Sean Reagan

Spiritual Poverty and the Mystery of Subjectivity

The wind blows where it will,
and thou hearest its sound
but dost not know where it comes from
or where it goes.
~ John 3:8

Yet the utterly subjective nature of our experience as human observers must be entered as into a mystery, its apparent infinities and eternities robustly explored. The interior is all there is, and yet it cannot be all there is, for one can never reach its end and thus say, “there is nothing beyond this.”

Barred from conclusion – from perfect knowledge, from the end of inquiry – we are given instead to wandering, forever hungry and thirsty, without even the comfort of divine guidance or instruction. There is only this: this this, and it is not enough.

window_sill_detail — window sill above the kitchen sink . . .

Our experience as human observers is forever bounded by – and bonded to – this mystery. It is as if we are forever entering the temple where the Beloved waits on her dais, and when we reach out to her she disappears, leaving only a note and a map leading us to the next temple. On and on we go, never quite vanishing into our desire, and never quite satiating it either.

Shall we worship then our going? The apparent cycle of discovering-only-to-lose-in-order-to-begin-yet-again?

We can, if we want. But it does not satisfy, not in the final sense. Worship never does; idols never do. That, too, is the mystery – this innate sense that we are called to fall to our knees and yet once on them perceive only the One who would never ask us to kneel.

The old Christians called this conundrum, this mystery, our “poverty of spirit,” being in the mode of Jesus who called on his followers to be “poor in spirit” and to “take up their cross.” If we interpret this in terms of our bodily existence, it devolves quickly into negotiating cultural mores. “I’ll recycle more and grow my own tomatoes,” “I’ll watch less television and read more books,” et cetera.

There is nothing wrong with executing our living according to terms and conditions which resonate for us according to circumstance, preference, et cetera. But this is a giving of meaning to our living that is secondary to the interior journey we undertake, the radical (as in rooted, not extreme) exploration of the subjectivity that underlies our living. How deeply can you go into yourself and what do you find there?

We are talking here about a movement – a journey, a dance, a descent-and-ascension – from which our teachers and lovers and allies are naturally excluded. The texts that point out the next step cannot actually take the next step. We go empty-handed, without provision. We go without a plan for going back. It is like Jesus said, the one who puts their hand to the plow and looks back is not fit for the reign of God. Harsh words but true and thus – in the end – kind.

We have to let go of platitudes about the interior, the easily memorized sentences and lines handed down by our idols and fellow worshipers. Bumper stickers are for tourists. We are not visitors who will go home to boast about our vacation. We are migrants, mendicants, apostles, beggars. The grace that inheres in our traveling cannot be possessed, recounted, valorized, or sold. It does not extend itself in the form of personal accomplishment.

To “bring forth Love,” which is what it means to be fully human, is to go into this mystery – this whole-that-is-not-whole, this God-forever-just-out-of-reach – without any image of what will happen next, without any plan for response, without any investment in investment in outcome. Those “withouts” are our poverty and only thus desiccated do we become a prism unto the One so that Her pure love might radiate through us in vivid scintillation. Truly we go into the darkness without lantern or fire in order to discover that we are the light and the darkness was but a dream.

Johannes Baptist Metz once wrote that “A human being is the ecstatic appearance of Being, and becoming fully human is an ever growing appropriation of this ecstasis of Being.”

Ever-growing means not ending. You see? There is no home. There is no one. No lover, no God, no shelter. No high table, no secret altar. There is only this, which can only be encountered in spiritual poverty – that is, in the utter open-hearted and empty-handed nature of Being meeting being meeting Being.

Being Homo Amans: Happiness as a Spiritual Practice

I say sometimes to my students: “take what you learn and act in the world with it. Do something.” And when they ask what they should do, I tell them to help somebody in a way that makes both parties happier than they were before the encounter started.

Related to this – especially when it comes to spiritual paths and practices and the inevitable contentions when one relates with them – is to have as one’s standard in this domain be that what’s right is what works.

Let me briefly address those two ideas.

