Spiraling back to "Obey or Wrestle?"

         Obey or Wrestle?  My sixth ever post.  For this second entry of my “Spiraling” series, which spirals back to former posts, I’m musing once again over this question of “obeying” vs. “wrestling.”  In my Just like Eve book, heroine Jasmine is wrestling over this same question, with the same characters of Noah who “obeys” but doesn’t wrestle and, in Jasmine’s terms, lets a planet drown, and of Abraham who does wrestle when he bargains with God on behalf of the city of Sodom.  Hero Davie does the same and explains through Jacob, who also wrestles, that obedience must come first.  First, we must learn to obey.  Once we’ve learned to obey, we face a new test: to wrestle.  Are we willing to wrestle?

      Specifically, the test is whether we are willing to wrestle even if it means disobedience.  At some point in our lives, and likely many points, we are given a test: will we follow what we know in our own heart knowledge to be true, or will we follow the easy way and obey what our authority figures tell us to do?

      No one expected me to buck my direct supervisor.  Nor, frankly, did I.  I thought my request would  be easily approved.  I was naïve.  And “buck” is not the right word, as I’ve remained positive and willing to follow the Spirit at each step.  For me, the question was who and what do I “obey”?  The Governor, the local health officials, and the university were all permitting what is deep in my own heart, so we could say I was “obeying” them, or, more to what matters most, we can say I have been “obeying” something much deeper within me.  I was “obeying” “My truth.” 

      While this post, like most, will not be made public beyond my blog, I have made public my stand on the controversy of on-line schooling in It Still takes a Village, essentially a middle-ground approach of hybrid schooling following common sense methods of maintaining safety, all in line with the statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics.  I’ve also made public my own personal experience as a mom that initiated my commitment to making sure students’ mental health is protected, including the removal of overly strict isolation.

        Divine comedy may have positioned me as an instructor who is teaching freshmen at a university that wants to offer some in-person instruction, especially for freshmen, for a department that chose all online instruction for everyone in our department.  But I had a loophole: my students are recruited by another college within our university and I, along with those who recruited my students, wanted some in-person instruction for my students.  So we put in a request for an exception. 

        I was naïve. 

        Four months later, I am both exhausted and relieved.  I’ve been downsized; I’ve lost my benefits; but I have one hybrid class and have succeeded in following Michelle Obama’s motto to “Go High.”  I’ve maintained my truth in a manner that is positive.  I reaped the consequences, but I have no regrets.

        Along the way, I believe it was expected that I would “cave,” because most people simply “obey.”  But what they “obey” is the external authority figure before them, in my case, my supervisor.  

        Who are we really to “obey”? 

        For those of us who have entered deeply into spiritual awareness, it’s the still small voice akin to the promise of Jeremiah 31:33:

"This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,"

declares the LORD.  "I will put my law in their minds and write on their hearts."

I will be their God, and they will be my people.

What is tricky for us to grasp hold of, especially if we come from an evangelical Christian background, is that the laws placed within me for my path are not necessarily the same ones placed for others in their path.  Davie also explores this notion and takes it further: the “law” I am to follow today may be different than the one I am to follow a decade from now, because I have evolved into a higher state of consciousness.  The classic example for this is the choice to drink a beer.  Some can; some can’t.  Some can’t today, but can ten years from now.

“My truth”: many Christians also have a problem with this term, as they counter that “Truth is Absolute.”  According to Ancient Chinese wisdom, the Universe’s “Absolute Truth” is called the “Tao.”  The only word like the Tao in Christianity would be “Logos,” unfortunately translated into English as the “Word.”  “Order and Harmony through the Divine Breath” comes nearer to the notion of “Logos,” but sadly, English does not have a word for it.  The best word in English for me to express the Grand Idea of the Divine is “Harmony.”  How each of us achieves such Harmony can differ from person to person, and, beautifully, if we each express Harmony in our individual ways, Collective Harmony is achieved.

Today, all of us, whether or not we have followed a path of Christianity, are living in a moment when the majority wants simply to “obey”: Tell me, authority figure, what to do.  Wash my hands, wear a mask, and stand 6 feet from anyone else?  OK, I can do that.  Until I see that old friend I want to hug.  Can I hug my friend?  Each one of us, every day, is faced with such decisions.  Will we merely “obey”?  How far will we go to “obey”?  At what point do we begin to “wrestle”?

Most instances of “wrestling” over whether to “obey,” what to obey and to whom are far more complex than our current daily inquiries of whether or not to hug, shake hands, wear a mask at a relatively safe place, or accept a moderate travel invitation.  These are fairly simple.  I’m cool with hugs and handshakes, so I simply ask the person, “Do you do real handshakes or air shakes?”  However, the deeper we dive into our Inner Authority, through our own spiritual practices, the more we’ll find ourselves at odds with traditional authorities.  We might even begin to wrestle with what we had previously thought as the most basic “laws.”  Ironically, the further our spiritual practice evolves, the more “rebellious” we become – at least in every one’s eyes.

