Veils, Words & Values (3/5): competing needs

O My servants! Be as resigned and submissive as the earth, that from the soil of your being there may blossom the fragrant, the holy and multicolored hyacinths of My knowledge. Be ablaze as the fire, that ye may burn away the veils of heedlessness and set aglow, through the quickening energies of the love of God, the chilled and wayward heart. Be light and untrammeled as the breeze, that ye may obtain admittance into the precincts of My court, My inviolable Sanctuary.

Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá-u-lláh — CLII

Authenticity

When I was confronting my challenges in the 1992 diary entry I quoted in the first post of this sequence, I asked myself ‘How am I to break this vicious circle? Do I risk losing the social ties and work I value? That’s what scares and deters me, stands between me and myself.’

I went on to explore this more deeply:

.  . . . My background programmed me to believe that the cost of being ‘myself’ in the face of disapproval would be some kind of ‘death’ or absolute loss. But is this true? Is it too late to turn this round and refuse to be self-traitor any longer? Can I not find the means to reflect and write within my various roles? . . . To do so I must dare to introduce my differences into my relationships rather than sinking them beyond recovery in a swamp of self-deception.

That scares me. It will also be extremely hard work. There will be no comfortable easy rides. Confrontations, the idea of which shrivels me up inside, will be frequent. I will have to discover my true response in positions where that will be dangerous. I have so far attributed my survival and ‘success’ to my evasion of all such situations. My roles seem to require a dedication to the kind of facts with which the world typically stones to death the metaphors and myths poetry values and relies on.

It’s perhaps worth clarifying that at this point I really didn’t know about the language of the heart and its importance. All I seemed to know was that ‘My life and sanity seem to depend on my finding a workable and sustainable solution.’

I was gifted my Hearth Dream in 1993, triggered by the quotation at the head of this post, and it seems clear now that it started me on my long road out of this impasse. What I didn’t even begin to realise in 1993 was that this priceless source of innumerable insights almost certainly came from my literal heart, and not just ‘heart’ in some metaphorical sense. That clinching insight, as readers of this blog will know by now, came decades later.

There were various other complicating factors at work during this challenging period, above and beyond the role strain and conflicting values. My introversion had been a long-standing contributor to my stress, as previous posts have explored in more detail. What I was probably not factoring in was something that was only clearly explained in a recent book. Adam Robarts in his moving exploration of how he and his wife coped with the premature death of their son touches on a theme which resonated strongly with me and concerned ‘authenticity,’ something that seemed a core quality deeply embedded in his son, Haydn’s, being.

He quotes research published in Scientific American by Jennifer Beer:[1]

Beer notes, “Authentic people behave in line with their unique values and qualities even if those idiosyncrasies may conflict with social conventions or other external influences. For example, introverted people are being authentic when they are quiet at a dinner party even if social convention dictates that guests should generate conversation.” The distinctive twist, however, is that “a number of studies have shown that people’s feelings of authenticity are often shaped by something other than their loyalty to their unique qualities. Paradoxically, feelings of authenticity seem to be related to a kind of social conformity.” Specifically, she notes that such conformity is usually applied to a particular set of socially approved qualities, such as being extroverted, emotionally stable, conscientious, intellectual, and agreeable.

I have grappled since my teenage years with the issue of reconciling my introverted temperament with the need to operate effectively in the social world. I still remember my decision in my mid-teens to fake sociability in order to get on in the world.

The insights Robarts quotes helped me see how the confusion of extraversion with authenticity had made authenticity difficult for me as an introvert.

A relevant Socratic question might be how do I square the value I attach to connectedness with my deep desire for so much solitude? The acting on the latter leaves me feeling guilty while acting on the former creates frustration and drains energy. I am therefore rarely content.

Competing Needs

Grounded in my values, there are competing needs within me, for connection on the one hand and for solitude on the other. The problem is I feel authentic when alone, which can trigger a need to withdraw from company: when alone, though, I feel guilty for neglecting people who value my company, even though I often feel inauthentic when I’m with them.

There is apparently therefore no escaping my need for solitary time most days and usually I can scrape enough of that together. What I consistently fail to do most of the time with most people is to be true to my real self (not my ego but my heart). Part of the reason for this is my sense that who I really am in certain respects would not fit well with “present company” – I might easily upset or anger someone. I’m not so bothered about angering others because, for example, my views or tastes differ, but I hate upsetting or offending anyone.

I have not so far been able to find any way out of this cage. This contributes to a sense of distance from or loneliness with others that feeds my need for the quietness of solitude.

I wonder whether the distinction made by Eliot in his poem, Burnt Norton, which Lyndall Gordon discusses, is a clue:[2]

. . . the end of March, then, was [Hale’s]’s first opportunity to take in the [Eliot’s] detachment from human love. It was certain to shake her trust that this was ‘our’ poem.

Next to the line ‘darkness to purify the soul’, Eliot gives Hale a clue in ink: ‘The Ascent of Mt Carmel’. And next to the passage beginning ‘Descend lower’, he writes, again in ink, ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’. The 16^th century treatises by the Spanish monk St John of the Cross preached a solitary discipline: to divest oneself of natural human affections so as to arrive at the love of God.

His poem’s swing from human love does not deny the validity of the rose-garden moment [they had shared together]. The rationale is that the ‘way up’ in the rose-garden and the ‘way down’ of the saint coexist, as in the epigraph from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus: ‘The way up and the way down are the same’. These are alternative routes across the frontier of the timeless, and the poem does not lose sight of the route via natural love.

. . . So, for him to shun human love would have been more than expected; how could it not come as a shock and change her willing surrender to shame and disappointment? The first hint that he will turn away from pleasure comes in an otherwise intimate letter on 6 January when he writes that joy does not lie in the things of this world.

Basically, the theory goes that you can pierce the veils and access the timeless either upwards through connection with others or downwards through solitary introspection. Eliot ended up opting for the latter. I am torn between the two: the first seems an inescapable obligation, the latter an inexcusable indulgence. Pursuing either causes conflict and/or a sense of guilt.

