Someday we may discover—after we have passed the border—just how strange an environment surrounded us in life, especially if we spent our time in a modern, highly mechanized urban civilization, out of intimate contact with nature.
Out in nature we’re always in close relationship with living systems, whether we live an agricultural, hunting-gathering, or a herding life. Of course I don’t mean modern agriculture with all of its endless machines and chemical underpinnings. These thoughts occur because I’ve been reading, again, the novels of Alexander McCall Smith, creator of Mma Ramotswe, Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective. In that book quite frequently we are reminded of an earlier way of life, herding cattle in the arid regions adjoining the Kalahari desert in Africa.
The other root of this notion arises from retirement—and age. In a way, with leisure, I’ve been thrown back into my youth, a period of greater openness, then, as now, to the world of intuitions and ideas, not in the sense of concepts but of perceptions of a higher character. And these, it seems to me, are often indistinguishable from the perceptions that reach us by way of the natural world—the plants, the grasses, the trees, the birds, the animals. The living things, strange though it may sound, are also the worlds of poetry, music, epics, tales, novels, great dramas, and immortal myths.
That on which we focus our attention—that, in turn, takes root in us. Attention is a kind of identification. If we attend to the myriad issues and problems of modern life, that modern life invades our soul and takes up its residence in us. And our perception of reality then becomes, well, industrialized. We see everything in terms of the outer—because we attend to it, indeed must do so.
One of the powerful tools we have to combat this invasion of our natural waters by alien flora and fauna is recurring, periodic detachment. That doesn’t have to take the form of meditation, diaries, worship, or things of that nature. We can also recover our fundamental reality by walks in parks, gardening, or working with our hands outdoors or in.
With age—in which experience has amassed a great deal of visceral as well as formal knowledge—attentive listening eventually produces the strange feeling that what we take to be reality is an artificial construct. It mostly hides that which are, in our essence, and that which really surrounds us, not just in the immediate quarter-mile or so but including the heavens above reaching infinitely far outward (on the visible plain) and in realms only known from myths (in the invisible).
Keep notes. Someday we may have occasion to compare them.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Border Region ABCs
Sometimes we have experiences in which the facts are crystal clear, yet these facts conspire to produce in us emotional contact with something grand: awe, love, union, exaltation. We might actually shiver. To make this sharper: We understand the situation perfectly well. At the same time we have emotions. The two coincide and it is impossible to separate the two sets of facts, the cognitive grasp to one side, the feeling to the other. They go together. They are mutually supportive.
I contrast this to experiencing pure music—no words. We may have powerful emotions, but there is no cognitive counterpart. We can project a cognitive frame in order to explain the music. We might imagine a marriage in heaven, say, and the great climax of the music as the final embrace. Or we may imagine a victorious army taking possession, at last, of the field of battle. But these are—projections. We supply the cognitive frame. It isn’t really present in the music in any even remotely visible or graspable form.
Similarly we sometimes experience cognitive insights entirely devoid of any feelings except, perhaps, a certain satisfaction that we have finally understood the puzzle. We may have an Aha! moment, but it is just a flash.
We can label these three experiences as A, B, and C. Now the question arises, which is the best?
I pose this question because, in accounts of mystical experiences—a good example is the medieval, fourteenth century anonymous work called The Cloud of Unknowing—the middle position, B, pure feeling and the impossibility of knowledge, is held out as the ultimate. And in countless other accounts of a similar kind, however they might be labeled, the same conclusion is drawn.
Now I characterize these three experiences using other imagery. I see B and C as polarities. The ecstatic state is pure emotion but, if carried to its ultimate expression, it is equivalent to annihilation. Not surprisingly, annihilation is one meaning of nirvana, and, I would submit, so is the idea of union with God. So great is the difference between creature and creator, that the first united with the other is nothing at all. The pure cognitive breakthrough, C, pure intellectual grasp, also carries a negative connotation for me. It is ultimately far too abstract. That is why metaphysics bores me. Pure concepts, pure numbers—who cares.
The only interesting experience, for me, is the first, A, in which the two polarities appear in relationship and, at best, in union—but not in fusion. Knowledge and feeling are present and remain distinct, each supporting the other.
But this position implies duality and hence is denigrated. In pure idealism or mysticism, monism reigns supreme. In one the intellect, in the other feeling are viewed as illusory. Monisms, invariably, lack all dynamism and life. To have real union, you must first have separation. And this very separation is the womb of life. It spawns the desire for union and the energy whereby the separated strive for union again. If you believe the mystics, this striving terminates in annihilation. My intuition shakes its head. For me each union is but the prelude to another separation, followed by another motion upward in a spiraling ascent.
I contrast this to experiencing pure music—no words. We may have powerful emotions, but there is no cognitive counterpart. We can project a cognitive frame in order to explain the music. We might imagine a marriage in heaven, say, and the great climax of the music as the final embrace. Or we may imagine a victorious army taking possession, at last, of the field of battle. But these are—projections. We supply the cognitive frame. It isn’t really present in the music in any even remotely visible or graspable form.
Similarly we sometimes experience cognitive insights entirely devoid of any feelings except, perhaps, a certain satisfaction that we have finally understood the puzzle. We may have an Aha! moment, but it is just a flash.
We can label these three experiences as A, B, and C. Now the question arises, which is the best?
I pose this question because, in accounts of mystical experiences—a good example is the medieval, fourteenth century anonymous work called The Cloud of Unknowing—the middle position, B, pure feeling and the impossibility of knowledge, is held out as the ultimate. And in countless other accounts of a similar kind, however they might be labeled, the same conclusion is drawn.
Now I characterize these three experiences using other imagery. I see B and C as polarities. The ecstatic state is pure emotion but, if carried to its ultimate expression, it is equivalent to annihilation. Not surprisingly, annihilation is one meaning of nirvana, and, I would submit, so is the idea of union with God. So great is the difference between creature and creator, that the first united with the other is nothing at all. The pure cognitive breakthrough, C, pure intellectual grasp, also carries a negative connotation for me. It is ultimately far too abstract. That is why metaphysics bores me. Pure concepts, pure numbers—who cares.
The only interesting experience, for me, is the first, A, in which the two polarities appear in relationship and, at best, in union—but not in fusion. Knowledge and feeling are present and remain distinct, each supporting the other.
But this position implies duality and hence is denigrated. In pure idealism or mysticism, monism reigns supreme. In one the intellect, in the other feeling are viewed as illusory. Monisms, invariably, lack all dynamism and life. To have real union, you must first have separation. And this very separation is the womb of life. It spawns the desire for union and the energy whereby the separated strive for union again. If you believe the mystics, this striving terminates in annihilation. My intuition shakes its head. For me each union is but the prelude to another separation, followed by another motion upward in a spiraling ascent.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Knotty Issue - Art
I am not altogether happy with the last post (Art, Spirituality)—another way to put it, that post needs elaboration. The problems are these:
Borrowed Inspiration
Here is an example. Someone published a novel a couple of decades ago entitled On the Beach. The intention behind this novel was fundamentally political—anti-nukes. Yet it took the form of an artistic creation, with characters and plot. It evoked emotions, used imagination, etc. Now the novel just happened to be relatively undistinguished, but often quite advanced works of art appear, each moved by an agenda drawn from the lower levels of existence. The creative process, no matter what the artist’s intention, is energized by that aspect of ourselves which reaches beyond the here-and-now. Thus it borrows energy to achieve worldly aims. Now, arguably, all human creations have a range of motives in which the lower levels are also present. But great art is distinguished from the ordinary kinds by a motive obeying an attraction from above, aiming to unite with the mysterious higher—not in order to sell or influence anybody but purely for the sake of art, thus purely from a perceived spiritual inspiration. Such art is marked by its orientation. Never mind the details: the substance, the story, the style. The inner orientation is what makes the difference. In these situations nothing is borrowed “in order to.” The work proceeds from love. The pursuit of the arts, in this second form, is a spiritual striving. To be sure it isn’t felt as such because, in our culture, spiritual action is almost always pent up in kennels, as it were. If the activity is not outwardly religious, if it isn’t lit by the lights of dogma, is not intellectually aligned with the religious, and/or is not characterized by various kinds of voluntary self-denial, asceticism, and the like—then it is denied the definition.
The Ambiguity of Art
Such denial is in part very much justified precisely because the category, art, is such a muddled mixture. This is nicely documented by the prevailing the tongue-in-cheek question we’ve all heard used, always with a touch of irony: “Yes. But is it art?” To see art in its two prevailing modes, as serving lower purposes and as a kind of worship, requires adequacy. No arbitrary rules can be applied. To see requires a developed eyesight—and only those who have ears can hear it.
- The arts require the spiritual dimension, and all those who engage in the arts do, in a sense, borrow the fire of the gods.
- But in the arts, as in everything else, the intention is the determining factor. I noted correctly that art is the language of spirituality, but it can be a borrowed language to speak about more mundane things. At the same time, if will is moved by a perception of the spiritual realm, thus if the artist is obeying the Muse rather than using energies that flow from her to shape some intention directed downward, as it were, the art will still be illuminated from above, but it is the intention which governs the ultimate expression.
Borrowed Inspiration
Here is an example. Someone published a novel a couple of decades ago entitled On the Beach. The intention behind this novel was fundamentally political—anti-nukes. Yet it took the form of an artistic creation, with characters and plot. It evoked emotions, used imagination, etc. Now the novel just happened to be relatively undistinguished, but often quite advanced works of art appear, each moved by an agenda drawn from the lower levels of existence. The creative process, no matter what the artist’s intention, is energized by that aspect of ourselves which reaches beyond the here-and-now. Thus it borrows energy to achieve worldly aims. Now, arguably, all human creations have a range of motives in which the lower levels are also present. But great art is distinguished from the ordinary kinds by a motive obeying an attraction from above, aiming to unite with the mysterious higher—not in order to sell or influence anybody but purely for the sake of art, thus purely from a perceived spiritual inspiration. Such art is marked by its orientation. Never mind the details: the substance, the story, the style. The inner orientation is what makes the difference. In these situations nothing is borrowed “in order to.” The work proceeds from love. The pursuit of the arts, in this second form, is a spiritual striving. To be sure it isn’t felt as such because, in our culture, spiritual action is almost always pent up in kennels, as it were. If the activity is not outwardly religious, if it isn’t lit by the lights of dogma, is not intellectually aligned with the religious, and/or is not characterized by various kinds of voluntary self-denial, asceticism, and the like—then it is denied the definition.
