Spirituality in Organic Systems: Habituation and Forgetfulness

It is often remarked that we humans have a hard time remembering to be good.  Our spiritual practices in particular are all too easily forgotten.  Much of religion appears intended simply to remind us to continue to pray, to think on God, to rise above the fray.  It’s not that we need convincing to do these things, we simply forget.

            Sometimes, though not often, I forget to do my morning devotion.  More frequently, in fact daily, I neglect the reminders that I gave myself in morning devotion for my day’s behavior:  make me humble today, O Lord; make me courageous and honest in my dealings with others.  No sooner do I rise from my knees than I am snappish with my wife or glaring at the neighborhood lout.  This is maddening!  The steps to a spiritual life are really not so difficult to take, and their rewards of peace and joy we value above all things.  How can we simply forget to do what is so needful and beneficial to do?

            There are many reasons for the failure of spirituality, including the requirements for the sort of concentration conducted in prayer or meditation.  In this entry, I discuss another cause, the human proclivity to habituation.

            By ‘habituation’, I mean our capacity to subsume under a simpler process of thought some more complex one.  For example, in first learning to drive an automobile, one’s efforts are halting and disjoint, as one must consciously direct one’s hands, feet, and eyes to perform in concert a number of distinct tasks.  Gradually, and in fact relatively quickly, the distinct commands that one must consciously make to drive are melded into fewer, harmonized commands, to the point where one must pay practically no conscious attention at all to the acts of driving.  Other examples abound – tying one’s shoes, learning a passage on the piano, walking, talking, typing:  testament to the extent to which we achieve mental mastery over our bodies and their environments.[1]  Indeed, so complete is the habituation process that in many cases we lose track of the initial, individual commands:  try telling someone how to tie a shoe, or to move an arm.

            Not only are we capable of habituation, but we are strongly inclined to integrate consciously willed acts to a form of direction requiring less conscious attention.[2]  This carries the obvious rewards of freeing the conscious mind for other work as well as placing the task in the hands of a more reliable process, given the distractible nature of conscious awareness.  However, in the case of spirituality, this result is the opposite of what we want and need.

            Spiritual life requires the activity of the higher-order conscious mind.  For one thing, it is precisely conscious awareness of God, of a Divine Principle or Spirit in one’s daily life that we seek, in spirituality.  Subsumption into the sub-conscious mind is antithetical to spirituality, in this sense.[3]  There are further signs of the dependence of spirituality on conscious reflection.  A hallmark of spirituality is moral awareness, which arguably is conducted at a high level of conscious abstraction.  Also, the sort of detachment from the immediacy of sense that is required in many spiritual states is a function of the conscious, rational mind.[4]  And further, as Tillich observes, spirituality is a holistic state, involving the whole of the person, while habituation places an activity in the background of one’s conscious state.

            Thus, it would seem, one reason for our perpetual struggle to remember to be spiritual is an active and powerful human tendency to forget.  Habituation is a powerful and essential feature of human being, one that removes activities from conscious attention.  In many cases, habituation is an immensely valuable process.  But where spiritual practices are concerned, removal to the background is often precisely the opposite of our desire.  We seek mindfulness, not forgetfulness.  Thus it is that in prayer we must avoid simply reciting our prayers, as habituation inclines us to do.  Thus it is that we carry worry beads, mount crucifixes, attend services, and otherwise ornament our lives with daily reminders to be mindful of our spiritual lives, lest we forget them.

            It is interesting to note that the proclivity for habituation admits of an organic description.  Humans are organic systems of organic systems.  Our bodily systems are relatively harmonious and stable in their interaction and interdependence.  Our mental systems, however, are more recently evolved and more prone to conflict.  The powerful memory system by means of which activity becomes habitual threatens to destroy, daily, the more fragile, intellectual systems supporting grace.  Spiritual programs succeeding in renewing our daily commitment to spirituality help us to preserve and develop behaviors whose subsumption in habit entails their destruction.

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[1] We are highly motivated to pursue this kind of learning, each instance of which is rewarded we a visceral pleasure and mental euphoria.

