The Nature Of Reality-based Community

(Wendy)
Good Morning.

Ray and I are pleased to be with you this morning.

Please don’t be fooled by the title of this homily as it is listed in the newsletter and the order of service. I’m sure I don’t want to take on any True Religions and I have no idea where that title came from.

If we had to title this talk, it would be called

“The Nature Of Reality-based Community”

How do we build community when reality exists separately in our own heads?

This is the question that Ray and I will wrestle with this morning.

I’ll start us off with some experiential data, and then Ray will fillet the question for us.

I spend a lot of time with the idea that we each carry with us our own version of reality.

In my work as a museum evaluator, my favorite kind of assignment is to be part of an exhibit development team.

In that situation, my role is to be the go between, between the team and the visiting public.

To make the exhibit accessible and relevant, developers need to get a fix on how visitors relate to or understand the proposed exhibit themes and messages.

So I participate in planning meetings with the content experts and the writers and the designers and then I go to the field to talk to visitors and find out…

How are their ideas about the subject matter formed? Where do they get their information about it? Do they have any misapprehensions about it? What vocabulary do they use to discuss it? And perhaps most importantly, what input do they need to enable them to appreciate in some constructive way the intended exhibit message?

Everyone comes to the zoo or the science exhibit or a work of art with their own background, their own life experience.

One researcher in my field, Minda Borun, at the Franklin Institute, calls this a person’s personal narrative. Everyone will interpret the exhibit or the work of art through the lens of their own personal narrative.

For some of us our personal narrative is firmly formed and does not yield easily to change. These folks have the confidence that comes with certainty. Certainty that they are right.

For others, our personal narrative is more easily re-formed as we encounter new information and experiences. These folks would seem to have more work to do as they continually re-evaluate their world.

Now, I know that you will all be filtering this information and my story through your own personal narratives. You’ll have to be responsible for those, yourselves.

So in my work I wrestle with this idea of each of us creating our own reality between our own ears. But there’s another reason why this idea carries deep meaning and interest for me.

Some 27 years ago I found myself in a unusual situation. Sitting in the basement office of a psychiatrist who had made a name for himself as a deprogrammer, I floated in a void between realities.

For the previous several weeks I had been a member of a small, unnamed religious cult. Centered as they all are around a charismatic leader, this group was a small band living a vagabond lifestyle and relying on the kindness of strangers.

I’ll spare you the often uncomfortable details of my experience, but there is a little bit I want to say about religious cults and how they work vis a vis brainwashing or mind control. Of course, the real experts at this are military trainers.

In both contexts, mind control relies most basically on two things.

1) removing or denying the subject of his or her individuality and

2) body control almost to the point of trauma. To break a person's programming, to shake up their personal narrative and change their reality is pretty straight forward work… some sleep deprivation, some physical stress, limited and capricious allowances of food and other biological needs, and a steady flow of rhetoric.

I might add that natural occurrences can affect a person’s reality too, as any parents of infants can attest… the pain of childbirth, sleep deprivation, physical stress, the new reality of infant care…

That will change your programing!

So, back to the psychiatrist’s basement office.

From his perspective, we sat in the basement of his suburban Detroit house while his wife served tea to my nervous parents upstairs. My perspective was much different.

In what I remember to be a calm and very brief conversation, he described to me various techniques and activities that he knew were used by the Moonies and the Krishnas, very big cult groups at the time. I knew what those groups were and they were bad, so when I recognized their techniques as things that I had been a part of, my reality changed in a flash.

There I sat, not in suburban Detroit, but in a void from which I could see the reality that I had grown up with and the reality that the cult had generated. It was like being in the vacuum of space looking at two globes.

Very quickly I concluded that I had a unique opportunity and the happy task of weaving together a new reality for myself by picking and choosing aspects of each of those two realities that lay before me. So that is what I proceeded to do.

You could say it was a formative experience.

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(Ray)

How do we build community when reality is in our heads?

This is not an everyday sort of question, and seems to point up an impossible contradiction. So how is it we can ask such a question anyway?

