A Tribute to Arthur Hancock

Do not weep for me,

This is not my true country, I have lived banish’d from my true country, I now go back there,

I return to the celestial sphere where everyone goes in his turn.

—Walt Whitman, Salut au Monde!

My husband, my lover, my friend, Arthur Hancock, died in February of 2015. He would ask that we not weep for him; he lived a life filled with love, creativity, and adventure and believed that in death he just moved on to his next adventure in the celestial sphere.

I knew Arthur for almost 35 years, which was half of his life. We were soul mates. That can be a cliché for couples that live together a long time, but in our case it went far beyond the cliché.

Arthur was an extraordinary person. He thought for himself and lived by his own rules. He was fiercely independent. He was brilliant.

Arthur had a great heart, honest and open. Open to all creatures, from all walks of life. Open to all ideas. Open to art, music, laughter, and love. Being open allowed Arthur to be easily moved by a song, or a poem, or a person’s story. As a result, he could see deeper into people’s hearts than most people.

Arthur was passionate about many things, chief among them love, truth, and music.

He was a natural-born musician; music was in his heart and soul. He played guitar and sang, and his greatest love was folk music. Arthur knew hundreds of songs; he had a song list with about 400 “requestable songs” on it, and when he played a club he’d pass the lists around. You could call out a song and he’d just launch into it. If you asked him to play a song he didn’t know he could always fake a verse or two.

He was also an amazing entertainer. He lived to be on stage in front of an audience. He loved songs from many genres—folk, old standards, blues, jazz, rock-and-roll, country—so it was easy to find a song for everyone.

But Arthur's interest in music was not just because it pleased him to play. It also stemmed from the fact that he loved to please others. Arthur loved playing for kids, and had all sorts of silly songs and silly voices to make them even more special. When he was on stage performing, he would work tirelessly, pouring out sweat, never taking a break, if he felt he was making his audience happy.

Arthur was an incredible songwriter. He wrote over 90 songs, and John Denver recorded one, entitled 'Relatively Speaking.' His songs are mostly about his passions: truth and universal love. He also wrote songs about relationships, but many of these expand out to universal love. I feel you could build a spiritual practice around Arthur's songs; his songs are both uplifting and inspiring; they are mind-expanding and heart-opening. You can hear all of his songs on his YouTube channels, Songs in the Key of Consciousness and We Are All Innocent by Reason of Insanity (the musical).

Arthur could spontaneously create a song to fit any situation and mood. In the first half of our relationship we had a cat, Fluffles, who lived for sixteen years. We had eight or ten songs about her we loved to sing. Arthur and his daughter Clea had many they’d written together.

Arthur had a great sense of humor. He loved to laugh. He loved silly movies like Airplane (our first date), Where’s Poppa, and Polyester, and TV shows like MST3K, Black Adder, and Fawlty Towers. He loved being silly. Even as an adult, even in his 60s, he would be silly and playful.

Whenever he and his daughter were together in a store they’d always misbehave in the funniest ways.

Arthur brought this silliness to Blackberry Bear, a character he played in a TV show we produced. Five-year-old kids loved Blackberry, and at the same time he threw in subtle jokes to keep the adults amused. (Watch a PSA Blackberry Bear did for the local hospital, or the Visitor Information Program, which Blackberry hosted.)

Arthur was even silly while we conducted business. For years we had a video business; we sold the nature videos we had filmed and produced at tourist shops around western North Carolina. When we visited our retailers Arthur would tell stories and jokes to the clerks or owners, always lightening up the transaction, or he’d go off and play with the store cat, all of whom he knew by name (while often not knowing the names of the people).

A friend called Arthur a “gentle giant.” He was a big man physically, but he also had an outsize personality. People always remembered Arthur. When we’d met someone casually sometime in the past, they would rarely remember me, but as soon as they saw Arthur they’d say, “Oh yes, now I know who you are!”