My diary entries persistently track other aspects of this, for example, in an entry from Friday 17 June 2022:

Today I have experienced a crucially important epiphany. On the back of a fleeting comment I made recently that Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book ‘The Matter with Things’, was stating that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I have been blind to all these years: art is not just a subordinate domain to science and religion – it is their equal. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

This realisation almost immediately created the acronym S.T.A.R. in my mind — a peak experience, in its way; certainly a lightbulb moment. If I am to provide true C.A.R.E [my acronym for consultation, action, reflection and experience] I must resolutely follow my S.T.A.R. It’s only taken me 79 years to realise this. In fact, only to by taking CARE and following my STAR will I really be able to achieve anything remotely close to my life’s purpose.

Star and Care

This moved me onto to a critical question:

Have I really at last reached a proper understanding of what I should be doing with the rest of my life — a question that’s been bugging me for ages?

After years of sometimes invisible struggle, I clearly thought I was coming close to ripping off a few of the veils obscuring my inner vision.

This is such a revelation. I can’t quite capture all its many meanings. This not only explains my mysterious and compelling sense of quest, a desperate search for elusive meaning — something that has driven me ever since my wakeup call in the mid-70s. It also gives me a far better sense of where and how I should be focusing my energy and attention. . . .

I think a lot more energy than I was aware of was struggling to bring this crucial insight to the surface of my mind through miles of labyrinthine potholes and passageways. CARE is largely ‘How?’ and STAR is largely ‘Why?’ and ‘What?’

Of course, I had to bring my bête noire of reductionism into the mix:

Any form of reductionism or potentially toxic over-simplification is to be avoided at all costs in all three domains. A destructive ‘science’, ‘art’ or ‘religion’ is neither art, science nor religion. I think with this model, if I am immersing myself in any kind of genuine manifestation of any one of those three domains, there is no need to feel guilty, or slag myself off for betraying the other two and wasting my time.

I must keep all three in balance though.  Different people will privilege different domains at different times and in different places: what is critical is that destructive dogmatism and fanaticism be avoided at all costs and ideally everyone should be open to information and experiences from all three domains, or risk descending into illusion at best or dangerous delusion at worst. If I hear anyone disparaging any of these domains as pointless I’ll know not to trust a word they say.

For me a more difficult task than avoiding reductionism, is keeping the three domains in balance.

I know I am not a polymath, but I really do need to keep all three in balance. Choosing psychology swung me away from the arts but the fire-in-the-car-engine dream helped me redress that imbalance. My conversion to the Bahá’í Faith derailed the arts again in favour of religion. The Writings talk so much about the harmony of religion and science as paths towards the truth, that even though they praise the role of the arts in expressing spirituality I failed to see that there is more to the arts than that.

I think these insights might help me shed the burden of guilt that has dispirited me so long and prevented my enjoying and learning from literature, painting and song in the way I used to. Maybe I again got too close to the position Iain McGilchrist reminds us that Darwin found himself in:

He draws from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography which speaks of the great pleasure he derived as a young man from poetry, music and art, something now almost completely lost to him:[3]

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts . . . And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through the use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

I am determined to do everything I can not to make that same mistake again.

. . . Basically, I think I have come to a firm realisation that my path entails using an exploration of the arts, social sciences and spirituality to help me enhance my understanding of reality and ease my own existential pain as well as lift the understanding and ease the pain of others.

Recent reading, which I will touch on in the next post, suggests I need to keep my focus on arts and sciences that explore spirituality in some way, however indirectly. My recent heart insights showed me that, as all three in their highest form are valuable paths towards what is ultimately the same truth, my sense of their being in conflict was a completely misplaced veil blocking my ability to jettison my disabling guilt about following any of them at the imagined expense of the others.

Also, I wrote that I had been ruminating so long on what I was interested in — science, art, consciousness, spirituality etc. — without really looking at how to enact that (except in my blog). That was not enough. I need to use every interaction, every solitary action, to authentically express my deepest self in as constructive a way as possible, regardless of the criticism, and possible contempt it might trigger.

I am trying to hold on to these words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, translated from the Arabic:

Let the loved ones of God, whether young or old, whether male or female, each according to his capabilities, bestir themselves and spare no efforts to acquire the various current branches of knowledge, both spiritual and secular, and of the arts.

More on all this next time.

Explained at this link

References

[1]. Nineteen – page 36.
[2]. The Hyacinth Girl – pages 227-229.
[3]. The Matter with Things – page 619.

Read Full Post »

Poetry – the last thing on our minds

In the context of my revisiting the poetry and life of Táhirih in the current sequence it seems only appropriate to republish this post from 2010.

Over the years of trying to read it and create it I have come to have a feeling for what poetry is for me.

This is not a theory about poetry. There can be no true theory about poetry whose essence eludes all theory. Poetry for me is about approaching an aspect of experience beyond the reach of prose and possibly beyond the reach of words at all. When I attempt to write a poem of potential value I am striving to express what I can’t explain, even to myself.

Auden referred to this as ‘solving for the unknown.’

Now, there are many perfectly enjoyable examples of what many people refer to as poetry which don’t do this. Such productions don’t take you anywhere you haven’t been before: they just describe it better – ‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,’ as Alexander Pope put it.

McGilchrist, in his book The Master and his Emissary, deals well with this issue of what great poetry does that’s different. He quotes Scheler (pages 341-342):

[Poets] actually extend the scope of our possible self awareness. They effect a real enlargement of the kingdom of the mind and make new discoveries, as it were, within that kingdom. . . . That is indeed the mission of all true art: not to reproduce what is already given . . ., nor to create something in the pure play of subjective fancy . . . ., but to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul, to see and communicate those objective realities within it which rule and convention have hitherto concealed.

