OUT OF THE BOX

ARE YOU AN OUTSIDE-THE-GENES GENIUS?

2009-01-15T17:41:00.026Z

If you suggest a scenario, please be precise and prepared to elaborate it - ie: imagine its development. I invite everyone who comes here to add your own elaborations to anyone else's ideas, as well as to contribute new ones. The point of this project is to stimulate our imagination to invent creative, non-traditional ways to STOP THE KILLING and, perhaps, eventually change the perception that killing can be the solution to conflicts.

Inspiration by itself isn't enough. If an idea is to have life beyond your brain or my brain and actually enter the real world where it might become fact, then the story needs elaboration. We have to go further into our initial fantasy and imagine the whole script, including the opposition it would meet in reality and then imagine how we would shape our idea to meet that opposition. In other words, this is more like writing a film script than it is like having a coffee table discussion about changing the world.

Traditional thinking about conflicts between nations or regions or religions or ideology tends to stick to the language and the methods of politics or, if that approach fails, of military action, whether by armies or by individuals - eg suicide bombers etc.
This thinking hasn't really changed (apart from the greater sophistication of weaponry) throughout history but you won't find a discussion of history here, or of our supposed genetic pre-disposition to kill each other for whatever reason (land, food, sex, power, self-defense, vengeance, ideology, religion, money etc). To those who bring up the "It's built into our genes" argument my question is: what about pacifists and conscientious objectors - do they have different genes from the rest of the human race?
And what about crazy bloggers trying to imagine non-traditional scenarios for stopping the killing: do we have different genes as well? If so, let's have more outside-the-gene genius!

In the worlds of entertainment, advertising, film, television, theatre, art, design, literature, internet communication, etc. imaginations can run free and sometimes come up with ideas which could, if applied to serious global issues (such as stopping the killing) provide at least new ways of looking at and perhaps resolving such issues. I'm proposing that we focus on such techniques, rather than engage in the old old worn-out debates.

Below are responses which have come in so far. I have edited them, trying to focus on scenarios that might be developed.

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Poet in Residence said...
9/1/09 19:04

We could send a radio message from a blurry UFO somewhere in a blurry desert: "We have landed on planet Earth to repair our ship. We will leave planet Earth as soon as we can. Please don't kill us. We repeat. We are here on a peaceful mission. We will leave soon. Please don't kill us. Please don't kill us..." and so on and so on until the war stops.

11/1/09 14:29
I think an inflatable UFO, or a hologram UFO, or even an invisible UFO might be ok because no Earthling knows what a UFO looks like. In fact an invisible UFO would be the best for it would show that superior scientic technology was here. A technology not to be messed with.

Nathan said...01.14.09 - 1:42 pm

You know how many computers can hook up and do distributed processing? So that all of them together can work on a problem which requires too much space for any of them to solve alone? I think people are like that, and we're all connected though our various means of communication, and we're all processing various problems that we have in common. A powerful solution to a problem may crystallize and emerge from a particular person--a particular node in the human network--but really, the solution will be the work of whatever part of the entire network that has been working on the problem.

Stray said...01.15.09 - 2:00 pm

The third is radical: an international draft. When your number is up then you must move to live in the country randomly designated to you for a year, to the place dictated by fate, swapping places with an individual or family who lived there. It is an extreme form of the 'veil of ignorance' - the concept of designing a society which afford you a decent chance in life but without knowing whether you are black, white, rich, poor, disabled etc at the point where you take part in the debate. We need to appreciate that even your birthplace is not a birth right - and that every human being deserves a safe, clean, resourced part of the world to live in.

Natalie replied...01.15.09 - 3:08 pm

I'm especially after the visceral-wake-up ideas. The next step is: how to make them work without being dependent on "Them" (any insurmountable power structure)? Can you elaborate your scenario? Bearing in mind the reality that no current government, anywhere, is going to decide to set up such an international draft. So, how would you go about it? Maybe start out with a 'reality' TV show? A model of what it could be like in the Real world? Whether we like it or not, the masses (I don't mean that derogatorily) are more moved by shows like the X-factor than they are by politics or government pronouncements.

bdieu said...15/1/09 09:58

A friend sent me this video after I mentioned your post on the list. It illustrates well the enormous power of social media combined with art that can be used to draw people together for a pacific cause.

