Pick and Choose Views

The other day I sat by the Hudson River in the late afternoon. The reflection of the sun made the water appear as molten silver with blue mountains in the background. And yet, I know that’s not what I ‘really’ saw. My mind automatically translated the poetic vision to a deep river of tidal water with the reflection of the sun on it and a haze changing the colour in the background. But it got me thinking about how culture and creature bound our view of the world is. We assume so often that what we see – or our interpretation of what we see – is the way things really are. And we are often so wrong.

Recently a study done on plants showed that they detect and react to the sound vibrations of caterpillars chewing on leaves by creating an insect repellent. If you later play a recording of the caterpillar chewing, the plants will also react accordingly —but not to the recording of ‘pleasant’ sounds like the wind. And so, we again must recalibrate our views of other living beings in this world. Another creature we saw as nothing but a backdrop to our humanity turns out to be a sentient being after all.

This happens so often! We keep setting up criteria that distinguish us from other animals only to find others share the same aspects after all. It used to be that what separated us humans from other living creatures was our ability to use language. And then we found that other creatures, such as dolphins and crows, use language. We thought our ability to use tools separated us as distinct. And then we found that other creatures – including birds – use tools. We thought our ability to mourn and recognize death made us unique. And then we found that elephants, crows, and apes all have mourning rituals for their dead loved ones.
Humans are trained by their cultures to see and not see in certain ways because of our assumptions and our limited views. Here are two examples: The people who live in African rainforests have a spectacular ability to see snakes and animals that are camouflaged by the forest. But if you put them on the veldt, wide open ranges with far vistas, they cannot see a giraffe that is in the distance. Their eyes have been trained to see objects close up, but not far away. A youtube video, “The Invisible Gorilla” asks people to watch carefully a group of young people passing a basketball and count how many times the ball is passed to the people wearing white. People concentrate so carefully on the ball and the count, they completely miss the person in a gorilla suit walking through the crowd beating his chest!

This culturally trained vision has been confirmed by neuroscientists in laboratory experiments as well. In her fascinating book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, science writer Sharon Begley describes the conversations a group of neuroscientists had with the Dalai Lama. One of the neuroscientists, Helen Neville, summarized her findings by saying: “Brain specialization is not a function of anatomy or dictated by the genes. It is a result of experience. Who we are and how we work comes from our perceptions and experiences. It is the outside world that determines the functional properties of the brain’s neurons.” (Begley, p. 108)

Sometimes we can or can’t see because of our innate vision limitations. In the window in our bedroom we have a hanging crystal from an old chandelier. Most of the time it just hangs there like a piece of glass – clear with nothing special emanating from it. But on summer mornings, as we lie in bed, we watch the sun through the crystal create multiple rainbows shimmering and dancing throughout the room. Those colours are always coming into the room. But we only see them through the help of the crystal and even then, some of the colours that are refracted through the crystal cannot be seen by the human eye.

In fact, it turns out that we humans (who knows what other creatures can/cannot see!), only see arpoximately 4% of the whole universe. Scientists acknowledge that “roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest – everything on Earth, everything observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter – adds up to less than 5% of the Universe.” (science.nasa.gov/astrophysics) They don’t know what dark energy and dark matter are, they just know that they’re there.

Physicists are boggled by the idea of entangled particles, two atoms which had been connected at one point are then separated even miles apart. Yet, despite the distance, when one changes the direction it spins in, the other one does as well, immediately. There is nothing connecting them anymore that we can see, and yet, they are still connected, still ‘communicating.’ How does it happen? We don’t know yet.

How many other things do we think look like one thing, yet are really quite more complicated and deep than we have surmised? How many things do we not see or recognize because of our cultural biases? Ghosts, auras, vibrations emanating from all kinds of sentient beings we never ‘saw’ that way before may be just some of the manifestations of a world far more complicated, vital, and knowledgeable than our limitations – cultural and physical -- allow us to see.

As Dr. Frankenstein said in Mel Brook’s movie Young Frankenstein, “I do not know what I do not know!” Perhaps like Dr. Frankenstein we too need to recognize our limited knowledge. Perhaps, like the plant that picks up the vibrations from the caterpillar, we need to be willing to enlarge our attunement to include more vibrations. Perhaps that’s what meditation and prayer attempt to do. It wouldn’t hurt!

