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| Us (Monterey Bay Aquarium), Steve Brown 2022 |
Why do we dread to think of our species as a species? Can it be that we are afraid of what we might find? That human self-love would suffer too much and that the image of God might prove to be a mask? This could only be partly true, for if we could cease to wear the image of a kindly, bearded, interstellar dictator, we might find ourselves true images of his kingdom, our eyes the nebulae, and universes in our cells.
--John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, 1941
Steinbeck was a scientist. Working alongside his best friend biologist Ed Rickets, he studied marine life closely. The two were early pioneers of ecology, observing how organisms worked together in groups within species, and how species worked together within ecosystems, and how ecosystems worked together in the web of life. He believed we are all interconnected, that all of the earth's biology together formed one super-organism, with each individual life on it acting as a sort of specialized cell, much like each cell that makes up our body is also an organism. And just like our individual cells form something greater than the sum of their parts (us), we as living organisms on earth form a super-organism greater than the sum of its parts, which he refers to as one. However, one is even larger than that, containing ultimately everything in the universe.
Because of his ecological view, Steinbeck was deeply mystical, as seen in the quotation at the top of this page. Although he rejected an old man dictator concept of God, it doesn't seem like he rejected a God-force. He seemed to suggest God is the life force behind and in absolutely everything. Creation and God are one, and so every living thing is a unit of the divine.
Steinbeck's interest in biology led him to observe how animals, such as fish, when gathered in groups, seemed to act as a super-organism where the individual animals become part of something greater than themselves. The individual seemed to disappear into the whole of the group and act more as a cell of the group-man than as an autonomous individual.
He observed the same behavior in humans. In Dubious Battle explores both the good and bad that comes from human collective power. Cannery Row studies one small neighborhood of Monterey as a living organism where each individual character functions as one cell for the super-organism, Cannery Row. Although Doc, based on Ed Rickets, plays the role of a specialized cell, similar to what Malcolm Gladwell would later call a " connector" in the Tipping Point, the story is not about Doc; it's literally about Cannery Row. The community as a whole is both the protagonist and antagonist in comic self-vs.-self conflict. Cannery Row is an organism as Steinbeck sets up below:
How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise--the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be a way to write this book--to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.
Perhaps one could think that the above is simply a metaphor for letting the book unfold naturally (and that is clearly part of it) if it were not for the chapter "Cannery Row" that appears prior to Chapter 1, which clearly establishes that Cannery Row is not simply the title and setting of the book. It is the book--the organism Steinbeck lets crawl onto to the knife blade to be studied. Doc, Lee Chong, Mack and the Boys, Dora, the prostitutes, the artist, etc.--together they all make up the living organism called Cannery Row. Individual cells, each with a specialized role, they all function together as one.
Steinbeck viewed man as a species driven by the same biological instinct as everything on the planet. A man in a mob may behave totally differently than that same man outside a mob because he becomes--for better or worse--part of something that collectively is greater than the sum of its parts. This would suggest that Steinbeck didn't really believe in the individual and in free will. If we are but cells in something greater than ourselves playing specialized roles for the good of the group, how are we also individuals with free will? Fish in a school operate as one, not as individuals with free will. Yet Steinbeck made it very clear that above all else he was champion of the dignity of the individual, worded succinctly in East of Eden:
And this I
believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most
valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the
mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight
against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the
individual. This is what I am and what I am about.
Steinbeck believed it is precisely through our individuality and our personal choice we approach the divine, as he lays out in East of Eden:
...this was the gold from our mining: 'Thou mayest.' The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin (and you can call sin ignorance). The King James translation makes a promise in 'Thou shalt,' meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word timshel—'Thou mayest'—that gives a choice. For if 'Thou mayest'—it is also true that 'Thou mayest not.' That makes a man great and that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.
Clearly, believing we function as units in something bigger than ourselves seems to contradict the idea of individual free will. Yet, Steinbeck believed passionately in both, and he isn't the only one. Eastern philosophy has always embraced both, as well as many contemporary thinkers, such as Wayne Dyer.
