Scripture Pointing

Below are six scriptural verses. Three are from the Bible, and three are from the Qur’an. Can you tell which is which? My guess is that, unless you are a religious scholar or an ardent believer in Christianity or Islam, then you are likely to have trouble identifying which is which – Bible or Qur’an.

A.    ‘Whoever would not seek (the Lord) should be put to death, whether young or old, man or woman.’

B.    ‘As for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.’

C.    ‘Slay the idolators wherever ye find them, arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them.’

D.     ‘Remember when your Lord inspired the angels…I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve…Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.’

E.     ‘Slay them wherever you catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out.’

F.     ‘Now go and strike... and devote destruction to all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep and donkey.’

Can you do it? Can you identify which verses are from the Bible, and which from the Qur’an?

Often we hear people pointing at the verses from one or the other of these holy books in order to claim that the other (i.e. not their own) religion is not peaceful or proclaims that killing is justified.

Yet, for those who would point to passages in the holy book of the others, half of the passages quoted above come from their own holy book.

My intention in quoting these scriptures is not to disrespect the Bible or the Qur’an. Nor is it my purpose to dishonour the believers of either religion. My intent is the following:

By pointing at a piece of scripture from the holy book of the other the (often tacit) inference is that those belonging to the other religion are heathens, infidels, non-believers, idolators, or at worst - evil. After all, “they” condone killing.

The scriptural texts quoted above are not, in and of themselves, the source of these issues. The source is the willingness – even eagerness - to point the finger at others, meanwhile ignoring the fact that each of us is as guilty or blameworthy as anyone else.

Thus it is that the pointing of the finger of accusation (or blame or guilt) at other people is at the core of the mistrust, polarisation, and violence (both latent and explicit) of the world.

Those who do point the finger, at either the scripture or the person, might do well to remember another piece of scripture, viz.

‘Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged...And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye. Or how can you say to your brother, “Let me remove the speck from your eye”; and look, a plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.’

-        Matthew 7: 1-5 (the Holy Bible)

That is a verse we all, believers and non-believers, might well try to remember as often as possible. If we were to do so, we would find that we are indeed all brothers, all sisters, all family.

Regarding the six passages quoted at the beginning of this post, it should be noted that they are all quoted out of context. Quoting out of context is very easy to do, yet by doing so it is possible to bestow meaning on a piece of text that the full context may not support.

And, in case you want to know the source and context of each of these quotations, they are as follows:

A.    Bible, 2 Chronicles 15: 12-13

B.    Bible, Luke 19: 27

C.    Qur’an 9:5

D.    Qur’an 8:12

E.     Qur’an 2: 190-191

F.     Bible, 1 Samuel 15: 2-3

It is worth noting that the comments above are not restricted to the religious realm. The pointing of the finger of blame occurs in many fields of human endeavour.

Finger pointing is, arguably, one of the biggest barriers towards a peaceful, tolerant, and harmonious world.

Empathy: Learnt or Reflected?

A few days ago, on a cycle ride with my neighbour, I reached down for my bidon (cycling water bottle) to take a drink. My cycling companion did the same a fraction of a second later. I was reminded of the role of mirror neurons in empathy.

The actions described above are often described as automatic imitation: the situation in which an individual observes a body movement in another person and unintentionally performs the same body movement themselves. Many researchers attribute this imitation to mirror neurons in the premotor cortex of our brain.

Mirror neurons have been studied since the 1980s and are considered to be a major factor in our ability to empathise with others, including, sometimes, with non-human species.

The word empathy itself is a fairly recent immigrant to the English language. In 1909 it was translated from the German word Einfühling (in-feeling). It was to be over one hundred years before the neuroscience of empathy was revealed. Only in 2010 did Californian neurophysiologists identify individual mirror neurons in the human brain.¹ These neurons effectively mirror in our brain what is happening emotionally for another person. Via this mechanism, our brains react as if what we are seeing or hearing from another person is actually happening to ourselves, within our own bodies.