The Ambiguity of Art
Such denial is in part very much justified precisely because the category, art, is such a muddled mixture. This is nicely documented by the prevailing the tongue-in-cheek question we’ve all heard used, always with a touch of irony: “Yes. But is it art?” To see art in its two prevailing modes, as serving lower purposes and as a kind of worship, requires adequacy. No arbitrary rules can be applied. To see requires a developed eyesight—and only those who have ears can hear it.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Art, Spirituality
The arts are the language of spirituality, but the complexities involved in this subject—cultural, social, personal, and, alas, commercial—make it difficult to see this. I’ll attempt a little unpacking today. Certainly in my youth the arts were viewed as a kind of rebellion against bourgeois customs. My youth extended from birth to twenty-five, let’s say, thus from 1936 to 1961. But this rebellion or upheaval predated my birth if, say, looking at painting, we see expressionism as an early sign of this collective mood. It goes even farther back if we take Romanticism as the model. It had its roots in the eighteenth century but flourished in the nineteenth. My own view is that the process—we’re talking about the Western Culture by and large—had its origins early in the nineteenth century. It took religious as well as artistic forms, and all of these were, in one way or another, impulses that moved against rationalism as it peaked in the Enlightenment, thus at the divide between the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, marked dramatically by the French Revolution.
The preponderant thrust of rationalism was outward, world-bound, and leveling. It’s ultimate expressions are “All is matter” and “God is dead.” The artistic reaction to this—ignoring the foolish behavior of all young people, including mine when I was young—is to deny and to oppose it. The denial does not automatically translate into an embrace of ritualistic (and never mind dogmatic) religiousness. But what the arts all sustain is something else, something higher, something above, something transcending.
Humanism is a marvelous synthesis of enlightenment thought energized by the new intuition. I always marvel reading, for example, Thomas Mann’s Sufferings and Greatness of the Masters—a book I re-read once a decade, roughly. It is such a splendid example of bridging the chaos between the Enlightenment and what is yet to emerge, a new Age of Faith. I am of the generation, perhaps a precocious member of it, that fully understands the Thomas Manns of the world, my grandfather’s generation, but can already discern the promised land that they could feel but could not intellectually affirm. I am the beneficiary of the dramatic devolution of rationalism into something ugly and destructive. That hadn’t happened yet in the formative years of that generation; and when they lived through the shattering experiences of two World Wars, they still clung to the blended value system that they had fashioned in youth.
Art as rebellion is a youthful gesture, jejune—and perhaps for that reason appealing to the masses. The model of the artist is the Pied Piper not the pitchfork wielding revolutionary who—all too soon—transforms himself into the commissar. In that rebellion is a conflict, it draws the media. Therefore rebellious writers and painters, people who like to exploit shock for fame and money, achieve at least visibility and, if clever, if able to adapt and channel their rebellion, can also achieve wealth.
Real art—which need not always be great art, but certainly great art above all—arises from travelling in the borderzone of life on this earth. It looks like rebellion, at least to some, because it fails to conform to the norms of fossilizing custom. The able artist will strip his work of obvious signs of rebellion, knowing full well that such behavior is posturing. Artistic inspiration is a grace. The artist is an instrument and, once aware of this, intent on making him or herself a fitting means to something mysterious. This is but one layer of an onion; the subject is inexhaustible.
The preponderant thrust of rationalism was outward, world-bound, and leveling. It’s ultimate expressions are “All is matter” and “God is dead.” The artistic reaction to this—ignoring the foolish behavior of all young people, including mine when I was young—is to deny and to oppose it. The denial does not automatically translate into an embrace of ritualistic (and never mind dogmatic) religiousness. But what the arts all sustain is something else, something higher, something above, something transcending.
Humanism is a marvelous synthesis of enlightenment thought energized by the new intuition. I always marvel reading, for example, Thomas Mann’s Sufferings and Greatness of the Masters—a book I re-read once a decade, roughly. It is such a splendid example of bridging the chaos between the Enlightenment and what is yet to emerge, a new Age of Faith. I am of the generation, perhaps a precocious member of it, that fully understands the Thomas Manns of the world, my grandfather’s generation, but can already discern the promised land that they could feel but could not intellectually affirm. I am the beneficiary of the dramatic devolution of rationalism into something ugly and destructive. That hadn’t happened yet in the formative years of that generation; and when they lived through the shattering experiences of two World Wars, they still clung to the blended value system that they had fashioned in youth.
Art as rebellion is a youthful gesture, jejune—and perhaps for that reason appealing to the masses. The model of the artist is the Pied Piper not the pitchfork wielding revolutionary who—all too soon—transforms himself into the commissar. In that rebellion is a conflict, it draws the media. Therefore rebellious writers and painters, people who like to exploit shock for fame and money, achieve at least visibility and, if clever, if able to adapt and channel their rebellion, can also achieve wealth.
Real art—which need not always be great art, but certainly great art above all—arises from travelling in the borderzone of life on this earth. It looks like rebellion, at least to some, because it fails to conform to the norms of fossilizing custom. The able artist will strip his work of obvious signs of rebellion, knowing full well that such behavior is posturing. Artistic inspiration is a grace. The artist is an instrument and, once aware of this, intent on making him or herself a fitting means to something mysterious. This is but one layer of an onion; the subject is inexhaustible.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The Householder
The household still figures in a meaningful way in modern statistical measurement (e.g., household income, number of households, etc.), but it has never carried any kind of spiritual connotation. Not so in the East. In Sufi circles, for one, at least in the tradition that I know a little something about, the Naqshbandi, to be a householder is deemed to be the minimum qualification for higher learning, thus for the spiritual path.
This stands in contrast to the Western and some Eastern traditions where higher forms of dedication appear to demand that the seeker abandon the usual life occupations, take up a celibate or ascetic style of living, and devote him- or herself entirely to the pursuit of God. The life of the artist, similarly, is viewed in the same way. Above all, as an artist, do not be bourgeois, for God’s sake! You must pursue a life in garrets, unattached, eccentric, and unpredictable. The nine-to-five is a definite No-No. I’ve always found this amusing in that—as secularization has spread like a brushfire over the last couple of completed centuries—the scribbler, painter, sculptor, musician, dancer, or actor have been required, in an odd sort of way, at least outwardly, to imitate the saint. Only sexual freedom—but to be enjoyed strictly outside the constrictions of marriage—has been granted these not-quite-volunteers to be the secular saints of the West.
When I came across the householder dictum in the writings of Idries Shah—and his writings are, above all, traditional Sufi teachings presented in varied and carefully selected assemblages to the modern Western reader—I felt a sense of confirmation. I’ve always subscribed to idea that hierarchies exist, but never to the notion that you could join them by merely conforming your behavior to some set pattern. Similarly I’ve considered the notion that the artist may be (or to be genuine even must be) an unreliable, unpredictable, irresponsible, and destructive rebel simply ridiculous: as if there is something magical in poems, novels, paintings, etc. that balances out a man fertilizing women at a whim, abandoning them and their children when another whim arises, and his body to alcohol and drugs because spontaneity trumps everything else. Pure, ignorant baloney.
I have always had difficulties with priesthoods—and this despite the fact that I believe in real hierarchies among the living and beyond. Priesthoods are the institutionalization, in effect the reification, of something much more dynamic and mysterious. Priesthoods have a certain functional role to play, alas. This comes home to me looking at the Muslim world. There the Prophet expressly forbade the forming of a priesthood, yet ranks upon ranks of lawyers came to represent that functions, and we have a priesthood there, too, in all but name. I bow to necessity. I’ve no objection to priests as functionaries. I oppose priesthood as the presupposition that a priest has a higher status than, say, a carpenter.
Why the focus on the householder in Sufism? In functional terms the householder is a responsible person who has managed the basic adaptations to the world and to society. One thing at a time. Before a person aspires to a higher level, she or he ought to be mistress or master of the fundamentals. This is very good doctrine, it seems to me, and equally pertinent to the would-be artist.
This stands in contrast to the Western and some Eastern traditions where higher forms of dedication appear to demand that the seeker abandon the usual life occupations, take up a celibate or ascetic style of living, and devote him- or herself entirely to the pursuit of God. The life of the artist, similarly, is viewed in the same way. Above all, as an artist, do not be bourgeois, for God’s sake! You must pursue a life in garrets, unattached, eccentric, and unpredictable. The nine-to-five is a definite No-No. I’ve always found this amusing in that—as secularization has spread like a brushfire over the last couple of completed centuries—the scribbler, painter, sculptor, musician, dancer, or actor have been required, in an odd sort of way, at least outwardly, to imitate the saint. Only sexual freedom—but to be enjoyed strictly outside the constrictions of marriage—has been granted these not-quite-volunteers to be the secular saints of the West.
When I came across the householder dictum in the writings of Idries Shah—and his writings are, above all, traditional Sufi teachings presented in varied and carefully selected assemblages to the modern Western reader—I felt a sense of confirmation. I’ve always subscribed to idea that hierarchies exist, but never to the notion that you could join them by merely conforming your behavior to some set pattern. Similarly I’ve considered the notion that the artist may be (or to be genuine even must be) an unreliable, unpredictable, irresponsible, and destructive rebel simply ridiculous: as if there is something magical in poems, novels, paintings, etc. that balances out a man fertilizing women at a whim, abandoning them and their children when another whim arises, and his body to alcohol and drugs because spontaneity trumps everything else. Pure, ignorant baloney.
I have always had difficulties with priesthoods—and this despite the fact that I believe in real hierarchies among the living and beyond. Priesthoods are the institutionalization, in effect the reification, of something much more dynamic and mysterious. Priesthoods have a certain functional role to play, alas. This comes home to me looking at the Muslim world. There the Prophet expressly forbade the forming of a priesthood, yet ranks upon ranks of lawyers came to represent that functions, and we have a priesthood there, too, in all but name. I bow to necessity. I’ve no objection to priests as functionaries. I oppose priesthood as the presupposition that a priest has a higher status than, say, a carpenter.
