Stunning and Profound Wisdom on Boundaries From Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich is one of the great “finds” of mine in the 20th century, shaping the course of my life henceforth.  I think he is the most important theologian I’ve ever come across and one of the most important thinkers. Being raised in Nazi Germany, he could not help but have learned a lot about boundaries and the easier path for him would have been to succumb to the inertia of his culture and become a Nazi; absolutism and certainty always solves the “messiness” of what could eventually become a mature faith!  But somewhere along the course of his young life, he found a “contrary” vein of thought in his heart which led him to follow the path of a German contemporary of his, Hannah Arendt and employ Shakespeare’s “pauser reason.” He found that boundaries had value but only if one could find the equally valuable respect for the “no boundary” dimension of life. This wisdom allowed him to write among many other things, “The Courage to Be” which is such a powerful book on the importance of “be-ing” a human and not simply become flotsam-and-jetsom in the current of contemporary thought. Here is an excerpt….

The American book, “On the Boundary” tells about several boundaries that are common to all and at the same time to my own personal destiny: about the boundaries between country and city, between feudalism and civil service, between bourgeoisie and bohemian, between church and society, between religion and culture, theology and philosophy — and lastly, quite personally, between two continents. (He had moved to the United States to escape the Nazis.)

The existence on the boundary, the boundary situation, is full of tension and movement. It is in reality not a stance, but a crossing and returning, a re-returning and a re-recrossing, a to-and-fro, the goal of which is to create a third area beyond the bordered ones, something on which one can stand for a time without being enclosed in a fixed border. The situation of the boundary is not yet what one could call peace; and yet it is the passage that each individual must and that peoples must go through to arrive at peace.  For peace means standing in the overarching thing that is being sought in the crossing and the crossing back over the boundary. Only someone who has a share in both sides of a boundary line can serve what overarches it and thus serve peace, not someone who feels secure in the momentary quiet of a fixed border.  Peace appears where in personal and political life an old boundary has lost its importance and with that its power to foment strife, even if it continues in place as the boundary for some partition.  Peace is not a tensionless juxtaposition; it is unity in something more comprehensive, in which the opposition of living powers and the conflicts between old and new are not lacking,  but in which they do not break out destructively, but rather are constrained in the peace of what overarches them.

If the crossing and crossing back over the boundary is the way to peace, then the fear of what lies on the other side, and the wish that is born from that to be rid of it, is the root of discord and war.

When fate has taken one to the boundary of one’s being and has made one aware of oneself, one is faced with the decision of falling back on what one is or of crossing beyond oneself.  All persons are led to the boundary of their being now and then.  They see the other beyond themselves, which appears as a possibility for themselves, and awakens in them the fear of the possible.  They see their own boundedness in the mirror of the other, and are frightened. (W. H. Auden, “And Truth met him, and held out her hand; but he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”)

Tillich’s explanation of the subtlety of boundaries reveals how conflict arises among human beings, and technically the whole of creation. He is very astute, and very “Rumi” to recognize the value of an “overarching framework” as being the solution to what can otherwise be an interminal and even lethal conflict. Rumi, a 13th century Persian told us, “Beyond the notion of right doing and the wrong doing there is a field; I will meet you there.”  The “field” is the “overarching” Presence that Tillich had in mind.

Change Involves, “Mangled Guts Pretending.”

How do people change?  I’ve always been curious about this issue for I knew very early in life that I needed to change.  Here are two pithy observations about this question, one from-13th century Persion mystic,Rumi and the other from a mere two decades by American playwright, Tony Kushner.

The Worm’s Waking

There is a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.

Suddenly, he wakes up,

call it Grace, whatever,

something wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.

He is the entire vineyard, and the orchard too,

the fruit, the trunks,

a growing wisdom and joy

that does not need to devour.

