(A brief essay categorized under “Things Sean Is Learning Really Really Slowly And Should Probably Be Cautious About Sharing Publicly”)
If we do not recognize that everybody needs help, then we will not be able to help anybody.
Important corollary number one: knowing that another body needs help, does not mean that that we know what help is needed.
Important corollary number two: knowing that another body needs help, and knowing what help that body needs, does not mean that we are the one called to provide that help.
The corollaries make clear that we need to be humble and we need to go slowly. It’s tempting to visualize ourselves as saviors whose love will redeem all the world. But we don’t know what we don’t know, which mitigates against grand projects and big leaps.
When we know how to help – when it’s clear how to help – then yes. Help. But we don’t always know and it isn’t always clear and in those cases, “help” can easily unintentionally morph into “hurt.” Or “hinder.”
And sometimes, even when knowing the specific form of help needed, we aren’t the ones who need to bring it. Someone else might be better situated to offer the help. That’s okay. Perhaps there are no saviors, only patterns of saving, and the formal way in which we interact with those patterns is . . . not up to us to determine.
We are not dictators of kindness. We don’t get to insist that others accept this or that scenario for a solution to their problem. They are allowed to own the problem on the terms and conditions that resonate and make sense to them – up to and including not having the problem we think they have – and our work is to abide.
Note that sometimes we help others by acknowledging our own need for help. To ask for help is to invite the other to help us, which is itself a form of love. If we are always the helper – if we insist on that role, subtly or otherwise – then we are only adopting a one-sided vision of helpfulness. It’s okay – it’s more than okay – to be helped by another. What matters is the help – which is love – rather than the specific narrative assigned to it, or the specific role we play in the narrative.
The suggestion is that there is a sort of relationship premised not on a victim/hero or savior/lost soul dichotomy. Rather, it is a relationship premised on a level playing field, where asking for and responding to a request for help are features of a relationship between equals, each one of whom could be the other and, with respect to their asking for and offering help, have been and will continue to be the other.
There is no one. There is also no other.
On that view, being helpful is a sort of dynamic continuum, a sort of wave on which we surf – or through which we gently tumble – aiming for grace and balance rather than status or praise.
Sometimes there is a tendency to view problems as flaws of character. We shouldn’t have problems, nor should others. We posit a world in which there are no problems or flaws. Everything is awesome! But what if that world does not exist? What if what exists is this ongoing attentiveness and willingness to help and be helped?
In my ongoing interior dialogue between arrogance and humility, helpfulness and spiritual self-aggrandizing, I wrote a little screed in which I suggested that A Course in Miracles could be shortened to literally “helping others” and “letting our own self be helped.” Neither step can be ignored! We tend to cherish and idolize the first while suppressing the second.
But if we let go of the ideal – the perfect, God as perfection, our self in pursuit of perfection – then what remains is the collective in which we enact love according to our structure. There are ups and downs. There are steps backward. We help and are helped. And it’s no big deal.
Hilary Putnam suggests that “What is wrong is that Nature, or ‘physical reality’ in the post-Newtonian understanding of the physical, has no semantic preferences.” That is, there is no one way or right way or best way to speak/write. There are only more or less helpful ways and they are all contingent on context.
This represents, for me, a fairly grueling hill to climb, yet it makes a point dear to my heart (if difficult to embody in a lived way), and so it is worth the ascent.
this past summer’s violets
We are haunted by separation – self/other, self/world, sign/signified, soul/body, here/there et cetera. Duality pervades our experience – appears to be our experience – and with it comes a longing to unify or transcend or undo or bypass the various dichotomies through which dualism asserts itself. We want falling in love to complete us, want to be “one” with God, et cetera.
Yet all our attempts at unifying, transcending, undoing and bypassing – insert your verb of choice here – end up confirming (conforming to) the very divide they aim to go beyond.
Part of the problem is that the world and the other all arise by virtue of distinctions that are descriptive and are thus contingent on language. Words sever and curtail. Perception is a cut, and language is a cut (and good luck trying to figure out which comes first). Looking for the bottom or the edge – or the beginning or the end – is like wandering through a hall of mirrors after a few hits of acid.
