Category Archives: poetry and prose

Neuroscience Trying to be God!

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Neuroscientist, Kathleen Taylor, argues that religious fundamentalism is an illness for which there will eventually be a cure as it can be explained neurologically. Well, that is fine with me because “they” are “them” and I love it anytime I can “them” anyone! But, alas and alack, I happen to know that Taylor and her ilk also argue that spirituality itself can be explained in terms of neurology and the mythical “god spot” in the brain and therefore she has me in her sights also. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/kathleen-taylor-religious-fundamentalism-mental-illness_n_3365896.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular)

However, I thoroughly appreciate the neurological research and find that it actually deepens my faith. Yes, I do feel that my spiritual imagery and even the impulse itself has a neurological component. Everything that I “know” and “feel” has a neurological component and even these very words that I write, even the motivation to write them, even this “meta-cognition” being employed has a neurological dimension. This knowledge keeps me from retreating to the perspective of my youth when I felt that objectivity was possible and leaves me with the simple mystery of life and of my own human experience. And it leaves me with the conviction, foolish perhaps, that what I feel and think are important are worth “tossing out there.” Now what happens when they are “tossed out there” is beyond me and is not even my business. As T.S. Eliot said, “We offer our deeds to oblivion” in that we do not know what their outcome will be.

The dilemma for neuroscience research is that it often fails to overlook the obvious—beneath the realm of neurochemistry and “science” lays absolutely nothing. I like to use the philosopher’s term “nothingness” or a primordial void that lies at the root of our existence. I like to call it “Nothingness” or even better, “No-thingness.” And when anyone deigns to venture into that domain of human experience, he/she is pretty close to entering the realm of the “spiritual” for there is where we meet “Otherness” to which some of us assign the term “God,” or “Source” or “Ground of Being” or “I am that I am”, the latter also translated as “the Being One.” But, when we get there…if ever…the only thing we get for the “effort” is the simple knowledge of our being which I like to term “Being.” We have “am-ness” and that is it. And Eliot termed this experience “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.” And, it has been my experience that awareness of this “simplicity” grants me a tad more humility than I was born with, allowing me to seek for inclusiveness with others, including those that disagree with me. “Where is our common interest?” I like to ask and it is always there in some finite respect and Ultimately there in that we are all simple Be-ings, “strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage” and prone to taking ourselves too seriously.

This nebulous approach to spirituality is strangely akin to quantum physics. And, in the realm of scientific research, there are individuals who do seek to find common ground between science, religion, and other approaches to life. For, they realize that “science”, like religion, is merely one approach to the incredible Mystery of life that we are all caught up in from which we cannot escape. We can attempt to “explain it” and therefore have the smug belief that it “makes sense” but history teaches us that the “absolute truth” of any particular era….the “god”…always ends up in the dustbin. Science, religion, literature are only a means to an end and not an end in themselves. Or as the Buddhists like to say, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

 

A Quaker Perspective on Prayer

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We pray, and yet it is not we who pray, but a Greater who prays in us. Something of our punctiform selfhood is weakened, but never lost. All we can say is, Prayer is taking place, and I am given to be in the orbit. In Holy Hush we bow in Eternity, and know the Divine Concern tenderly enwrapping us and all things within His persuading love. Here all human initiative has passed into acquiescence, and He works and prays and seeks His own through us, in exquisite, energizing life. Here the autonomy of the inner life becomes complete and we are joyfully prayed through by a Seeking Life that flows through us into the world of men. (“A Testament of Devotion” by Thomas R. Kelly)

Kelly, who was a Quaker writing in the first half of the 20th century, presents here a notion of prayer that is far removed from what I was taught. Kelly saw prayer, not just as something we do, but as something that is done to us. Prayer is a spiritual process that we can tap into if we humble ourselves, find an always elusive purity of heart, and open ourselves up to the Infinite.

