China’s Religious Experience

I’ve always considered the religious forms native to China the most sophisticated—at least in comparison with religious forms in India and in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim world. The last three, of course, are closely related. The specifically Chinese forms are a belief in spirits, especially those of the ancestors, and Taoism, a much later mystical form, in which the ultimate is pictured as a transcendental All. The chief similarity of Chinese and all other religions is that it is based on a conviction that a spirit world exists beyond this one. The chief difference lies in the absence of a personified God, a God whose characteristic are based on the human model. The great benefit of the religious view for the Chinese people has been that a sophisticated view of the All High is almost impossible to exploit for political purposes. Hence China has been spared the vicious religious wars that have plagued other parts of the globe.

 

On Love: Well Worth Reading

Herewith a pointer to what I consider to be a superb, brief post entitled “Aquinas on Amor” on Siris. It is a repost of an entry that first appeared last year. Aquinas had a crystal-clear vision, and here it is summarized with skill and parsimony. Click here to see it.

 

Our Strange Environment

Someday we may discover—after we have passed the border—just how strange an environment surrounded us in life, especially if we spent our time in a modern, highly mechanized urban civilization, out of intimate contact with nature.

Out in nature we’re always in close relationship with living systems, whether we live an agricultural, hunting-gathering, or a herding life. Of course I don’t mean modern agriculture with all of its endless machines and chemical underpinnings. These thoughts occur because I’ve been reading, again, the novels of Alexander McCall Smith, creator of Mma Ramotswe, Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective. In that book quite frequently we are reminded of an earlier way of life, herding cattle in the arid regions adjoining the Kalahari desert in Africa.

 

Border Region ABCs

Sometimes we have experiences in which the facts are crystal clear, yet these facts conspire to produce in us emotional contact with something grand: awe, love, union, exaltation. We might actually shiver. To make this sharper: We understand the situation perfectly well. At the same time we have emotions. The two coincide and it is impossible to separate the two sets of facts, the cognitive grasp to one side, the feeling to the other. They go together. They are mutually supportive.

 

Knotty Issue – Art

I am not altogether happy with the last post (Art, Spirituality)—or, to put it in other words, it needs elaboration.  The problems are these:

• The arts require the spiritual dimension, and all those who engage in the arts do, in a sense, borrow the fire of the gods.
• But in the arts, as in everything else, the intention is the determining factor. I noted correctly that art is the language of spirituality, but it can be a borrowed language to speak about more mundane things. At the same time, if will is moved by a perception of the spiritual realm, thus if the artist is obeying the Muse rather than using energies that flow from her to shape some intention directed downward, as it were, the art will still be illuminated from above, but it is the intention which governs the ultimate expression.

These two issues explain why all sorts of arts—commercial, pure entertainment, the fawning art that celebrates power and fame, the arts of propaganda, and quite evil arts intended to gain profit from lower drives are all, by some, classified as art.

To the extent that these differentiations are blurred or overlooked, the last entry is incomplete. These are knotty issues. Let me elaborate on each of the two points above.

Borrowed Inspiration

Here is an example. Someone published a novel a couple of decades ago entitled On the Beach. The intention behind this novel was fundamentally political—anti-nukes. Yet it took the form of an artistic creation, with characters and plot. It evoked emotions, used imagination, etc. Now the novel just happened to be relatively undistinguished, but often quite advanced works of art appear, each moved by an agenda drawn from the lower levels of existence. The creative process, no matter what the artist’s intention, is energized by that aspect of ourselves which reaches beyond the here-and-now. Thus it borrows energy to achieve worldly aims. Now, arguably, all human creations have a range of motives in which the lower levels are also present. But great art is distinguished from the ordinary kinds by a motive obeying an attraction from above, aiming to unite with the mysterious higher—not in order to sell or influence anybody but purely for the sake of art, thus purely from a perceived spiritual inspiration. Such art is marked by its orientation. Never mind the details: the substance, the story, the style. The inner orientation is what makes the difference. In these situations nothing is borrowed “in order to.” The work proceeds from love. The pursuit of the arts, in this second form, is a spiritual striving. To be sure it isn’t felt as such because, in our culture, spiritual action is almost always pent up in kennels, as it were. If the activity is not outwardly religious, if it isn’t lit by the lights of dogma, is not intellectually aligned with the religious, and/or is not characterized by various kinds of voluntary self-denial, asceticism, and the like—then it is denied the definition.

