25 July 2008
RIP Randy Pausch (1960-2008)
"Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose 'last lecture' about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47." He'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer almost two years ago. More at NYT and at Carnegie Mellon. This is his update page, which I've been following for about a year (servers at Carnegie Mellon must be overloaded; it's taking many tries to download today).
His Last Lecture is moving and inspiring, imo. Watch it.
12:06 Posted in death , education , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
22 July 2008
The Mechanism
"In a nutshell: before the advent of Judaism and Christianity, in one way or the other, the scapegoat mechanism was accepted and justified, on the basis that it remained unknown. It brought peace back to the community at the height of the chaotic mimetic crisis. All archaic religions grounded their rituals precisely around the re-enactment of the founding murder. In other words, they considered the scapegoat to be guilty of the eruption of the mimetic crisis. By contrast, Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous community. That's the moment in which the mimetic mechanism is fully revealed." -- René Girard, in Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture
Quoted by Chronicles of Atlantis, with accompanying photo at that website.
This may not be what was intended, but reading Girard and learning about mimetic theory these last few years has led me to become extremely wary of all sacrifice (making sacred) -- which actually I think is intended -- and also sceptical and even perhaps cynical of self-sacrifice, in myself and others.
Sacrifice seems so often to go hand-in-hand with feelings of righteousness and resentment, and the act of scapegoating, and it offers an enormous payoff both for acknowledging the sacrifice as such and for denying all else. I see self-sacrifice now as mostly an acceptable way to make oneself sacred, a kind of self-divination that can be deeply satisfying and comforting to the sacrificer. (A short time ago I would have agreed that 'we are all sacred,' and yet now I think that such language amounts to a sort of trick, a means of identifying and attacking 'the profane,' that which we think is unworthy.)
I think we are called to compassion -- i.e., suffering with, abiding with, experiencing what the other experiences without clutching onto the experience -- which sometimes entails sacrifice of one's ego, one's desires, and at times one's life; and yet I can't be unaware of the ego-needs and the desires that are met in the act of sacrificing oneself in both mundane and extraordinary ways, in the stories we tell ourselves and others about the sacrifice -- before (if premeditated or foreseen), during and particularly after the fact -- and in the refuge taken in false modesty that seeks to lift up our own altruism and to deny our own selfishness. And contrariwise, even boasting of our selfish motives can itself become a show of ego self-sacrifice, a twisted pretense of appropriate humility that serves only to enhance the perception of oneself as a hero, a god, someone who isn't even aware of the good they've done. We are a tricky, tricky lot, it seems to me, capable often of hiding the complexity of our own motives from our own minds and hearts.
I can imagine self-sacrifice as a consequence of feeling in the flow of all life, as a heartfelt response to feeling loved, as an act intertwined with living an abundant life, though I have a more difficult time imagining that the story about the act could leave it at that without justification, fabrication, meaning-making, and so on.... What I can't imagine is self-sacrifice as a measurement on a moral scale without also thinking about the Pharisees and their sacrifices, abstinences, denials of pleasures, etc., for the sake of God, and how good they felt about their worthiness under God because of those sacrifices.
Self-sacrifice that comes from a sense of duty and a need to 'do the right thing,' and that carries with it a sense of having done right, done well, been worthy and pleasing, feels to me likely to slip unobserved into a self-congratulatory act, and perhaps to leak into resentment, bitterness, anger and eventually accusation when the act is unappreciated, unrecompensed, unacknowledged, unnoticed, and even unaccepted, and/or has an outcome considered bad by the sacrificer. (Or, alternately, the sacrificer may view the lack of appreciation and the bad outcome as yet another burden added to the sacrifice s/he is making, which just enhances the satisfaction s/he feels in making such a sacrifice.)
If such an act derives from wanting to measure up, wanting to do what's right and to be right, then it seems mined with explosive devices that will likely damage the sacrificer, as it did the Pharisees, without their noticing it. If, on the other hand, such a sacrifice derives from a feeling of being loved completely for who one is (and isn't), from a knowledge at the core -- or perhaps simply from a quick glimpse that's never been quite edited out -- that we are the recipients of a gift that our word 'life' doesn't even begin to describe -- Well, that kind of sacrifice could, it seems, be experienced not as giving up anything, not as an unequal exchange, not as suffering at all except in the sense of 'suffer' as 'allow' or 'undergo.' We might then undergo sacrifice as a bit of ash undergoes a lava flow or as a drop of rain undergoes a thunderstorm. What would that be like?
(I ordered Evolution and Conversion yesterday, and a few days ago received a copy of Girard's other book published this year, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, from which I may occasionally quote as I get into it. I'll probably skip around ... Writers whose works he explores include Stendhal, Voltaire, Valéry, Tocqueville, de Beauvoir, Proust, Racine, Sartre, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare ... I haven't read most of the original texts, so it may be hard going. See TOC here.)
08:10 Posted in death , girardian anthropology , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
17 July 2008
Need for Sense of Control, Either Personal or External
Overcoming Bias points to an article in the July 2008 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (links to full text here but it's fee-based, or available through your library system) that examines four psychological experiments and concludes that when we feel a weak sense of personal control, we are more likely to believe "in the existence of a controlling God" and to defend "the overarching socio-political system." The authors discuss "the implications of these results for understanding why a high percentage of the population believes in the existence of God, and why people so often endorse and justify their socio-political systems." Sounds interesting -- I hope to read more when the July issue is available via my library system's EBSCOhost subscription.
This hypothesis seems in line with earlier reporting correlating that the longevity of communities with their religious underpinnings (religious communities last longer than secular ones, on the whole) and finding that the communities persist longer when those underpinnings (and the lifestyle they lead to) are stricter, more controlling.
Marginal Revolution commented on the same article, hypothesising that similar effects may hold for medicine and media, i.e., that we'd be more likely to believe that doctors are effective when our health is in jeopardy and that we'd be more likely to believe in media accuracy when we believe we need that media information in order to be safe. In all cases, we want to feel that someone is in control.
08:40 Posted in community , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , politics, government and law , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
16 July 2008
Justification by Theory
From Gil Bailie's mostly dormant website:
"Following another avenue of escape, which seeks its justification in a grandiose theory, there are those who wish to recognize only collective sin, 'objectivized' sin, 'social' sin, i.e. the sin committed by others. A universe is constructed where evil is everywhere denounced, but no where admitted; where it is always endured, never committed. By thus 'transferring the evil which is in man to the evil in the structures' -- called 'structures of sin' -- one is led, in addition, to the idea that man is essentially good, and that it is only society which corrupts him, and that he has no need of conversion of heart." -- Henri de Lubac
I think this is a danger for those of us who use a Girardian lens (seeking "justification in a grandiose theory"?), to see more and more clearly others' violent mimesis, scapegoating, the mechanism of sin for what it is in every interaction we observe, to see it woven into the fabric of society and institutions, while we remain blind to the way it flourishes in each of us.
