Individual salvation and the sorrow of the world

We live in an Age of Death, though it is, for most of those able to read this blog, just making the turn into their driveway. It will take a little longer to get to their doors. But it will be knocking, soon enough.

The current best estimate, one that may well prove too conservative, is that temperatures by the end of this century will rise ten degrees. Ten degrees is far worse than what was feared just a few years ago. The tundra is thawing, releasing vast amounts of methane, in a vicious positive feedback loop. Vegetation, rather than growing more lush in the presence of additional carbon dioxide, is dying, further accelerating warming. And the powers that be, like a thousand petty Strangeloves overseeing their own lucrative slow motion  Gotterdammerung, throw ever more fuel-- literally and metaphorically-- onto the fire.

What ten degrees means is that this is no longer a matter of changing lightbulbs. This is no longer a matter of Transition Towns. This cannot be survived in a well stocked mountain retreat with a sizable arsenal.  This might not be survivable, at all.

If it is not our extinction that is palpable, if in fact we put survival ahead of sociopathic greed, denial, and delusion, and muster the will to make it through, than the very best case is that we are just a few years away from a time of serious thinning of the herd. It's called "population overshoot", and it is not a pretty thing. It will not leave us stronger-- animal populations that have made it through overshoot are sickly and stunted for generations. And survival will not be for the most deserving-- survival will come, as in all great disasters, to those who are lucky (that's not to say that preparation is useless, but to say that given a severe enough disaster, it is insufficient).

That's the good scenario.

I sometimes feel as if I am living the nightmares of my childhood. The missiles have launched, and there is no pulling them back. The sirens have sounded. The world around me looks as it always has-- so ordinary, so peaceful. On a different day, in a different hour, I might sit under a tree and read a book, or curl up in a sunbeam and take a nap. But at a predestined moment, on this day, in this hour, this ordinary world before me will be horribly transformed, and there will be no more tree and no more sunbeam, only death. What now do I do?

The difference between then, and now, was that as a Cold War child I did not imagine I would have so much time to contemplate the horror of  what is to come, at this, the end of the world as we know it.

It's enough to make a mystic want to escape into navel gazing. You know, the ol' personal liberation routine. The eternal now (so much better than the here and now), infinite light (beats unending heat), find your own bliss (soon to be easier than find your own water) thing. Which brings me to the 144 dying Jesuses (Jesii?) on my workbench.

(Really. It does.)

I don't care how much one believes in respect for the world's religious symbols. When one's job involves nailing 144 tiny Jesuses to 144 tiny crosses, it is impossible to avoid twisted humor. Eventually, though, I had to get a handle on myself (clients do not pay for the knowledge that I had a really good laugh over the component parts of their missing crucifixes). Which brought me to Julian of Norwich.

I sometimes have difficulty wrapping my head around the mysticism of western Christianity. Some aspects of it, like  the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, seem to be cousin to some of my own practices. Others are alien to me, in particular the seeking out of pain and suffering, and experiencing the mystical experience in terms of the suffering of the Crucifixion.

The visions of Julian of Norwich are in many ways typical of the genre. She puts to paper quite a bit of gore, at least in my opinion. But she and I are  in complete concurrence when it comes to (some of) the essence of the mystical experience. As Julian put it, she saw God holding in his hand a tiny, delicate, nut, one that she thought might crumble before her eyes. And then she understood that the nut was the whole of creation, and was told "God made it. God loves it. God keeps it". And so the message of Julian of Norwich is of God's limitless love for His creation. "that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

Woo hoo! End of the world solved. It's party time at Hardcore's. Bring your SUV! Right???

Not exactly. In fact, not at all.

Julian saw an infinity of love in God. Julian did not observe the absence of sin among humanity. And while I don' t phrase the confusion of humanity in terms of sin, I have little doubt my understanding corresponds to Julian's understanding of sin. Julian said sin itself was the worst possible hell. I think that Julian would concur with me that a direct assault on the safety of that small brown nut God loves so much is among the worst possible sins.

(in Julian's day, the whole of creation meant this planet and its immediate environs and not some distant galaxy somewhere -- which in any case would too would be destroyed by our sociopaths, if only they could make a buck off it)

A more reasonable analysis is that we are due hell on Earth.

But there is a more important understanding nestled in among this discussion. That is, that there is no private liberation, no spiritual escape hatch to wiggle through. For if liberation is to become wholly transparent to the Divine, and the Divine is wholly loving and wholly love, then to be liberated is to confront suffering, not to run from it, to be wholly present in the Age of Death, for as long as we survive, acting as Love present in the world.

