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.
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.
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.
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.
“You might as well call me Omar. It’s my name. So when you get here, ask for Omar.”
The line then went dead. Of course it wasn’t a line anymore. The sound went through the air as electromagnetic waves for most of its journey. Furthermore, the air itself was irrelevant to the electromagnetic waves. That wasn’t the case as they exited the speaker of the phone handset. The air had to be present to convey the sounds to my ear, and the air had to be there to maintain my body in a condition to be able to receive the sound waves.
Any thoughts, I now realized, were able to distract me from my task. The truth was I didn’t want to ask for Omar. The bigger truth was I didn’t want to do what asking for Omar was going to enable. The more eternal truth was that I knew this was a moment where I could continue my karmic circling, or I could try to escape from it.
But maybe Omar was caught in the same loop. I didn’t know Omar. At least, as far as I recalled, Omar and I had never come in contact with each other in the bodies we were currently inhabiting. Somehow, I felt a warning this time, that I am pretty sure I had never gotten before. But the warning was late. I was already far down the path of decision. Pulling out now would inevitably disappoint, irritate, anger and infuriate at least a dozen people.
I folded the flip phone, put it in my pocket, and headed off to the subway station, intermittently sipping my coffee.
Halfway through the journey on the Red Line, I noticed a sign.
“Mind the Gap!”
It kept flashing. First in bright red letters, then black. I figured that was for the benefit of any color-blind people. Red doesn’t stand out to some of them like it does for the rest of us. I caught myself drifting from my upcoming decision. “Focus” I whispered to myself. “Focus.”
And then I saw it. Between the red and black versions of the Mind the Gap warning were smaller letters, which lasted an extremely short time. A nearly subliminal message. It took me at least a dozen flash sequences to make it out.
Merwegon Says: The purpose of all spiritual work is to extinguish your habits, thereby allowing yourself the chance to respond, rather than react.
www.merwegonsays.org
Hmm. Was Omar acting out of habit? Was I? Was this a clue? Was this the information I needed to end my slow dance with karmic determinism? Was it?
Never a picture of grace, despite that being the hopeful meaning of my middle name, Ann, I don’t suppose I have become nothing more than littered rubble yet. That time is somewhere in the future. Maybe not far though. You never know. I do find it helpful to keep a raven on my shoulder, to remind me of my death. That’s an improvement over Jiminy Cricket. I will allow myself to to go with my stream of consciousness. Stating that I am so allowing myself is an exercise of my yoga practice, the essence of which is to allow the witness to become established in itself. The witness is the truest version of the self. The witness is the one who calmly observes the activities, and even the great dramas, that every little self has to experience. So back to the blackest of black ravens on my shoulder, reminding me of my death. Death reminds me that the toil of life, the fog of memory, will not endure forever. Even if my soul is one of those who get to reincarnate, allowing a new effort to share hints of how to get by in the human condition, I think that the major portion of the dark, clinging fog of bad deeds will be left behind. Birth is a new start. By fact and rightly by human tradition. We might hold that parents, grandparents, and even more distant relatives cause pain to their descendants, but humans have never been punished by the law for something done by an ancestor who died before their birth. For better and for worse.
Subject to curse, subject to social reality, subject to group karma, but not punished by the law.
Last month I didn’t give any lectures, but I taught two short courses.
On my favorite topic. Failure.
On meeting new people, I always tell them that I am a failure…..
Long pause….looking for their confusion. And then they start to argue…
So I rush to add “ANALYST.”
But the fact is that the human condition is very challenging, and I do feel that I have failed to live up to my hopes.
As my mother said, my expectations were unrealistic. Oh well. Now I know better than to have expectations.
It’s only my hopes that are failed.
This seems true even as many of my specific small hopes have been fulfilled.
Thus ends my mini written lecture on failure!!!
This little piece was from the prompt “Cleaning” in my writing group this morning. I am not generally a fan of cleaning! Here goes!
(Be sure to check out the links shown in underlined blue hyperlink color.)
But she doesn’t care. She’s more interested in cleaning the doorways to her perceptions. No matter what Plato thought about the matter, it is pointless to act like humans can divorce knowledge entirely from perception. The best we can do it to learn to disentangle the layers of interpretation from the bare facts. Without the integrated, advanced automatic interpretation features incorporated into our brain/mind, we humans would merely be another species of stochastically enhanced automatons.
But our rational minds allow us to think in a self-referential manner. We can, or we are capable, that is, or knowing ourselves to be both embedded in the fabric of reality, and apart from it. The lion, the amoeba, and the dust mote don’t have the ability to move out of the binding ties of Indra’s web.
See also this link for a beautiful image of Indra’s web.
“Who could look at these pictures and not believe in God?” my Muslim friend asked. My Christian friend had expressed a similar idea as a statement. I wasn’t going to disagree with either one.
Indeed! Insects are always interesting to look at in a scanning electron microscope. But the beauty of this dead moth far exceeded my expectations.
I save dead bugs when I see them, for educational purposes. This poor moth had been sitting around for quite a while, before I decided it’s time had come.
Figure 1 shows the moth in question, after I had broken off one of its outer wings, and taped it down to an electrically conductive specimen holder (aluminum) and sputter coated it with palladium to render it electrically conductive. A kindof boring motley brown, but surprising orange and white on the hidden pair of wings.
The moth wing was also surprising in how soft it felt when I broke it off.
If you zoom in to Figure 1, taken with a Olympus Tough Gear 5 digital camera, in microscope mode, you can see that the individual scales have different colors. This camera is currently available on Canon’s website for $500.00. It can do a lot of things. It will also take me a while to make it do what I want! (It’s pretty complicated.)
Figures 2 – 4 show additional views, obtained with my scanning electron microscope, at magnifications up to 6000x. But it is still impossible for me to tell if the “holes” are empty, or filled with a thin film of some sort.
Figure 5 shows the pointed end of the wing, where it used to be attached to the rest of the body.
The different shapes of the feathery scales are beautiful. Figures 6 and 7 show how the scales are attached to the underlying shell of the insect.
I don’t know the cause of death of the moth. I found it whole, so maybe it simply came to the end of its life span. I’ll never know. But I honor the moth, the miraculous world we live in, and the “ugly beauty” of this plain insect.