Sean Reagan

When we ask for love, we implictly acknowledge that the conditions we specify as loving are not present. But since love cannot be absent, as it is our fundament, “not present” means that we are not fully or properly in attendance.

So the problem is not an external lack – circumstances not aligning in the right way – but rather an internal misdirection of attention, for which we are responsible.

The problem is never the world or the other but rather what we are doing with our attention. If we are unhappy – if we are feeling unloved or unloving – it is because we are giving attention to our expectations, desires and preferences and asking others to exist according to them. They cannot do this, which leaves us disappointed, which we denote as the absence of love.

But love is our responsibility; not anybody else’s.

So the solution to this problem is to realize through attention that when we insist on seeing others through the lens of our projected expectations, desires and preferences, we are injuring their self and our self. Naturally we feel those effects as unloving.

Expectations, desires and preferences arise naturally according to our structure as human beings; they are not themselves the problem. It is only when we project them and pretend their validity applies to all people, places and things that they become problematic, making us – and likely others – unhappy.

We don’t need to “fix” our expectations, preferences and desires. We need to become aware of how we project – or disown – them. We have to give attention to them.

One cannot intentionally undo projection. Projection happens naturally enough. To try and stop projecting is to project responsibility for stopping projection onto a projected self. All one can do is see that projecting is happening, and then see what happens as a consequence of that seeing.

Seeing that we are projecting is usually – at least briefly – the end of projection. But the end of projecting entails responsibility for our expectation, desires and preferences – not to mention the guilt and fear underlying them – that instigate projection in the first place.

So there is often a brief intermission, which is confusing and often painful to one degree or another, and then projecting begins again.

It is actually quite difficult to just sit with oneself in a natural way – a way that is not religious or formal or otherwise explicitly therapeutic. To not do anything goal-oriented – not count one’s breaths, not talk to Jesus, not pray a rosary, not catalog past errors and future goals, not compose tweets for later . . .

Mentally, we have grown deeply unaccustomed to this sort of simplicity. To literally doing nothing. Our bodies can readily do it – they are actually incredibly skillful at it – but our minds will no longer allow it.

So that is an old way of being human that still works, that we literally still long to bring forth – to sit quietly and give attention, doing nothing in particular (not even “give attention, doing nothing in particular”). It is actually not old because it remains perfectly accessible and viable. But it appears old because it is no longer familiar; we have sent it away, in a sense, and so we need to invite it back and make it welcome.

But again, putting it that way – “sent it away,” “invite it back,” “make it welcome” – is too intellectual. It is too poetic. We can’t actually send living lovingly away, we can only ignore its ongoing presence. We can only pretend we know better than the ancients and our ancestors. We can only pretend that we are separate from our bodies, and know better than they do.

Of course in a lot of ways, we do know better. Time has passed, bringing with it many boons. I am grateful for penicillin, toilet paper, septic systems, soap, twelve-string guitars, printing presses and so forth. Not all technology is bad, not by a long shot.

But also, we remain alienated from one another, and from ourselves, and we are vulnerable to manipulation, and we are confused about love. We waste a lot of time, energy and other resources trying to fix a problem that runs in significant part on our commitment to trying to fix it.

When I say “give attention,” all I mean is to just be quiet and easy with what is going on. Treat experience as a toddler of whom you are deeply protective of, highly amused by and also whose moods and feelings are not to be taken literally. Notice experience and notice your noticing and notice what happens as a result. Exclude nothing and include nothing. What’s here is what’s here; it changes and shifts less than you think.

So is this our spiritual answer? Is this the method to end all methods? Giving attention?

I think that is an unhelpful question because it perpetuates the illusion that there is anything external which can serve as the end-all/be-all – whether it’s God, psychotherapy, a certain lover, giving attention or science.

Life as we live it just doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t actually break into parts, it just seems to.

When we give attention in a gentle sustained way, things do happen. We project less. We become responsible, and response-able. After some early conflagration of discomfort, this responsibility and response-ability makes us happy, and since happiness begets happiness, we notice others being happy, too. In happiness, the original “problem” ceases to exist, and so “solutions” cease to exist as well.

