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About Liza Braude-Glidden

Liza Braude-Glidden, MA, is a Los Angeles-based mystic in the market place, a community catalyst and author with a long history as a core team member and process leader in both nonprofit and for profit groups. Liza is Co-founder and Creative Director of Beanfields Snacks, a values based natural foods company with award winning taste that features beans as the main ingredient.

A Bouquet of Truth Tests: Reflections on Certainty and Uncertainty (Part 2)

April 23, 2012 at 3:00 pm by 3 Comments

 

By Liza Braude-Glidden

Continued from Part 1. 

Reflection Six

An Opportunity and Crisis Truth Test

When uncertainty engulfs the present, how do you respond?

Hot winds off the Mojave Desert engulfed our neighborhood in towers of fire when I was seven. Dive-bombers careened overhead as if we were at war. Our teacher rushed us out of our second grade class crying, “ we must evacuate,” words instilling more fear than understanding in our seven-year-old hearts. Soon our bus rumbled though familiar streets made hellish by black smoke. We huddled together, wondering if our parents had saved our pets. When would we see our families again? Some of us wondered if our parents were alive.

We were right to wonder. My father, for example, stood on the roof of our home with a hose until the water ran out. One third of my friends lost their homes and possessions. Whirlwinds of fire charred the tops of our trees. The Fire spared my father and our home, but it could have gone another way. Miraculously, no one died. Yet in those moments we shared as children it was as if God had suddenly thrown all the balls of our young lives up into the air. No one knew how they would come down, MAYBE not even God.

We call our historical moment “the age of information.” We seem to know whatever we care to know on almost any subject including the chaos and suffering that seem ready to overwhelm our humanity daily. We know enough to be awestruck by the forces in play. Do we know enough to be willing to dance with all the balls God has tossed up in the air?

Reflection Seven

A Solitude/Isolation Truth Test

Am I allowing this truth to isolate me or using it to connect to a larger whole?

Most expansions of consciousness wrestle with shadows of isolation. I am connected with the universe in a new way and suddenly bereft of anyone with whom to share my new world space! William Blake is an example of a visionary who complained bitterly that the gutless cartoonists of his time received glory he deserved. Eastern influenced Westerners may see his rage as a lack of equanimity, yet wrestling with this shadow may have given Blake’s vision greater strength and integrity. One can imagine Blake alone in his workshop by the light of a single oil lamp, working furiously through the night on his engravings of the story of Job.

The shadow, the truth that I am alone in my revelation, is true enough, but not as true as the sense of belonging that knows that every opening to a wider embrace weaves me deeper into the fabric of life and being.

Expansion of consciousness connects. Its shadow dissociates and alienates. This dissociation and alienation is an important shadow truth. In it’s best expression, it aids in the evolutionary process of differentiation. At the same time, truths that connect me, that bring me into engagement with the whole and its parts are truer than those that isolate me from my fellow humans and the universe we share.

Expanded consciousness is sometimes described in terms of increasing self-reference and individuation and this is of course, true. Such beings are recognized by equanimity and lack of fear. And in the truth test I call Solitude/Isolation, an expanding consciousness is described as an increasingly vulnerable, engaged connectedness, thus the apt term, embrace. Such beings are recognized by monumental acts of love.

Reflection Eight

A Mud Hole Truth Test

How much humiliation does it take to humble me where intuition is concerned?

Glastonbury, England, home, some say, to the Holy Grail, has more than it’s share of mud holes. On You Tube, you can see a couple on their way to an outdoor concert disappear when what is beneath the wet, reflective surface of their path is much deeper than it appeared! Soon two thickly coated brown, demoralized beings are shown, struggling out of the depths.

Have you followed intuitions’ path only to land in a messy, inconvenient and perhaps wounding mud hole? Were reflections sometimes misleading? What was revealed in that messy instant that was invisible a few moments earlier? Did you hear, at loud volume, voices that ordinarily mutter in the background? Does the drenching shock of the mud hole discredit the original intuition? How does the baptism of the mud hole inspire your courage and resolve?

