Tag Archives: Religion and Spirituality

Glen Beck and Neurophysiology

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Glenn Beck is one of the arch villains for we American liberals, a daily font of conservative blather of the darkest vein. But two days ago on his tv show he tearfully acknowledged that he has been battling for years a serious neurological illness that will shut him down in only a few years.

I guess in the deepest recesses of the fatally ill “literallew” there was a want to go “tee-hee” and I fear there will be a lot of that brutal, heartless immaturity from other of my liberal brothers and cisterns….I mean sisters. But I’m deeply sorry for this brother of ours….for we are all brothers and sisters regardless of our different perspectives on life—we are all made from the same “stuff,” we are all the “quintessence of dust” as Shakespeare understood so well.

However, I do think that the vitriolic blather of Glen Beck and others does have a neurological sub-strata. But, alas and alack, I also feel strongly that this “enlightened” perspective you are now reading has a “neurological sub-strata” and coming to understand this years ago has helped me to take myself less seriously than I have done for most of my life. Modern neurological science has taught us so much about ourselves that if we would humble ourselves and pay attention we eventually find ourselves overwhelmed with the simple but profound mystery of life, including the mystery of our very being.

In the past three years plus some of your have witnessed my “tippy-toeing” into this mystery as my awareness of it began to blossom. Awareness of this mystery…cognitively and emotionally…always evokes a feeling of finitude and frailty and at times is overwhelming. It is an humbling experience. It always brings to my mind the image that Shakespeare offered with King Lear, out on the heath of the kingdom he had forfeited, “pelted by a pitiless storm,” bereft of all the accouterments of his power, “naked as a jay-bird”, noting of an animal nearby, “we are all but poor, bare forked creatures as thou art.”

This “nakedness” that Shakespeare so eloquently grasped in his plays is what Glenn Beck is now feeling. It is what I am now feeling. And according to the teachings of Jesus…and countless other spiritual teachers over the eons…this nakedness is something we can experience any time in our life and can therein find redemption. This nakedness is “death” and out of it can come “life.” This nakedness is death of the ego, a relaxing of its tenacious grip on our consciousness allowing us to see that our life and the whole of life is much more than we can comprehend, an incomprehensible mystery before which we can only “glory, bow, and tremble.” (Poet, Edgar Simmons)

 

I “Discovered” America!

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Yes, in 1952 I “discovered America” although I also soon realized there were a lot of other “Americans” here already! Edgar Simmons once wrote, “We rattle the world for our babies” and early in 1952 the annual “rattle” took place and I fell to the earth in the sticks of central Arkansas.

It was a “discovery” and adventure; and continues to be. This is an amazing world that we live in. For example, at this very moment I am sitting in what I call my “bird theater” and watch junkies, sparrows, titmice, cardinals, and two or three varieties of woodpeckers raucously queue up for their moment at the bird feeders, cavorting about in the blowing snow as they wait their turn. Suddenly I am a child again and can “feel” on some level again the marvelous beauty that the world has for children before they get fully ensconced in the mundane. That was the time when my heart was still made of “penetrable stuff” and had not been “bronzed o’er” with the “damned custom…(that is) proof and bulwark against sense (or feeling).”

Now, of course, I employ my “literary license” here to recall these moments as there was no cognitive apparatus there to “remember” them with. That contrivance would come later and with it would come a more routine, mundane appreciation of the “beauty” I saw…and felt…at that time. And I use the word “felt” deliberately for early in our life we are a “feeling state” and are constantly soaking up the impressions which will stick with us for life and which will formulate the core of our identity, the roots of that unconscious domain that shapes our life. And, now, I do sense that I have some awareness of that phase of my childhood, some intuitive grasp of how the world appeared back then.

