Problem of Painlessness

The following article is being reporoduced with permission from the author Alf Seegert (alfseegert@yahoo.com). I found it quite insightful. I am sure it will be of some interest to those interested in environmental issues & questions related to the self and our relationship to the world and what is happening. It has been helpful to me. Hope you like it too.

The Problem of Painlessness:

Why Deep Ecology Won’t Work Without a Willingness to Feel

by Alf Seegert (4/2003)

"The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain."

- Kahlil Gibran

Pain hurts. As a result we try to avoid it, and when we talk about the problem of pain our goal is generally to find a better way to get rid of it. I would like to try something different here by instead considering the problem of painlessness. What happens to ourselves and to the world when we close ourselves off from the experience of painful feedback? (Be warned: the following example is not pleasant to listen to, but it is I think necessary in order to show the seriousness of the problem.)

In his book The Gift Nobody Wants, Dr. Paul Brand relates the following true story:

Tanya, a seventeen-month old girl, was left alone in her playpen laughing and playing while her mother cooked in the kitchen. A few minutes later the mother walked into Tanya's room to find her daughter "finger-painting red swirls on the white plastic sheet." The mother didn't understand where the paint came from at first, but when she did she screamed. The little girl's fingertip was mangled and bleeding. Tanya had bitten off the tip of her finger and was now using it as a plaything for making designs with her own blood on the sheets.

Dr. Brand discovered that Tanya felt no discomfort in performing such a self-mutilating behavior because of a rare genetic defect that rendered her indifferent to pain. Although Tanya's parents did what they could to keep their daughter from biting off the tips of her fingers, no pleading seemed to work, and even spankings only induced laughter. When Tanya twisted an ankle, she didn't limp; instead she only twisted the limb further and further. By the time she was eleven years old, Tanya had lost both legs from amputation, as well as most of her fingers. Both elbows were dislocated and her tongue, which she chewed constantly, was lacerated.

This grim and startling picture would strike many of us as unfathomably painful. The irony here, however, is that this kind of intense, self-destructive suffering occurs only in a life where physical pain is absent.

At this point you may be wondering if you have walked into the wrong session or you might be asking yourself how this gruesome anecdote could possibly have anything to do with environmental philosophy or deep ecology. Bear with me. I use the story of Tanya because it provides a harsh and instructive example of how our sense of self, our capacity for pain, and our responsiveness to injury are all intertwined. Tanya’s self-mutilating behavior hints that how we experience ourselves has no small effect on how we take care of that which we call “self” in the first place. Such a claim is at the heart of deep ecology’s notion of the relational or ecological Self.

Proponents of deep ecology, for instance, argue that a truncated sense of self goes hand in hand with ecological devastation. They contend that our present environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis not of ethics but of perception, where we narrowly and mistakenly identify ourselves with our particle-like egos. Doing so introduces a subject/object split between the human and the more-than-human world that is not only illusory, but also dangerous. By conceiving nature as “radically other” and separate, we instrumentalize it and consign it to “thinghood,” thereby reducing the more-than-human-world to the status of raw material valuable only in terms of its use. The perhaps unsurprising consequence of such an isolated, dualistic sense of self is an ecological holocaust unrivalled by anything that the planet has seen for over 65 million years.

But there is a way to get around what Alan Watts called “The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.” Instead of identifying ourselves as narrow, particle-like substances, we can undergo an ontological shift that allows us to “identify widely" with our ecological context. In such a view we come to recognize that interactions with things outside our bodies are not merely relationships that we have, but are in fact what make us who we fundamentally are. This is to say that we are more than just our bodies; we exist as the intersection of countless interactions with our fellow beings, with the air and water, with the ecosystems that sustain us, and ultimately with our planet and the cosmos. Every time you gulp down a mouthful of water or suck in a lungful of air, your body absorbs and assimilates a new set of particles; you become your environment. Exhale, perspire, take a pee; your environment becomes you. Or, as deep ecologists might put it, the environment was part of your wider identity all along.

According to Arne Naess, deep ecology’s founding philosopher, the result of “identifying widely” is that you will spontaneously behave in an Earth-friendly manner because the Earth is understood to be part of your wider Self (that’s “Self” with a capital “S”). This is to say that if you experience your “Self” as including the biosphere, you won’t need to be moralized or legislated into not injuring the planet, because you will instinctively take care of what you perceive to be part of who you are.

