Fana

The friendship with the Sheikh is friendship with a form, and the form may disappear. A person may say, ‘I had a father, but now he is no more.’ In fact, the impression of the father whom he has idealized remains in his mind. The devotion to Rasul is like this; his name and qualities remain though the earthly form is no more on earth. Rasul is the personification of the light of guidance, which a mureed, according to his evolution, idealizes. Whenever the devotee remembers him, on the earth, in the air, at the bottom of the sea, he is with him. Devotion to Rasul is a stage that cannot be omitted in the attainment of divine love. This stage is called Fana-fi-Rasul. –Inayat Khan, Love:  Human and Divine:  Divine Love.  Sufi Message Volumes, Sufi Order International.  This excerpt is from a private document PDF document owned by the writer of this blog.

            In the Sufi order in which I am a disciple, we take our teachings from a long line of illuminated teachers, called a Silsila.  It means, simply, chain, the chain of beings down which the teachings are passed down from on high.  This concept, obviously, appears in many spiritual traditions.  I have this teacher, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, and he gave me the teachings on behalf of his father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, quoted above.  I have a spiritual guide, too; in fact, I’ve had several, but one of them has been my guide for, maybe, 12 or so years.  I love him dearly; he has been a wonderful friend and teacher. 

            Oddly, he kind of deserted me recently, or at least, that’s how it feels.  Felt.  Well, maybe not so recently.  I haven’t heard from him in well over a year, and I have kind of stopped wondering about it.  I have been through the classic stages attendant upon loss:  grief, anger, acceptance, and back again.  I suppose, at this point, I am simply waiting.  Meantime, I have been trying to figure out what to do with myself now that I no longer have a teacher, at least an earthly one.  There has been a good deal of loss in my life of recent years, and I suppose this is a stage most people come to at my age. But this is more than that.

            Sufis of most of the various orders take the them of fana for concentration.  Literally, the word means annihilation, but it is easy to misunderstand the concept if we think in terms of destruction or annihilation.  Actually, fana, an Arabic word, means losing one’s concept of oneself and the world in the reality of the being of the teacher, not in terms of the personality, but the realization, and the divine qualities one experiences in that being.  The classical stages of fana are fana-fi-Sheikh, fana-fi-Rasul, and  fana-fi-Allah.  One moves through losing one’s self-centered identity in the being of the teacher, in the Rasul, and finally, in God alone.  The term Rasul can be translated somewhat as Messiah, the messenger that appears at the time and place where that person is needed by a people who have lost their way.  It is a sort of lessening by degrees of one’s attachment to one’s more limited concept about being in the One Being, God before being.  Murshid (by whom I mean Hazrat (Saint) Inayat Khan, the founder of our order, a development of the Chishtia Order in India) points out that ultimately, one arrives at the state of Baqi-bi-Allah, annihilation in the Eternal Consciousness, God beyond becoming.

            So when I began asking myself what this ‘desertion’ of me by my teacher meant, and how I was now to guide myself, it occurred to me that I could turn to the concentration I have worked on more or less my entire spiritual life, an attunement to my Murshid, who died in 1927, at least insofar as we conceive of death on this planet.  My entire schooling as a Sufi initiate has been founded in this concept of fana, and it has many practical as well as spiritual purposes.  Murshid, the one I call Murshid (teacher), has been a reality to me for almost as long as I have been on this path, and over the years I have added to that attunement his successor. In case it seems obvious to some of you adepts who may be reading this, it has occurred to me that my own immediate guide and teacher is inviting me to realize that our relationship, as well, is far more real and meaningful in the silence than in all the phone calls, visits and emails we have exchanged over the years, even better than the wonderful friendship we have had.  And moreover, the process of fana leads one progressively up the ladder to God. 

            But I wasn’t ready.

            Until I was.  Am.  Sort of.  I have been through an increasingly difficult time in recent years.  My health has been deteriorating, there has been other loss, and I have, for many years, struggled to love a child who has many problems which seem to culminate in the one central one, which is her inability to receive love, let alone to return it.  There are clinical names for her problems, but I have tried to stay afloat and, at the same time, never lose my vision of her soul, which I know to be a pure and evolved one.  That hasn’t made it any easier, and our relationship has been a very, very draining one.  I will admit I have wanted to whine about the requirements being put on me:

The surrender to God is so hard that the disciple cries tears of blood.  –from the Hadith of Mohammad

But, other than my wonderful husband and second child, there doesn’t seem to have been many people around to listen to me whine, so that didn’t do any good.

            A very close spiritual friend of mine and I often talk about how there really aren’t any teachers any more.  There is a truth in this:  an earthly teacher will always prove fallible, and perhaps what we are meant to realize eventually is that we are to be our own teachers.  This idea has great heuristic value to me.  As well, I have learned that if I want realization, I have to give up all attachment to the pretty, comforting patriarchal images of God that most of us in this culture are raised on.  But what of this idea of fana?  It certainly seem to denote a relationship with an uneven power balance!  And if one does achieve something like it, what does this mean in terms of one’s own unique personhood, one’s divine purpose in this world, the one thing that makes all this worthwhile? 

            I think I got it today, or something like it.  In my present dilemma, I have gone through those stages I mentioned, and that has led me to a sincere attempt to rekindle my attunement to my Murshid, my Pir and my guide.  At the highest levels, of course, there is no difference between them, and between them and me; but one begins with images and qualities, and hopefully moves on to the reality.  What I have found is that, as I attune to the teacher(s), they begin to step in for me, to kind of take over the rudder so that I can rest a bit, and I experience their strength; their divine qualities, as I experience them, become available to me personally, and I feel supported.  It lets me feel as if I will be prevented from making any more stupid mistakes, if I continue to pay attention, and that I have, in fact, traded a pebble for a pearl, as the saying goes, by giving up my attachment to my own marvelous being and qualities and taking on the more experienced nature of the teacher(s).  There is experience beyond the practical, but I would have difficulty speaking of that, and that is why this blog has been called “Footprints.”

            It isn’t easy to do this.  It’s going to be even less easy to continue to do this, because it is a reality that has been available to me for at least 30 years, one that I have utilized more or less according to my own willingness, and there is a sense that I no longer have the right to treat these gifts cavalierly.  But life is the real teacher:  it has a way of bringing about fana, surrender in the reality of What Is.  I see that the fears of my ego-centered self, the one that says “but what about me?  Where will I go?”  if  I surrender, trades in an old model of thinking for a reality of power and creativity that is uniquely mine because of my surrender.  Not a bad trade, really. 

            A recurring theme in my dreams, all my life, has been that of climbing a ladder into the dark, starry sky.  In this culture, of course, there is always that dichotomy of up and down, good and bad, higher and lower, so it is logical that this should be a helpful archetype for me, if not the reality of my advancement toward the divine ideal.  Perhaps life is about climbing that ladder into the heavens, uniting both in the One Reality of whatever it is that one calls God.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, because the first heaven and the first earth had disappeared, and there is no longer any sea.  Revelations 21:1, New Standard American Bible.

 

 

 

 

Instant Karma

Don’t let any person bring you so low as to hate them.  –Booker T. Washington

 

I’m a little bit crabby about money just now:  we’re living pretty close to the bone during my healing process, and at our age, that can be a bit hard to take.  Money tends to be a big issue for me, anyway:  I tend to ascribe far more meaning to it than it ought to have, but we do indeed live in a society that encourages us to do that…and sometimes, LIFE just has to swoop down and teach me a good lesson.  

