Making Connections

From Menletter August 2006

By Tim Baehr

My wife sometimes wonders where I get ideas for essays (actually, so do I!). Many of them come during walks (exercise is supposed to increase creativity), and some come just from woolgathering - pondering some random thought or sight and - like a jazz musician - riffing on it.

Two recent little wooly tufts were the conjunctions "and" and "or."

The two conjunctions express relations - we could call them inclusion and exclusion, respectively. These relations are part of our mental makeup and may even have existed before our primate ancestors had language. In fact, we can observe that the so-called lower animals exhibit behaviors that we might interpret as inclusion and exclusion.

Fundamental Relations

We might also theorize that "and" and "or" were the first relational concepts that dawned on our ancestors and that were expressed in words (whatever those words may have been). Did you see Ogg and Mogg? That bird is red and blue. Should we sleep or eat?

"And" must have seemed a very powerful concept to the humans who discovered it and had big enough brains to make note of it. For the first time, people could think about two or more things at once, and notice that they were somehow connected. Something as simple as "day and night" or "sun and rain" is a very profound concept: Day is related to night; they are two pieces of the same thing. Sun is related to rain; they are both related to the sky, and they both affect how we feel.

Even more powerful, perhaps, was the concept of "or." For the first time, people could think about things in contrast to each other. Did Ogg or Mogg kill the antelope? Is that plant sweet or bitter? We could run or walk. "Or" implies alternatives - choices - differences - exclusion. Humans and many other animals make choices all the time. Think of something as simple and crucial to survival as eating or not eating a certain plant. But there's a long leap across the chasm of instinctive choice and choice we can think about.

Forbidden Fruit

One powerful myth of human origin involves the "fall" of humankind when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It's not as though only good had existed before. Good and evil are a part of a universal whole: It is extremely hard (once we dispense with synonyms) to define one without referring to the other, so intimately related are they. The fruit allowed our first humans to make a distinction between good and evil by judging between them - effectively interjecting an OR between them. The forbidden fruit was not an apple or a pomegranate; it was a big, round "OR."

One way to think about Adam and Eve before the fall is that they were seeing everything in the Garden - their universe - as somehow related to everything else. After the fall, they perceived things as dual, that is, as opposites: male or female, naked or clothed, good or evil, human or divine, mind or body, white or black - a total permeation of the elements of existence as binary opposites with a big OR between them. The biggest OR was human or divine. Whereas Creation, or the Garden, was part of a Divine One, we humans set ourselves apart from the rest of the Garden and were cast out of it.

Seeing the Daily Double

Our practical, day-to-day life seems to depend on dualism. We must make distinctions, almost constantly, to keep from being hit by traffic, decide what to have for dinner, figure out if we can trust some other person, and so on. We're constantly choosing between what we perceive to be opposites.

Sometimes, however, seeing everything as opposites can get us into trouble.

What makes people unhappy? I don't mean unhappy in the sense of feeling sad, wearing a long face, and sighing all the time. I mean a fundamental unease with life, seeing almost everything as part of an opposing pair and wondering when our luck will turn. We're unhappy as we wait to get what we think we want, or we're happy but ill at ease waiting for our good stuff to be taken away from us.

The funny thing is, we can often be unhappy or happy about the same thing at different times. Our judgment is not totally infallible. We find ourselves on one or the other side of a big OR in almost everything we experience, and our happiness about which side we're on isn't reliable.

What happens if we hang Adam and Eve's fruit back on the tree and look at all differences with an AND between them? We know things are different, but how can we see that the distinction between them is of our own making?

Expanding Universe

Once the fruit is back on the tree, what was excluded becomes included. We don't exclude other points of view, we include them as possibilities in an expanded universe. We offer understanding even when (because we have made a conscious choice) we don't agree. This is not merely tolerance; we usually tolerate things that are somehow distasteful to us. We embrace all possibilities and make a choice. This attitude could extend from our choice of ice cream flavors to careers to our stand on abortion, legalization of drugs, or even terrorism.

Understanding terrorism, and its roots and motivations, might encourage leaders to modify the conditions under which terrorism is seen as a useful political tool. Similar progress might be made on abortion, gender relations, and many other issues in which people find themselves at loggerheads.

No Matter?

Here's a very hard concept: What if we could get wrapped around the idea that nothing, absolutely nothing, really matters? Would we become passive and immobile? Would we take a "whatever" attitude about important issues? Would we become libertines, defying all convention and living only for our own pleasure?

Think about the phrase "nothing matters." All matter in the universe will eventually change, given enough time. Compared to many living things, we humans have a fair amount of time occupying the matter of our bodies. Compared to the universe, our time is infinitesimal. Set into the biggest possible picture, we really don't matter, and nothing in our lives matters.

But wait - we are a part of the universe, and we're in relationship to everything in it. Whether cosmic or as a Garden metaphor, the universe matters to the extent that existence itself matters. But that mattering is on a huge, almost inconceivable scale. So we too matter, on a huge almost inconceivable scale. What doesn't matter is our conception of ourselves as somehow separate from the universe - the big OR.

Our individual existence does occupy some time, and for the time in which we are conscious, things do matter. It's not us OR the universe, it's us AND the universe, because we're intimately a part of everything that's related to everything. So even if we know that nothing matters, we live our lives as if things mattered - because they do. The paradox is this: Knowing that nothing matters and at the same time knowing that everything matters. We're intimately related to everything in time and space. Not only are we in the universe, we are of the universe: We are the universe.

Living Our Days

How can this realization affect our daily lives, for those of us not in a position to end terrorism or any of the other ills on our planet? If we see ourselves and everything else as related, we can realize - make more conscious - that our choices are just choices of one side or the other of an OR distinction that is of our own making. There's no absolute reality that makes our choices right or wrong. And since we're related to everything, we might not only feel companionship with those who've made similar choices but also understanding and compassion for those who've made other choices. In this view, the universe is a big, timeless AND that often masquerades in our little, short lives as a series of self-important ORs. Being fully conscious of both AND and OR is a huge challenge for us fallen ones trying to find our way back to the Garden.