Fortunately, our mirror neurons don’t confine themselves just to feelings of suffering. When others are happy, joyful, or having fun, we can feel those emotions also via our mirror neurons. We have the capacity to feel empathetic towards someone experiencing ecstasy just as easily as we can towards someone in pain.

Although we may have mirror neurons and hence the ability to be empathetic, that does not mean that we are automatically highly skilled empathic people. We are able to increase our ability to empathise. Neuroscientists are discovering that the brain has the ability to adapt and change its neuropathways. Neuroplasticity is a very recent science, but already the findings from that science have radical implications for the way we relate to one another. One of those implications is that we can learn to become better empathisers. We can improve our empathy quotient if you like.²

In order to be able to empathise with someone else, we must be able to identify with our own feelings and emotions. The more self-aware we are the better we are at empathising with others.³ Thus to be able to outwardly empathise we need to inwardly become attuned to our own feelings and emotions. When we can better understand and identify our own feelings and emotions then we become better empathisers.

Feelings and emotions have a language, and like any language, it must be learnt. For men, until very recently at least, this language had a limited vocabulary. Men in my cohort, growing up in the middle of last century, often got told to “man up,” “don’t get emotional,” “big boys don’t cry,” and other inhibitions on emotional literacy.

Fortunately, this seems to be changing, and men are becoming more emotionally literate.

Let us now return to the question posed in the title of this piece. Is empathy learnt or does it come from reflection?

It seems that it is a bit of this and a bit of that. Mirror neurons reflect in ourselves what we see or recognise in others. Neuroplasticity tells us that we can learn to become better empathisers by understanding and learning about our own emotions.

We could say that through the process of reflection (whether internal or external) we gain an understanding of ourselves and of others. Crucial abilities in a fast-changing world.

Notes:

1. Cited in Stefan Klein, Survival of the Nicest, Scribe, Melbourne & London, 2014.

2. An Empathy Quotient (EQ) has been developed at the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.

3. Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: why it can matter more than IQ, Bloomsbury, London, 1996

Pillow Lessons

When I was a child, around the age of 6 or 7, the pillows we had to lay our head on at night were stuffed with feathers: possibly geese or duck feathers. Stuffed in this way the pillow was sometimes lumpy in places when I got into bed. I would spend the first minute or so pounding and manipulating the pillow so that it wasn’t lumpy – the technical term appears to be “fluffing.”

One of these nights it occurred to me that no matter where on the pillow I would pummel it, the feathers would shift to another part of the pillow. The contents of the pillow – the feathers – would remain. They just shifted position.

I cannot remember exactly what I deduced from this observation at the time, except possibly that my pummelling had no real effect upon the whole pillow. The feathers just shifted from one place to another.

Many years later I learnt what it was I was observing with my attempt to re-shape my pillow as a child.

I learnt the basics of systems theory and chaos theory.

I learnt that what we do to one part of a system (pillow) influences another part (the feathers move.)

I also learnt that systems have boundaries (the pillow slip) and limits.

These were important lessons.

We live on a planet where what we do to one part has consequences for another part. Todays globalised economy and interlinked supply chains ensure this. Furthermore, it may only be a small event or incident that we do in one part, yet the outcome in another part may be significant. Chaos theory calls this the Butterfly Effect.

We also live on a planet that has boundaries. Since 2009 the Stockholm Resilience Centre (based at Stockholm University) has been identifying and enumerating nine planetary boundaries (climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and novel entities.¹)

The latest (2023) update from the Stockholm Resilience Centre warns that “six (of these) boundaries are now transgressed, and pressure is increasing on all boundary processes except ozone depletion.”²

My metaphorical pillow is being torn apart.

