Early this week I showed a friend something I published about twenty years ago, "The Mentor's Apprentice," about the way I went about mentoring technical writers. I was reminded how I'd come to title the paper.
I asked my friend whether she'd ever heard of Carlos Castaneda. He wrote a number of books about a Yaqui Indian shaman whose apprentice he claimed to have become, and I think he used the phrase, "sorcerer's apprentice." (But, come to think of it, so did Walt Disney.)
At any rate, I was thinking of Castaneda when I titled my paper. (Or my muse was thinking of him.)
Castaneda was a student at UCLA in the sixties, and so was my old friend Thom Green (1937-2002). Thom told me many years ago that he once saw Castaneda in the graduate reading room. Thom said he looked deeply troubled, haunted.
My friend who read my paper on mentoring said, "Carlos Castaneda's picture looks normal. Why did Thom Green say that he looked troubled?"
I told her, "Remember, our spirits change from moment to moment. Castaneda would probably not have sat for an official photograph (such as that used in the Wikipedia article) when he was troubled. At the moment Thom Green sighted Castaneda in the reading room, he thought that Castaneda looked distracted and under intense internal pressure."
"You're right, Morris. Our mood and spirit can change from moment to moment. It's harder for some people than others to maintain a normal or good mood and stay stable. I feel sorry for those who are troubled by things, people, thoughts, treatments...."
And then I started to itch.
I told her that, yes, I feel sorry, too, for all the poor creatures of the Earth who, while they might not be eaten by a predator higher on the food chain, nevertheless have an unhappy life with much trouble and woe. The fact of all of this suffering is, to me, the primary "proof" that God does not exist. No God we'd want to imagine would create such a dog eat dog world1. No morally upright, self-respecting human being ever would, at any rate.
In my own way, I too am troubled by all this suffering. Its mewing and keening continually haunt my hearing.
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- From Wiktionary: "canis canem edit [Latin], 'dog eats dog,' refers to a situation where nobody is safe from anybody, each man for himself."
Maybe you "itch" because you still manage to feel your inner compass rather than resorting to a simplistic life of learned cruelty like most people lead. Very few children see an animal and immediately think of killing it. That takes conditioning. Numbing.
ReplyDeleteTwo bits of information I have come across recently seem relevant to your post:
1- there is apparently some question of proper translation and therefore a question as to whether an alleged higher being granted "dominion" or "stewardship" to humankind. The potential gulf between those two different terms hardly needs mention.
2- in a recent poll a higher percentage of college students described themselves as vegetarians than called themselves Catholics
For what it is worth I am not an elitist raised at a distance from blood or blood sport. I grew up fishing and hunting and worked summers on a farm. I was adept at catching, shooting and butchering by age 10 but knew none of it felt right.
I have been a vegetarian for 30 years and a vegan for nearly 20 and have never felt better physically or psychologically.
Listen to your inner voice, no matter if it is an "itch" or just a quiet stillness.
Dear Motomynd, I very much appreciated your comment, and thank you for it. I forwarded it to ten or so friends, one of whom responded with a clever little essay that I take the liberty of sharing with you and others who chance here:
ReplyDelete"Food for Thought
"The deity we believe in later in life is by and large the one that sustained us for better or for worse in our formative years. Even when our beliefs don’t make sense or don’t feel right or don’t survive scientific rigor, we tend to blindly cling to them anyway. Only if we are able to step back, forget what we’ve been taught and what we think we know about our deity and then study the subject objectively will we be able to discover the truth.
"Oops I just noticed a misspelling. Please change 'deity' to 'diet' and reread."
The instinctive desire to survive, versus the urge to cringe desperately within a comfort zone against all logic, are at odds with each other. Yet they may rank right at the top of the list of traits most humans share with most animals.
ReplyDeleteIf a barn catches fire, horses in a nearby open field will often run from their place of real safety back into their place of perceived sanctuary, and not notice until too late it is on fire. A deer spooked by dogs and hunters will run straight away at first, then it will circle back to its doom at the very point the chase began. Humans mock such ignorance, yet at many levels most of them devote their lives to it.
The “deity” people believe in later in life, as your reader commented, may not make any more sense than a child hiding under a thin sheet because they fear monsters in the closet, but the belief at least allows them to cringe within the same comfort zone where they have spent (or wasted?) most of their lives. Of course, if you think about the “Western” perspective on life, most people think it is better to save desperately for a short retirement restricted by age and infirmity than it is to live well when they are actually young and fit enough to enjoy life.
I unfortunately could not find the link to post here, but I recently read a piece by some vaunted thinker who was writing about animal versus human intelligence. He made the point that children are pushed so they can get into the best pre-school, then pushed harder to get into the best elementary school, then the best high or prep school, so they can get into the best college then the best doctorate program. All so they can afford the best nursing home.
“Badgers don’t do that,” the writer noted.
Motomynd, thanks again. I liked this comment so much that I quoted it approvingly as a comment on Monday's "Thought for the day."
ReplyDeleteYou are a philosopher after my own heart.