Column: Life, change, kindness, tao
By Charles Jeanes
Arc CC
Two-hundredth Arc demands big thoughts, serious topics
“It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.” — Aldous Huxley**
I feel the embarrassment of Huxley, today. I’ve been writing this column for more than a decade. A dozen years later, here I am still at it, and still wondering what can be the effect of my written words. I have said so much, and much was prescriptive.
Like Huxley, I have no summary offering to readers, after all, better than his advice.
Please note: the asterisk * or ** or *** requires you to read extensively in the Appendix. Today, this is necessary rather than optional for a complete appreciation of the column. I simply cannot do justice to my topic without these footnotes.
Entitle meant
This Arc of the Cognizant is number 200 since I began to publish it. The choice of my column’s title is a pretty fair summation of my focus on the history of the species, human consciousness, and the nature of conscious mind.
Arc means, among other things, trajectory, path, career, orbit – particularly the path of objects in space or through the atmosphere of our planet. Or a “narrative arc.”
Cognizant is the adjective, employed here as a noun, denoting an individual who is conscious, aware, knowing, informed. Aware people are The Cognizant [ Latin, cognoscenti ]. Cognizant people: is that most humans? Or a small number? Read on.
I began writing The Arc of the Cognizant early in 2012. My then-editor, the late
Adrian Barnes, approached me with a suggestion that I write regularly for this online newspaper, on the strength of a few letters to the Editor he appreciated.
History
What’s been my intention? In a word, change, in humans singly and in the mass.
Individuals desire it, humanity needs it; we need a world better for us, for our children, for other species.
I address one question in various forms: how ought humans live in this wounded world — with a sense of meaning, of purpose, and of value?
Change through history fascinates me. History is my academic discipline, in which I’ve earned university credentials. Yuval Harari defines History as the study of change over time. A fair summation.
[ see these two minutes of his insight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQXZ5prNuqw&list=PLfc2WtGuVPdlrYOmxNPwKPvhsJ_50hZJS&index=2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZqUrhYK-yM&list=PLfc2WtGuVPdlrYOmxNPwKPvhsJ_50hZJS&index=8 ]
Changes in the consciousness of humans makes history. This species owns unique intelligence, and has power “to master the material world.” The story of humans controlling our planet made the History that we know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rtS2OEV6bM
Intentions
I have hewed closely to historical, past-time topics for about half the content I’ve written. In the other half, I’m writing observations of humans as a species of conscious beings.
I look to the past, at the present, and toward the making of our future. The future is the path – the arc — on which humans make what becomes history. As I re-read my archive, I see I offer advice to the species – “we” and “us” – for the kind of change I personally advocate. I observe most writers on topics of current interest in a wide variety of journals, blogs, newspapers, and online text, are free with such advice.
Transform the interior individual, the single person?
Advice comes on two axes: One can change oneself. One can change the world outside. A writer addresses “you,” or “we humans.” Change demands an agent.
A point I’ve made in columns too numerous to count, is that one person has great power over one’s own being, the potential to change the Self. Start there.
Consciousness is the instrument of one’s own construction: make yourself better, if you want change. “… In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common …” — William Henry Channing
[see https://www.missminimalist.com/2010/03/to-live-content-with-small-means-this-is-my-symphony/ ]
My comprehension of change, for human society, politics, culture, economics has evolved in this particular direction: the individual is where fundamental alteration of historic pattern happens, not in political parties, institutions, or cultural phenomena. One person, changing her/his mind, alters our species’ mindscapes.
That the immaterial and spiritual have come to mean more to me, over the years, than secular technology or economy, is clear when I read old Arcs. I have followed Charles Eisenstein along a similar path, the evolution from exterior to interior focus. The individual is in control of changing her- or himself, and that’s why it’s practical (and less arduous) to delineate forms of individual, interior change.
Or transform the collective world, the human family?
