Happiness is Not Enough

I still appreciate a good Buddhist or Advaita pointing out instruction as long as it's pointing to Reality (one of my favorite instructors these days is this guy, who gets kudos for his visual backgrounds alone). Many come into these teachings (and as I did to some extent) to find some relief from their suffering, and come to a place of happiness. Over the years, I've come to see happiness is not the raison d'être for any spiritual practitioner. In regards to meditation as a practice, Frithjof Schuon notes the goal is not to have access to “limitless energy, heightened efficiency of thought and action, and release from tensions and anxiety, peace of mind and happiness. All such advantages have no spiritual value, because it is not happiness that matters, it is the motive of happiness and the nature of happiness.”

Let's ponder this notion around the motive or nature of happiness. I would gather Schuon is expressing something that is beyond therapeutic or conditional outcome that may accompany any insights through practice. We are not chasing happiness just for the sake of happiness, but perhaps to have a relationship with the Source of it. This is a much bigger deal, and probably beyond what most ask for when they get on a spiritual path. For to encounter the Source is to let go of the self that seeks something for itself, including happiness.  

Pedagogical tools to free oneself from the conditional mind has its place, but it can't replace ontology and cosmology. This is why Advaita and some schools of Buddhism are good at pointing the us toward liberation from existence, but not necessarily expressing the full extent of the cosmological drama as to why liberation is part of the story and to what ends it may be for existence. Some may posit that liberation is as Eckhart once stated is to live beyond asking why. And yet we still live with wonder of Truth and the telos it has gifted to us. Does it not still matter to inquire where have we come from?, what are we doing here?, and where are we going? 

In his terrific book about Schuon, Patrick Laude says Schuon “criticizes the frequent tendency to reduce Zen to a mere psychology, thereby depriving it of its anchorage in transcendence and its rigorous cultivation of a sense of form. What Schuon criticizes in all these cases is the flattening down of theological dogmas and metaphysical principles but also, and above all, all modes of unconscious profanation of religion resulting from a disconnection from the imperatives of transcendence and the sacred.” In other words, if we remove the transcendent nature of Reality and reduce it to a humanitarian ethos of “feel good” and “be kind”, it can easily get diminished to pseudo-spirituality of sentimentality, therapeutic relief, and bland social justice exercises.

Laude adds,

Truth is associated with discernment. It is distinguished from error that it rejects and extinguishes, as it were. It has to do with adequation to reality. In the absence of such an adequation, nothing is truly possible in the spiritual domain. While many modern spiritual seekers would deem intellectual principles to be foreign to spiritual endeavors, and largely inoperative or useless when it comes to realization, Schuon, like most gnostics from the past, sees the intellectual discernment of Reality as a prerequisite for any grounded and sustainable spiritual life.

Discernment is not done to create more dogmatic principles and negate realization, but to create a “virtual realization of its content.” Laude says, “However, far from any alleged intellectualism or abstraction, Schuon asserts time and time again that a consistent understanding of the Absolute gives rise to imperative spiritual and moral consequences” (emphasis mine). Or as they say: as above, so below.

One of the focal points of Schuon's work is “the oneness of the object demands the totality of the subject.” The exclusive reality of the Absolute requires from us all that we are, including our happiness or even our need to be happy. 

We Are Mimetic Fools

We need good models; not the hot, sexy kind, although I can appreciate the beauty of the human form, but models to imitate in good character and essence. Without good models, we don't stop modelling. We are always modelling something to be desired.

I recently read Luke Burgis' book Wanting, where he gets into Rene Girard's mimetic theory: 

Girard believed that all true desire—the post-instinctual kind—is metaphysical. People are always in search of something that goes beyond the material world. If someone falls under the influence of a model who mediates the desire for a handbag, it’s not the handbag they are after. It’s the imagined newness of being they think it will bring. “Desire is not of this world,” Girard has said, “… it is in order to penetrate into another world that one desires, it is in order to be initiated into a radically foreign existence.”

So once again we are condemned to be religious. We are always groping for something to compensate for the unsatisfactoriness of life. But how do we do that in a culture that makes man the standard of himself? We see the results thus far. In the age of the internet, authority is everywhere—which means its nowhere! With all the fragmentation and atomization, we lack a center to rely on and are therefore compelled to outsource our humanity to the influencers and “experts”; to various shifting authority figures; to mimetic models that come and go and have little grounding in reality. 