God – the Whole, the Beginning-and-End, the Source, Brahmin, Void, et cetera – is not partial to any language or ritual or cultural expression. Nor does God embrace each and every one of them, as if in a show of cosmic unity. The Whole, as such, is sufficiently beyond our ken, in a way that makes all our languaging, ritualizing and expressing divinely irrelevant.
Thus, we are welcome to play our spiritual games, but they are games. They are play. And – critically – they are non-zero-sum games. There are no winners or losers. It’s more like we’re just dancing, from dusk to dawn, partner to partner, song to song. It’s messy, glorious, exhausting, fun, social, tedious, lonely, prayerful et cetera. And it has no point beyond its own play, beyond its own expression. You stagger out of the dance hall only to learn that it’s dance halls all the way down. Allamande left!
One of many ways to approach the dance is to adopt a spiritual language and practice that is helpful, where helpfulness is measured by its capacity to make us consistently happy, where “happy” is more or less synonymous with “coherent” and where “coherent” means “I know it’s a dance, and I’m okay it’s a dance, and my knowing and okayness are a form amongst other forms of me dancing.”
{I know that previous paragraph is a mouthful but it works}
Another way to frame this is to ask what allows us to go slowly and cheerfully through our living, without wishing it were some other living, while simultaneously doing what we can to make this living more happy, viable, open, just, sustainable for all beings with whom this living is shared.
This is an invitation to a spirituality that does not insist on its own primacy but only on its relative viability (i.e., it is open, not closed) and – critically, fundamentally – it accepts the complexity and uncertainty and responsibility posed by this openness.
In essence, I am decrying any easy unities or pluralisms, e.g., “we’re all human” or “all religions share the same goals.” We aren’t and they don’t. Since it is impossible to separate context from observer-of-context, agent from world-in-which-agent-acts, glib statements which effectively flatten out all difference in the interest of some pure objectivity or absolute are not viable. In fact, they are a form of violence. Beware the preacher extolling them.
For example, my experience and practice and espousal of A Course in Miracles is not consonant with lots of other serious students. At some point me and ACIM together passed a rubicon that most ACIM students either don’t want or don’t need to cross. Fair enough! Yet the passing – and what occurred on its far side – remains generative in my living. Thus, what nurtures me leaves another hungry. Any move to avoid or ignore this difference functions as an injustice to both poles.
Yet at the same time we are not allowed to simply enshrine any and all differences under the rubric of casual relativism. “Hey if it works for you . . . ” If what works for me is doing violence unto others, in any form, then it has to be ended, healed, repaired, and otherwise brought to love. When “hey if it works for you” tacitly allows violence to go on unimpeded, then it, too, becomes a form of violence. It’s nice to pretend that we aren’t the ones strangling whales with plastic refuse but . . . we are the ones strangling whales with plastic refuse.
{Yes that did escalate quickly}
So a kind of vigilance is called for and a kind of intelligence, because we are simultaneously judging and not judging others. It’s complicated. We are going to make mistakes. We are going to get called out. And we’re going to have to deal with all that.
It’s so much easier to just go on picnics with self-help Jesus and like-minded folks who share our sense of order – hikes, bluets and brook trout, New Testament over Old Testament, Emily Dickinson over Walt Whitman, “over” instead of “and” et cetera . . .
{note the last critical distinction – “over” instead of “and” – *and imagine a spiritual practice predicated on noticing when we use one rather than the other – and on evaluating the use – and on being both capable of shifting and willing to shift accordingly}
I am thinking here of something Donna Haraway wrote in “A Cyborg Manifesto.”
Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. ‘Epistemology’ is about knowing the difference.
“Knowing the difference” is a learning process, including trial and error, study and dialogue, periods of silent reflection, abiding in confusion, relationship with teachers and fellow students and ex-teachers and ex-students and wanna-be students and teachers and . . .
