WORDS OF CONTEXT: 8 YEARS AGO

TO JOSEPH: THAT YOU MAY UNDERSTAND WHAT LIFE WILL BRING

YOUR SEARCH FOR CONTEXT, ORDER AND MEANING

I began questioning what I had assumed to be reality at the age of seven. At that point I wasn’t so aware of a dilemma involved in human existence or that any particular choices were to be made. My awareness was one of recognition of other dimensions of existence, beyond that which I had understood to be real. In addition the different reality of other people and how they affected me became very apparent. Three events occurred that affected me deeply, causing me to want to know and to understand what life was all about and who was I in it.

             First, after moving into a “new” house in Albany, New York, in 1954, I awakened one night to see the figure of a man standing at the bottom of my bed looking down at me. He was very tall and wearing a dark pin-striped three-piece suit. His head was tilted to the right in an extreme angle, his tongue hung out of his mouth to the side, his eyes protruded like a frog’s, and his arms swung limply at his sides. I was so horrified that I was paralyzed, unable to utter a sound or to move. A few nights later, the man returned, but not visually; rather, as an invisible presence with a soft voice. He apologized for frightening me, for he realized quickly the effect of his visual presence upon me. In time, he became my friend and close companion, returning almost every night for probably two years. We talked and discussed many philosophical points about life and living and what it was to be human. He also comforted me when I was in pain. Much later in my life, when I was twenty-one, I was motivated to research in the local newspaper, the Times-Union, and found an obituary and a short news article about a man who had committed suicide six months at the house I moved into with my family, six months before we moved in. He was a banker whose wife and children had left him several months earlier because he drank too much. One day he came home and hung himself in what probably was his bedroom, now my bedroom. He was very sad but very kind and knowledgeable. I never told anyone about him until I was twenty-one. When I finally told my mother, she was aghast, and asked, “How did you find out?” That is another story I will tell in due time.

             Second, my father, who was a decorated World War Two “hero,” and who had been in the Medical Core, serving on D-Day at Omaha Beach and in the Ardennes Forest in the “Battle of the Bulge,” had been through the profound horrors and confusion of war, and, though undiagnosed (as was the norm for most returning veterans from that war in those times) probably suffered by PTSD. He often saw me as a “defiant child,” though I probably suffered from a degree of autism as a result of being born six weeks premature. I exhibited various signs of autism and was slow to develop verbally and auditorily; in other words, I didn’t hear adequately and therefore was slow to respond, thus seeming “defiant.” My father lost patience of my “defiance” and began taking a belt to my back, not stopping until he was either too exhausted or he drew blood. At these times, which were extremely frightening and painful to me, I couldn’t understand why he was doing this to me. I knew he loved me and could not comprehend why he was doing this. In time, though, I did understand. I would see in my mind bloody, deafening, explosive battlefields in which men were dying and bodies and parts of bodies were strewn upon the ground. I felt absolute fear and confusion and paralysis. I wondered why I was having these thoughts and then I realized that I was seeing into my father’s mind, into his thoughts. I also realized that in his mind he was on that battlefield that I was seeing and reacting to. I understood that my father was “somewhere else” when he beat me. This didn’t lessen the physical pain or damage but it did diminish my inability to understand what was happening with him. And though I had an understanding, I still harbored much resentment that he somewhere within himself chose to take his rage out on me, his small child. I realized that other people, even if they loved you, were capable of utmost cruelty. At these times, I would try to flee into the safety of my bedroom closet, where my mother kept her fur coats reaching down to the floor from hangers. I would curl up in the fur coats like a small wounded animal. My friend, the “ghost in my room,” would talk to me at these times and console me, telling me that my father was a “victim of war,” that I should forgive him, that I was “good,” and would “get through it and be ok.”

             Now, during these beatings, I would find myself hovering above the scene of me and my father, looking down at the action, watching us both without any pain or suffering whatsoever. I became aware that I had inadvertently “left my body” in order to avoid the intense pain being inflicted upon it. In time it became almost second nature for me to “leave” whenever I was faced with physical pain or discomfort or even in confrontational circumstances. The fact that at these moments it left my body to seem almost catatonic bothered and affected others and their assessments of me, but I did not particularly care at all; I felt “safe.” Later in my life, when I “sat zazen” absolutely motionless for hours on end, I was judged to be quite “advanced” by Buddhist teachers, however, I was just out of my body; it was easy for me. The real challenge was to learn how to fully inhabit my body again.

             Third, in the fall of 1954, I got very sick, probably with a flu, though I’m not sure what it was. I lay in my bed in my room gazing out the window at a cold, orange sunset. I had a very high fever. As I lay on my left side, looking upon my body covered by a blanket, I saw a mountain range in the setting sun. As I watched, clouds came and enveloped the mountains, pouring down endless rain for an eternity, after which the mountains were totally washed away. I lay there now seeing nothing where my body had been. An eternity had passed and my body no longer existed. Even my ability to “see” had vanished and I found myself in a state that was without any senses except an awareness of self. I assumed it must be “my” self.

             Who is to say what causes a person to “question existence”? Each of us has his or her own causes, reasonable or unreasonable, conscious or unconscious. There is much that has occurred during my life that has led me in many directions. I have thus sought to “understand the dilemma of human existence,” for I do see that the many directions offer many choices, or even just two choices, both of which must be understood to be co-existent. It may be possible to “transcend” physical existence while living in a human body, and to do so makes a certain definite sense, however, such an “achievement” may be “pure nonsense.” I have been living in this question ever since I arrived at the “age of guilt,” a result of Roman Catholicism indoctrination during my childhood. Even beyond religious teaching and belief, the issue of “spirit vs. matter” is certainly ancient and modern, without solution, but understandable in its paradox and irony. In due time I will get to its gnostic roots and the damage done to the human psyche. But damage without destruction may be seen as evolutionary change. If one believes that what happens is “meant” to happen, that omens are not necessarily ominous, and that each of us is part of and integral to our own fate, then one may learn to be able to ride upon the “horns” of the dilemma of being human.

I am writing this in what is to be book form because I do not believe that electronic transmission will be permanent but will, sooner or later, abruptly end. At that point we humans may all abruptly end, but, if not, someone may read my book and find something of value in it that might aid him or her in the living of their life. I want to “leave something” of what I have learned in this life and this is one way to do it. There are other additional ways, such as living by kind and loving example. In this book there is a smattering of knowledge, including cultural and philosophical correspondences, some of which seem to be beyond what is generally or even specifically known, at least as far as I know. There is some “tongue in cheek” in my writing, which is my way of expressing my particular anecdote: “Too much irony makes one overwrought.” If one person smiles, it will all have been worth it. If one laughs, I get my wings. My references indicate my age and generation: old.

             Much of this book is taken from my journals and from essays and “putting together of information” I’ve written over the years, arranged by different themes and topics. All of it relates to “understanding the dilemma of human existence.” What else is there, anyway? I will try to provide connection and explanation when it seems necessary, and may become quite tangential at times, as the spirit moves me. I will also let the spirit speak whenever possible. I might just as well have asked, “What is real?” or “Who am I?” We each have our own questions that come to us and for which we seek to understand an answer. And, while it may be quite true that legions of people do not question at all, preferring to avoid all discomfort and to believe contexts presented to them, be they business or religion or sheer survival, are able and willing to contort themselves to fit and to belong without question or even apparent awareness, these are those many others who find themselves unable and unwilling to do so.