He sees the limitations of Augustan, i.e. 18th Century English, poetry which represents experience pleasingly rather than authentically. Even art forms not so concerned with pleasing and more with informing the mind or inspiring the heart along predetermined lines, such as political propaganda or religious hymns, fall short of being great poetry by my definition. Once you compare, for example, a typical hymn with what Emily Dickinson did with the same pattern on the page, you inevitably get closer to seeing the difference between great inspirational verse and great exploratory poetry.

Cardinal Newman is in the spotlight at the moment as the Vatican ponders on moving him towards sainthood via beatification. He wrote the words of a still very popular hymn:

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home;
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

This is beautifully put but the imagery is purely conventional and what it conveys is deeply familiar. We don’t need the hymn to introduce it to us. It is comforting to find the well-trodden paths of our own experience reflected back to us in this way. It helps us keep plodding on perhaps, which may be no bad thing sometimes. There is an honourable place for such work as this.

Emily Dickinson‘s experience is by contrast right at the edge of a darkness most of us know very little if anything about, even after more than 100 years, though a typical theme of hers, which I use here to illustrate her gift, is one that haunts us still. It’s in one of her better known (and therefore hopefully better understood) poems, of which I quote only the first verse:

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

What exactly are we to make of this?

At one level it’s as easy to understand as Newman’s hymn. The imagery is as familiar in one sense as his. We know almost as much about funeral carriages (see the link below to When the Circle is Unbroken)  as we do about the night. But not carriages that carry immortality as well. So puzzles begin to arise.

How can a carriage carry both death and immortality? They’re deadly enemies and immortality is vast – too big to fit even into a stretch limo. So the familiar here is used in an unsettling even sinister way.

And why the hyphens? And the ironic tone – calling death’s action ‘kindly’ for example. In any case, if we are conscious, his carriage is usually stopping to pick up someone else – maybe someone close to us, but definitely not us. So, what’s this poem really about?

Because the theme of this poem lies within a great tradition we can all begin to formulate answers to these questions. ‘Oh, death must be kind because he is releasing us into the realm of immortality.’ But, in truth, the poem in its entirety does not make it easy for us to settle into any one explanation as complete or satisfactory. She is using the verse form of the hymn to probe disquietingly into the themes that hymns are there to comfort us about.

Even my own modest efforts at poetry come up against this wall between what can be felt and what can be said. And that even when the experience described is pretty commonplace, in fact the one worked on in prose in the previous post that grapples with an experience which speaks for the close relationship between poetry and song.

The Last Thing on my Mind
(with thanks to Julie Felix)

On a bare and wooden stage, a metal chair
and two guitars wait in the still and empty air
until, with her lined face and jet black hair,
much lighter than her years she runs up to
the microphones and chooses her guitar.

Her long black veil, blurred with early morning rain,
dissolves into the long room in Wood Green
where, more than forty years ago, blues ran
the game: when the circle was unbroken,
Tom Paxton knew the last thing on my mind.

Now, in the mangle of my mind, the rollers
of my memories, and her melodies,
compress the fragile screen of consciousness
so thin the dyes of different times bleed both ways
with such relentless pressure thought stammers.

Even released days later, this ink’s flow
does not convey what I have come to know
nor my tongue catch its air within the strings of speech
though it was strings that brought her music within reach.

It doesn’t take a brilliant critic to realise how much greater this gap is when spiritual experiences are involved, as in Dickinson’s case.

George Herbert‘s genius, in a way not dissimilar to Dickinson’s, lies at least in part in his knowing how to use the commonplace to bridge the gap.

Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And made a suit unto him, to afford
A new small rented lease, and cancel th’old.

In heaven at his manor I him sought:
They told me there that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.

I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts,
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

We’re in a world of tenants, landlords, manors, parks and theatres. The verse form is a common or garden sonnet, albeit one that mixes the Shakespearean and the Petrarchan forms. His readers would have read hundreds of similar ones, many about worldly love, some dealing with the divine.

But at the same time we’re also sharing an aspect of Herbert’s experience of Christ. He has made it possible for us to capture something about that which is clearly impossible to summarise. The poem gives us an experience which extends our world – well, I believe it does – and I would defy anyone to express what we have learned except by reading the poem to me again.

Garden of Ridván, Baghdad

A tradition of Bahá’í poetry has a long way to go to catch up. Christianity goes back two thousand years compared to our mere one hundred-and-sixty-seven. I don’t think we can yet match Dickinson and Herbert who were both standing on the shoulders of giants.

One of the earliest Bahá’í poets was Tahirih. I only know her in translation but a non-Bahá’í scholar, Farzaneh Milani, praises her highly (page 91 in Veils and Words) though recognising she can be inaccessible :

Some of Tahereh’s (sic) poems are difficult to understand. Their language is rich in abstractions. She not only mixes Arabic with Persian but also makes repeated allusions to Babi jargon and codes. Her religious convictions saturate her poetry and set her verse on fire. They glow in her poetry like a flame that burns every obstacle in its way. The erotic-mystical imagery and language she uses reveal an all-consuming love of and an intense devotion to a divine manifestation.

And the translation on page 93 of one of Tahirih’s poems gives a sense of what I might be missing, though I suspect, as always, to translate a poem is to betray it (an old Italian saying about all translation goes: ‘Traduttore, traditore.’).

I would explain all my grief
Dot by dot, point by point
If heart to heart we talk
And face to face we meet.

To catch a glimpse of thee
I am wandering like a breeze
From house to house, door to door
Place to place, street to street.

In separation from thee
The blood of my heart gushes out of my eyes
In torrent after torrent, river after river
Wave after wave, stream after stream.

This afflicted heart of mine
Has woven your love
To the stuff of life
Strand by strand, thread to thread.

Robert Hayden

When we look at poems written by Bahá’ís whose native language is English there is only one as yet who is recognised as a poet of stature outside the Bahá’í community, and he is Robert Hayden.

Many of his poems do not confront a Bahá’í theme head on. One that does cannot be laid out on the screen in exactly the same as it can be laid out on the page and it therefore loses something in the process. Poems use their shape as well their sound to speak to us, though this shift came only with the birth of writing, then of print.