When I started this book, I intended it to be a travelogue that explores the work of John Steinbeck, especially with regards to the environment. I conceived it as something of a warning, thus titling it The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland. I felt that in so many ways we were living Steinbeck's times again, and that we were ignoring the lessons he taught, especially in The Grapes of Wrath. I still feel all of that is true. But my writing journey did not go as planned. My book became much more introspective, and the focus moved from changing society to changing myself. And as much as I kept trying to focus on Steinbeck, I increasingly found myself reading and listening to Wayne Dyer. For a while I felt I was losing my focus. But I no longer think that. I've been astonished to find how closely Steinbeck's vision of one and Wayne Dyer's vision of one align even though Steinbeck was a scientist focused on the material world open to something divine connecting it all and Dyer was a spiritualist focused on the unseen world open to science.
Furthermore, both men deal with the paradox: a deep belief in free will and a belief that we are all so interconnected that we are one. What an individual does affects everyone. If that is so, if we are always being affected by the actions of others, something out of our control, how can we actually have free will? Dyer puts this on a spiritual plane. He says we are all spiritual beings having a human experience. He envisions life a school and we as spirits driving our bodies and minds around sort of as cars. Our higher selves select the human experiences we have and everything we've each done up to his point, our higher selves chose to get us to this point. He says that rather than doing, we are actually being done by our higher self. Awakening, then occurs when we realize there is no separation between our spiritual selves, our physical selves, and everything else. Those together are the one. And yet Wayne Dyer is all about free will and self-actualization. He is marketed as a self-help guru, and all of his work is focused around choosing for yourself the life you wish to live while empowering other people to do the same.
However, unlike Steinbeck, I think Wayne Dyer came up with a way to actually make that paradox between free-choice and the interconnected web of life actually work. It would basically be this. We have always had free choice, and the choices we freely made up to this point, which included where we were born and who are parents are, our socioeconomic status, etc., were chosen by our soul as the curriculum to wake us up to the fact we are all interconnected and that essentially we are all one with the God, the source of creation. Awaking is that realization. Ego is the denial of that, and life is the curriculum we chose to abolish the ego.
Although I have a different conceptualization of God than Dyer does, that sits very well with me. It feels true. Somehow, I have a sense everything I've experienced in this life, I've ultimately chose, and that it has all served to make me a better man. In the midst of things, it feels like chaos. In hindsight, it feels like education. The more I realize that, the more everything opens up in endless options within the restrictions placed on me by my current circumstances. Choices are not physical things. They do not occupy space. You can have an infinite number of choices while physically being very restricted. Awaking is the realization that I am part of the fabric of life and have infinite choices because of that, not despite it. After one realizes that one starts working with life rather than against life.
Awakening, of course, usually comes with practice, moment by moment. But it doesn't have to. As long as one is in that infinite space that is I and everything else together as one a person is awake to reality. That can come all at once, as with Buddha, or it can come moment by moment, piece by piece.
But when it comes, everything changes. It has to. Everything is different because the lens actually lets in enough light to perceive the fundamental truth of reality: we are one.
Individuals throughout America and individuals throughout the world right now are sick with a sense of superiority and separation from each other, who, in a desperate need to find connection, gather in clicks and clans of similar thinking individuals, which then come together as unified groups or parties, but acting extremely separate from all others. Just like in Steinbeck's time, if we don't change our paradigm, it will end in disaster, causing pain and extreme suffering for millions and millions because it is based on a lie: that we can somehow get by without each other. We can't. It's impossible. Together, we collectively make up the world. It's like if the cells in our body decided to separate from each other and declare independence and superiority and rid themselves forever from the ties that unify and make us whole. You, I--we are each the cells that either keep humanity whole as one, or we explode humanity apart in bloody bits for nothing. And it will be for nothing. Because that separateness is an illusion. It can't happen. We are one earth. Period. Anything else is an absolute lie.
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