Voltaire's Yoga, Durer's Wings, Shiva's Tandava

My teacher once said, 

wearing a familiar unconcealed guile, “The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is certainty…”  He paused.  And with a Steven Wright-worthy riposte, “Though I'm sure we can’t be too sure of that.”

Appa made a point of parlaying criticism into actions, often without further comment.  If he was sitting in a chair and I sat at his feet like the dutiful disciple he would calmly put the chair aside and sit beside me. “I can hear you better from here.”  Another time he sighed with just a hint of exasperation and said, “Please get another chair, I don’t feel like sitting on the floor today.”  He was not the sort of “guru” who would tolerate even implicit superiority much less allow me to submit when a much more constructive deference could be implied, one that might even assume the appearance of parity.  There was no parity when it came to my understanding of Hindu lore, Sanskrit or Tamil literature, but Appa loved the gambit: he wanted me to keep up with him when he taught, he wanted me even to surpass his abilities, he wanted to learn, and most of all, not allow me to act as if he were some wisdom-Pez-dispenser.

The sworn enemy of honest erudition is submission, the cowering that accompanies intimidation, questions withheld, and, above all, the inculcated presumption of faultlessness.  Worse is the immunity supplied to “spiritual truths” to guard them from their own disregard of criticism.  That kind of servility is often freely extended because a lazy surrender to the preeminence of tradition is more satisfying than the torment of good thinking.  Thinking, after all, has its limits.  Thank goodness, we might add.  But not because the alternative is some Capital T for Truth.

Religions suffer from the kind of moral and intellectual certitude that follows as much from ideology as it does from irrefragable personal experience.  Who, after all, can tell you that is somehow not your experience?  Certitude is not all brimstone or smug quietist asservation, it has its ironic advocates as well.

We can admire especially those Buddhist philosophers committed to the principle of prasanga, the strategy of logical impasse made doctrine by Candrakirti’s reading of the great Nagarjuna.  The idea is that all argument must ultimately default to a standoff with the limitations of language and logic.  Unless you corral what’s not OK, your ultimacy will end up looking like the rest of us.  “You shall not pass,” to put this in another wizard’s words.  If the redolent treacle of irony does not yet feel like a plate of jellied eels served up on a Southampton damp winter’s day, let the Buddhists’ point be made the clearer.

There’s never an inopportune moment to pause for the didactic Middle Wayer quailing with ineffable glee at Ultimate Truth being empty (sunya) of itself.  You see, if all arguments are merely conventions of agreement (vyavaharika) then anything said about the ultimate (parmartha) truth must also be nothing more than another convention.  Ultimacy is thus safely beyond the boundary of conversations that, by definition, are imprisoned in the morass of ordinary meaning.  There’s no escaping this Donnemora.  Notwithstanding Bhavaviveka’s perspicacious 6th century efforts to establish the independent veracity (svatantrika-satya) of our meager provisional understandings, it is the Scaliaesque temerity of the Prasangikas that carries the ideological day.  It seems not even the most ardent zetetic can withstand the temptation to insulate an ultimate from the limitations of the temporal rumpus that forms our human condition.  Three more cheers for tortured prose in a twisted world.

The alternative is never merely agnostic because that too must take refuge (…saranam gacchami) in not-knowing as knowing.  What we can’t know rarely has meaning unless it serves, once again, the agenda of those who would confer authority on that Unknowable.  To wit, if we can’t know there’s a God then God or, to put this to wrights, “On the other hand, you have different fingers.”  Who said doubt is without a sense of humor?  Arguments about the ineffable are not usually a laugh a minute but they are, like everywhere, walking distance if only you have the time.  Trying to pry a person’s private experience from veracity is much the same as solving traffic problems by expanding the universe.  (N.B., more and more apologies to Steven Wright.)  To Land The Plane: serious self-inquiry can lead to not-knowing but this isn’t the same as certainty, no matter how certain one is that she or he doesn’t know.

