Being Humans Together

“Know yourself” was inscribed in Greek ‘gnothi seauton’ on the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Knowing yourself has been a fundamental quest for every human being for thousands of years.

Who am I? Who are you? What does it mean to know yourself?

These are not simple questions. And there are many answers.

Know yourself. Know your heart, mind, will, limitations, and strengths. Know your people and listen to them when they tell you about your mistakes and your strengths. Try to see those things more clearly, to grow, and to improve on all of it. Strengthen your relationships because they are also who you are. You are a complex collection of we's. 

When we identify consistent challenges, let’s try to alter our own perspectives. Strive to open our eyes to see our blindspots. Seeing more and seeing better is such a profound victory. And then let’s press forward positively and cooperatively to problem solve our challenges with our team of people. In so many cases, life is its own reward. Our consistent patterns of seeing, thinking and acting shape our world. If we can proactively and positively improve our lenses, perspectives, thought processes, actions and relations, we will plant better seeds and harvest better rewards. 

I believe these are the fundamental benefits of knowing ourselves. Remember, this is not about navel gazing, about sitting alone in a cave to know who we are. We are not alone. We do this together. In part two we will consider how we can better know ourselves by knowing God. 

“Leave me alone!” This is the curse we cast on ourselves.

Solitary confinement is the greatest punishment we enforce in many of our societies. We did away with torture and most capital punishment. So now we make people sit alone in cages.

But guess what? Many, many of us sit alone in well appointed cages of our own making and our own choosing. We buy our isolation in 4000 square foot homes, with smart phones and social media, and an increasingly caustic civil society where people resist, riot, and shout no at each other all day long. 

Wealth, institutions, public schools, corporations, and the pursuit of success all contribute to increased isolation and loneliness in our culture and society.

We can escape isolation by valuing relationships and sharing time, hospitality, and meaningful experiences together.

We can mean more than one thing when we say yes, or when we say no.

There are situations, actions, and people for whom we feel, say and perform solid yeses — strong and spontaneous affirmation. Parents experience solid yes for their children. We feel and do solid yes for our highest ideals. Love is solid yes. Loyalty or fidelity is solid yes. Sacrifice and nurture are solid yes. There are other principles that you feel deeply, passionately about. Our passionate goals and dreams are solid yeses.

What does “soft yes” mean? There are many other things that we feel we should or ought to affirm, that we think are good things to do, that we accept as good principles. But something holds us back. We don’t move directly from saying yes to doing yes. Often times the bar is work. It takes energy and effort to do work. We feel that we should clean up, do difficult jobs, exercise more, diet, help someone who is struggling. But messes, labor, exercise, and service take time and energy. And time and energy are limited resources. So we say yes, but we often mean yes tomorrow, yes but later, or yes in principle, or maybe yes, rather than yes now I will do it. These soft yeses are second choice priorities.

Next let’s consider negation. There are situations, actions, ideas, and even people we feel strongly we do not want to do or be or be with; we ought not to do them or embody them; we instinctively and strong turn away from them; we have experienced the pain of getting burned, humiliated, or hurt, and we do not want to repeat that experience. This is solid no. 

Next, what does “soft no” mean? There are many examples of things we do not really want to do, or think we should not do, that we say no to, but we later feel obliged to do, or we try them out of curiosity, or we change our minds, or we can’t escape the temptation to do. There are two broad categories of soft nos. 

First, Things we probably ought to do that are hard that we say no to because we don’t want to do them. These are the difficult soft nos. And

Second, Things that we probably should not do because they are frivolous or slightly unhealthy or somewhat harmful if done too often. We say no to these things because we recognize that they aren’t great, or because we have been taught to say no by parents or authorities. But these things have a pull on us. We are curious. They may feel good, or help us let go of stress. They may be pleasurable. But if done habitually they are recognizably harmful or risky. These are the tempting soft nos.

We and those we have relationships with move between solid yes, soft yes, soft no, and solid no. We definitely move between yes sometime or maybe yes to yes now. Managing and negotiating the complex, sometimes contradictory, movements between affirmation and negation is the substance of close relationships.

Resonating together with our people and relationships

How do we connect, resonate together, and form relational bonds?

How do we improve our relationships to bring more meaningful connections, closeness, or intimacy?

Human Beings hunger for connection, understanding, natural resonance, and relationship building. Many common human communications invite connection, shared experience, understanding, and shared resonance:
Do you see what I see?
Do you know what I know?
Do you agree?
Do you understand?
Do you understand me?
Do you hear me?
Will you do this with me?
Can you help me with this?
Do you like this too?
Do you see me? recognize me? know me?
Let’s do this together.
Let’s play. Let’s go.
Let’s be a team… [A thousand invitations that begin with "Let's..."]
Do you feel the same?
Do you believe me?
Do you believe in this too?
Do you like me?
Do you love me too?

