Consciousness stretched, mind blown

What a fine headline to wake to, on this Earth Day: Biden Commits the U.S. to Halving Greenhouse Emissions. Maybe we'll finally be "woke" on the central existential challenge of our time. 

It's getting very near the end, today our penultimate scheduled CoPhi classes take up the middle chapters of Sick Souls, Healthy Minds and Fantasyland's discussion of virtual reality, Disneyfied nostalgia, and (echoing Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up) the reluctance of so many adults to embrace their maturity, resulting in the infantilization of the next generation (and the next, and the next). They're goin' to Disneyworld!

No less a fantasist than the great Hobbit-maker Tolkien said reason and fantasy can coexist, but only so long as people can still distinguish the latter from facts. That condition is clearly being challenged in a country (and world) where people increasingly assert their right not only to their opinions but their own facts.

Will it be challenged more, as Virtual Reality becomes ever more "ridiculous, sublime, wonderful, or awful?" Probably. I for one still hope the holodeck (speaking, as we were, of Next Generations) eventually comes on line. There will be VR addicts there, to be sure. (They're with us now, as is "VR addiction therapy.") Let's hope they all find a competent counselor Troi to help them through it, to help them be happy and conscious and successful.

John Kaag says of James that, once he turned the corner to freedom and a committed life (vocation, marriage etc.), he "was intent on being somebody, which often makes being happy rather difficult." Difficult because being somebody mean being successful in others' eyes, and others in America often share the gaze of the "bitch-goddess SUCCESS" and her "squalid cash interpretation" of the term. (Letters, 9.11.06)

James was loyal to his "real me," so he wasn't about to sell himself out if he could help it. But "adult life makes tracking down the 'real me' extremely tricky." That's why he placed such a premium on developing sound habits. Like Aristotle he knew, "we are what we repeatedly do." How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, as Annie Dillard said (and Maria Popova endlessly and righteously repeats). "We are spinning our own fates," and "the point of life [is] to recognize the power of habit, but then to guide it and overcome it," to "set goals and strive for undetermined outcomes." We may loose, we may win, but we will never be here again... So don't take it too easy. 🎵

[An irresistible aside, and a commiseration: "teaching duties have really devoured the whole of my time this winter."]

"An emotion is not a ghost in a machine," it's a physiological event before it's a feeling. That's according to the James-Lange theory of emotion. "We don't laugh because we're happy, we're happy because we laugh." Is that "bass-ackwards" or is it just another endorsement of the philosophy of as if?

And then Kaag talks about discovering yoga, a kind of "emotional and physical spring training" that he now does in the spirit of James's Victorian remark that we should make ourselves "do at least two things each day that he hates to do." Maybe that helps summon "deeper levels of will power," or maybe it just slows you down enough to focus your attention on the living present. Either way, it's a gift.

James's father died in 1884. He sent a wonderful farewell letter. 

We have been so long accustomed to the hypothesis of your being taken away from us, especially during the past ten months, that the thought that this may be your last illness conveys no very sudden shock. You are old enough, you Ve given your message to the world in many ways and will not be forgotten... As for the other side, and Mother, and our all possibly meeting, I cant say anything. More than ever at this moment do I feel that if that were true, all would be solved and justified. And it comes strangely over me in bidding you good-bye how a life is but a day and ex presses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good-night. Good-night, my sacred old Father! If I don t see you again Farewell! a blessed farewell! Your WILLIAM.

The next year, the Jameses lost a child, Herman ("Humster") to whooping cough and pneumonia. The experience gave James "the taste of the intolerable mysteriousness of this thing called existence."

The wonderful "felt 'inside'" mysteriousness,"personal, continuous, and changing," is evoked by the stream of conscious experience. That's what we're supposed to be attending to, when we get our attention under control and begin to live in freedom.

Thoreau said "only that day dawns to which we are awake." So he was "woke," aware at least of the allure of wakefulness. Are we? Do we mean quite what he meant, when he said "morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me"? Recall, he also said those who do not keep pace with their companions are fully entitled to step to the music they hear. Being woke in the modern idiom can sound more lock-step than Henry might have found congenial. 

James was a nitrous oxide philosopher, once at least, but his inspiration and Laughing Gas revelator was one Benjamin Paul Blood, a pluralistic mystic and one of countless eccentrics whose peculiar angle of vision James found instructive and intriguing. He didn't just talk about gathering every point of view, to fill out a comprehensive vision of the multiverse, he tried to actually do it. Blood gave James his famous near-last words. "What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it?"

And that could be our conclusion today, but I'd rather end with the pretty picture of James's beloved "wild American country" at the foot of Lake and Mount Chocorua. 

He loved his summer house there too, with its "fourteen doors, all opening outwards" - much like her brother, said sister Alice. 

Visiting the place in 2010 with my friends in the William James Society was tame and civilized and utterly unique among academic conferences. It "stretched the bounds of consciousness" and stands out in the great and mysterious onrushing streams of experience.