Lucid Lewis?

Kairos is, of course, the other perspective on time offered by the ancient Greeks in addition to chronos. In a way kairos is more right brained time I think and chronos more left brained time-time is money sort of time.

I’m sure that is much to simplistic but fun to play with. Kairos is more about the quality of time and not the measuring–quantity of time. Kairos is more about an intutive sense of the right time-timing or, as in the synoptics, the fullness of time.

When we take the long view of our history and attempt to learn its lessons in order to accumulate wisdom we consider kairos perhaps more than chronos. Fr. Thomas Berry’s idea of “The Great Work” of our time asserts that we need to move into the moment of kairos to shift our relationship with the planet and with our own consciousness. He ties this projected great work to the moments of kairos that produced great works in the past in many cultures.

Lots of people have been “feeling” our present time as a moment of kairos. The recent election and all the talk about being on the right side of history and choosing hope means that many of us feel that perhaps we have taken the faithful leap into this moment of kairos. 

Time and space provide a frame, a kind of snapshot of our deep interconnectedness and often unrecognized unity. When many of us move as one into the moment of kairos the effect of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but, on the other hand each of us must live into the moment of kairos as individuals and smaller sub-communities as well.

Now is the time for us all to work harder, focus more intently and fill these moments chronos that are in this moment of kairos with creativity and hope and patience and strength and whatever we need in order to shift into the next and hopefully fuller and healthier place where healing and real progress and greater wisdom can illuminate our frture and the future of our children.

It is scary and very, very exciting! 

Love,

Lewis

Developmental Unfolding of Meaning and the Power of Metaphor

When I was in my teens or early twenties I heard Quincy Jones, on the Dick Cavett Show I think, tell a story about an old jazz player giving him the mantra, “Not one iota of who I am depends on what you think of me” in the face of the racial segregation and prejudice they faced while on tour. It spoke to my little queer heart and it became my mantra too.

Picture squinting eyes and a jutting chin as, in my mind only most of the time I assure you, I would repeat the mantra to myself in the face of crushing criticism from various sources in my life. I even said it out-loud a few times. When I remember it I am proud of the pluck and courage it took to defend my soft heart with that little bit of defiance and individuation.

Twenty or so years later I heard Mr. Jones tell the story again on the Oprah Show. This time it also spoke to my heart but instead of an act of barely self-convinced defiance it was a calm assertion of fact and it meshed well with other wise things I learned on Oprah like, “don’t take criticism personally” and “we are not our mistakes” and wisdom from the lovely Dr. Angelou “believe people when they tell you who they are” and “when we know better we do better.”

This time picture a gentle smile and a gentle shaking of the head proceeding from a centered and integrated place of self love and more mature confidence. 

By the way, I am in no way ashamed of being grateful to talk shows. Phil Donahue may have saved my life several times! Thats another posting I suppose.

In any case, A couple of years ago, well into middle age, I heard the mantra again in my own head. This time I heard it addressed to my “self.” I realized that it was a statement of profound and amazing freedom that I am still just glimpsing.

This time picture an inward bowing of the head and closed eyes–deep, steady breathing, relaxed shoulders–a basic meditative posture. I am not my own egoic constructs, I am not my neuroses, the stories I tell myself and sometimes others about myself, my disociated and limiting constructs–I AM.

Creeds

I have been aware for some time that text, ancient, modern, sacred, secular, poetry, prose–can often be read on many different levels. How one “hears” the text seems to be dependent upon the reader’s world view and level of development. This is nowhere more obvious than in dealing with “sacred text.”

I have been reading lots of great articles aimed at helping people escape literalistic readings of the scriptures either to defend or to reject them. There is lots of discussion about metaphorical meaning as opposed to modern history and or science.

It has certainly been my experience that many text read very differently as I return to them after my consciousness shifts and matures. When I read for the deep meaning and without the modern invention of “factual obsession”–when I read for a deeper truth amazing things happen. Some text that at an earlier stage I dismissed as antiquated and superstitious, from a higher and deeper place suddenly take on sublime, even transcendent meaning.

I feel this way about the historic creeds of the church. I won’t write in depth here about it but for anyone who is interested I urge that you set aside the historic conflicts and read them as metaphorical text, deeply rooted in the human consciousness and evolution. I believe that they are powerful enough to have grown and to continue to grow with us. I also think that, like adolescence, rejecting them for a time also serves.

Here are a few brief examples of what I’m banging on about.

