States of Mind

From The Interpretation of Dreams:

"...a certain psychic preparation on the part of the patient is necessary.  A twofold effort is made, to stimulate his attentiveness in respect of his psychic perceptions, and to eliminate the critical spirit in which he is ordinarily in the habit of viewing such thoughts as come to the surface.  For the purpose of self-observation with concentrated attention it is advantageous that the patient should take up a restful position and close his eyes; he must be explicitly instructed to renounce all criticism of the thought formulations which he may perceive.  He must also be told that...success...depends upon his noting and communicating everything that passes through his mind, and that he must not allow himself to suppress one idea because it seems to him unimportant or irrelevant to the subject, or another because it seem nonsensical...."

"I have noticed...that the psychological state of a man in an attitude of reflection is entirely different from that of a man who is observing his psychic processes.  In reflection there is a greater play of psychic activity than in the most attentive self-observation; this is shown by the tense attitude and the wrinkled brow of the  man in a state of reflection, as opposed to the mimic tranquility of the man observing himself.  In both cases there must be concentrated attention, but the reflective man makes use of his critical faculties, with the result that he rejects some of his thoughts which rise into consciousness after he has become aware of them, and abruptly interrupts others, so that he does not follow the lines of thought which they would otherwise open up for him; while in respect of yet other thoughts he is able to behave in such a manner that they do not become conscious at all-that is to say they are suppressed before they are perceived.  In self-observation, on the other hand, he has but one task-that of suppressing criticism....the point is to induce a psychic state which is to some degree analogous...to the state of mind before falling asleep-and also of course, to the hypnotic state."

Just wondering out loud if what good is done in Freudian therapy (and some good does seem to come of it at times) owes something to a practice not unlike certain types of Buddhist meditation techniques. 

Nowhere Man

Just finished Aleksandar Hemon's Nowhere Man, a tale of a Bosnian refugee written by a Bosnian expat.  The dust jacket says he publishes regularly in the New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, and Paris Review.  The book was published in 2002.

The writing was crisp and engaging - well written enough that my original attempts to keep myself reading by scheduling a pace were unnecessary.  The theme is homelessness, the disconcerting sensation of having nowhere you really belong.  The hero (antihero?) is an ethnically Ukranian native of Bosnia who moves to Chicago just before the civil war breaks out.  Vignettes are set in Chicago, Oak Ridge, Kiev, Sarajevo and Shanghai.  The effect of looking at Pronek from multiple points of view is quite striking. 

So, what does Hemon have to say?  And by inference, what do the literary powers that have given him "extraordinary recognition" (dust jacket) want to hear?

• Sex is central (but not sacred, oh no, not sacred). 
• Relationships are doomed from the beginning and we never really understand each other.
• By and large, people are ridiculous.  They should be viewed with cool, detached irony.
• Nationalism is ridiculous - dangerous, murderous, yes - but in the end ridiculous.
• Politics are ridiculous, and politicians are out of touch with reality.  This applies to both the establishment (George Bush, Sr.) and the revolution (Greenpeace).
• War is hideous. 
• Life really has no particular meaning or point.  The closest we come to a point is, well, sex, which is ultimately meaningless too, and doesn't seem to lead to lasting relationships, but it is, well, central.  What few moments of transcendence we get (however, illusory they may be) are from sex.
• Things that seem to have a meaning (Pronek's early passion for music, and his romantic and relationship yearnings) turn out to be ridiculous.
• Life having no point, a plot is, well, pointless.
• Literary criticism, by the way, is also ridiculous - "Queer Lear" and "Karaoke and (Re) presentation."
• Absent the existence of transcendence and meaning, the best thing is to be present and aware of the current moment.  This is almost a spirituality of some kind.

The dust jacket says his prose has "literary verve," "engrossing narrative, engaging warmth, and refreshing humor," with an "exhilarating sense of seeing everything new again."  I did find the narrative engrossing.  I actually enjoyed his technique - split points of view, a pastiche of vignettes, and his descriptive powers are substantial.  I suppose that translates into literary verve?  But I didn't find any warmth to engage with, nor did I find his cool irony "refreshing." 

The Tale of Genji (again)

I'm giving the Tale of Genji another go.  Trying to take this Christmas shutdown and get a running start.  Maybe I'll get all the way through this time.

I need to find another handle to this tale than the main character.  I find Genji uninteresting.  He's a medieval Japanese Brad Pitt.  He gets attention because he's attractive, a good performer, moves in all the right circles and is irresistible to the ladies.  But as far as I can see, there's not much else there.

Note to self:  What emerges if we pay attention to the women?

The power of acceptance

Howard Rheingold also said something (in the same essay) that has shaped my approach to Taoist texts. 


"When I started out on my life's journey, I thought this little book [the Tao Te Ching] was a mystical tract that would lead eventually to a noetic revelation.  Thirty years later, it's easier to recognize it as good, sound, immensely practical, astonishingly enduring advice about the way water flows, people act, history happens, universes evolve."


With that as an introduction, here is the passage of Chuang Tzu that has struck me the hardest so far.  This one is from The Second Book of the Tao by Stephen Mitchell


"...Master Yu got sick.  Master Ssu went to visit him.  'How are you?'  He said.

Master Yu said, 'Amazing!  Look at how the creator has bent me out of shape.  My back is so curved that my intestines are on top of me.  My chin digs into my belly button, my shoulders arch over my head, and my neck bones point to the sky.'  Yet he seemed peaceful and unconcerned.  Hobbling over to the well, he looked in and said,  "My, my!  How totally He has bent me out of shape!

....I received life when the time came, and I'll give it back when the time comes.  Anyone who understands the proper order of things--that everything happens at exactly the right time--will be untouched by sorrow or joy....When you argue with reality, you lose."

Stephen Mitchell's commentary has this to say--

"Master Yu is afflicted with a neuromuscular syndrome that has bent him over like a paper clip.  'Afflicted?'  No:  presented; graced....People think that detachment must be a cold, humorless business.  But Master Yu couldn't be more witty or engaging."


Not quite a Christian faith that all things work to the good of those who love God, but remarkably sane and admirable.

Thomas Merton and "translating" Chinese

"The rather special nature of this book calls for some explanation.  The texts from Chuang Tzu assembled here are the result of five years of reading, study, annotation, and meditation.  The notes have in time acquired a shape of their own and have become, as it were, 'imitations' of Chuang Tzu, or rather, free interpretative readings of characteristic passages which appeal especially to me.  The 'readings' of my own grew out of a comparison of four of the best translations of Chuang Tzu into western languages, two English, one French and one German.  In reading these translations I found very notable differences, and soon realized that all who have translated Chuang Tzu have had to do a great deal of guessing....Since I know only a few Chinese characters, I obviously am not a translator.  These 'readings' are then not attempts at faithful reproduction but ventures in personal and spiritual interpretation."


The Way of Chuang Tzu,
Thomas Merton


I am struck by this passage because it almost perfectly describes my own work with the Tao Te Ching.  I would call my version of it a personal paraphrase.  My own method owed its origins to Howard Rheingold who wrote in The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog


"Translating Chinese verse is an art that by its nature leaves room for many different interpretations.  Something emerges from between the lines when you read different translations of the same simple verses, something that no single translation captures."


Rheingold also first put me onto Jonathan Starr's character by character parsing of Lao Tzu that eventually formed the core of my engagement with the text.

Enchantment

The Song of Wandering Aengus

 

 

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

 

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

 

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.



