Majesty & Beauty

Sunrise, Dec 8, 2018

The Mercy and Generosity of God offer access into the Unknowable—limited access but as much as humans can contain—offered through complementary opposites. In this season, the pairing of Majesty&Beauty especially stands out. As we’re experiencing the edge of winter, with the loss of fruit, flowers, even leaves, finding beauty seems harder than it was in the lovely spring, in the abundant summer, and in autumnal color. My camera has to search into a different dimension of majesty, into the power that moves through loss. 

I’m learning to play with special effects. They force the questions around truth and reality. How might creativity and imagination lead into in-sight and under-standing of the Eternal Essence of Life. Perhaps the Severe guides toward a sense that more can be known than is reflected in the “realistic” image. Perhaps imaginative play with special effects can still ask for truth but for Truth that passes understanding and that still guards the heart-mind (cf. Phil. 4:7). 

Certain readings are providing strong guidance. Many of the passages that discuss this Beauty/Majesty dynamic contain “unsayings,” a concept developed very helpfully by Michael Sells in Mystical Languages of Unsaying. So we can expect to feel, even to be reassured by the presence of paradox. It’s like the hunter in Iron John who recognizes the track by the mark of trouble in the deep forest: the dogs have gone in and have not returned.

In Chapter 2, “Divine Duality,” Sachiko Murata includes a section on Majesty and Beauty (pp. 69-74, The Tao of Islam). In it, she cites, quotes, and elaborates several classic texts on the Majesty-Beauty dynamic. For background, she references Annemarie Schimmel and Rumi. Schimmel situates the pair in a special kind of spiritual knowing: 

“Rumi’s favourite idea is that things can be known only through their opposites—if a bird has tasted sweet water he will understand the brackish taste of the water in his native brooklet.God’s twofold aspects are revealed in everything on earth: He is the Merciful and the Wrathful; His is jamal, Beauty beyond all beauties, and jalal, Majesty transcending all majesties (twentieth century Western history of religion invented the juxtaposition of the mysterium tremendum and the mysterium fascinans to come closer to God’s attributes).” From pp. 230-1, The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi. Schimmel also footnotes Rudolf Otto’s Idea of the Holy “which couches in scientific terms—tremendum and fascinans—the two aspects of the Experience of the Holy, as they had been known to the Sufis for centuries” (p. 448).

In addition to Rumi (d. 1273), Murata cites Ruzbihan Baqli (d. 1209) in order to show the nature of vision felt in the Majesty-Beauty dynamic: 

“The unveiling of beauty is the place where spirits are plundered through passionate affection, yearning, and love. Through it the gnostic is given the ability to travel through the attributes and to remain constant in the vision of eternity and subsistence. The gnostic says, ‘The station of the witnessing of beauty demands intoxication, ecstasy, and turmoil.’ 

The vision of majesty is the station in which the elect are overcome by fear, dread, veneration, and reverence. The gnostic says, ‘The vision of majesty distracts the spirits and upsets the bodies.’” (quoted on p. 73, Tao of Islam)

As hinted at the beginning with the focus on finding beauty in winter, our vision may need further development if we are to progress on the path of beauty, of love, of God. This development moves into the remaking of meaning that surrenders attachment to pleasure, to indifference, to self. To elaborate this, Murata references Chittick’s Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi where Chittick translates a passage from the Mathnawi:

“Pain is an alchemy that renovates—where is indifference when pain intervenes? 

Beware, do not sigh coldly in your indifference! Seek pain! Seek pain, pain, pain!”   (lines 4304-4, Book VI, quoted on p. 72 in Tao of Islam and p. 208 in Sufi Path of Love)

Chittick quotes these lines in a section, “Love and Beauty: True and Derivative” which is in Part 3, Attainment to God. He also explicates the lines:

“In the present context Rumi explains the nature of beauty clearly and succinctly: It is a drop of spray from the infinite Ocean, or a ray of light shining upon a wall. All beauty derives from the other world, so here it is borrowed and ephemeral. True Beauty pertains only to God” (p. 201).

Chittick again cites the line and elaborates in a later section on Separation and Union: 

“Rumi considers this awareness of pain (dard) as the doorway to the path of Love, and he advises us, ‘Seek pain! Seek pain! pain, pain!’ Man cannot truly understand the meaning of pain and ‘suffering’ (rani) until he becomes aware of his state of separation” (p. 237)

As noted, Rumi’s “seek-pain” line comes from the sixth and concluding book of the Mathnawi. Nicholson’s translation has the lines this way:

“Passion is the elixir that makes (things) new: how (can there be) weariness where passion has arisen?Oh, do not sigh heavily from weariness: seek passion, seek passion, passion, passion!

The passage comes all mixed-up, Rumi-style (Alan Williams describes seven interwoven types of discourse in the Mathnawi's narratives), in a story beginning a hundred lines earlier about a man of Baghdad who has squandered his rich inheritance and who then dreams that his hopes of opulence could be fulfilled in Cairo. After traveling there, he’s reduced to begging for food and is assaulted as a robber by the night patrol. As he tells his story from the heart, the patrolman is touched and assists the treasure-seeker toward the revelation that the great treasure, the Water of Life, can only be found back in his own home. The unveiling of the treasure, the Beauty, the Beloved, apparently cannot be gained without Majesty. Through the hard journey comes the revelation. It seems that the growth of eyes-to-see depends on passion and is often experienced as severity and suffering.