First, it is important to allow our ideas and insights to have full run of the bodies in, through and to which they occur. If you are having ideas about peace, then behave peaceably. Don’t screw around by being casual or self-deprecating. Jesus and the Buddha were just people, like you. Beget peaceful practices that themselves beget peace. If that is not happening in your living – if everything is remaining at the level of the intellect – then something is wrong. The circle is not connecting, or closing. The wheel can’t go.

I am not disparaging the intellect. Praise and glory to the inner librarian, the inner scholar, and the inner cartographer. Truly! But a librarian without a writer of books is lost. A scholar without a classroom is lost. A cartographer without an explorer is lost.

You see where I am going with this.

I propose that we think in terms of identities – or essences – that make one another possible, that define and empower one another, so that what emerges is not one or the other but rather a relationship. Absent the explorer, no cartographer, and absent the cartographer, no explorer. You might think of the yin yang symbolism as an apt image. Somewhat less elegantly, you might imagine a bear eating blueberries, then shitting the blueberry seeds in sunlight so new bushes will grow, which in turn feed more bears who in turn shit more seeds . . .

Since I like bears and blueberries, I’ll use those images to build out the second idea. I proposed that a way to think about spirituality is to ask if it works. Is it helpful? If your spiritual practice has peace and justice as one of its goals, then are you helping instigate peace and justice? If yes, okay. Keep doing what you’re doing. If no, then reevaluate.

So there is this system we call a bear and it eats these berries, which are little systems themselves. The bear wants to make more bears, and the berries want to make more berries. This is a way of saying how life loves itself, how its aim is just to keep going, keep flowing. Life is what recreates itself, in and through all these observers, some of whom – like us – are aware of the the flow and some who aren’t. The flow doesn’t care; it just is. But it is sweet to see it – sweet like blueberries, rough and beautiful like bears.

The blueberries work for the bear because they energize her and satiate her, and they can do the same for her little cubs, if she has any. They help her be a living bear and to bring forth her bearness. But it works for the berries, too, because even as they lose their autonomy in the bear’s jaws, their seeds are set free in a most fertile way. As the bears brings forth her bearness, the blueberries bring forth their blueberryness. It works for both parties, you see?

You want to be happy. I want to be happy. I don’t mean the silly ersatz happiness of our team wins the Super Bowl, or we just ate a slice of fresh-baked bread with butter and cinnamon, or had some really great sex. Those things are fine – they are more than fine, really – but they are like fireflies compared to the great lantern of joy that is our inheritance and essence.

grazing_horses — horses grazing the far pasture, watching them from the woods

Happiness is what doesn’t come and go. It is not touched by external circumstances, which of course include your personal response to those circumstances. When we are happy we are helpful in a direct clear way because all that matters is extending our happiness. Joy wants to be shared, the same way life wants to be shared.

The blueberry is sweet and nutritious and so the bear wants it and takes it, and the way she consumes the berry maximizes the berry’s potential to become a new bush redolent with new berries. That is the nature of berries and bears. Our nature is to be happy and to extend our happiness through sharing, being nearby, co-creating, et cetera. We are loving creatures, what Humberto Maturana characterized as less Homo Sapiens than Homo Amans.

So I say: go do something today, something that works. And you will know it works by the measure of joy it brings you. Joy is infectious; it travels, radiates, disperses. It’s like a bear in a blueberry patch, a blueberry seed in bear scat. What makes you happy? Deeply naturally productively happy? Do that. That is your spiritual practice.

Against Conclusions, Spiritual and Otherwise

Experience is a continous whole that functions as a perspective. Experience provides an observer with a lot of phenomena – mental, emotional, physical – to observe. It owns the curious apparent paradox that it consists entirely of change and yet itself never changes.

wooden_buddha — one of the buddhas I put together on the trail out back

There are ways to experience this change-that-never-changes. You might consider experience as a kind of container: everything that occurs, from the passage of ants in the garden to the ideas in your head to the moon in the sky, are contained by experience.

In this mode, you might give attention to experience: can you find anything that is not contained in it? Doesn’t everything show up in experience?

Upon perceiving this awareness in which and to which all appears – we might begin to explore the container itself. What, if anything, do we find? What does it feel like to find it? Or to not find it? Or are those misguided questions?

I do not disparage those exercises and others like them. It is important to make sustained contact with the subjective nature of experience, and the way it feels so utterly infinitely whole.

