Aphasia

"There's no money in it!"

So long as we look to an extractive model to determine how we shape and define our perceptions of value we are condemned to suffering and implicated in its proliferation.

We interpret the deep and profound roots of our predicament as an inevitability. We call this human nature. This conflation arises out of the same reductivist habits of thought that put us in this position. A central mechanism binds us within  a confusion between a state of incoherence and its results. If we are incoherent then our actions lead to an incoherent result. Further incoherent action will not alter this course. Only by discovering coherence will we be able to bring about a creative response.

Facing the first glimmers of an awareness of the futility of our present paths – and how they reach so far back – we shrink from looking more closely. This traps us in a futile stance. Our fear of futility holds us in it.

These are errors. We insist on regarding them as failings. This leads us to defend them instead of dealing with them.

Organizing our lives around this economic model we take its fundamentally arbitrary and stereotypical arguments and views as if they were inevitable. This is an expression of our incoherence. It manifests our incoherence and our continuing pursuit of its crippled logic overwhelms our attention blocking any other avenue.

These paragraphs are an unwrapping of the sound-bite attributed to Einstein, "Our problems cannot be solved by the mindset that created them." The trouble with any such nugget of wisdom is that we latch onto the phrase as a talisman – a smooth and shiny rock to hold in our hands bringing us comfort as we believe in its magical powers. That we so readily accept these short-circuits is another sign of our blindness to incoherence. We insist on rushing ahead with a plan and refuse to stay with the question. We keep pounding our square peg into that round hole, "It's gotta work!"

Any attempt to draw our attention to the mechanism of incoherence runs into this aphasia. It is just not seen. Not heard. "It does not compute." As the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys used to do, we are stuck explaining Art to a dead rabbit.

"Human nature. Yep!"

No. If someone can see these things then anyone can. Whether we take Sheldrake's morphic resonance as a clue or accept the wisdom behind the common saying, "Monkey see. Monkey do." Or find truth in Jacotot's views of intelligence. The ignorance and blind-spots, the aphasias of a particular time and culture, a weorld, are not universal and they can change and they do change overnight. Just like that!

This is why the metaphor of a hygiene seems appropriate. It puts a certain perspective into play. It signals that we are dealing with behavior and habits that lead to a bad outcome and that are outside of our common awareness but are not set in stone. They can be modified and their effects ameliorated. It demystifies that which is not a mystery, simply a matter of confusion.

It also describes the positioning of the trouble we have with incoherence as a matter that can be addressed. One that suffers from a persistent pushing of its malevolent effects. We act as though they were inevitable. This persistence is not permanence. It is simply a typical form of resistance that affects any major change in habits.

We tend to simultaneously over and under estimate these difficulties. When we don't just shrug our shoulders at human nature we are impatient to get on with finding answers to the problems flying out from this root cause. This vacillation, another symptom of operating within a faulty hygiene.

A-phasia, out of phase, out of sync. It's a question of rhythms. Not a wall, not human nature. We live out on a limb. In our case more out just ahead of our eyes. Somewhere between our grasping hands and our ever-out-of-reach desires. A strange form of out-of-body experience that takes so much of what passed for spirituality and takes it to its consumerist reductio-ad-absurdo. A failing common to any insistence to go somewhere else, anywhere else, so long as we can refuse where we are. Lacking faith we insist on some belief in something else….

Seen as an aphasia, lack of synchronization, the trouble is with finding and holding the rhythm. In our hyperventilated state we cannot pause long enough to let this sink in. "More of the same!" is our never-ending refrain, our demand aimed at our God, or simply into our device. Scrolling past the chronicles of our consequences looking for that one thing that will confirm our desire, make us continue to believe, "No matter what!"

It all does come back to, down to, attending.

How can we be anything but out of phase? We do not attend. We insist. We demand. We intend….

Let's not compound our troubles by imposing a beat. Insisting that the fault is in some structure we identify and focusing on being its antithesis. Gathering the like-minded. Beating a drum. Whatever negative cadence it carries in our anger can only intensify the destructive results of our further inattention. The only thing worse than random aphasia is a concerted, pounding, resounding beat of an imposed rhythm. Drums and boots. Drums and boots…. Anything to continue in the drama.

Attend. Find the beat where faith finds its place.