And on that subject, I don’t think I really liked much of the world…or at least the “human” part. I found all “those rules” baffling and overwhelming and preferred to stay safely tucked away in my little uroborus. I mean, there were so many of “those rules” and how could I ever get them “all” right; and, of course, being a budding narcissist, I had to get them “all” right, didn’t I? And, I might add that I’ve spent my life trying furiously to accomplish this goal but have found enough Grace in recent years to give up the quest, to humbly realize just how silly, vain and “narcissistic” it was in the first place. I really think that I felt so “judged” by the world I was discovering, and judged so disapprovingly, that I had to be “right” to compensate and the only way I saw that I could do this was to master all of the rules. Meanwhile, I was also immersed in a Jesus culture in which I was nearly almost daily about God and His mercy and forgiveness; and though I came to say I believed it all, I actually didn’t believe a word of it, did I?! The only way I felt I could be forgiven was to “be right” and that meant to follow the “rules.” When that facade began to fade decades later, I referred to it as the loss of my, “ruined, rural righteousness.” And, I might add, that in spite of what I was being “taught” by my “Jesus culture”, the subtext of that teaching was a dictate to do just as I was doing—Be Right!

Come to think of it, there is another character flaw—I’ve always had a hard time focusing on what was going on, preferring to focus on what was going on beneath the surface, in the “subtext.” I almost wonder if I had some version of ADD?

Proof that there is a God!

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I offer here proof that there is a God. Watch this video and you will be moved deeply as God will speak to you. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeMcUyq370M&feature=c4-overview-vl&list=PL64108521BFB99335) Beauty is present here on so many levels. Oh, no I will never quarrel with you about the meaning of “God.” That is just an idle word that we assigned to an ineffable Mystery eons ago. But, in this video you will see our Source offering Himself/Herself to us today! Some time ago I came to the realization, “It’s all about the kids.” Yes, it is not about us anymore. It is about providing an hospitable environment to our children so that they can flourish and make this world a little better than we were able to. And this darling little girl is beaming out into the void the “Word of God” better than any obsessive, pseudo-pious recitation of Holy Writ can ever do.

 

“Thoughts Are Things. Choose the Good Ones”

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I receive an email each day from a New Age “guru” named Mike Dooley. I don’t always read his missive, but do check in from time to time as I find some of his observations very timely. And I love the quotation he concludes each email with, “Thoughts are things. Choose the good ones.” This pithy observation summarizes his central message, that our thoughts control us and that we do have control over our thoughts….or can have more control that we often think we do.

Here is his email of a few days ago:

Dominion over all things doesn’t come with age, spirituality, or even gratitude. In fact, it doesn’t come at all. You were born with it and you use it every moment of every day, whenever you say, “I will…I am…I have…” And for that matter, whenever you say, “It’s hard…I’m lost…I don’t know…” And he wittily concludes with, “Careful where you point that thing!”

The “thing” he is referring to is our mind, or better yet, our heart which makes the “decision” of which thoughts to pack into our quiver each day. Now this “packing” is usually an unconscious process but if we will slow down, pause, and pay attention to our heart we can begin to notice how certain thoughts and patterns of thoughts are predominating in our life, not all of which are productive, not all of which are even “nice” to others and even to ourselves.

The Bible tells us, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” Popular lore offers the bromide, “Our thoughts become us.” Shakespeare noted, “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.” And even Henry Ford had very astute wisdom on the note, tell us, “Whether you think you can, or think you can;t—either way you’re right.”

 

Plucked by a Tulip????

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It was a lovely, cool spring morning in 1990 and I had just been married about 9 months. I was in our front yard and was greeted by a bounty of lovely tulip blossoms. I bent down to pluck one and as I did so, the notion fluttered through my mind, “Am I plucking or being plucked?” That was such a random, silly thought that just “happened” but it immediately caught my eye even before I knew about “mindfulness.” And it is no coincidence that this event happened shortly after my first and only marriage, each of us being in our mid thirties.

This was the beginning of the end for my rigid, “lost in the head”, concrete thinking though it would take another two decades and more for the process to get to the point where the “flow” of life would begin to take place in my heart. The boundary ambiguity noted in that observation flourished over those decades and I increasingly have become more adept at drawing less of a distinction between “me and thee.” Now I do draw distinctions; and failure to do so would be a serious problem for we do live in the “real” world where distinctions and ego-functioning is required. But I’m not trapped in the paradigm of “I’m over here” and “you are out there”; I’m more able to see my world, human and natural, in more inclusive terms.

