Tag: Authenticity

Charlie: Reflections on Death, Beauty and Love

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“I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals… they are
so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition….
… … not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth” (Whitman, Leaves of Grass)

charlie deep in garden

Love may be eternal, as the saying goes, but it’s also never more than a series of fleeting encounters. What we hold too long and too close becomes blurry, dissolves into fetish. The objects of our love slip our embraces sooner or later.

Or as the saying goes, what we love, we let go. Living things are constantly going. The animal body moves, it breathes, pumps, circulates and leaves only a trace that fades and disperses.

Even the atoms of our bodies are constantly being replaced.

The person we love is a dispersing form. Or, rather, a shape discernable in the gathering and dispersing of material.

I’m watching suspended motes of dust slowly circulating through the room. If this dust formed an intelligent pattern in passing, if the shape of a person could be discerned in the circulating motes, would this suggest a presence beyond the dust itself? Would we intuit the impression of a soul, because something more than matter alone is at work here? Something that gathers and disperses, an immaterial attractor revealed in the passing shape of matter?

But to attribute this “soul” to something utterly non-material and separate from the body does great harm to our understanding of earthly life. It devalues the biology as some “mere” candy wrapper that can be thrown away, almost disparagingly.

The beauty of these paradoxes lies in the cracks that suggest something more. For there is something soulful about an animal body, about the earth itself. And we are too quick to explain it all rationally, materially and mechanically, or leap into a transcendence that betrays our earthly mother.

Rather than inventing some compromise view, I prefer the suspended question, which sees the limits of both and offers no final answer, only a direction of learning. A vision of life that is more than material, and more than non-material. Nothing so black and white. Nor the compromise of gray.  Somehow an embrace of both — a soul that shines as a body, a body that burns with soul.  Read More »

A New World Is Only a New Mind

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I’m picturing a mostly unconscious human being – a mind occupied all day by video games, food, sex, drink, and sleep. Or I could picture a corporate executive who has utterly surrendered to the sociopathic profit motive, perhaps somebody at Shell who has helped to bury the science on climate change. Or even myself more often than I care to admit – my thoughts like mice constantly scurrying to the higher end of a perpetually sinking ship.

But it’s all the same state of mind in one fundamental way at least – a mind perpetually busy trying to outrun itself, trying not to notice the unfathomed compulsion that keeps it busy. In this state of mind (if there aren’t sufficient distractions available) the tendency is to feel subjected to thought, tossed and turned by thought. To avoid the sensation of drowning in this tumult, an inner director, a thinker in charge, a focus of Self, is created, which seems to be a retroactive gloss that thought itself compulsively places over its own shenanigans to retain an illusion of order and control. But in this state of mind there is only a running script (though ad libbed) in which this fantasy of a director (a Me playing the starring role) ends up organizing what is still only a compulsive escape from its own unfathomed turmoil.

I need to emphasize this distinction between people and the habits of thought that hold them captive, otherwise I fall into the common misconception that people who think and do ugly, evil things are inherently (in their blood and bones) ugly and evil, and not merely ill with thought. If I blame the person — even my own starring Self — too much (and I often do) I become susceptible to the illness itself, willing to injure that person just to stop the ridiculous ideas driving them (or me). Then the distinction between these dimensions of life (between the actual human being and the thoughts driving them, between territory and map) is lost, and then I’m driven by the unfathomed compulsions of thought, and capable of ugly, evil things.

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