“May the Force be with you”

In times like these it’s natural to think about the regions beyond in terms of energetics: “May the Force be with you.” What distinguishes this saying from “May God be with you” is that it uses an energetic word; but most people will feel that Force means some Higher Power. Power, of course, is another energetic word.

In an earlier post I’ve pointed to the widespread use of this kind of reference in many cultures using equivalent words (here): chi, prana, baraka. The western form of this is grace.

Grace is not experienced in the same way by all individuals—or the same individual at all times. If it were we would think of it much as we think of life. We’ve got it while we’re living. Therefore this kind of energy is of a special, subtle kind—and what we do (or don’t do) can increase its experienced presence in us. It may be thought of as everywhere present, and to the same degree, but not always accessible.

The teaching of the cultures agree to this extent. Concentration of a certain kind produces the experience of grace; and when it is felt, it is transformative. The concentration must come from a freely willed decision—which makes it different in kind. Meditation, prayer, attention to some things, detachment from others—and carried on not for pragmatic reasons but in order to be transformed. In the Catholic doctrine, for instance, sanctifying grace attends salutary acts and the state of holiness. The acts are tied to mindfulness; they produce a state—of receptivity.

No word, however subtle its initial reference may have been, is protected from abuse. De Gaulle famously claimed that he had baraka when addressing the Algerians—thus using the word in a political context. Grace is available as a description for pleasing movements in dance or skating. But the human intuition knows full well that something, call it magical, is at work here. Does it matter whether or not we trace it back to a divine source and fit it into an organized religious system? It matters for some. But if we stay with the energetic terminology, it suffices to remember that energy is intimately connected with doing work. The word derives from the Greek ergon, meaning just that. And in that context I recall one of the short sayings of Laura Huxley’s, in You Are Not the Target: It works— if you work.

This man receives sinners…

A week or more ago (link) I wrote of choice and consequences, the first a gift from God to us, the second the results of choices made by us. To be sure, free will implies its abuse. That then constellates, in some minds, the problem of evil. God knew that evil would result from his gift; that past tense is just a linguistic nod to our sense of time here. Therefore God approved of that evil? My conclusion was, Not so! Knowledge is not approval. But free will is so great a gift that its price, namely its abuse, is worth it.

Got to thinking about that later along these lines. As knowledge is not approval, so also it is not indifference. And God is not only omniscient, he is also omnipotent. Therefore, in the long run—and never mind “fallen” concepts like eternal hell fire—I have no doubt that in the Great Plan all created beings will be saved. That might, of course, take a long time—but what does time matter in eternity? And also, to honor that great gift, free will, ultimately the created beings will have to choose. But they will. Be sure of it. They will. That God both knows and yet still cares is signaled by the tale of the prodigal son, told in Luke 15:11-32.

That episode is introduced by a brief note about Pharisees and scribes (and I am one of those, a scribe) who, seeing tax collectors and sinners drawing near to Jesus, observe with disapproval: “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” Then follow the parables of the lost sheep, of the lost coin, and of the lost son. In the first case one sheep of a hundred is lost, in the next one coin of ten, in the last one son of two, the younger—which in that culture then meant the less valuable. Rather like that progression. In each case major effort is expended on finding what is lost—or, in the case of the son, lavishly celebrating the prodigal’s return. The older son is angered—but he, of course, is the inheritor: “All that is mine is yours,” his father says.

Now, of course, a dry doctrine of choice and consequences leaves out one of the aspects of God, omnibenevolence. God is love. There is, therefore, more to that choice = consequences equation. Along with free choice we have another great gift, which is God’s absolute love. And it is, in subtle ways—subtle enough not to interfere with the gift of choice—all around us and streaming across the borderzone to envelop us all around. Grace. The first step in being found again would appear to be cultivate our powers to listen for the faint, faint sound of it. But once heard its power grows in guiding us home again.

Substance-Of-We-Feeling

We tend to think of Revelation as communication of knowledge, guidance, and of information from the realms beyond the border. That’s also the context in which I’ve written on the subject in multiple posts here (see Categories). That human renditions of revelation might decay over time and need to be renewed seems obvious to me—but such a view tends to be resisted by those who control its dissemination. They’d agree that interpretation may be necessary—but they reserve the right of interpretation to themselves. I’ve never encountered a sharply put interpretation saying that revelation may also be nutrition, indeed necessary spiritual nutrition. These are my two subjects today.

