Way back in 1959, when I was in 8^th grade, I watched one of the early programs on the new public tv channel.  It was Alan Watts discoursing on Eastern spiritual traditions.  He very emphatically made the point that the Eastern vision, especially the Chinese Taoist vision,  of the human being, of nature, of reality, is so radically different from the Western version of these.  He illustrated it by comparing a painting from ancient China and one from the Renaissance in Europe.  I found the whole thing so mesmerizing; never forgot the experience.  I would like to “re-live” the experience as it were, but with two different paintings that I think are even more interesting in this illustration, and maybe they show things may be more complex and more nuanced than Watts presented.  So….let us begin.

Sometimes no words are needed.   All you need do is LOOK.  What you see, what you think you see, and what you don’t see are all interesting.  Here two different sets of artwork invite comparison and contrast.  So, lets begin by just looking and pondering…..

The first painting is a prime example of German Romanticism, early 19^th Century, Caspar David Friedrich.

The second one is from China: by Shih T’ao in the Ming Dynasty, 17^th Century.

And just for emphasis I’ve included a third painting, another from China, something surprisingly very similar, by Shen Zhou,  also in the Ming Dynasty, 16^th Century.

Some notes on the Friedrich painting:

Romanticism as a movement in Western art, literature, and music is a fascinating phenomenon.  One of its key aspects, but certainly not the only one, is the reaction and revolt from the classical formalism of medieval and renaissance art and the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment Period.  Furthermore, the very place of nature changes radically; it is no longer merely the backdrop, the landscape, the stage on which the human drama unfolds.  Here it becomes almost the protagonist which engages the human.  In classical, medieval, and renaissance art, the religious and spiritual is primarily mediated through the human and its various institutions.  In the Enlightenment all this crumbles (and a lot of Romantic art shows that….like ruins of old churches).  One of the most striking aspects of Romanticism, then, is the mystical human-divine encounter that is now mediated by nature and no longer by the human constructs of civilization.  There is more emphasis on Mystery rather than the clarity and the human-centeredness of earlier art. 

 However, this must also be noted:  at times  in Romantic art the human is “writ-large.”  The human being is not a part of the Whole, but the centerpiece if you will, even if at times the human presence in the scene is minimal.   And nature itself is something “out there,” something outside us, which mediates the Mystery and mysticism of reality.    Romantic art “seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world.  The human focus is for all practical purposes on the ego self, human feelings, even irrationality (as opposed to rational thinking), subjectivity, etc.

An interesting note on Friedrich’s art found in Wikipedia:

“The visualization and portrayal of landscape in an entirely new manner was Friedrich’s key innovation. He sought not just to explore the blissful enjoyment of a beautiful view, as in the classic conception, but rather to examine an instant of sublimity, a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature. Friedrich was instrumental in transforming landscape in art from a backdrop subordinated to human drama to a self-contained emotive subject.^] Friedrich’s paintings commonly employed the Ruckenfigur—a person seen from behind, contemplating the view. The viewer is encouraged to place himself in the position of the Rückenfigur, by which means he experiences the sublime potential of nature, understanding that the scene is as perceived and idealised by a human. Friedrich created the notion of a landscape full of romantic feeling—die romantische Stimmungslandschaft.  His art details a wide range of geographical features, such as rock coasts, forests, and mountain scenes. He often used the landscape to express religious themes. During his time, most of the best-known paintings were viewed as expressions of a religious mysticism.”

And now for something different!

A note from David Hinton on the first Chinese painting:

(David Hinton, a noted translator and student of Chinese poetry and thought, has commented on Shih Tao’s painting).

“Like countless other paintings in the Chinese tradition, this painting by Shih T’ao appears at first glance to show someone gazing into a landscape, an artist-intellectual accompanied by his attendant. But mysterious dimensions quickly reveal themselves, suggesting there is much more here than meets the eye.  The poem inscribed on the painting describes a landscape that includes ruins of city walls and houses, abandoned orchards and gardens, but there is no sign of such things in the painting. The painting’s visible landscape isn’t realistic at all. It feels infused with mystery: depths of pale ink wash; black lines blurred, smeared, bleeding; mountains dissolving into faint blue haze. And there’s so much empty space in the composition, so much mist and sky. This sense of empty space is expanded dramatically by the soaring perspective: the mountain ranges appearing one beyond another suggest the gazer is standing on a mountaintop of impossible heights. And he seems a part of that emptiness, his body the same texture and color as the haze suffusing mountain valleys. Finally, there is the suggestion that the image is somehow a rendering of the gazer’s mind, an interior landscape we may possibly share when looking attentively at the painting. Or perhaps that the gazer has returned to some kind of originary place where mountains are welling up into existence for the first time, alive and writhing with primeval energy? Perhaps both at the same time: an originary place indistinguishable from the gazer’s mind, and even indistinguishable from our own minds?”

While Romantic art can look a lot like Chinese Taoist art in many cases, the differences are significant and, I think, more interesting.  As defective as the Romantic vision is, the situation today  sadly lacks even its stronger points, and we have succumbed to an incredible blindness  .  Now nature is more of a resource available for our exploitation, as a money-maker, or simply as another “toy” we play with, a stage setting for our “cultural selfies.”  As for the Chinese Taoist vision, we are so far from it that it almost seems incomprehensible to most people today.

A few weeks ago Pope Francis came down hard on the traditional Latin Mass in the pre-Vatican II mode.  This caused a flurry of reactions from all sides of the issue.  There were quite a few so-called liberal Catholics who hailed the move, saying it was about time the Vatican put an end to this “crypto-separatist” movement that questioned the authority of Pope Francis.  Of course these are also the same voices often calling for more “diversity” in the Church and quite willing to challenge any pope on an issue they disagree, etc.  On the other side, there were the elements proclaiming an apocalyptic moment for the Church and western culture.  “The sky is falling!”  A more restrained but still negative evaluation was provided by Ross Douthat, an intelligent New York Times writer on matters of religion with whom I find myself disagreeing most of the time.  He has a way of seeming to explain things by framing the argument in terms of these labels: conservative vs. liberal, right vs. left.  Really this explains nothing, neither in religion nor in politics.  These labels are a kind of convenient shorthand, a code for a complex cluster of beliefs, opinions, views, self-understandings, etc., but in themselves they explain nothing.  The labels may be convenient, but you have to see beneath them to understand what is really going on.  In other words, you have to set your heart on the truth, no matter what label is attached to it.  Gandhi used this word in reference to his philosophy and his movement:  satyagraha, truth force, or holding on to the truth.   We see this lacking very much in both our politics and our religious culture.

A refreshing example of something much better is this recent op-ed piece in the National Catholic Reporter by Rebecca Bratten Weiss:

“The Traditional Latin Mass is not the Problem with the Traditionalist Communities”

https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/traditional-latin-mass-not-problem-traditionalist-communities

There is a very serious problem with the “traditionalist” communities, but it’s not the Latin liturgy.  Weiss is very good at rooting this out and illustrating how this brouhaha over the presence/absence of Latin and the traditional liturgy is a smokescreen that obfuscates the very real problems for both the liberals and conservatives in the Church.    She merely opens a little crack on this problem; there is so much more to see here. 

 An interesting historical sidelight:  two prominent icons of “liberal Catholicism,” had a love for the Latin liturgy….Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day.   Merton, to his dying day prayed his Office in Latin.  He was totally conversant in Latin, and on the other hand he often lamented on the banality of the English translations.  Day strictly adhered to the protocols of the Roman Mass, and she would not allow the use of cupcakes or anything like that in her Catholic Worker community in New York, a practice  which was common among “liberal” Catholics in the late ‘60s.  The young people there chafed at her “authoritarian” stance in this regard!

What I see in the Pope’s Latin liturgy edict and in so many other moves and in our President’s actions in so many things is the very common seeking of a solution to a sensed problem but applying a “band aid” instead of dealing with the real cancer deep within.  Weiss catalogs the real symptoms (and Latin is not one of them), but even she doesn’t venture  to ask the hard questions:  WHY has the Church had so much sexual abuse in its priesthood?  WHY did it tolerate slavery?  WHY did it participate in a cultural genocide of Native Americans?   And WHY did it privilege the insights and language of western theology (something Abhishiktananda wondered about and at the end of his life had pretty much given up any hope of any real change in the Church’s blindness and narrowness)?   And so, so much more….

 Being “Woke”

Franz Kafka wrote a number of very strange and unsettling stories.  Probably the most surreal and best known is “The Metamorphosis.”  Written in 1915, at the start of World War I, here is the famous opening sentence:

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.”  (better translation might be “monstrous vermin”)

This opening is just as disturbing as in Orwell’s  1984:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 

As one commentator put it:  “This line perfectly sets up the idea that everything is not quite as it seems and manages to plunge you into an alien world without any explanation.”

What is especially striking is Gregor’s reaction and his family’s reaction to this shocking and horrible change in his identity in its external condition.    Gregor at first thinks this is a temporary condition and he can wait it out for a change.  Then, when nothing happens, he begins attempts at “living with it.”  His family is perplexed and troubled;  but they also in a sense “negotiate” with the new condition and are finally relieved when Gregor dies of starvation.  It is hard to imagine a more surreal story!

To borrow a term from modern urban slang, Gregor is “woke” but he hardly seems capable of dealing with his situation to say the least.  The real nightmare begins as he awakens.  We come up against an unsettling paradox:  to be “woke” means to be aware of the “nightmare” one is living in.   The current situation in Afghanistan seems to be one of those moments.  

But the “nightmare” did not begin just now; it goes back over 30 years.  And it involves at least 5 presidents; both Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals in our political culture.  You might say it begins with President Carter (but really it goes so much further back!).  During the Carter Administration we began to secretly arm various Afghani tribes and clans so they could fight the invading Russians.  It was the Cold War, and we wanted to mess up the Russians without getting our hands dirty.  That part worked; the Russians fled Afghanistan just as we have, but the people whom we armed evolved into the present day Taliban.   Whenever you join hands with violence, the results are never a blessing.  Fast forward to 09/11, Bin Laden hiding out in Afghanistan achieves a catastrophic terrorist attack on us.  President Bush commences military actions against Afghanistan including a full scale invasion.  Instead of treating Bin Laden and cohorts as a criminal gang and getting an international coalition to hunt them down and bring them to justice, we launched this war, and then, incredibly enough, another war on Iraq which had never been involved in any attack on us, but the war was built on a total lie.  And almost every member of Congress supported this, both Dems and Republicans (not Bernie Sanders, who was an independent at the time).  Incidentally, the vast majority of the Islamic world was shocked at the act of Bin Laden in the name of Islam, and many were prepared to help the U.S. in bringing him to justice.  There was even a Guardian story, which I can’t verify, that the Taliban were willing to turn Bin Laden over to the International Court but not into U.S. hands.  (By the way, the destabilization of Iraq contributed greatly to the formation of ISIS and that nightmare.)