W. B. Yeats
The Wind Among the Reeds

The Power of a Faith

Baldwin, who was deeply disturbed by Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, still gives a glowing description of its effects on its converts-

"Elijah Muhammad has been able to do what a generation of welfare workers and committees and resolutions and reports and housing projects and playgrounds have failed to do: to heal and redeem drunkards and junkies, to convert people who have come out of prison and keep them out, to make men chaste and women virtuous, and to invest both the male and the female with a pride and a serenity that hang about them like an unfailing light."

Patientia vinco

"Patientia vinco"

By patience I conquer.

I am by nature impatient and flighty.  Like Laman and Lemuel, it is not that I do not ever repent and do well, it is that I do not persist in my efforts.  This proverb is a reminder to me of how all things, both temporal and spiritual, are made permanent in the human soul.

Havel on Western Politics

An interesting look at ourselves from the outside.

"It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it.  People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies.  But this static complex of rigid, conceptually sloppy and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and those complex focuses of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion;  the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information; all of it...can only with great difficulty be imagined as the source of humanity's rediscovery of itself."

The Power of the Powerless

Baldwin - Sensuality, Self, and the Fountain of Life

"To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread....Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.  It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum - that is, any reality - so supremely difficult.  The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself.  Such a person interposes between himself  and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, thought eh person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!) are historical and political attitudes.  They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person."

Baldwin - the culture of Harlem and community

In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare.  Perhaps we were, all of us - pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children - bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love.  I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about "the man."  We had the liquor, the chicken, the music and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not.  This is the freedom one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz.

The Fire Next Time

The Sense of Self

"I had another experience at about this time [my twelfth year].  I was taking the long road to school from Klein-Huningen, where we lived, to Basel, when suddenly for a single moment I had the overwhelming impression of having just emerged from a dense cloud.  I knew all at once: now I am myself!  It was as if a wall of mist were at my back, and behind that wall there was not yet an "I."  But at this moment I came upon myself.  Previously I had existed, too, but everything had merely happened to me.  Now I happened to myself.  Now I knew: I am myself now, now I exist.  Previously I had been willed to do this and that; now I willed.  This experience seemed to me tremendously important and new: there was "authority" in me."

Jung
Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Walcott on Focus

Measure the days you have left.  Do just that labor
which marries your heart to your right hand: simplify
your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbor

and a sail coming in.

Derek Walcott
Omeros

Yeats on Modernity - II

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

 

 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

 

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.




W. B. Yeats
To Rose

Yeats on Modernity

The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey truth is now her painted toy;


W. B. Yeats
"The Song of the Happy Shepherd"
Crossways

Yeats on Modernity

The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey truth is now her painted toy;


W. B. Yeats
"The Song of the Happy Shepherd"
Crossways

A Storm Scene

Then, soaked like paper, the hills were a Chinese scroll

and she saw a subtlety where none was before.
Bamboo strokes.  Wet cloud.  Peasant with straw hat and pole.
Fern spray.  White mist. Heron crossing fresh waterfall.

Omeros

Havel - The Phenomenology of Responsibility

"Patocka used to say that the most interesting thing about responsibility is that we carry it with us everywhere.  That means that responsibility is ours, that we must accept it and grasp it here, now, in this place in time and space where the Lord has set us down, and that we cannot lie our way out of it by moving somewhere else..."

The Power of the Powerless

[Jan Patocka was a Czech Philosopher of Phenomenology, banned from teaching by the Communists, and a signer of Charter 77]

Havel - limitations of legislation

"The key to a humane, dignified, rich and happy life does not lie either in the constitution or in the criminal code.  These merely establish what may or may not be done and, thus, they can make life easier or more difficult.  They limit or permit, they punish, tolerate or defend, but they can never give life substance or meaning.  The struggle for what is called "legality" must constantly keep this legality in perspective against the background of life as it really is.  Without keeping one's eyes open to the real dimensions of life's beauty and misery, and without a moral relationship to life, this struggle will sooner or later come to grief on the rocks of some self-justifying system of scholastics."

The Power of the Powerless

The Ideological Fallacy - Havel

"Every Society, of course, requires some degree of organization.  Yet if that organization is to serve people and not the other way around, then people will have to be liberated and space created so that they may organize themselves in meaningful ways.  The depravity of the opposite approach, in which people are first organized in some way or another (by someone who always knows best "what people need") so they may then allegedly be liberated, is something we have known on our own skins only too well."

Power of the Powerless

The only proper starting point of politics

Havel speaks of returning politics to its "only proper starting point...if all the old mistakes are to be avoided: individual people."  He contrasts this with the politics of ideology, where the needs of people are subordinated to ideas.  An easy contrast to draw in a communist state, but he goes on to say-


"In democratic societies, where the violence done to human beings is not so obvious and cruel, this fundamental revolution in politics has yet to happen, and some things will probably have to get worse there before the urgent need for that revolution is reflected in politics."]


The Power of the Powerless

Jung questions a childhood dream

"Who spoke to me then?  Who talked of problems far beyond my knowledge?  Who brought the Above and Below together, and laid the foundation for everything that was to fill the second half of my life with stormiest passion?  Who but that alien guest who came both from above and from below?"


Memories, Dreams, Reflections


I don't know how impressed I am with Jung's answer, but it is a profound question.

Baldwin on Acceptance and Integration

"Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration.  There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you.  The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them.  And I mean that very seriously.  You must accept them and accept them with love.  For these innocent people have no other hope.  They are, in effect, still trapped in a history they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it."

Black History

In an essay written about the time of my birth, Baldwin gives voice to what it was like to grow up and live as a black man in the society I was born into.  The essay takes the form of a letter written to his namesake, his then fifteen year old nephew.  Many still living today were marked by those conditions.  How many still live in remaining pockets of that despair?  How large are those pockets?  I have no way of knowing.

---------------------

"But no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs.  I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it.  And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it."

---------------------

"...these innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago.  (I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, "No, this is not true!  How bitter you are!" -but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist.  I know the conditions under which you were born, for I was there.  Your countrymen were not there..."

---------------------

"This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.  Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country.  You were born where you were born and faced with the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.  The limits of your ambitions were, thus, expected to be set forever.  You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.  You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.  Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry.  I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and hear them saying, "You exaggerate."  The do not know Harlem and I do.  So do you."

Work and Fate

"But it was not really true that Okonkwo's palm-kernals had been cracked for him by a benevolent spirit.  He had cracked them himself.  Anyone who knew his grim struggle against poverty and misfortune could not say he had been lucky.  If ever a man deserved his success, that man was Okonkwo.  At an early age he had achieved fame as the greatest wrestler in all the land.  That was not luck.  At the most one could say that his chi or personal god was good.  But the Igbo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also.  Okonkwo said yes very strongly; so his chi agreed."

Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart

Chi here approximates the concept of "genius" in Roman thought and James Hillman's Daimon.

Anger and Fear

I was struck recently by how few black writers I have read.  I've set out to read three books to remedy the situation -Derek Walcott's Omeros from the Caribbean, Chinua Achebe's African Trilogy from Nigeria and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time from the United States.

"Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand.  His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children.  Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man.  but his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness."

Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart

Encouragement

"I recall the dream of a young woman who had tremendous difficulties relating to men.  In the dream, she came into a flower shop.  No one was there, and then she rang the bell.  A very mundane ordinary start, you see.  She waited a long time in the shop, and then the owner came down from above.  She was an unusual, super-human woman, because she did not walk down the steps, but floated down.  So she had a kind of angelic quality.  And so she appeared before this young woman and told her no less than the four possibilities of how woman could relate to man.  The dreamer knew it then, and woke up, and to her dismay, could not recall it.  She was just desperate that she had forgotten what this divine woman had told her.  It is as though the unconscious sometimes would tease us like this.  But I think it is not a tease.  With all her troubles and difficulties, she had to know that there is something like this….Sometimes young troubled people get hints, for the sake of enduring and surviving until they can know….They are not yet ready to experience it, but there is something….But we have to earn it.  It is not put into our laps."

