A Philosophical Musical

The philosophy in "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity" was developed by Arthur Hancock and Kathleen Brugger. Arthur is a singer/songwriter, and while Kathleen put the material together in a book, Arthur created a musical. Through humor, compassion, and deep insight into the human condition, Arthur's songs compellingly communicate the basics of our philosophy. 

Arthur has created a new art form--philosophical theater. This work is intended to be performed with actors bringing the imagery of the songs to life. 

The musical work, which is now on YouTube, contains 16 songs, which are meant to be listened to in a particular order. Please click on "playlist" or listen to the songs in the order in which they are listed on the home page.

The first song is entitled "Not Right in My Mind":

Mind Creates Reality

My husband has been enjoying a nostalgic trip to the early 1960’s since he’s found a YouTube channel that streams “Mr. Ed” shows. Mr. Ed was a horse that could talk, but he would only do it with his owner. Mr. Ed was quite neurotic and was always getting into various difficulties (it seems that the basic premise of the show was so outrageous that the writers realized they could take it just about anywhere).

When Mr. Ed was “talking,” his lips would move and a deep voice would speak. It’s a funny experience because part of your mind knows—of course—that that voice isn’t coming from the horse, but another part suspends disbelief and all of a sudden you’re ascribing human thoughts and emotions to Ed. (According to Wikipedia, the horse’s trainer at first got the horse to move his lips by putting nylon string in his mouth, but it didn’t take long for Mr. Ed to start moving his lips when touched on the front hoof by his trainer.)

One of the basic premises of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity is that we are not aware of reality itself, but a mind-generated version of reality. Our senses take in various perceptions, and these are filtered through both hard-wired circuits (inherited from our animal ancestors) that construct a version of physical reality, plus beliefs, assumptions, and memories we have formed in our lifetimes. All this filtration and reality-construction happens before we become aware of the perceptions.

The illusion that Mr. Ed is talking is one example of the distortion caused by this process. When we see a mouth moving—even if it’s a horse’s mouth—and hear words being spoken, our minds naturally link them up.

Ventriloquists exploit this same illusion to trick us into believing that their voice is coming out of their puppet’s mouth. I love Triumph the Insult Comic Dog by Robert Smigel. Triumph is a crude rubber dog, and it’s absurdly obvious that “his” voice is coming from off-screen, yet the illusion is created that Triumph is really speaking or singing. In a video on Conan Late Night about the cruise ship that lost power in early 2013 in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Smigel plays with the ventriloquism illusion. Sometimes the camera backs off and you can see Smigel’s mouth moving when it’s supposed to be Triumph speaking; at other times you see a close-up of Triumph “speaking” and his mouth isn’t moving. My mind said, “Something’s wrong! How can he be speaking if his mouth isn’t moving?”  In other words, my brain was totally buying into the illusion.

The art of foley is another example of how our brain’s processing of visual and aural cues can create an illusion of reality. We see someone’s leg breaking and we hear celery snapping, we see someone being punched and we hear a raw steak being hit, we see someone riding a horse and hear two coconut halves banging together (see Monty Python’s The Holy Grail for an amusing riff on this illusion; at the very beginning of the clip you can see the servant with coconuts), and we really believe we’re hearing the actual sound of whatever action we’re seeing. I’ve thought about this while watching action movies—how does anyone know what the sound of a fifty-foot monster kicking around buses on a city street sounds like?

I saw a short film on Vimeo recently that provides an example of another way the brain’s reality-construction algorithms distort reality: we tend to interpret actions as the volitional choices of an agent. Psychologists have described how research subjects will watch shapes move on a computer screen, and then come up with stories that explain why the shapes move the way they do. “The triangle wanted to get away from the circle,” they might say. Our minds were clearly designed to look for signs of agency in the world, and then come up with explanations for our observations that ascribe intent to the moving object. You can see how this would have been a benefit to us in this past. For example, imagine seeing grass moving in the wind, and a lion stalking through the grass. We distinguish between the movement of grass and lion, because the lion has the intent to move towards the antelope to attack, while the grass’s movement has no intent, it is the passive response to the wind.