So the war continued and also the delusions and lies.  Obama, who is so often portrayed as a commendable president by the liberal establishment, had his own contributions to this nightmare.  This extended quote is from a Washington Post story about the history of our involvement in Afghanistan (Craig Whitlock):

“President Barack Obama had promised to end the war, so on Dec. 28, 2014, U.S. and NATO officials held a ceremony at their headquarters in Kabul to mark the occasion. A multinational color guard paraded around. Music played. A four-star general gave a speech and solemnly furled the green flag of the U.S.-led international force that had flown since the beginning of the conflict.

In a statement, Obama called the day ‘a milestone for our country’ and said the United States was safer and more secure after 13 years of war.

‘Thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending and the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,’ he declared.

But for such a historical day, the military ceremony seemed strange and underwhelming. Obama issued his statement from Hawaii while he relaxed on vacation. The event took place in a gymnasium, where several dozen people sat on folding chairs. There was little mention of the enemy, let alone an instrument of surrender. Nobody cheered.

In fact, the war was nowhere near a conclusion, “responsible” or otherwise, and U.S. troops would fight and die in combat in Afghanistan for many years to come. The baldfaced claims to the contrary ranked among the most egregious deceptions and lies that U.S. leaders spread during two decades of warfare.”

Then this morning I saw this op-ed piece in the NY Times:

I Was a Marine in Afghanistan. We Sacrificed Lives For a Lie.

Well, that is one “woke” Marine!  Unfortunately there are so many military, political, and intelligence folks who still believe we were somehow “protecting” America over there.  Well, trillions of dollars later (which could have paid for everyone’s health care during the last 20 years) and thousands of American soldiers dead or injured, the Taliban are still in control!

Chris Hedges, the ultimate “woke guy,” had, as usual,  predicted this long ago.   Just a few weeks ago he was writing this:

“The debacle in Afghanistan, which will unravel into chaos with lightning speed over the next few weeks and ensure the return of the Taliban to power, is one more signpost of the end of the American empire. The two decades of combat, the one trillion dollars we spent, the 100,000 troops deployed to subdue Afghanistan, the high-tech gadgets, artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare, Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs and the Global Hawk drones with high-resolution cameras, Special Operations Command composed of elite rangers, SEALs and air commandos, black sites, torture, electronic surveillance, satellites, attack aircraft, mercenary armies, infusions of millions of dollars to buy off and bribe the local elites and train an Afghan army of 350,000 that has never exhibited the will to fight, failed to defeat a guerrilla army of 60,000 that funded itself through opium production and extortion in one of the poorest countries on earth.

Like any empire in terminal decay, no one will be held accountable for the debacle or for the other debacles in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen or anywhere else. Not the generals. Not the politicians. Not the CIA and intelligence agencies. Not the diplomats. Not the obsequious courtiers in the press who serve as cheerleaders for war. Not the compliant academics and area specialists. Not the defense industry. Empires at the end are collective suicide machines. The military becomes in late empire unmanageable, unaccountable, and endlessly self-perpetuating, no matter how many fiascos, blunders and defeats it visits upon the carcass of the nation, or how much money it plunders, impoverishing the citizenry and leaving governing institutions and the physical infrastructure decayed. “

You can read the whole piece here:

https://scheerpost.com/2021/07/26/hedges-the-collective-suicide-machine/

And from the satirical website, The Onion, there was this headline:

Critics Warn Withdrawal From Afghanistan Paints Entirely Accurate Picture Of U.S. Government

And last, but not least, in my opinion, the most woke guy in the modern era: Gandhi.  And he knew how to respond to the nightmare.

“Save Money.  Live Better.”   I am in a large store, and I see these words on a sign, very prominently displayed.  These words appear In a number of places in the store.  They are obviously meant as an important statement in this place, and in fact they express a foundational principle of the founder of this company.  In a sense these words are a trivial truism, and certainly there is nothing wrong with “saving money.”  However, in that very moment when we nod our assent to this truism, we slowly succumb to a corruption of our vision and our understanding.  The phrase conceals that with an innocuous truism that appeals to our “everyday selves” but which in fact poisons our ability to discern what might be the nature of this “live better.”   But this is what advertising is always doing by filling our mental, emotional and even spiritual environment with slogans and phrases that keep us from thinking and seeing the “nature of the beast.”  So….I propose an alternative phrase for the store:  “Buy Less, Have Less.  Live Better.”    Come to think of it, the Gospels would prefer this sign:  “Give up your possessions.  Live Better.”  See what I mean? 

Many, many years ago, when I was in my late teens, one summer night I was sitting on a porch, chatting with a lovely girl for whom I had developed quite an infatuation.  Anyway, suddenly above the trees there rose this incredible full moon.  It was so amazing that for a while we just looked at it in silence.  Then, out of the clear blue, I offered it to her as a present…..  I said, “It’s absolutely free; it’s all yours as a gift.”  She just laughed, and she was a bit puzzled.  I can’t say that I knew what I was saying, but it just seemed to sum up my own inner self somehow and I was trying to find something deeper between us.   As we chatted some more it was clear that she found no meaning in this beautiful moon being “free,” and if she could not take it back to her room it was not much of a “gift.”  It was only years later when I became a monk that then I began to understand what I felt at that moment.

Recently I saw this minor little story on one of the news sites.  It caught my eye because it mentioned a “neighborhood” I lived in for a number of years: Big Sur.  The story was about Ventana, a luxury resort in the storied mountains of Big Sur along the central coast of California, an incredible place.  The news story mentioned that it now costs about $2000 a night to stay at Ventana.  I was amazed.  Wondered what you get for that….  It is the essence of capitalism that a “fair” price is determined by the “market.”  That means you can charge as high as you want as long as someone is there to pay it.  A full discussion of that would take us far afield and perhaps unnecessary.  But anyway, why would anyone pay that amount?  Just a few miles down the fabled Highway 1 there is a monastic community that invites people to stay with them  a few days with basic accommodations starting at $135 a night.  Still a bit steep for me, but I do appreciate what’s involved.  In any case, that slogan does apply here:  Save money.  Live Better.

 Do you remember  “Big Yellow Taxi,” a fun song from long ago by  Joni Mitchell?  One line from the song stands out:  “They paved over paradise and put up a parking lot.”  Actually there is quite a lot packed in that one sentence, but I would like to focus on just one word:  paradise.  On the first and obvious level it refers to the awesome and beautiful natural world around us.  It is the vision of John Muir and Edward Abbey, among many others.  The line refers to the destruction of that “paradise,” exploiting it for profit, making it into a commodity.  But the word “paradise” also resonates with meaning far beyond what Joni probably initially intended.  It immediately connects us to the Biblical myth and its many echoes and re-echoes through the ages.   Recall the Book of Genesis, how it begins with the creation story, and by chapter 2 we are with the first human beings, Adam and Eve, in Paradise, their home.  It is the natural world in harmony.  Adam and Eve are created in the “likeness of God,” and in Semitic terms, “they walk with God as with a friend,” meant to live in his Presence all their days…as the Psalms keep repeating.   But they screw this up; “they pave over” this Paradise.  They want this “likeness” on their terms, as a “my possession,” not recognizing it as a gift, not grasping the nature of the gift.  They become unable to experience their world as originally intended, as Paradise, and the Bible is very concrete in what that entails for them.  They have committed themselves to what the Buddhists call “dukkha,” that insatiable and seemingly endless grasping for satisfaction (recall the Rolling Stones’ song, recall Sisyphus rolling his big rock up the hill).  Both personal and social life become very problematic…as the Bible slowly unfolds.  But I want to bring in a modern voice to illustrate a contemporary, unvarnished view of this deterioration:  John Lennon, just before his death.  I remembered this quote of his from one of my early blog postings back in 2014:

 “Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” 

Echoing some Desert Fathers….and the legendary Chinese hermit, Han Shan…..

Lets jump ahead in the Bible now, all the way to the New Testament, to the Gospels.  Recall Jesus’s words to the thief crucified alongside him: 

“Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  Luke 23: 43

Implying that there is a way of “returning to Paradise.” (Reminding one of Gandhi’s classic words: “I know a way out of hell.”)  Indeed, there is a whole Patristic tradition of Easter homilies and writings in which Christ is portrayed as having “descended into hell” (what later theology calls “limbo”—a place of illusory separation from God) at his death, and in his Resurrection he led all the people who were there into Paradise.  So, there is this aspect of this mythic language about “paradise” and a “return to paradise,”  and you can kind of see what it’s getting at.  However, it can also be seriously misread where paradise is something outside you, after you die, a “container,” if you will, of your life, an environment that is pleasant, etc.  This is one of the dualistic pitfalls within Christianity.  A modern Orthodox holy man, St. Innocent of Alaska, points us in the right direction of understanding this myth:  “ In brief, Adam was in Paradise, and Paradise was in Adam.”  When we became alienated from this Paradise within, we no longer could see the world we live in as Paradise, and so like fools we turned it into a “parking lot” and our lives became vehicles of dukkha.  

The person of Christ in the Gospels, his death and resurrection, means there is a way to “return to Paradise.”  But instead of a locus, a place, “out there” beyond me, this Paradise is my very being, in which this human being and God “walk together as friends.”  Here I would like to point out a wonderful work from ancient Christianity, a Syriac text which is a collection and translation of various Desert Father traditions from Egypt, from Palestine, from Syria, and from Iraq; and it is marvelously entitled:  The Paradise of the Holy Fathers.  Herein you will find the landmarks of the Paradise within:  humility, poverty, simplicity, silence, peace, compassion, mercy, and above all, purity of heart.  

Let me conclude with a few quotes from Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima, the holy monk and spiritual father in The Brothers Karamazov.   One who certainly “returned to Paradise.”

As a young man Zosima is a military officer with a servant.  One day he strikes his servant on the face and then on top of that also challenges somebody to a duel:

“Why is it, I thought, that I feel something, as it were, mean and shameful in my soul?  Is it because I am going to shed blood?  No, I thought, it doesn’t seem to be that.  Is it because I am afraid of death, afraid to be killed?  No, not that, not at all….  And suddenly I understood at once what it was:  it was because I had beaten Afanasy the night before!  I suddenly pictured it all as if it were happening over again: he is standing before me, and I strike him in the face with all my might, and he keeps his arms at his sides, head erect, eyes staring straight head as if he were at attention; he winces at each blow, and does not even dare raise a hand to shield himself—this is what a man can be brought to, a man beating his fellow man!  It was as if a sharp needle went through my soul.  I stood as if dazed, and the sun was shining, the leaves were rejoicing, glistening, and the birds, the birds were praising God…I covered my face with my hands, fell on my bed, and burst into sobs.  And then I remembered my brother Markel, and his words to his servants, and his words to the servants before his death: ‘My good ones, my dears, why are you serving me, why do you love me, and am I worthy of being served?’  ‘Yes, am I worthy?’ suddenly leaped into my mind.  Indeed how did I deserve that another man, just like me, the image and likeness of God, should serve me?  This question then pierced my mind for the first time in my life.  ‘Mother, heart of my heart, truly each of us is guilty before everyone and for everyone, only people do not know it, and if they knew it, the world would at once become paradise.’  ‘Lord,’ I wept and thought, ‘can that possibly not be true?  Indeed, I am perhaps the most guilty of all, and the worst of all men in the world as well!’  And suddenly the whole truth appeared to me in its full enlightenment:  what was I setting out to do?  I was setting out to kill a kind, intelligent, noble man, who was not at fault before me in any way, thereby depriving his wife of happiness forever, tormenting and killing her.”

