''This is Chapter One of the [[SolSeed book]].''
=== Being is where doing comes from ===
Since being is the fount from which doing springs, being deliberate in choosing who we will be is one of the highest callings for the human animal. No other part of creation has so many options for the being from which their lives spring. Humans can be artists, engineers, teachers, gardeners...the list is endless. Your vocations and hobbies don't even adequately define who you are. In fact, it is actually the reverse. Who you are being, your personality, values, and passions, will determine the vocations and hobbies that fill your life.
=== Getting into action ===
Many of us struggle with "procrastination." Noted blogger Merlin Mann, who writes about "finding the time and attention to do your best creative work," says that we only procrastinate when we forget who we really are. This is really a case of the doing getting before the being. Being is also not simply a function of personality, values, and passions. Being is to some degree a declaration. A moment by moment creation of an intention that you can live into. An intention that calls you into action with the rightness of its fit and the blissful inspiration it generates.
One of the sad forgettings of our time is the forgetting that we get to choose who we are being from moment to moment. While inertia tends to bind us into set patterns of being that are difficult to change, who we have been in the past is not decisive in determining who we will be in this moment. An example of this is the notion of being healthy. We often imagine "being healthy" as a state of being that will be achieved at some future time. If I weigh 230 pounds right now and have a flabby stomach, I'll be healthy once I lose 30 pounds and have abs of steel. This is a fallacy of a future beingness coming from a history of doing. Being is always and always in this present moment. Even if I am 30 pounds overweight, I can be healthy in this moment. If I choose to be healthy in this moment, this being will call me into actions such as choosing a salad instead of a cheeseburger. The more that I "be healthy," the more I integrate this into my habits and rituals, my patterns of being, the more healthy things I will do. The more healthy things I do, the more outward signs of health I will have (e.g., the abs of steel). Being calls us into action. Be, do, have.
When we talk about being a starfarer now, in a world that has no starships, it has the same sort of impact. Being a starfarer inspires and call us into action that is consistent with that inspiration. Being a starfarer means tearing myself away from the pattern of watching banal TV shows about "true crime," "amazing veterinary emergencies," or even the fictional adventures of a starship crew, and instead calling myself into action to get online and catalogue other kindred starfarers. Then in a future moment, being a starfarer calls me into action to contact some of these kindred. Then again, as starfarer I arrange to meet some of them. Then it's suddenly 30 years later and I am part of a company, a community, a family, and a religious practice that are all consistent with me being starfarer.
=== Science-based spirituality ===
When we say "religious practice," we don't mean what you probably think. It's possible to write a scripture that doesn't resort to the supernatural, and create rituals based around the sacredness of what we know to exist. In a way, we're already doing this as a society. Scientific research papers comprise the ever-changing scripture of a religion whose churches are laboratories and university lecture halls. Its "priesthood," the researchers and science professors, commands almost universal trust even though they all admit that anything they say could turn out to be wrong.
When there is data available, we use it. We believe the scientific method is currently our best mechanism to learn, codify, and share information about our world and universe. The distillation of the scientific method is essentially this:
* Create a recipe that includes how and what you should expect to see
* The community of the adequate can then perform the recipe and interpret the results, honestly reporting whether the expectation was met or not
* Recipes that are confirmed by others are elaborated on
But where do the recipes come from? Ideas for experiments and models with predictive power are not generated by science. They are generated by Life's creative spark. The same creative juices that stir one person to pen an opus stir another person to create a theory to explain cosmic background radiation. This creative force is mysterious. Where does it come from? We choose to see it as an emergent property of life that occurs when the input from your senses combines with memories and ideas stored in your brain in a unique way that generates a sudden burst of thought, which synthesizes experience and memory in a novel way that gives rise to a new idea. Again, we don't need to invoke anything supernatural to describe this wondrous occurrence. Of course, it's possible that there is some input into this process from a "higher realm" beyond the everyday world of matter-energy-spacetime, but we don't have much to say about that possibility because it's currently beyond the reach of scientific study.
The community of the adequate is a concept we first learned about from Ken Wilber. He makes the point that unless you have a super-collider, it is difficult to play back the recipes that are currently being run at CERN - The Large Hadron Collider. This requirement keeps the community of the adequate quite small to test out the recipes they propose. Likewise, many mathematical proofs involve concepts that are beyond the ken of most people. Evaluating whether the proof is sound requires a level of expertise that comes only with special aptitude and training. This too limits the size of the community of the adequate. Mathematical recipes are no less real for being entirely within the realm of mind. They are inner recipes rather than outer recipes.
So truth within many different realms can be communicated via the scientific method. This is true within the objective physical realm as exemplified by the "hard sciences" like chemistry, geology, neuroscience and the like. It is also true within the realm of mind and can be seen in mathematics, logic, philosophy and the "soft sciences" like psychology, sociology, and anthropology. The scientific method even applies to the spiritual side of life to some degree, and can be applied to meditation and other recipes for altering one's perception of the ground of beingness. But this kind of research must be approached with caution for a number of reasons, such as the fact that subjective experience is very difficult to measure, and science works best with quantitatively measurable results.
