Category Archives: fundamentalism

Epistemic Closure–Willfully Biased

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A story in today’s New York Times illustrates an issue which has always been endemic to human culture—an inability to recognize our bias, not only those who we have conveniently dumped into the category of “them.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/us/debate-on-a-jewish-student-at-ucla.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0)

A young Jewish student, being interviewed for placement on the judicial board of the student council at UCLA, suddenly found her self facing this question from a fellow student council member,   “Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community, how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?”  This is a stunning and vivid illustration of what lies at the roots our human drama—a complete failure to recognize that not only we seei the world through biases given them to us by background, just as it is with those who we see as biased.  Yes, this young woman would be at least subtly influence by dimensions of her faith and the rest of her life experiences.  But the interrogator revealed his naivety, failing to realize that the very question he posed revealed his bias toward Jews.

Each of us sees the world through a template formulated by our life experiences, all of which are also influenced by a neurophysiological substrate.  Poet Conrad Aiken offered my favorite p grasp of this truth when he wrote, “We only see the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the dark.”  But some of us are in positions of power in that our background teaches us that our way of seeing the world is the “proper” way while other’s will fail to see things “right.”  And the power I refer to here is the power that comes from being in the majority, being entrenched in the “consensually validated” view of the world.  Nietzsche understood this, noting, “All things are subject to interpretation.  Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”

Real power in any group lies in the agreed upon “truths,” the assumptions that are not questioned by anyone entrenched spiritually in this consensually validated prism (or “prison”!!!)  W. H. Auden noted the courage required to face one’s basic assumptions and be subject to the existential solitude that will follow, writing in  “New Year Letter”:

…only “despair

Can shape the hero who will dare

The desperate databases

Into the snarl of the abyss

That always lies just underneath

Our jolly picnic on the heath

Of the agreeable, where we bask,

Agreed on what we will not ask,

Bland, sunny, and adjusted by

The light of the accepted lie?

 Someone once noted that it is impossible to have a perspective on one’s perspective without somehow escaping it.”  But asking anyone to “escape” and enter the realm of meta-cognition is like asking a fish to see water. Auden recognized that this experience is disconcerting at least, and probably terrifying.  The following selection from his poem, “For the Time Being,” has the Star of the Nativity speaking to its followers:

Beware.  All those who follow me are led Onto that Glassy Mountain where are

No footholds for logic, to that Bridge of Dread

Where knowledge but increases vertigo:

Those who pursue me take a twisting lane

To find themselves immediately alone

With savage water and unfeeling stone,

In labyrinths where they must entertain

Confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain.

Auden understood the need of getting out of one’s self to the point that the legitimacy of other view points could be appreciated or at least tolerated.  But his wisdom also reflects what Alan Watts described as “The Wisdom of Insecurity.”  Vulnerability always ensues when we get to the point where we own our existential plight, that we are but a finite creature with a finite grasp of our world, a world also being composed of other vulnerable creatures with the same tendency to absolutize his/her world view.

 

(NOTE:  Can any of you who are familiar with WP tell me why I could not get the poetry to copy to single-space????  Thanks.)

 

 

 

 

 

Words can Kill…or at Least Deaden!

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Blogging the past three years has been such a wonderful experience for me. One of the nice things is that it has put me in touch with interesting people from around the world people who have books, movies, and experiences to share and thus broaden my life.  But yesterday, I received a comment via email from a “real-time” friend who I only recently met which further stimulated my thinking about words and their relationship to reality; or, the converse of that notion, “words and their lack of relationship to reality.” This person is a local artist/musician and is preoccupied with a similar concern of mine—words and their “meaning” they have in the depths of the heart, a “meaning” which is completely missed if we live only on the surface of life and take words…and the rest of our experience…only on a surface level. The following is an excerpt from Martha’s email:

A book I look at from time to time by Leonard Shlain would no doubt interest you, Lewis if you have not already read it! “The Alphabet vs. the Goddess” where this binariness is explored throughout history. He presents things in a left-brain right-brain paradigm and would probably agree that labeling was the end of beauty. I am fascinated by brain scans of children when taught that a color has a name. Can you imagine simply experiencing the color blue, all through your body and senses, before you were told that this experience was associated with the label “blue?” The scans show the brain tingling in all its parts and portions, lit up! When scanned later, once the label “blue” is assigned, the brain activity becomes very localized to the verbal areas, and I dare say, the experience is also tempered down. I just don’t want anyone’s light to be under a bushel and my mission in life is to wake up those experiential aspects that true artistry awakens, no matter the medium. (http://marthashepp.com)

 Martha’s thoughts brought to the table an additional dimension to my post of yesterday, illustrating how that there is a sense in which words can kill…or at least deaden…and keep us on the surface level which in the Christian tradition is known as “the letter of the law.” The brain scan research she referred to is just stunning.

Martha’s observation brought to my mind a marvelous poem on this subject by Carl Sandburg, a poem which captures poetically the “diaphragms of flesh negotiating the word”–attaching a subjective experience to a word which has currency “out there”. But this experience, there on the threshold of consciousness, introduces us to a “verbal order” (i.e.l patriarchy) which some of us spend the rest of our lives finding the courage to lay aside…in some sense…and allow the words to have meaning again.

 PRECIOUS MOMENTS by Carl Sandburg

Bright vocabularies are transient as rainbows.

Speech requires blood and air to make it.

Before the word comes off the end of the tongue,

While diaphragms of flesh negotiate the word,

In the moment of doom when the word forms

It is born, alive, registering an imprint—

Afterward it is a mummy, a dry fact, done and gone.

The warning holds yet: Speak now or forever hold your peace.

Ecce home had meanings: Behold the Man! Look at

          Him! Dying he lives and speaks!

(NOTE: If you check out Martha’s web site—where you will find some of her art and clips from her music…make sure you read her “Artist’s Statement.”)

Shakespeare & Binary Thinking

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“There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” This might be one of the richest bits of Shakespearean wisdom that I have gleaned from the treasure of his work. He is pointing out that it is our ability to assign labels that creates our world and in so doing carves this world up into categories. This notion is intriguing for on a superficial level it seems to mean that even something like murder is “murder” only because of thinking. And, well, in a sense that is so but that doesn’t mean our labeling it “bad” is a problem.

With this observation Shakespeare again takes us into the depths of our collective heart where distinctions were made even before we are rational human beings. He realized that somewhere in our ancient past we determined that labels (i.e. words) are necessary even before we were capable of formal thought. It is there, in our collective unconscious that we decided, “Hey, some of this stuff going on here is a problem” and from that subconscious realization we began to evolve a capacity to assign labels. But also, at that some point in development we started the preliminary process of assigning labels to the whole of God’s creation, illustrated so beautifully with Adam’s “naming the beasts of the field.”

Without this ability to assign labels and to categorize our world we would still be beasts of the field. But with this skill we were beginning to acquire the ability to create human culture, making it possible for life as we know it to unfold. But unfortunately, this spiritual phenomena of becoming verbal also had a price tag—it separated us from the splendor of the natural world and left us with a feeling of loss and an unconscious want to return to that Edenic bliss. It also created the capacity to take these labels too seriously and to forget they were only “pointers” and not the thing- in-itself. These made it possible for ideologues to climb out of the primordial slime with the rest of us and these ideologues take this verbal world to be the only world, not realizing that words have meaning only when their ancient, primordial, (i.e. pre-verbal) roots are engaged. When we reach this point of spiritual development, we understand that a simple word like “god,” for example, can cease to be a mere “idea” and the “experience” of God in the depths of our heart can begin to surface. When we reach this point of our life we then begin to “wrestle with the Lord” and can come to realize that in some sense we are also wrestling with the very core of our being, our very self. We are, as W. H. Auden puts it, “waging the war we are.”

