Stephen Harrod Buhner

I was ignorant when I left home at 16 though, as most 16 year-olds are, I didn’t know it. Nor, in my ignorance, did I care. My family was, as most American families were then, and often still are, dysfunctional. And so, when I left home I took with me a lot of psychological wounds, of which I was unaware (and were later to become some of my most enduring teachers), two decisions, and three questions.

I look back with wonder on that younger self, somewhat in awe of those decisions and questions; I don’t know how I, so young, could have come to them, held on to them so stubbornly, and continued to use them as my touchstone this past half century of my life.

The two decisions were: 1) I will never live a boring life again, nor acquiesce to the demand that I do so as my parents have done. I will throw myself into life and live it as fully as I can; and 2) I will find a way to live a life that is as full of the kind of love I received from my paternal grandmother and her father, my great-grandfather who, for whatever reason, gave their love into the depths of me and never judged my essential right to be or to be loved. I will find family in which that kind of love exists every day; I will never live a life that is not permeated with it.

The three questions were: 1) who and what am I? 2) what are human beings? 3) what is this place I have been born into? I did not have the words then to describe the meaning I sensed and forced into that inadequate word “place.” It took me years to find words to describe what I intuitively understood. Specifically: What is the nature of this scenario from which all of us have emerged and in which we are inextricably embedded and remain as an irremovable expression? As Buckminster Fuller once said, “It is possible to get out of a place, it is not possible to get out of a scenario.”

Creating a life oriented around those decisions and questions, as I was to learn, would confront my pervasive ignorance every day of my life. Over time I came to understand, in all its terrible reality, the scope of my ignorance. My extended family, most especially my parents, the schools and churches I was forced to attend, my culture, the family babysitter (our television) had filled me with a complex multitude of untruths that I have spent the better part of my life unraveling.

As the years passed, I came to understand that I possessed two kinds of ignorance. One is personal, specific to the time, place, and circumstance into which I was born. The other is integral to the nature of our humanness.

During my younger years, I would sometimes encounter in the writings of an elder I respected, someone extremely well read and who was a servant to these same questions. Invariably, somewhere in their writings I would read something like: “I know so much I know how much I don’t know,” a statement that made no sense to me.

During my lifetime I have read some 30,000 books, perhaps 50,000 scientific journal articles, and hundreds of thousands of articles in newspapers, magazines, and online. I follow wherever my curiosity leads me and because I have no institutional affiliation, I have never been limited to what I am allowed to bring into my work or study.

From this, I have come to know the inevitably and scope of human ignorance, that we can only ever know, as I think Einstein once put it, less than one percent of what goes on here. There is a humility that comes with this realization, one I wish that all scientists possessed. For the more one learns, the more that one realizes how little can be known.

As the circle of knowledge increases, the larger its circumference becomes and the more it touches upon the mystery of this scenario we sometimes call Earth or Universe.

The contemplative thinking that my questions demand brings the extent of that perimeter, and its touching, into awareness every second of every day. There is no escape.

My personal ignorance, on the other hand, has become a continuing source of humor/astonishment/embarrassment. All the things I learned when young, so many of them still reside inside me acting as a lens through which I see the outside world. As the years have unfolded their textures I have come to seek, rather than avoid, the subtle emergence of signals that tell me I have found another belief about myself or the world that has nothing to do with its reality. Some of my greatest discoveries have come from following where those signals lead.

The shapes taken by my life, my work, my writing have been formed by what those two decisions and three questions demanded of me and my stubborn refusal to give them up. And that stubborn insistence emerges most strongly when I am told: “this you may not think, this you cannot study, this you’re not allowed to discuss or speak, this you must not do or be.”

My personal experience, my extensive reading and contemplative thinking in a multitude of fields have taught me beyond doubt that the end result of such prohibitions -- on nations, cultures, and individuals -- is always tyranny and oppression. I have seen what it has done to the practice of medical healing in the United States by the impact it makes on those who are suffering. I have seen what it has done to scientists (and their work) in the impact it makes on this Earth that I love. I have seen what it has done to artists of every sort in the impact it makes the art we have and, most especially, by the absence of the art we need. I have seen what it has done to religion by the impact it makes on the sacredness inside each of us, inside everything that is. And I have seen what it has done to this country that I love by the impact it has made on each and every one of us who live here.

This blog is a response to all these things. It holds the understandings and insights, of varying depths and complexity, that I have come to in the half century I have contemplated them. Many of my posts are about the ideological totalitarianism that has infected so many areas of knowledge and study, including the healing professions. Many are about the tribalist polarization that is now tearing our communities and nation (and world) apart. Others are self-revelatory, funny or embarrassing things I have discovered about myself as I continue to deepen my understanding of who and what I am. And some are about things that caught my interest and opened up a perceptual orientation that I did not know existed.

While it has not been a boring life, it has often been uncomfortable. For these kinds of questions can’t help but reveal uncomfortable truths. I suspect that you may find some of the posts on this blog just as uncomfortable as I did when thinking them through.

I write these posts because I believe in our common humanity and that we must, as a species, find our way to a common ground of understanding between us. One in which we do not shame each other or find each other guilty merely for the fact of being born a certain color or gender or of a certain class or in a certain country. I believe that only free and open inquiry into the nature of who we are and what we do and free discourse about what we find, without removing the essential humanity from those who oppose us (for whatever reason) or disagree with us, is the route we must take if we are not to repeat the tragedy of the human condition that has played itself out far too many times during our species’ history.

For as James Baldwin once said, “There is such a thing as integrity. Some people are noble. There is such a thing as courage. The terrible thing is that the reality behind these words depends ultimately on what the human being (meaning every single one of us) believes to be real. The terrible thing is that the reality behind all these words depends on choices one has got to make, for ever and ever and ever, every day.”

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