What's the Word

I had a cavity filled, which led to an improvement in my mind, my emotional state, and to my physical performance at the gym. I have had only two cavities in my life. This experience was new to me. I found the cavity myself a few days before and had to wait for my appointment; it had probably been a factor for a few weeks, though not so bad that I noticed its affect on my daily life. Several years ago, I had discovered how the right shoes can make a difference in the way a day feels, and how an oral device to prevent me from grinding my teeth in my sleep helped me sleep better.

Small physical problems affect the way we feel, and how we think. Emotions can affect thinking even without a physical cause, and can, of course, improve or limit physical performance. Conversely, the cognitive mind can influence our emotional and our physical states. In my experience, the physical and emotional influence cognitive performance more often in more persons than the other way around. Even in instances when a person applies his or her mind to something, the motivation is emotional or physical, and the mind provides rationalizations rather than a rationale. Choices are made irrationally or because of misguided values.

After I had the cavity filled I felt an immediate surge of joy just to be alive. I found myself in a near euphoric, out-going state of mind. I sang and greeted people cheerfully. I was able to lift more weight longer and had to stop myself consciously from overdoing the workout. I had an excellent conversation with a friend, concerning, coincidentally, consciousness.

When the physical, emotional and cognitive faculties are out of alignment, consciousness is impaired. Consciousness involves our whole being, from our physical bodies and biochemical processes to how we feel and our emotions, and our thought processes, which rely on the candle of the body and the fires of life to produce the light and shadows of the mind. Consciousness includes the senses and feelings as well as common sense.

Our choices affect our consciousness. If we choose not to eat in order to lose weight, we risk physical and mental impairment. However, the mind can step in and calm the emotional and, to some extent, physiological responses. Though hungry and perhaps not as strong, we need not be angry. Adjusted intake of fluids and nutrients can maintain health, even as we reset our metabolism. Usually, however, the person who diets does so for external reasons, imposed out of a set of values or from necessity. A person with health problems associated with obesity has already made a series of choices over a period of time, for identifiable reasons, resulting in obesity. Those reasons over that time represent an inertia the person must now overcome. A person who succumbs to fashion and to the notion that being slim and muscular will make him or her more sexually desirable faces similar conflict. In both cases, the decision to lose weight is imposed from an external source that operates only because something internal is and has been missing. The motivation derives from dissatisfaction or fear. "If you don't cut down, you'll die. If you don't beef up, you'll never be loved."

The faculties are not aligned when we act for external reasons. There are already reasons in place inside us, choices we have made, which have brought us to that place. If we try to change without understanding the reasons that got us to that point, those causes will continue to work against our new efforts. When we make choices based on emotions or from dissatisfactions we have not identified, the mind produces rationalizations and becomes the tool of our defect rather than the engineer of our transformation.

A woman who chooses to have sex for money may rationalize that decision. Sex is an emotional and physical experience. By valuing money more than those faculties, the woman will damage her own capacity for understanding, especially herself, her own responses, and other persons. She will end up impaired. That is also true for the men who pay her for sex, but for them the physical and the emotional already direct their minds. Their perversity drives them, and their decisions are impaired to begin with. They already devalue themselves and the woman. In the case of the woman, the choice is one of valuing the money more than her own faculties and responses, and may be at first a rational decision. She may need the money. The men do not need to pay for sex and certainly do not need sex at all. They move from the physical and emotional to the cognitive; she could conceivably be moving from a rational decision into actions that will affect her physically and emotionally.

The choices affect the faculties and influence consciousness. Disruptions on a daily basis change us. Values that put superstructural technologies, such as money, above the senses, above the emotions, above our primal responses, above dignity and the sanctity of the human being, will corrupt all our human faculties. Rational choices or choices made with semiconscious understanding, or choices made from emotional impulse, affect our long-term physical condition, which incrementally affects the emotions and higher intellectual performance. Like the muscles, the faculties of our beings need to be exercised and nurtured in order to keep them strong and our movements coordinated. The signals of the body do not serve us if we ignore them, but we must respond to them sensibly and with respect for those faculties. The emotions fail to serve us, if we fail to interpret them and learn what they mean. The mind becomes ultimately a rationalizer, a confuser in ourselves, if we do not care for our faculties of sense, emotion, and reason.

If we let these matters go, failing to pay attention now and then, and then increasingly more often, in time we find ourselves lost. The cumulative psychological distortion and damage makes recovery more difficult. Like being out of shape for many years, the recovery of our basic selves after years of bad choices compounded by further bad choices often requires drastic dogmas and routines, such as Twelve Step programs, religion or other externally enforced rituals -- technologies, in a sense. Often, we end up following those new masters at the expense of ourselves, again impairing our faculties.

Nothing is more valuable than our beings. Any choice that fails to value the human being will lead to corruption of the faculties, corruption of values, and corruption of the mind. Human contact and sound socialization has been corrupted by placing money, a social means, above the persons using it. We care nothing for the people but only want their money. So we devalue ourselves. We care nothing about ourselves, caring more for money, fearing more a lack of money than a lack of sleep or a lack of genuine conversation.