 

Last week, I ordered some Fair Trade, Organic coffee, the kind we’ve always purchased, at a good price, from an online business I’ve patronized for several years.  Now, somehow–and I continue to believe it’s not my fault–the business sent the coffee to an old address of ours, and when we called to find out what was going on, they basically refused to discuss the matter, and said it was our fault and they weren’t going to do one damned thing about it.  We went back and forth with them for several days, and disputed the charge on our Visa, etc., etc., and there was much rancor on both sides.  Clearly, the basis of all this was FEAR.  We feel rather guilty about most any treat we give ourselves (and I shouldn’t be drinking coffee anyway, darn it), and are budgeted so closely that we couldn’t afford to lose the cost of ten pounds of coffee.  We felt resentful that, having given so much of our money to this company, they were not interested in finding a reasonable solution to all this.  As for the company, I would imagine it was about fear for them, also, as they said several times that no matter what way this was resolved, they were going to have a loss.  Clearly, to them, not losing the money for ten pounds of coffee was desirable to losing the business of people who had ordered from them monthly since they started their business.

 

Anyway, we were fuming about this, having contacted the former residence and receiving no cooperation, and the whole thing was at a standstill.  On our way to have dinner with our children and our new and lovely grandchild, we were, as I say, fuming, when something most interesting happened:  there was a thumping on the roof of the car, and I looked back and out the side window, to see the case of our digital camera hanging from the closed window.  We quickly pulled over, and it was evident that the camera had been put on the top of the car while we packed a cooler at Costco, and left there.  To us, it was amazing that the camera was unharmed, and that we didn’t lose it altogether.

 

Then it struck us that there was a lesson in this:  we lost ten pounds of coffee, but we didn’t lose a very expensive, digital camera.  It’s all relative.  It’s all LIFE.  One would think I would have gotten this one down prior to this, but evidently not.  On the other hand, I can remember when I would have been absolutely hysterical over some such situation, when now I was, mostly, just quietly grumbling and grinding my teeth.  

 

But Mr. Washington, above, is right:  the thing that strikes most deeply here, is that if we let someone else make us hate them, we’re the loser.  Gandhi said that the only way we can win over our enemy is to love him more than we love ourselves.  I have a long way to go on this path of love.

Buddha in Glory

Center of all centers, core of cores,

almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet–

all this universe, to the furthest stars

all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

 

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;

your vast shell reaches into endless space,

and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.

Illuminated in your infinite peace,

 

a billion stars go spinning through the night,

blazing high above your head.

But in you is the presence that

will be, when all the stars are dead.   – Rainer Maria Rilke

Cabin Fever

I remember when we lived in Alaska, there were these certain points, mostly in the winter, when we would realize we hadn’t been anywhere for several months and were starting to feel a bit trapped. Now, in a state the size of Alaska, this might be hard to believe, but unless you were one of those people prepared for any temperature and any weather, owned a snow machine, liked to ski, snowshoe or otherwise navigate the wilderness (we were none of these, I regret to say), when the temperature reached a certain daily level and there was about four hours of actual daylight to play with, you kind of….went inside. At the beginning, it is a time of energy and creativity, as you realize no one can expect anything of you, nor can you expect anything of yourself other than the daily chores required to stay warm and fed. But it gets old. People in Alaska who have money flee to Hawaii and other tropical climes as soon as they can, and don’t come home until Alaska’s tender green Spring hits. We didn’t have much money, and in Alaska, a weekend “away” is pretty much going to the same place you’re in anyway. But we liked taking off for, say, Seward, to the Sea Life Museum, or to Talkeetna to enjoy the village the way it really is, sans tourists, i.e., “Northern Exposure.” These places were on the road system. People in Alaska like to talk, especially at this time of year, and so in a strange way, loneliness was not at all the same as it is here where we’re all on top of each other. People need each other up there. We’ve tried to convince ourselves otherwise, down here.

Cabin fever. It’s an almost physical sensation: you feel like you’d do anything to get the hell out of town and go somewhere else for awhile. You feel like you’re strangling. We did, anyway, all of us, parents, kid and dogs. Well, the dogs could always wander into the woods and start something with a moose or caribou, so they stayed pretty perky, but we got a little crazy.

I allowed it to convince me that I would not be able to stay with Alaska for the long haul, after a few years. I was wrong, because it was there that the truth of our essential loneliness is unavoidable and can’t be hidden.

I am in a similar state of cabin fever at the moment, this one caused by my health, and while I keep myself pretty well entertained and get some reasonable amount of work done, I still get a little crazy at times. But you know, it occurs to me that cabin fever is a state of the soul. Everything goes dormant. There’s a sense of something bubbling down below, right at the pit of the solar plexus, an occasional hiss as something pops out momentarily and hits the side of this vessel used for cooking soul soup… Sometimes it feels as if there’s going to be an explosion. Where the hell did I put that recipe?! I know I had it…

Well. Nothing to do but keep simmering.

On Angelic Corporeality

 

Live in rooms full of light

Avoid heavy food

Be moderate in the drinking of wine

Take massage, baths, exercise, and gymnastics

Fight insomnia with gentle rocking or the sound of running water

Change surroundings and take long journeys

Strictly avoid frightening ideas

Indulge in cheerful conversation and amusements

Listen to music. ~ Celsus

 

         I write here, from time to time, about my own healing journey.  I am resistant to this becoming one of those “I ate 300 carrots a week and lost 500 pounds and gained six points to my I.Q.” kind of things.  In fact, I hesitate to write at all, because I find it generally a fairly boring topic, and we’re all different in any event:  we have differing constitutions, we’re different sizes and shapes, we have differing perspectives, different strengths and different weaknesses.  Having said that, I cannot escape the perception that we are becoming an increasingly sick people.  Or so it seems:  I have no idea of the statistics on health and illness among, say, the ancient Celts, but I suppose it is because there are so many more of us and our health seems to be increasingly a function of Heidegger’s “they” and what “they” think we should eat and what we should take and how we should live.  Mainly, it seems, all this is to be accomplished in relation to “their” needs for money, for control, for power, and increasingly virulent narcissism embedded in a murky fear always lurking at the bottom of it. 

 

         And after all, what if we all got well?  How would the pharmaceutical companies continue to become rich and richer?  What if we started eating foods that nourish us, as compared to what most of us eat now?  Well, on that one, I can say with some certainty that at least our farmers would then survive!

 

         Which brings me to my latest homily (could someone help me onto this soapbox, please?)  I use that word ‘homily’ advisedly:  there will be a religious tone to this, although only in the sense that I am compelled to plumb the depths of just about any subject that catches my attention.  And boy, has health been catching mine these recent years!  In previous posts, I have mentioned that I am suffering from something that has elements of rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme Disease, erm….oh, yeah, and I’m fat, too.  Well, aren’t we all, these days.  Most of us, anyway, which brings us back to the diet the “they” push at us endlessly, all the while advising us to starve and providing drugs to keep us sick enough to continue to need them.  So we do, right?  Starve, that is.  How could we possibly get all the nutrients we need from the deadness we consume daily?

 

         So if this is of interest to you, you can scroll down to a post I wrote a few weeks ago, one about the fast I undertook, after reading some of the work of Dr. Joel Fuhrman, author of Eat to Live and much research on healing the body of everything from diabetes to heart disease to obesity to….well, the idea here, is an age-old one:  the body wants to and will heal itself if given the chance.  This, as might be seen, is why the pharmaceuticals and food industry put forth such monumental effort to make sure we stay sick and fat.  A perfect system, yes?