It is only on the far side of joy that seeking joy makes any sense, and when we see clearly – and experience deeply – the joy-that-never-leaves, then seeking too dissolves.

Many years ago, while teaching Brokeback Mountain, I was approached by a student who professed that her religious beliefs obligated her to not read a text and to not participate in discussions that normalized what she – as a devout practicing Christian – considered “sinful behavior.”

I appreciated her raising the issue with me and we talked a long time about it. Her bottom line was that I was basically forcing her to disobey – by actively questioning the judgment of – her God. She wanted me to exempt her from the reading and class discussions and from the assigned paper relating to Brokeback Mountain.

At one point in our discussion I suggested that any God worth godhood could not possibly be threatened by questions from a devout follower who was sincerely only trying to understand the teachings that underlay the divine judgments.

She answered that following God meant not asking those questions. It wasn’t a question of faith but of obedience. God decreed; humans obeyed.

For many reasons I have thought often of that discussion over the years, two of which are presently germane.

First, that conversation made utterly clear to me the degree to which “God” tends to enter our thinking in the form of bias. In order to think about God, you have to actively not think about other things, or only think about them in certain ways. The young woman was intelligent and insightful and yet, on this issue, her intelligence and relative precision of thought literally evaporated. I didn’t see obedience; I saw passivity.

Of course I understood that this happened to people, but I had never observed it so clearly. I had never been called to be in dialogue with it so personally. The upshot was, I realized that being smart was no defense against ignorance, which was terrifying because “being smart” is pretty much the only arrow in my quiver.

We do not know what we do not know and, critically, we do not know what we forgot and forgot we forgot. The memory hole is real. Bias is real.

I began to wonder where in my life I sounded like this young woman. Where did passivity enter? Magical thinking? Unquestioned bias? And how would I know?

It was easy to answer those questions in a casual wordy way – in an intellectual or academic way, which comes easily enough to me – but to actually undertake an investigation that would actually change my thinking and living . . .

That was not so easy.

The second reason that conversation lingered – and lingers – was because the suggestion I made to the young woman (that God was that which by definition demanded inquiry) had ramifications for my own thinking. I often reflect on Exodus, largely because it figures so prominently in Bob Dylan’s excellent song I and I.

I and I
in creation
where one’s nature
neither honors nor forgives

I and I
one said to the other
no man sees my face and lives

Here’s the relevant passage from Exodus 33:20.

“But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.”

[Note there are Rastafarian overtones here as well – “I and I” referring to the conjoinment of self and super-self. I think Dylan’s treatment is primarily Christian, however.]

There are a lot of readings of those lines; in general, my preferred reading is that you can’t actually see God, so it’s folly to even try. And “see” can be extrapolated here – you can’t know God in the sensual way you can know your dog or your friend or a beach or the concept of equality. It just doesn’t work that way; it’s not of the body or of the world. So don’t even bother.

But why did the writer(s) of Exodus frame their directive in such bleak and unconditional terms? Why assign a penalty of death to an activity that has zero chance of success in the first place?

It’s important to remember that the bible was written by men who were educated, acculturated and politicized – and, generally, they were writing for one another. Most of the population couldn’t read and the idea that they someday would read would have been laughed at. The Bible is an anthology that like all anthologies reflects the politics of its editors; the text we read was never the only text or the best text, it was the favored text of those who had the power to force their favor on others. This doesn’t mean there’s no value in the text; it simply means we need to read critically and carefully, aware of the naturally inherent bias.

I suspect the warning was being issued by someone who a) saw God’s face, b) lived and c) decided that what he saw was somehow too great a threat and the only way to minimize the threat and the potential harm was to warn folks on pain of death from trying to look for God.

I mean, whoever wrote those words really really really wanted people to stop a little shy of actually seeing God. They knew you wouldn’t die if you saw God’ face, because they hadn’t died upon seeing God’s face, but something had happened to them upon seeing God’s face, and whatever happened justified the priestly class bringing death into it, the ultimate penalty to persuade the uneducated and unwashed to look the other way.

