Reinhold Niebuhr's 'serenity prayer' makes a lot of sense: "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."
However, our society's materialist dogmas assure us that we can, or it's just a matter of time when we'll have the knowledge & technology to control everything. AND we have to, because our happiness depends entirely on the quality & quantity of matter we accumulate. So we work desperately to accumulate stuff because materialism also tells us that life is random & meaningless. However, this nonsense is just our left hemisphere's inability to see the fact that it cannot control everything: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/ So it often takes a major traumatic event for the left hemisphere tosurrendercontrol, and allow the right hemisphere to re-establish balance & help us live wisely in the real world.
"Consider reflecting on what the word surrender means for you. It does not mean resignation or giving up, but rather it suggests letting go & trusting the moment, whatever arises. An attitude of surrender invites a sense of strength & ease. It suggests having faith in something beyond your limited self, something that helps when you’re living with forces beyond your control." Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle. “Ten Thousand Joys & Ten Thousand Sorrows. A Couple’s Journey through Alzheimer’s.” Penguin, 2008.
"Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor. Perhaps, in a way, that's where humanity is now: about to discover we're not as smart as we thought we were, will be forced by life to surrender our attacks and defenses which avail us of nothing, and finally break through into the collective beauty of who we really are."Marianne Williamson
“With age comes wisdom. But sometimes age comes alone.” Oscar Wilde
Aswe age, especially as retirement rolls around, diminishing physical & mental competences, illnesses, and death of friends & loved ones suddenly starts to feel very real & very personal. How little control we actually havehits like a brick. Dylan Thomas' "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" is, at one level, something we can empathize with, while at a more mature level, it's a pathetic, useless response to this stage of life. Compare it with the wisdom in Reinhold Niebuhr's 'serenity prayer.' See: "Successful Aging" http://www.johnlovas.com/2011/12/successful-aging.html
“We suffer to the exact degree that we resist having our eyes and hearts opened.” Adyashanti
“The greatest treasure comes out of the most despised & secret places… This place of greatest vulnerability is also a holy place, a place of healing.” Albert Kreinheder, “Body and Soul: The Other Side of Illness"
I HIGHLY recommend this informative, well-written book to help free those who are beginning to realize that their worldview & self-concept is a prison, rather than a safe house: Michael Pollan. “How to Change Your Mind. What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.” Penguin, 2018.
"… people who have a deep conviction and belief in a transcendent reality are better able to disconnect from the idea that the body and its ails are ‘all there is.’ By connecting to a higher power – however one experiences this or chooses to define it – we bring forth our inner sense of innate wholeness. We are able to see ourselves as spiritually perfect, even when suffering ill health. This promotes our ability to reconnect with our implicate patterns of health.” M.J. Abadie. “Healing, Mind, Body, Spirit.” Adams Media Corporation, 1997.
“The only way that someone can be of help to you is by challenging your ideas.” Anthony de Mello SJ, “Awareness: Conversations with the Masters” Image, 2011.
“Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there's another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn." Adam Grant. “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know.” Viking, 2021.