But here I have posed a problem for the old “concrete thinking” lew that still abides in the depths of my heart and he wants to shriek, “This is nuts!” And, I might add that occasionally in my Sunday School class, where we approach spirituality in similar “non-duality” terms, I will occasionally facetiously announce, “This is nuts!” For, I know that my friends also see how complicated and subtle this approach to spirituality is and how that it does not fit the mind and temperament of everybody. Approaching spirituality in this vein involves the ability to hold contradictory notions in the mind at the same time and most people can’t do that. And, I might add, most people should not do that and should approach spirituality in their own way. For, God works through us all and expresses Himself through us all, even through those that I might disagree with or at times even dislike!

But, at times it is hard to maintain this humble approach in the face of an old “un-literary” lew with his (its!) concrete thinking shrieking at him, who wants to proclaim from the rooftops, “THIS IS THE TRUTH! BELIEVE LIKE ME! TURN OR BURN!” I have the nagging need to “be right” which I keep at bay most of the time. But at times it gets triggered and then the black hole that it is gnaws at my soul for a few days. For, the need to “be right” is a black hole and will devour a soul if given into. It is much easier to “know” that you are right than to have hope, confidence, and faith that there is a “Right” that is present in this universe that is seeking expression through us all, even those that believe differently than I do.

And let me close with Shakespeare’s profound observation about prayer in Hamlet, where King Claudius kneels and prays, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” And then T. S. Eliot noted, “Prayer is more than an order of words, or the sound of the voice praying, or the conscious occupation of the praying mind.”

 

Richard Rohr Re The Profane

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Again, I must let Richard Rohr speak for me today, sharing his observations about the importance of getting beneath the surface of things. He argues that everything is profane…even religion…if you keep on the surface of it. And the profanity is particularly pronounced if it happens in the domain of religion for the sacred is blasphemed even as it is purportedly worshipped. As Shakespeare put it, “With devotion’s visage and pious action we sugar o’er the devil himself” and “When love begins to sicken and decay, it useth an enforced ceremony. There are no tricks in plain and simple faith; but hollow men, like horses hot at hand, make gallant show and promise of their mettle.”

If we just stay on the fearful or superficial side of the religious spectrum, religion is invariably defined by exclusionary purity codes that always separate things into sacred and profane. God is still distant, punitive, and scary. Then our religious job becomes putting ourselves only on the side of “sacred” things (as if you could) and to stay apart from worldly or material things, even though Jesus shows no such preference himself.

After the beginnings of mystical experience (which is just prayer experiences), one finds that what makes something secular or profane is precisely whether one lives on the surface of it. It’s not that the sacred is here and the profane is over there. Everything is profane if you live on the surface of it, and everything is sacred if you go into the depths of it—even your sin. To go inside your own mistakenness is to find God. To stay on the surface of very good things, like Bible, sacrament, priesthood, or church, is to often do very unkind and evil things, while calling them good. This important distinction is perfectly illustrated by Jesus’ parable of the publican and the Pharisee (Luke 18:9-14).

So the division for the Christian is not between secular and sacred things, but between superficial things and things at their depth. The depths always reveal grace, while staying on the surface allows one to largely miss the point (the major danger of fundamentalism, by the way). Karl Rahner, the German Jesuit, and one of my heroes of Vatican II, loved to call this “the mysticism of ordinary life.

The Mystery of Godliness

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Too late loved I thee, O Thou beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! Too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee, deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou were with me but I was not with Thee. Things held me far from Thee which, unless they were in Thee, were not at all. Thou calledst and shoutedst, and burstedst my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scattered my blindness. Though breathedst odors, and I drew I n breath and pant for Thee. I tasted, and hunger hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me and I burned for Thy peace. When I shall with my whole soul cleave to Thee, I shall nowhere have sorrow or labor, and my life shall live as wholly full of Thee.

This beautiful prayer of St. Augustine is merely the long version of “my soul followeth hard after thee, O Lord” from the Psalmist.   I’ve always had this longing in my heart and, though it was definitely a learned emphasis…my role in my family and community was to be a “man of the cloth”…I think it also revealed a sensitivity in my soul that has not dissipated after six decades. Yes, there are many ways of looking at it, including neurology and certainly neurosis! Perhaps there is that “god spot” in some of our brains that was merely over heated with St. Augustine and with the rest of us who “pine” after the Ultimate. I can’t help but speculate about whether or not we’d ever have heard of St. Augustine if he’d have been prozac’d!

