Continuous Wonder

This past weekend, I was confronted by someone, whom I hold so dear to me, about some very ugly things I've allowed to creep into my life. Every once and a while, you find your mental being in a place you didn't intend it to be. Sometimes the change is swift and tramatic, but most times, the change is gradual and unconscious until it's too late; a series of thought patterns that descend from others, trodding a path through one's psyche, metastasizing until it grabs hold and actually begins to drive the destiny of its host. Often times, these thoughts start innocently enough and can even be justifiable. Yet, while justice has been served in the mind of its host, these thought patterns are sending the willing participant spiraling into a dark abyss of self-doubt, cynicism and bitterness.

A better description of this psychological phenomenon came from a guy named Jeremy Smyczek, who a few years ago, wrote a semi-fictional blog called "The Gas Guy." In his Dead for a Ducat, post, Smyczek wrote the following:

The principal idea that this dead insect is conveying is that if people are going to notice and correct a change for the worse in the general state of cleanliness, they’re going to do so almost immediately. Once material objects go unnoticed and unaddressed for a sufficient chronological span, the tendency seems that they become part of the furniture—part of the landscape, even. It is hardly revolutionary psychology to note how the human brain has a curious method of assimilating objects once they cease to be novel, stuffing them into the vast mnemonic file called, “well, it was there yesterday.” This is why people can drive from home to work and back on the freeway and later be able to tell you almost nothing about the experience: the interstate, after the third or fourth time one has driven it, simply becomes a chapter from memory and no longer a new, interesting, or vital experience. There exists little likelihood that it will be much different today or tomorrow from how it was yesterday, so people simply react to it from memory, with just enough awareness fixed at the level of immediate consciousness to avoid crashing into the other cars. From a practical and utilitarian point of view, this type of activity is really pretty benign, but from a philosophical or spiritual perspective, the implications are somewhat more troubling: in doing so, one misses out on an awful lot of the minutiae that makes life interesting.

The intellectual negligence that I’m describing, regarding a thing as small and unseemly as a former social insect, certainly doesn’t end with wee and dismissible bits of matter. This is the phenomenon by which citizens of Switzerland and Nepal find nothing noteworthy or spectacular about the Alps or the Himalayas, how Londoners ride the bus to work past Big Ben and see a large clock telling them that they’re late, or go to church at St. Paul’s and find it the most pedestrian church in the world, wonder what the gawking tourists see in it, and sit through service as bored as anyone in the most truly uninspired of newer Episcopal buildings. It’s how fishermen on trawlers find nothing at all grandiose or inspiring about the pitch and yaw of a ship on the ocean, or indeed the sprawl of the ocean itself: while the witnessed phenomena are unchanged, the person receiving sensory input has changed. It is as if wonder and novelty are inextricably entwined.

In a perplexing way, the human brain seem to be offended by the concept of wonder, as if it is a cutting intellectual insult to be presented with something beyond its ability to effectively name and categorize, define and comprehend—something to simply admire rather than master. So as a gesture of spite it simply blinds itself to things that are beyond its grasp or outside the scope of what it deems compelling, as a means to isolate itself from the sensory overload that is the concept of amazement. We call things death, or ocean, or mountain, or God, or universe, so that we now have a working concept much more comfortably functional and infinitely less complex than the named thing itself.

Jeremy wonderfully articulates the philisophical and psychological concept of entropy: the inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society. The system that is in play here is your brain and how it processes the interactions one has with the outside world. Through several examples, he demonstrates just how the human being can unconsciously shut itself off, allowing it to drift and, as it drifts, it increasingly becomes disordered as all the factors that held it together at one point are competing against one another and pulling the unconscious subject's psyche in several different directions.

The outside world can be specific things or it can be packaged in experiences (which are combinations of actions and interactions with human and non-human things). Sometimes the brain is passive, absorbing information, and sometimes it's active making conscious choices and interacting with the outside world. However, the combination of initiatives the brain takes, after processing the results of these experiences, they become future autoresponses for like situations in the future. The brain is developing reactions based on what it learned in the past. Pavlov's dog, whose mouth waters at the sound of the bell, shows just how this whole system works in real life.

