Keeping Us On Our Toes

“A God you cannot comprehend is a God you cannot manipulate.” – Carl McColman

I’m in the midst of reading Carl McColman’s great book, The Big Book of Christian Mysticism: The Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality. And it is essential, in that although it's grounded in Christianity, it could apply to most esoteric traditions. We all know about paradoxes when it comes to the spiritual path, but why do they exist?

After a while, it becomes obvious that Truth shows up differently at the depth/height/breadth/length we see it. In other words, we can stand somewhere locally until we realize that another perspective may be on point. And the more perspectives we hold, the more challenging it is to traverse horizontally. We now have to step on the ladder and alter our vista to a nonlocal space.

And God wouldn’t want it any other way. He/She ;) likes to keep us on our toes. That is why no religious institution, spiritual path, or guide/teacher/guru has it all figured out. If you consider any of the paradoxes listed below, you’ll be able to point out how a particular person, community, or belief system emphasizes one over the other. No one can dance of the razor’s edge perfectly, and that’s why God can never be expressed perfectly in the world. 

From the relative plane, these paradoxes can make you feel schizo since they can't be reconciled. As such, “Christ does not resolve paradox; he simply transcends it.” Only you can decide to let go along for the ride.

McColman poignantly notes, “God tries to keep you on your toes not because he has a twisted sense of humor and wants you to feel uncomfortable, but because he knows that the best antidote for taking yourself (and your religion) too seriously is to fill your faith with all sorts of apparent contradictions. Sooner or later, you just have to throw up your hands and say: "Okay, God, I give up. There's no figuring you out." At that point, God comes to you "as a little child," laughs in your face, and says: "That's okay, I love you anyway! Let's go play!"”

Here are some of the tensions McColman comes up with that we can inhabit in that play (the only thing I would add is some of these paradoxes may have an asymmetric relationship where one side takes precedence over the other as one would be necessary for the other to exist; such as, a transcendent God is necessary for an immanent God to exist since creation came after that which creates). ...

Mysticism is the quest for God. You cannot seek God unless God has found you.
Mysticism is about experience. Mysticism cannot be limited to experience.
God is immanent. God is transcendent.
Mysticism involves significant, life-transforming events and changes in consciousness. A mystical experience may seem as insignificant as the Butterfly Effect.
You can do nothing to "earn" the mystical life. If you are passive, you will be thwarting the action of the Holy Spirit.
Mysticism is the "flight of the alone to the Alone." Christ is present "where two or three are gathered" in his name.
God is One. God is a Holy Trinity.
Christ is fully human. Christ is fully divine.
Seek the light. Embrace the dark.
Take delight in God. Accept even suffering.
God is all-merciful. God is uncompromising in his justice.
Seek holiness. Practice hospitality.
Plumb deeply the Christian tradition. Embrace all positive wisdom.
Love God's creation. Do not love the world.
Humankind is sinful. Humankind is invited to participate in union with God.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Perfect love casts out fear.
Place your hope in the future when you will find conscious union with God. Live in the present moment; that's the only place you'll ever find God.
Live by faith. Live the truth.
Authentic Christian mysticism conforms to Biblical and church teaching. Mysticism is following spiritual vision to greater freedom.
Pray methodically. Prayer cannot be reduced to a method.
Become like little children. Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind.
God is Father. God is Mother. God transcends gender.
Mysticism is an intellectual pursuit. True mysticism is mostly about the heart.
The mystical life is like climbing a mountain; it's a lifelong journey to reach the place God is calling you. There's nothing separating you from the love of God-right here, right now.
The Ultimate Mystery is silent. Part of being a mystic is trying to express the ineffable through words.
Heaven is a gift freely given. Hell awaits those who reject divine love.

When Tolerance Runs Amok

The conventional wisdom is there is always a fear of mob rule (or tyranny of the majority). But in truth, it doesn’t take much to tip the scales. Yes, we’ve all heard about the tipping point, but why is this so and where can it become a bigger issue in our tribal ethos?

Taleb’s book is all about nonlinear dynamics and the asymmetries that can shake things up from an uncompromising minority. He remarks, “Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of intolerance.” 

Case in point, Taleb notes that if there's one Orthodox Jew or Sunni Salafi in a community, they will require the local market to carry kosher/halal foods. In some cases, it's just easier for companies to meet this criteria for all its products assuming costs are reasonable. As such, most soft drinks are kosher. The tolerant are just fine with drinking kosher.

At times, these asymmetric dynamics can tip the scales for more significant change. In the case of the civil rights movement, it was a minority group of people who would be peacefully intolerant of injustice toward Black Americans. Yet, the “sad news is that one person looking at mankind as an aggregate may mistakenly believe that humans are spontaneously becoming more moral, better, and more gentle, with better breath, when this applies to only a small proportion of mankind.” It would seem it's always more challenging to tip the scales toward goodness than the inverse.

