I [God] Gave You Dylan

A co-worker of mine recently lent me Bob Dylan's latest release, Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol. 13 / 1979-1981. It's absolutely terrific!

I was never a huge Dylan fan, but appreciated much of his earlier work that got airplay over the years. I even saw him live in concert once in the mid-1980's. I still think it ranks up there as one of the worst shows I've ever seen. The guy on stage that night couldn't care less what the people thought of him, and it showed. I know for many music enthusiasts, their relationship to Dylan is a complicated one.

With that being said, I've started to see through Dylan's idiosyncracies and shortcomings, and have begun to hone in on the Dylan as a creative vessel at his best. In his 60 Minutes interview, he humbly reveals a mystery to his work and his inability to explain how he channeled the songs he did back in the day...

I found this piece of the interview particularly illuminating: one of the best songwriters of a generation can't seem to take credit for what he did. Only a God-loving person would say such a thing. Well, what do you know.

I was partially aware of his Christian conversion over the years, but not to the extent as to how deeply it changed him. Even prior to his conversion, there are many hints in his music as to this movement in his heart. Bishop Robert Barron, an ardent fan, goes into this here...

His real conversion took place in 1978. One night on tour in San Diego, Dylan looked down and saw a cross someone had thrown on stage. He reached down and put it in his pocket, not thinking much about it at the time. As to what happened later that night in his hotel room, he mentioned once to a reporter that he felt his “whole body tremble,” and that “the Lord knocked me down and picked me up.” 

It was during the next few years when many of these songs on The Bootleg Series Vol. 13 got recorded. These well-crafted gospel-inspired songs have an intensity to them that I've rarely heard Dylan radiate. Clearly, he was in some sort of exalted state, and had the caliber of a band to accompany it.

Interestingly so, Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller fame, and a vocal atheist) writes the liner notes for The Bootleg Series Vol. 13. Jillette claims Dylan's Christian period was his best musically, and has no doubt of the conversion that influenced it. In a recent interview he says, “I mean if there were a God, and God was to reach me on judgement day, God could say to me, 'Penn, I gave you Dylan in '79 and you still turned your back on me. I gave you Dylan!'”

Ha! He certainly did...

Why Quit Therapy?

It was around my early thirties that I entered a significant existential crisis (one of a few). This one was over making sense of a romantic relationship. The lady in my life at the time encouraged me to begin therapy, and that was the impetus I needed to take the leap.

On occasion, I've had a disposition towards melancholy (a word I am trying to restore in my vocabulary over being 'depressed').  I think we have overly embraced the illness of depression in today's culture, since it conjures up a disease that needs a cure. Maybe a pill. And yet, melancholy is so much part of the human condition for most, and maybe a healthy catalyst for some.

Nevertheless, it was not my disposition that was the issue, as was the inability to make big life decisions. And as they say: not making a decision eventually is a decision.

I dreaded the idea of going into my past. It seemed so futile. And yet, that's always part of the process when it comes to therapy. To not be held by it, one must be able to hold it.

After almost a decade of it, it became clear (in Attachment Theory speak) I was on the avoidant end of the spectrum partially due to my poor secure attachment to my parents. So I wanted to be loved, but was too overly independent to receive it. I feared being engulfed by another. It's still a sticking area for me, but I am much more objectively attune with it. 

I was fortunate with my therapist. He was a well-spoken gentlemen, with a keen sense for listening attentively while displaying useful insight when needed. He was also quite likable. I am not sure if this is necessary in these dynamics, however, when it comes to therapy they often say what most people need is just a good, wise friend. I think that's often true, so maybe likability is part of the mix (albeit the professionalization behind it).

During the latter part of some sessions, we would often meander about political or philosophical discussions. I enjoyed these moments. You can get sick of talking about yourself. And he would challenge me around some bigger themes that were more compelling to wrap my mind around. I often think he enjoyed these talks also. I can't imagine what it must be like to hear people's problems all day long and appear interested through it all.

But eventually I stopped. At the time, it wasn't like I was "cured". Neurosis never is. It's more like I felt I was in an endless loop about me. It started to bore me. And I knew it was time to take break.

