Trapped Inside,”A Life Safer Than We Can Bear”

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This cartoon made me think of the W. H. Auden wisdom, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.” Auden knew that it is mentally healthy to take care of oneself, to maintain diligence about his own safety and welfare but that this precaution could easily go beyond the pale and create a dungeon, or a cage for oneself. There is a certain amount of risk in being human; after all we are physically and emotionally vulnerable and we are daily exposed to circumstances, socially and even physically where others wish us harm. Yes, growing a “thick skin” with firm ego boundaries is important but even this evolutionary tendency can go beyond the pale when beneath the surface we have not resolved the need for establishing a certain autonomy in life. Finding this autonomy, and its concomitant authenticity, will equip us to withstand even the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” making the cage unnecessary.

It is common also for a group to become trapped in a self-imposed prison, or “cage.” There they “hunker down” inside the cocoon of their belief system and wallow in the squalor of, “Why do they hate us so much?” when only a blip of self-awareness would answer the question. But the fear-base of a cultic group of this sort can only intensify their resolve to fight on, knowing that “right” or even “God” is on their side. The tighter the coil of their mindset becomes, the greater the likelihood of violence, on self and/or others.

This process, individually or collectively, is just “another day at the ranch” for an ego. We all have one and it is an incredible accomplishment to gain a degree of awareness to the point that we can daily watch it ply its trade in our heart…or at least try to. There is, in a sense, nothing “wrong” with this; it is just part of the “human-ness” that each of us is blessed/cursed with. This awareness is related to humility but only if this “humility” can achieve what I call “humility-ization” which makes this otherwise “accomplishment” a simple experience in the warp and woof of our daily life, and never a “fait accompli.”

Ursula La Guin, the Imagination, and Awareness

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Science fiction is a literary genre that I’ve not spent much time with.  I really liked Robert Heinlin’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” decades ago and recently I’ve come to value Ursula Le Guin.  Here is a quote from one of her books that I must obtain, “The Dispossessed,” which emphasized the danger of taking commonplace distinctions too seriously, “We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else,” she declared.

Le Guin believed we came into our world empty handed, without the rigid grip on things that the ego would come to demand, and we would eventually leave the same way; she saw the value of discovering this “empty-handedness” during our lifetime, a discovery which her teachings recognized was death in a very real sense.  This is the death of the ego, of attachment to the “clinging to maya” in the Buddhistic sense, or to “things”, even abstractions like words. John Masefield noted in one of his Sonnets, the blindness of humans and their tendency to behave like a “lame donkey,” perfunctorily covering their eyes by,  “daub(ing) ourselves that we may never see, like the lame donkey lured by the moving hay, we chase the shade but let the real be.”  In my culture our “daub” often consists of words, giving us an “ear to hear, but hear not; eyes to see, but see not.”

With Le Guin’s statement we have “no nations, no, no premiers…no landlords, no wages, no charity…” she points out that these distinctions we take so real in our daily life are not as real as we think though we live in a world, and must live in a world where they are taken for real; and failure to do so would be catastrophic.  Leguin recognized the limitations of boundaries, even those of linguistics, and explored the mysterious realm that she discovered beyond them.  From early in her life she had an active imagination and gained confidence in her ability to frolic there and spin remarkable yarns which revealed so much about the unimaginative world that most of us called “reality.”

Here is the context of the quote from “The Dispossessed”:
We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.―Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Poetry and Me

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I have spent more than three decades immersed in poetry, always that of others. I can’t write my way out of a paper bag as far as poetry goes. I know a few poets, and read of many more, and I think that what separates me from them is that they swim in, cavort in the cauldron of poetry and emerge to put it into words for people like me. I look down into that same cauldron but am not “man enough” to “dive into the wreck,” hoping that I will arise with poetry in my mouth and hand. I’m not complaining or bemoaning any fate of mine. I love poetry and deeply appreciate the gift it has been to my life.

Here is a poem by Susan Howe which came to me via a poet friend of mine this year. Susan and her sister Fanny are two wonderful poets of our day though Fanny departed not long ago. This poem of hers is entitled, “from My Emily Dickinson” and I think it would be described as a “narrative poem”:

     When I love a thing I want it and I try to get it. Abstraction of the particular from
the universal is the entrance into evil. Love, a binding force, is both envy and
emulation. HE (the Puritan God) is a realm of mystery and will always remain
unknowable, authoritarian, unpredictable. Between revealed will and secret will
Love has been torn in two.

