Sentient Times Aug/Sept 2002 Issue

SENTIENT TIMES August/September 2002

Navigating the Tides of Change

By David La Chapelle

We are currently in a period of accelerated planetary change. Global weather changes, cultural ero-sion, disease transmission, increased information density, economic systems in transition, technology, biotechnology, the population explosion, shifting patterns of the family, urban sprawl, and the degradation of the biosphere are some of the waves that are cresting in the sea of change. The main thesis of this book is that accelerated change is pushing us to a new understanding of our role upon the planet.

As we deepen our awareness and understanding of the tides of change, what feels like chaos may actually turn out to be a current that can move us into a more coherent resonance with the fundamental rhythms of life. Our daily lives can be enriched, and solutions to our planetary problems can emerge if we are willing to participate directly in an ongoing inquiry into the unfolding of our worlds—both inner and outer. In the past this process has been approached through spiritual traditions and has been enacted in the bodies and lives of various mystics. Now, however, unless all of us participate in this inquiry we may be in danger of being overrun by our own limitations and blindness as a species. The enormous challenges facing our planet as well as our own personal tests and trials are all grist for the mill. At their center is an invitation: we are invited to deepen into a state of awareness in which the unfolding of the cosmos becomes a palpable experience, and to learn about a new level of coherence and integration.

Tides are an appropriate symbol for change. The shifting of tides is a daily aspect of transformation that literally appears at my front door. I live on the edge of a channel of water that can have tides as high as 20 feet. Other than the movement of night into day, there is no other shift that alters my environment more. Though this change is astonishing in its enormity—just try to comprehend millions of metric tons of water per hour that need to shift to make such tidal motion possible—the process has a predictability and periodicity that is comforting. Tides are like the heartbeat of the planet, a magnificent fluid exchange felt on the shores of every continent. They are an apt example of cyclical change.

Given the proper frame of reference, nearly every change can be seen as part of a larger cycle or process. Point of view is everything. To a lone oyster on the beach, a tide may seem like a world-changing experience. But from outer space, astronauts have seen tidal changes tracing elegant patterns across the oceans. They have been able to photograph the actual wave crests of the tides: the carrier waves upon which storm waves ride. Tides themselves result from the motion of the moon; it in turn is embedded in a space-time well that is a harmonic of much larger universal fluctuations. There are tides of solar radiation synchronized to the sunspot cycle that may have influenced human affairs for thousands of years. There are tides of cellular processes that sweep through our bodies and are intricately bound to the cycle of day and night. Tides of history sweep whole civilizations away and seed the beginnings of new cultures.

From a local perspective a hurricane or tornado is devastating and exacts a frightening toll on the environment. From a planetary perspective, though, localized storms dissipate solar gain and help to equalize the Earth’s energy balance. This may not be a comfort for the victims of the storm, but taking a larger view does offer a sense of meaning for what is happening.

A restoration of a sense of meaning is crucial if we are to successfully navigate the tides of change. Many events occur in the world over which we have little or no control. If we can learn to hear, see, and feel the thread of meaning that ties these events together, we can emerge into a world of meaning and connection which is spiritually nourishing and capable of sustaining us through the most difficult of outer changes.

Learning to see deeper patterns within localized change is essential to the process of spiritual inquiry. Without it spirituality degrades into dangerous fundamentalism. Ultimately the acceleration of global changes is pushing humankind into a reformation of spiritual inquiry—one which will link science, religion, the arts, commerce, medicine, and technology into a new whole. These times are extraordinarily rich with possibility.

Numerous agents of change throughout history have exemplified in their lives the larger process that we as a species are undergoing. Since computers are one of the most powerful instruments of change today, I am going to open with a story about one of the men who helped bring about the binary revolution.

Alan Turing is widely credited with being the man who helped launch the computer revolution. In 1936 he published a paper in which he conceived of a linkage between logical instructions, the action of the mind, and a machine that in principle could be housed in a practical physical form. He proposed a machine that would read a series of symbols on a strip of paper. Turing began to search for the most fundamental level of instruction possible. In essence, he arrived at a blueprint for all modern computers by exploring a logical question of mathematics: is there a method or process that will solve all mathematical problems?

Turing’s remarkable paper was in some sense a mere afterthought of a central life dilemma: what is the connection of consciousness to matter? His search for meaning was initiated by the brief but powerful relationship he had with a schoolmate when he was 16. The older boy and he shared a deep love of mathematics and philosophy. For two years the two were inseparable as they explored those wide-ranging fields of thought. Then suddenly his friend died leaving Alan with a crisis of the heart. Turing became consumed with the question of what had happened to his friend’s consciousness. In particular, he began to explore the relationship of matter to consciousness, a study that was to lead him into quantum theory and later into theories about the organization of life itself.