 

         Anyway, after a lifetime of fighting my tendency to obesity, sometimes winning, more often losing, but never entirely giving up…..  Well, then I really got sick.  So gradually, I have been trying to figure out how to drop out and give up.  I think I’m getting it.  First, I gave up by doing the fast which, although I’d done them before, somehow turned out to be just what was needed for me to go through not just a physical reorganization, but a cognitive and spiritual one, too.  Don’t as me why, I don’t know.  I think I was just ready.  Sick and tired of being sick and tired, as they say in AA.  After the fast, I moved immediately into Dr. Fuhrman’s recommended diet, which is an essentially vegan one, with heavy emphasis on the beans and greens and fruit.  This is where I began to take a giant leap in the “dropping out” part of my resolve, one I’ve been working on for several years now.   

 

         Now, the interesting thing about this is, well, you know all those ads you see everywhere:  “eat all you want and lose weight rapidly”?  Although I haven’t tried many of them, I have no doubt that they’re perpetrated by the fringes of above-discussed industries and useless.  But what Dr. Furhman says is “eat LOTS!!!  The more you eat, the more you’ll lose.”  Goddess bless you, Dr. Fuhrman.  Now I get to use food to heal me, not starve me.

 

         And guess what?  Damned if it doesn’t work.  Mind you, one has to eat what he says, but that’s a small problem, because his recommended foods are so “nutrient dense” that they are eminently satisfying anyway.  Here’s an example of what I eat every day:

 

For breakfast, a vast “smoothie,” made with 2-4 servings/pieces of fruit, flaxseed, soy milk, raw spinach (about half a pound), half an avocado, if I have one;

 

For lunch, a gargantuan salad made with greens, broccoli, carrots, whatever else is raw and needing to be made into something, about a cup of beans, tahini salad dressing;

 

For dinner, a large salad as above, cooked green vegetables, on some days a cup of brown rice or a sweet potato, mushrooms, tofu, beans…. you get the picture

 

And that’s it.  Truly.  I can’t lie to you, I still have my delicious cup of fair trade coffee every day, but that’s it.

 

         Does this sound like a lot of food?  To me, it does.  But that’s because I’ve been doing this for awhile, and I take Dr. F. at his word.  The thing is, it adds up to about 1,000 calories a day.  I smile to think of my mother trying to feed her chubby child on this number of calories and serve what “other” people eat.  It was not much food, I can tell you.  And thus began the ruination of my health and the lining of the pockets of said industries.

 

         I’ve lost about fifteen pounds and I lose about 1.5 pounds daily.  I feel content and inspired and energetic.  I might even be able to get well.  Dr. F. says if I don’t mess around with it, I will.  I’ll keep you posted. 

 

         Now, what is this all about, I ask myself?  And I am reminded of one of Inayat Khan’s little homilies, “Let the heavens be reflected in the earth, Lord, that the earth may turn into heaven.”  I don’t have any more idea what the meaning of life is than anyone, but when I look at my new granddaughter, I am reminded of what I knew with both my own children, and what I know whenever I see someone or something that is radiant with the light of the planes cosmic splendor through which the soul emerges on its way here, yet unsullied by the filth and lies of this very limited plane of sorrows:  I see where we come from, and I see that it’s possible to get back there while living here.  And because there does seem to be some needful emphasis on the corporeal as it expresses itself on this plane of…existence?…then perhaps it is in what is apparent, rather than what is innately known, that we must start this particular leg of that journey Home. 

 

         The soul has not come on earth to die the death of helplessness, nor continually to suffer pain and misery.  The purpose of the soul is that for which the whole of creation has been striving, and it is the fulfillment of that purpose which is called God-consciousness.  –Inayat Khan

 

         Perhaps when we realize, with more and surer consistency, that we are always beginning, we’ll begin to get it right. 

 

 

This Hall of Mirrors

            He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.   When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.  –Nietzsche

 

         I try to take the attitude that all experience is useful, and that, as Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan said, “we can learn from the worst fool, if we consider him a teacher.”  What other point would there be to this particular abyss?  Depending on my attitude, experience can be a useful, even spectacular, teacher, but I don’t always have the right attitude.  I still kick and scream a lot as I am carried to the cauldron of my own attachments and boiled alive in them.  As I grow older, it becomes more and more exhausting, because I find that I have to give up my own need to control my experience, in order to open to the reality that really teaches me. 

 

            I’ve been getting some great lessons, lately, in the art of projection:  you know, the idea that what we are not at peace with in ourselves we attribute to others, in order to reduce our anxiety about our own darkness.  Freud, Jung and others—the early depth psychologists—were big on this, and I agree.  I myself have made a lifelong study of projection, because I had a lot of darkness introduced into my soul fairly early on.  I notice that I’ve gone through a process of being able to notice it sooner as I mature, however, and sometimes even to laugh at myself when I see what I’m doing.  I do try to acknowledge my foolishness and take responsibility for it, but it’s pretty hard work, given the size of my ego.

 

            What is more difficult, however, has been coping with being the object of others’ projections.  I tend to be extremely impressionable (dammit!) and have always tended to soak up the feelings and thoughts of others.  I am even quite a creditable scapegoat, a quality I can attribute to growing up in a narcissistic, alcoholic family in which someone had to take the blame, and small children, determined to worship their parents, are very handy for this purpose.  But it gets old, and survival has meant identifying this tendency and doing my best to keep myself out of harm’s way.  But it still rears its ugly head from time to time.

 

            Two cases in point:  first is my new son-in-law.  Here is a young man who, according to his own account, grew up in a very difficult family, and he is only slowly, at his young age, finding his way to a healthy selfhood.  His chosen process, at the moment, is projecting all that he cannot accept in himself and his own family onto his new father-in-law and me.  His behavior is so blatant and immature that, in his case, it’s fairly easy to laugh at it and leave him to his own devices, but it does get wearying at times.  And I really don’t choose to be the object of his need for self-esteem, so I have taken myself out of his range, unwilling to be fired at constantly for a crime I didn’t commit.

 

            The other situation I am learning from at this moment is a more poignant one.  I had a friend, teacher and therapist many years ago, a fact which in itself shows why the relationship was difficult to navigate.  I was quite young at the time, still a “holocaust survivor” of the inferno of my painful childhood.  I’m sure I was carrying a major case of post-traumatic stress disorder, to say the least.  I was also, oddly, heavily into my own particular “spiritual trip” of the times, and all this combined to make me arrogant, needy, unkind, presumptious and judgmental, albeit occasionally inspiring.  I’m sure I must have had some good qualities, but looking back, I have to say that I must have been a real pain at times.  Because of all this, I must say that this man really, really saved me in many ways.  He was very formative of many of my attitudes, and he was a good friend, too.  I’d like to think I was, too.  Yet as we grew, we kind of grew apart, because we made different decisions as to how we wanted to comport ourselves in our lives.  If I had to express briefly my perception of our differing decisions, I would say that he decided that he’d had enough pain and angst and negativity in his life, and was going to create the “good life” for himself.  He’d paid his dues, and he’d had enough, and now he was going to run the show.  I gather, from him, that he is very happy today, and feels that he has made the right decision.  He is wealthy, and does what makes him happy.  Sounds good to me, but I went in a different direction because, I suppose, my more Buddhist leanings direct me to open to all of life, and life is suffering and joy both.  Wholeness, for me, is the embrace of all that comes my way, no resistance, but finding the still spot within, the vantage point from which I can be the observer but not the prisoner. 

 

            Oh, well, hard to express, and I don’t know whether this makes sense or not.  Perhaps it doesn’t matter, really, because what I’m trying to work with, here, is our collision when we tried to renew our contact after some 20 years.  In fact, we couldn’t, because he was very caught up in the image he’d internalized of me when I was truly among the “walking wounded,” and he was quite terrified that I would be a threat to his newfound freedom. 

