Returning to the World

Image Credit: NASA

I have just finished Martin Buber's extraordinary work, "I and Thou", and am still reeling from the experience. Every page in my book has been underlined, notes scribbled in the margins - confirmations, questions, refutations (yes, I'm one of those sacrilegious souls who writes in books). So here is one passage that left me deeply thoughtful about how we talk about "progress" and "development". This passage helped clarify for me where the true evolution of humanity is leading - first into our depths, then back into the world:

"The sickness of our age is unlike that of any other and yet belongs to the sicknesses of all. The history of cultures is not a stadium of eons in which one runner after another must cover the same circle of death, cheerfully and unconsciously. A nameless path leads through their ascensions and declines. It is not a path of progress and development...but only the unheard of return - the breakthrough. Shall we have to follow this path all the way to the end, to the test of the final darkness? But where there is danger what saves grows too." (Emphasis added.)

Buber speaks of "the unheard of return" - meaning our return to the actual, lived world of human encounters and relationships. For Buber, this is the essential direction of all true change - returning to the world from a place of aloneness, struggle, alienation. Of course, we must first descend into our darkness before we can return. But it is the process of return that redeems our darkness, gives it meaning, and ultimately, heals us.

Non-Integration Is No Longer an Option

"The one who is always trying to discover the unknown,

Could not discover himself.

The one who captured the rays of the sun,

Could not fill the void of his own life.

The one who illuminated the world with lanterns,

Failed to realize the darkness of his own heart.

If there is darkness in one's own heart, what is the use of light on the outside?"

- Allama Iqbal, "Filling Our Void"

There is always the question of whether you can separate an artist from his/her work. Or a great leader from his/her confused or sordid persona life. In the past, this separation was possible. In some respects, it still is. But we are swiftly moving into an era when the divorce between Work and Source will not be acceptable or even desirable. Non-integration is no longer an option.

I believe this is true for several reasons. First, there is the revolution in the means and speed of communication. In the past, information was very limited. We knew about people through word of mouth, through their own personal correspondence or memoirs, through other people's recollections.

Today, technology has so blurred the line between personal and public that many artists and leaders are confronted with the details of their "private" lives - whether true or fabricated - in almost real time, and before a global audience. It is becoming increasingly difficult to watch a film or policy debate without making even subtle character judgments: "Oh, he's the one who had an affair with..." "She was involved in that hit-and-run..." Even if the information is false, life in the public eye requires much greater vigilance to preserve one's reputation.

Second, and beyond self-preservation, there is a deepening thirst for honesty, sincerity, and heartfulness in art and leadership. In the past, people were content with making a living, or if they were hungrier, with the search for "meaning." Now, even meaning is inadequate. People are looking for meaning that is meaningful - which is not a truism. Many works of art have a kind of meaning - they can be conceptual, existential, or beautiful. Even ugliness and brutality, as witnessed in both politics and many commercial films, has a kind of meaning.

But this is not what people are seeking. In art and leadership, connection is everything. And connection cannot be faked. Without the integration of ethical living and creativity, connection is impossible. Why? Because connection rests, first, on contact with one's soul. And this bond is broken if a person is destructive of human relationships.

In politics, leadership without integrity is leading us farther away from our station as beings with a conscience and nobility.

In education, social services, and international development, ticking boxes and writing reports is no longer satisfactory. In fact, it is harming everyone from office workers to aid beneficiaries by talking about everything from "empowerment" to "sustainability" without one essential word...love.

In the arts, intellect and creativity divorced from humanity is producing much that is half-living, and much that is dead.

In religion, morality without relevance or role models is proving an empty ethics.

In science and academia, the highest aim has become to pick holes in each other's arguments. Personality politics is the name of the game, not collaboration, dialogue, or mentorship.

In industry and economics, the quest for utility and profitability leads to unceasing cycles of boom and bust because concepts like detachment, sacrifice, and service are not included in our models.

This is why I believe the era of non-integration must end. Because is becoming too painful to look at ourselves in the mirror without seeing, at the same time, the world we have created. 

