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peace be with you

Hello everyone, and welcome to this blog. 

The purpose of this page is to ask each of you to consider the ways in which you feel God or a higher power in your life - how do you know he's listening? In this collaborative space, I hope that you will feel comfortable sharing your experiences, so that we all might have an opportunity to examine and grow in our own faith.


Each of our relationships with God or our higher power is unique. What I would like to create here is a place to learn about how others see the light of God in their lives. I am asking you to share the moments in which you have felt the glory of God or the movement of a higher power. These may be little things, like finding a dollar on the ground, or life-changing events you might be inclined to call miracles.


My hope is that in considering our own blessings and those of others, we will be reminded of how beautiful the world is. Wherever and however you find God, please use this space to share it with others. There is wonder to be found in everything.



If you'd like to share something, look at the bottom of this entry for the link that says Comment.  Once you click it, you can type your comment and choose to post it either anonymously or with your name.

Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.

Ephesians 3:20

           

for now

              The story I am about to tell focuses on the past five years, but truly begins much earlier.  In class, after we had drawn our circles, I made an admission to Randy that I had never made to anyone else before.  When I was younger, maybe four or five, I remember standing in our church, Christ Church Cranbrook, and staring up at the hundred or so foot ceilings.  With my head tilted back and my eyes wide open, I gazed upon the light fixtures above me, and saw two small balls of gold circling around them.  It happened every time I looked up, and I thought they were angels.  Maybe there were.

            I have tried to look for the angels again, but since I have grown, they have been elusive.  Despite their absence, there still is, and always has been, a certain gravity within the walls of the church.  The air feels thicker and more charged, as if it is simply fuller than the air outside.  It is hard for me to say whether it is loaded with the prayers of others or just a lingering holiness.  When I leave, I wonder if it clings to my skin and clothes.

            Because I have been at my particular church for the entirety of my life, it feels like a second home.  It may even be the location I know second best; from an early age, I have actively explored its every crevice and chosen my favorite spots.  These spaces unconsciously and automatically induce a reverence within me that is seen little elsewhere in my interactions with the world.  When I am in them, it is almost as if my heartbeat and breathing become superfluous. 

            When I tell the story of my spiritual development, it seems as though I had a period of years when I didn’t believe in anything, but the aforementioned spaces always held their mysterious sway over me.  We will get to that later.  This is a story about getting lost and being found.  This is a story about the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world I had no idea was coming.

            I did not realize I was lost until I was found.  The veils I had placed over my own eyes were so ingrained in whom I had made myself to be that I became unable to distinguish who I really was.  It would be dishonest for me to say that I do not struggle with the same issue today; I have tried to write this story before, and I have always been held back by an inner unwillingness to abandon the troublesome parts of myself.  Even when I have complained about my unhappiness and desire to change, there has been a lingering desire to heap suffering upon myself.

            Someone once told that humans are not happy because they do not allow themselves to be.  It sounds so absurd because of course everyone claims to want to be happy, but I know it holds truth because I have lived it.  I think part of the problem is that we rarely really, truly know which routes will manifest lasting happiness, and so we spend a lot of time metaphorically flailing around. 

            Contentment is difficult to wholly experience, let alone sustain.  What I find fascinating is that by definition, to be content is to be in a state of peaceful happiness and not wanting more, but when used as a verb, to content oneself with, becomes accepting something as adequate despite wanting more.  The diametrical nature of this word’s various significances is apt for the way that I have experienced it in my life.  A change of state, a change of tense can mean everything, it seems.  

            Despite attempting at times to feign contentment for the sake of appearances, I have quite honestly spent a majority of the past five years contenting myself with its utter absence from my life.  It is not hard to lie to others, but I have never been able to deceive myself into accepting contrived happiness.  There is always that moment when the fake smile drops and suddenly I am alone with myself and the rawness of my discontent. 

            Perhaps we hold individual laws of gravity within ourselves.  In my internal field, I feel definite shifts when things become real, sometimes inescapably so. 

            Right after I got to Red Rock, I was IQ tested.  Someone made the mistake of telling me my score, which fell in a percentile that marked me as having very superior intelligence.  Once I had concrete evidence to support my pervasive belief that I was smarter than most everyone I encountered, I was in trouble.  Two hours of testing and the three digits resulting from its analysis had justified my inner intellectual bully.