A favorite argument for the personal-experience-is-truly-true comes at the opening of Patanjali’s Yogasutra.  After defining yoga as the occlusion of mental processes (1.2) which results in “abiding in the seer’s own form” (1.3), the next verse takes its turn at sealing the deal, “at other times, it takes the form of the movements.”  In effect, he says, if you are doing that abiding-thing in your “own form” (svarupa) then you’re done, no need to read further because you don’t need the further instructions.  You have arrived at Eternity in the form of that Person not-confused-with-mutable-experiences, all befitting the use of Big Letters because Truth.  However, if you’re not as certain as you could be, he demurs then read on, practice on, keep trying ‘cause there is such a thing as finality, a permanent and incontrovertible reality that can be accessed so long as you don’t mistake it for this pesky, afflicted, mercurial world.  Once you know, or even Know, you won’t even need to know that you know.  Must be grand.  This argument is strangely akin to Rudolph Otto’s opening salvo in the redoubtable Das Helige, not a book about the idea of The Holy but simply The Holy.  Here Otto, not merely appealing to the wonder of his own palindromic agnomen, tells us that if we have not had the feeling of what he terms the numinous, this utterly real but ineffable Holiness-Thing, well, we need not read further.  I recall the graduate school seminar when, assigned this book, I declared to the instructor that reading further was not a requirement because how could we know we are sharing the same ineffable experience? Otto’s got plenny on that too but it need not detain us.  All appeals to experience leave us outside each other’s minds anyway.  Getting inside, even with diodes and stuff, won’t tell us if the mind is what the brain does, or if the mind’s experiences are still something else.  What could “something else” be if it isn’t our brains and bodies creating it?  Good luck with that one.

So there can be no decent doubting without admitting that we’re in for a rough ride.  But far worse is certainty, a maudlin numbness much like the experience of flying at 35,000 feet so smoothly you don’t even know your flying at all.  Like Durer's wing, there's no bird in sight.  Brain lag is jet lag’s seat buddy: switch off the experience of change and with it comes a malady that can take days to remedy, maybe even a whole lifetime.  Of course, an alternative life to certainty must admit to Voltaire’s adage about how "life is a shipwreck" with the proviso "but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” Sing loudly and, when you can, in tune.

A lifeboat of certainty’s demurral is disquieting, often confusing, but it need not be distrusting.  Appa proved that everyday.  He invited your trust because you felt safe being vulnerable and welcomed risk as a way of learning.  He was not diffident to people’s needs for spiritual consolation, understanding that so many of us simply require destinations for faith to make it through our daily journeys.  If those destinations are heaven after death ("he's in a better place...") or a God who has mysterious purpose that assures meaning (ask Job about this), he could avow their comfort without assenting to their propositions.  We can’t always get what we want but we get what we need? 

I’m not sure I need to doubt or that I can ever fall in love with uncertainty but I feel reasonably sanguine that it gets my blood moving and always sets my heart 'aflutter.  Love too is something better when it is more interesting than it is unconditional.  Unconditional, after all, is simply our first condition.  I would not like it if the reality of contingent knowledge ---that true things seem true till shown otherwise--- were to suggest that this position is somehow, anyhow, or in any way morally superior.  I loathe feeling too safe and, as much as I like flying without turbulence as the next guy, I think a 21st century “spiritual life” can no longer lay any claim to an undisturbed spirit.  There’s plenty to say here about the concept of tandava, a feature of Shiva’s character we can spend lifetimes reconsidering.  Never has there be a less undisturbed spirit.  And, truth to tell, tandava is only a “dance” if you don't fathom the rage that fuels it.  More on this soon.  Keep Dylan Thomas in mind, just as a preface:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Ah, Shiva's tandava.  There’s a book(s) to be written about that, and more.  If you prefer to abjure the mystifications that can substitute for the harrowing authenticity that comes with inconclusiveness, then I think there is room for more conversation.  Nothing stanches good conversation quite like a that’s-my-opinion show stopper.  Let’s start with a few decorous lies devoted to deeper truths, you know, myths that aren’t just false and certainly never certain.  Tandava for all.  More wing, less prayer.

Got Game?

Game adds something dangerously more to the mix. Game pushes right up to and over the boundary of "fair" and raises the stakes of "cheat." And who ever said life was supposed to be fair was wishing for more than what is, and that's got plenty of game too.