Kushner’s play “Angels in America offers a scene in which the internal tension of change is vividly put into words, presented here as a gut-wrenching experience involving a Divine encounter.  Fortunately, most of the time it is merely discomforting or stressful as people like myself do not have the brilliant, sensitive, artistic

temperament of people like Kushner.  Here is a quotation from one memorable scene:

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching. 

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That’s how people change. 

December 10, 2020 Conservation

The socio/cultural/political morass which weighs down on us at this moment is very unnerving, even frightening matter; this is because it is a cosmic identity crosis, at least for one teeny-weeny little culture on this “Third Rock From the Sun.” It is teaching us so much about the ego, individually and collectively.

The development of our ego is a monumental event in our life. It is intrinsic to our ability to negotiate what the infant will discover as “reality”, a crisis in which twin poles of our Divinity war with each other. When our ego begins to come into existence, to come online, it struggles within its nascent existence as it loathes discovering its finitude. Only moments earlier, this very core of our being is enconsed in the womb of “no-thingsness” and is on the verge of making the decision to “fall” into this world of existants or remained in the comfortable, Edenic womb.

winnicott’s break down

W. R. Rodgers and Rumi On Language

Language is my forte.  To a fault, in some sense, “too much of a good thing” at times.  But I’ve learned that words can be hollow, merely formulaic to manipulate people into mirroring my performance-art of an inauthentic life.  The W. R. Rodgers poem excerpt I shared yesterday so elegantly described how language can decay and even die, becoming what is called a “dead language.”  And Rodgers singled out politicians in the cited poem, accusing them of falsifying language to accomplish selfish ends: 

Words are “now they are the life-like skins and screens 

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae, 

To terrify or tame, cynical shows 

Meant only to deter or draw men on, 

The tricks and tags of every demagogue, 

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys, 

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells 

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep 

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards.” 

(PLEASE NOTE, AM HAVING TROUBLE WITH EDITOR; COULD NOT ITALICIZE ABOVE QUOTE)

This morning I discovered relevant wisdom from the 13^th century Persian mystic Rumi who emphasized the importance of living a dual life, abiding in and respecting the “false” world that Rodgers had in mind and another where authentic moments are available here and there.  He described this “in-between” residence as a “small market between towns.”  He presents a solitude that one will find there, which the mystics and many artists are very familiar 

A small market between towns 

There’s a town where the soul is fed, where love hears truth and thrives, and another town that produces lies that degrade and starve love. Your voice is a small market set up between the two towns. Goods arrive from both directions, flimsy, fake items and honestly made, wholehearted tools and wares. Some travelers immediately know which is which. Some voices open a shop and spend sixty years cheating customers, gossiping when they leave, and flattering women to get their attention. Others weary of the marketplace altogether and rarely go there. 

Rumi 
Version by Coleman Barks, in “The Soul of Rumi” 
HarperCollins, 2001 

I’m Getting a Reservation in Doggie Heaven!!!

My beloved 11 year old daughter is now in doggie heaven, chasing butterflies, ground squirrels, rabbits and scratching furiously in the celestial dirt for “divine” insects.  She has found her brother and sister, also delightful dachshunds, and they are comparing notes with each other about the parental “mistakes” they were subjected to down here. In a text I just received, she told me that all of them completely forgive us and love us dearly.  She also told me she already put in my request with Dog that a place be reserved for me and their mother as “Doggie heaven” sounds like a better idea to both of us!  Lassie told her to tell us that She would “keep us in mind.”

I had a nice talk with this darling little girl this morning before we took her to the vet.  I told her how she had continued the lesson in loving in which her two predecessors had already done the “heavy lifting.”  For I had learned through them, and in my marriage to their mother, that love is not so much a thing that you “do” as it is something that you are “open to” and thus receive.  A 13^th century Persian poet Rumi said it is what happens when you discard all the barriers you have constructed to keep it from happening.