I recently came across a passage from Earnest Becker (I started to look through his classic book again after discussing it with a friend who is reading it for the first time). Becker brilliantly noted that, 

“Man wants to focus his love on an absolute measure of power and value, and the analyst tells him that all is reducible to his early conditioning and is therefore relative. Man wants to find and experience the marvelous, and the analyst tells him how matter-of-fact everything is, how clinically explainable are our deepest ontological motives and guilts. Man is thereby deprived of the absolute mystery he needs, and the only omnipotent thing that then remains is the man who is explained away. And so the patient clings to the analyst with all his might and dreads terminating the analysis.”

Maybe that's why psychoanalysis has done so little for some (see Woody Allen). But it also points out how we are all condemned to religion. It's just a matter of choosing the right one. As I started to see the limits of my therapy, a part of me was orientating more towards transcendence.

It's been several years since I quit therapy, yet I still often think about going back to him for a session here and there. Not because I need a "tune-up" (although it sometimes feels as I may). But I think I want to reconnect with his decency that saw my decency.

With everything I learned about my idiosyncrasies during those sessions, what stays with me most is the imprint of a sort of friendship. Maybe we all need a good, wise friend.

Four Inklings Walk Into a Bar...

Here's the scenario: you're a fly on a wall at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford on Thursday night, and you encounter J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams chatting about metaphysics. What do you say? Not much, since you're a fly after all. But even as a person, you would most likely be verklempt. In such fortune, enough satisfaction would come for the opportunity to at least eavesdrop.

Such was my experience to much extent reading The Fellowship. Lewis would coyly say, “We smoked, talked, argued, and drank together.” In a sense, that was all true. There was nothing fashionable about the Inklings. They were a small group of white men who got together to talk about religion, literature, and philology while smoking and eating unhealthy pub food. But I would have loved to have been a part of it!

Behind all the pub levity and intellectual quarreling, there was a intent of high aim through their writing. As the Zaleskis note, “their great hope was to restore Western culture to its religious roots, to unleash the powers of the imagination, to reenchant the world through Christian faith and pagan beauty.” This wasn't seen as a return to the past, as it was making the present more alive. These were challenging times with two major incessant wars that consumed their day. These men were restoring light through the darkness of modernity. Lewis, the former atheist, would go on the say, “Something inside me seems to be so intensely and burningly alive, and everything round me so starkly dead...” 

“The members' shared Christianity also included a wide spectrum of views. Tolkien was Catholic, Barfield, Anthroposophist; Lewis, a "mere Christian"; Charles Williams, Anglican with a dash of ritual magic. Differences notwithstanding, the members were glued together by shared adherence to the Nicene Creed... and a shared set of enemies, including atheists, totalitarians, modernists, and anyone with a shallow imagination.” As such, they had much to work with. 

Instead of being overly sanctimonious, these men worked with cultural forms they had at their disposal. Tolkien emphasized recovery, escape, and consolation as a model for his imaginary epic tails. Lewis approached his novels similarly, but also a defended Christianity in his other books in a straightforward, rational way that didn't echo the preachiness of early-day chaplains. Barfield carved out an evolutionary framework that bridged science and spirit. And Williams brought in aspects of occult and idiosyncratic interests that intrigued people more interested with Christian mysteries and orders. 

“That the Inklings may have been on the whole more decent and less vain than many other literary coteries can only be because they made a conscious effort to follow the path of real conversation.” And “the dispute over the exact nature of the Inklings —cabal or club?—has faded as history has stepped in with a third alternative: that whatever the Inklings may have been during their most clubbable years, today they constitute a major literary force, a movement of sorts.” Such movements may bring in something new, but as Lewis once said about humanity: “it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind.”

Despite the happy endings they brought to their stories, they “were not optimists; they ... understood that sacrifices must be made and that not all wounds will be healed in this life. ... One may be as gloomy as Puddleglum or as convinced as Frodo that "All my choices have proved ill" without losing hope in a final redemption.” In the end, the only hope they could leave from a quaint pub to the modern world was a redemption of the Eternal. 

