The Finite Order
The Finite Order

The Finite Order, a novel I have been writing, shelving, and renewing for three decades. Let me set the stage. The year is 2050. Robotics, nanotech, and the digital transformation of society have advanced at warp speed. But their complexity breeds confusion even amongst the educated, yielding a resounding call for simplification. His Holiness Pope John XXIV meets with anxious papal statisticians. They note the sharp escalation of mortal and venial sins and crime in recent decades. Ominously, they predict critical mass, the imminent descent of human civilization into chaos. The pope prays to the Almighty Lord for less complexity in the universe. His prayers are immediately answered; God issues the Finite Order.

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Secular Spirituality, Religions, Faces of GodEd ChandlerComment
Elbow Bumps and Pandemonium - Blog#26 - 28 March 2020
Elbow Bumps and Pandemonium - Blog#26 - 28 March 2020

The coronavirus has invaded, an invisible alien, spreading from Area 51 in Wuhan, taking over our fellow humans, infecting invisibly, so we don’t even know who is who. Are thee friend or foe? The word “pandemonium” was coined by John Milton in his classic poem, Paradise Lost. He combined a pair of roots, “pan” (meaning: all) and “demonium” (evil spirits), to form a word that now describes all hell breaking loose. How apt.

Our needs compete. Survival, health, and safety are more primal, and typically trump our needs for attachment, affiliation, and affection, though we seek compromises. Anxiety motivates fight-or-flight maneuvers intended to guarantee survival (social distancing = flight) or at least reduce an emotional threat. Loneliness motivates affiliation, the urge to connect. How can we balance them? How can we listen to the wisdom of our anxiety, but keep a leash on the amygdala? How can we maintain connectedness in the face of social distancing?

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Anxiety, Avoidance, Death Anxiety, Connectedness, Gratitude, Managing Feelings, Mindfulness, SadnessEd ChandlerComment
Gratitude - Blog#25 - 24 November 2019
Gratitude - Blog#25 - 24 November 2019

What makes Thanksgiving special? Thanksgiving, like mental health, is about connectedness. It is a time of year when we remind ourselves to count our blessings for what we have, and have had. And like Christmas, Thanksgiving is one of the more spiritual holidays. Spirituality is about consciousness and connectedness. The short list of spiritual virtues/emotions includes awe, existential joy, gratitude, humility, and love. At Thanksgiving we focus on gratitude. We can also contrast each of these spiritual emotions with their opposite. Gratitude allows us to move beyond negativity, entitlement, and greed. As an antidote to envy and greed, gratitude dampens our preoccupation with what others have that we do not, and our desire for more, more, more. Thanks-giving is our way of reminding ourselves of our good fortune in life, while tempering our frustration, disappointment, and unmet or runaway expectations. But what if we accessed our gratitude more frequently, and deliberately? In a closely related vein, “savoring” is a term used to describe thought practices that increase our awareness and appreciation of positive experiences in our lives. Gratitude can be an everyday practice, not just a Thanksgiving centerpiece.

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Gratitude, Spirituality, Connectedness, MindfulnessEd ChandlerComment
Bullies on the Block - Blog# 24 - 15 November 2019
Bullies on the Block - Blog# 24 - 15 November 2019

Once you allow bullies to take power, they tend to ruthlessly accumulate it. Passive bystanders participate in the process, while disavowing the results. Germany and Russia were the bullies of 20th century Europe, leave a swath of destruction in their wake. The residue was readily apparent in Nuremberg, where the rotting remains of the Third Reich leave an obvious stench. But we also found abundant footprints of the bad boys in the Czech Republic and in Hungary. Surely such madness couldn’t occur here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But our freedom and bravery seem to be eroding in recent years, as we shift further right, elect a bully as our leader, and tolerate the prejudice and authoritarian politics he embraces. A look in the rear view mirror may clean the fog off the windshield

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BulliesEd Chandler Comment
The Wisdom of Vulnerability - Blog#23 - 23 August 2019
The Wisdom of Vulnerability - Blog#23 - 23 August 2019