Why the focus on the householder in Sufism? In functional terms the householder is a responsible person who has managed the basic adaptations to the world and to society. One thing at a time. Before a person aspires to a higher level, she or he ought to be mistress or master of the fundamentals. This is very good doctrine, it seems to me, and equally pertinent to the would-be artist.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The Journal: A Tool of Contemplation
In my experience keeping a journal is one of the most valuable tools for contemplation. But a word about that word: certain words have awkward shadows. By contemplation I simply mean a centered inner state, balance, calm, and clarity. It might be put into the language of martial arts and called readiness; in that category readiness is also means emptiness. Nothing interferes with the steady look at reality as it is. I also like the word “sovereign,” used as an adjective, because in a state of contemplation we feel above the fray but not superior to it in a down-the-nose sort of way, just above it, ready to act, able to refrain, mistress or master of the self.
A contemplative journal is not a record of what I did yesterday. To-do lists are much more efficient for tracking. The point of an inner journal is to help me become aware. Its subject matter, in my case, is often something that troubles, irritates, or exercises me. I look at that and examine why I’m agitated. In due time—usually about a page of handwritten material later—the problem begins to sort. Another half-page later, calm begins to manifest. The irritation has receded. I see it clearly now. My various internal constituencies have calmed down. I am aware of the sources of my anxiety. These are almost always reflexive and therefore unexamined reactions. They combine and produce a collective shouting. I examine the matter with awareness, like an Inspector General, uninvolved. Then I see why I was reacting, see the point or pointlessness of it. If there is a point, I can jot it on a to-do list. In nine cases of ten, the root of irritation is something minor or unimportant—as seen under the species of eternity.
I don’t use the valuable time of journal writing—best done first thing in the morning—for tackling intellectual, analytical problems. Those are best done when I’m already “present.” Intellectualizing has no effect on inner states unless the activity is difficult enough so that it really deepens concentration. The process of journal-keeping serves me to clear away useless or energy-consuming “states”; states, in this context, are moods, preoccupations, emotionally-toned anticipations, anxieties—but also feelings of triumphalism (“Just wait till I tell him that! I can hardly wait to see the confusion on the bastard’s face.”). Upcoming events have a way of throwing a shadow backward from the future—even relatively minor events, e.g., having to go to the dentist for a cleaning or a checkup. These shadows disturb my equilibrium. Big meetings, trips, presentations—indeed any and all occurrences that in some way involve the self, disturb routine, or offer opportunities for momentary failure or success. These shadows are like strings—and I’m the puppet. But I want that feeling of sovereignty. From within that feeling, I am not at all concerned with the outcome. I am above it. I’m in a state of readiness. Que sera, sera. And I feel that without any kind of accompanying resignation or reservations. That is sovereignty, and looking at the day to come in that state, focusing on the up-boil of emotion-laced mental contents, until I see them objectively—that is the real value of journal-keeping of this kind.
These practices, to be sure, demand that we already have an effective cosmology. We must see ourselves as capable of worth. We must see ourselves as intended by something higher than ourselves; we must know, even if temporarily we don’t feel it, that we are empowered to be self-governing souls by our creator. If we seek our own worth in the very turbulence that we are fighting, we will merely (to change the metaphor) stir the pot. Nothing will change. We may just work ourselves into a greater fury or depression. We must become aware of hard rock beneath or steel within our own spine. In the Unity movement (but it is just one example), negation and affirmation are recommended. We must deny every lower manifestation of the mind, every associational stream attempting to suck us back into the problem; we must affirm our transcending origin and destiny. With practice and with time, the stable of Augias will be cleared of manure, even if we have to reroute a river to get the job done. Thereafter, things will improve if we keep returning to the inner silence that we can produce by the right application of attention—in this practice expressed as words on paper.
Public journals—blogs are today’s best example—do not serve this function. They are means of communication in which an audience is always at least potentially present. Journal-keeping is not communication. It is more akin to housecleaning or taking inventory. In many traditions mirrors are used as a symbol. Cleaning the mirror is the object—so that it is capable of reflecting the higher light. Windows work as a good symbol too. Life’s dust and grime obscure them. But the sun shines beyond the pane if we attack the surface with Windex, that favorite of mine.
A contemplative journal is not a record of what I did yesterday. To-do lists are much more efficient for tracking. The point of an inner journal is to help me become aware. Its subject matter, in my case, is often something that troubles, irritates, or exercises me. I look at that and examine why I’m agitated. In due time—usually about a page of handwritten material later—the problem begins to sort. Another half-page later, calm begins to manifest. The irritation has receded. I see it clearly now. My various internal constituencies have calmed down. I am aware of the sources of my anxiety. These are almost always reflexive and therefore unexamined reactions. They combine and produce a collective shouting. I examine the matter with awareness, like an Inspector General, uninvolved. Then I see why I was reacting, see the point or pointlessness of it. If there is a point, I can jot it on a to-do list. In nine cases of ten, the root of irritation is something minor or unimportant—as seen under the species of eternity.
I don’t use the valuable time of journal writing—best done first thing in the morning—for tackling intellectual, analytical problems. Those are best done when I’m already “present.” Intellectualizing has no effect on inner states unless the activity is difficult enough so that it really deepens concentration. The process of journal-keeping serves me to clear away useless or energy-consuming “states”; states, in this context, are moods, preoccupations, emotionally-toned anticipations, anxieties—but also feelings of triumphalism (“Just wait till I tell him that! I can hardly wait to see the confusion on the bastard’s face.”). Upcoming events have a way of throwing a shadow backward from the future—even relatively minor events, e.g., having to go to the dentist for a cleaning or a checkup. These shadows disturb my equilibrium. Big meetings, trips, presentations—indeed any and all occurrences that in some way involve the self, disturb routine, or offer opportunities for momentary failure or success. These shadows are like strings—and I’m the puppet. But I want that feeling of sovereignty. From within that feeling, I am not at all concerned with the outcome. I am above it. I’m in a state of readiness. Que sera, sera. And I feel that without any kind of accompanying resignation or reservations. That is sovereignty, and looking at the day to come in that state, focusing on the up-boil of emotion-laced mental contents, until I see them objectively—that is the real value of journal-keeping of this kind.
These practices, to be sure, demand that we already have an effective cosmology. We must see ourselves as capable of worth. We must see ourselves as intended by something higher than ourselves; we must know, even if temporarily we don’t feel it, that we are empowered to be self-governing souls by our creator. If we seek our own worth in the very turbulence that we are fighting, we will merely (to change the metaphor) stir the pot. Nothing will change. We may just work ourselves into a greater fury or depression. We must become aware of hard rock beneath or steel within our own spine. In the Unity movement (but it is just one example), negation and affirmation are recommended. We must deny every lower manifestation of the mind, every associational stream attempting to suck us back into the problem; we must affirm our transcending origin and destiny. With practice and with time, the stable of Augias will be cleared of manure, even if we have to reroute a river to get the job done. Thereafter, things will improve if we keep returning to the inner silence that we can produce by the right application of attention—in this practice expressed as words on paper.
Public journals—blogs are today’s best example—do not serve this function. They are means of communication in which an audience is always at least potentially present. Journal-keeping is not communication. It is more akin to housecleaning or taking inventory. In many traditions mirrors are used as a symbol. Cleaning the mirror is the object—so that it is capable of reflecting the higher light. Windows work as a good symbol too. Life’s dust and grime obscure them. But the sun shines beyond the pane if we attack the surface with Windex, that favorite of mine.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
The Contemplative Life
The last three weeks in my own life illustrate the reason why, in every culture, contemplative orders or aggregations have come into being and still persist despite the violent churn of Modernity around the globe. A sudden up-surge of work caused me to turn my head away from blogging—and the blog that I neglected most was Borderzone. We live in a layered environment in which the most demanding is the lowest level, the physical; the social is next; we will neglect it when we are ill or injured; and we neglect the one above that, the mental and the spiritual, when turbulence draws our attention downward.
I was editing novels I wrote about ten years ago to prepare them for publication. These books are not exactly time-bound in that they deal with an imagined future, and if anything has changed in the outer world since about 2000-2001, it has merely confirmed the trends that I used in my sagas as the base of my projections into the twenty-first century and beyond. But the effort to pummel these works into shape had to be done in the eternal Now, and my attention pulled me well in-land and away from the borderzone.
The men and women who formed and still inhabit the zone of contemplation, to give it a novel name, scorned the kinds of self-centered motives that make me wish to see my work enjoyed by others. For this reason they created environments for themselves in which “the world” was walled off to the maximum extent.
This has some curious aspects. One is that I wrote these novels while I held a demanding job and typically worked about 10 hours a day, not counting two hours of commuting. The writing itself, then, was a form of contemplative activity. It energized me and kept me sane. I used to carve out the time in the early morning, rising at 4 a.m. to write until 7. Contemplation is not, repeat NOT idle musing and idyllic walks. It is creative work. Its chief outer manifestation is concentration, but with the mind and heart in an invisible dimension. This is as true of writing as of sculpting—or cooking, or singing, or scientific work. The other aspect I would touch upon is that the contemplatives typically do a great deal of work, but they set boundaries to it, keep it as routine as possible, and pursue it in a structured manner. Some historians assign virtually all credit for the agricultural restoration of Europe to St. Benedict (480-547), at a time when the shattering of the Roman Empire and wide-spread depopulation had allowed large tracts of Europe to grow wild. In due course, the monastic orders, of which the first was the Benedictine, slowly accumulated immense wealth that, as other historians suggest, was the capital that Europe seized to underwrite the Industrial Revolution. In other words, not mere musing and idyllic walks with the occasional holding out of a begging bowl. But this sort of thing is not taught in our grade- and high-schools, therefore it comes as a surprise to some.
Indeed the contemplative life is not the contradiction of action, per se. But it has a very conscious and sophisticated view of action and thus harnesses its power more effectively. My own short-comings as a contemplative were demonstrated in the last several weeks. I allowed the excitement caused by revisiting my vivid imaginary worlds to break my usual routines. Live and learn. It’s possible at all ages. Indeed trying to do so is a sign of youth. A neighbor passed on to me just the other day a wise old saying that I hadn’t heard before: “If you want to stay young, keep going uphill.”
I was editing novels I wrote about ten years ago to prepare them for publication. These books are not exactly time-bound in that they deal with an imagined future, and if anything has changed in the outer world since about 2000-2001, it has merely confirmed the trends that I used in my sagas as the base of my projections into the twenty-first century and beyond. But the effort to pummel these works into shape had to be done in the eternal Now, and my attention pulled me well in-land and away from the borderzone.
