Chief Characteristics of Satori - 1

"1. Irrationality.  By this I mean that satori is not a conclusion to be reached by reasoning, and defies all intellectual determination.  Those who have experienced it are always at a loss to explain it coherently or logically.  When it is explained at all...its content more or less undergoes a mutilation....The satori experience is thus always characterized by irrationality, inexplicability, and incommunicability.
     .....There is nothing here of cool reasoning and quiet metaphysical or epistemological analysis, but of a certain desperate will to break through an insurmountable barrier, of the will impelled by some irrational or unconscious power behind it."

Havel - Faith V

"Even though faith can assume the shape of particular human moods, states, loves and other psychological characteristics and expressions, it goes considerably further, pointing man - like responsibility, with which it is closely linked - toward something that is both beyond things and within them: their 'absolute horizon.'  This horizon, as the originator, the bearer, and the giver of meaning, far from being a cold, abstract astronomical and metaphysical quantum is, as it turns out, the source of those vital forces that exalt man, humanity and history.  It might be put thus: if man is a kind of concentrated reprise of the great miracle of Being, then all visible expressions of his miraculousness have their origin in what primordially and uniquely binds him to the miraculousness of Being, that is, in his faith in the meaning of that miracle..  To be sure it is a carte blanche faith, but it is precisely this endless tension between the living experience of meaning on the one hand, and its unknowableness on the other, that gives real inner tension to all the actions by which man represents himself as man."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Woman as the Temptress - Campbell

II - Initiation
     3 - Woman as the Temptress

"The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is.  Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell.  Rather, we tend to perfume, whitewash, and reinterpret; meanwhile imagining that all the flies in the ointment, al the hairs in the soup, are the faults of some unpleasant someone else.
     But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to pure, the pure, pure soul....The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond her, surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond.
          For a God called him - called him many times,
          From many sides at once: "Ho, Oedipus,
          Thou, Oedipus, why are we tarrying?
           It is full long that thou art stayed for; come!"
     Where this Oedipus-Hamlet revulsion remains to beset the soul, there the world, the body, and woman above all, become the symbols no longer of victory but of defeat.  A monastic-puritanical, world-negating ethical system then radically and immediately transfigures all the images of myth.  No longer can the hero rest in innocence with the goddess of the flesh; for she is become the queen of sin."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Campbell her quotes the play Oedipus Coloneus.

Havel - Faith IV

"At the same time, it is not important at all how, and to what extent, you think about your faith, or whether you are aware of it at all; the only thing that matters is how profoundly the assumption of meaning, or the longing for it, lies dormant in the very bowels of your relationship to the world and of all your actions.  I mean both the meaning of individual entities and 'meaning altogether' (as the unique and ultimate source of the meaning of individual entities), meaning that transcends the relative limits of space, time or utilitarian (i.e. relativistic) human calculation. (For it is only in the light of the eternal, absolute 'memory of being,' that most of the good things one does can be explained.)  And so, just as that meaning transcends the relative world whose meaning it constitutes, so faith in meaning transcends all relative utility, and is therefore independent of how things turn out: everything - even what turns out badly - has its own admittedly obscure meaning in relation to faith.  Without this assumption of meaning or a longing for it, the experience of nonsense - absence of meaning - would be unthinkable.  (That is the case with so-called absurd art which, more than anything else - because it is a desperate cry against the loss of meaning - contains faith; the only art which may be able to get along without faith is strictly commercial art.)  In any case faith, with its profound assumption of meaning, has its natural antithesis in the experience of nothingness; they are interrelated and human life is in fact a constant struggle for our souls waged by these two powers.  If nothingness wins out, dramatic tension vanishes, man surrenders to apathy, and faith and meaning exist only as a backdrop against which others become aware of his fall."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Spiritual growth as an increase in consciousness and awareness