Anonymous said...15/1/09 11:48

All the port and airport workers in the world should refuse to load and unload ships carrying weapons. All the people who make guns, tanks, missiles, etc should refuse to make any more.

Natalie replied....15/1/09 15:24

Can you now ask your imagination to describe exactly how you would go about convincing those people to follow your idea? Imagining all the reasons they would refuse such as: those protesting port & airport workers would lose their jobs then what would they live on? And: the arms dealers and manufacturers make tons of money: why would they agree to lose such a cash cow? How to overcome the resistance which would inevitably occur?

WANTED: WORLD-CHANGING IDEAS, NO STRINGS ATTACHED

2009-01-09T20:54:00.003Z

This repeats a post first published today on Blaugustine and also on Augustine's Other Blog

People who have the power to change things for the better generally fail to change things for the better for one or more of the following reasons.

1. They are the wrong people to be in power.

2. They are the right people but depend on or are hampered by the wrong people.

3. Right people or wrong people: power itself is the problem.

4. Power always has many strings attached.

5. Too many strings = too many knots and loose ends and broken threads and nooses.

6. While the powerful are busy trying to untangle their strings without losing their power, the innocent and powerless suffer.

7. When the powerless adopt the methods of the powerful, they too become entangled in the strings of power, and the goal of making things better moves further and further out of reach.

THEREFORE:

WE WHO WANT TO CHANGE THINGS FOR THE BETTER

WITHOUT FALLING INTO THE TRAPS OF POWER

NEED TO CHALLENGE OUR IMAGINATIONS

TO CONCEIVE IDEAS WHICH ARE POWERFUL

BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT ABOUT POWER.

NEW WAYS OF LOOKING AT OLD PROBLEMS,

USING THE POWERFUL TOOLS

OF ART, OF MUSIC, OF DANCE, OF THEATRE, OF POETRY, OF FILM, OF SPORT, OF INVENTION, OF BUILDING, OR EVEN OF BLOGGING.

With all this in mind I imagined an unlikely but not unimaginable scenario. This is what I saw:

An army of dancers, amateurs and professionals, wave after wave of them, every style of dancing from anywhere in the world, accompanied by their musicians, moving in disciplined formation like a very long carnival parade. But not a carnival.

A massive non-violent dancing protest, confronting tanks and trucks and armed soldiers intent on their power mission, obeying their power orders. On both sides of the divide, the dancing army confronts the violence and advances inexorably, rhythmically. The fighters in their tanks and behind their rockets are flabbergasted, the music and dancing are so contagious......

Yes, yes, I know. The dancing army would nor be allowed into the country. And even if they were, they would not be permitted to enter the war zone. And even if they were, the dancers would become too traumatised by the dead, the dying, the wounded, the bereaved screaming despair and vengeance, to be able to keep on dancing. And even if they were, they would soon be mowed down by the fighting on all sides. Life is not a cabaret, oh chum. I know this.

A stubborn, childish, rebellious voice in me keeps on insisting my scenario could happen if enough people participated. There are other ways, ways that are beyond politicians and governments and armies. I'm concocting a little video to illustrate the above scenario and will post it when ready.

The killing and maiming and destruction have to stop. Not after discussions and negotiations and conferences but immediately.

If the 'experts' haven't been able to make it stop after years and years of talking and killing, killing and talking, why not try something completely different? I am absolutely not saying that a dancing army (or another idea of similar nature) would be a solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict or any other major conflict elsewhere on the planet. But it could (or so I imagine) at least stop the killing, allowing other solutions to be found.

In July 2007 I started OUT OF THE BOX which fizzled out after a very short time, mainly because I didn't keep it up. To start the new year, I want to resurrect it and am throwing this challenge out to you:

Can you imagine original scenarios which might STOP THE KILLING AND HURTING anywhere that people are wiping each other out in large numbers, for whatever reason?

Ideas which do not pretend to be solutions to the complex problems behind these conflicts but which focus only on means of putting an immediate stop to the killing and maiming.

Here are the rules:

1. Scenarios must be imaginative, constructive and non-violent.

2. Please, no lectures or analyses! Only visualisations of events that could be made to happen, using unconventional, creative, daring approaches, borrowing from the arts and entertainment rather than politics or moralising.