            In a session about a week ago, I speculated to my therapist that “I probably wouldn’t be as much of an asshole if I wasn’t so tall.”  We both laughed, mostly because I was serious.  At five foot eleven and one half inches and age twenty, I am above the ninety-seventh height percentile for females, and have been nearly my entire life.  Given both my younger sibling’s recent growth spurts, I am now the shrimp of all six grandchildren.  Even my sixteen-year old sister stands an inch above me.

            Obviously my stature gives me an esoteric experience of the world, and I cannot imagine what it would be like to be shorter.  At a rally, my similarly tall friend Dan and I held up our significantly shorter friend so that she was at our height.  She was amazed at how different everything looked from six inches higher.  I have always said that I would rather be remarkably tall than remarkably short; I can see things and I can reach things.  There is something else, though, that is less practical and less explicable. 

            If I was asked to describe myself in five words, I might choose “whip smart and freak tall.”  My siblings and I have received the abundant genetic blessings of height, intelligence, and attractiveness.  Each of us has responded completely differently to these qualities.  My particular reaction has been inarguably the most exploitative, oftentimes dangerously so. 

Although I have never been the type of girl to bat my eyelashes, somewhere along the line, I realized how easily I could manipulate people. 

            My interactions with the world and its occupants are driven by rationality.  This is to say that my critical thinking skills are acutely developed and largely automatic.  When I encounter a situation, whether a math problem or a discussion with a friend, I quickly and clearly see my options and the corresponding outcomes.  In my head, nearly everything is linear, neat, and binary; there is a sort of internal intrinsic organization that directly corresponds with external action. 

            I sometimes become frustrated with others for seeming not to function similarly.  It is never a question of what they were thinking, but why they were thinking in that particular way.  At my worst here, I can be unforgiving and judgmental, placing myself as superior to the other person and taking that to my advantage.  In predicting what I deem to be illogical behavior, I have been able to successfully manipulate any number of situations, which is a bragging right my intellectual bully relishes. 

            All of this is just perpetuating my claim that I am an asshole.  The truth is, I am not an asshole, but I can act like one.  

            Nearly five years ago, when I was sixteen, I underwent drastic personal changes.  I went from being a sweet, loving honors student to a cigarette smoking, alcohol drinking, cocaine sniffing asshole.  Although it seems an objective statement, I can only make it with the powers of hindsight.  At the time, the phase did not seem like a phase, and its effects have continued to linger.      

              In this paper, when I talk about spirituality, I am largely speaking about God as far as the Episcopalian faith is concerned.  From my viewpoint, other aspects of spirituality can be reconciled within this realm, which is to say I see no problem with seeming like I’m visiting the lunch line of a spiritual cafeteria.  I take what I like and leave what I don’t, all while grounding myself in Christianity.                

this is not a blog post.

Let's play a game. I'll warn you, this will get complicated, but bear with me.

What do you see here? If you answered "a kitten," what led you to this conclusion? Was it the fur? The whiskers? The ears?

Or maybe you answered that it was a picture of a kitten. How did you decide this?

It's possible you even answered that it was a group of pixels organized to form an image of a kitten. You might have gone a step further and answered that it was a collection of variously sized light waves hitting your retina.

Now, you might think I'm reading too deeply into this and setting you up to answer a seemingly easy question incorrectly. The point I'm trying to make is that all of your potential answers are correct, but that they are all borne from different ideas.

The human existence is one of perception and deduction. Each individual constructs beliefs about his or her environment differently, but inarguably, we are constantly influencing each other. Rather, we rely on previously constructed concepts to make sense of the complexities of the world.

Let's go back to the cat, whose name happens to be Buster. Here, Buster is existing on a number of planes. Perhaps most simply, he serves as an example of the human capacity for abstraction, the use of symbols to represent an object. Buster only works as an abstract because you've seen a cat before and can transfer your understanding of what constitutes a cat onto him. Additionally, you can perceive the photograph as a representation of the actual cat, or rather, that it is only one instance of him.

Believing the photograph to be a representation of an actual cat is actually a show of good faith in another concept. Although it was probably unconscious, because you understand the basic mechanics of photography, you were able to discern that Buster is real because a camera can only capture that which can be placed in the viewfinder. He's photographed, therefore he is, right?

But, what if you interpreted that image as the lightwaves activating the rods and cones in your retina? This is the wall that I've been trying to scale for the past few weeks. What I've come to believe is that while we inarguably live a sensory existence, we have an enormous capacity for perception. Simply put, we function within a number of symbol systems, largely by making automatic connections to previously accumulated experiences.

Think of it this way. Even if you'd like to argue that the image is its light waves, I'd challenge you on the basis that you still immediately knew it was a cat. You most likely did not even have to think about what you saw, rather, it happened automatically and unconsciously. As your retinas absorbed those light rays, your brain immediately processed their configuration and brought up "cat" from your memory. If you choose to look at it again, years later, you will still see cat.

Although this sort of process seems restrictive to a truly unique experience of the world, it is more or less what keeps the world in order. The gift of being human may be our ability to think, but if we didn't function with the automaticity we do, the sheer number of stimuli in any given moment would be overwhelming.

I'm going out on a limb here, but just come along for the ride. Of our six symbol systems, only the genetic code and spoken language are attributed to biological evolution (these traits are exhibited by many other species). So how do we account for the other four: written language, arabic numerals, musical notation, and locatation, referring to all forms of movement?

The fact that the human capacity for sensation is enormous is apparent. We exist in an umvelt chock full of stimuli, but so do other species. The difference, I'm arguing, is in the evolution of our brains. I'd go as far as to say that our additional symbol systems are proof of a general human tendency; in my opinion, humans are terrified of the unknown. A more optimistic view is that we are scientists by nature, constantly seeking logic and meaning in all our movement.

Because making sense of all we encounter could be quite a challenge, we've made it into a group project. From that sense, each of us represents everyone before us. Not only has the gene pool continued to evolve, but so have our means of experiencing the world. Each interaction, whether between two individuals or an individual and the environment, has an effect on our understanding.

We owe a lot to our forefathers and mothers, as well as to everyone and everything we've ever encountered. So if we're constantly moving through life using knowledge that we've borrowed and adapted for our own purposes, what is an individual? What can we deem original or real or true or pure?

To briefly explain how I got to this philosophical dilemma is to use the means I've been trying to shake. The futility lies in the fact that I need to use abstraction and references and hypotheticals in order to communicate the issue I'm having with them. Bear with me.

A few weeks ago, I decided that I was going to create a new way of organizing sounds. Optimistically, I sat down with a large drawing pad and my car keys in front of me. The jangle of the keys seemed to be a good first sound to dissect in order to create some kind of rubric for each sound. Dutifully, I began compiling a list of the sound's characteristics, including mental associations with it. As the list grew longer and longer and I tried to compare it to another sound, I realized that I had a fundamental problem: I couldn't shake the ties I had to every sound.

Rather, I knew that I was incapable of constructing an empirical rubric because my associations were automatic. I couldn't hear a sound as a sound, just as you couldn't see that picture as just a picture. The sound had become a symptom or a signal for some larger concept, a referent resistant to distillation; sensation was altered by perception. Thus began my journey to try and understand this phenomenon.

My question is nowhere near being answered, but I'm finding some interesting possibilities, and have a plan for an experiment that I'd like everyone to take part in. We'll see how well the symbol systems will serve me in explaining what I find.

sensation and perception

 Although our bodies are inherently designed for sensation and perception, it is language that mediates our experience of the world. For example, we use the word red to signify the color perceived between the wavelengths of 630-740 nanometers. The complexity lays in the esoteric nature of this sensation - the color red cannot be explained to someone who has never seen it, rather it must be experienced to enable full comprehension. But, even without knowing the word, humans are innately capable of distinguishing it within the spectrum of light. And yet, even when attempting to referencered to another individual, we are limited by the mechanics and boundaries of the connection of language. 


If I were to use the numeric representation (630-740), my conveyance likely wouldn't be clear despite the technical accuracy of the values. Despite the vast pool of connotations the word red may support, many of them exist on a largely subconscious level. 


Rather, our potential, in its complexity, for sensation may have physical and biological limitations (as naturally evolved systems) but due to the nature of its birth, our system of language and expression is nearly limitless.
Courtesian Theory of Fallacy: A statement can be simultaneously true and false because of its contradictory nature. The statement is true in its fallacy.

are we laptops or typewriters?

are we laptops or typewriters?
(http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AaxAzGo3CISTZGZnZDJtbjhfMmNua2NyZmN6&hl=en)

11-2525-4-1306

location as an intersection of time, physicality, compilation of concepts, mood, heart rate, perception (mine and others of me), social position, memory, demographic categorization, geographic coordinates (the map is not the territory?), etc, etc, etc
meaning as a conceptual structure with types that form the predicates of the code in which mental representations are constructed, processed, validated, and developed
six human sign systems as fibers of mediation: genetic code, spoken word, written word, arabic numerals, musical notation, labanotation
progress as a cultural construct derived from inherited beliefs