Useless in Utica

2011-01-04T08:54:00.000-08:00

Becoming Friends of the Immediate Things: the New Age Task

“’You shall become friends of the immediate things’ (said Nietzsche). And the immediate things are this earth, this life. For quite long enough our ancestors, and we ourselves, have been taught that this life is not the real thing, that it is provisional and we only live for Heaven. Our morality is based upon the negation of the flesh, and so our unconscious often tries to convince us of the importance of living here and now. In the course of the centuries man [sic] has repeatedly experienced the fact that the life that is not lived here, or the life lived provisionally, is utterly unsatisfactory. It leads to neurosis.” C.G. Jung, Interpretation of Visions

The next meeting of the Utica Temenos will focus on James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code. My intention here is to provide some context that might help our discussion. Sorry if much of what I say is “old information.” It is old information, but I am re-working it through my own chewing process and hope you - the Temenos group and beyond - find it useful

This reading, like everything we have read together in our Temenos gatherings, fits generally into the “New Age” category, which I understand as the literature of the re-emergence of the Divine Feminine, or the Great Mother archetype into western modern consciousness. That this emergence is happening is to me the most exciting occurrence of our age. The emergence had already been noted in the previous century in the work of mystics like W.B. Yeats, and of course prominently in Dr. Jung’s archetypal psychology. In the 1960’s the consciousness actually emerged in society in a big way, due in large part to the experimentation with psyche-altering drugs that was going on at that time.

Since the 60’s, we have been dealing with the counterattack to that emergence on the societal and political level, but also with a lot of work being done on many levels to further incorporate that consciousness, to understand its meaning and what it requires of us in terms of how we shall live on the planet.

For the Divine Feminine is also the expression of the earth and of Nature. She arises at this time due to the huge imbalance in consciousness that is the consequence of centuries of patriarchal dominance within a dualistic consciousness, and its particular manifestations in imperialism, industrial capitalism, rationalistic scientism, and so on. It is an entire and self-re-enforcing system that is anti-nature, anti-body, anti-feminine due to its need to survive as a system. That is, it is not driven by “bad people,” necessarily, but by people faithfully doing their part within the collective consciousness. The problem is, of course, that the collective consciousness is destroying the planet, cannot stop warring, violence, exploitation of poorer/weaker people, or using up the planet and its “resources.” What the imbalance has produced is a destructive, insatiable death culture.

The people we’ve been reading in Temenos have attuned themselves to this other wondrous and awesome thing that is happening; that is, the re-dress of the wrong being done by the lopsided materialist and rationalist system, and the emergence of the corrective consciousness, that is, Great Mother consciousness. This is the consciousness that returns the sacred, or spirit, the “invisibles” to nature and to the physical universe. Not that they ever left, but western consciousness lost its ability to know the Spirit nature of things. Western theology separated the Divine (perceived as a Father God) from Nature, and placed priests and scripture between human beings and the divine; this left the way clear for top-down system of domination and the using up the earth’s bounty as “dead matter.” Western consciousness, as opposed to indigenous consciousness, sees the world as dead matter and has essentially reduced human being to a kind of machinery, too.

The divine feminine, on the other hand, is an Immanence. The feminine aspect of the soul, or the soul itself, suggests the sacredness in land, sky, trees, rivers, etc., but this knowledge cannot be accessed via the rational mind. It can only be accessed by each individual her/himself coming into contact with her/his own inner divinity. Each individual, in order for the Great Mother to emerge into consciousness, has to make that journey into the Unconscious (Great Mother, Nature in us) for him or herself – that is the “hero’s journey.” It is also initiation, transformation, shamanic journeying, etc. It is the same process known to Jesus and the other great spiritual teachers – that is, it is the process whereby they became spiritual authorities. The religions that grew up in their names are a different matter – each worthy in its way, but partaking in the shortcomings of attempting to institutionalize an experience!

Our times ask of us that we each become a spiritual authority, that we each become divine knowers. Of course, the Eastern religions have been the great teachers in this mysticism because their religion is rooted in the transformational Divine Feminine. But wedding that transformational understanding to the western, more individualized and ego-developed mind is what we are about.

How do we know how to take on this mystical knowing, this mythic journeying into the Unconscious? Sounds scary. One look at Kali, or at the Baba Yaga, and you know we are talking scary. Hillman says that the soul or psyche, long buried in western consciousness, or the gods, speak to us through our symptoms – our illness. Pathology itself provides the door to the Unconscious, to the divinity within, to gnosis. As Marion Woodman attested, though her path has involved pain and suffering, she would not have had it otherwise; the rewards are incomparable. And remember she called the surrender to the Goddess a great humility. The hero’s journey calls for the right kind of grandiosity – one must surrender to one’s divine nature and calling, to one’s “extraordinariness.”

Joseph Campbell famously called on us as individuals to “follow our bliss.” This is another way of speaking about the same path to Divine Mother consciousness, which is an erotic path. If we follow the call to our bliss, to our genuine wanting, we will be likewise drawn into that mythic journey with its trial and its danger and its suffering. Estes calls us to the Wild Woman within. Same thing.

But there is a problem that is not addressed by following the wild woman within, from knowing one’s own greater being within. That is, how do you make sure that this changed consciousness, this attunement to mystical reality, actually gets manifest in the real world? How does it go from being wonderful and personal to bringing the individual back into this terribly flawed, terribly imperfect, frustrating and ungrateful world? Into Utica, we might say. For Utica represents as well as anything the unidealized world of our society. How do you make sure this consciousness does not remain a few inches above the earth, but actually touches down into the shit where, as Yeats wrote, “God has pitched His tent?” How do you get across the rather distasteful idea that the soul must grow down and it must “become friends with immediate things”?

I asked this question as if there were some mastermind at work planning and strategizing the change in consciousness. Of course there is not. And, in fact as Hillman points out, the necessity that the soul grow down was already an idea present in pre-Christian western mythology. The ancient mythology of the daimon, a mythology we can confidently claim as western, contains both the notion of following one’s bliss (i.e., the calling, the acorn) and the sense of a destiny realized in this life – the destiny of one’s character. According to this mythology, we are meant to become characters, that is, individuals as seen from the point of view of others. As you can see, this is a very earthy, this-world outcome. Like the pine tree or the owl or the barnyard chicken, we are meant to become that which we are in this-life terms, a goal that is as humble as all hell.

The suggestion is that by each of us becoming the character that is our in-born destiny, by growing down into that, we are fulfilling not only our individual destiny, but our meaning and purpose as “envisioned” by the Divine Feminine in her guise as Necessity. We become part of the diversity that the Divine Feminine is, which we can only become through this humble surrender to that inborn destiny, daimon, or “bliss.”

It is in this way that the soul of the world can be addressed, which absolutely depends upon the soul-making taken on by each individual. As Hillman writes: “We make soul with our behavior, for soul doesn’t come already made in heaven. It is only imagined there; an unfulfilled project trying to grow down.” (p. 260) Now, we can refuse our call, absolutely. Our consciousness gives us that freedom. And there are a thousand reasons not to take it on, and a thousand messages from the culture seducing us into “why bother?” On the bulletin board that hangs in my studio, several prompts toward this decision are posted, and have been there guiding me for more than 20 years. One is from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Another is from the author and Jungian psychoanalyst John Lee: ”Why are we afraid to go down into our pain? ‘I’ll go crazy, you think. No one will understand or tolerate me. It will destroy my family.’ Well, if you don’t go into your pain, every single one of those things will happen.

In a milder way, Hillman hints at the difficulty of choosing the path of the daimon: “Awakening to the original seed of one’s soul and hearing it speak may not be easy. How do we recognize its voice; what signals does it give? …it is hard to get it through our hard heads that there can be messages from elsewhere more important to the conduct of our lives than what comes through Centel or the Internet, meanings that don’t slide in fast, free and easy, but are encoded in the painful pathologized events that perhaps are the only ways the gods can wake us up.” (p. 278)

Hillman’s science, like Jung’s, partakes of the truth of myth and imagination as much as it does empirical science. That is precisely because he follows the great feminine in his work, and trusts in his own inspiration as being truth, the same as we are called to do! Not truth as orthodoxy, not necessarily true for all time, but the truth we each are called to express now, in the present we inhabit. He’s just doing his job in service to the Great Mother; we each can only do the same, in whatever capacity we are called to (“character is not what you do, it’s the way you do it.”) p. 252

This is exciting stuff – fully inspirational and fully revolutionary. I confess that I see Temenos not so much as space wherein we contest such ideas, but wherein we seek to understand what they have to say to us as we each seek to do our part in the re-emergence of the Divine Feminine. I am committed to doing everything in my power to help with the intelligibility of these ideas in the belief that ideas are part of the transformational process.

2010-12-23T07:12:00.000-08:00

Gods of War, the Gift of Anger, and the Ongoing Struggle for Peace

“Go over and over your beads, paint weird designs on your forehead, wear your hair matted, long and ostentatious, but when deep inside you there is a loaded gun, how can you find God?” Kabir

Reading both The Iliad, the oldest and greatest war epic of all time, and a book of local history called Bloody Mohawk, by Richard Berleth, concurrently a few weeks back, I cannot help but look violence, and our human propensity for it, in the face. Bloody Mohawk is a well-done history of pre-Revolution and Revolutionary war periods in our upstate New York area, a time when we were gloriously multi-cultural, in the truest sense, and when war was anything but an abstraction fought far off upon a distant land and people, using sophisticated weapons of killing that mediate the act. Like warfare in ancient Troy, the killing that brought us this land and our freedom from colonial rule was hand-to-hand, up close and personal, and frequently involved the slaughter of women and children and old people, white, red and even brown.

In the case of Bloody Mohawk, and the history of this region and of America, I believe it is important we all know these facts, and even more of them; The history of our country is soaked in blood, but generation after generation remains ignorant/innocent of the fact, which jibes so unpleasantly with images of sparkling beaches and happy clusters of healthy, Coca-Cola drinking young people. We are shocked by the level of bloodshed in a book like Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, but in truth the book could have been written around the colorful life of our own Sir William Johnson, who frequently and effectively led his Mohawk friends on the warpath against the French and their Indian allies, using techniques of forest warfare that were all on the Indians’ terms. This included scalp-taking and the use of elaborate and unimaginably cruel torture.

I think that we should all wonder, where did all of that viciousness and aggression go? Did it just simply wither away as the Indians diminished in number and became pragmatically pacified, and the land from sea to shining sea belonged fully to the invaders? What happens to these primitive, instinctual capacities for, well, for killing?

I want to talk about anger here in this piece, even though I realize that anger and war are not the same thing, and that violence and killing do not require having anger to drive them. Still, what other emotion leads to fantasies of killing, in our modern, well-behaved, suburbanized minds? And what emotion does one need, actually, to go to war against injustice or aggression, assuming one has a choice? And, prominently in my mind is the question what difference it makes if our anger, which is innate in all of us, is unconscious rather than conscious? I am sure that the settlers and Indians in colonial times along the Mohawk, which was the frontier of that time, did not worry over much about their capacity for anger. They felt it frequently, as each side suffered insult or injury, and acted on it. Anger and its lethal consequences were, in the frontier context, justified.

In contrast, modern commentators often point out the lack of public anger we see today in the face of acts of blatant wrongdoing on the part of ruling government and corporations. In fact, in the film we watched Tuesday night in our Temenos group, Dancing in the Flames, about psychoanalyst and writer Marion Woodman, we heard Andrew Harvey, her interviewer, make exactly that comment. And later on in the film, Marion mentioned the tremendous anger she feels at what is happening to the planet. Clearly, this woman dedicated to the work of spiritual transformation does not feel anger to be antithetical to higher consciousness.

Where, I wonder, is peoples’ anger located these days? A lot of it, by all appearances, is directed at each other. Having lost the collective enemy of Communist Russia and the Iron curtain, and the new enemy of terrorism being so much less ideological and definable, anger has become rather inchoate. At a Christmas party a few days ago, I listened to a teacher in our inner city high school, named John, express legitimate anger at state officials coming into the school, deeming it seriously deficient (I forget the designation they gave it) and making only one comment before they left the district 3 days later: their comment was that the classroom seating was still in old-fashioned rows. This, to a school whose teachers struggle with 47 languages in the student body, with many under-socialized children from poor homes, inadequate basic supplies, and so on.

I appreciated John’s candidness and his indignation, but as he sputtered on, he inevitably (it seems) placed his anger ultimately – after that directed at the well-paid layer of do-nothing school administrators, then at the teachers’ union and third, at guidance counselors - at the door of the social welfare system. He appeared incapable of a John Taylor Gatto reach with his anger, which would cut right past administrators, teachers, parents, and social welfare to the systemic nature of the problem, and to those whose interest this “dysfunctional system” serves – and actually serves quite functionally. (John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down, Weapons of Mass Instruction and other books powerfully indicting of our public education system came to Utica this fall and spoke at The Other Side)

So, one way we deal with that layer of unconscious, inappropriate anger is to direct it at the poor, and at the welfare system that, simplistically speaking, perpetuates their poverty. ( Not that this isn’t a genuine problem, mind you, but if you compare defense spending to welfare spending, its clear that helping the poor hardly compares to the non-constructive drain on our economy that war is) Another way that is increasingly prevalent and influential in today’s politics is “red state-blue state” anger, continuously whipped into a frenzy by Glenn Beck types and tea party activists.

As far as I am concerned, however, these anger targets are distractions. They work admirably to keep us away from both more intimate angers, and from our legitimate anger at the people actually in charge of the society and the economic order who benefit from war, from oil drilling that leads to catastrophic oil spills, from factory food that makes us and the planet sick and abuses animals, from seed patents and the rest.

It’s the intimate anger I want to look at first, because this anger is the key to the kind of spiritual transformation that Woodman speaks about and works for. Speaking for myself, it is terribly easy for me to walk around carrying a load of anger that is completely unnoticeable to myself (meaning, its unconscious). Even though this load of unconscious anger cuts me off from feeling real joy and well-being, I can function under it, and I am used to it. Buried anger was something I carried with me as a girl brought up to be above all nice, through my childhood, teen years, and right on through until I faced it, when I was in my early 40’s. By then it had reached lethal levels, as one can imagine, and it took quite a long and painful process to identify it and to transform it. But that is another story, one I have told in other settings.

Through therapy, I came to understand the anger as having originated in very early childhood trauma, the consequence of my parents’ 1000 ways of mis-recognizing me, and failing to love me as I wanted to be loved. The anger had made me ill, not because the anger was wrong, but because of the forbiddenness of the anger. Recovery of my legitimate anger through therapy was one important step in the recovery of my soul. The discovery of my innerness, my soul dimension, was the most important discovery of my life, bar none. Because of the discovery of this priceless pearl, my legitimate anger, no longer directed at my parents, is saved for that which destroys soul – the body-nature-feminine-hating culture that forced my parents’ adaptation, and forces all peoples’ adaptation who have lost their spiritual base, to its supreme authority.

The danger with anger is that, living in this culture that denies the sacred dimension, it goes unconscious and slips back into finding easier targets. Thus it comes to pass that the only means I have for recognizing my unconscious anger is being aware of it in relation to my husband. I cannot exaggerate how comfortably my anger comes to rest at his feet, for all the ways in which he doesn’t suit me, doesn’t see me, doesn’t listen to me, takes me for granted, etc. To the extent that I am aware of the anger, it appears completely justified. “I could have done better,” as Marion Woodman said at one point in relation to her husband. If I am to discern this anger that is hardening my heart toward the one I am – in a completely factual way - closest to in the world, certain conditions must be met

First of all, if I am to recognize this hardened layer in my being I cannot be strenuously busy. In fact, if I wanted to remain thoroughly unconscious of this anger, all I’d have to do is remain busy in the modern, multi-tasking, hurried-up sense. Given my husband’s ancient pattern of accommodating to angry, unhappy parents, with which he is utterly familiar, if we are both sufficiently busy it could take months before the pattern is discerned

Second condition that has to be met is letting go of certainty, allowing in doubt. The crack in the surface is there, but I don’t want to look. I am wielding anger at him, and I know from past experience that I must look at whether or not it is legitimate. Here is the moment at which a huge unwillingness to admit wrong appears, a stiff resistance to humility. Again, based upon past experience, having “been here” before, and knowing how I should proceed against my nature at this moment - which is bidding me to stay angry – I suggest we need to talk, or make some other grudging acknowledgment that I want something else to exist between us. Stubborn as the old unconscious anger is, I can’t even acknowledge this at first - can’t bear the thought of conceding the righteous position to him.

These are the necessary steps leading to reconciliation, an act taken so seriously in Roman Catholic tradition that it is a sacrament. (formerly known as the sacrament of Confession) It has its versions in the other major traditions as well, and is essential as the means whereby the community heals its wounds. The consequences of making this reconciliation, vs. not making it, are enormous. A huge consequence for me of staying in my anger is that, stockaded against Orin, fully armed with my projection on him, and unwilling to acknowledge his human side, my own genuine masculine, initiatory, decisive energy is unavailable to me. I am stuck in the mud of the negative feminine. All progress I have made toward being a woman who makes her own original contributions to the world, are a consequence of this process of taking back my angry projections upon my husband.

So, I wonder, what happens to people who do not have this intimate enemy with whom they must either make peace or remain at war? How do they, if they are women, manage to unlock that ready anger at the Father, at the masculine gods, that we were all steeped in for so long as children in a patriarchal, rigidly sexist order? Who would put herself through such a difficult, humiliating and unpleasant ordeal if some other did not call her to a greater honesty even than she feels capable of? And the “other” I refer to is not the husband per se, but the marriage itself, the quality of the invisible bond between us, so real and so easily severable?

