Category Archives: Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

You Are the Fates. You Weave Your Own Destiny.

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Winter                                                                        Winter Moon

Yet another caesura, this between Christmas and New Years.  Often a time of let down, regret, self-flagellation as we drive ourselves toward the New Year, whip in hand.  Again the self/no-self conversation comes to mind.  A good while back I used the image of a jockey riding our day-to-day actions, sometimes encouraging, sometimes holding back, sometimes using the quirt.  It’s this image that gives me pause when thinking about the no-self idea.  How can I have the clear sense of a guide, a jockey at work and maintain a notion of the no-self?

That is, if there is some part of me, no matter how small, that moves me to conform my actions to some roughly consistent standards or ideals or conceptions (whatever they are), at least that part has to be continuous.

We must be some combination of the two ideas.  My jockey is not a super-ego, or at least not only a super-ego.  My jockey loves his steed, has an intimate bond with it and wants only the best for it.  This is a relationship of love, not control, so all of the jockey’s urgings aim to enrich the life of the mount.  The bond between jockey and mount, between crudely put, mind and body, requires some ongoing entity whether that entity be a portion of the mind, a certain kind of body/muscle memory, an unconscious or subconscious cluster of hopes and dreams or whatever.

With the idea of a jockey or guide or a host or a friend of my journey there does come the evanescence of day to day experience, that flood of emotion, experience, thought and action we bathe in constantly.  Constantly here means waking and sleeping for our–jockey, guide, host, friend of my journey–never completely walks away from the task.

OK.  Let me shift metaphors here, maybe to a better one, our weaver (our own personal norns or fates) constantly has weft and warp threads in hand, shuttle rattling noisily back and forth across the loom weaving the tapestry that is our life.  Our weaver does not pluck all the threads (experiences, moments, feelings, thoughts, actions) out of our life to make her art.  No, she picks the threads that seem especially significant, or memorable, or important, somehow worthy of affecting the ongoing design.

The design for the tapestry shifts as it is woven, sometimes future threads wind back and alter scenes long wound up and considered done.  But note, and here is the no-self aspect, so many threads get dropped, no longer part of the thickness.  In this dropping of moments and in the selecting of so few moments to include in the tapestry (think of the total giga-peta-terabytes of information packed into anyone’s lifetime) we discard selves by the millions, the billions and the selves (the you interacting with a particular moment) that the weaver keeps are in a sense so random that the linkages seem not to exist at all.  Therefore, no-self.

However, and here is where I end up honoring the idea of the Self, there is the end a tapestry, a tapestry that gives visual shape to the life we have lived.  That tapestry of course is who you are at this moment.  Which will, following out this metaphor, change as your daily experience changes, sometimes, perhaps often at some points, altering understanding and appreciation of the past and thereby changing the design.  The look of the tapestry is never complete, never finished, always liable to change, even drastic change.  But there is still a weaver, a hand with the shuttle, working quickly and surely to see that our tapestry is a rich one.

A New Year is not a new year, of course, but a moment in time, an arbitrary moment when we pause, pay attention to the weaver.  What’s been added recently?  How does the design look?  Am I proud of it?  Could it use some spiffing up?  Perhaps a new image here and there?  OK.  Let’s see how we can create some new threads.

Let me take this idea one huge step further.  Our tapestry gets woven into the ongoing tapestry of our species and will always be a part of this larger work.  The hominid tapestry joins itself to the ape and the primate tapestries which in turn get knitted together with the mammalian.  You can see how this goes.  I’m not proposing a weaver in the sky, not at all, what I am proposing is an ongoing visual image which future conscious beings will be able to see.  They will marvel at it.

And, they will be, just like we are, the universe collected in a particular moment and looking back over the whole and saying, “It is good.”

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

At Home

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Winter Solstice                                                           Winter Moon

The long night continues.  Kate and I had our bonfire together.  All three dogs came out and sat with us for a bit before taking off for doggy business barking at something deeper in the woods.

