“Within Be Rich, Without Be Fed No More”

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That Shakespearean quip is a succinct summary of what Carl Jung offered us decades ago:

If you remain within arbitrary and artificially created boundaries, you will walk as between two high walls: you do not see the immensity of the world. But if you break down the walls that confine your view, and if the immensity and its endless uncertainty inspire you with fear, then the ancient sleeper awakens in you, whose messenger is the white bird.

Then you need the message of the old tamer of chaos. There in the whirl of chaos dwells eternal wonder. Your world begins to become wonderful. Man belongs not only to an ordered world, he also belongs in the wonder-world of his soul. Consequently, you must make your ordered world horrible, so that you are put off by being too much outside yourself.

Your soul is in great need, because drought weighs on its world. If you look outside yourselves, you see the far-off forest and mountains, and above them your vision climbs to the realms of the stars. And if you look into yourselves, you will see on the other hand the nearby as far-off and infinite, since the world of the inner is as infinite as the world of the outer.

Just as you become a part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies, so you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. A fool lives here or there, but never here and there.“ ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 264 |

Thoughts About our Endemic Obtuseness

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The “deep state” is often brought to the table in this pandemic by the Conservative voice. Technically, “it” is present also with our Progressive voice; for there is always unacknowledged intentionality in each of us, in all groups and individuals, as none of us know objectively what we are doing, saying, or thinking. But this “dilemma” proffers us an immediate ruse, individually and collectively–simply choosing to disregard the presence of subterranean depths in our heart. W. H. Auden had this problem in mind with the poetic quip, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” Satchel Paige, the brilliant, talented, and eccentric pitcher from baseball’s “Negro Leagues” in the mid-20th century often advised, “Don’t look back; whatever is there is gaining on you.”

In this current “deux ex machina” that is before us, blame is an immediate, self-serving escape from the sense of responsibility that it demands. Blaming China, or perhaps the “deep state,” or Obama, or some version of “them” only hampers our nation’s ability to address this crisis. Prophetic voices in a crisis like this become from beyond the pale, not from within it; the Reverent William Barber is a notable example. But Indian novelist and political activist, Arundhati Roy, last week also had a prophetic word for the world, describing this pandemic as, “a portal” through which we might find a turn-around in the very nature of how we grasp the world:

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And, in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. (from interview on Democracy Now)

This Indian wisdom brought to my mind a “war-horse” of many conservative pastors, 2 Chronicles 7:14, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

 

 

Buddhism, Wisdom, and Cognition

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“A lot of thinking without wisdom will lead to suffering.” This Buddhist wisdom cuts right to the heart of life.  Yes, “thinking” or “reasoning” are Divine gifts but they are dangerous without some wisdom.  Let me put this in personal terms.  I have spent my life in the category of humans that W. H. Auden described as “logical lunatic..”  With this spiritual imbalance, I’ve had the illusion that I could “figger” things out with my mind.  This did not include the belief that I knew more than anyone else, that others were “stupid”, this was more of a personal matter.  I now realize that in the depths of my soul I had the illusion that with my mind I could “assess” most situations and know how to respond appropriately.  This stemmed from a hyper-vigilance attitude I took very early in life, having realized that I was born into a “crazy” reality that skewed reality to fit its own unquestioned premises.  With the intuition, and wisdom that comes with age, I realize that I made the conclusion that the pain that was my reality could be mitigated if I would pay close attention to what was going on and learn what the rules were.  Then, I could make sure that I was doing “the right thing” which simultaneously became “thinking” the right thing.  But I was keenly sensitive even then and realized that it was impossible to remember all the rules as the rules were always changing.  But, with that hypervigilance I must have assured myself that I was better off making the effort and could then at least lessen the blows (emotional/psychological) when they came. Thus my early life put me on a course of “seeing” and categorizing (diagnosing), life, eventually leading to a career in the social sciences…history and psychology…as I adopted the stance of Emily Dickinson, saying, “Life is over there, on a shelf.”  And, this has done me well in life…but certainly with a significant price as far as authenticity.

Just today I discovered the Buddhist wisdom displayed above and immediately had a light bulb turn on in my soul.  Somehow, this quality of “wisdom” is slowly sinking into my thick skull, allowing me to see…and feel…the limitations of rationality and understand even further that, “we see through a glass darkly”; my rational grasp of this world is limited.  This understanding is introducing me to my finitude and the humility that comes with it.  Wisdom is to realize that you might “know” a whole lot, but that bank of knowledge is always self-serving and thus destructive to self and others. And yes, as noted above, suffering is accompanying this wisdom.  To understand and “feel” finitude always brings one to his knees; there we have the opportunity to appreciate what one poet noted about this moment, that there we can, “glory, bow, and tremble” as we face the Otherness that we have avoided. If we don’t at least hunger for this wisdom, and realize that we will never “own” it, our thinking will produce great suffering, the pain of which is usually avoided with distractions, one of which is,“them.”

