Tag Archives: Religion and Spirituality

A Prophetic Word Offered in Eureka Springs, Arkansas

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Eureka Springs, Arkansas is one of my favorite spots on the map of our world. I lived for twenty years only a stone’s throw from this lovely Victorian Era village and visited it often. Here is a post from Facebook by a man who offered a prophetic for our world in 2013, Paul DeFatta:

Transfusions: (based on a disturbing dream that I had in Eureka Springs, Arkansas on 11/27/2013) Everything of genuine value, it would seem, must be earned and not stolen. Stolen goods come back to wreak vengeance upon their stealers. When precious gifts and persons come to us, stolen or unearned, we usually do not know how to properly receive them or even how to open them. To earn something—a lofty or profound insight, the heart of a rare and exceptional lover, a magnificent artistic creation—is to STRETCH to (or into) that gift, idea, heart, work of art, etc. Where there is no stretching and no earning, a human life begins slowly to wither, to ossify, to dry up, or to decompose. In short, there are countless ways to end our lives long before we actually die. Dying, withering souls that never bothered to learn how to stretch and to earn often become psychic parasites that feed off the morsels and crumbs they can filch from those around them—those whose hearts beat with even a slightly stronger pulse than their own does. When the psychic parasites in a society begin to significantly outnumber the dwindling number of vital “earners” and “stretchers,” things really begin to go downhill at a galloping pace. It becomes increasingly dangerous for healthy persons to venture out into the streets, where, as likely as not, they will be greeted by a blood-sucking, prattling army of the walking dead. They will suck the life out them with empty blather, each word of which hits the skin like a syringe or a gibbering little vampire bat. With every syllable, the host’s life blood trickles through a network of invisible tubes into tiny mouths that have gathered in the surrounding shadows. (from Facebook page, “Carl Jung and the Creative Bridge)

Dostoyevsky, Intensity, and Creativity

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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!

The Tyranny of Labels in Video

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This video brilliantly illustrates everything I have been obsessing about with my emphasis on “distinction-drawing” and actually everything I’ve been trying to say for the past five years on this blog.  If we live our life in the tyranny of the narrowly defined world our ego has carved out for us, individually and collectively, we will always have conflict for there is no end to the need to draw distinctions between “us” and “them.”  Here again we see here the curse of religion…all religions…the ego always tends to take the spiritual wisdom provided there and turn it into a weapon under the name of whatever god we worship.  And, of course, there is the temptation to make this point accusatorily, “You do this but I do not” but the luxury of this self-deception is no longer mine. Losing that “luxury” is relevant to something said this morning in The Guardian about Donald Trump’s narcissism, “Trump does not have an interior life.  He ‘had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury…an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.’”  This “rumbling” is what my spiritual tradition calls “the Spirit of God” and if there is no “rumbling” there is only ego-ridden certainty which is devoid of any Spirit.

And when the ego’s tyranny metastasizes to a certain point, there will always be violence.  For the ego’s need to know that we are “right” can reach the point where we will to express with action the repressed experience of being “wrong,” a feeling that cannot help but arise when we are introduced to a world which is based on the tyranny of labels.  I do think that religion often offers the opportunity to dive into the depths of our heart and acknowledge this feeling of “wrongness” but it entails the willingness to face the pain of disillusionment, in Christian doctrine described as “being lost.”  This is why Aeschylus described the grace of god as “awful” centuries ago for he knew the agony of being disillusioned of the unquestioned certainties of our ego-constructed world.

“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.”  Aeschylus

 

Who Am I?

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This question has haunted humankind for eons.  Most people resolve the issue readily be donning the “suit of clothes” proffered by their family/community but for many of us that necessary “fig leaf” ceases to work at some point and we begin to wrestle with the essential issues of identity inherent in the question.  I realize now that assuming an identity in my youth was challenging, even very early before I was even conscious.  The angst did not really become conscious until pre-adolescence, then it beat the hell out of me for several decades, before I gained the maturity to begin to wrestle with the issue with an increasingly mature spiritual grasp of the matter.

