Greg Miller is a science journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Follow him on Twitter @dosmonos.
Joyce Rice is a cartoonist, news designer, and professor making comics about history, technology, and the future. She has worked with outlets like The Nib, Vox, and PBS, and she speaks internationally about the power of comics in news media, advocacy, and education. You can see more of her work at teenyrobots.com.
“I function only by falling in love: with French and France; with the 15th Century; with microbiology, cosmology, sleep research,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her daybook, capturing the necessary passion that makes writing akin to falling in love. But reading is where the parallel begins. Some of us read in order to write — one must first read about the fifteenth century and microbiology and sleep research before writing about it — and some read purely for the private joy of a world enlarged. Reading is the real fulcrum that lifts us up into new realms of thought and feeling, new atmospheres of reality, from which we free-fall into a deeper love of life itself. And whenever we read, we read the way we love — with our whole being, bringing to the book every experience we’ve ever had, every vestige of half-remembered impressions and half-survived heartbreaks, the imprint every other book we’ve ever read has left on our conscience.
From Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923–September 19, 1985) comes an uncommonly insightful, tender, and sensual celebration of this parallel between reading and love — the making of it, the falling into it — in a wonderful passage from 1979 novel If on a winter’s night a traveler (public library). From the frame narrative about a reader trying to read a book to the novel’s very title, deliberately styled like a sentence and not like a caption of capitalized words, this book is the ultimate meta-homage to reading — a book by and for the unabashed, obsessive lover of books; a book that exemplifies all of Calvino’s fourteen criteria for a classic, but especially the fourth: “a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.”
Drawing a central parallel between a story in literature and a love story in life, Calvino writes:
How to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest — for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both — must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.)
He considers how reading, like physical intimacy, is an act of total immersion that at its best requires a delicate osmotic balance of total surrender and unassailable sovereignty — one of the mind, the other of the body:
Now, since your bodies are trying to find, skin to skin, the adhesion most generous in sensations, to transmit and receive vibrations and waves, to compenetrate the fullnesses and the voids, since in mental activity you have also agreed on the maximum agreement, you can be addressed with an articulated speech that includes you both in a sole, two-headed person. First of all the field of action, or of existence, must be established for this double entity you form. Where is the reciprocal identification leading? What is the central theme that recurs in your variations and modulations? A tension concentrated on not losing anything of its own potential, on prolonging a state of reactivity, on exploiting the accumulation of the other’s desire in order to multiply one’s own charge? Or is it the most submissive abandonment, the exploration of the immensity of strokable and reciprocally stroking spaces, the dissolving of one’s being in a lake whose surface is infinitely tactile?
In both situations you certainly do not exist except in relation to each other, but, to make those situations possible, your respective egos have not so much to erase themselves as to occupy, without reserve, all the void of the mental space, invest in itself at the maximum interest or spend itself to the last penny. In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn’t change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voi, a second person plural, you are two tu’s, more separate and circumscribed than before.
In what may be the most sensuous passage ever composed on the subject, he likens the act of reading to the act of making love, addressing the reader-lover:
Now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being… The Other Reader now is reviewing your body as if skimming the index, and at some moments she consults it as if gripped by sudden and specific curiosities, then she lingers, questioning it and waiting till a silent answer reaches her, as if every partial inspection interested her only in the light of a wider spatial reconnaissance. Now she dwells on negligible details, perhaps tiny stylistic faults… and she exploits them to establish a margin of detachment, critical reserve, or joking intimacy; now instead the accidentally discovered detail is excessively cherished — for example, the shape of your chin or a special nip you take at her shoulder — and from this start she gains impetus, covers (you cover together) pages and pages from top to bottom without skipping a comma.
But then Calvino anchors the analogy in a crucial difference within the similarity of the two experiences:
Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against the moments, recovering time?
If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional model, perhaps four-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.
“To create today is to create dangerously,” Albert Camus told a gathering of young people at the peak of the Cold War, shortly after becoming the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize. “The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies… the strange liberty of creation is possible.” A generation before him, while policed by the forces about to unworld humanity in its first global war, the revolutionary artist Egon Schiele observed that true visionaries tend to come from the minority.
Millennia and civilizations earlier, two such visionaries who lived a generation apart, one born the day the other threw herself into the sea — Sappho (c. 630–c. 570 BC) and Pythagoras (c. 570–c. 495 BC) — revolutionized the deepest undertone of modern thought with their repugnant ideas about the most delicate, most beloved, and most elemental of the arts: music.
