Doubt and Reassurance Volume II
(Also available in soft-cover print editions)
Dr. Don Ray
Don Ray's work published by Quantum Embrace Publishing at Smashwords
Copyright © 2011 Don Ray
All rights reserved.
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Guide tips for this journey:
You should know what you’re getting into, so here’s an overview.
In looking at the nature of the entries in this book, to include some contrived list of chapters just seemed like deceptive advertising, implying far greater organization and rational planning than I could ever muster.
Instead of distinct elements and topics conveniently lending themselves to a socially acceptable compilation of chapters worthy of a passing grade in English class, the entries are arranged in a progressive direction. They grimly start out heavy on the doubts. But then, in the spirit of a climbing expedition in which you have to start the summit ascent in the middle of the night, about the time you feel you can’t stand stumbling through any more darkness you seem to notice that just maybe you can discern a little bit more light, and soon, although the darkness still surrounds, you can see beyond the attenuated beam of you headlamp, and your spirits lift with the reassurance that warming sun lies just over the horizon.
So if in reading you begin to doubt you can handle any more grim assessments of the state of the world, fast-forward to the sunrise and reassurance by skipping to the later sections. Within those later sections you reach the summit for this climb, a feeble stab at a summary of the Purpose that the condition of the world and humanity so majestically fulfills.
Whether you take the long technical route or a shorter, more scenic trail, I pray the burden of your doubts is somewhat lightened, and the waxing glow of reassurance assists your route finding.
Of course on any trail, landmarks and mile-markers can provide some reassurance that at least you’re not totally lost. So here are some things to watch for along the way. It seems more accurate to call them "landmarks and milestones", but editing software insists I call them:
Table Of Contents
* Part I: The world’s a mess. We’re a mess.
*Part II Physical brains, disabilities, guilt, confession,
Whoo hoo! Now we’re having some fun!
*Part III: Hints of growing light and approaching spring.
**********************
Part I
Got doubts about the world in which we live and the lives we lead? When doubts are well placed and justified, at least some reassurance is to be found in knowing that someone else shares those doubts.
Part I
Why our morbid fascination with mass shootings, the shooters, and the next disaster?
Look at all those hits on my website in the twelve hours after posting an essay about the Virginia Tech massacre! (April, 2007)……Such a fascination we have with disaster and evil.
Why should bad news, disaster, evil, mayhem, war, murder, and violence so capture our interests?
Is it simply because such events pose a potential threat to us? “If it happened to them, it could happen to me, so I better stay informed.” Or does our interest in these events reflect some innate interest in evil itself?
No doubt, psychologists have published volumes on this subject which I have no qualifications to discuss.
But I can at least consider the source of my own curiosity.
Does this curiosity about evil arise from the same source as my curiosities about the baffling behavior of physics at the quantum level, the bizarre life forms living equally bizarre life cycles in coral reefs, and the mind boggling variety of planets and nebulae and moons that inhabit this universe?
Does this curiosity about evil ironically stem from a desire to know God, whether we believe in God or not?
Somehow it’s hard to ignore tales and rumors of entities and events that just might shed a little light on the mysterious, hidden workings of the universe that shapes our lives. As kids we gathered in macabre reverence around the dead cat in the empty lot, morbidly intent on learning what did happen to the dead, which was really to ask, what does happen to us?
Finding a few animal bones in the woods is always worthy of a pause for inspection, for after all, aren’t there bones in us, though we can’t see them, and here before us is a chance to see the un-seeable and extrapolate the discovery to understanding our own makeup.
Tales of ghosts in the bed-and-breakfast in which we spent the night, an article about an Unidentified Flying Object, the mystic’s description of visiting avatars, all such things arrest our attention, and arrest it to a greater degree than the astonishing and verifiable discoveries of science.
We gape in insatiable curiosity around any liturgical hawker’s booth that purports to unveil some aspect of the reclusive creator of that universe.
The itinerant avatar, the tale of reincarnation, and the paranormal event, all provide tantalizing hints of that which we suspect, and perhaps hope for, that there is more, something beyond this material world we see, something more profound than our daily routine and physical body and common death.
And finally, in the unspeakable acts of Jack the Ripper and Cho Seung Hui, like the animal bones that grab our attention in the woods, we see exposed something that might reveal some aspect of the inner workings of a vaguely discerned realm of evil and good that might underlie this temporal world.
Do we see exposed in such acts the bones of something that resides in each of us, or some aspect of an eternal battle between good and evil, or some dark past from which our souls are trying to evolve, or some glimpse of the demonic forces that battle the good God that we hope also exists?
We don’t even understand enough to know why we are curious, intrigued, and irresistibly drawn to those reports about the mind of the killer. But we know we are drawn. There is something we want to know, we need to know, and chance discoveries of a dead cat, or bones by a trail, or news of a horrific exercise in evil might reveal to us a little of what is usually kept as mystery and secret.
We will peer into the reports and articles that direct their analytical light into the shadowy depths of the mind and soul of the mass murder. But we will never see very far into that abyss.
Yet there is something else to be learned from our watching the news and reading the reports. Our interest and curiosity themselves can teach us a lesson.
In our interests we cannot deny an instinctive awareness that there is something we should understand, something about that dead cat and those bones and that demented mind that can teach us something about ourselves and the unseen influences that shape this worldly life.
We need not wait for the chance childhood discovery of the deceased animal to learn about bones and biology.
And we need not wait for the breaking news event to ask questions about the nature of good, evil, and their manifold manifestations in human life.
In following our curiosity about what lies within, we ask what invisible bones underlie our life structure. In asking what lies without, we ask what forces and mysteries and mystical influences shape behavior and events. Perhaps we will discover those questions come together and arrive at the same answers.
Perhaps we should let the chance discoveries and morbid fascinations of this spiritual childhood of ours teach us most of all of our own curiosity, affirming that there are profound questions we want to better understand, and from that discovery, send us on a pro-active voyage of discovery of that which exists within, and simultaneously that within which we exist.