In a culture that is trained not to see such invisible (spiritual) bonds there is no reason to keep them when those points of “irreconcilable difference” are reached. Far be it from me to say whether or not truly irreconcilable differences exist, but given a 50% divorce rate, there are a fair number of couples abandoning the marriage bond because they can, not because it was demanded by the situation, however much a crisis that situation is. My answer to this would be not to toughen divorce laws, but to teach more accurately what marriage is, which is an opportunity to transform spiritually, alchemically, like no other offered to us in modern society. Marriage is, properly understood, a door into the spirit world, a passage not made except inasmuch, by serious pain, we are forced.

Fortunate indeed are we whose pain forces us to find that third way, that door hidden from our ordinary consciousness and sight. Living intimately with another person, committed in the vow of marriage, places one’s ego in real jeopardy. Placed in close confines to real difference, the ego must adjust, that is yield, or continue to demand having its own way. Given the many distractions of modern life, from extreme busyness, to TV’s in every room, to shopping, texting, and the like, not to mention chemical substances, the confrontation is postponable, but at some point, after sufficient postponement, the marriage is completely void. If, on the other hand, one takes on the reality of the difference between man and woman, masculine and feminine, as Marion and her husband Ross did, then one sees that marriage is exactly a vessel for transformation of consciousness. One can take it as that or not, but the difference in “the road taken” is real.

What I want to suggest further is the consequence to our society that by and large we refuse the cup of transformation. We refuse that death Marion spoke about, and thus we refuse that renewed life as well. We refuse the confined space of marriage as “optional misery” we refuse the confine of age, protesting, “I’m not old!”. We refuse the limitations of children by hiring nannies, sending them to day care, and by offering them up to television and the public schools that make them into the kind of people our consumer society wants and needs them to be.

One consequence is that our native anger does not reach its proper outlet, which is revolution. It is revolution because the system we are in, which denies the reality of, and profits from, the extinction of souls, must be replaced. Not by “meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” but by utterly new life, the kind attainable by means of spiritual transformation only, which is transformation of imagination.

The anger that we legitimately have, for what has been done to our society, to community, to vulnerable peoples and to the planet, must find its partner love, so that the ancient practice of war can be transformed into, not war against them, but war on behalf of that which cannot speak for itself. This may not be a war of literal killing as much as of voluntary dying so the new life can be born and be. I can find no apter prototype for this kind of transformation of war than the battleground of the genders, and the archetypal masculine and feminine aspects of the soul, in marriage.

Like Marion Woodman, I want to encourage the young not to abandon marriage. I want to ask of “the aging population,” of which I am a member, that we see through the trap of our own liberal smugness, which is as big an obstacle to planetary transformation as right-wing fundamentalist blame-throwing. The fact that alchemical, initiatory containers, such as marriage and religion, resemble the tyrannies and dogmas from which we have historically freed ourselves through enlightenment and technological progress, does not make them optional. And if we do not consciously make our way into these containers to learn the humbling process of dying and being reborn, we will keep the knife at the throat of the one in us who does not deserve to die. The story we tell ourselves may be anti-war, but the killing will continue.

2010-11-23T05:28:00.000-08:00

As the Far Right Gets Edgier, Should Not We? A Post-Election Reflection

Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honorable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be praise, think of these things. Philippians 4:8, American Standard Version

“Edgy” might be the word to apply to Glenn Beck’s promotion of the writings and ideas of a man named W. Cleon Skousen, an avowed John Bircher who “was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era,” according to a piece I read on Salon.com. I see it as a natural enough effort to connect with a tradition that justifies and supports the scoundrel’s impulse to hunt witches. In another liberal journal’s account of Beck’s reinvigoration of Skousen’s ideas, Skousen was referred to as a “nut job.” So apparently we can be plainspoken about how we think of edginess at the extreme right of the political spectrum.

How, I wonder, do we perceive edginess at the other, so-called “progressive” end of the spectrum? What does a progressive have to say to be labeled so decisively a “nut job” by the mainstream press? As Glenn Beck reaches for a fringe tradition that can rally the folks on the Right, is not there another “fringe” tradition that could work for those who can’t get worked up about the Communists or gay people or whether or not Obama is a Muslim? Hey! I’ve got it! What if people began putting out there some concrete ideas about forming a just, compassionate, peace-loving and earth-respecting society? There’s plenty of tradition behind those ideas, including the Judeo-Christian one!

First of all, it must be said that someone is already doing this on the national level – Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine, in his call to Democrats for a “bottom line of compassion” as a basis for an economy and a political order in our nation, and a “Marshall Plan” of generosity towards other less affluent countries, has been developing and putting forth these “fringy,” edgy ideas for many years. And what is it that keeps such excellent ideas on the fringe, seemingly as outlandish to the mainstream as the extremism of the John Birch Society?

While Republican voters going into the recent election were enjoined to help take our government back, return to smaller government and lower taxes, while maintaining a “robust and unapologetic national defense,” no Democrat did or will ever put forth an agenda based upon the quest for peace, for planetary health, or for justice for all people. That is because ideas based in simple human values, of peace, well-being, harmony with the earth and between peoples is off the table. In effect, they do not exist, except as wacko-fringy ideas of left wing nut jobs.

On a recent Saturday, a man came into the Café, bought his cup of coffee, sat down with it in the upper back room and proceeded to work at his laptop. In the brief exchange I overheard Orin having with him I learned he was from northern Vermont and, despite his fair, youthful looks, was in town for parents’ weekend at Hamilton College. At a table near to the coffee bar, a few customers were talking over the morning’s headlines about the man arrested at former President Bill Clinton’s talk at the Stanley the previous evening. The man was arrested for shouting at Bill, calling him a “war criminal.” Although the locals seemed not to be deeply offended at the man’s effrontery, the consensus at the table betrayed no awareness of any justifiable reasons for the protester’s position for which he had been willing to risk arrest. From behind the coffee counter, Orin added helpfully, “Every President since Truman could be called a war criminal.” Whereupon, the man from Vermont, who had been silently working upstairs, stood up to interject that every President for the last 100 years could justifiably be called a war criminal!

What was significant for me in this vignette was not whether or not the Vermonter knew his facts, but that he brought his opinion into a local (Utica) discussion of the type which in my experience usually (trust me) extends all the way from point A to point B. Such a “radical” claim, even Orin’s slightly less outlandish claim, (though it’s a fact I read recently that our government has bombed more civilians – other than its own citizens – than all other nations combined) can be disputed of course. That is what we have discussion for – to hear different perspectives, ideas and claims and talk them through. But if we do not hear ideas C through Z, if they are not put forth for public discussion, then they cannot be talked through. Right now we can hear edgy, Z-range ideas from the right wing, if we tune into Glenn Beck et al. But who is speaking and where do we go to hear the edgy ideas, not so much from the “left wing,” (or from Comedy Central) as from the compassionate heart of our society? What is the heart’s tradition, and who is attempting to win hearts and minds with reference to it?

Just recently I have been saying to my husband and to some of our board members that I felt The Other Side needed to be “edgier.” Funny I would be saying that in a season when we have brought to our space the leading proponent of ending mass public (government) schooling, John Taylor Gatto (9/22), and the beatnik poetry and out-there jazz of longtime pot decriminalization advocate John Sinclair (10/23). Plus, this summer, The Other Side (and Café Domenico) co-sponsored Ralph Nader’s appearance at MVCC. Still, though, I am greedy and I want more. I want documentary films bringing us perspectives from the “fringe” not represented in the mainstream, I want Alternative Radio bringing us the voices of Raj Patel, Noam Chomsky, the late Howard Zinn, Vandana Shiva and many others. I would love to host edgier theater productions, and informed guest speakers who could challenge the passionless status quo. I would love to be able to step out any night of the week and run into energized conversations about movies, books, politics, religion, that were engaging and meaningful, like the ones I fantasize wistfully the man from Vermont engaging in back home.

This passion for conversation is, in fact, what led me to establish The Other Side in the first place. A long time ago, I decided that the conversation held between people face-to-face, engendered by topics (as in salons), or the art or the lecture or the event, was as important as the art or the event itself. My faith in the power of conversation and ideas remains as strong as ever, even when I see the overwhelming preference of the majority of people for those substitutes for face-to-face conversation and relationships: cell phones, iPods and the Internet; evenings at home cuddled in front of Netflix; participation in mass, commodified politics, or socializing, often with the aid of alcohol, that contains little real conversation – that is, no C-Z of perspectives - at all.

The revolutionary space is the space between people in the same room. It is in these spaces where the great latent power of people in democratic society resides. Insert a TV into that space, a cell phone, an Internet, a rigidified schooling structure, and the human need for connection is displaced, and replaced with a medium. At the interpersonal level many of us have become tongue-tied, reluctant to speak our truths, anxious to keep conversations within “respectable” (translation: boring) bounds. Or we seek out little pockets of subversion where we can yelp out our unorthodox opinions, where they’ll be accepted, but where, in the absence of an “application” strategy, the ideas lose their energy to change anything. The ideas must be risked with an audience that might disagree, might be hurt or offended, or they amount to nothing more than private mumblings. For many reasons, but primarily because we are so uncertain of the solidity of our connectedness, these are risks we are less and less willing to take. But paradoxically, as we become more reluctant to risk our expression for fear of losing connection, the bonds of community weaken.

The crisis our planet is in tells us this: the future for human beings and the planet has now to be imagined; we have reached the end of the old paradigm; it is passing away. It is a time like no other for being awake. It is a time for paring down to essentials, like those expressed by St. Paul in his letter to the Philippians, or by our own outlandish American prophet, Henry David Thoreau. The Other Side, as a call to immediacy and to presence, asks me to resist the manifest temptations to enter the proto-cyborgian existence - before we have (re) learned to be fully human. I’m unsure that good can come of increasingly allowing the spaces between people, as well as those within, to be filled and replaced by media input when we have not yet made up our minds whether or not human beings, and human community, are worth saving.

Referring back to that quest for a tradition, there’s no older one than the tradition of community, and all the customs and rituals, cooperation and communication, art and industry, roles and relationships that make it up. Seems like a good time to risk being edgy in the very old-fashioned way I am suggesting: by returning to the people, the place, the most necessary activities and conversations close at hand, and in so doing, be able to put forth our own fringy nut job ideas with conviction.

2010-09-27T07:19:00.000-07:00

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.

.

2010-07-30T07:53:00.000-07:00

An Interview with the Urban Hermit: A Nobody for Our Time Part II

By Henry David Toro

“My instinct tells me my head is an organ for burrowing; as some creatures use their snout and forepaws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.” H.D. Thoreau, Walden

HTD: After the last interview, I have some understanding of why you call yourself a hermit. But why “urban?” That doesn’t seem to go with the tradition of hermits at all.

UH: Yes, hermits are usually in the forest or out in the desert, like St. Anthony facing down his demons, not living in the middle of Utica. The hermit archetype we’re familiar with is associated with wilderness for a good reason: the hermit’s “job” is Self-knowledge, and wilderness is a good metaphor for the Unconscious, or the Soul. One answer is, I designate my hermit self as urban because that’s where I am, here in Utica, and since the wilderness of the hermit is also an inner experience, why not here as well as anywhere? If I imagine I need to be out in Nature, I’m done for, since that’s not in the cards for me. And it isn’t in the cards for many people who lack the means or the freedom from responsibility to just up and take themselves off to the mountain or the ashram or the desert.

HTD: But isn’t that a mistake to impose limits on yourself as to where you can go, as well as to what you can be? Isn’t it true that one’s intention, at least to an extent, allows the unforeseen to happen in one’s life? So isn’t it self-limiting to say “I can’t do such and so because I can’t afford it?” What about dreams and visions?

UH: I am a major proponent of following dreams and having a vision. But even dreams have to stand up to some standard of the common good, or what is good for the community, first of all. Not that all dreams are held to such standards, of course. No independent council of community elders checked out Henry Ford’s dream and its consequences down the line, or the development of atomic weapons, or Monsanto’s seed technologies before they went on line. Some “good” is always served by these innovative dreams, but who is looking at the larger good? With the earth being destroyed at an ever increasing rate, with social structures in shambles, the welfare of children down the tubes, dreams have to refer to the context of the world we are in, and to an ethic of compassion and justice. Living in the city, with its strong essences and real diversity, I can never abstract too much, or get too ”spiritual” and lost in my own head. I am frequently annoyed, frustrated, and even depressed by the reality around me. But my job is to remain awake, no matter what my surroundings: if I can’t “bloom” here, what am I saying about myself? That I have to have a $250,000 house in the suburbs or I cannot be happy? In a way, living here forces me to go against a tendency in me to seek a kind of undisturbed gated peace. There is a part of me that really wants badly to go to sleep. I’d rather be awake, no matter what it is I am awake to.

So, really, like Booker T. Washington famously said, “Cast down your buckets where you are.” These words have been misinterpreted to mean “make the best with what you have and things will get better by and by.” Spoken to former slaves who faced a futile competition for industrial employment with white laborers and even immigrants, Washington was counseling a kind of self-reliance; rather than continuing to run futilely after the white man’s economy, black men and women should establish their own, from the bottom up. Today, the advice seems prescient, for what has running after the white man’s economy done for any of us? If we wish to “carve and paint the very medium through which we look,” and “keep ourselves awake,” first we must see that where we are, the limitations that bind us, are our allies in some way. The tasks of consciousness are great enough if you are in one place, married to one person, as Thoreau eloquently pointed out to us. This is a limitation I have chosen to live within. In these momentous times calling for us to change our way of life, this is something I have wrestled with in fine St. Anthony fashion: that is, how to be “stuck-in-place” (Utica or wherever) and prepared to find that “richest vein” at the same time. The answer to this conundrum might save a lot of marriages, as well as slow down the destruction of the planet.

In a well-known Russian fairy tale, The Maiden Czar, the boy Ivan finds himself at the Baba Yaga’s terrifying cottage in the middle of the deep woods. He is asked by the crafty Baba, Have you come here by compulsion or of your own free will? Ivan is no slouch in terms of cunning, either. He answers her in a way that keeps him out of being eaten and his skull added to the other trophies lined up along the Baba Yaga’s picket fence: “Largely by my own free will and twice as much by compulsion,” he replies.

To live within limitations such as place and marriage, for example – and don’t forget, life that is circumscribed between birth and death is the biggest limitation of them all - one has to be possessed of an alive imagination, and, not only that, one must be able to connect with the other realm - the spirit realm, which is the realm of true freedom. If we believe literally that either we must be able to escape a circumstance that has come to seem intolerable or we will be chained to misery the rest of our life, we are missing entirely the third way, the way of being in that circumstance consciously or imaginatively, and thereby transforming it. One cannot be a bliss-follower without learning this approach to the seemingly intractable problems that confront each of us during the course of a lifetime. Putting the problem out there, on the spouse, the environment, the neighbor, the crime-ridden city, means your answer to the Baba Yaga’s question is that you are here by compulsion. She’ll eat you for dinner.

If on the other hand, you insist that you are entirely a free agent, free to do or be whatever you want, she will eat you for dinner. Being brought up in the materialist American context, with its accompanying belief in free will, it is nearly impossible to answer the Baba Yaga’s question except with an answer that will get you eaten. That is why there is such a dearth of genuine aliveness and thoughtfulness in our modern culture, and so much addiction, numbing out, and escape. Many of our society’s adults have failed their encounter with the Baba Yaga. Or rather, they are unaware of that level in their being, and so simply pass from one sleep to another. We are taught not to believe in the invisible, spiritual realm, that if something cannot be empirically proven; if it does not meet with the criteria of rationalism, then it must not exist at all. This is a terrible and consequential narrowing of consciousness. The consequences of such a rigid materialist or secular view begin with unconsciousness on the part of adults toward the very real fears and sorrows of childhood, and their very real needs for intangibles like solitude, and unprogrammed experiences with nature.

Robbed of the inner realm, individuals are helpless to withstand the message coming from a society that has mysteriously become the Baba Yaga, out of control and devouring her young. If we ignore Nature, or if we refuse to learn what Nature teaches us through our bodies and souls, that does not make Her go away. On the contrary, it causes her to gain in destructive energy; in these times it is easy to picture the Baba Yaga having had to build multiple fences to hold all the skulls of her hapless visitors who have upgraded to their flat screen high-def TV and 500 channels on the cable, or who believe that being on Facebook is a good way to be a friend. So, for me, one part of my answer as to why I call myself an “urban” hermit is very much connected to this great lesson of learning to live within the given limitations, as consciously as possible, which is also, I must point out, not the path of deprivation but of desire.

HDT: You mean the Baba Yaga can be defeated by people following their desire?

UH: Well, yes. I hadn’t been thinking that, but it is true, and that’s in the fairy tale as well. In the fairy tale, Ivan is following the “maiden czar,” the awakener of his own spiritual longing for beauty, meaning, a relation to his own soul. Thoreau expressed it as the desire to not “live meanly.” Another way I have of picturing this is that we are called to live the artist’s life, even if we do not think of ourselves as artists.

Prophetic voices today are calling for contraction of our economy, and that means contracting our way of life as well as the whole idea of a global, ever-expanding-without-limits economy. As we can see, the engines of the economy are helpless to stop themselves. Only individuals who themselves can manage the contraction of their way of life – fundamentally a spiritual undertaking - can begin to withdraw themselves from the economy based upon ever increasing consumption. To me this simply means we have to learn once again to honor eros, or the longing of the soul for this adventure of meaning and purpose that we have tried as a society, and failed, to do without. Nothing else – other than our changing the “very medium and atmosphere through which we look –“can turn the sacrifice of contraction into a bountiful feast of a different kind - a feast of beauty, meaning and deep connectedness to Nature and all of life.

