Category Archives: existentialism

Truth and a Mall Santa Claus

A street preacher, already notorious in Amarillo, Texas, disrupted a shopping mall’s Santa visitation with children recently, loudly announcing to them, “Santa Claus is not real.” There is no doubt he was very sincere in what he was doing; for, yes, Santa Claus is not “real” but that does not mean his tradition in our country is not valid for little children. But he demonstrated the wisdom of the bumper sticker I’ve been obsessed with recently, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

This gentleman believes he has the “truth” and that the “truth” most boldly proclaimed because hapless parents lack the spiritual depth he has or they would not subject their innocent children to this falsity. And this illustrates the dilemma of “truth” and the danger that occurs when one is “filled with the spirit” and knows that he has the truth exclusively. As admitted in the past, I write from experience and now realize just how arrogant I was, now seeing Truth as much more subtle part of a mystical dimension of human experience which we can never own. But, oh is it tempting to think that we do!

I readily admit that I feel I am writing “truth” when I discourse here but have no illusion that it is axiomatic, written in stone, sent from on “high” Truth. I have only a simple perspective, shaped by my biological and social past and for some unknown reason I am moved to “hold forth” in this venue, taking comfort in the knowledge that no one is being coerced to pay any attention. And oh so many don’t!

The street preacher’s “truth-proclaiming” belied the certainty that consumes him about his beliefs and that certainty is now consuming American culture, especially the conservative element. The braggadocio of Donald Trump and his promise to “Make America Great Again” appealed to a segment of the population who pines foe the days when life was more certain. Furthermore, Trump’s rhetoric appealed to fundamentalist Christians who readily looked past his moral depravity in the hope that the “certainty” of their faith could be reassured. Certainty is so much easier than faith.

But the certainty I’m exploring here belies a profound lack of certainty, a deep existential doubt that must be assuaged by addictively clinging to some dogma, even “dogma” that I have found to have great value once I had the courage to see the role my ego was playing in my immature and dogmatic faith. When one is existentially insecure, he must find something to latch on to in order to alleviate the emotional, spiritual duress he would otherwise feel.

(See story about Mall Santa verbal attack, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/12/13/preacher-children-santa-claus-does-not-exist/95371826/)

Shakespeare and Consciousness

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Hamlet lamented in a famous soliloquy, “Thus conscience (i.e. consciousness) doeth make cowards of us all.” Shakespeare demonstrated in his plays and sonnets a profound grasp of the human condition and beautifully illustrated our foibles in various characters such as Hamlet. Hamlet, as well as many literary figures, portrays for us a soul tortured by consciousness and Hamlet noted in this same soliloquy that such “awareness” can stymie one into inaction. In clinical lore of recent decades I have often run across the “Hamlet Syndrome”, the plague of many young men who are so conflicted they have trouble making decisions, thus their many dreams and fancies, “lose the name of action.” (And this “syndrome” usually captures only males…but not exclusively.)

Another theme of Shakespeare was madness and his understanding of this common human malady was not unrelated to his insights about consciousness. For, consciousness is a phenomenon one is to be immersed in and to step outside for even a moment and become aware of “consciousness” is not unrelated to madness. For this leap into meta-cognition for someone who has never doubted his way of looking at the world, i.e. his conscious grasp of the world, will find the sudden dawn of a perspective on his perspective frightening. As philosopher Paul Ricoeur noted, “To have a perspective on one’s perspective is to somehow escape it.” The terror of this meta-cognitive leap is so threatening that most people live their entire life comfortably ensconced in the narrow view of the world they were given by their tribe, usually deemed as decreed valid by the gods/God.

By discoursing here on this matter I am giving the impression that I’m in the camp of the “conscious” ones and in some sense I do feel I am. BUT, consciousness flows from the depths of the heart and to be conscious is to realize that the depths of the heart are endless so that one can never bask in the comfort of thinking he has arrived with a wholly “conscious” grasp of the world. The best I can personally ever hope of doing is to own my very skewed view of the world and hope that as I continue to age my “skewing” might be increasingly open to other viewpoints, leaving me always without accomplishing “objectivity.”

But damn it, it was so much easier in my youth when I mindlessly and dutifully imbibed of what the Apostle Paul described as “the wisdom of this world.” Yes, in my case doubt was always there nagging at me but I always returned to my script and just doubled-down on unexamined truth, not yet willing to acknowledge that I was merely demonstrating the “bad faith” noted by Jean Paul Sartre.

