The End of The World

Here is a poem by Archibald MacLeish

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

Until I read this poem I had never heard so perfectly expressed my own fear of extinction - a fear born from rationality yet failing ultimately in irrationality, which made it all the more horrifying for a time.

The Intellect's fear of extinction, fearing that it itself is all there is, and knowing that it is temporary and so no matter what it perceives all about itself, no matter that the dead leaves of the winter tree form fertile ground for spring buds, no matter that the shark eats the minnow is eaten by fisherman is eaten by the bear is eaten by the worms and bugs are eaten by the hummingbird is eaten by the tomcat is subsumed into the earth and made fertile for the tree where the hummingbird lives and flies over the sea of the minnow and the shark - no matter any of that, an end comes nonetheless that the poor, chained, obedient intellect can see only, rationally, as nothing, nothing, nothing - nothing at all.

It was the same extinction feared by the Great Bomb, which poised and hovered over my childhood and two decades worth of childhoods before mine, which William Faulkner referenced in his Nobel Speech:

"There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?"

Because the intellect, father of reason, stepfather of justice, the intellect which took us out of the cave and the hut and put up high strong walls against the wind and snow, and taught us to wash our hands before we cut one another open, that taught us to irrigate, to heat our homes in the winter, to cool them in the summer, taught us to use this computer and land a man on the moon - the intellect, which necessarily severed ties with a monarchical overseer so we could be free, also, in a baby-with-the-bathwater moment, abandoned the home of the soul, the eternal sovereign soul, because, it seemed to us in the great roaring, climbing, shining, warring, bombing, explosive, expansive twentieth century, that the intellect and the intellect alone was going to keep us safe.

Only the intellect had built these walls and these cars and these bombs and these everythings, the intellect, stepfather of justice and creator of democracy, the intellect must be free, must not be servant to anything it cannot see or measure of argue against. All the rest that could not be seen or measured or argued with was superstition, and superstition is the end of justice and therefore the end of equality and so a return to hut and the cave and a return to fast and certain death.

And yet without the home of the soul, death becomes nothing, nothing, nothing - nothing at all. The brain will end. It will be subsumed. It is tissue and change comes to everything and the brain will no longer be the brain and all the intellect it held will in fact be gone forever. And yet even at the height of all the post modern irony, and brainy irreverence, even in the middle of all of this, Thomas Pynchon wrote a book called Gravity's Rainbow, a book about a group of people in WWII London, the war that birthed The Bomb, a book about a bunch of people waiting to be blown up, and yet in this book about people worried about rockets from Germany raining down on them, worried about when their end will come, this book begins with this quote from Wernher von Braun, father of modern rocketry:

"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death."

and ends with the following ditty:

"There is a hand to turn the time,
Though thy glass today be run,
Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Pret'rite one . . .
Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road
All through our crippl'd zone,
With a face on ev'ry mountainside
And a soul in ev'ry stone . . .

Now everybody—"

Freedom of Choice

Without a sovereign soul there is no free choice, and without free choice, there is no creation.

A sovereign soul does not answer to an external God, a personal God, who is responsible for all creation, who set the laws of good and bad to which we all aspire. If our only CHOICE is to abide by God's laws or not, or to create what pleases God or not, then we do not in fact have free choice. Our laws, our right and wrong, our creation, must be all our own, or these choices are not free. The RIGHT choice must not be predetermined or else it is not a CHOICE at all but is, rather, merely an elaborate correct answer on some great test designed by a separate, omniscient consciousness.

On the other hand, if we are only organic machines, plumbing and wiring with a computer brain to run it all, then we are not free. If we are merely evolutionary respondents to some primal tic, we are not free. If our CHOICES are merely RESPONSES to some genome, to some evolutionary desire to survive and procreate, then this is not freedom. Either our choices are sovereign, are original, come from US and not some reaction, or they are not. They cannot be both.

Therefore, the machinery of us, our brains and our loins and our skin, merely responds to the soul, which is the origin of all creation. Without a sovereign soul, without something free of the ineluctable, Newtonian response of action and reaction, or chemical compounds, or genetic code, without this eternal, sovereign force energy, we are not free. We are just responses.