Like old-fashioned cartoon characters, we may walk a long way with only intuition supporting us and only notice we have done so when we fall painfully to earth. Does that mean that the steps we take on solid ground are more real than those we take in flights of intuition?

Maybe there is strength and integrity in both. Maybe each informs the other. Mud holes are crucibles of evolution and you never know whom you’re going to meet there. While the baptism of certainty may be water, perhaps the baptism of uncertainty is mud

Reflection Nine

An Authenticity/Complexity Truth Test

How can authenticity emerge from complexity in our historical moment?

Recently an iconic photo circulated on the web of an indigenous man in traditional dress weeping with his face in his hands as he received the news that his tribe had lost the battle to save their entire cultural homeland from destruction by a hydroelectric project. Have you faced an uncertainty that wiped out all knowledge and meaning?

Many of us have experienced a dark night of the soul or considered that God might be dead. It’s still more painful to consider how many of us have come to a moment when it seemed our fellow humans had just executed God. How do we move forward from such a moment? This is one of the deep uncertainties shaking the foundation of our world.

A central task of World Spirituality is to help us respond to such moments in a state of engagement with one another and with All that is Holy, rather than in a state of alienation from one another and flight from the Divine.

How can our personal encounters with truth become a part of this Holy engagement in the face of convulsive forces? How can these encounters become a gift to the Pool of Knowing that connects us with one another and with the Whole? Our power as individuals and as groups comes in our ability to respond.

Certainty and Uncertainty emerge in the most intimate places. What we long for in our romantic partnerships  is often certainty in the face of our almost infinite vulnerability, yet what we discover, both in our own hearts and in our encounters is often uncertainty. Every therapist and pastoral counselor faces endless variations on this dilemma.

In the hearts and minds of seekers of truth resonant questions on certainty and uncertainty continue to surface. Theorists in many fields speak of the importance of novelty, a scientific term for the emergence of stuff scientists can’t predict. Psychologist and Complexity theorist Terry Marks-Tarlow in her new book on clinical intuition in psychotherapy writes:

…clinical intuition is an inner faculty necessary for therapeutic change both in therapists and patients alike. True change requires openness to novelty. This is the bailiwick of the right (and not the left) hemisphere. Transformation during psychotherapy harnesses imagination and creativity. Unless we can conceive of a future that differs from the past, we cannot live one out. (emphasis mine LBG)

What does it mean to us as an emerging global community to conceive of a future that is different from the past? How do we, as a global community address what every psychotherapy patient addresses: Stuff has become unworkable. We need new stuff. Yet self-replicating bots are hard at work in our global consciousness. We need new intuitions (on a personal scale) and new revelations (on a global scale.)

The Traditional Christian Author, Lael Arrington, blogging in the women’s Christian collective, Tapestry, laments that faith in a post-modern era has become a process of sitting with unanswered questions. These questions sit in the post-modern heart where conviction once was. Yet she knows we cannot go back to our old certainties. She quotes Jesus in the Book of John: “• Jn 18:37-38 “…for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

What could it mean, in a post post-modern world to be “on the side of truth”? Arrington reflects: “But how do we do this (testify to the truth LBG) with cognitive humility? Authenticity is the key.” These terms authenticity and cognitive humility lead into a rhythmic engagement with certainty and uncertainty that gives access to both.

Personal truth tests, such as the ones I recounted here, are a source of knowledge of my unique authenticity. Through sharing them and relating them to liberating structures, I am able to know and test both my authenticity and cognitive humility, even in those intuitions where I am currently alone, or in a small cohort of understanding.

Testing personal truth, inquiring into authenticity and cognitive humility invokes the liberating structure of Marc Gafni’s teachings on Unique Self. The emergence of Unique Self in the face of certainty and uncertainty, is, Marc says, a transition from the statement “It is true.” to the statement “I am true.” Through my eyes, God reveals unique and essential features of truth that sheds light on my inner life, my human family, and on the physical and practical world. I reveal myself as a Unique and necessary source of revelation. When I am true, I am making my truest contribution to the Whole. I am offering my unique piece to the puzzle of an emerging World Revelation.