     DUALISM: Pythagoras said that all things were divisible into two genera,
     good and evil; in the genus of good things he classified all perfect things
     such as light, males, repose, and so forth, whereas in the genus of evil
     he classified darkness, females, and so forth.
                              (Thomas Aquinas, “On the Power of God,” p. 84)

     Promethean aspiration: To be a woman and a Pythagorean. What is the communal
vision of poetry if you are curved, odd, indefinite, irregular, feminine. I go in
disguise. Soul under stress, thread of connection broken, fusion of love and
knowledge broken, visionary energy lost, Dickinson means this to be an ugly verse.
First I find myself a Slave, next I understand my slavery, finally I re-discover
myself at liberty inside the confines of known necessity. Gun goes on thinking of
the violence done to meaning. Gun watches herself watching.

Ken Wilbur Explains The Problem With Linear Thinking

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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”

Seeing Through a Glass Darkly

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We “see through a glass darkly”.  That is the best we can ever do but we have a deep-seated and potentially evil dimension of our heart that wants to see with clarity and assuredness.  This is simply “being human” and to become the best human possible is to recognize this truth and humbly accept that it applies to “me” also.  Here I write from this position of great limitation and am always beset with self-doubt–”Is this necessary?” or “Why bother?” or “What’s the point?” or, “Ain’t you got something better to do?”  It would be much easier if I had simply guzzled that kool-aid of my youth and thus have the comfort of knowing….so to speak…”Thus saiith the Lord” in all my blathering.  I think this is called “existential insecurity” but if one actually “exists” here in this world, that is, actually “dwells” here as the finite creature that we are there must be some degree of insecurity. 

But thinking gets in the way of any such humility.  By virtue of this Divine gift we have been subjected to the temptation to take our cognitive apparatus and its product–thinking, too seriously.  We have then glommed onto a body of thought with which we are intoxicated to the point that we are incapable of any humility, believing in our belief rather than the Ground upon which we and within which we are rooted.  This takes faith and faith is risky, entailing much more than clinging to the product of that “cognitive apparatus.” The cognitive trap that I am addressing is a prison from which one can escape if he is willing to pay the price, and the price was summarized by T.S. Eliot as, “…a condition of simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  This price tag for myself has been the simple understanding and experience of recognizing this “trap,” a recognition which begins to loosen the bars of our imprisonment.

My country is currently demonstrating this entrapment with Trumpism.  Hordes of Republicans “believe in their belief” of Trump; the resulting  enthrallment by a cognitive apparatus gone awry cannot end without tragedy.

Distance, Metaphor, and Edgar Simmons

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Last evening I stepped out into the bitter cold to witness Saturn and Jupiter come close to each other as if they were going to lovingly embrace, if you can consider “embracing” while separated by millions of miles. I can use the word embracing as in “touching” here only with the realization that in reality I am viewing this moment in our cosmic history from a physical distance of millions of miles. Even those two planets, appearing to be in “conjunction” are separated by five plus million miles. It is our “perspective” that allows us to witness this incredible moment in our history, giving us the necessary separateness that allows us to bring delight, joy, wonder and appreciation to the table. Before our perspective took roots in our early childhood we did not have the “luxury” of distance as we were part and parcel of a “moment” that we were immersed in and not able to cognitively/spiritually understand it. At that moment there was no “object separateness”…. to employ a bit of clinical jargon. It is the Biblical “fall” that gave us this detachment without which there would be no human culture. Spiritual maturity can gradually come to us in our “four-score and ten” when we grasp the wisdom of this Great Round of which we are but a part, a visitation of “Grace.”

