Talking about going towards “it”, at the lake we talked about teaching methods and how some work and some, like reading out of a text book, do not work. In our IDS we are participating in “experiential learning” which has something to do with moving towards “it”. Sitting in a lopsided circle next to the lake, I had trouble seeing how different our version of experiential learning was any different than sitting in a circle in a Guilford classroom. Yes, we’re moving in the right direction, but I feel that if we really want to move towards “it” there needs to be some movement, some stimulation. This is going to sound a little hippie dippy, but to explore the god in nature shown through magnificent creativity, how about sticking our hands in the mud, climbing a tree, or making a class sculpture out of materials in the woods? I know we have to be able to talk about the readings, but to go back to Rilke, I wish we had time to experience like we did as children where God “appear[ed] in [the world] everywhere.” I miss that. With all the bullshit we fill our time with there is no time to really see. What are we even doing? Why is this shit so important? Kauffman quotes Stephen Weinberg who said, “All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics…The more we know of the universe, the more meaningless it appears.” So we study the pieces, the parts which we believe will help us understand rather than going out an experiencing it. I read about bipolar disorder in my psychology text books rather than experiencing a person who has it for myself. There is no meaning to the words in a text book, in the reducible version of life.
I talked to Nick last class about how psychology has trained me to reduce things, to see the parts and not the whole and how I hate that. Saying that out loud somehow freed me a little. Sitting across from Maia I saw her as a 3-D object, saw how she stood out from the background behind her. Looking at the tiles in the shower later that day I actually saw the tiles in the shower instead of the white box that I step into everyday. It’s like tripping but without drugs when you let go and have those moments where you can really see. We are trained in reduction, not to notice the whole picture, the glory surrounding.
If we were to adopt a holistic view where God is the creativity in the universe, as Kauffman talks about, there would be less bullshit. We wouldn’t produce shitty food, we wouldn’t be pumping hormones into our cows and treating them like shit, we wouldn’t be buying shit all the time to fill up the ever expanding void that our disconnection with nature has produced, we wouldn’t be shitty to one another, we wouldn’t be dropping bombs on other humans! In a more holistic world full of meaning and agency we would be able to see past our prejudices, our dehumanistic views of anyone that looks different or who’s perspective challenges our view. If we could realize the agency we have, the “god” within us if you want to get Quakerly, to self-actualize (psychology), the power we have on our world, on the people around us, on ourselves, whew, tomorrow would be different. If we could all see that maybe there isn’t a God controlling everything up above, somewhere in the clouds, and that maybe I, and we, are it.
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