(Lorraine_Williams_Rainbow_Serpent_Dreaming)

The silence has fallen and will stay with us until morning.  Then the sunlight will wake up the birds and the newspaper deliverers and those who work on Sunday mornings.  And the long trek into darkness begun last summer in June trades places with an equally long ancientrail of light.

These are not opposites, not poles of a dialectic, but two sides of the world, entered through dawn and twilight, and with us every single day of our lives.  I’m still intrigued with the notion that the darkness may be our brains normal state and all this waking activity is clever misdirection by the dreamtime.

This will bear more thought and reading.

I do know this.  The ancientrail of darkness is katabatic, like Persephone’s or Orpheus’s or Odysseus’s.  That is, it is the trail which leads to the underworld, the dark places within us and that it has always drawn me more than the journey toward the light.

Let me say exactly what I mean here.  This is a bodily sensation, a sense of familiarity and comfort, a feeling of spirituality and it correlates to the increasing darkness.  It becomes most intimate this night, a night that is different from all other nights. Yet, the same.

It’s not that I reject the light or feel oppressed by it.  The garden, the growth of plants and the chance to wander outside easily has its joys, certainly.  It’s just that for me the darkness is richer, takes me further.

Does this have any correlation to my depressive or melancholic or dysthymic states? Maybe.  Does that mean it’s bad in some way or counter productive?  I don’t think so.  It seems to me that this is descriptive, not prescriptive or proscriptive.

My guess is that our bodies and our early life experiences give us a tendency to lean more toward the dark or the light.  My guess further is that since waking activity has a natural though not necessary linkage with the day, in particular work and school, that we privilege those who tend more toward the light, perhaps even suppressing in ourselves a tendency to favor the dark.

At any rate I’m of the dark persuasion and this is the moment in the year when I feel, as Tom Crane suggested, at home.

 

 

Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

My Faith: Reimagined

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Samhain                                                                     Winter Moon

I needed the philosophical last night because the cards ran strong against me at sheepshead.  Near the end I picked on weak hands just to have a part in the game.

The current state of my reimagined faith is a lumpy stew, made of bits from here and there, but that in itself may be a sign of the transitional time in which we live, a transition from Enlightenment certainty to the post-modern uncertain, from Modern meta-narratives that guided life to post-modern personal narratives.

What would a more compact version look like?  The Great Wheel positions us in this world and affirms our part in an ongoing and ever renewing cycle of life.  This cycle allows us to see that our efforts are not futile or meaningless, but additive and communal.  In both the additive and communal senses our life work can (should?) enrich our own lives and the lives of others.  An important, even central, aspect of this work right now involves creation of a sustainable human footprint on planet Earth.

That’s not bad.

 

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Memories, MOOCS, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

The Unreliable Narrator–You

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Samhain                                                           Thanksgiving Moon

Beginning to play with the post-modern idea of the unreliable narrator, a staple of certain literary fictions and now understandable to me.  The most unreliable narrator of all may be our Self, or, rather, the work done by our mind to create a self.  As we attempt to weave a coherent notion of our story–how this, what, let’s use Heidegger’s idea of dasein–this dasein came to be here now, we impose on our memories a logic, a sequence, a string of cause and effects that explain, as best the dasein can, how it came to be in this moment.

There are many problems here, but the one I want to focus on is the fungibility of our memory and what Kant called the a prioris of thinking:  space and time.  Our memory changes as we access it, as we put it into new contexts, as our understanding grows and that changes happens to a quanta that was shaped by the context in which we first had the experience, the understandings we had then and by the fog created by our senses, which, by design and necessity, edit our lived experience so we can utilize it.

On top of this string of memory altering inevitables are the a priori categories of space and time, mental constructs which our reason uses to make what William James called “the blooming, buzzing confusion” worthwhile to us.  We see objects in four dimensions, in a space time matrix that changes as we perceive an object, event, feeling, moment, idea.

