1 of 198 — What I Believe

BECOMING AN INTERVIDUAL — SITTING AUTHENTICALLY IN THE SPACE THAT REFLECTS OUR REALITY — IS THE NEXT STEP FOR AMERICANS SEEKING TO END OUR NATIONAL ADOLESCENCE

I begin with my personal, public declaration (I hope you will consider undertaking this act as the first of these 198 methods as well):

I’ve sometimes been less than my best self since August of 1970, when I was told I was born. Oh, my base instinct is clear; in publicly standing for anything, I’d want to first claim, and exclusively so, all the accolades and measures of my goodness that you’d find on my resume. I’d want to tell you, exclusively, about the work I’ve done and the lives I’ve impacted in a positive way. The truth? The truth is at various times and to various degrees I’ve also been a liar, a cheat, a thief. The truth is that my sins are too numerous to list here. For me, my personal bottom line is as Martin Luther King, Jr. submits in his lamentation “Unfulfilled Dreams,” a sermon King delivered a month before his death:

…I don’t know this morning about you, but I can make a testimony. You don’t need to go out this morning saying that Martin Luther King is a saint. Oh, no. I want you to know this morning that I’m a sinner like all of God’s children. But I want to be a good man…

I, too, want to be a good man. But how?

For me, something of meaning can begin with an open and public process of becoming “a good man”; about standing, in public, for something. In an existence that’s tragic in its very configuration — we are born, we live, and we will die — standing in public for something perverts space and time in the very act, freezing time and delineating space by saying, among other things, that “Right here, right now…this is what it all means to me,” and allowing others to say “Right then, right there…that’s what he was willing to stand for.”

That’s what was compelling, to me, about Gene Sharp‘s 198 Methods, a tool chest for responding to this messed-up world as a messed-up human who isn’t so messed-up he wants to proceed in violence…it begins with standing up, in public, and saying what you know or believe, for sure. And the first thing I know for sure is that I’m not good enough by myself to tell anyone else what they — or we — should be doing. I need to connect what I think I know with what’s knowable.

The second thing I know for sure is that one solid way for flawed, failed creatures to try and share a way forward — to try do good — is to be in connection with knowable reality, divine principle, or, in the best case scenario…both. Indeed I’m here to argue that where the clearest of our scientific approach intersects with the most universal of our metaphysical approach…well, there can be found a great potential energy for moving the human project forward.

But forward in what way? I’ve become a fervent adherent to the notion of reality as fundamentally interdependent…so much so that as I reflect on these 198 methods, and on the fact that they begin with standing in a public space and making a declaration — about oneself, and about the world — the thing I know beyond me, and who I am, is that I exist on a continuum, one that moves between dependent-independence and independent-dependence…depending. Cogito ergo omnia mihi, so to speak.

All of our science confirms it. I mean, we can actually do the math that calculates the gravitational pull I have on the furthest flung bodies of matter in the universe…and the pull they have on me. We know.

We know that when light makes its speedy, photonic way from a star toward earth, and passes through the atmosphere, ultimately into a leaf of spinach and that that leaf, through photosynthetic and chlorophyillc effect grows bigger and fuller and greener, and eventually that leaf may be eaten, by me, or my wife, or, petulantly, by my youngest son Kai…and the energy of a star will transfer in knowable ways from that star into my son…that he is comprised of the stars. We know.

We know that the universe demonstrates, measurably, more than just connection, but dependence. We can accurately assess life on Earth with no sun. With no gravity. With no atmosphere. We know. We know what our carbon emissions are doing to that interdependent balance. We measurably, definitively understand.

All our of physics, chemistry, astronomy…all of our biology, botany, neuroscience and genetic science…the quanta of the small and the cosmic of it all…all of it tells us that reality is composed of forces at all times both independent and dependent. We know.

