Disconnection of Thoughts about Connection

I’ve just started a new book entitled In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky. Ouspensky was a student of a gentleman by the name of G.I. Gurdjieff. Gurdieff was an Armenian born teacher and mystic. The following from the site www.gurdieff.org presents a brief synopsis of the basic tenets of his teachings:


Mr. Gurdjieff was an extraordinary man, a master in the truest sense. His teachings speak to our most essential questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life, and of human life in particular? As a young man, Gurdjieff relentlessly pursued these questions and became convinced that practical answers lay within ancient traditions. Through many years of searching and practice he discovered answers and then set about putting what he had learned into a form understandable to the Western world. Gurdjieff maintained that, owing to the abnormal conditions of modern life, we no longer function in a harmonious way. He taught that in order to become harmonious, we must develop new faculties—or actualize latent potentialities—through “work on oneself.” He presented his teachings and ideas in three forms: writings, music, and movements which correspond to our intellect, emotions, and physical body.

P.D. Ouspensky was an author and student of Gurdjieff. The book is a reflection of Ouspensky’s spent with Gurdjieff as well as a discussion of his teachings.

I agree with much, if not all of that brief synopsis although I have yet to get far enough into the book to know the details of his teachings. I just finished chapter one.

Anyway… as I’m reading this morning I got to thinking about a few things. I got to thinking about all of the books on spirituality, theology, psychology and philosophy that I’ve read over the past few years, which include both some eastern and western philosophies about spirituality, psychodynamic and Jungian psychology, Christian theology, admittedly for much of this time I’ve read mostly what could be classified as Christian spirituality, theology and philosophy however for the past year I’ve started to open my sphere of investigation. I am starting to dabble in more mystical writings, Buddhist and the like.

And I had a thought and it goes like this…

It is interesting to me that in all of these spiritual, mystical, philosophical (call them what you will) books we are presented with what appear to present deep, dark and profound thoughts about the nature of human beings, the nature of the universe, the different levels of being right down to the concept of ‘being’ itself. I have to say that these ideas are exciting to me, always something new to consider, always something new to confound and investigate and drive me forward for new levels of insight, understanding, wisdom and so on. These ideas, they spark a flame in us, a flame that points to a place within us that allows us to think that there just might be something else ‘out’ there or ‘in’ here or around it all SOMEWHERE that can fill the gigantic hole that exists in us. A void that so many of us cannot seem to touch no matter what we do, no matter what we buy, no matter how many churches we go to, books we read, trees we hug or yoga positions we assume.

We read, we listen, we practice yoga, we meditate, we worship in church, we volunteer at soup kitchens, we fight for our causes and we write checks to charities but still that hole remains. We are always listening to somebody else’s ideas, practicing somebody else’s instructions of movement or non-movement, hanging on somebody else’s words for the ANSWER. Somebody to tell us THE meaning, THE way, somebody to point us the way to that thing which we cannot even define. We are asking somebody to show us the way to a place that remains a mystery to us. It’s like going up to police officer on the street to ask for directions and saying “I’m going to a place, I don’t know what country it’s in, I don’t know the name of it and I don’t know anything about what it looks like but I need you to tell me how to get there.”.

I have noticed a similarity however among all of the teachings; they all talk about ‘connectedness’. They all infer knowledge of creation, a way to a ‘better’ place, a ‘higher’ plane, an elusive way of existence or a feeling or a state of mind that only a fortunate few might ever attain to.

But where is God in all of this? Where is God in all of these deep and profound explanations of the universe, of the talk of suffering and the connectedness of everything. Where is God in the talk of ‘higher’ states of being?

I cannot shake the feeling that all of these concepts exclude the personal. That is our deep connectedness to each other, the NEED of a person for other persons. I could be wrong but in my brief forays into Buddhist thought I’m pretty sure I’m detecting the suggestion that God is superfluous to the whole thing. I get a sense that this Buddhist idea of enlightenment does not require God. It’s all presented so… impersonally.

I am a human being and I must be connected to other human beings if I am to survive. This is a fact, pretty much everyone knows it. And so this necessity of connectedness to other people, this requirement of being human must dictate somehow that the ‘thing’ that I am searching for, the ‘higher’ plane of being is a different level of connectedness, in fact the ultimate level of personal connectedness and interaction which would be our connectedness to God.

How is it possible that a method (a path, a teaching, call it what you will) of being and living that purports to attain enlightenment or espouses a different (higher) level of existence could possibly exclude that THING from which everyone comes, runs through, exists in moment to moment? Given our connectedness to one another and everything then how can any “answer” to life exclude God?