"Insight can be lost again, and sometimes that has a very discouraging effect.  But it makes all the difference that one had it once.  Once, the sun did break through the clouds.  Even if it should rain afterwards for a long time, one knows there is a sun, and it can break through.  I think this is a consolation during periods when one is in a hole….But if one has never seen it, it is a totally different situation."

The archetypal significance of Gilgamesh

Rivkah Scharf Kluger

Self Reflection - Insight

Catching up on some older reading notes

“What is the faculty of insight?  It is to be able to question oneself, to reflect on oneself, and that is really the basis for the growth of consciousness.  Sometimes one sees people who are just not able to question themselves.  Everything is projected to the outside.  One can say it is a grace of God if we are able to question ourselves, to reflect upon ourselves.”

The archetypal significance of Gilgamesh

Rivkah Scharf Kluger

Jung - Community and Solitude

"For community is the depth, while solitude is the height.
The true order in community purifies and preserves.
The true order in solitude purifies and  increases.
Community gives us warmth, while solitude gives us light."

Sermon 5

The Path of Meaning

“It is a timeless story.  ’Now thou hast touched him’ is a very beautiful expression.  When the god has touched a mortal, he has to go a way he does not know.  The immediacy of being touched by fate, by destiny, is very impressive, showing the reality of being caught by something inner and greater, which forms our life.”

-------------------------

“So he has a restless heart, is not someone who can sit still and be content with all that he has…for he has a restless heart.  ‘Thou hast touched him,’ and he must go on this far journey – to face a battle he does not know, to travel a road he does not know – which is a classical expression for going the inner way which one does not know.  One only knows one has to go it.  The Chinese word Tao means ‘the way’ as well as ‘meaning’ or ‘goal.’  It is an equilibrium of the opposites.  We do not know the meaning except by going the way, step by step.  We do not know the goal ahead.  We only know we want to come closer to the Self, to become more ourselves.  But we cannot know what it is unless we go every step, not knowing where it leads us.  Naturally, without that attitude, which needs courage as well as humbleness one does not know.”

The archetypal significance of Gilgamesh

Rivkah Scharf Kluger

Tao Te Ching - Verse 10

A wise man
     is subtle, profound, intuitive, penetrating -
So far from the ordinary,
     that he defies understanding.
But he can be described:

Careful -
     like a man crossing a winter stream
Alert -
     as if surrounded by danger
Polite -
     as a guest in someone else's house
Self-effacing -
     as melting ice
Genuine -
     like rough hewn wood
Open -
     as a valley
Inscrutable -
     as muddy water

Amidst confusion,
     in stillness he finds clarity.
From stillness,
     he is moved to action.

He who follows the Way
     works within natural limits
So, though constantly in use,
     his strength is renewed.

Jung - Septem Sermones ad mortuos, Sermon One

One of the reasons I picked up "The Gnostic Jung" was that it contained his Septem Sermones ad Mortuos.  This Neo Gnostic document has some interesting nuggets in it.  From Sermon One -

"We ask the question: how did creation originate?  Creatures indeed originated but not the created world itself, for the created world is a quality of the Pleroma."

Interesting in light of D&C 93:33. 

 "Differentiation is the essence of the created world....That is why man himself is a divider, inasmuch as his essence is also differentiation....the undifferentiated principle and lack of discrimination are all a great danger to created beings.  For this reason we must be able to distinguish the qualities of the Pleroma.  Its qualities are the PAIRS OF OPPOSITES, such as

     the effective and the ineffective
     fullness and emptiness
     the living and the dead
     difference and sameness
     light and dark
     hot and cold
     energy and matter
     time and space
     good and evil
     the beautiful and the ugly
     the one and the many
     and so forth"

The Pleroma is a borrowed Latin word meaning "fullness."  Its use in this sermon evokes shades of a phrase from Second Nephi chapter two ("all things...a compound in one" v. 11), and like Lehi, Jung juxtaposes this undifferentiated oneness as an antithetical condition to the possibility of the creation.  For Jung, if we were (hypothetically) to "submerge into the Pleroma itself" we "cease to be created beings.  Thus we become subject to dissolution and nothingness."

Being Meant - 2

"I remember the case of a young woman[....]The first dream which made sense to her in her analysis brought about a big change.  She suddenly realized that if she had such a dream where there is an inner somebody, a mysterious inner somebody who means her, who is concerned about her, then she counts.  That brought about a big change.  It gave her a religious feeling of being meant, of being chosen, if you want, of being singled out.  In a way, individuation is [...] a kind of chosenness, namely to be meant, to have fate, to have destiny."

Rivkah Scharf Kluger
The Archetypal Significance of Gilgamesh

Jungian individuation proceeds by way of a religious relationship to a "a power greater than our own."  As with Alcoholics Anonymous it seems to matter little how you define this higher power, the relationship to it begins to generate power when it gets "personal."

Being Meant

"He [Enkidu] hears the hierodule telling him 'you know there is a king Gilgamesh in Uruk, and he had a couple of dreams, and they were about you!  And you will be a strong and trustworthy friend to him.'  Now if you were to have such an experience, being told that someone has dreamt that you would enter that person's life (things which happen by the way), how would you feel about it?  What does it give to Enkidu to hear this?

          REMARKS: Self-confidence.  Worth.

Yes but also....I would think of something very specific-if this is so cast by the gods.

         REMARK: Destiny.

Yes, it gives the quality of destiny.  The other comments were not wrong, but they belong in the larger connection of destiny.  That is the important experience at the bottom of many starts of the way of individuation - a feeling of destiny."

Rivkah Scharf Kluger
The Archetypal Significance of Gilgamesh

Hesiod 2a

Was there but one kind of strife upon the earth?
No, there are two.  A man who came to know the first
would applaud; the second he would blame.  They are
two souls.  One fosters evil war and ceaseless fights;
Her no mortal loves, but under force and through
will of deathless gods, men honor heavy strife.
But indeed, the other one dark Night birthed first.
Heaven dwelling Zeus, who sits on high, placed her
in the roots of earth.  Much better to man is she:
rousing work in all alike - the lazy too -
for a man craves work when he sees another rich -
of a truth it urges him to plow for crops,
building well his home; neighbor with neighbor strives
goading on to wealth.  This strife is good for men.
Potter to potter, carpenter with carpenter
grudges, beggar envies beggar, and poets too resent.

Qui observat ventum

From the Vulgate OT:

Qui observat ventum, non seminat,
et qui considerat nubes, numquam metet.
                                       Ecclesiastes 11:4

Who watches the wind, doesn't sow;
and he who examines the clouds will never reap.

Just a personal reminder to myself that if you wait for the time to be "perfectly right," you often end up waiting for ever.

Mere Spirtuality

I've always had an interest in what you might call "mere spirituality" - a kind of lowest common denominator of the spiritual - elements that might find resonance with most people who consider themselves spiritual.  Stephan Hoeller (one of Jung's students) makes an interesting and suggestive list of intersections between Gnosticism and Jungian Psychology. 

1) "A...spiritual...element is an organic part of the human psyche."  The Gnostics divided the soul into Hyle (material body), Psyche (mind, personality) and Pneuma (spirit).  Jung found in the unconscious that could only be called spiritual, elements that transcended individual and cultural limitations.

2) "This spiritual element carries on an active dialogue with the personal element of our selfhood through the use of symbols."  For Jung this would include dreams, visions, altered states and even miraculous coincidences.

3) "symbols...reveal a path of spiritual...development...which can be traced...forward to a goal in the future."  In Jungian terms the goal is "wholeness."

