Author: Meng-hu

The most succinct statements are usually the best. Thus, Kierkegaard’s short essay “What We Learn from The Lilies of the Field and The Birds in the Air” (admittedly not a succinct title but clear enough) is the epitome of his thought, style, clarity, and fiercely unambiguous philosophy of life. In fact he contrasted this view (he was a Christian of his own sort) which he called — “Religiousness A” — with the conventional Christianity of his day, the paradoxical-historical “Religiousness B.”

The essay uncompromisingly presents the lily and the bird as ultimate teachers from which we ought to learn “silence, or learn to be silent” (emphasis his). Speech distinguishes humans from animals, but not necessarily in an advantageous way, for humans fail to master the art of silence due to silence not being their default nature. Speech is only a functionality, opposed to the core of what the lily and the bird teach. The core teaching is simply Jesus’ own statement: “Seek first God’s kingdom …”

But what does this mean, what am I to do, or what is the effort that can be said to seek, to aspire to God’s kingdom? Shall I see about getting a position commensurate with my talents and abilities in order to be effective?

No, answers Kierkegaard emphatically. First seek the Kingdom of God. Shall I give up my possessions to the poor? No, first seek the Kingdom of God. What about going out and preaching the doctrine of God’s kingdom? No, first seek the Kingdom of God.

No duty or imperative should come before the existential necessity of actually doing what the Gospel enjoins as first and primary, of actually pursuing or seeking the Kingdom of God.

But then in a certain sense it is nothing I shall do? Yes, quite true, in a certain sense it is nothing. In the deepest sense you shall make yourself nothing, become nothing before God, learn to be silent. In this silence is the beginning, which is to seek first God’s kingdom.

The “doing” of this state of nothingness is “becoming silent,” an art to be learned. Wanting to speak is a corruption; one should be conscious of a state of fear and trembling to assume the audacity of speaking, about speaking of anything but especially of or to God. But we learn this only by heeding the gospel words, by emptying ourselves for silence, and then realizing that nothing is needful but God’s kingdom.

This is why the words of the Gospel, seek first God’s kingdom, upbringingly muzzle a person’s mouth, as it were, by answering every single question he asks, whether this is what he shall do — No, you shall first seek God’s kingdom.

This sense of silence as method is learned from the lily and the bird. Nature’s silence has of it “something divine” and is objective, not the silence of a mind in which chatter has been reduced but silence as virtually a palatable being.

There is silence out there. The forest is silent; even when it whispers it nevertheless is silent. The trees, even where they stand in the thickest growth, keep their word, something human beings rarely do despite a promise given: This will remain between us. The sea is silent; even when it rages uproariously it is silent.

Even in meadows, farms, natural places where birds chirp, their voices come out of silence, part of “a mysterious and thus in turn silent harmony with the silence …”

The bird responds to the change of season and does not announce or reflect on it but extends it with its modest song. The lily does not comment on the seasons (“We have too much rain” or “Now it is too hot,” etc.) but understands and makes use of the moment, or waits in patience for the unfolding of what is to be.

Kierkegaard contrasts the human response: “O you profound teachers of simplicity, should it not also be possible to find the moment when one is speaking? No, only being silent does one find the moment.” We cannot keep silent about what is around us, nor can we wait and accommodate the unfolding of time and circumstance. But one other characteristic distinguishes the human and animal, and we see it in the bird and the lily: they suffer, but in silence.

The bird suffers, and sighs, but returns, inevitably, to silence. There is no trace of contrived solace, of duplicity, in the bird’s reconciliation with reality. This reconciliation is not in anger but in silence. How different the human being, who would roar in anger like a storm. Rather, says Kierkegaard, “if you could be silent, if you had the silence of the bird, then the suffering would certainly become less.”

Likewise with the lily. It suffers, and like the bird does not dissemble but reveals its condition without disguise. The human who passes by would see the flower suffering. But the passerby does not care about the silent flower withering or bruised, does not notice the flower as “its head droops, feeble and bowed.” But the lily is silent.

When suffering is accepted as precisely what it is, neither more not less, it is “simplified and particularized as much as possible and made as small as possible.” It is not that the suffering becomes less than what it is, but rather that it is no more nor less than what it is. Suffering becomes extended and immense when it becomes indefinite, and is reduced to what it is when its definiteness is again understood and restored. But none of this can happen without our being silent, and this we learn from the bird and the flower.

Kierkegaard offers this counsel not as the “dreamy poet,” the romantic poet who idealizes nature into what it is not. The simplicity of nature contrasts with our own contrived complexity of mind and consciousness. If we are aware of the lily and the bird, we become conscious of their presence before God, and, indeed, our presence before God, even though our chatter and distraction and worldly worries blind us or fill our ears with noise. We lose the capacity for profoundness, depth, and identity. We lose the opportunity to understand. For without being silent, we neither understand God, the birds and flowers, nor ourselves.