And he was gentle, kind, and tenderhearted. Arthur was very loving and fair. I don’t remember us ever having a conversation about sharing household duties. It seems as if this was just a given in our relationship from the first, that we would share equally. And it was a very natural division, I don’t remember ever negotiating about who would do what. Arthur cleaned bathrooms, vacuumed, dusted, washed windows, and did the dishes.

Arthur loved animals and was very tender with them. One of my favorite photographs of him is in Tahiti, posed in front of a line of stray cats feasting on the canned tuna Arthur had brought them.

Arthur had an amazing mind. He was very intelligent, but had been born into a working-class Southern family and had no chance to go to college. So Arthur educated himself by reading literature and poetry. His memory was astonishing (as you might imagine given the fact that he knew hundreds of songs) and he could think of a passage from a book or film for every occasion.

Arthur loved literature and some of his favorite authors were William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Vladimir Nabokov, and Evelyn Waugh. He was 18 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the night of the assassination he stood under a streetlight and read Walt Whitman’s poem about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” 

He also loved astronomy. Arthur was at Cape Canaveral when the Apollo 11 crew took off for the moon in 1969, and we saw a few shuttle launches, including one on the base where we were so close we could feel the sound of the lift-off in our bodies. Arthur loved looking at Hubble telescope images, and was so conversant with the large numbers involved in cosmology that he could sing Monty Python’s “Universe Song,” filled with statistics about the size of the universe, completely from memory.

In his late 20s Arthur decided to see the Himalayas, and spent six months in Nepal. He had some amazing adventures there, including a two-week hike that took him within a few miles of Mt. Everest.

While there he contracted Guillan-Barre Syndrome and was paralyzed from the neck down for a year. He regained the ability to walk and play the guitar, but had physical limitations from that point on. Yet he never complained, and many casual acquaintances never knew there was anything wrong with him. Despite his disability, Arthur managed to accomplish much in his life.

Arthur took numerous risks and lived on the outside of our culture, never wanting to compromise just to make a living; he questioned himself and life carefully and deeply. As a result he had a very unusual perspective on life. And he wasn’t afraid to be outrageous. 

Arthur spoke his mind; he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought. I really admired that about him.

Arthur had some extremely profound spiritual experiences on LSD when he was a young man, and these informed his life and his work.

One of the lessons he learned from his acid trips was a profound love of nature. This found expression in our nature videos. Arthur could find as much beauty in a ditch as in an awesome vista. On his first LSD trip he saw that a patch of dirt was the jewelry case of God, and that perception never left him.

Another legacy of his LSD trips was an unshakeable faith in a reality beyond the physical. He had such deeply profound experiences that he never doubted that there is a God, an absolute Truth, underlying life. The reality of this Truth, which is Love, informed his songs and his philosophy.

Our first book, The Game of God, is the fruit of his LSD visions. Arthur spent five years seriously and soberly developing the philosophy that forms the basis of that work and our next book, We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity. He developed a philosophy that was comprehensive: it covered theology, the mechanics of the physical universe, and psychology. The heart and essence of Arthur’s philosophy is love. To quote Whitman again, “No other theme but love.”

Arthur and I produced a TV show in 2010 for our local public access channel where we discussed our ideas. You can watch them here at our 'A Question of Meaning' YouTube channel (we did 45 shows in all).

Arthur also wrote a memoir, Exposing Myself: A Life of Sex and Truth, in which he describes the adventures of his life and the development of his philosophy.

Arthur felt that most people hide their sex life when they write their memoirs; he felt that someone needed to be honest about this aspect of life and that he was the right man for the job. He dreamed of a day when people wouldn’t have to be ashamed about sex, and was an advocate for freeing our culture from our Puritan past.

One day not long after Arthur and I met in San Francisco we were walking through a park at sundown. The sky was banded with clouds, and the clear patches were turning a brilliant but soft green between the dark red and purple clouds. Arthur pointed and said, “That turquoise—there—that’s my idea of the color of paradise.” That color spoke of paradise to me also, and for all of our years together we would look for the color of paradise in the sunset.