Up until now, revelations of our collective spirit required compromises of each individual spirit, placing every human in an unacceptable dilemma: either narcissism or cream of wheat. Neither makes much of a party.

Can we tune our antennae to the signs of a revelation of the Whole that not only permits but in some sense requires the full expression of each unique human perspective?

Reflection Ten

Care to Dance?

Inviting an important person to dance creates a bit of trembling- will you? Won’t you? Dear Reader, have you found one exquisite detail here that got your feet moving to a rhythm?

We dance best in festive rooms full of dancers. There is music, maybe a live band. Perhaps interesting lighting, firelight, or maybe it’s warm and we’re dancing outdoors. World Spirituality’s invitation to the Dance of Certainty and Uncertainty is an invitation to gather enough inspired certainty and cognitive humility to engage such macro complexities as population growth, climate change, diseases of starvation and overindulgence, the extinction of species and cultures; and to engage intimate complexities such as how to be human and humane in a world of accelerating novelty and complexity.

To dance in affirmative engagement in such a world, each of us must do our best to embody an inner spiritual authority that provides alternatives to literal readings of scripture and fundamentalist ways of knowing. In these ten reflections, we have explored seductive glimmerings of alternatives. We have glimpsed World Spirituality’s challenge to apply liberating structures to our unique encounters with truth. MAYBE, dear reader, you have found renewed enthusiasm for offering your tests of truth as gifts to a matrix of collective wisdom without diluting their unique authenticity.

Some truth tests didn’t make the cut, so I’ll mention two: The truth test of the market place in which my daily life is engaged deserves an essay of its own. Another, as important as any I’ve mentioned is gratitude: How grateful am I for the opportunity of this moment and the consciousness I am able to bring to it? How grateful am I for you dear reader, for your response, whatever it may be, and for the teachings of World Spirituality that brings us together?

As consciousness evolves, we evolve new ways to recognize revelation in ourselves and others. I’m hoping for a good party with lots of dancing. I am grateful to be invited, grateful to remain curious about the unique gifts arising in each moment in you, me and we.

I hope for both Divine and human help in finding the courage to act in the face of uncertainty. For without such action I may not find enough knowledge and energy to contribute to the evolutionary momentum of the Whole. This means being willing to act with the certain knowledge that infinite numbers of God’s balls are currently up in the air. Which will come to earth? Which will hit me on the head? No amount of mapping will provide an answer, yet maps are glorious and needed.

The Integral map is like a pattern of landing lights on a runway. When God throws me up in the air, I use the map to return to Earth safely. I land where important others live, people with whom I can talk, people with whom I can build. Together we find the power to resist easy certainty and MAYBE in that resistance, a revelation of WE is being born.

Notes

“Physics Jokes, Number Three”, From Jupiterscientific.com, 2012

Life on Mars, BBC Wales, 2009

* It turns out this Einstein quote is a persistent urban myth. It’s likely Einstein never said it. The quote simplifies an insight that Einstein did exemplify. Intuition was central to his process and values. The quote was likely born out of a need to have one simple phrase to express that fact.

Lao Tsu, trans. Mitchel, Stephen. The Tao Te Ching, Harper and Row, 1988, 1

John 1.1, King James Version, 1769

Gafni, Marc, “The Path of Wrestling,” in The Marc Gafni Blog, 2011.

Mark-Tarlow, Terry. Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy, W.W. Norton and Company, 2012, P.29

New Testament, New International Version, John, 18:37: “You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

Arrington, Lael, “Certainty Versus Cognitive Humility, Why Does it Always Have to be Either/Or?”, Tapestry, 2010.

Photo Credit: Liza Braude-Glidden

Filed Under: Belief & Practice, Featured, Unique Self Tagged With: , , , , ,

A Bouquet of Truth Tests, Reflections on Certainty and Uncertainty (Part 1)

April 23, 2012 at 2:46 pm by 1 Comment

By Liza Braude-Glidden

Introduction

Physics Joke 3:
Q: Why are quantum physicists so poor at sex?
A: Because when they find the position, they can’t find the momentum, and when they have the momentum, they can’t find the position.