(Henry and William James)

What this means to us is that our Self has the demanding and ultimately futile task of seeing the plot in our life, its why and its meaning.  Why futile?  Because we change as we touch it, not Heisenberg, no, more than that we change more than the spin or the location of memory when we touch it, we change its content and thereby change our narrative, which, as a result changes our Self.  This is always happening, every moment of every day of our lives.   Modernist literature like Ulysses and Remembrance of Times Past was an attempt to give to us in written form this mutability at the heart of the internal project that is us.

As I said a few posts back, this is descriptive, not proscriptive and certainly not prescriptive, and it does contain one kernel of great importance. Since we actively construct our own narrative from the experiences we can recall, we can enter into that stream and actively construct our future.  In fact, unless we enter that stream with purpose, Heraclitus’s famous river, it will carry us along without our intention.

So, buckle up, strap on that orange life-preserver and take your seat in the raft that is your Self navigating the flood of your life.  It’s a thrilling ride no matter where it takes you.

 

 

Art and Culture, Humanities, MOOCS, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Enlightenment’s Dark Side

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Fall                                                                                  Samhain Moon

It was wet and chill, but the red and gold fruit warmed me as it slid off.  The raspberry canes grabbed at me as I moved among them as if wanting me to stay awhile longer, to chat or linger.  Once in a while I threw an over ripe berry over the fence to Rigel who watched my progress with head moving up and down, patient, waiting.

Before the berry picking I spent a couple of hours reading 34 pages, the introductory chapter to Adorno and Horkheimer’s, Dialectic of Enlightenment.  As this MOOC moves toward the end, we come closer to the current time and to thinkers with whom I’m familiar not through academics but through the politics of the 1960’s.  Adorno and Horkheimer are part of the Frankfurt School philosophers, most of whom emigrated to the US during WW II.  I was most familiar with the work of their colleague Herbert Marcuse, but I have come to know the work of Jurgen Habermas, too.

This is dense material and the argument is provocative, far from obvious.  In essence Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the enlightenment has become an instrument of oppression.  Some characterize the enlightenment as a movement designed to make the earth a home for humanity.  Instead of moving toward freedom and liberation the focus on repeatable natural laws and the tools of technology enabled control and domination, both of the planet and citizens of nation-states.  I’ll do better with this at another time, but this is heart of it.

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, MOOCS, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

God is the zocalo of Western religious life.

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Fall                                                                     Samhain Moon

 

Last night I dreamed of a place where reality could be reconfigured only by imagining.  Though I don’t remember many specifics, I do remember that at the close of the dream I wondered if the same process could put us in different historical eras, not just different places in current time.

This led, after waking, to a continuation of the dream space to the matter of the modern and post-modern, much on my mind these days thanks to the two MOOCs I’m taking. Having read Wittgenstein on language games from his Philosophical Investigations and his attendant critique of the really real as inaccessible at best since words do not hook onto reality, only other words (a paraphrase), somehow the Zocalo came to mind.

Kate and I visited Mexico City in the 1993.  It impressed me then that at the very center of the Federal District, with the National Cathedral on one side and the National Palace on the other was a vast empty space, the zocalo.   The idea of a country with a vast open square at the very heart of its national culture appealed and appeals to me.

Mexicans fill the zocalo often.  On September 15th at 11 pm, the President comes out on a balcony of the National Palace and delivers a grito, a cry that remembers the “grito de Delores” or the cry of Mexican independence first heard in the small town of Delores.  At other times the military parades through the zocalo.  Recently it has been filled with striking teachers trying to turn back education reform.  Each spring equinox Mexico’s ethnic groups, la raza, fill the zocalo with a celebration through which they assert their critical importance to the nation as a whole.

With Wittgenstein in the background and in particular his emphasis that meaning is use, that is, we learn the meaning of our language from the contexts in which we use it, the zocalo and God suddenly merged.  God is the zocalo of Western religious life.