As has been said, “it takes call kinds” and we “piners’ are therefore part of the picture that is being painted. St. Augustine and his ilk were highly attuned to the mystery that lies at the heart of life. This mystery can be overwhelming and so God has kindly offered fig leaves to hide those intense feelings for most people.

Here is wisdom from Ranier Rilke re this mystery, shared with us this morning on the blog by Blue Eyed Ennis on WP:

And yet, Though We Strain
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

And yet though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it then?

Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances
or streets, as they wind through time?

To “Be” or “Not to Be”

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This observation by Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines and the subject of being vs non-being was a recurrent theme of the Bard. On one level the issue in this famous soliloquy was merely that of physical existence, The morose young oedipally-conflicted neurotic was serotonin-depleted and questioned that it was worth it to toil on against those “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” rather than opt for the “bare bodkin” (knife)

But a more substantive issue for Shakespeare than physical life or death was “being” itself—-“what does it mean to ‘be’ as opposed to ‘not be.’ This is best illustrated in Sonnet 146 when he lamented a “poor soul…pining within…painting thy outward wall so costly gay” while disregarding that inward estate which he saw as the real, concluding that we should instead “within be fed, without be rich no more.” (See http://www.artofeurope.com/shakespeare/sha6.htm)

Shakespeare saw that humanity had lost his way and was immersed in the ephemeral, making the mistake that John Masefield described as “like a lame donkey lured by moving hay, chasing the shade and letting the real be,” the state of affairs which C. S. Lewis later described as sin, “misplaced concreteness”. (For Masefield sonnets, see http://www.sonnets.org/masefield.htm)

The issue is an “external” reference point which…and here things get complicated…is not really “external” but “spiritual.” But to delve into the “spiritual” we must first use language…most of us anyway…and so we must use words like “external” to evoke images. Shakespeare was merely saying, “Hey, there is more to life than meets the eye!” and that is a message that humankind has always been averse to as it takes him out of the comfortable little orbit of his ego-bound day-to-day life. But, in spite of this aversion, there is still “more” out there and we ignore it at our own peril.

 

The “Monkey Mind” and Insomnia

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My “monkey mind” is harassing me again so that I cannot sleep. I am so full of chatter.  And I do like my “chatter” but to have any meaning it has to find the primordial silence that is its Source. And I sure appear to be fearful of this Source even though I so often affirm my faith and confidence in it/Him/Her.

I recently read Jiddu Krishnamurti for the first time, a blog-o-sphere friend having recommended Freedom from the Known to me. This book so eloquently presents what I would call a Presence as encompassing the whole of life. As I read this incredibly insightful and powerful book, I am amazed at how it resonates with me on some level and I even suspect that I have some unconscious memory of having known this Presence in my early childhood and yearn to go back there. I think that probably I did know that Presence but discovered that I lived in a world where “chatter” predominated and opted for the validation that it offered.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from Krishnamurti that really grabbed me:

You are never alone because you are full of all the memories, all the conditioning, all the mutterings of yesterday; your mind is never clear of all the rubbish it has accumulated. To be alone you must die to the past. When you are alone, totally alone, not belonging to any family, any nation, any culture, any particular continent, there is that sense of being an outsider. The man who is completely alone in this way is innocent and it is this innocency that frees the mind from sorrow.

We carry about with us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that totally is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young – not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age – and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.

I do not think that Krishnamurti felt that we could or should purge our minds of accumulated memories. His concern was the attachment to these memories, this “accumulated rubbish,” an attachment which keeps us from being able to “be alone” in the sense of being autonomous.

But note what T. S. Eliot said in The Four Quartets on the issue of attachment and detachment and the oblique relevance of death to the issue:

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

 

The Great Round of Life

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“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” (Anais Nin, quoted in http://juliegreenart.com/)

This was a stunning line by Anais Nin. And, though I have not read much of her work, I have read enough to know she was full of “stunning” lines. And I also know she battled her demons throughout her life; it is only as we “battle our demons” that wisdom comes to us.

