The Solidarity of the Universe:
An Introduction to the Process Relational Ontology of Alfred North Whitehead
(The following was written for a class titled Towards a Physics of the World-Soul: The Process Relational Cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead, taught by Matthew T. Segall, CIIS, 2019.)
Alfred North Whitehead, the early 20th century British-American mathematician turned philosopher, attempts to refute the Cartesian-Newtonian bifurcation of mind from matter that has consequently rent the human from Nature, the sacred from the mundane, indeed God from the World. Instead he offers a broadly applicable ontology of a dynamically processual, qualitatively experiential, ineluctably relational, and vitally immanent cosmos that re-ensouls manifest reality with the numinous divine. Inspired by the recent discoveries of quantum science, and writing on the heels of nineteenth century Romanticism, itself a reaction to the disenchantment of Enlightenment mechanistic materialism which had, perhaps inadvertently, given way to a pervasive disaffected nihilism, Whitehead sought to re-insert meaning, value, and conscious intentionality into what was presumed to be an indifferent universe. His process-relational ontology brings God back to the World, elucidating a panentheistic philosophy of God inextricably related in and immanently necessary to the material universe.
Whitehead begins this ambitious project by refuting what he terms the “fallacies” of a Cartesian-Newtonian worldview, namely those of simple location and misplaced concreteness—the belief that the material world is solid and impenetrable—and, perhaps most significantly, of the bifurcation of nature—that there is a distinct difference and separation between matter and mind or consciousness. The doctrine of simple location presupposes that the material world is made up of particles of matter that exist independently “in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time.”[1] In other words, individual particles of matter exist separately from all other particles of matter throughout space and time. The experience of substance, that is of material reality, is thus created by the sense-perception of aggregates of particulate matter constellating to create the impression of solid objects, which themselves exist independently at a definitive location within time and space.
The doctrine of the bifurcation of nature, concurrently, presumes that these separate particles of matter, though independent from their relations to other particles of matter, have no agentic capacity in and for themselves. They are merely dead, inert stuff floating through the universe. What makes them constellate into certain forms or functions, therefore, must be some outside force (according to the Newtonian conception) or some internal vital force which must apply only to certain aggregates of matter which express a teleological function (i.e. living, growing things), but not to aggregates of inanimate matter. Whitehead calls this a “compromise” which fails to account for the existence of both animate and inanimate entities in nature. “The gap between living and dead matter is too vague and problematical to bear the weight of such an arbitrary assumption, which involves an essential dualism somewhere.”[2] It is this dualism, this essential separation or bifurcation of nature, that Whitehead argues against, and which his ontology seeks to resolve. “Neither physical nature nor life can be understood unless we fuse them together as essential factors in the composition of ‘really real’ things whose interconnections and individual characters constitute the universe.”[3]
In order to resolve this inconsistency he posits that existence is organismic, made up of events of actual occasions which arise from the eternal beingness of qualitative experience, and which are processually related to each and every other actual occasion throughout space and time.[4] According to this ontology everything in the universe (including, therefore, the Universe itself) is made up of moments of physical expression, which Whitehead calls “actual occasions” or “events.” “Actual occasions, as the final realities of which the universe is composed, are self-creating buds of experience, each one uniquely itself even while it remains internally related to every other occasion in the creative community of cosmogenesis.”[5] These actual occasions or events are what render the natural world substantial. As Whitehead writes, “If we are to look for substance anywhere, I should find it in events which are in some sense the ultimate substance of nature.”[6]
The relational interconnection of an event does not begin or end with its own concrescence, however. Each event is “prehended” by all those which came before it and whose own concrescences helped to shape, by way of their relations in form, function, and environment, the substantial existence and subjective telos of any and all future events.
“It must be remembered that just as the relations modify the natures of the relata, so the relata modify the nature of the relation . . . The notion of immanence of the cause in the effect illustrates this truth. We have to discover a doctrine of nature which expresses the concrete relatedness of physical functionings and mental functionings, of the past with the present, and also expresses the concrete composition of physical realities which are individually diverse.”[7]
Here Whitehead elicits an almost holographic panentheistic perspective of reality in which naught is mutually exclusive, in which mind and matter, time and space are inextricably interrelated, and yet which acknowledges the subjective existence of material diversity—the parts within the whole which are also wholes (in their own right) within the parts. “We are in the world and the world is in us.”[8] Thus all actual occasions are inextricably intertwined with all others throughout space and time. This is Whitehead’s process-relational ontology of organism. Though each event informs the processual unfolding of the substantial future, none is separate from any other. “Every actual occasion exhibits itself as a process: it is a becomingness. In so disclosing itself, it places itself as one among a multiplicity of other occasions, without which it could not be itself.”[9]
Moreover, these actual occasions in infinite processual relation are the embodiment, the becoming, of the substrate of eternal beingness which Whitehead calls “God.” In other words, God and the manifest world are not separate, but rather God has two poles of expression or experience, one being that of primordial creative potency, which Whitehead terms “mentality,” and the other consequent/conditioned actuality. Such actual occasions arise from the infinite potential of pure Being ordered by what Whitehead calls “eternal objects,” which “determine and express how actual [occasions] relate to one another,” thus forming “the solidarity of the universe.”[10] The solidarity of the substantial universe—that is, what lends coherence rather than complete chaos to the universe—is the eternal objects which “‘interpret [occasions], each to the other,’ such that they come to find themselves related to one another in an extended space-time manifold”.[11] Each event is an organism of interrelations whose concrescence exists within the context, not only of more complex organisms (e.g. a liver cell within a liver organ within an animal body within a social structure within an ecosystem…), but of all organisms throughout space and time. Thus we have a philosophic interpretation of the holographic interrelation of the one and the many—from the primordial fundament of pure being the eternal objects prehend the myriad concrescent actual occasions, all of which is God.
According to this intelligent ordering, actual occasions concresce into an existence of manifest becoming in order to fulfill a myriad of diversely individual teleological functions while nevertheless in indissoluble relation to all other existent actual occasions. Thus,
“God, as well as being primordial, is also consequent. [God] is the beginning and the end . . . God’s conceptual nature is unchanged, by reason of its final completeness. But [God’s] derivative nature is consequent upon the creative advance of the world.
Thus, analogously to all actual entities, the nature of God is dipolar. [God] has a primordial nature and a consequent nature. The consequent nature of God is conscious; and it is the realization of the actual world in the unity of [God’s] nature, and through the transformation of [God’s] wisdom. The primordial nature is conceptual, the consequent nature is the weaving of God’s physical feeling upon [God’s] primordial concepts.”[12]
Nature is immanent with God, or the divine; the two are not separate.