What do I mean?  God is the empty square at the heart of Western religious and political culture.  Over the course of two thousand years various groups from Judaism to Christianity to Muslims and many, many diverse splinters of all these groups have gathered in the square to give their grito.  At the time they fill the square they occupy the center of the culture’s awareness. (Note:  this is not at all, to the contrary in fact, a truth claim about what they say there.)

This same square also receives those who would fill it with alternative metaphysical or anti-metaphysical ideas.  Nietzsche, God is dead.  The square was empty and continues to be empty.  Nature is god.  The pantheists.  Even those who would entertain the world of many gods, contemporary polytheists like Wiccans and Astruans, have to enter the God/zocalo to make their proclamations over against this central Western idea.

This means that God is, for the group occupying the God/zocalo, what they say God is. That is, the way they use the concept of God in the square is what God is to them.  Use gives meaning.  Context gives meaning.

How is this helpful?  It helps me understand that faith, that word I’ve been trying to reimagine over the last couple of years, is not about a transcendental claim at all, but rather is a pledge to walk into the God/zocalo with a particular group and, while there, to abide by their understanding.  Faith is an initiatory passage into culture, not a passageway to the really real.  Said another way faith is agreement with claims about the really real made by a particular group when they inhabit the God/zocalo.

As long as you remain within that group, their language will be useful to you as a shared agreement about what spreads outward from the zocalo.  In Mexico City it is Mexico and Mexicanness.  In the Presbyterian occupation of the zocalo it is the presbyterian form of church government, John Calvin, local presbyteries and congregations, the Book of Order, ordination exams, elders, presbytery meetings, General Assemblies.

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Darkness Approaches

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Lughnasa                                                            Harvest Moon

The night takes on a different quality as fall approaches.  In my study I’m half below ground with windows opening out at waist level, the lawn sweeps toward me.  An animal safe in a warm burrow, protected from the storm and cold, or, I would be if there were any storm and cold.

(Giovanni Battista Ciolina – Melancholy Twilight (1899)

The change in light, the lower night time temperatures, the scudding clouds like there were today change the seasonal tone from brightness and beaches and growing things to  darker and more forbidding shades.  As this shift deepens and the night begins to overtake the day, as happens at Mabon, the Fall Equinox, most of us feel a bit uneasy, perhaps even a good deal.

By late November and well into December this uneasiness has intensified, perhaps that paleolithic fear that the sun would no longer rise at all, or that it would remain in its pale and weakened state, never again to warm us and encourage the plants.  So we fight back with bonfires and candles and festivities, lamps and decorations, gifts and food, celebration in spite of the vague menace.

Thus, by some wry twist the darkest and bleakest days of the year have the most joy, the most song, the most brave gestures we know.  We will move, around Thanksgiving, into Holimonth, a season stretching from then until Epiphany that features many of the best loved days and nights of the whole year:  Hannukah, Christmas, Posada, Winter Solstice, New Years, Deepavali.

Perhaps I would even go so far as to declare a Holiseason beginning on September 29th, the feast of the archangel Michael and lasting from then right through Epiphany.  All of October, November and December months of special observance with holidays as peaks lifted up from a plateau of enhanced sensibilities that lasts the entire time.  Why not?

Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Why Faith?

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Lughnasa                                                                Honey Moon

Another positive aspect of going into the MIA today was the drive time.  Although the constant in and out with the docent work and the Sierra Club had begun to wear me out, the occasional drive in offers a lot of time for contemplation, thinking.

Today the reimagining faith project popped up.  I began to think about the function of faith, its origin, rather than a new content for it.  This opened some interesting paths of thought.  In the first instance I realized faith is a bridge from an individual to some grounding, centering, certain, transcendent, smooth, calm, assured place.

But why?  What does faith bridge?  It bridges a deep void, a chasm, chaos, an abyss, a gap between us as individuals and a something we feel missing in our life.  What might that thing be?