Elif Shafak’s Perspective on Western Faith

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Elif Shafak is a Turkish novelist whose Sufi faith is a powerful influence in her life and in her writing. In this excerpt from The Forty Rules of Love she sheds a valuable light on faith from her tradition in which she can see unity where in the West often we see only difference, where our “distinction drawer” is too much in control. (The italicized material will be my observations.)

Instead of losing themselves in the Love of God and waging a war against their ego, religious zealots fight other people, generating wave after wave of fear. Looking at the whole universe fear-tinted eyes, it is no wonder that they see a plethora of things to be afraid of. Wherever there is an earthquake, drought, or any other calamity, they take it as a sign of Divine Wrath—as if God does not openly say, “My compassion outweighs my wrath.” Always resentful of somebody for this or that, they seem to expect God Almighty to step in on their behalf and take their pitiful revenges. Their life is an uninterrupted state of bitterness and hostility, a discontentment so vast it follows them wherever they go, like a black cloud, darkening both their past and their future.

This is a picture of the ego in firm control, using their purported “love of God” to wreak havoc on the world, including those most dear and close to them. When the ego is tyrannizing our world, it desperately functions as a distinction-drawer keeping parts of our human experience separate from our awareness and projecting it “out there.”

There is such a thing in faith as not being able to see the forest for the trees. The totality of religion is far greater and deeper than the sum of its component parts. Individual rules need to be read in the light of the whole. And the whole is concealed in the essence.

But the ego is a constellation of rules that seeks to “rule” our world, that is impose order upon it to make it consistent with our need for order and perfection. Its goal is to know all of the rules, never forget one of them, so it can always be right. It builds for us what W. H. Auden called, “A life safer than we can bear.”

Instead of searching for the essence in the Qur’an and embracing it as a whole, however, the bigot singles out a specific verse or two, giving priority to the divine commands that they deem to be in tune with their fearful minds. They keep reminding everyone that on the day of judgment everyone will be forced to walk on the Bridge of Sirat, thinner than a hair, sharper than a razor. Unable to cross the bridge, the sinners will tumble into the pits of hell underneath, where they will suffer forever. Those who have lived a virtuous life will make it to the other end of the bridge, where they will be reward with exotic fruits, sweet waters, and virgins. This, in a nutshell, is their notion of the afterlife. So great is their obsession is with horrors and rewards, flames and fruits, angels and demons, that in their itch to reach a future which will justify who they are today they forget about God…..Hell is in the here and now. So is heaven. Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven as they are both present inside at this present moment. Every time we fall in love, we ascend into heaven. Every time we hate, fight, or envy someone we tumble straight into the fires of hell.

The ego does not want us to live in the present moment. It is a creation of this time/space continuum that we have been confined within by the biblical “fall” leaving us comfortable only when immersed in memories of the past…good or bad ones…or hopes of the future.

Is there a worse hell than the torment a man suffers when he knows deep down in his consciousness that he has done something wrong, awfully wrong? Ask that man. He will tell you what hell is. Is there a better paradise than the bliss that descends upon a man at those rare moments when the bolts of the universe fly open and he feels in possession of all the secrets of eternity and fully united with God? Ask that man. He will tell you what heaven is.

Why worry so much about the aftermath, an imaginary future when this very moment is the only time we can fully experience both the presence and absence of God in our lives? Motivated by neither the fear of punishment in hell nor the desire to be rewarded in heaven, Sufis love God simply because they love Him, pure and easy, untainted and unnegotiable.

And when you love God so much, when you love each and every one of his creations because of Him and thanks to Him, extraneous categories melt into thin air. From that point on, there can be no “I” any more. All you amount to is a zero so big it covers your whole being.

This “love of God” is a challenging notion as it is so easy to be trapped into loving only some idea of God, some culturally contrived notion of God, which has nothing to do with the experience of Him/Her/It/Whatever. And here I pause as I’m at the threshold of silence, where all words become futile.

But when the “idea of God” is seen, and experienced for what it is, that being an idol, the theological teaching of God’s immanence and transcendence can become meaningful to one. Yes, God is “out there” as well as “in here” and this intuitive insight can best be said as simply, “God is.” And this God who we now see and feel “is” comes with a parallel development, the discovery of our own simple, bare, “is-ness” in what would be otherwise a cold and barren universe. We discover our “zero-ness” which is so big it does cover everyone and everything, uniting us all. In the Christian tradition we call this “the Spirit of God” which the Apostle Paul described as Christ and noted “by Him all things cohere.”

