cell913blog.com #76

 Attempting to live ‘in the between’ as this scribe put it in the last post, that is between the rawness of nature, ‘life eating life in order to survive,’ and some ephemeral, ineffable, timeless, and indescribable ‘deity’ or ‘transcendence,’ or ‘divinity,’ or ‘ekstasis,’ a Greek work denoting ‘stepping outside the norm,’ ( a satisfaction that goes deeper than feeling good) has been a constant tension in all cultures, religions and philosophies.

One of the most confounding aspects of this tension in a culture locked into a literal, logical, rational, empirical, sensate, language, perception, and ‘reality’ is that “Our scientifically oriented knowledge seeks to master reality, explain it, and bring it under control of reason,” as Karen Armstrong writes in her introduction to her work, The Case for God (p. xiv)

Armstrong continues:

One of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp. We constantly push our thoughts to an extreme, so that our minds seem to elide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence. Music has always been inseparable from religious expression, since, like religion at its best, music marks the ‘limits of reason.’ Because a territory is defined by its extremities, it follows that music must be ‘definitively’ rational. It is the most corporeal of the arts: it is produced by breath, voice, horsehair, shells, guts, and skins and reaches ‘resonances in our bodies at levels deeper than will or consciousness.’ (borrowed from George Steiner’s Real Presences: Is There anything in what we say? p.217) But it is also highly cerebral, requiring the balance of intricately complex energies and form-relations, and is intimately connected with mathematics. Yet this intensely rational activity segues into transcendence. Music goes beyond the reach of words: it is not about anything. A late Beethoven quartet does not represent sorrow but elicits it in hearer and player alike, and yet it is emphatically not a sad experience. Like tragedy, it brings intense pleasure and insight. We seem to experience sadness directly in a way that transcends ego, because this is not my sadness but sorrow itself. In music, therefore, subjective and objective become one. (Ibid)

Perhaps the ‘losing oneself’ in a ritual, skill or knack after constant practice might begin to illustrate a similar ‘ekstasis.’ A hunchback who trapped cicadas in the forest with a sticky pole never missed a single one. He had so perfected his powers of concentration that he lost himself in the task, and his hands seemed to move themselves. He had no idea how he did it but knew only that he had acquired the knack after months of practice. This self-forgetfulness (Daoist Zhuangzi) explained, was an ‘ekstasis’ that enabled you to ‘step outside’ the prism of ego and experience the sacred.  

People who acquired this knack discovered a transcendent dimension of life that was not simply an external reality ‘out there’ but was identical with the deepest level of their being. This reality which they have called God, Dao, Brahman, or Nirvana, has been a fact of human life. But it was impossible to explain it in terms of logos (appeal to logic and rationality). This imprecision was not frustrating, as a modern Western person might imagine, but brought with it an ektasis that lifted practitioners beyond the constricting confines of self. ……Even today, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists find that the contemplation of the insoluble is a source of joy, astonishment, and contentment.                                                                                                                            op. cit. p. xiii-xiv)

Senator John McCain of Arizona was renowned for exhortation, ‘to dedicate yourself to something larger than yourself’! Probably, in his mind he was attempting to elevate individual Americans’ aspiration, motivation and commitment to a philanthropic, a social need, a project that would entail a significant contribution to the public good. While honourable, worthy, highly ethical and eminently memorable, there is a difference between his exhortation and the kind of transcendence that Armstrong writes of in the contemplation of the insoluble, within the deepest ‘level of being.’ One is not more ethical or moral than the other; the difference seems more akin to an ‘objective project’ larger than self, rather than a subjective ‘spiritual’ kind of experience.

In some way, pedagogy, persuasion, modelling and motivating generate McCain’s version of ‘something larger than self.’ No amount of pedagogy, persuasion, modelling and motivating can engender transcendence.

The bifurcation of reality into modes of perception and thought, one the one hand, rational and literal, and on the other ‘aesthetic, spiritual, poetic, and ‘right brain’ is another of the contemporary tensions in our culture that continue to attract observers. And as the ‘left brain’ rational, literal,  empirical mode of both perception and thought, as well as the interpretation of reality dominates, the implication of this dominance are legion. In medicine, for example, the ‘soul’ of the patient is extraneous to the case history, the diagnosis and the treatment plans that doctors and their staff prepare for their patients.

The rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctly modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. The defensive piety popularly known as fundamentalism erupted in almost every major faith during the twentieth century. In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished mythos in favor of logos, Christian fundamentalists have interpreted scripture with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion. In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists have evolved an ideology known as ‘creation science’ that regards the mythos of the Bible as scientifically accurate. They have, therefore, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in the public schools, because it contradicts the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis. (Ibid, p. xv)

There is a kind of ‘certainty’ and objectivity and clarity to the literal, empirical whereas the poetic and imaginative and transcendent tends to be much more abstract, indefinite, uncertain, ephemeral, and thereby tends to be considered as less ‘real’ and certainly ‘less important.’ What are the facts?’ is a question bandied about in a presidential political campaign in which one candidate seems to depend on ‘alternative facts’…while another champions demonstrable, provable, measurable, literal, empirical data points.

One of the dark sides of the trend to conspiracy theories, in addition to their failure to meet the ‘smell test’ of literal, empirical accuracy, is that they tend to embody deep, highly toxic and even inordinately negative emotions, perceptions, images and the power of those factors, with impunity. How to hold such toxic perceptions, emotions and images to account, and the people who hold and spread their venom in an American culture addicted to the literal, empirical, legal, seems beyond the bounds of the public institutions.

The emotions, whether conscious or unconscious, however, illustrate a very cogent, poignant and visceral notion. In spite of decades or even centuries of training, education, normalizing and cultural embedding of the importance of reason, logic, the literal, empirical denotation of reality, there is always an inescapable ‘connotative’ aspect to reality….And ‘connotative’ exceeds ‘context’ the favourite word of contemporary pundits and reporters.

The dictionary definition of connotative reads: having the power of implying or suggesting something in addition to what is explicit…the subjective associations or feelings a word  (or image) brings to mind beyond the literal…

Ms Armstrong reminds us:

In most premodern cultures, there were two recognized ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was considered superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary. Each had its own sphere of competence, and it was unwise to mix the two. Logos (‘reason’) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. It had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality….Logos was essential to the survival of our species. But it had limitations: it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For that people turned to mythos or ‘myth’.

Today we live in a society of scientific logos and myth has fallen into disrepute. In popular parlance, a ‘myth’ is something that is not true. But in the past, myth was not self-indulgent fantasy; rather like logos, it helped people to live effectively in our confusing world, though in a different way. Myths may have told stories about the gods, but they really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos. Myth has been called a primitive form of psychology. When a myth described heroes threading their way through labyrinths, descending into the underworld, or fighting monsters, these were not understood as primarily factual stories. They were designed to help people negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche, which are difficult to access but which profoundly influence our thought and behavior. (Armstrong, The Case for God, p.xi)

 Some might argue that contemporary conspiracy theories, like the one of immigrants from Haiti eating pet cats and dogs, resembles a myth. Actually, it would seem more likely to be a horrific image of fear, exemplified in Greek mythology by the Greek gods Deimos and Phobos, the gods or personified spirits of fear. Deimos represented terror and dread, while his brother Phobos was panic and flight. They were the sons of the war-god Ares who accompanied their father into battle, driving his chariot and spreading fear in his wake. As sons of Aphrodite, goddess of love, the twins also represented fear of loss. (from theoi.com

 The conundrum and perplexity and danger of another trump presidency, far from the danger of literally weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, and mass deportations of allegedly illegal immigrants, lies in the deepest, darkest, images of war, based on fear and panic.

Eliciting and evoking the secret, undisclosed, unaccounted for, unconscious and yet profoundly influential fears of his ‘cult’ as a mirror to/of his own deepest, darkest, undisclosed and unaccounted for and highly influential fears by the Republican candidate and his lackey on the ticket, seems not only deceptively simple and highly radioactive.

Reaching into mythos, as a potential (and certainly not definitive) narrative image that attempts to represent those  matters of logos (reason) that resist containment in and by reason, logic and the literal, may not offer a legal  case for prosecution. The imaginative, poetic way of seeing, however, does attempt  to render a path to contemplation of one of the most vexing insolubles, without having to rely on the medical, psychiatric or clinical psychology professionals.

 Framing rhetoric in terms of war, based on fear and panic, for the purposes of arousing a nation (or a sizeable portion of a nation) by an American candidate for president, while echoing a similar framing by another Russian despot, may offer faux comfort and security to a fragile 78-year-old. It does not and cannot escape the depiction not only of a national, geopolitical, and dangerously imaginal and potential military and political conflict within and without the borders of the  United States.

Looking through the “left-brain-left-eye’ without considering the right brain-eye perspective endangers both the framers and the framed.