We have known for some time too that Earth has limits. Exactly when we reached (or will reach) Peak Oil is still being debated. However, we do know from current reserves and expected new finds that oil is likely to run out within the next 50 or so years. We know too, that of all the Earth’s wild forests, only 25% remain.

Each year more than 90 billion tons of biomass, fossil fuels, metal, and minerals are extracted from the Earth.³ Alarmingly, this rate of extraction has more than tripled in just 50 years.

The feathers in my metaphorical pillow are being depleted, and not replaced.

Somewhere in my 7-year-old consciousness these concepts were embedding themselves. Today, decades later, I know what lessons my pillow was offering me.

Notes:

1. Novel entities are created and introduced into the environment by humans (e.g. chemicals, and plastics) that have a disruptive impact upon the environment. There are now estimated to be more than 144,000 such artificially created entities, with 2,000 new synthetic chemicals being released every year.

2. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html  accessed 30 April 2024

3. This is more than 11 tons per person per year for every person on Earth. In the rich nations of the world the extraction rate per capita is staggering: 30 tons per person in North America and over 20 tons for those living in Europe. The extraction rate is highly disproportionate. Data mentioned in these two paragraphs from https://www.theworldcounts.com accessed 30 April 2024

Vita Brevis, Vita Continuus

Cueva de las Manos,
Argentina

How long is your life? Many would answer that life is fleeting. Indeed, there is a saying – Ars longa, vita brevis – claiming that art is long, and life is short.

Well, yes, it is, when viewed in cosmic terms. Three score and ten (70 years) is the supposed appointed human life expectation. That is just a blink compared with the age of the Universe.

Compared with how long Homo sapiens have been treading the Earth (200,000 – 300,000 years) 70 years is fleeting. Suppose you visualise your allotted 70 years as 7 cm – the average length of a man’s thumb. Then the first Homo sapiens began striding across the Earth some 200 to 300m away from us. That’s a lot of thumb lengths.

Measured like this then, our human lives are short and fleeting.

And art is long.

Speaking of art. There is another perspective with which we could look at our lives. And, there is no need to change the timeline with which we considered life’s fleeting nature.

All around the world there is art from millennia ago – cave art.

No matter who we are, or what part of the world we come from, it is likely that an ancestor of ours was responsible for (or witnessed the making of) one or more of these paintings.

One of the oldest sites is the cave of Maltravieso in Spain. Uranium-thorium dating gives a date of 64,000 years ago for a hand-stencil in that cave. It is thought that the creator of this hand-stencil was possibly Homo neanderthalensis. Since modern Europeans have around 1% - 3% Neanderthal DNA then, if you have European ancestry, were the paintings in this cave created by an ancestor of yours?

Or, further East. Hand-stencilling found on a cave on the island of Sulawesi, in Indonesia, are dated to 39,900 years ago. What is of further interest is that paintings of an almost life-size Sulawesi warty pig, found in 2021, has been dated to at least 45,000 years old. This makes it the oldest figurative cave art in the world. Perhaps your ancestor caught the pig, or painted the pig, or cooked and ate the pig around a fire with companions?

In the Cave of Hands (Cueva de las Manos) in Argentina there are hundreds of hands stencilled on rock walls in a number of collages. The earliest of these paintings were stencilled around 9,000 years ago, and the youngest just 1,300 years ago. Perhaps a hand from an ancestor of yours is amongst them?

The final example in this blog of cave art comes from Australia. At a site known as Nawarla Gabarnmung (Hole in the Rock) in Arnhem Land, far north Australia, the walls are covered with paintings of fish, crocodiles, wallabies, people, and spiritual beings. These depictions are at least 44,000 years old, and could be as old as 60,000 years. These paintings were created by the ancestors of someone alive today.

The purpose of the above examples is to show that we are all part of a continuous life. We may not know the name of those wo created these cave art pieces, but we can be sure they were ancestors of ours, or of someone we know.

So, yes, our individual lives may be fleeting, but our lives are part of a continuing cycle of life. A life cycle that has been in existence for at least 300,000 years.