Arthur loved me intensely. I loved Arthur intensely. We were both incredibly blessed to love the one who loved us.

Arthur and I were together 24/7/365. We worked together and wrote books together. We made music together. We made love together.

I will miss this extraordinary man for the rest of my life.

Life: A God-class Roller Coaster

I love roller coasters. When I go to an amusement park the roller coaster is usually the only ride that interests me. Many years ago, I went with my stepdaughter to Opryland, a park near Nashville, and a big thunderstorm came through. We decided to stay at the park and wait out the storm. Almost everyone else left so, once the storm was over, we had the unusual experience of having an amusement park to ourselves. My stepdaughter liked a ride with twirling swings that wasn’t too far from the roller coaster, so I left her there—she never even had to get off the swing between rides—and headed over to my favorite. This was a corkscrew coaster, meaning you spent time upside down. I rode it six times in a row with no waiting; what a fabulous experience!

Why are roller coasters and other extreme rides at amusement parks and fairs so popular? Why do we pay to be scared? Clearly many of us like to experience the simulation of approaching death. Why is this, when our whole animal nature is programmed to survive at all costs?

The message of my husband and my book, The Game of God, (newly revised), is that one reason the universe exists is to allow unlimited God to experience the roller coaster of life, the ups and downs of limited existence, which eminently includes life and death. In the first chapter (read it here, complete with cartoons) Arthur and I imagine someone who “has it all,” who is rich, beautiful, and powerful beyond measure, who has no problems, who is perfectly healthy, and best of all is immortal. That is, someone who is as close to being unlimited as possible.  We ask, “Would there be any experiences this person would miss?”

We conclude there would be plenty of missed experiences: from adventure to learning, from falling in love to anticipation of something new, from struggle to triumph, from fear of dying to the joy of aliveness. Even riding a roller coaster would lose its excitement if there were no possibility of risk:

Cartoon by Arthur Hancock, from The Game of God

Recently I saw an old Twilight Zone episode called “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” This is from a short story by Ambrose Pierce set during the U.S. Civil War. The TV episode begins with a group of soldiers preparing to hang a man from a bridge. The soldiers pull the board that is holding him up out from under his feet, but the rope around his neck breaks and he is free! He stays under water as the current of the creek carries him away out of range of the soldiers’ rifles. Once he’s out of sight he climbs up onto the bank and you can see he feels profoundly alive; he appreciates the simplest things: breathing, smelling flowers, and the song of birds. Only at the end do you realize that the rope didn’t break; he did die. The “escape” was a fantasy that happened in the few seconds between the platform being removed and his death. But in those seconds he lived.

Somewhere I heard a story about Civil War veterans that also illustrates this idea that the edge of death brings about a passionate experience of life (maybe it was from Ken Burns’ “The Civil War”?). These veterans were imagining heaven, and this was their conception: every day they would fight a battle, then every evening every soldier—including those who had “died”—would gather and tell stories around the campfire. On the surface this seems completely bizarre—who would want to recreate brutal, bloody battles in heaven? But once you see the link between risk-of-death and the buzzing energy of aliveness, their fantasy makes sense. For these men, the most alive they ever felt was on the battlefield.

This wisdom is embedded in many spiritual traditions. For example, the Tao te Ching teaches that we live in a dualistic universe of opposites, and that pairs of opposites arise together, they are linked. We begin the first chapter of The Game of God with a quote from the Tao:

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty

only because there is ugliness.

All can know good as good only because there is evil.

Therefore having and not having arise together.

Difficult and easy compliment each other.

Long and short contrast each other;

High and low rest upon each other;

Voice and sound harmonize each other;

Front and back follow one another.