Now let me reassure you, if you get to even middle age and give too much thought to “who am I?” you might go to your physician and seek a pharmacological easy way out!  For the quest to answer that question is a process and the answer will come in realizing that the process…like all things that are “process”…will never be completed.  This involves real work, spiritual work, spiritual work that cannot be resolved by the “well-worn and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness” even if they come from your favorite holy book!

Here I want to share a lovely poem from a lovely soul that I left behind in Fayetteville, Arkansas just over two years when I moved to Taos, New Mexico, Sue Coppernoll.  I did not know her well, but well enough to know she was a fine poet and a keenly sensitive spirit whose spirituality, like mine, had its roots in very conservative fundamentalist Christianity.  Here Sue so eloquently captures the fragility of an identity, particularly in its early formulation, and the resolve she had to “carry on” even when life dealt her hard blows.

MEMORY

Words

Worked out with toothpicks

On the royal blue carpet

On the living room floor.

 

First

My name,

WILLIE FAYE

Biting my lip in concentrated effort

Laboriously arranging wooden sticks

Into recognizable patterns.

 

I’m Real!

I have substance.

See, there I am,

Right there on the floor.

WILLIE FAYE

That’s me, I exist, I AM.

 

My baby sister crawls

Onto and through

My toothpick words.

 

My heart is broken.

 

I gather up the scattered sticks

To begin again

The construction of my self.

 

WILLIE FAYE

 

 

I wish I’d have gotten to know Sue better.  This poignant expression of a child’s heart just past the threshold of coming “on line” into conscious existence is riveting.  And the child at that point is so vulnerable and the mirroring from “momma” and the rest of the family and world is so critical.  But this validation is never perfect and even then Sue recalled having the experience of clinicians call “ego integrity,” allowing her to repair the damage to a particular disappointment.  And though, as noted above, I do not know Sue well, I did get to know her well enough to know that life dealt her more than her share of the Shakespearean “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir too” and that she has continued to employ that “ego integrity” and is today a beautiful soul and a beautiful woman.  In the terms of Judeo-Christian tradition roots that she and I hailed from it is the “Spirit of God” that provides that “ego integrity” which is a Presence described in the New Testament as that “by which all things cohere”

What is Going on with Evangelical Christians???

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Donald Trump continues to give my clinical mind plenty of “stuff” to play with though much of what he does and so is very scary for the sake of my country. One thing that staggers my imagination is how that he is handily winning the evangelical Christian vote over a much more egregiously Christian candidate, Ted Cruz, and in spite of stances and statements which are anti-thetical to everything Christians stand for. It is as if evangelical Christians have said, “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.” He can so or do anything and his numbers will continue to rise. In fact several months ago, he brazenly declared that he could stand in the streets of New York city and shoot somebody and “my numbers would still go up.” And even with that contemptuous observation about his constituency, he numbers continued to rise!

Two significant evangelical pastors have endorsed him. Jerry Falwell Jr, the son of the founder of the Moral Majority and the present founder of Liberty University, declared Trump an “outstanding Christian” as he endorsed him at Liberty University and then proceeded to listen to Trump use expressions like “What the hell” several times in his speech before the student body. I was thirty years old before I used that expression! And the pastor of First Baptist of Dallas, Robert Jeffress, endorsed him early in the campaign but did not cover his awkwardness real well. When Trump opened his arms to embrace the pastor, I remember noting that the pastor looked like a girl at the high school prom who was forced to embrace a disgusting football jock who she found repulsive.

But I think I understand why the Christian constituency is willing to overlook basic teachings of their faith and support such an unsavory man. Early in the campaign I was listening to one of Trump’s speeches on TV and had to share with my wife, “Wow, I understand why he is so popular! I want to give him at ‘atta boy.'” For his populist fervor and rhetoric appealed so readily to memories of my past when his simplistic solution to complex problemsappealed to me. “Make America Great Again” appeals to me still on some unconscious level though my reptilian brain is now countered by self-reflection.