Pythagoras (Art by J. Augustus Knapp, circa 1926)
In an era when the most widespread musical instrument was the tetrachord — the Hellenic four-string lyre — and musicians had no standardized system of tuning their instruments, no understanding of the underlying tonal patterns, and nothing more than a vague intuitive sense about how to strum melodies rather than discord, Pythagoras discovered the relationship between musical harmony and the mathematical harmony of numbers. According to his foremost biographer, the fourth-century Syrian scholar Iamblichus, Pythagoras took it upon himself to devise a mechanical aid for musical tuning.
One day, Iamblichus’s account goes, Pythagoras was strolling past a blacksmith’s forge and was captivated by the sound of the many hammers pounding in a pattern that suddenly sounded harmonious. He rushed into the forge and immediately began investigating the cause of the harmony, testing the various hammers in various stroke combinations — some producing harmony, others discord. After analyzing the patterns and weighing the hammers, he discovered a simple mathematical relationship between those that produced harmony — their masses were exact ratios of one another’s.
Although the anecdote may belong to that murky shoreline between the apocryphal and the factual that marks many biographies of genius, Pythagoras did eventually test these ratios on the lyre. They proved to be perfectly predictive of harmony — the first discovery of a mathematical rule undergirding a physical phenomenon, and the basis of what became known as the Music of the Spheres.
Celestial harmonics of the planets, from The Harmony of the World (1619) by Johannes Kepler, based on the Pythagorean concept of the Music of the Spheres.
In our time, Pythagoras, known to every schoolchild for his famous triangle theorem, is celebrated as the pioneer who set the golden age of mathematics into motion with the development of numeric logic. Having coined the word philosophy and defined the very meaning of wisdom, he seeded scientific ideas that fomented the later revolutions ushered in by visionaries as far-ranging and far-reaching as Plato, Copernicus, Descartes, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein.
But in his time, Pythagoras was very much a radical, a dissident, an intellectual deviant. His progressive views on social reform led him to flee the tyrannical rule of his native Samos. After arriving in the Greek colony of Croton as a refugee, he founded a philosophical school whose disciples, known as the Pythagoreans, devised an unexampled model of the universe, placing at its center a ball of fire more than a thousand years before Copernicus upended the geocentric Ptolemaic system with his heliocentricity.
In another stroke of radicalism, the Pythagoreans admitted into their school a class of sub-citizens denied education and excluded from the newborn civic system of democracy: women. One of them became the world’s first known female astronomer — Hypatia, who lived her trailblazing life and died her savage death in the city where nearly every trace of Sappho vanished.
Death of Sappho by Miguel Carbonell Selva, 1881. (Available as a print.)
When the Library of Alexandria was burned, the flames consumed the nine-volume set of Sappho’s collected works, leaving only fragments copied by fans and scholars throughout the ancient world. From this handful of surviving ashes, Sappho rose with her lyre and her verse to be remembered as the Tenth Muse, the inventor of the love song and the personal lyric, the first great beacon of women’s right to creative expression, and the first great champion of the right to love whom we love. Unlike Emily Dickinson, who deliberately changed the gender pronouns in her poems to conceal the same-sex passion that fomented her poetry, Sappho kept the female pronouns in the beautiful and heartbreaking odes she wrote to the women she loved. In doing so, she pioneered a radical shift in musical culture — the permission to sing not about the gods, the seasons, and the wars, but about oneself: about the stunning interior universe of subjective human experience. Without Sappho, there would be no Nina Simone to pose in song the central question of consciousness: “I wish you could know what it means to be me.”
The epoch-making contributions of Pythagoras and Sappho come alive in Ted Gioia’s altogether wonderful book Music: A Subversive History (public library) — the story of our species told through its most consummate and intimate art-form, traced through the lives of the visionaries and radicals who shaped it, from Pythagoras and Sappho to Bob Dylan and N.W.A.
At every stage in human history, music has been a catalyst for change, challenging conventions and conveying coded messages — or, not infrequently, delivering blunt, unambiguous ones. It has given voice to individuals and groups denied access to other platforms for expression, so much so that, in many times and places, freedom of song has been as important as freedom of speech, and far more controversial.
Art from an 1878 book about the history of science and literature, depicting some of Pythagoras’s influences and inspirations. (Available as a print and as a face mask.)
