Separate But Equal

     The world of dreams is an odd place, odd in the sense that for me it is oddly welcoming as if each night I walk into a grand terminal of some sort and not know where I'm supposed to go.  Recently my dreams have been growing a bit closer to home.  Here's one from the other night, me seeing an old friend (he's been gone for nearly 40 years now) and me saying to him, "It's been awhile since I've seen you."  Or in another dream, I was telling an unknown woman that I'd been in this dream before, even filling her in on the details I had missed (which she agreed was what happened).  Then there was the dream awhile back of my home when I was in grade school, a dream so vivid that I took copious notes about it as if it would have some meaning at a later date.  I used to do that, take notes of my dreams long ago --the dialogue, the changing scenes, the people and/or animals I had encountered-- but it soon began taking up hours of time each morning.  After a few weeks, I could see no pattern, no order, and rarely would I recognize any person or pet, the "environment" and the characters being so vivid and yet so totally unfamiliar (recognizing faces or pets has only happened in the past few years and once again, makes me wonder why, and why now?).  On several occasions work will come back into the picture, always about a lost access badge or an overwhelming scenario that leaves me both puzzled and frustrated (about work?...really?).  And each time I am thankful that my dreams are not haunting nightmares, either as victim or unwilling killer...the horrors of war, or an accident, or a mistake.  I can only imagine that to have such recurring dreams would make one dread falling asleep; and at that point dreams don't become entertainment or a "cleansing," but more of a loud and irritating screech that can't be shut off.  All of which somehow made me think back to the idea of a soul...

     Here's how Deepak Chopra put it in a book I mentioned in the last post: The whole business of making a stark contrast between the lower and higher self is futile to begin with.  There is no separate, all-good, all-wise part of you that you must either win or lose.  Life is one flow of awareness.  No aspect of you was constructed out of anything else.  Fear and anger are actually made from the same pure awareness as love and compassion; erecting a barrier between ego and soul fails to recognize this simple fact.  In the end, letting go is achieved not by condemning what's bad in yourself and throwing it away, but by a process that brings opposites together.  Your ego must see that it belongs to the same reality as your soul.  It needs to find so much in common with your soul that it lets go of its selfish agenda in favor of a better way of life.  And to complicate matters even more, Chopra tells of hearing a famous Indian guru talking to a large audience (mostly westerners, he points out), with the crowd wanting to believe what they were hearing but "didn't dare."  Finally a brave soul stood up and asked, "Is the divine plan unfolding right now?  The world looks so chaotic and violent.  Fewer and fewer people believe in God."  Without hesitation the guru said, "Belief in God doesn't matter.  The plan is eternal.  It will always unfold.  It can't be stopped." ...The questioner's brow furrowed.  "What if I don't join?" he asked.  "What happens then?"  The guru's face became stern.  "The divine plan doesn't need you to unfold."  He leaned closer to the microphone.  "But if you turn away, it won't unfold through you."  Chopra's next chapter was titled: Why Do I Matter?

       Religion has always been vexed by a serious contradiction, continued Chopra.  Everyone is considered precious to God, but no one is really needed.  Individual lives are thrown away in war by the tens of thousands every year.  Untold more lives are lost through disease and famine, or barely get a start before infant mortality strikes...I remember, early in my medical training,* wishing that just one person, upon hearing that he had incurable liver or pancreatic cancer, would murmur, "What a loss to the world when I am gone."  Not a loss to one's family and friends but an absolute loss, something that makes the world poorer.  We see the passing of eminent people that way, certainly.  Yet from your soul's perspective, you are as great an addition to the world as Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa, and subtracting you from the cosmic equation would be just as great a loss.  The most exquisite silk remains intact if you pull out a thread, but the snag will show.

      So how to, or how can you, makes sense of all this?  The friend I wrote about earlier had a "freak" accident, his putting on some roller blades (he'd been roller blading for years), standing up, and having his skates slip out from him as if he had stepped on ice; he landed on the back of his head, stood up again in a daze, then promptly fell forward and hit the front of his head on the concrete in his driveway, all witnessed by a neighbor.  Despite rapid intervention, including a craniotomy to relieve the growing fluid on his brain, he never recovered.  Then another friend recently told me that his neighbor was getting out of her car the other day (in her driveway) when it began slowly rolling back as she got out; the slightly open door knocked her to the ground and well, she died in a terrible manner.  What causes such odd accidents, that electrical wire that falls or the tree limb that breaks as you jog, the slip on the ice that cracks a hip or the tackle that sends a professional athlete into cardiac arrest (such ancient martial arts tales of a single finger hitting you in a targeted spot is not fiction).  Why do some of us get to live longer while others have their lives cut short; why such income disparities, and educational disparities, and physical, mental, geographical, and cultural disparities?  For that matter, why such disparities within ourselves, some finding inner peace while others finding nothing but turmoil...and is there, as Chopra seems to be implying, an overriding plan or a soul within that makes little of this matter?

