Situated Intelligence: Minds in Black Boxes by Stephen G. Perrin, EdD

SITUATED INTELLIGENCE: MINDS IN BLACK BOXES Copyright © 2014 by

Stephen G. Perrin, EdD Bar Harbor, Maine; steve@mindfarer.institute ABSTRACT. All people have brains; all people have minds; no people understand the relationship between brains and minds, including the author. Our understanding of world experience exists in our minds, not our brains. Each mind opens to the world—the puzzle to be solved—through sensory inputs and behavioral outputs from inside its individual (and figurative) black box. The brain itself understands nothing. Our minds make sense of ambient energies impinging on our sensory receptors. They reach beyond our bodily envelopes to include engagements in nature, culture, community, and family. Sensory perception includes arousal, expectancy, attention, sensory impressions, and recognition (categorization).

Memory is essential to perception in enabling recognition of familiar sensory patterns (phenomena). The situated intelligence (the self) at the heart of the nexus between perception and action determines the meaning of sensory impressions as a guide to judgment leading on to action appropriate to given situations as construed. The self is situated within a constellation of memories, impressions, values, emotions, meanings, dreams, motivations, comparisons, thoughts, ideas, judgments, etc. Consciousness is invoked by a polar disparity between two sets of signals, described variously as that between memory and perception, intended action and actual results, recall and expectancy—one set judged as preferable to the other, which prompts our minds to consciousness within the framework of a given situation. Judgments weigh options for action in given situations as either positive or negative. Actions appropriate to such situations include setting goals, preparations, projects, relationships, tools, skills, gestures, speech, and a host of trial essays and errors. The internal loop of engagement (as it is experienced) is sharpened for relevance, clarity, contrast, and emphasis by unconscious neural loops within the brain. External loops engage the mind with features of four primary levels of world experience: nature, culture, community, home and family.

Spacetime and information do not exist in the world but are creations of human minds that perceive, make meaning, and act simultaneously. Time itself is a cultural calibration of sensory changes noted by a stationary observer; space is a cultural calibration of spatial changes noted by an agent in motion. In the same vein, information is achieved by directing sensory impressions to certain pathways leading to taxonomic (relational) understanding in our minds, not to facts in the world. Baseball, Roget’s Thesaurus, and the stars provide examples of such engagements as enabled by the mind, with profound consequences. The views expressed here represent one man’s lifelong experience within his personal and subjective black box in contemplating whatever external events might lie beyond his bodily envelope. The author concludes that we each serve as helmsman of our own vessel. The choosing of a course is why we are here. Consciousness is not in our brains or minds but in our engagements linking perception to meaningful judgment to purposeful action to nature, culture, community, and family. (See paragraph 5, page 32f.; also paragraph 4, page 92; paragraph 3, page 111; and paragraphs 2 and 3, page 115.) 

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CONTENTS. ABSTRACT. 1 CONTENTS. 2 PREFACE. 3 1. MINDS AND BRAINS. 4 1-a. Introduction 4 1-b. Ambient Energy 5 1-c. Attention 6 1-d. Memory 8 1-e. Maps in the Brain 10 1-f. Seeing As 13 1-g. Education 16 1-h. Black Boxes 19 1-i. A Life Course of Trial, Error, and Successive Approximation 21 1-j. Wayfaring 26 2. ENGAGEMENT, A BRIEF RUN-THROUGH. 29 2-a. Inside the Black Box: Perception 29 2-b. Inside the Black Box: Meaning 31 2-c. Inside the Black Box: Action 39 3. OUTER REACHES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 51 3-a. Nature 51 3-b. Culture 68 3-c. Community 80 3-d. Family 87 4. WHAT ENGAGEMENTS SAY ABOUT OUR MINDS. 98 4-a. Baseball 98 4-b. Roget’s Thesaurus 106 4-c. The Stars 115 5. DISCUSSION. 132 6. CONCLUSION. 138 7. DEPICTION OF SITUATED INTELLIGENCE. 140

[T]here / is nothing either good or bad, but thinking / makes it so.

Shakespeare, Hamlet

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PREFACE. Human minds differ along so many dimensions that no two are alike, making theories of mind highly suspect. And theories proposed by any subset of those minds even more so. Pedro G. Ferreira provides an excellent overview of the confusion that results when scientists theorize about the workings of the universe before having a firm grasp on the workings (and frailties) of their own minds (The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). Theory construction, it turns out, is a function of theorists’ personality traits, life experiences, convictions, concepts and ideas, use of language, putative understanding of the material universe, all amidst proposals made by a community of colleagues interested in similar topics.

Theorists, like the rest of us, live in their minds before they live in the cultures they are born to, or any all-encompassing universe beyond that. This frailty common to speculators, no matter how renown, is spread throughout humanity. Except for a few well-rehearsed routines, we often proceed on the basis of subjective concepts, hunches, conjectures, and firm convictions drawn from our unique wells of life experience.

Without familiarizing ourselves with the workings of our minds, we should avoid putting our faith in the universe as a cohesive entity, or even in ourselves and other people. Nobel Lauriat Gerald M. Edelman points out that our genomes are not nearly sufficient to specify the connections in our brains, making our minds subject to epigenetic adaptation to idiosyncratic experience. As our immune systems are unique to our individual selves, the neural connections determining our minds are unique in each case. Making each of us a unique observer of the world scene. It is not possible for us to look upon the universe as it is, much less to gauge the truth of our inner convictions (Topobiology: An Introduction to Molecular Embryology, Harper Collins, Basic Books, 1988, p. 176).

The thrust of this reflection is that as wayfarers, we do better to know ourselves before setting off on travels to far places. 

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1. MINDS AND BRAINS. 1-a. Introduction. Here at the start I want to tell you where I am coming from in writing this reflection. I call myself Steve from planet Earth. Yes, I am an Earthling, one who engages, as single-celled life forms engage, a habitat provided by a particular planet orbiting a particular star in a particular galaxy in a galactic neighborhood of a particular universe, so-called. A lot of personal baggage comes with that placement, somewhat similar to but far from identical with your own. Every second of my existence is underwritten by active engagement with my personal surroundings on more levels within and beyond my own brain than I can imagine. The air I breathe; the food and fluids I take in; the sensory world and memories I engage; the parents, genetic heritage, and family I am born to; the community I live in every day; the culture with its language, ways, and institutions; the natural world, vistas of day and night sky, and glacial age in which I take part—these and myriad other engagements have been the business of my life up until now. Engagements in parallel and succession as warp and woof of my puny personhood in this universe we commonly think of as ours, while the reverse is actually true: we are its progeny and owe everything to its generative powers.

The next issue is where I am heading in writing this piece. The only suitable answer is: as near as I can get to the core of such an experiential universe as I have depicted in the preceding paragraph. To the integral core of me, situated as I am inside the ceaseless flux that marks my existence here on Earth. Who am I that I should witness these goings on from my privileged perspective? The standard metaphor these days is that I am an information processor, a kind of computer that juggles incoming bits of information and fashions them collectively as the world I live in. But I think I am no data-processing machine, nor any ghost as might inhabit such a machine, a denizen imprisoned in that metaphor borrowed by neuroscientists from the discipline of electrical engineering. To myself I feel like a witness to the multiple engagements I suggest above, one person’s integrated self as situated at the heart of a unique set of ever-changing personal experiences. Not any mere ghost but the veritable host of my existential awareness, Steve from planet Earth, he for whom this universe appears as it does from my singular point of view. He who eats and drinks and breathes and sleeps to sustain a metabolism enabling him to engage a universe of potential experience as a true survivor of the many skirmishes he endures—growing up, going to school, working, marrying, parenting, thinking, writing—in order to make himself happen as his own unique person.

At this point in my argument, I propose two statements that I hold to be true. 1) All people have brains. 2) All people have minds. And now add a third. 3) No one understands the relationship between minds and brains in general, or even her own mind and brain in particular. I put it that way because it is equally true that our understanding of our brains is in our minds as it is that our understanding of our minds is somehow situated in our brains. Yet brain and mind are far from synonymous. The brain is an electrochemical system, believed by many to be, composed as it is of some 100 billion nerve cells comprising a network forming trillions of connections, the most complicated physical system we know of in the universe, while the mind is the seemingly immaterial vessel of personal experience, no two alike. It is as if we could simultaneously regard our mental activity from two wholly different perspectives, one physical, one experiential. Yet when we die, our minds and brains die together, putting

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an end to both our conscious and physical lives, and to any privileged perspective we may have, however briefly, enjoyed.

Before Google cars became feasible, cars were assembled as physical systems meant to be operated by drivers with minds who knew where they were going, and when, and why. Car makers worked from one perspective, car owners from another. The two perspectives joined in the driver’s seat where they merged as seamlessly as possible. In those days, we could distinguish eggs from chickens as being two growth stages of a single organism, and it was a joke to inquire which came first, as if they were two different things.

Does it make sense to ask which comes first, mind or brain, as if the issue were one of temporal priority? As if one emerged from the other as a kind of product with different qualities than those of its progenitor? Or do mind and brain coexist simultaneously, so the issue is one of simultaneous cause-and-effect, not order in time? This would be somewhat similar to determining the induction, capacitance, or resistance of an electric circuit, qualities which appear once a given circuit is turned on. That rings a bell with us because we grasp immediately that brains must be aroused or awakened for minds to become evident, whereas brains do their thing whether we are asleep or awake. Mind becomes a state or quality of a brain’s physical system once it is aroused in a particular way.

But does that explain the relation between a mind and its brain? Not really, because it adds a proprietary dimension in that the mind seems to belong to a new entity that does not exist in states of deep sleep or coma, the “I” or personal self at the core of the mind, whereas the unconscious brain appears to have no such central perspective. Mind seems to be possessed by a self that does not exist while dreamlessly asleep, comatose, or dead.

We appear to live in two worlds at once: one featuring a physical brain, body, planet, and universe; the other, a world of the mind that transcends merely physical limitations in imagining other universes parallel to our own. Who are we, really? More to the point, who am I that I should be writing this reflection? And who are you that you should be reading over my shoulder as if trying to see mind and brain from my perspective in comparison with yours?

There are those who, because they do not understand how mind and brain can be related, dismiss mind as a wishful fantasy at best, at worst as a physical impossibility.

Yet those same sceptics do not question the existence of cellphones just because they don’t understand how they work, or call gravity a myth because they can’t explain why they fall toward the center of the Earth when they trip on the edge of a rug. Many of our claims of understanding are based on descriptions of what happens under certain conditions, not explanations. So here I acknowledge the existence of both mind and brain on equal footing on the assumption that they are intimately connected in ways we won’t understand for many decades. The architecture of the brain is so complicated, I think the detailed physical relationships between its component parts may well provide clues to the processes by which signals flowing through neural networks evoke a sense of mind with a self at its core. At least I have first-person access to my mind, as you do to yours, while our respective brains are dreamy abstractions we leave it for others to describe and explain however they can.

1-b. Ambient Energy. I think we can agree that the world around us streams with patterns and sequences of energy coming from many directions. As inhabitants of that

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world, we have developed ways of sampling those streams of energy to create sensory impressions that serve to guide us in fitting into the relevant niches and situations on which our livelihoods depend at any given moment. In that sense, we entertain ambient stimuli (sights, sounds, pressures, temperatures, motions, and so on) that might affect our well-being in comparison with similar such impressions from prior experiences.

Judgments based on comparison between memories and present sensory impressions may somehow elicit the meanings that drive our actions in fitting response to the patterned sequences of energy we selectively witness in our engagements with the world around us.

We, you and I, also derive energy, flavors, and aromas from molecules of food, water, and air taken in from our immediate surroundings. In this we are no different from our one-celled ancestors whose survival depended on the selective permeability of their outer membranes, skins, or integumentary layers. Life thrives on the two-way trade of input and output, nourishment and waste, fuel and exhaust. We are of our environment, but isolated from it by an outermost layer that selectively allows traffic across our borders in two directions. Life depends absolutely on our controlling the traffic in and out of our living systems: digestive, reproductive, circulatory, respiratory, immune, sensory, motor, autonomic, integumentary, and so on. We are made of the same stuff as the ambient world, but it is how we arrange, transform, and manage that stuff internally that allows us to engage our surroundings, and our surroundings to engage us. We live by a host of concentric loops, both within our limiting membrane and crossing that membrane into the world beyond in a series of transactions involving incoming nutrients and outgoing wastes, sensory impressions linked to purposive actions, forming what I call ongoing loops of engagement. As individuals, we live by engaging other features of our environment on the far side of our bordering membrane, some similar to ourselves (people, animals, insects, plants), most differing from us in being unlike ourselves in every way (stars, mountains, rain drops, dust).

Our minds and brains alike are housed within the protective, outer membrane of our skin or hide. What we can know of the world on the far side of that membrane depends on what we can make of the energy and molecules that impinge upon us, and of the actions, creativity, and wastes we export in return. The world lives in us just as surely as we live in the world; both are simultaneously true. To live is to engage in multiple streams of two-way traffic for a lifetime. It takes a village to raise a child, and a throng of persons of all ages to make a village. Our insides and outsides complement one another; should they become disengaged for any reason, we fail to thrive.

1-c. Attention. Attention is the gateway we use in both getting stuff from the world into our minds, and stuff from our minds into the world. It is our means of monitoring the traffic between the two—our conscious engagement with the world. Attention is told by what we notice, both inside and beyond ourselves, as well as by how we act in response to what we notice in an ongoing flow of activity. What we call mind is situated at the junction between perception and action in the zone informed by emotions and memory where judgment is applied to situations, and goals are set for subsequent action. Mind is the jurisdiction where judgment reigns, deciding what to do next on the basis of values, fears, and desires in the context of whatever sense of an outside world we can put together from the incoming traffic we pay attention to in comparison with memories derived from earlier experience.

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What we don’t reach for by projecting our curiosity and expectancy outward simply passes-us-by unobserved. We know what we know and don’t what we don’t. The worlds we fashion for ourselves consist largely of projections of the traffic that concerns us and we pay attention to. When we are inattentive, asleep, or distracted, ambient energies have their play without our witness, and our actions may or may not be appropriate to our situations within a particular niche in the world.

I visualize our engagements as taking place on four levels of attention and concern having varying degrees of intensity and specificity. We live simultaneously and concentrically within nature, culture, community, and our family at home. Nature determines our placement and structure, including genetic makeup, organic form, nutritional needs, geographical location, climate, and habitat. Culture gives us our language, folkways, institutions, history, rituals, and social aspirations. Community provides our immediate surroundings, human contact, daily employment, food, necessities, lifestyle, healthcare, education, and recreation. Home shelters our family as a unit so we can care for and respect one another in intimate proximity, meet the challenges of life, and gain a sense of accomplishment as each member grows in experience, awareness, understanding, and ability.

The common focus of these engagements in each case is our individual minds as they seek coherence across a wide range of generality and specificity. It is our view of events on these different levels that we pay attention to, not events themselves as they might exist in any world that we imaginatively construct around us. This is proven by our relative abilities to respond appropriately to such events as come to our attention.

Here are examples of my personal engagements on four different levels of specificity:   



Global warming is a violation of the natural order, yet my feeble efforts to walk instead of drive my car, and to monitor sea-level rise in local waters, do almost nothing to avert it.

I deplore the current implosion of Syrian culture into itself, yet, despite daily reminders of the calamity, can think of no concrete steps I might take to lessen the violence, destruction, and suffering.

On a community level, at least I can write letters to the editor of the regional paper, participate in the local Occupy group, or talk with friends about issues that concern me. As an environmentalist, I have been active for more than thirty years in watching over an estuary that contributes to the character of the area where I live.

By way of an example on the family level of concern, I and my two adult sons are actively engaged in settling the estate of my younger brother, who died unexpectedly at age seventy-nine.

After more than thirty years of self-reflection, I visualize our minds as being built up in layers of structured situations having such dimensions as values, feelings, sensory impressions, conceptions, judgments, goals, all washed by streams of awareness on different levels of generality and specificity. Attention controls the flow of that awareness, allowing only a vague rendering of the world to enter our minds in any given situation, and our actions to be directed toward one chief concern at a time. The point being that our minds are not strictly contained within our brains, but, on a time-sharing basis, encompass the worlds of nature, culture, community, and home at different levels of resolution and specific detail, facilitated by the brain, true, but not restricted to it.

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Loops of engagement pass through the brain more-or-less in serial order, from arousal and expectancy, to attention, perception, conception, emotion, understanding, judgment, and on to planning and action. But much of the flow of those loops extends beyond mind, brain, and body into the world outside the body’s delimiting membrane where that flow of energy continues as it will under whatever conditions it encounters on its round-trip adventure across the boundary between self and non-self.

Consciousness, then, is a collaborative effort between a given mind and body with their common world. The focus of any given mind is achieved within the network of neural connections within its home brain, but its reach depends on a diverse range of two-way connections out into the world as well. Such external connections might depend on the U.S. Postal Service, public transportation, another mind during a cellphone call, weather conditions, a meeting or casual conversation, reference books in a library, somebody’s blog, a Google search, and so on. For consciousness, it is the continuity of the flow that counts, from mind to world, world to mind. The mind is a crucial way station along the route of exchange between a given individual and her environment. As such, it has a proprietary interest in keeping the traffic moving in-andout across its delimiting membrane. When it comes to minds, the flow’s the thing, and that flow depends on how well we pay attention to what’s going on both within and beyond us.

1-d. Memory. We tend to think of memory as one thing, an entity unto itself, like a vault, but memory is more than a place to store precious thoughts. It comprises a vast network of nerve cells, which become variously interconnected depending on the patterns of stimulation (and inhibition) it receives either repeatedly or in company with strong emotions on particular occasions. Memories are built by the traffic of signals along particular routes through specific portions of the network in the most complex system we know of in the universe. We inhabit a world far richer and more diverse than that of, say, the disciplines of neuroscience or French cuisine. It isn’t the brain itself that attends to its world, but the mind that the brain enables, the network of all possible electrochemical routes activated on the spot by sensory stimulation acting in conjunction with memory, together with the energetic input the mind receives from its perimeter ranging between concrete sensory detail and conceptual abstraction.

By analogy, the GPS unit in a car does not exist solely within an assemblage of electronic components behind the dashboard of the car, but extends to satellites in fixed orbits high above the Earth. The seeming “intelligence” of a GPS unit depends on its reach to those satellites far beyond the body of the car itself. And to the human intelligence of the individuals who imagined, conceived, designed, and built Geographic Positioning Systems in the first place. We are born to a culture that maintains GPS navigational systems, and countless other systems of transportation, healthcare, education, finance, agriculture, recreation, entertainment, and all the others we rely on and take for granted as integral parts of our cultural and experiential heritage.

The wonder of indoor plumbing depends on its connectivity to a municipal system that delivers water and removes waste on demand. Compare that to a system in which the availability of water depends on able-bodied women carrying empty containers across rough terrain to a well, spring, or river five miles away, filling them, then bearing them back the same distance on their heads for ready access at home on a daily basis.

Just so, the wonder of human consciousness depends on access to the ordered systems

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maintained by our surrounding households, communities, cultures, and regions of the natural world. Our personal intelligence depends on our engaging with intelligent systems beyond our individual brains and bodies. In a Paleolithic culture, we would be fortunate to have minds that could conceive of primitive stone tools and fire as dependable assets to our communities and households. In the Neolithic, we would celebrate agriculture, the use of pottery, and sharper stone tools as the leading edge of modern technology.

Our minds have evolved along with innovations in our cultures, communities, and family households. Strip the achievements of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and other such luminaries from the history of science, and a thin soup of primitive beliefs is all that’s left. Innovation depends on developing novel neural pathways within the brain, pathways that did not exist in earlier times. Once formed by innovative personal experience or by copying a specific example, such pathways persist as long as they prove useful on a regular basis. If unused, then, due to high maintenance cost, they suffer natural attrition. Old concepts never die, they just fade away with the minds that sponsor them.

This is not a popular view of the relation between mind and brain, so I will employ the metaphor of the mind in a black box, not in the current sense of the so-called artificial, silica-based intelligence said to lurk within a robot or computer, but in the more organic sense of a carbon-based mind and brain housed within an individual body protected by a semipermeable layer of hide, not limited to the confines of that hide, but actively striving to bring sensory stimulation from beyond its perimeter into alignment with its network of memories, feelings, values, and aspirations.

As neuroscience has demonstrated, the mind is a puzzle when viewed from outside, but the real puzzle is just the reverse: the world when viewed from inside the mind, which is the only vantage point any of us can attain with confidence. We don’t live in the world; we—our personal selves—live in our minds, which do the best they can to create a world from the fleeting signals they are privy to as ushered into the mind by expectancy, curiosity, attention, and interest. The core of the mind is memory, residuum of repeated or affective experience. Without memory, we wouldn’t remember who we are because we’d lose any identity we’d built up over time. We wouldn’t be able to recognize the world because we couldn’t remember ever seeing it before. We’d be condemned to a state of perpetual innocence, ever reinventing ourselves and our worlds again and again.

We’d never be bored because everything would strike us as utterly new, but we wouldn’t live very long, either, because we would be unable to learn from sorry experience. We’d be so innocent as to appear stupid in fact, eternal ignoramuses without hope of growing any wiser, or of surviving for even one day in a world we could never become familiar with or get used to.

Memory lets us compare new experiences with old during the act of perceiving, and then add the difference to our store of remembered details. Memory lets us learn from experience, and possibly to grow wiser. Too, it allows our respective cultures to calibrate our individual experience in their traditional ways of engagement, and so as children we learn to speak to and understand one another by means of a common language, to create, innovate, and survive as a group.

Memory is the essence of conscious awareness, the measure of our success as a species. The longer it builds within our minds, the better we become at solving the problems we face, and the longer we live. Memory is evolution’s peak accomplishment,

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the key to primate intelligence. In that sense, global warming is a test to see if we’re paying attention so we can transcend our traditional self-pride and limitations.

Forgetfulness, denial, hot-headedness, inattention, and drug-induced states of neglect are enemies of survival and evolution. The challenge is as real as it is clear.

Memory establishes the baseline of what we have to work with in heading into one situation after another. It comprises the tool kit of strategies, routines, incidents, methods, knowhow, concepts, patterns, and accomplishments with which we respond to strange or unusual events and circumstances. It is what we reach with into the unknown, and use to welcome each new engagement. That is, memory provides the setting for everything that happens. It is what we bring to bear on the current object of our attention. It is like a national road map of all the routes we could take in driving from, say, Boston to Los Angeles. Which is what memory provides us, a potential network (or labyrinth) of all possible routes through our brains, of all the connections we could make if we needed to, longest to most direct, most scenic to fastest, allowing stops with the most relatives, national parks, historic sites, trout streams, wildlife sanctuaries, or whatever else might attract us along the way. Memory is the grand map of our experience as built up synapse-to-synapse, axon to dendrite, offering trillions of alternative routes for dealing with our needs at the moment.

1-e. Maps in the Brain. In neuroscientific circles, much has been written about maps in the brain. Primary motor cortex at the back of the frontal lobe is often depicted as a kind of cartoon of the effector areas of the body, and primary sensory cortex on the front surface of the parietal lobe is shown as a disjointed caricature of the layout of sensory receptors on the surface of the skin. Such depictions gloss over the considerable overlap between individual neurons and the areas they connect to.

Successive visual areas of the sensory cortex often repeat the spatial arrangement of cells in the retina, but these are not the typical maps we are familiar with (muchreduced and necessarily simplified symbolic representations such as road maps, topographic maps, and nautical charts). The so-called maps in the brain are often based on a point-to-point correspondence that emphasizes specific details without loss due to reduction in size as in conventional maps. Neural “maps” are highly interactive in being linked through miles and miles of two-way, interconnecting fibers so that features can be clearly distinguished and not suppressed. The point in cortical mapping appears to be clarity of particular details for the sake of comparison and refinement, not summary, small-scale, symbolic representation. Neural “maps” are the real thing.

As an optical system, the eye forms a reduced image of a field of view on the retina.

That image is sharpest and most detailed in the region of the retina known as the fovea where the density of receptor cells is highest. When we pay attention to a particular object of interest, muscles controlling the eye make sure that the image of that object falls upon the fovea. Even when looking closely, our eyes shift rapidly from point-topoint across the image to scan its details in close succession. This abrupt movement of the eye and shift of focus happens so fast that we are generally unaware of it.

To facilitate the seemingly immediate recognition or categorization of the distinguishing features of an incoming sensory signal, the spatial and temporal patterns of that signal need to be compared against similar patterns stored in the neural network of the brain, which requires a search for the closest fit between incoming signals and routes they might take through the existing structure of neural connections. The genius

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of our system of pattern recognition or categorization is that such a match can be established in short order with a high degree of accuracy. The dynamic process of searching for a close comparison requires deciding which set of feature is most telling, and then of finding a match for that set of features already resident in existing displays within the brain. To name a particular tune upon hearing it (no matter what instrument it is played on) is a matter of matching a sequence of notes to a group of notes already labeled with an identifying title. The simpler task of recognizing a tune as having been heard before without naming it is a matter for matching a sequence of notes to a sequence already stored in auditory memory, and does not require involvement with semantic memory.

The whole point of perception is to present memory with a signal it can recognize and identify from a standpoint of significance in comparison to meanings derived from prior experience. Memory is no frill; it is the essence of being aware of what’s happening in our bodies and immediate surroundings. The trick to perception is to present incoming signals as concrete impressions readily matched to conceptual patterns latent within the network of memory so appropriate action can be taken accordingly. Our survival depends on quickly registering such connections between specific percepts as received onto more general concepts as stored for future reference. And on registering them again and again in different situations every day of our lives.

This is where loops of engagement come back on themselves in the form of expectancy of what will happen next. We usually think of memory in terms of recall, overlooking its influence in shaping our expectancies, and the “normal” course of events.

Thoreau writes in his journal of never seeing a certain species of plant in his customary haunts, even though it is reported to thrive in the area. Then one day he happens upon it, and is amazed at how often he comes across it again once he’s seen it. Birders often use habitat type as a clue to the sorts of birds they will find in such an area, and sure enough, they find just those birds. Not so much because the birds are there, but more because they expect them to be there, which significantly cuts down the work of identification. A novice has no such expectations, and will likely see no such birds. What expectancy does is narrow the field of possibilities, making it easier to connect with what is likely to happen. This is why we get good at what we rehearse and do often; we suit our expectations to the task at hand. That’s the true meaning of the Boy Scout motto: Be prepared. Not for every eventuality, but for the situations you are most likely to engage where you are. Expectancy suggests that you take along a map of the routes you are likely to travel. That way it is far easier to gauge your progress by known landmarks along the way.

Here are several examples from Thoreau’s Journal, of his grappling to register sensory phenomena with conceptual patterns stored in memory.

How much more game he will see who carries a gun, i. e. who goes to see it!

Though you roam the woods all your days, you never will see by chance what he sees who goes on purpose to see it. One gets his living by shooting woodcocks; most never see one in their lives. (Thoreau, Henry David. Journal. Entry for Feb. 28, 1856. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, eds. Fourteen volumes bound as two. New York: Dover Publications, 1962. Originally published by Houghton Mifflin, 1906.)

I think we may detect that some sort of preparation and faint expectation preceded every discovery we have made. We blunder into no discovery but it

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will appear that we have prayed and disciplined ourselves for it. (Ibid., Sept. 1, 1856.)

It commonly chances that I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I [am] in a thrilled and expectant mood, perhaps wading in some remote swamp where I have just found something novel and feel more than usually remote from the town. Or some rare plant which for some reason has occupied a strangely prominent place in my thoughts for some time will present itself. My expectation ripens to discovery. I am prepared for strange things. (Ibid., Sept. 2, 1856.)

Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind. (Ibid., June 5, 1857.)

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i. e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for. (Ibid., July 2, 1857.)

The Great Fields from this hill are pale-brown, often hoary—there is not yellow enough for russet—pastures, with very large red or purple patches of blackberry vines. You can only appreciate the effect of these by a strong and peculiar intention of the eye. We ordinarily do not see what is before us, but what our prejudices presume to be there. (Ibid., Oct. 12, 1857.)

This principle applies as much to politics and theology—and every other human discipline—as to nature study. We all find it easier to fit the world to expectancies based on earlier experience of the world than to fit ourselves to the world as it is today. We see what we have already seen, and know what we already know. Which is precisely why education takes decades, not a few months. Education as a true preparation for thingsto-come in life requires a lifelong dedication to learning lest our expectations get out of date, which they invariably do because not one of us can keep up with events in a world that is constantly—not only rotating and orbiting—but evolving every day. Like old road and topo maps, the maps in our heads get out-of-date very quickly. As a result, we find it difficult to keep up with a changing world, and fall back on living within a world that conforms to the world we were used to years ago (or in our youthful fantasies) as sponsor of our expectations.

An aging and complex system of such interactive maps is just what a sensory pattern encounters when introduced into one person’s mind in a particular situation—the remnant of once and future experience that one person’s memory represents. Not as a model of the world per se, but of that particular individual’s subjective experience of the world. Acts of attention seek a match between the arrangement of sensory features constituting a perceptual pattern in comparison with the overall “map,” network, or labyrinth constituting a person’s memory of significant (formed in the presence of affect or repetition) patterns and concepts. Recognition of that pattern as fitting into the

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established network of patterns and conceptions in memory results in the categorization of the perceptual pattern as fitting a class of experience that has been met before.

Because the interaction between human perception and memory is so powerful, even echoes, shadows, or reflections of patterns can be recognized as familiar and therefore meaningful. Personal discovery, meaning, and understanding are the upshots of such interactions, leading forward to appropriate emotions, judgments, and actions in response to a wide range of perceptual patterns upon presentation and recognition.

In simple situations, this interaction can appear to be a matter of matching a given stimulus to a set response from a repertory of possible alternatives, but that view belies the rapidity, flexibility, and complexity of what actually happens in matching the one to the other. The true power of matching sensory impressions to patterns stored in memory is told in novel situations outside the range of everyday experience. Novelty and unfamiliarity arouse feelings that activate strategies for dealing with surprising or unusual situations. Blood flows faster, concentration peaks, and the mind scans its resources in search of ways to clarify the situation.

Think of the spurred attention and ingenuity demonstrated at Mission Control in Houston and by astronauts aboard the threatened Apollo 13 spacecraft when the number-2 oxygen tank exploded on April 13, 1970, some 200,000 miles from Earth, and all concerned went into crisis mode in facing a loss of power, warmth, and water, along with an excess of carbon dioxide in the Command Module Odyssey. As a result of their performance under extreme pressure in adapting to an unanticipated situation, all astronauts made it through the aborted mission and splashed down successfully in the Pacific Ocean southwest of American Samoa (not the Indian Ocean as planned). ("Apollo 13," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apollo_13&ol did=595344805 (accessed February 19, 2014).)

In brief, we are what we bring to any given occasion. What we bring with us is a function of memory—what we can repeat, recall, invent, or look up when facing a challenge. That is, we are what we have to offer in reaching out to the specific patterns of energy that determine a particular situation. Our gift is whatever we can do to help things along. That is precisely why we have memory in the first place: helping things along promotes survival of those who have what it takes to do just that, a repertory of useful skills and experience. Among primates, memory is one of the main thrusts of evolution. We don’t all have the same background or skill sets, so our challenge is to find a niche where we can perform without sacrificing our personal integrity. Finding that niche is the art of living the good life, good for us as individuals and also for our family, community, culture, and the natural world.

1-f. Seeing As. As I visualize the relation between memory and perception, we route traffic aroused by concrete, sensory stimulation along pathways in our brains built up by similar stimulation repeated over time, or facilitated by the presence of strong emotion making an experience important to remember. That is, we rely on preexisting routes within our neural network to render current perceptions sufficiently familiar to recognize, categorize, identify, or interpret. We see what we are experientially prepared to see, to hear words we are experientially prepared to hear. Which is why Thoreau can conclude, “Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind,” “… we find only the world we look for,” and “We ordinarily do not see what is before us, but what our

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prejudices presume to be there” (see quotations above under Maps in the Brain, page 11f.).

I have lived in my current apartment for fourteen years, so have a lot of experience looking down at the linoleum floor in the bathroom, laid down to look like ceramic tiles featuring swirling, abstract patterns in three shades of light brown. Over the years, I have acquired a repertory of figures I recognize in those tiles, mostly faces, bodies, and animals. My favorite looks like a clown wearing a three-cornered hat, reminding me of one of the Three Musketeers, who looks up at me while I am sitting on the toilet. I never see it as twice the same, but it is always based on the same pattern of swirls in light, medium, and dark brown linoleum within one particular four-inch square. The pattern is there on the floor to see, but the familiar figure I make of it is mine alone. I see it not as a mere pattern but as a living clown. Clearly my own creation, a figment within the portion of my neural network activated when a signal spurred by that particular pattern is routed through my visual cortex. I see the clown as emerging from the floor while it is actually a projection of a pattern confined to my brain. As angels, butterflies, and bare breasts emerge from inkblots, and profiles of the Virgin Mary emerge from stained stucco, and grotesque faces presented themselves to Leonardo da Vinci’s sharp eye from stained walls he scrutinized during the Renaissance.

If we claim such figures to be there in the patterns before us, we are profoundly mistaken. The figures are what we make of them in our minds, what we take them to be, what we project upon them in seeing them as something they obviously are not. I have written about seeing my friend Fred walking ahead of me up Fifth Avenue in New York, of pursuing him at a rapid pace, sure from the gait, raglan overcoat, heavy cordovan shoes, woven scarf, that it was my friend from high school days—to discover when I came abreast of him and was about to clap him on the back that I had been chasing an imposter, a man whose face looked nothing like the Fred I knew at all. Stunned, I stood on the busy sidewalk amid the passing horde, lost in a reverie about how sad I was to have made such a mistake.

While once taking dishes out of the drainer and putting them away, I stepped back to get around an open cupboard door—and heard the yeowl of an angry cat accusing me of stepping on its tail, and “saw” that very cat, gray, calm, and unaccusing, looking up at me from the floor for several minutes after the event, when, in fact, I hadn’t lived with a cat for over twenty years, had no cat at the time, and had merely brushed the cupboard door so that a hinge, which had never made a sound, squeaked at me, which I immediately interpreted as the yeowl I had heard, the entire event being a fiction created in the instant on the basis of the activation of a pathway in my brain that had been laid down years ago when I had in fact stepped on several real cats, none of which had been gray, long gone but apparently not forgotten as patterns of sight and sound lodged in my brain.

When my family made the move to Seattle in August of 1947, I was eager to see the Rocky Mountains for the first time. As we drove west through flatlands in eastern Colorado, I expectantly peered from the back seat through the windshield, but saw only low clouds blocking my view of any mountains. The clouds grew taller as we approached, and for half-an-hour I grew more desperate to view the Rockies. At last, when I began seeing trees and valleys among the clouds, I realized that I had seen the Rockies all along, but their being snow-covered in late August prevented me from

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recognizing what I was looking at. Had it been winter, I would have seen them sooner.

My summer expectations got in the way of my seeing.

It’s not so much that seeing is believing as just the reverse: believing is seeing (or hearing). “It’s true if you think so,” says Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello. We see “what our prejudices presume to be there,” says Thoreau. Travelers on Cape Cod once reported a black man holding a white man at knifepoint by the side of the road, a scene that turned out to be a reporter from a local radio station holding a microphone to the lips of a man he was interviewing. In going through old National Geographics from the nineteen-teens and twenties, I have come across photographs of bare-breasted African women nursing babies under the title, “Black Madonna,” suggesting a verbal veil of social acceptability to make the image suitable for a prudish and mostly White middleclass readership.

“Reification” is a five-dollar word that means turning an idea in the mind into a material thing. The verbs “specify,” “objectify,” “incorporate,” “substantiate,” “materialize,” or “realize” might serve as well (though that’s not how we typically use them). In the case of misidentifying Fred, what I did in my mind was “impersonate,” “incarnate,” “or embody” a stranger as my friend. Watching plays, films, and videos, we believe in the characters so much that we forget they are actors playing roles scripted in advance. We are completely taken in, or rather, take ourselves in, wanting to believe in the plot as an actual event unfolding before our eyes. The reification of God from being a concept in the human mind to the putative creator, prime mover, and ruler of the universe serves as the archest example of the elevation of an idea from subjective to objective status in the history of the world, which exhibits the power of the human imagination in believing what it chooses to believe (see Sec. 4-c. The Stars, page 115ff.).

We do not simply look at a scene and see what is laid out before our eyes. Perception is a creative act, a fitting together of details into a pattern we are prepared to recognize.

Prepared by having seen it before many times or accompanied by strong emotion so that we build pathways in our brains by strengthening the synapses that link them together to form a route blazed with recognizable features (color, size, shape, contour, motion, texture, etc.). If a particular array of features can be recalled as a unit, then we are likely to remember it when we meet it again. Expecting to see something in a certain locale, we open our minds to just that so we are more likely to see it when we come across something that might resemble it. The key point is to have something in mind before we come across it, in mind as a particular structure within our neural network of interconnected neurons and cortical columns. Expectancy gives priority and ready access to just that mental structure, saving a huge amount of time and effort in suiting ourselves to our worldly environment and, conversely, that environment to us.

In novel situations, we lack preparation for what we are likely to perceive, so lack the proper orientation for making sense of what is to follow. We can be slow to catch on to what’s happening because perception has to start cold without a boost from memory providing glimpses of likely situations. When Pierre Monteux premiered Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on a French ballet program in 1913, the audience had never heard anything remotely like it, so was famously outraged at having sounds and rhythms they were not prepared for thrust upon them. They had no way of engaging such music, so rebelled against it because their expectations were thwarted and few could find a way into it, or let it into them. Now audiences seek that same music out because they find it so exciting. We may be expert at seeing what we are trained or accustomed to see, but

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seeing the novel and unexpected means having to learn our way through solving problems by extensive training or trial and error, which takes careful attention, scrutiny, and double-checking our surmises. If we are lucky, we have been prepared by experience to be cautious in just such situations, to put ourselves out so we can take our environments in. Institutions and situations that prepare us for doing that make up the bulk of our educational and job-training systems.

1-g. Education. I said above that a good education would enable us to keep up with changing times, but we leave school at a relatively young age and tend to coast on early learning and on-the-job training into old age, carrying our increasingly antiquated internal maps and expectancies along with us. Living longer makes it inevitable we will grow increasingly out-of-date. At the current rate of technological change, we need to go back to the classroom every year or two just to keep up with innovators who never take a day off. That includes not only technologists but bankers, investors, manufacturers, and the rest of the human population that is trying to survive in an increasingly rapid-fire and globalized world. If we persist in thinking locally, we are left standing in our socks as the world whizzes by.

To train our minds to keep up with the times, educators believe we need to be trained conceptually to deal with the larger and larger masses of data and information streaming toward us. Big Data is the coming thing, Metadata, Überdata. First it was personal computers, then in rapid succession the Internet, World Wide Web, server farms, the Cloud, now smartphones and iPads we can’t live without. Soon it will be chips in our heads to augment our relatively slow wits. How will we survive in a world awash in wowzerbytes and ziggybytes? Artificial intelligence is in our cards.

What I’m getting at is the rush to replace the careful perception of subtle sensory phenomena (as in the appreciation of art, nature, music, and poetry) with broader and bolder chunking of ever-larger masses of data (as in national security media surveillance), hoping to discover patterns we are missing at smaller scales and sample sizes. In jazz, this urge to extremes takes the form of playing faster, louder, and higher than the human ear can readily tolerate. Bigger-and-faster is thought to be better because it’s so in-our-face we can’t miss it. The scope of education is expanding while our brains retain the same number of neurons and synapses, our minds the same finite span of experience. To deal with a global world whizzing by at electronic speed, how do we meet the need to learn more and more while our capacity for understanding remains essentially the same?

Probably we’ll face this challenge much as we have faced similar challenges in the past: by learning less and less about more and more. That is, by reducing the complexity of concrete experience to abstract (schematic) concepts that take up less memory space and so are easier to remember. I’ll give two examples from my own experience.

1. When I was a poet-in-residence in Massachusetts schools back in the 1970s, I visited classes on every level from kindergarten to twelfth grade. I vividly remember a kindergarten teacher taking a shoebox of miniature toys off the shelf, reaching into it, holding up a two-inch model of a truck, asking, “What is this, class?” “Truck,” came the chorus of answers. “House,” Airplane,” “Boat,” and so on. She congratulated the class on doing a good job—of reducing crude examples of sensory experience to membership in broad, abstract categories having slight similarity to the objects they represented in that they didn’t make

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noise, didn’t run because they didn’t have engines or operators, didn’t smell, didn’t pollute, didn’t move, didn’t hold people, and were extremely reduced in size and detail. That is, the children were taught schematically to disregard specific details in order to come up with the “correct” category label.

2. A few years later, when I taught in a private secondary school, I felt the need to include an emphasis on concrete, sensory details to improve my students’ skills of observation. They were good at writing conceptually as if from a safe distance, but they tended to take concrete examples for granted and seldom included them in their essays. I took a class of seniors to a remote area of the campus and turned them loose on a quest for sensory details they could smell, feel, taste, but not see. My aim was to have students come to grips with concrete, sensory experience, not mental categorization. I had them pair up in teams, choose which partner would be blindfolded, leaving the other to play the role of guardian, and sent the pairs on a quest for sightless experience meant to heighten their awareness of the palpable world. After twenty minutes, I had the pairs switch roles. In my imagination, the students would savor their immediate environments while exploring everything they came across from a sensory perspective. But that is not what happened. What they did was the same as the kindergartners did with that box of toys—they tried to give the “right” label for whatever they encountered, no matter how loose the fit. Touching bark, they said, “Tree.” Touching a scaled, oblong shape, they said, “Pinecone.” Touching a puddle in a basin of mud, they said, “Water.” No one smelled anything. No one tasted anything with the tip of her tongue. No one felt sunshine on his cheek or back. And so it went, reducing complex sensory objects to concepts they’d clung to since entering school. Giving correct answers was the challenge that my students made of my instructions; having concrete sensory experience was not an issue they could grasp.

When I read about school committees cutting music, art, and sports programs to make room for more math and science classes, and to increase the load of nightly homework and summer preparation, I groan inwardly at the thought of how we teach our kids to live conceptual lives in a conceptual world, as if the world of detailed sensory experience didn’t matter or even exist. Test scores and right answers are the measures of a good education, not experience, engagement, fascination, or enjoyment. We teach our kids to “know” what a small, select segment of the adult population already knows, not to lead their own lives and draw their own conclusions from their streams of unique experience. We train for entry-level jobs in favored industries as if we could tell the future, not for leading a life in unpredictable times, which would be closer to what is likely to happen. As once we trained farm girls to tend whirling spindles in textile factories throughout New England, jobs that no longer exist because we have shipped them abroad.

This is exactly parallel to our reaching out to new experience from the vantage of where we’ve already been, rather than taking pains to explore what is presently before us. Projecting our remembrances onto the now, seeing in terms of the past—how does that serve as adequate preparation for welcoming a future we cannot predict in advance? We know the journey ahead will differ from the path we are now on, but we educate our children to reach the same point we have attained for ourselves, as if

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Copernicus and Galileo faced the same world, or Newton and Einstein. We know that Steve Jobs would have been a misfit in the days of James Watt, Thomas Edison, or Henry Ford. We need to help our children live in a world we cannot see from where we stand today. The task facing every generation is to learn to be open to possibilities raised by novel situations, today and forever. If we insist on clamping what we already know now onto the minds of the young, condemning them to relive the lives their teachers have already lived, how are they going to find the essential freedoms and skills to lead lives of their own in their own times?

In truth, education must allow for a high degree of uncertainty in how it is to be put to use. Its goal must ever be teaching the young to experience and to think for themselves in the many unknown situations they will surely face. Some of those situations will be similar to the ones we have known, but they will also differ in many respects. Heading into the unknown with resources that can be brought to bear no matter what, that is the gift of the true education we owe to our own children. Making them into copies of employees we need today in our workplaces—that condemns them to a life of frustration and inadequacy in falling short of becoming their own unique selves.

Even the language we use in schools is crucial to shaping the lives of our children. It contains nouns as the names of conceptual categories, and proper nouns for the names of unique entities (people, places, events). It is a kind of code that glosses over the specific details that makes entities unique. That work is left to adverbs and adjectives, which can lend an aura of specificity by narrowing the field down a bit in terms of a few details worthy of mention for clarity or emphasis. Little blue truck; bright yellow roadster; sleek black Ferrari streaked with reddish-brown mud. But even so, language is pretty hopeless in conveying the unique specificity of things in a few words. It is better at dealing with generalities than with specifics because it takes fewer resources to store, retrieve, and combine concepts in words than detailed, sensory patterns. Astronauts looking down on the Earth from space tend to rely on shorthand exclamations such as “wow,” “beautiful,” “amazing,” with a sprinkling of recognizable geographic identifications as the Earthscape shifts beneath their gaze.

Language is made for conceptual generalization because searching through memory for an exact compilation of relevant details requires such painstaking effort. “Keep it simple and familiar” is memory’s motto, especially when pressed for fast retrieval.

Which translates as “Keep it conceptual.” Lofty. Abstract. Uncluttered. With perhaps a few telling details salted here and there as accents to create just the right atmosphere.

Daily speech usually can’t be bothered with details because they take so much time in the recalling and telling, so we settle for references to “things,” “stuff,” “entities,” “items,” “gear,” “goods,” “junk,” “whatchamacallits,” “thingamies,” “crap,” “whatsis,” and similar metageneric terms.

No getting around it, we learn by doing. And doing takes time, variation, imagination, refinement, constant experimentation, and practice, practice, practice. If leeway for such a program is not built into our schools, then we fall back on rote learning to be fed back on the test. Better, we let students pose their own answers, and wrestle with working them through, making a great many errors along the way. Those errors will be their own errors, which they will learn to correct in short order. Education based on trial and error is far better than learning to mimic a paradigm from the outset.

How would you go about solving this problem? How do you see this situation? What

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options can you think of for ways to move ahead? Which option is the fastest?; cheapest?; most enjoyable?; easiest?; hardest?; in the long run, best?

The role of education is to unleash the promise with which each child is born to this and a future world, not to shape that promise to the desires of a select group of strangers driven by self-serving interests.

1-h. Black Boxes. Metaphorically, a black box is a kind of generic puzzle container.

You try to solve a puzzle you can’t see directly, using clues you can discover by any means short of actually opening the box. In that sense, a wrapped Christmas present is a puzzle you can size up, heft, shake, listen to, bend, sniff, turn upside down, and so on to gain a sense of what’s inside. A wrapped soccer ball would respond differently to manipulation than a pair of dumbbells in a package of the same size and proportions.

I first came across black-box problems during my brief stay at MIT over sixty years ago where they took the form of electrical circuits containing various arrangements of resistors, capacitors, and induction coils sealed in a box with only input and output terminals outside the box. The challenge was to determine the structure of the circuit hidden within the box by observing how it transformed a range of electrical inputs into outputs exhibiting specific characteristics. Those were the days (early 1950s) when behaviorism with its stimulus-response paradigm reigned in the psychological world so that rats in mazes and animal behavior in general were treated much like black boxes as input-output systems observable only from the exterior. Human behavior was seen as a response to external environmental situations and manipulations, and fully understandable as a transformation of ambient stimulation.

Psychology and neuroscience have come a long way since then, yet still cannot account for minds as higher order abstractions emerging from molecular and cellular brains. The notion of free will, for instance, is dismissed as a myth, even though every scientist exhibits personal judgments, decisions, and behaviors in designing and conducting his or her experimental research. The truth is that human behavior cannot be described or explained solely in material (atomic-molecular-energetic) terms any more than the migratory flights of shorebirds and butterflies, the Gettysburg Address, or the beauty of sunsets and stars at night. These higher order phenomena elicit aesthetic judgments far transcending their generalized physical conception.

Scientists reduce the sensible world to measurable expressions of matter and energy while all along they are perceiving that same world as a reflection of their personal (subjective) experience as revealed by the sensory organs and neural networks that intercede between their minds and any such world. They want it both ways—molecular and experiential—while failing to acknowledge the difference simply because they neither recognize nor understand it. This approach is ideological at best, product of intense training in a particular cultural discipline using methods that apply to only a small portion of human experience. It is partial and selective at every step, and at worst, backwards in that it awkwardly relies on inexplicable minds to explain by so-called rational means (such as statistical analysis and peer review) a limited and perspectival grasp of a world designated a priori as primary reality.

To return to the metaphor of the black box, the minds of scientists and the rest of us are not outside, observing the box, but are themselves firmly seated within an opaque container surrounding their embodied minds, a figurative “box” allowing multiple circuits of engagement with family, community, culture, and nature. The minds we so

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desire to explain are the very tools we use to explain everything else as if mind were the absolute standard of understanding and judgment. Uncritically, we want it both ways.

