Category Archives: existentialism

The Angst of Duality and Rumi

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I feel like a broken record. Thinking back over my two years of blogging I realize there are certain themes that keep coming back, themes which are obviously very important to me, themes which one could even say haunt me. One of these themes is that life is not as it appears to be, that it is always something that is going on beneath the surface which must by design always elude us. It is kind of like a cat chasing its own tail; or better yet, the quest for it is like the mythological euroboric image of the snake trying to swallow its tail. I sometimes want to tell myself, “Hey! Stop this! Get a life! Get out there and make some money, watch a lot of reality TV, go ahead, drink that Kool-Aid.

And, spiritual lore in which I’m steeped even warns of the futility of spiritual obsession. For example, the Buddhist koan notes the lunacy of “riding an oxen, searching for an oxen,” the point being, “Hey, just quit trying! Don’t waste your effort. The thing you search for is already there. As W. H. Auden noted, “The Center that you cannot find is known to the unconscious mind. There is no need to despair for you are already there.”

From a clinical perspective, this quest can even be thought of as schizophrenic in nature and it is no accident that schizophrenics often have spiritual themes in their fantasies. The schizophrenic is trapped in a bifurcated world, not able to find his/her place in the “real” world and subjected to the torment of living in a hinterland, constantly buffeted by the daily torments that his “delusional” system presents to him.

So, let me demonstrate my venturing into another day of such mental machinations and share with you a beautiful poem by Rumi who too recognized the presence of this shadow world, insisting that it was the real one that we should give more respect to.

The Self We Share

Thirst is angry with water. Hunger bitter
with bread.

The cave wants nothing to do with the sun.

This is dumb, the self- defeating way
we’ve been.

A gold mine is calling us into its temple.
Instead, we bend and keep picking up rocks
from the ground.

Every thing has a shine like gold,
but we should turn to the source!

The origin is what we truly are. I add a little
vinegar to the honey I give.

The bite of scolding makes ecstasy more familiar.

But look, fish, you’re already in the ocean:
just swimming there makes you friends with
glory.

What are these grudges about? You are Benjamin.
Joseph has put a gold cup in your grain sack and
accused you of being a thief.

Now he draws you aside and says,
‘You are my brother. I

am a prayer. You’re the amen.’

We move in eternal regions, yet
worry about property here.

This is the prayer of each:

You are the source of my life.
You separate essence from mud.

You honor my soul. You bring rivers from the
mountain springs. You brighten my eyes.

The wine you offer takes me out of myself into
the self we share. Doing that is religion.

Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

 

Is it Feelings or “Old-brain” Passion run amok

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“He who feels strongly behaves.” Marianne Moore wrote a beautiful poem about intense emotion and the heart’s ways of accommodating that intensity. She used beautiful watery imagery of those intense emotions doing battle with structure and describes them as “surrendering” but noted that “in its surrendering, finds its continuing.”

I think here a distinction must be noted between raw, unmediated passion which Freud would have called “drive energy” and feelings or emotions. Feelings are the product of the primal energy but they have been “processed” by our neurocortical machinery and can find expression in an “appropriate” fashion. Admittedly “appropriate” is a nebulous term and many people of mature, strong feelings must push the limits of “appropriate” to give expression to their feelings and to accomplish their purpose.

I have written lately of my three-decade long escape from “literallew” who preceded this present altar ego. And now I often have intense emotion burgeoning forth in my heart and life, emotion so intense that at times I don’t know what to do with it. Yes, it rattles my cage on occasion and besets me with a lot of anxiety. But I am blessed with the ability to listen to Ms. Moore’s directive and “behave”…most of the time! And my “behaving” includes a lot of attention to my daily devotional which I describe as “chopping wood, carrying water.” And I love T. S. Sliot’s wisdom on how to respond to intense religious emotional sentiment, telling us we have to offer only, “Prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action.” And these actions, in my case, usually find me deeply immersed in “Mother Earth” and caring for her and her creatures, flora and fauna.