Each occasion of God fulfills its individual telos according to the teleological requirements of the whole, be that an atom within a molecule, a molecule within a cell, a cell within an organ, an organ within a body, a body within a society, a society within a species, a species within an ecosystem, an ecosystem within a planetary biosphere, a planet within a galaxy, and so on and so forth. “The perfection of God’s subjective aim, derived from the completeness of [God’s] primordial nature, issues into the character of [God’s] consequent nature.”[13] And according to a process-relational philosophy of organism, that atom within the molecule within the cell within the organ is beholden to the teleological process of that organ, but so is it beholden to the telos of the animal whose body the organ belongs, the society and species to which the animal belongs, the ecosystem to which the species of animal belongs, the planetary system to which that ecosystem belongs, and even the galactic structure to which the planet belongs. Likewise, each of these organismic components of the whole organismic system are beholden to one another. An atom within a molecule within a cell within a blade of grass is beholden to the grass land within the ecosystem in which it resides, as well as to the animal which eats it for nourishment of its bodily organism, as well as to the animal which eats that animal, as well as to that animal’s telos within the encompassing ecosystem and galactic structure.
As Whitehead writes, “There is the vague sense of many which are one; and of one which includes the many. Also there are two senses of the one—namely, the sense of the one which is all, and the sense of the one among the many . . . We are, each of us, one among others; and all of us are embraced in the unity of the whole.”[14] The one which is all permeates and enfolds each of the ones in the many. This is the distinction between Being and becoming, both of which are inherent expressions of the substance of nature. There is a qualitative experience of simultaneously being a one and a many, and a one within the One, that subverts any sense of bifurcation or separateness. Thus, “The concept of the order of nature is bound up with the concept of nature as the locus of organisms in process of development.”[15]
But how is a momentary, potentially infinitesimal organism within one planetary ecosystem, for example an atom or an animal or a blade of grass, beholden to the swirling eonic telos of a galaxy or beyond? Whitehead argues for an ontology of consciousness immanent within all actual occasions such that each actual occasion, which together make up the myriad parts and whole of the organismic universe, experiences a quality of its existence, which he terms “experience,” endemic to it. Recall that “the consequent nature of God is conscious” and so accordingly, indeed, Nature and the Universe in its entirety is a living, conscious organism. It is this doctrine of mutual immanence that so radically defies the Cartesian-Newtonian bifurcation of nature into separate capacities of mind and matter, animate life and inanimate substance, and, consequently, God and the World. He writes, “This sharp division between mentality and nature has no ground in our fundamental observation . . . we should conceive mental operations as among the factors which make up the constitution of nature.”[16] All entities have a capacity for mentation, for consciousness, no matter how large or complex or how small or simple.
This, Whitehead argues, is the only plausible explanation for the existence of consciousness in the Universe. It cannot be surmised or explained that consciousness arises suddenly from nowhere in certain animate organisms but not all organisms. “The only intelligible doctrine of causation is founded on the doctrine of immanence. Each occasion presupposes the antecedent world as active in its own nature.”[17] In other words, because this is a process relational organismic universe in which all entities are necessarily implied in one another, if there is consciousness somewhere in the universe then there must be consciousness everywhere. Furthermore, if we cannot accept either a doctrine of external cause or divine interference to explain the existence and processual development of the universe, then some modicum of conscious agency must be implied in nature in order for anything to exist at all. “To explain any emergence at all, Nature must be conceived as an agent of its own evolution and not just a collection of inert stuff.”[18] Nature is alive; it is immanent with its own subjective qualitative experience.
As such Whitehead suggests an ontology of Nature that includes both mental and physical “poles” of experience, rejoining mind and matter as endemic to every level of experience within the universe.[19] He “avoids the modern bifurcation of Nature . . . by recognizing that every organic occasion or ecosystem of occasions—whether it be an electron, a bacterial colony, a sequoia, a bottle-nosed dolphin, a human civilization, a star, or stellar society (galaxy)—is constituted by both a physical pole inheriting the feelings of realized actual facts and a mental pole anticipatory of realizable eternal possibilities. Nature is thus a hybrid process inclusive of both physical and mental activities.”[20] However, in order to also avoid a monist substantialism in which all of Nature is presumed to be merely one conscious substance, he distinguishes the diversity of actual occasions within Nature as manifesting different telic experiences. “There is the dim qualification enjoyed by the lowest types of actuality. There are the clear, distinct qualities enjoyed by human experience. There is every stage in between, and there are numberless stages which human experience has never touched.”[21] Again there is the necessary acknowledgement of the diversity of things, of the many and the one.
This term “mentality,” therefore, is not meant to suggest a particularly anthropocentric cognitive capacity. Human beings, or even animate life, Whitehead argues, are not the only proprietors of mentation or consciousness. Rather, what has been presumed over centuries as human or animal mentation is simply reaction to sense-perceptions given by the physical body. Responding to Locke’s sensationalism, he posits that “the primary qualities are the essential qualities of substances whose spatio-temporal relationships constitute nature,” while those experiences apprehended by the senses are secondary, regardless of any capacity for self-reflexivity.[22] In other words, sense-perception is not the essential consciousness-eliciting force in the universe; rather it is a means and a byproduct of that consciousness. Likewise it is a mistake to qualify our humanness by our capacity for mental cognition, as has been the case for centuries under Cartesian dualism. “Clear, conscious discrimination is an accident of human existence. It makes us human. But it does not make us exist. It is of the essence of our humanity. But it is an accident of our existence.”[23]
The qualification for our existence, and that of all things in Nature, must, then, be predicated on something other than the capacity for sense-perception or human mental cognition. Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum” may have seemed captivatingly persuasive within the context of a liberatory 17th century idealism, but from the 20th century perspective accounting for the ecological, social, and spiritual desolation wrought by such a dualism, Whitehead thus proposes instead an ontology of experiential value as the basis of existence. “At the base of our existence is the sense of ‘worth’ . . . of existence for its own sake, of existence which is its own justification.”[24] It is this aesthetic, felt experience of value, which Whitehead terms “enjoyment,” that is the immortal Beingness at the foundation of all actual occasions. It is the “birth right” of all “things,” and indeed of the universe itself. “Each individual act of immediate self-enjoyment . . . these occasions of experience, are the really real things which in their collective unity compose the evolving universe”[25]. . . “Value is in its nature timeless and immortal. Its essence is not rooted in any passing circumstance . . .”[26] In other words, it is not in any subsequent detail of the secondary qualities, such as physical capacity or mental cognition, of any actual occasion or organism that existence is qualified. Rather, it is the bare fact of existence in the telic fullness of experiential “absolute self-enjoyment, creative activity, [and] aim”[27] which qualifies the existence of everything in the universe. Whitehead poetically proclaims that,
“It is the essence of life that it exists for its own sake, as the intrinsic reaping of value”[28] . . . “Our enjoyment of actuality is a realization of worth, good or bad. It is a value-experience. Its basic expression is—Have a care, here is something that matters! Yes—that is the best phrase—the primary glimmering of consciousness reveals, Something that matters.”[29]
To become re-acquainted with this sense of intrinsic worth within all things is urgently needed to bring healing and a sense of coherence, wholeness, and integrity back to our human relation with Nature, which necessarily also implies that with ourselves and one another. This is perhaps particularly true at a time in human history characterized by i) environmental desecration and the specter of species extinction due to the materialistic reduction of nature to dead matter and its subsequent exploitation for human interests under capitalism; ii) paralyzing social alienation, inequality, and rampant violence due to a doctrine of rugged individualism exacerbated by arbitrary divisions between people based on hierarchies of class, race, gender, sexuality, and belief; and iii) a deep spiritual malaise due to the desacralization of nature, life, and the relational interdependence of all things. On all levels of existence we feel ourselves torn asunder, fragmented from what is of true value, the “something that matters” that is our foundation and our telos, our being and our becoming.