In most situations, it is the intolerant person with crappy values who can more successfully take things down many notches even if not supported by the majority. That’s why it’s good to stay away from toxic people. They’ll always suck the air out of a room faster than the healthy folks can keep things inflated. In our current cultural climate, where we see a sort of dug-in tribalism with intolerance toward each other side, it would seem things can get fairly dicey in our “open” system. 

The underlying premise of democracy in the civil sense is to tolerate the freedom individuals have to manifest their essence (as long as it doesn’t impede on other people to manifest their essence and as long as it doesn’t allow such manifestations to run amok into utter chaos). So in other words, we need an ordered freedom where such ideas and activities are tolerated in such a way that it doesn’t negate freedom.

This is harder than it looks. The Founding Fathers sided on liberty, but knew that religion was a critical piece in keeping things in place. But not just any religion, but one that was legally tolerant of other practices of religion while offering a coherent organizing principle that freedom could hang off of.

In a time when a secular, tribal ethos leads the way, what standards do we use to measure good or bad values that could emerge from freedom? In D. C. Schindler’s Freedom from Reality, he mentions several criteria as to what he would consider to be diabolical values (or values that divide) that should be avoided if…

1. the diabolical presents a deceptive image that substitutes for reality;
2. it is characterized by an essential negativity;
3. it renders appearance more decisive than reality, and indeed, better than reality according to the measure of convenience and efficiency;
4. it has a supra-individual dimension that is nevertheless impersonal: that is, it tends to take the form of an essentially self-referential system;
5. it is "soulless" in the sense of lacking an animating principle of unity; and
6. it is essentially self-destructive.

We will never have liberalism perfected; so maybe the best we can hope for is pluralism with a unifying center that tolerates the least diabolical values for a society. And I'd add that unifying center ideally offer some depth (soul) to the span (diversity of people and ideas).  

Otherwise, the self-destructive nature of diabolical tolerance will undermine freedom itself. And when you throw nonlinear dynamics into the mix, it makes it clear that we can screw things up all too easily.

Earth will never be a paradise, but it could perhaps be prevented from approaching closer and closer to being a cheap imitation of Hell. — Dávila

Choking Humanity (A Rant)

I recently saw a sweet documentary at IFFBoston about Fred Rogers. Say what you want about Mr. Rogers, but he was a bodhisattva or modern day saint. I didn’t appreciate it as a child, but I when I saw the clips of the unusual pacing of his show, it stunned me that he was able to get away with what he did. 

Mr. Rogers would spend the first ten minutes just changing his shoes and putting on a sweater, feeding his fish, and dabbling around his television studio home while having a quiet conversation with you. It was as if he just wanted to allow for something extraordinary in the ordinary. His silence, presence, and being were given room to unfold within a child’s imagination and intuition.  

Most children could probably see how genuine and decent he was. Even if you can’t articulate or confirm it at that age, you somehow knew it.

Turn the clock ahead thirty or forty years, and now we live in a world that requires us to quantitatively confirm it before we can know it. We’ve been subsumed under legal formalism, standardized tests, red tape, metrics, algorithms, social media, and augmented reality devices. Humanity has been outsourced! 

It’s like an unhealthy cognitive dissonance has taken over, where we aren’t allowed to trust our imagination and intuition in a wholesome sense.

Have you ever noticed how much chattering goes on with the media these days trying to tell what is true, but just about all of it is useless noise? It’s as if they’re afraid to give us any space to think and contemplate for ourselves. It’s brought me to the point where I can barely watch any news shows these days. Now I’ve become one of those older people yearning for simpler times of less is more. 

The Aphorist would say Wordiness is not an excess of words, but a dearth of ideas. Just because you can say it more cleverly and more often, doesn’t make it more True. In the end, it just goes down and out like bad sushi.

Nassim Taleb bluntly talks about how his bullshit detector is way overly sensitive to the “intellectual professional” these days. Scientism has taken over good, old fashioned wisdom. We are no longer allowed to trust tradition or grandma's advise. Yet, “Replacing the "natural," that is age-old, processes that have survived trillions of high-dimensional stressors with something in a "peer-reviewed" journal that may not survive replication or statistical scrutiny is neither science nor good practice.”

So maybe we needed to leave simplicity behind to justify the salaries for these talking heads. And “when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication.”

Mr. Rogers was not concerned with perception or sophistication. In fact, he was as uncool as you could get during those decades he broadcasted his low-fi show.

Yet, we got to see decency and goodness in a person. And today, we can't seem to point to that very often. Or we need some talking head or algorithm to tell us otherwise.