All in all, their prolific contributions were nothing less than extraordinary. I wish I knew them.

The Church of Jim Carrey's No-Self

In Greta Gerwig's terrific new film, Lady Bird, there is a scene near the end of the film where the protagonist, Christine, asks a new college classmate, “Do you believe in God?” When he responds glibly with a resounding no, she chides him for his shallow thinking with a clever, yet nuanced retort: “People go by the names their parents give them, but they don't believe in God.”

And then there's Jim Carrey these days, who would probably say a name is nothing but a label that is not associated with anything, because the self and objective reality is just an illusion. Recently, there was a lot of social media chatter with an interview he gave at a fashion show (seen below). Much of the reaction revolved around how deranged and incoherent he came across. But truthfully, Carrey isn't so much crazy as he is just delluded by a common mantra in certain spiritual circles these days. 

Seeing the illusion of self-world gets its roots in neo-advaita teachings. In the Vedic teachings, specifically from the mystic/philosopher Shankara, there is no recognition of reality between the Absolute and the relative. Hence, the individual is also an illusion if seen through the veil of ignorance. Spiritual practices would aim towards extinguishing the personality since there was no mediator between God and world. All was not-two. 

Carrey, a student of Eckhart Tolle in past years, drank the radical non-dual kool-aid. Moreover, some of his acting experiences allowed him to get so absorbed in character, he would later get disoriented to who his real self really was. 

And yet, in the end, as one mystic said, it seems there is “no cure for personality.” The metaphysical genius Robert Bolton is known for writing about these needed correctives in Shankaran philosophy. He states, “In reality, individuality can have spiritual potentialities just as much as the profane ones it is usually associated with, while conversely there is nothing to prevent anti-individualistic systems from serving profane delusions as well as wisdom, as modern history shows.”

While it is true: “it can be shown that the perceived world is in many ways not the same as the known world.” It is also true: “If the ultimate reality is pure unity, there must be a mind to know it to be so, and that means something more than the pure unity. At the same time yet other minds can know the mind that knows the Unity, as though reality had a self-multiplying infinite regress in it. This is closely attached to the fact that all mystical states, monistic or dualistic, include the continuation of the subordinate faculties in the same personal life. The dualistic conception makes this easier to understand than does the monistic one, and the principles on which it is based account for the existence and truth of Theistic religion as distinct from Pantheistic.”

Again, the point here is not to confuse ontology with experience. Mystical realization is never the same as metaphysical or moral insight. While I agree some mystics have the "experience" of no-self, most have not been very adept at integrating this as a lived philosophy. In the case of Carrey, I would gather his experience is mostly a combination of spiritual by-passing and espousing the Shakaran view that he was indoctrinated to. 

Ross Douthat makes an interesting point (while quoting Leszek Kolakowski) about how “The Christian churches imposed strict limits on their mystics... they were expected to maintain "the ontological distinction between God and the soul" and to refrain from suggesting that "the mystical union involves a total annihilation of personality." They were forbidden to use their experiences "as a pretext for disregarding the traditional rules of obedience, let alone the common moral duties." And their claims to divine favor were tested against their conduct: "A mystic's experience, if genuine, strengthens his common virtues of humility, charity, chastity; it proves to be a diabolic temptation, rather than God's gift, if it breeds hubris, indifference to others, or irregularities of conduct."”

Bolton says, “The idealism that makes the most sense is that everything on every level is a manifestation of Consciousness Itself. This viewpoint allows for a material reality that actually exists, but is a stepped-down modification of an all-subsuming universal Mind, a.k.a. God.” As such, and “Unlike the Oriental traditions, a Christian gnosis requires both ‘poles’ of consciousness, because belief in the Incarnation does not allow that the manifest personality is only a ladder to be kicked away when some unspecified entity has identified with the Nous or Atman.” It would be all to easy if “our representation of objective reality could be simplified away if we had the right to say that this just meant that everything was an illusion.”

When Chesterton said “Love desires personality; therefore love desires division,” he was pointing to the telos of the cosmos. We are not put here to extinguish objective reality, but to become sanctified through our love for it. 