Along lines implied by Haraway, I suggest that functional spirituality is in the nature of a learning process, one that we did not begin and should not expect to see the end of because it is fundamentally Protean, reflexive, circular, ever spiraling hither and yon. A lot of our unhappiness and acting out arises from insisting – sometimes consciously, often unconsciously – on linearity and absolutism. But linearity is a description of experience, not a law, and certainly not the law. There is – for there is always – another way.
For example, I prefer the blooming violet to the blank white snows of winter, yet beneath that cold flat surface of January, the violet, in its way, lives and enacts – in what to me is darkness, mystery, void – its return. On that view, why hate winter? It’s just violets another way, sort of like looking at your dog or child the side. Same person, different view, but your love doesn’t change.
Yet it is also possible to mow over the violets again and again, a sort of murder, so that they cannot reseed themselves, cannot return, and their absence is no longer “violets another way” but rather “not violets.” Their absence is deliberately constructed and intentionally enacted and – for me anyway – it hurts. For me, it constitutes an act of violence I cannot – will not – countenance.
The difference between violets in spring and violets in winter is – deploying Haraway’s construction – a playful difference, for it is not devoid of living. You see that? While the difference implied by repeated mowing is not playful because it ends the violets.
Let me say diverge for a moment on the subject of violets, for they are vital to my understanding of what I am trying to say here with respect to spirituality, God, self and so forth.
When we moved to this place, the remnants of an apple orchard dotted the northwest corner of the property – six trees, two of which were dead, a third of which was all-but-dead. Other trees appeared to have been cut down in previous decades but nobody really knew. The ghost of an old farm haunts the landscape but it’s been severed and sold and zoned so often, even the ghost has a hard time finding its bearings.
The little orchard, as such, was overgrown. It was dense and tangled. Maple saplings had taken hold; thimbleberry and goldenrod crowded the trees. A previous owner had tossed empties there: countless Bud Light cans shined in the underbrush like big blue sequins.
We cut down the two dead trees and all the maple saplings (I say saplings – a couple were more than seventy feet tall). Over the next year or so, I cleared the space – hacking and raking, collecting trash. The year after that, it was clear enough to mow, so I did.
By the end of that year, we had a decent apple harvest, and the space was green and open. We put lawn chairs there so we could watch the horses.
Next Spring, the violets came.
Purple is the union of red and blue and generally when I encounter it, a quiet sense of holiness abides. Plus, I like pretty things, especially flowers, and watching anything grow – a chicken, a tomato plant, an apple tree – quiets some interior discord. So it was easy to mow around those violets. It was therapeutic in a religious sense. It mattered.
But a funny thing happened. Next year there were more violets – like a small community of them. It was like somebody had seeded a little church. And so the space that went unmowed enlarged. And the year after that – which is this year – the space enlarged yet again and – to my delight and amazement – another patch of violets emerged about twenty yards east of the original patch. The violets are traveling, propogating, and their travel is amplified in my joy and wonder which, in turn, nurtures their expansion.
The suggestion I make here is that attention to the violets, as outlined above, and attention to attention to the violets, is a form of life-giving playfulness that gets at what I suggest is “helpful spirituality.”
The violets appear as other to me. They are alive and possessed of agency. In making space for them, I am also in nontrivial ways making space for my own self, my own living, my own agency. Else why would I be so happy?
But of course, nurturing the violets is a decision. By entering into relationship with the violets, other relationships are curtailed. For example, if I mowed more rigorously in that space, then dandelions might proliferate. Or we could plant another apple tree, or some blueberry bushes.
In attending the violets in and with love, the intention is to attend as well the space in which all-that-violets-are-not also dwells. The absent blueberry bushes, the absent dandelions . . . My play necessarily excludes them but if I recall them, then my play is mature because it is not ignorant. It accepts responsibility for itself. Since I cannot have everything – the Whole – then I must choose the part – the partner for the dance – and accept responsibility for my choice, and then love / dance accordingly.
If I put the violets at the center – a choice I make – then mowing them becomes an unacceptable form of violence. Yet if dandelions were central, then another approach would be viable.
