The life and times of Isaac Dust
I love how Sam Harris cuts to the quick. And I like the format of this Big Think website, elitist snob that I am. I recommend checking out the rest of Harris’s “ideas,” as well as those of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Or else keep it locked to Celebrity Rehab. It’s all good.
Below is Harris’s take on the pursuit of happiness (and it’s coherent, despite the freeze-frame that makes Sam look like he just hit the bong hard):
Watching tonight’s new episode of Celebrity Rehab was, admittedly, a complete waste of time (I knew Daniel Baldwin was full of shit!). Same goes for ninety-nine percent of all my television viewing. I’m left with a vague sense, a twinge in the gut that says, “Diminishment.” But then there’s TED.
TED started out as an annual conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) gathering together cutting edge thinkers, activists, and visionaries. Now, these fascinating talks are available to the public, via the TED website and Blog.
The latest TED Talk is by author/gardener Michael Pollan, who has an interesting take on the power of perspective. I dig it. All the political rhetoric I’ve been hearing lately, propping up us Americans as if we were the pinnacle of creation, the center of the fucking universe. If Pollan is right, maybe corn is really king…
Okay, so I couldn’t resist. I don’t have cable TV in my own home, but since I’ve been staying at my parents’ house (recovering from knee surgery) I’ve succumbed to the power of the remote. Last night I sat in front of the tube for three hours straight, first to watch the Democratic debate and then to check out the latest episode of Celebrity Rehab.
Now, for those who don’t know, I spent the last three years of my professional life working at an adolescent substance abuse recovery center, so I could pull a Pete Townshend and claim my watching the show is strictly “research.” The truth is, though, I cannot look away.
At first I was disgusted by the entire premise of the show. Especially disturbing were the scenes of an obviously mentally ill Jeff Conaway weeping and threatening suicide. It quickly dawned on me though, as I continued to watch on, that what I was seeing on the show almost exactly mirrored what I saw day in and day out on the job. I’m telling you, it’s positively uncanny. Everything is right out of the Adolescent Chemical Dependency Unit playbook — from the patients trying to hook up with each other, the sneakiness and rule breaking (secret cell phone conversations), the “these rules are stupid” attitude, the constant threats to leave treatment, the mind-boggling contradictory statements, the rationalizing of any and every behavior, the horror stories of abuse, the emotional immaturity, the group dynamics, the crazy visitors and dysfunctional relationships.
The main difference, other than the cameras and microphones, is that the majority of the kids I worked with were court-ordered and had zero motivation for change. The similarities are striking though, and how it is that rural Kentucky teenagers can be so much like washed-up semi-celebrities, I just don’t know. The obvious answer is: “They’re all addicts.” But I don’t think I’m buying that.
In fact, the more I think about it, the less sure I am about what “addiction” really is. Frankly, the party line towed by many addiction professionals — that addiction is a treatable, medical disease, based in the brain — seems to me to be a deeply confused misreading of the available data. I’m in the process of exploring some alternative approaches, which I’ll discuss in more detail some other time. For now, you can check out my Integral Recovery page, which is part of my new Integral Psychology Portal (an ongoing project to both clarify and share my evolving perspective on life and whatnot).
Watching Scotch Mist (a fifty minute film of Radiohead playing songs off their latest album, In Rainbows) makes me want to drop everything, call my friend Eric, and join his band (for the third time).
My favorite moment from the film was this version of Faust Arp, with Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood playing out in the middle of some field at dusk.
I once joked that Americans may just as well elect the next president via a reality TV show: “The Next American President.”
Not only do I believe a president COULD be elected this way, I’m starting to think it’s ACTUALLY happening. Instead of Simon, Paula and Randy we have Wolf Blitzer, Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly.
All they need to do now is share the voting results in a suspenseful way, like Ryan Seacrest does:
“Barack [gasp] …You are safe [deep exhale]. You can have a seat. That means Hillary and John, you are in the bottom two. One of you will go home tonight. We’ll find out who, after a word from our sponsor.
[Returning] John, you sang “Working man’s blues.”
Wolf thought you were a bit too white, but he liked the way you stayed positive.
