Attitude
I made a discovery, nothing new to much of the world, just to me. Things are out there already, but you don’t learn anything until you find it “in here” too. Sometimes people call this “resonance”. A friend had been writing a series of pieces trying to discover what was wrong with his life, and how it got that way. I was trying to make helpful remarks, based on intuitive perception. It’s very useful to mull things over in this way, with another person. Our dialogue had been framed in such a way that he was the one looking for enlightenment & I was throwing in the odd helpful remark, but I discovered I was learning from him just as much, or more.
My methods were intuitive, I said. He reckoned that 90% of people would equate intuition with “gut reaction”. Yes, I suppose they do. What I’d said to him was
My ‘intuitive method’ consists of not thinking about a thing, leaving an empty space in my mind. Sooner or later something pops in. Sometimes it is a phrase fully formed. But then it requires elaboration. It’s like an egg, that has to be hatched. So when I spoke to you a while ago with the phrase ‘damaged sense of self’, I’ve been trying ever since to tease meaning from it—to see what it is and what it isn’t.
For I thought he was suffering from “a damaged sense of self”. I don’t know where I had got the phrase from, but it had resonance for me. No sooner had I said it, than I saw it describing my own case. Why had I not been able to formulate it this way before? Only because now I could see my own sense of self being healed, before my eyes, in the everyday routines of living. My attitude was transforming, as if I had only just learned to live.
I wanted to share it with you but that seemed impossible, too personal. I find neither will nor words tell the world about my damaged sense of self. Let it rest in peace. So I planned a post called “A Proper Sense of Self”, in which I would give examples of my new-discovered life. But I cannot do that either.
So I shall quote Scripture instead, like a vicar in his Sunday sermon. For something else popped into my head, leaving me wondering what its author meant, and what millions of Christians may have made of it since. To me, it’s merely an observation about how the world is:
For he that has, to him shall be given: and he that has not, from him shall be taken even that which he has.
Some people get richer for being already rich: that’s capitalism. Others are famous for being famous: that’s showbiz. It sounds unfair, and not something that Jesus would preach, if indeed he said those words. The gospel of Mark includes them as part of his address to a crowd beside the Sea of Galilee where they pressed round him so tightly that he hopped on a boat to get some space. I don’t think the loud hailer had been yet invented, so we can estimate the crowd as not very large. There’s an ancient tradition that St Mark wrote down what St Peter recalled from personal experience. One can imagine the fishing-boat belonged to him (Peter), so he’d have been able to hear everything perfectly. Authenticity of the source doesn’t bother me, as I’m not a Christian. The quote just popped into my head when I wasn’t thinking, and struck me as true.
For I see that when you have an undamaged sense of self, you walk a royal road, the sun shines upon you, people smile, doors open for you, as they would indeed if you were rich-for-being-rich or famous-for-being-famous. We know that such people have acquired a sense of entitlement, and it would still work for them if they were to go in rags, incognito, so long as they kept their attitude, a word with many uses but the one I mean is this: “individuality and self-confidence”.
But I still don’t call it a proper sense of self, when the entitlement comes from riches or fame. You need nothing. You may live in rags, permanently incognito. Only you must discover who you truly are, and that you fully deserve the space you occupy—even if you have to take steps to claim it! Then you have to acknowledge what you have received, and graciously give it back wherever you go and to whomever you meet.
This is what I have been trying to say to my friend, if only the words would come. And when words don’t get through, there is music, and examples in practice, and here I was led to Labi Siffré's song, “Something Inside So Strong”, and here someone else who did it anyway.
12 Comments:
I don’t mean to imply at all that the proper sense of self or the practice of “attitude” leads to what the world calls “success”, that graven image that the Western world largely worships. But it manifestly does optimize our relationship with the world, and gives us an inner stillness, whereby we are not held back from doing anything that is within our given gifts to do.
Having made this proviso, I’ll point you to a couple more audios. By one of those happy coincidences, or what Jung calls “synchronicities”, I turned on BBC Radio 4 soon after finishing my post, and caught a programme part way through, which illustrates rather well the point I’ve been trying to make. It’s about someone I’d never heard of, called Goldie. For a shorter summary, listen to this. also from Radio 4. The programme I partially heard starts at 42 seconds from the beginning.
For better or for worse (often worse) I think I have a pretty good handle on who I am. To me, I suppose it's a matter of sticking to your strengths and passions and inclinations and knowing what those are. It's a matter of being honest with yourself. And ultimately, it's a matter of knowing things about yourself that no one else knows or possibly will ever know.
