American Jazz: A Protest Against White Hegemony
(1st Place in Weber State's Literature Conference and the Carl Andra Essay Contest; to be Published in Weber State's Metaphor 2020)
While many would argue that art should speak for itself, it is impossible to remove it from the social contexts from which it is born. The emotions and thoughts that go into creating art are indivisible from the life of the person creating it, and in the case of jazz, its architects' lives have been permeated by racism. This racism can be seen not just through the personal stories of black musicians, but through society’s reactions to the musical genre as a whole.
To claim that jazz and the blues can be defined solely by race and protest against white hegemony would be faulty, for to say that white suppression is the only black emotive experience is, of course, erroneous. However, it would also be wrong to leave out such an important piece of the puzzle or even to treat it as a side note, as many critics and historians have been apt to do. This paper will explore how jazz has often been used as a form of protest against white hegemony through both its emotional and intellectual content and its form, and how white America has in turn ignored, demonized, and appropriated the genre in attempt to suppress black expression and identity.
The importance of music in the life of the American slave can be traced back to the country’s founding. Since that time, African expression, including music, has been suppressed in a variety of ways. The original set of slaves were forcibly removed from not just their countries, but their cultures. Traditions based in the material world (such as sculpture and basket weaving) were lost. Religious, social and political ideas were forced out of slaves' minds by those who enslaved them. Attacks were also made early on toward musical expression. In the 18th century, for example, The Hymns and Spiritual Songs of Dr. Watts was distributed to try to “convert” African Americans to Westernized styles of music. In another instance, slaves used drums to signal an attack on the white citizenry during the Stono Rebellion of 1739. After this, slave use of drums was banned by South Carolina, along with all loud instruments in the state of Georgia.
Despite the suppression of music, many slaves still managed to hold onto many African musical traditions by passing them on orally and by creating inventive instruments, such as using overturned washbasins for drums. The songs they brought from Africa slowly evolved over time for various reasons: some lyrics (such as those alluding to African gods) were not allowed by masters, the songs' language shifted over time as slaves transitioned from African languages and dialects to English, and lyrics were adapted to the new contexts of plantation life and slavery. However, many of the components of jazz, such as its complex rhythmic patterns and lack of structure, still maintain many aspects that clearly descended from African, not European music. Due to these factors, the blues and jazz that resulted was not purely African, nor European, but a distinctly African American music derived from the unique and exploited experience of the African American.
An early account of such music can be found in the powerful narrative of Frederick Douglass. Douglass expressed that these songs revealed, “at once the highest joy and deepest sadness,” and that they would, “compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune . . . They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone . . . they were tones loud, long and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” He went so far as to say that he had, “sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.”
The work song, such as the street cries described by Douglass, along with field hollers and levee camp hollers were born out of the pain, oppression and desperation of slavery. They are also considered one of the most unadulterated forms of African music to have existed in the Americas, and as such they completely ignored Western constructed scales and notations. These work songs laid the foundation for the blues and jazz. The ignorance and disregard of Western musical constructs in scale and notation was a major influence on these genres, both in melody and in rhythm. For example, these early musicians used what have since been branded “blue” notes, which “were no longer just notes, but flexible sounds that could change in ways unforeseen by the most renowned nineteenth-century composers.”
As the name suggests, blues and jazz musicians would pick up the technique of the blue note, particularly in horned and vocal sections. Like the songs in Douglass’ narrative, the blues and jazz are able to capture gut-wrenching human emotion by breaking the rules of the constructed boundaries of European music. Early jazz musicians such as Sydney Bechet and King Oliver, “defied conventional notation and refused to be reduced to a systematic methodology.” One of Bechet’s students recalled Bechet instructing him to take a single note and, “See how many ways you can play that note—growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it. That’s how you express your feelings in this music. It’s like talking.” Such technique and emotional depth can be heard prominently in both Bessie Smith’s vocals and Louis Armstrong’s horn work in the song “St. Louis Blues.”
The work song was also the earliest American example of the call and response form that became quite dominant in the blues and jazz. The technique was used in field hollers, for example, to allow to parties to communicate. The historian and jazz expert Ted Gioia explains that call and response in its original African form is, “as much a matter of social integration of performance into the social fabric,” and due to this fact, “takes on an aura of functionality, one that defies a ‘pure’ aesthetic attempting to separate art from social needs.” As jazz artists reinvented the genre time and time again, call and response and its theme of social integration prevailed. The music was always functional, not simply something to be listened to as background noise. The African American scholar and musician Samuel A. Floyd Jr. calls call and response and other modes of improvisation a “struggle-fulfillment in microcosm,” going on to say that the music played is a subconsciously derived metaphor for the African-American experience. In these ways, the call and response technique is both an expression of individual identity and social integration.
The earliest structural forms and emotive energies that underlay blues and jazz music to this day were a product of the employment of African musical techniques on slave plantations. Clearly, this music was an important mode of artistic and emotional expression for the black American. This would not be tolerated by prejudiced Americans, for to accept blues and the jazz as a true art form would force acknowledgement of black intellect, emotional intelligence, and cultural identity. As such, to accept black art, white Americans might have to acknowledge black Americans as human beings deserving of equal status to white Americans. Largely, white society was not prepared to do this. The specter of slavery was to be transmuted into other systemic forms of racism and discrimination: the era of Jim Crow was nigh.
After the end of the Civil War, southern tensions ran high. Slaveholders thought the freemen might take revenge, and the poor white population felt threatened by the competition of black people entering the job market. Many assumed the success of black people would translate to a backslide of the white population. Racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan were formed and white southerners inflicted great violence on black Americans, and laws were passed to force the black American out of the public sphere and into a new kind of slavery. Black people at this time could be imprisoned for walking along a railroad, speaking loudly in the presence of a white woman, drinking, loitering, spitting, being drunk in public, or not having a job. Penalties were increased and enforced only against black Americans, and allegations were often fabricated. Black prisoners were leased out by state-run prison systems to factories and mines to bring in revenue for state governments. From the disenfranchisement, rampant discrimination, and state-run slavery of Jim Crow arose the blues. Music was one of the few conduits through which black Americans could express themselves. Some scholars go so far as to assert that the blues would not exist were it not for Jim Crow.
Largely uneducated, most black Americans could not read or write at this time, and to protest in the public sphere was extremely dangerous and often a death sentence. Simply expressing oneself or asserting individual or racial identity in any way was a dangerous form of protest. Cultural historian Lawrence Levine describes a prisoner’s take on prison songs, and how in these songs, “You can tell the truth, about how you feel, you know, but you can’t express it, see, to the boss. They really be singing about the way they feel inside. Since they can’t say it to nobody, they sing a song about it.” While some songs were less explicit, others were written directly as songs of protest. For example, “Take This Hammer” (1902) blatantly protests prison enslavement by implying that the singing convict is going to escape his imprisonment because he knows he doesn’t deserve his chains with the lines, “Take this hammer, carry it to the captain. Tell him I'm gone . . . If he asks you was I runnin', tell him I was flyin' . . . If he asks you was I laughin', tell him I was cryin' . . . They want to feed me cornbread and molasses, but I got my pride. Well, I got my pride.”
These musical forms, the work and field song and the blues, along with the social context of Jim Crow were the conditions under which jazz was born. Buddy Bolden, the mythic creator of the jazz genre, and of whom we have no surviving recordings, wrote songs that would land a black person in jail simply for singing them, not to mention the physical abuses officers would inflict upon the offenders. For instance, his signature song “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” makes mockery of a local judge and other prominent public figures. Not a great deal is known about Bolden, but what we do know of his life and death seem to be ominous omens for future jazz musicians. Bolden was a heavy drinker and suffered from severe mental illness. He was imprisoned twice, and on the second time was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Bolden died in an asylum at the age of 54 from cerebral arteriosclerosis. Unfortunately, many of his musical offspring, such as Fats Navarro, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Fats Waller all died under the age of 50 due to illnesses of poverty, such as tuberculosis and drug addiction. Charles Mingus and Thelonius Monk would follow soon after. Both suffered from severe mental health issues and died at the ages of 56 and 64 respectively.
It is a great loss to both the jazz world and historians that there were no recordings of Buddy Bolden, the father of jazz. It is also telling of the times that the very first jazz band to be commercially recorded was in 1917 by The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which consisted solely of white musicians, and was led by Nick LaRocca. The song they recorded, “Livery Stable Blues,” appropriated many elemental forms of the music created by black musicians of that time period, including the three chord 12 bar structure of the blues and early jazz, call and response, Caribbean influenced melody and ragtime influenced piano. The song’s tone is jovial, and the barnyard sounds that respond to the horn sections might be seen as humorous were it not for its historical context. The song’s facetious humor had its roots in minstrelsy, the most popular performance art of the time, in which operas were parodied, and very often, white actors dressed up in blackface and portrayed black people as buffoonish and racist caricatures. “Livery Stable Blues” was a “major commercial success,” and LaRocca tried to cash in further on this success in claiming propriety as one of the indispensable progenitors of the jazz genre, a claim which jazz historians have found no evidence with which to back. It is doubtful that the ODJB was even the first white band to play jazz music.
The ODJB and were not the only to cash in on the new jazz idiom. They and many other white bands benefited from a “virtual monopoly” on the jazz market at that time, and continued to until record companies realised the money that could be made off of “race records.” Even though black musicians had invented and continued to reinvent the entire genre of jazz, they were not recognized until they played with the white musicians and bands that emulated them. Jelly Roll Morton, one of the immediate descendents of Buddy Bolden and greatest New Orleans jazz composers was ignored until he played alongside The Rhythm Kings in the first ever interracial recording session. The Rhythm Kings had already recorded multiple times before this event, but admitted that they had asked Morton to record with them as both pianist and composer because they had done, “the best (they) could, but naturally couldn’t play real colored style.”
When jazz finally broke through to mainstream society in the 1920s, droves of puritanical Americans were outraged. A quick glance over the newspaper articles of the time period gives an idea of the way this “devil’s music” was viewed by “high” society. Racist allusions to the black race were abundant. One preacher in the Washington Times described jazz as a “nervousness, lawlessness, primitive and savage animalism.” A 1922 article of the East Orgonian reported that a judge in Chicago had ruled jazz was “immoral” and “fined the proprietors of a . . . dance hall for permitting jazzified strains,” of music. The Tacoma Women’s club condemned it, saying it was on par with the “saloon and scarlet vice,” and that the “perpetrators of it should be imprisoned.”
One of the biggest fears of the time was of the type of dancing jazz elicited in the youth of the day. An Ogden Standard-Examiner headline lamented, “Even Gay Paris Shocked by America’s Jazz Dances.” In 1926, the Cabaret Law was passed in New York, which banned establishments from allowing dancing without a permit, permitted only string and keyboard instruments (effectively banning most jazz instruments), and restricted the number of musicians to no more than three. The law was used to reduce interracial mingling, and to push black musicians out of clubs. The area most affected was Harlem. In 1943, it was expanded to force musicians to carry “cabaret cards.” Law enforcement disproportionately revoked the cards of black musicians. Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, J.J. Johnson, and Thelonious Monk were a handful of musicians who, at some point, had their licenses revoked. The Cabaret Law was not repealed until October, 2017.
Other articles from the 1920s make clear divisions between the “high” and “low” arts. A Princeton professor stated in the New York Herald, “good music” has “melody and harmony,” while “sensual music, lascivious, mean music–if it can be called music at all–irritates, demoralizes and vulgarized those who listen to it . . . Jazz . . . was invented by imps for the torment of imbeciles.” A 1922 periodical called the Topeka State Journal lauded Topeka citizens for its massive turnout to a classical music event, and commented that “the masses are strong for good music.” They exulted that once classical records could be bought for ten cents as jazz records could be at the time, people would again be buying “good music,” and jazz would be “relegated to the trash heap.” Such commentaries speak loudly of the particular aspects of jazz “high society” condemned: those that did not conform to European American musical orthodoxes.
While white jazz musicians like Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin were making a killing off of jazz music, most black artists were living in poor conditions, even during the time of “renaissance.” As jazz expert Ted Gioia described it, Harlem was a place of “harsh economics, low salaries, and looming rent payments.” He goes on to explain that, “A 1927 study showed that 48 percent of Harlem renters spent more than twice as much of their income on rent as similarly situated white city dwellers . . . a quarter of families took in at least one lodger . . . Sometimes the same mattress was rented out twice, to tenants on different work shifts . . . the earning differential between white and black was still an unbridgeable gulf. Black independence, in this setting, came at a price, one meted out daily in the cost of food and shelter.” Rent parties were common, encouraging the creation of jazz music, and giving the people of Harlem a break from the stresses of daily living.
From Harlem came musicians like Cab Calloway, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, who at the time were relegated “to the submerged Harlem, the lowlife world of speakeasies and slumming.” There was a divide even among black Americans regarding jazz music. Those against it hoped to integrate into white society, and believed that jazz music made black society look uncultured. The vast majority of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance tried to distance themselves from jazz music and musicians. One notable exception, however, is perhaps the most well known of the Harlem Renaissance writers today, Langston Hughes. Hughes was unafraid to write about the less glamorized experiences of the black American, and became a champion of lower-class black Americans. Being unapologetically black, Hughes became one of the first writers of jazz poetry. Jazz poetry, such as Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” conformed its verse to jazz structures, such as syncopated rhythms. The musician in “The Weary Blues” does a “lazy sway to those Weary Blues with his ebony hands on each ivory key,” which may be a commentary on the black man’s experience of living, creating, and surviving in a white man’s world. Because of Hughes commitment to black identity and the lower classes, he was not taken seriously as a poet, even by many of his fellow renaissance writers. Like jazz musicians, Hughes has been vindicated with time as American society continues to deconstruct its former and present prejudices.