Let me start with the first by focusing on a single word, Grace. The first dictionary definition of that word is “unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification.” The first example Merriam-Webster’s online version gives is “She walked across the stage with effortless grace.” The last three examples mention God. One of these is “By the grace of God, no one was seriously hurt,” but you won’t see that in newspapers. They will substitute “fortunately” for the leading phrase. Neither the deeper meanings of the word, nor its role in religious controversy, is present here.

The word does have such meanings in Christianity. There it is a gift of God linked to salvation and said to flow from right deeds and holiness. Luther disputed this by asserting that faith alone saves—and grace is unnecessary. Its meaning therefore as an active, indeed necessary, support, arising from a real and transcendental source has very much thinned out, more or less replaced by modernity’s secular explanation for all mysteries: chance and probability.

Now concerning the subject of nutrition. In her science fiction novel, Shikasta, Doris Lessing tells the story of a galactic empire, but of a different kind. Multiple planetary settlements have taken place over many eons from the star system Canopus, in the constellation of Argos. All kinds of species have been, as it were, planted, and they are evolving. Sustaining their evolution is an energetic emanation called Substance-Of-We-Feeling, abbreviated SOWF. It isn’t necessary for simple survival, but it is what sustains harmonious development. All is well for a long, long time—but then the emissaries from Canopus notice that something very troubling has taken place. An unexpected cosmic realignment causes the flow of SOWF to thin. Another empire, Canopus’ enemy, Puttoria, attempts to exploit this situation. A degenerative disease begins to affect settlements, among them Shikasta (read Earth); it’s not a physical disease; it is the higher levels—spiritual life, community life—that are affected.

The story of Shikasta, of course, merits interpretation as a new or as a renewed revelation—this one emanating from Sufi roots. Doris Lessing was associated with the Sufi teaching projected by Idries Shah from Britain. When I first read Shikasta, I had to smile when I encountered SOWF; to me it was an obvious reference to Sufism; later I discovered that others had had much the same thought. Lessing’s series of novels, collectively known as Canopus in Argos, is the framing of a cosmology in modern terms, thus accessible to a secular and technological age. SOWF functions as Grace—a gift, a source of higher nutrition, regenerative, as Webster’s has it. Lessing’s intent, to be sure, is far from suggesting that God is a distant galactic civilization. The effect of her, alas, very difficult fiction is to make such ideas of a conscious and meaningful cosmic plan—in which, as it were, energetic emanations like Grace play a vital role—visible to modern minds and, when thought about, illuminative of ancient and by now moribund structures of belief we’ve come to dismiss as backward superstitions.

The Grace of Recognition

Part of existence for all of us—it comes sooner or later to all—is a feeling of abandonment. Here I mean a certain you might say existential kind of feeling. At times like that we oddly yearn for a sign out-of-the-blue, as it were. And it must come, in that particular way, not through the usual routes of ordinary attention. It must be unusual. It must counter a feeling I’ve always expressed to myself by “a stranger in a strange land.” That biblical phrase—no Heinlein didn’t frame it though he used it as the title of a novel—is not exactly on target in its own context. Let me reproduce the context by way of showing the peculiar power of the highly compressed Biblical narrative. Here is Exodus 2:16-22:

Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters: and they came and drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. And the shepherds came and drove them away: but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock. And when they came to Reuel their father, he said, How is it that ye are come so soon to day? And they said, An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and also drew water enough for us, and watered the flock. And he said unto his daughters, And where is he? why is it that ye have left the man? call him, that he may eat bread. And Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter. And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.

So much for the phrase, which, for me, echoes something deeply embedded in a Gnostic kind of consciousness that sometimes rises.

Now the odd thing is that quite minor happenings, thus meaningful coincidences—which by their nature are both, meaningful and yet pure chance—serve to relieve the sense of strangeness whereas, surrounded as we might be by caring others in our own environment, that feeling of abandonment might still be present. The existential confirmation almost requires that it be untraceable to causes. Thus neither family, friends, nor public recognition serve the purpose of providing meaning—because we can easily trace the sources of these supports to a mutual kind of give and take. True love serves this purpose—when it first dawns. It then appears miraculous. Celebrity is vanishing if our head is screwed on right. Then we see that we are merely mirrors in which others see themselves. And complete strangers who come to understand us well, with whom we feel a kinship, rapidly enter, for functional purposes, the role of friends and family.

But here and there an odd event, very often of the most minor kind, lifts our moments of abandonment because we then get a hint that we might actually matter beyond the realms of mere cause and effect.

