Capacity

Rain is falling outside the window, softening the hard soil, as needed, for example, by the newly planted seedlings in our “colossal pollinator garden,” a vital niche in life on earth. This rainfall is also required for raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries to fill and sweeten, and it’s wanted further on throughout all the burgeoning summer growth for continued nourishment. 

     Thunder now rumbles overhead with a reminder of the potential power of water, referenced in the Tao cited below as the weakest or softest, yet capable of galloping through the strongest.

The weakest in all beneath heaven gallops through the strongest, 

and vacant absence slips inside solid presence. 

I know by this the value of nothing’s own doing. 

The teaching without words, 

the value of nothing’s own doing: 

few indeed master such things.

[from p. 83, David Hinton. The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius. Kindle Edition] 

     James Legge translates line 2: “that which has no (substantial) existence enters where there is no crevice” and comments “Ho-shang Kung says that ‘what has no existence’ is the Tao; it is better to understand by the insubstantial air which penetrates everywhere, we cannot see how” (p. 87, The Texts of Taoism). The passages on Tao extend understanding of emptiness attended in previous blog entries. 

     The closing line notes that “few indeed master such things.” Being able to live like this, in harmony with the Way, which might also be understood as living by the Spirit, is perhaps the ultimate goal of a life well lived, mastered by “few in the world,” certainly worthy of dedicated focus. And very interestingly, the way is made not by brute force but marked by the “weakest” (Hinton’s translation in line 1), by the “softest” (as Legge and Nasr translate the opening line).

     Nasr also comments on the last line: 

“Only the sages and a selected few comprehend teaching without words and the possibility of acting without acting [wu wei ] and put them into practice. Understanding this truth is not possible for everyone” (p. 123, S.H. Nasr, A Sufi Commentary on the Tao Te Ching: The Way and Its Virtue).

     While the understanding referenced in this text may be quite demanding, current conditions indicate that such work is crucially needed.  Jim Palmer has been writing eloquently about the urgency of developing such capacity.  

"A person’s ability to tolerate uncertainty, remain present during grief, sustain belonging, exercise restraint, or stay grounded when familiar structures collapse … Capacity often becomes visible only when circumstances become difficult. It reveals itself not through performance but through what a person can carry without avoidance, fragmentation, or retreat into illusion." 

Palmer explains how the collapse of structures (especially including organized religion) calls for significant investment in nurturing existential health, like the soft strength of rain, because the well-being of individuals today is confronted by a flood of troubles.

"Questions once answered collectively become questions individuals must answer for themselves. What gives life meaning? Who am I? How should I live? What should I believe? What matters? How do I face suffering? What makes life worth continuing when certainty disappears?

Modernity did not solve these questions.

It privatized them.

The result is a profound transfer of responsibility from external structures to the individual. Increasing numbers of people are being asked to carry psychological and existential responsibilities that previous generations often shared with religion, culture, family, community, and tradition. Yet society rarely pauses to ask whether people possess the capacities necessary to meet these demands.

This may be one of the defining developmental challenges of our age."

Thinning Veils

November 1. Dawning

These days almost refuse to go unseen. The pink gold of dawning light penetrates through where just-fallen leaves so recently shaded, through where clouds covered seconds before, revealing how the color spectrum’s right now breaking open…all this almost as with a Halloween spell and/or with the holy demand that must not be denied. See! Look through the worlds. Know like a prayer that crosses the materialistic blinders and receives admission into the eternals of truth, beauty, love…

November 1 pathway of early light

So many of my favorite writers are sharing this time of light breaking through. From Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations:

What some call “liminal space” or threshold space (in Latin, limen means a threshold) is a very good phrase for those special times, events, and places that open us up to the sacred. It seems we need special (sacred) days to open us up to all days being special and sacred. This has always been the case and didn’t originate with Christianity. Ancient initiation rites were intensely sacred time and space that sent the initiate into a newly discovered sacred universe.  What became All Saints Day and All Souls Day (November 1–2) was already called “thin times” by the ancient Celts (as were February 1–2: St. Bridget’s Day and Candlemas Day, when candles were blessed and lit). The veil between this world and the next world was considered most “thin” and easily traversed during these times. On these days, we are invited to be aware of deep time—that is, past, present, and future time gathered into one especially holy moment. 