H.D. Toro: So an old rust belt town’s lack of illusions, pretense, or false purity can make it a good place to mine for Thoreau’s alternative wealth?

UH: Loss is always a good starting place to meet up with the soul.

2010-07-08T07:54:00.000-07:00

An interview with the Urban Hermit, A Nobody for Our Time
By
Henry David Toro

Interested as I am in how people at all levels in our society are responding to the growing environmental calamity, and to what seem to be death throes of our western civilization, I determined to seek out individuals who characterize themselves as living out a response to this crisis, albeit not by means of traditional activist venues. Being myself a sort of deep ecologist, and knowing that nature thrives in diversity, I assume there have to be a multiplicity of these responses. The days of the mass movement driven by a collective ideology, to which individuals sacrifice their individual “light” for the greater good, are gone. Secretly, I have long envisioned a grassroots response guided not by ideology but by that which is innate, instinctual knowing of the individual. My anarchic vision would be for a change originating in individuals, in, metaphorically speaking, each grass root, each dandelion, each nondescript clover that we walk over without noticing, sort of a revolution of the “silent and plant-like,” salvation by the utterly unextraordinary.

My proclivities bring me with great interest to the Urban Hermit. It was her nom de plume at first that intrigued me. Its anonymous declaration of retreat from the world, following a tradition going back to the desert fathers, offered an interesting contrast to the mass striving for stardom, the desperate craving to be recognized in this massest of mass societies. In such a massified context, the central message of which is the replaceability of the individual, I wonder, how can we return to the spirit of localism, local economy and local culture, to the diversity that can challenge the corporate-powered centralized monoculture and its destructive, hell-bent joy ride.

So here, in the person of the Urban Hermit, is someone doing it, that is, choosing to be ordinary and to make a difference, to perhaps slow that apocalyptic joyride down simply by opening up the imaginative possibility of another way.

HDT: What is it like, being a hermit in modern life? And how do you feel being interviewed – an unlikely activity for a hermit?

U.R. First of all, Henry, everybody, or every adult, anyway, were we each able to reconnect with the invisible parts of ourselves, that is, with soul and spirit, is a hermit. Hermitry is simply a way of being whole. It is a metaphor for the particular individual located within the collective of society. What we have in mass society is a loss of that which is absolutely requisite for individuality. Human beings are imaginative as part of their intrinsic make-up; what is called “reality” must feed imagination as well as body, so to speak. We require, to be healthy, a basis which includes all parts of the human organism, rather than what we have, a materialist-defined reality that excludes spiritual reality. On the other hand, as you suggest, the last thing a mass person wants is obscurity, which has already been thrust upon her. Cut off from the stable context of community over time, families crumbling right and left, encouraged to follow a career climb that will bring one the material rewards of the culture, as well as identity and a measure of power, (but will further assure one’s estrangement from self and others), the choice to be anonymous and ordinary – a hermit - seems like choosing to be buried alive.

But the reason there is such distaste – not really distaste, but a lack of imagination about - for the local and the ordinary is precisely that materialist base. Outside of the materialist base, and that is an addictive context, by the way – since man cannot live on matter alone, the craving for spirit leads directly to addictions – if one can find her/his way there, it is possible to find a way to live human life meaningfully. Just as religion provided the context of meaning for generations before us, that realm of meaning is still open to she or he who will “knock.” The God that died - as Time magazine declared in the 60’s - was not the eternal reality that is beyond language, but the particular metaphoric version – the collective archetype - that guided western civilization since the middle ages or so.

As to being interviewed, it is a great treat for me. I have no rules against interacting with the society, but I do not seek it, even though I have mostly been convinced it will never come and discover me. In medieval times and later, if you read your Brothers Karamazov, (which I just did last year!) devout people sought out hermits for a perennial truth or a wisdom less bound by society’s fleeting standards. Did you see, by the way, Michael Caine’s brilliant performance as the hermit-hippie Jasper in the movie Children of Men? There is something undeniably nutty about us hermits, but, as with the Caine character, it is a principled nuttiness. Or better yet, a nuttiness that understands, with Blake, that the fool who will persist in his folly will become wise. Today we cannot understand someone who isn’t motivated by fame or status, whose creativity is driven not by ego but by the need to embody the wholeness prefigured in the Divine. Witness the general cluelessness regarding J.D. Salinger’s choice to do exactly what he had been led to do by the “divine” inspiration of his own writing: to become, in effect, a hermit. If we are to become a society of ordinary, common-as-daisy kings, that can bring humanity into its full flowering bloom by bloom, this change is necessary. It depends completely upon switching from the materialist base to the “spirit-in-matter” base.

H.D.T.: Two questions occur to me: what do you mean by the materialist base vs. the ‘spirit-in-matter” base, and what does it mean to “knock” on the door of the realm of meaning?

U.R. The materialist base is simply what we have in our culture to base meaning on. It is the view that the only real things are the things we can see, touch, eat – the things with physicality. There are many consequences to our having reduced reality in this fashion. We have only to switch our gaze cross-culturally and we can see that not all cultures are so drastically materialistic as we are, and that our extreme and strenuously defended (often in the name of “freedom”) materialism is a consequence of our affluence. Peasant cultures, for instance, where people have few to none of the things that for us make life interesting and “worth living,” often have an abundance of spirit. We enjoy being among these people; they make us feel comfortable, at home and “good enough,” in a way that our own cultural context does not. Indigenous cultures, where the separation is not made between spiritual and material the way it is here, do not base human worth according to the criteria of materialism, and can live meaningfully in circumstances we would consider “reduced.” To say nothing of the fact that they also know how to live harmoniously with nature, as we emphatically do not. I’ll say more about “spirit-in-matter” at some other point, but suffice to say it is a base for meaning (familiar to indigenous people but not to our deeply dualistic worldview) that rejects neither the material nor the spiritual. It is a “middle way” that is also the way of living harmoniously with the planet.

To answer your second question, I can use my own case. First of all, the expression, “Knock and the door will be opened to you,” probably is familiar to many in a historically Christian culture like ours. ("Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. Matthew 7:7) What door? That is what I might have responded with, had I given it that much thought, for much of my life. What I learned is that “the door” is not the door to belief, but to inner experience. Experience precedes belief, or ought to. And when one has experience, the matter of belief, and of different beliefs, is nullified. ( I suppose the fact that one calls a certain profound and private kind of experience “spiritual” or a “conversion” means that the mind decided to call the experience this and not that – which is a kind of belief This is precisely the reason we need guidance from tradition, so that such numinous, individual experience can be understood as being humanly meaningful. No matter how far out and obscure the images in a dream, for instance, we pay attention, and take insight from them if we understand these as being the voice of the soul.)

To materialist, rationally based people like myself, as I was raised to be, the matter of belief in God as promulgated by mainstream Christian churches is a serious stumbling block. My own situation was further complicated by the fact that my father, being an artist, moved the family a certain distance away from 100% acceptance of the materialist base. Clearly something else (i.e., my father’s painting) was very important which could not be explained materially. Perhaps partly for this reason, I would never get out of the cul-de-sac of materialism by surrendering my will to, essentially, the religion of Jesus defined by others. In my family, received, conventional wisdom already had a crack in it.

For whatever reason, I had to knock on the door for myself, the door, that is, of direct experience of the Divine. Sounds mystical, is mystical, but that doesn’t mean it’s at all exclusive. We are all mystics, as Matthew Fox among others points out. We are all mystics, but if we remain within the materialist, rationalist context we are not going to find this aspect of our nature. What is more, we will remain afraid of seeking that door. We will dismiss our wildest most profound dreaming, like Ebenezer Scrooge, as being caused by the modern, low-carb, high in Omega 3 equivalent of “ a bit of bad beef.”

My own discovery of the door was the result of a process prompted in part by the deeply unsettled state of mind I found myself in through much of my twenties and thirties. I was utterly clueless as to a path or a purpose in my life, though I ended up with a Masters degree in Divinity by 1979. Marital conflict was also a huge factor in the pain that was driving me toward exploring my inner realm by means of psychotherapy. Mind you, in my region of upstate NY, and this is still true, one does not discuss in public such things as analysis and psychotherapy. There was a sense at that time of moving out from the norms of my original culture even just in going to talk to a therapist about my depression. In combination with this was the fact that I had prepared for the Unitarian Universalist ministry and was serving a church in upstate NY during my 30’s (the 1980’s, roughly). This clergy identity was another way in which I was in, but not of, my local central NY culture. Because of the ideas afloat in liberal religious circles of that time, I began to delve into feminist spirituality, Jungian psychology, and eventually the 12 step recovery process. The process of finding out “what was wrong with me” was turning into a spiritual process! All of this culminated in the summer of 1988, after I had left my job in the church, declaring my need to “find out who I am.”

That July, my husband and I got ourselves down to Kirkridge retreat center in Pennsylvania to attend a workshop offered by Ann Wilson Schaef, author of When Society Becomes An Addict, Codependence: Misunderstood, Mistreated, and other books. The mantric phrase for the weekend, repeated often by Schaef, who encouraged personal reflection even to the extent of doing that rather than listening to her talks, was “Trust the process.” There I experienced, amidst much anguish that came up for me during the three days, the most profound awakening of my life thus far. It was Anne Schaef’s use of those words, “Knock and the door shall be opened unto you” that did it for me. For the first time I understood that the Christ was within me, and that that inner Christ (or
Self archetype, in Jungian terms) was what I must follow. My life up until that point had involved, even for our culture, an extraordinary amount of repression. I was so terrified of my interior I had avoided going near any kind of counseling or therapy during my 4 years of training for ministry, when my fellow ministers-in-training at Yale Div were flocking to it. I was terrified of that immersion that must have felt to me then like the threat of annihilation.

Well, dear reader, of course it was an annihilation! But what joy there was for me in that reunion with my lost Self, with my long-rejected soul! I cannot exaggerate. The experience at Kirkridge led to a greater commitment to 12 steps, to a conversion experience to belief in the Christian God, and to eventual confirmation as a Roman Catholic in 1990.

HDT: Yikes! Catholicism? From the perspective of the New Age, that could sound to some people like a great leap backward!

UR: Well, don’t forget, I was devoutly following my process – or my heart rather than my head - at that time. Catholicism appealed hugely to my starved protestant imagination. Also, it appealed to the powerful need I felt at that time for Father. Having been influenced by archetypal psychology and the comparative mythology preached by Joseph Campbell, I was certain that my being there in the Catholic church was part of the re-emergence of the feminine, of the Goddess, in that theology and tradition. I felt belonging as I had never known before or since, and the period of my Catholicism was great for my marriage as well. Everything was finally making sense. The fact that I was shunned by my liberal friends did not bother me. I was “On the road to find out,” as Cat Stevens, another convert to a scripture-based faith, used to sing.

HDT: I know from things you’ve written that this period of reprieve from “the struggle” for self knowledge ended with a kind of scary and profound collapse in early 1994. After all the work you had done at that point, which after all, was more change already than most people experience, and now you say things were going well with your spiritual life - why do you think this happened?

UH: Brief answer: With the new and strange experience of happiness I was having, I believe for the first time I was strong enough to experience the real initiation. Just recently I was reading an interview (The Sun) with Malidoma Some, the West African spiritual teacher and author, where he talks about the initiation experience. He mentions in a couple of places that in fact, initiates in his Dagara tribe do not always make it through the initiation. They die, literally. Initiation is real; it is an experience of coming against the power of nature, of the death-life-death cycle, of finality. This is the awareness of the initiated adult, not of the pre-initiated child. For all the work I had done, I was still not initiated. Through my first conversion, and the deep sense of safety and belonging it brought me - belonging in the sense of belonging in my life and also of belonging in a religious tradition - I had achieved innocence at last. Experience, that of meeting up with the dark aspect of God, was still ahead of me.

HDT: Are you saying that experience or initiation has to involve the actual risk of death or, as in your case, of madness?

UH: I am saying the process is not for the faint of heart, yes. On the other hand, I was faint of heart – never would have taken on the type of experience that forces one to face mortality in this way, which is perhaps why in my case the hand had to come up and pull me down. But remember, the path of initiation, while in many cases brought on by an accumulation of pain from grief or loss, is also and equally the path of desire. Joseph Campbell’s oft-repeated adage Follow your bliss was intentionally meant to bring people into initiation. No way you can follow your bliss without meeting up with the Baba Yaga for real!

HDT: I don’t remember Campbell ever saying this. You make it sound as if he had an agenda beyond just teaching comparative mythology and encouraging folks to follow their true desire.

UH: It’s not hard to figure out. He was a teacher, remember. Everything he talked about was there by intention to help convey his teaching. Remember his showing us the planet earth as seen from space, and telling us we need a new mythology that crosses boundaries and will include the planet? He preached a revolutionary message, but subtly, as befitted someone who actually thought about his audience. As he pointed out, if you are out there preaching against the status quo, you too will risk crucifixion. I hear his story about the tiger and the goats as being exactly about this issue, and as explaining his choice to “appear as” a mellow, kindly, tweedy college professor – an acceptable persona in our society. That’s what he truly was, but he was also, and really, the tiger.

HDT: As we all are.

UH: As we all are.

Interview to be continued. Next installment, the interviewer asks the Urban Hermit to talk about” spirit in matter” in an accessible way.

2010-05-11T08:17:00.000-07:00

Choose Your Crisis (and Save the Planet)

"Buddhist enlightenment consists simply in knowing the secret of the unity of opposites- the unity of the inner and outer worlds..."~Alan Watts
“Everything contains its opposite.” Hermes Trismegistus.

Driving home from Clinton on the weekly pastry pick-up trip that supplies our Café with delicious scones, cookies, biscotti and more, Orin returned to the subject of the vast and horrific oil spill going on in Louisiana that has particularly planted itself in his consciousness. And there we were, driving back to Utica from Clinton, no different from all the other oil-dependent folks on all sides of us, mired in the dilemma.

What will it take, I wonder, to accomplish the paradigm shift that might allow us to relinquish the way of life that demands fossil fuels for its maintenance? I call for “paradigm shift” because I do not particularly believe in technological solutions, but rather in change of consciousness as “the solution.” Certainly the oil companies are working at technological solutions to the embarrassing problem of oil spills (or perhaps only working to convince us that they are working on such solutions!) – and look at the results!

Speaking not as an expert, but in an effort to put this into terms I understand, what is entailed centrally in such a paradigm shift is the capacity to transcend fundamental “normal” consciousness, which can be referred to as “the plane of the opposites,” or dualistic consciousness, a concept used in eastern spiritual traditions and though with differences in western hermetic tradition to explain the realm of suffering or conflict that is “normal.” This is the common consciousness in which most of us do our “thinking” every day. (Or what passes for thinking! Personally, I waste a lot of thought on self-criticism, resentment, and other unconstructive kinds of “thought-like activity.”) In spiritual terms, it is considered the plane of the opposites because at this level of consciousness, individuals are trapped in the illusion that either this is true, factual, real, or that is. The problem is, when an individual is restricted to this level of awareness, given any pair of opposites, whether material, behavioral, mental, etc., she can only perceive one of the pair as fully real at a time. In the plane of the opposites, choices must be made on one side or the other, which makes our everyday consciousness lopsided and delusional in an interconnected, unified universe. This lopsidedness has led us to prefer mind over body and nature, for instance, to value male over female, to see others in terms of friend or enemy, to see morality as either good or bad, as if these were clearly discernible. In other words, either/or thinking, though handy, is incomplete, and can lead to destructive, consequences. It is extremely difficult to transcend this kind of thinking, and there are many spiritual practices designed to help people do this. However, these are not my focus.

Right now in our country we are experiencing what amounts to a struggle against consciousness change, an unsettling circumstance in which a significant portion of society remains firmly in the plane of opposites and allows hostility for the “other” (in the form of republican or democrat, Hillary or G.W., Obama or Glenn Beck) to drive all public expression. It’s a society-wide traffic jam!

Recently I asked my students in an upper level undergraduate writing course at the local state college, who have read several articles of radical media criticism, to read an essay by the late scholar Edward Said, called “Covering Islam and Terrorism.” In her response to the reading, one student, a young woman who is not gifted in writing, wrote in her response about how her friends had responded after 9/11: “we should drop a nuclear bomb on the middle east and wipe them all out.” Not entirely sure that she didn’t agree with her friends, even though I had been working to raise consciousness through heightening awareness of the way mainstream media functions to construct reality, I referred to her words in my final address to the class. I suggested that it was exactly the function of our media to strengthen this kind of “either/or,” enemy-making thinking that will allow us to funnel our fury onto innocent human beings in other countries, at the same time maintaining our belief in our country as being beneficent and good.

When we exist primarily in the “common, everyday consciousness,” we are ripe for such manipulation, which works against another, innate tendency to love our neighbor and to treat others as we ourselves wish to be treated. In fact, existing in the either/or consciousness it is impossible to do otherwise than to make some other “other” the focus of either our enmity or our envy, our adoration or our derision, our extreme love or our fear and hate. We have now had two thousand years in which we have not gotten the central message of Christianity’s most revered spiritual teacher, to love our enemy. This would be an irresolvable stalemate but for one fortuitous fact: the primary “other” that holds the key to all the rest, our very real and up-close “opposite number” is located within ourselves. We are granted the opportunity, at least, to accomplish this necessary transcendence at every moment. The question I ask is, how may more of us achieve this difficult integration of our internal opposite and thus be readier to inhabit the new paradigm, a change which is as much a shift of consciousness, as a matter of “lifestyle change?” Implicit in my question, because I live in Utica, NY, is how may this be accomplished by people of modest means living ordinary lives

Certainly one way to make this shift in consciousness is through personal crisis, or a “hitting bottom” of some kind. At times of pain and loss the fact of nature intrudes catastrophically in our lives; pain brings an opportunity to go through the crisis and see what it has to teach us. Our culture, because it cannot recognize the inner opposite, encourages us to take the high road, to “get over it,” and thus to preserve the ambient dualism. The low road, on the other hand, leads to acquaintance with that “other” within us, our “opposite,” who was never taught to take “the high road” and who feels everything.

