Chrysalis

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Time for a thought experiment, a light-hearted yet cautionary tale.

One image which keeps poking into my awareness these days is that of a caterpillar entering its cocoon stage and later emerging as a butterfly. I guess there could be some similarities with my current situation. 

The humble little caterpillar emerges as a magnificent butterfly. 

There is indeed lots of symbolism we can attach to the image of the chrysalis (cocoon), but is any of it truly applicable to the human condition? So if we were to play around with the imagery of transformation and metamorphosis in the insect world, would it be of any help to us in reaching a deeper understanding of ourselves? 

Most of us likely derive this picture of a quiet metamorphosis from something we've seen quaintly represented in a picture book (The Hungry Caterpillar wasn’t it?). How cute! After putting in my time as a dull and dreary caterpillar, I get to become a butterfly with wings and everything - sounds like heaven as a reward or enlightenment as a reward right? 

But, I think this merits a deeper look because if you drill down and look at the actual process with a state of innocent perception, you can see that the caterpillar is always doing just what a caterpillar does. Eat and poop. Eat and poop. It’s a pretty good life if you manage to stay away from the robins of the world. In one way, the caterpillar's life is complete and whole just as it is. Moment to moment, it is a caterpillar just being a caterpillar. It's not a caterpillar grudgingly going through the motions of being what it is right now knowing that something better is just around the corner. It doesn't desire to be anything else. It can’t be anything else but itself.

And then one day, out of the blue, the caterpillar gets this odd urge to stop eating and of all the damn things it could imagine, and it starts to wrap itself up in silk thread as snugly as possible. After weeks of just eating and pooping, there’s been a change. Slowly, slowly, the caterpillar spins itself inside a cocoon. What do you think this creature is feeling as its habituated life changes? Is it weaving a death shroud? Perhaps it may feel like that, having a life change without knowing what might come after this. And certainly, the creature in its pre-cocoon state of being is neither pleasant nor cute. 

And from the caterpillar’s point of view, it can’t possibly be aware that it is at step two of a three-step process. The creature can’t possibly know what lies ahead. 

"Dum de dum, if I wrap myself tightly and nearly die, that means I'll get to become something else. Yeah, I think I’ll try that." The caterpillar simply doesn’t know the outcome as it spins the cocoon of deep sleep. If it has an inner voice, it's probably saying things like “Stop this insane behavior right now. Stop it! But I CAN’T stop it. What is wrong with me?” No, the caterpillar does not go to sleep with visions of multi-colored wings dancing through its mind. More likely it thought: "WTF was I thinking? Must have been that hemp leaf I ate yesterday."

Many days later the deep sleep is finished and the butterfly emerges. Does the changeling even remember it was a caterpillar I wonder? Does it regret the change? What an easy life that one was. Eat, poop. Repeat. Now, it’s about - find Mister Right, have sex, lay eggs, and then die. "Oh if I’d only known!" Or when the butterfly sees another caterpillar, does it think, "there but for the grace of God go I?"

This part, for me, raises the most interesting aspects of this whole exercise. Since we have already seemed to move this whole thought experiment to an anthropomorphic level, might a butterfly and caterpillar even be able to communicate? Although sharing the same biology (of sorts), and of course the same caterpillar language, does the metamorphosis create a communicative disconnect due to the drastic experience now included in the butterfly’s caterpillar based butterfly-ness? And how would a caterpillar even imagine that a creature so unlike itself would be the true end of its becoming? How would the butterfly express that change to a caterpillar? How do you describe a dream using only a waking language? Or rather, being awake, how does one speak into a dream?

Assuming that the butterfly has no new words, how would it express that transformative experience to the caterpillar in only 'caterpillar terms'? Since the caterpillar has absolutely no possible imaginational ability to see how that lumpy dumpy old me could become a movie star with wings, then how would the butterfly shout back across that gulf? Would the metamorphic experience make the butterfly seem like a mad being, capable only of unintelligent gibberish? 