Burgis states, “it seems that the primary and underexplored reason for our stagnation and decadence is mimesis. We lack a transcendent reference point outside the system. Meanwhile, everyone is more or less imitating everyone else. Our culture is stuck because we’re fighting over space in a pool, next to the ocean. Yet nobody dares to talk openly about it, this mimesis. It’s the hidden force driving our cultural development, and yet it’s taboo to speak about, like envy.”

Mimesis requires a light lift, and therefore it's easily exported from person to person. It's stripped of complexity, richness, and depth; providing a safe haven of conformity without the risk of social alienation from one's tribe or any intellectual challenge that would make one uncomfortable or humble.

What is more fascinating (and often tragic) is that our choices in life are always prioritized for us by the object sought than the inclination in our soul. In D.C. Schindler's The Politics of the Real, he makes this astute point:

The motion of desire does not begin in the soul, but instead begins in the object sought, which, as Aristotle has said, stands to the soul as an unmoved mover. Properly understood, this means that the good that I pursue makes a claim on me before I make a claim on it in my choice. In other words, in pursuing a good, the compelling power of which I recognize rather than arbitrarily posit, I am implicitly and analogously representing its authority, as we will elaborate below. My choice is always and inevitably responsive and thus “obedient” at its base; whenever choice occurs, it occurs as a consent to a claim on my appetite that precedes its own deliberate act.

This makes a good case that our models are more important than whatever agency we assume we inhabit. Or in other words, free will is never in a vacuum. This also makes the case for how liberalism without a transcendent model can eat itself alive—which we can easily affirm when we look around. 

Even having a transcendent model can be corrupted, if not Revealed as Truth and grounded in Beauty and Goodness. In other words, we make God a silent partner who makes no demands on us.

What happens, then, when the highest principle of all gets reinterpreted, no longer as pure act, but now more basically as potency—first as potentia absoluta , then as a generic truth expressed incompletely in a variety of traditions, and finally as an “option,” the possible object of “religious preference”? The absolute no longer functions as the ultimate reference point that makes sense of everything else, or rather, because God remains in some sense highest, this revolution in the meaning of God introduces into the cosmic order a fundamental contradiction, which generates an endless, and constantly self-sustaining and indeed self-reinventing, series of dialectics, divisions, and dissemblings (Schindler).

Is there any hope from all this foolishness? Schindler says, “as Plato argued relentlessly in his dialogues, the pursuit of one’s own good is inescapably a pursuit of one’s own good.” To escape our mimetic traps, we need to become good models and have good models. The Saints have always held this role in the Church, and in turn they imitated Christ. Recall Saint Augustine's plea: “Why art thou proud, O man? God for thee became low. Thou wouldst perhaps be ashamed to imitate a lowly man; then at least imitate the lowly God.” There was a reason God became man, so that we can become more than merely man trapped in a fruitless search of empty desires. He imitated us, so we could model Him. 

Next

I came to this conclusion recently: what we do with our life doesn’t matter all that much if it's just about our life. We overvalue our existence to accomplish things, and undervalue what we're already doing. As such, the key is not as to what we're doing, but how we can do it rightly: perhaps with more love; also with an understanding of our role in a grander narrative; maybe having more gratitude for our gifts and appreciating our constraints; and in the end, realizing our life wasn't about us but how we related to God and our fellow man & woman. 

I've come to this posture, as I am more concerned about having a holy death than a long life full of various activities. I hope to have some more years to repent, purify, and commune. But I have no grand ambitions, or even things I need to do on some checklist. I may decide to write a book, or not. I may decide to become a contemplative hermit for a period of time. Or I may fall and grow in love with someone. In any case, I am quite fine being a tad idle; however, not in a passive/bored/checked-out sort of way, but in an enchanted way. Therefore, it doesn't seem to matter as to what—but as to how. 

Recall the parting words in Middlemarch,

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

I've grown accustom to the hidden life. In fact, I wouldn't want it any other way. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be Jordan Peterson or some other thought leader and have all those eyeballs on you. I don't want any of it. If what I write influences someone along the way then I am pleased to not even know it. What I do now is prioritized as to whether or not it brings me closer to God. The grain of culture, while always offering opportunities for growth and freedom, does not become my benchmark for progress. Nor does anything else that can be measured or quantified.

If we can allow for greater Truth to infuse our being and make it our life's practice, we will be prepared for eternity. In the meantime, we must endure the spiritual battle the ego insists upon. We must counter the moment to moment ego contraction with a moment to moment intentional undoing to be closer with God. That is the meaning to life that is not ours to make. Ratzinger makes the astute point, 

“Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received.”