Anthony Storr’s Solitude is a basic and reliable descriptive approach to the topic by a psychologist, a book that can be highly recommended. But another Storr book also of compelling interest is Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus (1995).

Feet of Clay offers the same calm and open-minded approach from its author. Like Oldham’s methodology. Storr uses the premises of modern psychiatry — wherein mental illnesses, objectively defined and characterized, can then be placed on the extreme end of a spectrum, with characteristics identified for the opposite functional end of the spectrum for personality. Storr is writing biography as much as psychology, however, so an apparatus is not obvious, and like Oldham, his method is sound and information, even entertaining.

What is a guru? Storr’s approach is comparative psychohistory or psycho-biography that identifies what gurus have in common. Storr begins at the dysfunctional end with Jim Jones and David Koresh, and works his way back to personality characteristics. Creativity is an important criteria for functionality in Storr (see his The Dynamics of Creativity) and places an important role in the development of the unique ideas of the gurus he discusses: Gurdjieff, Rajneesh, Rudolf Steiner, Jung, Freud, Ignatius Loyola, Paul Brunton. Creativity, indeed, is the touchstone of sanity in Storr’s estimate. The eccentricity of ideas have their sphere for criticism, but it is the integrity of their creators’ personalities that makes them creative versus dysfunctional — or, rather, may make their followers dysfunctional as well.

The gurus all grew up solitary, if not actually under difficult circumstances. They learned early to rely on their own imagination and vision of life, seldom fitting their family, peer, or societal expectations of worldly success. They learned to communicate their vision of life, to refine, share, and persuade others of its validity, regardless of content, because they had an undaunted confidence that their unique vision was an answer, a holistic solution, a subjective but valid and exciting if mysterious view of the universe.

Thus Gurdjieff, Rajneesh, Steiner, and Brunton developed systems of cosmogony unique to themselves. Why did people believe them, follow them, cling to them? Perhaps these gurus fulfilled in their own selves what others wanted fulfilled in themselves as well. And the gurus projected this resolution of their life problems with great success — given the disciples they attracted, which would comprise a whole separate treatment, though Storr cites many testimonies.

Gurdjieff, and the less persuasive Brunton, never revealed details of their alleged travels and “meetings with remarkable men.” Rajneesh developed his own Eastern-styled philosophy but quickly fell into hopeless corruption. Steiner, despite the eccentric details of his elaborate Anthroposophy, lived a morally impeccable life, that of a “saint” in Storr’s estimation. And though not intentional gurus, Freud and Jung attracted strong-minded disciples who often exceeded the enthusiasm of their presumed gurus. Loyola inverted his amoral hidalgo life into an austere discipline that at first was suspect by the Inquisition.

One characteristic of each guru was a major illness or medical incident in childhood or youth. Not only did incapacity alienate them from their peers but it also gave them a perspective on what matters. The incidents compelled them to create a system viable to themselves first and foremost. Often the ramifications of this incident were postponed to midlife (thirty to forty years of age), when they developed symptoms of mental illness, usually approximating schizophrenia. This diagnosis (Storr is excellent at sorting out the symptoms and relating them to behaviors) fits the now standard Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders perfectly, while the author points out how the gurus remained (except, of course, Jones and Koresh) quite socially functional.

The ideas of the gurus can be discussed independently, so that the guru characteristics of these figures do not impinge on the validity or utility of the ideas. Eccentric or different ideas cannot be dismissed based on the personalities presenting them. On the contrary, the fascinating interplay of personality, behaviors, and ideas makes for a truly functional person, independent of the average, the mundane, the thoughtless.

Creativity is a kind of madness, as the cliche goes, and one expects a quirkiness from those who argue a new vision of reality. What we need to remember, as Storr reminds us, is that those who espouse ideas — any ideas — have feet of clay, just as much as the rest of us. What we can imitate from those who seem unique in history is the creative process that heals our lives, not the sin and madness of gurus — or their disciples.

Mysticism in the West has always been looked upon with suspicion by Church authorities because premises of mysticism, often not developed or articulated fully, suggested bypassing sacraments, ritual, and dogma in attaining union with God. Western mysticism offered no methodology (a dangerous act had it done so) but the experience itself was probably offensive enough to authorities, the emotional and passionate experience, let alone the subjectivity.

Bernini captured this dangerous form of expression in his classic portrait of St. Teresa of Avila. Even if he honestly believed this experience a visionary rather than erotic one, who can doubt that the Church would not want it to reflect some goal or norm? Or to have the faithful read lines like these of Teresa:

I saw in his [the angel’s] hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying. (Autobiography, 29, 17).

How far away from otherwise prosaic voices, from the measured tones of Meister Eckhart to the ruminations of Freud on the pleasure principle versus the reality principle, or phenomenological explorations of Heidegger on openness to mystery. As mentioned in an earlier post, the pleasure principle is the pursuit of excitation, the presumed eros underlying the human psyche that Freud himself came to reject in favor of the reality principle, the underlying trajectory of the psyche for stability, balance, and equanimity.