I'm not sure if that's relevant to what you're talking about or not. Sometimes I feel like your words are butterflies and I'm trying catch them and stick pins in them and proudly display them to you all arranged neatly in a case, heedless of the fact that now they're all dead. It's funny, because I'm not typically in the habit of trying to drag people's ideas down to more prosaic levels. It's seems simply to be the fated dynamic I have with you. On top of knowing who we are, there's also the matter of understanding the nature of the relationships that we have with those around us, which can come in all sorts of shades and nuances and varieties.
When writing the piece I did think of you as an example of someone with a pretty good handle on who you are. You have enhanced my intention with what you have written. I never said anything like that to you before, but it's in response to your doubt as to whether you said anything relevant.
And thank you for all those dead butterflies in the past. I think we may yet break that fated dynamic, if it is fated that we do so.
I very much like your additional comment about the relationships we have with those around us. But I would add this: that when we feel we've undergone a transformation of the kind i was referring to, it is those who think they know us the best who won't even notice any difference in us, or not for a while anyhow, because they are more alert to their idea of us than the reality before them. If we dyed our hair green, they might notice but not the inner change I was trying to convey (or perhaps trying to not convey).
Your mention of dead butterflies gives me the opportunity to share something quite irrelevant to the post above, except that it had a synchronicity with the radio programme I referred to. That is to say, I was listening to it when I was trying to fix the LED clock we keep in the bedroom.
K had several times said she'd seen a fly in the illuminated dial. This morning she said it was moving around. I looked and saw a cockroach, half an inch long including wings. How did that get in there? Below it was something that looked like a dead insect. So I puffed some ant-killer powder in there. Later I put on the radio and tried to clean out the powder. The cockroach had gone, I couldn't see how it could have escaped. So I took off the cover and found it alive and well in the mechanism at the back. Not entirely well, but determined to carry on regardless. So I put it under an upturned shot glass before it could make any long-term plans, sucked out the powder with a vacuum cleaner and put the clock cover back on.
The "dead insect" was the exoskeleton of the childhood cockroach. It must have been there for years---feeding on what? I'd bought it from a store now owned by Wal*Mart. It was assembled in a Chinese factory. Both places doubtless have extensive cockroach colonies and no licence to sell or export them. The British climate, and doubtless domestic hygiene, make home infestations rare.
But the big mystery to me is why the clock doesn't work any more. This isn't from your Encyclopedia of Counted Sheep. I'm a witness of sound mind, if I am a fit judge of that, and cannot help if my words are butterflies. Be thankful they are nothing worse.
"...feeding on what?" Exactly. That is the really baffling question, isn't it?
An undamaged sense of self? I wonder. I think the recognition of the flawed nature of the self and one's attachment to, and identification with, the ego (ahamkara) is vital. It is all part and parcel of the process of coming to terms with one's poverty of spirit. Maybe spiritual recovery, the redemption of the self is tantamount to restoring the self to an undamaged state. It is at that point that my doubts creep in. Maybe it is a perceived requirement for detachment from the self that is where my barely formed thoughts are headed.
With reference to your quote, I do wonder whether Jesus was feeling a little depressed that day, and indulged in a little world weariness. Unfortunately, an observation that is as true today as it was in his time, seems to justify the taking by the haves from the have-nots, and the assumed right to have more when you already have enough. But let's not get political, uh!
I’m delighted that you have challenged me Tom on the very point where I wanted to challenge you, in your latest on Poverty of Spirit. I felt I was in direct opposition to what you said. Perhaps because I don’t have a personal understanding as to what poverty of spirit is, only a sceptical bias.
You and I approach these topics from opposite directions. One would hope we could meet in the middle, if we meet at all. Let’s see.
Taking a definition at random from Google (http://oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spirituality/the-beatitudes/poverty-in-spirit), I find “To be poor in spirit is to recognize clearly that one has nothing which he has not received from God, that one is nothing except by the grace of God.”
I have no difficulty with that. I don’t have a concept of God, but do recognize a need to focus my petitions, thanksgivings and humility, all of which arise from my naked vulnerability in this world.
The same website continues in its next paragraph to say, “To be poor in spirit is to be devoid of all pride and trust in the power of one’s own spirit. It is to be freed from all reliance on one’s own ideas, opinions and desires.” This I find dangerous. You suggest it is vital to recognize the flawed nature of the self. I suggest in response that it is vital to recognize the flawed nature of Christianity, in its attitude to pride. Nietzsche attacked that. William Blake does it better:
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
We need to distance ourselves from hand-me-down precepts of religion, as if they are Gospel truth! Well, they may be from the gospels but that doesn’t kake them true. Watch the film Philomena and see how devout nuns treated unmarried mothers who came into their care. Then you will see “poverty of spirit” not as a virtue but a weapon to exploit the downtrodden.