3. You can post your ideas on your own blog and put a link to your post in the comments here at OUT OF THE BOX

4. Or, enter your idea as a comment here and I will copy and paste it as a post.

5. Illustrations and videos welcome. Post at your own blog and/or give the link here.

6. Links to existing initiatives which tackle such issues creatively are also welcome. For instance:

Peace Child , a non-profit organization which uses music and the stage as a vehicle for grassroots repair and reconciliation processes. Serves Arab and Jewish teenagers, their parents and teachers.

Or this which documents some of the international initiatives helping to build peace through the arts.

COMMENTS SO FAR ON IN/OUT OF BOX

2007-08-08T00:21:00.000+01:00

Nathan said...

I think the moral of what I'm about to write is that outside of one box is the same thing as inside another box. A "box," the way we use it in this expression, is a conceptual framework. If you think outside a particular conceptual framework, you're automatically reaching into a different one.

So last night in my dream there is this very loving unmarried couple in their mid-30s, white people with straight, dark-brown hair, and they're walking hand-in-hand into a park in or near Los Angeles, California. It's evening.

She tells him she has become a vampire, and would like to make him a vampire too. He's totally in favor of that. Her lips push forward, her jaws elongate, and long, sharp canine teeth grow out of her gums. He takes his shirt off, leans forward, and she nips him on the back, just enough to break the skin. She's not the kind of vampire that needs to drink blood to survive.

He straightens up, his mouth undergoes the same transformation, and he bites her a little too. They disappear into the night holding hands like Batman and Batgirl.

The next evening their friends go looking for them, because they've vanished from home and work. They are flying over Los Angeles in a batplane, like a silent black fighter plane with the cockpit on the underside (because they prefer to sit upside-down). They land near a woman friend. "Where have you been?" "We're vampires now." "Whoa, that can't be a good thing." "Sure it is. Watch this!" And she starts punching him really hard, but because his body is now quite different from what it once was--more supernatural--it doesn't hurt at all, he's just like a totally soft punching bag for her, and he's standing there on the wing of the plane with a huge smile on his face!

Now, what does this have to do with the theme? The fictional characters in my dream went outside the box of the human and into another conceptual framework, which makes no sense from the perspective of their friend, but makes perfect sense from theirs.

August 8, 2007 3:19 PM

Rain said...
Putting my thoughts into this box are the only way they will get posted... a limitation right at the start.

Basically I believe all innovation comes from those who are willing and able to think outside the box. Sometimes they say one generation has to die before something can really take over and grow as people become so defensive of what always was.

As is the case with so many things, I believe a society needs both those who think outside and inside the box. Some develop what has already been done or figured out but others look and think but why not-- this? That totally blows the minds of those who have spent years developing something and then along comes a johnny come lately who suggests it was for nothing. Well it wasn't really for nothing. It was the foundation but from that, the idea can go anywhere that it is physically possible.

So being a typical Libra, I think it's important for a culture to have both types-- those inside the box and those who can go outside.

August 7, 2007 10:16 PM

Dave said...
O.K.

August 8, 2007 3:40 PM

Natalie d'Arbeloff said...
Dave, never mind abstract. Think concrete!

August 7, 2007 3:39 AM

Dave said...
I'm still pondering the question of identity. I don't do very much abstract thinking any more - I burnt out on it during my first two years of blogging, I think.

August 7, 2007 1:46 AM

Natalie d'Arbeloff said...
Dave, yes it was/is a great conversation - why not join in? I'm sure you have an interesting take on the subject.

Towanda, I agree it's not an either/or situation. I'm just putting the challenge out to see what people will come up with.

August 6, 2007 11:29 PM

Towanda said...

Not feeling particularly witty today but can offer this question -- why does it have to be one or the other? Out OR in? Seems to me we need both...I find myself doing both...

August 6, 2007 11:20 PM

Dave said...

What a great conversation!

August 5, 2007 3:34 AM

August theme: IN OR OUT OF THE BOX?