Cartoon by Arthur Hancock, from The Game of God

There is a Zen story that answers the question “What is Zen?” (see below): A man is in a jungle. A tiger spots him and chases him to a cliff. The man lowers himself down on a vine until he hears another tiger below. As he’s hanging there, with death above and below, two mice, a black one and a white one, start chewing on his vine. Facing certain death, he notices a wild strawberry plant near him and, plucking a berry and eating it, says, “How sweet.” In other words, the message of Zen is: experience every moment fully because death is always lurking. 

Don Juan Matus, the Yaqui Indian shaman in the Carlos Castaneda series, taught Carlos that he should make friends with his death.

When we deny death, ironically we deny life. We end up taking life for granted. We don’t see the perfection in every moment. We think of death as the worst thing that can happen to us, yet it makes life meaningful.

The Game of God presents the theory that the first purpose of the universe is to allow unlimited God the experience of limitation—life and death, beginning and end, fear and hate, happiness and sorrow, ignorance and learning.

In order to have a realistic experience of limitation, God must forget that She-He-It is God. In other words, the universe is God…in a state of amnesia.

The universe is a game in which God forgets His-Her-Its identity and, in the process of playing, remembers who She-He-It is.

Evolution is the process of God awakening from amnesia into the remembrance of His-Her-Its true identity.

The universe is literally An Expression Of God In Amnesia (AEOGIA). And God likes roller coasters!

Zen, by Arthur Hancock:

Spinning a Web of Self

I am digitizing the text of the metaphysics my husband Arthur and I wrote twenty years ago, The Game of God, in preparation for publishing it as an ebook. It’s been many years since I read it, so it’s an interesting experience.

As I typed in the chapter on the evolution of human consciousness, I was reminded of Daniel Dennett’s book, Consciousness Explained [which I quoted in an earlier post, Intelligent Plants], which was published about the same time as our book. In particular I was struck by a similarity in the discussion of the self: both books asserted that the self is constructed as a survival strategy.

This has made me realize that I have been taking the self (ego) way too seriously. That is, I’ve thought of the self as some entity that is as real and solid as my physical body that I am stuck with. Maybe I can exercise it and keep it toned, but the basic elements are cast in stone. The confusing advice of many spiritual teachers and books (including my own, The Game of God) is we’re ego-dominated and we need to escape it (somehow). It’s a formidable opponent that we have to battle.

But the concept of self as survival strategy has shifted my perspective in a way I find liberating.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - a first look

I’m reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, (TOOC) by Julian Jaynes while typing in my and my husband's book The Game of God (in preparation for releasing it as an ebook), which is an interesting experience, and gratifying because the section on the development of the mind in TGOG is not contradictory to Jaynes’ classic.

TOOC is fascinating. It looks at the same period of human history as Ken Wilber’s Up from Eden (which I have described as a frame-changing book for me), but from a completely different perspective. One difference, which I was relieved to find, is that he basically ignores the details of mythology. Both Up From Eden and the similar book Cosmic Consciousness were filled with the names of Gods and it was easy to get overwhelmed. But Jaynes sees all those various Gods as irrelevant details of the larger picture.

Jayne's theory is that humans didn't possess "meta-consciousness," that is, the awareness of being conscious, until about 2500 years ago. Jaynes estimate the use of language developed around 70,000 years ago. Then about 10,000 years ago a new development occurred—hearing a voice in the mind. This was the emergence of the bicameral mind. By “bicameral” he means the two brain hemispheres were split, and the interior voice, a function of the right hemisphere, was interpreted as the voice of a God or King. There was no conception of “self.”

Then about 2500 years ago a breakdown occurred, which was actually an integration of the interior mind as part of a new conception, the self. The gods retreated and quit speaking.

Jaynes provides evidence in many different writings of 2000-3000 years ago. His main texts are the two works attributed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad has no terms for self, or thought, or reflection. Everything is directed by the Gods. But the Odyssey is different: all of a sudden there is a hero, an  individual who has thoughts and wishes.