Keith thought your hygiene was immaculate, but he said your delivery was ‘Ho hum.’
Bill liked your energy, but thought you should’ve lost the southern accent.
Hillary, you sang “Black Magic Woman.”
Wolf thought it was your best performance yet.
Keith thought your voice was strong, but that your dance moves could use a little work.
Bill just snarled and called you a “Liberal Fascist.”
America has voted. Hillary, you are…
SAFE! Congratulations, you will be moving on to the finals.
John, I’m sorry, that means you will not be The Next American President.
We’ll miss you around here, big guy.
[Roll video montage]
John, how ’bout taking us out with one more stump speech.
America, let’s give it up one last time for John Edwards!”
So, one of things I’ve been doing these days (other than rehabbing my knee) is thinking about the field of Psychology. I started trying to figure myself out at an early age, was a Psych major in college, and later on grabbed a funky Master’s Degree in East/West Psychology. On top of that, I’ve been working in the field for fifteen years, yet I’ve never considered myself a “psychologist.” This is probably because, in the technical sense of the term, a psychologist is a licensed professional, one who has jumped through a series of hoops which I’ve avoided for various reasons.
Yet, in a broader sense, I am a psychologist, as I’ve dedicated a big chunk of my life to a fairly systematic inquiry into the nature of human experience. As an undergrad, I had a real love-hate relationship to the field. More than anything, I was looking for a method of self-discovery, and what I found was an academic discipline which appeared disinterested in the deeper realms of subjective experience. A “study of the soul” it was not, especially at Binghamton University, where they took a strictly experimental science perspective. The APA (American Psychological Association) seemed to me to be “The Man,” keeping down creative inquiry for the sake of some money-driven status quo.
When I later moved to San Francisco and was exposed to the perspective of Transpersonal Psychology, my mind was blown and I felt like I had finally found my place in the field. As a graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies, I felt completely at home and certain that I would be a famous Transpersonal Psychologist who would rock the world with my brilliant discoveries.
But then those fucking APA Nazis pulled the rug out from under me, as I was told the East/West Psychology program would have to be torn down (with only the POSSIBILITY of eventual restructuring) in order for CIIS to meet new accreditation criteria. With student loan debts already at critical levels, it seemed insane to invest tens of thousands more into a program which might soon cease to exist, so I stopped my PhD work in its tracks, wrote a master’s thesis, and got out of Dodge.
Love and Rock N’ Roll took center stage for the next decade, and my work in the mental health field, while engaging and meaningful in many ways, has been primarily a matter of paying the bills. Which brings us to today, as I contemplate the next stage of my journey, the one that will begin when my wife and I return from Mexico in May.
For a while now, I’ve wanted to try my hand at teaching Psychology. The trouble has been — aside from my funky master’s degree giving pause to potential employers — that nearly all academic institutions are locked into the same cookie-cutter, status quo, APA sanctioned curriculum that drove me nuts back when I was an undergrad. So, I’ve been re-examining the landscape, seeing if there isn’t a way for me to operate within the established field while still bringing in the transpersonal and integral perspectives.
I’m sure it can be done, and in the coming weeks I might use this blog to think out loud a bit on this topic.
My mother was watching “The Biggest Loser” the other night while I was exercising on the stationary bike. I remarked that it was hard for me to feel much sympathy for these grossly overweight people, much less give them a big pat on the back if and when they lost weight. After all, I said, isn’t that like giving someone a medal for ceasing to bang their head against a wall? I mean, it’s a good thing to lose weight, but aside from the rare thyroid condition or what have you, didn’t these people get fat in the first place because of ignorance and poor choices? Clearly, I wasn’t feeling much in the way of compassion for these people, and my mother got on me a bit, saying that not everybody is as disciplined as I am.
Now the first thing I thought to myself was “Shit — I’m always lamenting my LACK of discipline.” Then I really started to ponder about whether or not any of us really has a choice about such matters, whether or not we truly are responsible for our own misery and/or fulfillment. I’ve been operating on the premise that I, in fact, AM responsible for my own happiness, having seen time and again how I choose the dulling comfort of the status quo when faced with the possibility of deep personal change. So, naturally I assume most other adults choose a life of relative ignorance and suffer the consequences accordingly.