It is such a challenge to recognize and to experience the limits of binary thinking. In a sense, “binary thinking” is the only thinking there is but only in a sense. With this marvelous neo-cortex, we have the God-given capacity to learn how deeply we are embedded in our own thought. When we reach this point of maturity and have the courage to enter the struggle that follows, we recognize that yes, there is “good” and “bad” in our world but we understand that the distinction between the two is more nebulous than we used to think. This understanding makes us less sure when assigning those particular labels though we can,, at the same time, have the courage to judiciously utilize them. Yes, there is “good” and a “bad” in this world and even more so, in the very depths of my own heart. This neo-cortical phenomena of meta-cognition allows us to hold in our mind and heart “contradictory” notions at one and the same time and we can begin to cavort about in the Unity of all Things.

Lunacy in Religion Surfaces Again!!!

Christiandom has given Bill Maher and other stand-up comedians more fodder for there routines as a 53 year old former fundamentalist pastor has been arrested in Brazil to face 53 charges of sexual abuse. I will offer a link to the story as it is really creepy, primarily many of the parents willingly “followed God’s leadership” and entrusted their teen daughters into the care of this man’s reclusive and isolated ministry with a promise that he would make these girls God’s women! (http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/01/us/victor-barnard-brazil-caught/index.h)

I see so much lunacy in contemporary religion. And, history has many other stories of additional religious lunacy enough to bring anyone to the point of consideration, “Is all of this just nuts?” And I look at contemporary Christianity and am amazed at how intelligent, educated people can believe some of the things they believe in the name of Christ; and, yes, on the fringe I see many “nut-jobs.”  However, the social context that produced me some six decades ago would label me “nuts” also, or some variation of that term And, in a sense, they would be right for it is the context that gets to define the terms and in reference to the context from which I hailed I certainly merit some disapproving label.

Spirituality deals with the issue of meaning or our quest for meaning. And meaning is always found in a search into the depths of the heart. Unfortunately, the “depths of the heart” are chaotic to say the least and contain good and bad, a veritable Pandora’s box of mischief and worse. Sometimes one’s spiritual quest will take one right into the “Heart of Darkness” and there are times that temptations leads to catastrophic decisions, often “in the name of God.” An equally sordid route is when someone is so fear-bound, so fearful of that dark realm in his heart, they will not allow the Spirit of God that he professes to believe in to lead him in the depths of the heart in the first place. This person will keep it all in the head and become an ideologue, one picture of which we have today is Isis but in Christianity in my country there is Westboro Baptist Church.

But, this issue is ultimately a human issue and not the fault of the religious/spiritual impulse though certainly that impulse goes awry and we see catastrophe. We are complicated little critters because in those hoary depths of our heart monsters do lurk and sometimes our adaptations to them are inadequate, even in our faith. And this realization keeps me a little less rigid than I used to be though often I will find myself relapsing into an arrogance even with my “liberal” and “open-minded” and “all-inclusive” notions of Christianity. And this realization always brings me back to the basic emphasis of spirituality—chopping wood, carrying water. For all of our lofty and noble thoughts, what are we doing to make this world a better place for our kiddies?

 

 

 

Modern-day Tent Revival Coming to Taos, NM!!!

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In the “old days” of my youth in the American South there were tent revivals, even tales from my mother of “brush arbor revivals”, and other examples of evangelical fervor run amok. I received a mailer last week regarding the modern-day equivalent of this type of event which will be held in the comfort of a local motel on the north end of the main street in Taos, NM. The flyer (fortunately addressed impersonally to “boxholder) announces—THE BIBLE…AMERICA…WHAT’S NEXT? Inside the flyer, some of the topics to be addressed are: How near is His return?; The Signs of His Coming; Will the United Nations Rule the World? The Power Behind the Beast & the Anti-Christ. This is a glossy, full color, four-page flyer and it will bring the crowds in along with their hard-earned money. The evangelist will leave town 11 days later with his coffers fattened and the desperate souls will leave with the fears heightened and their desperate ideologically-based faith intensified.

In my youth, I loved it when these guys would come to town, though I was born late enough that brush arbors and tent revivals were almost a thing of the past and I never got to participate in one. But these evangelists would hold us in awe, driving up in their expensive cars, wearing their handsome suits, and trotting out all of those impressive diagrams and charts which offered positive proof that the end-times were near and that Jesus was coming back to bring his children home and wreak havoc on all those left behind.