November 1 Dawn

Of course, for those who learn to see, liminal time is the eternal now, Rumi’s “breeze at dawn,” telling secrets. As suggested in the top photo, my favorite space for contemplating this comes in the woodlands. Krista Tippett links these liminal days with forest time: 

Suzanne [Simard] trained my vision and imagination down to the ground, where features of the natural world that we’re only now taking seriously are stitching the life of the forest and the life of the planet together: mycelia, fungi, mosses. It turns out that a forest is a single organism wired for reciprocity and mutuality. The oldest hub trees — which she calls Mother Trees — are incessantly sensing “who is rich and who is poor, who is healthy and who is sick.” They communicate, send warning signals, and deliver nutrients — you can hear this with a Geiger counter — by way of carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and water and chemicals and hormones. One of Suzanne’s most astonishing findings is that these networks of communication and sustenance closely mirror what we’re now able to see in the neural networks of the human brain.
I’m letting all of this enliven my understanding of what it means to stay grounded and vital and whole in this time. For this too is the generative story of our time: We’re on dazzling, revolutionary territory of seeing the workings of vitality inside the body of the Earth and inside ourselves. 

Today, November 1st, “The Morning” (shared from The New York Times) features Melissa Kirsch on “Quality Time” reminding us that we’re only one more twilight from the end of Daylight Savings Time:

The hour between dog and wolf, or “l’heure entre chien et loup,” if you prefer, is, I think you’ll agree, the dreamiest way to refer to twilight. (I will entertain arguments for “the gloaming” and “the violet hour,” but I don’t suspect litigants will get very far.) It’s that time just after sunset when the atmosphere is still partly illuminated by the sun, when the light is ambiguous and the sky can’t choose between blue and black. Night hasn’t yet fully fallen and we are in the borderland between day and dark. One might be forgiven, in this threshold moment, for mistaking a dog for a wolf, for mistaking safety for danger, for feeling slightly off.
Daylight saving time ends tomorrow. That first Sunday in November is a full day suspended between dog and wolf. We’re still grasping at the corn-silk tendrils of summer just as winter gets more insistent. 

October 31 sunset across the cornfield

Presence Alone and With

Dreams often transgress into the past as if a forty-year career hasn’t properly ended, even when final grades were done a half-decade ago. A few days ago, the night’s visitation ghosted students who were more concerned with getting points than with understanding. Will we ever learn?  

    The art of teaching inspires the quest into the inarticulate, not the adulation of dead letters. Love glides above, beyond the best of poems. Modeling has a place but truth lives in continual creation.

    

     Education, at essence, invites experience of wonder, nurtures longing for not-knowing, frees the drive further into mystery where the personally unique swirls into Union. 

     A trace or savoring of such might be felt as resonance; maybe it’s a subtle tone of love—the sense of entering a harmony, a tension that joys in the fragrance of peace. 

    In this way, my reading has recently delighted in the terrain of Teilhard de Chardin. For example, 

“When he has pursued to the end the vocation contained in all sense-perception—when his eyes have once become accustomed to the Light invisible in which both the periphery of beings and their centre are bathed—then the seer perceives that he is immersed in a universal Milieu, higher than that which contains the restlessness of ordinary, sensibly apprehended, life: a Milieu that knows no change, immune to the surge of superficial vicissitudes—a homogeneous Milieu in which contrasts and differences are toned down. As yet, he can say nothing of this diffuse Reality except that it exists, that it is enveloping and that in a mysterious way it is beatifying. It is enough for him, however, to have glimpsed its serene and luminous folds. Nothing henceforth can shake his determination to move for ever into its embrace and to find his happiness in there becoming ever more lost.” [p. 120, Writings in Time of War]

 

Longing and Certitude

“... and there’s not a trace of doubt…” Even a monkey-mind acknowledges the longing for certitude. Such longing itself testifies to the presence of God, but how easily this affirmation, the longing instead gets misconstrued as abandonment and taken as an elevator down to despair. 

     Mystics and other seekers of God have tried for ages to tell us that our conception, the picture we hold of “reality,” determines what we know and how it’s revealed.  A person’s construction depends on whether he or she is committed (a) to things of this world or (A+) to God’s World. It takes a special faith to discern Truth in a culture shadowed for centuries by the legacy of “cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am), a world entrenched in the “scientific method.” How demanding it is to live in reliance upon the Word Who speaks in a whispered stillness that’s often heard only by the individual in his or her unique aloneness, often inarticulate and unconfirmed by anyone else. And yet, how thrilling! How awesome the inner temple of God!

“… the answer [to the more superficial aspects of human’s condition], as Ghazali had discovered for himself, lay only in internalizing the formalities of religion through ‘tasting’ (dhawq): personal religious experience… the only way to certitude” (p. xviii, Introduction by T.J. Winter to Al-Ghazali: The Remembrance of Death and the Afterllife)

     Neither the furthest reaches of human thought nor one’s hardest effort can reach the Divine; for the assurance of God’s presence rests upon God’s grace. When left to the human mind, doubt is certain. The great Divine cannot be known through human resources alone.

