One Poet's View

The poet I have in mind today is the Bengali poet Ramprasad Sen (1718-1775), he who celebrated the Goddess Kali throughout his life in verse. In the West we’re so conditioned to think of the divine in a masculine form, it is almost odd to hear divinity framed in the feminine—but such a framing is most accessible when a poet does it. I found the first two quotes on Wikipedia (here), untitled, and sourced there to books by western authors.

You’ll find Mother in any house.
Do I dare say it in public?
She is Bhairavi with Shiva,
Druga with Her children,
Sita with Lakshmana.
She’s mother, daughter, wife, sister—
Every woman close to you.
What more can Ramprasad say?
You work the rest out from these hints.

Bhairavi, Druga, and Sita are all names of goddesses in the, for us, vast universe of divinities discoverable in the traditions of India. Where she is linked to Shiva and Lakshmana, these male deities are her consorts. Now if the above strikes the reader as a kind of exaltation simply of the feminine, the next quote shows that Ramprasad had more in minds and that his hints are not worked out by most. It presents a fascinating piece of negative theology applied to the Divine but in a female aspect.

You think you understand the Goddess?
Even philosophers cannot explain her.
The scriptures say that she, herself,
Is the essence of us all. It is she, herself,
Who brings life through her sweet will.
You think you understand her?
I can only smile. You think that you can
Truly know her? I can only laugh!
But what our minds accept, our hearts do not.
Ants try to grasp the moon, we the Goddess.

Finally a brief but sharply poetic take on Death by this genuine poet of the first rank. I found this quote in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. It also bears no title or sourcing:

How can you shrink from death,
Child of the Mother of All Living?
A snake, and you fear frogs?

The Beloved and Her Veils

One of the fascinating limitations of existing in this low dimension is that we see the higher through veils formed of concepts, symbols. There is that image of the finger pointing at the moon—and the ignorant observer staring at the finger. I’ve always liked that image. The high cannot be uttered—but does that stop us? No. It can be experienced, and somehow we shall express it. The problem is much worse than the finger and the moon. The moon is felt, not seen. The finger is a web of words and images that spring from the hidden inward parts of the person who has the feeling.

It occurs to me that the ineffable has been described in endless ways, but that traditional ways of uttering and picturing the transcendent are, superficially examined, radically unlike each other. There are, for instance, spiritual traditions identical at their core but one we describe as “religion” and the other as “poetry.” Music is another such tradition—radically different enough from the other two so that it appears embedded in each of them. Vast confusions also arise especially for those who will not (or sometimes sadly cannot) fuse the intellectual with the intuitive effectively—and this because no detectable, hard boundary can be mapped between so-called lower and higher feelings; they’re always interwoven or, put another way, are identical, and what we call the lower is just the high at a coarse or “lossy” sort of resolution.

All three are veils—and at our least developed level we attempt to appropriate, co-opt them for service of the bottom layer. We exploit religion for social conditioning and deform it in all manner of strange ways; we name poets-laureate to praise kings or to worship nations; and music must accompany even our boring elevator rides.

I find it interesting that some traditions ban the visual arts, e.g. in branches of Christianity and in Islam; Islam also frowns on music. These customs, of course, arise from a vague sense that it is the Beloved, and not her veils, that should be at the center of worship. What those who’d ban images or sounds don’t seem to realize is that their doctrines, too, are merely veils—and that veils are unavoidable. In this dimension we must attempt to discover the hidden mystery as best we can.

How “It” Talks to Us

Having waxed eloquent about deuterocanonical or apocryphal books of the Bible yesterday, occasioned by a quote, let me today present the full context of that quote and show how It, the dimension beyond, but not further specified, communicates with us. I take the quote from Owen Chadwick’s book, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 257-258. Chadwick, as I’ve already mentioned yesterday, is an Anglican Priest. He was born in 1916. Here is the quote:

On 31 October 1941 at breakfast time, more than fifty people were burnt to death in a factory fire in Yorkshire, and a few were killed when they jumped from the top storey down to the pavement. That was a long day. I spent all of it seeing burnt skin and the relatives of corpses, the most miserable and most exhausting day of my life. When at last I got home after 11 p.m., dog-tired and empty and wretched, I opened a Bible and found, reluctantly, the lesson for the day. And the words leapt out from the page as though they were illuminated, and swept over the being like a metamorphosis, with relief and refreshment:

The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God; and no torment shall touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, and their going from us to be utter destruction… Like gold in the fire he put them to the test — and found them acceptable like burnt offering upon the altar.