What was the “something” that happened?

What if, when you finally see the face of God, you realize that there is no God as such? No distant father calling the shots, no first cause setting the universe in motion, no infinite and omniscient mystery-being . . .

What if you discovered that “God” as such was simply the light in which all living occurred, and was given equally to all beings, and didn’t require initiation or penance or tithing or anything?

What if what dies is the idea that there is or ever could be a gap between you and God, you and love, you and absolute joy? What if what dies is the notion that the Kingdom is remote in time and space and thus can actually be enacted here and now?

That would be a big existential threat, both to a human being who had organized their whole life around God-as-separate-causal-being, and to a priest class whose raison d’etre depended on others accepting that the priests know something and have access to something that most people don’t.

One can understand their insecurity of the priests and still set aside the doctrinal nonsense they espoused that God is other than a present love, and the Kingdom other than a present reality presently unobserved.

That is, read Brokeback Mountain (Really! Read it – it is one of the most precise, effective and moving pieces of fiction ever written in English) and question seriously and critically those who claim to act as brokers of God and Love and the Kingdom and question God.

Doing so promotes two questions, which are actually related, and cannot be answered by anyone except our own self (though obviously dialogue and communion with others helps a lot).

1. What do you not know? How will you find out? Who will help?

and

2. Are you ready at last to see the face of God?

I think an obvious argument with respect to my recent post about certainty and right / wrong thinking is captured in the spirit of comments to this old post about getting along and this one about helpful spiritual junctures: if somebody says to me, “hey I think the Holocaust was great,” am I going to respond: “well, that’s fine!”

No, I am not. And it is not my intention to rationalize or otherwise facilitate anybody else’s doing that either.

So I understand the concern and think it bears consideration. I am always in a state of learning; for me there is no other way.

Underlying my argument about resisting certainty and conclusion – especially in the form of arguing for “right” and “wrong” – is the belief that we have the structure of communal beings who are given to cooperation, coordination and communication. In its fullness, this structure brings forth love, the way two banks bring forth a river.

This structure – and the cooperation, coordination and communication it entails – is a) ongoing and b) realized locally. It is a process that we experience in a subjective way. It is a feature of our living

For example, when I was in middle and high school in the late 1970s and early 80s a common slur among young men was to suggest another young man was gay. This happened a lot. I did not understand its application as problematic at that time. Unfortunately, from time to time I participated in it.

I deeply regret that participation, both for the pain it caused folks who were gay or bisexual or questioning their sexual identity, and for the contribution it made to justifying the ongoing use of that unkindness. It was wrong and hurtful.

At some point in my late teens, I realized that this behavior was cruel and irrational and I stopped doing it. As time passed, I began to try and contribute to the bringing forth of a world where nobody did it.

Today, I make inclusivity and dialogue around gender and sexuality and desire a fundament of my teaching and living. I do this imperfectly of course but it is much closer to love than when I was a young man in high school.

I understand that experience as a learning process which happened to Sean wherein a big block to the free, open and inclusive expression of love was undone. I know that a similar process happened to others. That sort of undoing is always a cause for happiness.

I live now in the understanding that we don’t always see those blocks in our living and so we have to go slowly and patiently. As they say, more will be revealed. I was not a bad person when I was sixteen, but I did say and do stupid hurtful things. I did not need to be erased from the Book of Life for that behavior, but I did need to change that behavior, especially in the realm of language.

It seems to me that love obligates me to recognize that I may be saying and doing stupid things now as well . . . I don’t like that but it’s obviously a possibility. What do I gain by ignorance?

The point is, when I meet folks who are racist or homophobic or misogynist – and I do meet them (they are neighbors, family members, students and so forth) – I see them much the way I see high school Sean. Not as a fundamentally bad person but rather as someone in whom the free, open and inclusive expression of love is blocked (for any number of reasons). I feel compassionate; I feel called to be in dialogue with them.

But being in dialogue means saying clearly and explicitly that I do not agree with their position. Saying so is an implicit statement that I am not casting them out in the darkness. I am not erasing them from the Book of Life. I am simply trying to make the case for a gentle, sustainable, open and inclusive expression of love.

