Category Archives: religion and spirituality

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.

Sleep Walking in the Spiritual World

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An “awakening” is an interesting notion as it implies having been asleep before.  And it brings to mind the notion someone posited that we are a “nation of sleep walkers” in reference to not apparently having any idea what we are doing.  And the notion that one is not “awake” is disconcerting to say the least.  It can threaten one to the core and technically should do so as the “core” is where the “stuff” of life is found.  There we find the heart.

Spiritual traditions usually have awakening as a primary concern for spiritual teachers who help formulate these traditions always “see through” the falsities of life and want to bring them to the attention of others.  And this was certainly so with my spiritual tradition, Christianity.  But the spiritual truth that Jesus offered to the world was wisdom from the depths of the heart and this wisdom cannot be put into words.  Jesus, of course, used words but knew these words would only rattle around in many heads and never make it into the depths of the heart where meaning could be experienced.  This is what he meant by “having ears to hear, but hear not” and “eyes to see, but seeing not.”  For He knew that the real “stuff” of life takes place deep in the bowels of the heart and words can furrow there but only when great resistance is overcome.

This issue is very relevant to my spiritual history.  I was “Christianized” from early on.  I imbibed the “stuff” from even before I was conscious and one might say that since then everyday was summarized by, “Wind me up and watch me be Christian.”  And, yes, I grew up and got an education and dared to become a “damn liberal” and then it became, “Wind me up and watch me be a liberal Christian.”  Same song, different verse.  Only in the past decade or so have I realized just how I was embedded in my own thought, including in my own Christian teachings, and was largely just an indoctrinated automaton.

So, what is the solution?  Atheism?  Agnosticism?  Self-indulgence?  All of the above?  Well, I don’t know if I have a “solution” but I do know that I have been granted awareness of my self-serving faith, I have been made aware that ego-gratification was one of its primary intents.  And with this awareness, or “awakening,” I have suffered the disillusionment that I think is necessary at some point in life.  But this descent into the darkness has taught me that there is some inner resource I have other than the ego and its trappings.  I am finding a Center that is solid which words and spiritual traditions can only point to.  Yes, I still think of that “Center” as God, or even the “Christ child” that is within us all but I’m aware that these are only words.  I only know that in the depths of my heart I am a mystery, and that the whole of my life is a mystery, and that I’m living for a while longer in a beautiful world that is full of mystery, part of which are you!

So often I conclude with the observation, “But I have no need to convince anyone or to convert anyone.”  In my spiritual tradition, the spiritual passion has always led to an urgent need to evangelize and hope that others will “join the team.”  Not so in the least now, and that is one indicator that I’m growing up.  Changing others is no longer my job.  Changing my own life is the issue and gawd is there work to do there!  And I firmly believe that as I focus on “working on my own salvation with fear and trembling” any impact on others that needs to take place will occur.

Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening

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I’m going to share a list of 12 symptoms of spiritual awakening that I found on Face Book, formulated by David Avocado Wolfe in “recoverytradepublications.com.” But I’d like to focus briefly on three of them which pertain to the subject of judgment: 9) A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others; 10)A loss of interest in judging others; 11)A loss of interest in judging self.

Philosophy posits the notion of “the faculty of judgment.” My take on this notion is the necessary function of interpretation of our environment and even of our own subjective world. With this “function” we carve our world up into “categories” which is much related to the task of assigning words or “names” to things. And in so doing, we are accomplishing what my background in clinical work describes as “object separateness.”

But this very important and necessary function of our psyche sometimes can run amok and we use it to isolate ourselves from life, hiding behind these “categories” even to the extent that we even know our “self” only in terms of “categories.” We have subscribed to the cultural demand to become “objectified” and in some sense lose our very soul. We become an “idea” and cease to be a fluid, dynamic, subjectively alive spirit.

My life has been a fine example of this problem. I will soon wrap up a 20 year career as a licensed mental health professional in which I utilized my “diagnostic knife” to help the “mentally ill.” And this role in our culture was, and is, a valuable and necessary role. But I realize now even more than then that this clinical detachment was present in my life from my earliest years and that I’ve used to “stand up there” and make detached observations about people, my world, and even my self. I sometimes call it my “god complex.”

W. H. Auden once noted, “We drive through life in the closed cab of occupation.” I still have that “closed cab” of detachment but, having gained this insight, it is much less “closed.” I have gained insight to what I’ve been doing and am much better at just turning it off, recognizing that whatever I am observing “just is” and does not always need my labels or interpretation.