You might say because God does not exist and we must find ourselves within ourselves. Hmm…

Then explain the connectedness. How is it possible that everything that IS is connected to everything else that IS? Random chance?

Unlikely.

The Unity of Polarity

The psychologists, the scientists, they want to describe everything in purely natural terms and in the mystics I have seen a tendency to describe everything in purely spiritual terms, at times teetering on the brink of falling over into rigid and dogmatic theology. They take their transcendent experience and frame it or rather force it into the box of religion. As the scientists insist on strictly natural explanations for everything that is, the mystics insist on purely spiritual explanations, something I have come to classify in my mind as ‘scientific’ religiosity or spirituality.

But the two they are one. The awakening of spiritual awareness can only happen, can only be explained in terms that completely and unabashedly integrate the two concepts together into one whole. The separation of the two aspects into natural vs. spiritual is, I think how the understanding and acceptance of the reality and process of awakening of spiritual awareness as an inherent aspect of humanness to the average person becomes confused, hard to fathom, hard to integrate into their daily life, into their normal intellectual and emotional sphere of comprehension. We think that life must be one or the other when in fact it must be both of them together, when in fact it is both of them together.

The religious, the spiritual literature would have us believe that this, whatever ‘this’ is, is not our true home. I am perplexed by this notion. Is God-awareness a severing and casting off of all aspects of our natural senses, those senses by which we experience the physical world, i.e. touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing? Does that sixth sense, the intuition by which we recognize God come only, always and completely at the expense of our five physical senses? I find this hard to believe and harder yet to accept. That we have existed in the physical world via the exercise of our five natural senses at the expense of our sixth intuitive sense is without question for most. But to suggest that we then turn the tables and develop that sixth sense at the expense of the other five seems just as questionable to me.

If we do that what then becomes of our appreciation of physical beauty? Did not God create the physical world as an expression of His existence? Does not the Word of God encompass not only that which is unseen but also that which is right before our eyes and ears and noses? Who has ever stood at the end of the earth at sunrise gazing out over the ocean? The scene that presents itself in the moments just before the sun peeks into view over the horizon is nothing short of majestic. The colors of the sky, hues for which we have no representation in a box of crayons, purples, pinks, grays and blues, all at once and yet separate.  Glimpses of Eternity... all at once and yet separate.  Is this not the very definition of sublime? Do I dismiss this phenomenon as purely natural and therefore unnecessary to my quest for God? Not relevant to my spiritual awareness and growth?

Must it always be natural vs. spiritual, rational vs. irrational. This AGAINST that. Two forces in direct opposition to each other? Always two ends of the spectrum pitted against one another, in competition for the rights to claim the human soul? We speak of unity when we speak of God and yet we divide and separate in our struggle to explain how it ‘must’ work.

Can we comprehend the true splendor and brilliance of the Light unless we have first descended into the depths of the Darkness?

Trusting God... Or Not

Let us go back to a thought that I had voiced in a previous post (http://jssfive.blogspot.com/2009/11/there-but-for-grace-of-god.html) whereby I had expressed the irrationality of the idea that the mowing down of young schoolchildren by a mad gunmen was somehow God’s will. There are people, seemingly religious people, those who have intentionally given themselves to God, devoted their lives to the work of God and because of the simplicity of their lives, because they have renounced their ties to the material world, because they choose horse and buggy over cars we here in the ‘secular’ world believe that somehow they might actually be more ‘godly’ than the rest of us heathens who elect to use cell phones and like to drive fancy cars.

I would like to expand on my earlier thoughts about God’s will or rather that which we might be tempted to ascribe to God’s will as it pertains to trust or perhaps more accurately the inability to trust. The events that we choose to blame on God’s will, the death of a child at the hands of a gunmen, the devastation wreaked by an earthquake (thank you Pat Robertson), cancer, aids, airplanes flying into buildings, all of these tragic events of history are ascribed by so many of our religious ‘leaders’ as God’s will and to be sure sometimes God’s will comes in the form of God’s wrath.

But here’s the thing. These same people who assign responsibility of tragic events to the will of God are those same people who insist, quite possibly in their next breath, that only God can be trusted. In order to be saved (whatever that means) we must place our trust in Jesus, give our lives, our souls over to the care of God and he alone will take care of us.

So I would like to ask how is it possible, when God’s will is served for example by their five-year-old son dying of cancer, for two parents to be able to trust God with their own lives and the lives of the rest of their children? The assignation by the parent of so incomprehensible an event as the death of their child to God’s will is a coping mechanism. “God must have wanted him” we tell ourselves. He is now safe in the arms of God. And nobody would doubt that this is a comforting thought, the ONLY comforting thought they might be able to grab on to and to be sure it may very well be true (one can only hope). Problem is that I, as the parent, am left utterly devastated. And chances are probably pretty darn good that I’m pulling the rest of my children just a little bit closer to me and just a little bit further away from that God guy who seems to apply his will rather imperiously.