This divergence is familiar in the East, where popular religion often rides on the crest of ecstasies — as in Rumi or Ramakrishna or Abhishiktananda. Without doubting the authenticity of the experiences or the motives of pursuants, East or West, there is left a begging for credibility mixed with genuine perturbation and a tinge of envy in the lay people who watch as spectators this sport of gods and their chosen ones. Ecstasy becomes a commodity to revive flagging logic and dogged but monotonous asceticism. Ecstasy substitutes for introspection, for self-understanding, a one-time stand that does not prove love but only the pleasure of experience.

Thomas Merton offers wise insight in his Wisdom of the Desert:

Obviously such a path could only be traveled by one who was very alert and very sensitive to the landmarks of a desert wilderness. The hermit had to be a man mature in faith, humble and detached from himself to a degree that is altogether terrible. … The Desert Father could not afford to be an illuminist. He could not dare risk attachment to his own ego, or the dangerous ecstasy of self-will.

No wonder that the hermit, those who are already attracted to solitude, will naturally pursue a path that eschews ecstasy. I am not ready to divest mysticism from mystery, but the wisdom of practice forces consideration of methodology.

A wise voice on navigating practice is a lay person’s: Katsuki Sekida is the author of the invaluable Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy. Sekida distinguishes what we call the ecstatic state (kensho or satori) from a more refined and ongoing state of stillness (samadhi), as his editor A.V. Grimstone points out:

He [Sekida] by no means ignores or belittles kensho, but he does not place it before the student as something he must strive for in his practice of zazen. It is not merely that, like some other writers on Zen, he regards kensho as something that must be allowed to come naturally, in its own time, rather than be sought or induced by artificial methods. For Mr. Sekida the primary, initial aim of zazen is the attainment of the state of absolute samadi: the condition of total stillness, in which “body and mind are fallen off,” no thought stirs, the mind is empty, yet we are in a state of extreme wakefulness. “In this stillness, or emptiness, the source of all kinds of activity is latent. It is this state that we call pure existence.”

Solitude is not merely the condition of physical aloneness nor of psychological alienation but a state of potentiality, wherein the self can work toward self-realization by using the humble and slow techniques or methods of desert hermits and zazen practitioners, among others. The “illuminist” search for ecstasy is not the path of nature, which transforms slowly and leaves room for discovery and reflection long after the excitation of ecstasy has faded into a haunting memory.

French writer Albert Camus exemplifies the ability to carve out a philosophy of life, a philosophy of solitude, from experience and nature. Not that all his writings don’t likewise brim with intellectual concerns and a passionate awareness of what matters in the world. It is, rather, that a purity and heartfelt sense of presence, especially in the earlier “lyrical” essays, conveys a fullness, even a sensual quality. For Camus, born in Algeria and a child of the Mediterranean Sea, that quality is best conveyed by climate and the sea.

Camus does not like cold northern cities: Prague, Paris, New York. Of Prague he writes: “I was suffocating, surrounded by walls.” In New York, high atop a skyscraper hotel where he sleeps fitfully, Camus writes that he hears a far-away tugboat and is relieved to remember that the city is on an island and that the sea is not far away.

“Nuptials at Tipasa” is full of the scent and wild colors of flowers, glaring stone ruins, the shadow of distant desert hills. Nature is sufficient to bring Camus life and philosophy. The ancient mystery religions of Greece only required that aspirants open their eyes to what was around them. Does not the “Hymn to Demeter” cry: “Happy is he alive who has seen these things on earth.”

Plunging into the warm salty sea is a rhapsodic venture:

The breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there’s nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. … Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.

And this is the gist of what we call too pretentiously “personal development”: to life surrendering nothing, to “don no mask.”

Camus haunts the villages and towns of North Africa, the grand cities of Europe, alone. He exemplifies the alienated, the existential, the “stranger” or “outsider” of the title of his most famous novel (“The Stranger”) who is too dazzled by the natural elements to understand the madness of society around him. Not that Camus did not understand it thoroughly. Rather, he did not abide by it, suffering the loss of his compatriots’ esteem even while gaining the esteem of the whole world for his fierce defense of the individual and of liberty. (He wanted France and Algeria to be reconciled, but no one in France or Algeria wanted it.)

Camus wrote no essay or fiction on solitude as such, but he touched upon the ultimate solitude of existence in every page he presented. Wrapped in nature and what he called the “absurd” makes hard work to extract an easy summary of his philosophical impact on this topic of solitude. But solitude is linked to death, and to the meaninglessness of society and its delusions. A person is obliged to make his or her own meaning, and therein discovers not only freedom but the despair and tragedy of everyone else. At once a rebel from contrivance, a solitary becomes conscious of what binds everyone in a common but futile task. Self-realization, not mindless conformity, is the ironic (“absurd”?) way to reach out to others in the world and make a solidarity that will last at least a short time.