The abysmal distance left us with a hunger to “close it up,” to find the lost connection and return to the delightful “Garden of Eden.” We pine for the relief from the burden of life in which we are separate and distinct, where culture seduces us into believing its artifice can give us that “Grand Conjunction” where grace awaits us. Culture, certainly language, can guide us in that direction but only if we see…and feel…that words will never suffice; they are but “pointers” to the Ultimate. The Buddhists so profoundly teach us, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

Here I want to share another Edgar Simmons poem which beautifully and profoundly captures the experience of distance:

THE MAGNETIC FIELD

Distance…which by definition
Indicates a separation from self
Is the healing poultice of metaphor,
Is the night-lighting of poetry.
As we allot to elements their weights
So to metaphor we need assign the
Weight of the ghost of distance.
Stars are stars to us
Because of distance: it is in the
Nothingness which clings us them
That we glory, tremble, and bow.
O what weight and glory lie abalance
In the stretch of vacant fields:
Metaphor: the hymn and hum of separation.

The Story of My Life, Simply Told

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I am increasingly fascinated with the realization that I am just a blob of protoplasm, frantically scurrying about on this chunk of cosmic granite with a bunch of other blobs.  In some sense I am part of an ant hill, a simple ant drone going about my daily life thinking that I am separate and distinct from all the other ants, oblivious to the fact that I’m not in the least.  To use another metaphor I, too, am just a single letter in an alphabet…quite often upside down…gradually finding the humility to accept my meager status in this cosmic adventure.

I began this sojourn very simply, just a simple gleam in my daddy’s eye which shortly thereafter took root in my dear momma’s body and soul.  There the magic of life came into play, designing me to go far beyond the pulsating quiver of energy I might have been without this “grand design.”  Thanks to Her wisdom, I “chose” to unfold meaningfully, and contriving arms and legs, a head, a torso and…oh my Lord…genitalia! And, pretty close to an “essence” of this, I found myself with a tiny “will” that is today, nearly seven decades later, still whirly-gigging my way through something I eventually learned to call “life.” I just looked up the term “whirly-gig,” btw, and found the urban dictionary describing it as “an unspecified object that has some sort of rotational point.”  That’s me!!!

I wish I could have discovered this ignominy earlier in life, allowing me to just “whirly-gig” to my hearts to delight rather than being a slave to this “rotational point” that I was.  Hey, I might have occasionally just kicked my heels and screamed with delight, seeing this world as “puppies and flowers all over the place.”It is delightful to look around me this morning, watching the news, chatting with my wife and canine son, Petey and watching this bitter-cold New Mexican Saturday unfold under a marvelous sunny sky.  My wife and Petey too are but “blobs”; but then the whole world is composed of these pulsating sacks of energy, these “meat suits” that we usually take to be who we are.  Wouldn’t it be nice if humankind could find this humility and embrace the notion that we are all in this “thing” together and could get along if we wanted to?

AFTER THOUGHT—The alphabet point was an illusion to Kierkegaard who also felt he was an outside—“I feel like a letter turned upside down in an alphabet.”

“How Do You Make a Poem?

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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

The Ego and Its Recalcitrance

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Two days ago I shared re the need of change and the great pain that can be entailed.  Why is change so challenging and often gut-wrenchingly painful?  It has to do with the ego which is resistant to becoming other than a citadel for self-interest.  When we came into this world we found ourselves in a “world that is always already underway.”  Our family was a context, a “milieu” which was rigidly structured by the emotional and, therefore, unconscious assumptions of the parents and any child that had preceded us.  My research has suggested that our fragile ego responds with a salvivic capability of “assessing” this milieu and formulating its response.  Our “response”, however, will quickly become rigid also which is part of our neurological wiring.  But that rigid structure, regardless of how open-minded we might be, will always be resistant to change.  This rigidity is also “hard-wired” as we need to filter-out much of the “stuff” that comes our way to maintain ego-integrity  If we had no filter…or one that is wired….maladaptively…we would submit to every demand of change that comes our way and our life would look like a “sheet in the wind,.”  

This is where the Pauline “discerning spirit” is applicable.  This quip from the Apostle Paul is an admonishment to employ what Hannah Arendt has described as an, “internal dialogue,” which iis to have  second-thoughts about what we are most sure…especially those “noble-sounding” bromides that we religious people are want to cling to.  Let me paraphrase the wisdom of Paul into a modern bumper-sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

Political Wisdom From Ancient China Gives Us Political Instruction Today

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A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.

A truly good man does nothing,
Yet nothing is left undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done

When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.
Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of the Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.

Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real
 and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower,
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.

Tao te Ching–(translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)