It is natural to try to eliminate emotional pain from the mind in order to feel happy and pain free. None of us enjoy feeling sad, guilty, ashamed, anxious, fearful, etc. Who wants to feel vulnerable? If the mind were simply a bottomless pit, we could discard negative feelings like garbage, dropping them far enough below consciousness that their stinking fumes never touched us again. Unfortunately, the mind is not a bottomless pit, feelings do not disappear forever, and the problems that generate such feelings are not resolved by suppressing them from consciousness. More permanent pain relief requires an understanding of the problem that creates the pain, and a strategy for resolving that problem, both of which require us to approach, experience and explore our painful feelings. Temporary pain must often be tolerated in order to reduce and prevent more lasting pain. Likewise, there is wisdom to be found in vulnerability within relationships as well. One cannot be emotionally intimate without being vulnerable. Allowing oneself to love requires allowing oneself to risk being hurt. We all want safe love, but we must risk safety in order to obtain love, or risk lack of love and loneliness if we demand too much safety. How do we find the balance?

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Psychology, Self-Help, Vulnerability, Love, Avoidance, Managing FeelingsEd ChandlerComment
Is Me cRaZie!? - Blog#22 - 9 August 2019
Is Me cRaZie!? - Blog#22 - 9 August 2019

No one wants to be “crazy,” and most of us would prefer to be considered normal. On the other hand, most people want to be “unique,” not a cookie-cutter clone of some middle-gray cardboard portrait of normalcy. But how do we determine what is psychologically normal? What is mental illness? Most angles on this issue are quite subjective, involving obvious or subtle value judgments. We can distinguish between statistical normal and healthy normal, but common behavior (e.g., Nazi compliance) is not necessarily healthy, and the context of your unhealthy or atypical behavior (e.g., a history of trauma) is also relevant. Your degree of control over your mind and emotions, your ability to adapt to various situations, and your internal and external connectedness are also relevant. Ultimately, mental health is just as much a social value judgment as a psychological fact, and compassion serves us well when we are judging our self or others.

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Psychology, Self-Help, Awareness, PrejudiceEd ChandlerComment
Secular Spirituality, aka, Spiritual Atheism - Blog#21 - 12 July 2019
Secular Spirituality, aka, Spiritual Atheism - Blog#21 - 12 July 2019

The following blog recreates the lecture I recently provided, on June 30, 2019, to the members of the United Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast, in Valparaiso, Florida. The topic of secular spirituality requires us to define spirituality, its evolving meaning, and why it is important to human beings. It further requires us to distinguish between secular and religious versions of spirituality. And what is nonreligious spirituality?

Is there evidence to support disembodied consciousness, as in gods, ghosts, and souls? If spirituality isn’t about spirits, what is it about? Spirituality lies at the intersection of consciousness and connectedness. We can celebrate our consciousness of the gift of life, and our connectedness to each other, and the “All,” without believing in spirits or immortality. We can practice the positive spiritual emotions: existential joy and gratitude for the gift of life, humility regarding our special, small place in the universe, awe regarding existence, and love for our brethren. We can indeed be spiritual, but nonreligious.

 

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Secular Spirituality, Spiritual Atheism, Spirituality, Consciousness, Awe, External Connectedness, Internal Connectedness, ReligionsEd ChandlerComment
Managing Sadness and Depression - Blog#20 - 7 July 2019
Managing Sadness and Depression - Blog#20 - 7 July 2019

Clinical depression goes well beyond sadness and related feelings. It is best viewed as a syndrome with cognitive, behavioral, and physical, as well as emotional symptoms. To reduce depression, we often need to grieve, and replace or accept significant losses that led to our depression. But we also need to address behaviors and thought patterns that contribute to or maintain depression. Specifically, we need to counteract depressive withdrawal, and change negative thoughts about our self, the world (and people), and our future. And sometimes we need to muster the courage to address childhood issues that continue to dog us well into our adult years. If you get stuck in the blues, or experience more pronounced clinical depression, join us for this foray into perspectives on the alleviation of depression.

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Depression, Sadness, Self-Help, External Connectedness, Avoidance, Acceptance, Consciousness, Managing FeelingsEd ChandlerComment
Psychomechanics Has Arrived! - Blog#19 - 16 June 2019
Psychomechanics Has Arrived! - Blog#19 - 16 June 2019

For all subscribers to my blog, and all current clients at Turning Point, an e-copy of my newly published self-help book, Psychomechanics – Tools for Self-Regulation of Emotions, will be available FREE for 3 days: June 21-23. Thereafter, the e-book will be available for $5.99. The printed copy, due to printing costs, cannot be offered free, but is available for $12.99 through Amazon. Thanks to all of you for your encouragement down through the years, and thanks to my current and past clients, who have taught me as much as I’ve taught them.

