Grow More Loving

INTRODUCTION

Why You Should Read This Book

(T. M. Ganim—artist and teacher, poet, songwriter, crisis counselor, inspirational force, and lover of commas—offers reader some reading advice.)

We, of a nomadic mind, can’t help but blur the boundaries between love and hate. No sooner are we helping our neighbors than are we hoarding more than our portion. Perhaps these metaphysical forms we call love and hate converge in much the same way as light distinguishes itself from dark and polarizing forces interplay in the quanta. There would seem to be an extraordinarily fine line of scrimmage at which duality blows the whistle of life and our experience. In the resistance, lies the game.

Foul! we cry. Where is the referee? It would seem human beings have been asking this question long before the luxury of enough free time to draw artificial lines and create our own games inside the grand one.

Many books have been written in and around religion, philosophy, and science, all of them presenting the various flavors on the palate of human consciousness. Few cut to the chase and slap the thesis on the front cover. How the import drives the imperative.

If there is a sense of urgency in the book you are about to read, it is not by accident. If there is a common theme that underpins the requirement of growing more loving, it is that hardship inures and steels the fluid of our awareness and settles in compassion. Though how persistently do our egos become restless? They quickly tire of the talk of love. All the while it is love that consumes the pithy ego and brings us to rind, as Miller would say. The container which holds the flesh. How are the two related? Are they one in the same and not so?

By reading Grow More Loving we are offered a taste of the loftiest of questions as we chase the challenge of its title. In it, we encounter a splay of avatars that mean something of extraordinary significance to the world and their authors. Dots of light, as described by author Lawrence Miller. Whatever their real or supposed history, upon their recognition a name was shaped by and for each, influencing the serpentine river of zeitgeist. Miller playfully transports us along its rivulets, allowing us to stop along the banks. On some we may linger as we scan the formations of the cliff sides and observe the motifs of color and shape.

Our minds are endlessly searching. For what? For love. The dots respectfully suggest we are looking for love. Love is what we understand as meaning. Meaning ignites and continues to fuel love.

We have an idea of who we are, and our experience is indeed our own, however limited. We continue to search for meaning. Is it because we have yet to enjoy sustained fulfillment? Through time we have evolved to become more loving and yet, not quite. The tumultuous maintenance of the ego dances with aggression and cynicism, denouncing love. It travels with the titillating curiosities of thought and obscures our vision of reality. The history of humankind is checkered with intolerance, violence, and oppression for the sake of deluded ego self-preservation. How do we interrupt this destructive pattern? How do we evolve unless we challenge ourselves to grow more loving? Like its introduction, this book will ask many questions of you.

Why is this book important? It pounds the steady, pulsing drumbeat of love with every breath and step. It teaches love in the negative shape contrasts of Gilgamesh and the active and vividly colorful demonstrations of Mohandas Gandhi, among some two hundred others. One may find Miller’s brief abstracts on these stars of humanity at most aggrandizing and at worst gently mocking. Nevertheless, they inspire a deeper level of understanding.

Know this book and memorize the lot that speaks to you. As Miller has done, make it personal. Add your own humor and connect your own dots.

I think of my time in Scotland as a young man, a student. I think of the billowing life. I think of the limitless grandeur and the consummation of existence. I search for actualization.

Throughout this fascinating work is the evolutionary synthesis of expanded understanding and extraordinary minds. The commentaries are modestly brief, such that the reader might fill the spaces. My wish is that you enjoy a humble gratitude like the one I continue to enjoy for having found this book. Perhaps, herein, lies your inherent gestalt?

The myriad refractions of universal light assemble to manifest all that is and what we perceive. In our own functioning aggregate of consciousness, we transmute the source of all things and become active players in the culture of the living. Find the light that illuminates your life. Activate your mantras. Drive your ambitions to materialization, each of us creatures within the universal organism, sustaining the whole of it.

—T. M. Ganim

Sailing The Same Sea

What is more revealing than the moment after death? Either one’s consciousness is snuffed or it is not. Either the ride ends or the plot thickens. If the former, why worry? If the latter, what next?

~

In the material world, the dance wind whirls with water is concentric and hypnotic. Beyond, who knows? Grasping the tiller of a seemingly solitary vessel, a pilgrim is well-advised to full-attentively monitor sights, sounds, scents, and inner shudders possibly indicative of drinkable fluid, digestible food, friendly environments, or—danger, Will Robinson, danger—the darker realms of sharks, and cannibals, and pirates.