*****************************
Trading Diamonds for Whale Teeth
Thoughts while in the Otago Museum, New Zealand
The museum displays include Maori recordings of their history, but history conveyed not in documents and illustrations, but in objects intricately carved. Hardly primitive, the Maori visual art is used to express deeper meaning than mere facts, capturing the feeling of history. Such an artistic expression of history can include dimensions of reality missing in our factual descriptions using chronologies and written word.
In another display, an armored tropical atoll warrior figure reminds me oddly enough of the mountaineers with whom I climbed last week, both adapting to extreme conditions by use of appropriate clothing. Museum displays such as this Maori art reveal not differences between peoples, but our sameness, only masked by different construction, clothing, and media, as dictated by our environments. Expressed through wildly differing forms, in museums such as this the human spirit is revealed to be universally shared.
This sameness is again illustrated in a display of sperm-whale teeth used as jewelry. Our diamonds, their sperm-whale teeth, all the same thing. Except obtaining that sperm-whale tooth required courage and daring, and its owner might have known a relative that died getting their “cetacean diamond”. Further, their “diamond” ( tooth ) was a byproduct of getting food to survive, not a possession hunted for its own sake. With that background of honor and courage, I would stack the value of their sperm-whale teeth against our diamonds with their anonymous, bloody, and cruel histories anytime.
**************************
Lightning Strikes
I recently read an article about Suzanne, a young woman struck down by a lightning bolt.
Her nervous system decimated by the current that coursed through her spine, her brain partially deadened by the lack of oxygen during the time her heart did not beat, her completely disabled life now bears no resemblance to the sporty, active, popular life she lived only two years before.
Suzanne’s mother made the comment “When you are in public, you want to tell people she wasn’t always that way. They don’t know the real Suzanne.”
True, no doubt.
But I suppose that’s true of all of us.
We do not know the real Suzanne because she’s trapped in a body that cannot speak, cannot move other than an occasional finger or hand movement. We do not know the real Suzanne that used to, and no doubt would still like to, accomplish, act, do. We do not know the real Suzanne because she can no longer communicate or express who she is.
Yet her tragic situation represents only a more extreme case of the barriers and hurdles we all face. None of us can take on all the activities we would really like to, none can find words that really convey the complexity and depth of our thoughts and emotions.
Let us keep in mind that in dealing with most people, we do not really know them, just as they do not know us. We are all trapped in bodies that constrain our abilities, to greater or lesser degrees. We all fumble with words, and we are all crippled in our communication by the blows of childhood comments, the strikes of rejection, the shock of criticisms, that leave us to varying degrees insecure, hesitant, and protective of our inner selves.
The people passing Suzanne’s wheelchair in the grocery store have no way to know of her long jump record or her now missing smile. When passing anyone on the street, in the hallway, or between the cubicles, we have no way to know of their real aspirations, pain, and joys.
Let us learn from Suzanne’s example, and keep in mind that behind the personally crippling effects of a bottle, or a history of abuse, or a consuming drive for money, career, and prestige, everyone has loftier aspirations, everyone has an authentic smile, however long hidden.
As we struggle to maintain patience in the relationship, professionalism in the meeting, and sanity on the freeway, let’s keep in mind that we all have a real self hidden by the spiritually crippling lightning strikes of personal circumstances.
******************************
Flower Stalk
I go hunting on those morning walks through wooded hills, stalking insights, words, phrases, descriptions, treasures rare and elusive.
The first brush strokes of fall clearly apparent
on a cluster of leaves here,
in a crisp wisp of air there.
Last flowers and desperate grasses
work furiously,
racing the inexorable orbit of the planet,
racing to turn dirt, sun, and water into next spring’s life.
Formed of nothing but minerals from soil and mixtures of water and dust, the structural marvel towers above its slender base, more than 1000 (!) times as tall as it is wide, reaching toward the sky, crowned by bright structures of unthinkable complexity, to broadcast a message of life itself.
Its maker has no need for humility as rising sun illumines the marvel of the seed stalk of grass.
All for naught, in this doomed piece of Heaven.
Demon bulldozers spurred by ravenous bank accounts lurk just over the hill, anxious to crush and tear and bury under hot, black, dead tar that which would live, that which would nourish our souls.
***************************
Hawk
Caressing unseen surfaces,
streamlined,
effortless,
frictionless,
coasting down invisible hills,
raised by transparent wisps of spirit.
Motionless, floating, seeing all,
ancient memories fed by
endless sights,
wind curves
unseen by
man,
feather
spirits,
seeking place,
no compromise, drawing
life in precise parabolic arcs
suspended in blue and white space.
**********************************
Ya Gotta Sing Those Carols!
I write during that season when sounds of Christmas come from the radio, 24/7 if one so desires.
Only a century ago (how short a century now seems to me!) people heard such sounds only in church, or when family sang at home, or when carolers came by, or perhaps at a special performance.
A few times during the Christmas season people would have heard the music of Christmas, and in a number of those occasions they heard the music because they were singing it themselves.
How much more meaning would the lyrics of those songs have had for people singing them themselves. Surely to read the words, to sing them, would unavoidably force one to a greater awareness of what they say. It’s hard to sing something without being aware of what you’re singing.
Today the marketers ensure we are awash in Christmas music for a solid six weeks before Christmas. I cynically suspect that musical deluge is largely motivated by the hope it will encourage us to more generously give our hard earned money to the poor starving multinational corporations that own the big box stores in which we shop.
And ironically, awash in a tsunami of carols and musical cheer, compared to pre-radio and pre-Muzak times only a tiny fraction of the population knows the lyrics to those traditional carols, and fewer still know the message.
(I type with ‘Tasha kitty purring and purring, deeply vibrating my left arm as I stroke her.)
I would be the last to say we should remove the Christmas carols from the radio. I love them and look forward to them each year.