II - Initiation
     3 - Woman as the Temptress

"...every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness.  Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.  The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale.  Therefore it is formulated in the broadest terms.  The individual has only to discover his position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls.  Who and where are his ogres?  Those are the reflections of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity.  What are his ideals?  Those are the symptoms of his grasp of life."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Havel - Faith III

"But what, in fact, is this genuine faith?  Where does it come from, what does it consist in and what is it directed toward?  I don't have an exhaustive answer, of course, so I shall try to indicate only a couple of obvious things.  Faith in this sense can, and usually does, assume specific forms, that is, it is usually 'faith in something,' but that 'something' is not the decisive factor, it is not, that is, a fetish of some kind, a challenge to which would either shake the faith or require  a rapid change of fetish.  Genuine faith is original, primal and discrete; it precedes its object (if it has one).  In other words, it is faith that animates its object, not the other way around.  (Naturally an opposite, 'reciprocal' tendency exists as well, but I think it is always secondary, a reflex caused by the main factor.)  This is one of the ways in which genuine faith differs from the optimist's enthusiasm: it does not draw its energy from some particular reality or assumption, on whose existence it is utterly dependent and with whose loss it would collapse like a pricked balloon.  It is not a state of enchantment, induced by the narcotic of an evocative object, but rather an intrinsic 'state of the spirit,' a profound 'existential dimension,' an inner direction that you either have or don't have, and which - if you have it - raises your entire existence onto a kind of higher level of being."

Vaclav Havel
"Letters to Olga"

As a Mormon, how do I take this description of faith - that the experience supersedes its object?

As one for whom faith is, by definition, "Faith in Christ," it seems unlikely that I could agree with the statement that my faith's object, Christ, is not the 'decisive factor.'  And yet, I catch a meaning here that does to some degree accord with my experience--

Faith is a relationship of trust with God.  Your conception of God may be incomplete and partially erroneous (and whose isn't to some degree?), but your experience with his reality has built a trust that is not dependent on the perfection of your personal conception.  I've known plenty of Mormons whose faith was in what Havel calls a "fetish" - a particular, concrete conception of how things are.  When such a person runs into a thorny knot where some portion of Joseph Smith's life doesn't seem to match one's picture of what the prophet should have been like, or the understanding of 21st century science doesn't match one's understanding of what our doctrine is, he often turns (sometimes with astonishing rapidity) to a positivistic atheism in response.  His faith was never a genuine relationship with deity (genuine faith is a little more difficult to shake than that).  He believed in the finger that pointed at the moon, but never really had that deep of an experience of the moon itself.

How to handle "falling off the wagon"

"When thou hast been compelled by circumstances to be disturbed in a manner, quickly return to thyself and do not continue out of tune longer than the compulsion lasts; for thou wilt have more mastery over the harmony by continually recurring to it."

Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

A different take on "the best revenge"

"The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong doer."

Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

The Mystical Marriage

II - Initiation
     3 - Woman as the Temptress

"The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero's total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master.  And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness cam to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full possession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride.  With that he knows that he and the father are one: he is in the father's place."
 
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces 

Havel - Faith II

"Genuine faith is something far more profound and mysterious, and it certainly doesn't depend on how reality appears to one at a given moment.  For this reason, too, only someone with faith in the deeper sense of the word will be able to see things as they really are (or rather be open to reality, i.e., to phenomena), and not distort them in one way or another, since he has no personal, emotive reasons for so doing.  This, of course, is not true of the man who lacks faith: he has no reason whatever to try to get to the bottom of reality, for such an effort - perhaps more than any other - requires faith, and is unthinkable without it.  The faithless man simply tries to survive with the least possible pain and discomfort and is indifferent to everything else.  Any claims he makes about reality will usually, in one way or another, serve his "conception" of life - in other words, again, merely what suits him.  He is not open without prejudice to all the dimensions of reality."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

An interesting insight into the adversary?

"...the ancient betrayers most evil and most vile snares vomit forth blackest murder with such great passion that the human intellect cannot fathom its insanity."

