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April 7 , 2007
PREDATOR-TRAPS, PORNOGRAPHY, AND BEYOND
Recently there’s been quite a bit of attention given to Dateline NBC’s show “To Catch a Predator” (which is basically a sting operation devoted to identifying and detaining potential child sexual abusers). Those caught -- at the address where they had gone to meet their prey -- typically deny that they’d had any intentions of being sexual with the children they had met online (and whom they had been led to believe were home alone), despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Pedophiliac protests.
A trap? Yes. Some may quibble about the ethical fine points of such entrapment, but is it not far more important to ask why this much-needed operation is largely confined to a television newsmagazine? Why are our governments not running such programs -- or something like them -- on a massive scale? Why the far from full-out effort? Why the lack of energy for such an obviously worthwhile undertaking?
Part of the answer lies in the pornographic nature of our culture, along with the exaggeratedly tolerant or “liberated” -- or, by contrast, “look the other way” -- approach many take to it. There is a still largely unexamined (or only superficially considered) male prerogative in contemporary society regarding a man’s “need” for sexual outlets. We don’t make more fuss over rape because we -- not all of us, but still plenty of us -- have mixed feelings about it. Yes, of course it’s bad, states the disembodied thinking that serves as a refuge for masculine dumbness, but what about that alluring dress she was wearing, or that smile she gave you, or the arousal her presence stirred in you?
And here’s the cold shower (no gradual entry into it here): If we are into adult porn, we are, however indirectly, also supporting child porn, no matter how ardently we may draw a line between the two. Same industry, same business, same promise, same hook. Are “adults” who are into porn -- using it, relying on it, okaying and justifying it -- really adults, or just adult-erated children and adolescents, trying to find some release through porn from the very pain that generates porn?
Porn is porn. We can divide it up, like a country being sectioned into counties or provinces, and we can list and crayon the differences between the various sections ad nauseum, but it’s still the same country. Fucking a fantasy, or watching a fucking fantasy, simply distracts and maroons us from what really matters. With an ease as banal as it’s astonishing, many of us make getting off more important than being connected or, God help us, aware of what the fuck we’re actually up to while we’re being sexual. When sex for us is no more than a matter of making ends meet, we lose, no matter how exciting our ride.
Pornography is dehumanizing objectification in erotic drag, both depending upon and reinforcing obsessive interest in sexual activity and possibility. Pornography doesn‘t care about who it fucks with, so long as it has their business.
But neither condemnation nor neurotic tolerance bring us any closer to dealing sanely with pornography. It still burns, and will burn, and burn far and wide, until we stop sexualizing our distress, wounds, and unresolved needs — which means releasing sex from the obligation to make us feel better.
Pornography’s fire does not purify, but only inflames and engorges, both distracting us from our pain and bloating us with such heated urge that we seemingly have to have some sort of relief, or discharge of energy. However, such discharge doesn’t rejuvenate or truly ease us, but only sedates us, dulling our edge, leaving us less motivated than ever to getting to the heart of what is driving us to so desperately seek the excitement and payoffs of our pornographic proclivities.
As long as we men make women responsible for our sexual arousal -- “she turns me on” or “she makes me crazy [with lust]” -- we are, however slightly, on the same side as those who seek children for their sexual pleasure. Think of the logic: If “she brings out the beast in me,” how can I not help “pouncing on her”? After all, if she’s responsible for stirring up all that animality in me, what am I supposed to do? Many of us are not inclined to take charge of our charge (charge being the amplification of sexual excitation), choosing instead to play victim to it. Very convenient...
More than a few men cling to (or have a soft spot for) such “logic,” thinking that women -- and sometimes also girls -- actually want the sex which they’re trying to get away from; and they reinforce this assumption through dehumanizing the women they want to fuck. Think of all the soldiers who fucked the broken, clearly traumatized young women who populated the Bosnian rape camps -- how far gone did these men have to be to go ahead and do what they did? Such gross violation -- not only of the women, but also of their own nature -- could only be engaged in when they were cut off from their own humanity. Plus, if we’re under enough stress, and ejaculation was our default when we were miserable, uptight, or anxious teens, we are probably going to rationalize our “need” to have some sexual release when we’re stressed, perhaps even under highly questionable conditions. Thus does sexual violation slide into the territory known as “normal.”
DOLLHOUSE BLUES
Dark the swell of frozen purple
Iron slabs of sky scraping the stubbled hills
Frostbitten air sucking dry whatever’s still alive
Wind’s bruising howl framing the pastel desolation
Houses nailed-down boxes in a deserted warehouse
Creaking with cold, jammed with fireside distraction
Dark the swell of frozen need
Playing house day and night
Two-car caskets of buried longing
Mommy giving Daddy her back night after night
Daddy going to Daughter with some chill-defying heat
Crawling over her with his desperate meat
While Mommy stays firmly asleep
Bustling about in psychic gristle
Letting the wind do her crying
Sitting tight amidst all her books
While her lover howls outside
Dollhouse blues too down to sing
Daddy’s riddled with guilt, keeping busy
Daughter’s frightened numb, keeping mute
Mommy’s baking up a storm, keeping mum
No one’s talking about it
Dollhouse blues played with three broken strings
Unheard through the cracks
Little bird dying, too frozen for crying
Too hurt to sense the deeper dying
The passage through all the pain
The healing that cannot be denied
When true parenting takes to heart what’s inside
Governments are not making a full-out, committed effort to round up those who are seeking to fuck with children, simply because they have other agendas that they make more important, like getting re-elected. And there may be a darker reason: If some sexual abusers -- or would-be sexual abusers -- of children are in high places (and there’s no reason to believe that they are not), then they’re likely going to be doing whatever they can to obstruct whatever processes might expose them. This is not paranoia. The sexualizing of our unresolved needs and wounds goes on at all levels of society; few are those who have released their sexuality from the obligation to make them feel better.