But in our culture it isn’t easy to find our way onto the “low road.” instead of teaching us to make contact with this interior one who feels much, we are encouraged by practically every message coming to us via mass media, to immerse ourselves in addictive activity or/and substances. From the point of view of keeping the masses passive consumers and workers, addictions are not one bit dysfunctional: addictions, as well as do obsessions and compulsions, which are epidemic in our society, to keep us in the old paradigm and under the illusion of “either/or.”

Remember, this either/ or thinking is entirely natural and universal. But it is also natural to achieve transcendence beyond dualistic thinking. The addictive process is a means of numbing, of repressing the natural energy and aliveness contained in our bodies and thus of controlling against a higher awareness or consciousness. The consequence of the mass failure to achieve initiation, which is another word for this transcendence of dualism, is the global catastrophe we now have: destruction of the planet, incessant bombing of poor people, terrible inequities in the distribution of life’s “goods,” support for terrorist regimes while maintaining the image of ourselves as the good guys, and an incapacity to take our eyes off the “the enemy.”

Inasmuch as we have a society in which few achieve the transcendence, or paradigm shift, I am speaking of, and thus few are initiated into the psychically altered stage of adulthood, we are primarily a people who are stuck in the old paradigm, unable to imagine our way out of the tragic dilemma mentioned in the opening scenario. Faced with the overwhelming evidence that our way of life is destroying the planet, we can only protest, “But what can one person do?” – a question that itself comes straight out of the old, dualistic paradigm. Having bought into the individualistic, either/or narrative told us by our culture, we have relinquished the deeper knowledge of our connection with all of life; we have lost the comfort of that knowledge and also the sense of responsibility that naturally accompanies such awareness. Only if we know the deeper connection can we have the strength and the driving energy to pick up the awesome responsibility to act on behalf of the planet.

That is, only if we know we are loved – and this is a far greater representation of love than we are ever exposed to by our culture – can we love back with adult, generative kind of love that can say firmly no to the destructive forces that manipulate and divide, which thrive upon the dualistic, either/or thinking every single one of us is prone to. Without experience of this impersonal energy of love, human love degenerates to its pallid relative, a preference for sameness, by which we can love our family and friends generously and at the same time wish for a nuclear bomb to be dropped on “our enemies.”

So that another, more commonly available avenue to transcending the plane of the opposites and to find the consciousness dominated by compassion, we must know its opposite in ourselves; we must know we have been hated, as well as loved. The most cherished assumption of pre-transformational consciousness is that of being unconditionally loved: by parents, by society, by our country, which in turn secures our loyalty to that limited consciousness in which we grew up. That consciousness taught us: If there was anything amiss in that world, it was our own fault for not being good enough, for being unworthy.

The great psychoanalyst and writer, Alice Miller, who died last month (4/14/10), pointed the way to find this opposite within us, and thus toward transcendence and the new paradigm. In her work that bids the reader to acknowledge the generalized, unconscious cruelty that society inflicts upon children, she indicates the way to overcome that fundamental resistance to “meeting” our opposite within. As she so well knew, the first inviolable tenet of ordinary consciousness that must be overturned is the one we most cherish: our parents loved us. God bless the child who knows better, that, because parents love within the limitations of the culture, children are loved in an either/or way, meaning, inasmuch as we become the child our parents want us to be, we are “loved.” Thus we learn that to be worthy of receiving love is a matter of not being our true selves. We learn not to challenge that dualism residing in our innermost foundation that tells us, while my world is fundamentally good, I am fundamentally worthless or bad.

Back in the 1980’s many people, my mother included, were fascinated by the work of John Bradshaw, author and educator in the recovery and self-help movements, and his focus on “the inner child.” My mother, who died in 2008 at the age of 85, watched every one of his PBS specials, bought his books and devoured them. But she never took on that most difficult, extremely painful work of going within and actually acquainting herself with her own “inner child.” I say this not to point out my mother’s failing, but to underscore that it is easy to remain at the level of fascination with the “other,” it is far more difficult to actually engage with it. That “other” within, after years of our staying obediently within the bounds of everyday, dualistic consciousness has indeed become “the enemy.” It has the aspect of a monster, feeling more like malicious threat than entreaty from an adorable “inner child.” We do not gladly engage with it, just as our society does not easily open itself to the human, “like us” reality of the people behind the visage of terrorist presented to us via our media.

But they are the same act on different levels of reality. Both acts of rejecting awareness or refusing to “befriend the dark” (whether inner or other) serve to keep us in the plane of the opposites, incapable of transcendence, and thus powerless against the ongoing destruction of the planet, the rampant violence and war, the immorally uneven distribution of “goods” among populations.

Another relational area endangered by ordinary dualistic consciousness is that between the human opposites of men and women. Each of us is one or the other (skipping for the moment the ambiguities of gender orientation), and each of us has within us both aspects or archetypes, popularly referred to in men as the “feminine side,” and in women, the “masculine side.” Skipping for a moment the fact that increasingly fewer young people have any idea of what marriage is for, and fewer are perhaps even experiencing the traditional honeymoon period, it is still possible to talk about what is at stake in that moment of marital crisis when “the honeymoon is over.” So thoroughly dualistic are we, once the dazzle is seen through, and the other with bonafide feet of clay is staring at us across the breakfast table, though we are at the point when the marriage can do its deep level work and acquaint us with the long neglected “opposite” within, most of us opt to go no further. The culture gives us no help, and lets face it, divorce is good for capitalism.

As I have said many times in the past, the value of marriage at this crisis point in history is its offering to us a way into the paradigm shift by its forcing us into relation to the impossible opposite. It could be looked at as a way of embracing the crisis, rather than waiting for it to find us through loss or illness or death of a loved one. Whether performed in an institutional church or not, marriage is a sacrament, in that it is a means to connect with an archetype (divine reality) and thus to provide a path for that larger, generative, non-dualistic love to enter and transform human life. It is not an anachronism to be tossed out with the rhythm method and spinsterhood, but rather an extremely relevant, democratically available means to move human consciousness along toward the new paradigm. Consciousness will not change without the crisis that forces it out of the habitual groove of either/or, and marriage constitutes such a crisis. As we approach closer and closer the planetary crisis from which there will be no return, I am pitching for our choosing our crises instead: choose community, choose marriage, choose stable relations over time to people and place, go deep instead of only upward, learn to embrace difference.

Because I am married, I have been able to participate in transformative work in my community that I would not have done as a single person People love the things my husband and I have offered in our community, and often do not understand the source of the unusual energy we have. In particular, many people are content with hackneyed kinds of dualistic “war between the sexes” language and attitudes. At a public event recently where we hosted a superb jazz performance at our nonprofit space, The Other Side, my husband in his typically nervous way loudly sent out a couple of messages that indicated his fear that I would not get things right. In the current atmosphere, it is always permissible to suggest that the man is the oppressor. As I was stacking chairs after the performance, a woman said to me, sincerely and with all good intentions, “He couldn’t do what he does without you.” Kindly advice for the downtrodden woman, unconscious support for either/or unconsciousness. I would ask everyone, “Kindly refrain from such acts of random kindness!”

What we need at this time is not such kneejerk “team player” mentality. We need the adult perspective that recognizes what it will take to provide the generative love sufficient to change our way of life from the ground up. Such work cannot be done from within the delusion of separateness and isolation engendered by everyday, either/or consciousness. Because marriage is the smallest unit of community, made up of two “differences,” the marriage vows contain transformative potential needed in this time. The crisis entailed by this union of opposites is no different than the one we are confronted with by mortality itself. Avoidance of that crisis simply gives us a little more “wiggle room” in which it is possible to wiggle out of the truth of death and the necessity of limitation. It allows us to remain in the familiar separateness of either/or consciousness, rather than in the “freedom for” limitation imposed by community and by nature. Because of its now optional status in society. never has the time been more opportune for the sacramental, transformational, metaphoric understanding of marriage to become common.

The soul wants to transform; it wants to individuate. If you look at the work of Dr. Jung, this is what it suggests; there is an innate potential within the psyche or soul for wholeness; in fact, the template for wholeness is already there in the archetype of the Self. When we engage in the transformational process, we are merely following the direction laid out for us by nature, by our nature. Not all of the traditional limitations of culture and society were laid down in order to oppress us. Some of them are there in order that we can liberate ourselves and society toward meaning, conscious adulthood, and the creation of the new paradigm. Choose your crisis: if we cannot manage, in the tiny unit of community that is marriage, to reflect the non-dual, transcendent reality of oneness existing in and through the opposites, then heaven help us in accomplishing this on a planetary scale.

2010-04-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

The Age of the Goddess and the End of Free Will

In our little Utica Temenos group we have an “assignment” to tell our individual stories. We took this on as an “elder” activity, taking off from Robert Bly’s list of “qualities of the adult” at the end of The Sibling Society (“…an adult is able to organize the random emotions and events of his or her life into a memory, a rough meaning, a story.”)

I think I understand why Bly used the adjective “rough.” Although for many people, seeing a meaning or pattern in their lives is an almost inconceivable challenge, never before attempted, others have too much tendency to see everything that happens as having had the hand of Providence guiding it. Excessive uncertainty on the one hand, and a surplus of certainty on the other!

The question I see emerging, for all of us in this group, is how far we are going to take the notion of being “divinely guided,” the idea that we serve something greater than ourselves (and what does that mean in our post-death-of-God world?) We can’t help the fact that we grew up in a liberalized, post-vertical (to use Bly’s term) collective consciousness, that we’ve known from childhood on we could take what we wanted from the certitudes presented to us and “leave the rest.” This was especially true in my case, growing up in a liberal, secularized home in which the barely churched adults served no power or reality beyond themselves. But even strictly raised Catholics in those days had to be aware that there were choices, in behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, etc., even if they dared not choose until the time came for breaking away from the parents. So the notion of having no choice is foreign to us. Like everyone else, our tendency is to act in all matters as if we were free to do and to choose what we want. In that way, we live as if we would live forever, as if we had all the time in the world.

Thus, though we are drawn to archetypal/transformational and eastern spirituality, the idea that we would bend or surrender our will to “Spirit” may not even occur to us. The idea that there was a “plan” for us, a trajectory for our lives, just does not fit with the freedom of will we were taught that we have. Dreams, or other transmissions from the spiritual realm have fascination for us, and we recognize them as communications from our soul, but even they do not suggest the kind of binding force that would oppose our personal freedom. What does it mean that we are given significant, suggestive dreams? Is there anything to give us pause in our enjoyment of these treasures from the unconscious?

In our Temenos group, I am in the minority in that I had a St. Paul-type falling off the donkey experience in relation to “non-ordinary reality.” My “breakdown,” back in the mid-nineties was an unambiguous experience of finding myself in relation to forces or powers far greater than my own, that could swallow me up and spit me out at their leisure. My inner furniture got drastically rearranged because, in my view, up to then I had refused what mythologist Joseph Campbell refers to as “the call to adventure” for too long. As Campbell says in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “the refusal (of the call) is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one’s own interest.” Further he says, once one has refused the call, “the divinity itself becomes one’s terror; for obviously if one is oneself one’s god, then God himself, the will of God, the power that would destroy one’s egocentric system, becomes a monster.” My second birth, with “the hound of heaven” gnashing at my heels, did not feel optional.

But even for me, and maybe for St. Paul too, after a period of time, the sense of urgency lessens, and the “illusion” that I have choices returns. Because of modernity, the time and place in which we live, the question reappears as to what place this “spirituality” has in one’s life. There is no political or religious force great enough to “make me” do anything against my own will. I’ll draw down on myself no public censure unless I do something considered bad by conventional morality, but my soul can burn in hell – or starve in abandonment - without a remark from anyone. In this modern context, though we still recognize the motivational power of guilt, we do not recognize the necessity to a meaningful life, of conscious surrender. Especially we do not recognize the necessity of conscious surrender to the Immanent voice of the Goddess to become the full flowering of our particular, individual being.

I don’t really believe in signs, but on this Good Friday just past, I received what could be perceived as one by somebody who does believe in them. Even to me, it is worth looking at. Each year, the inter-faith Living Stations of the Cross takes people on a walk outdoors that includes stops at various places of significance in the crumbling inner city of Utica. This year the walk concluded with a ceremony invoking the names of the “saints” from various traditions who have stood up for truth, justice and love for humanity. The group of us stood in the Copernicus park in a large circle. The idea was we’d be given one of these names, we’d speak it, and than all would say together “Presente.” When the basket of names came around to me, I was handed “Mary, mother of Jesus.” Orin whispered to me, ”Wow – the Goddess!” If he had not done so, I might not have bothered to even notice, or to ponder this interesting coincidence.

But if you have dedicated the past 20 years of your life to transformational spirituality, and the past 2 years to bi-weekly honoring of the Divine Feminine specifically, as I have, one can imagine a connection even if one is not quite willing to assign the “coincidence” to the hand of Providence. And Mary, remember, was she who was stunned by the news that she had been chosen to give birth to the godhead. Just put yourself in those shoes!

I mean it: put yourself in her shoes. For this is still our story. Even for those who reject or have outgrown Christianity, the story retains its power to speak to us directly as a confrontation with the Goddess/God nature within. What are we to do when we are likewise called to give birth to+ God? If we are really listening, we will do as Mary probably did – check to see if there isn’t some mistake. Seek a clarification. Attempt to strike a bargain. The offer feels more like the announcement of death than birth, and the immediate reaction is to run like hell for the hills.

There is no way to give birth to God without changing one’s life utterly, without surrender to a power beyond one’s own. When we play at the edges of goddess consciousness we play with a serious reality. In the book we are reading in our group, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess and the Transformation of Consciousness, the authors discuss the mind-body connection using a description written by C.G. Jung in 1954 as “two cones whose apices, meeting in a point without extension,- a real zero point – touch and do not touch.” Jung’s intuitive insight has received support in recent years from neuroscience which posits in the mind both a “physical substrate, which is the body and the brain, and…another immaterial substrate that has to do with information moving around.”

The authors continue to say that “in the imagery of the Feminine, this midground between spirit and body, the subtle or metaphorical body, is the place of the Virgin…Like the virgin forest that carries all the potential of new life, within her is the seed of the new consciousness that may be quickened by the spirit and brought into life.” Specifically what is nurtured and brought into life according to Christian mythology is the “Bridegroom,” the “masculine energy strong enough to partner the Virgin.” This ultimate “wedding” of archetypal energies is the realization of the transformational or individuation process.

On the one hand, it is true to say that we have a choice (i.e., to accept the seed of the new consciousness or not). Mary has a choice. “It’s my life and I’ll do what I like,” as the Animals sang it back in the 60’s. Modern life is defined by our having more choices, at all levels, than ever before in history. We can marry whom we please, or not marry. We can choose to not give birth to children, through contraceptives and legal abortions, or we can choose to have children with or without the father in the picture, with or without a personal “father” at all. We can prolong the dying process by keeping the body alive even when spirit has all but flown away, we can divorce without serious censure, we can change jobs, move to Boulder, reinvent identities over and over. Given the amount of choice we have compared to our ancestors, it is far more difficult to imagine anything in relation to which we are not free.

But what that is, simply, is a failure of our imagination, for our bodies, our beings in nature, dictate that we are not free. For beginners, we are not free of aging, disease, death, decay, dissolution. We are not free of our utter dependence on earth, water, air, plants and animals. In fact, the purported free will is an illusion cooked up by overexcited 18th century rationalists, aided and abetted by various technological innovations and the enormous riches of industrial and post-industrial civilization. The illusion of freedom we’ve enjoyed for the last couple of centuries has led to the unparalleled destruction of the planet and must now be relinquished. Freedom of choice must be re-examined. In the absence of what Robert Bly calls “the vertical,” in the absence of hierarchical absolutes or of biological determinism, if we are to avoid the rigid, dogmatic and oppressive interpretations for society and social roles coming from the right, we have to choose our limitations and our bonds.

The guidance for following these chosen limitations is mainly inner and intuitive, for God had shifted in our era from heavenly transcendance to bodily immanence. There will be no 10 commandments carved in stone to transmit body-centered wisdom. It will be learned by each individual as she comes to terms with her real and painful limitations, her non-optional needs for community, for beauty, for meaning, for lasting, committed relationships that represent the hard limitations of natural life. It will be learned as she lives with awareness of the mortal life span, its cycles, births, deaths and rebirths. As the authors of Dancing in the Flames express it, the Virgin who mediates between body and spirit, who accomplishes the work of transformation of consciousness “seems to know that our place of wounding is where she will come in, where we will meet others in love, where we will celebrate our planet in love.”

Notice that in talking about these matters, I rely entirely upon metaphoric, mythological language. We will know that we are no longer playing at the edge of Goddess consciousness when our dependence upon metaphor becomes apparent, when, after too many hours of being “productive” or answering demands, or otherwise justifying our existence, we can feel starved for the “nonproductive” language that puts us right in that midpoint place between body and soul and containing both.