      Richard Paul Evans, famous for his Christmas Box novels, wrote a series of "road" books about a mega-wealthy promoter of make-yourself-rich seminars for which people forked out $3000 or more to discover his secret "formula."  Anyway, the character in his road trilogy goes on a search to find whatever --himself, happiness, a second chance-- and runs into this conversation at a bar: "You're a believer in God?" I asked.  "The big Santa in the sky?...Isn't that was God is?  Just an adult version of Santa Claus.  Didn't Freud prove that?...He said that God is just the manifestation of our deepest wishes.  Especially the wish for security in a dangerous world.  That's why we usually think of God as a man, since men are traditionally the protectors.  Freud proved there is no god."  The man's brow again furrowed.  "I don't think Freud's argument was that God didn't exist; it was more that our belief in Him is driven by our desire for Him to exist."  Perhaps this is what Chopra was trying to say about our belief in a soul...maybe our soul and a divine plan exist whether we believe iin them or not.  Frances Mayes asked something similar in her book, A Place in the World: Is home fixed forever or a moveable concept?  How do four walls, utilitarian and convenient, or soulful and evocative, connect with your metabolism and turn into that charged feeling of I'm home?  Or is home a quest never to be fulfilled?  Down the road not taken was there a blue door for you to open?  Some writer said, "My home is my subjects."  What a floating idea of home.  Mine feels more visceral.  Most alluring, the places where you feel an immediate, illogical bonding.  You wish you lived there but you never will.  Capri, San Miguel, Provence -- you imagine yourself extant in another version that may for years run parallel to the road taken...The old places we love will bring up the question that haunted medieval poetry: Ubi sunt...Where are...short for ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt, where are those who went before us?  Where is that 10-year old that was you?  Where is that laughing or sad, chubby or grief-stricken multi-faceted person that was once so fully you throughout the years?

     For conductor Gustavo Dudamel of the L.A. Philharmonic, the belief was (and is) music.  Winner of the Mahler young maestro's competition in Germany when he was just 23, Dudamel never forgot his simple roots in Venezuela where every child was welcomed into El Sistema, their nationwide musical program.  Dudamel told TIME that his mentor once told him "the destitute young musicians of El Sistema shouldn't have to make do with what's merely adequate; how they must be provided with the best instruments, the best teachers, and the most inspired spaces in which to grow and thrive." My maestro always said that the culture for the poor people cannot be a poor culture.  That's beautiful!  Give these children the resources, and they'll create their own future -- their own dimension...Music is not only an element of entertainment in the society, it is a power of transformation.

     Speaking of transformation, the BBC had a another update on the massive Hunga-Tonga volcanic eruption in Tonga a year ago, this time showing the Lamb waves that traveled across the planet (I had never heard of Lamb Waves): Hunga-Tonga produced the highest ash cloud ever recorded, sending rocky particles more than half way to space.  But the energy involved also shook the atmosphere, dispatching so called Lamb waves in all directions.  These are energetic waves in the air that move at the speed of sound, along a path guided by the surface of the planet...Just over an hour after the onset of the mighty eruption, seismic waves from its associated Magnitude 5.8 earthquake ripple through the Atlantic network.  This signal will have travelled around the Earth, through its crust, at a velocity of a few kilometers per second.  It's a further 14 hours before a Lamb wave arrives.  How to explain such things?  A few months earlier the largest explosion ever recorded came from space.  Said a piece in The Week: Dubbed the BOAT, or "brightest of all time," the eruption released more energy that our sun will in its entire 10 billion-year life span, reports Space.com...a gamma-ray blast so enormous it briefly ionized our atmosphere...the blast occurred some 1.8 billion years ago, and the gamma-rays traveled 14 billion trillion miles to get here, the energy was still powerful enough to jolt electrons in Earth's upper atmosphere.  All of this while a famine even worse than the one in 2011 is on target for Somalia (only two have ever been declared under the Famine Early Warning System; this would be the 3rd).  Criteria for declaring a famine is strict, reported a piece in TIME: when a third of a region's children are severely malnourished, a fifth of the population has no access to food, and there are two hunger-related deaths per 10,000 people each day.  The headline of the print article was: Somalia faces its worst drought ever, as the world looks away. (noted the article, the U.S. has "given over $700 million in aid this year to the region, more than the rest of the world combined.")