So….Zosima doesn’t go through with the duel in a truly incredible way…he lets the other man shoot at him, the shot misses, and he refuses to fire back and throws the gun away.  He has this  “enlightenment” moment, and I am sure that many modern readers will be put off, misunderstand, and misread all that language about “guilt” and “being worst,” etc.  It is a kind of code language for a reality that they don’t know how else to express.   Zosima (Dostoyevsky) is speaking in traditional Desert Father/mystic language which does not lend itself to modern sensibilities about self-image and self-regard.  This particular language here does not point to a pathologically sick self-awareness.  The modern concern about people with self-destructive self-images is valid, but this is a completely different dynamic.  For the people that Zosima represents, the issue is not good self-image vs. bad self-image, but it is this enlightenment/illumination that in effect explodes the very notion of a self-image and leads to a completely different self-presence.  It is also at the same time an unveiling of our profound interrelatedness and interconnectedness.  

As Zosima’s military comrades castigate him for his “failure” in the aborted duel, he responds:

“’Gentlemen,’ I cried suddenly from the bottom of my heart, ‘look at the divine gifts around us:  the clear sky, the fresh air, the tender grass, the birds, nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, we alone, are godless and foolish, and do not understand that life is paradise, for we need only wish to understand, and it will come at once in all its beauty, and we shall embrace each other and weep….’”

And then when he is an elder monk, teaching:

“Brothers, do not be afraid of men’s sin, love man also in his sin, for this likeness of God’s love is the height of love on earth.  Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand.  Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light.  Love animals, love plants, love each thing.  If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things.  Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day.  And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love….  My young brother asked forgiveness of the birds; it seems senseless, yet it is right, for all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.  Let it be madness to ask forgiveness of the birds, still it would be easier for the birds, and for a child, and for any animal near you, if you yourself were more gracious than you are now.  If only by a drop, still it would be easier.  All is like an ocean, I say to you.  Tormented by universal love, you, too, would then start praying to the birds, as if in a sort of ecstasy, and entreat them to forgive you your sin.  Cherish this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to people.”

Amen!

There is then this mysterious encounter.  Old man Karamazov comes to the monastery with his three sons to have one of the Elders arbitrate a major dispute between them.  The old guy is a buffoon, an egomaniac, a thorough liar, a lecher, etc.  (Kind of makes one think of a  certain modern day figure in politics.)  When the Elder Zosima comes into Karamazov’s presence and looks at him, he prostrates himself before the old buffoon and scorner.  Then he gets up.  There were a number of people in the room, and everyone is mystified about what has happened.  No one understands the gesture.  I know that there are quite a few people who would object to such a gesture before such a man; there are some more who would totally misconstrue the gesture and turn it into something superficial; and there are a few who might catch a glimpse of the meaning of such a moment.  Fr. Zosima is teaching about Paradise not just with words, but just like a Zen Master, with a gesture that becomes a continual echoing koan.  

I am not going to delve into grammar or the use of language, though that is a topic worthy of reflection also.  This is simply a collection of observations, reflections, questions, etc., on a topic of enormous importance for all the great spiritualities and all the major religions.  To put it more negatively way, though clearer, if you get this  wrong, you will get lost in a serious way.  I speak from experience!  So:  Who am I?  What is being pointed at when we have the word “I”?   The great spiritual question!

Lets start with Monchanin and Abhishiktananda.  Monchanin was a genuine intellectual, a brilliant thinker who was well-read in theology and philosophy, and at the same time a true spiritual man who sought to somehow translate the spiritual heritage of India into Christian terms.  Abhishiktananda was very different in personality and in his approach to India once he really got into it.  He was very impatient with intellectual /conceptual investigations, but rather sought to dive straight into the experience of India’s Advaita tradition, especially as exemplified by the sannyasi.  The two men respected each other, and each had their own strengths and weaknesses.  But also each had their criticisms of the other.  Monchanin had this interesting thing to say about Abhishiktananda toward the end of their companionship at Shantivanam.  He was worried about the so-called experiences that Abhishiktananda had related from his extensive sojourns in solitude and meditation.  Here is the quote from a letter he wrote:

“Serious divergences between us have cast a shadow over these last years; I think he goes too far in his concessions to Hinduism, and it seems to me more and more doubtful that the essence of Christianity can be recovered on the other side of Advaita.  Advaita, like yoga and more than it, is an abyss.  Whoever in an experience of vertigo throws himself into it does not know what he will find at the bottom.  I am afraid he may find himself rather than the living trinitarian God.”

Very interesting indeed!  That last sentence is very telling, and it shows a faulty line of thought.  But how to proceed to evade Monchanin’s conceptual trap? 

From a certain standpoint it is impossible to tell what another person is experiencing, but there are certain signs and signals about what that experience may be all about.  When it comes to the Ultimate Reality which we call God, I certainly don’t mean anything dramatic—I am not a member of the “miracle and special effects” school of religious authenticity.  No, what we might look for is a depth of person there, a deepening of compassion, a broadening of vision, an inner freedom….and from what I can tell from Abhishiktananda’s diary and letters, that is largely there.  But, then again, we really can’t know, and it’s best to leave individual cases alone.  But Monchanin’s words do raise a legitimate possibility of an inquiry in a general sense.  He seems to be saying that when we go deep into our self in meditation we might only encounter our own self OR God.  He assumes the “separate self” that then must be “united” with God.  This is who you are and the whole point of life and existence and Christian identity.  But advaita presents a different vision of who we are.

 Monchanin approaches advaita conceptually, and it’s practically impossible to reconcile that with these Christian concepts of “who I am,” and Christian concepts of that “I’s” relationship to the Ultimate Reality.    But Monchanin’s concern is legitimate because there is a very real way of getting trapped within one’s own ego identity within one’s extensive meditation.  Some American Zen people have written a whole book about it.  And consider these cautionary words from Ramana Maharshi:

“He meditates, he thinks he is meditating, he is pleased with the fact that he is meditating; where does that get him, apart from strengthening his ego?”

(Words that resonate well with our Desert Fathers!)

Authentic advaita is NOT about “supersizing” the ego self; quite the contrary.

But I also fear that Monchanin’s words do seriously lead one away from a most deep and profound realization.  I think he misses something important because he is so intensely committed to standard traditional theological language; and that great philosopher of language, Wittgenstein, warned us:  the limits of our language are the limits of our world and our thinking.  A Christian advaita definitely shatters the usual patterns of Christian theology, and also how we answer that question:  Who am I?  A number of Christian mystics and profound theologians have caught a glimpse of a Christian advaita without using that same language.

Consider these quote from Catherine of Genoa, a late medieval mystic:

“In God is my being, my I, my strength, my bliss, my desire. But this I that I often call so…in truth I no longer know what the I is, or the Mine, or desire, or the good, or bliss.”

“I see without eyes, and I hear without ears. I feel without feeling and taste without tasting. I know neither form nor measure; for without seeing I yet behold an operation so divine that the words I first used, perfection, purity, and the like, seem to me now mere lies in the presence of truth. . . . Nor can I any longer say, “My God, my all.” Everything is mine, for all that is God’s seem to be wholly mine. I am mute and lost in God…God so transforms the soul in Him that it knows nothing other than God, and He continues to draw it up into His fiery love until He restores it to that pure state from which it first issued.”

And then there’s this more radical statement from her:

“My “me” is God nor do I recognize any other “me” except my God himself.”

Basically, Catherine is a pointer to a Christian version of nondualism.  It is there.  And it can be found in a number of other Christian mystics, like Eckhart.  (And interestingly enough, Catherine’s words are very much in tune with Rabia, the great female Sufi.)  Abhishiktananda discovered this nondualism through his immersion in India and the Upanishads, the sannyasi tradition, and the lived experience of the holy men he encountered there.  He discovered that the “I Am” of God is spoken in his heart, and from that Absolute flows the little, the relative, the contingent “I am” of his own being.  This “little I am” is what we might call the peripheral ego, the “nafs” of the Sufis; and modern spirituality speaks of “letting it go,” the Sufis call it “fana,” “annihilation(!), the old Christian mystics call it a “death of the self.”  Your “I am” gets lost in the “I Am” of God.  But this will seem like becoming “nobody,” a nothing with no name, etc.  

Modern sensibility is not comfortable to say the least with the language of classical spirituality of any tradition; you know, all that stuff about “me” dying to self, annihilation,  etc.  (even the language of Jesus in the Gospels causes some to wince or just ignore or interpret very metaphorically).  The science of psychology is all about building up the ego, helping it function well.  It does not know or recognize the area of experience which we are alluding to.  A pop guru of the ‘60s, Ram Dass, once said that psychologists are “fender repairmen”—might be good to remember that he had been a Harvard psychologist before he “dropped out.”  What he means is that psychology is really only concerned with the periphery of the human identity, not the core reality.  It cannot answer the question: who am I?  It cannot recognize that the ego self is embedded in a much deeper sense of self that cannot be objectified, cannot be the object of our analysis.

An entry from Abhishiktananda’s Diary, a reflection on the moment of his massive heart attack that soon led to his death:

“Seeing myself so helpless, incapable of any thought or movement, I was released from being identified with this ‘I’ which until then had thought, willed, rushed about, was anxious about each and every thing.  Disconnection!  That whole consciousness in which I habitually lived was no longer mine, but I, I still was.”

Perhaps we can borrow something from Buddhism to shed some more light on this topic.  Mahayana Buddhism has this central doctrine of the Two Truths: relative truth and absolute truth.  There are extensive and elaborate explanations of these, but here is a brief, succinct account from the magazine Lion’s Roar:

“What is the relationship between absolute reality-whatever that may be-and the relative world we inhabit? That question is at the heart of all religions. Mahayana Buddhism’s answer is called the two truths.

Relative truth includes all the dualistic phenomena- ourselves, other beings, material objects, thoughts, emotions, concepts-that make up our lives in this world. These are sometimes called maya, or illusion, because we mistakenly believe they are solid, separate, and independent realities. But the problem is not relative truth itself, which is basically good, but our misunderstanding of its nature. That is revealed when we understand….

Absolute truth is the reality beyond dualism of any kind. It’s also the true nature of relative phenomena. In Mahayana Buddhism, it can be called emptiness or interdependence. Thich Nhat Hanh uses the term “interbeing.” In Vajrayana Buddhism, absolute reality is also referred to as space, complete openness, or primordial purity.

The two truths are what’s called a provisional teaching in Buddhism-helpful for where we are on our path but not the final truth. The final truth is that there is only one reality, and it unites the relative and absolute. Absolute truth is the true nature of the relative. Relative truth is the manifestation of the absolute.”

So perhaps it can be helpful to see our little ego self to be part of that relative truth of our everyday conventional existence.  It has its importance as it is the ground of the manifestation of the absolute truth of our existence and our identity.  Therefore it is good and proper to have a healthy ego, and the psychologist has a true role in this; but he/she do not have access to the absolute truth of our identity with the tools of their profession.