Holding up Pythagoras as the most significant figure in the history of music, whose controversial contribution was both a liberation and a limitation, Gioia writes:
Greek culture before his arrival revered what we call nowadays Orphic thought (named after Orpheus, the mythical musician, but almost certainly considered a historical personage in those distant days), and believed songs possessed powerful magic. The rise of Pythagorean music theory, circa 500 BC, changed all that by conceptualizing music as a rational science of sounds that could be described in mathematical terms.
The very first algorithm entered Western music with this philosophical rupture that happened more than 2,500 years ago.
And yet while the Pythagorean model of mathematically distinguishing melody from noise liberated music by giving it a new language of codified expression, it also limited music by excluding from the musical canon styles that didn’t conform to these proportionate structures of scales and rhythms — styles like those that emerged from the African diaspora or from my own native Balkans. Gioia writes:
The ratios and proportions that initially helped us grasp songs turned into the rules and constraints that defined them. The strategies and schemas were often seen as the ‘authentic’ music, and the actual sounds only got validation through their allegiance to what was written on the printed page… The eventual result was a conceptualization of music that excluded far more than it allowed.
[…]
The very practice of legitimization is an act of distortion.
Still, the Pythagorean conceptualization of music had profound and beneficent consequences, stretching far beyond the realm of music and into the entire landscape of culture: By bringing mathematics to an art-form previously regarded as mystical, it catalyzed the slow shift from a world of superstition and magic to a world of science and reason — a cultural evolution that would unfold on the scale of epochs. Two millennia after Pythagoras, Kepler would spend years defending his mother in a witchcraft trial while revolutionizing our understanding of the universe with his epoch-making laws of planetary motion, drawing on the Music of the Spheres to discover the proportional relationships of planetary orbits.
Solids from Kepler’s Harmony of the World, exploring the relationship between harmony and geometry. (Available as a print and as a face mask.)
From this foundation laid in the Pythagorean past, Gioia leaps across the millennia to the present:
Today, these three spheres — science, music, and magic — appear as self-contained and unrelated disciplines, but in the context of 500 BC, the connections between them were obvious to the leading minds. Anyone who hoped to dislodge magical thinking in a traditional society and replace it with a scientific worldview was forced to address music theory, because it, too, could be conceptualized as either magic or science. Any choice between these two models would have profound implications. And not just for theory: society would be altered by how this matter was decided. Before Pythagoras, songs possessed magical potency. If Pythagoras and his followers hoped to eradicate superstition and elevate a more rational and logical worldview, they were almost forced to redefine all the parameters of musical practice.
But while this reconfiguration of musical practice as a mathematical language advanced the world toward science, it also repressed a central animating force of music — its elemental humanity, ablaze with feeling, sensuality, and a sense of the sacred. Even Schopenhauer, so very German and so unfaltering in his central tenet of the will as the supreme instrument of the human spirit, considered music capable of reaching beyond the reach of will, into “the inner being, the in-itself, of the world”; even Kierkegaard, for all his ceaseless cerebration, his Nordic reserve, and his lifelong virginity, exulted in the unparalleled sensuality of music.
It was Sappho who feathered the other great wing by which music took flight toward modernity, carrying the whole of human culture on its back. Gioia writes:
Sappho has two obvious concerns, and they dominate her worldview even as they expose a hidden rift in Western thought: the emotional bonds of love, and communal obligations to the gods. In the later evolution of Western music, these two approaches will veer off into their separate traditions and have little to do with each other. You could hardly imagine two music genres with less in common than love songs and religious hymns, but for Sappho these are intimately connected.
While Pythagoras took the mysticism of music and turned it into a mathematical language, Sappho took the ancient tradition of sacred singing and turned it into a new literary genre of personal poetics. By pioneering the love song and the self-permission for telling our own stories, drawn from our most intimate experiences, she gave the world an immense and abiding gift — the ability to preserve our stories in song as a fundament of identity and survival, from the African spirituals that sustained the souls of the enslaved to the folk ballads by which refugees hold on to culture and community. In fact, Sappho’s home island has always been a nexus of cultures and remains a major portal into Europe for refugees from the Middle East. Gioia writes:
At the height of the Syrian crisis in 2016, new arrivals would show up on Lesbos almost every day, making their treacherous journey on small boats, rafts, and inflatable crafts… Songs are the possessions most likely to survive long journeys, remaining the property of the newcomer even when everything else has been taken away.