Here are Mr. Wolfe’s list of “Symptoms…”

  1. Frequent attacks of smiling.
  2. An increased tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen.
  3. Feelings of being connected with others and nature.
  4. Frequent overwhelming episodes of appreciation.
  5. A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than from fears based on past experience.
  6. An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.
  7. A loss of ability to worry.
  8. A loss of interest in conflict.
  9. A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others.
  10. A loss of interest in judging others.
  11. A loss of interest in judging self.
  12. Gaining the ability to love without expecting anything.

“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)

Make the World Go Away

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Make the world go away


And get it off my shoulders


Say the things you used to say


And make the world go away.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdWEbweX1rQ)

These words from Eddy Arnold, an old country-western great, really speak to me from time to time. Everyone feels from time to time that they wish to “check out,” perhaps using the old line from Star Trek, “Beam me up Scotty. There is no intelligent life down here.” The need to escape is part of being human and requires us to find appropriate ways of making the escape. For, there are many “escapes” that are costly or devastating in the long-run such as addiction, or fanatical beliefs…of any sort… or insanity, or even at an extreme suicide. These are all merely ways of saying, “I hurt too much! Stop it! Give me an escape! I can’t take this anymore.”

Shakespeare had insight regarding the escape into insanity and btw, all of these “escapes” carried to an extreme become insanity. For example, Hamlet pined re his desire to, “Flee to a nutshell and there be the king of infinite spaces.” This brilliant image of retreating to a private world is an astute description of insanity, which is always a retreat to a private reference system where one is freed….at least in his mind…from the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” There, the assault of reality might continue, but the individual ensconced in his private prison will be oblivious to the “assault.” “Free at last! Free at last! Praise God, I’m free at last,” he might say. But this “freedom” is an ugly escape from reality, for actually it is the antithesis of freedom as one is then in the bondage of his own whims and fancies. Paul Tillich called it “an empty world of self-relatedness.”

And all escapes have some risk for if they become too much a preference over reality, they can devolve into insanity. Religion is such a classic example of how a valid “escape” can become a prison. And a glass of wine or shot of bourbon can become such a delightful escape, or release, that addiction sets in and one disappears into the bottle. (And I admit, I have some experience with this “disappearance.”)

Arnold’s lovely tune also offered a marvelous escape…of the adaptive variety…as it was a love song and he was pining for the solace of relationship when his lover would again, “Say the things you used to say, and make the world go away.”

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.”

Thoughts re Subject/Object Distinctions.

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“The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” (Thomas Berry)  But our world “functions” because of clear and precise “subject-object distinction” that is the reality of most people, a “distinction” which makes us “objects.”  Most people do not see the unity of all things for doing so is too frightening.  And the result is that, yes, the world “functions” but the price tag of failing….or refusing…to see the unity of all things is that catastrophe always lurks on the periphery of our collective reality.  Witness current political circumstances around the world…and in my country (the U.S.).  According to the teachings of Carl Jung…and countless others…until we embrace the violence which is within all of our hearts we will never see the Millennium arrive.

But when we are safely within the harbor of our “object” world we do not have to be bothered with the ambiguity of subjectivity– imprecise boundaries, the confusion, the doubt, and the fears that haunt all of those who have dared to take that path.  W. H. Auden put it this way,, having the Star of David offer these words:

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 or unfeeling stone,

In labyrinths where they must entertain

Confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain.

Finally, I’m “Somebody!”

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“The Jerk” is one of my favorite movies and my favorite scene is when the star, Steve Martin, discovers he listed in the phone book for the first time and announces with great delight, “I’m somebody! I’m somebody!” Well, only yesterday I had similar delight when I discovered by accident that this literary venture here is ranked #800,000 or so (out of who knows?), produces income of $.36 per day and has a value of $139.00. What a hoot! About the only thing sillier than “holding forth” like I do in this blog is compiling statistics about completely unknown bloggers like myself! Like many other bloggers have noted, I often wonder why I do this? “What’s the point?” Well, I don’t know. But I gotta get this “stuff” out somewhere and better here than the “street preaching” I used to do before they tarred and feathered me and ran me out of several towns. Btw, I’ll sell this verbal dog-and-pony show for half price any day. I’m expecting a deluge of offers.

I think one of these days I will pass on and will suddenly find myself before God. He’ll see me coming and immediately roll his eyes and groan, whispering soto voce to a colleague, “How in the hell did this guy get up here? I intended to let him live for ever just to avoid having to deal with him.” Then He’ll say, “Ok, Literarylew, get your ass on up here and let’s see what you’re worth.” Then I’ll remember the value cited earlier and my heart will sink.

The Enneagram and Immanence/Transcendence

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A blog-0-sphere friend and spiritual mentor recently introduced me to the enneagram, a personality-type inventory dating back to the 4th century. Though it is initially off-putting, appearing to resemble some Face-Book contrivance in which you “fit” into some conceptual category, it is a very sophisticated and rich spiritual tool.

