Tag Archives: Garden of Eden

Dostoyevsky, Intensity, and Creativity

2 Replies

I exist.  In thousands of agonies–I exist. I’m tormented on the rack—but I exist though I set alone in a pillar–I exist!  I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there.  And there is a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky was aware.  He was conscious. And thus he was torn between the twin poles of human existence, being and non-being, presence and absence. The rending of the soul in this existential dilemma is described by French psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva, as a “tearing” from an unconscious matrix that an individual has not been able to face. Dostoyevsky lived in that existential crisis his whole life which contributed to his literary greatness.

Every human being carries this same intensity in the depths of their heart, but most of us have it “filtered” into a socially permissible abeyance.  Oh, what would we do without those “fig leaves” in our Garden of Eden experience!  This intensity also makes me recall a joke by a very bizarre stand-up comedian, Emo Phillips.  In his routine, he once asked, “Hey, you ever been in a chair, and you lean back…just a bit too far…and you realize that you are about to fall backward?  Remember that feeling you got in your gut at that moment? I feel that way all of the time!”  I don’t feel that way “all the time”;  but I do live with the intensity that Phillips was joking about and that drove Dostoyevsky to explore the human soul for us. There are times I do wish that back in 1951-52 when God was putting me together he’d have given me a brand new “fig leaf” and not the “factory-second” that I’ve had to cope with!

Shakespeare & Binary Thinking

Leave a reply

“There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” This might be one of the richest bits of Shakespearean wisdom that I have gleaned from the treasure of his work. He is pointing out that it is our ability to assign labels that creates our world and in so doing carves this world up into categories. This notion is intriguing for on a superficial level it seems to mean that even something like murder is “murder” only because of thinking. And, well, in a sense that is so but that doesn’t mean our labeling it “bad” is a problem.

With this observation Shakespeare again takes us into the depths of our collective heart where distinctions were made even before we are rational human beings. He realized that somewhere in our ancient past we determined that labels (i.e. words) are necessary even before we were capable of formal thought. It is there, in our collective unconscious that we decided, “Hey, some of this stuff going on here is a problem” and from that subconscious realization we began to evolve a capacity to assign labels. But also, at that some point in development we started the preliminary process of assigning labels to the whole of God’s creation, illustrated so beautifully with Adam’s “naming the beasts of the field.”

Without this ability to assign labels and to categorize our world we would still be beasts of the field. But with this skill we were beginning to acquire the ability to create human culture, making it possible for life as we know it to unfold. But unfortunately, this spiritual phenomena of becoming verbal also had a price tag—it separated us from the splendor of the natural world and left us with a feeling of loss and an unconscious want to return to that Edenic bliss. It also created the capacity to take these labels too seriously and to forget they were only “pointers” and not the thing- in-itself. These made it possible for ideologues to climb out of the primordial slime with the rest of us and these ideologues take this verbal world to be the only world, not realizing that words have meaning only when their ancient, primordial, (i.e. pre-verbal) roots are engaged. When we reach this point of spiritual development, we understand that a simple word like “god,” for example, can cease to be a mere “idea” and the “experience” of God in the depths of our heart can begin to surface. When we reach this point of our life we then begin to “wrestle with the Lord” and can come to realize that in some sense we are also wrestling with the very core of our being, our very self. We are, as W. H. Auden puts it, “waging the war we are.”

It is such a challenge to recognize and to experience the limits of binary thinking. In a sense, “binary thinking” is the only thinking there is but only in a sense. With this marvelous neo-cortex, we have the God-given capacity to learn how deeply we are embedded in our own thought. When we reach this point of maturity and have the courage to enter the struggle that follows, we recognize that yes, there is “good” and “bad” in our world but we understand that the distinction between the two is more nebulous than we used to think. This understanding makes us less sure when assigning those particular labels though we can,, at the same time, have the courage to judiciously utilize them. Yes, there is “good” and a “bad” in this world and even more so, in the very depths of my own heart. This neo-cortical phenomena of meta-cognition allows us to hold in our mind and heart “contradictory” notions at one and the same time and we can begin to cavort about in the Unity of all Things.

Lessons from Poetic Obscurity

Leave a reply

I’ve always been drawn to obscure poetry and obscure observations, some of which linger with me years before I begin to understand them. They “linger” there on the periphery of my consciousness for they have something to offer me when I’ve matured enough to let their truth sink in. I now have three poems to offer here which I have always found “obscure” but now I feel I am beginning to understand what the writer was seeing. I’m going to share them here and offer my perspective on what they mean.

AS BAD AS A MILE
By Philip Larkin

Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,
Show’s less and less of luck, and more and more
Of failure spreading back up the arm
Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.

I now see this Larkin poem as quite obvious. He was talking about mankind primordial before he had “bitten the apple” and fallen into the realm of time and space. Before we tasted that forbidden fruit, we were perfect, still living in the Uroboros, delighted in the Edenic delight of pure freedom. But the minute we succumbed to Eve’s charms (see, it’s always a woman, damn them!) we entered the realm of cause and effect, or time and space, and gained a formal introduction to failure. Now, this side of Eden, we never get it “right” but have it in our heart to try and have available stories of Grace which tell us each step along the way, “Hey, its ok. Hey, you are okay. Just keep on truckin’. You are forgiven. Something is underway that you can’t figure out with your finite mind.” Or, as T.S. Eliot said, “For us there is only the trying. The rest is none of our business.”

HOUSE
By E. L. Mayo
House
Vast and ambiguous
Which was before we were
Did you
Build yourself and then grow populous
By taking thought, or
Did someone leave a tap on long ago
In You
Which with its spatter
Affirms at the very least a householder
Who will return at the last if only to
Turn off the water.