As a kid I liked football a lot, actually managed to letter in high school by sheer dint of determination over talent (since I clearly had not enough talent). What was better than Joe Namath giving the Colts "game" in Super Bowl III (Roman Numbers Make It Seem More Important) and then winning it all? The Babe famously pointing to the fences. Ahhh, Reggie. I confess that the contemporary game of football no longer has interest for me but _gamesmanship_ is an interesting thing. What exactly is game? How does one draw the line between having game and, you know, moral boundaries? When is "cheating" cheating? Oh, and I remember Gaylord Perry's knuckleball too. Krsna at his best, I say. Trash talking is nothing new. Having game is something very, very old. Worth our consideration.

Any honest assessment of the great mythologies of India ---and by extension the ancient Indo-Europeans, like the Norse and Germanic myths---reveals the gods to have plenty of "game." Krsna's got game. Rudra has some serious game. Rama's game is, at least in Valmiki versions, to make playing-the-rules-is-game the game. Lila always trumps Dharma, if by Dharma we mean some sort of eternally applied standard that registers probity and the karmic consequences of behaviors "contrary" to Dharma. Lila means the world has game.

Game is when a situation creates an opportunity to use desire and interest for one's advantage (and _perhaps_ the advantage of others you care about.) Bias is part of everything we prefer or want. And why not? How else to know what it is you care for and about?  Lila puts the world in play and as players we are here to contrive our game, to figure out what game we have (and what we don't, say, my football career).  Lila reminds us that we are played, no matter what kind of players we choose to become.  Krsna too must die in the forest near Mahabharata's conclusion, mistaken as he is for...game.  No one gets a pass, not even the best players.

Every living thing in nature seeks its own advantage even when that means, on occasion, working towards the advantage of the larger phenotype (think: bees, ants). Humans may have selected out with aspects of altruism for their advantage, and there is some debate among evolutionary biologists about whether we pursue the collective over the individual. But since Dawkins' groundbreaking The Selfish Gene, the argument has been refocused because we know that pursuing more than selfish interest is a kind of interest. There's nothing special or exceptional about being human except the ways we work our interests---because like all other living things we seek fecundity, fidelity, and our advantage. We have called persons "saints" by virtue of their self-abnegation of their personal interests and we routinely proffer a transcendental exemption to God or gods by virtue of mystery or "higher" purpose. Think Job here. God gets to not play by our rules or meet our expectations, God gets game because God. Humans submit then and don't get the same game. That's pretty common, we'd have to agree.

When students of mine ask how Krsna (in Mahabharata and elsewhere) can be a "god" when he lies, cheats, misleads, rationalizes, seduces, murders, and _games_ the whole story---a friend you want and an enemy you must fear---I ask them why should god be any different than you are? How do we learn about ourselves from a god who is not like us? Drawing the line between gamesmanship and venality is no easy task, and why should it be? Are you puzzled that "cheating" is another human way of securing advantage? Morality doesn't get in the way of having game.  Rather, moral choices are another way of playing, another feature of our game.

Let's repeat the obvious: the gods and/or God (your game here) usually gets a pass. That is, there is the attribution of mystery, divine purpose, higher unknown goals, all ways of taking game from god(s). God is above human games is the usual meme. But not in every case, certainly not in all of these preChristian stories. But maybe, just maybe, gods have some really interesting game. You know, like the rest of us. The current tabloid game involves the money, the power, the industry of the NFL and its role in worldwide entertainment. I've no particular judgments here about the game of football or Mr Brady or the utter absurdity of this affair in light of other matters (he received a longer suspension and fine for gaming than for others in the industry who are spousal abusers?) or it's social "importance." Life is about having game. How you decide the stakes, the costs, the benefits, and the consequences: that is what matters. Choose wisely or have enough game that you can be Krsna. In our modern world that's no small game.






Here's a link to the story that prompted this reply. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/sports/football/in-tom-brady-mess-distinguishing-cheating-from-chicanery.html?_r=1

Amaurosis Unveiled

In the Tamil language the Lord of Dance Shiva Natarajar is also known as Tillai Kuttan (say "Kuu-tan"). He is described as the "Dancer of the Blinding Forest" because, it is said, that once upon a time a vast mangrove forest enveloped the brackish byways where today stands the great temple city of Chidambaram, deep in south India. The tillai is no ordinary forest grove: its fruit and flowers are dangerously toxic and its circuitous aqueducts a menace to all who accept the forbidding invitation.  But times have indeed changed--- at least in some ways--- and today we enter these same precincts with the gracious aid of the Podhu Diksitar priests, descendants of the original "three thousand," the muvariyavar, brought from the heavens to perform the pujas, the rituals that are daily performed in witness of the Dancer and his beloved Ambal, the goddess Sivakamasundari.