Objectivity is a subjective judgment we make within our very own black box when we’ve convinced ourselves that we know what we’re doing. Which accounts for the common conceit that what I think is indeed true while what you think is a gross distortion or misconception. Each of us looks upon her world from just such an idiosyncratic point of view. Any reality beyond the confines of the black box we are born within (the semipermeable skin that contains our organic self) is an experiential hypothesis, not an absolute truth. The marvelously descriptive and painstakingly-derived qualities we ascribe to the hydrogen atom, for instance, will perish when we become extinct, yet hydrogen atoms themselves will carry on as they have since the big bang, none the wiser for our having described them and claimed to understand them.

Mind cannot be inconsistent with the forces that drive the material universe because that’s the meaning of is, to be or exist as a feature of the All, which includes the affective and figurative as well as the material. Mind is the realest thing there is. Just try living without one! The beauty of mind is that it gives us both a personal self and a world, invites us to participate, to engage, to selectively peer through the walls of our personal black box, to hear, to touch, to taste, to smell. And always to remember what we’ve done.

Without mind there’d be no atoms or molecules to speculate about, to chase down, to combine in new ways, no cell parts, no cells, no tissues, no organs, no organisms, no habitats, no living systems, no culture, no art, music, theology. No sorrow. No Joy. Without minds at the heart of our respective black boxes there’d be nothing at all because, quite simply, we would have no way of knowing anything about whatever was around us. It takes a mind to know anything at all, including how the brain “works.” The physical brain knows nothing at all, as a car engine or nuclear reactor knows nothing. It takes a mind to convert rival signals in adjacent cortical columns into a sense of spatial depth before two eyes peering from different perspectives a few inches apart. A mind to learn through trial and error, discrepancies, disparities, and simple mistakes. A brain can compare signals, but mind is a virtual quality residing in the relationship between signals, a quality arising from such a comparison, but not reducible to it, as humans are not reducible to the mud or stellar refuse they are made of.

In our minute portion of the universe, it is our privilege to engage courtesy of the power of reaching out with our minds. No minds, no awareness, no universe to be part of. Instead of grousing that the mind is a fiction, a myth, an illusion, an impossible speculation, I think it would be more productive to find sufficient grace to appreciate the gift of feelings and awareness so we can get on living harmoniously with the colorful impressions they provide us.

So, how does it happen, this mental life of ours? Neural networks offering a multiplicity of routes to synchronous signals coursing through our brains invite us to engage the universe of which we are a part. Let us stop willing the mind not to exist because it opposes our ideology and get with evolution’s program that proves it does exist as a bona fide feature of the universe in its current stage of development. Stop warring among our willful, mutually-exclusive ideologies and seek harmony with our home planet, not mastery over it. We are the most willful species imaginable. It is time to admit it so we can transcend our past errors and fulfill the promise we are born to.

Rip off the blinders of our self-serving orthodoxies and join the company of universal

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beings we might become if we cease claiming to be the one true believers chosen by God before all others.

What I am asking is that we accept the fact that we know only the glimmering, flickering impressions on the inner walls of the dark caves we inhabit throughout life.

That we live in subjective confinement within our minds. That our powers are puny in comparison to the majesty of the stars from which the atoms in our bodies have been created and donated to the universe by cataclysmic implosions when radiative pressure has surrendered to gravitational attraction. If we can update our thinking and cherished beliefs, then we might at last transcend the narrow thread of history we have come to believe in as if it were true, go beyond our previous attainments, and so become beings worthy of the planet, solar system galaxy, and universe that have hosted us all along— and of which we are integral parts. Nothing matters more than the wellbeing of the planet we live on in the vast chill of space. We know that now. It is past time to act on that certainty. Burning fossil fuels is a luxurious habit, like smoking cigarettes, an evil (in the sense of unhealthy) habit. Crowding the planet with our ways of doing things is not our destiny if we are to survive. If we don’t naturalize ourselves and become firstand-foremost citizens of the Earth, then our glorious achievements cumulatively amount to our own demise. How ironic is that? All because we claim to take as real the world as we find it, while in the meantime fabricating a world of our own making to suit ourselves from inside the black boxes we truly inhabit. It is past time to bring our actions into compliance with the living order of nature, not our self-serving fantasies as mindlessly cast upon the waters of our beliefs.

1-i. A Life Course of Trial, Error, and Successive Approximation. We live by setting goals and striving to achieve them. Roughly speaking, our first life goal is to grow into competent human beings. Our second is to discover who we are and what we hope to accomplish. Our third to make a livelihood for ourselves by developing and practicing our skills. Our fourth to find a partner and establish a family. Our fifth to support the community that in turn supports us. Our sixth to reinvent ourselves in our maturity to fill in the gaps we may have missed. Our seventh to go beyond what we have achieved to see just how far we can go before we die.

To live such a life, we set a series of goals, then strive to achieve them through a course of successive approximations. We probably won’t end each stage where we thought we would, but we’ll reach some equivalent we had not imagined for ourselves.

We pull ourselves ahead by working as hard as we can, stage after stage, always within the situations we meet along the way. The steepness of our trajectories may vary, but we advance in proportion to the attention we focus on our personal journeys, and the effort we put into our daily engagements.

To achieve our grand life goals, we work toward lesser goals day-by-week-bymonth-by-year-by-decade. Our days are largely consumed in setting and trying to meet the expectations we impose upon ourselves from morning to night: taking a shower, getting dressed, preparing breakfast, getting kids off to school, going to work, making appointments, attending meetings, shopping, and so on. Our daily routines are based on deciding on and then attaining the goals we set for ourselves on any given day as a matter of course. In this, we are primarily responsible to ourselves in conducting our life activities according to the master route map we have drawn up for living our lives, which in practical terms we live one step at a time. Our life is our life, the one we have

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imagined for ourselves and then work to achieve. Lived not on some grand, idealistic scale, but worked out detail-by-detail in one project after another, all adding up to the life we actually live through a series of engagements to which we devote our attention and effort as best we can, hope after worry after wish after bias after desire after want after need after duty after whim after commitment after question after doubt after whatever motivates us at a particular time and place. So do we invent ourselves one step at a time, each stride, leap, or shuffle adding to the journey of a lifetime.

Setting goals is how we guide ourselves in getting ahead, how we navigate this life of ours day-by-day. But gauging how close we come to attaining those goals is another matter entirely. To head off in a particular direction makes for a good start; but to arrive where we want to go is not a sure thing. Do we make it or not? Do we even come close?

That is the question. Either we do or we don’t. If we aren’t there yet, do we still have a chance? Do we have enough time, money, energy, and stamina to keep going? If not, what then? Set a lesser goal? Retreat? Call for help? Give up?

As it turns out, setting goals is only a hypothetical beginning. The real show is what happens in pursuit of that goal. It’s easy to make New Year’s resolutions, something else again to stick to them. Of the thousand entrants in a marathon, only one will be first across the finish line. Politicians are hesitant to enter races they may not win after all, risking the raising and spending of millions of dollars for the privilege of defeat. In seeking goals, follow-through is crucial. Sticking with the challenge, even as it intensifies and we grow weary unto exhaustion. And then adapting to situations we didn’t anticipate. Life is spent modifying and renewing our commitments, hoping we get a second and third wind, pushing on as best we can.

Proximity to our respective goals can make a big difference by renewing our dedication to the task we have set for ourselves. Do we have what it takes to go all the way when the going gets tougher and tougher? We’ve trained to be at our best at the start of the race, but what about near the end when we discover how young and powerful the competition is, and how painful every stride that we take?

Questions, always questions. Setting goals is absolutely no guarantee that we will achieve our wishes. Hopes, wishes, desires and all the rest are states of mind that spur us to action. Achieving goals requires that we have the right stuff to stand on the threetiered podium at the end. At the Olympics, finishing fourth puts us at ground level. Mere effort doesn’t count. Medals are precious because rare; they aren’t given out for sweat, good intentions, excuses—for anything less than peak performance.

Mental events, too, are won by those who have bested their rivals. Striving, competition, and comparison are at the heart of our mental activity, conscious selves, and engagements. From observations of my own mind, I find that comparison between goal and attainment, or past and present achievement, generates a signal as an urge in my brain that sets a particular engagement off on yet another round of action, opening in turn onto another round of perception. Our engagements are more circular than linear or, more accurately, helical like a coiled spring or inclined plane of a drill bit in that our rounds never bring us back to exactly where we were when we started, but somewhat displaced from the end we were aiming for.

Mental comparisons generate signals in proportion to the disparity between goals and accomplishments, between where we were and where we are now, between remembrance and current perception. With consciousness, the gap’s the thing. The gap between images cast on the retinas of our left and right eyes, giving rise to depth

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perception; between sounds as heard by our left and right ears, producing a sense of distance and direction; and between motions in opposite directions as told by sensors in our left and right semicircular canals when we turn our heads, providing a sense of a counterbalance within a gravitational field so we don’t fall. Consciousness—what we are aware of—is not found in neural signals themselves but in the disparity or discrepancy between two signals in, say, adjacent cortical columns. Comparison between columns creates a polarity that tells the difference between them, consciousness residing precisely in that gap along a scale of what might be expected for good or for ill.

Another way of looking at consciousness is to think of it as a result of the comparison between the possibilities offered by the many routes through the neural network linking cortical columns together into our potential memory system and the actuality of specific sensory traffic as it adopts a particular route in and among those possibilities. Sometimes the electrochemical sensory traffic flows by a familiar route and is quickly recognizable. At other times it takes a novel route never traveled before, so must be accompanied by strong emotion if it is to be remembered and made recognizable upon recurrence. As I visualize it, the routing determines the general type of pattern being engaged, the actual neural traffic the experience of the perceiver in dealing with a specific, sensory example of that pattern. The difference between potential route and actual traffic resulting in what we are conscious of.

The dichotomy exhibited by many pairs of concepts is no accident. Good/bad, happy/sad, gravity/levity, win/lose, love/hate, near/far, up/down, easy/hard, and on and on. In each pair of opposites, one is desirable in a given life situation, the other less so. Such terms are the gleanings of felt and heightened comparisons we make every moment of every day, the waypoints by which we navigate through life. The space created by these daily comparisons is where we live as conscious beings doing our best to correct the errors we make. Without such discrepancies and polarities, we’d have nothing to arouse our attention, no need to adjust our heading in life, so we’d lose our way in a fog of raw awareness in the instant, the next instant, and the next after that. A helmsman relies on his compass in gauging the difference between his actual heading and his intended course; he makes a corresponding correction again and again. His action in turning the wheel is aimed at correcting his heading to align more closely with the course he has charted beforehand. He is conscious of the disparity between heading and course; his consciousness lives in the space defined by that difference.

Just where we are on these and similar scales of being and achievement are told by the sensory input to our loops of engagement meeting up with the original impetus that spurred us to action. Like old Uroborus, the mythical serpent biting its own tail, when the active and receptive ends of our loops connect (in, say, adjacent cortical columns or in corresponding areas of a sensory map), the difference between our intentions and achievements is a measure of our success or failure in a particular venture. That difference then serving as the basis of what we need to pay attention to in order to better adjust our affairs to the particular situation we are engaged in at the time.

We learn, not simply by doing, but by purposefully engaging the situations we find ourselves in. Engagement is a matter of action, sensory perception, and concentration on the matter at hand—all at the same time. As I see it, our conscious minds emerge where a comparison between perception and action generates a correction signal that spurs the subsequent round of action. That comparison produces a polarized (positive or negative) judgment as a corrective signal to put us back on course in what we’re trying to

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achieve in the world from the confines of the particular black box in which we (our minds) reside.

We conduct our comparisons on several levels of engagement at once, within our brains, in human families, communities, cultures, and the natural world that supports us all in every way. We live, then, in ever-changing fields of comparison and polarity inside our personal black boxes, we trying to figure out the world outside our box, the world in turn trying to figure out who we are inside that same box as viewed from the great beyond. To us, the world is a puzzle; to the world, our mind is a puzzle. It is through thousands and millions of lesser engagements that we begin to piece our respective puzzles together in gaining a sense of the mystery on the far side of the walls of our box, both inside and outside, depending on our situated perspective. All made possible by our brains, but not wholly contained within any particular brain. We live by inference, feeling, guesswork, and opinion, not certain knowledge. Most of the time we are mistaken because our powers are so frail and our tasks so enormous. Yet if we don’t commit ourselves to a life of ongoing, successive, multi-level engagements, we are apt to think we know everything when in fact we know almost nothing at all. The proof of our success is in the actual doing, not in the goals we have set for ourselves.

Brain talk is full of terms like data, information, computation, processing, knowledge, and other terms of that noble family of academic abstractions. But seldom do we live up to the expectations of the scientists and engineers who treat the brain as if they had designed it themselves by rational means, which they didn’t and never could.

Such terms are descriptors of what neuroscientists want to find, not necessarily of what’s there in the brain to discover. That is, neuroscience is salted with terms meaningful to those who study the brain, but those same terms are wide of the mark set by instinctual users of particular brains as tools for conducting life as a work-in-progress at every step.

Most of the mass of the brain is made up of axons, connections between neurons, not the nuclei, cortical columns, and synapses that actually perform so much of our mental work. It is the chemical flow between nerve cells that brings minds to life, as facilitated by the travel of ionic potentials from cell bodies to their extremities. The flow of neurotransmitters across synaptic gaps between nerve cells at myriad points of connection enables those chemicals to get to the right place at the right time to activate or inhibit a comparison in synchrony with other signals so that simultaneous connections are sustained between different regions of the brain, furthering the coherent neural traffic we experience as mind, awareness, or consciousness.

Mind is a collaborative function of brain, body, culture, and nature. It is not confined to the brain but reaches through skilled actions to the outer limits of the body and, beyond that, to the cascade of energy impinging on sensory organs, as well as to reliable supplies of air, food, and water. Our minds acquire language and numbers because they are born to language and numbers as two of the cultural media in which they are immersed. They acquire a genome and genetic heritage by being born to particular parents who, at conception, consist of one man and one woman who inhabit a particular niche within culture and nature.

What is not obvious is that minds sharpen, clarify, emphasize, and inhibit various aspects of their collaborative functioning, so that the worlds they live in are largely of their own making and editing. Minds are models of the great world, but are not that world in itself. Evolution may have brought them so far, but the specific situations each

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individual is born to are subject to unique, epigenetic influences that shape each subjective life world in idiosyncratic fashion, with the result that each life world is unlike any other in finest detail. The more the brain sharpens and clarifies the signals it processes (a necessity for survival based on fast and appropriate action), the less the inner world of awareness enabled by that brain can be described as a “representation” of the world itself as it is construed to exist on the far side of one’s senses.

Our minds leap the hurdle of non-representation by sampling the outer world as fast and frequently as possible through rapid deployment of as many loops of engagement as it can sustain on different levels of awareness, allowing each mind to update its input as frequently as possible, and govern its behavior accordingly.

But such rapid sampling comes at the high cost of rendering a world as more of a précis than a representation. We see what we see, and don’t what we don’t. To sense sharply and clearly means we see boldly and schematically. Our sensing becomes warped without our knowing because we see what we see so clearly that we take it as the true state of worldly affairs rather than our rash stab at portraying such a world. We create a world that suits our purpose of the moment, which is all the more believable because memory, as the repository of personal truth, recognizes the world not as it is but insofar as it conforms to our prior beliefs as based on personal experience. The world we find is the world we seek in keeping with our background of expectations. That is, we see through the hazy filter of the history behind us, making the now conform to the then rather than updating the past. We abhor questioning our own judgment. Better to blame the world than blame ourselves. We are gold standards unto our own perceptions, so it makes sense to judge world situations by the performance of our own eyes (ears, touch, grasp, etc.).

What upsets us the most is to have our loops of engagements thwarted by those who view the world differently, and so disagree with us. Voices of children and telemarketers break into our trains of thought, disrupting the flow of our concentration, causing us to break stride, falter, and suffer confusion. This is the end of world order as we know it to be—that is, the order we have personally imposed on the world from the security and certainty we enjoy inside our box. Distraction, interruption, competition, contradiction, opposition—we loathe them all, and do everything we can to suppress or avoid them.

Even physically; even violently; even repeatedly. We love the worlds we create for ourselves at great personal effort and sacrifice. We warn others not to mess with what they can’t understand. Not to tread were they don’t belong.

Which is why the human world is and always has been in such turmoil. There isn’t one world out there but currently more than seven billion different worlds, each wrought to the likings of its creator and most ardent defender. What we fashion for ourselves within our outer membranes, we cast upon the waters in which we are bathed, as if those waters were an extension of our personal worlds. All we know is one life inside a black box; we are stuck in that box and that life forever. If only we could put a picture window in the end of the box so we could look upon the world more directly; but that would let the world into our sanctuary where it could violate our sacred rites and beliefs. In isolation, we are free to be fully ourselves as long as others have no idea how we conduct our mental affairs. Letting in the light of day would shatter that illusion of freedom and autonomy. Mentally speaking, transparency is anathema.

What a sad story. But told and retold around the world every day. Rulers with little minds lord it over their principalities with AK-47s gripped in iron fists. Tycoons lord it

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over their minions. Billionaires lord it over the ninety-nine percent. Heads of churches lord it over their flocks. All knowing the truth inside-out. All calling world events as they see them in splendid isolation. Husbands lording it over their wives, assigning them their duties. Wives fighting back, lording it over their partners and children as so much personal property. Mine, all mine! is the motto of the unexamined will. Again and again, open engagements coopted by those more powerful than the rest. Minds and beliefs asserted. Blindness and prejudice passed off as revelation. Subservience to one mastermind or another glossed as the highest virtue.

All because, in our heart of hearts, we dwell at the center of our respective little worlds. The same worlds we have painstakingly built for ourselves over the years. The worlds we wholly believe in because we live in a black box that would never lie to us. Or allow us to lie to ourselves. We have only the facts of our little life to go on, along with our little beliefs, and our little experience, and our little openness to the world.

I carry on like this because I’m trying to point out that, for everyday purposes, our minds are poorly equipped to deal with delicate shades and subtleties. Our sensory systems substitute boldness for accuracy. Not better to see what is out there on the far side of our senses, but more to impose our grasp of such a world as conforms to our inner remembrance and belief—the doctrine by which we live. Because we reach out of our black boxes with expectations driven by personal memory, we are prone to perceiving the world inside-out, not outside-in. That is, our engagements are more apt to be driven by what we already know than by questions, doubts, or uncertainties. Stuck in our ways, beliefs, and extreme convictions, we seem to be parodies of any thoughtful, curious, rational beings we might imagine. We are stuck in ways we have learned in the past, busily imposing that past on the present and future. Our credentials stem from the fact that we have survived to this point, so must be doing something right. Let’s get this rig moving full-throttle ahead, back to the future, indeed.

That sketch of our minds is bothersome because so counterintuitive. Is that the best we can do? Will our demise as the result of global warming be the monumental achievement we have been working toward all this time? Not necessarily. We have other options. The obvious one is to become better acquainted with our minds in their respective black boxes so that our actions are governed by a truer understanding of how we bend the world to our will, with ever more dire consequences. If we can trace our self-destructive behavior to our unwittingly self-centered attitude toward the world, then we may gradually come to see that same world as the source of all benefit on every level of our existence. Caring first for the natural, biological world that provides for us, and from which we derive our well-being, then we may find better ways to care for ourselves than taking what we want and running to get away with it. Once we assume responsibility for the state of our sheltered minds, we discover the error of our ways, not those of the world.

1-j. Wayfaring. In the terminal moments of a dream I had on the morning of March 10, 2014, I found myself loaded with gear in both hands, struggling up a crowded escalator. I met a series of obstacles at every level, but could not find my way to a particular street, which I could reach by traveling north, while again and again I found myself forced to move off in other directions. I was determined to get to that street, but events in the dream kept turning me aside. My awakening mind linked that dream to similar dreams of being thwarted in a lifelong series of similarly wayward excursions.

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When fully awake, I had the distinct thought that such dreams are models of my mind, much as my mind, in turn, is a model of my world. It struck me that what evolution has wrought in the physical network of the brain is a tool to be used for modeling the world in navigational terms such as goals, journeys, routes, destinations, distances, maps, obstacles, distractions, pathways, landmarks, wayfaring, migrations, and so on. We are primarily a mobile species that conducts its business by standing on two legs and walking toward specific destinations as goals. Our minds are made to support such a lifestyle. When immobilized and desensitized by sleep, what else would we dream about?

During breakfast I made four pages of notes in a steno pad detailing such a vision. It made sense at the time. It makes sense to me now. Animal life is, well, animated, always on the go. It moves about in search of food, water, mates, shelter, vantage points, and so on, as well as to avoid dangerous places, enemies, competitors, rivals, harsh conditions, and fearful situations. Animals have appendages that enable them variously to crawl, walk, run, gallop, scamper, hop, leap, fly, glide, slide, slither, float, drift, paddle, swim, dig, roam, and explore their way about their habitats. They make or adopt paths, trails, routes, flyways, tunnels, home ranges, migrations, forays, escape holes, dens, nests, warrens, and other artifacts to accommodate their travels and activities.

To accomplish such feats, animals have brains that coordinate the movements of their bodies and appendages, enabling them to move about and thrive in the habitats to which they are suited. Minds, to the degree they have achieved them, allow those animals the spontaneous coordination of sensory inputs (impressions) with motor outputs (actions) in the construction of behaviors intended to fit individual animals to the environments and situations they encounter in the course of meeting their needs and desires, either instinctively or as informed by memory of such efforts in the past.

In this particular dream, I could not coordinate my sensory impressions with any kind of meaningful action because sleep results from the uncoupling of just those two capacities, leaving my goals unsupported by any means of attaining them, which is my plight in a great many of my dreams. Leaving me laboring mightily to accomplish the impossible in being stymied in my search for a route leading where I want to go. If wayfaring is the essence of consciousness, as I believe it to be, then dreams leave me in a present state without the backup of memory to remind me how I might have found my way in the past. In dreams, I am only half-human. I have access to selected desires and a rapid succession of images, with no way to join the two in a successful effort to do what I want to get done. My brain may be sufficiently awake to maintain my innards in a state of semi-automation, but my mind is left to twiddle its figurative thumbs for lack of any ability to move, depriving me of the essential quality of animate life.

All of which casts a revelatory light on the nature of mind, our personal prime mover and animator. Currently, it may be an unforgivable faux pas to mention the existence of free will, but what is it that is missing in states of sleeping and dreaming if not precisely that, the will that serves as wayfarer-in-chief when we reawaken? Selfguided locomotion is the essence of our animal existence. Our abhorrence of that thought is a shadow cast by the ideology of behaviorism on the entire discipline of neuroscientific study. If I were a psychologist or neuroscientist, I would look first at the nexus between perception and action for the neural structures that account for the coupling of the two. Affect, values, and memory would feed into that coupling, along with an ability to compare goals against accomplishments as a gauge of the relative

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success or failure of earlier attempts to coordinate the two. And, too, I would expect to find several means of smoothing out the coordination during the next round of sensorimotor engagement by way of cortical appendages thought to assist in that function (such as hippocampus, cerebellum, basal ganglia).

Mind in its black box as model of the world outside the box—that is the image I awoke with from my dream. Every individual’s neural network is different due to epigenetic (including experiential) factors governing the structure of such networks in finest detail. Every mind providing a unique model of, and introduction to, the world.

Every mind steering a person on her unique journey through life. The job of each person’s mind being to guide his steps through successive life engagements in response to relevant sensory experience, memory, feelings, values, judgments, goals, expectancies, and other motivators acquired in a single lifetime. No mind being merely an autopilot, but all serving as finely-tuned, experiential systems creatively bridging the gap between the integrity of a singular organism and its familial, communal, cultural and natural environments at different levels of resolution and discernment. The upshot being the powerful influence of mental characteristics and accomplishments on the physical reproduction and survival of individual bodies and brains, as well as on the cultural and genetic traits they share with their descendants.

All that from one dream, backed up by hundreds of earlier examples. And by the flurry of ideas in my mind as I waken unto them yet again. The image of a wayfarer in a black box is as good a metaphor as I have hit upon for what it feels like to be me. It is no accident that I wrote a book based on sixty hikes taken in Acadia National Park over a period of five years. Ostensibly the book was my effort to describe “the soul of a national park,” but as today’s dream gives an early morning snapshot of my mind, the book is more a portrait of the same mind in the mid-1990s when I was engaged in taking those hikes and putting that book together. I see it now as an extended metaphor for the park from the perspective inside my black box at the time. And looking further back to 1982, I see the doctoral dissertation I wrote then as a portrayal of the mind of the same wayfarer at an earlier stage of his journey. 

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2. ENGAGEMENT, A BRIEF RUN-THROUGH 2-a. Inside the Black Box: Perception. In this section I will summarize my view of our looping engagements with our surroundings, starting within ourselves from perception to action via the several alternative routes between them (from reflexes and mimicry, through habit and routine, to prejudice and ideology, on to full awareness). In the next section I will extend those loops past our bodily envelope to include our surrounding families, communities, cultures, and natural environments at different levels of discernment.

Please note that I am the world’s leading expert on the mental goings-on within my personal black box according to the perspectives provided by my own mind from inside that box. Other than by my personal understanding as based on my reading in neurology and neuroscience, I have no authority to speak about events taking place on a neurochemical level in any brain whatsoever. Brain is implicit in mind at every stage of engagement. So too is the energy flowing through pathways within the brain, energy that reflects its spatial and temporal organization upon being translated into neural terms by our body’s sensory receptors. Though my view of these processes has been formed during a long course of self-reflection, I generalize here by writing variously in reference to “I,” “you,” and “we” as if I were intimately acquainted with mental events in everyone’s brain (including yours). I do this to encourage readers to take part in the mental exercise I am performing on myself, so to offer other wayfarers an opportunity for self-discovery in light of their own experience. Feel free to modify my offer as you see fit so that your findings are your own.

Personal memory plays in the background of every engagement as called for by the different situations and patterns of stimulation we encounter, providing a backstory that helps us translate what is happening into the familiar terms of our mental understanding. The plot runs like this: starting with arousal so that memory is poised to entertain signals stirred by our readiness to pay attention, an inner sense of the current situation we are dealing with focuses expectancy on what is likely to happen.

What we notice in particular is deviations from, or exceptions to, our expectancies.

Novel features catch our attention because they have much to tell us in relation to the pattern of what we expected to find, which instantly becomes background to what actually strikes our senses. Looking up from a hospital bed (where I was having stitches put in my hand after a recent fall on slippery rocks), I noticed, not the pattern of white netting that attached the curtain around my bed to a track in the ceiling, but the oneinch hole in that netting that formed a black exception to the white regularity of that grid of fibers. Attention is drawn to the buzzing fly that is a conspicuous exception to the silence around us, to the lightning striking out of dark clouds, to the silhouette of the sole sandpiper running along the tideline, to the stain on the white tablecloth, the cough arising from a rapt audience, the new rattle in our car, and so on. Expectancy establishes the pattern of what we are used to seeing; attention rushes in to focus on particular details that stand out against the background of those expectations.

If a particular sensory pattern is unfamiliar, and we are not on the lookout for such a pattern, we might well ignore it. If, on the other hand, we have noted it before and so recognize it this time because we have a history with such patterns and they have acquired a certain personal meaning or significance, then that pattern will make its way to a suitable pathway in our neural network, where it will assume the significance

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bestowed by previous activations of that pathway. Expectancy signals a readiness to welcome incoming sensory stimulation into particular pathways through our neural networks. Without such preexisting pathways, our minds would be eternally naïve regarding whatever current stimulation they might receive, and our welcome, devoid of expectancy, would be equally shallow on every occasion. But in fact our histories of earlier stimulation in particular situations have significantly altered our readiness to receive further examples, so from the start we favor some patterns over others, while not recognizing those we have not met with before.

Distinct sensory contrast or motion, on the other hand, direct attention to a notable feature within the overall pattern of ambient energy that our sensory receptors receive at one level of discernment or another (wasp in the jam, cherry atop the sundae, smudge on a clean sheet). In short order, we recognize that feature as matching a familiar pattern of activation and inhibition within the neural network of our brains. If that pattern of ambient energy is novel in our not having noted it before (or not having remembered it), we may dismiss it as irrelevant because it is not what we are looking for. On the other hand, if the situation warrants (because of frequent repetition or strong emotion such as shock or surprise), that novel pattern may ignite long-term activation of neurons along its route through our neural networks as being worthy of remembrance. In that case, we can search our semantic memories for a suitable label to associate with that particular pattern (It looks like some kind of duck, a merganser perhaps; it doesn’t match a common or red-breasted merganser, maybe it’s a hooded merganser. Yes, it has that white patch at the rear of its crest. That’s what I’ll call it.)

Such a sequence of perceptual events can take place across a wide range of discriminations or levels of detail regarding the patterns we are dealing with. We can perceive grossly or finely, remotely or closely, depending on our need at the moment in accord with what we feel is warranted by our current situation. We shift the scale of our discernment to meet our interest at the time, allowing us to peer at, say, the hand weaving of a Navajo rug through a magnifying glass, or to step back to gain an overall sense of the pattern as if we were to imagine hanging it on the wall of our living room. In general, experts and professionals make the extra effort required to appreciate the more detailed view, while laypersons settle for a quick scan from a greater distance in keeping with their everyday needs. The discriminating observer takes pains to encompass a wide range of details in her understanding of a given sensory phenomenon of particular interest. A once-over-lightly approach is suitable to the curiosity level of the casual passer-by.

That whole series of events—fitting a particular sensory pattern to a preexisting route determined by a corridor of neurons reserved for members of a given concept bearing a familiar name—represents the categorization or recognition function of mind as the upshot of a given instance of perception. This function is the mind’s response to the question, What’s happening now? What’s going on? What am I seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, and so on?

With memory always in the background, the flow of sensory stimulation proceeds— courtesy of arousal, curiosity, expectancy, and attention—from sensory receptors to the formation of sensory patterns or phenomena within the neural network given to perception, where those impressions are categorized as patterns we are familiar with and so recognize as types of experience having not only labels or names, but meanings as well. At which point we cease engaging perceptually with that incoming energy and

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shift to dealing with its conceptual meaning, giving it place in our hierarchy of meaningful understanding of how named patterns of energy fit together within the structure of our experience of such patterns as we are able to sort and recognize them as being related one to another.

2-b. Inside the Black Box: Meaning. Following perception, the next stage of our mental engagement is to put the resulting understanding in context of our current situation so that a judgment of its meaning or place in our scheme of things prepares us to frame an appropriate response.

The agent performing that judgment in the presence of affect or emotion is what I call the situated self at the core of the mind where it serves as mediator between perception and action. The self is the intelligent agent having access to memory, perception, understanding, emotion, and biological values, together with the life force as the metabolic fuel driving us to act on our own behalf in a particular situation. How the self resolves the various motivations feeding into it by comparing, weighing, and judging their influence is what we call free will. It is “free” in the sense that each person judges the relative importance of the various motivating forces in the light of her personal experience, the residuum of her having lived this far in her life and earned the right (if not the obligation) to be the person she is. Free will is nothing else than the gift of learning through experience that evolution equips us with as we face into the situations we encounter, and decide how to respond in light of the teachings of our personal life story. There is no blanket formula for survival we can all call upon such as insects’ reliance on a small set of preprogrammed instincts; we are under our own recognizance, and have the privilege to decide for ourselves what to do, including calling on the judgment of others when we need help.

What we call belief is a conceptual summation of the internal forces of motivation which drive us to construe a given situation one way or another. The irony of the situated self is that living within the confines of its particular intelligence in its figurative black box as uniquely suspended between input and output (perception and action), as each of us does, our primary motivators constellate the situation that we occupy at any particular time, so that our operative reality, experienced uniquely by us, is a matter of subjective belief. That is, we construct the situations we find ourselves in from the inherent mental forces that motivate us at the time, and those forces—memory, understanding, imagination, thought, values, emotions, energy level, among others—are weighed against one another in forming a judgment upon how best to resolve the tension between perception and action in a manner appropriate to that subjective situation. The world we claim to live in is a high-level abstraction, a concoction of our unique intelligence in its internally-structured situation. Our subjective reality results from the categorizations of impressions as projected upon the energy field that surrounds us, and as such, is subject to a construal for which each of us is wholly responsible. The world lives in us as much as we live in the world. And that world is largely a matter of subjective, affect-driven belief, not demonstrable fact.

Inherent biological values and situational emotions are two of the primary motivators that guide the self in weighing evidence and deciding what to do. We all require air, water, food, rest, shelter, and companions to survive in most situations. We build (or select) cultures around ourselves as a group to meet these and other needs on a reliable basis within the natural habitats where we live. But emotions are our primary

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resource and guide in meeting the many situations we face on our own during our ongoing engagements. Fear, anger, loathing, envy, sympathy, love, and joy not only stir us to action in proportion to their motivating strength, but their positive or negative polarity directs us to either seek or avoid situations in which they arise.

The situated self, the “I” at our core, initiates a round of engagement by converting the meaning of a given situation as perceived into a course of action appropriate to our experience in such situations. The valenced or polarized drive of emotion provides the key to the self’s judgment on the basis of that meaning. Fight or flight? Good or bad?

Glad or sad? Love or spite? If the incoming perception supports or agrees with our intentions, we judge it to be a positive state of affairs and we will do what we can to further that agreement. If, on the other hand, perception disagrees with or opposes our prior intentions, then our judgments will depart from what we did earlier and we revise our behavior to remedy the situation by taking a different tack. The self, that is, is where incoming and outgoing signals are linked together on the basis of our current judgment of harmony or discord, suitability or inappropriateness, liking or loathing. That judgment is an expression of our personal intelligence in combining the diverse forces acting upon us into a coherent course of action.

In writing these words, I continuously edit what I have just written to better accord with what I am trying to say. The work of engaging is ongoing and requires judgment at every round. I write, read, rewrite, reread, continuously adjusting my stream of activity until I am happy (or at least not dissatisfied) with what I have put down, and move on to the next thought. What I am after in writing this reflection is a sense of personal integrity that represents my inner workings as I truly know them from inside my mind.

In wallpapering the front room of a house I was living in over forty years ago, I chose a colonial pattern in pale blue that I thought was attractive while not calling undue attention to itself. Stepping back to view the first strip I had hung behind the door, I realized I had hung the pattern upside-down. It was too late to remove it, so I had no choice but to continue, taking care to right my error, beginning with the second strip. As it turned out, the pattern was so subtle, it was hard to tell the difference between the first two strips. By looking closely, I could see it, but no one ever mentioned my mistake. Note, however, that I have remembered it for half of my life. That long-ago lack of scrutiny and judgment has stuck in my brain as a major flaw ever since. A flaw in my integrity that I need to draw attention to, and apologize for. A cautionary tale. A life lesson to myself, earned through trial and error. As my confounding “solstice” with “solace” in a sentence (long forgotten) that I spoke to my father who was in the driver’s seat when I as an adolescent was getting into the back seat of the family car, a mistake that made me feel stupid then, and embarrasses me even now fifty years later.

The situated self is the helmsman who steers future behavior in keeping with judgments made upon the state of affairs signaled by current perception, emotion, and understanding. We all live at the core of our engagements, adjusting our course according to where we want to go in relation to where we have been and where we find ourselves now. The essence of mind is in the sense of mental integrity and intelligence that our navigational skills represent. My inner helmsman is as close as I can come to the sense of spiritual guidance I feel when trusting my situated self to find coherent meaning in the many currents of thought and feeling flowing through my mind as integrated into a particular judgment and commitment to action. Such guidance is everpresent in my mind as I write this essay on self-reflection. The crux of that guidance is

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its integrity as a sign that all dimensions of mind are in active relationship one with another, creating an intelligent whole from its contributing parts. That sense of mental integrity is very much like what we mean by physical health as a sign that all our bodily systems are in good order and functioning together, the result being nothing less than life itself. Mental integrity (health, wholeness) is my sense of, and guide to, my inner life. It is the presence in myself that I recognize as my personal consciousness.

In familiar situations, we often relax our scrutiny by relying on less demanding procedures than full judgment of how we are handling ourselves. Easing off, we can link perception to action via unconscious reflexes, mimicry, rote learning, habitual performance, prejudice, the comforting practice of ideology, and other such shortcuts.

In moving on from perception to action, we can fall back on our reflexes and act wholly without thinking. We can mimic how our peers respond in similar situations. We can rely on rote behaviors we have internalized from how others have taught us to act in such circumstances. We can replay habits and routines we have fallen into over the years through frequent repetitions. We can surrender to the prejudices that come to the surface from deep inside our histories of experience that we have never truly dealt with or given much thought to. We can fall back on the ideology we have been steeped in for much of our lives, the ways of our tribe, of our kind of people. And, always, we have the option of acting imaginatively and creatively to solve particular problems or otherwise meet our needs at the moment, of taking the risk of doing something we have never done before as called for by our sense of self in a novel predicament. Imagination depends on reshuffling our standard schemes of meaning at different levels of discernment so that we mix and match our schemes and orders of understanding to come up with a new version of what might be fitting and possible, and give that new order a try to see what will happen.

Typically, we are less than spontaneous in deciding what to do next. If we feel that a lot is riding on our decision, then we can make lists of pros and cons, weigh them, prioritize them, review them, reshuffle them, add other possibilities and eliminate the ones we find weak or unacceptable. If we have the luxury of time to come up with a plan, we can usually mull such matters long enough to finally decide what to do. What job to take, school to attend, partner to join, apartment to take, neighborhood to live in, or meal to prepare for dinner. We often do this by narrowing our choices down to two alternatives, and then by eliminating one or the other.

If we have a great many options in steering our course between the reefs on either hand, it is the uncharted ones that cause most of the trouble, the ones we do not suspect are even out there, waiting for us to make one wrong turn or misstep. It takes a great deal of vigilance to be constantly on guard. Too much, that is, in comparison with our everyday habits and expectations. On local ground or in familiar waters, perhaps we can get by without accident. But sooner or later the sun will be in our eyes, or night will fall, fog roll in, visibility drop to zero, and we will find that our habits and routines are not good enough guides to engagements that continue nonetheless without benefit of oversight.

I have tales to tell about each of these factors endangering my life as a casual wayfarer caught off-guard by prevailing conditions. When blinded by the sun, steering my car into the ditch to avoid oncoming traffic, feeling my way with my feet across the face of a cliff after sunset, turning my boat in circles with no sense of direction in the fog, being trapped between cliffs of ice ahead and behind me, watching icicles fall into the

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trail just where I would have been had I not stopped to take one last picture—these are the stuff of memories and nightmares I will never forget, engagements gone wrong due to lack of forethought, wisdom, or due caution. No wonder parents become worrywarts when the responsibilities of childrearing strike home, and children grow to maturity sadder but wiser for the risks they have taken without knowing any better during fits of youthful fervor.

How to respond is always our call as a reflection of our integrity, maturity, and intelligence in meeting challenges head-on by suiting our behavior to what we feel is called for in the moment, drawing on strengths, skills, and inclinations we have built-up in living the lives we have led as preparation for making this particular judgment.

The “I” is the seat of life’s engagements because, having access to them all, it is the seat of perception, memory, meaning, emotion, judgment, and drive of the life force in a particular body. It is the seat of the self because it is at the core of our identity, who we are to ourselves. Its job is to derive meaning from sensory impressions, and to channel that meaning forward into a course of purposive action. A good portion of the self is an emergent property of the brain with its neurons, ions, and chemicals, but it is not limited to that physical organ because its reach extends fore and aft, from sensing incoming energy from the world to looking ahead to acting in the world beyond body and brain. The self is situated in the flow of energy through its portals, the flow of traffic through pathways in the brain, and outward into the world, which it extrapolates from awareness by paying attention to particular sensory features as inciters of meaning and significance.

No, this is not the prevailing view, but it fits the facts when mind, will, and judgment are allowed to be real, and the brain is accepted as the vehicle of mind, a vehicle such as an automobile that knows nothing of its driver’s plans, but serves the will of that driver nonetheless. The car has no idea where it is going; that understanding has been reserved to the mind of the driver (or now her GPS unit as prompted by her mind). Experience is the cumulative ability we have accrued over the years to judge situations in light of our own wits, our personal grasp of how the world works and how we ourselves work as complementary members of that world. Even inside our black boxes, we live within whatever awareness we can eke of what’s happening around and within us that we can make an appropriate response.

I could not have written these thoughts when I was thirty or sixty years old; I had to wait until I was in my eighties to discover the audacity within myself to feel that I knew what I was talking about and that I wanted to give the world an opportunity to consider my message. In the meantime, I have read works by thinkers such as Gerald M. Edelman, Joseph LeDoux, Michael Gazzaniga, Douglas Hofstadter, and shorter pieces by a great many soldiers in the trenches of neuroscience. But my primary source for over thirty years has been my personal witness to the workings of my own mind, not to be confused with my brain, of which, concretely speaking, I am wholly oblivious.

Decisions, decisions, beginning to end, life is made up of one after another. The life we are born to is only a beginning where the major decisions are made by grownups and we as children go along because we don’t have a choice. As we gradually come into our own through hard-won experience, we learn to grapple with situations as we come to them, striving for freedom and independence in living as we choose to live for ourselves, not as somebody’s child. But of course being ourselves gradually comes to us while we

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are somebody’s child, so we become who we are through a long series of trials, errors, retrials, and eventually morph into selves whose judgments we can live by and with.

Examples of the exercise of judgment include courts of law where judges, tribunals, and juries weigh the evidence pointing one way or the other toward either guilt or innocence (precluding the possibility of shades of guilt); umpires calling strikes or balls, safe or out; and debaters randomly assigned a thesis to defend or disprove, pro or con.

Judgment comes down to an either or decision: yes or no, go or no-go, true or false, good or bad, freedom or captivity, change it or lump it. Which means the situation at issue has to be structured as a duality to simplify the job of making a polarized decision.

This structure is not arbitrary. It flows from the workings of the human mind in seeing issues in black and white. Nerve cells either fire or they don’t. They resolve the various activating and inhibiting signals they receive. If the activation threshold is reached, the nerve cell fires; if it fails to reach that level, it does nothing. End of signal in that branch of the network. True, if the threshold is crossed, then variations in signal strength are reflected in the frequency of firing. But if the threshold is not reached, that signal is dead in that neuron. Which is why so many of the concepts with which we compose our thoughts come in pairs of opposites: pro or con, assertion or negation, promotion or opposition, with or without, fight or flight, and on and on. As I have written above, the essence of consciousness is found in sharpening perception, increasing contrast, heightening discernment, making thoughts and judgments that much clearer and unambiguous. We are wayfarers made to be judicious in choosing our pathways through a succession of either-or decisions. The ultimate determination has serious consequences: win or lose, live or die. So the wisdom of our heritage, genome, intelligence, and judgment comes down to the quintessential difference between positive or negative, yes or no, do or don’t, this way or that.

Mental judgments, the very stuff of consciousness, are based on either-or comparisons. On summing good points and bad points to see which tally is more convincing. Comparison of possibilities is one of our primary means of survival because, as I see it, it is the method that our nervous system is dedicated to. I have already pointed to the role of comparison in such vital functions as depth perception, directional hearing, and maintaining our balance. Simple acts such as steering a boat by a compass are acts of comparison, in this case between our charted and actual headings, the difference—the dis-parity—between them indicating the degree and direction of the course correction it is our duty to make.

The disparity between two signals is what we are aware of, not either one or the other by itself. As the French say regarding the sexes, vivre la difference! because it is precisely such crucial differences that elevate us into states of awareness. Consciousness is all about relationships, not things in themselves. About how the present stands up against expectancies grounded in bygone days. About how engagements turn out in comparison to our original intents. About how jokes defy our expectancies. About how perceptions gauge the fit between our intentions and the concrete results we actually achieve. Our primary approach to judgment is to assess how a given phenomenon fits into the situation we find ourselves in. That is, fits our purposes and engagements at the moment. Trial-and-error is the gateway to consciousness. Is the glass half full or half empty? That depends on our perspective, which further depends on our situation. If we want more to drink, it’s half gone; if we’ve drunk all we want, it’s half-full. Being situational, consciousness comes in two polarities, encouraging or discouraging,

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affirming or negating, good or bad, considered or rash, wise or foolish. The sharp differences heighten the clarity and emphasis of the comparisons by which we decide our course between the well- or less-traveled way ahead.

Comparison can be a measurement to a standard, or a simple judgment of the similarity and difference between any two phenomena. We quickly notice the wrongness of the wasp in the jam, the rightness of the cherry atop the sundae. I remember a teacher of aesthetics once remarking that he could discourse endlessly on the comparison between a cigarette and a piece of chalk (he then having one in each hand). Being a highly visual person, I find symmetry and other comparative relationships in the features of almost everything I see and photograph. It is the tension and balance told by such graphic relationships that I notice more than the things in themselves. I remember a faculty wife whose face was so perfectly symmetrical that I found it painful to look at her because, without any disparity, I had no comfort zone within which to admire her beauty. Standards often turn out to be what we are used to, so are rooted in personal experience and opinion. I am tired of winter so think a daytime temperature above freezing is just fine; a skier would find it too warm. Men and women vary widely in their primary and secondary sexual characteristics and preferences, yet convention has it that men are men and women are women, period. Only recently do we provide a few boxes to check for those who don’t fit either stereotype. We are often optimistic or pessimistic about world affairs, reflecting polarized judgments about how things are going from our point of view. We gauge the temperature by scales graded in either degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius, but not both. Optimists are prone to seeing virtues where pessimists harp on faults. Pollyannas find good in everyone; fault-finders thrive on what’s wrong. Some people shift moods between extreme states of mind: euphoria and depression, bursts of creativity and bouts of despair. At New Year’s we resolve to improve ourselves, and promise to do better next year. If sins didn’t call for either penance or forgiveness, church attendance would crash.

Which may sound like idle chatter on the topic of comparison, except what I’m trying to suggest is that comparison is the common feature of a great many neural operations. In fact, I see comparison as the essential function of the brain in leading to consciousness. It is not any particular signal that matters so much as the difference between signals in adjacent or linked cortical columns. I think of such mental comparisons as producing a delta (Δ, δ) signal in proportion to the Difference, Discrepancy, Disparity, or Displacement between corresponding signals originating in different but closely related regions of the brain. I call these virtual signals because they can only be appreciated from a vantage point that looks upon the relative discrepancy as being meaningful in itself. Such delta signals are the determining feature of three aspects of awareness I have already mentioned: binocular vision, binaural hearing, and motion detection in semicircular canals on opposite sides of the head.

I have also provided the image of the helmsman at his wheel gauging the delta signal representing the discrepancy between the desired and actual heading of his vessel as told by his compass, leading to his compensating for that discrepancy by turning the wheel an equal degree in the opposite direction. So do we correct our wayfaring courses every day of our lives. And similarly, so do we learn by trial and error, adjusting our behavior to compensate for the many ways we mislead ourselves time and again. I have frequently said that my true education has been based not on remembering what I have been taught but by going off as led by my own lights, getting lost in the Slough of

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Despond, then, wiser for my slogging, fighting my way back. This is the essence of empiricism, learning the lessons, not of theory, but of concrete sensory experience.

Which is precisely what our minds provide us via our loops of experiential engagement.

Namely, our displacement as the result of a specific course of action by which we discover where our effort has taken us. We don’t look out on the world so much as on what’s right or wrong with the world, to which we direct our attention.

We are all learners by doing. If we don’t make the initial effort, we are stuck exactly where we were before, with no sense of how to correct ourselves. Mind is our means of successive approximation in approaching the goals we hope to achieve. If we make a foray, at least we learn whether or not that is the way we want to go. Standing still doing nothing, our learning, as always, is in direct proportion to our effort.

When I say the brain is a comparator, I am pointing to the essential process by which mind comes into being. Mind is not in any particular signal but rather in the horde of discrepancies between comparable signals throughout the brain. Looking from the perspective of our situated selves, our mind is the sum total of what we become aware of in that situation, including our sensory impressions; understanding of those impressions; the feel, memories, and affect they generate relative to our customary state of equilibrium; our biological values; and the life force urging us to act under present conditions one way or another. That is exactly where we live, in the space defined by that constellation of psychic phenomena, as the helmsman lives in the tension between his charted course and the actual heading he has attained.

Wayfarers all, what are we but course correctors, ever vigilant to steer ourselves clear of reefs all around? To find our way through the uncharted seas ahead? I view emotions as signaling the relative success (positive or negative, good or bad) of our engagements in furthering the journeys we are making for ourselves. Positive emotions such as joy, happiness, and a general wellbeing confirm our progress, while disorders of engagement as marked by frustration, anger, anxiety, grief, fear, and loneliness signal that we are lost to ourselves. Emotions tell us how we are doing in making our rounds.