Now, I must point out that “I” was plucking the damn tulip! But in so doing the beauty of the moment was toying with my heart, bringing to my mind and heart the notion of “being plucked.” There is such magnificent beauty in the world but we can’t see, and feel, this beauty unless we are able to let go of the rigid ego-identification which our culture always mandates. But the ego identification is so insidious that we can’t even see it without having already somehow escaped its clutches. This is relevant to an old philosophical bromide that I came across decades ago, “You can’t have a perspective on your perspective without somehow escaping it” ; or, “Asking someone to see his ‘self’ is like asking a fish to see water.” Or, even better yet, one of my Indian blog-o-sphere friends offered, “Someone who has fallen into a vat of marmalade can’t see anything but marmalade.” I liked his observation because it was new to me and registered dissonant at first, thus communicating to me effectively as I quickly mulled it over.

This drawing of distinction between “me and thee” is intrinsically a spiritual process. And I’m not even address “Spiritual” here though it is very relevant. I’m referring to “spiritual” as a human enterprise in the depths of the heart, a willingness to look inside which is an enterprise that our culture discourages. And if we deign to venture “there”, we will eventually end up wrestling with “God” in the realm of the “Spiritual.”

A Picture of Me Being Enlightened!

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I finally “saw the light” and it hit me like 240 volts, as you can see.

Yes, I was reading in the book of Deuteronomy, wholly consumed by the intricacies and hidden meaning of the “begots”, and suddenly I felt a rumbling in my bowels, my head felt faint, and suddenly it got me! Seriously, a good friend of mine and I were having coffee last year and were kidding each other about our respective quests for “enlightment” decades ago. We were chuckling at our immature and ego-ridden our quest was. And I certainly admire anyone who seeks spiritual maturity under any guise, and all such seekings have ego involvement, but mercifully if we are patient enough God will address that ego. Actually, he will begin to address that ego as His work will continue the rest of our life on that issue.

Grace, Hope, and “The Peace of Wild Things”

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I have met several Indian friends in the blog-o-sphere the past two years and feel a real kinship with them. And, this kinship corresponds with an “Eastern” direction in my spiritual life as I see boundaries as less distinct than I was taught in my youth. I illustrated this several weeks ago with an anecdote I learned decades ago when someone pointed out that in one Eastern language, instead of saying, “I see the book over there” their language puts it like this, “The book is seen.” The separateness from the world is less pronounced. The world is less objectified…in some sense.

One of these Indian friends and I have had several very rewarding exchanges about the nature of reality, the nature of “spirituality”, and the role that culture plays in shaping our view of these things, and our view of all things. He, like me, sees the ugliness in the world…in my country, yes…but also in his own country. I get the impression that at times he finds it very troubling like I do. When I have these feelings, I will often deliberately miss-apply one of the scriptures, the shortest verse in the bible, and will tell myself, “This is why the Bible says, ‘Jesus wept.’” For, the writer of this “shortest verse in the bible” said Jesus was on a mountain, overlooking a city when he said these words. Using my “literary” license, I feel Jesus was weeping in realizing how unnecessary it was that mankind lives in the self-imposed spiritual squalor and I think that any of us who looks at the human situation with a heart, including his/her own situation, certainly wants to cry on occasion. I know I do.

But this friend this morning pointed out something which again caught my attention. Perhaps I fawn too much over his culture and it’s lesser emphasis of object separateness for he noted emphatically, “Forget culture shit. Culture is the same everywhere.” And I realized that yes, even in that culture of his with its different “object-relationship” paradigm, there is still the human tendency to absolutize to his/her worldview and to take it to be the only way of being in the world. And the minute people make this mistake poison is introduced and/or perpetuated in the world. This is the human predicament in a nut shell right there. We just can’t get around that obstinacy and it is that obstinacy that creates the profound problems that we are facing. I see it currently in my country’s recurring political pissing contests which I most recently illustrated with the internecine squabbling in the extremists of the Republican Party. But everywhere in the world, we just can’t “get over ourselves”.

Now, suddenly I realize I’m broaching too much despair! I try to not go there too often. When too much grim besets me, I am learning to counter this despair with focus on the beauty that always abounds in my life if I will deign to look for it and pay attention to it. And when I focus there for a moment, if I practice meditation, I will offer a prayer of thanks and find my Center again. This exercise helps me to appropriate and honor grace.