In a later essay, “The Sea Close By,” Camus writes of an ocean voyage where self is consumed by the vastness of the ocean, prompting reflection on our own final consumption.

Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us die. Great sea, ever in motion, ever virgin, my religion along with night! It washes and satiates us in its sterile billows, frees us and holds us upright. Each breaker brings its promise, always the same. What does each say? If I were to die surrounded by cold mountains, ignored by the world, an outcast, at the end of my strength, at the final moment the sea would flood my cell, would life me above myself and help me die without hatred.

If the prospect of mass extinction described by scientists like Peter Ward (previous entry) engenders gloom, one must reflect further on the sense of solitude that science confirms. The demise of a treasured Earth as it is known by human beings ought to compel us to reflect on what, after all, we always needed to reflect upon even without the image of mass extinction: that which is impermanent and evanescent versus that which we may grasp and clutch and try to turn into an essence, at least for one’s own solitude and inspection. Like a drifting apart, we reach helpfully beyond our sphere, hoping to salvage what floats past and away from us, but are left empty and wondering.

But this solitude is ironic. We must place our Earth, our very selves, into this category of evanescence. We contemplate our own emptying and that emptying which our own species engenders. And that solitary part of us sees the epic of life and existence around us and wonders how it can be conscious of itself as distinct, apart, and yet aware and complicitous in small incremental ways.

Such is the sorrow that underlies the poem of Issa when his little daughter died:

This world
is a dew-drop world —
and yet.

Solitude is sharpened by the further realization of scientists (again, like Peter Ward) who offer no contextual relief from the bleakness of the grand cycle of mass extinctions. For some time, especially in recent decades, there was an absurd expectation even on the part of scientists that life in the rest of the universe was somehow more persistent, more intelligent, more hopeful.

Looking to popular culture, illustrating this hope was the classic 1950’s science fiction story in the film “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” conjuring hope, a hope in redemption. Plunged into the prospect of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War era, an alien from a distant planet comes to Earth to warn its inhabitants to stop their ways. Most reviewers saw the story as an analogy: Christ comes to Earth to tell humans to stop what they are doing. But nobody listens — or at least one is left wondering at the end of the film if ever they will. We have our message so it isn’t our ignorance or misunderstanding that impedes us. The story isn’t over yet — but the prospect of mass extinction, the acceleration of those factors bringing the next cycle into being, remain and intensify.

So a message from beyond will not change things, and it hasn’t for thousands of years. Clinging to the possibility of external salvation, though ruthlessly thwarted since the dawn of humanity, was a hope evident in the notion of extraterrestrial life, of intelligent life in the universe. Carl Sagan popularized the Drake equation to postulate a the existence of a very high number of intelligent life forms in the universe, and from this drew a measure of hope that humans could not be the highest form. Surely Leibnitz was wrong to say that we lived in the best of all possible worlds — but, argued Sagan or others, should this dissuade optimists from expecting that grander worlds flourish beyond the stars?

Peter Ward (in his book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe – 2000) points out the simple fact that intelligent life means complex life, highly complex life. What Sagan and others postulated as life may certainly be widespread: microbes and simple forms. But the factors that turn these simple forms into evolved products such as plants, animals, and consciousness is extremely rare.

Here is a partial list of necessary factors enumerated by Ward:

• right distance from a star
• right star mass
• right galaxy
• right planetary mass
• stable planetary orbit
• stable satellite(s)
• right plate tectonics
• right atmosphere
• right magnetic field
• right temperatures
• right chemicals and minerals
• right water at surface
• right atmospheric pressures
• right biotic diversity

And so forth … not even entering into the subject of biology and the excruciating complexity of DNA and similar factors. And ultimately we don’t even know if these factors necessarily add up to anything except by chance. The cycles of mass extinction are also cycles within an Earth that is incredibly benign to life, and recovers over the eons. Whatever comfort that is to the notion that life (if not intelligent life) is salvageable despite the cycles of extinction.

Buddhism always reminds us that it is a very rare thing to be born a human being. And science certainly demonstrates that insight today in a forceful way not appreciated by cultures and societies of the past. Or indeed still not appreciated today, when the life of individuals and whole peoples, let alone plant and animals species, are expended in the same futile drive to demonstrate survival. Being conscious of this flaw in human behavior is itself a very rare thing. Otherwise, one might see it addressed at last, if only by diligent individuals seeking enlightenment. But let us not take the simple-mindedness of Leibniz and transmute it into projections of extraterrestrial salvation, either scientific or otherwise.