Watch “A Girl Named Elastika” and notice the sensations of belief popping up, that even in this short animation using push-pins and rubber bands, the illusion of action and volition seem real. 

Optical illusions are a great way to explore how the mind creates our reality. Neuroscientist and artist Beau Lotto gave a TED talk in 2009 entitled “Optical Illusions Show How We See.” One of Mr. Lotto’s demonstrations involves a drawing of various geometric shapes. He isolated two sections of the drawing that conveyed exactly the same visual information to the viewer’s brain—same shape, size, and color. Then he revealed where these two areas fit into the larger diagram: one was the shaded side of a yellow box while the other was an illuminated side of an orange box. They may have conveyed exactly the same information to my retina, but when I looked at the complete picture I saw different colored boxes, one in shade and the other not. The two surfaces didn’t look the same to me, even though I knew they were identical.

The lesson I take from this is the importance of humility: always be willing to question my perception of reality. If I can be so wrong about reality as to think a horse is talking, what else might I be deluded about?

Personal Zeitgeist

On an internet forum I participate in someone started a thread called “personal zeitgeist.” She asked,

What do you think contributed to your own current set of intuitions, worldview, etc.? For example: 


- Noteworthy historical events that really made an impression during a formative period in your thinking 

- Pop culture of the time 

- Personal experiences 

- Geographic region you were born in/local culture/travel, etc. 

- Personal values, as in it was part of your nature to value critical thinking, emotions, religious beliefs, etc.

I found it quite an amazing process to write a list in response. In We Are all Innocent by Reason of Insanity I talk about what I call My Story, and how we all write narratives that define our lives. The beliefs and assumptions that we form in our early development become filters of our perceptions; these filters construct our mind-generated reality (and it’s the confusion of our mind-generated reality with actual reality that makes us insane). This mind-generated reality is our narrative, our Story. 

In the book I talked about the influence of my family and some of my personality quirks, but her question helped me frame My Story in a broader sense, based on the cultural influences of my time. Here’s what I posted:

1. Childhood in the 60’s. I thought revolution was normal and liberation (of all kinds—race, gender, sexual) should be easy.
2. Travel to the Soviet Union in 1979. I realized my government had been lying to me my entire life (trust me, it was obvious to a 21-year-old that the USSR at that point was not the threat it was made out to be).
3. My parents’ divorce when I was 14. Agony at the time but started me questioning everything. My family had seemed like “Leave it to Beaver” and then it all crumbled overnight, out of the blue. Nothing seemed dependable anymore, but I also became less interested in living like everyone else.
4. Learning, when I was about 12, that Jesus was a special case, the only son of God, and the rest of us are cursed with original sin. This really pissed me off; I couldn’t see any point in Christianity after that.

After I wrote the line, “revolution was normal and liberation (of all kinds—race, gender, sexual) should be easy,” I realized what a defining influence that perspective has had on my life. It has certainly skewed my perception of politics; I’ve been angry and bitter about what I saw as lack of progress because I couldn’t understand why things didn’t change faster/more easily.

What also comes clear to me from this list is a problem with trust—numbers 2, 3, and 4 are all about feeling betrayed, lied to, made a fool of. And the truth is a good portion of my adult life was spent trying not to be a fool—I was a cynical skeptic distrustful of any organization, be it environmental, political, or spiritual. I never wanted to be a member. I didn’t want to get trapped in the conventional world because it was, I believed, built on a pack of lies, so I have lived an alternative lifestyle on the fringes of society. Those perceptions made before I was 21 have had an enduring effect on my life. Now I can see why I’ve never been a “joiner,” the pejorative term I used when someone asked why I wasn’t part of a local environmental group. 

What I learned from this little exercise is that understanding your personal zeitgeist is a good idea—it can help you become more aware of the assumptions and beliefs skewing your perception.

Crazy Means Nothing Left to Hide

A friend of mine loves to sing and play the guitar, but she has been too shy to play for Arthur, my husband, who is a professional musician. One night recently when she was visiting she grabbed Arthur’s guitar and played a song for us. When we expressed our delight in her performance, she said, “Now that I’ve read We Are ALL Innocent and realize that I’m crazy, it was liberating. I knew that it wouldn’t matter to you how it sounded, because you know I’m nuts!”

