Bathsheba Syndrome

Bathsheba Syndrome

As the news media and the American public become all hot and bothered over the breaking David Petraeus sex scandal, many are using the phrase “the Bathsheba Syndrome” to identify the cause. It refers to the story of King David and Bathsheba from the Old Testament of the Bible and other traditions. It is an apt story/myth to describe the abuses of power that sometimes befall a successful (and previously ethical) man. We’ve seen so many men, so many of our leaders (and a few women and as the glass ceiling continues to be dismantled we will probably see more) fall into this trap. The seeds of the downfall are sowed in the very ground of success.

The term was coined in a paper called: The Bathsheba Syndrome: The Ethical Failure of Successful Leaders by Dean C. Ludwig and Clinton O. Longenecker, published in the Journal of Business Ethics in 1993. [Link to the paper] The authors were looking at the business impact of leaders whose moral failings occur in part due to their success. There was also an interesting article in Stars and Stripes this last March called Do fired Navy COs suffer from ‘Bathsheba Syndrome? by Wyatt Olson that references the other article and brought it much deserved attention. [Link to the article]

David and Bathsheba story/myth

David went from being a shepherd to the King. He slew the giant Goliath with his sling and a stone. He was a righteous man who believed in and spoke for the one true God. God rewarded David by having him replace King Saul to become King. He had a fast rise to power and wealth.

After conquering everyone around Israel and Judah, expanding the boundaries of his Kingdom, and the pressures of ruling, King David grew complacent. When fighting season came around he sent his chief of command, Joab, out with the army to fight the Ammonites rather than go himself as Kings were expected to do. He stayed home. One night he was strolling on the terrace of his palace that built high to give him a vantage over his kingdom. While strolling, he looked down and saw a woman bathing on her rooftop. The bible says “She was very beautiful to look upon.” (The Jewish Midrash says that Satan came in the form of a bird and knocked down the screen shielding Bathsheba.)

David enquired of his servants who she was. The answer came back she’s Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of your generals, and the granddaughter of one of your most trusted advisors. He sent for her. She came unto him. He came into her. I mean, He lay with her.

Bathsheba conceived and David needed to cover up his sin. (Remember its cover up that gets you rather than the initial crime.) He sent to the battlefront for her husband, Uriah, to return. After asking him to report on the battle, he told him to go home, eat at his table, sleep with his wife. Uriah replied “The Ark, and Israel, and Judah, abide in tents: and my lord Joab, and the servants of the lord, are encamped in the open fields; shall I then go into mine house, to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife? As thou livest, and as thy soul liveth, I will not do this thing.”[i] (Now there’s a custom. While the country is at war, all soldiers will abstain from dwelling indoors and sleeping with their wives. If everyone in the military followed this custom today, we’d have fewer and shorter wars. If you included Congress and the President, it might be the end to all American wars.)

King David would not be foiled. He had Uriah stay another day. That night he feasted him and got Uriah very drunk. But, Uriah still did not lie with his wife, Bathsheba.

King David sent a sealed message back to the front with Uriah. It commanded Joab to set Uriah at the “forefront of the hottest battle.” He commanded Joab to retire the rest of the army when Uriah was beset by the enemy so that he might be “smitten, and die.” This was done and ‘some’ died, including Uriah the Hittite.

After a short period of mourning, David took Bathsheba to be one of his wives.

Along came Nathan, the Prophet. (Prophets weren’t so much future tellers as truth speakers. Truth to Power. They said what is. They said what wasn’t being said, which is why many of them were executed.) Nathan comes to King David and says “Hey man, how’s it hanging?” (I always imagine the long haired, sandal wearing prophets of the Old Testament being like the hippies of the 1960s.) “What’s shaking?” replies David. (I always imagine the Kings of Israel trying talk like the prophets, trying to be cool.)Nathan says “Some bad things are going down; you need to be hearing.” “Talk to me brother.” says David.

Nathan tells this story: “Down in the town, there was this rich man and this poor man. The rich man had many oxen, sheep, goats and rams. The poor man had this one ewe, this one little sheep. The poor man, he loved this ewe. He fed her off of his own plate, let her drink from his own cup, let her sleep in his house with this kids and family. This ewe was like a daughter to him. Well, you know what happened, this rich man had a brother visit from out of town. He had his servants take the poor man’s sheep rather than taking from his flock. He had it slaughtered and feasted his brother.”