“How far apart is the one who seeks proof through God from the one who seeks proof for God! The one who seeks proof through God acknowledges the due that he owes, and affirms the matter by reference to its original existence. One seeks proof for Him only because one has not reached Him. Otherwise, when was it that He became absent, such that one would need to seek proof for Him? And when was it that He became distant, such that one would need to follow the tracks of created things to find him?” (p. 240,  Shaykh Mohamed Faouzi al-Karkari, Introduction to Islamic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Sufi Treatise on the Secrets of the Divine Name).

     When I enter the wholeness of the ephemeral blossom of life/death, when nested into the beauty of early sunlight igniting the yellow and red poppies, the inner light reflects God’s Majesty. This conjoining of the Immanent and the Transcendent, the yielding to paradox, breaks open the false self, the prison of human arrogance, the pride of self-sufficient intellect. That which is true can only be found in the One, in God; for Truth is one of God’s names. In surrendering completely to God’s Sovereignty, we may be admitted, by God’s Grace, to the Unity, to the full mystery of Love, Peace, Justice, Mercy, Beauty, and the full spectrum of Life/Death.

“Thus, dear disciple, if you wish to be among the people of union, you must gather the beautiful names within your true self. For the secret of the names lies in their gathered totality. God says: ‘He taught Adam all the names” [Qur’an 2:31], and the totality of the names is the secret of union of the everlasting presence.” (p. 230,  Shaykh Mohamed Faouzi al-Karkari, Introduction to Islamic Metaphysics)

     Richard Rohr’s meditation this week elaborates the textures of longing drawing especially on Teilhard de Chardin and Saint John of the Cross. Quoting from Teilhard:

“God does not offer Himself to our finite beings as a thing all complete and ready to be embraced. For us God is eternal discovery and eternal growth. The more we think we understand God, the more God reveals Himself as otherwise. The more we think we hold God, the further God withdraws, drawing us into the depths of Himself.” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu: An Essay on the Interior Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 119. Note: some changes made for inclusive language.)

“John of the Cross describes the doubt that disrupts a soul in the dark night, when all sense of knowing God is absent. Mirabai Starr translates from John’s classic work Dark Night of the Soul:

‘The deep suffering of the soul in the night of sense comes not so much from the aridity she must endure but from this growing suspicion that she has lost her way. She thinks that all spiritual blessing is over and that God has abandoned her. She finds neither support nor delight in holy things. Growing weary, she struggles in vain to practice the tricks [prayer practices] that used to yield results. . . The best thing for the soul to do is to pay no attention to the fact that the actions of her faculties are slipping away. . . . She needs to get out of the way. In peaceful plentitude, let her now say “yes” to the infused contemplation God is bestowing upon her. . . . Contemplation is nothing other than a secret, peaceful, loving inflow of God. If given room, it will fire the soul in the spirit of love. [John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. Mirabai Starr. Riverhead Books, 2002), 67, 68–69, 70.]

Winter Containment

While not a big fan of winter, this season perseveres in proving the value found in stripping down to the basics, the beauty revealed in moving toward the essence. Spiritual teachings stress the hard truth of suffering that is necessary in order to remove the superficial and to recover the True Self; for example, “die before you die,” “to thine own self be true,” and “He who knows himself (or his-self, his soul, his mind) knows his Lord.” The latter phrase is provocatively elaborated in an article by Dom Sylvester Houédard, “Notes on the More Than Human Saying: ‘Unless you know yourself you cannot know God.’” For example, he writes:

“The authentically Semitic act of gnosis (daath, yada ‘to know’) is always the fruitful experience of the one living God as Lord and so as obliging us; e.g. knowledge of God’s goodness to us imposing on us goodness to others. It is the certitude of faith fruitful in deeds; the knowledge that produces likeness and makes us like what we know, that deifies and makes us deiform.”

Houédard also links to the Creation and to “the essence prior to the creating word”:

“Whoever wishes to know the divine breath must first know the cosmos for he who knows himself knows his Lord who is manifest in him. (The ‘distress of the Divine Names at the non-manifestation of their effects’ prior to the creating word of command, is not only why the obligating command is for us to show the effects, but indicates that the divine and uncreated energies are themselves an eternal manifestation of the essence prior to the creating word: the former is developed by Eckhart, the latter by S. Gregory Palamas.)”

