Category Archives: mind/body dualism

Forgiveness Is Not a Perfunctory Performance

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One of my blogging friends, Anne, has honored me by requesting that I write about forgiveness.  It just so happens that the subject is much on my mind, having been a recurrent theme in my exploration each morning of A Course in Miracles with my wife. For months my she and I have explored the infinite intricacy of forgiveness, learning that it is more than a perfunctory function because one is “supposed to” offer it.  Forgiveness is recognition in some sense that, “there but by the grace of God go I.”  Furthermore, if one finds himself perfunctorily forgiving people while harboring continued indignation and anger, there is no meaningful forgiveness.  ACIM even points out that forgiveness can be a way of asserting power over the other person, as in, “Hey, I forgave you for this heinous offense….so you better not forget it!”

I can offer forgiveness only to the degree that I have received it.  And “receiving” it is often avoided as it might require opening up, even to someone else, about very unsavoury things that one has done and said, so unsavoury that often they are barely remembered if at all.  It brings to mind a relevant mantra that I use often, “There is nothing wrong about being wrong other than admitting that one has been, and is, wrong.”  Each of us cannot escape our “human-ness” and to be human is to have an ingrained tendency to be wrong, often even in the pursuit of doing things that are “right.”  It is very liberating to find the grace to be able to put into words with another person, or even in a journal, moments of shame that he has recoiled from for years.

Anne made an observation when she emailed me about this subject that is highly relevant, She noted, “I do not think we can actually ‘decide’ to forgive. Maybe it happens to us where we are swept into a current.”  This “current” is so important.  Until we have begun to experience the fluidity of life, its “flow,” our linear-thinking will often confine us to habitual ways of thinking and feeling which often make forgiveness little more than a perfunctory, rote performance. This flow of life is very related to discovering the practice of meditation about twelve years ago, a practice which I happen to know Anne is much more familiar with than I am.  Until I discovered meditation I did not realize the wisdom of the teaching, “You are not your thoughts.  You are the one having them.”  This wisdom helped me to understand that the cacophony of thoughts that had free-rein in my mind and heart, left little or no space to say to myself on occasion, “Oh, I didn’t even mean that nice thing I said!  I was just reading a cue card and ‘being nice’ again.” That was the beginning of the “internal dialogue” of Hannah Arendt that I speak of often.

Distance, Metaphor, and Edgar Simmons

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Last evening I stepped out into the bitter cold to witness Saturn and Jupiter come close to each other as if they were going to lovingly embrace, if you can consider “embracing” while separated by millions of miles. I can use the word embracing as in “touching” here only with the realization that in reality I am viewing this moment in our cosmic history from a physical distance of millions of miles. Even those two planets, appearing to be in “conjunction” are separated by five plus million miles. It is our “perspective” that allows us to witness this incredible moment in our history, giving us the necessary separateness that allows us to bring delight, joy, wonder and appreciation to the table. Before our perspective took roots in our early childhood we did not have the “luxury” of distance as we were part and parcel of a “moment” that we were immersed in and not able to cognitively/spiritually understand it. At that moment there was no “object separateness”…. to employ a bit of clinical jargon. It is the Biblical “fall” that gave us this detachment without which there would be no human culture. Spiritual maturity can gradually come to us in our “four-score and ten” when we grasp the wisdom of this Great Round of which we are but a part, a visitation of “Grace.”

The abysmal distance left us with a hunger to “close it up,” to find the lost connection and return to the delightful “Garden of Eden.” We pine for the relief from the burden of life in which we are separate and distinct, where culture seduces us into believing its artifice can give us that “Grand Conjunction” where grace awaits us. Culture, certainly language, can guide us in that direction but only if we see…and feel…that words will never suffice; they are but “pointers” to the Ultimate. The Buddhists so profoundly teach us, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

Here I want to share another Edgar Simmons poem which beautifully and profoundly captures the experience of distance:

THE MAGNETIC FIELD

Distance…which by definition
Indicates a separation from self
Is the healing poultice of metaphor,
Is the night-lighting of poetry.
As we allot to elements their weights
So to metaphor we need assign the
Weight of the ghost of distance.
Stars are stars to us
Because of distance: it is in the
Nothingness which clings us them
That we glory, tremble, and bow.
O what weight and glory lie abalance
In the stretch of vacant fields:
Metaphor: the hymn and hum of separation.