Besides, if I ever asked Mr. Carrey for some of his financial holdings, I doubt he would freely say there is nobody who has this money to keep for himself.

One Christmas Fairytale

This from David Warren:

My favourite “modern” Christmas song is, “Fairytale of New York,” by the Pogues. I have it not on disc, but listen every Christmas Eve on YouTube. If I had to explain why I so love it, the spell would be broken. Suffice to say, it is perfect in its kind. There are people, even in New York, and these days even in Ireland, who can make no sense of it. This is their constitutional right. But there ought to be a law to prevent it from being “covered” or re-recorded.

He reminds me how much I love the song also. I'll add that Shane MacGowan always had this way about him as to how he wears his struggle on his sleeve (yes, he's had his share of demons), but with enough self-awareness to know it has its part in purifying human fallibility. It could be an Irish-thing too. 

Definitely in agreement with David here:

Merry Christmas!

Top 10 Ways to Deal with the Dark Side

Sorry Star Wars fans, this post is not specifically for you. It's a trojan horse as to how to relate to real evil. We don't like the word evil very much these days. It's too objective and judgmental for our cultural sensibilities. Yet, evil (or darkness beyond the psychological) really exists. Even Jung didn't quite get it right, as he just saw evil as complementary to the good. That's mostly because he didn't believe in an Ultimate good beyond man (he came to regret his television interview response as to whether or not he believed in God: “I don’t need to believe, I know.”). 

Coincidentally, George Lucas was influenced by Jung's harmonious balance between lightness and darkness. That made for a good sci-fi romp, but it added little to good theology. 

As William Wildwood says, “Good is good and evil is evil and there can be no alliance between them... Evil must be overcome not integrated either outwardly in the world or, especially, inwardly in oneself.” The tricky thing for people these days is to truly discern what evil is.  

In any case, real evil is beyond the scope of anything we can resolve by ourselves. Bob recently got an email asking him “advice on how a Christian is supposed to love our zombie invaders.” He then replied with a Top 10 in the comments section that I thought was worth re-posting. More so, because I see this an inventory of profundity to deal with general evil in the world. I interject a few thoughts in brackets:

#10:
The world is your challenge, precisely. Let the world be the world, because that is what it is always going to be anyway. Your task is to participate in it, but from a transcendent point of view. If you think we're f*cked now, you are correct. But history teaches that this has always been the case.

[As the Chinese alluded, we are always living in interesting times. But at least today, the phones keep getting better.]

#9:
Always be practicing karma yoga, which means engaging in good works for their own sake, while renouncing any fruit thereof. Don't be good for a reward -- otherworldly or thiswise -- but because you love virtue.

#8:
In the long run, all the idiocy in the world tends to cancel out.

#7:
Davila: “Christianity does not solve 'problems'; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level.”

#6:
God himself is crucified in and by history. That's called a hint. And “you shall be persecuted for my sake.”

#5:
Abandon mere horizontal hope and try to see things from the perspective of eternity.

[I'm reading a terrific book on the Inklings, and it appears Tolkien used imagination beyond the everyday world to give readers an escape from death and the resolution of eucatastrophe to offer vertical hope.]

#4:
You can't change yourself. What makes you think you can change the world? However, this doesn't mean change doesn't take place. Unexpected vertical interventions are everywhere. 

[Bob elaborates on this: “You might say that man is a necessary but not sufficient cause of his own betterment.” Or in other words, we must take responsibility for our change through effort, but real change can only come from grace.]

#3:
There are no solutions, only trade-offs.

[So much for the experts.]

#2:
Don't worry, it will all be over soon. Practice transcendental humor. Life is ridiculous. Don't wait until you are sick and dying before you realize this, but live your terrestrial life in light of its end.

[Peter Kreeft said it best: “Life is neither a tragedy nor a comedy but a tragicomedy. If we do not both laugh and cry at life, we do not understand it.”]

#1:
Nothing is possible without God, without whom you are condemned to an absurcular existence, devoid of liberating graces from above. Aspiration, rejection (of unreality), and surrender are the keys. You cannot lift yourself by your own buddhastraps, so the sooner you turn yourself in and surrender peacefully, the better.

