Daily Post: Warning
Human condition
Ahead. Take care. You can’t know
what the future holds.
To live is to kill,
to enjoy, to be set up
for pain down the road.
Our total life’s way
is the average of all our
perceptions and acts.
Frantic, I looked up.
Dismayed, looked out, then around.
No help was in sight.
Panicked, I looked in.
Confused and confined, I peered
through my clouded mind.
Fearing, peering through
familiar mist, truths emerge,
exits call my name.
I have somedays felt that faceless is the preferable condition. Lay low.
But I read all of C.S. Lewis’ ‘Til We Have Faces” without figuring out what the title means, or meant. A fantastic story about the struggle to know what the gods want from us. The ancient chthonic dieties didn’t have faces. We moderns are aware that in normal human interactions, the words may carry as little as 7% of the meaning. The rest is conveyed by our tones, expression, even what we wear!
The faceless deities of course were not human. And thus also not from any particular racial group of humans. A faceless stone shaped in the female (round) or male (elongated) version, no wonder people had trouble knowing what these deities wanted from them. All we got was words through multiple layers of priest’s interpretations.
But we have faces, don’t we?
C.S. Lewis wrote this book late in life. He had a Jewish girlfriend, and maybe was softening his ideas that Christianity was the only true way. To me, even his Narnia books imply that.
Is Lewis struggling with the fact that the truest religion can only emerge when humans all see each other the way that the most spiritually enlightened Hindus do.
Which is also what Mother Teresa found to be the most important teaching in Christianity.
Learn to see the Divine in every face you encounter.
Then we will all truly have faces.
It’s important to remember that the point of admiration is inspiration. That’s inspiration, not imitation. It’s difficult to discern the difference. Humans are primates and primates have a system of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are part of the system we have evolved to help us understand other people’s experiences. Mirror neurons provoke emotions in the viewer. When the system is working properly, the provoked emotions are like the emotions of the viewed. Thus, mirror neurons are the biological foundation of empathy.
This is a necessary and useful part of the system we have developed to maintain social structures. Even those of us who feel like hermits couldn’t survive if we’ve never been conditioned by society. Humans have too many degrees of freedom for that. Too many options to respond to the impingements from the world. We need to imitate before we can become inspired, thus lighting the candle of others’ inspiration.
The way to distinguish imitation from inspiration must be a function of the emotions. If the imitation provokes upliftment, joy, bliss, peace, it becomes inspiration, and then admiration follows.
In order to flourish, we must have a clearly functioning ability to distinguish pleasure from pain.
That is the rock from which the more difficult discernment between good and evil may be constructed.
The thoughtful are surely capable of understanding that pain and pleasure are micro versions, in duration, size and significance, of evil and good.
Thus, it is imperative to the optimal functioning of higher beings, to whose family we claim to belong, that culture minimize, or even attempt to eliminate, using verbal reinforcement, while necessarily protecting the immature from pleasurable danger.
Perhaps this is the ultimate end of culture.
In so doing, the fields of true compassion are tilled.
Suddenly, I wept
with joy, the agonizing gone.
Now truth controls tongue.
Isn’t fabric a
better metaphor by which
to live than coin?
Events can be strands
in individual lives,
lives, strands of world cloth.
Both have two sides, but
fabric is flexible; can
be folded, or crumpled, and
so become
multi-dimensional. We
can hold it up to the light
and see right through to
the weaver’s skill.
The dark, the hidden portions
of the strands are just as important
as the clear or easy to spy.
Merwegon says:
Failure and success are two sides of the same coin. When all self-conscious beings give up the very idea of using the coin as a metaphor to understand and manipulate the world around us, we, and all sentient beings, will have a more enjoyable experience.
Failure and success, embodied and spiritual, male and female, hot and cold, high and low, crazy and sane are merely convenient labels for conversation. Longer reflection often reveals the transparecy of the coin.
Then we see them for the unity they truly are.
Think, meditate, see.