It Starts with One (Primary) and Ends with All (Secondary)

There is tendency to look at the world these days and feel a tad pessimistic. Perhaps hopeful beyond this world, but still despondent about this world. It may have something to do with anti-intellectual relativism, lost virtues, corrupt institutions, new-age gnosticism, technocratic secularism, woke hysteria, hyper-capitalism, godless materialism and transhumanism. That's just for starters. In a more nuance fashion, D. C. Schindler hits on all the issues at the heart of the matter in his recent book, The Politics of the Real:

“There is a basic restlessness, a radical “mobility,” because there is no “anchor” in reality that would present a place of contemplative rest; Instead of real flourishing as the perfection of one’s actual nature, we find a more negative preoccupation above all with safety; Participation, or membership in a reality larger than oneself, is regularly trumped, not so much by the reality of the individual as by the activity of self-assertion; An essentially abstract sense of equality is taken to be a— perhaps the —governing ideal of social existence; Intrinsic meanings and values, which have their roots in actual realities and demand for their recognition the categories of goodness, truth, and beauty, are relentlessly functionalized, identified with what they achieve or produce, and measured by consequences; There is an all-encompassing drag toward materialism, both in the moral/existential sense of the reduction of goodness to economic value and in the properly metaphysical sense of a tendency to interpret “spiritual” realities exhaustively in terms of their material components; A sense of transcendence, in all of its manifestations, is either lost altogether, moralized, or sentimentalized; Cultural forms, and the taste and manners that accompany them, are minimized, held in contempt, or enacted only ironically; The capacity to understand and recognize genuine authority, and the capacity to hold and exercise it (these capacities cannot be separated from each other) disappear, and so authority is generally reduced to power; Political discourse, cut off from reference to the reality of intrinsic meaning that would give it substance and enable genuine deliberation, tends in a formalistic and functional way to the opposition of simple polarities; The profound principle of unity that allows the cultivation of beauty is excluded, and so art tends to fragment into the sentimental (art as kitsch or mere ornament) and the “edgy” (art as political statement)—or both at once; Technology increasingly saturates the culture, penetrating into the most intimate (social relations) and the most significant (work, both manual and intellectual) dimensions of human existence, so that, even when the excitement and curiosity fades and concern begins to set in, the culture can find no substantial resources for resistance; Absent the intrinsic organizing principle of form, there is a tendency toward sprawl in public building and social organization; Architectural style tends to fragment into either pure utility (whether that be measured by economic efficiency or ecological sensitivity) or the purely aesthetic, that is, the intrusion of features that are not only useless but inconvenient and intended only to produce a psychological effect; One witnesses a relentless, collusive effort to deny the essential meanings of things, rooted in the actual givenness of nature; an effort that is forced to go to extremes of absurdity and self-parody; Detached from its roots in the real, language tends to inflate, or to settle into the formulations of (technologically mediated) hip expressions or phrases and words “of the day,” accompanied by a tendency toward hyper-rhetoricization in speech, both public and private; The actuality of human judgment cedes its place increasingly to process, technique, and automation; The “peace” of order is generally imposed, enforced, and repaired through the essentially coercive means of political action, police and military force, and lawyers; Education ceases to be a formation of the person, through his introduction into the tradition, which he is meant to display and pass on in turn, and becomes instead training, the provision of the information and skills needed for individual success; The organization of human affairs, institutions, and collective endeavors tends to take the form of bureaucracy and formalized “management,” whenever it cannot simply be replaced by computer or machine; Philosophy is dethroned by science (and engineering) as the paradigm of human reason; There is a reduction of wisdom traditions to a culture of “scientifically-trained and certified experts”; Natural bonds, or those rooted in nature, are reinterpreted as far as possible from the ground up in terms of contracts (deliberately) entered into by (abstractly) “free” agents; Political authority is reduced to “the state,” which is either relied on in a disordered way (the “nanny state”), insofar as the bureaucratic structures replace the role of “natural” human institutions, or it is rejected as an artificial intrusion into one’s affairs (libertarianism); And finally tradition , rather than unifying a people, becomes a principle of diversity (“cultures and traditions”), and is thereby reduced to a superficial overlay—the seasoning one uses in cooking, the style of dress, taste in music, and so forth.”

There is always a part of us that may decide not to inquire where do we start?!, but to check out entirely! Obviously, this is always the cop-out. The temporal may be an image of the Real, but it's still God's image. The issue is always what is the relationship between the Real and its image. It's not like we can easily integrate them (in the Catholic integral sense or even the Ken Wilber integral sense). 

I like to think of the integralists like this sometimes: Take a clear glass of pure water (here is the Real). You can mix in a few drops of lemon. Fine (a proper image). A few drops of lime. Also fine (another proper image). And then there's a few drops of fecal matter. Not so fine (yucky image). Now I would never drink that water! For some, that's what integration can be. 