This poem is about the very roots of our being, that subtle spirit of consciousness which is always there but always lies outside the grasp of our conscious mind. This is what we are when we are bereft of all the superficies of our existence and feel so very alone, comforted only by the intuitive knowledge that there is a “householder” who is the very ground of our being and that this “householder” is He Who unites us all ultimately.

Navigating by the Light of a Minor Planet

by Jessica Goodfellow

The trouble with belief in endlessness is
it requires a belief in beginninglessness.
Consider friction, entropy, perpetual motion.
And the trouble with holding to both is that
belief in endlessness requires a certain hope
while belief in beginninglessness ends in the absence of hope.
Or maybe it’s vice versa. Luckily,
belief in a thing is not the thing itself.
We can have the concept of origin, but no origin.
Here we are then: in a world where logic doesn’t function,
or else emotions can’t be trusted. Maybe both.
All known tools of navigation require an origin.
Otherwise, there is only endless relativity and then
what’s the point of navigation, in a space where
it’s hard to be lost, and even harder not to be?
Saying “I don’t want to be here” is not the same
as saying “I want to not be here.” It rains
and it rains and it rains the things I haven’t said.
By Jessica Goodfellow

No less a conservative Christian luminary than Dietrich Bonheoffer discoursed on the human dilemma of wanting to know and own his origin, to grasp it with his rational mind only to find that no one can “wrap his head around it.” Life is an incredible mystery and, though some of us find it amusing to wrestle with this mystery, ultimately we have to accept that mystery and recognize that we only “see through a glass darkly” and must busy ourselves with the Divinely “mundane” responsibilities of day to day life. Relativity is something one wrestles with if he pursues spiritual matters beyond the confines of his little ego. But, though we can “tippy-toe” in that bewildering world of doubt and despair…and some of us even take a swim in it from time to time…we have to come back to the only “real” that we know and act purposefully, knowing that we have an impact on this world.

 

Creation and the Fall

4 Replies

One of the most vivid memories of my childhood was the Apollo 8 mission to the moon on December 24, 1968,  I was gripped by the majesty of this technological accomplishment and the sheer beauty of the moon from such a close perspective and even more so of the beautiful earth floating so freely in the void.  This was a very humbling experience for me and I will never forget it.  A very important part of the event was the stirring reading by the three astronauts of Genesis 1:1-10.  I’ve always been captivated by those verses and have been even more so since that moment.

I love this creation story.  I find creation stories in all human culture fascinating and revealing.  We have always had this deep-seated need to explain our origin and thus make more sense out of what the hell we are doing here.  It is very hard to accept that perhaps this information is not available to us, that “flaming cherubim and seraphim” keep us from returning there and revisiting the Garden of Eden.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a marvelous little book entitled Creation and the Fall in which he speculated about creation, the fall, and mankind’s quest to escape his existential predicament.  He argued that mankind is aware that he is caught in the “in the middle” and is anxious about the beginning and the end.  I’ve read others who have described this status as being caught in the “in between” or the “metaxy”.  Mankind is obsessed with getting back to that beginning and understanding and explaining it and therefore “owning” it in some manner.  But we are trapped, fated to wonder the earth knowing that “our little life is rounded in a sleep.” (Shakespeare)

T.S. Eliot offered a thought on this notion.  He said, “Man’s curiosity searches past and future and clings to that dimension. ” For “past and future” is but a single dimension, the time-space continuum from which we cannot escape try as we may.  I’m made to think of Jim Morrison’s song, “Break on through, break on through, break on through to the other side, break on through, break on through, break on through to the other side.”  Morrison’s heart hungered to “break on through” and that is what drove him to drugs and alcohol. He could not accept being trapped like the rest of us, he could not accept “the fall” into space and time.

Wanta go to heaven?

Leave a reply

In my conservative upbringing, I was taught that the story of Adam and Eve was about creation and “the fall.”  I was taught that when Adam succumbed to the temptation of Eve’s offering of the forbidden fruit (i.e., the apple), we as a species were plunged into sin, we had “fallen” into sin.

I now see that story as a myth and a very compelling and rich myth.  It is the story of how we did indeed fall from grace but only in the sense that it was the fall from a primordial unity with nature into the realm of consciousness—from raw, unmediated, instinctual experience into the realm of conscious, cognitive, rational reality.  And this event in our psychic development is very much related to the advent of language.  This event can be thought of as a fall from the pre-conscious into the realm of the verbal.  Even Aesychlus noted, circa 500 b.c. noted how that Zeus had “banished us thought-ward”.

Karl Jung taught that before the advent of language, the child dwells in a state of unity with his/her mother.  The mother’s world and that of her child are tightly intertwined until the process of differentation leads them to that radical juncture in the process of separation—language. (That world of unity is sometimes thought of and conceptualized as the ouroborus, symbolized by the snake eating its own tail.)  Furthermore, I have read of speculation that those children with speech impediments have been overly enmeshed with their mothers and have not formed clear and separate boundaries.

And, yes, “sin” is relevant to this situation.  Human experience is that of a sinner in that we sense on some level that we “come from out there” or at least somewhere else.  It is a sense of being separate from our source.  We are cut off from our source and cannot go back.  Our longing for heaven is the yearning for that Edenic state of one-ness with nature, primordial unity.  On some unconscious level we recall “heaven” where all was well with the world, nothing ever went wrong, all of our needs were met.  And, as conscious adults we subscribe to the belief that after death, we return to that wonderful state