It is this emergency that makes Whitehead’s ontology of aesthetic experience within a process-relational organismic universe so imminently necessary. As Segall writes, Whitehead elucidates a profound intuition “that the ontological bifurcation separating the physical from the psychical can be healed only through an aesthetic act of creative imagination, an act that allows us not only to think but to feel the world in a new way.”[30] Through feeling the world in this new way—immanently divine, inextricably interconnected, developmentally interdependent, and aesthetically vital—perhaps we can begin to halt the destructive machinations of four centuries of bifurcated existence. For if we do feel the world in this way then we cannot continue to extract natural resources or desecrate habitats with impunity without acknowledging the violence we are doing not only to others and the whole collective, but to our own selves as well.
“The key to the mechanism of evolution is the necessity of the evolution of a favourable [sic] environment, conjointly with the evolution of any specific type of enduring organisms of great permanence. Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide.”[31]
All things arise relationally with their environment, therefore to destroy ones environs is to destroy oneself. As long as we remain ignorant of our interdependence on the collective cosmos of which we are a part, we will only further our collective demise. Once we feel this inherent, intuitive tug of unity with our environment then we become aware of the violence we do when we deny it. Furthermore, we can no longer accept the illusion of separation between humanity and nature, or between any element of the living cosmos.
Likewise we cannot allow others to suffer needlessly from poverty, lack, or wanton violence, and we cannot continue to other those who exhibit difference from us on account of culture, nationality, beliefs, color, gender, sexuality, or any host of superficial idiosyncrasies of human experience. In other words, we cannot accept the fallacy of separation and difference within our own species or between individuals. We must instead recognize that “the whole question of how ‘one’ thing can know ‘another’ would cease to be a real one at all in a world where otherness itself was an illusion.”[32] In other words, the very concept of “other” is an illusion and an absurdity in a process-relational cosmology of organism. Any perceived difference is an abstraction of the consequent telic manifestations of actual occasions, and not substantially real at the heart of things. Our differences are merely the myriad masks that God wears in the concrescent process of becoming.
And finally, but perhaps most significantly, we cannot ignore or deny the immanent value-experience that is the ground of our own individual Being, nor accept the illusion of separation of the self from the all-encompassing oneness or wholeness that is God. “The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’ There is no such mode of existence, every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the Universe.”[33] There is no separate self divorced from the embrace of and responsibility to the whole of Beingness, and yet there is an experience of individual “things” as well as, moreover, the existence of self-reflexive awareness in Nature. This would seem to be an insurmountable contradiction: that individuality may yet exist and not exist simultaneously. But things are not always as they seem, and yet perceptive experience is nevertheless meaningful. It is meaningful that we should perceive the earth as flat, though we now know that not to be true—otherwise we would have no way of understanding or effectively functioning within our immediate reality of the earth as a flat plain. So too, it is meaningful that we should experience a sense of individual selfhood as the temporal vehicle for the active engagement with Nature.
As Whitehead writes, “each single example of personal identity is a special mode of coordination of the ideal world into a limited role of effectiveness. This maintenance of character is the way in which the finitude of the actual world embraces the infinitude of possibility.”[34] The personal identity of the individual, including the physical body, skills and capacities, genetic lineage, relational connections, attractions and aversions, hopes and dreams, memories, emotions, thoughts or opinions, is just an amalgam of actual occasions concrescing over the course of a single span of existence; the personal identity is thus temporal, subject to change and flux, life and death, and not an element of the eternal ground of being. So too, the human life is a temporal actual occasion which concresces into existence before disintegrating back to that ground in death.
Though we may be swept up in the dream of separation, the dream of individuality, the dream of a self which acts upon the manifest world by virtue of possessing a capacity for choice and free will, that is not the be-all-end-all of our existence. In truth such a fragmented self-perception is profoundly limiting, as it mistakenly restricts our frame of experience to our consequent nature, our secondary qualities of personhood, rather than allowing us to fully enjoy the wholeness and infinitude of our universal Being. Rather, “personality is the extreme example of the sustained realization of a type of value” [emphasis added].[35] Each creature is God incarnate through the sustained realization of its own self-enjoyment, its own value-experience, which is its telic nature. It is the nature of Nature to enjoy its existence. In other words, joy is the fundamental, non-negotiable fact and function of the universe; it is the meaning of life.
“Everything has some value for itself, for others, and for the whole. This characterizes the meaning of actuality . . . We have no right to deface the value-experiences which is the very essence of the universe. Existence, in its own nature, is the upholding of value-intensity. Also, no unit can separate itself from the others, and from the whole. And yet each unit exists in its own right. It upholds the value-intensity for itself, and this involves sharing the value-intensity with the universe. Everything that in any sense exists has two sides, namely, its individual self and its signification in the universe.”[36]
Therefore, we can no longer deny or shy away from the call to know, or rather to remember, that wholeness that we embody but of which we are only a finite concrescent part. Again, “we are in the world and the world is in us.”[37] Though it would not be exactly correct to say that we are contained in the wholeness of the universe, since that would denote an inner and an outer existence—the universe as a kind of enveloping outer shell and us, the concrescent parts, as inner—nor can we exactly say that we “contain” the wholeness of the universe within our individual entities, because the individual entity is merely a consequent abstraction of the substrate of being. Rather, it would perhaps be more accurate to say simply that we are that wholeness of the cosmos in our inextricable, immanent, and processual relation to everything throughout space and time.