This may be a bit grim on a superficial level, so we always need clear, explicit discernment—and that sometimes means putting things in their proper order. I'll drink from the lemon/lime water, but use the poop to fertilize the lemon/lime tree. 

The bottom line is we need to begin with aligning ourselves to the Real beyond whatever cultural or political order we belong to. It starts with us individually before anything can happen. And nothing may happen collectively. We may not even make a dent to our immediate circles, never mind the culture at large, in any measurable way. Yet, there is an immeasurable change of heart in us which will always matter in God's eyes. 

Beyond this, it is still essential that we maintain the Christian virtue of hope, and not mistake this hope as belonging exclusively to our own individual salvation or liberation. God's creation will always matter and there will always be the deepest longing for the redemption of the whole world. It is important to keep this in mind, because otherwise the virtue of hope might seem to be in some ways selfish, with us not wanting to take part in history. 

The purpose of the earthly city is to provide the conditions which will allow human beings to develop themselves to the fullness of their gifts and in right relationship to the Real. And in this two things are necessary: that we live in fellowship with each other, and that we live in communion with God. However, I would not put this on equal footing: one is always primary; and that is our relationship to the Real is first!

Bruce Charlton recently wrote on his blog:

“There is an alternative way of being Christian - one which offers the possibility of a hopeful attitude to this moral world, and a sense of positive purpose for this mortal life; but it involves regarding tradition, orthodoxy, church, human-groups as being of secondary, not primary, importance. Indeed, I believe that the alternative is a deeper and more validly Christ-derived truth.”

I tend to agree.

Perennial Prescriptions

I don't really do New Year's resolutions anymore, since I now believe anything worth doing is worth doing always. Sure, there are minor practical considerations that often need tweaking, but best to get first things first right and all those other secondary matters will eventually line up in their proper order. 

In regards to those important primary matters, it's not like we can negotiate our way into them through some annual ritual. We have to want it ALWAYS—even if partially concealed with competing desires and commitments. 

And if you're not tending to those important things, eventually you will get signals you're going the wrong way. COVID has done that to many in my circles: not the virus itself, but the environment it created that forced many to look at themselves. So if I was to give advise for those looking to put what matters first, I would probably echo an excerpt I read from E.F. Schumacher's excellent book A Guide for the Perplexed.

I don't think these 'tasks' have to been done in a strict linear fashion as Schumacher details below, but could actually all be approached simultaneously while emphasizing some aspects over others depending on one's stage of life. I do agree with him that you have to at least start with the first and second to some extent. 

He says that,

“His first task is to learn from society and 'tradition' and to find his temporary happiness in receiving directions from outside.”

[Why re-create the wheel (or at least recognize you have been indoctrinated into one spoke of the wheel without being aware of the whole of it)? There is so much to learn from culture and tradition. And not a sclerotic tradition, but one that comes alive today. Human nature does not change much, and the real insights to Truth are eternal. The shoulders we stand on often have more originality and freshness than many of the contemporary thinkers of today. Learn from the past and present, with breadth, height, width, and depth.]

“His second task is to interiorise the knowledge he has gained, sift it, sort it out, keep the good and jettison the bad; this process may be called 'individuation', becoming self-directed.” 

[We are still individuals with particular inclinations. Not everything will resonate with everyone. The point is to integrate what does make you come alive and make it your own to embody; with your gifts; and to be lived with autonomy and mastery.]

“His third task is one that he cannot tackle until he has accomplished the first two, and for which he needs the very best help he can possibly find: it is 'dying' to oneself, to one's likes and dislikes, to all one's ego-centric preoccupations. To the extent that he succeeds in this, he ceases to be directed from outside, and he also ceases to be self-directed. He has gained freedom, or, one might say, he is then God-directed.”

[This is an endless task of praying, meditating, and contemplating that is really not a task. It is more an undoing. We undo our cravings around who we think we are to become as we really are. As t.k. says: “I” is a superstition masquerading as unquestionability. So better to always inquire what is Real beyond our ego-centered “I”.]

What I particularly like about Schumacher's prescription is it includes both the inner and outer path to God. I'm also reading W. Norris Clarke's The Philosophical Approach to God, where he states “It is one of the powerful perennial attractions of the Neoplatonic style of philosophy that the inner spiritual ascent of the soul to the One and the outer metaphysical ascent through the cosmos reveal themselves as two sides of the same coin. The spiritual and the metaphysical are not closed off from each other, but mirror each other in different orders.”