I am thinking about trust in the therapeutic relationship this morning. It is, I must admit a bit of a stumbling block for me. We as clients are supposed to lay our inner world open to this person, our thoughts, our emotions, our joys and (mostly) our pain. Two problems with this. First of all the laying open of ourselves, even a little seems to have the undesirable effect of somehow drawing us closer emotionally to this person of the therapist which is an instantaneous signal for the warning sirens to go off and the deflector shields to go up because... Secondly so many of us who end up on a therapist’s couch have had mostly nothing but disappointment and (for some) the most gross violation (annihilation?) of trust by the people who were supposed to love and protect us as children.

And so I ask how is it possible for me to trust my therapist not to up and bail on me in the middle of my hour of need when I cannot even trust God as witnessed by the seeming arbitrariness of the application of His will?

I have a theory (but you already knew that didn’t you) and my theory goes something like this: It is not God’s will that a five-year-old boy dies of cancer. In fact I think it might just be possible that God was nowhere in the vicinity when that young boy died.

Foundations

As I sit here listening to Ravel’s Bolero (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-4J5j74VPw&feature=fvw) I am reminded of underlying themes. If we are not listening carefully they run beneath our conscious awareness. I read once that Maurice Ravel the composer of this powerful piece of music did not look kindly on this composition of his. I got the impression that he was disdainful of it, as if he thought it rather pedestrian, not up to his usual standards. I would like to strenuously object to that assessment. From what I have seen it appears to me not only a crowd pleaser but also a performer pleaser. I saw the New York Philharmonic performing this piece on PBS recently and it was clear they were enjoying the hell of playing it. Sometimes I think composers, or perhaps it is more accurate to say artists in general do not give the general audience much consideration, much credit for discerning good art. Do I need to be a classical music aficionado to like a piece of music, a painting, a poem? Does the fact that I, ignoramus that I am in the ways of musical composition, like something mean that the composer has missed his mark? Am I not his mark in the first place? That’s called hubris.

Anyway, I digress. Back to my original theme which was well… themes.

If you are not familiar with this piece please listen to it via the link above. Even if you are familiar with it give it another listen and you will hear it. Notice the violins plucking the theme that runs through the entire piece, it maintains the rhythm. On top of it runs the melody. It starts ever so slowly, building little by little, to a very loud and emphatic ending. Call me pedestrian but I love this piece. This is manner of composition, an underlying simple theme playing continuously through the piece while the melody and harmony rise and fall, telling the composers story that is used frequently (listen also to second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony). For the record listen at the end for the audience response. Clearly they have no taste in music because it seems that they liked it too.

Does this not model our human existence? The archetypes of Carl Jung, the basic structures that run through our psyches and represented (unconsciously) in our art, our movies, our mythologies, our literature, and yes (and clearly) our music, these are the underlying themes of human existence. They set the structure, the beat, the rhythm, the tone of our lives. It is unfortunate that mostly all we ever hear is the melody of life and to be sure there are many of us who miss even that. But the melody is generally what is front and center. The sandlot baseball games of childhood, school, college, daily stresses of raising children, of going to work, of dealing with sick parents, the pain of physical and psychological illness and the fear of death. These are the melodies of human existence. They ebb and flow, they rise and fall from day to day. These are the events that hold our attention and place us in danger of missing the underlying themes.

What’s the point of this? I don’t really know, it is just something that dawned on me this morning. A reminder perhaps to remain cognizant of the foundations, to not get lost in only the enjoyment of the melody but also to pay attention to that on which the melody stands.

Dreams, Jung, God and Stuff Like That There

How does anyone ignore an invitation like this? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/llewellyn-vaughanlee/dreamwork-what-we-can-lea_b_413787.html

As I'm reading this article, and might I just admit right here and now that I am fascinated by Jung's ideas. This man's work, his discoveries about the human psyche are to my mind just one of the many proofs of the existence of God. It is hard to deny that his theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious isn't pointing to an underlying structure, the foundation of the human psyche which must point to 'Intelligent Design', I'll use that soulless, impersonal and blandly scientific term for what I firmly believe is exactly the opposite. Anyhoo...

By the way for anyone who is interested in Jung's ideas I would suggest also the work of Joseph Campbell, specifically The Hero With A Thousand Faces. If you're interested in Jung than you must also read mythology and in doing so you will find out that there have been about a gajazillion other people who have been on the same life journey as you. Jung and mythology. They go together like salt and pepper, cream and coffee, Laverne & Shirley, Abbott & Costello, like ramalamadingdong...