As jazz grew in popularity among the masses in the 1920s, white musicians were paid more both for recording and playing live shows, and were made more visible by record companies and clubs. One of the most popular and highest grossing jazz musicians of the 1920s was Paul Whiteman, a white musician from Colorado who eventually settled with his band in New York. Whiteman made over a million dollars in a single year in the 1920s. To this day, Whiteman is a controversial figure. Just as Benny Goodman would be called the “King of Swing” in the 1930s, Elvis Presley was to be dubbed the “King of Rock” in the 1950s, Whiteman was dubbed the “King of Jazz” in the 1920s. While Whiteman’s talent and influence is undeniable, it is imperative to recognize his position as a musician in that time, and the reasons for which he was named “King” in the 1920s, when history has vindicated Louis Armstrong as the revolutionary of that time. The Richmond Sun Telegram reported at in 1922 that Whiteman had wanted to get married and start a family, but was not making the money he needed to do so in the San Francisco Symphony. He understood that there was money to be made in dance music, and so borrowed blues and jazz songs by black musicians, then fitted them into the European symphonic form. In songs like “Whispering” and “Japanese Sandman,” Whiteman blended jazz music with symphonic music in order to “civilize” the “primitive rhythms” and free improvisation of jazz, watering down the Africans influences of the music and making it “more acceptable to white audiences.”
As Whiteman’s music grew in popularity, the musician at times publicly praised black musicians and even attempted to bring black musicians into his band, but was persuaded not to do so by his record company’s owners, who told him it would be career suicide. Still, many credit Whiteman, and later Benny Goodman, for the upliftment of the black musician to an elevated position of dignity in white society. It may be tempting to accredit the uprise of of black musicians to the help of white musicians who were willing to praise or play with them, but ultimately black musicians should be recognized on their own creative merits. Black musicians were the creators and leaders in innovation of the jazz genre. Were it not for systemic racism, they would have risen high above these white musicians, and without their assistance. Historical emphasis ought to be placed on what prevented the most creative and innovative of the genre from transcendence in the first place.
In its appropriation by white culture, jazz music went through, “a virtual stripping of Black musical genius and aesthetic innovation,” as both white and black musicians tried to “minimize their association with ‘Blackness.’” Even musicians like Louis Armstrong, and later Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie were as successful as they were because they, to some degree, melded their music into white established forms in order to survive as artists in the 1920s and beyond. Even as they did this, white society allowed them to be performers, but would not recognize them as intellectuals, particularly in the beginning. They were forced to “master a wide range of novelty devices and popular effects.” When white property owners realized that there was money to be made off of black musicianship, “The procurement of black entertainment for white audiences soon became . . . a mini-industry.” When white audiences ventured into Harlem, they still expected to be treated as “ruling class elites,” and thus the “grotesque spectacle of the Harlem club for all-white audiences was born, a musical menagerie in which social proximity and distance could exist.” Duke Ellington later in his career said that, “When I began my work, jazz was a stunt.”
None of this is to say that these musicians were any less innovative, valid or decisive than other musicians, but it is important to the narrative of jazz as a genre, and says much about the time in which it was created. As parts of American white society grew more accepting of jazz music, they still expected black musicians to conform to their expectations of what jazz should be, and what its musicians should look like. The next two generations of black jazz musicians would take offense to this and reclaim it as “afro-centric” music by reinventing the genre time and time again.
As jazz progressed, black musicians continued to “preserve the African American vernacular music heritage,” while also “advancing the jazz idiom.” As the music evolved from swing to modernist bebop, postmodern jazz, and then to free jazz, expectations of what jazz “should” be were deconstructed, and emphasis on improvisation and freedom of form was heightened. The creative forces behind these genres were marginalized individuals, and individuals who refused to be seen as anything less than serious artists and intellectuals. Miles Davis, for example, commented in his autobiography that he refused to suck up to white critics or “perform” for white audiences as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and others before him had done to get by as musicians and support their families, but also expressed gratitude at their having done it before him so his generation didn’t have to. When Miles performed, he would go so far as to play with his back to the audience, saying that he was an artist, not an entertainer.
The blues and jazz music were invented and reinvented time and time again by black musicians, and against the grain of European American standards of what music “ought” to be. When white Americans began to take notice, they often road on the coattails of black musicians, and, whether or not they were fully cognizant of it, took advantage of their privilege. Though many of these black musicians have been vindicated with time, it is important to take a historical perspective on the subject and consider the implications this topic may have for today’s musicians, as history tends to repeat itself. Today, we ought to consider the implications of cultural appropriation and demonization on other forms of music, such as hip hop and rap.
To claim that jazz and the blues can be defined solely by race and protest against white hegemony would be faulty, for to say that white suppression is the only black emotive experience is, of course, erroneous. However, it would also be wrong to leave out such an important piece of the puzzle or even to treat it as a side note, as many critics and historians have been apt to do. This paper will explore how jazz has often been used as a form of protest against white hegemony through both its emotional and intellectual content and its form, and how white America has in turn ignored, demonized, and appropriated the genre in attempt to suppress black expression and identity.
The importance of music in the life of the American slave can be traced back to the country’s founding. Since that time, African expression, including music, has been suppressed in a variety of ways. The original set of slaves were forcibly removed from not just their countries, but their cultures. Traditions based in the material world (such as sculpture and basket weaving) were lost. Religious, social and political ideas were forced out of slaves' minds by those who enslaved them. Attacks were also made early on toward musical expression. In the 18th century, for example, The Hymns and Spiritual Songs of Dr. Watts was distributed to try to “convert” African Americans to Westernized styles of music. In another instance, slaves used drums to signal an attack on the white citizenry during the Stono Rebellion of 1739. After this, slave use of drums was banned by South Carolina, along with all loud instruments in the state of Georgia.
Despite the suppression of music, many slaves still managed to hold onto many African musical traditions by passing them on orally and by creating inventive instruments, such as using overturned washbasins for drums. The songs they brought from Africa slowly evolved over time for various reasons: some lyrics (such as those alluding to African gods) were not allowed by masters, the songs' language shifted over time as slaves transitioned from African languages and dialects to English, and lyrics were adapted to the new contexts of plantation life and slavery. However, many of the components of jazz, such as its complex rhythmic patterns and lack of structure, still maintain many aspects that clearly descended from African, not European music. Due to these factors, the blues and jazz that resulted was not purely African, nor European, but a distinctly African American music derived from the unique and exploited experience of the African American.
An early account of such music can be found in the powerful narrative of Frederick Douglass. Douglass expressed that these songs revealed, “at once the highest joy and deepest sadness,” and that they would, “compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune . . . They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone . . . they were tones loud, long and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” He went so far as to say that he had, “sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.”
The work song, such as the street cries described by Douglass, along with field hollers and levee camp hollers were born out of the pain, oppression and desperation of slavery. They are also considered one of the most unadulterated forms of African music to have existed in the Americas, and as such they completely ignored Western constructed scales and notations. These work songs laid the foundation for the blues and jazz. The ignorance and disregard of Western musical constructs in scale and notation was a major influence on these genres, both in melody and in rhythm. For example, these early musicians used what have since been branded “blue” notes, which “were no longer just notes, but flexible sounds that could change in ways unforeseen by the most renowned nineteenth-century composers.”
As the name suggests, blues and jazz musicians would pick up the technique of the blue note, particularly in horned and vocal sections. Like the songs in Douglass’ narrative, the blues and jazz are able to capture gut-wrenching human emotion by breaking the rules of the constructed boundaries of European music. Early jazz musicians such as Sydney Bechet and King Oliver, “defied conventional notation and refused to be reduced to a systematic methodology.” One of Bechet’s students recalled Bechet instructing him to take a single note and, “See how many ways you can play that note—growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it. That’s how you express your feelings in this music. It’s like talking.” Such technique and emotional depth can be heard prominently in both Bessie Smith’s vocals and Louis Armstrong’s horn work in the song “St. Louis Blues.”
The work song was also the earliest American example of the call and response form that became quite dominant in the blues and jazz. The technique was used in field hollers, for example, to allow to parties to communicate. The historian and jazz expert Ted Gioia explains that call and response in its original African form is, “as much a matter of social integration of performance into the social fabric,” and due to this fact, “takes on an aura of functionality, one that defies a ‘pure’ aesthetic attempting to separate art from social needs.” As jazz artists reinvented the genre time and time again, call and response and its theme of social integration prevailed. The music was always functional, not simply something to be listened to as background noise. The African American scholar and musician Samuel A. Floyd Jr. calls call and response and other modes of improvisation a “struggle-fulfillment in microcosm,” going on to say that the music played is a subconsciously derived metaphor for the African-American experience. In these ways, the call and response technique is both an expression of individual identity and social integration.
The earliest structural forms and emotive energies that underlay blues and jazz music to this day were a product of the employment of African musical techniques on slave plantations. Clearly, this music was an important mode of artistic and emotional expression for the black American. This would not be tolerated by prejudiced Americans, for to accept blues and the jazz as a true art form would force acknowledgement of black intellect, emotional intelligence, and cultural identity. As such, to accept black art, white Americans might have to acknowledge black Americans as human beings deserving of equal status to white Americans. Largely, white society was not prepared to do this. The specter of slavery was to be transmuted into other systemic forms of racism and discrimination: the era of Jim Crow was nigh.
After the end of the Civil War, southern tensions ran high. Slaveholders thought the freemen might take revenge, and the poor white population felt threatened by the competition of black people entering the job market. Many assumed the success of black people would translate to a backslide of the white population. Racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan were formed and white southerners inflicted great violence on black Americans, and laws were passed to force the black American out of the public sphere and into a new kind of slavery. Black people at this time could be imprisoned for walking along a railroad, speaking loudly in the presence of a white woman, drinking, loitering, spitting, being drunk in public, or not having a job. Penalties were increased and enforced only against black Americans, and allegations were often fabricated. Black prisoners were leased out by state-run prison systems to factories and mines to bring in revenue for state governments. From the disenfranchisement, rampant discrimination, and state-run slavery of Jim Crow arose the blues. Music was one of the few conduits through which black Americans could express themselves. Some scholars go so far as to assert that the blues would not exist were it not for Jim Crow.
Largely uneducated, most black Americans could not read or write at this time, and to protest in the public sphere was extremely dangerous and often a death sentence. Simply expressing oneself or asserting individual or racial identity in any way was a dangerous form of protest. Cultural historian Lawrence Levine describes a prisoner’s take on prison songs, and how in these songs, “You can tell the truth, about how you feel, you know, but you can’t express it, see, to the boss. They really be singing about the way they feel inside. Since they can’t say it to nobody, they sing a song about it.” While some songs were less explicit, others were written directly as songs of protest. For example, “Take This Hammer” (1902) blatantly protests prison enslavement by implying that the singing convict is going to escape his imprisonment because he knows he doesn’t deserve his chains with the lines, “Take this hammer, carry it to the captain. Tell him I'm gone . . . If he asks you was I runnin', tell him I was flyin' . . . If he asks you was I laughin', tell him I was cryin' . . . They want to feed me cornbread and molasses, but I got my pride. Well, I got my pride.”
These musical forms, the work and field song and the blues, along with the social context of Jim Crow were the conditions under which jazz was born. Buddy Bolden, the mythic creator of the jazz genre, and of whom we have no surviving recordings, wrote songs that would land a black person in jail simply for singing them, not to mention the physical abuses officers would inflict upon the offenders. For instance, his signature song “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” makes mockery of a local judge and other prominent public figures. Not a great deal is known about Bolden, but what we do know of his life and death seem to be ominous omens for future jazz musicians. Bolden was a heavy drinker and suffered from severe mental illness. He was imprisoned twice, and on the second time was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Bolden died in an asylum at the age of 54 from cerebral arteriosclerosis. Unfortunately, many of his musical offspring, such as Fats Navarro, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Fats Waller all died under the age of 50 due to illnesses of poverty, such as tuberculosis and drug addiction. Charles Mingus and Thelonius Monk would follow soon after. Both suffered from severe mental health issues and died at the ages of 56 and 64 respectively.
It is a great loss to both the jazz world and historians that there were no recordings of Buddy Bolden, the father of jazz. It is also telling of the times that the very first jazz band to be commercially recorded was in 1917 by The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which consisted solely of white musicians, and was led by Nick LaRocca. The song they recorded, “Livery Stable Blues,” appropriated many elemental forms of the music created by black musicians of that time period, including the three chord 12 bar structure of the blues and early jazz, call and response, Caribbean influenced melody and ragtime influenced piano. The song’s tone is jovial, and the barnyard sounds that respond to the horn sections might be seen as humorous were it not for its historical context. The song’s facetious humor had its roots in minstrelsy, the most popular performance art of the time, in which operas were parodied, and very often, white actors dressed up in blackface and portrayed black people as buffoonish and racist caricatures. “Livery Stable Blues” was a “major commercial success,” and LaRocca tried to cash in further on this success in claiming propriety as one of the indispensable progenitors of the jazz genre, a claim which jazz historians have found no evidence with which to back. It is doubtful that the ODJB was even the first white band to play jazz music.
