Richard Hawley Trowbridge. MA Philosophy, Vermont College, 1995. Thesis: Two Worldviews. PhD Human Development, Union Institute & University, 2005. Dissertation The Scientific Approach To Wisdom. Superior, Arizona USA. Thanks for your interest! Contact [email protected]
Journey of a Soul
From the beginning, or near the beginning, my life has followed a logic. “Going around the perimeter”, but beginning books and reading with “the classics”.
Key Motifs
More than anything, it seemed necessary to figure out what was going on. “integratively interpreting the totality of life and the world.”[¹] Why I was alive, and what were the mainsprings of the world around me?
The first observation was that people seem to accept that appearances are valid and all that is necessary for making key decisions in life. Ultimate values, beliefs, and attitudes are formed using unquestioned appearances as the foundation. These criteria sufficed for building religions and governments, and for the lives and choices of individual humans.
At the age of thirteen, I decided what I would do with my life: be a writer, like Jack London. Over the following fifteen years, my decision – although it does not seem that it was a decision, but rather a realization – remained. The “like Jack London” qualifier never meant that I was interested in writing the type of material he did. By the age of twenty-eight, I realized the type of writing I felt drawn to: to report the world as I perceived it, and by doing so to understand “what was going on.” In August 1981 (Notebook L) I Wrote
I had to run around the whole outline before I could calm down to fill it in. And right now I know that I need to sit and be quiet and remain quiet until all the pieces form. They need to be free from disturbance. . . And I feel compelled to learn Greek—and German, Italian, French, Latin, music, and it is difficult to take time from them. They keep me from letting go, from looking around. I feel I should be studying every minute.
My mind considers the question. Completely stumped. It feels as if there is a barrier so tight my mind recoils without even getting close to it.
Until you finish going around the circle, you must be quiet.
The first stage was becoming aware of my mental processes. This was a stage of collapse, shock, bewilderment leading to alienation, desperation and effort.
On my own. New relations and behavior are needed. That was the exploding spot, and I felt there wasn’t anyone there.
This thought from adolescence of getting an overview of the entire terrain as prefatory to exploring the terrain may be expressed as my need to understand the situation; to comprehend the important and basic aspects of the natural, social, historical, psychological and spiritual worlds. By the time I was in my final two years of secondary education, I had rejected what I thought of then as “the system”, and was committed to exploring the meaning of the world around me that was not understood by any of the cultural institutions. Not understood by any religion or representatives of any religion, certainly not understood by the culture that is dominated by business, government, and formal education. I felt I was very bright, but that I could not succeed within the orthodox institutions. My success in these would be low-level; and worse, to participate I would have to channel my talent and deepest desires into areas that were alien and uninteresting to me. Even if it were the study and practice of English, Latin and Greek literature, it would not be the path my heart demanded. In those days, what concerned me most was my academic future, and I felt very strongly that I would not be able to compete. Students who were more interested in success as the institutions judged it would far outpace me. An elite university education was not possible for me. The effort that would have to be made even to win admission to one of them was displeasing to me. Not the effort to learn. I felt as capable, as intelligent, as any of the people I knew of whether in my prep school or in the books and magazines I read hungrily.
There was, in fact, no question of entering this world. If it had turned out that as the time for applying to college approached, a door had opened, I probably would have entered it. In that case, it is hard to know what the result would have been. Unsolicited, Loyola University in Los Angeles sent me a letter of acceptance. But I had no one with whom to discuss the options: my parents did not have even a high school education, and I don’t believe they ever mentioned college to me. For some reason, it never occurred to me to consult with our school guidance counselor after a single, obligatory meeting for which I do not believe I made any preparation and at which I did not pay much attention. The counselor was a priest I knew only by sight, and whom I judged to be a spouter of clichés without any ability to encounter me as an individual. He was rather a mechanical person going through the motions in my estimation, and I would not open myself to discuss heartfelt concerns which, I felt, would be uncomprehended and not honored.