2007-08-04T00:33:00.000+01:00

Out to dinner with good friends recently, somehow we got on to the subject of "thinking outside the box." I defended my corner but Ogukuo the Scholar took the opposite view, arguing that thinking inside the box was the way to go, building on previous research, carefully comparing, evaluating. The debate branched off into artistic creation, whether skill is essential to art, whether young children's "art" is ever really art and so on. Ogukuo grabbed a biro and, on the back of a menu, did a two-minute sketch of the objects on the table and the person sitting opposite him (me). He believes that he has no visual skills and wanted to prove his point: no skill, no art. I looked at the sketch and automatically drew a frame around it. Ogukuo took it back and wrote: "You have put my work into a box". True! I had instinctively boxed-in an outside-the-box manifestation! How embarassingly interesting. I slipped the drawing into my bag and when I got home, scanned it, added some colours in Photoshop and emailed it back to Ogukuo. Over the next week or so we played a sort of emailed ping-pong match which I've assembled on a single page below, though each frame was a separate message. I had to reduce it drastically but if you click on it you'll see the larger version.

So, that's the theme for this month: your thoughts, your experiences concerning in-box /out-box approaches. If you want to continue along the lines of our playful exchange, please do. But anything goes. Be bold!

CLICK ON PICTURE TO SEE LARGER VERSION

SOME LAST WORDS ON IDENTITY

2007-07-31T02:23:00.000+01:00

Many thanks to those of you who contributed to the first month's theme and I hope will participate in the the next one. Ruminating some more about identity I asked myself:
When are the times in my life when the subject doesn't arise? When do questions like "Who am I?" "What am I doing here?" "Where am I going?" "Where have I been?" become irrelevant?
I made a list and here it is, in no particular order.

When I'm in love.
When I'm wholly involved in creative work.
When I dance or sing or play or pray or am entranced by nature.
When I'm communicating with close friends.
When I'm taking care of others who depend on me and whom I love.
When there is a crisis of some kind which demands immediate and specific action.

At times like those, I am who I am, no question about it. So now I leave this topic, wondering if wondering about identity only happens when none of the above circumstances exist?

Tomorrow I'll announce the topic for August.

UPDATE: LAST-MINUTE CONTRIBUTIONS FOR JULY

DefSufi said...

One last thing about identity...
Sufis teach that a human soul is a drop in the Ocean of the Divine One. Once it is realised that the lover is the same substance as the Beloved, all "identity" ceases, and both "become" what they truly are.
"But do not think that the drop alone becomes the Ocean— the Ocean, too, becomes the drop!" Jelaluddin Rumi

July 31, 2007 12:00 PM

Beth said...

Am I too late? It's still July, barely...

Like Dick, I've always had a strong sense of knowing who I am, so this question is a hard one for me to comment upon. My identity doesn't seem mysterious, in fact it seems logical. Knowing who I am doesn't, of course, mean that I've always been able to act on it fully, often because of other people's expectations or needs, but gradually I've found that what really matters is knowing who you are at your core, and then you don't lose it quite so much when in difficult situations or living with limitations. What is mysterious to me is not so much identity as being. "I AM," said Yahweh, and we can say it to ourselves, and never understand entirely how that could be possible, and yet be absolutely clear that we in fact "ARE," and we are ourselves and no other. My explorations and wonderings about identity as an adult have been more along the lines of who I am in relationship to all the others who are, and what that might mean. It's a question of becoming more fully myself, and at the same time surrendering to the knowledge that we are all parts of one another; I certainly exist in my own individual physicality, and in my own consciousness, but I'm most fully myself when engaged in the ego-less activities Natalie mentions in her list. Moving more deeply into that paradox will be the continuing work of the next years....

July 31, 2007 2:49 PM

Paul said...
Who teaches the teacher?
August 1, 2007 1:33 PM

2007-07-22T15:59:00.000+01:00

Nathan says....

Autobiology

My father and mother split vitriolically when I was three.
They had a long nasty custody battle over me.
I ended up mostly with my mom and her second husband
and his three kids, who were much older than me, and
according to the terms of the judge's decision I went to
my father's apartment every other weekend and every other
Thursday afternoon. So I had an odd living situation
and felt that neither place was completely my home
and had to mentally switch gears every time I went
from one place to the other.
I always had friends, but
I spent a lot of time on my own back then too, pondering things.