Crazy means nothing left to hide. Am I less than perfect? Big deal…I’m crazy. Did I do something embarrassing in the past? I was nuts. Did I do something I feel guilty about? I was delusional. Whatever I did, it was motivated by the confusion in my mind, the programming of beliefs and assumptions that distorted my worldview.

One of the benefits of recognizing my craziness has been the ability to laugh at myself, to stop taking myself so seriously. I no longer have to hide mistakes, or try to explain them away. I can share personal details in We Are ALL Innocent, and on internet forums using my real name, because they don’t matter anymore. Crazy people do crazy things.

In addition, many of us spend an inordinate amount of time trying to promote our good sides, hoping that by an engaging display we can keep others distracted from seeing our warts and flaws. When we no longer feel the need to hide parts of ourselves, we can relax and just be ourselves.

In our culture there’s something almost everyone hides—their sexuality. We are programmed to believe sex is dirty, and the sex act is obscene, and it’s wrong to feel aroused except in very circumscribed situations (like with your spouse).

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve gotten criticism for addressing sex in WAAI. Some have intimated that sexuality doesn’t belong in a self-help book that isn’t explicitly about sex. This stems from the insane belief that sex should and could be split off from the rest of life. Others have warned me that including sex would limit my audience, because people would be reluctant to share the book with others.

But again, crazy means nothing left to hide! I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that sexual problems are rampant in our culture. Personally I think this is because we cannot discuss our sexuality freely, as we can so many other aspects of our lives. So our problems stay hidden away where they fester and grow worse. Confusion about sex was just another one of my issues, like insecurity and competition, so why shouldn’t I share about it in the hope that it would help another better understand their sexuality?

In this spirit, my partner in life and in the development of the philosophy behind WAAI, Arthur Hancock, has written a memoir entitled Exposing Myself: A Life of Sex and Truth. In this book he honestly reveals his obsessions with sex, ending a lifetime of hiding the shame and guilt about his sexual proclivities.

Arthur had a life-changing experience at the age of 28, when he realized how superficial his perception of the world really was. The next forty years have been a quest to understand this experience, an attempt to seek truth over lies and love over lust, in the midst of such adventures as playing folk music in St. Augustine. Florida in the midst of a major civil rights confrontation, and traveling to Nepal and returning paralyzed from the neck down (the year of recovery in a rehab center led to some unbelievable sexual adventures).

Exposing Myself is a great companion to WAAI, as Arthur not only takes the reader through the development of the philosophy of universal insanity, but illustrates in his own life how the recognition of his insanity has removed shame and guilt.

Recently Arthur said that publishing Exposing Myself has been of great therapeutic value. By exposing himself he no longer fears his inner blackmailer of ego (remember when you did this? See the cartoon version of this inner blackmailer at Arthur's website entitled "Why the unexamined life is so popular"). Arthur no longer has to be fixated on hiding his sexual shame and self-hatred by pretending to be superior. This has given him a sense of peace; he is free to simply be who he is; he no longer has to hide.

Eckhart Tolle: The Human Race is Insane

In his bestselling book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle uses the words “insane” or “insanity” over thirty times to describe human thinking. For example:

The mind-identified state is severely dysfunctional. It is a form of insanity. Almost everyone is suffering from this illness in varying degrees. The moment you realize this, there can be no more resentment. How can you resent someone’s illness? The only appropriate response is compassion…Nobody chooses dysfunction, conflict, pain. Nobody chooses insanity…It always looks as if people had a choice, but that is an illusion. As long as your mind with its conditioned patterns runs your life, as long as you are your mind, what choice do you have? None. You are not even there.

Mr. Tolle uses the term “conditioned patterns,” I use “mind-generated reality,” but we are talking about the same process. We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity argues that all of our perceptions are filtered through assumptions and beliefs before they reach our consciousness, so what we see is a subjective version of reality that has been slanted towards our world-view. We confuse this subjective mind-generated reality with objective reality; we are deluded about what is real. This is why we are all insane.