Hearing this story, David got irate. He cursed and screamed saying “the man that hath done this shall surely die.” And Nathan replied, “You be the Man!” Nathan said that God said “I’ve given you all this. I took you from being a shepherd to being King. I gave you riches and wives and power. I was planning to give you even more than this. And, you go and do this evil in my sight. You have Uriah slain along with others? Therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house. I will raise up evil against thee in your own house.”

David immediately repented of his sin[ii], but he had done the deed. God’s wrath was upon him. The child died of an illness shortly after being born. One of David’s sons raped one of his daughters. Another son killed the rapist son, and then tried to overthrow his father along with the trusted Joab who followed the order to have Uriah killed. David’s story became a regular soap opera, like Dallas, or the Petraeus Affair.

Ludwig and Longenecker analyzed the cause and conditions of these failings in their article. They found that they were not due to general low moral character. Actually the ones who were most egregious in their acts were those who had been the most moral and virtuous in their rise to success. The ethical violations did not lead to the success but followed in the wake of success, more of a by-product than a direct cause. It is the shadow side of success that is the potential pitfall.

Here are the causes they listed:

1.                  Success often allows managers to become complacent and to lose focus, diverting attention to things other than the management of their business.

2.                  Success whether personal or organizational, often leads to privileged access to information, people or objects.

3.                  With success usually comes increasingly unrestrained control of organizational resources.

4.                  Success can inflate a manager’s belief in his or her own personal ability to manipulate outcomes.

They found: “Even individuals with a highly developed moral sense can be challenged (tempted?) by the “opportunities” resulting in the convergence of these dynamics.”

I can’t really speak to what happened with General Petraeus, or Eliot Spitzer, or Clinton, or Madoff, or any of the countless others, but we might need to look at how our very system sets them up for fail in such a huge way.  

---

[i] This is found in 2 Samuel 11 of the Bible. I like the King James Version. It's what my father, the Southern Baptist Minister preached. Also, my ability to understand Shakespeare was helped by being raised on the King James Version of the Bible. Did you know many Elizabethan/Jacobean Poets like Shakespeare helped write the King James Version of the Bible?

[ii] David's song of repentance is  Psalms 51

Consilience

Consilience

As I write about brain architecture, new physics, psychology and history, I hear a nagging critic that tries to convince me I’m unworthy saying: “These are realms for scientists and people with PhDs.”  There seems to be a warning that goes “Leave it to the Professionals!” and “Don’t try this at Home!”

Our Modern World respects the separation and division between fields of study. With the rise of the left brain came categorization and compartmentalization. Disciplines have been divided into micro-specializations. (It’s a good rule of thumb in the English language is if a word is long it derives from a Latin and is more cerebral than visceral.)  When the two sides of the brain were more balanced there was a greater emphasis in having a wide range of knowledge and experience.  The generalist ruled rather than the specialist. 

Iain McGilchrist, who wrote the brilliant THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, commented in an interview that the research into left-right brain architecture was set back in the 1980s by the popularization of the topic.  After the major research by Gazzaniga and Sperry in the 1960s, the social sciences, humanities and arts adopted the research and applied it to their areas. (It made sense with what they already knew.)  It did not matter that books like DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF YOUR BRAIN made the new brain research accessible or that it provided an entrance to an idea that allowed and encouraged so many to express themselves artistically through drawing.  Real scientists did not want to be perceived as delving into pop science.  Serious science can only be understood by scientist.

The same thing happened with research into the emotions. 

Even Mr. McGilchrist, who balances the training of a Psychiatrist/Neuroscience researcher with having been an English Don who taught at Oxford, was unable to avoid the criticism on his research and his conclusions in his erudite and meticulously written book.  The biggest criticisms seemed to state that what we currently know about the brain can’t possibly be translated into a view of our how we humans have lived or can live.  I thought the purpose of all human endeavors was to express how we can live in our time.

E. O. Wilson wrote a book in 1998 that he called CONSILIENCE.  He chose this word and title to describe “a literal ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.”  He chose this word over coherence due to the rarity of usage had preserved its original meaning.[i] 

He theorized that to solve the really big problems that face us in the new millennium the combine the natural sciences will need to collaborate with the social sciences, humanities and arts (gods forbid).  This was a bold move for a man of science, though not a new thought.  It was an idea that he shared with the thinkers from all time periods where there was a balance between the left and right brains, such as the Golden Age of Greece, the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. 

