Irony and a warning from Zbigniew

I'm not sure about irony. I'm addicted to it, being a middle-class sort of Brit well into those retirement years during which fewer and fewer of us actually do or can completely retire. 

It's certainly useful as a distancer in social and interpersonal contexts, and as a way of trying to hang on to what's left of the idea of personal privacy and cultural restraint.

But: it's easily misunderstood, especially in emails, blogs, forums - in fact, through any quickly-written and hastily read electronic output (i.e. a lot of it.)

It can be mistaken for coldness, now that everything is awesomely wonderfully marvellously lots of lovely so brilliantly done (even if it's really, just ok) but many kinds of restraint can seem cold in whatseems to me like an age of linguistic emotional inflation.

Here's a prose poem from a survivor of Eastern European totalitarianism, the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert,

by way of a warning:

"Prose Mythology

First there was a god of night and tempest, a black idol without eyes, before whom they leaped, naked and smeared with blood. Later on, in the times of the republic, there were many gods with wives, children, creaking beds, and harmlessly exploding thunderbolts. At the end, only superstitious neurotics carried in their pockets little statues of salt, representing the god of irony. There was no greater god at that time.

Then came the barbarians. They too valued highly the little god of irony. They would crush it under their heels and add it to their dishes."

(translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Swift)


Until the barbarians arrive, I'll continue to carry the little statue in my superstitious neurotics' pocket. 


Or: maybe the barbarians are already here, but instead of stamping on my precious little statue, they are eroding it away bit by bit with the tears of an easy emotionalism. It's easier to shed such tears than to take the full weight of the suffering of our times. Zbigniew knew that - he fought the Nazis and resisted the Stalinists, and one of his weapons, alongside his surrealistic imagination, was irony.

Gurudom

It seems to me that the person with real understanding, true enlightenment with regard to states of being and ways of living, avoids the concept of "guru" as one would avoid a mad dog. The cult of personality is like a lethal and easily-caught virus, and you don't have to belong to some horrible cult to come across it in those seeking to dispense wisdom, especially wisdoms that can't be "dispensed."

Shunryu Suzuki was a Zen Buddhist teacher who settled in California and worked at a zen centre there. 

One morning a student at the centre arrived early and was horrified to find the Zen Master cleaning the toilet. He asked Suzuki to let him take over such a menial and unpleasant task. Suzuki merely said "Why don't you go and make the coffee?"

Gautama Buddha is believed to have told his followers "Be your own light." 

Any true teacher doesn't want the people s/he is working with to follow his example, or to use his ego to dominate them. S/he wants them to shine their own light into every corner, question everything, work for their own understanding.

Here's poor old Brian, in the Life Of same, telling his followers not to follow him, they are all different, they are all individuals:

 

But it's hard, especially when times are uncertain, to work through Big Stuff with your own devices. We like to be led. Brian's followers - well, you know the response:

"Yes! We are all individuals!" (In unison...) 

The difficulty lies in an internal conflict; to be widely-regarded as having unusual insights, powers or authority is to receive ego-inflating responses from those who feel they have benefitted from your particular kind of leadership. It is a pleasant thing, to be told you have helped others. It reinforces your sense of self-worth. 

But what many people want from such a leader-figure is a way of lessening the clamour of ego, and if the leader-figure shows just the kind of egocentric insensitivity s/he is supposed to be leading us all away from, the result is: disillusion.




 

mindfulness, mountains, water

When out walking in the hills, the usual attractions include: the scale of it all, the high, isolated peaks with huge views, the wind sighing and whistling through the rocks, the steady plod plod of feet that are mine but eventually seem to be moving quite independently, to fit the rise and fall of the land's surface rather than my instructions. These feet swing round a boggy pool, lift up yet another step, clatter across some scree, until they, not me, reach the top.

So a distant view of the highest peak in the area:

or the pleasure of contact with the very last snow of the season:

These are the elements of the day that expand consciousness until it takes in the swing of the seasons, the flow of life, of geological time itself. And as the day wears on, the shadows change, the clouds roll, disperse, gather, regroup: you can feel the planet rolling you towards the evening. These are the big things, the spaciousness, in the face of which your own mortality seems not to matter very much.



Increasingly these days, another element of the experience holds me, a smaller, more immedate thing - the water. I'm stopped, about to cross a little torrent - not a  mighty waterall, just this:

The changefulness of the water is indescribable - water, air, light, rock, gravity, all interplay - play - and I am held, to pause and focus in for a while, just to be with the water, in the moment.

 

I don't need the concept "meditation," I don't need bells or cushions, this is enough, for now.

Tolkien, Pullman, Le Guin and the problem of evil

Powerful myth-makers all three. I'll argue here that "His Dark Materials" and "The Earthsea Quartet" are better for us than Tolkien, and that it does actually matter, because it relates to how we see evil and good in human behaviour.

Fine writers all three, Tolkien (above) in particular an eminent scholar and prof. But in The Lord of the Rings, creatures tend to be either good or evil, and the source of evil is ultimately supernatural. I mean, what is the Dark Lord? Orcs, some humans (Wormtongue) bad, skewer 'em. Hobbits good, most men good, elves good. OK, there are exceptions - Boromir gives way to jealousy and greed for power, and dies for it - but mostly, evil in the book comes from without, not within, the major characters.