And if liberation, or realization or salvation, or whatever we choose to call it, is, as I believe, our human duty to approach, then it remains our duty, and our destiny, to love this fragile brown nut with all of our hearts. It is our duty to do everything in our power to mitigate harm and to comfort the harmed, even though to do so requires that we face, and bear, almost overwhelming sorrow.

The missiles of the Age of Death have been fired. There is no pulling them back (though it is still possible to prevent the missile from firing which will bring about our extinction). The warning sirens have sounded for all who are listening. Everything looks normal, as it will for a time, but in a matter of years it will not be. Already death has rung doorbells in places like Joplin. Mo.

I have no suggestions, at all, for how to avoid the sorrow of this age. But the question of "what now" is resolved. As a voice from the depths of the last great human die off would no doubt concur (the Plague killed 30-60% of the people of Europe, and over 20% worldwide), what now, is love.

Well, I'm not officially anonymous anymore

In the course of transferring domains around to get hardcorespirituality.com to properly point at Blogspot, I had to remove anonymous domain registration. I'm not going to put it back.

Instead I'll throw in the promised discreet advertisement for stuff I make ( http://www.artfire.com/users/webmuskie --- buy stuff and help me dig out of my parrot master and overlord's vet bills. End of plug, at least for this round of bills).

Why drug-induced spirituality is inadequate

I came across a rare sight the other day-- a harmonious and constructive Internet discussion between a skeptic and a very mixed group of religious and spiritual-but-not-religious individuals.

At one point two of the spiritual-but-not religious persons spoke of how drugs, many years before, had brought them to an understanding of the oneness of existence, an understanding which has stayed with them throughout the years. It would be impossible, reading their words, to doubt the power of what they had experienced.

Yet, their experiences were as a peck on the cheek, compared with the profundity of true consummation brought about through disciplined, drug-free, practice. Let's see how this is so.

You can't forget truth. Whether it's the truth of how to ride a bicycle or the Truth of a glimpse into the Ultimate, one is changed forever by one's experience of the truth, and forever it will be with you, sometimes in an attenuated firm, but it will be there. The two persons who discussed their drug-related experiences spoke of this transformation.

But yet, that was what they spoke of. They spoke of an experience,  of a singular event which came about largely by happenstance, an experience which they could not further expand upon because, while a drug may impart an experience, it cannot impart tools, discipline, continuity, or development. And in their voices, even as they spoke of the profundity of the change they both experienced, was sadness. What they had was a memory, a powerful memory of a place they longed to return to but could not, and did not believe they ever could. And so they comforted themselves with their memories.

Something I must add here: memory, of such an experience, is more nearly like motor memory than the recollection of your aunt's telephone number. It is a much more powerful and intimate state, this soul memory, than is ordinary mental memory. Nonetheless, it is not presence itself.

Spiritual discipline lacks any of the ease and charisma of drugs. It lacks even the sex appeal of isolated techniques like meditation (chiefly because meditation, these days, is used as an artificially induced drug substitute, rather than as something that arises naturally in its own due time). There's zero glamor accrued to the art of digging the crap out of one's head and refusing idle thoughts their play. But while the purpose of the effort and the risk and the disruption is often out of mind, that one has tools and is self-propelled somewhere is never in doubt for the practitioner of spiritual discipline. And hidden in its debris field of its austere recklessness, is the development of presence, that which cannot be longed for, and which is not even oneness.

The urgency of making distinctions

I was in a minor spat with another poster on a discussion board the other day. The poster said that he intended to revolutionize mysticism by putting words to the ineffable; I called him an idiot or a fool or some such fungible word (folly, it seems, is highly "effable" in English), and ended the conversation.

I have not gotten back there recently due to illness, and so I can't say I saw all of the aftermath, but there seemed to be some shock and a few words to the effect that "everyone in your path is put there to learn from" and other well-how-can-anyone-know-what-is-foolish kind of statements. I'm not here to rehash the incident away from the board (I'll do that, if at all, at the board); I'm here to address the importance of making clear distinctions.

The world's wisdom literature is full of accomplished mystics calling other people fools, and worse. Were one not attuned to the reasons why, it would seem, say, that the patient, kindly, wise one on page 19, who sat up all night with a distraught parent, and who on page 24 gave away his robe in a snowstorm, on page 35 suddenly, inexplicably, thunders "fool" at a visitor who said no more than a word or two, and throws him out on his ear.

Those wise ones sure are inexplicable, right? Surely that  last anecdote wasn't intended to be an example for us, like all the other anecdotes were, right???