We are rare beings on a rare earth, and it is only our solitude as individuals — not our hard and futile work with others to redeem the world, which is culture and societies — that can open our minds and hearts. We require a rare understanding, a sense, an inkling, of understanding. Only hard work on our consciousness, and a deep appreciation of our solitude, can bring some semblance of order to that rare thing we call life — our lives.

I am not a scientist but can appreciate works like Peter Ward’s Under a Green Sky (2007) as a useful popularization by a new breed of paleontologist who integrates other sciences into the search for patterns or cycles of mass extinctions on Earth.

Up to recently, the consensus on the cause of the the most recent extinction (Cretaceous-Tertiary) was an asteroid strike, since nothing else could explain the sudden heating of Earth. Ward usefully documents all of the most recent evidence, ranging from rock cores in mountains to ocean oxygenation to measurements of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, all pointing to accelerating carbon dioxide and massive warming as a driver of extinction on Earth.

Though a scientific theme, the concept of mass extinction certainly has its philosophical implications. Extinction is another word for death on a massive scale, of species or of life in particular geographic regions. But war, genocide, exterminations, scorched earth policies, deforestation and the like have existed throughout human history, reflecting how human beings have changed their local “environment” long before the advent of higher technology. Environment in this sense is cultural and social, as well as a mental environment that is hidden away from consciousness as a belief, a fear, an obsessive drive.

But first we experience death as individuals. However much our necessary connections with a physical habitat or a culture, with a place or with loved ones, our death is an extinction, even if we hope others will remember us or keep our effects.

Reflecting upon death is a source of discovery because it reveals to us our solitude, a solitude which has always been the core of self but was muted over by the noise and distraction of society and people around us. We are born for extinction; we have been dying from the moment we were born.

The drive or instinct of a living Earth viewed as Gaia is to give life, prolifically, like the Mother or the Creator, the engendering, birthing and nurturing principles of the universe that go on with blind faith, with perseverance, with eternal hope. And yet all life, all extant things, while abiding in this primordial sea of being, contain the seeds of death, of the dissipation of time and the limits of space. These factors close in upon that single entity and rip it apart, body and soul. Nothing is more poignant than suffering except suffering as a process, a trajectory, towards death. We see it consciously, yet Gaia does not, nor does the Tao nor God, nor does anything step in to consider why this and not some other pattern should rule the universe.

There is no solace in the scientist’s assurance that we are all part of the matter, the same energy, originating in the core of a distant star — that our atoms and molecules, the stuff of our hearts and livers and brains, were forged in the furnace of a distant star abiding in a far-away galaxy. No, we want to live now, on this humble green earth, with the familiar trees and clouds and winds. No wonder that Emily Bronte cried out that she did not want Heaven when she died, for nothing could replace a single day on this Earth.

And now science blithely assures us that life on earth will be extinct not in a few million years (as scheduled) but that it will face mass extinction within decades if carbon dioxide continues to rise in the unforeseen proportions that it is rising. At this point in time it is a matter of numbers and optimistic folly. Some scientists say 400 parts per million is the tipping point, and others 350. But we are already at 385 ppm.

The sequence described by Ward, and by many scientists besides, foresees erratic weather patterns, increasing ocean dead zones, polar meltdown, ocean conveyor system shutdown, sea-level rise … and, ultimately, seas erupting excessive hydrogen sulfide mingling noxiously with a once blue heavens to leave us helplessly “under a green sky.” (blue + yellow = green).

Extinction is a hundreds of millions of years cycle. Or it is within the lifetime of many in the not-distant future who will be victims of social and climate change. Or it will be ourselves as individuals, irregardless.

What is refreshing about Andre Comte-Sponville’s book L’esprit de l’atheisme is his unexpected attitude. Lately translated into English as The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality in order to emphasize its style — informal, not technical, not hostile — the book’s tone is not expected in the US, not after a history of Robert Ingersoll, Madalyn O’Hare, the Scopes Trial, and intelligent design. Perhaps because the author is European (specifically French), and in Europe bitter rhetoric has been played out, weary of wars of religion, world wars, and religious intolerance.

Or perhaps because Comte-Sponville was raised Catholic and is not, I think, hostile to what one might call the aesthetics of chant, ritual, and incense. Occasionally Comte-Sponville is proud of his non-belief, occasional cool and nonchalant about it — not militant, angry or crusading. His style is that of Montaigne, Pascal, Renan. His affable personality makes his reflections, which surprisingly culminate in a strong defense of mysticism — however we may construe it — seem eminently reasonable, acceptable, even inevitable.

There are only three chapters. Comte-Sponville covers the usual issues of society and culture in the first chapter (“Can We Do Without Religion?”) and the old proofs for the existence of God in the second (“Does God Exist?”). There are a few new insights here, especially in chapter one, where Comte-Sponville discusses the effects of the Holocaust on Jewish belief, and how a priest once confided to him that he agreed on the priority in life of ethics and behavior rather than faith or belief. The author concludes with a sense of deliberate “cheerful despair.” He is not an existentialist. He expresses faith and optimism in “democracy” and abhorrence of “terror” and “fanaticism” — perhaps too trusting in Western thinking, a point of view no longer supportable, especially when dealing with his topic. In the end, Comte-Sponville, like most atheists in the Western world, are still working in reaction to biblical ideas.