The subtitle of my book is “The Mechanics of Compassion,” because, as Mr. Tolle says, once you realize that people’s minds are dysfunctional, that they are in face insane, you can no longer be angry with them or hate them.

Mr. Tolle also refers to the human race as insane in A New Earth:

One can go so far as to say that on this planet “normal” equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say, ego…Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind. When you recognize it for what it is, you no longer misperceive it as somebody’s identity. Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don’t take it personally anymore…Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others.

If you’d like to learn more about how this insanity works, click here to read the first four chapters of We are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity (free). 

Does Sex Belong in a Book about Insanity?

In We Are All Innocent by Reason of Insanity I use my life to provide examples for various points I make, and this includes some discussion of sexuality. When I am illustrating my insanity, I discuss problems I have had with family, relationships, jobs, self-esteem, etc.; I also include some related to sex. When I describe the lessons I’ve learned—acceptance, humility, compassion, and love—I also include some lessons I learned about sex.

Some readers have criticized me for this inclusion. The sense I get from these people is it’s okay for me to talk about how insanity has impacted my life in every area except one: sex. Somehow that’s out-of-bounds in a book that’s not specifically about sex.

This is a book about insanity, both personal and cultural. If insanity doesn’t describe most cultures’ attitude towards sexuality, what does?

American culture has an incredibly puritanical attitude towards sex: it’s dirty, and it’s damaging to young people and other innocents, so just don’t talk about it. But I would counter that sexual problems are rampant in our culture, and a lot of the reason has to do with our cultural attitudes.

We Are All Innocent by Reason of Insanity argues that every society develops a “consensus reality,” which is a collective mind-generated reality (my definition of insanity is: confusing our mind-generated reality with actual reality). Our individual realities are constructed within the collective reality of our culture. The American (and almost every other nation’s) consensual reality includes the belief “sex is dirty,” and we all imbibe that belief with our mother’s milk. As a result almost everyone in our culture is crazy in the area of sex.

Sex is a natural function of our bodies, like eating, yet we get no guidance from our parents and teachers about it. We're taught how to eat with a fork, how to use the toilet, how to wash ourselves, how to spell and do math, and how to drive a car. But we're not taught anything about how to have sex—because it's dirty. We might have sex education in school, but that’s mostly educating us about the consequences of sex—pregnancy and disease. So almost everyone grows up conflicted, confused, and privately believing that he or she is a monster for the "sick" fantasies and desires in his/her mind. We're taught that sex is something you have to hide.

No wonder half of all marriages end in divorce, with sexual problems as a major cause. Studies have shown that 15 percent of married couples have not had sex in the last six months to a year (or more). No wonder that loads of people sneak around behind their spouse's back to have affairs or watch porn.  A hotel manager once told me that during his career, the highest percentage of guests watching X-rated in-room movies occurred during an evangelical convention—the guests were in a place where they thought they could watch porn in secret (not knowing their program selections were being notated)…and they did watch.

In the chapter entitled My Story, where I lay out some of the major issues in my life, I wrote: 

At one point in my life I read a lot of spiritual books, and always I would wait hopefully for some advice on how to see sex from a more enlightened perspective. It always seemed as if the author either ignored sex completely, or did a whitewash of the subject, as if they were as confused as I was.

I determined not to do this.

I have a vision of sexuality that I call "clean sex," which is sex freed of the beliefs and preconceptions we’ve been burdened with, pre-eminently including “sex is dirty.” Clean sex is like meditating while having sex, but in the nicest way—no thoughts getting in the way of feeling the exquisiteness of the sensations.

Sexual energy is always flowing, like all forms of life energy. You can open yourself to tap into that energy flow at any time, and if you stay open you can ride that sexual energy wave into places of bliss, without need for exotic tricks to keep you interested. I think of it this way: when I want to have sex I shift my awareness to tap into the sexual energy, then I get out on the leading edge and ride the wave wherever it goes. It’s all about staying right there on the edge of the wave, not thinking about anything, just moving with the flow of energy.