11:35 Posted in community , girardian anthropology , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Notes from Status Anxiety: Conclusion
Final note on Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the twelfth post on this topic; the first is here.
CONCLUSION
We need status anxiety because "fear of failing and disgracing oneself in the eyes of others is an inevitable consequence of harbouring ambitions, of favouring one set of outcomes over another, and of having regard for individuals besides oneself."
But we can choose the audience from whom we accept judgment, we can recognise that values that seem fixed and immutable actually fluctuate with time, place, the ethos of the age.
"Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy. They have attempted, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority while maintaining a firm grip on the differences between success and failure, good and bad, shameful and honourable."
[This all falls flat for me somehow.]
09:00 Posted in art and photography , books and reading , community , other people said it , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
15 July 2008
Solutions: Bohemia (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the eleventh post on this topic; the first is here.
PART II: Solutions
CHAPTER 5 - BOHEMIA
Bohemians came to prominence in France after Napoleon, 1815. Bohemians are found in all social classes, age groups, professions, and in both genders. They include Romantics, surrealists, Beatniks, punks, situationalists, Kibbutzbiks, et. al.
Bohemians lived simply, read a lot, didn't care much for money, were melancholic, had an allegiance to art and emotion, led unconventional sex lives, and ... some of the women wore their hair short! Most importantly, they did not fit into the bourgeois conception of respectability.
Bohemians don't like the bourgeoisie, private schools, debutantes and 'eligible bachelors,' blood sports, missionaries, bores, and people who worry about their reputations.
Bohemians like men and women, Nietzsche, Picasso, Kokoschka, jazz, acrobats, Havelock Ellis, the Mediterranean, DH Lawrence, those who don't anticipate life after death.
Flaubert: "Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom."
The bourgeoisie are seen as prudes, materialistic, both cynical and sentimental, immersed in trivia and trivial pursuits.
'Real' bohemians were those who "set themselves up as sabatoeurs of the economic meritocracy." They valued 'sensitivity' over worldly ambition. Work and money, they felt, destroyed one's capacity for sensitivity. They thought themselves "deserving of the highest honour for their ethical good sense and their powers of receptivity and expression." [Isn't this just another form of meritocracy, status based on talent, skill, intelligence?]
Thoreau - lack of wealth didn't necessarily mean, as the bourgeois said, that one was a loser at the game of life; one might be impoverished financially because one focused energies on things other than making money, equally enriching in their own right.
Bohemians (and others) realised that maintaining confidence in their values, so at odds with the mainstream, required mixing socially mainly with others who shared the same values, and reading and listening to materials that supported their values. Hence, enclaves of Bohemians in Montparnasse, Bloomsbury, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Venice Beach, etc.
Bohemians redefined failure. For the bourgeoisie, failure in business or the arts was an indictment of character because it's assumed that society is fair in distributing its rewards. For bohemians, there's nothing punitive about failure. In fact, because those who succeed in society are those who can best "pander to the flawed values of their audiences," commercial success was viewed with some suspicion. (Myth of the misunderstood artist)
Bohemians emphasise the "dignity and superiority of the rejected ones," which is a secular counterpart to the Christian message and story of Jesus's marginalisation and crucifixion: "Torture at the hands of the uncomprehending masses" is "evidence of the righteousness of the neglected party."
Sometimes bohemians were "radicals devoted to anything so long as it was taboo in the Mid-West," shocked the middle class, outraged public opinion.
It's "only a short step from valuing originality and emphasising the non-material aspects of life to feeling that almost anything that could surprise a judge or pharmacist -- from crustacean-walking [Gérard de Nerval] to strawberry-breast-cooking [Filippo Marinetti] -- must be important."
Most generally, bohemia has legitimised the pursuit of an alternative way of life." They "articulated a case for a spiritual as opposed to a material method of evaluating both oneself and others."
08:10 Posted in books and reading , community , consumption , girardian anthropology , other people said it , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
14 July 2008
Morality
A couple of thought-provoking posts at Overcoming Bias about morality (among many there lately on the topic): The Moral Void and Is Morality Given. See also the comments.
From the first, the question is posed: "When you cannot be innocent, justified, or praiseworthy," which course of action will you choose anyway?
And this, pointing to labelling and authority as it relates to morality, and to our propensity for letting someone else define 'morality':
"In 1966, the Israeli psychologist Georges Tamarin presented, to 1,066 schoolchildren ages 8-14, the Biblical story of Joshua's battle in Jericho:
"'Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword... And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.'
"After being presented with the Joshua story, the children were asked:
"'Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?'
"66% of the children approved, 8% partially disapproved, and 26% totally disapproved of Joshua's actions.
"A control group of 168 children was presented with an isomorphic story about 'General Lin' and a 'Chinese Kingdom 3,000 years ago'. 7% of this group approved, 18% partially disapproved, and 75% completely disapproved of General Lin.
"'What a horrible thing it is, teaching religion to children,' you say, 'giving them an off-switch for their morality that can be flipped just by saying the word 'God'.' Indeed one of the saddest aspects of the whole religious fiasco is just how little it takes to flip people's moral off-switches. As Hobbes once said, 'I don't know what's worse, the fact that everyone's got a price, or the fact that their price is so low." You can give people a book, and tell them God wrote it, and that's enough to switch off their moralities; God doesn't even have to tell them in person.
"But are you sure you don't have a similar off-switch yourself? They flip so easily -- you might not even notice it happening."
Why, he asks, do we even listen to an "external objective reality" instead of to ourselves?
The second article is a staged debate about whether morality is a given, something beyond simply "human preference"? Here's a little bit of it:
"Subhan: Once upon a time, theologians tried to say that God was the foundation of morality. And even since the time of the ancient Greeks, philosophers were sophisticated enough to go on and ask the next question -- 'Why follow God's commands?' Does God have knowledge of morality, so that we should follow Its orders as good advice? But then what is this morality, outside God, of which God has knowledge? Do God's commands determine morality? But then why, morally, should one follow God's orders?"
"Obert: "Yes, this demolishes attempts to answer questions about the nature of morality just by saying 'God!', unless you answer the obvious further questions. But so what?"