My basis for asking this starts with my overall model of human existence. I’m an engineer, and it pleases us to have models for keeping track of things. The fundamental observation I find useful is that we are pattern-makers. We grow and are trained to pick out and remember patterns and structures in our experience.

Parents can see this in their children from the beginning as they focus on faces. Children see it themselves when looking at clouds; adults amuse themselves with spreadsheets, cards, inkblots, tea leaves, and many other trinkets and techniques. We’re built to pick up on patterns, and to arrange them against each other.

The stakes are high sometimes – agriculture and product safety depend on the correct sorts of regular events and behavior. We can call the collection of such patterns ‘reality’.

The dictionary definition of reality includes this: “something that is neither derivative nor dependent but exists necessarily”. Leave it to the dictionary to put in several other words that then need defining; I suppose it’s job security.

A more ready-to-hand definition comes from the fiction writer Phillip K. Dick:

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

Another writer, Buckminster Fuller, would sometimes begin lectures by noting that everything we see is inside our heads. He would explain by drawing a simple diagram of the eye, noting that the incoming light gets inverted on the retina, then reinterpreted by the physical brain before we are conscious of it. At the deepest levels, our perceptions and experiences are conditioned for us by our brains.

A classic experiment in perception involves measuring the nerve impulses in the ear of a cat as it listens to a metronome. The repeating electrical pulses in the nerve are obvious, until a mouse comes into the area. As the cat turns its attention to the mouse, the metronome no longer causes the nerve impulses; the measurement shows the difference. Now think about that for a second: the animal has changed the physical perception due to changes in its mind.

Now we have to expand our definition of reality, to include the very real impact of our inner landscape, the emotional, intellectual and social facts we carry with us. We know these at a deeper level than intellectual learning or belief. They influence our behavior individually and in relationships, and they drive groups of us into fads as well as panics.

From birth, we form the habits and internalize the rules we associate with the meeting of our needs. This tendency helps humankind survive, and it is strong within us. We acquire our tastes when we encounter food, manners when we encounter others, preferences for attractiveness when we encounter mates. All these are associated with our sense of the world at those times. Our sense of the world affects our perceptions of it directly, and thus our choices. This sets a particular view of the world that we carry forward, unless some circumstance changes it.

Such changes happen at a deep level, since our map of the world is made at a deep level.

The shock of events like a traumatic accident or giving birth make deep impressions on us – we often remember them as life-changing. Situations like boot camp or rehab are constructed to make such changes: they call survival into question, while forcing new patterns of behavior on the subjects in all aspects of life: whether/when/what to eat, privacy, social status, manners, goals.

A person carries the mark of such experiences forward from then on. Mothers share an experience that neither maids nor men can know. The world was startled to see Patty Hearst transformed from college coed to violent radical in a few weeks. We are less startled to see an indifferent boy go off to the military and return a focused, industrious, committed young man. The upheaval of life alters our worldview to cope with the new situation, and we tend to value the new view with an absolute certainty, as once we valued the old.

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We have developed into the kind of creature which benefits from living with others of our kind: a social animal. Our forms of society vary widely. Those social forms that have persisted have done so because they provided enough advantage to allow the participants to live and pass on the forms.

We pass on our social patterns by example, but also by reinforcing our collective memory of them.

We connect through storytelling; this pattern works well enough to persist in all societies. Shared stories grow into common understandings of the world. Those understandings which help are in turn attractive to tell stories about, and thus they persist even in the absence of recorded history or measurement.

Philosophers have noted the importance of ritual and myth and the remarkable degree of stability they maintain over generations and even civilizations. More than just good advice on agriculture or medicine, our stories of inner life give us guidance for our feelings and judgements, on navigating our inner worlds. A personal sense of certainty, an internal steadiness, can be essential in times of turbulence, so it is not surprising that we defend the stories and lessons which provide it so vigorously.

“Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

Sometimes, in our inner selves, we need consistency and certainty, as when children need reliable limits to feel real security.

