Musings on cognitive processes and unconscious programming

The other morning as I was driving to work I needed to make a phone call.  I had stayed up too late the night before, so I was feeling tired.  And I was a bit worried about the content of the phone call. And I was driving.  So my mind wasn't at its sharpest.

After a few rings I heard a beep and a recorded message, "Please state your name, and Google Voice will connect you," then another beep.

 Like a dummy, instead of stating my name, I started talking as if I was recording a voicemail.  "Hi, it's me, I wanted to talk with you about..."  But after only two seconds, there was another beep, and I realized the recording had stopped.  Then I realized what I had done.  Instead of recording my name, which the instructions had clearly told me to do, I had started trying to record a voicemail with a message.

What happened there?  Well, my conscious mind was distracted, and my ability to connect with my "executive function" was hindered due to physical tiredness.  So the unconscious, or semi-conscious mind took over.  Somewhere along the way, due to repeated exposure to the stimulus of a recorded voice and a beep, I have been programmed to associate this stimulus with the response of recording a voicemail.  The sudden change of expectation, to record my name instead, did not register fully onto my conscious mind, due to it being in a weakened and distracted state.  Thus, what was pre-programmed took over like auto-pilot.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an excellent book a long time ago called "Blink," that explored some of these ideas. I highly recommend it.

This reminds me of the concept of "Freudian slips."  Occasionally during speaking we will accidentally say the wrong word, but it will betray what we are "really" thinking, or at least what we are unconsciously thinking.  For example, a presenter accidentally introducing Prince William as the "Douche of Cambridge," then quickly correcting it to "Duke of Cambridge," COULD, according to Freudian theory, be construed as the presenter secretly thinking the Prince is a pretty shitty person, and accidentally betraying his true feelings.  (Of course, it's an easy mistake to make, considering the presenter was introducing "The Duke and Duchess..." That one word uses a hard -k-, and the other a soft -ch- sound, makes it easy to flip them around, completely innocently. But it's still a funny example, whether it was a betrayal of real feeling or not.)

So, what does something like this reveal about a person?  Which level of consciousness should be considered the "real" person? The incident that happened to me this morning was fairly innocuous; it just betrays that I have left a lot of voicemails in my lifetime (and, OK, all the privilege that implies...) But what about when someone's guard is down for whatever reason and the things that come out on autopilot are racist, misogynist, ablist, violent, or some other kind of undesirable trait?  What does this mean?  Is the person "really" a terrible person at heart, or are these things simply artifacts of poor programming?  Sometimes these values and traits are imprinted on us by our culture, even against our wishes.  With education and effort, we learn to identify ourselves with nobler values, but sometimes the old ways creep through when we are unguarded.  Can someone be held responsible for the contents of their unconscious mind, or is it only the conscious level that counts, (at least as far as moral responsibility)?

Pagans and Jesus Christ

I recently ran across an article by a Pagan leader named Sam Webster called, "Why You Can't Worship Jesus Christ and Be Pagan."  (Yes, it's from 2013. I've never been one who's on the cutting edge of anything, so... whatever. I just go with things as they come to me.)  The ideas in this article fascinated me, and I want to try my hand at unpacking them.  (Webster expounded on his article in an interview, on this podcast: http://disinfo.com/2014/06/datc-044-cant-worship-jesus-christ-pagan-sam-webster/)

As a disclosure, I'm not Pagan, nor do I any longer feel safe identifying as a Christian, so my opinions are going to be more philosophical than personal.  I'm interested in exploring these concepts, not prescribing boundaries.

The essence of the article is that because Christianity has consistently sought to exterminate Paganism throughout history, either by conversion or by execution, the spirit of Christianity is incompatible with Paganism. Many good points are made, and I can totally see where he's coming from.  What I'm interested in, though, are the cracks and crevices in his arguments; the nuances on the edges of his monolithic declarations (which, to be honest, came across as thumpy in places).

First, let's just acknowledge that Webster presents a very narrow view of Church history and severely oversimplifies its complicated relationship with political power.  Let's also acknowledge that he ignores the HUGE subject of how religious syncretism has affected Christianity, in both directions, in and out.  For having seminary and history degrees, he really should know this stuff; that he ignored these things is baffling.