~

Thankfully, our species is advantaged by an evolutionarily advanced (so far) knack for acquiring, analyzing, and associating bits and chunks of useful information. Among many beneficial and practical applications, these processing skills are helpful in our on-going quest to fathom the operative principles of Consciousness.

~

Limited to sensory data, the bit or so of consciousness that functions as human ego is tempted to conclude that what we see, feel, hear, taste, and smell is All There Is. By considering this perception immaculate and inviolate, Ego more or less automatically equates reality with physical universe.

At least one aspect of human consciousness is occasionally aware of the possibility of something more. People from all lands and centuries have tracked its presence and struggled to comprehend its meaning. Some of their insights—herein more-or-less chronologically presented—track humanity’s progress from less understanding to more. Isn’t the individual and collective march toward more inclusive awareness a reflection of this growth of consciousness?

~

Like many of us, in my heart-of-hearts I’m relentlessly pragmatic, making moment-by moment decisions based upon a continuously updated understanding of reality and my place within it. However, because ego tends to think and choose selfishly, ego-pragmatics are a trap.

In the current moment (gratitude is heart-deep), my I-Am’s POV includes that of Ego and the aforementioned something more—a more inclusive consciousness enfolding my ego as a rind wraps the innards of a melon.

~

Upon noting the value of pragmatism, I never again reckoned the utility of subduing reasoned judgment in deference to the entirety and/or permanence of any single reality theory—including (especially) those of my own.

~

The number of viable paths conducive to authentic spiritual and psychological growth might be calculated thusly:

~

X = Y*Z

~

X counts the total number of beneficial individuation development paths. Y represents every person who has ever lived on the planet Earth, approximately 108 billion. Z is the number of seconds in the life of someone who lives to be at least 70 years old, like me in the present moment. In my case, the numerical value of Z is presently 2,207,522,000. Accordingly, as of right now, one concludes that the number of viable paths conducive to authentic spiritual and psychological growth is 238,412,160,000,000,000.

~

Resembling Colombo more than Holmes and Sipowicz more than Perot, the I-Am I am sifts heart and history for insights relevant to three questions:

1) Which came first: Consciousness or Biology? (2) Whether source or product, does Consciousness transcend Biology? (3) Is love an elemental principle of Being or a cooperative survival strategy evolved by Ego?

Ego’s answers: (1) Biology, (2) Of course not, and (3) Cooperative survival strategy. From experience, observation, research, reason, and introspection, my I-Am has developed different opinions: (1) Probably consciousness, (2) Yes, and (3) Both.

~

Preferring to hoard their booty, sharks, cannibals, and pirates rarely coordinate their attacks, and for that we should be grateful, though truth be told, there are those—of a type that drink more than a little and smoke all sorts of things—who swear that more than once they have been forced to swallow the hell fruit of loveless pirate-shark-cannibal cooperation. Fairness notes that a single sip of this ill-brewed gruel could easily launch a person into an imprisoning sequence of compensatory stupefying intoxications. Thankfully, running away and hiding is not the only option.

~

Inhale understanding. Grow more loving. Exhale love. Grow more loving.

~

While growing more loving, I-Am increasingly gives credence to and acts in harmony with the principles of Fair Play and Free Choice. As many have noted, Fair Play does not necessarily have to be sparked by love. An unloving, pragmatic person might engage in Fair Play for strategic/tactical reasons. While not ideal, this is better than hating. Adds love to the mix.

~

From my observation and experience, it seems that as an I-Am grows more loving—no matter how or why—it correspondingly grows more certain that Fair Play is a necessary given in a bigger game than Ego’s.

~

Fair Play enables Free Choice, which—when unimpeded by force or fear, propaganda, spins, lies, and various nefarious unfair misrepresentations, manipulations, and coercions—allows each of us to authentically demonstrate the essence of our individuality instead of experiencing a never-ending series of shallow pool Ego melodramas.

~

By Ego, I mean: (1) an aggregate of awareness completely focused on the physical world; (2) a self-concept of I-Am totally reliant on sensory data.

~

Personal observations can be evidence. Here’s one of mine. In my lifetime, I have grown more loving. Was less loving when younger than now. Am happier now than when younger.

~

The tropism of individuation is toward more love, not less. Even the most unloving human experiences can be illuminated by dots of light—spurs to grow more loving. For me, integrating insights from multiple paradigms in quest of more inclusive perspectives seems an excellent strategy for spiritual progress, as does keeping an open mind, avoiding unnecessary extremes, and nurturing a loving heart. Similar traits have seeded millennia with hint after hint regarding a realm of Being beyond the reach of Ego.