Several evangelical voices have dared to confront their “family” and pose the question, “What about simple decency?” For example, Trump has publicly made fun for one of his critics for having a physical deformity, a physical deformity similar to what Jesus described as a “withered hand.” (This man’s entire arm was “withered”.) And on another occasion, he ridiculed a Fox commentator who is disabled from the waist down for not being able to stand on his own two feet. I was, and still am horrified with these two events. And evangelical Christians merely overlook it! And, furthermore, Trump has repeatedly revealed on TV that he has incestuous thoughts about his beautiful daughter but we never hear anything about that…other than Trevor Noah!

I can just imagine what other countries are thinking now as they witness this spectacle. And, the amusement and horror are justified as this phenomena does reveal something about our character, not just that of the Republican party.

Shakespeare and the Unconscious

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“I have within me that which passeth show.  These are but the suits of woe.”

Hamlet uttered these words one day when moping about the castle he was confronted by his family about his despondent mood.  He was saying, “Hey, you think this is depressed.  This is nothing.  This is only a cloak of depression; but I have within me the real thing.”

Shakespeare knew that life was but a “show”, a display of what was going on within our hearts, individually and collectively.  He was the greatest psychiatrist that we have any real record of, though I think Jesus Christ and Lao Tzu…to name but two…could have given him a run for his money if we had more of a record of their wisdom.  Shakespeare had a grasp of the human heart because he had a grasp of his own heart and could therefore convey this wisdom in the characters of his plays.  Without this ability to sublimate into thoughts, concepts, and literary contrivance he well might have ended up escaping into the abyss of alcohol or some other worser fate.

The Bard knew of the unconscious realm long before Freud and Jung made it popular.  He was familiar with the heart’s ravenous impulsivity, its abysmal darkness which knows no restraint, which would not permit civilization without the intervention of the gods who provided that marvelous contrivance which we know today as the neocortex.  And, though he had no knowledge of modern neurological science, with his God-given intelligence, intuition, and humility he knew “it” was there though he could not define it as we can today.

I look at the insanity of our world today…and reflect back on my own, realizing that it is not a thing of the past…and wonder, “Why do we do this to ourselves?”  I then am reminded of my gifted guru, Richard Rohr, a Franciscan monk in Albuqurque, Nm., who has interpreted the words of Jesus who on the cross said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” to mean, “Father, forgive them for they are unconscious.” And I reflect back on the stupid, ugly, self-serving, and mean-spirited things I have done and said in the name of religion and realize just how much I had no idea what I was doing and saying.  And, yes, that ignorance is still with me, no doubt!

 

 

A Witty, Ironic View of the Bible

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I love people who think out of the box.  And Megan Amram not only thinks outside of the box, I think she thinks outside of the box that the box is in!  Yet, there is “method to her madness” and she can make us laugh at ourselves.  At this link she certainly demonstrated another viewpoint of the Bible.  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/bible-system-updates

Basic Premis of “Getting Saved” Culture

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The problem of “getting saved” culture is not on the surface but in the depths of the heart, in the premises. A fundamental primis of this mind-set is that the world is seen as separate and distinct from humankind. The “unity of all things” dimension of human experience is not recognized. Their world is bifurcated into “saved” vs. “unsaved” which is merely another version of the “us vs. them” paradigm, the need to see themselves as separate and distinct from other people and from the world. It goes hand in hand with the notion that this earth is something to exploit.