We are here to understand, and “to understand is ultimately to unify: it means first to discern the parts of anything clearly, but finally to unify them into a meaningful whole in itself and then with all else that we know” (Clarke).

The Metaverse: A Place Where We Will Be “Either Greater than Kings or Less than Men”

“Ultimately software-based humans will be vastly extended  beyond the severe limitations of humans as we know them today. They will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies, foglet projected bodies, and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms and other forms of nanotechnology.” — Ray Kurzweil

Something has not been created yet, and I'm already lambasting the idea of it. So be it, as I always happy to proved wrong (but let's leave my superego out of this). I may not be able to predict human progress, but I can sort of predict human nature. It was Toqueville who noted that Democratic citizens may someday see themselves “either greater than kings or less than men.” It does look like we have gotten nearly there, with the metaverse probably be the straw that breaks the camel's back. 

Today, we rarely look upward to God, but instead have supplanted any transcendent with manmade ideologies and the political state. We then buffer our world further still by looking inward through our constant barrage of technological distraction that disconnects us from substantive intimacy. And this has led to more isolation without any need for us to look outward towards our fellow citizens—many seen in contempt because they're boxed in to a subcategory of “other” without a shared universal identity. I can't see an easy way out, but moving our worlds further into virtual/augmented realities will probably just heighten our proclivity to dismantle our humanity.

After all, it was Stanley Kubrick who believed as we come to rely on technology to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens out. So in other words, artificial intelligence won't come to us, but we will come to it. But what is it about such entrenched artificial medium that lessens our potential for being fully human?

Without any deeper meaning and right praise to the transcendent, it is too easy to fall into despair and to allow ourselves get distracted by entertainment and technology. The burden to cultivate meaning is too much when faith has been lost by the existing institutions. We may dabble in new age modalities, but this will never cultivate the time-tested institutions that have scaled shared practices, community, coherent doctrines, sacrifice, and faith for millennia. And I don't care how much futurists sell us the utopian visions as to how the metaverse will transform our world; it will always fall short of expectations of transforming the person (keep in mind they always toot their horns by their own evaluation criteria, such as material wealth, comfort, convenience, and a trivial enjoyment). 

The truth is the metaverse can never equate real life and existence. Existence is immeasurable and prior to anything created—instead of being an emergent property of manmade creativity. Living out one's life in some abstracted manmade environment can never compensate for real lived experience. Of course there are those who prefer the abstract to the real, such as our leftist managerial class. Allen says the left “do very little with their hands, and so tend to privilege form -- intellectual ideas and theories, design, structural adjustments and so on -- over function, over actually engaging with the real world.” Sounds like the metaverse will be primarily voting one way to its favor, while creating a deeper addiction to the simulation at the cost of real. 

Real life is also embodied, and as much as the metaverse can simulate sensate experience it will always be disconnected. The fully human embodied experience goes beyond superficial sensations on our skin and through our visual and auditory functions, but is a more deeply reciprocal relationship that involves our heart, intuition, intelligibility and the deep subtle sensations that lie beyond our skin. We engage reality with our whole person! Moreover, real life is also an open system allowing one to go beyond oneself while any simulated world is a closed system. There is no God in the metaverse, beyond another simulated limited object.

Offering people the ability the script-write their world leaves one cold towards humanity's significance. We will play god with our simulated life, instead of seeing our place in a cosmological journey where we are fated with limited choices and possibilities. The forthcoming metaverse will get closer to simulating a superficial sensate experience of the real, but in the end it will ultimately dim the person to meet a lesser baseline vitality of one's humanity while he/she is allowed to control a world that offers no meaning.

Unself or Unreal

I've been on blogging break due to the laziness that comes from the summer heat and my cultivation of unselfing a self of self-importance. In other words, I'm getting sick of myself trying to make a point or pontificating here. My inquiry and practice to Truth does not subside, but turns here and there while never straying too far from its unifying principle. But do I have to always write about it? Sometimes, I'd rather let it simmer or even shimmer. 

I have read some recent things that turns my attention to why smart people can be very stupid. While I can never be knowledgeable about everything, I weed out the chaff of books that probably don't need to be read. While I may be drawn to philosophy, I don't think I need to read most philosophers. Here's a good reason...

“...many students who take philosophy degrees have the distinct feeling that they’ve got on the wrong train. They expect to be dealing with the towering mysteries of human existence, they expect to be studying the accounts of the immortals who went before us, who attempted to scale the same heights, they expect to be guided on this odyssey by interesting people who have made the same journey and returned with pristine insights into the path ahead. What they find instead is a cross between a librarian and an accountant piling up items of knowledge like coloured beads then handing them out to confused and bored young people who are expected to categorise them in, at best, a slightly different way to those who preceded them” (Darren Allen).

