The Still Point

 

Very interesting illuminations burst across from the fusion coming out of initial readings in two texts. Titus Burckhardt, in Sacred Art in East and West, details how the essential form of a holy structure composes the symbolic themes connected with line, square, circle, and center point. Each of us in our daily work and play, especially in our craft and art, engage with and are mediated by these inevitable structures.

        Burckhardt explains how these elements lead to two- and three-dimensional crosses, mandalas, icons, and on into altars, temples, and other spaces that support contemplation of the divine. Themes include the centrality of sacrifice, transformation, even the containment and resolution of “all cosmic antinomies” (p. 25). Temples extend from altars, the significance evident in this footnote 

“Union with the Divine Essence always comprises, as phases or aspects of a single spiritual act, the reintegration of all the positive aspects of the world—or of their interior equivalents—in a symbolized ‘hearth,’ the sacrifice of the soul in its limited aspect and its transformation by the fire of the Spirit.” (p. 28)

   The physical structures express the fully human along with the cosmos: 

“the temple has a spirit, a soul and a body, like the man and like the universe…the architect of the temple identifies himself with the building and with that which it represents; thus each phase of the architectural task is equally a phase of spiritual realization. The artist confers upon his work something of his own vital force; in exchange he participates in the transformation which that force undergoes by virtue of the sacramental and implicitly universal nature of the work” (p. 47).

   Huston Smith in Forgotten Truth elaborates the multiple dimensions of the cross, including: “a horizontal cross is a mandala, a sacred enclosure, round or square, with typically four approaches to a ‘hidden treasure’ that lies at its center” (p. 23)

“For the point at the center of the three-dimensional cross that gives rise to the order of nature concomitantly creates the souls that inhabit that order, not just in the moment of their conception but continuously, instant by instant as they pursue their trajectories. . . If it strikes the reader as presumptuous to equate his personal center with the center of the cosmos, he must be reminded that physics requires him to do just that because space is relative and curved, the center of the physical universe is for each observer the point from which his observations proceed…The Hermetic formulation is exact: ‘God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.’” (pp. 29-30)

   Smith elaborates in a footnote at the bottom of the page with a quotation from Meister Eckhart:

 “‘The soul that enters into God owns neither time nor space…But it stands to reason, if you consider it, that the space occupied by any soul that enters is vastly greater than heaven and earth and God’s entire creation. I say more: God might make heavens and earths galore yet these…would be of less extent than a single needle-tip compared with the standpoint of a soul atoned in God’” (p. 30).

   Reflections on these texts along with “meditation of everyday life” (referenced on p. 31 by Smith) lead to a sense of being directed to release all reactions, such as those spinning off the political miasma that tumults about us, to let these go into the "black hole.” 

“Passage through the ‘gateless gate’ (Mu Mon Kan) that guards the holy center can be disorienting. If it takes the form of a powerful satori it can feel as if one has been sucked into a ‘black hole’ where physical laws are destroyed. When eyes have accustomed themselves to the new, ethereal light, however, one sees that no movement has occurred. Length and breadth had already withdrawn into the cross’s horizontal center; now the vertical axis too collapses. Renouncing the space it had embodied to make an important but provisional point, that axis now withdraws the ontic, value distinctions that once it metered. . . Superfluous and ego-aggrandizing activity must be stilled, but the stilling of such activity clears the way for pure effectiveness—action that is powered by force that is concentrated and energy assembled” (p. 31; Smith follows with quotations from the Tao Te Ching, the Chuang Tzu, Pascal, and Eliot’s “still point” “where there is only the dance”).

        Let’s release all the worries for dear ones, let every trouble of the world be taken into this still point. This the only way to love. The way to the Only Love.

Finding Pearls

Nov 23, 7:31AM

From Huston Smith’s Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, I came away with the importance of escaping the spell of postmodernism in order to affirm the possibility of the development of higher capacity in human spirituality. While acknowledging the benefits from the scientific age, Smith asserts that scientism veils humans from understanding our divine inheritance because foundational to the domineering mindset imposed by science/postmodernism is the pervasive premise that humans advance from lesser forms rather than from greater. When in the spell of postmodernism, humans are blocked from realizing ourselves as created in the image of God. In postmodernism, we may say the words while denied the infusion of spirit. And in the thrall of material mindset following religious prescriptions risks separation from divine guidance. Postmodernism gives highest values to quantification as evident in the materialism that ever seeks more money, status, sex, and other things. Postmodernism leaves us bereft of the sense of quality.

     A resource for breaking this spell of postmodernism, then, may be found through investing in quality rather than quantity. One view of qualities comes in the Names of God, as expressed in the Islamic tradition. Perhaps the most compelling of these qualities that calls to me is Beauty. As a follow-up to Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (in addition to beginning Smith’s earlier Forgotten Truth), I’m finding myself drawn to Titus Burckhardt’s Sacred Art in East and West. An antidote to the toxicity of materialism comes in the unveiling of the divine in everyday living. Burckhardt explores an aspect or quality of this in the sacred art of “the five great traditions”: “Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism.” For example:

“That which the Christian view of things grasps by means of a sort of loving concentration on the Word incarnate in Jesus Christ, is transposed in the Islamic view into the universal and the impersonal. In Islam the Divine Art—and according to the Koran God is ‘artist’ (musawwir)—is in the first place the manifestation of the Divine Unity in the beauty and regularity of the Cosmos. Unity is reflected in the harmony of the multiple, in order and equilibrium; beauty has all these aspects within itself. To start from the beauty of the world and arrive at Unity—that is wisdom. For this reason Islamic thought necessarily attaches art to wisdom; in the eyes of a Muslim, art is essentially founded on wisdom, or on science, the function of science being the formulation of wisdom in temporal terms. The purpose of art is to enable the human environment, the world so far as it is moulded by man, to participate in the order that manifests most directly the Divine Unity. Art clarifies the world; it helps the spirit to detach itself from the disturbing multitude of things so that it may climb again towards the Infinite Unity.” (pp.16-17)

Most everyday, my spirit finds refreshment by expecting to see beauty in nature. 