Someone steeped in this “getting saved” culture sees the world “out there” reflecting the over emphasis of God’s transcendence, God always being “out there,” sitting on a throne wielding judgment and pulling strings bringing about his will. This is a projection of the human heart, reflecting the abdication of his/her own power onto a sterile image. This perspective gives only lip-service to the immanence of God which in favor of His transcendence. The subtlety of Spirituality is not seen as God is, yes, “out there” in some sense (though not in terms of time and space) but simultaneously he is “in here” (though again, not in terms of time and space.) “God” is a merely a word that we have used in an effort to capture this incredible Mystery of the human experience, an experience which is actually intrinsically divine. That Ground of our Being cannot be reduced to a mere word or concepts, nor to elaborate theological veins of thought.

And this is what Jesus was telling us that “the Kingdom is within” and that “he who was afar off, has been brought nigh by the blood of the Cross.” The Old Testament Jahweh, “way out there” in the heavens had reached a new level of development and it was time for humanity to recognize it was no longer necessary to attempt to appease him with the “blood of bulls and goats.” Jesus was saying, “You can give that stuff a rest” as that which you worshipped has become enfleshed, I am He, you and I are one, you too are God.”

But acknowledging and embracing our deity, which Jesus taught that we have, requires handling the awkwardness of thinking of ourselves as “God.” It requires a spiritual subtlety that permits an individual to handle mutual contradictory notions at one and the same time; such as, “I am God” as well as “No, I’m not.” It requires recognition, not just intellectually, but intuitively that I am not what I imagine myself to be, that I am more and even less than I “think” that I am.

But when this notion begins to seep into consciousness, it is scary, even “scary as hell.” For this notion invites us to recognize another dimension of life that lies beyond the pale of our conscious mind but is always vibrating within that conscious mind.

Okay, I’m running out of steam and the not quite dormant “literallew” is raising his juvenile hand, reminding me of just how crazy this line of thought is. Yes, it is “crazy “ to a linear mind trapped in the time-space continuum. This is the “Mystery” that even Einstein noted lay at the root of his explorations in the realm of science. But this same “Mystery” with Christians…and most religions…is immediately “bronzed o’er with the dull cast of thought” when we encounter it and we fall in love with the concept. If we would look carefully, this concept, this “idea” that we love is merely our own ego-self wrapped in religious trappings. That is what Jesus was trying to tell the “Christians” of his day, those who were ensconced in the “Pharisee” denomination of that time.

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I blogged several months ago about “the unity of all things.” It probably will continue to be a recurrent theme in my life as I see…and feel…its truth in the whole of my life. And, with my heart being more open now, I have intuitive knowledge that I was intently conscious of this unity very early in my life, much longer than one should if he is going to “join the human race” on schedule. (That is a story for another time.)

This discovery in my adulthood can probably be attributed to my marriage in 1989 at the age of 37. I think marriage for both of us was the onset of an exploration of the phenomena of “otherness.” This exploration is a boundary issue, a daring pushing of boundaries in a new manner which has led to profound changes in my life, changes in the depths of my heart. The Universe offered me a little hint at what was coming in the Spring of 1990 when I plucked a lovely tulip in our front yard to take in and give to my wife. The thought immediately flashed through my mind as I plucked this tulip, so taken with its exquisite and intense and beauty, “I don’t know if I’m plucking or being plucked.”

Immediately I knew this flashing thought was “interesting” and revealing. I thought, “Oh, wow! This is psychotic” for my knowledge of psychology had given me the awareness that this was an experience that could be the onset of a psychotic break. But, at the same time I was not alarmed in the least for I knew that I wasn’t psychotic but that this experience merely reflected that my boundaries were beginning to become fluid, that the rigid distinction between “me and thee”, between “me” and the object world was becoming less pronounced. I also knew enough about linguistics to quip later, “My signifier is beginning to float!” My life since then has been a steady but mercifully slow story of my “signifier” learning to float and my learning to adapt to the resulting duress of a new view and experience of the world.