The Ambiguity of Art

Such denial is in part very much justified precisely because the category, art, is such a muddled mixture. This is nicely documented by the prevailing the tongue-in-cheek question we’ve all heard used, always with a touch of irony: “Yes. But is it art?” To see art in its two prevailing modes, as serving lower purposes and as a kind of worship, requires adequacy. No arbitrary rules can be applied. To see requires a developed eyesight—and only those who have ears can hear it.

 

Art, Spirituality

The arts are the language of spirituality, but the complexities involved in this subject—cultural, social, personal, and, alas, commercial—make it difficult to see this. I’ll attempt a little unpacking today. Certainly in my youth the arts were viewed as a kind of rebellion against bourgeois customs. My youth extended from birth to twenty-five, let’s say, thus from 1936 to 1961. But this rebellion or upheaval predated my birth if, say, looking at painting, we see expressionism as an early sign of this collective mood. It goes even farther back if we take Romanticism as the model. It had its roots in the eighteenth century but flourished in the nineteenth. My own view is that the process—we’re talking about the Western Culture by and large—had its origins early in the nineteenth century. It took religious as well as artistic forms, and all of these were, in one way or another, impulses that moved against rationalism as it peaked in the Enlightenment, thus at the divide between the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, marked dramatically by the French Revolution.

 

The Householder

The household still figures in a meaningful way in modern statistical measurement (e.g., household income, number of households, etc.), but it has never carried any kind of spiritual connotation. Not so in the East. In Sufi circles, for one, at least in the tradition that I know a little something about, the Naqshbandi, to be a householder is deemed to be the minimum qualification for higher learning, thus for the spiritual path.

This stands in contrast to the Western and some Eastern traditions where higher forms of dedication appear to demand that the seeker abandon the usual life occupations, take up a celibate or ascetic style of living, and devote him- or herself entirely to the pursuit of God. The life of the artist, similarly, is viewed in the same way. Above all, as an artist, do not be bourgeois, for God’s sake! You must pursue a life in garrets, unattached, eccentric, and unpredictable. The nine-to-five is a definite No-No. I’ve always found this amusing in that—as secularization has spread like a brushfire over the last couple of completed centuries—the scribbler, painter, sculptor, musician, dancer, or actor have been required, in an odd sort of way, at least outwardly, to imitate the saint. Only sexual freedom—but to be enjoyed strictly outside the constrictions of marriage—has been granted these not-quite-volunteers to be the secular saints of the West.

 

The Journal: A Tool of Contemplation

In my experience keeping a journal is one of the most valuable tools for contemplation. But a word about that word: certain words have awkward shadows. By contemplation I simply mean a centered inner state, balance, calm, and clarity. It might be put into the language of martial arts and called readiness; in that category readiness also means emptiness. Nothing interferes with the steady look at reality as it is. I also like the word “sovereign,” used as an adjective, because in a state of contemplation we feel above the fray but not superior to it in a down-the-nose sort of way, just above it, ready to act, able to refrain, mistress or master of the self.

 

The Contemplative Life

The last three weeks in my own life illustrate the reason why, in every culture, contemplative orders or aggregations have come into being and still persist despite the violent churn of Modernity around the globe. A sudden up-surge of work caused me to turn my head away from blogging—and the blog that I neglected most was Borderzone. We live in a layered environment in which the most demanding is the lowest level, the physical; the social is next; we will neglect it when we are ill or injured; and we neglect the one above that, the mental and the spiritual, when turbulence draws our attention downward.

 

The Experience of Helen Keller

Self-observation tells us that consciousness manifests in many forms. Sharp self-awareness is rather rare. In times of stress and trouble, during infatuations, during illness, disasters, or after winning a sizeable lottery—while daydreaming, watching TV, musing at the wheel, and even doing habitual work—the self is in various states of identification. For all practical purposes, it is one with, unified with, its own experience. The sense of self is vaguely present at all times, but the consciousness of the self is dormant. It requires concentration to take control. “I had to get a hold of myself,” people say—but indicating what? They mean that they had to break the identification and become aware. With consciousness fully present—rather than held captive by experience—directed action becomes possible. Arguably a principal difference between people is the degree to which they are able effectively to detach. The word is paradoxical because, in this context, to be detached is to be present, whereas to be identified means that the self is absent in a state of semi-sleep. Shocks awaken people.