30 Ideas That Have Influenced Me (And Will Probably Continue To Do So)

[A post from Facebook. An ideological bibliography, of sorts.] 
 
 
I've been tagged by now in a number of notes entitled "Write 30 Things About Yourself". The premise is simple: just come up with 30 random idiosyncrasies, opinions or facts about yourself and tag friends whose responses you'd be interested to know. Well, in the course of attempting this exercise I kept finding that many of my most cherished idiosyncrasies clamored for more exposition than a mere info-byte questionnaire should warrant, and just couldn't find the words to fit the format. Yet, I'd enjoyed reading many of the more insightful entries on my friends' lists and wanted to participate. I think it's a swell idea to use this social networking technology to present and learn about the ideas that shape our lives.
 
With that in mind, I decided to change the format for myself more along the lines of the similar "List 15 Authors Whose Work Has Changed You", sacrificing brevity in favor of expanded scope and changing the name to:
 
30 Ideas That Have Influenced My Life (And Will Most Likely Continue To Do So)
 
This list will necessarily incomplete, as all the ideas that have influenced me have had their genesis in ideas before them (i.e. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, and I don't even know most of their names) and I don't know how I will come to view them in light of new information and experience in the years ahead. Many of the ideas might stretch the term "idea", overlap, contradict each other or otherwise bump elbows on this list, but anybody who never contradicts themselves doesn't strike me as very interesting. (Of course, long-winded people aren't often very interesting either, but nobody's forcing you to read this.) The contradictions are a large part of my motivation for putting it all out there as an ideological self-inventory. I'm reporting to Navy boot camp soon and would like to be more familiar with the soup of influences that have shaped this mind I call myself before entering that different world.
 
I tagged anybody I thought might like to read such a thing, or write their own. I don't expect anybody to make it 30 open response essay questions like I did, but I hope some of you may consider making your own list of Ideas. The thinkers and thoughts who have influenced you are legion, and you have understood them uniquely relative to your experiences. Feel free to keep your answers to a single word, a short sentence or short paragraph -- or, for that matter, cut the list down to 15, 10, or 5. Feel free to laugh at my presumptuous naivete and inability to summon the properly accented "e"s for that word. I don't care. We only get a century or so of shared time here, a brief shared moment on a cosmic dust mote. Knowledge loses value when hoarded -- so let the paradigms collide!
 
 
 
1. Communication / The global community -- such as Facebook, the Internet and the entire network of information now increasingly crisscrossing the planet. Because our generation is the one most familiar with it, we might take for granted how remarkable it really is. Scientific data ages this planet at 4.5 billion years. On the evolutionary time scale we humans are just the teeniest chip of the iceberg. We are now living in an era of human civilization where the rate of technological advancement has been described by a well-documented prediction known as Moore's Law (one which we have probably all seen in action) which says that every year at the current rate of development computers will grow twice as small and twice as fast. Whether they could somehow grow infinitely fast and small is irrelevant to the matter of how the information network has affected the global culture and will affect it in the future. Bear in mind, information technology is just the latest and fastest form of consolidation of global culture, the others being trade, imperialism, evangelism, literature, the arts, etc. They share this effect: the old boundaries between cultures and subcultures are breaking down. With our capacity for accessing information increasing dramatically and even exponentially, it seems reasonable that our understanding of ourselves and each other will likewise intensify... if we can keep up.
 
2. Individualism, as manifested in America. A Murngin tribesman is bound to have a much different conception of the importance of having a distinct personality than a young American such as myself. Our life here is aesthetically saturated with potentially literally thousands of ads everyday, most of them suggesting that the product in question will somehow give you the buyer a leg up in the game of outdoing everyone else or just keeping up with the Joneses. As a child I was prone to answering the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" with the most grandiose of fantasies, from being President to the next Nikola Tesla to an influential writer, or just somebody who types out really verbiose responses to Facebook surveys. Influenced by sitcoms I'd seen, I'd also often imagine myself being funny in my head, replete with my own laugh track. I'm the kid who got sent to the corner in 1st grade PE for obeying the order to "sit down" at my place in the circle like a suddenly unsupported rag doll. Fun stuff, and afterwards embarrassing (although I do try to follow the "no regrets" injunction of the individualists.) I can hardly catch my reflection in a mirror without making it a mental photo opportunity. I'm probably not the only one whose self-image is rooted in the bedrock of vanity.
 
 
3. Modesty / Sincerity / "The Truth Shall Make You Free" -- mostly instilled by a Protestant upbringing (I'll get to that.) Lest I leave anyone who might not know me so well with a false impression that I am/was the Alpha Class Clown, let me clarify that I was much more of the Beta Quiet Kid, except in those capacities where I was allowed to step into the role of the Alpha Smart Kid (it's funny how much this archetype is relatively defined, depending what class you're in and where. Overall I think being Alpa Studious Kid would have served me better in the long run.) I would generally describe myself as intellectually and philosophically oriented in the sense of head-in-clouds-all-too-often and more-questions-than-answers, or, you might say, a mixed blessing balanced by a double edged sword. I like to contemplate matters usually encrusted as "banal platitudes" which can nonetheless "have life-or-death importance" in the words of David Foster Wallace (speech at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction), among them the "cult of the individual" (the sociologist Emile Durkheim's term) mentioned above. Fashion is in many ways an inscrutable paradox to me, based on the ostensibly opposite notions of knowing when to take cues from others and setting yourself apart.
 
 
4. Self-Determination -- The "paradox" of fashion leads directly into what is probably the most important entry on this list and the one in which I feel the most confidence. In fact I'm going to split it into a few entries to fill in more toward the 30 goal and because it deserves it. There are several pertinent quotes I can think of to use here, as this idea has influenced me from a number of sources. It's often associated with Existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard, but they've influenced me only indirectly as I haven't read them. A quote from my older brother: "Only you can define success for yourself." Fashion will drive you crazy if you look to it for meaning. Better to set your own goals and measure progress as related to those goals and in being superior to your former self. The existentialist mantra is that life has no inherent meaning; it is up to us to determine the meaning of our own lives. While I don't necessarily agree with the first part of that statement, I do agree with the second and what the whole statement tries to do, which is put YOU squarely in the driver's seat of your own life. 
 
