• Tag Archives Self

  • How We Discover Who We Are

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                         Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    Sl-o-w-i-n-g dowwwnn.  Ah. Life returns in the emptiness.  Doing gives us fuel, puts us in life, covers our lives with experience, action, momentum.  Without doing we would not live, not be different from the rock in the garden.  But.  Without emptiness, without ceasing from action, from planning, from expecting, from measuring ourselves against markers important only to us or, worse, to others, we will not see the experience, we will not see where our all our momentum and flurry takes us, we will have no way to tell the movement of heaven.

    On a blog about Taoism I read that Taoism says the universe is our body and the tao of the universe our nature.  I don’t know if this accurately reflects taoism–so much I birthplace-of-starsdon’t know–but no matter, it does speak a truth, at least a truth that speaks to me, to my journey.  This Hubble telescope photo of the birthplace of the stars–Star-Birth Clouds in M16: Stellar “Eggs” Emerge from Molecular Cloud–is our own fertile womb, our own site of elemental fecundity, our own inner world changing and becoming the outer reality, the 10,000 things.  Fertility lies at the heart of our nature, then, and we need not worry for our nature will see us born and reborn, this time as queens, that time as infant stars, the next time as stellar dust.

    Our purpose as humans lies not in the doing, but in the opening of ourselves to wonder, to the awesome majesty of our nature, letting it guide our being and our doing.  How?  By being still, by sitting in emptiness, by slowing down, by waiting, by humbly accepting the matters and tasks that come to us.

    The doorway and the window, the room and the tea cup are all useful because they are empty.  To discover our own way we need to become empty like the room in which we sit, the doorway through which we move, the tea cup from which we drink.

    This lesson has come, or should I say, comes, to me with some difficulty, born a man, a white man of privilege, a man of whom things are expected, for whom life has a path governed not by my nature but by accident of birth. Note that in this I differ from no one.  Each of us has a life path laid down by the circumstances of our family, the particularities of our person, the exigencies of our time, yet this path is not the way, it is not our way.  Our way lies in waiting upon our body, the whole universe, to reveal our nature, the nature of the whole universe, to us.  Then our life will unfold as a flower in the spring sun.


    📂This entry was posted in Asia Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged

  • The Self & The Other

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                Waxing Strawberry Moon

    Finally, some sun.  That’s good for the bees, good for the veggies and good for the spirit.

    I collect articles on certain subjects:  art, aesthetics, philosophy, political theory, modernism, individualism for instance.  Over the last few months there has been an interesting increase in the number of articles I’ve found with new takes on individualism.

    Let me give you an example.  You might think of the existentialist as one end of the continuum, radical individualists, almost, sometimes actually, solipsistic.  That’s me philosophically and in terms of deep belief about matters often called religious.  On the other end you might consider the Asian cultures in which the individual has no unique identity except as they function within the family or the state.  You might be the second son, the first wife, a citizen of a particular city or region.  Feudalism, too, had a class based view of the person.  Peasants were a large, amorphous group who worked the land, did jobs like tanning, blacksmithing, weaving, but whose individual qualities were of little obvious merit.

    It’s not surprising that the enlightenment with its focus on reason, blended with the Renaissance emergence of the individual as a psychological reality had such a powerful and corrosive affect on feudal culture.  It moved away from class based political and social structures toward more democratic and meritocratic ones.

    Anyhow, here’s the interesting piece I read the other day.  Those of us, like me, who believe in the inviolable isolation of our Self, forever walled off from the rest by the flesh and our peculiar, ineluctably unique internal world have it wrong.  The Self, in this view, is socially constructed.  We are who others see us to be, or, said another way, we see ourselves in the way that others see us.  In this perspective the political libertarian, the leave me alone and let me do it my way Rand Paul crowd, denies the very nature of the system within which they live.  That is, at one level, it is a system made of up of intimately connected parts, parts that could not be without the other.   There is, from this perspective, no alone; we are always apart of, perhaps not in the more rigidly defined feudal or Asian family way, but in a manner much closer to them than to the live alone, die alone types like me.

    In fact, this article goes on to compare the socially constructed self and the democratic state with love, a bond in which we are only who we are in relation to each other.  This makes us, if we deny this bond as libertarians do, jilted lovers when our dependence on the state and each other is revealed.

    Politically, I find this argument compelling, explaining as it does the Tea Party anger as the anger of lovers in denial.

    Personally, the socially constructed aspect of the self cannot be denied.  Even the stance of the existentialist comes from reading, say, Camus or Sartre or Kierkegaard, a fellowship of lonesome strangers.  Yes, the fingers of the other does reach into the interior, switching on certain perceptions, switching off others.  Yet, this much is still true:  no one knows my inner world.  No one except me.  No one has lived my life.  No one but me.  No one else will die when I wink out.  No one.  These radically separate realities keep me on the existentialist end of the bell curve.  At least for now.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged

  • Being YourSelf

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                       Full Awakening Moon

    “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.” – e.e cummings

    This has always been top of the list for me, remain me.  I’ve had my skirmishes with great levelers like alcohol, tobacco, marriage for no discernible reason, the cloak of ecclesiastics. Even after these resolved or faded into the background, I continued to struggle with that greatest beast of all for men, ambition.  Fame.  Honor.  Wondering just when my gifts would finally gain recognition, the recognition they deserved.  Didn’t occur to me until much later that they probably already had.  Gained the recognition they deserved.