We should just be aware that listening to the carols no more incorporates their spirit into our hearts than playing video games makes us strong and brave. Ironically, in the age of adventure movies we spend more time indoors, inundated with sports we grow fatter, and awash in Christmas carols and images we grow less conscious of their real meaning.
It’s the spiritual equivalent of Type II diabetes. The person that consistently grabs the snacks at the convenience stores, always has a soda in hand, gets that bag of chips from the vending machine at work, this person’s body continually awash in carbohydrates and the insulin that allows the body to process them, eventually develops a resistance to its own insulin.
So too when our visual and aural senses can so readily access images of adventures and sounds of carols, we develop an oblivious immunity to them.
It’s great that after millennia of starving masses, at least some countries now have such bountiful food supplies that Type II diabetes poses a problem. We just need to learn to accommodate this bounty with self-discipline in our eating habits.
It’s great that we can now hear Christmas carols and their two thousand year old message around the clock for over a month. We just need to make the effort to ourselves sing once in a while, so that we do not cheat ourselves out of the joy that comes from incorporating that message of hope into our lives. When we do that, even if we only sing alone with the radio accompaniment, other lives will still be touched by the music of our lives, and the meaning of Christmas will not be relegated to a song, a gift, or a single month.
*************************
Potential
Surely the great life struggle is not against Nature and the elements, to build structures and civilizations; it is the struggle with the individualego/ self, even if never to conquer in the face of our myriad weaknesses, to at least progress toward our longed for personal potential.
Most to be pitied is that person who does not aspire, does not wrestle their limitations, does not long for their potential.
***************************8
Surviving modern life: reclaiming your rhythms
We live like pin-balls, bouncing from bumper to bumper. If you have seen Japanese Pachinko games, they offer an even better analogy for our modern techno-lives. Pachinko resembles vertical pin ball, but with no flippers. The balls bounce chaotically from point to point, inexorably moving downward, toward their ultimate fate at the bottom of the machine, just as we inexorably move to our ultimate and commonly shared fate.
All the bombarding inputs, the ceaseless contact with people, the relentless demands upon our time, all this shatters the natural rhythms of our lives.
Living in reactive mode works for a while, keeping the boss off our back, keeping the bills paid, getting the kids to their meetings, but it can't go on forever. Stress, tension, and associated illness eventually add up.
Our modern techno-world destroys our natural rhythms. If we want to reclaim the joy and peace and health of those rhythms, we must fight to regain them.
I've discovered that whenever I begin to feel "off" in my life, I should look to the rhythms by which I live.
For instance, to give one small example, I've finally accepted the necessary weekly rhythms of regular physical exercise. It is essential to one’s health, invaluable for one’s state of mind, darned helpful for one’s emotional condition, and once discovered and made routine, a source of boundless joy.
The first benefit of adhering to rhythms in your life comes from having something to which to look forward. If you plan on that vacation or long weekend or quiet evening at home "once you finally catch up" you will quickly discover that you never catch up, and the light at the end of the tunnel gets farther away instead of closer. Discouragement, resignation, and hopelessness begin to stalk you in that ever darkening tunnel of “to-do’s”.
Imagine instead your daily, weekly, and annual cycle of rest and relaxation waiting for you on your dayplanner, welcoming you, providing something to look forward to. Wouldn't the hassles of the day, week, and year become more tolerable? Knowing you have hope for escape makes bearing today's imprisonment to duty a bit more tolerable.
I gained a new appreciation for natural rhythms while sea kayaking off the coast of New Zealand. Added to the familiar rhythms of sunrise and sunset were the rhythms of the tides. It became necessary to plan life, well, at least plan the day's coastal kayaking route, around those natural rhythms. The integration of all our activities into the rhythms of the seasons, days, and tides led to a profound peace and clarity of spiritual vision.
Every last shred of existence in this universe functions according to rhythms. From the life cycle of galaxies to the periodic wave-form of sub-atomic particles, Nature builds existence upon rhythms. What audacity possesses humans to imagine they can live otherwise?!
Each day I experience the stress of establishing the day's schedule based less upon any natural cycle but more on the demands of the moment. Sure, if I acquiesce to the demands of the world I may accomplish a lot, but at the price of a growing sense of dissatisfaction, a feeling of disquiet, a malaise of unease.
Over the years of professional life, physically and emotionally I finally felt the lack of rhythm in my life catch up to me, and had to take measures to regain rhythm. I have learned to eat on a schedule and to exercise on a more or less prioritized cycle that takes precedence over weather and work load. I continue to struggle to schedule some semblance of rhythm for time for escape, for vacation, for friends, for Nature.
Perhaps the time has finally arrived to acknowledge I am a part of Nature, a part of the Creation, and I cannot by will or goals or contrived priorities escape the cyclical needs that link me to my evolutionary heritage, that link me to my Creator. Whatever role in some grand Purpose, Design, Universe, or Creation I would play, doesn't it make sense I could more effectively fulfill that role if I lived in harmonious matching rhythm with that Creation, Universe, Design, or Purpose?
Again, our shattered, temporal, human, western, technological world will not make rediscovering rhythms easy. Every ring of the phone, every incoming text-message, every beep of received e-mail, tears and claws at natural rhythms. The boxes in which we live, drive, and work, the artificial light, the filtered air, the genetically engineered, chemically preserved food from anywhere in the world, all hide and warp and subsume the natural rhythms from which we sprang.
Still, I have faith that one searching for those rhythms can find them. The person searching must pay a price, no doubt. A disappointed acquaintance.... a disgruntled boss.....a movie you never got to see. Our human contrived world does not exist in rhythm. Each arrhythmic interruption demanding you accommodate its schedule will exact a toll when you audaciously insist on adherence to your, to our, rhythmic foundations.
That inevitable price is worth it. Ironically, in the long term your peace, health, and productivity can benefit that boss, that family member, that financial project that would by its stringent demands have severed you from your rhythms in order to accommodate its schedule, deadline, or due date.