In his discussion of the mythological motif of the refusal of the call to adventure, Campbell refers to the story of King Minos. Minos refused to make the sacrifice of the divine bull (i.e., to answer the divine call ), for reasons of economic advantage. Minos achieved his “empire of renown,” but with disastrous consequences. To return for a moment to another metaphor, that of the virgin birth, mentioned above, and of the birth of the “Bridegroom,” which Woodman and Dickson make equivalent to the “masculine energy strong enough to partner the Virgin.” Here is the ultimate surrender for a woman of our age taught to serve other peoples’ interests before her own, to make herself likeable out of the perpetual fear that she will offend. Such a woman will not be released to her full being by following the conventional path to success (i.e., money, status, material possessions) offered by the culture, anymore than Campbell’s King Minos was. Inasmuch as she has not wedded with her own masculine energy – the power to manifest her own specific nature (destiny) in the world, she will continue to serve the dominant culture and to “serve” the ongoing catastrophe.

The demand of the Goddess is that each individual make her own full expression, her own contribution to the community and the world that is in keeping with the limitations and the abundance of nature. Is this demand negotiable? Can we ignore this call? Can we behave as if we have forever to make up our minds, to give up our half-stepping lifestyles of co-dependently making sure that we are liked, and respond to the inner call to a very humble sort of greatness? Put another way, can we forever refuse our differentness, which is to deny the Goddess? For She is only interested in genuine diversity, a diversity in which each individual, plant, animal or human, is fully present as itself.

As for me, I take the fact of my freedom as a priceless good and an even greater aspiration. But as an individual of my place and time in history, I have learned vastly more from the effort to live consciously within my limitations. The most difficult limitation of all may not be death, but the limitation of my own particular (Goddess) nature, acceptance of which is a most demanding discipline.

2010-04-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

Reviving Matriarchal Consciousness

“You can’t purchase soul; it isn’t a commodity doled out at toney workshops. It doesn’t come in a jar of high- end supplements. There’s no greater supply of it in Rhinebeck, NY or Denver or Nepal than right here….” Orin Domenico

“…The Black Goddess Kali, the terrible one of many names, difficult of approach, whose stomach is a void and so can never be filled, and whose womb is giving birth forever to all things….” Joseph Campbell

In my experience, people love to hear the “good news” that what is chiefly wanted of us in this life is to fully become ourselves. Our souls rejoice at this message, voiced in all the major religious traditions (I think of “Jesus loves me,” and of a rabbinic tale I heard at a bar mitzvah once that conveyed this message that we are loved as individuals and that what God wants of us is that we be who we are.) When they hear this message pronounced, our souls leap in hope that we, their earthly caretakers, will actually take the project on seriously. .

Like most profound messages, however, this one gets fairly well misconstrued, misheard, and/or ignored, in our culture of shallowness, wherein the project of “being ourselves” gets mixed up with the culture’s idealization of youth, of slender body types, of happiness measured materially, of freedom from constraint, and all kinds of media blather. In fact, in a culture based upon the individual’s being a replaceable worker, passive consumer, “mass man and woman,” banal and opinion-less, what we learn best is self-hatred. In particular, we learn to hate our bodies, and the inner knowledge for which the bodies are the medium. Far from having cause to rejoice, our souls are the first thing to be jettisoned in order to make a “fit” with the culture; they, and the “young feminine” by which the soul is archetypally represented, are left outside to starve. Thus there is precious little information in the mainstream that refers to this business of “becoming who we are.” The phrase is used to sell things, as is the young feminine body. By teen age, most of us are enjoined in the culture’s fear and hatred of the feminine; we are, in effect, the enemies of our very souls, counter-insurgent forces against the now become revolutionary goal of “becoming who we are.”

At the last gathering of our Temenos group, we discussed what the role of people like us might be in our community and world. I had brought up the fact that we are a group, being “Divine Feminine-centered,” whose traditions have been lost, wiped out significantly during the witch burnings of the 16-17th centuries. The “crones” of that day, those women who had achieved, in terms of wisdom, experience, and psychic autonomy, an embodiment of the crone aspect of the Goddess in their lives, were exterminated.

This is a profound loss to all women today of which we are at best, dimly aware. For the most part, we have never even been taught to acknowledge, let alone to grieve, let alone to understand that somehow we must regain essential knowledge that was lost, never to be passed down generationally mother to daughter ever again. Realization of what was done to us centuries ago can help us to appreciate those wounded, partial women of the 1950’s who were our mothers. It can help me to appreciate the difficult gap between my daughter and myself; to the extent that she is a child of the culture in which the feminine archetype (goddess) is effectively banished, how can I ever communicate to her knowledge that can be useful to her in her development of her own goddess aspects, her own inner strength, power, creative expression? Not necessarily the knowledge itself, since that can only be gained experientially, but the awareness, the blessing, for which I as her mother am the first representation (and perhaps also the primary obstacle) in her life? Is there anything we can do to prompt the initiations of younger women, so painful to watch as they collide with, and imbibe, the culture’s toxic hatred of the feminine?
(Some might object to my use of the word “hatred,” and prefer I use a word more nuanced, such as “ambivalence.” Hatred, as my students would say, is so blunt. Okay. To be more balanced, I will correct myself: there is love for women as well; but the destructive culture will not be transformed by this love until the hatred is consciously acknowledged. That is my completely biased opinion.)

The initiation I am speaking of, the development of “goddess aspects,” the true process of “becoming who we are,” is also the passage into genuine adulthood. The distinction must be made between what passes for adulthood in our modern culture and what I am calling “genuine” adulthood, because the dominant culture seeks to keep individuals infantilized as passive consumers and powerless citizens. Initiation, on the other hand, accomplishes a change in consciousness into fully individuated, self-responsible, discerning, generative adults. As far as the dominant culture is concerned, it is quite okay, preferable in fact, that individuals retain their memberships in their families of origin, never venturing beyond that limited, socially constructed consciousness into the deeper consciousness made possible through the “second birth.” The avenue to this deeper consciousness, the “hero’s journey” or transformational process, was taught and practiced, we conjecture, in matriarchal traditions, and is available today via the process of intensive psychotherapy.

If the diaspora had not occurred, the genocide against our kind, I’m guessing our culture would impart to us awareness of the Goddess’s gift of genuine aliveness, and therefore of how to become who we are.. However, according to Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson, authors of Dancing in the Flames, the Dark Goddess and the Transformation of Consciousness, we actually do know the Goddess but being “sons and daughters of patriarchy,” (i.e. of the diaspora, of the post-witch-burning era) we are “locked in fear of her judgments.” She is perceived, the authors say, as a negative mother who could destroy [us]; therefore we wish either “to please her or to dominate her.” This tendency to either placate or dominate can be seen in the most fundamental ways men and women of today have of relating to each other and to the world. Furthermore, if we are tempted to say that it has been patriarchy’s approach - and many men’s within patriarchy - to dominate, might we say that women’s approach to the Goddess is to placate?

Just the other day, in the group of women I meet with monthly, we addressed the topic of “what would our relationships be like if we knew we were completely loved by everyone?” The immediate response given by several of the women was that they would be free, they would have more energy, because they would not have to give so much of it away in the effort to make themselves likable. This was a remarkable admission from well-educated, intelligent, relatively successful women. And how is it that the world has become for them an “other” which stands ready to judge, destroy, devour them if they fail to make themselves pleasing first? Surely this fear is not attributable to the fear of men, since it is generalized and demands a generalized response to the world. This generalized fear-based attitude is like the mentality of a slave, whose personality has been warped to fit into the social reality of domination by the white man. It is a projection of the fearsome, devouring “Teeth Mother,” the dark aspect of the goddess, upon the world.

As long as the fear is misplaced, displaced “out there” and attributed to the very world we live in, then our project of “loving ourselves as women,” of becoming “who we are,” will only go so far, not far enough for those of us who truly desire a kinder society, more harmonious relationship to the earth, a better world for our children and grandchildren. How do we become women and men who can steadfastly contribute to the better world, a world safe for our individual passions and for compassion, no longer allowing it to be the case that, in the words of Yeats, all the “passionate intensity” is expressed only by “the worst?” That projection has to be seen for what it is, if we are to regain our full and rightful measure of creative power as women (and this is also true for men).

As long as we do not take back this projection, own it as our fear of our own innate goddess power, we remain sitting ducks for that which daily erodes our integrity as it destroys the earth, one species after another, one indigenous culture after another. If we won’t give up our ego position, which, for many women, clings to a deep identification with worthlessness, we cannot say no to any technological enhancement sold without discussion to the masses, nor to the commodification of the world (which gives us a false sense of power over it), nor to the dead end of materialism. If we cannot make our way back to the source of archetypal spiritual energy – which is the power to change - we will have none; our lives will be embodiments of the death we fear.

In other words, the Goddess does her work whether or not we are in conscious relationship to Her. But in relationship to her, we are in relationship to Nature itself, to the life-death-life cycles that keep us within nature’s limits. In relationship to her, open to her archetypal energy, we can switch from unconscious complicity in the destruction of the earth to conscious participation in divine creative energy through our art, our work, our loving relationships

Conscious awareness of the Goddess is so difficult because it is a gift that can only be “opened” by individuals. To receive it, one must let go of the authority one has transferred to others, to society and its institutions, to “the world” in general and expect it to come only from within. Unlike the rewards of the culture, it cannot be received by “masses,” or “consumers” nor by replaceable employee units. It does not serve to distinguish “high” from “low.” Only at the level of the individual can Goddess-change happen, and here, in this most local of localities, is where it must happen. Fortunately, the individual and the particular, the great variety and specificity of nature, happen to be the Goddess’s agenda. She who is divine spirit immanent in all living things, pushing everything and everyone toward greater consciousness is par excellence the champion of particularity and cheerleader for presence. In the form of nature, she has produced the incredibly intricate and diverse biology of the planet. And she has produced that variety and diversity in the human part of creation as well, which is why each of us is enjoined to be fully who we are. Destiny, in matriarchal terms, is not a facile explanation for why bad things happen, like attributing them to “ God’s will.” It is that acorn destiny, inborn in me and in you, which can only be known from within the organism, through the medium of the body itself.

This is the precious, dangerous, astonishingly “blunt” message which was lost in the witch burnings and successively buried under the rise of nation states, industrialism, and global corporations, all extensions of the patriarchal power drive, unchecked by feminine concern for balance and relationality (peace and harmony based in mutual respect) among all living things. Now we are in a period of planetary crisis, when all the old political and reform-type “solutions” have lost their mojo, and can be perceived, by everyone who cares to look, to be inadequate for the radical, systemic change that is needed, and when hope itself seems like another illusion. We are left either with clinging obstinately to fundamentalism of right or left, or of allowing our very selves to be changed, by time-honored well tested processes known to the mystical wings of the major religious traditions, and in esoteric, wisdom traditions, all of which teach from the inside out. Only individuals in the privacy of their own hearts and souls can receive this message; it is up to individuals to hear and respond, or to resist and deny the call to change. No institution can address, publicize, promote, or impede this change because they, by their “nature,” are part of the old paradigm. Each individual is left free to be a pioneer of the spirit, or, if you will, a Mary, faced with the prospect of becoming Mother to God, surrendering to the unwanted and terrifying divine call to give birth to new life within.

Because the inner journey is inherently frightening, and because our culture conspires in a thousand ways against our hearing, let alone responding to the call (think cell phone, video games, internet, 500 cable TV channels, food and process addictions and all the other lures of banality) few will make the journey who are not driven by their pain. And as pharmaceutical companies make even pain negotiable, the odds against consciousness grow even greater.

Happily, in the call to this kind of change, numbers do not matter, for this call cannot refer outside itself – at least, not to the dominant culture - for confirmation or encouragement. Beyond inner confirmation, it can only be confirmed in the experience of heroes who have taken the journey themselves, such as hidden heroes at local AA meetings who have surrendered to the cosmic call for their real presence through entering recovery. Or it can receive encouragement from the works of those poets, mystics, scholars and spiritual adventurers who have escaped the binds of literalized, dualistic thinking and stepped on to the Goddess path of spiritual transformation. Men and women who have been willing to defy the accepted truths of their times, who were willing to be prophetic fools for their visions, who stood by their opinions against the hegemonic, even at the cost of their lives, can provide nourishment for the difficult journey. ( I here omit the list of heroes whose genius was in the area of making money, which is a paradigm we know well enough.)

But even the heroes do not remove that very tough requirement for inner, personal assent, nor the need to continuously translate the message for oneself, into one’s own local (personal) idiom to address the relationships in one’s own particular life and circumstances, and to the culture and the world. And what does it mean to address the dominant culture from the perspective of inner transformation?

There is some confusion here. More and more, I am clear that surrender to the transformational process is a surrender not only to a “nice” Goddess saying “you go girl”, but to a terrible one as well. To face her, to face Nature, to face death, entails a recognition of that which we most reject. For many post-feminist women, myself and those I have observed, that which we reject spontaneously and unreflectively is all we associate with patriarchy and the so-called masculine. At some level we hold on to our anger at men, and our self-righteousness in relation to men. In this area of relationship we continue on in the old paradigm; perhaps we have not fully left our home of origin, ruled over by its archaic gods, at all. And where I see this clinging to old gods most clearly is in the refusal among women of their “grandiosity,” their steadfast persistence in being “ego-less,” in never, ever pursuing seriously their own expression as though it were as serious as accepting knighthood. (If the Queen offers you knighthood, do you refuse, and on what grounds?)

Many women still accept patriarchy’s version of womanly virtue to the extent that we feel our own expression unworthy of being that which we place at the center of our purpose and our devotion. We adhere privately to the belief that suppression of expression is more virtuous than “dominating the conversation,” and those who do dominate, often men, we resent. Plain and simple, this refusal of our inner Queen is refusal of the goddess, tantamount to acknowledging that we are keeping our bets on the old patriarchal guy-God we love to hate. For it doesn’t matter what we say about goddesses or fairy tales or archetypes, or how many yoga classes we attend, or how natural our diet, or how much spiritual knowledge we have attained if we still refuse our grandiosity, our “know-it-allness,” our right to stand up for that which has no other advocate: that is, our own soul. The assertiveness that matters does not end with landing the great job but with bringing out, baldly and yes bluntly, our own individual, philosopher’s stone of truth. To achieve this may be the project of a lifetime, but such, it seems to me, is a worthy life, and a lifetime well spent.

In the end, the fear of grandiosity, of being “too much,” is groundless. The crone, so long missing from our pantheon and at such great cost to individual psyche and to the anima mundi, is not a “diva.” I take a diva to be a woman who has become a “goddess icon” of her age, but not the Goddess. The Goddess points back to the crowd of common people, to ourselves, common as dirt, and enjoins the goddesses in us all to her great work of abundance and diversity. Our highest work and the only nobility is in sacrifice; the Queen herself gives back of her Highness to her community; from our wholeness we give back our art, our creative expression, our sturdy and elaborated opinion, our service in a priestly/prophetic role. The fear of being “too much,” passed on through our fear-bound mothers, is false and can no longer be heeded for in heeding it, we turn away not from false pride but from the call to humbly serve Her Immanence.

2010-03-12T04:55:00.000-08:00

Endangered Opinion and the Life of the Soul

Driving home from the coffeehouse where we’d gone to hear our young friend perform, having left early during the set that followed our friend’s first set, Orin blazed forth about singers who don’t speak their words. I was uncomfortable with the coloration his anger gave to our reason for leaving; I had thought we’d left because of next morning’s early duties at the Café. His vociferously expressed opinion (pretty much Orin’s preferred mode for the expressing of opinion is vociferous) suggested to me we’d left because he could not tolerate the music. I felt he was being unfair, that anger was the wrong response, as these were young kids just making their first attempts at performing. They need our feedback in order to develop, I rebuked him, not our harsh criticism.

In part, we were enacting the same old Mother vs. Father argument, the mother’s archetypal role to unconditionally care for vulnerable others, the father’s to make distinctions and demand excellence. Something like that. Letting go of my hurt feelings for a moment, however, another way of looking at the disagreement began to enter my awareness. What he was pointing out, albeit with too much energy, was something I myself had noticed many times with students and with my own children: the habit of using language as if the words did not matter. (Think of it: with the advent of cell phone cameras, no one will ever have to struggle for words to describe anything, again, ever!!)

After some thought, though I maintain I am right in feeling that it is the job of elders to encourage expression, not to squash it, I concluded that Orin’s point was well-taken, for words do matter. As we have so often found in the course of our 32 year marriage, both truths can co-exist and become more than each alone, supremely in the right and squared off against the other, could be. Further, though my hearing is undoubtedly worsening, and my samples no doubt skewed by the stranded outpost of a city I live in, there does seem to be a trend afoot to kill words, and with them the strong and definite, if connotative and metaphoric, meanings words imply. TV and other mass media have of course been instrumental in this trend, driven by their imperative, because they are aimed at the “masses,” to dumb down messages and remove the need for thinking on the part of the audience.

Because for the past decade and more I have dedicated myself, like a medieval hermit, to a practice of solitude in which my own voice, my own words and ideas are given their due, this war against words is hard on me, who am generally not able to express myself in the common, dumbed down, flattened idiom (not because I’m so smart, mind you, but because I am out of practice!) Moreover, such a war on words makes it difficult for anyone whose soul needs to know that other souls exist; others who, like themselves, are engaged in the struggle to preserve meaning and need to hear, once in awhile, the sound of another individual’s genuine thought or imagining. Further, using my own personal experience and my experience teaching writing and public speaking to college students for 26 years, upon which to base my opinion, not only are words mattering less, but the having of genuine opinions is a behavior decidedly on the decline.

