Photo by Warren Falcon
"Man is an animal who feeds upon transcendentals." - Raissa Maritain
"Break all our teacup talk of God." - Hafez
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Spiritual bypassing is a manic defense against depression and death, a denial of the realm of "pathos" - suffering in existence - from which the word "pathology" is derived, the path or pattern of suffering in being.
Great Nature runs riot upon and within that which we project to be "transcendence" but, without a doubt, crushing dissolution, decay and ending is Nature's insistent way despite all our reification of wishful "happier" metaphysics - read "escapes" - bypassing inexorable existential givens.
We choose to believe that these spiritually flavored subtleties of Imagination must concretely be true given understandable human desperation in the teeth of facticity, of throwness feet first or head long into the maws of life.
Searching for transcendence long sought and hard fought for in the all too human act of artifice, art, alchemy and religion, in the depth cry toward surcease and significant if but momentary peace of mind and body, I no longer wonder that some are wont to take holy vows who, tipping Cosmic Cows (or piercing murderous bulls), cloak themselves in Blessed Silence, a long breath out-sleeved.
There may be more to me and thee, O Mercurial Verities between How-and-Now Cows, than the undertaker's shovel and the deep blue sky and sea but I am a soul man, partial to soul, to space, to time, to locale, at more than a lover's quarrel with the world and very much at quarrel with spirit and entire "congregations of vapor" (Shakespeare).
This argument is ongoing as it should be, at least for me. What follows here below are extensive quotes from thoughtful, clear-headed and compassionate writers who rediscover and sing/argue in the face of the bypassers (as are we all, truthfully, us "hopefully transcending ones") of and for the nobility inherent in suffering Creation and Her creatures, including humanity, as part of living and dying into and out of conscious existence:
Alan Watt's: "Man has to discover that everything which he beholds in nature - the clammy foreign-feeling world of the ocean's depths, the wastes of ice, the reptiles of the swamp, the spiders and scorpions, the deserts of lifeless planets - has its counterpart within himself. He is not, then, at one with himself until he realizes that this "under side" of nature and the feelings of horror which it gives him are also "I". - The Wisdom of Insecurity, Chapter 7: "The Transformation of Life", p.111.
Charles Ponce, Jungian/archetypal astrologer and psychoanalyst, brilliantly writes, arights and reorients us very necessarily toward the urgencies and immediacy of Existence, of Nature in Her appeal, in Her drive for attestation as She is. I quote extensively here for it is a much needed compensation to the overly-inflated and hysterical spiritual bypass which is most certainly the manic "happy" newish religions and and bipolar (manic-depressive) culture of contemporary America):
"...we rebel essentially against the autonomy of Nature, the natural breakdown of Nature, the need of Nature to relax into itself, even to collapse into itself in the way that trees retreat into themselves with the advent of Winter...We turn away from our bodies in illness and death not because we have resolved the issue of the wound, but because it is far easier to think of an afterlife, far less fearful and painful to surround ourselves with the good feeling that we may not only escape this life in one psychic piece, but that we will no longer have to concern ourselves with our physical humanity...This approach to death robs us of our tie to Nature, strips us of our humanity in favor of an exquisite angelology of the ego. It allows us to slip past the experience of the mystery: that the body is indeed a great temple which moves slowly towards a breakdown and dissolution. The alchemists knew this: that the soul cannot fly, cannot be released from the vessel until the body is broken down, dissolved, and even putrified. When you read the alchemists you will discover that this breakdown and dissolution is the beginning of the Great Work, and that without experiencing and seeing, watching and attending to this momentous operation--keeping the fire of heart and attention at the proper degree--nothing happens. The soul does not fly, the subtle body is not created, nor is the imagination which is the soul's experience of itself open to eternity. It is this focus on the body and the wound in both life and death that leads to the sacred marriage of the alchemists. Paracelsus stressed, "The eternal is a sign of the dissolution of Nature, and not the beginning of created things, and the end in all things which no nature is without...A true medicine and counseling should therefore be one that addresses the immediate, the body of things and the body, for if we really wish to enter into the eternal, see the universe in a grain of sand, we must in our imagination understand..the soul's expression of itself through body, and that woundedness, disease, and the putrefactio of our humanity are for us in the West ordained as the focus of a yoga that sees in these sufferings the gods we have rejected." -- Charles Ponce, from "Paracelsus and the Wound", Working the Soul, Reflections on Jungian Psychology, pgs. 25-26.
