The Spiritual Life Revisited

Ahh, mon cher, as you know, I have long averted the distinction that nowadays tells us we can be spiritual and not religious.  Just what to make of this difference?  If it waddles, quacks, has webbed feet, and a bill it's likely a duck.  What folks often call "spirituality" looks much like a "religion" because it passes the proverbial duck test.  Their spiritual preference often has ritual, mythology, a favored and authorized body of lore that works like a canon---to wit, it has many of the features of a religion, and it usually has a tribe too.  It's hard to have a religion without a tribe.  But I think we may be spiritual even in our aloneness.  Now we may be onto something.

There might be a distinction with a difference that is worth more consideration.  We can surely be religious, I think, and not be spiritual.  We can be spiritual but not religious.  And we can be both at once.  So even as I try to be brief here, it may not be as small a matter to sort out as I thought.  Let's persist, for that's surely the best beginning of a spiritual life.

What is it to be spiritual? 'Tis easy and at once, of course, utterly impossible.  This is because I think we must embrace paradox when we choose a spiritual life.  Must we? Without the whole of the paradox I think our understandings will fall short, even if our feelings make the occasion complete.  Let's take this apart, take it to heart, see what we find.

Pascal is a good beginning.  He puts it plainly enough, Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas.  

We know from the unconscious core of our being, from our very cause of existence that the spirit cannot not defend reason when the heart commands.  In truth, it's no contest even when in fact we refuse.  The mind can tell any story, offer any reason but the heart will rule.  We may conceal and dissimulate, we may pretend and rationalize but the heart will rule.  No matter the weight of the evidence, no matter how persuasive or indisputable the case, there is always something more, more at stake, more that must take its place.  The spirit is that something else that we cannot deny no matter what story the mind tells---for what won't we do for love?

We are onto the matter now, for a spiritual life is committed and tested and founded in love.  By that I mean we have feelings so primal, so real and deep that the soul forms itself around them.  What we care about, what we put before other things, what we must do because we are called to do it---that is the spirit's command, the heart's direction, its vector and compass.  Just what are you willing to do for that?  That is spiritual adjuration and to that you must answer, no matter the time or circumstance if it is a spiritual life you want.  What moves you? You know, you always know even when you doubt or deny.  

The spiritual life is when life is what we cannot avoid or postpone, even when we neglect, procrastinate, or deny it---still the heart will feel and it will insist.  No heart can ever be forced to love but the spirit learns and teaches what we know is true.  This is why the spiritual life can also be your vocation, your work, your everyday commitment, the thing you do.  It is not only the what you do that is you but it is the you within that must do it.  In the spiritual life you live in your skin, it is how you come to know yourself, it is the form you take when what you do is who you are, and the other way around too.

The spiritual is living, for the heart, like love true and deep, will not wilt or diminish no matter how many springs and summers pass.  Look to the Bard to savor this immortal's mortal form, for he tells us what we all know to be true, "To me, fair friend, you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I eyed, Such seems your beauty still." (Sonnet 104)

So it is: all that is spirit lives and will not die a mortal death no matter the fact that death will take every mortal life.  And this is more still...

The spirit is never trivial. It all that is compelling and necessary just to be. It is clamorous, exigent, importunate, and principal. In the deepest feelings of what you know to be urgent and momentous, the spiritual presses us and leads us to the imperative center, to the heart's source.

Yeats tells us,
"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..."

And then? Then, what is left is the spirit and from there the spiritual life begins again.  It comes first and second, and in the last it is what will endure, resist, and lay down its marker.  Not everyone I think wants this, not everyone seeks it.  It may be too that some are denied it for reasons they do not control or command.  A spiritual life is not easy to come by and less easy to live.  We all have some of it because we love---and let us hope everyone gets that chance.

To be spiritual is to love deeply.  And all who do must agree without consent, even without understanding, that to love is to grieve.  To love we must also admit to fear and accept its shadow too, to stand in the terror of all that can happen because what we love, who we love and that we love can fail us, it may disappoint, betray, or die---and we are not in command, we do not control all that can happen because we love. And still we love. A spiritual life brings all those possibilities and accepts, withstands, and will choose to live with every peril that love harbors.

There is a difference worthy of note, though I will not dwell too much on this distinction: religion is not the same in all of these ways; for religion is foremost how we manage, it is how we console and cope, we use it to form ourselves in tribe and stand in its good (and bad) graces.  When our religion tells the heart's story, love's clamant and inescapable truth, then it is also our spirituality.  But religion need not be that when all we might need is its armature to support our needs and feelings---be that in ritual or for sake of the clan and its needs.  Religion may place demands upon us but it is not the same as  the heart's truth, for that is a matter far more private and cuts more deeply.  And yes, it will cut.

The spiritual calls us, cajoles, inspires, intimidates, demands, invites, and resolves to be there in our hearts---to wail, to weep, to howl and bleed---for there are the things worth living and dying for.  And there are indeed things we must do because we must.  The spiritual may be your art, your work, your calling, but it is always vital and acute, often dangerous and sometimes disturbing because we cannot but feel it.

While religion attends well to the anodyne, to things we must do when we must do them, religion serves matters that may feel compulsory---but this is not the same as the spirit's imperious identity.  The spirit is self, the sort that withstands religion's tyrannies and cannot be defeated by mere threats or worse.  Religion may serve us when we need it but the spiritual life never ceases, never pauses, never goes on vacation or merely appears for the occasion.  A spiritual life is about always, ever, now.

So, no matter what reason might claim or what religion might demand, spirit calls us to live from its imperative and no other. We may not succeed, we may not rise to the spirit's calling.  We can fail in our spiritual lives because, well, because we can.  But when we want a spiritual life more than all, we will risk it all to stand in the midst of our mortal storm---in a world that may not for one moment care what happens to us.

