When we’ve been there 10,000 years

An intriguing article about long-term thinking. It is obvious to everyone that short-term thinking has led us to most of the financial and environmental disasters we are facing today. It is interesting that we choose to calculate our impact only up to a certain point, and that point is artificial. 3 years? 5 years? 10, 15 years? Why these numbers? One reason is that prediction gets worse as we look out into the future. More variables, more fuzziness, less accuracy. Think: weather forecasting.

But are we really like the weather? Or better, is it important, or even needed, that we predict every rain shower in our lives, individual and collective, with precision, or is it more beneficial, and in a certain way more accurate, to say “monsoon season ahead” and leave it at that. Sometimes vagueness is more accurate, especially when the need of precision leads to paralysis or artificial inflation of some numbers to compensate for the lack of actual, you know, precision!

The part of this essay that has me thinking most, though, is this sentence: “we are part of an enormous flow of life and that we have an obligation to it.”

Now it seems sensible to say I am responsible for the quality of life of my children until they are old enough to work for their own quality of life. But these are partly biological and partly legal constraints. Biology imposes about 12-15 years, maybe 20 with our lazier Western ways, of responsibility on parents for their children. Legal because we decided that 18 is the ideal number of years for a human to reach the age of consent. Why? Not sure, and I am certain there is a nice story behind it. Historically speaking that is pretty late.

But I digress, the challenge for me is the obligation. This leads to all sorts of categorical imperatives which I am very unclear about (if you want to read up on categorical imperatives go here )

But here is the bone I am gnawing on: I concede that I do have an obligation towards my children. I fail to see where that “automagically” translates into an obligation towards other people, for example, let alone other people’s children (I have seen them, and I want no part of them!). I may want to voluntarily accept responsibility for others, and it seems to me this is quite a reasonable morality, but I do not see where I am obligated to do so.

If someone is a great parent, and in all other ways pursues only their own happiness, are they at fault for the sad state of our world?

Then we add another level.  Kant proposes a “Humanity” formulation where he holds that we should never treat “humanity” (in myself as well as in others) as a means to my happiness, but as an end in itself. This means that I cannot use people as an object of my pleasure. It also means I cannot judge another person as more or less worthy of respect. A person, by the fact that they are a person, is worthy of all respect – they are an “end” not a means or a tool.

But still, am I obligated to change my own pursuit of happiness to satisfy the, quite often, conflicting needs of others? Someone’s happiness may be the exact reverse of mine, and the means to achieve it might (frequently does) run counter to, or downright disrupt, my own pursuits. So where I am I left?

This clearly is a little ways away from the idea that we should think ahead 100 or 1000 years. While taking actions with concern for the future seems prudent, I am not sure at all it is wise. Mostly because I have absolutely no idea or capacity to predict all the consequences and unintended consequences of my actions today.

This concern for 1000 years in the future, or Kant’s formulations, are not quite at the same level of commitment to others that Jesus demands. Jesus say we are to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. This would seem to imply that the pursuit of my own happiness must be tied with the happiness of others. In Biblical terms most especially the happiness of the weak (widows, orphans).

But the critical thing here is the word “love.” There can be no obligation to love. Love springs from a grateful heart. A grateful heart comes from true humility. True humility comes from knowing our precise value in the Universe. That value is that of belonging to a group (“the world”) that its Creator so loved (first!) that he gave His only Son so that all members of that group might be free to love.

Love collapses time into eternity. Which leaves us with the much wiser formulation by Augustine: “Love, and do what you will. If you keep silence, do it out of love. If you cry out, do it out of love. If you refrain from punishing, do it out of love.”

Unethical Christianity

Antropofagia, de Tarsila do Amaral (1929)

I have been wondering for quite some time now about the ethical underpinnings of spiritual practice in the West. The first time it hit me was in talking to a Buddhist about karma. She said that the West interprets karma in an ethical way, with a “just deserts” implication. The original term has no such weight though. It is much more like gravity or electricity. Just karma. No judgement, no punishment. And punishment is always how I thought of karma, or at best a punishment/reward cosmic mechanism.

