TURNING TO ENLIGHTENMENT

Solstice will turn in the night and the days will get longer.  We can call this Enlightenment, a fact as well as a metaphor.

"Tonight's full moon will be a supermoon, which occurs when a moon is full or nearly full and is at its closest point to Earth along its elliptical orbit. That closest point is called perigee."  It's only "gibbous" at the moment, approaching perigee.

These past days I've been looking at darkness in our world -- not the most serious examples like murder and war if seriousness is measured by death -- but rather the more subtle horrors and terrors, anxieties and dreads that are embedded in our ordinary lives.  The "lanterns" for mammals are two-fold, attachment and empathy, the ability to form organically existing ties with others and even to recognize their thought patterns and emotions.  Even a puppy can do it.  It is a precursor to faithfulness and what we often call "love."

The ability to share consciousness, or at least parts of it since it is only the part of our self-awareness that is UNconcious and therefore unknown and uncontrolled, is specific to humans, though Jane Goodall assures us that chimps come close.  In humans, the stroking and kissing and feeding that is common to all mammals (though humans resist kisses that are licking) and grows into shared frame of expression that begins between mother and child, grows into making love between adults, and finally becomes into an ability to open up to process and shifting reality, is sometimes labeled "spirituality."

Two thousand years ago the idea was that a superhuman molded little clay dolls that became us.  Today some people hang onto that, but many of us see a human being as a creature emerging from the life around it with the help of one other human being equipped with the proper organs to support nine months of growth that lead to decades of evolving growth, pulling in the environment as food, breath, and music and then pushing back what is around us in order to make room for our own existence, reaching out to others of all kinds.

Years ago I read an account of how a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly.  The expectation was that the parts would rearrange themselves into a new anatomy, one thing becoming another.  But as the study proceeded, it showed that the parts of the caterpillar were stripped back to the molecules of the organs and then re-gestated into butterfly parts.  The chrysalis was a womb on a deeper level than was suspected: parts were still parts but smaller and more elemental.  For a while neither creature was really a creature but only a kind of soup.  "Splitting the gene and running its map into the ground was exciting while it lasted, but molecular genetics, pursued to ever lower levels of organization, inevitably does away with itself: The gap between genetics and biochemistry disappears." Seymour Benzer, 1971

This is what death is.  This is what our whirling times are like.  We are in the midst of transforming, neither this nor that.  Highly disconcerting to not be an organized and dependable insect/animal.  Fire, climate change, floods and droughts are taking even the environment back to the molecular level.  Ten thousand years of culture based on being able to use the surface of the earth to make food and shelter are deeply challenged.  We must become different creatures.  Probably we will use our tremendous advantage of a culture that is both conscious and unconscious, both inherited and newly conceived.  But then those developments will cause our bodies to change.

The dashboard of our bodies is our brains and it works in circuits built partly before birth and partly through experience.  Go back to the idea of the frame of expression that creates something called "liminal time and space."  It takes us over the threshold of what we know and have built a map for in our brains, into a context of possibility, a new way of looking at life which becomes life itself as we enact it.  New neurocells add longer axons that create the circuits.

We are told that our unconscious sensory world, besides coding the knowledge of organs, also notes the evidence from single-cell senses, like whether we are standing or moving and where are limbs are, whether we are near a drop-off or a rising wall, which end of us is the "head", very faint awareness of magnetic force, and as many as a hundred other bits of monitoring.  Some animals can produce enough electricity to light a Christmas tree.  Maybe we could, too, if we could manage our unconscious, but that's why it's lucky it's unconscious or we'd either be doing frivolous stuff or weaponizing it for war.  

So much happens through us, not at our bidding.  The most "spiritual" of us may be the ones who can feel life passing magnetically, electrically, through us.  Maybe someday it will make our faces shine with enlightenment, but not right now, though some folks are said to "light up."

The moon waxing and waning, the planet tipping from side to side, are phenomena of the light produced by the sun which defines our days.  But the light of the night, what we see in the dark, are the dancing patterns of the Aurora Borealis across the sky.  "When charged particles from the sun strike atoms in Earth's atmosphere, they cause electrons in the atoms to move to a higher-energy state. When the electrons drop back to a lower energy state, they release a photon: light. This process creates the beautiful aurora, or northern lights."