"Subhan: "And furthermore, let us castigate those who made the argument originally, for the sin of trying to cast off responsibility -- trying to wave a scripture and say, 'I'm just following God's orders!' Even if God had told them to do a thing, it would still have been their own decision to follow God's orders."
"Obert: "I agree -- as a matter of morality, there is no evading of moral responsibility. Even if your parents, or your government, or some kind of hypothetical superintelligence, tells you to do something, you are responsible for your decision in doing it."
"Subhan: "But you see, this also demolishes the idea of any morality that is outside, beyond, or above human preference. Just substitute 'morality' for 'God' in the argument!""
11:20 Posted in language , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Solutions: Religion (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the tenth post on this topic; the first is here.
PART II: Solutions
CHAPTER 4 - RELIGION
Death
Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan llyich (1886) is a Christian memento mori. Ivan Ilyich is all about status. When he realises he's going to die, he recognises he's wasted his time on Earth by leading an outwardly respectable but inwardly barren life. He always wanted to appear important and to impress people whom, he sees now, don't care for him at all. Those around him love his status, not his true vulnerable self.
The prospect of death may cause us to do what matters most to us and to pay less attention to the verdicts of others. We see we cannot "afford to defer forever, for the sake of propriety, our underlying commitments to ourselves."
Ruins! They comfort us, reveal our "punishingly high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing," our own exaggerated self-importance. Our miseries are tied to the grandiosity of our ambitions.
Community
We all have the same vulnerabilities and the same two driving forces: fear, and a desire for love.
The Christian would say that there is no such thing as a stranger, "only an impression of strangeness born of failure to acknowledge that others share both our needs and our weaknesses."
Christianity attempts to enhance the value we place on community -- through ritual (a transcendent intermediary) and through music (great leveller and social alchemist -- we see that others respond as we do, which forges connection).
Twin Cities
Jesus is the model for Christians' understanding of status. He has two different sides, as ordinary carpenter and as the holiest of men. We can see the difference between earthly status (determined by occupation, income, others' opinions) and spiritual status (related to one's soul and merits in God's eyes).
The City of God, Augustine, 427 AD: All human action can be interpreted from either the Christian or the Roman (earthly) perspective, which are different. Christian status derives from humility, generosity, recognition of one's dependence on God, etc.
Divine Comedia, Dante, 1315: Dante's Hell is home to many who enjoyed high status while they lived.
Christian lore asserts the superiority of spiritual over material success and endows its virtues with "a seductive seriousness and beauty" through music, art, literature, architecture, etc. "Through its command of aesthetic resources, of buildings, paintings and Masses, Christianity created a bulwark against the authority of earthly values and kept its spiritual concerns in the public eye."
Heydey of cathedrals, 1130-1530.
Christianity never abolished the Earthly City or its values, but that we retain any distinction between wealth and virtue is largely due to the impression left on Western consciousness by Christianity.
06:00 Posted in books and reading , community , death , girardian anthropology , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
11 July 2008
Distraction = Less Hypocrisy, More Impartiality ?
On the face of it, this study (described below) seems to challenge the Buddhist ideas that letting go of distraction (labelling it as such, and not following its threads) and practicing mindfulness are tools towards more compassionate action ... (also, NYT article on distraction and its deleterious effect on creativity and critical thinking), although it seems perhaps that what's actually at stake in this study, and in Buddhism as well, is finding an end-route around habitual thinking (and its attendant fantasies, judgments, status-check-ins, comparisons, opinion-making, ego defenses, etc.) rather than the pure benefits of distraction as one way to do it:
"Why We're All Moral Hypocrites", by Robin Nixon at LiveScience, posits that we are more lenient on ourselves than others, that we "judge others more severely than we judge ourselves. ... [We] are loathe to admit, even to ourselves, that we sometimes behave immorally. A flattering self-image is correlated with rewards, such as emotional stability, increased motivation and perseverance."
The article describes a recent study in which 42 students were asked to assgn tasks to themselves or to the 'next participant.' The tasks might be "tedious and time-consuming" or "easy and brief." The students could also opt to have a computer assign the tasks, randomly. The researchers found that 85% of the students "passed up the computer’s objectivity and assigned themselves the short task -– leaving the laborious one to someone else" and they characterised their decision as fair. Another group of 43 students, merely observers of all this, considered the actions unfair.
Then the researchers "'constrained cognition' by asking subjects to memorize long strings of numbers. In this greatly distracted state, subjects became impartial. They thought their own transgressions were just as terrible as those of others."
The analysis: "[W]e are intuitively moral beings, but 'when we are given time to think about it, we construct arguments about why what we did wasn't that bad.'" [That explains the hypocrisy, in restrospect, but not the partiality, in the moment -- unless perhaps the partiality is habitual, an action formed and/or strengthened by being justified day by day with a succession of persuasive defensive arguments ...]
The lead researcher even went so far as to say that their research suggests that "ubiquitous Blackberries and iPods may make society more just."
09:00 Posted in community , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Solutions: Philosophy (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the seventh post on this topic; the first is here.
PART II: Solutions
CHAPTER 1 - PHILOSOPHY
Dueling! For duelers, others' opinions were the only factor in forming their sense of self. If others judged a dueler effeminate, foolish, a coward, a failure, dishonorable, he could not remain acceptable in his own eyes. He would sooner die or kill than let an unfavourable assessment go unanswered.
We may not duel but we may have extreme vulnerability to the disdain of others.
Socrates, on the being insulted in the marketplace, was asked, "Don't you worry about being called names?" He replied, "Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?" <-- misanthropy as a response
Socrates and others refute the suggestion that what others think of us must determine what we think of ourselves.
[Socrates' response in this anecdote, though, seems like a reaction to feeling keenly the sting of the other's barb; he may not 'believe' the other's view of him, but he also has to create some kind of defense against it, indicating to me that it matters more than he wants it to, that it infiltrates his psyche at least a bit. Maybe not, though.]
06:25 Posted in books and reading , community , girardian anthropology , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
07 July 2008
Handy Dandy Girard Synopsis
I find this a useful encapsulation of some of Rene Girard's primary ideas, as well as an interesting analysis and extrapolation of those ideas in the field of psychology.
He expresses well, I think, how desire works:
"The relationship of imitation (often mutual) between the desiring person and the mediator of their desire is deeply important. Objects of desire are largely interchangeable, but the bond between the individual and the mediator of his or her desire is far stronger than this. This relationship of imitation can be manifested in a deep attraction between the top mimetic partners, an attraction that can transform into antagonism with incredible ease. Both the attraction and the antagonism find a common source in the imitative relationship that exists between the two partners. In such a mimetic relationship the one who desires wants to be like the model of his or her desire in all things, to occupy their position." ...