Turning from self to the world [ Latin saecula, from which we get our word secular] beyond our interior, we have this suggestion: “… to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch Or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!”
So said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson expressed the intriguing thought that one can leave the world better by one’s legacy of a child, a garden… “Or a redeemed social condition.” **
https://benjweinberg.com/2021/08/05/a-life-well-lived-according-to-emerson/
A social condition transformed into a better order, is quite distinct from a garden. World-transformation requires a plan, a blueprint, such as one encounters in the novel Brave New World. The author of this classic dystopian novel is none other than Aldous Huxley.
Rather than offering blueprints for large collectives like a whole society or system of many parts, when he confronted the challenge of advising other people, his advice was kindness, not an “altered social condition.” He confesses “embarrassment” because his vocation was philosopher, deep thinker, author, man-of-ideas. Huxley’s career as a thinker was devoted to changing the world. Revolutions across human history promised to do the latter, and Huxley knew history quite well.
The Two Architectures for Human Transformation
In human history, religion has been the method most obviously applied to the interiors of human beings to the goal of self-awareness and self-transformation. Some say it hurts more than it helps.* Politics and ideology are other ways we’ve tried to make a better world inside ourselves. Witness Plato, Marx, Gandhi and a host of other historical intelligentsia spouting vast, fascinating ideas.
In the history of homo sapiens, war and violence have been the human doings that cause rapid, wide-reaching alteration in human being on the exterior, while it would be impossible to say what it does to our insides. War touches everything.
One teacher who consistently evolved from large, collective projects of economic transformation to changing of one student at a time, is of course Charles Eisenstein. He now addresses change of mind, not revolutions for worldly organization.
It’s my time to attempt meaningful conclusions about my intent, my content, and my record across the 200 Arcs, in light of confessing ingnorance about how to promote and activate the changes in the people I know and the world I live in, that I desired.
Conclusions: sober second (and third, and fourth…) thoughts
I began the column with an epigraph from Huxley, and I conclude with another. “For in spite of knowledge, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one cannot really communicate anything to anybody.
A columnist citing such a proverb is likely to be suspected of giving up her or his vocation to write, but I am not at that frontier quite yet. It might be on the horizon.
No, the point I raise is this: what if we simply surrender to entropy? That is, accept the Change that is inherent in the cosmos, that never ceases – unless Energy is constantly invested in holding a stasis, a state without change.
This acceptance that change can never stop and will go forward regardless of one’s own actions, is comforting, to me. As physicist Brian Cox said on BBC: “Permanent change is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. We all age as the years pass by — people are born, they live, and they die. I suppose it’s part of the joy and tragedy of our lives, but out there in the universe, those grand and epic cycles appear eternal and unchanging. But that’s an illusion. See, in the life of the universe, just as in our lives, everything is irreversibly changing.”
The second point to make in my conclusion is that not all humans are equal. Not all are conscious, aware, fully-cognizant beings. Only some. In fact, a small minority. And the philosophers of many times, places, and cultures, have all recognized the fact and named the Cognizant Ones by various labels, such as philosopher-king, Sage, Superior Man (sic), Wise One, enlightened being, old soul, Taoist.
I cannot communicate anything of my thought about Change, says Huxley. And what the Cognizant know is this: they do nothing to make change, but good things can happen when the wise know when to align with Entropy. I am lifting this idea from Lao Tzu of course, and his teaching in the Tao that one does nothing and all is accomplished. Lao Tzu offered teachings on how to transform self and world, intended to apply to human life.
His formula was not change in one person at a time, nor was it changing “the world”. It was alignment with the Tao. He calls it wu wei ***
The Tao is effectively synonymous with Entropy, the Way “things are.” The Way is unnameable, but humans live in a world where Tao is beyond human effect. We humans can live in alignment – or not… so a wonderful motto from Tao is, “Don’t push the river.” The clearest natural model from the classic text tells one that Tao is like water, but you must read this for yourself. Read the Tao Te Ching. It won’t take you long.
