Christian rebirth

I don't know how the concept of rebirth is reflected in Judaism, or exactly the meaning of "submission", as meant by the word "Islam, " but the Christian branch of this Abrahamic trio of religions has a very deeply metaphysical belief that may not be apparent from outside.

The following quote from Charles Trumbull is taken from the Campus Crusade for Christ's Teacher's Manual, (c) 1965, William Bright Editor. It reflects a nuanced meaning of spiritual that may be surprising, even to Christians of different branches of that faith. It also takes a position on the perpetual tension different Christians have on whether "faith" or "works" is the thing that matters the most.

"Jesus Christ does not want to be our helper; He wants to be our life. He does not want us to work for Him. He wants us to let Him do His work through us, using us as we use the pencil to write with -- better still, using us as one of the fingers on His hand.

When our life is not only Christ's but Christ, our life will be a winning life; for He cannot fail. And a winning life is a fruit-bearing life, a serving life.

...He 'came not to be ministered unto, but to minster.'

An utterly new kind of service will be ours now, as we let Christ serve others through us, using us. And this fruit-bearing and service, habitual and constant, must all be by faith in Him; our works are the RESULT of His life in us; not the condition or secret or the cause of the Life.

He seems to be saying, in other words, that what matters is not getting us in the right spirit, but getting the right Spirit into us.

That gets into a question considered impolite these days, of whether there is also a wrong spirit that can get into us, or for that matter, multiple different helpful or annoying spirits that can drop by and inhabit us and take the reins, as in "The devil made me do it!" -- which has gone out of favor as an explanation for behavior.

Actually, the Christian Bible's New Testament is filled with examples of Jesus or the disciples "casting out demons" and the immediate result of that process being a biomedical cure of some illness or deformity. Demons apparently do not evaporate, for in one case the demons are cast out of a person, and the demons negotiate being cast into a herd of swine instead.

Whether they attributed the observed behaviors to the "right" mechanism, I'll have more to say in future posts, and some past ones, into ambiguities about exactly what the "self" is, and to what extent "we" control our own self, and the surprising extent to which the surrounding crowd or culture effectively constrains some behaviors, empowers others, down-regulates and up-regulates behaviors in the genetic sense, entrains us, motivates and strengths us ("active strength") or demoralizes and depresses us. The people around us certainly affect how we perceive the world, in obvious and non-obvious ways.

To the extent that laws of behavior of complex, composite entities (like us) are independent of scale, we might look at lessons we've learned about trying to change behaviors of others and reflect on what that means about our own behavior.

Certainly, sometimes, even our own behavior seems out of our own control. Many people set off on New Year's Eve with the best of intentions and resolutions, but a month later few of them still have those resolutions. We need a better vocabulary of concepts to describe this nuanced and subtle interplay of "selves" that seem to negotiate with each other over "our" behavior.

Regardless, these days even the esteemed Institute of Medicine in Washington tells us that trying to change "an individual" is difficult, if not a losing battle, but that we should focus instead on changing the behavior of "microsystems" or "small teams". The message is that "individuals", apparently, are so much captive of their peer-group that they have trouble changing behavior if the peer-group doesn't also change. Again, this seems to say that we are not our own people, to a large extent, but that a good sized fraction of "us" is actually embodied and taking shape and living form in the people around us.

As with the VMware I discussed this morning, the edges and boundaries of "self", and even simple counting, are more like "waves" than "particles". Like "Silly Putty", what seems in one scale to be hard as a rock seems in another scale to be soft and flexible or even flimsy and unsubstantial.

This has profound implications for strategies for changing the behavior of other people, or populations of other people, or for changing our own behavior when it seems to be "stuck" somehow where "we" don't want it to be. As System Dynamics demonstrates, a lot of behavior is actually "structural", due to the way feedback loops operate outside people, not due to what the people themselves think or do.

That says that one way, and sometimes the only way, to change the behavior of a person is to change the peer-group they are embedded within. You need to change jobs, or partners, or cities or companies or something, or you are simply "stuck", in some cases, it seems.

The flip side is much more positive, and says that the behavior of many people around us is partly under our own control, way more than we realize. Much of what seems to be "them" is actually a downstream echo of our own earlier behaviors. By changing how we perceive them and act towards them, almost magically, we can find that "they changed."

In point of fact, we appear to have much of ourselves outside our skin, effectively living in the people around us, and much of their life is outside their skins, living inside us. We are not quite so "separate" as we tend to think.

Whatever we are, as people, and as part of society, as members of teams and families and cultures, and as the upper level of ten trillion cells acting as one human body, we are not "simple" entities, and not "single-valued."

To pick an analogy from chemistry, it seems more like "we" are like the electrons in some complex molecule that end up being "shared" across "bonds", and it becomes meaningless to ask exactly "where" the electron is. The electron is everywhere and nowhere, but mostly around here and over there, and "where" is a badly formed question anyway because there's no way to measure it without distorting it beyond recognition. You can only ask questions like "If I do this to the molecule, what will the molecule do?" and the internals are beyond our reach.

But the question keeps coming back to the front of what it means to say "We are one spirit" or "Moved by one spirit" or "One in the Spirit". There is some important or profound physical reality here that is beyond just a fancy choice of words or a sloppy analogy or metaphor.

As always, this comes back to whether we really, deeply understand what it means to have "unity in diversity" or an overarching unity in an organization that crosses "silos" and brings people together, out of their shells, motivated by something larger than their own local and petty personal or departmental interests.

I think, like The Toyota Way, this is beyond what one would call a "philosophy" which is cognitive -- this involves an indirectly measurable change in what we ARE, more than just a change in what we DO.