 

            I will admit that this pissed me off, because I felt imprisoned in a tomb of his own making, unable to be who I have become, and disappointed that I was evidently not “allowed” to start fresh, appreciating the past from the vantage point of a growing freedom.  This man needed very badly to see me as I had been, and unwilling to allow for any expansion of being at all, on my part. 

 

            I did not behave well under this particular projection.  I was, as I said, pissed, and I wanted to be a person, not the projection of his fears about “high maintenance” women who sucked him dry.  Good grief, I hadn’t seen him in 20 years!!  We were, at the time, living hundreds of miles apart, and I am more inclined toward a solitary life than the “social butterfly” one I tended to lead when we had known each other.  I was puzzled and frustrated that this person was determined that I could not possibly have changed and that he should beware of me.  The remnants of psychological transference and therapeutic neuroticism didn’t help things, either, which is why “they” say you shouldn’t do therapy with a friend.  In this case, “they” are probably right.  The more I tried to protest this man’s insistence on seeing me as he felt safe seeing me, the more he insisted on his own point of view, completely ignoring my input.  There was no room for my own reality in the context of the connection, and I gave up eventually, smarting and angry.  Part of me wanted to laugh in his face, because the whole thing truly was ridiculous, but it pushed enough of my buttons that I indulged myself in a certain amount of anger, instead.

 

            Ah, well, water under the bridge.  But I saw him the other night at the natural foods store, and was quite surprised when he spoke to me; I hadn’t even recognized him, at first, but he evidently recognized me, and we said hello, I introduced him to my family, and we moved on.  I found the scene rather sad and, in a sad way, amusing.

 

            So:  projection.  We live in a hall of mirrors, and we constantly project what we are terrified of into the mirrors that pass before us.  I ask myself if we are more prone to it in this Judeo-Christian culture where dichotomy is a moral rule, or whether all people tend to do this.  I suspect not, because I find that it is possible to work with the tendency, however slowly; but meanwhile, we keep hurting and limiting each other by our need to make the other guy wrong, so that we can feel right.  It’s very sad, really.  I would like to reach a place where I accept my own wholeness—darkness and light and everything in between—so deeply that I am not daunted by the other guy’s wholeness, or her/his difference.  I would like to develop the willingness to plumb my own depths to the place where I find the Other and am able to embrace that soul. 

 

            My beloved Dr. Jung was right when he said (paraphrasing here!) that the fate of the world is hanging by a thin thread, the thread of the human Shadow.  Unless we are able to confront, embrace and integrate our own darkness, the source of our confusion and our creativity and our growth and our joy and the inherent tragedy of the human experience, we are in danger of self-immolation, both as a world community and as individuals.

 

             

Fasting the Spirit

 

Oh, those New Year’s Resolutions! In the resting and rejuvenating time after Christmas, my husband and I have watched some old films we liked, and have been reminded of the ways people trip themselves up with resolutions, mostly brought on by guilt over excesses, resentments, unkindness and, sometimes, over the “good stuff,” i.e., the feeling that one wants to take better care over God’s creation, sometimes in the form of oneself. That is what led me, of course, to not so much make as to give birth to a resolution.I have been sick for many years now, with some chronic conditions which have…wasted, I think is the word…me. ‘Wasted’ seems right, because they have caused me to withdraw from active life and move into a life of happy loneliness. This suits me rather well, because I have a monastic nature, and have always loved solitude, but there has been a nagging feeling of guilt at kind of deserting the world, particularly those aspects of my world for which I feel some responsibility. It has been easy to enjoy my solitude here in the country, in my lovely, airy home, and still be with family and those few close friends who fit in, while spending my days in simple activities and reverie. I needed that. It has been the first retreat I’ve ever been able to really allow myself, without giving undue concern to what I “should” be doing, and it has been healing. But back to New Year’s and those nasty little resolutions.

I suppose there has been a feeling that it is gradually becoming time to return to a more active life, and to rediscover my purpose, in the way that it now reveals itself, and I was trying to think how to do that, reluctant to give up my solitude, still not well physically, but still somehow knowing it was time. That’s when this resolution to fast was born, and it seemed to take on a life of its own, because I thought about it a bit, did some reading, talked to friends, and resolved to let it happen, which it did.Now, I don’t know if you have any experience with fasting, but I recommend it, because it is much more about fasting the spirit than the body, although that has its own rewards. My resolution was to do a true fast, taking in only pure water, and withdrawing completely. I got a lot out of it, although it may have been contraindicated, in my case. If a person takes medication and has some preexisting condition, it’s probably best to be under medical care when one undergoes a fast, and I wasn’t. But I do my best to serve a higher authority, and I felt strongly directed to do it.

I was able to continue the “pure fast” for a week; would have liked to go on longer, but didn’t entirely have the nerve. Now I’m phasing in raw fruits and vegetables, and eventually grains and the like. It all took place on so many levels! For me, going “cold turkey” was pretty rough on my system, as I tapered off medications and the like, and I felt pretty awful the entire time. The first days seemed to be more about my ego: in than weird crossover from spirit to matter and back, I felt as if I was allowing a kind of self-abasement, and it was not fun, but it was productive.

In a sense, a fast is a sort of alchemical process, wherein one goes through a kind of dark night of body,heart and soul, eventually to rise into the light. That is the best reward, as the “dissolution,” where lead becomes separate from all that holds it, and then becomes, eventually, gold, as it is distilled, through rising, and then reintegrated into physicality. These later stages emerged once I got past the ego that wanted to kick and scream and struggle and moved into something akin to the Immaculate state where the light body is able to rekindle itself and feel clearly its connection with the one Light. The feelings of holiness and peace are wonderful as the physical and ethereal are cleansed and made strong again. I suppose this is why fasting is an age-old spiritual process, one that threatens to become forgotten as the age of sciences works its politics, and people continue to relinquish their own autonomy, not always through choice.

I like very much the Buddhist practice of tonglen, where one becomes a vehicle of healing through dedicating ones own suffering to the suffering of others. Psychologically, it is helpful both universally and personally, because suffering always means much more if there is a purpose for it. I suppose Sri Gandhiji is the preeminent example of this, may peace be upon him.

I also want to express my gratitude for the work of Joel Fuhrman, M.D., who wrote an excellent book on the subject and who has done much, I suspect, to bring the archaic knowledge of fasting into our current world. His work seems well-researched (not that research isn’t always very subjective) and practical. He pulls no punches, and I think he is well worth learning from if you want to make a fast.

But that’s not what it’s about.

My Point Exactly…(see below)

After I wrote the “Illumination” post below, I decided to find a suitable Christmas tree for my page. This one reminds me vaguely of one of my favorite painters, Charles Burchfield. His paintings, however, are far less “storybook” and far more angsty, with everything in them conveying the darkest and saddest and sometimes most frightening mysteries–and the beauty of them. Don’t know who did this one, but to me, it conveys a feeling of warmth, and reaching for the light, which is what I think these particular holidays are all about. I realize there are various similar ones in other traditions, but I am writing, here, about the one with which I am the most familiar. God bless us ones and All. 

See Carol’s slideshow on the topic:  http://carolsill.wordpress.com/2007/12/14/secrets-in-the-christmas-tree/ 

Illumination

Having blown out the only candle
In the unlit room, we still thought
We could see through the dark a string
Of smoke rising from the snuffed wick.

The raccoon, fascinated by reflection,
Is unable to light his den
With his gathered bits of metal,
His scraps of foiled glass.