The back pages of one of our local papers is totally devoted to ads for fucking-for-hire. Prostitutes, female, male, and otherwise -- all there for men. To call the advertisers sex trade workers is a fucking bypassing of an enormous amount of pain. (And to call prostitution something other than prostitution says a lot about our denial of how we may be prostituting ourselves, and not just sexually.) But before we throw standard knee-jerk moral clichés at porn and prostitution, let’s remember that something much deeper is needed if we are truly to cut through our pornographic leanings. Rather than simply proclaiming how bad it is, why not do what we have to do to outgrow it?
Instead of just repressing or indulging in our pornographic leanings, we’d do better by exploring them and journeying to the heart of the pain and disconnection that underlie them. Pornography will not cease until we recognize — and recognize more than just intellectually! — how we reinforce our distress, compassionately turn toward it, and do whatever is necessary to bring about the needed healing. Until then we will crave quick-fix release (sexual and otherwise) from our distress and will repeatedly betray ourselves in both the indulgence and the repression of our desire for such release, drowning our integrity in misguided notions of right and wrong, notions that arise not from our being, but from our conditioning.
April 12 , 2007
WOMEN’S RAGE
Plantation whips slicing open the cottonpicking day
Laying crimson hieroglyphics across dark skin
She bends, taking to heart every cry heard or not
She bends, her deeper tears seen by none
She bends, knowing her labor has just begun
Plantation whips hissing through the sweating air
Trying to lash the life out of an unseen shadow
She weeps, seeing her children crushed low
She weeps,seeing her man gelded every day
She weeps, feeling hate eating her heart away
Plantation whips laying down some stars and stripes
On those who just don’t know their place
And also on those that do, just in case
She watches, her eyes barely covering her grief
She watches, seeing her man cut low and swinging high
She watches, doing her time beneath a burning sky
Africa rises in her dreams, wild and green
Bleeding under a densely darkened sun
Jammed into slaveships headed for the land of the free
Too-large pain dulled by nightmare chains
Plantation whips keep falling in a long black rain
She waits, seeing her unborn grandchildren
Playing on some far distant day
She waits, knowing she can be but soil for their breakaway
She waits, wise and getting wiser with her dying
She waits, singing O my children, rise up from me
Rise, rise up from me, remember me
I wait for you forever now
And at the end of history
The disempowerment of women has, among other things, meant the suppression and devaluation of their anger. Where male anger, despite anger’s supposedly “lower” origins, has in many circumstances — war, contact sports, vigilante heroics — often been viewed as healthy, morally justified, righteously ass-kicking, or even ennobling, female anger has generally been viewed much less favorably, as illustrated by our less-than-flattering labels for angry women. He’s hotheaded, pissed off, letting off some steam, taking care of business, etcetera; she’s a nag or bitch.
Thus have anger-in or anger-suppressing practices tended to be more expected of women than men. Anger is culturally held as far less legitimate an expression for women than for men. The result is that for many women anger is unavailable as a resource. A woman marooned from her own anger is likely to have a harder time maintaining healthy boundaries; she may feel more helpless, more fearful, more prone to despair and depression. When her anger cannot be depressed — kept or pressed down — its energies may be routed into resentment or bitterness. And what a pity this is, given that anger can be, even in its fieriness, a form of caring. In groupwork I have often seen a woman’s rage — full-out, clean rage — cut through the cognitive muddling of her partner or other men, waking them up to what they’re actually doing.
For anger actually to be a resource in relationship requires not only that it be permitted its innate vulnerability, but that it also be valued, and valued equally, in both women and men. So long as female anger is treated as something less worthy of respect than male anger, relational approaches to anger will remain superficial or unproductive. The creation of empowering relational contexts for anger presupposes both familiarity with cultural attitudes toward female anger, plus a deep recognition of anger as legitimate, useful, and necessary in building and maintaining better connection in relationships.
As female rage emerges culturally — and it has been a very recent emergence — it is crucial that it not be trivialized, negated, geisha’ed away, or misrepresented. Films like Misery and Fatal Attraction, by dramatizing the pathological extremes of female rage, may — however inadvertently — work against a more positive reception of female rage. For example, women watching the latter film might well disown their own fury through siding with the “good” (read: non-raging) woman in the film. Yet the woman expressing non-abusive rage is no murderess, psycho, or Medusa gone into isolation, but rather a potent awakener, present to varying degrees in “everyday” women whose anger is significantly infused with caring. Wrathful compassion.