Below is a very brief excerpt I transcribed from Iain McGilchrist's introduction (bottom of page) to his 2,997 page book, "The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World," whichsheds light on the basis of many of our problems today, including short attention spans, environmental destruction, populism, materialism & meaninglessness:
“This book is an attempt to convey a way of looking at the world quite different from the one that has largely dominated the West for at least 350 years – some would say, as long as 2,000 years. I believe we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, and chosen to ignore or silence the minority of voices that have intuited as much, and consistently maintained that this is the case. Now we have reached the point where there is an urgent need to transform both how we think of the world and what we make of ourselves. Attempting to convey such a richer insight is the ambition of this book. We have been seriously misled I believe, because we have depended on that aspect of our brains that is most adept at manipulating the world in order to bend it to our purposes. The brain is importantly divided into two hemispheres. You could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us apprehend and thus manipulate the world; the right hemisphere to comprehend it, to see it all for what it is. The problem is that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control, militate against a true understanding of it. Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it, as proof that we understand it. But that is a logical error. To exert power over something, requires us only to know what happens when we pull the levers, press the button, or utter the spell. The fallacy is memorialized in the myth of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’ It is hardly surprising therefore, that while we have succeeded in coercing the world to our will to an extent unimaginable even a few generations ago, we have at the same time wrought havoc on that world, precisely because we have not understood it. This book then is about the nature of reality. It’s about how we are equipped by our brains to try to understand it, and what we can learn from that. It’s about the approaches that are available to us to gain an understanding of reality, given that equipment. It attempts, consequently, to give an account of reality that seems truer to the evidence than the one to which we have long been accustomed, one that is far-reaching in its scope and consistent across the realms of contemporary neurology, philosophy and physics. And from that follows an account of who we are, on which nothing less than our future depends. What in particular I offer here is a new synthesis of philosophy and science, which I believe is importantly and excitingly liberating to both parties. As a rule philosophy and science go on as if the other did not exist. Scientists tend to see philosophy as a luxury they can’t afford to get involved with, a ball and chain that will slow them down in their race for the next discovery; philosophers, to see science as somewhat beneath them, and in any case irrelevant to the ponderings of the mind on itself. But as the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger put it, ‘In science and humanism, it seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said, the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field, has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge, and only in as much it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, “Who are we?”’ Here, Schrödinger is remembering Plotinus, one of the greatest of Greek philosophers. But his point is of contemporary relevance, that it is impossible to overstate. Seventy years on from Schrödinger’s pronouncement, specialization makes it even harder to expect more than a tiny handful of scientists and philosophers to be in a position to venture into a genuinely new understanding of their, in reality, common enterprise, one that has the potential hugely to enrich both parties. When any attempt is made to reach out a hand across the distancing void, it is almost invariably an exercise in reinforcing the status quo: the scientists telling the philosophers that they find only machinery, and the philosophers reflecting back to the scientists that a mechanistic view is the best option on offer. Since what you find is a product of how you attend, this is a more or less pointless exercise in making sure that both parties sink to the bottom in the shortest possible time. Philosophy is engaged in weighing evidence so as to decide between conflicting ways of understanding the world, each of which has something to be said for it. This is why philosophy never ends. But what if among the evidence, there was some way of recognizing a particular take on the world as not just floating in a contextual void, but rather the predictable result of paying a quite particular kind of attention to the world? And what if we happen to know a great deal about the evolutionary purposes and the consequences of such a way of attending, including what weight we should attach to its findings? And what if such insights gained from science, and explicated by philosophy, could be applied in turn to the science of mind itself. Then might we not begin to see a fertile symbiosis of philosophy and science, helping one another, each turn building on the next to rise to a new, more truthful vision of who indeed we are?