Sometimes we need to review or refine an overly simplistic worldview, when circumstances bring truly new situations to us. In these cases, we need to know the advantage of loosening our hold on what we think we know. The challenge of gaining new understanding of a place or a person comes neither from blind experiment, nor from automatic rejection of experiment. Rather, it comes from an openness to new information and practice of evaluating it. The skills built in this way are often characterized as wisdom.

“Those who do learn from history are condemned to watch others repeat it.”

Life, especially life with others, poses a series of changes, tests and challenges to our worldviews.

If we cling to, or idolize, our worldview too much, we will experience these challenges as painful, threatening, or destructive. People who go on like this become increasingly alienated, wary of connection with others and of new ideas, even resentful and angry at a world that seems bent on tearing them down.

Violence and destructive behavior to self or others often follows, and a retreat further into the one constant remaining in such a life– the sense of right, of self-righteousness. The conclusion that others are in their hearts mean-spirited or evil is reinforced by each new difficulty, each failure of the world to conform to the capital-T Truth; contrary perceptions go unheeded, overtures of peace unanswered.

Mark Twain once remarked that anti-semitism reminded him of a cat he knew who sat on a hot stove once and never sat on a hot stove again. “What’s wrong with that?” asked an anti-semite. “The stupid cat never sat on a cold stove again, either,” Twain replied.

I see religions as guides to navigating these inner realities, including reports on what it’s like to live inside a complex, reflective mind and brain. The story lines of the great myths, and the precepts of the great religions, all contain many proverbs and examples pointing to the tools we need to keep bad impulses in check, and to act in ways which benefit ourselves and others: kindness, compassion, tolerance, and generosity of spirit and substance.

The Oracle at Delphi, the Ten Commandments, Buddhism’s Four Truths, our Seven Principles, even the homespun Serenity Prayer all speak to the value of our inner strengths, of understanding our limits, and of a consistent practice of self-knowledge. With these we can respect ourselves and others, even while confronting our differences, and we can sympathize with strongly-held views whether or not we agree with them.

After all, an absolute sense of right and wrong in all things has a certain charm – it’s far less work than evaluating difficult or complex problems, or granting respect to those who annoy us. Apply a rule, and we’re done – and if that doesn’t work, apply it louder and harder to drive the wickedness from the world, or at least from our sight. Personally, we gain some satisfaction, but socially, we bring oppression, or isolation if those wicked others can manage to avoid us.

Our alternative, then, is to take advantage of the experience of those who have lived before us; who esteemed love above all else, who saw the benefits of kindness and compassion. The catch is that this requires us to learn some of life’s least comfortable lessons: control of impulses, the habits and skills of respect for others, generosity and the choice to surrender one’s own gain for another’s sake, and sympathy for our fellows’ struggles with these same lessons. Here, the personal experience involves patience, trust, restraint, humility, and a continuing effort at self-evaluation – not a very easy sell. But to the extent we have freedom to learn, freedom to experiment and to reach out, it is because of the society that results from pursuing these constructive inner goals: a society of discovery, of freedom and progress.

These strenuous prospects are recognizable to everyone with the experience of making one’s own way in the world, and often can produce a hankering for a simpler, happier time. Garrison Keillor has a fine observation at this juncture:

"My memory is faulty, as everyone's is. And I think back to that life that's gone, and those people. And I think about it as the olden days; the good-old days when life was simple. And it's not true. It's a terrible disservice to them. Life was simple for me - then - because I was a child, and my happiness was looked after by other people. But it was not simple for the others. Never."

There’s our tune again. I’m here, with you, because I’ve taken on the goal of improving my life, with the hope of a better society. And with you, my social group, I do some talking and a lot of listening. I try to learn, and I wish that my children and yours may develop “a questing mind, so you may know how others live”. So let’s live, and lighten up – it’s the hardest way, except for all the others. Peace.

The Nature Of Reality-based Community by Wendy and Ray Meluch August 26, 2007

The Nature Of Reality-based Community
by Wendy and Ray Meluch
August 26, 2007