With these three doggies working in consort with their mother for the past three decades I have learned that the heart offers evocative potential, an infinite source of riches which cannot be accessed without the ability to recognize the resistance that Rumi noted.  When the heart is open…Toni Morrison described it as “petal open”… it is full of “penetrable stuff” (Shakespeare) and a Divine work of art like a puppy, or a delicate tulip, or a beautiful sunset, or a lovely wife can “evoke” a Divinity that has always been there.  This experience is what the spiritual tradition of my background termed, “the Spirit of God”; and that notion is now profoundly meaningful to me.

There is an absence in my soul this afternoon.  This absence can be described as an “Absence” for it is during loss that we can feel a dimension of our heart that is closely akin to the Divine.  For this experience can bring to our awareness…on a deeply emotional and experiential level…the profound connection that we can have with the whole of this world if we find the courage to “lose our mind and come to our senses.” (Fritz Perls, saw “senses” as the “feeling” dimension of human experience.)

Psychotherapy & Negative Capability

Poet John Keats offered the term negative capability to describe his ability to embrace a host of subjective experiences that most people avoid.  In a letter to his brother in 1817 he defined negative capability in these terms, “…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reach after fact and reason… in order to allow, as yet unimagined, creative possibilities to emerge.”

In an article in Contemporary Psychotherapy, Diane Voller applies this notion to her work as a therapist, declaring, “‘Negative capability’ is the advanced ability of a person to tolerate uncertainty. This does not mean the passive uncertainty associated with ignorance or general insecurity but the active uncertainty that is to do with being without a template and yet being able to tolerate, or even relish, a sense of feeling lost. ‘Negative capability’ involves purposely submitting to being unsettled by a person, or situation, and embracing the feelings and possibilities that emerge.  (http://www.contemporarypsychotherapy.org/vol-2-no-2/negative-capability/)

Voller introduces the concept of “space” to describe the intimacy of a close relationship that can be found in therapy or with any care-giving relationship, professional or personal. This is the ability to get out of oneself and realize that the distinction between “me and thee” is not as definite as we are taught that it is and yet avoiding the pitfall of co-dependency.  It is the ability to enter the domain of “no-boundaries” even as one maintains his/her own “boundaries.”  The 13^th century Persian Sufi poet Rumi best described this essential spiritual skill, “Out beyond the distinctions of right doing and wrong doing, there is a field.  I will meet you there.”  Rumi keenly grasped the need of getting beyond the distinctions of “me” and “thee” if we are to enter sacred space with another person and clinical work is intrinsically spiritual.  Or it should be.

Voller is simply putting on the table for therapists and care-givers the notion of vulnerability.  It is so much easier to practice clinically when one is ensconced in jargon and “shop-talk”, hiding behind a diagnostic knife which always keeps the client “out there” separate and distinct from oneself.  And relevant to vulnerability, my mind always comes to a pithy observation from Norman O. Brown, “To be is to be vulnerable.”  If one is invulnerable, he/she lacks ‘be’-ing in the world.  He/she is just another object in a world full of objects, devoid of any spiritual (i.e. “spacial”) presence.

Rumi Visits Me Again!

Poet Gene Derwood once noted, “Big thoughts of got us.” I think she had in mind the drifts of ideas in 1950’s American culture but the observation also has personal application for me as I realize “big thoughts” have often “got me.” I have always loved to read and to study, spending lots of my early adulthood as a “professional student” in which I read voraciously in fields which had nothing to do with my actual career. I love to think. I am carried away by “big thoughts” and use this WP forum to share some of them and to discourse re my impressions from discovering these thoughts.

And, with this internet and blog-o-sphere I can explore sources from around the world and also meet and engage in dialogue with other men and women with a similar curiosity. So I continue to “hunger and thirst after” these “big thoughts.” There is even a sense in which I’m an addict. Psychologist Gerald May noted decades ago that addiction to “thinking” is not uncommon and even my “guru”, Richard Rohr, has noted that he himself is plagued to some degree with this malady.