These are a few of the things that could drive us to see a gap between our present experience and our desired experience:  aimlessness, rootlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, alienation, terror, roughness, even fatelessness.   In their own way each of these symptoms opens a gap between what we have and what we want.

And the landscape across the abyss has the antidote:  smoothness, confidence, destiny, transcendence, calm, assurance, certainty, community.   How to get there?  A movement, as Kierkegaard called it, a leap, of faith.

In this line of thought there is a rich vein, a path through the wilderness, it seems to me, that led me to the reimagining faith project in the first place.  More on that later.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

At The Limit

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Ancientrails hit its size limit on my host, 1&1, and has to be moved to a larger venue.  Bill Schmidt is working on that right now.  It took a bit of time to realize what was wrong.  I’ll be back online as soon as possible.  Thanks

 

Soul

Lughnasa                                                                      State Fair Moon

The soul. As probably understood most of the time (in the West):  a non-material component of the body-mind-soul combination that makes up all human beings.  This third component floats free at death, off to any number of possible outcomes depending on your belief:  heaven, reincarnation, nirvana, Elysian Fields, Valhalla or hell.  Usually the soul’s journey after life is believed to have some correlation with adherence to one moral code or another.  Might be karma, might be sin, might be courage and bravery, might be heroic stature.

If your belief aligns with any of these understandings, then the third phase, as the one we know for certain ends with the terminal phase and the terminal moment, becomes critical, a blessed time when spirituality and spiritual attentiveness prepares you for the afterlife.  Not gonna say how you might do this because it entails too many variables but the menu certainly includes:  retreats, meditation, reading, prayer, perhaps engagement with a community of fellow travelers. It also includes attention to the past if you feel making amends or restitution or penance is part of your journey.

And if you’ve been so engaged prior to the third phase, congratulations.  Now this kind of personal work can become a key thread in your life.

The soul:  As I understand it at the moment.  Roughly equivalent to the Self, a holistic view of the you that is body-mind-soul.  Now.  In this understanding the third phase stands as a blessed time when you can become more of who you already are.  It can mean jettisoning the persona-pack you’ve carried in the world of work for a persona more consonant with the Self.  If you’re lucky enough to come into the third phase with a persona and Self in healthy dialogue, you’re in good shape.  This time can then be an extended exploration of the unique gift you are to this world.

Soul work:  These two perspectives, one tied if loosely to religious tradition, and the other tied closely to the humanist tradition in Western culture are not exclusive of each other.  That is, both ancientrails can overlap in any one individual.

Next time:  what then might we do?

Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., World History

Sapere aude

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Lughnasa                                                        Moon of the First Harvests

A slower day today.  We both needed a little less activity.  Nice to be able to ratchet back and not worry about it.

Did spend an hour plugging the new credit card number into those accounts that need it. Our card got stolen by someone who bought a hotel room and flowers.  A romantic thief. A bit of a hassle but not too bad.

I’ve also been reading Jean Jacque Rousseau for the Modern and the Post Modern MOOC.  Kant, too.  Kant’s essay What is Enlightenment began the course.  It contains his Dare to know idea.  That is, trust your own reason and act on it.

The two Rousseau essays are very interesting, one on the arts and sciences which I plan to give more time here at some point, argues that the arts and sciences represent culture at its most decadent, at its furthest remove from the state of nature.  It’s a very interesting argument.

The second, which I’m reading right now is on the origin of inequality.  Here a couple of quotes from it:

Nature speaks to all animals, and beasts obey her voice. Man feels the same impression, but he at the same time perceives that he is free to resist or to acquiesce; and it is in the consciousness of this liberty, that the spirituality of his soul chiefly appears…

(Henri not Jacques)

It is by the activity of our passions, that our reason improves…and it is impossible to conceive why a man exempt from fears and desires should take the trouble to reason.

The first language of man…was the cry of nature.

…as to adjectives, great difficulties must have attended the development of the idea that represents them, since every adjective is an abstract word, and abstraction is an unnatural and very painful operation.