The quote in the quote is from The Book of Wisdom, 3:1-6—and what the Book of Wisdom is was the subject of yesterday’s post.

In a secular age, we are surrounded by mysteries. And, indeed, we’re always thus surrounded, never mind the label not quite firmly sticking to the times. But it is an indicator of our era that we speak of such experiences as meaningful coincidences, serendipities, and such—rather than as revelations or as communications from beyond. When we experience this sort of thing ourselves, it’s always quite another matter—even when the circumstances are not as powerful, dramatic, and meaningful as what happened to Professor Chadwick.

My own views of revelation as a whole, as a reality, as a doctrine, are built upon these up-close-and-personal experiences of humanity. This particular case is doubly enlightening in that for a large portion of Christianity the Book of Wisdom is not considered to be canonical, thus is not viewed as inspired. It was written at a time when a Greek version of the Old Testament was already partly available, because Wisdom quotes from it. Biblical scholars believe that the writer was a Jewish sage living in very secular Alexandria and wrote towards the middle of the first century BC. The book reveals Platonic influence, thus the presence of a real distinction between the body and the soul. “For a perishable body presses down the soul, and this tent of clay weighs down the teeming mind.” Wisdom 9:15. This view becomes accepted in Christianity as it develops.

Revelation, it seems to me, is continuing, personal, and comes from all of humanity—as It communicates something of Its reality to this dimension. A Jewish sage living in Alexandria in the midst of the hellenistic decline, an Anglican priest in World War II tending to burn victims, a Greek sage writing dialogues in the fourth century BC. Official revelation is but a sampling, and multiple canons exist. In some the Book of Wisdom is excluded; in others the Tao Te Ching is included. But what really matters ultimately is that It communicates…

Startled in the Primeval Forest

In a book I was reading by a distinguished professor, historian, and priest of the Church of England (Owen Chadwick), I came across a quote from the Bible that sounded unfamiliar. I followed the footnote to the back of the book and discovered that the quote came from Wisdom 3:1-6. I was startled, but only a little, because somewhere in my depths I knew there was a Book of Wisdom, something to do with Solomon. The Layman’s Parallel Bible lies within my grasp (four versions: King James, The Modern Language, The Living Bible, The Revised Standard Version). I knew that it didn’t have that book in it, but I checked it anyway. I was right. Odd. Odd because, Chadwick introduced his quote by saying:

When at last I got home after 11 p.m., dog-tired and empty and wretched, I opened a Bible and found, reluctantly, the lesson for the day…

This suggested to me—that phrase of his, “a Bible”—an ordinary Bible. And in the household of an Anglican priest that would be the so-called Authorized Bible, therefore the King James. Puzzled now, I went off to find my Jerusalem Bible, a modern translation that appeared in the 1960s. And yes. There, in that Catholic Bible, there it was, the Book of Wisdom, sandwiched between the Songs of Solomon and Ecclesiastes.

Several questions now arose. Why did an Anglican, on October 31, 1941, find the “lesson for the day” pointing to verses in the Book of Wisdom, a book that is missing in what for Anglicans is the authorized KJ version...unless, as might be, he was using the Bible as an oracle and opening it at random. My next task was to run all of this down. In doing so I found myself in the primeval forest of the western religious tradition, an amazing, fascinating ecosystem, if you like.