A Lesson from a Rabbit

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Becoming real means finding the courage to wade into the difficult dimensions of human experience, a courage which is usually the function of the wear and tear of daily life, the relentless oppression of those “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” Becoming real means you find the courage to tippy-toe…at least…into the “unreal” in that you find that what was once so certain is no longer certain, discovering only then an inner core which has always been present but unexplored due to your lack of courage. Becoming real is a liminal moment, approaching the boundaries of existence itself which is always humbling. Becoming real is finding what Paul Tillich described as “The Courage to Be” which always means flirtation with non-being, its presence announced by intense anxiety. Norman Brown summed it up pithily decades ago, “To be is to be vulnerable.”

Here is a beautiful summary of this experience from the children’s classic, “The Velveteen Rabbit”:

What is real asked the Rabbit.. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” (“The Velveteen Rabbit,” by Margery Williams. see http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/williams/rabbit/rabbit.html)

Freedom and Determinism

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“Freedom and determinism” was one of the first “big thoughts” that I encountered in college and I have wrestled with the notion ever since. One image that helped me along the way came from psychologist Rollo May, I think, when he likened freedom without limits to being like a river without banks; for, a river without banks would be useless and also possibly destructive. One of the best ways of summing up my clinical practice was that I frequently assisting clients who had too much freedom in their hearts and were “acting out.” The clinical term was, “impulse control disorders.”

I want to share some of the thoughts of May, gleaned from his book, “Psychology and the Human Dilemma”:

The inseparable relation of self and world also implies responsibility. The term means “responding,” “response to.” I cannot, in other words, become a self except as I am engaged continuously in responding to the world of which I am a part.

What is interesting here is that the patient moves toward freedom and responsibility in his living as he becomes more conscious of the deterministic experiences in his life. That is, as explores how he was rejected or over protected or how he was hated as a child, how his repressed bodily needs drive him, how his personal history as a member of a minority group, let us say, conditions his development, and even as he becomes conscious of his of being a member of Western culture at a particular traumatic moment in the historical evolution of that society, he finds his margin of freedom likewise enlarged. As he becomes more conscious of the infinite deterministic forces in his life, he becomes more free.

Freedom is, thus, not the opposite to determinism. Freedom is the capacity to know that he is the determined one, to pause between stimulus and response and thus to throw his weight, however slight it might be on the side of one particular response among several other possible ones.

We are prone to see ourselves as “above” history and to fail to see that our psychology, and even modern science itself, are historical products like any other aspect of culture.

May’s book brings to my mind the word contingency, making me aware of just our contingent our very existence is. We cannot truthfully declare, as did one poet, “I am the captain of my fate, the master of my soul.” But we do have that power presented above as “awareness” of our contingent, finite, and mysterious world…and of the “contingent, finite, and mysterious” nature of our very own personal existence.

The Peace of Wild Things

Flight 370: An Existential Observation

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I’ve read some speculation in the press about why we are so “obsessed” with the flight 377 disaster. On this note, I always think of Aesychlus observation thousands of years ago, “The gods send disaster so that mankind will have something to talk about.” That is a cynical viewpoint but certainly worthy of consideration. However, our fascination, i.e. “obsession,” goes much deeper than that, reflecting a deep-seated connection that we feel with each other in this precarious adventure we are all immersed in, one from which there is “No Exit” as Sartre once noted. But I believe a story like this taps deeply into our individual and collective unconscious and stirs a sense of vulnerability that we all carefully avoid each day of our life. The notion of floating innocently through the air and being suddenly sucked into oblivion by the caprice of circumstances is a metaphor for the fragility of our life.

Here is a short poem by Eugene Mayo which beautifully captures this existential predicament:

THIS WIND
By E. L. Mayo

This is the wind that blows
Everything
Through and through.

I would not toss a kitten
Knowingly into a wind
That blows like this
But there’s no taking

Anything living
Out of the fury
Of this wind
That we breathe and ride upon.

More on Ego-Ridden Faith

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Yesterday I addressed dualistic thinking and the “saved” vs “unsaved” emphasis of some religions, portraying that emphasis as merely an expression of an “us” vs “them” approach to life. This expression of faith is very guilt-ridden and must have very rigid boundaries and often appears to be searching daily to find things “that we don’t do that others do” which “make us good, and them bad.” Looking back on my life, I realize that my tenuous identity was explicitly based on this false premise and consisted of a relentless list of “thou shalt nots” which I religiously sought to adhere to to compensate for a deep-seated self-loathing. And even though I was a professing Christian, that approach to spirituality was intrinsically antithetical to the teachings of Christ who said that He accepted us “as is.”