Hildegard of Bingen
Scivias

It's not an attribute I have really ever before associated with Satan, but I think it follows logically from what I do know of him.  Satan is insane. 

Food for thought.

Havel - Faith I

"For the New Year, I wrote that the most important thing of all is for you not to lose faith and hope.  As promised, I'd like to return briefly to that subject.
     First of all: when I speak of faith and hope, I'm not thinking of optimism in the conventional sense, by which I we usually mean the belief that 'everything will turn out well.'  I don't share such a belief and consider it - when expressed in that general way - a dangerous illusion.  I don't know how 'everything' will turn out and therefore I have to admit the possibility everything - or at least most things - will turn out badly.  Faith, however, does not depend upon prognoses about possible outcome.  One may imagine a man with no faith who believes everything will turn out well, and a man with faith who expects everything to turn out badly.  Optimism as I understand it here is not unequivocably positive and life-giving, but may well be the opposite: I have met many people who were full of euphoria and élan, most of it overblown, when they felt things would turn out well, but when they came round to the opposite point of view - usually at the first opportunity - they suddenly became profoundly skeptical.  Their skepticism (usually expressed in catastrophic visions) was of course just as emotive, superficial and selective as their previous enthusiasm had been; it was merely the other side of the same coin.  In short, the need for illusions in order to live one's life is not an expression of strength, but of weakness, and the consequences of such a life are just what one would expect."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Temptation

Eros's warnings to Psyche can be applied to many situations of the slow assault of a growing temptation -

"Fortune...threatens you with mortal danger....Don't you see the danger that threatens you?  Fortune is now engaging your outposts, and if you do not stand very firmly on your guard she will soon be grappling with you hand to hand....the day of reckoning and the last chance are here...the enemy arrayed in arms against you; they have marched out and drawn up their line, and sounded the trumpet call; with drawn sword..."

Apuleius
The Golden Ass

Eros

Modern Western Society tends to limit erotic love to the purely physical, but the classical conception was broader than that.  When the tern accuses Eros of neglecting his godly duties, his absence doesn't result in a lessened physical drive in humanity -

"there is no pleasure anywhere, no grace, no charm, everything is rough, savage, uncouth.  There are no more marriages, no more mutual friendships, no children's love, nothing but endless squalor and repellent, distasteful, and sordid couplings."

Apuleius
The Golden Ass

Eros, in its fullest and deepest sense, is so much more than the sating of physical appetite. Much that our society terms "erotic" lacks the grace, charm, refinement, friendship, love, and commitment that mark the best that Eros offers. 

The power of concentrated effort

"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull."

Shakespeare
All's Well That Ends Well

The politics of the disinterested observer

"We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon."

Shakespeare
King Lear

I've always found the phrase "as if we were God's spies" evocative.

Lear's progress

I finished Lear this week.  I was touched again by Lear's progress from a self centered, shallow man to a deeper, more compassionate, aware and thoughtful human being.  I'm always caught by that bittersweet turning point in the storm where he first begins to think about the ills of others.  First the fool -

"Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?"

And then a broader consideration for all the poor -

"Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this."

As it does for all of us, the growing awareness of needs we might have meet brings remorse.

The two poles of my intellectual life

"The debate the two men [Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem] conducted...ultimately concerned nothing less than the question of how to create the most profound life work possible - how to avoid misspending one's time on earth.  Do we mine down as deep as we can go into the shaft of our own personal origins?  Or do we strive to disseminate our energies and insights as broadly as possible  across the panorama of human production?"

George Prochnik
Stranger in a Strange Land

Gershom Scholem - Zionism and Utopianism

"The building of the land of the Bible and the foundation of the State of Israel represent, if you will allow me to use a daring formulation, a utopian retreat of the Jews into their own history," Scholem wrote.  He considered an exclamation by the philosopher Hermann Cohen against the Zionists - "Those fellows want to be happy!" - the most profound statement made by an opponent of the movement.

George Prochnik
Stranger in a Strange Land