Event on March 21, 2021: Releasing the Hidden Splendour workshop facilitated by Richard Hartnett, H.W., M. and Rick Thomas, H.W., M. will be held on Sunday, March 21 at 3 p.m. Pacific time. Open to all students of RHS.
I dwell in Possibility – A fairer House than Prose – More numerous of Windows – Superior – for Doors –
Of Chambers as the Cedars – Impregnable of eye – And for an everlasting Roof The Gambrels of the Sky –
Of Visitors – the fairest – For Occupation – This – The spreading wide my narrow Hands To gather Paradise –
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Little known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. Wikipedia
‘Jane’ is a client familiar to every psychotherapist. She is suffering, perhaps intensely, but struggles to put into words the feelings and internal conflicts that drive her suffering, except in the most limited way. She might pin her angst on something specific: she’s terrified of gaining weight, or agonises over the shape of her nose, or says she can’t control her drinking. But when asked to say more about her inner life, she comes up blank, or returns to her already well-trodden initial complaint, or perhaps dismisses the question entirely. It’s not, the therapist soon discovers, that she’s holding back; on the contrary, she doesn’t have the capacity to give a fuller description of her internal life.
People like Jane are alexithymic, a term coined by the US psychoanalysts John Case Nemiah and Peter Sifneos in the 1970s, from the Greek a (‘without’), lexis (‘words’) and thymos (‘emotions’). It refers to a cluster of features including difficulty identifying and describing subjective feelings, a limited fantasy life, and a style of thinking that focuses on external stimuli as opposed to internal states.
Yet even before there was a name for it, psychoanalysts would oftendescribe clients with apparent alexithymia, who reached an impasse in treatment because of their concrete thinking, limited emotional awareness and dismissive attitude toward their inner lives. These people were prone to developing so-called somatic symptoms (bodily complaints such as pain or fatigue) and they used compulsive behaviours to regulate their feelings, such as binge eating and alcohol abuse.
Clinicians have since observed alexithymia among people diagnosed with a wide range of mental health problems, including post-traumatic states, drug dependence, eating disorders and panic disorders. The broad spectrum of problems with which alexithymia is associated is consistent with the notion that when a person can’t express her emotional feelings in symbolic form, such as through words or images, this leads the emotions to have a harmful effect on her physiology, which then manifests as bodily symptoms.
What’s missing in alexithymia is a capacity that Nemiah in 1977 called the ‘psychic elaboration’ of emotion. Alexithymia is an extreme form of a deficit that is present in all of us to varying degrees. Whereas some of us struggle to put our feelings into words in nearly all domains, others can speak with sophistication and complexity about their emotional lives in relation to their artistic pursuits, for example, but not their personal relationships. Developing this capacity – the psychic elaboration of emotion – is a life-long task with which we must all engage. It is a cornerstone of psychological self-knowledge. Moreover, the failure to foster this capacity in psychotherapy is one of the most common factors that undermines its success.
To explain what is meant by the psychic elaboration of emotion, we must first clarify the terms affect, emotion and feeling. In 1917, Sigmund Freud, with his usual foresight, described affects as composite experiences that include ‘particular motor innervations or discharges’ and ‘certain feelings’. Since then, psychologists have defined emotion as the neurophysiological and motor-expressive component of affect (ie, what happens in the body) and feelings as the subjective, cognitive-experiential component (ie, ‘what it feels like to have that emotion’). Meanwhile, the term affect has come to encompass both the emotional and feeling components.
For our purposes, let’s think of affect as being expressed in four different ‘registers’: somatic, motoric, imaginal and verbal (following a model first proposed by the French-Canadian psychoanalysts Serge Lecours and Marc-André Bouchard in the 1990s). In the somatic register, affect is expressed through internal physiological sensations, bodily disturbances and injuries. This is how affect is first experienced in infancy, through sensations such as pain, tension, warmth or nausea, in the internal organs, head, musculature and skin. Throughout life, the body remains our ultimate emotional backdrop, the place in which any experience we cannot know with our minds continues to leave its mark.
The next step up in complexity, also available to infants, is the motoric register, which involves the behaviour and action of the muscular body, including positive and negative manifestations (eg, twitches and pacing, but also silences and stillness). The infant squirms, wiggles, cries and smiles – all are reflexive enactments of bodily affective sensations. Yet adults equally make use of bodily activity as a means of expressing affect: schoolyard fights, slammed doors and enthusiastic hugs are all, in part, expressions in this register.