 

cell913blog.com #75

 Who among us is not still struggling with headlines of war….in Ukraine, In Gaza, now in Lebanon, and in Israel…in the Sudan and ……?

In the Middle East, particularly, the conflict between Islam and Jews, seems not merely intractable, historic, epic and endless and  deeply rooted in their respective holy writings.

In his outstanding work, Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell, writes a full chapter entitled, ‘Mythologies of War and Peace’.

He writes:

It is for an obvious reason far easier to name example of mythologies of war than mythologies of peace: for not only has conflict between groups been normal to human experience, but there is also the cruel fact to be recognized that killing is the precondition of all living whatsoever: life lives on life, eats life, and would otherwise not exist…..(Rather) it has been those who have been reconciled to the nature of life on this earth (who have survived). Plainly and simply: it has been the nations, tribes, and peoples bread to mythologies of war that have survived to communicate their life-supporting mythic lore to descendants. (Campbell, op. cit. p. 174) 

Integral both to his thesis and to his personal biography, are these lines:

One of the first books that I had the privilege of editing was of a Navaho war ceremonial, accompanied by its series of sand paintings (or rather, in this case, ‘pollen’ paintings, made of the pulverized petals of flowers…..The name of the ceremony was ‘Where the Two Came to Their Father.’ It told of the journey of the Navaho twin heroes to the home of the sun, their father, to procure from him the magic and weapons with which to eliminate the monsters that were at that time at large in the world. For it is the basic idea of practically every war mythology that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable order of human life on earth, which is that, of course, of one’s own people.  (Campbell op. cit. p. 176-177)

While our papers and screens are replete with images of war from Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Israel and Sudan and their collective impact is to churn the intestines and the nervous systems of millions of what were once dubbed, ‘peaceniks,’ ( an often disparaging word to depict an activist or demonstrator who opposes war and military intervention, also a pacifist), some people continue to uphold a Greek notion of empathy for the enemy. On the website, romankrznaric.com, in a piece entitled. Empathy with the Enemy, this Australian philosopher writes this:

In the spring of 472 BC the people of Athens queued up to see the latest play written by Aeschylus, the founder of Greek tragedy. The Persians was an unusual production, and not only because it was based on an historical event rather than the usual legends of the gods. What must have really shocked the audience was that it was told through the eyes of their sworn enemy, the Persians, who only eight years earlier had fought the Athenians at the Battle of Salamis…..The audience is encouraged to feel the personal sorrows of their military rivals and to see the battle from the perspective of the vanquished barbarians. Although some Athenians watching the unfolding drama may have been gloating over their victory, Aeschylus was asking them to undertake the radical act of empathizing with the defeated enemy just at their moment of triumph. Even more striking is the fact that Aeschylus himself fought the Persians at the earlier Battle of Marathon, where his own brother had been killed. Perhaps when writing the play he was remembering that while 191 Athenians fell in the conflict, 6,400 Persians lost their lives. The imagined cries of Persian mothers and widows may have been haunting him ever since.

This attitude of empathy for the enemy, however, is very different from the attitude of the major Abrahamic religions to their own wars.

From Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By, we read this:

But when we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament it is to a mythology with a very different upper story and very different power up there: not a polytheistic pantheon favoring both sides simultaneously, but a single-minded single deity, with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled in this literature in a manner in striking contrast the Greek, pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a Thou (to use Martin Buber’s term), but a thing, an ‘It.’  (p. 180-181)

Campbell quotes from Deuteronomy:

When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens up to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoils, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these people that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites the Cannanites and the Perissites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God had commanded. (Deuteronomy 20:0-18) (Campbell Myths to Live By, p.181-182)

Campbell continues:

And of course…the Arabs have their divinely authorized war mythology too. For they too are a people who, according to their legend, are of the seed of Abraham: the progeny of Ishmael, his first and elder son. Moreover, according to this history, confirmed in the Koran, it was Abraham and Ishmael, before the birth of Isaac, who built in Mecca the sanctuary of the Ka’aba, which is the uniting central symbol and shrine of the entire Arab world and of all Islam. The Aabs revere and derive their beliefs from the same prophets as the Hebrews. They honor Abraham, honor Moses. They greatly honor Solomon. They honor Jesus too, as a prophet. Mohammed, however, is their ultimate prophet, and from him-who was a considerable warrior himself—they have derived their fanatic mythology and unrelenting war in God’s name.