"For instance, two friends desire the same woman and become each other’s rival. For Girard, the most important relationship in this classic love triangle is the relationship between the two friends. In such a relationship the woman may well be interchangeable with almost any other woman. What makes her significant is not what she is in herself, but what she is as surrounded by the aura of the other’s desire. She is desirable because she is desired by the other." ...
"Mimetic desire can explain why we often chose as models of desire people who are indifferent to us or despise us (unsmiling models create the aura of desirability that goes with top brand products). Their indifference is seen to be indicative of a self-sufficiency that we lack. We desire to be self-sufficient like them and so we desire the objects that they desire."
10:25 Posted in girardian anthropology , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
25 June 2008
Celebrity
I'm moving towards writing about status, from a Girardian perspective, some time soon. Meanwhile, this post of Canadian pastor/not-pastor Scott Williams, is on the same topic; specifically, it's about mega-churches and the underplayed celebrity of some evanglical Christian leaders labelled as 'ordinary radicals.' It's about jealousy, envy, hero-worship, desire, man's search for meaning and purpose, and most of all, status anxiety.
Here are the phrases and sentences that stand out for me:
** "I think I was also experiencing a low-burn jealousy that was to last for many years."
This is the kind of jealousy we don't admit to others except in jest, clouded in ambiguity and mixed signals, and we may not even be conscious of feeling it. It's the kind where we say, "It's great that he's doing so well" and then give reasons why we don't want that exact situation or position, explain why what we have is good enough, explore what it is -- about us, about those around us, our circumstances, the system, nature and God -- that keeps us from being and getting what we envy.
** "The emerging church movement wants to let you know that it is made up of little people, regular fallible leaders and friends. We want to be known as ordinary radicals -- regular people who do extraordinary things.
"Some time ago I happened upon the Ordinary Radicals website, a website featuring some of the most highly regarded thinkers in the North American church." Scott lists about 15 names of so-called ordinary radicals (I've heard of 3 of them), then says,
"When I read a list like that ... I am frustrated by the absolute 'un-ordinary-ness' of the people it is about. Several of the people on the list are international superstars in the religious world, have been on The Colbert Report and any number of high profile talk shows and television appearances. ... Though I genuinely laud the intentions for such projects it is simply symptomatic of the problem in North American faith and culture. We cannot seem to get beyond the love affair we have with celebrity culture. Even in a climate of anti-heroes we are easily infatuated with the cult of personality."
My thought is that this is the same motivation we have for watching reality TV shows -- they too are 'ordinary people' we can easily identify with, and yet they're doing something extraordinary (they're on national TV, for one), so we can also model ourselves after them, look to them as ideals and the embodiment of our manifold desires (i.e., one desire: to be valued for who we are).
11:15 Posted in girardian anthropology , other people said it , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
23 June 2008
How To Get What We Lack
Love this meditation, "Starbucks Log: To the pretty but stern lady in line," by Stephen Berg at Grow Mercy today. I've re-formatted it to poem form and added some commas for ease of reading and to open it to the slower, shuddering, reverberating voice of poetry.
The existential lack you wake up with is real enough.
The thing you fill it with is not.
The thing, whether object or being, has no substance.
You look and see and desire and look to another to know
what it is you should desire
and it is all helium.
Up it goes, no hanging on or retrieval.
But you tell yourself the romantic lie that, in fact, you did hang on,
and that it is now what is filling you and giving you your bit of buoyancy.
And without knowing what you're doing,
you add to the lie
by convincing yourself that if only you could acquire
a bit more of whatever that was,
you would finally satisfy that deficiency
and come into yourself discovering your trueness.
And without knowing you're doing it,
you cast about to see who it is that is leading the fulfilled life,
and you seize upon your neighbour three doors down.
Your neighbour two doors down you know well enough to conclude he has his own problems.
In fact, one time you caught him giving you the envy-eye,
so you know his environ is a dead end.
But she, of the next-door-to-the-two-doors-down, looks altogether put together.
She had seemed average enough but you caught something else,
something more the day you passed her on the sidewalk outside your office.
What was it, you wonder?
You catch yourself looking for an answer
but not really looking
and not conscious that you're looking,
yet one morning at 3:30 AM you wake up and wonder what kind of salad she eats.
What's her breakfast?
She might as well have her own line of clothes, fragrance, hair products,
so well is she pieced and plaited!
Where did she find her poise, you wonder?
What's her regime? Her program? Her magazines?
Yes, obviously, she lacks the lack you wake up with.
Can't be. Can it? It is!
Has her own line of clothes? Silly! Go back to sleep!
You press all this down far under the threshold of awareness from where it came
and you get on with your day.
Except without knowing it
you allow the play of the romantic lie
and you make little raids on the inarticulate something that tells you of her preeminence.
And now you move beyond her surface
to the substance of things
and consider her friends, her intimacies --
yes, of course hers are the right friends and intimacies and soulish powers
and here lies her secret.
But just how did she acquire them?
No, that's the wrong question…she has them…how do you get them?
Now we're getting someplace.
And then the conclusion comes naturally enough,
almost divine in its revelatory shimmer
with you self-possessed
and in control of your innocent desires,
not trying to evince a solution in any way,
and now you know that in order to be yourself
it's her being you must possess.
And so in every way you must kill her off.
Your existential completeness is just that close.
Three doors down.
This is your awakening that you remain unaware of.
11:11 Posted in girardian anthropology , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
31 May 2008
What I'm Reading Online: We All Need -- or Don't Need -- to Improve!
>> at Zen Habits, 12 Practical Steps for Learning to Go With the Flow. A simple list. I like the quotes, especially this one: 'Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.' - Chuang Tzu. I wonder whether the idea of accepting whatever I'm doing is consistent with Christianity, with prayers of confession, etc.
>> from Life 2.0, Follow Your Bliss. The central idea, similar to the quote above, is 'no need for self improvement.'
"The central premise behind all the self improvement stuff (although often unseen as it can be oh so subtle) is that there is something wrong with us, something flawed that needs to be improved, something we need to do in order to be happy, healthy, successful and fulfilled. It is this unexamined assumption, that we can be improved and therefore must be less than perfect, that keeps us in chains ... that reinforces this illusion of brokenness, powerlessness and being a victim-of-circumstances-beyond-our-control, which we see reflected back to us in the world we perceive around us."