Chapter two includes the familiar cosmological proof, ontological proof, and a “physico-theological” proof. He touches upon the non-theism of Eastern thought, and revisits great Western thinkers from Epicurus and Lucretius, to the Stoics and Spinoza, to Montaigne, Pascal, Kant and beyond. He hones in on the illogical and the inexplicable, and — one of my favorite areas — the intractable nature of evil.

The author quotes Epicurus:

Either God wanted to eliminate evil and could not; or he could and did not want to; or he neither could nor wanted to; or he could and wanted to. If he wanted to and could not, he is impotent, which cannot be the case for God; if he could and did not want to, he is evil, which is foreign to God’s nature. If he neither could nor wanted to, he is both impotent and evil, in which case he is not God. If he both wanted to and could — the only hypothesis that corresponds to God — where does evil come from, or why did God not eliminate it?

Or as Pascal puts it:

We must be born guilty or God would be unjust.

But as Comte-Sponville rightly points out (reminiscent of Jung’s Answer to Job) what a terrible and stupid fate it is and what a horrible thing to throw sin into the face of so many suffering in the world.

Besides the weakness of the proofs, the obviousness of our common experience of life, of tortuous explanations, and the aforesaid enormity of evil, the author adds two other arguments: human mediocrity and Freud’s illusion concept (laid out in Future of an Illusion) wherein what we wish is projected without our being aware of it.

But for all that, Comte-Sponville is more sensitive and mystically-oriented than even the average believer in presenting the concept of mystery, of openness to being, of what both Meister Eckhart and Heidegger called “releasement” (though the author unfortunately does not mention them). He quotes Wittgenstein: “Mysticism wonders not how the world is but that the world is.” The author’s third chapter is thus a heroic structure built around the insights of medieval mystics (Eckhart and Angelus Silesius are cited), Simone Weil, Zen masters, Krishnamurti, Swami Prajnanpad. He describes the maturation of “immanensity” in our notion of the universe, or rather, our experience of the universe, emphasizing an active opening of the mind and heart, an opening of the spirit. With favor he pursues what Romain Rolland called the “oceanic feeling” and what writer Michel Hulin calls “spontaneous mysticism.”

Comte-Sponville links all this to the absoluteness of silence. Silence is the ground of being. Wittgenstein paraphrases Lao-tzu: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” This silence yields its fruits to the one disposed to it: simplicity, unity, eternity, serenity, acceptance, independence. These terms are not just an extrapolation, but Comte-Sponville’s own subchapter headings. He does an excellent job leading the reader to a refreshing sense of confidence and insight, of what he calls (in a final subheading): “Interiority and Transcendence, Immanence and Openness.” Solid grist for philosophical discussion, and not what one would expect from an “atheist.”

Comte-Sponville has written a heartfelt book, skillful and invigorating, well worth the time to the explorer of ideas.

The first chapter of the Lao Tzu (that is, the Tao te ching) presents an understanding of the Tao and the method by which to comprehend it based on the concept of desire (or desirelessness) and mystery. The second chapter begins a description of the Tao based in part on perception and judgment.

Everyone recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly; everyone recognizes the good as the good, yet this is only the bad.

We are immediately alerted to the very function of consciousness. To assert cognition, we immediately apply judgment. We determine what is beautiful, immediately implying that all else is ugly, for we want only that one thing. We celebrate something as good, immediately determining that all else is shortcoming and bad, because we want only the good.

Is it wrong, then, to have this desire for what we consider complimentary, to make a judgment about what is before us? The first and essential point is that this process is not cognition or perception, it is judgment. As soon as we judge we assert a panoply of subjective desires and feelings that will inevitably shift and re-form as experiences and feeling change and multiply. We have already left the realm of mind to enter the realm of human sentiment, assumptions, and the rush to desired certainty. We assert compatibility and accelerate it to a pleasure principle. We ignore the responsibility for what we have also created or engendered by our consciousness — an opposite. But let us see where the Tao te ching will take this first admonition.

Thus Something and Nothing produce each other;
The difficult and the easy complement each other;
The long and the short off-set each other;
The high and the low incline towards each other;
Note and sound harmonize with each other;
Before and after follow each other.

By describing one thing, something, as beautiful, we immediately produced its opposite: ugly. In fact, by assigning somethingness to an object, we immediately assigned nothingness to its absence, to its opposite, to its nonexistence. How can this be? Have we the power to conjure nothing out of something? Yes, if we call something A, then we conjure non-A, even though we are not qualified to do so, that is, we have no facticity to our unintended creation of will.