All human beings, but especially Westerners, have this amazing capacity to build up this ego self, becoming an elaborate construct like one of those fantastic sand castles some kids build out of beach sand.  And I am afraid this ego construction is about as durable as that beach construction!  Thus, the deep-seated anxiety about the whole project, and the therapist is there to help us live with that.  We use wealth, power, status, achievements, reputation, sex, badges and markers of all kinds, etc., etc. in this construction.  Even formal religion does not always provide a true diagnostic of what’s going on but in fact enhances the whole project with a religious clad version of all the above.  Thomas Merton once said that it is truly a gift to meet the Zen “man of no title.”

The issue is “personhood.”  I am a person; God is a person.  Think how important that is especially in western thought.  Politics and philosophy and religion and economics and psychology all are focused on this “reality.”  Every one is looking for personal happiness, personal fulfillment, personal success, personal satisfaction, etc.  But what is this “person,” what is personhood?”  Again, what is this “I” that is doing all this seeking?  Conservative Christians reject Buddhism and other Asian religions because these seem to deny or diminish this reality we call “personhood,” in regard to both the human and the divine.  After all, what’s important for them is the “personal relationship” to Jesus, to God.  The personhood of God and the personhood of the human being are the two poles around which their whole religious consciousness moves.  In a sense one can see what their concern is; but one can also see the danger in this language of utter superficiality and trivializing the religious journey—which happens all too often.  The “nafs,” the peripheral ego, becomes the norm and the guiding light to delineate “personhood.”  Modern western culture almost automatically sets you up for this problem.  But they also make the same mistake that Monchanin made, overlooking something very important.

Here I will recall one of my favorite quotes from Aquinas:  “At the end of all our knowing we know God as something unknown; we are united with him as with something wholly unknown.”  Indeed.

And who we are, then, is immersed in the depths of that very Mystery.  At one point Abhishiktananda asks: “what constitutes personhood?”  What Jesus communicates is  at the heart of personhood in the absolute sense: that experience of being “from the Father” and “going to the Father.”  If you wish you can drop that Semitic metaphor of “father” and simply insert “Mystery.”  Who you are is embedded in the Mystery of the Ultimate Reality.  As Abhishiktananda well recognized, Jesus reveals the ground of our advaita.

Let us conclude with a poem from Thomas Merton, “The Fall”:

“There is no where in you a paradise that is no place and there

  You do not enter except without a story.

  To enter there is to become unnameable.

 Whoever is there is homeless for he has no door and no identity 

          with which to go out and to come in.

Whoever is nowhere is nobody, and therefore cannot exist except

           as unborn.

No disguise will avail him anything.

Such a one is neither lost nor found.

But he who has an address is lost.

They fall, they fall into apartments and are securely established!

They find themselves in streets.  They are licensed

 To proceed from place to place 

They now know their own names

They can name several friends and know

Their own telephones must some time ring.

If all telephones ring at once , if all names are shouted at once and

             all cars crash at one crossing:

If all cities explode and fly away in dust

Yet identities refuse to be lost.  There is a name and number for

                everyone.

There is a definite place for bodies, there are pigeon holes for 

                ashes:

Such security can business buy!

Who would dare to go nameless in such a secure universe?

Yet, to tell the truth, only the nameless are at home in it.

They bear with them in the center of nowhere the unborn flower

                 of nothing;

This is the paradise tree.  It must remain unseen until words end

                 and arguments are silent.”

There are quite a few authentic, integral, deep spiritual traditions in our world.  Each with its own fascinating strengths; each with its own peculiar weaknesses.  We have come in human evolution and development to the point that none seem able to stand  by themselves without a very real diminishment.  All traditions do seem to really need each other in order to cover  those areas of human experience that are not sufficiently explored or even neglected in their own path.  Examples:  Merton’s comments in Asia on how the Tibetans had gone so much further in understanding our mind/consciousness in the spiritual path; and the Dalai Lama’s comment on how much he is impressed with Christianity’s focus on compassion and works of mercy.  

Kashmir Shaivism may well be one of the least known and least appreciated spiritual traditions.  It’s “home ground” is of course Kashmir, a beautiful area in the northwest of India.  With the Himalayas close by, with beautiful green valleys filled with lakes, with a mild climate, it was always an attractive place.  When the Brits controlled India, their top people would vacation in Kashmir or get away from the heat of the south and float on Dal Lake in a luxurious houseboats with servants.  More importantly, for centuries this area was extremely rich in religious traditions.  The Sufis were there; the Buddhists were there; and, yes, that particular form of Hinduism now known as Kashmir Saivism.  

The political situation that developed in the 20^th century destroyed most of that.  Kashmir got caught in a violent tug-of-war struggle between Pakistan and India.  In part that is the responsibility of the Brits in the way they left India; in part it is of course more complicated than that.  The tragic thing is that this is only a part of that fierce animosity between certain elements in Islam and certain elements in Hinduism.  Today it is mostly populated by Islamic people, and adherents of Kashmir Saivism will largely be found elsewhere.

India is the home of an incredibly varied religious traditions.  To locate Kashmir Saivism we first note that it belongs in the nondualist camp of spiritualities.  India has been the home of 4 major nondualist traditions:  Madhyamika—basically the Buddhist foundation of all Mahayana paths including Zen and Tibetan Buddhism; Vijnanavada (sometimes known as “Yogachara”); Advaita Vedanta, especially Shankara’s interpretation of it; and finally Kashmir Saivism.  

To be frank about it, I myself am not really attracted by this mode of spirituality.  It obviously is a rich and deep tradition; it obviously still offers something significant to a goodly number of people, both the very educated and also average folks.  But as for myself even as I find a number of very interesting and intriguiging insights within Kashmir Saivism,  I am averse to its complexity; seems so needless to me—same holds for me in regard to Tibetan Buddhism.  If you want to get just a little taste of that complexity dip into one of these books:  Abhinavagupta’s Hermeneutics of the Absolute by Bettina Baumer or The Doctrine of Vibration by Mark S.G. Dyczkowski.  The complexity I am referring to is not primarily one of concepts or ideas—I always enjoy the challenge of understanding deep/difficult lines of thought. No, what I am referring to is a whole religious complex of symbol, ritual, practice, etc.  For one thing, I am simply not attracted by invitations to a panoply of complex meditation practices wherever they be found.  That simply could be just me.  After all, my native tradition of Catholicism can look very complex to an outsider, but being born and educated in it I navigate around that seeming needless complexity to get to the heart of it.   Almost impossible to do with a completely different tradition—unless, like Zen, it already points to that unspeakable simplicity at the heart of all traditions.  Here we can remind ourselves something that Merton pointed out in Asia:  when we get behind all the “complexity” of these various traditions, we find something profoundly and utterly simple which gets covered over by layer after layer of myth, ritual, concepts, even superstition and magic—how true this is of my Catholicism!

Bettina Baumer, whom I mentioned above, is both a world-class scholar of Kashmir Saivism and a devoted adherent.  She gave a talk at a gathering to honor the memory of Abhishiktananda in which she expressed the opinion that he was closer to Kashmir Saivism than to Advaita Vedanta (at least the dominant Shankara interpretation of it).  As Baumer explains it, Abhishiktananda was not really acquainted with explicit Kashmir Saivism, but his relating of his spiritual experience and his read of the Upanishads indicates that he had stumbled on the central teachings of this tradition and would have been more at home in it.   Perhaps, perhaps not.   Abhishiktananda did express his displeasure with Shankara’s treatment of the Upanishads and his teachings: “too much conceptualization.”  He preferred to deal with the Upanishads unfiltered; there he felt he was more in touch with his own nondual experience.  But we do have to consider this:  for Abhishiktananda the focal point and total symbol of what was India’s most valuable gift to western religious consciousness was wholly contained in the figure of the sannyasi.  Shankara himself was a sannyasi, and the whole Advaita Vedanta tradition elevated the figure of the sannyasi into a transcendent symbol.  This is not quite true of Kashmir Saivism.  It does not elevate that kind of external radical renunciation.   There is no “class distinction” between sannyasi and householder; all spiritual work is purely interior.  Yes, the true adherent will live simply, like the last great holy man of Kashmir, Lakshman Joo, but he will not be seen to engage in radical renunciation.  Yes, Lakshman Joo was a vegetarian, was celibate, dressed simply, but certainly lived more comfortably than the sannyasis Abhishiktananda admired.  Abhinavagupta, the great scholar-saint of ancient Kashmir Saivism, was a married man and raised 3 children.  And many of Lakshman Joo’s disciples are married with families.  It’s a different kind of path than the Upanishadic sannyasis.  Just my conjecture, because I have not read this anywhere, but with the mass movement of Islamic people into Kashmir about eight centuries ago, a lot of Sufis came there also.  These may have had a large influence on a lot of Kashmir Saivism because their mode of spirituality is very similar.

To follow up more on the above, one of Kashmir Saivism ‘s more intriguing and, to me, most attractive aspect is its radical nondualism.  By that I mean something special.  What I am referring to is the push of religious nondualism into relativizing or deconstructing all the dualisms people live by.  Consider this concrete example: the caste system, not as dominant in India as in the past, but still a strong influence on social and religious life in India.  The key adherents of Advaita Vedanta, belonging to the brahmin caste, have traditionally been zealous upholders of the caste system.  It appears that their staunch nondualism is only in regard to the Ultimate Reality, and there are no social consequences to that.  No so with Kashmir Saivism.  Consider these words by the holy man, Lakshman Joo as found on the website run by his followers :

“The fifth significant difference between Kashmir Śaivism and Vedānta concerns the question of who is fit to practice this monistic teaching. Vedānta holds that this teaching can only be practiced by “worthy people” such as brahmins with “good qualities.” In fact, Śaṁkarācārya holds that Vedānta is meant only for saṁyāsins¹ and not others. From the Vedāntic point of view, women and other castes are not allowed to practice the Vedāntic system. This point of view, however, is not recognized by our Kashmir Śaivism. Kashmir Śaivism teaches that this monistic thought can be practiced by anyone, man or woman, without the restriction of caste, creed, or color. In fact, our Śaivism teaches us that this thought can be practiced more fruitfully by women than by men.^”

On this website there is also a full explanation of the difference between Kashmir Saivism and Advaita Vedanta:

https://www.lakshmanjooacademy.org/difference-kashmir-saivism-advaita-vedanta/

In the book previously mentioned, Bettina Baumer has this quote from Abhinavagupta:

“In Trika Sastras, this very activity almost without any curb is worship.  All things are available for the fulfilment of this worship.  The course of knowledge has been described in detail.  Regarding the castes—brahmanas, etc. – there is no fixed principle, for the caste distinction is artificial.  The specification that brahmanas alone are entitled for instruction can convince only the silly herd.”

And Bettina herself:

“This hierarchical sense of inferiority and superiority applies practically in the social realm to the caste system which has no place in Anuttara.  That this is not only a theoretical statement but has practical implications in Trika has been shown in the context of adhikara:  there Abhinavagupta ridicules the restrictions of Sastras to a particular, especially the brahmana caste.”