Standing under the yellow poplar at noon,
She cares nothing for the tree,
Being interested only in the way light
Moves across its turning leaves.

If we study a mirror in a black cave
Long enough, the absence of light
Will be made clearly visible
Sitting on a high branch in the cloudy night,
Can the raccoon see what expectations
Light has led him to understand?
When the last leaf of the yellow poplar
Has been blown away,
Will the eye of the girl remembering,
Be the only body left there for light? –Pattiann Rogers, The Expectations of Light, 1981

I have a friend who recently told me that he absolutely despises Christmas and everything it represents. He hates the tacky decorations and the mindless greed and compulsion that keep people supporting the systems that would lead us all to financial ruin. He hates Christmas trees, with their gaudy, colored lights and tinsel. He hates the day itself, and the family systems it purposes to support, and the endless round of meaningless customs and the empty sentiment that surrounds the whole phony thing.

Well now.

When he told me this–with some degree of anger–I was speechless at first, but I am never speechless long, and I have been thinking about how it is that I have made my peace with all he mentions above, despite the fact that it is all absolutely true, and does often seem to bring out the worst in people.

Still.

What occurred to me when I considered all this was that moment when I realized what the winter holidays are all about. It was at a high mass in a Catholic Church, a midnight Christmas mass, as I recall, wherein I was transported into the reality of the Cosmic Mass that celebrates itself endlessly in the heavens, resounding its music, its eternal light always amidst the darkness, available to all who have ears to hear and eyes to see. I was quite young, and this was one of the first times I had the realization that this was an option, this willingness to go beyond the apparent and attune to the higher reality. I am grateful to my teacher, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, for teaching me how to do this, for I really think it has saved me, one of those of us who does not manage these gross, lower realms of the earth plane very easily.

Since that time, I have come to realize that these holidays that we celebrate in our culture are celebrations of light, the fulfillment of light more and less perceived by creatures starving for light. That’s what it really is, of course: beyond all the razzle dazzle and fakery is this hunger, this nostalgia for our origins, for the worlds we have emerged from and are returning to, for some reason making a stop here where light is at a premium, but can be found and must be found if we are to survive. The thing is, we are all different in our ability to remember, and for some of us, our efforts are fairly material ones, while others can indeed partake of the Cosmic Mass.

It’s a longing for that plane from which the original Being emerges, descending through the planes of Splendor and the planes of Light, the pristine condition of being a soul without experience, unsullied by the sight of darkness and the experience of personal limitation, personal pain. I always think of the Fool in the Tarot deck, his eyes turned upward, stepping heedlessly off the precipice of time into experience. But experience teaches us caution, and for most of us our caution has become such that we forget to turn our eyes upward, to remember ourselves as beings of glory, light beyond light.

Throughout the eons of time, matter has awakened through awakened consciousness, consciousness has awakened through matter. –Inayat Khan

I remember another experience when this was brought home to me. I was on a long, personal retreat in a forest, in a little hut that had a glass door in front, so that I could sit inside where it was warm–it was winter–and look out into the forest, the forest primeval as all forests are on some level, and as it was in the early stages of the retreat, I was mired in the “dark night of the soul,” the letting go of my own perspective on things, in order to make room for a more profound and less personal perspective. All morning, the rain poured down as I struggled with my ego, listening to Gregorian chant as I repeated dhikr, trying to rise out of my own personal darkness into the stage of glorification often called the immaculate state. Noon came, and I was truly desolate, sure there was no hope for me, but I forged on anyway, and the next time I opened my eyes–I was dimly aware that there was no longer the sound of rain beating on the leaves–the rain had changed to snow, and was rapidly filling the forest, and all that had been dark was being pelted with the dry, white flakes, and then I was able to rise, and through the magic of the natural world, I was able to realize my own essential purity…and all that emerges from That.

Mithra emerged from Mitra, a Vedic god, and the worship of Mithra migrated to Rome through Asia minor. Mithraism was the official religion of the Roman Empire by 307 A.D., but that changed with the Emporer Constantine’s conversion to Christianity by 312 A.D. –A historic tidbit from my resident theologian, David

I really think this expectation of light is what this Christmas thing is to people: a celebration, a remembrance of light. We tend towards a state of famine, in which we cannot let ourselves know who we really are, and cannot bear the grief of knowing where we come from and our seeming inability to get back there… and from the first Pagan celebrations of Mythra, right around the time we celebrate Christmas, and a guise then for the celebration of the winter solstice, the renewal of light that was being replaced by the “new God,” the Christ. In this largely Christian culture, we see Him as the representative of light, the immaculate state incarnate, and although our limitation leads us to an incorrrect apprehension, the hunger, the famine, still exists, and within our capabilities we keep trying to find our way home.

I decorate a Christmas tree very year, and I hang no colored lights on it, but the tiny, clear, twinkling ones that remind me of home, and when I walk down a crowded avenue at the mall, aglow with those same tiny, starlike lights, I am reminded to look up. Giving to others is an expression of the bounty I am coming to know more and more as I learn to allow myself to, as Murshid says, “give all that [I] can and take all that is offered to [me].” I find it possible to be tolerant of those who do not see things as I do, because they are a part of me, and without my kinship with that part, I cannot rise any higher than any other branch on the tree or star in the sky. Amidst the seeming greed, the avarice, the drunkenness, the selfishness, the lies we tell ourselves, I see this famine and the reaching out for the fattening of our light bodies in any way we know how.

So somehow light is associated with a smile. It’s a Sufi tradition, the smiling forehead. And as I said . . . it is very difficult to smile when people are so mean and life is so hard but still, that’s a saving grace. And as I say, one can suffer terribly, in agony, and at the same time smile. And you smile for the sake of people. You know, there’s a famous Chinese saying, “Cry and you cry alone. Laugh and the world laughs with you.” So even though your heart is bleeding, you smile for the sake of the people whom you are communicating with.And otherwise, one is wallowing in self pity. And self pity will encapsulate you in that slither of your being which is . . . self image. And this is exactly what we are trying to overcome in meditation. That’s what meditation’s about. So now we are dealing with the real issue. So that meditation is really an authentic experience that involves your whole being instead of wishful thinking.The secret is love. I know it sounds like preaching, I know. . . . Pir Murshid Inayat Khan said “We are tested in our love.” That is the way we are tested. Not in our mind. . . . We are our realization. … We are our degree of love.Of course unconditional love… If you say to a child, if you are naughty, I won’t love you, that’s not unconditional love. It’s a ploy. Say, I love you even though you are naughty.So I don’t know whether this is going too far when I say that the secret of being luminous [of realizing ourselves as beings of light] is being in love. And when I say that I’m not talking about being in love with a person, I’m talking about being in love with love. — Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, paraphrased from a lecture.

We have so few opportunities to play with the children of the world. Why not? As my husband quoted after he read this, “Yes, Virginia, there IS a Santa Claus.”

On Becoming a Grandmother

Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild. ~Welsh Proverb 

Yes, indeed, I did become a grandmother in the last week, and I highly recommend it. I remember my mother saying that being a grandparent was just perfect happiness, because the grandparent gets to just enjoy the child and then hand her or him back to the parents for all the worry and responsibility of being a parent. And there is a certain truth to that, although I feel very responsible indeed where my own grandchild is concerned. I’m not exactly sure what that means, because I’m new at this, but the feeling is there nevertheless. And I am in love, not just with this angelic little being, but with the whole world, and with the entire process of motherhood. At this moment, existence reveals its meaningfulness, and the circle is complete.