We will break and are sure to be broken but in the life of the spirit we live, we carry on and we live for its calling.  Dumas reminds us to shake our fist, give it our worst.  We will raise our voice, hold and be held, we will give our all for better and for worst because the heart accepts no less. The spirit does not wait for the storm to come. The spiritual life's storm is always here and now, it knows it is always the time to love and to care, to burn and to cry.  Make yourself the person that the Fates that know you to be, as we do, as you are.

The spiritual life must come from the very core of our being, from the place of paradox, and its calling is simple enough: to live deeply and truly is to love.  We may die unfinished and incomplete in this calling, perhaps a thousand deaths and more even before we die, but when you choose the spiritual life you never, ever relent.  Perhaps that is enough.

#NotJustTeamHuman, "As we forgive those who trample on our lawns..." Your Sacred Mileage May Vary

"As we forgive those who trample on our lawns..."
Your Sacred Mileage May Vary

Religion provides cover, dissimulation, a way of revealing and concealing things about how you feel and what you think: that its what "the sacred" does. It tells the world that this thing you regard---an idea, a person, a behavior, something about the world---is special, valid, sound, and so important that you too should take it as seriously. At the very least you too should "respect" someone else's sacred. Umm, sure.

America has a special kind of stupid set aside for people's "sacred" because we are a land of immigrant cultures and tribes, and there are a lot of teams. Team Religion isn't just beliefs, it's whatever religions do or say that tells you if are on the team. So perfectly sane 21st century people will continue to make claims that are, in effect, ways of saying, "I'm on Team Jesus" or "Team Jewish" or "Team Allah". The rest of it is a narrowing down, so that one can be on Team My Team, which isn't anything like Their Team Jesus. The sociological and psychological benefits of teaming up should make you want to re-read the great Emil Durkheim very, very carefully. Americans like to think that these "sacred" are really their individual choices because we really think we are just making up our own minds.

Of course humans have way more power when they identify with teams because that's one way we gain legitimacy. One person's religion is called neurosis, fifty is a cult, but 50 million is a religion. Your call. Once you get to a religion it's hard to remember that a "cult" is someone else's smaller version of your own obsession and that another's madness is just their own personal version of the prayer, "Our pasta, who art in a colander, draining be your noodles. Thy noodle come, Thy sauce be yum, on top some grated Parmesan. Give us this day our garlic bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trample on our lawns."

People get offended when you tell them that their version of Get Off My Lawn isn't really all that special but to them and most will take the But Ours view, which is a lot like thinking that YOUR lawyer isn't there to bill you hours because that's what other lawyers do. Everyone else is less special is part of the sacred too. And that gets as dangerous as the mob. A language is a dialect with a mob the way a religion is a cult or a personal neurosis with a mob. Is there any saving grace?

You can take the "it's spiritual, not religious" exit but you will simply end up on the county road version of the religion interstate. This bit of nomenclature legerdemain is another way to make you feel special about yourself and an another attempt to dissociate from some perceived larger group delusions. I'm not opposed so long as you know that your own personal Wittengenstein language game is what you are playing in order to find a way to live with yourself. After all, we humans make religions not only to control, manipulate, exploit, and dehumanize our fellow humans. We make them to accomplish what only teams can do---try building your own barn _entirely_ by yourself, see?---and because we have to tell ourselves some story that allows us to live with ourselves.

For my own frame of reference, for example, I like mostly Hindu stories that I interpret as humanist Jungian insights into our unconscious becoming our conscious selves, like it or not. YMMV but this creates a model for creating some mighty worthwhile meaning in a perfectly meaningless world. Of course this is not how the vast (any?) majority of HIndus understand their stories and behaviors so that reduces the team size in the Hindu league maybe to one guy and maybe a few of his friends. Like I said, choosing teams is hard when you think that other people on the larger team are involved in nothing less than abject superstition and a boatload of social emotional identity that doesn't speak to yours.

You want to believe that your team in the bigger league---say, Rajanaka somewhere in the larger reference of Team Hindu---relatively harmless inasmuch as it does some little good and really tries not to be too obnoxious about its own claims or too terribly demeaning of others. Rajanaka has the added advantage of being powerless in any socio-political or economic way, say, much unlike being Catholic or Mormon. Team Rajanaka doesn't really ask anything from you. It's a voluntary conversation and then the one you have with yourself. It's how _you_ re-write the Giant Spaghetti Monster Prayer to suit yourself. Rajanaka doesn't pray at all, of course, if you don't.

Not all religions, cults, and neurotic personal "spiritualities" are as innocent, at least not as I see it. Now, you don't like to pick on them just 'cause they are ridiculous but because so much of what they teach is just plain vile, such as LBGQT people are "apostates." (I'd call that lucky. You mean you get to be thrown out and don't have to do that again, with those people? Thank the Latter Day God...)

But it's now official Mormons really really don't want to be called "Mormons" any more. They find their pejorative historical nickname insulting. And, more importantly, they have been told by no one less than the Latter Day God to make this clear to everyone. I say, all the more reason to keep calling them Mormons. Insulting someone else's claim to Absolute Truth isn't insulting. It's an attempt to intervene in their application of the Dunning-Kruger Effect and to spare the world more misuse of capitalization.

According to the CNN report, the current old white guy that Mormons call simply The Prophet is, "A former heart surgeon who conducted Utah's first open-heart operation, the Mormon president said he has prayed for the Holy Ghost's help while wielding a scalpel over a patient's body."
Dr. Nelson, that's this guy's name, has had other interesting stuff happen because, you know, God talks directly to him and these folks think that God, yup, THE God, the TRUE God talks _through_ him to THEM TOO.