     There was yet another transformation I noticed, that of my brother becoming a grandparent.  For him, so many other once-important issues dropped away or at least fell in priority interests: politics, world history, trying to figure out our frailties and failings.  The focus was now on watching his grandson absorb the world around him, the simple tasks of learning to crawl and watch and smile.  My brother now could see that the simple act of providing love to a child was transformative, that (as Gustavo Dudamel said earlier) "they'll create their own future -- their own dimension."   Another good friend of mine from high school has --at age 71-- successfully won adoptive rights for his granddaughter, an autistic ball of fire whose mother had neglected her in many ways due to her own problems.  Even at my friend's age, he and his wife are blossoming as they shift their lives into yet another one of giving ("she's family," he told me, without hesitation).  Professor Ed Pavlić wrote a piece in the Virginia Quarterly Review that questioned his own transformation years ago: I’m not exactly sure to what extent these simplicities—one-dimensional and mono-racial—inhibit other Americans’ ability to recognize themselves and be recognized by others.  It inhibits mine in the extreme.  To live has meant finding ways—in experience, and later in the telling of it—beyond these violent and fraudulent simplicities, which lie about our actual lives and our actual possibilities.  Of course, saying it this way is itself an oversimplification; our truths are far more granular and contradictory than simple rules allow.  But it’s the power of these rules that makes digging toward those possibilities such hard work...These changes would not play out in the abstract, or on paper...The changes would have to happen in me and in the world; in fact, somehow, through me they’d have to happen to the world. 

     Pulitzer Prize winning physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee was asked by TIME about his recent book on cells, The Song of the Cell.  Our cells, the author noted: receive signals; they integrate signals. They have a desire to survive.  So if cells were so successful, asked TIME, why did they begin bonding and basically begin to form us and other life?  Dr. Mukherjee replied: Bacteria still exist, and they are very good at surviving.  So I would indeed ask the question, Well, if bacteria are so successful, why aren't we all bacteria?  We aren't bacteria because at some point in time, evolution came to nonconscious conclusion that in fact, agglomerations of organisms were very effective...Multicellular organisms can gather food, they can gather information, they can contemplate.  

     To think and contemplate is a good thing...or is it?  Here's how Esquire bid adieu to the past year: We are facing disaster in about 60 different ways.  Climate devastation?  You bet.  Fascism?  On the rise.  More pandemics?  Seems likely.  Civil war?  Possibly.  Nuclear war?  Throw it on the pile.  A new Red Hot Chili Peppers album?  No.  We blew it, said my friend, we of the hippie, Woodstock, counter-revolution crowd; we had 50 years to change things and nothing really happened.  That protesting, social-questioning generation of ours had a chance since it may have been one of the very few times that the "establishment" was caught off guard...Congress, society, parents, pretty much everything traditional was facing a quiet rebellion that seemed to come out of nowhere.  Suddenly a large segment of young people were unified against war, were for the environment, and for the animals, and for equality, all while questioning authority.  And then that monstrous entity that we thought we might be able to change merely gobbled us up, tossed us around and around as if we were an irritant that produced little more than heartburn, and spit us out as mere shells of ourselves, split, divided and angry.  50 years, my friends noted.  We had 50 years.  And we blew it...as Neil Young wrote in his song Mother Nature on the Run: I was lyin' in a burned-out basement, With a full moon in my eyes.  I was hopin' for replacement when the sun burst through the sky.  There was a band playin' in my head and I felt like I could cry.  I was thinkin' about what a friend had said, I was hopin' it was a lie.  My friend looked at me as he heard that song recently and said, "That song has the same meaning today as it did in the 70s." (indeed, Young now performs that line as an updated, 'Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 21st century")**

     If the whole universe is conscious, wrote Chopra, we have an instant explanation for why nothing is accidental.  Yet it's hard to imagine a rock by the side of the road being as conscious as you and I are...Then someone comes along and says, "Everything is conscious.  It has to be.  All that you see around you is happening in a person's brain.  That person is you.  You are the dreamer, and as long as this is your dream, it shares in your consciousness...The ancient rishis of India compared life to a dream because all experience is subjective.  There is no way to experience the world except subjectively.  If every experience happens "in here," it makes perfect sense that things all fit together: we make them fit together.  Even randomness is a concept created by the human brain.  As mosquitos swarm at sunset, they don't feel random, nor do atoms of interstellar dust.  We don't see form and design until they fit our preconceptions, but this is doesn't matter to Nature...As far as Nature is concerned, every aspect of your body is orderly and purposeful.  

     All in a dream, wrote Young in his song.  And if we tend to think that the world we awaken to is filled with wonder of all sorts, we seem unable to pierce that other world that takes nearly a third of our lives, a time of needing sleep and needing dreams (whether we remember them or not, we all dream).  But if we feel ourselves as just a tiny speck of no consequence, picture an atom and how many atoms make up the world around us...indeed, make up us!  Who would have thought that inside each individual atom rested enough power to destroy cities and lives, or to heat our planet, or to send gamma-ray bursts throughout space?  Perhaps when we dare to venture inside ourselves, inside our brains, we would find that same hidden power, orderly, necessary, and working away on a plan we can't comprehend.

Photo by Smithsonian photographer of the year, Igor Altuna

*Although Chopra is still a licensed physician and fellow at the American College of Physicians and member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, he now makes more from his own various speaking engagements, books, and organizations which try to incorporate holistic and ancient practices into modern medicine.

**  If you've never heard the song, the version I enjoy is one by the trio of Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, and Dolly Parton.