“Oops!”

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Hannah Arendt’s work has emboldened me recently to “assail” reality, blessed with some dimension of her “internal dialogue”. Taking a critical stance toward reality is a dangerous endeavor as the attempt to “view” reality entails an assumption that one is separate from it.  That very assumption can easily lead to sheer madness as it implicitly gives one the temptation to think with delight, “Oh boy, I’ve got it!  Lay down world and take it! I’m special, having a word from ‘on high’ that you need to listen to.”  The imperious attitude that one has achieved objectivity is the very same peril that I’m so “arrogantly” hoping to not share here.

The alienation that I labor with always brings to mind the quip from Emily Dickinson, “Life is over there…on a shelf” as if it was a book or a curio on a shelf.  That “blessing/curse” gifted us with the brilliant poetry of Dickinson though I have achieved only a critical viewpoint that I share here occasionally. “Reality” is a set of assumptions and biases that we live by, a body of “givens” that is necessary to be able to wake up in the morning without the task of “making sense” of our world all over again.  When we awaken in the morning, the implicitly agreed upon worldview will still be with us and we will again be able to put our pants on one leg at a time.  BUT, as this “reality” unfolds over the passing of time, it accrues sinister notions that need to be addressed.  In my life, that has involved disavowing, for example, that women are to be submissive to their husbands, that persons of color are inferior to we honkies, and that my spiritual tradition did not have toxic dimensions.  When critical thinking begins to set in, it can leave one with a sense of having become unmoored.  It is frightening to have the insipid experience that, “I don’t see things as I was taught to see them.” But I am today coming to accept this “internal dialogue” that insists that I have something to offer…but only to “offer” and not a view point that I can wield like a hammer.  Remember the old adage, “Give a kid a hammer and everything is a nail?”

I like to describe “reality” as a mere “dog-and-pony show” to which we are taught to subscribe.  Shakespeare described it with the cryptic observation that it was “a tale told by an idiot.” His insight makes me cringe at times when I recall the many times this has been the case with me, and inevitably still is! But the humility of this insight makes it easier for me to utter the famous wisdom of Senator Ted Cruz when I am wrong, “Oops!”

Momma Nature Offers Her Wisdom Daily!

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I just discovered a new poet on the website of Commonweal, Samuel Menashe.  With short, even cryptic poems, he captures some essential dimension of life which I think Ram Dass had in mind decades ago when he coined the expression, “Be here now.”  Here is a sample of his work, entitled “Rue”:

For what I did

And did not do

And do without

In my old age

Rue, not rage

Against that night

We go into,

Sets me straight

On what to do

Before I die—

Sit in the shade,

Look at the sky

Sitting in the shade and looking at the sky is really good advice, though I would suggest a dollop of the lovely sunshine here and there!  Momma nature is so gracious and loving, though culture teaches us to live in the past and/or future and avoiding the loveliness of, “being here now.”

Thoughts About a Chattering Monkey Mind

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In the following epigram, one of four epigrams under the title “Four Poems after Callimachus” by Stephanie Burtt, I discover the presence of a cautionary self-reflection with anyone who deigns to write…even in the humble milieu of the blogosphere.

(Epigrams, 60)

Lucky Orestes.
          If you know his story,
you probably think that saying so makes me a jerk.
Fair enough. But I’ve been losing my mind
in my own way this week: Orestes lost his,
but at least he didn’t insist
on asking his loyal companion to read and critique
his own book-length original fictional work.
That’s why he kept Pylades as his friend.
True friendship can exist.
          As for me,
I need to learn how not to speak,
when not to hit send.

