Unequally Yoked

We can thank the Apostle Paul for giving us the phrase, if not also it’s imperative, when he wrote in II Corinthians 6:14, “Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers.”  The intended meaning was Paul’s plea for his church members to NOT associate with unbelievers, but rather to surround themselves within a family of like-minded members of the Faith.

The reason for mentioning that particular phrase is that I had it presented to me nearly three decades ago when Debbie worked for a Christian weight loss organization called “Weighdown Workshop”, created by an overly pious dietitian name Gwynn Shamblin, who would later come to believe she was a prophet of God. A quick Google search will illuminate the level of delusion that emerges from such a revelation. She started out simply enough as a Christian weight-loss advocate selling programs to church goers with a biblically based approach to their weight problems and was extremely successful. But with her growing famed and outreach, she soon came to believe that God wanted her to set up shop with her own Christian brand, calling themselves “Remnant Fellowship”, meaning they alone considered themselves, predictably, the only remnant left of the one true faith. From there it was a short walk to cult leader.

But before that would-be Prophetess took stage, she simply ran a weight loss business where Debbie worked, and while there it became Gwynn’s insistence for her staff to follow the laws “from scripture” that I believe seeded the idea in Debbie’s mind that we were ‘unequally yoked’, and in that regard Gwynn was entirely right. Debbie is a devout believer and I’m an atheist, so we’ve always been on opposing sidelines regarding the Faith question, but that has never been a significant factor for us, and certainly not how we defined our love for each other. It was Gwynn’s preaching that explicitly inferred that Debbie needed to get my mind right with the Lord…. or move on. To cut to the chase, Debbie soon understood that Gwynn’s misguided certitudes were just that, and we laugh about it all now.

I feelthe need to mention that episode in our lives not for personal reasons, but rather to borrow Paul’s phrase as an analogy to segway into a theme that has isolated me from most everyone I know. The reason why this train of thought began barreling through my consciousness is due to an article that my friend Brett forwarded regarding a favorite subject we both share, the mind. The article is titled “New Evidence for the Strange Geometry of Thought” which presents new evidence from cognitive scientists about the nature of thought itself, in particular why humans are so good at conceptual thought. I won’t go into any details of the article here, since I only want to offer a single sentence from the article, which suggests that I am unequally yoked, cerebrally speaking, from damn-near everyone I encounter. And by that I do not mean to imply intellectually in any way. Not at all. For me the issue is solely one of passion and curiosity, not intelligence. As an example of what I’m trying to convey here, take the sentence below, which comes from the article mentioned above.   

“Although the coarse nature of the fMRI signal urges caution in making conclusions at the level of neuronal codes,” the researchers concluded, “we have reported an unusually precise hexagonal modulation of the fMRI signal during nonspatial cognition.”

Now, step back and consider that this sentence nearly took my breath. Seriously. Even before reaching the end, my mind began losing its moorings due to its clarity. But stay with me for a moment because I must be clear about my point here, because the element that melted my brain was certainly not the grammar, but the sheer poetry of it, and by that I don’t mean aesthetically, but rather the purity of how it exposes scientific thought. The sentence is every bit as pure and expressive to a neuroscientist as any line written by Whitman regarding the beauty of nature. But hold onto that thought for just a moment, because I have another sentence to offer up. This one by John O’Donohue, the Irish Poet/Philosopher that I discovered last year.

“Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. So I think beauty, in that sense, is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.”

Again, another stunning sentence, yet from a completely different domain of thought, with this one exposing a profound intuition about the nature our own inner world witnessing itself. Since I am aesthetically inclined to begin with, when I first heard O’Donohue express it, my mind ignited into an inferno of sentimentality. In fact, I could nearly fall to my knees and worship it as divine.

