Convergence in the Timeless

Sunrise, Nov 27, 2018. Sky and Earth.

I’m in an almost bizarre convergence among three currents flowing from reading Iris Murdoch, Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, and S.H. Nasr/Frithjoff Schuon. There’s no beginning; no end. So maybe the place to continue is in the timeless, the Reality that Nasr/Schuon and Sufi mystics assert is the only way to make sufficient sense of being today (or any other day). For example, Schuon warns against the peril of splitting the ideal and real:

“Nothing is more false than the conventional opposition between ‘idealism’ and ‘realism,’ which amounts to insinuating that the ‘ideal’ is not ‘real,’ and conversely as if an ideal situated outside reality had the smallest value and as if reality were always situated on a lower level than what may be called an ‘ideal’; to believe this is to think in a quantitative, not a qualitative, mode.” (Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 15, footnote 14).

True Reality resides in the absolute, that which transcends our mundane experience, best known in this world in the qualities God sends down, lent for humans to manifest. Trouble comes in when our knowing gets too limited by human restrictions such as those set by behaviorists presuming to be the sole proprietor of the true. The essence gets lost in ideologies of facts, data, cogito ergo sum, philosophy reduced to existentialism... And equally by religion stripped of mysticism when faith is dominated by the scientific mind and when theologians succumb to status as in the academy. Of course, educators already sold out in order to sit alongside physics, to get the grants, and to publish in journals that count. Who among us has clean hands?

Kingsolver splendidly explores today’s terrain by looking back a hundred years to when the theory of evolution struggled to find a place in culture dominated by religious fundamentalists as well as consumerism blindly eating up the environment. Alongside this, she weaves a contemporary and prescient collage of traumatic family life; although I wince at saying “life” because she portrays dramatically how distressingly distant today’s home may be from Life, from the Alive, the Loving. 

The poignancy of these streams’ convergence builds also from Murdoch’s portrayals of dysfunctional abuses of Power and Love. Her novels roam about over most of the 20th-century-world disheartened by war, environmental wreckage, abusive partners, and varied desiccations of culture (across arts and sciences). Much of this broken-down, broken-hearted condition seems occasioned through allowing the personal and social orders to be ruled by the pronouncement “God is dead.” The destruction comes whether players are conscious or not that their lives have strayed far from devotion to Truth, Beauty, Justice, and the other qualities necessary to approach the depths of love and the responsibilities of power.

Although Nasr and Schuon expose the catastrophe of science, particularly evolutionary theory, masquerading as God, they also argue that scientific knowing has a vital role in a proper ecology of epistemology and ontology.

“The religious view of the order of nature must be reasserted on the metaphysical, philosophical, cosmological, and scientific levels as legitimate knowledge without necessarily denying modern scientific knowledge, as long as it is remembered that this latter science is the result of very particular questions posed to nature” (Religion and the Order of Nature, p. 6).

Interestingly, Kingsolver’s gift includes the compelling drama evident when religion gets big-headed and heart-short. In this convergence of currents, the arrogant man of science looks scarily like unto the preacher man/woman blinded by God-less religion. 

I’m now in the midst of Kingsolver’s novel, having just been struck with a wash of empathy for the bigot I’d previously found impossible to like. I don’t expect to ever like this character, but I feel some compassion, some sadness for how he gave his life for the fake “American dream.” He’s the person who long ago dried up inside, who suffers greatly from a failing body, and yet clings to dead faith. Perhaps his bitterness is all that sustains his breath.

I’ve become pretty sure that any hope we have for moving ahead in this country depends on developing empathy that reaches across the political chasm. Instead of blasting at the “other” in Facebook-ish social media as well as in our intimate family spaces, humans who would be god-like just have to live a deeper level into Love and Power… Peace, Justice, Truth …

Sunset. Sky, Earth, Sea.

Gratitude for Life

Woods between Greenville, SC, & Ashville, NC

     This day, November 22, 2018, offers a special opportunity for thankfulness, for expressing gratitude for Life. Photos shown here were taken with an “effect” in which the shutter snaps twice, thus allowing the image to reflect movement. Life can be discerned by movement: the vibration from a pounding heart, especially one made more passionate, by breath, particularly when panting for love. Life reflects particles in wave, even those inside leaves, stones, and the human mind. These movements might well remind us of our ultimate progression forward and back to the Source of Life. It’s the steps in the world for greater compassion, caring for all our relations, tending broken hearts, remembering the Divine Reality. One remembrance comes in looking for and loving the balance and beauty of the imaginal world.

     S.H. Nasr writes of this in Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man. The human creation is 

“the channel of grace for nature; through his active participation in the spiritual world he casts light into the world of nature. He is the mouth through which nature breathes and lives. Because of the intimate connection between man and nature, the inner state of man is reflected in the eternal order. Were there to be no more contemplatives and saints, nature would be deprived of the light that illuminates it and the air which keeps it alive. It explains why, when man’s inner being has turned to darkness and chaos, nature is also turned from harmony and beauty to disequilibrium and disorder. Man sees in nature what he is himself and penetrates into the inner meaning of nature only on the condition of being able to delve into the inner depths of his own being and to cease to lie merely on the periphery of his being. Men who live only on the surface of their being can study nature as something to be manipulated and dominated. But only he who has turned toward the inward dimension of his being can see nature as a symbol, as a transparent reality and come to know and understand it in the real sense” (p. 96).

