Category Archives: religion

Robert Frost and Mindfulness

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I love the many friends I’ve met in the blog-o-sphere. You “kindred spirits” are cut from the same bolt of cloth as myself. It is exciting to meet men and women from various corners of the world, with different belief systems, who demonstrate what the Buddhists call “mindfulness.” Here is a lovely poem by Robert Frost about the beauty of discovering  presence of mind:

A Considerable Speck
By Robert Frost

A speck that would have been beneath my sight
On any but a paper sheet so white
Set off across what I had written there.
And I had idly poised my pen in air
To stop it with a period of ink,
When something strange about it made me think.
This was no dust spike by my breathing blown,
But unmistakenly a living mite
With inclinations it could call its own.
It paused as with suspicion of my pen,
And then came racing wildly on again
To where my manuscript was not yet dry;
Then paused again and either drank or smelt—
With loathing, for again it turned to fly.
Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.
It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,
Yet must have had a set of them complete
To express how much it didn’t want to die.
It ran with terror and with cunning crept.
It faltered: I could see it hesitate;
Then in the middle of the open sheet
Cower down in desperation to accept
Whatever I accorded it of fate.
I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
Collectivistic, regimenting love
With which the modern world is being swept.
But this poor microscopic item now!
Since it was nothing I knew evil of
I let it lie there till I hope it slept.

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise.
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.

Letting Go of Pain

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As one teacher said, “The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it.” Love is the bridge. It is the whisper of underlying suchness. To enter this reality, we let go of the thoughts and feelings that filter mercy and forgiveness, the resistance, the fearful doubts that seduce awareness into identification with the unhealed. We let the mind float in the heart.

To cross from the banks of “my pain” to the shores of “the pain” we must cross the river of forgetfulness, constantly remembering our true nature and the healing that ever awaits our clear entrance into the moment. The fare is love and a constant remembering, letting go of our suffering, lightening our load. Like a ship that has to jettison its heavy cargo in order to weather rough waters, we begin to cut the fetters of our attachments with mercy and awareness, to let go of all that hinders our progress.

This wonderful, profound excerpt from Stephen Levine’s “Healing into Life and Death” is more than I can wrap my mind around. I just do not fully understand it. But a central notion, here and in the whole of the book, is letting go of our pain. Now, who would deliberately cling to their pain? Well, look around you and you will see many people doing this very thing; and then, if you are honest you will find you too are clinging to a lot of “stuff” that needs to go. I will admit, “C’est moi.” When I was a counseling intern at a psychiatric hospital, a psychiatrist noted re one of my clients, “She clings to her mental illness like most of us cling to mental health.” He was right, as this woman’s identity had morphed into one of pain or “mental illness” and to suddenly forego that identity would have been to entertain something which, in her estimation, was worse than mental illness.

Now most of us do not have “mental illness” to deal with. If we are lucky, we will have to battle some garden-variety, plain-vanilla neurosis. But, the issue is, how do we let it go? How do we let a maladaptive pattern of behavior and its underlying emotional state be cast aside? Well, I don’t have the definitive answer as those who know me well can readily attest. But I’m working on it! It do think it involves honesty, gut-wrenching honesty, as we “unpack our heart with words” (Shakespeare).

And always remember the observation of W. H. Auden, “We wage the war we are.”

Man’s Quest for Meaning

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Oliver Sacks writes in the current New Yorker re his battle with drug addiction during the 50’s and 60’s. He introduced the subject with a very thoughtful note re mankind’s quest for meaning:

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.

This adventure we are caught up in, from which we cannot escape, is just an incredible, mind-boggling enterprise. It has been delightful to spend my life pondering over the inimitable mysteries of life, poring over history and discovering that even thousands of years ago men and women looked up at the stars and felt the same overwhelming awe that I often experience.

We are such fragile little creatures who somehow have climbed to the top of the food chain, a success which now presents us with profound existential questions all of which can probably be summarized as this quest for meaning. And this quest for meaning inevitably tempts us with its antithesis…meaninglessness…and the struggle between the two often leads to some really poor decisions, individually and collectively.