Yes there are those whose riches and fame gives them an unmerited sense of pride. But “pride and trust in the power of one’s own spirit” is a more honest weapon, whereby the psychically downtrodden can merely reclaim their own space. Surely this is a prerequisite for spiritual development.
That’s my case. Do you think we’ll be able to meet somewhere in the middle?
I get the feeling that we have come up against a case where Socratic dialogue is in order. When you said such-'n-such, did you mean...? etc. On the face of things we appear to be poles apart, in a messy situation. But I think the differences are more apparent than real. I find it impossible to accept that when two (or more) people approach a problem honestly seeking truth, they cannot but meet.....somewhere.
Let me say that when I talk about matters spiritual these days, I always try where possible to speak from my own experience. If I could use St. Augustine's approach I would say, "What does it matter that poverty of spirit is defined thus and exists, if I do not experience it in me? That it should be experienced in me is what matters." Now before this becomes a transfer of my post to yours, let me stop ther and try to make some comments on the various points raised in your essay.
Para.3: Although such a definition may be valid, it does not ring any bells with me. I can only define poverty of spirit according to my experience, not others. The insertion of God into this definition is, for me, an irrelevance.
Para.5: "To be poor in spirit is to be devoid of all pride..... etc. This just not gel with my experience, or the experiences of countless others. One of the key features of poverty of spirit is that pride is rampant; reliance on one's own opinions and desires is paramount. Not only is this kind of talk dangerous, it seems to me to be blatantly false. Yes, I do say that the self, the ego, is flawed. As a result the works of the self are also flawed, and that includes Christianity and all religions and philosophies. Added to the flaws in Christianity are the actions of people guided by misinterpretations, whether deliberately (to suit one's own personal agenda) or by accident.
Para.7: I would say that we need to distance ourselves from hand-me-down precepts of religion if we cannot affirm them in our lives, with our own experiences. That is not to say that the conclusions we may reach about our experiences should be carved in stone. I can always be wrong! But we cannot, if we have any desire to progress spiritually, follow like sheep where others preach, without at least querying what is being taught. I once said that Christianity has not failed man; it is man that has failed Christianity. In the end one cannot blame a human construct for its flaws. It's like 'blaming' a computer because it wasn't programmed correctly. But one can hold to account humans and their behaviours.
I have read your case and must ask the question, "Are we really so far apart? Or have I inadvertently spoiled a good argument?"
Vincent wrote a post in July called Building from Within. The destruction and reconstruction of a building in his neighborhood is a metaphor for the journey of the spirit through the world of matter. There is a time for emptying ourselves and a time to be refilled with new gifts and challenges. We tear down in order to build up.
But there has to be some 'sense of self' to undergo the processes. We can't talk about 'poverty of spirit' without postulating a spirit. Blake gets a handle on this by calling the permanent, immortal self the Identity. It is this Identity which he wants to release and express because, by living in matter, it becomes encrusted with layers of thought-patterns which imprison it. Tearing away ideas, behaviors and relationships which we have depended upon is perceived as a loss, but it is a prelude to gain.
Vincent's 'attitude' is the result of being freed from some internal restraint which prevented him from affirming a deeper level of his true Identity.
Please pardon me if I have misunderstood what was being said.
These issues are subjective, so individual to each one of us, yet many of us experience same-ish or similar emotional reactions and experiences, thinking that we are unique. Yes we are because of how we respond. I agree, if issues can be shared, often the sensations they cause, may diminish. Sharing with the 'right' person for you,me, or them, and/or in the 'best' place, is a key point here. The written word works amazingly well for many people.
If I may come back on this, for my part Ellie makes a very good point. (Thank you for reminding us of the earlier Vincent post.) I agree we can't talk about 'poverty of spirit' without postulating a spirit. I would, without going too deeply into the problem of semantics, identify Blake's Identity with the Higher Self, and the encrustation with the ego. I must say that I enjoy these impromptu forums.
Thanks all, I think we have met in the middle! If we all met face to face, we could add more words and clarify further. For we come from different positions and probably have different visions of where we would like to go in life. I do like this word "Identity" though, as it seems to respect one's uniqueness, whereas "Higher Self" in my mind implies some kind of merging into one standardised soul, which would be an anticlimax & quite opposite to the infinite variety we've spent our lives getting used to, here with our feet on the ground.
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