Moving away from this technical discussion I started to notice that pretty much everything in Western spirituality is fundamentally ethical. It is all about rewarding the good and punishing the bad, about going towards (or grabbing closer) the good fruits, and throwing out (expelling, purging) the bad rotten fruit. Even the rottenness of fruit carries some moral undertones. Or at least it does to me. Like it is the fruit’s fault that it has gone bad. And again “gone bad” as a description is a big hint.

Does it need to be this way? Is this the particular genius of Western civilization? To bring ethics into the discussion of every aspect of life?

Right now I have been trying to come to grips with an unethical form of Christian practice, well I should probably say “ethicless” not really unethical. What would it mean to strip away from my practice everything that has to do with judgement and prejudice (i.e. pre-judgement)? The Desert Fathers talk a lot about apatheia, which is one of my own central practices. It seems to me that apatheia has a strong component of ethiclessness to it. You are not to spend time thinking or even caring about whether this or that is good or bad, whether this or that person is good or bad.

One of the methods they use is to radically, deeply come to grips with my own personal sinfulness. If I am quite certain, deep in my bones, that I am unworthy of not even being a neighbor, let alone of coming before God’s attention, then I am much more likely to give other people some latitude.

Now this is a pretty violent approach, and can (and has!) lead to abuses. Both self-abuse and other or systemic abuses. So there are many pitfalls. When I was back in high school I came up with a few formulas. One of which was “To be generally kind and specifically unfair.” I think I meant that you give others a lot of room for mistakes and excuses, but when you are dealing with one person in a specific context, and when dealing with myself, then fairness goes out of the window and you are hard, demanding, “unfair”.

This could work, but again it is all in the delivery. No one wants to be around a difficult and demanding person unless that person is even harsher on themselves, and if that person takes the time to celebrate the positives. Because when we are harsh we tend to avoid the positives at all – and that is where the imbalances occur. Paul’s letters are a good example of balance, because they always start with positives, event to the Galatians!

But how to look at sin in a non-ethical way? After all isn’t sin the very bedrock of ethics? The way I have been trying to work this is to use an inversion which my friend Allen told me about a long time ago. When looking at the 10 Commandments, instead fo seeing a list of Shall Nots we should look at it this way: when you are perfect (enlightened, etc) you will not murder, you will not steal. So the 10 Commandments become a mirror which reflects only the True Self.

This adds some context to Jesus’ pretty outrageous commands that even looking at a woman lustfully is like committing adultery. I mean, really? Well, from the position of the true Self it is! From that vantage point, your compassion and love for every human being makes it pretty nigh impossible to look at any other person as an object to satisfy my personal appetites. First because appetites are something that belong to the False Self. Second because the Tue Self is satisfied with Christ. If you got God, it ain’t a pretty girl or a pretty car or a pretty house that are going to do the trick is it?

Another level. The ethical underpinnings of spiritual practice are driven by psychological rules of purity (as Richard Beck consistently points out). This means that we sublimate/mutate a mechanism which is used for food and eating into a set of rules for social interaction. Guess what, if you spend your life using food rules for social rules, is it any wonder that you will continually think of people as objects to satisfy your appetites? That you will call some a good fruit and others a bad fruit? That we will eat people with our eyes and that a multibillion dollar porn industry will gladly offer you some “food”?

For me the shift from ethical, food based spiritual practice to non-ethical, REality-based practice comes when you make a concerted effort to respect the integrity of every human being. This is exceedingly hard. The first stage of practice comes from simply recognizing our anthropophagous nature. The second practice comes from learning how to properly fast from such food, and thus tame the cravings. The final part comes from being able to join Jesus in saying:

While this was happening, Jesus’ disciples were saying to him, “Teacher, please eat something.” But Jesus told them, “I have food that you don’t know anything about.” His disciples started asking each other, “Has someone brought him something to eat?” (John 4)

What is your food? What do you eat every moment of your day? Are you stuffing your face full of enmity, strife, jealousy, greed, lust, self-righteousness? These are questions I am asking myself, trying to make sure I am improving my diet one thought at a time. The Real Body and the Real Self need Real Food. It is not about making an artificial discrimination. It is simple biology…or spirituality.