We are fearful of or angry at those who thwart or interrupt us, and smile upon those who cooperate and help us on our way.

I have suggested that dreams highlight our yearnings as regarded from a perspective of helpless inactivity imposed by sleep. Here is the verbatim report of a dream I had recently (December 4, 2013) that reflects the state of my mind when my loops of engagement were stymied, yet I remained at the helm with my raw feelings exposed. A wayfarer without navigation skills, I couldn’t engage in a meaningful way with the situation I found myself in, so things inevitably went from bad to worse.

I am hired to operate a big electronic machine. I have two assistants to work with me, but no one has explained the machine to me, so I feel strong pressure to explain it to my helpers, but I can’t. I can’t live up to my responsibility. I have the blue machine moved outside to be where other machines are. I wait for instructions, which don’t come. To get back in the building, we all must climb up the forty-five-degree slope of the loading dock made of slippery metal. The climb is arduous. After climbing the ramp twice, I say I won’t do it again, so am shown an alternate route up the back wall of a dark room where my superiors are meeting around a table. I hear my name mentioned as I scale the back wall to reach a narrow (horizontal) cupboard door at the ceiling level that I must crawl through. It leads to a kitchen shelf where two men are preparing food. I

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apologize for getting in their way, but imagine the meeting’s view of my legs sticking out [of] the narrow opening as I barely squeeze through it. I have a strong sense of the direction I must take to get back to work along a metal-lined walkway up a steep slope and along slippery rocks. I wear boots and keep slipping back, making no headway. I wake up while slipping back once again.

To me, that is a clear portrait of a mind that is driven to act, but can’t act effectively because I can’t engage in a meaningful exchange with significant features of my surroundings. It is precisely the feel or texture of such thwarted exchanges that fuels the bulk of my dreams. There is no on-the-spot revision or change of course, no learning from experience. Each dream situation depicts a series of errors without correction. My dreams are one dimensional, relentlessly rushing on from situation to situation without any course adjustments whatever. I find myself navigating without judgment—because as helmsman, I can’t turn the wheel, or it is broken. It is always a relief to wake up and return to my senses, that is, to actually engage my world once again.

Another dimension of the self as situated between perception and action, between memory and emotion, is the creation of spacetime as the medium of experience.

Spacetime is the medium of two types of change, change through time, change through space. Perception from a stable point of view—such as from a seat in a theater or stadium with the gaze fixed on one spot, or while listening to music with eyes closed— such fixed attention results in awareness of changes over time that are not the result of personal action. Such changes generated by others exist in the medium of time. Action resulting in bodily motions through space—as walking through woods while brushing branches aside, or slaloming down a steep slope while swinging one’s center of gravity side-to-side—such changes resulting from bodily motions result in changes in the perspective from which the self is perceiving the world, so those changes are generated by an agent moving through the medium of space.

Most awareness of change exists in the combined medium of active engagement in which both self and world are changing simultaneously in the combined medium of spacetime. We are both subject and object, actor and perceiver at the same instant in the same place. When we fly across the Pacific without moving from our seats in the plane, we suffer jet lag because our inner self has done nothing to bring about such changes in both time zones and geospatial location, even though our attention has shifted from one thing to another during the journey. As a result, we become tired and disoriented. When we sit fixed in our seats before a computer, TV, or film, we observe car chases, explosions, and world-changing events without the benefit of truly engaging a palpable situation, so we can walk away from it without a scratch as if nothing had happened, and we are none the wiser for the time we have spent sitting comfortably in our seats because we have invested very little energy in staying put. On a treadmill or stationary bike, we can go for miles putting in the effort without a change of scene, ending where we started, putting in our time by the clock, exhausting ourselves, but gleaning not one iota of experience. Treadmills were invented to do work (raise water from ditch to field, grind grain, power bicycles), but exercise machines are made to accomplish nothing at considerable expenditure of energy. We live in a world of phony engagements that take place in no real place and no real time, other than the illusions we create for ourselves while striding manfully ahead or being “entertained.”

Impairments of the wayfaring and homebody skills of the situated self at the center of its black box include hearing-, vision-, and memory-loss; addictions of all sorts;

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affective disorders; the full autism spectrum; schizophrenia; disaffection; posttraumatic stress disorder; and bipolar disorder.

2-c. Inside the Black Box: Action. So, to continue my journey along the loops of engagement cycling through my mind: after perception and the situated self comes the realm of planning and action, leading to my playing my role as wayfarer making my way through the serial adventures of my life. Once options have been compared and judgments cast, the issue then is to make and effect a plan of action. Goals are set, decisions made how to proceed, projects designed and implemented, teams and relationships formed, tools selected, skills developed and practiced, all leading to decisive moments when action is performed in accord with the judgment cast so many milliseconds, hours, days, or years ago.

By the black box image, where perception treats the energy input to my mind from the ambient, action directs my life’s energy output into that ambient as shaped in spacetime by my mind. The transformation of that flow of energy by the self as situated in a particular configuration of mental parameters (memories, values, emotions, impressions, meanings, motivations, and so on) is directed across the gap or discrepancy between incoming perception as realized and outgoing action as intended or desired. The conscious mind as the nexus between perception and action is the seat of that discrepancy, and of the judgment intended to adjust or correct it.

Action is the most familiar stage of our loops of engagement because it is how we make our livings by doing what we do, sometimes for pay, often not. The difference is told by whether we are acting primarily for ourselves or for our employers, furthering our own journeys or helping them along on theirs—or doing both at the same time. The art of living is to find a balance between the two that is mutually agreeable to both.

Other people have no direct way of reading our minds and intentions; they have only our deeds to go by in engaging us from a distance and forming a response. To an experienced observer, however, our mental processes may be partially suggested by what we do. And what we “do” includes speech acts, facial expressions, gestures, bodily postures, dress, grooming, poise, prosody, presence, style, and all the other signs we give off when we act, and interpret when forming impressions of those we engage. Our behaviors flow in several channels at once, many of which are largely unconscious, yet all originate in our mental processes nonetheless. In that sense, all human activity is to some degree expressive of the inner states within our personal black boxes, whether we send such messages wittingly or not.

On a daily basis, our engagements proceed in channels with many way-stations, both in our minds and in the world. I have frequently mentioned several of the dimensions of the situated self in this reflection. Our actions are equally complex in progressing through the world in serial fashion from such locations as bedrooms, clothes closets, vanity tables, bathrooms, kitchens, driveways, and cars on our forays and engagements, where we interact with our families, communities, cultures, and nature. From which we return more-or-less in reverse order to our home base, the place where we dream and restore our powers during sleep in preparation for our next round of engagement. Our persona as wayfarer is counterpoised by our character as homebody, the two aspects of our nature complementing each other in different ratios at different stages of our journey. Living with our parents while we are young children sets up patterns of expectation, yearning, and engagement that last a lifetime (because

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our minds are shaped accordingly). Developing more and more confidence as we mature, we grow increasingly bold in ranging from our home base, until we set up new bases for partnering and rearing children of our own. We make the transition from child to adult only gradually, punctuated by a rapid spurt during adolescence, which equips us with adult bodies steered by unseasoned minds, so that we rush to maturity through a program of trial and error in hope that our volatile interiors will eventually catch up with our bodily facades.

Wayfarers and homebodies in black boxes, that’s what we are to one another, each on an independent course of action guided by perception, perception stirred by previous action. We speak lightly of getting into bed with one another on intimate terms, but to really get to know someone would require us to get inside the black box shielding his or her mind, and vice versa. Can there be such a thing as a double black box, a black box for two in which we can meet each other pure-mind-to-pure-mind? No, the integrity of our respective outer membranes precludes such a possibility. If we take off our clothes, we can snuggle our outer membranes together, but our minds keep their distance. The best we can do is engage one another on a trusting and intimate course of action by mutual commitment. Walking side-by-side holding hands, jointly venturing forth in common endeavor, is about as close as we can come to synchronizing the relative integrities of our respective black boxes. Shared regard and consent—not possession, not dropping all barriers, not going through the motions, not hooking up—is the essence of love. As wayfarers in black boxes, a consentient and durable commitment to engage side-by-side is the best we can achieve when it comes to fulfilling the dream of union with another. Engagements run by mutual consent and coordination may be possible; a merging of souls is beyond mortal reach.

As bipedal quadrupeds, our remarkable, weight-bearing hind limbs enable much of our wayfaring, freeing our forelimbs for all manner of clever manipulations for which we are duly renown. While our legs shuffle, walk, lope, stride, run, hop, leap, jump, skip, dance and generally carry us ahead in a forward direction, our arms, hands, and fingers can hold, carry, throw, catch, pull, push, press, twist, hit, point, rub, caress, clap, and make a great many other finely-adjusted movements and gestures in accomplishing the myriad tasks we assign ourselves to get done. Think of the physical discipline required of ballet dancers, baseball players, musicians, mechanics, assemblers, crafters, artists, chefs, carpenters, jewelers, and all who work with trained arms, hands, and fingers—the thousands of hours of practice, rehearsal, and refinement they put in to acquiring the skills they need to create the civilized world we take so for granted as if being born to it meant it has existed forever just as it is.

No, the world we live in today is largely made and maintained by human hands.

Hands consisting of bones, joints, muscles, and tendons all directed and coordinated by human minds that intentionally will them to perform as they do. Here is the crux of our loops of engagement, the behaviors we exhibit as appropriate to the situations we find ourselves in. This is the leading edge of our intent to get through the day and survive.

Every perception, meaning, and action leads to this, our daily performance. Our engagement with life itself by which we prove ourselves worthy.

Just having that thought gives me a jab to the chest, leaving me breathless. It’s that simple? The commotions and alarms, the furor, the folly, the turmoil—all come down to this? Our painstaking engagement in doing whatever it is we do? Me, sitting at my computer, leaning back in my chair, staring at my winking cursor at the end of this very

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sentence? This is what it is all about? The point of my life? Me, sitting here, fingers poised over my keyboard, deciding what to write next?

Yes, in my case, this is precisely the point. I have shut everything else from my mind. My life experience leads to this moment of wonderful tension. What now? After eighty-one years, what do I do in this exact instant? Picture a life made of billions of such instants. Cumulatively preparing for, adding to, and shaping this particular one.

The evidence of my survival for those billions of instants tells me I must be doing something right. As a wayfarer, I have made and followed a course for myself that leads here. The challenge I take from this instant is to decide how I am to guide my arms, hands, and fingers to type what it is I have to say. Not want to say, but have to say because my entire life is balanced just here at this point in time when I am about to change the configuration of the world with my next stroke of a key. Spiritual guidance is what it takes, in the form of a metaphorical helmsman at the inner wheel of myself.

These thoughts may give you a sense of the urgency that drives me to engage in this task I have assigned to myself by living the life I have lived. To get down on paper my thoughts about how my mind works. The only mind I have access to, which I can only take as a fair example of minds somewhat similar to those of my family and friends. The recent deaths of my two brothers, both elder and younger, leave me as the last man standing—the last wayfarer—of the generation born to my father and mother, who, too, were survivors as proof they must have taken the right path, as their progenitors must have taken theirs—all the way back to beginning times.

You see how I have fleshed out the instant when I caught myself gazing at the cursor. One instant leads on to the next, and that to the next. Thought follows thought, action follows action, keystroke follows keystroke. The necessary order of my life appears before me, more discovered than planned. I put myself at the leading edge of my existence, and that edge cuts decisively ahead into the unknown and unpredictable. I barely know what I am thinking and writing. What I do know is that I have to be true to the sense that emerges within me when I put myself in this place. What I am trying to do is trust the life force that is driving me ahead right now. To listen to that force and write down what it dictates. Except it doesn’t dictate, it passes the burden to my fingers and tells them to get busy and write what they want. Which turns out to be the words you are reading as they flow from the situation my mind is facing. My life force is engaging your life force one-on-one. My mind is speaking to your mind. There’s only the two of us together in this instant. Engaging in our own way. Being wholly ourselves. Separate as individuals in different black boxes, but equal one to the other as joined in common endeavor. Trying to understand what is going on in our respective minds. Caught up in that challenge. Giving our utmost to that cause.

One thing stands out in my mind. I am on the right track. I can feel the energy pulsing through me without opposition or resistance. I am onto something big: the workings of my mind as the muse of my fingers at my computer. No ifs, ands, or buts. I am on a roll. After more than eighty years of wandering, I am getting close to my final destination. I know that because I am living that destination in my actions. This is the payoff of my being a wayfarer. Of following my own path. Of being myself to the hilt. My bones, tendons, and muscles are fully coordinated with the traffic through the pathways in my mind, in turn coordinated with my sensory experience in living the life that I have made for myself. It is all coming together in this particular engagement, the one I have been aiming at all these years, without realizing it.

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Imagine: the realization of a lifetime. I’ve never had that thought before. I wasn’t ready. But now I am. Because I have spent the last thirty years preparing for this instant.

I have deliberately taken step after step in pursuit of this moment. Wary game, indeed.

So wary as to be unimaginable because I couldn’t picture the form it would take. I had to live that form in my own mind to discover how it works. Now I have it. Memory of past thoughts prepares the way so that my learning has been cumulative, even though I didn’t know it. My doings are now adding up. Step after step, wrong turn after wrong turn. Now I’m here, deep in my own thoughts about the very essence of thinking.

Clicking fingers taking dictation from a mind shaped over the years by its ongoing engagements, a mind that has arrived, so these fingers, too, have arrived. Or are engaged in the process of arriving, to which there is no end. Earlier, I was setting out, wandering, exploring. Now I see where I was heading all along. The route may include detours, but the destination is fixed. Like a maze, so that at the penultimate moment you are as far as ever from your destination—and with the next step you’re there!

I’ll tell you a secret. What’s been a secret to me until just now, this last step. I love being me. I love the journey I’ve taken. I love the frustration of not understanding anything. Of getting lost and confused. Of waking up and following the lead of my own nighttime dreams into my own daytime thoughts. The two are intimately connected. The dreamer and the waker are the same person. The trick is to realize the difference. One can’t act, the other can. The ability to follow thought with action makes all the difference. That’s what makes each of us so powerful. The ability to follow our dreams with actions having a similar drift. To accept our dreaming self as our guide on our journey within our own mind. As a comrade following the same path we are on. That is the key: to accept our minds as whole and concerted, even when they seem rent by confusion.

To insist on adherence to the rules of logic and reason at all times leads us astray. At the core, we are neither logical nor reasonable. We are what we are, doing the best we can to put pieces of the mind puzzle together however they might fit. If we don’t give ourselves to solving that puzzle by its own dictates, we’ll never impose a solution that fits from outside. Too much of our most intimate mental makeup marches to a series of different drummers, with a beat that changes and never settles down into a regular rhythm. Imposing a certain order on what we allow ourselves to think encases the mind in cement. But the mind is not a rigid thing. It is a fluid organ that shapes itself to the demands of the moment. That is the genius by which we have survived all these millennia, not by being “right” and “proper,” but by adapting to the situation we are in.

By detecting the structure of unique moments of history from inside our experience of those moments, not imposing a predetermined structure from without.

As with our thinking, so in our acting do we need to prepare ourselves over the years by practicing the moves that are important to us. The best method is total immersion in what we want to do, trying it over and over again. Nothing worth doing comes easily.

Practice is the secret of success. Not good looks. Not youth. Not luck. Not money. Not connections. Practice. We often give credit to talent and gifts, but the secret of talent and gifts is disciplined hard work. Think of Fred Astaire rehearsing fourteen hours a day to appear effortlessly graceful. We have to train our arms, hands, and fingers to do what we want. Mind over matter. Which is the true challenge we face. Make that mind over muscle—and tendon and joint and bone. Our minds and bodies are made to do the work, and to sharpen our performance through years of dedicated practice.

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It helps if we break our task into stages that build one on another. Which is the nature of projects. We can’t tackle every challenge all at once. The recipe for successful action is to break it into sessions for working on one thing at a time. When we get good at one subroutine (in Tai Chi, say), we move to the next, rehearsing earlier ones as we go, adding new goals every day until we become masters of the whole. Then we move on to the next scene, paragraph, chapter, or movement of whatever we are engaged in building or perfecting. Projects are a means of achieving concentration on one part of a complicated process after another, and concentration is of the essence in directing our full mental attention on both perception and action at the same time, that is to say, on our engagement with a particular activity.

Projects are behavioral units in which energy is consistently directed toward attaining a particular goal. I have made over eighty PowerPoint presentations, each aimed at a particular audience to achieve a desired effect. Some I have made in a day, others have taken me months to perfect. Each slide has its place in the series so it adds to the plot by which the overall show builds to a fitting finale. Each such presentation is the result of a project to which I give my focused attention to the same program over time, with frequent breaks lasting hours, days, or weeks in between sessions. Eventually I finish a given show and move on to the next. One show I call “Heavy Metal” was built from photographs of cast-iron drain and manhole covers on the streets of Bar Harbor.

Some castings were made in Portland, Maine, others in Canada, France, or India. It took me several weeks of patrolling the streets on the lookout for variations on my theme.

When the lighting was wrong, I went back several times until it was right (showing off the texture and design of the metal to good effect). My wanderings may have appeared random, but each foray contributed to the overall effect, and eventually I judged the project finished, then moved on to the next—the secret underworld beneath caps of mushrooms, stems of trees in the Acadian Forest, estuary wildlife, horseshoe crabs, eelgrass meadows, and so on. Each show resulting from a project of concerted effort assembled over time.

Many of my projects are characterized by a close relationship to the natural history of the region in Maine where I live. Projects, in fact, establish a kind of intimate relationship, very much like building a friendship over time. I strive to respect my subjects by focusing on their integrity, the set of qualities that make them what they are in achieving a particular identity. I think of women building human relationships dayby-day, of men making tables and bookshelves and model boats by shaping and putting their pieces together. It takes the same qualities of mind to accomplish each such project, women concentrating on human qualities, men on the qualities of the materials they put together toward a given end over time. Please forgive my resorting to stereotypes. Of course women can be artists, CEOs, and presidents; men can be caregivers, spouses, and friends. I was speaking from a general impression built up over a lifetime of some eighty years. My point is that human relationships are a kind of project that requires maintenance and attention if they are to work out as we hope.

Projects and relationships are examples of our wayfaring, of taking one step at a time until we get where we want to go. That is how we build bridges, skyscrapers, families, organizations, and civilizations, each contributing as she is able during whatever time he has to put in. Most significant actions take time to consider, prepare, plan, assemble, and execute. Sometimes we operate as a team of one, at other times we

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join together to make up teams of five or nine or hundreds or thousands, all aiming at a common goal.

That synchrony and coordination within and between ourselves is what we get good at by paying proper attention to the details involved in such engagements. Engagements within ourselves at different times, and with others distributed through a field of activity. One of our chief characteristics as workers in the world is whether we are team players or do better by ourselves working alone. But always our jobs require suitable attitudes, workplaces, preparations, materials, tools, skills, and sufficient time to get the work done. From making a PowerPoint presentation to constructing One World Trade Center to building friendships that last a lifetime, our actions require attention to detail at every step of the way. And that is precisely what we wayfarers are good at, paying attention to what we are doing as we go. In every instance, our going is a stage in the journey of a particular person who is mindful of what he is trying to accomplish, and pays attention to what’s happening around her at every stage of the way.

Every step of that personal journey changes the point of view from which we look out at the world. The reason we are wayfarers is to deliberately change our points of view so that we discover what has been hidden from us before. Our aim is to make a difference in the world by making use of the new perspective we have gained from our travels. Our every action is aimed at adding to that difference, of accomplishing what we want to do in our lives. By acting to bring about change, we try to build the sort of future we want for ourselves, our loved ones, friends, associates, and neighbors.

We might be the only ones who realize the differences we seek to make, but that is often sufficient for our purposes. However, we often fail to appreciate the collective aftermath of the travels we make individually. We are change agents by nature. And hugely successful. I own a two volume report of an international symposium sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, held in Princeton during June, 1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1193 pages in 2 volumes, © 1956 by the University of Chicago.) . The report, edited by William L. Thomas Jr., details the impact of our species of quadruped on the habitats we have occupied since antiquity, and changed forever after, almost always for the worse.

The report makes for fascinating but extremely hard reading. Not hard because of its density or specialized terminology; hard because of its message, which we disregard at our peril. As our numbers increase, our collective wayfaring is inevitably wounding the planet that supports us, rendering it uninhabitable for not only ourselves but for many of the species that share our space with us. Global Warming, also our doing, particularly through our power generation and motorized travels and transport, is but the coup de grace.

In his summary remarks on “Prospect” at the end of the report, Lewis Mumford, one of three main contributors to the structure of the symposium, includes these words of caution derived from the decline of Rome: In the third century A.D. an objective observer might well have predicted, on the basis of the imperial public works program, an increase in the number of baths, gladiatorial arenas, garrison towns, and aqueducts. But he would have had no anticipation of the real future, which was the product of a deep subjective rejection of the whole classic way of life and so moved not merely away from it but in the opposite direction. Within three centuries the frontier garrisons were withdrawn, the Roman baths were closed, and some of the great

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Roman buildings were either being used as Christian churches or treated as quarries for building new structures. Can anyone who remembers this historic transformation believe that the rate of scientific and technological change must accelerate indefinitely or that this technological civilization will inevitably remain dominant and will absorb all the energies of life for its own narrow purposes—profit and power? (Volume 2, pages 1142-1143.)

Our individual actions—our journeys—it seems, have massive collective consequences. Not only those we purposefully strive for, but also the cumulative impact of our species on the blue planet that hosts us in the vastness of space. We don’t mean any harm, but deadly harm we surely inflict. Now that polar ice sheets are melting, the race is on to claim the fish and resources that our carelessness is opening unto us in the Arctic. Never mind the polar bears. We are out to consume the flesh of our planet, not realizing our own folly. How cruel, how stupid, how ironic is that? We plead innocent, but stand guilty—each one of us—nonetheless.

No, this is not the point of my story of engagement. But it is a pointed digression to suggest that minds which evolved to survive in a Paleolithic world may not be suited to a world we have largely modified for our own comfort. Can we further evolve in time to save ourselves and our world, or are we destined to thwart our own intentions—as I so often do in my dreams? Perhaps we can stage a recall of our advanced model of humans and have chips inserted in our brains that will program us to recognize when we have done more damage than Earth can bear. I merely wish to point out that, as currently equipped, we have outrun our warrantee and are doomed for the scrapyard, proving our mortality yet again—as if more proof were needed. As I said, we act to make a difference in the world, and, indeed, we are proving successful beyond our wildest dreams, but not in the ways we intended. We took a wrong turn getting out of the Neolithic, inventing roads and engines and cities and weapons, which led to assembly lines, cars, atom bombs, and the fix we are now in. We might have done better striding on the legs we were born with instead of lounging in luxury motorcars. But what’s done is done.

The question is, can we avoid becoming creatures of our technologies by minding our tendency to revel in the thrill of our own innovations? As I said, the world we live in is shaped by our subjective opinions and motivations. The lesson of my study of mind is that each is responsible for the workings of her own. When it comes to saving the planet through yet more technology, let believers beware, particularly believers in technologies that admit to being artificial. Our numbers are already far too large for our planet to bear at current levels of consumption and life expectancy.

Continuing on the topic of action; speech and listening are other common acts we perform. We pride ourselves on our skills in reading, writing, and comprehension.

Speech has evolved as a kind of substitute for exerting ourselves by flexing our larger muscles. It is far more efficient to gently release air through throat and lips than it is to lunge forward while making threatening gestures with raised arms brandishing sticks. It is also much safer.

It is humbling to think that the origin of speech must have been in uttering expletives whenever our ancestors’ engagements were thwarted or went awry. That is my belief, largely resting on observation of my own behavior in dealing with my tired old computer, which is programmed to do its own thing, and so pays no attention when I want it to do something else. Vulgar outbursts wrest attention from all ears within range. I shout curt obscenities at my laptop when it goes off on its own, but having no

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ears (mine is an older model), it ignores me and sits there doing its thing whereas I paid good money for it to do my thing. Why else would I buy it?

Why, Indeed? I mean to use my computer to facilitate my many projects depending on use of words and pictures. All my writing, all my photographs, all my illustrations are on my computer. Books, articles, PowerPoints, slide shows, Pechakuchas, notes, lists, random thoughts, addresses—all stored on my hard drive. So when I can’t get at them because my computer is busy doing something else—installing updates, scanning every file, printing pages I didn’t ask it to print, posting inexplicable error messages about not being able to do some task it thought up on its own—I get—how shall I put it?—upset.

Mad. Angry. Finally furious after not being able to get through to it to tell it to stop what it’s doing and do what I want it to do.

By nature, I am a very calm person. I have confidence in making that judgment.

People are amazed at my not getting upset in situations that would have driven them batty. But when engagements requiring deep concentration are interrupted, I have trouble restoring the focus that my balance of mind depends on. I am forced to switch my mind to some irrelevant task. I am on a roll, but can’t continue. Imagine my distress.

Which requires some kind of outlet as a stand-in to release the energy I was putting into the project I was focused on. So these sounds come out of my mouth. Not words that fit the sentence I was writing when so rudely interrupted, but sounds out of nowhere. Shit.

Fuck. Chert, click, runt, frump, fart, muck, flack, blat. Expletives. Sudden eruptions of sound that bear the burden of my frustration and annoyance. That, I believe, is the true origin of language. Or at least a contributing factor in drawing attention to the urgency of some issue or another. In this case, an issue with a negative valence giving evidence that breaking an engagement is wrong, bad, undesirable, annoying, perturbing, frustrating, immoral, etc., and ought to be against the law.

In the opposite situation when I am caught unaware by something surpassingly pleasing that gives me pause, I say, Wow! Oh boy. Amazing. Beautiful. Gorgeous.

Hallelujah. Hooray. Lookadat! Or some cooing expletive suitable to such an occasion. In which case the issue of expression is to release a gasp of sudden joy, happiness, surprise, wonder, satisfaction, insight, gratitude, and other such utterances suggesting a positive valence that gives approval to an engagement that is right, good, desirable, affirming, pleasing, enjoyable, and essentially positive.

For sake of reference, we give names to others, to things, to places, to qualities, and to ideas, as well as to any conceptions we may have of how individual items are to be grouped or associated. A whistle gets everyone’s attention, but to get one man’s attention, we call out his name. We need to remember, however, that speech is provisional. If we call out “Jim!” the wrong Jim may respond. If we say we’ll do something, it may slip our mind. Speech is deliberately made easy as a kind of shorthand for hard labor. To give our words more weight, we shake hands to signal agreement, sign contracts that might need to be enforced, and make sure our vows are witnessed by those with a reputation for accuracy and honesty.

Speech, like other actions, is motivated and recommended by judgments upon the flow of inner experience felt in the moment. It comes not from muscles themselves but from the forces that spur our muscles to flex or relax. Speech, as a deliberate act, flows from the situation—the particular constellation of motivating factors that comprises the living space of the self at the core of its mind. It takes the form of words situated in sentences because that is how the culture into which each of us is born understands and

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externalizes its felt situations. Our birth culture calibrates our minds in the units we will employ ever after. That culture includes a vocabulary suited to the variety of situations its members are likely to experience in leading the many aspects of their lives. The syntax of that speech is meant to convey the structure or meaning of the inner situation as experienced by the speaker. Speakers are both subjective agents who put energy into intentional actions, and objective recipients acted-upon by energies transduced by their sensory receptors. Which is why individuals reflect themselves in speech as playing both complementary subjective and objective roles or personas. They do things, and things are done unto them, which, from a personal point of view, is the primary distinction to be made between the self-conceived “I” and the “I” beheld by others.

Speech is always purposeful. We have motives for saying what we do. The burden of checking on our motivation falls to our listeners. Who have a repertory of questions they can ask in gaining the clarification they would like. Questions reflect curiosity, uncertainty, doubt, interest, and suspicion, among other states of mind. Conversations unfold according to the interests of those involved. Casual conversations bounce from topic to topic, driven by associations that participants make with something that comes up. Memory is one of those machines that requires a kick before it will start; the jolt that usually serves is some sort of prompt or reminder that stirs a particular line of thought.

One mentions a trip to “Cincinnati,” say, and someone relates a story about her uncle in that city, and someone else tells of going to school there, and someone else again tells of traveling by train through the city at night in the winter, and so on. Not much gets said, but everyone present has their personal say on the topic of Cincinnati. Inclusion is the name of that game, putting your oar in the water, being a player. Little gets accomplished, but everyone goes away feeling good, even though she remained staunchly in her black box the whole time.

Other conversations draw people out of their black boxes, a riskier kind of engagement, requiring trust of those involved. Some find confessional gatherings unseemly, others thrive on the tidbits they glean. Others are genuinely interested in getting to know their neighbors, so systematically inquire about background, schooling, jobs held, hobbies, cities lived in, families, and aspirations, often modeling the behavior they seek by taking the initiative to share such information about themselves.

Professional conversations tend to stick to business, some aspect of a topic all present are concerned with. There are as many uses of speech as there are speakers, so I am only giving a smattering of the social possibilities. I will repeat that everyone has a purpose in saying what she does, and sooner or later, everything that can be said will be said by someone. After all, words (among other gestures and activities) are the glue that binds us together as friends, families, communities, and cultures. There is no way to underestimate their importance. Or their misuse in various form of skullduggery.

Another common activity we engage in is the playing of games. My partner and I have enjoyed what must be thousands of bouts on opposite sides of a cribbage board over the past twenty years. And hundreds of games of dominoes. We move rival pegs and pieces about board and table in a state of absolute concentration as if everything hung on our progress as make-believe wayfarers. Such weekend games keep us sane by diverting our minds from concerns that occupy us during the rest of the week. Others play games of cards such as poker or solitaire, bridge or old maid. Many games feature fields, courts, or courses—marked-out territories occupied or traversed by opposing players or teams trading roles as defenders and aggressors.

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Humanity spends countless hours each day engrossed in nonviolent contests of skill, chance, strength, speed, and endurance. Ice hockey, boxing, and American football occupy niches close to the edge of harmful and dangerous physical play, but for the most part sports and games, in their claim of being nonviolent, fall short of being battles or fights to the death. Games are universally played by rules, and are officiated by umpires, referees, and scorekeepers, and by the players themselves. The essence of games is in the taking of turns, so that players alternate in facing more-or-less equal opportunities and conditions.

I bring up sports and games in this reflection because, being governed by rules of play, they are examples of the kinds of engagements I am discussing as fundamental features of mind. Rules of play are rules of engagement are rules of thinking are rules of mind. Games are examples of human activities in which our minds play themselves out in full public view. The game itself is what each player and spectator has in mind at the time. Here we see expectancy, attention, understanding, emotion, motivation, value, the life force, judgment, goals, strategies, and skilled actions out in the open for all to see and participate in. In films and videos, the action takes place on a set that blocks our view of the chaos behind the scenes, so we are allowed a cut-and-spliced version that makes sense only from the camera’s point of view, which we are unable to change. That is, we are being manipulated by actors and directors and costume designers and producers and hundreds of others to see what they want us to see. But in sports and games, we take the leading roles, so put ourselves—our own minds—into play, in the company of others who are doing the same. Which is fun because safe, each side playing by the same rules of engagement. We are wayfaring in joint engagement together. That is, in friendship earned along the way during the journey at the heart of the game.

The apparent innocence of children is achieved much the same way—by being unreservedly themselves in translating thought into action. Lion cubs, ditto, when they roll about nipping each other’s ears and throats. They aren’t simply playing, they are being fully themselves at their level of development and understanding. We love them for being that honest and that free. Qualities rare among us in defending our private lives and innermost thoughts as we do lest others get too accurate a picture of what’s going on inside our black boxes.

As adults, many of us live a life of illusions in a world of illusions. We run every trick by our attorney and public relations office before we commit ourselves to a course of public behavior. If we don’t have an attorney or PR team, we all do have internal censors and distorters that provide the same services. How many hours do we put in dressing and grooming ourselves before making a public appearance? Illusionists all, we thrive by editing our minds and performances so others will see us as we want them to, not as we are. And we expect others to do the same in joining us to create a so-called civilized world we can agree on beforehand. That is a different kind of “play” entirely. Think of Bernie Madoff gulling his friends into investing their life savings with him. Think of politicians posing in their neckties and suits before an American flag and wall of books, all wearing a lapel pin as a miniature bumper-sticker to make them attractive to their constituents. This is a different kind of game entirely in that the rules have not been made public, so everyone plays by her own. Rampant deception is the name of this game of conning the public to believe true is false and black is white. Judging by the headlines, there’s a lot of it around these days, making it seem the national—and perhaps global— pastime. The state secrets that Edward Snowden revealed add weight to that view. The

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discrepancy between public and private postures was too much for him. In the right situations, our sensitivity to delta signals in our minds makes each of us a potential whistle-blower.

Which is exactly the sort of engagement I am talking about here—the linking of perception to action for the sake of mental clarity and effectiveness, not deception. That is an honorable game in the best sense of the word. A moral game promoting playing by the same rules for everyone, not just the rich and powerful few who have become such a cliché in these times. Or the poor and destitute, either, also a cliché.

The last type of action I will bring up is one of the most prevalent: sexual engagement in all of its rich variations. In our own ways, we are all sexual beings. We wouldn’t be here if that weren’t the fundamental truth of our lives. We all take our places somewhere along the sexual spectrum of desire and fulfillment, appetite and release, as our parents took theirs, and their parents theirs. Even if childless couples, gays, and lesbians may not raise youngsters of their own, they contribute more than their share to communities that do, fairly meeting their generation’s obligation to its children.

Our sexuality is driven by the same life force that fuels our metabolism. Beyond that, it is a response to hormones that drive formation of the specific organs, body shapes, and urges we all exhibit one way or another. Not that sex acts are consciously grounded on reproduction, which is often the last thing on partners’ minds when engaging in sexual behavior, and in fact trying their best to make sure that not one sperm reaches the egg it is programmed to hook up with. Even without some form of birth control, the odds of a sperm’s being successful in meeting up with the egg of its dreams are inversely astronomical, that is, hugely minute. A sexual engagement may be aimed at reproduction, but much more commonly that is not on the mind of either partner. Sexuality is more often aimed at gratification of passions, the sooner the better.

The mind is thinking, soon, sooner, and now. If things work out to mutual satisfaction, particular pairs will want to stay together to make the passionate moments last not for seconds but for days, weeks, or years. If they make a contractual agreement to do so, that’s what we call marriage, meaning our families and communities respect their intentions, and so back them up for the long term. At one remove, those families and communities share the joys of their members’ passions. Engaging on the deepest levels of physical intimacy, those members enable others to imagine and then perhaps realize their children and their grandchildren.

So do sexual engagements spiral through the decades like augers turning through a plank of maple or spruce. Attraction and affection are one dimension of life, love and desire another, enduring passion and release a third. This is equally true for heterosexual couples, gay and lesbian couples, transsexual couples. The commitment to caring engagement is the essential ingredient, the spice that lasts on the taste buds. Sex in such a union is often enjoyable because safe and secure, as in fun and games. We revel in such engagements. Many would say they are the meaning of life. I say they keep us going from round to round, testing to see how we’re holding up. When the vigor of our relationships fades, we are replaced in others’ affections by more hardy rivals. We can’t live forever after all, so must continually prove ourselves just to stay in the race.

Race for what? Our own demise, of course, the one goal we aim for in life at the far limit of our physical and mental endurance, which come to the same thing. Past that we are

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useful to neither self or significant other. Our span of effective engagement meets its end. We are lost to the world we once sought so ardently to possess.

Action is the payoff, the proof of mind. Wayfaring is our religion and our profession.

What are we but structured water, ancient, landlocked seas up on two legs, walking about? It’s not the product, it’s the process; not the winning but the playing; not the image but the act of seeing. The issue is always: What now? What next? What next after that? In other words, threads of engagement. Exercising our perceptive and active skills as joined by the meanings we find in the flow from one to the other.

So much for sex and other human behaviors. I have reviewed the route within the figurative black box sheltering each of our minds, from arousal, expectancy, and attention on to the formation of sensory impressions, recognition, categorization, to meaningful understanding. Then I have traced the various routes that connect perception to action via reflexes, mimicry, habits, routines, prejudice, and orthodoxy, all of which bypass full conscious deliberation and awareness, the faculty of mind that considers the architecture of the situations we face in their various dimensions such as I have listed above.

Perception answers the question: What’s going on? Judgment answers the question: What does it mean in the context of my current situation? Action answers the question: What should I do? These stages of mental engagement also entail loops within the brain that shape, sharpen, and emphasize aspects of the mind’s ongoing engagement with the world for the sake of clear judgment.

The situated self is the “I/me” at the core of one’s streaming intelligence and experience as variously constellated from moment-to-moment in endless succession.

The self is no independent observer of that flux; it is that flowing process of engagement itself, the inner wayfarer at the heart of our being alive, active, and alert.

Now my task is to extend loops of engagement from within each person’s unique black box into the ambient of the world ocean in which each of us swims, much as onecelled organisms swam in the primal, energy-rich seas of ancient Earth. And beyond that, how four levels of that ambient transform our outgoing gestures into patterned streams of energy directed toward our sensory receptors, completing the concentric loops by which we individually engage the ambient worlds where we respectively live.

Now, on to the extension of our loops through the surrounding worlds of nature, culture, community, and family, and back to the input terminals of our black boxes, all set to receive patterned signals from those several worlds. 

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3. OUTER REACHES OF CONSCIOUSNESS Set a serious wayfarer like me down in such broad, unbounded fields as nature, culture, community, and family, and you can expect a flow of discursive writing led not by reason but by immediate on-the-spot experience. For wayfarers, every step is equally charged with excitement at savoring the moment, then at taking the next step to the next moment. The excursion itself, the process of going—and not the ending—is the point of the trip. The following sections are not dispassionately about the outer reaches of consciousness; they are existential engagements with those reaches themselves. Is my mind as wishy-washy as such ramblings might imply? Yes, that’s what I’m telling you right at the start: wishy-washy, perhaps, as a stage of striving for clarity and coherence.

3-a. Nature. In the most basic sense possible, the human mind is a feature of the natural world, so its perceptions, judgments, and actions are natural as well. Any sense that our cultural preoccupations are somehow unnatural or immoral is nonsense. We are what we are, and that is an outgrowth of the planet that supports us. We are Earthlings to the core, made of Earth’s materials, thinking Earth’s thoughts. As are ants and termites in building their nests and tending their eggs, as are amoebas, birds of paradise, slugs, snakes, and rhinoceroses, all in our respective stages of genetic development and evolution.

As outgrowths of the Earth, there is an inside and an outside to each of us. Outside is our environment, source of all that we need to live on the inside of our outermost layer, our skin, hide, or integumentary system. Both historically and individually as fertilized eggs, we begin as one-celled organisms separated from our surroundings by a semi-permeable membrane that allows a selective exchange of materials and energy across the boundary layer between inside and outside. Food and oxygen flow outside-in to sustain our metabolisms; waste and carbon dioxide flow in the opposite direction, inside-out. From the outset, we live in a state, not only of exchange, but of active engagement with our natural environments, trading what we no longer need for what we need to live. The story of life on Earth is the story of life’s natural engagements.

As natural creatures, we cannot live without the essential resources Earth provides us—air, water, food, shelter, warmth, and clothing in their various forms to preserve what Thoreau called “the vital heat” of our bodies generated by complex metabolic processes we each sustain for a lifetime. We live by the grace of our biological mother’s metabolism (governed by her—not our father’s—maternal line of mitochondrial DNA), first in the womb, and after birth until we are weaned, and ever after that while our families and cultures feed and provide for us, until the day we die. In that sense, we never outgrow our natural mother’s care and bodily warmth; it is built into the structure of every cell in our bodies from conception on.

Our culture, however, offers us a range of choices for diet, shelter, clothing, the purity of the water we drink and air we breathe, so the choices we adopt reflect its influence in modifying how we choose to meet our biological needs. In speaking a dialect of one language or another, adopting a particular style of dress, favoring particular foods, and living in certain types of housing, we show that our essential genetic makeup is covered by a veneer of cultural conventions and habits suited to the local climate and terrain. Without doubt, we are creatures of both culture and nature.

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Beyond serving as representatives of two great worlds at once, the natural and cultural, in the end we stand on our own legs as unique individuals. So many variables contribute to our personal makeup and experience, no other person on Earth has a mind like the one in our private, mysterious, and, yes, figurative black box. In that sense, each one of us is an experiment to see what we can make of the gifts the universe has provided us with via the great traditional streams of nature and culture. At every moment, we are alive to nature, to culture, and to our inner selves. It is extremely difficult to tease these primal influences apart in giving credit to one or another. As a result, we generally find it easiest to take responsibility for ourselves as agents in charge of our own perceptions, judgments, behaviors, and engagements. Even though in so doing, we lose sight of the complex underpinnings we represent. We are agents of nature, culture, and individuality at once. As is each star as we perceive it, each sparrow, each mote of dust.

The furor over life beginning at conception is misleading in that, as terrestrial mammals, our individuality as persons is deferred until we truly earn our independence and can care for ourselves, which in advanced civilizations is when our schooling ends and we become contributing members of our communities as capable adults. Until then we are appendages of our mothers and families, such as they are. As fertilized eggs, blastulas and gastrulas, we are closer to seeds and worms than we are to humans. Our welfare depends absolutely on our genetic heritage, and those who love and care for us enough to raise us to be fully human. That is, to be realized Earthlings of the human species. At which time our minds are sufficiently developed to guide us as independent wayfarers.

Once we attain our maturity, we each live with three questions: Are we ornaments unto the Earth? Unto our culture? Unto ourselves? With one voice, our population, collective appetites for Earth’s resources, and personal longevities answer for us: No, we are not. As I have said above, we are changing Earth’s biosphere in ways that unsettle its ability to support life as we know it. We are proving to be thankless children, undoing our planet’s ability to care for us as organisms, as it has done for three-and-a-half billion years. Not that conditions haven’t changed a lot over that span, but our unprecedented consumption and waste are overwhelming Earth’s capacity for self-renewal, so without doubt, in the near future some looming combination of natural and cultural events will cut our numbers back to a size more fitting to our home planet, and a few of our children may get another chance to live with the Earth (not just on it), but only in much reduced circumstances.

That dire prediction raises the issue: What rules of engagement with the natural world might be appropriate for us to live by in working toward a more secure future for ourselves and the extended family of Earthlings that accompanies us (if our minds could conceive, enact, and abide by such rules)? Certainly Love your mother is good advice, but no one yet has found a way to forge that advice into a firm rule. I’ll settle for: Treat planet Earth with the care and respect it deserves as our sole habitat in the universe.

We could devote the third grade in our educational system to exploring what care and respect might mean in such a case, and why the damp, sunlit Earth, as our sole means of support, actually deserves it.

First, we would have to overcome positivistic thinking—reducing natural events and systems to formulas expressed in numbers (as if that “explained” them)—which has been the scientific metaphor of choice for almost two hundred years. That would mean

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explaining Earth systems in metaphors appropriate to third graders’ budding grasp of the world rather than attempting to train them in the so-called hard (mathematicallybased) sciences.

I would build a third-grade curriculum starting off with differences between Earth’s lands and waters, continents and oceans, then differences between salt and fresh water.

Followed by study of a range of climates with different seasonal-temperature and precipitation regimes. Then on to terrain, hills and valleys, the water cycle, streams, rivers, lakes, and wetlands, and vegetation (including edible plants) subject to variations in sunlight and soil moisture, leading to an understanding of watersheds as Earth’s primary means of receiving, storing, and distributing moisture across large tracts of land. All leading to consideration of why particular plants take root in different locations within a given watershed. And then to the ways that people have impacted watersheds over the years by felling native forests and practicing agriculture, and the consequences of those changes to Earth’s fundamental natural systems. That start could lead to more specialized study of plants, continents, nations, habitats, ecological niches, wildlife, farming, and urbanization in grades four through eight.

My basic assumption here is that we will never take responsibility for climate change and global warming until we internalize an understanding of three things: 1) the workings of the natural world, 2) the workings of our cultures, and 3) the workings of our own minds in governing how we are to act in the world. Always, in studying the world, we are building our own perspectives on any such world, and it is those perspectives we carry with us forever after. My aim would be to build memory systems within children’s minds adequate to their projecting realistic expectations on the worlds they are sure to face, together with providing them a repertory of suitable behaviors for living appropriately in a range of such worlds.

Up until now, we have taught our children to live by the light of past beliefs, battles, glories, and accomplishments. The time has come to update our approach in making it more suitable to providing a foundation for the life ahead of us rather than that already behind us. If seven thousand years of agricultural practices and two-hundred-and-fifty years of technology based on fossil-fuel consumption have created the situation we now confront in the fact of global warming, it is time for our minds to favor more benign ways of preserving the vital heat we depend on for life. Those challenges are as fundamental as they come, so require the best thinking, planning, and action from all of us, starting today. Dallying with variations on technologies we have already achieved or are soon to develop isn’t going to be good enough.

What rules of engagement with the natural world could we come up with beyond extending care and respect to Earth itself? How about: To discover the world, first know thyself? That maxim opens onto another curriculum entirely. Third grade would be way too late to introduce that as a basis for all learning yet to come, as preschool would be too late. Knowing the self begins at birth with entry to the presence of the biological mother as the “other” who has been caring for embryo and fetus all along, and includes the presence of others who contribute to the intimate world of infant and child, all of whom are essential members of a given child’s natural world. That stage of learning is the province of two primary influences: 1) parental intuition, and 2) specialists in early childhood development, who are concerned with the unique physical, mental, and social abilities of every child during the first hours, days, months, and years of life.

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After all, if we don’t care about the individuality of who’s doing the learning during those formative engagements, and who’s promoting it, it might well come across as dogma based in the remote past—as is the case in orthodox religious schools where memorizing sacred texts comes before being able to comprehend them, as if the words on the page were ends in themselves apart from their being understood by particular minds. This creates an atmosphere where student minds are regarded as blank slates akin to empty hard drives with nothing on them, a view that doesn’t apply to even babies in the womb accustomed to the rhythms of their mother’s activities and manners of laughing and speaking.

So the issue comes down to who cares most about a child’s learning, those who are promoting some doctrine within a given culture, or those who wish to prepare young wayfarers for their journeys ahead? Known and familiar, or uncertain and adventurous, which path will it be? One approach draws out the unique qualities of a child’s mind, the other lays foregone wisdom upon that same mind. Which best suits that child to both its interpersonal and natural world? Strong convictions back each. And the child is too young to decide between them, so the decision is up to whom? Parents, schools, or the powers that be? Who can foretell what sort of mind will best serve the wayfarer each babe in arms will become in years ahead? No issues are more profound or more taxing than those met in the earliest years of development, with all that hangs on experiences dealt with during those years.

This is particularly true of the assumptions behind how we will use language for the rest of our lives as referring either to the external (material) world or the internal world of speakers and listeners situated in the multi-dimensional space within their own minds. When we talk, we are really addressing ourselves as based on our view of our world situation, not those who are listening to our words from the midst of their placement within situations in their own minds. Much of world misunderstanding between different people stems from parties to a discussion not grasping the fact that they are coming from different places in their respective minds. Meanings are in minds, not words. Words can flow freely back and forth between parties, but minds remain fixed in their respective black boxes, without possibility of translation. Usually, we have no idea of whom we are actually talking with or to. So we keep trying to guess where the other is coming from, ascribing motives freely but usually wildly for lack of access to the others’ understanding based on life experience very different from our own.

Through the medium of personal growth laboratories, John Weir addressed this common problem as being axiomatic and universal. His solution was for all participants in a discussion to claim responsibility for their personal impressions of words, gestures, and appearances, and particularly meanings as interpreted in the light of personal habits and experience. He invented a language to assure transparency of understanding between people speaking from different backgrounds. He called it “percept language” because it is based on personal perceptions or impressions, not facts in the world.

Percept language sounds strange when you first hear it in use, but as a means of dealing with a common problem, you very quickly get the hang of it. I think we should develop such a language for children to help them distinguish between their minds and others’.

It might help avoid a major part of world misunderstanding. As Weir has described percept language: [E]ach of us is continually perceiving and organizing his world in his unique way, never precisely the same as anyone else. I am “doing” myself and you are

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“doing” yourself. Your “existence” is for me always my perception of you, the “you-in-me,” and I “exist for you only as the “me-in-you.” You are there, you act, you may even physically influence me. This has the consequence of changing the “you-in-me” and the “me-in-you.” How I “do” the “you-in-me” is determined by my needs, my perceptions, and my past experiences. It is, I am, always my own responsibility. This is true both for how I do myself and how you do yourself.

