Random Signals #1

There are times I can't complete a sentence, never mind a full post. There's a distraction of many bits of excitable thoughts that can't completely cohere, but need to be expressed. So here it is that I present to you a piecemeal post of random signals (as opposed to all the noise in my head). 

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There does to appear to be a rejection of Aristotelian logic in many circles these days, especially in regards to the law of non-contradiction. While the orthogonal approach of both/and works in many cases to limit binary thinking, there are time when either/or is unavoidable. Trying to come up with a philosophical system that works for everyone can be manipulative, as it casts aspersions without clarity and accountability.  You are left with no actual principles with which to live by, leaving it difficult to get your arms around anything substantive and concrete.

As I heard recently, when the British Parliament call for a vote, they also say they are calling for a division. Sometimes we need to take a side; hopefully the more logical side, no matter how large our vista, how grey our choices, and how ill-prepared our courage. 

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I've been reminiscing of my past entheogen experience as I recently came across William Wildwood's post on Drugs and Spirituality. I tend to agree with his point that, “the real aim of the spiritual path is not to achieve a higher state of consciousness (if it were, why be born?) but to acquire virtue using that word to encompass all that is involved in the idea of the good, the beautiful and the true.” That's not to say I have any regrets at all. Even he acknowledges that, “experiencing these states could reorient a person to the spiritual but even if that were true (and I don't dismiss the idea) then once is enough.” So maybe I had my once and done experience, and there is no need to get on that wagon again, and instead continue with meditation, prayer, and study. 

Not to mention the downside. One astute facebook poster was commenting as to why some people don't change after indulging in entheogens. His point: while “sure entheogens are strong medicine, no doubt. But, speaking from experience, the powerful impression of great clarity and insight can also be yet another veil and bulwark against utter nakedness.”

I am more convinced that to become utterly naked before the Divine, it may be better to drink from the cup of suffering and joy (over the cup of plant medicine). 

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David Brooks recently took on the notion of coolness. He says, “It emerged specifically within African-American culture, among people who had to withstand the humiliations of racism without losing their temper, and who didn’t see any way to change their political situation. Cool culture in that context said, you can beat me but I am not beaten, you can oppress me but you can’t own me. It became a way of indicting society even if you were powerless, a way of showing your untrammeled dignity. It was then embraced by all those who felt powerless, whether they were dissident intellectuals or random teenagers.”

It certainly does have a Christian ring to it when we refer to the turning of the cheek doctrine. 

While being cool created a stance of moral ambiguity and emotional detachment, it also allowed for mystique of character that would often be admired and emulated. It appears internet culture has brought that all crashing down. Who is really cool today?

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I saw two great films recently: Dunkirk and War for the Planet of the Apes. Dunkirk is a masterpiece in the many ways the critics are raving about. One observation is the chaos of war from many angles and vistas can leave one emotionally detached from the suffering. Maybe Stalin was right: “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” We can't surpass the tragedy of one, as the masses just obscure the infinite value of the loss.

With War for the Planet of the Apes, the opposite was true. I found the intimacy and subtle resonance of the film to bring me to tears at times. Oddly, the film's title doesn't do justice to the contemplativeness that underlays the arc of the narrative.

I Can't Go On, I'll Go On

Samuel Beckett's aphorism seems to reflect my stance best these days.

I know there is much to be grateful for, yet I also have to be grateful for the cross I bear. It's a familiar pattern, full of fleeting fears around abandonment, resignation, and defeatism.

Without the need to get into particulars, it feels so familiar to me I often wonder if this is my natural disposition. Is the desolation more real than the consolation?

Yet, there is something I get closer to in the suffering. I sense a richer humanity that is in tune to the suffering in others. I am not as dismissive of the subtleties of pain despite the contraction that takes me over. While it may be a psychological desolation that takes me there, there is also a spiritual consolation in all of this.

I am reminded of some words by Parker Palmer...

That without pain, there is no joy. 
That from despair, hope emerges. 
That out of death, new life always emerges.
That real life hurts.
That real life is beautiful.
That hearts are meant to love and live and breathe and connect.
That hearts are meant to break.

Palmer notes that there there are two kinds of hearts that break. The first is the unresolved broken heart that inflicts its pain onto others. I am definitely not immune to this. When in the pain, the horizon looks shallow. Possibilities seem bleak. I feel recoiled from what is. I want to lash out with sadness and anger. 

Palmer also points to another heart that is broken open “into the largeness of life, into greater capacity to hold one's own and world's pain and joy.” Oddly in my contracted suffering, I can simultaneously sense into this world too.

There is a Hasidic tale where the rabbi is asked why does the Torah ask its followers to place the words upon our hearts — and not in our hearts? The rabbi answers, “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks, and the words fall in.”