That's why reading too much without a coherent center can fragment and frustrate the reader. And does it even change you for the better? Collecting all that information inflates the ego, and rarely opens one to being teachable. We know “People don’t first reason their way into their beliefs; they seek beliefs and attitudes which correspond to their felt inner reality, their way of living and their life-in-the-world, then find reasons to accept and defend those beliefs and attitudes; which is why reason cannot change them.” We can only be awakened from our deeper assumptions of reality. But that hurts too much for most.

And then there's the folks who claim street smarts, and like to point to their experience. But what do people really mean they know from experience? 

“Similarly, experience is ordinarily — and philosophically —understood piecemeal, as a series of knowable things that are learnt, remembered or possessed, rather than a totality which is lived. Ego can hardly be said to experience at all, instantly transporting whatever happens into the modal warehouse of the self, where it is stored, evaluated and used to get a better job, lord it over newcomers, or gas on about what it knows or what has happened to it. When people say ‘I have experience’ they nearly always mean that they possess something which is not experience, but the corpse of it.”

So we are always in the way of reality which can truly suck the life out of it. So to self-correct, we chase bigger vistas and thrills without bringing the whole self for the ride. 

“The isolating mind of the sleeping ego is like a blazing torch in the forest, over-illuminating a minute area of the dark, sharply dividing the user from everything else, which thereby seems both darker than the light and more uncannily different. To counter the threat of this obscure otherness, I turn up the torch, brighter and brighter, expanding my view further and further, but the light is so bright it now kills what it is directed at, petrifying the trees, shrivelling up the plants. I can see more and more, but fear of the darkness doesn’t decrease — in being suppressed, quite the opposite — so I turn up the beam higher and higher, looking for life in more and more distant realms, wiping out more and more life with the killing exposure, until, finally, I am left in a super-bright desert, blindingly overlit in every direction, and dead. All along, all I had to do was switch the torch off and grow accustomed to the darkness.”

So once again, we escape, overcompensate, indulge, but we never own our shite? That's because “Ego has two basic modi operandi; that of the physicalist, viewing reality as a matrix of cause and effect relationships, or that of the solipsist, for whom no laws, literal or otherwise, have any validity.” Which is like saying the non-physical aspect of ourselves doesn't have a part in existence or our non-physical selves are the center of existence. Either view fails. But then there are those who make a conscious effort to ‘transcend’ the ego. In this effort, they assume the ego is just a collection of thoughts, when there is so much more unconsciously stirring behind the scenes. So they spend...

“a great deal of time meditating, being mindful, jingo-jangling to DMT or swimming through esoteric oceans, often ends up being an extended psyche-wank which severs one’s participation to the represented world as it is — the shared canvas upon which the social self paints — which slowly becomes less interesting and less real, leaving ‘mystic’, meditating man, hovering round his magic, Romantic mind-realm, feeling tremendously wise and enlightened, while, in reality — the reality we share — he is well and truly up himself.”

This is what Allen terms as “orthophilia” or “compulsive avoidance of consciousness and context by over-focus on one’s emotional life, health or ‘spirituality’.”

Sounds dreadful, but been there and done that. 

In the end, we just need to unself through engaging God and disengaging our vices with an unwavering fanatical-like single mindedness. In seems our ancestors were right, albeit less sophisticated than us clever moderns. They did bear and struggle with it, but in our comforts of endless distraction we seem less willing to do so.

“Love God, with all your heart, and with all your will, and with all your mind, and with all your body, and renounce the devil, and all his works. Now and forever. So be it.”

* All quotes are from Darren Allen's excellent book Self and Unself.

Pickers & Mixers

“Experience is the worst teacher. It gives the test before giving the lesson.” — unknown

I came across the above study that shows the vast majority of Americans hold a syncretic worldview. I do have issues with this study, specifically as to how people were categorized and the bias of the source, but regardless let's go on the assumption (which I see very much anecdotally) that most people create their own worldview by pulling from various sources as well as being indoctrinated by the culture at large. Most of us who are spiritually and intellectually plugged-in are going to have syncretic tendencies anyways since we have been exposed to so much. We can't undo that. But perhaps we can decide to lean in to where Truth best reveals itself.

Maybe that's why Valentin Tomberg's Meditations of the Tarot was such an influential book for me. Tomberg was exposed to a lot of New Thought ideas, being a student of Rudolf Steiner, and having exposure to the Eastern religions and various esoteric and gnostic systems. But in the end, he chose the Catholic Church. 