Divided Mind/United Mind

I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of art today. Much of contemporary art and literature seems to suffer from similar ills - disorientation, dissatisfaction, disillusionment. Artists hold up a mirror to society, it’s true. So of course it makes sense that art should reflect the world’s turmoil and confusion. But can the artist sit back once she's held up her mirror and say to the viewer, “There. This is what you look like. Isn’t it dreadful?”

I think this is where much of art fails. It skims the surface without seeking the essence, or attempting to search for the cause and purpose of all this upheaval. Our fractured society is reflected in the shattered mind of the artist, who often dredges up his or her own internal battles to inform art that may be cathartic, but is rarely enlightening.

In the Bhagavad Gita, a seminal text of early Hinduism, Krishna instructs the warrior Arjuna on the ways of true life. He tells Arjuna that the divided mind is the source of suffering, and the cause of anger, attachment, and selfish desires. But the united mind enables us to shed anxiety, and to perform our work “as a man established within himself.”

I’m struck by this phrase, “a man established within himself.” It seems like this is what most of us are searching for - to be comfortable in our skins, poised, confident, and at the same time, un-self-conscious. And paradoxically, the more of our Self we find, the less it concerns us, and the more attention and service we can devote to others.

But how does the mind's unity or division relate to the state of art today? Much great art, it can be argued, stems from struggle - often the artist’s internal wrestling, but also external conflict. Perhaps a fully united mind could never have created Picasso’s Guernica, or Beethoven’s Fifth. Yet there is more than chaos in these works. There is also a drive toward empathy, honesty, and insight.

So perhaps the true artist is a person who is not perfectly at peace, but also does not surrender to confusion and chronic anxiety. Art that lasts is not purely a reaction to its time and place, though of course it is informed by both. And art cannot reside fully in the skin of its maker - though personality and humanity should both shine through.

Yet the beautiful and transcendent faces of art are often forgotten in a quest for cleverness and self-confession. Beauty? the critics scoff. That's so old-fashioned. And anything hinting at soul or spirit is looked at with skepticism if not outright derision.

This saddens me, because I feel that one of the primary tasks of the artist is to see the world with new eyes, without distortion but with love. And love is a dimension I find missing in much contemporary art. Love is a force of attraction, and attraction leads to unity. So perhaps the artist does not need to begin with a unified consciousness, but must have a great capacity to love, and an ability to translate this love into words or images that enlarges this capacity in others.

I'm not speaking of romantic love, of course, or even the Platonic ideal. The kind of love I'm speaking about is what the Gita calls 'devotion.' Devotion is love detached from any expectation of outcome or success. It is love coupled with hard work and service. It is a commitment to small acts of beauty that bring joy or understanding to people's lives.

Uncertainty Principle

Uncertainty Principle

"It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man."

~ Richard P. Feynman, Physicist

Humans are not comfortable with uncertainty. We like certitude, definition, direction.

Otherwise we feel like an unobserved photon of light - neither particle nor wave. 

Or perhaps both. 

I'm trying to enjoy my time as a photon, dodging direct observation, slipping between cultures and continents. 

The more I get to know London, the more I feel it is the Capital of Uncertainty, home to the (literal and metaphoric) homeless who are increasingly a global norm.

If you're like me, you hesitate when people ask "Where are you from?" or "What do you do?" I mean, how can there be one, simple answer to those labyrinthine questions!

For a small but growing band of professionals, there are simply no models out there for what we want to do. 

We are not (unlike many university departments) "interdisciplinary" in name only. We are connectors and integrators to the core. 

We gulp down knowledge from diverse sources, synthesize it, then spit out this spidersilk braid of different theories and paradigms - which, I believe, will one day be incredibly useful in pulling the world out of the deep pit into which it (or some of it at least) has fallen.

I think a lot of uncertainty stems from the fact that the entire world has entered uncharted waters, virgin territory. The old models don't work, and we don't have a firm enough grip on what the new ones should look like.

Yet there is a pioneering edge to this unknowingness. An edge of inventiveness and creativity that many people are beginning to explore.

But you still have people who look askance when you say, "Well, I have degrees in International Relations, Public Policy, Education and Philosophy - but I'm really interested in journalism right now. Also literacy and migration..."