My teacher, Dr. Gopala Aiyar Sundaramoorthy, whom I call "Appa," grew up in Chidambaram in the home of Sri Rajaratana Diksitar, where he evolved his life into every aspect of Natarajar's lore. He had experienced first hand the toxicity of the tillai trees and reveled as much in telling the ancient stories of those who dared to enter the glowering darkness to seek out the Dancer's grace.  Nowadays, of course, we seem to enter with such ease, guided and made welcome by the Diksitars.  But Appa also explained that to venture into such a forest is enter the depths of one's heart, and when you go there, to love with all your heart you must put your heart at risk. Such a place can never be entirely safe because for all the ways in which love provides every reason to live, love also puts everything in peril.  How could it be otherwise?

The chalk notice written in Tamil that you see at the top of the page appeared inside the temple of Sri Natarajar this past January.  It announces a small gift of sugar cane and turmeric root made to each of the Podhu Diksitar families, the Priests of the Sabanayaka Temple, that they might come and collect in celebration of the holiday of Pongal.  The gift was made in the name of Dr. Sundarmoorthy but those of you who were there know that you made this possible because it was you who ventured this time into the forest, you who took the risk to enter the place where the heart puts everything before the Dancer.  Thank you for this gift and for your gracious hearts.

The words below are assembled from my notebooks as Appa described Tillai Kuttan and our journey into his forest. There are many more such journeys ahead.

***

Tillai Kuttan, The Forest Dancer

Enter the Blinding Forest of the Tillai at your peril,
Where the Lord of Dance performs his Tandavas, and
Sages Descend as Grace to drink the Tiger’s Milk, with
Three Thousand Born to Serve.
Dare but do not touch the milky mangrove,
For your skin will burn and blister, amaurois too and
smoke that poisons when leaves are long since dried.
But choose to chance it all and gamble with the dice,
as did he and his beloved,
And perhaps you will also see the Dance of Tillai Kuttan,
find healing to cureless love and refuge in life’s artistry,
Beneath the golden roof within the Hall of Consciousness.

----assembled and rendered from the words of Dr. Gopala Aiyar Sundaramoothy

The Gratitude of Understanding a Spiritual Life: A Thanksgiving Sermon for the Choir

Happy Thanksgiving, dear pals! 

What a strange and curious holiday this is as we Americans give thanks for our blessings havingcome here as illegal immigrants greeted warmly by the native folk. It's fascinating what we have done since. The ironies can go further unnoticed, of course, but who could resist? Most of the people going to work today either perform truly important services for the public good or work in commerce for wages that they cannot afford to pass by. We have in America a "right to work" (read: can't make a living by taking a holiday) and apparently a right to shop. I preach to the choir here, which means you've already read too far for me to apologize.

Let me make a point about something that goes to the heart of yoga traditions and to our conversations that extend beyond the usual how-do-you-do-sricakra puja whatever yo. From the outset Indian philosophers and commentators on the ritual life have privileged efforts of understanding and explanation. These are understood as empowerments, not mere exercises in thinking.  When you understand and can explain, more can happen: more meaning, more progress, richer life. These are contrasted and often rejected (vilified is not too strong a word) by those who maintain there that a direct, intuitive experience that defies and does not mandate an explanation or rational portrayal of events. Yes, India has plenty of mystical anti-intellectualism, the favored position of far too many, if only because it's uninterested by definition, or to put it more bluntly, a cop out and an excuse not to think because...religion. Not that I have an opinion about such matters.

The only thing less interesting than claims of ineffability and beyond-understanding are claims to Oneness, which are really just another way of saying you don't want to talk about the world that you experience on a daily basis but prefer instead to assert an experience of exceptionalism. Checking into Oneness is, by definition, checking out of the complexities and sufferings of the conditional world. Oneness never means that we share a common humanity, which is what we might want it to mean (please oh please), rather it means we don't have to: that's precisely the gist of arguments made by the Oneness-philosophers. References abundant upon request. Please feel free however to check into the mystic Oneness that checks you out, if that's what suits you. Diversity is a good thing, unless you think it's all One. I have expressed a dim view of that but who knows, from the mystic's point of view I'm the one who is dim. My point is that we might just as well prefer the world we experience with all its glorious limitations and boundaries imposed upon our provisional knowledge, which is the one we can talk about.