The men and women who formed and still inhabit the zone of contemplation, to give it a novel name, scorned the kinds of self-centered motives that make me wish to see my work enjoyed by others. For this reason they created environments for themselves in which “the world” was walled off to the maximum extent.
This has some curious aspects. One is that I wrote these novels while I held a demanding job and typically worked about 10 hours a day, not counting two hours of commuting. The writing itself, then, was a form of contemplative activity. It energized me and kept me sane. I used to carve out the time in the early morning, rising at 4 a.m. to write until 7. Contemplation is not, repeat NOT idle musing and idyllic walks. It is creative work. Its chief outer manifestation is concentration, but with the mind and heart in an invisible dimension. This is as true of writing as of sculpting—or cooking, or singing, or scientific work. The other aspect I would touch upon is that the contemplatives typically do a great deal of work, but they set boundaries to it, keep it as routine as possible, and pursue it in a structured manner. Some historians assign virtually all credit for the agricultural restoration of Europe to St. Benedict (480-547), at a time when the shattering of the Roman Empire and wide-spread depopulation had allowed large tracts of Europe to grow wild. In due course, the monastic orders, of which the first was the Benedictine, slowly accumulated immense wealth that, as other historians suggest, was the capital that Europe seized to underwrite the Industrial Revolution. In other words, not mere musing and idyllic walks with the occasional holding out of a begging bowl. But this sort of thing is not taught in our grade- and high-schools, therefore it comes as a surprise to some.
Indeed the contemplative life is not the contradiction of action, per se. But it has a very conscious and sophisticated view of action and thus harnesses its power more effectively. My own short-comings as a contemplative were demonstrated in the last several weeks. I allowed the excitement caused by revisiting my vivid imaginary worlds to break my usual routines. Live and learn. It’s possible at all ages. Indeed trying to do so is a sign of youth. A neighbor passed on to me just the other day a wise old saying that I hadn’t heard before: “If you want to stay young, keep going uphill.”
Monday, September 28, 2009
The Experience of Helen Keller
Self-observation tells us that consciousness manifests in many forms. Sharp self-awareness is rather rare. In times of stress and trouble, during infatuations, during illness, disasters, or after winning a sizeable lottery—while daydreaming, watching TV, musing at the wheel, and even doing habitual work—the self is in various states of identification. For all practical purposes, it is one with, unified with, its own experience. The sense of self is vaguely present at all times, but the consciousness of the self is dormant. It requires concentration to take control. “I had to get a hold of myself,” people say—but indicating what? They mean that they had to break the identification and become aware. With consciousness fully present—rather than held captive by experience—directed action becomes possible. Arguably a principal difference between people is the degree to which they are able effectively to detach. The word is paradoxical because, in this context, to be detached is to be present, whereas to be identified means that the self is absent in a state of semi-sleep. Shocks awaken people.
The Case
To illustrate the thesis I present the fascinating case of Helen Keller (1880-1968). Keller lost her sight and hearing in an illness at the age of 19 months. She was beginning to learn to speak, was imitating phrases that she heard. She had also learned the word for water and remembered it (as “wah-wah”) throughout her painful period of mental darkness. Thus her acquisition of language had at least begun, if only barely. Then she fell into a world of total silence and darkness. It is clear from her autobiography that she was conscious in a way—but conscious in the way I’ve labeled as identification. She felt a need to communicate and tried to do so with some success by using signs and gestures—pushing, pulling, imitating the motions of cutting bread to get bread, and so on. She felt powerful frustrations. And she enjoyed sensory experiences using her remaining powers of movement, smell, and touch. But full consciousness dawned in her only as she was approaching her seventh birthday. This happened while she felt the flow of water on one hand as her teacher, Anne Sullivan, spelled out the word for water with finger-motions on Helen’s other hand. Suddenly Helen understood. This was a revolutionary and dramatic experience for her! As soon as she had understood that a certain pattern of finger-touches stood for water—and that the experience of water thus had a name—her heroic and splendid career began. She had been enabled to experience abstraction. As she put it later, “The mystery of language was revealed to me.”
Discussion
Let us ponder this mystery, the mystery of naming. It consist of the association of two radically different phenomena with one another. In Keller’s case the two were the flow of water and a series of touches. Her mind made the conjunction: this is that. Her power of consciousness grasped this difference and sameness. But the association was presented to her by another person, and repeatedly, until Keller “got it.”
Keller’s experience, of course, was of a fundamental type, akin to something like the taste of chocolate. To convey what any taste actually is using words alone comes down to empty gesturing unless the other party shares the experience. But if the other does, just naming it suffices. In Keller’s case, one cannot say much more than simply to assert that such an association, between this and that, is obviously possible; we’ve all experienced it. But why then was this particular experience so revolutionary in Helen Keller’s case? During her long period of silence and darkness, she had already begun to use a kind of language—a language of motions. Why did her pushing (to signal “go away”) and pulling (to signal “come”)—and the discovery that these signs got appropriate responses—not give her the grand experience of understanding that a signed word gave her later?
My guess is that the discovery, the mystery of language, is the discovery of abstraction—but also that abstraction really points at something more than merely “abbreviation.” The motions she used earlier were such abbreviations, but they didn’t give her that moment of Aha! It seems that the abstract points to or reveals some aspect of another reality which, by means of the abstraction itself, suddenly becomes perceivable. Thus the emotion Keller felt came from the sudden opening to the dimension of Intelligence. In her own report, she spoke of having a feeling of suddenly remembering something long forgotten. Pushing and pulling were too closely associated with the physical facts of go-away, come-hither to serve the purpose of abstraction. The word “water” spelled with fingers, however, did have this alien quality of otherness and therefore its magical effect. The finger-spelling was radically different from the flow of water Keller actually felt on her other hand. An effort of inner linking took place. A new world opened.
The word “symbol” derives from the Greek word meaning “sign.” Language provides an alternative world of signs for every conceivable aspect of reality. By its very nature, language is arbitrary, illustrated by the fact that humanity uses many different languages. This quality, this arbitrary assignment of this for that, where the this has no resemblance whatever to the that, demands a corresponding motion or act by the perceiving intelligence, a perceptive act. When this act takes place effectively, the self awakens to a power dormant until then. The mystery of language, therefore, appears to be its power to evoke a recognition of meaning.
Curiously the perception of meaning, like the taste of chocolate, is a primordial experience we can’t describe. In a manner of speaking we acquire meanings long before we do. For most of us the recognition of abstraction is not an explosive experience, as it was for Helen Keller. Meaning is intrinsically associated with naming. For the child, early on, a table covered with objects is just a sensory landscape without meaning until the child discovers that that red object over there is called a “cup.” Once the object and the symbol are connected, the cup has meaning even as all the other stuff remains a landscape. “Buckle, Mami,” one of my daughters used to say in her crib, still tiny. She meant her bottle. Her hunger, her desire to have some milk, had been resolved into a clear meaning with a name. She had acquired a power more discriminating and efficient than simply crying.
Language awakens intelligence by separating the self and its surroundings (including its internal experiences like pain or pleasure) into a triad of relationships: there is the self, there is the object, and there is its abstract representation—its meaning. And meaning, to be sure, is a deeper concept than mere abstraction. Using that representation, the child can understand the object and, in turn, manipulate it in the mind itself and in communication with others. But using this insight, the self itself becomes an object of thought. An inchoate sensation becomes me; me becomes Jane, initially. Later, more ceremoniously, the last name is added: me becomes Jane Xavier.
Now the chief lesson I draw from this case is that language is a tool, a means. The capacity for understanding must be present and is innate. It isn’t language that produces intelligence but intelligence that manifests by using a tool. And once the tool is present, the powers of the intelligence are able to expand.
The Case
To illustrate the thesis I present the fascinating case of Helen Keller (1880-1968). Keller lost her sight and hearing in an illness at the age of 19 months. She was beginning to learn to speak, was imitating phrases that she heard. She had also learned the word for water and remembered it (as “wah-wah”) throughout her painful period of mental darkness. Thus her acquisition of language had at least begun, if only barely. Then she fell into a world of total silence and darkness. It is clear from her autobiography that she was conscious in a way—but conscious in the way I’ve labeled as identification. She felt a need to communicate and tried to do so with some success by using signs and gestures—pushing, pulling, imitating the motions of cutting bread to get bread, and so on. She felt powerful frustrations. And she enjoyed sensory experiences using her remaining powers of movement, smell, and touch. But full consciousness dawned in her only as she was approaching her seventh birthday. This happened while she felt the flow of water on one hand as her teacher, Anne Sullivan, spelled out the word for water with finger-motions on Helen’s other hand. Suddenly Helen understood. This was a revolutionary and dramatic experience for her! As soon as she had understood that a certain pattern of finger-touches stood for water—and that the experience of water thus had a name—her heroic and splendid career began. She had been enabled to experience abstraction. As she put it later, “The mystery of language was revealed to me.”
Discussion
Let us ponder this mystery, the mystery of naming. It consist of the association of two radically different phenomena with one another. In Keller’s case the two were the flow of water and a series of touches. Her mind made the conjunction: this is that. Her power of consciousness grasped this difference and sameness. But the association was presented to her by another person, and repeatedly, until Keller “got it.”
Keller’s experience, of course, was of a fundamental type, akin to something like the taste of chocolate. To convey what any taste actually is using words alone comes down to empty gesturing unless the other party shares the experience. But if the other does, just naming it suffices. In Keller’s case, one cannot say much more than simply to assert that such an association, between this and that, is obviously possible; we’ve all experienced it. But why then was this particular experience so revolutionary in Helen Keller’s case? During her long period of silence and darkness, she had already begun to use a kind of language—a language of motions. Why did her pushing (to signal “go away”) and pulling (to signal “come”)—and the discovery that these signs got appropriate responses—not give her the grand experience of understanding that a signed word gave her later?