What’s with the Trinity? Well, as a metaphor it says everything proceeds from, is grounded in, a community–a field of love. Theistic language is relationship language and does not need to be seen as over and against atheistic language in my opinion. The metaphor of the Trinity says that the most basic reality is this active love that pours itself out in manifestation while remaining completely whole and centered and unmoving. All paradox is reconciled in this field of love.

All language is conceptual and can only point beyond itself to direct experience of anything. Metaphor is as real, as true as what we think of as fact. At the deepest point every experience of reality in itself is unutterable.

Most of us would say that the experience of love is the most powerful experience we know. Love’s power is obvious, especially when it is thwarted. Our souls deepest desire is to be in and of such a unlimited, unconditional field, relationship of love. What more powerful metaphor for the unutterable? Yes, what a metaphor, a Divine threesome! Ha!

The resurrection of the dead–horror movie or a metaphorical way of expressing the absolute unity of Spirit and Matter– the fact that nothing, not even one particle, is ever lost? Physics asserts this on the gross level and I believe it is true on all other levels as well–no experience, no thought, no feeling is ever lost and it all returns to the source even when it sometimes becomes inverted and deeply, horribly, painfully confused for a time before it turns toward and is glorified in the light–all.

The virgin birth–Parthenogenesis or an amazing and radical metaphor on many levels from the political through  the deeply spiritual– about the divine being generated, born within without reference to or dependence upon any of the established authority systems or ranking and value systems or constructs like male dominance, or the privileging of transcendent spirituality–once again a metaphor for the perfect unity of Spirit and Matter.

Yes. I love some talk shows and I love reciting the historic creeds.

Love,

Lewis

Thales and other ancient thinkers were interested in discovering the primal, foundational element from which all other things were made. The great mystics have long known that at the deepest point and the highest point there is the One, the void, the All, the Ground of Being. All these titles are conceptial and thus only point toward what can only be experienced beyond knowing.

Perhaps the greatest pointer is the most simple. God is Love. 

There are those who cannot see beyond the anthropromorphic language of theism and think of it as lesser than the more abstracted language of some other traditions. While I understand the issue I think and I know how this anthropromorphism and theism itself can be limiting and is certainly inadequate I respond that so are all other concepts. In fact, the language of relationship and devotion often speak more directly to the heart and to our embodied experience and thus are very compelling and at their very best are powerfully transformative. What more transformative experience is there in human life than falling in love? The mystical language of Sufism and the Christian mysticis and the Jewish wisdom tradition speak to my heart in powerful ways and I feel no need to apologize for them.

After all, in this time of the rapid emergence of global, integral experience we don’t need to choose either, or– either the language of theism or the language of atheism (as in some forms of Buddhism, not necessarily the angry political form as in Dawkins et al). We are free to consider the perspectives of both, and–and still they only point to an experience that is beyond concepts, beyond language.

Belief, faith–in what? Only in this experience that we may all glimpse and grow into (perhaps through many lifetimes). Only in this fundamental, primal reality–Love. 

“Beliefs,” “faith” “faiths” are provisional concepts–pointers and should be taken on and put off as if helpful. A sense that we are, each of us, exactly where we need to be now, and now and now and now… makes it possible for us to move beyond our judgmental structures and limiting belief systems that seperate us and often lead to violence and a sense of justification for our abusive and destructive behaviors (toward ourselves and toward others).

The good, true and beautiful simplicity beyond the awesome complexity is as St. Augustine uttered it–LOVE AND DO AS YOU WILL.

This does not make the dance of life less interesting. It does not end intellectual and creative enterprise. It does not flaten the political discourse. But, it puts it beautifully in perspective and helps us to move toward true and ultimate freedom.

Love,

Lewis

Of course this election, like the crisis in the world markets, like every other thing is about much more than most if not all of us realize. Of course there is a shift in progress in our very consciousness.

Such shifts are indeed always in process and always have been. They are always taking place on every level at once. From time to time these shifts become very apparent and powerful.

Our group psychology follows many if not all of the same patterns as our individual psyches and it helps for us to understand what is happening if we can look within and ask ourselves about our individual reactions to what may seem to be external events.

It may help to understand that human experience includes cyclic patterns but it is at one and the same time linear. We  have never been “here” before and we will never be “here” again but what happens “here” and “now” will continue forever–every here and every now. 

The rapidity of our cycling and of our linear acceleration is growing greater and greater in direct proportion to the level of our conscious interconnectedness. This acceleration also serves to heighten both positive and negative responses, both joy and fear.