But, please understand, this is not a “confession” or lamentation. This is just a personal observation, a disclosure of an issue that I wrestle with. I do believe there is something beyond these “big thoughts” which would satisfy this addiction, something which I prefer to describe as a Something or even a Someone! My spiritual mentor, Rumi, addressed this issue with me several mornings ago, sharing with me: You are quaffing from a hundred fountains; whenever any of these one hundred yields less, your pleasure is diminished. But when their sublime fountain gushes forth from within you, no longer do need you steal from these other fountains. I was taken aback! Seven hundred years ago and,immersed in a different spiritual tradition, he understood my dilemma. He understood what several of you have been telling me and what I already knew myself in some limited way. “Big thoughts”, even if from “big” fountains, are not the Source! Again I quote the Buddhist wisdom, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

I think that actually I’m afraid of this “gush.” Look what it did to the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road! I’m just not wired for that kind of neurological tumult. But, I take comfort in the wisdom of another one of my confidantes, W. H. Auden, who often reassures me, “The Center that you cannot find is know to the unconscious mind. There is no need to despair. You are already there.”

Rumi on the “Faculty of Judgment”

Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there

Rumi was addressing what the philosophers call the “faculty of judgment”, that human ability to carve the world up into categories so that he can have the illusion of controlling it. And, I think Rumi knew this cognitive apparatus was an essential part of being a human and actually allowed him to create his world. But Rumi saw that it was necessary to not be confined by this conceptual prison and had learned that it was possible to occasionally lay aside this whirligig and meet someone out “there.”

To approach the matter clinically, Rumi was speaking of “object-separateness.” He saw that the whole of the world, and especially other humans, lay beyond the grasp of our thoughts about them. He knew that we tend to “live in the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness,” the “darkness” being a boundary that we must venture into if we are to ever go “out there” and meet someone. And this is essentially a spiritual enterprise.

In this brief poem, Rumi addressed one particular bifurcation of the world that we are familiar with, that compulsive need to label some people “right” and some people “wrong.” (And, what a coincidence that I so often happen to fall into the “right” category????) Certainly, “right” and “wrong” are valid labels in this world and Rumi knew that. What he was saying is that we don’t need to wield the distinction like a weapon and can, on occasion, give it a rest, perhaps offering someone who we first want to label ‘wrong” a little bit of grace. The best example I can think Jesus offering forgiveness to the Samaritan woman at the well when he was legally required to condemn her and stone her to death.

Rumi knew there was a karmic law that is written in the universe—when one has a compulsive need to be right, he will create wrong.

The Merits of Silence

Sometimes I think God wants us to remember his admonishment, “Be still and know that I am God.” Sometimes, I think he might want to be more emphatic and tell us simply to, “Be quiet” or even, “Shut up! I don’t need to hear all of your regurgitated verbal platitudes, your obsessive jargon. Just give it a rest for a while.” And then he would offer reassurance, “Now you will get it back in due time. But for a moment in your life, take a break! As it is, this is mere chatter.”

And I fear so much of our religious communication is mere chatter, “god talk” with value similar to that of “car talk” or “sports talk” or “talking politics”—providing social grease to reassure and confirm our social connections. We do need silence from time to time and some go for years before the Silence has done its work and “the letter of the law” has become “Spirit.”

St. John of the Cross said, “Silence is God’s first language.” Rumi pithily noted, “Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river” and, “Silence is the language of God, all else is a poor translation.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a marvelous poem about “The Habit of Perfection” part of which I will now share. Note that he emphasized that only in silence, “Where all surrenders come” will we find “eloquence.” It is Silence that gives meanings to our words and especially The Word.

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear,
Pipe to me pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From where all surrenders come
Which alone makes you eloquent

 

Rumi, the Bible, and Self-control

“He who has no rule over his own spirit is like a city without walls.” The writer of Proverbs recognized the battle we all wage with our internal haunts. The apostle Paul also acknowledged this human frailty, declaring “I will to do good but evil is present with me.” We are a composite of contradictory impulses and most of us manage to “give the name of action” (Shakespeare, in Hamlet)  to the good ones and sublimate the bad ones. Our news reports are filled with those who were less capable of that God-given fore-brain wizardry.

