Tag Archives: Philosophy

“Wind me up and watch me be…”

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Last week I posted re this Shakespearean note:  With devotion’s visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself.  I then paraphrased this wisdom into, “Wind me up and watch me be pious.”  I’m going to elaborate a bit.

This “wind me up…” concept can be applied to the whole of our life.  We are all “wound up” with a core identity and the verbal/ideological template that goes with it.  For example, I am again today saying with my thought and behavior, “Wind me up and watch me be…for want of a better term…a liberal.”  Many will be similarly wound-up today.  Then there are the conservatives.  “Wind me up and watch me be conservative”.  There are many of them too.

For, we are all “wound up” with some core identity, some template that we impose on the world and this template is usually not given any attention because asking someone to pay attention to his/her “template” is like asking fish to see water.  And then we have the human tendency to affiliate ourselves with other groups who subscribe to some similar template, thus shoring up our otherwise tenuous identity.

This problem is so apparent in our government.  Our leaders seem to be very smug, very rigid, very sure that the other side is wrong.  There is limited, if any, capacity to realize that the perspective of the other side deserves respect.  And corresponding with this arrogance is the all-too-human tendency to demonize those that view the world differently than ourself.  So, today go watch the news and watch the dog-and-pony show continue—-people saying, “Wind me up and watch me be Democrat” or “wind me up and watch me be Republican” or “wind me up and watch me be a Tea Partier.”

This is a deadly trap and this is a spiritual problem psychologically/emotionally.  And ultimately this is a Spiritual problem.  This reflects a fundamental problem with our culture.  We are all “wound up” and cannot, or will not, consider the possibility that all we have to trot out each day of our life is a mere perspective, it is not the ultimate grasp of reality.  Those people that we heap into the category “them” deserve a modicum of respect at least.

I conclude with the relevant wisdom of two of my favorite poets.    Conrad Aiken noted, “We see only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which likes the darkness.”  Our challenge, individually and collectively, is to venture “into the darkness” and offer respect to someone else today.  And W. H. Auden accused us of dwelling safely “on the heath of the agreeable, where we bask, agreed upon what we will not ask, bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light of the collective lie.”

Wanta go to heaven?

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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

the Ultimate

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In fundamentalist Christianity there is the oft-used phrase, “in the word” as in “I’m in the word a lot now-a-days.”  I’ve been there, done that, and it has its place.  I now am “in the word” daily though my “word” has broadened to include non-Christian holy writ, spiritual teachings (contemporary and historical), and literature (past and present), philosophy, and religious tomes.

I’m aware of how much brain-washing is involved here.  It is a way of indoctrinating ourselves, filling the void that we are with something we deem important to keep that void from sucking us up.  It is part of maintaining the identity that we formulated a long time ago, that identity being “a veil we spin to hide the void” (Norman O. Brown).

So, what’s the point?  Is brainwashing all there is?  Am I merely espousing nihilism here?

I think the answer is to realize that the “stuff” that we have filled our minds and heart with must have meaning beyond itself.  This “stuff”   (words, images, ideas, etc) is important but it has no meaning unless we have an ultimate reference point outside the realm of time and space.  I think it was Gabriel Marcel who once noted that “words have meaning only when they burgeon forth into a region beyond themselves.”  So, when it comes to spirituality…at least…does our ideology, our words, our dogma “burgeon-forth into a region beyond themselves” or is it merely so much flotsam-and-jetsam that we have glommed onto to stave-off the existential abyss that we live in.

As a culture…and I could broaden that to “world culture”…I fear that we do not have an ultimate reference point.   Or to put it more correctly, an “Ultimate Reference Point.”  Therefore we “glom on” to “stuff”.  We are materialistic.

death of the ego

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The hero is strangely close

To those who died young.

Permanence doesn’t interest him.

His dawn is his lifetime.

Daily he takes himself off

And enters the changed constellation

Of his everlasting risk.

(Ranier Rilke, Duino Elegies)

Rilke was writing of the loss of ego consciousness with the line, “Daily he takes himself off.”  And when the ego is “taken off” one can take a leap of faith into the unknown, into the “changed constellation of his everlasting risk.”  Karl Jung taught that the crucifixion was a metaphor for this death of the ego.

But the ego dies a hard death.  It fights for preservation and wins with most people.  However, I should qualify use of the term, “death”.  The ego must not be destroyed as that would lead to insanity.  What is taught by these and other spiritual teachers is that the ego needs to lose its primacy in our lives and this “loss of primacy” often feels like a death or crucifixion.

 

More “loss”

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Renunciation -- is a piercing Virtue --
The letting go
A Presence -- for an Expectation --

Emily Dickinson was a very complicated and very troubled woman.  But as she wrestled with her demons, she found words available as a solace and skillfully articulated her anguish.

In the above poem, she was wrestling with loss and risking a descent into madness.  “Renunciation” was the term she chose for rejecting the “common sense” world she lived and breathed in—a “presence”.  This “presence” can be thought of as her egoic consciousness (see Eckhart Tolle), a bit of fiction she had subscribed to which plugged her into that “common sense” world.  Norman O. Brown once noted, “The ego is a veil we spin to hide the void.”  Emily’s “veil” was precarious at best.

In another one of her poems she described this loss of egoic consciousness as “a funeral in my brain.”  And then she concluded the poem with the lines:

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down–
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing–then—

Note that she “hit a world at every plunge.”  So, even though the demons of madness were besetting her, she found a world at every step and then “finished knowing—then.  Her ego survived the descent.