[Or maybe this could be summed up in three short verses from 1 Thessalonians 5: Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.]

The Perennial Problem

I can sympathize with the syncretic endeavor in religion. It reaches out to see the patterned relationship in all things to cohere an elegant map that simplifies all the roads to God. That's what drew me to Wilber, Almaas, and Schuon. But like any 'ism, perennialism has its share of cracks in the foundation. Jorge Ferrer recently gave a compelling talk that makes this point explicitly.

Is this Reality?

So what's the issue with perennialism, neo- or otherwise? It comes down to spiritual ultimate and goals are not all valued equally in the major traditions. Some value awareness, some the Trinity, others more embodiment. Where I don't agree with Ferrer is his concern for sectarianism (or spiritual elitism) becomes pernicious. Yet, he clearly espouses a participatory framework that is very relational, and some metaphysical systems are clearly more relational than others. If we can't reconcile it all in a neat little bow, let's not diminish quality when we see it.

(In my view, the ultimate is relational. But that's another story for another time.)

Alasdair MacIntyre noted the need to situate oneself in tradition to know the standards of the tradition. In other words, you can't find a universal standard by which to measure traditions’ rightness. The standards are always internal to a tradition and therefore requires membership in that community, making a syncretic approach to all traditions untenable. As they say, if you believe in everything equally, you essentially believe in nothing.

MacIntyre argues that philosophy in general and ethics in particular cannot proceed by means of reasoning from neutral, self-evident facts accepted by all rational persons. And if our philosophical/ethical communities are incommensurable, then we need to accept that any attempt at perennialism will also fall short.

So maybe we can't create a synthesis of the Religion of Tomorrow. But taking Ferrer's and MacIntyre's perspective into account, it may be we are best served by situating ourselves at home in one path or possibly some hybridization approach. Truth and method can come from different traditions, but not all the traditions. (I've always contended to be open to Truth wherever it can be found.) Moreover, being in a tradition does not have to compromise our ability to hold a critical eye towards it. We can always have both a keen sense of irony and reverence towards any rock we stand on.

But I will leave with a quote from Nikos Kazantzakis that Ferrer mentions in his presentation that gets to heart of the matter of the perennial problem:

Within me even the most metaphysical problem takes on a warm physical body which smells of sea, soil, and human sweat. The Word, in order to touch me, must become warm flesh. Only then do I understand — when I can smell, see, touch.

Random Signals #2

David Warren mentions, “We make fun of things because they are wrong, yet at the same time, we candidly admit their attraction. We use humour to flash moral insight, and to disarm.” But now the subject of moral insight (or lack thereof) is the comedian himself.

Et tu, Louie?

Louie CK, like for many, has been my latest preoccupation in today's comedy scene. Unlike some professional tricksters, he cleverly brought his essence (albeit perhaps contrived at times) to his humor. Now we find out he was fallible to weird sexual proclivities brought upon by a power dynamic he took advantage of with several women. The dark underbelly of comedy has crossed another line.

His actions are not defensible and this blemish probably recontextualizes my relationship to his art. The demarcation between art and the artist has always been a challenging one, since great art has not always been made manifest by great men.

But let's consider the outrage in this time in culture. Could it also be that our sensitivities have resulted from the secular edifice we now stand on? Maybe if we took transcendence more seriously, we wouldn't take ourselves so seriously. Instead, we have become fragmented and tribal, looking for our next scapegoat to release our existential anxiety and anger. Some justly deserve their fall from grace, others are just a product of their time.

*

Speaking of our times, one astute facebook poster observed that “students are trying to deconstruct what they have not properly constructed yet.” As such, we are burdened with a generation full of contradictions: “they are dogmatic about relativity, ethnocentric about cultural acceptance (you’re either an “ally” or an enemy), hateful in the name of compassion, etc.” Again, it's a good prognosis that can't be equally matched with a proper cure. We just have to go through it, and see what we have wrought. 