We lost our religion in the 20th century and our culture is showing the wear-and-tear that happens when this happens to a tribe. Now, it is true we needed to “lose” our religion in that it had become moribund, primarily consisting of, “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken) But now the task is to find spiritual roots again and these roots can be found often in the very religious traditions that we have discarded.

The Flat Earth Society?

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We look with bemusement today on the Flat Earth Society and stand amazed that this was the prevailing world view at one point in the past. And I’m sure that when the world was believed to be flat, many were persecuted and even killed for daring to question that “modern science” of the day. Of course, now we know that we are far beyond such tomfoolery and look at the world in the way that is objective, having finally grasped…pretty well…the nature of reality.

But I just don’t think that is the case. “Reality” is always in flux and in time to come there will be certain facets of today’s prevailing wisdom that our descendants will view with the same bemusement and scorn. And, this is true individually as well as collectively. There are so many things which I accept as common place today which forty years ago would have been preposterous.

This insight gives me pause very often. For example, I have very strong feelings about the current political campaign in the United States. And I see how polarized our country is on the same issue. But, as they say, “This too shall pass.” I don’t know what will transpire but I do have faith that “there is a wisdom that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.” (Shakespeare)

A core issue is the transitory nature of life, including our belief systems. If we could only remember that at best we “see through a glass darkly” then perhaps we could be a bit less arrogant of regarding “the bad guys” and, with a little bit of luck and a strong tail wind, perhaps they will be a little less arrogant regarding us!

On this issue…and I realize it is a recurrent theme of mine…I always like to share an observation from W. H. Auden who posited the notion that our agreed-upon conventional reality hides the:

Snarl of the abyss
That lies just underneath
Our jolly picnic on the heath
Of the agreeable, where we bask,
Agreed upon what we will not ask,
Bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light
Of the collected lie.

 

Opiate of the Masses

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Karl Marx famously noted that “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”  O’Bama had this notion in mind four years ago when he was unwittingly heard referring to some people who “cling to their guns and religion.”

Well, I agree but with qualification.  First, re the gun issue, yes there are some whose identity is too wrapped up in gun ownership and they make things look bad for men who own guns but have a life outside of gun ownership.  The latter aren’t nuts. Likewise with religion, there are those who use religion obsessively to cover up an impoverished identity and often they end up as certifiable nuts.

But the problem here is not guns or religion.  The problem is an impoverished identity which often does cross over into mental illness.

But my main focus here is religion.  There is so much insanity that surfaces in religion and it is so easy to throw the baby out with the bath water.  I do think religious people should give Marx’s observation attention for religion…yes, even yours and mine…does have an opiate dimension.  And that is not the fault, necessarily, of the religion we practice or believe in.  It is the fault of our human nature which tends to take ourselves too seriously and tends to interpret religious teachings in a self-serving manner. And when this tendency runs unchecked, lunacy will likely ensue.  Case in point—Westboro Baptist Church and Islamic Extremists.

Existential Guilt and Forgiveness

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Guilt is a nasty beast and is often very subtle. My upbringing instilled in me the notion of original sin, a notion that I still subscribe to though not as it was taught to me. With this emphasis of sin came overwhelming guilt and the guilt accrued as a litany of things I had done, or thought of doing, or might do which were bad. My life became a careful, compulsive routine of avoiding an ever-increasing list of “bad” things and by not doing them my guilt was assuaged. So, to speak metaphorically…and to borrow a bromide from back then…I did not “smoke, drink, chew, or go with the girls that do.”

But the problem with that guilt-ridden lifestyle is that it does not deal with the real guilt, a guilt that lies in the depths of the heart, a guilt that can best be described as existential, a guilt that is spiritual, not legal. This is not the place to go into great detail on the matter, but this existential guilt has to do with the very onset of “being”, the very emergence of our fragile ego, and its desperate effort to stave off “non-being.” That guilt is a spiritual issue and cannot be dealt with by mere intellect/cognition, cannot be addressed by following any scriptural syllogism.

Many religions become very legalistic and assuage their guilt by formulating lists of things that they don’t do, vices from which they abstain. Among some of them, it amounts to them telling themselves, “I am ok because I don’t lie, steal, cheat, smoke, drink, lust after the opposite sex, and I go to church dutifully, and tithe faithfully.”