Yes, part of me is snickering at this scene that will unfold in this lovely community and part of me would like to attend a night or two and gawk. But I’m pleased that I’m now mature enough that the snickering is overshadowed my a profound sadness, especially for the children who will be mortally wounded with the terror of the atmosphere and many will “come to Christ” out of a fear of hell and will spend the rest of their life under the tyranny of ideological Christianity.   And I don’t think the evangelist is necessarily a shyster. He probably is caught up himself in this institutionalized hysteria and is merely playing his role…as we all tend to do in life…in a collective mindset that has him at its beck-and-call, his life being merely the “toy of some great pain.” (Ranier Rilke)

God is love and perfect love casteth out fear.  And I wish I could tell you that I now embody “perfect love” and all fear has been “casteth out” of my heart and life. But it hasn’t. But God is working on it and I will continue to let Him. And now the fears are more readily exposed and I’m finding the Grace to acknowledge, embrace, and “go swimmin’” in them occasionally.

 

A Caveat re this Awakening “Stuff”

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There is a note of irony re this “awakening” business that I’m discoursing about. When you have awakened, all you get is the knowledge that, technically, you never have been awake and never will be! All you get is the knowledge…and experience…of the darkness in which you live. You will never be able to say anything but that you “see through a glass darkly” and if you have any honesty you will come to realize that your glass is a lot “darklier” than you could ever imagine!

Oh yes, I believe that “Light has come into the world” but we can only catch a faint glimmer of this Light before it is immediately beset by our ego needs which the Apostle Paul called “the flesh.” This merely means that there is always that tendency to interpret things…and certainly spiritual things…in a self-serving manner and a great resistance to acknowledging this. Of course, we see this so readily with that vast population known as “them” but it rarely dawns on us that we are guilty of the same. Since I found the temerity to acknowledge this, I have frequent “Rick Perry moments” when I have to say “Oops!” as I realize that once again I am just full of myself with some of my blather and that I am using my “enlightened” discourse to merely avoid reality.

Now, when this happens I try to not castigate myself and I certainly am not trying to say that I am a bad human being. I am not. I’m just a “human being” and it is human nature to take ourselves too seriously and not accept our shallowness and ego-centricity. And it is just so very “ok” to be “guilty” of being a human but it is important to acknowledge it! This helps me to snicker less when others are caught being guilty of the same.

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There is a note of irony re this “awakening” business that I’m discoursing about. When you have awakened, all you get is the knowledge that, technically, you never have been awake and never will be! All you get is the knowledge…and experience…of the darkness in which you live. You will never be able to say anything but that you “see through a glass darkly” and if you have any honesty you will come to realize that your glass is a lot “darklier” than you could ever imagine!

Oh yes, I believe that “Light has come into the world” but we can only catch a faint glimmer of this Light before it is immediately beset by our ego needs which the Apostle Paul called “the flesh.” This merely means that there is always that tendency to interpret things…and certainly spiritual things…in a self-serving manner and a great resistance to acknowledging this. Of course, we see this so readily with that vast population known as “them” but it rarely dawns on us that we are guilty of the same. Since I found the temerity to acknowledge this, I have frequent “Rick Perry moments” when I have to say “Oops!” as I realize that once again I am just full of myself with some of my blather and that I am using my “enlightened” discourse to merely avoid reality.

Now, when this happens I try to not castigate myself and I certainly am not trying to say that I am a bad human being. I am not. I’m just a “human being” and it is human nature to take ourselves too seriously and not accept our shallowness and ego-centricity. And it is just so very “ok” to be “guilty” of being a human but it is important to acknowledge it! This helps me to snicker less when others are caught being guilty of the same.

“Christians are the Salt of the Earth…

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“…everything is dead where they’ve been.”  I read this in a novel by a local novelist decades ago and could not help but laugh. And I still find it very funny, even though then and now I consider myself a Christian. That novelist might have been a complete cynic or perhaps like me he could appreciate the fact that, for all of its great contributions to human culture, the Christian faith has sure introduced some nonsense from time to time, some of which is tragic and some of which is just amusing. And this brings to mind the comedian Bill Maher who regular jabs Christians for their “imaginary friend” and points out ludicrous things about contemporary Christianity. Though he is an avowed atheist, I give him an hearty “amen” as he points out absurd dimensions of the Christian faith that Christians are not capable of, or not willing to, see.