We must give in, surrender, accept, and submit, not to the project schedule, not to the school schedule, not to the television schedule, but to our natural selves, our rhythms, rhythms of sleep, of eating, of ebbing and flowing energy, of peaks and valleys of creativity. Long term such submission will make us more productive, healthier, happier, more at peace, and perhaps, even a bit wiser.
******************************8
Chicago Subway
I was drawn to it, this city scene, in a macabre re-enactment, like watching an ugly wreck. ? As I unconsciously suspected would happen, on a sad American train I am compelled to fiendishly write.
A mumbling, shaking old woman reads “inside the Third Reich”. Is she homeless? Is she rich? Did she make the salad I’ll eat on the airplane tonight? Unlike the view from German trains, from these windows looking past the dead desolation of concrete rail bed and steel tracks, here lies only more desolation of concrete and steel. Token islands of growing green survive only at the mercy their masters condescend to bequeath. Bright fresh painted car and motorcycle advertisements make the old church “welcome” sunshine-emblem look even duller.
I can’t begin to imagine the lives of the people in those houses. White faces of perky news anchor people whine from ad placards. For me it’s a shocking transition from the glistening white snow and blue ice of Tasman glacier that filled my senses a few weeks ago. Layers upon layers of graffiti leave all the graffiti illegible. I’ve got to admit, even graffiti adds life to these soulless, colorless canyons of brick. The graffiti artists are Michelangelos compared to the architects of these multi-story crypts.
The lady emptying trashcans pulls a magazine out and pauses to look at pictures of the latest styles.
As a naïve newcomer I note in curiosity that this crowd in this car is all white. South bound moments ago the crowd was all black.
Faces etched with crushing sadness scurry into sports pages and “how to please your lover” articles.
News is replaced by high tech red-letter headlines about nothing.
Page 14, my God, page 14: a 23 month old toddler is shot in a drive-by shooting while her 17 year old mother watches. We pass movie billboards advertising danger and suspense.
The highest fence I’ve seen outside a racetrack debris barrier surrounds the only patch of unpaved land on the entire route.
Why do graffiti faces never show smiles?
Page 25, father shoots a nine year old boy.
The passengers are still all white.
***********************************
Observation on a flight to a place long forgotten:
In first class……she’s beautiful…..the bone structure, facial profile, curve of the lips, size of the nose. Yet as her man sleeps, she pulls out three makeup cases, two mirrors, and an assortment of brushes to try to improve what nature has given her. Somehow our society has done her a grave injustice, to ingrain her with this constant concern that she is not good enough, is not pretty enough, is not attractive enough.
***************************
Faithless Fear
Listen to the sirens!
Wow! What is going on?!
God help somebody.
Such strange times, these.
It is almost as if a sense of foreboding underlies the fabric of our nation, waiting on the next Columbine, Oklahoma City, or Twin Towers, the media stoking the fear that keeps ratings high.
Perhaps one of the greatest impacts when a nation loses its faith is the increase in fear, the ease with which a faithless people are frightened.
A nation of easy morals and material priorities is a nation subservient to fear, for in threat to life and possessions, all is threatened, there is nothing else, no other foundation on which to rely.
We were not an easily frightened nation in 1776, or 1941. In 2001 the Twin Towers rattled our martini glasses and interrupted our football games, and we begged our leaders to save us from the freedoms that had given our flag meaning for 225 years.
Our leaders seemed conveniently prepared to oblige our wish.
So we remain free to drink our martinis and watch our football, our faith placed in guns and the stock market….the same guns used at Columbine, the same market that fell with the Towers.
….and decisions once formed and votes once cast by faith, are now molded by fear. “Security concerns”, physical and fiscal, have taken precedence, filling the vacuum in the absence of faith-based courage.
The sirens pass, this time.
*************************************
Why are we in a bar?
Bright colors of fall,
belying inevitable gray of winter;
Brightness of party scene,
belying missed hopes.
But all those souls,
in all the bars,
are at least
assuaging
their fears
and loneliness
together, with a smile,
the modern American scene,
faced together.
We struggled against the elements,
and we gathered in tribes.
We struggled against the next tribe,
and we gathered into castles.
We struggled against
weather, seasons, and pestilence,
and we gathered at barn raisings, hoedowns, and ceremonies.
We struggled nation against nation,
and we came together in armies.
We strove for economic and manufacturing power,
and we came together in factories, mines, corporations, and unions.
We reached out for the unseen Purpose,
and we came together at pyramids, temples, and churches.
And now,
bereft of family,
of bonds, of stability,
we battle our loneliness,
and we come together in bars,
meeting over a glass of chemicals,
attempting to dissolve away the veneer
of discipline, the work place, the modern contrived priorities.
Mightily we struggle,
valiantly we laugh,
boldly we say
"good to meet you"
in this modern war
with the condition
of our souls.
We
drown
in tepid
loneliness,
but in tribute
to the human spirit,
we refuse to drown alone,
clustering together,
toasting the
flickering
embers
of our lives,
accepting our fate,
but not succumbing to it,
the modern Americans;
connectionless,
touchless,
always
armed
with
a smile;
Defending
their Alamo
of loneliness,
their Bataan of isolation,
locking arms in comradery
at the barricades
of a loveless
society.
*************************
Lights in the Gray
Memories of scene,
a place,
a time
fade to uniform gray,
while the touch,
the smile,
the gift
shine through distant past.
*****************************************
Spiritual Leprosy
A plague of loneliness besieges our world. Zombie-like undead shuffle into bars, night after night, seeking some touch of any sort. Their curse prevents them from even recognizing the touch once it's finally offered. If they feel the touch it may send them fleeing in panic, or their pain induced madness may induce them to strike and claw and bite at the proffered contact, or their long deadened, jaded, scarred nerve endings simply can't feel the touch, even when in full embrace.
Like emotional lepers, bits and pieces of our feelings have simply fallen by the way- side, casualties of the ravages of this 21st century disease of loneliness. When we've lost enough of our emotional wholeness, akin to the leper, it finally becomes obvious enough so that others shy away from us, crossing over the street of life to avoid contact.