Bahá’u’lláh in the Garden of Ridwan

Agonies confirm His hour,
and swords like compass-needles turn
toward His heart.

The midnight air is forested
with presences that shelter Him
and sheltering praise

The auroral darkness which is God
and sing the word made flesh again
in Him,

Eternal exile whose return
epiphanies repeatedly
foretell.

He watches in a borrowed garden,
prays. And sleepers toss upon
their armored beds,

Half-roused by golden knocking at
the doors of conciousness. Energies
like angels dance

Glorias of recognition.
Within the rock the undiscovered suns
release their light.

You can sense his struggle to find the words in English that fit his purpose. Christian and quasi-scientific imagery rub shoulders perhaps uneasily, perhaps creatively together – it’s hard to judge. It is a significant achievement but it’s not on George Herbert’s level, I think. But we need to walk this precarious path of poetry unstintingly, persistently, and such gifts of grace as Herbert’s will eventually come our way.

Because great poetry broadens and deepens consciousness it has a significant part to play in building a better world. But great poets do not appear from nowhere. They need a fertile soil from which to grow. That soil is the wide-scale practice of poetry throughout a whole community of minds. Great poets arrive on the scene when ordinary people not only read but write poetry, and not only that but they pass it round from hand to hand, from brain to brain – in the old days it was in manuscript, nowadays it can be in blogs and on Facebook. We all need to play our part in this, if we are so inclined.

So, post a poem and pave the way along which the next great genius can walk into our midst.

Read Full Post »

Emily Dickinson – as genius of the interior (2/4): Investigating the Nature of Consciousness

The only authenticated portrait of Emily Dickinson later than childhood. (For source of image see link)

[I]n turning inward, Dickinson gained unique insights into the human psyche.

(Pollak and Noble in A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson,page 45)

Given that I am about to take another look at a brilliant female poet martyred in the 19th century, it seemed a good idea to republish this sequence.

The Passion of Emily Dickinson 

As I indicated at the end of the last post, I am looking at another book this time. Unlike Gilbert and Gubar, with their focus on patriarchy in The Mad Woman in the Attic, Judith Farr, in her book The Passion of Emily Dickinson,spends most of her time in the first two thirds of her book unpicking delicate strands of evidence to help us guestimate to whom some of Emily Dickinson’s poems were addressed.

Though fascinating from a biographical point of view, whether Emily Dickinson was writing a poem to Sue or to the Master doesn’t really matter to most of us as aficionados of her work. For us, what counts is to be able to allow the poem to impact as strongly as possible on our consciousness through the lens of our current understanding. Admittedly sometimes biographical details can shed light upon the meaning of poem: but all too often they constitute a veil between it and us. A great poem almost always transcends even the writer’s conscious intentions and understanding. That’s what makes it great. If anyone can capture all its meaning in words it might as well have been written in prose.

For these reasons, I am skipping over the whole of the first part of her book and homing in on where I feel most at home, with what Farr has to say about Emily Dickinson as poet of the interior in relation to time, nature and eternity.

The beginning of this exploration comes at page 247 when Farr writes:

She did have a poetic ‘project,’ and throughout her oeuvre it is perceptible. This was to depict ‘Eternity in Time.’

She continues (pages 247-48):

[H]er feelings result in a radiant conception of immortal life. . . . There is nothing morbid about this dream vision. … It is love, and the painful longing issuing from it, that gave Dickinson her vision of eternity. . . If Dickinson’s poetic productivity largely ceased after 1868, the reason had to do with the assimilation of her two great passions for Sue and for Master.

I will come on later in more details as to why I think this is yet another over-simplification of why she may have fallen away from her peak after the mid-1860s.[1]I’m not denying though that love and loss were part of the grit that helped form the pearls of her poetry. I concur with Farr when she writes (page 251):

[S]he had to grieve before she could continue to develop (and the grief was itself a means of developing).

Pollak refers (page 6) to ‘Dickinson’s incremental knowledge of the house of pain.’

Her love of poetry and her perception of its links with love, as we have already noted contrasted with her loathing of domestic chores (page 255):

Her prevailing conception of love inspiring art enables Dickinson to write her final sentences. There eternity is felt in time, and its sea is linked to her work.… Her vision was of the next world next to her as she did her housework, all that baking, canning, cleaning, and sewing so balefully recorded in her letters.

Nature was crucial to her, as it had been to the Brontës and to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, because for her (page 294) ‘nature offers clues about infinity.’ This was even to the extent that (page 302):

The horizon was a point of order for landscape painters like Church. For poets like Dickinson, it was the point of fusion of this world and the next.

Which finally brings me to two specific poems.

This is the first, an intensely powerful poem of sacrificial separation.

There came a Day at Summer’s full,
Entirely for me—
I thought that such were for the Saints,
Where Resurrections—be—

The Sun, as common, went abroad,
The flowers, accustomed, blew,
As if no soul the solstice passed
That maketh all things new

The time was scarce profaned, by speech—
The symbol of a word
Was needless, as at Sacrament,
The Wardrobe—of our Lord—

Each was to each The Sealed Church,
Permitted to commune this—time—
Lest we too awkward show
At Supper of the Lamb.

The Hours slid fast—as Hours will,
Clutched tight, by greedy hands—
So faces on two Decks, look back,
Bound to opposing lands—

And so when all the time had leaked,
Without external sound
Each bound the Other’s Crucifix—
We gave no other Bond—

Sufficient troth, that we shall rise—
Deposed—at length, the Grave—
To that new Marriage,
Justified—through Calvaries of Love—

Farr writes (pages 305-06) that, while being on the one hand plighting ‘troth on earth,’ it also records a quasi-religious ‘ceremony or compact of renunciation.’ She summarises it by saying:

This may have looked like an ‘accustomed’ sunny day when her flowers bloomed as usual, but it has marked her own movement from spring to summer: from girlhood to womanhood, from the old life to the sacred new one.