The main thing I want to focus on, though, is the ramifications for his arguments of his obvious conception of gods and goddesses as literal entities.  (As opposed, perhaps, to a kind of Jungian psychological approach, where deities are really archetypes — elements of the human psyche, endogenous creatures that take life in our collective imaginations.) That there are literal, exogenous spirits who can imbue physical bodies (besides being a fun and/or scary thing to turn over in my mind) is really what makes this article challenging to unpack.  I don't know where I stand on that issue.  Are there actually intelligent spiritual entities, separate from ourselves, whom humans label as god/desses, or are these actually psychological projections, or is it some mix of the two, or is it something else altogether?  I do not know.

But let's assume there are literal spirits, in order to address this article.  Because we need to know the nature of these spirits he believes in.  Are spirits (or, more specifically, is the spirit of Jesus Christ) eternal?  Because if so, that would mean that Jesus existed before the rise of Christianity.  (Which makes you wonder where Webster believes Jesus was before that, and what he was doing.)  Can the fundamental nature of spirits change over time?  So could, say, Venus, one day decide she's bored with being seductive, and instead focus more on, oh, traveling or something?  Or is Venus immutably seductive, because goddesses/gods don't change?  Likewise, if Jesus is a god whose nature is to eradicate culture and destroy dissenters (as Webster claims), was Jesus always this way? Will he always be this way? Or was he maybe more peaceful at one time (say, during the time when Christians were being persecuted by, ahem, people who worshiped multiple deities), and later evolved to be more wrathful?  Unpacking the theology of what Webster means when he talks about the spirit of Jesus really affects the validity of his arguments.

If I had to, today, decide how I wanted to understand what goddess/god spirits are, I would probably choose a conception similar to Plato's Forms.  Spirits are concepts, often universal concepts such as harmony, division, communication, and so on, that imbue the physical world.  So anything beautiful is, at least partially, imbued with the goddess Venus.  Anything angry or warlike is calling on Mars.  And so on. Thus, spirits cannot change, because they are concepts.  You can't change the concept of "roundness" or "green," even if you find different words for it or different nuances of it.

And it's important to recognize that the names for these concepts DO change.  Not only due to different languages, and linguistic shifts over time, but also, more subtly, due to the co-opting by various cultural elements of certain concepts.
For example, let's take the concept of the struggle for economic freedom for all of humanity.  A worthy goal.  This concept or spirit (as I'm currently deciding to conceive of the word "spirit") clothes itself in different forms throughout time and place depending on the context.  The spirit of universal economic freedom (for the sake of expediency, let's call this spirit Santa Claus, OK?) uses whatever tools it can find to accomplish its goals.  In one context, the most expedient tool Santa Claus can use is capitalism, while in another context, communism serves the job much better.  It's a crude example, but you can hopefully see my point, that the spirit behind very, very different movements can still be the same.

The Santa Claus impulse, to provide economically for all of humanity, drives very different people and marches under very different, sometimes even opposing, banners at times, based on the culture that surrounds it.  Now, let's say Santa Claus merged with Capitalism for awhile, because Capitalism was able to provide a lot of wealth for a wide range of people, and that made Santa Claus happy.  But over time Capitalism became corrupted by greedy people who refused to heed to the problems that were developing in the system, and instead collected more and more of the wealth for themselves.  Is Capitalism still imbued with Santa Claus?  I would say no.  At some point Santa Claus had to depart from the banner of Capitalism and find a different vehicle to accomplish his goals, most likely even fighting against the very thing he once indwelled.

So where I'm going with this, is back to the question of Jesus Christ.  If there is a spirit of Jesus Christ, is he, as Webster claims, a malefic spirit at heart, who deceives people with promises of peace and light, while actually only wanting to assimilate them, or destroy them if they refuse to be assimilated?  Or is it possible that Jesus is actually something else, and another spirit has co-opted the banner of Christianity, essentially driving the spirit of Jesus away from the very thing he once indwelled?

The latter is actually an argument that some Christians make, from a surprising diversity of viewpoints.  On one side, you have far right fundamentalists (the kind who merge their faith with their American nationalism,) such as Chuck Missler, who say that when Christianity merged with the Roman Empire, it ceased being Christ-like, and drove "the true church" underground.  The Catholic and Orthodox branches of Christianity are actually just the Satanic Roman Empire continuing in slightly different forms, who will eventually usher in the antichrist and the end of the age.  From another angle, you have liberal Christian theologians such as Rob Bell and Don Golden stating that the spirit of Christ is incompatible with any form of colonization or empire-building.  Despite what some Christians do in his name, Jesus is always about providing life, joy, and freedom to people, whether these people acknowledge him or not, whether they believe certain doctrines or not.