The debate Carl Jung referred to about the existence of good and evil showed how the supposed reduction of evil to a mere absence of good, unintentionally pronounced by the theologians and logicians who insisted on the good, produced a subtle but real evil that merely awaits propitious moments to assert itself. That is, the quest for good inevitably creates of bad something of a facticity, a reality. After all, if we have decided that there is a good, why not finish the judgment and acknowledge an evil? We assume that both exist, that both are real, have facticity, have being.

So those who defined good did not recognize the power of what Jung calls shadow and void in their preoccupation with the good. But popular culture knew better: it “created” evil, or engendered it with power, to a degree concomitant with good, perhaps even stronger — well, of course, much, much stronger. And that is our plight today.

So the Tao te ching observes this cascade of duality that comes from a primordial assertion of consciousness: what is difficult is so perceived to be, making it subjective, pertinent to one person. As a consensus grows, based on the behavior of groups, societies and cultures, then power asserts itself among the few or among a class. “Difficult” is now what culture and power decide, as is “easy.” And so forth with all of the qualities enumerated in this passage: What is long? Is it really not short from a different point of view? Or, more precisely, does not the announcement that is is long create another necessary perception, that it could well be short, or that everything else is short by comparison? And on and on: high makes low, note and pause, before and after … However, while this is a subjective perception of an individual consciousness, we should not overlook that we are born into a milieu in which much of this is already decided for us.

Therefore the sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practices the teaching that uses no words.

The practice of the sage is to recognize that as soon as one thing is judged to be such-and-such in character or appearance, then its opposite becomes necessary and “real.” Such judgments are, we think, innocuous common-day necessities. But how much do we need them at the deeper level of consciousness, in the depths of that solitude which is the true nature of self? This is the way of the sage, to not pursue them. As will be seen in later chapters, the sage is as dumb as a newborn — or as simple and nonjudgmental.

We walk the slender path of paradox, but it is not contradiction to keep silence, to not judge (which is what Jesus must have meant), to exist and act only as nature does: the rock, the cloud, the wind, all acting without action, all moving without intention, all practicing without words.

The myriad creatures rise from it yet it claims no authority;
It gives them life yet claims no possession;
It benefits them yet exacts no gratitude;
It accomplishes its task yet lays claim to no merit.

The “it” is the Tao, that which remained as a backdrop to our insistence on thoughts, words, judgments. Now we see that the ten-thousand things that emerged from it are completely autonomous and distinct, yet have in common this origin. And they have in common this potential characteristic of the Tao: it does not distinguish beautiful and ugly, good and bad, long and short, difficult and easy … The Tao engenders the myriad creatures, creates them, gives them degrees of consciousness (humans have so much!), but lets them be — it claims no authority over them.

The Tao is too subtle to be anthropomorphized, to be appealed to, to be characterized, to be reduced to a series of qualities, and attributes. We must realize that we cannot do the same to our world or we are thrown into a whirlwind that is no long an understanding of the Tao. It must be so if the Tao is to be the model of the sage, neither acting acts nor teaching lessons but simply resting within the context of being.

We will never fully understand this totality, this All, this Tao, this Absolute. We acknowledge its inevitability. As long as we refrain from assigning it good or bad, long or short, beautiful or ugly. We will also dwell in its mystery, however, because, as the last lines of chapter 2 say:

It is because it lays claim to no merit
That its merit never deserts it.

And that is where we want to be: claiming no merit, understanding without desire.

In the Western world, good and evil are largely defined in biblical terms, pushed close to the dichotomy of God as Summum Bonum or absolute good and a counterpart of absolute evil. Carl Jung points out that the notion of evil as substance or being is in fact vigorously denied by the Church Fathers through Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Theologians in the West have always argued that evil does not exist in the form of the devil, that it is merely a privatio boni, a defect or shortcoming of human behavior. This raises more questions than it settles. Jung first quotes extensively from the original Christian sources (here only excerpted) to demonstrate this point.

Tatian:

Nothing evil was created by God; we ourselves have produced all wickedness.

Basil the Great:

Evil is neither uncreated nor created by God. … Evil is not a living and animated entity, but a condition of the soul opposed to virtue, proceeding from light-minded persons on account of their falling away from good. Each of us should acknowledge that he is the first author of the wickedness in him.

Dionysius the Areopagite:

Evil in its nature is neither a thing nor does it bring anything forth. Evil does not exist at all and is neither good nor productive of good.

John Chrysostom:

Evil is nothing other than a turning away from good.

Augustine:

Evil therefore is nothing but the privation of good. … Evil is not a substance, for as it has not God for its author, it does not exist; and so the defect of corruption is nothing else than the desire or act of a misdirected will.

Thomas Aquinas:

Evil is signified by the absence of good. Evil is not a being, whereas good is a being.