So the most abused, the most neglected, the most neurotic, get recognized, their scarred and disfigured personalities further securing their isolation. For most though, the lost emotional appendages are not evident enough to frighten away others. In time, the damage plays its inevitable role, preventing meaningful contact between souls, preventing feeling deep affections.
Emotional lepers with invisible scars shuffle through this land of spiritual plague and pestilence.
How will future societies view our state?
We wonder in disbelief at our forbears’ ignorance of the causes of their problems. "How could the cholera infested cities have not realized that their putrid water supply and primitive hygiene caused the disease?" we ask.
Centuries from now perhaps humanity will look back on this time of self-induced demolition of souls and understand the why's and reasons. They will see our psychotherapy as equivalent to bleeding with leaches. They will see our crime and violence and gang warfare as the evident buboes of our technology and economics.
Hopefully those future generations will have learned preventive measures and will wonder at our ignorance in isolating ourselves from Nature and its rhythms. Perhaps those future generations will shake their heads at our incomprehensible worship of flickering box altars in every home and gathering place, video altars to which we sacrificed the precious time of our lives and entrusted the raising of our children.
Perhaps future generations will wonder "Why did they immerse themselves in superficial appearance, pursue an endless quest for physical sensations, and commit their lives to obtaining material possessions, all contributing to their self-induced loneliness?"
To people of the future our behavior and our society's values will appear as unfathomable as would some starving tribe doing nothing to hunt or gather or cultivate to alleviate their hunger, but instead scurrying about and expending all their waning energy to pile up rocks in inscrutable geometric patterns. Our loneliness is spiritual, it is our souls that ache, yet never in history has a society so thoroughly eliminated the spiritual from its priorities and daily existence, or so adamantly denied the existence of "soul".
To ignore the reality of our soul and its needs while suffering the pangs of modern loneliness is like a starving person trying to assuage their hunger by convincing themselves they don't have a stomach.
We all stumble and shuffle through the land of lonely spiritual plague, no cure at hand, our emotional leprosy having stripped us of even the ability to reach out and touch one another. Yet with no hope, no cure, and no respite, we can and must still rail against the absurdity, each victim acting as a limited and temporary comforter to the other.
In this we can triumph, in this we can forge our dignity, in the midst of the cold realization that no cure exists for our lonely isolation, we can hope for our own power of will to triumph over the hopelessness and despair.
Throughout the human story, each moment of testing has its unrecognized heroes, true heroes for they did not conquer, did not attain the rewards of heroes, but continued the struggle in the face of abject hopelessness and anonymity: the inmates in concentration camps throughout history, comforting each other; the dying in the besieged fortress, sharing a crumb of bread before mutually facing starvation. In this day and time, in a warped and almost unrecognizable way, one finds this human dignity and triumph in the bars and lounges, those smoky dens of most intense loneliness, the front line triage centers of human isolation.
Just as the doomed and dying cling to each other to avoid falling down, the modern lonely souls smoke and drink together to facilitate their escape from their individual prisons. They support, smile, laugh, joke, feign a common interest in a sport, sympathize with a sad story, humor an obviously exaggerated tall tale, all the time battling the absurd social condition by flaunting their own absurdity.
-----------------------So what to do?
Rage against the loneliness!
Take loving action, engage in activity, movement and motion, purely for the sake of life, purely in defiance of, directly in the screaming banshee face of, loneliness! To defy loneliness by reaching out to others even when you are untainted by any hope for yourself is to claim a certain purity and dignity.
Unselfish loving action is an insistence that in the midst of our lonely dying we don't have to quit trying to communicate, to touch, to help someone feel. Indeed, the walls that separate us all may stand un-scalable, impenetrable, and indestructible, but better to chip and claw and dig at them purely for the sake of defining our humanity than to sit and let them slowly, night by lonely night, encroach upon us, until crushing our singularly isolated soul under their oppressive illusion.
**************************
Fragile Castles
What strange malaise is this that grips my soul?
What inner hopelessness besets my spirit?
How this place weighs on me,
this monument to personal profit,
this opulent extravagance made the more burdensome
by the token remnants of Nature left in torn and tattered shreds
lying about and around our castles,
castles fragile behind their high facades,
for they too were built on principles of personal profit,
not pride,
leaving walls hallow and decayed
though glossy paint has not yet dried.
*************************
Tadpoles in the Tracks of Civilization
The puddle in the car tracks is full of the biggest wonkin’ tadpoles I’ve ever seen!
How did they get there?!
There’s no natural
body of water, just
a dip from truck ruts.
How did they survive
to get 3 centimeters (one inch) long?!
They paddle vertically, mouths gulping air,
shining silver bellies belying
the survival of life
in even the bleakest
of our scars on this
World.
This spring’s beauty
exceeds any I’ve seen,
not visually, but because
I feel a part of it,
in it,
immersed in it,
all volume filled with life,
a drifting seed,
a swooping bird,
the butterfly monarch,
Life would take root
in the very air itself
did not fertile ground
offer more tempting Home.
Wild roses bless
the precious gift
of eyesight,
playing their part
in harmony with a dozen
other types of flowered instruments of
Beauty, performing a
grand symphony of
Spring.
Immersed in the
Passive beauty of God
and Creation,
we must
drive a little faster,
fill our view with
a larger screen,
tint our glasses darker,
lest
we see the dead and
jagged ugliness
of our creations.
(The man watching me write this says he has called the city to spray for mosquitoes and put in more drainage.)
****************************
Myth, Math, and Morals
Of course the Minoans and Ionians were the first scientists!….liberating humanity from the drudgery of mythology.
(I write this after reading in Masks of the Universe, 2nd Edition, 2003, pages 45-49, by Edward Harrison, Cambridge University Press)
(I get up to retrieve this book, and return to of course find ‘Tasha kitty having claimed my chair. As happens several times a day, I try to move her over so I can sit down, and as every time, she responds in total, limp perplexity, as if she has utterly no idea what it is I want.)