 
5. "Response-Ability" -- The intentional pun with "responsibility" implies that proactively making your own decisions is actually a moral imperative, something I have never fully grasped but strive for nonetheless. The closest I can come is that humans are goal-striving beings, therefore without a worthwhile goal to strive for you are bound to feel empty and do no good to yourself or anybody. "In between stimulus and response, there is a space in which man has the freedom to choose his response." This quote from Viktor Frankl -- a Jewish psychologist who successfully forged his insights through learning to exercise that freedom until he actually thrived while being a prisoner at Auschwitz -- expresses what I've come to view as the only really meaningful connotation of free will. No matter what some new age guru types might suggest, there are always unforeseen circumstances cropping up beyond your control, your own birth being a prime example. It doesn't matter if you are creating or cocreating these circumstances through some law of quantum attraction or any other such dubious malarkey. What matters is that you are directly responsible for how you react to those stimuli, including how you mentally label and view them. Even if you deny that you have a choice and assert you are a victim, you will have to keep choosing to view circumstances as justifications of that position. Temporally, there is only one place you can choose to choose your reactions: the here and now.
 
 
 
 
6. "Know Thyself" -- This is another one I probably ought to split up. There's the ideas of knowing where you came from and where you're going, but especially there's knowing who you are right now. To the extent this is possible, I think it relies on have a set of principles that represent your highest beliefs about the way things work and how you want to be involved with them (a concept among others I credit to the seminal book 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey). My set of principles is not very clear; I am writing this in aid of it.
 
 
7. The Breath of Brahma -- and now we begin to come to the religious influences. This is the Hindu "Vedanta" idea that this universe is one of an infinite series of waves in a series of expansions and collapses, all essentially a part of a primordial "God" intelligence playing hide-and-seek with itself (an image from Alan Watts). Of course, modern findings in astronomy have suggested the universe's expansion is accelerating, putting to question the hypothesis that there will be a complentary "Big Crunch", but nonetheless my cosmological view is that we are all intensely purpose-driven actors in a play in (and sometimes about) the mind of God. As this is a purely theological or philosophical speculation about matters concerning which evidence is not or cannot be available, it doesn't hold nearly the relevance for me as entries 4-6. A pertinent quote from the movie K-Pax which sort-of ties in 4-6: "The Universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, then it will expand again. It will repeat this process forever. What you don't know is that when the Universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make you will live through again and again forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around because this time is all you have."
 
 
 
8. The Scientific Method -- now I will insert something which has been hinted at before, but especially after the last entry deserves to be shown at least as a catharsis. The scientific method is a trial-and-error approach at finding the truth with which most of us in the Western World are familiar. However, for me it took a lengthy debate with a friend and reading the likes of Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan to understand that scientific truth is really on a qualitatively different level than philosophical argument or mystical revelation. Those things have certainly had their impact on the world, but the rise of science and its attendant technologies has transformed the world like nothing else in an astoundingly short time (see number 1). And every one of those sciences and technologies can be traced back to its most basic proofs. This is a vast and profound subject of which I am largely ignorant. It has taught me the essence of truly reliable communication: show your work, make testable predictions and then test them, and let the evidence speak for itself. (My apologies that most of this list will not conform to empirical standards. Separating the wheat from the chaff, as in most matters, will be your own affair.)
 
9. Life after Death -- this was an idea I accepted at an early age as a tenet of the Christian faith. Although I generally consider this another matter with insufficient evidence for anything but speculation and thus not approaching the relevance of 4-6, I tend to operate under the assumption that a noncorporeal element of ourselves ("spirit") will survive bodily death and go on to some sort of encounter with a universal intelligence or "ground of being", and then onto another form of existence or perhaps just assimilated like rainwater into the ocean. One reason I tend to think this is the work of Elizabeth-Kubler Ross, one of the modern world's premier experts on death, dying and near-death experiences. Of the latter she recorded a vast amount of information from many people who'd had "NDE"s, and noted much similarity between their remarkable experiences -- many of which occurred after the body (or shall I say person?) was declared dead. In any honest attempt to study the question of life after death, her work deserves a place.
 
10. Empathy / nonviolence -- Cultural ideals of individuality aside, everyone experiences their own self as the center of the universe. Since I was very young I did not find it difficult to visualize myself in others' shoes, assuming that everyone had their own reasons for everything they did which seemed good to them at the time. I distinctly once remember when playing with action figures, "what is it that makes the Bad Guys bad? If I, the Good Guy, were in their shoes, wouldn't I also be convinced of the Goodness of my actions?" An early encounter with moral relativism, the implications of which I've yet to fully resolve :P. Most likely I was heavily influenced in the direction of compassion by trying to follow the injunction of the New Testament Jesus to "turn the other cheek". More recently, I've also been influenced by the legacies of people like Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, women's suffragists, abolitionists, Tianamen Square demonstrators, Harvey Milk and Viktor Frankl who had the guts and wisdom to be able to use nonviolence not just to turn themselves into welcome mats but as a powerful tool to fight injustice in the world. A quote from the empirical sector: "If a human being disagrees with you, let him (or her) live. In a hundred million solar systems you will not find another." - Carl Sagan
 
11. Human dignity / human rights -- Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and Bill Of Rights. "I have a dream that one day my children will live in a country where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" - Martin Luther King. The "Melting Pot" here in America with its essential ingredient of human rights is perhaps the only reason I think this country could have a future for the betterment of the entire world, and not just another failed empire. Just spice up the education, proactive diplomatic outreach to the rest of the world, and find some magic way to make all that advertising aesthetic as beneficial for people as it is fattening for corporations, please. And... you know... get people like me to get informed and vote, make the two-party system results-oriented, and teach pigs to fly.
 