I reject any idea that claims I am anything but free. I reject I as the machine. I reject I as the servant of an external God. I am I. I am sovereign. I was put here to create, and unless I am free, I am either responding or answering a test. There is no right answer to life. And life is not some cold, unavoidable response. Life is original. Every moment as original as the one that came before.

You Are What You Believe

People often wonder what they or some other believes. In fact, you need look no further than the very moment you are standing in to know what it is you believe.

Your entire life is the culmination of what you believe, because your entire life is the culmination of every choice you have ever made, and every choice is based upon what you believe. Even those who say they "believe" in the Bible or the Torah or the Koran actually only believe in themselves, for no one, no matter how devout, follows every book to the letter. Even if they wanted to they could not - as soon as the book is closed they begin to reinterpret it for themselves.

So I say make your belief conscious. Do it on purpose. It's all you're going to be anyway. Like it or not, you are a sovereign soul. You are the sole creator of your life. Your are the thinker of your thoughts. Nothing you will ever do will be anything but the culmination of your thought, which is what you believe. So decide what you believe. Look at your actions. Every action is the expression of a belief.

If you believe in love, you must show love. If you believe in war, then make war. If you believe in autonomy, be autonomous. Belief, in the end, is intention, and intention is the fuel that fires action. And the action becomes the sticks and bones of the "reality."

You are what you believe.

Choose Your Words

I am now wary of any argument involving ad hominem arguments of any kind, no matter how mild or seemingly playful. They are used so frequently and so casually it seems sometimes that they are merely one more potent weapon in one's rhetorical arsenal. In fact, they are little more than the dead-end back alley of discussion, a little conversational terrorism.

Too strong, you say? No, this is not an argument for sentimentality, which I read described once as, "Showing anything more tenderness than God would show it." Rather, it is a call for courage. Everywhere about us is contrast. If you want to stand alone, to be allowed to express your unique manifestation of God, so you must understand that everywhere about you are all the others striving to do that very thing themselves.

Although every soul springs from the same universal pool of love, although every soul, at it's core, is an expression of that love, how each individual achieves the portal to their soul - what journey they take, the choices they make, their preferences and tastes - are all that define one soul from the next. The difference is in fact just as essential as our universal love, for without difference there would be no creation, which is choice, with is life.

This does not mean that you should be required to view all choices as equal. This does not mean you should never share your opinion with another (for what am I doing at this very moment?) nor that you should never try, through reason and compassion, to turn another away from a path you believe is destructive to them or another. But HOW will share this opinion? HOW will you steer another?

If you resort to ad hominem arguments, to name-calling of any kind, you have chosen the path of fear. The insult is an attempt to demoralize another person into silence. You offer no evidence, no understanding; at the moment of insult you accuse them of a crime (stupidity, simplicity, vanity) for which no trial has been offered. They may defend themselves, but against what? The point of the insult is NOT to engage, but to silence. The person making the attack feels, on some level, that this other perspective simply cannot be. It must be stopped. The ends justify the means. And yet, in attempting to silence another without engaging them, without understanding them, it shows that you yourself are afraid that their point of view might hold even some merit. And if it holds merit, then perhaps, you worry, yours holds none at all.

This is so often why religions find themselves bombing one another. One religion is defining God in a way that is anathema to how another religion defines it. Both beliefs, it would seem, cannot be simultaneously true. And so, instead of venturing down the dangerous path of another opinion, which might mean change, which would be dangerous because we have made some decisions with how the world is and we feel safe with them and we don't know if we'll feel safe with a new definition, we simply bomb the other one. Remove it from existence. God is safe.

So choose your words with care. If someone holds a point of view different from yours, engage, yes, but do so only with the goal of understanding. Only through understand will change for the greater good ever be realized. Insults bring either more insults or stony, grudging silence. Understanding says, I know you have come to this world from a place of love, and that you wish to return to that place of love just as I am. Let us work together to see the clearest and straightest route to where we all wish to go.

The Art of What is Not Said

Here is something Emily Dickenson wrote that I find very beautiful:

That love is all there is
Is all we know of love.