The ODJB and were not the only to cash in on the new jazz idiom. They and many other white bands benefited from a “virtual monopoly” on the jazz market at that time, and continued to until record companies realised the money that could be made off of “race records.” Even though black musicians had invented and continued to reinvent the entire genre of jazz, they were not recognized until they played with the white musicians and bands that emulated them. Jelly Roll Morton, one of the immediate descendents of Buddy Bolden and greatest New Orleans jazz composers was ignored until he played alongside The Rhythm Kings in the first ever interracial recording session. The Rhythm Kings had already recorded multiple times before this event, but admitted that they had asked Morton to record with them as both pianist and composer because they had done, “the best (they) could, but naturally couldn’t play real colored style.”
When jazz finally broke through to mainstream society in the 1920s, droves of puritanical Americans were outraged. A quick glance over the newspaper articles of the time period gives an idea of the way this “devil’s music” was viewed by “high” society. Racist allusions to the black race were abundant. One preacher in the Washington Times described jazz as a “nervousness, lawlessness, primitive and savage animalism.” A 1922 article of the East Orgonian reported that a judge in Chicago had ruled jazz was “immoral” and “fined the proprietors of a . . . dance hall for permitting jazzified strains,” of music. The Tacoma Women’s club condemned it, saying it was on par with the “saloon and scarlet vice,” and that the “perpetrators of it should be imprisoned.”
One of the biggest fears of the time was of the type of dancing jazz elicited in the youth of the day. An Ogden Standard-Examiner headline lamented, “Even Gay Paris Shocked by America’s Jazz Dances.” In 1926, the Cabaret Law was passed in New York, which banned establishments from allowing dancing without a permit, permitted only string and keyboard instruments (effectively banning most jazz instruments), and restricted the number of musicians to no more than three. The law was used to reduce interracial mingling, and to push black musicians out of clubs. The area most affected was Harlem. In 1943, it was expanded to force musicians to carry “cabaret cards.” Law enforcement disproportionately revoked the cards of black musicians. Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, J.J. Johnson, and Thelonious Monk were a handful of musicians who, at some point, had their licenses revoked. The Cabaret Law was not repealed until October, 2017.
Other articles from the 1920s make clear divisions between the “high” and “low” arts. A Princeton professor stated in the New York Herald, “good music” has “melody and harmony,” while “sensual music, lascivious, mean music–if it can be called music at all–irritates, demoralizes and vulgarized those who listen to it . . . Jazz . . . was invented by imps for the torment of imbeciles.” A 1922 periodical called the Topeka State Journal lauded Topeka citizens for its massive turnout to a classical music event, and commented that “the masses are strong for good music.” They exulted that once classical records could be bought for ten cents as jazz records could be at the time, people would again be buying “good music,” and jazz would be “relegated to the trash heap.” Such commentaries speak loudly of the particular aspects of jazz “high society” condemned: those that did not conform to European American musical orthodoxes.
While white jazz musicians like Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin were making a killing off of jazz music, most black artists were living in poor conditions, even during the time of “renaissance.” As jazz expert Ted Gioia described it, Harlem was a place of “harsh economics, low salaries, and looming rent payments.” He goes on to explain that, “A 1927 study showed that 48 percent of Harlem renters spent more than twice as much of their income on rent as similarly situated white city dwellers . . . a quarter of families took in at least one lodger . . . Sometimes the same mattress was rented out twice, to tenants on different work shifts . . . the earning differential between white and black was still an unbridgeable gulf. Black independence, in this setting, came at a price, one meted out daily in the cost of food and shelter.” Rent parties were common, encouraging the creation of jazz music, and giving the people of Harlem a break from the stresses of daily living.
From Harlem came musicians like Cab Calloway, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, who at the time were relegated “to the submerged Harlem, the lowlife world of speakeasies and slumming.” There was a divide even among black Americans regarding jazz music. Those against it hoped to integrate into white society, and believed that jazz music made black society look uncultured. The vast majority of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance tried to distance themselves from jazz music and musicians. One notable exception, however, is perhaps the most well known of the Harlem Renaissance writers today, Langston Hughes. Hughes was unafraid to write about the less glamorized experiences of the black American, and became a champion of lower-class black Americans. Being unapologetically black, Hughes became one of the first writers of jazz poetry. Jazz poetry, such as Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” conformed its verse to jazz structures, such as syncopated rhythms. The musician in “The Weary Blues” does a “lazy sway to those Weary Blues with his ebony hands on each ivory key,” which may be a commentary on the black man’s experience of living, creating, and surviving in a white man’s world. Because of Hughes commitment to black identity and the lower classes, he was not taken seriously as a poet, even by many of his fellow renaissance writers. Like jazz musicians, Hughes has been vindicated with time as American society continues to deconstruct its former and present prejudices.
As jazz grew in popularity among the masses in the 1920s, white musicians were paid more both for recording and playing live shows, and were made more visible by record companies and clubs. One of the most popular and highest grossing jazz musicians of the 1920s was Paul Whiteman, a white musician from Colorado who eventually settled with his band in New York. Whiteman made over a million dollars in a single year in the 1920s. To this day, Whiteman is a controversial figure. Just as Benny Goodman would be called the “King of Swing” in the 1930s, Elvis Presley was to be dubbed the “King of Rock” in the 1950s, Whiteman was dubbed the “King of Jazz” in the 1920s. While Whiteman’s talent and influence is undeniable, it is imperative to recognize his position as a musician in that time, and the reasons for which he was named “King” in the 1920s, when history has vindicated Louis Armstrong as the revolutionary of that time. The Richmond Sun Telegram reported at in 1922 that Whiteman had wanted to get married and start a family, but was not making the money he needed to do so in the San Francisco Symphony. He understood that there was money to be made in dance music, and so borrowed blues and jazz songs by black musicians, then fitted them into the European symphonic form. In songs like “Whispering” and “Japanese Sandman,” Whiteman blended jazz music with symphonic music in order to “civilize” the “primitive rhythms” and free improvisation of jazz, watering down the Africans influences of the music and making it “more acceptable to white audiences.”
As Whiteman’s music grew in popularity, the musician at times publicly praised black musicians and even attempted to bring black musicians into his band, but was persuaded not to do so by his record company’s owners, who told him it would be career suicide. Still, many credit Whiteman, and later Benny Goodman, for the upliftment of the black musician to an elevated position of dignity in white society. It may be tempting to accredit the uprise of of black musicians to the help of white musicians who were willing to praise or play with them, but ultimately black musicians should be recognized on their own creative merits. Black musicians were the creators and leaders in innovation of the jazz genre. Were it not for systemic racism, they would have risen high above these white musicians, and without their assistance. Historical emphasis ought to be placed on what prevented the most creative and innovative of the genre from transcendence in the first place.
In its appropriation by white culture, jazz music went through, “a virtual stripping of Black musical genius and aesthetic innovation,” as both white and black musicians tried to “minimize their association with ‘Blackness.’” Even musicians like Louis Armstrong, and later Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie were as successful as they were because they, to some degree, melded their music into white established forms in order to survive as artists in the 1920s and beyond. Even as they did this, white society allowed them to be performers, but would not recognize them as intellectuals, particularly in the beginning. They were forced to “master a wide range of novelty devices and popular effects.” When white property owners realized that there was money to be made off of black musicianship, “The procurement of black entertainment for white audiences soon became . . . a mini-industry.” When white audiences ventured into Harlem, they still expected to be treated as “ruling class elites,” and thus the “grotesque spectacle of the Harlem club for all-white audiences was born, a musical menagerie in which social proximity and distance could exist.” Duke Ellington later in his career said that, “When I began my work, jazz was a stunt.”
None of this is to say that these musicians were any less innovative, valid or decisive than other musicians, but it is important to the narrative of jazz as a genre, and says much about the time in which it was created. As parts of American white society grew more accepting of jazz music, they still expected black musicians to conform to their expectations of what jazz should be, and what its musicians should look like. The next two generations of black jazz musicians would take offense to this and reclaim it as “afro-centric” music by reinventing the genre time and time again.
As jazz progressed, black musicians continued to “preserve the African American vernacular music heritage,” while also “advancing the jazz idiom.” As the music evolved from swing to modernist bebop, postmodern jazz, and then to free jazz, expectations of what jazz “should” be were deconstructed, and emphasis on improvisation and freedom of form was heightened. The creative forces behind these genres were marginalized individuals, and individuals who refused to be seen as anything less than serious artists and intellectuals. Miles Davis, for example, commented in his autobiography that he refused to suck up to white critics or “perform” for white audiences as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and others before him had done to get by as musicians and support their families, but also expressed gratitude at their having done it before him so his generation didn’t have to. When Miles performed, he would go so far as to play with his back to the audience, saying that he was an artist, not an entertainer.
The blues and jazz music were invented and reinvented time and time again by black musicians, and against the grain of European American standards of what music “ought” to be. When white Americans began to take notice, they often road on the coattails of black musicians, and, whether or not they were fully cognizant of it, took advantage of their privilege. Though many of these black musicians have been vindicated with time, it is important to take a historical perspective on the subject and consider the implications this topic may have for today’s musicians, as history tends to repeat itself. Today, we ought to consider the implications of cultural appropriation and demonization on other forms of music, such as hip hop and rap.
Citations
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Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States. Oxford University Press, 1997.
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Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Gioia, Ted. The History of Jazz. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Gonen, Yoav. "City Council will repeal NYC’s infamous dancing ban." New York Post. October 30, 2017. Accessed December 10, 2017. https://nypost.com/2017/10/30/city-council-will-repeal- nycs-infamous-dancing-ban/.
Hall, Perry. "African-American Music: Dynamics of Appropriation and Innovation." In Borrowed power: Essays on Cultural Appropiation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.
Jenkins, Craig, and Frank Guan. "Is Culture Borrowing Always Theft?" The Culture Pages, July 25, 25, 75-79. Accessed November 15, 2017.
http://web.b.ebscohost.com.hal.weber.edu:2200/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=69f792a0-a9ce- 46fe-ab3e-92bf374e26b4%40pdc-v-.
Kerry, Eli, and Penn Bullock. "The Racist Legacy of NYC's Anti-Dancing Law." Thump. March 08, 2017. Accessed December 10, 2017. https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/z45g5e/nyc-
cabaret-law-racism-discrimination-history.
LaMothe, Ferdinande J. "Jelly Roll Morton - Buddy Bolden's Blues." YouTube. February 02, 2009. Accessed November 16, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgmZyImasvA.
Lauter, Paul. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Early Nineteenth Century: 1800-1865. 6th ed. Vol. B. 4 vols. Australia: Wadsworth, 2014.
Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007.
McKee, Joseph, Chairman. "THE MUNICIPAL ASSEMBLY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK. ." Zort Music. Accessed December 10, 2017.
http://zortmusic.com/CabaretLaw/Resources/December%2026%201926%20Cabaret%20Law%20As%20Enacted.pdf.
New York Herald. "No Art Exempt in Moral Law, Says Dr. Van Dyke." Chronicling America. Accessed December 10, 2017. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045774/1921-03-13/ed-
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Range&page=2.
Ogden Standard-Examiner. "Even Gay Paris Shocked by America's Jazz Dances." Chronicling America. Accessed December 10, 2017.
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07/ed-1/seq-3/#.
Slavery by Another Name. May 23, 2017. Accessed November 16, 2017. http://www.pbs.org/video/slavery-another-name-slavery-video/.
Smith, Bessie, and Louis Armstrong. "Bessie Smith - St. Louis Blues, 1925." YouTube. March 24, 2012. Accessed November 17, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rd9IaA_uJI.
Times Pub. Co., The Washington Times. (Washington [D.C.]) 1902-1939, March 03, 1922, HOME FINAL EDITION, Page 10, Image 10." Chronicling America. Accessed December 10, 2017.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1922-03-03/ed-1/seq-10/#date1=1893&index=0&rows=20&words=JAZZ
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Ethical Implications of Space-Time Singularity
What is time? On the surface, this seems like a simple question. Take a moment though, to consider what it is that makes a person feel as though he or she can immediately answer this question. Supposedly, time is measurable, but was it not man that invented time keeping devices? Philosophers and physicists have postulated about time for centuries, philosophy often picking up where physics leaves off. One theory that has been considered by many cultures and modern physicists is one that seems entirely non-intuitive and irrational, that being that time is, on another plain of existence, an illusion. If space-time is somehow simultaneously singular and relative, all individuation and separation may be, on some level, an illusion. If this is true, it would have major philosophical implications for the individual, and how his or her life might be lived.
How is it that anyone could question time? Clearly it exists, for we are moving forward within it as we speak. However, as anyone waiting in line at the DMV or at an amusement park knows, there is not only one way to experience time. Do perceptual differences have any basis in physical reality? It has been discovered that different animal species experience time differently, and that in fact even individual people may experience time differently, not simply because of mental interpretations, but because of their physical bodies. Species that have less mass and faster metabolisms experience time more slowly. Dogs, for example, “Can take in visual information at least 25 percent faster than humans—just enough to make a television show look like a series of flickering images” (Reas). This explains why it can be so difficult to actually swat that annoying fly. Some have also postulated that slowing metabolism is also why time seems to speed up as we age.