Just last week I was having coffee with a new friend of mine who has had a similar experience in her life.. She is a retired corporate “uppity up”, highly intelligent and accomplished, and with a keen spiritual intuition. We were talking about this phenomena of boundary subtlety and the complicated nuances of having this awareness. I shared with her my tulip anecdote and some other similar “adventures” and she shared similar anecdotes, all in the context of a discussion of spirituality. Suddenly, I abruptly noted, “You realize that someone listening in on this conversation would say that we are psychotic?” She paused briefly and then noted, “Yes, but there are layers to reality but when I experience the unity of myself and a tree….for example…I simultaneously know that this is not how the rest of the world experiences it and also know that if I went around announcing it everywhere I went I would get myself into a lot of trouble.” Our discussion then ventured into the multiple dimensions of reality and how that “common-sense reality” allows only one, one that can be summed up as that of time and space, a linear and thus sequential world.

Reality is multi-dimensional. Yes, my experience with the tulip was a valid and meaningful experience but it is fortunate…and a sign of mental health…that I had the immediate understanding that there were other ways of looking at my experience. There are always “other ways of looking at my experiences” and learning this has helped me to be a little more open-minded and more tolerant of difference, or “otherness.”

To summarize, a tulip spoke to me! Now if I ever feel that a tulip literally speaks to me and perhaps communicates to me, “Don’t pluck me! Don’t pluck me,” I’m gonna be alarmed! In fact, I will go down to “Wal Marts” and buy me an hypodermic of industrial strength Haldol just in case! But the tulip did “speak to me” in a powerful way, a message that has reverberated through my life to this very day.

And each day the whole of the world speaks to each of us, every bit of this beautiful world offers a word to us–flora, fauna, fellow man/woman. All we have to do is listen but to listen we have to first realize that we have a deep-seated inclination to not listen, to pay attention only to the self-serving whisperings of our own unconscious needs. We have “ears to hear but hear not, eyes to see but see not.” And truly understanding this wisdom of Jesus is something we just don’t like to acknowledge, even we Christians who love to quote it!

One caveat here. Now suddenly if the whole world opens up to us and speaks to us, if it suddenly cascades in upon us, all at the same time, you might want one of those aforementioned hypodermic needles! This could be a psychotic break. We merely need to be aware of the need to listen and to observe and at specific moments we will have the opportunity to listen to and see the subtleties of our world. The rest of the time we will dutifully go about our day to day life keeping this dog-and-pony (linear) show afloat.

 

NOTES:

Here is a link to a BBC story in which the interconnectedness of the forest is explained, illustrating one dimension of “the unity of all things.” http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet

For further explanation of “floating-signifier,” you might see the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_signifier

Here is a beautiful description of the sense world collapsing in upon the ego, and the ego being saved from catastrophe (psychosis) by poetry:

bewildered with the broken tongue

of wakened angels in our sleep

then, lost the music that was sung

and lost the light time cannot keep

 

there is a moment when we lie

bewildered, wakened out of sleep

when light and sound and all reply

the moment time must tame and keep

 

that moment, like a flight of birds

flung from the branches where they sleep

the poet with a beat of words

flings into time for time to keep

 

words in time by archibald macleish

Be a Voice, not an Echo!

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I recently saw a quip on Facebook that grabbed me, “Be a voice, not an echo.” I feel I have spent most of my life merely echoing what I have been taught and what I have been rewarded for thinking and believing. I have dutifully mirrored back what “they” have wanted in the interest of the approbation that is always promised for this behavior.

But, due to my own internal “non-sense,” I realized I wasn’t feeling the approbation in the first place. And I saw that I had been guilty of this spiritual “offense” and am finding that I live less in an echo chamber now.  But notice I said “less.” We can never think with perfect clarity…unless we achieve deity; and if I ever have intimations of having done that I hope someone is nearby with a hypodermic of industrial strength Haldol!  We always live and think in a context and we always have a human tendency to interpret things to fit with our old-brain, ego-template of the world. When this understanding comes to us, we can back off more readily with our “certainties” and allow some doubt to filter in, making room for others. I love that line from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets about the need to “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”