We choose our living – and by our choosing construct our living – and a field of ethics emerges. Context brings forth responsibility. Knowing and living and loving are all situated, embodied, consequential. There is no one right way, and yet the movement is forever towards love and happiness and coherence, and so there are more and/or less helpful ways, and our living must attend to them in responsive and responsible ways.
Of course, the dialogue is relatively simple when we are talking about violets rather than blueberry bushes, but when we are choosing economic policies that oppress women, or military policies that make whole swathes of the planet unsafe for children . . .
Then it becomes messy. And complex. And recourse to simple utterances – “God is One” or “I am not a body I am free” and so forth – tend to function as blindfolds. They tend to promote the illusion of a knowable God, whose privileged vantage point can be ours if we only believe/act/profess rightly. Thus, they become lacunae in which seeds of confusion and pain take root.
They become utterances behind which we avoid responsibility for our choices, by which our spirituality becomes a bland patina of “I’m okay” rather than a deep dive with open arms and open hearts into uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity, difference that constitutes living . . .
The self-improvement or self-help project – which neatly swallowed A Course in Miracles – and was itself neatly swallowed by Patriarchal Capitalism – always promotes the abstraction of a perfect completed subject, which we translate as our own self raised to glorious perfection in both body and thought.
But attention – which is the light of Christ, in the semantics I adopt as most viable for me presently – reveals not only what is lovely in us (and others) but also reveals our inadequacy, despondence, infidelity, greed, selfishness . . .
Perfection, as such, is the vague grail that keeps us forking over our living – materially and otherwise – to a system bent only on depriving us of the only thing that matters, which is our living, our messy beautiful frustrating gorgeous ecstatically mutual living.
The suggestion is that we let go of those abstract ideals – the idealized self, the God taking a personal interest in us, the sanitized Jesus and Buddha, the easy spiritual outs, and take the hand of our kin – who are not family but with whom we share affinity, who are our kind – and together, in ways that resonate and cohere for us in our shared hand-holding, bring forth love.
This will be clumsy and inefficient and will almost certainly appear irrelevant but so be it. In our togetherness, we will remember how to be happy by making others happy, and perhaps recall some other ways of being that will be useful going forward.
So I wonder if in the end we are not like the violets?
They appeared out of nowhere. Yes, there is a handy story that explains their appearance (but note biology is a discourse about life not life itself), but it doesn’t comply with experience, which is that I cleared some land thinking “apple orchard” and was unexpectedly met with “violets.”
By all accounts the violets do not know me even though it is literally my indulgence and attention that allows them to live and thrive. And lest I become too self-righteous – Sean the God and Savior of Violets – I must remember that I cannot say who or what countenances my own existence. Who or what indulges me? Attends me? Takes pleasure in me?
I have thoughts and opinions about answers to those questions, but any answer I offer is necessarily partial and thus does not fully settle the question.
In these ways, for these reasons, the gap between me and the violets shrinks, becomes almost unnoticeable, and certainly less dispositive than it once seemed. We are all lovely, we are all processual, we are all giving – and being given – attention.
Did I bring the violets forth? Did the violets bring me forth? Are we together brought forth by God – the deliberate God of Christianity? The blind functionary of evolution? Or some other Holiness/Wholeness altogether? Or not?
And does it matter? For when I finish writing, I will wander out back to check on the garden, throw hay to the horses. I’ll visit the violets. I’ll come back in and tend to the sourdough starter and make a pot of tea to see Chrisoula and me through the afternoon. Is this not love? Is this not service? Is this not enough?
We know anything because we can distinguish it from what it is not. Distinctionsare being; they are existence. You can look at a maple tree and see how it is a maple tree and not a flower or a sky or a passing car. Maple tree and not-maple tree are how maple tree appears. It is this way with everything.
This is why it is so hard to argue that we can know God or the Absolute or The One Without Another. With what would you compare it to in order to ascertain that it was in fact the Absolute? If you can compare it to something it is not, then it is no longer “Absolute” but relative.
pale wild morning glory out by the chickens
Therefore, who would want to meet God? The only possible thing you could say about the encounter was that it was obviously a lie. As soon as you knew it was God, you’d also know what was not-God, and so you’d not be meeting the Absolute but a pretentious facsimile.