The more we are willing to wrestle with orders that don’t resonate within our deepest heart wisdom, which we confirm through our spiritual disciplines, the more the “laws” of the Spirit for our own path will be written into our hearts and minds.  How do we begin this process?  Through searching the scriptures and other sacred texts.  Then we can talk with trusted friends, observe the synchronicities, pray and meditate, journal, and let the Spirit speak to us as we do.  The skill to listen well comes through many years of disciplined practice and of slowing ourselves enough to hear the still, small voice within.  That we on planet Earth, and especially here in the US, are now forced to slow down like never before is a beautiful silver lining to this moment we all find ourselves in.

(c) 2020 by karina. Please use by permission or cite this link.

Oh, What a Whirlwind we're in!

        Shhh!  Don’t tell.  My very first post.  I find myself spiraling back and upward, like a DNA molecule, to the myriad of themes emerging out of my twilight zone. 

 

(photo by phys.org)

The spirals are so numerous I think I’ll start a “Spiraling Back” series.  (Sorry, Just like Eve readers, this whirlwind is still too big for the creativity of fiction, but I will “spiral back” to it when the winds slow down; if you’d like to hunt down a publisher for me, then perhaps I could return sooner . . . ? 🤔)  I’ll begin with my very first post and all three of its images: the fast-moving “freight train” of information, my “eyes of paradox” (one near-sighted, one far-sighted), and the movement toward whispering, careful speech.  

Image 1: The fast-moving freight train

           Shhh! Don’t tell explained this fast-moving train like a college lecturer speaking so fast you, a student, can’t keep up to take notes.  You had agreed to take notes for some absent classmates, but you gave up, told them the lecture was too fast, and they were on their own. 

I’m now trying to keep up with another freight train speeding along at record speeds.  Nothing adds up, but information – some useful and some really off and very distracting – is blowing in like hurricane.  With all this debris of information flying everywhere, which do we grab hold of, and which do we let go?  Friends, the answers are not at all obvious.

Too many think they know which nuggets of information to trust and which to distrust, but they might be making those decisions based on either a “False Authority” fallacy or an “Ad Hominem” fallacy.  These logical fallacies are opposites, so let me explain them:

A False Authority fallacy is the belief that a statement must be true just because Reliable Person said it.  Perhaps Reliable Person is an authority, but just because Reliable Person said it does not necessarily make it true.  Reliable Person has to provide strong, accurate, reliable evidence for his or her statement in order for it to be trustworthy.  Therefore, a False Authority fallacy does not necessarily mean the speaker is not an authority; instead it means the statement cannot be trusted just because the speaker said it.  Genuine evidence is necessary. 

The classic False Authority is truly false: "Celebrity says solar flares are harmless." However, a subtle type is a Non-sequitur (it does not necessarily follow) type of False Authority: “NASA says solar flares are harmless.”  NASA, of course, is a genuine authority for such a statement.  Without evidence, however, its logic is incomplete. A good listener should ask why NASA says that and what evidence NASA has for such a statement.  (BTW, NASA hasn’t said this; I made it up for the purpose of the analogy, and I purposely chose a respected national agency who I myself trust.)

An Ad Hominem fallacy is the opposite: it believes a statement must be false because Unreliable Person said it.  Maybe Unreliable Person is reliable, and has genuine evidence for X, but is getting demonized 😅 for something she stated (perhaps in jest) about Y.  Are we not to listen to her evidence on X because something from unrelated Y, taken out of context, condemns her?

Or, perhaps Unreliable Person really is unreliable.  Does that mean that everything that person says is false?  What if Unreliable Person brings forth reliable evidence?  Shouldn’t we take a look at that evidence?

 Think about these two questions also:

1.     Has Person, who is being presented to you (or you think is) either Reliable or Unreliable, provided evidence?  Has Person provided it accurately, based on your own fact-checking through the original data or the original source? 

2.    Are you seeing the full evidence in full context of Person, who is being presented to you (or you think is) either Reliable or Unreliable?  Perhaps Person is Reliable, but is being presented as Unreliable, and Person’s strongest evidence has been eliminated from what you’re seeing.  Have you checked the original source?

