Inscendence

A space for excerpts of inscendent insight

[inscendence]

Thomas Berry on Reemergence of Shamanic Personality

My own suggestion is that we must go far beyond any transformation of contemporary culture. We must go back to the genetic imperative from which human cultures emerge originally and from which they can never be separated without losing their integrity and their survival capacity. None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation out of its own resources. We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive, resources. Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted. What is needed is not transcendence but "inscendence", not the brain but the gene. [...] The genetic coding that gives to the human its species identity is integral with this larger complex of codings whereby the universe exists, whereby the earth system remains coherent within itself and capable of continuing the evolutionary process. [c.f. John Muir: "the world, though made, is still being made" and Ishmael on human story that we are the pinnacle, the end, of evolution] To remain viable a species must establish a niche for itself that is beneficial both for itself and for the surrounding community. The difficulty generally with this proposal is that our genetic endowment is considered to be a mere physical determination of our being, not also our richest psychic endowment, our guiding and inspiring force, especially when the cultural process has entered into a destructive pathology. This pathology is manifest in the arrogance with which we reject our role as an integral member of the earth community in favor of a radical anthropocentric life attitude. [...] In moments of confusion such as the present, we are not left simply to our own rational contrivances. We are supported by the ultimate powers of the universe as they make themselves present to us through the spontaneities within our own beings. We need only become sensitized to those spontaneities, not with a naive simplicity, but with critical appreciation. This intimacy with our genetic endowment, and through this endowment with the larger cosmic process, is not primarily the role of the philosopher, priest, prophet, or professor. It is the role of the shamanic personality, a type that is reemerging once again in our society. More than any other of the human [arche-] types concerned with the sacred, the shamanic personality journeys into the far regions of the cosmic mystery and brings back the vision and the power needed by the human community at the most elementary level. The shamanic personality speaks and best understands the language of various creatures of the earth. Not only is the shamanic type emerging in our society, but also the shamanic dimension of the psyche itself. In periods of significant cultural creativity, this aspect of the psyche takes on a pervasive role throughout the society and shows up in all the basic institutions and professions. The great scientists do their best work through this dimension of the psyche. This shamanic insight is especially important just now when history is being made not primarily within nations or between nations, but between humans and the earth, with all its living creatures. In this context all our professions and institutions must be judged primarily by the extent to which they foster this mutually enhancing human-earth relationship. […] a new type of sensitivity is needed, a sensitivity that is something more than romantic attachment to some of the more brilliant manifestations of the natural word, a sensitivity that comprehends the larger patterns of nature, its severe demands as well as its delightful aspects, and is willing to see the human diminish so that other lifeforms might flourish. --Thomas Berry, from “Dream of the Earth” (1988)

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Henri Nouwen on Wounded Healer

Those who are inwardly directed are faced with a new and often dramatic task: they must come to terms with the inner tremendum.  Since the God “out there” or “up there” is more or less dissolved in the many secular structures, the God within demands attention as never before.  And just as the God outside could be experienced not only as a loving father but also as a horrible demon, the God within can be not only the source of a new creative life but also the cause of chaotic confusion.

The greatest complaint of the Spanish mystics St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, was that they lacked a spiritual guide to lead them along the right paths and enable them to distinguish between creative and destructive spirits. We hardly need emphasize how dangerous the experimentation with the interior life can be.  Drugs, as well as different concentration practices and withdrawal into the self, often do more harm than good.  On the other hand it also is becoming obvious that those who avoid the painful encounter with the unseen are doomed to live a supercilious, boring, and superficial life.

Therefore the first and most basic task required of contemporary ministers [/psycho-spiritual guides] is to clarify the immense confusion that can arise when people enter this internal world. […]

… [We can] find the courage to enter into the core of our own existence and become familiar with the complexities of our own inner lives.  As soon as we feel at home in our own house, discover the dark corners as well as the light spots, the closed doors as well as the drafty rooms, our confusion will evaporate, our anxiety will diminish, and we will become capable of creative work.