If we have a desire to meet God or know God, and we can see how this desire cannot ever be met but only frustrated, then we might ask a new question: what shall we do with this desire?
In my experience of inquiry with desire, I learn that desire has two contrary goals, each of which negates the other.
First, there is a desire for a personal experience of God – of happiness, joy, ecstasy. To this end, I pray, do zazen, study A Course in Miracles and other nondual traditions, exercise, practice compassion. I take the self seriously.
Second, there is a desire to transcend personal experience – to undo the self, to be done with vanity and self-improvement and the hoarding of special experiences.
I want both! And yet to have both is to have neither, because they would cancel one another out. To have one rather than the other does not end desire, because I still want the other. And for the life of me I cannot discern a third option.
Thus, desire is forever paradoxical – always making demands of me that cannot possibly be met.
So it is interesting to give attention and see where – in our actual experience – these two aspects of desire appear most closely, nearly touching. Where is the body or other – be it human or animal or landscape or whatever – that intimates an end to the paradox, that suggests I can have my sensual experience and transcend sensuality?
I say “intimates” here because the argument can never be made explicitly. It has to be hinted at. I have to be seduced, because I know that logically it can never work. The two facets of desire are at odds. Any suggestion they can be wedded is as nonsensical as suggesting I can light a match under water.
So the suggestion is that when we are aware of the intimation and the body, the one, making it – the one slyly hinting that in its embrace our yearning will be both satisfied and destroyed – we have to go very slowly and be very attentive. The image is given to us as a gift. By giving our attention in return, we induce sacred relationship.
It is a kind of dance, which on the one hand has to do with logic and on the other with the utter absence of logic, even the opposite of logic. It is like studying a classic text on the moon by day and at night going outside and dancing naked in moonlight, reveling in moonlight.
Those become poles, right? The rigorous study and the reveling? And the work becomes not to privilege the one or the other but just to allow them both their space, their voice, their influence. When they cry out for public witness, we give it. Sometimes I do dance in the moonlight! Really! And when they insist on privacy, we give it. I will not tell you that I am reading _________________ by __________________ nor how I find it ________________________ with respect to ____________ and so am contemplating ________________________ if ___________ says yes.
Obviously I am describing here a sort of balancing of tension – wanting to come very close to the prong of desire that will destroy itself (transcendence) without losing proximity to the prong that extends itself (personal experience). It’s like surfing, maybe. Or running very fast down a mountain. Or crossing the river on a thin wire.
And I suggest that somewhere in that balance, we have the insight that paradox ends when we stop insisting on it, and begin to search for its origins. The two-pronged desire arises where? Why? How?
In other words, having given attention to desire, having to some extent acquiesced to it in its paradoxical wonder and creativity, now I want to meet its mother.
Desire arises as a consequence of our physical and cognitive structure. That is, I have the structure of homo sapiens, and that brings forth a certain experience of world and living in the world, and this includes an apparently paradoxical desire.
But the paradox seems to hinge on my belief in an actual self that can be either transcended or improved. What if that self isn’t real? Isn’t actually there as something that can be improved or fixed or transcended?
If that’s the case, then desire as such is a mirage. The paradox doesn’t present a real dichotomy, but a false one. On that view, when the impulse to self-improve arises (through learning or practice or exercise or diet or whatever), one attends to it. When the impulse to transcend the self arises (through prayer or meditation or forbidden ecstatic union), then one attends to it. No more and no less.
Thus, desire loses its privileged claims to primacy, intensity, individuation, etc. And the demands it makes are similarly deprived of privilege.
So back to the beginning then. What shall we do with our desire to know/see/experience God?
I think we have to demote it to equality with our desire for a slice of cake, a deep kiss, a walk in the woods, the feel of the river on our feet and ankles, the sight of a black bear, Emily Dickinson poems, toads in the garden, violets, snakes et cetera. It’s one of those, and one with those.