Here’s a chart illustrating some of the ideas: 

Clean Sex.................................Dirty Sex 

Present in body...................Absent in mind 

Spontaneous..........................Ritualistic (same combination of elements) 

No goal.......................................Orgasm-oriented 

Whole self oriented.............Genital or fetish-oriented 

Love.............................................Lust 

Variations.................................Fixed theme 

Heightens unity....................Heightens separation 

Sane……………….……….........Insane

 There are many benefits to recognizing our insanity, both personally and collectively. Chief among these benefits will be a new attitude towards sexuality.

Nouns are Delusional

A friend of mine recently said to me, “nouns are delusional.” When I asked him to elaborate, he said he was quoting a physicist, but couldn’t remember who. Basically the idea is that nouns presuppose a static, unchanging object. Modern physics has shown that everything is changing all the time and that matter is energy, so nouns should actually be verbs to bring in the dimension of time and change. Instead of Kathleen, I should be called “Kathleening.”

I spent a little time googling the idea and found that Buckminster Fuller described himself as a verb. He published a book in 1970 called I Seem to Be a Verb: Environment and Man’s Future in which he wrote: 

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.

My friend’s comment resonated with me because I had just read about the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, which also emphasizes the need to bring the element of time into our understanding of matter. From Rupert Sheldrake’s Science Set Free:

Whitehead was probably the first philosopher to recognize the radical implications of quantum physics. He realized that the wave theory of matter destroyed the old idea of material bodies as essentially spatial, existing at points in time, but without any time within them. According to quantum physics, every primordial element of matter is ‘an organized system of vibratory streaming of energy.’ A wave does not exist in an instant, it takes time; its waves connect the past and the future. He thought of the physical world as made up not of material objects but actual entities or events. An event is a happening or a becoming. It has time within it. It is a process, not a thing.

Whitehead’s philosophy is known as “process philosophy,” and its ontology (the study of being) replaces Being with Becoming. Nouns are objects that exist (being). Verbs are processes that become.

This has made me realize that the conception of static, unchanging objects is just another part of our delusional mind-generated reality. When I think of objects, I think of them as unchanging entities; change might happen but that doesn’t alter the essence of the object. For example, my car: I think of it as a wondrous mechanical device composed of an engine, transmission, wheels, and the body that I sit in (among other parts). Those things are the essence of the object “car.” When I think of it out there in my driveway, I think of a completely static and unchanging object. When a sparkplug gets clogged, or the transmission goes out, I think that something broke, and when it is fixed it goes back to normal. “Fixing” implies getting it back to its “fixed,” static object state.

What if instead I visualized my car as a verb, as a changing stream of processes? It’s actually instantly clear to me that this is a much better way to look at the car—what it is today is the sum of ten years of existence, of driving and sitting, all the dings on the doors and sludge in the transmission, and it will be different this afternoon after I drive to the Y.

I have always loved to look at trees in the winter, and this idea of “nouns should be verbs” is the reason why—without the leaves you can see the history of an individual tree written in the shape of its limbs. But now I realize that I was still seeing the tree as a static object, frozen in a moment in time, and not as a flowing movement of process in time.

When I apply this concept to myself it’s liberating. I’m not stuck as some unchanging “me,” I am a constantly evolving Becoming. I’m a work in progress. 

Deepak Chopra: We Live in a Lunatic Asylum

In an interview in October, Deepak Chopra said, “I had this moment in meditation where I realized we’re living in a lunatic asylum. There’s no other way to describe it. Everything that we see is madness, but it’s normal…So, we’re in it, there’s no escaping the lunatic asylum. You can choose to be an inmate, or you can pick up your visitor’s badge. That day, I chose to pick up my visitor’s badge.” (begins at 9:25)

When he said “it’s normal,” he kind of waved his arm around and paused—that’s what the “…” means; I didn’t cut anything out. Chopra meant, I believe, that it’s difficult to see the madness because we have been conditioned to believe that it is normal. It’s like the old joke about the fish in the sea having trouble with the concept of “water.” We live within a consensual reality created by our culture and family. We have to take on the beliefs and assumptions of our culture in order to survive, and these beliefs and assumptions skew our perceptions before we even become aware of them.