The next step in the chain that bridges body and mind is the imaginal, which involves using mental pictures and scenes to represent underlying bodily states. Its content can take the form of images as expressed in dreams, fantasies and metaphors. It is a pivotal step, for it is the first register that utilises symbols to represent affect. Crucially, these can be combined to allow for the creation of more complex meaning structures. Note that not all imaginal expressions of affect have this representational quality to the same degree: consider persecutory hallucinations, which are often experienced as ‘things in themselves’ without symbolic qualities.
The psychotherapist helps the client put into words affects that have remained unrecognised
Finally, the verbal register entails the manifestation of affect in language, in words and stories, explanations and insights. It is the pinnacle of our emotional architecture, allowing us to link past and present, to hold up an experience and to examine it from different angles, to put our emotions ‘on pause’ and to bridge, even if only partially, the gaps that separate us as individuals.
As the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott argued in the previous century, affect is foremost a bodily experience for infants, and it is only with a ‘good enough’ intersubjective environment – the relationship between mother and infant – that the ‘psyche-soma’ begins to unfold through the psychic elaboration of affect as bodily experience. Psychotherapy is similar in some ways. The relationship between therapist and client creates a new intersubjective space intended to promote the psychic elaboration of emotion – that is, the elaboration of affect into images and words, and the linking together of these images and words with increasing complexity and sophistication. The psychotherapist, like the ‘good enough’ mother, helps the client to put into words affects that have in the past remained unrecognised and unelaborated.
Let’s imagine that ‘Jane’ struggles with binge eating, consuming enormous amounts of food, often to the point of feeling physically ill. In our work together, we discover, through tentative steps of enquiry spanning several weeks, that before many of her binges, there is a barely conscious feeling of anger toward her work colleagues, who take for granted her willingness to ‘pick up the slack’. In fact, I suggest this possibility after she makes an offhand remark about staying at work late – yet again – before stopping at a fast-food restaurant on the way home. We start to become more curious about her experience of anger more generally, and in a later session she describes a fantasy (ie, an image) of herself pouring her coffee onto her boss’s desk, ruining his carefully laid-out papers.
My interpretation of Jane’s binge eating is that, as with many clients, it is driven by her struggles to translate affects – many of which might be described as ‘angry feelings’ – into words and images so that they can be further elaborated and subjected to reflection. Without this capacity, she turns to binge eating as a last-ditch effort to regulate emotions that feel dangerous and out-of-control. The fervour involved in eating large amounts of food provides a ‘motoric pathway’ through which she can express her affects, which brings temporary relief before the cycle begins again. In our work, Jane and I strive to elaborate her affects, to link the resulting representations together in increasingly complex systems. We talk at length about Jane’s history with anger through her life, including how the feeling was handled in her family. Over time, this provides Jane with a ‘thicker’ mental buffer of symbolised material – ‘the “immune system” of the psyche’, as Lecours and Bouchard call it – that protects her from internal and external strife, promoting reflection instead of counterproductive action.
As I hope this abbreviated example has demonstrated, the problem that Jane struggles with – alexithymia – points to a task with which we must all engage: elaborating our affects into images and words, and subjecting them to ongoing reflection. Although most of us are not alexithymic in the clinical sense, we all have ‘pockets’, some larger and others smaller, of our inner lives that remain unelaborated. And in psychotherapy as in life, while a single, brilliant insight can be deeply important, that alone rarely leads to sustained personal development and relief from emotional suffering. It is, on the contrary, the development of this capacity – the psychic elaboration of emotion – that leads, quite literally, to continued mental growth.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary has added a new entry to the definition of the word “they” as a pronoun used to refer to a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary. Gender pronouns and gender fluidity aren’t topics that only LGBTQ+ folk should be knowledgeable about; cisgender people need to educate themselves as well.
Raven Yamamoto is a junior journalism major whose gender pronouns are they/them. They define genderfluid as “an unwillingness to cling to standards or someone who doesn’t adhere to any side or point on the spectrum. It can be going back and forth between the two extremes.” This means that someone can be very feminine-presenting one day, very masculine-presenting another or androgynous.
Millennials and Generation Z are the most familiar with gender-neutral pronouns and do the work to accept and understand gender-nonconforming, trans and LGBTQ+ folk. “[We’re the only ones] who make that effort to recognize the identity that they own,” said Yamamoto. They still think it’s a problem, as there’s a gap in understanding and fear of interacting with people who are trans, gender-nonconforming or who are queer.
