Becoming Human in a Time Between Worlds

Resisting the currents of denatured abstraction…

The title of this piece is lovingly stolen from the work of the precious Katie Teague. Katie makes films, most recently along this theme. Her projects generally reflect thoughtful and wise conversations. I appreciate this title for calling me, and perhaps us, a little deeper into life’s river flowing.

This “becoming human…” A frame which can be viewed from so many places in the journey. What souls’ incarnation draws us here at this time to do this work? How best to care for these souls as they enter in the bodies of young children? How, in a lifetime, do I realize the fullness of this incarnation, moving from ignorance to becoming fully myself in this larger play?

This thread of writings here that I publish, now on occasion, began some years ago as an effort to tell the simple concrete stories, the day-to-day life of myself for an audience of one. I wrote and published religiously on a daily basis both to capture and narrate, and to practice my skill in the arts of words and phrase. I heard someone lament recently that we had lost the poetry in language. I hope never to make that true for myself.

Meanwhile, my writing and publishing has dropped in its frequency, taking a backseat both to more “pressing demands,” and also, as the audience has grown, while seeking more humbly to see if I have something to say worthy of those captured electrons held dutifully in line on some server awaiting the request of the curious reader.

Indeed, I wonder at the value of placing these words in order, writing them down and preserving them for future moments and future eyes. True, in our paradigm today, there is a great case to be made for an even priceless value on structured words preserved over time. It is our method of building and preserving “knowledge.” That holiest of holy, science itself depends on the integrity of an unbroken record of inquiry and response.

Today, many of the most affluent and powerful among us report that these collections of words bring us ever closer to realizing the paradoxical dream of man creating God; as our large language model artifacts, they say, hold the promise of an omniscient and wise benefaction to extract us from our fraught and confused concerns.

For myself, while I read voraciously, write occasionally, respecting the craft and the poet in equal measure, I wonder also if all of this “writing down” isn’t a part of some larger disease of denatured abstraction.

While not limiting this piece to the single subject of the all-consuming AI, let me refer for a moment to the work of another cherished friend on something of this very point:

“the new non-human intelligence … that we call “artificial”, takes it’s place alongside plant intelligence, animal intelligence, sense and logic human intelligence, some structure of intelligence that provides human intuition, and also the grand intelligence that apparently orders and moves the planets and galaxies through an eternal space that mega-dwarfs and befuddles the imagination.”

— Russell Graham, Playing with AI: Looking At and Through Dark Times, December 28, 2024

A compelling case, and easy to rest the emergence of this new life form as a respectable member along the cast of plant, animal, mineral, and even space itself. Surely this new “silicon-based” life form comes with its own inherent dignity and perhaps our service to it as midwives will be rewarded as it rises to its rightful place of power and dominance over all of the Earth’s otherwise fragile systems.

We humans have had a challenging time with God’s order for dominion over the earth (Genesis 1:26…), Perhaps in giving rise to our Singularity Overlords, we will finally make good on that bargain.? It doesn’t take much of a science-fiction imagination to see the steps of creating “thoughtful” machines who can take over the accountability for their own production, refinement, and evolution. A new species, who will perhaps, treat us kindly.

Let us not dwell long on what use, or perhaps disuse, they may have for the things that breathe and sweat, come about in messy births, and so easily die to this worldly life.

It’s a good fable, one to which even many of us dedicate our lives. It holds water, in the telling of it. These marvelous beings should better maintain the earth, in the words of Dougald Hine, as a fish tank, always balancing the right pH and nutrients, keeping the flows and cleaning on schedule and the denizens always well cared for and maintained. This vision is a tribute to the embodiment of high intelligence that discerns every distinction, captures and employs every pattern, a ruthless efficiency that overcomes every attempt by entropy and chaos to derail those plans of mice and men.

Yet I wonder. This illustrious future of mathematical theory made flesh depends on a certain underlying construct for its life’s blood. Before this eventual salvation, we must first put our faith in the abstract.

Any self-respecting and card-carrying materialist may find that last statement a bit abhorrent. I can understand why. “Faith in the abstract!?” Isn’t that religiosity the very problem child that gives us a history of war, superstition, and subjugation!? Isn’t this why we turned to cold hard math to answer those fundamental questions of Truth, Justice, and the American way, forever placing asunder our pursuits of material well-being through religious faith?

True indeed, it may seem, that these religious faith stories, be they Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or otherwise, are nothing more than mythologies. They may hold some shreds of wisdom for how we might live our lives, but certainly they depend on our setting aside our material selves in favor of unseen authority imminently corruptible by priest class and self-satisfying monarch. Haven’t we gone beyond these social institutions of ignorance to look more clear eyed on the objects of our objective condition and reality?