This way of thinking though, does let one off the hook when it comes to feeling compassion, which might be an indicator something is amiss. After all, isn’t compassion supposed to spring naturally and effortlessly from the state of spiritual wakefulness?
Anyway, later on I went upstairs and finished the book The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle, and came across the following:
It is misleading to say that somebody “chose” a dysfunctional relationship or any other negative situation in his or her life. Choice implies consciousness – a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means that you are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind.
This makes a lot of sense to me, as did about ninety-nine percent of what Tolle had to say throughout the rest of the book. Apparently, Oprah liked the book as well, and her stamp of approval put the book in millions of hands. Basically, Tolle subscribes to the notion that the main barrier to spiritual enlightenment is our identification with the mind or ego. He advocates a practice of focusing awareness and attention on present moment experience, particularly the felt sense of the body, as a means of breaking our attachment to thought forms and thus realizing our true, transpersonal nature.
His basic view of enlightenment fits quite well with my own experience, and I appreciate his keen ability to express subtleties of spiritual inquiry in simple, direct language. In fact, he expresses his views in a pretty radical fashion, and it surprises me that so many people read his book. I wonder how many people really “bought” it. It struck me that if one REALLY believed what this guy was saying, the implications would be staggering in terms of how one goes about living one’s life. This certainly has been the case for me, although I’ve been struggling to integrate my transpersonal realizations into my daily life for many years now, long before I came across Tolle’s book.
For the most part, The Power of Now struck me as an articulate expression of what I already know to be true in my experience, at least as I understand it presently. However, I can’t endorse it a hundred percent. At times Tolle slips out of his clear, direct, experience-based language and makes bold, dogmatic metaphysical claims. For instance, he made reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and claimed one needed a certain degree of consciousness while dying in order to realize “conscious immortality,” or else be subject to “another round of birth and death.” This strikes me as nutty. How in the bloody hell does he know what happens at biological death? And he also equates women’s premenstrual tension with “the awakening of the collective female pain-body” — as if we’re just supposed to take his word for it. Again, this is kinda nutty, and would be quite enough for many to reject everything else he says. And that would be a shame.
I’ll close with another quote from the book that I dig. By “practicing surrender” Tolle is talking about accepting the present moment as it is, which means letting go of thought forms and becoming deeply present to the flow of experience as it felt in the body:
Until you practice surrender, the spiritual dimension is something you read about, talk about, get excited about, write books about, think about, believe in – or don’t, as the case may be. It makes no difference. Not until you surrender does it become a living reality in your life.
There’s an interesting discussion going on at the Progressive Buddhism blog under the heading “The difficulty helping people.”
A commenter named Bill shared the following Taoist story, which I like a lot:
There’s an old Taoist story about a man whose horse ran away. When it happened, all his neighbors came over and said “Gee, it’s really awful that your horse ran away and so forth…” And the man said, “Maybe, maybe not.” The next day the horse came back and brought twenty really nice wild horses with it. And all the neighbors came and observed how really great it was that this guy now had all these new horses- and the man said, “Maybe, maybe not.” The next day the man’s son was out trying to break one of the horses, and got thrown off and broke his leg. All the neighbors came over and talked about how awful that was and so forth, and the man said, “Maybe, maybe not.”
So finally, the next day the army came by conscripting young men to go fight in some war, and they didn’t take the man’s son because he had a broken leg.
Blogger ~C4Chaos continues the Integral-Atheism discussion:
“Excellent discussion guys. allow me to address both your points with a link to a debate between Sam Harris and Scott Atran (post-Beyond Belief 2006 conference).
i do like Sam Harris, but i think Scott Atran had the upper-hand in this exchange due to Atran’s field experience and his implied approach of meeting people where they’re at, in short, Atran’s arguments is more “integral” than Harris’s arguments, especially when it comes to the discussion of sacred values.”
My response:
I’ve written about this many times before, but it always amazes me when highly intelligent people disagree. What does it say about reason that we can support almost any claim? That’s a whole other discussion, I know.