Ernest Becker: Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet...this bone-crushing, bone-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity. Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person's life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good. -- Ernest Becker, Escape From Evil, pg.2
Guillermo Arriaga (transcribed from an interview at PEN Writers Conference 2007): "...So I said, "I am going to be a boxer...so I began training hard and hard and suddenly I have a pain in my chest so I say, "It's nothing, a torn muscle," and so I began again and again, training, training, training, and I went to a doctor and say, "Yeah, you have a torn muscle." Wrong. I have an infection in my heart so I went to a cardiologist and he said, "I have good news and bad news...the good news is that you are not a hypochondriac. The bad news is that your heart is completely swollen and that you can have a heart attack maybe today, maybe tomorrow, I don't know. So you have to go to bed NOW." And so I say, "Fuck!" And so I watch my hands. I say, "My hands may be the hands of a corpse tomorrow.They will not move anymore tomorrow." So I make a commitment to caress the skins I have to caress, to beat with my hands those I have to beat, and to build something that will survive my hands," and that's when I began to write furiously without stopping and I have my studio full of skulls, not real ones but of wood, stone...and every time I get tired I say, "Arriaga, you are gonna die. You have to do something with your hands."
So until now I have caressed the skins that I have to caress, I haven't beaten people that I like but I don't want to be violent anymore, and I have been writing since then. Thus, a personal fight against death...so I have two thoughts about pain--the first, the worst thing you can do with pain is not using it. You cannot waste pain. Another one is that pain is inevitable but suffering is a decision so I use pain for writing and every time I have pain I try to keep it and use it in a certain way...
I personally believe that Death doesn't present once, it presents daily and I always think that Death has a giant tongue that licks you. For example, this [rubs his thinning hair] is death licking my hair and says, "You thought you were okay? Well, there goes your new look." And, uh, cellulite in women and tits going down, it's like Death licking and, you know, we men (makes a gesture of an erect penis deflating), is like wop! wop! wop!...and when you lose someone you love, a woman, you are carrying the corpse of someone you love inside you...
They say that dust is skin flakes and I believe that every time
we wipe the dust we wipe the corpse of who we were at that time..."
-- Guillermo Arriaga, acclaimed Mexican writer, in conversation with Paul Auster at 2007 PEN Writer's Conference, has written screenplays, Babel, Amores Perros, The Three Burials of Melchiades Estrada, 21 Grams, and more.
Alexis Zorba: Why do the young die? Why does anybody die?
Basil: I don't know.
Alexis Zorba: What's the use of all your damn books if they can't answer that?
Basil: They tell me about the agony of men who can't answer questions like yours.
Alexis Zorba: I spit on this agony!
-- from the film, Zorba the Greek, based upon the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis of the same title
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Of the Shadow of Divinity -
Tired of Speaking Sweetly
Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.
If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.
Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.
God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.
The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.
But when we hear He is in such a "playful drunken mood"
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.
- The Gift – versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky
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easy sleep
easy rest
easier to be an animal
than not - Jerome Rothenberg
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All the time I pray to Buddha I keep on killing mosquitoes. - Issa Kobayashi
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Outside of this Heart there is no Buddha
This Heart is the Buddha.
Outside of this heart there is no Demon
This heart is the Demon.
- Huey Nin, the 6th Patriarch in the present era of
Dao lineage is credited with this quote. This quote was later expanded upon by other Buddhas in the lineage of Dao to include the bottom two lines.
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