Here is a free copy. The version is by a brilliant writer, U. K. Le Guin.*** https://terebess.hu/english/tao/LeGuin.pdf
The conscious, cognizant person can be an agent of change by doing not-doing. Wei Wu Wei. Understanding that phrase might begin by a glance at Le Guin’s footnote below.
I will tell you this: it most definitely does not “advise you to do nothing.” But to act and be at peace with the result means something quite other than what 99% of us understand by “acting in the world.”
You are an agent alive with the Way — and you might indeed be necessary to a great transformation, but in no manner will you ever copy Alexander the Great or Moses – those towering mythical figures most of us think are the greatest history-makers and agents of change humanity has ever known. Wu Wei.
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Appendix
* On living well: To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common–this is my symphony.” — William Henry Channing (This piece was used on a popular [in Nelson!] poster, with paintings of Nelson buildings. A bombastic claim to being special. Nelsonites aren’t modest.)
“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate the beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch Or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/transcendentalism
Channing is speaking to individuals changing the self, Emerson to individuals transforming self and entire societies. Neither addresses “humanity.” (= wisdom!)
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* * On religion and its effects
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO48ANdqFoI
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/04/religion-poisons-everything.html
https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2009/02/01/a-secular-age-by-charles-taylor
One could explore philosophy, politics, and literature as cultural products of the human species also addressed to transforming the inner Self.
Religion is a paradigm of all such complex, ramifying, structured, compelling, systematic products of human thinking.
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***
The Wise soul, the superior person, the Taoist, or the Sage:
https://www.pdcnet.org/wcp23/content/wcp23_2018_0008_0007_0014
https://www.themathesontrust.org/papers/fareasternreligions/interreligio-kim-sage.pdf
Lao Tzu [alternate, Laozi] or, how to guide change while doing nothing:
[ a long transcript of a video discussing wu wei ]
From Le Guin’s footnotes on the Tao
Over and over Lao Tzu says wei wu wei: Do not do. Doing not-doing. To act without acting. Action by inaction. You do nothing yet it gets done. . . . It’s not a statement susceptible to logical interpretation, or even to a syntactical translation into English; but it’s a concept that transforms thought radically, that changes minds. The whole book is both an explanation and a demonstration of it.
Everything Lao Tzu says is elusive. The temptation is to grasp at something tangible in the endlessly deceptive simplicity of the words. Even some of his finest scholarly translators focus on positive ethical or political values in the text, as if those were what’s important in it. And of course the religion called Taoism is full of gods, saints, miracles, prayers, rules, methods for securing riches, power, longevity, and so forth—all the stuff that Lao Tzu says leads us away from the Way. In passages such as this one, I think it is the profound modesty of the language that offers what so many people for so many centuries have found in this book: a pure apprehension of the mystery of which we are part.
A strong political statement of the central idea of wu wei, not doing, inaction. My “monstrous” is literally “new.” New is strange, and strange is uncanny. New is bad. Lao Tzu is deeply and firmly against changing things, particularly in the name of progress. He would make an Iowa farmer look flighty. I don’t think he is exactly anti-intellectual, but he considers most uses of the intellect to be pernicious, and all plans for improving things to be disastrous.
Yet he’s not a pessimist. No pessimist would say that people are able to look after themselves, be just, and prosper on their own. No anarchist can be a pessimist. Uncut wood—here likened to the human soul—the uncut, unearned, unshaped, unpolished, native, natural stuff is better than anything that can be made out of it. Anything done to it deforms and lessens it. Its potentiality is infinite. Its uses are trivial. – Ursula K. Le Guin
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/10/21/lao-tzu-tao-te-ching-ursula-k-le-guin/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erFrtb-7MX4
Ursula K. Le Guin and Doris Lessing owned minds of huge capacity — giants of literature whose novels are profoundly interested in human being — both of whom entertained depths of curiosity leading them toward mysticism and entropy.
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