Are you a dilettante? Some people wonder. Or just another example of one of those poor, lost kids who dabble in this and that before settling down to a nice stable job in accounting.

No! I want to shout. All these young people searching for themselves and their "calling" are not, generally speaking, self-absorbed (or at least, like most of us, only mildly so).

Because having a calling means answering a need, a need only you can fill. And you find that need by going deep down to the roots of your tree, where the little grubs and leaf moulds live, and finding that - goodness! - you actually are connected to this strange, wandering spacerock we call home. 

You discover that your head may be up in the stars, but your feet are fed by subterranean seas...

Being neither animal nor angel, neither atom nor cosmos, humans are paradoxes, bundles of contradictions.

But once we begin to make peace with ourselves as "between worlds", there is tremendous potential to be found.

For me, it's the tension between opposites that sparks originality and progress.

"Peace on earth" will not come when everyone looks and acts the same. Homogeneity creates weakness and disease - like crop monocultures that are highly susceptible to blights that can cause entire population collapse.

Hybrids are hardier and healthier (sorry for the alliteration), and usually much more interesting.

But hybrids are also harder to label, define, and stuff into pre-existing boxes.

So it comes back to uncertainty again - to being comfortable with new forms of life and work that may defy easy definition.

I like to think of uncertainty as the creative principle that underlies our universe.

In fact, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics - and therefore describes what's really going on "beneath the surface" of the physical world.

It basically states that the more precisely you measure a particle's speed, the less you can know about its location, and vice versa.

For me, the Uncertainty Principle is how the universe manages to be both measurable and mysterious at once.

At the subatomic level, the universe is just fluid enough to slip through our fingers when we reach out to grasp it.

It's the universe saying, "You can know this much, but no more..."

As physicist and historian Jacob Bronowski said, "The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited."

So it reminds us to be humble. 

It also reminds us to be alive.

Because for me, it's this fundamental uncertainty that is the secret engine of growth and evolution. It's what makes the universe expand.

It's what Emily Dickinson meant when she said, "Dwell in possibility."

Because uncertainty is just another name for possibility, for the freedom inherent in each speck of light, to choose where it's going - and how fast it will get there.

Vanishing Point

Vanishing Point

I had actually completed this entry, was on the verge of posting it, when I accidentally erased everything I'd written. So I've been staring at this blank page trying to reconstruct the "gems of wisdom" I had just finished polishing.

And then the irony struck me. This entry was supposed to be about the soul and the paradox of finding ourselves by losing ourselves, and my theory of how this works.

I called the entry "vanishing point" - which is a term for the spot on the horizon where two parallel lines seem to converge.

I have this idea that the human soul is such a point - a vanishing point in the self through which we experience other people, the world, the universe.

And then, just as I was getting carried away by the loveliness of this image - Poof! My words vanished.

I've been sitting here trying to wrest some lesson out of my frustration, and what I keep coming back to is: detachment. 

For weeks I've been feeling the need to exert all my energies and, through sheer strength of will, simply FORCE life's doors to open. I've been editing and honing and tweaking and basically obsessing over every step I make out into the world - little things like opening a Twitter account, publishing this website, applying for a job.

It just made me realise how our need for control binds us ever tighter to ourselves, in a destructive, self-referential loop. It seems that true progress can only come once we've let ourselves go, accepted our flaws, made peace with the fact that going out into the world means sometimes being wrong, getting hurt.

But how to do this? Accepting imperfection is all well and good in theory, but we are constantly bombarded by ideals, whether on the cover of magazines or in the pages of religious texts. How to accept necessary imperfection, while at the same time striving to be truer, kinder, wiser?


Obviously I don't have any answers (this blog is about questions after all), but I do think some clues lie in the idea I started out with: that of the soul as the vanishing point of the self.

For me, it's a relief to think that there is some small pinprick in me that is not-me. I don't know what it is exactly. All I know is that when I'm squeezing myself into some ideal mould of who I think I should be, this little place of not-me refuses to be squeezed. 


Like a doorway, it retains its integrity and offers me a glimpse of a world beyond myself, a world that needs me to just get on with the task at hand - with honesty yes, but not perfection.


And that tiny glimpse is all I need to square my shoulders, take a deep breath, and walk on.