“Actuality is the self-enjoyment of importance. But this self-enjoyment has the character of the self-enjoyment of others melting into the enjoyment of the one self . . . The main point of this description is the concept of actuality as something that matters, by reason of its own self-enjoyment, which includes enjoyment of others and transitions towards the future.”[38]
Thus, at the deepest level I am not me, nor am I exactly you, or that tree over there, or my sleeping dog, or a hydrogen atom at the center of the sun, or any one of the multitudinous microbes in the soil beneath my house, since all those concrescent occasions are mere masks of the true reality. But at the deepest level, beneath the mask, we are one and the same. “Wither thou shalt goest I will go…”
Finally, Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy of an immanent organismic cosmos cannot merely be understood as an intellectual exercise in metaphysics; it must become a lived experience, an aesthetic practice of feeling the interweaving interdependence of Nature, society, self, and spirit in an ever-changing, ever-developing tapestry of holographic wholeness. As Segall writes, “Epistemologically, feeling . . . must be granted an enhanced status as our primary mode of relation to the life of the cosmos, such that a rational cosmology comes to mean the same thing as a relational one.”[39] Moreover, as the principle of the all-pervasive value-experience at the base of existence, God cannot be conceived as disconnected from or transcendent to the material world. Rather, God is immanent to the world, whose creative act and telos is the World, the Universe, Nature, God incarnate. Such an ontology utterly rejects any presumption of dualism, the bifurcation of existence, or the illusion of separateness. All is wholeness—intelligent, intentional, agentic, alive—ever concrescing in the eternal dance of the pleasure of existence that is our individual and collective birthright.
[1] Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925/1960, 58.
[2] Ibid, 80.
[3] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 205.
[4] Thus offering an explanation for the phenomenon of quantum entanglement.
[5] Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, 3rd edition. Lulu Press, 2018, 42.
[6] Whitehead, Alfred North. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920/1964, 13.
[7] Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1933/1961, 157.
[8] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 227.
[9] Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925/1960, 176.
[10] Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, 3rd edition. Lulu Press, 2018, 42.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: The Free Press, 1929/1978, 345.
[13] Ibid, 345-346.
[14] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 150.
[15] Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925/1960, 75.
[16] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 214.
[17] Ibid, 226.
[18] Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, 3rd edition. Lulu Press, 2018, 89.
[19] Comparable to the Tao of ancient Chinese wisdom, as symbolized by the yin-yang, or taijitu.
[20] Ibid, 40.
[21] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 161.
[22] Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925/1960, 55.
[23] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 158.
[24] Ibid, 149.
[25] Ibid, 206.
[26] Schlipp, Paul Arthur, ed. The Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951, 684.
[27] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 208.
[28] Ibid, 184.
[29] Ibid, 159.
[30] Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, 3rd edition. Lulu Press, 2018, 13.
[31] Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925/1960, 109.
[32] James, William. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1904, 541.
[33] Schlipp, Paul Arthur, ed. The Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951, 687.
[34] Schlipp, Paul Arthur, ed. The Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951, 691.
[35] Ibid, 689.
[36] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 151.
[37] Ibid, 227.
[38] Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938/1968, 161.
[39] Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, 3rd edition. Lulu Press, 2018, 130.
The Waterslide.
(The following is from an upcoming book, Living In A Time of Dying: Cries of Grief, Rage, Love, and Hope, co-authored with William Douglas Horden, published 2021.)
I want to tell you a story.
It’s a story about a trip down a waterslide.
It was mid-August 2018, what seems an eternity ago, back when we could still take so many things for granted.
It was my friend Shockie’s 34th birthday. I met Shockie and her wife, Bombshell, through roller derby, and hence we always refer to each other by our “derby names.” For her birthday Shockie had invited a group of us—myself, Scratch, Scratch’s girlfriend Eileen, Tricki, Ziggy, and of course Bombshell—to rent tubes and go floating down a nearby river. I tend not to be someone who “does things,” per se. I’m more of a homebody—which is just another way of saying that I’m straight-up boring, which is the truth—but I had recently made up my mind to make more of an effort to nurture my friendships, especially with good, wholesome, creative, fun, and sincere people like the Shocks (as we called them), and I wanted to support and celebrate my friend on her birthday. So, with images of basking belly-up in the open sunshine, the cool fresh water tickling our toes, and with perhaps a drink in hand, I anticipated a pleasant afternoon in good company.
Then, on the morning of our special birthday outing the skies opened up with a deluge of rain and the threat of lightening which dashed our lazy dreams. I was sincerely disappointed, and we tried to brainstorm alternative ideas for possible indoor shenanigans. That’s when Shockie (to my utmost chagrin) elected that we should all go to the nearby indoor water park. (Yikes, I thought. I mean, WHAT FUN!)
Now, normally I wouldn’t be caught dead at a waterpark, indoor or otherwise. The very thought of it sets me on edge—all those people gathered in close proximity, everything damp, the pungent acrid smell of chlorine hanging in the air and slimy wet children screaming and running all over the place. No, thank you. But I wanted to make the effort to play nicely with others, make friends, and not be a spoilsport, so I set my trepidations aside, grabbed my bathing suit, and hopped in the car.
It was more or less exactly (as bad) as I had imagined. Entering the park was like running smack into a wall of hot, moist, sticky, vaporized chlorine. My lungs protested and my heart began to pound in panic as I gulped for fresh air (in vain). I tried to remind myself that if no one else was suffocating in here then neither would I and to just calm down and relax. (What fun!).
The high glass walls echoed with the shrieks of children, running amok from pool to pool, their wet feet slapping on the warm, glistening concrete. I surveyed the chaos dubiously, perhaps as Dante might some circle of hell. There were various different pools and features—a small kiddie pool where grandparents and new moms sat with their young toddlers splashing innocuously; a large wave pool with a simulated waterfall feature where children and adults in innertubes rocked languidly on the puny waves; a pool with low basketball hoops; a large faux-tropical wooden structure that would periodically dump a load of water on the gaggles of children climbing and playing on its scaffolding (I made a mental note to steer clear of that area); and several waterslides of different colors, a dinky light blue one, labeled “Category 1,” that was clearly for babies, and two larger twisty slides, yellow and red—Categories 2 and 3, respectively—for the bigger kids.