How anachronistic of him! 

He could have kept his connection to the sacred without the institutional doctrine and demands of the Church. But I think in the end, he saw that New Thought ideas had its own cosmological dogma, high priests, and gatekeepers. Moreover, all his experiences confirmed for him that “the Roman Catholic Church is, in fact, a depository of Christian spiritual truth, and the more one advances on the way of free research for this truth, the more one approaches the Church. Sooner or later one inevitably experiences that spiritual reality corresponds—with an astonishing exactitude—to what the Church teaches” (Tomberg). Whether this was the cart leading the horse, he probably saw that Steiner's as well as other attempts to update the “spiritual science” was a futile in the arc of eternity. It became too abstract where the Church centered itself around a Person. 

It is easy when you reduce God to a spiritual science, people can begin to believe they are the source of their own divinity or if they believe in “God”, He has been reduced to a silent partner or a deist/pantheist God either removed from the natural world or just equal to it.

Most people aren't free thinking or intuitive enough to be syncretists. Today's culture at large often seems rudderless, selfish, and emotionally-centered, prioritizing a life of comfort and convenience. Thinking for oneself requires a lot of hard work and time. It can be decentering and uncomfortable. And it is unlikely most will be able to push themselves to create the proper conditions for spiritual growth on their own. (This is true for the religious as well as the just spiritual.)

Tracey Rowland makes an astute point in her book on theology, that when even adherents to Catholicism try to pick and mix different aspects of doctrine, it creates a “disintegrative pluralism” that can lead to disunity within oneself  and eventually the institution itself.

“Disintegrative pluralism occurs when people get so hooked on one part of the Christian kerygma that they begin to lose a panoramic vision. What should be a symphonic harmony is reduced to something quite discordant because one note or melody is drowning everything else. Typically some principle or doctrine is taken out of its rightful position and exaggerated or some fashionable concept becomes a hermeneutic through which every other part of Christian teaching must pass or else be sidelined. To put this principle another way, Catholic theology is renowned for its capacity to cope with mystery and with paradox and for its similarity to Gothic architecture. Just as every small piece of a Gothic cathedral has a role to play in maintaining the balance of the opposing structural tensions, so too, in Catholic theology, there is always a delicate balance between apparently antithetical ‘truths’ held in tension. When this tension is lost, when one single buttress is made to bear all the weight, because this particular buttress has become a fashionable subject of reflection, then all possibility of transcendence is lost and one is left with something quite defective, destined to collapse.”

Simone Weil said, “Each religion is alone true, that is to say, that at the moment we are thinking of it we must bring as much attention to bear on it as if there were nothing else ... A 'synthesis' of religion implies a lower quality of attention.” We are better off to go deep than wide. And as syncretists, it is too tempting to not purify the elements that need to be repudiated, especially when bucking against the culture at large. It is too easy to want to integrate everything in the milieu. But even then, we need to be able to see our loves rightly ordered. For even the Catholic Church tries to live up to its name (catholic meaning all embracing) by not excluding anything, even Hell, but remaining consistent by putting things in their proper order. All in all, this does not deny the immediate presence of God in all things.

If most of us are bound to be religious syncretists going forward, then God help us. Because there is probably no way we are going to be able to this rightly on our own.

Niceness or God?

I've seen this period of pandemic cloistering challenge many relationships. I've witnessed break-ups and strains and those attempting to mend some old wounds, but it appears we are being prodded to operate on another plane than mundane existence. In my case (albeit a natural introvert), I've seen my outer world get a tad smaller while my inner world gets tossed around and stretched. Is this a good thing? Sure, why not. We are all discombobulating our comfort zones for a greater harmony. And in this harmony, we can occupy a higher moral space.

C. S. Lewis said,

“Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play. You may have noticed that modern people are nearly always thinking about the first thing and forgetting the other two.”

Perhaps during this time we are being nudged to sort ourselves out with “the other two.” I once had a date where the person said there is no need for religion, we just have to be nice to each other. If we settle for a therapeutic harmony of be nice-happy-content with others, then we will limit our gifts and moral aspirations to this world only. 

In truth, most of us are just being Dick's...

“As long as Dick does not turn to God, he thinks his niceness is his own, and just as long as he thinks that, it is not his own. It is when Dick realises that his niceness is not his own but a gift from God, and when he offers it back to God—it is just then that it begins to be really his own. For now Dick is beginning to take a share in his own creation. The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose” (Lewis).