We conclude that the perceptual elements of our interpersonal interactions consist of a “you,” a “me,” a “you-in-me,” and a “me-in-you” (Weir, John, “The Personal Growth Laboratory–1,” in Benne, K., et al., eds., The Laboratory Method of Changing and Learning: Theory and Application. Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, 1975, Ch. 13).

Children can mimic sounds and gestures, as well as recognize the situations within which they are appropriate. But differences in perspective are much harder to master, and are the source of much childhood instruction and discipline. I think it would benefit children immensely to have a tool such as percept language for distinguishing between different people’s perspectives. And benefit parents at the same time so they could join the same learning experience. Children have a natural intuition that people and animals can be hurt by cruel treatment. And benefit when treated kindly. They know this of themselves, bunnies, dogs, and cats. Or if they don’t know it, they can learn it by having it pointed out to them in teachable moments. I can hear young voices exclaiming about “your you” and “my you,” “your me” and “my me.” This would open onto the possibility of taking increased responsibility for budding perceptions, judgments, and actions, with applications on all levels of personal engagement.

Think of how our mental attitude toward nature will affect our coming journeys in nature for the rest of our lives. If we fear or are unaccustomed to the dangers of nature, there is no telling exactly where it lurks or when it will show. What we do know is that volcanic eruptions will be inevitable, along with earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, mudslides, wildfires, floods, droughts, avalanches, sinkholes, pandemics, ice storms, and the rest of the worst that nature can send at us. At the opposite extreme is nature as it is shown on monthly calendars: scenic, subtle, serene, colorful, majestic, calming, dramatic, inviting, exhilarating, glorious, beautiful, and so on. Nature is neither fearsome or beautiful. Those are human judgments made by minds grounded in personal experience. Nature is as it does. The question is, what are we to make of it? Certainly more than we have in the past—or we die as acculturated individuals, as a species of animal, and as occupants of planetary habitats.

Nature is as we engage with it on any and all occasions. Which in my case comes down to how I have engaged nature during the course of my life. What I will have in mind the next time I venture out of my comfortable apartment in Bar Harbor into Acadia National Park is not the result of my study of nature as a topic in school but of my cumulative subjective experience of nature gained through all the forays and engagements in which I have put myself out—taken the initiative—to discover what nature means to me.

I do not possess a store of knowledge about nature so much as a set of expectancies and receptivities as my basic gear for dealing with whatever I might meet along the way to my current destination. Such expectancies and receptivities reflect my past experiences on similar adventures at similar seasons at similar times of day. Whether heading for shore or summit along a valley or ridge trail, I will expect to see or hear a variety of trees, plants, flowing waters, and wildlife moving about one way or another

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through the habitats I engage as I go. On one trip I might take along a readiness to meet up with red squirrels, beavers, snowshoe hares, white-tailed deer, chickadees, blue jays, and robins, while on another day I might be prepared to meet up with herring gulls, eiders, loons, guillemots, warblers, crows, and granite cliffs. If I spot turkey vultures, song sparrows, bald eagles, peregrine falcons, or a red fox on either walk, I won’t be surprised.

This is how I live, how I make my way—by building on my personal experience. I call my method pulling myself up by my own bootstraps because that is essentially how my mind works in such situations. I use what I am familiar with in casting my recognition ahead of me as I go. What I reach out with for new experience is based on who I have been and how I have gone in the past. Anything novel immediately catches my attention, and I do my best to fit it in with the experiences I bring with me.

The first foray into nature I can recall is looking for mayflowers with my mother and brothers by peering under leaves released by melting snow. That was near Hamilton, New York, some seventy-seven years ago. About the same time, when I was four, I remember jumping off the bow of a lobster boat, landing on rockweed, slipping, hitting my knee. On that trip I also remember eastern cottontails posing behind every stump and standing tree on an island in Maine that had recently (within twenty years) been cut for timber. That and raspberry bushes scratching my legs. Reaching the gravel shore on the far side of the island was a great relief. A few years later, I hiked with my family to the fire tower on top of Schoodic Mountain, near where my mother grew up in Sullivan, Maine. We climbed through stiff winds on a rickety ladder to talk with the fire ranger in his tower standing over his plane-table map of surrounding terrain, a man who wouldn’t look us in the eye because he was so watchful of the forestlands stretching around us in all directions, on the alert for faint wisps of smoke.

As a child, I spent many Saturdays in March in Hamilton roaming surrounding hills, drawn by meltwater forming little rivers rushing into the valley. I dammed those rivers by poking palisades of twigs into damp soil, got sopping wet head-to-toe, and had the time of my life. That’s who I still am today, Steve from planet Earth, poker of twigs, launcher of leaf boats, staunch defender of watersheds and the life—plant and animal— they support. Later on, after the war (World War II), I stood looking from the shore of Lido Key in Sarasota out over the Gulf of Mexico, and saw without warning a great manta ray lift from the gulf, hover above the surface of the water, and glide back into the depths, something I had never seen before and have not seen since, that single experience alerting me to the possibilities offered by a lifetime of curiosity, exploration, and discovery. Which I am living to this day in exploring and writing about my own mind. I take the sight of that manta as the very emblem of who I was then and still am, an Earthling to the core facing the possibilities offered by his home planet.

I have briefly told above the story of my first encounter with the snow-covered Rocky Mountains in August, 1947, when I was wholly unprepared to see snow at that time of year, so unwittingly put a bank of clouds in place of what I could not accept, demonstrating the power of expectancy over reality, of a closed and inexperienced mind over the mind of a would-be explorer. Trial and error is at the heart of my conscious experience, venture and correction, leading to a course of successive approximations in becoming acquainted with nature, or anything else in the world beyond the black box I was born to. I remember the shock of seeing the groomed forest around Dansenberg, Germany, where I lived briefly as a soldier during the Cold War back in the 1950s. Every

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German town had its forester, who made branches and twigs available to local residents for starting fires. I was not used to pruned lower branches, so cast that valence upon them, finding them ugly, until I understood the rationale for treating the trees as a renewable resource for hunters and local residents, keeping the woods healthy by making use of what was expendable to the trees themselves. Their leaves still fell to enrich the soil, but they shared their twigs and game with local people.

Driving across the Brenner Pass in the Alps from Italy to Austria during a snowstorm in January, 1957, I defied truck drivers waving me over to get in line behind trucks stalled by lack of traction—and kept going in the wrong lane because I knew if I stopped I’d be stranded for hours if not days. My little 1946 Opel Olympia was one of the few cars to cross the border during that storm. I applied what I had learned damming meltwater streams, that I could defy nature and get away with it in a few cases. But as people who build in flood plains eventually learn to their sorrow, that is a dangerous practice, which I just happened to get away with that one time. As I have rowed among huge ice floes in the dark after a meeting on the mainland to get back to my island cabin with its glowing wood stove and warm bed. After a particularly delicious Thanksgiving dinner with the McCormicks in Franklin, Maine, I rowed out into a northeast blizzard, again in the dark with no shoreline lights to steer by, and navigated by the bite of ice pellets driven by the wind against my right cheek, pulling on my oars with all the strength I took from eating that meal. When the wind abruptly died, I knew exactly where I was by the map in my head—in the lee of the cliff on the north end of the island I was aiming for, the rest of my course hugging the leeward shore of the island, which I couldn’t see, but could sense off to port, so I could avoid every rock and jutting point in reaching the gravel beach where I could haul up my boat, and then wend my way through snowy woods to my cabin. Despite my hosts’ pleas not to row into the storm, my expectancy after rowing through all kinds of weather navigating by hidden signs I didn’t know I would recognize told me I could do it. And by believing I was a match for the risk, I made it safely, where no caring or careful person might think it possible. We learn about nature by engaging with it up-close and personally. If we give it our all, nature will give its all to us. If we insist on only taking from nature, as we frequently do, we’ll end up with nothing.

Now the winter of 2013-2014 is winding down, the coldest, iciest, and most relentless I can remember. It just won’t let go. Like preceding warmer months, it’s a season for all people to learn from, if we will but pay close attention. The melting of arctic ice due to manmade global warming is destabilizing circumpolar climates in lower latitudes around the Earth. In the U.S., stories are told of a wettest summer in Florida, ice storms in Georgia, widest tornado swath in Oklahoma, record rains in Colorado, hottest summer in Utah, driest year in California (with memorable wildfires), record snows and record warmth in Alaska, wettest Septembers in the Northwest, heaviest day of rain in Iowa, remarkably low water levels in the Great Lakes, and in October, 2012, a super storm surge from a memorably devastating hurricane dubbed “Sandy.” The warmth that is melting ice farther north is exporting the polar vortex all the way from Alaska to Georgia and Florida. Demonstrating once again that increasing global warming shows itself as climate destabilization.

Before I get back to my thoughts on rules of engagement with nature, I will add a few notes on engagement with the water cycle, which almost single-handedly is responsible for the hospitability of planet Earth to life of all forms, including primates,

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including apes, including humans. Powered by sunlight and gravity, the water cycle tells the story of the vast migration of water molecules from the surface of the ocean into the air from which they fell a day or a million days ago, returning to that upper realm as water vapor, an invisible gas, from which it will fall as rain, hail, sleet, or snow.

Watersheds are the domain where the water cycle interacts with the land that conveys it back to the ocean, picking up mineral and organic nutrients, making photosynthesis possible in algae and green plants, which in turn make animate life possible in every clime around the Earth. In engaging with nature, we are truly engaging with the flow of water in its various forms.

Watersheds are one of the primary ways the natural world organizes itself. All life on Earth depends on water, and watersheds are systems for distributing water across time and space, making it available on a reliable enough basis for individual plants—and life dependent on them—to survive. Watersheds take water from large areas of higher ground on their peripheries and distribute it to ever smaller, concentric areas lower down, conveying a flow of water, soil particles, and nutrients downward toward a central focus in the lowlands below. Almost everything we take for granted on Earth stems from the cyclical movement of water from the surface of the ocean into the air, from air to soil, from soil to stream, from stream back to ocean.

Soil, by definition, is porous. It consists of particles of rock and organic material nestled more-or-less closely together (more closely in the case of clayey soils, less in sandy or gravely ones). Spaces between particles invite water to flow in and around them, picking up air and dissolved nutrients and minerals, which that underground water conveys to thirsty roots and microbes on its relentless journey downslope toward the ocean. That journey does not take place across the land so much as within it, in tunnels of infinite complexity leading on to more and more of the same. We are mystified by the wonder of ocean depths and outer space, while the wonder of the soil beneath our feet eludes us. The French peasant who held up a clod of soil from his field and exclaimed (in translation), “This is France!” had it almost right. He might have said, “This is life!”

The vascular system of plants is an extension of the watersheds in which they grow.

Powered by evaporation through the surface of leaves, a lifting force draws water taken in from damp soil upward into the presence of chlorophyll, where it intercepts energy from the sun, ionizes, and frees a hydrogen ion that triggers the process leading to the production of glucose—containing energy in a form plants can use for maintenance, growth, repair, reproduction, and defense.

With roots in the soil, leaves in the air, vascular plants have the best of both worlds.

If they were not able to rise aboveground to spread their leaves in the sun, or able to draw water up to those leaves, plants would exist only in areas where water, air, and sunlight come together at ground level—shady and humid places such as where nonvascular plants like mosses and liverworts grow in glens and at the bases of cliffs, or in shallow wetlands, streams, and ponds.

But by enabling the aerial, sunlit world of wind and leaves to combine with the dark, subterranean watery world of soil and roots, plants bring two aspects of a watershed together, the upper and lower, in a way that radically expands Earth’s potential for growth, producing the lush world of sap, fruit, seeds, and leaves into which every meadow vole, weasel, hawk, person, fungus, and bacterium is placed today. Plants are the creators of this modern world, and watersheds are their patrons, mentors, and

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protectors. (These last five paragraphs are drawn from my Watershed File, a collection of brief essays compiled in loose-leaf folders, 1992.)

With watersheds ever in mind, I wrote up sixty hikes through Acadia National Park in a book it took me five years to write while working as a park ranger. Here I include excerpts from Hike 34—Sargent Mountain via Hadlock Brook Trail, which I made on March 19, 1997.

Rising through the watershed of the Hadlock Ponds, the Hadlock Brook Trail gives the hiker a close-up view of the local bioregion at work. Until it gains the ridge, the trail passes through a heavily wooded valley. Near the pond, Northern white cedars thrive in a damp outwash plain deposited at the foot of the last glacier. From there the trail rises through mixed woods clinging to thin, rocky soil up to the wind-stunted spruce hunkering for protection below the ridgeline. Red spruce predominate, mixed with white pine, maple, birch, beech, and a variety of other trees. In winter the woods have an open look, sunlight shining through where it would be blocked by leaves from late spring until early fall. From ground level, the trees look tall and dignified, each holding its head erect, forming a collective canopy of needles and branches seventy feet overhead. When spring really comes, the trees will be the first to get the news, letting it gradually filter down to the commoners below. The watershed is built in layers—bedrock, thin soil and roots, ground cover plants, straight stems, and the high green garden where air and water are wrought into sugar by means of energy supplied by the sun, creating a habitat for myriad bacteria, fungi, insects, spiders, amphibians, and the occasional mammal. Without water seeping downslope through the soil, the entire enterprise would collapse. The valley terrain keeps a trickle of moisture available to roots through the growing season, giving trees sufficient time to work the magic of photosynthesis.

Hadlock Brook carries off what excess water the trees can spare, supporting life in the ponds below, and the town of Northeast Harbor beyond.

Whether as microbe or salamander, striped maple or haircap moss, to reside in the watershed of the Hadlock Ponds is to share the ways of the local bioregion, the lifestyle of planet Earth here and now. A trek along the Hadlock Brook Trail gives hikers a chance to see local stylists at work, putting Earth forces to communal use. Climate, terrain, precipitation, bedrock—all play a role in the process, producing life suited to this place in this clime. Here is nature’s local idiom in daily use, a maritime dialect of the northern mixed forest that stretches in the U.S. from New England through northern Michigan and Wisconsin to northeastern Minnesota. Bioregions are places where a particular lifestyle predominates because it is best suited to local conditions. In Acadia the prevailing style is that of the northern hardwood-spruce forest. To see what that looks like, hike the Hadlock Brook Trail at different times of year. The landscape will look familiar to New Yorkers and New Englanders because it is similar to landscapes found throughout much of the region. We have taken in its style from our earliest days, if not in mother’s milk, in grandfather’s maple syrup and grandmother’s blueberry jam.

In nature, style is the essence of survival. Each individual’s style is suited to the style of its favored habitat. Warblers eat insects; they thrive where insects abound. Sparrows typically eat wild fruits and seeds of weeds and grasses; they

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thrive where fruits and seeds abound. Home is where we thrive, where our personal style reflects the style of our surroundings. Anywhere else we are out of our element and don’t feel like ourselves. That the universe makes sense to us at all is due to our finding a niche within it that feels like home, a niche where we are rewarded for being who we are. Everywhere else we are at risk, our style clashing with unfamiliar surroundings. Sanity stems from being where we belong; insanity from being out of place. How terrible to possess a personal style that has no counterpart in the natural (or cultural) world, to be an outcast forever, to have no place that feels like home. If we can find no unity or logic in the world around us (that is, nothing that reflects the unity and logic of ourselves), we are homeless and lost. That is what war or the sudden loss of a loved one does to us in turning our familiar dream of reality into a nightmare where nothing will ever be the same again. Peace restores us to our dreaming if not to our former dream, to the state in which our surroundings seem welcoming and familiar, helping us to accept the fact that we are who we are.

French philosopher Marcel Merleau-Ponty saw perception as a form of communion between our bodies and our surroundings, a primal faith placing us in the world as in our native land. The reason we make sense of the world is because it reflects our sensory explorations while we in turn reflect its possibilities of discovery. If we find order around us, that is because we are born of that same order. To come into the world is to join the Earthling order that created us and gave us life. We habitually screen ourselves out of our perceptions, but we are at the core of our earthly experience—and Earth is at the core of our core. To walk through the watershed of the Hadlock Ponds is to walk through the bioregion from which we have sprung as naturally as cones spring from the branch of a white pine. What nurtures the pine nurtures us; what threatens the pine threatens us. We belong to one community, one habitat, one bioregion of the Earth. We and the pine are of the same stock. (Perrin, Steve.

Acadia: The Soul of a National Park. Bar Harbor, Maine: Earthling Press, 1998, pages 168169.)

I am the same writer today as I was when I wrote that selection, focusing on nature then, on my mind today. After writing that book, I produced three smaller photo books depicting natural features of Mount Desert Island (MDI) where I live, and then spent twelve years concentrating my efforts on understanding the workings of Taunton Bay, the shallow estuary at the head of Frenchman Bay on the eastern side of MDI. Since my mind naturally works by making comparisons between past (as recalled) and present (as perceived) observations, what I was looking for was patterns in periodic changes from day to day, tide to tide, season to season, year to year that would give an indication of how the bay was responding to ever-changing natural conditions affecting its ecological stability. Two of the bay’s outstanding assets are its eelgrass meadows and two separate populations of horseshoe crabs at the northern extreme of that species’ global range.

Eelgrass is an underwater flowering plant that provides a safe habitat for a variety of juvenile fishes which mature in the deeper waters of Frenchman Bay and the Gulf of Maine. Safe, that is, from the appetites of diving birds such as loons, cormorants, and mergansers that prey on just such small fishes, and haunt the waters of Taunton Bay. I characterized Taunton Bay in a number of PowerPoint presentations, and concluded that horseshoe crabs (HSC) and eelgrass meadows stood out, among harbor

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seals, clams, bloodworms, blue mussels, and American bald eagles, as two of the most notable indicators of the bay’s productivity, which flourishes in some years, and declines in others. When eelgrass thrives, its long, narrow leaves are shed in late July and August, contributing a huge bulk of detritus to the wrack along the shore, habitat to countless amphipods and isopods (small crustaceans), and the migratory shorebirds that feed on them. When a rare April snowstorm covers the ground, robins and hermit thrushes feed on the bounty sustained by that fringe of wrack.

In June 2003, I became a tracker of horseshoe crabs in Taunton Bay, trying to figure out their annual patterns of movements, and whether or not they left the bay in the winter months for warmer waters in the Gulf of Maine, which it was generally believed they did. I am a lifetime member of Friends of Taunton Bay, a nonprofit group keeping an eye on the bay through a variety of monitoring programs. We partnered with Maine’s Department of Marine Resources in attaching sonar transmitters to thirteen crabs in each of two sub-embayments.

My job was to track those twenty-six crabs with a sonar receiver carried about in a small boat. When the signal in my earphones from a particular crab was as loud as it could get, I marked my GPS position on a chart, figuring I was directly over that crab so my position was also its position as viewed from overhead. HSC come ashore only during a two-week breeding season, so it’s no surprise that I saw only one during the two-and-a-half years I went searching for crabs from late April through late November. I judged that one to be directly under the boat when it was lodged against shoreline rocks; I backed off a few feet—and there it was with its mate, blue sonar transmitter epoxied to its prosoma (the forward part of its shell).

As the tracking effort turned out, horseshoe crabs in Taunton Bay stay in the bay year-round, burying themselves in the mud for half the year during colder months. They rouse in late April, and immediately take off upslope from their over-wintering sites.

Not one of the crabs we were studying left its native embayment; there was no evident bridge between the two distinct populations. The channel bearing cold water into the bay passes by a particular point of land that leaves no room for a warmer passage between the two sites. The movements of the crabs appeared almost random, but when females began giving off pheromones during the breeding weeks, males and females got together on their traditional breeding shores, males clasping females with a foremost pair of legs suited to that task, females navigating for both of them, making trials at digging a suitably deep nest, moving on if it didn’t work out, typically laying eggs in several sites in a row once it did.

That monitoring effort eventually took over my mind. I did my best to think like a horseshoe crab, and actually got pretty good at keeping track of them day by day, often with intervals of several days between sessions due to wind and weather. We expected the transmitter batteries to run down after two years, but we got a good part of a third tracking season out of them before they finally died (the batteries, not the crabs, which can live for about twenty years in the wild). We are not dispassionate when we engage.

Our motivations and passions drive us to connect. Engagement requires a commitment to stay with something we are interested in, concerned about, attracted to. As I was drawn by horseshoe crabs, one of the most basic (because functionally effective) and long-enduring animal forms in the ocean. They’ve been around for almost half-a-billion years, way longer than dinosaurs, primates, and humans. I feel an intimate kinship with horseshoe crabs, and admire the beauty and functionality of their bodies. They can swim

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right-side-up or upside down, walk on the bottom, dig in muddy sediments, eat bountiful small mollusks, and fight infections with copper-based blood that congeals to heal wounds. They are survivors adapted to estuary habitats, largely unchanged for some 400 million years.

My mind goes out to horseshoe crabs, and every sighting thrills me head-to-toe.

Being of such ancient design and so beautiful, they have an undying claim on my attention. I am caught in the spell of their attractiveness, and because I will never be able to understand them, there will always be that discrepancy urging me on to further interactions. I respond by engaging them however I can: monitoring their breeding sites, tracking their movements around the bay, photographing them, making PowerPoints that share my respect and enthusiasm. I have an extensive library on horseshoe crabs, and samples of their shed shells on my walls. Without an ongoing discrepancy in engagement, the known and familiar lose their allure. They become fixtures. And as such, we take them for granted and lose interest in them. Discrepancy is the spark that ignites into allure, calling us out of our sheltered selves into the world.

Horseshoe crabs and eelgrass meadows do that for me, as do hermit thrushes, song sparrows, fairy webs, and old man’s beard. It’s isn’t what I know that makes my world; it’s what I don’t know because it is just beyond my reach. Without disparity and surprise, engagement reduces to habit, and mindless habits have slight attraction.

In a very real sense, I am possessed by horseshoe crabs, and as a result, become possessive of them in return. The root of ownership is in just that sense of possession through engagement. A claim on my attention works both ways. I own it and it owns me.

The circle is complete. I have elsewhere compared that situation to the image of the ancient serpent Uroborus biting its own tail. The point being that engagement unites its parts into a unitary entity. I am part of horseshoe crab existence in Taunton Bay by tracking their every move; they, in turn, become an integral part of my experience by changing the mind at the core of my being. No wonder we get possessive of who or what we engage with. Our experience binds us together, and our experience becomes part of our minds, enriching us, making us part of a larger whole. As integral parts of my experience, horseshoe crabs became aspects of my identity. We became an item, an entity, a sort of couple. We were openly engaged.

We are sometimes jealous of others who engage with something we desire for ourselves. We envy what they have. What they possess. What they engage with. We envy their circle of engagement with life itself. We want to attain that engagement for ourselves. To own such a thing. To possess it. To have it available for our own use.

Having and owning are the basis of our possessiveness, our shopping sprees, our powerful concept of ownership. Of private property. These are my horseshoe crabs.

Keep your grubby hands off. Don’t harvest them for eel bait. Don’t interfere with their livelihood. Don’t pick them up by the telson (tail) which might come off in your hand, don’t touch them. Leave them alone, the way I want them to be: safe from interference.

Safe for me to observe. Whoa, how our engagements come to master us, to link engager forever to engagee. This is such a fundamental part of our nature, of our natural experience, we devote a huge amount of our cultural law to protecting the right of individuals to engage as they will. We own something, not by buying it, but by using it again and again. This is my book, my pencil, my computer, my wife, my family, my car, my house, my boyfriend. All property is intellectual property. That is, property that exists in our heads. Property is an attitude, a state of mind, a combined outlook and

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inlook, a sense of engagement. The sting of our engagements, of completing our perceptual and active loops, of our biting our own tails, drives us to protect what we have and own and engage with on a regular basis. Mine, all mine! By use, by custom, by familiarity, by desire, by need, by my being who I am with a particular history of engagement with others.

This is strong stuff. Powerful in getting at the heart of who we are as natural beings.

Of our having and holding a particular life we can count on, now and forever. Don’t come between me and my significant other—what- or whoever it is. I will get very angry because you are threatening my way of life. My perceiving, judging, acting, and engaging. You are breaking my loop. The loop that is me as I know myself. As I bite my own tail. Which, for stability’s sake, is all I have to anchor myself to reality. My way of being in the world through my serial and collective ways of engaging, which tell the history of my interactions with all that I care for.

I am not placing the burden of my passionate engagements on horseshoe crabs. I am using them as an example of my engagements in general, an example that embraces every one of my engagements in particular. I live to engage as I am with whom or what I choose at any time. Those to whom I am responsible in asking them to be responsible to me. That’s all I want. Mutual engagement and responsibility. Ownership, as I say. The right to live my life as I want. Naturally. Culturally. Communally. Personally. That is the state of mind this reflection is trying to get at by examining the processes of perception, judgment, action, and engagement, collectively making up the loop of my unique stream of consciousness. And by extension, I believe, your unique stream of consciousness as well. Do you feel the power of what I am trying to say, and have been since the beginning of this piece? If I didn’t believe in its truth, I wouldn’t be writing these very words. The course of our everyday mental functioning creates the worlds we live in as individuals living the lives we have chosen for ourselves. The lives we live out every day by maintaining the engagements we do with all that we care about. In our respective black boxes, we are at the center of those worlds, creating them day-by-day as the foundation of our engagements.

While I have your attention, I will add: It’s not money that drives our natural and cultural economies, but the natural and cultural engagements that money can buy. In itself, money is so much brass or paper. At best, it is a token of our desire to engage as we will. It is not freedom itself, but it stands for freedom to engage anything having a price. That’s what we buy, engagement. What we are out to invest is not money but attention, wherever it pays the biggest dividend of positive or “valuable” life experience.

When we go shopping, we are looking to engage. Not with goods in themselves, but with the engagements they enable. Buy an iPhone and it will open your attention to a certain world of digitized engagements that today passes for experience. Virtual experience, because you have to look at the screen to share in it (or hark to the sounds that issue from it). We hear endlessly about the GDP, but that acronym misses the mark in not gauging the health of the economy so much as some ineffable yearning for human experiences that money can buy. Nature, for instance, is not for sale; it’s a gut-level experience you recognize when you go to certain places and pay attention to the ambient energy falling on your sensory receptors. You have to open your personal expectancy to such experience; no matter how many safaris you go on, money won’t get it for you.

More accurately, the GDP is an index to things that economists and others want you to

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want, not what you want for yourself. It is another social manipulator to tell you how well you’re doing on somebody else’s scale of well-being.

Back to my engagement with nature in the person of horseshoe crabs. In May 2005, I got a look at proper horseshoe crab breeding habitat in Delaware Bay—extensive sandy shores where they laid billions of eggs, and a great many ravenous shorebirds stopped by to gobble those eggs up on their migratory flights. I asked myself why on Earth do such crabs bother with rock-bound Taunton Bay where suitable breeding habitat is reduced to a very few scrawny patches of gravel tucked between granite boulders and ledges? I thought about that on the bus coming back to Maine, and decided to investigate. For several years I had been monitoring breeding HSC in one of two bays within Taunton Bay, and wondered what it was about that site that attracted them when the water temperature warmed to 13° Celsius (55.4° Fahrenheit) in late spring, when they would come ashore to dig nests and lay eggs.

Tradition has it that horseshoe crab breeding is triggered by the full moon (either its luminosity or gravitational pull). Having watched the mating and egg-laying process for a number of years in Taunton Bay, I thought the moon had nothing to do with it; it was all a matter of shoreline waters reaching the threshold temperature at or around a midday high tide. After several years of observation I reached the conclusion that in Maine the moon exerts an indirect influence, but that breeding is set off by water temperature, not the moon. And the minimal temperature is likely to be reached in late spring on sunny days when the tide is low about sunrise, so the incoming tide washes over flats of warm mud (and, not incidentally, warm ledges and rocks that hold the heat), becoming high in early afternoon. The crabs are drawn by the influence of hot mud and rocks in warming an incoming morning tide, and those conditions are apt to occur on days when the moon is near its new or full stages.

By my hypothesis, breeding crabs are attracted to particular sites by the heat given off by ledges and boulders, then imparted to tidal waters, and have little to do with the sparsity of suitable breeding habitat. The crabs themselves are relatively sparse in Maine waters, and yet are hardy enough to eke out a living under local conditions in spite of short summers, cold waters, and harsh habitats.

Besides horseshoe crabs, I also have a longstanding engagement with eelgrass. For over twenty years, I have conducted aerial surveys of eelgrass in the bay at frequent intervals. The meadows vary in size from one year to the next, and are never the same two years in a row. In 2001, the meadows abruptly disappeared, leaves turning black, then breaking off their plants and floating away on the tide. Indicating a serious problem in Taunton Bay because there were no protective thickets for fish nurseries, no fronds for migrating Canada geese to graze, no periwinkles crawling on those missing fronds for black ducks to up-end for.

This was a catastrophe for Taunton Bay, and I hadn’t seen it coming. If I had extrapolated the downward trend of rainfall in preceding years, I might have predicted the drought, but I noticed it only in hindsight, not as it was happening. I wouldn’t have predicted the dieback because I was unaware that eelgrass die-back disease was held at bay by the low salinity characteristic of estuaries where streamflow and snowmelt dilute the saltiness of incoming tides.

I spent years trying to grasp what had gone wrong, and, by studying my aerial photographs, finally figured it was a simple response to a season with the least rainfall in the region since records had been kept. There were no sea lavender plants that year,

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either. What do eelgrass and sea lavender have in common? An absolute dependence on skywater, in the first case to keep salinity low so eelgrass wasting disease—which thrives in high salinity—wouldn’t take hold. In the second case, insufficient flow of water through the soil from shorelands into sandflats where sea lavender grows. Unusually high salinity due to lack of the customary dilution of seawater by rainfall set the estuary up for a dieback of eelgrass directly caused by the ever-present wasting disease organism that thrives in undiluted seawater. It took some eight years for the meadows to grow back to anywhere near their customary extent. Insufficient rainfall to adequately irrigate the roots of sea lavender plants was the immediate cause of those plants’ absence in 2001; they were back the following year when the amount of rainfall returned to its normal range. I could tell that eelgrass was beginning to make a recovery when sprouts appeared in the shallow drainage channels across mudflats at the mouths of small streams. Of all places in the bay, that’s where salinity is lowest and most hostile to the wasting disease organism. A seed that lands there has a good chance of taking hold.

The eelgrass meadows disappeared again in 2013 as abruptly as they did in 2001, for an entirely different reason. Here again there were warning signs, in this second case taking the form of unusually high turbidity two years in a row, but no one could figure out why bay waters were so muddy. Some thought it was due to mussel dragging in Frenchman Bay, others blamed hand-raking of mussels in Taunton Bay, but that was a localized activity that didn’t look like it could affect the whole bay. I noted an unusually high number of green crabs at low tide along the shore, but I never connected that with eelgrass. In 2014 word got around that green crabs use their claws to nip off stems of eelgrass to get at clams living in the mud among them. I couldn’t imagine crabs mowing down vast acres of underwater plants. Then I read reports of lobster traps containing hundreds of green crabs being hauled up, attracted by the lobster bait in each trap, and I realized that I had severely underestimated the feistiness of green crabs, their insatiable appetite, and their cumulative impact when massed by the thousands. Add warmer waters due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere favoring green crab reproduction, I quickly saw that given their appetites as individuals, a spike in their numbers could result in a loss of eelgrass throughout the bay. Fishermen are now talking about building traps to catch green crabs, and of perhaps developing a new fishery suitable to the conditions produced by global warming. The future, recently thought to be far ahead, is upon us. I have no notion how this drama will play out, but it is clear that tomorrow will differ from today in ways I never imagined.

I dwell on these personal anecdotes because they reflect the workings of my mind.

As I know myself, I am a visual person with great capacity to pay close attention to visual patterns that intrigue me, and with persistence to work on problems one step at a time, which I observe in every project I take on. My lifelong engagement with photography—first black-and-white film photography, then color, now digital— illustrates these qualities. It is my nature to engage features of my mental (not my worldly) experience. I don’t live in the world; I live largely in my head, safely hidden from public scrutiny by a little black box reserved solely for me (as you live in one reserved for you). We may create our respective worlds simultaneously, but those worlds are not the same.

As wayfarers, you follow your path, I follow mine. Our likes and dislikes may bear some resemblance, but they are highly idiosyncratic. I thrive in locales featuring horseshoe crabs, eelgrass, harbor seals, and diving ducks. What turns you on? My mind

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emphasizes certain details and downplays or inhibits others outright. Metaphorically, I see things clearly in black-and-white terms, and so do you, but my black is not your black, and your white is not identical to mine. We have strong personal opinions, beliefs, and convictions because our minds are built (by means of lateral inhibition) to be clear.

Clear convictions lead directly to clear actions; our survival and our dignity depend on our not being wishy-washy, ever, in any situation. Ambivalence and uncertainty are unacceptable. The prize goes to those who, right or wrong, for good or for ill, act decisively and incisively—as if they were sure of what they were doing. I have watched people utter nonsense with a straight face as if they knew what they were talking about. I have done so myself, far overstepping the bounds of my personal understanding and experience. If you don’t know the answer, make a stab at it. Guess. Lie. Make it up.

Above all, speak clearly in a strong voice.

To give a commonplace example, while waiting on the shore to photograph the entry of the Queen Mary II into Bar Harbor, I heard a woman behind me ask her male companion, “What’s that boat that looks like it’s going out to meet the ship?” He replied, “That’s the pilot boat taking the pilot out to bring the ship in.” Wrong. The ship was already in the outer harbor. With its telling diagonal red stripe painted on the hull, the boat at issue was clearly a Coast Guard cutter providing security, with a machine gun mounted on its bow. I myself have issued wrong directions to tourists asking their way about Bar Harbor. The “Are you a native?” called out of the window of a car is a setup just asking for misinformation delivered with “knowing” authority. I do my best by winging it on the spot, sometimes way out of my depth in situations coming upon me suddenly without advanced notice that might allow for preparation. So I make a stab at giving directions, and am often unsure or plainly wrong.

It is not by whim or accident that I visualize loops of engagement with nature as fundamental to mind and to consciousness. Our every cell requires water and nutrients if it is to perform its biological function. We are some seventy-percent water, after all, not as a self-contained pond, but immersed in a lifelong flow that requires continual replenishment, each cell drawing its share. In turn, our conscious minds flow from the engagements of such cells one with another. That flow is not limited to brain or body, but extends into the ambient of our surroundings, the natural medium to which we are born, as one-celled organisms are born to, and interact with, the fluids that sustain them and disperse the wastes and chemicals they secrete. The story of nature is simply this: One thing leads to another. And another. And another. There is no stopping it, as I learned from building dams of sticks to divert meltwater when I was much younger.

What I could not do was stop the flow. As now I cannot stop my mind from running on and on from one thing to another. Sleep provides a brief respite, but each morning I awaken to those flowing thoughts. Our brains are not self-contained, any more than the stem of a plant is self-contained. We are all caught in the middle between input and output, as between dark, damp soil and sunlit air. As our one-celled ancestors were caught in the middle of what they took and gave to the ocean around them. Two-way engagement is the essence of life, including mental life. Insofar as we are natural beings, our engagements with nature are of the essence.

Which brings me full-circle to considering the so-called rules of such engagements, where I started this section. To continue the list I was working on, here I will add other rules drawn from the thoughts I have had since making that start.

1. Treat planet Earth with the care and respect it deserves as our sole habitat

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

in the universe.

To discover the Earth, first know yourself.

Judge what is good for you by what is good for the Earth.

Ask yourself: What is Earth’s situation with a throng of humans on board?

Think: You are built on the same plan as the worm—a hollow tube open at both ends, with a brain at one end but not the other.

If you want something to believe in, try sunlight, air, and damp soil.

What if we split Earth like an avocado so we could mine the iron at its core?

Engage without depleting or spoiling, that is the art.

Earth is here for the long haul; what about us?

Our first duty to Earth: Do no harm.

Including fungi, plants, animals, and others, all life forms in nature that are backed by genetic heritages take part in ongoing engagements with their surroundings. Those with mediating selves that influence the transformation of perceptual input into behavioral output in response to the modulatory influence of their inner states, whether consciously or unconsciously, I would say are equipped with minds of varying degrees of complexity. Any such creature that can direct its sensory attention selectively to one thing and not another in a given situation—and behave accordingly—meets my minimal requirement for consciousness. In that sense, consciousness comes down to having behavioral options and choosing among them. Even if those choices are decided by trial and error, and for a time exert an influence on subsequent behaviors, I see them spread across a range of mental abilities I welcome as mindful. I see apes as being more mindful than monkeys, monkeys more mindful than dogs, dogs more than cats, in turn more than birds, more than fish, more than worms, which I rate as about on a par with plants. Our respective repertories of behavioral options—and the shadings between them—tell the world who we are. How we choose among them in given situations reflects our native intelligence.

A good part of the world we claim as a resource for ourselves has a mind of its own and sees the world very differently than we do. Our careless and heavy-handed methods of mountaintop removal to get at seams of coal is an example of human abuse of native Earthling intelligence. Fracking to get at buried oil and gas is another. Burning the products of such efforts to generate heat and move our vehicles is a third. Blinded by our commercial appetites so we can see nothing else, humanity is at war with its planetary habitat as well as with its own judgment and intelligence. Our collective engagements with nature are a tragic shambles. Yet we keep blundering on and on as if our blindness and insensitivity didn’t matter. As if we don’t have a choice. As if we were mindless.

Many of our sorry engagements with nature aren’t engagements at all; they are brutal, bullying assaults—the antithesis of sensitive engagements. As a species, we are ending as each of us begins, in that dark space below the level of worms.

This is my cantankerous self talking, my inner curmudgeon, the voice of the baneful discrepancies that overshadow my personal engagement with nature. Nature is the First Big Thing. It will also be the Last. If it isn’t the Next Big Thing to prove that humanity is on the road to recovery, we—humanity—won’t make the cut. Lowly horseshoe crabs will outlast us all. They don’t foul their nests as we do, and they have lived in nature hundreds of times longer than we ever will. In truth, wild nature is dead. Starting with the advent of agriculture and deforestation seven thousand years ago, we have killed it off. What’s left is nature managed by humans for human benefit alone. In Maine, the

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mountain lions are gone, the wolves, the passenger pigeons, Eskimo curlews, great auks, Labrador ducks, like the woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers before them. Now spruce-fir forests are being driven north by a warming climate, hardwood forests moving in to replace conifers with maples and oaks. Changing habitats mean changing lives. Within a human lifetime, Maine will have a climate like South Carolina has today.

Instead of facing into the challenge and taking responsibility for our collective impact on our home planet, we talk of technological fixes and fleeing to Mars. So much for science, knowledge, religion, and our other notable accomplishments. So much for nature. So much for us.

Our insides have seemingly triumphed over our outsides on the far side of our permeable membranes. But not really. No such triumph is possible because we are wholly dependent on fair and equal engagements between our insides and outsides to assure our needs are met and our wastes are disposed of. What we are doing is affecting the balanced flow we depend on for life. Our home planet can no longer meet our needs in the manner we have grown accustomed to. We are on the verge of discovering what that new state of imbalance with the natural Earth means for us all.

3-b. Culture. Human culture is the collective and cumulative human mind—the terms by which people of all sorts perceive, judge, feel, and act—writ large on the Earth. It tells the story of our efforts and our fields of operation all taken together as viewed from our respective points of view deep inside our personal black boxes. Not one of us knows what culture really amounts to because all we can grasp is the smattering we make of it for ourselves. Embracing all the ways of the human world, “culture” labels a concept so large and abstract that it has room for almost any human trait or behavior we can imagine. A school bus, like an abacus, AK-47, and a hula hoop, is an aspect of culture, along with (focusing on foods) sushi, Wiener schnitzel, falafel, and rocky-road ice cream. My many dreams about being thwarted in finding my way through city streets and subway tunnels are aspects of my engagement and dreamy non-engagement with culture.

This morning, for instance, I awoke from a dream about forgetting to tie up my canoe (in the wakeful world I don’t own a canoe), then remembering that I had forgotten to tie it up, so went looking for the canoe where I had left it, not finding it, searching up and down the shore, seeking help, getting lost, forgetting what I had been looking for, feeling anxious, waking in a state of confusion. Then getting out of bed to whip back the window curtain, finding myself looking, not at the dry ground of yesterday, but into a blindingly white blizzard blowing snow horizontally out of the north on the 16th of April, a scene that fit seamlessly with the remnants of my dream. I couldn’t tell the difference between nighttime and daytime phenomena, dream and storm. To me they told the same story in being equally real and fantastical at the same time. It is a shock to wake up from a dream and find yourself immersed in the next chapter of what seems like the same dream.

Culture as viewed from the depths of our individual black boxes is an enigma; it’s there, and it isn’t. It’s a quasi-reality in being what we choose to make of it according to our selective attention to some features while ignoring others, emphasizing one feature over another, editing the cultural compendium to suit our personal tastes, desires, and sensitivities, believing that when we die, it will go on as we knew it. Culture is the great mirror that reflects our personal likes and dislikes as if they were its own.

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As they are rendered by my senses, cultural features get my attention, but that doesn’t mean I perceive them from the depths of my black box as they are in the world.

What I see is what I see, not necessarily what is out there to be seen. An extensive and idiosyncratic electrochemical sensory apparatus lies between my culture and myself. I see and hear for purposes of my own, from my personal point of view. Memory and expectancy are looking to be fulfilled, not ignored. My mistaking a black trash bag blowing in the wake of passing cars for a crow dying on the roadside is wholly my doing.

My hearing a squeaky hinge on a kitchen cupboard as a yeowling cat, ditto. My hearing a man in the street hoarsely calling out a nonsensical “Fa, Fa!” in a Boston accent at two in the morning translated as “Fire, Fire!” only after I heard it some twenty times. Culture is my personal Rorschach or audiology test. In the refined language of truth, I call the impressions it makes on me as I see them and hear them.

Culture is the public forum where we engage, the stage where we each do our thing.

We ought to know, we built it ourselves. Not the original, of course, but the one we keep running in fair order with daily contributions of our collective dreams, needs, and desires. In that sense, culture is a reification (thingification) of our thoughts, imaginings, hopes, fears, and all the rest of the contents of our personal black boxes.

When we were very young, the then culture calibrated our inner workings. It gave us a repertory of numbers, letters, words, gestures, symbols, songs, stories, and beliefs useful in describing our thoughts and situations. Now that we’re older and know the ropes, we give back in kind to keep the show going. We play the great game of cultural engagement. Now that we’re adults, the whole thing is our intellectual property because we’ve given it nothing less than our perceptions, meanings, actions, and interactions.

Everything adding up to the lives that we lead.

What our minds respond to is the bite, the pang, the sting, the punch of disparity between what we want to do and what we can actually pull off. We dream big so we can at least make some kind of mark. We fall back on habits, routines, or rituals in our cultural engagements at our peril because they lack the force of spontaneously paying attention to what we are doing. We switch on our automatic pilots as a last resort when we can no longer trust our originality and imagination to guide us ahead. Expertise is not enough. Once we’ve got it, we live in the past looking backward. The future is for amateurs, those in love with what they are doing, who look ahead to the wonder, glory, and opportunity of each new day. Habits and convictions are a drag. The secret is to pursue what we don’t understand. We can run on that fuel forever and never run out.

The ocean of culture is always bigger than our puddle of experience. There’s way more ahead than behind us. Surrender? Never! Keep looking over the next hill and around the next corner and down the back alley. We haven’t been there yet to discover those dimensions of ourselves.

It’s easy to believe that culture is largely caught up with what’s wrong with the world, not what’s right. Just turn on the news, read the paper, talk with your neighbor.

After a time it’s tempting to settle for that world of petty skirmishes and frustrations and disappointments and forlorn hopes. Bruised and battered, we want to give up. That seems the safest course. If we do nothing, nobody can blame us for doing the wrong thing. If we disengage and don’t venture a thing we’ll be safe. Quick, hide! Quit the forum, the stage, the soap box, the protest, the rebellion, the call to action. Never take a stand on anything. Don’t make waves. Go find a cave in the desert and cherish your lonely illusions. Blame the world for all that is wrong. You know who to name. Everyone

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but you. The rest of humanity. People are no damn good. If you’d never been born, you could have lived in ignorance forever. You had it made. Your big mistake was having doubts and asking too many questions. There are no questions in a cave. Only darkness.

Forever. Just shut your eyes and ears—your black box is a kind of private cave. The ultimate shelter: your own living grave.

But no, disengagement is not the answer. Never the answer. This reflection is about engagement, not giving up. Not hiding, not taking drugs, not getting drunk, not running away, not lashing out in anger, not blaming others. Engagement is aimed at using errors and discrepancies to change things for the better. The helmsman doesn’t blame his compass for getting off course; he has a wheel for correcting his heading. He’s not there to complain but to rectify that specific situation. He is an agent of change, not a prophet of doom.

As every wayfarer is an agent of change. Every path leads both the right way and wrong way. It’s not the fork in the road that makes all the difference, it’s the change in your mind—your attitude, your dreams, your understanding, your growth—that matters.

Where you are and want to go, you can get there from here. You are the voyager crossing unknown depths to new shores and continents, not of conquest, but of engagement, revelation, and discovery. As an Earthling, you claim nothing for God, King, or Queen, but all for Earth and the human mind, our designated planet and vehicle of experience.

It would be tiresome to run through all the dangers and failings of our cultural engagements. That would merely catalogue the norm of our fumblings through the ages.

We can harp forever on the burning of witches and heretics, sinking of the Titanic, fiery crash of the Hindenburg, America’s so-called Iraq War, or the ruin of Middle-Eastern culture by sectarian strife. I’m more interested in the opportunities suggested by the widening gap between our accomplishments and the fullness of our promise. There, now, is something to contemplate and engage to our fullest. A challenge worthy of us all.

In the United States, we now use the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to gauge the success of the U.S. economy, and by extension, the standard of living of its culture and people. Little Bhutan on the slopes of the Himalayas, to the contrary, gauges its national quality of life by an index of Gross National Happiness (GNH). Other alternatives to the GDP include the Happy Planet Index, Better Life Index, Social Progress Index. Or if you’d rather wallow in the mud, there’s the Misery Index. How about cultural ratings based on Justice for All, Peaceful Solutions, Nonviolent Alternatives (to military action), Earth Forever, or Small is Beautiful? Once you start thinking about other ways of rating cultural achievements, it’s hard to stop. One thing is clear: It’s time to raise the bar for the cultural measures we use to rate ourselves. The GDP ignores environmental degradation and exploitation as consequences of production, as well as inequality of wealth distribution. Who are we kidding? Like me viewing the blizzard out my window, we indulge in a living dream.

Overall, culture is the footprint of our collective ways of obtaining the basic necessities of life from our local communities, their surroundings, and ultimately, our host planet. Necessities including air, water, food, shelter, warmth, fuel, clothing, sex, safety, healthcare, and help with large projects. Omitting environmental protection (along with the arts, sciences, religions, sports, entertainments, and other cultural interests), concerns currently addressed by the U.S. President’s cabinet of top advisors are: agriculture, commerce, defense, education, energy, health, housing, homeland security, interior, justice, labor, state, treasury, transportation, and veterans affairs. The

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highest administrators of our national government selectively address issues of great concern to the general public, each member nested snugly in his or her private black box. That brief list hints (by what’s on it and what’s missing) at the intricacy of the infrastructure necessary to maintaining a modern national culture. The shadow of the Washington Monument reaches farther than we commonly suppose. Add to that national influence the heated discussions held in state and local government offices, the budgets proposed, bills signed into law, enforcement of those laws, and the ignorance, neglect, and breaking of those laws—there you have a lopsided, Washingtonian synopsis of the culture we engage with every day of our lives, whether we know it or not.

We are governed by the rules of fair play in the form of legislative and judicial decisions, edicts, proclamations, ordinances, policies, and guidelines of every imaginable sort. We are subject to the rule of law, layer upon layer of it, which regulates our engagements in more ways than we can keep up with or even imagine. All meant to level the playing field to suit the individual situations and predicaments of every citizen, who turn out to be even more particular than the givers of law themselves can calculate in advance. Resulting in a state of full employment with good pensions for government employees, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of our system of laws. Think of the potholes filled, snows plowed, ditches dug, wrecks hauled, votes counted, tax bills sent, hearings held, reports issued, checks cashed, jails filled, witnesses sworn, and on and on. The pulse of state never skips a single beat.

Culture, that is, descends upon us from above as a reflection of the concerns we sent aloft in the first place. We the People are the instigators of culture. It is our doing, each of us bearing the burden of the share for which he or she is personally responsible. And for which her/his parents are personally responsible. And their parents before them.

Culture is like an archaeological dig down through the midden of human activity until we hit bedrock, which is nature’s doing before our tribe came on the scene. We inherit our culture because it is in the air and soil of our homeland. It shapes us according to the free-floating pressures and concerns most alive in the human mind at the time and place of our birth. Where do we find shelter? Water? Something to wear? A place to sleep? Our next meal? Work? Help? Care? A potential mate? A dump for our waste? Our culture shows us the path. As wayfarers, we learn from those around us. We go where they go and do as they do, modifying their example to fit our personal needs and desires.