Nov 19, 7:11AM

Sometimes the harmony of color and line is increasingly revealed by editing photographs. For example, by adding contrast or by moving the center point, the otherwise hidden beauty emerges more clearly. Looking expectantly, loving the variation of light over shadow, and playing with images all guide the discovery into subtle manifestations of the quality of beauty.

Nov 19, 8:46A harvesting the fallen tree

Nov 21, 4:45P river birch planted this year

     It’s interesting that the same day I’m drafting the above a Facebook friend posted from the fiftieth discourse of Rumi’s Fihi ma fihi:

“The sciences and crafts are like measuring the sea in cupfuls; the way to finding pearls is something else. Many a person is adorned with every accomplishment and possessed of wealth and beauty but has nothing of this intrinsic meaning in him; and many a person is a wreck on the outside, with no fairness of feature, elegance or eloquence, but within is found the intrinsic meaning that abides forever. It is that which enables and distinguishes humanity.” (p. 195, Signs of the Unseen, translation by Thackston)

A year ago today, Nov 24, 2018

Longing into Certainty

Photo taken today 7:34:12 AM attempting to represent
“this moment in which the transcendent reveals itself as the immanent”

Three wonderful readings are converging, or perhaps they spiral, about. The “what” that they are mediating goes into the nameless and might be called “the mystery” as long as the nature of the inarticulate unknowable is respected. Huston Smith says that this “what” holds the certainty that summons the truth-searcher and carries one past the destabilizing turbulence permeating the current age. This transport, mediated with mystery, validates longing that otherwise risks being demeaned as escape or fantasy or even madness.

     Iris Murdoch, in the first page of her sixteenth book, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, opens with a character having “A sensation which he felt almost all the time now, a sort of mild aching disgust and lassitude, [that] made him unable to concentrate his mind.” Her portrayal, reminiscent of postmodernism’s miasma, with its devilish variations so evocatively portrayed here and through her fifteen previous novels, concentrates again so that we might loosen, and perhaps even gain release from the toxic illusion.

     Huston Smith’s book, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, very helpfully describes this “worldview that science introduced,” and more importantly, for me at least, points the way beyond, toward “apophatic theology, the via negativa” (p. 59), toward where mystics focus. And that’s the link to the third reading: Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying.

     These three readings are working together so that the attraction I’ve long felt to Rumi and Hafez makes more sense, and the increased understanding offers to bridge from the sacred into the profane and back again, and again as the indwelling flows without cease. Murdoch’s stories are especially valuable as the richness of story surpassing the intellectual gold of exposition allows compassion to develop so that the otherwise unloveable might be approached. But finding the way takes more than is humanly possible. The divine needs to come through. 

     For this to happen, I believe we need at least these three: the ground of understanding, the sweet waters of compassion, and the warm light from the spirit. In short, the mystical union. That’s what Rumi, Hafez, and all the charmers of radical love tantalize us toward. Michael Sells concentrates the teachings from the entire book in the final pages when he says this is “This moment in which the transcendent reveals itself as the immanent.”

“The affirmation of transcendence—when taken with full apophatic seriousness—then turns back upon itself. The paradoxes of transcendence and immanence, the coincidences of opposites, the displacement of the grammatical object—all are in violation of the conventional logic that functions for delimited entities…”     “This moment in which the transcendent reveals itself as the immanent is the moment of mystical union. [emphasis added] At this moment, the standard referential structures of language are transformed: the breakdown of the reflexive/nonreflexive grammatical distinction in the antecedence of a pronoun [It sees it(self) through it(self) in it(self)]; the breakdown of the perfect/imperfect distinction (it always has been occurred and always is occurring). At the moment of mystical union, the divine attributes are not known to a nondivine subject, the distinction of deity and creation and the duality of lover and beloved are undone. The attributes appear in the mirror, and the image in the mirror is divine in human and human in divine. As soon as the attributes are ‘known’ (perceived as objects by a subject other than them) they harden into idols. They can be realized only through union and self-manifestation. . . This realization is both timeless and utterly ephemeral.” (p. 212)

Michael Sells continues so that the language and the effect of the spiritual poets may translate more easily into the daily offerings pregnant with the grace of mystical union.

“The moment in which the ego-self passes away entails a ‘bewilderment,’ ‘love-madness,’ a ‘being driven out of one’s wits.’ Conventional rationality is built upon the very structures that are momentarily superseded in mystical union.” (p. 212)

     Terrible thing about a worldview is that when it’s the only view known there’s a significant risk that no other world can be believed nor born. Like if a Jonah were in the whale’s belly his entire life, could he have conceived any other possible world? Persons who only experience the narrow oppressive texture of the postmodern world may be so depressed in spirit and vision that they are condemned to be swallowed their entire lifetime. Thank God for sending prophets, poets, and other teachers throughout created forms to display the divine and to invite the mystical union.