When we answer "Yes" and act on that affirmation, we build relationships. The accumulation of shared mutual experiences and affirmation builds closeness and relational bonds and eventually various forms of intimacy. We enjoy resonance and harmony.

Know who your people are. I recognize how challenging relationships are for all of us. Understand how your relationships fit into your circles of relations, including intimate relations, core family and friends, extended family and friends, community members, and acquaintances and contacts. Consider the kinds of experiences you share together. 

Beware common mistakes we make in misunderstanding and undervaluing relationships.

Finally, we consider how to recognize the limits of contextual relationships are and how to bring special relationships into our homes and core circles where they can last.

Paradigm shift: We should value knowing our people more highly than professional knowledge, technical knowledge, or political knowledge, even though those domains are often connected with increased status or money. Too often we are convinced to pursue success, degrees, career, or just excitement; and so we walk away from/ move away from/ let go of the people we know, who know us.

We believe that relationships are easy to make or replace, We believe that the connections we made when we were young will always be there. Or we don’t place enough value in the people with whom we share relationships, relational knowledge and bonds. Maybe we even consider those people and those relationships to be a weight to be shed and left behind so that we can reinvent ourselves in the anonymity of a new city.

Sadly, building new relationships is hard work that takes a long time. We will never replace many of those people, particularly not family. And in many cases the relationships we leave when we move away will not continue.

We also mistake new contacts or professional connections for long term relationships. But most of those people will not sacrifice for us. They won’t be there for us when we have crises, or when we lose our apartment or our job. They will find someone else to chat with at work.

We also naively believe that we will be good at knowing who to trust and that we will be able to gain the trust of others. I have certainly made that mistake in my life. But you can only trust people to be who they are, and do the things they normally do. It takes a lot of time and experience to know a person, and what they will do in a given circumstance. Sadly the result often is that we get hurt when we hope and trust in people who never were who we thought. The failure to highly value relational knowledge is a road to isolation and loneliness.

I don’t mean to say that we should never move, or not pursue education or careers, or not have dreams that extend beyond the confines of our current locale and current relationships.

I am saying that we should highly value our relationships.

We should understand the costs of moving away, moving on, changing our circle of relationships; and we should make those decisions carefully. We should do whatever we can to maintain relationships.

I promise you there are plenty of cubicles and corporate offices out there. You will get the degrees and certifications needed to find jobs and sit in office spaces. Perhaps you already have.

But along our pursuit of success, degrees, careers, and all of the technical and professional knowledge required to do that, let us not forget the central importance of knowing your people and them knowing you, and sharing the experiences together that create and cement that relational knowledge and bonds.

When everything else passes away, when your life breaks down, when you are up against something difficult, when you’re not sure you can make it on your own, when you finally lie down in the last bed you will ever occupy—relational knowledge is what matters most.

Your people will be there for you to help you pick up the pieces, to make sense of the disasters, to overcome the trials and obstacles, to laugh and cry and love our way through it all.

That is how you will know or remember who your people truly are. And you will be there for them. In those situations, no one cares what your salary is, or which desk you sit in, or how many followers you have, or how many degrees you have, or how important you status is.

For the people in your core circle, you are all that matters, and they are everything that matters.

In the end, relational knowledge is all that matters.

We need experts to accomplish many of our advanced goals.  To gather, sift and organize new knowledge; to apply basic research in order to engineer new possibilities; to better understand the physical and human worlds we live in.  Experts are well trained in narrow specialties that enable them to do original, creative things.  Expertise is often accompanied by experience, commitment and dedication.

But there are limits to the utility of experts. Experts can be elitist and authoritarian.  Experts can be bought.  Experts can be biased and ideological.  Experts can be as foolish and fallible as anyone else.  Experts can bludgeon dissent and frighten lay people into obedience.  Experts and expertise can be a two-edged sword, particularly in the realm of civil society.  We need experts for many things, but we cannot surrender to experts our opportunities – our responsibilities – to engage the world as intelligent, passionate, informed citizens and community members of the social fabric.  

Gathering knowledge from diverse perspectives and sources enriches our minds and hearts, gives us more complex tools to understand our modern and increasingly global societies, and provides us with more robust and healthier abilities respond to challenges.

How do we know what is real? How do we know what is true?

How do we balance the differing worldviews and approaches to knowing that shape each of our worlds and the larger world that we share together?

One of the core issues of this set of episodes of Being Human Together is how we understand the world scientifically, philosophically, socially, and religiously. 

In this episode we will lay out three ways we know things, or three methods of epistemology — arguments from authority, the scientific method of inductive reasoning, and knowledge passed to us relationally or socially. 

Next, we’ll consider some historical examples of the tension between scientific and religious ways of knowing, including a more complex view of Galileo than you may have heard. 

Finally, I will tell you a personal story about balancing religion and biological evolution.

Our goal is to give you more perspective on the inevitable struggle we must all engage in to piece together meaning from multiple approaches and forms of knowledge. Because in the end, none of them is complete alone.