~

Every I-Am choice is the stroke of an artist’s bristle. Right Now—this Moment—represents an I-Am’s up-to-date self-portrait. Experience, when all is said and done, is vivified feedback. Ego is too preoccupied with dubious nonsense to note the fullness of any Moment’s textured revelation.

~

Okay. A quick review: We each have our own path. There’s likely some overlap. I-Am sharing with you ideas that have captured my attention, struck me as meaningful, increased my awareness.

The following comments are not intended to be comprehensive. No one should confuse—and most won’t—this little book, Grow More Loving, with a scientific, scholarly treatise—a writing task for which I qualify neither by training nor temperament. Rather, I gratefully rely on the work of fair-minded experts, admired and respected for their step-by-step, generation-by-generation advancement of human understanding.

Why not? Have always been fascinated with the ongoing nature of reality conversation between thinkers from a wide variety of times and places. A thinker living in our era can track this discussion thousands of years. A thinker living ten decades from now will be able to duplicate that feat—plus one hundred years. What will we have learned by then? Talk about your never-ending story.

~

My I-Am perceives history’s dots of light as non-Ego info originating from an aggregate of consciousness in circumference of a more inclusive point-of-view (including that which is conscious to humans, that which is unconscious to humans, and that which is technically neither, and thus beyond our reach). Many of these hints of love add to the value of archaic teachings by placing them within a more revealing context.

Some dots break new ground by adding fresh light, thereby alerting us to errors and dead ends, or more starkly, to the flaws and shortcomings of previous reality interpretations. Others stagger me with the beauty of human penetrative insight. My encounters with the fruitage of this hint/dot litany occasionally propel my I-Am past its current limits into a more direct alignment with a more complex aggregation of consciousness, not restricted by ego, yet just as much me as the me I-Am now, except more aware, and, therefore, more loving.

~

Though my batting average is far, far less than 1.000, I-Am by nature associative and can occasionally perceive (sometimes oddly) how things are or might be connected. Over time, my associations have been sufficiently informative to merit legitimate self-confidence, though certainly not certainty.

My shared extrapolations are offered in the spirit that we are looking for answers together, and every little bit helps. Opinions emerge from my singular I-Am mix of perceptual relativity, imperfect knowing, and gleaning of revelatory glimmers. Sound familiar? The same is true for you.

~

Seven billion differing views. Pay your dues. Stand in queues. Sit in pews. Live in zoos. Can a particle grok the wave in which it lives, and moves, and has its being?

~

Superficial differences cannot forever disguise fundamental similarities. Though our waypoints vary, our expeditions share a common direction. Why shouldn’t they? Our existence can be rationally theorized as the migration of individuating aggregates of Consciousness toward ever more inclusive reality perceptions. Given the logic of this logic, at some aggregation level, you and I and all of us may well exist as the same I-Am. At least, that’s what the hints suggest to me, although I do not know how such a thing might work in practice. Unless, of course, how it works is life as we experience it.

~

Forward alone together sailing the same sea.

~

A true-hearted pilgrim—any grow-more-loving type—eventually comes face to face with a challenge more difficult than the endless games humans play on fields stuck between the fences of birth and death. Comes a moment in the tickle of the crosshairs—shakily balanced on the semi-eroded entry plank to a rickety bridge spanning an apparently bottomless abyss—when an advancing traveler is required to ask and answer questions two:

~

(1) How can I-Am escape the buffoonery of Ego?

(2) How can I-Am live a loving life?

~

What I like most about these questions: (1) The answer to the second is easy. (2) The answer to the first is the same as the answer to the second. (3) The answer to both is the title of this book.

~

Our physical Universe is continually re-shaped and re-arranged by the dueling energies of entropy and gravity—the tendency of things to separate versus the tendency of things to come together. In the material world, aggregating galaxies occasionally generate a cumulative gravitational force sufficient to curve light—move it out of the way, as it were, to peek at what may be hiding beyond.

Thus, we are able to detect normally invisible objects and—using limited data—imagine theories to explain their existence and situation. In a similar manner, consciousness also aggregates and re-aggregates in ways that reveal the unknown, or why do we know more now than we knew before?

~

As we progress from one era’s perceptions to those of the next, we constantly redefine reality and the meaning of individual existence. Good. This is a sane and pragmatic approach.

Some are obsessively defensive—too uncomfortable with change to change. Good luck with that. Although fanatical clinging to a favored reality interpretation despite evidence of its growing irrelevance is to be expected at the fringes, psychological and spiritual progress are hindered by the use of power to compel belief. Such an egoistic tactic undermines personal development and un-lovingly impedes the authenticity of individual and collective creative self-expression.