4) "the human soul is dominated by many blind and foolish powers" that our spiritual growth begins to free us from.

5) As we deal with our issues and obstacles our path lies "not out, but through."

6) "The goal of spiritual growth is expressed by images of completion in a whole"

7) "the wholeness...is characterized by all the qualities such as power, value, holiness which religious systems have always attributed to God."

Why the Ancients? - 2

Reading a book called The Gnostic Jung. 

Jung reached back to the Gnostics and the Alchemists.  The neo-Jungians of different stripes reach back the gods and goddesses of ancient mythology.  The men's movement reaches back to folk tales. Thomas Moore reaches back to the magicians of the Renaissance.   For decades the West has been digging about in the ancient wisdom of the East.  The whole New Age movement reaches back eclectically to just about any shiny object from the past that looks interesting.  All an effort to "reanimate" the lifeless mechanical image of Modernism - to give it a soul (anima).

Qui habet tempus, habet vitam

"Who has time, has life."

It's been a crazy week at work.  Not sure I have a life....

:)

Tao Te Ching - 67

一      yī     one

The following passage from 67 reminds me a bit of 1 Corinthians 13 -



I have three treasures -
     the first is love,
     the second is frugality,
     the third humility.
Love makes me fearless.
Frugality makes me prosperous.
Humility makes me first.
     Thus I reach my full potential.

To be fearless
     without love,
to be prosperous,
     without frugality,
to be first
     without humility
          is certain doom.

Love conquers all.
Love is impregnable.
Whom heaven wishes to protect
     it surrounds with love.

Why the ancients?

You can study the ancients, you can learn every fact
You can follow the cycles that leave and come back
                                                                Bob Seger

I stopped an old man along the way
Hoping to find some long forgotten words or ancient melodies
                                                               Toto


I picked up Hugh Nibley's (and Michael Rhodes's) One Eternal Round.  The whole fascination with the Ancient Egyptians arose within me from my childhood - my personal manifestation of the strange obsession the West has had with them since at least the Romantic Movement.  Why the ancients?  Why study dead languages?   Why pour over musty manuscripts from long millennia ago?  Why the related romantic turn to the middle ages and the volkerwanderung that lies before it?  (The genre of fantasy is the mask it wears today).

There aren't too many who hold on these days to Magick and the thought that the ancients knew something more than we did.  But I think we Moderns are still driven (haunted) by the thought that we threw a baby out with that bathwater when we launched ourselves into this brave new world.  If I had to venture a guess, I'd say we are looking for Spirit.

Proverbs 1:1-7

I've worked my way through the first seven verses of Proverbs in Hebrew (again with a lot of help from reference books of various types).  Here are my results.

The proverbs of Solomon,
     the son of David, king of Israel.

To know wisdom and discipline,
     to understand insightful sayings.
To take hold of the discipline of intelligence-
     righteousness and judgment and straightness.
To give shrewdness to the naïve,
     and knowledge and discretion to youth.
The wise will hear and add learning,
     the intelligent will acquire guidance.
To understand a proverb and a parable,
     the words of the wise and their riddles.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,
     but fools despise wisdom and correction.

Hesiod 2

I've finally finished lines 12 through 26 of Works and Days



Was there but one kind of strife upon the earth?
No, there are two.  A man who came to know the first
would applaud; the second he would blame.  They are
two souls.  One fosters evil war and ceaseless fights;
Her no mortal loves, but under force and through
will of deathless gods, men honor heavy strife.
But indeed, the other one dark Night birthed first.
Heaven dwelling Zeus, who sits on high, placed her
in the roots of earth.  Much better to man is she:
rousing work in all alike - the lazy too -
for a man craves work when he sees another rich -
of a truth it urges him to plow for crops,
building well his home; neighbor with neighbor strives
goading on to wealth.  This strife is good for men.

A man of one book

Timeo hominem unius libri.

"I fear a man of one book."

The adage is attributed to Thomas Aquinas.  It has generally been used to disparage one whose learning was so narrow that he lacks the corrective of other points of view, other perspectives.  In its original use by Aquinas, however, it expressed the formidable opponent in a debate that is presented by someone who has specialized, when the debate is on his turf.  He is said to have recommended the deep study of a single book as the surest method to gain a good education.

Deep versus broad - the tension inherent in every autodidact's education.  For myself I like to combine both.  Broad surveys of the terrain, but when I find something that seems promising, I like to let it "possess" me as an obsession for a time.

Havel - Power of the Powerless 1

In Havel's classic essay, "The Power of the Powerless" he articulates the meaning, aims and basis for hope of the dissident movement in the Soviet Bloc in the years when hope seemed, well, farfetched. 

Along the way he makes a statement that strikes me as a fundamental political concept that strikes at the programs of both right and left.

"A genuine, profound and lasting change for the better...can no longer result from the victory (were such a victory possible) of any particular traditional political conception, which can ultimately only be external, that is a structural or systemic conception.  More than ever before, such a change will have to derive from human existence, from the fundamental reconstitution of the position of the people in the world, their relationships to themselves and to each other, and to the universe.  If a better economic and political model is to be created, then perhaps more than ever before it must derive from profound existential and moral changes in society.  This is not something that can be designed and introduced like a new car.  If it is to be more than just a new variation of the old degeneration, it must above all be an expression of life in the process of transforming itself.  A better system will not automatically ensure a better life.  In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed."

We live in a political age.  We are convinced that our solutions are political.  We think in terms of making changes by elections, parties in power and laws enacted.  The truth runs a little deeper.  Elections and parties and laws can enforce changes that have already occurred in the nature of a people.  They can't create those changes.  The American Revolution worked because it was fought to protect changes THAT HAD ALREADY OCCURRED among the American people in their two hundred years of separation from the motherland.  The French Revolution failed to create "equality, fraternity and liberty" because it was an attempt to CREATE A NEW SOCIETY from the top, by legislation and enforcement on a people who had neither the experience nor even necessarily the desire to live in the manner expected of them.

Alma's retreat from the Chief Judge's Seat in order to devote himself to the preaching of the word (Alma 4:15-19) seems to me to be to be based on the recognition of the priority of social change over political change.  When has society reaches a certain point (and I think in the United States we may very well be approaching it) the solutions are no longer political.

Isaiah 1:1-15

My long, slow working through Isaiah in Hebrew (with the help of numerous reference guides) is still progressing.  Here is my translation of the first part of the "Great Arraignment" -

The vision of Isaiah, son of Amoz,
   which he saw about Judah and Jerusalem
      in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, kings of Judah.
Hear heavens, give ear earth, for the Lord has spoken -
   Children have I taught and brought up
       and they have revolted against me.
The ox has known its owner
   and the donkey its master's feeding trough,
      but Israel has not known,
         my people have not understood.
Wo!  a nation sinning, a people heavy with iniquity,
   a seed doing evil, children corrupting,
      they have forsaken the Lord,
         despised the Holy One of Israel,
            they have drawn back.
Will you be struck again?
   You will increase rebellion.
      The whole head is diseased,
         the whole heart sick.
From the sole of the foot to the head
   there is no soundness -
      a wound, a bruise, an open sore,
         not pressed closed, not bound up, not softened with ointment.
Your country is waste,
   your cities burned by fire,
      enemies consume your land before you -
         Waste! as if overthrown of enemies.
The daughter of Zion is left
   as a hut in a vineyard,
      as a shack in a cucumber field,
         as a city besieged.
If the Lord of Hosts had not left us a tiny remnant
   we had been like Sodom,
      we had become as Gomorrah.
Hear the word of the Lord,
   leaders of Sodom,
      give ear to the law of your God,
         people of Gomorrah.
Why do I have a multitude of sacrifices?
   asked the Lord,
      I am satiated with offerings of rams,
         and the fat of plump calves.
            The blood of rams, and lambs and he-goats
               has not pleased me.
When you will come to appear before my face,
   who required this at your hands,
      to walk my courts?
Do not add to the bringing of false offerings.
   Incense, it is an abomination to me.
      New Moons and Sabbaths and the calling of convocations -
         I cannot endure iniquity and assemblies.
And when they reach forth their hands,
   I will turn my eyes from them.
      And when they multiply prayers,
         I do not listen -
            their hands are filled with blood.