This feels consonant with my (ongoing subjective) experience of love – being cooperative, coordinative, communicative, and so forth.

If we do not know what we are doing is hurtful or cruel, then we are not acting with malice. We are behaving unlovingly but our culpability and responsibility are of a different order. Change is still called for, but it has to come via some channel other than gentle confrontation. It’s more in the nature of education.

When we learn that what we are doing is hurtful and cruel, then we are obligated to alter our behavior so that it becomes kinder and more inclusive. If we insist on hurting others, knowing that we are hurting them, then we are working actively against love.

It is important to resist – nonviolently but firmly – those who actively oppose love. Ideally, this resistance begets dialogue. Dialogue is how we teach others – who could be our own self – what love is.

Thus, I consider the Holocaust a vast failure of love and freedom to love, and feel called to work in my own being and in the collective in which my being expresses to try to mitigate against such failures.

Lovingkindness does not mean ignoring or condoning unloving acts and unkind acts and violent acts. Love is always corrective – both in and through us and, by extension, in and through others. Teachers abound, often disguised so as not to appear as formal teachers.

Heinz von Foerster once said that A is better off when B is better off. I think this is a fair description of how to approach love in world of others who do not always agree with us about what love is or how to bring love forth.

Does our behavior – which includes our languaging – promote the welfare of A and B? Or is it more focused on one (us) to the exclusion of the other?

These are good questions, and we are never not helped by asking them over and over, and allowing ourselves to be surprised and disappointed and then inspired by the answers.

I want to think out loud a little about certainty – how and why it arises in thinking, what function it serves, what it produces and so forth. Ultimately, I think certainty is basically a mirage, albeit a harmless one (so long as one is clear it’s a mirage).

Say that I want to be certain that the world exists or that it doesn’t exist: I have no preference for either outcome, as my existence as such does not actually change much given the one or the other. But I would like to know.

In this “want to be certain” there is an unquestioned assumption, namely, a certainty that being certain is valuable in its own right. Why would I want to be certain about the ontological status of the world if I was not certain that such certainty was valuable?

So the question becomes, what underlies that second-level certainty? What is its source? What assumptions, if any, function as its ground? For it is non-specific and generalized and underlies the whole operation of wanting to be certain about everything, from the world’s existence to the best way to bake apples to what to read before bed.

[Note that wanting to be certain in this sense is not different from wanting to be right, especially given that one is not invested in a particular outcome. It can be X or Y or . . ., but it must at least by X or Y or . . .]

Arguably, this “certainty about certainty” arises from uncontested – because uninvestigated – convictions about what is real or true. For example, take my question to you: “I am not sure there is a world, what do you think?”

Underlying that question is a conviction that I am not alone but in the presence of someone – or something, anyway (a “you”) – with which or with whom dialogue is viable. There is a corresponding conviction that this dialogue can be comprised of words that do not themselves require explanation or justification. Particularly, there is an assumption that when I say “world,” you know to what I refer. There is a reason I pose the question to you and not, say, to a child or a cow or the bathroom mirror.

These assumptions are a kind of sustaining structure for the inquiry. They make the inquiry possible; without it, the inquiry doesn’t happen. Indeed, the assumptions are themselves a nontrivial aspect of the world that sustains the question “is there a world?”

And yet, by and large, these assumptions tend not to be the subject of our inquiry. It is as if in asking the question we elide the possibility of fully answering it.

And yet.

Here we are giving attention – are raising to awareness – the sustaining structure of those a priori assumptions. Right here in this essay we are doing it. Thus, it must be that we can interrogate them. We are doing that right now, aren’t we? It’s just a question of focus, of directing our attention accordingly.

And therein lies the conundrum. I give attention to the underlying certainty that certainty about X is valuable. But this underlying certainty – by virtue of its being an object of my attention – becomes certainty about X’ where X’ = certainty about X. If I give attention to X’ as the new level or layer to be investigated it becomes X” where X” = [[certainty about X’] certainty about X]. If I give attention to X” it becomes X”’ . . .