BUT, back then and even now, I don’t find myself having any thoughts about violent responses to those who would ridicule my faith. Yes, decades ago I would have been less likely to find amusement in those who would offer ridicule but now in hind sight I realize that the problem even then was that I took my faith too seriously because I took my self too seriously. To be more precise, back in my youth the “god” that I worshipped was only a projection of my own ego and thus when that “god” was criticized or ridiculed, I took it personally and reacted defensively. But now I see that God is the Wholly Other, not just a “being among other beings but the Ground of Being” (Richard Rohr) and He is not so insecure that he needs us to defend Him. Those who attempt to defend him, especially to the point of violence, are merely demonstrating personal insecurity and alienation and have projected their soul “out there” and called it “god.” There is a sense in which that leaves them without a soul and people without a soul can do heinous things without any capacity to self-reflect. “They call it Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.” (Shakespeare)

Sublimated Religious Violence

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An image that is indelibly imprinted in my mind from the past year or so vividly illustrates the violence that is present in the religious impulse. A Muslim terrorist in a Saudi Arabia casually walking down the aisle of a shopping mall, nonchalantly gunning down shoppers, but pausing periodically to kneel and pray. I prefer the violence in the religious experience I am familiar with when it has been sublimated into “simple” (cough, cough) manipulation, intimidating and terrorizing into “getting saved.” That is a very violent ritual but admittedly it cannot compare with what we see with today’s Muslim extremists.

Let me focus on the “getting saved” culture that I am familiar with, by experience and by research. I think that “getting saved” can be a meaningful religious ritual that can introduce one into the realm of spirituality. But in my experience I fear that often it only fulfills the “tribal function” of religion, bringing the young person into the tribe and fulfilling a very necessary human need to belong. But too often the value of the experience never goes beyond perfunctory compliance with the letter of the law, just as with many religious traditions.

But in the conservative, fundamentalist Christian denominations the children are often terrorized into “getting saved” with stories of excruciating death-bed conversions…or worse, death-bed failures to be converted and subsequent writhing for eons in the pits of hell. And the social pressure and intimidation is relentless as the young person is pressured into “asking Jesus into his life.” One blogging friend of mine recalled as a teen-ager gaggles of females besetting her and attempting to “gang save me.”! This procedure is intrinsically violent and it is interesting that many parents will subject their young children to this abuse even while the main focus of their faith are offenses like drug and alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct, abortion, and our “Kenyan President leading us down the path to Socialism.” Each of these issues, save the latter, is a legitimate concern. But how can a spiritually discerning adult allow their young children’s spirituality to be warped for the duration of their life while their spiritual fervor is directed on matters that might warrant attention but not as much as the mental, emotional, and spiritual welfare of their own children.  This is overt institutional child abuse that is clothed under the rubric  of “faith.”

Young children exposed to this terror are developmentally immature and the “neurological plasticity” of their brain means they are extremely susceptible to this kind of pressure and whatever they do to “adapt” to the stress, will likely follow them “en toto” to the end of their life. That often means their faith can never mature so that layers of meaning in the religious symbols can be appreciated. To let go of the subjective experiences of that moment of terror and broaden their worldview regarding spiritual life, would subject them to an adult version of the terror they felt as children. So the maistros who orchestrate this violence are creating a captive audience

Jesus is “Speaking” to Me!

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Now, He does not “literally” speak to me.  I don’t hear voices or anything like that.  If it should happen I would refill my prescription of industrial-strength Haldol quickly! But my imagination, so long dormant or even imprisoned within tyrannical linear thought is finally coming out to play and from time to time I like to interpret a few things I’m learning in the realm of spirituality with the following refrain, “Jesus said unto me….”