 

Poetry Arises With a Stirring in the Heart

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The poet, to whose mighty heart
Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart,
Subdues that energy to scan
Not his own course, but that of man.
(Matthew Arnold)

Arnold knew that poets harnessed energy in a different way than most of us.  Being immersed in poetry myself, though not being a poet, I think I understand what he meant.  Human beings are in essence merely energy, “pulsating” energy, and most of us have the “pulsating” curtailed into structured behavior and thought…and even feeling.  But poets are different; you might even say they have a screw loose, or to borrow from Emily Dickinson, “a splinter in their brain.”  Thus, they have free-floating energy which, being gifted with the poetry muse, they can “subdue” and thus “scan, not his (“their) own course, or heart, “but that of man.”  (The quip about “loose screw” was not meant with any disrespect!!!)

Poetry, therefore, offers us a glimpse into the depths of the human heart.  To some it will fall on deaf ears and that is not to dismiss them in the least; their lot in life is different.  But it speaks to those of us who at least have an ear…and a heart…for its wisdom.  In the mid 1980’s a friend of mine gave me a copy of W. H. Auden’s “Collected Longer Poems” and I was stunned by Auden’s wisdom.  This was the first time poetry had penetrated the linear-thinking prison I had spent my first three and a half decades in.  That little paperback book only recently broke completely in half, down the spine, just where “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” began; but I will never throw it away, even though I have a hard bound collection of his complete poetry.

Franz Kafka offered wisdom about the impact that good literature can have on a person, how it can act as a “pick axe” to the frozen sea within us just as Auden’s work did to me three decades ago:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

A Lamentation of Reality’s Intransigence

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Today I am going to continue my “assault” on reality, the quotes necessary because “reality” is impregnable to the attack of one simple bloke like myself.  What makes it so invincible is its subtlety; it can’t be seen with the naked eye.  Its premises are commonplaces, most of which a society cannot be left without.  But so many can be lived without and a society is better off when they are given the light of day. One simple example from my youth in the American South involves racism—television shows were “white”; NFL quarterbacks were “white”; and miscegenation was verboten.

This “reality” that I am here kicking around ordinarily has the capacity to slowly evolve, to adapt to circumstances even against the down drag of inertia.  But in certain moments of history, there is tremendous “down drag” as the evolution appears too drastic and frightening to much of the population.  This leads to the socio-cultural ferment that we are currently witnessing in the United States, and even in the world.  This has led to civil war in the past.

We can’t escape the unconscious dimension of life which shapes reality.  Oh, well, we can simply assume that it does not exist and passionately insist that we know exactly what are doing.  But we don’t.  There is always more to the picture which is a frightening notion to most people. It is so frightening that people will cling desperately to their certainties and usually will find a leader who will be their champion.

If you are curious about this tenuous nature of reality, you might find the following book of interest, “The Social Construction of Reality” by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman.

Specious Reality Gets a “Reality Check” Here and There

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My focus here recently has been reality, as in “reality.”  My emphasis is the vulnerability that “reality” faces, as it is something other than the basic assumptions that we take for granted.  Here, I am putting on the table something that cannot actually be put “on the table.”  For “reality” is subtle to the point that we can never fully grasp it with our feeble, pea-sized brain but only with a discerning heart that can understand these subtleties, or at least understand that they can only be inferred.  In this effort I make it very complicated…because it is complicated, infinitely so…but it can be simply presented by borrowing from the Apostle Paul, “We see through a glass darkly.”

It is this “darkliness” that is imperiled with the term I employed days ago, “the judgement of God.”  Psychologist Carl Jung used the word “einfall” to describe this irruption into our consciousness, an intrusion which often rattles our cage beyond our comfort zone.  Another term I’d like to introduce here is the “black swan” popularized several years ago by Nassim Nicholas Tasseb with his book, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.”  Tasseb uses the aberration of a swan being black rather than white to introduce the shock of cognitive dissonance, the “catastrophe” of realizing that things are not as we see them.  According to Wikipedia, Tasseb’s metaphor “lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought.  A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved.”

Our world is now being shaken to the core, with many “fundamental postulates” jeopardized.  Any country worth its salt will have leaders who will avoid blaming anyone, will focus on the problem as it applies to its own people, and offer a well thought out strategy for this perilous moment in history.  The image of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, confined to a wheelchair, calmly guiding us through the Great Depression and into the 2nd World War came to my mind.  What courage, fortitude, and faith.  He knew it was not all about him.

A More “Aesthetic” and Poetic Approach to Judgement

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Today I’d like to approach the “judgement of God” more aesthetically.  Though I emphasized yesterday the metaphorical approach I had in mind, I want to further gloss the term over…if even possible… with a bit of poetic finesse. W.H. Auden wrote, “O blessed be bleak exposure on whose sword we are pricked into being alive.” Auden captured the starkness of those moments when reality stuns us, stripping us of the adornments of our personality of which we have become so comfortable.