What If

You were presented with a unique opportunity today to deconstruct, brick by brick, board by board and by your own choice, every belief you ever had about yourself, your relationships, about God or not God, about the ‘reality’ of the universe, humanity, creation, heaven and hell, life after death, etc. Everything until you got right down to nothing.

And what if this process guaranteed that you not only question every belief you ever had but caused you to realize that for your entire life you haven’t known yourself at all, that you haven’t been paying attention to what is really going on around you, that you don’t really know the people around you, your family, your friends, the sales guy at the hardware store.

What if it caused you to realize that you married your spouse for all the ‘wrong’ reasons and that in fact you never really loved her/him at all. What if you realized that your child’s drug problem, psychiatric problem, personality problem, fill in your own problem description here, was the direct result not of some gene that she/he inherited from you but rather your own psychological ‘disorder’ of which is currently not even on your psychic radar. The sins of the father and all that. In fact what if part of the deal was the realization that you don’t have the first clue what might be presented to you about yourself, good, bad, ugly, pretty and how it profoundly affected not only you but all of your loved ones also?

What if this involved the loosening of all of the bonds, the behaviors, the habits, those ‘things’ that get you through the days and nights, the booze, the drugs, the cutting, the smokes, the job, the gambling, the nail-biting and the porn in the hope of something new and undefined?

What if this process caused you to be thrown into complete and utter confusion, thick fog or even total darkness about what is real and that the only path out was to actively choose every moment for the rest of your life to live in this state of confusion and fogginess, to keep choosing to step out into the darkness, not able to see what lies even one foot in front of you, constantly letting go of the concept of ‘what is’, replacing definitiveness with a continual, active and conscious acquiescence to ‘this might not be’ again with only a promise of increasing clarity, true clarity which (it is promised) will be forthcoming only a teaspoonful at a time over the course of the rest of your life. And what if clarity turned out to be something you thought you knew the meaning of but in fact turned out to be something you had never seen before?

In other words you discard completely everything you (think you) know right now about EVERYTHING and start from scratch with a blank slate all in the interest (here’s the pay-off) of finding the ULTIMATE reality, true TRUTH.

You put yourself on a path, you have no idea where it's going to lead and you have absolutely no idea what or where you're headed and you haven't the first clue what it's going to look like when you get there.

Would you have the courage to do that?

The Jesus I Want to Know

The ideas, the universal, perhaps metaphysical ideas, images, symbols, thoughts, myths – all of the abstract phenomena that represent universal thought are patterned after something. They are an imitation, a representation of something that already exists… in our minds and ‘out there’ somewhere. And these theories of super-consciousness, un-consciousness, consciousness, while in many respects are hard to discount i.e. if something empirically exists one can hardly dismiss the validity of that something, I keep getting a sense that they complicate a very simple yet vital fact. A very important factor that is sometimes obscured in all of this universal thinking is the individual, or what is the personal-ness of the individual.

We are individual, personal beings and we cannot function properly, or I should say we cannot function optimally without connection to other individual, personal beings. We need to love and be loved, we need to know and be known, we need to feel joy and pain and we need to feel the joy and pain of others. Our joy and pain, all of our feelings serve nothing, come to nothing but suffering in the absence of another. And somehow the universal ‘stories’ of the hero’s journey through life, salvation, redemption, death and rebirth, all of these concepts come to nothing unless they are shared with another. To be sure it is a universal truth that no man is an island.

I have come to the conclusion that I want Jesus to be real. Lately I find myself questioning if he was, not so much whether a man named Jesus actually existed in the flesh – that part is easy to accept. It is the part that says that Jesus was God incarnate as human being, as one of us. But this much I know, I desperately want him to be who the Gospels claim he was. Because it is God as man, divine in human form that tells me that God knows us, that God understands our struggle as human beings and not-God. That he knows the pleasure and pain of humanity that is endured daily and moment by moment for so many. In Jesus is represented the God that we need, the God that must be in order that we have hope for something more. In Jesus we see kindness and gentleness, love and forgiveness, the power to heal and the promise of so much more beyond the harsh realities of our existence in this life.

This is why I want Jesus to be real and I know that there probably will not be any definitive answers provided to me as confirmation of my wanting and sometimes I don’t understand that. But I also know that in the acknowledgement of these things, in the realizing of my desire for this to be so I may also be stating the reality. I may be recognizing the pattern, the basic structure that has been there from the beginning.

I think it safe to say that Jesus is everything we human beings need him to be.