12. Conservation / Animal Rights / Agrarianism -- My limited perspective here was largely shaped by Wendell Berry's collection of essays, The Art Of The Common Place (also Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.) Berry argues for a whole-systems perspective and seems to attribute the root cause of nearly all social ills to the ownership of too much of the land in the hands of too few, and the Decartesian dualism (which Berry and Quinn trace as far back as the Agricultural Revolution) between mind and body . He defines health as "membership", active participation within a community. My favorite quote, from the essay The Unsettling Of America: "The growth of the exploiters' revolution on this continent has been accompanied by the growth of the idea that work is beneath human dignity, particularly any form of hard work. We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them. Out of this contempt for work arose the idea of a nigger: at first some person, and later some thing, to be used to relieve us of the burden of work. If we began by making niggers of people, we have ended by making a nigger of the world. We have taken the irreplaceable energies and materials of the world and turned them into jimcrack 'labor-saving devices.' We have made of the rivers and oceans and winds niggers to carry away our refuse, which we think we are too good to dispose of decently ourselves. And in doing this to the world that is our common heritage and bond, we have returned to making niggers of people: we have become each other's niggers."... I included animal rights in this entry just because it seems profoundly stupid to drive to extinction or even endangerment countless species that have taken millenia to arise here, just for the sake of our upstart "exploiters' revolution". It's the sort of thing Peter Singer meant when he coined the term "species-ism"; because of our worldview is so anthrocentric, animal species don't have a role in it -- in contrast to the essential roles they actually occupy in the ecosystem.
 
 
 
13. General Semantics -- the brainchild of Alfred Korzybski was introduced to me through the book Language In Thought And Action by S. I. Hayakawa. A combination of linguistics and psychology, the foundational mantra of general semantics is that "the map is not the territory", just as a word is not the same as the thing it represents and you really wouldn't want to attempt to bite into that succulent-looking steak pictured on the Denny's menu (which was probably raw when the picture was taken anyway.) From there the book goes on to an elegant study of how to use language accurately and not be deceived by your own words. I'm really not doing it justice here. But "the map is not the territory" is relevant for this list / linguistic map of my own ideological maps. The Scientific Method, number eight, happens to bump elbows and wag its finger at many of the other entries on this list. However, at least for my purposes here, I do not find that ample justification to reduce the list here to solely those entries that have respectable empirical pedigrees. As for science itself -- logic is a very noble ideal, but you need to know a good deal more than sheer mathematics to function in the real world. Intuition has its uses. We would have no creative expression without it. Logic may be the best method we know for making accurate maps, but as Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem actually proved, there's more to making maps than just logic.... It occurs to me now that a more accurate title for this list might have been "30 Ideas That Have Influenced Or Describe Influences On My Life (And Will Most Likely Continue To Do So)", especially in the case of number one, where it is mostly the territory itself and not the idea/map of it that has influenced me. I'll leave the title as it is for the sake of brevity (ha, ha.)
 
 
 
 
 
14. Self-Image Psychology -- "[Prescott Lecky, one of the pioneers of self-image psychology], conceived of the personality as a 'system of ideas', all of which MUST SEEM to be consistent with each other. Ideas which are inconsistent with the system are rejected, 'not believed,' and not acted upon. Ideas which SEEM to be consistent with the system are accepted. At the very center of this system of ideas--the keystone--the base upon which all else is built, is the individual's 'ego ideal', his 'self-image' or his conception of himself." That quote is from the introduction to a book called Psycho-Cybernetics by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Dr. Maltz was a successful plastic surgeon who felt that in the course of his work in altering people's appearances that he also bore some response-ability as a psychologist as well. This was because some of his patients experienced radical turnarounds in their personal lives following their operations, while others did not. Asking himself what the essential difference between these two groups of patients was in the interest of helping his patients gain the maximum benefit from their surgery, he came to the conclusion that the decisive factor was whether a 'mental operation' had taken place on the patient's self-image, as in Prescott Lecky's definition. Psycho-Cybernetics is written in a self-help style for the common reader which I find rather tedious, but it's surely one of the best and most influential self--improvement books of the past century, and one which makes an effort to support its claims with experimental evidence.
 
15. Cognitive Psychology -- This was introduced to me through the unfortunately titled "Feeling Good" by David Burns, MD. However, it is particularly interesting from the scientific perspective in that a) it's the only such book proven in clinical trials to outperform anti-depressant drugs in helping patients and b) the entire book is really a course in clear thinking, under the premise that all depression comes from distorted thinking and mislabeling. I find it an interesting piece of evidence that the logical approach is really only understood by a few of the many people who are affected by it, a misunderstanding with tragic results for our collective mental health.
 
16. Archetypal Psychology -- Carl Jung may be one of the great polarizing figures in psychology, as on the one hand there are schools devoted entirely to the vein of his work, and on the other hand in a number of modern psychology books the only brief mention of his name you will find is for his contributions to the theory of personality typology. Jung was Freud's one-time favorite student, who broke from his mentor to pursue his own theories. Whereas Freud is credited with the idea of the individual's psychological development over the lifespan and the idea that there is subconscious which can be studied through dream analysis, he is also credited with being wrong on a great many counts, such as his arbitrary map of the psyche containing the Id, the Ego and the Superego. Jung's map of the Psyche was considerably more complex, asserting a huge unconscious territory occupied by archetypes such as the Shadow (personification of repressed traits), the transcendent Self, Animus/Anima (Male/Female traits; one becomes the subconscious gatekeeper to the psyche as the other matches the physical gender) and also the conscious Ego, which was considered to embody an archetype of its own. It may well be that Jung's map of the unconscious was just as arbitary as Freud's, but it is also contains a far richer palette for exploring the psyche than Freud's mere repository of repressed sexuality, especially through prolonged attention to and conscious creative work with one's dreams. In fact, my first exposure to the work of Jung as well as its practical application to dreamwork was in Rick Veitch's dream comic series, Rare Bit Fiends.
 
