Being a Starfarer
From SolSeed
This is Chapter One of the SolSeed book.
Contents |
Defining what we mean by "Starfarer"
Being a Starfarer is really a state of mind. Consider this example:
An elderly man is tending his cottage garden. As he digs the weeds from around his carrots, he looks up toward the green-white brilliance of the star that provides the energy to power the growth of his little garden. His original home was Terra, an invisible pale-blue dot that circles a barely visible pale-yellow speck in his night sky, and he voyaged to this new place from there. This man was clearly a starfarer. But when did he become one? And did he ever stop?
Our lives are bounded and shaped by the problems that we choose. Sometimes those problems choose us, such as famine in our country or a war that we are swept into. But sometimes we get to choose the problems that define our lives. Given a choice between a life defined by whether we have as nice a car as the neighbors (or whatever commonly defines the quality of a life in your culture), and a life that is part of fulfilling a Destiny to take root amongst the stars, those who choose the latter actually become starfarers by the definition we use here.
Consider what it means to live life as if it were possible to send life from our solar system to another star system and as if your contribution to this aim will matter. Given this frame of reference, other problems in your individual life suddenly seem small and their solutions almost immediate. This "starfaring" state of mind busts through the artificial ceilings we place on what is possible in our lives. It is a generative place to live from.
Since being is the fount from which doing springs, being deliberate in choosing who we will be is one of the highest callings for the human animal. No other part of creation has so many options for the being from which their lives spring. Humans can be artists, engineers, teachers, gardeners...the list is endless. Your vocations and hobbies don't even adequately define who you are. In fact, it is actually the reverse. Who you are being, your personality, values, and passions, will determine the vocations and hobbies that fill your life.
Getting into action
Many of us struggle with "procrastination." Noted blogger Merlin Mann, who writes about "finding the time and attention to do your best creative work," says that we only procrastinate when we forget who we really are. This is really a case of the doing getting before the being. Being is also not simply a function of personality, values, and passions. Being is to some degree a declaration. A moment by moment creation of an intention that you can live into. An intention that calls you into action with the rightness of its fit and the blissful inspiration it generates.
One of the sad forgettings of our time is the forgetting that we get to choose who we are being from moment to moment. While inertia tends to bind us into set patterns of being that are difficult to change, who we have been in the past is not decisive in determining who we will be in this moment. An example of this is the notion of being healthy. We often imagine "being healthy" as a state of being that will be achieved at some future time. If I weigh 230 pounds right now and have a flabby stomach, I'll be healthy once I lose 30 pounds and have abs of steel. This is a fallacy of a future beingness coming from a history of doing. Being is always and always in this present moment. Even if I am 30 pounds overweight, I can be healthy in this moment. If I choose to be healthy in this moment, this being will call me into actions such as choosing a salad instead of a cheeseburger. The more that I "be healthy," the more I integrate this into my habits and rituals, my patterns of being, the more healthy things I will do. The more healthy things I do, the more outward signs of health I will have (e.g., the abs of steel). Being calls us into action. Be, do, have.
When we talk about being a starfarer now, in a world that has no starships, it has the same sort of impact. Being a starfarer inspires and call us into action that is consistent with that inspiration. Being a starfarer means tearing myself away from the pattern of watching banal TV shows about "true crime," "amazing veterinary emergencies," or even the fictional adventures of a starship crew, and instead calling myself into action to get online and catalogue other kindred starfarers. Then in a future moment, being a starfarer calls me into action to contact some of these kindred. Then again, as starfarer I arrange to meet some of them. Then it's suddenly 30 years later and I am part of a company, a community, a family, and a religious practice that are all consistent with me being starfarer.
Truth, Beauty, and Values (the religion of science)
When we say "religious practice," we don't mean what you probably think. It's possible to write a scripture that doesn't resort to the supernatural, and create rituals based around the sacredness of what we know to exist. In a way, we're already doing this as a society. Scientific research papers comprise the ever-changing scripture of a religion whose churches are laboratories and university lecture halls. Its "priesthood," the researchers and science professors, commands almost universal trust even though they all admit that anything they say could turn out to be wrong.
