For Freedom's Sake - Quareness Series (68th "Lecture").
"No individual is free who cannot evolve beyond the confines of the mental world into which he/she was born" - Dervla Murphy (Irish Travel Writer "A Place Apart"). And this evolving can surely be facilitated primarily by being sufficiently aware to trust in
open-minded dialogue rather than in competitive conflictual debate or pontificating. For this purpose the learning process is surely the major goal to be fostered in any helpful airing of differing views.
It has been reasonably argued that man attains civilisation by submitting to female sexuality, with males in groups finding the masculine assurance that allows them to submit and swim deeply in female time and space before surfacing redeemed, and that male anxiety and energy and female time and space in transcendence are indispensible to art. And what is necessary for art may also be so for all other male enterprises i.e. only socialised males can usually contribute value either to the great corporations or bureaucracies or to the alternative modes of activity arising in our modern societies. Furthermore it may be only through the maintenance of affirmative male roles that our societies can assure the long term sexual patterns on which civilisation depends. The assembly line and the bureaucracy tend to make males so defensive and unsure of themselves that long term submission to women is difficult and detraction of women is pervasive. In producing males who do not respect themselves, such jobs also fail to foster respect for women. And this is despite the fact that the husband ultimately validates his individual worth through the wife, who may be the only one in his entire adult life who receives him as a whole human being.
This arbiter role of woman calls her to cultivate herself in order to fulfill her moral aesthetic and expressive being as an individual embodying the ultimate values of the society. She does her work because it is of primary rather than instrumental value. Woman in the home with her child is the last bastion against the technocratic marketplace. And while the man's role is indispensible as well, it is relatively derivative - his is the instrumental realm of the world of "outside" work where individuality is much less in demand and ultimately the marketplace defines the value of the work. It is sobering to realise that jobs rarely afford room for the whole
person...one may become a specialist chiefly by narrowing the mind, by excluding personal ideosyncrasies and visions in order to master the disciplines and technicalities of one's trade, but this process does not fulfill the individual in any profound way. In this regard many (if not most) men in our modern "developed" societies have to forego the individual fulfillment of responding as whole persons to their lives through curiosity and openess. Instead they have to limit themselves, at great psychological cost, in order to fit the functions of the economic division of labour.
Unfortunately the Women's Lib viewpoint on women (who are uniquely in charge of the central activities of human life) has tended towards exalting the peripheral values that have real meaning only in relation to the role they would "downgrade". The reason the man tends to be paid more is not because of special virtue but because of the key importance of socialising his naturally disruptive energies. In addition his possession of a margin of financial advantage endows his role as provider or social initiator. The woman's place in the home is best facilitated when she can get the man there too, but she cannot easily do so alone. Society has to supply a role for him (usually as provider) that connects him to the family in a masculine way. In essence civilisation's values are domestic ones.
These "home" values can give meaning and illumination to male sexuality and indeed to all other masculine enterprises. Male work is most valuable when it is imbued with long term love and the communal concern of femininity i.e. when it is brought back to the home. Otherwise masculine activity is apt to degenerate quickly to the level of a game, and games have a way of deteriorating into the vain pursuit of power unless closely regulated.
Essentially the above makes a strong case for the social importance of what we might term "traditional marriage".
Now...to take a different tack...
Beliefs can reasonably be characterised as preconceptions of truth (clinging to certain ideas) whereas faith involves more an openess to truth without preconceptions. Perhaps we can also reasonably surmise that the sins after the Devil's heart (because he is pure spirit) are not those of the flesh but the intricacies of spiritual pride, mazes of self-deception and the subtle mockeries of hypocrisy where mask hides behind mask and reality is lost. And the true art of living may consist in being completely sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in holding the mind open and wholly receptive...a good definition of real freedom? But there can be no real freedom if there is motive to become something, or as long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at this moment...virtue will be pursued for exactly the same reason as vice and good and evil will alternate as the opposite poles of a single closed circle. Hell is then revealed not as a condemned state with time going on forever, but rather as the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained (like in an unbroken circle) i.e. the everlasting impossibility of self-love, self-consciousness and self-possession.
We can also come to understand that the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are one and the same thing. Naturally we all want to be happy, to forget ourselves and yet the more we try to forget, the more we remember the self we want to forget. What we need to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking it is painful and that when we imagine we have found it, we don't like it. In truth life is entirely momentary, there is neither permanence nor security and there is no "I" which can be protected.
The more we accustom ourselves to understanding the present in terms of memory, or the unknown by the known, or the living by the dead, the more desiccated and embalmed, joyless and frustrated life becomes. Thus "protected" from living in the truth, man becomes encrusted in a hard shell of "tradition" and when reality finally breaks through (as it must) the tide of pent-up fear runs wild. If on the other hand you are ordinarily aware of fear, you realise that escape is impossible because this feeling is now yourself. Calling it "fear" really tells you little or nothing about it because the comparison and the naming is based not on past experience but on memory (= a present taste of past experience). And you're then left with no choice but to be aware of it with your whole being as an entirely new experience (indeed every experience is in this sense new and at every moment of our lives we are in the midst of the new and the unknown). At this point you receive the experience without resisting it or naming it and any sense of conflict between "I" and the present reality vanishes.
Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape but so long as you are not aware of the inseparability of thinker and thought, you will try to escape. From this, absorbtion follows quite naturally...no effort is involved...the mind does it by itself. Given that there is no escape, the mind yields to the pain, absorbs it and becomes conscious of just pain without any "I" feeling it or resisting it. Like the great Kahlil Gilbran pointed out in "The Prophet" - "You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief. But rather when these things girdle you life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound".
A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good e.g. in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor is it interested in being free e.g. in acting perversely just to prove its independence. Its interest is not in itself but in the people and problems of which it is aware...these are "itself". It acts not according to the rules but according to the circumstances of the moment, and wishes liberty rather than security for others. Love can emerge only when one is convinced of the impossibilty and the frustration of trying to love oneself...a conviction that will not come through condemnation or hating oneself...it comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.
There can be no creative morality unless man has the possibility of freedom and the meaning of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my experience and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around. What we ordinarily mean by choice is not freedom, given that our choices are usually decisions motivated by pleasure and pain and the divided mind acts with the sole purpose of getting "I" into pleasure and out of pain. But our experience shows that the best pleasures are those for which we do not plan, and the worst part of pain is expecting it and trying to get away from it when it has come. Outlandish and insatiable desires tend to arise when man engages in exploiting his appetites to give the "I" a sense of security.
Behind all imitation and discipline there is still motive, and there can be no freedom as long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at this moment. Love is the organising and unifying principle which makes of the world a universe and of the disintegrated mass a community. It's the very essence and character of mind, becoming manifest in action when the mind is whole. Indeed we essentially are love (it's what we're made from and consist of) and the only real problem is not the "how to" but the direction of love i.e. whether it embraces all (like sunlight) or tries to turn back on itself like a "candle under a bushel". From this viewpoint it's clear that the morality of rules and regulations based on rewards and punishments has no relation to free action. In effect such is just a way of ruling by "benevolent" exploitation of people's illusions and can never lead to freedom.
We and our thoughts are part of the universe...we cannot stand outside them to describe them. To "know" reality we cannot stand outside it and define it...we must enter into it, be it, and feel it. When the mind is split, life tends towards perpetual conflict, tension, frustration and disillusion...with suffering piled on suffering, fear on fear and boredom on boredom. Under such strain and futility, it's no wonder mankind so often seeks release in violence and sensationalism and reckless exploitation of appetites, bodies, the material world and our fellow man. Once we realise that we live in (and are) this present moment and no other, and that there is no real past or future (i.e. there's just a present taste of past or future "experience"), we have no option but to relax and taste to the full of pleasure or pain. And when we do so it becomes obvious why this universe exists...why conscious beings have been produced, why sensitive organs, why space, time and change. Then the whole problem of justifying nature, of trying to make life mean something in terms of its future, disappears utterly...it all exists just for this moment...it's a dance and when we dance we are not intent on getting somewhere...we go round and round but not under the illusion of pursuing something or fleeing from hell. The meaning and purpose of the dance is the dance...like music it is fulfilled in each moment of its course.
Goethe - "As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorry traveller on this dark earth". Death is the epitome of the truth that in each moment we are thrust into the unknown where all clinging to security is compelled to cease. And life is renewed whenever the past is dropped away and safety abandoned. In truth, death is the unknown in which all of us lived before birth.
We can readily see that the above two views of aspects of our human condition are very different and to some extent oppositional. However, this does not mean that either is necessarily incorrect or otherwise. The expression of both serves to inform the learning process and contributes to the potential of each of us to "evolve beyond the confines of the mental world into which he/she was born".
Gill Hicks - a lady who survived having been severely injured in the London Tube bombings of July 2005 - learned from that "unwelcome" experience that nothing really mattered other than she was a precious human life and that unconditional love and respect both saves and transforms lives. She came to realise that love gave her the courage to turn away from hatred and wanting retribution...and to realise that she was loved...and to say "this ends with me".
Would that we would all take her words to heart.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
July, 2016.