Just because many men fear female anger or rage -- retreating like frantic sperm from the suddenly engulfing power of the ovum -- is no reason to slander or suppress it.
Your rage storms the breath
empties the stands
awakens the room
blasts through the walls
A full-bellied heartfist
petals exploding all around
your sobbing breast
drawing from this suddenly breathing room
tears and deeper tears
greening overgrazed eyes
and hidden hollows
Your eyes no longer yours but ours
pools of maternal fury
Your voice a summons to wake up
Now!
Not just release this rage
but holy fire and baptism
cutting through the paradox-stained
debris of exploded rationality
Your voice burning bright
burning through all the catharsis
to the us beyond us
Silence moves in now, takes over
Your whole body smiling so sweet and so deep
your tender immensity cradling all
inviting us into truer lands
where anger and love
go hand in hand
The fiery intensity at the heart of anger asks not for smothering, spiritual rehabilitation, psychological marginalization, nor mere discharge, but rather for a mindful embrace that does not necessarily require any dilution of passion, any lowering of the heat, nor any muting of the essential voice in the flames.
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April 7 , 2007
When well-known radio show host Don Imus was recently on the national hot seat after uttering his now infamous “nappy-headed ho’s” line (referring “jokingly” to the members of a women’s basketball team), much more was surfacing than just outrage at his racist comment. Imus did eventually get fired, but probably not so much because his employers were outraged at what he’d said, as because some bigtime advertisers were withdrawing from his show. Such a drop in profits, plus general public censure of Imus, were enough to finally persuade CBS to drop him.
So what else was surfacing? Well, for starters, a deeper questioning of cultural elements that make money from denigrating women, especially black women. And high on that list is rap music -- not all rap, of course, but rather the rap that talks about women with about the same level of respect as a pimp has for his whores. Some rappers, in a show of remarkable hypocrisy, have made it clear that they don’t like being lumped in with Imus. Snoop Dogg, for example, describes the women he routinely puts down in his music as “ho's that's in the ‘hood that ain't doing shit.” Like many rappers, he makes it cool to look at women as whores, bitches, second-class citizens -- and he makes plenty of money for doing so, however much he goes on about the roots of rap, and their responsibility for what rap lyrics say. Millionaire rappers as victims -- pawns of circumstances -- now victimizing the ones least able to fight back!
Misogynist rap, ugly and heartless as it is, spells bigbucks, and so record companies, conveniently faceless, keep producing and marketing it. They may claim that they are just meeting a cultural need -- that is, they just can’t help themselves! -- but in fact they are helping create and reinforce that cultural need, while the neurotic tolerance that pervades our culture says in so many words: I may not like what you’re saying, but you have every right to say it, so no way am I going to interfere with what you’re doing. What a fucking cop-out! The stand against taking any stand.
And why is so much rap misogynist? Part of the answer lies in its origins: Beaten-down cultures -- and not just African-American -- often slip into misogyny, not because they really hate women, but because women are easier to beat on than those who are the real oppressors. Domestic abuse and incest are appallingly common, for example, among native Americans -- when a people has been largely annihilated and treated in subhuman fashion, this is a common result, needing something more than government handouts. And something more than leaders who mostly only seem to be interested in profiting from the appalling conditions from which they arose. On the one hand, we have Snoop Dogg, and on the other Martin Luther King; both had chances to make a real difference to African Americans, but only one really went for it. Of course, it’s not too late for Snoop, but to do so, he’s going to have to get vulnerable and feel his shame for what he’s done with regard to reducing women to ho’s, bitches, and video vixens. Time to grow up, Snoop -- you have an incredible opportunity right now to turn a major corner, but time’s running out...
Rap’s cultural roots constitute no excuse for rap to degrade women. Yes, maybe in the ghettos and the ‘hood, women are degraded, so yes, put that into the music, since it’s an essential part of the experience. Yes, put across how women are treated there, and do it bluntly and graphically. But why, why, why degrade women in the music? Why not rap about the degradation, instead of perpetuating it?
I haven’t heard a lot of rap, but most of what I’ve heard lacks heart. Much of it sounds tough, cocky, invulnerable, packed with hard masculine energy, but is almost devoid of anything that’s soft, tender, caring, or compassionate. It’s as if rap is afraid to show any caring -- how many male rappers (and the great majority are, no surprise, male) have the balls to be vulnerable? It’s easier to hide behind the shades and hyper-stylized clothing. And this is just the surface! Dig a bit deeper, and misogyny more often than not kicks in. Women then are just ho’s, pieces of ass, bitches, basically classifiable as fuckable or unfuckable. The good news for misogynist rappers is that they can make a lot of money for portraying women as such. At least Don Imus wasn’t making a living from doing so. Imus got fired for his comments; why shouldn’t rappers who put out misogynist lyrics -- that go way past Imus territory -- lose their record contracts?