Seriously Christian

I think that my rant this morning has subsided a tad. And then I run into this article on Kierkegaard and find an echo of my “argh!” In fact, it is as if I shouted and the echo came back, clearer and more melodious than when it left my throat.

Long quote: “What Kierkegaard showed was that the only serious alternative to atheism or agnosticism was not what generally passes for religion but a much deeper commitment that left ordinary standards of proof and evidence completely behind. Perhaps that’s why so many of Kierkegaard’s present-day admirers are atheists. He was a Christian who nonetheless despised ‘Christendom’. To be a Christian was to stake one’s life on the absurdity of the risen Christ, to commit to an ethical standard no human can reach. This is a constant and in some ways hopeless effort at perpetually becoming what you can never fully be. Nothing could be more different from the conventional view of what being a Christian means: being born and baptised into a religion, dutifully going to Church and partaking in the sacraments. Institutionalised Christianity is an oxymoron, given that the Jesus of the Gospels spent so much time criticising the clerics of his day and never established any alternative structures. Kierkegaard showed that taking religion seriously is compatible with being against religion in almost all its actual forms, something that present-day atheists and believers should note.”

Time to read up on some K. methinks. How does the psalmist put it: “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.”

Stop the idolatry!

The following very minor story made me want to upchuck my Wheaties this morning…were I the kind who eats Wheaties that is, which I am not…but I digress.

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2013/05/victorious-h-s-relay-team-banned-from-state-meet-after-religious-celebration/

And here: http://www.khou.com/sports/Act-of-fath-costs-track-team-its-win-205661221.html

The story linked shows some sort of consternation by a local community when their track team failed to make the State finals. There are two versions of the same events here: one, and the one the press is loving, is one of freedom of expression and honest appreciation for God-given talents. The other, and the one which I subscribe to and am appalled that no one seems to have picked up on, is that using religion to excuse unsportsmanlike conduct is exactly why I believe that 90% of US Christianity is some sort of American New Thought movement and nothing at all to do with Christianity. To be fair, New Thought had or has very little with showboating, this stuff is pure Christianity. Alas.

Let me see if I understand the justification here: the young athlete raises his finger to heaven, and simultaneously his hand to his ear to listen to the crowds adulation, and claims this is a symbol of his humility before God…hmmm…how about we call this showboating and humiliating your opponents, and the worse type of ego worship that is so entrenched in so-called Christian churches these days.

Should I even ask if any of the other runners on the other team were Christians? Am I to assume that God has preferred this one idiot against the other runners? He is divinely appointed to win? Can we possibly try to inflate this ego any further?!

There is so much to detest here. First, the terrible form – I am sure if his coach is any good he will hear a thing or two about running through the tape BEFORE celebrating. In fact, this is exactly the case. had he run through the tape, and continued through and then going to the crowd raised his finger and so on, my guess is that nothing would have come of it. It was because of showboating, I am certain, that he got disqualified.

But if it had stopped there, I would have just ignored the story. It is the second part, where the terrible behavior is being asked to be overlooked because of it falls under religious freedom that really really annoys me. yes you are free to worship whatever ego you want, just please do not bring Christianity into it! Argh. it is hard enough these days to try to witness to the loving power of Christ without idiots doing this.

Can we just make sure we all understand: Jesus on the cross is an act of faith. Winning at sports is not. As a cleansing of my palate I will be working slowly through these minor little passage from this little book which apparently some people like to call “holy” but in fact use it as a springboard for their own prosperity and fame….Nary a  word here about winning…

• Romans 6:5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.
• Romans 6:8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.
• Romans 8:36 As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
• 2 Corinthians 1:5 For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.
• 2 Corinthians 4:11 For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body.
• Galatians 6:17 From now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.
• 1 Peter 4:13 But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.
• 1 Peter 4:14 If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you.

There is no formula

In a discussion the other day about “real” monastic life versus, one assumes, my less-than-real one, I was struck by the near voodoo level of superstitious nonsense surrounding the word “monk”. Alas, to many Religious enjoy too much from that word and its magical effects to spend much time debunking, or at least downsizing it.