I am “full of words”; yes, even too full of them, like Elihu in the book of Job who noted, “My belly is full of words, like a taut wineskin, about to burst.”  And that is ok; all of us have our “belly” full of something and I’m glad my stubborn willfulness is sublimated into verbiage as opposed to less benign “stuff”.  But I’m certainly learning how to “not hit send” more often and the same discretion is being exercised in my daily life.  It makes me remember a bromide from a pastor in my youth, three filters through which should pass anything we might say—-1) Is it true?; 2)Is it kind?; 3) Is it necessary?  Number three is really challenging, putting about anything we do or say into question.  I recall the tune from the ‘60’s, “Silence is Golden” by the Tremeloes.  My meditation experience of the past ten years gives rise to these thoughts about silence.  This practice continues to remind me of the chattering of the monkey mind and how that much of this chattering can take the form of “noble” thoughts.  It often is still “chattering.”  W. H. Auden noted, “We are afraid of pain, but more afraid of silence.”

Belonging, Identity, and Toko-pa Turner

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I was a joiner in my youth and early adulthood. I was not a good one, able only to offer a half-hearted commitment to any opportunity I found to convince myself…and half-heartedly again, that I belonged, that I fit in.  This intense, and often desperate attempt never sufficed. I now realize that the more one must “try” to fit in the more likely it is that the efforts themselves will be off-putting to others.  If you feel that you do fit in, it is likely that you will do so, and that you will be so comfortable in this “chez nous” of yours that you will rarely, if ever, worry about “fitting in.”

But I’ve almost totally given up in this futile quest of fitting in and am finding peace as a result.  To borrow a term from Anna Burns’ Booker-Prize winning novel from last year, “The Milkman,” I am from beyond the pale and thus, in her terms, a “beyond the paler.”  And I’m happy that this full awareness did not dawn on me until the 7th decade of my life as now I have the maturity to not be intoxicated with the intrinsic alienation of this lot in life.  I know whole-heartedly and appreciatively that those “within the pale” are the backbone of this “reality” we live within.  Arrogance is a readily available to all of us, certainly those that lie beyond this pale and harbor some deep-seated wish that we didn’t.  Arrogance just belies a failure to appreciate that the only thing that any of us have, beyond or within the pale, is “being here.”; this is relevant to the imperative of Ram Dass decades ago, “Be here now.”  We are present in this mysterious maelstrom that we know as reality and it is important that we realize that this is true for all of us.  We have only “being here now” so briefly, and that is the commonality that we all share.  Regardless of how much we vehemently disagree or even loathe anyone in our life, they share with us this humble quality of being simply an entity that is nothing more than a “being” like the rest of us. It is in this simple, but Infinite Presence that we can find the unity which can point us in the direction of living together in harmony.  Here in this Sacred Space we stand naked together, unadorned by all of the pretenses, dogmas, adornments, accomplishments, and chicaneries that have given us the illusion of our separateness.

Here I share a quote from a writer I discovered last year, Toko-Pa Turner which sums up these thoughts so beautifully:

Our longing for community and purpose is so powerful that it can drive us to join groups, relationships, or systems of belief that, to our diminished or divided self, give the false impression of belonging. But places of false belonging grant us conditional membership, requiring us to cut parts of ourselves off in order to fit in. While false belonging can be useful and instructive for a time, the soul becomes restless when it reaches a glass ceiling, a restriction that prevents us from advancing. We may shrink back from this limitation for a time, but as we grow into our truth, the invisible boundary closes in on us and our devotion to the group mind weakens. Your rebellion is a sign of health. It is the way of nature to shatter and reconstitute. Anything or anyone who denies your impulse to grow must either be revolutionized or relinquished.
― Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

“Ways of Seeing” by John Berger

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Vision is subtle and frequently we “have eyes to see but see not” and, yes, ” ears to hear but hear not.”  And it is very challenging to realize that human nature subjects us to this limitation yet without meaning, necessarily, that we are a bad person.  But if we never let the wisdom of this quip from Jesus sink in it can lead to a lot of “bad” that will emanate from the resulting unexamined life.