The current number one rap track is "This Is Why I'm Hot." It has topped the charts for the few months. Here are but a few of its lyrics:
This is why I'm hot
Catch me on the block
Every other day
Another bitch another drop
There are, of course, many other rap lyrics that are in a similar spirit, with the male rapper cutting his studly superstylish way through all the black bitches and ho’s (who, if they have it at all together, are in instant, almost worshipful heat around the rapper -- or, more precisely, around his ego). It’s no accident that probably the major audience for rappers is white teenagers. In rap, they find an expressive outlet for their aversion to the adult (and largely white) world; they too are in an oppressive environment, however light their oppression is compared to that of less fortunate others. White teen males can, without much trouble, relate to the adolescent cockiness and need to raise one’s self-esteem by being openly wanted by young women who are little more than adolescent masturbation fantasies come to life.
In American white culture, leaders get plenty of heat from those “below” them, but in American black culture, leaders don’t get nearly as much heat, probably because it feels like more of a betrayal to do so in black culture than in white culture. This seems to be true of most minorities. And this goes beyond race: Consider teenagers, whatever their race, sticking together when adults bring heat on them -- how many teenage boys are willing to “rat” on their misbehaving buddies, even when those “buddies” are doing some pretty horrible things? Nevertheless, it appears to be time for African Americans to bring more heat to their leaders, instead of just looking up to them or envying them. If this is not cool, so fucking what?
And what to do with rap? It can’t be scrapped, but it can be deepened. Listen to an edgy rap masterpiece like “Dance With the Devil” (by Immortal Technique); yes, it will shock you and wrench your heart and belly, but it will also serve you, not only deepening your understanding of the crucible out of which rap arose, but also helping you to feel it from the raw inside. The song is, in part, about the extreme violation of a woman, but it itself does not violate women. Instead, it exposes, in a deeply visceral way, some of what underlies such violation, leaving listeners with more of a chill in their spine than just another opinion about oppression’s roots.
So yes, fire Don Imus, but don’t bypass or ignore others who make a living putting down women, and I’m not just talking about misogynist rappers! There’s a mega-industry based on the exploitation of women, and the rappers in question are just part of the tip of it. Once we’ve turned away from our basic humanity, we will inevitably be attracted to whatever rationalizes and reinforces that turning away. Once we have dehumanized women, we can stay with our porn, or our misogynist rap lyrics, or our msiguided tolerance for our hypersexualized culture. Then the whole planet becomes just something for us men to exploit, to rape, to reduce to a “ho” whose only purpose to please and pleasure us, while all around us our home burns.
Many rappers like to talk of revolution. How about getting behind a real revolution, namely that of taking a committed stand against whatever dehumanizes us? The times demand it. No revolution, no evolution.
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May 1, 2007
WE ARE NEVER NOT IN RELATIONSHIP
Everything exists through relationship, and only through relationship. Everything. Everything, everyone, everywhere, everywhen, every last bit of it. None of it exists unto itself, separate from all the rest of it. None of it!
We are never not in relationship. How could we be? No one and no thing has truly independent existence, and therefore cannot stand apart from everything else. In fact, that very “everything else” is exactly what we depend upon for our very existence.
Every life arises only in the context of relationship. No matter how far apart we are, we are still connected. No matter how isolated we are, we are still connected. As sages have long pointed out, there are no such things as truly separate or truly independent things or beings, but rather only different manifestations of the same primordial reality, all following the arc of their own unique yet ever-contingent leanings, meeting more and more of themselves through each other, until it is obvious through the evolution of a sufficiently developed neurological capacity that the other is none other than us.
Central to what is fundamentally occurring (but not necessarily absolutely central), no matter what the appearance or circumstances, is awareness simply being aware of awareness -- the formless essence of relationship this is, co-arising and coexisting with unqualified love, simultaneously transcending and totally pervading and embracing every possible kind of bond, link, connection, relationship.
The unitive nature of what we are is not the final realization of being human, but rather just the beginning. Honoring it while at the same time honoring the demands of individuated life is where the real growth is. How we differ is more interesting to me than our oneness. Oneness is a given; the rest is not.
Objectivity (the apparent reality of what is exterior) and subjectivity (the apparent reality of what is interior) appear to be very different, perhaps even polar opposites, but actually have quite a bit in common, not the least of which is their myth-like nature. Whatever data they emit -- and both can do so with ease -- and whatever degree of reality they each claim, they still remain myth-like, bound to interpretive contexts that may be far from obvious.
To say that both objectivity and subjectivity are myth-like doesn’t mean that they are not real, but rather that they are but the presenting surface of something much deeper, something that includes both without being reducible to either.
And that something is relationship.
Many might say that relationship is intersubjectivity, but to me relationship is intersubjectivity (the encounter and interplay of interiors) and interobjectivity (the encounter and interplay of exteriors) operating as one process. And when this process, this seamless meeting and furthering, operates in the presence of love and awareness, intimacy is the result.
When inside and outside are lovers, and when we cease letting our recognition of our oneness separate us from our separateness, we are are on our way home.