As we engage, so do our minds learn, so do we become.

What I am getting at is that our brains are too puny to account for the fullness of our minds. You can study the brain forever and not find diamonds, electricity, tartans, boomerangs, umlauts, or inhabitable planets in far galaxies. When we die as individuals, such things will persist in our cultural repository. When all humans die, then only the mind of nature will be left, and nature’s brain, which is the whole Earth itself from whose waters and soils we have risen into sunlight. Nature and culture are unnamed lobes of the brain. We participate in them as much as we do our own thoughts. Without them, we wayfarers in our black-box vessels would not float on their currents. Nature and culture (including art, science, politics, economics, literature, and religion) are concepts in our minds, just as we become imaginable only in their fields of influence.

The initiative to engage them is up to us. We find ourselves simply thrown here at birth by forces we do not understand any more than we do gravity. We know only that we have to stack dishes bottom to top, and that when we trip we will fall down. If we are

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wise, we will learn to live in gravitational fields, natural fields, cultural fields, subjective fields.

Simply put, that is both our heritage and our destiny if we are to fulfill the promise we are born to. Pitch in and engage the best we can, that is the way. Start by opening our eyes, focusing, lifting our heads, paying attention, looking at and listening to the sights and sounds around us, and opening ourselves to the great ambient that is ours by birth, whether we discover ourselves in Mongolia, Tibet, Syria, Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, Finland, or the south side of Chicago. We will come into selfhood by starting where we are, when we are there, and moving on through nature and culture while always being true to ourselves, building on that genetic and cultural platform. How far can we go in a single lifetime? That is the question. All we can do is start out and see where our legs carry us on our great, unmapped journey.

Culture can be as much an impediment as it is a way to the future. We have to be selective in how we follow the advice and example of our peers and elders. Pick and choose, that is the way of engagement. As guided by our personal judgment acquired through years of proceeding by trial and error. Take a step and see where it gets us.

Then retreat or move ahead, or bound like a knight in a game of chess. Or even stay put where we are. We all have choices, all the time, wherever we are. Constant rethinking, our revisions and adjustments mark our engagement. That is called growth. Learning through experience. Blazing your own path. Being yourself. Not as who you were, but who you are on the way to becoming who you will turn out to be. No, you can’t know in advance; you have to find out through a process of self-discovery. That is the adventure of a lifetime, the very reason you are here. Your survival depends on it.

Regarding impediments to our personal journeys, in an increasingly globalized world, of the many facets of culture, commerce has come to dominate human attention and engagement. Trading in goods. Shopping. Buying what we need and selling what we don’t. Money changing hands all the while. The point being to get a good price; good from buyers’ perspective, good from sellers’. In the U.S., commerce is now what we are primarily conscious of, every day of our lives. Making a profit from the sale of material goods and services. Most other facets of our culture—art, education, governance, justice, technology, sports, healthcare, food and energy production, personal freedom, fairness, environmental protection—are glossed over by the arch value of making a monetary profit. In the world of films, for example, box office eclipses excellence as a criterion of success. On our national journey, profit leads the way. Wherever we pay attention with alert minds, trade is involved. We are all out to make, if not a killing, a better life for ourselves. Which we see primarily in terms of money and goods, not engagement with the mysterious or the unknown, not self-improvement, not beauty, not world peace, not equality, not civil rights, not freedom and justice for all (including women, children, immigrants, and animals).

The whole story of mind is told by what we are interested in, pay attention to, notice, discover, and engage with every day of our lives. That is, by what we have in mind, what we are mindful of, what we think and talk about, what captivates us, what excites us, what is important to us, what is at the core of our existence as cultural beings.

And because of the way our minds operate, these qualities come in pairs of polar opposites: what pleases us or what displeases us. What we like or don’t like, want or don’t want, seek or avoid, love or deplore.

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After all, we can’t pay attention to every gradation. So we focus sharply on what strikes us as good or bad, pleasant or painful, beautiful or ugly, healthy or unhealthy, wise or stupid, enriching or debasing, fun or painful. Our memories and attention spans are limited. Our bandwidth is too small. If we have too many choices, we get confused.

Too much email to respond to, too many friends on Facebook, too many films to see, books to read, games to play, people to meet, glasses of beer to drink—we have to draw the line somewhere just to stay sane. Enough, already! Toe a line in the sand. This far and no farther. Disengage from what’s not important. Make distinctions between positive and negative, play and work, ahead and behind, winning and losing. Being starkly clear lets us act fast and stay on top of things. Getting food on the table every day shows we are doing our job. Making time to clean house, wash dishes, and read to the kids shows everything’s under control.

Reflecting the conscious concerns of every one of its members, every culture is hugely complex. Living with others, particularly those we don’t know, is stressful. We can’t be all things to all people. If we try, that leads to overload. Our minds have limited capacities for dealing with what cries out for our attention. We have to cut back to what we can deal with. Get our priorities straight. Let go of the excess. Do what’s important and chuck the rest. So in the U.S., we put first things first in paying attention to money and commercial affairs because, as we see it, everything else depends on that. With money in the bank, we think we can lead the good life. Poverty and deprivation—even sufficiency—are thought degrading. Everything takes money; without it, we can’t do what we want, be who we want. It’s the economy, stupid. In black and white, Bill Clinton has given us a bumper-sticker slogan to serve as our cultural philosophy.

Living in a small village is one thing; you know everyone by name, know their children, what they do for a living, when they are sick. You can afford to give them the benefit of the doubt, assume they are good people, and help them when they have a setback. By helping a neighbor in a village, you are likely helping one of your relatives who shares some of your genes. But when an entire culture intrudes into our safety zone by mail, phone, TV, newspaper, magazine, internet, email, cellphone, connecting us to everything that’s happening every minute of our lives—culture is no longer our friend or relative but is clearly out to get at us in our homes and other places where we used to feel safe and snug. It’s not our culture so much as theirs, whoever all those people are who commandeer our personal engagements for purposes of their own. I know they are out there; I get emails, letters, and phone calls from them every day.

Perhaps in some far and mythical past, cultures were built and maintained by groups for the mutual benefit of all members. When people got sick, others took care of them. When people needed help, others lent a hand. But now there are so many of us, and we come in so many varieties, we can’t identify with the whole, so tend to defend ourselves by reducing our decisions to yes-or-no choices, stay or flee, love or hate, pass or fail. As it turns out, this is exactly how our minds work on the most basic level.

Neurons either fire or they don’t, send signals forward or not, excite or inhibit, engage or stand pat. Our minds are made to reduce complex issues to simple choices so that we can act decisively in short order. Which holds as true in cultural as in natural settings.

Culture exists for our personal benefit so that our needs can be met with minimal fuss, delay, and expense. When it gets out of hand and causes more trouble than we can bear, it consumes us as so much fodder for the benefit of aggressive others, not as individuals worthy in themselves.

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When the self-seeking, aggressive members of our culture—what I call the culturally over-advantaged—prey on those less fortunate than themselves instead of helping them, the culture is owned by those on top as they increasingly isolate themselves from those in lower castes. Instead of existing for the benefit of all its citizens, culture becomes stratified into levels of the fortunate and unfortunate, deserving of privilege and undeserving, as if those on each level earned the fate they were born to according to the prevailing scheme of things as mapped from above. Feeding on itself, such a culture is self-defeating, and will endure only through bullying and coercion. The great reckoning will eventually come because the internal aggressors are out for themselves, their relatives, and cronies, not those they control, who will eventually take the upper hand, even at great cost, because driven by the pressing disparities evident in the depths of their own minds. And at last count, they are a multitude.

It is ironic that cultures are built around the needs, wants, beliefs, and convictions of individual members, who, in seeking help and support in having, say, their cars, roofs, or teeth fixed, create a class of providers to meet their common needs, and in meeting those needs, that class of public servants gains sufficient influence to steer the culture away from meeting public needs to assuring their own private benefits, claiming the culture for themselves. Capitalism puts a wealthy few owners in charge of the wageearning many, creating the myth that the few are more worthy and deserving than the multitude, defying the tenets of democracy, creating a ruling elite that comes to own not only the means of production, but the people themselves and their system of government. Everyone takes risks, not only the few at the top. Daily living is a risk in itself. There’s no justification for rewarding the bosses in particular. I see this as slavery by a new name, assuring exploitation of the many for the benefit of their self-appointed masters. The best alternative would be to step outside the bounds of the GDP and work for yourself as a home industry of one. That way you share the responsibilities of both employer and employee, your black box becomes your boardroom, and you can always meet one-on-one with your boss.

Given offshore tax havens that maximize profits while jobs (or whole industries) are shipped overseas to minimize costs, the benefits of capitalism are a temporary illusion.

Other persistent cultural illusions include the impressions that the sun goes around the Earth rather than vice versa; that sun, moon, and stars rise and set rather than that it is the Earth that turns beneath them; that men are superior to women (or vice versa); and that some groups of people are inherently superior to others. Another common cultural illusion is that time and space are properties of the material universe and not an overlay by us in our black boxes of arbitrary units of measurement onto changes we either perceive from a stationary point of view on the one hand, or generate on the other through our personal movements and actions. In my view, science proceeds by projecting the calibrated understanding in our heads onto the universe instead of engaging nature as it in a two-way dialog, letting nature take the lead, then the mind, until a state of resonance is achieved and true understanding can be declared with confidence. We are natural as well as cultural beings after all. By imposing scientific (cultural) order on nature in a quest for understanding from a human point of view, we set ourselves up to control nature, not join it in common endeavor. As things stand, when we die off, the universe will persist in the form of continuous change without benefit of our units, measuring instruments, and lust to master the universe in our own terms.

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I particularly enjoy the illusion that men in uniforms or dark suits and neckties are more trustworthy than the crumpled masses. And its parallel, that beautiful, welldressed, or well-spoken women form a higher class of person. We commonly believe that words say what they mean to us or what we read into them, leading to claims of being able to interpret the U.S. Constitution from the framers’ point of view, truly an illusory conceit. In wartime, with rhetorical mastery, each side glorifies its heroes and slanders its opponents as being evil and subhuman. Sports fans blame the referee or umpire for every call that favors the opposition. Every discipline, including art, history, science, and religion, boasts of its own rituals as hitting closer to the truth than those who view the world differently, while truth is a matter of perspective, and every culture must embrace multiple (often conflicting) truths if it is to be fair to its members. It is ironic that, from within our respective black boxes, the truth may be perfectly clear, while those on either side of us feel the same within wholly different streams of experience, belief, and engagement. There are no truths or beliefs that do not need to be introduced by, “As I understand the issue . . . ,” or, “From my perspective, . . . .”

In the end, cultures are governed by nested layers of laws, ordinances, rules, edicts, policies, pronouncements, conventions, mores, mistaken beliefs, prevailing opinions, ignorance, and hearsay. With culture serving as a buffer between humans and nature, we thrive on obeying the rules, such as they are. That way we can coordinate our efforts, take turns, play our parts in synchrony with others, practice, rehearse, and improve our performance so that we eventually get it right—either that, or are proven wrong, wrong, wrong. Rules of one sort or another are what make cultures work for a wide diversity of people looking out from the relative calm and shelter of their subjective estates. And if they don’t work all that well, they can always be improved.

Along with rules come the enforcers. The leaders, teachers, trainers, coaches, managers, directors, supervisors, inspectors, umpires, referees, timekeepers, linesmen, hall patrollers, quality controllers, and all the rest. Their job is to make sure the rules are obeyed, which challenges us to do our best within tight constraints. We can harmonize our voices, play our parts, go solo, sing in unison, or form duets, trios, quartets . . . unto nonets and beyond. Which takes training, practice, rehearsal, anxiety, adrenalin, and giving our all. Being under direction the whole way assures coordination of specialized effort to achieve maximum effect by smoothing and synchronizing our individual performances as they issue from the passionate core of our respective black boxes.

Culture, then, is the great stabilizer that balances and coordinates our myriad individual efforts for the common good (or ill). Pierre Monteux conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique at Symphony Hall is one cultural event at which I was present in my little black box.

Others have watched or run in the Boston Marathon; cheered Harvard on against Yale; attended Red Sox, Celtics, and Patriots games; taken flights from Logan Airport; cruised among the islands in Boston Harbor; visited the Science Museum and Massachusetts General Hospital; read the Boston Globe; and borrowed books from Boston Public Library. Such events and institutions are not generally possible in nature. It is human culture that sponsors them and human individuals that support the opportunities for engagement they offer. Without culture (as a subclass of nature), we wouldn’t be anything like who we are. Whether we are deferential or assertive personality types, culture forms, stirs, provokes, instructs, and challenges us to grow into the people we become. And that influence is not so much in our brains as in our cultural experience as

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enabled by our brains. You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take country culture out of the boy. Country culture isn’t so much in the boy’s brain as it is in the integrated style of his engagements, in his way of being himself. Through years of engagement, it resides in his eyes, ears, muscles, clothing, vocabulary, and neural pathways, ready to be activated on demand.

Music is a branch of culture that makes it possible for people to gather for the purpose of making noise. The art is in the integrity of the noise, how it all fits together.

What string quartets and jazz ensembles release in me is a sensitivity to and appreciation for the interplay between separate voices weaving in and out among their companions. I find musical chords boring. I like polyphony, each voice playing its part.

It’s the difference, not the sameness that gets me. The playful gap between voices, the delta, the dichotomy, the discrepancy, the polarity, the disparity. In brief, the close encounter, engagement, relationship, interaction. Moving in, then away, then back again by a different route. It’s the wayfaring. Playfully finding the way in easy company. I turn off the switch on jazz that blows the loudest, highest, longest. That’s for the Olympics. So what? I say to myself. It’s not individual prowess in itself I want to hear but deftness in relating to others. The more spontaneously the better because more engaging. That is my preference. I am not a rational or reasonable person. I’m out for adventure. That’s what I seek and pay attention to. The lilt and surprise, not the pure form. Not the logic.

I will conclude this section on culture with a number of examples of my personal cultural engagements. In 1951, I was living in a fraternity in Boston as a sophomore at MIT. Early in the term, fraternities entertained prospective pledges from among the incoming freshman class. I was particularly struck by the mental acuity and good nature of a student from India. I took him around the house, played Ping-Pong with him, sat with him at lunch, and thought he made an excellent candidate. After lunch, the president of the fraternity took me aside and told me I was doing a great job stringing the boy along, making him feel welcome, while there wasn’t a chance in hell we would pledge a dark foreigner. My response to that news was to find an apartment near Kenmore Square and to quit the fraternity I could no longer belong to because of its Whites-only policy, which I naively hadn’t realized was part of its deep-South traditions from post-Civil War days. I haven’t stepped into a fraternity house for sixty-three years.

I’ve already mentioned Pierre Monteux conducting Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. That was one of the most moving experiences of my college life, which I stumbled into during a Wednesday afternoon walk when I found the door open at Symphony Hall. A sandwich-board on the sidewalk announced an open rehearsal, so, out of curiosity, I went in and sat in the back row. I knew Berlioz from WGBH broadcasts, but had never been present at a live performance. Monteux raised his baton just as I took my seat. What caught my attention was actually witnessing the different instruments and sections playing the music that I heard with my ears. It was the simultaneous presence of the music and its lively performers that astonished me. My eyes and ears reinforced each other, adding to an experience I had never had until that day. It is the seeing that sticks with me, the actual witnessing of sounds being produced through human effort. Violins, cellos, bases, brass, woodwinds, tympani—I can see them all. The standing percussionist striking the suspended chimes with a small mallet produced sounds I had never fully appreciated until then. He is with me today, making a guest appearance in my mind as I type these few words of thanks.

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At the end of my sophomore year, I transferred from MIT to Columbia College in New York, where I took up the study of the humanities during the last year that that major was being offered. I studied cultural events in the city as extensively as books at the college. On a spring night at one o’clock in the morning, I decided to walk the length of Broadway from 113th Street to the ferry terminal in lower Manhattan. Just me by myself, my solo wayfarer. The signs, curbs, venting manhole covers, streetlights, few cars, buildings, and people I met have now blended into an impressionistic panorama of that event, all of Broadway compacted into a single image distilled from my moving perspective, now entirely visual. That and a sense of great adventure is what I have left. I can’t recall specific details—they’ve faded away. I must have passed through Columbus Circle, Times Square, Union Square. I can’t remember how long it took. I know I got to South Ferry before dawn, and took the subway back to 113th Street.

Just thinking about my walk down Broadway reminds me of another walk with my younger brother Peter a few years later, a cultural walk of a different color. I met him at his apartment near Kenmore Square in Boston at noon on a Saturday, and together we headed west to place stones on the cairn at the site of Thoreau’s cabin twenty miles west in Walden Woods near the famous pond. We walked back roads all the way, and talked about the region as it had been a hundred years ago, and in some stretches still was in the 1960s. Stone walls and apple trees are what I remember. And how tired we both were when we caught the ten-o’clock bus back to Boston from Concord. Now that Peter is dead, that walk stands out as one of the highlights of our brotherhood. An interaction between family and culture.

In 1955, I worked as an engineering aide in the servomechanisms group at Boeing Aircraft in Renton just south of Seattle. I worked in a giant hangar of a building filled wall-to-wall with wooden desks, an engineer seated at each of several hundred desks. No partitions, no cubicles, just one big room. The only thing on my desk was a leveroperated mechanical calculator. I spent six months making charts and plots on graph paper. One day my supervisor explained that one of two prototype B-52 airplanes was showing a tendency to veer (his term was yaw) to the side, and he wanted me to plot fuel consumption of all four engines to see if one engine was burning more or less fuel than the others. The fuel consumption records consisted of a series of actual photos of dials taken during each test flight. I was told which flight to check, and sent to the large hanger where the records were kept. I got the photos in a thick file, read the dials for all four engines during that particular flight, and plotted the numbers I read from the dials.

As it turned out, no engine was using more or less fuel than the others. What I remember was the bleakness of the days I spent on that job. Doing the duty I was assigned in a kind of set state of mind that was wholly mechanical, like my calculator. I was engaged to the point of doing my job, being sure of my accuracy in reading, writing down, and plotting long series of numbers, but beyond that I was not personally engaged, just pulling a lever. It was something I could do without being engaged. I had effectively rented my brain out to help solve someone else’s problems. At the end of six months, I was drafted into the Army, and left Seattle for Fort Ord near Salinas, California. Ever since, wayfarer that I am, I have made sure to choose my engagements from among those that appeal to me as much as walking down Broadway at night.

In the Army, I was stationed in Kaiserslautern, Germany, as a Signal Corps photographer during the Cold War. My unit was the only Signal Company (Photo) in the U.S. sector of occupied Germany at the time, so its still and motion picture

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photographers were assigned to cover events anywhere from Bremerhaven to Munich.

On one assignment, I covered all the territory between those two cities. In the damp spring of 1957, the first U.S. Helicopter Company deployed to Europe arrived in Bremerhaven on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, and I was assigned as the still photographer to document its journey south along the Rhine River and then across Southern Germany to Munich. Helicopters? What role could they play in the Atomic Age? It took the Vietnam War to set me straight on that. I began by photographing the readying of the helicopters on the flight deck of the carrier, views from the open door of my designated craft during the short flight to the Rhine, then various stops along the route in plowed farmlands, and in one case, a municipal soccer field. The stop that caught my attention was the one in a rural field where, on takeoff, the generator of the helicopter I was in cut out when we were forty feet in the air. Craft, crew, and single passenger with 4 x 5” Speed Graphic abruptly fell like stones out of gray skies into a bed of wet topsoil. Powered by inertia, the rotors were still turning as we hit, the sudden halt forcing the sweeping blades down to the ground, where one crewman had the luck of his life in darting between the spinning blades to get away from the explosion sure to follow.

But there were no sparks this time to ignite the magnesium-alloy skin, and the rest of us waited in a sort of daze for the rotors to calm down so we could seek higher ground with whatever gear we could lug. We had to wait for the wrecker that was following us by road to reach the site of the crash and pick up the fallen bird. In the meantime, a crowd of local residents came out of nowhere to comment on damage to field and helicopter both, and I struck up a conversation in German (I’d had two years in college) with a sprightly man wearing a dark green loden coat and Tyrolean hat. The rest of the journey was uneventful. The helicopter company made it to its base near Munich, and the photo crew took the train back to Kaiserslautern.

I knew it was the Atomic Age because as a soldier, I bivouacked with atomic cannons in Germany, all barrels pointing east. On one assignment in 1957, I was sent to photograph Soviet antennas rising above the trees just beyond the cleared boundary through the forest that marked the Iron Curtain. By the time I got there, the antennas had been moved. I took a photo anyway, that showed nothing but trees on a hill. But returning from one training exercise, our company convoy got stalled in a traffic jam in a rural village that featured a right-angle turn in the middle of town. Creeping ahead, we at last met an atomic cannon with transport carriers on both ends. In the other lane, it was straddling that sharp corner, the trucks at either end hung up against stone walls, able to move neither forward or back. Our lane of traffic millimetered its way past the turn, but during our creeping occupation of the site, that cannon never budged. As far as I know it may still be there as an ad hoc monument to the Cold War. I remember the engagement with that cannon because until I saw it with my own eyes, I thought that bivouacking was just playing soldiers like we used to do as kids during World War II. But this was no wooden gun, and I was no tin soldier. This was a pointed show of strength against our then national enemy of choice. That realization sobered me up very quickly.

In early September, 1959, I was hired as the Information Service photographer by Iowa State University in Ames. Timing was of the essence because Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev was coming to town during my first week on the job to learn why U.S. farms were so much more productive than those in Russia. I barely had time to get my hands on the equipment I was to use before I had to get memorable photos of one of

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the most famous men in the world. One stop on the tour was a home economics lab equipped with several rows of gas stoves. A class was to demonstrate the frying of eggs for the Premier and his wife, but at the last minute the Secret Service ruled that said stoves couldn’t be turned on because they might cause an international incident by scorching the person of the Russian leader. A quick-witted teacher had the students draw outlines of fried eggs on paper cut to the proper shape, with the words “fried eggs” written across the drawings. No sooner done than Premier and Mrs. Khrushchev walked in the door, followed by a retinue of high government officials in the State Departments of Russia and the U.S. I stood atop a stool to record the delegation’s responses. The front row directly facing the stoves, including both Khrushchevs, erupted into hilarity, followed by those behind them who were quickly told what was going on. All had a good time, except perhaps for a sheepish home-ec. teacher. Even using the antiquated Leica I inherited with the job and was struggling to use, I got enough pictures to satisfy my boss, so I, too, was happy.

Early in 1962, I started work at Harvard College Observatory by setting up a photo lab worthy of the Space Age. I quickly expanded my fiefdom from a one-room darkroom with walls eight feet apart to a fourteen-room photo lab near Fresh Pond on the outskirts of Cambridge. Early on I was handed a remnant from a fallen Russian satellite that had landed piecemeal in northern Canada. No one knew what its purpose was, but as a piece of space junk, it deserved to have its picture taken. That was a first for me, and the beginning of Harvard’s playing an active role, along with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, in lofting research satellites into orbit. With one click of my shutter, my mind went from a dark wood kind of nineteenth-century awareness into full-fledged, gold-plated, twentieth century engagement.

When President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, I was in the photo lab darkroom at Harvard College Observatory making prints. I had the radio tuned to WGBH. When the bulletin came that Kennedy had been shot, I called my assistant on the intercom and asked if he was listening to the radio. He said he was. The horror of that moment was implied in neither of us commenting on the news. There it was. Suddenly adrift, I kept printing the job in the enlarger. I never felt more isolated from the culture I lived in than I was at that moment, doubly sealed in my darkroom and in my own thoughts, under the glow of a red safelight.

On a Wednesday afternoon in the spring of 1973, I drove my Humanities 3 class at Abbott Academy from Andover to Cambridge to see what we could discover in two hours exploring MIT. Starting on the steps of Building 10, we headed off in different directions to see what experiences we could have and sense we could make of a cultural institution devoted to science and engineering. A chapel had been added to the campus since my days at the school, so I was curious about what sort of building could acknowledge the ineffabilities of faith and spirit in such surroundings. On the outside it resembled a red brick pillbox much smaller than I thought it would be. Without windows, which surprised me. Entrance was through a curved archway. Passing into the interior, I left Cambridge, Mass., behind and entered another world. It was dark, almost black. Arcs of chairs spread across a circular floor. A larger space than I expected in a pillbox, almost infinite—like the darkness outdoors on a moonless night. Lit from above by a gentle shower of light descending from an off-center skylight in the roof onto some sort of table. Golden rectangles like leaves hung suspended in the glow as if falling through eternity. I was stunned by the aura of the place. I sat and savored the atmosphere, the

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ambience. Everything dissolved except for those golden leaves. I had not a thought in my head. Unlike the granite institution on the other side of Mass. Ave., here was no place for thought. This space opened solely onto inner feelings of awe, wonder, and comfort. Whatever I needed at that moment, there it was. Released inside, not outside of my body. As my eyes adapted to the shadows, I sensed movement in front of me to the right of the table. I was not alone. A silent figure removing something from a case.

Suddenly a burst of sound. Music. A violin. Bach. A solo sonata. The voice of that place on that day. Exactly what I needed to hear. What I had come for and didn’t know it.

Discovered at MIT of all places. I just sat, wholly open to the dark, the music, the falling golden leaves. I knew exactly where I was, who I was. I was meant for this experience.

Nothing else mattered. There was nothing else. After the music stopped, the figure of a woman carrying a violin case passed up the aisle. I wondered who she was and why she had begun playing in the dark exactly when I had sat down. But I already knew. She was kin. A fellow wayfarer. Making sense of her brief stay on Earth by doing what she had to do. As I had had to take my class on yet one last voyage of discovery before Abbott (oldest girls’ school in the U.S.) shut down in a few weeks, was swallowed by the boys’ school up the street, and I was out of a job.

What these ten cultural engagements share in common is that I remember them from the years between 1951 and 1973, each having made its mark on my mind and memory so that it is still readily available to me today in 2014. Available, I now believe, because of an element of surprise in that things turned out other than I had expected them to. Each exhibits a discrepancy between my expectancy on that occasion and what actually happened. The combination of discrepancy and surprise heightened the engagement itself, making it memorable, for either its positive or negative polarity in comparison to what I was ready for at the time. These incidents are the stuff my personal consciousness is made of. The emotionally charged high points between the hours or days I get by on automatic pilot, between routine engagements leading up to the peak occasions marked by disparity such as these. Why do I call myself a wayfarer?

Because I love going beyond where I’ve been before. For good or ill, trial-and-error is the name of my game. Taking the next step, and the step after that. Some would call it empiricism. Or experimentation. I call it being a wayfarer driven by heartfelt curiosity.

3-c. Community. Early human settlements were commonly located on the banks of lakes, streams, or wetlands where water for drinking, fishing, hunting, washing, removing waste, and boating was readily available. London was founded at the junction where the River Fleete flowed into the Thames Estuary, New York between the Hudson and East Rivers; Rome on the Tiber, Paris on the Seine, Alexandria in the Nile Delta.

Along the coast, safe harbors were essential. On Mount Desert Island (MDI) in Maine, I now live in Bar Harbor, not far from the towns of Northeast Harbor, Somesville at the head of Somes Sound, Southwest Harbor, and Bass Harbor. Communities spring up where they do for good reason, usually having to do with protection from the elements, plentiful natural resources essential to survival, together with access to other areas.

Coastal Hancock County, Maine, is the smattering of modern American culture I physically engage with on a daily basis. I live in senior housing in the Town of Bar Harbor, attend Quaker Meeting in Northeast Harbor, gas my car in Trenton, buy most of my clothing at Rene’s discount shop in Ellsworth (Rene is my “haberdasher”), attend meetings of the Executive Committee of Friends of Taunton Bay in Sullivan, near where

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my mother was born in 1897 into a granite worker’s family, and across Taunton River from where my ashes will end up in Hancock’s Riverside Cemetery. For five years in the 1990s I worked as a part-time ranger at the headquarters of Acadia National Park, and in my free time wrote and illustrated four books about the park and the Shore Path in Bar Harbor. Born in Utica, New York, in 1932, I am not native to these parts. I migrated here in June, 1986, to live (as it turned out) for two-and-a-half years on Burying Island twelve miles north of Bar Harbor, a now wooded island which my father and uncle (mother’s sister’s husband) had bought in undivided shares as an island of stumps and raspberry bushes in 1938 when I was five.

Community provides the context of my personal engagements. It is the particular sector of culture and nature I interact with every day. It is where my wayfaring feet meet the pathways of the collective society I am a member of. Community is the footprint of my personal experience on my culture and, in turn, my culture’s footprint on my mind.

For me, in practical terms, it is the sample of culture within walking (and short driving) distance of where I live. When I wrote up sixty hikes along the living trails of Acadia National Park in the mid-1990s, the shortest hike was 1.3 miles around Lower Hadlock Pond, the longest 13.5 miles along four trails on Isle au Haut. Geographically speaking, a circle with a fifteen-mile radius around my apartment in the town of Bar Harbor embraces the coastal community I have engaged for the past twenty-eight years, including the whole of MDI, Frenchman Bay, Taunton Bay, greater parts of Franklin, Hancock, Sullivan, along with Trenton, Lamoine, and Ellsworth. Most particularly for me, that circle includes Burying Island, the center of my personal universe in being my toehold—of all places on Earth, the one most essential to my physical and mental wellbeing.

In June, 1986, I moved to Burying Island from the Boston area to avoid distraction so I could write the great book roiling in my innards about humanity’s abuse of its natural environment. Later, when I sent my manuscript to a kind reader, he pointed out that the work was too angry to publish, so I rewrote it three or four times, trying to calm the waters of my soul, with slight success. For four years, writing that (never published) book was my primary engagement. It was on my mind when I went to bed, and when I got up. I was driven by the disparity between my personal respect for the natural order of our home planet and its callous treatment at human hands.

Occupying roughly thirty acres, the Burying Island community, bedrock to canopy, is now almost exclusively natural. When my father and uncle bought it, it had been logged over as a cultural wasteland of stumps and slash having no value to anyone. I am not able to make a living there because, out of respect, I have vowed not to bend it to my wishes. It does not exist to meet my needs nor suit my purposes. It draws me precisely because it is wholly authentic unto itself as ruled by natural forces. I try not to mess, meddle, or interfere with it. When I lived for two-and-a-half years on the island in the 1980s, it hosted a large breeding colony of great blue herons, and in winter I couldn’t walk anywhere on crusty snow without broadcasting my presence, sending eagles hidden in white pines flying out over the very ducks they were hunting, said ducks flying for their lives, while I was out for my daily excursion to see what was going on in my winter community. From an eagle’s perspective, I was what was going on, disturbing the quiet, breaking its concentration so it could not focus on what it was doing—making a living in the winter by hunting diving ducks feeding on blue mussels. From a natural perspective, as the sole member of my species in the vicinity, I was more an intruder

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than a wayfarer. A stranger in that place. A nuisance. On the island, sole representative of humanity that I was, I was a community of one, which had its advantages in boosting my self-reliance and confidence, while whetting my sense of aloneness. If I didn’t do it, it didn’t get done. I put my heart into going solo, but increasingly yearned for a more companionable community than I could sustain on my own. In the long run my going native just didn’t work because none of my neighbors spoke my language. It didn’t work for the eagles or herons, it didn’t work for me.

On Easter Sunday in April, 1987, I became an annoyance to the human community on the mainland. I’d watched plumes of white smoke above shoreline trees in Hancock for several days slowly progressing toward an active eagle nest that I could see from my stance on the island. I figured I had a unique vantage point, so was probably one of the few people to realize something unusual must be happening. It looked to me like slash from a road-building project was being burned. Was a road being run straight toward that nest? If I didn’t check, who would? On that day I rowed across the bay, found property lines blazed and cleared through shoreland woods, pointing back toward where the smoke was coming from. I walked one boundary line running away from the shore, and shortly came across a crew clearing a broad swath through the woods, heading exactly where I feared. A thirty-four lot subdivision was being built, and although it had not yet been approved by the Hancock Planning Board, the access road was well under way. I asked the developer, who was directing the crew, if he knew the road passed directly under an active eagle nest. He claimed not to know about any such nest. I walked ahead along the row of survey stakes, and in two minutes came to the tall white pine hosting the largest eagle nest I’d ever seen—directly over the road. I told the developer I’d let the Planning Board know what I’d found. He said, “See you there.”

This was in the 1980s when developers in Maine were buying up old farms and converting them to subdivisions. They’d pay local folks a finder’s fee for letting them know where large parcels of land could be had on the cheap. Nobody would pay me a fee to block the landrush in this particular case, but I vowed to try.

To shorten the story, eagles were at low ebb in the Eastern U.S. at that time because of the die-off due to rampant application of the pesticide DDT. Eagles were put on Maine’s Endangered Species List, and nests were being monitored for their breeding success. Which was discouraging. I obtained the services of a pro-bono attorney familiar with environmental causes, and she spread the word to groups like Maine Audubon and Maine chapter of The Nature Conservancy. Although I was blocking progress in Hancock, and was heckled for my meddling in affairs people felt I had no part in, behind the scenes I received strong support in environmental circles. The local board approved the subdivision, and my appeal was rejected for lack of standing, but a state judge in Ellsworth ruled that I did have standing after all because of my outspoken participation in the extended planning board hearing. In the end, The Nature Conservancy gave the developer a no-interest loan to find a less controversial site, and the subdivision land was conveyed to the state as protected eagle habitat by the Land for Maine’s Future Board.

In the aftermath of that affair, I became active in the local environmental scene, helping to found three nonprofit organizations: a regional land trust, a bay-watch group in Taunton Bay, and a watershed-watch NGO for the Union River. The first two are still going strong after more than twenty years. So where I was a community of one on my island, I inadvertently became part of a much larger community on the mainland,

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establishing close ties with all manner of people (in the days before cellphones and email, so I got used to rowing to meetings, and rowing back at night).

In December, 1988, the Dutch, Zen, police-non-procedural writer Janwillem van de Wetering offered me a small bedroom in an uninsulated studio on his land near the Union River to stay in, and I continued my writing and environmental work on the mainland, slowly making the transition from the wild to the civilized world. Janwillem, and his wife Juanita, were ideal companions during the two years it took me to develop a new community around my preferred lifestyle. Our minds worked much alike, so we established an immediate rapport. He’d been disillusioned by the antics of Zen masters during and following the two years he’d spent in a Zen monastery in Kyoto, as I had been by living too deeply in nature. We were both on the rebound from excessive indulgence, sobered by pushing ourselves too far in searching for an ideal community to replace the one we’d inherited. We both found a sense of humor essential to our recovery. I eventually picked up a job in Bar Harbor helping to write a report on watershed management for a freshwater fisheries organization, and squeaked by with minimal community engagement beyond my environmental work.

In 1993, I took a job as a seasonal ranger at Acadia, lived in park housing, and in the off-season did volunteer work in the lands office in exchange for a place to stay for the winter. I worked first as volunteer coordinator, then as a writer-editor in the planning office. My community involvement began to expand, first due to contact with over a thousand park volunteers, then through planning projects in the park and beyond.

Today I live in senior housing in Bar Harbor adjacent to the park, a more suitable habitat among many people, so I am not the conspicuous exception disturbing the natural order of my wild habitat on the island. MDI is a much larger island with room for eagles, coyotes, occasional moose, spruce-fir forests, ponds, streams, wetlands, four towns, several million visitors a year, and yes, a community of year-round residents, of whom I became one. Given the easy access to Acadia, not a bad second choice for a tree hugger. Given the seasonal influx of tourists, that tree hugger is prone to having second thoughts, as well—when Bar Harbor unabashedly gives itself to the tourist industry.

My adopted community has many portals providing access to world culture. I send Christmas cards to California, Australia, and England via the U.S. Post Office. I manage my money at a bank with several branches throughout the region. The local library gives me access to book collections all across Maine. UPS and FedX deliver packages from sources I contact on the Web to my door. The local movie theater shows films made in many countries. That’s where I saw Ten Canoes, made by Aboriginal People in Australia, an instant hit with me. Wi-Fi in the community room of my senior housing unit connects me to the Internet. Having felt disconnected from a human community when I lived by myself among eagles and herons, I now consider myself over-connected to the distractions of the world, and am cutting back on many of the links I have built through the years, trying to find a workable compromise that doesn’t erode the peace and quiet I require to think my own thoughts and feel like myself.

Choosing the communities we live in is a serious matter. In the wrong surroundings, we can lose our sense of equanimity very quickly. Which I realized by leaping from one extreme to the other by moving back to the mainland on the 23rd of December, 1988, to stay with Janwillem, the very man, it turned out, I needed to help me restore my sense of balance. Our minds and lifestyles are highly susceptible to the communities we live in.

We have to achieve the right placement to get the balance of our engagements just

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right—so that we are replenished to the degree we expend ourselves. We need to live to a similar degree in the world and in ourselves at the same time by maintaining engagements that keep our incoming perceptions in-line with our outgoing actions. If the balance tips excessively either way, our engagements become distorted, taking a toll on our minds. Total abstinence is as bad as overindulgence. Our capacity for judgment is crucial to the regulation of our engagements with our families, communities, cultures, and nature. Moderation is not necessarily the answer. I find that selectivity in choosing the projects I take on is essential to my personal happiness.

Think of the temptations we face on the Web and in the big city. Today, wherever we live, we have access to virtual communities where anything goes—pornography, drugs, and terrorist activity, along with recipes for squash soup and where to buy a used car. It is up to each of us to tailor the community we live in to our needs. Which takes personal judgment in each case. The body I am may have GPS coordinates in Bar Harbor, Maine, but my mind can go anywhere on Earth, hugely extending my community of immediate engagements beyond any conventional limits imposed by my physical location.

Community being the locus where my identity engages its culture, where, truly, do I live? Since I here claim that I live in my mind, and it is my mind that travels the Internet, my email address may be more crucial to my identity than my street address ever was. At least in a limited, virtual sense.

The potential disparity between my physical and mental locations raises the issue of trust as the key to the community I actually live in. Do I trust my virtual neighbors on the Web as I do my physical neighbors in Bar Harbor? A few yes, many no. Face-to-face interaction makes all the difference. The Internet opens me to a host of anonymous others making claims on my attention, judgment, and money. I can buy anything I might want on the Internet, from people I can’t meet and don’t know. What guarantee do I have that these people are who they claim to be, or will deliver as they promise? The community I choose to live in is based on my engagements with people I have reason to trust. If I grow up with such people, and know their children, associates, reputations, and life stories—and they know mine—then we earn a sense of mutual trust as the basis for our ongoing engagements. My grandmother pronounced, after having had tea with a new neighbor, “I didn’t object to her any,” meaning, in her New England way, she had made a new friend because she had found no grounds for suspicion. There was no gap between her standards and her assessment of the lady upon meeting her in person. If a merchant has a habit of shortchanging me, I take my business elsewhere. If a friend lets me down a lot, I seek him out less often. These are gut-level judgments based on the impressions I form through many engagements with others through the years.

Like relationships, our community engagements are not set in stone, they are ongoing processes that flow both ways in looping fashion from perception to action, action to perception. As such, they are constantly changing, depending on current circumstances and events. After several rounds, we come to count on them as if they were stable, or at least fit within our comfort range. Trust in other people and institutions builds a sense of loyalty to them as reliable features of our community. We go out of our way not to offend them. We give them a certain consideration by holding them in our thoughts. If we sign a contract, we are obligated to hold to its terms as a kind of commitment to duty. But communities hold together not out of duty but from a mutual sense of caring, liking, and sharing of experience. They do not form around a set of obligations or duties. In basic training, several of my buddies would sleep on guard

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duty because, as enforcers, they could excuse themselves in their own minds and get away with it. But trust and loyalty build a sense of mutual responsibility as if we were all members of the same extended family.

Communities, that is, are stabilized by networks of shared, positive engagements.

They aren’t planned so much as lived in the details of everyday life. In people meeting on the street, in the drug store, the Post Office, the bank. Schools build communities around themselves because parents entrust their children to their teachers and administrators. Children become invested in schools because that’s where their friends are, and where, if lucky, they learn helpful skills. It takes time to build a community around ourselves, often many years of engagements of all sorts. But if most of those engagements are positive, then we make a place for ourselves at the intersection of our individual traits with our larger society. I consider myself a member of the southern Hancock County coastal community, Maine community, New England Community, Eastern community, in that order. Last of all I admit to being an American with New England roots. I don’t think of the U.S. as my homeland; I reserve my loyalty for New England in general, and coastal Maine in particular. I am a Yankee, a Northerner.

Beyond that, I dub myself Steve from planet Earth because that identity emphasizes Earth’s claim on me. If it were not for my home planet, I wouldn’t be writing these words. First and last, I am an Earthling.

Rules, too, are essential to my sense of community. I carry three library cards, Maine driver’s license, several ID cards, Social Security card, Veterans Administration card, Medicare card, and a credit card. I do my best to take library books back on time, to obey traffic laws, pay my bills, and uphold my end of the several memberships I hold.

When flush, I sometimes splurge on a ten-show ticket to Reel Pizza, the local movie house. I get to meetings on time, play my part, and leave without dawdling. Towns have ordinances, companies have rules of employment, games have rules of play. One of the basic rules of any community is to give each person an opportunity to do her thing.

Taking turns is the first law of community. Giving everyone a chance to have her say.

That way we come to feel we have a place in, and belong to, our community, and our common community belongs to us as an extension of our caring selves. In this sense, we are similar to one-celled creatures in establishing a stable relationship with the environments that meet our needs, becoming inhabitants of those environs in the process.

Trust, love, play, loyalty, and relationships are all subject to rules that everyone concerned can agree on. I think of them as rules of engagement, of linking action to perception, self to other(s), individual to society. Community is a web of interactions, always changing, never twice the same two days in a row, but promoting engagement nonetheless. Reduced to a concept, it sounds like a fixed thing, but it is alive because each of its members is alive, and the exact configuration of events in unpredictable. The Fourth of July Parade comes around every year, but, too, it is different each time.

Different personnel, different bands, different floats, different weather, different watchers along the route—but the same, enduring communal institution so that we refer to it as a fixture of communal life because subject each year to much the same rules and traditions. We are a year older each time, with another year’s experience put away, but we are the same people engaging much as we always have with others who are also different but always look the same to us.

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It is the differences within the envelope of sameness that we pay particular attention to, and differentially respond to. We don’t want this year’s parade to resemble last year’s too closely. We want to be pleasantly surprised, excited, involved—engaged in our minds. Otherwise we lose interest and turn away, or don’t show up at all. We need the stimulation that differences provide us or we don’t even notice what’s happening. The same-old, same-old shuts us down, turns us off, fails to catch our attention. Dullsville, Inc. Change the channel; find something better to do. Make new friends. Buy a new dress. Get a new drill or new App. Order something new at that restaurant that just opened. Novelty promotes engagement because it takes us beyond where we were to where we want to go. We are wayfarers precisely because we’re en route to somewhere we’ve never been. We hunger for novel experience to break up the essential routines we depend on in getting through the day. Finding something to wear, packing a lunch, getting the kids off to school, going to work, eating lunch, coming home. Yes, we need the stability provided by such familiar routines, but at the same time we want those engagements to be special in being particularly noticeable because they stand out from the background of everyday routines. So we acquire a repertory of tricks to spice things up as if they were new. This time we make our own Valentine’s Day cards, knit a new scarf, pack a surprise in the lunch box, put in a row of scarlet runner beans, eat with chop sticks, fast for a day, read a book instead of watching TV. We don’t want to rock the boat, just shake it enough to sharpen our attention. Do enough to spark up a long-term relationship. To keep things from running down and getting dull. We do this in so many ways—getting our hair cut, trying a new stud, tattoo, or shade of lipstick, telling a joke, this time bringing flowers and a bottle of wine—it barely needs mentioning. Except these are reflections of our minds in action.

Stimulating lagging relationships. Avoiding being taken for granted. Staying perky, bright, and attractive so the right people will notice and stay as engaged with us as they were in the old days. There is a whole layer of unwritten rules beneath the familiar rules of the game. Things our mother never taught us because she thought they were obvious and didn’t need saying. Things we missed because we weren’t ready or weren’t paying attention. Like our manners in public, which cause people to turn and stare at us.

Communities are built by sustaining a host of ongoing engagements that don’t turn sour because of casual indifference. Active communities promote engagements between their members, they don’t just sit and wait for something to happen. That is, the group of movers and shakers in a community take turns making it an exciting, inviting, and enjoyable place to live.

What we each do on our own is reach out to those we know in an active manner to kindle engagements that might be lagging a bit. We wave to friends and acquaintances to make sure they recognize us. We turn towards those we engage, shake hands, pat them on the back or shoulder, share a hug, give a kiss, initiate a conversation, share a story, invite friends over for a game or for dinner. We each have a repertory of gestures that reach out to others in signaling our readiness to engage. Nothing is more powerful than an open smile in inviting a trusting engagement. Eyes askance or to the ground signal otherwise. Even at work where we are expected to do our job, we can do it with a style that includes others in the process we are engaged in. If we seem to be enjoying ourselves, others will want to join in the fun. If we keep our distance, others will keep a distance from us. By synchronizing our actions with those of others, we can make it easier to be ourselves in mutual companionship, even inducing them to join us. Such

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activities are moderated by our strengths and needs at the time, which we can subtly broadcast in our postures, gestures, and facial expressions. In a very real sense, communities run on the collective body language of their members at different levels of intimacy. To make anything happen, you have to select the level you want to engage on, then show up and give it a try, always being mindful of the level appropriate to that occasion.

The stuff that communities are built of is not bricks and mortar but flesh and blood.

And something else: human minds. Each unique. No two communities are the same because their prime constituents are highly specific. For that reason, it is dangerous to generalizing about the nature of communities, as if there were any such thing other than as a gross generality. With a different mix of unique inhabitants, each community is unique in itself.

Since communities are the warm seas our minds swim in, we want them to harbor us as contentedly as we enjoy them. Harmony between a place and its residents is the watchword, even if not always achieved. There it is again, that helical loop of hospitality and gratitude between a one-celled organism and its surroundings. We humans are no different in depending absolutely on the nurturing engagements we establish with the niches that provide for us. Every community is just such a niche in providing water, clean air, food, shelter, companionship, and much else. The polarity of the relationship we establish says it all: this is good, I like it, I approve, I want to stay here; not, this is terrible, I hate it, I disapprove, I want to get away. To get clear with ourselves, we intuitively react in such passionate terms. Our brains are made to sharpen distinctions in our minds so we think in bold strokes. Our minds do the heavy shading for us so we won’t miss the point in a wash of subtle tones. Fish or cut bait, stay or move on, help or get lost. Just as scientists think in terms of truth or error, and convert their insights into firm convictions.

3-d. Family. Our minds are proposed in the womb, then disposed during subsequent engagements after birth for the period of one lifetime. It is in the care of our families that those minds develop perceptually from arousal, expectancy, and attention on to the formation of sensory impressions, their recognition, categorization, and understanding.

Then in that same care that we apply those minds situationally in supporting our judgment, resulting in our setting goals and planning actions through projects and relationships as aided by tools and skills to actual enactment of specific courses of behavior. Families are the medium in which we thrive (or not) as we learn through trial and error to piece these dimensions of mind together in coherent order to serve in our varied engagements with a world we can only construe and interpret because, snug in our black boxes, we can never know it directly as it might be in itself.

Our parents and extended families offer examples that serve to illustrate the mix of skills, priorities, and attitudes by which we learn to live. Keeping clean is one ingredient in that mix, along with such qualities as being careful, paying attention, learning to talk and listen, recognizing when we’ve had enough, cleaning up after ourselves, playing fair, sharing, controlling our tempers, and caring for one another. Through family living, we forge the commitments and responsibilities that connect us, along with the many interpersonal traits that invite or promote successful engagements. Within the shelter of our families, we develop along the dimensions of mind that we exercise the most in our engagements one with another. We apply many of those same dimensions to

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engagements with people outside the family, or supplement that set of dimensions with others we find lacking at home and yearn to develop in ourselves.

Our intimate families are the nests or niches that provide the protective spaces in which we grow into ourselves through the interplay or our mutual engagements. Family engagements are never one-way streets, but depend equally on the mental qualities and actions of all members. Families may create the conditions of our personal growth, but that same growth spurs our families to develop along with us. Each family can be seen as a school of fish all swimming—or flock of birds all flying—together. Or as a cohort of confederates joined in common cause. And yes, a can of worms wriggling en masse, each touching all the rest. Families are group projects dedicated to personal fulfillment and development of all members. Individual commitment and responsibility are spurred by such dedication, on a variety of levels as we attain them.