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Psychology, Self-Help, Managing Feelings, ConsciousnessEd ChandlerComment
Birth, Death, Sex, Awe, and Mars - Blog#18 - 7 June 2019
Birth, Death, Sex, Awe, and Mars - Blog#18 - 7 June 2019

Birth and life are amazing, and reproduction all the more so. There is incredible variation in the ways that living species recreate themselves, and thereby produce the gift of life. Our daily dose of spiritual awe is bolstered when we take time to notice the diversity of life, and appreciate the intricate wonders of its recreation. Whether sexual or asexual, single-gendered or hermaphroditic, there are a host of ingenious strategies out there that renew life, propelling it forward, generation after generation. We hear about them in school, but appreciate them more with age.

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Awe, Consciousness, External Connectedness, Internal Connectedness, Love, Secular Spirituality, SpiritualityEd Chandler Comment
Why was Giordano Bruno Gagged and Burned at the Stake? - Blog#17 - 24 May 2019
Why was Giordano Bruno Gagged and Burned at the Stake? - Blog#17 - 24 May 2019

Between the death of Copernicus and the birth of Galileo, Giordano Bruno was born in 1548 in Nola, Italy. Fifty-two years later, at the turn of the 17th century, he was gagged and burned at the stake in Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. His books were to be “publicly destroyed and burned in the square of St. Peter,” and placed in the Index of Forbidden Books. Why? He reaffirmed the Copernican view that the Earth circles the sun. But he went much further. His heresy argued that the universe is infinite, composed of “innumerable worlds” similar to our own solar system, and that our sun is not the center of the universe. His true sin? Proposing a cosmology that removed human beings from the center of the universe.

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Anthropocentrism, Religions, Death Anxiety, Heliocentrism, Humility, PrideEd ChandlerComment
Inner Parenting - Blog#16 - 10 May 2019
Inner Parenting - Blog#16 - 10 May 2019

Self-nurturing is easier if we have a history of being nurtured by our own parents. If not, we are more challenged. Religious folks can use the power of prayer to access and bathe in God’s love. Others require more evidence for their beliefs. In the absence of faith in the love of an invisible God, a secular approach to self-soothing is required. If we have a history of abuse, rejection, or other experiences that have led us to internalize negativity, resulting in rejection of our self, self-nurturance is a bigger challenge. The inner-child approach is one route through this dark forest. By tapping our capacity to nurture those we love, particularly our own children, we can access our nurturance skills and apply them to our self, developing self-compassion.

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Awareness, Awe, Belief, Love, Relationships, Spiritual Atheism, DefensesEd Chandler Comment
The Gift of Consciousness - Blog#15 - 27 April 2019
The Gift of Consciousness - Blog#15 - 27 April 2019

Consciousness and matter are two fundamental properties of the universe, radically different from, and irreducible to each other. Consciousness is an incredible gift, and can be deliberately developed, mentally, not just chemically. We can identify various dimensions and dichotomies of consciousness. It can be private, or shared as a means of connecting, since connected consciousness is the essence of spirituality. It can be externally or internally focused, rational or intuitive, conscious or unconscious, and goal-directed vs. associational. Consciousness is as complex as matter, and just as fascinating. But it needs to be understood, managed, and altered to meet our needs and influence our feelings.

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Awe, Meditations, Mindfulness, Consciousness, Spirituality, AwarenessEd ChandlerComment
Feminism and Religion - Blog#14 - 19 April 2019
Feminism and Religion - Blog#14 - 19 April 2019

God Himself and His patriarchal book of rules, otherwise known as the Bible, is the true glass ceiling, containing and suppressing the rise and equality of women. Feminists remain chained to an implicit Faustian bargain. They have traded mortality for patriarchy. Women have unwittingly sacrificed power and equality on Earth for immortality in the supposed afterlife. Women seldom challenge God’s gender. Only by deposing God, and His biblical male inventors, can women assume a  fully equal role in day-to-day gender politics and the governance of the planet.