An example of consensual reality from We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity: long ago humans divided the Earth into countries and have so completely forgotten that the divisions are arbitrary that we have fought endless battles over the invented boundaries. When people first saw the photos of our planet taken by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s it was a revelation—there were no lines like on our maps and globes! And people had the dawning awareness that all those arbitrary borders are irrelevant when you comprehend the vastness of the blackness surrounding our precious globe of life.

Recognizing the insanity, seeing the delusions, allows us to be a “visitor”; this perspective means we have compassion for the inmates still trapped in their delusions, and compassion for ourselves every day we forget to pick up our visitor badge.

Expectations Shape our Reality

The claim that everyone is insane is based on the premise that no one sees reality as it is. Our perceptions are heavily filtered by our beliefs, assumptions, preconceptions, and expectations before we become aware of them.

Evolutionary psychologists have theorized that the brain evolved to make assumptions about the future based on what we have experienced in the past. This is an efficient use of our brain’s resources because it helps us focus our attention on what is important to our survival.

For example, an animal might be attacked at a waterhole. It would then form the assumption that waterholes are a place where there is an increased chance of danger/predators. So the animal stays alert every time it’s at the waterhole and expects predators.

In his best-seller Incognito, David Eagleman says expectations are vital to our ability to see. He included an illustration that looked to me as if it was just random blobs of light and dark. Eagleman said most people see it that way: without any expectation for what we should see, our brains don’t see anything. On the next page he gives a clue about the image, and once I knew what to expect, when I looked at it again I instantly saw it. Days later when I looked again the image jumped out at me as if it were obvious. The brain, Eagleman writes, is constantly engaged in the activity of comparing our expectation of what we should see with the information coming from our senses: “What all this tells us is that perception reflects the active comparison of sensory inputs with internal predictions.”

Many years ago a fascinating experiment demonstrated the influence of expectations on our perception of reality. The study built on the “halo effect,” a well-known cognitive bias: people who are attractive are judged to be more competent and have better personalities than those who are less attractive. Mark Snyder, the lead scientist, called the study an “attempt to demonstrate that stereotypes [another word for expectations] may create their own social reality.”

Pride's Gotta Go Too

One aspect of the philosophy of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity is the rejection of free will. (See these blog posts: general, societal consequences, personal consequences.) There are many consequences of letting go of the belief in free will; these include the elimination of blame and guilt. If, in any situation, I couldn’t have done any differently there is nothing to feel guilty about. This is pretty easy to swallow. But another of the consequences seems a little harder. This is the flip side of guilt: if I couldn’t have done any differently, there is nothing to feel pride about. This seems cruel and unjust.

Many of us have worked hard in our lives, in school, at our profession, in our marriages, and it seems only just that we feel pride when we have achieved success.

The New Yorker recently published a review by Malcolm Gladwell of a new book, The Sports Gene, by David Epstein (you can watch his TED talk here), that is pertinent to the issue of pride:

In The Sports Gene there are countless…examples of all the ways that the greatest athletes are different from the rest of us. They respond more effectively to training. The shape of their bodies is optimized for certain kinds of athletic activities. They carry genes that put them far ahead of ordinary athletes.

For example, the book reveals that major league baseball players have superior eyesight compared to the average person. The ophthalmologist Louis Rosenbaum tested four hundred professional baseball players and found the average visual acuity was 20/13. When he looked at the Los Angeles Dodgers, half had 20/10 vision, and a small number fell below 20/9, “flirting with the theoretical limit of the human eye,” according to Epstein. Gladwell concludes

The ability to consistently hit a baseball thrown at speeds approaching a hundred miles an hour, with a baffling array of spins and curves, requires the kind of eyesight commonly found in only a tiny fraction of the general population.

The question here is: should those baseball players be proud of their ability?