And here is my point, by presenting these two disparate sentences together, my intent is to reveal the scope of my intellectual passions, which in turn exposes a lifelong dilemma of mine. To come at this another way, consider my day-to-day interests, Evolutionary Biology, Theoretical Physics, Mythology, Aesthetics, Art history, Music, Poetry, Comparative Religions, Social Anthropology, Political Science, Philosophy, Literature, Evolutionary Sociology and Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Theory of Mind, Meditation, Consciousness, and Cosmology. These are the subjects that dominate my interest.

Then to further illustrate my point, allow me to list the books, ideas, and projects that I am actively engaged with this week in my spare time.

Relistening to Theoretical Physicist, Carlos Rovelli’s “The Order of Time” which explains Time through the lens of Quantum Mechanics.

I finished listening to a book by Historian Richard Carrier titled, “On the Historicity of Jesus”, which is a 28-hour marathon of stunningly detailed research, methodology and logic.

Continuing to read Maria Popova’s book, “Figuring”

Reading a fictional book titled “Outsiders” suggested to me by Morgan.

Began a journal entry called “Southern Delusion” about the delusion of Confederate worship

Finished rewriting a long journal entry about the Jim Jarmusch film, “Paterson” that I titled “Uh, huh”, which affected me tremendously

Continuing to write a journal entry about the concept of the Self and its narrative being the Glue to our Self-Image

Rewriting an old journal entry on the playing style of Willie Nelson and Neil Young titled “Notes from the Earth”

Read the article mentioned above about the cognitive science of conceptual thought

And I’ve meditated most every night this week as I continue to study the nature of consciousness, as viewed from the inside.

Now with that in mind, please tell me who there is to speak with about any of this. I know a number of people who are impressively knowledgeable, far more than myself, but typically it is contained within a few narrow lanes of interests, and I applaud them for it, certainly, but finding someone who is equally informed about Carl Sagan, Nietzsche, Joseph Campbell, Voltaire, Carlos Castendena, Dali, and Dostoyevsky as they are with Henry David Thoreau, Frank Lloyd Wright, Dennis Diderto, Christopher Hitchens, Walt Whitman, Picasso, or Montaigne….well, the list shrinks exponentially. In fact, this journal of mine is a direct result of simply needing someone to talk to.

These essays that I have written over the years are little more than conversations with myself.To emphasize what I’m getting at, allow me to recount a conversation I had with a younger fellow at work recently regarding the singer/songwriter Chris Cornell. This young guy (30’ish) mentioned that he spotted me at Cornell’s concert several months earlier at the Ryman and awkwardly mentioned that he had been there as well, seemingly wanting me to know he was a fan. It was just what I wanted, someone to share my interests with.

After getting the preliminaries out of the way, I then mentioned the circumstances of Cornell’s suicide and how sadly unnecessary it all was, that he had been taking Ativan to mitigate his anxiety from his drug addiction and evidently became confused before a Detroit concert and took too many pills, which has a known side effect of acute depression and suicidal tendencies. His wife spoke with him and immediately understood there was a problem and called his manager, but by the time they entered his hotel room, it was too late. But the guy knew nothing about these details. That puzzled me because if he was a fan, as he seemed to be indicating, and an idol commits suicide, I would think he’d want to learn why. It was certainly information readily available at the time through a simple browser search, but after I described the situation to him, he claimed it was all news to him.

Then I pivoted somewhat to safer ground by mentioning that I recently saw Tom Morello at a local venue called, “3^rd and Lindsley”, but he had never heard of Tom Morello, who was Chris Cornell’s guitarist in ‘Audio Slave’, as well as the musical architect behind ‘Rage Against the Machine’ and quite a famous guitarist on his own. Once again, he didn’t know what I was talking about. I could have also added that Morello was raised in a broken home alone by his mother, yet graduated with Honors from Harvard with a Political Science degree, or that Cornell was a recipient of the “Stevie Ray Vaughan Honor for Sobriety”, or that Vaughan, who inspired the award, had gotten himself clean after falling off the stage in London due to his alcohol and cocaine addiction, or that his older brother was “Jimmy Vaughn”, the guitarist for the “Fabulous Thunderbirds”, but at that point….it was pointless. The guy had disqualified himself from the conversation.