Image 2: Eyes of Paradox

           As noted in “Shhh! Don’t tell,” I have anisometropia, or what I call “eyes of paradox,” a slightly near-sighted left eye and a fairly pronounced far-sighted right eye.  In certain ways, like trying to read anything from the Internet on my cell phone, or trying to hit an overhead in tennis, my condition is a nuisance.  No set of eye-glasses can give me perfect vision, so I do the best I can, while taking advantage of its benefits, like being able to see road signs far in advance.  “There it is, coming up, next Exit, you’ll need to stay in the right-most lane of the fork,” I tell my husband when we’re on a busy freeway.  Astonished, he exclaims, “You can read that?!”

           Although they’re usually a nuisance, I’m proud of my eyes of paradox.  My life has been about paradox, starting in childhood.  I often imagine my angels are upstairs laughing, playing a joke on me, as I think they did with my eyes.  She’ll be all about paradox; she’ll see nothing but paradox, so let’s give her eyes of paradox!  That my more pronounced eye is far-sighted is also not lost on me.  As I watch the world, life, everything, I see things much more in far-sighted vision than near-sighted.  Right now, I’m seeing everything in paradox, and I’m seeing more of it with the far-sighted eye.

           Let’s consider Highly Unreliable Person, a person I do not trust at all.  If I had not already been investigating X through credible sources, I might respond to what Highly Unreliable Person is saying like everyone else: Highly Unreliable Person thinks X; therefore, X must be false.  But what if X is true?  It’s a paradox. I want to think Highly Unreliable Person can never be trusted.  In our whirlwind, nothing is that simple.

            Paradox accepts that there is no one size fits all.  Maybe a particular treatment will work well for you; maybe it won’t.  Each treatment comes with effects, some of which are more risky for some than others because our bodies are all different.  This should be a decision between each patient with his or her own doctor.

             Likewise, perhaps a particular preventative measure will help you because you have a weak immune system and could be assisted by it.  Perhaps  that same measure could set back another person who has spent years building up his own natural immunity.  For that person, the same preventative measure that helps you is like the boulder that he, Prometheus, has to roll back up a mountain.

           Here’s another paradox: the stay-at-home order that fits my own zen leanings, but jeopardizes the needs of those on my heart, the youth.  I’ve just posted It Still Takes a Village on the youth, so I won’t repeat that here; I’ll just say that what is trying for the youth -- to slow down and remain in place -- is actually refreshing to me.  These are just a couple of paradoxes, but in our whirlwind, the paradoxes are legion.

Image 3: Shhh! Careful speech

           Through this pandemic, my family has chosen to do “Family Movie Nights,” rotating each of us to choose a film and a couple of nights ago, at my request, we watched Karate Kid 2, my favorite of these because in this part, one of my all-time favorite of film characters is the star: Mr. Miagi.  This little man doesn’t look tough, he doesn’t say much, and he’s quirky – he tries to catch flies with chopsticks!  But no strong man, nor crowd of them, armed or not, can defeat this guy.  And even if his phrasing is as quirky as his habits, when he speaks, you’d be wise to listen.

             After a period of silence, a moment tends to arise when one is released to speak.  Another spiral up into the next rung for me on this theme comes from 2013.  I had been advocating for my students to “rise into voices of power for the sake of good,” and at the start of 2013, I began praying the same for myself. In early April, I faced quite a challenge for an instructor at the start of a new quarter: I lost my voice for two weeks.  The Spirit whispered, I will give you a voice of power, but I first have to take away your voice.  (If you glance at my Blog Archive and the posts per year, you’ll also see when my blog voice dropped off for a few years.)

            A year ago, the Spirit surprised me with another whisper: I’m positioning you to be that voice, so I’ve permitted a distraction to you for a test.  Will you be distracted, or will you be a voice of power?  A year later, I’d say the answer has been both.  Thankfully, not only I, but those relevant, following the divine forces, have shown restraint, opening the door for me to emerge into this voice, beginning with my successful advocacy on behalf of Oregon college students.  For now, the whispers repeat the counsel to emulate Mr. Miagi: be humble, simple, silent, restrained, and be ready when the moment arrives to move or speak.

(8/12 update: I hope to have the chance to be silent for quite some time now. A voice is very difficult.)

(photo by portcitywire.com)

Should we always listen to Reliable Person?  Should we never listen to Unreliable Person?  Oh, what a whirlwind we’re in!  To properly discern, we need to examine the evidence for ourselves through our Inner Authority.  To trust our Inner Authority, we need to free ourselves from fear, anxiety, anger, and lower nature desires. Once we do, our Inner Authority is remarkably reliable.  Here’s a doctor who studies, examines, questions, tests, and listens to her Inner Authority, and suggests we do the same.  As a triple board certified Internal Medicine physician, she fits “Reliable Person.”  But even she encourages us not to take her word for it, nor the word of the many speaking another narrative, but to examine the evidence for ourselves through our Inner Authority.

© 2020 by karina.  All rights reserved.  Please use with permission or a citation that links to this blog.