The issue I’m addressing here follows the overture I made last post entitled, “Seeing through a Glass Darkly.”  The core issue is linear thinking which has been an obsession of mine in the last couple of decades, having finally found the Grace to begin comprehending that mischief of the ego.  Any style of thinking can be captured by an ego, individually or collectively, but it appears that linear-thinking is particularly susceptible,  This is because linear thinking carves the world up into categories and then fails to consider where these categories, with another perspective employed, could blend into others.  One simple example is the distinction between the category “good” and “bad.” In non-linear thinking, sometimes known as non-binary thinking, there would still be the categories “good” and “bad” but the distinction between the two would be more nebulous.  Thus one could see how that “good” carried to an extreme could become extremely “bad,” much related to my oft-quoted quip from Goethe, “They call it reason, using light celestial, just to do the beasts in being bestial.”

Here I have a lengthy quote from Ken Wilbur who delves into the intricacies of this cognitive delimma:

As simple as that sounds, it is nevertheless extremely difficult to adequately discuss no-boundary awareness or nondual consciousness. This is because our language — the medium in which all verbal discussion must float — is a language of boundaries. As we have seen, words and symbols and thoughts themselves are actually nothing but boundaries, for whenever you think or use a word or name, you are already creating boundaries. Even to say “reality is no-boundary awareness” is still to create a distinction between boundaries and no-boundary! So we have to keep in mind the great difficulty involved with dualistic language. That “reality is no-boundary” is true enough, provided we remember that no-boundary awareness is a direct, immediate, and nonverbal awareness, and not a mere philosophical theory. It is for these reasons that the mystic-sages stress that reality lies beyond names and forms, words and thoughts, divisions and boundaries. Beyond all boundaries lies the real world of Suchness, the Void, the Dharmakaya, Tao, Brahman, the Godhead. And in the world of suchness, there is neither good nor bad, saint nor sinner, birth nor death, for in the world of suchness there are no boundaries.― Ken Wilber, “No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth”

Somewhere I read one poet’s answer, “You grab a word and pull on it.” With this effort one can extricate the word’s interior depths where it will eventually reach a breaking point where its inner-most essence begins to flow. One can then delve into its meaning. When ,you “pull” on a word it begins to stretch, to stretch-thin eventually; then it will bend or tear or break and that “inner essence” is reached. There, kindred spirits of the poet will be able to say, “Aha!” or “oh boy’ as those interior depths of the “shell” ooze outward and speak. An “evocation” will then occur rather than the mere “denotation” which is how the word strikes the non-poet.

A line from Conrad Aiken comes to me here, “When the Word lies broken, bleeding at our feet,” its chora of nuances can begin to flow. But for one to understand the wisdom emanating, that listener must already have a “petal open” heart that owes to it a parallel “death, burial, and resurrection”… so to speak. To put this in personal terms—my first name is “Lewis” and before I could appreciate and understand poetry “Lewis” had to be “stretched” upon the rack of human experience and humbled with the onset of brokenness or humility. An identity crisis happened into which the ego crashed into disillusionment. Now three decades later, my “ear” for poetry is maturing and I can glean a poem’s essence much better than when I started!

Here is T.S. Eliot’s description of the “inner essence.”

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
— “Burnt Norton,” 1935

In the morning news, I heard a member of the Justice Department of the State of Michigan explain the difference in perception and fact as it pertains to the Trumpian effort to overturn the recent vote in that state.  To paraphrase, “Perception is how a matter feels to you, fact is how a matter is taken by a consensually validated reality that you are part of.”  She argued that, yes, Republicans “feel” that there were voting irregularities there…and in many other states…but close scrutiny by these states, including Republican judges, has determined this is not the case. 