 
 
17. The Acorn Theory -- If you've read any Socratic dialogues, you might recall that Socrates sometimes refers to his "daimon" or guiding spirit, which lead him to his life of questioning everybody he met, also to accepting his decreed fate of death by poison out of principle instead of escaping when he could. This "daimon" is the subject of the book The Soul's Code by James Hillman, which expounds on his "acorn theory" of personality. The idea is that just as a mighty oak tree can develop from a small acorn, every human is born with a unique seed of personality, which exerts a gravitational pull over the lifetime (though especially in childhood) to fulfill the image present in the acorn. He mostly doesn't bother with empirical support, but spends time showing the advantages of explanatory power of this view over other modern contenders which he sees as "psychology without soul", such as behaviorism. Of course the existence of the "soul" might be open to question, but when dealing with the complicated beings called humans, might it not perhaps be better to err on the side of introducing loaded philosophical concepts rather than oversimplification? There is also an intriguing chapter where Hillman paints a picture of Hitler's daimon, while arguing that when the daimon is "demonic", the higher purpose might be to show us the importance of recognizing the power of the daimon. I don't know -- Hillman may be putting the cart before the horse. An insightful read, nonetheless.
 
18. Mythology as Psychology -- The preceding entry would be a near-example of this, as Hillman's acorn theory is a modification of the Platonic Myth of Er. However, what I mean here is better symbolized by the book Iron John by Robert Bly, in which the author takes a "fairy tale" and breaks it into eight stages of psychological development. Highly recommended. What I have gleaned from reading him (aside from the memorable image that one's greatest wound is their essential totem for transfiguration)and also Joseph Campbell is that in native cultures, myths are the stories that the youth are initiated into to become adults, and the adults to become wise. When I wrote in number two that "a Murngin tribesman is bound to have a much different conception of the importance of having a distinct personality than a young American", mythic initiation is what I would cite as the key difference. The Murngin adolescent will undergo a quite intense ceremony to become a man, just like generations before him. Me? My Dad was raised Jewish, but I wasn't, so I wasn't Bar Mitzvah'ed. As part of my Christian upbringing I was baptized once or twice, and I testified in front of a campfire once. That's it. No scarification, no ominous warnings a few days before the ceremonyfrom the old men that the "Father Snake is calling for your foreskin." See the difference? (Not that I'm complaining, mind you!) The point is simply that this sense of being profoundly initiated into a mythologically charged world, something ubiquitous among the world's cultures, is something we have all but lost in the modern age. The Murngin has a different sense of the importance of being an individual because he is born into a whole different worldview. Things are changing so fast in the global culture that the mythology has had no time to congeal in the manner you see in tribal societies.
 
 
19. The Hero Cycle -- This is the theme of the book The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. George Lucas reportedly happened on this book after he'd written most of the script for Star Wars, found many correlations and finished the script accordingly. The Hero's Journey is a pattern of adventure Campbell claims exists in stories all over the world. Although not all scholars agree, Campbell smoothly presents it as a single human journey, full of spiritual metaphor, earthy humor and, of course, swashbuckling action. The Hero archetype is certainly not unknown to our culture, and many Hollywood screenwriters have followed Lucas's example in using THWATF for plot advice (perhaps even making it responsible for the redundant similarity of many films' plots.) To me the Hero is someone who finds meaning in alienation, successfully completing a quest to earn (or sometimes steal) a boon from the mythological realm to enlighten the mundane world.
 
20. Fundamentalist Christianity -- Jesus Christ's was the first great Hero story I learned. Somebody who's willing to take away the debt caused by your sins and put it on the tab of the three days he spent in Hell (though I'm a little hazy on the official story there) so you don't have to moan there for eternity. I guess cause he's a the only really choice piece of non-sinner, he only had to stay for three days. It's a nice thing to do. The metaphysics of the bargain never made a whole lot of sense to me, but I've already told you the main thing I ever took to heart about Jesus (turn the other cheek.) Which leads to a prime example of why I'm no longer a Christian: the New Testament says "Turn the Other Cheek". The Old Testament says "An Eye For An Eye" (when it's not saying "Kill Their Men And Drag Home Their Women".) The church I know says BOTH, at least when it comes to "God Bless America" and "God Protect And Aid Our Troops". Contradiction. Jesus's favorite epithet: Hypocrites. Sorry, I'm not perfect either. But, I don't claim that I'm supposed to be, anymore than anyone else. Another general criticism: it seems to me that our need to worship something far exceeds the need of an Almighty Creator to be worshipped by its own creations (unless you buy into the speculations of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett that gods are nourished by attention/worship.) A thanks to Pat Robertson, of all people for helping me realize I wanted to distance myself furthur from the beliefs he represented: when he made that comment about how Haiti had been asking for an earthquake because of dealing with the devil (which is only a single extremist, paranoid, un-evidencially-substantiated worldview away from saying: f**k those pagan n****rs) I could actually understand where he was coming from because of my background, which frightened me. Getting on with things... I usually avoid talking about why I don't believe the Bible is the inspired Word Of God, because losing my faith was far from pleasant for me and, in the spirit of empathy, I don't wish it on anyone else. In an ideal world, everyone would be solely responsible for asking, answering and verifying those questions on their own. But, then, people aren't usually willing to think rationally, are they? And there are times when Christians actually do want to start conversations about their beliefs (as well as when they want to start it off by condemning the beliefs of others). For reasons that may become apparent with #30 (and also thanks to Pat Robertson), I'm somewhat reconsidering my moratorium on discussing theology with those I know are Christians. But Fundamentalist Christianity deserved a place on this list for the influence it has had on me, and its interpretation of the Passion story with Jesus as the martyr-hero will probably continue to influence me. Actually, I'm not done with Christianity on this list yet.
 