It is inexorable. We must embrace the process and respond to the greater emerging complexity in an ever more focused and agile way if we are to create within the eternal flow. Attempting to hold it back is like trying to hold back the sea with a sheet of plywood.

In order to respond in an joyful and centered fashion we must respond from a deeper and higher place that all of us are but of which we may be only dimly aware. This place is a place of experience and not belief. It is a place of extreme honesty and thus plyabality. Living in this place that is only joyful if it is grounded in an active identification with love–love as the source, ground and goal of our being.

Nothing will be lost but all form is changing. In the midst of the constant flow and change of energy which is our experience of reality the only unchanging, unmoving reality is the absolute and foundational one of this love which is all in all. When we awaken to our true identity as this love, this energy then we are the all and the all is luminious-joyful-powerful.

No matter which direction the river chooses to flow it will run to the sea and ultimately we will all be aware that we are caught up in–that we are that flow.

Here and now we grow when we orient ourselves with it, identify with it at ever deepening and profound levels and relax into it with faith, trust, real knowledge of the goodness, truth and beauty of what is emerging.

Mistakes are relative. Perhaps the only real mistake is attempting to disidentify with the flow or turn it from its natural and loving course. This is the source of suffering and harm. Relax and Act from the beginningless and endless source of all potential and SMILE!

By the way–I’m voting Obama–with joy!

Love,

Lewis

Aligning Personal Ambition With The Evolutionary Unfolding

Or

The Way You Make Love Is The Way You Live Is The Way You Do Business

Have you ever made love with someone with whom you are so deeply in love that their most annoying characteristics become adorable (e.g.. a new aquantiance just reported that she so missed the little puddles of pee her beloved left on the toilet seat before he died)? Have you ever been so in the flow of love that the deep funk and musk of your lover became sweeter in your nostrils than the scent of sweet olive in the French Quarter on a sunny December morning (oops, too personal)?

Have you experienced the difference between this kind of love making with your whole being and impersonal, sometimes performance driven sex that may be fueled by amazing lust but fails to deliver a deep sense of well-being and deep communion?

I think these two examples of love making are more than metaphors for the way we relate to being incarnate, to matter, to the manifested here and now of time and space, they are actual experiences of being incarnate that have lessons to teach us all the way up to global (perhaps intergalactic, kosmic) relationships.

The intensity of passion hightens our senses and focuses our attention. We see and feel things that would ordinarly pass by unnoticed.

If we come to recognize that the whole manifested order is the body of the beloved, flows forth from the ground of being, and that we are in that flow and of that flow, then being incarnate becomes the divine making love to the divine.

Seemingly individual expressions or incidences of this love making, upon closer inspection, become subsumed in the radiant beauty and energy of the absolute unity of all being. The universal and the paticular are experienced beyond all concepts and all words–inexpressable–only to be experienced. We can only point to what “it is like”– like a holograph in which the whole is completely present in each particle already, always.

What does this deep, inexpressible experience, realization have to do with Entrepreneurship?

If we create as an act of love making–if we embrace nature, matter, the manifest as the body of the beloved, miricles of love and delight emerge.

If we supplant the old idea that we are seperate from the natural order and that we are here to have dominion over it and we understand not only that we as physical beings are part of it but that our whole being is actually one with it and designed to make love to it, in all of its manifestatiions, and that to do so is to love ourselves, and to love ourselves is to love the all, the absolute, then in that passionate embrace our senses are heightened, our attention is focused and we learn and indeed intuit better and better how to make love to the beloved, how to serve and be served by the beloved.

The simple act of riding a bicycle or composting organic matter or planting a tree or inventing an amazing green energy producing teconology or unraveling a complex medical mystery or composing a beautiful piece of music or painting a beautiful painting or any conscious action become passionate acts of love making and our creativity flows from the very source and in alignment with, in oneness with the very source of all that is.

Even if others are still in conflict with the beloved. Even if others show disrespect and lack of love we can become transforming presences and can model the power of creating in concert with nature, matter, our beloved. If we recognize the deeper reality of what it means to be incarnate and the deeper reality and complete oneness of Spirit and Matter, we become the kosmic singularity in our own being.

Even if we may not understand these things or cannot communicate these things fully, we can understand that a loving attitude toward the material world and a deep respect for the design encoded in the natural order can yield amazing innovation and sustainable and even healing teconologies that will improve the quality of our life and our love making.