Thus, "Revelations have seeded Nelson's love life as well. After his first wife died in 2005, Nelson proposed to the former Wendy Watson. "To strengthen my proposal to Wendy, I said to her, 'I know about revelation and how to receive it,'" the Mormon president has said. Wendy Nelson said she, too, had received a revelation about their relationship." Well, I'm jealous. The closest I've come to my relationship is based on revelation involved a warm smile and other stuff that got me really excited. YMMVagain.

So there you have it, some sacred with your morning joe. I have to go teach today. We're gonna talk about heroines and myths and stuff and hopefully feel a whole lot better about just trying to be decent human beings. If any revelations happen, we'll let you know.

Complexity and Fidelity, What it's Going to Take Just to Keep Going

Is it fair to say that everyone loves simple? Or maybe prefers it? We prefer to choose to be puzzled rather than puzzled by what we must choose. Simple means fewer variables, complex more, and old Occam was right about keeping out matters that have no place in the equations of understanding or choice. Well, except by choice.

One of the things we've learned is that complexity is required to do difficult things. It isn't only matters complex that make this computer operate or function in cyber world. It is also that there are certain persons who appreciate complexity, who like the processes, who love the wonder of the details. For most of us the complex is merely confusing: what we don't understand may be dismissed or denigrated because we aren't familiar with the languages required to do the job.

But as much as we may _want_ things complex to _be_ simple, it may be as much the case that we want complex matters to _appear_ simple, particularly for those of us less skilled in the particular expertise and skills we would need. Apple design has prided itself on just such a vision: make the _use_, ,the interface so easy that nearly anyone can learn. But, lest we forget, the insides are mightily complex, a lesson we are reminded of especially when things don't work the way we want them to.

Cell phones employ quantum theory, without which they are mere fantasy. But using the computer, cell phone, or your more more reliable today than 1975 automobile requires only a bare minimum proficiency in interface, not quantum physics, neither electrical nor mechanical engineering. What we didn't have then, we can't fix now. Sure any decent could fix your AMC Hornet but nowadays nothing happens without a computer hook up that is prerequisite to the work.

Complexity efficaciously hidden from us is often what we need and crave. Virtuosity is making difficult things look easy but it is also the ability of virtuoso to turn genius into beauty. By beauty I mean to invoke a sense of elegance, gracefulness, and felicity rather than that which is merely pleasing. But if things ain't pleasing, we're usually low on attention span and short of patience. More importantly, given the pressures of modern life, when things take up time our frustrations and stress require more complexity, like what it takes to book a vacation.

Having more choice is, by definition, admitting to more complexity. After all, fewer is simpler, more is complex. So we are selective and particular about the _kinds_ of complexity we like and what it takes to master _enough_ of "the argument" to experience beauty.

Complexity is dangerous too because ignorance---not the willful kind but the sort that involves difficult expertise--- and choices make people more vulnerable. When we require more experts, we must commit to greater trust. This being an "informed consumer" is no small beans, whether those involve counting what's left in your pockets or your faith in humanity. When individuals invoke chaos, we seek a false simplicity when what we need is faith in those who empower us to manage a complex world.

Now we've arrived at the crux of the matter. The greater our relationship and dependency on complexity, the more necessary and vulnerable we become, the more our trust and commitment is put on the line. Our emotional, often physical peril longs for whatever protection and attenuations we can achieve. We ache, we have algos ("pain" in Greek) for a homecoming (nostros) and literally "nostalgia" kicks in: we not only want things we can understand and do, we want to _trust_ that things will be okay. Whether they once were may be another illusion with which we contend but life isn't going to get simpler anytime soon---or so you should hope.

What is required is that we gain a greater feeling of confidence, become closer to the heart, with those on whom we depend and from whom we require complexity. It is this deeper fidelity we seek first and last: the rest is just stuff. Winning minds is still, above all things, winning hearts.

“Know it, and do not lose your sense”, Listening for the Gods in the Age of the Demons

There’s a compelling, disturbing passage in the first book of the Mahabharata that comes long before any of the familiar story commences--- the story of family, of succession to kingship, or the tribulations that lead to the inevitable fratricidal war.   It’s very Mahabharata and by that I mean it states as matters of fact truths we do not like to know but must know first before we can know any more. It appears in the voice of the sage Ugraśravas, whose name literally means something like, Ferocious Acclaim. There’s something in that too we should take to heart. But let’s get to his point.

He says,

“All this is rooted in Time, to be or not to be, to be happy or not to be happy. Time ripens the creatures. Time rots them. And Time again puts out the Time that burns down the creatures. Time unfolds all beings in the world, holy and unholy. Time shrinks them and expands them again. Time walks in all creatures, unaverted, impartial. Whatever beings were in the past will be in the future, whatever are busy now, they are all creatures of Time---know it, and do not lose your sense.” (1.1.88ff., see van Buitenen)

We can easily understand this to be another description of fate and of karma, of the processes of death, rebirth, and re-death. We can see it as a familiar table setting along with the metaphysical etiquette that must precede the story. But there’s more here once we take the poet’s last admonition to heart. Know it, and do not lose your sense.

Know what? What sense?

First a little table setting.
It's a dominant trope of the classical Hindu worldview---and shared by Buddhists, Jainas, and virtually all others---that time has been unkind to truth, to betterment, to ethical standards, and to everything we experience that is somehow failing us. It's fundamental to the theory of the Ages or yugas that we are not only in the time of degeneration---the Kali Yuga and please do not mistake the word “kali” here for “Kālī.” (These are entirely different words, with different roots, and we’ll not digress to further explanation.) The theory of the Ages describes a wholistic process of entropy: things were once better and will become only worse for the foreseeable future. Kali’s Age being the fourth of four, and only just having recently started, means that matters are now so depreciated that the worst will only become worse still. Cheery, eh?