The key word here is “articulation.” Those who can articulate the movements of their inner lives, who can give names to their varied experiences, need no longer be victims of themselves, but are able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering.  They are able to create space for the Spirit whose heart is greater than their own, whose eyes see more than their own, and whose hands can heal more than their own.

This articulation, I believe, is the basis for a spiritual leadership of the future, because only those who are able to articulate their own experiences can offer themselves to others as sources of clarification. --Henry Nouwen, from “The Wounded Healer” (1972)

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Start at 1:09:24 ... 12 centuries old Shambhala prophesy told by Joanna Macy. 

“There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger...”

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Grace Lee Boggs on "two-sided transformation"

The America that is best known and most resented around the world pursues unlimited economic growth, technological revolutions, and consumption, with little or no regard for their destructive impact on communities, on the environment, and on the billions of people who live in what used to be called the “Third World.” On the other hand, there is little or no national or international recognition of the movement to “grow our souls,” which began emerging organically in the United States after the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki... At the time Einstein summed up most succinctly the urgent need for this redefinition of what it means to be a human being. “Technological progress,” he warned, “is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. The release of atom power has changed everything but the human mind and thus we drift towards catastrophe. The solution to the problem lies in the heart of mankind. Imagination is more important than knowledge. “A human being” he said, “experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." The nuclear bomb created a great divide in theories and strategies for social change. Henceforth, human beings could no longer pretend that everything that happened to us was determined by external or economic circumstances. Freedom now included the responsibility for making choices. Radical social change could no longer be viewed simply in terms of us vs. them, of victims vs. villains, of good vs. evil or of transferring power from the top to the bottom. We could no longer afford a separation between politics and ethics. Consciousness and self-consciousness, ideas and values, mere “superstructure” in the Marxist-Leninist paradigm, had to become integral, both as end and as means, to social struggle. Radical social change had to be viewed as a two-sided transformational process, of ourselves and of our institutions, a process requiring protracted struggle and not just a D-Day replacement of one set of rulers with another. The 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott was the first struggle by an oppressed people in Western society from this new philosophical/political perspective. Before the eyes of the whole world, a people who had been treated as less than human struggled against their dehumanization not as angry victims or rebels but as new men and women, representative of a new, more human society. Practicing methods of nonviolence that transformed themselves and increased the good rather than the evil in the world, always bearing in mind that their goal was not only desegregating the buses but creating the beloved community, they inspired the human identity and ecological movements which over the last 40 years have been creating a new civil society in the United States.

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existential pain

what is it like

your existential pain?

mine is like a migrain

in my soul.  

no pain no gain they say.

i bear my pain today

like a weightlifter;

no long term gain, really,

but i know i can do it.  

what's it like

to be with your pain?

today i don't over-react,

nor do i under-react.

i won't ignore or bypass;

i will not put my life on hold

to prostrate to...what?  

today, my pain simply exists

sometimes as a stone in my throat

or a dull thunderstorm in my chest

or a river yearning for the ocean

in my belly  

i bet you will want to fix this -- 

yours or mine -- or both -- 

when you hear; it's natural.

but we know it's not meant 

for fixing.  

nor can i.

i don't have these answers.

and that's painful, because

the questions are so important.

but at least i have the questions.

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A Systems Approach to Social Change

"The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realize that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent. For example, stabilizing world population will be possible only when poverty is reduced worldwide....Scarcities of resources and environmental degradation combine with rapidly expanding populations to lead to the breakdown of local communities and to the ethnic and tribal violence that has become the main characteristic of the post-cold war era.

Ultimately these problems must be seen as just different facets of one single crisis, which is largely a crisis of perception. It derives from the fact that most of us, and especially our large social institutions, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world." [Fritjof Capra, from "The Web of Life", 1996] [...] 