 
 
 
21. Christian Kabbalah -- a single website, www.yhwh.com, is responsible for this entry, and also solely responsible for me regaining an appreciation for the story of Jesus Christ. The author essentially poses the story in Eastern terms: the Fall in the Garden of Eden and the partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil represents the descent into fragmented, dualistic consciousness, and Jesus's prayer ("let this cup pass from me, but not my will be done, but Thine") in the Garden of Gethsemane represents his sacrifice of his ego to the God's Will. God on this website always carries the metaphysical connotation of "I Will Be What I Will Be", which I like to read as God = and encourages self-determination = the whole universe. I'm not real sure what this guy's position is, as he says he is an actual minister who also happens to be a student and webmaster of this mix of mystical Judaism and Christianity. He also changed his name to the Hebrew Name of God and is comfortable titling his publications "God's Website" and "God's Blog" to attract more readers. I value the material for helping me re-appreciate the myth of upbringing and intelligently presenting interesting material on esoteric ("inner", as opposed to outer "exoteric") religion I wouldn't have otherwise seen.
 
22. The New Age Online Melting Pot / "Fractal Wisdom"-- Probably the most embarrassing item on this list and one of the most empirically dubious; there was a period when I spent too much time reading hooty-guru stuff on the Internet. Most of it is pretty much junk, although it is interesting to know that Christianity, Judaism and Islam all have esoteric traditions that get along with and complement each other, whereas the three exoteric traditions tend to have international incidents. Anyhow: the primary website I want to credit here is a section of a larger site at www.fractalwisdom.com. The hooty-guru interpretation of fractals there has stuck with me and is something I would like to learn more about. Plants and galaxies both exhibit fractal patterns, similar at cosmically different scales but with infinite variation. I like to think that the universe itself is some sort of fractal wave... I'd also like to acknowledge the Kabbalist tradition (through various more-and-less reliable printed and online material) for the idea that Mercy must be balanced with Strength... other luminaries include iconoclast Rob Brezny's www.freewillastrology.com , Nick Fiorenza's standout www.lunarplanner.com, and the I Ching.
 
 
 
23. Buddhist Meditation / The Bodhisattva Ideal -- There was also a period of time when I was much entranced by The Myth Of Freedom by Chogyam Trungpa. Reading his descriptions of the six dissatisfied states of mind called the Realms of Samsaric Occupation and the five skandhas/stages of ego formation, I felt like someone was revealing to me the deepest workings of my own mind. Of course, like Zen, Buddhism takes work. The Eightfold Path seemed to boil down to one thing: zazen, zazen, zazen. Sitting meditation. I never had the discipline or guidance to be "successful" at it. More important to me now is the description of the vow of the Bodhisattva, which is the stage of enlightenment right before Buddhahood/Nirvana. The Bodhisattva vows to forsake enlightenment for him/herself until "all sentient beings" can be enlightened. "And the first shall be last..." ... that sort of thing. It struck me as a respectable attitude for a hero. Even if there is a lurking desire for one's own enlightenment in the shadows... what could be better for it than a commitment to service for an indefinite time?
 
24. Amore / Monogamous Romance -- I was several years and several crushes past my adolescence before I actually started to make efforts to talk to those girls. Wish I'd started trying sooner -- maybe I would have if I'd known how difficult it'd be to get past that much timidity. The first time I got the message from someone's eyes, though... I'm only half-kidding when I say it's the only thing in my life I feel like I could classify as a mystical experience. More of a visceral and somatic experience, really, to feel a level of happiness and okayness with your body you hadn't known you were missing. At one point I was jumping up and down in the parking lot outside my apartment for the novelty of feeling the ground pushing against my feet. Philosophically, I felt that all phenomena was reducible to a single binding yet expansive agent we humans know as Love. Perhaps most telling -- coming from someone who is decidedly more pensive than opinionated -- when I sat down to write a short essay for school, I suddenly found seemingly fully-formed opinions rushing to jump onto the page. Odds are my feelings and thoughts would have been different toward everything on this list... Soon, I learned that when attention from a specific person catalyzes you into such a reverie, the reverie is bound to end without that infantile sense of receiving specific attention from the same source. I wasn't crushed. I was addicted.... of course later I had to learn that being grasping gets you nowhere. I am grateful for the courage to risk making mistakes, and the ability to learn from them when they happen. 
 
 
 
25. Social Stigma -- In the case of social stigma, I have come to realize, the only psychological damage that is done to the stigmatized individual is done by the idea that they are stigmatized which they are holding. It's not quite as simple as "no on can put you down without your permission", but without recognizing that any feeling of shame comes from this mental map/idea, it becomes very much a situation of "when all you have is a hammer, all the world looks like a nail." As somebody with a facial difference I am deeply interested in contributing to the specific struggle (in this day and age, whose life is not a struggle?) of those like me in that manner. To retrieve the idea of the daimon, I believe that, regardless of the daimon's objective existence, everyone does have a unique potential which they and only they can fulfill. I believe this is true of social groups as well; as such the demographic of the facially anomalous (the need for an adequate nomenclature perhaps here becoming apparent) could have a unique potential within the greater mythology of today's multicultural global community. Already organizations such as the Smile Train routinely place full page ads in publications such as Time magazine, capitalizing on the symbolic power of the image of a baby with cleft palate (a symbol which I am of course implying could be used for more profound artistic purposes than solicitation for charity.) One (perhaps "the") seminal sociological work on this subject is "Stigma" by Erving Goffman, a book I have recently read. Aside from being a no-holds-barred well-researched expose on the varieties of stigma, the book particularly struck me with its coining of the term "moral career" to describe the philosophical journey of the stigmatized individual to find meaning in or just live with their stigma. As most everyone has or will experience some form of stigma or localized alienation in their lifetime, I see this concept as a key descriptor for what better understanding, acceptance and integration (which must necessarily begin, as has the social progress of other minorities, with self-acceptance and self-determination) of the facially differentiated could achieve for everyone: an important contribution to the moral career of all humankind. For death (or: dread of inevitable ego dissolution and its implied immateriality) is the stigma we all share, and a world in which character is understood as the bedrock of aesthetics and health is understood as membership instead of invulnerability and freedom from infirmity, might just be a little closer to a world where we are ready to take on and solve the truly gargantuan problems of unequal distribution of food, wealth, land, and privilege. If I could choose just one insight to leave the world as my legacy, it is that the image of the imperfect face is a perfect symbol for three truths: impermanence, interconnectedness (none of us would have any individuality without the symbol-making mental storehouse of language accumulated from all humankind around and before us,) and something the Buddhists call origination in dependence ("All phenomena arise as the result of conditions and cease when those conditions change." http://mingkok.buddhistdoor.com/en/news/d/2475) And to that I might add a fourth: the ethical observation voiced by none other than Richard Dawkins in the introduction to A Devil's Chaplain that while evolution is largely a story of ruthless competition, coldhearted elimination and other examples "nature's tooth and claw", the novelty of our intelligence as a species gives us the ability and responsibility to rise above the wastefulness of our biological forbears. It's either that, or wipe ourselves from the Earth with atomic stupidity. No destination in space has been found anywhere near as welcoming as this fragile M-class paradise, and no technology yet invented that could enable us to get there with any kind of efficiency... honorable mention addendums for the "Social Stigma" category of influences include Autobiography Of A Face by Lucy Greeley (a good example of "moral career") and the improvisational "Making Faces" acting workshops for children with facial differences conducted by Michael Williams-Stark.
 