One of my early awakenings in the late 1980’s resulted from a weekend spent with author Anne Wilson Schaef at Kirkridge retreat center in the Poconos of PA. She had recently published her insightful book When Society Becomes an Addict, which had been helping me make some connections between my newly discovered childhood wounds and the society at large. Many of her words that weekend went right to my core, where there was so much unacknowledged pain that by the end of the weekend, in the final gathering of the large group, the dam burst in a spasm of sobbing and some passionate words I no longer remember. In the way I understood it at the time, she had pointed me inward, to the “Christ” within, to the separate world of my interior which had been completely sealed off from my consciousness for many years.

To this day I remember Anne Schaef telling the story of a young man – perhaps her son – who had gone on a date with a woman who turned out to be excessively passive. The quite remarkable young man’s words to the date were, “You have to have an opinion.” Imagine anyone today holding this as a qualification for a second date!!

In this story is the suggestion that some forms of shyness, reticence, or passivity are inauthentic, they are ways of feeding the disease of “addiction,” or of denying the reality of the vivid interior that every one of us possesses.

In an essay by John Taylor Gatto I am having my students read for an upper level college writing course, called Against School, Gatto argues that our system of compulsory public school education is purposefully designed to render children into passive “servants,” suitable only for employment in mass corporate jobs and as mass consumers. In the rousing conclusion of this prophetic piece, he remarks that “After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.”

Many of my students at a public university in upstate New York (as well as I myself!) are examples of the success of this mass passifying project, in place now for perhaps as much as a century. While most of my students offered no comments on the amazing reading I had given them, one young man sitting in front gave me a clue to where the rest might be at. A bit older than the others, himself a father I gathered, he was clearly uncomfortable with Gatto’s radical critique. He chose to pick on one of Gatto’s historical examples of an individual – Admiral David Farragut - who performed successfully in war as a teenager without having undergone what we know as “schooling.” Not being as informed as my student on the historical fact, I conceded the point. But privately I wait to see what happens to this young man over the course of the semester, now that he has received notice – perhaps for the first time - that the(his) soul has its champions in this world. From the many teachers I speak with who complain about the quality of their students, I know that my experience with a passified student body is not unique. But the teachers don’t get that they are equally ill- prepared to accept the news they too have a genius within that they, and they alone, are responsible for bringing forth into this world!!

For the most part, the having of an opinion is not understood as the expression of one’s “genius,” and as necessary for the bringing to life of one’s own character or personhood. Stuck within the dualistic, dichotomizing pseudo-thinking of the dogmatically rationally-based culture, people will position themselves so as to stay within the dualistic frame they know. Much of what we hear passing for opinion is actually the consequence of everyone’s having being taught, from childhood on, that their individual opinion is unimportant. Genuine opinion is substituted for with taking sides in “arguments” of no substance or consequence, at the meaning level of the Coke vs. Pepsi controversy. Others substitute for genuine opinion with being smart but unprincipled, or with being unprincipledly partisan. These last, from whom we hear so much these days, will say anything, no matter how fallacious, to maintain the dualistic “comfort zone.” Dualistic thinking, which has to think in terms of either/or, \is particularly threatened in these tumultuous times as our civilization collides to its end; thus one sees desperate, fundamentalist attempts on all sides to keep faith in enmities, rather than in reconciliation, in our society and in the world.

With each passing semester in my public speaking classes, the persuasive speech assignment presents a crisis in my student’s lives. They have not been expected to have genuine opinions and they do not have them. Recently I sat next to an intelligent and likeable young man at a bar who commenced to express his opinion on some topic. Finding his opinion objectionable, I was forced to express my opposing opinion, hoping, I suppose, for a conversation.. To my surprise he began instantly to agree with me!

Genuine opinion rests upon having a relation to one’s own true thoughts “in a marrow bone.” They are the consequence of pondering what one finds to be true, what resonates as truth within one’s own heart. These are not “easy opinions,” like Corvettes vs. Mustangs, this rock band vs. that rock band, or Democrat Vs. Republican, but opinions worked over a low fire, with some heat and pressure applied. They do not come without effort, and even pain. Thus, the having of them would be greatly enhanced if the culture taught us that having well thought out, expressible opinions is a duty one owes to the larger community.

The writing course I mentioned above, designed for juniors and senior psychology, sociology and criminal justice majors, would be unteachable if I concentrated only on writing. These people have been taught that a shallow, uninformed reaction to someone else’s fully thought out and researched ideas, is enough, as good as a real opinion based upon understanding and appreciation for what the writer has said. Because of this, I have reconceived my job as that of making a strike for consciousness simply by insisting that the students in my class read in order to understand as fully as possible what they have read. I am postponing their expression of an opinion because in any meaningful sense, they cannot have one until they understand what has been said.

I imagine (maybe “fantasize” is more accurate) to myself the joy of that student who one day “gets” what C. Wright Mills means by “mass society” vs. a “public of public opinion,” who gains an appreciation for an idea conceived and fleshed out in someone else’s head and being. I think I understand what a confirmation that can be of the freeing and consoling truth that one is not alone in the universe, that connection and community exist, and that some courageous souls have taken it upon themselves to have and defend an opinion about this world we inhabit, about its effects upon human community, and which indicates how we are injured by unconscious acceptance of status quo, consensus reality. My own radical addition to Gatto’s radical point is that because the expression of genuine opinion is essential to the common good, not just a means for those sanctioned as “genius” to fulfill themselves, it amounts to being what was once thought of as religious duty.

It is in this sense I argue we are all supposed to have such opinions, the ones that come from knowing how we feel within the private wholeness of our own soul’s integrity, vs.ones fed to us by the controlling mass “unconsciousness.” The difficult pre-requisite for having opinions is that one must be acquainted with one’s true feelings. Otherwise, one’s so-called opinions can be at best footnotes to some other “genius’s” more fully developed opinion, whether Plato’s or Marx’s or Betty Friedan’s or Michael Pollan’s or Carl Jung’s. All visionaries are deserving of our gratitude and admiration, and accepting their mentorship makes a good starting place for cultivating our personal genius. But the lesson we should take from reading opinions we admire is that we must do that for ourselves; we must wrestle our opinion out from our very flesh, and “publish it to the world,” as Thoreau put it.

One tires from the effort to maintain the clarity of one’s opinions in the current modern condition. It has always been difficult to find the truth, but today it is culturally encouraged to give up one’s responsibility as an individual to decide what is the truth. Easier to slip back into talk that keeps us within the collective universe of things the culture gives us, which do not disturb us too much, about which “opinion” is pretty effortless. I find this to be particularly true among women, who are culturally and archetypally predisposed to be relational, connective, community and family-oriented. But when this tendency is not balanced, at soul level, with healthy, archetypally “masculine” energy, what we have is a refraining from opinion. (or a falling back into the crab bucket, to borrow an image from author Richard Wright).

At a group I meet with monthly, consisting of 9 or so women friends, all of us white, middle class, middle-aged, I introduced a topic: the serenity prayer. I asked my friends to consider what in their lives is hard to accept, and what they can change, etc. At my turn, I spoke about my difficulty in accepting myself, my pronounced introverted nature, and, ultimately, my spiritual nature. All of my projects here in Utica, I said, are based in the effort to preserve my spiritual grounding, which is also the means of accepting it. I was alluding to the fact that, in my community here, I do some striking things, perhaps admirable, but they are all based in the ongoing struggle I face to accept that which I cannot change; they are rooted in surrender. All else is ego. Even our defeatism, the inability to follow through on projects of our enthusiasm, to write the novel or launch the small business, is ego-controlled, which may make it harder to address than the evil of patriarchal power. I learned years ago that ego works as hard to keep us small and unnaturally passive as to make us what we conventionally think of as “egocentric,” “egotistical,” or grandiose. (All those characteristics we women like to ascribe to men) Women take heed: false modesty is false indeed! It is time to stop disowning our own masculine energies and aggressively make peace with our human opposite, as I described in my opening story. Our souls need us to actively take up their need for transcending dualism and for true soul-level expression.

In writing this piece, I have become aware I do so to push myself toward another level of acceptance of “that which I cannot change.” I continue to seek avenues by which I may do my true work of advocacy for the soul, that source of genius and of aliveness that each ignores, suppresses, degrades, denies at his/her extreme peril. Its invisibility makes it easy prey to our determinedly and lopsidedly materialistic, rationalistic, dualistic way of life, which as we now know irrefutably, is a way of anti-life, and unsustainable. The invisibility and silence of my inner nature allows me to foolishly ignore it, as if it were the puny suffering of some ragged person beneath my notice. But, in truth, my soul’s aliveness is consequence of the interplay of dynamic energies in my nature, the archetypes of masculine and feminine, which can only be realized in surrender to them.

The life force, in an acorn is invisible, but it accomplishes its undeniable – as well as incomprehensible - work of driving the acorn toward its oakish destiny. Who are we to deny that force in us?

2010-02-23T06:53:00.000-08:00

To Orin,
and to Adam, Rob, Marshall
On the Occasion of the Debut of
The Rag and Bone Shop Poetry Theater
February 20, 2010
at
The Other Side of Utica

Over the rising beer-fueled din
In the bar we love,
After your reading,
A friend told us where he’d been that night -
A concert at the Aud with 2 remaining Dead.
The Grateful Dead! Rivals to Yeats’ poems
While your doughty cast surprised us,
In the tiny theater dedicated to Her - the Muse -
And to all who’d be so unsavvy, so punily destined
As to follow Her in this town so bloody far from Hollywood,
In this butthole kind of place,
Irishly unwanted -
As distant from “the real” on TV screen
As real stench to its description,
As my real heart to Valentine trinkets
Arrayed in bright discounted piles at RiteAid,
As a man - 61 and steeped in that Sixties ecstatic stew -
Getting up first time to read on stage -
Stage-scared, his customary persona fled -
to the icon Yeats, his poems today unread.

I cannot imagine how ridiculous the world
handed down must seem to our young -
Its mockery of heroism, its erase of humble men and women bent on
Virtue, kindness, honor to the gods whose traces
Linger, though not encouraged, in every human breast -
Where Holocaust survivors and Tiger Woods parade
Before us in celebrity, as though knowledge were value-free,
Accrued in our poor besieged brains by electronic grace.

Can such a world even behold
Acts done purely for devotion’s sake,
Out of love for Her and for those few who in their age
lent Her their voice?
Muse, Great Mother, Goddess:
All names for the One in whose orchard we must
Learn to walk.
In each incredibly humble bite
Of her apple,
Using voice and body and word,
The truth -
Like food for the starving in Port-au-Prince -
Leaks through
Barriers of blindness allied with greed:
All souls of equal worth!
And fight we must to bring each one -
My child, and yours; none purely welcomed -
To manger birth.

2010-02-19T08:35:00.000-08:00

Suffering for One’s Life (As Art)

“I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?” Ernest Becker

“I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch
A blind man battering blind men...

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!” W.B. Yeats

“On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise and know of no other sort of love.” Dostoevsky

"Life is suffering," Buddha’s central teaching, upon which hung all the rest of that religion, was incomprehensible to me back in 1978 when I was taking my first and only world religion class at Yale University as part of my program for a Masters in Divinity from Yale Divinity School. I was very concerned with the oppression of women, and of people of color. I admired liberation theology even though I was handicapped by my lack of a faith in God, but I was completely baffled as to Buddha’s meaning. Probably I assumed it came from the fact he was addressing those poor Asian people, people whose lives were ground down, I imagined, by poverty, short lives, many children, like I’d read about years earlier in The Good Earth.

My cluelessness was not an accident. The American attitude toward suffering, as I have experienced it and observed it, is complex: for instance, the suffering of “dumb animals” appears to be less tolerable than third world suffering, which we tell ourselves in the face of the staggering problems, “we can only do so much about.” Many stories about this anomaly come to mind, but in particular I remember a young man who used to come to our Café in Utica daily with his young daughter, before he moved away with his family several years ago. During all seasons, he parked his big Great Pyrenees out in front, tied to a newspaper box, but it was in winter that this practice caused disturbance for passers by. He was remonstrated by people from their cars as they drove by, and even received phone calls on the Café phone from people distraught over the suffering of the animal. He would patiently explain that the dog was made for the cold, and much preferred it to being indoors.

But as for human suffering, as far as I can tell, nice Americans like myself aren’t supposed to know anything about it personally. It is entirely something for other people.

True to my culture, I remained a virgin to suffering until, in 1995 or so, during a prolonged and agony-filled period when I was undergoing treatment in intensive psychotherapy, I realized that I had suffered in my childhood. I say “I” had suffered, but to this day I think of the one who suffered as “the child.“ Memory of the terror and the rage had persisted in my body for 40 years, though I had been unaware as I pursued a strenuously ambitious life of career, family, & activism. Gradually, through therapy, I learned to recognize and own those feelings instead of short-circuiting them by means of obsessive compulsions. But the fact that I am the kind of person who by cultural definition is not one who suffers, and who in fact enjoyed in many respects an ideal childhood, remains a strong influence on my perceptions, and vies continually with the truth of my actual experience.

I am interested in the notion my culture clings to, that some of us are not supposed to suffer, because of the serious obstacle it makes to important self-knowledge. Maybe if we were not so culturally predisposed to consider ourselves the luckiest, most blessed (exceptional) people on the face of the earth, we would not be so hard on ourselves, and not being so hard on ourselves might make it possible to be kinder to other people. Why is it that “exceptionalist America” is automatically accompanied by thorough saturation.in the diabolical art of suppression of feelings?

Going back to that Eureka moment in the 90's, the recognition that I had suffered as a child amounted to the same thing as learning I had feelings, just as other people have. In the instant of knowing my suffering, I knew such pain was not unusual or unthinkable, but the common thread binding humanity together. The knowledge humanized me in a way I have ever since been immensely grateful for. I had not known how cut off I was from the human community, from connection with all at a very deep level, until this discovery of my suffering. My story was now changed forever; or rather, I had found my story. I had learned a major truth that took me outside the boundaries of my culture: To be in a body, that is, to be human, is to suffer. In the end it is not the suffering endured that makes one ill, but the fact that suffering is not recognized, not allowed, in the American vocabulary that I grew up with. Not only does this taboo make healing from certain kinds of woundings next to impossible, it contributes to the building of the “shadow American” character that is not so benevolent and generous as we like to think.

Beneath the preferred American identification with exceptional goodness of our character, a whole range of suffering occurs, and is tolerated, which is a result of unconsciousness, rather than of out and out Simon Legree-type cruelty. Such suffering is still suffering, but it is socially invisible, not remarkable, and becoming ever less so, I believe. My suffering as a child was apparently invisible to all who knew me. The many “tics” of my childhood - persistent bed-wetting, nail-biting, food neuroses and insomnia, did nothing more than earn me a single visit to a child psychologist at age 10. In a sense, I was the elephant in the family living room, whose pain, and therefore her reality, was denied by all. My pain was not truly hidden, given all of those neurotic behaviors, but no one around me was trained to acknowledge it as pain. None of the adults around me were trained themselves in compassion, or in the recognition of the suffering of others. In my turn, I simply learned to go with the program: okay, if we don’t talk about these things, then I will do my level best to help us bury them. Thus, I became trained in an ethos that does not recognize suffering, beginning with my own.

An aside about the children: It seems therefore to me eminently possible today that we take the “I’m okay” statements from our resilient children of divorced parents, children stressed out from constant structured activity and parental fears for their achievement and success, who no longer are held by networks of extended family and community, as true enough, and ignore the inconvenient pain growing in the souls of young people. Is it time we stop the blather about the kids being so much more (smart, mature, savvy, seasoned, global, fill in the blank) than we were, and ask ourselves tougher questions, at great inconvenience to ourselves, of course, about how well they are doing in their souls?

The idea I am working on here is that the cultural “face” that one learns to put on as a privileged white American (whiteness itself being the key privilege) plays a huge part in teaching us that we are not the ones that suffer. As one who is fairly steeped in New Age literature, and on a transformational spiritual path, I find that much of the literature of new age spirituality contributes to the persistence of this notion by preferring the word “compassion” to the word “suffering.” In general, it seems that if one is Africa American one is allowed to use the word "suffering," but if one is a member of the group defined by whiteness, one must talk about "compassion." Now I did not embark upon this topic with the idea that I was focused on race. But the distinction I’m talking about, and the suppression of knowledge of suffering entailed, has a direct impact on racism and racial discrimination. Because denial of one’s own feeling trains one to be, while perhaps intentionally kind and compassionate, unconsciously mean.

I believe there is no way around it. And this brings me to what it means to have an embodied, or body-centered spirituality, as many of us involved in transformational spirituality profess to have. Surely the embrace of the Goddess’s Life/Death/Life Cycles, means, centrally, living in one’s body, which means, in turn, suffering! I hazard this claim having myself made the perilous passage from the disembodied existence where suffering is not (consciously) known, to the one premised in feeling, which is emphatically "of the body."

From my earliest experiences with the language of transformational spirituality, the word compassion was given to me to help to explain the pain I was experiencing. I was growing a compassionate heart, these difficult changes would lead to a greater capacity for compassion for others. Such words were right on, in a way, but also they tended to leap over the intense suffering I was undergoing. In the 15 years since then, though I have done no formal study of it, I have observed that spiritual literature consistently prefers the word "compassion," with its high-toned connotations of eastern spiritual traditions, Buddhism in particular, to its poor disreputable cousin, "suffering." Of course, this is not a problem of Buddhism, but may lie in its translation by post-moderns who “choose” their religious tradition like a consumer commodity, taking what they like and leaving the messy parts back in Bhutan or Bombay. And there is the possibility that publishers recognize the greater market appeal of "compassion" as opposed to "suffering."