There are a few bright sides to this vision but let us not ever miss the premise: once there were golden ages and the future’s only gonna get worse for as far as the eye can see. In fact it’s going to have to end in a complete cataclysmic dissolution before it can return to a more pristine state and begin the whole process over again. But let’s get back to the matter of the bright side. For one, a little good goes a long way. Thus virtue, rare and getting rarer still, can change things by application of even a tincture of decency. Furthermore, those who apply themselves to truth and to goodness will advance quickly through the malaise though prospects for enlightenment are still, by the sheer din of the natural processes of debasement, not much in the way of probable.

Some, like the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta, will argue that their own superior birthright is the only plausible explanation for their own advancement. Abhinava makes quite the case for his own prospects because his parents conceived him in a Tantric ritual that bypasses much of the karmic detritus that clutters the rest of us. I somehow doubt you believe that you too were conceived in a Tantric ritual in which your parent’s superior states of awareness and sublime consciousness brought you into the world. Be that as it may, some people, at least according to Abhinavagupta, have all the luck. (See his Tantrasara introduction for this bit of self-aggrandizing legerdemain.)

You don't have to make this up: the Indian world seems sure that things were once far better, things are pretty terrible now and getting worse, and that you're going to need some real help---be that a Tantric conception, a divine intervention, a guru's grace, _something_ to help you find your way through the devolving debauch that makes up a world that never fails to offer seemingly only more human folly. Good luck with that. Karma is a bitch. And you're likely really in for it. That's how it usually plays. And then: well, maybe Krishna's on your side, Siva appears as your guru, there's a magic wand touch, or some such intervention comes to the rescue. I repeat, good luck with _that_ too.

So it's not all hopelessness and just getting worse though that's actually mostlytrue. There's such a thing as yoga, which Krishna in the Gita tells us can do wonders, God might step in, and there are innumerable examples from the past that can inspire us. After all, things were simpler in that Age before Yudhisthira came to realize that no manner of goodness can persuade the nihilist to be less devoted to burning down the world for nothing more than his own narcissism. Virtue is not impossible nor is it merely futile even when it fails. And that virtue is possible in the face of the menacing facts of life, well, that only makes it more valuable. It's hard to argue with these tough lessons. We can't stop the onslaughts that time will bring but we can put up worthy alternatives to the certain horror even if those forms of goodness remain vulnerable and less than perfect.

Within this theory that implores us to strive and to do good despite the odds and the near certainty of failure there is also a kind of demon's game. While the gods advance the idea that we must work both with and against the terms of the Age, the demons have another take. For the demonic the process is simple enough, their agenda being one of manipulation and exploitation of those eager for another kind of world than the one in which we must actually make our way. The demons know that we humans not only want what we want but that we are also willing to fool ourselves. We can be so be fooled that we can use hope to pretend to get what we want. We'll go so far as to even deny the evidence, refute our own experience, and reject the possibility of our own error just to have a story that tells us what we prefer to believe.

One of the problems that the gods point out is that truth is often discomforting, that some problems are intractable (at least for now), and that we humans will go to nearly any lengths to deny what is true if it meets some immediate desire. When our deeper desires come into play---and when are they ever not?---then our vulnerabilities open even more graciously to the demons' seductions. We should never underestimate their appeal precisely because we should never sell short our human desire for a story that feels good even if that's just for _now_. Being firmly rooted “only in the present" is a surefire way to deceive one's self about what being is about all the rest of the time.

So what's the demons' play? It's got a few simple steps.

First, take an event or situation, something that happens that could cause us anxiety or raise questions about our ability to manage or control outcomes. 

Then complain about how things have become worse, take note about how progress has failed us whether or not this is true, ignore the facts, and confuse the situation with oversimplification and dissimulation. 

Invoking this confusion with an air of authority, the next move is also an easy two-step. First, appeal to some nostalgic past where things were purportedly better. It doesn’t matter if this past actually ever existed but Indian worldviews will help because they insist it has. And this is not uncommon in other cultures because who among us cannot imagine a better world and then project that back with greater ease than what we can envision as a future? And to finish it off ---this being the second step of that last two-step---the demon will then claim only he can bring things back to that imaginary better world. You buy the lie because it looks true and feels like hope and then the demon’s your man, and the next thing you know you are defrauding yourself as if it were the next smart thing to do.

This is, by the way, how Trump became president but let’s not digress; he’s just an example of what Barnum told us about suckers being born every day.

We all want to feel like someone else has the answers. It’s never very comforting to find out that the harder questions are the better path. But saying yes to the flimflam is something the demon can count on because it’s as easy as water flowing down. The hoodwinked believes that the matter has been seemingly demystified; they are in the know nowand everyone else is being fooled. It’s a Dunning-Kruger thing too: the less they know, the more they believe they know. That it’s only more hornswoggle matters not as much as that it feels good to feel it, it feels affirming such that the demon’s gambit is now one’s own personal self-satisfying delusion.

Once this cycle has taken hold, it’s mightily difficult to get through any other message. We love certainty too much to let something as valuable and important as doubt get in its way. So how do we not get taken?

It’s not really possible, you know, to “think for yourself” if by that you mean that you are not already conditioned by time itself. You are never not a someone who has not already been determined by assumptions, values, and circumstances not of your own making. Well, much of it may be of your making but you don’t remember and aren’t going to.  And the rest is collective, intertwined, and inextricable to some greater whole of which you are merely a part.