The Mystery of Chi

Two posts back I have suggested that the Chinese concept of chi is present in every culture under other names, and I recited some of them: baraka, prana, and our own concept of grace. We also have a more secular version of it, the élan vital, the life force. In actual use these words often have quite different emphases and connotations. A good example is our use of the word grace. In the religious context it is seen as a special gift from God or a state of being without sin (“state of grace”); in the social context it connotes good upbringing, charm, advanced behavior, fluidity of movement; and then there is “grace under fire.”

All of these uses of the word suggest a kind of elevated state or mode of being; the last phrase is instructive because it suggests holding on to our humanity even when all hell breaks loose. An equivalent of it, the French sang-froid, has the same connotation: cold blooded, thus above the natural state. But notice that in our usage, grace is never equated with the life force as such, whereas it is strongly linked to that concept in Asia. Our usage is the product of our culture, a product of our system of classification. We’re very conceptual. We like to separate. We’ve separated grace from the life force—and this despite the fact that our founding book, the Bible, in Genesis 2:7, tells us that God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” That breath, I would suggest, is chi. The dust of which God formed the body is matter.

Now, mind you, speaking of such matters we’re engaged in the pursuit higher forms of knowledge than our science can ever hope to reach. We’re in the realms of poetry. Poetry’s favorite subject, love, is as foreign to science as is life. The poet dares to call them one and the same thing; science is silent on both. This subject is also ultimately foreign to philosophical approaches unless these acknowledge a higher realm, the realm of revelation. Conceptual approaches cannot capture the essence here, which must be experienced. Concepts divide, poetry unites. But poetry unites without destroying crucial differences that manifest in experience. Indeed the more precise our conceptual understanding becomes, the more it shatters the unity of experience—whereas the life force has the magical result of fusing—without destroying—a vast diversity of materially distinct entities into a unified organism.

One way to get a better feel for the mystery of chi is to picture this fluid, this breath of the divine, as present in everything that lives—and, by organizing matter, becoming visible. At the level of ordinary life—and that dusty little weed growing in the crack of my concrete drive is alive—we might think of chi as already and miraculously present. It announces itself. For all we know it’s also present in the inorganic realm. It may be that energy which defies the laws of inertia and keeps electrons swirling around atomic nuclei. Where do those electrons get their force? And why don’t they ever run down? Those electrons are still swirling, moving, glowing even in the coldest rocks on the frozen continent of Antarctica. And we, ourselves, seem to be made of innumerably many perpetua mobile. Chi may permeate the cosmos. It may be the strong force that keeps the quarks clinging to each other to form protons and neutrons inside the atomic core. In those tiny entities—and they are mere inferences so far as we really know—the energy is invisible. In living things it’s manifest—but, for us, it’s not particularly remarkable. Familiarity breeds contempt. That dusty weed mostly reminds me to pull it. But chi also manifests in much more mysterious and higher form—as grace. And in that form, once more, it becomes invisible. We can, however, still experience it. We experience it as beauty, harmony, intelligence, and benevolence—real phenomena that escape reduction to the visible forms that carry it. That music isn’t violins or black dots on white paper. The grace of that building isn’t merely stone.

This sort of view of chi, poetic and therefore unifying, might be dismissed as a fuzzy sort of pantheism. But what it suggests to me is actually a glimpse into the very structure of reality. I conceive of it as consisting of three distinct but closely related elements always in interaction: matter, energy, and self. Staying with the Chinese modes of naming these things, the first is yin, the receptive, the second yang, the creative, and the third is the Tao. We would call it God, the ultimate Self. A proper view of this structure, I would suggest, emerges when we imagine that the same constituent elements exist at every level of reality, not merely here in on earth. This would suggest that matter has its higher or subtle forms as well—beyond the border I keep talking about. So does energy. So does self, writ small or large. And in that case we get a conceptually sharper view of chi or grace in the bargain. Here is how I would argue that:

What appears as simple energy to us—thus solar power, for example—is chi as it manifests in a lower order of reality. What we call life is that same energy already intensified to a higher pitch, but still embedded in the lower order. It is a sign of a transition between orders, the prelude to entry into the next “mansion” that exists above ours. Living here we’re poised between dimensions, at the very point of transition. What we call grace is the life present in the heavenly reaches touching this one but only, alas, ever so lightly. To have it more abundantly, as suggested in John 10:10, we must cross over.