My guess is that the discovery, the mystery of language, is the discovery of abstraction—but also that abstraction really points at something more than merely “abbreviation.” The motions she used earlier were such abbreviations, but they didn’t give her that moment of Aha! It seems that the abstract points to or reveals some aspect of another reality which, by means of the abstraction itself, suddenly becomes perceivable. Thus the emotion Keller felt came from the sudden opening to the dimension of Intelligence. In her own report, she spoke of having a feeling of suddenly remembering something long forgotten. Pushing and pulling were too closely associated with the physical facts of go-away, come-hither to serve the purpose of abstraction. The word “water” spelled with fingers, however, did have this alien quality of otherness and therefore its magical effect. The finger-spelling was radically different from the flow of water Keller actually felt on her other hand. An effort of inner linking took place. A new world opened.
The word “symbol” derives from the Greek word meaning “sign.” Language provides an alternative world of signs for every conceivable aspect of reality. By its very nature, language is arbitrary, illustrated by the fact that humanity uses many different languages. This quality, this arbitrary assignment of this for that, where the this has no resemblance whatever to the that, demands a corresponding motion or act by the perceiving intelligence, a perceptive act. When this act takes place effectively, the self awakens to a power dormant until then. The mystery of language, therefore, appears to be its power to evoke a recognition of meaning.
Curiously the perception of meaning, like the taste of chocolate, is a primordial experience we can’t describe. In a manner of speaking we acquire meanings long before we do. For most of us the recognition of abstraction is not an explosive experience, as it was for Helen Keller. Meaning is intrinsically associated with naming. For the child, early on, a table covered with objects is just a sensory landscape without meaning until the child discovers that that red object over there is called a “cup.” Once the object and the symbol are connected, the cup has meaning even as all the other stuff remains a landscape. “Buckle, Mami,” one of my daughters used to say in her crib, still tiny. She meant her bottle. Her hunger, her desire to have some milk, had been resolved into a clear meaning with a name. She had acquired a power more discriminating and efficient than simply crying.
Language awakens intelligence by separating the self and its surroundings (including its internal experiences like pain or pleasure) into a triad of relationships: there is the self, there is the object, and there is its abstract representation—its meaning. And meaning, to be sure, is a deeper concept than mere abstraction. Using that representation, the child can understand the object and, in turn, manipulate it in the mind itself and in communication with others. But using this insight, the self itself becomes an object of thought. An inchoate sensation becomes me; me becomes Jane, initially. Later, more ceremoniously, the last name is added: me becomes Jane Xavier.
Now the chief lesson I draw from this case is that language is a tool, a means. The capacity for understanding must be present and is innate. It isn’t language that produces intelligence but intelligence that manifests by using a tool. And once the tool is present, the powers of the intelligence are able to expand.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Understanding and Intellectual Grasp
At bottom understanding and intellectual grasp are really one and the same thing. Or are they? I ask the question for a reason. The understanding of something often dawns in my mind before I’ve actually articulated it, thus taken it apart into pieces and realized, in detail, how everything fits together. But even before I do that, I’ve already understood the object. Conversely, understanding may also arise suddenly from the puzzled handling of details, looking at them this way, that way. All at once I understand.
This is a peculiar experience. What is this feeling? What actually happens? Mysterious. A man will say: “Well, I just knew.” If then you ask him how he knew, you may sometimes trigger a retrospective inspection of the process; the account of it will depend on the ability of the person to see into his own innards. The speaker will begin to trace a process backward. We usually call it a process of thought, but the point I’m after is that thought is often not involved at all.
The man in this case will begin his account by examining slices of the process one by one, isolating them from one another. Put another way, the speaker reviews his stream of experiences over time and notes his reactions one by one, almost second by second. When this process originally took place, the speaker did not engage in conceptualization—did not use tokens, words. The process worked beneath the level of speech or its equivalent, thought. The speaker nonetheless absorbed the events and his reactions to them. Translating that process into speech (spoken or silent) is really what results in intellectual grasp. But we know the thing, we understand it, before we ever proceed to its mental formulation into concepts. Like many other people, I often don’t know what I know until I write it down, but, paradoxically, I knew that before I wrote it. But after writing I possess it more fully and completely. But what is it that I possess? It is a structure of symbols in meaningful relationships. And I’m persuaded by my experience that the meaning and the relationships preexisted my grasp of them. Hence the world is intelligible. Some disagree. They assert that no meaning exists out there, none whatsoever. We impose it by using speech. How we act on our understanding may, of course, depend on which fork of this divide we take.
Experiential footnote: I grasped this process years ago once when our washing machine broke down. I disassembled it enough to expose its pulleys, blocks, and belts. I stared at it for at least half an hour totally absorbed, fingering this lever, pushing that belt. I wasn’t analyzing. I examined the assembly by looking at it, now this part, now that; I was letting my mind absorb the picture by focusing on it in great detail. Suddenly, with a flash, I understood the damn thing. I just knew. Then I trusted myself to proceed to the next steps of disassembly—because I now had a feel for how the thing actually worked. The conceptual process began only as I proceeded. In two hours I had the thing running again.
Now putting things this way may seem to support the modern line of thought that intellect and consciousness are the consequence of language, that language could and did simply evolve by accidental changes in our throat so that simple grunts could become much more elaborated sounds. Etc. I take exactly the opposite tack. I think that our innate endowment, what I call soul or self, has hierarchically overlaid powers each seeking expression and realization as soon as it has the modes to actualize itself. Thus understanding is the foundation; the symbolizing intellect is the next higher layer; above the intellect yet other powers await unfolding. In the species homo sapiens nature managed to implement the means by which intellect could function, but it did so because a fierce energy within the self sought expression and exploited the accidents of nature. It is the intellect that creates language, not language the intellect. Same facts, different interpretation.
One corollary of this view is that understanding—in a pre-verbal sense—is present in animals, indeed in all living things, as well; so is, I would assert, the potential for our kind of consciousness. This view is consistent with my experience with Winston, our much loved labrador in Minnesota, who certainly possessed much understanding. I would also point those interested to the fascinating story of Helen Keller, a person whose physical defects prevented her exercise of an innate facility until rescued by Anne Sullivan. This is a fascinating and highly illuminating case. I’ve written it up—its here on this computer somewhere. This post suggests that I ought to find that analysis and present it in the future. It makes my case.
This is a peculiar experience. What is this feeling? What actually happens? Mysterious. A man will say: “Well, I just knew.” If then you ask him how he knew, you may sometimes trigger a retrospective inspection of the process; the account of it will depend on the ability of the person to see into his own innards. The speaker will begin to trace a process backward. We usually call it a process of thought, but the point I’m after is that thought is often not involved at all.
The man in this case will begin his account by examining slices of the process one by one, isolating them from one another. Put another way, the speaker reviews his stream of experiences over time and notes his reactions one by one, almost second by second. When this process originally took place, the speaker did not engage in conceptualization—did not use tokens, words. The process worked beneath the level of speech or its equivalent, thought. The speaker nonetheless absorbed the events and his reactions to them. Translating that process into speech (spoken or silent) is really what results in intellectual grasp. But we know the thing, we understand it, before we ever proceed to its mental formulation into concepts. Like many other people, I often don’t know what I know until I write it down, but, paradoxically, I knew that before I wrote it. But after writing I possess it more fully and completely. But what is it that I possess? It is a structure of symbols in meaningful relationships. And I’m persuaded by my experience that the meaning and the relationships preexisted my grasp of them. Hence the world is intelligible. Some disagree. They assert that no meaning exists out there, none whatsoever. We impose it by using speech. How we act on our understanding may, of course, depend on which fork of this divide we take.
Experiential footnote: I grasped this process years ago once when our washing machine broke down. I disassembled it enough to expose its pulleys, blocks, and belts. I stared at it for at least half an hour totally absorbed, fingering this lever, pushing that belt. I wasn’t analyzing. I examined the assembly by looking at it, now this part, now that; I was letting my mind absorb the picture by focusing on it in great detail. Suddenly, with a flash, I understood the damn thing. I just knew. Then I trusted myself to proceed to the next steps of disassembly—because I now had a feel for how the thing actually worked. The conceptual process began only as I proceeded. In two hours I had the thing running again.
Now putting things this way may seem to support the modern line of thought that intellect and consciousness are the consequence of language, that language could and did simply evolve by accidental changes in our throat so that simple grunts could become much more elaborated sounds. Etc. I take exactly the opposite tack. I think that our innate endowment, what I call soul or self, has hierarchically overlaid powers each seeking expression and realization as soon as it has the modes to actualize itself. Thus understanding is the foundation; the symbolizing intellect is the next higher layer; above the intellect yet other powers await unfolding. In the species homo sapiens nature managed to implement the means by which intellect could function, but it did so because a fierce energy within the self sought expression and exploited the accidents of nature. It is the intellect that creates language, not language the intellect. Same facts, different interpretation.
One corollary of this view is that understanding—in a pre-verbal sense—is present in animals, indeed in all living things, as well; so is, I would assert, the potential for our kind of consciousness. This view is consistent with my experience with Winston, our much loved labrador in Minnesota, who certainly possessed much understanding. I would also point those interested to the fascinating story of Helen Keller, a person whose physical defects prevented her exercise of an innate facility until rescued by Anne Sullivan. This is a fascinating and highly illuminating case. I’ve written it up—its here on this computer somewhere. This post suggests that I ought to find that analysis and present it in the future. It makes my case.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Power Tempts
Many who reject religion and wouldn’t be caught dead engaged in “worship” are nonetheless temped by spiritual power. People who lean this way are reassured by naturalistic descriptions of the spiritual. If the spiritual is a higher or occult kind of power, a power we can tap, capture, and deploy to benefit ourselves, why—that sounds like science. Science? I’d call it magic.
But we’re all of us subject to this temptation. As we emerge from matter, we all go through a magical phase. Some of us get stuck there not because we manage to develop genuine powers but because we discover that we can attract attention and even make money by exploiting the mysterious. At one level attention is money. The magical, however named, is a sizeable industry, its products: books, movies, services, training, music, holy objects with special virtues, websites, and many kinds of groups. People pass through these groups like water through a filter; they leave money behind as they pass. They come expecting powers, are disillusioned, and flow on to other fake “attractors.” Guardians of these faux treasures benefit.
