Nervous Conditions

S: The real changes I’ve seen in my life all happened when I was totally beside myself, and feeling that if I didn’t stop something, whatever it was, that I would be dead in a few days or minutes. I was feeling desperate, and I don’t think people can trust those states.

AH: My dear friend, it is always desperate like that-we just don’t see it. You think of physical death as a bad thing. What happens to most people is worse. It’s always a desperate condition. This is one of the truths you need to see. You have to look at your assumptions and ideas and see that things could be different from what you think. You thought at one time you were in a desperate situation, and I see that you are always in a desperate situation. You might cover it over. People cover up their desperateness and hopelessness and everything else. Most of the time people are desperately trying to do something. There is always this feverish movement going on inside, always. If you really look at yourself deeply you will see that.

- A.H. Almaas, Diamond Heart, Book 2, p. 115 (“Change and Truth”)

Finite and Infinite Games: A Lecture

James P. Carse’s book Finite and Infinite Games have been an important book for me for many years. I just started reading his book Breakfast at the Victory, Googled him, and found this video on “Religious War in Light of Finite and Infinite Games” courtesy of the Long Now Foundation.

Most Likely You’ll Like This Video

Link (Sorry for the ad)

New A. H. Almaas Book

Apparently, a new book by A. H. Almaas is coming out on June 10, 2008:

The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence

Is he moving in on Eckhart Tolle’s territory?

Has me scared: Prep for war in Iran?

Many of the scary, foreboding things I’ve read on the Internet never happened. This one still scared me (by George Packer at the New Yorker website; click the link for the full blog entry):

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August 31, 2007

Test Marketing

If there were a threat level on the possibility of war with Iran, it might have just gone up to orange. Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, has written an account of a conversation with a friend who has connections to someone at a neoconservative institution in Washington. Rubin can’t confirm his friend’s story; neither can I. But it’s worth a heads-up:

They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

True? I don’t know. Plausible? Absolutely.

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His freedom stretches so widely…

Man’s freedom has roots that are in his very nature as man. It cannot be totally eradicated by circumstances, no matter how severely it is stifled under the stiff iron mesh of neurotic patterns. However, we may also use the expression “free, unique personality” to indicate the person in the fullness of being, when he has reached the top level of freedom. His freedom is such that he is able to give complete fulfillment to each of the facts that go toward making up his personality. His freedom stretches so widely into all corners of his life that he is able to turn each obstacle or adversity into a positive personal value. In freedom, he becomes able to experience his very illnesses in such a way that they help him grow.

– Adrian Van Kaam, The Art of Existential Counseling (p. 52)

Our love for our children and for the human race…

The greatest and most devastating ignorance of humanity is perpetuated in the daily lives of families. Most of us do not want such knowledge or perception; it is too painful and frustrating to confront our fears and illusions. But our love for our children and for the human race might give us the courage to face these issues and allow us to look inward to find the true harmony of Being.

- A. H. Almaas, Pearl Beyond Price (p. 249)

Abandon the search for God…

Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you makes everything his own and says, My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find him in yourself.

- Hippolytus, Heresies, 8.15.1-2 (quoted in Karen Armstrong’s A History of God [96])

On Evil Deeds

Re:

NYT – “Bombings Kill at Least 171 Iraqis in Baghdad” and the Virginia Tech Shootings

When our view is informed by seeing life without the veil of the personality-when we see things objectively, in other words-we see that since most of humanity lives on the surface of themselves, out of touch with their inner depths, such behavior is inevitable and needs to be curtailed and controlled. To say, however, that such things should not happen does not make sense-they are a natural consequence of humanity’s estrangement from its depths. Also, what we consider evil behavior is simply behavior rooted in ignorance of how things really are. Rather than destructiveness estranging us from the Divine, it is an expression of our estrangement, which has nothing to do with the underlying presence of that dimension of existence. The solution to human destructiveness does not lie in trying to regulate or eradicate it but rather with connecting to a dimension within ourselves in which such behavior does not make any sense.

- Sandra Maitri, The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram (158)

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut died tonight, and over the last few hours I have been struggling to figure out what that means to me. There is a familiar feeling of sadness when a personage I respect but have sort of forgotten about dies. It is also a bit like when, as a child, I came to the end of a really good book and I was sad that I would never know anything more of the characters – sad that someone I knew and liked was gone, and that I had not quite taken advantage of his or her presence.

I discovered Vonnegut around 8th grade and he was the perfect author for me at that time, with the sex, the humor, the sense of knowing-adultness, the cynicism, the mysterious time-capsule of the time when something strange had happened that I’d missed (or had come in on way at the tail-end of [1979]) – a sort of aliveness and energy, dynamic, political, idealistic, that was no longer around in the 1990s. I did a book report on “Welcome to the Monkeyhouse” and thought it quite exciting. Then I read his books; a more obscure one, Mother Night, has turned out to be the one that stayed with me the most after some 14 years. Something to do with the main character seeking a nation of two to protect him from the sickness around him in WWII Germany…come to think of it, I may have taken the message the wrong way, because I wanted my own nation or two, or if that was not possible, of one. But you can’t really escape and the spy in Mother Night paid the price.

In a senior year paper I used a quote from Cat’s Cradle about “living by the happy untruths…” (or something) that allow us to get on with life. Looking back that seems almost dangerously naive… or perhaps I’ve internalized all the happy un-truths and can no longer recognize them as such. In recent years – basically since I wrote that paper in high school – I have come to feel that I had grown past Vonnegut, that I had got his relatively simple messages and needed to look deeper into things. They were good starting points, good anchors – treating people well, and such. Dostoyevsky, for example, expanded things. I became aware of a certain egotism in Vonnegut’s message (among many many others, well, almost everyone), a solid placement in some object relation of “I versus the world.” The spiritual realm where perhaps the darkness of humanity was not entirely separate and loathsome, to be eschewed, but a part of the system, beyond our understanding, but possible to sense… Of course, the front pages of the papers still force me to face the questions Vonnegut first raised for me.

So thinking back it all seemed too simple, too… perfect for my 8th grade self. Was it all too simple and… trite?

No… I have to keep intellectualism at bay. All that is simple is not expendable… as long as it is true. It may not be all the truth (in Vonnegut’s case it wasn’t) but is can still be true. He really was a man who did struggle with these issues and put them down on paper – explaining how he was able to survive as a human in the face of it all. So it was sincere, if simple, and that counts for a lot. I never really got the idea, even when I heard him talk, that he was some superman. I didn’t really want to be him, as I did so many other of my idols (Indiana Jones, Bob Dylan, etc.). He was a real guy, a chain smoking, perhaps a grump, with his demons that didn’t seem mysterious or anything… the kind of demons you might expect an eccentric bachelor uncle with a penchant for alcohol to have.

I feel the need to resist sentimentalism – quotes like “Thus it goes,” and rambling about his humanism, and so on. To me the guy was existential America in all its desolation and cynicism – maybe it was the moustache that did that for me. He was like my mom’s ex-husband, a kind of 60s cynic, unable to really come to terms with the existential difficulties of being human, the absurdities of our society. Maybe he seemed like he was certain about a few things, but I think he was probably somewhat doubtful about it all, he just had a certain amout of faith in the happy untruths that make it worth living, as if, “If we can’t believe in these we might as well just go kill ourselves.” He could have ended up on some beach in Mexico or something, but he could write catchy stories, he was able to put pen to paper, he could see his own country just enough to show it all to us. So, now we all know who he was and that he died, and that’s why it is kind of sad even though I hadn’t heard from him in a while.

That’s all I have to say, and no one will probably read this.