Now, adherence to a moral code is noble. And, sociologically it is imperative that we have moral codes. But spirituality at some point in one’s life needs to go beyond simple adherence to a moral code, it needs to go beyond the “letter of the law” and enter into the domain of the spirit. And that involves getting honest, finding the courage to acknowledge that beneath that oppressive moral code…so religiously adhered to…lies a lot of ugliness that needs to find the light of day, ugliness for which we can find forgiveness. But there is no forgiveness when we hide behind that moral code fig leaf.

 

I Hate Intolerant People!

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Yeah!  I hate’em!  And I thank they should be all lined up and shot!

Ok, ok.  I hope you understand irony.  I speak in jest.  But it is important to recognize that even those we deem “intolerant” deserve a certain amount of respect.  But how much is a judgment call.  There is certainly a time when one must speak out against intolerance; but certainly not every time.

Sometimes it takes patience to respect people that are different than us.  It is just so very apparent that they should see things differently  But, of course, there is the catch—who gets to define “should”?

And here I am in the morass of “relativism”, that murky domain which I was taught to eschew as a child.  Oh how wonderfully safe and secure it was!   (Oh, to be honest, it was not a very pretty world!  It was unreality.)

Macbeth and the Unconscious

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Macbeth confessed, “My dull brain is wracked by things forgotten.” Thus, he admitted that he was haunted by things his brain had “forgotten” which is to say his “dull brain” had not really “forgotten” them. In other words, he was beset by his unconscious.

Such is the human lot. We cannot escape the haunt of our unconscious depths, those unseemly fears, anxieties, and beastly impulses which civilization does not permit. And they have this unearthly way of slipping out when we are least expecting it. For example, I can’t help but speculate what led Michelle Bachman to select the term “deep penetration” recently in reference to her perceived infiltration of our government by Muslim extremists. Or, perhaps I’m just a dirty old man!

And the unconscious has a collective as well as an individual dimension. For example, note the present conservative emphasis on drawing boundaries between “us and them”, most obviously in their emphasis of building a fence to keep the Mexicans out. Yes, I do think they over emphasize boundaries. But, I readily acknowledge that we liberals are too prone to not set boundaries readily enough, that we are too quick to trot out the Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” and attempt to do too much to assuage the public ills.

 

A Thought about Mormonism

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The current issue of The New Yorker has an article on Mormonism entitled “The Birth and Evolution of Mormonism” by Adam Gopnik. This article provides a very good historical summary of Mormonism and its efforts to adapt over the past two centuries to a culture that has always looked askance at it.

It would be easy for a Southern-born Redneck like me to be real critical of Mormonism. But I’m not much more critical this “ism” than I am with all the rest of ‘em. AND, all of us are knee-deep in some “ism” or another, whether we like it or not. I guess I’m a social scientist at heart and enjoy reading someone’s thoughtful account of a religious expression, especially one that is so prominent in our country at present moment.

It is easy to see the lunacy of Mormonism. (I’m tempted here to trot out a few of my favorites, but will leave that selection to your devices!) But it is not so easy to see the lunacy of our own belief system and believe me, it is there.

 

Desperate lovliness

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BRIGHT CONVERSATION WITH SAINT-EX
BY Carl Sandburg

There is a desperate lovliness to be seen
In certain flowers and bright weeds on certain planets.
With the weeds I have held long conversations
And I found them intelligent
Even though desperate and lovely.
The flowers however met me with shortspoken,
“Yes” and “No” and “Why”were their favorite words,
And they had other slow monosyllables.
They seemed to find it more difficult
Than the gaudy garrulous bright weeds
To be intelligent, desperate, and lovely.
Take a far journey now, my friend, to certain planets.
Meet then certain flowers and bright weeds and ask them
What are the dark winding roots of their desperate lovliness.
See whether you bring back the same report as mine.
See whether certain long conversations
And certain slow practices monosyllables
Haunt you and keep coming back to haunt you.
For myself, my friend, I have come to believe on certain planets anything can happen.

I think that “loveliness” always has desperate, winding roots. Most of my clinical practice was in an alternative school and this adolescents could best be described as the “weeds” that Sandburg described here. It was stunning to see how astute and intelligent so many of them were even though often they were such failures in mainstream classrooms.