To put this simpler, you inherit the self, so start there, and if you do then you stand a chance at creating more selves than just the one that makes you believe you can wholly self-determine. We can’t, we don’t, and it doesn’t matter that those facts are facts, they don’t limit us so much as tell us that limitations are not the problem.

The gods proffer a less appealing but more worthwhile alternative--- it’s not nearly as satisfying as the demon’s gambit. It requires us to go back to our premise.

It is not just that time rots us---the catch-all for the ways in which we are held in time, by time, through time as mortal beings. Rather it is that time invites us to break into ourselves so that we can break the strangleholds of time. Then we can instead experience those conditions as our time, the brief, warm, lovely gift of this life. We will have to decide not to wish for some other time, some other life. But we will also have to not give up the feeling that we can live in any time, past or future, through the sheer power of our will and imagination.

We can still ache for a past and dream of a future but we will have to be content to accept that living happens in the space between every moment as it is and how we wish it were. What more it can be is up to us only when we are willing to stay in that seam, when we can go into that place where time cannot rot us because we are no longer in just one time or the other. When we are no longer “just now” wishing it were “just then” there’s room to move inside time, into a place where the false past no longer appeals and the wishful future is no longer remote. It’s not a twilight zone though it contains our shadows. It’s not stable or singular but neither is it unreal. We’ll have to embrace paradox without solving every problem but if we do then we can become more, not bound by time’s one-thing-or-the-other-ness. We can become a third, another, something that is no longer defined by what Time alone declares will rot us. We can enter a place that doesn’t demand we know or control or command so much as it allows us to live in our own skin. We’ll have to talk about this a lot more, but this is a start.

The Difference Between Yoga and Work, Life in the Distracted World

I have a minute here because the machine that I need to work on today is figuring itself out. I have to wait for it to finish its job before I can do some yoga.

A coupla' years ago I banned electronics from the classroom because students couldn't help themselves. The distraction was too much and rather than pay any attention to class, they just surfed. I walk through the library to get outta' Dodge and that's what I see: students on their phones and/or surfing with their work propped up right in front of them. The percentage of surfers to workers is about 10 to 1. Life is oh so busy.

We are all susceptible and tempted, it's the nature of the apple in the garden: it's not the serpent's fault, it's that eating a tasty apple is way more fun than any inner directive---much less than merely obeying your Invisible Friend's dictates. No one despises the tyranny of The Man more than I do, whether The Man is some god, capitalism's imperatives, or the trivialities of the human condition.

These kids at my college are smart and also nearly illiterate; they are ambitious but some few are still a bit conflicted when they hear (not knowing what they are hearing) the voice of their Inner Rilke demanding more art and less submission to the costs of worldly success. I understand their conflict, it's not peculiar to their station. We should all be dutifully afraid of the price of worldly failure since most of us have barely the means to survive more than a month or two of serious travail. Capitalism is a merciless, indifferent commandant ruling this gulag of profit before people.

Fewer students than ever take my classes, the decline has been precipitous. I would take that personally but it’s across the board and many colleagues have no students and advertise their wares. I would rather talk to myself than have to sell the idea that ideas must be sold. The information is easily accessible, in fact more so than it has ever been. I get why the advertising is done: it’s all part of the same problem. We are vying for attention in a world in which there is just more trivial distraction than anyone could want, even those claiming some higher purpose or the guise of the indifferent Luddite.

I don't know how to make people care about something.  I certainly don't believe they should care about what I happen to love to do or think about.  But I sure hope that they do care about more than work or play.  I hope they create a yoga.  More on this soon.

Opting out of news cycles, social media, and the rest may be a vacation but it is not the work of citizenship. The more we pretend to be serious reclusives the more inane and ill-equipped we become for anything but the cave on the mountaintop. That place, I assure you, has wi-fi too.

Much of what I am writing here is personal, that is, it’s my own stuff about having too much to do in the way of responsibilities to “the world” and my worry that I will die with fewer than Wittgenstein’s 81 unfinished manuscripts on my desk. Writing comes quickly to me but it takes time to do all of it that I must do: the need for me is like air itself. I can no more deny my political outrage than I can my long studies of Mahabharata or the endless (thank goodness) cycles of Goddess mythologies. I have to get it all out.

Somewhere there must also be sleep, some activity other than sitting in a chair, and time with human beings in, you know, conversations where you could actually touch each other in permissible ways, say, by looking them in the eye. I am just as susceptible as the next person to the digital distraction so part of my solution is to burn the candle at three ends or more. I hate vacations. All I want to do on a vacation is bring the stuff I have at home with me---like books, pencils (I love pencils), diaries, and the computer. The distinction for me is that “work” is just stuff I don’t want to be doing but have to because life.

Working now on completing the prose translation of the Bhagavadgita I have chosen not to translate the word “yoga” or its related cognates whenever possible. I mention this not because I don’t have a preferred translation but rather because I really do want people to see how many ways the word does it job. But that job is pretty clear, as far as I can tell. Yoga means paying attention. And it means imposing upon oneself---yes, imposing, insisting, making one’s self do something because that something can’t be done properly without the time, effort, commitment, and focus it requires.

To wit, yoga means something like discipline and that’s a word so far out of currency and implicative that it doesn’t convey the meanings I want to suggest. But truth to tell, yoga isn’t just what you care about, it’s doing the time with the real effort it takes make the worthwhile investment. It’s less about the results, so Krishna is right about that: it’s about the emotional and cognitive and physical focus. Pay attention, stop complaining means that “complaining” is really everything but paying attention.