Of course those baseball players worked hard to get where they are; the fact that they are members of a professional baseball team didn’t happen just because of their good eyesight. Epstein reveals that even the ambition to work hard is not shared evenly among the whole population. In the Sports Illustrated article he wrote (unfortunately Sports Illustrated has taken this article down since the book was published),

But researchers have found that even motivation to work out has an important genetic component. A 2006 Swedish study of more than 13,000 sets of fraternal and identical twins—fraternal twins share half their genes on average, while identical twins share all of them—found that the exercise tendencies of identical twins were twice as likely to be similar as those of fraternal twins. 

Another 2006 study, of more than 37,000 pairs of adult fraternal and identical twins from six European countries and Australia, concluded that about half to three quarters of the variation in the amount of exercise people engaged in could be accounted for by their genetic makeup, while environmental factors, such as access to a gym, often had less influence. [my bold]

Wayne Gretzky famously said, “Maybe it wasn't talent the Lord gave me, maybe it was the passion.” But what if the two are inextricable? What if passion is a talent?

What if passion were a talent? Exactly. The passion that motivates an individual to devote his life to the physical training required of a professional sport, or to practice the piano eight hours a day, or to pursue a Ph.D. in particle physics is not “freely chosen” by the person. It is created through the interaction of that person’s physiological makeup and psychological programming. I know scientists whose field of study was clear at the age of seven: they had a fascination with bugs or stars in childhood that lasted all their lives. Novak Djokovic, the tennis star, began to hang around a tennis court at age six, and when he began playing that year the tennis pro said it was obvious he had extraordinary talent.

Of course this passion doesn’t have to be obvious as a child. One of the scientists involved in Curiosity, the latest Mars rover, didn’t become interested in astronomy until he was in his 20s. According to “The Martian Chroniclers” (The New Yorker again) Adam Steltzner, the leader of the team in charge of entry, descent, and landing, dropped out of college and, at age 21, was working as a musician. One night as he drove home from a gig he noticed the stars overhead and wanted to learn more.

A few weeks later, he went to the local community college to sign up for an astronomy class. Told that he had to take physics first, he reluctantly agreed, only to discover that he had a knack for it. More than a knack, really. “I just fucking dominated,” he told me. “There were tests where the average was thirty per cent and I would have a ninety-eight. I was the dude.”

Steltzner ended up with a Ph.D. and a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But how many of us have looked up at the sky in wonder and been content with a trip to the planetarium, or taking a single course, or just cruising around the Internet looking at photos. We didn’t have the ability to understand physics, or the drive to keep learning and working that this man had. Should Steltzner feel pride at his accomplishment?

Another element that Epstein discovered was that not everyone responded to training equally.

Even after five months of training, some people in families that benefited little on average did not improve their aerobic capacity one iota, while others in families that generally showed marked improvement increased it up to 50%. Statistical analysis showed that about half of a person's ability to improve with training was determined by his or her parents. The amount any person improved in the study had nothing to do with how good he was to begin with—his "baseline aerobic capacity"—but about half of that baseline, too, was attributable to family inheritance.

So for some of us, even if we have the passion to undertake a sport, our physiology might mean we are incapable of improving. So for those born with the capacity for improvement, should they feel pride at their increased aerobic capacity?

We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity says that instead of pride, we should feel gratitude. Gratitude for our inbuilt passions, talents, drives, and abilities. Gratitude for what those gifts allow us to accomplish in life.

Pride means we are claiming a control over life that we do not have. It reminds me of the folk saying “‘My, look at the dust we raise,’ said the ants on the chariot wheel.”

Everything is interconnected. Say I made an apple pie that I was proud of. Did I make the apples that taste so good? Did I grow the wheat, create the cows that produced the butter? Carl Sagan once said that in order to truly make an apple pie from scratch one would have to first bring the universe into being.

Because of the linkage of guilt and pride there is a benefit to letting go of pride:

You don’t have to take the blame if you don't take the credit.  

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

What is reality? Could it be different from what we perceive? These are the questions addressed by Plato, the Greek philosopher who lived 2500 years ago, in his Allegory of the Cave.