I also want to be careful about the conclusions that I draw from that experience.

The experience we have is the experience of a human observer. There is some variety built into this but in a general way it is isomorphic across the species. Importantly, we want to be clear that other observers bring forth different worlds – different cosmos – in their observation. If you and a butterfly look at a flower, you see two different objects. If you and an ant look at the sky, you see two vastly different ceilings. Who is right? And since the obvious answer is that both are right according to the particular observer they are, then can we actually draw objective conclusions about the flower or the sky?

We really are constrained from drawing conclusions, including those that sound like “there is only this” or “I am that.” The very fact of our existence as human observers means that while we can make educated guesses and estimate probabilities and so forth, and can manage varying degrees of confidence in our scholarship, the whole – at least as we have long understood it in spiritual terms – is foreclosed to us.

Seeing this clearly is often experienced as painful, especially if it arrives after we’ve had the shallow enlightenment experience of “there is only this” and “I am it” et cetera. Again, I don’t disparage those experiences or insights. They are part of the overall human experience, and they are helpful in their way. They are even delightful in their way. It is simply that we tend to be confused by them, to objectify and cling to them through the form of adoration, worship and so forth. They can subtly be cherished as accomplishments, evidence of spiritual growth, and so forth.

Really, “this is it” and “I am that” are simply ways of expressing what it feels like sometimes to be a human observer. If those phrases are helpful in terms of making us gentler, kinder, slower to judge, more helpful, less argumentative and so forth, then great. But they aren’t dispositive. They don’t end the inquiry. They are more in the nature of a sign than that which is being pointed at. That is, they’re like the sign that says “river,” rather than the river itself.

consciousness — containers in which all phenomena appear

If we want the river, then we have to allow for the limitations imposed on us by virtue of being human observers. We get AN experience, not THE experience. It’s not even THE experience relative to other humans. Lots of people are happy, insightful, peaceful, helpful, generous and kind without ever having to resort to nondualism or Christianity or pop psychology.

Right now, this is how it is happening for us – this this – which is okay because it is a way of being human. It is one filter among many, all of which can be misused, confused, abused and so forth. All of which can be helpful and productive, too.

The work really is to go slower in terms of concluding. That is, we want to just let life be what it is without rushing to decide what it is or what it should be. That is a real practice! It takes time, energy, attention, commitment. Becoming the loving being that we naturally are is the work of the one life we are living.

Oneness Functions as Perspective

Part of what I am saying is that a human observer is essentially a perspective, A way of seeing rather than THE way of seeing. If I am sitting by the river I am not mucking the horse pasture. I am weeding the strawberries I am not writing poetry under the apple tree. If I am gazing at a sky full of stars I am not gazing a mushrooms in the compost.

mushrooms-in-compost — tendril ghosts sprouting from and falling back into the compost after rain

At any moment, the observation of which you are comprised is both local and partial. At the sensorimotor level it includes whatever data is allowed by the intersection of the local environment with the particular organism. At the cognitive level, it includes your vast knowing predicated on all the years of your learning to be the particular human observer you are.

For example, my perspective on cows includes my father’s relationship with cows, which was complex and lifelong, and my own history with cows, which cannot be disentangled from my father. Nobody can experience cows the way I experience cows, and I will never experience a cow apart from the specific way that I experience cows.

Right now I am writing on the back porch while it rains. The sky is soft gray like the belly of a trout. The lilac is just beginning to bloom. The grass is rich and green, like the first time I flew over Ireland. The neighbor’s sheep are bawling. I am thinking about what one does when faced with disagreement, with a particular focus on some of Hugh Gash’s ideas about spirituality in a constructivist context.

That’s Sean – or was Sean, a couple of hours ago. Who are you?

If we can see the way our observing constitutes a perspective that is biological, mental, psychological, spiritual and so forth, then we can perhaps begin to also see how this is true for all observers. You are a perspective. Your neighbor is a perspective. Robins in the backyard are a perspective. A bee is a perspective. The lilac is a perspective.