Remaining in a “bud” is to not live. For the blossoming to occur, the “bud” has to break apart and even disintegrate so that “purpose” might be achieved. This is the wisdom that Jesus had in mind when he reminded us that unless a grain of corn fall into the earth and die, it could not bring forth life. And this is the meaning of the Crucifixion. Ranier Rilke approached the same life-out-of-death theme with these words, “Daily he takes himself off and steps into the changing constellation of his own everlasting risk.” (Duino Elegies)

Shakespeare also knew this essential truth of life, using the “bud” image himself in his first sonnet. In this lovely sonnet The Bard described a young man who balked at commitment to marriage, holding onto his heart’s “bud” and being unwilling to participate in the Great Round:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

Boston Bombers and the Danger of “Big Thoughts”

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“Big Thoughts Have Got Us.” These words of the poet Gene Derwood come to my mind every time I hear of someone else getting carried away with his/her ideology and carrying it to the extreme of taking lives, their own and certainly those of others. I always remember the wisdom of Mike Dooley, “Thoughts are things. Choose the good ones.”

And they, thoughts, are “things” in that they carry weight and can lead us to actions that are not in our own best interest or in the best interest of others. And I am speaking from experience. Now it is easy to look at the ideology of the Boston Marathon bombers and say, “Oh, why did they ever think that and get carried away by it?” Well, that is a good question and there is lunacy in their thought system that is not present in the thought system of most of us. But all of us have “thoughts” and none of our “thoughts” are devoid of intent, noble though we may think them to be. For example, let me take the thought system of Christianity, a “thought system” which I subscribe to and do so ever more passionately. But the danger I face, and the danger that all Christians face, is that they take their “thoughts” as having ultimate value and fail to realize the emotional valence they have been given by our life experiences. Yes, most of us have “thought systems” which are relatively benign compared with the Boston bombers, but they are not totally benign. I, for one, am appalled to recall some of the things I have done and said under the guise of “the Spirit leading.” For, even with benign and even noble thoughts we can be brutal. Even with “Jesus Christ” we can seek to dominate, control, and brutalize other people.

Let me be more honest. I have had interchanges under this persona of “LiteraryLew” which I have had to confess to a few friends are mean-spirited, to put it mildly. And there will be more of that as I am a mere human, driven by passions which at times consume me. But, may I always be subject to Shakespeare’s “pauser reason” which will make me “meta” every now and then and seek to balance some of my verbal and emotional excess. For, with things we feel so strongly about we can be so brutal.

 

Language “Calming the Savage Beast”

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As I work with very young children as a substitute teacher, I marvel at the early childhood memories that come flooding back. The haunt of anxieties, fears, insecurities, and neediness surface though they no longer terrorize me. I have matured and have developed an ego, an ego which itself is mature enough to allow these feelings to resurface without feeling its integrity is jeopardized. So, I learn from this classroom experience even as I am patiently helping these lovely children to learn.

Neurology has taught us that our experiences from birth onward…and even before birth…stay with us and shape our lives. For the roots of the ego are organic and so we get a head start even before we are born; and, I would deign to say, even before we were a “gleam in our daddy’s eye.”

But especially after we are born, we soak up what is going on around us and begin to formulate an impression of the world, one basic impression being whether or not the world is an hospitable place to be. “Do I like this place or do I want to check out?” Fortunately, most of us are wired to want to hang around even if our world happens to be very ugly and the same wiring helps us develop coping skills (i.e. a “denial system”) that can thwart what would be otherwise an unbearable subjective anguish. But sometime the “denial systems” are too maladaptive and lead one beyond the pale when he/she grows up and begins to take part in the human carnival. That is when therapy becomes relevant and sometimes even incarceration and even…perhaps…capital punishment.

One of the basic tools of denial is language itself. It is our ability to formulate words and enter into the verbal world that calms the savage beast that reigns prior to that Oedipal moment. Nikos Kazantzakis pithily referred to those “twenty-six toy soldiers that guard us from the rim of the abyss,” George Eliot said that we should “speak words which give shape to our anguish.” and Conrad Aiken noted that,”to name the abyss is to avoid it.” And now I have suddenly wandered knee-deep into the field of semiotics. If you find exploration of the nitty-gritty of subjective development, of that moment in our early life when language is being “wrapped around” the primitive beasts of our early subjective anguish, let me suggest Julia Kristeva who has written brilliantly and eloquently on this subject. Her books draw from her practice as a psychoanalyst with patients whose denial system, i.e. “linguistic filter,” has been compromised either neurologically or by trauma. The Kristeva title which delves most deeply into this is Power of Horrors.