Rethinking some assumptions At the core of the contemporary world, is the reductionist view that we are, Nature is, the earth is nothing but a bundle of senseless particles, pointlessly, helplessly, mindlessly colliding in a predictable fashion, whose existence is purely material, and whose only value is utility. Neither Plotinus nor Schrödinger would have been impressed. I cannot remember a time when I thought that this sounded at all convincing, and a lifetime of thinking and learning has nothing to allay my skepticism. Not only is it mistaken I believe, but actively damaging, physically to the natural world, and psychologically, morally and spiritually to ourselves as part of that world. It endangers everything that we should value. Reductionism can mean a number of things, but here I mean quite simply the outlook that assumes that the only way to understand the nature of anything we experience is by looking at the parts of which it appears to be made, and building up from there. By contrast, I believe that the whole is never the same as the sum of its parts, and that except in the case of machines, there are in fact no parts as such, but that they are an artifact of a certain way of looking at the world. For this reason, it is every bit as true that what we call the parts can be understood only by understanding the whole to which they belong. And with the reductionist outlook, goes determinism – the belief that if we knew enough about the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, we could predict everything that happens from hereon in, including your every thought, desire and belief. Even if contemporary physics did not demonstrate that this is an impossibility, there is a problem with this kind of argument. Reductionists and determinists unerringly fail to take account of the fact that their own arguments apply to themselves. If my beliefs are nothing but the mechanical products of a blind system, so are all views, including those of the reductionist. If everything is already determined, the determinists’ tendency to embrace determinism is also merely determined, and we have no reason to take it seriously, since we’re all determined either to believe it or not already. As the philosopher Hans Jonas observed, ‘There is an unspoken hierarchical principle involved. The scientist does take man to be determined by causal laws, but not himself where he assumes and exercises his freedom of inquiry and his openness to reason, evidence, and truth. His own working assumptions involve free will, deliberation and evaluation as aspects of himself, but these qualities and capacities are stripped away from, and denied to the human object or thing that he is inspecting.’ If it were not for the fact that this world picture is mistaken, you might argue that we ought nonetheless to man-up and accept it. But it is, as I hope to demonstrate, massively mistaken. My aim is to show the reader the magnitude of the error, and its consequences. I say show, because I cannot more than anyone else prove anything finally and irrefutably. The material with which we are dealing makes that impossible. But rather I wish to take my reader, by degrees, to a new vantage point, one built upon science and philosophy, from which in all likelihood the view will appear at the same time unfamiliar and yet in no way alien, indeed rather the opposite, more like a homecoming. From there, the reader must of course make up his mind for himself. ‘To put the matter in a nutshell,’ wrote the philosopher Frederick Wiseman, ‘a philosophical argument does more and does less than a logical one. Less in that it never establishes anything conclusively; more, in that if successful, it is not content to establish just one isolated point of truth, but affects a change in our whole mental outlook, so that as a result of that, myriads of such little points are brought into view or turned out of sight as the case may be.’ Such a whole shift of view, rather than the adjustment of a few points within a familiar landscape, is what a hope for my reader. And that process must begin with the very idea of things. ‘The world is not just a set of separately-existing localized objects, externally related only by space and time,’ writes Tim Morden, professor of philosophy and physics at NYU, something deeper and more mysterious knits together the fabric of the world.' Indeed, according to Richard Conn Henry, professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins, to see the universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things. Reductionism envisages a universe of things, and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter. However, I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related, that the relationships don’t just connect pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the things, which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with. That is because what we are dealing with are ultimately relations, events, processes. 'Things' is a useful shorthand for those elements congealed in the flow of experience that emerge secondarily from, and attract our attention in, a primary web of interconnections. I have nothing against things, provided we don’t see them as primary. In our ordinary way of thinking, things must be established before there can be relationships, and so this about turn would seem paradoxical. But as I shall explain, paradox very often represents a conflict between the different takes afforded by the two hemispheres. However, we must also be prepared to find as Neils Bohr recognized, whereas trivial truths manifestly exclude their opposites, the most profound truths do not. This is itself a version of the realization that what applies at the local level, does not necessarily apply in the same way at the global level. The failure to observe this principle underlies some of the current misconceptions of both science and philosophy. I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but ratherin a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to re-present, what first a presence is, to the right hemisphere. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a virtual image – an infinitely thin, immobile fragment of a vast seamless, living, ever-flowing whole. From a standpoint within the representation, as a necessarily diminished derivative of it, we see reality as merely a special case of our representation, one in which something is added in to animate it. In this it is like a cine film that consists of countless static slices, requiring a projector to bring it back to what at least looks to us like a living flow. On the contrary however, reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a devitalized version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special wholly atypical and imaginary case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life. The re-presentation is what one might call a limit case of what is real. Stepping out of this world picture and into the world, stepping out of suspended animation and back into life will involve many of our perhaps cherished assumptions."