The significance of this is that it loosens our stranglehold on truth or reality. It eases up our conviction that there is a 1:1 correspondence between our experience as observers and an external cosmos. There isn’t the Way, the Truth, and the Life. There are many ways and many truths constituting many expressions of Life. This is disconcerting at first, given our particular investment in being special separate selves, but as we come back to it over and over, its potential for peace becomes clear.

If there are only many perspectives – as opposed to a singular truth that can be known – then we don’t need to argue as much. Disagreements arise but they needn’t devolve into estrangement or worse. Of course someone has a different view than us. They also have a pair of feet that aren’t ours. Are we going to get bent out of shape over that, too?

So we relax a little and see a way in which to build a world in which it is easier for people to be good, forgiving, gentle, patient. A world in which it is easier to be loving. And we can build it together. That is the real work of being human – to build together a world in love.

strawberry-beds — purple blossoms along the strawberry beds

Too often, we perceive differences as signals to defend ourselves or prove others wrong. It becomes a way of deciding who is valuable and deserving and who is not as worthy. That is a world in which love is constrained and denied its full expression.

When we appreciate that differences arise naturally as a fundament of the human observer, then some space opens up in which we are quieter, gentler, kinder and more nurturing. After all, this other could be me. To see that clearly is love. To let it be is love.

On Oneness

Perhaps we might consider the difference between oneness and one, and see the way the observing organism has a tendency to translate the former into the latter, and then to forget its translation, and – inevitably – defend against any effort to instigate remembering.

window_apple — the world through an apple

(The fragment longs to be whole. The human desires union – sexual, dialogic, communal, spiritual. Poetically, the jagged shard dreams of the clay pot of which it was once a part. Yet, any return to that state necessarily ends the fragment’s discrete existence. And any “whole” that subsequently emerges will have seams and cracks that recall its fragmentation).

How can we think about this? And how can our thinking inform our living?

First, we can say that “oneness” reflects a state of equilibrium. Picture a town hall full of citizens carefully listening to a speaker make the case for passage of a certain article, or a church in which the faithful attend the deacon’s homily. All are present, all are giving attention, all are committed to the shared nature of the experience, observing the rules which facilitate mutuality.

We might say that this state or condition of mutual attendance is one of harmony, in which the part neither regrets its “a-partness,” in the sense of needing to solve or amend or undo it, nor longs to aggrandize any apparent whole. That is, the citizen or church-goer is neither wishing they were elsewhere or otherwise (regretting their apparent separation) nor trying to colonize the shared experience in order to possess it as her “own.”

Yet obviously that regret and that colonization happen. Why? How? How does the simple harmony of “oneness” become the rude invader named “one?”

Here we might consider that “one” is a set. It is a bounded unit that includes itself and, by definition, excludes others. If we look again at the image of the town hall or the church, the “oneness” is composed of parts that are balanced. Yet any one part can take “oneness” and declare it “mine.” Our sensorimotor subjectivity allows for just this way of being. Separation is easy to perceive and, once seen, easy to identify with and, once identified with, easy to defend (including through aggression).

Can you see this in your own experience? The way you can be a singular you? Pitted against the world? Can you feel the sense of fear and guilt that naturally correspond to this separation? Can you see what you have done account of this fear and guilt? Can you imagine what you would do? Or could do, if pushed just so?

And can you see how if you shift your attention, even a little, this experience of “one” merges into something less threatening? It is happening right now – in this shared experience of language. You reading what another wrote, and understanding it, and responding to it, in whatever way – slight, dramatic, affirmative, doubtful – you respond.

It is always the other who reminds us of wholeness, and who makes our return possible.

Each person has a responsibility to love one another – to look upon his fellow man only as God created him – because he has discovered there is no difference between himself and his brother.

This responsibility is yours.
To accept that responsibility
will transform your life

(Tara Singh The Future of Mankind 156)

In essence, I suggest a delicate dance. Any human observer can experience herself as singular and discrete. Her subjective experience allows her to claim oneness as “hers.” “We” peacefully coexisting is translated into one with boundaries that need defending.

Yet at any time, one can instead give attention to oneness. Most of our spiritual discipline – those of us in the tradition of A Course in Miracles and other contemporary expressions of oneness – can be understood as perceiving oneness rather than one. If you look for harmony, it will show itself. But this looking – this giving of attention – needs to be liberated from ideas of what oneness looks like, feels like, acts like, et cetera. All of that are weapons in the war of the one. Beat them into plowshares, if you will.