But this demotion is also a bringing-forth, because it implies that our desire for God is natural and readily met. Indeed, by placing it in a family of other longings, we open the possibility that “God” is not other than “a slice of cake, a deep kiss, a walk in the woods, the feel of the river on our feet and ankles, the sight of a black bear, Emily Dickinson poems, toads in the garden, violets, snakes et cetera.”
solitary lily out front off Main Street
Whatever happens when the black bear lumbers across the trail before me, or when we unfold in one another’s arms, or wade through the river at dusk, or share dessert on the back porch, it is also what happens when we encounter God. The satisfaction, joy, happiness, pleasure is the same.
It is a fairly short step from this fact to the suggesting that the sight of the black bear is itself a sight of God, a glimpse of the divine. And that our kiss brings forth the Lord as Alleluia, and the river we wade through is the Divine afoot in our own watery being.
I don’t suggest that we are seeing the whole! I suggest the whole remains forever beyond our grasp. Always I suggest that! Yet the glimpses we obtain – over and over in our living, this very living we live right now – are themselves sufficient. We are letting go our insistence that God somehow exceed the range of our being and experience. Desire is met and lit accordingly.
Perhaps we are moving beyond a space of needing to “know thyself.” Perhaps we are entering a new space where it is enough to realize the process of knowing, without getting hung up on knower and known and so forth.
The self seems to be that which has certain identifying data (name, birthday, place of residence, family constellation), which data morphs into narrative (likes and dislikes, significant life events, hopes and dreams, hobbies, secrets, et cetera).
A profusion of flowers in the garden, a lovely tangle that makes me happy and grateful.
But before identity and narrative, there is that to which identity and narrative apply. There is that for which they are relevant or significant, that which attends them and which they attend in turn.
This “that” is a distinction that in our current state of thinking and speaking we refer to as a “self.” First comes the self, the particular distinction, and then come identity and narrative, which are effectively window dressing for the distinction to which they apply.
Perhaps part of the spiritual process is just seeing clearly this order: the self is that which to which identity and narrative apply. And then a further part of the spiritual process is attending the self, the that-which-occurs-prior-to-identity-and-narrative.
It is possible to give attention to that self, and to experience it in a direct way. This direct experience can be quite intimate and intense, given that time and place, identity and narrative apparently dissolve in it.
Yet there is also a potential for confusion in such intimate intensity. We sometimes end up identifying with the intensity, that pure state of awareness. As Ramana Maharshi put it “that Awareness which alone remains – that I am.”
Yet this “I” remains a distinction. It cannot be otherwise. In order to distinguish “I” we automatically distinguish “Not-I.” To bring forth a “self” – any self at all – we must also bring forth “not-self.” Else how would we know it?
Thus, the self for its existence relies on the other, who is also a self relying for its existence on another.
It is tempting to observe this circularity, this mutuality, and declare with respect to it: we are one. But this declaration is limited. A and B, who mutually specify each other, also mutually specify C, which is their unity, their oneness. It is this oneness that allows A and B to be both self and other (even though each is aware of only one self and one other).
But in order to specify C, we must thereby specify not-C. On and on it goes. That is why the declaration “we are one” is limited. C brings forth not-C, which in turn brings forth D, which in turns bring forth not-D. It’s true we are one, you and I, but we are not “only” one, or “the only” one.
It seems like we are locked into an infinite regress here (C leads to D leads to E leads to F et cetera). But rather than focus on that, it’s helpful to focus on the circularity that inheres between A and B, or AB and C, or ABC and D. Each forms a circle in which each is the full equal of the other, and in which each brings the other forth.
This circularity undoes – or dissolves – the inclination (which is premised on linearity) to ask about first causes, beginnings, before-the-beginnings, et cetera. There is no beginning. Nor is there any end. There is only being, wherever and however one looks, that is all there is. Being.
I am suggesting one actually go into this. I am suggesting one actually observe the distinctions and the distinguishing and reflect on them. They are living processes, dynamically capable of being observed.
And I suggest that in doing so, one comes up against lawful limits (there is a self that is not alone but exists in mutual codependence with others who could be one’s own self), and that these limits are nonetheless experienced as essentially infinite and eternal (without beginning or end), and that at some point in the inquiry, the giving of attention to all this, it becomes possible – it becomes desirable – to just breathe and say “okay, this is it” in a relative rather than absolute way.