WHAT ARE YEARS
By Marianne Moore

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, –
dumbly calling, deafly listening-that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,

 

Wordsworth and a “Big Thought”

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From, “LINES COMPOSED NEAR TINTERN ABBEY” BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the midst of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Oh how I love “big thoughts,” those lofty ideas that carry me away and as they do so facilitate a grounding in this beautiful world. Beware thoughts that do otherwise! In the second line of this excerpt, I would assign a capital “P” for I think he is referring to a Presence which is actually the very Ground of our Being, the ineffable “Wholly Other” which is paradoxically deeply ingrained in our own mortal heart and in the warp-and-woof of our very life. And I see this “Presence” in others from time to time, even more so in recent years as I’ve allowed it to find more expression in my own life. And, yes, I feel this “Presence” is very disturbing though I can’t really say that I’ve graduated yet to the “joy” element. I do find joy in life, and I do feel joy, that I feel…and intuit…that there is some dimension of this experience which Wordsworth knew about that still eludes me.

 

Another Paean to “Mama Earth”

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I stumbled across a lovely poem this morning about Mother Earth and our intricate relationship with her; specifically, we came from dust and will return to dust.  And, that evokes “grim” in some level of my heart but that is only because I was taught wrongly, taught that we are separate and distinct from the earth which is really a “grim” notion and will be fatally so if we, as a species, do not get our head out of our backside.  Seeing our “earthiness” is such as important discovery and is so very much the “Truth” for which we long.  I’m made to think of the words of W. B. Yeats who noted, “Throughout all the lying days of my youth I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun.  Now, may I wither into the Truth.”

 

 

Agriculture Begins by Sasha West

Cleared forests and carbon for warmth
Rice in paddies and cows in pastures and the methane rising—

Failure evinces in the boy a tenderness towards the pig,
A need to kiss its soft ears and mouth.

And the family sleeps by the rotten grain,
And the workers breathe in the wasted cotton, the boles.

[Pause for the Black Death, as plows and shovels still, the world temporarily cools—]

The gods made land so we could bury in it—

From coal, release the old sunlight it holds and build again.

***

We till the fields and tend the fruit.

Bacon called the self “a grinding machine:”
One machine causes dreams of horses, another great sadness.

Returning, like Persephone,
To the scene of the crime, willingly, repeatedly.
I plant my body in the ground and in the spring I grow.

Like fire that burns the field, prepares it for crops, let the mind be seared by failure into readiness.

Smaller rabbits this year, fewer quail—

At last the animals starved by drought will eat the cactus, spines and all.

***

[crops that dissolved into earth with drought, crops that through mouths became winged things and flew, ice that wilted the lettuce, train car that stalled on tracks, water diverted to the city, that we had no wood for coffins, that I could keep no hens alive, that leaves become lace overnight, the field a gown with delicate feathers, mold that ruins the hay, in your lungs the blooms, in your lungs the delicate tendrils and trees from the mines]

***

Trees burned back to root. The long-drawn-out filaments of smoke. Saltbrush that chokes everything.

Egyptians covered mummies in wet linen to plant corn on,
Osiris sprouting green, flowers through the cloth.

Woodpeckers work to hollow the flesh of the tree.

Ten years of growth, ten years of fire.
The worst fire in the worst drought
Of recorded history.

[Cue: Each year, a new state’s announcer speaks this line.]

[Plant upon your gods, make them fields and keepers of the fields, if crops fail on the bodies of gods you have proof of earth acting upon you, proof of the sun’s vast power, proof of indifference and decay.]

—A scourge over the sky of birds and white ashy snow.

[Ancestors in the ground means you own the land.]

A slow combing through the dark warm soil—

Each year, we bury more of it.

Sasha West

 

Lessons from Poetic Obscurity

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I’ve always been drawn to obscure poetry and obscure observations, some of which linger with me years before I begin to understand them. They “linger” there on the periphery of my consciousness for they have something to offer me when I’ve matured enough to let their truth sink in. I now have three poems to offer here which I have always found “obscure” but now I feel I am beginning to understand what the writer was seeing. I’m going to share them here and offer my perspective on what they mean.