Nature is here contrasted with the spiritual by its ignorance of the day’s significance, its beauty notwithstanding. While her hope for her love’s fulfillment in the afterlife is its main theme, there is the implication that this separation is at least part of the crucible for her future poetry.

Before moving onto the next poem I want to quote in full, I need to refer briefly to two others: ‘I cannot live without You’ and ‘Behind Me – dips Eternity.’ As Farr explains (page 308) the first poem is important because it is describing ‘the surrender of a love that is morally forbidden.’ This is one of the sources of the grief referred to earlier. The second is important for present purposes because the opening stanza captures vividly her fusion of nature and eternity:

Behind Me– dips Eternity –
Before Me – Immortality –
Myself – the Term between –
Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray,
Dissolving into Dawn away,
Before the West begin –

Farr goes into much detail about how the Luminist paintings of Frederick Edwin Church and Thomas Cole, with which Emily Dickinson was deeply familiar, play on these tropes. I will shortly be coming onto how nature and women were similarly seen, and in my view still continue to be seen, as objects of exploitation during this period and beyond.

It’s probably also worth including here Eberwein’s view, expressed in A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson (page 79), that ‘For Emily Dickinson, then, the essence of religious experience remained in that haunting question, “Is immortality true?”’

Capturing the Inscape

I now need to illustrate the other powerful capacity her poems have: to capture inner states. It will also serve as a useful pointer towards the next book I’ll be considering: Lives like Loaded Guns.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things gives a powerful account, similar to the one in John Fitzgerald Medina’s Faith, Physics & Psychology, of the so-called Enlightenment’s rapacious attitude to nature, expressed all too often in sexual terms. Patel and Moore write (page 53):

The second law of capitalist ecology, domination over nature, owed much to Francis Bacon (1561–1626)… He argued that “science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her.’ Further, the ‘empire of man’ should penetrate and dominate the “womb of nature.“

For them, ‘The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup.’ I think their meaning would have been more faithfully represented if they had written ‘Society and Nature’ in that order. Even so their point is reasonably clear.

They share Medina’s distrust for our Cartesian legacy (page 54):

[H]ere was an intellectual movement that shaped not only ways of thinking but also ways of conquering, commodifying and living. This Cartesian revolution accomplished four major transformations, each shaping our view of Nature and Society to this day. First, either–or binary thinking displaced both–and alternatives. Second, it privileged thinking about substances, things, before thinking about the relationships between those substances. Third, it installed the domination of nature through science as a social good.

Finally, the Cartesian revolution made thinkable, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination.

This maps onto McGilchrist’s thinking about left-brain and right-brain differences and how the holistic, intuitive and empathic processes of our minds, which were in the past sometimes dismissively referred to as ‘feminine,’ and which tune into the ambiguous subtlety of reality, have been misguidedly subordinated to those arrogantly over-confident, logical, serial and linguistic processes, which hopelessly oversimplify reality and are sometimes complacently referred to as ‘masculine.’

I agree that Emily Dickinson, though she ultimately transcended them, was shaped by these crude ideological forces within a capitalist nonegalitarian culture that sees nature and humanity (women and ‘natives’ particularly) instrumentally, as things to be exploited for some kind of purely material advantage, rather than as beings to be valued for their own sake and nurtured with love and respect. As the Universal House of Justice has pointed out in The Promise of World Peace, capitalism is as flawed as communism, because both are equally materialistic ideologies:

The time has come when those who preach the dogmas of materialism, whether of the east or the west, whether of capitalism or socialism, must give account of the moral stewardship they have presumed to exercise.

That Dickinson was able to retreat from these repressive pressures into Vesuvial creativity is both a blessing to her, that helped compensate for her pain, and a gift to us now as we confront our generation’s variants of a toxic culture. She can inspire us to also strive to turn our pain in the face of abuses into creativity.

Her social isolation, a characteristic that fascinates me as my Solitarios sequence testifies, may have brought at least one other crucial benefit, beyond giving her creativity space to flourish in a general sense. It may have made her more sensitively attuned to her inscape than most of us will ever be.

I heard a Fly buzz– when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –

The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –

I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –

With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –

Not only is this one of my favourite Emily Dickinson poems, but it is a significant one as we begin to transition to Lives like Loaded Guns. Farr pins down its crucial characteristic (page 310): ‘In such poems Emily Dickinson investigates the nature of consciousness by analysing its recession.’ As many people know it’s not the only one. Most famously there is also ‘I felt a funeral in my brain.’ More of that later.

Why she should be so interested in recessions of consciousness, Farr does not explain except in terms of her interest in death. She apparently called her poems (page 328) ‘bulletins from immortality.’

In the next post we will begin to close in on where all these ideas are leading.

Footnote

[1]. Between 1861, the year the American Civil War started, and 1865, the year it ended, she wrote something in the region of 936 of her 1789 poems, ie 52%. She was writing at an approximate rate of 187 poems per year. After the war was over, her average rate was 32 poems per year. That may not, though, have been the only factor.

Read Full Post »

Book Review (2/3): Eknath Easwaran on Meditation

Given my reference to Easwaran’s work in a recent post, it seemed worth republishing this short sequence again, even after doing the same thing just over a year ago! 

Picking up the threads of my review of Eknath Easwaran‘s excellent, down-to-earth and accessible book Meditation: common sense directions for an uncommon life from where we left it last time, having dealt with the basics, things for me get much more interesting.

When he started talking about Slowing Down and One-Pointed Attention was when I really began to wake up. So far he had been going over fairly familiar ground which my current meditation practice is successfully keeping alive, if not quite in perfect order.

But maintaining a slow and steady pace and reasonable focus – well, that was quite another matter. I am well aware that my journals, kept from 1975 till now, are full of my whinges about rushing around and trying to do too many things at once. Then, I record making resolutions to counteract this only to find that a few months later I’m back to whingeing again.

Was I missing something still? Clearly I was. I was even moved to start pulling some of his ideas, including slowing down, into my developing model of spiritual progress, as the cube above tries to illustrate. The top of the cube needs to be adapted to include the idea of one-pointedness more clearly.