             In my own life I have always tended to write down these choices made to not fit in and often the pain involved as a result of not being part and parcel of the “world,” that is, of the way in which life is “expected to be lived” by the greater majority. Some of us are aided in our eventual understanding of such a situation by what happens to us in life that is seemingly much beyond our control. For instance, I refer to my own premature birth “forced” upon me by my mother slipping on icy stairs, “breaking her water,” thus forced against the time of nature itself, to bear her baby six weeks early. From the beginning, then, I was not quite “normal” and spent the first two months of my life in an “incubator,” a small container with a light bulb for warmth used to hatch motherless chickens. I was so small and frail, for my father chain-smoked as well, that I was not touched or held except by nurses when they changed my linens and diapers. “Human touch” was infrequent and without love, warmth, or gentleness. Physical touch became overwhelming, uncomfortable, and even painful to me. I squirmed like an animal to get away, kicking and screaming and flailing; in time, people were not intimate with me and I felt safe though always alone, always different. Then, thirty-four years later, when my daughter, Sarah, exhibited signs of profound autism at two or three months, I understood how that was for her, and she understood that I understood. A very close bond was formed between us. I kept a detailed record of my own thoughts and feelings and still do almost thirty-five years later.

             I have also always read different sources, particularly of philosophy, religion, and history so that I might have some kind of understanding of what human beings have to say about themselves, their lives, and their worlds. I have sought to see what they have done and how they acted throughout history all over the world. Their thoughts over time and their consequent actions taught me much about what it means to be human, both for better and for worse. Much of what I have read has resonated closely with me, had “spoken” to me clearly, and has explained, in some respects, not only how I “hold” the world or “see” it, but why whole cultures have come to do what they have done and why they still hold such views of God, themselves, and humanity. For we are not so separate as we may think we are; we actually operate as a whole, especially now with the technology of the internet which provides an immediacy without time or space to give us a chance to weigh and to think, to reason. Much of what I include in this book is a result of my thoughts, some with particular purposes to bring new thoughts or evidence to light especially to specific audiences. There is much here that therefore sounds rather “academic,” containing footnotes and sources for the quotes I use. If, in my reading, I find that someone else has come quite close to articulating my own thoughts or something quite close to them, I have no problem in letting them do much of the speaking for me. Sometimes they are so well-spoken, in fact, that it would be a disservice to them for me to even attempt to paraphrase them. And the fact is that I find myself “in” various historical views and even in those who spoke them, as if I actually were the person who articulated them. I do not quite know just what will be included in this book, but whatever lends itself to an “understanding of the dilemma of being human or of human existence” is apropos. For, if something “speaks” to me, it may speak to another as well. The beauty that I am fortunate to be able to see may possibly be seen by another. The questions and needs that well up from my own soul and my own heart may very well reflect those of others, just as the questions of the most ancient philosophers are questions that I too have asked before I ever even knew of them.

             My writings here, then, will cover a spectrum of that which is quite personal, such as my own life, to that which is very abstract, such as my philosophical thoughts on cosmological topics. Some will be paraphrased renditions, primarily through the use of quotes, of various historical narratives or overweening points of view, such as the fascinating mythologies of the various Gnostic schools of early Christianity and from what they are derived. For, to understand the reasons how things are now and the foundations from which they arose does provide an understanding of current human nature and thought which is utterly vital if we are to survive and even thrive in our current world. The primary cause of the problems humanity is faced with throughout the world is a lack of historical and therefore foundational awareness. Those who do not know history are bound to repeat it in their overweening ignorance. To know history is to know oneself.

Central to this desire and need to understand this “dilemma of human existence” is the need for context, for a context for ourselves in which we may “belong” and thus “be a part of life.” Without context, we are lost; we do not even know what we are, much less who we are, or even why we are. Context most often takes the form of a story of ourselves in some way. It may be a story of our “people,” our race, our religion, our society, our nation, our family, or it may be more individualized into a story of “my spirituality,” my relationship with the universe, with God or gods, with the earth, with my “true nature.” And so we may spend our lives searching for stories, for cosmologies, that “resonate” with us, that “speak” to us, in which we can find ourselves. We may, in fact, discover many such stories that, themselves, overlap in so many ways, with us able to find a bit of ourselves in each and consequently coagulating them all into a still greater story, a still greater context and place of belongingness in which we are able to exist as we are, though still always searching for still greater boundaries. It is similar to Siddhartha moving from one guru to the next, absorbing what each teaches and presents, but then having to discover the next guru with the greater teaching. Each time he is filled to the brim and realizes that reality is bigger and more inclusive than he has been able to hold; he must consequently expand himself, his own reality to be able to contain that which is to come. I have gone to many religions, many philosophies, many ways of seeing, many experiences of being, often enough then returning, able to traverse a higher spiral of that particular story, and noticing that, at a certain point, the stories become much more entwined in the same spiral. The Gnostics present incredible “creation” stories, differing according to the main schools, but with quite similar results. The Plato-Christian stories, though different in the telling, also have quite similar worldviews and virtue. The Buddhist and Hindu and Daoist are not so different from the Plato-Christian, though they are utterly different in their telling and even in their conclusions. Then, of course, there are the philosophers and the mystics who also skirt and parallel the religious correspondences. Their various “movements,” from those of Blavatsky and Bailey, to Krishnamurti and Steiner are fascinating and amazing, all as sparks of intelligence and great heart permeating all existence. They all sit with me here in my office library, waiting patiently to “hold company” with me, weighing the issues closest to the human heart and its existence with the human soul and divine spirit in the same body. If people but knew what they had to convey of their own experiences and their understanding and interpretation of that experience, they would not be the same. I am not the same. The gods and the God have spoken and continue to speak, but we do not believe that we can hear them any longer, and so we do not listen. But I have listened and, in the most profane and prosaic moment, have heard. It is not so much what they say but the fact that we realize that they have spoken to us; that they, as the ancient Greek “pagans” and Christians believed, walk amongst us still. Such realities, which we now hold to be more “sentiments” than truth, are noted in the NT, as when Christ says, “You shall find me in the very least of my brethren.” He is being both metaphorical and literal, which is exactly how both the Greek “pagans” and Christians believed that the statues or images of the gods and of God were “alive” with the presence of the god and God. Such statues were placed in locations where not only could they be visited by people, but where they could walk, frolic, make love, and otherwise romp in the absence of human beings.

Previously I spoke of the necessity of “finding context” for oneself, noting that we are “lost” until we “find a center to ourselves,” a place in which we belong and in which we are “safe.” Context, in itself, may internal and/or external, that is, we may have it “within” ourselves and/or find “belonging” outside of ourselves. Some of us attain an internal context while never finding an external one, while others find an external context, such as religious group, nation, “cause,” etc., without ever having an internal one. Of course it is probably best if one can attain to both contexts, though external contexts change over time rather too quickly and radically at times, while internal contexts may also change as we change in our self-interpretations and worldview. While “having a context” is utterly important if one is to have a “ground of being” within oneself and a “place” in one’s community, if such a context is in fact false, we have a problem with and in our very existence and being. People may collectively choose a religious or a political context for themselves which leads to their individual and collective destruction due to its inherent falseness and unreality, as when the Germans elected Hitler as their leader in the 1930s. Individuals may also interpret their own “true feelings and insights” incorrectly, for instance, if they have a belief that God does or God doesn’t exist, or the body is good or the body is evil, or people of a different race are a threat or are also human and can be trusted as such. Thus, a wrong context can lead us to personal and/or collective disaster, as evidenced throughout history.

             In my blog, Metaphysical Forces in Flux: What on Earth Is Happening? (metaphysicalforcesinplay.blogspot.com), I asked a question of the Yijing (I Ching), the ancient Chinese oracle, which I have studied and worked with over the last fifty years. I would like to be able to provide the history of this oracle system with its 4096 possible permutations that occur in the moment and movement of time but will resist in this moment. On October 28, 2016, I specifically asked: “What is happening in the world at this juncture in time?” I posed this question with a desire to understand what was occurring politically and socially in the United States, given the upcoming presidential election. Normally I tend to ask questions relating to my own life but this was more of a collectively-focused question. The response was telling. Rather than interpreting it myself, I will convey the actual words of the text, The Taoist I Ching translated by Thomas Cleary, both quoted and somewhat paraphrased. As you read, consider it a response to the circumstances of the presidential election process that had been continuing for eighteen months. My minor comments are in brackets. I have italicized sections that are worthy of note. I would hope that the reader will draw his or her own conclusions.