         Along these lines, Antonio Machado’s Llamó a mi corazón  has long been a favorite, memorized and often recited in Spanish and with Robert Bly’s English translation. The second end rhyme (viento/quiero) capsulizes the essential quest, the human/divine drama; and the entire poem radiates with images of the True Self. 

Llamó a mi corazón, un claro día,

con un perfume de jazmín, el viento.

 -A cambio de este aroma,

todo el aroma de tus rosas quiero.

Quiero translates as “want, wish, or love”; viento as “wind.” And as the ensuing lines tell, this wind speaks to the soul, calling to account for the tending of the garden: The human accountability for nurturing the divine spark poignantly noted with the longing for the aroma of the roses, the watering of the flowers, and heartbreak over the lost inheritance. As often shown in revelation, this wind carries the holy spirit, the breath of God, the communion to and from the Self.

     Like a compass needle, my directional finder points to “true self,” perhaps always, certainly as years advance. Far back in the beginning, only twenty-seven verses into the Good Book, we’re given our inheritance and destiny: “made in the image of God.” And yet, the currents of life confuse the signal system, or maybe the pathway back home takes threads of many colors, making the unique texture of each creation. 

In any case, the current clue that seems to be key to getting there comes in this teaching: “to know yourself is to know your Lord.” That magnetic pole star has been featured across religions and through varied major writers.

Readings resonate as soul guides, especially ones on gnosis/mysticism, suffering, and wholeness. As the season of winter draws inward, space has opened to engage volumes that previously seemed too demanding: C.G. Jung’s Aion, The Grail Legend by Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, Barbara Hannah’s Striving Toward Wholeness, and writings by St. John of the Cross, including Edith Stein’s The Science of the Cross.

The swirl, stirring up muddy stuff from the bottom, among readings, dreams, and weather, seems to compose in the effort and evidence of holding together opposites. Barbara Hannah writes:

“In the empirical Self of psychology, light and shadow form a paradoxical unity, but in the orthodox Christian concept the archetype is split into two irreconcilable halves…

This inevitably involves us in a crucifixion of the ego between these two irreconcilable opposites. Of course, there can be no final extinction of the ego, for that would destroy all possibility of consciousness. The ego has to submit, however, to a continual crucifixion between the opposites, to those dreaded conflicts in duty…" (pp. 28-28, Lectures on Jung’s Aion).

Path-Maker Breaking Stones

"We make the road by walking," photo, January 9, 2021

The primary offering of a mystical text, in my experience, comes in the uniquely personal breaking open of the divine, often only as an elusive whiff at the edge of the articulate, a breeze that dares one to go beyond frozen thought patterns, to venture past traditions that violate the sanctity of freedom. And almost paradoxically, this freedom conjoins with unity, as Rabindranath Tagore told in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech: “We must discover the most profound unity, the spiritual unity between the different races…… He who sees all beings as himself, who realises all beings as himself, knows Truth.” This focuses the heart of Gitanjali, the force that Coleman Barks seeks to liberate and preserve.

        The beckoning pathway forms in glimpsing, in tasting the mystery that remains mysterious while also flavoring the everyday with a texture of life beyond. With this expectation, I looked forward to Fons Vitae’s publication of Coleman Barks’ “translation/version” of Tagore’s Gitanjali (Song Offerings). Having often found support in “making the road by walking” through Barks’ versions of Jalaluddin Rumi (which he fashioned from English translations by Arberry, Nicholson, and others), how would Barks enhance the vitality in Tagore’s own English translation from his native Bengali in the work which led to Tagore’s Nobel Prize award?

        In addition to the 103 songs comprising Gitanjali, Barks includes four additional poems from Tagore’s work, The Crescent Moon, and Barks also gives us a dozen pages of his own commentary and notes. I’d like an additional hundred pages of Barks’ commentary, and still I find that the concentrated material contributes by showing the involvement of W.B. Yates, Ezra Pound, and others as well as pointing to connections with Ghandi and Kabir.

        Barks begins, “Rabindranath Tagore is one of the great universal mystics.” Again, to me, the role of the mystic and thus of mystical text features access to the holy, so that the individual breathes the unique essence that purifies, inspires, and vitalizes, so that he or she moves forward on the pathway “made by walking” (e.g., Antonio Machado, in Campos de Castilla, Proverbios y Cantares, #29) and bridges “these daft twin brothers, life and death” (from Tagore’s #58, p. 76). Barks’ version, just cited, shows the light touch, which serves as a little wake-up invitation, in part through the addition of “daft” to Tagore’s English translation which reads: “the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world…” (p. 149 in Visva-Bharati/UBS Publication of Gitanjali). Barks also features, in the next line, “the storm” in a way that moves me differently from Tagore’s “tempest.” 