One of the degenerations that comes from the science being most successfully applied to the objective outer space is the collapse of inner and outer realms and the collapse of spiritual with objective. An example of this can be seen in experiments that try to show there is some sort of telepathic force field that operates within and across life. These experiments confuse the essentially subjective, spiritual feeling of "oneness with the world" with phenomena like root systems or computer networks that objectively link things together. The subjective feeling is important and valuable even if it doesn't correspond to anything in the world around you, other than the impressions it makes on your ordinary senses, which may combine with your learned knowledge of the objective interdependence of people, species, and ecosystems within the global biosphere, to trigger your spiritual experience.
=== Religion-shaped hole ===
Main article: [[Religion-shaped hole]]
Human beings tend to have a religion-shaped hole, that is, a set of desires that are fulfilled only by participating in a religion, or at least in an institution that resembles a religion. We don't know whether this was selected for by memetic and genetic evolution because it confers reproductive advantage, or whether the tendency toward religion is more a byproduct of selection for other desirable traits. In the first case religion would be a kidney, a critical piece of a fully functional organism, there for a specific and clearly beneficial purpose. In the second case religion is an appendix, an oddity mostly ignored except when it's blocked with feces and becomes a life-threatening ball of inflammation.
For our purposes it doesn't really matter whether religion is an appendix or a kidney. Identity is fluid, and for millenia one of the most powerful forces shaping identity was that of the religious culture a person belonged to. Rather than trying to untangle the causal chain of how humanity and religions co-evolved, we would like to assert that for most humans, religion of some sort is part of their makeup and a source of meaning in their lives.
One way to judge the worth of a particular religion is by how satisfied people are with the meaning it creates. This is important because without some system of thought and belief imposed on it, life is intrinsically empty and meaningless, so it falls to our minds to create meaning. (We prefer to build our structure of meaning by thinking about the actual facts of life as we empirically observe it; others prefer to add belief in unseen supernatural forces to help create a satisfying meaning to life.) Another important way to judge a religion is by its fruits. Are the people who are a part of the group happy, productive, and free from suffering?
Surprisingly, it turns out that within nearly every religion there are common subgroups that emerge. At one end of the spectrum are fundamentalists, for whom strict adherence to the code of the religion is essential. The fundamentalist seeks to protect the religion from compromising with, and therefore becoming undifferentiated from, the rest of modern life.
At the other end of the religious spectrum in nearly every religion we find those who believe there are many paths to spiritual enlightenment, and the path from their religion may not even be the best. While welcoming difference whenever they can, these folks rarely claim that ''all'' possible beliefs are equally valid, and are typically "intolerant of intolerance," i.e. strongly opposed to any religious sect that preaches "death to infidels," subjugation of women, or similarly harmful ideas. They seek a middle ground between an overzealous certainty in their own rightness and an empty relativism that denies the value of believing in anything. From this place of balance, they teach that bliss is available for all to experience directly, usually through a process involving an opening up and emptying out of self.
The fruits of the first group are confrontation and war. The fruits of the second group are peace and acceptance of diversity and a doctrine of the interconnectedness of all being. Identifying with this second group of religious practitioners, we recognize the deep meaning of spiritual practice both individual and collective.
=== Multiple Selves ===
So who are we really? It turns out that answering this question is complicated. It turns out that there are many different good answers to this question. Each of the different good answers is useful at different times and in different contexts. That said, many people are stuck with just one of the good answers that paraphrased goes something like this: I'm this skin bag and all the fleshy bits inside it. While this is true, it is incomplete.
To illustrate the problem with being stuck with a single perspective on who we are, let's take a trip back to in time to 1987. 1987 was Brandon's freshman year in high school, and most of his friends couldn't drive. They were too young, or didn't have access to cars. Watching the older kids pull into the parking lot, they would wonder what it would be like to posses that kind of power and freedom. One of the older kids drove a 20-year-old Renault that wouldn't go into reverse. He was very careful to always park with a clear escape route in front of him. Every now and then he would find himself boxed in and be vividly reminded of his car's dysfunction as he pushed the car himself, or had to enlist others to help him.
That old Renault that was stuck going forward serves as a useful metaphor about how we view ourselves. In ''Big Mind Big Heart'', Dennis Merzel compares the different ways we view ourself to the different gears on a car. Each of the different ways of looking at who we are is useful some of the time, but not all of the time. If we are limited to a single particular view of ourselves we are like that old Renault. Our view may be adequate much of the time, but when circumstances would benefit from us adopting a different view, we find ourselves stuck and without the necessary perspective to respond powerfully to the situation.
=== The Divided Self ===
Metaphors are incredibly powerful. They are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. Perhaps no metaphor is more important than our metaphor for our selves.
In an age of cars, machines, and computers it is tempting to adopt a metaphor of self that places our conscious mind in the role of operator and the rest of us as the machine that is being operated. This metaphor is highly inaccurate and provides little in the way of insight about how to create what we seek to create in the world.