This is not the only example of how time changes due to variations in the physical realm. When the first part of Einstein’s theory of relativity exploded onto the physics scene in 1905, it completely blew up the way we thought about both time and space. Einstein’s teacher, Hermann Minkowski, had already proposed the idea that space and time were an inseparable continuum, an essential idea that helped Einstein build his theory of relativity (Brittanica). A second essential component of the theory of relativity (specifically, the theory of special relativity) regarding time is time dilation. In ascertaining that the speed of light is constant, Einstein discovered that time and space must be relative and plastic. Due to this fact, a clock that is in motion relative to an observer will tick more slowly than a clock that is in stasis near the observer.
Gravity also dilates time. If there is a stronger gravitational field acting on a clock than its observers, it will also run more slowly than, say, a wristwatch on the observer’s wrist. Due to this fact, time passes more slowly at the center of the earth, and faster at higher elevations. This fact has been tested with atomic clocks. An atomic clock run by a single “ticking” aluminum ion was shot into space, while another identical clock was kept on earth. “Due to their different elevations above the surface of the Earth, the higher clock—experiencing a smaller gravitational force—runs faster.” (Ost) In his latest book, theoretical physicist who helped author the theory of loop quantum gravity (a hypothesis that could potentially bridge the current gap between the theory of relativity and quantum physics) writes that,
If things fall, it is due to this slowing down of time. Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. They float. Here on the surface of our planet, on the other hand, the movement of things inclines naturally towards where time passes more slowly, as when we run down the beach into the sea and the resistance of the water on our legs makes us fall headfirst into the waves. Things fall downwards because, down there, time is slowed by the Earth.
Though it may not be possible in practice, Einstein’s theory opens the possibility of time travel into the future. In one thought experiment called the twin paradox, a twin is blasted into space in a high-speed rocket. When this astronaut returns to earth, she will find that her twin has aged more than she has, for, “If one were to leave Earth in a spacecraft travelling at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed, turn around and come back, only a few years might have passed on board but many years could have gone by on Earth” (“Is Time Travel Possible?”). Unfortunately, if we were able to time travel this way, time travel into the past would not be possible by the same means. One would have to move faster than the speed of light to do so, which Einstein, of course exhibited to be an impossibility. However, wormholes, as many a science fiction writer has realized, may open the possibility of time travel even into the past. Wormholes are a sort of tunnel that links two spots in spacetime, and though we are unsure if they exist, they have been mathematically predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity.
More recently, mathematician Ben Tippett of the University of British Columbia has computed another time travel possibility. Tippett’s reminds us that, though we like to treat time and space as different dimensional entities, they are in fact on in the same (“Researcher Uses Math”). As a result, one should be able to travel through time, just as one travels through space. In looking out at the night sky, we know that space time is finite, for if it were infinite, the sky would be full of the light of countless stars. In addition, because of the rate at which light travels, we actually see the afterglow of the big bang billions of lightyears away through super powerful microwave telescopes. In our searches, “we'd expect those distant views to reveal clouds of gas which have not yet turned into stars and galaxies,” and this is exactly what we have found. (Aderin-Pocock) Because the universe is both provenly finite and curved, it eventually curves back in on itself. As a result, Tippet has come up with a model of a time machine that, “Uses the curved space-time—to bend time into a circle for the passengers, not in a straight line. That circle takes us back in time.” (Aderin-Pocock) Of course all of this is theoretical, but the implications are profound, regardless. The potentiality of time travel gives us an easy way to see just how malleable and illusive time is. Wildly enough, these are just a few of many theoretical possibilities of time travel that bend our perspectives of time.
Perhaps even more mind-boggling than the elasticity of time is the potential elasticity of space. Because space and time are a continuum, the concept of space may also lose meaning. Space does not behave as true emptiness would. Gravitational waves ripple it, gravity curves it, it can expand by means of dark energy, and quantum particles burst into and back out of existence within it. Some physicists are now questioning the existence of space, period (Flatow, et al.). This is partly due to experiments on quantum particles. Certain behaviors of quantum particles have baffled physicists for decades. In the case of quantum entanglement (what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance), the phenomena has been tested time and time again under more and more definitive circumstances, and yet the results continue to be replicated and have yet to yield answers. Quantum entanglement is the circumstance in which two seemingly separate particles, with a 100% concurrence rate, behave in the exact same way at the exact same time. There is no communication between the two particles, such as radio or sound waves. This can happen across billions of lightyears of space; therefore it is impossible for them to be communicating, for the signal would have to move faster than the speed of light. As a result, many physicists are having to do what formerly seemed to be unimaginable: to question whether there is any true distance between the two particles, thereby treating spacetime as an illusion (Flatow, et al.).
The same is seen in regards to time when looking at quantum level particles. Every theory that has thus far been proposed to reconcile the gravity of relativity and quantum mechanics, such as string theory and loop quantum gravity, has had to disregard time’s existence completely. On a quantum level, the concept of time does not make sense. Carlo Rovelli wrote, “If I observe the microscopic state of things,” writes Rovelli, “then the difference between past and future vanishes . . . in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’” (Higgins). One particularly intriguing hypothesis that has come out of this conflict is the holographic principle of string theory. In another attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity, physicists Gerard 't Hooft, Leonard Susskind, and Charles Thorn proposed the idea that our 4-dimensional universe, could in fact be a holographic projection of 2-dimensional information encoded on a 2-dimensional event horizon, like that of a black hole. This theory would not only help make the leap from quantum mechanics to the theory of relativity, but would also solve the black hole information paradox (how is information stored when it falls into a black hole?). (Susskind) Though this has by no means been proven, physicists in 2017 found evidence that supported this theory in studying the microwaves left over from the early universe, and to a less complex degree have been able to use this 2-dimensional model to recreate 3-dimensional data from our universe. (Afshordi, et al.)
If time is dependent on a person’s brain, body and metabolic processes, if it depends his or her particular coordinate in supposed space, on the gravity acting on him or her, on the velocity at which he or she is moving, and on the trajectory at which he or she is moving; if it is entirely elastic, the question should be asked again: what is time? Is time more “correct” for this person, or at this supposed point in space? Does it really even exist at all? If each coordinate in space has its own time, the entire concept of time becomes meaningless. Again, Carlo Rovelli: “We might just as well ask what is most real – the value of sterling in dollars or the value of dollars in sterling. There are two times that change relative to each other. Neither is truer than the other. But there are not just two times. Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. The single quantity “time” melts into a spiderweb of times” (Rovelli).
In contemplating questions about the universe and ultimate reality, the philosopher does not need to ask the unanswerable cliché, “What is the meaning of life?” but perhaps instead, “What is at the marrow of life? What is at the core of all being? And what does this mean to me as an individual?” If time and space are, on some level, illusory, what does that mean for the everyday man or woman? The first question that comes to the mind of many in facing the potentiality of this seemingly fixed reality is, can freedom exist within a universe that always has been, and always will be? A reality in which everything is already written? Does this not make us “cogs in a machine?” It would be easy to believe this to be so, and it is of course not entirely false. Humanity should, indeed, be humbled by the discoveries cosmologists, astrophysicists and biologists have made. The individual should understand her utter finitude, that she is as a miniscule speck on this “mote of dust” we call earth (Sagan). She should understand her imperfections and limitations as a human being who is limited by a physical body. However, human beings have an incredible drive to understand these innerworkings, including those of their own bodies and minds, and to discover how those things emerge from and are connected into the universe at large. As these seekers make these discoveries, humanity is able to see a broader picture and understand that its actions have consequences, and what those consequences are.
Whether or not all the universe is determined start to finish, the individual cannot, and typically does not act as though his or her life is written for him or her, and this is because even contemplating these two modes of living changes the behavior of the individual. If the individual behaves as though all her life is determined and that she has no choice regarding her actions, she would likely relinquish responsibility for her actions and behave more as an animal or a machine than as a human being, for she would have given up all hope and aspiration. Simply believing that there is control to be had gives a person some amount of control, for it pushes her to consider what could be instead of what must be. Again, this is the beauty of the human species: its imagination and love to explore.
Free will is the ability to peer into the past and change behavior, or to imagine the future and consider what could be, and then to use those thoughts to take action, which inevitably shapes the future. Whether or not these abilities arose out of deterministic mechanisms matters not, for even if everything is determined, determinism is a two-way street. The individual and humanity at large shape the world around them, even as it shapes them. Reading this right here, right now, may change a reader’s behavior, and that is meaningful. Without the ability to reflect and alter our behavior based on newfound information, the individual and society at large would be unable to change or grow. Perhaps the story of humankind is already written, but human beings certainly helped write it.
If the universe is paradoxically both singular and in motion, then every event within it is occurring in exactly the same way over and over again. Alternatively, many physicists, including Stephen Hawking, are proponents of the many worlds theory, arguing that there may be many very similar realities in which each reality is divided into new universes with each decision someone makes. In either case, what the individual does with her time on earth has monumental consequences for her and the rest of the world. In consideration of this fact, Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out in Thus Spake Zarathustra that this concept of “Eternal Return” bestows great responsibility on the individual and society at large. The individual should think long and hard before making any decision, because it may occur exactly that way, or very close to exactly that way, forever. To live a life in deception and ignorance would inevitably create unneeded conflict, harming others and the planet, and that conflict and harm may resound for eternity. All of this can be avoided, but the only keys to doing so are knowledge, understanding and awareness.
The question now becomes, how can the individual gain the knowledge, understanding and awareness she needs to shape future outcomes that always have been and always will be, but that she cannot yet see herself? Humankind has already taken the first steps out of Plato’s cave. Yes, perhaps it can only see the shadows on the wall (or the projections of quantum particles) because of its biological limitations, but it is still able to seek, find and understand truth. As in all of the above examples, scientists do this every day by studying and analyzing the physical world to try to grasp the fundamental realities of nature; to test our perceptions and see which deceive us. Artists and writers do this as well, by continually deconstructing reality and asking society to reassess its perceptions, assumptions and prejudices.
One such writer is Ralph Waldo Emerson. A particularly clairevoyant man, he speaks of timelessness throughout several of his greatest essays. In “Self-Reliance” he declares that, “Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming . . .(Man) cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time” (Lauter 1755). In his essay “Nature,” he explains what it can mean to see eternity; to live above time: “What is matter? Whence is it? and Whereto? . . . Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite” (Lauter 1728-1729).
The poet Walt Whitman, a disciple and friend of Emerson, takes this line of thinking further. His entire poem “Song of Myself” which begins, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself/And what I assume you shall assume/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” seems an ode to the interconnectedness of all things. In this poem and throughout the rest of Leaves of Grass, he breaks down the false boundaries a person places between “you” and “me,” and tears at the false divisions humanity places between the individual and the collective, man and beast, a leaf of grass and the stars. He tells us that time and space are no thing. A particularly moving passage reads:
My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,
All below duly travel’d, and still I mount and mount.
Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.
Long I was hugg’d close—long and long.
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.
All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul. (Lauter 3048)
In another example, author John Neihardt recorded the experiences of the Sioux spiritual leader Black Elk during the times of the Custer battle, the ghost dance, and the massacre at Wounded Knee in the Dakotas. Black Elk was recognized as a holy man even as a child because of his extraordinary visions. In his first, he hears a voice say that he would be taken to, “Stand upon the center of the earth,” and there atop the highest mountain, he saw “the whole hoop of the world.” He saw that, “The sacred hoop of (his) people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father” (Neihardt 42). In The Power of Myth, mythologist Joseph Campbell interprets the passage thus: “‘The central mountain is everywhere. . . ’ The center of the world is the axis mundi, the central point, the pole around which all revolves. The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you're doing in the temporal experience- this is the mythological experience” (Campbell).
In another spiritual work, this time borrowing from tenets of Eastern philosophy, Hermann Hesse parallels the life of a man named Siddhartha with that of the life of the Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama. In this novel, Siddhartha, the character Siddhartha likens Nirvana, an experience outside of time and space, to a river in which, “All the love, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil,” blended into a single voice. He says that in listening to the river, he learned that, “Time is not real . . . And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception.”
The man who desires to open his perspective and change his perceptions would do himself good in reading such literature, in learning more about disparate subjects such as physics and biology, and to step into an art museum and see the many colors and definitions of truth and beauty. However, as the above mentioned writers have demonstrated through example, learning secondhand is not the only way to touch ultimate reality, and scientists and artists are not the only individuals who have access to great truth. What drives those individuals to create, wonder, question, and discover is an intrinsic part of all humanity. If past and future are all existent here and now, that realm of existence is open to every human being here and now. Every individual has access to totality, because each individual is a fragment of totality. These insights can be gained not only through studying the physical world, but also through solitary contemplation and meditation. Men and women have come in contact with the timeless, spaceless reality that is at the core of all existence in this way since they have known to ask why they exist at all. Some call it “God,” some, Nirvana, some Brahman, some Allah, some The Tao, some the sublime, some love, among a million other inadequate names. As English professor John Schwiebert of Weber State once said, “Language is a clumsy means of articulating the ineffable.”
If words are poor means of describing the infinite and eternal, perhaps it is best to instead contemplate silence, for silence is what lay at the bottom of all things. Meditation can be a particularly effective tool with which to do this. Consciousness, like all time and space, is entirely relative. It is a result of connections built up in the brain that create an integrated picture of reality, and a person builds new connections to learn something new. Often however, false assumptions and perceptions are created due to the imperfection and finite nature of man. In meditation, the meditator breathes room into those connections and illusions become apparent and break down.