It turns out that the Book of Wisdom first appears in the second of three major versions of the Bible, the Septuagint. That book was created by translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek. Long ago. Precisely (if that’s the word) during the third and second centuries BC. The translation was completed in 132 BC. Now one oddity here is that this Greek translation has a Latin name. Septuagint means seventy. This version came to be known, later, to Latin speakers, as “translation by seventy men,” of which the word “seventy” became the abbreviation used in ordinary speech and writing. The seventy translators incorporated several books into this version not present in the Hebrew original. The Book of Wisdom was one of these; it was originally written in Greek. The third major version is the Latin translation, known as the Vulgate, derived from versio vulgate, the “common version,” thus understood by everybody—at least in the fourth century AD when it was commissioned. Of this word we still retain the English “vulgar,” thus common with an attitude. The Vulgate also contains the Book of Wisdom and twelve other books called deuterocanonical in the Catholic tradition; these same books, plus four others, are part of the Authorized King James Bible, but not the King James Bible “Lite,” as it were. On that more soon.

Before I discovered KJV Lite, I had to learn what “deuterocanonical” meant. Turns out that all of the books of the Hebrew Bible, thus of the Old Testament, are part of the official canon of the Catholic church. The books included in the Septuagint in addition came to be labeled as part of the “second canon”—thus also officially recognized as inspired. The word therefore means “belonging to the second canon.” This is a primal forest. We should not expect things to be simple. In the Protestant tradition, the word Apocrypha has come to be used. The word means hidden or obscure or, perhaps, more obscure books. Whatever the name used, these books are not recognized by Protestant churches as part of the canon; thus they are not viewed as divinely inspired. Protestants stick with the Hebrew Bible. And this stance, in part at least, explains why the King James Bible no longer carries the Apocrypha. The other part of the explanation is economic. Startled by that? Or just bemused? The latter, in my case.

Beginning in the 1770s, innovations in printing began to make large print runs possible. To reduce costs—and in efforts to attract a large Protestant market for the King James Version—publishers began omitting the Apocrypha from the book. Those active in the Church of England, like professor Chadwick, continued to use the “full” editions for good reasons. In the life of the Anglican Church, some “lessons for the day” referred to these books, and it is then startling to open the Bible and find them missing.

The realms of faith are just as vast, complex, and organic as all the rest of reality. It’s life, once more, if on another level…

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Chadwick's book referenced above is The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1975.

Doctrine and Religion

This post is meant as a companion to the last—in which I attempted to define the personal experience of religion. I defined personal religion as an attitude and orientation in which an intuition of a transcending “beyond” has a genuine reality. While I view this experience as arising in an innate intuition of reality, an “intimation of immortality”—something that trumps, as it were, various conceptual formulations of it—I’m still fully aware that people have the use of intellect and reason and that a fully mature person will have a comprehensive view in which a conceptual framework will be present as well. Today more on the later aspect.

A doctrine literally means a teaching. In the western religious traditions, all of which are revealed religions, the teaching is the elaboration of a revelation directly or indirectly received from God. In the eastern tradition, and here I have the Buddha in mind, the teaching concerns the elaboration of the meaning of an experience persons had—and also about what they themselves said about it. In both cases a certain acceptance, usually labeled faith, is necessary before the doctrine, the teaching, can be considered on its own merits. The fundamental character of such teachings is precisely this faith or this acceptance. There is no way that the ordinary human, even with a great deal of diligence and effort, can replicate the experience on which the doctrine rests. Religious doctrines have a very different character from what we call hypotheses or theories.

To reduce the western religious conception to its absolute grounding premise, it says that the ultimate creator of reality intervenes in its creation at certain times in order to communicate its will to many people through one person. Acceptance of this premise is, I submit, required to go further into the specifics of a doctrine.

The Buddha’s teaching contains another basic assertion, namely that a realm of suffering exits where the illusion of the self is present. The self is created by attachments. When all these are withdrawn, we enter a kind of blissful annihilation.

People who have serious, sincere difficulties with either of these essentials will be left to form their own explanations of the nature of reality. What they must accept as given is that from time to time religious faiths arise from the experiences of individuals, that these experiences are very evidently of a greatly persuasive and very energetic nature—sufficiently so that they produce huge social phenomena that spread over time and, by and large, produce more benefits than harm.

Clashes between groups, the use of coercion to make unbelievers comply with the teaching, persecutions, wars, inquisitions, and crusades do not, alas, at all require a religious orientation. The religious aspect in these phenomena is incidental, not central. What is central in them is the drive to power. The twentieth century brought us ample, indeed rich samples of each of these negatives under entirely secular conditions.