*

I suppose we can also grapple with what in culture today will remain tomorrow. We speak of some artifact groping for the Eternal. NPR recently considered this with music. I am not sure what music from today will last through the ages, if any. But there are some examples I would place bets on. For instance, take a popular gem from Al Green. It's about as perfect as you can get with soul music, and it nearly fulfills Josef Pieper's insight: “Music opens a path into the realm of silence. Music reveals the human soul in stark “nakedness,” as it were, without the customary linguistic draperies.” 

Al Green, incidentally, gave up his commercial success to do gospel music. He probably got to the place where he felt soul music wasn't enough. But this was:

And then there are lesser known gems that deserve more recognition:

Commitments that Cohere

Commitments are not always the strongest suit on my end. I suppose it's an issue on honing in on passions (as well as placing too much emphasis on passion) or the fear of being duped (by a passion). But I've always intuited there are always the decisions in life that matter over the frivolity we spend so much time on.

This builds on a recent post I wrote about the complementary of freedom and order. As Tim Keller states, “Freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones.”

So what are the right restrictions? Or commitments, for that matter? I came across a recent speech from David Brooks, who seems to be channeling some ideas from Charles Murray, around the commitments that matter. These are:

• To a loving partner/spouse and family.
• To a vocation.
• To a community.
• To a philosophy or faith.

The issue is it's either a failure to see or a failure to move. First, we need to see the significance of these commitments. That can only come from an innate wisdom, the mores of a culture or tradition, or exemplars that can guide us. As Brooks and Murray have pointed out, a life is usually fulfilled when most or all of these commitments are aligned to Truth.

But once we see the see this, then we need to act. In some cases, that motivation can be out love or a yearning. We fall into it by grace or are nudged towards it by a innate seeking. But if the motivation doesn't come, then we need discipline. That's why passion is such a tricky thing. Sometimes it takes effort that begets the grace of true passion. 

It is also a matter of seeing where our commitments are coming from. Brooks elaborates, “Imagine finding a faith and saying, "Does this serve my needs?" That's not a faith, that's just  opportunism. ... So you have to adopt a different lens, a moral lens which is beyond rationality, which takes you beyond utilitarian thinking, when you have to just throw it all in. People who adopt a moral lens are looking for ways to forget themselves, surrender themselves, throw themselves into something without counting the cost. They understand, if only by instinct, that their true joy is found on the distance side of unselfishness and not on this side. People who has used a moral lens don't ask, "What do I want from life?" They ask, "What is life asking of me?"”

Even when it comes to relationships, people with this moral lens “don't ask, "Is this person right for me?" They ask, "Can I love her in a way that brings out her loveliness? Can we take our private passion and direct it outward? Can we -- can I go through every day assuming that my own selfishness is the core problem in our relationship?"” I wonder how many singles have come across these values on Tinder? 

In our best moments, we can intuit that coming from a place of less self-centeredness is what gives our commitments meaning and purpose. But here again, it often takes effort to see this and to move on it. 

It's not always easy, but the things that give life richness and fulfillment often never are.

Gardeners Wanted

We can't force plants to grow. In any garden we tend to, we can only cultivate an environment that spurs the growth on. This includes all the tilling, planting, nourishing, and pruning that constantly needs to be done. And yet, we have no control of the broader environment, therefore we often acquiesce to what nature has in store. But these days we see everyone wants to be a builder. We want to master and take ownership of any growth we do — whether we are an ambitious materialist or a spiritual aspirant.

I appreciate one version of growth depicted in a Bruce Charlton post, taken from William Arkle's A Geography of Consciousness, depicting a spectrum of spiritual progress:

lower man > average > responsible > sophisticated cynic > idealist > poet > mystic > higher man.

The point is not to worry so much where we are, or to force ourselves to be at the higher end of the spectrum. The significance of this is to keep moving forward, gently and wholly. As they say, many are called but a few are chosen.

(BTW, if you're reading this, you're probably at least above average.)

So here's the scary thing when it comes to growth: there is one place many of us get stuck, not quite as in a stand still, but more like a cycling between progress and regression in a pool of fragmented turmoil.