    The drive to live into your true Self rather than plump up your persona, polish the ego is a strong one, but it often gets subducted, like a continental tectonic plate meeting another.  This kind of movement, pushing the true Self far down, further into the dark center of Self, only increases the tremors when it finally becomes untenable, when the true self must out.

    We can ever tell for ourselves how well we’re doing on this score because the persona and the ego set the original tender traps, honey pots of positive stroking, so our self evaluator is too often compromised.  Analysis helps.  So does a loving partner who will be honest while being kind.  Friends of the same kind, help too.

    Today though, as I live into my 63rd year, 63 long trips around the sun, it feels to me as if I generally live as my self,  not as others would have me be, but as my own conscience guides.  Hallelujah.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged

  • Spelunking

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                           Waxing Blood Moon

    Rainy and cold, October has come.  Though most don’t realize it, the rain of early fall is as important to spring as April’s showers.  The plants drink deep, ready themselves for the dry, desert like conditions of winter.  Without adequate moisture in the fall a plant can die of thirst even while the earth is white, covered with frozen water.

    These days come as elixirs to my soul.  The outer becomes the inner.  Spelunking the caverns within has  a seasonal aspect for me, one I wrote about a week or two back.

    Gotta go meet with our financial adviser.   Later on.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Right Regrets

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    62  bar rises 29.84  0mpn NEE dew-point 61  sunrise 6:29  sunset 29.84  Lughnasa

    Waning Crescent of the Corn Moon

    “Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.” – Arthur Miller

    Arthur Miller.  Once married to Marilyn Monroe.  A right regret?  Who knows.

    His point seems apt.  Until scientists convince us we do not have free will (another time), all we have in life are the choices we make.  Since the world and its manifold dynamics function chaotically (thought not without a kind of order), making choices that reflect our true values and our authentic Selves are the best we can do.  Results have so much to do with accidents of birth, i.e. man, woman, white, black, Latino, Asian, African, poor parents, middle class parents, rich parents, country of origin:  USA, Namibia, Brazil, Bangladesh, France, Georgia, era: middle ages, reformation, 19th century, 23rd century, not to mention genetic endowments and psychological environment, the crucial forks in the road for each individual life.

    This reality gives Taoism a special resonance for me.  Conforming ourselves to the movement of heaven means recognizing all these various factors as they come to a point in an individual life, our life.  Attunement rather than atonement.  We scan the heavens, using the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, our minds and discern where to adapt and where to use the times as leverage for our choices.  Even a perfectly attuned Taoist, a sage, may have no result in their life if the times and the heavens have no room for their ambitions.

    leaves.jpg

    Thus, we can only choose.  Our choices, not the results, define our regrets.  If we choose paths consistent with our values and our authentic Selves, then we will have only the right regrets.   Why?  Because we will have not betrayed who we are and we  will not have betrayed those values we clasp to our hearts.  The results come from the movement of the heavens as  our choices either align with them or bump into their hard reality.

    It may be that I have added one step too many.  If we align ourselves with the Tao, the movement of heaven, then our values may be of no importance.  If a value serves to set one in conflict with the movement of heaven, then, if I understand the Tao, it can force one out of alignment with the Tao.  This can violates conforming ourselve to the movement of heaven.

    This is what I mean when I say life does not need meaning, it is meaning; life does not need purpose, it is purpose.


    📂This entry was posted in Asia Faith and Spirituality Writing 📎and tagged

  • No Title

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    63  bar falls 29.57  3mph WNW dew-point 56  Summer, sunny and cool

    Last Quarter Flower Moon

    Mid-summer has come and gone.  This means that Lughnasa, a cross-quarter holiday lies only a few weeks ahead.  Lughnasa is a cross-quarter holiday; it comes between the Summer Solstice (mid-summer) and the Fall Equinox (Mabon).  The Celts divided their festival year first in halves, Beltane and Samhain, Summer and Winter, then in fourths, adding Lughnasa and Imbolc (Candlemas).  At some point they added in the solstice and equinox celebrations that were more common in the rest of Europe.  This created the current eight part Celtic year which begins at Samhain on October 31st and runs, successively, through Winter Solstice (Yule), Imbolc on February 1st, Spring Equinox (Ostra), Beltane on May 1st, Summer Solstice (Mid-Summer), Lughnasa on August 1st, and the Fall Equinox (Mabon).

    This means that New Years for Celts occurs on what the US celebrates as Halloween.  The creative part of me has found the Celtic year a perfect fit for my writing life.  I try to start writing projects on or around Samhain since the late fall, winter and early spring seasons are inside times in the northern latitudes, at least for those who don’t ski.