Instead, this weblog counsels "an alternative to self-improvement, a spiritual path or another kind of seeking.... Vow to do what makes you happy right now and see where that takes you." Ah, but "anything we think we want, we have been conditioned to want," so it's not as easy as it might seem to do what makes us happy.
What I can't help thinking is that this plan to "be happy" is self-improvement by another name, with its implication that we're not happy enough already, and that we need to do something about this lack.
>> "Jesus Made Me Puke" by Matt Tabbi in Rolling Stone, about a 3-day "Encounter Weekend" retreat with John Hagee's Cornerstone Church:
"The program revolved around a theory that [pastor Philip] Fortenberry quickly introduced us to called 'the wound.' The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.
"In the context of the wound theory, Fortenberry's tale suddenly made more sense. Being taken on that eighteen-hole golf trip with the barmaid, and watching his family ditched by Dad, had been his wound. It was a wound, Fortenberry explained, because his father's abandonment had crushed his 'normal.'
"'And I was wounded,' he whispered dramatically. 'My dad had ruined my normal!'
"The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing what it was to have a crushed normal."
>> at Marginal Revolution, How To Choose An Apartment. How much does the actual living space matter, and how much does the location matter? Do we under- or over-invest in one or the other? Interesting anaylsis via comments. I now live in a house I don't really like, in a location I love. Before this, I lived in a house (including extensive grounds) that I loved in a location I didn't like. I still don't know which is better.
>> provacateur PJ O'Rourke's "Fairness, Idealism and Other Atrocities," commencement advice. His advice: make money, don't be an idealist (they're bullies), get politically uninvolved (politics is anathema to truth), forget about fairness, be a religious extremist (that is, realise that "using politics to create fairness is a sin").
About fairness:
"Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I've got a 10-year-old at home. She's always saying, 'That's not fair.' When she says this, I say, 'Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That's not fair. You were born in America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you.'"
>> 25 Things All Women Should Learn to Do Already by the women at Jezebel. Ranges from manual and practical skills like rapid vegetable chopping, masturbation, financial investing, and assembling furniture, to the more abstract realm of truth-telling, and social skills like withholding information, getting angry without being passive-aggressive, and not taking things personally. And of course, there are comments.
>> "Total Recall … Or At Least the Gist" at Miller-McCune, on the differences between gist and verbatim memory. What interests me here is the hypothesis called 'fuzzy trace theory,' which "explains how we can 'remember' things that never really happened:"
"When an event occurs, verbatim memory records an accurate representation. But even as it is doing so, gist memory begins processing the information and determining how it fits into our existing storehouse of knowledge. Verbatim memories generally die away within a day or two, leaving only the gist memory, which records the event as we interpreted it. Under certain circumstances, this can produce a phenomenon Reyna and her colleagues refer to as 'phantom recollection.' She calls this 'a powerful form of false alarm' in which gist memory -- designed to look for patterns and fill in perceived gaps -- creates a vivid but illusory image in our mind." ...
"Gist memory allows us to make snap decisions. But life does not always follow familiar patterns, and harm can result when we discard evidence that doesn't fit our assumptions."
They note that this 'misremembering' is a very common, ordinary occurence.
>> "The Candidate, the Preacher and the Unconscious Mind" by Shankar Vedantam in the WaPo. Central idea: We are biased against people who are in proximity to people we are already biased against. Second idea: We believe that people "from other ethnic, cultural and political groups are quite similar to one another, whereas they know that people from [our] own groups are quite varied."
The study he cites is fascinating:
Volunteers in a research experiment see an applicant sitting in a waiting room next to an overweight person, while others see the applicant sitting next to someone of average weight. ... "A variety of experiments have shown that overweight people suffer from discrimination; what [researcher Michelle] Hebl wanted to find out was whether strangers in the vicinity of overweight people would share in such approbation.
"Remarkably, Hebl found that volunteers rated job applicants more negatively when they had been seen seated next to an overweight person than when they were seen seated next to an average weight person. The volunteers had no idea that they were showing not only a prejudice against fat people but also a bias against people who were merely in proximity to overweight people."The experiment tells us something about the Obama-Wright controversy. The presidential candidate may have made it clear that the minister does not speak for him, but every time Wright's words are replayed on talk radio and cable TV, they automatically retrieve mental associations in many voters' minds with Obama. Hebl similarly found her volunteers unconsciously made associations even after being explicitly told there was no connection between the job applicants in the waiting room."
Similarly, "men and women seen in the company of beautiful partners are perceived as being more attractive than when they are seen in plainer company." But -- "there is some evidence our minds are especially attuned to negative associations."
>> "The Gospel of Consumption And the better future we left behind" by Jeffrey Kaplan in Orion. The article, with a focused accounting of Kellogg company work-hour policy over the years, is primarily a vision of Americans working and spending less while living comfortably.
"Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but 'higher productivity' -- and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce. ...
"By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. In other words, if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produ€ced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day -- or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level.
"But we cannot do it as individuals." The marketplace doesn't offer "a choice to work less and consume less. The reason is simple: that choice is at odds with the foundations of the marketplace itself -- at least as it is currently constructed. The men and women who masterminded the creation of the consumerist society understood that theirs was a political undertaking, and it will take a powerful political movement to change course today."
In a sort of rebuttal to PJ O'Rourke's suggestion (above) that democracy might mean having our clothing choices, e.g., determined by the majority (of shoppers, i.e., teen girls), Kaplan notes that Edward Bernays, "one of the founders of the field of public relations and a principal architect of the American Way," decreed that "the choices available in the polling booth are akin to those at the department store; both should consist of a limited set of offerings that are carefully determined by what Bernays called an 'invisible government' of public-relations experts and advertisers working on behalf of business leaders. Bernays claimed that in a 'democratic society' we are and should be 'governed, our minds ... molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.'"
>> "Engines of Emotional Pollution" (continues here) by Steven Stosny, Ph.D., in Psychology Today, posits four mechanisms that "govern most human interactions:" contagion, attunement, negative bias, and reactivity.
Contagion for Stosny is "what makes you feel what the rest of the group feels."
Attunement is a type of contagion, or a response to it; it's when we match "the intensity and tone of [our] emotions with those of someone else." It's honouring the boundaries of social convention. Interestingly, "[a]lthough our unconscious sensitivity to others is almost always active when we're not alone, it is not always accurate, i.e., we sometimes misconstrue what other people are feeling. However, we are far more accurate in sensing what others feel than in knowing what they think. This disproportionate accuracy between sensing another's feelings and judging their thinking leads to most of our misunderstandings of one another." We're pretty accurate in knowing another person's feelings but in trying to account for what's behind them, we make wrong assumptions.