Two extremes

Alter frenis, alter eget calcaribus.

"One needs a bridle, while another needs the spurs."

Most of us at any given point are in need of one or the other.

Community again

The Top 500 Poems is a collection of the 500 most anthologized poems in the English language.  I love picking up the book and approaching it from various angles - random, chronological, by author, by order of popularity.  Today it was Chronological.  Chaucer stands close to the beginning -

                                      .....a group
of sundry people, by chance fallen
into fellowship....

The Canterbury Tales

Seven Ways to be Happy Right Now

"If you do any of these seven things for two straight weeks, you will feel happier."

1)  Three Walks

     Studies from the Pennsylvania State and the American Psychosomatic Society
     "Half an hour of brisk walking a three times a week improves happiness."
     "Three thirty minute brisk walks or even jobs even improve recovery from clinical      depression....results were stronger than...using medication."

2)  The 20 Minute Replay

   A study from the University of Texas  "dramatically improves happiness"
   Write for 20 minutes a week about some positive experience.
   "you actually relive the experience as you're writing it and then relive it every time you read it.

3)  Random Acts of Kindness

    Study done at Stanford University
     five random acts of kindness a week  -
     over time you feel better about yourself and you feel appreciated, and short term
     "doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any      exercise we tested."

4)  A Complete Unplug

     Kansas State University
     Take some time periodically to deliberately unplug from electronics

5)  Hit Flow

     Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi
     Get totally absorbed in an activity you enjoy and are really good at.

6)  2 Minute Meditations

     Massachusetts General Hospital Study
     spend a few minutes each day quietly paying attention (mindfulness) to what is happening.
     More powerful than you think
     "parts of the brain associated with compassion and self awareness grew while parts associated with stress shrank."  Meditation can permanently rewire your brain to raise levels of happiness."

7)  Five Gratitudes

     Write down five things you are grateful for from the past week.
      A study from 2003 - "happier and healthier"

Alget qui non ardet.

Alget qui non ardet.

"That which does not burn grows cold" or "He grows cold who does not burn."

Love, interest, passion, testimony, commitment are a few of the things that require tending (much like a fire) in order to keep going.

Peck - Crisis and Community

Here, however, is the passage I was looking for when I picked up Peck again

"Genuine communities of a sort frequently develop in response to crisis.  Strangers in the waiting room of an intensive-care ward suddenly come to share each other's hopes and fears and joys and griefs as their loved ones lie across the hall on the 'critical list.'"

"On a larger scale, in the course of a minute a distant earthquake causes buildings to crumble and crush thousands of people to death in Mexico City.  Suddenly rich and poor alike are working together night and day to rescue the injured and care for the homeless.  Meanwhile men and women of all nations open their pocketbooks and their hearts to a people they have never seen, much less met, in a sudden consciousness of our common humanity."

"The problem is that once the crisis is over, so - virtually always - is the community.  The collective spirit goes out of the people as they return to their ordinary individual lives, and community is lost.  yet community is so beautiful that the time of crisis is often mourned.  Many Russians speak with great feeling about the brutal days of the siege of Leningrad, when they all pulled together.  American veterans still remember the muddy foxholes of World War II, when they had a depth of comradeship and meaning in their lives they have never since been able to quite recapture"

"The most successful community in this nation - probably the whole world - is Alcoholics Anonymous, the 'Fellowship of AA'....As with the victims of a natural disaster, AA starts with people in crisis.  Men and women come to it in a moment of breaking."

M. Scott Peck - Politics again (sorry)

Havel's description of the sense of community that arose in connection with the trial of the Plastic People of the Universe (who can explain rock band names?) put in mind of another author I haven't picked up for quite some time - M. Scott Peck (specifically A Different Drum, his book on the phenomenon of community).  Haven't yet had time to pursue it in any depth, but I DID run onto a quote the resonated with Capek's staking out the radical center-

"When people ask me to define myself politically, I tell them that I am a radical conservative.  Unless it is Thursday, when I say I am a radical moderate.  The word "radical" comes from the latin radix, meaning root--the same word from which we get "radish."  The proper radical is one who tries to get to the root of things, not to be distracted by superficials, to see the woods for the trees.  It is good to be a radical.  Anyone who thinks deeply will be one.  In the dictionary the closest synonym to "radical" is "fundamentalist."  Which only makes sense.  Someone who gets down to the root of things is someone who gets down to fundamentals.  Yet in our North American culture these words have come to have opposite meanings, as if a radical were necessarily some left-wing, bomb-throwing anarchist and fundamentalist automatically some right-wing primitive thinker."

Havel - Community

The feelings that arose in Havel at the trial of a rock band were shared by a group of other dissidents who gathered to support the accused.

"Only the exalting awareness of an important, shared experience, and only the urgency of the challenge that everyone felt in it, could have explained the rapid genesis of that very special, improvised community that came into being here for the duration of the trial, and which was definitely something more than an accidental assembly of friends of the accused and people who were interested in the trial.  For instance, a new and quite unusual etiquette appeared: no one bothered with introductions, getting acquainted or feeling one another out.  The usual conventions were dropped and the usual reticence disappeared, and this happened right before the eyes of several squads of those 'others' (though they wore no uniforms, they were identifiable at once).  Dozens of things were discussed that many of us, in other circumstances, might have been afraid to talk about even with one other person.  It was a community of people who were not only more considerate, communicative, and trusting toward each other, they were in as strange way democratic.  A distinguished elderly gentleman, a former member of the praesidium of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, spoke with long-haired youths he'd never seen in his life before, and they spoke uninhibitedly with him, though they had known him only from photographs.  In this situation, all reserve and inner reticence seemed to lose its point; in this atmosphere, all the inevitable 'buts' seemed ridiculous, insignificant, and evasive.  Everyone seemed to feel that at a time when all the chips are down, there are only two things one can do: gamble everything or throw in the cards."

Serpentum in sinu foves

"You are nourishing a serpent in your bosom"

A proverb that refers to a fable of Aesop's.  As one who has nursed more than one serpent in his bosom with the mistaken belief it would not bite me, it's a useful reminder.

Havel - the challenge of an example

Havel finds a new energy in the quiet dignity, courage and solidarity of the defendants in the trial -

"Somewhere deep down, however, I discerned yet another element in this experience, perhaps the most important of all.  It was something that aroused me, a challenge that was all the more urgent for being unintentional.  It was the challenge of example.  Suddenly, much of the wariness and caution that marks my behavior seemed petty to me.  I felt an increased revulsion towards all forms of guile, all attempts at painlessly worming one's way out of vital dilemmas.  Suddenly, I discovered in myself more determination in one direction, and more independence in another.  Suddenly, I felt disgusted with a whole world, in which - as I realized then - I still have one foot: the world of emergency exits."

Havel - Turning Points

In a short samizdat essay from 1977 (The Trial), Havel talks about one of the turning points of the Czech dissident movement, the arrest and trial of an underground rock band from Prague.