The best of our religiosity and metaphysical understandings submit that same interdependent sensibility. Christ Jesus submits, for example, only two commands as “the Greatest Commands,” giving them a direct, articulated primacy over all other submissions he might have made. Christ is asked about this directly, and answers interdependently, in the Book of Matthew (also found in verses 17 and 18 of Leviticus 19):

36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Indeed, for Christ, loving all that is, and loving everyone you come across with the merciful love you can give yourself — in other words, interdependently, as his answer to the question “Well, who, then, is my neighbor?” tells us — is the hinge upon which the entire rest of the faith hangs.

And whether it’s Islam, where the Prophet Muhammad says in the Hadith “…You will not enter paradise until you believe, and you will not believe until you love one another,” or the Buddhist submissions on advesa and mettā, or the Greek consideration of philía versus éros versus storgē, pragma, and philautia…and the ultimate elevation of agápe above all precisely because its the form of love that, as Liddell and Scott wrote, is “the love of God for man and of man for a good God,’ or the Hindu take on prema, or “elevated love,” it’s clear that among notions of divine principle the most trans-formative acts are those interdependent with, and interconnected to, others, and, in the most radical from of The Other, with God.

We also know that our human society reflects this interdependence, whether or not we build personal or social or religious constructions to acknowledge it. It doesn’t matter, at all, how survivalist various members of my extended family want to persist in moving to vistas in Texas and Colorado and Ohio (where they can live out their sense of individual freedom) if, for example, Xi Jinping loses his mind. Xi Jinping, is, of course, the President of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and I have no information that he’s gone mad while in possession of approximately 260 nuclear warheads. What I do know is that right now, my life, your life, and the life of everyone on this planet is in deep and abiding relationship with President Xi. And with Prime Minister Modi. And with Vladimir Putin, Donald John Trump and all the others who possess the ability to immediately have a nuclear impact on my lives and the lives of everyone on the planet. And it doesn’t matter how I feel about them; it doesn’t matter what kind of social construction I place in front of myself and others to “not see” them, nor does any attempt to diminish them in terms of their ideology matter. They are…and I am.

I am in fervent, ongoing and intimate relationship with them and depend upon not only their sanity but the sanity of all those around them, in a very direct way. I am both free and independent — i have freedom of thought, and free will — and I am in dramatic and undeniable dependent relationship with them, these people most of whom I’ve never met.

I use this example to illuminate seven and half billion other, less dramatic truths. Forget the esoteric and lends-itself-to-Hollywood sense of the butterfly effect; each of us plays a role in our waste management, transportation choices, food choices, and a thousand other life choices that impacts the other, in measurable, calculable ways,and in ways we’ve yet to completely assess.

We are both perfectly independent beings and, at all times, hinged to and dependent upon each other and everything else in this reality. Both things are always true, all the time.

We struggle to live this truth, this knowable reality of the simultaneity of that continuum ranging between dependent-independence and independent-dependence…depending.

We also lack the daily grammar and vocabulary, landscapes, vistas and points-of-view that spring from and can articulate these truths. As a result, we live in the ostensible next best thing our communities can confer, and differing societies see that “next best thing” differently; the USA, unable to articulate knowable reality, emphasizes the individual project above all other considerations, and resultantly steeps itself in illusion over reality. The PRC, unable to articulate knowable reality, emphasizes the collective/the “people” over all other considerations, and resultantly steeps itself in illusion over reality. Entities like the EU, or various American or African nations, look at the ostensible extreme approaches of nations like the USA or the PRC and rest replete in a moderated “middle,” still unable to articulate knowable reality, and resultantly, well-positioned between two illusions, lives a similarly illusory, oscillating existence.

I stand here in love, and in commitment to knowable reality. I begin in the smallest of ways, by publicly declaring what I am: I am an intervidual; I am at all times my singular, free, independent self and also I am a component, universally dependent, of the reality beyond my nose. All at the same time, with the same potency of meaning.

Having declared myself, for the first time, and knowing how absent the vocabulary, grammar and societal structure around this truth is, I dedicate my life to moving beyond this first step into a firmer, more graspable deployment of the truth.

An intervidual; seems like a good place to start.