On and on it goes. I cannot ever reach the ground floor. The foundation – the fundament – is lost to me. Certainty in this formulation really is turtles all the way down.

On the one hand, that is clear and its clarity is frustrating (because of its bottomlessness). But on the other hand, not being able to reach the floor (or foundation or fundament or bottommost turtle) is not an impediment to being itself, nor to the sharing that is so integral to being. Clearly it’s not – here we are, being and sharing!

It is important, I think, to see this. Our ability to talk to each other, bake bread for each other, make love with each other, go on walks together, help our neighbors with chores when they travel and so forth is not contingent on establishing a metaphysical foundation.

A metaphysical foundation may or may not exist. Looking for it is fun and interesting, in its way, but certainty with respect to it is hardly a precondition for living or loving.

In other words, certainty, as such, is not a requirement for the operation of love.

Indeed, the fact that we are already experiencing being and are already drawn to loving as an effective expression of being can sometimes feel like all the knowing we actually need to be happy and fully realized. It is not those who are starving and perennially food-insecure who worry about where the bread that feeds them was made (was the flour organic, were the workers organized and well-paid, et cetera). That analysis enters only when we are sated and unworried about future satiation.

The suggestion then is to realize that our inquiry into certainty – into the longing to be certain or right about this or that aspect of living (e.g., is there a world, or is there a self, or what is the other) – can only arise because the fundamentals (of world, self and other, say) are already in place.

Or, to put it another way, we only become spiritual seekers because we are spiritually found. We know what we’re looking for; that’s why we’re looking for it.

In order to feel a loss or absence or emptiness, we have to have known fullness or wholeness. The one specifies the other. We cannot miss what we do not know exists. If we are on a spiritual path like A Course in Miracles, we are only on it because we know where it’s going and how it goes.

We could compare it to visiting an amusement park. We know what’s going to happen on the roller coaster but that doesn’t mean we don’t still want to ride it. It doesn’t mean we aren’t going to be thrilled and chilled and all of that while riding it.

Or this. Say that we go looking for our eyes. We will never find them. We may see a reflection of them in a mirror. Someone may take a picture of them and so we may see an image of them. But we will never “see” our eyes. And yet the whole premise of this apparently fruitless impossible-to-satisfy search *is our eyes. Looking – not our eyes – is the answer.

In that example, when we stop looking for an object and instead accept a process, then we’re home. The problem lay in how we framed the search. When we reframe it, the whole inquiry dissolves on the spot.

Wanting to be certain arises because we are already certain. Lack and non-lack arise together. But these conditions do not cancel one another out; one is not categorically superior to the other. Rather, they mutually specify one another. They do not contradict but rather affirm one another. Choosing between them – making one “right” and the other “wrong,” say – is an illusion because they not separable, any more than a half mile is separable from a mile.

But this does reflect a shift in our thinking (about our thinking). We have a preference for – we give primacy to – a mode of thinking that insists on X or Y, or X vs. Y and so forth. The suggestion here is that this frame is both unavoidable (and so nothing to worry about) and contingent on other frames (namely, that discerning or distinguishing has value in its own right). The supposed quandary is “solved” by realizing that it doesn’t need to be solved at all. It’s not a zero sum game like Monopoly. It’s more like a bunch of Legos with which we can build anything we like, tear down and build again or build differently. It’s play for play’s sake, not play for the sake of winning by defeating our brother or sister. And we know this because the love that underlies our living – which is the sine qua non of our living – goes on without regard for our particular grasp of the metaphysics. Moms were hugging babies long before Plato showed up and they’re still doing it post-Wittgenstein, post-Darwin and post-Derrida. When A Course in Miracles is forgotten – and it will be, in time – people will still be happy and joyous and free when they devote themselves to one another in love. We already know what to do; pretending we don’t is part of the (non-zero sum) game.

When the quest for certainty – or sources or fundaments or answers or truth or reality – relaxes, then a natural pragmatism and coherence appears, which is that we are already being in love, and that this love is sufficient unto itself. We are all winning; of this I am certain.