And the notion of grace brings to mind a powerful moment about a year ago when I was helping a dear friend exit this world after a long, ugly battle with that bitch cancer. KW and I had always talked about spiritual matters in the 25 years we had known each other so this was not merely a “death-bed” concern of his. On a particular day, he posed the question to me, “What is grace?” Well, I didn’t miss a beat and employed what I so often employ, a bit of poetry that I have gleaned over the years. And on that occasion I quoted an excerpt from a marvelous poem by Wendell Berry entitled, “The Peace of Wild Things.” KW was touched, and so was I, as I felt I had offered a “word fitly spoken” even if it was someone else’s words. Here is that profound wisdom from Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty in the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come unto the peace of wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come unto the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 

The Merits of Silence

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Sometimes I think God wants us to remember his admonishment, “Be still and know that I am God.” Sometimes, I think he might want to be more emphatic and tell us simply to, “Be quiet” or even, “Shut up! I don’t need to hear all of your regurgitated verbal platitudes, your obsessive jargon. Just give it a rest for a while.” And then he would offer reassurance, “Now you will get it back in due time. But for a moment in your life, take a break! As it is, this is mere chatter.”

And I fear so much of our religious communication is mere chatter, “god talk” with value similar to that of “car talk” or “sports talk” or “talking politics”—providing social grease to reassure and confirm our social connections. We do need silence from time to time and some go for years before the Silence has done its work and “the letter of the law” has become “Spirit.”

St. John of the Cross said, “Silence is God’s first language.” Rumi pithily noted, “Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river” and, “Silence is the language of God, all else is a poor translation.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a marvelous poem about “The Habit of Perfection” part of which I will now share. Note that he emphasized that only in silence, “Where all surrenders come” will we find “eloquence.” It is Silence that gives meanings to our words and especially The Word.

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear,
Pipe to me pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From where all surrenders come
Which alone makes you eloquent

 

A Mean-Spirited Poem about Hell

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BUT MEN LOVED DARKNESS RATHER THAN LIGHT

The world’s light shines, shines as it will,

The world will love its darkness still.

I doubt though when the world’s in hell,

It will not love its darkness half as well.

Now I don’t know anything about Richard Crashaw but I hope he was merely having a bad day when he penned this short poem.  Perhaps his wife had burnt the toast that morning, or perhaps she was neglecting her “conjugal duties”, or perhaps his neuro-transmitters were merely screwing around with him.  But this is a nasty, mean-spirited poem.

Now the “concept” of hell exists in world culture and I don’t doubt that hell exists.  But I’m no longer sure about its precise nature or when and where it takes place.  I do feel strongly that those who are most obsessed about condemning others to hell, and emphatic about the point, are pretty much already there themselves.

And those ugly mean-spirited preachers who shriek and scream their sermons about hell’s torments, scaring their children into “getting saved” when they have no idea what they are doing,  simultaneously guilting the adults into “Christian” piety, have no idea just how close they are to hell’s torments.

I Want to be (Un)Famous!

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I think all of us want to be famous meaning we want to be admired and love more than we can possibly be.  We want to be the BMOC or BWOC.  And some of us get to be but most of us are confined to obscurity and left with the vicarious satisfaction that comes from glomming onto (identifying with) popular heroes—sports stars, movie stars, musicians, political figures…and in my case, literary greats.

But I think we can still take great satisfaction in being insignificant  For, life is inherently paradoxical, nothing is as it seems, and if we look carefully at what we are doing we can take great satisfaction in our meagre, “insignificant” station in life.  If we have the humility to realize that our prime responsibility is to merely show up and fulfill our responsibilities…mundane though they may be…then we are doing our part in keeping this dog-and-pony show afloat.  And that IS significant and we can take the same satisfaction that we could have if we were famous!  There IS glory and power in mere Be-ing.  And ultimately, there is found the only Glory and Power in the universe even for those who are the movers-and-shakers in our world.

T. S. Eliot advised us to “offer our deeds to oblivion.”  That was not nihilistic…he was a man of great Christian faith.  He was merely noting that we should live our life as productively and meaningfully as we can and then realize that the outcome is beyond us, and we must trust that our actions will be helping to the unfolding of God’s purpose.  Eliot, in the same marvelous poem, The Four Quartets, said that this faith requires merely, “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.”   Here is a marvelous poem by Naomi Shihab Nye about this type of “fame,” entitled, Famous:

 

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.