It does not take a great deal of faith to believe in truth, justice, and the good. That comes with personal religion, as I’ve outlined in the last post. The doctrines, however, belong—because of their basic premises—to the realm of judgment.

Religion and Doctrine

I would here contrast religion as a personal experience and religion as a structure of doctrines. The first I would define as an attitude or orientation to reality—but with a twist. It holds within it an awareness of something beyond the tangible experiences of our day to day life—also something beyond projections derived from observing the world, thus such concepts as “humanity,” “nation,” “cosmos,” “history,” and so on. Under my definition Marxism would not qualify as a religion despite its detection of a “dialectical process” in history—however appropriately airy-fairy that sounds. Nor would atheism or materialism qualify. The last two would deny anything “beyond” the experienced. Atheists with odd intimations of positive meanings hidden somewhere invisibly have already committed heresy, as it were, in their hearts.

Intimation here is a good word although, for me, the German Ahnung, is best. Its derivation is from Die Ahnen, or the ancestors—and they’re definitely no longer here. Wordsworth’s title, Intimations of Immortality, fits my purpose nicely. My personal experiences of the religious take this form, the form of intimations, and they arise from poetry, myth, literary, and other artistic forms, including music. A sneering realist would label all this mere emotionalism—but I view such criticism as arising from the absence of inner powers rather than their presence.

Religion as experienced is an intuition. The moment concepts arise, and we hear of God quite early in life, we enter another realm. We learn to associate certain intuitions with certain structures of concepts. Intimations are intimate, personal. When I was young the concept of God produced in me images of a person in the sky. It did not connect with my own experience of awe—indeed has never linked that way in the intimate sense except in moments of extreme anxiety or gratitude. Odd, that, isn’t it. In certain moments when feelings rise beyond the normal range, when they transcend the average, we reach for the nearest concept of transcendence. There are no atheists in the trenches.

Experience teaches transcendence—and not just in extreme moments. But one does not experience it in a concrete, tangible way as one experience a tree, for instance, when climbing it as a child. The transcendental is ineffable yet felt as real. And the more open the top of one’s head, the more real it is and becomes. But between this experience and the doctrines of religions there is an enormous gulf—one so deep that the Grand Canyon would seem, by contrast, to be a mere line in the sand drawn by a wooden match-stick.

For these reasons I treat all scriptures as poetry—and view poetry as humanity’s highest achievement. I resist doctrinal claims to be communicating tangible realities, to describe in detail, however vague, what God intends or once might have done. Regarding that concept I hew resolutely to a negative theology and assert, no matter what I hear, “Not that, not that.” In the poetic mode I hear of “God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” in Genesis 3:8—and that’s fine with me, not least what came before and comes after. Eventually, by a long process, this inspiration turns into something that has nothing to do with intimations of the high; poetry is turned into doctrine; and by that time it has sunk out of my sight.

Second the Motion

The New York Times today brought a story titled “The Burning Bush They’ll Buy, But Not ESP or Alien Abduction.” “They” refers to the body of religious scholars generally and specifically to those attending the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion that recently concluded in Atlanta. But the article is actually the review of a book, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred by Jeffrey J. Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice. I haven’t read the book myself; I didn’t know about it until today. The article tells me that it is about four writers on the paranormal, two going back a ways and two who focus on UFOs. Kripal, evidently, advocates the inclusion of paranormal phenomena in religious studies and the inclusion of such writers as Frederic Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee, and Bertrand Méheust among the scholars.

“According to Dr. Kripal,” says the article, “their omission is evidence of a persistent bias among religion scholars, happy to consider the inexplicable, like miracles, as long as they fit a familiar narrative, like Judaism or Christianity.”

Good point, there, Dr. Kripal. I’ve made the same point on this blog myself, expressing the same regrets, although I directed my attention more generally at science rather than restricting it to religious studies. Kripal also identifies the ultimate problem underlying this avoidance of the paranormal, be it by science or by the humanities. The paranormal is, alas, a borderzone phenomenon. It bridges the material and the mental spheres, each of which has its well-established professions. It is uncomfortably real, as I might put it. People stay on their respective reservations because that’s more secure than wandering in the desert in the twilight. We might actually advance our knowledge if more talent were dedicated to the study of this uncomfortable interface.