Millennia ago, in the lands of the Mediterranean Sea, Minoans and later, Ionians were island based seafarers.
For one thing, this meant that during their weeks at sea they had little space for the great dead weight of stone temples, pyramids, and altars so essential to maintaining the burden of mythology and liturgy that characterized other civilizations of the time.
Second, as sailors, the practical knowledge of patterns of tides, currents, weather, and water was both inescapable and invaluable. Land bound Egyptians and Persians could afford the luxury of perceiving the occasional earthquake and thunderstorm as the upset and indigestion of some god.
But an Ionian merchant sailor needed an information model of more pragmatic utility. Hence ”the love of wisdom”, natural philosophy, was born beside the water. “What comprised the earth” and “how did it work” became necessary questions instead of heretical questions. Rising tides, shifting currents, and approaching storms combined with economic and survival interests to motivate humanity to finally accept the responsibility to try to understand.
In fits and starts, interspersed with ample interludes of dark ages and shamanic deceptions, we’ve been at the task of understanding ever since.
Centuries of practical, maritime knowledge of repeating patterns finally triggered the revelation that we can understand at least some things, and we can use that understanding.
The power of knowledge blossomed forth, and 2600 years later airplanes fly and cell phones ring.
To a greater degree than the Minoans could have dreamed, we have sailed away from the temples, altars, and pyramids that once anchored civilizations, anchored in both the positive and the negative sense of the word.
Knowledge, practical and economically beneficial, allows us to ‘sail” tides and currents far beyond the Ionian Sea.
But other storms now bedevil us, and dark waves crash across the bow of our societies.
From those first speculations in Miletus 2600 years ago about atoms and planets and an earth round instead of flat, we have sailed far, on the winds of technology and science, so far that in distant, storm-tossed seas we have lost our way.
Practical survival and economic needs lifted Minoan and Ionian eyes up from the altars to gaze upon a wondrous world of regularity, structure, and mathematics, a world comprehensible as more than just playground and battleground of petulant gods.
2600 years later, as waves of suicide, murder, depression, drugs, crime and personal emptiness capsize our foundering societies, will practical, spiritual needs open our eyes to new personal revelations denied by our science, technology, and material possessions?
****************************
Artificial Life
Scientists are working on creating a living entity, creating it from scratch that is. Cool. That will of course raise all kinds of religious, spiritual, and philosophical questions.
But we will find these questions for the most part to be the same age old religious, spiritual, and philosophical questions that remain as salient as ever.
Of course fears of humanity striving for godlike powers will arise, and arise for good reason…..that’s always been humanity’s quest and always will be, sometimes to our benefit, sometimes to our detriment.
Along with spears, machine guns, and nuclear weapons, any newly contrived control of the creation of life will undoubtedly be used for evil. Along with X-rays, PCB’s, and thalidomide, it will undoubtedly be used for good and turn out to pose horrible, unseen dangers when not adequately controlled. Along with wheels, fertilizers, and electricity, it will undoubtedly redirect human life in dramatic new directions.
And when it’s all said and done, some people will claim our engineering of life as proof that humanity no longer needs God or the spiritual. Humanity will toy with this proposal for a few generations and find itself wandering in an emptiness that will once again us them fleeing back to anything offering meaning and purpose.
*************************
Horoscopes_Fortune Telling_Astrology_Omens, and what they really tell us.
I read of the skyrocketing numbers of United States citizens that believe in horoscopes, alien abductions, and astrology.
I read of the newly robust beliefs in Xinhua (China) in propitious signs, fortune telling, and omens.
Such tragedy!….how rapidly we sink into these spiritual dark ages! How quickly enlightenment fades!
…..and for good reason. Our new economic gods and scientific gods and technological gods have proven impotent and petulant as we seek their help in nourishing our souls and answering the age-old questions that long predated any investment tools or cellular communication.
For all our theories and equations and institutions, we still want, we still need, answers to those questions.
For all our phones and keyboards and PDA’s, we still don’t want to be alone.
For all our knowledge and Internet and security devices and government agencies, we still fear.
Above all, we fear being alone and facing an unseen future.
So we invite aliens and ancestor’s spirits into our personal paradigm, and we frantically look to stars and planets, shamans and fortunetellers, to cast at least some feeble light onto the deeply shadowed path lying beyond the appointments in our planning calendar.
*****************************
Panama Energy
Leaving the climbing gym yesterday I meet Juan, a man of broad dark face and jet black moderate length hair, curling symmetrically right and left from a central part. After a simple “hi” to the stranger, I get pulled into the conversation because Juan just returned from a family vacation in Panama.
Hey, how often do you get a chance to hear first hand about Panama?
To say the least, Juan is not averse to talking about his experiences, and I’m soon starting to regret my initial friendly overture to this bright eyed verbal encyclopedia of the Panamanian bus system.
But Juan’s nonstop express bus conversation swerves onto a detour upon invocation of the term “energy”. Maybe because Juan senses I’m a receptive listener, or maybe because he couldn’t contain his enthusiasm for sharing his exciting news, Juan begins talking about places of “energy” even greater than the famous Machu Pichu site in Peru, places where rivers flow uphill and you have to use the parking break so cars won’t roll away…..uphill of course.
I see no point in entering into a physics debate with bright eyed Juan, who maybe because of his own peaceful “energy” I had instinctively taken a liking to…..but naturally my mind cries out “No! Wait! Let me explain!”
In Juan’s comments about “energy” I see the innocent, childlike trust of so many well-intentioned spiritual searchers. I hear a sensitivity to places of aesthetic beauty and people of warm hearts.
( I try to write with ‘Tasha purring loudly in her box as I sit on the floor and pet her. Now that is a place of positive energy! )
In Juan’s conversation I also hear evidence of collapse of what was once the finest science education system in the world, now crumbled into pathetic ineffectiveness, and I see the age old pattern of how easily naïve people are deceived by authors and witch doctors willing to spin a sellable yarn of deceit for the sake of making a fast buck.