My group of middle-aged friends and I found a table where we could park our towels and bags before changing into our bathing suits and courageously—if a bit self-consciously, for our age—entered the fray.
The wave-pool was pleasant enough—disconcertingly lukewarm, and tame—but crowded and, quite frankly, boring. Before long one of my friends suggested we pick things up a bit by trying the slides and we all eagerly acquiesced, tramping over to the stairs leading up to the entrance to the twisty tubes. Upon reaching the first landing, however, I noticed a sign tacked next to the red and yellow slides that read, “only those under 120lbs allowed,” and I realized with slight chagrin that these slides were strictly for children and that I had not fit into this particular category for quite some time. It was at this point that it began to dawn on me that perhaps I was getting myself into more than I had bargained for.
But there was no turning back now. This is what one does at an indoor waterpark and I was trying to be a team player and go with the flow—to turn back now would have been just so square and boring, and too typical of an old me, a more anxious and inhibited me. So on up I went, dutifully plodding after my friends, a grown-ass woman scared to go down a silly waterslide, but even more scared to admit that she was faking it, desperately, this act of free-wheeling confidence. (…What fun…)
At the top of the staircase we arrived at a platform with two large holes in the wall, one colored dark green and large enough around to fit an adult human, and one orange and slightly larger to accommodate an innertube. These were labeled Category 4 and 5, respectively. The slides that I had anticipated riding were the ones for children whose twists and turns I could see and appraise for myself. But alas, those were not for me. These slides went outside the building, their contortions a mystery, before depositing their riders back inside the park into a pool two-stories below.
Standing between these two gaping holes stood the obligatory bored teenager, half-heartedly monitoring the slide-goers as they, one by one, got into position at the mouths of these menacing maws before disappearing with echoes of hooting glee into the unseen bowels.
Holding in mind the corresponding categories assigned to hurricanes, and given that I did not have an innertube, I chose the line for the lower and less ominously categorized green slide. Scratchy, Eileen, Bombshell, and Tricki had all carried innertubes with them, so they dispatched to the Category 5, while I queued up behind Shockie and Ziggy.
Shockie disappeared first with a howl, arms flown above her head in wild abandon.
Ziggy followed without trepidation in a perhaps more sensible corpse pose, arms crossed tightly over her chest.
Now I was the last one left standing on the platform and, without thinking too much about what I was about to do, slid my legs into that hollow maw. My hands gripped the edges of the wet plastic as I waited for the indifferent teenager to give me the go-ahead. But he was distracted by a group of kids clamoring on inner tubes next to me, eager to push off into the exhilarating plunge.
What if I went to soon? Would I run into Ziggy in the middle of the tube? Or come splashing out on top of her at the bottom? But surely it’s been long enough, I thought. If I waited any longer I might lose my nerve! And with that thought I steeled myself and took my hands away from the edges of the tube, leaned back, scooching my butt further down the slippery plastic, and began to slide irreversibly forward.
Inside the tube was pitch black, the dark green plastic emitting absolutely no light. I stared blankly into the darkness as I plunged with increasing speed, the only sensation the cool slippery water at my back, lubricating my descent, and the bump, bump, bump of the junction seams of the hard plastic sections of tube rhythmically knocking against the back of my head as I went, progressively faster and faster, turning this way and now jerking that way. It didn’t take long—a few seconds at most—for me to realize that I had made a horrible mistake, as my body was whipped from side to side, and then upside down in a loop-dee-loop, losing all sense of direction and spatial relation. I was twisting, spinning, shooting through sheer darkness with nothing but my breath to rely on.
“Just breathe,” I reminded myself. I tried to take deep steady breaths through my nose, despite the jerking and jostling—my mouth, jaw, and eyes all clamped shut, every muscle in my body taut with fear. The air entering and exiting my lungs was my only comfort and I leaned into it as a lifeline. “As long as you’re breathing,” I thought, “you know you’re not dying,” as my stomach lurched around another curve, through another upside-down loop, my limbs lost for a sense of gravity, for anything to grab hold of.
There was no stopping this. And no telling how long this groundless chaos would last. Rationally I knew it couldn’t go on forever, but still, in the heart of the uncontrollable twisting darkness, a deeply subliminal part of me still wondered: “what if this is forever?” And in that moment it might as well have been. In such a moment of terror and utter helplessness it almost doesn’t matter that or if or when it might end. Because all that matters in that moment is that what is happening cannot be stopped.
And in that moment, which stretches on for what might as well be an eternity, when I realized with gut-wrenching terror that the solid ground which I had always taken for granted was no longer there beneath my feet, I found a kind of secret doorway, a threshold, within myself. On the one side was the terror of this seemingly endless descent, this unraveling of everything I thought was stable and dependable about the world, and which crushed my chest in an icy panic; and on the other side was, perhaps paradoxically, a kind of freedom.
Between these two sides, I found, swings a door bearing that much maligned term: “Acceptance.” Or maybe it’s “Surrender,” which isn’t any better, with its connotations of powerlessness in defeat. We like to think that we are in control—of our minds, of our bodies, of our lives (and perhaps even of those of others)—such that to accept or surrender is to admit our submission and our powerlessness in the face of reality—of what, simply, is.
“But no! I must be free!” we exclaim. “I must be able to choose that which befalls me, my fate, my destiny!” And yet, here I am, half-naked shooting every-which-way through a pitch-dark tube with no recourse to stop it or choose any alternative to the current situation. (What fun.)
I felt the panic rise up in my chest like bile—
“Wait,” I thought, “is it bile? No, it’s definitely panic. (Oh thank god it’s just panic!)”
—as I clenched my entire body against this inescapable ordeal. “Just breathe,” I reminded myself again.
And there it was again, that door! With each steady, measured breath—as I careen through this twisting netherworld—the door swings open and I glimpse what is there on the other side of this infernal ordeal. With each breath I can feel myself coming back to myself. Despite the panic I must not run away, must not abandon myself in this, my hour of need.
No, the running, the resistance to the terror itself only serves to feed the terror. My desire—no matter how true, no matter how justified, no matter how righteous—to make it stop, to rewind, to go back to the top, to the beginning, and make a different choice—in other words my insistence on control, on exercising my free will, dammit!—is the very torment of my current circumstance. And it will not have its way (except with me) so long as I feed it my fear.
Oh, the irony that my grasping for ultimate freedom should become instead this torment of fate, tossing me about like a ragdoll in the jaws of a Rottweiler, a turmoil of my own making to rival that of the tube! The irony that my need for freedom from my circumstance should hold me captive to it, while freedom should be found in the surrender to my fate, to what I cannot control.