For example, in the mid eighties when I was knee deep in my “great depression” and was walking past a large Baptist church to get my favorite comfort food, ice cream, and I just noticed that for the first time in my life I had no tinge of guilt for not being there in that moribund house of worship, for disobeying the biblical injunction to “forsake not the assembling together as  the manner of some is,”  And this tid-bit of freedom has been burgeoning through my life since then, slowly working away on that deep-seated core of guilt and shame that had kept me in Christian bondage. And there on that street that summer night, Jesus told me, “Hey Louie, its ok!  You don’t have to do that anymore!  You are free, my son!  You’ve done your time, done your penance…a penance you never did have to do in the first place; for, after all, that’s what I was about.  Remember?  Remember?  Remember?”

And Jesus continued to speak to me and to tell me, “Hey, that whole Christian thingy.  You don’t have to do that any longer.  I paid the price for your freedom from all bondage, even the bondage to “me”….which by the way I never had in mind!”  I began to explore this vein of thought and realized that in the way I had been taught in my youth, I was no longer a Christian and Jesus was telling me it was ok.

So I wondered in that wilderness for years, knowing that I was not an atheist or even agnostic even with this radical vein of thought coming to me from Jesus, of all people.  For, yes I had lost my religion, I had lost my family, I had lost my childhood friends, I had given up professional employment and was living on a meager income, barricaded in the basement of an office building.  I had “lost” everything.  But, I then realized that Jesus and the Christian tradition was still there even though “it” had lost its grip on me.  I no longer “had” to be Christian but realized that I still believed fully that Jesus walked the face of this earth and trotted out a lot of marvelous ideas….and lived them, embodied them!  Now it is true, dealing with “loss” of this type…and speaking now as a clinician…can lead to radical loss which is known in my trade as psychosis.  But I knew that history was still present for my scrutiny and that Jesus had been here in history in some shape, form, or fashion and though we know little about Him, we can surmise that he was a powerful spiritual teacher and I found that his teachings had great value for me, greater value for me than ever before.  And I realized that this meant that I was a Christian and always had been and this “loss” I had experienced was the “loss” of the letter of the law which in the subsequent decades has allowed the “spirit of the law” to begin to flow in my heart and life.

 And since then, Jesus has said occasionally, “Hey Louie!  You are beginning to get it!  You find me only when you lose me, you find me only when you lose the “idea” of me and discover me deeply in the inner depths of your own heart, discovering that the Kingdom is within.  And, Louie, this “loss” you experienced is an ongoing experience but this is only the loss of your ego self which is what I had in mind when I taught that you can find yourself only when you are willing to lose yourself.

 Since then I’ve come to realize why most Christians hyper-ventilate with the Mel Gibson “Passion of Christ” stuff for with that imagery they can allow the story of Jesus, his death, burial, and resurrection to remain…in their mind…an historical “fact” and miss the point that he was “the lamb slain before the foundation of the world.”  This allows them to keep Him and the whole story a mere conceptual narrative which has nothing in the least to do with the depths of their heart where the real “death, burial, and resurrection” must take place.  They cling tenaciously to the “idea” of Jesus just as they cling to the “idea” of their own identity for to let go of the “idea” and embrace the experience would mean letting the ego die, it would mean following the advice of W. H. Auden who encouraged us to, “climb the rugged cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

 

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But with this vein of thought, I always am brought to the realization that I have just condemned them all to hell!  By that I mean, in the old-brain mind-set of “literallew” they do not believe the “right way” and therefore are “lost as a goose in a hail storm.”  But the marvel of the Jesus story is that…as the old evangelical hymn puts it, “Jesus paid it all.”  Sure, they don’t get it “right” but guess who else does not get it “right”?  C’est moi?  None of us get it “right” but the message of Jesus is that we are forgiven nevertheless!  And as far as getting it “right”, please define right for me?  “Right” will always be a rational construction, a formulation arising from the depths of the heart which always has a deep-seated need to legitimate its preconceptions.  And that is why Christianity has often been a laughing-stock, easy fodder for late-night comedians such as Bill Maher who see readily through the non-sense and confront them with reality.  But, being confronted with reality, most Christians have a built-in escape, captured by W. H. Auden with this note, “When Truth met him, and held out his hand, he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