At night in our sleep, something like this happens in our heads.  Some of it is unconscious, clearing old patterns and ideas away, and some of it is conscious, seen as dreams, sometimes reassuring and other times terrifying, traveling the circuits of the life as recorded in the dreaming creature, even mammals -- the dog chasing and whimpering, the cat muttering and flexing claws.  Rehearsing both perigee and apogee so we'll be ready when either rises over the black horizon line again and again.

http://solsticeconcert.com/livestream/?utm_source=Paul+Winter&utm_campaign=82116090b2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_20_11_54&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d2b1f962ca-82116090b2-5221169

EMERGING FROM THE SOLSTICE

(Posted a bit early to coincide with the actual Solstice.)

It’s the Winter Solstice, one of those natural events that is the substrate for a multitude of human religious ceremonies and paradigms, one that escapes all dogmas, all priesthoods, all institutions, all nationalisms, to tilt through our lives once a year whether or not we pay attention.  On the prairie we never escape awareness of where the sun is or the effect on the Great Winds that rule our lives as much as if we were seafarers in the great winged ships of the past.  The jet stream is often overhead and sometimes in our yards.

One of my cousins is a California Prosperity Christian (claiming that he had to overcome his natural narcissism and hubris to achieve that state).  His adversary, he thinks, is secular humanism, so he was a bit disconcerted to be told that our paternal grandparents were quietly dedicated prairie humanists.  This was revealed when a grad student studying the movement in Canada found their names on an organizational roster and inquired through this blog what we descendants knew about them and their ideas.  As it turned out, not much.

Glenn W. Smith

http://www.dogcanyon.org/2010/02/07/prairie-humanism-the-just-now-emerging-progressive-movement/   This blog post is a good place to start.  Progressivism and neighborliness in response to very hard times, self-reliance combined with co-operative organizations, are certainly what I recognize.  But also, the fuzzy future envisioning, the weak ability to form a future, the craving to know more, are part of that strand of my Strachan family which started with immigration from Scotland in order to farm where the Brulé Sioux had just been cleared away.  In the end they didn’t do much better than the tribe.  South Dakota is a tough place to live.  Any prairie setting left by the great inland sea that once covered North America.

Glenn W. Smith has taught at Starr King, the UU California seminary I passed up in favor of Meadville, the Chicago version.  His “skew” is political and if you google him, you’ll find that he’s been fighting the good fight for a long time.  My own “skew” is cosmic.  I did a sideways step from Meadville to identification with the U of Chicago Div School, but even they are merely global.  I was taking writing classes from Richard Stern, sitting alongside the wife of David Schramm, the wildman astrophysics prof who was always seeking the missing “Dark Matter,” not as a metaphor but as what he hoped was a reality.  He died in a plane crash, the sole occupant and pilot.  I lost track of that writer wife.  The planet is full of dark matter.

David Schramm

I find that somehow, though I respect and will claim prairie humanism, my faith center is not there.  Many have suggested fanciful ideas about how to name another forming “faith” that many don’t even recognize as existing.  “Scientific Mysticism” will do.  Non-anthropocentric, often represented in science fiction (especially if one includes the work of people like Ursula LeGuin and the visions of pop film), welcoming to indigenous “spirituality” (whatever that is, so long as it’s land-based), the space program, and the persisting Aquarian thought represented by the Edge, some TEDtalks, the Bioneers, and other think tanks, including Smith's www.dogcanyon.org

Paul Tillich used to say that symbols can’t be imposed on people like advertising icons, but must be “found.”  That is, they are emergent from our lives.  This is certainly true of Scientific Mysticism which tries not to be anthropomorphic by including all life as neighbors.  On the other hand, the science part of the syndrome is emphatically NOT about magic and superstition, but rather about the interwovenness of all existence whether it is T-cells trying to resist HIV virus or the nursery of the stars where new fusion-based entities create energy.  We come to understand our bodies as aggregates of cooperating cells organized into -- well -- “organs” and our brains as an orchestra that plays the symphonies that are our consciousness.