Fear is the other side of power. To conquer fear is to gain power. An element of trade, of quid pro quo, adheres to many religions despite the best efforts of individuals within them to combat this ultimately low tendency. The verse from Proverbs (1:7) is instructive as well as subtle: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” This single sentence in a way sums up the essence of transcendental experience. The fear is a beginning point, felt by those who are becoming conscious. What is rarely stressed is the important word in this verse: beginning. Fear is just a stimulus, the lowest form of an emerging knowledge. I note here in passing, as it were, that our success in mastering nature, illusory though it is—and the great improvement in our standard of living—is the best explanation for the decline of organized religion. Fear has been lowered. I call our mastery illusory because it greatly depends on fossil fuels; and those we shall eventually exhaust; then fear may return and, quid pro quo, religion will once more thrive. An early illustration of this? Church attendance surged immediately after 9/11. Has that surge lasted? I wonder…
Serious travelers of the Borderzone eventually discover that such travel is like art: you do it for its own sake. Indeed, if done for any other reason, it isn’t genuine travel, so to say, but just a form of tourism: snap a few photos and gather a subject or two for conversation once you get home. “Why, the last time we were at the Riviera…”
One of the best-known Sufi saints—and virtually none is known in the West—was Rabia al-Adawiyya (717-801 AD). She put this matter succinctly: “If I worship you for fear of hell, condemn me to hell. If I do so in hope of paradise, deny me paradise.” Why do I cite a Sufi saint of Basra, in Persia, rather than, say, one of the many Christian saints, not least St. Teresa of Avila, who voiced many of the same sorts of sentiments? Here is an sample: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” I cite a Sufi saint because outer forms wear out. There is a reflexive rejection in the West of our own traditions and experience. But we must remember this: all those who wander the hidden ways are in the same country and hold the same citizenship, but people get confused by the different traditional garb that they wear.
Reality and its phenomena always have a naturalistic aspect—which does not mean that there is no awareness and personality behind them; there always is, as in us. To rely on one side of this coin and neglect the other is to worship power ignorantly. Yes, power is tempting. The paradox is that our actual possession of it manifests when we no longer seek it. At that point we’ve made a few steps past the beginning and the radiance of wisdom begins to manifest like a predawn light under the horizon.
—————
Picture credit: Wikipedia here.
But we’re all of us subject to this temptation. As we emerge from matter, we all go through a magical phase. Some of us get stuck there not because we manage to develop genuine powers but because we discover that we can attract attention and even make money by exploiting the mysterious. At one level attention is money. The magical, however named, is a sizeable industry, its products: books, movies, services, training, music, holy objects with special virtues, websites, and many kinds of groups. People pass through these groups like water through a filter; they leave money behind as they pass. They come expecting powers, are disillusioned, and flow on to other fake “attractors.” Guardians of these faux treasures benefit.
Fear is the other side of power. To conquer fear is to gain power. An element of trade, of quid pro quo, adheres to many religions despite the best efforts of individuals within them to combat this ultimately low tendency. The verse from Proverbs (1:7) is instructive as well as subtle: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” This single sentence in a way sums up the essence of transcendental experience. The fear is a beginning point, felt by those who are becoming conscious. What is rarely stressed is the important word in this verse: beginning. Fear is just a stimulus, the lowest form of an emerging knowledge. I note here in passing, as it were, that our success in mastering nature, illusory though it is—and the great improvement in our standard of living—is the best explanation for the decline of organized religion. Fear has been lowered. I call our mastery illusory because it greatly depends on fossil fuels; and those we shall eventually exhaust; then fear may return and, quid pro quo, religion will once more thrive. An early illustration of this? Church attendance surged immediately after 9/11. Has that surge lasted? I wonder…
Serious travelers of the Borderzone eventually discover that such travel is like art: you do it for its own sake. Indeed, if done for any other reason, it isn’t genuine travel, so to say, but just a form of tourism: snap a few photos and gather a subject or two for conversation once you get home. “Why, the last time we were at the Riviera…”
One of the best-known Sufi saints—and virtually none is known in the West—was Rabia al-Adawiyya (717-801 AD). She put this matter succinctly: “If I worship you for fear of hell, condemn me to hell. If I do so in hope of paradise, deny me paradise.” Why do I cite a Sufi saint of Basra, in Persia, rather than, say, one of the many Christian saints, not least St. Teresa of Avila, who voiced many of the same sorts of sentiments? Here is an sample: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” I cite a Sufi saint because outer forms wear out. There is a reflexive rejection in the West of our own traditions and experience. But we must remember this: all those who wander the hidden ways are in the same country and hold the same citizenship, but people get confused by the different traditional garb that they wear.Reality and its phenomena always have a naturalistic aspect—which does not mean that there is no awareness and personality behind them; there always is, as in us. To rely on one side of this coin and neglect the other is to worship power ignorantly. Yes, power is tempting. The paradox is that our actual possession of it manifests when we no longer seek it. At that point we’ve made a few steps past the beginning and the radiance of wisdom begins to manifest like a predawn light under the horizon.
—————
Picture credit: Wikipedia here.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Castaneda
What follows is a diary entry of mine from a while back. I thought it might be of some interest here. At the end I’ll enlarge on the initial reference, which I expect is obscure for most who haven’t read, or no longer remember, the book.
* * *
I found today the chapter in which a mountain lion plays a role in Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan; reading it I was reminded again of the mastery of the author. His knowledge is very advanced—and these days I’m experienced enough to recognize that. Therefore the various scholarly critical dismissals of his work, not least that he was simply writing fiction, thus imagining the content, I reject. No doubt the presentation is fictionalized; no doubt a good deal of his knowledge was acquired from books, but I am fairly sure that he was in touch with a living shaman tradition. Oddly enough my conviction arises because I see so very many similarities with Sufi traditions, most pointedly the one that Gurdjieff had tapped into and exploited and Ouspensky “took to market,” as it were.
All harsh forms of mysticism seem derived from a cosmology in which the divine is conceived as indifferent to—but not unaware of—individual entities. These tend to be pantheisms. The discovery prized by their devotees is a kind of crystallization that takes place under extreme conditions of inner training. Castaneda’s cosmology fits into this class. There is no love relationship between creator and creature. The survival of death, in my definition of it anyway (as holding on to memories and to identity) is denied to all but the tiny minority of sorcerers
The cosmology doesn’t interest me. What strikes me forcefully, however—and much more now than it did when I read Castaneda more than thirty years ago—is the force and correctness of the methods used and the accuracy of the psychological descriptions. Castaneda’s vantage point—from what he claims is a “primitive” position, pre-Christian, unaware of Judaism, blind to Islam, ignorant of Hinduism, and so on and so forth—is now, and has always been, for me, very original and refreshing. The motivation for action is direct and entirely free of the vast overhang of cultural forms, rituals, traditions, dogma, and unsavory history that, in truth, completely suffocate spirituality in the West. Here you find the hard basics—and find it easy to ignore the primitive framework, anchored in nature, which is the teaching’s outward support. This sort of thing attracts the adventurer, the solitary, the “I-want-to-do-it-my-way” personality
Much of this originality really comes from having different names for everything—while the relationship of concepts to real life remain the same. The authenticity of this teaching shines through, however. This is not just a verbal exercise. Castaneda’s stuff comes from people who got there the hard way, by doing, experiencing, and thinking things through in an environment quite different, back when their patterns were laid down, than that of any other tradition on earth.
* * *
The mountain-lion episode appears in Chapter 11 of Ixtlan, entitled “The Mood of the Warrior.” This mood is composed of contradictories, iron control and total abandon. Castaneda guide into sorcery, don Juan, arranges an experience in which Castaneda encounters a mountain lion by night. Moved by fear, he acts with a great deal of skill and yet with total abandon, and this don Juan later explains is the warrior’s mood. It can be invoked at will—not merely by fright.
Other aspects of this story left an impression on me. Don Juan reminds Castaneda that his disciple simply acted, did what was necessary to escape the mountain lion. He treated the mountain lion without unnecessary, extraneous judgments—such as hating it, or imputing all sorts of fancy motives to the animal. At the time I read the story, it suddenly struck me that in most cases, dealing with individuals and with institutions, it is indeed very wise to regard them simply as natural phenomena without wasting time on all kinds of secondary interpretations of their motives. That view has served me very well. I remembered that a while back and went back to reread the account, hence that entry. The last paragraph of that chapter is interesting too:
* * *
I found today the chapter in which a mountain lion plays a role in Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan; reading it I was reminded again of the mastery of the author. His knowledge is very advanced—and these days I’m experienced enough to recognize that. Therefore the various scholarly critical dismissals of his work, not least that he was simply writing fiction, thus imagining the content, I reject. No doubt the presentation is fictionalized; no doubt a good deal of his knowledge was acquired from books, but I am fairly sure that he was in touch with a living shaman tradition. Oddly enough my conviction arises because I see so very many similarities with Sufi traditions, most pointedly the one that Gurdjieff had tapped into and exploited and Ouspensky “took to market,” as it were.
All harsh forms of mysticism seem derived from a cosmology in which the divine is conceived as indifferent to—but not unaware of—individual entities. These tend to be pantheisms. The discovery prized by their devotees is a kind of crystallization that takes place under extreme conditions of inner training. Castaneda’s cosmology fits into this class. There is no love relationship between creator and creature. The survival of death, in my definition of it anyway (as holding on to memories and to identity) is denied to all but the tiny minority of sorcerers
The cosmology doesn’t interest me. What strikes me forcefully, however—and much more now than it did when I read Castaneda more than thirty years ago—is the force and correctness of the methods used and the accuracy of the psychological descriptions. Castaneda’s vantage point—from what he claims is a “primitive” position, pre-Christian, unaware of Judaism, blind to Islam, ignorant of Hinduism, and so on and so forth—is now, and has always been, for me, very original and refreshing. The motivation for action is direct and entirely free of the vast overhang of cultural forms, rituals, traditions, dogma, and unsavory history that, in truth, completely suffocate spirituality in the West. Here you find the hard basics—and find it easy to ignore the primitive framework, anchored in nature, which is the teaching’s outward support. This sort of thing attracts the adventurer, the solitary, the “I-want-to-do-it-my-way” personality
Much of this originality really comes from having different names for everything—while the relationship of concepts to real life remain the same. The authenticity of this teaching shines through, however. This is not just a verbal exercise. Castaneda’s stuff comes from people who got there the hard way, by doing, experiencing, and thinking things through in an environment quite different, back when their patterns were laid down, than that of any other tradition on earth.