This breathing (I am not being metaphorical but really indicating giving attention to one’s experience of breathing, of being breathed) – this relaxing into (not resisting, not adapting, not altering) what is as it is – is what makes us fundamentally happy, peaceful, coherent, creative and so forth.
Finally, I think a language around this process that is not inherently spiritual or religious or therapeutic but basically logical – like directions for screwing in a light bulb – is helpful. That is, rather than spiritualize our confusion and inattention, why not just be clear and attentive?
rain falls on the river out back, low in a dry summer, like the rest of us longing for that which we are.
In a funny way, it is actually easier to be clear and attentive than unclear and inattentive. But we have to want to see it that way.
Part of why I suggest a non-spiritual/religious mode of dealing with this material is that spiritual/religious modes tend to be conclusive. And any conclusion with respect to the self (or Truth or God or the Whole or whatever) strikes me as incoherent in terms of logic and – more importantly – community.
It is incoherent logically because we can never stand outside the domain of experience in order to compare it any putative truth. Therefore, experience is always conditional – it is what it is, but what it is, in the ultimate sense, is foreclosed to us. Statements like “there is only this,” while tempting because of their pretense to certainty, and the comfort certainty brings, are effectively superstition. They are magical thinking. We just don’t know.
More significantly, it is a distraction in the communal sense, because our problem is that we are unhappy, and fixing this is not complicated – we just have to let go of what makes us unhappy! It’s not a spiritual problem. It’s not a psychological problem. It’s a mechanical problem. If you see a rattlesnake on the trail, you don’t need a metaphysician to know to stop walking. You stop walking; you give the snake its due, and this happens naturally. Like that, happiness is natural. To be is to be happy. But we can ignore this, or forget this, and thus make ourselves unhappy.
We can turn the rattlesnake into a problem of God or metaphysics, what are basically undecidable questions. When those questions are posed in the sense of “I have to answer this in order to be happy” rather than “asking these questions makes me happy” than we are effectively screwed.
I speak from considerable experience in that regard . . .
But it seems that we are beginning to move beyond that space, the space of complicating things in favor of a space where our natural proclivity for joy, helpfulness, peace, cooperation and so forth might prevail. I hope so. We need that, as a species, and the ecosystem of which we are such a problematic part needs it, too.
I sent out a newsletter this morning, ruminating on the garden and how it symbolizes – in an active and useful way – the love and inner peace into which we are all slowly spiraling. Sign up if you like!
I am doing some ACIM-specific writing in the form of Facebook Notes, and welcome you to read them and help me refine my thinking and its expression. Writing and reading are a shared dance and I am never not in need of partners, new steps, reminders not to step on toes, et cetera.
Finally, I want to share something personal.
This summer, I had the unusual (for me) experience of being physically unwell. I had to take some powerful medication, an experience to which I am generally averse. For the first time ever I underwent anesthesia. I was laid up in ways that are unfamiliar and debilitating.
A lot of time was given to a sort of hazy reflecting, remembering, re-cognizing.
Also simply to resting.
A couple of years ago I had a powerful experience in the Cambridge Library. The gist of it was that while it was okay to keep reading and studying, it was no longer precisely necessary. A door opened and I was invited to walk through it.
So naturally I stayed in the library and kept right on reading and studying.
This summer, that intense – some might say frenetic – study finally collapsed on itself. Sickness and medication combined to make me largely incapable of sustaining it. Intellectual busy-ness slowed to a crawl. In its place was a gentle float, not unlike that described by Bob Dylan in “Man in the Long Black Coat.”
There are no mistakes in life
some people say
and it’s true sometimes
you can see it that way
but people don’t live or die
people just float
she went with the man in the long back coat
The whole song is worth listening to, really.
Anyway, in time, that floating softened into a gentle peace towards which I was resistant, even hostile. It was if I were leaning on a slight fence, gazing into an enormous lovely field. All I had to do was lean the tinest bit and I would live in that lush bounty forever.