Love,

Lewis

Transcend and Include

I was once very involved in the Integral New York City Salon. I still read the post on their Yahoo site and occasionally post there. I pulled back a couple of years ago. One of the frustrating discussions we could never seem to have was about the possibility that the dominant integral model from Ken Wilber, while noting the need for the full integrity of the masculine and feminine was very loaded in its privileging of the masculine and transcendent.

Most often the conversation became defensive and the bigger picture of Transcendence and Immanence never got much traction. I posted my step back into the discourse here the other day. I was drawn back in by a young woman who was asking the questions I had asked and I had a feeling the time for the discussion was ripe. Some who had been in the ascendency before and had a vested interest in the status quo were feeling from others some of what they had dished out in their turn. It seems it is ever so. But, some new young minds were raising the same questions with a new force and not being shot down or ignored. I really wanted to acknowledge them in ways I had actually desired for myself back when.

I don’t feel I can use names or copy other’s post here so I am excerpting my own side of the exchange below for what it is worth.

The conversation modeled its topic in my opinion. It was very gratifying and provided us all a chance to examine our assumptions and to grow and it ended for now with good feelings I think, at least with me.

Love,

Lewis

In answer to the assertion by a bright young man that we were having two different conversations.

I wrote,

“Respectfully, I do not believe we are having two different conversations. In fact, I believe that in our conversation we are modeling exactly what we are attempting to discuss. 

In my opinion, if we are to see the larger, deeper answer I think we are all seeking we need to discover the essential unity behind our points of view.

Language and concepts are not adequate at all and ultimately we will only be able to experience the unity of our seemingly disparate perspectives as an experience beyond language, concept and what we typically think of as knowledge.

We are considering the most basic reality of lived experience and indeed we may be approaching it with different emphasis and from different entry points. 

In an attempt to understand a bit better I don’t know any way to proceed except to employ a few generalizations, hopefully orienting. We all actually employ our own particular mix of approaches and methods.

Perhaps the more masculine/transcendent approach is to focus on structure and the “higher” view that “sees clearly” in a way not “confused” or “muddled” by too much emotion. One looks for the universal, the transpersonal, indeed approaches the personal and particular from the perspective of the universal. This ability is essential and in this I think I completely agree with you. 

This approach was essential for me to begin to escape the constructs that imprisoned me, many of which I had internalized and perpetuated from that confused and hateful society and family which you described so well. The particular sometimes seemed so hopeless that escaping into this higher vision was the only place I found hope and a motivation to go on.

That more intellectual, structural and abstracted point of view was and indeed remains the point of view that I am most comfortable with. It has been necessary for me to live and grow.

(The adjectives I use may need adjusting and may not all fit your sense of your point of view but I am simply making an effort to deepen our discourse and am in no way passing judgment on what I know I do not fully understand.)

The more feminine, immanent perspective tends to begin with felt, embodied, very personal and particular experience. It is sometimes thought of as the heart path. It approaches the universal from the experience of the particular. Nature, ritual, dance, emotion all tend to play a greater role. Judgment is often based more on felt response to life–one kind of intuition.

This perspective is also essential and it includes the ability to deeply hear and honor one another’s stories and to know that any structures or “solutions” must resonate with this lived experience and raise its quality and impact us at every level from the gross upwards.

In my natal tradition all of this us metaphorically represented in the glorified body of the risen Christ. The so called hypostatic union–the complete union of the fully human and the fully divine eternally revealed as being eternally present there already, always, past, present and future–represents our true nature and the oneness of Matter and Spirit, Humanity and Divinity, Heaven and Earth. 

Of course, as in all traditions there are lesser versions and visions of the tradition but this one is firmly there in the tradition.

The Transcendent and the Immanent are not two but one reality that we experience as eternal movement, the pulse, the tidal action of God/Kosmos. That wonderful cadesus L_____ sent and her meditation upon it where the snakes recognize one another in each the other’s eyes is a beautiful metaphor or symbol as well, thanks L_____.

If we rest in the gift of the constant witness and never act it is in my opinion a pathology and fairly meaningless but if we have this perspective of witness held with the gift of constant presence here and now, conscious embodiment, and we act and create in and through the manifest then we are sharing in the creativity of the Kosmos–of God–evolution. The Kosmos acts, unfolds, creates, embodies, dances, expresses in the constant flow of change and yet is always and eternally still and unchanging as the ground of all potential from which all arises and to which all returns and arises and returns and arises and returns… and IS.

My understanding of integral is the ability to take these perspectives together at once and to see, experience the greater unity that is there-transcend is one movement which resolves itself in include. As language is dualistic we express this as alignment between Spirit and Matter but beyond all these words and concepts like kosmos, god, nondual there is this unitive experience that can become our center of consciousness, gravity…no words.

