Last issue I
wrote about plans to put on a film series on mentoring. I've been investigating
films and a place to show them; here's my progress so far:
Place: There's
a possibility of using one of the churches in Jamaica Plain; Larry Murphy made
the initial connection for me. I had investigated the public library, but I
wouldn't be able to charge admission - which will be necessary to cover movie
rental costs, and possibly equipment costs.
Rentals: I
can't legally show videos without proper "public performance"
licensing. This involves renting a special version of a movie without the FBI
warning that we all fast-forward past when we watch movies at home. I've been
in touch with an agency in New York that will charge $50 a film, about half
their normal fee for rental and licence.
The movies: The
films I've looked at seem to fall into four categories. Here they are, along
with a first and second choice:
Writers and
academics as mentors: Finding Forrester; Man Without a Face
Women as
mentors: October Sky; Billy Elliot
Wounded healers
as mentors: The Tic Code; Man Without a Face
Social
deviants/outlaws as mentors: Training Day; Fisher King
I haven't seen
Slam; it may be an alternate for the last category.
Look for
further details in coming issues; I think the series will take place in late
summer or early autumn. [Note: as of 2003, the film series is still no
more than a gleam in my eye. But anyone could put together a series for a small
group of men to see at one of their homes.]
You've probably
heard about, read about, or experienced what is called an "altered state
of consciousness." There's quite a catalog of the various kinds, which can
be described by their causes: illegal and legal drugs, botanicals such as
peyote and mushrooms, alcohol, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, stress,
trauma, meditation, holotropic breathwork, religious ecstasy, exercise-induced
endorphins ("runner's high"), high fever, orgasm, mental illness.
Even chocolate and love have been implicated, and I suspect I've left a few
out.
What's
"altered" in an altered state? You could go through the gamut -
emotion, sensation, perception, cognition. And what "consciousness"
is being "altered"? Do we all have the same baseline consciousness
fom which the alterations take place?
Yes and no. We
inherit, as human beings, a hard-wired neurological system that's pretty much standard.
But then it's constantly altered. The things we see, hear, taste, smell, and
feel interact with any hard-wired neurological inheritance. Perhaps that's why,
at any given time, a society or an individual may encounter the world quite
differently from the way you and I encounter it.
And we must
interact with the world in order to make sense of it. Much of what we
understand about the physical world is conditioned by our experience of that
world. In extreme cases, this conditioning can fail at a critical time. People
born deaf may never acquire spoken language skills unless they gain their
hearing very young. Beyond a certain age, those skills can't be acquired. A
similar phenomenon happens among people who are born blind: if sight is
acquired beyond a certain age, people may find it difficult or even impossible
to make sense of visual sensations.
What about our
sense of ourselves as human beings? We know, or can at least guess, that
there's some variation - from society to society and even from person to person
- in how we view ourselves. What we feel, perceive, and think about are at
least partially conditioned by our upbringing in a particular society,
community, and family. At any point in time, each one of us is the main
character in a long story, mostly created by others.
This isn't
entirely bad. Without a common story - without norms - each community could
lapse into chaos and anarchy. In extreme cases, lack of interaction with others
leads to death. Orphan babies could die without human interaction, even though
they were fed and kept clean.
In living our
stories, we're often unaware that we're immersed the story - in a constant
chatter not entirely of our own making. The chatter may be in the form of words
and sentences or it may be preverbal - a stream of ideas and images just before
they're put into words. Most of the time, we're unaware of this chatter. It's
about as automatic as breathing. But it's a huge part of what makes us
conscious human beings.
It isn't
entirely good. In some obvious and subtle ways, we're told who we are as men.
Messages - all part of the chatter - come from people close to us such as
parents or partners. The strongest messages come from the cultural collective,
and many of them are toxic. Men are violent (we are? all of us?). Men are
rapists (sex with our own wives has been called marital rape). Men are silly
and awkward (watch nearly any sit-com). Men are poisoned by testosterone
(simply not true, medically). Men are irrelevant. Men are tyrannical overlords.