             First, the “current moment” is presented. Hexagram (or gua) 32: Constancy. Long persistence. Thunder, active, above, wind, penetrating, below. Acting gently as the breeze, active yet serene, neither identifying nor detaching, the mind steadfast and the will far-reaching, therefore constancy. This is genuine application in real practice. Following upon the previous hexagram fire, or illuminating the inward and the outward, aiming at profound attainment of personal realization, so that illumination is all-pervasive. But this is not possible without a constant mind, which means single-mindedly applying the will, the longer the stronger, not slacking off. Thereby one may comprehend essence and life, revealing a path of development. [18 months of campaigning definitely demonstrates “constancy.”] However, constancy must be correct; abandoning the real and entering into the false is not developmental and is faulty. Blind practitioners in the world go into deviant paths, taking what is wrong to be right, aggrandizing themselves, boasting of their practices and cultivating vain reputations, striving all their lives without ever awakening; most assuredly capable of constancy but constant in aberrated paths, not in the right path. To seek eternal life in this way hastens death; when your time is up, you will have no way out and cannot escape the blame. Therefore correctness is necessary. Even correctness is only possible through constant practice of what is correct. What is correct is the true principle, which is the Tao of body and mind, essence and life. This path appropriates yin and yang (or negative and positive), takes over creation, sheds birth and death, escapes compulsive routine. It requires flexible, gentle, gradual advance, ascending from low to high, going from shallow to deep, step by step treading in the realm of reality; only then can it be effective. A great affair which endures long unchanging requires great work that endures long unceasing before it can be achieved. The constancy that is beneficial if correct is the constancy that is beneficial if it is going somewhere. But if you want to practice what is right, first you must know what is right, investigating truth, reaching the basis of essence, thereby arriving at the universal order. The work of comprehending essence and arriving at the universal order of life is all a matter of thoroughly penetrating truth.

             Next, there are the “moving lines” which denote changes that are occurring and will occur or are recommended to occur before the final “outcome” hexagram. They are in chronological order. As the “current situation” hexagram, the parallel and correspondence to that of the presidential election is, to my mind, uncanny, and evident enough:

Moving Line 1. Deep constancy; fidelity brings misfortune. If one does not distinguish right from wrong, one enters deeply into false ideas so that they persist extensively. If one plunges in deeply without clearly understanding true principle, even if one wants to seek what is right, on the contrary one will bring on misfortune.  [This occurrence can pertain to both leader and followers.]

Moving Line 3. If one is not constant in virtue, one may be shamed; even if right, one is humiliated. One may be strong and correct and determined in practice of the Tao, but if strength is not balanced and one is in a hurry to achieve attainment, one may advance keenly yet regress rapidly, thus not being constant in virtue, and shaming oneself. What is the shame? It is the shame of setting the heart on virtue but not being able to be constant in virtue, setting the will on right yet being unable to constantly practice what is right. Following the path in practice yet giving up, even though one is correctly oriented, one is humiliated. [I would say that we have seen this occurrence come to pass.]

Moving Line 4. No field, no game. When strength is in the body of action, the time is for doing, like having fields to plow. If one dwells in a position of weakness, the will inactive, constantly embracing the Tao but unable to put it into practice, is like empty fields. This is constancy without action.

Moving Line 6. Constancy of excitement is bad. Thinking one has what one lacks, that one is fulfilled when one is really empty and aggrandizing oneself, concerned with oneself and ignoring others, is called constancy of excitement. With constant excitement, the culmination of aggrandizement is inevitably followed by ruin, the culmination of elevation is inevitably followed by a fall. Ultimately one winds up being destroyed. This is constancy fooling oneself and bringing on misfortune. The proper way was never taken. [It seems that the “fall” with its “ruin” and “misfortune” are yet to happen, however, they are foretold.]

This is followed by the “outcome,” the hexagram that follows from the current situation and the changes it holds:

Hexagram 41: Reduction. Diminishing excess. Above, still, mountain; below, joyous, lake. Having something to rejoice over, yet immediately stilling it; by stilling the joy there is no errant thought. Strength and flexibility are balanced, emptiness and fullness are in accord; strength does not become rambunctious, flexibility does not become weakness. Reduction is therefore diminishing what is excessive, adding to what is insufficient. This is the existence of increase within reduction. Previous to this is halting, in which one can stop where there is danger, preserving the primordial Tao in the midst of the temporal, which requires the removal of acquired conditioning [which is social and cultural belief that has been “learned”], i.e., traveling the path of reduction. Reduction as a path means not following desires but stopping desires; many people cannot be sincere in it, and if one is not sincere, one cannot finish what is started, will fail, and will also bring on blame. Whereas if one can be sincere, every thought is true; sincerity of mind naturally shows in action. Good fortune comes even though one does not try to bring it about. However, such sincerity must be correct, such reduction must be correct. People in the world who contemplate voidness, stick to quietude, forget about people, forget about their own bodies, and go on like this all their lives without change, are certainly sincere about reduction, but they are faithful to what they should not be faithful to, and reduce what they should not reduce—thus there is decrease with increase, which is still faulty. So if one can be correct in sincerity in reduction, discern whether it is right or wrong, whether it is false or true, understand it in the mind and prove it in actual events to the benefit of all. Actual practice in real life is most important, to finish what has been started. As long as one has not yet reached the serene, equanimous realm of the middle way, work cannot be stopped; one must daily reduce for the sake of the Tao, daily increasing one’s accomplishment. When strength and flexibility are balanced, there is flexibility in strength and strength in flexibility; strength and flexibility are as one. One has gone back to the origin; the spiritual embryo takes on form, and from this one receives the bliss of freedom and nonstriving. One’s fate now depends on oneself, not on heaven. Be sincere in reduction, and within reduction there is increase. This is no small matter. [The “serene, equanimous realm of the middle way” in which there is “balance” between “flexibility” and “strength” is the kind of reality that is seen as our future.]

*                                                              *                                                              *                                                                                      

I felt compelled to present the oracular view of “context,” both as truth and as untruth. Now, how do we find real, true, “correct” context? Reality and Truth, that in which we seek “live and move and have our being,” are most elusive, though not illusive. To see it, we must be it. there have been many people throughout history who have given themselves to this quest for reality and truth. I am aware of the sentence in the preceding hexagram: One’s fate now depends on oneself, not on heaven. There is a Tibetan Buddhist chant: Om mani padme hum. It was translated to me as “You hold the lotus in your hand,” which can be taken to mean that we contain our fate within ourselves. Our fate lies within our hands. Like “God” or “the universe,” it is not just “out there”; it is also “in here,” within ourselves, even as we are within it.

            

             *                                                              *                                                              *

--

The “dilemma” of being human, as noted, is that of our relationship with ourselves as both physical and spiritual existing together within each other. These two modes of being are quite different. The spiritual exists within the physical body, animating it with life. To be able to co-exist as matter and spirit together is the challenge of our lives. Ultimately, the body gives out and the spirit continues on. Soul is seen as the quality of spirit within the body.

             But there are two main worldviews of those that include both the physical and the spiritual in their cosmology, for many exclude one or the other. These two worldviews I would classify as Platonic-Christian and Gnostic. They are reflected also in Buddhism and Hinduism and other major and minor religions and indigenous beliefs. But how existence and the world is viewed and held makes a great difference in our ability to live with the dilemma, the paradox, of human existence.