Get In The Habit

One impetus behind this post is a link sent in a comment to a post of mine on Ghulf Genes. The link is to an essay by Alasdair MacIntyre (accessible here) on The Nature of Virtues. The second is a post on Siris yesterday (here) addressing the question Is Faith a Virtue? Sometimes comments on blogs are just not the way to present one’s own response to highly stimulating ideas of enormous complexity, hence I thought I’d sort out my own thoughts on the matter of virtue here.

In one sense virtue and morality are very closely linked—or indeed synonymous. I find this in Webster’s first definition of virtue, rendered as “a conformity to a standard of right: Morality.” In an earlier posting I’ve at least touched on the subject of morality (here) focusing on its ambiguities. Virtue, by contrast, although very slippery (for reasons that follow), turns out to be simple and straightforward.

As MacIntyre shows, the word is rooted in the Latin vir, man, and is therefore manliness—a concept that different times define in different ways. It also carries the meaning of excellence—and when we speak of the virtue of a plant, say in a medical context, it means efficiency or efficacy. By way of example MacIntyre discusses the meaning of virtue in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament’s so-called theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity), in Jane Austen’s work, and in Benjamin Franklins. The contrasts are quite striking. MacIntyre’s essay is well worth reading just to see how he parses apart two motivations behind virtue, which he labels external and internal. External motivation comes from rewards you hope to gain; internal motivation arises from the inward experience of some practice, e.g., the sheer pleasure of doing a job right. My own view of the external/internal split has been to deny the presence of virtue if the motive is external, to recognize it when it is internal. Rabia al-Adawiyya’s saying always comes to my mind. “If I worship you from fear of hell, condemn me to hell. If I do so in the hope of paradise, deny me paradise.” I’m with her.

So long as we view virtue through the lens of qualities, tendencies, or endowments (like “manly strength” in Homer), the concept remains slippery. Natural endowments lack the immediate sense of a moral quality I tend to associate with the word. It helps me a great deal to define it more sharply from actual experience—always my tendency. And here I get real help from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Augustine defined virtue as “a good habit consonant with our nature.” Aquinas calls it “an operative habit essentially good.” Here I footnote the Catholic Encyclopedia (link). As a habit virtue loses its mystery and becomes straight-forward. Habits are acquired by repeatedly doing something—and if a difficulty must be overcome, thus a higher good must be preferred over a lower, it involves an act of the will. Thus virtue becomes, you might say, a record of repeatedly choosing right. Experience teaches that we naturally tend toward the good; the difficulties arise when we become aware of an ascending scale of goods and realize that lower goods often have more immediate and sensory rewards. A realization, thus a conscious mental grasp of these differences must first arise before a choice even faces us. And before virtue, the habit, is present, our naked will must form it by repeating what at first are relatively painful choices.

Now here I underline that a recognition is necessary—a kind of inward knowing. In my experience this is not an intellectual operation. My word for it is intuitive. I know the difference, for me, but I cannot speak for others. I don’t know what Aquinas really meant by intellect; the internal experience of that concept, for him, might have been be quite different from mine; for me it ranks lower than intuition and, therefore, unless the intellectual formulation gets intuition’s nod, I view it with a certain reserve.

Here then arises the issue of faith as a virtue. Faith in a structure of doctrines—which includes faith in the authority on which they rest—absolutely demands an intuitive assent. We are dealing here with matters that cannot be confirmed in the usual ways. Faith has a much closer relationship to truth than to goodness. Once I believe that something is thus and so, must I continuously repeat that affirmation? The reason why faith plays such a gigantic role in Christianity, it seems to me, is because its fundamentally very complex doctrine does not meet with intuitive assent as readily, say, as belief in God. Hence, perhaps, the affirmation must be repeated—because it’s not genuinely believed; in that context it can become a virtue. Further, faith in God does not by any means logically and automatically produce the Christian doctrines unless we first accept a very particular formulation of how God relates to man. But fear of hell or hope for paradise should not compel a person to act against the movements of his heart.