Without the transcendent, people become self-satisfied with their character. They want the heights of good experiences without the length of moral demands. But how will our experiences add up if they ultimately come to an end? They want the beauty of diverse tolerance without the rigor of unified principles. But who is more tolerant than the devil himself? 

We can't just be nicely swimming in the currents, without having any rocks to stand on. So our challenge is to find our rock. Some may believe all that is solid melts into air anyway so what is the point. But you can't even have air without an atmosphere that holds it all together!

As William Stoddard says: “People find themselves drowning in a sea of accidents; they do not know how to reach the one substance which alone is truth.” But there is a way to reach Truth. In one's life, solid ground can be found in the inner silence of sacredness, and the outer Tradition of cultural and religious wisdom. In the wisdom traditions, “these two components are always present: theodicy and soteriology; doctrine and method; theory and practice; dogma and sacrament; unity and union.”

We need to understand our relationship to God, and how to liberate ourselves to be closer to Him and His creation. Being nice just won't cut it. In fact, we may need to cut through it to see the Truth. 

“A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save” (Lewis).

Between Melting and Freezing / The Soul’s Sap Quivers

Today's blog title is credited to T.S. Eliot, who happens to be a favorite poet of Shinzen Young, author of The Science of Enlightenment. Shinzen is also one of my favorite meditation teachers as of late. I find him to be extremely clear and gentle on the trials and tribulations of deep meditation practice, as well as appreciate his pragmatic and scientific approach with minimal Buddhist jargon. I still have an immense appreciation for Siddhartha Gautama's refined formulation of the original dharma (which Shinzen often pulls from), and continue to see these methods as part of my practice within the cosmology of a Catholic theocentric worldview. I look at Buddhist practice as bottom-up; and Christianity as top-down-all-around. It works for me.

Meditation is not always easy, and yet the only bad meditation is often the one we don't do. Even if the experience is challenging, there may be something good happening that we aren't aware of. Perhaps our soul is getting ready for what our mind isn't seeing yet. Meditation is even better if we don't resist the what and persist with the why. Meister Eckart says, “You should not attach such importance to what you feel; rather, consider important what you love and what you intend.”

In essence, we meditate to liberate ourselves to be present to Reality, to what is, to God. But even Shinzen acknowledges we can not directly experience God: “you only experience the afterglow of God.” God is too Real for our finite nervous systems to inhabit. 

But we must (as Thomas Merton once said about improving prayer life) take the time. We must take the time for practice for the sake of the practice itself. What comes of it will come in the right time, and yet there is always a vector to all of this. As Shinzen points out, we are made for practice as even our busy, aging minds point us toward the Real. 

“The ordinary mind is constantly scattered in many directions and cannot hold a center. We think this monkey-mind experience is awful. People feel tormented by this ceaseless turning of the mind. But when you look beneath surface appearances, the scattering can be interpreted as space effortlessly spreading, and the inability to hold a center could be looked upon as contraction gobbling up the solid ground beneath you.”

The solidity we hold on to is never relaxing. Even in our happiest conditioned moments (e.g. being in love, enjoying a favorite piece of music), there is still an underlying sense of more—or even that this experience will not satisfy due to it being unenduring. We approach an wide open canyon right at the point of a cliff that holds us back from leaping; or giving up our control or safety.

“When things solidify, when there’s pressure in body, mind, sight, or sound, people have a tendency to blame themselves: “I’m resisting.” “I can’t let go.” Expansion and contraction give us a different way to think about pressure and solidity. It doesn’t have to be about you at all; it’s about two impersonal forces eventually learning how to mutually interpenetrate without mutually interfering. Relating to unrelaxable solidity in this way can help you to develop equanimity.”

We first must recognize equanimously this subtle discomfort as a complete experience—for that is what is solidifying and standing in the way of our relationship to the Real. In practice, we go over and over this as we slowly and effectively uncover the True face that God wants to see. He doesn't want us to be safe and defensive; He wants us as we are fully alive!

Shinzen is quite a fan of The Cloud of Unknowing also. The author there says, “It is not who you are or what you've been that God sees with his merciful eyes, but what you want to be.”

Our anonymous friend adds, 

“Even meditating on God’s love must be put down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. Show your determination next. Let that joyful stirring of love make you resolute, and in its enthusiasm bravely step over meditation and reach up to penetrate the darkness above you. Then beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with the sharp arrow of longing and never stop loving, no matter what comes your way.”

This strong determination is an approach Shinzen acknowledges can get us all the way. The techniques suffice, but our intent is necessary.  

Between Melting and Freezing / The Soul’s Sap Quivers / Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer? — T.S. Eliot