* * *
The mountain-lion episode appears in Chapter 11 of Ixtlan, entitled “The Mood of the Warrior.” This mood is composed of contradictories, iron control and total abandon. Castaneda guide into sorcery, don Juan, arranges an experience in which Castaneda encounters a mountain lion by night. Moved by fear, he acts with a great deal of skill and yet with total abandon, and this don Juan later explains is the warrior’s mood. It can be invoked at will—not merely by fright.
Other aspects of this story left an impression on me. Don Juan reminds Castaneda that his disciple simply acted, did what was necessary to escape the mountain lion. He treated the mountain lion without unnecessary, extraneous judgments—such as hating it, or imputing all sorts of fancy motives to the animal. At the time I read the story, it suddenly struck me that in most cases, dealing with individuals and with institutions, it is indeed very wise to regard them simply as natural phenomena without wasting time on all kinds of secondary interpretations of their motives. That view has served me very well. I remembered that a while back and went back to reread the account, hence that entry. The last paragraph of that chapter is interesting too:
“I know, I know,” don Juan said patiently. “To achieve the mood of a warrior is not a simple matter. It is a revolution. To regard the lion and the water rats and our fellow men as equals is a magnificent act of the warrior’s spirit. It takes power to do that.”Now the mention of two names, G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky. Both were Russian émigrés, Gurdjieff the leader of a self-development system which has earmarks of having been derived from Sufism. Ouspensky became its chief advocate. The essentials of the teaching are in the latter’s book, The Fourth Way.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Attachment and Detachment
These two words have wonderfully ambiguous connotations. To be attached is to be drawn to something, but the attraction may very well arise precisely because the object bestows attention back. Attachment implies possession, therefore control. Love and attachment are often conflated, but troubles rapidly develop when love is not returned. Then attachment turns out to be simply trade: I give you attention if you attend to me. Failing this give and take, we’ll soon hear someone say, “X, I think we need to talk.” Love is much more difficult. If it is real, it’s anchored in the will; it’s not provisional, contingent, situational, etc. The reason why pet rocks are amusing objects is precisely because the rock cannot return affection. This aspect of attachment shows that it has a strong element of need hidden within it. Hence people can be said to be “too much attached to”—you fill in the blank.
Detachment gets its positive connotations because people are often excessively attached—so much so that other aspects of their lives suffer. Hence detachment is of value. If we’re in pain but able to detach our attention from the problem, we benefit. Detachment diminishes emotional involvement and therefore increases our freedom to reason, hence to discover objective values, thus to make correct decisions. But too much detachment is viewed as indifference, an absence of “love,” but read this as an absence of willingness to reciprocate attention with attention. Nothing infuriates the lover so much in a quarrel as the partner’s cold insistence on being rational.
If you attend to X with all your heart, you can’t attend to Y. If Y requires a lot of attention, X must be diminished so that Y can increase. In spiritual systems, therefore, teaching people techniques of detachment is usually job one. But this is best achieved by teaching people how to attach attention at will.
People are often frustrated by such systems—and exploited by cults—because they don’t understand the basics. They attach themselves to circles, groups, and communities—or avidly read “occult” literature—wanting to know “secrets.” They think that conceptual grasp of some secret will give them “powers.” This position is equivalent to wishing to be told what chocolate tastes like. No amount of reading, lectures, off-sites, seminars, and mystic journeys to India or Tibet will produce the desired result—until chocolate is actually available and put in the mouth.
Cults exploit people by paying them lots of attention and feeding them conceptual or emotional pabulum—when what is really required is the training of inner powers, already present, which, alas, only the seeker can actually do. The feedback from this is almost always next to nothing—for years on end. Extraordinary persistence is necessary before changes actually manifest. For the vast majority of seekers, long before this can even begin to happen, the work gets tiresome, they drift away, they settle down and find some satisfying game of give-and-take that will stimulate them until it’s time to go. It is for this reason that Sufis, for example, say that the minimum qualification for spiritual advancement is to become a “householder,” generically a person engaged in responsible social activity. The ability to persist in boring and tedious activities, undertaken just because they have to be, for the common good, not for self-pleasing, is “good practice,” as it were, for doing the same thing on another plane.
What appears to many as airy-fairy, whispy-ghostly, magic-wandish, fancy-dress, mystical-elvish activity—surrounded by an aura of mystery, romance, and miraculous powers—is really something much more akin to training for a marathon or editing a ridiculously sloppy computer-generated index of 40,000 words down to 12,500. You really need a lot of attachment and detachment to do jobs like that. And after you’re done, the big feedback is that you’re finally done. Way in the distance will come a payoff. Way in the distance.
Detachment gets its positive connotations because people are often excessively attached—so much so that other aspects of their lives suffer. Hence detachment is of value. If we’re in pain but able to detach our attention from the problem, we benefit. Detachment diminishes emotional involvement and therefore increases our freedom to reason, hence to discover objective values, thus to make correct decisions. But too much detachment is viewed as indifference, an absence of “love,” but read this as an absence of willingness to reciprocate attention with attention. Nothing infuriates the lover so much in a quarrel as the partner’s cold insistence on being rational.
If you attend to X with all your heart, you can’t attend to Y. If Y requires a lot of attention, X must be diminished so that Y can increase. In spiritual systems, therefore, teaching people techniques of detachment is usually job one. But this is best achieved by teaching people how to attach attention at will.
People are often frustrated by such systems—and exploited by cults—because they don’t understand the basics. They attach themselves to circles, groups, and communities—or avidly read “occult” literature—wanting to know “secrets.” They think that conceptual grasp of some secret will give them “powers.” This position is equivalent to wishing to be told what chocolate tastes like. No amount of reading, lectures, off-sites, seminars, and mystic journeys to India or Tibet will produce the desired result—until chocolate is actually available and put in the mouth.
Cults exploit people by paying them lots of attention and feeding them conceptual or emotional pabulum—when what is really required is the training of inner powers, already present, which, alas, only the seeker can actually do. The feedback from this is almost always next to nothing—for years on end. Extraordinary persistence is necessary before changes actually manifest. For the vast majority of seekers, long before this can even begin to happen, the work gets tiresome, they drift away, they settle down and find some satisfying game of give-and-take that will stimulate them until it’s time to go. It is for this reason that Sufis, for example, say that the minimum qualification for spiritual advancement is to become a “householder,” generically a person engaged in responsible social activity. The ability to persist in boring and tedious activities, undertaken just because they have to be, for the common good, not for self-pleasing, is “good practice,” as it were, for doing the same thing on another plane.
What appears to many as airy-fairy, whispy-ghostly, magic-wandish, fancy-dress, mystical-elvish activity—surrounded by an aura of mystery, romance, and miraculous powers—is really something much more akin to training for a marathon or editing a ridiculously sloppy computer-generated index of 40,000 words down to 12,500. You really need a lot of attachment and detachment to do jobs like that. And after you’re done, the big feedback is that you’re finally done. Way in the distance will come a payoff. Way in the distance.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
More on "Primacy of Intuition"
Intuition “flows” or “bubbles up,” “flashes,” “dawns,” “strikes like lightning,” and—sometimes “nags” as conscience. All but the last of these words suggest waters or energy. Indeed I think of intuition as an influx of something energetic from the higher level of reality. Now in this modern age our almost reflexive tendency is to formulate experience in naturalistic term. It feels more real to think of intuition as an energy, thus as something impersonal. In other times, and in still active traditions, we see the same experience rendered in quite another form. We speak of “the voice of conscience,” for example. The artist feels “inspiration” coming from the Muse—that lady surely conceived of as a person. We think it sophisticated to label such things as anthropomorphizing.
I come from a demanding religious tradition, Catholicism. It takes reality seriously, insists that action has real consequences, here and beyond. In my early schooling we were invited to see our selfish urges as temptations whispered in one ear by the devil; our conscience had the other ear. The devil was recruiting future inhabitants for hell; the guardian angel strove mightily to save our soul. These images are vivid, sensory, and therefore effective ways to teach. The abstract formulations—and energetic or liquid analogies—are somewhat less compelling but more suited for the adult understanding. I’ve waxed eloquent on the symbol of the spiral just recently. In that imagery intuition might be imagined as an attraction upward, a kind of negative gravity. (It is, by the way, put almost like that by Beatrice in Dante’s Paradise. The soul “falls upward” toward heaven as naturally as water falls into the depths at a waterfall.) Temptation is the “pull” of the depths.
But I am wandering afield. If intuition manifested in sharp, precise words heard in the ear, all would be clear. It manifests as feelings, images, and perceptions of patterns. So does temptation. We supply the “little voice”—and it is an interpretation, an interpretation in both cases, be it of higher inflows or of feelings produced by hormonal reactions to stimuli. The two differ in taste, as it were; tastes are difficult to render in concepts, but attention to our experiences develops the palate, as it were. The intuitive has a certain joyous sharpness—even when it is a “dark” intuition; temptation is always heavy in flavor (as we speak of certain wines, for instance); one feels the pull of the flesh, the greed for dominance.
To state simply what I’m groping to make palpable: Intuition is primary, but it needs interpretation. The images, feelings, and sensed patterns must be properly understood. The intuition will always be right, but we can make a hash of it nevertheless by inattention or excessive attention to it, by twisting its meaning or direction. Art supplies endless examples. The same inspiration produces both kitsch and the sublime.
Scrupulosity—obsessing about one’s own sinfulness—is a good example of the abuse of conscience. Naturally, under the influence of Modernism, it is labeled as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can also be seen as sloppy interpretation of intuition, of conscience. The consequences of sin on the one hand (damnation, etc.) and of the self’s importance on the other are exaggerated, deformed, and produce a downward spiraling of obsessive self-absorption. Here, as in everything human, a comprehensive approach is vital. Intuition must be consulted about judgment—and judgment applied to intuition. I assign primacy to intuition in this sense: we don’t produce it ourselves. Nor do we produce our own desires. But intuition comes from above; most desires rise from the body. In the use of both we must apply ourselves correctly.
Now the human is the most maddeningly perplexing reality. I use the word “interpretation” above—and now feel the urge to interpret interpretation more comprehensively. We interpret an intuition in two ways: intellectually, thus as something meant or intended; and by action, thus by doing or abstaining to do something, by the exercise of will. A popular phrase comes to mind: “Which part of NO don’t you understand?” When we ignore a nudge of conscience, we interpret it by action.