I love the metaphor of the tide because I have done my best thinking, such as it is, by the sea I think. The metaphor I have heard often is that enlightenment is when one realizes that one is not the wave but is in fact the whole sea itself.

I never liked that. To me growth (I’m not really keen on the idea of enlightenment as it is often presented)is when one realizes that one is the sea and the wave simultaneously- -one realizes that the wave always knew (perhaps not in full consciousness) that it was the sea, the expressive, dancing manifesting, creative energy of the sea that manifest and returns, manifest and returns, manifest and returns in joy, in particularity every time as an expression arising from the universal every time.

Its all gloriously messy, the mess of birth. One way is to dive into the mess and ascend from the particular to the universal, the personal to the impersonal, the immanent to the transcendent or one can get one’s act as much together as possible and descend from the transcendent to the immanent, the impersonal to the personal, the universal to the particular. Integral seems to point to what many of the mystics have know before that there is no real contradiction to going in two directions at once or experiencing two aspects of one reality unchanging and constantly changing, etc. at once.

For what it is worth…

Love,
Lewis” 

The young man wrote back that I did not see that I was the constructs, I was what I  hated and that by projecting it out of myself onto the abuser I was denying half of God. We were having two conversations at that point I think. I was not interested in blame or denying my own abusive potential. I was interested in not denying the body, the incarnate, matter with all of its mess. I believe that the sea is a sea of love and that only when love is confused and turned away from its goal and object does it become what we call hate. I am certainly not interested in denying my own confusion nor the often deep dark confusion of the world. 

In a note to a dear friend I remarked on this as follows, “I don’t believe in sin and evil in the way most often represented either (I love Ernesto Cardinal’s Hymn of Love and Blake’s tiger and lamb poems) just that the confusion can become so deep and dark and destructive that we can’t hold it and acknowledge it because it is potentially in each of us. That is so scary. We put it out on to the other and make that other the devil, even as a super source presence outside ourselves in the darkness.”

Lewis wrote,

“In my opinion I am not the constructs. I am the I in which they often manifest and the I that I am often confuses itself with them but that I of itself is a point of
connection and expression– manifestation- -potential. I am an incarnate being, not disembodied spirit alone, but my deepest identity, body and soul, is that same “you know what I mean God.”

I’m not interested in blaming the constructs on anyone including
myself. That does not mean I am not going to point them out to myself and others and resist them when they attempt to repress or oppress or truncate. I’m just interested in realizing, waking up, being part of a waking up community that is aware more and more that they are not immutable
and in fact are constructed of the plastic substance that can be used for expressing my/our own particular version of the Divine–waking up and realizing the cell is open or rather that its appearance of solidity was always an illusion.

The constructs are in me and in us–in the ideosphere. We often share
them and manipulate them and the confusion, the inverted love
(interesting redeployment of word once used to label same-sex love)
can result in deep, dark confusion and pain and hatred and violence (individual and collective painbodies).

In fact I spend and have spent much of my time thinking I am the
constructs, good ones and bad ones, but I am not them and once I
realize that they are constructs and not ontological, that is, not
about the essential reality of my being, body or soul, then I become
free to heal and forgive and love and create. They manifest in matter
(boy can I document that with about 405 lb. at my highest weight) but
the constructs are often confusions– love turned away from its flow,
from the Beloved.

Damn it! As much as I hate to admit it, anytime I hate and project
that hatred on to someone I actually know that it is to that degree, the
degree of my hatred, that in reality I sooooooo want to love them.
That sucks! Ha! So I know I am what I hate.

I don’t want to get rid of constructs I want to align them with
Wholeness, with Spirit for their to be an essential unity of Spirit
and Matter in and through the universal and the particular aspects of
I which like L_____’s snake will recognize itself in your eyes and

> R’s eyes and J’s eyes, and Y’s eyes and S’s eyes and
> N’s eyes and and and and. A Divine Hall of Mirrors.
>
> Not sure that mirror thing works?
>

Some of this no doubt is about defining terms and comparing models.
>
> You don’t know me because I’m an old semi-hermit of very little
> worldly consequence who just has not had the pleasure of making your
> acquaintance beyond these pages. We must rectify that.
>
> Love,
> Lewis”

Defining Terms

There is some intersection between those who look at my mess here from time to time and the iNYCS Yahoo page where I seldom contribute now. 