We must also accept that it is not only the scientists that shun the non-scientists.  Most intellectual people are completely oblivious to basic scientific knowledge.  We are doing much better than when C. P. Snow delivered is influential lecture, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, that brought attention to the divide between the Sciences and the Humanities.  He criticized the so-called “intellectuals” of being ignorant the most basic scientific principles.[ii] 

I appreciate Snow’s argument.  About twenty years ago, I realized that I had absolutely no understanding of the theory of relativity or even the beginnings of quantum mechanics.  I knew they were important discoveries and theories of our time.  As a purported intellectual person, I felt I should have a working knowledge of these huge advancements in our description of how our world works. 

For a while, Adele and I ran a group we called the Whole Actor Research Project (WARP).  We met regularly with a group of actors to explore and research alternative rehearsal and performance techniques.  Our research pulled inspiration from the current advancements in the physical and social sciences.  Our actors had advance training in their field (most had terminal degrees - Master of Fine Arts in Acting) and extensive professional experience.  In our studies, the finely tuned physical and emotional intelligences of our actors had access to more finely tuned information than most people.  This was especially helpful in our studies on impulse and emotions.

The challenge is in finding ways for the fields to speak with each other. I appreciate the scientists’ distrust of the arts.  We are speaking from opposite experiences and I could say opposite sides of the brain.  Also, artists in trying to be accepting, fail to exert the quality control and rigor to match the scientists’ standards.  We artist need to step up our game to play with the scientists because our voice and information is needed to create a true consilience.  It will be in the unification of all of our perspectives that will help to express our age and help us to solve our challenges. [iii]

---

[i]I recommend reading E. O. Wilson’s book.  It is a great read.  Here is a little more information on Consilience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures_and_the_Scientific_Revolution#cite_note-Nature-9

[iii]This is an interesting TED Talk where the scientist Nalini Nadkani has worked with artists of different types to expand her work on conserving the tree canopy environments. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/nalini_nadkani_on_conserving_the_canopy.html

As You Like It: What if Orlando knew?

As You Like It: What if Orlando knew?

Of all of the heroines in Shakespeare’s Canon, I have always loved Rosalind. Since I first read her at fifteen, she was my desire. But, I hated her play, AS YOU LIKE IT. The problem was Orlando. I could never be as stupid or vapid as he had to be not figure out this boy in the forest, Ganymede, was actually Rosalind, the woman he fell in love with at Court.[i] He’s wandering around the forest posting hideous poetry extolling the virtues of “his Rosalind”, then he meets her disguised as a boy and he doesn’t recognize her. What a dolt.

Remember, both Rosalind and Orlando were banished from the Court. They separately escaped to the Forest where Duke Senior is hiding out after being usurped by Duke Fred. When Orlando meets Rosalind in the forest, she is disguised like a teenage boy called Ganymede. Rosalind (as Ganymede) abuses Orlando for marring the trees with bad poetry and questions if he is a true love. She/he offers to cure Orlando of his love sickness by having him pretend that he/she is his love, Rosalind. Orlando accepts the cure, to pleasure and annoyance.

Everyone plays Orlando as if he doesn’t know Ganymede is actually Rosalind. Most play this misidentification until the end of the play when Rosalind returns in her female attire. Some Orlandos figure it out in Act V, Scene 2 when Orlando responds: “I can live no longer by thinking.” to Rosalind’s question: “Why then tomorrow I cannot serve your turn for Rosalind?”

How could Orlando be so stupid as not recognize her? Being in love with Rosalind as I was, how could I see myself in this dolt? I’m sure I would have figured it out. It doesn’t help that most Rosalinds do not pull off the boy disguise. I mean, who are they kidding? And, don’t start flinging phrases like the “throes of love” or the “willful suspension of disbelief”. I thought, if theater was to instruct me on how to live in my world (and find a girl like Rosalind), I needed a better example than Orlando.

I stage managed WOMEN OF WILL, PART II, Tina Packer’s exploration of the feminine in Shakespeare. These lecture/performances gave/give Tina the opportunity to discuss her big ideas about Shakespeare and the chance to play all of the leading women in Shakespeare.[ii] In the second part Going Underground or Dying Tell the Truth,[iii] Tina and Johnny Lee Davenport played Rosalind and Orlando in a section of Act IV, Scene 1. They were well past being the age of young lovers. While Tina’s Juliet was fully believable, Johnny Lee and Tina’s maturity deeply undermined the situation of Orlando believing that this Ganymede was not actually Rosalind. It didn’t work. He had to become more foolish to keep it up. And, she had to ignore that he was a daft.  Watching it night after night, I wondered: what if he knew?