"It doesn't often happen and when it does it usually happens when least expected: somewhere, something slips out of joint and suddenly a particular event, because of an unforeseen interplay between its inner premises and more or less fortuitous external circumstances, crosses the threshold of it usual place in the everyday world, breaks through the shell of what it is supposed to be and what it seems, and reveals its innermost symbolic significance.  And something originally quite ordinary suddenly casts a surprising light on the time and the world we live in, and dramatically highlights the fundamental questions."

"....if a certain event slips out of joint - and if it does in the deeper sense that I have in mind here - then inevitably something slips out of joint in ourselves, too: a new view of the world gives us a new view of our own human potential, of what we are and might be.  Abruptly jerked out of our 'routine humanness,' we stand once more face to face with the most important question of all:  How do we settle accounts with ourselves."

Capek on Idleness

Witty and urbane, Capek sings the praises of idleness.  But wait...
As is sometimes the case with this man, there is more going on beneath the seemingly simple surface of these waters.  He's not being funny at all, he's trying to describe an odd state of mind he finds attractive from time to time.  A state of mind that's easiest to describe by negations -

"...idleness is neither relaxation nor amusement.  Idleness, pure perfect idleness, is neither a pastime nor time's extension; idleness is something negative: it is the absence of everything by which a person is occupied, diverted, distracted, interested, employed, annoyed, pleased, attracted, involved, entertained, bored, enchanted, fatigued, absorbed or confused; it is nothing, a negation, an intentlessness, a lack-purpose, I don't really know how to put it: in short, something perfect and rare."

It almost sounds a bit like the practice of "sitting Zen" doesn't it?

"Relaxation is a slow, ever-flowing current which gently laps and cradles you; resting is a dark, calm pool in which the angry foam and sediment of evil or intense moments are drifting away; laziness is an inlet covered with green algae, slime and frog's eggs; but idleness is a standing-still.  I has neither rhythm nor sound; it is fixed, it does not progress...Water-lifeless and transparent."

This meditation of sorts, though seemingly nothing, is not without effect:

"And when a person is through idling, he arises and returns as if from another world.  Everything is a little alien and different"

Capek on Masaryk

In his essay "At the Crossroads of Europe" Capek gives a warm appraisal of his friend "T. G. Masaryk, the Liberator and first President of our Republic."

"For him, who for eighteen years and to such a ripe old age guided our State, politics represented a realization of love of our fellow men; in his eyes democracy and liberty were based on respect for man, for every man; they issued from recognition of his immortal soul and the infinite value of human life; for Masaryk the ultimate goal of all honest politics and all true statesmanship was to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth."

 It is interesting to think of the times when a figure like Masaryk can actually be effective in political life in our world.  I don't think they occur very often.  We (as mortals) are particularly open to them at the inception of what we might term the founding epoch of a national cycle.  The optimism and enthusiasm of new freedoms and opportunities create a place where a Masaryk, a Gandhi, a Mandela, or a Havel, can actually have a substantial political impact as well as a spiritual influence. 

Capek - Anticipation

Just a charming little passage about something that in our 21st century has almost passed away - the experience of waiting for the mail.

"No one these days gets out of bed believing that today, perhaps, he will accomplish something undreamed-of and surprising; and yet at the bottom of his heart he trembles incessantly in the expectation that today something unpredictable and grand will happen, that something will come from somewhere....

"And most curious of all is that this state of eternal expectation overcomes even people who on the whole don't have anything to wait for; they don't have an uncle in America, they don't long for something from somewhere that would intervene in their lives, and they would be terrified if they had to accept  a new assignment of some kind; and yet, at the postman's ring, they are seized with a glimmer of anxiety or hope that perhaps...who knows...something has come from somewhere in this large, strange world...God be praised, it's only some printed matter, an ad for coal by the truckload or in bags; but the eternal human hope that something unforeseen and wonderful will happen never definitively and irrevocably fails."

Havel on Political Parties

From an interview in 1987,

"I've come to be rather skeptical about the very principle of mass political parties.  I suspect that involvement in government inevitably leads to parties' bureaucratization, corruption, and loss of democracy.  I'm not opposed to solidarity and cohesion of various interest groups of like minded people.  It's just that I'm against anything that serves to cloud personal responsibility, or rewards anyone with privileges for devotion to a particular power-oriented group."

Havel - Evasive Thinking 2

"Just think, for instance, of how confidently we make predictions about what will be, and with what remarkable precision we can interpret, explain, and classify what has already happened.  Yet we never seem to notice how suspiciously often what happens - in fact - does not conform to what - according to our prognoses - was to have happened.  We know with utter certainty what should happen, and when it turns out differently, we also know why it had to be different.  The only thing that causes us trouble is knowing what will really happen.  To know that assumes knowing how things really are now.  But that is precisely where the catch lies: between a detailed prediction of the future and a broad interpretation of the past, there is somehow no room for what is most important of all - a down-to-earth analysis of the present."


I'm struck by how much this quote reminds me of every political talk radio host (right or left) I've ever listened to.  They are all (in their own eyes) so right, so precisely on, so prescient, so sure.


The problem with our political theories is that we are unable to see it when "a fact is in conflict with an a priori interpretation of it."  We have already pre-judged and our prejudice all to often blinds us to what is right in front of our very eyes, and, even more importantly, to its meaning.

Havel - On Evasive Thinking

It's an election year in the United States, and a particularly bizarre and discouraging one.  I'm looking forward to reading Havel again if only to clarify my own muddled thinking about politics.  My first encounter with the writings of Havel the dissident fell into my life like a lightning bolt.  I'm looking back now across the chasm of a decade and a half and wondering to myself what I found so relevant in the writings of a man fighting totalitarianism.  Who was that man who embraced Havel so enthusiastically and what do I still have in common with him?

The speech, On Evasive Thinking, was given in 1965 and published in 1968 during the short lived Prague Spring, when Alexander Dubcek attempted a liberalization of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.  Think of it as an early attempt at "glasnost."

I find in this speech a certain mistrust of political rhetoric and labels that resonates with my own distrusts.  We label a thing - socialist, conservative, reactionary, progressive, we throw it onto a particular spectrum of interpretations and lump it together with a lot of other things with which it may or may not have much in common and we feel we have now somehow "dealt with it."  The problem with political rhetoric is it deals with broad generalities and ignores the very specific incidents and situations we confront.  In Havel's words-

"The praiseworthy attempt to see things in their broader context becomes so formalized that instead of applying that technique in particular, unique ways, appropriate to a given reality, it becomes a single and widely used model of thinking with a special capacity to dissolve - in the vagueness of all the possible wider contexts - everything particular in that reality.  Thus what looks like an attempt to see something in a complex way in fact results in a complex form of blindness.  For if we can't see individual specific things, we can't see anything at all.  And the more we know only what is apparent about reality, the less we know about reality in fact."

I find myself squirming at the ideology of both left and right in politics.  Both are working with a preconceived set of interpretations, a collection of emotionally charged stock phrases and a set of ready made caricatures of their opponents that prevent their holders from actually perceiving concrete problems in their full complexity. 

John Keane - Vaclav Havel

I wasn't sure at first I was going to be able to put up with Keane's style.  I'm beginning to warm to the fact that he makes no attempt to pretend to objectivity.  The freewheeling manner of his narrative voice gives him a chance to editorialize quite frequently.  At times, it generates quite a bit of insight.  A lengthy diversion on Dubcek's political fortunes made a useful point about what he calls the "politics of retreat." 

Dubcek and his opponents have always judged him by the sine qua non of political measurement - did he gain or lose power?  Dubcek, however, found himself in a situation little discussed, but that has actually been fairly common in my lifetime.  Keane points out that in the "politics of retreat," a politician who has determined to liberalize or even bring an end to a totalitarian system soon finds out that he has "to be ruined for the good of others."