I come from a demanding religious tradition, Catholicism. It takes reality seriously, insists that action has real consequences, here and beyond. In my early schooling we were invited to see our selfish urges as temptations whispered in one ear by the devil; our conscience had the other ear. The devil was recruiting future inhabitants for hell; the guardian angel strove mightily to save our soul. These images are vivid, sensory, and therefore effective ways to teach. The abstract formulations—and energetic or liquid analogies—are somewhat less compelling but more suited for the adult understanding. I’ve waxed eloquent on the symbol of the spiral just recently. In that imagery intuition might be imagined as an attraction upward, a kind of negative gravity. (It is, by the way, put almost like that by Beatrice in Dante’s Paradise. The soul “falls upward” toward heaven as naturally as water falls into the depths at a waterfall.) Temptation is the “pull” of the depths.
But I am wandering afield. If intuition manifested in sharp, precise words heard in the ear, all would be clear. It manifests as feelings, images, and perceptions of patterns. So does temptation. We supply the “little voice”—and it is an interpretation, an interpretation in both cases, be it of higher inflows or of feelings produced by hormonal reactions to stimuli. The two differ in taste, as it were; tastes are difficult to render in concepts, but attention to our experiences develops the palate, as it were. The intuitive has a certain joyous sharpness—even when it is a “dark” intuition; temptation is always heavy in flavor (as we speak of certain wines, for instance); one feels the pull of the flesh, the greed for dominance.
To state simply what I’m groping to make palpable: Intuition is primary, but it needs interpretation. The images, feelings, and sensed patterns must be properly understood. The intuition will always be right, but we can make a hash of it nevertheless by inattention or excessive attention to it, by twisting its meaning or direction. Art supplies endless examples. The same inspiration produces both kitsch and the sublime.
Scrupulosity—obsessing about one’s own sinfulness—is a good example of the abuse of conscience. Naturally, under the influence of Modernism, it is labeled as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can also be seen as sloppy interpretation of intuition, of conscience. The consequences of sin on the one hand (damnation, etc.) and of the self’s importance on the other are exaggerated, deformed, and produce a downward spiraling of obsessive self-absorption. Here, as in everything human, a comprehensive approach is vital. Intuition must be consulted about judgment—and judgment applied to intuition. I assign primacy to intuition in this sense: we don’t produce it ourselves. Nor do we produce our own desires. But intuition comes from above; most desires rise from the body. In the use of both we must apply ourselves correctly.
Now the human is the most maddeningly perplexing reality. I use the word “interpretation” above—and now feel the urge to interpret interpretation more comprehensively. We interpret an intuition in two ways: intellectually, thus as something meant or intended; and by action, thus by doing or abstaining to do something, by the exercise of will. A popular phrase comes to mind: “Which part of NO don’t you understand?” When we ignore a nudge of conscience, we interpret it by action.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
The Priest and the Dervish
The other day I mentioned the Venerable Solanus Casey, a man on his way to sainthood; I know of him because he’d spent many years in Detroit. At that time, looking back over his history, I was reminded of the fact that Casey had been ordained a “simplex” priest, meaning that he could celebrate mass but was prohibited from hearing confessions or giving homilies. Why? His superiors in the Capuchin order thought that he lacked the intellectual capacity. Perhaps. But his saintly powers, not least to heal the sick, those soon began to manifest…
This reminded me of a Sufi story called “The Man Who Walked on Water,” found in Idries Shah’s volume titled Tales of the Dervishes. The story, on page 84, goes like this in summary:
A dervish who belonged to a conventional sort of community was walking along a river and meditating on moralistic and scholastic problems; such problems formed the core teaching of his group. As he walked he was suddenly startled to hear an outcry coming from the island in the water. Someone was intoning the dervish call, YA HU but doing it all wrong; the man over there was saying U YA HU. Our dervish decided that the ignoramus on the island needed instruction. He hired a rowboat and got over there. He found a man dressed in a dervish robe, stopped by him, and carefully instructed the unfortunate.
Our man then left the island again, satisfied; he’d done a good deed. Rowing back he reflected on this sacred formula. It was said that anyone who could repeat it properly could even learn to walk on water, something our man had always hoped to do—but had always failed to achieve. Now he listened, but no sounds came. He had reached the middle of the water when he heard a halting start coming from over there, the ignorant dervish starting out with U YA again. Our man shook his head. Perverse humanity, persistent in error. Then he suddenly beheld a strange sight. The dervish from over there was walking on water, coming out toward the boat. Our man stopped rowing in astonishment. The dervish arrived. “Sorry to trouble you,” he said, standing on the river. “My memory is weak. I’ve already forgotten how to say it right. Could you help me again…?”
This reminded me of a Sufi story called “The Man Who Walked on Water,” found in Idries Shah’s volume titled Tales of the Dervishes. The story, on page 84, goes like this in summary:
A dervish who belonged to a conventional sort of community was walking along a river and meditating on moralistic and scholastic problems; such problems formed the core teaching of his group. As he walked he was suddenly startled to hear an outcry coming from the island in the water. Someone was intoning the dervish call, YA HU but doing it all wrong; the man over there was saying U YA HU. Our dervish decided that the ignoramus on the island needed instruction. He hired a rowboat and got over there. He found a man dressed in a dervish robe, stopped by him, and carefully instructed the unfortunate.
Our man then left the island again, satisfied; he’d done a good deed. Rowing back he reflected on this sacred formula. It was said that anyone who could repeat it properly could even learn to walk on water, something our man had always hoped to do—but had always failed to achieve. Now he listened, but no sounds came. He had reached the middle of the water when he heard a halting start coming from over there, the ignorant dervish starting out with U YA again. Our man shook his head. Perverse humanity, persistent in error. Then he suddenly beheld a strange sight. The dervish from over there was walking on water, coming out toward the boat. Our man stopped rowing in astonishment. The dervish arrived. “Sorry to trouble you,” he said, standing on the river. “My memory is weak. I’ve already forgotten how to say it right. Could you help me again…?”
Monday, September 14, 2009
The Boundaries of Experience
One of the brute facts that balances out the primacy of intuition is that our perceptions are bounded by experience. Let me illustrate this. Some people have extraordinary experiences; those who lack these and merely hear about them by report, possess very limited means of judging the veracity of the experience itself. But let me make that sharper. I don’t want to limit that word, “veracity,” to mean “speaking the truth.” Suppose I accept that the individual really did have the reported experiences. But even then I can wonder whether or not—in the absence of physical proofs—the interpretation of the reporter would be the same as mine would be if I had the experience. I’ve noted time and time again in life that my interpretation of an event can radically differ from that of someone standing next to me. When it comes to paranormal experience, the only analogue to physical proof is to have “been there,” thus to have experienced the same thing. Lacking that we’re left with analyzing the basic pattern that the experience offers. We can examine it in terms of consistency, comprehensiveness, probability; by analogy to other patterns; and so on.
A famous case is that of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the man who conversed with angels and visited both heaven and hell. The book to read is Heaven & Hell. It was published 251 years ago, written in Latin, then translated—thus it doesn’t have a modern flavor. And it is tough going—but not because it’s difficult. But an awful lot of it is moralizing, a good deal of it is abstract reasoning in which you have to buy into the concepts Swedenborg offers. Here is a paragraph to illustrate what I am saying:
In the margin next to this I scribbled: “Empty concepts.” I’m not exaggerating when I say that much of H&H is filled with paragraphs like that. To extract meaningfully descriptive material requires extraordinary patience. To get beyond the abstract order and the preaching that fills Swedenborg’s best known work, the best thing to do is to read his Spiritual Experiences, two volumes of what were originally diaries. But here one encounters very little order, structure, or context—because here Swedenborg was making notes for himself, often very elliptically: he knew what he meant, and he left out precisely those details that someone who “hadn’t been there” needs to know. You become convinced that he did have experiences—also that they were far from the pristine order he hammers out in H&H. The sense you really have is of a man who is suddenly opened to a very strange, complex, vast reality that he has difficult understanding and struggles to master while, in a way, stretched across a border.
Knowing how crucial experience is—and that it is the only genuine proof of such realities—my approach is to stick closely to the ranges that I can reach, trusting that, mastering the problems of my reality as best I can will prepare me well for what lies ahead—when the Reaper finally comes.
A famous case is that of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the man who conversed with angels and visited both heaven and hell. The book to read is Heaven & Hell. It was published 251 years ago, written in Latin, then translated—thus it doesn’t have a modern flavor. And it is tough going—but not because it’s difficult. But an awful lot of it is moralizing, a good deal of it is abstract reasoning in which you have to buy into the concepts Swedenborg offers. Here is a paragraph to illustrate what I am saying:
In heaven, there are two distinct loves—love for the Lord and love toward the neighbor. Love for the Lord dwells in the inmost or third heaven; love toward the neighbor dwells in the second or intermediate heaven. Each comes from the Lord, and each constitutes a heaven. In heaven’s open light, the way these two loves differ and the way they connect is clear, but it is quite hard to see this on earth. In heaven, “loving the Lord” is not understood to mean loving His character, but loving the good that comes from Him. Loving the good means intending and doing what is good, out of love. “Loving the neighbor” is not understood to mean loving a companion’s character, but loving what is true that comes from the Word. Loving what is true means intending and doing what is true.
We can see from this that these loves differ the way the good and the true differ, and associate the way the good associates with the true. But this will not fit comfortably into the concepts of a person who does not realize what love, the good, and the neighbor are.
In the margin next to this I scribbled: “Empty concepts.” I’m not exaggerating when I say that much of H&H is filled with paragraphs like that. To extract meaningfully descriptive material requires extraordinary patience. To get beyond the abstract order and the preaching that fills Swedenborg’s best known work, the best thing to do is to read his Spiritual Experiences, two volumes of what were originally diaries. But here one encounters very little order, structure, or context—because here Swedenborg was making notes for himself, often very elliptically: he knew what he meant, and he left out precisely those details that someone who “hadn’t been there” needs to know. You become convinced that he did have experiences—also that they were far from the pristine order he hammers out in H&H. The sense you really have is of a man who is suddenly opened to a very strange, complex, vast reality that he has difficult understanding and struggles to master while, in a way, stretched across a border.
Knowing how crucial experience is—and that it is the only genuine proof of such realities—my approach is to stick closely to the ranges that I can reach, trusting that, mastering the problems of my reality as best I can will prepare me well for what lies ahead—when the Reaper finally comes.
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