Pondering Action

In a comment on “Pondering Desolation,” Monique wonders why the life of action is so distracting and compelling—and why it produces imbalances with undesirable results. Good points. Her comment reminded me that life on the frontier, and here of course I mean life on the borderzone, has its own solution to the demand for “action in the world.” We are, after all, supposed to be in the world if not of it. The Sufi tradition is but one of others that calls for realizing spiritual values in the world—but it is a tradition that gives this matter emphasis. In that tradition withdrawal into solitudes—and celibacy, for that matter—are seen as temporary practices to strengthen the individual for the life of action.

I would also note here that in Asia the martial arts, and related practices derived from it, like Tai chi chuan, directly link physical with spiritual action. And there is also the body of useful western observations about types of personalities—inner- and outer-directed (introverts and extroverts), sometimes linked to body types (somatotypes). This last concept was developed by the psychologist William Herbert Sheldon and studied at Yale. Sheldon proposed three body types called endomorphs, mesomorphs, and ectomorphs, roughly associated with personality types that are gregarious-social, active-muscular-athletic, and inward-sensitive-cerebral. People are, or tend toward, one or the other of these. Thus we may be drawn into the social whirl or the world of action by our own temperament. But beneath our temperaments we are all souls, and ways of life that let us express our given natures at the highest form have been developed over time.

I’ve always felt that the Chinese concept of chi, rudely rendered as life force, is perhaps the key to the spiritual life—no matter what our constitution. Four strangers, all from different parts of the world—in a time before English became a world language—met at a tavern and decided to journey together. Some days later they came across an orchard, and all four cried out in delight. One saw cherries, another one les cerise, a third one die kirschen, a fourth called them cseresnye. They saw the same fruit—a sweet red berry with a stone in the middle. The Asian chi or qi, ki, or gi is another’s baraka, the third person’s grace, a fourth traveler’s prana, and so on.

Why does chi flow more readily in the desolation of the desert, on the peak of rocky mountains? Because the distractions of the world have been minimized. Our genuine happiness derives from increasing and concentrating the flow of grace; unhappiness rises when this flow is rapidly dispersed or blocked by endless distractions. The modern error is to confuse baraka with ordinary life energy of the sort we get from carbohydrates. If it were only that, mere over-eating would make us saints. The wisdom of the traditions lies in recognizing that this energy is of another dimensionality, above that of the coarser kind. It is subtle but, when present, of tremendous potency. In very concentrated form it will cure ills spontaneous and more, much more…

The key to spiritualizing action seems to be concentration. The key to concentration is detachment—not in the sense of withdrawal but in the sense of presence. This demands the cultivation of a peculiar sort of duality within ourselves. We must be present to ourselves while simultaneously attending to the action before us. This may sound weird and contradictory, but it isn’t. What we must detach from is identification with the constant upwelling of emotional reaction to anything and everything. It is that automatic commentary of our habit selves—sometimes a whisper, sometimes a shouting, sometimes rage, sometimes hysteria—which actually distracts us. Action only requires seeing the facts, understanding them, selecting the right action—and then doing it. Without commentary. When the phone rings just as we start typing a sentence, the mind shouts, God dammit! I hope that’s not…whatever. A centered self, a concentrated self, a self that has prepared itself in the morning with appropriate meditation—renewed at intervals—will simply…pick up the telephone. The three dots I placed there stand for an inward pause, a conscious breath to suppress the shouting; it’s a reminder.

Yes, yes, already. But it’s hard. — And it is. But in a real sense the distractions are all internal. What’s out there is just the bombardment of facts. The distraction arises when we let them—distract us. From our intention. Our intention to act. We want to focus on something—and therefore, interrupted, we lose our focus. The trick is not to lose our focus even in the midst of interruptions. The result of this, if assiduously cultivated, is that the atmosphere will cool. The mind will become more disciplined. Slowly. Gradually. The flow of chi will increase, less of it will be blown away into the winds of emotion. We will become more efficient. The lower self is in many ways quite like an animal and requires long and tedious training—and retraining. And again.

My own experience is that practices of this type wear out after a while. As I succeed in organizing my own action better, as things calm down, I tend to ease up on the discipline and then over days I gradually slip back into bad habits. But the upside is that each succeeding effort is more successful, and even in these matters habits do build, not least the habit of just clearing the desk when I feel myself getting hysterical—putting the To Do list aside, overcoming the terror and panic of doing so—and beginning all over again with a session of reminders and a forcible recall of what it’s all about. It works—if we do. We learned that last motto, years ago, from Laura Huxley.

I’ll have more to say on this subject. The whole reality of chi and grace has many more interesting aspects. The teachings of Montessori were centered on natural concentration as a “normalizing” phenomenon. I’ll get to it. It’s on the To Do list.