And the Persian poet Rumi put it this way, “intelligent people want self control; children want candy.”   God, that guy was good, even if he was a damn Iranian!  (wink, wink)

 

Rumi, Shakespeare, and Moral Codes

The Persion poet Rumi noted, “Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” This is similar to Shakespeare’s famous observation, “Nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

These two quotations appear to convey moral relativism which permits basically anything under the sun, appearing to convey the absence of any moral absolute. But I do not feel this is the case at all for the teachings of these men suggest they have much more in mind than mere self-indulgent behavior. Each recognized that it was the God-given capacity to think which creates categories for the whole of human experience, including those categories of what is right and wrong. But it is only “thinking” and the capacity to think that allows this categorization to take place. They are merely noting that “thinking” and the resulting categorization of human experience can appear to be quite arbitrary. For example, not too many years ago in our country African Americans were thought of as second class citizens, and in the Deep South in particular, were second class citizens in the estimation of most white people. And having been raised in the South, due to this pervasive mind-set that my sub-culture was imbued with, I saw African Americans as second class citizens. For, as we learn to perceive, so things are. The categories formulated on the basis of our perceptual field are real, as far as we know it. And unquestioningly accepting these categories is validated day in and day out in the community. However, due to the strong arm of…may I say it…an “intrusive” Federal government our thinking regarding race has changed significantly in the past fifty years. African Americans are not viewed with the same racist mind-set by many Southerners and those who continue to subscribe to those Neanderthal beliefs are forced to treat them with more respect, albeit begrudgingly in most cases. One other example is prominent in our world history. At one point the prevailing world view was that the world was flat. That viewpoint was reality and anyone who deigned to suggest otherwise did so at the risk of ridicule or worse. The world was flat for that is how prevailing thought described it.

So, back to “wrong doing” and “right doing” or Shakespeare’s “good” or “bad.” Yes, it is only thinking that makes anything right, wrong, good, or bad. However, what these gentlemen were teaching is that we must get beyond mere categories, mere words, mere labels and learn that subscribing to a mere moral code will merely leave us trapped in the letter of the law. Sure, these moral codes will constrain our behavior and thus serve a useful social purpose. We cannot function as a society without them. But at some point we have to grow spiritually to the point that we are no longer merely constrained by the mere letter of the law but by the spirit of the law. Therefore, if I want to do something which I feel is “wrong”, I am given pause and proceed to ask myself, “Now what does this reflect about the depths of my heart? If I want to do a brother harm, what does that say about me, aside from whatever this brother might have done?

Now Rumi’s note that “I will meet you in a field that lies beyond that domain of right doing and wrong doing” is rich. A field conveys an open space, an area out beyond the narrow confines of a moral code, and this is the realm of the spirit. When we are rigidly governed merely by the letter of the law, when our heart is jam-packed with rules to which we are slavishly devoted, we can never get beyond, we can never get out side of our self, and we can never get into that Sacred Space where honesty, openness, and intimacy is found. This is the domain of the “I-Thou” relationship so eloquently described by Martin Buber.

Let me reiterate. A person who is slavishly devoted to the letter of the law, whose life consists of punctilious observation of moral, religious, and spiritual rules is trapped inside himself/herself. And if he/she finds the comfort of like-minded people, great comfort can appear to be found, but at a great price. And usually this mind-set produces a judgmentalism which has to be wielded on other people as the beasts within which this “letter of the law” carefully constrains will be projected onto the outside world. One expression of this poison is the view that the world is “going to hell in a hand basket, is inherently evil, and must be actively combatted.” Well, the world has evil present but I argue that groups with that emphasis need to pay an equal amount of attention to the evil within their own hearts. The evil outside with which they are obsessed is actually within their own hearts. This is the classic projection spoken of my Karl Jung.