In Phillip Pullman's trilogy, evil is altogether more complex. Bad things are done for what might be good reasons. It helps that Will and Lyra are well-rooted in their own worlds. Individuals behave both badly and well, and it doesn't take a Dark Lord to tempt them. In fact, there is no external Dark Lord.

A more profound thinker on the problem of evil, yet a creator of unforgettable characters and events, as all three of these writers are.

Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea Quartet takes us back into the land of wizards and dark forces, but it's not MiddleEarth, because her wizard is much more complex than Gandalf; the harshness and cruelty of his early life makes him a difficult person, and out of this comes, in the first book, a dangerous and damaging act- he releases a supernatural evil thingy into the world, and eventually he has to deal with it.

Less well-known now than the other two, she is under-rated and comparatively under-read. There is much of Earthsea in the Harry Potter stuff. (I'm being polite...I seem to remember that Le Guin said yes, she was a bit startled at first, but took it as a compliment and moved on. A lesser soul might have reached for the lawyers. )

OK, so what?

If we simplify evil it is much easier to dismiss the Other as "the bad guys." Nice and simple. A War on Terror, as The Simpleton President put it. Islamist terrorists do dreadful things, but there is no Dark Lord, there is no Mordor. The way to deal with evil is surely not to simplify it. 

There is hatred, cruelty, fear, greed within each of us, to differing degrees and we come to terms with it, control it, or fail to do so. A War on Evil would be a war on ourselves, each of us. Oversimplifying evil is a dangerous temptation.

In this song, the character feels lost and confused in a world full of grey.






That's right Oscar - it's hard dealing with the complexities of life, it takes a lot of emotional and intellectual maturity. We surely deal with terrorism by combating terrorist plots and actions, and addressing the causes of their rage, intolerance and hatred, not by oversimplifying them as "the bad guys," servants of Mordor.

The moral world of the Lord of the Rings, much as I love it, is infantile, compared with that of Pullman and Le Guin, and it seems to me that powerful cultural artefacts do influence at some level how we see the world. In "Despatches," Michael Herr describes young marines in Vietnam behaving like the John Wayne characters they had seen in movies.... 

If we are lucky enough not to live in dreadful poverty and danger, if the circumstances of our lives don't drive us to bitterness desperation, we should at least stand a chance of finding the Balance within us that stops us running for easy answers that are no answers. Even North Korea isn't Mordor (though I confess it's not my ideal holiday destination.)

The fear of death and the idea of reincarnation

Big JuJu today. Bit chewy - I'll do my best.

People are/may be filled with dread by the idea of the end of the self, "me," "I," at death. Can the idea of reincarnation help with this fear? 

A few takes:

1) The classic Hindu/Buddhist-derived concept: we have souls; when our bodies die, our souls take off, and re-enter the cycle of life, to be reborn as another creature. We can't remember our previous life or lives (well, a few people say they can...)

But that's no good, is it? Jane Ordinary might say "It still means the end of 'me.' There's no continuity. I might see it as a way of urging me to live a more ethical life, if I believe in a causal, 'karmic' relationship between my behaviour now and my next reincarnation.

But when I'm a mayfly I won't have any connection to the current 'me.' So I still dread the death of my self.

 2) The whole thing is a rather wonderful myth, a longing for some kind of cosmic justice. 

The myth says "Jane Ordinary, you were once a dung beetle, then a tern, then warrior, then a teacher, and now you are enlightened and virtuous? You can step off the wheel of reincarnation and fuse with the eternal." H'mm. "But," says Jane, "that's nothing to do with this 'self' that doesn't want to end. And what if I don't think I've got a soul?"

3) In one sense, we are reincarnated. The matter of which our bodies are made is not eliminated, it's simply re-arranged, with atoms and molecules being, er, redistributed.

 "Gee, thanks," says Jane, "I find that no help at ALL."


4) Step forward Alan Watts. In "Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown" there is an essay called "The Reality of Reincarnation." I couldn't possibly outline here (or anywhere else) such a sophisticated line of thought, but here are a couple of very crude versions of points he makes, in that essay and elsewhere*:

1. It only feels that "I" am a separate thing from the rest of the universe, but "I" is not a thing, it is a set of vibrations, a pattern of movements (atomic particles, molecules, cells...) just as a river isn't a piece of water you can isolate and say 'that is the essential river.' The flowing of water in a channel is a river, ever changing. "I" is a process, continually changing.
2. If that's so, then I am the same as the universe; the universe peoples like a tree leaves or a river flows. I am not part of the universe; I am the same thing as the universe, which existed before "I" did, and will continue after "I" end.

So, Jane Ordinary, try looking down the other end of the telescope. If you don't believe in the traditional Hindu/Buddhist version of reincarnation, or any New Age version thereof, then work (via reading and meditation or contemplation) on your perception of yourself; on what you feel yourself, your "I" to be. 