When there is data available, we use it. We believe the scientific method is currently our best mechanism to learn, codify, and share information about our world and universe. The distillation of the scientific method is essentially this:
- Create a recipe that includes how and what you should expect to see
- The community of the adequate can then perform the recipe and interpret the results, honestly reporting whether the expectation was met or not
- Recipes that are confirmed by others are elaborated on
But where do the recipes come from? Ideas for experiments and models with predictive power are not generated by science. They are generated by Life's creative spark. The same creative juices that stir one person to pen an opus stir another person to create a theory to explain cosmic background radiation. This creative force is mysterious. Where does it come from? We choose to see it as an emergent property of life that occurs when the input and [...]
So truth within many different realms can be communicated via the scientific method. This is true within the objective physical realm as exemplified by the "hard sciences" like chemistry, geology, neuroscience and the like. It is true within the realm of mind and can be seen in mathematics, logic, philosophy and the "soft sciences" like psychology, sociology, and anthropology. The scientific method even applies to the spiritual side of life to some degree, and can be applied to meditation and other recipes for altering one's perception of the ground of beingness. (The problem is that subjective experience is very difficult to measure, and science works best with quantitatively measurable results.)
The community of the adequate is a concept I first learned about from Ken Wilber. He makes the point that unless you have a super-collider, it is difficult to play back the recipes that are currently being run at CERN - The Large Hadron Collider. This requirement keeps the community of the adequate quite small to test out the recipes they propose. Likewise, many mathematical proofs involve concepts that are beyond the ken of most people. Evaluating whether the proof is sound requires a level of expertise that comes only with special aptitude and training. This too limits the size of the community of the adequate. Mathematical recipes are no less real for being entirely within the realm of mind. They are inner recipes rather than outer recipes.
One of the degenerations that comes from the science being most successfully applied to the objective outer space is the collapse of inner and outer realms and the collapse of spiritual with objective. An example of this can be seen in experiments that try to show there is some sort of telepathic force field that operates within and across life. These experiments confuse the essentially [...]
Religion-shaped hole
Human beings tend to have a religion shaped hole. I don't know whether this was selected for by memetic and genetic evolution because it confers reproductive advantage or whether the tendency toward religion is more a biproduct of selection for other desirable traits. In the first case religion would be a kidney, a critical piece of a fully functional organism, there for a specific and clearly beneficial purpose. In the second case religion is an appendix, an oddity mostly ignored except when blocked with feces and it becomes a life threatening ball of inflammation.
For our purposes it doesn't really matter whether Religion is an appendix or a kidney. Identity is fluid and for millenia one of the most powerful forces shaping identity was that of the religious culture a person belonged to. Rather than trying to untangle the causal chain of how humanity and religions co-evolved, I'd like to assert that for most humans religion of some sort is part of their makeup. Given that life is intrinsically empty and meaningless, it falls to our minds to create meaning. One way to judge the meaning of a particular religion is by its fruits. Are the people who are a part of the group happy, productive and free from suffering?
Surprisingly, it turns out that within nearly every religion there are common subgroups that emerge. At one end of the spectrum are fundamentalists for whom strict adherence to the code of the religion is essential. The fundamentalist seeks to protect the religion from compromising with and therefore becoming undifferentiated from the rest of modern life. At the other end of the religious spectrum in nearly every religion we find those who believe there are many paths to spiritual enlightenment and the path from their religion may not even be the best. These folks teach that bliss is available for all to experience directly and include an opening up and emptying out of self.
The fruits of the first group are confrontation and war. The fruits of the second group are peace and acceptance of diversity and a doctrine of the interconnectedness of all being. Identifying with this second group of religious practitioners, we recognize the deep meaning of Spiritual practice both individual and collective.