I must have some bias for Sam Harris’s way of thinking, because I always seem to agree with him. He has a real knack for cutting to the quick:
“The point is not that all religious people are bad; it is not that all bad things are done in the name of religion; and it is not that scientists are never bad, or wrong, or self-deceived. The point is this: intellectual honesty is better (more enlightened, more useful, less dangerous, more in touch with reality, etc. ) than dogmatism. The degree to which science is committed to the former, and religion to the latter remains one of the most salient and appalling disparities to be found in human discourse.”
Ironically (as a supposed, pro-evidence guy), what I didn’t like about Atran’s essay is his continual referencing of social science studies. Whenever someone says “Studies show…”, I get very skeptical. Without the study in front of me, I have only the author’s interpretation to rely on, an interpretation which I may or may not agree with. I’ve always preferred common sense arguments to “Studies show” arguments. Working in the mental health field as long as I have, I’ve seen first hand how economic, political, and personal agendas can distort the process of scientific research. This too, is another discussion, although I’m surprised religious-minded folk don’t use this argument more when railing against a science-based society. Scientific conclusions are often not nearly as objective as people might think.
Wilber is a master at stretching the “Studies show” spiel to support a conclusion that he undoubtedly arrived at long before digging up the research. Look how much mileage he’s gotten out of Taylor’s TM study. I’d be more impressed with AQAL if Wilber came right out and said “I just came up with this shit, because it makes so much sense” — instead of trying to make it look like a model built from the ground up through careful examination of empirical evidence.
With that, I’m WAY off topic and revealing to myself (and probably to all of you) what MY not-so-hidden agenda in all this must be, namely to shoot down Ken Wilber and to prop up Sam Harris. WHY I’m compelled to do this, only semi-consciously, I’m not sure. I’ll have to sit with that a bit.
There’s an interesting discussion unfolding on Julian Walker’s Blog regarding the intersection of Integral Theory and the New Atheist movement. Here’s my latest bit, in response to Eric:
Eric said:
“I subscribe to the notion that if you really want to help people grow through levels of development, then finding ways to provide for the healthiest possible setting for each structure while improving life conditions and increasing opportunities for all people to explore and develop into higher structures will be more effective than simply arguing against the existence of a mythic-literal concept of God.”
My response:
I just don’t know what this means in terms of taking action, right now, today. HOW do you find ways to provide for the healthiest possible setting for each structure? HOW do you increase opportunities for all people to explore and develop into higher structures?
I think creating cognitive dissonance in people so that they might let go of distorted thought patterns IS working to provide a saner, healthier setting within which continued personal growth can flourish. I don’t see the issue here as helping people “develop” from a “Mythic” center of gravity to a “Rational” center of gravity [or “structure of consciousness”]. People’s already established capacity for reason needs to “develop” from pathological distortion to healthy clarity. The vast majority of religious people have highly developed powers of reason in all areas of their lives EXCEPT when it concerns their religious beliefs. Many of the 9/11 highjackers were highly educated. Yet they believed they’d get a date with seventy-two virgins by murdering thousands of innocent people. This insane belief needs to be acknowledged as insane, right now, today, along with countless other insane beliefs held in other religions, otherwise reasonable people will continue to act on these beliefs in necessarily ignorant and destructive ways. It is not necessary to “eliminate” everything about religion – ritual, community, contemplative practices, etc. – and Sam Harris is certainly not trying to do that. He’s just trying to expose dangerous and downright stupid ideas for what they are, so that we all can be free to move forward as a species without continuing to harm ourselves and others.
I’ve yet to hear a single practical solution to any specific problem from Ken Wilber or his followers. Everything under the sun in translated into AQAL terms, which seems elegant and satisfying until we recognize that nothing has changed. “Meditate” or “Try my ILP program” –that’s about all I can think of as the practical applications of AQAL thus far.
Rational dialogue has been and will continue to be a true agent of transformation for individuals and societies. The capacity for reason is already there, it just needs to get healthier, stronger and clearer. That’s what Sam Harris – and Ken Wilber for that matter – have done for me: Clarified my thinking. This clarity has, in turn, affected my actions in ways that have been fulfilling and transformative [and, I hope, helpful to others].