Nothing is more valuable than our beings. Ideologies, whether political or religious, are a technology. They are device of the mind. When we value them above ourselves, we have created false idols; we are moving down a path of corruption and will do evil when we act in the name of these beliefs, if we value them above the human element.

Like a cavity in the tooth, a lesion of consciousness impairs a person. Valuing ourselves, physical and mental health, other human beings and human contact, raises the quality of life. The unexamined life is not worth living. Any rationalized value systems which place tools above people, ideas above people, things above people corrupt what makes life worth living: the capacity for examining our lives clearly.

From Metaphor to Megaphor

We still refer to the return of daylight as sunrise, although we know the Earth rotates our star into our hemisphere of the firmament, which is not a vault at all. However, the niceties of the differences remain less relevant to our lives and so we persist in using old metaphors in casual expression. Dead metaphors also inhabit our common words. "Examine" is now distinctly ocular, although it comes from the word to weigh, as on a set of scales. The origins cease to resonate with most of us, so we employ the words only in their current meaning, forgetting their ancestry. Examination involves eyes, probably even when scales were involved.

For most of us in most situations, we gain and lose little by knowing and not knowing the differences. These ignorances are such small barnacles on the hulls of our vessels, and who notices the drag? Are we that far off with our estimates of getting from here to there in our own ideas, if we ignore the changes and forget the origins of words, the ancestry of our paradigms? Does it pay to pay such close attention? Perhaps not with certain words. Probably not in many social settings. What motive sends us to that place with those people? What is our intention here?

On the other hand, there are larger paradigms still in our minds, based on those older understandings. Notions of race, for instance, still get bandied about and still play an active role in our social lives. Laws are based on a defunct set of assumptions about racial groups. Personal judgments and important decisions derive from prejudices or from reacting to prejudices. It is the method and the process, not the answer, yes or no, which are the problem.

We are all biologically of the same species. Despite this knowledge, we associate differences of social behavior and aculturation with physical characteristics of ethnicity, as if there were a basis for linking them to the superficial physical differences, or that those physical differences conjoin with behaviors more prevalent in one group or another. The words "ethnicity" and "culture" have taken the place of race-based mythologies, but remain relatively unchanged in how they work within us.

Behaviors come from socialization, from relationships in the family first, and then from in our first community, our neighborhood, school, and town. However, the term "culture" serves as a catch-all for the source of these characteristics. That is an error; the differences are not cultural, deriving from institutions and intergenerational elements, such as religion, customs, educational and political systems. The differences are primarily social, in that they are not taught directly in schools but are learned from behaving like the others around us. It is inaccurate to say that talking loudly and using wild hand gesticulations in casual conversation is cultural. It is not part of a religion or the result of a school. Members of the group learn it from other members of the group as they learn the basics of language. This is socialization, not aculturation.

The basic verbal error is further compounded by a tendency to connect social habits with ethnicity and from there to connect further these things with value judgments, based on our own discomfort or comfort, usually from our own personal problems -- not cultural at all but psychological.

When we ask apparently innocent, curious questions, we reveal a great deal more about the thought processes and assumptive models we use to understand each other and the world. Often we ask after meeting someone, "What's your background?" or "What ethnicity are you?" or "Where does that name come from?"All of those questions, and similar questions directed toward an immediate identification based on what is essentially racial classification, evince a method of interpreting the world based on assumptions about different "cultures" and ethnicity. This method is fundamentally the same as older racist models. Whether the answers are responded to positively or negatively, the underlying process of thought is the problem. It is inaccurate, parochial, and idiotic.

The problem is simply this: The idea that knowing where someone comes from, what nominal ethnic group, will provide better insight than merely observing their immediate behavior is based on prejudices associated with groups in our minds. It can be positive or negative. The process is the problem, and the question indicates that is what is going on. If we ask, it is because we are thinking like that and not necessarily focusing on what a person chooses to say on his or her own. It is our direct interest which exposes our simplistic association of significance with ethnicity. We think it somehow has meaning and a bearing on our relations with this person to categorize him or her based on nationality, tribe, religion. We interpret those classifications outside of what is in front of us, as if the nominal fact were more important than how the person behaves.

Generally, a keen observer will know essentially where someone comes from without asking. With a name, if you know it's origin, fine. But all that is less important than what happens right then. There is no cognitively relevant information from knowing a person's "background" initially, except to pigeon-hole him or her, using experiences and associations with no connection to that newly met person. The innocent questions do not suggest this is what is going on. They affirm that this is the way we are processing information, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not.

It is the process which is the problem. We show the way we "think" by the questions we ask, and by the way we figure things out. This particular way of asking questions reveals only the limitations of our minds; for the answers can only be interpreted in association with our own experiences, our knowledge and beliefs about different groups. It has no connection with the person in front of us, but is purely our own. Whether we end up loving the person or avoiding him or her, if the process was based on this method, we have failed to use our minds, a habit with implications for all our behaviors, all our decisions.