Author: Neil Hanson

Are We Chasing Happiness or Running From Something Behind Us?

The story is told of an old rabbi who visited a bustling town, and was nearly overwhelmed by the pace at which everyone was moving.. Everyone was running so quickly, not matter which direction they were going, so he assumed they must not all be running from something. He stopped a young man and asked him, “Why are you running?” and the man says “I’m running to make a living and find happiness”.

The rabbi stood looking up into the young man’s face for a moment, holding his arm. When the young man tried to politely release himself to continue his errand, the rabbi bade him wait just a minute. He looked into the young man’s eyes, and asked, “What makes you so sure that the living you need to make is in the direction you’re running? How can you be sure the happiness you’re seeking is running away from you, rather than trying to catch up with you? Maybe the living you seek is behind you waiting to catch you, along with the happiness you say you want.”

We’re all running. It’s the American way to be driven and ambitious and fast-paced. New Yorkers pride themselves in their frenetic pace.

I don’t think you can easily change the stripes on a Zebra. I am who I am, and you are who you are. Some combination of genetic and environmental factors shaped the person we have become. I do like to go fast often. I get joy out of being productive and out of making “progress” toward some goal.

While I can’t change these things about who I am, I certainly can force myself to stop and look around as I move through the life I’ve made for myself. I can force myself to look back behind me as well as up in front of me. I can continually ask the questions of myself:

What am I running from?

What am I running toward?

Are there some things that I’m running from that should catch me? Are there times that I need to rest and wait for happiness and “living” to catch up with me?

And the things that I chase – are they really staying so distantly in front of me, or is this my illusion? Am I continually running past some of these targets I’m chasing, not savoring the moment when I catch them, focusing my attention on the next target?

Prayer. Probably the best way to take that moment of reflection. Probably the best way to look behind, and to look ahead, and ask those hard questions.

Note: Story adapted from one told by Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks of the British Commonwealth on a broadcast of an event on Krista Tippett’s “Being” radio show.

Does Evolution Select Against The Soul?

I recently listened to an interview that Krista Tippett did with French geologist Xavier Le Pichon, and it got me thinking quite a bit about his point of view on our evolution as “humanity”.

My thoughts, inspired by that interview, kept coming back to the notion that what defines us uniquely from other animals is compassion. I should also add a connection to a recent book on exactly this subject – The Prehistory of Compassion by Dr Penny Spikins.

I’m not sure I agree completely with this notion, but I might… I just wonder a bit.

Let’s talk about the Neanderthal. Archeological records suggest these creatures were religious (shamanic capes found as part of grave at Hortis site), that they were artistic (creating musical instruments), and that they showed compassion (remains discovered indicating an infirm tribe member was cared for throughout his life).

I think I’d consider all these to be human characteristics – religion, art, and compassion – and they were all three part of the life and culture of a folk that we don’t consider to be “human” like we are. There are some, in fact, who believe that compassion may have been more deeply engrained in Neanderthal culture than it is in ours, and that compassion may have made Neanderthal vulnerable.

Don’t get me wrong – I really want to believe that compassion is a uniquely human characteristic. I really want to believe that compassion is something that ties us to G-d, and that it is compassion that strikes the chords of harmony between the spirit of G-d and the soul of man.

But I’m not there yet. I see behavior in many animals that looks a lot like compassion to me. I’ve seen mother deer or elk in clear pain over the loss of their fawn. You read stories of Chimps who carry their dead baby’s corpse for days in what appears to be mourning.

It’s not that I question compassion as “holy” – I absolutely believe it is. Just as I believe a capacity for art and religion are “holy”. I’m just less and less convinced as time goes along that “holiness” is something that we have any sort of exclusive right to claim.

If you read my blogs and rants much at all, you know how much I dislike the human tendency to claim one particular perspective on G-d and “righteousness” as the one and only way that G-d chooses to be part of our life. This tendency has caused more destruction in the history of mankind than anything else in my opinion.

Why would I expect that G-d would look for some special relationship with one and only one species of mankind throughout the history of the world? Why would She choose only this most recent period in the history of our earth to establish that relationship? In fact, why would He have chosen only the creatures of this earth in the vast universe to establish a relationship with?