Keane's lengthy list of those who had to learn this "most difficult of all political skills" included Dubcek of Czechoslovakia, Kadar of Hungary, Suarez of Spain, Karamanlis of Greece, Jaruzelski of Poland, Gorbachev of the USSR and to some degree Khrushchev before him.  He might have added De Klerk from South Africa.  Considering how crucial this activity has been to the history of the 20th century it's interesting that we haven't given it more thought and recognition.  I think to some degree we share the career politician's scale of measurement of success - did he gain or lose power?  In the politics of retreat, however, the crucial values  are

• the courage to recognize the need to "withdraw and retreat from unworkable political positions" BEFORE those positions become undeniably disastrous (it's no virtue to flee Saigon before an advancing army).
• an attachment to the rightness of what needs to be done that supersedes what you know you would have to do maintain yourself in power.

Even those whose liberalizations seemed to be failures (Khrushchev, Nagy, Dubcek) can be seen as having created crucial turning points in the history of their totalitarian systems.  In time the seeds they sowed would be reaped by others.

Capek - Winter

A beautifully apt description of what happens to a landscape under a really good snow storm:

"Peacefully, endlessly, snow kept falling over the frozen countryside.  Like snow, silence too always comes floating down, thought Boura, nestled in his cabin....The land was turning simpler and simpler before his eyes.  It coalesced, widened, undulated in white waves untroubled by the disorderly traces of life."

Karel Capek, Footprints

Elie Weisel - his mysterious mentor

Just want to record this story for future reference - Paris 1947

"Back in France, and still under the care of the O.S.E., Wiesel for two years fell under the spell, the influence, and finally the educational training of one of the most mysterious and extraordinary men he was ever to meet.  He was a Jew, and the name he gave people was simply Shushani, though he had not been named Shushani at birth.  He was a diminutive, shabbily dressed little man with a large head and a tiny hat atop it, and dusty glasses.  He never said anything about who he was or how he had come to be in France, not to mention where he had been brought up.  He had hung around the Shabbat services at the O.S.E. home outside Paris where Wiesel had moved, saying little or nothing, but evidently noticing everything."

"One day, as Wiesel was returning to the home by train from Paris, Shushani was sitting in the same compartment.  Has though he had known Wiesel for years, he began to question him about the book he was reading.  Wiesel shyly revealed that he was preparing a talk on Job for a forthcoming meeting at the home.  Shushani began to talk about Job, and Wiesel began to grasp what a startlingly brilliant and insightful mind he was.  Over the next year and a half, Shushani talked frequently with Wiesel and the other Jewish students at the home."

"His appearance, as if from nowhere, and his equally mysterious origins, at first frightened Wiesel a little.  But as he came to know him and derive immense insights into the entire world of learning, especially Jewish learning, from him, the encounter appears to have had a profound impact on the young man."

"'I am increasingly convinced,' Wiesel has written in his Memoirs, "that he must be considered one of the great, disturbing figures of our tradition.  He saw his role as that of agitator and troublemaker.  He upset the believer by demonstrating the fragility of his faith; he shook the heretic by making him feel the torments of the void.'  The effect of Shushani's genius and teaching on Wiesel seems to have been incalculable.  'What I know is,' Wiesel writes today, 'that I would not be the man I am, the Jew I am, had not an astonishing, disconcerting vagabond accosted me one day to inform me that I understand nothing.'"

"Shushani was a Talmudic scholar, originally from Lithuania, and he spoke Yiddish with a strong Lithuanian lilt.  His name, Wiesel discovered later, was Mordechai Rosenbaum.  He appeared to have memorized the entire Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, knew Sanskrit, the Greek and Latin classics, and innumerable modern languages.  To demonstrate his genius to Wiesel, like a juggler showing off new tricks, he once learned Hungarian in two weeks.  One evening, he lectured to the orphans at the O.S.E. home at Taverny for four hours straight simply on the  very first verse of the book of Isaiah."

"He passed himself off as a rabbi, but no one knew where he had acquired his learning, or even, at the time, where he was from.  He never seemed to be reading a book.  for some reason, though, he imparted to Wiesel huge chunks of his knowledge and understanding, as though gasping intuitively that Wiesel among few others was capable of absorbing it all.  He was absolutely silent about his roots, hi past, even his close relatives, if any of them were alive.  Once, when Wiesel was rash enough to ask him a personal question.  Shushani angrily closed off any further discussion of it.  Only later, piecing together morsels of information from others had bumped into him in different parts of the world, did Wiesel learn his real name or from where he originally came."

"There was something deeply mysterious to Wiesel about Shushani and his sudden appearance.  For a moment the youth wondered if there was something of the infernal supernatural about him.  He wrote indecipherable manuscripts in an unknown script--some of which Wiesel apparently owns--and in 1965 he died in Montevideo, Uruguay.  Why had he gone there?  No one seemed to know.  Where did he get money to live on?  No one was sure about that, though it was rumored that famous professors in France paid huge sums of money to  be instructed by him."

Reference in Aikman is to Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea. (New York, Alfred A. Knopf), p. 130.

If you seriously believe in the existence of translated beings (and I do) the question arises within you of what they have done and are doing behind the scenes of history.  You have a tendency to look for possible instances of their ministry. 

Karel Capek and the problem with letting the market solve your problems....

I just finished R.U.R., Capek's most famous play, and the work of literature that introduced the word "robot" into the world vocabulary.  The second act of the play shows mankind being slowly overwhelmed by the very technology they thought was serving them.  The last survivors (ironically those who ran the company that produced the robots that destroyed humanity) are arguing about who was responsible.  In a remarkably prescient speech one of the characters (his name is Busman) points out the smoking gun-

"My, you are naïve.  No doubt you think that the plant director controls production?  Not at all.  Demand controls production.  The whole world wanted its Robots.  My boy, we did nothing but ride the avalanche of demand, and all the while kept blathering on--about technology, about the social question, about progress, about very interesting things.  As though this rhetoric of ours could somehow direct the course of the thing.  And all the while the whole mess picked up speed under its own weight, faster, faster, still faster--and every beastly, profiteering order added another pebble to the avalanche.  And there you have it folks."

Busman puts his finger right on the problem with a society that knowingly allows its prime organizing feature to be the market:

"history is not made by great dreams, but by the petty wants of all respectable, moderately thievish, and selfish people, i.e., of everyone.  All our ideas, loves, plans, heroic ideals, all of those lofty things are worthless."

Karel Capek - Toward the Radical Center

"Philosophically as well as politically, Capek was a man of the center, but not in the sense used by hostile critics.  The center he was aiming for was not a lukewarm middle ground between extremes.  It was a radical center, radical in the original sense of the word: at the root of things."

Elie Wiesel - Words

"Be careful of words," Wiesel quotes a learned rabbi as saying.  "They're dangerous.  Be wary of them.  They beget either demons or angels.  It's up to you to give life to one or the other."

Pope John Paul II - Swing Wide the Gates

"Be not afraid!  Open up, no, swing wide the gates to Christ.  Open up to his saving power the confines of the state, open up economic and political systems, the vast empires of culture, civilization and development....Be not afraid!

Julian of Norwich - Materialism

I finished Terryl Givens "Crucible of Doubt."  The main impact of the book was to arouse an interest in Julian of Norwich and Edward Beecher.  There's not a lot of time right now to pursue either one in depth, but I ran onto a collection of 30 short passages from Julian's work.