Too, families contain many specific personal experiences not shared with other members. In fact, I often found myself yearning to get away from other members so I could be myself and not somebody’s child or underling. In my early years I had a recurring nightmare, which I never shared, about slowly slipping toward a glow in the lower right of my visual field, the remainder of the field being a featureless black. The thrust of the dream was a deep, rhythmical beat in the background, relentless pressure, and a strong sense of helplessness in resisting movement that was not of my doing. I could feel that dream coming on with a kind of pressure and sense of dread. I suffered that same dream periodically (weekly, monthly?) for several years, then after some time I realized I wasn’t having it anymore, but could still recall the details and the horror at will. What sticks with me today is the feeling of that dream coming on, my being helpless to stop or avoid it. Relentless terror, that’s what I felt. Later, when I was several years older, I had another recurring nightmare about crawling under a brick wall at the back of a building into a dark room with a pitted, earthen floor. From that room I would go into the streets at night when everyone was asleep, enter the house of a stranger, go upstairs, and kill (I’m not sure by what means) a sleeper in a bedroom picked at random. I escaped by retracing my route back into the earthen-floored room and then crawling under the wall into daylight. Two feelings always accompanied that second dream: the horror of what I had done in secret, and the fact that no one would ever know that I had done it. It was my guilty secret. Once begun, both dreams unfurled true to form, and I could not avoid the fear of what was sure to happen. I mention the two dreams together because they both incited the same feeling of helplessness and horror in facing into their respective inevitabilities. I think they might have been two different versions of the same dream, the first for a younger audience of one, the second for a somewhat older audience vulnerable to a sharp sense of personal responsibility. I never told anyone in my family about such dreams. They were for my eyes only, a note passed from me to myself.

We acquire our genetic parents at conception, but achieve our dreaming and waking minds in the womb as distinct from those of our parents. We are each born to our most rudimentary families, such as they are, with a mind formed by a particular course of events and conditions in utero, a mind we bring with us at birth as our basic tool for engaging the hereafter as it gradually unfolds in our particular case, strengthening, weakening, or expanding the mental pathways we are born with. The rest is history as told in our expanding autobiography. Though there may be general milestones, there are no laws of child development. Laws are cultural, not natural, artifacts. As Gerald M.

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Edelman has so carefully postulated, specific conditions in our mother’s womb at the time in her life when we reside there guide the particular interconnection of our fetal neurons, interconnections that thrive or die away, depending on our inadvertent use or neglect of them (The Remembered Present, A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books, 1989, page 242; and elsewhere). Each family is an experiment by trial and error, for grandparents, parents, selves, children, and grandchildren. That reflects evolution’s wisdom in not attempting to anticipate the conditions we will be born into, so not committing us in advance to ways of engagement which might prove ineffective or even harmful.

In truth, subjective judgment is evolution’s gift to us all in being formed in response to the specific situations we actually confront in life, not some archaic set of Paleolithic challenges we are supposedly destined to face. Whether nurtured by our families or not, the judgments that we ourselves make as based on our unique life experience is the crowning glory of evolutionary achievement. Evolution does not lay down the law, it allows for and opens us to the possibilities we might actually meet on our own.

I used to believe that matter obeyed Newton’s laws of motion, or that electrons heeded Ohm’s law. But the universe is not driven by obedience. In every case, the specific conditions in each situation determine the outcome of what happens next; situations flow from one state of being into the next because conditions are right for that to happen, not by decree, but because each situation spontaneously governs itself in inventing itself on the spot in response to its state at each instant. There is no such thing as an overall universe governed by laws; there is only the resulting configuration of matter continuously being what it must be right where it is in response to the set of current conditions affecting its state of being. The Higgs boson is the next state of matter that arises from the conditions that lead up to it. It appears, not in response to a causative or descriptive law of physics it has never heard of, but because, under the circumstances, as the likely outcome of the conditions leading up to it, it can’t help it.

Just as each point in the universe does as it does on its own in its unique situation, each family member is on her own in the bosom of her family. She is as she does in response to the conditions comprising her situation at each instant.

How do families form? How do they work? How do they stay together? How do they fall apart? Some would say the driving force is the binding power of religious belief (cultural tradition, civil authority, paternal or maternal consent, and so on), while others would maintain that families are formed in response to the abiding and mutual love of two individuals. Many would agree that it takes a public act or ceremony to instigate a family, attended by as large a sector of a community as can be gathered together, adding the weight of many hearers to any vows that might be spoken. But in fact, families form whenever and wherever conditions are present in the right proportion to support individuals in committing themselves to one another, as construed by the minds of those concerned. Sexual acts may be involved before, during, or after any such pledge of commitment. Most agree that families require consummation at some point to become sufficiently binding to enter into the books that make families official or legal in the public mind. But there are a great many extra-legal ways to start a family, one being a shotgun wedding enforced by the male parent of a fallen maiden, or simply by mutual consent of the people (not necessarily a couple) involved with no additional requirement.

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We know our families from the unique perspective of our unfolding minds, never twice the same two days in a row. By definition, we are developing all the while, every hour of every day. We are not yet fully human, and have far to go before we achieve an identity worthy of that honorific title. But day by day, wayfarers that we are, we head in that direction. If the question could be put to us early on, “Eat and poop, poop and eat, when are you going to stop being such an animal?” our behavior would answer for us: “Bear with me, I’m working on it.” By the time we are thirty, forty, fifty, or eighty, all will be revealed.

As children, our repertory of gifts is influenced by a number of factors: genetic heritage, diet, skills we work on, engagements we strike up, character traits of those around us—parents siblings, relatives, friends, pets, and neighbors. We’re all working on it by providing a stimulating and supportive family setting matched to (and a little ahead of) our level of competence. Think of the young Mozart, Tiger Woods, Serena and Venus Williams, following the examples provided by attentive, encouraging, and sometimes demanding parents. Prodigies are made, not born, by seizing the occasions they are given for grappling to achieve what they see others doing with ease and polish.

Infants thrive on repeated awareness of warmth, softness, milk, and sonorous engagements suited to their needs and abilities. Reassured by their initial contacts, they seek a greater range of challenges through more demanding engagements. Cooing sounds become hummed tunes become lullabies become rousing songs. Eyes open, heads lift, arms reach, legs push, ta da—we’re crawling, and about to rear up on our hind legs and really get moving. Every step is earned through hard work and determination. Given time enough and stamina, there’s no limit to how far the life force might take us.

Five factors are crucial to our childhood development: our unique genome, the ages of our parents, spacing and birth-order of all siblings, and sex (now referred to as gender). Relative not only to our siblings but to our parents, whether they be nurturing, encouraging, challenging, preoccupied, overprotective—whatever. Father is often the active one who physically challenges us; mother the caregiver who supports (while shaping) our every endeavor. It could be the other way around, or neither, or both. We respond to the parents we are born to, whatever their gifts and limitations at the time, however we are able to engage them. We respond differentially to their example according to our traits and desires. These first mutual interactions set the tone for all that follow. We bask in the attention, and strive to keep up by doing our best. The bar rises higher and higher each time, the effort goes up, the satisfaction climbs. We grow into ourselves through personal exertion, putting ourselves out to become who we strive to be. No one can do it for us. But our families can engage us so that we keep striving on our own with their help. Together, we can make it happen. Apart, we can only get so far on our own because engagements take two or more players, and it is the flow of ongoing interaction that counts, not merely token glances or smiles. They are for later once we’ve learned to meet our own standards through disciplined practice again and again. We get good at what we actually do, not what we say we will but only half-heartedly try.

Parents can’t be all things to all children. They are who they are. Children tend to draw closer to one or the other, sex hormones being one draw, a sense of shared identity another. I’m with him, mister active; I’m with her, the listener and supporter. However attachments are formed, they stir our engagements as loving hands turn a prayer wheel.

It takes only a gentle pressure now and then to keep relationships active. They are made

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to spin, two partners in mutual orbit. To endure, they have to spin. In most families, parents trade off in keeping things going. Both are active while doing different jobs that have to get done. Like working for a living, getting dinner on the table, or driving the kids to afterschool activities.

When my parents got married, my father laid down the law: this is to be a one career family. My mother was working on a doctorate in geology, so had to switch trajectories mid-course. Her father had been a granite worker in the quarries in Sullivan, Maine. It was only natural for her to follow his lead. I remember she kept a few mineral samples in a bowl, each labeled with its scientific binomial. In 1923, she did geological research at Acadia National Park. That was the year her father died of silicosis. In the mid-1920s, her future husband showed up on her doorstep, seeking a rest stop on a hike from Dartmouth to Nova Scotia (he was a wayfarer even then). He never made it past her home in Sullivan. They got married the following year. She grudgingly learned to specialize in childcare and homemaking, developing a sideline of easel painting on Sundays, her day off. I remember her boiling the laundry in a huge copper laundry tub that fit over two burners of the coal stove in the kitchen. She was a highly visual person, with marine artists in her family background. A Maine native, she loved the outdoors. In Seattle, I remember her saying after a long spell indoors, “I want to go out and touch trees.” She sent many signals that childrearing was not her chosen thing. But she worked at it as best she could because that was her family role. When she got more free time as her three boys got older, she took up flower gardening. Because I was a budding photographer, it became my job to portray her prize blooms.

My father was a college teacher of English. As far as I could tell, his toolkit consisted of pencils, paperclips, a stapler, pads of paper, and a zinc writing board with a bent corner. And the centerpiece, an upright Underwood typewriter that made clickety noises through the closed door of his study after dinner. Identifying with our father, but never having had an adult conversation with him, each of us three boys had to invent himself for lack of an explicit model to engage with. Career-wise, we each did a lot of flubdubbing around. Both my older and younger brother had great trouble finding a way through the halls of higher education. Both of them got lost. Suspended between science and the arts, I, too, got lost, but as a middle child with lesser influence from both parents, in my late forties I eventually stumbled my way to a doctorate in humanistic and behavioral education from Boston University in 1982. On the secondary level, I taught English for a time, and poetry, along with creative photography, art, and the humanities. Then I moved to Maine to write my book, became an environmentalist, and discovered wayfaring as my profession.

Our father’s mother had died of a heart attack in 1896 after giving birth to her only child, so he had never known her, his mother. He was christened at her graveside. And we had never known him, our father. To us he might well have been a cobbler sticking to his last in some distant workroom. But we loved him in spirit because he often read to us as children, reading to himself as he did so. In the end, he pipe-smoked himself to death. Though famous in a professional sense, he never found the engagement he was deprived of when the one person destined to be there for him throughout his young life had simply gone missing. He never engaged her, and so never had a chance to respond to her personal qualities and traits. Or to engage his own children. He was a presence notable for its absence due to professional duties. In retrospect, I see him as a good provider, but, too, as a kind of silent partner, a sort of blank to be filled-in upon later

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reflection. Which is exactly what I see myself doing in writing this essay based on the one mind I have to work with. And saw my two brothers doing late in life before they died—typing out plays and poetry respectively.

My father’s great gift to his family was Burying Island, which my mother brought to family attention as a memory from her childhood, presented to her in a dream she had in 1937 of a time she and her father had rowed to the island to pick raspberries. Talk about family engagements: I have spent almost my whole life interacting with that island on the Maine coast, and I am sure that connection explains why I moved to Maine in 1986 to become an inadvertent environmentalist. As I write these words, I am awaiting delivery of two books from Flickr.com, together containing 102 photographs I have made of that very place in the past two years. My love for that island goes back to its meaning for both of my parents. I now manage Burying Island LLC for the three families that used to own it in undivided thirds, but together formed an LLC to assure protection of its ecological integrity for the foreseeable future. That island is at the core of my creative life as Steve from planet Earth. Mind, self, island, planet, I can’t keep them separate—because they aren’t separate. They are levels of life on Earth as expressed through my lineage. I had to live my whole life to this point in order to write that sentence in the context of this reflection. That is how minds work. Ultimately they are expressions of the planet that bore them, their families, communities, cultures, and natural workings, at root based on sunlight and water joining forces with soil to create mindful life.

In the fifth paragraph on page 32f. above I wrote these words: We all live at the core of our engagements, adjusting our course according to where we want to go in relation to where we have been and where we find ourselves now. The essence of mind is in the sense of mental integrity that our navigational skills represent. My inner helmsman is as close as I can come to the sense of spiritual guidance I feel when trusting my situated self to find coherent meaning in the many currents of thought and feeling flowing through my mind as integrated into a particular judgment and commitment to action. Such guidance is ever-present in my mind as I write this essay on self-reflection.

Our families provide a core around which our engagements are wrapped, giving form to our actions, to our judgments, to our perceptions. Here I am connecting the words in this essay to the situation I have created for myself by undertaking this project as an expression of my family history as kindled by my mother and father all the way back to the founding of one-celled life in ancient waters and soils pooled together and both warmed and lit by the rays of the sun. This is my story as dictated to my fingers by my mind. All told by “trusting my situated self to find coherent meaning in the many currents of thought and feeling flowing through my mind.” Can you feel it—that flow?

That’s who I am in alerting you to that flow in yourself, to give you encouragement to keep your own flow flooding through your mind and activities as a vehicle for your family’s history of turning sunlight and moisture into deeds so that they perpetually flower in the guise of your engagements. Though I didn’t know it at the time, that is why I undertook the project of writing this reflection—to earn the right to say what I just did in these last few sentences and paragraphs.

The essential benefit of families is to give children a chance to build a store of memories that will serve to get them started in life, and perhaps see them through to the

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end. Love, liking, sex, companionship, respect, and cooperation help parents bond with each other as essentially different people, that bond being the gift they give to their children who, born wholly naïve to the ways of the world, need early engagements with others to build memories, habits, and skills that will help them stand on their own legs as capable adults. Whether heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or other, adult pairs that complement each other can provide the stimulation and stability necessary to maintain a functioning family that benefits children directly or indirectly during the restless journey to adulthood.

Couples don’t need to justify their existence by having children. They provide the same services by engaging each other so that, having a shared home to return to that restores them, they can go forth and do the work of the world in turning solar energy into deeds. This benefit also spreads throughout the neighboring community. It takes true, skilled, generous, and reliable engagements to run the world, not the union of one man with one woman, which is only one example of a wide variety of productive human relationships. There are as many kinds of marriages as there are couples. The essence of family is stability through mutual engagement, not any one particular kind of relationship. If we over-specify the nature of families based on a particular personal preference, morality founders on the sharp rocks of that needless specificity. Children don’t need orthodox beliefs to grow into competent adults, nor do any partners who already function on that level of competency. Expressions of mutual love help, along with enough healthful food to fuel the currents flowing through minds both young and adult, endowing them with coherent thoughts and meanings.

The essential thing in a family is to build a store of common experiences to stimulate the growth of all members on their respective levels of attainment. This requires a certain flexibility of expectation, not the rigidity of preordained results. When I was two or three, the bed of an old canal that passed at the rear of our back yard in Hamilton, New York, was selected as the route of a new sewer. Big sections of concrete pipe were lined up along the banks of the canal, ready to be rolled into place. Walking as a very young child along that line of pipe, I came to its end, which I immediately crawled into. I remember the feel of the rough surface on my hands and knees. My way into that tube of darkness grew ever dimmer, without any sign of light ahead. The pipe was too tight around my crawling frame to let me turn, so I tried backing up, which didn’t work.

I had no choice but to keep crawling. Crawling. Crawling. I got worried that I wouldn’t be able to find a way out. The separate sections were pieced together so tightly that only faint hints of an outside world glowed dimly here and there. I was firm in my conviction that the only way out was ahead of me. At a slight bend, I suddenly saw a shimmer from a wider gap far ahead. I kept crawling, and came to two sections of pipe that had not been closely fitted together, leaving a six-inch gap flooded with daylight. This was my chance! I scraped my way through that gap, drawing blood and white scratches along my arms and legs. I twisted my way through, and stood free in the open, taking the coolest, freshest breaths of my life. Only then did I admit my stupidity in crawling into that line of open pipe. To this day I remember telling myself never to do that again. A certain lack of parental supervision in my case as middle child led to many subsequent episodes of my learning about the world on my own. I became an independent thinker. Whenever I could, I roamed the hills around town, getting scratched, wet, tired, and cold, but never cutting back on my roving explorations.

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Looking back from the vantage of being eighty-one, I wonder, was I ever young?

Was I ever! Young, that is. I have a bank of memories to prove it. Gleanings from a life.

Falling over the edge of a hayloft, hitting the floor between two pieces of heavy farm machinery, breaking my wrist. My Vermont grandfather scolding me for sneaking into his workshop, messing with his woodworking tools. Watching my grandmother talk through fingers screening her lips to keep her false teeth from flying out. Lying in bed listening to steam locomotives pulling out of the station on wintery nights, trying to gain traction on icy rails, slipping, then slowing, then making another try, and another.

Auntie Viv giving us a dog that chased cars in Buffalo, and promptly chased cars in Hamilton, never tiring of attacking noisy tires. Feeling heat from the fire in the boiler at the basket factory, hearing the machinery. Crunching on broken glass, hearing whining complaints from sheets of galvanized roofing swaying in the wind at the old observatory on the hill. Holding my nose among the bodies of cats pickled in formaldehyde at the gut lab, stiff legs poking under lids of their metal coffins. Ogling a man’s head in a jar, donated the label said for research, skin stripped from half his face to show veins and arteries filled with blue and red rubber. Watching a meteor shower with Norman Stauffer. Finding fossil trilobites in layers of slate. Getting stung by yellow jackets. My father emptying his pipe out the car window, sparks setting tents lashed to the running board on fire. My fifth-grade teacher’s heaving bosom as she sang Gilbert and Sullivan in the gym. Brass spittoons among the ferns at the barber shop. Crawling out over rafters holding up the tin ceiling of study hall at school, sticking a balloon through a rust hole, bending down, braced between taut arms and legs, blowing it up for all to see— except nobody looked up. Stealing a bike adornment with five flags from the dime store.

Peeing in a jug for a week to put on the neighbor’s porch. Kicking a soccer ball on an icy sidewalk, legs flying out from under me, landing on the back of my head. My tongue freezing to the steering bar of my Flexible Flyer. Poking sticks into muskrat traps set in Payne Creek, the trapper yelling at me on the street. Breaking into a barn, stealing an upright telephone and jewelry, which I wore for a week under my sweater at school until my mother found out. Mother spanking me with a canvas stretcher when I yelled “I’m going to murder you” at my little brother for knocking down the tower I was building with wooden blocks. My father making me give back the jackknife I stole from Dickie Wet-his-pants in second grade. Was I ever young? Which tells you why I am now an empiricist, studying my own mind by direct observation and personal experience, shunning theories and mathematical models like dengue fever, dwelling contentedly in my subjective black box, taking full responsibility for my engagements with the world.

At birth, we are naïve about the ways of that world. The point of memory is to free us from our ignorance that we might have some chance of survival. Childhood is given us to learn as much as we can by trial and error in a somewhat protective environment.

Now I know that pottery breaks when I drop it. Splinters lie in wait for me as I rub my hand across rough wood. In the days when tires had inner tubes, and I was old enough to drive, I was sure to get a flat tire if I didn’t carry a jack in the trunk. It isn’t the taming of fire that gives humanity an edge on survival, spoken language, or even humor; it is memory that lets us learn from careless mistakes so, if we’re lucky, we can eventually work our way around them.

Memory is at the heart of learning through trial and error. We are born knowing very little; it’s all uphill from there. Families give us a leg-up by not having to be feral children dependent on instinct. They give us enough leeway so that we own what we

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learn. And what we learn is what to expect next time. Expectancy, recognition, identification, meaning, and understanding are gifts our sheltering families make available to us. Leading to judgment, which opens the way to appropriate behavior. All courtesy of the families that give us room to fall on our face, pick ourselves up, and have at it again. Getting that one more chance makes all the difference because we remember the last time, and vow to do better. Our efforts add up as we go. Practice makes, if not perfect, at least for improvement. Families give us the opportunity to engage through successive approximation, so that what we aim at, we eventually attain. Not trial and error just once, but again and again, showing an increment of improvement each time. If we put in our ten thousand hours of consciously appreciating those decreasing increments, we find ourselves right where we wanted to be two years ago. Courtesy of memory, room for experiment, the wisdom of patience, and the willingness to try. Join all of the above to the life force that urges us on from every one of our cells because we need to do something with all that energy our mitochondria provide, and we have the formula for success via one earnest attempt after another.

Knowing almost nothing in particular at birth opens the door to the possibility of adapting to unanticipated conditions and situations. If we were born fully equipped with everything we needed to know, the first surprising change we encountered would throw us off our stride. We’d have no way of coping with novelty, and it would be our downfall in the end, which would come sooner rather than later. No matter how trying family life can be, real life is far worse. Family life is a trial run for the time when we must face every challenge on our own by standing on the two feet we are born with and our families have encouraged us to develop into an asset. Thanks, Mom; thanks, Dad; we owe it all to you. Oh, yes, and to the kids who grew up alongside us, no matter what pains they may have been to us at the time, or we to them.

Families are our first schools. In that sense, we are all home schooled. What do we learn? To be ourselves. To speak our native language. To engage. To babble, then invent our own patter. To discover meaningful speech. To understand others. To understand ourselves. It all begins at mother’s breast while we are fed, warm, and safe. She smiles; we smile. She laughs; we laugh. She oohs; we ooh in response. Then we ooh meaningfully at the sight of her smile. She giggles; we giggle. Peek-a-boo! We sense we’re onto something. We play off against her; she plays the same game. Back and forth; forth and back. There’s no stopping the banter. Then the flow of talk. Her turn, our turn.

Then the full exchange, the loop of engagement. She playing her part; we playing ours.

Equally engaged. Paying attention. Watching, listening. Being watched; being listened to. Taking turns. Conversing. Being with each other. Not alone anymore. The biggest discovery of our lives. Or not, if there’s nobody to play the game with us to get us started.

To play the speech game you have to take turns. There’s a beat to it. You have to enter the rhythm. Say something, wait for a response. Pulses of meaning going both ways. Your turn, my turn, your turn, my turn. Incoming, outgoing, incoming, outgoing.

Perception alternating with action again and again. I am with you; you are with me. We are together. Two worlds as one in alternation. Subject and object combined as one.

Agent and recipient forming a unity. Acting, being acted upon. Speaking, listening. I hear you; you hear me. I see you listening to me; you see me listening to you. All joined by a thread of meaning with no end. Your words spark something in me; my words spark something in you. Together, we create something entirely new. We expand each

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other. Our mutual understanding grows larger. You build me; I build you. We are a dynamic duo in a relationship. That relationship is bigger than me, bigger than you. It is the two of us being bigger than ourselves. Creating a world we can both live in. A world to our liking. A world of shared understanding we can’t live without.

Families create spaces where such things can happen. People can get to know themselves in the company of people they trust. That company and those spaces are powerful. Like traveling through space to visit another planet. If you learn such ways in your family, you can try the same method outside with others. I have a family behind me; you have a family behind you. Let’s get together to see what happens. See if we can make it work for the two of us. We’ll start slowly, taking turns. You go first. Then I’ll go, then you again. We’ll compare worlds. Discover new planets. Off into the universe of possibilities before us. Whooee, this is fun. I’m having an adventure. How about you?

Engagements aren’t only with people. They can be between people and animals, animals and animals, people and things, people and places, people and weather, people and music, people and art, people and games, people and fantasies, people and dreams.

The common thread is a flow of action unto perception, perception unto action, for as long as it lasts. Each round setting the stage for the next, and then the next after that. As each day leads to the next, each week, each month, each season, each year, each life leads to the next. The flow is the essence of engagement, the moving ahead. The wayfaring, the adventure, the prospect of discovery. Anything but the same old, same old. Under the spell of a biography of Charles Proteus Steinmetz, as a kid I unwound countless transformers to see how they were put together to solve the problem of electrical energy being wasted as heat in the magnets that stored that energy from cycle to cycle. The solution was to build transformers out of thin insulated layers of iron to break up the currents that stole energy out of the system. I was entranced to find how such an idea itself could be transformed into a design that solved a problem. In a word, I was engaged. As I have been with one thing after another my whole life. Each discovery leads to the next challenge. On and on, like footsteps one after another. Once the process of engagement is discovered in childhood, there’s no telling where it will lead.

I took C. Kenneth Meese’s Theory of the Photographic Process with me into the Army when I was drafted. I’ll bet no other draftee has ever chosen that particular book.

But the choice made sense to me because I wanted to know how light striking a lightsensitive emulsion could produce a photographic image. Kodak made emulsions out of cheek pieces of cattle obtained from slaughterhouses. The makeup of those cheek pieces depended on what the cattle had eaten in the fields they had lived in. The sensitivity of the photographic emulsions invented by George Eastman depended on the amount of sulfur from mustard weed the cows had ingested. Kodak film came to depend on very strict quality control of the diets of cows whose cheek pieces went into the gelatin from which that film was made. Who could have known, or even suspected? I loved it, reading that book by flashlight after taps during basic training. The Army didn’t own me completely; by clinging to such idiosyncratic engagements, I was still my own man.

So here I am today, writing about the exploration of my own mind, trying to finish this project before I die, continuing a tradition begun so long ago under the influence of the family I was born to as middle male child out of three. I loved my parents, but felt distant from them. My older brother had my father’s attention; my younger was my mother’s chief concern. I turned my engagements into the world of nature and discovery. What else could I do? Here I am, still at it, but with a twist. Looking inward

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because so few others have taken that path, and among all choices, that is the one that intrigues me the most. The real action is not in the world or its universe, it’s in the miracle of our own minds. Einstein’s famous thought experiments were all in his mind, as current theories of how the universe works are in the minds of modern cosmologists.

I can’t understand taking on the universe with an incomplete grasp of the primary tool I use to observe its features. Talk about carts before horses, that strikes me as insane, employing a tool you don’t understand to probe the biggest mystery of all. The blind leading the blind. Trapped in worlds of conjecture and opinion.

All going back to the families we were raised in, to our primal engagements, and the lifelong habits we build around them. To the situations we found ourselves in early on and tried to understand. And to explain, often mainly to ourselves. The very selves we have to understand in getting beyond our limitations to a true appreciation of our place in the cosmos. The development of our minds begins in our families where we catch on to the trick of linking perception to judgment to acting on purpose, then extending our reach into nature, culture, community, and back to our families. 

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4. WHAT OUR ENGAGEMENTS SAY ABOUT OUR MINDS It has taken me this long to reach the point where I had wanted to begin this reflection by considering the light shed by three aspects of our culture—baseball, Roget’s Thesaurus, and the stars—on the human mind. My introduction turned out to be far more detailed than I had anticipated. There was a lot in my head that needed sorting out if I was to make it clear to anyone else. Now I have caught up with my original plan, so, back on track, let me begin.

During my early encounters with psychology, that word held strong connotations of pathology and mental illness. Stemming via Latin from two Greek words meaning roughly “breath” or “spirit” (Latin psyche) and “talk” or “thought” (Latin logos), the two roots add up to something like spirit talk or mind lore. Early on, breath was taken as a sign of life, absence of breath a sign of death. Breath was what we acquired at birth, and lost with our last gasp—what we think of as spirit. It came to stand for the non-physical element that seemingly animates our bodies. The negative connotations of psychology were laid on in the nineteenth century when attention was directed by medical doctors to what might go wrong with a mind in contrast to its right and proper functioning.

Much of my early reading in psychology was given over to discussion of mental disorders. Now, my interest in the mind is directed more toward its normal, everyday performance. We need to understand what’s right with the mind before we can deal with what’s gone wrong. That difference itself says a great deal about how our minds work.

We pay attention either if our minds seem to work exceptionally well, or if they do poorly. The state of “normalcy” in-between is taken for granted without comment.

That’s why the connotations of psychology are so often negative, suggesting our minds need to be fixed or healed. If they work, there’s no need to see Dr. Freud or Dr. Jung.

The meaning of mind lore, then, commonly leans toward the negative polarity, as we take our cars for granted until they won’t start, so going to the garage suggests that something is broken and needs fixing.

My preference is to consider the human mind in its everyday mode of wellness and not sickness. For that reason, I will here deal with the mind in the context of baseball, our national pastime; Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus, found lying around somewhere in every writer’s workspace; and the stars above, which, remote as they may be, affect our inward lives more profoundly than any creation of mankind ever has.

4-a. Baseball. Abner Doubleday (later a General at Gettysburg) is said to have invented baseball in 1839 as a means of keeping his military academy students in good physical shape. Other traditions trace the origin back to the game of rounders in eighteenth-century England. Doubleday did stipulate the dimensions of the field of play, size of and distance between bases, rules governing defensive play by the team in the field and offensive play by the team at bat. The game itself serves as a metaphor for the battles that make up a military campaign, its very structure flowing from the polarity that underscores awareness of events good or bad, positive or negative, desirable or undesirable, won or lost. Asymmetrical warfare is based on the defiance of any rules that might even-out opposing sides; the rules of baseball impose the ideal of fairness on every contest, giving both teams an equal chance to win the game.

We watch baseball because many of us find it thoroughly engaging. It speaks our language, and we speak its. We are born to play and watch baseball. Or so it seems.

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Actually, we are born to engage with what captures our attention, and baseball is designed to do just that. To bring out our best at throwing, catching, running, sliding, leaping, batting, playing as a team, and displaying our skills. All of which requires extreme concentration every step of the way. Baseball does exactly what Doubleday intended it to—keep us on our toes while striving to do our best. Even if we’re in bleacher seats, we are aroused, paying attention, and on our toes nonetheless.

Nothing seems to be played more on the surface than baseball because it’s so physical in nature—a minor tempest in a stadium with fans sitting around drinking beer.

But beneath that surface there is an inner game of moves, tactics, strategies, felt situations, motivating tensions, and the life force itself that gets us out of our seats and into the game, where we play, indeed, very hard. That inner game is what baseball is all about because that’s where our engagements lie. And it is those engagements I am writing about here, not the statistical game played-out in the media and public press.

We are engaged in a fundamental way with baseball because engagement is based on situations, and situations, as we know, are not set for all time but develop, turning into wholly new situations, in turn leading on to other new situations, surprising us at every turn of events, taking us further and further into ourselves as we become more deeply involved. The motivating situations are in us, as well as in the players on the field. We map them onto sensory patterns passing as images in our heads, where the life they take on is sparked by how the players perform, but because of the play of tensions we find in ourselves, very quickly becomes our own. Two games are being played at the same time, outer and inner; we are spectators attending the outer one, and players ourselves in the inner one.

How do I know that? Because our feelings are involved, and they are not on the field. Our values are at stake, ditto. We are aroused, stimulated, excited by the inner game. The images and impressions are formed in our minds. Where we recognize what is going on as more or less familiar and meaningful. The field of play is nothing less than the life we are living at that very moment. We have a personal stake in the game. We see our hopes and desires fulfilled or dashed before our eyes, as if they were being played out on the field and not in our minds. It’s like watching a part of ourselves being made clear to ourselves, a great favor once you realize what is happening. Situation after situation, batter after batter, pitch after pitch, we want to find out what happens next, and next after that. We’re in for the long haul, to the end of the game. These guys are good at what they do. Throwing, catching, leaping, running. We are good, too, because they carry us along with them. We hang on every pitch, swing, hit, catch, and error. As wayfarers, we look to the players to show us the way into the winding labyrinth of ourselves. That’s a powerful relationship, like having a mentor or guru, someone who listens and acts on our behalf.

The best thing that happened to baseball in my lifetime was not Lou Gehrig or Babe Ruth, but TV coverage by cameras with fantastic lenses that focus the game on the screen in our living room, literally bringing it home to us. We can actually watch a pitcher with glove to his chin shake off a signal from the catcher (the defense team’s tactician), go through his windup, then see him abruptly spin around and hurl the ball, not to the catcher, but to the first baseman in time to catch an off-base runner in the act of diving for the bag. Now fans can sit in costly stadium seats hunching over their smartphones watching the game they came to see through the well-placed lenses of TV

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cameras. And we can enter into the game more effectively from within our black boxes because it is brought to us so up-front and personally, even intimately.

As a team sport, baseball is all about relationships between members of two different teams playing against one another. There is tension between the two opposing teams, tension within each of them as plays unfold over time. And tensions in us as we follow along, gripped by the drama unfolding in our minds, and of which we are a big part. Without fans, baseball wouldn’t exist. It is made to carry us along with it. Why else would we watch? Such tensions stem from uncertainty concerning what is about to happen. Our minds thrive on uncertainty because they are made to be certain, so they have to stick with the challenge. And from first to last inning, baseball is charged with moments of uncertainty. As well as yearnings for successful outcomes. What pitch will the pitcher deliver? Will the batter take the bait, and if so, will he swing for a strike, hit a fly ball, or send a bounding ball just past the second baseman’s glove? Will the catcher throw off his mask, crane his neck, then grab that high foul ball? Will the pitcher lob the bunted ball to first? Will the fielder reach the grounder in time to get the runner out at second? Will the shortstop cover second when the baseman chases a ground ball? The pitcher-batter confrontation can lead to so many possible situations, we are on the edge of our seats and edge of our minds much of the time, eager to find out how each play will develop as players throw the ball from one to another: pitcher to catcher, outfield to infield, second base to first, third to home. Each play depends on so much coordinated skill, strength, speed, and accuracy, there is hardly a moment when we dare take our eyes off the ball for fear of missing the crucial play that makes all the difference. Paying close attention to each play takes exertion on our part. We exhaust ourselves just by following along. But the adventure is worth it. There’s no other way to have such an experience than to commit to it in both body and mind.

We not only follow the game from our viewpoint, but we anticipate what will happen. And enjoy the thrill of finding out if we’re right or wrong. We live on the edge of our own excitement, teetering this way and that, like riding a defiant bronco. Investing our minds in the game, we find ourselves being carried away. Commitment is what it takes, commitment to engage as best we can for as long as we can. Paying attention takes perseverance, dedication, stamina, and strength. Those are all forms of engagements that carry us along. You find new dimensions of yourself by losing your old self and giving in to the power and drama of the moment. You come out of it bigger than you were, stronger, more enduring because of the engagement. Engagement builds strong bodies eight ways, all variations on exercising the mental skills you bring to the job. I’ve already mentioned several of them: expectancies, imagery, feelings, values, situations, understanding, meaning, judgment—that’s eight and I’m not finished. The whole list adds up to a multi-dimensional engagement that takes concentration, but ends up in a generous serving of personal fulfillment by a game well-played.

Just as there is a quota of good in everyone, there is a quota of excitement in every engagement. And a quota of enlightenment if you truly give yourself to it. When we get bored, that’s because we are not committing any energy to what we are doing. We’re not putting ourselves into it, whatever it is. So we draw back for lack of concentrating on something—anything—and that invites boredom to descend upon us. Boredom is a declaration of our lack of curiosity, interest, concentration—in a word, engagement.

Which requires a commitment of our attention before anything can happen at all. Being bored is a comment on our own lack of reaching out to the world to invite the world to

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reach in to us. The world owes us nothing. It is not out there for our benefit. As individuals, each of us is in charge of that department for ourselves. Baseball offers us a release from the cell we lock ourselves into when we wistfully moan that we are bored.

Watch baseball players in action, engage yourself, and rejoice.

In training, individual players build their respective skills on one level, and practice working together on another. There may be individual heroes in baseball, but it takes heroic effort by all concerned to build a team that can face every possible situation with shared skill and confidence. Each player must stand ready to play his part without advanced notice. Each is playing an inner game of expectancy before a play unfolds. As is each watcher in the stands, stadium, or living room. In that sense, players and fans are engaged for the duration of the game, however long it takes for one side to win.

Baseball is all about arousal, anticipation, seeing what happens, recognizing what that means from a personal perspective, of all possible responses seizing instantly on the one judged most effective, and following through on plays that have been practiced in countless situations under a variety of different conditions. Anything can happen, and what actually does happen comes as a spontaneous show of coordinated (or not) team skill, strength, speed, and accuracy.

Baseball gives fans an endless flow of opportunities to be personally conscious. Each witnesses the game with her own eyes and ears, own sense of anticipation, own flow of perceptual, meaningful, and active engagements. Being there is like inventing yourself on the spot, again and again as situations come, evolve, and lead on to the next. This is what fans live for. If baseball didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it as a rule-governed alternative to the horrors of war, revolution, strife, violence, genocide, and mass murder. Civilized nations rely on games to ward off the inevitable slippage into violence and chaos resulting from friction between factions having different perspectives on the world. Harnessing such perspectives in orderly pursuits such as baseball, soccer, basketball, and tennis makes the world safe for democracy and other form of civil governance that actually might serve to keep people meaningfully occupied and productive. Baseball is no frill; it is a civil necessity—along with art, music, dance, Earthcare, full employment, and a fair distribution of wealth—to maintain a healthy state of mind among peoples accustomed to different ways of engaging one another in their separate worlds. Or, as in boredom, not engaging at all.

What does it take to play baseball? If you’re a kid in the street, a stick and a ball and a few chalk marks on the road. If you’re a billionaire, a city stadium is a bare minimum, a corporation, the best players you can get, along with a base of dedicated fans. If you’re somewhere in-between being a kid and a billionaire, bats, balls, and gloves are readily available. If you’re organized, you’ll need an infield diamond and outfield laid out to Doubleday’s specifications, bleachers, care of the grounds; uniforms; protective pads, masks, and helmets; and a pool of eligible players to draw from, which includes roughly half the citizenry in Canada, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Venezuela, Japan, and the U.S. Too, you’ll need leagues big enough to maintain a full schedule of 154 games, along with playoffs between league pennant-winners held at the end of the season (early spring into fall). But what it really takes to play baseball is acceptance of the rules of play, and umpires who can enforce those rules in specific situations, assuring fair play between opposing teams. Mascots, trophies, and blaring horns are optional.

Where does the drive to win come from, that we feel the urge to play competitive games in the first place? I would say part of it arises from healthy metabolisms that

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convert glucose to available energy in our bodies’ every cell, of which there are trillions. I call that drive to be active the life force. If we’re ill or poorly nourished, we don’t have enough of a margin to exert ourselves in playing or attending games. But if we’re young, active, well fed, and eager to prove ourselves, the life force can be extremely compelling in initiating a host of engagements, including organized sports. Beyond that, if we feel we have a special gift for playing baseball stemming from our initial contact with the game, then our sense of personal identity may be strong enough to call forth the extra effort it takes to get really good at mastering the required skills, or at least playing as well as we can. It help to have models, mentors, or heroes to pattern ourselves on. And a strong sense of fun, enjoyment, and fulfillment in developing our abilities. The urge to play ball, that is, comes from inside us in discovering who we are and what we want to do with our lives. Baseball as played-out in the field flows from the confines of our black boxes into the cultural and communal worlds in which we personally live. Without doubt, playing baseball is a way of living an admirable life, like being a policeman, nurse, teacher, or astronaut, a person to look up to as a child, and grow into as an adult.

We don’t play to win so much as play to engage others at our finest moments.

Playing baseball is a way to be human in a particularly personal way. The crux of dedication to such an engagement is in the inner self of each player, where what you do is recognized as what you most want to do in being yourself to the max. Our situated selves are at the core of our being, responding to the call of our memories, feelings, emotions, values, understandings, drives, thoughts, dreams, and imaginings. No aspect of mind is more powerful than the urge of a developing self to participate in a palpable situation within the stream of personal awareness. Every era offers its wayfaring members a selection of routes to self-realization. Hunter, gatherer, farmer, tool maker, warrior, craftsperson, poet, which is to be your way? Today, whether you are batter, pitcher, catcher, baseman, fielder, umpire, manager, batboy, or spectator, the plate umpire’s “Play ball!” is a call to live as you choose to live. You are present, ready to be fully yourself.

The genius of organized sports is in having players and teams show their prowess by taking turns at offense and defense, attack and protection, and as in baseball, batting and running, pitching and fielding. The precincts for both are strictly limited, particularly for the team on offense. Batters are restricted to a home plate and two rectangles on either side to stand in and swing; three bases forming a diamond ninety feet on a side; runners being given a right-of-way to run the bases around the sides of the diamond. The defending team occupies the infield within the diamond, together with the outfield lying between two foul lines meeting in a ninety-degree angle at home plate and extending for a minimum of 250 feet beyond the infield diamond out to the fence on the far side of the outfield.

As attackers of the defenders’ territory, batters come up in specified order one at a time until three of them have been put out of play, at which time the teams trade roles.

The batting order is based on players’ records for hitting the ball or getting on base. The defending team, however, is on duty at their respective stations for the full time they are in the field (half of each inning in a string of nine innings). The pitcher throws from the center of the diamond, sixty-and-a-half feet from home plate. The catcher crouches behind the plate to direct defensive play by giving signals with fingers held between his legs to suit the next pitch to the batter’s prowess and situation. Three basemen stand near their respective bases, with a shortstop to back them up. Three outfielders spread

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themselves between right, center, and left field, at a distance governed by their expectation of what the batter is likely to do.

The essence of baseball is the duel between defensive pitcher on his mound and offensive batter at home plate. Pitcher and catcher form a tactical team trying to outwit the batter at each throw. The batter, as lone member of the offense (unless others are on base) tries to outwit the pitcher by carefully selecting the pitches he elects to swing at.

Three swings and he’s out (unless he fouls the ball after two strikes, in which case he keeps on until he either gets a hit or third strike). If the pitcher throws four balls outside of the strike zone, the batter gets a pass to first base, and any base runner at first gets a pass to second. The umpire standing behind the catcher calls each pitch not swung at as a strike (if it passes over the plate between the batter’s shoulders and knees) or a ball (if wide, high, or low). The ball is in play from any given pitch until the ball is returned to the pitcher’s glove, thereby starting the next play.

The central drama of the game is played out by pitcher and catcher in setting up the play, and batter in making what he can of their efforts. They are playing to get him out; he is playing to reach first base or farther, or at least to help other runners advance around the diamond back to home plate, scoring one point for each round of the bases at the corners of the diamond. It takes much more time to write about the action than to see it happen. Pitchers these days can throw the ball at over ninety miles-an-hour, mixing fast balls with curves, sliders, knuckle-balls, balls that change pace or break one way or another, and other pitches intended to outwit the batter. Batters are ever on the alert for balls that look like they’re headed over the plate, but take a detour in the last fraction of a second. Fans divide their support between teams, and show strong reactions to anything that goes against their personal allegiance, particularly if it leads to a score by the “wrong” team.

Hopes on both sides run high, and spirits droop when events or judgments go against the favored team. Odds seem to favor the nine defensive players strategically placed around the field facing only one offensive batter at a time, each needing only three strikes to be called out. But in that small window of opportunity, batters can hit balls through the defense, over its head, or even out of the park. With a runner on base, the situation gets more intense for both sides. With two or three runners in position around the diamond, a pitcher can still throw in only one direction at a time, so the odds shift to the offense, unless the next batter hits into a double or even triple play, the likelihood of which increase with the number of runners. Or the next batter can slam a home run over the fence, sending four runners home (including himself), releasing pandemonium throughout the stadium and spreading far and wide into the radio and television audience, echoing within millions of individual black boxes around the world.

That tells me that baseball is more than a pastime; it is a state of consciousness to which humans are innately suited by the makeup of their minds. If not to the stars, humanity has peacefully risen to the level of baseball at least.

It is difficult to appreciate the profound difference between offense and defense in baseball. From the batter’s point of view as he awaits the pitch, he is almost rooted to the ground, unmoving, watching for the signs that will tell him whether or not to swing.

When the pitch comes, again from the batter’s point of view, the ball quickly grows larger and larger, not by any doing of the watchful batter, but seemingly on its own, like an asteroid bearing down on Earth. Before he swings, if he does, the batter’s eyes are the only eyes in the stadium that exist in time, wholly removed from the approaching ball

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that grows larger in his eyes as it subtends a wider arc on his retina, a change the batter can’t control, so perceives as a change over time, not space. But if he swings against the ball in the opposite direction, his actions shift him from an orientation in time to an orientation in space, the smack of the ball against the swinging bat being a consummation of time turning into space, with space overwhelming the perception of time, because now the change is the batter’s doing, and he owns it by watching the struck ball fly out over the field of play as fielders jockey to be in the right place to catch it when it returns to Earth, as he himself picks up speed on his run to first base, no longer watching and waiting as time passes, but now on the go along one leg of the infield, moving, shifting his position in space as fast as he can go.

I first became aware of watching (or listening) in time and acting in space during the opening minute of the film, Lawrence of Arabia, a sequence in which the figure of a distant camel (viewed through layers of air shimmering with heat waves) looms larger, ever larger, as I, the stationary viewer in my theater seat, experienced a sense of change over time (not in space) because I was just sitting there, doing nothing but watching. I had no need to compensate for my own movements, so the change came to me gratis, on its own, much as the sun shifts slowly through the sky, apparently on its own, but secretly powered by Earth’s rotation far below. Earth’s bowing down being converted in the instant to the sun rising above the horizon, an unappreciated dipping movement by Earth in space being converted to an apparent self-movement of the sun over time. That scene with the looming camel opened my eyes. Giving me a Eureka! moment in which I suddenly grasped in a new way something I had never doubted before. We still talk of sunsets and moonrises, when in both cases we should really admit to witnessing Earth rises and Earth falls or descents.

In baseball, I think we sense the difference between the viewpoints of opposing teams at any given moment, depending on whether they are scattered about the spacious green field of play or are standing in serial order still and alone at the plate awaiting the pitch that is about to come. That is, whether they are moving about in space under their own power, compensating for their ever-shifting positions and changes in perspective, or they are still-as-a-post, alert, yet waiting for the ball to appear due to no effort on their part, so requiring no compensation, but expecting the ball to appear as driven by the pitcher’s motive force. To hit the ball where they want it to go, batters have to begin their swings at just the right instant. Fielder, to catch a fly ball, have to be in the right place. These are two entirely different skills; some can do both, others can do one or the other, still others neither. Not everyone makes a great baseball player. As it is, players vary tremendously in their skillsets, some able to play every position, other being specialists in doing one thing exceedingly well. It takes all kinds to complete a team.

A sense of space results from our having to subtract our own motions to be sure of where we are in relation to objects in space, such as bases, balls, and sidelines. A sense of time results from viewing the hands of clocks, hearing the ticks of a metronome, crediting the changing hours to the shifting shadow of the gnomon on a sundial aligned with Earth’s figurative axis, the changing proportions of upper and lower masses of fine white sand in an hourglass, or the looming approach of a ball hurtling through space.

Scientists who claim to find time and space in the universe are projecting their own abilities and perceptions onto what they observe. Our own cultural calibrations of time and space work very well if we apply them consistently. Einstein conducted his famous

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thought experiments in his head, then sent the results as goodwill ambassadors from Earth into the far reaches of the universe. After almost a century, judgments are still pending on whether spacetime is a helpful addition to our view and understanding of events in far space. The evidence in favor is not all that compelling (see Pedro Ferreira, The Perfect Theory, cited above in Preface, page 3).

Speaking of great leaps, it seems a far stretch to get from baseball to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. But what I was pointing to was the very different skill sets opposed in offensive and defensive encounters in each play within each inning of each game of baseball. Both teams may be in the same league, but the players are apt to be processing each moment in a game from very different perspectives. Of course they are, being unique individuals trained and managed differently, and coming as they do from different cities and cultures. All of which adds to the allure of baseball as a medium for individual players to truly express themselves in their own ways. And for fans to respond in kind. Baseball is no thought experiment. It is played in the minds of players and fans, but batters must hit the ball in real time, and fielders catch that same ball as it moves through real space. Fortunately for us, through practice and great effort, players get good at performing such acts, and the rest of us genuinely enjoy the gripping engagements that result in our mindful experience of baseball.

The same can be said of our mindful experiences witnessing or participating in soccer, ballet, ballroom dancing, Olympic Games, cribbage, poker, chess, bird watching, mountaineering, sailing, cooking, dining, glass blowing, filmmaking, jazz, orchestral music, singing, and all the other engagements that thrill us inside-out and make us glad to be alive in that space at that time.

Do I know what I am talking about? Almost, insofar as I can know anything beyond opinion and personal belief. I don’t believe I can know anything for sure. I make stabs in the dark based on situational insights and conjectures. What I have in this instance is a feeling. A sense of the texture of my thinking. Like fine sand on a shore darkened by the sweep of the incoming tide. I find that texture reassuring. It’s more an aesthetic judgment, a sense of pleasing relationships shared during the run of ideas through my mind. Of balance, harmony, unity, symmetry. Fittingness to my train of thought. Space and time are two perspectives on change—change due to my own actions, change due to something else when I am still. Both sorts of change calibrated in units agreeable to the culture I grew up in. Space gives me a perspective on changes as I move; time gives me a different perspective on changes that do not flow from what I am doing. Changes due to my action; changes discovered in my perception: two different segments of my ongoing loops of engagement. Self-changes; it-changes. Like the batter hitting the ball, I switch from one perspective to the other. Often, while I am acting and perceiving at the same moment, I take the conjoined perspective of spacetime, a way of dealing simultaneously with two very different sorts of change at once.