I am well aware of what he points out (page 89): ‘a great deal of carelessness results from hurry.’ And from the consequent fatigue, I would add, as my own experience recorded in Marmalade and Meditation, testifies:

First, in spite of my lip-service to mindfulness, I became so ungrounded by the pace I was keeping up, that I spilt coffee on my lap top and destroyed it. That jolted me more than a little but I still did not fully wake up to my need to change something radically until, late at night a month later, in a haze of fatigue, with my whole close family in the car, convinced I was already on the dual carriageway which was in fact still half a mile down the road, I moved out to pass the slow moving car and trailer ahead of me. I was alerted to my mistake when I saw, with initial incredulity, the headlights of an oncoming car heading straight for me in the distance. I pulled back inside with time to spare more by good luck than good judgement. What shocked me most about this incident was that fatigue had warped my perception of reality so much that what I believed about where I was completely overrode the cues telling me otherwise that were plainly there for me to see and respond to.

I remembered the story about a well-known Bahá’í, Dorothy Baker, who had a serious and almost fatal car-accident on a steep mountain road.

She mused aloud to a friend: ‘I wonder what God is trying to tell me.’

To which the reply came: ‘Dorothy, you drive too fast!’

The same kind of answer came to me in a flash, in the aftermath of this near collision: ‘Pete, you’re driving yourself too fast.’

Our hurry is also contagious, though hopefully calm is too, and has even spread to the way we read. It feeds on the competitive drive that underpins so much of our culture (page 97). I know this but am still in the grip of the Hurry Up driver, after all these years and so much meditation.

So how does he say I can learn to stop?

Learning to Slow Down

His key advice comes almost at the end of this chapter (page 112) and is deceptively simple and beguilingly concrete for the most part:

The first thing… is to rise early so you can set a relaxed pace for the day. Eat slowly at mealtime, sharing yourself generously with others. Arrive beforehand at your job and work on the essentials at a steady rate, not pushed by the clock or competition. Build friendly and loving relations with those at work and at home by practising patience at every opportunity. Put things in order when you leave your job, and learn to detach yourself from your work at will. Cultivate discrimination in recreation so that you choose what really revitalises and avoid what drains your time and energy.

The mantram is also particularly helpful in the case of hurry, because it gives the restless mind something to fasten on and gradually slows it down. [When a mistake triggers a mind bomb] [t]he best course to follow at that time is to repeat the mantram a few times and recollect yourself so you can proceed at a measured pace.

He also advises (page 114), as many others now do in self-help books, to make a list of everything we feel driven to do. It will be a long list. Then delete everything that is not essential. He concludes:

Putting aside my likes and dislikes, keeping my eye on what was necessary, using as much detachment as I could, I struck more and more from the list. Soon half of it was gone, and I found I had more time to give to what seems likely to be of permanent value.

This though is only half the story, and in fact would not in itself tackle all aspects of my problem in this area.

Learning to Focus

We now come to remedying my other weakness that compounds my problem with hurrying: distraction and lack of focus.

He reminds us what meditation does (page 118): it trains ‘the mind to be one-pointed by concentrating on a single subject – an inspirational passage.’ It turns the mind from being (page 119) ‘the master of the house into ‘a trusted, loyal servant whose capacities we respect.’

This reminded me of McGilchrist’s brilliant The Master & his Emissary. There the left-hemisphere language and logic based mode of operation has usurped the role of the holistic right-hemisphere processing, much to our detriment. There may be deeper parallels here but now is not the time to explore them. I’m distracting myself again!

Easwaran argues (page 121) that we should work at learning to focus even on tasks we find unpleasant. If we do we might find they become more satisfying. Focused attention also makes us more efficient (page 122):

When the mind is unified and fully employed with the task, we have abundant energy. The work, particularly if routine, is dispatched efficiently and easily, and we see it in the context of the whole into which it fits. We feel engaged; time does not press on us.

So it can alleviate the hurry up as well.

His core advice here is simple, if we are to learn this skill (page 127):

The first step is the systematic practice of meditation, which is the perfect way to learn the skill. There is another valuable aid too: to refrain from doing more than one thing at a time, to abandon totally the habit of trying to perform several operations simultaneously.

This last point should be applied to everything, from work through eating to recreation, and our meditation will benefit. It’s a two-way street. And we will have fewer accidents – that should keep me out of trouble.

His summarising phrase is (page 139) ‘Concentration is Consecration.’

Which seems a good point at which to pause before completing my survey of what I have read of his book so far.

Read Full Post »

Heart-to-Heart Resuscitation (3/4): Working on the Inscape

To be explained at the end of this post.

So, what do we do to at least begin the work of enhancing the power of our hearts.

A quote I use frequently in meditation is:[1]

Return, then, and cleave wholly unto God, and cleanse thine heart from the world and all its vanities, and suffer not the love of any stranger to enter and dwell therein. Not until thou dost purify thine heart from every trace of such love can the brightness of the light of God shed its radiance upon it, for to none hath God given more than one heart. This, verily, hath been decreed and written down in His ancient Book. And as the human heart, as fashioned by God, is one and undivided, it behoveth thee to take heed that its affections be, also, one and undivided. Cleave thou, therefore, with the whole affection of thine heart, unto His love, and withdraw it from the love of anyone besides Him, that He may aid thee to immerse thyself in the ocean of His unity, and enable thee to become a true upholder of His oneness. God is My witness.

The value of memorising quotations to use in this way is explained by Lasse Thoresen in his valuable book Unlocking the Gate of the Heart[2]: ‘Repeatedly reading a prayer or passage which you feel meaningful can increase your ability to experience it at a deeper level’ although we need to take care and avoid letting it ‘become a mechanical ritual of piety which we carry out without collecting ourselves or turning our hearts towards God.’ Done mindfully in a spirit of remembrance, it ‘will eventually give birth to new insights.’

I have explained before how Eknath Easwaran covers this same ground in his book on meditation so I won’t repeat it here.  What might be worth mentioning is the importance of a skill that meditation helps us learn: focus.