Juan recites what he’s read about the collision of tectonic plates in Panama as the reason for the concentration of “energy” there. I bite my tongue to not rudely burst his delusion.
So what insights does this conversation provide?
First: If Panama has rivers flowing uphill, I’m buying stock in Panamanian hydroelectric companies.
Second: M.C. Escher was a realist artist after all!
Third: People like Juan do sincerely seek the beautiful and the spiritual, and do possess the care and sensitivity to discern it.
Fourth: New age conmen and scam artists have fooled good hearted people into thinking this mysterious spiritual “energy” is isolated to certain geographic locations. Juan did indeed perceive a special uplifting experience, but it had nothing to do with geographic locations and plate tectonics. Juan felt his soul revived by the beauty of Nature, natural life rhythms, and the gentle, welcoming, helpful people of the villages he visited. Such uplift, natural beauty, and spiritual renewal is available anywhere those ingredients come together. We possess the power to evoke anywhere the blessings that Juan calls “energy”, wherever we preserve, pause, protect, help, touch, and listen.
Finally, tales like Juan’s illustrate the critical, even desperate need for every society to vigorously invest in solid science education for all its citizens in order to protect them from the inevitable pernicious assault by charlatans and shamans.
All human history stands as consistent testament to the innocent open-mindedness of uneducated people, and our human ability to believe anything, without pause for critical, objective analysis. The associated misery, suffering, poverty, pestilence, and societal stagnation that inevitably accompany ignorance and superstition surely must compel rational people that solid education in the scientific method and principles of logic for all citizens is an essential armament in the battle against the ever lurking dark ages that surround the brief blossomings of civilizations.
However, this education in the sciences must not again be the cold, spiritless science that demands its disciples forsake all hope of soul and divinity.
People instinctively recoiled from the godless, lifeless incarnation of science in the late 20th century. Knowing they needed more than offered by test tubes and computers, but traditional religious institutions having crumbled under the weight of time and bureaucracy, western people fled to fundamentalist mega-churches and New Age ashrams.
People and nations must, absolutely must, return to solid, logic based, science education for all, no longer in order to “beat the Russians”, but to protect ourselves as individuals and society from the deceivers and marketers ever ready to fill any void of knowledge we allow…..and that science must not again claim the place of God in people’s hearts, but must humbly accept science’s limitations to how and what, while accepting a greater Source for why.
Juan, and all citizens, need and deserve the light of science education, so that in their courageous personal quests they can find even greater personal spiritual heights, not shadowed by misconceptions and misplaced faith.
***********************************
Voices in the Dark
On the hill above my house, feeling the approaching sunrise.
A mere two hours ago young revelers explored different aspects of their still fresh lives, under the dark night blanket covering this same hill, perhaps on this very spot.
Disturbed my slumber, they did, but it was a disturbance caused by echoing laughter and friendship, reminding me of similar invaluable times at similar ridiculous hours in the predawn morning of my life.
The young hearts this morning couldn’t see my house through woods below, so there was no rudeness or thoughtlessness in their unintentional disturbance of the peace.
Such a difference that makes in trying to return to sleep, compared to the late night loud voices on neighborhood street, waking all in houses dark to declare they do not care, will willingly harm, hold no regard for feelings or welfare of others.
Voices awake you in night’s deep slumber, the laughter in the hills carries you back to youthful exuberance, the yelling in the street joining sounds of breaking bottles to shatter the night and tremble the soul.
Following either, morning rises, and golden diamonds pierce the dark horizon.
****************************
Tribal Anglicans
Last night on TeleVision I watched rules and laws, commandments and traditions, bring tribes to the edge of war and a church denomination to the verge of self-destruction, leaving me to ask just how destructive are rules, regulations, edicts, and commandments to ourselves and our institutions.
Rules and regulations…… I even make them up for myself. This ritual of morning writing unfolds according to a personal discipline. My daily routine follows rules. How else can we know what to do moment to moment?! The world is too unpredictable, too irrational! We are too easily tempted and distracted! Of course we need rules and laws and guidelines and regulations! I sit here writing at sunrise in the morning cold because of a personal discipline rule that I apply to myself. Otherwise I would get the heck down to the relatively warmer house and eat some warm breakfast right now.
But I made a rule for myself that I would first write in the morning, write while on the ridge at sunrise, weather permitting. And I credit to that discipline, ritualistic in its repetition, much of whatever I write that might have any value.
In last night’s documentary on the Travel Channel, two clans in Papua New Guinea were about to reluctantly go to war because traditional rules dictated that one owed the other cowry shells, but the one tribe had agreed to new rules with the government that all payments would be made using that new fangled invention “money”. Honor, commitments, tradition, and integrity were on the line.
The clans were related. The leaders anguished over the prospects of going to war. But rules had to be followed. Only when negotiators agreed to a compromise involving payment in both money and shells could both sides feel the rules had been satisfied, and war averted.
The Old Testament is in no small part a history of ever growing lists of rules, rules issued in many cases at the demand of the people.
The New Testament is in no small part a railing against the tyranny of rules, Yeshu (Jesus), Paul, and others facing death because they taught that a law of Love should take precedence over human contrived ritual and regulation.
In the news today the worldwide Anglican Church is at odds with its United States franchise, the Episcopal Church, over a rule about gay clergy. Agonizing debate over shapes of dots over “i’s” and length of crosses through “t’s” will determine if people who would like to remain as one organization will allow themselves to do so.
The parallels between the two clans in Papua New Guinea and the feuding conclaves of the Anglican Church are striking.
With such fervent commitment we allow words on paper to overrule the love hidden in our heart. Tribes, congregations, denominations, and nations will assault, destroy, and divide because of word on paper or a self-inflicted tradition. In the absence of awareness of that one dictate or rule, they would instead happily and generously invite each other to sit together and celebrate a meal shared in camaraderie.