Negative bias is related to attunement: Our 'negative' emotions influence us more than our positive ones, and we 'tune in' to negative emotions more than we do to positive ones: "So if you come home from work in a fairly good mood and find that your spouse is brooding or upset, attunement will bring him or her up a little and you down a lot. To keep from being 'brought down' by the other's negative mood, many couples attempt to dull their sensitivity to the other's emotional world."
Reactivity: is "learned resistance to the unconscious pull of contagion and attunement." It can be obvious -- 'I'm not putting up with your attitude!' or passive, ignoring another's bad mood.
From a Girardian perspective, I found this paragraph, which speaks of interdividualism (as opposed to individualism) without naming it, enlightening:
"The aspect of reactivity that makes it difficult to see, let alone change, is its illusion of free will and ego independence, even 'authenticity.' You think that you are acting of your own volition and in your best interest, when you are merely reacting to someone else. We've all uttered (or at least thought) the most ironic of all statements, 'You're not going to bring me down!' As long as you're in this reactive mode, you are down -- reacting to negativity with negativity."
12:05 Posted in books and reading , community , consumption , finance and business , girardian anthropology , householding , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , silliness and humour , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
26 May 2008
Nuala O'Faolain RIP (1940 - 2008)
Have you heard about Irish writer Nuala O'Faolain's response to her terminal diagnosis? I'm very attracted to the way she chose to live her last months, to her grief and depression as she says goodbye to what she finds meaningful and beautiful, and to her honesty as she faces the end of her time on earth.
The Guardian has the story and obituary; below are some excerpts from an interview with her at independent.ie in mid-April. She died on 9 May, about two-and-a-half months after her diagnosis, at age 68:
"I was just reading about some best-selling man who says 'Live your dream to the end' and so on and I don't despise anyone who does, but I don't see it that way. Even if I gained time through the chemotherapy it isn't time I want. Because as soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life. ...
"It amazed me, Marian, how quickly life turned black, immediately almost.
"For example, I lived somewhere beautiful, but it means nothing to me anymore -- the beauty. For example, twice in my life I have read the whole of Proust. I know it sounds pretentious, but it's not a bit. It's like a huge soap opera. But I tried again the week before last and it was gone, all the magic was gone from it.
"And I'm not nice or anything -- I'm not getting nicer. I'm sour and difficult you know. I don't know how my friends and family are putting up with me, but they are, heroically. And that is one of the things you learn."
"You see, the cancer is a very ingenious enemy and when you ask somebody how will I actually die? How do you actually die of cancer ?... I don't get an answer because It could be anything.
"It can move from one organ to the other, it can do this that or the other. It's already in my liver, for example. So I don't know how it's going to be. And that overshadows everything."
She says that she doesn't believe in an afterlife, or an individual creator, and goes on:
"Let poor human beings believe what they want, but to me its meaningless. ... And yet I want to mention one thing that you might play at the end, particularly for dying people, ... a song I heard a few years ago 'Thois I Lar an Glanna' -- a kind of modern song sung by Albert Fry and other Donegal singers. And the last two lines are two things, asking God up there in the heavens, even though you don't believe in him, to send you back even though you know it can't happen. Those two things sum up where I am now. (Crying)"
"I am sick, but I am trying to say goodbye. So much has happened and it seems such a waste of creation that with each death all that knowledge dies. [and all that experience ... ]
"I think there's a wonderful rule of life that means that we do not consider our own mortality. I know we seem to, and remember, 'man thou art but dust', but I don't believe we do. I believe there is an absolute difference between knowing that you are likely to die, let's say within the next year, and not knowing when you are going to die -- an absolute difference."
The interviewer asks: "One of the things that you wrote about and wrote about is that what you thought mattered in life was passion?" to which O'Faolain responds:"That seems a bit silly now. What matters now in life is health and reflectiveness. I just shot around. I would like it if I had been a better thinker.
MF: What about the passion?
NO'F: The passion can go and take a running jump at itself, that's what it can take.
MF: And love?
NO'F: Well, love's different, but I always [get the] two mixed up anyway."
"I know everyone says the hair matters, but that is not true. You can put a little cap on or something for the hair. That is irrelevant compared with having to leave the world behind."
05:50 Posted in books and reading , death , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
25 May 2008
Religion and Polarity
Tim Townsend's "Love Thy Neighbor: The religion beat in an age of intolerance" in the May/June 2008 issue of Columbia Journalism Review, is worth the read, in light of the Jeremiah Wright drama and the fundamentalist Mormon news of late here in the U.S., and the ongoing and manifold religious conflicts (and power conflicts cloaked in religion) all around the world.
Townsend is a reporter who has covered religion at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for the last four years. The gist of this essay is that religion is divisive and religious folk -- Jesus, too! -- are polarising. (The Matthew passage he quotes at the start of the essay doesn't convince me, but I agree generally with Townsend that a prophetic message can be polarising, and that Jesus's harsh language at times is divisive. My view is that Jesus disrupts the 'peace' we cling to, the very peace Jesus threatens verbally in the Matthew passage, in order to displace that temporary, violent sort of peace with a shot-through-with-life peace ...)
Townsend suggests that this polarity is nothing new in America, citing Puritan John Winthrop's landing-in-America sermon outlining "a political system whose top priority would be ... 'the duty of suppressing heresy, of subduing or somehow getting rid of dissenters.'" Townsend doesn't state the obvious, that suppressing heresy and marginalising dissenters had been the modus operandi of many in power, or seeking power, long before this.
Later, he speaks of the current chasm in the Episcopal church, which he says isn't about "sex, or even theology, but about power, and who gets to make the decisions that will tie the hands of everyone else." He quotes Cathleen Falsani, a religion columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times: "'Heat is good for a story, and religion is consistently good for that. ... Religion is polarizing. Maybe that's not the way it's intended to be, but it is.'"
I think adherence to religion both is and isn't intended to be polarising; it's intended to bring cohesion among some by excluding, marginalising, demonising, and polarising others, and it's very effective. Townsend quotes Neela Banerjee, religion beat reporter for The New York Times, who, speaking of the 'culture wars' between 'secularists' and 'the Christian right,' says that "'each sees the other as a profoundly dangerous influence on society.'" Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service, agrees: "All parties, he says, feel their worldview is under attack." Look at almost any conflict, geopolitical or interpersonal, and you'll see the same mechanism, the same justification: the other is a danger, a threat, to what's good, to what's right.
