(I realize that sharing random snippets from my book begs some context. Let me provide this by answering the following rhetorical questions – why am I writing it, why is it important and what is it useful for? In addressing the subject at hand I’ll be breaking certain taboos. This is, in my view, the only way to move past the superficial and begin an authentic discourse on life’s struggles.)
Being the inhabitant of a human brain and body I’ve been dumbfounded by my inability to meet my own expectations in many areas of life. In elementary school my desire was to avoid punishment, but the need for novelty and stimulation often won out over the guidance provided by my teachers. While this never led me to engage in illegal activities, the Principle at my school did say this to my mother during a parent-teacher interview:
“I’ve met boys like Stuart before, one of them came at me with a knife and I broke his arm! Just think of all the terrible things he’s done at home. He’ll go to jail for sure.”
The worst thing my mother could remember was my picking paint off the wall in the bathroom.
The principal was basing his assessment of my character on a couple of incidents: one in which I hid a thumb tack in Plasticine and put it on a chair, and another when I took a reel of fencing wire and inserted the ends into a 240v power outlet. No harm came to anyone in either of these cases. Had I plugged one end of the fencing wire into the live receptacle I would have been the one electrocuted, but providentially I had plugged them into the neutral and the ground. As I was only six years old I didn’t realise that there was such a distinction. In order to use the event to communicate the seriousness of my action, and provide an object lesson, the principle announced at an assembly of the whole school the next day
“I’ve bailed out of a fighter plane on fire at 8,000 feet, I’ve been shot down behind Japanese lines, but I’ve never been as afraid as when I pulled those wires out!”
What was it that motivated me to behave this way, and is it even possible to be “obedient”? The contrast between my behaviour at school and at home was certainly because I found school to be torture, whereas home was a place of solace and creative play. My misbehaviour at school was a desperate attempt to escape boredom.
While behaviours, such as harming others, can always be judged as unnecessary, destructive and cruel, the seriousness of a misdemeanour may be judged quite differently by two different people, or by the same person at different times. A case in point – Marijuana becomes legal in Canada as of July 1st 2018. Currently, the possession of up to 30 grams of dried Marijuana is a summary offense, one for which you are convicted without appearing before a judge and jury. It still results in a criminal record (and all the restrictions that come with that), but the offense is regarded as less significant than an indictable one. While this is the view of the governing authorities until July 1st, many of the general public believe that the law denies them the right for compassionate access to a necessary therapeutic drug. This has inspired some to open illegal “dispensaries” or “compassion clubs” across the country which are subject to closure by the police (an event that happens rarely enough to make the operation of such businesses a viable activity). From the dispensary operator’s perspective the law itself is at fault. A challenge for the government, after July 1st, however, is what to do with the criminal records of those convicted under the old law.
There are many examples of this values-based plasticity that can be observed in the work place, the home, church and elsewhere. In some cases judgment and censure may result from the kind of mood the authority figure is in at the time of the infraction. In others it may be due to ignorance of the facts or a misinterpretation of the evidence. If our goal is to always do the right thing, however, we are going head to head with at least three separate principles:
1, Our nature, which seeks reward regardless of the conventions or consequences.
2, The fickle aspects of human judgment we share with the people in our lives.
3, The knowledge that the activity we are engaging in is against the rules in some way.
As a child of one of our friends once shared with his mother “mom, it’s so easy to be bad and so hard to be good”.
In his autobiography Benjamin Franklin describes a similar experience in his struggle with pride (one of the Seven Deadly Sins of Christian tradition):
“In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.”
If that isn’t hard enough, what about the things we do wrong that we didn’t know were unlawful? We are still guilty even though we weren’t aware of the offense. Once the infraction is identified to us we can own it and admit our responsibility, but what if it was never revealed to us? In that case we would be guilty and unable to make restitution. The reason these things are important is that there are real-time consequences to our behaviour. Relationships (and our physical bodies) are extremely vulnerable to certain behaviours, and life is all about relationships, one way or another. As Benjamin Franklin also wrote:
“I grew convinced that truth, sincerity, and integrity, in dealings between man and man, were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life; and I formed written resolutions, which still remain in my journal-book, to practice them ever while I lived. Revelation had indeed no weight with me, as such; but I entertained an opinion that, though certain actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by it, or good because it commanded them, yet probably those actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us, in their own natures, all the circumstances of things considered.”
Interpreting this statement in the language of Non-Violent Communication we see two classes of strategy for meeting our physical, emotional and psychological needs. There are those actions which meet our needs but are destructive, and those that do the same but are beneficial. In the broader scheme of things, living an authentic life is not about a cut and dried distinction between right and wrong. We can’t overcome our natural tendencies and navigate the vicissitudes of human existence by will power alone, by telling ourselves “don’t do that”. But if we admit our own limitations and embrace the fact that, as fallible human beings, we are bound to mess up, what is the solution? (You’ll find the answer in the book!)
One thing that’s certain, is that we will meet our needs either beneficially or destructively. When needs go unmet the state of dysphoria within is almost palpable – it’s a state that cannot be sustained. Identifying the difference between destructive and beneficial ways of meeting needs takes practice, and destructive strategies are usually the easiest to implement. The destructive strategy involves very little short-term cost to the individual and fulfills its purpose quickly. Time, education and wisdom are needed to identify and implement a beneficial strategy. The six year old “me”, in the classroom, chose the quick fix of risk taking and novelty seeking behaviours to create a state of being (excitement/engagement) that the school environment had failed to provide. This state of being was a function of neural activity inside my nascent brain.
The quintessential quick fix for most unpleasant mental states is psychotropic drug use. Consider this quote from a post on the Humans of New York Facebook page from yesterday (May 1st):
“I was raised with that Jewish intellectual worship of knowledge. But all my professors in college were small-minded [people] getting off on their own power, wanting me to parrot them while telling me they didn’t. So I decided I was a nihilist and that I was going to do as many drugs as possible. If the goal is to spend your whole life trying to get rewards to trigger chemicals in your brain, why not go straight for the chemicals? But that didn’t work out very well. It quickly became less of a philosophy, and more of a massive drug addiction.”
This individual sidestepped the education system, and used their knowledge of the brain’s operation to create a quick solution. Instead of gaining the skills required to create a rewarding life he went for the reward immediately, with devastating consequences. Drugs fake the experience of meeting needs, and the withdrawals render the state after using worse than the state before. Sadly drug use has become the default life strategy for many in North America, to the point where in British Columbia, in December 2016 alone, 142 people lost their lives to drug overdoses (922 deaths for the whole of the year). In the USA for the whole of 2016 the death toll is estimated to be between 59,000 and 65,000. Meanwhile in Portugal (a country with more than twice the population of British Columbia) the death rate from overdoses has dropped to 30 per year. The turn-around in Portugal is due to the de-stigmatization of drug use, a redesign of the medical and legal systems, and the legalization of all drugs (more about that in the book).
The questions I attempt to answer in “The Science of Spirituality” relate to neuro-physiological function. What is reward and why is it so alluring? What is the correlation between a spiritual practice and neuro-chemistry and why is a reliance on a higher-power taught by so many drug and alcohol recovery programs? For an increasing number of people, understanding these issues has become a matter of life and death.