Meditation

Easwaran reminds us what meditation does:[3] it trains ‘the mind to be one-pointed by concentrating on a single subject – an inspirational passage.’ It turns the mind from being[4] ‘the master of the house into ‘a trusted, loyal servant whose capacities we respect.’

This reminded me of McGilchrist’s brilliant The Master & his Emissary. There the left-hemisphere language and logic-based mode of operation has usurped the role of the holistic right-hemisphere processing, much to our detriment. There may be deeper parallels here but now is not the time to explore them. I’m distracting myself again!

Easwaran argues[5] that we should work at learning to focus even on tasks we find unpleasant. If we do we might find they become more satisfying. Focused attention also makes us more efficient:[6]

When the mind is unified and fully employed with the task, we have abundant energy. The work, particularly if routine, is dispatched efficiently and easily, and we see it in the context of the whole into which it fits. We feel engaged; time does not press on us.

So it can alleviate the hurry up as well.

His core advice here is simple, if we are to learn this skill:[7]

The first step is the systematic practice of meditation, which is the perfect way to learn the skill. There is another valuable aid too: to refrain from doing more than one thing at a time, to abandon totally the habit of trying to perform several operations simultaneously.

This last point should be applied to everything, from work through eating to recreation, and our meditation will benefit. It’s a two-way street. And we will have fewer accidents – that should keep me out of trouble.

His summarising phrase is[8] ‘Concentration is Consecration.’

The Heart Again!

Because I attach such importance to gardening my heart, many of the prayers and passages from the Bahá’í Writings I have memorised contain key quotations about the heart. For example, in the more mystical Writings of Bahá-u-lláh we find:[9]

O My Brother! A pure heart is as a mirror; cleanse it with the burnish of love and severance from all save God, that the true sun may shine within it and the eternal morning dawn. Then wilt thou clearly see the meaning of “Neither doth My earth nor My heaven contain Me, but the heart of My faithful servant containeth Me.”

From the prayers I chose two that contained these supplications:[10]

Ignite, then, O my God, within my breast the fire of Thy love, that its flame may burn up all else except my remembrance of Thee, that every trace of corrupt desire may be entirely mortified within me, and that naught may remain except the glorification of Thy transcendent and all-glorious Being. This is my highest aspiration, mine ardent desire, O Thou Who rulest all things

And:[11]

O Thou the Compassionate God. Bestow upon me a heart which, like unto glass [lamp], may be illumined with the light of Thy love, and confer upon me thoughts which may change this world into a rose garden through the outpourings of heavenly grace.

They help remind me of where I am heading at least, as well as of the truth I first encountered in what I regard as one of Wordworth’s greatest poems, his Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, which contains these lines – words that I memorised in my teens and which survived my years of disbelief:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,          60

        Hath had elsewhere its setting,

          And cometh from afar:

        Not in entire forgetfulness,

        And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come             65

        From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

        Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,   70

        He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

    Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,

      And by the vision splendid

      Is on his way attended;        75

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

Wordsworth’s own life sadly exemplified that trajectory.

Nature

Which brings me onto the importance of nature, a key theme for Wordsworth with his ‘sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused’ which dwells within the ‘light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and the living air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.’ Part of the reason this resonates with me so strongly is the close link for me, reinforced in my Hearth dream, between the earth and my heart.

Lasse Thoresen makes clear[12] the importance of nature for Bahá-u-lláh, which is not just exemplified by his joy at being able to relish its greenery once more after years confined within the stone walls of the prison in Akká:

Bahá-u-lláh speaks of the country, as opposed to the city, as the home of the spirit. In His prayers and meditations He uses nature’s own sounds, colours, shapes and scents as symbols of spiritual realities and forces.[13]

‘Abdu’l-Bahá resonates to the same theme[14] and ‘even states . . . the Book of creation is the command of God and the repository of divine mysteries. In it there are great signs, universal images, perfect words, exalted symbols and secrets of all things, whether of the past or of the future.’

He goes on to state:

… When thou gazest at the Book of creation thou wilt observe signs, symbols, realities and reflections of the hidden mysteries of the bounties of His Holiness the Incomparable One.’

In Bahá-u-lláh’s book of meditations we find:[15]

. . . every time I lift up mine eyes unto Thy heaven, I call to mind that Thy highness and The loftiness, and Thine incomparable glory and greatness; and every time I turn my gaze to Thine earth, I am made to recognise the evidence of Thy power and the tokens as Thy bounty. And when behold the sea, I find that it speaketh to me of Thy majesty, and of the potency of Thy might, and of Thy sovereignty and Thy grandeur. And at whatever time I contemplate the mountains, I am led to discover the ensigns of Thy victory and the standards of Thine omnipotence.

Just as access to the potentially deep significance of nature demands of us the necessary effortful focus, the same is true for the metaphorical and symbolic references in the Writings. Thoresen flags up the importance of this as well:[16]

Many of the pictures drawn in the writings and metaphors. A metaphor replaces a concrete description with an image which has certain similarities. For example, when Bahá-u-lláh refers to ‘the Most Great Branch’ He means ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Reading at a superficial level, we might content ourselves with just knowing that ‘the Most Great Branch’ refers to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. But if we wish to understand this metaphor at a deeper level, we have to ask ourselves: why does Bahá-u-lláh choose to use exactly this image?

He goes on to state:

Only by deeply experiencing the imagery and turning to God in intense prayer with the wish of gaining insight can we hope to acquire some understanding of the true spiritual realities behind these images.

He adds:

Many of the pictures used by Bahá-u-lláh are taken from nature. Each phenomenon of nature can be seen as a metaphor for one of the qualities of God.… The moment we can see the world around us as a metaphor, we transcend the concrete, material world and approach the spiritual world, a world not directly perceptible to the senses.

The Diagram

Now is time for a short explanation of the Heart-to-Heart Resus diagram which has headed all three posts so far.

