Marianne Williamson quotes Aeschylus, “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
Now why would anyone describe God’s grace as “awful”? The answer is that grace can come to us only when our ego has been penetrated and that is an excruciatingly painful process. Mercifully, most of us get this grace piecemeal.
Martin Buber’s I and Thou is one of the pivotal books in my life. I think it is one of the finest works in spiritual literature of the 20th century. This book is about relationship and the infinite grace which is involved in establishing relationship, establishing connection with another person. Buber writes of the “in-between”, what Deepak Chopra would call “the gap” which separates us all. And, actually this “gap” separates us from all objects/persons in the world. To have meaningful communication…or connection…with another human being, we must experience this “in-between” which always comes to our ego consciousness as a loss. (I personally think that this experience is what “the judgment of god” is in Christian literature and tradition). It is knowing our aloneness, our alienation from the rest of God’s creation.
Buber also apparently believed that animals have a soul, noting that this can be experienced when one gazes into the eyes of an animal. I have two dachshunds and I can affirm this conviction. Those beautiful little doggie eyes convey mystery and love, suggesting the presence of another soul. Buber credits the animal with anxiety, the anxiety of becoming, “the stirring of the creature between realms of plantlike security and spiritual risk. This language is the stammering of nature under the initial grasp of spirit, before language yields to spirit’s cosmic risk which we call man.”
If I was more mature spiritually, I would become a vegetarian. Any time I drive behind a Tyson chicken truck, I feel the need to take that leap of faith. But, I don’t think I’m going to pull that off in this lifetime.
We tend to believe just what we want to believe. And, then we carefully congregate with others of like mind and persuasion. I read somewhere years ago that “our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions which we have already been lead to be our desires.” So, there is our “thought system” and beneath the surface is the real “reality”, our unconscious needs and desires.
So, how can we be “objective”? Well, we can’t. That is the point. We must always realize that we are not being objective and neither are “they”. We can, then, with a little bit of luck and a strong tail wind, be a little less arrogant and a little more tolerant of difference when we run into it. Although, we usually try to avoid difference and isolate ourself into that safe world comprised of people who think and behave just as we do. Relevant to this, W. H. Auden onced noted, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”
Karl Jung wrote extensively of “the shadow”. He described this dark side of human nature as always with it and insisted…iin my own words…“Resistance is futile”. Or to use one of his bromides, “What we resist, persists.” His teaching, of course, was not that this dark side should be indulged or acted upon, but that it should be embraced as part of our nature. He taught that in this embracement we diminished the power of this shadow, given us more freedom to make mature, appropriate decisions. In recent readings of Buddhist literature, I’ve learned that the Buddha called this shadow-side “mara” and reported that it was a daily part of his life. Even the Apostle Paul lamented, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me.” And, of course, in the Christian tradition, there is the ever-present “Satan.”
I think the Catholics have the right idea in confession. There in the confessional booth, Catholics are encouraged to come and bare their deepest, darkest secrets. In my work as a mental health counselor, much of the work I did was merely to listen to my clients lament their short-comings, to acknowledge their baser instincts.
The key is to just not pretend! It is there and it will always be there. To live in a world of duality is to realize that “mara” is there but to believe its power is diminished as we openly acknowledge it. Even more so, as we openly acknowledge it “to another human being.”
The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.
by Emily Dickinson
My take on this is the soul’s tendency to isolate itself, to select from the world what is most comforting to it, and to shut out the rest. We tend to believe what we want to believe and quickly relegate everything else to a trash heap, to attribute it to “them”.
“He who feels punctured must have been a bubble.”
What a concept! And, oh my lord, have I ever been punctured so many times.! I’m such a damn bubble. But God’s infinite grace covers us all.
“With devotion’s visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself,” noted Shakespeare (Hamlet). Spirituality is a perilous journey for it so easy to become “humble”, failing to recognize that one is just being smug or arrogant. As I like to put it…and this comes from personal experience, “Humility comes hard to the humble.” Eckhart Tolle’s concept of “egoic consciousness” is so relevant to spirituality. And this pseudo-humility, this “devotion’s visage and pious action” usually stems from taking oneself too seriously.
If honesty intrudes on us, we will often have to admit that our spirituality is just a song-and-dance which serves the purpose of assuaging our lonliness and isolation. It is part of the aforementioned (in an earlier post) effort to “spin a veil to hide us from the void.” (Norman O. Brown)
Read here how John Masefield summarized this matter:
How many ways, how many different times
The tiger Mind has clutched at what it sought,
Only to prove supposéd virtues crimes,
The imagined godhead but a form of thought.
How many restless brains have wrought and schemed,
Padding their cage, or built, or brought to law,
Made in outlasting brass the something dreamed,
Only to prove themselves the things of awe,
Yet, in the happy moment’s lightning blink,
Comes scent, or track, or trace, the game goes by,
Some leopard thought is pawing at the brink,
Chaos below, and, up above, the sky.
Then the keen nostrils scent, about, about,
To prove the Thing Within a Thing Without.
I’ve read The Secret by Rhonda Byrne several times. And I’m about ready to read it still again. However, I am embarrassed to admit this. I am an intelligent, educated, and erudite man so this book is “beneath” me. It is such a light-weight, new-age, self-help book that it is roundly criticized in the professional circles that I function in. If offers so much to so many desperate people who then lamely cling to its promises of wealth and health even though their circumstances are so limiting. It is the new age equivalent of the “prosperity gospel” of the right-wing religious fundamentalists.
HOWEVER, I have read it repeatedly and am about to again. This is because I whole-heartedly believe in one of its central theses—-that our thinking shapes our reality. Get rid of “stinking thinkin “, and your world can change. Yes, I do subscribe to that belief though I have so much “stinkiin’ thinkin” that remains. But, as they often say in the 12-step movement, “Progress, not perfection.”
Proverbs declares, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” Someone once said, “Our thoughts become us.” And Mike Dooley declares daily on his web site, “Thoughts are things. Choose the good ones.” Byrne quotes Henry Ford in her book, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, either way you’re right.”
A fundamentalist pastor in my past once quipped, “And the truth shall set you free…but first it will make you miserable.” I still like that. “Truth” is out there but we are so far removed from it and we carefully guard against its intrusiveness. Hell, “Truth” when it visits just scares the hell out of us for it makes us aware of our finitude and our tendency to be utterly self-absorbed and smug. W. H. Auden put it this way:
And truth met him,
And held out her hand;
But he clung in panic to his tall belief
And shrank away like an ill-treated child.
And, yes, I’m still “shrinking away” daily. BUT, I do believe Truth has me….as it does us all…and it is patiently doing its work on me. Though I don’t have “truth”, I do have confidence that “Truth” has me and has all of us.
And I conclude with the wisdom of Leonard Cohen: Oh bless this continual stutter of the Word being made flesh.
Just don’t go see it. It was one of Woodie’s worst.
literary lew 