I have work to do today, which means I will pay as little attention to that as is necessary to get it done. I need only as much yoga as is required to do my work. Paying attention doesn’t mean you can’t multitask. I entirely reject that proposition. It really is possible to understand that some things don’t require much yoga at all and that that leaves some time to rest, to wander, to do some healthy nothing while you work. But the rest of my time I hope will be spent in some or another “yoga of.” That is, when I’m not distracted. I'm working now but soon I will do some yoga.

Pilgrimage Diary Entry, January 5th 2019 Tamil Nadu, India, Somewhere on the Bus

On pilgrimage is about my favorite thing in the world, it's an indulgence I cannot help but want more of no matter how much I get. What I understand about that feeling is that life's journey is never far from the imperatives of culture: culture makes for differences that demand, invite, and challenge every bit of shared humanity.

Some of us are so fortunate---that strikes me as not earned whatever we have earned---that our journeying places us _together_ in the strange, shared circumstances of sharing our differences. Whatever we agree upon to be or to do, how we act and what we offer, it is nearly always difference that we share. What else makes us human than that we are not all, not one of us the same? How could we be doing this were we not the same? That is as much an opening as it is a meeting, like the journey itself, it gives us no reason to believe that we are somehow here for the same reasons or for much of the same anything. But here we are and we journey to meet the next and the next.

What we believe or believe we are doing doesn't require agreement. We may depend on agreements in every moment just to carry on but nothing about belief makes an agreement true. What's true is more than belief, likely less too. What's true is that we all want something from the journey.

India doesn't so much invite us to believe as it does offer up the idea that believing is something we do along with other things that are done and to be done. How you believe here is what you are doing and what you believe is rarely queried; it's not beyond language or gesture or observation no matter how it is convicted or heartfelt. What we are on the outside obviously doesn't tell us about what is concealed within. We never bring that to conclusion, we tell us ourselves to "integrate" but our inconclusion must persist if there is any hope of further self-discovery.

People vest in belief because the anxiety we must feel to be alive is but few moments from desperation or catastrophe. We all live _as if_ we know what is next because the alternatives are even more untenable. It is how we tell themselves what to do, how to survive, and what makes them us think we can flourish, are happy, have meaning.

What we know with even modest reflection is that this isn't always true even when things work out well. By that I mean we do more than survive, we may be consoled and even flourish, we are living the better for the beliefs we count on to be true. And it is just as often the case that we are not the better for any belief, particularly those we cherish. Our most honored beliefs may not be true, they may have never been true. They may simply do a job we need done even when we admit the same beliefs may also fail us.

Belief may be testable but we humans extol faith, which somehow rises to another level of asservation. What might just be possible or resilient we insist must be more or cut more deeply into us. It's less what we believe or in what we place our faith than the ways we feel. We may prefer being saved by faith or something more like "taking refuge" (as the Buddhists would have it) but none of us are immune to the idea that what we can count we want to count on. We all learn that the tests of belief involve matters so everyday that we don't count them at all, we merely act accordingly. However we take matters into our own hands, the facts persist whether we conjure them or not.

It's interesting to believe we need this "faith" but not because we must but because it may merely be evolutionary. The faithful are not merely selecting as humans do to live faithfully but are being selected because the consequence of denying some or another faith can get you killed, or worse. We have had centuries of traditions not only telling us what to believe but to believe.  It doesn't matter if the faithful refuse reason or attempt to embrace it: truth wants nothing to do with faith.  Truth subverts, it never just believes and faith is by definition a problem, never a solution or conclusion.

Religion does this with especial fervor, often to our positive detriment. But life at its best is difficult and even more difficult to understand because what we want is not the same as what turns out. And it is in those spaces and in those incongruities that we place belief, that which we call upon as the fictional light of faith usually for the purpose of ignoring its well-tested shadow.

Of course, we will be tested by the shadow even when we do not see it. It's the ones we test that take us to others and, if we're lucky, back to some more burning light. Be prepared to be burnt even when you are illumined.  Don't stop looking into the darkness even when you can't see.  The darkness isn't there to be revealed, it's to be included because it comes with the light.

Faith's shadow is neither doubt nor the disappointments that follow after belief; faith's shadow begins when we take up the hard work, often frustrating and arduous tasks that demands we remain stalwart in our incompleteness and ineptness; that we come to terms with truths to live with and to live by that are unfinished and will remain open to further inquiry. We now live in a world of so many facts and so many beliefs that we can not possibly pretend that anyone could grasp it all, not even a fraction of all that what we actually know. That's not a matter of belief. That's as true as any day spent learning.

It is difficult to ask any question when those around you would prefer you did not. We are so tender, so easily insulted, we take truth as personally as we take its discomforting pursuits. It is challenging to follow the evidence wherever it might take us because we might discover things we wish we had not, we might be compelled to change our mind or admit mistakes.

We might never see our mistakes even if we go looking honestly. We might never be able to remedy, fix, or address our failures even when we want to enough to suffer the consequences. What is unintended is just as powerful as any intention. It is exhausting to pursue possibilities that may be unknown or mere speculation because we must refuse mere belief in order to continue to learn. Faith in not believing is likely a positive virtue until it becomes a disadvantage to living with the real differences that separate us.

No one wants to feel separation and there is a good argument that separation does not exist in a world of connectivities. Shall we tell ourselves again that difference is real but separation is not? How worthy or valuable is that contemplation? That strikes me as the question while the point, the content is secondary. What's it worth to us to take up the question? I prefer my truths to be questions. Answers are interesting only when the questions insist on never being erased just because we prefer some, any answer---even those that are true.

But the fact that we are all connected does not mean that our connections are available to our feelings or understandings. Let's admit too that being connected doesn't necessarily make us good or happy either. Those are matters just as ambivalent as any matter of belief or deep felt desire or hope.