Now, this is just strict mechanics, and many have falsely concluded that this demonstrates that we are completely or mostly at the mercy of our neurons pulsing and firing at will. But what is it that seperates us from collective biological functions that create our physical being, to the human being who we really are? The human element is how man consciously takes initiative and expresses himself into the world. Bruce Lee describes this balance between man and machine:

...so what I'm saying, actually, you see, it's a combination of both. I mean here is natural instinct and here is control. You are to combine the two in harmony, not--if you have one to the extreme, you'll be very unscientific. If you have another to the extreme, you become, all of a sudden, a mechanical man--no longer a human being. So it is a successful combination of both, so therefore, it's not pure naturalness, or unnaturalness. The ideal is unnatural naturalness, or natural unnaturalness.

Bruce Lee's form of self-expression was Martial Arts. He'd spend 10 hours a day training so that all his movements would come unconsciously. Blocking, kicking, punching. Iteration after iteration he mechanically trained to the point where in a split second, his body was responding in complete symmetry with itself toward its desired end, without a thought other than the one to trigger the response. However, the end goal wasn't a punch, a kick or combination thereof, it was how those elements were used together to express who Bruce Lee saw when he meditated on himself; it was ultimately an extension of his morality.

It has to go beyond just mechanics. Science is ultimately limited because it is doesn't provide much forward looking guidance. My good friend Kevin used his linguistic wizardry to describe the false paradox many have set up in a wedding toast this past weekend: there is a great reason "why science and spirituality needn't compete." My morality, that I choose to follow, is simple and based on an external source found in the Bible. Bruce Lee found his in Buddhism. Whereas my ability to reason and form understanding from the outside world is based on science, what I ultimately do with that knowledge comes from my spiritual relationship upwards to God. I then express my understanding of this relationship through self-expression. Some examples of my self-expression come through exploration and music, Bruce Lee's was martial arts and acting. Other examples of self-expresion play out in personal relationships with friend, family and others.

Throughout my meditations on who I am, I've come to the ultimate realization that my humanity is wonderful, yet horribly flawed: I'm a human being capable of great things, while at the same time, I can be awefully cruel in the preservation of myself. I need an external source who has communicated to me who I am and where I belong, so that I can actively take steps to keep my being from falling apart due to entropy. The process with my God is an active process, not a passive one.

One's particular religion doesn't really matter here. I'm not talking about theological concepts such as redemption from sin; that is a whole other topic that I refuse to get into here on any level ever. In fact, affilation with a particular religion--in this case Christianity--is mutually exclusive to avoiding entropy. A man who is a not an active participant in his life and does not take active steps to repair and strengthen his relationship with the outside world, yet claims to be a Christian, is passive and subjected to mechanics tending towards disorder. This explains why I am quoting a Buddist, Martial Artist rather than someone within my theological tent. Theology aside, Bruce understood something critical about our humanity and how one can consciously choose to live to overcome that which is pulling him apart when he becomes passive participant.

Without this consciousness, man drifts towards disorder. This entropy is capable of ripping him apart as well as his relationship with the outside world. The unconscious man wanders while these forces continue to pull him apart; often times in the late 20th and early 21 century, he medicates to relieve the pain that is just a symptom of the things that are pulling his soul apart. Medicine has it place, but it is not a substitute for active participation and keen awareness of the effort and courage it takes to live in freedom.

Why am I talking about this here on my site? First, I need to write it down because it helps me think. Second, I want to publically acknowledge this to the person who brought this up to me how much it really meant. Lastly, though, this is the foundation and the basis for the new website that Kyle and I are designing: Continuous Wonder.

Smyczek demonstrated and concluded that the human mind is fundamentally offended by the concept of wonder through his examples above. The very concept of continous wonder is the cornerstone ideology that guides me as a human being: an individual consciously engaging the outside world. Sometimes my self-expression will take on the form of travelling to the tallest mountain the world, sometimes it will be a walk down my hill sipping coffee and reading a paper, sometimes it'll be creating a video with music that I wrote (unfortunate for all the cats out there who still have their hearing). The what isn't as important as the why. Continuous Wonder will be a place that will explore the why and I invite all who want to participate in this journey to do so in their own way.