As many meditators have described, including the Buddha himself, time and space are a couple of the fictions that can be torn away. A man who does not know himself looks outside of himself for completion, believing that the latest fashion trend, a new girlfriend, a pay raise, a degree, the perfect job, the perfect house, or any other number of things will make him feel whole. In breaking down relationships to things “outside” the self, in tearing away at desire, a person can see that those relationships are what create his perception of reality. When “outside” relationships are torn away, the house he has built for his ego falls apart and he can see that what is most real and true is at the center of all things, for he has glimpsed the absolute.
In the absolute, time and space are meaningless. Outside of time and space, there is no distinction between one individual and the next, or even between one generation and the next. The Big Bang and the end of the universe are all happening at once. Outside the limited point of view of the individual, all of those things are happening right here, right now, and to meditate can mean coming out of the self and touching that reality. To turn inward is to see that there is no thing that can complete him, for he is already complete. To turn inward is to see that all that has been is hidden away in one’s DNA, what Plato termed “anamnesis,” a remembering of knowledge from past lives forgotten at birth. (Honderich) This is what Hindus call the “Atman,” or the capital ‘S’ Self. There is the self who wears a certain brand of clothes, enjoys certain movies, and who is self-conscious about his acne, and there is the all-Self that is infinite and eternal. The solitary man is not only the solitary man, he is all things.
None of this is to say that the individual has no meaning. Of course, to the individual, the world around him or her is far more real than what may or may not be at the center of metaphysical reality. Both layers are important for a complete picture of what is, for what would the point of understanding truth be were it not to bring it back and shape the world? When the individual experiences totality, he can see that he and humanity has created unneeded false boundaries and divisions, compartments and categories. If those barriers are swept away in the mind, the individual man becomes that harmonious allness at the core of all being, and can bring that unified sense of self, peace and love back into the world to share with all around him. As man and woman remember who they are, they realize they have access to all knowledge and their lives will be irreversibly altered. As the remarkably discerning Sufi poet, Rumi wrote, “Everything in the universe is inside you, ask all from yourself.”
Since the conception of the scientific method, humanity has had to deconstruct and reconstruct its assumptions about reality countless times. It should come as no surprise by now that its assumed perceptions of reality may once again be deeply flawed and incomplete, and that like with the earth-shattering discoveries of evolution and the Big Bang, the answer at the bottom of everything is not compartmentalization and division, but interconnectedness and unity. If these scientific postulations and predictions end up turning up as fact, they and their implications should not be feared, for they do not take this moment away from humankind, but instead hand to it all eternity.
How is it that anyone could question time? Clearly it exists, for we are moving forward within it as we speak. However, as anyone waiting in line at the DMV or at an amusement park knows, there is not only one way to experience time. Do perceptual differences have any basis in physical reality? It has been discovered that different animal species experience time differently, and that in fact even individual people may experience time differently, not simply because of mental interpretations, but because of their physical bodies. Species that have less mass and faster metabolisms experience time more slowly. Dogs, for example, “Can take in visual information at least 25 percent faster than humans—just enough to make a television show look like a series of flickering images” (Reas). This explains why it can be so difficult to actually swat that annoying fly. Some have also postulated that slowing metabolism is also why time seems to speed up as we age.
This is not the only example of how time changes due to variations in the physical realm. When the first part of Einstein’s theory of relativity exploded onto the physics scene in 1905, it completely blew up the way we thought about both time and space. Einstein’s teacher, Hermann Minkowski, had already proposed the idea that space and time were an inseparable continuum, an essential idea that helped Einstein build his theory of relativity (Brittanica). A second essential component of the theory of relativity (specifically, the theory of special relativity) regarding time is time dilation. In ascertaining that the speed of light is constant, Einstein discovered that time and space must be relative and plastic. Due to this fact, a clock that is in motion relative to an observer will tick more slowly than a clock that is in stasis near the observer.
Gravity also dilates time. If there is a stronger gravitational field acting on a clock than its observers, it will also run more slowly than, say, a wristwatch on the observer’s wrist. Due to this fact, time passes more slowly at the center of the earth, and faster at higher elevations. This fact has been tested with atomic clocks. An atomic clock run by a single “ticking” aluminum ion was shot into space, while another identical clock was kept on earth. “Due to their different elevations above the surface of the Earth, the higher clock—experiencing a smaller gravitational force—runs faster.” (Ost) In his latest book, theoretical physicist who helped author the theory of loop quantum gravity (a hypothesis that could potentially bridge the current gap between the theory of relativity and quantum physics) writes that,
If things fall, it is due to this slowing down of time. Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. They float. Here on the surface of our planet, on the other hand, the movement of things inclines naturally towards where time passes more slowly, as when we run down the beach into the sea and the resistance of the water on our legs makes us fall headfirst into the waves. Things fall downwards because, down there, time is slowed by the Earth.
Though it may not be possible in practice, Einstein’s theory opens the possibility of time travel into the future. In one thought experiment called the twin paradox, a twin is blasted into space in a high-speed rocket. When this astronaut returns to earth, she will find that her twin has aged more than she has, for, “If one were to leave Earth in a spacecraft travelling at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed, turn around and come back, only a few years might have passed on board but many years could have gone by on Earth” (“Is Time Travel Possible?”). Unfortunately, if we were able to time travel this way, time travel into the past would not be possible by the same means. One would have to move faster than the speed of light to do so, which Einstein, of course exhibited to be an impossibility. However, wormholes, as many a science fiction writer has realized, may open the possibility of time travel even into the past. Wormholes are a sort of tunnel that links two spots in spacetime, and though we are unsure if they exist, they have been mathematically predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity.
More recently, mathematician Ben Tippett of the University of British Columbia has computed another time travel possibility. Tippett’s reminds us that, though we like to treat time and space as different dimensional entities, they are in fact on in the same (“Researcher Uses Math”). As a result, one should be able to travel through time, just as one travels through space. In looking out at the night sky, we know that space time is finite, for if it were infinite, the sky would be full of the light of countless stars. In addition, because of the rate at which light travels, we actually see the afterglow of the big bang billions of lightyears away through super powerful microwave telescopes. In our searches, “we'd expect those distant views to reveal clouds of gas which have not yet turned into stars and galaxies,” and this is exactly what we have found. (Aderin-Pocock) Because the universe is both provenly finite and curved, it eventually curves back in on itself. As a result, Tippet has come up with a model of a time machine that, “Uses the curved space-time—to bend time into a circle for the passengers, not in a straight line. That circle takes us back in time.” (Aderin-Pocock) Of course all of this is theoretical, but the implications are profound, regardless. The potentiality of time travel gives us an easy way to see just how malleable and illusive time is. Wildly enough, these are just a few of many theoretical possibilities of time travel that bend our perspectives of time.
Perhaps even more mind-boggling than the elasticity of time is the potential elasticity of space. Because space and time are a continuum, the concept of space may also lose meaning. Space does not behave as true emptiness would. Gravitational waves ripple it, gravity curves it, it can expand by means of dark energy, and quantum particles burst into and back out of existence within it. Some physicists are now questioning the existence of space, period (Flatow, et al.). This is partly due to experiments on quantum particles. Certain behaviors of quantum particles have baffled physicists for decades. In the case of quantum entanglement (what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance), the phenomena has been tested time and time again under more and more definitive circumstances, and yet the results continue to be replicated and have yet to yield answers. Quantum entanglement is the circumstance in which two seemingly separate particles, with a 100% concurrence rate, behave in the exact same way at the exact same time. There is no communication between the two particles, such as radio or sound waves. This can happen across billions of lightyears of space; therefore it is impossible for them to be communicating, for the signal would have to move faster than the speed of light. As a result, many physicists are having to do what formerly seemed to be unimaginable: to question whether there is any true distance between the two particles, thereby treating spacetime as an illusion (Flatow, et al.).
The same is seen in regards to time when looking at quantum level particles. Every theory that has thus far been proposed to reconcile the gravity of relativity and quantum mechanics, such as string theory and loop quantum gravity, has had to disregard time’s existence completely. On a quantum level, the concept of time does not make sense. Carlo Rovelli wrote, “If I observe the microscopic state of things,” writes Rovelli, “then the difference between past and future vanishes . . . in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’” (Higgins). One particularly intriguing hypothesis that has come out of this conflict is the holographic principle of string theory. In another attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity, physicists Gerard 't Hooft, Leonard Susskind, and Charles Thorn proposed the idea that our 4-dimensional universe, could in fact be a holographic projection of 2-dimensional information encoded on a 2-dimensional event horizon, like that of a black hole. This theory would not only help make the leap from quantum mechanics to the theory of relativity, but would also solve the black hole information paradox (how is information stored when it falls into a black hole?). (Susskind) Though this has by no means been proven, physicists in 2017 found evidence that supported this theory in studying the microwaves left over from the early universe, and to a less complex degree have been able to use this 2-dimensional model to recreate 3-dimensional data from our universe. (Afshordi, et al.)
If time is dependent on a person’s brain, body and metabolic processes, if it depends his or her particular coordinate in supposed space, on the gravity acting on him or her, on the velocity at which he or she is moving, and on the trajectory at which he or she is moving; if it is entirely elastic, the question should be asked again: what is time? Is time more “correct” for this person, or at this supposed point in space? Does it really even exist at all? If each coordinate in space has its own time, the entire concept of time becomes meaningless. Again, Carlo Rovelli: “We might just as well ask what is most real – the value of sterling in dollars or the value of dollars in sterling. There are two times that change relative to each other. Neither is truer than the other. But there are not just two times. Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. The single quantity “time” melts into a spiderweb of times” (Rovelli).
In contemplating questions about the universe and ultimate reality, the philosopher does not need to ask the unanswerable cliché, “What is the meaning of life?” but perhaps instead, “What is at the marrow of life? What is at the core of all being? And what does this mean to me as an individual?” If time and space are, on some level, illusory, what does that mean for the everyday man or woman? The first question that comes to the mind of many in facing the potentiality of this seemingly fixed reality is, can freedom exist within a universe that always has been, and always will be? A reality in which everything is already written? Does this not make us “cogs in a machine?” It would be easy to believe this to be so, and it is of course not entirely false. Humanity should, indeed, be humbled by the discoveries cosmologists, astrophysicists and biologists have made. The individual should understand her utter finitude, that she is as a miniscule speck on this “mote of dust” we call earth (Sagan). She should understand her imperfections and limitations as a human being who is limited by a physical body. However, human beings have an incredible drive to understand these innerworkings, including those of their own bodies and minds, and to discover how those things emerge from and are connected into the universe at large. As these seekers make these discoveries, humanity is able to see a broader picture and understand that its actions have consequences, and what those consequences are.
Whether or not all the universe is determined start to finish, the individual cannot, and typically does not act as though his or her life is written for him or her, and this is because even contemplating these two modes of living changes the behavior of the individual. If the individual behaves as though all her life is determined and that she has no choice regarding her actions, she would likely relinquish responsibility for her actions and behave more as an animal or a machine than as a human being, for she would have given up all hope and aspiration. Simply believing that there is control to be had gives a person some amount of control, for it pushes her to consider what could be instead of what must be. Again, this is the beauty of the human species: its imagination and love to explore.
Free will is the ability to peer into the past and change behavior, or to imagine the future and consider what could be, and then to use those thoughts to take action, which inevitably shapes the future. Whether or not these abilities arose out of deterministic mechanisms matters not, for even if everything is determined, determinism is a two-way street. The individual and humanity at large shape the world around them, even as it shapes them. Reading this right here, right now, may change a reader’s behavior, and that is meaningful. Without the ability to reflect and alter our behavior based on newfound information, the individual and society at large would be unable to change or grow. Perhaps the story of humankind is already written, but human beings certainly helped write it.
If the universe is paradoxically both singular and in motion, then every event within it is occurring in exactly the same way over and over again. Alternatively, many physicists, including Stephen Hawking, are proponents of the many worlds theory, arguing that there may be many very similar realities in which each reality is divided into new universes with each decision someone makes. In either case, what the individual does with her time on earth has monumental consequences for her and the rest of the world. In consideration of this fact, Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out in Thus Spake Zarathustra that this concept of “Eternal Return” bestows great responsibility on the individual and society at large. The individual should think long and hard before making any decision, because it may occur exactly that way, or very close to exactly that way, forever. To live a life in deception and ignorance would inevitably create unneeded conflict, harming others and the planet, and that conflict and harm may resound for eternity. All of this can be avoided, but the only keys to doing so are knowledge, understanding and awareness.
The question now becomes, how can the individual gain the knowledge, understanding and awareness she needs to shape future outcomes that always have been and always will be, but that she cannot yet see herself? Humankind has already taken the first steps out of Plato’s cave. Yes, perhaps it can only see the shadows on the wall (or the projections of quantum particles) because of its biological limitations, but it is still able to seek, find and understand truth. As in all of the above examples, scientists do this every day by studying and analyzing the physical world to try to grasp the fundamental realities of nature; to test our perceptions and see which deceive us. Artists and writers do this as well, by continually deconstructing reality and asking society to reassess its perceptions, assumptions and prejudices.