Grandmothers… People so often give huge credit to them for being a positive support, the bearer of unconditional love, etc., etc., and I’m sure that’s true, but I think it’s easier to give credit to the person who goes home at the end of the day than the one who changes your diapers and cleans up your vomit and gives up all hope of sleep so that you’ll be safe and full. That’s what my daughter is going through right now, and it does take me back: I’ve always said there is no greater love affair than the one you have with your child, and I so well recall how hard I fell for both my children, how overwhelmed by the weight of the passionate love they brought forth in me. Tiptoeing in to make sure they’re still breathing, usually more than once a night… Giving up the tiptoeing for the pleasure of taking them into your own bed, a pleasure slightly dimmed by their insistence on forming an ‘H’ between mother and father, and kicking the stuffings out of both… the fear when they are sick… not even minding changing diapers… reading everything you can to make sure you’re doing it right… It is a joy and a chore than I am just now noticing doesn’t even end when they go to college and/or have children of their own.

Ah, but grandmotherhood… the love is just as passionate, but there is a…lightness, I suppose… to it, this time. I remember as a child thinking that my grandma was just the wisest, strongest and kindest person in my world, and I hope to be the same to this little person. I watch my child take care of her child and sympathize with the enormity of this love that has overtaken her, and the terrible responsibility she feels, and her worries that she may well go insane from lack of sleep…and I remember how I once felt all that, and at least I can tell her “this too shall pass”… But does she really want it to? I think I can remember, with both my dear children, an oceanic feeling of ecstasy that almost–although not quite–precluded all the rest, and I’m pretty sure there were only rare occasions when I wanted it to be over with. But it wasn’t easy, and so far, being a grandmother is pretty easy, except for feeling a desire to solve all the problems of both daughter and granddaughter.

And there is…a mystery, something I can’t quite yet name, in the feeling I have for this child: perhaps it is the perfection of love without the fear and obligation, perhaps a chance to experience the perfection of what I felt for my own child, but without everything that went with it. It is a great pleasure and a great fulfillment. I love getting to hold this little girl, and I love buying presents (without having to worry about college costs and braces (unless I just want to)…

And yes, the way my mother phrased all this is not too different from my own experience. I’ll have to give her that.

Seeds

O Lord, I see within your body all the gods and every kind of living creature.I see Brahma, the Creator, seated on a lotus;I see the ancient sages and the celestial serpents. I see infinite mouths and arms, stomachs and eyes,and you are embodied in every form.I see you everywhere, without beginning, middle, or end.You are the Lord of all creation, and the cosmos is your body. You wear a crown and carry a mace and discus;your radiance is blinding and immeasurable.I see you, who are so difficult to behold,shining like a fiery sun blazing in every direction. You are the supreme, changeless Reality,the one thing to be known.You are the refuge of all creation, the immortal spirit,the eternal guardian of the eternal dharma. You are without beginning, middle, or end;you touch everything with your infinite power.The sun and the moon are your eyes, and your mouth is fire;your radiance warms the cosmos. O Lord, your presence fills the heavens and the earthand reaches in every direction.I see the three worlds tremblingbefore this vision of your wonderful and terrible form. The gods enter your being,some calling out and greeting you in fear.Great saints sing your glory, praying,”May all be well!”

the bhagavad gita - 11:15-20 - arjuna

Monogamy

 

 

“Homosexuality,” Plato wrote, “is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love–all of which homosexuality is particularly apt to produce.”        

 

         Recently, an old and dear friend came to visit us while he was traveling from another state.  We had a great weekend talking about just about everything, as old friends will, and somehow we got started on a topic that is an old one with us.  I am afraid it is my fault, because my endless desire to learn about people brings it up again and again.  The topic was monogamy.

 

         My friend happens to be a homosexual (I personally regret the loss of the word “gay” to one particular sub-culture, even though I too use it that way).  Over the years, we have taught each other a lot, and I am encouraged to see our various arguments coalescing into a few central theme from which I can learn a lot, monogamy being one of them.  He happens to have lived with one partner for many years, and it appears to me that they are very close indeed, and I love them both very much.  But he pointed out that monogamy for homosexuals does not mean the same thing it means for “breeders,” as we “straight” people are now called.  For him, if I understood him correctly, monogamy means committing to one person and never saying “forever,” yet still being completely committed to working through whatever comes up for either within the parameters of that relationship.  What it doesn’t mean, according to my friend, is that either partner feels obligated to have sex with only the other partner as it does, he claims, in the accepted “straight” definition of monogamy.  This man has described himself as a “sexual outlaw” in his life, and while I regret the need for such distinctions—for anyone—I think I can see how he feels that way.  I was actually quite intrigued by his definition for monogamy, and I am still thinking about it.  It seems to me that it is a rather wonderful concept, and is very possibly true of “straight” relationships also, in the end, at least as they are practiced in this day and age, and possibly for eternity.  Or not.  I’m still thinking about it.  In any event, in practical terms, none of us can ever say “forever,” if we look at the prevailing divorce rates.  It may be that my friend’s definition contains more of what “forever” really is, in terms of its possibilities. 

 

         Jung pointed out that the best marriages have infidelity built into them.  He himself effectively had at least two “wives,” and he believed that this worked well for him.  My research indicates that his “legal” wife was made most unhappy by this, but the argument could be made that this was because of her religion-oriented, static views of things.  This seems a rather easy argument to me!  However, I’d like to return to the central theme.

 

         First of all, I can’t honestly say I have a firm opinion, because as my views have evolved, it has increasingly seemed to me that our views on gender and sexual preference are largely a function of religious and secular institutions both, in the interest of control in general and the protection of property and inheritance.  As far as I can tell, if we were able to live in a way that allowed us to be completely who we are, we would probably all be bisexual, and I am not at all sure most of us would be monogamous in the accepted sense of the word.  I suppose in this way, if my friend’s definition of monogamy is the accepted one for his sub-culture, it is the right one.  It is my observation that humans are forced into roles based upon the various and more apparent legal and social definitions before they are able to make a free choice, and after that, it never occurs to most people that they do indeed have choices.  I imagine it must be both hard and painful for any human being to become an outlaw in this sense, making choices that cause her or him not to look like what the rest of us blithely call “normal.” I applaud anyone who can develop the strength to do it.  I think it makes for greatness any time one goes against the accepted mores of “the crowd” in order to be oneself.  I suspect this is what Plato himself was referring to, and I feel great tenderness and great respect for such beings.

 

         Yet I myself am a monogamist in the traditional and currently accepted sense of the word.  I can think of a number of reasons for this:  I would find it difficult to have a full relationship with more than one person; I find it fulfilling and wonder-producing to fully explore the unfoldment of being within the containment of a relationship with just one person; I have no desire to sleep around, if that it is what it comes down to, because sex is sex is sex, and frankly, it’s all pretty much the same under the proverbial covers anyway!  I’m not sure I could handle the energy needs produced by having more than one love relationship at a time.  And in all honesty, I don’t have time to, even if I did have the desire, which I don’t. 

 

         I think upon reading this, my friend might feel moved to point out all the mistaken ideas in this view, but that’s what makes friendship interesting:  it’s our differences, not our similarities, that teach us.  I am relatively certain that he has no intention of becoming monogamous in the current sense of the word, and I have no intention of making a mess of my life for something that I’m doing just fine without.  On a more humorous note, I could say that, as a woman moving into her late fifties, I need to save my few remaining hormones for my beloved!