The jihad, the duty of the Holy War, is a concept developed from certain passages of the Koran which, during the period of the Great Conquests (from the seventh to tenth centuries), were interpreted as defining the bounden duty of every Muslim male who is free, of full age, in full possession of his intellectual powers, and physically fit for service. ‘Fighting is prescribed for you,’ we read in the Koran Sura 2, verse 216. ‘True you have an antipathy to it: however, it is possible that your antipathy is to something that is nevertheless good for you. God knows, and you know not,’ ‘To fight in the cause of Truth is one of the highest forms of charity,’ I read in a commentary to this passage. ‘What can you offer that is more precious than your own life?’ All lands not belonging to ‘the territory of Islam’ (dar al-Islam) are to be conquered and are known, therefore as ‘the territory of war’ (dar al-harb). ‘I am commanded,’ the Prophet is reported to have said, ‘to fight until men bear witness, there is no god but God and his Messenger is Mohammed.’ According to the ideal, one campaign a year, at least, must be undertaken by every Moslem prince against unbelievers. However, where this proves to be no longer possible, it suffices if any army, efficiently maintained, is kept trained and ready for the jihad. (Campbell, Myths to Live By, pps. 184-185)

Campbell then proceeds to posit the Jews as the target of Islam.

And the Jews, ‘the People of the Book,….hold a special place in this (Moslem0 thinking, since it was they who first received God’s Word but then -according to Mohammed’s view) repeatedly forsook it, backsliding, rejecting, and even slaying God’s later prophets. In the Koran they are repeatedly addressed and threatened: of which passages I shall cite but one, from Sura 17, verses 4-8 (and wherever the word ‘We’ appears in this text, the reference is to God; where ‘you,’ to the Jews; while the ‘Book’ is the Bible):

And We gave clear warning to the Children of Israel in the Book that twice they do mischief on the earth and be elated with mighty arrogance, and twice they would be punished. When the first warnings came to pass, We sent against you Our servants given to terrible warfare (the Babylonians 685 B.C.): they entered the very inmost parts of your homes; and it was a warning completely fulfilled. Then did we grant you the Return as against them: We gave you increase in resources and sons, and made you the more numerous in manpower. If ye did well, ye did well for yourselves; if ye did evil ye did it against yourselves. So when the second of the warnings came to pass, we permitted your enemies to disfigure your faces and to enter your Temple (the Romans 70A.D.) as it had been entered before, and to visit with destruction all that fell into their power. It may be that your Lord may het show Mercy unto you; but if ye ever revert to your sins, we shall revert to Our punishments: and We have made Hell a prison for those who reject the Faith. (Campbell, Myths to Live By, p.185)

Some have argued that the deeply embedded notion, construct, belief and theology of monotheism, the belief in the existence of one god, or in the oneness of God. (Britannica.com), a position held by the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, has contributed to, perhaps even injected ‘steroids’ of discipline, commitment, passion, and morality into devotees of the three faiths. Alternatively, it might be posited that faith ennobles its devotee to aspire to, envision, and strive to attain, and to ‘fight’ for, with, and under the command of, the deity of that faith.

Britannica.com further articulates a social, intellectual, cultural and even psychological minefield in the dichotomy of monotheism and polytheism.

Monotheism and polytheism are often thought of in rather simple terms—e.g. as merely numerical contrast between the one and the many. The history of religions, however, indicates many concepts that should warn against oversimplification in this matter. There is no historical material to prove that one system of belief is older than the other, although many scholars hold that monotheism is a higher form of religion and therefore must be a later development, assuming that what is higher came later. Moreover, it is not the oneness but the uniqueness of God that counts in monotheism; one god is not affirmed as the logical opposite of many gods but as an expression of divine might and power.

Whether in and through a shift from a literal, bilateral, numerical, empirical perception, epistemology and attitude of monotheism to polytheism, at least as a psychological matter, or a more ephemeral and metaphoric notion of monotheism as ‘divine might and power,’ without the historical accretions and barnacles of exclusivity, absolutism, self-righteousness and the need to ‘war’ on behalf of a deity and one’s faith in that deity, we continue to recognize and confront the inescapable notion:  life lives on life, eats life, and would otherwise not exist.

There is also an inescapable unifying force in that reality; we are all intimately, intricately and often unconsciously engaged in “life” in which we dwell in the between of literal flora/fauna and all of their respective complexities and the also inescapable image (whether metaphoric and aesthetic or religious) of a force, energy, mystery and numinosity of the divine.

And how, when where and in what  measure we bring, insert, activate or infuse our imaginations into that ‘between’ will tell us much about our relationships to ourselves and all others on the planet we share…there is no PLANET B!