AS BAD AS A MILE
By Philip Larkin

Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,
Show’s less and less of luck, and more and more
Of failure spreading back up the arm
Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.

I now see this Larkin poem as quite obvious. He was talking about mankind primordial before he had “bitten the apple” and fallen into the realm of time and space. Before we tasted that forbidden fruit, we were perfect, still living in the Uroboros, delighted in the Edenic delight of pure freedom. But the minute we succumbed to Eve’s charms (see, it’s always a woman, damn them!) we entered the realm of cause and effect, or time and space, and gained a formal introduction to failure. Now, this side of Eden, we never get it “right” but have it in our heart to try and have available stories of Grace which tell us each step along the way, “Hey, its ok. Hey, you are okay. Just keep on truckin’. You are forgiven. Something is underway that you can’t figure out with your finite mind.” Or, as T.S. Eliot said, “For us there is only the trying. The rest is none of our business.”

HOUSE
By E. L. Mayo
House
Vast and ambiguous
Which was before we were
Did you
Build yourself and then grow populous
By taking thought, or
Did someone leave a tap on long ago
In You
Which with its spatter
Affirms at the very least a householder
Who will return at the last if only to
Turn off the water.

This poem is about the very roots of our being, that subtle spirit of consciousness which is always there but always lies outside the grasp of our conscious mind. This is what we are when we are bereft of all the superficies of our existence and feel so very alone, comforted only by the intuitive knowledge that there is a “householder” who is the very ground of our being and that this “householder” is He Who unites us all ultimately.

Navigating by the Light of a Minor Planet

by Jessica Goodfellow

The trouble with belief in endlessness is
it requires a belief in beginninglessness.
Consider friction, entropy, perpetual motion.
And the trouble with holding to both is that
belief in endlessness requires a certain hope
while belief in beginninglessness ends in the absence of hope.
Or maybe it’s vice versa. Luckily,
belief in a thing is not the thing itself.
We can have the concept of origin, but no origin.
Here we are then: in a world where logic doesn’t function,
or else emotions can’t be trusted. Maybe both.
All known tools of navigation require an origin.
Otherwise, there is only endless relativity and then
what’s the point of navigation, in a space where
it’s hard to be lost, and even harder not to be?
Saying “I don’t want to be here” is not the same
as saying “I want to not be here.” It rains
and it rains and it rains the things I haven’t said.
By Jessica Goodfellow

No less a conservative Christian luminary than Dietrich Bonheoffer discoursed on the human dilemma of wanting to know and own his origin, to grasp it with his rational mind only to find that no one can “wrap his head around it.” Life is an incredible mystery and, though some of us find it amusing to wrestle with this mystery, ultimately we have to accept that mystery and recognize that we only “see through a glass darkly” and must busy ourselves with the Divinely “mundane” responsibilities of day to day life. Relativity is something one wrestles with if he pursues spiritual matters beyond the confines of his little ego. But, though we can “tippy-toe” in that bewildering world of doubt and despair…and some of us even take a swim in it from time to time…we have to come back to the only “real” that we know and act purposefully, knowing that we have an impact on this world.

 

Charlotte Joko Beck and Disappointment

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Disappointment is a recurrent feature of our lives. Some people handle it well while others are just devastated, not able to cope with the misfortune, perceived or otherwise, that has come their way. But Charlotte Joko Beck sees disappointment as an opportunity:

When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it’s the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing. The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we’re alert. This gift is always present in anyone’s life, that moment when ‘It’s not the way I want it.”

I’ve seen people face the disappointment and then with sheer will power and brute force face the disappointing circumstances and get what they want, only to later learn that it was not the best thing for them or for others. Yes, there is a time to confront the disappointment but Beck’s point was that there are definitely times when the disappointment needs to be embraced as a learning opportunity.