"This is the reason why those who deliberately occupy themselves with earthly business, seeking worldly well-being, have no God's rest in their hearts; for they love and seek their rest in this thing which is so little and in which there is no rest, and do not know God who is almighty, all wise and all good.  God wishes to be known, and it pleases him that we should rest in him; for all things which are beneath him are not sufficient for us."

Pope John Paul II - Spiritual discipline

Karol Wojtyla's spiritual apprenticeship to an unassuming Polish Tailor -

"Tyranowski, at the request of some Salesian fathers, had become involved in a program called the "Living Rosary" that would help young Poles, under wartime conditions, walk a disciplined, spiritual, Catholic life and sharpen their overall spiritual appetite....He would meet with them in his cramped, second-story apartment in groups to share his insights into living the spiritual life at a far deeper level than they were familiar with.  He gave them assignments to fortify their self-discipline: daily prayer times, Bible readings, periods of meditation; and he asked them to keep a close spiritual diary of their efforts in these areas. 'Every moment must be put to use,' he would say, and Karol used this wisdom to fuel his own phenomenal energy throughout the rest of his life."

Wojtyla's own description of Tyranowski -

"one of those unknown saints, hidden like a marvelous light at the bottom of life, at a depth where night usually reigns....In his words, in his spirituality, and in the example of a life given entirely to God alone, he represented a new world that I did not yet know.  I saw the beauty of a soul opened up by grace."

Dies diem docet

Dies diem docet.

(One) day teaches (another) day.

The experience we gain today, will be available to us tomorrow.  Today can be illuminated by yesterday's experience. 

Mother Theresa - Something Beautiful for God

"I have not begged from the time we started the work.  But we go to the people - the Hindus, the Mohammedans, and the Christians - and I tell them: 'I have come to give you a chance to do something beautiful for God.'  And the people, they want to do something beautiful for God, and they come forward."

Mother Theresa - Vocation

"While I was going by train from Calcutta to Darjeeling to participate in spiritual exercises, I was quietly praying when I clearly felt a call within my calling.  The message was very clear.  I had to leave the convent and consecrate myself to helping the poor by living among them.  It was a command."

------

"I understood what I needed to do, but I did not yet know how to go about it."

Mother Theresa and Vocation

A conversation between young Agnes Bojaxhiu and her priest

"How can you know when the Lord is calling you into some vocation," she asked Father Jambrenkovic. 

"You can know by the happiness you feel," he told her.  "If you are glad at the thought that God may be calling you to serve Him and your neighbor, this may well be the best proof of your vocation.  A deep joy is like the compass which points out the proper direction for your life.  One should follow this, even when one is venturing upon a difficult path."

Mother Theresa on Faith

"You need double grace for faith.  First, for the grace itself, and then for the courage to act upon it."

More Solzhenitsyn

"Everybody has a purpose and the main purpose of each of us is how to understand it.  Given the everyday preoccupations of ordinary life, people don't spend enough time thinking about this.  They have their daily troubles.  Only self-deepening, reflection, prayer, only reflection can discover that purpose."

Solzhenitsyn

An insight that came to Solzhenitsyn in the gulag during the first stages of his conversion from Marxism while he lay "on rotting prison straw" -

"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts.  This line shifts.  Inside us it oscillates with the years.  And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good remains.  And even in the best of hearts, there remains....an unuprooted small corner of evil."

Tao Te Ching - Verse 25

一      yī     one

"In the country there are four greats and the king is one among them."
                                        Robert G. Henricks

My paraphrase of the last half of verse 25, like Starr's translation, takes the word for king as a symbol for the potential of any man who touches greatness.

There are four things
     that can be called great-
          the Way,
          the cosmos,
          the world,
          a great man.
There are four great things in the universe,
     and a great man is one of them.
Men are enlightened through the world,
     the world gets its law from the cosmos,
          the cosmos is an expression of the Way,
               and the Way unfolds itself.

Tao Te Ching - Verse 22

一      yī     one

In Verse 22 the text speaks of the sage "embracing the one" --

"So the sage embraces the One
     and becomes a model for the world"
                              Jonathan Starr

Personal Paraphrase

Broken,
     then whole.
Bent,
     then straight.
Empty,
     then filled.
Worn out,
     then renewed.
Need,
     then supply.
Excess,
     then confusion.

Thus the wise man holds to the One,
     and becomes a light to the whole world.
Not displaying himself,
     he shines.
Not justifying himself,
     he is manifest.
Not boasting,
     he is effective.
Taking no pride in himself,
     he leads.
Because he does not compete,
     he has no competitors.

The old saying
     "Broken, then whole"
          is surely true.

Become whole.
     Turn.

Tao Te Ching - Verse 14

一      yī     one

One or unity appears in the opening lines of verse 14 -

Eyes look but cannot see it
Ears listen but cannot hear it
Hands grasp but cannot touch it
Beyond the senses lies the great Unity-
     invisible, inaudible, intangible
                              Jonathan Starr

As with Verse 11, my personal paraphrase does not pick up the word "one" -

You can't see it,
     it's invisible.
You can't hear it,
     it's inaudible.
you can't touch it,
     it's intangible.
No physical test can reveal
     its presence or absence,
     its structure or qualities.
Boundless and eternal,
     it is beyond our names and explanations.

But if you hold fast to the timeless Way
     you can master the present moment,
     and grasp its historical context.
The Way provides an unbroken link
     to all that is vital and living
     from every age

Great Souls - Nelson Mandela quote

"All men have a core of decency, and...if their heart is touched they are capable of changing."

Amazing the power that this one insight had in transforming the path of an entire nation.

Socrates' Nobility

I'd like to take leave of Socrates (at least for this year), though, with a look at him as he appears in his best light.

A)   In addition to his single-minded pursuit of his calling, he possessed an uncommon dedication to the right.

1)    "Through all my life, I shall prove to have been just the same, both in public life, if I have done anything there, and in private life; I have never given way to anyone in anything contrary to right."

                                    Apology

2)    His two recorded political stands, reveal integrity and courage in the face of very real personal danger.

                        "All my anxiety was to do nothing unjust or wrong."

                                    Apology

3)    The argument that convinced him to stay and face his execution was based on a principle straight out of the Sermon on the Mount”

                        "We must not do wrong at all....Not even, when wronged, wrong in return."

                                    Crito

B)   He was conscious of how much this single-mindedness and dedication put him out of step with his society and its institutions, and that this involved some danger.

1)    "Some one of you then might put in and ask...'all this talk about you, and such a reputation, has not arisen, I presume, when you were working at nothing more       unusual than others."

                                    Apology

2)    "So I went to one after another after that, and saw that I was disliked, and I sorrowed and feared; but still it seemed necessary to hold the god's business of highest importance."

                                    Apology

3)    "No man in the world will come off safe who honestly opposes either you or any other multitude, and tries to hinder the many unjust and illegal doings in a state.  It is necessary that one who really and truly fights for the right, if he is to survive even for a short time, shall act as a private man, not as a public man."

                                    Apology

4)    "Do you think I should have survived all these years, if I had engaged in public business, and if then I had acted as a good man should, and defended the just, and made that, as is one's duty, my chief concern?  Far from it gentlemen."

                                    Apology

5)    "What is proper for me to suffer or to pay, for not having the sense to be idle in my life, and for neglecting what most people care about, moneymaking and housekeeping and military appointments and oratory, and besides, all the posts and plots and parties which arise in this city - for believing myself to be really too honest to go after these things and survive?"

                                    Apology

6)    "Then we must not do wrong in return, or do evil to anyone in the world, however we may be treated by them.  Take care, my dear Criton, when you agree to this, that you don't agree against your real opinion; for I know that only a few do believe it, or ever will.  Then those who believe it and those who do not have not common principle, but necessarily they must despise each other when they see their different principles."

Crito