[2] Clivus is Latin for slope, pro means “for” or “towards”.  We are thus inclined and readily fall into habits – a strong metaphor for an ever-present force.

[3] Indeed, it may be that the “sense” of the divine of which we are capable is precisely a function of the conscious, logos-grounded intellect.  Fideist and other a-rational religious traditions rely, too, on the paradoxes of reason – cf. Kierkegaard, in particular.

[4] See Sartre, here, or even Descartes or Locke, on the role of negation in consciousness.  The capacity to formulate and contemplate that which is not, pax Parmenides, is a condition of rational thought.

Step Three

Step Three

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

This is going to be an on-going challenge, for me, I think.  I have a regular practice in the mornings, now, in which I meditate on God and on how I can connect with and serve Him throughout the day.  And in general I think that I am doing a good job of this.

I continue however to face uncertainty and doubt as to God’s nature and existence.  This means, among other things, evidently, that I must renew my faith in God daily.  It is not something that I can do once and have done.  Perhaps then my morning ritual and its continuation through the day are sufficient for this step.

To elaborate on what I think that this means generally, I invoke my understanding of God as the moving principle of the divine.  (See DATE.)  Some of the features of this principle have been elucidated by others.  As James, Otto, and others have observed, the divine is ineffable but also it is felt, a form of experience, a passion.  And as Tillich asserts, the divine (our “ultimate concern”) comprehends all facets of our person – as well, we may add, as all facets of being generally:  Tillich’s account being strictly existential.  Again following Tillich, the divine involves full expression and satisfaction of one’s needs and potential.  To be blessed – a synonym of the divine – is to experience the realization of one’s full and possible self.  (Not, as discussed elsewhere, the ego-self, but the true self or soul.  This idea of course requires further development, especially in light of Nietzsche’s criticism that there is no single, independent core personal entity – in which view I concur.)

I have said that God is a moving principle of the divine, meaning that He is active, spontaneous in Kant’s sense (not a mechanism, an effect of prior causes).  (See again DATE.)  This means that God can express Himself through me.  That is, by my choosing and acting in certain ways, my will coincides with God’s, or, to put the point properly, I become the servant of God’s will.  I can do His work, both as I develop my person and as I influence other things, persons, around me.  The logical extension of this idea is the Kingdom of Heaven, in which all persons fully realize their potential for enacting God’s will.  This ideal represents the telos of human being.  It is the Song of Heaven, Feuerbach’s image of God, that for which Schiller wrote his Ode to Joy, for which Beethoven wrote his glorious chorale.  It’s a tall order, of course, but a concept by reference to which we orient ourselves and our behavior.  (Again shades of Nietzsche require attention.  But we needn’t mistake this image for a static conception of being in-itself or of social repression.)

A further expression of the idea is furnished in a personal meditation aid:

Molding your life means cutting and shaping your material world into something good, something that can express the spiritual.  All material things are the clay out of which we mold something spiritual.  You must first recognize the selfishness in your desires and motives, actions and words, and then mold that selfishness until it is sublimated into a spiritual weapon for good.  As the work of molding proceeds, you see more and more clearly what must be done to mold your life into something better.  (Twenty-Four Hours a Day, Hazelden Meditations.  2001:  978-1-59285-758-6.  June 4 entry.)

That is, where we find ourselves short of the divine ideal, we contemplate the task of development towards this ideal.  For me, this journey has recently begun again, as I reconsider the terms of my being.  Sobriety and the self-examination that it brings gives me the opportunity to re-begin the approach to the divine.  I may count myself fortunate, now, that I have a more mature set of experiences and tools on which to draw in this undertaking.  This includes a clearer understanding of the role and nature of selfishness.  I have the motivation that comes from serious spiritual failure – fear is always a good motivator:  thank you Mr. Ego.

And so I want to close with that banality, “It’s all good.”  Like those many other banalities so true and so despised by the unwitting lofty (cf. David Foster Wallace, discussed here DATE), this canard is true and especially difficult to achieve and especially in all of its humility.