As I look at the limited evidence, I think I’m prone to accept that compassion is, indeed, one of the components that creates and strengthens a soul in relationship with G-d. Moreover, I’m prone to wonder if we’ve not evolved further and further away from compassion as just such a strong component in our life.

Are we evolving away from relationship with G-d?

When I look around me, I see a great nation that was established to “…form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare…” Yet, the only piece of that beautiful preamble to our constitution that we seem to pay attention to these days is the “provide for the common defense” section. Even in the past 200 years or so, we seem to have lost our focus on issues of Justice, Tranquillity, Union, and Welfare. In fact, the word “welfare” has become a nasty word in our political lexicon today.

We established a nation on lofty principles, clearly driven by some sort of spiritual purpose. Yet, all of the spiritually motivated components of our reason for establishing a nation have become dirty words, and all we care about today is defending ourselves from the hordes of “others” who we think want to come and carry us away.

This is our history as a human race throughout recorded history (which admittedly isn’t very long). We’ve continually moved back and forth between the selfish drive to eliminate others and the threat from others, and some sort of internal call of compassion. The further we go, the more it seems that natural selection is selecting against G-d, and selecting for human selfishness.

The last 200 years within our nation is a microcosm of that selection process – a very frightening one.

Somehow or another, evolution selected against the Neanderthal. Our ability to conquer and defend increased as a result of that selection.

What happened to our ability to maintain closeness with G-d?

What’s happening to our soul?

Do Our Brains Manage Away Our Ability To See G-d Or To Be Creative?

Somebody once told me that they read someplace that somebody said that way back when Europeans were first invading the Americas, it’s likely that natives might not have even seen the ships out on the sea as they approached and anchored. If they had to mental construct for the idea of a big ship on the water, their minds might have simply failed to process the images coming in to them.

Sounds like a crazy notion to me. And since it was something somebody might have read about something somebody might have said, I’ve always considered it to be mostly a made-up thing.

But a fun idea.

I suspect there might be a grain of possibility in the idea as well. So I’ll talk about it here as-if it’s real fact. It makes a point I want to make after all. And really, if I do this well enough, it might be that some Faux News Network might make me a job offer…

So, the ships were there. That’s a fact. And folks on the shore had eyeballs that worked, and they were looking out across the horizon, and their functional eyeballs picked up the information, and sent the information along the optic nerve and into the brain for processing.

So far, it’s all fact, it’s all science, and it actually probably happened just like that.

But we’ve all worked hard to “manage” our brain so it doesn’t interfere with the way we want to see the world. We all process incoming information in similar ways, but with little twists and turns, filters, brushes, and enhancing tools.

We all know what we want the world to look like, and we have fine-tuned our senses to pick out the pieces of information that surrounds us that reinforces the picture of what we want the world to look like.

My Faux News comment is a perfect example. What is your source of news? While some people work hard to get a wide variety of opinions and input, most folks simply find the news or opinion source that tells them about a world that’s built the way they want to believe it’s built. In my opinion, that’s explains the growth in popularity of particular networks or sources that are biased to the point of absurdity – people aren’t looking for Truth, they’re looking for reinforcement of the views they want to hold.

Just like the husband or wife who’s blindsided by the unfaithful spouse, even though everyone around the couple could see the signs for years. From the inside, the husband or wife had a picture of what they wanted their spouse to be, and the only information they accepted into their brain was the information that reinforced that view.

I understand this tendency. It makes sense. I can only imagine how overwhelming the world is to an infant – information bombarding the brain with no context or ability to put the pieces together. As we mature and grow, one of the ways we unleash the power in our brain is to learn how to filter and “manage” the information that we’re swimming through.

We can become extremely efficient at filtering and managing information, so that our lives run smoothly, and we’re not troubled with dilemmas. We’re not forced to confront and adjust our filters, brushes, enhancers, and other “information management” devices that make us comfortable.

I recently ran across a post by a gal (Katinka Hessilink) who suggests that creativity is tied up in this whole equation. In her article, Katinka is talking about the existence of a soul, but I’m co-opting her argument here to help me suggest that creativity in a person might really be little more than a higher tolerance to leave the filters turned down.