Around the time I was seven and eight
I was convinced that I was the subject of
an experiment conducted by extraterrestrials
to see how I would react to various situations.
Other people were robots created to see how I would
react to them.
At one point I shared this belief with a close friend
and he said that he thought the same thing about himself.
So I figured there were at least two of us and probably more.
As late as ten I remember thinking I was being spied on.
I was sitting alone in a classroom
and thought there was a camera concealed in a clock,
and I grabbed my penis to insult whoever was looking at me.

This solipsism changed over the next years
into a belief that I and a few others
were vastly superior, intellectually,
to the rest of humanity.
In my freshman year of college
I met a poet girl who struck me as being of the same calibre
and she told me she, too, thought of most people
as being mindless sheep.
She and I were like sparks and gasoline fumes.
Deep in the night in bed with her I dreamed
two planets orbiting around each other
at an incredible rate of speed. Another night
a mountain lion and the moon.
My body has memories of these things
that it doesn't tell my mind.

The other morning, walking to work
up Hetzendorferstrasse,
I was characterizing my earlier selves
by their obsessions.
I've always been fascinated
but the fascinations shift.
If I subtract ten years from me now
I find a man who's passionate about visions
and willing to do dangerous things to achieve them
because he's confident that his death is not written into
that section of the script.
And wondering what to do with those visions
and where he'll live and how he'll earn his bread.
But if I do believe anything today
it's that we are all part of the same massive being.
I believe this because I saw it in a vision
as I lay in a hammock in the jungle:
all the humans in space and time,
I saw together, connected like the twigs and branches
of a single giant plant.

A much younger me was mad to know everything
about whales and dolphins
and dreamed of being a marine biologist
and solving the problem of interspecies communication;
though even then I thought that was a bit beyond me.
The summer I was thirteen
my mom, my stepdad, my stepbrother and I were in Maine
assisting a scientific study of whales. That is,
we'd go out in the boat most days with our friends the scientists and the
boat captain, and that summer, we saw a lot of right whales
at very close range.
I wasn't there the day the whales were mating
and one lifted the front of the boat to warn the people
to stay away.
One night the phone rang at 11PM and we raced out to some
rocky coastline because a lot of dolphins had beached themselves
and needed to be saved.
By the time we got there there was nothing to be done,
others had done it already: thrown some back in the water;
some were already dying and were taken to a building
belonging to the fishing industry and put in tanks
partly filled with water and their skins were kept moist.
I touched one of those dying dolphins. I think it was barely conscious.
Smooth and gray, firm,
and unable to explain to any of us why it had done what it had done.

2007-07-16T13:32:00.000+01:00

Richard Lawrence Cohen said...

Funny you should ask. I was thinking about identity just today, doing The Work of Byron Katie (which I've blogged about in the past) on the belief statement, "I don't know who I really am." I found that I don't know whether I'm happy or sad about the most important developments in my life; I don't know whether I'm still the same person I was as a child, or last year, or yesterday; I don't know what the interior of my body is doing; I don't know what's in my unconscious; I don't know my future; I don't know whether I love or hate myself; and I don't know whether I love or hate others. And with all this, I have thought for a long time that I understand myself.

July 11, 2007 7:00 PM

Nathan said...

I and Identity

There's a belief
that our souls are made up of fragments of older souls.
I read about this in a lovely book about Jewish mysticism called 9 1/2 Mystics.
A rabbi would look at a man and diagnose,
"There seems to be a speck of Cain
in your right shoulder."

I believe this in the same way I believe everything:
completely, not at all, and everything in between, in all directions.

***

The Rastafarian term I and I
is the same as the Hindu concept of atman and brahman:
one is simultaneously oneself as a person
and oneself as the godhead;
the many selves are one self.

***

Etymology can help us open the door of a word
and look inside.
"Individual" is "that which cannot be divided."
A useful fiction.
"Atom," from Greek, means the same thing,
indivisible, unsplittable.

***

One's self is many selves;
Letters are atoms of language;
Our voices are made of voices;
Everything we get involved with
writes long, long poems on our minds and bodies;
Our speech is the glittering surface of a river.

***

Since I was there, I've been working out what to do with the material--
how to say it, how to write it, how to dance it.

In the 1990s I spent four years in Ecuador,
teaching, translating, running illegal jungle tours, and
sitting in ayahuasca ceremonies with shamans.

