever happens to be fashionable beauty. It is timeless and universal.

The second truth my mother taught me was how transparent a youth is to an adult.

Mostly she did that by instantly seeing through my every pretension. Many times when we're growing up, we want to put on a front, we want to have pretensions, and we especially do not want our mothers to see through those pretensions. Instead, we want the sense of privacy that comes with imagining no one else knows we're bluffing.

Yet, just as a six year old is transparent to a 16 year old, so is a 16 year old transparent to a full adult. To this day, I have mixed feelings about that truth.

On the one hand, I've learned over the years that it is basic human nature to play at being something before one becomes something. Like all mammals, humans in most cases learn best through play. If you want to be a charitable person, first "play pretend" you are a charitable person. If you want to be a good lover, first "play pretend" you are a good lover. Playing/pretending kicks in whatever gears there are in our brains that allow us to learn very complex behaviors. So, to the extent we put on fronts as part of that learning process, it's not all that helpful when your mother tells you to "quit pretending to be something you're not."

On the other hand, when your mother tells you to "quit pretending", it can be a great lesson in the futility of living inauthentically. The trick is whether your mother knows you well enough to steer you away from trying to become something untrue to your nature, and instead tries to steer you towards becoming things true to your nature. That's largely what my mother did, and today I'm grateful to her for it.

She allowed and even encouraged me to play pretend at things that developed my natural talents into skills. She discouraged me from playing pretending at things I had little or no natural talent for, or which were anti-social. She was able to do that because she was some 39 years older than me and my own true nature was transparent to her.

At 37, I moved to Colorado. Through a strange set of circumstances it happened the first 200 or so people I met here were mostly kids. Some of them attached themselves to me, and I used to wonder why they willingly attached themselves to a man two decades their senior.

One day the answer came to me: I was doing for them what my mother had done for me. I was encouraging them to be true to themselves in the same persistent and often subtle ways my mother had encouraged me to be true to myself. That's what they wanted and even needed from a man two decades their senior -- someone who could see through their insecure fronts, and encourage their true selves.

The final truth my mother taught me about youth is the tragedy of wasted potential. This was something she taught through her comments on people. As I was growing up, she would occasionally point out how this or that person had wasted their talents. She never made a big deal of it, and her comments were always more or less in passing, but her point nevertheless sank in.

Is some part of youth's universal beauty the almost tangible sense of potential that young people exude? I don't know. But I know potential is thick on youth. I know that youth is a time when crucial steps are taken -- or at least should be taken -- to realize that potential. And I know that a thousand pitfalls await youth which will prevent all but a minority of them from ever fully realizing their genuine potential. That last strikes me as an especially poignant tragedy, and I think the reason the tragedy of wasted potential affects me as deeply as it does is in part because of my mother's teachings.

Again, this is something I saw most clearly in my late 30s and 40s, and if you have kindly read this essay, you will know by now that's a pattern with how I've absorbed my mother's teachings about youth. In each case, she pointed me to look. But in each case, I either didn't look, or perhaps couldn't look, at what she pointed until I was middle-aged. Yet, once I looked, I saw clearly what she had been all those years talking about.

Now, if I add all three of those lessons together to make a sum, then I get something like this: My mother prepared me through her teachings to clearly see, once I was older, how beautiful youth is, how important it is that youth learns to be true to itself, and how tragic it is when it doesn't.

All in all, I think those are some pretty profound lessons.

D.H. Lawrence somewhere says that youth should not be misled into believing that it must rebel against authority and tradition in order to achieve freedom. Lawrence asserts that those battles have already been fought and won. Youth is largely free to do as it pleases today, and so it is misleading youth to tell them that they should be battling against authority and tradition.

On the other hand, Lawrence points out that the real revolution youth must accomplish is "to find the undiscovered and unsuspected door." That is, to find and exploit the aspects of life that youth does not even as yet suspect are part of life. Doing so will bring about a greater revolution in youth than will battling against authority and tradition.

What do you think of this? Is the real job of youth to find the undiscovered and unsuspected door, or is it to battle against tradition and authority? Which brings greater freedom? Which is more revolutionary?