Then paradox is but Truth in drag, and we are none other than the very relatedness out of which we arise. It’s an infinite wonder, forming, reforming, and evolving with our every step. We may never understand it fully, but we can always love it, and love it fully, awakening through our relationship with it... |
May 3, 2007
THE NON-NONDUALITY OF NONDUAL TEACHINGS
Before launching into this blog — which is still veined here and there with the rant that it once was — I’ll toss in something about the nondual, risking that my doing so will muddy rather than clarify my topic, given the severe limitations of language in trying to describe what transcends description.
ABOUT THE NONDUAL
To nondual being, the inherent inseparability of all that exists is neither a concept nor an experience, but rather an obviousness beyond understanding, consistently recognized to not only always already exist, but also to be none other than the consciousness that “knows” it. (This may be paradoxical to the mind, especially the rational mind, but is not to the heart.)
That is, not only is awareness naturally aware of itself here, but it also is obviously not apart from whatever may be arising, be such manifestation gross or subtle, ephemeral or long-lasting, peaceful or fearful.
No dissociation from phenomena, no strategic withdrawal from life, nowhere to go, no one to be, while “showing up” as all form, forever and everywhere and everywhen — such phrases, blooming with mind-transcending paradox (and the debris of exploded rationality), point to the unimaginable yet ever-present reality of the nondual, and point with unavoidable inaccuracy, given that there is not a fitting language for the nondual (because of the inevitably dialectical nature of language, not to mention the need for an ear that can “hear” and appreciate nondual statements).
The reality of non-separation is never not here, never not available, ever “inviting” us to awaken from the entrapping dreams we habitually fuel and occupy. We may conceive of it as a place, a stage, an achievement, a reward — but it is simply what we forever already are, already transcending (and simultaneously including) every would-be “us” that would attempt to assume the position of self.
The personality is no longer the locus of self, but it still persists — and why shouldn’t it? If one is at home “in” (and as) the nondual, then personality, like everything else, is but one more non-binding expression of nondual being, asking not for annihilation, but for recognition and acceptance. To the realizer of the nondual, everything, everything, is God — anger, joy, duality, personality, clouds, wonder, fear. There is only God, only the Self, only the Real, only the One, only the hyperbole-transcending reality of what we truly are. So what problem is there, really, if fear or any other undesirable state arises? From a nondual perspective, such arising is, to put it mildly, radically nonproblematic.
In the nondual, fear is not what is transcended; what is transcended is what was done with fear in nondual states or stages.
Okay, so here we go...
THE NON-NONDUALITY OF NONDUAL TEACHINGS
Some of the more rigidly dualistic — and dehumanizing — approaches to spirituality can be found in nondual schools, nondual paths, nondual practices and perspectives.
Behind the nondual half-smiles perhaps ever so gently flickering across the faces of more than a few nondual teachers — or sometimes self-proclaimed non-teachers, as what they teach cannot, they often insist, really be taught — something very personal, something decidedly non-nondual, something with measurable egoic emissions, may be seeking unmuted expression, which of course cannot be openly permitted (unless perhaps it’s clearly positive or pleasant), as it might taint or screw up the proceedings (exposing, for example, the attachments or anger or less-than-noble desires of the teacher).
But wouldn’t something other than recycled, far-from-fresh nondual — and more often than not obsessively impersonal — pronouncements and unrelentingly detachment be a huge relief?
Where has the wildness, the rawness, the full-blooded yes, of spirituality gone? Must it be caged, drugged, homogenized, reduced to squeaky clean teacherliness for hungry seekers? Must we play vigilant zookeeper to its edginess? Must we dehumanize it?
The spooning out of nondual pablum — pre-chewed for us — assumes that we have no teeth, no bite, no need for uncooked truth, and just need to keep our bibs on. Spiritual etiquette. Mind your manners if you want another spoonful of the understanding. But just because it’s easy to swallow doesn’t mean that it’s easy to digest!
It’s enough to stir up some revolutionary rudeness. If being off the path can be part of the path, then why so much emphasis on being spiritually correct? Equanimity sometimes is just sedation in spiritual drag. Who’s that behind the serenity shades?
Just as much of contemporary art has become more about the intellectualization — or, better, over-intellectualization — of art than about art itself, so too have many contemporary takes on nonduality fallen into the same trap. Many of those claiming to teach or offer nondual spirituality may cover their tracks with nondual wordplay — displaying, yes, attachment to the label “nondual” — but no matter how they say it, their separation from and refusal to truly explore and get down into (and it’s only “down” to preconceived “up-ness”) the dual, the personal, the idiosyncratic, the shadowy, and, yes, the unrepentantly egoic, keeps them (and their followers) up to their eyeballs in good old dualism, clinging to the idea (or ideal) of nonduality.
Premature claims to abiding in nondual awareness run rampant in modern spiritual circles — making spiritual real estate out of a moment of light — and how could they not, given that they arise in and are embedded in a culture slavishly devoted to getting it right now? Given the inevitably contingent nature of manifest existence, what else would you expect?
When we try to make too much out of a moment of genuine awakening, what we’re mostly making is just more of the very selfhood we are so eager to transcend.