And this is where the significance of pain enters the picture. In his work with lepers, Dr. Brand discovered that because they felt no pain in their extremities, people suffering from leprosy would (like Tanya) use their bodies to perform acts that bodies are simply not intended to perform. He relates how one leper would retrieve food cooked in hot coals with his bare hands (his hands were just suppurating knobs at this point, really) because he didn’t feel himself being burned. Dr. Brand lectured the man about how important it was to take care of his hands, but the man didn’t seem to care. He encountered another leper who was running—seemingly unaware—on a badly dislocated ankle. Such cases were typical of Brand’s experience with leprosy, and they had in common what Brand called “an utter nonchalance toward self-destruction.”

But why? Why do Tanya and the lepers of whom Brand speaks behave in a manner that is so deliberately self-mutilating? I think that the reason is because they do not construe their behaviors as mutilations of themselves at all, for the mental distinction we make between self and other is grounded most basically in our physical sensations. Lacking the experience of pain in their limbs, the lepers and Tanya understood their own hands and feet and even their entire bodies as Other. Because no pain registered for her, the little girl Tanya perceived her own fingers as objects to be manipulated at will—as things separate from herself—and not as parts of her own precious being.

I believe that the same mechanisms are at work in how we as human beings interact with the planet. Like lepers, we express an “utter nonchalance” toward global self-destruction because our nerve endings terminate at the skin and we allow our self-identification to (for the most part) stop there; we therefore don’t experience the feedback necessary to recognize and respond to the damage that we are doing to our wider, ecosystemic Self. Like Tanya, who used her own bloody fingers as paints, we continue as a species to channel and dam our rivers, pour toxins into our air and water, reduce our agricultural land to asphalt, and wantonly cut our forests, all the while not recognizing that it is ourselves that we destroy. We mangle our world as Tanya did her fingertips, not because we are evil people (usually), but simply because we misperceive where our selves start and end. As ecological pioneer Aldo Leopold put it, “We only grieve for what we know.”

Because the capacity for experiencing feedback is critical in determining what we experience as "self," it would appear that a necessary condition for global healing is that we go beyond the skin and somehow extend the reach of our nervous systems. For we will only treat as self what we experience as self. We therefore need to be willing and able to feel the pain of the world as our own pain and to embrace the earth’s joy as our joy—in order that we can respond to suffering with healing, and respond to healing with celebration. But how do we achieve this?

There are, of course, many ways to answer this question—but I think there is a lot of room for hope in this respect. One thing often overlooked in deep ecology is how we already tend to identify more widely than we might initially think. When someone we love rejoices, we are overcome with sympathetic delight; when a loved one is suffering, we feel pain involuntarily; our own self has been afflicted whether we like it or not. We already identify ourselves not just in terms of our bodies but also in terms of our interactions, our loves, our aspirations, our frustrations, our joys and sorrows. I have played a game with college students—a variation of the “Dating Game,” actually—where I ask students to tell me three things about themselves. They characteristically respond by telling me about their family, their favorite sport, the musical instrument they play, where they live, fun they have with their pets, or the places they like to visit in their spare time. All these means of self-identification involve relationships with things external to one’s body. Not once have I heard a student identify herself as a hairless biped, as a rational animal, or in terms of her binocular vision or blood type. I don’t mean to say that this counts as a scientific survey or that we never identify in terms specific to our bodies; but I think it is actually characteristic to invoke relationships beyond the skin when conceiving who we are. Our nerves already reach well beyond our fingertips. Thus I would argue that realizing our ecological selves by “widely identifying” is not different in kind from what we already do regularly. It is only different in degree.

Making the transition from ego- to eco-consciousness is, however, not a logical but a psychological procedure—and a difficult one. In our techno-savvy culture we are so primed to eliminate pain and discomfort that we rarely question why we’re experiencing it in the first place. Think how we unreflectively pop a pill when we feel a headache coming on. How we clearcut our forests but divorce this fact from our awareness by leaving thin “buffer-strips” of trees in place along roads. Same story. But pain happens (usually) for a good reason, namely to protect each of us from injury: it combines fact with value in such a way that it can’t merely be ignored. When your hand makes contact with boiling water, your body does not merely inform you of this fact; it instead ensures that you value such an experience so negatively that you remove your hand reflexively. Pain can therefore be a powerful ally; by creating suffering that demands an immediate response it provides the means for avoiding even greater suffering. Denying pain its power to speak is like putting masking tape over your car’s oil light when it flashes on. It doesn’t make the problem go away.