Let us amend that Latin phrase then:

Ars longa, Vita brevis, Vita continuus.

Feather Musings

A few days ago I found a tiny feather (see attached photo.) It’s reddish-orange colour, with black at the base and apex, and the small yellow wedge at the tip, all intrigued me. It’s tiny size and exquisite colouring set me to musing.

Feathers have been key symbols in many cultures for millennia. Along with shells and beads they have adorned our heads, arms and legs as decoration. Feathers have hung from necklaces, drums, and dreamcatchers. They have also had spiritual and mythical significance.

Many of our legends include feathers as crucial elements. The modern-day legends of Harry Potter note that phoenix feathers are one of the three supreme cores for wizard wands (the other two being dragon heartstring and unicorn hair.) One of the famous legends of Persia tells of the flying creature named Simurgh. It is said that one who finds a golden feather from Simurgh will be blessed with the fulfillment of their greatest hopes.

Mind you, for some, the use of feathers did not result in their hopes being fulfilled. Icarus attached feathers to himself with glue so that he could fly, only to plummet to earth when the glue melted on passing too close to the sun.

Away from the realm of symbolism, myth, and legend, feathers provide us with an example of fractals. Fractals, in brief, are geometrical shapes that show a self-similarity at different scales.

Feathers have a distinctive shape and construction to them if we look at them. If we take a closer look, then we notice that the individual barbs of the feather show a similar shape and pattern to that of the feather as a whole. When magnified using an electron microscope we can see this same pattern repeating. (See photo below.)

Feather magnified by electron microscope

This self-similarity is not restricted to feathers. Many natural phenomena display fractal and fractal-like structure. Sunflowers, Nautilus and snail shells, clouds, mountain ranges, river deltas, trees, and even the arteries, veins, and capillaries in our own bodies – all display fractal structures.

Often it is this fractal quality in nature that underlies our appreciation of, and for, beauty.

So, next time you find a feather, look at it closely. Look closely also at a tree, notice how the ranches, twigs, leaves, and leaf veins, all replicate each other in ever smaller (or larger) self-similar patterns.

Then consider the self-similarity that our own bodies show in comparison with other elements in nature. Notice, for example, how the bronchi, bronchioles, and alveoli of our lungs resemble the patterns of rivers, streams, and creeks of a watershed.

Truly, beauty surrounds us and contains us, at micro and macro levels.

Other - Self - Other

The predicament we face today can in large part be traced to three major disconnections in the human sphere: disconnection from nature, disconnection from each other, and disconnection from self. These three disconnections are interlinked and mutually reinforcing.

This blogpiece will briefly explore one of the mechanisms that results in our disconnection from each other. As alluded to above, this mechanism has its own roots within the disconnection from our own selves.

Many psychologists, following on from Carl Jung, have explored the Shadow aspect of our selves. The Shadow in Jung’s understanding is that part of our psyche that, although true of us, we do not know exists. The Shadow is not part of us that we have denied or consciously suppressed.

If we think of our psyche as a room, then our Shadow would be behind a secret panel in the wall: a secret panel that we do not even know is there.

It is tempting to think of our Shadow as being the dark and nasty side of our unconsciousness. However, that would be a mistake. Our Shadow may also include aspects of ourselves that could be claimed to be our higher or more beautiful facets.

More often than not, however, our Shadow is comprised of nasty or brutish facets, that if pointed out to us, we would vehemently deny.

Yet, these facets within our Shadow make themselves known by projecting onto others the nastiness and brutishness. Projection is the process by which we readily label others as stupid, greedy, nasty, or, in the extreme, evil. The ecopsychologist, Bill Plotkin (highly influenced by Jung,) defines projection as the “unconscious transfer of our own emotions, desires, or traits onto another person, or sometimes a whole class of persons.”¹

Such projections, especially if it is a projection of nastiness or evil, results in the class of persons upon who those traits are projected being labelled as entirely different from us, to the point where not only do we become disconnected, but where we wish to remain, and enforce, that disconnection.