We like our heroes to be a bit above us, so we can cut them down to size after we’re done romanticizing them. Having a nondually-oriented teacher telling us that we already are what we ache to be, and that our not getting this is just part of it, etcetera after predictable etcetera, may temporarily ease us, because it quiets our mind for a bit, but in most cases it’s really not very helpful and in fact tends to distract and strand us from the work we truly need to do, including facing, working with, and integrating our shadow elements (our fear, despair, aggression, promiscuity, greed, and so on).
The shadow of most nondualism is its unacknowledged dualism, the key symptoms of which include spiritual constipation, ego-transcending egoity, and resolute aversion to acknowledging the need to do any shadow-work.
An almost-universally acknowledged sage of the nondual like Ramana Maharshi spoke and acted from a nondual perspective simply because he couldn’t do otherwise. Just as importantly, he wasn’t looking for immunity from the raw stuff of life, and he sure wasn’t busy being clever or verbally elusive.
We don’t need any more regurgitated nondual teachings. We need the original thing, the firsthand transmission, the industrial strength dosage minus the usual mixers, but only if and when we are sufficiently ripe. And how do we get ripe? By living, really living, getting right into the messy stuff of Life, including that dualistic awakener and unparalleled exposer of neuroses and personal bullshit known as intimate relationship.
Just as scientific methodology tends to select for those who find comfort in the promise of a consensually validated remove (or emotional distance) from the object of study, nondual teaching opportunities tend to select for those who find comfort in the promise of a consensually validated (or emotional distance) from the personal. But the truly nondual nonproblematically includes — and not just in theory! — the dualistic and personal, and is not a solution to it!
Nondual teachings point out the pointlessness of searching for what was never really lost, but often overlook or underemphasize the fact that the search is not experienced as pointless until it actually has been undertaken.
So we might as well jump in, getting messy, getting attached, getting hurt, getting involved — we’ve made, and are making, an appearance here as humans, so let’s get into it! Only when we’re really in it and truly involved, can we leave it, and then, and only then, can we realize with our totality that where we were and where we are is precisely the same locationless location.
Those under the thumb of nondual teachings might say that there is nothing to do, because there is no one to do it, etcetera after colorless etcetera, thereby creating a philosophical dead-end (or hermeneutic drainhole) masquerading as spiritual wisdom. However, the non-doing of the true sage is far from the non-doing of the rest of us, and needs to be recognized as such.
And thus ends this piece, with a deep bow to the true teachers and embodiers of the nondual, in whose presence and love my words stretch beyond themselves, and in whose wisdom my arrogance evaporates, leaving nothing but What-Really-Matters. |
May 7, 2007
What Am I Taking From You?
Last night I watched a film called “Instinct,” in which Anthony Hopkins plays Ethan Powell, an apparently insane anthropologist guilty of murder. Cuba Gooding, Jr. plays Theo Calder, a psychiatrist ambitiously trying to “get through” to Powell. At one point, as Calder sticks to his rational guns, continuing to keep himself removed from Powell’s world, Powell seizes him (they’re in a windowless room without any guards), puts duct tape over his mouth, and holds him in a position where he could easily kill him. Calder is obviously very frightened, and clearly in great danger.
Powell puts a pencil and piece of paper on the table before Calder, saying, “Now, this will be a very simple test. Pass or fail, life or death... Now, you write on this paper what I have taken from you.... What you are losing.”
Calder quickly writes: “My control.”
Says Powell: “Wrong. You never had control. You only thought you had it.”
Powell then gives Calder another chance. Calder writes: “My freedom.”
Wrong answer again.
Calder is right at the edge, starting to really get that he’s in a life-and-death situation. ”In the middle of the night,” says Powell, “when you wake up sweating, with your heart pounding, what is it that has you all tied up, tied up in little knots ?”
“I used to be you,” adds Powell. “Okay, one last chance.” And it’s clear that he really means it. “Last try,” he says. “Get it right.”
Calder writes: “My illusions.”
Right answer.
He didn’t really have control or freedom in his everyday life (but thought that he did). So how could he actually lose them? But while just a moment away from being killed -- so existentially vivid a moment -- he realized that he was, to whatever degree, starting to lose his illusions. About what? All kinds of things, especially those that he’d taken as givens -- like him being the sane one, and Powell the less-than-sane one. For our illusions to give up the ghost, we have to be in a position where we can actually see them for what they are, and this is ordinarily a far from easy undertaking. Our eyes may only really open when we are right at the edge of...
Big moments. Extraordinarily alive moments, simultaneously dreamlike and hyper-real, moments when we are profoundly present. But what’s just as amazing as the appearance of such moments is our not letting our seemingly less spectacular moments be equally alive. When we deny our moments their true size, we only shrink ourselves, withdrawing from authentic contact with the edge they present and illuminate.
Too much of the time, we pretend we’re not at the edge, and then pretend we’re not pretending. But the edge is nonetheless still very much here, precisely and unavoidably here, ever inviting us to wake up to it presence and invitation, so that we might truly live.