Turing’s personal crisis became the matrix of a life that ushered in the computer revolution and established the field of morphogenetics. At the end of his life Turing was exploring the very issue which is one of the concerns of this book: how is change possible? He developed a theory of chemical reactions based on reaction and diffusion that became the basis of a whole new science, and was one of the first people to explore non-linear systems in a coherent manner. (Incidentally, he is largely credited for the theoretical work that enabled the Allies to crack the Nazi radio code during World War II.) Turing’s search for meaning ultimately changed the face of the world. Just as Turing wove a matrix of inquiry around his friend’s death that helped transform our planet, so each of us has an opportunity to make searches and discoveries that can illumine our own understanding.

In the fall of 1998 a tropical typhoon drifted north across the Pacific Ocean and came to rest against the coastal mountains of Alaska near my home. The unusually moist air brought record rains, and a stream that comes down from a steep mountain behind my house suddenly switched channels and threatened our driveway. I called some friends, enlisted my family, and we began to try to divert the stream away from our yard. In the process of fighting the flood I discovered a practical illustration of a theoretical principle: a small amount of work done upstream diverts more water than a much greater amount of effort made lower down. The higher we went up the hillside the more effective our diversion work became. Those discoveries provided the inspiration for this book.

As we deal with rapid change, we must find diversion points as high in the system as possible. Otherwise we end up fighting futile battles and become easily exhausted. I have spent a good part of my life listening to the stories of individuals who are in the midst of some sort of crisis. I have never yet heard a story that was not embedded in a larger context. Stories disassociated from their greater environment tend to become tales of problems and difficulties. When a person’s story is connected to a larger field of meaning, those same problems and difficulties become indicators of the deepest truths. The solutions to any of our problems—personal or global—are present if we will summon the heart to look deeply into the issues and listen humbly for instructions.

Secrecy, the Buddha, and the Veil of Unknowing

In 1629 a Dutch ship is caught in a storm off the coast of Australia. The ship soon founders and the captain and crew are forced to make for shore. The small group of storm-weary sailors find themselves in a strange and exotic land. While they wait for rescue, they explore the landscape of their temporary home.

The sailors see large creatures that hop about on their hind legs. They see birds as tall as men that seem to hide their heads in the sand and furry bear-like creatures that live in trees. But by far the most bizarre animal they see is a furbearing creature that has webbed feet and a bill like a duck, sharp spurs like a rooster, and a flat beaverlike tail. The creature lays eggs like a reptile and yet nurses its young with milk like a mammal.

The diligent captain duly reports these discoveries in his ship’s log. The sailors are eventually rescued and taken back to their homeland where the captain is questioned about the fantastic creatures he has described. Scientists of his day concede the possibility of the kangaroo, the ostrich, and the koala, but they balk at the platypus. “Impossible,” they say. “No such creature could exist.” The captain’s descriptions are dismissed as the uneducated observations of a sailor clearly not trained to render exact descriptions of wildlife.

The platypus continues to live unmolested—despite its official nonexis-tence—for another 100 years. Then an Australian settler catches one and sends its skin to scientists at the British Museum in London, who pronounce it a fake. (That skin is still at the museum, and you can see the scissors marks where they attempted to detach the bill to prove their point.) One hundred-and-sixty more years pass before a researcher sails to Australia and studies the shy animal in the wild, after which humans finally pronounce the platypus an official creature.

What we see is culturally and socially constructed. The platypus was “an impossible creature” because scientific constructs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had nothing in them that could account for its existence. Lest we dismiss those constructs as naive, thinking that such a thing could not happen in this day and age, consider the story of the USS Juneau.

In November 1942, after a night of fierce fighting in the South Pacific, the crew of the damaged USS Juneau are busy repairing their vessel. A lurking Japanese submarine manages to release two torpedoes before fleeing; both find their mark, sending the USS Juneau beneath the waves. Nearby American vessels steam out of harm’s way, unaware that more than a hundred men have survived the disaster. Not wanting to break radio silence, the commander of the retreating flotilla does not broadcast an appeal for help. The survivors make their way through water blackened with bilge oil and into three inflatable life rafts. Wounded, oil smeared, and in shock, they wait to be rescued.

But it is as if the silence and secrecy imposed by the commander somehow suppresses people’s awareness of the existence of survivors; though they are spotted several times by crews on surveillance flights, no message is passed up the chain of command. By the time someone in a rescue plane notices them, only a few of the men are still alive.

The sinking of the USS Juneau made headlines not so much for the botched rescue effort as for the death of the five Sullivan brothers. The deaths of all five from the same family at the same time became an icon of loss for the nation. What the nation was not to know was that many more died because of the distortion in perception created by military protocol. Once secrecy became the lens of perception, lives were sacrificed in order to sustain the illusion. In the case of the USS Juneau what people saw—or rather what they didn’t see—was constructed by habituation and adherence to military protocol. No one had been told to expect to see survivors, so in some sense at least, they didn’t see them.