I have mentioned before that I think, at its best, a healthy monastery is one where the harmony of all its members imitates the harmony of the Holy Family, or perhaps even the harmony of Eden pre-Fall. If anyone has ever visited a harmonious monastery the charity pervades its courtyards and rooms like incense. it is truly uplifting.

But, much more common, is that monasteries are lodgings for wayfaring men who are busy plugging holes in many parishes due to priestly shortages. Others are continuing their educational studies in various places, most notably in Rome. Not much more about stability, even while there may be obedience there.

So we come to new versions. Lay communities which do attempt to fulfil the spirit of monastic life, with greater or lesser success. often referred to with some condescension as “experiments” it is also seen by others in the Religious world as the next wave.

the way I have come to see it is that all baptized Christians have a “rule” (the baptismal covenant) and they do so within the context of a worshiping community – first their family, then the congregation which they attend. But being a Christian means, or should mean, also living to the full all evangelical counsels, not just the ones we can or want, including St. Paul’s admonition to ‘pray without ceasing.’

So, if Christians are called live a life under the rule of baptism, in a community of believers, which includes regular daily prayer, study of Scripture, prayer and meditation, then what is the special calling of traditional monasticism?

This is where I am unclear. There is little that impedes your average person from living a monastic life of regular prayer, meditation and service. Actually, there is nothing that impedes it.

The last bastion of exclusivity for monasticism seems to me to be the learning of the various inner disciplines. This is still tricky, but in an age of internet and mass communication, mass transportation and even space stations, such information from valid teachers is available. In fact there is an abundance of such things. While in olden days a seeker would have to travel (and travel was dangerous, expensive and inconvenient) great distances to sit at the foot of a master, it seems that these days all that is needed is a good internet connection.

We can argue until we are blue in the face whether online learning is real learning. All traditional universities (themselves modelled after monasteries!) are having to do some serious soul-searching before the onslaught on information freely available on the internet. the ones who are resisting, and are on retreat, keep repeating a mantra about “experience”: the experience of college life is what you go to college for. I have heard similar things about monasteries: it is the living together and working together that is formative.

But, but, but…is that not the case with any family life? I would say it is, and even more so.

The bottom line is that there is no formula for bottling the Holy Spirit. There are some types of living and there are other types of living. None is better/holier/deeper/more faithful than the other. In fact, staying put (ah! we are back to stability again) is more transformational than its opposite arrangements. Deep connections to a place can only be gained over time – there are no shortcuts. But if the place you choose is disconnected from life, if you are not interfering with the world in your work of purifying it like a tree cleaning up the air (as Merton put it), then God bless you but you ain’t doing me no favors.

I too dream of sitting in the caboose in a lovely monastery with beautiful views, quiet organized housework, and a stipend. I too would feel very holy there, I am sure. But, poor wretch that I am, I am asked to be all of that while commuting to work and going to watch my kid play soccer and help the other with his math. To be husband and father (as well as son, of course, and brother). Do not tell me that this God-given option is the lesser….

Psychological modalism

From Krishnamurti:

You cannot understand yourself according to Freud or Jung, or according to me. Other people’s theories have no importance whatever. It is of yourself that you must ask the question, is fear to be divided into the conscious and subconscious? Or is there only fear which you translate into different forms? There is only one desire; there is only desire. You desire. The objects of desire change, but desire is always the same. So perhaps in the same way there is only fear. You are afraid of all sorts of things but there is only one fear.” (Freedom from the Known)

Only one desire. Only one fear. Many forms. This is a form of psychological or spiritual modalism. It makes sense if your goal is non-duality that you would want to find that everywhere.

“Objects of desire change, but there is only one desire.” I am not so sure. It makes sense linguistically to say so. After all the word “desire” is the same….but that does not make much sense. My desire for a donut (say) is different from my desire for world peace, or for my wife, or for the success and health of my sons. The only thing in common is that I use, by an accident of language the word “desire” for all of these.

Think of the word “love” and it will become clear as well. I love donuts, and my wife, and my children. But these are quite quite different. Were I precise in my language I might say “I crave donuts”, “I love my wife and children”. Even then there is a difference between spousal love and paternal love.