Like Theo Calder, we don’t drop our illusions very easily, especially when our entire life is built upon them. We may have the illusion that we are free just because we are king or queen in our our finely furnished, pleasingly populated cell; we may have the illusion that we are in control just because we are able to sit upon someone else or padlock the closet that contains our more undesirable elements; we may have the illusion that we are who we think we are, just because so many others think the same way; we may have the illusion that it’s all an illusion, just because we’re attached to a spiritual path that says this is so (except, of course, about itself!); and so on.
Having the illusion that we are free does not mean that freedom itself is an illusion. It’s just that we have an astonishing ability to fool ourselves, and an equally astonishing ability to cut through whatever’s in the way. The first ability (which appears at every level of development) generates the very conditions that catalyze the second. However unwittingly, we invite in circumstances that bring our dissatisfaction to such a peak (or trough) that something has to give -- and that something is mostly just our clinging to whatever it is that we’ve convinced ourselves we just have to have, no matter what.
To cut through illusion, we have to get disillusioned, and the more thoroughly the better. There’s the pill of sedation, and there’s the pill of thrill, and then there’s the pill that wakes us up in the midst of our dreaming and scheming. We don’t need a prescription for these, since Life itself does such a great job of providing them.
We can play the sick one; we can play the fixer of the sick one; and we can play the one that includes both. But what really matters is our degree of intimacy with each. We are all Ethan Powell, studying the habits and lifestyle of other primates, hairless and otherwise, sharpening our anthropological lenses, with our life being but a field study that pulls us so far in that we forget there’s an out; and we are all also Theo Calder, stuck in trying to get an inside look at what makes others tick, trying to do for others’ interiors what Dr. Powell is doing for others’ exteriors (behavior, life style, etc.). We can identify with either, or we can identify with neither while compassionately holding both, along with everything else that constitutes us, in an embrace that is not so much ours to have, but ours to be, until the edge is recognized to be everywhere, even in the homeliest or most mundane of moments.
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May 9, 2007
LADY IN THE WATER
Movie critics generally panned “The Fountain” (see my Dec. 21, 2006 blog), but really trashed “Lady in the Water,” M. Night Shyamalan’s latest effort. And they didn’t just trash it, but also castigated Shyamalan for the role he played (a character who is apparently destined to have an enormous impact on humanity) in the film. Perhaps what incensed them the most was that the movie critic in the film was not only a desiccated pedant, but also met an untimely death, scripted of course by Shyamalan, who had received some pretty rough treatment from said critics for his earlier films (other than The Sixth Sense).
If I were to take “Lady in the Water” literally — as the children’s fable it supposedly is — then I’d perhaps be irritated by it, grumbling that Paul Giamatti’s virtuoso performance as the central character, Cleveland Heep, was largely wasted. But the very fact that Shyamalan lays out the tale the way he does — after all, he is a very skilled director — is a clue that more is going on than meets the viewer’s eye. (Hint: It’s more than a fable.) In fact, we are being invited not just to look, but also to look inside our looking. And how many movie critics are inclined to do that? Certainly not the majority.
To me, the entire film is about Cleveland’s interiority — and interiority in general, on both personal and collective (and maybe even transpersonal) scales. His is a badly fragmented psyche, compartmentalized without any awareness that it is compartmentalized. An apart-ment complex that he barely manages to manage.
He is us in our usual state (suffering a case of mistaken identity), made worse by the trauma (his wife and children all murdered) he has suffered and is determined to keep secret. The various elements, mostly disconnected or only superficially linked, that constitute him — as personified by the characters in the film — are not let in on his secret. Only the sea nymph, Story, knows, once she has surfaced and entered his life.
Her surfacing — his surfacing, projected onto her — stirs him up, reacquainting him with his pain and his longing to take care of what is naked and vulnerable in him. Her presence forces him to more deeply encounter those who live in the apartment building which he caretakes — that is, those who live in him. Each has a role to play in helping Story, and Cleveland works hard to pull it all together, trying to clearly identify what each person — each part or piece of him — is meant to do in this endeavor. The fragments of his psyche are not so scattered now, as the first signs of a coming together (and perhaps even an integration) appear, orchestrated by Cleveland. Although he is not particularly skillful, he has the advantage now of an increasing single-mindedness.
The common goal is to serve the needs of Story — the needs of his purity, innocence, and depths — but to effectively do so, he has to leave his comfort zone, dive deep, and meet what opposes the purpose with which he is aligning himself. Several encounters with dark, red-eyed, bristling monsters called scrunts shake him up badly, but still he persists. An unlikely hero, perhaps, but a hero nonetheless, aimed toward wholeness.
He goes for advice to the movie critic — his (and, of course, our) inner critic — and takes it in too uncritically. Only when the critic meets a scrunt and is killed by it (after dryly concluding that he will, no doubt, escape from it just in time, because that’s how these movies go) — and is therefore silenced — does Cleveland really start pulling it all together. Now he can finally hear what he needs to hear.
Nevertheless, Story is dying, and the person supposed to heal her cannot. Cleveland finally realizes that it is his role to heal her, to bring her back to life, so he lays his hands upon her wounds, and lets himself go into the heart of the trauma he has been carrying and hiding in the darker places in the apartment building. He weeps and grieves (and Giamatti does an astonishing job here) with abandon, crying for his loss without any self-consciousness. As he does so, Story is revived. And so is he.