One such writer is Ralph Waldo Emerson. A particularly clairevoyant man, he speaks of timelessness throughout several of his greatest essays. In “Self-Reliance” he declares that, “Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming . . .(Man) cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time” (Lauter 1755). In his essay “Nature,” he explains what it can mean to see eternity; to live above time: “What is matter? Whence is it? and Whereto? . . . Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite” (Lauter 1728-1729).
The poet Walt Whitman, a disciple and friend of Emerson, takes this line of thinking further. His entire poem “Song of Myself” which begins, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself/And what I assume you shall assume/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” seems an ode to the interconnectedness of all things. In this poem and throughout the rest of Leaves of Grass, he breaks down the false boundaries a person places between “you” and “me,” and tears at the false divisions humanity places between the individual and the collective, man and beast, a leaf of grass and the stars. He tells us that time and space are no thing. A particularly moving passage reads:
My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,
All below duly travel’d, and still I mount and mount.
Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.
Long I was hugg’d close—long and long.
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.
All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul. (Lauter 3048)
In another example, author John Neihardt recorded the experiences of the Sioux spiritual leader Black Elk during the times of the Custer battle, the ghost dance, and the massacre at Wounded Knee in the Dakotas. Black Elk was recognized as a holy man even as a child because of his extraordinary visions. In his first, he hears a voice say that he would be taken to, “Stand upon the center of the earth,” and there atop the highest mountain, he saw “the whole hoop of the world.” He saw that, “The sacred hoop of (his) people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father” (Neihardt 42). In The Power of Myth, mythologist Joseph Campbell interprets the passage thus: “‘The central mountain is everywhere. . . ’ The center of the world is the axis mundi, the central point, the pole around which all revolves. The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you're doing in the temporal experience- this is the mythological experience” (Campbell).
In another spiritual work, this time borrowing from tenets of Eastern philosophy, Hermann Hesse parallels the life of a man named Siddhartha with that of the life of the Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama. In this novel, Siddhartha, the character Siddhartha likens Nirvana, an experience outside of time and space, to a river in which, “All the love, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil,” blended into a single voice. He says that in listening to the river, he learned that, “Time is not real . . . And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception.”
The man who desires to open his perspective and change his perceptions would do himself good in reading such literature, in learning more about disparate subjects such as physics and biology, and to step into an art museum and see the many colors and definitions of truth and beauty. However, as the above mentioned writers have demonstrated through example, learning secondhand is not the only way to touch ultimate reality, and scientists and artists are not the only individuals who have access to great truth. What drives those individuals to create, wonder, question, and discover is an intrinsic part of all humanity. If past and future are all existent here and now, that realm of existence is open to every human being here and now. Every individual has access to totality, because each individual is a fragment of totality. These insights can be gained not only through studying the physical world, but also through solitary contemplation and meditation. Men and women have come in contact with the timeless, spaceless reality that is at the core of all existence in this way since they have known to ask why they exist at all. Some call it “God,” some, Nirvana, some Brahman, some Allah, some The Tao, some the sublime, some love, among a million other inadequate names. As English professor John Schwiebert of Weber State once said, “Language is a clumsy means of articulating the ineffable.”
If words are poor means of describing the infinite and eternal, perhaps it is best to instead contemplate silence, for silence is what lay at the bottom of all things. Meditation can be a particularly effective tool with which to do this. Consciousness, like all time and space, is entirely relative. It is a result of connections built up in the brain that create an integrated picture of reality, and a person builds new connections to learn something new. Often however, false assumptions and perceptions are created due to the imperfection and finite nature of man. In meditation, the meditator breathes room into those connections and illusions become apparent and break down.
As many meditators have described, including the Buddha himself, time and space are a couple of the fictions that can be torn away. A man who does not know himself looks outside of himself for completion, believing that the latest fashion trend, a new girlfriend, a pay raise, a degree, the perfect job, the perfect house, or any other number of things will make him feel whole. In breaking down relationships to things “outside” the self, in tearing away at desire, a person can see that those relationships are what create his perception of reality. When “outside” relationships are torn away, the house he has built for his ego falls apart and he can see that what is most real and true is at the center of all things, for he has glimpsed the absolute.
In the absolute, time and space are meaningless. Outside of time and space, there is no distinction between one individual and the next, or even between one generation and the next. The Big Bang and the end of the universe are all happening at once. Outside the limited point of view of the individual, all of those things are happening right here, right now, and to meditate can mean coming out of the self and touching that reality. To turn inward is to see that there is no thing that can complete him, for he is already complete. To turn inward is to see that all that has been is hidden away in one’s DNA, what Plato termed “anamnesis,” a remembering of knowledge from past lives forgotten at birth. (Honderich) This is what Hindus call the “Atman,” or the capital ‘S’ Self. There is the self who wears a certain brand of clothes, enjoys certain movies, and who is self-conscious about his acne, and there is the all-Self that is infinite and eternal. The solitary man is not only the solitary man, he is all things.
None of this is to say that the individual has no meaning. Of course, to the individual, the world around him or her is far more real than what may or may not be at the center of metaphysical reality. Both layers are important for a complete picture of what is, for what would the point of understanding truth be were it not to bring it back and shape the world? When the individual experiences totality, he can see that he and humanity has created unneeded false boundaries and divisions, compartments and categories. If those barriers are swept away in the mind, the individual man becomes that harmonious allness at the core of all being, and can bring that unified sense of self, peace and love back into the world to share with all around him. As man and woman remember who they are, they realize they have access to all knowledge and their lives will be irreversibly altered. As the remarkably discerning Sufi poet, Rumi wrote, “Everything in the universe is inside you, ask all from yourself.”
Since the conception of the scientific method, humanity has had to deconstruct and reconstruct its assumptions about reality countless times. It should come as no surprise by now that its assumed perceptions of reality may once again be deeply flawed and incomplete, and that like with the earth-shattering discoveries of evolution and the Big Bang, the answer at the bottom of everything is not compartmentalization and division, but interconnectedness and unity. If these scientific postulations and predictions end up turning up as fact, they and their implications should not be feared, for they do not take this moment away from humankind, but instead hand to it all eternity.
Citations
Aderin-Pocock, Maggie. “How Do We Know the Big Bang Actually Happened?” BBC IWonder, BBC, www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zgr7fg8.
Afshordi, Niayesh, et al. “From Planck Data to Planck Era: Observational Tests of Holographic Cosmology.” Physical Review Letters, vol. 118, no. 4, 2017, doi:10.1103/physrevlett.118.041301.
Ashby, Neil. “Relativity In The Global Positioning System.” Living Reviews in Relativity, no. 6, 28 Jan. 2003, pp. 257–289., doi:10.1142/9789812700988_0010.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Hermann Minkowski.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 18 Oct. 2017, www.britannica.com/biography/Hermann-Minkowski.
Campbell, Joseph, et al. The Power of Myth. Turtleback Books, 2012.
Demers, Sarah, et al. “The Biggest Questions In Physics.” Science Friday, Public Radio International, 22 Dec. 2017, www.sciencefriday.com/segments/physics-on-the-edge/.
Elk, Black, and John G. Neihardt. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Flatow, Ira, et al. “In the Quantum World, Physics Gets Philosophical.” Science Friday, Public Radio International, 29 Apr. 2016, www.sciencefriday.com/segments/in-the-quantum-world-physics-gets-philosophical/.
Hesse, Hermann, and Stanley Appelbaum. Siddhartha. Dover Publications, 1999.
Higgins, Charlotte. “'There Is No Such Thing as Past or Future': Physicist Carlo Rovelli on Changing How We Think about Time.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 Apr. 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/14/carlo-rovelli-exploding-commonsense-notions-order-of-time-interview.
Honderich, Ted. The Oxford Guide to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2005.
“Is Time Travel Possible?” Is Time Travel Possible?| Explore, IOP Publishing, www.physics.org/article-questions.asp?id=131.
Lauter, Paul. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 6th ed., B, Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009.
Ost, Laura. “NIST Pair of Aluminum Atomic Clocks Reveal Einstein's Relativity at a Personal Scale.” NIST, U.S. Department of Commerce, 8 Jan. 2018, www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2010/09/nist-pair-aluminum-atomic-clocks-reveal-einsteins-relativity-personal-scale.
Reas, Emilie. “Small Animals Live in a Slow-Motion World.” Scientific American, Nature Publishing Group, 1 July 2014, www.scientificamerican.com/article/small-animals-live-in-a-slow-motion-world/.
“Researcher Uses Math to Investigate Possibility of Time Travel.” Phys.org - News and Articles on Science and Technology, Phys.org, 27 Apr. 2017, phys.org/news/2017-04-math-possibility.html.
Rovelli, Carlo. “'Time Is Elastic': an Extract from Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 Apr. 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/14/elastic-concept-order-of-time-carlo-rovelli.
Sagan, Carl. Cosmos: Carl Sagan. Ballantine Books, 1985.
Susskind, Leonard. The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. Back Bay Books, 2009.
Afshordi, Niayesh, et al. “From Planck Data to Planck Era: Observational Tests of Holographic Cosmology.” Physical Review Letters, vol. 118, no. 4, 2017, doi:10.1103/physrevlett.118.041301.
Ashby, Neil. “Relativity In The Global Positioning System.” Living Reviews in Relativity, no. 6, 28 Jan. 2003, pp. 257–289., doi:10.1142/9789812700988_0010.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Hermann Minkowski.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 18 Oct. 2017, www.britannica.com/biography/Hermann-Minkowski.
Campbell, Joseph, et al. The Power of Myth. Turtleback Books, 2012.
Demers, Sarah, et al. “The Biggest Questions In Physics.” Science Friday, Public Radio International, 22 Dec. 2017, www.sciencefriday.com/segments/physics-on-the-edge/.
Elk, Black, and John G. Neihardt. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Flatow, Ira, et al. “In the Quantum World, Physics Gets Philosophical.” Science Friday, Public Radio International, 29 Apr. 2016, www.sciencefriday.com/segments/in-the-quantum-world-physics-gets-philosophical/.
Hesse, Hermann, and Stanley Appelbaum. Siddhartha. Dover Publications, 1999.
Higgins, Charlotte. “'There Is No Such Thing as Past or Future': Physicist Carlo Rovelli on Changing How We Think about Time.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 Apr. 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/14/carlo-rovelli-exploding-commonsense-notions-order-of-time-interview.
Honderich, Ted. The Oxford Guide to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2005.
“Is Time Travel Possible?” Is Time Travel Possible?| Explore, IOP Publishing, www.physics.org/article-questions.asp?id=131.
Lauter, Paul. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 6th ed., B, Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009.
Ost, Laura. “NIST Pair of Aluminum Atomic Clocks Reveal Einstein's Relativity at a Personal Scale.” NIST, U.S. Department of Commerce, 8 Jan. 2018, www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2010/09/nist-pair-aluminum-atomic-clocks-reveal-einsteins-relativity-personal-scale.
Reas, Emilie. “Small Animals Live in a Slow-Motion World.” Scientific American, Nature Publishing Group, 1 July 2014, www.scientificamerican.com/article/small-animals-live-in-a-slow-motion-world/.
“Researcher Uses Math to Investigate Possibility of Time Travel.” Phys.org - News and Articles on Science and Technology, Phys.org, 27 Apr. 2017, phys.org/news/2017-04-math-possibility.html.
Rovelli, Carlo. “'Time Is Elastic': an Extract from Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 Apr. 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/14/elastic-concept-order-of-time-carlo-rovelli.
Sagan, Carl. Cosmos: Carl Sagan. Ballantine Books, 1985.
Susskind, Leonard. The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. Back Bay Books, 2009.
Meditation, Brain Structure & Cognition
Meditation can take many forms, but common themes include a reduction of outside stimuli alongside a focus on ones breathing, thoughts, and bodily sensation in attempt to attain a state of emotional equanimity and increased awareness. Over the last few decades, meditation and its effects on the physical brain and cognition have become a matter of increasing interest to psychologists in both eastern and western societies due to its apparent psychological and cognitive benefits. As a result, several of these supposed neurological and psychological benefits have been corroborated by scientific analysis, particularly those involving the cerebral cortex and limbic system.
The cerebral cortex is the largest part of the mammalian brain, and is vital for perception, cognition, attention, memory, abstract thinking, language and planning. It is composed of layers of grey matter, which is mainly made up of neurons. Amazingly, scientists have measured significant variations in the cortical thickness of meditators. These results have been repeatedly replicated, and through varying techniques, such as DTI, MP-RAGE, FMRIB (all MRI techniques), EEG, and psychological surveys. Because of the diversity of data collection techniques and the replicability of the data, these results have stood up to the test of time, and continue to be investigated further.
In Kang, et. al (2012), and Taren (2013), it was found that long-term meditation practitioners had significantly greater cortical thickness in the prefrontal cortex than did control groups. The prefrontal cortex is vital for working memory and higher functions such as decision making, abstract thinking, regulation of impulsive behavior, planning, and considering past and future events. Conversely, significantly thinner cortical thickness was found in the limbic areas of meditators compared to the control groups; particularly the parts of the limbic system that are involved with fear and aggression, such as the amygdala and caudate sections. In addition, communications between the prefrontal cortex and limbic areas appeared to be weakened.