To engage with the growing community of the Center for World Spirituality is to accept an invitation to the dance of certainty and uncertainty. The relationship between certainty and uncertainty is one of the key teachings of World Spirituality in the writings of Dr. Marc Gafni, The Center’s teacher in residence. These recent teachings  emerge from Marc’s book The Uncertain Spirit published in Hebrew in the mid-eighties. An updated, expanded version of Marc’s teachings on certainty and uncertainty will soon be released in English. This essay is a series of ten short reflections on Marc’s teachings on the dance of certainty and uncertainty from a feminine and inter-subjective lens.

Reflection One

A Granular Truth Test

How detailed is this truth?

Breeze wafts through my open window. Outside, flower vines bob in a slow rhythm. I feel your eyes looking out on whatever scene is yours to see at present, feeling honored by your presence here, wondering how you will come to know what you know in your moment about what I am writing here in mine. In this moment, dear reader, how are you knowing what you know?

Consider this scene from Science fiction: a man stands joyously on a twenty-story rooftop edge about to leap. He’s certain he’s found a way to prove that the reality around him that seems real, isn’t. He’s confident jumping will show him what’s real. A female character calls him to step away from the edge. Her voice is too inviting. He grasps her hand. “Grit” he says, “I feel gritty sand on your fingers.”

“Yes,” she says, “I touched a broken plaster wall on my way up to the rooftop.”

“How could my mind fabricate that level of detail?” The main character questions, “Perhaps you are real.” Her feminine presence plus the sandy grit on her fingers gave birth to enough uncertainty that he stepped away, at least long enough for the story to continue.

Traditionally, “certainty” and “reality” and “truth” are used in close connection. In Marc’s writings reveal truths of both certainty and uncertainty.

Some of us love to jump; others habitually hang back. Is either choice inherently wise? What kinds of details make a moment more certain than your interior can fabricate? What details in your life might give you what Marc calls” the core certainty of your existence?”

Reflection Two

“Maybe Stories”

Of what, dear reader, are you absolutely certain?

Is there a place in you that rests gently in the natural uncertainty of each arising instance? Is there some uncertain country inside your heart that longs for inspired action? Is there a nostalgic wish for the certain unity of the One True Right and Only Way? Or do you cling ironically to uncertainty, like a post-modern security blanket?

As globally connected spiritual practitioners, compelling and seemingly contradictory texts on certainty and uncertainty call to us from religious scriptures of many eras and cultures. “The Tao that can be told is not the Eternal Tao” is a common invocation of uncertainty stated in the first line of the Tao Te Ching, primary text of the Taoist tradition (Forth Century BCE.) In contrast, in the New Testament, John echos Genesis: “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. “

Is it possible that two great traditions could differ so completely? Can we see these two perspectives as part of a larger whole? World Spirituality lives into the question:

If consciousness is indeed evolving, our recognition of revelation must also evolve. In a post post-modern world, how can we recognize authentic revelation?

In the quote below, Marc recounts a revelatory process of discovering Maybe Stories, tales of inspired certainty about the central importance of uncertainty:

It occurred to me in a moment of graced intuition that although the word Safek (Doubt LBG) does not occur in biblical text, the word Ullai, meaning, Maybe, does appear. Not once but in seven major pivoting points in the book of Genesis.

It also became clear to me in that moment of grace, that there is a distinct and intentional biblical genre of Ullai- Maybe stories which form the basis of the biblical theology of Uncertainty.

In each of these stories the ability to hold uncertainty and not be seduced by easy certainties is the key to the triumph of the Biblical Hero. (2011)

God, who could be called a biblical hero, died. We attended His funeral throughout the twentieth century, yet for the vast majority of people the thirst for the Divine refused to be quenched. Something in us refused to be seduced by the easy certainty of His demise. MAYBE, our hearts said, the Beloved is becoming more present through the act of dying. MAYBE a death of God in each unique heart sweeps the slate for a flood of Eros, a unified yet multiple revelation of the Beloved. MAYBE God’s heroism is revealed uniquely through the heroism of each and all of us.