Truth is not doubt anymore than it is certainty. Truth is not one process nor does it demand but one, singular method of inquiry. We can feel and know, we can reason and know, we can intuit and gain empowered understanding just as we can experiment with evidence both material and imaginary. What makes truth possible is not that it is somehow there to be found. What makes things true is not merely that we have done our due diligence or reached consensus. What makes things true is not that we believe things or even act in certain ways because of truths.

What makes things true is that we can learn and change, that we can be sure and doubt at the same time. What makes things true is that we can embrace truth as a paradox even as we use it to solve problems, raise serious concerns, or feel deeply about something.

The nature of the paradox of truth is human nature. We are here but we are unfinished and will never be finished; for not even death finishes us off as it casts us into both nothing and the collective memory. We are made of bodies and are nothing more than the powers of cognition but we are also minds and souls who also want all things beautiful possible and impossible because somehow we want or need or just do that.

Truth is not mere preference or belief but neither could it be (and it is) without some willingness to admit our needs or desires be they pleasant or painful. Truth may be blind, pitiless, and indifferent to our wants but we aren't or at least we should hope we are not. Truth doesn't care but we can. The paradoxes don't end, do they?

Our human nature is not a fixed fact however it may have emerged to be, to exist as it does in a shared process, one of nearly unimaginable complexity of its own self-making, little by little, from things so simple now so complex. We invent ourselves but have been invented by facts that we did not invent, that we do not control, that nothing and no one invented or controls. Our shared humanity is true but is not necessary and the universe has no plan, no reasons for our existence, and no purpose to our being. Still we are truly here for this brief, warm respite that is life, burning, howling, weeping, bleeding, and loving, all of us, no what kind of break we got.

Nature is kinder to some than others though nature itself possesses no kindness. Nature doesn't need to think or feel or have cause because it can carry on without any of them and still create life. Culture, history has brought privileges that create deep and painfully real inequities that have nothing to do with goodness or merit, rights or our shared humanity; we social humans can't live without society and society both provides our possibility and invariably brings us to limits, boundaries, and end games that advantage some and cruelly disadvantage others.

We humans are all human but not two of us are really the same, not even those identical twins. We aren't equal nor endowed by a creator even as creation endows us and we pursue in good faith the meanings of equality. We can invent our humanity by dedicating to noble proposition but none of us is beyond the tinctures of hypocrisy, prejudice, or cruelty that we inflict upon one another. None of us is ever just kind even when some of us make too fine a point of being cruel. We can all do that too. We must not only embrace paradox to use it to help us be true, we must succumb to paradox as part of our incomplete nature.

Belief rarely helps but we can't live without it. Faith is often an excuse not to think or change or learn but where would we be without it? How would faithlessness be better? Or maybe when is it better? Better is something we can imagine, perhaps something we must continually reinvent. Maybe that's enough. Maybe being human is less a pursuit of happiness and more an invitation to more, to more better, to whatever that might be given what we can do, each of us.

For the Love of More, And Its Costs. Another Long Note to Myself

I write this morning because I'm working out two stories in the "news." The first is personal but one I think we might share in with some common interests. I mean to say something here about Hindu pilgrimage, the practices of darshan, and all that comes with making this a journey of self. For me, this is nothing less than obsession but I collect obsessions the way obsessives collect whatever it is they are obsessing over. I want only more until there's just the end and I'm gone from this life. The second story involves yet another piece in the news where, once again, I am deeply offended by matters involving religion, education, and the absence of self-critical thought.

First things first, and the happier of the two stories.

We have again returned from India and another rich, evocative, truly wonderful pilgrimage. Darshan is the centerpiece of that effort and the effort itself invites an ardor that's, for me, never enough. I like that it is physically, mentally, emotionally demanding, in every way demanding, that it takes something of you and from you, I like that it's no day at the spa even if there's time along the way to have a day at the spa. The point of pilgrimage is to make a vrata, a vow, a commitment to _see_ and to do what it takes to have experiences of seeing. With that comes the body---pain, health, illness--- and involves all of the other senses, the imagination and all of its powers, the mind and all that is demanded from within a context that _means to overwhelm_ one's capacities, all of them, all of the time. Too much of everything is just enough.  I will get on that bus again and again until I can't walk, I will go find another temple, look for another god, goddess, demon, and demigod, and I will ask for arhati and make darshan. There's never enough for me. It's like poetry, art, music, and literature. It's like the study of science, history, culture, and human possibilities: I am insatiable, I like it that way. This is not going to end until I end. I'll go alone if no one else wants to come.

I am wholly convinced that the reasons I love Hindu pilgrimage and darshan have little to with what the majority of other Hindus are hoping to receive from the practice, though I think it's plain enough that we do share many comparable _feelings_. I have no qualms identifying as a "Hindu" since those are the very signs we pass as we enter the shrines. They say, "Hindus only beyond this point" and while I may not identify with others' beliefs or values, I must admit that we share the same ritual shapes and destinations. We all _do_ the same things and the beauty of the practice itself is that there is no one to dictate what anyone is meant to believe or think or feel. What's required is a shared respect and, above all, a shared behavior that extends into gesture, movement, dress, marker, and, above all, an application of the rules, explicit and implicit. For newbies this orthopraxis has to be learned and mimicked if one wants the shared participation.

I am a creature of ritual, which invariably demands an imposition of protocols that place boundaries and terms on our behaviors. But I am no less a creature of the rigors of critical humanist thinking and the deep evocative powers of mythology to cull the heart's desires, feelings, and mysteries. As I learned Rajanaka that meant wanting _all_ of these things, with all of the complexity, paradox, contradiction, beauty, and strangeness that accompanies a life rich and well-loved, outside and in.