The Talmud

One of the quips about Judaism is that where there are 5 Jews there are 7 opinions. Nowhere is this clearer than in the phenomenal collection of opinions trying to understand how best to live ethically in this world called the Talmud. Page after page, volume after volume, are discussions and arguments over time and space between rabbis from other eras who use precedents and ‘what if’ scenarios to try to explicate what the Torah, the first five books of the Bible and the heart of Judaism, is asking us to do.

In a way, the relationship of the Torah and the Talmud is very similar to the U.S. Constitution and the American Legal system. For example, our Constitution tells us that people have freedom of speech. But what if someone cries “fire!” in a crowded theater or joke about bombs at an airport? Is that freedom of speech, our Supreme court Justices asked. No! Well, what if a group of Nazis parade in a Jewish area or an anti-abortion group demonstrates in front of an abortion clinic? Is that freedom of speech? Yes. And then there’s the question as to what constitutes a ‘person.’ What if there’s a major corporation donating a lot of money to politicians? Is that to be considered a person? Unfortunately, in today’s Court, the answer is yes. Although, as with the rabbis of the Talmud, the Justices do not all agree on the answers to issues.

Based on a phrase or a commandment from the Torah, each page of the Talmud tries to work out how to apply it to everyday life. For example, in the book Exodus, it says “Do not boil the kid (baby goat) in its mother’s milk.” “What does that mean?” asked the rabbis? Well… they worked out, don’t mix meat foods with dairy foods. “But what if you have a plate that meat gravy had permeated, or was not entirely washed off?” Well then, you must use separate plates and silverware for meat and dairy. “What if … a person eats a piece of cheese, how long before they can have a piece of meat – and does it count differently if they have the meat first?” they asked. Yes, you can eat meat half an hour to an hour after dairy, but you must wait six hours after meat to eat dairy because meat takes longer to digest. (Don’t ask what if it’s hard cheese or a piece of meat between your teeth! The rabbis did, and there are answers.) These are how the laws of kashrut or keeping kosher developed. And there are Talmudic books on how to keep the Sabbath, marriage, holidays, civil law such as who constitutes a witness and what forms of punishment there should be for different crimes.

But my favorite Talmudic discussions are the ones that are ethically thorny. For example, the book of Leviticus is full of a lot of dos and don’ts for the people of Israel once they get settled into their new land. It gets quite wordy and – for me – it’s easy to zone out in a ‘yadda, yadda, yadda’ state. So I would miss a line like Leviticus 25.36 that says: “…If your … so that your brother might live with thee.” But the rabbis didn’t miss anything. Believing that every word and phrase was there as part of G-d’s message, they felt a need to understand what that meant in order to live a good life. And so they asked, “What does it mean that my brother might live with me and who constitutes my brother anyway?” And the ‘what if’ they posed is as follows:

What if two people are out in a desert with only one flask of water that’s enough to keep one of them alive, but not both of them. Who gets the water and why? When you stop trying to find a way out of the situation, you begin to consider seriously additional questions: Would it be better for both of them to die or only one of them? What is the relationship of the two people and does that make a difference? What if one of them is the parent of the other? Does age matter and if so, how? Does position or contributions to society matter – for example, what if one person is a cancer researcher and the other is a drug addict? Does over-all health matter? Or does possession (who brought the water in) matter?
And the questions – and answers -- raised by the scenario no longer apply just to this old and improbable situation, but some very real, very modern examples of limited resources as well. How do we as a society decide who gets an organ transplant when there are a limited number of donors? Do we let the wealthiest or healthiest people on the top of the list? Should it be by potential for doing good for society? Should it be first-come first serve? And what about the international black market for organs? Is that fair?

Water itself is a growing modern, global problem. In a world where there is a dramatically decreasing supply of clean, fresh water, we are already arguing about who gets it and why. Should the farmers in California get the water coming from Colorado or should the suburban citizens of L.A.? Should water continue to be sold as a bottled commodity or should it be available to all people? Is it fair that in our country that is less than 20% of the world’s population should consume 80% of this and other limited resources?

