The Myth of the Pelican & the Truth About Humans

 

There is an interesting bit of information about pelicans circulating among bird lovers. It holds that because of their diving into the water from heights up to 60 feet and at high velocity,

they eventually go blind from the accumulated damage done to their eyes when they

hit the water. In other words, some of the very things that serve their survival—their keen eyesight and diving ability—lead to their demise. Now I have discovered this is not true. It is a myth. First of all, not all pelicans dive for prey. Some of them paddle along the surface and do quite well catching dinner

from a sitting position, thank you very much. Those that do dive have protective sacs that cushion the

impact on their eyes. Pelicans have been around for roughly 40 million years without significant change in their anatomy, from what we can tell. So the design seems to work. Individual pelicans also live up to

forty years, which puts their diving scores far beyond those of any human Olympian.

So this is a myth, but we have many myths in human culture. They are not true on the surface, but they are true at the depth. An obvious example is the myth of Superman, which I have written about extensively (my first book, The Superman Syndrome, 2000, Authorhouse). When is the last time you saw a man flying around your city in blue tights with red boots? No, there is no superman, no superheroes, no X-men, no Prometheus giving fire to man (if you want to go all the way back to the Greeks). Nonetheless, a careful examination of these myths teaches us some valuable lessons. The preeminent one for me is that all these superheroes have some kind of terrible wound visited upon them. In the case of Superman, his entire planet exploded with his family on it when he was merely a baby. He had to endure a long solitary journey to his new home on earth. He grows up to be the Man of Steel. But there is something very interesting about this man. He doesn’t feel very much. He’s not the sensitive type. If he has any feelings, they seem to be a kind of detached amusement or righteous anger. But the deep truth is conveyed to us when we discover that in order for him to be in love with Lois Lane, he must give up his super powers. In other words, steel and feel don’t compute.

The myth is repeating to us a basic human truth. That when we undergo trauma in childhood, we tend to shut down. The capacity to feel, to yearn for connection is there under the surface but we are not fully in touch with it. We become grandiose. We become world-shakers, masters of the universe in business and politics, figuratively or literally insane artists who create magnificent paintings, sculptures, poetry, film roles, or athletic stars--all to feed the public hunger for someone to instill hope that we can triumph in the end.

But, like the teaching within the myth of the pelican, what we discover is that while being able to disconnect from feeling has allowed us to survive through the traumas of the childhood of our species and our individual childhoods, in the long run, this dampening of feeling puts us at risk of vanishing.

We seem to need crises to awaken our deeper sensibilities—like global warming today, or the suffering of our fellow man paraded before our eyes on evening TV such as happened during the Viet Nam war and the Civil Rights Movement or more recently, the devastation of Katrina on the people of New Orleans or the brutal suppression of human rights in so many countries around the world. But reacting to crises is a risky strategy at best. We are always trying to catch up. We don’t seem capable of grasping and acting on the essential truth by asking the core questions: why would humans treat each other this way? Why would humans treat the planet that has given them life this way? How could we be so insensitive to the evidence that surrounds us?

Jill Bolte Taylor, the Harvard neurologist who suffered and recovered from a left hemisphere stroke has written: “Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think.” (Her italics). Yes, we are birthed and experience are first most vulnerable years of life with our sensing and feeling brains (brainstem, right hemisphere, right limbic system), and have to wait for more than two decades for the left hemisphere “thinking brain” to completely come online. But it would probably be more accurate to say that we are feeling creatures that disconnect from our feelings under certain levels of trauma and stress, but that the feelings from which we disconnect to not vanish from our biological system, only from our conscious awareness. Then they exert tremendous influence on the further development of our entire physiological system, including how and what we think about later as the left hemisphere does develop. We are, in many ways, at war with ourselves—a heightened feeling capacity being “told” by other parts of the brain that it does not or should not feel so deeply. As long as we obey those messages which are delivered by life in general and often our quite specifically by our original caregivers and instructors as agents of a disconnected society, we will increasingly be at risk. As individuals, a lack of feeling will lead us toward less than best-case decisions, at the least. As a nation and a species, we will not feel danger until it is upon us—until we are nearly blind from the impact of so many dives in our frenzied pursuit of what we have come to believe is the real sustenance—material possessions, status, money, power. Even political freedom, while a necessary precondition, does not guarantee psychological freedom from this cycle of reinforced suppression of feeling.