Understanding experiences is not the same thing as declaring that experience is rational. Hardly. Note our efforts here and elsewhere to understand events in Ferguson, Missouri and the genuinely tragic, tortured American history of slavery and race relations. We mean to understand and even try to explain why people are acting as they are, not to endorse or condone, not to reason or explain away but rather to comprehend and to feel more. Thinking has always been a form of feeling in Indian thought, this is why the "subtle body" (manas, ahamkara, buddhi) belong to the material (prakrti) part of the equation. We feel-and-think: this is an important way to understand the word "manas," which means something like mind-and-heart. Now in Indian thought to explain and to understand is not to justify behavior. It is to fathom, to comprehend in ways that draw thought into feelings and our feelings more deeply into our thoughts. It is in fact to do yoga, to engage deeply and to integrate however it is possible the expanse of comprehensive Self that is embodied physicality into the mental autobiographical experiences of consciousness.

This task is not considered optional by the more interesting philosophers unless you are happy to buy into mystical bypassing. Yeah, I said that. Mystical bypassing is the refusal to admit that our limited process of understanding is our ultimacy.  Or to put this differently, it's the claim that we must admit more than our human limitation to find the "true" spiritual life.  It favors instead a "please pass go" and "collect on the 'pure' experience" of [fill in the blank with your favorite "spiritual" claim of beyondyness.] Don't mistake me we all loves some mystical bypassing and some folks simply need it to get through the horrors and ordinary indiginities of being human. There is also the implication that we as individuals are solely responsible for our behaviors just as we are capable of changing hearts but one at a time. But there is an alternative: creating explanations is another way you can arrive at a spiritual life---ask Krsna about this when you open the Gita and find that Arjuna is bypassing his duty, asks for renunciation, looks to abjure the world in favor of some alternative mystical plot, and can't fathom wtf he is doing. Krsna then _explains_ that he has to do far better than that. But importantly it is the explanation along with the instructions for practices that are the keys to a greater yoga, a deeper engagement. 

When you can explain something you don't reduce it to reason, rather you make it available to understanding. Could our current situation in the news provide better examples? When you can put it into a context of understanding then you can act, discern what is knowledge (and what is not), and so commit (translate that: karma, jnana, and bhakti). Without the explanation you end up in a puddle in the chariot with the bow slipping from your hand, having a meltdown. In America the effective response is to make everything we humans do an individual choice, an individual responsibility, and individual incidents, thus preventing any understanding that there are deep, ancient feelings, there are realities of society and history, there are rich fields of explanation that help us understand that we are created by worlds greater than ourselves. Without trying to understand can become the mystic (there is no need, it's all beyond) or simply one who fails to appreciate that a good explanation, however unsatisfying or even unsatisfactory, is the beginning rather than the end of a spiritual life. Happy Thanksgiving!

When Violence is Not Beyond Explanation, Ferguson Again

Rioting is not beyond explanation, even if it's counterproductive. A friend of mine asks, why destroy property? What sense is there to these riots?  To explain violence and destruction proffers no remedy.  First we need to understand.

When society preferences property values over people and profits over the value of labor and there is a crisis of trust where a significant segment of the population feels fundamentally disenfranchised in that system, then those persons feel like prey. It is a predatory capitalism, our current model rooted in inequities. The system preys upon them and the law comes to represent the enforcement of a system that is betraying them rather than serving and protecting them. That system confers profits on others while it preys on those disenfranchised. There are consequences, emotional and often counterproductive but not unexplanable. The social contract has been contrived to exclude a group that believes it has lost rational recourse.

Sure, we can deem it irrational, counterproductive, and foolish to destroy another's property or hurt others (and oneself) to express this point, but it is not a wholly irrational reaction. It's an ill-conceived reaction because it is so counterproductive. What is rational about such an action is that when those preyed upon have _in fact_ been preyed upon _by the system_ (it's crucial to see this as structural, endemic, and institutional, not individual incidents which are triggers and examples), such persons respond by becoming self-predators and have no compunction in destroying the system.