Convincing? Perhaps not. But there it is. An idea in one man’s mind, based on his serial linkage of perception, judgment, action, and outward engagement. Bounce it off the walls of your own black box and see what you can make of it from your own experience of change when you are still, and again when you are moving. For example, I have two styles of hiking: striding ahead, and then stopping to look and listen. I move along the trail in space, and stop to listen to what is going on around me at a particular moment in time—birdsong, chattering squirrels, an airplane overhead, whatever. And while driving my car, I can fix my attention on one thing (say the license plate of the car

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ahead of me) giving me a snapshot in time, or I can take a much broader view of the landscape sweeping through my field of vision as I speed at fifty miles-an-hour in the opposite direction. In myself I discover two different strategies for dealing with change; how about you?

One last word about baseball. As played during the World Series (when skills have been polished for a full season) it is one of the highest forms of performance art.

Imagine having to express yourself using only a ball and a bat. Put two well-rehearsed casts of characters (teams) together, playing from identical scripts, but from complementary perspectives, like Yin and Yang, taking turns on offense and defense.

One cast limited to the perspective of time, the other to the perspective of space. Let each cast play at its best. Then switch them around so Yin becomes Yang, and vice versa.

Let them have at it again from where they left off in the last inning. Repeat that cycle for nine acts and see how they stand at the end, how many rounds of the diamond each cast has made. Award the year’s trophy to the cast that works best together, making the most of their individual talents at shifting from time to space, and back again. Discipline, that is the secret. Aesthetic prowess and discipline. True art for the people. Time and again; space and again. A true celebration of perception and action, what we know as life itself, both outer and inner. A tribute to creativity under highly restrictive conditions, using only a ball and a bat to stir up almost every emotion humans can bear. Genius, pure genius. It happens every year. And fans love it because it is their show all along. (Facts remembered since high school checked against Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1946, s.v. “baseball.”)

4-b. Roget’s Thesaurus. It was in 1852 that Dr. Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) published his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, classified and arranged so as to facilitate the Expression of Ideas and assist in Literary Composition. As I view it, that book gives us a portrait of his mind striving to map meanings onto words in English, a task he began early in life to support his own writing, and completed well into his retirement from medical practice in 1840. In his preface to that first edition he writes of his initial hopes that such a work “might help to supply my own deficiencies” when, in 1805, he first compiled “a system of verbal classification” that he later believed would be useful to all who take care in selecting words to suit their intended use in particular settings. Throughout life, Roget kept his mind active in pursuit of a wide range of interests. The Thesaurus is but one of his many accomplishments—the one for which he is cited today, even if its author is only dimly remembered.

I am of two minds regarding Dr. Roget and his Thesaurus. I admire his identifying a thousand categories of meaning in his own mind, and then systematically sorting his personal vocabulary of words and phrases among those headings. As one who takes his own mind seriously, I identify with him in making that effort. But, too, I feel almost claustrophobic in wending my way along the quaint and weedy pathways he treads among the meanings and feelings he discovered within himself. His era is not my era, his reverence for Latinate expressions not my reverence, his verbal style not my style. I cringe at many of the word clusters he created from terms he believed to share a core sense of meaning. I find myself silently dusting off and editing his lists, which, fortunately, others have done overtly in updating his now antiquated original to suit the needs of changing times. But even so, I feel pinched in reading through earlier editions of the Thesaurus as I try to get as close to the man as I can from my remote perspective

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in the twenty-first century. Mine is a labor of, if not love, then of fellowship with a kindred wayfarer on the journey through inner life.

Being deep in that frame of mind, last week I attended a workshop on social transformation led by a revisionist member of the New Buddhism persuasion. In facing into the issue of global warming, the leader cited a saying by Thich Nhat Hahn that I wrote down as, “We are here to recover from the illusion of our separateness.” The idea is that our current predicament is caused by our sense of separation from society and the natural world. If we can overcome the anxiety and insularity caused by our delusion of being separate from one another and from nature, we can join in solving the crisis of our time. If we put kindness and generosity in place of the greed for material goods we use to ward off the delusion of our selves being separate, we can actualize ourselves in concert to bring about the change we cannot manage on our own. The promise that the leader held out to us was that we can escape from the self-imposed prison of personal isolation by deconstructing through personal meditation the bonds imposed by the delusion of selfhood.

But endless mass repetition of the mantra “We are all one” (or “Might makes right,” or “God is the greatest” for that matter), doesn’t make it so. As a convinced separatist in believing that our respective genomes, immune systems, neural networks, experiences, memories, dreams, and daily engagements confirm each of us as a unique and separate self, I tried to imagine what it would be like to dissolve our differences so we could be of one mind and act in harmony for once. Instead of everyone sharing in such a mind, I was struck by the cacophony of thoughts and feelings—the psychic Armageddon—that would result if our fundamental separation turned out to be delusionary, a mere construction and convention of the culture we live in. In my view, the workings of evolution depend on us responding differentially to the forces acting upon us; we tailor ourselves to the niches we occupy for the sake of survival. If we all thought and acted as if we were of one mind, we would self-destruct in an instant. Instead of solving our common problems, deconstructing our individual selves would bring about the end, not only of personhood, but all humankind. Only discrete selves can take responsibility for their actions, and join cooperatively with others who are doing the same as led by their respective—and demonstrably separate—points of view.

My discomfort at approaching Dr. Roget’s mental processes too closely is a faint shadow of what might happen if we knocked down the walls of separation between our individual minds. Imagine having access to others’ minds in such a way that we could witness their thought and feelings from the perspective of our own life experience.

Fiction writers sometimes play that game, but what would it be like if we really could do it? Dr. Peter Mark Roget was no writer of fiction, but I find him remarkable for creating a set of word clusters that provide partial access to the workings of his subjective mind.

To approach his thinking as directly as possible, I bought a used copy of the first American edition (1933) of his Thesaurus as enlarged by his son, John Lewis Roget, and grandson, Samuel Romilly Roget. Both editors had deep respect for their father’sgrandfather’s brainchild as realized in the editions he brought out between 1852 and the marked-up copy of the 1855 edition he left at his death in 1869. In effect, the 1933 American edition transports the reader into the mind of a man who was born in 1779 during the American Revolutionary War, enabling us to see how one man of those days went about sorting (in his own words) his “ideas,” “feelings,” “views,” “conceptions,”

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“emotions,” “thoughts,” and “sentiments” into the convenient one-thousand categories of his own devising.

My interest here is in the meanings of words as they spoke to Peter Mark Roget in compiling his Thesaurus as a guide to writers and speakers of English. Collectively, those words as arrayed in Roget’s system of classification constitute a project for mapping his mental field of all possible meanings, each one cataloged under a fourtiered hierarchy of 1,000 headings grouped into 112 subsections, then into twenty-four sections, and lastly into six overarching classes of categorization. This is not only a system for embedding word meanings within an increasingly general hierarchy of conceptual categories; by being the work of one man, the system also reflects the very structure of meaningfulness within that man’s mind during a particular era of linguistic development in his culture. As I view it, Roget’s accomplishment was to reflect the very workings of his mind in the structure of his printed lists. For indeed they are his lists, categorized by his system, and therefore shed light on his mind. And his mind, in turn, serves as an exemplar of the minds of his peers and contemporaries to the extent they found those same lists to be personally meaningful and useful. And, as subsequently cleaned up by future editors, as a model of the workings of the minds of modern students, speakers, and writers of English.

In his Introduction to the first edition, Roget divided his project into six grand classes of meaning, beginning with the higher levels of abstraction: Commencing with the ideas expressing abstract relations, I proceeded to those which relate to space and to the phenomena of the material world, and lastly to those in which the mind is concerned, and which comprehend intellect, volition, and feeling; thus establishing six primary Classes of Categories (page xvi, italics added).

He, like all who believe they are privy to the world in itself, projected natural phenomena into that world as if they were not interpreted and enhanced by his personal process of perception, as an ant’s view of the world is tailored by its perceptual apparatus, a slug’s by its, a fish’s by its, and a weasel’s by its. I would say the mind is “concerned” in all six classes, not only the last three, providing an overview of the highest level of abstraction held by the human mind itself. God, as supreme being, is certainly one of our highest abstractions, right up there with “cosmos,” “eternity,” and “truth,” but Roget saves “God” for Section V, Religious Affectations, an entry under heading 976, “Deity,”out of the total 1,000 headings. I have many other quibbles with Roget’s system of categorization, but here I am writing about his system (which I wholeheartedly applaud), not mine.

Roget divides his six Primary Classes into twenty-four Sections containing concepts of greater specificity, and those into 112 Subsections, further divided under 1,000 Headings, each with its number as identified in the index, creating the word clusters or lists that share a core meaning in common as the key that will release the specific meaning the student, writer, or speaker is searching for. This system of verbal classification furnishes, in his own words, on every topic a copious store of words and phrases, adapted to express all the recognizable shades and modifications of the general idea under which those words and phrases are arranged (Introduction, page xiv).

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In practice, most users of the Thesaurus ignore the system and go straight to the synonym for which they are seeking an alternative. As John Roget wrote in his Editor’s Preface of 1879, “almost everyone who uses the book finds it more convenient to have recourse to the Index first.” But even so, what Dr. Roget gave to speakers of English was a printed reference system to make it easier to retrieve words relevant to (meaningful within) a given situation. The trick was to identify the proper situation from among the clusters of words in his lists. His system consisted of a catalogue of words arrayed across four levels of conceptual fineness or discrimination, appropriately stacked in categories on the fourth level with 1,000 particular headings suggesting the basic meanings of the words grouped under each one. He intended his system to map out something similar to the way he visualized words being stored in his personal vocabulary, ready for use in a specific situation (to be supplied by the user) because their meanings are germane to, and so called up by, just that situation. What he offered the English-speaking world was similar to the method by which meanings were made available to his mind according to the experiential situations they answered to, as modeled on somewhat similar systems devised by earlier linguists (in a footnote in his Introduction to the 1852 edition, he mentions several works by linguists working with categories of meanings in various languages, including Sanskrit, English, and French; Introduction, p. xxvi.). In that same footnote he points to a higher guiding

principle:

The principle by which I have been guided in framing my verbal classification is the same as that which is employed in the various departments of Natural History. Thus the sectional divisions I have formed, correspond to Natural Families in botany and Zoology, and the filiation of words presents a network analogous to the natural filiation of plants and animals (Roget’s capitalization, Introduction, p. xxvi).

Again, I would say that such taxonomies rely heavily upon the mental system for nesting or embedding levels of structural detail within hierarchies made possible by the neural networks within which we lay down ideas in our minds, as we nest levels of concepts and related ideas from most concrete to most abstract, and vice versa. These systems make sense to us in reflecting the inherent neural structures governing our cumulative understanding of language, animals, plants, ideas, and other categorical systems of all kinds. We are natural beings—great apes—after all, with ancestors who knew all about branching systems because they lived in the trees among palpable examples of such. It is no accident our minds are tuned to arboreal thoughts and images; that is probably how our ancestors organized their understanding of the world.

Worldly systems such as the one Roget invented for the classification of ideas and meanings stem from the structure of the very minds that claim to “invent” them. We do on the outside as we are organized to do on the inside. Such is the law of our engagements that link perception, judgment, and action serially to the natural, cultural, communal, and familial settings that, in turn, shape our felt situations, experiences, and minds through sympathetic reflection. We can’t help it, we are of the primal worlds we grow up in, and our actions ever-after declare the depth of our allegiance to those unique worlds. We draw branching diagrams connecting concepts and ideas because we grow up in a world of trunks, branches, and twigs that direct the flow of water and sap from roots to leaves and out into the air. Our road systems branch in such a fashion so that, yes, we can get there from here. Even if no one explicitly teaches us about

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networks, they are inherent in the workings of our minds, as thinking in terms of currents is native to fish and migratory pathways is native to birds, because we grow up within our experience of branching pathways, gossip, arteries, rivers, and trees, and our minds remind us of those structures because it works by building connections in similar fashion. If we but observe the nature of the world as we perceive it through careful attention, we become inhabitants of just such a world, in turn reflecting its methods in our doings.

Only after-the-fact does our intuitive syntax become grammar as a subject in school.

Only after he struggled a thousand times to come up with the perfect word apt to his thoughts did Roget come up with a system for classifying meanings to make the job easier and more transparent for himself and for others. We learn by doing and striving to do better, faster, with less waste. So do we grow into the selves we become, but could never have predicted beforehand where we would end up. So did Roget leave us a map of his mind without having the slightest intent to leave any such a map. No one taught him to build clusters of words around the common idea they all represent, such as under Heading 320, Levity, he associates feather with dust with mote with down with thistledown with flue with cobweb with gossamer with straw with cork with bubble with float with buoy with ether with air. He opened his mind and that cluster rose up within him because his mind had already sorted those words as being related one to another. Filaments of common meaning as flow through his collective experience made him do it—create all those clusters of words. It was not a rational exercise. Start to finish, it was wholly experiential and aesthetic in that he had lived that flow, and his mind had simply mapped the currents flowing through it. That is, it was those mental currents themselves that were shaped by the structure of the neural tunnels through which they were channeled.

Currents and processes in the brain determine the nature of mind. Is that true? Is his brain responsible for Roget’s system of classification, or is his experience? How do we come by the orderly systems we rely on to classify, rank, relate, distinguish, select, and compare our percepts and concepts? Where do taxonomies come from, anyway?

How are signals routed through the labyrinth in our brains? The answer is, I don’t know.

What I do know is that the ability to make meaning—the fitting together of chunks of awareness according to one system or another—is so prominent a human trait, we take it for granted as a quality of human thinking and intelligence. Some give credit to logical habits of thinking, but I don’t think it’s that simple. It is commonplace to group percepts and concepts by any quality or feature we can imagine. Then to put such groups or collections in ordered sequence by any number of criteria—size, shape, color, texture, function, time, date, age, topic, rarity, weight, effectiveness, and so on. If we grow up among trees, say, are our neural networks any different from what they would be if we grow up among snowflakes, mountains, or sand beaches? If so, are our thoughts and ideas any different as a result of the nature of the world we are born to? Are fish thoughts more fluid than bird thoughts (which might well be more flighty)? Certainly our thoughts and experience would differ to some degree, but would our neural networks be different? Our meanings? Our intelligence? If we had seven or sixteen fingers, would the numerical system by which we put things in sequence be different?

What if we had three eyes, or nine eyes like horseshoe crabs? We know that crows can count up to about seven, how high can jellyfish count? What sort of alphabet would snakes develop if they had a language?

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What we do know is that people are good at identifying similarities and differences; at sorting things into collections, classes, or categories; at putting things in sequence according to a number of qualities; at discovering relationships of all sorts, including symmetry and complementarity; at associating or connecting different things. People are particularly good at comparing one thing to another, then acting meaningfully according to their findings. We put dishes away in the cupboard in the “right” place; use proper syntax as we have been taught; file documents by topic, author, date, length, or any number of other criteria; look words up in the dictionary; find articles in the encyclopedia; distinguish between luggage passing on an endless belt at the airport; grade papers pass or fail, or by letter grade from A to F; buy clothing that fits; wear certain colors together and avoid other combinations; buy cars by distinct yet ineffable characteristics; purchase stock issue by one company but not another; construct taxonomies; justify whatever we do as reasonable; and so on endlessly, finding meaning in life by acting in particular ways at particular times in particular places—and not others. Here I am spelling and putting words in sequence as if they weren’t words at all but thoughts and ideas flowing through my mind.

How do we do it? Find meaning in all these different ways of doing things? It comes with the territory of being human. With the culture we were born to, the community we live in today, the family we grew up in, the ways of the natural world we are extensions of. What I know today is that I somehow put one word after another in writing such paragraphs as these, judging by function, role, topic, emphasis, rhythm, and what I am trying to say on the basis of my personal experience. I don’t think about how I do it, I just do it. In a more-or-less orderly fashion. The order is the thing, so that others will decipher letters put down in certain groups in a particular order and derive a sense of meaning from that pattern of parts grouped into wholes.

Throughout this reflection, I find the metaphors of helmsman, wayfarer, and navigator to be particularly apt and meaningful in reference to my sense of my own mind. So I ascribe pathways and routes to my thoughts as if they were travelers within a network of interconnected highways and byways within my mind and brain. Talk of maps, too, seems proper and germane. These images feel right to me as I try to find words to use in writing about my own mind. To me, thinking feels like navigating, like finding my way. I visualize my consciousness as forming a certain terrain with uplands and lowlands I pass through as I write. Does my study of watersheds reflect or echo that terrain, or perhaps determine it? Which comes first, my outer or inner landscape?

Again, I don’t know. Is there a connection between them? I say yes. Metaphors are products of mind and brain; they don’t come out of nowhere. They are useful in describing the indescribable in terms of the known and familiar. I am dealing with mysteries here that have baffled people since the first human thought coursed through the first human mind. The basic idea is a flow of minor thoughts gathering into a river of thoughts, into grand ideas on a larger scale, built up from lesser streams, rivulets, and observations. Do I know what I am talking about? No—but I certainly have a feel for the coursing of my mind, and the best I can do is try to put that feel into such words as I depend on in writing this essay about navigating, voyaging, journeying, wayfaring through my mind, the adventure of the lifetime I am allowed.

Roget started with meanings and developed clusters of words that he identified as relating—by finding similarity to or difference from or gradations of—to a repertory of different meanings he recognized in his mind, which he numbered according to his

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system of classification from 1 to 1,000. In so doing, he captured the order of his mind on paper. As I am trying to do in my last days by writing this reflection on the terrain I discover in my own mind as if I were a wayfarer passing through it. I have sent a probe into my mind, and this is the final report of my findings.

One prominent feature of his mind reflected in Roget’s magnum opus is the notion of duality (dichotomy, opposition, negation, polarization, bifurcation) and other such close couplings of related pairs of meanings or ideas. He found the sense of unity as composed of two distinct parts in relation to each other so compelling that pages of the Thesaurus are printed in two columns to allow such related pairs to be juxtaposed in print to capture the effect they have on our minds. In his Introduction, Roget writes: “There exist comparatively few words of a general character to which no correlative term, either of negation or of opposition, can be assigned” (page xx). Counting up the opposed pairs in my 1933 edition, I discover that 78.6% of the 1,000 headings are paired with an opposite member. That is an astounding statistic; mine, not Roget’s. He merely captured it as a prominent feature of the way meanings are stored in his mind as polar couples. Is he just being contrary? No, he is simply echoing or reflecting the dichotomous structure of his neural network in being home to two sorts of signals, those that activate, and those that block, squelch, or inhibit. Our minds are built of either/or decisions, go or no-go, yes or no, either or, win or lose—maybe gets lost in the shuffle as an unsuitable or unworkable prospect that is simply not helpful in any real life situation where coming up with a proper response is crucial. Uncertainty means hesitation means vulnerability. Speak up or listen, don’t stand there muttering to yourself. Either close the door or keep it open. Fish or cut bait is the issue, the only issue by which you will rise up or fall of your own weight. The issue is always survival, not hedging, not vacillating, not beating around the bush. People are maybe’d to death every day because they can’t make a judgment by the time it comes due.

What does Roget (1933) say on the topic of irresolution? He offers word cluster 605 Irresolution, which includes the Nouns: infirmity of purpose, indecision, indetermination, loss of willpower, unsettlement, uncertainty, demur, suspense, hesitation, vacillation, ambivalence, changeableness, fluctuation, alternation, caprice, lukewarmness, fickleness, levity, pliancy, weakness, timidity, cowardice, half measures, waverer, ass between two bundles of hay, shuttlecock, butterfly, timeserver, opportunist, turn coat; along with Adjectives: irresolute, infirm of purpose, double-minded, half-hearted, undecided, unresolved, undetermined, drifting, shillyshally, fidgety, tremulous, wobbly, hesitating, off one’s balance, at a loss, vacillating, unsteady, unsteadfast, fickle, unreliable, irresponsible, unstable, without ballast, capricious, volatile, frothy, light-minded, giddy, fast and loose, weak, feeble-minded, frail, timid, cowardly, facile, pliant, unable to say ‘no,’ easy-going. I was looking for wishy-washy, but that’s listed under headings: 160 Languid, 391 Insipid, 575 Feeble style, and 643 Unimportant.

Often the polarized pairs of headings are based on the same root with a prefix added to one of them: non-, dis-, anti-, contra-, mis-, in-, or un-, as in the following pairs of headings: 17 Similarity/18 Dissimilarity, 23 Agreement/24 Disagreement, 27 Equality/28 Inequality, 43 Junction/44 Disjunction, 46 Coherence/47 Incoherence, 58 Order/59 Disorder. Many other headings are based on different roots: 50 Whole/51 Part, 66 Beginning/67 End, 102 Multitude/103 Fewness, 123 Newness/124 Oldness, 125 Morning/126 Evening, 127 Youth/128 Age, 140 Change/141 Permanence, 159

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Strength/160 Weakness, 164 Producer/165 Destroyer, 173 Violence/174 Moderation, 210 Summit/211 Base, 212 Verticality/213 Horizontality, 234 Front/235 Rear, 292 Arrival/293 Departure, 298 Food/299 Excretion.

On the level of the word clusters within headings, Roget contrasts 516 Meaning with 517 Unmeaningness, placing them side-by-side in two columns. Comparing the two clusters, you can feel the author’s judgment at work, awarding high approval to one list, rating the other as pure folly. I present samplings from the two headings in serial order.

516 Meaning. Signification, significance, sense, expression, import, drift, tenor, implication, connotation, essence, force, spirit bearing, colouring, scope; matter, subject, subject matter, argument, text, sum and substance, gist; general meaning, broad m., substantial m., colloquial m., literal m., plain m., simple m., accepted m., natural m., unstrained m., true, etc.

517 Unmeaningness. Scrabble, scribble, scrawl, daub (painting), strumming (music); empty sound, dead letter, ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,’ ‘sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal;’ nonsense, jargon, gibberish, jabber, mere words, hocus-pocus, fustian, rant, bombast, balderdash, palaver, patter, flummery, verbiage, babble, platitude, insanity, rigmarole, rodomontade, truism, twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, stuff, stuff and nonsense, bosh, rubbish, rot, drivel, moonshine, wish-wash, fiddle-faddle, flapdoodle, absurdity, vagueness, etc.

Here, I suggest, we have direct evidence of the perceptive mind at work shaping, sharpening, emphasizing, contrasting, and distinguishing the impressions it makes of the patterns of energy it receives from the world, doing its work with a deliberately (and figuratively) heavy hand, ensuring that each sensory impression conforms to the attitude of expectancy with which it is welcomed. Indeed, we recognize exactly what it is we expect to find. To me, this is a demonstration of how our loops of engagement do their jobs in such a way to reassure us that the world we discover is the same world we seeded our attention and expectancy with in the first place.

My contention in this reflection is that I, you, we all play the same game. We are smoothers-over to suit ourselves. We can’t help it, our auxiliary loops of perceptual adjustment and refinement do the work for us. To a man, to a woman, we are biased toward our own predilections, the teachings of our personal life experience. Far beyond Dr. Roget’s influence, the evidence is all around us in the polarities with which we apprehend the world. In the military battles, political in-fighting, religious strife, business practices, sporting contests, artistic preferences, social engagements, entertainments, literary tastes—we know what we like, like what we know, and dispense with the rest. Our minds work in ways that are almost as pat as that. As set according to our gleanings from the survival niches we have sowed and harvested up until now. We are self-made in ways we hardly suspect because we filter our own interests out of our engagements, seeing those of our partners with far greater clarity than we do our own— almost as if our interests played no part in our dealings with the world. As if our personal meanings were accurate, just, and true, while the unmeanings of those we engage with are no more than scrabble, scribble, scrawl, and daub.

I am certain that Dr. Roget never recognized such a state of affairs in his own mind.

How could he have? He was convinced that he was writing about states of affairs in the world, not in his mind. As scientists filter out their very standpoints as trained scientists in dealing with a supposedly objective universe of pure events happening within reach of their instruments of observation. As the Pope is considered to be infallible in his

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judgments as referee of all human engagements. As politicians paint their opponents as caricatures, themselves as noble knights in armor. As Buddhists avoid human suffering by declaring the individual self to be a mere construct, so how can anyone suffer in a mind focused on nothingness?

Without our knowing, the answers we seek are contained in the questions we ask.

We don’t want the truth; we want affirmation of our proprietary truth as only our loyal prejudgments can deliver it. The one we recognize because it is already within us, safe in our very own black box, where it is part and parcel of any effort we might make to engage the world beyond our perimeter. Talk about self-interest, we can’t live without it, which puts everyone we interact with at a disadvantage because they think we are interested in them and their welfare, not purely our own, which we can’t see, so safely ignore. If we weren’t self-ish to the core, without a fairy godmother, we wouldn’t survive for one day. So we tilt the playing field in our favor, and do just fine on the basis of foregone conclusions that aren’t conclusions at all but unquestionable axioms of personal faith.

Who could imagine discovering such an outrageous position backed up by no less an authority than Dr. Peter Mark Roget himself? I, for one. Lone wayfarer that I am in hot pursuit of any secrets my mind might be holding back. I offer myself as Exhibit A of the very ideas I am talking about in this reflection. I may be only one authority, but I certainly serve in that office for the only mind I have access to. As you yourself serve in the case of your own mind. I am trying to provoke you into examining your credentials for holding that office. Are you as fair and impartial as you believe and maintain? Can any of us be that fair? Are we rational in any sense at all?

Rather than dissolve the constructs that bind us together as conscious beings, I truly believe our best option is to get to know ourselves without the self-support system that comes with the territory of being an earnest and well-meaning individual. I think we can work around that support system by regarding ourselves as if we were total strangers, and had no power to edit the data on which our conclusions are based. Yes, we can see ourselves with new eyes, hear ourselves with new ears, augment our self-image by including the very data we’ve been excluding for all these years. A priori, we are neither good nor bad. We are what we are, wayfarers on a minor planet for a brief instant in time. Imagine going to our deaths not knowing who we are? What we have truly accomplished, and at what cost to others and to our home planet? It is never too early to take stock, and to keep taking stock for the rest of our travels. In fact it makes a lot of sense to get to know ourselves before we inflict unwitting harm on others, thinking all the while we are blameless. Facing into myself, that is my project. No one can do it for me. The buck stops with me. As it does with each person. If we don’t respectively rise to that challenge, we know that no one else ever will. We are born to that challenge. And if we don’t take it on, can we truly claim to have lived, or claim to have lived truly, being stuck in the darkness within our personal black box all our lives?

Thank you, Peter Mark Roget, for unwittingly reflecting that wisdom back onto your readers, if only we would take the effort to follow the line of thinking you set before us in your work as a light shining on how our own minds might be organized. The moral being: that everything we notice from our privileged position sheds light on our minds if we will but look for that hidden message.

Mindfully play and watch baseball; mindfully pore through Roget’s Thesaurus; two down—mindfully ogle the stars yet to come.

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4-c. The Stars. In themselves, stars are meaningless. It takes human minds looking through human eyes (and perhaps a telescope equipped with a spectroscope) to make stars meaningful. The meanings are in us, ready to be mapped onto stellar features and characteristics—position, motion, relationships, color, brightness, lines of spectral absorption or emission, and so on. The meanings of stars are in our minds, as all meanings are in our minds.

What are meanings? I view them as the qualities or dimensions of a situation we discover in our minds, a situation made up of some combination of experiential and intellectual values, motivations, emotions, understandings, imaginings, sensory phenomena, remembrances, aesthetic qualities, comparisons, polarities, judgments, thoughts, attitudes, urges to action, and so on, all driven by our personal quota of the life force as delivered by our metabolism. Meanings and situations are often associated with particular words as supplied by our culture and families for our personal use.

These various qualities of inner awareness (what I refer to as dimensions of mind, experience, intellect, or consciousness) are present in greater or lesser degree, forming constellations in our minds that characterize the specific mental situations in which they arise, so constituting the meaning of a given situation in our experience as witnessed from our perspective at any given moment. The proper reference for our meaningful mental activity is the situation we are facing as we construe it at the time.

Words may symbolize such meanings, but the meanings are not in the words themselves. Meanings are properties of the experiential situations that words refer to or represent, however concrete or abstract, specific or general they may be. I think of words as arising from (or being called forth by) preverbal kernels of awareness. Each such kernel is a seed of meaning bearing its particular set of qualities of inner experience as a nugget, node, or item in awareness. I associate each such seed with a particular kind of experience kindled by life situations as they occur (present themselves) in my conscious mind. When I speak, that seed sprouts and blossoms as a stream of words issuing from my lips.

If I find meaning in the stars, what I find is the inner meaning comprising the dimensions of my mental experience activated by a particular occasion for stargazing.

That meaning is in me, not the stars. It is something I bring to the stars, not something they give to me. As visual impressions, stars are gleaming, glistening nonentities, minute dots of radiant nothingness. I can’t hear them, touch them, smell them, heft them, taste them, collect them, or affect them in any way. How can I engage them if they answer me only with silence and their chorus of fixed smiles overhead? I can point and name and ogle, but they just carry on doing their thing, whatever it is that stars do. I can see them arrayed before me much as I see grains of sand spread out as a beach. It is more their overall effect and relationships that I see, not individual stars.

I can’t even imagine how remote stars are from my everyday world. That remoteness is measured in light years, the distance light travels in the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun in one year. How far can light travel in 365 days at a speed of 186 thousand miles each second for every one of those days? How about 5.88 trillion miles, give or take?

Excepting the sun, our nearest stellar neighbor, the star that astronomers call Alpha Centauri (the brightest star in the constellation Centaurus), is about 4.4 light years away, almost 26 trillion miles. What experience can I have of something as remote from my everyday life as that? Contemplating that non-event, I feel overwhelmed by a hypothetical thought experiment of the most trivial kind. I’ve got errands to run and

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groceries to buy; how can anything as minute as Alpha Centauri rise above the horizon of my attention? Who needs Alpha Centauri? Who needs the stars?

Some migratory birds may use the stars to navigate by. And as it turns out, humanity seems to rely a great deal on the stars in its life travels. We are born to them after all, to the sky at night as well as the day, and once we escape the glare of city lights, what else is there to see at night than the moon and the stars? We may not be taken by individual stars so much as the luminous array stretching across a dark sky. Who (in the northern hemisphere) has not oohed and aahed at the sight of Orion in winter months or the Milky Way spread overhead in summer? Our primal relation to the stars is demonstrably preverbal. We utter appreciative noises that hint at the awe within us as we lift our eyes to them, but words generally fail us, as they fail astronauts gazing down on Earth from their capsules, shuttles, and stations in near space. It’s not so much that stars have no meaning as that we aren’t accustomed to grandeur on so vast a scale. They may be remote, but the feelings they engender in us are at the core of our being aware.

You can’t get more intimate than that.

Navigators, of course, rely on the stars. Astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists make a living by trying to understand them. Astrologers plot the positions of sun, moon and planets against certain constellations or houses as positioned at their clients’ times of birth. Imagine life without images provided by the Hubble Space Telescope to place our meager lives in their proper universal perspective. I have to admit to having been star-struck as a kid. And still am, even if I don’t go out much at night anymore. I’m struck by fireflies, too, and glints off the water, but anything to do with lights in the sky commands my attention. Even airplane lights and satellites at night invariably grab my eye. The cosmic aesthetic may be ethereal, but it is compelling nonetheless. I am fascinated by auroras borealis, which aren’t properly celestial at all, even if they are lights in the sky. I find as much meaning in auroras as anything I’ve ever encountered. To give an outstanding example from personal experience, I cite the single cartwheel display of aurora borealis I’ve seen in my lifetime. That was some time ago, back in the late 1960s or 1970s. The point here is how I personally discover meaning keyed to celestial events. The lights may be in the sky, but the meanings are in me.

The center of the spectacle is at the zenith overhead, apparently directly above my island camp in Franklin, Maine. It is midnight. On my way back from the latrine, I look up—to see streamers shimmering from around the horizon toward that celestial vortex where, wavering, flowing, they whirl together in a pulsing gyre of living forms that spreads and contracts and shifts its shape as I watch. Glowing spiders turn into snakes into eyes into butterflies. The air fairly hums. Beneath the stars, the cartwheel rings its changes without repetition as if two eyes aren’t enough to take in the spectacle and I need ears as well. I am having a whole-body experience. Candle flames turn into running wolves into great whales into chickens, rays shooting above the trees all the while, feeding the starved gyre, spinning it round and round and into itself. Roses turn to sparklers turn to ants turn to luminous lizards. The spectacle goes on for hours, each second consuming my entire attention. What if I blinked and missed a crucial transition? Continuity is of the essence. But eventually, cold, stiff, tired, I not only blink but go to bed, my head swimming with the best auroral display I’ve ever seen—and am likely to see in my lifetime (Reprinted from my Consciousness: The Book, Bar Harbor: Earthling Press, 2011, page 17).

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Was I hallucinating? Seeing something that wasn’t there? No, something definitely was there, patterns of streaming light coursing up along the spokes of the cartwheel from horizon trees to zenith, but that’s not what I “saw.” The streamers were in the sky; what I made of them was in my mind as a series of overlaid interpretations that converted meaningless patterns into recognizable forms having names. Which is exactly what we do when we look at stars and make groups of stars fit into patterns— constellations—we are familiar with: Cygnus the swan, Lyra the lyre, Sagittarius the archer (or teapot), Delphinus the dolphin, Ursa Major the big dipper, even (in the Southern Hemisphere) Horologium the clock, Sextans the sextant, Musca the fly, Telescopium the telescope. Constellations are a cooperative venture between meaningless stars and the pattern-seeking minds of humans looking for meaning by projecting recognizable forms onto the heavens. Even the patterns are illusions in being made up of stars distributed in three-dimensional space (not spread across a twodimensional surface such as we make of the celestial “dome” overhead). In that we do violence to the stars for the sake of making them conveniently familiar. Seeing a parade of figures along the zodiac is no different. All of astrology is in human heads, along with naming planets after ancient gods, and imagining a prime mover behind the apparently harmonious motion of the stars, the mover being as illusory as the motion itself, which exists solely in the eye of Earthbound beholders revolving beneath the stars, not in the stars overhead.

Such doings are Exhibit A of our human yen for meaning to the extent that if we don’t find it, we simply make it up to suit ourselves and put it out there where we are looking at the moment. Our minds author constellations and prime mover just as my unique mind authored the apparitions I saw in the aurora. It is one thing to see what we see; something else again to take responsibility for our part in the process of putting mind and image together as if they were one and the same. That is a profound lesson the stars have to teach us because we know there are no actual constellations in the sky such as we draw on charts of the heavens. As I know there are no actual creatures in the wavering filaments of the northern lights. I personally saw them, but I don’t believe in them. Any more than I believe there is a prime mover responsible for the motions of the stars, even for the star trails they leave on photographic film during a time exposure; those are Earth trails. Any more than I believe the stars, planets, sun and moon rise and set when, all along, it is the Earth that is turning in relation to sun, moon, and stars. We may not see it that way, but that’s how it is. It might look like Earth is at the center of the universe, but that’s not our true situation, located as we are in an outer arm of a minor galaxy among many others. It only seems that we are the center of the Great All because our minds are locked into their black boxes in our heads, and that’s what we make of the puzzle of the outside world in a kind of grand guess about what may be out there in clear view above the horizon of what we can know with any certainty.

In truth, the evidence provided by seeing with our own eyes is pretty shaky. All Blacks may look alike to Whites because blackness is all we need to know in order to place a fellow human into the category we want her to fit, overlooking the overwhelming evidence of the fullness of her humanity. It takes concentrated effort to avoid making that error. And for Blacks to avoid the same error looking the other way into our white faces. Simpleminded categorizations cut human awareness off at the neck, they are acts of such violence. As seeing a prime mover, supreme being, or creator behind the apparently harmonious motions of the stars is an act of violence in putting something

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into the universe to suit ourselves, something that, on reflection, patently is not there.

Any more than the demons that haunt our political campaigns are there at the focus of the advertisements hurled at us as Election Day nears. We know those claims are false (or are at best overdrawn) because we similarly exaggerate the polarity of our own likes and dislikes, but we keep forgetting our own fibs and distortions when it is inconvenient to own up to them in polite company.

In my Army unit, being one of the four tallest members qualified me for being a squad leader. In my squad the recruit next to me was the fifth tallest, the blackest man I had ever seen. He was so black, I couldn’t make out his features at all, only the whiteness of his eyes and teeth. His face was always in the shadows. After several months of being in close quarters with him, I found that most of his darkness had drained away and he’d become a human being. It’s strange how that works. It wasn’t that his skin was black so much as that my mind was white from lack of experience (as my skin is white from lack of exposure to sunlight) and I didn’t know it. In that sense, the Army was a great leveler in mixing Blacks and Whites and Latinos and Asians together, giving a good shake of shared experience, and letting the results speak for themselves. Putting young men and women together in college dorms and the military doesn’t work as well because hormones give us a primal agenda that takes a long time to recast as the will of mature, consenting adults.

We all do have a favorite star in our neighborhood, and that is the sun, a star that truly makes a difference in our lives as Earth’s source of radiant energy, and source of gravitational energy that gives our planet a place to hang out in the universe. It doesn’t resemble other stars in being, for practical purposes, minimally worthy of notice. To the contrary, at some seasons the sun beams down on us with so much heat and light that it forces itself on our attention, and we seek shelter from its direct rays. At opposite seasons, when lower in the sky, the sun is often thrust into our awareness by its shyness, and we wish it would be more forceful than it is. But even given its seasonal variability, the sun is far brighter to the eye than other stars, and hotter, and apparently moving so fast through the sky that we feel compelled to keep track of it with our clocks, watches, sundials, and digital devices. In a very real sense, we want to know where it is at all hours so we can set our lives to its motion. That is some star. A star to hitch your life to.

A star to rise and shine by every day. Without sunlight, plants wouldn’t exist, animals wouldn’t exist, we wouldn’t exist. There, now, is a star that has meaning. Without it, meaning wouldn’t exist because our minds wouldn’t exist. The sun is implicit in the meaning of meaning, in every one of the dimensions of human awareness. Without it, those dimensions would be unimaginable. With it, they become possible.

When we do notice other stars and heavenly bodies, it is often their variability that draws our attention. We notice the comings and goings of comets across the sky, of meteors and periodic meteor showers, of supernovas suddenly blazing forth where no star was seen before, then fading away. Too, we notice full and partial eclipses of sun and moon, alignments of planets with bright stars and other planets, phases of the moon as sunlight strikes its surface at different angles as seen from our point of view. And the seasonal comings, goings, and rotations of stellar constellations, those apparent groupings of stars we find sufficiently familiar to identify by name: Orion, Sagittarius, Libra, Cassiopeia, Pleiades, Cygnus, Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Southern Cross, among others.

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To my mind, it is changes in the aesthetic arrangement of the stars that invites them into our attention and gives them much of their meaning. They are not fixtures after all, but sensory phenomena in our minds that are subject to variation. What we call fixed stars are fixed in the sense of their unchanging relations one to another, not in relation to us. Indeed, they appear to move across the sky every day, but en masse, as a welldisciplined flock, preserving their relative positions, never wandering, never getting out of line. We know now that that seeming sweep of the stars is not their doing but ours in revolving beneath them and orbiting the sun through the seasons. It is Earth’s twofold motion, not the stars above moving in harmony with one another. But for most of human history (and all of prehistory), people were convinced that the stars themselves moved together on well-ordered paths across the sky. And it was the presumed source of that orderly pattern of motion that gave meaning to the stars as disciplined lights subject to a fundamental rule of the “universe” (which means one-turning, even though the stars aren’t turning at all; it is we Earthlings who are moving, projecting our illconsidered impressions onto the stars). “Universe” is a misnomer. A mistake. A fundamental error of misconception. What we mean by “the universe,” then, doesn’t truly exist. It is not at all what we once thought it was. Yet the word persists on our tongues, and has meaning for even scientists, who know better, but in this matter stick to old habits.

Projected onto the stars, the meaning our distant ancestors found in their orderly procession was that they were compelled as one body by a prime mover, alleged source of, and driving force behind, the order of the universe. The notion of a prime mover was wholly a fiction in human minds, a product of deluded imaginations in not being able to detect their own planet’s motion because they moved with the Earth and had no other reference than the stars to gauge that impression by. So if the stars seemed to move, that was enough to convince them that that must be the true state of affairs. Everybody believed it, everybody said so. Opening the door to a myriad of profound consequences, which still persist among us today. Wars have been fought, millions killed, as a result of such beliefs. Those meaningful consequences, as residing in our minds as matters of faith and belief, are what I am concerned with in this section on the stars.

Along with the concept of one turning, several other concepts accompany that of the prime mover: the idea of harmony as the essential order of the cosmos, and the idea that deviation from harmony was a message played like notes against a musical scale intended to call people on Earth back into harmony with the circling stars. The five visible, star-like planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), as well as sun and moon, did not share in the disciplined rotation of the stars, but travelled their own ways among them along a wide pathway of their own. That pathway was not random but stuck to a middle way along a particular band of stars that ancient peoples visualized as forming twelve constellations, the band coming to be known as the ecliptic, the celestial path along which the messenger planets (Greek angelos, messenger) traveled and, when those paths coincided, conjunctions and eclipses would occur. The twelve, thirty-degree constellations (houses, signs) along the ecliptic were seen as domains ruled in monthly succession by twelve godlike figures, together forming the ring of zodiacal signs marking the progress of the seven angelic messengers.

Once the stars became animated by ancient humans projecting their minds onto the cycling radiance overhead, the stage was set for conception and projection of prime movers, supreme beings, creators, and rulers of the (supposedly) one-turning universe.

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The stars and the messengers weaving among them bore whatever meanings arose in those minds upon beseeching the cosmos for guidance in conducting their affairs.

Sumerian minds became famous for conceiving of such deities (shining or radiant ones, later depicted with haloes) some five- or six-thousand years ago looking up from their marshy homeland in the delta of the combined waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers at the head of the (now) Persian Gulf. Among many other gifts to their descendants, the Sumerians are famous for leaving behind them a great many clay statuettes of worshippers with folded hands and dilated, dark-adapted eyes, only much later to be discovered by archaeologists within the past 150 years. The figures depict worshippers in the grips of a variety of fraught human situations beneath the stars at night, looking to be told by the messenger stars what to do, because, as the Sumerians believed, that was their job, the luminous planets serving as divine messengers from the gods of the starry heavens. What the Sumerians invented—along with cuneiform writing on clay tablets; an extensive literature of poetry, myths, lamentations, hymns, and wise sayings; and religion with a priestly profession as we know it today—was an intricate system of awe so lustrous as to have a compelling effect in organizing the behavior of a people who sought answers to their most pressing problems from the seemingly informative movements of the planets weaving among the orderly motions of stars along the ecliptic. The Sumerians took the idea of a prime mover so seriously that it took on the stature of a supreme being, the very being that drove and created the cosmos, and ruled it as a model of power and harmony for all who sought order and obedience in their lives here on Earth.

The Sumerians were so creative and influential, it would be easy to get sidetracked by their enduring accomplishments. They affected human civilization as much as any people on Earth, and far more than most. As Joseph Campbell has written, in 3200 B.C., there appears in this little Sumerian mud garden . . . the whole cultural syndrome that has since constituted the germinal unit of all of the high civilizations of the world. . . . It was actually and clearly the highly conscious creation . . . of the mind and science of a new order of humanity, which had never before appeared in the history of mankind; namely, the professional, fulltime, initiated, strictly regimented temple priest (The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. New York, NY: Viking Press, 1959; Penguin Books, 1976, paperback ed., page 146).

Used by permission of Joseph Campbell Foundation (jcf.org).

But the priest was only an instrument (the administrator, as it were) of the Sumerian system of belief. It was the feat of mind I find so extraordinary, the feat that recognized the order of the stars circling overhead as exemplifying the daily and seasonal order by which humans should conduct their civil, agricultural, and religious affairs in harmony with principles established by the authority of a mythical ruler of the cosmos—that is what was so truly remarkable. The successful eking-out of an existence, not by hunting and gathering, but by tilling the soil and grazing cattle in accord with directives issued by the starry heavens. In other words, successfully shifting to a fundamentally new agricultural way of life by heeding the advice of the stars—the rest is the subsequent history of humankind.

When that happened over 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, religion (Latin religare, to bind back, meaning to bind oneself to the harmony exemplified by the stars overhead—to partake in the order of the heavens) was at the leading edge of human

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understanding. What made it work in real-life situations was the allure that the new cosmic empathy held for common folk working in the fields. They could see the stars as well as anyone, simply by gazing upward and paying attention to the current positions of the planets against the background of stars sharing in the one stately dance across the sky. Tying that image to recollections of images in years past, they kept a kind of calendar of human activities as charted against events in the heavens (which we still do to this day). Now is the time to prepare the soil, said the stars (as interpreted by the priest with backing by the king); now is the time to plant; now the time to hoe weeds; now the time to harvest; now the time to gather the flocks; now the time to rejoice in having food laid ahead for the time of scarcity. On Earth as in heaven. The greatest wisdom of all time.

The discovery Campbell alludes to in the Sumerian system of belief was synchrony between goings-on in the night sky and human labors on Earth—on both daily and yearly scales of events. What was not discovered was the cause of that dual synchrony in the daily rotation of Earth about its axis, together with its yearly and seasonal journey around the sun, with the planes of those two motions tilted at an angle of twenty-three degrees one to the other. Instead, the stars and planets themselves were credited with their own self-motive powers as inherent in the cosmic order fulfilled nightly overhead.

How marvelous that daily and yearly procession must have seemed. How powerful.

How profound in a system with so many moving parts being visibly obedient to one rule of motion that joined Earth, planets, sun, moon, and stars in unison together with flawless harmony. Not for a day, a season, a year, but—as evidence and wonder accrued from generation to generation—seemingly forever.

If we put ourselves in their place, the temple priests who formulated that discovery were clearly on the leading edge of their personal experience, and the collective experience of their people at that era in history. Their vision of cosmic harmony, combined with belief that self-motion was proof of the motive power of the living soul (because only living beings could move by their own will), was the intellectual accomplishment of their time in expressing their early grasp of cosmology in the intuitive concept of religious faith itself as the force that bound human understanding to the self-turning universe. Each point of light reflected the overall scheme of a world (or cosmic) soul as the driving force behind the evidence they beheld with their own eyes.

Do stars have meaning for humans? Indeed, as profound as meaning can be.

Practical meaning. Cultural meaning. Historic meaning. Religious meaning. Aesthetic meaning. Survival meaning. Which taken together surely amount to the truth. Or at least an operative truth. A truth until a more durable one comes along. A truth in the fallible human mind. Which, no matter how many people believe them, is where all concepts-ideas-thoughts-truths reside. The fragility of this particular truth was compounded by the philosophical musings of Plato, Aristotle, and their Neoplatonist heirs—unto Thomas Aquinas and the builders of Medieval cathedrals who expressed this one truth in stone and stained glass—in idealizing and reifying the prime mover as the principle of absolute goodness and harmony at the core of the universe.

One of the foremost historians of religious beliefs and festivals, E. O. James, has written succinctly on the role of religions in human affairs: When life depended largely on the hazards of the chase, the vagaries of the seasons, and similar circumstances and events by no means wholly, or in some

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cases even partly, under human control, the emotional tension was endemic in a perpetual struggle for existence in a precarious environment. Therefore, once a ritual technique had been devised to deal with the situation and sublimate the strain, it became established and organized to meet the various demands and to maintain a state of equilibrium in an expanding social and religious structure.

This religious consciousness was projected into any natural object, force or process that it identified with the mysterious awesome sacred power transcending yet immanent in the phenomenal world, in particular species of animals and in physical features such as rivers, mountains and the constellations, and in the rhythm of nature. Around these various symbols of divinity and divine activity a cultus [religious cult] collected, designed to bring under control and to make efficacious the forces with which the symbols were associated (Seasonal Feasts and Festivals. Copyright Š 1961 by E. O. James. New York: Barnes & Noble, University Paperback, 1963, page 18).