Perhaps people in such situations of disagreement must ask the following: had no one ever told you about this rule, had script or oral tradition never informed you that this principle supercedes unity, brotherhood, compassion, and God’s love, how would you respond to that human being standing before you? Would you, in your heart, in the absence of the debt of shells or the ancient verse, instinctively know that you should revile, reject, or rebuke them?
Were it not for someone long past or demandingly present telling you God’s or gods’ will in this matter, as that other person stands before you, how would God’s counseling Spirit directly call your heart to respond?
How often do rules and dogma incite acceptance and compassion? How often do rules and dogma incite conflict and crucifixion?
Of course we need rules, regulations, laws, precepts, and commandments, self-generated as disciplines for individual life and institutionalized as foundations for society. Obviously our choices of interpretations of rules will vary from person to person, church to church, and tribe to tribe. But it is in our response to those inevitable differences of interpretation that we will show the world the overarching law our heart has chosen to follow.
In that documentary last night, the anguished expressions and words of the tribal leaders revealed the highest law to which they ascribed. Within that law written on their hearts, in spite of the calls for blood and vengeance by tribal members, the leaders found a way to satisfy without bloodshed the rules and traditions and laws of shells and money.
Will we invoke rules, laws, and commandments, or our interpretations thereof, to sow discord, conflict, and division? Or while remaining true to our disapproval, will we use our disagreements to demonstrate forgiveness, tolerance, and compassion?
Will we use the rules to which we so zealously ascribe to show the world how hard we can harden our heart in their defense? ….or to fulfill that commandment, and the one “like unto it”, that Yeshu deemed the greatest?
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Cargo cults are alive and well
During World War II the natives of Papua New Guinea watched strange white alien beings arrive on their islands, proceed to clear out long strips of jungle, set up huts and structures and tables by those cleared strips. The strange white aliens sat by the cleared strips, in their strange huts and at their strange tables, moving sticks across pieces of very, very thin bark even whiter than the aliens themselves. And after some days of performing these rituals, giant flying objects, bright and shiny, descended from the heavens to alight on those clearings to deliver astonishing gifts of food and objects with magical powers.
The resourceful, hardworking natives were quick to learn from this astonishing lesson. With their stone tools they cleared strips in the jungle. They erected huts and structures and tables beside the cleared strips. With thin bark and straight sticks they emulated the ritual motions of the white aliens as best they could. And they waited for the shiny sky canoes of the gods to descend and deliver food and magical implements.
Of course they had to wait a very, very long time……and of course in spite of their faith and careful analysis, their patient wait was to no avail.
The native’s response to the quite evident facts they witnessed, cleared jungle strips and curious rituals of sticks on thin white bark resulting in food descending from the sky, was perfectly reasonable. They took the facts at hand, combined them with their own perfectly natural desires and wants, and stirred together with their open mindedness and diligent hard work proceeded to take action to replicate this amazing event.
The result anthropologists labeled “cargo cults”.
Through no fault of their own, they were just missing some of the salient background explanations.
Cargo cults are alive and well today, not in Melanesian Islands, but in New York, San Francisco, Beijing, and any other modern city.
With each day we see new technological marvels, which for most of us appear as mysterious as they do marvelous. We hear terms such as “energy”, “dark matter”, “field lines”, and “quantum fluctuations”.
We experience the descent of marvelous gifts out of the unseen ether, images on our screens, music in our ears, conversations in our hands, power and information and energy flowing at the behest of ritual patterns on keyboards or touch-screens.
And like the natives of 1942 Papua New Guinea, we are hungry.
We are hungry for healing, hungry for hope, hungry for touch, hungry for contact and meaning and source and to not be alone and to not be afraid.
So our adaptable and flexible and resilient and optimistic minds go to work, stirring together our glimpses and rumors of science and technology with our wishes and hungers.
And beside the cleared runways in the jungles of our ailing bodies and lonely hearts, we practice the rituals to which we conveniently affix the magical appellation “scientific”, because surely invoking the holy name of “science” will enhance their power.
And then we wait, wait for the touch to heal, wait for the energy to flow, wait to feel younger and to be balanced and to overcome depression, wait for this modality and that chakra and some spirit and the obligatory focus to deliver the cargo of food for our hungering soul.
The natives of Papua New Guinea were right in recognizing the role of runways and structures and pen and paper (or sticks and bark) in invoking the arrival of astonishing shiny objects out of the sky, objects full of food and healing power.
The modern day cargo cults are right in recognizing the potential of science, the necessity of energy, and the power of focus and touch and spirit.
The conclusions of the island natives and the urban denizens are perfectly understandable and even rational in their uninformed way.
But the jungle clearing and the sticks writing on bark could not of themselves get the airplane to arrive. And the crystals and energy vials and recitations and rituals do not of themselves bring the peace and wholeness and healing for which we long.
Supporting the arrival of the airplane were metallurgy and aerodynamics and electro-magnetic radio communication and navigation, not to mention the tractors and plows and fertilizer that produced the food delivered by the airplane….and the stick scratching on the bark needed to be filled with ink.
The visually evident artifacts of runway and flight control station were only the concluding outcomes of all the technology and planning not visible to the natives.
The visually evident artifacts of drawings of energy lines and ritual touch and any shiny object supposedly imbued with healing powers are on their own as comically impotent and perpetually empty as that stretch of jungle cleared with stone tools, waiting for the shiny food container to descend from the heavens.
Supporting the arrival of wholeness and peace and healing for our souls (and the commensurate benefits for our body) must be love and compassion and forgiveness and Unity and surrender to that greater than us. It is not the touch that heals, it is the sincerity and love and tenderness that evokes someone to compassionately give that caring touch. It is not the sparkling crystal that heals, it is one’s openness to the sparkling glimpses of beauty that permeate all Creation. It is not the chant and meditation that brings lasting peace, it is that the chant and meditation can facilitate relationship with the loving Source of all life.
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