So, do we ultimately perish from using the same strategy over and over again as the myth ascribes to the pelican? Is this a fatal glitch in our design—that in order to survive we must disconnect from our deep feeling nature, and that disconnection will render us incapable of responding to the very crises it impels us to create?

The jury is still out, out on the question of whether or not enough of us can see this and change

However, the jury is not out on how we make it through. Nowhere is it more exquisitely stated than by Martin Prechtel in his luminous book, Long Life, Honey in the Heart: “For me, true initiations would be impossible until the modern world surrenders to the grief of its origins and seeks a true comprehension of the sacred.” He goes on to discuss the perverse hunger that is the result of being disconnected from the simple feeling truths of everyday life: “…hunger for entertainment that hopes to fill the spiritual void of individuals and a whole culture with talk shows, corn chips, movies, dope, fast cars. That hunger is an emptiness that should be wept into, grieved about, instead of blocked and filled up” (my italics). What an irony. The teaching here is that, like the pelican, we have protective "sacs" near our eyes--tear ducts! The pelican has been here 40 million years. Homo sapiens has only been here 150,000. Our survival repertoire is still largely untested. Still, it is a sad measure of the breadth of repression that there are still large numbers of people in the psychological community that not only fail to give grieving its due importance as a healing process, but actively denigrate it.

As is so often the case, artists and soul-adventurers like Prechtel know better than so many of the people who purport to be experts on healing the human heart.. There will be no true transformation into the centuries-old longing for peace and collaboration among humans without our first feeling the brutal and sorrow-filled episodes of our origins—as a species and as individuals. No feeling, no tears; no tears, no truth; no truth, no vision; no vision, no potency to manifest what lives beyond political freedom—psychological and social freedom that cherish, respect and mobilize our essential nature as brilliant feelers.