Salvation is not found in virtue, but in participation.  Eternal life is not found in the persistence of one skin-enclosed entity but rather in the long-time influence and sharing through eternity.  Once defined, our impact may be small but it is forever.  No “faith” is necessary, just communication, action, connection.  One of the strong influences on the Strachan generations has been a baby named Archibald who lived only seventeen days.  He was the first child of my paternal grandmother, immediately preceding my father. 

The loss of that baby, which my grandmother believed came about because she was so desperate for the company of others that she went to town in the wagon, even knowing she was close to term in her pregnancy has meant a legacy of sadness.  The birth came on the isolated homestead.  Archibald was kept alive for a little more than a fortnight in the warming oven of the woodstove.  My generation didn’t know of the baby’s existence until I read through the boxes of journals my grandmother kept.  Neither did we know that her sister had died in childbirth and we still don’t know what happened to that baby.  Live babies and conceived but naturally aborted babies are lost every day, often undetected, often due to bad code.  But it has meant that my cousin wants safety, assurance, "faith."

Now we understand that all is code.  The first response, like that of the US government, is to hoard code, to try to get hold of all information in the effort to save everything, like a mechanic making sure to save all the pieces. But this is not the way.  It leads us to the problem of the centipede who was asked how he knew to walk with so many legs to manage.  He ended in the ditch with his legs in the air, a symbol that emerges again and again.  The way forward, as Smith recommends, is a function of desire and focus.  The goal may not be reached, but the minutia will be pulled into some kind of purpose.

Oh, yearning!  Oh, vulnerability!  I listen, I watch.  My kitchen has a big east-facing picture window where I often stand and look up the long alley that reaches to a close horizon, a bulge in the terrain.  From behind it rises the full moon, coloring the snow blue but draining the color from the feral calico cats I can’t resist feeding just under the window, their tails forming a mandala around the dishes of cat food.  It’s a good depiction of the mental and emotional life of a single old woman in a defensive small town, using a fancy education in a way it was never intended.  (One is supposed to become a success in one’s field, usually through affiliation with an institution, but when it comes to them I’m strictly a feral cat.)

Words don’t serve as well as music.  Consult Paul Winter.  The Winter Consort at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. http://solsticeconcert.com  

Of course, this is the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.  We are all connected.  Survival drives evolution; evolution responds to the rhythms of the world.  We are emergent and something will in turn emerge from us.

CULTURE & KENOSIS IN THE MOVIES

Whether or not I intended it, two movies that both featured Gerard Depardieu followed each other in my Netflix queue : “The Loving Father” acting with his own son, who died of pneumonia last month; and “Changing Times” with Catherine Deneuve. Both movies were about looking back over life -- the regrets and the cherished but possibly imagined love. I don’t think Depardieu will be re-watching the one with his son any time soon -- it might break his heart.

I do not know the real story of Depardieu’s relationship with Guillame, his son, who looks very much -- as one of the imdb.com commenters noticed -- like Julian Sands, the free spirit in the first version of “A Room with a View.” This story, “The Loving Father,” is represented as being created by John Berger’s son as a kind of exorcism of his father’s failure to love him, but the echo I kept getting was Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries,” which is also about the trip of a famous man to Stockholm to receive a Nobel prize. In that classic movie the cold-hearted achiever is accompanied by his daughter-in-law, but he also is taken on a trip of memories that leaves him somewhat redeemed by the transcendent vision of his parents on a picnic, waving from across a stream of water. In this bitter French version the two grown children go overboard from the ferry and in a startling underwater moment, the brother saves the sister. So water is still symbolic of life. The burned-out father is left to go on with a pretense of death which will preserve his reputation. He’s in the far north (the water is frozen?) and the child who comes to his door, as his son once did, is evidently Inuit. What does it mean? Who knows? There’s no table of symbols for reference.

The reviewers split down the middle on both of these films. I think part of the problem is that young viewers are simply impatient with Depardieu’s ox-like massiveness and Deneuve’s grimacing plumped-up mouth. They do not recognize experience. But the older viewers see -- themselves. (If they are so lucky!) In fact, most of us have memories of these two actors as they were in the photo that gets burned in “Changing Times.” The youngsters wanted to see more about the young man with his two lovers, one a woman with a child and the other a young man like himself.