On a forum I frequent is a person who wants to be your guru. He's had some mystical experiences (He claims they are beyond counting), and has reached firm conclusions about the nature of god, the self, and the universe.

Whoever doesn't agree with him is a fool, he says, because he has had so many more profound experiences than they. Better yet, he's even brighter than they are too. How can you beat such reasonable qualifications?

Some of the people on the forum are even impressed by this man. He's witty in his put-downs, you know. A sure sign he's the Buddha.

Some years ago, I did a stint as a firefighter. In the ready room, the room where we waited for the calls, the men would bullshit. "Captain, what do you think of abortion?"

"Simple! Abortion is always wrong."

"Lieutenant, what do you think of abortion?

"It's murder, plain and simple."

"Anderson, what do you think of abortion?"

"There's no two ways about it: A woman has a right to choose."

The men would bullshit like that until a call came in.

Then they'd get real.

A fire does not favor firm conclusions. Fighting a fire is a game of odds. A game of probabilities. You cannot be certain what the fire is going to do. You can't bullshit a fire.

In a fire, you calculate the odds, take your best chance, and go with it. You don't look for absolute truth. There is none. You don't reach absolute conclusions because you're not a fool. You stay alert. You remain open to the changing reality.

Reality is always changing. It's just that most of our time is spent in the ready room where we don't notice it changing. So, we relax and bullshit. We speak with absolute conviction. We even call that kind of talk, "being serious". But it's light years from being serious. It's light years from reality.

I suppose it's possible that "seeing god" somehow leaves a person with absolute convictions about god, the self, and the universe.

But if I had to bet on that, I'd bet those absolute convictions are simple, fundamental misinterpretations of what he or she experienced. I'd bet what they really experienced was just as uncertain as dancing with fire.



(Photo courtesy of Ernest von Rosen, www.amgmedia.com)

This morning, I poured myself a glass of milk and noticed as I poured it that I was thinking the same random thought I'd had the day before when I poured myself a glass of milk. But that wasn't all, for yesterday I'd noticed that very same thing repetitious thought when I poured myself a glass of milk.

Moreover, in recent days, I've discovered more repetitious thoughts. It seems when I put on my shoes, the same thought pops into my head as when I last put them on. When I brush my teeth, I have the same thought as the last time I brushed my teeth. These are all different thoughts -- I don't think the same thing putting on my shoes as I do brushing my teeth -- but they are in each circumstance the same thought today as they were in that same circumstance yesterday.

It seems so many of the spontaneous thoughts I have on a given day are repetitious.

I can guess at a simple explanation for it. Some of the neurons in my brain have made more or less random associations between, say, putting on my shoes and my memories of the weather on a certain day last week. So, when I put on my shoes those neurons are prompted to fire and I remember the weather on that day. It doesn't surprise me that happens. What has surprised me in recent days is how much it happens.

So many of my thoughts are familiar to me that I'm beginning to suspect the brain is an extraordinarily repetitious animal. It seems to like ruts. As I was going to the laundry room a few minutes ago, it occurred to me (for the first time, apparently), "These repetitious thoughts are comforting. They reassure me I am the same person I was the day before. They provide a semblance of stability in an ever changing world. Yet, that semblance of stability is based on the mere repetition of thoughts, the repeated firing of the same neurons, rather than on the stability of events. Is it therefore illusionary?"

I didn't pursue the idea very far. It's one of those notions that can be tested through observation, so I decided to simply wait and watch rather than try to reason it out.

Earlier, Don and I drove out of town south into a hazy fall afternoon. We speculated the haze could be coming from the large California fires, for there seemed no other source for it. It's happened before that smoke has drifted hundreds of miles into Colorado from large fires as far away as California. Was that happening today?

No way of to be certain. But the distant mountains to the south and west were obscured by the haze while above us the sky still embraced the royal blue depth of a perfect autumn day.

I hadn't driven south of Colorado Springs in well over two years. You forget how beautiful the hills and canyons are. The colors are mostly understated and subtle in the fall. Olive junipers dot the yellow grasses, cling to the sandy red cliffs like freckles. The deeper greens of Ponderosa and pinon pines crowd the junipers, and the scrub oak has copper leaves. All respectable earth tones. But then along the water courses, the light bursts as it falls into the luminous yellow leaves of the cottonwoods.