Nature provides essential support for our engagement: “nature herself can be an aid in this process provided man can learn to contemplate it, not as an independent domain of reality but as a mirror reflecting a higher reality, a vast panorama of symbols which speak to man and have meaning for him” (p. 95). For this passage, Nasr includes a footnote to Frithjoff Schuon’s Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, from the chapter on “Seeing God Everywhere.” Schuon speaks directly to the gift of trees for those who can see: 

“‘How’ then  do things symbolize God or ‘divine aspects’? One cannot say that God is this tree or that this tree is God, but one can say that in a certain connection the tree is not ‘other than God’, or that it cannot not be God in any way since it is not nonexistent. For the tree has existence, then the life that distinguishes it from minerals, then its particular qualities that distinguish it from other plants, and finally its symbolism, all of which are for the tree so many ways not only of not ‘being nothingness’, but also of affirming God in one or another respect: life, creation, majesty, axial immutability, or generosity” (p. 91).

"The Place of Peace" at Furman University

Early Winter Gift

One gift of early winter comes in sighting simple line

 and the feeling of flow.

All That's Needed

Sunday morning, November 4, 2018

Through the space between leaves, the wisp of wind breathes the early fire from the sun through the mist rising off the damp earth, reminding the morning consciousness to awaken. All six elements are right here in the aspiration between worlds, inner and outer, East and West. All that’s needed for a new birth of love.

Near dusk, Nov 3

           S.H. Nasr’s chapter “The Wisdom of the Body” in Religion and the Order of Nature reviews the teachings for all major religions including an amazing section on Japanese Buddhism, pages 243-248.

"The six elements, (earth, water, fire, wind, space, and consciousness) of Buddhist cosmology are the samaya body of Tathagata, samaya meaning the state in which metaphysical reality appears in phenomenal form, so that from that religous point of view the visible universe is the phenomenal form of the Buddha-body itself. In man’s ascending the ladder of perfection, the Buddha-nature descends to an ever greater degree into his soul and even his body. . . For Dogen, cultivation is in fact achieved through the body, and he goes so far as to say that in order to become rid of the illusion of self-centeredness, one must realize that the body does not belong to the rational consciousness. The body must be allowed to dominate over the mind so that man can forget himself and become authenticated by all things. [note references Yasuo Yuasa, The Body]

Sense of the Sacred

                 

The world seen through the windows of my study, even in the muted tones of autumn, abounds in natural beauty. And still, it's a world away from the rainforests and breath-stopping coastlines of Australia where we felt spirited away to a magical place.   

But there, too, like the D.C. suburbs where we resided for many years, the streets outside our airport hotel in Sydney, convenient for the return flight, were of a different world, much more grey and noisy. In order to enter the beauty of nature and especially to commune there with the divine, we may need to realize the different realities or "worlds" around and within. 

            In Religion and the Order of Nature, Nasr contrasts a) the world that can be seen, loved, and nurtured as sacred with z) one targeted for pollution and destruction by humans driven by voracious intentions bent on feeding insatiable appetites. In addition to feeding sensory lust for material possession, the rapacious aggression can result also from a thirst for knowledge stripped of the sense of the sacred. “The environmental crisis requires not simply rhetoric or cosmetic solutions but a death and rebirth of modern man and his worldview.” Humans must be reborn to conceive of “a sacred realm reflecting the divine creative energies” (pp. 6-7).

         It’s almost as if inhabitants of this globe are on different planets using the same words but ruled by hugely different worlds. Certain words reference a person’s dominant values such as “nature,” “money,” “sense,” and perhaps most importantly, “God.” And to boggle the mind, the same word can mean vastly different worlds. Each person serves a master of meaning whether it is his/her own self, a quest for knowledge, the Divine Source, or some other force. 

         A complication arises when the culture surrounding words and worlds pervades the individual so that meaningfulness can scarcely be found--unless consciousness develops and shifts . Nasr elaborates how the meaning of Nature has dramatically transformed so that the presence of God often goes missing due to the “scientific revolution” and the “death of God.” It can happen unless a person is “reborn” (as noted above). Without the reborn consciousness, persons in the “modern” world tend to treat nature (including plants, animals, and “othered” humans) as objects suitable for exploitation. The following passages detail the contrasting worlds and significant consequences.

“… among all the factors distinguishing one type of humanity from all others was the presence of the skeptical vein. It led to many scientific discoveries but also to the loss of sacred knowledge and in some cases the sense of the sacred itself. And it remains to this day a salient feature of that type of human being for whom the desecration of nature is meaningless because there is nothing sacred to start with. . . this type of naturalism involved more the rediscovery of pleasure than of the spiritual significance of the body or nature. . . There thus appeared this other important characteristic of modern man so prevalent to this day, that of being a prisoner of his senses, which he must seek constantly to satiate without limit, and that of a follower of a naturalism that is against the order of nature as a value in itself, a being devoted to the bodily gratification without the least interest in the significance of the body in the religious, metaphysical, and cosmological sense.” (p. 172)

The “rediscovery of pleasure” and the “bodily gratification” especially expresses itself in the “appreciation of the importance of money.”

“The modern world needs nothing more than the so-called world-denying mysticism that is nothing other than its ascetic aspect that seeks to control the passions and to slay the dragon within, without which the greed that drives the current destruction of nature cannot be controlled. Moreover, world-denial is simply one aspect of a single reality whose other dimension is ‘world-confirmation,’ but the soul cannot confirm the world as sacred without first of all denying the ‘world’ that disperses the soul from within and makes it ever more reliant upon the material environment for the satiation of an ever-increasing thirst. One wonders how, in the light of the crucial nature of the problem at hand, a deeper distinction is not made by often well-intentioned eco-theologians between the world as enticement toward passion, greed, and aggression and the world as God’s Creation and ultimately theophany.” pp. 217-18.