One of the greatest causes of disappointment is failure and it can be one of the most horrifying experiences of our life. But failure also often has something to teach us. E. L. Mayo put it like this, “Failure is more important than success because it brings intelligence to light the bony structure of the universe.” When in the throes of failure, our heart torn asunder with the disappointment of having our dreams crushed, if we can manage to pause for a moment, and exercise “mindfulness”, we can often find an intelligence present in the moment that will teach us something we would not have learned otherwise.

 

“Unaccomodated Man”–The Absence that we Are

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King Lear gave up his kingdom, became estranged from his family, became very disconsolate, lost his eyesight and even  his mind,  and suddenly found himself out on the heath, pelted by a pitiless storm and retreating to a hovel where he lamented,  “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare forked animal…” Shakespeare saw clearly that man was other than he takes himself to be, that the trappings of his life merely cover up his internal nakedness. He realized and repeatedly emphasized the absence that we are.

And, when we get to the point in life where we entertain this spiritual impoverishment and experience the loss of our “kingdom”, the trappings of our ego-bound life that we have always taken to be of such great importance suddenly appear to amount to nothing. And when we get “naked”…as King Lear did literally after the above quote…we can discover meaning in our life and meaning for all of these trappings which until now have been merely “accomodations.” At this point many, if not all, of these “accomodations” can still be ours but they will not be the core of our identity any longer. We will have them. They will no longer have us.

Listen to what Thomas Merton said about this subject in his book, Seeds of Contemplation:

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person, a false self. I wind my experiences around myself and cover myself in glory to make myself perceptible…as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface….But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structures of pleasures and ambitions have no foundation. I am my own mistake…..The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God.

Shakespeare, Merton and other great spiritual luminaries recognized that entertaining this “absence that we are” is an essential task in life and is a spiritual enterprise. They recognized that only when we embrace our emptiness, not just cognitively but emotionally, can we find the fullness of our Source. This is what Jesus had in mind when he said that to find our life we must lose it, we must lose the ego investments in ephemeral things in order to embrace the Essential. And, this also often means “losing” our religion as we have to forgo the ego-ridden, “letter of the law”, approach to spirituality and this often feels like we are losing our faith. Sometimes we have to lose our faith to find it.

 

Do We Dare Let Go of Guilt?

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Huffington Post offers a very insightful article about dealing with guilt and escaping its clutches. (Huff Po =— http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/dealing-with-guilt-iyanla-vanzant_n_3472594.html)

How do we let go of any emotion that has tyrannized us such as guilt has. Sure, I accept the notion of the forgiveness of God offered in the story of Jesus, for example. But that comes to us first as a rational, conceptual “idea” and does not necessarily burrow into the depths of the heart where the “real” guilt abides; for the “real” guilt is in the affective domain which controls how we use our rational mind. Thus, our guilt can make us “guilty” believers of any stripe which will always make us so fanatical and legalistic that people who come across us will want to put up the “sign of the cross” when we approach and run away. For, guilt-ridden faith offers no “human” quality and therefore has no “godly” quality to it. It is just an “idea” devoid of any experience; or, better yet, it is an “idea” devoid of any Spirit, as in the “letter of the law killeth but the Spirit maketh alive.”

Guilt so often is so intrinsic to our being that we can’t fathom living without it. Letting it go would make us feel like a duck out of water or a fish on dry land. It would be scary and even fatal in a sense in that our ego would definitely be threatened by the loss of this core element which allows it to cohere. My dear friend, brother, spiritual mentor, and soul mate, Bill Shakespeare said it so eloquently, noting in Hamlet that we would prefer to “cling to those ills that we have, than fly to others that we know not of.” Our guilt is so comforting because it is the only thing that we have ever known. And, we are validated daily for living in this guilt as it is guilt (and shame) that binds our world together in the dog-and-pony show that the Hindus’ call Maya and fundamentalist American Christians call, “Well, it’s just the way things are.” And many faiths depend on guilt as without guilt attendance of their churches, synagogues, and mosques might decline, worship palaces fall into disrepair, clergy go underpaid or unemployed, and its constituents left with the challenge of dealing with Reality…which always requires faith in a Beyond which I often label our Source. And, I am of course referring to a transcendent deity who is, paradoxically, immanent; and the appreciation of this powerful truth requires ability and a willingness to hold contradictory notions in the mind at the same time. In other words, this notion “ain’t makin’ no sense” to many people and it never will!