I posted what is below there today. A couple of years ago some of us attempted this discussion but got no traction. There is new life and energy there and on lots of the sites I scan and the discussion seems to me to be maturing. It makes me happy.

————————————————————————-

I’m delighted to see this list considering this issue again. Here, once again, is a bit of my opinion on the subject, my two dollars (inflation),

As an example of the way the social/cultural/political constructs and the developmental categories can intersect–as you know– one of the early developmental models Wilber sighted, even before Spiral Dynamics, was Carol Gilligan’s from selfish to care to universal care to integrated. She still lectures at NYU I think and as I remember from years back she believes men and women development through these same levels with perhaps more men emphasizing agency and more women with an emphasis on relationship (or communion).

This may be largely accurate without being universal and immutable. Biology can be powerfully influential without being destiny.

Because the terms masculine and feminine are so loaded and have influence that crosses quadrants (how messy!) things get confused. I’m not up to sorting them out but have thought about it.

1.    In the spiritual traditions masculine has often been used to label the more abstract and transcendent approach. This is roughly true both East and West I think– mind more than heart or body, spirit privileged over matter.

I have come to like using the terms transcendent and immanent instead. 

Of course they are ultimately not separate in the most profound reaches of any of the traditions.  They both manifest from the Ground of Being (the Heart Sutra) and change and no change are reconciled in a larger apprehension of reality.

It is no mistake that Mater and matter are related etymologically and often etiologically.  Who wants to actually reject their mom if there is any alternative? We all got here because of her.

The privileging of the masculine and the taking for granted and underestimation of the feminine is a pathology that has deformed most of us and most of our spiritual traditions. I think this is true of the general and particular uses of masculine and feminine or rather the immanent and transcendent usage.  (I must say that the Cohn/Wilber dialogue in WIE last year …) It leads to a complete failure to manifest and refine through testing and experience and is a large part of the root cause of sexism, homophobia, global warming, eating disorders, racism, etc.            

2.    Biology has provided us with a much more sophisticated understanding of human variety and complexity. Simple VIN diagrams based on biological characteristics considered male or female imposed on the population will show how complicated the matter of gender is. (of course this is true psychologically and spiritually as well) Anthropology as an important foundational set of assumptions for almost all disciplines has not caught up even in this upper right sense not to mention any hope of a more integral model.

3.    Culturally we are still largely treating men and women according to constructs, partly inspired by accidental differences, that are perhaps dominant but not universally accurate, between the two most recognized sexes (the great contribution offered by intersexed people is not yet widely received in our society).

Back in the day Jungians like June Sanger and was it David Hopeke? were talking about androgyny (drawing on ancient sources like the Zohar and the Vedas) as not so much an individual identity as a sense of the wholeness of our humanity-a model other than male dominance or female dominance for that matter.

We often do this mispredication of the accidental as the ontological with race, sex, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity.  Accidents are great but must not obscure our common being.

All of the constructs based on these confused predications are breaking down upon deep examination. Kinsey destroyed the “normative assumptions’ about sexual orientation and behavior years ago and the various liberation movements have done and are doing their part. Race is beginning to be dealt with in more sophisticated ways at a larger scale.

The more sophisticated sorting out of accidents from constructs and understanding that neither are ontological categories is testimony to the slow degrading of these old assumptions.  None of this means that we will have to become flavorless clones but that room for a greater individuality can become a social, cultural possibility. (Anyone else love Torchwood’s Captain Jack?)

So, when we attempt to employ tools like AQAL or IMP or other integral approaches we must be conscious of the short hand ways of using these loaded terms and understand that they are useful but not absolute.

In the amazing soup of emerging global discussion made so quick and sometimes careless by the internet we often fail to remember Socrates’ fundamental requirement for philosophical discourse to first define terms. This is no easy task.

One of my favorite examples is a personal one. My one seemingly progressive cousin, also raised by my Calvinist minister father, rebelled in a big way and has practiced Zen for decades now. When I last saw him not only did he look like my father he spoke to me with the same puritanical and Calvinistic fervor that my father always used. He translated the sense of sin and fallen-ness into different language. He is not waiting for his ego to die he is trying to kill that of others.

I think this is such an important discussion because the shadow is powerful most of all because it is the place where we consign dissociated aspects of our potential. I’ve been so uncomfortable with my more masculine energies that only after fifty am I consciously (my inner Calvinist Dad always did find a way out if not consciously) sorting them out from the abusive examples I have encountered and recoiled from. This in no way means I intend to give up one bit of my inner screaming queen. In fact, I am convinced that only in an awareness and comfortable integration—not a balance (beyond balance—fully both/and) can one freely manifest one’s own individual flavor and creative construct—personality.