We overlook oneness because we see instead our presumptions about oneness. That is, rather than experience a state of equilibrium (which requires the other), we look for a personal experience that is our own – that we have, possess, commodify, et cetera. Either is possible but given a choice, why insist on pain?

When I say – as I sometimes do – “this this,” I am simply observing that we cannot simultaneously stand with both feet in the river and both feet on the bank. We cannot simultaneously be on the trail to the summit and on the summit. Our capitalist culture will sell any insight, which can appear to cheapen it, but “be here now” is truly good advice, and giving attention to it as a practice is really all one needs to do.

Thus, through the gift of attention, “one” remembers “oneness,” which includes the other, who is “not-one.” Here it is helpful to remember that “the other” does not experience herself as “other” but as “one.” And that “one” experiences us as “other.” What we call “love” is really just the realization that everything we say and do in our living is being done to, with and through others each of whom could be our own self. This realization restores awareness of equilibrium and ends the observing organism’s “detour into fear” (T-2.I.2:1).

Or so one says on a cloudy morning, writing in a reconfigured hayloft, for others one has never met, and yet meets in the sweet fields of language, which are always Love spilling and sealing the seams of us.

Self Setting Aside Self

A non-trivial aspect of my spiritual practice – that is rooted in A Course in Miracles but diverges in thoughtful applied ways – is to set gently aside questions of mystery in favor of engagement with what appears, or what seems to be, the case.

That is, when I am mucking the horse pasture, or clearing trails in the forest, or baking bread, I am less concerned with the abstract nature of the self – the light of pure awareness, say, or Consciousness (with a capital C) – and more with how that self is experiencing its self right now.

In doing so, the spiritual mystery of the self, its nature, its origins, et cetera – naturally dissolve. It is as if – and may, in fact, be that – love is content with the subject/object divide, so long as it is allowed to rest gently and non-confrontationally in the apparent division.

Also in doing this, I am engaging in a sort of bastardized Husserlian bracketing. I am giving attention to what is given, rather than struggling mentally (or psychologically or intellectually) to understand what is given. Again, it is my experience – my thesis, as it were – that love understands itself in the context in which it appears. So the bracketing – which intends to set aside complex questions of self which have riddled western history and thinking for millenia – becomes a way of knowing. It is as if the questions that were bracketed return or – even better – never left.

What does this look like – or how is it enacted – in my living?

Say that I am mucking the horse pasture. I give attention to the task which includes both physical and mental elements:

– noticing where the manure is;
– forking it into the wheelbarrow;
– eyeballing the horses eyeballing me;
– noticing the birds, butterflies, and insects;
– noticing the flowers and grass;
– hydrating if necessary;
– not rushing and not slacking and not hurting my body;
– dumping manure in the proper compost pile (they are divided according to time of year and length of time spent composting);
– stirring the pile if and as necessary;
– putting the tools away

This is a lot to do! And, of course, it all sort of arises in an apparently singular welter. There is the work and there is the way my body handles it. There is the environment and the way in which attention reveals it – the more attention given, the more there is to attend. There is the overarching context of loving these very horses and wanting their living to be clean and pleasing and safe. There is the comfort and diligence in composting manure to enrich our gardens and allow us to barter with neighbors, and there is thus an overarching sense that one is doing to the best of one’s ability what is best and most loving for the collective.

It is not necessary to do anything in order to be aware of all this! It simply happens. And there is a natural corollary: it is not necessary to understand the self or its origins or its true nature in order to be a self or experience a self or bring that self into loving application. Simply do it and observe what is happening as it happens.

distant pasture — the pasture at a distance a little after dawn

The suggestion I make – because it arises from my experience – is that the mysteries and the mysticism (and salvation and awakening and present-moment-awareness and . . . ) are all simply natural aspects of what is naturally happening. They are included in the package, as it were. And they reveal themselves as we give attention to what is happening, which is not dramatic or intense but merely this very living that we are doing and were always doing.

No more and no less: and just enough, just so.