Definition of God II

Here is an hypothesis:

God is the principle defining the divine.  To the extent that things, events unfold in accordance with this principle, we may say that God's will is done.  Many things, unconscious things, appear to evolve in accordance with this principle by default - their behavior cannot detract from the divine. Conscious beings, or more precisely self-conscious beings, appear to have some choice as to whether they behave in accordance with this principle, though this is a matter of dispute, and may be an illusion.

At times, the principle seems to entail moments of synchronicity - moments when one "receives" just the thing one needs at that moment.  Individual such purposive moments suggest to those experiencing them that "everything happens for a reason."  On a larger scale, both within the given person's life and beyond, any overall "design" in the world may be difficult to discern; it may be, as Kierkegaard suggests, a matter of interpretation.  The "principle" may be either non-rational or beyond human intellectual means - or non-existent, after all.

In mere logical terms, however, a principle is both abstract and inactive.  And God would seem properly to be the opposite in both cases:  concrete and active.  Concrete not in the sense of a physical substance, but in the sense of full reality.  And God must be understood not as a mere feature of reality, but as a principle of motion, as Aristotle might say.  God must be capable of inspiring and invigorating life.  If God is real, and if realities are powers, then God is a power, the power of and creating goodness.

So, in nine words, God is the principle and power of the divine.

Definition of God

My sponsor has asked me to define God in three words or less.  He wants a one-sentence summary of my views on my higher power.  These are not unreasonable demands.  They are the kind of demands that I make of my students, saying that if you cannot state precisely what you have in mind, then you don’t have a clear idea in mind.

            My sponsor says that I need to have a more definite idea of my higher power, so that I can call upon Him/Her/It when I need to do.  He fears, I think, that my thinking is too nebulous to provide the kind of help and support that we need from a higher power, the help and support necessary to remain sober.  He fears, too, I think, that an over-intellectualized higher power won’t really be a higher power at all, but an elaborate denial mechanism, a way of thinking about and so not embracing my need for help, my need to give my life over to a higher power.  David Foster Wallace characterizes this problem of giving the will over to something else as follows:

The bitch of the thing is you have to want to.  If you don’t want to do as you’re told – I mean as it’s suggested you do – it means that your own personal will is still in control, and Eugenio Martinez over at Ennet House never tires of pointing out that your personal will is the web your Disease sits and spins in, still.  The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who know how many Substance-drenched years ago.  It’s now shot through with the spidered fibrosis of your Disease.  His own experience’s term for the Disease is:  The Spider.  You have to Starve The Spider:  you have to surrender your will.  – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York:  Back Bay Books, 1997), 357.

            I have a number of sources of resistance to giving up my will to a higher power.  First perhaps is my will itself, which of course experiences relinquishing its grasp on me as death.  Also involved here is a fear of seeming stupid to others.  I have a terrible fear that others will think me stupid for believing in some kind of God.  And also there is my own critical doubt that questions the truth of any proposition about God or a higher power that I may consider.  I think that these forces may be related.  The ego is after all our psychological armor where a primary need for this armor is in the thorny world of social standing and opinion.  My ego, however, is protecting not so much me as itself – typical among alcoholics, I understand, is the ego run rampant, egomania.  So one way of the ego’s preserving itself may be a heightened experience of such fears as require its protection.  If I fear seeming stupid to other, and if my intellect helps me to identify the potential logical weaknesses that faith would bring, where my stupidity would then show, then I would be likely to experience considerable resistance, in this form, to placing my faith in a higher power.

            One thing that I am trying to do is to construct an account of the logic of faith and God that won’t, in fact, be vulnerable to intellectual doubt.  I think in fact that there probably is such a logic.  But as Kierkegaard reminds us, and as my sponsor fears, I don’t want to be in the position of placing my faith in the force of my logic.  However good the logic may be, not only may it be vulnerable to the future discovery of error, but it does not by itself command the act of belief (– Hume saw this, too).  I still have to take the vulnerable step of belief – Kierkegaard’s leap of faith.