MAYBE I will get the job. MAYBE she will say yes. MAYBE I will conceive a child. MAYBE the Arab Spring will bring enduring change to the Middle East. What are the MAYBE moments in your world, dear reader? What is the worthy fulcrum on which your life is leveraged at this moment? What is the heroic challenge? Is there a temptation to be seduced by easy certainties?

Reflection Three

A Bouquet of Truth Tests

How can I offer my personal truth tests as a gift?

On one hand, a field of study with centuries of tradition and scholarship, sourced mostly by male sensibilities, inquires into how human beings know what they know. On the other hand each of us, in an intuitive space and in each fresh moment must make judgments about what is certain using whatever skills and resources we have. In that spirit, beloved reader, I offer this bouquet of truth tests, as an empowerment and blessing for the intuitive leaps your life inevitably asks of you. For, as the title implies, truth is a gift, one that emerges uniquely in each instance of expanding human consciousness.

No one test makes something true or insures that I am able to share my truth with you. Yet a well-arranged bouquet of truth tests helps. The purpose is not to assure ourselves that things are real and solid. They both are and aren’t. Rather, the purpose is to inquire into what inspires us to believe that they are and aren’t. What truths move us forward? How do we come to understand the authenticity of such truths?

Sometimes your truth tests may be the same ones I use, sometimes they may be remarkably different. Do your truth tests tend to be linear or rational? Or do you find yourself relying more on whole pictures, leaps of intuition, and nonlinear juxtapositions? We all need and rely upon both of these styles yet in everyone, one or the other is dominant

Some people assume that linear processes have truth tests while holistic, intuitive processes do not. Some assume that only the truths we share with others can be tested. These assumptions have at least two downsides: first we do not give intuition credibility, and second we do not hold intuitive individuals to the level of integrity necessary to fully integrate them into our most vital conversations.

As our world becomes more complex, we are asked to make more and more leaps of creativity and intuition. As the technology we have collectively sourced demonstrates it’s linear superiority over us as individuals, intuition and the synchronicities it stimulates become our assignment as warm-blooded, wet people. Since the latest research in neuroscience affirms the centrality of intuitive and right brain functioning in all human decision-making, we may as well enjoy it and explore it.

There are few things more interior and personal than how you or I know what we know; yet these inner intuitive tests of truth become truer when we share them. Gathered from wild fields and carefully cultivated gardens within, I offer this bouquet of truth tests, and though I cannot, through the medium of writing, receive your bouquet in return, I hope that in every passage of this writing you will feel my curiosity about what is in your bouquet. How are you engaging your essence by testing your personal truths?

Reflection Four

An Inquiry Truth Test

How can I rest in my questions in a way that evokes ever more beautiful and functional questions?

At one point in the dance of certainty and uncertainty, we may have assumed that the purpose of testing the truth is to find a clear answer. Another way of testing truth is to assess the depth, beauty and power of the questions that emerge from it.

Each section of this essay poses contemplative questions. One way to use them is as starting points for journaling or dialogue. Questions are italicized so you can find them easily. Another way to use the questions is as contemplative tools. Here are some steps:

  1. Read the piece through once with open eyes and heart.
  2. Scan through again, this time underlining the questions that have the most resonance.
  3. Choose three questions and write them, perhaps long hand, on a paper you can place near your bed.
  4. Instead of writing responses, simply read the questions in a quiet, relaxed moment, ideally before sleep. When answers come, bow to them gently, jot a reminder, and keep asking. Sit with the questions.
  5. Out of step four, new questions are born. They will lead your curiosity in important directions. MAYBE to an ever-expanding sense of wonder at the particular flavor of mystery to which your being is most alive.
  6. If you find yourself stuck in inaction, uncertainty may be dominant. If you find yourself exhausted by relentless activity, certainty may be at an extreme. What questions emerge from inaction? What questions emerge from relentless activity? When new questions become rich and resonant, (or threatening and charged) repeat the process with the new questions.