As a result of taking a simple test, I have learned that I am “6” with a “5” wing which reveals a lot of things about how this little whirly-gig in my head operates. For example, I am an “observer” in life, standing aloof and detached, making observations about life, including even myself. I think Emily Dickinson was one of these as evidenced in a line of her poetry when she noted, “Life is over there, on a shelf.” Emily was noting her perspective that life was, in a sense, an object on a shelf and she was studying that object as if it was a specimen in a test tube or on a laboratory table.

There is certainly a place in our world for people like this though there is always the risk of carrying the detachment to an extreme with pathological results. But the other extreme…failure to go “meta-cognitive” on life…is also pathological.

Approaching this matter as a clinician, the issue is integration of the two extremes…head and heart, thought and feeling. We are thinking beings and feeling beings but if either function becomes out of balance, problems result. And to further complicate things, when one is on either extreme the recognition that one is on the extreme is very difficult to apprehend without intervention from “out there.” By that I have reference to what Carl Jung called “einfall” (an “intrusion” perceived as from “out there”) and that W. H. Auden had in mind when he wrote, “O blessed be bleak exposure on whose sword we are pricked into coming alive.”

Religious and Spiritual Addiction

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I use the expression “drinking the Kool-aid” often to refer to those who have always carefully followed the dictates of the tribe and never left its “safe confines.” This is in reference to the hundreds of religious extremists in 1989 who followed the dictates of their leader, James Jones, and committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in the Guyana, South Africa compound.

I admit that using the expression of “drinking the Kool-Aid” to describe those who simply follow the tribal dictates is a bit over the top and even “ugly.” As indicated yesterday, we must have people who follow these “dictates” and allow malcontents like myself to have such a good life. But the problem occurs when the human need to “belong” goes beyond the pale and an inordinate energy begins to constellate to maintain this sense of “belonging” or “tribal identity.” At this point the normal human need for group affiliation becomes poisoned and the need to affiliate with the world at large begins to be diminished and eventually even discouraged. Unconscious fears are then unleashed and then, with a leader who is in tune with these unconscious forces, ugly things can happen. Witness the aforementioned Jim Jones and Guyana Massacre.

What has happened in this scenario is that the need for group affiliation has become addictive and the reason this is so is because the members of the group have a deep-seated fear of the existential loneliness that haunts us all. That terror so grips them that they are willing to make horrible decisions to protect what I will call the “group lie”….even the decision to die or in some cases to kill others…rather than deal with the gamut of fears associated with this loneliness which dwell in all of our hearts.

And many noble truths can be present in a “group lie.” I think, for example, many expressions of this disease are found in my Christian faith, the best example immediately available being Westboro Baptist Church. These people have merely taken a noble spiritual tradition and used it to perpetuate their own private fantasy, giving no concern for the world outside of themselves and even contempt and scorn for that world.

This is religious addiction and religious addiction is one of the most pernicious forms of this mental illness as they “know” they are believing and doing the “right” thing. And it is their “knowledge” and “certainty” that is the basic problem. Reasoning with them is a waste of time. And I might add that this Westboro Baptist Church phenomena is reflective of the poison that is always a temptation with any belief system, certainly any spiritual tradition. Yes, even mine!

For, we are all addicts as psychologist Gerald May noted decades ago. My “guru” Richard Rohr has noted his own penchant for “thought addiction”, a malady that I wrestle with myself. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” said T. S. Eliot. We must have a denial system and religion is one of our best efforts in this respect.

But religion does have the capacity to lead one beyond the “addictive” dimension of faith into a region of value, into a region of human experience in which one offers respect, value, and love to the whole of God’s creation. But this entails giving up the addiction to the “letter of the law” which then entails having the courage to realize just how much we are all slaves to this “letter of the law.” It requires understanding what Martin Buber called the “it world” and respecting and participating in this “it world” while realizing that one’s roots are “elsewhere.”

But religion also has the capacity to illustrate the same dishonesty of the “it-world” and offer only a smug, self-serving dog-and-pony show which has the simple purpose of perpetuating its own private fantasy, of being only a “work of the flesh” as the Apostle Paul would put it. This religion illustrates the “bad faith” so eloquently described by Sartre, the faith that Shakespeare had in mind when he noted, “With devotions visage and pious action they sugar o’er the devil himself.”

A root fear with all addiction is hopelessness which is associated with the fear of being out of control. This fear drives addicts to invest immense energy into their “substance” and thereby derive a sense of being in control even though from anyone looking on they are very much out of control. It is not pleasant for Christians to consider their faith as a “substance”…nor is it for adherents of any other belief system…but when they venture into the addictive dimension of faith they are totally missing the point of their faith and are using it merely as a means of escaping reality. And reality, if we live authentically or even attempt to, will always lead to vulnerability.