So…..very interesting…..   Just think of slavery in the Christian context.  Right from its origins.   Amazing to me how St. Paul missed the boat on this point badly, and got early Christianity orientated wrongly on this point, with a lot other implications.  Recall Paul’s argument:  he is thoroughly overwhelmed by the reality of the Risen Christ, and his theological elaboration of the implications is awesome, especially considering the background and culture of the Semitic mindset.  When he comes to this widespread social phenomenon of slavery, he points out that in the light of the Resurrection no one is really a “slave” anymore; there is no second—class citizenship in the kingdom of God.  Good enough, but then in a curious twist of logic he goes on to say that if you as a Christian are a slave owner, treat your slave like a brother in Christ.  Apparently there may be no slaves in the kingdom of God, but here it’s ok even for Christians.  If one failed to get that message, Paul makes it explicit:  Slaves, obey your masters.  And because of Paul’s blindness in this regard, Christianity was saddled with a muddled approach to slavery and other issues for over a thousand years.

Let me quote a few lines from one of Abhinavagupta’s key mystical writings as translated by Bettina Baumer:

Anuttarastika

From:  Eight Verses on the Unsurpassable

1. There is no need of spiritual progress,

     nor of contemplation, disputation or discussion,

     nor meditation, concentration nor even the effort of prayer.

     Please tell me clearly:  What is supreme Truth?

     Listen:  Neither renounce nor possess anything,

     share in the joy of the total Reality

     and be as you are!

2.  In reality no world of transmigration exists,

      so how can one talk about bondage?

      To try to liberate one free already

       Is futile, for he was never in bondage.

       All this just creates a delusion like that

        of the shadow of a ghost or a rope mistaken for a snake.

       So neither renounce nor possess anything.

       Enjoy yourself freely, resting in your self,

       just as you are!

4.   This bliss is not comparable to that which is experienced

       through riches or wine or even union with the beloved.

       The dawning of that Light is not to be compared

       with the light of a lamp or that of the sun or moon.

      The joy that is felt when one is freed from the burden

       of accumulated differences can only be compared

       to the relief felt while setting on the ground a heavy weight.

       The dawning of the Light is like finding a lost treasure:

       the state of universal non-duality.

Think of the words of Jesus in the Gospel: the treasure buried in the field, the light burden vs. the heavy burden which we carry, etc.  Think of the Sermon on the Mount … it really is only understandable from the standpoint of a nondual spiritual consciousness.  Otherwise we tend to dismiss it as “exaggerated,” or “simply a lofty unreachable goal in this life,” or “idealized ethics” or “symbolic,” or some other rationalization for not letting these words be a real map to our real life.  There’s so much more that could be said along these lines, but I will leave it at that.  Suffice it to say, that among all the teachings of Abhinavagpta that I read and (think) I understand, none is a problem to the heart of the Reality of the Christ.

Some interesting and (to me) appealing notions in Kashmir Saivism:

a.  Anuttara—“the Unsurpassable,” “the Absolute,” “that which has nothing beyond it,” etc.  Perhaps this is “the Father” of the Gospels; perhaps it is the Godhead of Meister Eckhart, etc.  

b.  anupaya— the “no means,” “no-way,” the highest of the four ways of liberation.   You’ll find this idea among the deepest of the Desert Fathers, Zen Masters, Sufis, etc.

c.  pratyabhijna— philosophy of recognition.  “Recognition” of who you really are is the key to all true spiritual paths, and so it is with Kashmir Saivism.  Read the New Testament in the light of this.   There is the way of “recognition”  vs. the way of “achieving” or “earning” or “working for” …..otherwise known as “salvation through works.”

Truly, the tradition of Kashmir Saivism is blessed with a beauty, a power, and a vision that we all can learn from!

Recently, out of curiosity, I was perusing the internet pages of several conservative Catholic colleges.  A lot of it was standard academic language; but some of it was that depressing arrogance of the “Catholicism uber alles, Catholicism contra mundum” attitude.  No need to go over all that.  However, in at least one case I did find something I could relate to:  Thomas Aquinas College has built its whole education program on a Great Books foundation.  Now what they do with that good intention I am not sure.  But I want to move on to something else.  Soon after this I saw a story in the Washington Post about Howard University, one of the primary historic Black colleges.  It appears the university had decided to close its Classics Department, and a whole bunch of students, alumni, and friends of the school were expressing vigorous disagreement and protest with that decision.  Now I come to something very interesting…a remarkable op-ed piece in the Washington Post that lays out the reason why Howard was mistaken, but more importantly it points to a bit of wisdom that we all need in the modern world.  The piece was written by Cornell West and Jeremy Tate.  The latter gentleman I don’t know, but West is a famous Black intellectual who has been a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, and in general an inspiration to read. 

 The title of the essay is “Howard University’s Removal of Classics is a Spiritual Catastrophe.”  Strong language but it gets stronger.  The essay begins:

“….one of America’s greatest Black institutions, Howard University, is diminishing the light of wisdom and truth that inspired Douglass, King and countless other freedom fighters. Amid a move for educational ‘prioritization,’ Howard University is dissolving its Classics Department. Tenured faculty will be dispersed to other departments, where their courses can still be taught. But the university has sent a disturbing message by abolishing the department.”

So, the authors point out that the classical tradition informed and aided the liberating vision and discourse of such figures as Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King.  This is not too well known but even less well-known is that Black Panther leaders like Angela Davis and Huey Newton quoted figures like Socrates and Cicero.  But this line of argument is not yet getting at the heart of the matter.  The stakes are very high when you are diminishing the presence of the classical tradition in our public AND religious discourse.  Our authors, again:

“Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.  Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.”

A good point but it’s not their best or most important point.  The essay continues:

“The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else in the world. We should never cancel voices in this conversation, whether that voice is Homer or students at Howard University. For this is no ordinary discussion. The Western canon is an extended dialogue among the crème de la crème of our civilization about the most fundamental questions. It is about asking “What kind of creatures are we?” no matter what context we find ourselves in. It is about living more intensely, more critically, more compassionately. It is about learning to attend to the things that matter and turning our attention away from what is superficial.  Howard University is not removing its classics department in isolation. This is the result of a massive failure across the nation in “schooling,” which is now nothing more than the acquisition of skills, the acquisition of labels and the acquisition of jargon. Schooling is not education. Education draws out the uniqueness of people to be all that they can be in the light of their irreducible singularity. It is the maturation and cultivation of spiritually intact and morally equipped human beings.”

Good points; very well put.  Needless to say Howard University pushed back on this critique but I am not going to get into that argument.  More interesting to me is the applicability of what West and Tate say to the realm of spirituality, theology, religion.  There are at least two different ways that it may apply.  The first is simply to look at one’s own tradition, Catholicism in my case.  There you will find a rich tradition of spirituality, even mysticism of high realization; but it is all encased in a very problematic history.  From some very dubious Biblical tropes to the quasi-mythological language of the early Church to the keen articulations of medieval figures, but limited in their horizon, all the way to our own insights, our own limitations, our own advances.  It is all a “conversation” of sorts, and this is a good way of approaching “the Tradition.”  Unfortunately, however, much too often the Tradition is seen  through the lens of the catechism:  “You have a question; we have the answer.”  The history within which this Tradition unfolds is also too often whitewashed, covered up, retold in a totally unreal way.  The weird, infantile, dysfunctional piety found in many corners of the Church is covered over with grand theological language.  The saints put on a miracle show, and the faithful obey, which is their place in the institution.  The Church’s handling of its dysfunctional and predatory priests and religious was colored by this attitude.  The bishops didn’t want to “scandalize” the “simple faith” of believers; and the “holiness” of the church, that image if you will, had to be impeccable and so propped up….at the expense of enormous injustice and falsehood.  And then  too often the language of our primary texts is left unexamined for what it is really saying; we are encouraged to rely on “simple faith” and “trust” the Church reading of them.  It’s amazing how much superficial religiosity, even false religiosity gets pedlled this way.

But what happens if we begin to see our Tradition as a conversation of a sort…between us and the key voices of our past.  No better example than Thomas Merton.  When he entered the Trappists in the mid 1940s, he was a sophisticated, well-educated young man who was also very intense in his spiritual search; but he was at the same time constrained and limited by the narrow horizons of the Catholicism and the monasticism of his time.  The Trappists that he entered after his conversion saw monastic life as something to “endure” rather than as an intense focus on union with God.  The point of it all was not “contemplative prayer” but continual penitential practices.  Yes, for the love of God, but still distorting the real meaning of the life.  Merton plunged into this program, but he also began a far-ranging examination of the Tradition and recovered the contemplative heart of his monasticism.  He was not the only one doing this among the Trappists, and so by the ‘60s the focus on their life had changed and a vigorous renewal began.  Needless to say, not everything in this renewal was positive or helpful, but the focus had definitely changed.  And the real agent of this change, for the positive elements in it, was an engagement with the Tradition, a re-reading of it, not for the purpose of mindlessly copying or accepting what was there—not looking for easy formulas, new rules, simple answers from the Tradition; on the contrary, learning how to question the Tradition for what was essential in it and what was “window dressing,” etc.  Learning how to get behind  the language to grasp the reality.  Merton’s writings and teachings on monasticism and contemplative prayer articulated in the ‘60s shows the result of this conversation.

But there is another conversation that also arises in this context and also that Merton was a big part of.  Merton discovered that to truly understand the depths of his own Tradition and to uncover “still buried treasure” in it,” he needed the help of the other great contemplative traditions of the world: primarily Sufism, Taoism, Zen, and Tibetan Buddhism.  This is quite remarkable, and is in fact a new element in our Tradition.  It was never conceived before that it would be a good, even a necessity to engage with these great traditions.  Not as “tourists,” certainly not as “missionaries” seeking converts; but as fellow spiritual pilgrims seeking to learn what treasures these brothers and sisters of ours have.  So there is this new conversation between traditions; a conversation that will enrich some, challenge some, bewilder some, scare some, perhaps even leading some to see their own Tradition in a completely new way.  If the classics helped empower key Black leaders, perhaps Lao Tzu, Milarepa, Han Shan, etc.  can do something for us pilgrims on this journey.

Clarity is not often mentioned as a spiritual quality; certainly it is not listed as one of the “classic virtues.”  I would suggest, however, that clarity is not just a commendable characteristic of a person, but that it represents a critical and essential element of authentic spiritual depth.  I don’t mean to say that wherever we find clarity we find authentic spirituality in any explicit way; far from it.  Some people who exhibit intense clarity are not popularly recognized as “spiritual” or “religious.”  But the presence of clarity does indicate a dimension of holiness that may be unnamed (or named).  In any case we are all a bit of a mixture of elements, some of them not so good, some of them amazingly true and deep.  Clarity, wherever you find it, is to be valued.   Lets reflect a bit on this and look at some examples of some sharp clarity.

But first, what is “clarity”?  What do we mean by this term?  It has to do with seeing something in its reality, not overlaying it with our projections, not distorting it because of our disordered desires, fears, expectations, etc.  But even this is not enough.  After seeing something in its reality, there is the moment when we call it by its right name.  Clarity necessitates  this naming because clarity is not a private inner vision but a function of our nature as communal beings; and language, the correct use of language,  is a foundation of authentic community and an unconcealing of our fundamental communion.  (Think of that account in Genesis of Adam in Paradise naming all the animals created by God.  It is a key function of our humanity and shows our connection and responsibility to all other creatures.)  That’s one of the reasons, by the way, that a hermit who has lived in his solitude and silence, when it Is authentic, arrives at a prophetic kind of clarity and people may start coming to him for that clearness.  His gift is for the community. Paradoxically, the solitary one becomes the sacrament of communion.