Of course, opening yourself to the experience of a wider range of feedback introduces a serious potential for overload. When you become existentially and not merely intellectually aware that you live in a world of wounds, the pain can be overwhelming. Take for instance the following catalog of dismay from David Orr:

If today is a typical day on planet earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rain forest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, the results of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 250 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 250. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today, we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Tonight the earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare. By year’s end the numbers are staggering: The total loss of rain forest will equal an area the size of the state of Washington;

expanding deserts will equal an area the size of West Virginia; and the global population will have risen by more than 90,000,000. (7)

Orr concludes by indicating that up to 1/5 of the life forms that existed on our planet in 1900 are now extinct (7). (Have a nice day.) Hearing these things can make us numb—it feels like too much to bear. Such awareness can lead to despair, a feeling that is as unhelpful as it is unpleasant.

And despite one’s best attempts to identify widely, still one must act from within the finitude of a particular skin-encapsulated body in one particular place and time, and that’s OK. Consequently, I think that a good place to start might just be in that clichéd, seemingly overused, and absolutely essential domain of particularized action: one’s own backyard—which I mean both figuratively and literally. One of many ways to help deepen and widen your sense of self would be to interact concretely with your immediate ecological context, working to become intimately aware of your shared identity with it. For instance: grow a garden; plant a tree; trace where the water in your tap finds its origin; say grace and mean it; volunteer in your neighborhood (or as an instructor, work with your class on service learning projects in the community); plant native species and other vegetation in your yard appropriate for your bioregion; follow the weather by looking up—not at a TV; wait expectantly for the hummingbirds to return this spring and greet them with beakers of sugarwater and flowers brimming with nectar; honor dates that the sky celebrates—solstices, new moons, full moons, equinoxes—not just holidays marked on human calendars; get out of your car and walk.

One specific practice that has helped me to reconnect with the local landscape is ecological restoration. For over ten years the non-profit organization TreeUtah has worked with countless volunteers—many from the University of Utah Bennion Center—to restore critical migratory songbird habitat along the Jordan River in Salt Lake Valley. Their work planting trees not only helps restore ecosystems but also reconnects people with the land in such a way that they feel it become a part of them, experience themselves as a part of it, and spontaneously come to its defense when it becomes threatened. This work of attempting to restore mangled ecosystems is an outer expression of our attempt to restore our own hearts. I still remember the jubilant expressions on children’s faces at planting projects; they would often draw me aside to show me that tree, what they called “my tree,” the tree they planted, the tree they would come back and take care of.

Deep ecology’s goal is very basic, and it’s far from new. Dozens of centuries ago the Oracle at Delphi urged one who sought wisdom there to “know thyself.” But the “Self” that deep ecology argues to be both real and badly in need of being realized is a circuit of interactions that extends far beyond the “individually wrapped” egos that we too often mistake ourselves for. We are enmeshed in a web of relatedness with all life. To cut ourselves off, through denial, from this flow of relationship to our hearts is indeed to cut off the pain of the senseless destruction of other living beings. In doing so we not only enable such destruction to continue but we also, beyond that, doom ourselves to the frigid and numbing waters of isolation and alienation. In contrast, to reconnect our isolated selves to the larger unity of earth’s ecology can indeed open us to the messengers of pain and so motivate us to care for the planet. And it can do more. Reconnection can also remove the painful chill of alienation and put within our reach the warmth and fulfillment of connectedness that our spirits hunger for. In nourishing life around us, we ourselves are nourished.

Alf Seegert holds a masters degree in Philosophy from the University of Utah and was the Assistant Planting Coordinator for TreeUtah in Salt Lake City for several years. He is presently pursuing a graduate degree in English and teaches writing at the University of Utah. He can be reached by email at alfseegert@yahoo.com

Works Cited

Brand, Paul and Yancey, Philip. The Gift Nobody Wants. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Donaldson, Stephen R. Lord Foul’s Bane. New York: Ballantine, 1977.

(Not cited in the paper, but it’s foundational to the project as a whole—it’s an epic fantasy tale in which the hero—or anti-hero—is a leper thrown into another world where the health of the land enters directly into people’s awareness. Lord Foul’s Bane is Book I in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever.)