Why care about a system that excludes you and means to oppress you? Why care about a system that is designed to exclude you or imprison you in situations where property is always before people and profits are more important than your labor? Like working for forty hours a week for a minimum wage that does not pay you enough to live? Why _not_ just burn it down? And then some are also sociopathic criminals but so too are the structures and authorities who hide behind the guise of their "justice for all" and "fair trial" claims when any serious look at history tells you that is another form of power claiming its own prerogatives and prejudices over others.

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On Our Original American Corruption, A Note on Justice, Racism, and the Dream

I have until tonight reserved these pages for notes about Tantric spirituality and scholarship, and my life in the traditions of yoga and philosophy.  Then a Grand Jury in Missouri decided there was "no probable cause" for the indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown.  The President called upon us to respect the Grand Jury's decision, reminding us that we are "a nation of laws."  He is, of course, beholden to say as much but much more, I think, needs to be said about these events.  I will not refrain. There are causes far deeper than the circumstances of Michael Brown's death that brought about these events and, as I fear, the more that will unfold.

There is a rot in the American soul that has yet to be addressed and requires still far more definition.  It began with the founding of this country, with labor and commerce built on the backs of slaves and the exploitation of the powerless.  And just how far have we come?  I remember heady days of progress as a child of the Great Society, I was a kid in school.  And I also remember the murder of Dr. King, Robert Kennedy, and realities of waging war in southeast Asia while trying to effect change at home.  It's not only a story of despair, of course, but tonight warrants a contemplation of that Original American Corruption that begins in slavery and the reason for its possibility: the rejection of a shared humanity on the basis of racism.

Growing up in the first school system in America committed to desegregation by busing, the change that enveloped my young life was profound and palpable. We learned and played together, loved, lost, fought and made our peace together. But could we understand the depths of endemic racism and the systemic power committed to unraveling the progress we wished for America?

I want to say we struggled mightily then to try to effect change and yet now, some fifty years later, America’s inequality of power, wealth, and income is greater than in the past ninety years. At the heart of the matter is our continuing legacy of racism, a divide that only those served by its denial will fail to admit. It was indeed not Officer Wilson before the Grand Jury in Missouri but rather the victim, Michael Brown, and his chances were seemingly no better in the halls of “justice” than on the streets of Ferguson. 

Could this decision not to indict _for any crime_ better illustrate a system that _means_ to serve and perpetuate privilege and power over the disenfranchised? Charles Blow today in The New York Times, speaking to the President’s detractors on immigration reform, also pointed to issues that inform Michael Brown’s death and explain Wilson’s flight from culpability: once again we are directed to an original corruption in our American history. Mr. Blow writes, “This is about the fear that makes the face flush when people stare into a future in which traditional power — their power — is eroded, and about their desperate, by-any-means determination to deny that future.”

Make no mistake about it: change is coming and there are no means beyond those who fear most its advent. Still long before such change takes honest root, more young black men may die in the streets by the hands of “justice,” more politicians bought to serve the powerful, voter rights repressed to prevent “fraud” while plutocrats continue to debase every last shard of decency from an American dream save their own dystopic revelries. Tonight what is left of other childhood dreams seems a bit further away than it was years ago waiting for the bus at school.

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On Showing Your Hand, or Consolation Unfixed

My teacher Appa was my appa, a “father” in more than figure or authority, he loved me and I loved him so.  I'm confident I will never “get over” his premature death, no amount of soporifics will create the promised blessedness.  The loss and the pain far too real for that, the harvest of experience that I reap is the hope I still cherish as a gift of mortal birth.  There can be no nourishment without toxicity, no medicine without unforeseen implications or unwanted vulnerabilities.  When there is love there is terror, the certainty of losses and the fear of fear.  That rage of fear is the bedfellow of love’s rage.  There is nothing more dangerous in life than certainty, especially when it’s certain.

We look for ways to make our endemic humanity a richer ground for reflection as we traverse the territory of outrageous fortune.  There is no denying slings or arrows even for those whose religion promises, well, what exactly does it promise?  Most spiritual paths invite some kind of palliative and consolation, even claims to exemption, immunity, and transcendence.  Let’s add mystery to that and if we put it in capitals we might feel all the more Mystery.