That, I believe, was a crucial turning point: the transition from secondary to higher education. My only possibility was to enter the local junior college. This was a painful experience that hurt for a long time. All my friends were attending four-year colleges or universities, some of them rather prestigious. The four ensuing years were the most difficult of my life. They coincided with the expansion of the war in Vietnam, the wave of assassinations of progressive leaders, the inundation of society with hallucinogenic drugs, and civil unrest. Further, the girl I was going out with became pregnant the first time we had sex – the first time I had ever had sex.
Following the realizing at age thirteen that I would spend my life writing, I entered a period of fourteen more years when I was unable to find a way to express anything in writing. This puzzle was continually on my mind, until it was resolved by an insight at the end of 1975.
But even that breakthrough only clarified a part of the puzzle. I was not consciously aware of the nature of that puzzle in fact, other than the sense of having to “read around the perimeter”, which easily encouraged my desire to continue with the study of ancient Greek language and literature – a choice that was to determine my path for over ten years from my thirtieth birthday. By then it had been overlaid by a need to understand the modern world. This world was entirely repugnant to me, which led to a major personal difficulty that lasted perhaps fifty years.
This difficulty was to understand the nature of the world and of human history, and to articulate my objections. A vague repulsion was inadequate. To say that the Modern world was hostile to the spirit, materialist, enslaving, ruled by trivial or nihilistic values was as good as saying nothing. The real difficulty was that I was greatly intimidated by the leading establishment intellects of the twentieth century, who were aggressively materialist. Though they instinctively seemed to me to be wrong, and though I read widely in the literature protesting the dominant thrust of Modernity, I didn’t feel able to rebut their “scientific”, authoritative claims such as those expressed by analytic philosophy and empiric psychology. As years passed, and I continued to study and think, it seemed to me that the heart of the objection to the Modern world is that it assumed a basis of separate individualism, and denied that there are any realities other than those measurable by empiric science. Values, for example, are no more than personal preference: there are no values in the universe as described by physics. There is no meaning to life – no significance to it, in fact. No purpose. Love itself was a physiological reflex that enabled organisms to ensure that their genetic equipment survived and, if possible, conquered. These modern beliefs were unacceptable to me and I did not believe they were correct.
Yet to have this conviction was still inadequate. It was only one more opinion. The counter-culture versus science; the tender-hearted vs. the hard-hearted, in William James’ distinguishing.
So I continued. After a while, it occurred to me that the former analysis was correct and had its basis in the fact that reality is nonconceptual. There are no words or mathematical formulae that can express the world: it simply is. This was a more powerful weapon, and I soon found many statements by respected authorities to this effect, including the following by the Dalai Lama:
The Buddha’s basic attitude toward conceptualization is that reality, which includes human life and experience, is always elusive to words and ideas, uncapturable by any description, and irreducible to any formula. Thus, no construction corresponds to reality. It presents at best only a useful perspective.[²]
As all these objections to Modernity accumulated, and my historical study continued, I began to understand the actual nature of the argument. The Modernizers actually did not have the evidence on their side, but were guided by a few assumptions, such as that matter and material forces are all that exist. This is an assumption not based on evidence, and given the brief period science has existed compared to human existence, and to cosmic existence, it seemed very imprudent to make the categorical claims made with such certainty by materialists.
[to continue: Seeing Wallace and Rupert Sheldrake. However, I am not particularly interested in debating proponents of materialism, but in presenting a worldview, a mentality, and a technique that is superior to materialism. Also, I couldn’t promote my writing, as I hadn’t yet reached the heart of what I was trying to express. Alice’s encouragement – even as it stood, my writings might be useful to people who haven’t gone as far. A large part of my unwillingness has been lacking self-confidence, introversion, and discomfort promoting myself.]
- rht Sept 13, 2018 [language polished a bit, substance unchanged 240828
[¹] Lawrence E. Cahoone 1988. The Dilemma of Modernity. Albany: State Uof NY Press, xiv. “The subectivist anti-culture cannot understand that human beings create, think, and become individuated, independent creatures only within and through a context of meaningful relations to other human beings and to non-human beings.” pp215f.
[²] His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Robert A. F. Thurman, “Buddhist Inner Science: An Overview”, in McNeill, Barbara, and Carol Guion, Eds. Noetic Sciences Collection 1980-1990, Sausalito, CA: Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), 1991, pp. 25-27 at p. 27.