The place where this turmoil happens the most is with the sophisticated cynic. As Charlton notes, “the sophisticated cynic is at the Dead-Centre of the evolutionary scheme - poised, suspended, trapped between lower and higher consciousness. This is a state of wide awareness of options and possibilities; made possible by increased knowledge and learning - but experienced as a pervasive relativism.”

Relativism is a metaphysical resignation with the culture at large. And when you're intelligent, you've got all the more excuse to drop any convictions and stay in dead-center. 

“And the centre is 'dead' because there is a state of demotivation. The longer a period of time that is spent in the dead centre; the harder it gets to escape.” Talk about the inertia one must work through even if we want to grow! I'm reminded of Augustine when he said in his younger years, “Lord, make me chaste – but not yet!”

The sophisticated cynic's “materialism and hedonism reduces and deconstructs all higher values - while he 'knows better' than the natural, spontaneous, instinctive Man - and he finds he just cannot forget or discard his sophistication, science, philosophy, ideology... They come back, again and again, to haunt him.” We are all condemned to "religion", but many of our priests are full of clever foolishness.

“The sophisticated cynic is therefore pulled in both directions; and also repelled by both directions. The sophisticated cynic is the permanent adolescent - too mature to be a child, too immature to be an adult; too bored by both immaturity and maturity, seeing-through the innocence of childhood and the responsibility of adulthood. He is cut-off from the basic satisfactions of simply getting-by in practical, material life; and also from the spiritual satisfactions of living for ideals located outwith mortal life and human limitation.” This is Peter Pan syndrome, but without the flying.

“The sophisticated cynic knows that the world of communications - of nature, of other people, of his own evanescent thoughts - are doubtful and unreliable: he has often experienced this unreliability. This insight itself implies that some other and solid form of knowing exists (with which communication is implicitly being contrasted); but when it comes to any specific knowledge, the sophisticated cynic remains unsure: he lives in an atmosphere of doubt... Yet at the same time, he doubts his own doubts, suspects there is 'more to life', and cannot embrace a fully nihilistic skepticism.” 

This is one hell of a diagnosis, but for Christ's sake where's the doctor's cure?!

“We begin as immature little-children of God; in spiritual adolescence we solipsistically assert ourselves to be the one-real-God in a universe made-up by our-selves; in maturity we recognise that we are products-of and inhabitants-of the framework of God's creation; destined to become a multiplicity of gods; destined to become God's grown-up children and loving companions both of each other and of the deity. And this is the basis of new, real, permanent relationship.”

Once again, it comes down to relationships. But here with True metaphysics! And in that we develop our capacity to consciously relate to the Spirit, and to make conscious connections that enable us to identify and grasp the whole of reality. 

And yet again, this is like the gentle growth of gardening. We tend to what we can, but allow nature to take its course. Like our flora, we flourish, but forward by the way of upward instead of the reverse. 

“The phase [of the sophisticated cynic] is a necessary point through-which Men must pass if they are to attain the autonomy required by higher consciousness; but if the lessons are to be learned, then the phase must feel real - must indeed be real - at the time it is being experienced. There must to be a pause in progression - and this pause may become prolonged and arrested into stasis.”

In such spiritual desolation, sometimes it is best to do nothing but to bear witness.

I recall this beautiful passage in MotT:

Now, we occultists, magicians, esotericists and Hermeticists — all those who want to "do" instead of merely waiting, who want "to take their evolution in their own hands" and "to direct it towards an aim"—are confronted with this choice in a much more dramatic way, I should say, than is so for people who are not concerned with esotericism. Our principal danger (if not the only true danger) is that of preferring the role of "builders of the tower of Babel" (no matter whether personally or in a community) to watching over "as gardeners or vine-growers the garden or the vine of the Lord". Truth to tell, the only truly morally founded reason for keeping esotericism "esoteric", i.e. for not bringing it to the broad light of day and popularising it, is the danger of the great misunderstanding of confusing the tower with the tree, as a consequence of which "masons" will be recruited instead of "gardeners".

Better that gardeners shall apply. No need to concern ourselves with collective utopias; instead, we sort ourselves out with our internal, external, and Higher relationships under a coherent metaphysical ideal. Then we can grow in the way that was Infinitely intended.