He also uses the Old Testament, and in particular suggests the reader compare Amos with Ecclesiastes, which I did. Amos is almost completely the ravings of God against various peoples, with a very short section about Amos, and none of that has any reference to what Amos thought. In contrast, Ecclesiastes feels like the first self-help book, an advice manual full of the wisdom accumulated by a thinking human being. The author repeatedly says “I thought to myself” or “I applied my mind.”

I think the difference between Wilber and Jaynes is that Wilber believes in God and Jaynes doesn’t. Wilber suggested that those mythical Gods were visions of the actual Underlying Ground of Being, distorted by the level of consciousness of the most advanced people of the time, but real nonetheless. Jaynes calls the Gods “hallucinations.”

This is just a first impressionistic post on the book, I’ll be writing more soon.

Better Never To Have Been Born? Really?

Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film, Wild Strawberries, is a beautiful story of an old man realizing that, even though he was a brilliant doctor who selflessly served his patients, he was emotionally reserved. No one could get close.

The film takes place in one day, as the old man drives to the town where he is to receive an honorary degree. Through vivid dreams he is able to experience the cost of his coldness—the loss of his first love and the infidelity of his wife. His daughter-in-law accompanies him on the trip, and she reveals the cost in the life of his son. When she told his son that she was pregnant, he replied, “Life is absurd, so I don’t want to bring any children into this world. I want to die myself.” (Not an exact transcript)

Bergman ends the film with the promise that his characters will be healing from this life-negating worldview.

The film brought to mind “The Case Against Kids,” by Elizabeth Kolbert, a review of three books about the ethics of having children. I was astounded to read about Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, by a philosophy professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, named David Benatar, in which he claims that the inevitability of suffering means it’s better not to be born at all.

Kolbert quote from Benatar’s book: 

One of the implications of my argument is that a life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad—a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pinprick—is worse than no life at all.

She paraphrases more of his argument thus:

If we all saw the harm we were doing by having children and put a stop to it, within a century or so the world’s population would drop to zero. For Benatar, this is an outcome devoutly to be wished. "Humans have the unfortunate distinction of being the most destructive and harmful species on earth," he writes. "The amount of suffering in the world could be radically reduced if there were no more" of us…Benatar’s title refers to the passage in Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ in which the chorus observes: "Never to have been born is best, But once you’ve entered this world, Return as quickly as possible to the place you came from." It also alludes to an old Jewish saying: "Life is so terrible, it would have been better not to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand."

It occurred to me that this is the inevitable consequence when a culture no longer believes in absolutes: since there is no meaning to our suffering, it’s better not to exist at all.

Obstacles

Last week in my backyard I found this daffodil growing up through a leaf. I loved the way the four leaf blades were twisted so I went and got my camera.

I think of spring as the season of emergence, and I love taking photos of flowers surfacing through the winter’s leaf litter. To me this symbolizes life conquering any and every obstacle.

For a long time I dreamed of having a life without obstacles. I thought I’d be happier. I think a lot of people feel this way; that’s why there’s such an obsession in our culture with celebrities and the rich, and why lotteries are so popular. Our fantasy is that if we get rich and/or famous then all our problems will disappear.A cursory glance at any magazine in the grocery store checkout lane will dispel the myth that the lives of the rich and famous are obstacle-free, but somehow we still go on believing it will be true in our life when that happy life-transforming day arrives.

Recently I watched a film I made with my husband Arthur just after we got our first video camera twenty years ago. We went to a number of different locations in the Atlanta area and asked people, “What, in your opinion, is the meaning of life?” We got a wide spectrum of answers, and the film is a fascinating look at the variety of personalities in any given population.

After watching it this time I thought about how I would answer if this question were asked of me. “To grow, to expand, to learn,” I thought, “If I ever stop growing it’s time to die.” Obstacles are crucial to growth. Without obstacles we would stay stagnant. We wouldn’t have any incentive to change. Obstacles make life interesting.