What if Orlando knew that Ganymede was Rosalind upon their first meeting in the forest?

Part of the greatness of Shakespeare is that every line can hold many meanings. When you speak the text of lesser playwrights, there is usually only one or two ways to say it. Shakespeare can go lots of places. I started hearing Orlando’s lines with the thought, he knows. It worked for every line. He can know it is Rosalind and choose to play along. This makes him smarter and not an idiot. He chooses to play her game. The flirtation and getting to know you aspects of the scenes become more heightened and sexy.[iv]

The question that follows is: If Orlando knows Ganymede is Rosalind, does Rosalind know that Orlando knows? Either right away or at some moment? And, if she knows he knows, does he know she knows he knows? And does she know that he knows she knows?[v]

When I directed AS YOU LIKE IT at The Shakespeare Project in Frederick, Maryland, now called the Maryland Shakespeare Festival, we gave this idea a go. When Drew Kahl auditioned, he said he’d play anything but Orlando. He couldn’t play that idiot, even Silvius’ unrequited obsession with Phoebe is more playable. However, he became intrigued with the idea of Orlando knowing. It completely worked in the rehearsal room and added so much to the playing. Outside onstage in the big field I doubt many playgoers could figure out the convention, though it continued to inform the playing. I’ve always wondered how it would play in a more intimate space. We played that he knew Ganymede was Rosalind; she realized he knew; and he suspected she knew, though it was unclear if she knew he knew she knew. This added more fun. Don’t believe me? Give it a read with the thought that he knows: As You Like It: III.2 lines 294-435; IV.1; it informs IV.3 lines 74-183; V.2; and V.4.

What I liked best about the idea is that it made the play between Rosalind and Orlando smart. The lesson Rosalind was teaching Orlando was how to love. He was learning how to love her rather than be in love with the idea of her. This was not displaced courtly love. This was the love of two equals.

By learning how to love and come into balance with his own femininity, he could forgive and save his brother’s life when threatened by the lion. The realignment between the masculine-feminine in the relationship between Orlando and Rosalind led to resolving the masculine-masculine feuds between the brothers. Duke Frederick could meet the religious man and not attack Duke Senior and the people of the forest. The play could end in love, marriage and procreation, rather than in hate, bloodshed, and death.

I learned from an Orlando who could recognize the boy in the forest as the woman he loved. This was an Orlando that I could aspire to be. While he learned how to love, so did I.

---

[i] Short synopsis if you need more: Duke Frederick has led a coup to oust his brother, Duke Senior. Duke Fred allows his niece, Rosalind, to stay in the court with his daughter, Celia. They’re besties. Duke Senior has fled to the forest where in my view he is hunkering down and preparing for the coming battle against his brother. Orlando is the youngest son of the deceased Sir Roland de Boys. His older brother, Oliver, rejects him. The action in the play is driven by brothers who hate each other. Orlando decides to go to Court to win money by wrestling the champion, Charles, the Wrestler. Oliver pays Charles to kill Orlando. Rosalind meets Orlando. They are smitten. Orlando wins. He beats the champion. When Duke Fred learns he is the son of Sir Roland de Boys, he exiles him. Orlando also learns that Oliver is planning to kill him. He escapes to the forest to join up with Duke Senior. Meanwhile, Duke Fred tells Rosalind she has to leave the court. Rosalind and Celia, who won’t be separated, devise a plan to go find Duke Senior. Due to the perils of young women travelling alone, Rosalind decides to disguise herself as boy. It is in this garb that she meets Orlando in the woods. When she meets him, she abuses him for marring the trees with bad poetry and being a lover. She offers to cure him of his love sickness. Orlando, supposedly believing this is a youth, accepts his cure which involves him treating the boy as his Rosalind.

[ii] WOMEN OF WILL was/is brilliant. It has impacted everything I think about Shakespeare. I count myself lucky to have worked on it. Tina still performs it, sometimes as one part, other times as a six or seven part series. If you have a chance, see it!