But for the breath, that familiar touchstone, swinging wide the door of surrender and acceptance to the truth and totality of the moment, I might have lost myself to the panic of that swirling vortex, whether of my own mind or the tube I can hardly tell.
And then there it was, a light! The literal light at the end of the tunnel came rushing towards, engulfed me and, before I knew it, I shot out of the end of the tunnel and was instantly submerged. Blinking blearily through the stinging chlorine haze I could see nothing but bubbles and froth all around me. For one terrible moment I had no idea which way was up and frantically reminded myself that I don’t have to know, I only have to hold my breath until I float to the surface.
I came up sputtering and shaking. The first thing I saw was Shockie’s face beaming back at me with the ecstatic, stricken look of one who has just survived rites, a kind of baptism by fire—or water, as it were. I swam clumsily towards her, as one scrabbles towards a port in a storm. Land, ho! The world had righted itself once more—I could tell up from down, I hadn’t died, and soon I had my feet firmly back on solid concrete. I shakily hauled myself out of the pool and, on adrenaline-induced Bambi legs, tottered back to our table where I slumped gratefully into a chair and, still breathing heavily, took stock of what I’d just experienced.
~
I immediately recognized my trip down the waterslide as an almost religious awakening, or at the very least a profound metaphor for the uncontrollability of life…and death.
We are all on the waterslide. We are all in this erratic unpredictable, sometimes tortuous (and torturous), often serpentine conveyance called Life. We all suffer our own personal waterslides when our lives are turned upside down—the loss of a loved one, an illness, or other crisis of the soul; and we also struggle through collective waterslides—poverty and economic inequality, the rise of anti-democratic fascism and extremist factions, the fear of social and ecological collapse, and pandemics as well. I think most would agree that at this moment in history (which certainly goes beyond even the writing of this in 2020), it often seems that the tunnel is getting darker, the pace swifter, the turns sharper. We are continually wrenched by whiplash from one seeming catastrophe to the next—from one political corruption scandal to the next, from one police murder to the next, from one natural disaster to the next, from one more calamitous study on the effects of climate change to the next, from one social uprising to the next—without time for our hearts to mend, or our minds to get a grips and regain our equilibrium.
For many of those of us in the United States, we perhaps first felt this slippery slope on the morning of November 9th, 2016, when we woke up to fact that not only did a large faction of our populace willfully support forces of vocal white supremacist fascism, but that the very democratic process and ideal of majority rule, which is the foundation of our government, has been woefully corrupted. Since that day we in the U.S. have watched as blatant white supremacists and self-proclaimed neo-Nazis have marched through our city streets; as voting in predominantly urban, Black, democratic, and low-income communities has been significantly restricted; as environmental protections have been tossed aside in favor of wanton exploitation of natural resources for corporate profit; as the rich have been allowed to grow exponentially richer to a level unprecedented in history and so obscene it is literally inconceivable to the human intellect; as the majority of citizens, who struggle to maintain even the most basic standard of existence (I will not deign to call it “living”) are pushed ever closer to, and often passed, the brink of bankruptcy and houselessness; as Black, Indigenous, and peoples of color continue to be wantonly and unceremoniously brutalized, gunned down, suffocated, and enslaved—yes, enslaved, according to the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution—by the foot soldiers of our—and their—own government; as South and Central American refugees are illegally imprisoned and tortured; as suicide rates continue to rise across demographics of age, race, and gender; as we battle compounding epidemics of income inequality, health care disparities, and opioid addiction; and now, as a global pandemic has been let run rampant through our country, largely unchecked, causing the worst infection and death rates in the world, and only exacerbating and rendering bare the systemic injustices that already plagued this supposedly great nation.
To be fair, these realities are not necessarily a direct result of the outcome of the 2016 presidential election—most of them, with the exception of the Covid-19 pandemic, have existed to varying degrees, often under a shroud of secrecy and/or willful denial, for centuries. Certainly, the forty-fifth president of the United States did not invent the systems of imperialist white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy—which have existed since well before the founding of this country and are embedded in its history and political apparatus’. But the consequences of these systems of injustice have all grown demonstrably worse over the past several decades—concurrent with the neoliberal stronghold of Congress, the presidency, and the federal policies—and have either gotten exponentially worse in the last several years or have failed to be mitigated in any substantive way. The result, or perhaps the intent, of all this—rendered particularly acute by the willful inaction of the U.S. government response to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis—seems to be a rather bald-faced objective by those elites in power to simply let “the masses” die or kill each other off, whether by illness and disease, poverty, or violent factionalism along racial and political lines. Meanwhile the wealth and resources needed to survive in this “civilization” continue to be amassed by a privileged few.
This is, of course, nothing but a fool’s paradise, as there will be no survival on a dead planet (which includes Mars, by the way), and true wealth has always been measured not in hoarded resources but in robust relationships of community solidarity. The joke’s on them…I guess.
But thus far I have focused on the story of the United States, though many of the themes elucidated above run rampant through many if not most countries, as well as the corporate stronghold on business and industry world-wide. The more recent descent of U.S. politics and society into an experience of near-apocalyptic loss of normalcy and control has been jarring to many (particularly white, middle-class or affluent) Americans, but many peoples the world over have already been experiencing these crises for a long time yet.
Across the globe the vast majority of the world’s population has been kept in extreme poverty, left vulnerable to disease, starvation, and various forms of modern slavery. Many have been forced to flee their homes, their lands, or their countries, due to the ramifications of the often compounding forces of colonialism, dictatorial fascism, civil and international wars, and climate disruption. These people have already lost or been forced to leave behind any semblance of normalcy, comfort, familiarity, or control over their circumstances, instead taking the risk of finding new communities, new opportunity, and new life in foreign countries amongst strangers in unfamiliar cultures. Those who do find homes elsewhere often face virulent racism, ostracism, and violence, while those who don’t end up foundering in barely survivable, inhumane refugee camps—that is, of course, if they survive the migrant passage at all.
Each of these stories is a trauma. We feel ourselves—and our world—slipping, losing our grip on the familiar, on what once seemed stable and constant, predictable, controllable. We find ourselves collectively falling, plummeting to an unknown end by some unknown and rapidly changing trajectory. We are all on this waterslide, together, with no indication of how or when it will end.
~
The waterslide, this experience of a dark plummeting groundlessness, is what some might call fate. It is what is; that which we, puny humans, have no recourse to stop or change. The terror induced by such an experience grips us at our very core and sends us into psychic spasms of panic and resistance. We clamor for some relief, some exit, any way to be free of the torment of living in such a violent and unjust world.