This may not be a matter of logical thought alone. Someone somewhere (Lawrence Durrell?) wrote that (this kind of) "truth is a matter of direct apprehension; you canot climb a ladder of concepts to it." But the path to apprehension may come through perfectly rational thought and reading. 

Jane, maybe you could try letting go of reincarnation as a lifebelt on which you can prolong "Jane." Let go of what you currently think "I" is, what your self feels like, and maybe your sense of dread will lessen. "Jane" is a manifestation of something more than just "Jane."

Maybe you will feel that the pulse that you are now has always been and always will be. The water molecules in the river run into the sea, evaporate, rain, becomes river. Our planet "peoples" just as it "rivers." Our universe "planets." 

Once your sense of "I" relaxes its grip on your states of mind, you will, I hope, no longer fear so much the death of "I, Jane Ordinary."You may be able to accept the end of that transitory, constantly re-made and necessary social construct we call "me."


Well, it may be worth a try; and of course there are other ways of lessening the dread of personal extinction. Did I ever mention mindful meditation? I did? Oh, good.

I know all the "" above are a bit irritating, but I'm trying not to slip back into the usual unconscious assumptions about our individual identities. Which I thin are only part of our story.


*Especially in "The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are."  

Letter from China: "spiritual?"

I've often skirmished with this word "spiritual;" it gets used easily and frequently. I was told, in another working life, that someone I worked with was "a spiritual man." (I thought he was devious and unreliable, just like most of us.) Bookshop shelves are sometimes labelled "mind, body, spirit." Which means you'll get astrology books next to bibles next to Dawkins. Anyway:-

There's a huge Tibetan Buddhist temple in Beijing called Yonghegong. It's full of people doing this stuff:

which under Chairman Mao would have got them locked up or worse. (It's also full of tourists like me, c.f. St Paul's in London.) It's great to see them doing what they want. I guess it's a spiritual observance, or is it simply a religious act, which may or may not have a deeper, "spiritual" significance?

Maybe it's an example of "this is what we do around here," by which I mean religion as a cultural habit, something that feels right and homely, not usefully to be seen as a matter of belief distinctions, more as a matter of something that works for a particular group of people.

Maybe the observances at the Temple are symbolic, by which I mean the people may not believe there is a non-material being, a BuddhaGod or spirit, to whom they pray; perhaps  they are simply expressing their wonder and admiration at what the historical Buddha did for them. 

After all, Buddhist thinkers in the Chan/Zen tradition will tell you that Buddhism is not a religion; it has no God, in the Judeo/Christian mould. So maybe these people at the Lama Temple are not worshipping, in any way comparable with Christian worship.

Or maybe they are worshipping, in the hope that a nonmaterial entity, a god, a spirit, will interecede for them and make things better.

I mean, presumably they don't think he's actually going to eat this stuff, do they? The monks take it away when it gets rotten, surely...

All very colourful, fascinating and puzzling.  

But one answer to my questions might simply be that the people with the incense sticks, and the monks, are engaged in practices which have a spiritual significance for them.

It seems to me that we use "spiritual" (in contexts where we do not relate the term to a god, a non-material power) to mean an experience that seems much more significant than our usual states of mind; something that creates in us deep meanings, connections and perceptions beyond those that we are used to. 

I am certain that such experiences happen to atheists, in-betweens, and followers of a religion. I am certain that we need such experiences, and the vehicle we ride on to get there matters much less than experiencing the destination itself.

We tend to over-value belief as a definer of spiritual practices. Does it matter what someone believes, as long as what they do provides a spiritual experience for them? And provided it doesn't hurt others.

Einstein and Buddha - and Alan Watts too.

"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description...if there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism."

Er, but - it appears Albert never said this, or at least not in this tidy form. He is usually described as a theist, or a pantheist, rather than an atheist, and he certainly didn't go for the personal God who is directly involved in human affairs, the "Lord please smite our enemies because we don't like them" sort of God. It would seem he approached Buddhism via Schopenhauer, and he does mention it favourably.

I think MythoAlbert, as quoted above, is right, in that the experience of a sense of unity above/below individual forms and processes, the "mystical" experience Alan Watts tried to describe (in my last posting here) sits better with Big Science than the Judeo-Christian family of faiths.

So Gautama Buddha* still gets top marks from me (and one or two others) for:

• not claiming divine origins or a pre-ordained mission
• telling his followers to find their own light, their own way
• giving them the astonishing** insight that the ego, the self, is transitory and not a consistent entity
• getting people to meditate their way to a better, calmer, more compassionate state of being

So well done GB, and AE!

* Many Buddhists believe in Buddhas before Gautama, and that there will be Buddhas in the future, e.g. the overweight cheerful bloke you see in China, represented in lots of little easy-to-purchase statues. See below.

** astonishing, because it seems to be confirmed, or at least supported, by psychologists and neuroscientists; they tell us that we continually recreate our sense of who we are, and that the feeling that "I," my sense of self, is a consistent thing- that's simply a sort of working assumption we need for social interaction etc etc. And GB had no psychologists or brain scanners to help him discover this insight. Just meditation.

The future Buddha, Maitreya; I have to say as an aesthetic experience I prefer Gautama....

but no doubt he'll be welcome, if/when he arrives!