Maybe this is where suffering can move us forward, to a larger and deeper embrace of the wisdom that has been imprinted in our soul. 

As one sage once said: “Life can be transcended, or it can be repeated, but it cannot be fulfilled.” It seems the real challenge is to live in the tension of immanence and transcendence. Or as Palmer says, stand in the “tragic gap,” the “gap between what is and what could and should be.” 

It's in this tragic gap where all the suffering can enrich and embody a deeper joy that eventually ensues.

And so for now, I'll go on.

Patterns of Deceit

When we're orientating patterns in an historical-cultural context, we always have to be careful because the particulars do matter. While I've been drawn to meta-theories, like spiral dynamics, I do see more problems than good from them. First, historic paradigm shifts as not as clean as often depicted, such that many of these patterns overlap with prior epochs. These theories often privilege recent cultural trends over many of the high culture achievements in more pre-modern times, often dismissing these periods as "less-evolved" than ours. Moreover, these models often represent trends and patterns to justify speculative non-empirical outcomes.

When looking at a meta-view, I can empathize with the Levinas position that responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth". Or another way to consider this is while the part is always in the whole, the part always needs to be made whole.

Maybe that's why I prefer how Kreeft depicts these historical-cultural patterns, since he doesn't attempt to place them hierarchically. We can see how Kreeft draws on Christianity as a synthesis of virtue in theory (Hellenism) and practice (Hebraism): or the True and the Good.

He also sees the postmodern period as leading to a new axial age resulting from the Western Enlightenment and Continental Romanticism. I am not sure if it's a revival or a dead-end, but there many people attempting to grope for the next, new thing.

In the dead-end camp, David Bentley Hart eviscerates the notion that we have come up with a deeper ethical stance in our postmodern milieu... 

“Even when we have shed the moral and religious precepts of our ancestors, most of us try to be ethical and even, in many cases, “spiritual.” It is rare, however, that we are able to impose anything like a coherent pattern upon the somewhat haphazard collection of principles and practices by which we do this. Our ethics, especially, tends to be something of a continuous improvisation or bricolage: we assemble fragments of traditions we half remember, gather ethical maxims almost at random from the surrounding culture, attempt to find an inner equilibrium between tolerance and conviction, and so on, until we have knit together something like a code, suited to our needs, temperaments, capacities, and imaginations. We select the standards or values we find appealing from a larger market of moral options and then try to arrange them into some sort of tasteful harmony.”

And he also does a beautiful job deriding our approach to religion, and how cultural sophistication has undermined spiritual depth and rigor...

“As for our religion, much the same may be said: few of us really feel that the creeds we espouse are more important in giving shape to our ethical predispositions than are our own judgments. We certainly, at any rate, do not draw near to the “mystery of God” with anything like the fear and trembling of our ancestors, and when we tire of our devotions and drift away we do not expect to be pursued, either by the furies or by the hounds of conscience. This is especially obvious at modern Western religion’s pastel-tinged margins, in those realms of the New Age where the gods of the boutique hold uncontested sway. Here one may cultivate a private atmosphere of “spirituality” as undemanding and therapeutically comforting as one likes simply by purchasing a dream catcher, a few pretty crystals, some books on the goddess, a Tibetan prayer wheel, a volume of Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung or Robert Graves, a Nataraja figurine, a purse of tiles engraved with runes, a scattering of Pre-Raphaelite prints drenched in Celtic twilight, an Andean flute, and so forth, until this mounting congeries of string, worthless quartz, cheap joss sticks, baked clay, kitsch, borrowed iconography, and fraudulent scholarship reaches that mysterious point of saturation at which religion has become indistinguishable from interior decorating. Then one may either abandon one’s gods for something new or bide with them for a time, but in either case without any real reverence, love, or dread. There could scarcely be a more thoroughly modern form of religion than this. It certainly bears no resemblance to the genuine and honorable idolatries of old, or to the sort of ravenous religious eclecticism that characterized the late Roman Empire. The peoples of early and late antiquity actually believed in, adored, and feared their gods. No one really believes in the gods of the New Age; they are deities not of the celestial hierarchy above but of the ornamental étagère in the corner, and their only “divine” office is to give symbolic expression to the dreamier sides of their votaries’ personalities.” 

And in regards to our god(s) today...

“They are purchased gods, gods as accessories, and hence are merely masks by means of which the one true god—the will—at once conceals and reveals itself.”

Ouch! But probably more accurate than not. I often believe postmodernism is a result of modernity's tantrum with civilization than a true step forward. Patterns may emerge, but whether you see things progressing or not comes down to where (and how whole) you stand.