Gorges and canyons, mesas and buttes. The land seems eternal here. It's hard to believe people own it -- you think more of the land owning them.

There's defiance of the land in some of the houses people have built. Houses whose architecture is traditional in distant parts of America -- in the northeast, for instance -- but not here in Colorado. You can't look at those houses without imagining some newcomer has tried to transplant a bit of the lush eastern United States, complete with well watered bluegrass lawns, to the rocky, thin soils of the arid west. Maybe he got homesick for a more congenial landscape. Maybe he's in denial he no longer lives in Massachusetts, Georgia or Kentucky. Whatever the case, it's not really your problem -- yet in this land, his home is an alien.

Some miles south of the Springs, Don and I turned off the main road and, after a few miles, entered Phantom Canyon. Phantom Canyon is a narrow gorge whose rock walls rise 150 or 200 feet. It winds for miles up into the Rockie Mountains -- right into the heart of the high gold country. The road changed from asphalt to gravel, and then from gravel to earth. The walls were mostly red rock deeply fractured by the weather, like an old man's face; and brilliant cottonwoods lined the floor of the canyon.

It's strange how in some parts of Colorado you can see everywhere the evidence of people -- you are after all, traveling a road built by people -- and yet you almost feel you are the first person to explore the land. Twice in the Canyon cars passed us coming from the other direction and each time the occupants waved to us as if we were the first people they'd seen all month. I think that feeling of being a little bit beyond the boundaries of society doesn't just come from the scarcity of people on the Phantom Canyon road. I think it comes from the way the world rises up 150 to 200 feet above you. I think it comes from the way the trees, the grasses, and the brush obey their own laws -- not some gardener's laws. I think it comes from the uncivilized quiet that confronts you when you finally stop and step out of your car. But whatever the source of it, the effect is to give you a slightly different perspective on yourself.

It's not the beauty of nature that most inspires me to reflect on myself. Nature is not always beautiful. But nature is always indifferent. And it's that indifference that inspires both thought and feeling about the human condition.

You can never really put what you learn about yourself from nature in words because what you learned, you didn't learn from words. Rather, you simply experienced a truth. You can write all the commentaries you want about your experiences, but you cannot recreate them through those commentaries. Words never brought a fractured rock cliff into existence.

At times, it seems that societies revolve around the ego. Perhaps it can even seem they are huge conspiracies to make the ego primary in this world. I think the ego is just as much a part of us -- of who we are as a species -- as our eyes and noses, and I reject any ideology that calls for the annihilation of the ego. Yet, I don't think the ego is of primary importance. I think it has its place, but that place is not central.

I believe I see that most clearly when I am out in nature, away from society, away from its tendency to make the ego primary. Yet, it is also out in nature when I feel I am being most true to myself. Is that a paradox?

Unless you are trying to pass a class in metaphysics, whether god ontologically exists or not is trivial at best and more likely irrelevant. It's true that discussing the issue can, if done well, exercise the brain and sharpen one's thinking, but so can many other issues exercise the brain and sharpen one's thinking. Overall, wondering whether god exists or not is nearly pointless -- except perhaps as a way of distracting ourselves from dealing with more authentic challenges of living.

Underlying the mistaken notion that god's existence or non-existence is vitally important are the assumptions that god, merely by god's ontological existence, saves us from meaninglessness, makes sense of our suffering, preserves us from eternal death, is with us in times of need, and so on and so forth. Yet, not one of those things can be demonstrated -- not to you, not to me, not to anyone.

The mere ontological existence of god implies almost nothing about the nature of god or god's relationship to us. For instance, suppose that tomorrow someone finally proves the universe must necessarily have a creator, and therefore god must ontologically exist. Fine. But would it necessarily mean anything to us? Would it mean there was salvation from eternal death? Would it mean god in any way cares for us? Would it tell us a thing about whether god has a purpose for us or not? On what grounds could anyone answer "yes" to those questions?