What is remarkable about this short verse is what is NOT said. Reading this, I believe this statement is true, and yet there is no argument being made. What makes these lines so effective is how much WE fill in. I, for one, believe that Love is all there is, and so when I read that first line, I think, Yes, you're right. And then I read the second line. This second line tells us that this thing that we know is true, which is in fact the sum of all life, is a mystery. A mysterious truth. How wonderful. And yet she doesn't say THAT. All she says is

Is all we know of love.

But this is all art. All art is metaphorical. Art is not a documentary. Hamlet is not about whether you should avenge your father. The odyssey is not about how to get home from war. Ulysses, for that matter, is not about how to buy soap. All art is metaphorical. And the power of the metaphor is the contribution made by the listener, the audience. Art becomes an interpretation. But the artist must create fertile emptiness into which the audience's imagination is impelled to flower. Great artists, then, are master of what is not said.

This then is the most gracious job for the artist. They are there to inspire others to create. Art, the sharing of art, becomes a shared creative experience. No one is passive. For consider: what the audience fears is inside the closet is bound to be worse than whatever the horror film maker might put there. They may not be picturing anything specific, but their imagination fills in with horrific abstractions.

There is no escaping participating in your own life. Art, at it's very best, impels us to create what is most meaningful to us.

My Hero

As I said earlier, I think the Bible is a work of art, part poetry, part narrative. As in any great narrative, there are characters, and, likewise heroes. I think that, at least in western tradition, there is probably no more valuable a hero than Jesus Christ.

My take on Christ is that the Man Jesus lived and taught and was crucified. For whatever reason, then, mankind was ready to take this story of this man Jesus and turn it into the story of Christ, he who "was of the spirit" or "not of the world." The story of someone who said that he must die to his body to live fully as spirit.

I think this is everyone's story, everyone's struggle. Over and over again in our lives we are asked to die to our body, to make some choice that does not seem to have our immediate, earthly needs in mind. And I am not talking just about the 30 year-old firemen of the world who rush into burning buildings to save 85 year-old women. Why risk another fifty years of life to save a life that could easily die tomorrow of natural causes? I am also talking about something so simple as leaving a job you have held for twenty years that pays every bill and your insurance and your retirement because you want to go back to school to learn to write music.

We all define safety in our own ways, and at some point we are asked to make a choice that, in the immediate moment, puts this safety at risk. We put this safety at risk, usually, because we say, "We have to be ourselves," or "It just felt like what I had to do." This is the spirit talking. But the spirit offers no guarantees beyond a direction. It is that hand that points, it cannot paint a picture of where you will be or how you will get there, it can only point.

And so we are all Christ at one time or another. And thus we created the story after 300 some odd years and then wrote it down once we'd got it right. Because we needed it, just like we've needed all art, which reduces life down to its essence, so we can see it clearly, stripped of dull extraneous stuff, and remember again why the journey is worth it.

Body and Soul

I believe the dynamic struggle that defines the human experience is the tension between the immortal spirit living within the mortal flesh.

The body knows it will die. The body and its obedient retriever The Brain have been programmed with a clear directive: Survive. Survive, survive, survive. Such it is with all life. All life wants to live, all life wants to survive. And yet, if all we think about is survival, if all we think about is ourselves and our flesh, how quickly things go awry. Greed, hubris, lust and on down the seven deadly sins are all expressions of a psyche consumed with the survival of the flesh or the satisfaction of the Ego.

The soul, meanwhile, is eternal, knows it is eternal, and has, as a result, an eternal perspective. The soul is not afraid of death. The soul is not afraid of pain or poverty or scorn. And yet the soul must contend with the very real need of the body to stay alive. If the body does not stay alive, the soul cannot express itself in this form. If the soul were merely to stay in its energetic eternal state, there would not be this dynamic tension. Chastity, humility, charity and so on all ask us to live not from our earthly needs but from something higher. And yet each of these great qualities seems to put our body or our ego at risk.

And so our lives are characterized by this tension. This is why religions sprout up all over the world and why they all preach, in one form or another, obedience to something higher, which is ultimately the spirit, which is God. The spirit, interestingly, cannot lead you astray. And yet to listen to it always requires setting aside your fear of death. And so the tension.

Happiness, by the way, occurs when you live from spirit. You have found that spiritual vibration. It is the difference between riding with the current or against the current. As the song goes:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

So true.