In our struggle to get away from this reality, from the simple, inescapable totality of what is, we often end up carelessly abandoning ourselves—furiously repressing or contemptuously turning away from our own sensitive hearts stricken with terror, grief, and rage—as we rail against our own impotence in the face of untenable circumstances. We feel utterly powerless, trapped, like a wounded animal, a hopeless victim of a cruel world.
And yes, perhaps there is some truth in this. No one of us has the power to change any of the litany of injustices and abuses that we encounter in this world, or in life in general, much less that ultimate injustice—the fact that all things die, that every sacred event, every unique being, every novel creation of the universe, will inevitably be irrevocably lost.
This is, of course, the ultimate symbolic significance of the waterslide as an allegory for the uncontrollable inevitability of death, of the loss of that which cannot be replaced. Which is also what perpetually breaks our hearts and inflames our senses with rage when we witness lives and Life so recklessly, callously, and casually treated as expendable. It is unconscionable. And yet, here we are, naked and afraid, plunging through this wretched nightmare with no recourse to stop it. (And no, it is no fucking fun.)
It is true, we cannot resist the often cruel hand of fate, and doing so often risks doing more harm than good, as we thrash against our constraints. In truth it is that very resistance to circumstance, to what is in any given moment, that exacerbates our torment into a frenzy of panic and powerlessness—it is the desire, the need, to make it stop that turns the ride of Life into some sort of torture device, and thereby confirms our victimhood; or, in other words, “seals our fate.”
And from this position, from this perspective, we are powerless. But that is not the only truth. Because we always have within us the freedom to choose how we respond to circumstances, to fate, to the world, and Life, as it is. But such a choice is never a done-deal, because it must be constantly made afresh in each new and ever-changing moment. Such choice, such freedom, requires one bring a core of and commitment to integrity—which is the very opposite of compulsion—as well as conscientious self-awareness to every thought and action.
And it requires that one accept and surrender to what is, to fate. Resistance breeds resistance; war breeds war. Acceptance and integrity allow for action imbued with sincere intention, rather than simply rote or compulsive reaction. Moreover, surrender is an act of faith. It is not only an acknowledgment but a co-creative conception of (and with) the divine in everything. In surrender we not only find ourselves held in the sacred embrace of divinity, but we are responsible for embodying and manifesting that divinity as immanent to the living world.
This is crucial. It is a vital and reciprocal, co-creative, collaborative way of re-ensouling an enchanted world and cosmos, as well as of envisioning a new mode of existence on this planet. In truth, our cosmos has always been and remains immanently enchanted—as ancient and indigenous wisdom traditions teach us—but it has become dis-enchanted within the dualistic materialism of the modern Western, imperialist white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchal worldview.
We cannot continue doing things the old way, the way that has sought to divide and conquer, exploit and exterminate, leaving us broken, broken-hearted, and enraged. We cannot dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools. We must envision and have the courage to respond in radically new ways to the crises we face.
Instead of grasping for equilibrium in a broken system and world, we must have the courage to stay in disequilibrium, to let ourselves fall and perhaps fall apart, to embrace the collapse of all we knew and relied upon before, and instead lean into the faith that there is something more than this, something bigger than us puny humans with our catalogue of mistakes, and possibly even something greater to come.
This is not to say that the fear, pain, and loss that come with the fall are not real, are not devastating, are not significant. They are. And what—or who—may be lost in the process is inviolably imbued with immeasurable worth, and thus cannot be replaced. Rather than resist the inevitability of such losses, rather than deny or ignore, repress or evade the agonizing reality of suffering, uncertainty, and, yes, even death, there is always the possibility of not just finding but creating another doorway, another way of relating—from our own sensitive hearts ringing with love, courage, and hope—to this thing called Life.
And then, when the light at the end of the tunnel finally comes, we will not come sputtering up from the depths only to find more of the same—it will not be the violent, broken world we left behind. We will instead have created a portal and crossed a threshold into a new world and a new way of living in it—with ourselves and with one another—which is no longer predicated on fear, division and competition, scarcity and exploitation, violence and cruelty, but on integrity and faith, trust and solidarity, compassion, forgiveness, and Belonging.
We will still—always—be on the waterslide, but no longer will we feel powerless to fate; rather, we will know not only our own resilience and capacity for acceptance and surrender in the face of circumstances outside our control, but we will also be able to find joy in the exhilaration of the ride.
The Paradox of the Rider and the Elephant.
(The following was written in the summer of 2017, as a final paper for the Psychology Bachelor’s Capstone course at Lesley University.)
One of the fundamental questions in the study of psychology is the relationship between mind and body, nurture and nature. How much of our experience is fated by our inherent biological physiology and how much can we affect through the exercise of conscious free will? The bridge between these two seemingly dichotomous worlds is, many argue, perception.
It is now widely recognized in many fields, from quantum physics to psychology, that perception affects reality. A quantic entity may act as either a particle or a wave depending on the perception of the observer. That is to say, if one expects to see a particle then one will see a particle, while if one expects to see a wave then the quantic entity will appear as a wave. Psychologically, this equates to mean that the intervening component between nurture and nature, or between one’s environment and one’s physiology, is perception.
In fact, this is the basis of evolution: an organism adapts its physiology in response to sensory signals (via perception) from its environment. Thus, it is posited that our capacity to adapt psychologically to our experiences of environmental stimuli is also mitigated by our perception of such experiences. As Haidt (2006) writes, “Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world” (p. 23). A rather bold and audacious claim, to be sure, but one that is the very backbone and foundation of positive psychology theory which seeks to facilitate greater happiness and wellbeing by encouraging more positive and, presumably, healthful perceptions to bridge the gap between mind and body.
In his book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006), Haidt employs an analogy for this mind-body relationship as that of a rider on an elephant, wherein the rider represents the mind and free will while the elephant, obviously therefore, represents the body. With this analogy Haidt is attempting to ascribe the body its respective influence vis a vis the mind, i.e. that the rider may be the one “on top” who is holding the reigns, but their control is primarily illusory while the elephant, in reality, is simply going to go where it wants, bringing the rider along for the ride. The question thus posed by Haidt, and contemplated by psychologists the world over, is how to control the elephant? How can the mind affect the body so that it doesn’t get taken for the proverbial ride by its own biology?