On the other hand, and directly in contrast to the association of “compassion” with the Buddha, the word and the concept of suffering are front and center in Catholic Christianity’s chosen archetype: the image of Christ on the cross is meant to evoke compassion in the beholder.

Which is not to defend Christianity, nor to make its case, but to make a case for individuals to become conscious of their suffering, and end the long practice of identifying only with the cheerier, more upbeat and optimistic version of ourselves. The case has already been made with the image of the man hung on the tree, but the point of Christ’s agony appears to be lost on many of the faith’s adherents. Being Americans first, and Christians second, means we’ll do our damndest to stay out of our bodies, in perpetual expectation of the heaven lying somewhere up ahead, that greater good, that growth and perfection surely attainable in the future. In the meantime, as best we can, we stay out of the moment, out of the eternal now, out of our bodies and our genuine feelings. As the tumult of violence and news of destruction becomes ever more clamorous, we remain outside it all, numbed and distracted by the pervasive media blitz, by shopping, electronic communication devices, and a slew of other distractions and addictions.

No wonder the rage of the Tea Partiers at the prospect of reduced expectations and a shrinking economy - no one ever told us we would have to suffer in this way during “peacetime!” The wonder is that they consistently fail to direct their rage at those who are not and will not suffer economically; they direct their rage at “government,” rather than at those who control and manipulate government through their power and wealth.

But I want to stay with my own “constituents;” the body of people who, to the extent that we call ourselves spiritual, are connected more with the transformational, “gnostic,” or esoteric wing of religion, rather than the institutional traditions or fundamentalist offshoots. Like the moderns or postmoderns we are, we indeed pick and choose from the traditions. However, if we are to trade “in-our-head” spirituality for heart-centeredness, if we are to follow the Goddess and learn to live in accord with Nature’s life/death/life cycles, if we truly want to stop the long habit of allowing nature, the earth, the diversity of animal and plant species, to suffer in our stead, we’d better start becoming acquainted with our own pain. And lest I be interpreted to mean that I am calling “ the victim” in everyone to stand up and be counted, I assure you I am not!

To be “worthy of our suffering,” a phrase attributed to Dostoevsky, we have now to learn our own joyful song. To accomplish such a soul triumph, victim identity is useless, and so is resolute optimism. Suffering is fearful because it threatens to destroy the meaning some of us have identified with for so long, the “sunny side of the street” optimism that we learn to carry like a potent talisman against the dark. In a sense this is true, but one must trust that giving up that identification will yield something far greater and more valuable. The voice you will have obtained in knowing your suffering, and must now use, is the voice of the artist, the mystic, the poet, the prophet that is you; contact with that forgotten one in you makes your more authentic voice manifest. To be “worthy of our suffering” each of us must learn what her/his song is and offer it to the community, where it is wanted and needed for the long healing.

As the world hurtles toward destruction, we cannot anymore leave the depth and the soul of our humanity, the pain of being human, to be lived out disproportionately by “the others,” the “less fortunate.” We come to know our wounds and our suffering not to withdraw in resentment and self-pity, but to fulfill the complete and magnanimous template we were given at birth. To have any hope at all of being able to “suffer with” those others, and with the planet, we must cross over and learn the rest of what we know, but have not only been afraid to acknowledge, but actively discouraged from attempting by dominant aspects of our American culture. If, at the deepest levels in ourselves, we do not know our suffering then we do not know the joy of connection either, its that simple. The most profound act of love is the one we direct to our own suffering; all else issues from that.

2010-02-12T08:14:00.000-08:00

The Most Necessary Liberation Struggle of All

The honoring and the freeing of the individual soul is the necessary liberation story for our time. Society has made gains based upon the willingness of individuals identified with an oppressed group, such as women, black people, gay people and other minorities, including holocaust survivors, to voice their pain and to force recognition of their experience of oppression. These groups, in some settings and discourses, are even privileged to speak from their pain, as in a way that people are discouraged from doing in the general society,.

Last night, at The Other Side in Utica, we heard a talk by an African American professor of classics and Africana studies at Hamilton College in which she set the matter of Cleopatra’s contested ethnicity straight. In the course of her establishing the fragile basis for our concept of Cleopatra - a few writers in antiquity who came along well after her death, the insistence by many modern scholars of her being “Greek,”against all the evidence - the speaker interlaced her own story of growing up black in America. For example, one experience she shared was of having been told in 9th grade by her world history teacher that Asia and Africa had made no contributions to history.

Reflecting on all of this as I lay in bed this morning - a powerful time for such reflection for me - I thought of the speaker’s vulnerability in bringing up such stories, in settings where people are not predisposed to consider the suffering of others. Except where it is part of the program as in church or academe, or during times of particular catastrophe, such as the earthquake in Haiti, or Hurricance Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, this is pretty much everywhere in society. I knew, recollecting from my own experiences in graduate school, that in academia, stories of oppression as a gay person or a black or Asian person are treated very differently. A special place is given to them, their voices are welcomed, in a sincere effort to balance the burying of their stories and their suffering in mainstream society and official history. Such prizes as grants and fellowships can be more readily obtained if one can speak from the pain of being a member of one of these groups.

Let me be clear that in no way whatsoever do I make light of the pain that is inflicted on gay people , black people, Latino people, etc by our society. I’m not a racism denier, nor am I anti-Affirmative Action. Nor do I believe that oppression ended with Civil Rights legislation in the 1960's, as I suspect many people do. For example, the students where I teach, at a local branch of the state university, tend to voice the facile, optimistic cliche that “things are better now,” which frees them, I suppose, and all of us to the degree that we buy it, to pay attention to more important things, like the next text message coming in on the cell phone.

I simply believe that the underlying oppression which all other oppressions arise from is the intolerance for the reality and the expression of the human soul. The individual is the most unprotected “group” within the human species; prejudice, hatred, and violence, including violence against the earth, other species and indigenous cultures, stem from this fundamental spiritual oppression that characterizes pretty much all of modern, post-enlightenment, rational, developed “civilization.”

This oppression, because it is based within the individual, is very different from the others. For one thing, it emphatically includes the “privileged” classes and groups. White, northern European, affluent men, for example, have not been exempted. Although patriarchal predations and brutalities, with its assumptions of privileged status, can never be excused or condoned, men too are a member of this”group“ whose individual natures are violated by their enslavement to a soulless system in turn constructed and maintained by partial humans alienated from their souls.. The oppression of souls is also different in that it is not so much a political condition as an archetypal one. Although there are those who profit, (most definitely!) from the oppression of souls (or simply “soul,” since it is the ground of being that humans share with all other life forms) the focus of the struggle is not on oppressors as such, but on the responsibility of the individual to free her own portion of soul.

Another feature of this soul oppression that makes it different is, as you can see from what I have already said, that the “truth claims” of the individual cannot be backed up with empirical facts. It is a part of the special oppressive condition that that which needs defending is invisible, and thus does not fall into our standard categories of those things that possess “rights.” Like trees and other plant and animal species that cannot speak for themselves, but are accumulating more and more defenders today, the soul has not been granted full legal status. Like a wife in the bad ol’ days, it can be treated pretty much any way its master likes.

And who is its “master?” Well, I am the master of my own soul, as you are of yours. And, as masters, we are likely to be (with exceptions of course) as ignorant of the beauty, worth and dignity of our personal souls as was an antebellum slaveowner of his slave’s personhood, or a drunken abusive husband of his wife’s. We are not reliable persons to be in control of a vulnerable thing like a soul. The reason for this lies in another feature of “soulist” oppression..

Unlike other situations of oppressed peoples, the individual soul is oppressed first by those entrusted with its original care. It receives its initial wounding not from the society, nor from any power-drunk, privileged group or class or gender, but from its human parents within the supposed safety and loving embrace of the family nest. Thus, defense of the soul requires that one let go of the most precious assumption we by-and-large possess: the one that says, in a way that forbids any opposing possibility, “my parents loved me.” And here let me add, that the issue is not whether or not one’s parents really did love their children, but whether or not one can tolerate, based only upon the evidence supplied by one’s subjective feeling and experience, the possibility that they did not. The evidence for this unacceptable knowledge is obtainable only through communication with the deepest level of the soul, depths which by and large our society keeps us from entering. Thus, most of us are thwarted from discovering, let alone freeing, the soul that is silenced and captive within our being.

I sense skepticism budding in the minds of my readers at this point. I wish I could leave out that part about the parents, but I cannot. I want to soften the message so you will not reject it, and me along with it. On the other hand, there is no need to get hung up on that part. Though obtaining the knowledge that your parents did not love you as you assumed they had is essential to defense of the soul, the process does not end with hatred of one’s parents, for that is not the point of the soul’s purpose. The soul’s purpose is to be allowed its measure of expression by its human vehicle, the “you” or the “me” chosen for its time on this earthly plane. The unintentional cruelty of parents, like other more recognized oppressions, is incidental to the larger meaning that the soul is.

With a group of other readers meeting at The Other Side, I have been re-reading the classic tale of a woman’s soul journey, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. There are those who would disagree with me, but this story is less focused on the story of racial and gender oppression than on the archetypal journey of the human soul from its initial condition of being buried in matter to the gradual increase of light, and eventual release/expression of the soul incarnate in the person, in this case, Janie Crawford.

Janie is pressured into her first marriage at age 16 by her grandmother, who raised her and who fervently desires for her to be taken care of. Two marriages later, Janie looks back at her grandmother, and sees the relationship differently than she had as a girl. “Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon - for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you - and pinched it into such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love....She (Janie) had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the marketplace to sell.”

As long as Janie believed, in the conventional way, that her grandmother did what she did out of love, the only possible identity for Janie is the ungrateful, undeserving, unworthy (grand)daughter. She has to be able to defend her own spirit, the jewel of her aspiring soul, against the voice that would call her ungrateful and bad. She has to come to know this yearning for more life that is within her, the sense that she must put into language who she is, and “gleam” herself before other people, as sanctioned, or blessed. Such a blessing can come not from any social or familial source, but only from within herself, from the authoritative voice of her own soul. It is not enough for her soul’s journey that she reject the selfish, loutish versions of love offered by her first and second husbands; she must also see through the self-sacrificial love of her grandmother, as even the stronger imprisoning force.

One writer who might agree with my claim that the soul is the most oppressed “group” in contemporary society is John Taylor Gatto, whose prophetic voice against compulsory public schooling authored the book Dumbing Us Down. As it happens, I am using an essay of his in a writing class I teach. I say “as it happens,” because the essay is anthologized in the text, and I was not aware of it when I ordered it. I’m happy to be using the essay and confronting my students with his challenging, passionate ideas about schools and education, but I did not choose it as such.

Yesterday, in fact, I asked the class what they thought about Gatto’s essay, called “Against School.” We were looking for things like “thesis” and “major ideas” in preparation for writing a summary paper. Here is an essay, mind you, that begins by alluding to the pervasive boredom in high schools, a boredom, Gatto emphasizes, shared by students and teachers alike. There could be not one person in my classroom who did not know the boredom referred to, including from their experience right there in my classroom!. However, very few spoke up to comment, or to analyze the argument with me. It was clear that several did not so much want to analyze as object. While a couple of women in the front row voiced unqualified approval, a young man, also up front, wanted to defend some schools, some “excellent teachers,” against Gatto’s charges.

Towards the end of the essay, Gatto writes, “After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.” With this astonishing opinion, he meets the expected objection, one he has heard many times I’m sure, that says some students are just not talented enough to be given the kind of freedom/responsibility for following their own interests and passions that he is suggesting. Sure enough, the young man brought up the very objection, and I pointed out Gatto’s statement to him. He remained unconvinced. And indeed, how does one support this generalization with measurements and verifiable facts? Surely, Mr. Gatto can provide example after example of remarkable, but altogether ordinary students he has known, each capable of following his or her “genius.” But swallowing the statement whole requires one to swallow a formidably large “lump.” Most of us are more comfortable holding to the assumption we’ve been taught: genius is rare, and the rest have been assigned life’s grunt wor, which has consequences for achiever and “underachiever” alike..

Rationally we can grant the argument of differing abilities, but what does it mean to the soul to accept that assumption, an acceptance aided and abetted by the unconsciousness of schools, which ignores the Janie Crawford-like yearning in every human soul for expression of its unique voice and calling?

Our society becomes ever more adept at tuning out that fragile but ultimately powerful voice of the soul. By means of prescription drugs, a deluge of cable and satellite TV channels, constant connectability via cell phones and Internet, unchallenged assumptions about the world and the way it works, whether liberal or conservative, mass schooling, and a thousand other ways, the soul is kept in its place. Everywhere we can see soul pain, the pain of not being seen: we see it in youth suicide, in pervasive violence, and in drug and other addictions, in depression and other mental illness symptoms, in the emptiness of modern living that never satisfies the deeper human need for connection and community, or for a social-political-economic world that reflects our caring and our humanity. We see it in our alienation from nature, in nature subjugated and plundered for its resources as though Nature, the Mother of us all, existed for our benefit.

The good news is that the soul buried in the prison of each body never ceases, and never stops tugging at our coattails to gain our scattered attention. Silenced for lifetimes, she (archetypally, the soul is always represented in feminine form) can awaken and remind us of our individual longing and destiny, the genius in each of us that is “common as dust.” She can reach us through night time dreams, through chance images crossing our awareness, and through the learnings contained in some psychic pain, and other kinds of pain and loss. But the good news is potential only. The release of the soul from captivity is a lifetime journey. It might be wise to remember the words of one who spoke for a people long oppressed:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
.

2010-01-28T08:10:00.000-08:00

A Revaluation of Renunciation

‘In the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John gospels it is simply mentioned that, at the conclusion of the celebration of the Last Supper, Jesus and his disciples sang a hymn before he went forth. But in the (apocryphal) Acts of John…just before going out into the garden at the end of the Last Supper, Jesus says to the company, “Let us dance!” And they all hold hands in a circle and as they circle around him, Jesus sings, “Glory be to thee, Father.”’ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“In the Middle Ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There’s the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel. For example, if you are attached to the rim of that wheel of fortune you will either be above going down or at the bottom coming up. But if you are in the hub, you are in the same place all the time. That is the sense of the marriage vow…”
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.” William Blake

How are we to live justly, peacefully, and deeply in this world? The last part of the question would not have had to be asked through much of human history; while war was omnipresent and justice evolving, still, people were not asked to live without meaning. Only in the modern age is that so, and I have always been grateful to Robert Bly, since first hearing of the mythopoetic men’s movement back in the 1980’s, for behaving as if this question, a religious one even though he speaks for no religion, were important.

As I see it, meaning depends upon things being in relationship with one another; meaning essentially is the fact of relationship, the fact that everything is connected whether we are behaving as if this deep truth were so or not. I will never forget the moment in my therapy, some 15 years ago, when I realized that I had learned my sense of extreme isolation, hauntingly conjured in my mind as an infant floating in space with no place to plug in its umbilical cord, in relation to others! Being in relation is the source of all good we humans can expect, and of all evil as well. But to behave as if we can reject the notion of deep interconnection is to be just plain wrong. And that is what modern life teaches us to do. And that error is what Robert Bly points us to in his book The Sibling Society, the book we’ve been reading in our Temenos group in Utica..

Bly’s perspective is rooted in archetypal, mythological, religious understanding that sees human life, individual and social, as inextricable from biology, nature, and from human community with its biology-driven, non-negotiable roles. These roles – father, mother, son, daughter, sister, brother, grandfather, grandmother, husband, wife, etc. - partake of depth and meaning at the mythological level. They come to us not only or essentially through dictates of the church or law courts, not only through archaic beliefs just waiting for technology to make them anachronistic, but through archetypes passed on generationally, via “the blood.” I’m not a scientist, but archetypal psychologist Dr. Carl Jung was, and this was his contention.

Where Bly gets in trouble with readers is that he speaks from a mythological perspective to people who read literally, not metaphorically. Joseph Campbell was very patient with this problem also, explaining over and over what a metaphor is. God, of course, is such a metaphor, a word frequently used and understood literally, by both conservatives and liberals. In fact, I often wonder, what is the point of someone declaring herself to be an atheist? When I hear someone do that I want to respond: What, do you mean you don’t believe in a metaphor? Well, that’s downright silly. Oh, you mean you reject the God of judeo-christianity – oh, well, that is something different isn’t it??

It took me a long time to work up to the point when I could let go of my professional identity as a minister, back in the late 1980’s, even though I was very unhappy in that work and unsuited to it. The terror lurking for me was that without that identity, there was no me. I had never been able to imagine a work I wanted. Every so often, I would have an urge to go back to school for a graduate degree: school was the only identity I knew, even though I had no desire to be a scholar at that time. But I wanted and craved assignments. Oh Lord, remove this burden from me of my volition, I don’t know what to do with it and it frightens me. When I took the plunge and quit my profession, it was a leap without a net. My simple determination was to find out if there was a me. My secret belief was that there was not, but I had no choice but to find out for sure.

When I emerged from the more intense stages of my inner journey, in the late 90’s, no beam of light awaited me to answer this question I was most desperate to hear answered: what should I pursue “professionally?” That cluelessness remains in place to this day, as I am poised to turn 59 next month. I was and am still compelled to respond only to my inner guidance system; I am never let off the hook on this. My work, it seems to me, has been to contemplate the experience of “uselessness,” of letting go, over and over, of the ideas for ambitions that are not authentically mine; they are “solutions” to a problem godless society gave me, but God did not give me.