Most stuff is stuff we don’t know. And while it’s vital to be certain and to act, my hope is to do so with humility born of contemplation of how inevitably mysterious and complex any human life is. Each human life unfolds in a Singing Kosmos that makes the greatest human music seem like a nursery rhyme. In each intimate and expansive moment, how can we best listen to its song?

Reflection Five

An Exemplar Truth Test

What do you learn about your own intuitions through exploring those of your exemplar?

Many of my personal truth tests arose as I sang in and studied the choral works of J.S. Bach as a young person. In Bach, complex, mathematically perfect structures refine and amplify personal and religious feeling. As a choir singer I entered the maelstrom of that perfection. Do you remember a watershed series of experiences that occurred perhaps in your teens or twenties that helped you form what later became vital ways of recognizing truth?

In high school and college, my wise, feminine, unstructured presence produced countless songs, poems, paintings and deep conversations under the influence of a marvelous variety of creative women who still influence me including my college mentor, Deena Metzger, Cal Arts Faculty member Judy Chicago, and my grandmother, the abstract expressionist painter and Christian Science mystic, Vicci Sperry.

In the process of obediently following intuition I stumbled into plenty of blind alleys. While nursing bumps and bruises, I had many golden opportunities to become curious about masculine role models of structure and vision that could lend strength, integrity, and direction to my intuitive and empathic gifts. Yet most of the possibilities that presented themselves seemed to want to decimate the pleasure, beauty and energy I recognized as intuition’s life-blood. So, the search continued, who could be my exemplar?

Albert Einstein was a candidate. “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.” He wrote, “We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” * True enough, yet as Einstein knew, intuition also has a Master, a divine one. Einstein was not always happy with the warlike masters his intuitions served, and as I mentioned above, J. S. Bach’s comprehensive expression revealed the beauty and identity of intuition’s Master.

Have you searched for an exemplar of intuition? Perhaps if you are quite masculine and/or rational your exemplar has contrasting qualities. Is there a passage of writing or an interview that describes her intuitive process? What moves you the most about her expression? What grounds you the most? What do you most seek to emulate?

At age eighteen at California Institute of the Arts, singing in a choir devoted to Bach, the meaning, theory, and history behind his choral works became an early touchstone that mirrored important intuitions of the Kosmos and humanity’s place in it. At the same time, I began practices from Eastern wisdom traditions. The choral works of Bach stood out as the most unimpeachable esthetic, spiritual, conceptual and structural authority. Studying and performing Bach gave state experiences of early spiritual practice meaning they could not have had otherwise. For a sizable minority of students and faculty at Cal Arts in the seventies, spiritual practice and musical expression were one fabric. We held both Eastern and Western enlightenment in our intuitive musical rapport.

A seed was germinating: Structures such as those I found in Bach make it possible to exchange and cultivate our knowledge of the filigree of manifest love we call our world. These structures have the potential to give us more freedom and beauty than they require from us, and to serve as evolutionary ladders, not only for those coming up behind us but even for those ahead of us, who teeter on the shaky edge of human possibilities.

Much later as the seed that was my knowledge of liberating structures began to grow, Ken Wilber sat down beside Bach as a living treasure whose integral map helps give intuition an honorable and expanding home.

Now, as my emphasis on individual expression intimates, I’ve become a student of Unique Self, World Spirituality and Marc Gafni, who has given inspired context to these truth tests. “Questioning,” Marc says, “is a right which emerges from intimacy.” In intimacy with myself, I gain the right to question myself, in intimacy with you; I gain the right to question you. In intimacy with truth I gain the right to test it. In Intimacy with God, I gain the right to question God.

What questions have you earned the right to pose, dear reader? How does your curiosity inspire intimacy? How does your intimacy inspire curiosity?

(for end notes, see the end of part two)

Continued at Part 2.

Photo Credit: Liza Braude-Glidden

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