But if the butterfly could communicate something of the experience, then what would it say? Tell the caterpillar not to be afraid if it stops eating and then gets the urge to starts wrapping itself up? 

"Don't worry, it will lead to greater things."

“Uh-huh. Right. Stop eating and go to sleep? I’m not so sure about that plan. Honestly, I kind of like what I’m doing now, thank you very much.”

Hard to find a satisfying answer for the caterpillar. Most explanations would likely cause nightmares rather than stimulating a desire of hoping for the same outcome. 

“Hey, I used to be just like you. No, really. Then one day I thought, screw it, I’ll just give all that up, wrap myself up, and take a nice long meditation spa retreat, and see what happens. Spiffy set of wings, eh? Oh, yeah, and I got a bonus; I lost the love handles.”

“How do I know if that will happen for me? How can I trust you? You’re nothing like me. This sausage body becomes that? What if I never wake up?”

“Never wake up? I woke up. Ah, come on. What do you have to lose? The view from up here is AMAZING! Don’t you want to be just like me?”

If caterpillars could talk, then every caterpillar would probably have a butterfly encounter story to tell. From a caterpillar's point of view, butterflies, on the whole, are beautiful to look upon but annoying to converse with. Given that, it's likely that most caterpillars would rather sidestep the destiny of becoming one if at all possible.

But fortunately, the true course of nature is that caterpillars live moment by moment, accepting change as it comes without question, following the flow to becoming what was marked out for them ever since they were laid as an egg. And becoming that, the butterfly then flies off into the fields, leaving the other caterpillars to do their caterpillar thing.

Conditioned responses

I had hoped to be a bit more regular in my posting. But honestly, this chemo/radiation dance with cancer is a new one for me, and Monday and Tuesday of this week saw me at an incredibly low energy level and just couldn’t do it. However, new topics then flooded my mind on Wednesday and Thursday such that I started three or four new pieces, but somehow I couldn’t get the right handle on how to push any of them through to the end.

I’m not even sure why I wandered down this exploration of conditioned response. Perhaps what got me started was thinking about how when I’m driving and my wife says sternly, “Red Light!”. (Unfortunately this actually happens more often than I usually care to confess to later). I now don’t even bother to regain my focus and composure to look for the actual red light, but automatically put my foot on the brake, starting to slow down. And that conditioned response used to be followed by another conditioned response, “Yeah, I saw it.” Now, though, through the behavioral modification mechanism from her of a stern look, that has been re-conditioned to “Thanks. I wasn’t paying enough attention.”

It is said that for most of our day, most of our actions are conditional; responses that have been shaped over time by environment and habit, ones not done by any actual choice. Some are social: red light means stops, green means go. Some are biological: redheads catch the eye more readily than brunettes. Perhaps a certain melody evokes a pleasant memory. Or a certain aroma brings tear. Even concepts and ideas bend to conditional responses.

 Growing up, the only person ever to call me “Scottie” was the family dentist. So you can imagine the conditioned response that name held. It lost its power though when my dear wife started using it as well in a much sweeter voice (although now it seems to be always tied to some household chore…)

In my early years, my father worked for an agriculture bank which made loans to the farming community. Weekends were often spent as a family driving through the countryside of the California’s San Joaquin Valley looking at crops, visiting dairies and cattle ranches, Dad just checking in on clients. I remember when Caesar Chavez arrived in the valley and began organizing the farm workers. Over dinner, I remember my dad and mom sharing stories about this or that incident where the strikers had injured farmers or their property. All I heard was about was what trouble makers those organizers were. In time, whenever the topic of United Farm Workers came up, my response became what I was exposed to in my house and environment, one that sided with the farmers and packing house owners who were antagonized by union thugs. 

It was until many years later, after watching a documentary on the struggle of the workers to unionize and their well deserved right for a safe working environment, that I realized I didn’t have the whole picture. I was responding not out experience but hearsay and impact from my environment. I hadn’t thought things through for myself. The documentary brought up memories of actually seeing the living conditions of the labor camps when I younger on some of those Murray family drives. Hundreds of small cinder block tin-roofed sheds, and a single water faucet serving a single tribe of numerous dwellings. The living conditions were nothing I had ever seen before or could even imagine. Why didn’t that come to mind before?