When one finds this freedom and integration then one can change and flow and still be already, always still, eternal and unchanging. Imagine the “cultural creativity” this would make possible. The present version seems better but still fairly conventional I think.

Love,

Lewis 

Another Movie With A Subtext

Based on a novel by James Hilton (Goodbye Mr. Chips, another of my favorite old tear jerker novels and movies) 1942’s Random Harvest was Greer Garson’s favorite of her movies.

Garson stars along with Ronald Colman. She is a member of a traveling troop of show people in England during the First World War. Colman, a shell shocked unidentified officer suffering from amnesia, wanders one foggy night out of the asylum where he is being treated and is discovered in a disoriented state by Garson.

She leaves the troop and nurses John Smith (Colman’s assigned name) back to health while helping him avoid being caught and returned to the asylum. Of course they fall in love.

Mr. and Mrs. John Smith are married in the parish church in a nearby village and honeymoon in a little inn there. They are so happy that they move into a modest cottage in the countryside outside the village and he discovers a talent for writing and makes a living as a freelance contributor to various magazines and papers.

Several years pass and they continue to be happy. They have a son and almost immediately, as if in response to their greater need, he is offered a staff position on a Liverpool paper. Liverpool is not far away and he leaves, somewhat reluctantly, a few days after the healthy birth in order to be interviewed for the position.

On his way to the paper’s offices he is knocked unconscious in the street in a freak accident. He awakens in a chemist shop where he has been taken and, again of course, remembers that he is Mr. Charles Raniner, the eldest son of a wealthy family in the south of England.

Though he is haunted by vague feelings of urgency and thus remains in Liverpool attempting to discover how he got there and where he has been for the years that have elapsed since his last memory in the trenches in France, he cannot reclaim any of it.

He returns to his lovely country estate home the day after his father’s funeral and is greeted as the heir of the estate. He goes back to Oxford to finish a degree he started before the war and later must take over the family business from his incompetent brother. He turns out to be wizard at business and becomes one of England’s industrial princes. He is knighted and becomes a respected member of parliament.

He is pursued by a beautiful young socialite and becomes engaged to her but finally by mutual consent the wedding is called off because they both are forced to admit that he is not capable of loving her as she wants and deserves. He is a very good man and very successful but is living a muted and almost joyless life.

While he is living this haunted and muted life, Greer, Mrs. John Smith, after looking for him franticly when he fails to return from Liverpool, falls ill along with their infant son. The baby dies and she works at various menial jobs in order to survive. She spends the small amount extra she can earn in searching for John. Finally, after some years of despair, she sees his photo, the now famous Sir Charles Raniner industrialist and MP, and recognizes him.

During her initial search she returned to the asylum searching for any clue and was befriended by the psychiatrist who had treated John/Charles there. He helps her as much as he can and in the process confess to her that he has fallen in love with her. She is grateful to him but has a heart only for her beloved Smithy.

The psychiatrist warns her that John/Charles must recovery his memory of her and their love naturally. She has been studying stenography at night in order to find a better job and sees an advertisement for a personal secretary for Sir Charles. She applies and he hires her. It is almost as if she is vagley familar.

She quickly makes herself indispensable to him and they work together well. Being near him is a torture and she pines for his look of love and his passionate embrace.

From time to time he has a glimpse of his lost years but confess to her that with the loss of his memory of them he also seems to have lost the capacity for passion and joy.

In a kind but dispassionate way he proposes marriage as more or less a business arrangement. She hesitates but consents to become Lady Raniner. She is a great asset in his public life and a stellar social success but her heart is constantly breaking open as he looks at her respectfully but without recognition.

Finally, at what is clearly a breaking point for her, she announces her need to go away for a rest. She plans a trip to South America. He does not want her to go but feels he has no right to detain her.

Before leaving England she decides to spend two days visiting the site of her last happiness and returns to the inn where they honeymooned. Coincidentally, he is called to the nearby town where he escaped the asylum to negotiate the end of what has been a bitter and protracted strike in the mill there. He tells his new assistant, a young man, that he has never been to the town before.

He settles the strike to the happiness of all and as he is leaving the mill realizes that he is out of smokes (everyone smoked in those days especially the sophisticated). He remarks to his assistant that there is a tobacconist just around the corner. They go there and he walks into the shop in which Greer had found him in the beginning of the film.