Who is more famous for offering consolation than Boethius’s (De consolatione philosophiae) where all misery defers to a higher source, our human love mimetic but incomplete in comparison to Platonic form or God’s mysterious Love.  More Capital Letters.  More affirmation that limited human experience seeks not just more of limitation but something more that is Else and More.

Nunc fluens facit tempus,

nunc stans facit aeternitatum.

The fluent now makes time,

The remaining now makes eternity.

We pick and choose our consolations but my inner historian reminds that Boethius is not conforming to my preferred readings but rather making his case.  And I would not deign to deny him: we all prefer our boats to float than be sunk in a tempest of criticism or, dare I say, evidence to the contrary?  Being dissuaded of our needs is tantamount to declaring another’s consolation unsound.  But religions do this all the time; it’s one of those things that make religions so sure of themselves.  Even religions that validate others’ experience don’t maintain the Other is just as sound, because sound means really true and who holds an opinion he doesn’t think is true?  True in that sound kinda' way. We can be offended and dissociate from dogmas and we can interpret privately to suit ourselves but religions prefer to claim things whole even when every interpreter---be that institutions or individuals-- is by equal terms picking and choosing.  I’d like to say that a spiritual life invests in making one’s own picks and choices but that would be denying that religions are somehow not doing as much, notwithstanding their claims to completeness, certainty, and finality.

Do recall that most forms of admitted incompleteness refer to an unfinished project: you are not yet liberated or enlightened or you can rejoice for your reward will be great in heaven.   The word “faith” now appears and you’ll notice that this is a preferred way of describing someone’s expressed preferences for private experience.  We call them “faith traditions”---think of how American politicians try to talk about religion this way.  I want not to be annoyed at another's claims of faith, their prospects or promises made but I can’t help myself.  I see them as a con game, a scam, a grift, a hustle, a bunko, a swindle, a flimflam, a maneuver, a wheedle, a honey trap, sweet talk, sing along string alongs, a get around, a gaffle, a racket, hornswoggle, a bamboozle, a caress made of mere blandishment.   Shall I go on?  This too takes us, again in decidedly American First Amendment terms, to the invitation to be hands off, accommodating, opinion-free, in a no disenchantment zone because we confer the dignity to the Other no matter what we might be thinking.  I may well have already offended because what’s at stake is another’s experience---to which no other human has access and so is without claim--- and it looks like I just called that out.  Called out always feels insulting or diminishing; no one likes to be shown wrong and how much less brought to account for what she or he feels and told is subjacent to another’s version of reality.

But this private-only club of experience begs the question: what do we share when we say we share a personal experience?  If it’s that personal then there’s nothing left to say because there’s no way your feeling is my feeling.  Peace at last?  Tolerance doesn’t mean we agree, it means we agree to disagree without talking (more) about it.  The damage has already been done.  What we do about those feelings matters aplenty.  When does our inner forbearance become acquiescence, the sort of phlegmatic, groggy compassion we tell ourselves keeps the peace but maybe doesn’t feel so peaceful?  I confess I prefer vexation with tolerance because that’s the emotion that comes with not knowing, not being able to know, and wondering how another could feel so differently.  Or just apparently so.  How would I know?

It was Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia who wrote, “But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”  Jefferson was making a case for taking private belief out of certain public domains, a kind mind your own inner business zone for the State’s common weal.  We all know how that’s working out these days.  We humans seemingly tolerate Other’s religions only so long as they conform to ours.  The ideal of a secular politics has never been so manifestly forsaken as in our recent American experience and never been more conspicuously banned nearly everywhere else.  There’s no getting ‘round the issue that convictions remain a topic of conversation despite efforts to spray non-toxic tolerance on the leaky crannies of intolerance.  We offend and are offended.  It comes with the territory of having experiences, not just opinions or even well founded opinions, the kind with evidence and reasons.  The alternative peace is not merely silence but permissive inaction.  How we doin’ with that?  Not working out so well, is it?

In a world of powers sought and inflicted we all seek some form of personal authority.  This is one of those frightening things about delegating and deferring, about being cajoled, bullied, or determined by the will of others.  We all succumb to the vicissitudes of time, pain, and death, well, unless we tell ourselves otherwise.  How do we choose to live taking on such powers when our experience tells us there’s no way to have it only our way?  Running from is running into.  Run hard.  Then relax enough to run again.  Appa taught me that.