Plato asks us to imagine a group of people chained in a cave since birth. The chains prevent them from moving their heads so they can only see the wall of the cave in front of them. A fire is kept burning behind them. Other people pass back and forth between the fire and the prisoners, carrying things. These peoples’ shadows and the prisoner’s shadows are cast onto the wall that the prisoners can see. Understandably, because it is the only thing they see, the prisoners believe that the shadows are reality.

The prisoners can talk to each other; they form all sorts of theories and philosophies and scientific hypotheses about the shadows. But the truth is the reality they think is so real is actually just a shadow-world. The real world exists, but they can’t see it.

In my terminology, they are deluded about what is real; they are out-of-touch with reality; they are insane. But within the prisoners’ consensual reality, within the “truth” of their society, to be “sane” you must believe that the shadow-world is objective reality.

Plato then asks us to imagine that a prisoner escapes the chains, makes it out of the cave, and sees objective reality. After a difficult period in which his eyes adjust to the light of the sun, this person realizes that the shadow-world is an illusory, delusional reality. When this person tries to enlighten those still in chains as to the truth, he is ridiculed.

But in fact he is more in touch with objective reality than those who believe the shadows are reality. He is the relatively sane one.

This allegory is exactly to the point of the message of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity. Our perceptions are like the shadows on Plato’s wall. Yet we mistakenly believe that our subjective point-of-view is actual reality.

Lately I have been wondering what brought about the so-called Post-Modernist worldview, which began to appear in the 1960s. In a major shift from earlier times, when it was accepted that there was only one correct worldview, people began to recognize that everyone has a subjective point-of-view.

While watching a collection of films made by Thomas Edison’s studio between 1901-1906, it occurred to me that the advent of film played a role in this shift. We take it for granted today, but imagine what it was like one hundred years ago to go into a dark theater and see on the flat screen something that seemed so real. Of course people had been attending stage-plays for centuries, but these could never approach the simulation of reality that is true of movies.

In addition, in an age when many people never traveled farther than 50 miles from home, the images of life in far-off places and of people behaving differently than the norms of the local society must have been startling and revelatory. (The film “Cinema Paradiso” is a fascinating look at the influence movies had on a small town in Sicily.)

While I was looking for online versions of Plato’s Allegory, I came across a version posted by someone at Washington State University, with this commentary:

If he were living today, Plato might replace his rather awkward cave metaphor with a movie theater, with the projector replacing the fire, the film replacing the objects which cast shadows, the shadows on the cave wall with the projected movie on the screen, and the echo with the loudspeakers behind the screen. The essential point is that the prisoners in the cave are not seeing reality, but only a shadowy representation of it.

The essential point here, in this blog, is that when we are confuse our shadow representation of reality with actual reality, we are delusional, we are insane.

In an earlier version of We Are ALL Innocent Arthur and I used a movie analogy for the concept of “mind-generated reality.” We wrote: imagine a one-seat theater in our minds in which we watch the film of our life. This film is scripted, edited, and directed by the beliefs and assumptions of our culture, time, family, and personal experience, and is projected on an internal screen of awareness.

Arthur wrote a song about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave:

PLATO’S CAVE

by Arthur Hancock

In Plato’s cave a prisoner dreams of a place he knows is true

High above this shadowed darkness that was once all that he knew

In Plato’s cave a chanced escape sent him wandering from that wall

That he'd studied for a lifetime that he'd never learned at all

In Plato’s cave everyone was chained with their faces to the stone

And their shadows were reality not just ghosts the light had thrown

In Plato’s cave all the others said that a life in shadowed chain

Was the most that one could hope for there was nothing else to gain

In Plato’s cave he escaped his chains and he stumbled to the light

And he saw the wherefore and the why and he saw the prisoner’s plight

So to Plato’s cave he returned to tell of the truth he’d found above

But there his words of hope received more fear and hate than love

In Plato’s cave maybe life ain’t much but it’s all we’ve ever known

We’re secure in this reality so won’t you please leave it alone

In Plato’s cave maybe life ain’t much but it’s all we’ve ever known

We’re secure within our misery so won’t you please leave us alone