Misinformation can breed fear, which leads to people not being willing to ask if they are confused about someone’s gender pronouns. If you aren’t sure about someone’s gender pronouns, ask; this way you avoid any discomfort. Another way to normalize asking for gender pronouns is to offer your own when meeting someone. Simply saying, “Hi, my name is Gloria, and my pronouns are she/her, what are yours?” avoids any possible awkwardness or uncertainty you might have about misgendering someone.
To normalize gender-neutral pronouns, higher education, such as universities and colleges should incorporate training on how to use and ask for pronouns as well as offering their own. This would allow them to be able to handle a situation where someone.
It’s likely to fall into an awkward situation where you have used the wrong pronoun when referring to someone. Do not ignore your mistake in the hopes that it will blow over. Correct yourself the moment you realize that you’ve made a mistake. This shows that you are working on using their correct pronouns moving forward.
Moreover, if you didn’t know someone’s gender identity or what pronouns they prefer and they correct you, express gratitude. Ken Cavanaugh, a senior women’s and gender studies major, who goes by the pronouns they/them or she/her, advises against apologizing when you’ve made the mistake. “Apologizing for using incorrect pronouns puts the person who was just misgendered in the position of comforting you and telling you it’s okay,” they said.
Saying thank you acknowledges that you now understand and are aware of their gender pronouns, and you are both able to move on from that moment.
One way that we can avoid making these mistakes is to practice saying some sentences using they or them to yourself. As silly as it seems, this is a good way to work it into your everyday vocabulary.
Another thing to be conscious of is not policing someone’s gender identity. Gender identity is a spectrum, and just because someone may not fit your definition of a specific gender identity does not mean that they are not valid.
One way to be more aware of what particular pronouns mean is to read up on them. A great resource is Them.us, an online magazine that provides a range of information about topics from entertainment to politics to culture through the lens of today’s LGBTQ+ community.
Although we have come a long way in nonbinary representation, we still have a long way to go. We need to take the simple steps to work non-gendered language into our everyday lives. We can do this by interacting with more nonbinary people and following people on social media that provide more information. Some of Yamamoto’s favorites include Alok Vaid-Menon and Chella Man. A few more people who identify as queer or non-binary that you may not have known of include Sam Smith, Asia Kate Dillon, Ruby Rose and Amandla Stenberg.
This is the opinion of Gloria Ndilula, a senior economics major from Windhoek, Namibia. Tweet comments @LALoyolan or email editor@theloyolan.com.
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What if your entire life could be infused with and fueled by the energy of evolution itself? In this 16-minute audio, Craig guides you on an experiential journey into the heart of the evolutionary impulse that gave birth to the cosmos and that continues to propel life and consciousness forward toward ever higher orders of goodness, truth, beauty and complexity. This potent audio culminates in a contemplation that invites you into a direct experience of your own “evolutionary self” and shows you how you can begin to activate and align with it in your own life.
Below the video player is an MP3 version of the talk and an edited transcript, if you’d prefer to engage the content in that way.
There’s one way of understanding spirit or divinity as the sacred essence of everything—the ground of everything. It’s the timeless, changeless, unmanifest ground of all manifestation. This is the dimension of spirit or divinity that we primarily work with through meditative practices. When we awaken to our true nature or our natural state or our awakened awareness through these practices, we are awakening to this particular dimension of spirit or the sacred.
But there is another dimension of divinity that is of a completely different order. It is the active face of spirit. It’s the impulse of evolution. It’s spirit as the evolutionary impulse itself—the creative principle, the driving force in the cosmos and in consciousness. It’s the active, dynamic power that moves the cosmos forward.
We now know scientifically that we live in an evolving universe. We used to think the universe was static. Then we realized that the universe started with a Big Bang and then went through all these phases and cycles of evolution. Then life emerged and went through its own stages of evolution, leading to the most remarkable (and potentially precarious) stage: human evolution.
The cosmos evolved, life evolved, and in human beings, consciousness evolved. We went from being primitive, simple animals to having this extraordinary, complex consciousness that has created the world we live in. This consciousness is able to know itself through us, and even discover divinity and spirit and enlightenment. All of this from just stardust.