             The Platonic-Christian are noted as one because they are quite similar, with the Christian flowing from both classical Greek “pagan” religion and Judaism. They reflect an ordered universe in which a central deity reigns through universal truths and laws. Nature, or creation, is considered overall to be “good,” as least in its essence, and the central deity is as a center to all creation, all life. In Buddhism, this center is seen not as a deity as such but as our “true nature,” as our “ground of being.” This “universal center” provides a sense of meaning and place for all creation, including humanity. “As above, so below,” means that the earth, the creation, is a reflection of heaven, the place of the gods. There is an order, a logic, a reason, a purpose for our existence. We were created to give praise to the Creator and to learn to live in the image of the divine goodness and express it in the physical world through our living and being. All society is based on this integrity and center of the universe, and the belief in this system is the glue that holds society together.

             The Gnostic views are in opposition to this. These will be closely examined in due time and are also discussed in the next few pages, but suffice it to say that they hold that our universe and all creation, including ourselves and all nature, was created in error by an ignorant deity, the son of the First Cause, our of his own desire and egotism. As such, all creation is a mistake that should never have happened. The world itself is to be shunned, even hated. Jesus Christ came to destroy our belief and faith in our creator and to lead us to the First Father who is unknown and alien to us, and who does not love us, have any regard for us whatsoever, and who does not even know we exist. There is no center to our universe, no God of our universe, no purpose to our existence except to no longer exist and to them return to the Source from which we came. We are trapped in these tainted bodies in this contaminated, ignorant world. We know nothing of ourselves or our true nature and we are not even supposed to exist. We are a mistake created by a demonic demiurge. There is nothing to love and nothing worth loving. Life in its essence is hateful and miserable; no one cares about us humans.

             There is much more to Gnosticism but this is a major part of its teachings and beliefs, which do vary according to the different Gnostic confessions. Some of this is reflected in various statements of Jesus, Paul, and others such as Augustine. It is clearly reflected in Calvinist Protestantism, which carried it to even greater extremes. It is both highly individualistic and collective. When a Savonarola takes control, heads roll. Society does not hold together under a religion that makes people go against their own better nature, their own human-kindness, and teaches them to hate both themselves and others, all in the name of God. Hans Jonas, author of The Gnostic Religion, pursues the Gnostic tradition to a more gentle, though still nihilistic, modern Existentialism, which puts more emphasis into the value and relationship between human beings who are all “thrown” into existence together and should therefore help each other, since no god or God is going to do it for them. In this respect, the Daoist notion that “one’s fate now depends on oneself, not on heaven,” rings quite true. Human beings must learn to be responsible to themselves and for themselves, and “God helps those who help themselves.” Sophocles and Euripedes wrote similar phrases in their plays and Benjamin Franklin made the quote famous in his Poor Richard’s Almanack. In the Middle Ages, the Cathars of southern France and others parts of Europe expressed quite Gnostic views and

In early October, 2016, I received an on-line invitation to a Jungian webinar that presented an agenda that examined what was happening in the American political election and why there could be so much expression and acceptance of racism, misogyny, anger, violence, hatred, etc. and what might we possibly do to bring about an atmosphere of understanding and reconciliation. It was to be hosted by five or six Jungian authors and depth psychologists. I was very interested in its purpose, especially since it corresponded closely with my own blog, Metaphysical Forces in Flux: What on Earth is Happening? At that point I wrote the following post (with some minor editing here) to my blog and sent it to Chiron Publications, which was hosting the webinar:

The Jungian webinar jogged my memory of the poem by William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming. Having spent the last few months reading and absorbing many of the original Gnostic sources and texts from the first through the third centuries CE, I realized that I had a response to the overall questions of “what is happening and why”? I also realized that Yeats, who wrote this poem after the end of World War 1, is making particular references to the ominous consequences of a devolved Gnosticism being reborn in our postmodern world. A historical perspective of the effects of the original Gnostic cultural wave is valuable if not vital to the understanding of our current world situation. It seems that there is a new, dark, dualistic, puritanical, Gnostic current flooding the world now and that conscious choices must be made now to stem the tide. I do hope that the presenters in the webinar, the “six blind Jungian monks,” take the time to consider this “food for thought” offered here.

THE SECOND COMING by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight; a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

When the Gnostic mind reigns, the center does not hold; the God of this world, this cosmos, and nature itself, is not to be trusted and no longer exists as unifying force. The unified universe of Platonism and Christianity (with counterparts in Buddhism and Hinduism and many Indigenous religions) is gone. That which was seen as a revelation or a reflection of divine beauty and order within all nature and all matter throughout the cosmos, no longer makes sense, and is no longer understood or accepted. The glue of society, culture and civilization is weakened. Nothing makes sense except to those who have lost hope in humanity and the world, have lost their senses, their connections with nature and themselves as “parts of nature,” instead, seeing existence as revolving around only themselves or, conversely, are no longer able to even see themselves but can only give credence to visions of unknown saviors; visions put forth in manipulative lies of hope and salvation. People lose their own vision, having given up their own minds and souls, their own ability to understand, and their own willingness to think for themselves. They lose common identity except that defined by fear and its unbalanced elements: hatred of and violence towards any imagined enemy, any “other,” which have been made real through absolute loneliness, alienation and despair. They gather then as hateful predators to insure their own survival even as they consume what is left of their souls and the world itself as if it were meat. For their God whom they had worshipped and held as sacred has become the Devil himself; they have been thrown into the world unawares and then out of the Garden to survive as dumb animals, but animals who are unnatural and do not belong in this landscape of earth, much less in their own physical bodies. In their state of darkness, ignorance and sleep, they are unable to see any goodness, any divinity within themselves, within nature or within their world, seeing only the dark images of their own thoughts and imaginations. And they see their lives only in and within the power of the great beast, the Demiurge, their Creator, rather than in any loving, merciful, universal Father.

When we can no longer see the beauty of nature or find ourselves in nature, when we can no longer trust nature and ourselves as the reflection, order and goodness of the “Divine,” that is, a principle of essence or ground of being, we lose hope, understanding and direction. For, from the perspective of the first Gnostic cultural wave in the first to the third centuries CE, the whole universe was created in error by Error, and we ourselves cannot escape imprisonment in such a world of ignorance and evil. Yet, as social beings, there is an innate need, or at least tendency, to find “divine essence” within ourselves and others. The ignorance that comes to possess human minds and souls devolves into the form of anti-social actions, to the point of “evil” itself. But, at that moment, does the Truth then finally arise within us? Within humanity itself? Are we suddenly somehow “made aware” and able to “see the light” of understanding? Do we become aware of the great goodness and love that exists within and among us? Or, do we fail as a species, never fulfilling the potential of our “spiritual destiny,” destined to fade away or otherwise destroy ourselves?

I see that this as a choice we must make. Though it may seem to be the other way around, being in the world is far more challenging than avoiding the world; the via positiva is far more difficult than the via negativa, the kataphatic far more harsh than the apophatic. This a choice which requires that we sacrifice such pleasures as avoidance of the world’s helter-skelter and learn to find peace and quiet in the very midst of frenetic, distracting existence. It requires that we come together, cease our endless judgment and division, and be willing to trust others and ourselves. It is our purpose to create a “center to hold” if human life is to be able to continue in love, goodness, reason, and heartfulness.

Gnosis has devolved into dark division and separateness; the “elect” judge and condemn those who do not “know the secrets of God” but are simply of kind and good heart. Living is not a mental exercise, no matter how erudite or impressive. Rather, it is an act of love and faith in that love of all that lives. If we cannot act lovingly towards others, ourselves, and the planet itself, we are doomed. If the split way of seeing continues, we will continue to split ourselves, to disconnect and destroy ourselves. The Gnostic vision of cosmic duality must by choice and understanding be replaced with an evolved Platonic vision and version of existence in which we are able to experience and recognize a “center that holds,” a center that exists throughout the cosmos and that is one of love and awareness of others as ourselves, in which we treat each other as we would like to be treated.