 
 
26. Sociology -- Aside from the book by Goffman mentioned above, my two biggest influences from the abstract world of sociology have been Emile Durkheim's concept of effervescence and Philip Zimbardo's book the Lucifer Effect (www.lucifereffect.com). Effervescence provided me with an explanation for the experience of euphoria I and many others felt around the last campfire one night at church camp. One of the speakers had preached with the passion of an aggravated grudge against the social stratification he perceived still existent in that religious brotherhood, including in his talk this very effective exercise: "please look around you at the campfire, find two people you have not spoken to all week and go shake hands and introduce yourself." This proved to be an emotional door-opener and catalyst for many dedications, re-dedications and personal testimonies, including my own. The capstone to this, however, was it only changed my viewpoint for about a week. Getting back to summer boredom at home, the circumstances hadn't really changed and neither had I. The next time I remember a similar experience was a visit to my friend's family's "Charismatic" Pentecostal church. The congregation's joy and preacher's passionate, finely-crafted sermon actually brought tears to the eyes of my then mostly-agnostic self. On that occasion, the super good feeling lasted all the way until I got into the parking lot. Whaaa? A few years later I learned about effervescence in Dr. Groce's Sociological Theory class at Western, and a bell rung. Crudely summarized, effervescence attributes the religious sentiment to the energy of a group brought to focus on some transcendent metaphor. It was the novelty of the feeling of total social acceptance and membership, a feeling which it would not be an exaggeration to say I have not been granted a great amount of indulgence in my lifetime. The concept of effervescence may also go a long way to explain the "mystical" episode described in #24... Philip Zimbardo's work tends to work with much the same phenomenon, but from the dark side of amoral influences. He was behind the notorious "Stanford Prison Experiment" in the 1970's which arbitrarily placed college students in Guard and Prisoner positions within a simulated prison environment in a campus basement; the experiment had to be ended prematurely because of the excessive enthusiasm of some of the participants in playing their roles. Dr. Zimbardo was also an expert witness involved in the investigation of the abuses of prisoners revealed at the Abu Ghraib facility. The question he frames and tries to answer in The Lucifer Effect is: How is it possible for ordinary, average, even good people to become perpetrators of evil? For those who might question the intrinsic meaningfulness of the word "evil" as a descriptive term, let me rephrase the question as: how would you or I really behave amidst the genocidal fervor of Nazi Germany or apartheid Darfur? The answer is not a simple "social forces are dominant", but Zimbardo's work does point to a disingenuous and possibly dangerous undercrediting of the power of those forces. He also includes a study of heroism, in the sense of the conscientious objector, those who put themselves at risk to oppose social trends they perceive as unethical. He provides a list of ten points based on his observation of true life heroes for successfully resisting morality-bending situational influences. An interesting contrast to the Campbellian hero, the Zimbardo-an hero is less about travelling outside the social confines to bring back insights or inventions and more about the equally taxing (and perhaps sometimes related) business of having the courage to be the voice of common decency at times when there may be enormous pressure from the status quo to go with the flow and remain silent.
 
27. The Anthropic Principle -- In the aforementioned personal theological testimony around a campfire, the argument (of sorts) I presented for taking the call of Christ seriously was what I read years later summarized in a lecture by Carl Sagan in The Varieties Of Scientific Experience as the anthropic principle. Simply put, it's the claim that the precariousness of conditions which permits life here including the presence of life itself is evidence for an Intelligent Designer. Or: "This whole world was put here for US!!!" as I exclaimed to the assemblage of fellow campers and faculty. The anthropic principle does not now strike me as convincing of an Intelligent Designer, as the universe is so inconceivably huge that it seems most probable to me that these conditions and life itself exist elsewhere, albeit most likely in different form. If God really needed to build the whole universe to get one planet ready for life, it really seems to circumvent the need for a conscious Creator and resemble more the eons-long wasteful trial-and-error process of evolution. Sagan also introduced a factor in the uniqueness of life here which I had hitherto not considered: the (scientifically probable) timely extinction of the dinosaurs by meteor, which cleared the way for mammals to achieve dominance. Now, I still find the anthropic principle striking today in the sense that it is marvelous that life exists and can exist at all. This speaks to me not of an Intelligent Designing in advance, but of an even more profound propensity of the universe to become Intelligent and cognizant of itself. In the words of Doctor Manhattan in Ch. 9 of Watchmen, we are "LIFE, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly." ... Another, more classical proof for the existence of God is the so-called Ontological Argument: "The nature of God is Perfection; Existence is a necessary attribute of Perfection; Therefore, God exists." After many years the essential retort to this was formulated (I think by Spinoza) as "Existence is NOT necessariy an attribute of Perfection." God as the embodiment of Perfection, in any sense which I could be said to believe in It now, is beyond the categories of existence and non-existence. Anyhow, I wanted to include the Ontological Argument here because it is remarkably similar to a sentiment I held during that quasi-mystical period of early childhood: Somewhere, somehow, something must be Right and Perfect that we may Exist here now. Call it the "c" in Einstein's equation, the exquisitely calibrated atomic weight of hydrogen and every other element, call it the Buddha or the self-existent "I Am". It's validated every time the physicists are published saying "if conditions in our universe were just a tad different this way, things couldn't work out." Perfection is a necessary attribute of Existence. The funny thing is how the longing for perfection seem to be allowed right along in there -- and isn't Imperfection the necessary foil to define Perfection?... but these are just my shallow speculations. The map is not the territory, after all.
 