The Adventure of Life

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“Life is an adventure,” so they say.  It is a commonplace that is almost banal, ranking right up there with “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”  But, I find it really is an adventure which takes place when one begins to venture beyond the narrow confines of the way one was taught to see…and feel…the world.  But the real challenge lies in the very difficult task of becoming aware of this narrow prism through which one views the world, how the tyranny of assumptions shapes our fundamental perceptions of the world.  And to ask one to see these premises that shapes this world view is like asking a fish to see water.

It must be noted by those of us who swim in the aether of cerebral thought that most people in the world cannot ever make this meta-cognitive leap; and for them to do so would be catastrophic for human culture.  The day-to-day grind of reality depends on people who “mindlessly” go through the motions of their daily life without questioning the “basic assumptions” that I am putting on the table here.  And furthermore, for me to use the term “mindless” here merits caution as I do have a contempt gene which is too often near the surface!

We are tribal creatures and the tribal rituals are easily analyzed by people like myself who have lived their whole life “off the grid” in some fashion.  (I think one term for people like me is “pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals” or perhaps more accurately “alienated.”)   But we are a tribe, a global tribe composed of smaller tribes who must somehow find a way to live together with a modicum of harmony.  But each tribe has an innate tendency to not see beyond the safe confines of its basic assumptions and each member of that tribe learns to drink the same “kool-aid.”  That is what makes it a tribe.

But the adventure of life starts when we realize that we have “drank the kool-aid” in some fashion and are shaped by basic assumptions given to us by our culture.  Then we can begin to find a bit of freedom and can begin to play with reality.  Yes, we can even begin to “play with our self” (wink, wink) and with the beautiful human and natural world that we find ourselves in, a beautiful “Garden of Eden” in some sense.

However, it is scary!  We are hard-wired to live within those “safe confines” and to suddenly realize we are “off the reservation” can easily be a Pyrrhic victory.  To take a quantum leap here, it will ultimately bring us to the Shakespearean issue of “to be, or not to be” and can even bring one to the point of suicide.  For it is gut-wrenchingly painful to realize that one does not belong to the tribe, to be deprived of that “fig-leaf,” and to stand there on that heath like King Lear, pelted by that pitiless storm, naked as a jay-bird.

This is where faith comes in for me.  But the temptation here is to take one’s tribal faith, make a fanatical investment or re-investment in it, and hold on “come hell or high water.”  And all fanaticism (i.e., “addiction) has its roots with this deep-seated existential loneliness.  The tribal religion that my culture offered me was the Judeo-Christian tradition and I have certainly allowed it to be in my life the “opiate” that Karl Marx described.  But opiate does not work for me anymore…or at least that one does not! (I do drink too much!)  I find that my “tribal religion” offers symbols, stories, traditions that are very valuable as I stand here on this heath with King Lear and others and find that there is hope and even purpose.  This “adventure” I am discovering now beyond those aforementioned “confines” involves death, for pushing limits always involves a death-wish of some sort but the Christian tradition teaches that death and live are intertwined and that to “die” is to “live.”  To put it succinctly, there is no “life” without “death.”  Oh yes, there is existence but there is no experience of human-ness, being a live body and soul for this brief moment we have in this time-space continuum.  This is what Jesus meant when he told his disciples who wanted to delay going with him for to help with a burial party, “Let the dead bury the dead.”

However, here is an important point that I’ve already touched on.  It is easy to interpret that quip from Jesus to mean that everyone else in the world who did not follow him was “dead” and therefore would “burn in hell one day.”  That is how I was taught!  But I don’t think so.  Jesus was playing with words, telling his disciples that they needed to follow him and let the burial party take care of its business, that it did not need them.  Jesus was saying that the rest of the world was okay and “dead” was only a metaphor to say they were not amenable to his teachings, that their role in life was to see things differently and to live different lives within “safe confines.”  Jesus realized that the “adventure” I’ve described here was not for everybody but that their life also was “ok”.