    Following the Celtic Year, or the Great Wheel of the Year, has proved faith and spirituality enough for me since late in the last millennium. We move in response to nature’s deep rhythms whether we acknowledge them or not, just consider the beating of your heart and the breath in your lungs right now.  Eating, sexuality, exercise and play are all intrinsic aspects of the body and DNA we have inherited from millions of years of evolution.  That evolution has focused on those functionalities necessary to survive in Earth’s specific environment:  its seasons, its other animals both predator and prey, its plants and mountains, rivers and streams, lakes and grasslands.

    We are not only animals, our mind gives us self-awareness, a precious and difficult gift.  We are, however, never less than animals and the self-awareness and agency we so cherish vanishes if we lose the vessel given to us by those millions of years of evolution.  This is why death is such a difficult barrier for us.  We flail around when confronted with the loss of our body’s elegant functionality.  Perhaps this body is a chrysalis and death the trigger for our imaginal cells to begin a process of subtle transformation so that we emerge after death a resurrected or transmigrated entity, as different from the earth bound us as the butterfly is from the caterpillar.

    Until that great drifting up morning however, we walk here, feet bound to alma mater and hearts beating without conscious help.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Great Work 📎and tagged

  • Finding My Place among the 10,000 Things

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    59  bar steady  29.77  4mph NW  dew-point 37  Beltane  Sunny and cool

                                      Full Hare Moon

    Want to say a bit more about mastery (or, as Stephan said, maybe it’s anti-mastery) as living into the Self.  It has become clearer and clearer to me that I offer more impediments to the Movement of Heaven through me than I do channels.  I’m not being modest here, only stating a not too  unusual fact.  This opening and emptying of the ego so that my Self can flow through me out into the world is the big task ahead for me.  Yet, it is an ironic task, a task that only be realized in the negation of tasks.  It is a goal that has as its objective, an empty vessel and, to compound the irony, an empty vessel that will be filled, but this time not by the culture’s values, but by the values of the movement of heaven.  I believe a Taoist might call this finding my place among the 10,000 things.

    I prefer this approach because it negates the notion of mastery as an over and above phenomenon, something that effort can achieve, and opens the way to mastery of the ego by the Self, the larger you that participates in the archetypal realm.  Let go and let Self, perhaps.  I envision this as a congested field filled with objects of desire and presumed needs suddenly cleared so that the plants natural to the immediate ecosphere can flourish.  It is the garden filled with native plants who require no artifice to grow; rather, they rely on the soil that the past has created, the rain a season brings and the sunlight that can reach the soil.  Native plants do not care if it is hot or wet or cold and dry, they have developed a lifeway that follows the rhythms of the seasons where they bloom. 

    How much simpler our life would be if we could open ourselves to the rhythms native  to our Self; then we would not have to worry about dignity, accomplishment, status or desire.   We, too, would not care whether it was hot or dry, cold or wet, yet we would act, and act effectively because our actions would shape themselves to the  movement of the Tao. 

    That’s how I see right now.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged

  • In Tutelage to My Self

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    41  bar steady  29.41 4mph dewpoint 39 Beltane

               Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

    Wet.  Cold.  Dreary.  An inside day.  I was gonna plant beets and carrots outside, but not today.  Maybe Sunday.

    Lunch with Tom Crane.  We discussed the meeting at his house where I serve as his assistant.  The topic is mastery.  The word poses some problems for me because it is difficult, if not impossible, to extricate it from its linkage to subordination.  The idea that lurks behind it, though, is strong.  Somewhere in the terms Zen master or Taoist sage or master gardener, even master craftsperson lies a life time of practice, the honing of a skill or a life way on the hard stone of experience. 

    We had an interesting conversation about who we had come across in our lives we would consider masters.  I’ll get back to you, but no one leapt to mind.  We also discussed the possibility of naming for others where we see mastery in them.  This gets around the culture bound reticence we upper-middle class Midwesterners have to tooting our own horn.

    I admitted that I had not allowed anyone to mentor me, nor had I been willing to be anyone’s disciple.  This is a weakness, I believe, borne of a need to figure things out for myself, to do things on my own.  Tom had the same experience, but for a different reason.  He was thrust into responsibility and expected to survive.  And he has.

    This is, in part at least, a vulnerability question.  Can I make myself vulnerable enough to another person to become their student, their disciple.  The result of not doing that is, as Tom and I admitted, a sense that we have never quite arrived, not quite done enough.  A niggle of uncertainty that has no reference within us which we can use to dislodge it.

    We also spoke a bit about being in tutelage to the Self.  I said I have been willing to trace my own journey by the vague outlines I feel in that part of me that participates in the greater universe, and which calls me forward to my own destiny.  As a Taoist, I would call that my attunement to the Movement of Heaven, the Tao.  A good lunch on a wet day.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Friends Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged