A funny thing happened on the way to the grave: It disappeared.
But first, as they say, a word from our sponsor.
The primitive brain that has helped us survive does not easily release its grip. As much as we like to think that we live in the outer domain of our brains, we snap back into the reptile stem whenever we think we’re threatened. Then we react to things that look or sound like other things as if they ARE those other things. I guess looking silly when you run from a car backfiring is better than dying the one time in a hundred the bang is really a gunshot.
After a threat, it takes most brains a few hours to get back up to “flow” level and lose themselves again in the pleasures of creativity and selflessness. Reality has a way of interfering with our higher pursuits, and the brain thinks it knows which things to put first.
Labeling or categorizing is one of those things. Labeling must have great survival value, must save time and energy, must not cost us much in the long run.
After years of confronting black-and-white thinking, now I feel it’s often a waste of time to suggest a more subtle interpretation. I used to think education would change all that, but sometimes I think education just makes our prejudices more subtle. The experience of living in the digital world will probably not percolate soon to that deeper reptilian brain that has, after all, our best interests at heart, even when we disagree with its conclusions.
Life in the digital world is interactive, fluid, modular. When I first used the word “morph” in speeches, I asked who knew what it meant. A few hands went up, then more and more. Now most folks seem to know that images can change from one thing into another. But they change through stages, and that’s important. As a metaphor of how individuals and organizations adapt to changing conditions, it’s critical to know that we move from phase to phase, not all at once. Grandmother does not turn willy-nilly into a wolf. Grandmother turns into a gray grandmother, than a gray hairy grandmother, then a gray hairy grandmother with fearsome teeth, then a wolf.
A young man from an evangelical Christian seminary asked to interview me for a project. His task was to talk to “others” so he knew how they thought. He had logged a Unitarian, a rabbi, and a Jew-for-Jesus when he came to me. He was genuinely interested in how I had morphed through careers and different religions. “What should I call you?” he said. “What are you now?”
“I guess, as the Buddhists say, I am ‘not this, not that.’ I’m in process. I like to think of myself as open to possibilities.”
His pen halted on the pad and his consternation showed. Without a label, what was he to do? And what are we to do with reality itself, particularly when our interaction with the digital world (we are embedded in our time, after all, our historical context is the matrix of meanings with which we must wrestle) teaches us that life is fluid, interactive, and modular, and that ultimately there is only the light of our monitors momentarily illuminating pixels that we gestalt into symbols that seem so real?
A friend recently criticized evolution, which for all its flaws as a Theory of Everything still seems to have some useful insights. A creationist, she spoke about species as if they were real things, rather than categories we invented. Taxonomy is an addiction, like the classification of knowledge itself. We need a map, but we know the map is not the territory. We know the territory intuitively by the immediacy with which it presses against us as we walk, alive and responsive and aware.
Hard to maintain our moorings, when everything is going through the looking-glass. Intellectual property, a category invented in the past few hundred years, is as blurred as a headline in the rain. The “protean” self celebrated by some and described ruefully by others is morphing along: we can choose careers and grow into others, we can choose partners and grow into others, we can choose identities and grow into others, and even our illusory self can watch with amusement or anxiety as it creates and discovers various personae as vehicles for being in the world.
Hemingway disdained adjectives because they diluted the aesthetic experience he intended to create. These days, we might be more in tune with Jorge Luis Borges who wrote about a culture that used verbs and adverbs to describe its perceptual world. Everything moved, nothing stayed slotted, and the world was a blur of temporary states.
It is not news that this is how it is, but it is news that we can’t withdraw easily as we did in the past into a consensus that the fixed and rigid categories of our minds, from religion to science to metaphysics, are “real.” They’re a way our primitive brains need to know, a modality good for survival. Oversimplification gets our feet (and our mouths) moving fast when there’s danger or perceived danger, but we use the word “flow” to denote that most highly prized state in which we lose ourselves and all illusory attachments to which that self is anchored. The energies of love, creativity and generosity flow outward into a world that accepts our contribution without comment, other than the reflexive joy we feel at knowing that our contribution and participation is a privilege and a gift.
In a network or web, we exercise power by contributing and participating. Life, whatever it may be, looks in these digital days more like a network or web than anything else. There, in that web, we allow ourselves to be woven into something we don’t have to know or control. And even the grave, as I said when I started, vanishes into thin air whenever we flow in that direction.