Emily Dickinson, with her cryptic and even severe style, put it more starkly:

He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys —
Before they drop full Music on —
He stuns you by Degrees —

Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Ethereal Blow
By fainter Hammers — further heard —
Then nearer — Then so — slow —

Your Breath — has time to straighten —
Your Brain — to bubble Cool —
Deals One — imperial Thunderbolt —
That scalps your naked soul —

When Winds hold Forests in their Paws —
The Universe — is still —

Mercifully, as I’ve noted before, most of us get this “wisdom” gently over the years…if at all.  I like the way William Butler Yeats put it, “Throughout all the lying days of my youth, I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun.  Now may I wither into the Truth.”

Boundaries is the subject matter here.  I might quip, “We can’t live with ‘em, we can’t live without ‘em.”  By that I mean part of us resists restraint but fortunately we are hard wired to appreciate the “reining in” of our deep-seated desire to be unrestrained.  Proverbs 16:32 captures this inner conflict beautifully, “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.”

Reality, God, and Boundaries

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The “judgement of god” is to me a literary construct, thus amenable to a personal application rather to a rhetorical one.  In my youth, as a fledgling Baptist preacher, it was sermon fodder, stem-winder material, for an “hell-fire-and-damnation” sermon in which I could hold forth about the impending judgement of God.  I put myself in this position because this “judgement of God” was heavily upon myself and one of the most effective ways of dealing with the gut-wrenching exposure of this experience is to attempt to deflect it to other people.

For, from a literary and more personal perspective, this “judgement of God” is when reality sets in and stings us with the realization that, “Uh oh!  I’ve been found out!”  In that moment we are naked and vulnerable to varying degrees and it is an humbling moment.  It is a moment when the ego harnesses all of its resources and almost always it will aim these resources in the form of projection upon someone else.  That is the reason that my fragile teen-age identity needed the position of “Baptist preacher.”

Biblical terminology like this “judgement” and even “God” are terms I’m a bit hesitant to use; for the Bible and its terminology are highly suspicious given the history of Christianity and its present day expression.  However, now having the ability to de-contextualize the Bible from how it was presented to me in my youth as well as “de-contextualizing” even myself from my youth, I have a deeper appreciation for it as Holy Writ.  Yes, I would even deign to describe it as the work of the “Holy Spirit” expressed through ancient humankind and if approached with a degree of humility has value for this present moment.

With this in mind, this “Reality Check” is upon us and “heavily” or “grievously” so.  I am going to take this approach for a few days as I apply it to issues that are present in our world today.  “Reality” is speaking to us as a species just as it is speaking to each of us personally…at least it is to me “personally.”  Limits are painful to the ego which always sees itself as without any, especially for those of us who have lived our lives in the illusion of certainty, and its twin–piety.

 

My Name is Mud…And I’m Kinda “Proud” of It

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One of the earliest stories I heard in my life was that God created us by digging into the earth and creating our progenitor, Adam.  I later learned that the name “Adam” meant “earth.”  And increasingly I realize just how much we are but “dust of the earth” and are destined to return to that dust. Shakespeare in “Hamlet” so pithily noted that we will ultimately become “food for worms.”

But from this humble origin we can become what Shakespeare described as “the quintessence of dust.”  However, achieving any degree of this quintessential…requires a lot of work, a lot of soul work, and there our dusty origins fights us tooth-and-toenail.  For one of the fundamental dimensions of our earthy, dusty origins is the constellation of the ego and that “beastly little treasure” has an intrinsic desire to never relinquish its “beastly” dimension.  Mine certainly does not! This ego is the “will of the species” and its willfulness if not mitigated by a concern for the “species” at-large will become self-destructive and that destructive energy will seek to wreak havoc on the species.  This is relevant to the Apostle Paul’s declaration, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me.” He knew the grandiosity of his spirituality…among other things!  I just visited our present day “holy ghost” (Google) and learned that 1 Corinthians 15:46-48 is very relevant to this vein of thought, Paul noting that “the first man” (i.e. “the ego”) is of the dust of the earth but the “second man” is spiritual, “of heaven.”

I want to close with a poem by the man I shared from yesterday, Samuel Menashe, who daunted my ego with the notion that my, even my name, “is mud.”  Humility is good.  It takes all the pressure off!

 

 

ADAM MEANS EARTH

 

I am the man

Whose name is mud

But what’s in a name

To shame one who knows

Mud does not stain

Clay he’s made of

Dust Adam became—

The dust he was—

Was he his name

Samuel Menashe

Momma Nature Offers Her Wisdom Daily!

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I just discovered a new poet on the website of Commonweal, Samuel Menashe.  With short, even cryptic poems, he captures some essential dimension of life which I think Ram Dass had in mind decades ago when he coined the expression, “Be here now.”  Here is a sample of his work, entitled “Rue”:

For what I did

And did not do

And do without

In my old age

Rue, not rage

Against that night

We go into,

Sets me straight

On what to do

Before I die—

Sit in the shade,

Look at the sky

Sitting in the shade and looking at the sky is really good advice, though I would suggest a dollop of the lovely sunshine here and there!  Momma nature is so gracious and loving, though culture teaches us to live in the past and/or future and avoiding the loveliness of, “being here now.”