One of the ancient truths that has been discovered over and over and commented on by many different authors is the notion of the divided self. We are not simply a conscious mind operating a piece of biological machinery. We are actually a collection of different systems cooperating and competing to accomplish their own individual goals. Not all of these systems are equally intelligent, nor equally powerful.
In his book ''The Happiness Hypothesis'', social scientist Jonathan Haidt takes a look at various metaphors for self that have received widespread attention throughout the years. He then suggests that we adopt the model of our conscious mind as a rider on top of the elephant of our unconscious mind and body. Roughly speaking, the rider represents advanced reasoning and the elephant represents instinct and emotional reactions. This simple metaphor does much to explain day to day life.
The model of a rider and an elephant is particularly good at explaining the differences between what we say our goals are and our actual behavior. The only part of the ride-elephant combination that we have direct cognitive access to is the rider. Any time we say something voluntarily, it is the rider who is speaking (while the elephant is responsible for things like the reflexive yell of pain on touching a hot stove). So when we talk about our goals, we give a one-sided account that only incorporates what the rider wants.
It takes a tremendous amount of gumption for the rider to overcome the elephant. In a direct contest of wills, the rider is doomed. A skilled rider understands this and works sideways to create an environment in which the elephant can be successful. This means shaping the stimuli that the elephant has access to, in order to limit exposure to undesirable situations that take the elephant down a destructive path, and to increase exposure to situations that lead to instinctive or emotional responses that motivate positive action.
=== The motivation paradox ===
While it may be true that service of others provides happiness and life satisfaction for the person who is doing the serving, the motivation for the service is very important. When the service is done to look good or even just because we know that service leads to a happier life something is missed. It is only when service springs from a depth of character from which it is simply the right thing to do that it brings the most peace and satisfaction.
There is a trap of motivation that may be called spiritual narcissism. People who seek after spiritual enlightenment, satisfaction, and peace as if they are the ends themselves rather than the byproduct of a life of service find themselves continually lacking peace and satisfaction. The more they focus on peace and satisfaction, the bigger the hole becomes that they are trying to fill.
Part of the paradox stems from the realization that the person we have the most direct influence over is ourselves. This makes it seem like we ought to be working directly on ourselves. Growth and development of ourselves is helped most by developing in ourselves a focus on others. This can be illustrated by the attributes of a great conversationalist. The best conversationalists are those who are actually interested in what the other person has to say. When the other person pauses, the interested listener naturally rephrases what they heard to verify they got it, or asks a question about something of particular interest. Contrast this with the person whose main motivation is being heard. The talker doesn't listen to the other person, instead they organize their own thoughts so they can start talking in the first gap that is left.
Good religions must then in fact demand that we live a life of character and that we help others because it is "the right thing to do." What this means in a more concrete sense is that we must empathize with the people we help, talking with them and learning about their lives, so we can see the world through their eyes and understand what will bring ''them'' the most peace and satisfaction. This also helps us avoid seeming to take a condescending "I know what's best for you better than you do" attitude.
=== Passion, empathy, and wisdom ===
We like to talk about all these ideas in shorthand through the lens of three key virtues that we try to cultivate in ourselves. The first is Passion: focusing on what we really want from life and what we feel driven to accomplish, or to use Jonathan Haidt's analogy, asking the elephant where it wants to go and helping it get there, because that's how it can use its massive energy most effectively. This virtue has been described in many stereotyped ways, like "live your dreams," "follow your bliss," "be true to yourself," and so on, but that doesn't make it a useless cliché. On the contrary, those catch phrases are designed to remind us that the mind-numbing routines of modern life that we often fall into in life are not permanent, and that with a little effort, our lives could be much closer to what we truly want them to be.
The second virtue is Empathy, which must be used to guide our passions into channels that lead to benefit for others as well as ourselves. If we made no effort to deliberately cultivate our feelings of empathy, we would tend to act only in our own self-interest and in the interests of immediate family members, and society would quickly collapse. Conversely, if people learn to experience much more empathy for the feelings of others beyond our immediate families and peer groups, and even beyond our species, it will powerfully focus our passions toward building a happier and more harmonious world. This can take the form of working to ensure that people's basic needs are met, but it can also include helping other people to discover and follow their own passions.
The third virtue, Wisdom, is the hardest to describe, because it includes many facets. One aspect of wisdom is learning to change the patterns of our behavior and establish better habits of thought and action; these habits conserve our limited willpower by allowing us to automatically make choices in line with our values. Another aspect is cultivating the intuition that helps us to decide on the most positive and effective course of action in uncertain situations, where our habits aren't enough to guide us. A third aspect is learning to balance and synthesize the reasonable and emotional aspects of our minds, so that we avoid making unreasonable choices based solely on emotion, but also accept and celebrate the fact that without emotion, reason could never tell us the best choice to make because no choice would ''feel'' better than any other. And finally, wisdom is fundamentally about accepting reality as it is, not as we would wish it to be (which is where science comes in handy), and only working to change things after we've determined, to the best of our ability, where and how we can actually make a positive difference in the world.