Be Like Noah

“Ignorance in English law is no excuse for breaches of law. In the collective unconscious, ignorance, unawareness, is not only inexcusable but the greatest offence with the most dire consequences. That is why in Greek myth, legend and art, the villain is always the ignorance that serves as an image of unawareness, it is always the “not-knowing,” the non-recognition of man’s own inner eventfulness which is the real crime…How great therefore the culpability of a consciousness like our own that knows and will not face up to the responsibility of what it knows! For no one since Freud, and above all since Jung, can any longer plead ignorance of where our failure starts.” Laurens van der Post, Jung & the Story of Our Time

My own reading of Carl Jung, and of many of the writers, psychoanalysts, poets and others influenced by his work, has convinced me of his motivation to provide modern men and women a way out of the systemic failure of our civilization. He and his “disciples” open the way to the interior, to the feminine area of consciousness, to the transformative spiritual potential in human beings, heretofore largely ignored by “western” religion. This is an absolutely huge and momentous feat, and the efforts of the one man, Jung, to accomplish it, has to be acknowledged by each of us who has benefited so much from his brilliance, his courage and his love for human kind. Reading the van der Post book about Jung quoted above is especially pleasurable because van der Post does not stint in his praise for his friend Carl Jung; even though it is unfashionable to show such “biased” passion for a great man. He admires Dr. Jung for his unmatched gifts to our civilization, for giving us the chance to turn around the “blood-dimmed tide,” but he loves him for the gift he gave to himself, that is, the gift to make it possible to contact and to guide one’s life by the Divine energies within.

And that is why Dr. Jung has my undying gratitude, and my love as well. Adrift for half my life with only this culture to cling to for any idea of meaning or purpose, I found his raft – by now quite large, but still far from the mainstream of what passes for information and ideas in our culture – and climbed on. Once on this raft one finds oneself dedicated also to the work of transmitting to others the great soul-saving insights, not only to inspire and give hope to individuals, but to address the alarming crisis we are in in the only way that can make a true difference! Surely there are outer reforms and changes to take on, such as the rebuilding of local economies and cultures, but individuals who have not taken on the honest search for self-knowledge, knowledge that is deep and transformative, will in the end only build what they know, and the anti-nature, anti-passional, anti-Feminine bias of this culture will be transmitted once again.

This more imperative aspect of transformational change is the religious aspect. Through a process of secularization and rationalization appealing to our desired sense of being “moderns” and “better off” than any people before us on the planet, we have thrown out the baby of religion with the bathwater of dogma and dead mythology, and deem ourselves better off for it. Countless times I have heard the distinction made between “spiritual” and “religious,” as a way of distinguishing oneself and one’s own spirituality from the benighted mistakes of unthinking orthodoxy, conformity and dogma .

It is time that we understood what we are doing as we make this pet distinction, which is equivocating - it is bargaining with God and the gods - and realize that if something is not our religion, that is, if something does not confront us with the task of answering to and acting upon life’s ultimate meaning and purpose during this brief mortal space, then we are, as van der Post says it, “culpable of not facing up to the responsibility of (what) we know.” The problem is that for many of us there is a great difficulty in re-imagining religion. We understand it only in the dualistic, literalistic terms of our culture’s stunted kind of “thinking,” which can conceive of it only as an evolutionary step backward, a relinquishing of prized freedom, a return to unenlightened, blind ideology, etc. Like Jung, I know that “only religion can replace religion,” and without it, we are always “subjects” (as in “subjected”) in someone else’s religion – in our case, this would be the religion of obeisance to the interlocked, and mostly invisible powers of corporations, the military and the state, and a culture debased to the point that it no longer reflects the needs and longings, beauty and strength of real human beings. Unless we have an alternate religion, and religious passion, we can do no more than play our part in theirs.

In our Temenos gathering two Tuesdays ago, beginning our discussion of James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, we touched into the idea of “calling.” The term, clearly, is central to Hillman’s thesis, and, somewhat troublesomely, is surely a religious term. The very next night in the Imagining America lecture at The Other Side, the speaker, talking about what was needed if Americans are to act collectively to save the earth (or “the environment,” as he referred to it) from destruction, used the term “sacrifice.” He said that Americans would need to learn again to view sacrifice as something that has its real reward, though not a material one. It was pointed out by an audience member, Carl Rubino (former Jesuit), that “sacrifice” is a word also associated with religion.

Over and over I see contemporary writers and thinkers, groping toward the language that is adequate to the challenge we face, coming back to the language of religion. Not said, by either of the two Hamilton College professors, was what are we going to do, in this post-Christian, dominantly secular age, if we need religion - if we need to be religious - to let go of this one way ticket to disaster we are currently holding.

Wednesday night (9/22) in his talk at The Other Side, writer and activist educator John Taylor Gatto named the 3 traditional purposes of education: to make good people, to make good citizens, and to make each individual his/her personal best. The first, he pointed out, is a moral goal, and historically has depended upon a person’s having a connection to a transcendent meaning – to the Divine, or to God. He suggests, and I paraphrase, that it is no accident that society – and schooling in particular – has thrown out education in the Divine, for people whose meaning is based in spiritual reality are not as controllable as those lacking that base.