Recently I reflected on the phenomenon of greed in our society.  I wrote about 8 or 9 pages, but my dear old friend, Lao Tzu, whom I first read 60 years ago in my teens, nails it sharply and succinctly in a few lines:

“With Tao under heaven

          Stray horses fertilize the fields.

Without Tao under heaven

          Warhorses are bred at the frontier.

There is no greater calamity

           Than not knowing what is enough.

There is no greater fault

            Than desire for success.

            Therefore,

Knowing that enough is enough,

             Is always

                         Enough.”

                                          (Addiss and Lombardo translation)

Simple words that conceal a depth beyond “clarity.”  Don’t think that clarity means easy to grasp!

Another wise figure from ancient China was Confucius. Mostly we have stereotypes and caricatures of this figure, and we have little sense of what he actually taught.  Even later Chinese thought distorted his vision.   He placed a high value on clarity.  In fact he saw it as the necessary foundation of a sane, orderly, peaceful society.  Two quotes:

“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name ~ 

In the  Analects, a disciple asked Confucius the right principle of government, and in reply Confucius said:

“The one thing needed first is the rectification of names.”

In our world of fake news, propaganda, advertising, so much selling of products, ideas, feelings, images, so much manipulation and obfuscation, this “calling things by their right name” sounds rather revolutionary!

Speaking of which, lack of clarity does not just lead to “difficult times.”  More often than not it leads to situations of life and death.  Consider the misleading and false language that was used to justify both the Vietnam War and the Iraq War.  Consider the obfuscations around our critical issue of gun violence.  Or even the poverty of people; the ability to make a living wage.  At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the modern financial system there were very few who saw clearly and spoke clearly what was happening to common people.  Certainly not from the leaders of the times, neither political leaders nor financial leaders.  You have to go to an outsider, a revolutionary figure like Friedrich Engels, one of the founding fathers of communist theory.

He observed the conditions of working people in England and named it “social murder.”  Engels wrote in one of the most important works of social history, The Conditions of the Working Class in England, that this “social murder” was built into the economic system. The ruling elites, Engels wrote, those that hold “social and political control,” were aware that the harsh working and living conditions during the industrial revolution doomed workers to “an early and unnatural death.  Here is an excerpt:

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.^”

Interesting to note that at this same time in the U.S., slavery was flourishing and here too neither religious, nor political, nor business leaders named the monstrosity of this practice.  It was the few outsiders, the revolutionaries,  the abolitionists, who spoke clearly and eventually pierced the conscience of the majority of the population.  

As a bit of a diversion but along the same line consider this:  recently there was a story in the NY Times and elsewhere about the Jesuits in the U.S.  They made the news because they pledged millions to certain Black people as reparations.  It turns out that in the pre-Civil War era the Jesuits were slave owners.  Yes, that is right!  And when they founded Georgetown University in Washington, at a certain point needing money for expansion, sold over 200 slaves in the general slave market….kind of hard to believe that, isn’t it?  Whatever Black families existed there were torn apart.  Many ended up in especially brutal plantation labor.  So, today’s Jesuits look like they are trying to make up for that travesty and sham of religious life by tracking down as many contemporary people whose forebears were these slaves and “returning” that money a thousand fold.  Sounds like a step in the right direction, right?  However, even this is mired in obfuscation.  The Jesuits are not digging into their own pockets to pay these reparations; they are going to “raise” this money and pass it on to the forebears.  Something similar went on when they had to pay millions to the many victims of sexual abuse by Jesuits.  For someone who was educated by the Jesuits like myself, this is a sad, sad story.  And of course in none of my history classes in the ‘60s did I ever hear of the Church’s and religious orders’ involvement in slavery.  Lack of clarity was always endemic to these institutions!  But here I just want to emphasize a bigger, much bigger point.  What kind of blindness and deafness are you afflicted with, how thick a fog, how dark is the darkness in which you find yourself when you hold the Gospel of Jesus Christ in one hand and the lives of slaves in the other.  “Lack of clarity” is way too mild to describe this situation.

 Thomas Merton often hit on the theme of clarity.  Both in essay and in poetry (the late stuff), he lamented  the falseness and manipulation of our language environment and how it facilitated our self-deception.  But here I want to quote something more important…his emphasis on clarity in his own spiritual experience, how clarity was a key characteristic of a deep spiritual experience that he had in Asia.  I refer to that famous scene at Polonnaruwa depicted in the Asian Journal:

“I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand.  Then the silence of the extraordinary faces.  The great smiles.  Huge and yet subtle.  Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything—without refutation—without establishing some other argument….  I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures, the clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into the rock shape and landscape….  Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied, vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. “ 

You would think that religion would be a welcome space for clarity.  Unfortunately that is far from true in most cases.  Whether it be in the case of the personal spiritual journey, or, whether it be in the case of a religious institution, lack of clarity can have devastating effects.  In Christianity, we can almost have a whole catalog of ills that arise from lack of clarity: religious orders devolve, monasteries become decadent, individuals turn the spiritual life into trivial pursuits, ritual begins to encourage superstition and magic, preaching becomes massaging people for funds, power and wealth get dressed in religious garb, etc., etc.  But also fortunately we do have a number of examples of clarity in all the major traditions, which can help us keep our focus even when our institutional religious life gets lost in a fog of unreality.

If you go to some of my friends among the Desert Fathers, you will get razor-sharp clarity.  Someone from a different time and different tradition is Milarepa, the profound hermit of Tibetan Buddhism.  For someone who is not from this tradition, Milarepa is hard to appreciate, especially since he is such a radical hermit, so focused on that.  But he is a most interesting and striking figure also for his clarity about the spiritual life (and just think he was not even formally a monk or ever lived in a monastery!).  

Milarepa:

“Deep in the wild mountains, is a strange marketplace, where you can trade the hassle and noise of everyday life, for eternal Light.” 

“I have no desire for wealth or possessions, and so I have nothing. I do not experience the initial suffering of having to accumulate possessions, the intermediate suffering of having to guard and keep up possessions, nor the final suffering of losing the possessions.” 

“My religion is not deceiving myself.” “I realize that even though I should possess the whole world, at my death I should have to give up everything; and so it will confer happiness in this and the next life if I give up everything now. I am thus pursuing a life which is quite opposite to that followed by the people.”

“Maintain the state of undistractedness, and distractions will fly away. Dwell alone, and you shall find the Friend. Take the lowest place, and you shall reach the highest. Hasten slowly, and you shall soon arrive. Renounce all worldly goals, and you shall reach the highest Goal. If you follow this unfrequented path, you will find the shortest way. If you realize Sunyata (the absolute Emptiness), compassion will arise within your hearts; and when you lose all differentiation between yourself and others, then you will be fit to serve others.”

Then there’s another old friend from recent times:  Abhishiktananda.  A prophetic voice that now seems “out of fashion”—his writings seem to be vanishing.  I heard from someone that even in a theological library in India his books are covered by dust, very little touched.  But how often you get jewels of clarity from him…in deceptively simple words yet leading into profound depths:

“There is no part of our life in which we can escape the mystery of God which fills our whole being….”

“Piety is perhaps the most subtle and also the surest way for the ego to escape pursuit and re-establish its status and dignity.”

Yes, all of the above is simple language, seemingly simple ideas, but their clarity conveys unspeakable depths.  In the spiritual life clarity and Mystery are the two sides of the same coin.  You don’t need an advanced degree to grasp this; you need something else…..please read Lao Tzu and the Sermon on the Mount for some direction!

Here’s another example from the Sufi tradition:

Shaikh Ahmad Al-Ahawi

“It is not a question of knowing God when the veil be lifted  but of knowing Him in the veil itself.”

A saying like this is like the proverbial sword that cuts “false religion”  from “true religion.”

And here’s a most subtle example of spiritual clarity…I refer to another old friend whom I started reading in my teens through the translations of Ezra Pound, the ancient Chinese poet Li Bai (sometimes known as Li Po), one of China’s greatest poets.  A mystic of sorts with a poetic sensibility practically unmatched by anyone in the West, but also a failure in almost everything else he did.  His clarity of vision is so subtle you can mistake it for banal simplicity, especially in translation.  Here’s an example: 

“Ask me

  Why I stay

  On Green Mountain?

  I smile

  And do not answer,

  My heart is at ease.

  Peach blossoms

  On flowing water

  Slip away

  Into the distance—

  This is another world

  Which is not of men.

(translated by Greg Whincup)

But let me turn now to the “social world” once more, the world that we all inhabit.  The role of clarity or lack of clarity therein is quite an important topic and was touched on by Merton quite a few times in the ‘60s.  You might assume that spiritual clarity is more important and should have priority of place in our concerns; but really it’s not that simple.  One might think that spiritual clarity leads to social clarity and lack of clarity in the former infects the latter with the same corruption of vision.  But the situation might be more like the proverbial “chicken and egg” dilemma…which comes first?  I think it can be shown that the lack of clarity, that the downright obfuscation and corruption of our communal communication about our everyday lives really does have a serious detrimental effect on our ability to clearly express what is important to our spiritual vision.  In any case, here is a remarkable example of remarkable clarity from a young lady who goes by the name of Walking Womad.  She has been a global hiker and a blogger writing about her hikes on some of the greatest trails in the world, including the ones in my beloved Sierras.  She also lives a radically simple lifestyle.  I haven’t seen anything recent from her so I hope she is ok, but I found this sharp quote from her from a few years ago:

“Yesterday I bought a women’s magazine. I hadn’t bought one in years. While standing in line to pay my stuff I pictured myself on the couch, sipping on a glass of white wine and reading something without brains. It sounded like a good plan to me. However that thought only lasted till I opened the magazine and noticed the word “more” being used a lot. An awful lot. “Be more human” (Reebok ad), “Want it more” (Asics); over all “more” seemed to be the way to go.

And I heard myself thinking “What the fuck?” Wearing tight sexy clothes while doing a crazy impossible yoga pose is making me more human??? And what would happen if I wanted it more? What is “it” anyway? Being fit? Having a six-pack? Being better than the rest? Or being someone else?

Cause what “more” is really saying, is that right now “I am not enough”. Not good enough the way I am. Not hot enough. Not cool enough. Not beautiful enough. Not happy enough. Not tough enough. Not chilled enough! Not! enough! I need to be more! Apparently I am lacking something. Maybe there’s a hole somewhere in my body, a space full of emptiness that makes me “not enough”, waiting and begging to be filled with “more”?

So then I went on to check my body, and I had a little talk with my heart and of course my soul had its say too, and even though we looked under the nail of both of my small toes and in that hidden lower left corner of my heart, o and also behind a strange curl in my brain, we just couldn’t find the hole.