A compelling theme for civilization, wisdom literature, and spirituality teaches the Hidden Treasure, the archetypal pearl of great price. In summarizing her chapter on Divine Duality, Murata says:

God created the cosmos to make the Hidden Treasure manifest. Only after that can He be known by the creatures, who themselves are part of the Hidden Treasure. . . Once God creates the cosmos out of love and mercy, He is concerned to nurture knowledge of Himself in the others, since all reality and bliss lie in the Real, the Blissful. (p. 77)

Golden Snowflakes

I recently dreamed of two men, probably one young and the other old, with each “purviewing" (see note at end) his map for moving forward in life’s journey; and either in the dream or in the liminal edge toward wakening, I considered the young man’s roadmap as the exoteric pathway while the older one viewed an inner mapping of the esoteric journey, that of his heart/soul. S.H. Nasr explains “the basic distinction” between these pathways, the outer/exoteric and the inner/esoteric: “Religion has an outward aspect concerning everyone destined to accept its teachings, but it also possesses an inner dimension accessible to the few who are able to penetrate from the realm of outwardness to the inward” (pp. 15-6, Religion and the Order of Nature). He continues by noting the interdependence of these two and affirms the importance of honoring the exoteric forms required in following the teachings of traditional religions alongside the personal esoteric movement into inner meanings. This connection keys the hope for “religious harmony” among religions:

“The insistence upon the esoteric as the only means of penetrating beyond the veil of distinct formal worlds of various religions to the inner meaning or transcendent unity—binding them together, and wherein alone can religious harmony be found in the deepest sense—has in fact been one of the major impediments for a wider appreciation of the approach of the perennial philosophy to the study of religion in academic circles. Esotericism, traditionally understood, does not negate the significance of the exoteric. . . On the contrary, it [esotericism] insists upon its [exotericism’s] importance, for it is only through forms that one can transcend the formal plane, and one cannot surely throw away what one does not possess.” (From the section,“The Outward and the Inward in the Cosmos and in Religion,” pp. 15-17 in Religion and the Order of Nature.)

While there’s value in exploring exoteric and esoteric separately, in the fuller picture they overlap and perhaps in an absolute frame do so almost completely.

The dream did not, unfortunately and yet not surprisingly, reveal the mapquest details on either of these pathways, but I suspect it’s affirming the direction I’ve been taking that honors the sacred in nature and art. As evident in recent postings, my reading and photography show devotion to spending time walking more slowly and with more gratitude among woodlands while also reflecting upon the beauty with more creative attempts. The collage of images at the top suggests the exoteric-esoteric play as witnessed through the window above my desk. In Light on the Ancient Worlds, Schuon offers guidance for choosing the pathways to walk and for the destination to strive for: “The mission of man is to introduce the Absolute into the relative” (p. 82). 

The “relative” in the collage comes from approaching nature with reverence and with an expectation of revelation at any moment, even in a landscape of muted tones.

Perhaps in the small steps of my personal walking, I’m making a gesture toward “the resacralization” of nature. Nasr’s opening of his final chapter in Religion and Order of Nature addresses this:

“Nature needs to be resacralized not by man who has no power to bestow the quality of sacredness upon anything, but through the remembrance of what nature is as theater of Divine Creativity and Presence. Nature has been already sacralized by the Sacred Itself, and its resacralization means more than anything else a transformation within man, who has himself lost his Sacred Center, so as to be able to rediscover the Sacred and consequently to behold again nature’s sacred quality. And this remembrance and rediscovery can only be achieved through religion in its traditional forms as the repositories of the Sacred and the means of access to it.” (pp. 270-1)

The second image, taken with a special effect available with the camera, might suggest an attempt “to introduce the Absolute into the relative.” 

As I edit the images, I’m caught by the notion that these remaining autumn leaves appear as golden snowflakes, and I’m touched by the Love manifesting in nature. I believe the time spent in nature looking, appreciating, and playing in a creative manner can be a form of remembrance and contemplation in the tradition of spiritual contemplatives. Many writers emphasize the importance of contemplation to our bridging the exoteric with the esoteric. Schuon offers crucial insight regarding the terrible risks and the possible Gold marking our human journey: 

“… it is impossible to contemplate a nearby object and at the same time the distant landscape behind it, so it is impossible—in this connection alone—to contemplate and act at the same time.” Footnote 21 which states: “This is what the tragedy of Hamlet expresses: there were facts and actions, and demands of action, but the Shakespearean hero, seeing through it all, saw only principles or ideas; he sank into things as into a morass; their very vanity or unreality prevented him from acting, dissolved his action; he had before him, not this or that evil, but evil as such, and this inconsistency, absurdity, and incomprehensibility of the world thwarted everything he wished to do. Contemplation either removes one from action by causing the objects of action to disappear, or it renders action perfect by making God appear in the agent; now the contemplativity of Hamlet had unmasked the world, but it was not yet fixed in God; it was as it were suspended between two planes of reality…the drama of the contemplative who is forced to action but has no vocation for it… (p. 39, Light on the Ancient Worlds).

Note on "purviewing": I’m playing with the word “purview” as the dream might suggest a person’s reach across the two worlds, the inner and outer, with the purpose indicated in the meaning of “purview: “the range or limit of authority, competence, responsibility, concern, or intention.”

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.