 

         Another reason for monogamy comes to me, based on my own relationship.  My partner is what they call a “one-woman man.”  Inayat Khan speaks of this as the most beautiful of ideals to be sought, for to be completely and sincerely dedicated to one person is the greatest lesson in love, according to him.  I am not at all sure I can match my partner’s level where this kind of love is concerned, but he is the person I want to be with for as long as I can, and I would never do anything to destroy his ideal.

 

 

         But that brings me to my overall feeling about all of this, and this is it:  it seems to me that we all come here with a purpose to be fulfilled, and ultimately, how we comport ourselves has to revolve around that, if we are completely dedicated to that purpose.  But the purpose is different for all of us, and we are all at different stages of awakening to that purpose.  To say that the fulfillment of one’s purpose has a subset of conditions under which that purpose can be fulfilled is ridiculous.  Either that, or it’s the Church and those various social systems that tell us how to behave…or else. 

 

         This friend of mine laughs at me when I speak of “the world I want to live in.”  It doesn’t exist, he says, and of course he is right, at least as far as practical and temporal matters go.  But that world exists in my imagination, and if, as someone I’ve forgotten said, “imagination is our memory of the future,” my world is one where we can love beyond our individual choices, even if we might occasionally poke gentle fun at each other for them. 

 

A flame of pure and sincere love is as a torch upon the path of the lover. It reveals to him the mysteries of life, as it awakens the answering gleam of light, the soul, in each created thing. –Inayat Khan  

SAMSARA by Ghani Odell

you come in holy rags muttering teachings,

                         complaining about the miso soup,

telling me about your pooja table

telling me how to toe the spiritual line,

with a powerful beard

and one long  pointing fingernail.

 

you are the mission bishop in the amazon with your priest army,

Colombus whispers in your ear,  ”they are savages”

.

The beautiful painted faces smile at you,

“we are  humans.”

you use Jesus’s sweetness

his promises   

to get their gold.

 

i hear you clicking  prayer beads,

chanting  mantra,

everyone looks so special in that certain spiritual way,

the followers that pay the bills.

 

How does this happen?

 a childhood spent with pluto in leo?

 narcissist parents?

 

Stop…put down your practice, brother!

Tell your chelas to go home…

leave them alone!

 

It is not that I don’t care

no one carried you off to bed,  gave you sweetness as you formed your childhood.

I know, ”You never did anything right.”

Here is your practice:

Your outer petals have dried up…

your brittle leaves

let them fall

juicy ones are waiting  for you to flower

mingle your perfume with the perfume of all beings. –Ghani Odell

 

A Brief and Hopefully Naive Examination of Meaning

         My younger daughter went off to college this fall, and in preparation, we spent the last year making sure she’d read just about everything high-schoolers (she unschooled at home) were “supposed” to have read, in combination with what her parents were determined she should read, combined with what she herself was going to read or die trying (Terry Pratchett, Harry Potter, etc.; who is it who gets to say what’s good literature anyway?).  On one title–at least one–the schools and I were in agreement that she should read a book called The Chosen by Chaim Potok.  Earlier in my life, I had read most of his books, and although they were never the most enjoyable books I ever read, his writing is spare and elegant and I attribute him with much of my education about the Jewish religion and its psychology, past and present.  And he can really tell a story.  I do love a good story.  In fact, while others are good at textbooks and studies and documentaries–and can even learn from them–with me, it’s like pulling teeth.  Just tell me a story.  I’ll get what goes along with it.  Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it, that the way human beings learn, coexist, pass on knowledge, and be in relationship is through telling stories.  Ever since the first crude drawings were scratched on the wall of a cave, we’ve needed to create a narrative for ourselves and others, to explain–to ourselves and others–what’s happening.  Perhaps the gene “they” now say is the God Gene is quite close to one that ought to be called the Meaning gene.  We want our lives to mean something.  We want all this not to be just a huge cosmic happening that is randomly generated from some prodigious energy event.  Either one of these alleged genes can potentially cause us a lot of trouble, because our primal tendency is to want to believe someone is running the show, this being one of the first things we attribute meaning to:  maybe it should be called the Parental Responsibility gene.  Certainly we are wired for that one, because we survive our childhoods through our parents’  compulsion to be responsible for us…and our innate programming that says they are our first gods.  Ultimately, this kind of thinking needs to be modified, because we twist this concept way out of shape one way or another as adults:  either we want to believe God is all responsible for whatever happens (thus relieving us of responsibility), or we want to take the place of God in the lives of another, or many others.  Sometimes this latter tendency displays itself in catastrophic proportions.                   

         All of this brings us back to The Chosen, of course.  I loved it when I read it as a teenager, read several others and then moved on to other things.  When it occurred to me that my daughter would do well to read it, she loved it too, which led us to collect his other books.  Do you ever want a copy of a book you’ve read just because you want it on your bookshelf when you die and feel better for having it there meantime?  I do.  But I digress, as often happens.                     

         We spent a good bit of the summer reading Rabbi Potok’s books, and of course discussing The Great War.  For those of us in this era, this unimaginably horrible event illustrated for us the darkest realms the human spirit can possibly descend into.  How can we imagine human beings performing such acts as were performed over and over in that time, not just willfully, but often blindly?  How did we live through it, even if we were relatively “untouched” by it?  In fact, perhaps no one is ever untouched by anything that happens:  if it is true that the world soul is a collective one with delusions of separation–a theory I buy into, anyway–we didn’t.  And now that we have, what do we do with the knowledge we’ve gained, a knowledge too vast and terrifying for most of us to grasp, the knowledge of what we–the world soul–are capable of?  Well, it’s general knowledge what part of us is doing with that knowledge which is, in the end, not new knowledge at all.  Freud was right: 

I have found little that is “good” about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.       

 

          Perhaps he overstated it, and perhaps there’s another side to this particular issue; but I, personally, am not at all happy about being a human being who is, for instance, an American in this day and time.  The phrase “ugly American” truthfully fits every one of us in terms of what we have kept our heads in the sand and allowed to happen to ourselves and the world.  How can we do this?  Part of me wants to say, “well, it’s not me, it’s “them,”"  but I made no attempt other than my usual grousing to stop “them” from doing it (well, I suppose a vote still counts…barely.)  But then I am forced to recall Heidegger’s “they-self” in Being and Time, that points out how we are all prone to attribute whatever we don’t wish to take responsibility for in the world  to “them,” rather than acting from our own unique potentialities.  ”They” say this, “they” say that”….  ”It’s a proven fact,” we say glibly, having not the slightest idea of who proved it, or how, or why or when or even if.  And so we continue to unthinkingly destroy all that we say has meaning to us.                  

 

         Ah, but wait:  I am supposed to be a believer.  As I lay in bed last night, having just finished Old Men at Midnight, Potok’s collection of novellas about several people’s memories of war, I thought, what is there to be happy about, in such a terrible world?  Rabbi Potok himself makes an excellent stab at providing the answer(s) to that, and as he lost his entire family to the war (103 members, all told), he had good reason to try to find an answer, to try to make meaning out of a horrific nightmare.  I have yet to read everything he wrote before he died, but as far as I know, even he found the answer in religion, but he answered the question with open eyes, and to my knowledge never drew a final conclusion as to whether what got him through the night was true or, simply, reassuring.  Yet the determination of his characters to assimilate what kept them sane must reflect his own will to meaning (Frankl).                     