*           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *           *

Gnosticism, so far presented here, has historical substance and reality, however, Gnosticism is also an archetype, a set of aspects ever-present, manifesting anew as powerful cultural and epic waves in the currents of history, often as seemingly necessary and worthy purging social movements but resulting in chaos and the destruction of order, including any sense of “center.” Yeats, well-versed in Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Theosophy, in The Second Coming, recognizes the “widening gyre” of the cosmic spheres meant to both define and contain the differing cosmic elements, as becoming unbalanced and unable to “hold its center.” We “falconers” who had once been able to merge and find ourselves within the “falcon” and act as part of and in accordance with nature, have lost this ability as we have accepted the Gnostic tenets of the essential “error” of our being, nature, and all creation, in which we reject the material world, including our own flesh, as anathema to our “true divine being.” In the Gnostic view, we are prisoners of ignorance and evil in this universe of matter: there is no virtue, no trust, no innocence, no “conviction,” no consciousness (for we have been created by a lesser god of pride and ignorance, who is compelled to imprison us in his world and maintain darkness so that the other-worldly light within us may not be revealed to us). And those minions, called Archons, of this mind come to dominate and to infect and enthuse humans to the point of “passionate intensity” in the creation of a world of even greater loss and depravity. Yeats recognizes this “Spiritus Mundi,” this Spirit (God) of the World as Evil personified, perhaps as the Antichrist, as Ialdabaoth, the Creator of the cosmos, the Demiurge, in the form of the Sphinx (with human head and lion’s body) arising from the desert, the realm of the dead and the remote past. These images are Gnostic ones. Has the “rough beast” been born into the world?

Commentators on Yeats’s poem note that this was the world he had witnessed during the First World War and was now observing—and experiencing—as the devastation of the civilization he had known. Perhaps what is occurring in the world now is simply an extension of that process, made here and now through the immediacy and strange intimacy of the internet. Perhaps it is quite similar to the “Gnostic revolution” that occurred twenty centuries ago and brought down the “pagan” Platonic and Christian “universal orders” held in place by “divine powers.” But then, Gnostic duality (with its Manichean-Iranian version deriving from the dual and independently “good” and “evil” gods of Zoroastrianism, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, and the Syrian version of Valentinus, deriving from Greek philosophy itself, perhaps Egyptianized) has remained quite alive throughout history to our current time. Sts. Paul and Augustine carried it into Roman Catholicism and Calvin and Luther into Protestantism. Existentialism and Marxism hold much of Gnostic archetypes, if not actual beliefs. And now it surely appears that “things fall apart” and “the center cannot hold.”

I would be remiss if I did not elaborate a bit more on “original Gnostic tradition,” since this is, as I see it, the archetypal and metaphysical force that has come into play in a most powerful way in our world. In his Preface to The Gnostic Religion, Hans Jonas summarizes the “Gnostic epic,” so to speak, as follows:

Almost all the action would be in the heights, in the divine or angelic or daimonic realm, a drama of pre-cosmic persons… And yet that transcendental drama before all time, depicted in the actions and passions of manlike figures, would be of intense human appeal: divinity tempted, unrest stirring among the blessed Aeons, God’s erring Wisdom, the Sophia, falling prey to her folly, wandering in the void and darkness of her own making, endlessly searching, lamenting suffering, repenting, laboring her passion into matter, her yearning into soul; a blind and arrogant Creator believing himself the Most High and lording it over the creation, the product, like himself, of fault and ignorance; the Soul, trapped and lost in the labyrinth of the world, seeking to escape and frightened back by the gatekeepers of the cosmic prison, the terrible archons; a Savior from the Light beyond venturing into the nether world, illumining the darkness, opening a path, healing the divine breach. (xiii)

Let us briefly compare what might be called “classical Greek Platonism” and “classical Gnosticism,” as presented by Jonas:

Plotinus maintains the unity of all being in the universe, with no essential separation of the human and the non-human realm. Man is in his essence kindred to the whole cosmos … [and he is endowed with] the best in him, namely reason… He actualizes his kinship with the cosmic powers, that is, … he increases the original generic community of his being and that of the total cosmos [when he utilizes reason].

Gnosticism, on the contrary, removes man, in virtue of his essential belonging to another realm, from all sameness with the world, which now is nothing but bare “world,” and confronts him with its totality as the absolutely different. Apart from his accessory outer layers contributed by the world, man by his inner nature is acosmic; to such a one, all the world is indifferently alien. Where there is ultimate otherness of origin, there can be kinship neither with the whole nor with any part of the universe. (263)

I quote Jonas on Gnosticism’s historical and culture influence and effect in the first few centuries CE and ask the reader to compare the Gnostic archetype and historical reality as it affected that world to its seeming affect in our current one:

The gnostic movement—such we must call it—was a widespread phenomenon in the critical centuries indicated, feeding like Christianity on the impulses of a widely prevalent human situation, and therefore erupting in many places, many forms, and many languages. First among the features … is the radically dualistic mood which underlies the gnostic attitude as a whole and unifies its widely diversified, more or less systematic expressions. It is on this primary human foundation of a passionately felt experience of self and world, that the formulated dualistic doctrines rest. The dualism is between man and the world, and concurrently between the world and God. … In this three-term configuration—man, world, God—man and God belong together in contraposition to the world, but are, in spite of this essential belonging-together, in fact separated precisely by the world. To the Gnostic, this fact is the subject of revealed knowledge, and it determines gnostic eschatology: we may see in it the projection of his basic experience, which thus created for itself its own revelatory truth [my emphasis]. Primary would then be the feeling of an absolute rift between man and that in which he finds himself lodged—the world. It is this feeling which explicates itself in the forms of objective doctrine. In its theological aspect this doctrine states that the Divine is alien to the world and has neither part nor concern in the physical universe; that the true god, strictly transmundane, is not revealed or even indicated by the world, and is therefore the Unknown, the totally Other, unknowable in terms of any worldly analogies. Correspondingly, in its cosmological aspect it states that the world is the creation not of God but of some inferior principle whose law it executes; and, in it anthropological aspect, that man’s inner self, the pneuma (“spirit” in contrast to “soul” or psyche) is not part of the world, of nature’s creation and domain… . (326-327)

… whoever has created the world, man does not owe him allegiance, nor respect to his work. His work, though incomprehensibly encompassing man, does not offer the stars by which he can set his course, and neither does his proclaimed wish and will. Since not the true God can be the creator of that to which selfhood feels so utterly a stranger, nature merely manifests its lowly demiurge: as a power deep beneath the Supreme God, upon which even man can look down from the height of his god-kindred spirit, this perversion of the Divine has retained of it only the power to act, but to act blindly, without knowledge and benevolence. Thus did the demiurge create the world out of ignorance and passion. (327)

The world, then, is the product, and even the embodiment, of the negative of knowledge. What it reveals is unenlightened and therefore malignant force, proceeding from the spirit of self-assertive power, from the will to rule and coerce. The mindlessness of this will is the spirit of the world, which bears no relation to understanding and love. … Power thus becomes the chief aspect of the cosmos, and its inner essence is ignorance. To this, the positive complement is that the essence of man is knowledge—knowledge of self and of God: this determines his situation as that of the potentially knowing in the midst of the unknowing, of light in the midst of darkness, and this relation is at the bottom of his being alien, without companionship in the dark vastness of the universe. (327-328)

What sticks in my mind is our “situation as that of the potentially knowing in the midst of the unknowing, of light in the midst of darkness.” As I previously noted, this is precisely the choice that must be made by those who “possess knowledge,” specifically, “knowledge of God.” Jonas notes the presence of “understanding and love” as, in my estimation, our proper and true ground of being. I do not wish to present Gnosticism as inherently wrong-minded or “evil”; it is a creation of dualistic perspectives with their own mythology and cosmology that took root in the minds of many at a juncture in history. It is nihilistic, anarchic, and even anti-social in scope and practice. I would submit that my criticism of Gnosticism may be more of a criticism of a most diminished human condition. Historically, those who “possess gnosis” of the transcendent, believe that they possess such knowledge or are the “elect of God,” have tended to see themselves as “superior” to others, and conveying this “superiority” to their impressionable and “passionate” followers. Even if they did not impose their beliefs upon others, their belief in their exclusivity was socially and culturally separative and divisive. They often chose to no longer operate within the common law and only recognized their own. Society broke down: the center could not hold. This is not to say that they did not possess true knowledge or even transcendent gnosis; they very well may. But, in the world of human beings, such gnosis “goes to the head but not the heart,” feeding their sense of separateness—and paranoia. When fear for survival takes over, there is no gnosis, no matter how right or how true; there is only catastrophe.