Making such distinctions to the best of one's ability is an imperative, not an option and not a special prerogative of a handful of great masters from great books.  A mystic pursues Truth and nothing else. Admitting ego nonsense and delusion, and setting it it up as an equal to Wisdom with a shrug of ones shoulders and a sigh of "how could anyone hope to tell which is which?" is cowardice at best. If one is mystic enough to know what mysticism is, one has tools to begin to make distinctions between wisdom and foolishness.

What tools? An earlier post of mine that unfortunately lost its title in the move points to them:

If one is steeped in the Western tradition of prayer, sooner or later in among all the words has to enter the thought “why am I praising That which needs no praise? Why am I asking things of That which already knows everything I would ask about? What function does all the noise I make serve, except to display my insolence?” Then, the most natural prayer in the world is silent contemplation of the Divine.

Such prayer is absolutely indistinguishable from most forms of Eastern meditation. There is a trend, in fact, to call it “meditation”, so that the general public knows what is being talked about. Or, worse, to label it “centering prayer” and then to teach it as a technique, much as yoga is taught. But it’s not a technique. It’s a state of mind that simply sprouts after one has tilled the soil long enough.

(....)

Somewhere after the point where practices converge, so too does theology, which is to say that it disappears. Whether one calls it emptying or repentance or yielding or surrendering, one cannot cling to dogma with a deeply silent mind, not even to the dogma that brought one to silence.

Any sound path will converge at that same point.

Where does something point? Does it point towards that point of convergence, at least for the individual who believes it? If they are promoting it as truth, might it lead their listeners closer to that point of convergence, or are they inadvertently misleading others? Is it a suffering individual looking for answers (looking for answers is not the mark of a fool). Or is it just another example of something that aimlessly meanders the fields of ignorance?  Sometimes the answer may not be obvious. But it  is important to try to recognize the differences.

So does that mean that every time one spots foolishness, one shouts "fool!"? Of course not. Aside from the obvious risk to one's vocal cords from shouting "fool" all day and night (often at the mirror ;-) ), one has to exercise some judgment. There are times to suffer foolishness in order to get something else constructive accomplished. There are times to suffer foolishness because sometimes by stringing a fool out one can reveal the foolishness to the fool and/or observers.  Sometimes shouting "fool" will bring about harm to oneself and accomplish nothing constructive. Sometimes it is best that someone else point out the foolishness. But, as a rule, it is a kind deed to let a fool know they are a fool (or more accurately, are thinking and spreading foolish -- i.e., false -- ideas). Whether, when, and how this is done is situational.

A kind deed? Is Hardcore nuts?

My best moments have come about, by and large, as a result of being told accurately, either by myself or by others, that I was a fool. Sometimes it was said gently. Sometimes (often by myself to the mirror) it was not. The more appropriately delivered under the circumstances, the sooner I have understood it, and the more quickly I have benefited. But no one -- no one -- benefits from having their foolishness tolerated.

Those who fail to discern between foolishness and truth are neither wise, nor courageous, nor kind.

As is obvious, this blog has moved to Blogger

My annual web hosting bill was coming due at the same time I was hit by a number of other annual bills and a large vet bill. Given a choice between web hosting and a parrot, I decided to keep the parrot :) So, for the foreseeable future, blogspot.com it is.

I'm weighing whether to abandon my anonymity here, so that I can do some flagrant hawking of merchandise (I make stuff) to offset vet bills (both recent and past bills I'm still paying off, and for that matter future vet bills, as my sweetheart needs an expensive procedure I can't yet afford).  If I do this, I promise to keep the hawking to a minimum.

How spiritual teachers do a disservice (sometimes)

(This entry was first posted on the old blog on Saturday, February 19th, 2011 at 12:51 am)

No, I’m not talking about the flagrant frauds (oh so many to link to, oh so few words here to link). I’m talking about what happens when some people get a little whiff of truth (but only a little).

Words are a pathetic vehicle for conveying ultimate truth. The best description possible would still contain within itself aspects which, taken together, render the description an inadvertent fraud. The first is that, being evocative of the truth, it would inspire many listeners and stir in them positive feelings. The second is that, being a mere approximation, it would fall far short of describing truth. When words of this sort fall on the ears of the spiritually lazy, what such people carry away is not understanding, but a bunch of feel good words. Because they “know” the words, and the words stir in them a pleasant feeling, they think they understand. They repeat the words to each other without real understanding. And, like a demoniacal inoculation, the words immunize them against hearing anything deeper and clearer and truer.

You can’t speak of love to someone who has memorized platitudes about love. You can’t talk of the truth in the silence to those whose minds are filled with noisy words about silence. Even the less popular, if sometimes more apt for the audience, words like surrender and sacrifice become blotters which absorb stray truth before it hits home.