Gibran, Kahlil. The Prophet. New York: Knopf, 1973.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine, 1966.

David Orr. Earth in Mind. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994.

On Interpretation

The topic of interpretation came up in a conversation I had been having someone. This is a vexed issue, yet one which I think is very important to resolve for any reasonably thoughtful person. We can help each other to an extent, but it can only be resolved by & for oneself by each individual. What follows is my limited attempt to highlight various aspects.

Let me begin with a story I read recently:

One day, Drona summoned two of his students, Yudhishtira and Duryodhan. “Spend a day in Hastinapur and find me a really bad man,” he told Yudhishtira. Then turning to Duryodhan, he said, “Spend a day in Hastinapur and find me a really good man.” The day passed. Drona waited for his students to complete the search. Finally, at sunset, the two returned, but with no one accompanying either of them. “Well, where are the men I asked you to find?” asked Drona.

Yudhishtira replied, “I scoured the city and went to every house. I met every man, woman and child. I really looked for a bad man but at the end of my search, I am convinced that everyone is the city is actually very nice. There is not a single bad person in Hastinapur.”

Duryodhan replied, “I don’t agree. I too scoured the city and went to every house. But everyone I met was a scoundrel. Even the children. There is no good man in Hastinapur.”

Drona heard both and said, “This is all Maya.”

The author then goes on to clarify what is meant by the word maya. It is usually simply translated as illusion in English, which is incorrect. Yet that is how most people seem to interpret this word. Maya derives from another Sanskrit root which means to measure. What the word maya tries to convey is that "...our understanding of the world depends on the measuring scale we subscribe to. Yudhishtira’s measuring scale failed to identify a single bad man in Hastinapur. Duryodhan’s measuring scale failed to identify a single good man in Hastinapur. Their opinions about Hastinapur said nothing about Hastinapur but about the measuring scales they subscribed to."

The way that they interpreted the behavior of others revealed more about themselves than the people they observed. We are the creators of our own limited worldview mistaking it for reality. That is not the same as saying that we are in illusion, because what we perceive as reality seems real enough to us. My guess is that depending upon how clear we are, either our sense of reality is way off the mark & quite distorted, or we somewhat see reality or the truth, but as if through veils. I have a notion that being intelligent is a never ending process wherein you constantly strive to uncover veil after veil so as to see the truth or reality as it is. If so, this would hold true whether we are trying to understand the world (the external) or our own self (the internal). Also, even amongst the most clear of people, their perception of reality is bound to be limited by their consciousness, however intelligent they may be. As a corollary, I can take our sense of vision as an example. Human beings do not have the ability to see the ultraviolet or the infrared spectrum. That is the limitation of the human eye. The eye of a bee can see some of the ultraviolet spectrum as well. Some other animals can see infrared. Some see only the primary colors - red, green & blue. Imagine what if we too could see some ultraviolet & infrared spectrum. Our sense of reality would be radically altered. A crow, instead of appearing to be in shades of grey, might appear multi-colored. Same with the mind as well: the nature of the human consciousness affects our perception of reality. If we evolve & have a different consciousness, our sense of reality will also be radically altered.

Conditioning also plays a major role in our lives. Although a lot of people talk about unlearning & unconditioning, I think that is almost always more a case of substituting one kind of conditioning with another. We see the world as we want to or the way we have been conditioned to see it. Our consciousness, which includes experience, knowledge, desires, hopes, relationships, beliefs, ideas, biases, prejudices, images and all kinds of emotions, act as a distorting screen through which we see the world. I can see all this happening in myself quite clearly, yet is very difficult to live & act in another manner - to live a life illuminated by the light of truth. I am not being too negative by saying this. I am merely being brutally frank.

Here’s another related idea. I remember reading what Mirra Alfassa said once, that “…if you see a defect in someone else, you may be sure that it in you…” All of us are human beings, members of the same species sharing a common evolutionary heritage of millions of years. Thus in a certain sense our consciousness is the consciousness of the whole of humanity. If I see a certain quality in another person, that is only because the very existence of that quality in myself allows me to recognise it in him or her. It is only my conditioning which causes me to label it & classify it as good or bad, desirable or undesirable, beautiful or ugly and so on. A warning though! This should not be interpreted as a justification for nihilism or that moral values do not matter. Rather, what it means is that if you see some defect in others then it is a pointer for you to correct it in yourself first. Similarly, if we see something wrong with the world, then this attitude would help us realise that the cause of it is our own self. The problems of the world are merely a gigantic projection of the problems in the consciousness of each human being. For example, all the terrible wars are merely the projection or externalization of the conflicts that exist in our minds. We are directly responsible for the wars of the world. Thus, to change the world, we have to change our own selves first. The human consciousness itself has to change, because it seems as though there is something seriously wrong with the way it has evolved so far. What this calls for is a scientific attitude towards understanding one’s own self. To explore this further, I would have to go off at a tangent so I shall leave it at that for now. :)

Getting back to the topic, here are some other aspects related to interpretation.