My body was like “I never heard of that hole anyway!”; and my heart said  “Girl relax, that magazine is fooling you!” and then my soul shouted into my ear real loud (damn it almost hurt): “Fuck them!!!” Ya my soul has always been a bit of a rebel, but I like it that way.

Even when you have a look at the other side of the scale, at the world of “less and mindfulness and simplify your life” you will bump into the popular “Less is more”, mostly written in a curly font on a what seems to be recycled paper.
So now less is more too? What???
And then they want you to go buy a stone that will clean your karma.
“Fuck them!”… Ah here goes my soul again. Sorry.

Fact is: Less or more or more or less are words that wanna make me believe I need to change something, that I have a hole that needs to be filled and that the writer of those words has the ultimate solution for the emptiness, for the “not enough”. Sexy yoga clothes that make my muscles (or rather not-muscles) shine through will make me more human. “Hell I better go and buy those clothes then cause I feel a little like not enough human today!” Eh!? Yeah right!

The thing is: I am no more or less. I AM ME. I am enough. More than enough… No wait… “Just Enough” will do!
See… that “more” is everywhere, creeping up on you inbetween sentences and blinks of an eye and just when you think you’ve had enough of the shit.
I don’t need to have more of this, or be less of that. I’m fine with being me. Just me. Human. Cause there’s no such thing as “more human”. Yoga won’t save my soul, nor will anything that money can buy. It doesn’t need to be saved. Even if it says “fuck” a lot.

So while I was sipping white wine and I was looking through that magazine and I searched for holes in the lower left corner of my heart ánd I almost had to put in earplugs because of my soul screaming so loud, I decided that the only things that mattered were being happy with who I am, being grateful for what I have, and loving my wild cursing soul.”

  Merton could not have said it better OR clearer!

Recall that old Catholic list of the “Seven Deadly Sins”:  pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.  This list actually goes back to the writings of Evagrius and Cassian, and then it became kind of institutionalized in ecclesial thought and practice.  Originally it was just meant to organize and categorize the various drives in the human heart that plague us, and not only drag us down spiritually but even undermine our very humanity.  The list is not arbitrarily arranged;  the “worst” sin is listed first and then the others in order.  It is interesting that greed is considered so potent in its evil dynamics.  But none of the classic authors was able to map out the full play of greed in the human reality, or even see how it can be lurking disguised in what seems like acceptable social dynamics.  But one thing for sure, when they did smell the reality, they called it for what it was: evil.

The famous words in the title above were spoken by fictional character Gordon Geckko in the 1987 Oliver Stone movie Wall Street.  Although the story is fictional, it very much reflected the Wall Street realities of the ‘80s.  But if you look deeper perhaps you will see the more universal underlying theme of the story: how greed infects not only the economic and social fabric of our society but also the very depths of the human heart.  If you think that story is dated, “so ‘80s,” or simply reflecting an anamoly, try these stories, of more recent vintage and reflecting more recent situations: Margin Call, Boiler Room, The Wolf of Wall Street, Barbarians at the Gates, The Big Short, and a number of others.  

Now, while greed becomes clearly manifest in the economic sectors of our society, it is a much more prevalent condition of our humanity. The vision articulated by Gecko is that greed is a driving force in human evolution—“it’s what makes us tick.”  It’s what makes us move “forward,” whatever that means.  It is who we are at our best.  Here we have gone a long way from our ancient ancestors!

Consider the following actual occurrence:  a group of mountain climbers with their Sherpa helpers approached a Buddhist lama for a blessing.  This is a usual practice for an expedition trying to summit one of the Himalayan peaks—the Sherpas will not climb without that blessing.  This lama surprised them with these words:  Climbing is a form of greed. Not at all obvious how that is so, but these  words would have been well understood by our ancient Desert Fathers—the lama saw something in what was motivating them. 

 This points us to a much bigger reflection on “greed” and its impact on our humanity.  But for now let us stick to the more visible economic manifestations.  Let’s take a look at two terms:  “accumulation of wealth,” and “the market.”  The accumulation of wealth is widely considered and assumed to be an unquestionable good, the so-called “American Dream.”  To some it seems that the accumulation of wealth is the whole point of life; something in tune with the great Aristotelian and classical axiom: every human being pursues his/her good.   So if one slips in the idea that wealth is a true good in itself (so therefore “more” is “better”), then presto, the accumulation of wealth, more and more, greed,  is a natural dynamic that fulfills one’s humanity.  And the market (capitalism really) facilitates that.  One cannot overstate how much this is the modern global vision, especially in the modern West.  

But greed runs against another current in the human community: the seeking of the common good—a central concept, by the way in Catholic Social Thought.  When we seek the common good, we seek the well-being, the enhancement of all in the community, not just our own.  And if we push this to the Buddhist vision, we will be seeking the good of all creatures, all beings.  The community we belong to is quite large!  Of course we do seek our own good also, but if we have a clear vision of who we are and what this includes, this seeking will never be simply for us as isolated individuals.  Our interdependence and interrelatedness means that our “wealth” is never simply “ours.”  In modern social life, especially in the U.S.,  these two contrasting currents work against each other and the result is incoherence and dysfunctionality and its effects are increasing and becoming more apparent.

Let’s consider some concrete cases.

Let’s start with the recent Texas catastrophe.  Many suffered from the extreme weather, but the worst was to come: power outages and failed water supplies.  This especially affected poor and middleclass folk.  But some well-to-do people did quite well.  Note the story below:

https://truthout.org/articles/billionaire-dallas-cowboys-owner-and-oil-man-cashes-in-on-texas-blackout-crisis/

Texas is one of this country’s most deregulated states in regard to energy.  The Republicans who have run the state for decades are the “apostles of deregulation”—meaning they don’t want any government agency, especially 

“them socialist bureaucrats in Washington” to limit their ability to make money on energy.  But that’s now how deregulation is presented—they will tell you that everyone will benefit from the competition among many providers and in regulation, the government sets limits on who can and can’t be an energy provider and how much they can charge.  They will tell you that prices under that system will be artificially high; but the “free market” would correct that.  And this same argument is pulled out for other sectors of the economy.  It has a slight grain of truth in it, that’s why it’s so seductive; but it is also seriously flawed.   But my main point is that in that word “deregulation” you will find deeply concealed the pure reality of greed.  It is the American way, these folks will tell you, the “freedom” to make as much money as possible.  The market allows you to charge as much as “the market will bear,” so they say—meaning you try to get as much as you can from the buyer.  Getting back to the Texas situation, Paul Krugman analyzed in the NY Times how things went wrong in Texas:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/opinion/texas-electricity-storm.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

And even the Wall Street Journal pointed out that Texas electric bills were $28 billion higher since 2004 because of deregulation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-electric-bills-were-28-billion-higher-under-deregulation-11614162780?mod=hp_lead_pos7 

And then this story appeared in the Washington Post:  (This is just the beginning of the story)

As Texans went without heat, light or water, some companies scored a big payday

Windfall profits are likely to total billions of dollars

By 

Will Englund and 

Neena Satija Feb. 27, 2021 at 5:00 a.m. PST

“As millions of Texans went days without heat, light or water, as store shelves were emptied, as deaths blamed on the cold began to add up, Texas’ frenzied and deregulated electricity market opened the door for some companies to reap windfalls that may mount into the billions of dollars.

The nation’s most deregulated energy economy was supposed to be a win for consumers and for energy companies nimble enough to do business in a bustling, cacophonous market. But the cold snap — rare but by no means unprecedented — shattered it last week, plunging consumers into misery and leaving a badly prepared and dislocated energy sector in pieces.

“This is the classic definition of market failure,” said Aneesh Prabhu, an analyst with S&P.

Wholesale prices for electricity spiked 300-fold, and for natural gas almost as much, and when supplies dwindled firms that had some of either commodity to sell were in line for tremendous short-term profits. But other companies are looking at stupendous losses.”

This is sometimes called “economic Darwinism”:  the survival of the fittest, never mind the human toll that takes.

But this is merely scratching the surface of the problem.  Every sector of our social life is affected by our legitimizing of greed through our economic philosophy.  Consider the public myopia that seems to prefer a “healthcare-for-profit” system.   A society that values the common good would not treat healthcare as a commodity to “sell” in order to increase wealth.  Seems there is almost nothing in our society that can’t be commodified.  Even higher education—in Germany it’s all free for everyone, and in many other countries it’s dirt cheap.   Of course the liberal contingent of our country softens or 

disguises the roughness and toll of this mad dash for profits through various mechanisms.  But most Democrats and all Republicans refuse to leave this “for-profit” approach to healthcare where costs are going up every year.  So we got Obamacare and now Biden has his own adjustments.  These merely try to cushion the toll this approach takes rather than unmasking the hard reality and dismantling it.  Take a look at the story below.

https://truthout.org/articles/bidens-health-plan-shifts-even-more-public-dollars-into-private-hands/

Another, more radical, proposal that few seem to appreciate is a universal basic income.  It means that every person would get a certain amount from the government once they are 21.  Like about a $1000 a month.  Several European countries are experimenting with this idea.  The big outcry against this and the other common good proposals is the rant:  Who Will Pay for THIS?  Indeed.  If something is truly an important element of the common good, then in fact we all should share in paying for it.  This is called taxation.  The reason this won’t work in the U.S. is that we have a tax structure that favors and rewards greed.  Not too long ago the billionaire Warren Buffet said there’s something wrong when his secretary pays more in taxes than he does.  The fact is that the top tax rate is only 34%  and the fact is that no wealthy person (or corporation) pays 

even close to that because of all kinds of legal loopholes and deductions built into it to protect wealth (by comparison the Scandinavian countries take a much bigger chunk with no loopholes).  

All Republicans and many Democrats (the so-called “moderates”) are proponents of “lower taxes.”  A large part of the population has been brainwashed into believing this myth that lower taxes will enhance economic activity and benefit all.  Very recently there was a massive study released which, not surprisingly, has not been widely discussed.  It debunks this myth thoroughly, and unmasks this right-wing gospel of wealth accumulation as a path to a community’s well-being.  It merely leads to a greater and greater economic inequality.  The links to various version of this story are  below:

https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2020/L-December/Tax-cuts-for-the-rich

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/23/tax-cuts-rich-trickle-down/

https://www.businessinsider.com/tax-cuts-rich-trickle-down-income-inequality-study-2020-12

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-02-05/tax-cuts-for-rich-dont-trickle-down

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/19/degrowth-pushing-social-wellbeing-and-climate-over-economic-growth.html

How bad can this greed get?  Take a look at this story:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/22/-25-highest-paid-hedge-fund-managers-earned-record-setting-32-billion-in-2020.html

The fact is that while the majority of people suffered to varying degrees during the pandemic, the top 1% did quite well.  After the 2017 tax cut, the top 400 earners in the country paid a tax rate lower than the working class.  We have basically evolved into a plutocracy, rule by the wealthy….the greedy.