Quickly, Townsend himself, when in his reporting he sought to respect all beliefs, became seen as the dangerous other and became the target of accusations: "Besides being called ignorant, arrogant, balding, stupid, rude, fat (my new nickname was Burger Boy), lazy, and incompetent, I was depicted as a Satanic baby. My mother was insulted. I was accused of lying about my academic degrees, having a comb-over, being a paid agent of the Saudi government, and acquiring 'numerous social diseases.' I was, apparently, a plagiarist and a terrorist. Someone did a search to see if I was a pedophile." And not only was he accused, his life was threatened.
I think, from a Girardian perspective, one could say that it's never the other who is the danger; the danger -- the real obstacle to love and to life lived fully -- is the perception that it's the other who threatens us and our worldview. (For more, read an excerpt from René Girard's I See Satan Fall Like Lightning at Paul Nuechterlein's Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary).
10:45 Posted in community , girardian anthropology , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
21 May 2008
Mob Violence - This Just In
Reported today at CNN: "Mob burns to death 11 'witches, wizards'" in Nairobi, Kenya:
"Officials say a mob has burned to death 11 people suspected of being witches and wizards in western Kenya. Deputy police spokesman Charles Owino says the mob hunted down the 8 women and 3 men in two villages in the western Kenya district of Kisii Central. Owino says most of the victims were between 70 years old and 90 years old. Only one of the victims was 40 years old. Senior administrator Njoroge Ndirangu says ... 'These people identified who is to be killed by accusing their victims of bewitching their sons and daughters.'"
A BBC report on the attacks adds:
"The mob dragged them out of their houses and burned them individually and then set their homes alight, our correspondent says.
"Residents have been ambivalent about condemning the attacks because belief in witchcraft is widespread in the area...."
The International Herald Tribune put the size of the mob at "300 young men" and said that in some cases the victims' throats were slit or they were clubbed to death before being burned.
One police officer, Mwaura Njoroge, questioned how the young men could prove someone was a wizard and suggested that "'It is likely that the people who committed these killings had personal vendettas against their victims.'"
Added 22 May: In depth article on the issue of witch-hunting in Malawi, from the Women's Internatonal Perspective: "Mob Justice in Malawi: Accused of Witchcraft, the Elderly Are Rarely Protected by the Law"
16:40 Posted in community , crime , death , girardian anthropology , politics, government and law , theology, spirituality, philosophy , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
15 May 2008
Discovery of What Is
With the comment interchange about paths and truth in my mind, and a sermon from worship recently also fresh, I came upon a chapter titled "Creation in Christ" in James Alison's On Being Liked that I think is useful in considering how we think about everything, and specifically in the context of this conversation about Truth, Reality, God, the "something" that Mike posits in his comments.
It's a chapter that challenges the usual way of thinking about "the great panorama of Christian salvation," which is linear and logical: first creation, then fall, then salvation, then heaven. Alison rearranges it all, coming from a fundamental insight that we can explain creation only from the vantage point of salvation. We're not external viewers. We see everything only from where we are now. As Alison says, "our access to creation is present, as is our access to the past. ... The only access we have to the past is the access for which our present understanding equips us." Obvious, yes, and easily unacknowledged.
He also posits that "the answer to the question 'Where do we come from?' is narrated from within the schemes of power and social order which are in force. And the answer tends to maintain and shore up this order. ... [T]he description of the origins comes from an understanding of 'social' salvation which was already in evidence within the group in question."
In other words, creation stories come from a group that feels successfully ordered and constituted, and the stories are used to explain how it all happened in a way that necessarily supports the current standing. "The description of what things 'are' is strictly dependent on what they now 'ought' to be. ... [T]he perception of God is tied to the social world." Alison's claim (and Girard's) is that the Jewish scriptures divert from the usual creation stories in important ways (read the book for more on that).
Alison's major argument in the chapter is that by detoxifying death, Jesus opens us all to creation as it is and to the possibility of participating in bringing creation into being, now, every day:
"Part of the process of the discovery of creation is the discovery of an astonishing freedom with respect to what is, since what is seen and perceived, and what is are different things. When we see and perceive, we do so still partially from within a world formed by our systems of order, of security, of identity, guaranteed in the last resort by death. And what is is not strictly attainable from within a mentality formed in this way."
(These sentences seem to me to go to the heart of both the problem with strict adherence or allegiance to a path (to a point where its protection requires a defense of what is perceived as 'the sacred') and also the desirability of emptying the mind of knowledge -- necessarily beholden to perception, to interpretation -- as a way towards an experience of what is.)
Alison goes on to say that "to the degree to which we cease to have our mind and heart formed by death, we cease having our mind formed by the perception that the social 'other'" is hostile or ambivalent, and we can discover that 'the other' is "benevolent, limpid, without ambivalence and without ambiguity. That is to say, the relationship between God and everything that is, is gratuitous and trustworthy. And if it is to be trusted, then we need not fear discovering the truth about what is, however little convenient that might seem in its social repercussions." His major point here is that what we discover is "something that is present, and able to be lived in the here and now." We can put into practice ourselves "the same overcoming of our culture shot through with death, trusting in a generosity that does not know death, and which will take care of us."
The tricky part of all this is that Alison's discovery about God or reality or what-have-you -- anything -- is discovered from the vantage point of where he is now. And my discovery, and yours.
(I'm on the road this week and don't have time to parse this further online but may return to it later.)
09:01 Posted in neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
07 May 2008
Deeper Voices
I read Barbara Bash's True Nature: An Illustrated Journal of Four Seasons in Solitude (2004) today while sitting in the sun with the dog. It's a simple, lavishly watercolour-illustrated journal of a retreat in the woods, taken during seven days in Summer, seven in Spring, seven in Fall, and ending with seven days in Winter. She's a Buddhist (Chögyam Trungpa is her meditation teacher) who is struggling with fatigue, fear of the dark, a need to do, a certain restlessness, loneliness, self-doubt.
This first journal entry reminds me of the 'grief' I wrote about yesterday:
"My insides are heavy. There are voices tisking and shuddering at such laziness, but I am listening to deeper voices."
That's how I feel. I can hear the voices that tisk and shudder, and, I can hear voices from a deeper place, and I am listening to them.
In Winter, she says something that seemed to me to reframe the dilemma a friend expressed earlier in the day:
"Here in this cabin for six days these demons of pressure and critique can be -- what? Loved? Banished? Teased? Ignored? Put down for a nap? ... It has been a day of doubt. The wind of my mind blew me around. Here's the dilemma -- to articulate the confusion, describe it, know it -- or to label it 'thinking,' let it go and return to the breath. I walk both paths."