How can one speak to such persons, when they’re looking for help, wanting insight, but have become immune to the meaning of words? These are not abstractions for me. I count among my friends people who are inoculated against verbal teaching in this way. Some of them are plainly stuck at being spiritual dilettantes, and there’s nothing to be done for that — I mean, if you really think you can buy enlightenment through pricy weekend workshops, what can anyone do but let you have at it till you tire of such nonsense (or go broke)?– but some are not. Some want more depth, and the words they’ve memorized have become their shackles. They would be better off if they “knew” nothing at all.

As a freelance mystic I obviously have my issues with notions like “initiation” and “inner” and “outer” teachings. Formal religious hierarchies built on those concepts fossilize quickly into all ritual, no substance. But there is something genuine in watching one’s words so as not to dispense descriptions where they can’t be understood except as a cliche. Of course there’s nothing that can be “hidden” anymore, with the world awash in spiritual triteness, but at least one can try not to add to it.

A primer on reason

(This entry was posted on the old blog on Sunday, January 2nd, 2011 at 9:41 am)

This ought not be a blog post. This ought to be a book outline. Perhaps someday I’ll find the initiative to write such a book, but for the moment, here’s a quick and dirty, almost flow chart like, look at reason as appropriately applied in mysticism.

Step zero in reasoning is humility. One must be brave enough to know what one does not know, and ready to submit oneself to the truth one may find at the end of one’s quest, whether or not the answer one found was expected or desired. If this sounds, well, mystical. it’s because all truth seeking converges at the same point, even rationalism.

Step one is to look at the question and make your best guess at the answer.  What is it that you think might be true?

What if you haven’t a clue what might be going on? Most likely you either lack sufficient good information for a guess, or you are being indecisive (sometimes as a result of an overwhelming amount of information). Try seeking out more information,. Or carefully outline what you do know on paper. Or get the opinion of others. Then just make yourself make a best guess.

Step two: ask yourself how can you test your idea(s) to be sure of their validity?  Can you set up some sort of experiment – say, by making coffee three different ways, then tasting all three to find out which one really tastes better? (scientific method).  Or can you look over published raw data – say, census bureau data, to confirm whether there really are an unusual number of single Polish biochemists living on your block (the scientific method as applied by observational astronomy and many social sciences). Maybe you can go back and read Aunt Millie’s letters to see what she was really saying about your father when your father and mother first met (the historical method). Or perhaps your idea is untestable – say, a thought that God loves people more when they wear Red Sox t-shirts (in which case you may need to evaluate the idea spiritually- see below).

Really important question: Is it worth your while to test your idea? Maybe you’re a tea drinker who doesn’t really care which method makes the best coffee, at least not enough to go out and buy or borrow three coffeepots. It’s okay, then, to simply keep your opinion that coffee is best made in a French press as an unvalidated personal opinion (but remember always that you don’t really know this to be a fact).

Or maybe your idea is testable but you don’t have the means to test it — perhaps, it turns out, census data is not fine-grained enough to determine if your block is chock-full of single Polish biochemists, and while in theory a survey could answer your question, you don’t have the time, skill set, or finances for such a survey. Then you can infer a likely result from census data for your neighborhood or city, decide to keep your opinion as an entirely unvalidated one, or defer to the opinion of experts who have performed the kind of research you  cannot, depending upon the importance of the question and the resources available. Maybe the question about chemists is a little important to you and there are no experts on the question, in which case you choose to infer an answer from the number of singles and of Poles in your neighborhood coupled with that you live across the street from a biochemistry research institute. Your opinion then has some evidence behind it, but remains untested.

Or maybe your question is very serious and while you haven’t the means to test it, there are experts — say, instead of pondering Poles, you’re trying to decide what treatment approach is best for your newly diagnosed cancer. Then absolutely look at what the experts who have studied the question have to say.  If someone says they are an expert, but they have not studied the question, then their opinion is at best inferred from a little data, at worst, sheer quackery. I once saw a surgeon who represented himself as trained to perform a very delicate, highly specialized form of joint surgery, but his curriculum vitae made it clear that he had not, and no, the argument that he had been trained at the Cleveland Clinic (where such surgeries are sometimes performed– but not, apparently, by him) was not sufficient to make him a genuine specialist. People don’t acquire expertise by eating in the same lunchroom as experts, though sometimes they try to acquire it by experimenting on a lot of unwitting patients till they get it right.

Step three: If you should test: test. If you will rely on others results: examine how they got their results. Did they test? How many others have gotten similar results? Is their opinion consistent with what you do know?