Are spirits real? I wanted to know.
What is the self?
Is there life after death?
Can the soul travel outside the body?

I received no concrete answers to these questions.
No, no concrete answers at all.

July 11, 2007 10:40 PM

Part Deux

...I laugh. By the light of the candle, I notice that two eyes have sprouted on the band of Dave’s crown. I tell him so and he laughs. Next, those disappear and four new eyes appear on his face, on a level with his own eyes, forming a linked band of six eyes across the front of his head. An angel-man, he squints at me out of six bright eyes, grins and laughs. It’s a bit much. I feel like I’ve been out in the sun too long.

Nausea hits me and I rise and get down off the floor onto the ground. The night is vast and dark, the grass is soft and damp. Things are happening in my guts that I will have to fight. A battle begins between me and my own demons, whatever those are, tactile metaphors. I raise my hands in the air and do an ancient war dance, consciously playing a role, also consciously possessed by the spirit of an ancestor, grunting huh huh huh huh hu hu hu hu hu hu…. A paleolithic tribal code surges through me: first we show the strangers our peace, then our strength, and if they attack anyway, we eliminate them. I’m a soul half a million years old. I’m what I’m not. I’m everything.

Nausea hits me again, harder, a solid punch in the stomach. I bellow with pain. Losing the war against myself, I walk to a big fallen tree and vomit with a deep roar on the far side of the trunk. Now that I’ve lost, the victory is mine: I’ve driven out the invader, as all invaders must be driven out, and I shout toward the river and any demons who can hear, WE PROTECT OUR OWN! The struggle suddenly seems a transpersonal one, all of us in this microcommunity of neighbors on this river defending ourselves against attackers; the battleground is Aguilar’s life. Highly energized now, I feel a puma spirit from the highlands enter my body, and we step around catlike, silent, looking around, sniffing the air, learning the place. The puma energy leaves, the puma thoughts recede, and in comes a condor spirit. We stretch out my arms and our soul seems to fly high above the earth. A jaguar is next, and finally a wolf. He lopes away, a gray form melting into shadows. As I turn toward the hut, a river of brilliant multicolored energy from a small cluster of stars near the middle of the sky swarms down into my chest. An unbelievably strong ecstasy surges through me, and I dance, and words sing out of my mouth—One love is high! One love is high! One love is high!

After some time I’m only me again. As I walk back to the hut, still dazzled, I mutter to David, “That wasn’t me dancing, it was the universe dancing through me.” ...

July 12, 2007 4:38 AM

Dick said...

I have a powerful sense of identity that defies provenance, location, even definition. A sort of 'selfness' seems to have been with me since first memory, & maybe before; I have no idea from whence it arises within (it certainly has no connection with any external visual representation); I cannot even begin to apprehend it verbally & thus depict it to myself. As an only child, I'm aware that the purity of my consciousness of 'selfness' has been untrammeled by sibling presence & it's at its most intense & vibrant when I'm alone. I know too that its clearest voice is to be found (for better or worse) in my poetry.

And that's about as far as I've ever got when shining the torch into the darkest places!

July 12, 2007 7:12 AM

Jonah said...

I am not I.
I am not my hazel eyes,
that change shade with the seasons.
I am not my thin hair.
I am not my gray beard.
I am not my thin mouth.

I am not that reflection.
I am not I.
I am not my voice.
I am not my thoughts.
I am not my desires.
I am not my nightmares.
I am not my dreams.

I do not see my eye.
I am not that twinkling eye.
I am not my shadow.
I am not the one you see,
or the one you think you see.
I am not I.

I am not the song.
I am not the singing.
I am not the slender fingers
on my guitar fretboard,
nor the fingers that
pluck each string.
I am not the harmonica moan.

I am not the prayer
or the pray-er.
I am not my breath.
I am not that distant figure.

The finger does not touch itself.
The eye cannot see itself.
I am not I.

July 12, 2007 2:09 PM

Jean said...

I guess I would completely agree with Dick that "I have a powerful sense of identity that defies provenance".

I regard my life as an almost unmitigated disaster. Staying alive is no small achievement; still, I would have liked a lot of other things I haven't done and haven't had.

Nonetheless, if I ask myself: who would I like to be? the answer is unhesitatingly that I cannot imagine being anyone else but me, cannot imagine *wanting* to be anyone else but me.