We, too, wear blinders that limit and blind us to the realities of our global situation. A subtle veil occludes our vision. It is woven from threads of belief—belief in systems and technologies that tantalizingly promise solutions if we will only move more information faster and deliver more services more quickly. Seen through the veil, damage to our world is seen as isolated problems to be contained rather than as an index of underlying dysfunction to be healed. Seen through the veil, the true extent of our global problems can be swept under the carpet of business as usual.

The Buddha discovered several thousand years ago that reality (within the world or within us) is created through relationships and that his internal condition was dependent on external events. This is not a difficult concept to understand when we relate it to the physical world: our bodies heat up when we sit in sunlight because they absorb radiant energy from the sun. When rain falls, rivers rise. When you step on the gas, your car speeds up. The concept is a little harder to grasp when we relate it to our feelings, thoughts, and reactions, but it holds.

If you follow a feeling to its origins you will see that it arises in response to a web of connected events that exist beyond your own body and mind. If you are angry with your son for watching TV instead of helping around the house, investigate the source of your anger. You may find that the barometric pressure has influenced your endocrine system and is altering the intensity of your emotional response. You may be resenting the influence TV has on your son’s life or the amount of sugar in his food that leads to his need for constant stimulation. Your son’s refusal to work may, in fact, be triggering you to mimic your own father’s anger. You may even find yourself remembering a time when your father contained his anger by pouring himself into his work. Nothing—not even emotion—exists in isolation.

As science increases our capacity to penetrate the workings of matter, the interconnected web that sustains the world becomes more and more apparent. The Buddha was bold enough to state that there is no substantial reality other than the web of relationship by which the world is knit together. Therefore, he concluded, the best way to help oneself is to serve the world and help relieve the suffering present in it.

Physicists have revealed a level of reality in which events are instantaneously transmitted across the universe. Our capacity to communicate across boundaries once considered inviolable—via the scanning electron microscope to the Internet—is remaking our understanding of our place in the universe. The cell phone and the Internet have given humanity access to its intrinsic connectivity in an explicit way. We face the difficulty of critiquing systems in which we are deeply embedded—some of which rely on our unknowing for their continued existence. Our challenge is to contemplate the whole spectrum of reality. Secrecy, mistrust, denial, and the withholding or obscuring of the truth create suffering and impede our capacity to respond appropriately—a lesson made patently clear in the case of the USS Juneau. We are being called upon to learn how to behave in new ways. And our best ally is open and honest communication.

In a competitive culture the idea of an open and honest exchange of information is a startling one, but we cannot afford to ignore it. Crisis fixes our attention on dysfunction and, at the same time, invites us to generate insight at a higher level. We need to explore the causes of our current dilemmas, accept and integrate responsi-bility in our actions, and move ahead. Our willingness to expose the secret that parts of the system are not working is our best hope of crafting one that does.

As long as we hold a complex of trauma we will perpetuate and project the issue onto the world at large. (How many times have you held an attitude toward something which, in the end, turns out to be your own projection and not the reality of the situation at all? I’ve done it more times than I care to list.) The current debate over global warming is a case in point. The last few years have been the warmest on record in modern times. Indicators of climate change are obvious to the entire world, and yet the debate continues, influenced by the points of view of people who are invested in maintaining the status quo. Like the scientists with the platypus and the navy with the survivors of the USS Juneau, even if we look at the evidence, we don’t always see it for what it is.

A deep contemplation of our global situation will help remove the blinders and may offer some timely gifts. The result of deep contemplation is often some form of fusion where the object perceived, the perception, and the perceiver are one. Or, as a sutra from Indian philosophy puts it: “The mind becomes that which it dwells upon.” Consciousness merges with the field of attention, and information about the deep structure of the field is extracted—perhaps so quickly that the observer doesn’t con-sciously notice what is happening. New discoveries, solutions, or the illumination of problems may occur as a result of the attainment of fusion.

I suspect that some kind of intelligence is at work, pushing us to a reformation of understanding about who we are as humans and where we fit in the web of life. As traditional strategies of relating to the world undergo radical transformation, our challenge is to see our intrinsic con-nectedness to all life with a clear and unvarnished awareness. When we allow ourselves to accept the full range of information about ourselves and our world, and not just partial truths, energy that has been tied up in denial, resistance, and obstruction becomes available for emotional healing and the reframing of beliefs and practices. Our willingness to take off our blinders, discard the veils of secrecy, and remain open to hearing disagreeable information can lead us. And the fullness of our knowing will help us find appropriate ways to respond.

David La Chapelle lives in Juneau, Alaska. He has been a healer for 25 years, is a writer and a contributor to the Institute of Noetic Sciences Magazine, taught at the Naropa Institute, and has led countless training, retreat, and wilderness quest groups. Visit David’s website www.tidesofchange.org for more of his writings, resources for navigating personal and global change, and information on his classes and retreats.

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