If the question appears to be a spiritual one: First, is it actually a testable (i.e., scientific) one? If someone claims to be channeling advanced aliens from Betelgeuse, it is possible to determine that Betelgeuse is a short-lived unstable supergiant that almost certainly never had sufficient time to evolve any life, let alone advanced life (when dinosaurs looked up at the sky, Betelgeuse hadn’t yet formed, and any day now Betelgeuse may go out of existence with a spectacular fireworks display, as it has begun it’s final stellar collapse). If the channeler quickly adjusts his or her story to fit the facts (“Oh, not that Betelgeuse, but the other star The Space Ancients call Betelgeuse”), you are right to suspect fraud or self-deception on the part of the channeler (it’s implausible that The Space Ancients would speak a derivative of medieval Arabic).

Important fact: it isn’t necessary that someone be asking payment for their wisdom for fraud to be a possibility. Maybe they’re quietly collecting “donations”, or secretly sleeping with cute female followers. Maybe they are in it for the ego boost. Or maybe they’re black magicians trolling for potential victims. Certain things, like purporting to sell divine wisdom, are inherently suspect, but evaluate the claims, not appearances. A good con artist knows how to fake appearances.

Of course, if you know someone is acting unethically, get away from them as fast as possible. They are almost certainly not dispensing anything like wisdom, and whatever wisdom they may by happenstance share is not worth your becoming their victim. The same applies when a spiritual group often  acts badly.

If it is a truly untestable spiritual question: What is the broad opinion of spiritual thought throughout the ages concerning the matter? Note there is not anything like universal agreement on the particulars, but certain principles and patterns have a way of appearing over and over again in spiritual thinking.Are your ideas consistent with, or at odds with, those themes?

Though particular attire has been used over the centuries by the world’s spiritual traditions, the attire prescribed has generally been worn for reasons of modesty or simplicity, or to visually set the group apart from others.  Rarely do spiritual traditions say that God favors wearers of particular attire (i.e., simply donning a head scarf or prayer cap will not automatically please Allah. Only the state of my heart towards Him will do that, though if my inmost desires are towards Him and He commands modesty, presumably if at all possible I will cover my head). Do Red Sox t-shirts fit the pattern of religious and spiritual attire?

If what you think is true is also  consistent with spiritual thinking throughout over the ages, it is more likely to be sound. If it is not consistent with the  repeating themes of human spirituality, or don’t seem to appear among them, then honest self-examination is called for.  Is it plausible that God hates New Yorkers who do not renounce their own baseball teams, or at minimum agree to wear the T-shirt of their rivals? Does God really care about baseball, or is God more concerned that His creation come to know him  and be filled by his truth and love? Is your idea an insight, or is it wishful thinking, or is it the result of outside influences you’d rather not be influenced by? Maybe you own a bar not far from Fenway, and you make a lot of money on game days, and that has influenced your thinking.

The final word on a spiritual thought is direct mystical knowledge. But be aware that most “mystical experiences” are nothing of the sort. The more mystically inclined one becomes the more aware one becomes of, for lack of a better description, “spiritual static”.  Some “static” is clutter and distraction, and some is outright hostile and deceptive (many religions call that stuff “demons”; I prefer to give the nasties the more diminutive moniker of “fleas”).

If one has not known true mystical insight it can be hard to discern signal from static. The best description I can muster is that a true mystical experience has the quality of imparting actual understanding and insight, rather than mere ideas and information. A mystical insight, for example, won’t tell you to find a job by blindly going to the corner of Main and Vine at precisely 2:30 on Thursday. Mystical insight instead opens ones eyes to how things really are, so that one sees more clearly. After a true mystical insight, one is a changed person. One may see that the patterns of things would lead one to find employment if at that street corner at that time, but if so then one would truly understand why it would be so.

If one “sees” something, tests it, and it does not turn out to be true, then your “mystical insight” had become testable, and it has failed. You have a genuine emergency on your hands. You’ve got a heaping helping of delusion to free yourself from. If at all possible find someone you trust to help you through the crisis. You need to determine whether it was wishful thinking and you are a poor judge of genuine mystical experiences (and fix that, pronto), or if you are awash in static or fleas (also something that needs to be fixed asap). It may be necessary to drop freelance mysticism for a more formal path at this time. Take this seriously– understand that this is the very  scenario where would-be mystics sometimes go insane.

Note there are psychic experiences that resemble the blind take-it-or-leave-it of the job search example, which, if carried through, do work (i.e., one would find a job in that manner). I don’t like psychic experiences, because not only is it difficult to discern “good” psychic experiences from flea-laden suggestions intended to cause harm, they offer no experience of Truth.  I would advise others to stay away from the merely psychic, though obviously ymmv.