In answer to this conundrum, Haidt (2006) suggests that meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, and medication are effective means for “taming the elephant” (p. 35). Through daily meditation, he proposes, citing Buddhist philosophy, we can forego our “attachments” or desires and voila! The elephant no longer takes the rider where it wants to go because it no longer wants anything specific. Of course, this takes practice, a lot of practice, and practice takes time. His second recommendation, that of cognitive behavioral therapy, focuses on training the elephant, or perhaps more accurately the rider, in order to steer the elephant away from habitual patterns of behavior, but this also takes time. However, medication, which Haidt generically refers to as “Prozac,” offers a relatively “quick fix” by altering some of the biological hormones and neurochemicals that influence the body’s perception of and resultant responses to external stimuli. He thus disputes the oft cited concern that anti-depressant medications are, or indeed can be, overprescribed because “for those who . . . ended up on the negative half of the affective style spectrum, Prozac is a way to compensate for the unfairness of the cortical lottery” (p. 43). Comparing them to contact lenses, not dissimilar from the proverbial rose-colored glasses, Haidt argues that anti-depressants can be a “reasonable shortcut to proper functioning” for those who suffer the affliction of any level of melancholia.
Walker (2013) echoes this proposition, comparing what Haidt (2006) refers to as the “cortical lottery” to “‘slavery’ to the genetic endowment bestowed upon us by nature” (p. 187). He purports that the use of anti-depressant medications—what he calls “happy-people-pills”—therefore grants us greater autonomy—freedom from slavery, if you will, under the tyranny of our otherwise inescapable biology. He contends that, “happy-people-pills are autonomy enhancing because they allow us to take control of something deep and ubiquitous, our emotional states” (p. 190), i.e. the elephant.
But such control is an illusion. We never truly control the elephant and to believe so is hubris. If anything we may merely, and tragically, sedate the beast until it either reawakens in a rage at its mistreatment or withers away and dies, as all things eventually do. That is not control but postponement, deferring the inevitable in a state of suspended anesthesia. To attempt to sedate and control our emotional selves in this way is a form of violence, plain and simple. Wilson (2008) refers to this practice as “annihilating melancholia” (p. 4) and laments that “trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos . . . insinuates in the end that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as a weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill” (p. 7).
This gets to the crux of the problem with positive psychology and positive psychologists like Haidt and Walker, which is that they ascribe value judgments to people’s differing emotional and psychological experiences, dividing them between “positive” and “negative.” This inherently paints those in the latter group as wrong, broken, needing to be fixed, in effect negating any possible value that such an experience might actually purvey to the individual or to the world. If Van Gogh had “tamed the elephant” would we have gotten Starry Night? Would Herman Melville have written the great American novel Moby Dick? Would we have gotten the music of Mozart? Would Abraham Lincoln have dedicated himself to the fight against slavery and led America to its abolition?
This is not to glorify suffering, or to suggest that those individuals should have suffered for the benefit of the rest of us; each person deserves well-being, whatever that may look like and however that may manifest for them. But to suggest that every person who experiences some amount of melancholy in their lives should be medically altered for their own good is not only deeply disrespectful, condescending, and paternalistic, it is downright dangerous. The wholesale denigration, denial, and desecration of such experiences of suffering not only discounts, disparages, and delegitimizes the lived reality of those individuals who carry them, but it threatens to exacerbate such suffering by merely suppressing and further relegating it to the shadows of our collective existence. As Wilson (2008) says, “I for one am afraid that our American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life” (p. 6).
What happens when we forget that “essential part of a full life,” when we sedate the elephant? The effect is not less but greater dis-ease, greater suffering, because so long as we treat people as broken and wrong, rather than validating, accepting, and honoring the truth of their feelings and experiences, then we perpetuate their so-called “brokenness,” their woundedness, their trauma, rather than their healing.
By means of example, inflammation is the body’s healing response to sustaining a wound. A traumatizing impact or infection causes inflammation in the affected tissue, the purpose of which is to bring blood flow with its oxygen and antibodies to the site in order to facilitate healing. Taking anti-inflammatory medications “helps” to relieve the swelling and its resultant pain, but it also hinders the body’s natural and necessary healing process. I, as a former roller derby athlete, have sustained many a sore and pulled muscle, bruises, twisted ankles, and even concussions. But I’ve learned that simply popping a couple of Advil and getting back out on the track doesn’t necessarily help, and sometimes it actually hurts. That doesn’t mean I never take painkillers—when I broke my finger and was in excruciating pain you better believe I took the meds they gave me—but emergency and extenuating circumstances notwithstanding, simply masking the wound with medication doesn’t allow it to heal and can even make it worse over time.
What if depression and melancholia are simply natural and necessary responses to psychic wounds? What if their function is to call attention to the “site” of the wound so that it can heal? When I or my teammates are injured on the track the best remedy is rest—sit the bench or take time off until healing is complete. Similarly, depression acts as a stop sign requiring a mental rest and recuperation. But just as with the Advil, Haidt’s (2006) and Walker’s (2013) suggestions that anyone with the slightest melancholia simply mask such feelings or experiences of sadness or trauma with anti-depressant medication doesn’t allow for or support the psyche’s natural signals that it needs healing.
Yes, perception affects how we relate and respond to our experiences, and our experiences, in turn, affect how we perceive reality. Changing perception can thus affect how we experience our reality, including the severity and depth of our past psychic wounds and our resilience in the face of new or future potentially wounding experiences. But simply “putting on rose-colored glasses” by taking “happy people pills” only changes our perceptions superficially.
That is to say, if the glasses can be put on they can also be taken off. And then what? If reality looked grim before seeing through artificially tinted lenses, how is it going to look after those lenses are lost? The true change in perception must come from within, must be forged and built into the internal structure of the individual’s psyche. Then it can never be lost or taken away. That is the true means of “controlling” the elephant, when the rider and the elephant realize that they are, and have always been, one in a symbiotic relationship that must be based on mutual respect, acceptance, and reciprocity.
There is no dichotomy between mind and body, nurture and nature, the rider and the elephant. This is the paradox of living. At the same time that we are fated by our inherent circumstances we also have the capacity to exercise free will and thus to change our perceptions, our reality, and yes, even, potentially, the world. But it is not the responsibility of the rider to tame and control the elephant; it is the responsibility of the rider to see the elephant as an extension of themselves, as themselves. Only then can they meet, move through, and respond to the jungle, by which is meant life, with dexterity, agility, and grace.
References:
Haidt, J. (2006). The happiness hypothesis: Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. New York, NY: Basic Books Publishing.
Wilson, E.G. (2008). Against Happiness. New York: Sarah Crichton Books.
Walker, M. (2013). Happy-People Pills for All. Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell.