The way I have been seeing our current difficulties is the triumph the current misbegotten anthropology. We don't know who we are and therefore how we should live. I have scattered myself in so many directions. I am still doing that. It is easy to get lost. Hence, the meaning crisis.
I mentioned Nous in a previous comment. As it happens a book arrived for me to today entitled, you guessed it, The Nous: Themes from the Philokalia. Here's the definition of Nous given:
Nous (Gk: Νους) "The highest faculty in man, through which--provided it is purified--he knows God or the inner essences of principles...of created things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual perception. 'The Nous' does not function by formulating abstract concepts and then arguing on this basis to a conclusion reached through deductive reasoning, but it understands divine truth by means of immediate experience, intuition, or 'simple cognition' (the term used by St. Isaac the Syrian). -The Philokalia Vol 1 p.362.
To take this definition of the Nous as true is to see it as a rejection of our current technocratic conception of being human and the purpose--or lack thereof--of human existence. It is to engage in, with Marcel and others, an "obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction".
Or it is, rather, to get at the root of our disease. All else is to cover up or to exacerbate our symptoms, nothing more.
I once had a discussion with a fellow Christian about what is the greatest music of Western Civilization. My first intuition was to say Bach. Not bad. The real answer is the Divine Office.
I was thinking the other night that any young composers should begin their training by forming a chant schola. They should, as time allows, spend a few years (at least) chanting the office. If possible, spending some time in a traditional Benedictine Monastery and really soak in to that.
Arvo Part's music trajectory was changed by hearing Gregorian Chant in a local record store in the early 1970s. He spent 7 years or so trying to incorporate what he had heard and experienced. In this I see a path out of our current musical darkness.
For us, congregational chanting is the single most important spiritual practice for these fallen times. Here's how my guru put it a few years ago:
"According to Vedāntic doctrine, the reversal of psychological contamination, which manifests as social chaos, can be achieved through the principle of onomatodoxy. Onomatodoxy is a profound principle found within all the sects of Hinduism, which are based on the Sanskrit Vedas. We also find a strong representation of this theological principle in Orthodox Christianity. Onomatodoxy is the principle that the vibration of the Name of God is non-different from and ontologically identical with God Himself. Many great saints throughout Indian history have suggested that any common person can daily meditate on the Names of God. They can also sing together in a congregational choir with others, thus engaging in the most effective way for psychological transformation and communion with God by direct experience. Countless persons have experienced that when they join together as a choir and sing, they begin to experience the expansion of their consciousness. And the influence of ego, anger, lust, greed and all the lower-based qualities are completely washed away by that influx of spiritual inspiration. Christian theologians like Illarion and Bulatovitch have proposed different attempts to explain this phenomena of God-realization through the repetition of God’s Names. For example, in Christianity, the faithful person goes to church and prays, bowing down and giving reverence to the icons in the church. Both theologians have suggested that the vibration of the Names of God and the glories of God is a type of icon made of sound—a sonic icon.
"In the Vedānta school of India, there is a different approach to the explanation. In all the yoga disciplines, every thought, every feeling, every conception is considered to be our subjective experience of cittavṛtti. Cittavṛtti means ‘the vibration of prāṇa within the mind
stuff’. The actual substance of the mind vibrates due to the movement of prāṇa (life air, energy) and that is called cittavṛtti. All thoughts and feelings are the subjective
experience of that cittavṛtti or mental oscillation. When faithful persons sing and praise God, that vibration of sound facilitates the appearance of aprākṛta prāṇa—a spiritual prāṇa enters the mind and takes over ordinary mental functions. Thereby, once the mental functions have been arrested, hijacked and taken over by the vibration of the aprākṛta prāṇa (spiritual energy), that person becomes capable of perceptions and realizations that are beyond ordinary human capacity. Therefore, the tradition of religious communities coming together and praising God not only serves a social function or a function of some musical entertainment, but also opens the door to individual subjective spiritual realization."
I became a platonist in college studying music. I had trouble sleeping even then. I would lie awake thinking about the mathematical relationships of the overtone series. That these mathematical relationships could bring forth beauty that clearly changed us, and revealed inner depths typically hidden from us, seemed meta-mathematical. Music could not be explained by purely human means or contrivances.
From that I recognized how out of tune contemporary music was (and is). Out of tune both physically (through the compromise tuning system of 12 tone equal temperament) and culturally, in how music was being used and what it often intended to express. Music was being used for destructive ends. Harry Partch was a big influence at the time.
Also, I would listen to Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening. An album recorded in a large cistern, which had a natural 40 second reverb. This would allow me to sleep. The music was largely dronal in character. I would often wake up before I was fully conscious, enveloped in sound. This only added to my sense of music, contrary to most contemporary use, as transcendent.
At the time it was difficult for me to find books to deepen (or even corroborate) this understanding. Most of my peers were humanities majors and under the full spell of the first wokening of the late 80s, early 90s. Thankfully, I was largely sheltered from that in the music department. Back then it still was a *conservatory*.
Even so. Bach was the guiding spirit of the conservatory. Which is hardly a bad thing. It is a very good thing. I shudder to think about what the presiding spirit is now.
I used to go the listening library and get albums (LPs back then) of anything and everything, e.g., avant-garde, ethnic music from all over the world, early Church Music, etc. The first time I really listened to Gregorian Chant--outside the confines of Hollywood--I sensed, much to my surprise, the interior deepening it induced. I even asked a trusted professor about this. His simple answer: that's what is meant to do. I took note of that.
This is all to say I agree fully with your comment. As someone who practices the Jesus Prayer and loves to sing plainchant, I know the kind of changes that these practices can induce. Which makes the shallowness of the vast majority of what passes for music all the more apparent.
I also studied North Indian Classical Music for three years or so. Hardly enough time to even scratch the surface. What it did do, however, is confirm all my "Platonic" intuitions about the meaning and power of music.
Wow, so you're a musician! I didn't know that. What's your specialty?
I've always kind of gravitated around music, dabbling a bit with a few instruments and working as a sound technician/engineer. I'll post some time soon about some songs I've written, and what I've learned from studying mostly traditional Colombian music (that's where I'm from).
The sacred is definitely where we can find the heart of music. Most of what you or Paul Kingsnorth or many others write about our lost civilization can also apply to its music. Sacred and devotional music is such a fascinating subject I could just go on and on for hours... Let me just say that lately the focus of my attention has been devotional roots/folk music, which I think has great potential for exploration and development in these crazy times of ours.
And then Vaishnavas saints left such a great legacy of songs! And sound is, of course, such an important topic in all the Vedas. Transcendental sound is the origin of everything.
To the extent that I have any training beyond basic education it is in music. I have a BFA in music composition. Hence my long career in customer support and shipping and receiving.
This is how I am trying to go about writing this substack. I take a musical approach. I try to bring up themes and variations and counter-themes for a musical sense of drama. Hopefully. I am obviously still working on it.
But what I would really like to do is delve more fully into plainchant. Most importantly as prayer, but also as a means of cultural renewal.
I had two strange and discombobulating experiences this weekend in the realm of silence. The first during a very windy afternoon where I watched, in silence, dozens of bees going about their lives around a row of Holly trees for about an hour. Riding the wind, fighting back to reach the nectar. I was blessed in that moment to just sit and see another part of creation live creation.
The second was the opposite. I drove through my old cities downtown and witnessed thousands if not tens of thousands of people shoulder to shoulder corralled between brick building and metal guardrail in the midday heat. Drunkenly waddling from bar to bar. Many looking exhausted and confused. Inaudible music competing against their neighbors inaudible music, while buses full of drunk patrons screamed and danced inside rooftop bubbles. The things we trick our selves into doing for connection. But I’ll never forget the noise. It was the noise of exhaustion. Of hoping to find a connection with no directions on how to find it. Just numbness. Just noise.
Paul Kingsnorth’s latest essay made me think of that initially but your essay brought it home. The idea of understanding someone’s grief. A cultures grief.
Loving and caring for your patch of tangled ground.
JP- I can't think of a better presentation of the choice we are faced with. These two experiences are a gift given to you, I think. I have been one of those people in the noise of the rooftop bar. Lost, and trying to forget that I am lost. Now I'd much rather watch the bees, or the light change on a forest of ponderosa pine.
We can cultivate attention in that way. Which is a kind of miracle in itself, in its own often ordinary way. And we don't have to live by their rules. Chasing after nothing. A disobedience which may cost us at some point. But living by their rules has cost me far more.
I once went to beatiful lavender plantation, and what struck me most was sitting in the midst of that purple tide and just listening to the bees humming. Deeply relaxing. My friend, who is more musical than me, said they were actually tuned to the same note!
A few months later, I sat for the first time to meditate on the maha-mantra while chanting with my Guru and a group of about thirty people. The way we do it is each follows their own pace, pitch, "melody"... but the overall effect is strangely harmonious and very soothing. I had the exact same feeling as sitting in that lavender field amongst the bees, it was very powerful!
Thank you for sharing this deeply personal journey here. I am struck by many things you have shared, but mostly this Benedictine saying “the holiness of the ordinary”. I believe in that. I am challenged by it to do better tomorrow. Prayers for you to have clarity as you chart your course. I love how you describe the enneagram 5... trying to meet abstractions with more abstractions. I see myself struggle with living in the head and I have to be intentional about getting the feet and hands moving, too. It is both our gift and our downfall. We have to live the tension.
Clara- I do get stuck in a feedback loop of abstractions. Which can feel like tripping over one's own feet, and having a thousand feet! The answer can't be: add more feet!
You are right, a good part of the solution is to live more of a hands on life, in touch with the concrete., i.e., building, planting, making, and relating to those we love as the singular human beings they are. You seem to be doing that. I am definitely still working on it.
Looking at the Enneagram Institutes' website, they list the healthiest forms of a five. It is worth aspiring to, within our actual situation:
Healthy Levels
Level 1 (At Their Best): Become visionaries, broadly comprehending the world while penetrating it profoundly. Open-minded, take things in whole, in their true context. Make pioneering discoveries and find entirely new ways of doing and perceiving things.
Level 2: Observe everything with extraordinary perceptiveness and insight. Most mentally alert, curious, searching intelligence: nothing escapes their notice. Foresight and prediction. Able to concentrate: become engrossed in what has caught their attention.
Level 3: Attain skillful mastery of whatever interests them. Excited by knowledge: often become expert in some field. Innovative and inventive, producing extremely valuable, original works. Highly independent, idiosyncratic, and whimsical
I looked at this web page again that you linked. I have the book by Riso and Hudson, too --really helpful. In considering the less healthy levels like 6, 7, and 8 I sometimes wonder if the urge to join a monastery or move to a remote place is an unhealthy manifestation of 5-ness? It is the typical 5 urge to isolate and follow extreme ideas rather than engage and take leadership in the messy reality of life. Have you ever read Paul Kingsnorth's book Savage Gods? He explains that moving to the country didn't quiet his mental chatter, hands-on work didn't negate his intellectual struggles. Clearly his writing and continuing to engage with the messy world has turned out to be something tremendously helpful for others and probably is something God has called him to. This kinds sounds like I'm picking apart other people's life decisions who I really don't know. I don't mean to be presumptuous. I think about it for myself often and wonder if I am acting the part of the 'less healthy' 5 or if I am truly having insightful understanding of where things stand. I was floored when I first read about enneagram types and realized how accurately my spiritual weak points were laid bare. (and those of others I had struggled to understand!)
I have read Savage Gods. I got a lot out of it and it parallels my own struggles. Is Paul a 5 perhaps?
Honestly, I do think my path is "in the world". But I could use some monastic training and the time to get my bearings. I think a Benedictine lay monasticism sounds interesting...
I think you are onto something. Your concerns are well-taken. I am not gung-ho to join a monastery, though I don't rule it out. What I would like to do is spend some time there. I love to sing Gregorian chant, there is something very healing and calming about it. Spend some time in quiet and contemplative prayer. I have been offered the opportunity to stay there without becoming a postulant/novice. I think it is worth trying.
The Enneagram has proven very insightful and helpful. I am a 5 with a 4 wing or a 4 with a 5 wing. Depends on the week, I suppose. But it has proven to be a very interesting combination of traits! -Jack
I know almost nothing about monastic life and chanting and all that... but I was binging on Canticle for Leibowitz last night and more able to envision that life. I am attracted also. I wondered about the background of the author. Was he a religous person? I suppose the internet wil tell me if I ask it.
Walter M. Miller's story is a tragic one. I think he created a masterpiece in A Canticle for Leibowitz. I consider it a good novel, but a great book. I think he intuited something deep about human nature, civilization and even institutional Christianity that is dark, but hard to ignore. Maybe he had other issues, but I have to think he found it difficult to have hope given what he saw.
This comes back to a question I keep asking. Given the human tendency to get caught up in the will-to-power and the global game of chicken it creates, e.g., what is happening between the US and Russian in Ukraine, can we do otherwise? Given our fallen nature are we doomed to destroy the civilizations we build in a never-ending cycle?
He was Catholic--a convert, I believe. But I recall him saying, ultimately, it "didn't take". He eventually took his own life.
Which leads me, in the face of the downward spiral of human events, to consider hope. Gabriel Marcel makes the distinction between optimism, i.e., everything will work out!, and ontological hope. He defines the latter as:
"Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me, which cannot but will that which I will, if what I will deserves to be willed and is, in fact, willed by the whole of my being." (from The Philosophy of Existentialism)
Without hope, true ontological hope in God, beyond optimism and despite the negative gravity of human action and will-to-power, I can see how Walter M. Miller ended up where he did. So, I hope...
I sense that Miller has a deep respect for the church but also his hopelessness breathes through the story. No way to explain it, but my experience of God has left me with ongoing hope. Hope that doing the right thing counts eternally if not temporally. And I have not suffered the dark things that many have. (yet?)
Thanks for your reflections. Not all abstractions are bad, except perhaps if we are Zen monks, in which case even words are problematic. A certain balance is needed in life between the abstract and the particular; mostly in the direction of particularity, unless we are philosophers, depressed, or dictionary writers. What is my balance between abstraction and particularity? What is yours? And that cannot be resolved abstractly. I am drawn to the view that we are living in the unfolding of a Narrative—a specific story with both earthly and spiritual dimensions—and the only way to find the balance is to open oneself to the Author of the Narrative, and the nudging of the pen. So most of it is walking by darkness, trusting the light is there…which you have captured beautifully.
Separate from a monastic life…have you thought about writing a novel? Or short stories?
And I fully agree with this paragraph from your latest post:
The real solution, if I dare hazard one, is awareness of the problem and finding the discipline to look away from the shattered mirror and at the real physical people in our lives: our children, our spouses, the people in our local community. And not only the discipline to do it, but the conviction—because discipline will not last long without conviction.
Peter- Thank you for your comment. I did practice Zen Buddhism 20-25 years ago. So I think it has left its mark on me. But I didn't remain because, as you say, I didn't find balance there.
Marcel addresses the distinction:
"Roughly, we can say that where primary reflection tends to dissolve the unity of experience which is first put before it, the function of secondary reflection is essentially recuperative; it reconquers that unity."
There is a place for both modes of reflection. I think many of us see the imbalance, and even madness, of relying almost wholly on primary reflection aka the calculative/analytical mind. This is the disaster of our times.
It's like when I was 13 and disassembled my bicycle. I didn't know how to put it back together!
In Orthodox Christianity a similar importance is put on the Nous as opposed to purely relying on the calculative mind. The purification of the nous is an important aspect of spiritual practice. The goal, so to speak, is that of having the mind in the heart. I think this is worth the work to acquire. Though it is deeper than all that. Contemplative prayer, broadly speaking, becomes essential.
Iain McGilchrist is, of course, leading the way in this new/old way of thinking. The Master and his Emissary goes into all of this more deeply than I am capable. I am eager to read his new book...in paperback, alas, when the price goes down.
The question I have is whether we can make the shift in time. The Quants and Social Engineers and Technocrats have the steering wheel. The poets and contemplatives and composers need to step up in a different way.
My attempt here, in my own small way, is to contribute to this effort.
I am currently purging my possessions. My goal is to fit all of worldly goods into my small- to midsize station wagon. Today I found a bag of hair [sic] from my childhood dog...from 35 years ago. Also, letters, photos of people I had nearly forgotten, but who were once very important to me, on and on. The weight of the past!
The way I have been seeing our current difficulties is the triumph the current misbegotten anthropology. We don't know who we are and therefore how we should live. I have scattered myself in so many directions. I am still doing that. It is easy to get lost. Hence, the meaning crisis.
I mentioned Nous in a previous comment. As it happens a book arrived for me to today entitled, you guessed it, The Nous: Themes from the Philokalia. Here's the definition of Nous given:
Nous (Gk: Νους) "The highest faculty in man, through which--provided it is purified--he knows God or the inner essences of principles...of created things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual perception. 'The Nous' does not function by formulating abstract concepts and then arguing on this basis to a conclusion reached through deductive reasoning, but it understands divine truth by means of immediate experience, intuition, or 'simple cognition' (the term used by St. Isaac the Syrian). -The Philokalia Vol 1 p.362.
To take this definition of the Nous as true is to see it as a rejection of our current technocratic conception of being human and the purpose--or lack thereof--of human existence. It is to engage in, with Marcel and others, an "obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction".
Or it is, rather, to get at the root of our disease. All else is to cover up or to exacerbate our symptoms, nothing more.
Chanting the Office... Must be quite an experience!
I once had a discussion with a fellow Christian about what is the greatest music of Western Civilization. My first intuition was to say Bach. Not bad. The real answer is the Divine Office.
I was thinking the other night that any young composers should begin their training by forming a chant schola. They should, as time allows, spend a few years (at least) chanting the office. If possible, spending some time in a traditional Benedictine Monastery and really soak in to that.
Arvo Part's music trajectory was changed by hearing Gregorian Chant in a local record store in the early 1970s. He spent 7 years or so trying to incorporate what he had heard and experienced. In this I see a path out of our current musical darkness.
Nanda- It was. There is something deep about chanting with others. Something shifts. -Jack
For us, congregational chanting is the single most important spiritual practice for these fallen times. Here's how my guru put it a few years ago:
"According to Vedāntic doctrine, the reversal of psychological contamination, which manifests as social chaos, can be achieved through the principle of onomatodoxy. Onomatodoxy is a profound principle found within all the sects of Hinduism, which are based on the Sanskrit Vedas. We also find a strong representation of this theological principle in Orthodox Christianity. Onomatodoxy is the principle that the vibration of the Name of God is non-different from and ontologically identical with God Himself. Many great saints throughout Indian history have suggested that any common person can daily meditate on the Names of God. They can also sing together in a congregational choir with others, thus engaging in the most effective way for psychological transformation and communion with God by direct experience. Countless persons have experienced that when they join together as a choir and sing, they begin to experience the expansion of their consciousness. And the influence of ego, anger, lust, greed and all the lower-based qualities are completely washed away by that influx of spiritual inspiration. Christian theologians like Illarion and Bulatovitch have proposed different attempts to explain this phenomena of God-realization through the repetition of God’s Names. For example, in Christianity, the faithful person goes to church and prays, bowing down and giving reverence to the icons in the church. Both theologians have suggested that the vibration of the Names of God and the glories of God is a type of icon made of sound—a sonic icon.
"In the Vedānta school of India, there is a different approach to the explanation. In all the yoga disciplines, every thought, every feeling, every conception is considered to be our subjective experience of cittavṛtti. Cittavṛtti means ‘the vibration of prāṇa within the mind
stuff’. The actual substance of the mind vibrates due to the movement of prāṇa (life air, energy) and that is called cittavṛtti. All thoughts and feelings are the subjective
experience of that cittavṛtti or mental oscillation. When faithful persons sing and praise God, that vibration of sound facilitates the appearance of aprākṛta prāṇa—a spiritual prāṇa enters the mind and takes over ordinary mental functions. Thereby, once the mental functions have been arrested, hijacked and taken over by the vibration of the aprākṛta prāṇa (spiritual energy), that person becomes capable of perceptions and realizations that are beyond ordinary human capacity. Therefore, the tradition of religious communities coming together and praising God not only serves a social function or a function of some musical entertainment, but also opens the door to individual subjective spiritual realization."
I became a platonist in college studying music. I had trouble sleeping even then. I would lie awake thinking about the mathematical relationships of the overtone series. That these mathematical relationships could bring forth beauty that clearly changed us, and revealed inner depths typically hidden from us, seemed meta-mathematical. Music could not be explained by purely human means or contrivances.
From that I recognized how out of tune contemporary music was (and is). Out of tune both physically (through the compromise tuning system of 12 tone equal temperament) and culturally, in how music was being used and what it often intended to express. Music was being used for destructive ends. Harry Partch was a big influence at the time.
Also, I would listen to Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening. An album recorded in a large cistern, which had a natural 40 second reverb. This would allow me to sleep. The music was largely dronal in character. I would often wake up before I was fully conscious, enveloped in sound. This only added to my sense of music, contrary to most contemporary use, as transcendent.
Here is the album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U__lpPDTUS4
At the time it was difficult for me to find books to deepen (or even corroborate) this understanding. Most of my peers were humanities majors and under the full spell of the first wokening of the late 80s, early 90s. Thankfully, I was largely sheltered from that in the music department. Back then it still was a *conservatory*.
Even so. Bach was the guiding spirit of the conservatory. Which is hardly a bad thing. It is a very good thing. I shudder to think about what the presiding spirit is now.
I used to go the listening library and get albums (LPs back then) of anything and everything, e.g., avant-garde, ethnic music from all over the world, early Church Music, etc. The first time I really listened to Gregorian Chant--outside the confines of Hollywood--I sensed, much to my surprise, the interior deepening it induced. I even asked a trusted professor about this. His simple answer: that's what is meant to do. I took note of that.
This is all to say I agree fully with your comment. As someone who practices the Jesus Prayer and loves to sing plainchant, I know the kind of changes that these practices can induce. Which makes the shallowness of the vast majority of what passes for music all the more apparent.
I also studied North Indian Classical Music for three years or so. Hardly enough time to even scratch the surface. What it did do, however, is confirm all my "Platonic" intuitions about the meaning and power of music.
Wow, so you're a musician! I didn't know that. What's your specialty?
I've always kind of gravitated around music, dabbling a bit with a few instruments and working as a sound technician/engineer. I'll post some time soon about some songs I've written, and what I've learned from studying mostly traditional Colombian music (that's where I'm from).
The sacred is definitely where we can find the heart of music. Most of what you or Paul Kingsnorth or many others write about our lost civilization can also apply to its music. Sacred and devotional music is such a fascinating subject I could just go on and on for hours... Let me just say that lately the focus of my attention has been devotional roots/folk music, which I think has great potential for exploration and development in these crazy times of ours.
And then Vaishnavas saints left such a great legacy of songs! And sound is, of course, such an important topic in all the Vedas. Transcendental sound is the origin of everything.
As I said, I could go on for hours.
To the extent that I have any training beyond basic education it is in music. I have a BFA in music composition. Hence my long career in customer support and shipping and receiving.
This is how I am trying to go about writing this substack. I take a musical approach. I try to bring up themes and variations and counter-themes for a musical sense of drama. Hopefully. I am obviously still working on it.
But what I would really like to do is delve more fully into plainchant. Most importantly as prayer, but also as a means of cultural renewal.
I had two strange and discombobulating experiences this weekend in the realm of silence. The first during a very windy afternoon where I watched, in silence, dozens of bees going about their lives around a row of Holly trees for about an hour. Riding the wind, fighting back to reach the nectar. I was blessed in that moment to just sit and see another part of creation live creation.
The second was the opposite. I drove through my old cities downtown and witnessed thousands if not tens of thousands of people shoulder to shoulder corralled between brick building and metal guardrail in the midday heat. Drunkenly waddling from bar to bar. Many looking exhausted and confused. Inaudible music competing against their neighbors inaudible music, while buses full of drunk patrons screamed and danced inside rooftop bubbles. The things we trick our selves into doing for connection. But I’ll never forget the noise. It was the noise of exhaustion. Of hoping to find a connection with no directions on how to find it. Just numbness. Just noise.
Paul Kingsnorth’s latest essay made me think of that initially but your essay brought it home. The idea of understanding someone’s grief. A cultures grief.
Loving and caring for your patch of tangled ground.
JP- I can't think of a better presentation of the choice we are faced with. These two experiences are a gift given to you, I think. I have been one of those people in the noise of the rooftop bar. Lost, and trying to forget that I am lost. Now I'd much rather watch the bees, or the light change on a forest of ponderosa pine.
We can cultivate attention in that way. Which is a kind of miracle in itself, in its own often ordinary way. And we don't have to live by their rules. Chasing after nothing. A disobedience which may cost us at some point. But living by their rules has cost me far more.
Thank you for your post. -Jack
I once went to beatiful lavender plantation, and what struck me most was sitting in the midst of that purple tide and just listening to the bees humming. Deeply relaxing. My friend, who is more musical than me, said they were actually tuned to the same note!
A few months later, I sat for the first time to meditate on the maha-mantra while chanting with my Guru and a group of about thirty people. The way we do it is each follows their own pace, pitch, "melody"... but the overall effect is strangely harmonious and very soothing. I had the exact same feeling as sitting in that lavender field amongst the bees, it was very powerful!
The bees have their own Divine Office to chant. I mean that literally.
Thank you for sharing this deeply personal journey here. I am struck by many things you have shared, but mostly this Benedictine saying “the holiness of the ordinary”. I believe in that. I am challenged by it to do better tomorrow. Prayers for you to have clarity as you chart your course. I love how you describe the enneagram 5... trying to meet abstractions with more abstractions. I see myself struggle with living in the head and I have to be intentional about getting the feet and hands moving, too. It is both our gift and our downfall. We have to live the tension.
Clara
Clara- I do get stuck in a feedback loop of abstractions. Which can feel like tripping over one's own feet, and having a thousand feet! The answer can't be: add more feet!
You are right, a good part of the solution is to live more of a hands on life, in touch with the concrete., i.e., building, planting, making, and relating to those we love as the singular human beings they are. You seem to be doing that. I am definitely still working on it.
Looking at the Enneagram Institutes' website, they list the healthiest forms of a five. It is worth aspiring to, within our actual situation:
Healthy Levels
Level 1 (At Their Best): Become visionaries, broadly comprehending the world while penetrating it profoundly. Open-minded, take things in whole, in their true context. Make pioneering discoveries and find entirely new ways of doing and perceiving things.
Level 2: Observe everything with extraordinary perceptiveness and insight. Most mentally alert, curious, searching intelligence: nothing escapes their notice. Foresight and prediction. Able to concentrate: become engrossed in what has caught their attention.
Level 3: Attain skillful mastery of whatever interests them. Excited by knowledge: often become expert in some field. Innovative and inventive, producing extremely valuable, original works. Highly independent, idiosyncratic, and whimsical
https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-5
I looked at this web page again that you linked. I have the book by Riso and Hudson, too --really helpful. In considering the less healthy levels like 6, 7, and 8 I sometimes wonder if the urge to join a monastery or move to a remote place is an unhealthy manifestation of 5-ness? It is the typical 5 urge to isolate and follow extreme ideas rather than engage and take leadership in the messy reality of life. Have you ever read Paul Kingsnorth's book Savage Gods? He explains that moving to the country didn't quiet his mental chatter, hands-on work didn't negate his intellectual struggles. Clearly his writing and continuing to engage with the messy world has turned out to be something tremendously helpful for others and probably is something God has called him to. This kinds sounds like I'm picking apart other people's life decisions who I really don't know. I don't mean to be presumptuous. I think about it for myself often and wonder if I am acting the part of the 'less healthy' 5 or if I am truly having insightful understanding of where things stand. I was floored when I first read about enneagram types and realized how accurately my spiritual weak points were laid bare. (and those of others I had struggled to understand!)
I have read Savage Gods. I got a lot out of it and it parallels my own struggles. Is Paul a 5 perhaps?
Honestly, I do think my path is "in the world". But I could use some monastic training and the time to get my bearings. I think a Benedictine lay monasticism sounds interesting...
I think you are onto something. Your concerns are well-taken. I am not gung-ho to join a monastery, though I don't rule it out. What I would like to do is spend some time there. I love to sing Gregorian chant, there is something very healing and calming about it. Spend some time in quiet and contemplative prayer. I have been offered the opportunity to stay there without becoming a postulant/novice. I think it is worth trying.
The Enneagram has proven very insightful and helpful. I am a 5 with a 4 wing or a 4 with a 5 wing. Depends on the week, I suppose. But it has proven to be a very interesting combination of traits! -Jack
I know almost nothing about monastic life and chanting and all that... but I was binging on Canticle for Leibowitz last night and more able to envision that life. I am attracted also. I wondered about the background of the author. Was he a religous person? I suppose the internet wil tell me if I ask it.
Walter M. Miller's story is a tragic one. I think he created a masterpiece in A Canticle for Leibowitz. I consider it a good novel, but a great book. I think he intuited something deep about human nature, civilization and even institutional Christianity that is dark, but hard to ignore. Maybe he had other issues, but I have to think he found it difficult to have hope given what he saw.
This comes back to a question I keep asking. Given the human tendency to get caught up in the will-to-power and the global game of chicken it creates, e.g., what is happening between the US and Russian in Ukraine, can we do otherwise? Given our fallen nature are we doomed to destroy the civilizations we build in a never-ending cycle?
He was Catholic--a convert, I believe. But I recall him saying, ultimately, it "didn't take". He eventually took his own life.
Which leads me, in the face of the downward spiral of human events, to consider hope. Gabriel Marcel makes the distinction between optimism, i.e., everything will work out!, and ontological hope. He defines the latter as:
"Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me, which cannot but will that which I will, if what I will deserves to be willed and is, in fact, willed by the whole of my being." (from The Philosophy of Existentialism)
Without hope, true ontological hope in God, beyond optimism and despite the negative gravity of human action and will-to-power, I can see how Walter M. Miller ended up where he did. So, I hope...
I have just started reading Peguy. He was an influence on Gabriel Marcel.
The faith that I love best, says God, is hope.
Faith doesn’t surprise me.
It’s not surprising.
I am so resplendent in my creation. . . .
That in order really not to see me these poor people would have to be blind.
Charity says God, that doesn’t surprise me.
It’s not surprising.
These poor creatures are so miserable that unless they had a heart of stone, how could they not have love for one another.
How could they not love their brothers.
How could they not take the bread from their own mouth, their daily bread, in order to give it to the unhappy children who pass by.
And my son had such love for them. . . .
But hope, says God, that is something that surprises me.
Even me.
That is surprising.
That these poor children see how things are going and believe that tomorrow things will go better.
That they see how things are going today and believe that they will go better tomorrow morning.
That is surprising and it’s by far the greatest marvel of our grace.
And I’m surprised by it myself.
And my grace must indeed be an incredible force.
-Charles Peguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope
I sense that Miller has a deep respect for the church but also his hopelessness breathes through the story. No way to explain it, but my experience of God has left me with ongoing hope. Hope that doing the right thing counts eternally if not temporally. And I have not suffered the dark things that many have. (yet?)
Thanks for your reflections. Not all abstractions are bad, except perhaps if we are Zen monks, in which case even words are problematic. A certain balance is needed in life between the abstract and the particular; mostly in the direction of particularity, unless we are philosophers, depressed, or dictionary writers. What is my balance between abstraction and particularity? What is yours? And that cannot be resolved abstractly. I am drawn to the view that we are living in the unfolding of a Narrative—a specific story with both earthly and spiritual dimensions—and the only way to find the balance is to open oneself to the Author of the Narrative, and the nudging of the pen. So most of it is walking by darkness, trusting the light is there…which you have captured beautifully.
Separate from a monastic life…have you thought about writing a novel? Or short stories?
And I fully agree with this paragraph from your latest post:
The real solution, if I dare hazard one, is awareness of the problem and finding the discipline to look away from the shattered mirror and at the real physical people in our lives: our children, our spouses, the people in our local community. And not only the discipline to do it, but the conviction—because discipline will not last long without conviction.
Peter- Thank you for your comment. I did practice Zen Buddhism 20-25 years ago. So I think it has left its mark on me. But I didn't remain because, as you say, I didn't find balance there.
Marcel addresses the distinction:
"Roughly, we can say that where primary reflection tends to dissolve the unity of experience which is first put before it, the function of secondary reflection is essentially recuperative; it reconquers that unity."
There is a place for both modes of reflection. I think many of us see the imbalance, and even madness, of relying almost wholly on primary reflection aka the calculative/analytical mind. This is the disaster of our times.
It's like when I was 13 and disassembled my bicycle. I didn't know how to put it back together!
In Orthodox Christianity a similar importance is put on the Nous as opposed to purely relying on the calculative mind. The purification of the nous is an important aspect of spiritual practice. The goal, so to speak, is that of having the mind in the heart. I think this is worth the work to acquire. Though it is deeper than all that. Contemplative prayer, broadly speaking, becomes essential.
Iain McGilchrist is, of course, leading the way in this new/old way of thinking. The Master and his Emissary goes into all of this more deeply than I am capable. I am eager to read his new book...in paperback, alas, when the price goes down.
The question I have is whether we can make the shift in time. The Quants and Social Engineers and Technocrats have the steering wheel. The poets and contemplatives and composers need to step up in a different way.
My attempt here, in my own small way, is to contribute to this effort.
-Jack
"One thing is clear to me I have entered into a new season in my life. It is a time of letting go."
Me too, and I am almost 79 and I often find this process of letting go as particularly irritating!
Really looking forward to your future reflections.
I am currently purging my possessions. My goal is to fit all of worldly goods into my small- to midsize station wagon. Today I found a bag of hair [sic] from my childhood dog...from 35 years ago. Also, letters, photos of people I had nearly forgotten, but who were once very important to me, on and on. The weight of the past!
How do you do it? How do you let go?