I have no idea what I mean by 'me', but my heart and all my instincts certainly know.

I presume it is the same for most people.

One of life's great and wondrous mysteries.

July 12, 2007 3:10 PM

DefSufi said...

My experience is that identity can be a slippery thing, and that even if you yourself feel you have a firm grasp on who you think you are, others may not agree. At all. Not even close.
I sort of live that.

First, I can look back over my life and see that "who I am/was" has changed periodically, as I found new loves, new interests, new friends. I have come to think of these phases in my life as incarnations, even though my body has continued to live. Yes, there is a central thread of "me" that runs through it all, but if there were such a thing as a time machine, I doubt that my 10-year old self would ever think she would become my 47-year old self. She wouldn't recognise me as the future her.
Secondly, the way I identify myself is radically different to how my parents, especially my mum, identifies me. I am a Sufi Muslim. I have been for more than a decade. But just a few weeks ago my mum said how glad she was that I had "given all that up". She said this because I don't fit her stereotype of a Muslim woman (she's a lapsed Christian, btw, as are my dad and sister) because I "don't dress the way those women do". So in her mind, because I wear jeans and a t-shirt, I'm something other to her than how I see myself.

If you look at your day, you too might get the feeling that who you are at work is not quite who you are at home, down the pub, at church, with the kids, out shopping, etc. I've observed that most of us have "additions" to our central core personality and identity that we put on and take off like we do our clothes. Mum in the morning whilst getting the kids off to school, office manager in the workplace, mum again later when the kids are back, spouse / lover / partner when the other adult in your life comes home, dance floor chick if you get to go out clubbing with your mates. We are still "Chris" or "Alice" or "Cait" or "Mike" at the core, but we put on those other clothes.

Part of the purpose of a spiritual path, awareness path, etc. is to discover and develop our core identity to the point where the clothes can come off, and we ARE who we are, full stop. At that point, we can finally experience our true self, and the "self" of the rest of creation.
There's a quote from Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach that I really like:
"You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self.
Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them.
You're always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past."

July 13, 2007 12:19 PM

Rain said...

Wow, you started this off with a bang, as in things I have thought a lot about and could write a book on each of them.

On the DNA, I have said that for a long time that it might carry memory markers and as you said, could explain all of these 'mutual' memories. It also is possible you were the Egyptian queen in a past life and the reason so many remember the same past life is that they were in that era but not necessarily the person. So you end up with a lot of Cleopatras but most were serving maids, knew her and remember the details, claiming the more important identity as their past life personally.

There is no knowing on any of it as we can't prove from where come these memories or coincidences. Interesting though and you certainly do resemble her. They say we do through one lifetime to another and Tina Turner sure doesn't look like her this go round-- if she was her in the past.

My personal past life in Egypt (if there are such things) was likely as a temple priestess which translates to forced sex supposedly for god and not a good memory set at all.

On identity, it is weird you wrote about this as I have had the same thoughts recently; and as you said in my blog, it's kind of amazing how this all comes together that so many of us think the same thing at the same time. Like an energy wave comes through.

July 13, 2007 4:44 PM

wrr said.....

Defining who I am is a very curious endeavor because there's no one clear cut or simple answer.

All that I am is a result of the lessons learned from all the varied life circumstances I went through. As life is continuing learning process, identity a work in progress.

How I look at life is also a result of lessons leaned from decisions made in the past. This too contributes to who I am, what I stand for and what is valuable to me.

Consequentially, how I deal will people and life circumstances is culled from all of the above.

I agree with Dick, identity does defy provenance. Its experiences that is the result of life circumstances that shape a person's identity. We learn something new every time we are confronted with the result of a decision we've made in the past.

Andy said....

Some people seem very sure of their own identity; others - like me - are much less so.
I wonder how much of the uncertainty comes about because, somewhere along the line, we started living out other people’s expectations of us? Expectations which diverged from our true nature, and so that nature became suppressed, the loser in a power struggle.

Of course, that idea assumes that there is such a thing as ‘true nature’; something which we are independently of all those external influences - the old nature versus nurture polarity.