A ghost memory comes upon him and the young assistant ask him how he knew the shop was there if he had never been to the town before. He is puzzled and another ghost memory of the asylum arises. Accompanied by his young assistant he describes the asylum to a local who tells him that it sounds like the old abandoned hospital on the edge of town. They go there.

In the next scene we see Greer, Mrs. John Smith/Lady Raniner chatting with the clerk at the desk of the honeymoon inn. She enquires after the old lady who had been the inn keeper when Mr. and Mrs. John Smith first checked in as husband and wife years before. The clerk reports that the old lady died a few years back and then remarks that she was very popular and that people often ask after her. In fact, she reports, a gentleman who had once lived in a cottage near by had been in asking after her just a few moments before Lady Raniner came down.

Greer knows instinctively that the gentleman was her beloved and she runs toward the cottage. They meet one another under the flowering cherry tree in front of the cottage and embrace with a rediscovered, renewed, reinvigorated and enlivened passion and fullness that has suddenly been restored.

It will not surprise you, especially if you have read my earlier post, to hear that I think this very emotionally gratifying movie is a perfect allegory for the souls search for the beloved.

As a gift–a grace–often after years of glimpses–one suddenly awakens in one’s ordinary life and realizes that one has always already been in the safe, passionate and completely loving and joyful embrace of the beloved. It was just as if one had been asleep or had amnesia and suddenly waked up, remembered.

I suppose most of us have lives in which we glimpse this blissful and passionate state and perhaps even experience it full on for a time now and then but it seems truly passionate, awakened people who live there most if not all of the time are rare. I think I have know a few, enough to think it is possible. Perhaps like Elliot’s chorus in Murder in the Cathedral most of us are living and partly living, dulled by one sort of poverty or another.

The Kosmos, God, is the lover and we are the beloved. we are always loved, always embraced. If we can just fully wake up to that reality then no matter what arises our hearts will be full and secure and nothing can ever again separate us from that love.

I told you in the first post that I love a love story.

Love,
Lewis

Narcissism or Transcendentalism?

Well, if everything is eternal not in form but in substance, if everything proceeds and returns to the Ground of Being then so do I.

If at the gross level no energy is ever lost but only changes form and cycles on and on and which can be measured and observed through the physical senses and their amazing extensions and if I am correct that this gross level is only the surface of a much more amazing and complex reality which I believe I have, along with many others, experienced directly with subtle and even transcendent senses, then why would I think that this energy of consciousness and transcendence, this soul and spirit energy will be lost?

I believe that nothing is ever lost on any level, no thought, no pain, no joy, no experience. They are all energy and they all proceed from the One Source, the Ground Of Being and I believe return to it to the ground of all potential to be manifested through awesome creative action over and over and over.

If nothing is ever lost then neither is my experience of myself as an individual. If we have complete unitive experience then we can experience ourselves as the all, as God. St. John of the Cross said, “In my deepest self I have no being but God.” But, in this unitive reality all paradoxes are resolved and there is no problem with being conscious as the All and as an individual. In other terms which I like less and less as they are abused in the spiritual marketplace, enlightenment is indeed impersonal, BUT, at the same time it is also completely personal. These experiences are not antithetical but simply facets of the same experience. Eminence is not the opposite of Transcendence just two words we use in this realm of contrast and dualism to describe our experiences which at a higher level of consciousness are experienced as facets of one eternal luminous diamond.

The idea of eternal hell is odious but the idea of eternal heaven or bliss is also not that interesting to me, sorry. Perhaps I’m crazy but I rather fancy experience, life movement change adventure. Perhaps after trillions of lifetimes and after having explored the kosmos I will be ready to retire into the Beatific Vision, but not yet. Weeeee! He squealed as the wheel turned round and round!

Part of our incarnate experience is a kind of amnesia as regards the full extent of our reality and indeed the reality of the whole. The old metaphor used by some spiritual teachers that waking up or being enlightened is realizing that you are the sea and not the wave has always seemed wrong to me. The wave always knows who and what it is, it is the sea, the most interesting and playful and creative expression of the sea. To say that one wakes up to being the sea is true but that one realaizes one is not the wave is false. The wave is both/and all along so to me waking up is realizing that we are beautiful and amazing waves breaking the surface and communicating the delight and the joy, the dance of the whole, the sea and we get to return and return and return to dance and dance and dance.

This metaphor does not even communicate the depth of the unity as the sea and the land the earth and the sky the planet and the solar system, the solar system and the kosmos are not finally two either and yet at one and the same time it is all many, diverse and also completely one.

Love,
Lewis