The universe is not in a process of evolution. The universe is a process of evolution. There is an evolutionary impulse running through the whole thing. This evolutionary impulse is actually who and what we are at the deepest level. We aren’t just an individual body-mind organism. There is a dimension of who we are that is the living, incarnated impulse of evolution itself that has given birth to the whole cosmos and everything in it.
This is an evolutionary imperative, and when we awaken to it, we feel compelled in every cell of our being to align with that impulse, to manifest it, to participate in the further evolution of life and consciousness and even the evolution of God. In this we realize that spirit or divinity isn’t static either. Even though it has a static, timeless, changeless dimension, spirit itself is going through evolution just like everything else in the cosmos. And we can participate in its further development. We can participate in uplifting the world into ever-higher orders of goodness, truth, beauty, and complexity.
In a sense, when we discover who and what we are as the evolutionary principle, we start to see that we can make an enormous difference. Even one person can have a huge impact because this is a free and open system. It’s not a closed system. It’s an evolving process, and everything is dynamic. And it’s all moving forward. And when we become conscious of the evolutionary impulse and we begin to express it, we become an agent of evolution. We become an agent of divinity in the world, and this makes our choices very powerful.
We can make a big difference in whatever context we find ourselves in. It’s not that we’re all necessarily going to become activists. Some might. But the point is that now everything we’re doing in our life takes on a new and profound significance.
This practice ends up being a very powerful self-transcending process, because our petty little concerns don’t seem very important when we awaken to the enormous significance of our life as participants in evolution and as an expression of the evolutionary impulse. The incredible wisdom, power, strength, courage, and love that is coursing through our veins makes so many things that once seemed burdensome and difficult seem pretty inconsequential. We find that we are up for so much more in life than we ever thought possible, because something much bigger than us has stepped into the driver’s seat. It’s not that you’re not you. It’s just that you’re you with a capital Y-O-U. This really realigns everything.
So, how do we work with this evolutionary impulse in a practice context? There is one dimension of practice that has to do with waking up to this evolutionary impulse in a contemplative sense. But once you’ve discovered and begun to realize that you are the evolutionary impulse—that it’s your own true nature—the practice becomes learning to align your life with that. This is what I call the “evolutionary self.” It’s the human face of the evolutionary impulse. When we discover the evolutionary self within us, we realize that it has different values, priorities, concerns, cares, and perspectives. It sees things very differently than your conventional self.
So what are the practices you can begin to do to align your life with this evolutionary self? There are dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct practices that we can derive from this evolutionary orientation. But for our purposes here, what’s important is to get the essence of what it means to align with your evolutionary self. Then you can begin to create all kinds of specific practices to activate and manifest it in your own life.
To begin to give you a taste of what it means to put this evolutionary self into practice, I’m going to guide you in a brief contemplation. This is not a meditation. It’s a reflection or a contemplation. I want to invite you to bring your attention to the part of you that is the energy of the Big Bang still rippling through the universe. Bring your attention to the part of you that is the dynamic, creative force moving through the cosmos. It’s the life force. It’s the evolutionary force moving through life—bringing life to ever higher, more complex, more diverse and beautiful expressions.
Take a moment to just contemplate all the beauty and biological diversity in this world. Think of all the diversity of animal life and plant life—the colorful birds and fishes and flowers. Now think of all the extraordinary diversity that human life has brought into existence—technology, innovation, and this whole explosion of creativity. Now bring your attention to the part of yourself that is that explosion of creativity—that is this explosion of evolution, of spirit in action, of consciousness expanding and moving forward, upward, onward.
Become aware of how this energy and intelligence already lives in you and expresses itself in your life. Feel the part of you that gets thrilled by change, that’s excited by newness and novelty. Feel the part of you that gets excited when things don’t go according to plan, when just for a moment nobody knows what’s going to happen. We’re in the unknown. We’re off the map, on a new frontier we didn’t expect. Notice this impulse to create, this impulse to evolve, this impulse to awaken.
Just notice what it feels like to step fully into that right now. Now acknowledge that this is your own nature; that you are that impulse of evolution. Allow it to continue to ripple forward in whatever way it does.
The work of awakening to and aligning with the evolutionary impulse is a very comprehensive and life-changing spiritual practice. Again, it’s not something we do sitting down with our eyes closed, by ourselves. It’s something that we do when engaged in life, and it propels our engagement with life in a whole new way.
The best way to begin to practice it, is simply to notice the evolutionary impulse in your own life and begin to activate it and align with it. Explore what it’s like to live your life from that different center.
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