As children, we learned to please our parents; as employees we learned to live out the role our employers defined for us; as spouses we continued the desire of young lovers to please the beloved, until the desire was gone and only a shell of habit remained.

Or perhaps it was nothing as overtly coercive as expectations; perhaps it was simply that none of the role models we had available to us in our formative years adequately illustrated all the possibilities open to us. Certainly, in my case, all my relations (I have many cousins mostly a decade or so older than me) followed seemingly identical patterns – ‘good’ jobs (for ‘good’ read secure, dull, conventional, conformist), marriage in mid-20s, then ‘settling down’ to have a family. Any dreams of anything more adventurous were seen as precisely that – just impossible dreams, utterly divorced from reality.

I often feel that I don’t altogether fit in the life that I’ve got – and moreover I’ve felt this pretty much for as long as I can remember. It seems that, without deliberately planning it this way, I’ve constructed a life designed for somebody else. Over the decades, one decision leads to another, and another, and slowly the paths diverge. What is becomes further and further removed from what could have been – what should have been?

Neither path is necessarily any ‘better’ than the other in any material sense, but they’ve led to very different places. In one, I might have felt at home. In this one, I feel something of a stranger, a misfit.

Of course, reality is not always so black-and-white – I’m painting a picture of extremes in order to make the point. The influences which make us who we are complex and continually changing, and if there is a power struggle between external expectations and internal identity, it may ebb and flow.

But one of the strengths of blogging is that, since it is a means of self-expression, it can provide a medium where that ‘true self’ may find a voice.

July 16, 2007 10:19 PM

Theme for July 2007: IDENTITY

2007-07-11T14:47:00.002+01:00

My own contribution to the theme of identity is my post of July 5th on Blaugustine :

Anyone who has followed this blog from the start knows that I have a thing about Hatshepsut

Now they've gone and found our mummy so I have to mark the event. Wait a few more years and the ressemblance will be even closer but, embalming having gone out of fashion, you'll never know what my current mummy would look like. An odd thing about that missing tooth: when I was very small I had an extra tooth - really extra - on the gums, high above the normal row of teeth, and when I smiled it was like a fang. Coincidence about Hatshepsut's mummy's missing tooth? Maybe. My extra tooth was extracted when I was about ten or twelve when someone finally noticed that it was rather weird. This whole reincarnation thing gets even weirder. There's more than one of us convinced we were Hatshepsut in a past life: Tina Turner is a well-known contender for the title and there's a woman who wrote quite angrily after I posted my Luxor journal, saying that I couldn't possibly be Hatshep because she was her and could prove it. And I met an artist in Italy who was another ex-Hatshep; her home was filled with Egyptian artefacts and she had built a sarcophagus in which she would lie to meditate, I kid you not. For all I know, there are hundreds of people out there who feel sure they were this particular ancient Egyptian monarch and quite possibly we are all deluded fools with over-active imaginations influenced by art history and low (or excessive) self-esteem. On the other hand, we may all be right. Maybe there's another kind of DNA beyond the usual one. A sort of psychophysical DNA. (I'm just making this up as I go along but let's see where it goes). What if, when an individual dies, their psy-DNA splits into a certain number of clones of itself and those mini-clones get into the appropriate host bodies and are reborn. So, along with normal genetic inheritance we get this other kind of inheritance. Yes, the theory is full of holes and can't be proved. On the other hand........

WHAT IS IDENTITY?

I've been looking, mostly with horror, at recent photos of me taken by other people then taking some of myself to see if they match the results that others get. Mostly they don't. I'm not quite so horrified by my own snaps. Probably because I can control the lighting and the angle and the expression and the lens of the built-in camera on my computer isn't that sharp.

But the mystery of identity obsesses me. The mind that is inside this body observes itself from within, behind its own skin, and reports to itself on what it sees. This inner image only vaguely resembles the outer one and the more time passes, the less it resembles it. But why do we put such emphasis on pictorial 'reality', as if there is only one kind ? An x-ray of me would also be reality. So would my DNA profile. So would a psychological assessment. And if a picture could be taken at the sub-atomic level of my particles whirling round, that would be reality too. Yet none of these versions would be, or would explain, identity. The only tool we have for examining identity, from the inside, is our own inner camera. It's not very reliable but it's all we have.

The mystery of the "me" is that it feels like it's always been there.