Every religious tradition has a way of asking and answering the hard questions of how best to live life in an ethical and humane way. (Although we don’t always follow the answers we give!) Japanese Zen koan, Catholic catechism, Hindu literature such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana, the Buddhist Jakata tales, all are ways of posing and grappling with life lessons. They may look to different sources, they may come to vastly different conclusions based on their understanding of the source. But they all are looking and providing guidance – whether it’s followed or not.

FASTING

Right now it's Ramadan, and Muslims are fasting everyday from sunrise to sunset for a month. some Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus often set aside days for fasting. In a few months it will be Yom Kippur, the holiest and most solemn day of the Jewish year. Jews will fast from sundown Friday to nighttime Saturday.

So one of the questions one might ask is –“What’s with the fasting?” Why suspend eating for a whole day or a whole month of days? It’s not the same as dieting. Nor is fasting the same as an eating disorder. So what’s the purpose?

There are a number of reasons people – in almost every religious tradition I know of – practice fasting. Literally, at a gut level it, fasting stops us from our usual running around and makes us pay attention in ways we didn’t before. We become aware of our body in ways that we didn’t before. We become aware of our dependency on food and those who make or prepare it in ways that we didn’t before. We become aware of how often we usually do things willy-nilly – like snack or how often we think we’re invincible. It empties us of our hubris and fills us with awareness of our fragility.

So fasting makes us aware. Rabbi Allan Lew in his book on the Jewish High Holidays, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation, says that every tradition:

“ speaks of a kind of layered mindfulness, a sensibility that works up and out of the body, to the heart and then to the mind and finally to the soul.” (p. 190)

The Quran says that “fasting is proscribed to you…that you may learn self-restraint.” (Sura 2.183) Self restraint – there’s something to learn! It’s interesting that no human reaches maturity without learning self-restraint. Every religion, every society, every school, every family, binds us in some ways, keeps us in check somehow because to live in society – maybe even to live on our own – we need to learn self-restraint. As the Rolling Stones song lamented, “You can’t always get what you want.” And religious fasting makes you recognize the reality of that human condition.

The fasts of both Ramadan and Yom Kippur remind us that we live in a larger sphere than just our own bodies or our own lives. We are connected to a larger community. Others in the tradition are also going through the pangs of hunger and that unites us. Others in the world – through no choice of their own – are also going through the pangs of hunger and that unites us with them as well.

My friend Eboo Patel, an Ismaili Muslim who does a great deal of interfaith work, wrote a book about growing up as an American muslim. This is what he wrote about Ramadan:

"For a moment, I stopped thinking about my own gnawing stomach and dry throat, and thought for a moment about the people in the world whose hunger will not be lifted at sundown. And what was I doing for them? On a normal day, I do not think such thoughts. On a normal day, missing my daily cup of coffee or piece of chocolate puts me in a bad mood. But Ramadan is not a normal time. This is a month, in my view, not primarily about restraint, but about remembrance."

And one of the things Eboo remembers is what the Quran demands of all Muslims:

“Spend of your wealth, out of love for G-d, for your kin, for orphans, for the needy, for the wayfarer, for those who ask.” (Suara 2.177)

In Judaism the words of the prophet Isaiah are there to question and challenge our reasons for fasting. Resoundingly he claims that the purpose for the fast is:

“To let the oppressed go free;
To break off every yoke.
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to cloth him,
And not to ignore your own kin.” (Is. 6-7)

As well as connecting us to a larger community, fasting empties us. We are no longer 'full,' or 'full of it,' but now we have room to receive. For the Western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, what we hope to receive is the word and the presence of God. By shutting down our satiated self absorbtion, we can listen to the Source, the Other. For the Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, the fasting allows us to stop focusing on our needs and desires, and allow true insight/knowledge/wisdom to enter us. There is a Buddhist story about a scholar interested in learning from the Zen Master. He begins by telling the Master all of his credentials, books, and knowledge. The Master says we will now have tea. As the Master pours the tea, the scholar keeps talking, until he notices the Master is still pouring after the cup is full. When he asks with shock why he Master is still pouring the tea when the cup is overflowing, the Master replied: You cannot fill a cup that is already full, nor can you teach a person who is already full."

So what’s with the fasting? We become aware of our humanity on a gut level. We practice self restraint. We remember that we are connected to a larger community than our own needs. We are reminded to help others. And we practice being empty so that we can spiritually receive. Not bad lessons to learn!