Relevant to this subject, John Berger wrote a classic little book in 1972 entitled, “Ways of Seeing.”  When I discovered the book 25 years ago it grabbed me immediately even though it was written to artists by an art critic and I am far removed from either.  But at that time in my life I was very familiar with the ambiguity of life, including “ways of seeing” and readily grasped the wisdom from the eye of this art critic. Berger pointed out that seeing ultimately is not so much a deed as it is an experience as an evocation as we focus on an object and allow that object to evoke from the depths of our heart a meaningful experience.  Each of us have these interior depths though so often circumstances have confined us to the surface of life where we scurry about our three-score and ten without ever daring to venture into the deep places of the heart that hide the mystery of life.  Venturing there will force us to encounter the significance of the teaching the aforementioned teaching of Jesus about having vision and using it not.

Here are the opening words of Berger’s brilliant book:

Seeing comes before words.  The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.  But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words.  It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.  The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.  Each evening we see the sun set.  We know that the earth is turning away from it.  Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

 Berger realized the simple truth that object-relations theory teaches us in the field of psychology:  there is a gap between the subject and object, between the sense-perceiver and the perceived.  This is the “gap” that Deepak Chopra has made famous and therein lies the mystery of life.

 

The following is a list of my blogs.  Please check the others out!

 

Literarylew.wordpress.com

anrrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com

Theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com

Julian Jaynes, Consciousness, and Meaning

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Julian Jaynes published a very controversial book in 1976 entitled, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Break-down of the Bicameral Mind.” I bought the book back then, delved into a mite, and then let it catch dust until I eventually discarded it.  But for some time the book title has been coming around in discussions with friends and I finally found me a cheap cast-off version of the book in a locale resale shop.

Forty-one years later, I find the book very arresting.  He argued that “consciousness” as we know it began to evolve  during the time of The Iliad and involved a newfound capacity of “self” awareness, a subtle grasp of the phenomenon modern psychology describes as the “I” vs the “not I.” Jaynes noted that this “internal difference” made possible an internal dialogue which, I think he would agree was probably related to what Shakespeare called, “the pauser reason.”  For with an internal dialogue as part of consciousness, mankind could begin to develop a moral and ethical compass in his heart and not be driven merely by unmediated impulses.  It was the event in the evolution of our consciousness that “meaning” also appeared on the scene which is relevant to the “internal difference” mentioned above.

And the subject of meaning and difference brings to my mind one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems:
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

I Have Still Another Girlfriend!

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Yes, I’m always running into “gal pals” in real-time but also in social media.  Those of you here in the realm of “Social Media” know who you are and I won’t embarrass you by naming you.  But I want to introduce you to a recent “acquisition” recently cited by my “guru” Richard Rohr—Etty Hillesum.  Etty was a Jewish woman who died at the age of 29 in Auschwitz concentration camp but left behind a journal she kept the last two years of her life, “An Interrupted Life: the Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-43.”Etty’s journal is a compelling disclosure this young woman’s “faith journey” in very difficult times, though it is important to note that her “faith” is not clearly identified with any particular spiritual tradition.  But she speaks openly about her struggles in the conflict between body and soul, even addressing sexuality struggles.  And openly sharing re sexuality clearly means she could not have been a Christian for that kind of honesty and human-ness is verboten in that kingdom of “purity.”!!

And Etty’s testimony in this book reveals the unimportance of labels in spirituality.  In my background, the label “Christian” has been so important to me that I missed out on any legitimate spiritual/human experience.  And wearing any label so tightly, like I did, does provide a comfort of some sort, the “comfort” of denying our mortality and the vulnerability that comes with the experience.