Multiple Selves
So who are we really? It turns out that answering this question is complicated. It turns out that there are many different good answers to this question. Each of the different good answers is useful at different times and in different contexts. That said, many people are stuck with just one of the good answers that paraphrased goes something like this: I'm this skin bag and all the fleshy bits inside it. While this is true, it is incomplete.
To illustrate the problem with being stuck with a single perspective on who we are, let's take a trip back to in time to 1987. 1987 was my freshman year in high school, and most of my friends couldn't drive. We were too young, or we didn't have access to cars. Watching the older kids pull into the parking lot we would wonder what it would be like to posses that kind of power and freedom. One of the older kids drove a 20+ year old Renault that wouldn't go into reverse. He was very careful to always park with a clear escape route in front of him. Every now and then he would find himself boxed in and be vividly reminded of his car's dysfunction as he pushed the car himself, or had to enlist others to help him.
That old Renault that was stuck going forward serves as a useful metaphor about how we view ourselves. In Big Mind Big Heart, Dennis Merzel compares the different ways we view ourself to the different gears on a car. Each of the different ways of looking at who we are is useful some of the time, but not all of the time. If we are limited to a single particular view of ourselves we are like that old Renault. Our view may be adequate much of the time, but when circumstances would benefit from us adopting a different view, we find ourselves stuck and without the necessary perspective to respond powerfully to the situation.
The Divided Self
Metaphors are incredibly powerful. They are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. Perhaps no metaphor is more important than our metaphor for our selves.
In an age of cars, machines, and computers it is tempting to adopt a metaphor of self that places our conscious mind in the role of operator and the rest of us as the machine that is being operated. This metaphor is highly inaccurate and provides little in the way of insight about how to create what we seek to create in the world.
One of the ancient truths that has been discovered over and over and commented on by many different authors is the notion of the divided self. We are not simply a conscious mind operating a piece of biological machinery. We are actually a collection of different systems cooperating and competing to accomplish their own individual goals. Not all of these systems are equally intelligent, nor equally powerful.
Social scientist Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis takes a look at various metaphors for self that have received widespread attention throughout the years. He then suggests that we adopt the model of our conscious mind as a rider on top of the elephant of our unconscious mind and body. This simple metaphor does much to explain day to day life.
The model of a rider and an elephant is particularly good at explaining the differences between what we say our goals are and our actual behavior. The only part of the rider elephant combination that we have direct cognitive access to is the rider. Any time we say something, it is the rider who is speaking. So when we talk about our goals we give a one sided account that only incorporates what the rider wants.
It takes a tremendous amount of gumption for the rider to overcome the elephant. In a direct contest of wills, the rider is doomed. A skilled rider understands this and works sideways to create an environment in which the elephant can be successful. This means shaping the stimuli the elephant has access to in order to limit exposure to undesirable situations that take the elephant down a destructive path.
The motivation paradox
While it may be true that service of others provides happiness and life satisfaction for the person who is doing the serving, the motivation for the service is very important. When the service is done to look good or even just because we know that service leads to a happier life something is missed. It is only when service springs from a depth of character from which it is simply the right thing to do that it brings the most peace and satisfaction.
There is a trap of motivation that may be called spiritual narcissism. People who seek after spiritual enlightenment, satisfaction, and peace as if they are the ends themselves rather than the byproduct of a life of service find themselves continually lacking peace and satisfaction. The more they focus on peace and satisfaction, the bigger the hole becomes that they are trying to fill.
Part of the paradox stems from the realization that the person we have the most direct influence over is ourselves. This makes it seem like we ought to be working directly on ourselves. Growth and development of ourselves is helped most by developing in ourselves a focus on others. This can be illustrated by the attributes of a great conversationalist. The best conversationalists are those who are actually interested in what the other person has to say. When the other person pauses, the interested listener naturally rephrases what they heard to verify they got it, or asks a question about something of particular interest. Contrast this with the person whose main motivation is being heard. The talker doesn't listen to the other person, instead they organize their own thoughts so they can start talking in the first gap that is left.
Good religions must then in fact demand that we live a life of character and that we help others because it is "the right thing to do."