That exchange is the explicit point I’m attempting to make here, which again has nothing to do with intelligence, but rather that I am “unequally yoked” with most everyone I encounter. There have been so many times while in conversation with someone that I will feel encouraged to float a question or remark into the discussion, simply to entice them to reveal a deeper level of interest, yet time after time I am presented with a dead-end.

My lifelong saving grace is that I come from a family of curiosity seekers. In fact, several of my brethren have educated themselves impressively on a number of different topics and I always enjoy and value the conversations we have. We don’t have overlapping interests necessarily, but the curiosity to dive deeply into our passions appear to be part of our family DNA.

For the past twenty-five to thirty years now, my nephew, Scott, has been the only person whose interests and passions most resembles my own, and occasionally exceeds them. In fact, he is responsible for enlightening me on Nietzsche, as well as Banksy, Peral Jam, Wilco, Gillian Welch, Dave Rawlins, and Jack White. No one else had thrown a wider net in my life.

And that is how most of my adult life unfolded, with a very limited pool of like-minded people that I could speak with…periodically. But just a few short years ago, and quite randomly, I met a co-worker, Brett, at an after-work, vendor sponsored get together at a nearby Pub. I was actually getting ready to leave when I recognized him walking in. We had never spoken, but I respected his intelligence as a programmer in our IT department. I also noticed that the only seat available was next to me, so I “prepared” myself for an encounter with forced small talk. After taking that seat next to me, the two of us began performing the perfunctory “chit-chat” about nothing of any particular interest, as these situations tend to go, but I soon felt something of a rhythm to the comment/response dance we were engaged in, and at one point I vaguely recall the conversation had drifted into slightly deeper waters when something came up regarding religion in a general way.

At that point I felt the impulse to test the waters, to see what more there was behind the mask, so I quoted a Nietzsche theme regarding “herd morality”, and suddenly he perked up. He knew the quote and more importantly, the context, which is a rare thing indeed. Evidently, we were both starving for a deeper conversation instead of the banality of forced pleasantries, so once we detected a deeper thread was in the offering, we both jumped in and quickly discovered dozens of overlapping interests. To the point that Brett has become my comrade and the only person I know whose range of curiosities match my own. In fact, I consider our friendship to be a gift from the gods, in a manner of speaking, for now I have stimulating conversations every week with someone who pushes me to “keep up.” He is the ultimate sounding board for my mind, and also honest enough to call me out over a weak position or my logic lacking. Sam Harris once remarked that we should “never underestimate the benefit of having quality people in our lives”, and he certainly provides that to mine.

Before summing this up, I should make a proper confession…..the admission that I have casted that same “lure” used with Brett many times before. Since I am always eager to make deeper connections, I will often cast a line in the water whenever I sense there may be more in the offering, that my interlocular may have a nuanced, more expansive version lurking beneath the their Jungian mask. But it often takes patience, because I’ve found that many people guard themselves by erecting a type of “security fence” they will not open unless they feel sufficiently comfortable. And that is precisely how it played out with two women I work with, Phyllis and LuAnn, both of whom I discovered to be intelligent, well-read, engaging people…. but it took time..

Of course, I realize there are many more out there that not only meet but far exceed my own interests. That is a given, but in my daily life, that is just not in the offering, so I’ll continue to talk to myself here in this journal, attempted with all my limited capabilities to express the fireworks exploding across my mind. The purpose for it is simple; I’m compelled to do it. In fact, I’m powerless to stop it, which I can easily sum up with a lyric from a Bob Dylan song titled “Restless Farewell” from his 1964 album, “The Times They Are A Changin”, an album I first purchased as a 21 year old searching for answers.

Oh, every thought that’s strung a knot in my mind
I might go insane if it couldn’t be sprung