The circle becomes a vicious one. We are disconnected from a part of our own psyche. That disconnected part (our Shadow) projects onto others, so that we become disconnected from them. Then, because we label others as nasty, we can easily deny any nastiness in ourselves, thus keeping our Shadow unknown to us.

To heal the rift between people, to help us reconnect, we must also heal ourselves. We must find and reconnect with our Shadow.

How?

Carl Jung spent years delving into his (and other people’s) Shadow. He discovered methods by which we might reconnect ourselves with our Shadow and hence, with each other. Jung is reputed to have said the following:

‘Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’²

Healing does not appear to be easy, does it? To heal the rift between people we must heal the disconnection within our own selves. However, the encouraging side of this is that as we work to heal ourselves, so we heal the rift with others, and vice versa. We cannot do one without the other.

For any reader wishing to understand and/or work on their Shadow the book by Bill Plotkin (see note 1) is highly recommended. As too are any of the immersive experiences run by Animas Valley Institute (founded by Bill Plotkin) or any of its offshoots located in many parts of the world.

Notes:

1. Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, New World Library, Novato, California, 2013

2. This quote appears to be a misattribution, although Jung did make the following comment: ‘The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his (sic) inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.’  Carl Jung, Christ: A Symbol of the Self. For myself, I find the misattributed quote easier to understand.

Negative Capability and Resilience

John Keats

In December 1817 the English Romantic Poet, John Keats, in a letter to his brothers (George and Thomas) used the phrase negative capability. He described this capability as belonging to a person ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’¹

Since Keats time the term has come to be applied mostly by artists to mean the ability to seek after beauty and perfection, even if this leads them into uncertainties and confusion.

The phrase, however, is of use to humanity as a whole, rather than limited to artists and philosophers.

Undoubtedly, we are entering into times of uncertainty. Indeed, we have been in those times arguably since at least the beginning of this century.

Since the 1970s there have been numerous studies that put forward various scenarios (not to be confused with ‘predictions’) indicating collapse of life as we know it sometime from the middle of this century onward.

Others tell us not to worry, our ability to innovate will solve any problems. Technology has come to the rescue previously, and will do so again.

There are advocates, academics, influencers, radio talk-back hosts, politicians, commentators, and others on both sides. And, we all choose which of these we listen to. We all choose whom to believe. We also choose whom not to listen to, and who not to believe.

Between the two seeming polar opposites – collapse vs techno-optimism – most people on Earth live their lives in many different states: denial, despair, hopefulness, anger, apathy, lethargy, idealism, etc etc.

All these states of awareness and consciousness are possible and do exist. Yet, no-one can reliably predict what will or won’t happen.

There is no doubt we are living in uncertain times.

If the future is uncertain then how do we prepare for it? John Keats’ advice was to enhance our capability to live with the uncertainties ‘without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’

That means becoming resilient.

Resilience (literally to leap back) is associated mostly with a mental capability. Most dictionaries will define it as the ability to regain a happy outlook following some sort of setback.

So, in uncertain times, how do we become resilient? Keats’ advice is negative capability, whereby the uncertainty is held without attempting to rationalise what is happening. This does not mean ignoring what is happening nor fantasising about some rosy future. It simply means letting go of the need to control outcomes. It also means letting go of fear and anxiety.

But note too; Keats wrote of mysteries also.

We live in a world full of mystery and wonder. Again, Keats advised not to want to diminish our sense of awe with facts, figures, data, and intellectualising.

I am certain that Keats would have said to just enjoy the mystery. That’s why he was a Romantic Poet.

Negative Capability is such good advice. Let us enjoy the romance of mystery and uncertainty.

Notes:

1. John Keats, The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge Edition, Houghton, Miffen, and Company, 1899.