The Gordian Knot

Carved on the St. Madoes Stone in Perthshire, Scotland
A Celtic knot from one continuous line

The sword is not just a symbol of killing. In the days before stainless steel, a sharp bright sword was a symbol of value and power. Famous or magical swords had names. Excalibur is raised out of the Lake by the Lady who dwells therein so that it may pass directly to its intended holder and wielder. Or it is stuck fast in a stone and no one can pull it out but Arthur, as proof he is worthy to be King.

From a different tradition we have the Gordian Knot, itself a tangle of related legends. Here’s a fragment of one:

. . . while wintering at Gordium, Alexander the Great attempted to untie the knot. When he could not find an end to unbind it, he sliced it in half with a stroke of his sword, producing the required ends.

Words can resemble swords, in more ways than spelling. They can be precise enough to cut through confusion. When blunt and rusty they make things worse, as in my last piece on belief when I should have spoken of faith. The only thing that can take you through the days, months and years of pursuing any kind of dream is faith: in the purpose of the journey, the worth of the destination. In the Sixties I kept coming across this adage in a translated I Ching: “Perseverance furthers”. In the Seventies all through to the Nineties, I persevered along one path, through blind faith. Eventually I understood that the destination was fake and the path led nowhere. Then I was able to let it go and start learning, with no special effort. You might think that a slow student who finally learned could become a teacher; but the only thing I can pass on is that ill fortune can reveal itself as a blessing in the end. Furthermore, I’m beginning to see that everything is a blessing, if only we can see it as such. What we mainly need in this age is to see clearly.

When I wrongly confused faith with belief, I omitted to notice that faith clings like an addiction. Belief is merely to accept as fact what you cannot prove. It’s not something we can eliminate altogether. Will the bus arrive on time, or even at all? No one knows but we go to the stop in reasonable belief. Those who have faith will wait there calmly, no matter how long it takes. Others may drift off disappointed, or call a taxi. Faith provides comfort to those who are short of comfort. I’ve given it up. Nor does belief interest me at all, except in practical issues. I like going by bus. Disputes seldom prove anything, except to show that both sides are driven by the same desire: to claim victory over the other. As pleasure goes, this is really low-grade stuff.

Faith is like a drug which drives an athlete to win at any cost, by fair means or foul. With my Alexandrian sword, I try and cut the knot of faith, to expose its free ends and unravel its complexities. I discover three components: faith in Self, faith in Other, faith in the Unseen. Faith in self is solitary self-reliance—“I have what it takes! I will get there, no matter at what cost.” Faith in Other is a wide-embracing and often rational-seeming optimism. We can trust the system, except where we can’t, and there we can find a solution to its malfunctions, and make a better future.

By faith in the Unseen I mean none of the above. By definition, faith concerns itself with unknown outcomes, but the Unseen is not a reference to the future. It is a realm not visible with mortal eyes. To some this could include gods and goblins, but I mean the inner life of a human being, the unseen world of our thoughts and feelings, which touch beauties and horrors where none is physically present. I don’t refer to the fantasies of idle imagination, but that which grips and moves more powerfully than anything mundane.

And this, as I’ve found when trying to express what I mean, is where the Gordian Knot is most tangled, a knot of such generality that my bright sharp metaphoric sword, or pen-which-is-mightier-than same, hangs slackly at my side. The knot is a great deal bigger than I am. My inner world is real to me, but how can I share it?

I wanted to take this notion of “faith in the unseen” and show how it covers the highest human experience—noble deeds, the Good Life, Enlightenment—while cutting the Knot so precisely as distinguish this realm from the murkiest superstition, the forked-tongue weasel words of hidden persuasion and falsehood, which mislead us so as to cause wars, corruption and misery, in humanity and all nature. Once again, we revert to the imagery of legend, as in this retelling for children:

As they slept, a dense wall of thorny vines grew round the castle. The vines were as green as emeralds and the thorns were as sharp as razors. . . . Many years passed. Many knights and princes tried to enter the castle and break the spell. None could cut through the thicket of brambles. Then one day, after one hundred years, a prince from a faraway kingdom heard the story of the Sleeping Beauty. . . . Finally he arrived at the castle. He drew his sword to cut through the thorny vines. The sharp blade shone like a mirror in the sunlight. When he raised his sword, the thick vines parted miraculously, making a clean path.

Someone else, whose legend was based on real life, is reported to have talked of a sword too, in words seeming so totally out of character, or so contrary to our expectations, that you feel he must have truly said them, or something similar.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

But I don’t know what he meant. A parable would have helped.

Beliefs I: Pursue Your Dreams

Jim Jefferies

What is belief?

. . . the human necessity to have a working framework of beliefs to help us get through each day, and so on till the end of our lifespan . . .
. . .
Most human beings most of the time are uncomfortable with doubt. We crave certainty, but there isn’t enough available. [by means of belief] we satisfy ourselves with a manufactured certainty. . . .