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Anthropocentrism, Religions, Theology, Feminism, PrejudiceEd ChandlerComment
Weird Photos: The ?Aha! Experience and Zoomers - Blog#13 - 10 April 2019
Weird Photos: The ?Aha! Experience and Zoomers - Blog#13 - 10 April 2019

Are you up to your waist in quicksand, stuck within the claustrophobic confines of a straight-jacketed day-in day-out existence, bored with the same old, b-flat, cardboard grey surroundings? It’s time for a safari, a photographic journey outside of the box. Not to worry, you are guaranteed a return ticket back home. And your trip will last a mere ten minutes, without any substances or hangovers. Your exposure will be limited to a few doses of visual fun, with a pile of perplexity and jolt of surprise, and a little zooming through a new neighborhood. Join us on the ?Aha! Express, for a ride into the photographic wilderness, no reservations required.

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Awe, Photography, Zommers, The ?Aha! ExperienceEd ChandlerComment
Morality: Top Down or Bottom Up? - Blog#12 - 5 April 2019
Morality: Top Down or Bottom Up? - Blog#12 - 5 April 2019

Many religious leaders talk as if religion has a monopoly on morality, and that one cannot act morally in the absence of religious belief. But despite religious press to the contrary, most atheists, and even some primates, are capable of acting quite morally. And the notion of objective morality, pre-woven into the fabric of reality, and monitored by an eye in the sky, may be seductive as a means of inducing social compliance, but is compliance really morality? Furthermore, morality comes from within, regardless of whether it initially comes from above (from God), or from around us (socially). And it starts out emotionally, not cognitively. In the words of the primatologist, Frans de Wall (2013), who studied morality in other mammals, morality is “bottom up, not top down.” Join us for a discussion of objective versus subjective, religious versus secular, and proactive versus reactive morality.

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Religions, Atheism, Morality, Moral Development, Moral Compass, Belief, Guilt, ObedienceEd ChandlerComment
Anxiety and Avoidance - Blog#11 - 29 March 2019
Anxiety and Avoidance - Blog#11 - 29 March 2019

“What if…?” is a sure fire cognitive manufacturer of anxiety. Avoidance behavior temporarily reduces anxiety, but maintains or increases it in the long run. The Serenity Prayer is an excellent resource for management of the worry that creates anxiety, and the expectations that create frustration. Approach behavior may temporarily increase anxiety, but it puts you in a position to practice and improve the skills needed to minimize anxiety. Join us for a discussion of anxiety management, focusing on generalized and social anxiety.

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Acceptance, Anger, Frustration, Anxiety, Avoidance, Defenses, Managing FeelingsEd ChandlerComment
Never Again! Spotlighting the Path to Never - Blog#10 - 16 March 2019
Never Again! Spotlighting the Path to Never - Blog#10 - 16 March 2019

Are mere beliefs sustenance enough? Are moral practices superfluous? Can we espouse love but practice prejudice without even noticing the incongruity? What prismed spectacles must be donned by extremists at the far edges of the politico-religious spectrum to blind themselves to such hypocrisy? Understanding prejudice seemed like a moral imperative after World War II. As a species, we could not let the Nazi slaughter of the Jews pass us by without understanding it, and preventing a recurrence. It was all too easy to blame the inhuman Germans, the Nazi enemy, and more recently, the Muslim jihadists, the despicable “other.” But is there something in the general human condition that ferments these atrocities? The key, perhaps, is to understand us-against-them, ingroup/outgroup thinking, and the danger of focusing on our differences, rather than our similarities to others, when the others also have nuclear toys.

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Anger, Anthropocentrism, Ingroup, Outgroup, PrejudiceEd ChandlerComment
Environmental Spirituality - Blog#9 - 8 March 2019
Environmental Spirituality - Blog#9 - 8 March 2019

Spirituality involves a celebration of our consciousness, gratitude for the gift of life, and immersion in our connectedness to the “All.” We all need to belong, to attach, to connect to something beyond and larger than ourselves, something “trans” personal. We can connect to a lover romantically, to friends socially, and to broader tangible entities such as humanity, the environment, or the universe. We can also connect to invisible spirits, such as God or the souls of deceased loved ones. But we must connect somehow, lest we feel alienated from our surroundings, lonely, isolated, and adrift. How can we re-center ourselves spiritually? Today we focus on environmental spirituality, and eco-awe.

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Awe, Spirituality, Mindfulness, Environment, External ConnectednessEd ChandlerComment