C 2012 Bob

The Judgment on Judgment

     There is a popular notion that judging is bad. We have the biblical warning, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." We have Buddha saying, "Make no comparisons" which is what a judgment is. Therapists and self-help afficionados regularly coach us not to judge, not to make others wrong, but rather to listen and be present non-defensively. There's some real merit to this but before we get to that, I think we need to untangle
a few things.
      The human brain is wired to make comparisons and judgments, to know what is good water to drink and what bad; to know what is a good plant to eat and what bad, to know which animals can be approached without fear and which we should stay away from. It is also wired to use this capacity when interacting with other humans. First, who am I safe with? Who will nurture me and love me? Later, who is a good friend I can count on to be a good playmate. Still later, who is a good person to work with or for; who is someone I can trust with my effort, my money, my heart? All of these require that we hone our capacity to make good reality-based judgments. We are learning creatures, so we build on past experience. This doesn't always guide us to the best decision, but then, if we make a mistake, we have another opportunity to learn. So there is a critical, life-saving and life building capacity to the ability to judge well, to be good at comparing. Frankly, in my role as a consultant for individuals and organizations, I get paid for my clarity about the best options, and for my ability to grow that same acumen in others. Having good judgment about who to hire, what to pay them, how to put them in a situation where they can do the best for the company...not to mention having good judgment about how to bring a product or service to market, how to maintain a competitive advantage--all these are very important functions. As a mother or father, it's critical to have good judgment in discerning what food is actually nutritious, what schools are good, what teachers in those schools are the best, to what degree your children should be exposed to TV and other technologies...and so on, more important decisions where good judgment is called for.
      So let's not paint with too broad a brush and give judgment per se a bad name. It's part of our survival and thrival repertoire.  It can also really get in the way of a relationship, especially a love relationship. Maintaining a deep, empathetic connection with your partner is simply far more important than making judgments about him or her. I'm specifically thinking of how people tend to make their partners wrong or feel less than. What's the upside to that? Oh, yes, if you're wrong, I'm right and I get to feel good. I do? I love you. You feel bad that I made you wrong and now I feel good?       Somehow, that just doesn't pencil as a strategy for intimacy, does it? So when we say, "Judge not..." we are talking about the realm of human experience. We are saying that judgment separates us from others, rather than uniting us. We are saying that if I dismiss my partner's needs as childish instead of hearing the child within those needs and ministering to him or her, if I do that, I am stepping back, not forward towards my partner. I am being cold, not warm.  The same applies in many other situations. I see a homeless person on the street. If I think, "Oh, that fellow is a useless, disgusting, a drunk" I have forgotten one of the cardinal rules of life: there but for the grace of God or circumstance go I." Malcolm Gladwell has pretty well put to rest the idea that there is really any such thing as "a self-made man" or woman in his book Outliers. Those of us who have good lives have them only partially because of our own efforts and to a large degree because of good fortune and opportunity. When we start thinking it's really all about us, we are descending into narcissism.   It is quite possible to disagree with your partner without making him or her feel stupid. In fact, it's possible to mentally note that you disagree and then move into curiosity about why your partner sees it the way he or she does.
      It's possible make a judgment to avoid another human being without erasing his or her humanity. It is possible to be temporarily angry at someone without doing same. It is possible to disagree with the politics of someone without demonizing him It is possible to think that your kid's teacher isn't very good at teaching without robbing her of her humanity.
      There is a large middle ground here where judgment and empathy not only can co-exist but should and do when we are secure in our own selfhood. Sadly, this territory has been abandoned by many of our public figures. When we label or judge or one-dimensionalize another, we legitimize the whole activity of labelling, judging and one-dimensionalizing a human being...and that includes others doing it to us. A vicious cycle that turns others (and ourselves) into objects, like a donkey on whom we want to pin a tail just to feel better. If we compulsively go around doing that, labeling and judging others, flattening their humanity into a cardboard cut-out, it speaks much more loudly about something missing in us than it does the reality of others. It puts up an arrow the size of a billboard pointing to our past and asking, "What happened to you? What happened to your ability to walk in another person's shoes?" The obvious task, then, is to take responsibility for something being lost or denied within us...meaning, get into therapy. There are plenty of good therapists out there who specialize in this kind of emotional recovery. We certainly focus on that in our Imago work, but so do many others, including those who have been trained by Terrence Real in Boston and Sue Johnson in Ottawa, and the Janov's in LA. I'm sure there are others I"m not familiar with.
      The point is to embrace the fact that if you are a chronically judgmental person, you are separating yourself from others. It's a self-reinforcing downward spiral. You judge them. That makes you feel separate and alone. In turn, to cope with that feeling, you make them wrong or less than you. This denies you much of the richness of life available through deep connection and vulnerability. It is a primary impulse in humans to attach to each other; detachment is a secondary adaptation to a painful experience. So, clearly, if you're constantly labeling and detaching from others or simply diminishing them (there are always degrees along a continuum with this sort of behavior), there is a reason. Something, perhaps many things happened as you grew up and moved into adulthood. Those reasons can be discovered through gentle emotional archaeology...and ultimately healed. We know too much today about how human beings function to just settle for being a frustrated person who tries to convince himself he or she is right and most of the rest of the world is wrong.
The bottom line on judgment, then, seems to be that when it serves our survival and our thriving, it's a good thing. But in our love relationships, at work, in our community if we use it in a way that is disconnected from essential human feelings, it speaks more volumes about us than the object of our judgment. In that case, the bible is quite right: judge not, lest ye be judged.
C 2011 Bob Kamm