The Uncomfortable Neutral Stance

Is there a neutral way to approach what are invariably viewed as religious experiences? The answer isn’t obvious. Let me be precise to bring that out. Let me take the case of a person, let me call him A, who hears or reads about other people who claim to have had such experiences. Those reporting may say that God, an angel, or some other sacred figure has addressed them, that they’ve received a revelation, or simply that they’ve had experiences of a transcendental state. Now if A is an unbeliever, he will reject the truth of such reports outright—except to acknowledge the presence of some disarrangement in the claimant’s brain. If A belongs to a well-defined faith system, but the claimant mentions figures from another faith, and especially makes references to some doctrinal aspects of the same, A is likely to dismiss the revelation because it doesn’t fit his structure of belief; he may even think the revelation came from the devil. A Muslim will be dubious if the center of the revelation is the Virgin Mary; a Christian will be dubious if the central role is played by Mohamed’s daughter Fatima.

A neutral stance would seem to require that A must credit the possibility of a transcendental reality, indeed one in which actual persons exist—and also view all religions as essentially equivalent, thus as having equivalent claims. Neither believers nor unbelievers will grant a neutral A much standing. For the unbeliever A is too soft, too gullible. For the orthodox believer, A is “lukewarm,” uncommitted, wishy-washy, and probably some kind of muddle-headed pantheist.

This is a real issue. At the core of every religion is a narrative, a conceptualization, an historical context, indeed a logic that makes it unique, and making any two of them equivalent invariably renders both in some ways or to some extent false. The neutral stance, which happens to be mine (alas!) relies on human fallibility as the legitimate explanation of the claimed equivalence.

All human experience is filtered through the imperfect lens of our consciousness; this is as true of ordinary as of extraordinary matters. At the very root of transcendental experiences—thus the initial core experience of the founder of a religion or a major movement—a human mind encounters something totally unprecedented and undeniable. This must be explained in some way, and the person must use his or her existing knowledge, not least cultural heritage, to make sense of it. And that’s at the root. All religions then develop further, always taking centuries, and the intellectual formulation crystallizes long, long after the revelatory event. By the time a religion has a full complement of orthodox doctrines, many, many people have made their contributions to it and incorporated their fallibilities as well. It remains to note that the source of such developments, whatever it is that the original claimant underwent, carries an enormous force of benevolence within it. If it did not, the religion could not take hold and acquire its millions of followers.

An authentic neutral stance does not deny the reality of the high but sees in the interpretation of the experience of it the equally undeniable fallibility of man.

A Marxist Orientation

Reading a book in which Karl Marx’s development is skillfully presented, I got to wondering about people’s innate leanings. Marx tried his hand at poetry in youth but rapidly became an intellectual, initially very much influenced by Hegelian philosophy and also much concerned with religion—without, seemingly, even opening the door of it to understand its mysteries. He began to feel a certain comfort when he shifted his view to society and became a materialist. Then religion began to make sense to him as a coping mechanism to mitigate the pain of social conflict and of class oppression. And he was off.

Now, mind you, this man spent his entire life reading and scribbling. He was an intellectual. He was trying to understand the world, to orient himself. Thus he engaged in precisely the same activities I spent my time on when not actually working for a living. Why did my efforts take me very deeply into the religious phenomenon—and through all of the many rooms that surround it (psychology, mythology, hard science, literature, and history) whereas Marx quite rapidly settled on material production and its arrangements over time and expressed in political forms. All of those “rooms” of mine were, for him, by-products of that. Why did he never wonder what people are doing here in the first place? Wouldn’t that be the proper starting point? Of any orientation?

The way we’re inwardly constituted—our innate leanings—are ultimately the most decisive in how we approach our lives. The layer that totally entranced Karl Marx I took in one or two long strides before I’d ever reached my sophomore year—and also occupied my paid labors. The curious aspect here is that his approach was shared by so, so many others of the elites of his time so that he left a huge mark on history. That tells me something about the uneven distribution of gifts…

Little Town, Big Influence

Herewith a little photograph of the town square of Tirschenreuth, Germany. I spent some years there, in my formative years between 9 to 13, a deeply Catholic region that had a huge influence on me. In those dark post-war years in a backward corner of Bavaria, I might as well have been time-traveling—because that region then had a culture that, for all intents and purposes (ignoring modern power and a few cars) might as well have been medieval. There is nothing like experience, as I keep emphasizing on this blog. Thus there is nothing like living a tradition to get to know it viscerally. I view such experiences—especially when they happen naturally—as gifts.