In one area of work, however, I have persisted all of these years. That is the area of finding meaning in the traditional roles for a woman in society. The most reliable source for my “continuing ed” has been the alchemical crucible of marriage. After 32 years of experimentation in one marriage, I have determined that marriage makes sense not for reasons primarily of social stability, economic partnership, division of labor, sharing of parenting responsibilities, though all of these are distinct benefits. It makes sense because it is an undertaking initiated in desire, which, due to its scylla and charybdis -nature, and the renunciation required for the voyage, brings the partners willingly or not, into the realm of the mythological.

And here’s where my subject, which might be called the personal quest for meaning converges with the ecological crisis we face today

Few would argue that global catastrophe and the irrevocable destruction of the ecosystems we depend upon, call for us now to learn to live in accord with Nature’s truth: life as a circumscription, not the ever-expanding realm of possibility and free choice epitomized in the American lifestyle. Because marriage is a teacher nonpareil of renunciation, with its vows of forsaking all others, persisting in sickness and health, for richer for poorer, etc., the crisis jokingly referred to as “the honeymoon’s over” seems to me perfectly suited for teaching us what we now need to learn, the antithesis to the dominant ethos.

Moreover, we must learn a different sort of richness than the material, a more metaphorical abundance. Renunciation unaccompanied by delight is as false and one-sided as unimpeded appetite. The richness we must learn to seek is one made up not of ever increasing piles of stuff and opportunities to go wherever whenever, and not of absolute freedom, a fantasy which is fed to us and aided and abetted by our corporate dominated culture and its media priests. It is a richness not of this world, which on the other hand allows the full experience of the gift of this world and our numbered days on it.

The very best, most sure-fire door for entering the mystical, inner realm of non-material riches is crisis, that is, via an experience to which there is no solution, not technology, not cryonic immortality, not increasing our rights under the law, not power and might. Experiences of loss, of deep grief, of illness, aging and impending death offer such a portal. Marriage, endured through its excruciating impossibilities, is such a portal, the advantage of which is, through faithfulness to a vow that includes all of life’s limiting factors, it can bring you into eternity without anybody having to actually die!

The insight that Bly and others brought to me back in the 80’s was, first, the News from the universe is Good. The imperative to “follow your bliss” is an angelic call if there ever was one. But what I also heard was that following my bliss and taking up my responsibility for maintaining the roles bequeathed to me by my ancestors, including marriage, was the same thing. This was a message that helped me as I continued to keep myself in the fire of marriage. Although confirmation of the saneness of my lunacy came infrequently, in those too rare moments of illumination I saw clearly that everything gains its meaning from relationship, from the deep interconnection that make up the natural world and the human-made one. And relationship is indeed a binding, a restriction of very high order! This is “the big point,” so elusive in post-modern, deconstructed, contemporary society.

Those of us who have cut the cord with religion no longer are informed that meaning and joy are the rewards of the renunciations demanded by marriage and the limitations imposed by committed relationships. I was raised by a depressed mother who was very damaged by the inflexible social role assigned to women of her generation as housewife and mother only. Every woman on both sides of my family of her (“the greatest”) generation was damaged by the onerous restrictions of patriarchal marriage. They passed on their damage to me, as they could not possibly avoid doing. Today I am prepared to say that it was not the fact of their being wives, mothers, housewives per se that damaged them. It was not per se the fact that they were discouraged from seeking identity in the world of work that left them so wrecked. It was not only that they were treated as second class citizens and their work, as wives, mothers and housekeepers, unpaid and therefore not of serious worth. It was not only the excruciating isolation of the nuclear family that did them in. It was the fact that they and everyone else in our society has been robbed of the God-given river of meaning transmitted mythologically through our roles in society. .

Someone might argue, well what meaning is there if society does not reward your work with money, the only valuation it understands? Someone might argue what about gay couples and about single mothers and lesbian mothers and unmarried mothers and parents who need access to daycare? What about their needs? What about women’s reproductive rights? How is a focus on traditional roles going to address all of these variants on the “traditional” family? Sounds like back to “barefoot and pregnant (and quite possibly abused)” to me!

To me, these responses are fair questions and also they partake of the literalism of the atheist mentioned above, as do questions like “Well, what can I do if he won’t do his work?” or “After all, I’m entitled to my happiness,” etc. It is quite true, not much can be done to keep a marriage going if only one partner is doing the work. But the larger problem is, who is teaching people that marriage is a symbolon, ( a word provided by Bly in The Sibling Society) and the vow a means by which the longing for God will take you into the deep changeless realms of myth and meaning? Living in the sibling society, we no longer know that all of our most basic roles include these two “ends” of the symbolon. Having lost the other end completely, no wonder our imaginations have stopped working; and instead of thought we have reaction, defensiveness, an entrenched victim point of view. No wonder so much of our motivation is self-righteous, and self-justifying, designed ultimately to support the status quo rather than to heal and transform it.

The point I’d like to end with is that our “bliss,” though attainable through a highly personal, individual, solitary inner journey, can only be had in relationship; it is a function of community. Community has its transcendent (“body of Christ”), and its real world embodiment. The real world embodiment is not arbitrary, made up of infinitely replaceable parts, as we are taught in modern, disposable society. Each particular community contains all the good and all the evil we would ever expect to find in this world. Utopian experiments only worked until some individual wanted something for herself. Traditional religion, so to speak, has to face the fact that in the modern world, even the faithful take what they want and leave the rest. What we in our communities, from micro to macro representations of it, now have to learn is that community, with all of its restriction on our freedom, is the space for real (unmediated) presence and real difference.

Taking my marriage example as one level of community, this means that each marriage must call forth and honor the full presence, the full flowering of the other, which means honoring the intolerable differentness of the other. This inclusiveness, in turn, cannot happen if one partner or the other remains intolerant of the “different one” within himself or herself. In this way, the marriage alchemy works at the level of the individual, and the resulting community is comprised of two integrities, not two fragments leaning together for comfort (all the while growing an incendiary pile of resentments behind a door they implicitly agree never to open.) If we can manage this mutual integrity at the excruciating level of marital intimacy, maybe we have a chance at making peace, justice and harmony with nature work at other levels of our society and of global society.

At the same time that Bly calls for us to become adults, so we can stop passing on to our children soul-killing meaninglessness, what is implied also is that the “duty” to become adults, is at the same time the pursuit of our individual bliss. The authority that calls for surrender to duty comes not from without, but from the archetypes (the soul) within. To submit to this authority (to renounce) is also to surrender to our native, indigenous joy. Bliss and duty are not separate or mutually exclusive; they are the same. As the poet Rumi expressed it, We are drunk and this is the edge of the roof. Hallelujah!

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2010-01-18T06:52:00.000-08:00

The Problem of Depth of Feeling in a Sibling World

“The cause of all our personal problems and nearly all of the world can be summed up in a single sentence: ‘Human Life is very deep, and our dominant modern lifestyle is not.’” (Bo Lozoff)

“The higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. And going down into those waters is a sweet thing.” (Robert Bly, The Sibling Society)

Last Saturday morning, as Orin and I labored in January pre-dawn dark at cleaning the Café before opening at 8:00 a.m., a record of soul singer Bill Withers played in the background. The singer spoke about his grandmother and about her church which she brought him to at age five, and some very funny memories of his experiences there. He ended the little digression saying, with emotion, “I love that ol’ lady! I love that ol’lady!” Then he broke into song, “My Grandma’s Hands,” his marvelous voice filled with the abundance of feeling we turn to soul music for.

Who was this woman who inspired the boy Bill with such devotion? A black woman, insignificant in the larger scheme of things, and in white, affluent society in particular. A woman devoted, in her turn, to the church and to her Lord. The scene, in my view of it, contains a silent partner most modern white people, trained in the modern way to shallowness, can’t grasp fully. The partner speaks to us powerfully in the music, but the Source is out of reach and beyond the understanding of those of us weaned on rationalism. And that God-and-pain-drenched atmosphere of the black church is where Bill Withers learned to sing in the sublime way we turn to soul and gospel music for.

What our “dominant modern lifestyle” cannot teach is that great heights of spirit depend upon great depths of feeling. The experience of the pain of the depths makes possible the soaring eloquence of a Sam Cooke singing “If I could just touch the hem of his garment...” Bill’s Grandma’s church was filled with joy, but the joy found its way in because hearts there knew unspeakable, unrelievable, completely unearned pain. But increasingly, depth of feeling is something we overcome if we are successful. For those who still have it, perhaps we think, if we allow ourselves such un -P.C. thoughts, this capacity for feeling is what allows them to deal with the tragedy, the misfortune, the unrelenting oppression that life in our civilization brings them. They need this capacity to have all this emotionality in a way that we who no longer need to suffer so, do not need any longer. We insist on maintaining an optimism that would be incomprehensible to Bill’s Grandma.

This refusal of our depths is what Robert Bly wrote about in The Sibling Society, a book I’ve been reading in a spiritual study group called Temenos. The loss of verticality ( the word Bly uses for the ordering principle in society once covered, with much collateral damage, by God, patriarchy, its institutions) results in the loss of adults, an adult being one “who has been able to preserve his or her intensities.” A major consequence of the loss of the vertical dimension is the triumph of mass society. Mass society refers to the change in location of power, from within persons and local communities to a small “ruling elite” who control and manipulate the entire society in a top-down manner. A society of adults in the sense Bly is speaking of would not be so easily “massified” as we have been.

But preserving our intensities means taking a ride on the “down” elevator. It means recognizing and bearing the bleakness, both inner and outer. Instead, we get art that carries “a single-minded optimism...that leaves out all drowning.” When offered the waters of “melancholy and tragedy,” we moderns say, well, uh, on second thought no thanks. I’ll take that wonderfully reliable (reliable in that it will not truly disturb) Hollywood movie or wacky conceptual art show instead.

Listening to Bill Withers speak about his grandmother reminded me of one of my first experiences of conscious deep feeling in relation to a human being. Long after she died, just mentioning my Italian husband’s grandmother Lucy’s name would bring tears flowing from my eyes, and my heart would be flooded with feeling. How, you might ask, could having feeling for a dead grandmother be remarkable unless one were some sort of cold-blooded WASPy ice goddess? I suppose that is exactly what I was raised to be. I had previously lost 4 grandparents, and never felt this luxuriance of pure feeling, of grief. Up until Lucy’s death when I was in my late 30's I had never consciously grieved, not because I had never loved anyone, but because in the relationships I had known, deep feeling, and any knowledge of “the vertical,” (of, say, a reality larger than my parents), was not part of the experience.

The feeling connection to Lucy was a consequence of a confluence of factors both outer and inner, on her end and on mine, but key among these, I am certain, was her Catholicism; the verticality a lifetime of devotion had given her which allowed for her expression of deep feeling. Having grown up in a nominally protestant, non-religious household, I had never known an adult who could speak so honestly of her sorrows, weeping without embarrassment, and who could laugh so heartily as well. These were astonishments to me. Married to a renowned philanderer, forced to work very hard even though her in-laws were wealthy, Lucy had cause for bitterness. But always, in recounting her stories, she left accusations out of the telling. She may have been doing her work of preparing for her end, in these sweet and intense sessions of memory, laughter and tears, certainly she spoke openly and acceptingly of that end approaching. This, too, - any relation to death other than pure denial - was far outside my previous experience. Although, as I have been reminded many times since her death in the late 1980's, her relationship with her son and his family was complicated and even abusive, deeply ambivalent, and lastingly scarring, none of which I refute, for me she provided my first relationship in which real depth of feeling was allowed.

For the doubters among you, these two examples may not be enough evidence to prove the connection between deep feeling and verticality. For myself, the discovery of my inner depths amounted to the Second Birth, expelling me at last from a barren, falsely flattened existence that I could only realize in retrospect. When I was in it, it and my constant depression, were simply “normal.” God save us all from that normality! Though like many others raised in modernity, I knew nothing of the depths and heights of feeling made possible by what Bly calls “vertical longing,” I learned that I cannot have my native spirit and energy without "the depths," and the portal to those depths passes through God. The word (God), so objectionable to many in the sibling society, is as good as any, as long as we’re clear we’re speaking of an experience available to anyone willing to suffer her own pain.

It is precisely God that can save us from succumbing completely to mass society. And I speak of God not only as the author of Christian scripture or all scriptures, but as the authoritative energy within that inspires our thoughts and words, and emboldens us to say no to the culture’s lie that humans are shallow, and community optional, and yes to the practices that reinforce connection to each individual’s ecstatic depths. This is a challenging message, not a McDonald’s Happy Meal one. We can continue to believe we are fortunate to have gotten beyond the primitive beliefs of people like Lucy, and Bill Withers’s Grandma, lucky to have freed ourselves from the necessity of mass every Sunday and weekly confession, the woman submissive to her husband, and other outworn dogmas. Who needs that guilt-inducing crap? But what is our option?

“Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.” Kabir

2010-01-04T09:06:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I wrote a piece for a little journal my husband and I produced (Doubly Mad) called "The God of Serious Excitement." I am still serious, and still following my excitement (also known as bliss) as my religious path. These are things I want people to know who might seek or stumble across my blog. Other than spiritually and imaginatively, my life is lived within fairly serious limitations. Not physical or mental ones, but more of the "chosen" variety. I have been married to the same man for 32 years, not all of them tranquil. I have lived for all but about 7 of my 58 years in the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York, and for the last 19 years in an unpretentious 2-story house in a "borderline" neighborhood in Utica, a post-industrial city ill served by the global economy but still fighting for life. My husband and I, assigning the cause of our not robust financial condition in part to the fact we are both children of artist fathers, have never attained secure middle class status. We are, however, as comfortable as one can be when depending upon natural gas for heat, a car to get over to the shopping areas that have left the city, computers to make at least necessary communications, and a few other percs of the famously non-negotable American lifestyle. A long time ago, although we are not against having money, we decided we would place the basis of our marriage "community" upon spiritual foundations, rather than a strictly material one. I like to think of our situation as having a smaller economy than many of our friends, like the Czech Republic as compared to Germany or France; not inferior, just smaller, and in some non-material ways, perhaps richer. But who's comparing?

Living outside mainstream values and materialism puts us decidely on the fringe with little to crow about here in upstate NY, where corporate-capitalist-sibling-TV-chainstore culture rules relatively unchallenged. A woman from Northampton, MA, who I met once at a homeschooling conference in the Boston area, when I described where we were from said, "Oh, you live in the real world." So these are some of the limitations we live within, not to mention a solid 4 months of winter.

But here's what we have done to turn limitation into abundance: For 7 and a half years, I have co-owned a coffee shop business with my husband, who runs it with our daughter. It is named "Cafe Domenico," but everyone calls it simply "Domenico's." Three years ago, I launched my own "pet" project, The Other Side, in a storefront adjacent to and in the same building as the Cafe. This non-profit was set up as a space for encouraging community and local culture, and has become a site for lectures by local scholars, reading and discussion groups, performances, informational talks and panels, activism, and more. My idea was inspired by archetypal psychologist and author James Hillman's Institute for Culture and the Humanities in Dallas, which I had read about and wanted such a place to exist in my city. The idea sprang more immediately from a conversation at one of the monthly salons we held in our living room for 8 years, when people voiced the need for a place to go for information about things the mainstream media does not inform us well about, such as climate change.

Today, we are a tiny space that holds 50 comfortably. We have established a partnership with nearby Hamilton College that brings lecturers in the Humanities to Utica, and just received a NYS Council on the Arts grant to produce a year-long monthly jazz series featuring guest musicans from out-of-town. This means I guess that we are "on the map." For me, however, the entire project is about the space I keep there for meeting with groups with a spiritual focus. Originally, I called it the Utica Gnostic Society (UGS). It is a space for continuing the Western Wisdom (esoteric) Tradition by various means. For me, it is the reason for everything else, but it is the aspect that most people do not get at all, and some, even some on our Board, are uncomfortable with. I am committed to the Divine Feminine, to making it possible for this energy to be manifest here where I live, and to keeping a space (temenos) wherein it is safe for one to be one's full self. It is medicine for healing the world and the relation to nature, and it is magic as I understand magic.

The "UGS" came together last spring in a new way while reading Clarissa Estes Women Who Run With the Wolves, and is now reading Robert Bly's The Sibling Society. Currently we are coming to grips with the degree to which "the sibling society is a functioning and self-consistent structure whose principles have not yet been fully observed or articulated." (The Sibling Society, page 131) In other words, we are coming to grips with the degree to which our (unconscious) participation in a society without initiation expresses "disdain and contempt for children." To me, the book is important because it addresses the need for individuals in our society to learn again to live with, and within, the limitations imposed by "tradition, religion, devotion" in order precisely to defend the divine feminine, the sacred dimension of each human soul and of the world. It sounds lofty, but believe me, on the ground in Utica such ideas do not raise one's status.

To conclude this first ever blog, I come back to the word "useless" that appears in the title of the blog and on this post. Useless, for me, is a trickster word that allows me to enter the sacred space of the divine feminine. It deflates the fear residing in me that I am, in my being, worthless, bad, useless, like WilliamBlake defuses the accusation of being just a "fool." ( "If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.") In our group someone offered the phrase "creative indolence," which points to the same paradoxical idea. Devotion to the useless is the defiant cultivating of a space for divine creative energy right within the mainstream consensus consumer culture. I hope everyone who reads my blog will do so in the spirit of uselessness, as I will do as I write. If I have left you puzzled, I expect to say more about the uses of uselessness in the next blog.