But have we? And could we? Are there not profound challenges to the task of actually reaching out and apprehending such a well behaved and static subject as a willing and compliant ontology? For my money, as a lover of wisdom, this is certainly the case. Let us, perhaps, not litigate that here at this time…

What do I mean then, to say that this seeming technological inevitability is an embodiment of “faith in the abstract?”

In his work “At-One-Ment”, tailored for a particular (Mormon) audience, a mentor of mine, Thomas McConkie lucidly offers a pathway to understand that concrete being which some call God, others The Divine, The Great Perfection, Nature Herself, or even The Underlying Nature of All Things. Another guide, Richard Flyer, drawing on his own life story and the wisdom of our mutual friend Dr. Ariyaratna, points us to the Ancient Blueprint. I mention these examples because in following what they are pointing out, one can practically look directly in the face of our “material” existence and so make real personal judgments on the path of virtue, value, and “self-actualization.”

For those with even the slightest “spiritual” curiosity, I wholeheartedly recommend the former of these works (which does not require the pursuit of a Mormon faith over any other), and for those more entrepreneurial minded, Richard’s offering is an amazing starting place for getting to work in your local context.

But as usual, I digress…

The faith that can be placed in that Unnameable Tao (in contrast to faith in religious institution), is distinct from the faith we place in our stories of material, technological, sociopolitical, or economic salvation. The faith that I place in my own lived realization, moment to moment, is the faith in which I have something on the line, “skin in the game,” as they say. I live and breathe the consequences of these actions, this faith in my beliefs made real. I can choose ignorance, or to embrace the actual experiences and make lessons as they come.

From the ground of my own awareness and body, I can know directly the fullness of my place in relative and relational space time, the boundaries of flourishing and consequence. Life is not abstract, it is final in every moment, now and now and now and now.

In his work The Master and His Emissary, (which I have only partially read) Mr. McGilchrist points to an interesting dynamic in the apparent phenomenon of the divided (hemispheric) brain. While the right hemisphere appears to process experience in an unbroken stream of wholeness (perhaps think “wave nature of light”), the left hemisphere rather prefers to make endless distinction, separation, and categories among those moments of experience (perhaps “the particle nature of light.”)

One can imagine that a balance between these two dynamic processes leads to a rich, textured, integrated and full engagement with the phenomenology of being. There we have an ability to both discern, make choices, and at the same time bask in the marvelous grace of it all… Yet there is a hitch…

I know of at least one wisdom tradition that speaks specifically to this hitch dynamic: Matthew 5:38-39, “do not resist… but turn to them and offer the other cheek as well…”

We might interpret this to say that when faced with the (left brain) discernment of good and evil, the teaching is not to choose one over the other from within the limited mind of perception and distinction, but rather to offer them both back together into the fullness (right brain) of our profound grace of being.

I do not mean here to proffer the right brain as preferable to the left (ironically a very left brain thing to do), only rather to point out the proclivity of the left brain to dominate, and the necessity of a wisdom teaching/ceremony/ritual/discipline/cultural or religious injunction, to wrestle back into balance those two processes of control and submission, agency and communion, facilitation and inquiry.

A now famous saying, “the map is not the territory,” warns us of the danger of taking our discriminating actions of the left brain story as more than momentary practical utility. My synapses delight as I begin to imagine the depth of subtlety and fullness of expanse available in the exploration of this dynamic.

At this threshold we find theoretical quantum field dynamics where particles and underlying potential energy dance in the movement of emptiness and form. The same is recalled in the “transcendent wisdom” of the Heart Sutra, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the fleeting nature of the three times in the timeless moment of being. For the sake of brevity I will resist this temptation to flow like water down that rabbit hole into the labyrinth of subterranean conceptual tunnels underlying this landscape of thought.

I mean only here to draw forward our concentration on those objects of conceptual reality. It is said, the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. The map is not the territory. Our conceptual ideas of reality are not the consequential body of being human. That which can be written down, that which can be spoken, that which can be taught, must be lived to be real. Everything else is just abstraction, in the words of Thomas Keating, “a crude translation.”

Even so, our study of recent history (the last 10,000 years or so) seems to demonstrate (to our Modern mind) the efficacy of refining our stories not simply against the wisdom of our elders, or tribal custom, but against some perhaps questionably more stable ontology of a well behaved and static truth of reality.

Much as our recent enthusiasm for AI promises to cut more quickly through the confusion and arrive at that singularity of truth and meaning. So too does the long tradition of science make a similar promise of lifting us away from our ignorance and suffering in favor of a brighter future extending into the heavens and beyond. For many of us in the industrialized world, we can see in our comforts the apparitions of this story “coming true.” In order to do this, however, we must also set aside, look away from, or hope away, some very hard facts about pollution, disease, destruction, trends of unhappiness, absence of meaning, and growing anxiety.