One could simply watch in order to enjoy the scenery. The Cinematheque boys would say that no “Yanks” could understand this movie anyway. We’ll accept Deneuve as a perfume representative but Depardieu? There are few equivalents in the Hollywood star system, though Karl Malden’s nose always comes to my mind. Aron, of Cinematheque, says, “People want TV. Frozen pizza. Just give it to me. Make it what I already know. It can't be different from what I already know . . . It has to be like in a magazine. It has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. All clean and neat. It can't be too creative.” I think Aron is right. This is what American commodified culture is like, whether it’s clothes or movies or food.

This is what our standard American education system rewards: compliance, schedules, curricula, tests. “No child left behind” actually means “no child going his own way.” The threat is that if the child doesn’t conform, there will be no success. So here we are back at the Fifties, except setting up group rendezvous by cell phone. (These two movies show few computers or Internet moments, but the cell phones are everywhere, little buzzing bugs in pockets.) What can be next but the new Sixties?

As usual, the wealthy and connected are able to bail out of this system with all its valuing of adversarial sports and all its de-valuing of the humanities: art, music, dance, literature, by sending their children to private lessons. But the poor and ghettoized are not able to compensate this way. This is fortunate, because they invent their own ways of finding those same disciplines. They paint graffiti on rail cars, make music by pounding on garbage cans, break-dance on sheets of cardboard, and pretty soon what emerges is hip-hop culture that is then made popular by the people who are bored with conformity.

This counter-intuitive cycle is humanly inevitable because it is based on brain-wiring, hearts and community. It cannot be managed. By the time the dance studios on the Montana High-Line are teaching hip-hop steps, the style is dead. Basquiat as a phenomenon of high art instead of a back alley tagger was soon destroyed, cut off from the energy that inspired him. And now formally choreographed garbage-can symphonies tour the country. Oh, those Yanks! Always ready to exploit something.

Actually, “Yanks” as a synonym for Americans doesn’t quite work because the New England sailing ship traders were sharp dealers out for a buck in a way that people in other areas of this association of states were not, notably the indigenous population that was already here when the traders came. There is a US culture, invented by the media, but then there are counter-cultures, sub-cultures, alternative-cultures, under-cultures -- often with their own media and networks. Some are gangs in LA and some are Montessori networks, each evolving along its own path through the labyrinth.

Sitting here at my desk next to a window, I can see past this fat snoring cat to a grove of trees several blocks away that is being whipped hard by wind, making the limbs thrash against the sky. But in my own yard all is still. Both of these Depardieu films have moments of poetry, existential (they are French movies) images of the cosmos that question the whole nature and value of human lives in the most elegant of language. Do Nobel prizes really matter? Are the affairs we have in youth really the incredibly life-affirming events we think they are? Are high achievement and dramatic intimacy -- narcissistic enterprises that they are -- likely to rob our own children of their lives? Or should they stop whining and get on with it?

It appears that this Solstice season will be a “seven plague” event with temps down to thirty below, record high winds, expensive fuel (only gasoline has come down), deep snow, world economic depression, mounting cholera and starvation deaths, and political corruption. What I have learned is that truly facing existential truths like this, “emptying” in the spiritual practice of Kenosis, can be in the end a life-affirming practice. It can sweep away the TV, frozen pizza, glossy magazine stuff that Aron despises, and force us to new terms for creativity, a new transcendent vision.

DARK SOLSTICE

This time of year suicide rates go up, partly -- I suppose -- because the darkness is closing down over the northern hemisphere, partly because everyone eats too much sugar and drinks too much alcohol, partly because of the relentless reminders from marketers that money is the only way to express love, and partly because everyone is just too darn busy to pay attention to the ones among us who are always walking on the tightrope of existence. The opposition to suicide from religious sources is so strong because the temptation to just die is so strong. Especially when staying alive is expensive. (Another article in the NYTimes about how much the last six months of life with a fatal disease can cost, thanks to pharm companies who produce pills of great price and little impact. In Britain they have simply imposed a cap. So many thousands of dollars and you will be helped to stay alive. A dollar over that and goodbye.)