 
28. The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism -- This is was a book by the early social theorist Max Weber. His thesis was that the puritan, particularly Calvinist inner uncertainty as to whether one was predestined to be part of God's "elect" or not -- the moral teaching being to maximize your number of good works and amount of faith in order to minimize your own uncertainty -- had borne out in the economic perseverance, drive and success of the capitalist, Protestant, Western nations. I was inspired by this idea my freshman year of college and set out to make it the basis of a research paper. In the course of researching I quickly discovered that Weber's thesis was and is still hotly contested in the academic community, seemingly yanking the statistical legs out from under his theory. I don't think I ever finished that paper. The thesis I hoped to support, however, still intrigues me: "The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Commercialism". The idea is that the today's advertisements display a variant of the Calvinist's inner uncertainty: while you as the consumer are never quite sure whether you are one of the bona fide "Elect" (the successful, the attractive, the trendy), you can sure as hell better your chances by getting your hands on whatever product that gorgeous model is wearing in the advertisement, or that average Joe is using to attract her. Failed scholarly execution, but intriguing idea. Now you know it too. A suggestion as to the furthur metaphorical possibilities to be illuminated in adverculture, in the form of a quoted caption from a few pages in Rick Veitch's CAN'T GET NO graphic epic poem (a great modern take on the Campbellian Hero's Journey, in my opinion): "If sacred ceremonies have one thing in common, it's that performers take on the roles of divine beings. We turn on the tube, and Soupy Sales is balancing Yin and Yang while getting his cream pie in the face. We go to the movies, and there's Silent Bob feeding the multitudes with one large buttered popcorn and a box of Snow Caps. So Satan's smile is not to be feared. It's really just God in his secret clown face, slipping out the side door of heaven."
 
 
29. The Creative Arts -- Alan Moore's Watchmen was the first graphic novel to show me (and lots of other folks) what the "sequential art" medium was uniquely capable of, as well as blowing my mind with a lot of well-flushed out anthropomorphized ideas walking and talking and trying to save the world in garish costumes, with acknowledgment to the more human characters underneath. I probably have Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics to thank for the term "sequential art" and a good part of my enthusiasm for it. Other luminaries include: Maus by Art Spiegelman, the aforementioned Rick Veitch, The Tale Of One Bad Rat by Bryan Talbot, 300 (just the book, not the movie, thanks) and Sin City (of which I only saw the movie, but enjoyed it -- probably because it stayed true to the author's vision) by Frank Miller, and just about everything from DC's Vertigo imprint I have read. Moving on to music: aside from those albums which have struck me as exemplary at some point in time (I won't list them as they are unlikely to impress or surprise anyone) I'd like to acknowledge all the passionate, hard-working live musicians I have seen, none of which are likely to be familiar to anyone except as a regional coincidence. Props to the people who showed me that playing someone else's song in your own style can be a heartfelt art form. Props to the people who actively challenge the status quo. Props to anyone who knows they're no more or less an entertainer than anybody else on a pedestal, and is comfortable letting the art define them in the audience's eyes. Props to anybody who considers it an honor to play to a hostile crowd. Especially props to the anybody who does it for their own sake, who risks playing something really sincere in front of a group of people who might as well turn out to be mewling stoolies as hateful critics. The best show I ever saw was some kid in a basement belting his emo songs with his six-string. Props to music itself, the strangest marriage of math and intuition to come out of every human culture.
 