There are a number of other “Gnostic sources” I have consulted, including Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity from 330 BC to 330 AD by Francis Legge, Pagans and Christians: Religion and the Religious Life from the Second to the Fourth Century by Robin Lane Fox, The Other Bible edited by Willis Barnstone, The Confessions of St. Augustine (which is quite Manichean) translated and edited by Albert Cook Outler, and others. So far, Jonas seems to have the deepest understanding and the most thorough research. As a philosopher himself, he is familiar with both ancient and modern philosophers as well as both “pagan” classical Greek and early Christian apologists who understood Gnostic teachings well in order to be able to provide persuasive arguments against them. These apologists and critics of Gnosticism include Plotinus, Augustine, Irenaeus, Origen, and Tertullian. Jonas realizes that Gnosticism is informed by Christianity and Classical Greek thought and vice-versa. The threads of each are interwoven and Jonas is quite careful when separating them in order to reveal how Gnosticism is much the opposite of the other two, which are quite similar in many ways. Finding the “right” quotes from Jonas in order to display the various essential Gnostic teachings and their applications has been a most difficult process, for Gnosticism has many different threads. This one, by Jonas pertaining “gnostic dualism” and the consequent view of the psyche, also in light of the fact that Jung himself claimed to be “gnostic,” provides food for thought:

Gnostic dualism … regards the “soul” itself, the spiritual organ of man’s belonging to the world, as no less than his body an effluence of the cosmic powers and therefore as an instrument of their dominion over his true but submerged self. As the “terrestrial envelopment of the pneuma,” the “soul” is the exponent of the world within man—the world is in the soul. A profound distrust, therefore, of one’s own inwardness, the suspicion of demonic trickery, the fear of being betrayed into bondage inspire gnostic psychology. The alienating forces are located in man himself as composed of flesh, soul, and spirit. The contempt of the cosmos radically understood includes the contempt of the psyche [my emphasis]. Therefore what is of the psyche is incapable of being elevated to the condition of virtue. It is either to be left to itself, to the play of its forces and appetite, or to be reduced by mortification, or sometimes even extinguished in ecstatic experience. [This] indicates that the negative attitude to the world, or the negative quality of the world itself, though it does not give room to virtue in the Greek sense, still leaves open the choice between several modes of conduct in which the negativity is turned into a principle of praxis. (269)

The praxis may therefore be that of the libertine, the ascetic or puritan, of the loss of self in fantasy or altered reality (which is not so different than the first two).

I introduced “Gnosticism” as a major, if not the major, influence of change that has occurred in civilization in our present time. I believe it affects the whole world at this point. In Gnostic cosmology (of the Valentinian-Syrian school), the realm of Light is attacked by the powers of Darkness, which have each so far existed separately and independently of each other. Light sacrifices a part of itself, seemingly losing the battle to Darkness, believing that the devouring (and consequent absorption) of Light by Darkness will bring imbalance and disorganization to the Dark, thus halting its invasion of Heaven, the Pleroma. This is how the Light-Dark polarity works out in the West. In the East, the Daoists of two thousand years ago were able to maintain “Heaven” and “Earth,” “Light” and “Dark” separately but equally and in relationship to each other, each in its proper place and, in that respect, keeping the other in its place. But now it seems there is no longer any safety from the loss of the “center that holds all together.” I believe the “Gnostic” archetype and historical image is an effective and perhaps true representation of a force now both loose and loosed upon the world. It is insane, without any center at all, and it spreads itself like an infection of fear, loss of self, and extreme, passionate, and violent quest for this lost self. We who claim and believe ourselves to know point righteous fingers at “those others” who are “ignorant, irresponsible, inferior.” Each individual believes himself or herself to be “right.” We may have reached a crisis of individuality in which the pursuit of the “rights of the individual” destroy the cohesiveness of the whole. Or separate, warring groups of people destroy the cohesiveness of the whole.

To me, as noted earlier here, it seems that the answer begins with each of us choosing to be with others rather than against them. To do that we must be able to recognize ourselves as the other. This is most difficult for those with the Gnostic temperament of distrust of the world-as-ignorance. The world we see is the world we have created through our beliefs. If we loved one another, the world would be a loving place. If we forgave one another, the world would be forgiving; we would have another chance. This requires profound sacrifice from each of us who may actually “possess gnosis,” but also possess an inherent fear for our own survival and see ourselves as quite separate from the person next to us or from the group of others who seem so different from us. It has to start somewhere. What comes to my mind are the Irish women, Catholic and Protestant, who chose to stand in between the Irish men, Catholic and Protestant, who were all ready to start firing at each other towards the end of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Our lives may not be so immediate or dramatic as that, but it does become a matter of “turning the other cheek” (which is a “Lighting of the Dark”) in a world of intolerance, fear, and blame. How do we change what people think, much less how they think? By changing what we think, how we think—of ourselves, others, the world, and life itself. Kindness, love, forgiveness, understanding, appreciation, trust have to start with ourselves. We bring a calmness and then a peace; a sanity and a sense of safety and acceptance. I think this is how the world changes. This is how we bring about “Heaven on Earth.”

I have thus far avoided using Jungian terms since this essay is meant also for the general public. Of course I am speaking of individuation and how to get there. The process of individuation itself can make us too separative in our individuality. Daryl Sharp, paraphrasing Jung, in The Jung Lexicon, writes:

The aim is not to overcome one’s personal psychology, to become perfect, but to become familiar with it. … Individuation involves an increasing awareness of one’s unique psychological reality, including personal strengths and limitations, and at the same time a deeper appreciation of humanity in general [my emphasis]. (68)

Jung’s own thoughts regarding the pitfalls in the process of individuation, as noted in his Collected Works, also come to the fore:

As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation [my emphasis]. (“Definitions,” CW6, par. 758)

Individuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to itself. (“On the Nature of the Psyche,” CW8, par. 432)

Individuation has two principal aspects: in the first place it is an internal and subjective process of integration, and in the second it is an equally indispensable process of objective relationship. Neither can exist without the other … [my emphasis]. (“The Psychology of the Transference,” CW16, par. 448)

Sharp interprets the split that can occur in the process of individuation, according to Jung, and Jung more specifically presents the consequences if there is not adequate “production of values” to the collective world in which one lives:

Individuation and a life lived by collective values are nevertheless two divergent destinies. In Jung’s view they are related to one another by guilt. Whoever embarks on the personal path becomes to some extent estranged from collective values, but does not thereby lose those aspects of the psyche which are inherently collective. To atone for this “desertion,” the individual is obliged to create something of worth for the benefit of society [my emphasis]. (68)

Individuation cuts one off from personal conformity and hence from collectivity. That is the guilt which the individuant leaves behind him for the world, that is the guilt he must endeavor to redeem. He must offer a ransom in place of himself, that is, he must bring forth values which are an equivalent substitute for his absence in the collective personal sphere. Without this production of values, final individuation is immoral and—more than that—suicidal [my emphasis]….