[iii] Going Underground or Dying to Tell the Truth – Tina’s thesis is that in the middle plays, the heroines have two choices: disguise themselves in some way and live in a comedy (Portia in Merchant, Viola in 12^th Night, Helena in All’s Well, or Imogen in Cymbeline) or stay in their womanly robes and end up dead in a tragedy (Juliet in R&J, Portia in Julius Caesar, Ophelia in Hamlet, or Desdemona in Othello). They can’t speak the truth as women and stay alive. To survive, they must subvert the system and disguise themselves to speak the truth. The feminine must go underground to survive. It’s pretty bleak, but get’s better in the later plays when the daughter’s redeem the fathers.

[iv] By having him know he is a she you avoid the homoerotic foibles of Orlando falling for Ganymede who is a guy, though secretly played by a girl. He likes a girl, but now he is falling for this boy. Does he like boys or is it because the boy is playing the girl he loves? In Shakespeare’s theater, a boy played a girl pretending to be a boy. Ambiguous sexuality makes for a good telling of this story, but becomes a bit of red herring in any production that does not exclusively want to be about that.

[v] There is a great RSA Animate by Steven Pinker on this topic of communication. I don’t agree with him on all things, but this is shall we say spot on. In it, he talks about the politeness of being inexact in our language. What is implied is different than what is spoken directly. http://www.thersa.org/events/rsaanimate/animate/rsa-animate-language-as-a-window-into-human-nature

Lost Sight

Lost Sight

On Saturday, I rode my bike to Pilates. When I arrived home, my eyeglasses and case were missing.  I quickly retraced my steps and found the case in the middle of an intersection. Elation. As I approached it, I saw the shards of lens around the squashed case. Despair.

When I finished Pilates, I sat down to put back on my sneakers before riding back home.  As I put my wallet in my shorts and my glasses case in the pocket of my zip up jacket, a thought ran through my head “which one do you want to lose?” It was not a loud statement, just part of the constant chatter in my brain.  I thought “replacing all of the things in my wallet would be a real pain.” I continued placing my wallet in my shorts and my glasses in my jacket.  I didn’t think about it again until I got home and realized my glasses were not in my jacket. 

Could I have actually listened to that moment of clarity and made a different choice? I could have chosen to put my wallet in my jacket pocket and lose it instead.  I did make a choice: a “this” or “that” choice.  If I had listened, could I have made a choice to not lose either: a “this” and “that” choice? 

I suspect I have moments of foresight all of the time. It is part of the constant dialogue in my head.  I probably listen more often than not.  I only notice when I don’t heed the suggestion and something calamitous occurs.

Could I incorporate this way of knowing more into my life? Can I listen more? Can I incorporate my insight with my intellect? Can I choose to live in the opposites of “this” and “that”, rather than in the consequence and loss of a “this” or “that” choice?

The Teeter Totter of Our Brains, Post 7

The Teeter Totter of our Brains

How Left v. Right Brain Dominance has Created our World

Post 7

[This is the seventh and last post in this series. Go to the Introduction if you want to begin at the beginning.]

3 to 4: Transition from the Modern to the Next

The last twenty-five years has seen a rise in the competition between the two hemispheres of our brain. The primary cause or result has been the change in technology. All praise the microchip!

Consider for a moment the everyday technologies that have become common in the past twenty-five years (some already obsolete): Desk top computers, laptops, color televisions, the remote, the VCR, blu-ray, the digital video recorder/tivo, flat screen TVs, digital projectors, fax machines, microwave ovens, CD players, walkmans, mobile phones, text messaging, bluetooth headsets, email, the internet. In the last decade we have added IPods, IPhones, and IPads. Ten years ago the World Wide Web was new. Since then we have added Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, and countless other services that fill our days.

These technologies have changed how we communicate with each other and how we access information from the critical to the mundane. They have changed our relationship with time and space. They have actually made our experience of time and space more closely resemble how the physicists tell us it works.

Is it absurd to say that my DVR (Digital Video Recorder) has changed my relationship with time? I stop time, I flashback a moment, I speed time up, I arrest time only to pick it up later. My relationship with space first changed when I went from driving across country to flying. Now, I communicate with friends via Skype with friends continents away. My wife and I recently sat down for dinner with friends on the other side of the continent. I can move through space and time. These experiences confirm the right brain’s view of the world.