Yet, it is crucial to point out here that some people experience god. To be precise, they have an experience of something they choose to name "god". Other people, having similar experiences, choose to say they experienced the Tao, the Buddha-Nature, the Great Spirit, the Void, the Ultimate Weirdness, or some other placeholder. It doesn't much matter what people call their experiences experiences of. That seems to be more determined by what society, religious tradition, or culture they come from than by anything else. What matters is those experiences are so often transformative.

They are transformative in ways the mere ontological existence of god is not. For instance, someone who has had such experiences might find they no longer fear dying. Not because they now believe in a life after death, nor because they now have a reassuring theology, but simply because they have changed, been transformed, into someone who doesn't fear death. Likewise, someone who has had such experiences might find they are now capable of much greater love. Again, not because they believe god ontologically exists and has commanded them to love, but simply because they have been transformed into someone who is more loving. While the ontological existence of god (or the Tao, or whatever) is at best trivial, the experience of god is often profoundly transformative.

The question of whether god exists or not is insignificant compared to the transformation that can occur when one experiences god. Moreover, that transformative experience does not come about from believing in god. You can believe in god to your heart's content, but all your hours of belief will do nothing to bring about a transformative experience of god. Why is that?

"God" is just a symbol -- no more, no less. To say you believe in god is quite the same -- and just as trivial -- as saying you believe in the star that represents Paris on a map of France. It is just as insignificant -- and just as trivial -- as saying you believe in your wife's name. Nor does it matter in the least how elaborate, sophisticated and complex your notion of god is. For does it matter whether you say you believe in the star that represents Paris on one map, or you say that you believe in the more detailed street map that represents Paris on a different map? In both cases, your mere belief will not be the same thing as an actual experience of Paris -- regardless of how passionately or fervently you believe.

For those reasons, belief in god is quite often mere escapism. It is like reading a map of Paris rather than visiting Paris. It can be no more than a longed for daydream.

At Andersonville during the American civil war, the Union soldiers who were held prisoner there by the Confederates lacked salt. When you go without salt, you begin to crave it, and the craving of some of those soldiers became so intense that they would cut the world "salt" from their Bibles and chew the word. It did nothing to preserve their lives -- they starved for salt anyway. But it had a psychological effect on some of those who ate the word. It comforted them.

For many people belief in god is just such a comfort. It does nothing to really nourish them spiritually, it is by no means as transformative as experiencing god, but it does give them a morale boost -- just as eating the word "salt" comforted some of the soldiers who did it at Andersonville. Perhaps ironically, I think most of us would prefer the comfort of believing in god to the experience of god. That might be why we place so much emphasis on whether we believe or not.

"Competition can be a very intense experience and a very rewarding one, or it can be enormously destructive. External pressure, whether it’s exerted by a coach, a school, a ski club, or a country, is what can make it a negative thing. When they use you to satisfy their need to succeed, when they impose their value system on you, then competition isn’t personally rewarding anymore.... You’re either a winner or a loser.... There’s no way in my mind that you can divide humanity into those two categories."

- Andrea Mead Lawrence (Olympic Gold Medalist)



"In tennis, at the end of the day you’re a winner or a loser. You know exactly where you stand.... I don’t need that anymore. I don’t need my happiness, my well-being, to be based on winning and losing."

- Chris Evert (Champion Tennis Player)

"What is the meaning of life?" The classic way to approach that question is to approach it intellectually. When approached in that manner, the most common answer almost suggests itself: Any secure meaning to life must be derived from something thought to be outside the self that is superior to the self. And what better fits that "something" than an ontologically existent god?

God is a convenient source of meaning. But let's briefly examine that here. Suppose, then, there were an ontologically existent god. And suppose that god was the creator of the universe. Further suppose that god created a heaven in order to offer us the option of spending eternity with Him in a paradise. Would any of that mean the meaning of our lives was to spend eternity with god? Not necessarily.

It could only become the meaning of our lives if we ourselves decided to make it the meaning of our lives. There's no logical reason why it would automatically become the meaning of our lives. The truth of that point can easily be seen: We are free to choose some other meaning for ourselves than spending eternity with deity. In other words, the source of meaning -- even if god exists and has created a heaven for us -- is ultimately ourselves.