The individuant has no a priori claim to any kind of esteem. He has to be content with whatever esteem flows to him from outside by virtue of the values he creates. Not only has society a right, it also has a duty to condemn the individuant if he fails to create equivalent values. (“Adaptation, Individuation, Collectivity,” CW18, pars. 1095f)

What I refer to as “devolved Gnosticism” is a description of the “negative values” that derive from it and draw one into oneself and out of the world and being in and connected with the world, with others. Jung recognizes this as well and says, to paraphrase, that there must be a “balancing out,” as it were, between that which one takes from the world and that which one gives back to the world, the collective. He pointedly notes, “Without this production of values, final individuation is immoral and—more than that—suicidal.” It seems that there has been much taken and not enough production of values in service and contribution to the world, that the movement inward of those modern-day Gnostics has metaphysically and literally “sucked the world dry,” that the negative, hopeless mind-set of too many people of influence has become a self-fulfilling prophecy spreading throughout the world. And so, those of us who may and can, must now make the choice to change the way we think, the way we see, and what we think and what we see. It is up to us to “turn the tide.” 

*                                            *                                                 *

TO JOSEPH: THE STRANGE BUT TRUE STORY OF YOUR LIFE

Dearest Joe,

             As I look at your school photo probably from 1955, I know exactly the bewilderment and confusion you felt. I see the sorrow and disappointment in your eyes, and the grimness through which you try to smile for the photographer, who tells you to “say cheese,” but you cannot; you can only move your lips into a line of resignation. You are wondering, I know, “Where is the hope I’m supposed to have? Where is Jesus who is supposed to love me, to take care of me?” I know that these were your prayers, which are not supposed to be the prayers of a child. I know that you had already had experiences and memories that let you see through and even beyond time and space and form, but that you did not understand them and found yourself even more confused and disappointed and alone. I know that you lived in fear, both at home and at school, and that only when you were alone in nature, away from home and school, did you feel any peace. I know that you lived very much in your own world, which became too large to bear at times but never too small. I know that you did not understand the world very much, even feeling that you did not belong in this world, even in the body you possessed. And that you could not understand any of these things to the point that you were almost constantly overwhelmed by it all, bewildered by life itself, especially by people, and particularly by people who came too close to you, and that you either became paralyzed or like a wounded animal when they tried to touch you or hold you. You had been like this from a very young age. I will tell you more.

             I know that you sensed and had learned from your own experiences, even at a very young age, that you were neither locked in to time or space, and so you were aware of yourself in many times and many spaces. In your despair, you called out to your future self, me, to come and help you, for it seemed that you would be trapped in this existence as a child forever. You knew you could not comprehend or help yourself, but that perhaps I, the future you, might be at least able to explain to you what was happening and how you would finally be able to get through it all and survive as yourself. Well, Joe, I have finally come, finally arrived, to help you. I know you are still trapped as that bewildered little boy and I have come to free you after sixty-two years. It has taken me this long to find you and to understand exactly how you feel. It has been too long but I am here now for you. And I love you very much. It has taken me this long to even realize how fettered I was in the same chains that have imprisoned you for so long. I am with you now, Joe.

             When I tell you things about your life and about you, you may remember them well or not. Sometimes there is too much pain in remembering, so we choose not to, and try our best to get on with living our lives. I did this, but eventually we have to return and unravel and unlearn all that became twisted and consequently learned in the wrong way. I have tried to do this.

             You were born six weeks before your nine-month birth date. You realized that you had to free yourself then or that you would die before you could be born. Your mother had to inhale your father’s cloud of constant cigarette smoke and it was filling your little lungs and choking you, smothering you. So you kicked hard and she fell on the ice and down some stairs, breaking her water. You were born in the taxi on the way to the hospital and were so small and frail that the doctors had you put in an incubator, a little box with a lamp inside it to keep you warm, just like the kind that was used to hatch motherless chickens. You were fed with a bottle and were so small and frail that you were not held much in the two months that you were there before you were allowed to go home. You did not learn to “bond” through human touch and had become solitary and alone in your existence. When your mother tried to pick you up, you squirmed, fought, and screamed; human touch was overwhelmingly intense, even painful to you. It felt as if you were being shocked with electricity. Even when people looked directly at you into your eyes, that too was overwhelmingly intense and painful; you could feel the energy from their eyes going into you through your eyes and it was so powerful that you felt as if it would literally cause you to explode, as if you were being electrocuted. You could only bear to look at people peripherally and could not bear being touched or even having people in your close proximity. Your mother would bring you in your carriage to the park and place you under the trees blowing the wind, where you would watch for hours on end. I am still mesmerized by trees blowing in the wind and still could watch for hours.

             You were not a “normal” child. I know you really did try to “fit in,” but even your parents couldn’t understand the topics that you brought up at the dinner table. Once you got over the shock of transferring from a small, “country” public school, Roosevelt School, in Colonie, New York, to a large city, Catholic school in Albany, you did “take” to the whole concept of “Jesus, my friend” thoroughly, and would talk about concepts from the Baltimore Catechism such as the “nature of God as Supreme Being,” the “nature of the essence of love,” and other such topics with your parents. They had no idea what you were talking about whatsoever, and could only shake their heads and make fun of you by calling you, “Pope Joseph”; “The Pope speaks,” they would say in their inability to understand the philosophical, theological, ethical and moral issues that you were trying to convey. It had taken you much longer than normal to learn to talk; your parents thought you were “retarded,” though were too embarrassed to seek medical attention for you. And then when you did start talking, you immediately started asking philosophical, existential questions that were beyond their level of superficial conversation. You were serious and wanted to understand what life was about, but your father could only ridicule you. This is when you developed a level of stuttering equivalent to a speech impediment. You could barely get a sentence out without severe stuttering and having to stop speaking. Within a year you became a child who hardly ever spoke, and so your teachers thought you were “retarded” (which was the word commonly used at that time) as well. You were anxious and distracted. Perhaps it was that you had to be “somewhere else” in your mind because the invasiveness and demand of your environment and the world itself was just too unbearable, too difficult to satisfy. I know that at school you would look out the window at the trees blowing in the wind and lose yourself in that movement and beauty, only to be sharply interrupted by the nun’s shrill demanding voice: “Joseph, pay attention. Answer my question.” You would look up, now afraid, licking your lips, and suddenly would feel sharp pain on the knuckles of your right hand as she hit you hard with a ruler. You would cry out but more inside than out, and then become very quiet and afraid. You felt so forsaken you could not even cry; but tears flowed inside your being. You would stammer something in response to her question that you could not even recall hearing. In disgust, she would then call on someone else, and you would go back into your sad, lonely dream. The other children did not laugh; they too were afraid. Going to this school with its demanding, harsh nuns all dressed in black, with clicking rosary beads around their waist, clicking as they rushed down the aisle with a ruler in their hand to smack your knuckles or to hit you upside the head with their open hand, made living into a constant hell for you.

I suppose it is a bit unfair to say that you were not “a normal child.” Are there actually any “normal” children at all? There are definitely “normal” adults. They are the ones who carry on their lives without ever questioning who or what they are or what they are doing. They go through their lives as they believe they’re supposed to and then they die as they’re supposed to. This is not a bad thing at all; in fact it may be quite fortunate for those who are not “normal.” You were normal enough to pass for normal to a certain extent. In today’s world you might have been diagnosed in one way or another and even placed in “special ed,” but now is now and then was then.