Information/Communication Technology is a double edge sword. It plays to both sides of the brain. It has led us into left brained isolation of the person sitting at home in the dark staring at the computer screen with everything in the one mind. At the same moment, our technology has connected and interconnected us through our right brains to each other and the world.

It is a sign of our conflicted time that we both feel and are more isolated from others than we have ever been while we are more interconnected with more people, more intimate than ever. The left brain experiences our existence as isolated and detached from others. The world is abstracted and of our own invention. The world is a projection of the real existence in our brain like the reflections in Plato’s left cave. The mind is disconnected from the body. Our right brain experiences our existence as interconnected to the point of being anonymous; the place where we don’t know where we stop and others begin. We feel our holistic mind, bodies and spirits. The world is a mass of people and ever present stimuli of sense and impulse. The experience of the 21^st century varies between differentiation and integration; left and right brain experiences.

The ascending right brain has helped us to experience others as part of ourselves. This is an interesting blend of sensation and abstraction. The last century gave rise to broadest march of equality our world has known. (Please acknowledge the enormous changes prior to lamenting the distance left to traverse.) The class structure has eroded giving us a strong middle class. Women gained the right to vote and greater equality. The Civil Rights’ Movement has not only brought African Americans into balance with the European American but lifted all races. The United Nations meets in respect and peace. Homosexuals are rapidly gaining the same rights as Heterosexuals. The disabled, blind and deaf are finding their place with all others.

The left brain compels us to see ourselves as unique and separate from others and our group. This way of thinking has fostered competition, the capitalism and invention. This differentiation has spawned so many of the advances of the 20^th century. The right brain’s shadow lives in our homogenization and integration; in the idea we are the all the same. Communism is as sinister as the idea that every man is an island.

The conflict and interplay between the hemispheres has also played with our relationship between the Individual and the Community. In the even eras, it was all about relationship to the community. There was very little about the individual. In the odd eras, it is all about the individual. We’ve currently gone so deeply into the individual that the image of our time has become the sole person sitting at the computer wearing headphones in isolation. I’m not sure what is coming next, but the challenge is to retain our individual identity while reconnecting with the collective. This is already happening. People who work with young people today speak of their collective hive communication. The youth are more connected to each other than the generation that preceded them. Can we be both interconnected and independent?

The political divide is an example of this split between the left and right brain. It has become so pervasive and divergent. I start to wonder if we are living in separate parallel universes.

4: The Next

We sit at an interesting moment in our human evolution. The two sides of our brain are more advanced than ever. They are also as equally balanced as any other time in human development, except perhaps the Renaissance. One difference is that we have a larger percentage of the population with developed and reasonably balanced brains. The two sides of our brain are more in conflict and divided as any other time in our development.

The two sides of our brains are fighting to see who will be the Master. If either side dominates the other we will retreat to a dark ages. The left brain considers itself more equipped to rule and denigrates and enslaves the right brain. Left in control, our left brains will lead us toward an autocratic and violent dictatorship, which will disintegrate into anarchy and a new dark ages. Remember the fall of the Roman Empire. The right brain is the rightful heir, being older, of the reign. If it gains control, the world will devolve into illiteracy. Our government will erode into fiefdoms and civil wars. Like the Middle Ages, there will be limited culture and no progress. I know this sounds bleak, but at our current conflict level either side could destroy us.

This is why I suspect that our current challenge is in living in the balance between the two sides of our brain. While the Modern Man’s challenge was “to be or not to be” and choosing one side over the other; this or that. Our challenge is to exist in the tension of the opposites; this and that. It seems impossible because these two world views cannot reasonably both be true. At best, it seems that one can be true at one moment while the other is true in another moment. Quantum Physicists call this the Complementarity Principle.

Complementarity is expressed as a duality. Objects may have properties that appear contradictory. While it is possible to observe either property, it is considered impossible to view both properties at one time despite their simultaneous existence. Our challenge is in holding this duality: allowing the contradiction to exist; allowing the opposite properties to be true and have value; and living in the contradiction.

As Einstein discovered, our vantage point within the system affects our observations of the system. Our world view is largely based on the way our brain is seeing the world. The right and left sides of the brain have opposite ways of seeing the world. The world we see, and in the same way the world we create, is based on our way of seeing it. This idea of entanglement affects everything we observe.

Our world, as do our brains and our selves, is both a “one at a time” and “all at the same time” system. Our challenge is to live while holding these opposites; living in both sides of our brains.