Iron John and the Men's Movement
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by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

When I was practicing medicine up in Connecticut, I had some success in counseling adolescent boys. One fourteen-year-old patient of mine, Michael, improved so much that his school invited me in to come share my wisdom with a group of five or six members of their staff.

Those were the days of the Men's Movement: Robert Bly and James Hillman. I spoke to my boys about becoming men, about taking care of, rather than teasing or torturing, their mothers. I went for at least one long walk with Michael in the West Hartford Reservoir, a large (semi)wilderness area.

I suspect that it was Michael's taking to heart this one piece of advice that most impressed his teachers:

"If you behave yourself for the first two weeks of school, then your teachers will develop a good opinion of you, and after that you can do anything that you want."

In this regard, the old saying comes to mind, "The way to catch a bird is to put salt on its tail." But, if you are close enough to put salt on its tail, then you are close enough to just grab the bird.

If Michael could control his impulse, if he could limit his classroom antics during the first two weeks of school, then he could limit them the rest of the year. Essentially, Michael became better aware of his relationship with his teachers... and his mother.

I also counselled a pair of fifteen-year-old brothers, who were running wild in a fatherless household. One morning I opened the newspaper and saw a headline that a youth in their hometown, Suffield, had seriously attacked his mother. I held my breath until I read that the culprit wasn't either of them.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
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The brothers were discovering the music of the late 60s. I remember saying, while one of them was praising the album Deja Vu, "I was there when these albums were coming out. When it was happening." You need street cred with these kids.

Memory is a slippery fish. Nostalgia is worse. Looking back to some more perfect age, especially an epoc before you were born, is fraught with peril. I, for one, wouldn't trade today for any past moment.

1967 may have been the Summer of Love, with hippies cavorting in Golden Gate Park, but today even scientists are turned on, and are developing a science of love.

Previously, and for decades, science held consciousness to be an accident, a by-product of brain activity, not even a direct phenomenon, but an epiphenomenon. Members of the scientific orthodoxy preached that consciousness was an illusion.

Now there is a new science that places consciousness at the heart of it all. Objective, physical reality, always the only subject of scientific inquiry ("There is nothing else"), now makes room for the scientific investigation of subjective reality.

Federico Faggin's scientific credentials are impeccable. He invented the CPU (the heart of your computer and smartphone), neural networks (the heart of AI) and touch-screens. Fagin proposes that we are "part-wholes," individuals who are yet connected to and of the same stuff as the cosmic mind; and that this mind is what science recognizes as the quantum world. He explains that the body is like a drone being operated by our mind. The body is an interface between the physical world of classical physics and the quantum world of our inner experience.

Frederico Faggin
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Faggin asserts that qualia: our sense of the color red, the smell of a rose, the flavor of an orange, our experience of love..., are quantum phenomena: beyond materialistic explanation, but completely real, and even primary.

(The other two legs of Faggin's reality stool are that free-will is the collapse of the quantum probability wave and that the universal mind wants to know itself.)

Also, Faggin asserts that death is not the end of our consciousness, but a greater, more obvious unification of our part-whole with the whole.

How affirming to have science finally recognize our consciousness, our most immediate, intimate, central experience. How satisfying to put our actual sense of being at the center of our science and philosophy. This is especially true compared with the meaningless, accidental, randomness of life preached by the previously dominant scientific orthodoxy. Believing that we are the products of stupid, error-driven, chance has had grave consequences for society. It's depressing. It leaves people casting about, trying to find meaning elsewhere, including political extremism. (See last week's article Yanqui Go Home.)

Faggin, and others, have a special place for love in their new cosmology: We are each telling our own story. But when we love another our stories merge. Our resonances combine creating a new being, a more whole part-whole.

My patient Michael came to consider and accommodate his teachers' point of view. That respect and connection is the basis of love. We love more that which interests us more, that which draws us close.

In another reference to the 60s, The Beatles had it right when they sang, "All you need is love."

Lokkal, our internet platform for the local community, generates love and understanding. As we currently love to see selfies, our individual selves, online, even more we will love to see our community, our community self, our self as a part-whole, online. Like two mirrors facing each other reflect an infinite regression, when the online community reflects the actual local community we will achieve a singularity; part-wholes will more easily merge; we will manifest the collectivity of consciousness online, fostering peace, love and understanding.

Learn more about Lokkal's mission, or help bring the singularity by clicking the orange donate button below, please and thank you.

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, our local social network, the community online and off, Atención robustly reborn for the digital age. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

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