Surprisingly, the benefits attributed to meditation have been seen even in short-term meditators. Holzel, et. al. (2011) studied participants who had never meditated. Sixteen such subjects were studied for eight weeks after starting a mindfulness meditation course. Participants meditated for an average of 27 minutes a day, and MRI data was collected and analyzed. Researchers found that the participants in the program had increased gray matter volume in the left hippocampus, which plays an important role in learning, cognition, memory and emotional regulation, and also in the temporo parietal junction, which is associated with perspective taking and empathy. At the same time, the amygdala’s density decreased.
These structural changes likely explain the behavioral and mental health differences in meditators verses non-meditators. The brain is somewhat analogous to a muscle: the more an area is used, the more connections are made, and the stronger and more active it becomes. Having a thicker prefrontal cortex and thinner limbic area seems to give a person more control at the wheel of thought and emotion. It allows one to think more logically and calmly, consider more options, curb impulses, process information efficiently, and make rational life decisions. All of these progressions would be beneficial to anyone, but especially to those with mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, OCD, and PTSD, among others. These disorders involve cyclical and irrational thinking that must be headed off in order to make any headway in increasing the wellbeing and happiness of the person experiencing them.
In Lazara, et al. (2005), gray matter was found to be denser in the frontal cortex, the insula, and the auditory and sensory cortex in long-term meditators. The insula has been associated with interpersonal functioning, compassion, and self-awareness. By increasing compassion, meditators can extend these benefits into relationships with others and themselves, which can in turn create an exponential increase in happiness and wellbeing. Increasing density in the auditory and sensory cortexes is associated with mindful presence. These cortexes integrate sensory information, thereby allowing a person to live in the present moment, and to choose where to place their attention. This can be especially helpful to people with disorders that give a person stress over past events or future potentialities, such as PTSD or anxiety disorders, and people with attention deficits caused by disorders such as anxiety and ADHD.
Another study supports these findings. Cahn, et. al. (2012) gathered EEG data during the meditation of 16 Vipassana meditators who had meditated 30+ minutes a day for at least one year. Vipassana meditation is a specific kind of meditation that asks the meditator to place all focus on their natural breathing. Various auditory stimuli were sounded during meditation. Meditators were asked to pay no attention to these sounds during the sessions of meditation. The meditators were found to have less brain activity when sounds were played than the brains of non-meditators, showing an enlarged ability of meditators to direct their attention as wished.
These studies, among many others, provide hard evidence for the substantial advantages of meditating. Meditation should be incorporated into the therapy practices of any therapist who wishes their patients to reap the benefits of improved mental health and cognitive function, and by anyone else who wishes to increase well-being.
The cerebral cortex is the largest part of the mammalian brain, and is vital for perception, cognition, attention, memory, abstract thinking, language and planning. It is composed of layers of grey matter, which is mainly made up of neurons. Amazingly, scientists have measured significant variations in the cortical thickness of meditators. These results have been repeatedly replicated, and through varying techniques, such as DTI, MP-RAGE, FMRIB (all MRI techniques), EEG, and psychological surveys. Because of the diversity of data collection techniques and the replicability of the data, these results have stood up to the test of time, and continue to be investigated further.
In Kang, et. al (2012), and Taren (2013), it was found that long-term meditation practitioners had significantly greater cortical thickness in the prefrontal cortex than did control groups. The prefrontal cortex is vital for working memory and higher functions such as decision making, abstract thinking, regulation of impulsive behavior, planning, and considering past and future events. Conversely, significantly thinner cortical thickness was found in the limbic areas of meditators compared to the control groups; particularly the parts of the limbic system that are involved with fear and aggression, such as the amygdala and caudate sections. In addition, communications between the prefrontal cortex and limbic areas appeared to be weakened.
Surprisingly, the benefits attributed to meditation have been seen even in short-term meditators. Holzel, et. al. (2011) studied participants who had never meditated. Sixteen such subjects were studied for eight weeks after starting a mindfulness meditation course. Participants meditated for an average of 27 minutes a day, and MRI data was collected and analyzed. Researchers found that the participants in the program had increased gray matter volume in the left hippocampus, which plays an important role in learning, cognition, memory and emotional regulation, and also in the temporo parietal junction, which is associated with perspective taking and empathy. At the same time, the amygdala’s density decreased.
These structural changes likely explain the behavioral and mental health differences in meditators verses non-meditators. The brain is somewhat analogous to a muscle: the more an area is used, the more connections are made, and the stronger and more active it becomes. Having a thicker prefrontal cortex and thinner limbic area seems to give a person more control at the wheel of thought and emotion. It allows one to think more logically and calmly, consider more options, curb impulses, process information efficiently, and make rational life decisions. All of these progressions would be beneficial to anyone, but especially to those with mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, OCD, and PTSD, among others. These disorders involve cyclical and irrational thinking that must be headed off in order to make any headway in increasing the wellbeing and happiness of the person experiencing them.
In Lazara, et al. (2005), gray matter was found to be denser in the frontal cortex, the insula, and the auditory and sensory cortex in long-term meditators. The insula has been associated with interpersonal functioning, compassion, and self-awareness. By increasing compassion, meditators can extend these benefits into relationships with others and themselves, which can in turn create an exponential increase in happiness and wellbeing. Increasing density in the auditory and sensory cortexes is associated with mindful presence. These cortexes integrate sensory information, thereby allowing a person to live in the present moment, and to choose where to place their attention. This can be especially helpful to people with disorders that give a person stress over past events or future potentialities, such as PTSD or anxiety disorders, and people with attention deficits caused by disorders such as anxiety and ADHD.
Another study supports these findings. Cahn, et. al. (2012) gathered EEG data during the meditation of 16 Vipassana meditators who had meditated 30+ minutes a day for at least one year. Vipassana meditation is a specific kind of meditation that asks the meditator to place all focus on their natural breathing. Various auditory stimuli were sounded during meditation. Meditators were asked to pay no attention to these sounds during the sessions of meditation. The meditators were found to have less brain activity when sounds were played than the brains of non-meditators, showing an enlarged ability of meditators to direct their attention as wished.
These studies, among many others, provide hard evidence for the substantial advantages of meditating. Meditation should be incorporated into the therapy practices of any therapist who wishes their patients to reap the benefits of improved mental health and cognitive function, and by anyone else who wishes to increase well-being.
Citations
Cahn BR, Delorme A, Polich J. Event-related delta, theta, alpha and gamma correlates to auditory oddball processing during Vipassana meditation. Social Cognitive and Affective
Neuroscience. 2013;8(1):100-111. doi:10.1093/scan/nss060.
Hölzel, Britta K. et al. “Mindfulness Practice Leads to Increases in Regional Brain Gray Matter Density.” Psychiatry research 191.1 (2011): 36–43. PMC. Web. 14 Apr. 2018.
Kang, D.-H., Jo, H. J., Jung, W. H., Kim, S. H., Jung, Y.-H., Choi, C.-H., Kwon, J. S. (2013). The effect of meditation on brain structure: cortical thickness mapping and diffusion tensor imaging.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(1), 27–33. http://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss056.
Lazar, S. W., Kerr, C. E., Wasserman, R. H., Gray, J. R., Greve, D. N., Treadway, M. T., Fischl, B. (2005). Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical
thickness. Neuroreport, 16(17), 1893–1897.
Taren, A. A., Creswell, J. D., & Gianaros, P. J. (2013). Dispositional Mindfulness Co- Varies with Smaller Amygdala and Caudate Volumes in Community Adults. PLoS ONE, 8(5), e64574.
http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064574.
Neuroscience. 2013;8(1):100-111. doi:10.1093/scan/nss060.
Hölzel, Britta K. et al. “Mindfulness Practice Leads to Increases in Regional Brain Gray Matter Density.” Psychiatry research 191.1 (2011): 36–43. PMC. Web. 14 Apr. 2018.
Kang, D.-H., Jo, H. J., Jung, W. H., Kim, S. H., Jung, Y.-H., Choi, C.-H., Kwon, J. S. (2013). The effect of meditation on brain structure: cortical thickness mapping and diffusion tensor imaging.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(1), 27–33. http://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss056.
Lazar, S. W., Kerr, C. E., Wasserman, R. H., Gray, J. R., Greve, D. N., Treadway, M. T., Fischl, B. (2005). Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical
thickness. Neuroreport, 16(17), 1893–1897.
Taren, A. A., Creswell, J. D., & Gianaros, P. J. (2013). Dispositional Mindfulness Co- Varies with Smaller Amygdala and Caudate Volumes in Community Adults. PLoS ONE, 8(5), e64574.
http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064574.
Schizophrenia and its Modern Treatments
Schizophrenia is one of the most difficult disorders to live with, and to treat. Due large gaps in our knowledge in regards to its foundations, people with schizophrenia are often written off as lost causes. Drugs are of little help to schizophrenic’s cognitive and social improvements, only masking symptoms while simultaneously bestowing distressing side effects on the patient. Sadly, many with the disorder end up with their careers and interpersonal relationships dwindling and dying as they rotate in and out of hospitals and prisons, and eventually end up on the streets. Fortunately, the scientific community has been gradually discovering new, effective treatments that can help to break this cycle since Aaron Beck discovered the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy for schizophrenics in 1952. Though we have yet to find a “cure” for schizophrenia, treatments such as group therapy, family therapy, culturally informed therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy have been shown to help schizophrenics manage their illness, rebuild their relationships, and even get back in touch with or regain some of their cognitive abilities.
The symptoms of schizophrenia are more than difficult for a patient and patient’s family to live with. The positive symptoms (symptoms that are obvious and visible) include hallucinations, delusions, confused thoughts and speech, trouble concentrating, and abnormal motor movements. Negative symptoms, on the other hand, are less concrete and less detectible because they are absences of behavior. These include lack of emotion, withdrawal, being unable to follow through with goals, discontinuation of self-care, and cognitive problems, such as deficits in memory, attention and organization of thought. (Goldberg, 2015) These negative symptoms can be especially difficult to treat due to their abstraction and due to lack of detection.
Ahmed and Boisvert (2003) took a particularly social approach to therapy for schizophrenic patients in the form of MICST, or Multimodal Integrative Cognitive Stimulating Group Therapy. This model assumes that people with schizophrenia “have isolated intact areas of cognitive and memory functioning that can be stimulated and accessed via ‘cues’ that clients provide through spontaneous ‘utterances.’” (Ahmed & Boisvert, 2003, p. 645) The therapists latch onto these intact memories and cognitive processes and attempt to get the patient to expound upon them. This helps the patient realize that they still have functioning cognitive abilities that they might get in touch with and build upon.
The therapy session begins with a mindfulness and breathing exercise that sometimes includes visual imagery. Next, the group engages in a discussion exercise to get the patients engaged and conjuring up memories that are still intact. They first ask about the past week’s events, and then move on to any other remembered information. Often patients surprise themselves with the things they are able to remember. Next, the group moves on to a paper-and-pencil exercise that involves “general knowledge questions, word associations, categorizing objects, or abstracting similarities or differences between words.” These are to enable and assist patients to continue using cognitive skills, such as comprehension, self-reflection, memory, attention and reasoning. This helps prevent further loss of cognitive abilities. Lastly, therapists engage clients in a feedback session and give both corrective and positive feedback.
It can be difficult for a person with schizophrenia to stay focused and to keep conversation relevant and based in reality. When this happens in the MICST process, the therapist uses redirection techniques to get the patient to talk about events based in reality. For example, the therapist might draw a Venn diagram representing person A (the patient) and person B’s (one of their counterparts or the therapist) experiences, and then explain that the person’s “unique experiences” don’t fall into the middle. Each person needs to talk about topics from their “overlapping areas of understanding.” (Ahmed & Boisvert, 2003, p. 645) MICST sessions last about 45-60 minutes each.
At the end of the study, the researchers measured the effectiveness of the MICST technique through patient feedback questionnaires, therapist observation, and MICST and Non-MICST group comparison data. Patients that participated in MICST said that it “improved their concentration, taught them relaxation skills, increase their knowledge by hearing about people, places and things, and improved their social interaction.” (Ahmed & Boisvert, 2003, p. 647) Therapists found marked improvements in their clients. The group comparison compared the MICST group to two other groups and found that MICST group’s at risk ratings were significantly lower than the control groups, and that in fact the control group’s at risk ratings had substantially increased.
Divergently, the researchers Weisman de Mamani, et al. took a familial and cultural approach to treating schizophrenia. CIT-S, or Culturally Informed Therapy for Schizophrenia, is composed of 60-75 minute sessions that happen weekly for 15 weeks. 69 patients were involved. Therapists are cross-culturally informed, particularly in regards to religion and spirituality. The therapist’s first goal is to make sure that the family understands that they are a “team working for unified goals.” (Weisman de Mamani, et al., 2014, p. 802) The family is encouraged to discuss their roles in their family, along with the feelings they have with either dealing with schizophrenia themselves or having to care for someone who does. The therapist attempts to downplay differences and highlight things the family members have in common.