When people commit suicide, they think they are all alone, but in fact they are not and even people they have never met are affected by their death. This is part of the reason that suicide is stigmatized so much, to the point of suppressing any knowledge about it. And, indeed, one famous suicide can trigger many copycat suicides who are known only as statistics. It is defined as a failure of the person who died rather than a failure of the larger picture: family, local safety nets, society. Rarely except in the circles of existentialists of a dour disposition is it seen as something built into human beings, the same as their cells have a built-in self-ceasing called “apoptosis.” Apoptosis of the person: “I’ve had enough. I want out.” Freud called it “thanatosis.”

It has haunted me that just across the border in Mexico where they sell quack remedies and cheap China-made versions of drugs, one of most popular -- if quietest -- products is a little bottle of lethal veterinary barbituates for $30. Of course, by the time such a solution is probably justified by rising pain and falling outcomes, a person is too sick to go get it. One either needs a co-conspirator or one must plan ahead. What if times get tough enough in this recession for the same folks who bring meth to all who want it (an uglier and slightly slower way to die, possibly killing others) to bring us these little bottles of death? In case your state has not passed the law allowing assisted suicide.

There is always the danger that someone may be “assisted” who was NOT suicidal, but merely a nuisance. My father-in-law died at ninety and took years, paralyzed in bed, speechless. The home “nurse” who was most “successful” simply kept him asleep with nembutal suppositories. Why end a perfectly good job? But why torment him with therapy and experimental drugs? (Actually, there WAS an effort at therapy for months.)

Eons ago when I was preparing for the ministry, I was in a “growth group” guided by two leaders, one male and one female. Just before I joined this group, one of the previous members had committed suicide. There had been no sign, no way for the leaders to know this was coming, but they were deeply affected. Since this can happen to a minister as well -- probably will sooner or later -- we spent time reflecting on the issue, but the puzzle was not solved because the motives and definition of a "solution" was not clear. We only stirred up more questions.

Another story on the radio yesterday was about a young college student who suffered a concussion which caused him to be depressed and suicidal. The college immediately threw him out. (I almost said “terminated.”) The American way: denial and ejection. Circle the wagons: fort up.

When my younger brother died of a heart attack, I remarked to my other brother that our sib had occasionally been suicidal and that maybe we should have reacted in some other way that we did. He had a head trauma that had destroyed his ability to think clearly but he also said, “I have a right to live!” which is a hard thing to remember. My sib said tartly, “If you wanted to kill yourself, would you have wanted anyone to stop you?” I wouldn’t. So I have to remember that, too. But is this brother speaking personally? Is there something I ought to do about it?

When I was suicidal (I am NOT, so don’t rush over to save me!) I saved myself. I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t playing games and hoping to be saved -- no doubt redeemed and loved at last. I couldn’t be sure I would really die all the way and I didn’t want to dangle between life and death for years. I couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t be of use to someone in the future. If you’re willing to die, why not spend your life working for peace in a dangerous country or helping the abysmally poor get a foothold against disease? And the biggest reason is that I didn’t know what would happen tomorrow. What if I were awarded a big prize or some person showed up whom I would come to dearly love?

So staying alive is in large part a matter of surviving the uncertainty of living, letting it save you instead of taking you under. I explain this to others by saying it’s like swimming: if you fight and thrash, you will sink and it will be impossible for others to save you without drowning themselves. But if you stop fighting, relax (What a stupid word! How little it describes surrender to the forces around one instead of trying to decide and control everything!), and open awareness to the -- well, to the universe, then everything changes. New possibilities are waiting there.

So this is partly why I step away from the Christian Christmas, so corrupted, so focused on defying the darkness and denying death. (“If Heaven is so great,” the naive might ask, “Why wouldn’t a person just go there?”) Instead I like the solstice, which underlies all religious interpretations anyway, and try to obey it’s injunction to be patient. All things are cycles (even recessions) and all wheels turn to bring up new light, new circumstances that have nothing to do with human intentions.

Suicidal? Well, wait a while. Maybe wait until Candlemas, when it’s clear that the light is returning. Then maybe you can see what you’re doing.