 
30. Power -- It's fitting this item should be last on the list, because it's probably the one concerning which I have the most mixed feelings and stand to learn the most about in the near future. Perhaps I am uncertain because the conception of power, what it is and how it should be used, is dependent or at least interdependent on one's larger worldview and, if the past twenty-nine items are any clue, mine is a tad unsettled. Here's a chime-in from the indispensable Mr. Berry from number twelve: "power can only be disposed morally or harmlessly only by thoroughly unified characters and communities." Well: a thoroughly unified community is the work of generations, and a thoroughly unified character, I believe, the ultimately unreachable yet only proper goal for a lifetime. To achieve greater integration within one's own character takes the willingness to undertake challenges. So power is most meaningful to me, I could start off by saying, in this sense of power over one's own reluctance and cowardice. A saying attributed to the Buddha: "To conquer oneself is a greater task than conquering others." Fear is not a thing to be ultimately defeated; once mastered (to the extent that such a feat is possible or advisable), it should survive in the form of prudence. Yet all this is mostly a repetition of items four-through-six and says nothing about the complicated transpersonal sphere of power relationships. What is the significance of Power, then, between groups and individuals? In the sense of Sun Tzu's The Art Of War, I understand that when tasked with defeating an opponent in a game of chess, the objective is to maximize the possibilities for winning for yourself while minimizing them for your opponent. However, the duality of Us-v-Them or Winner-v-Loser is only the most accurate map of real life when the territory is in a state of all-out war between two contenders. There is no concern for what comes after the winner is officially declared (a tendency most explicit in the prospect of nuclear war, in which our gameboard Earth may well be wiped clean because neither loser would permit the other to win) and there is no provision for the problem of conflict among multiple actors in a "power vaccuum". The paradigm that emerges next would be Us-vs-Everyone else, or Me-vs-Everyone on the micro level -- the preferred writing canvas of Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Robert Greene. The basic goal is to maximize your own gains and minimize your own losses, worked out through attracting allies and isolating enemies, keeping your true resources and intentions secret, etc. From here is where I have divergent ideas. First, there is the imperative of "me, on my own side, at all costs." Not that I don't have self-interest (see number two), but due to modesty (three), empathy (ten) and human dignity (eleven), I tend to highly question the intrinsic worthiness of being self-centred. Add to that some Eastern sentiment that the individual self is illusory (something I don't claim to have experienced or can make a great intellectual case for) and that to the extent that the individual's identity can be traced, it is actually identical to the whole universe due to the infinitely receding context (seven), and the result is sort of me sitting with a bewildered look on my face in the lotus position in the middle of a busy shopping mall, listening to strangers' confessions, washing feet and distributing random pamphlets. Ha! Not really. There is something I find lacking in this picture that makes it "not me" -- an essential get'em goal-setting quality that seeks my own meditation through my own unique experience of life. If there's one thing I've learned about meditation, it's that anything performed with a heartfelt quality of awareness, mindfulness, passion or just gusto can qualify. To be truly a member of the universe, I am convinced I must seek to be a full individual, to fulfill my own unique potential, to actualize my daimon. So we return to the everyone-for-themselves game -- a game which could be enriched by the inner certainty that who-I-am-is-also-who-you-are. But to get there, you have to go through the Game of I & I & I. There is a tendency to resist the acknowledgment of oneself as an individual by some, to place the determination for one's own actions in the hands of others. You might call this behaving reactively instead of proactively, or you could invoke to Nietsche's ideas of slave morality and master morality. I must give credit to Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising for introducing me to this (and also the substantial feat of providing a frame of reference which can accomodate every item on this list.) I've not read Nietsche himself extensively (only some of Beyond Good And Evil), but I've gathered this much: he views freedom as a relative concept defined by servitude, i.e. that the statement "I am free" is necessarily followed by "...to command, and you must obey." While this does smack of the dualistic mind/body pandemic described in the quote in 12, I find something interesting and challenging in his characterizations of the philosophies the "slave" and "master" use to justify their position relative to the other. The "slave" says: "I'm a born loser. I have bad luck. The snotty elites walk all over me, but I wouldn't join them if I could." The "master" says: "I'm a winner. I make my own luck. God helps me because I help myself. The devil take the hindmost." There's only so far I buy into Nietsche's "nihilist" paradigm; he did wind up thoroughly insane after all. Nonetheless, these are malleable archetypes, and the "slave" morality is something I feel it is worthwhile to search myself for. To what extent are my ideals about karma, the hypocrisy of the elite and the brotherhood of all people merely reactions formulated by the feelings stirred up by the "master" types I have encountered? To what extent are my speculations about life after death a justification for passivity in the life I am living? Toward the "masters" there are many fingers I can mentally point: "It's people like you who are exploiting the Earth to our own extinction / killing the human spirit / are the problem and not the solution. Your compulsive aggrandisement of your superiority is really just the inverted advertisement of your inner fears of inferiority. Your power is as much of an illusion as is your petty ego." I can think these things, but it's usually while I'm at a loss for a witty comeback, averting the eyes and generally declining to play their game. Nietsche's challenge to me is to recognize that there is no escape from the game of being an individual, not while you ARE one. Defaulting to the position of conscientious nonparticipant might be the best you can do to keep your hands clean, but in terms of the game you just make yourself into someone else's pawn. To take the step into the role of Zimbardo's conscientious objector requires a choice to stand up for your principles and refuse to be intimidated into silence. It is the Nietzsches, the dictators large and small, the "master" types, the Machiavellian Princes, the Robespierres, the Lucifers who initialize the Lucifer effect who force us to choose our stance, who shock us with the negative feelings they stir up in our pure nonviolent selves, who are the movers and shakers of the world in lieu of anybody else willing or able to defend and nurture what is good in human affairs (and the natural world). Against the widespread destruction, tyranny and misery rightly associated with these types there may be found a few redeeming qualities: as complex human beings, the order they may leave behind may be in some ways good (although achievement by evil means will tend to soil it.) They remind us of our own capacity for good or evil, a capacity of which it may well be said most people would rather do anything than use either way. They might shock us into thinking for ourselves or mobilizing to take up our latent power to stop them. After all, in the story of power, there are also the Thomas Jeffersons, Winston Churchills, Copernicuses, and the like. There are different moralities of Mastery as there are different To quote the great ending line from Brian Azzarello's graphic novel Joker: "There will ALWAYS be a Joker. Because there's no cure for him. No cure at all. Just a Batman." .... The final paradigm I'd like to introduce (perhaps as a way of slipping in another idea while still meeting my goal of 30) is from the classic social psychology book Games People Play by Eric Berne, M.D. The book gives credence to the idea of psychological games played between people, defined as interactions in which an ulterior motive exists. Most of the games fall into the "Destructive" category: "Now I've Got You, You Son Of A Bitch", "If It Weren't For You", "Let's You And Him Fight", "Kick Me", "Wooden Leg" ("What do you expect from someone with a wooden leg / emotional disturbance / comes from a broken home / is a suffering from a disease known as alcoholism / is socially stigmatized?") In these there are usually at least two roles, with variations on Nietzsche's "slavenmorral" and "herrenmorral" not hard to spot. There is a single chapter devoted to "Good Games" (Batman's favorite), those that are personally and socially constructive, such as "Happy to Help", "Cavalier", and "They'll Be Glad They Knew Me". The final section of the book is dedicated to the game-free state of "Autonomy", described as the rare exception to the rule in human life. From this book I gather the following insights regarding power: it can often be described a game in which everyone finds their own motivation for playing, but a game which it is not impossible to rise above.