Part of the motive of these theologians was to distinguish, especially in the early centuries, Christian doctrine from Manichean, which saw evil as such a dominant force in the world that in order to safeguard divinity from tolerating its pervasiveness — let alone safeguard divinity from the charge of creating it — posited two co-equal gods, one good, one evil. While this explanation addressed the struggle of good and evil in the world, it compromised the biblical depiction of God as absolute good, as Summum Bonum. In reaction, the Church Fathers all the way through scholasticism downplayed the pervasiveness and power of evil, shrinking it to a minor defect of character, as “nothing else than the desire or act of a misdirected will,” as the mere “absence of good.”

We will not pursue the disastrous tolerance of practical evil evidenced through the centuries based on this theological sleight of hand. Nor can the character of diplomacy and social order be attributed solely to theological assumptions. But a morality that concentrated on only a select set of human behaviors has been a long-term legacy of Western thought.

However, while the theologians downplayed evil as being or substance, the biblical tradition is dominated by it. The devil plays a significant role in the books of Genesis and Job, and especially in the regular New Testament references to the devil and hell, culminating in the Book of the Apocalypse or Revelations. Literature ever since, from Marlowe to Milton to Goethe and on to pogroms, revivals, witch hunts, exorcisms, and recent papal affirmations that the devil does exist as a being — all this has saturated minds, hearts, and vocabularies.

This was what so bothered Nietzsche, this contradiction that churchmen allowed tyrants, armies, and abusers their “misdirected wills” and “defects” while horrifying the masses with witches, demons, and damnation.

Jung saw clearly that an underlying tautology exists, beyond human behavior: that if God is the author of good and human beings are the author of evil, there is a clear discrepancy of nature and origin, of theory and reality. To cite his analogy, if light does not produce darkness, then neither does darkness produce light. If humans are the author of evil, then they are also the author of good, because good and evil, or what we call good or evil, involves human judgment.

Both good and evil are categories of values. Human beings are the author of judgments. As Jung explains:

Psychology does not know what good and evil are in themselves; it knows them only as judgments about relationships. “Good” is what seems suitable, acceptable, or laudable from a certain point of view; “evil” is its opposite. If the things we call good are “really” good, then there must be evil things that are “real” too.

Jung defined the shadow and the void as phenomena of mind with enormous and subtle propensities for what we conventionally call “evil.” The existence of shadow and void in human nature provides a more cogent explanation of the function of judgment in the psyche. Judgment is simply too externalized by traditional theological explanation. On this subject even philosophy devolves, we may say, into ethics, which is a logical category for describing behavior but not a holistic psychological explanation of the factors of behavior, especially social behavior. In short, philosophy, like theology, can use logic to circumvent human experience, especially our experience of evil.

Of course, Jung is not the first thinker to shift the issue of evil back to an empirical and realistic level, but he did so with sympathy for the great religious traditions, however inadequately they had addressed such a pressing issue. Jung understood that evil does exist and that psychology must insist on this fact. Evil is not necessarily a metaphysical phenomenon but it is clearly a psychological experience. We should not have to struggle through theology in order to describe evil as an historical experience, as a collective phenomenon.

We are left with a Summum Bonum that we can never attain as realistic behavior nor fully emulate as a model because it is contradictory. Human experience is not so providential to dismiss evil as a bad habit, while entertaining an infinitely powerful archetype like the devil.

The Western world has been focusing for centuries on power as the resource for suppressing evil, instead of realizing that it was the very insistence on the necessary triumph of good over evil that has engendered much of what we call evil, and much that we have overlooked as evil.

Sunflower
Last year around this time a sunflower appeared radiantly on a side of the house not frequented, not thought of in terms of a sunflower. There was great expectation, but the batteries on the camera needed recharging, and the sunflower was forgotten. Next time I looked, the sunflower head had drooped like a willow, perhaps too long neglected. In a little while the flower was brown and gone. There was no lesson to learn but that perhaps sometimes precocity and hope must be nurtured more than solitude.

Things done lately:
stumbling on a cautious rabbit hopping away,
hearing the rustle of a bird in a treetop,
watching the ever-changing outline of clouds,
following visually the unpredictable course of a butterfly,
jumping back from a baby snake on a path,
feeling soft rain drizzling on bare arms,
rescuing a daddy-long-legs from the bathtub,
smiling at a lizard huff and puff its red-throated flap,
gazing at a rainbow in the dusk sky.

Bears
A teen bear has been crossing down the road lately, back and forth around dawn and dusk. Bears are always about, but not in the abundance of 2003, when entries here and photographs for the Features section were opportune. Surely they suffer from the habitat destruction since then, the increasing heat of summer, and the decline in native food sources. Now they make the rounds of trash containers, attracted especially by the smell of flesh, which, however, will not be in our container since we don’t eat it. Nevertheless, the bears will check, as part of their routine, knocking over containers, squashing down field fence, going about the bearish things they do.