Basically, as I explained long ago on this blog, I see a strong connection between the heart and the earth, held more easily in mind by the fact that in English those two words are anagrams of each other. On my side of the diagram there are symbols to indicate that psychology, spirituality and poetry are key sources of inspiration, deepening my heart’s connection with Reality. The heart with which I am interacting may hold other such sources that will complement mine if I am open-hearted enough, and further enhance my understanding. Each heart is drawing not only upon its interaction with the other heart but also on its developing access to the Star of Truth, enabled by experiences often based in science, spirituality and the arts. In this way we become increasingly capable of transcending our strong tendency to rely upon our primate-brained egocentric dystopian myopia.

I am not claiming that any of this is easy, either developing one’s own heart or interacting with the hearts of others, or that there are no other ways to move in this desired direction. What I am seeking to convey is that we all need to search for effective ways of dispelling the conflicted and all too often self-serving scripts and sub-personalities that haunt our inscape, so that we become at peace within, open to the hearts of others and possessed of a strong sense of our unbreakable connection with all forms of life. This will empower to make a real difference to the destination our culture is moving towards and speed up our collective journey to the tipping point where enough of us are on this same page to turn our destructive trajectory away from darkness and towards the light.

So, in my quieter moments nowadays, the first thing I do, rather than read a book, is read my own mind to catch valuable insights I would otherwise have missed, such as this one!

More on possible kinds of action next time.

References

[1]. The Summons to the Lord of Hosts – page 214.
[2]. Unlocking the Gate of the Heart – pages 110-11.
[3]. Meditation: Commonsense Directions for an Uncommon life – page 118.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 119.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 121.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 122.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 127.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 139.
[9]. Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys – pages 21-22.
[10]. Prayers & Meditations of Bahá-u-lláh – XCVI.
[11]. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Bahá’í Prayers.
[12] Unlocking the Gate of the Heart – pages 85-88.
[13] Hasan Balyuzi’s King of Glory – page 356.
[14] Bahíyyih Nakhjani’s Response – page 13.
[15] Bahá-u-lláh’s Prayers and Meditations – page 272: CLXXVI.
[16] Unlocking the Gate of the Heart – pages 119-121.

Read Full Post »

The Bahá’í Concept of Unity (1/3): God and Religion

The peaceful and uplifting simplicity of the interior of the Methodist Church in Ludlow

Given that the third post in my sequence on Science, Spirituality and Civilisation looked in some detail at the issue of perennialism and the idea of unity it seemed only right to republish this sequence from 2019.

I was asked to give a talk at a South Shropshire Interfaith meeting in the Methodist Church in Ludlow. This sequence is based on the slides I showed and the explanations I gave. It does not attempt to give an account of the experience of the evening: it would be impossible to do justice to that. Suffice it to say, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to explore these issues with such a welcoming group of seekers after truth.

The Oneness of God

For present purposes I am of course assuming we can all accept that a power we label God in English actually exists. It would take too long to deal with that issue fully right now. What we can deal with briefly is to confirm the essential unknowable nature of God: in the end it is the words we use to describe this Great Being, the Ground of Being, that divide is.

‘McGilchrist in The Master and his Emissary explains (page 193): ‘Metaphor is one of our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what cannot be comprehended totally; our feelings, aesthetic experiences, moral practices, and spiritual awareness.’ Similarly with painting: Each painting says what words can never capture. Munch wrote (Prideaux’s biography – page 201): ‘Explaining a picture is impossible. The very reason it has been painted is because it cannot be explained in any other way . . .’

When we try and capture such an immense ineffability as God, we are in the country of the blind where the one-eyed man is king, as they used to say. Imagine two adjacent countries, the one a culture of cooks, the other of gardeners. For the land of cooks, the colour red has been explained to them by the one-eyed king as chilli: in the land of gardeners, their one-eyed king has said that red is like the perfume of a rose . When people from these two different countries meet they quarrel bitterly, sometimes killing each other for not believing in the rose or in chilli, when in fact they are talking about the exact same thing but do not know it. So . . . .

Copyright of the image belongs to the Bahá’í World Centre

The Oneness of Religion

This is not a new idea, though. John Donne, an Elizabethan poet-priest in Tudor England, wrote:

On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.

He wrote those words, part of the third of his five satires, during what must have been an agonising period of his life, when he was deciding to abandon the Roman Catholic faith, for which members of his family had died, and become an apostate. By taking this step, he avoided torture and execution and gained a career at the possible cost, in his mind, of eternal damnation.

While the Western world feels it has moved on from such ferocious divisions, the same does not seem to be true everywhere. Also, we should not perhaps feel we are completely free from milder variations of religious intolerance here.

This means that Donne’s message is still relevant.

The most obvious implication of what he says here is that we have to work hard to find Truth.

However, there are other equally important implications, and one of them in particular is crucial to the work of the Interfaith and makes a core aspect of the Bahá’í path particularly relevant for us in our relations both between ourselves and with the wider community.

Within the interfaith, we are all, in a sense, approaching Truth from different sides of this same mountain. Just because your path looks somewhat different from mine in some respects, it does not mean that, as long as you are moving upwards, yours is any less viable than mine as a way to arrive at the truth. Only when someone’s idea of God takes them downhill, perhaps killing others in His name, or at least hating them as misguided deviants, should we realize their God is not ‘worthy of worship,’ to use Eric Reitan’s phrase, and is not God at all. Theirs is not a true religion. All the great world religions are in essence one. It is only when we mistake the cultural trappings and rituals for the core that we think this is not true.

Donne clearly felt so at the time he wrote Satire III:

As women do in divers countries go
In divers habits, yet are still one kind,
So doth, so is Religion.’

A material symbol of this essential unity is the Bahá’í Temple.

Bahá’í Temples, as the world community of Bahá’ís grow larger, will be surrounded by ‘a complex which, as it unfolds in the future, will comprise in addition to the House of Worship a number of dependencies dedicated to social, humanitarian, educational, and scientific pursuits.’ These will be open to all.

I will explore the oneness of humanity next time.

Read Full Post »