To quote verbatim, my friend wrote that “... a piece of art stops being owned by the artist once its gone public... its then an idea which is shared and meant to be tossed and turned, introspected, mulled, subsumed, consumed. There is, in my belief, no one true meaning to anything. There are only interpretations...”

I think that to have a meaningful exploration or understanding of anything, meaning has to be distinguished from interpretation. Speaking of art, that does not mean that, let us say a poem, has only one meaning. It may have multiple meanings and/or multiple layered meanings. The richer & deeper a work of art is, the more this would tend to be the case with it. Yet I think that these meanings should me distinguished from interpretations. Interpretations can be thought of as arrows shot in the dark. We are in the darkness of ignorance, not knowing what is meant or intended to be conveyed and so we interpret in an attempt at understanding. And that is not a bad thing at all. It is a good thing. It is always better to say that perhaps this is what it means, or probably that is what he/she meant, rather than making assertions, or sticking to beliefs & ideas as opposed to facts or reasonable conjectures/interpretations.

Actually, a lot depends on how one interprets the idea of interpretation itself. :) There is certainly a place for responsible interpretation as opposed to irresponsible interpretation. A classic example of this would be the different ways in which people have interpreted the various religious scriptures. Asserting that a certain interpretation is the right one and developing a codified set of beliefs only leads to conflicts between religions and sects. This has been a big time problem throughout history, all because people don’t know how to be reasonable, think logically and not indulge in irresponsible interpretations. I am sure God would be horrified to know that he (or she, whatever you please) has been one of the leading causes of death in the world. :)

The so-called scientists are also not as scientific & logical as we might expect them to be. There are of course those who validly point out science is very limited in what it can & cannot explain. Yet even in their somewhat limited field of enquiry, scientists seem to be as worse as if not more than ordinary folks like us. Two of them may study the same phenomenon, analyse the same evidence, and yet come up with totally different conclusions – both asserting that they are absolutely right, and mistaking their dimly lit investigations & crude hypothesis & theories for the truth. I shall only give two examples to illustrate this. Firstly, note how for centuries they asserted that the Sun, other planets & the entire universe revolved around the earth. When Galileo said “Nonsense!” to that, they got him imprisoned and virtually killed through mental torture in collaboration with other powers. Another example is of how members of society are being brought up to believe that all human beings are in essence selfish, scheming creatures only interested in protecting their own self-interest above everything else. This idea, supposedly supported by the game theory, is at the core of the laissez-faire ideologies and the belief that in each person pursuing his or her own self-interest, whatever it may be, lies the overall good of society. One of the leading proponents of this was John Nash (A Beautiful Mind is based on him). Yet, as I saw in a brilliant documentary series called “The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom”, it turns out that he was quite mistaken. His beliefs about the behaviour of human beings arose from his own schizophrenia, which no one knew he was suffering from. He used theories & twisted evidence to support his own beliefs. In the documentary, there is an interview in which the now old & cured John Nash admits that he may have overemphasized the role of that in human interpersonal relations. Yet so much mischief and harm has already been done by his theories which influenced hundreds of other people and their work, who caused even more chaos in the world.

Often people in power also wilfully distort scientific truths to serve their own self interest and to manipulate others and influence society as a whole. A classic case of this is how Darwin’s theory of evolution has been distorted to justify the survival of the fittest in human society. It has almost become a buzzword, which you will hear in corporate boardrooms as well as in interpersonal relationships. What of kindness? What of kinship & compassion? Even other animals, which we consider lower than ourselves (another artificial and noxious idea!), have some measure of that.

Well that’s all. I know I have rambled too much & wandered here & there, perhaps aimlessly, but that’s how I am. I really should learn to be more focussed and stick to the topic while writing. :)

Sleepy now… and tired. Got to go. Over and out.