~

When choice and circumstance scrape barnacles from I-Am’s hull; when wind and water speed one’s vessel in a promising direction; when lovers love, and thinkers think, and writers write, behold: dots of light emerge to brighten Ego’s firmament of muck.

Hints of Love, Dots of Light

No Where

Nowhere is an odd place from which to launch a material cosmos. Did our 13.5 billion-year-old explosion originate in a similar universe, resembling ours as a mother resembles her daughter? If so, how did that one get its start? Etc, etc, etc.

~

Time has moved our universe billions of years beyond the instant of its creation. Expansion continues without pause. In the place where our boom banged, might it be that less than thirty seconds have passed?

What happens when an explosion expands to its maximum and runs out of energy? Do particles blown outward by the blast return—slowly or in an instant—to their pre-blast locations? Not according to the witness of our senses. Nor the direction of our time. When a stick of dynamite detonates, does it eventually re-shape by contraction?

ET

Everywhere, life finds a way to be. Why wouldn’t this be true in other galaxies? Science currently estimates the average number of stars per galaxy (including our Milky Way) to be between 200 billion and 400 billion. How many galaxies in the universe? In the present moment, using the present technology, scientists predict a minimum of approximately 500 billion. Let’s say only one-tenth of these known galaxies evolve intelligent life on one planet orbiting one of their hundreds of billions of suns. This quite conservative estimate would give our known universe a minimum of 50 billion inhabited worlds, quite a few likely more advanced than us, as probability suggests, and others likely as far behind us as we are in arrears of those ahead.

Is an advanced civilization affecting our physical and mental evolution? Are they presently helping us? Or herding us? Or both? Movies such as ET, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Independence Day, and a myriad of televised speculations present various scenarios—some friendly, some frightening—involving alien interaction with humans. Orson Wells’ iconoclastic radio program, War of the Worlds, is another example.

Given the root-deep utility of myth, we might be preparing ourselves psychologically—getting ready not to go nuts—by imagining potential encounters and slowly accepting the realization that we are not alone in the universe and, further, might not be the alpha species in our own neighborhood. One might reasonably think of the attainment of this knowledge as a kind of graduation.

Earth

Inside a section of space considered empty, during a most exciting Moment-at-Hand, one streaking dust molecule smacked into a second. An instant, electric attraction caused them to stick together. More collisions added to the gravity of their burgeoning aggregation. Nine billion years passed. Where does the time go? Behold: empty space coalesces into Earth, the garden of our growth, and what a work of art, this planet we temporarily call home.

~

One billion years after the Earth more-or-less settled into its current proportions, conditions were ripe for the emergence of life. Guess what answered the call and pretty much had the planet all to themselves for the next two billion years. Bacteria = 2,000,000,000 years. Compare to: Humans = 150,000 years.

Bacteria are surprisingly influential life forms who put me in mind of the mice in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Science tells us bacteria have much longer life spans than humans. They exchange DNA in ways superior to mammals, cooperate vertically and laterally, are aware of their environment, and manipulate it in a willful manner. In short, bacteria—like humans—seem to be an expression/manifestation of Consciousness of individual and collective perspectives.

~

Friendly reminder to myself that a billion is a thousand times more than a million, and a million is a thousand times more than a thousand, and a thousand is a thousand times more than I presently have in my wallet.

Except for the latter, big numbers. Here’s a smaller one. I will probably not live to be one hundred years old—a task for which I am inclined to volunteer only if certain mental and physical conditions are a given.

Let’s say things work out this old man’s way, and Lawrence Miller becomes centurial, a question—if reading this after 2044, you should easily be able to answer, if you decide it is worth your bother. Anyway, a hundred years is a good biological run, don’t you think? It would take 10,000 similar-length lifetimes to total a million years, and 10,000,000 incarnations to span a billion.

~

One-hundred-fifty million years ago, plants finally poked their stems above water. Eighty million years later, a wide variety of physical forms—still water-reliant—had made their way onto dry land. Many tried, some survived (at least for a while), and a few thrived (at least for a while).

~

How can a tree successfully compete for water, root space, and light? How can it reproduce? Comes a new concept: Winged Seeds. Creative breakthrough. Avoids the nuts-falling-onto-a-crowded-forest-floor reproduction dilemma. Did chance—mentally-sorted probability intersecting with the possibilities inherent in the Moment-at-Hand—produce the evolutionarily advantageous flutter-seed?