             You did eventually adapt yourself to the social world of your peers and the adults, perhaps by the time you reached puberty. But prior to that you were very solitary, not so antisocial as aloof and unsocial. At age ten, a boy, Frankie D., who lived three houses down the street, who was sickly and frail, perhaps having been affected with polio at a certain point earlier in his life, and who the kids on the block called “Drizzlepus” because he looked so sad as if he were going to cry, invited you to his house. In truth his mother invited me in as I was walking by to have tea and cookies with Frankie, who was a bit younger than me, whom I didn’t know well and wondered why he moved so slowly and stiffly like an old man, but I never thought any less of him. All I remember is that he brought me to his room and proudly showed me his stamp collection, with the stamps mounted in books with pictures of stamps. The moment I saw the collection and how dignified and cool he felt about it, I was hooked on stamp collecting. He had been able to create a whole world for himself that he could call his own. For the next five years or so I would spend every dime and all my time on creating a most incredible stamp collection, alone, sequestered in my bedroom. I would relish and cherish every single moment of it. I would be able to shut out the whole world and live in one of my own making in which I was the master. I absolutely loved it. And I became quite knowledgeable in the hobby in its myriad and esoteric details. In this time I somehow found a Russian penpal, probably through Cub Scouts, who sent me letters with Russian stamps on them, which I soaked off for my collection, and found a message scribbled underneath the stamps, that said “Please help me.” I put a dollar, earned from collecting bottles and hauling them a mile away to the closest store to collect deposits, in the next letter I sent and never heard back from my friend again. But the stamp collecting saved my poor little psyche from having to deal with an insane world. I still had to go to school but I played sick as often as possible by pressing my forehead up against the warm radiator, sprinkling some water on my face, and going into my sleeping parents’ room and telling my mother, “Mom, I don’t feel so good.” She would put her hand up to feel my forehead, and would say, “My God, Joseph, you have a fever. Go to bed.” She would call the school and I would be home free. I was able to miss many days of school this way, which was wonderful. As time went on, she paid me fifty cents an hour to collate her many Chamber of Commerce mailings consisting of so many pages that I lined them up from the dining room into the kitchen which included the dining room table, the buffet, and the kitchen table. One these days she would tell my father I was sick and call the school. I would collate while watching Truth or Consequences and I Love Lucy, and get paid for this. It was like heaven.

             *                                                              *                                                              *

I know you seek to understand what is happening in your life now at age eight. I know you seek to comprehend the very dynamics of life itself, wondering why it is as it is and even why and how you can come to such false conclusions. You have already begun the “quest” of your whole life: to find context of being, order, and meaning. You will seek it everywhere: through relationship and love of others, through nature and the physical pleasures of the body and mind themselves, through detail and focus of mind in minute work, through spiritual paths and the many ways to God and many divinities, and spiritual paths and others ways that avoid God altogether, through the responsibilities of caring for others and your family, for taking care of those who need you and upon whom you may focus your attention rather than only yourself. Such choices will lead you into great anger and despair but also great joy and fulfillment. You will experience profound pain on many levels of being as well as the pleasures of life. You will suffer for others and for yourself. Your remembered mistakes and oblivious hurting of others will cause you heartache and regret throughout your life. In the end you may become a decent human being who loves and cares about others and knows yourself to a much greater degree. You may attain an understanding of who you are and what life is, where you meet and what is required. You will find that there are as many vantage points as there are contexts and that all orderings must give way to chaos so that you may pick up the pieces and reconstruct order in a manner than now fits who you are, for old ways die hard. Yet context and order must be sought, found, created, destroyed, remembered, and recreated. In this process meaning is found and purpose exists. To be human is to climb the highest mountain and gaze upon all existence and to descend into the deepest, darkest abyss and experience the inherent agony of humanity, especially your own. Though life be Heaven, it is also Hell. One must learn to seek the Heaven within themselves and how to maintain it without themselves leading them astray so that they forget who and where and what and why they are. If we cannot find the Heaven, we are destined to Hell until the next opportunity, the next quest, the next lifetime, the next form, presents itself, which all, as is taught by some, is our own choice.

I have searched for “understanding of existence” which I see as “context” since I was quite young. I went in many directions, perhaps all leading up (or down) the same mountain. There was always love for a woman which I did find and which is quite real to me. There is also love for my children, one of whom, with autism, I helped to care for for many years. Those were “immediate” directions. But before that, even as a younger child, I sought to understand why I was here and who I was, believing that a relationship with God would accomplish that. At the time, while being “taught” and otherwise indoctrinated in a Roman Catholic school, it was quite “natural” for me to foster a relationship with Jesus. I became a very devout little boy, going to Mass and receiving communion every day before school. I felt very good and blessed. This went sour as a result of continuing physical abuse upon me and my own guilt about all my various “sins” which “hurt” Jesus. I figured that if I distanced myself and he were no longer my friend, he would not be so hurt. I was also of the belief that he would either protect me or I would have enough faith that I would no longer have to live in fear or experience physical pain. So, due to my over-expectations of what God was supposed to do, I lost much faith in such a context. This process of strong belief and faith fading away would come and go many times in my life. At this point, I live with the facts that I have very great faith and that I have no faith at all; that all depends on what I do with it, and that in the context that God loves me almost unconditionally, though not quite.

But “context” is not something to be found by “searching,” for it is always present; we just don’t see it and think that we must “find it.” There is “realization of context” which we can and do experience, usually without awareness of it. When one “sits zazen” beneath the great clouds of one’s thought, there may be times when it seems that the clouds of thought part and one sees the sun shining in the heavens, even for just a moment. That is context. When there is no thought of oneself, one ceases to exist, even if just for that moment. And one realizes that the sun shines above the clouds and is there whether it can be seen or not. That is “realization of context.” A religious person might realize, “God is always with me,” in the same sense, though it must be a God free of all responsibility for “saving” anyone. It is this kind of context that provides us with the ability and the knowledge that such a force or power, of God or life-giving sun, is present within our humanness, within ourselves. We tend to literalize everything, “seeking a way,” a method, a technique, a belief, a ritual to “make things happen” as we would like, to make a God in our likeness and image to serve our needs and wants. If we have a realization of context that is strong enough and makes enough of an impression upon us, within us, we do not forget. We may not want to remember but we do not forget. We discover and finally have to admit to ourselves that we “know,” even though a great part of ourselves would much prefer to remain in the seeming bliss of ignorance.

But one cannot cling to any kind or any remembrance of “knowing”; it can only be known in each moment. “Context” is not a mental construct but a state of being that can only be known in each moment. Such knowing is something I have not accomplished or attained well enough that awareness of it dominates my thought, my state of mind and being. Such “knowing” or “context” does not mean that one is always “aware” or “content” or “in control.” Great waves of sadness and despair, I believe, are inherent in the human condition. Paradoxically, such “knowing” causes one to doubt and to question the so-called “truth” even more. I question my own sense of awareness, my own ability to discern and discriminate and interpret what happens within myself and within life, most of all. And another paradox is that I do believe in a “merciful and loving God” just as I was taught, which is so difficult to reconcile with an often unmerciful and hating world I cannot avoid seeing. It may be that “we see ourselves in the world,” that we “project ourselves” upon that which we see. It may also be that there are elements “out there” that are dangerous to us, physically, psychologically, and spiritually. And we are consequently drawn to believe and to have faith in a God who can and will help us, and that, to complete the apparent tautology of such belief, if we are not helped as we would like, we are willing to accept what happens as “God’s will,” in the belief that we do not know God’s mind or the “plan” for us. And so we maintain hope and faith even in “all possibilities,” including “the impossible.” I am faced personally every day with someone who suffers in excruciation, as if she were verily nailed upon a cross. I am to believe in a “merciful and loving God” even as I witness her intense suffering and pain. I am to believe that there is “purpose” in this, that there are “vital spiritual lessons to be learned” through all this. Her pain is and becomes my pain. Her suffering is my suffering. There is no possible way to shield myself from her pain, or even the pain of others. This is “context”; this is learning to “be with” that with which one comes face to face in life. And when these “great waves of sadness and despair” pass over me, even overwhelming me for a time, I am in it and am with it; I know that there is no escape, though life provides us with so many distractions from being with ourselves in this way.