C. S. Lewis already identified in Greek different words for love: storge, phileo, eros, agape. What is interesting in his book is that he started with the simple “God is Love” formula and ended up, many pages later, with a four-fold distinction and the certainty that whatever else “love” is it is complex and complicated.

The same, I suggest, applies to fear and desire. I wonder if the Greeks had multiple words for “fear”? Does “desire” fit into “eros”? Or are there more words? I can imagine a whole cloud of related terms…try typing “fear” in here.

For my part if I want to improve my thinking (per previous post), I need to improve my vocabulary. It means that I cannot use “fear” or “love” or “desire” as umbrella terms. Perhaps this is where a convenient word becomes a mere acronym, and where using an acronym (eg. LOL) is really really sloppy thinking, though convenient for expediting conversation.

Thinking better

I think about thought a lot. More accurately, I think about being conscious. It seems to me the central question to be asked and answered. By science, by religion.

For example, when I accept the Jesus as my Savior, who exactly is He saving? because “me” is a very nebulous entity. Not always there, as they say.

Unpacking a little, we know we have experiences, even in the womb. These experiences ensure that I am never ever entering the world as a blank slate. And upon entering I continue accumulating experiences, which also are dependent on things outside my control: inherited DNA, socioeconomic status of my parents, the moment in history I am born into, and so on. Basically, everyone is born with a spoon in their mouths – for some people it is a wooden spoon while for others it is a silver one.

As my brain develops, the experiences are encoded on layer upon layer of connections, until they coagulate into thoughts. These thoughts then guide me towards further experiences (and way from others). Thoughts, basically judgements on the safety/desirability of whatever experience, react to my personally accumulated, though impersonally filtered, experiences. It looks backwards and then projects in a calculus of survival.

The problem comes when we live so divorced from our embedded, embodied software that we cannot use it for pretty much anything apart from communication. Not saying communication (intra and inter, infra and supra) is a bad thing. But the reality is that all my aversions/attractions are programs to make me survive in the wild *without having to think*. This is both curious and important.

We then use this survival tool, our intellect, to think. It seems the most obvious use of it, but I am increasingly unconvinced of it. I do not think (hah!) thinking should be used this way…it can be clearly seen in the deadening clarity of naturalism when reading the myopic statements of someone like Francis Crick, who says “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons,” one has to be grateful. There is a clarity there – the clarity of rushing at full speed down a road only to realize that it is a dead-end and there is a brick wall in front of you. The same is true of saccharine pious statements which punt the hard questions to an afterlife.

So we have this really cool thing just idling, and we want to use it. How should we use it? I am proposing that how we are using it now is, if not totally wrong, then certainly misguided.

Perhaps this would be a better way of saying it: we misuse our capacity for thinking when we use to it focus on creating pain and pleasure, repulsion and attraction, by projecting from past (suspiciously reconstructed) experience into a fantasy called future.

From fantasy to fantasy is all my thinking. St. Gregory talks about our interiority as being ruled by “passions” (irrational), and he saw these as being somehow exterior from your real self. Anthony of the Desert also regards our passions as “animal traits.” This is a common position in monastic thinking across all religions. It is, in fact, a cornerstone of the apologetic for a monastic program: our regular thoughts are like wild animals that must be tamed, or at least mastered, to become useful. Again and again monastic life asks: if someone is dominated by their passions can they be considered fully human? Can someone be considered a “potential human”? Without being able to do some inner work someone is surrendering their self to outside forces. This, in my view, is how the language of “bondage to sin” is helpful. Sinful living, then, becomes not an exploration of freedom, but rather a deliberate decision to be subhuman, and less free.

Am I doomed, though, to always fail, because I am incapable of living without relying on inferior thinking? Not always. And I more and more drawn towards those other moments of other-thinking, which are not fantasies. Moments of deep prayer. Moments of poetry. Moments of great leaps of thinking in understanding of reality. All the great moments when one person overcomes the immense invisible barriers that separate them from their neighbor, and they reach out and touch and help and love – and fear ends.