It might be that what we call creativity is really just a tolerance to accept, hear, and see input that doesn’t necessarily fit with the shapes we’ve already constructed within our mind – the shapes that we think the world is supposed to fit into. The “creative mind” really might just see more.

There’s always been this assumed connection between creativity and, shall we say, a looser grip on sanity? I have no idea of this is actually true, but it’s a pervasive stereotype.

If there were a linear representation of “sanity”, it could be that the further one moves to the right on the scale, the more constricted is their view of the world, and the less they are actually able to experience the world they’re moving through. They have a very tightly managed shape into which they fit all of the incoming information, and whatever doesn’t fit, is ignored or changed in some way.

What’s on the other end of that scale? Off the edge of either end would seem like insanity to me.

Way back in the time of Columbus, a dreamer sat on the beach of some island in the Caribbean. On the horizon he saw something he’d never seen before – he saw ships with tall masts and large sails. He ran and told the others of the tribe, who looked and saw nothing that fit into the shape of the world they knew, so they saw nothing at all.

I can believe that. You?

Here’s a Wayne Dyer quote, that I probably have a little wrong:

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you’re looking at change”.

I’ve been reading through a really neat book that Aldous Huxley wrote. There was a saying in there that came to me the other day, and I had to go back to it.

The essence is this: Our relationship with G-d defines the shape of our life in the form of a sponge. The particular traditions and teachings that we pick up along the way are what fills the sponge, but if you squeeze all that tradition out, you’re still left with the underlying sponge – the relationship with G-d.

Tradition and intellectual teaching is just the fill that we use to let the sponge take shape. Like a living sponge, filling it lets it grow, the more it grows, the more it’s able to absorb.

In a life made full by a robust and deep relationship with G-d, the sponge grows. The more the sponge grows, the less it’s about the tradition and intellectual teaching, and the more it’s about the relationship with G-d.

When ripe, we should be able to squeeze the tradition and dogma out of the sponge completely, and yet the relationship with G-d remains full and complete and strong.

Here’s the quote that got me thinking about this:

Why should what Abbot John Chapman calls ‘the problem of reconciling (not merely uniting) Mysticism and Christianity’ be so extremely difficult? Simply because so much Roman and Protestant thinking was done by those very lawyers whom Christ regarded as being peculiarly incapable of understanding the true

Nature of Things.

“The Abbot (Chapman apparently is referring to Abbot Marmion) says St. John of the Cross is like a sponge full of Christianity. You can squeeze it all out, and the full mystical theory (in other words, the pure Perennial Philosophy) remains. Consequently for fifteen years or so I hated St. John of the Cross and called him a Buddhist. I loved St. Teresa and read her over and over again. She is first a Christian, only secondarily a mystic. Then I found I had wasted fifteen years, so far as prayer was concerned.”

from Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy

Folks I know who have a problem with religion should resonate with some part of this. After all, the most common complaint that the “non-religious” have about religion is that it’s so shallow – that it focuses too much on human traditions and interpreted teaching, rather than searching for real meaning in the world we live in.

I think they’re right in many ways. Too often, our religions fail to encourage us to grow and mature in our faith. Too often, our religions want us to grow in our relationship with the church, rather than in our relationship with G-d. The best pastor or rabbi should be looking for ways to help parishioners become so strong in relationship with G-d that they no longer need the pastor or rabbi.

A wise boss used to pound the idea into my head that my job as a leader was to be wise enough to work my way out of a job – to help people around me grow so that some of them would go past me, or at the very least be ready for my job. It’s a hard leadership style to truly live, though I always strived toward it.

This wisdom and teaching has a place in the seminaries of the world, as pastors and rabbis would be well served to try and achieve the same thing. In my experience, most pastors work to keep their flock contained, and dependent, and tied to what’s taught in that church. Instead, pastors should be trying to help people become the most absorbent sponge possible, ready to move past that pastor and on to ponds where even more can be absorbed.

A faith sponge can only grow when it’s constantly given just a little more to absorb than it’s ready to absorb.

Go see how much you can absorb this week.