~

Holler monkeys eat their fill of fruit and then move to trees whose leaves they love to more slowly chomp. Their inability to satisfactorily digest the entirety of their previous meal inevitably results in a high number of shit-covered seeds dropping to the forest floor. Excellent growth environment. Therefore, the two trees in which holler monkeys prefer to dine almost always grow side by side. Where there are no holler monkeys, this is not so.

~

When it comes to the hunt, both predator and prey possess a personal sense of self and situation, a basic understanding of available means and desirable ends. As a bird has a certain basic psychology adaptive to the wants and needs of being a bird, so too a lion, a snake, an antelope, an ant. What are the limits of the limits imposed on awareness by form?

~

Birds and bears know where fish swim. Memory is summoned by association. Animals can associate, remember, innovate. Crows cut leaves and bend sticks to make worm-hunting tools. Lions hunt in prides. Dolphins herd fish into each other’s mouths. Ants make the best teammates. Speaking of dolphins, each of them has an individually distinct whistle, serving the same function as a name when mimicked by its friends.

~

Components of biological form—such as cells and organs—are constantly replicated and re-generated, even after physical growth has reached maturity. Because the consciousness of a perceived self advances or retreats moment by moment, state-of-mind need not insist that replacements be identical. Tinkering is possible. Improving. Healing.

~

What bundles individualized consciousness? A sense of I-Am. After a certain point, the physical seems less prone to development than the mental.

~

Ten million years ago—plus/minus a few hundred millennia—our tree-loving, primate ancestors left their arbor sanctuaries to risk the danger of walking on the ground. Five million years later (250,000 generations), we had honed the ability to walk on two feet and use front appendages as hands—thus increasing our capacity to manipulate tools for hunting, farming, and, of course, killing each other.

At least 27 different sort-of human species mutated from chimpanzees. What did they have in common? More inclusive cognitive capacities than their animal predecessors. Ergo, more consciousness. The following summaries highlight specific contributions and are not intended to be comprehensive. About 200 thousand years ago, the first true humans—our gritty ancestors—evolved onto the scene. For a while, we lived in Africa, a little bit south of the Sahara desert. Some of us stayed there, others moved on to Asia, Europe, and beyond.

Homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived more or less side by side for about 15,000 years. Neanderthal females were able to become pregnant at age 11 or so. Many modern humans have traces of Neanderthal DNA. Seems we liked to have sex with them, were not impressed otherwise. Very prescient of us, since they’re extinct and we’re not. Is it prophecy or preview when one causes what one predicts?

One hundred thousand years ago, homo sapiens sapiens was one of a relative few human species extant on Earth—each populated with less than a hundred thousand people. By the way, sapiens means wise, and sapiens sapiens means wiser. Species which didn’t make the cut include Neanderthal, Denisovan, Red Deer Cave, homo floresiensis, and others whose bones have escaped our attention.

About 50,000 years ago, the global climate became warmer and wetter as Earth entered into a post-Ice Age mode. Humans began to domesticate animals for labor and food. Cro-Magnon man—possessing pretty much the same human potential as we do today—showed up in Europe about 40 kya. Bad news for competing species, because our direct ancestors were far more capable of coping with changing circumstances—like ice or flood or dearth of food. Simply put, we demonstrated superior mental and psychological flexibility.

~

Construction of the world’s oldest-known temple of worship took place 12,000 years ago in what the modern world calls Turkey.

~

By 9,000 BCE, we farmed cereal grain plants and shepherded domesticated animals (particularly goats and sheep) by managing the movement of herd leaders. These techniques spread quickly throughout the species. Our ability to develop bone and antler blade technology helped push us to the top of the food chain. Cooperation—coordinated efforts to kill game—increased our hunting efficiency. When success moved us beyond subsistence, we began to use sea shells and the teeth of giant cats and bears as personal ornamentation. Cro-Magnon man’s cave paintings (which could not be accessed without considerable effort) and burial ceremonies seem to indicate secret rituals and preparation of the deceased body for after-death existence.

As far as we know, humanity’s first official divinity was a bear. Because bears devoured human flesh, it’s hard to say whether the decision to worship them came from respect, awe, or fear. Love is a less likely candidate. Here’s a small sample of who else liked to eat us in those days: other humans, primates, lions, tigers, snakes, wolves, hyenas, crocodiles, sharks, hawks, insects, a multitude of other terrifying roaming carnivores, and possibly extra-terrestrials. With the possible exception of insects, each of these