Somnolent Vocabularies

In efforts to wake up mornings, I jot notes by hand while (this time of year) listening to the furnace. In my case “waking up” only begins after breakfast, and after at least glancing at the papers. My notes today started off in harsh reaction, saying “I’m not in the least interested in reality.” Then the process of waking up actually kicked in, and I realized that what I’d referred to disparagingly as “reality” is linked to the distinctively human, and the collectively human at that. I see nature—yes, dunes, grass, birds, the sky, clouds, ravens, dawns—as part of the transcendent.

Remembering Self-Remembering

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread…
     [Milton, Lycidas]

I encountered the writings of P.D. Ouspensky roughly in the 1970s and soon learned about George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who was Ouspensky’s inspiration. Both men were Russians born in the nineteenth century; both died in the late 1940s. Gurdjieff was the leader of a spiritual teaching movement; Ouspensky, while part of this grou for a while, was more broadly speaking a philosophical writer. Much later I discovered that Gurdjieff had latched on to his ideas from Sufi sources and turned a narrow slice of these into the foundations of his work; he himself characterized what he taught as esoteric Christianity and never acknowledged his debt.

I found Ouspensky’s (and later Gurdieff’s own) writings fascinating but strange. The essence may be rendered by saying that people are asleep; they have selves but not a genuine core self. That self, the real one, develops after arduous practice; the central technique for producing this initially absent self is self-remembering, thus becoming conscious of self, separating oneself from the flow of mentation, seeing the multiple personalities that constitute us (per G&O) as unreal, and gradually reaching genuine humanity.

I found this strange because I was only too aware—and indeed from childhood on—that I did too have a core self. My roots are in Catholicism, and you don’t go very far from those roots before you’re only all too aware that you have a conscience. But in truth I already knew that as a little child before I’d ever heard of anything like the catechism. Therefore, in the 1970s, the notion that I was an automaton sleep-walking through life was odd. I knew what it referred to, by and large, namely inattentiveness, absorption, passion, and the like, but the notion that you somehow created this self—and in its absence were sort of dismembered after death and blown into the void like dust, as Gurdjieff suggested—seemed illogical. How could you remember the self if there was no self there to do the remembering in the first place. Quite early on, of course, I’d learned Goethe’s famous saying: “Two souls, alas, reside within my breast.” True enough, of course, but Goethe, the third soul, as it were, knew this fact. Later yet I encountered the modern evolutionary doctrine that we are automata—and that our personalities are nothing but discrete (and ever changing) structures of nerve cells engaged in a Darwinian competition. But while that description also fits the G&O model of the ordinary, unenlightened common human, neither of these men came from that modern tradition.

The fascinating aspects of such doctrines is their narrow focus on some aspects of a teaching which, entirely legitimately, uses techniques to nurture human development. The very narrowness of focus is what makes bodies of teaching such as this one cult-like—thus with but marginal influence. The Sufis have developed many techniques of disengaging the human attention from the flux of ordinary life. The repetition of a single phrase, the zikhr—also known to us from the Hindu mantra—was another. Catholicism has both. Self-remembering has the same function as the examination of the conscience; and there is also the repetition of the Holy Name. But what makes a particular practice valuable is the comprehensive structure in which it is embedded. Some teachings tempt people because they promise success by some kind of recipe or formula. Therefore such groups attract those seeking power and—much more poignantly—whose who have been starved of meaning.

The core self is, indeed, enveloped in the material dimension—and, unless cultivated, can readily habituate itself to live in the continuous flux of stimulus that life produces. The proper preparation of the human takes place by nurture in a home and a comprehensively formed society. The vast number of religious and quasi-religious movements that have characterized the twentieth century testify to the failure of homes—and society as a whole—to assume the burden of nourishing the higher aspects of the soul. Then the hungry sheep look for almost anything that seems to offer help.