            It does help me to reflect on the source of the fear of commitment, so that I can see that for what it is, bring it down to size.  That helps me to feel less fearful, if it doesn’t of course relieve me of the need to take the plunge myself.

            Believe first.  Ask questions later.

Cosmic plan, or not.

In a recent Talk of the Town piece in The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten writes of the soon-to-be-completed 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero and the complex algorithm developed to order the names of the dead in the memorial’s bronze panels.  An alphabetical ordering of the victims’ names would do nothing to summon the complex relationships among the dead, which associations the designers hoped somehow to represent in the arrangement of names in the monument’s parapet.  Some computer scientists doubted that it could be done, but a solution was found, ultimately, and I found the conclusion to Paumgarten’s piece worth comment:

A graphic representation of the computational armature, color-coded on a laptop screen, brings to mind Tetris, but the sight of the names themselves, inscribed in bronze, linked together by happenstance and blood, calculus and font size, is a little like the faint silhouette of a cosmic plan, or else the total absence of one.  –  Nick Paumgarten, The Names.  The New Yorker.  May 16, 2011, 40.

What is the difference between chaos and divine order?  Is the world we live in chaotic or is it ordered, and in either case where and how, if at all, does divinity fit in?  It would be repellent here to suggest that part of the divine plan involves the mad destruction of so many lives (though, of course, any notion of a divine plan faces this challenge).  What I like about Paumgarten’s conclusion is its elegant postulation of the delicate difference between chaos and cosmos.  In faith, many believe that we experience glimpses of this faint silhouette, but the silhouette appears to be consistent with its lack.

Joy

A text search of the Bible yields 154 verses containing the word ‘joy’.  Here are two, one from the Old Testament and one from the New, both selected as generally representative:

Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart:  for I am called by thy name, O LORD God of hosts.  (Jeremiah 15:16)

Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name; ask and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.  (John 16:24)

In my prayers and mediations, I have sometimes asked for a life of joy or remarked upon my joy.  In seeking faith, I seem to be seeking joy in my life, either as a consequence of faith or as a part of it – I am not sure what is the exact relationship, here:  joy does seem to accompany faith.  I would say that it is not joy per se that I seek but rather faith and that joy is the happy companion of faith.

            A doubt sometimes nags at me:  why do you seek the joyful life?  What good is it?  Is it a worthy preoccupation of a man?  Are there not better, more serious goals in life?

            This crabbed, Nietzschean voice (perhaps an injustice to Nietzsche, though I think that he has these unlovely moments) is answerable, if not definitively.  First, we may distinguish joy from the emotion, happiness and from generic pleasure; second, we can note that seriousness is not incompatible with joy (compare Camus’s Sisyphus); third, even in the terms of the criticism it is hard to see any failing in joy.

            First, then, joy is not a selfish emotion in the way that happiness or mere pleasure can be.  I do not seek a self-satisfaction in joy but rather I seek to be good and worthy and find joy in doing so.  This question then resolves to the worthiness of the good and worthy.  Some of the things that we call good and worthy are subject to Nietzsche’s criticism as slavish, but we needn’t be distracted by his benighted family life.  The good I seek to do has no part of repressing either myself or others:  it is respectable, dignified.  And there may be good evolutionary reasons why we experience joy in uplifting ourselves and others.  But we commit a genetic fallacy if we conclude thus that joy in itself has no spiritual significance.

            Second:  perhaps joy is antithetical to seriousness, and perhaps the “subterranean seriousness” to which Nietzsche enjoins us is itself desirable for its worthy, dignified results.  Joy is glad; it is blissful.  There is a bubbling, giddiness in the heart of joy.  Can I be all bubbling and giddy while I concentrate on the analysis of a concept, on pressing with all my might against this great stone the size of my life?  The answer is yes, exactly yes.  To fully master the stone of life is also to master the emotional and spiritual terms of existence.  I cannot, it is true, at every moment, stop to enjoy my giddy joy.  But I can notice it out of the corner of my eye as I strain, and the small smile that crosses my face as I turn back to my task will carry with it a renewed, joyful energy to that task.  If joy and seriousness are antithetical, then I want to preserve that antithesis, the kind of oscillation of opposites whose synthesis creates a being in time – if Hegel and Heraclitus have it right.  This places me at the tippi-tip of existence.