The popular “anti-religious” perspective sees religion as an instrument of social and political control, the opiate of the masses, etc. And of course as institutional religion allied itself to power, this view is understandable. But it is not accurate, for what religion actually does is oppose the good of the common good against the only other big game in town, which is the “good” of corporate “good,” profit, power and the continued hegemony by the few over the many. What we really hate is their religion; what we must be careful of is not allowing our hate to interfere with our religion.

It’s clear to me that those who do not find religion for themselves – that is, ultimate meaning, ultimate purpose - are doomed to repeat the old one. The old one, in its more imperialistic permutations upheld the view, propagated (as Gatto showed us) in a line of progression from Plato on through to Darwin, that the problem for those with the good life of wealth and power was to keep that way of life from being threatened by the vast majority of people, the “masses.” Thus such religion has always allowed a measure of justification for inequality, even as some of its members, interpreting the gospels differently, took action against social injustice. The social gospel interpretation of Christianity actually became the prominent voice of religion in the 1960’s and 70’s. For the most part, however, society and its religions as a whole, both left and right, do not challenge the basic assumptions of the materialist, rationalist, anti-Nature, anti Feminine culture which, let’s face it, as a whole upholds the old power arrangements very well. In this way, even self-proclaimed atheists uphold the old religion they hate.

But another turn of the historical screw has occurred since the 60’s and 70’s. We no longer hear the social gospel being proclaimed, nor activists on its behalf publicly debating the inequalities and injustices and war-making propensities of our capitalist system. At the same time, we are aware that the problems are much vaster, in a sense, than the way we treat each other, significant as those are. Now we face the fact that our way of life is destroying our very habitat. The way we treat others is at last turning visibly and palpably into the way we treat ourselves; we have failed to love our neighbor, and we have failed in loving ourselves. And the only consistent voice to which we can turn to show us how to behave toward this terrifying threat is one based in religion. I have in mind here the indigenous cultural voice, rooted in the religious perspective of the sacredness of all of life: the community, the land, the individual, the plants, animals and water and air. Only there can we find the religious attitude sufficiently whole to address the crisis we face, that does not separate religious from secular, that, imagination intact, knows the earth as sacred and as Mother.

It is because of the “dumbing down” of our culture, as Gatto calls it, which means so much more than lower SAT scores! - that we hear the word “calling” as if the call were away from our bliss and toward a duty of some kind. Oh, bother, I guess I should be involved in some kind of protest activity or writing my Congressman or hugging a leper. But I don’t want to – Does that make me wrong? Who said the calling was to something you don’t really want to do, feel inadequate for, have no experience in, etc?? The answer is quite simple: nobody said that. It is the consequence of a culturally learned limitation imposed on your imagination. The reactive fear that if we treat something as a call, it must be something taking us away from what we want - from our “freedom” and our true “bliss,” - is the opposite of the truth. The calling exactly means that one’s bliss and one’s freedom to choose to follow that bliss is the ultimate meaning and purpose of our lives – is God’s purpose for us, and has to be taken up – or refused – as such. But why would one refuse one’s bliss? Why would one refuse the opportunity to use one’s freedom to fulfill its ultimate meaning – that is, to be for the good, the common good, the whole good? Would you refuse just because you are really really mad at God? So very mad that you categorically refuse even to entertain the possibility that God, or Spirit, is real? And I refer here to no dogmatic image of God, not to God of the Bible particularly, but God as experience. Our refusal of this experience is what Jung refers to as the willful ignorance of modern man

For many of us, the instinct to mistrust religion is practically visceral. We hear the word and flinch. By now it must be clear, I do not share that mistrust! And though I do not have a perfect vision in my mind – yet – of what a religious community made up of “bliss-followers,” of people who have surrendered to the path of spiritual transformation (Jung’s term was individuation) and are committed to building a society that is in harmony with Nature would look like, I am more and more leaning toward seeing it as mutual commitment to the old stabilizers of human life: to particular family, particular community, particular land or place. Like religion, such a notion can be offensive to our collectively “dumbed down” intelligence. We can hear this as being asked to undergo a life sentence with people we don’t like. We fear the loss of freedom such commitments entail, even as we face loss of the ability to imagine the future for humankind if we cannot bring our way of life into harmony with Nature’s limitations!

And who says that such sacrifice would be a deprivation? Who says calling must take us from what we want to be doing (even if that ain’t much, it’s my right)? Who says these religious words do not point the way to fuller, happier existence? We’ve been hoodwinked, dumbed down, and lead down the primrose path long enough. No matter what way you cut it, the way out of this corner we’re painted into will be a lot of work and some measure of pain. But the satisfaction ahead is that the best from each of us is wanted and expected: by following our bliss we add to the universe exactly what it is missing, and in our own marriages, families, communities and places, meaning is again reflected back to us.

Orin read me this poem by Rumi the other night. It really spoke to the kinds of thoughts I’ve been having, and puts the idea of “calling,” that I have been so prosy about, into poetry. I love it!

These spiritual window shoppers,
who idly ask, How much is that? Oh, I’m just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

Where did you go? “Nowhere.”
What did you have to eat? “Nothing much.”

Even if you don’t know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.




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