It was in the minds of individual thinkers that the notion of divinity was coded into a language of symbols and rituals to bring about the obedience of humanity to the will of lustrous gods in their cosmic heaven through the agency of priests in their Earthly temples. I don’t know who developed the ideas that bound the Sumerians to the orderly pageant of heaven, but that idea was a potent one that caught priestly attention because none other than the local priest himself would play the mediating role between the socalled prime mover of the stars and those who read the angelic signs from below. Earth and its cosmos would share in the same divine order if the two could somehow be linked at the nexus between them, so unifying state, church, and people under the figure of a prime mover (creator and supreme being) in his heaven. The Sumerians set up the linkage. Then the Greeks in the person of Plato and other thinkers subsequently supplied the philosophical rationale of the world soul linking stars and planets to people on Earth. Which spread through the colossus of monotheism via Aristotle, Abraham, Paul of Tarsus, the Neoplatonists, the Prophet Mohammad, and Thomas Aquinas, among many others, thus staunchly reifying the idea of a prime mover and ruler of the one-turning universe. That meme or cultural idea has now far outrun its usefulness, rendering the notion of binding-back to the harmony of the heavens over-stretched as a footnote to the meandering history of situated intelligence in the human mind.

This abuse of the ultimate meaning of the stars was upheld by all monotheistic religions, even after Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) made it clear that our planet was not at the center of the solar system. This revelation (long known by some) scuttled the idea of the universe and world soul as conceived up until then. As a truth claim, that former vision was proved to be false. Long before then the meme of a divine prime mover at the center of the cosmos had become a cultural fixture. And that fixture was deeply embedded in the foundation of the three major monotheistic religions. Not only that, but in the institution of religion itself. The tenacity of that meme in surviving against all odds hardened it from an ideal belief into a rigid universal constant unscathed by the mass of undeniable evidence that it was untrue. It was a truth of faith, not fact. That meme expanded from a regional Sumerian revelation in the Land between the Rivers, to a prescriptive belief that built monuments in other lands, to a global faith destined to fall from the weight of its inconsistencies. Yet one more chapter in the history of intelligent minds in black boxes attempting to solve the world puzzle.

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I take this chain of events as demonstrating the persistence of ideas that, once entertained in a given mind, become generally accepted by expanding numbers of people, to, like a ripple made by a stone thrown into the ocean, eventually engulf the Earth. Never underestimate the power of an idea in a single mind to which subsequent generations are born, and so adopt as the wisdom of the ancients. Spacetime as subject to gravitational influence. Toilet paper. Eating with chopsticks. The World Wide Web. Driverless cars. The birth of Venus. Pinocchio. The Tooth Fairy. The infallibility of the Pope. Justice. Truth. Peace. Eternal love. Cultures are built from two-way engagements with individual human minds. Individuals get what they want; groups of people get what they need to sustain their belief in the mystery and majesty of the impossible.

Consciousness extends far into the world—and back again. It is not imprisoned within a single brain. We are born to engage our mothers and fathers, and they to engage us, their infant children. Mother and child form a fundamental unit of consciousness, hinting at all that lies beyond and is yet to come. Each is an extension of the other. Each needs the other; each serves the other. Talk about being bound back, once conceived, we are members of such relationships forever. As members of families, communities, cultures, and nature, we are set for life to engage with them, and they with us. Our individual minds depend on ongoing activities far beyond the walls of our black boxes, far beyond our particular bodies and brains. We are kinetic beings that thrive by being perpetually active on all levels of engagement. When we can no longer sustain our engagements across our bodily envelopes, we die. No more exchange of air for carbon dioxide, food for waste, talking for listening, giving for receiving, acting for being acted upon. For our entire lives we are simultaneously subjects and objects. That duality is built into our bodily equipment. Even movers and shakers are themselves moved upon and shaken up. Even in the confines of our respective black boxes, we are informed by sunlight and starlight, rising moons and setting planets.

We are partnered in life by the times in which we live. Those times live in us with their full cast of characters. We live in those times with the full array of our actions and ideas. Neuroscientists have begun to observe the distribution of blood in our brains as altered by our mental activity. That’s a start at understanding our engagements, but it’s a hard way of going about it. I think my method is better because I have access to at least my side of an engagement, not a mere hint provided by a drop of blood in my brain. In truth, our experience is far larger and more influential than can be told by observing those drops of blood. Our history is told by our ideas, beliefs, thoughts, judgments, actions, engagements, and perceptions. Only our conscious minds have access to that history as it flows through our awareness. I have here been trying to offer a glimpse of that flow through countless human minds engaged in making meaning of the stars. I think it will take neuroscientists a long time to engage on that level of complexity and undeniable significance. Which is why I am writing this reflection, to encourage mindworkers to cooperate rather than waste time belittling one another’s efforts.

Before I introduce a document that I consider to be at the heart of this effort, Plato’s Timaeus, I will admit that it is somewhat abstruse, so will try to suggest where Plato was heading by quoting from his most famous pupil, Aristotle, whose writing in this case is far more accessible: The single harmony produced by all the heavenly bodies singing and dancing together springs from one source and ends by achieving one purpose, and has rightfully bestowed the name not of ‘disordered’ but of ‘ordered universe’ upon

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the whole. And just as in a chorus when the leader gives the signal to begin, the whole chorus of men, or it may be of women, joins in the song, mingling a single studied harmony among different voices, some high and some low; so too is it with the God that rules the whole world. For at the signal given from on high by him who may well be called their chorus-leader, the stars and the whole heaven always move, and the sun that illumines all things travels forth on its double course, whereby it both divides day and night by its rising and setting, and also brings the four seasons of the year, as it moves forwards towards the north and backwards towards the south. And in their own due season the rain, the winds, and the dews, and all the other phenomena which occur in the region which surrounds the Earth, are produced by the first, primaeval cause (On the Universe, translated by E. S. Forster, in Barnes, Jonathan, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation, Bollingen Series LXXI • 2. Copyright © 1984 by The Jowett Copyright Trustees. Princeton University Press, 1984, page 636f., italics added).

That knowledge, that wisdom, that truth had been duly passed down from one generation to the next for five thousand years, which is why I am willing to own up to beliefs, opinions, and ideas, but not knowledge. The whole scheme was as wrong in Aristotle’s day as it had been among the Sumerians. The passing down of this wisdom was no casual game of telephone; it was a systematic effort to pass the baton of orthodox belief forward, mind to mind, memory to memory. Which confirms much of what I have claimed for my own mind, that Pierandello’s phrase, “It is true if you think so,” is a more honest way of approaching what somebody tells you. That little word “if” is a good thing to remember, placing the burden of proof on the one who believes in a meme, not the lock-step memory of the hearer.

Plato’s Timaeus is named after the narrator who presents what he has learned about cosmology from his lifetime of study. In that capacity, he is Plato’s persona, serving to distance the author from his own ideas, giving him space to perfect his thinking on the matter of cosmology. I find reading The Timaeus hard work in forcing me to think in terms that made sense to Plato, but are foreign to my own way of making sense of the world. For Plato, ideas and ideals are even more concrete and palpable than their realization in sensible objects and events. I on the other hand think of ideas and concepts as abstractions derived from sensory impressions by simplification and elimination of unessential details. Plato thinks of sensory impressions as flawed realizations of rational ideas which are perfect in their own nature. I keep getting twisted around in my head, trying to live in two worlds at once, two minds at once, two streams of thought at once. Fortunately, the translator of The Timaeus from Plato’s language to mine, Francis M. Cornford, in his commentary, has provided a bridge that spans the abyss between Plato’s world of ancient Greek thought and my modern English version, making it possible for me sitting in my chair, pen in hand, to lurch back in time to underline words and phrases, draw arrows and boxes, and wrestle with the task of entering Plato’s world from afar while staying grounded in my own.

The Timaeus deals with the physical realization of the visible world of stars, planets, and the Earth from an intelligible model representing the essence of rational thought as entertained from Plato’s point of view. Bringing such a world into existence required a creator, which Cornford translates as the Demiurge, “a living creature with soul and reason” as a sort of mythical craftsman who fashions objects from raw materials (Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato, Translated, with a running commentary, by

Perrin, S., Situated Intelligence—125 Francis MacDonald Cornford. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., reprinted 1997, originally published © 1937 by Routledge, page 34, 30B.-C.). Plato goes to great lengths to describe the characteristics

of such materials, but the upshot is that if the stars and planets are to move in circular paths they must possess reason within souls within bodies, thereby distinguishing order from chaos (characterized by random motion). In his commentary on the text, Cornford writes: The world itself, like the heavenly gods and man, is divine because it contains the divine element, reason. Reason, moreover, as Plato says here and elsewhere, ‘cannot be present in anything apart from soul’: if it is ‘present’ in the body of the universe and in man’s body, that body must be alive, endowed with soul, which is defined in the Laws and the Phaedrus as the self-moving source of all motion. The statement is consistent with the belief that the reason, as divine and immortal, can nevertheless exist in separation from the body and divested of the mortal parts of soul. There is, then, in the soul and body of the universe a divine Reason analogous to man’s; and we shall find that the unchanging movement of its thought is symbolised, or even visibly embodied, in the circular revolutions of the heavenly gods and of the universe as a whole (Ibid, p. 39).

In Plato’s thought, then, the prime mover of the stars is the idea of divine reason as contained in soul as contained in the physical bodies that move with circular motion.

The kernel of Plato’s ethics is the doctrine that man’s reason is divine and that his business is to become like the divine by reproducing in his own nature the beauty and harmony revealed in the cosmos, which is itself a god, a living creature with soul in body and reason in soul, as here described (Ibid, p. 34).

Divinity is reserved to reason, not the creative Demiurge that fashions the stars, planets, and Earth as living gods. Plato, whom Cornford identifies as a pagan polytheist, is not suggesting that the creator should be worshipped. But being endowed with souls, people themselves partake in the divinity of rational creation, and so should strive to move with divine inspiration like the stars and planets overhead, which is similar to the Sumerian view of world order embracing both heaven and Earth. For Plato, these are objects of rational thought, and our destiny is to imitate their motions as closely as we can come to them. By his view, our proper realm is reason, not sensation per se, because reason is superior to sensation, as ideas in the mind are superior to the body, which merely houses the mind. In this sense, the stars moving in their rational orbits overhead serve as paragons for people to live up to in their worldly striving. The more like the stars we become in our orderly habits, the closer we approach the ideal of the rational and good. And when we die, “he who should live well for his due span of time should journey back to the habitation of his consort star and there live a happy and congenial life.” And, after a brief pause at a semicolon to heighten the effect, the great philosopher lets the other boot fall: “But failing of this, he should shift at his second birth into a woman” to see if “in this condition he did not cease from wickedness”. . . (Ibid. page 144, 42B-C.).

The circular motion of the stars, for Plato, is the rational motion of intelligence; “if you abstract Reason and its works from the universe what is left will be irrational Soul, a cause of wandering motions, and an ordered element of the bodily, itself moving

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without plan or measure” (Ibid., page 203.). The alternatives to circular motion are the six irrational motions (forward, backward, left, right, up, down), which compared to circular motion are random, rectilinear, and disorderly. Our choice, then, is between leading an orderly or chaotic life, a rational or random life, a meaningful or meaningless life, a good or bad life. We can follow the stars, or be deviant and suffer the consequences—the choice is up to us.

What intrigues me about the Timaeus is how difficult it is to reconcile the observable order of the cosmos with human understanding of that same order. The problem is much like our modern struggle to reconcile our experience of mind with our understanding of the brain that is thought to be largely responsible for that same mind.

First there is Plato who authored the dialogue to explain his understanding of the cosmos. Then there is the narrator, Timaeus, in whose words the cosmos is presented.

Then there is the Demiurge, Timaeus’ agent for creating the stars, planets, and Earth as one coherent system. Then there is the mechanical (and problematic) model of the system as a kind of armillary sphere by means of which the Demiurge mythically creates the cosmos. And, too, Francis M. Cornford, one of several translators of the Timaeus.

Together with the other Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, cited by Cornford as having their own views on the cosmos. All leading to the confusion in my mind resulting from an effort to fit Plato into my discussion of what the stars reveal about the human impulse to find meaning in the natural world. And the effect on any of my readers who might try to make sense of the relationship between stars and human minds.

The essential problem comes down to an inconsistency in Timaeus’ presentation of the relationship between stars, planets, Earth, and human observers viewing the stars overhead. The thrust of Timaeus’s argument is that the Greek gods and the material components of the cosmos they comprise all share in the same harmonious system as demonstrated by their respective motions—except that if that system includes Earth rotating on its axis west-to-east (as it does), then that motion would cancel out any need to explain the apparent motion of the stars and planets moving east-to-west, while exactly that explanation is the essential point of the whole cosmic structure Timaeus presents on Plato’s behalf.

Timaeus’ Demiurge takes great pains to create a system in which stars-planetsEarth all move in rational order in conformity with the idea of circular motion in the same direction being the only acceptable, rational motion. Which is problematic in that that idea links Earth, planets, and stars along an axis that is something of a driveshaft in order to have them all share in the same divine rotation about a common center driven by a single prime mover. But if the shaft turns with divine motion, observers on Earth would not see the stars as moving through the sky because Earth’s motion would cancel that apparent motion, leaving the stars fixed in place for all time. What kind of coupling to the stars would allow Earth to be stationary relative to the stars, or even turn in an opposite direction (the actual case), thereby destroying the idea of a prime mover? The existence of a prime mover depended on the model the Demiurge used in building the universe in the first place to bind the stars to Earth along an axis shared by both. Was it a rigid driveshaft, passing through Earth on some kind of bearings so the stars would seem to turn around an Earth that remained stationary? But no, Earth had to share in the idea of a divine motion common to the larger cosmos. The universe as Timaeus presents it simply does not bear close scrutiny. Cornford takes pains to understand how Timaeus’ views would not be inconsistent with Plato’s philosophy. But in the end, by

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means of a fanciful dialogue between Plato and Aristotle, concludes that Plato’s ideas on, and explanation of, the workings of the cosmos at that stage in his life were inherently irreconcilable, and so “wrong.” Plato’s ideals did not jibe with the observable facts, a situation not uncommon to human minds (Ibid, page 134).

The moral of this tale being that the more elaborate philosophical systems become, the more likely they are to be inconsistent within themselves, the more prone to error, the more apt to be wrong. Even the greatest philosophers are fallible human beings.

Particularly when trying to support the underpinnings of false beliefs. It is far easier to believe that the apparent motion of the stars along circular routes through the heavens is due to observers on Earth moving counter to those routes, making the harmonious motion of the stars an illusion projected by human minds onto the heavens. It was an illusion for the Sumerians, an illusion for the Greeks, and is today an illusion for us. But it was not an illusion for the priests and philosophers whose livelihood depended on a cosmological system maintained by adherence to that mistaken belief. To an idea in their minds being projected onto the stars because it suited the stories they told about a monotheistic God driving the stars through the heavens, about stars forming the retinue of such a God, about planets being angelic messengers bearing commands and prophesies straight from the prime moving God to his faithful flock below, and about members of that flock having an obligation to find spiritual meaning in precisely the appearances of those relative motions as seen from below. Whoee, what a ride it is to go to such lengths to devote your one and only life to such wrong beliefs. And to defend such beliefs against all who doubt them. Would those who so earnestly taught us believe in an untruth, in a lie? Unthinkable. Heretical. Grounds for doing battle to stamp out all such contrary beliefs. The rest is the history of the world as told by and to human minds.

Cornford convinces me that Plato did everything he could to avoid abandoning his beautiful idea of the unseen motive force driving the stars into perfectly rational, circular orbits through the material heavens. Plato, that is, wanted it both ways. What he offered the world was belief in a beautiful theory and a lifetime of rationalizing that theory in conformity with his aesthetic ideals. What Plato gave us was faith in the nature of ultimate—inner—reality. Inner belief in an idea that almost fits with the facts, but not quite, so you believe in that pristine idea in spite of yourself. Cornford worries about the discrepancy in Plato’s mapping of his ideas onto the one-turning universe, but convinces himself that Plato did his best to reconcile Earth’s turning on its axis with the apparently self-driven stars moving in their circles in perfect harmony with one another. So Plato settled for having his cake and eating it, too. As he believed in men and women forming two mutually exclusive orders of society despite all evidence to the contrary. He believed in the armillary sphere (mechanical model of celestial motions) that the mythical Demiurge used as a pattern for constructing the heavens, even though that model was a complete fiction as an after-the-fact idea used to explain how the stars came to be. The armillary sphere was patterned on the motions of the heavens, not vice versa. Running through Plato’s works is the primacy of ideas over material objects, and that primacy is apparent in the Timaeus as an article of faith, not reason. Causing the great philosopher to hedge when it comes to explaining Earth’s rotation on its axis relative to the motion of the stars.

Strive to learn from or imitate the stars, that is the message passed down by the Sumerians, and much later, by Plato. One a religious teaching, the other a secular philosophy. Part of the message being supported by the correlation of zodiacal

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constellations with the succession of seasons on Earth, part by ideas in the human mind projected onto the stars as prime movers and supreme beings, or as exemplars of reason and the good toward which Earthlings should dedicate their lives. What we make of the unknowable stars tells us much about what our minds need them to be in order to fit in harmoniously with our preconceived notions. It is easy for people to believe that the stars exist for our benefit, that there’s a reason they are such conspicuous features in the night sky, and it is our job to figure out what that reason might be. Then easy to followthrough as if we had an obligation to live in harmony with the stars’ purpose for being.

That may sound outlandish—that the stars exist for our benefit—but that is the upshot of these lines of thought. Anthropocentrism is the name of that game. Our job, should we agree to take the assignment, is to live up to the idea of what the stars mean to us, turned around to what we mean to the stars. Projection, pure projection. The stars are a gleaming mirror in the sky giving us back a reflection of our own enticing thoughts and ideas.

Those ideas were developed and cemented in cultural practice by Neoplatonists in the third century of our era, philosophers who combined Plato’s idealism with remnants left over from the Roman Empire, producing a grand image of the heavenly host spread before the mind’s eye for human guidance and edification. Dionysius the Areopagite (Pseudo-Dionysius, second century of our era, six centuries after Plato), a Neoplatonist with a theological bent, has left us a compelling depiction of the cosmos combined with a religious structure mirroring the heavens in the hierarchy of the Christian church here on Earth that is devoted to spreading the message spelled out by the heavenly host to make sure humanity understands the meaning intended by God for its eyes and ears (when harmoniously sung).

In brief summary of Dionysius the Areopagite’s teachings: God’s retinue in heaven is divided into a celestial hierarchy of three tiers of heavenly minds placed there for our instruction and imitation here below. From The Celestial Hierarchy (1899) (www.tertullian.org/fathers/areopagite_13_heavenly_hierarchy.htm) (Accessed Nov. 2, 2013): The purpose, then, of Hierarchy is the assimilation and union, as far as attainable, with God having Him Leader of all religious science and operations, by looking unflinchingly to His most Divine comeliness, and copying, as far as possible, and by perfecting its own followers as Divine images, mirrors most luminous and without flaw, receptive of the primal light and the supremely Divine ray, and devoutly filled with the entrusted radiance, and again, spreading this radiance ungrudgingly to those after it, in accordance with the supremely Divine regulations. . . . He, then, who mentions Hierarchy, denotes a certain altogether Holy Order, an image of the supremely Divine freshness, ministering the mysteries of its own illumination in hierarchical ranks, and sciences, and assimilated to its own proper Head as far as lawful (Caput III, Section II).

For Dionysius, the cosmos has become a divine holy order immediately accessible to those who will contemplate, and obey, the directives of its radiance. This is mystical advice, comprehensible only to those instructed in interpreting such language. But behind that language the stars can still be seen to shine as clearly and brilliantly as they do overhead on a moonless night through dry air. The Neoplatonists give stellar radiance a finely divided and philosophical series of orderly distinctions which they bind into a philosophy centered on a single, luminous, but hidden central God surrounded by

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ever-larger circles of heavenly powers, commonly regarded as angels or angelic messengers (Greek angelos means messenger), the whole troupe of heavenly luminaries being divided into a concentric hierarchy of ever-finer gradations of meaning to the informed (indoctrinated) mind. To be philosophical about things is to make fine but meaningful distinctions between subtle differences and variations. This is precisely what our minds are good at, creating pathways in our brains that lead on to finer pathways unto ever-finer pathways, which then become almost indistinguishable, allowing us to make much ado about nearly nothing. This is the allure—and also the trap—of thinking in terms of taxonomies. Of valuing distinctions more highly than similarities. Indeed, there is no end to such thinking, for every point can be endlessly subdivided into two finer points, ad infinitum. There is no way we can view each of the over-seven billion people on earth as a unique individual; the mind boggles at the thought of trying to be fair and evenhanded with everyone. Carried to an extreme degree, the notion of equality leads to rice pudding in which one grain is so equal that it is wholly indistinguishable from its neighboring grains. It is strictly for practical reasons that it is better to think in twos, threes, and fours, than seven-millions. Dionysius carries his argument to finer levels than most of us care to consider, as if he got points for the number of distinctions he was able to make, creating a lot of confusion and overlap in the process.

His overall scheme is that the celestial hierarchy is divided into three levels, each composed of three further sub-levels. Beginning tightly around the “Divine Hiddenness”(or prime mover, the original holy ghost) at the center, the celestial powers or angels are divided into, 1) a highest, brightest, and hottest circle of Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. 2) A second circle farther out from the center is divided into somewhat lower, dimmer, cooler groupings of “Heavenly Minds,” Lordships, Powers, and Authorities, or alternatively, Dominations, Virtues, and Powers. 3) In the outer reaches of heaven, the group of angles most concerned with human welfare and obedience encompasses Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.

On Earth, in a more accessible ecclesiastical hierarchy, Pseudo-Dionysius depicts three Earthly triads of 1) symbolic sacraments—Baptism, Communion, and Consecration of the Holy Chrism; 2) holy orders—Bishops, Presbyters, and Deacons; together with 3) Monks in a state of perfection, Initiated Laity in a state of illumination, and Catechumens in a state of purification. In the background are the higher church offices of Bishops, Cardinals, and the infallible Pope at the center of his theological domain. These Dionysian hierarchies are a late melding of pagan Neoplatonic ideas with orthodox Christian theology to produce a mystical union of ideas and ritual acts as a blend of philosophical and theological strands to produce a wholly spiritual system of human belief rooted firmly in a personal faith often embracing incompatible aspects, very much like the state Plato found himself in while penning the Timaeus as his last word on the relationship between humankind and its cosmos.

Each of the separate levels of the celestial hierarchy can be told from all the others by its specific qualities and range of concerns. Here is a complete union of theology and philosophy, modeled on distinctions made by Plato, but reinforced with ringing overtones of righteousness based on the celestial likeness of the gods to the mental ideal of the good. Given mind enough and time, which the priesthood has gathered to itself in churches and monasteries through the ages, theological philosophies have thrived in isolation, unsullied by contact with the realities of everyday life because so focused on

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perfecting the idea of the connection between the stars in their heaven and the various orders of monks in their remote cells far below.

My point here is that the stars we are born to are not that different from the stars our ancestors were born to for many hundreds of generations. But the cultural stars we are born to—the stars and the memes they engender as we gaze upon them—are vastly different because they have evolved with each passing generation of those intent on discovering the meanings the stars hold for them. Both our perception of the stars and the ways in which we conceive of them within our various fields of understanding— astrology, astronomy, astrophysics, theology, mysticism, art, and so on—vary from place to place, time to time, so that stars have a very human history culminating in the particular mind of each person, as I have tried to suggest in this section. Consciousness is as much a matter of cumulative life experience as it is of perception and memory. And our personal experience is influenced by our natural experience, as well as our cultural, communal, and familial experience. Van Gogh’s Starry Night conveys some small part of his personal experience of the stars. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope details other aspects of the stars that most of us have never personally experienced or imagined.

Yet we are the progeny of stars themselves, and cannot be anatomically, physiologically, or psychologically separated from their influence on our innermost mental and physical being. We are taken, awed, gripped, fascinated by stars. Perhaps ancient civilizations such as that of the Sumerians represent an intuitive grappling with that fact. We are born of the stars as well as to them. Without them in our lineage, we wouldn’t even be here today to gaze upon them. It is fitting that Dionysius, Aristotle, Plato, the Sumerians, NASA, and everyone else pays homage to the glory of the stars.

So do religions, but in doing so they reframe the stars as spiritual beings and deliberately use them as vehicles for gods of their own devising that distract us from the immediate radiance of the stars themselves. We put halos around the heads of our saints to signify their appointed divinity. Even Gothic cathedrals resonate with the teachings of Dionysius the Areopagite, serving as models of the supposed celestial hierarchy worked in stone, with their vaults of divinities and stained-glass windows shining down on the seat of the bishop below, and those assembled around him, as if that seat were the throne of reason, order, harmony, truth, and beauty on Earth. That is—as seen from inside our black boxes—of human intelligence situated for all time. Those imposing seats of power stand today as monuments to our medieval understanding of our own minds, our then psyches wrought for the ages to admire with eternal awe.

What Plato achieved, rather than discover a place for humanity in the stars’ cosmic scheme, was assign them their place in our psychic scheme, so having us ride our own coattails round and round, setting us back a thousand years in solving the world puzzle.

We could easily dispense with religious belief altogether—but the idea of binding our lives back to the orderly motion of the stars is the most profound realization that the human mind has ever entertained. If we truly honored the stars, we would celebrate their gift of light and receive them as they give themselves to us without overlaying our psychic needs on their radiance. We have evolved to appreciate the patterns, brightness, and motions of the stars at night; that should suffice. We need not look for a message coming from them any more than we look to a mockingbird or a giraffe for truth. We don’t look for messages from baseball or Roget’s Thesaurus, yet we freely engage with them as valuable aspects of our experience. Why impose such a burden on the stars in order to fit them into our scheme of things? Instead, we should do everything we can to

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live in harmony with the natural world, of which stars are one of the highest and most eminent expressions.

At this point I can hear my Quaker friend Ken Doyle stepping in to tell his joke about the three baseball umpires being interviewed by a reporter after the big game.

How do they go about making such difficult and often controversial calls as their duties require them to? The first umpire says, “I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em.” The second says, “I calls ‘em as they are.” The third umpire says, “They ain’t nothin’ till I calls ‘em.”

You get the point. All three umpires are there doing their jobs for the benefit of both teams and their fans. It’s just that each does the job his own way in the light of his personal belief, as each player plays, and each fan roots, everyone in the stadium giving as he or she is able to give, and receiving a like gift from everyone else. Like the three umpires: artists, scientists, and theologians see with different eyes. As do the young, the mature, and the elderly. The Sumerians saw the stars their way, Plato saw them his way, Pseudo Dionysius his way. It is unrealistic to sort through them trying to decide which is right. They are all right and all wrong in some ways. But under the circumstances, they each were true to their perceptions, judgments, actions, and life engagements—to their minds and personal experience. They saw the stars as only they could at that time in that place. What more could we ask? It is now our turn to see them through our own eyes.

That, now, is something to celebrate. As well as an obligation to right the wrongs of the past. 

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5. DISCUSSION. This reflection has covered considerable ground in attaining an opportunity for taking it not as a series of separate steps but as a journey entire in itself. Here are a few bulleted reminders of where we have been together:                  

Solving the world puzzle from the perspective provided by our minds is a matter of conjecture based on personal experience, not knowledge, not truth.

Perception provides not a glimpse of the world so much as a sharpened impression of the world from a particular wayfarer’s point of view.

The more ardently we hold our beliefs, the more likely we are to be wrong.

All life engages its surroundings in an ongoing exchange of matter and energy.

Expectancy and recognition reveal the participation of memory in perception.

Attention is the gateway to consciousness. It is aroused by a delta signal stemming from a sense of discrepancy between two parts of mind.

From the outset, all awareness is polarized as either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, satisfying or dissatisfying, right or wrong, true or untrue.

It takes persistence to explore the middle ground between two extremes.

Consciousness is a collaborative effort between mind, body, and world. It intercedes between perception and action, and can be bypassed by rote learning, mimicry, habits, routines, prejudice, and ideology.

Our engagements couple perception to meaningful judgment to fitting action in one or more realms of nature, culture, community, and family, which in turn affect our attention and stimulate sensory perception.

Our engagements are told by the situations they create in our awareness.

The dimensions of those situations include feelings, emotions, values, understandings, imaginings, dreams, thoughts, ideas, and judgments.

We are linked and anchored to our worlds by a host of simultaneous engagements with nature, culture, community, and family.

Time is a calibrated sense of change that is not of our doing; space is a calibrated sense of change resulting from what we actually do. Spacetime is a calibrated sense of change resulting from our simultaneously doing and perceiving at once.

Ownership and possessiveness are attitudes toward persons and objects with which we meaningfully engage in being wholly ourselves. Money is a tool we use to engage on cultural terms.

Freedom is an opportunity to engage the world with full respect for the integrity of each of its inhabitants.

Baseball, Roget’s Thesaurus, and the stars provide examples of situations we are apt to engage with through time and across space.

Like Plato, we all share in the common failing of mistaking our personal solution to the world puzzle for the way the world really is.

I view my personal reflections as culminating in the image of a wayfarer finding his way among others who are making their own ways for themselves. Our respective journeys are so varied and personal, I identify with each wayfarer in taking on the challenge of finding a way forward from wherever she or he is at any given stage of life.

The task each one faces is solving the world puzzle in a meaningful way, while respecting other solutions for other wayfarers on their own journeys.

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In June, 2006, I took part in a month-long seminar at the Quaker Institute for the Future at which “the Quaker way of knowing” was briefly discussed. For me, an atheist Quaker, if there is any such thing as the Quaker way of knowing, it would be a method that applies the mind to the mind as the source of all inquiry and all knowing. Knowing results from discussion of self-with-self as both subject and object, seeker and finder. At the core of each mind (soul, spirit, prophet) is the situated self, the one who seeks understanding as a state of mind under particular conditions. The answer sought is to be found by examining the conditions bearing on the situation in which the question is asked. Those conditions themselves are qualities of mind produced by dimensions of mind, which in themselves have been the subject of this reflection. The situated self is our agent for knowing the world by reviewing the conditions constituting the situation that arouses it and brings those conditions to mind. What a marvelous system it is that we are given at birth and learn to use by living the life that we do. If we but ask the question, What is divinity?, What is mind?, What is self?, we can trace an answer to how we ourselves frame the question under the influence of the conditions bearing upon us at the time. Others at our sides will do the same task their own way. Since questions do not ask themselves, the source of that “how” is always the situated intelligence of the self. The essence of knowing can be found by appealing to the interest and curiosity of the self who wants to know. Where else can we look?

This piece is probably as close as I will ever come to solving the mystery posed by my own mind as viewed by myself. One of my chief learnings is just how few people are concerned with the issues I raise here, most, apparently believing to the contrary that answers lie in the material world, not their own minds. I find that the dictum “Know thyself” is dead to the world in which I find myself alive. As a culture, we are fixated on the brain as the source of all answers, not the mind that works in conjunction with engagements with nature, culture, community, family, and its own brain to produce the miracle of consciousness. Which is in fact no miracle but humanity’s cumulative response to the myriad challenges we are born to. The many facets of mind are the answer to the questions that Earth poses, not the material answer, brain.

My chief discovery in writing this reflection is a growing awareness of the quality of mind that makes my engagements possible with others and the world that we share together, a quality I don’t have a name for. It takes the form of a word cluster without a heading. The cluster includes striving, hope, intelligence, confidence, durability, fragility, respect, responsibility, worthiness, reaching, and trust. These words refer to the mental tools I sense in myself every day. Put them all together and they spell . . . what? Double them by applying them to my environment as well as to myself . . . what, again?

Whatever it turns out to be, that missing word captures the set of conditions that collectively enables engagement by self with non-self. It is precisely what suicide bombers and terrorists lack. What oligarchs and plutocrats lack. It is a kind of love that embraces self and others as being equally worthy and responsible at the same time. It balances durability with fragility, hope with despair, planning with spontaneity. It is within the aura of that cluster of words that productive engagements can take place, that perception can spur meaning and judgment, culminating in action and, through engagement, a subsequent response. Does any such word exist? If not, I will have to invent one that fits the need I am alluding to. A word that defines the social contract by which it is safe and exciting for me to engage you—and you to engage me—in such a way

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that we will both be changed for the better. As Venus and Serena Williams engage their tennis opponents and take the game itself to a higher level for the benefit of all concerned. As life-long learners turn all experience into a positive good. As contests and rivalries blossom into win-win situations.

The essence of that word, whatever it turns out to be, is that it refers to a process initiated by one person who engages another—either person, place, or thing. It both invites and enables mutual engagement. Within a definite context that applies equally to both. It balances a lone self with a we. As love is a gift to all, and does not impose a claim, a demand, or a duty. But love smacks of romance, and I am not being romantic in wishing for that kind of relationship. How do I combine a sense of respect for another with a sense of responsibility to something beyond myself? How do I respect their/its and my durability, along with our respective fragilities? How do I make plans and at the same time allow for spontaneous innovations? How do I open myself to another and welcome that other into myself in such a way that together we expand both ourselves?

Questions, nothing but questions.

Clearly, I am not talking about using others for my personal advancement. Or about imposing myself on others. Or making myself dependent on others. I am looking more for a sense of balance between respective durabilities and fragilities, hopes and fears, worthiness and failings. I think trust and intelligence come pretty close, as long as they are mutual, and are joined in an ongoing process that evolves, not a gift that is given once and for all, not something either foolishly ventured or demanded.

What do we call the process of trusting another and committing ourselves to a mutual engagement at the same time? Equality is of the essence here, between subject and object, so that both are not only taken into account, but can change places at any time. Not foolishly in tit-for-tat but realistically sharing to equal degree. Taking turns.

Keeping the balanced relationship going, giving it time to develop into what it will become. Not living in the now but in the All Time that allows both for change and for growth. For living in hope, not fear; in striving, not merely waiting. It’s the doing that counts, not the expecting; the surprising, not the disappointing. The growing, not the sameness or retreat.

Perhaps you know what I mean as well as I do. What do you call this all-embracing process by which we grow into the selves we will become by means of our daily engagements? Life, that’s what we call it. Or, rather, living life at our best, or at least doing the best we can by ourselves and by others at the same time. But life is too big a word. I am talking about intentional life, life as we make it happen, caringly, deliberately, with the fullness of hope and not dread because we are building on what we’ve already established, not on what we wish for in the future. Yes, that sounds right.

Living on purpose, deliberately, respectfully, caring for those who go with us on their own journeys, wayfarers at our sides.

Mindfaring! Not Wayfaring; inside, not outside. That’s what I’ll call it. Being responsible for making our own way, while helping others find their ways at the same time. Not by contract, but as a joint venture and adventure. We are in this life together.

What can we do but guide our steps by selecting a course as called for by the inner terrain we respectively pass through, some bearing heavier burdens than others, but all moving forward from here to there, from today into tomorrow.

Life is not a given or a right; it is a process of building ourselves to our own specifications. And supporting others in building themselves to their specifications, not

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ours. I am thinking of the life process as an opportunity for engaging the world around us, and inviting that world to engage us as we go. That way, both self and its world meet their respective requirements by making adjustments for the situations that come up along the way. We grow into ourselves by adjusting our steps to current conditions, here leaping hummock-to-hummock, there stepping carefully stone-to-stone, crossing rivers when we come to them by whatever means we can devise, staying in touch with our minds and surroundings at all times, engaging them, inviting them to engage us.

All that wrapped up in one mental process that guides us on our way. That’s what I mean by mindfaring. Each finding and going her own way, as driven by a life force as a personal prime mover. A sort of engagement with an attitude of fairness for all who go with us in our time and place. An attitude that promotes sharing, taking turns, equality, and striving out of respect, with a sense of personal responsibility for everything we contribute to a particular engagement.

That’s what I’ve come to by writing this reflection to this point. I did not have plans to say what I’ve just written. The words have flowed from the situations I’ve worked my way into day-after-day, from the day I started out until this minute, today, July 29, 2014. I am a creature of this very moment. A creature with a past, yes, but building toward a future that will be an extension of the journey I’ve made so far. That is the upshot of what I now call mindfaring, the process of living life with an attitude of trust, intelligence, interest, curiosity, adventure, openness to what happens, and striving to go beyond that.

All learning being essentially self-learning, mindfaring comes down to learning about self while being mindful of others. Other people, other creatures, other ways, other objects, other ideas, other universes (one-turnings) unto themselves. What I’ve just put before your eyes is an example of the thought process I’ve been going through in real time in synchrony with my fingers typing on the keyboard of my computer. It may seem hokey that the word I was searching for was based on a word I’ve been using all along, but the point is that my usage was based on a nonverbal kernel of thought, not the actual word, which I was using intuitively without a definition in mind beyond that cluster of felt meanings. What I did was put the legs under that kernel to give it a particular kind of flexibility and mobility in the situation I found myself in in trying to depict the state of mind that has been driving this reflection all along. The process of discovery I’ve laid before you is what I’ve been getting at in trying to describe the workings of my mind. So there you have it, Exhibit A of my mind working on itself in as concise a summary of self-reflection as I can put into words.

Mindfaring, I discover, means engaging both your companions and surroundings. It is an opening to and a taking in at the same time. The distinguishing characteristic of engagement is simultaneously acting and perceiving while staying focused on the same issue. In that sense, it means truly connecting with the world beyond your bodily perimeter while also connecting with your inner self. The trick to engaging is being both attentive and purposeful at the same time. Attentive to what you are perceiving and purposeful in what you are doing. That way you set up a continuous loop of engagement so that input affects output, and output affects input, your situated judgment in the middle position maintaining an intelligent and effective relationship between the incoming and outgoing parts of your mind.

By my black box metaphor, engagement is told by both input and output terminals being active together in real time, not by matching set responses to signals coming in.

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Engagement is not a trade-off, an alternation of give and take. It is founded on paying attention to input and output at the same time, all the time, so there is no gap between them, no lull in attention to both self and other. When we get on a roll, that’s what happens. We are in the moment totally, not separating input from output but seeing both as integral parts of the same state of mind. We are with it, whatever it is. We are mindfarers so fully engaged with our surroundings that we become an integral part of the scene wherever we are. As mindfarers, we want our companions to win along with us, not go down in defeat. If Israelis and Palestinians fight until only one is left standing, they both lose. Each side has to win in its own way.

Mindfaring (engaging) is a matter of coordinating with our surroundings, as in dancing, as in music, as in a good marriage. It is being with ourselves and with the other, not against or in spite of. Mindfaring is being together. Existing in a state of mutual exchange as equals, each playing her part, not going off on his own. It is an extension of a state of mind that embraces our engagee, whether person, place, or thing.

It is a fundamentally different state of mind than opposing, conflicting, fighting, defeating. There are times when you must run for your life, and times you must run toward your life. Mindfaring is running toward, not away from. It is seeking, not avoiding. Moving ahead, always ahead. In company with respected companions. Along a path that leads to a natural culmination of the going itself.

I will end this discussion by reminding you of the dimensions of consciousness I have discussed so far as giving structure and color to the situations we find ourselves in, and govern our judgments, subsequent actions, and engagements. These are some of the dimensions of intelligence we claim as our own when we remember to think for ourselves and structure our own experience. To wit: arousal, memory, expectancy, attention, sensory impressions, recognition, understanding, imagination, meaning, thought, feeling, emotion, value, humor, comparison, polarity, attitude, judgment, dreams, goals, projects, relationships, tools, skills, speech, gesture, and overt action, among other dimensions that come to the fore in specific situations.

How does this bear on the relationship between mind and brain? We are each born to nature, culture, community, and family, all of which challenge and feed our minds on a daily basis, so we become part of them, and they become part of us as a kind of reference system that, as we engage with it, defines our uniqueness in our particular place and time on Earth. Our brains process the endless stream of our engagements, but leave nature, culture, community, and family outside of ourselves where we can draw upon them as needed in particular situations. Our situations are temporary configurations of the dimensions of personal consciousness, which flow into other situations as the result of our mindfaring engagements. We don’t lug all our memories around with us as an accumulating store of baggage, but develop neural networks capable of recognizing familiar patterns of traffic flowing through them. Our brains excel at pattern recognition, but not at storing dead data for future use. It is the ability to recognize patterns we were once familiar with that we lose as we grow older, not the patterns themselves because we retain only a potential pathway, not the full-blown configuration itself. Our brains give us a capacity to recognize patterns as having been met before, not to store them in every detail.

That is, our brains are no bigger than they need to be to process the engagements we set up between our insides and outsides. What is outside stays outside as a facet of nature, culture, community, and family. When we die, we die to them. They stay behind;

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we don’t take them with us. The brain is not a filing cabinet or a closet full of old clothes.

It is a director of traffic from perception to action via an experienced and intelligent self that serves as a situation evaluator in matching incoming impressions to outgoing gestures, speech, and action. Speech itself is a tremendous saver of brain space, whenever possible substituting fine muscle movements of jaw, tongue, and lips in place of movements of trunk and limbs. The brain is a facilitator. It enables perception, decision making, and action as an ongoing flow of engagement. Its genius is in guiding selection of what we pay attention to, evaluate in comparison to other options (that is, judge), and subsequently act upon. When a routine is effective, the brain makes it easy for us to do more of the same. We come to think in terms of routines in our repertory so we don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. The essence of consciousness is in turning new problems into effective routines we can count on when one such problem comes up again. Language is a code for reducing the brainspace we need to get by with. Which is what Peter Mark Roget did in producing his Thesaurus. And Plato did in pondering the connection between stars in their heaven and the activities of people on Earth. He was working on that question for the rest of us, and did his best to come up with a workable solution. The Timaeus is a record of the trouble he went to on our behalf. As every World Series game is a record of the skill and effort players on each team expend on behalf of their fans in particular, and all fans of stellar performances beyond them. The same is true for Olympic athletes. And outstanding thinkers and doers of all kinds.

Individual minds matter. Brains matter. Engagements matter. Families matter.

Communities matter. Cultures matter. Nature matters. All as aspects of a planet that matters in a solar system that matters in a galaxy that matters in a cosmos that matters.

Not to fulfill a set of universal laws, but to make an effective response to conditions and situations that come up and need to be dealt with. None of these levels are governed by rules or laws. Each is determined by the energy available and forces bearing on fraught situations of every size and nature throughout the whole system. For we all are parts of that system: particles, atoms, ants, anteaters, eaters of anteaters, to habitats that nurture eaters of anteaters, and so on. We can do nothing but respond to the conditions and situations that put pressure upon us in every way from every direction with whatever energy is available. We strive to do the best we can under those conditions in those situations. And what we do best is engage the world around us for that is what we are designed by circumstances to do because we don’t have a choice. We are the leading edge of a spreading and evolving wave of energy that spurs us to be who we are in our own time and do what we find it best to do. That is our job, our only job. To be good citizens of the precinct of the universe we find ourselves in at the time—on the playing field, in the library, out at night ogling the stars in their sky.

So, yes, minds, brains, engagements—all matter, whether we understand them or not. The particular piece of the puzzle I have claimed for myself is nothing less than the challenge of understanding my own mind. This reflection is the best I can do. It is my performance in the last play of the last game of the World Series for mind gazers. There will be Series after this one, with other teams and different players.

I can’t add anything to this discussion with myself that I haven’t said several times over. I will move on to whatever conclusions I can sum up from my journey so far. 

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6. CONCLUSION. Nothing matters. Everything matters. Both statements are true to equal degree.

Clearly, our job as individuals is to pick and choose the engagements that are most meaningful to us. Which puts us in an awkward position because those around us want us to engage in ways that are most meaningful to themselves. It is the nature of mindfarers to occupy public spaces where such conflicts are out in the open. The only thing we can do is pay attention to the forces acting on all of us and select the issues we as individuals find most personally meaningful, letting go of the others to be dealt with by those who choose to do so. We each serve as helmsman of our own ship, correcting our course as we go. The choosing of a course is why we are here, how our ancestors got us to this point by navigating under their own stars. We owe it to them to do the same under the stars that shine most clearly for us.

As to the relation between mind and brain, I’ll say this: Consciousness is not contained in either our brains or minds but in our engagements as they couple perception to meaningful judgment and on to purposeful action in nature, culture, community, and family. Our minds do not fit neatly into our brains but extend to include our sensory and behavioral engagements as well.

You’d expect an octogenarian to issue generalities of that magnitude. But as a unique individual, I am at the core of my own generalities. I am speaking for myself, trying to use fitting, encompassing words to do so. However you take them, your unique person is at the core of those same words as they speak to you as you know yourself. I read them my way; you read them your way. The main thing is to maintain our intelligent judgment as we consider our own minds. To simply act on our beliefs is not good enough. We must catch ourselves sharpening, emphasizing, distorting those beliefs for personal advantage. Throughout this reflection I have drawn attention to the selfserving nature of our mental processes. In rounds of self-reflection, it is essential to keep a neutral perspective. Robert Bly advises us to follow our bliss. Thoreau says to follow our dreams and imagination. I say we should engage as we must the situations we get into as the ones having most to teach us, while remaining somewhat remote as if we were truly impartial, not agents of our own beliefs and opinions. It is that critical faculty that is essential to self-reflection. Without it, we become little more than lobbyists or apologists for our inner beliefs.

As children we do as we are told because our parents are likely to be wiser than we are, and we have neither the strength nor the wit to resist. But as adults, to do as we are told binds us to the will of others who have not lived our lives or thought our thoughts, so are addressing their own motives from their own perspectives, not ours. Too, those others are likely to be dealing with situations different from those we face at the time.

The problems we work on are best answered in the context of our unique repertory of personal options. To ask what Jesus (Gandhi, Nelson Mandella, Mohammad, et al.) would do assumes that we understand the situation he was in when he did what he did, and that that situation is the same as the one we are facing today. Which, given the vagaries of time and place is a highly questionable assumption. We learn most from situations we analyze and address as our own. When we make mistakes, as we surely will, they are our personal mistakes, leading to our personal learning. The essential thing is to see our inner selves without subterfuge.

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How do we do that—see our inner selves without subterfuge? After thirty years of wayfaring as directed by my own mind, I have come to realize that I can turn my attention from my footsteps to the mind that is plotting them in advance to suit itself.

Mindfaring, that is, reveals the same journey from inside the black box that shelters its workings from view, workings that become evident by turning my attention back on itself. What that takes is a mindset of self-reflection that makes such a turn not only possible or desirable, but essential in opening onto the next stage of my journey. The true adventure is not in the world; it is in my own head. As I now see it, my mind is an awareness hosting a situated intelligence in engagement with its world. It is the navigator essential to the art of wayfaring itself. Minds are evolution’s gift to those who remember the experiential impact of patterns of energy from before, then act appropriately. We all build our minds by noticing, judging, and acting as we make our way day by day, dreaming our way night after night.

My suggestion is that you develop your mindfaring skills by noticing what you pay attention to, and how, and why. That is, by making yourself-as-subject the object of study. Also, by tracking what you remember, and what brings that to mind. And by appreciating the respective dimensions of each experience, and how they frame the flowing situations that shape your inner life and outer actions. Too, when you act, I suggest that you notice the depth of your concentration at the time so that you realize the true focus of your awareness. And as you engage the worlds of nature, culture, community, or family, that you track the situations developing in the core of yourself as you do so. Particularly, be aware of your successes and setbacks, and how they feel from the inside. I predict that in short order you will be reaching toward the world with greater confidence, and be depending less on the world to do your work for you.

In short: Know thyself from a neutral perspective, then practice that knowing on a daily basis. Learn to know others, then engage with them on caring, respectful, yet familiar terms. Strive to balance hope with despair, durability with fragility, forethought with spontaneity. Live a sensitive and an intentional life, being ever mindful of the personhood of those around you. Steer clear of nicotine, alcohol, and other mindaltering or numbing drugs. If you do this, you will become a true mindfarer, which may not be your measure of success, but is sure to keep you gainfully occupied for many years, and bring you closer to yourself and to those with whom you engage.

As for myself, this is my most recent—and final—try at depicting my mind. In the end, I strongly believe in setting the stars free from their ancient bondage to fanciful gods; with Roget, I believe in striving to know my own mind; and I also believe in practicing like a baseball player to do the best I can in the time I am allowed with whatever tools I’ve got, even if only a ball and a stick. These are distinctly low-tech efforts, based not on artificial intelligence, but the real thing.  SGP, September 9, 2014 140 pages 89,684 words (Overleaf.) Depiction of situated intelligence (the self) striving to solve the world puzzle from inside a figurative black box via four cotangent loops of engagement through nature, culture, community, and family.

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Loops of Engagement Output Internal Loops

{ } Nature Culture Community Family

Leonardo & Steve from planet Earth April 5, 2014

Input

April 5, 2014

BLACK BOX Action

Perception

PPPPerceptionPPerception SELF

Meaning

Perception • Arousal • Expectancy • Attention • Impression • Recognition • Understanding Situated Self • Memory • Meaning • Thought • Emotion • Value • Judgment • Dreams

Action • Goals • Projects • Relationships • Tools • Skills • Speech • Trial & Error Perception into Action • Reflexes • Mimicry • Habits & Routines • Rote Learning • Prejudice • Orthodoxy

Memory