Now Cleveland is no longer so apart from his myriad selves. They all go outside — stepping out of the complex that ordinarily contains (or overcontains) them — and align themselves with what must be done with minimal fuss and maximal cooperation.
As was conveyed earlier, each character can be viewed as part of Cleveland’s psyche. Before Story arrived (or was invited forth, however unwittingly, by him), he took superficial care of each character, keeping them in their place (and role), no matter how odd their behavior. However, once Story entered the scene, he took a deeper look at the residents of his building — thereby getting a better look at his interiority. The characters therein are colorfully varied, mundanely archetypal, all stuck in their identities, mostly disconnected from each other until Cleveland, now truly in touch with Story, brings them more and more together in a common and life-enhancing cause.
Think of your sleep-dreams, and how bizarre, odd, surreal, elusive, or disconnected they can be, and remember that everything in them is literally part of you — and not just the people or the role you play, but also the animals, furniture, plants, things, and even the space in which they all arise. Pretty amazing this is, but not so amazing as our tendency to take it all to be real, instead of recognizing it for what it really is.
Cleveland plays himself in the film, but he is also playing everyone and everything else, just like our dreaming consciousness. The more varied and colorful and bizarre the characters are, the less likely Cleveland is to recognize them as himself in disguise. But when he gets close to his depths and innocence and fragility, he begins to awaken, not enough to fully recognize what is going on, but enough to take fitting action, much like someone who, when being pursued by something in a nightmare, wills himself to turn around and face it, even though he doesn’t know he’s dreaming.
To heal is to make whole. “Lady in the Water” puts this across at a level rarely touched in film, and for this it deserves another, deeper watching. Curl up with the fable, yes, and get cozy beneath your blankets as you would for any good bedtime story (which, naturally, needs a few scary parts), but also keep your eyes open for what underlies the fable, existing between its lines and beyond its metaphors. You won’t be disappointed.
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May 29, 2007
STRANGER THAN FICTION
Just watched “Stranger Than Fiction,” starring Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson. I wasn’t expecting much, not being a fan of Will Ferrell, but found myself really getting into the film, and not just because Ferrell came through bigtime. Emma Thompson’s character is Kay Eiffel, a famous and obviously troubled novelist who always kills off her key character at the end of each novel. Harold Crick (played by Ferrell), is, we quickly find out, the protagonist in Kay’s latest novel, which is not yet completed.
Once he realizes his predicament (literally hearing the author’s disembodied voice describing exactly what he is doing and is about to do), he desperately seeks to find Kay. His awakening to his predicament shakes his life up, and it is a life in serious need of some serious shaking-up; he is OCD precise and routine-tied to an extreme that is at once laughable and freakishly flat. But awaken he does, and his ossified approach to life gets some bone-cracking and sometimes hilarious input.
Other films have dealt with waking up from the trance of everyday automated life, but “Stranger Than Fiction” is one of those that does more than just contrast the slumber of status quo reality and the awakening from it, creatively setting up a gestalt of author and author’s creation, giving that creation a voice and some flesh-and-blood autonomy while simultaneously allowing the author to take a rare (and self-transforming) responsibility for what she has created.
And by whose author-ity are we here? When the puppet wakes up, what happens to the puppet-master? When the characters in our dreams really look at us (and they are capable of doing so, if we will but let them), can we say with any authority that we are any more real than them? After all, we’re all arising in the same dream, regardless of our role there; the role that we play — or identify with — in our dreams is just that, a role, needing only some illumination to reveal what it really is.
So the author may appear more real (because she’s more central and more powerful) than the character she has created, but in a way she is just as much a creation as that character. They are but two aspects of the same reality, the deep structure of which is obliquely yet evocatively approached by the literature professor (played by Dustin Hoffman) in the film. There is the story, and then there is the story. There is fiction, and then there is what’s stranger than fiction. We are, after all, more than we can imagine.
Kay is more like the central figure in a dream — the “me” of the dream — but Harold’s departure from his scripted slumber (you could say that he’s scared scriptless) starts to awaken Kay from the dream she is busy occupying and furnishing. Only when both interact, and knowingly interact, do both find a new life.
We are affected, and are affected deeply, by what we have created, regardless of how much we may distance ourselves from our creations. The characters that we bring forth and animate (in dreams, and not just sleep-dreams!) are but extensions of us — much like cars are extensions of our feet — and each extension eventually circumnavigates the sphere of our influence to return to us, not just as a character we’ve generated, but as us in increasingly transparent drag.
Once we’ve allowed that return, and once we’ve allowed it to touch us right to our core, we can then move in directions that were not previously possible for us. Our very relationship to what constitutes us changes us, as is illustrated by Kay’s final decision regarding what to do with Harold. By so deeply contacting what she has literally made of herself, she is freed to a significant degree from her own automaticity and suffering, liberating both herself and her creation from the script that was written for her.
Watch “Stranger Than Fiction” as if you were watching one of your dreams from the outside. It’s worth it.
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