Next the family undergoes psychoeducation, in which they learn more about schizophrenias symptoms, causes and what might aggravate symptoms. This gives the family a better idea of what they are dealing with and creates empathy for the member who has the diagnosis. After psychoeducation, the family is asked about their spiritual lives and how they practice spirituality. Handouts are given to direct the discussion and to relate it to the issue at hand. They are encouraged to continue those practices. Those who do not practice or who don’t want to discuss their spirituality or religion are guided through mindfulness meditation and other “existential exercises.” (Weisman de Mamani, et al., 2014, p. 803)
The last two steps in CIT-S are communication training and problem solving, in which the family are taught communication skills and verbally walk through solving problems that have arisen or might arise in the future related to dealing with schizophrenia. All of these techniques combined give patients and their families a personalized session that helps them to better understand one another and better understand how to cope with the trial of schizophrenia. Patients who participated in the CIT-S study had “significantly lower levels of symptom severity” in comparison to the control group who instead participated in a PSY-ED program. (Weisman de Mamani, et al., 2014, p. 807)
Though it is the earliest subtype of therapy found to help patients with schizophrenia, cognitive therapy may still be the most effective for treatment of schizophrenic patients. Over time, cognitive therapy has evolved through fine-tuning. Grant, et al. was one research group that discovered just how well cognitive therapy can work for a patient through a case study. They used CT-R, or Recovery-Oriented Cognitive Therapy to help their patient “develop approaches and strategies for instilling hope and encouraging the person to mobilize his or her remaining strengths and resources in order to gain mastery over the illness; identify, set, pursue, and accomplish goals; and . . . to live a meaningful and satisfying life.” (Grant, et al. 2014, pg. 125)
Mary had been treated for 25 years by her psychiatrist with no improvement. She was unable to complete even the simplest activities of daily living. Despite being medicated, she continued to have auditory and visual hallucinations, including a voice telling her to kill herself or “we will kill you.” Her late mother would also “speak” to her to tell her that she was wasting her life away. (Grant, et al. 2014, pg. 126) Of course, these voices were actually internal and said much about Mary’s state of mind and self-esteem. To make up for these negative feelings, Mary would incessantly call local hospitals, the police department, the FBI, and family members. She was under the delusion that she needed to save the local hospitals. Calling these various people and organizations helped her put the voices to rest because trying to save these hospitals made her feel needed and of value. Prior to CT-R, she would make these phone calls about 15 times a day. Mary’s scores were also low in regards to global functioning, and she had high levels of both positive and negative symptoms.
Mary participated in 70 weekly, 50 minute CT-R sessions over the span of 6 months. She and her therapist worked together to create goals, and then broke those goals down into smaller, concrete goals and steps. For example, Mary wanted to “become happier.” (Grant, et al. 2014, pg. 127) She and the therapist broke this down into goals like “smiling more, participating in additional activities, and making a friend.” (Grant, et al. 2014, pg. 127) These were broken down into even simpler goals, such as getting out of the house to grab a sandwich with her sister, or going to a community center and talking to one person.
Eventually Mary was able to both accomplish one of her biggest goals: to help other people in a meaningful way. She learned how to brew coffee over the course of several weeks, eventually getting to the point where she was able to do it on her own. Mary then delivered the coffee to local offices to help office workers get through their day. This accomplished many things for Mary: she learned that she was able to have success in learning and remembering something new, she got to practice social skills in her interactions with the office workers, and, perhaps most importantly, Mary felt needed and of value. As she engaged in these tasks, Mary’s energy levels rose, her social skills improved, and she had less time to listen to and worry about voices. By the time Mary was done with CT-R her very problematic phone calls deescalated from 15 a day to zero. Near the end, Mary had also made a friend- her first friend in over 20 years.
Sadly, we may still have a long way to go before we get a point at which schizophrenia is consistently and reliably treatable, so that those that carry such a diagnosis are able to lead conventional and entirely self-supporting lives. These new treatments, however, bring new hope for people with this disorder. As we become more efficient at diagnosing schizophrenia at earlier ages, filling in information gaps for patient’s loved ones, and implement treatments that involve loving kindness and compassion instead of drugs alone, more and more people with schizophrenia will be able to hold onto their relationships, take care of themselves, and give back to the communities that helped them.
The symptoms of schizophrenia are more than difficult for a patient and patient’s family to live with. The positive symptoms (symptoms that are obvious and visible) include hallucinations, delusions, confused thoughts and speech, trouble concentrating, and abnormal motor movements. Negative symptoms, on the other hand, are less concrete and less detectible because they are absences of behavior. These include lack of emotion, withdrawal, being unable to follow through with goals, discontinuation of self-care, and cognitive problems, such as deficits in memory, attention and organization of thought. (Goldberg, 2015) These negative symptoms can be especially difficult to treat due to their abstraction and due to lack of detection.
Ahmed and Boisvert (2003) took a particularly social approach to therapy for schizophrenic patients in the form of MICST, or Multimodal Integrative Cognitive Stimulating Group Therapy. This model assumes that people with schizophrenia “have isolated intact areas of cognitive and memory functioning that can be stimulated and accessed via ‘cues’ that clients provide through spontaneous ‘utterances.’” (Ahmed & Boisvert, 2003, p. 645) The therapists latch onto these intact memories and cognitive processes and attempt to get the patient to expound upon them. This helps the patient realize that they still have functioning cognitive abilities that they might get in touch with and build upon.
The therapy session begins with a mindfulness and breathing exercise that sometimes includes visual imagery. Next, the group engages in a discussion exercise to get the patients engaged and conjuring up memories that are still intact. They first ask about the past week’s events, and then move on to any other remembered information. Often patients surprise themselves with the things they are able to remember. Next, the group moves on to a paper-and-pencil exercise that involves “general knowledge questions, word associations, categorizing objects, or abstracting similarities or differences between words.” These are to enable and assist patients to continue using cognitive skills, such as comprehension, self-reflection, memory, attention and reasoning. This helps prevent further loss of cognitive abilities. Lastly, therapists engage clients in a feedback session and give both corrective and positive feedback.
It can be difficult for a person with schizophrenia to stay focused and to keep conversation relevant and based in reality. When this happens in the MICST process, the therapist uses redirection techniques to get the patient to talk about events based in reality. For example, the therapist might draw a Venn diagram representing person A (the patient) and person B’s (one of their counterparts or the therapist) experiences, and then explain that the person’s “unique experiences” don’t fall into the middle. Each person needs to talk about topics from their “overlapping areas of understanding.” (Ahmed & Boisvert, 2003, p. 645) MICST sessions last about 45-60 minutes each.
At the end of the study, the researchers measured the effectiveness of the MICST technique through patient feedback questionnaires, therapist observation, and MICST and Non-MICST group comparison data. Patients that participated in MICST said that it “improved their concentration, taught them relaxation skills, increase their knowledge by hearing about people, places and things, and improved their social interaction.” (Ahmed & Boisvert, 2003, p. 647) Therapists found marked improvements in their clients. The group comparison compared the MICST group to two other groups and found that MICST group’s at risk ratings were significantly lower than the control groups, and that in fact the control group’s at risk ratings had substantially increased.
Divergently, the researchers Weisman de Mamani, et al. took a familial and cultural approach to treating schizophrenia. CIT-S, or Culturally Informed Therapy for Schizophrenia, is composed of 60-75 minute sessions that happen weekly for 15 weeks. 69 patients were involved. Therapists are cross-culturally informed, particularly in regards to religion and spirituality. The therapist’s first goal is to make sure that the family understands that they are a “team working for unified goals.” (Weisman de Mamani, et al., 2014, p. 802) The family is encouraged to discuss their roles in their family, along with the feelings they have with either dealing with schizophrenia themselves or having to care for someone who does. The therapist attempts to downplay differences and highlight things the family members have in common.
Next the family undergoes psychoeducation, in which they learn more about schizophrenias symptoms, causes and what might aggravate symptoms. This gives the family a better idea of what they are dealing with and creates empathy for the member who has the diagnosis. After psychoeducation, the family is asked about their spiritual lives and how they practice spirituality. Handouts are given to direct the discussion and to relate it to the issue at hand. They are encouraged to continue those practices. Those who do not practice or who don’t want to discuss their spirituality or religion are guided through mindfulness meditation and other “existential exercises.” (Weisman de Mamani, et al., 2014, p. 803)
The last two steps in CIT-S are communication training and problem solving, in which the family are taught communication skills and verbally walk through solving problems that have arisen or might arise in the future related to dealing with schizophrenia. All of these techniques combined give patients and their families a personalized session that helps them to better understand one another and better understand how to cope with the trial of schizophrenia. Patients who participated in the CIT-S study had “significantly lower levels of symptom severity” in comparison to the control group who instead participated in a PSY-ED program. (Weisman de Mamani, et al., 2014, p. 807)
Though it is the earliest subtype of therapy found to help patients with schizophrenia, cognitive therapy may still be the most effective for treatment of schizophrenic patients. Over time, cognitive therapy has evolved through fine-tuning. Grant, et al. was one research group that discovered just how well cognitive therapy can work for a patient through a case study. They used CT-R, or Recovery-Oriented Cognitive Therapy to help their patient “develop approaches and strategies for instilling hope and encouraging the person to mobilize his or her remaining strengths and resources in order to gain mastery over the illness; identify, set, pursue, and accomplish goals; and . . . to live a meaningful and satisfying life.” (Grant, et al. 2014, pg. 125)
Mary had been treated for 25 years by her psychiatrist with no improvement. She was unable to complete even the simplest activities of daily living. Despite being medicated, she continued to have auditory and visual hallucinations, including a voice telling her to kill herself or “we will kill you.” Her late mother would also “speak” to her to tell her that she was wasting her life away. (Grant, et al. 2014, pg. 126) Of course, these voices were actually internal and said much about Mary’s state of mind and self-esteem. To make up for these negative feelings, Mary would incessantly call local hospitals, the police department, the FBI, and family members. She was under the delusion that she needed to save the local hospitals. Calling these various people and organizations helped her put the voices to rest because trying to save these hospitals made her feel needed and of value. Prior to CT-R, she would make these phone calls about 15 times a day. Mary’s scores were also low in regards to global functioning, and she had high levels of both positive and negative symptoms.
Mary participated in 70 weekly, 50 minute CT-R sessions over the span of 6 months. She and her therapist worked together to create goals, and then broke those goals down into smaller, concrete goals and steps. For example, Mary wanted to “become happier.” (Grant, et al. 2014, pg. 127) She and the therapist broke this down into goals like “smiling more, participating in additional activities, and making a friend.” (Grant, et al. 2014, pg. 127) These were broken down into even simpler goals, such as getting out of the house to grab a sandwich with her sister, or going to a community center and talking to one person.
Eventually Mary was able to both accomplish one of her biggest goals: to help other people in a meaningful way. She learned how to brew coffee over the course of several weeks, eventually getting to the point where she was able to do it on her own. Mary then delivered the coffee to local offices to help office workers get through their day. This accomplished many things for Mary: she learned that she was able to have success in learning and remembering something new, she got to practice social skills in her interactions with the office workers, and, perhaps most importantly, Mary felt needed and of value. As she engaged in these tasks, Mary’s energy levels rose, her social skills improved, and she had less time to listen to and worry about voices. By the time Mary was done with CT-R her very problematic phone calls deescalated from 15 a day to zero. Near the end, Mary had also made a friend- her first friend in over 20 years.
Sadly, we may still have a long way to go before we get a point at which schizophrenia is consistently and reliably treatable, so that those that carry such a diagnosis are able to lead conventional and entirely self-supporting lives. These new treatments, however, bring new hope for people with this disorder. As we become more efficient at diagnosing schizophrenia at earlier ages, filling in information gaps for patient’s loved ones, and implement treatments that involve loving kindness and compassion instead of drugs alone, more and more people with schizophrenia will be able to hold onto their relationships, take care of themselves, and give back to the communities that helped them.
Citations
Ahmed, M., & Boisvert, C. M. (2003). Multimodal Integrative Cognitive Stimulating Group Therapy: Moving Beyond the Reduction of Psychopathology in Schizophrenia. Professional
Psychology: Research And Practice, 34(6), 644-651. doi:10.1037/0735-7028.34.6.644
Goldberg, J., MD (Ed.). (2015, August 19). What Are the Symptoms of Schizophrenia? Retrieved April 17, 2017, from http://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/guide/schizophrenia-symptoms#2
Grant, P. M., Reisweber, J., Luther, L., Brinen, A. P., & Beck, A. T. (2014). Successfully breaking a 20-year cycle of hospitalizations with recovery-oriented cognitive therapy for schizophrenia.
Psychological Services, 11(2), 125-133. doi:http://dx.doi.org.hal.weber.edu:2200/10.1037/a0033912
Weisman de Mamani, A., Weintraub, M. J., Gurak, K., & Maura, J. (2014). A randomized clinical trial to test the efficacy of a family-focused, culturally informed therapy for schizophrenia.
Journal Of Family Psychology, 28(6), 800-810. doi:10.1037/fam0000021
Psychology: Research And Practice, 34(6), 644-651. doi:10.1037/0735-7028.34.6.644
Goldberg, J., MD (Ed.). (2015, August 19). What Are the Symptoms of Schizophrenia? Retrieved April 17, 2017, from http://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/guide/schizophrenia-symptoms#2
Grant, P. M., Reisweber, J., Luther, L., Brinen, A. P., & Beck, A. T. (2014). Successfully breaking a 20-year cycle of hospitalizations with recovery-oriented cognitive therapy for schizophrenia.
Psychological Services, 11(2), 125-133. doi:http://dx.doi.org.hal.weber.edu:2200/10.1037/a0033912
Weisman de Mamani, A., Weintraub, M. J., Gurak, K., & Maura, J. (2014). A randomized clinical trial to test the efficacy of a family-focused, culturally informed therapy for schizophrenia.
Journal Of Family Psychology, 28(6), 800-810. doi:10.1037/fam0000021