Now, in this “second half of life” (to borrow a Richard Rohr term), I find that spirituality is letting down some of these rigid boundaries and acknowledging some of those unsavory impulses, a process that Karl Jung described as “embracing your shadow” or “withdrawing your projections.” For, as Jung also pointed out, “What you resist, persists” and is therefore created in your outside world. To illustrate, the notion of “saved” would not have any meaning, would not even exist, without its complement of “unsaved” much like “green” would have no meaning or existence without “un-green.”

But recognizing this spiritual subtlety is antithetical to the interest of the ego who, should it recognize this ambiguity, would have its authority in jeopardy. So usually when an ego-bound person encounters teachings like this, they will respond with something like, “Of the devil” or “straight from the pits of hell” or “damn New Age stuff.” Thus the ego continues merrily on its way, smug in its faith, not listening to Shakespeare who noted, “With devotions visage and pious action they sugar o’er the devil himself.”

Ego-Ridden, Ersatz Spirituality

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I’ve shared here several times that Richard Rohr steal’s my thoughts. He continues to do that and is rich and famous and I am still poor and unknown. Life is just not fair! In today’s email he again chides Christians for their “dualistic” thinking and points out how the ego is hard at work in this process. It is really unnerving to realize that something as personal as one’s faith can be little more than an ego function, an escape from life, and not the expression of the Divine that one purports it to be. And that is what I’ve had to learn and am continuing to learn about my own faith. But when this truth began to sink in, the first faint glimmer of light dawned in my soul allowing me to see the darkness in which I lived. And I still live in this “darkness” and will always do so even as that “glimmer of Light” brightens each day. For, I now know…and feel…more clearly what the Apostle Paul meant when he declared that “we see through a glass ‘darkly'”.

Let me explain just one facet of the ego’s presence in the spirituality of my early life. One of the first things I learned as a child was the distinction of “saved” vs “unsaved”, a distinction which paralleled the infinite variety of other distinctions I was learning as my innocent world was being carved up into various categories. And, of course at some point I learned that I could recite the correct syllogism, the magical words, and presto I would join the club of “the saved.” This bifurcation of the world followed me through the first half of my life as I hid behind the facade of being “saved” and from that subjective prison lived and felt separate from the whole world, radically disconnected. Now, I didn’t know about this disconnection as I participated in a “saved” culture which daily reassured me that I was “one of them” because I spoke the right language and lived the right life…at least out in public! However, there was always unrest in my soul, an unrest which in the middle of my life began to grow and became a veritable tumult which is now blossoming fully in my life. But this “tumult” is merely the experience of life unfolding in my heart as it opens up and becomes, “filled with penetrable stuff” as Shakespeare once put it.

Rohr presents spirituality as a “personal” phenomena, not an ideology. Spirituality is not a mind-set or a template through which we are to view the world as “out there” and needing to be made like me. Spirituality is the process of letting boundaries down and seeing the connection between “me and thee” and between the whole of God’s creation. And the process never ends. We never “get it” as there is nothing to “get”. It is a process. “Saved” and “unsaved”???? Well, the concept does exist in Christianity and most religions have some way of setting themselves apart and reassuring its followers that they are “special.” I now feel that the only “saving” I am responsible for is the saving of my own soul…a life long process which always involves relationships with other people…and which the Apostle Paul had in mind when he instructed us to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” This “fear and trembling” is the tumult I alluded to earlier.

Here is Rohr’s observations for today:
DUALISTIC THINKING

Resistance to Change
Friday, March 21, 2014

Sadly, the mind trapped inside of polarity thinking is not open to change. How else can we explain the obvious avoidance of so many of Jesus’ major teachings within the Christian churches? Jesus’ direct and clear teachings on issues such as nonviolence; a simple lifestyle; love of the poor and our enemies; forgiveness, inclusivity, and mercy; and not seeking status, power, perks, or possessions have all been overwhelmingly ignored throughout history by mainline Christian churches, even those who so proudly call themselves orthodox or biblical.

This avoidance defies explanation until we understand how dualistic thinking protects and pads the ego and its fear of change. Notice that the things we Christians have largely ignored require actual change to ourselves. The things we emphasized instead were usually intellectual beliefs or moral superiority stances that asked almost nothing of us—but compliance from others: the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, the atonement theory, and beliefs about reproduction and sex. After a while, you start to recognize the underlying bias that is at work. The ego diverts your attention from anything that would ask you to change, to righteous causes that invariably ask others to change. 1 Such issues give you a sense of moral high ground without costing you anything (e.g., celibate priests who make abortion the only sin). Sounds like an ego game to me.

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go. Split people split up everything and everybody else. By the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts.
1. Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, p. 94
2. Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,
p. 151

Hamlet, Depression, and Boundaries

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