And I wouldn’t lean! I couldn’t. It was such an incredible to thing to witness! Imagine someone offering you a slice of blueberry pie and you just knock it to the ground, even though you’re starving and you love blueberry pie. Imagine doing that over and over . . .
Yet I saw more than that, too. Namely, I saw that the peace that offered itself did not recognize my resistance. It wasn’t indifferent to my resistance. For this peace, my resistance didn’t exist.
That is, there was no relationship between “Sean” (my body, my learning, my feelings, my issues – the whole screwy welter) and this peace. One could be the biggest, most selfish idiot imaginable and this peace would neither depart nor retract its openness.
The pie was never not there. It only seemed like you were knocking it away.
Why do we say no to Love? Why do we refuse to let go of the sliver of identity that causes us so much grief and pain?
Those are nontrivial questions! And lately when I reflect on them, and seek to answer them in pragmatic ways – to bring the answers forth in my living – I find myself reflecting in turn on A Course in Miracles – that beautiful, maddening curriculum and its beautiful, maddening body of students, of which I am a – yes – a beautiful, maddening aspect.
As I have begun to physically heal, and to resume more natural levels of energy and attention, it is A Course in Miracles I find myself writing about and relying upon to remember how to navigate both life in the world and Life which is Love.
The way station and the trail and the summit merge . . .
Saying so is a bit more personal and biographical than is perhaps helpful, or even necessary, but honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Healing is in no small part our willingness to to fully own our need for healing and then – when the healing is offered, which it always is – to accept it, as best we are able, on the terms in which it appears.
It remains my conviction that by giving attention to our living in the world, and sharing that living with others, that living will – sometimes dramatically but perhaps more often in gentle ordinary ways – make clear a path to a peace that surpasses understanding, and a love that is impersonal and unconditional, and the happiness attending both.
On which path I remain a wordy and sometimes obtuse traveler, whose wordiness can never make clear my gratitude for your fellowship and care.
There is a domain whose existence we are aware of but the contents of which – for now – remain beyond our ability to know. Hence my commitment to epistemic humility as a spiritual practice.
I say “for now” because I cannot rule out the possibility of advances – technological, psychological, et cetera – that will open up this domain to knowing.
But for now we can say that we don’t know what we don’t know and we are aware of this fact. Thus, there is a domain whose existence we are aware of but the contents of which are beyond our ability to know.
Therefore, uncertainty is inherent in this ongoing experience. We have no choice but to relate to it.
One suggestion with respect to relating is to recognize our apparently innate tendency to confuse this domain with eternity and/or infinity.
Eternity and infinity are qualities that unknowing can appear to have. And since we don’t like uncertainty, we readily assume that what we are dealing with is not uncertainty but rather infinity and eternity.
From there it’s an easy hop to rename uncertainty “God” and assume we are having a spiritual experience. “I am that.” “I am awareness itself.” “I am one with God.”
And so forth.
But what if we leave God out of it? What if we leave infinity and eternity out of it and just make friends with uncertainty?
That is, rather than see uncertainty as a problem to be solved, why not see it as a companion for a journey? Or a partner for a dance? Or even the music to which we dance, if that metaphor works better.
This doesn’t mean we can’t be in dialogue with uncertainty with a goal of being less uncertain or uncertain differently. By all means study. By all means explore the inner and outer landscapes.
When we view the world and our living not as a problem to be solved but as a partner for a dance, then our living changes. It becomes happier in the sense of being less rigid, conditional and exclusive. We aren’t trying to control life or restrict life. We are just responding to life as it responds to us.
Paradoxically, when we no longer insist the world resolve into absolute divine answers or patterns, then hints of divinity suddenly appear. Life becomes vibrant and dynamic, a welcoming flow rather than an opposing force. We feel joy and peace. We feel free.
Thus, rather than attack unknowing or uncertainty, perhaps we ought to lean into it. Perhaps we ought to question the tendency to see uncertainty as problematic or somehow other.
Rather, can we see it as an invitation to play rather than work? And then go ahead and play? Will we not – at last – be happy?