        

         And as I continued to lie in my bed feeling profoundly sad, feeling the pain of the world and unable to come up with a single reason to put it out of my mind, I thought about my own individual experiences of pain, or trauma, of lack, nothing at all like what these people lived through, and I saw clearly that there was no answer.  Except…well, except the sound of the wind in the trees and my down comforter and the snores of my dog, who lies faithfully beside my bed at night because that’s where he wants to be, and it occurred to me that just as there is pure evil, there is pure…purity…and that despite the huge pits dug so that starved and tormented human corpses (some of them still alive!) could be thrown into them randomly, hiding them from the eyes of their perpetrators, there are, moment to moment, times when the sun shines out between the clouds, hitting me right between the eyes and reminding me of home, and there are acts of kindness that I have the opportunity to perform and witness, and occasionally I hear an excrutiatingly funny joke and am able to laugh real laughter, and the coffee was good this morning, and…well, I would not even dream of saying this makes it all worthwhile, because it doesn’t and never will.  But I have the opportunity to plumb the depths of both joy and pain and become what these want me to be, and I am infinitely grateful for all who went before me and showed me the way.  And even that doesn’t make it okay, but for some reason, it seems to keep some of us going.

 

Though frosts come down

night after night,

what does it matter?

they melt in the morning sun.

Though the snow falls

each passing year,

what does it matter?

with spring days it thaws.

Yet once let them settle

on a man’s head,

fall and pile up,

go on piling up—

then the new year

may come and go,

but never you’ll see them fade away.  –Ryokan

About Judgment

 

 

From Pema Chodron, on the excellence of Bodhichitta (loving kindness):

 

  . . . The insight meditation teacher Jack Kornfield tells of witnessing this in Cambodia during the time of the Khmer Rouge.   Fifty thousand people had become communists at gunpoint, threatened with death if they continued their Buddhist practices.  In spite of the danger, a temple was established in the refugee camp, and twenty thousand people attended the opening ceremony. There were no lectures or prayers but simply continuous chanting of one of the central teachings of the Buddha:            

 

Hatred never ceases by hatred,  but by love alone is healed.  This is an ancient and eternal law.   

Thousands of people chanted and wept, knowing that the truth in these words was even greater than their suffering. (The Places That Scare You, page 7) 

Bodhichitta is something we are nearly all capable of, obviously, but what I’m thinking of this morning is loving kindness toward ourselves.   A lack of self-judgment, one way or the other.  We live in this largely Judeo-Christian culture where we’re taught to see things in terms of opposites: this is good, that’s not good, this is black, that is white.  While historically this kind of thinking may have been helpful to keep this old world wobbling along in space, I think it has its drawbacks, particularly in the individual.  On a planetary level, it is obvious that what black-and-white thinking leads to is war, because there is no room for grey.  But what about its effects in the individual psyche?   

 

Like many people, I was born into a family typical of this kind of thinking, one in which great harm had been done to its individual psyches, and loving kindness was at a premium.  I learned, early, that the way to stay safe (literally) was to take care of myself  (as opposed to waiting for someone older to do so),  particularly in terms of doing the hitting before it could be done to me.  In other words, if  I judged, condemned and punished myself, that tended to make it a little less painful when the other person’s blow fell.   If I said “I’m a terrible person” before my mother or father could assure me that I was, something that tended to happen a lot, it had the effect of both preparing me for the terrible judgment to come, but also allowed me some control over it.   

 

There was just one problem: I was very young when I made this discovery.  I can still remember the exact moment when it occurred to me, in fact.   And since I hadn’t had much of an example of appropriate parenting, and since I was, essentially, making the decision to take on my own parenting, I wasn’t entirely prepared for the responsibility.  Thus, I kept myself alive and safe by developing an inner judge who was merciless, so all the bases would be covered.  And because the world I lived in was a frightening and dangerous place, it was necessary to have this judge on duty at all times and in all places.  

 

I was probably in my twenties when it dawned on me why I was so exhausted all the time.  It wasn’t as if I worked so hard or spent so much energy–not outwardly, anyway–but that I used up all my energy in self-judgment.  The internal battle being carried out in my being at all times rivaled the worst world war.  And I had to have something to heal the wounds, so I used the usual things people use when they do this: food, substances, escape of various kinds, relationships, etc., etc., etc.   And then, in the few intervals between beating myself up, I wondered why I could not give up my various addictions (asking myself these questions in my parents’ voices; did I mention that my inner judge spoke in their voices?).  In fact, I have thus far managed to keep my parents alive long past their deaths because I immortalized their pain-filled, hateful, raging voices.  

 

I hate to sound like–for instance–Freud, who blamed the poor parents of this world for just about everything,  but I can’t deny that, as the parents are the first God to a soul on this earth, they have the power of whatever deity they themselves have internalized, and all too often, it was the cruel, punishing one of this culture.  It is not difficult to see how the inner war constantly reflects itself in the larger world, and my own inner war exhausted me and kept me torn apart, unable to stop the judgments long enough to allow the perfection to come through. 

 

Perfection.  Whatever that is.   I remember someone saying to me that it’s impossible to be perfect, but not impossible to be whole. Damned near impossible, of course, but not entirely.  I got a lot of mileage out of this idea, and lived with it for a number of years, until I began to see that perfection may actually manifest in wholeness, and so this brings me back to the central idea here:  if I am keeping myself fragmented by my self-judgment, not only does what wants to come through get blocked, so does wholeness, and the battle continues, waged both within and without.   It occurs to me–and I am not the first, I know–that this is what the whole Garden of Eden idea was all about: at the moment that I make the decision that some things are good and others are bad, I have created a dichotomy that leaves me–and my world–changed forever.  

 

The problem is, of course, that if there is no dichotomy–of some sort–there will be no change, and hence neither me nor my world will progress.  What a conundrum!   A more stereotypically Eastern way of looking at this idea would be to acknowledge the dichotomy, notice it, and move on without resistance.  Instead, I–a million ‘I’s–tend to allow it to paralyze me.  What if, instead of endlessly searching for the footprints of my mistakes, I were to simply inquire into the reality of my process, and be as kind to myself as I try to be to others?   My own particular “for instance” is my relationships with my students and clients:  I am very, very good at this process with them.  I see them beating themselves up over something they’ve done–or said–or thought–and I can suggest an alternative viewpoint, and the possibility of being kind to the self rather than punishing it.  This is an excellent idea with regard to my own psyche as well as theirs, but I find it very hard, as the methodology I internalized as a child is so deeply ingrained, and I have a strong feeling that it has, finally, taken its toll in my current health problems, all of which relate to carrying the weight of my own self-criticism.   It is not even logical to think that it is okay to be this kind to others and this cruel to myself. And to do so not only holds me back personally, but acts itself out in my relationship with the planet: my world, my community, my relationships.  I imagine that none of this is new for many of you who might be reading it. Not all, but many.  And even though these ideas would seem to lend themselves to the process of release–of one kind or another–there seems to be a developmental aspect to it that makes this particular change one that comes slowly.  For me, it is only in my fifties that I am beginning to be comfortable with myself, and becoming comfortable with my imperfections is an even slower process.  But it is an attractive idea.  It is life-giving.   It uncovers energy and inspiration and connectedness.  It banishes fear.

 Bodhichitta has this kind of power.  It will inspire and support us in good times and bad. It is like discovering a wisdom and courage we do not even know we have.  Just as alchemy changes any metal into gold, Bodhichitta can, if we let it, transform any activity, word, or thought into a vehicle for awakening our compassion. (Chodron, page 7)  

 

The Creator is hidden in His own Creation. (Inayat Khan)            

 

Ultimately, if I fulfill myself in regard to my own ideals, it is my privilege to acknowledge the source of them within..and to honor the creation of That.

 

 You can live in love, or you can live in pain. Take your pick. (S.A.M. Lewis, as related in personal conversation by his student Wali Ali)