So which is it?  Will the real Jesus please stand up?  Is Jesus a colonizer or a liberator?  Yes, a large segment of today's Christianity, and a large segment of the historical church, takes a very authoritarian, colonizing approach.  But maybe the real spirit of Jesus has left the building, so to speak.  Maybe Satan or someone else (whoever the hell has been in charge of raising the various world empires throughout history, all of whom have colonized and destroyed the cultures of others, it's not just Christianity that has done that) has taken control.  Or maybe it really has been Jesus all along.  So... will invoking Jesus invite a self-erasure?  Or will you find that invoking Jesus does the opposite?  How can you know? And if Jesus is a deceptive deity, will you even be able to know before it's too late and he has assimilated you?  (Hypothetically speaking, here.  I don't personally invoke gods.)

There are so many directions I can go with this, but this post is long enough.  From the little I know of Paganism, most of them are strongly anti-authoritarian and won't let some guy tell them whom they can and can't worship, based on his own opinions of what that god is.  Based on the comments on the article and the podcast, it looks like a good chunk of the Pagan community has decided they have the right to define Jesus for themselves, and to reject or accept their personal ideas of who Jesus is, as they see fit. So who knows how influential this article actually was.  At least it gave me some food for thought, for which I'm grateful.

Anyway, I close my ramblings with a song I wrote several years ago, which seems apt for this topic.
Name

the devil's greatest achievement

I want to start a series of posts loosely organized around the quite-simple (ha) theme of "how the questions of evil affect my epistemology," but I don't have time to get all my thoughts out right this moment.  For now, an introductory teaser:

The greatest achievement the devil ever made was convincing people he doesn't exist.

So said someone famous.

I, however, think the devil would be smarter than that. People who aren't agitated for a cause are pretty useless for anything the devil would want to do.

Much better to convince people that fighting him will be effective using technique XYZ, which doesn't actually do anything at all. The fear/tribalism response is one of the most powerful instincts humans have, and can be rallied for all kinds of purposes. Make people spin their wheels, believing they are fighting evil, when actually they aren't.  Or, even better, convince them to do evil things, ironically believing they are fighting evil.

THAT, friends, would be the devil's greatest achievement.

"Saving Christmas," the movie (guest post)

My friend, Peter Brahm, posted this on his FaceBook wall, and I think it's great.  With his permission, I'm copying it here.  He doesn't have a website , but maybe he should start one!  He IS working on writing a book, I hear, so follow his FaceBook page if you're interested in reading that when it's ready.

This is a real poster for a real movie that was really made and really just came out in real theaters.

First off, you have to love how Kirk Cameron, the writer and star of the movie, has his name in letters just a little smaller than the title, while the message of the movie, "put Christ back in Christmas," is in teenie weenie little letters you can barely notice.

Or how about the fact that the title appears to be "Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas," as though he wants all the credit for "saving" a holiday which he and a bunch of his lunatic followers believes is being oppressed into nonexistence, when in actuality it's growing so big that people are even starting to celebrate it the month before?

Or how about the idea that this movie supposedly rails against the commercialization of Christmas, but this is a movie that people will have to pay to see? Hypocritical much, Cameron?

The very message of this movie is repulsive. There is no war on Christmas, period. Acknowledging other people's holidays during December is not waging war on Christmas or Christians or anything like that, it's called being inclusive.

Nutjobs like Cameron, who oppress everyone different from them and then cry about "persecution" any time that they get some reality check about how there's people who aren't Christians who also deserve to be respected, are poisoning society. They spread self-righteous hatred under the veil that they're really doing it out of love for those that they treat like sh*t. They lie about being "oppressed," in spite of making up the religious majority of the nation, whilst demonizing the people they claim they are being oppressed by. They're in the media, they're in the press, and they're even in office, too. And they're the ones who are giving religion a bad name. They're the ones causing much of the criticisms about religion these days.