        It’s not that one translation/version is better than the other but that a force may be invoked to join the dance, to broker the mystical encounter. In Gitanjali, Tagore offers a departure from conventional religion. For example, number 11 opens:

“Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!

Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with all doors shut?

Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

   He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground

and where the path-maker is breaking stones…” 

     (p. 23 in Visva-Bharati/UBS)

Barks’ version goes:

“Give up this fumbling with beads, this chanting 

     in the dark, shut temple.

… A mason

     is breaking and laying stone for a path.”

      In number 102, Tagore, with beautiful respect for the individual’s responsibility and authority for path-making, tells of people who demand “Tell me all your meanings” and he responds, “‘Ah, who knows what they mean!’ They smile and go away in utter scorn./ And you sit there smiling.” (p. 253 in Visva-Bharati/UBS)

Barks’ version of the middle part of #102 offers, “A secret part of you flows out of me.” 

For me, the chance for a bit more of this secret is the offering from the publication of What Wants to Come Through Me Now. 

Paradox, Certainty, Suffering, and the All-Surpassing Omniscience (That is, Love)

August 24, 2020

     The year 2020 must go down as a great humbler. Perhaps this period of time, if viewed in the long landscape, reveals possibilities, particularly opportunities to inspire radical remakings. Reflecting off the craziness of the current political arena, we might channel this turbulence to transform meanings of crucial standpoints. Could the time be ripe for radical change in the prime movers among the complex of Power to Love? How might we engage creative chaos? What if we’ve been tangled in the old, old but failed, mythos of the hero? And what if this heroic sense of self (which necessarily generates blame as well as hubris) is incommensurate with our divine guidance? Can we risk surrender to the divine? How can a person let go of the struggle without falling into darkness?

     Perhaps the sense of what to do and what not to do requires a revolution in the feeling of certainty. The Good Books tell us that Knowing belongs to the Omniscient and thus reaches beyond our cognitive grasp (cf. Philippians 4:7, Peace surpasses understanding; Ephesians 3:19, Love surpasses knowledge). So why be surprised when the best we can reach of certainty comes in a sacred texture of bewilderment, being awed, surrendered.* 

The mark that someone knows that the Real’s knowledge encompasses his acts, states, and words is that quaking and dread becomes his watchword, and awe holds up the banner of rulership from his head to his toes. . . Adam was biting the fingers of wonder with the teeth of bewilderment: ‘What’s this? What happened?’” (William Chittick translating Sam’ani, The Repose of the Spirits, pp. 90,103 on al-‘Alim: the Knower)

October 8, 2020

Teachings of Sufism often return into the theme of mystical annihilation (fana) as one approaches the One (see, for example, Stoddard, Sufism, p. 64; Lings, What is Sufism? p. 78; Ernst, Shambhala Guide to Sufism, pp. 61, 115). An outgrown, dysfunctional sense of knowing needs release in order to birth wonder. Why bother about a feeling of ineptitude if we are swept into the ocean? 

      Richard Rohr’s meditation this week comforts me in the reminder that being heroic (my term, not his) is not the only way of acting responsibly in the presence of suffering. He uses the metaphor of a swollen river, sweeping folks off into its flow. The responsible action to today’s crisis comes not just in heroic activism that works toward systemic reform, but also and equally valuable are works of education/healing and those of hands-on help for persons in distress. In Mark Wallace’s writings, the caring attention extends to all of creation, trees to butterflies. 

“As the breath of God who animates all life, the Spirit becomes present in the spaces opened up between persons who risk themselves for the other. . . The Spirit is not a static entity but a potential modality of divine presence that becomes actual in the co-partnerships of persons with one another and other life forms” (pp. 10-11, Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation).

August 1, 2020

     Even so and always, the work zone flows from the interior and, of course, the Source. Blame and anger transform into constructive fire for healing and loving. The only effective agent, God.

*Previous blogs elaborating the theme of Bewilderment include:

August 18, 2019 When Bewilderment Tracks the Mystery

May 13, 2020 Recognition on the Pathway

September 7, 2018 Living with Bewilderment

August 24, 2019 Bewildered by God

November 16, 2019 Longing into Certainty

March 23, 2019 Rumi, Radical Love, & I/You (part A) 

August 18, 2018 Transcendent Power

February 10, 2018 Tracking on the Path of Attraction

December 16, 2017 “and He is with you”

November 14, 2017 Sure Good?