I remain a student of religion because religion is the human endeavor that has had the most to do with our histories of creativity, it has been a repository for the creation of art, beauty, wonder, sensuality, peace, courage, the entire array of the rasas---just as it has been a nearly inexhaustible resource for the manufacture of hatred, sexism, bigotry, manipulation, and false hope. (I feel just as committed to science but far less adept.) To say that I am conflicted over and about things that come from and work through religion is merely to describe my entire personal and professional life.

But I mean to go further: without all of that discomfort, contradiction, ambivalence, horror, and challenge I would want nothing to do with the things-of-religion. Or anything else. Without conflict and shadow, without rage and disdain, without passion and love and hope and softness, these practices that move through religion along with all their forms and stories would be ruinous and, for me, just plain false, nonsense. No one escapes moral compromise or lives without a tincture of hypocrisy. That itself is an idea that religions cannot seem to admit as honestly as I would hope. We are not sinners to be redeemed. I want no redemption or forgiveness. I want to make these facts of life livable, something I can manage to bring into every good thing I seek. Without the strife there's nothing.

So the second story. It's about how Vice-President Pence is offended that we are offended that his wife the art teacher chooses to work in a Christian school where, "The school’s employment application asks applicants to initial a passage stating that they will "live a personal life of moral purity.” The “moral misconduct” that disqualifies potential employees includes “heterosexual activity outside of marriage (e.g., premarital sex, cohabitation, extramarital sex), homosexual or lesbian sexual activity, polygamy, transgender identity, any other violation of the unique roles of male and female, sexual harassment, use or viewing of pornographic material or websites, and sexual abuse or improprieties toward minors as defined by Scripture and federal or state law.”"

Let's not mince words here. These people _are_ Christians because they say they are. There isn't anything like a "real" or "true" Christianity just because you too by be offended by theirs. I am often offended by Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, you name it, just about everyone who practices or claims some belief or behavior on the basis of their religious affiliation that I find less than commendable. I have no qualms about feeling offended or how my feelings and thoughts are matters of judgment. We all judge, no matter what we claim, and the issue at hand is so what about that.

Let's return to Pence. I know, I know but this isn't about that story. It's about what that story claims. This school claims to offer "religious education" and that, I assert, is an oxymoron. Pence wants us not to be offended by what they believe. I am merely offended _that_ they believe though _what_ they believe is reprehensible and moronic. It's not as if I don't have opinions. You may notice this as we continue.

There is no such thing as "religious education" though plainly we can be educated _about_ religion. There is only religious inculcation, even within the most critical and self-examining traditions. Christian scholastics, Buddhist logicians, Kashmiri Shavites---not _one_ them is willing in the end to change their views on the basis of further evidence and experiment.

Further, religious views are not merely captive of language or vocabulary. Rather, the problem is that the method of enquiry does not permit subversion _as the method of enquiry_. And Madhyamaka Buddhist method notwithstanding, they invariably reach their desired conclusions. Madhyamaka is built on the theory of impasse or prasanga, which claims that all argument ends without ultimate certainty. However, ultimate uncertainty is ultimately true---and what if it's not? It's not merely _that_ question that pushes the matter forward it is that provisional-only worlds undermine their claims of what Buddhas know. However they cherish human beings, they are not humanists bent upon the acknowledgement that we reach no "awakened" end game that leaves us all flawed, incomplete, and shadowed. The claim of awakened beings is anti-human, it is sexism and classism, it is merely false, religious nonsense---and, worse, it is dangerous for its manipulations.

The humanist cannot claim the methodologies of skepticism and incomplete knowledge are superior except insofar as they refuse the privilege endemic to religious conclusions. Matters are as true as the best evidence invites us to experiment with the notion of truth. This doesn't mean that everything is opinion or that there is no such thing as "truth." Rather it means that the processes of discovery are themselves subjects of inquiry _and_ that the best (provisional) conclusions are reached when evidence is examined without predisposition for certain outcomes.

As much as the religious might employ strategies of doubt, their ultimate end is self-verification and the reclamation of basic dogmatic assertions; to wit, conclusions are foregone _because_ they are religious objectives. You're not about to convince the Dalai Lama that there's self anymore than the Pope will admit that Jesus was merely human and did not rise from the dead. Don't equivocate over whether this is allegory or symbolic language---the claims themselves are not _replaceable_ no matter what questions are asked or evidence revealed. When Einstein pulled the rug from under Sir Issac, well, that was that: certain _fundamental_ claims in Newton's theories were understood to be faulty or just plain false. What people believe is not the same as what we might discover to be the better truth we can share.

What's at stake is not mere veridical conclusion. "Truths" invoke _feelings_ that may have nothing to do with being rational. How we prefer to feel or what we feel may be all the truth we need to believe some or another truth. But how truth makes us feel may have nothing to do with the facts, with truths we agree are the true explanation. Remember that Charles Darwin withheld his theory of natural selection because he rightly feared that the _facts_ of his discovery would prove deeply disturbing to theists, offend their sensibilities, and provoke backlash. He was right. Again.

Religion comes hand in hand with tender sensibilities; it is the place where we keep many of our most cherished desires, preferences, and feelings about family, tradition, history, our identities. When we are offended it is itself an insight into how we have been made and can make ourselves human. Whatever else might be said, to be human is to explore what moves us to feel, to think, to contend with our mortal selves. Without the contest, the challenges, and contradictions, I have no reasons left to live. Love is not enough even if we can hope to love more and better. Life's never just one thing. It's a maze, a prism, a mirror of selves unfinished, incomplete, and journeying until they are annihilated by the gift of life that made them.