Fritjof Capra, in the quote above, draws our attention to what he calls an "outdated worldview." He and others from the physical and social sciences have written extensively about the paradigm shift now occurring all around the planet. Discoveries in physics, biology, mathematics, and other sciences during the past century have widely discredited the heretofore prevailing notion of reductionism--that worldview which sees reality as a set of mechanical interactions whose parts can be reduced to, and studied as, separate entities, particles, or phenomenon.

The search for the building blocks of matter, or of life itself, has led to the astounding realizations that matter is energy in motion; that life is process as well as substance; that consciousness is an inherent and critical component of any living system; and that everything is connected through a vast set of interdependent webs or networks.

This revolution in science has led to a shift in thinking as radical as the Copernican discovery of the Sun rather than the Earth as the center of our solar system. It is as big a change for the human family as the Iron Age, the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Information Technology all rolled into one, for it re-orders how we think about the nature of reality itself, of everything in our world and in our lives.

Capra says further: "The paradigm that is now receding has dominated our culture for several hundred years, during which it has shaped our modern Western society and has significantly influenced the rest of the world.  This paradigm consists of a number of entrenched ideas and values, among them the view of the universe as a mechanical system composed of elementary building blocks, the view of the human body as a machine, the view of life in society as a competitive struggle for existence, the belief in unlimited material progress to be achieved through economic and technological growth, and--last, but not least--the belief that a society in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male is one that follows a basic law of nature. All of these assumptions have been fatefully challenged by recent events. And, indeed, a radical revision of them is now occurring."

--Louise Diamond, from "A Systems Approach to Peacebuilding"

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Love (or loving ;)) wins

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Carl Rogers shares a personal slogan that got him through times of uncertainty and doubt. From The Evolution of Psychology Conference in 1985.

"What I am is good enough, if only I can be it openly."

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What is creativity? A neuropsychology definition.

Excerpt from "On Being" interview with Rex Jung.

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The difference between creativity and intelligence? Transient Hypofrontality. :)

Excerpt from "On Being" interview with neuropsychologist Rex Jung.

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Antonio Machado -- Last Night

         Last night, as I was sleeping

I dreamt - marvelous error! -

that a spring was breaking

out in my heart.

I said:  Along which secret aqueduct,

oh water, are you coming to me,

water of a new life

that I have never drunk?  

Last night, as I was sleeping

I dreamt - marvelous error! -

that I had a beehive

here inside my heart.

And the golden bees

were making white combs

and sweet honey

from my old failures.  

Last night, as I was sleeping

I dreamt - marvelous error! -

that a fiery sun was giving

light inside my heart.

It was fiery because I felt

warmth as from a hearth,

and sun because it gave light

and brought tears to my eyes.  

Last night, as I was sleeping

I dreamt - marvelous error! -

that it was God I had

here inside my heart.

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"Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is made available ... a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose." --Fred Hoyle, 1948 THE OVERVIEW EFFECT

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Pablo Neruda -- Keeping Quiet

  Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.  

For once on the face of the earth

let's not speak in any language,

let's stop for one second,

and not move our arms so much.  

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines,

we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.  

Fishermen in the cold sea

would not harm whales

and the man gathering salt

would look at his hurt hands.  

Those who prepare green wars,

wars with gas, wars with fire,

victory with no survivors,

would put on clean clothes

and walk about with their brothers

in the shade, doing nothing.   

What I want should not be confused

with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about;

I want no truck with death.  

If we were not so single-minded

about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing, 

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us

as when everything seems dead

and later proves to be alive.  

Now I'll count up to twelve

and you keep quiet and I will go.

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Penned by the inimitable Pavirthra Mehta. Designed by the unflappable Gurinder Mehta.

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The man of our time is losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, he seeks to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.

~Abraham Joshua Heschel from “Who Is Man?”

Read + Hear more about Rabbi Heschel in The Spiritual Audacity of Abraham Joshua Heschel

photo by Steve Schroeder