The Dance of Change - Quareness Series 74th "Lecture".
It's long been a puzzle to me why we are so ready to dismiss as not relevant the evidence that some people appear to thrive to a ripe old age despite their life-long indulging in "unhealthy" behaviours/habits. Today's experts tend to justify their admonishments of..."such 'n such is bad for everyone"...and explain these obvious anomalies by pointing to some exceptional people's genes, etc. as different from the norm for most of us. Apart from this tending to undermine the "bad for everyone" viewpoint, it may also serve to discourage more in-depth scrutiny of potential causes of human dis..ease and ill health.
The temperament of writers tends to be liberal, their energy creative, their focus social and critical, and their trade naturally imaginative, while the nature of authority is realistic, controlling and generally conservative, and this might in part explain why so many of our experts lean towards certainty. In the main our artists, reformers and writers seem to be engaged in a struggle for self-affirmation against the pressures of conformity. However, all of us may endure this in one form or another and there may be a vital issue here worthy of further exploration.
Maybe it's more accurate in practice to say the world is in us rather than we are in the world i.e. everything that we perceive as happening to us takes place in our consciousness? It can seem also that the influence of those who matter to us
continues to live in us even when they are not physically present. And there may be real empowering potential in thinking this way, enabling us to seek out the ways we connect as well as the ways we pull apart.
Could it be that clogged up arteries, for example, can represent "clogged up" emotions where say anger may be a root cause of stroke or heart disease? If so, maybe diet or smoking or lack of exercise might add to the risk but would not be the cause. Having our emotions "freeflowing" in our bodies may be the real antidote here - this may be why some people can perhaps smoke and eat a poor diet without any apparent ill effects? Overall it can seem a major mistake to discount/ignore the interwoven connection between the human mind and body and we may now need much more widespread acknowledgement and understanding that personal growth and development could be vital for true health.
Some people (including yours truly) tend to think there is an invisible patterned reality (an implicate order) waiting to unfold into present visible form, and the more certain we are of something the more it limits our freedom through fear of letting go in case
there's nothing underneath. The good news is that we can deliberately train ourselves to see the flow of activity that underlies all things, which necessarily involves the ability to "suspend" our certainty and see things from other viewpoints. And thereby we can be relieved of the pressure to have everything fixed and worked out. In truth the only thing we can reliably know for certain in this world is that things will change.
We might also usefully consider that without the violence of thought such as attempting to impose logic or judgment or values on others (even in perceived self-defence) there would be no violent action. In truth violence (= undue use of force) begins between our ears - a dysfunction remedied by recognising that the boundary between ourselves and the rest of the world does not exist as we perceive it.
Humanity has need of stewardship as well as vision. Rather than foolishly hiding the shadow side of our ideals (e.g. bureaucratic authoritarian non-friendly side of oneself or one's group) we might need to develop more capabilities to cope. In this regard we'd have to become conscious that there's really no such thing as abstraction, though we may use it as a mental construct, and that fragmentation which may be useful for focussing on a narrow purpose nevertheless causes us to lose our awareness of the connection between the parts and the whole.
A beginner's mind has a fresh perspective with many possibilities. That of an expert holds few(er) possibilities. In some sense we could perhaps see idolatry in perceiving memory as thought and drowning out any new fresh thoughts we might have.
"I put before you life and death...choose life".
If we permit others to determine the quality of our inner life, we give them the keys to our destiny. Victimhood is really a choice for death. It is possible to soar beyond the pain and beyond relationships that foster such pain. Creativity is our own responsibility and without it we die...we succumb to victimhood...we surrender our uniqueness as an image of God.
Hostility tends to feed the illusion of self-importance and pride, and centering (rather than an unbalanced distribution of power) is more likely the path to health and happiness. It's more than likely also that true success does not lie in what we achieve but in who we become aware of being in the process, as well as in losing the desire to compete and win while retaining our desire to achieve.
Happier people tend to consider many prospects without a sole outcome in mind, believing the conclusion will take care of itself. Simple willingness to stay open-minded and a refusal to allow real or imagined obstacles to get in the way is what leads us to the adventure of life. Things normally don't get figured out in our heads but rather in the process of life and its unfolding. The future rarely turns out as we expect and it may be far riskier to follow just one path/plan/scenario than to explore a number, and thereby likely avoiding much anxiety and disappointment.
Many of our most satisfying accomplishments turn out to be those we never thought were realistic or measurable but we gave them a go anyway. When we're aware we can create options and possibilities and at any time we'll be looking out for them. When we step away from the confines of the "realistic" we become almost like artists painting their masterpieces...creating new ways of looking at situations...innovating...
and it's almost impossible to be bored.
A work of art cannot be definitive
If it must stimulate curiosity
To work on, until emotion is spent
And we can look on objectively.
It's "finished" when we don't know
What more we can do with it,
And only then can we truly see it
Continuously coming into being...
No finite thing, but something of
No beginning or middle or end,
And no full stop.
Our living itself is not being sure,
Not knowing what's next or how,
And the moment we know how
We begin to die a little,
Unlike the guessing of the artist
Taking leap after leap in the dark.
Some of our formal religions involve the concept of the Sabbath (7th or final day of rest after the creation), taking it to mean the final realisation of Good in the wholeness of Truth. Acting only from Truth leads us to sin (in Greek - to miss the mark) i.e. it misses the idea of how vital inner evolution or rebirth/regeneration is in order to be made whole in the Good (which encompasses the Truth but not vice versa). Thus acting from Good in place of Truth would have to involve our shedding of all feeling of merit, self-evaluation and all sense of ourselves as good. Here the Kingdom of Heaven is seen as the highest possibility in man, and in order for us to move towards the "Higher Level" anyone's feeling of his/her own righteousness must change...as long as we feel right as we are, we cannot change. In this view it's exactly our feeling righteous which prevents us changing and traps us in justifying ourselves. And we may have to come to realise we are almost nothing as we are but we do have an inbuilt possibility to break up our whole psychology (what life has made us and how we regard ourselves) and to think, feel and act in a new way moving towards a higher level of psychological existence. In a sense our soul (identification point) is our potential and we must lose it on a lower level in order to find it at the Higher Level.
It's arguable also that only a common acceptance of Good can give a common ground of understanding, and that modern man has committed psychological theft in attributing everything, including life itself, to ourselves (breaking the "thou shalt not steal" rule by appropriating that which does not belong to us and of which we are not the cause). The religious "Word" may in fact be the Truth about our inner evolution and rebirth but psychologically we tend to lie in our beliefs and opinions. Perhaps we can only bring Truth alive by seeing its Good and so acting spontaneously from our will.
A basic condition of knowledge is that it should always lead to understanding and that understanding is only possible with a corresponding development of being. To repent basically means to think in a new way, which state is continuously aided through the destruction of psychological truth by literal truth defining the continual drama of human life.
To believe passionately (or even violently) in someone or something can (and often does) prevent others from understanding. When a man thinks logically he has no mercy or understanding...he is the man of dogma. On the other hand to forgive comes from emotional development i.e. developed beyond self-love and all its absorbing interests. Faith is not blind belief but rather resides in seeing for oneself the truth of a thing, and we may pray that we not be led into the temptation of misunderstanding whether deliberately of otherwise. Essentially the meaning of prayer can be to reach a higher level of development.
To reach the "Higher Level" it seems we must give up any belief that by our possessions (mental, social and material) we are better than others. To become heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven we must go against all our natural resentfulness, passion and anger. Only then can we become "pure in heart" (= correspondence of our inner and outer being) and come to realise that righteousness properly understood means inner harmony. And our faith can then denote a conviction that a higher interpretation of life exists and as a consequence that the transformation of man is a possibility involving a perception/insight that there is an order of Truth above the truth of the senses and that the starting point has to be beyond ourselves / beyond the senses.
Given what appears to be a necessary condition for entering the Kingdom - to rid ourselves of certain old ideas, ways of thinking and feeling (e.g. anxiety) in order to gain what we really most value and thereby to make room for what is new - it's perhaps not surprising to hear that few may acquire the wherewithal to attain this state and fewer still may make the attempt to do so. Maybe the new in oneself would lose much of its power if mixed with the old, and our old views, values, estimations and standpoints (based on everyday life, traditions, appearances and the sense-produced mind) would simply serve to subvert the new teaching? In the final analysis of course what's important is that we keep on trying to grow and develop...like the Lord of the Dance of Change taking leap after leap in the dark.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness,
January, 2017.