But, there is always “method to our madness,” individually and collectively. The best we can ever do is muddle through and believe fervently that there is a “wisdom that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.” (Last two quotes from “Bill”)

 

A “Fig Leaf” for Existential Anxiety

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We are such vulnerable little creatures, described by W. H. Auden as “clinging to the granite skirts of our sensible old planet.” I think we are acutely aware of this vulnerability which is why God gave us a “fig leaf” to hide ourselves from our existential anxiety This “fig leaf” we know as our “ego” and if it does its job, we will be mercifully unaware of our vulnerability, assuming (i.e. “pretending”) that we will live forever. But, alas and alack, some of us were issued defective “fig leaves” and have been cursed with existential anxiety. One way we have to cope with this distress is poetry and I will now share a wonderful poem on the subject of vulnerability:

Edge

by Eamon Grennan

When I’d walked out to the sea surfing and spuming
into meerschaum heaps of lettuce-tinted gauze —
breakers becoming light then noise, the ocean raging
and rearranging this long spit of sand like a life
at the mercy of circumstance — I saw the north wind

drive trillions of sandgrains to scour every last trace
of what the previous tide had done, and gulls snatch
huge clamshells from the swirl and smash them
to get at and gobble each salt, soft-bodied helplessness
at the heart of its own broken home, and I felt caught

between water-violence and the gulls’ patience,
between shifting ground I stood on and the thunder-
turbulence of water, between a slowly disappearing
ceiling of cloud and the blue sky-cupola it leaves
behind, between titanic ocean-roar and the ticking heart.

 

 

We Are “Needful Things” at Heart

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Jenny Kissed Me is an excellent blog featuring a steady array of very thoughtful poetry. (http://jeglatter.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/let-go-of-everything-that-does-not-serve-you/) In the poem linked here, she describes emptiness as a place of fulfillment and strength and uses the image of the mother’s breast as the model of need fulfillment. “Dear One, Let go of everything/That does not/Serve you/Then lay, rest//And suckle here,/Until your emptiness/Becomes/A strong new you.”

Clinical theory offers object-relations theory to explain the “needfulness” of the human heart, suggesting as the subject begins to formulate it “needs” objects with which to constitute itself. Or, better stated, it needs objects against which to define itself, this process of definition often described as “object separateness.” The mother, according to this theory is the first object, the “primary object”, and her breasts are the “primary” part of her as they are quickly learned to be satisfaction for a primary need, physical hunger.

But a primary dimension of the human experience will always be “emptiness” or an “object hunger” which we will return to if we do anything meaningful in life. If our ego is mature…if we have “ego integrity”…we will be able to let down our boundaries here and there and step into that “neediness” and there find a Strength that we will not find otherwise.

Marilynne Robinson wrote a marvelous novel entitled Housekeeping about twenty years ago, a novel that was turned into an excellent movie by the same name. In the novel she noted something that grabbed me even before I knew why, “Need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.” Robinson knew that need, though a very scary dimension of the heart, is fertile territory if we dare to go there. And, by describing it as “fertile” I am assigning it femininity and I do so deliberately; for, there in the maw of primordial hunger is our Source and it/He/She is the Ultimate compensation that can be found there. But, unfortunately, addiction of all varieties is always a ready temptation when we visit that matrix of life.

However, emptiness is antithetical to everything we are taught in Western culture and this is not unrelated to the misogyny that we making inroads into in the past 100 years. Our culture emphasizes “be strong” in an ego-maniacal way, not realizing that real strength is found in weakness. Sounds a whole lot like the teachings of Jesus, doesn’t it? Hmm.

And let me close with a facetious note. Stephen King wrote a short story entitled “Needful Things.” I sometimes like to think that this is a good description of the human race.