Movies like "God's Not Dead," "Heaven is for Real," "A Matter of Faith," "Persecuted," and... THIS cosmic abomination are detrimental to society and religion itself, and if you claim to be a Christian, then trust me, supporting this movie and encouraging its level of dogmatic insanity is only going to lead to your religion fading into irrelevance in the near future.

Dear Jane Teresa,

I had an insight recently that I think you might be interested in. 

I was driving along in my car on a long trip last week, listening to your podcast, and I started thinking about all the dream interpretation and alchemy I did several years ago, when I was going through the process of a divorce, questioning my religion, raising small babies, moving, and a host of other extremely stressful situations.  I had remembered lots of dreams during that time period, and I had tried to do an alchemy at least every couple of weeks.  Now I wondered, in hindsight, while driving down the highway, if the dream alchemy had really helped, actually.  It seemed to me like my healing took a long time. And in fact, I still haven't accomplished some of the goals that I was hoping to achieve through alchemy.  Was that all a waste of time? Or did it actually make a difference? "Ah well, who knows," I thought.

When I arrived at my destination, I stopped at a café and to my surprise, I randomly happened to bump into an old friend. We hadn't seen each other in years, but I knew that he had gone through a similar period of extreme stress, around roughly the same time I had gone through mine. As we were talking, catching up, I noticed that when he brought up the names of certain people, or mentioned certain places or situations, how bitter his language became. He was still angry, and I sensed that his current life is hampered by his anger.  It was so obvious to me, but as he was speaking I got the feeling that he wasn't even aware of how angry he was.

I noticed that by comparison, I was doing well, emotionally speaking.  I am no longer angry at the people involved. I'm not nearly as bitter as I used to be.  I feel like I have made considerable progress in making peace with (much of) my past.  (Though I'm sure there is more work to be done!)  I am able to look at what happened to me, and not be triggered by panic or rage.  I'm more relaxed, and definitely happier than I ever have been.

When I noticed the difference between myself and my friend, it felt like there was my answer.  I had engaged with my unconscious, as one (of several) interventions to improve my inner condition, during that time period of extreme stress, and now I can see that my hard work really did help.  I may not have achieved everything I wanted, but perhaps the very act of trying at all was enough for the unconscious to continue its drive for maturity and wholeness and peace, at a faster rate than it could have otherwise.

Now, of course, my friend's situation was not exactly like mine, his personality is not mine, I used other interventions besides only dream alchemy, and so forth, so I can't really make any kind of scientific comparison. These are just my subjective impressions. But the uncanny timing and surprise nature of the visit caused me, at least, to pay attention. It felt like an affirmation to the question I had asked myself earlier in the day. Yes, I am better off for having paid attention to my dreams and having tried to intervene. Yes, I did make progress in 4 years that other people might have needed 8 years for (or who knows how long). Yes, the unconscious should be listened to.

Since you had helped me with a couple of my dreams, I thought I would share this testimonial with you.  Thank you so much for the show, for your research and development into the topic of dreams, and your dedication to share it with the world.

Sincerely,
Sleeping Realities

the ethics of deciding whether or not to have sex

Am I missing anything?
(Click to enlarge image)

the logic of weather men

Today I met someone who worked for the National Weather Service (he's retired now.) He told a true story of some soldiers he worked with years ago in the forecasting department. One of them, clearly a higher rank than the others, looked up from his computer screen where the simulations and models were being processed and announced confidently that the weather tomorrow would be sunny and around 82ºF.

The next day, everyone walked into work dripping from the rain and shivering from the cold. They complained at the senior officer about his total miss. To which he replied, in all seriousness and in an indignant tone of voice, "I am a Forecaster, not an Observer."

From what I could gather from the conversation, those who are just starting in the service are Observers, but as they move through the ranks, they "progress" further indoors until they have only their computers to tell them what's going on and what will go on. Few ever actually bother to look out the window after that point. It is, apparently, beneath them to observe.

No attempts were made to recalculate the computer's algorithms to figure out what went wrong and to improve the accuracy of the program. Maintaining the internal logic of the simulations was more important to the people on duty than matching them to reality.

I'm confident that not all people who work/ed there are/were of this mindset.  (The gentleman who told me the story was very sensible, for example!)  But still, there is philosophical, religious, and political commentary to be found in this amusing story...