The reason this “gospel” has held sway over our public thinking is a sinister combination of problems.  The general populace has been brainwashed into seeing this mechanism of greed as an integral part of the “American Dream,”  “what being free means,”etc.  If someone running for office proposed the raising of taxes, even if it’s only for the higher income folk, they will immediately be labeled as “radical socialists,”  “radical leftists,” even communists, etc.  Their chances of getting elected are slim to none; that’s why so many who do sense the problem settle for these half-baked solutions that simply ameliorate a raw naked push to put greed at the heart of our communal lives.  And we see so many people resist fighting climate change because it infringes on what is perceived as a God-given right to make as much money as possible.   No politician dare ask people to make some sacrifices to save the planet.  So we have to settle on inadequate measures that allow people to make money in fighting climate change….that’s the only way to get many of the corporations to support fighting climate change.

But, as I said previously, there are countercurrents in our social and economic lives that reveals what we could really be like.  Back again to Texas and this example:  a supermarket of shoppers, not for luxury items but for food, and suddenly the power goes out.  I was once in such a situation as a shopper myself, and we all had to leave our baskets in place and walk out of the building.  No one could pay for anything, so everything had to stay in place.  Well, this store handled it differently.  They let everyone out with the food supplies they needed without having to pay.  They simply said, “Have a nice day!”  Here is the story:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/02/19/texas-heb-lost-power/

This is only one example of probably very many acts of sacrifice, of sharing, of focusing on something more than one’s own “wealth.”

Recall Dr. Jonas Salk, the doctor who invented and developed the polio vaccine, the scourge of the early ‘50s.  He could have patented this vaccine and made millions, but he refused.  He saw it as an important contribution to the common good of all humanity, not a profit making thing.

Then, on a bigger scale, there is an alternative vision and a movement developing globally—because the whole planet is at stake due to climate change—which says that there actually is a different way of being a flourishing society than by enabling raw greed.  There was a story about this on CNBC:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/19/degrowth-pushing-social-wellbeing-and-climate-over-economic-growth.html

This Degrowth movement has a strong voice in this website from Germany (in English):

https://www.degrowth.info/en/contact-en/

This is their answer to what is Degrowth:

“Degrowth is an idea that critiques the global capitalist system which pursues growth at all costs, causing human exploitation and environmental destruction. The degrowth movement of activists and researchers advocates for societies that prioritize social and ecological well-being instead of corporate profits, over-production and excess consumption. This requires radical redistribution, reduction in the material size of the global economy, and a shift in common values towards care, solidarity and autonomy. Degrowth means transforming societies to ensure environmental justice and a good life for all within planetary boundaries.”

And I would like to conclude with one of my favorite people on the internet: Walking Womad.  She is a young lady who truly has taken “the road less traveled.”  She has hiked many of the great trails around the world, but it’s her actual everyday life that lifts my spirits.  Here is the link to her website:

https://walkingwomad.com/about-2/#content-wrapper

And here is a very apt self-description:

“In normal (not sure what that means!?) life I studied Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Archaeology (Assyriology to be exact… Yes I am a freak!) and Social Work with specializations in Animal Assisted Therapy (with llamas and alpacas), Public Health and Outdoor- and Wilderness Education. My partner Dan and I run a wilderness school, where we teach and offer wilderness-, outdoor- and ancestral skills, nature connection and rites of passage. We live in a tiny cabin in the middle of the woods and fields. No running water, no electricity, no bathroom, instead we get fresh air, meet wild animals and hear the song of the wind in the pine trees.”

And of course there are numerous small monastic-type of communities and quiet people who are experimenting with a more responsible stewardship over the earth.  Our larger society, however, relies too much on a lie and that does not bode well for the future.

These are multivalent terms, and so one has to be careful in their interpretation and in their use.  Basically they are philosophical terms that appear in various contexts that shades their meaning in one way or another.  For example, “dualities” appear in advanced mathematical analysis, and this yields some complex mathematical notions.  Also “dualism” is a common notion in psychology and in the science of human structure:  brain, mind….do these words refer to “2” separate entities or are they one and the same?  Is “mind” reducible to the biology and chemistry of the brain (nondualistic materialism), or is mind (and consciousness) something non-material that uses the brain like you use the computer.  Or, to put it even more radically, are you as a “person” reducible to the biology and chemistry of the body, or is there something more which we traditionally have called “the soul”?  This has been debated for a long time!  From Plato, the ultimate Western dualist, to many modern scientists who are “nondualists” in that matter is all there is, you can see that these terms can be applied in quite a few different contexts and with some very different consequences.  As far as science is concerned, I am definitely a dualist: there is more to reality than just matter.  But as regards spirituality, I am definitely on the nondualism side of the ledger.  And this is something I would like to explore a bit.  Nondualism itself has various shades of meaning, and perhaps different interpretations.  Many westerners are scared away from it because of that pop caricature of nondualism as a drop of rain vanishing in the “oneness” of the ocean.  Therefore they do not seek out any traces of nondualism within Christianity because…well, isn’t Christianity totally dualistic.  I suggest that this is a sadly and terribly wrong notion.

All the great religious traditions have their own approach to this matter, and interpret “dualism/nondualism” in their own particular way.  What you have to be careful about is skipping from the language of one tradition to another and thinking you are referring to the same reality in the same way.  It’s not that simple.  

Consider Hinduism.  It seems to cover all bases.  Whatever form of dualism/nondualism you want, it will provide!  The range of possibilities extends from a strict dualism that matches anything in the West; to a modified dualism (or modified nondualism if you wish), with its own treasure of bhakti, devotional practice that seems very close to Christian mysticism and the Sufis of Islam; to, finally, the total, radical nondualism of Advaita Vedanta, which in its turn comes in several types: from the austere mode of Shankara, to the complex tantric Kasmir Saivism.

Now Buddhism presents a different approach.  We are no longer concerned about relating to an Ultimate Reality.  The focus is on a kind of liberation from a “wrong view” of all reality, including our own self-understanding.  The liberation, or “enlightenment” is a kind of journey from living dualistically to a way of being that is truly nondualistic.  We awaken from this “dream” of seeing ourselves as this isolated individual self that stands in opposition to all other selves and the whole environment.  We discover an awareness of our intrinsic interrelatedness.  But here too there are variants, from Tibetan Buddhism to Chinese Zen to Theravada Buddhism and so on, each with its own nuances.

When we come to the great Western Traditions—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism—we encounter a very determined dualism.  Especially in Orthodox Judaism and orthodox Islam, the reality of God as the Wholly Other is emphatically asserted and all praxis revolves around that realization.  Christianity “softens” this dualism in the Mystery of the Incarnation, where the Wholly Otherness of the Divine enters the human reality.  Jesus is fully human and fully the Absolute Wholly Other we call God.  Traditional doctrine teaches this.  In itself it is a type of dualism, but what does that mean?   For sure this is not just a conceptual game of convenience to attribute two  fundamentally different terms to the same person.  These words refer to two different realities, not just concepts; but traditional doctrine also says that here we have reached the limits of what rational thought can do in grasping this Mystery.  True enough.  But we just slid by another very critical part of this doctrine:  Jesus is not some schizophrenic, “split personality;” not somebody divided up into two centers of consciousness; in other words he is ONE person, not two—this is traditional doctrine.  So the dualism of the “two” natures is transcended in the one person.  This points us in the right direction of discovering a very real Christian nondualism within a very dominant dualistic matrix of devotions, theology, self-understanding, living praxis, and ritual.  God is the reality you behold, you pray to, you obey, you seek, you worship, etc., etc.   Most believers never get past this awareness, but there is a deep mystical tradition within traditional, orthodox Christianity (as opposed to some off-beat variants that I am not referring to).  Christian mysticism has always been in a kind of tense relationship to traditional theology and authority.  On a conceptual level there is no way of reconciling these two tracks, but Christian mysticism simply uses the traditional language but pushes its meaning to a much deeper level, discovering its own form of nondualism;  and at the level of lived  religious experience there is simply no comparison.  Christian mysticism, then, does seem reasonably successful in finding its own nondualism while immersed in a totally dualistic religious paradigm.  The only other example of such that I can think of is the Sufi tradition within Islam.

But now I am thinking of Wordsworth’s poem, “Intimations of Immortality,” and I realize that what I am really looking for is not so much crumbs from the theological table that might suggest a form of nondualism, but more like the intimations of nondualism in the whole praxis of the faith, not just mysticism.  Like I said, the writings from the authentic mystical tradition of Christianity, both East and West, has a lot to offer to these “intimations of nondualism.”  Especially the Eastern tradition with its emphasis on “theosis” or divinization, participation in the Divine Life, rather than the Western emphasis on morality and “being saved from sin.”  But let us push ahead to what seems most common, at least in Catholicism, the practice of the celebration of the Eucharist, the Mass.  At first glance this practice looks like a true manifestation of the dualism of Christianity.  But look deeper this Lent.  There’s a reason Abhishiktananda was keen on celebrating the Eucharist even after his deep realization of Advaita!  Don’t get distracted or diverted by an approach to the Eucharist that I call “messaging.”  The celebration of the Eucharist becomes a series of messages.  Even worse is the “thinging” of the Eucharist, which in various ways turns the Eucharist into a thing which we “have.”  Now I do not mean to disparage anyone’s simple faith, practices, or understanding.  It’s just that wherever we are in our faith journey, whatever our state, we are always and everywhere at the gate of something infinitely deeper, and this is so true when we participate in the Eucharist.  But we do need to awaken to it.  Perhaps this is the real point of Lent, the true meaning of “conversion,” that awakening.   Once we realize that, we can freely participate in all traditional practices without anything limiting our vision; astonishingly enough, each practice is truly the “gateless gate” to our own version of Tat tvam asi.  Each practice is not for “gaining merit,” (there is nothing to gain really), not for “pleasing God,” or worshipping God, whatever that means, not for fulfilling an obligation, etc.; but each practice becomes simply a manifest, a theophany of the Divine Life.  It is the Christian “Namaste” to all of Reality.

Ponder also the simple words of the Gospel of John, which are also the most profound words written by any human being.  Yes, at first sight, the focus seems to be on Jesus Christ as the Other, the Wholly Different if you will, the object of our worship, etc.   But without negating any of this, we still need what the professional literary people call the “hermeneutical key” to reading  these simple but unfathomable words of the Gospel.  The hermeneutical key is the interpretive lens through which you understand the Gospel as a whole, and in the case of John you could almost miss this key because it comes to us in very common language:  door, gate, light, bread, way, etc.  You enter by a gate; you see by the light; you live by bread; you walk on a certain way.  (And ponder here Merton’s beautiful reflection on Jesus as the door in the Asian Journal.  It gives you a way to approach these words that uncovers the intimations of nondualism deep within them.)  

Here we begin to find Jesus not so much as the object of our attention, but as one through whom and in whom we exist and live and are connected to all that is Real (a Pauline thought also).  Now we begin to have true intimations of nondualism.  But the basic Christian focus on Jesus is not mistaken.  If you want to see what “living nondualism” is all about, just look at the life of Jesus, the person of Jesus and his teaching.  (Of course you might want to take account of the Semitic accent of the Gospel language; after all it is a language based in a certain cultural matrix.)  It is not some abstract theology or philosophy that is presented.  And from that contemplative gaze at the person of Jesus to our own “Tat tvam asi” THERE IS A BRIDGE, but I cannot tell you what it is because it is your own absolutely unique inner life manifesting the Divine Reality.   Something to ponder for Lent!