I could easily have torn the leaf off of the daffodil and let it unfurl like the other daffodils around it, but I found myself thinking, “is that in the daffodil’s best interest?” For all I know, overcoming the challenge of this leaf could lead to a stronger breed of daffodil that could help daffodils survive into the future.

As unlikely as that may be, the point is that obstacles and challenges aren’t things to be dreaded or avoided or hated; they are necessary ingredients of an interesting life.  

pink ladyslipper

In fact, I believe that the universe exists for the experience of overcoming obstacles. In The Game of God, co-written with Arthur, we proposed that the Unlimited (which most people call God), created the universe for the experience of limitation. The attributes usually ascribed to God—omnipotent, omniscient, immortal, omnipresent—can be summarized as “unlimited.” God has no limit in power, knowledge, time, or space. In other words, God has no obstacles.

 But, we observed, if God couldn’t have the experience of limitation then God was limited after all: the inability to experience limitation would be a limitation!

crocus

We concluded that the universe is God, experiencing life-and-death as if his-her-its life really depended on it. The universe is a game created for the fun of experiencing obstacles and overcoming them.

Many years ago I looked with wonder at some plants growing on a sheer cliff at Point Lobos, San Francisco, right above the pounding Pacific Ocean. I had lived in San Francisco for a couple of years and knew the force of the winter storms that came in off that ocean. How could anything survive in such a brutal environment? Those plants convinced me that nature would overcome anything that humans could throw at it. No matter how many obstacles we create, like climate change, pollution, radiation, etc., nature will triumph over them. We might not; our civilization might crumble if we push too hard, but nature will be fine.

[Note: The Game of God was published in 1993. In the intervening years we have changed our thinking about one aspect of this theory:

We no longer hold God to be a willful or deliberate creator. One of the most basic aspects of the Supreme Being must be that it is free from desire. The unlimited, infinite, all-powerful, all-knowing source of everything would already have every thing. Where would desire come from? If you have everything what could you want? Where would the desire to create something come from? The logical conclusion is that the dualistic universe is an aspect of Supreme Being, not something “created” by She-He-It. This just deepens the connection between God and us: we’re not a game God is playing, we are God in the most meaningful sense.]

Theodicy

Another mass shooting has occurred; this time at an elementary school in Newton, Connecticut. Twenty children—all six and seven years old—and six adult teachers and staff, dead. I didn’t watch the televised memorial services. Personally I don’t care for the media frenzy that follows these events; I find it unseemly, to put it mildly. But I did hear a little bit of a speech made by a minister, and he seemed to be struggling to express himself. I think his problem was that he was paralyzed by a basic problem of most theologies, what is known in philosophy as “theodicy”: how can you reconcile a loving God with human suffering?

I love this word, theodicy, because to me it sounds like the combination of “theology” and “idiocy”; many religious people come across as idiotic when they try to explain how God could allow something horrible to happen, like last week’s senseless slaughter of children.

Twenty years ago, my husband Arthur and I published a book called The Game of God. Theodicy is the starting point; the book’s introduction begins with this passage:

A friend recently told us that, of all the funerals he had ever attended, he had yet to hear a minister satisfactorily answer the question, “Why did God create death?” He went on to say that, in fact, he had yet to hear a minister (priest, rabbi, etc.) make any sense of why God had created anything at all. Our friend concluded that the most sensible explanation for this dangerous and mysterious universe is simply that there is no God.

We live on a tiny planet lost in a huge and seemingly indifferent universe. Life is a continuous struggle which inevitably ends with death. Life is a terminal disease.

What kind of universe is this anyway? Does life have any meaning or purpose? If there is a “God,” why did God create the universe?

Many religions have tried to explain God’s motives for creating the universe—a universe filled with suffering and death—but these theologies are often illogical and filled with contradictions, and thus fail to provide comfort when a true test arises: when real disaster strikes.

A minister once told us that, in his experience, the death of a child was particularly difficult to “explain,” and has often resulted in expressions of hatred for God by the parents, and even the abandonment of their faith.