And on and on.
There are good
messages, too, of course. Men are heroes. Men protect their families and
country. Men have superior upper body strength. Men do the heavy, dirty work.
And so on.
The problem
with all the messages, bad and good, is that they define us from without. The
messages worm their way into our consciousness. How I see myself, how I feel as
a man (even acknowledging some inconsistencies) may not be who I really am. I
am a character in a story I didn't write.
Altering the
story - the chatter - can happen when we enter into an altered state of
consciousness. We can alter the chatter quickly with drugs, changing its
content or shutting it down. Changing the content through hallucinatory drugs
(for instance) just substitutes another kind of chatter. We can also change the
chatter by changing the circumstances of our lives. Extreme sports,
danger-seeking, or even typical "midlife crisis" behavior can change
the chatter. But it's still chatter, and it's just another story. Shutting the
chatter down (alcohol and other depressants come to mind) also dulls or even
shuts down awareness. This gets rid of the chatter, but without awareness
there's no benefit.
The trick, it
seems to me, is to find a way to quell the chatter and leave awareness intact.
Who are we, without the messages we have internalized? What do we think when we
don't think in words? What do we perceive when there's no story to tell? What
do we feel when the most toxic of the messages are absent? How can we use the
chatter-free awareness to rediscover our true selves?
One
time-honored way is simply to sit still and pay attention. This takes a little
more effort than popping a pill or toking a joint, a little less effort than
biking down a mountain or jumping out of a plane - or buying a sports car and
trolling for a young girlfriend.
Sitting still
can be pretty hard at first, but it improves with practice. Paying attention
may be even harder. Beginners are often told to pay attention just to their
breathing. When distractions arise (they will!), you just observe them and let
them pass you by. Can you sit still for ten minutes and "do"
absolutely nothing? Try it. You may find it a lot harder than you imagined. Can
you do it for twenty minutes? Once you've gotten through twenty minutes, can
you do it every day?
When you are
immersed in stillness, you can enter into an altered state compared to your
everyday consciousness. But you're also in an "unaltered state" in
that you've set aside many of the things that have conditioned your consciousness
and set up the chatter in the first place. With awareness intact, you've taken
the first step on a journey of discovery.
What's the
payoff? Eventually you get acquainted with a self that's not conditioned by the
chatter. You also get to see a world that's not being filtered through chatter.
As a man, you can get closer to your male essence and discover a far richer and
more complicated human being than you had imagined. You'll probably also
discover that the "bad" parts of yourself aren't so bad after all and
that you have perhaps been undervaluing the good parts. And having done all
that, you may also find out that you can see the rest of the world, and the
people in it, more clearly and with greater compassion. A lot - maybe all - of
the negative judging we do comes from the chatter.
The biggest
payoff, perhaps, is that you begin to see yourself without being defined by
other people's expectations. When you return from your stillness, you're more
genuine, more "you," and people generally respond well to that.
Notice I
haven't called this practice "meditation." Somehow the word doesn't
capture what I have in mind, even though, objectively, sitting and awareness
exercises are definitely a form of meditation. What I want to emphasize,
however, is the stillness and the quieting of mind and body. You need no
special cushion, room, time, clothing, guru, or anything else. Just you in a
comfortable position in a quiet place.
Stillness is
hard. If you've ever tried it, you know it's far from passive. I don't expect
that many men would embark on this kind of practice simply because they've read
what I've said here. But store this information away somewhere in your head.
There are many ways to approach the practice of stilling the chatter. If you
stay attentive to the possibilities, one may click with you someday.
Copyright
notice
All original
materials are (c) Copyright 2002 by Tim Baehr. All rights reserved. All signed
materials are copyright by their respective authors.
Personal
correspondence:
Tim Baehr
tbaehr@aol.com