But I can’t blame my father for my conditioned response. It just was what it was. There can be no blame in any of this. I did the best I could with what I had, and fortunately, in later years, it was easily fixed with a balance of information and a willingness to change. As for him, his own response had surely been shaped by forces unknown to me as well. Doing the best with what had.  

In a strange parallel of early childhood memory not shaping future responses, several years ago I picked up novel by John Grisham, Painted House, one the few of his that was not a legal web of intrigue. It was about dirt scrabble farm family in Texas during the Depression years. Reading that book moved me to tears because Grisham described the same life my father had hinted at when he told us about his life at that time. For him it was Oklahoma, just north of Texas, ten years old picking cotton all day long in order to help the family eat at the end of the day. No doubt he too was living in a similar type of rusty metal shack I saw as a child at the migrant camps. 

The takeaway: perhaps most of us, most of the time, act out in our lives in conditioned response. There is not much you and I can do it about except to be more aware of these responses and their triggers, and even more importantly, more forgiving. Imagine someone standing up and trying to correct us because of some conditioned response of ours in a harsh and unkind manner; or scold us for a conditioned response which over we had little control or didn’t even understand ourself. If we might use our imagination to understand what it is like to be on the receiving end, then perhaps our quickness blame and need to affix responsibility when it is turned back around might give way to understanding and forgiveness.

Dancing with the Chemo Dragon

Yesterday started Round 2 of chemo. The actual time with the chemo in the IV was about two hours, but prior to receiving that there was about a liter of preparation solution and anti-nausea stuff. And following the chemo will be two days of continuous solutions pumped in to flush the chemo slowly out so that  my liver doesn’t get a big hit. So far it has been bearable. I got back in to watching Breaking Bad before getting here, and his bad reactions to chemo built up some horror expectations, but mainly it has been various minor discomforts. 

As I mentioned previous, when I receive radiation I pull up an image based on my short experience with Aikido, basically a whirling dance of reception, combining the active force with the passive receiving force, then redirecting the total energy into a non-lethal controlled finish. What drew my attention in yesterday as I was there is that the plastic mask (pictured in a prior post) that is used to keep my head in proper position each time, has been an icon of sorts for that treatment.

Icons, those used in the Orthodox faith, are seen a windows into another world. Almost shamanic one could say. So I see that mask as a window into Western medicine. I was feeling very fine until my neck got a little swollen. Western Medicine said that there was something underlying the swelling. More tests and before I knew it, Western medicine had me in the hospital even though I felt fine. But that’s okay. Since I view everything in life as some sort of play, well, I would let the doctors play and take care of whatever they felt was “wrong” with me. I entered their world, and would receive what they would give. But Scott’s world is larger than that. And it also includes many parts I can never comprehend consciously and so I must trust that there is always more unknown than known in my world. 

That was all to just say i find it interesting that somehow I’m using an Eastern Christian symbol of icon and an Eastern martial art to blend into Western medicine. What to make of that?  Hmmm.

And sliding sideways in dance. When I meditating on some of that last night, chemo has become a sort of dance too, but in a bit more dark mode. I kind of picture the slow somber dance steps one might see in medieval court. And the words about dance of Alan Watts come to me. He said that in dance, there is no destination. You don’t dance to end up in a specific place. You dance for the pleasure of dance, each moment flowing into the next until the music finishes. You can’t dance completely if you have a goal in mind. You have to be in the moment.

Or another example: a symphonic performance. If it were all about the finish, then the conductor would launch headlong into the fastest possible tempo to get there right away. But that doesn’t happen. Each moment builds on the next, but each moment is perfect in itself. You could later analyze various parts of the musicality for deeper understanding, but the deepest understand is of the whole, presented moment by moment. Moment by moment participation in the sounds creates a mysterious joy, one felt not just through the ears but in the body as well. And by the end, there is just release.