My Venture into the Dark Side

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I occasionally venture into the dark side just to see what is going on over there. And it is dark there, abysmally dark, as a stifling smugness predominates along with a complete inability to be self-reflective, to self-monitor, to utilize “meta-cognition.” And, of course, I’m talking of my occasional checking in on Rush Limbaugh’s daily radio show on which he tells the hard-core right-wing extremists what they are to believe.

Let me illustrate. Yesterday he noted re one issue, “Now, liberal media won’t pick this up because it is not part of their narrative.” But implicit in that observation is that he does not have any “narrative” that he has subscribed to, a narrative that consists of “cherry picked” information which will support his bias. For, you see he thinks he is being objective and is reporting the news as it “really is” while all those liberals have an agenda. And the smugness of those who feel they grasp reality in an objective fashion is a basic form of tyranny which seeks desperately to maintain the status quo, which is averse to anything which threatens the narrow little prism through which they view the world. He even noted how the liberals “bend and shape the news, pushing their liberal agenda” without any suspicion that he has an agenda of his own and is pushing an agenda. This is a classic example of the projection that Karl Jung wrote about, ascribing to others the faults that one is actually plagued with him/herself.

Rush proudly announced that he lives in “Realville”, not in the fantasy world that liberals live in. Well, he does but his “realville” is the smug world view that once championed slavery, saw nothing wrong with the corporate excesses of the late 19th century, opposed giving women the right to vote in the early 20th century, vehemently opposed the civil rights movement in the 1960’s, and basically demands that our country lives in the past. His “realville” is merely a version of a template that he and his ilk daily impose on their world, a template that I describe as “the way things are.” They wake up daily and know assuredly that “this is the way things are” and do not consider that their viewpoint is very subjective and does not definitively describe reality. And their “way things are” is imposed in a tyrannical manner on the whole of their world, including those nearest and dearest to them.

They cannot have the humility to become aware of their own subjectivity, their own inner experience, and know that they can have a confidence in this subjective reality but not with the arrogance with which they are accustomed. When their subjectivity is recognized, and experienced, they can respect their own reality but at the same time recognize that other people have their own subjective world and that many times that subjective world is very different than their own. This is the phenomena of “difference” and “difference” is what makes the world beautiful and exciting. But, to acquire this humility always entails entertaining some doubt, anxiety, and emotional distress.

And discovering one’s subjective world is a spiritual enterprise. And by “spiritual” I am here not talking of Spiritual here…that is for another occasion. By “spiritual” I mean becoming aware of the complexities and ambivalence and ugliness of the human heart. Or, to put it differently, I referring to opening up to consideration of the unconscious dimension of the human heart. I am encouraging one to allow the “Spirit of God” to open up the heart and follow the advice of Shakespeare and allow that Spirit to make that heart “full of penetrable stuff,” no longer allowing it to be “bronzed over so that it is proof and bulwark against sense” (or feeling) It is only when our heart is “full of penetrable stuff” that we feel and therefore have a heart which is spiritually alive.

Conservatism is a valid and critical dimension of any culture. But when its extremists are allowed to predominate and influence the moderates and intimidate them into submission, darkness rears its ugly head. But the real evil is when these moderates do not have the courage to stand up and vote for their convictions, vote for what they feel is the right thing, and worship only their false god, “What will get me re-elected”

The election last fall provided us with one example of courage by a Republican luminary. Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who “palled around” with President Obama in the interest of his state who was suffering from a weather catastrophe. He knew that his party would get all over his ass but he knew what the right thing to do was and he acted boldly. He then voted Republican, nevertheless, as he is a Republican. But one can be a Republican and see merit in collaborating with a Democrat on occasion to accomplish what is in the best interest of his constituency. And, of course, Christie was punished and was disallowed by from playing in some of the “reindeer games” of the Republican party.