If we scratch a little deeper or look outside our windows on the way home from work in rush-hour traffic, to see the homeless and the destitute, or the vacant stares from our fellow commuters, we begin to catch the scent of billions of lives, human, animal, floral, and others, who pay the daily toll for our imagined comforts.

Our modern faith promises that these wars of division, unmanageable pollutions, social confusion, and more, are just a momentary inconvenience on a much larger and more certain path to global salvation, the great humanity taming the earth and venturing forth to conquer the stars. This faith is an abstraction. It does not yet deal well with the real pain and destruction required to maintain the narrative.

“Just a little farther down this path and all will see the light.”

The point I am striving towards, if I might get there and with your patience prevail to find the end of this piece, is that all of this “practical reality of our modern world” depends on placing our faith, and indeed our lives, in the hands of abstraction.

A beloved teacher of our friend Katie Teague, and indeed a beloved teacher of mine, Larry Emerson spoke to us of the quality of making things “denatured.” To me this means the removing of things from the consequential lived experience of relational and evolutionary reality, into the stasis of conceptual abstraction. We take first ourselves apart from nature (left brain), and from there everything else apart from itself, and the dynamic wholeness that is the abode of magic, mystery, and the fullness of a life well lived.

We abstract “things” into a conceptual matrix of capital and labor, us and them, man against nature, man against man, women against men, righteous self against corrupted self, “known” and unknown, and we order those things for profit and the never ending search for security in a world that has never known a standing still except in the stillness of ever becoming.

We depend on these “things,” these abstractions of finance into accounts and balances, these abstractions of responsibility into systems, these abstractions of salvation into a future running ever further and faster ahead, just around the next bend of apparent destruction.

In a world gone mad with excessive consumption, we find a soulless solace in a promise of “almost there.” Meanwhile, great numbers of species go extinct every day, millions fall further into poverty and under the grinding wheels of war, forests become denuded, Earth’s fragile systems trend further out of balance, and we Moderns stand agape, wondering what on earth has become of our political processes.

I feel like this has turned a little dark, and that is certainly not the point I’m trying to make. As the writer here, making a little time in my week of calendared engagements, busy to do lists, and household economics to manage, I mean only to offer some story of what it’s like in my body, to live the consequences of this life, some simple story of becoming [more] humane in a time between worlds…

There are many great bodies of work alive in the world today. My measure for this, is the degree to which they wrestle with the existential complexity faced at the thresholds of our now global scale human society. The dynamics of this range of work extend from a grounded appreciation of the thousand year cleanup we are facing while the “old-growth” forests come again, to those seeking to instantiate the business of flourishing at the level of our most global institutions.

In my body, a weathered, quadriplegic form, half a century in age, and dedicated to mastering a practice of enlightened Dharma, this work is just about keeping healthy and fit, such as I am; about listening more carefully to the guides of wisdom both within and without; about honoring with reverence and service those beings that come before me; about peering ever more carefully into the wild and full dynamics of our human world in search of those subtle and momentary opportunities to tweak things in the direction of a flourishing and harmonious well-being for all of life, love, and light.

We are in a time between worlds, no doubt. Simply Google the term. I will just say that the human species has, in the last fleeting centuries gone from being worldwide in its endeavor, to being global in its impact, these are different worlds. This transition, if it will be, is by no means complete.

Becoming human, here and now in this lifetime, in this context of world, is for me an invitation to soften, to become more humble in the face of a profound and majestic mystery. It is an invitation to lean in and to ask how skillfully can I resist the conventional currents and flows driving me to participate in the destruction of things that I hold dear; ecosystems, communities, ancient but living cultures. More than that, I find it an invitation to strive for creativity, to open myself more fully to the possibility of participating, awake and aware in a dynamic context, a razor’s edge between caring for life and being careless with it.

The offer, for me, is to re-nature my humanity. In a nihilistic sense, there is no escaping nature, it is nature itself which drives this global exploitation and offers to trade our carbon base for a silicon salvation. In the embrace of it all, on the other hand, nature is what I do with my time here; nature is the fullness within which I realize a fluid and dynamic relationality that makes all of this awesome space a profound and beautiful artwork that draws the heart evermore fully into love.

In summary perhaps, I have said nothing new. Turn the other cheek. Strive for goodness. Honor each other. Honor the earth. Care for yourself, and care for others as yourself. Forgive our divisions. Practice peace and nonviolence. Be cautious with your ideas and generous with your creativity. Take time. Appreciate. Become whole. Become human in this time between worlds.