            Third, what is there to object to in joy?  Nietzsche himself recommends the joy of the Blond Beast.  Joy is a healthy animal’s revel in its power.  Joy is the wondrous realization of this world’s ample, generous beauty.  The modern world presents its own dialectic:  we have come to know the terms of the empirical world; but we have also come to recognize the limits of these terms and their world.  The resolution of this antithesis takes various forms.  For the atheist, it takes the form of the absurd.  For the theist, it takes the form of the divine.  The effect on the human heart is the same:  joy.

            Religion, as I understand it, is a means of finding joy in existence.  Joy is not itself our sole goal, but joyful life is, where this means the thrill and bliss of rolling our rock to heaven, creating what we can from what we have.

David Foster Wallace on Intellectuals and AA

David Foster Wallace accurately portrays the experience of the intellectual in beginning stages of recovery.  He obviously has some experience with both being an intellectual and going through addiction recovery.  “It’s the newcomers with some education that are the worst…  They identify their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters in the head.”  – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York:  Back Bay Books, 1997), 272.  Those of us who have developed for years as creatures of the intellect have perhaps succeeded in becoming more purely intellectual in our daily being than we realize.  That there may be requirements of us that are Simple But Not Easy may then come as a rude surprise and a significant challenge to the ego, where this ego, our brainy ways, has been our primary social armor.

            Wallace obviously knows something about the intellectual life.  Though he places this point among things learned in an inpatient recovery program, it is something well-known to the intellectual:  “[t]hat concentrating intently on anything is very hard work”  (p. 203); and similarly, “[t]hat it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds” (p. 204).  But, for us intellectuals, because a significant portion of our selves is centered in the intellect, and because this appears to be a key center of the disease of addiction, “… it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people” (p. 203).

            Those of us who have lived to think of ourselves as smarter than most others will in recovery be forced to confront also this fact, “[t]hat no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that” (p. 201).  (This goes double for anyone regularly teaching Socrates’ theory of wisdom.)  Fortunately, and again much to our chagrin, there is a lot of help available to us in an AA program or at a treatment center, provided that we are able first to recognize our need for it.  It is likely, there, that we will learn “[t]hat you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it” (p. 202), and “[t]hat it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person” (p. 204).   We must hope that once we learn “[t]hat it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak” (p. 204), we can then summon that courage to accept our disease-ridden condition and to begin to recover.

            It is important finally to learn that what seem to be trite and superficial clichés – such as learning to live One Day at a Time and to avoid, for us, the especial danger of Paralysis by Analysis – it is important to learn that these are in fact deep and crucial truths.  It is a particularly galling but vital assault on the intellectual ego to find that these mangy idiots by whom we’re surrounded may have learned this and learned it well before we did.  Don Gately is a low-life thief and addict turned live-in counselor and Geoffrey Day is a recently-arrived client, a sociology instructor at a lower-tier college:

You just have to Ask For Help and like Turn It Over, the loss and pain, to Keep Coming, show up, pray, Ask For Help.  Gately rubs his eye.  Simple advice like this does seem like a lot of cliché’s – Day’s right about how it seems.  Yes, and if Geoffrey Day keeps on steering by the way things seem to him then he’s a dead man for sure.  Gately’s already watched dozens come through here and leave early and go back Out There and then go to jail or die.  If Day ever gets lucky and breaks down, finally, and comes to the front office at night to scream that he can’t take it anymore and clutch at Gately’s pantcuff and blubber and beg for help at any cost, Gately’ll get to tell Day the thing is that the clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do.  To try and live by instead of just say.  – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York:  Back Bay Books, 1997), 273.

Happily, once we do accept this fact, we find that it is indeed possible to be reborn into a life of fruitfulness and joy.