Before reasoning begins to take place with a child, he lives in the realm of feeling. And, as W. H. Auden told us, “Feeling knows no discretion but its own.” Auden realized that if feeling was not balanced with reasoning, if the two human faculties did not work in tandem, we would find ourselves making choices based wholly on an unacknowledged (i.e. “unconscious”) feeling state

This brought to my mind the research of clinical psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, who found that feeling is more important than reason on matters like voting.  We vote, primarily, on the basis of how we feel not on the basis of sound reason.  But, “what is good for the goose is good for the gander” so this observation has to be relevant to any voting persuasion…and to the rest of life.  None of us are “objective” even if we passionately and boisterously offer up some bromide like, “God is leading me.”  We are complicated little critters, scurrying about on the granite skirts of our little planet and the humility of this cosmic “fate” is so frightening that we often prefer to take our grasp of reality as absolute and assign others to that vast category of “wrong.” This just is not so!!!  I know.  Because, I..being extraordinary and special, AM RIGHT!!!  (Hey, just kidding!) 

Election Day is nigh upon us and my country will have a chance to drive a stake into the heart of the darkness we opted for just four years ago.  If we succeed with this impaling, it will only be a mere stake and will not mean the darkness has been obliterated. For example, the real darkness is a bifurcation of our soul into an “us” vs. “them” view of life, “republicans” vs. “democrats” being only one articulation of this cosmic death spiral.  Should we Progressives win the election, the temptation will be to gloat in victory and allow a vindictiveness to prevail in our heart.  If so, we will be merely continuing what we have alleged the Conservatives have been doing, “us vs them-ing.”  We will continue, therefore, to live out the phenomenon T.S. Eliot noted in a dysfunctional family that he described as, “united by the strife which divided them.”  (See Eliot’s play, “The Family Reunion.”) 

We are currently so polarized that regardless of the election’s outcome that issue will continue.  However, I admit that if Trump is re-elected that polarization will only get worse as his emotional/spiritual impoverishment thrives on having someone, individually or collectively, to “them.”  But if Biden should win this election, we Progressives will have to avoid the “tee-hee” response, gleefully enjoying a triumph to the point of “rubbing defeat in the nose” of Conservatives.  If these two ends of the political spectrum continue to be unified only by this divisive spirit, healing of the breach will not take place and ugliness will continue to abound. 

People think differently; but regardless of how differently they “think,” it is still “thinking” that they do.  The challenge when we encounter someone who thinks differently than we do, and therefore sees the world through a different set of eyes, is to slow down that torrid certainty of ours…take a pause…and offer a moment of respect, possibly in the form of a “silence” of some sort.  This “silence” can be as simple as not responding with the first thought that comes to our mind, perhaps even letting that thought go completely, and simply asking the other party, “Tell me more?” No thought we have is so important that it cannot be put on hold for a bit, maybe even until another day with another person.  But in the heat of conflict, our heart is teeming with our arsenal of verbal responses, most of which have the main purpose only of putting the other person “in their place.”  We will then be able to get on our pony, ride into the sunset, blowing smoke triumphantly from our pistol.  Oh, how sweet it is to be “right”…but usually for no purpose other than ego aggrandizement! 

Poetry kicks ass!  Yes, poetry comes at one from “out there” and rattles our cage…but only if our “cage” is amenable to being rattled!  But most of us are appropriately “human-ized” and have a cage which is hermetically sealed to protect us from anything “out there.”  We humans currently are having a lessen given to us about being “hermetically-sealed” in this “small bright circle of our consciousness, beyond which lies the dark” even though it is in this “dark” that we might begin to see the Light.   

Whew!  Now, I’ve settled down.  Let me explain.  I just this morning discovered another brilliant poet in The Paris Review, Zoe Hitzig, who is a doctoral student in economics at Harvard University.  Yes, I did say, “doctoral student ‘in economics’” as crazy as that sounds for a poet! 

Here I want to share some wisdom she offered in quoting another literary figure, Grace Paley, “One of the things art is about, for me, is justice. Now that isn’t a matter of opinion, really. That isn’t to say, ‘I’m going to show these people right or wrong’ or whatever… [It’s] the illumination of what isn’t known, the lighting up of what is under a rock, of what has been hidden.” 

Poetry brings “justice” as it exposes that which has been hidden.  And, I might add, “justice” has been pretty hard on me the past 35 or so years since it deigned to intrude upon my hermetically sealed prison!