It seems it's often a question of whether to engage with the confusion -- to work with the pain, resentment, desire for connection, longing for affinity, fear of disappointment, hope, lack of trust -- or to recognise that those feelings, opinions, beliefs, reactions, and thoughts are just 'thinking' -- they're transitory, they're a fantasy our mind weaves, they can be released. Yes. We do both.
20:20 Posted in theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Truth is a Pathless Land
Thinking about Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1996) today after coming across a short quote by him:
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
I don't know that much about him -- his writings are voluminous and some are still being discovered, edited and published. He was Indian, traveled extensively, was involved for a while with the Theosophical Society but broke from them around 1922, during which he experienced several mystical encounters (which he termed "the process") in which he felt a mystical union and immense peace: "Love in all its glory has intoxicated my heart; my heart can never be closed. I have drunk at the fountain of Joy and eternal Beauty. I am God-intoxicated."
By 1929, he had renounced any path as a way to Truth:
"You may remember the story of how the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, 'What did that man pick up?' 'He picked up a piece of the truth,' said the devil. 'That is a very bad business for you, then,' said his friend. 'Oh, not at all,' the devil replied, 'I am going to help him organize it.'
"I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path." (in Krishamurti: The Years of Awakening, 1975, by Mary Lutyens)
Schools that he and his followers (though he said he didn't want followers) founded in India, England and the U.S. emphasise a holistic vision, concern for humans and the environment, and a religious spirit. He was awarded the United Nations Peace Medal in 1984. Of course, he's on YouTube (I haven't watched these yet.)
Krishnamurti's thoughts on meditation speak to me:
"Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life -- perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority. When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy -- if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation. ...
"Meditation is the emptying of the mind of the known. It cannot be done by thought or by the hidden prompting of thought, nor by desire in the form of prayer, nor through the self-effacing hypnotism of words, images, hopes, and vanities. All these have to come to an end, easily, without effort and choice, in the flame of awareness."
09:49 Posted in other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
06 May 2008
What I Did and Didn't Do
There's a line in a song I like that goes "I've grown so tired of grieving for what I did and what I did not do." It's been running through my head a lot lately and it feels like grief just saying it.
In some churches, there's a prayer asking for forgiveness for sins of omission and sins of commission: "in your compassion forgive us our sins, known and unknown, things done and left undone." Is to ask forgiveness the same as to grieve? Is there a time factor at work, so that perhaps grieving comes first, then asking for forgiveness, and then absence of grief as I feel absolved; or perhaps grief, a recognition of wrong or imbalance, is sometimes simultaneous with confession?; and likewise, if I don't feel my grief, and/or don't ask forgiveness, will I continue to grieve as an ongoing process, perhaps lodged in my body as much as my heart or mind?
I'm asking because I was reading the other day that some people think resentment -- holding onto wrongs, attaching to them, perhaps even nursing them -- causes cancer (Louise Hay for one, here for another; just google 'cancer' and 'resentment' and you'll see). I don't think I'd ever say that emotion or even attachment to emotion causes physical cancer, but I think that getting stuck emotionally probably contributes in some way to an overall lack of embodied well-being.
But then I thought that maybe grief, and in particular grief about one's own actions -- or perhaps it has more the quality of regret, shame, disappointment, remorse -- might affect well-being as strongly as resentment. (And maybe they're related, concurrent.)
Even if I don't go over and over in my mind or heart some wrong I feel I've done, some good I feel I'm not doing, there is still a sense for me sometimes that I'm always being called to account for the moral right and wrong that I've done, and, even more, the right and wrong that I continue to do. How much of that underlying sense comes from the American/Puritan emphasis on individual responsibility, (Amercan) Christian teaching, the 'punishment' tendency of the current culture, my own genetic predisposition and upbringing, who knows. I know I'm not alone because I hear a lot of other people voice the same thing, though more often in talking about a sense of personal duty as necessary, meaningful, and fulfilling than in talking about how wearisome such a sense of duty feels.
The line from the song captures so well how it feels to me: the energy-drain, the resentment, the grief I feel about feeling that I have to be always grieving my imperfect actions. It's oppressive, heavy, enervating.
I find some solace, strangely, in the prayer of confession, even as it directs my attention yet again to what I'm doing wrong. And I find solace in James Alison's discussion of forgiveness. He calls it, in On Being Liked, "a process of undergoing 'being undone' from various traps, dead ends and ensnarlments," and thus being able to participate in being (re)created. That's how Buddhist meditation feels to me, too, a way of 'being undone' from ensnarement.
Alison says that faith is not about morality or about what we do: "It's a receiving something. It's someone having done something for us." It's being able to relax in the regard of someone coming towards us, someone who likes us, someone always offering us friendship.
I know the partyline on confession is that it can keep us from holding on to past sins of omission or commission, that it offers relief from the grief, but I'm after something else here. There's something in the whole standard of good and bad, in the need to measure oneself against that standard, that seems counter to who I hope and even believe God is. (And as I write that, a flood of Bible passages come to mind to counter my hope. I have another hope, thanks to Girardians, that we've read a lot of that stuff inaccurately over these many years.)
I might phrase my 'belief' as "All have fallen short, and all are falling short, so why measure? Does it matter exactly how far short I am? And striving to improve my position vis a vis that standard by doing what I think are good acts -- is there a point to that? Is faith really about morality? What if God just wants to give me something, just wants me to receive it lightly, not to grasp it but to let it undo me, and in being undone, to live life more fully, with all the passion, participation, presence, and risk that implies?"
Even that, curse my heritage, leaves me with a standard against which to measure myself, which is, to what extent is what I'm doing life-focused, to what extent death-focused? Am I acting in the flow or not? "Am I alive enough?" becomes just another way of asking myself "Am I good enough?"
Somehow, it's the measuring that prompts the grief, and the weariness, and the dissonance, and yet everywhere around us, including in religious teachings and practice, there's the encouragement and often the obligation to measure. I think there's another way, another way to be alive without the measuring. In fact, I think the only way to be alive is sans measurement. I know it for sure when I am so involved, so 'part of,' that the present enlarges and I have no sense of time passing. That is the 'flow' that so many speak of (I first read about it in Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's book about it), where measuring falls away, is undone, and something that can compassionately accommodate both "what I did" and "what I did not do" is created, discovered, revealed.
13:45 Posted in