I dashed off these ideas in comments on my last post, and thought they could be developed further, but I wonder. Is it possible to understand human belief? Aren’t we prevented from being objective by what we already believe? Let us investigate.

Since we must start somewhere, let us consider a belief widely held in the Western world today: that individual possibilities are open, and the proper way to live is to pursue a personal dream of happiness and fulfilment. We have invested much in this: notions of freedom, government, economics, education, commerce, advertising, science and technology. It is costly to have beliefs and support them. Belief is proved by the evidence of what we invest in it.

Is this Western belief well-founded? It is easy to comfort ourselves by looking at other beliefs and their adherents, and see ours as far better; or by taking time and effort to try and demolish theirs. They are poor; they live under an authoritarian regime; they live in fear; they labour till they drop; they cannot discover who they are and realize their full potential. All very fine, but it doesn’t answer the question. Is the Western belief that I have described well-founded?

What I have to say is simple, and not an especially personal viewpoint. In fact I shall call witnesses to say it on my behalf. You can find critiques of this belief that “everything is possible—go for it” in many places. That’s not the problem. The difficulty is in being able to reject our own beliefs. I nearly said “cherished beliefs” but the adjective is redundant. The kind of belief I’m talking about is cherished by definition. What happens when you sit in a tree and saw off the branch you are sitting on? You realize that you have to be supported by something. You can only shed one belief by adopting another. How easy is it to change horses midstream? Following these lines of thought, we begin to understand how the world is the way it is. We begin to wonder what anyone thinks they can achieve by attacking the beliefs of others.

As my first witness, I call Australian comedian Jim Jefferies. Shall I warn you about him first? No, listen at your own risk, but I’ll point you to two passages only, first Why I get depressed, from 27 mins 42 seconds for about two minutes; and then “You can do anything”, from 33 mins 9 seconds, about teachers setting expectations. It’s satire, not philosophy, and he doesn’t offer answers. On a higher intellectual plane, here’s a passage from La Doctrine Suprême, published in 1960, & which I’ve mentioned several times. The official English translation is literal and frankly useless—but here it is, for comparison against an idiomatic approximation which you’ll find more readable, below. The ideas are simple enough, but it’s not easy to change our viewpoint, as I’ve said already.

Pursuing one’s dream vs taking the leap

It’s basic to my humanity that I see myself as a separate being. This is my sense of “I”. Once this is developed in me it shapes my desires, which in turn dictate my hopes and fears. This “I”, which sees everything from a unique personal viewpoint, carries its own intent and expectation; makes me feel a lack. My life is spent waiting for this lack to be filled.

This ambition or expectation takes the form of waiting till my real life begins, that time when my existence will be wholly affirmed in the world as it should, not just patchily as now. Aware of it or not, we all live in hopeful anticipation of this “real life”, a place where the negatives have disappeared.

What constitutes this real life, of course, differs for each of us, both in overall pattern and moment-to-moment detail. We each have our own image of what this new era would be, free from the drawbacks of today. An inner voice whispers how nice it would be to have this, be like that, enjoy such-and-such event. Sometimes I see very clearly what this real living will be. Sometimes it stays vague: I await the coming of that which will set everything to rights. This sense of a flawed present and better future isn’t always at the forefront; but it always comes back. Paradise is somewhere to be had, I know that. All it needs is some change to the world, or to myself. This is the key that will open the door and let me back in to my lost Paradise. So my whole life is a quest for that key.

Meanwhile, I kill time as best I may. I invest effort in getting ready for the key, seeking my chosen forms of success, material or otherwise.
. . .
My understanding has not yet been awakened by right teaching, so all I can do is let myself be drawn to aspects of what I know or am able to imagine as slightly beyond what I know. The clay with which I work is the “dualistic world of phenomena”.
. . .
In part, my aspirations are worthwhile, but the way I pursue them is self-defeating. While my mind is on something other than this moment, I let go my hold on the real life that’s right in front of me, the forms of the here and now which I already possess. Instead of being swallowed up in the forms actually before me, my intent is waylaid by images of the desirable. My dream of paradise holds firm. Meanwhile, the present slips from my grasp.

Thus I create an illusion of time, with the painful feeling that it’s leaking away from me. On the one hand is what I know, solidly contained in space and time. On the other is my perfect satisfaction, somewhere in the future. Time is the thing that separates one from the other, origin from destination.

I’m in two minds about time. Looking back, I bitterly regret its passing. Ideally, I want it back; at the very least I want to stop it retreating even further. But when I look forward, I’m impatient for it to pass, fed up with waiting. Looking back to a particular epoch of my life, I feel quite different now from what I felt at the time. Then, I was obsessed by dissatisfaction and images of a better future, just as I am now. Hindsight blinds me to that, but fills me with regret for all those things, all those times, which I hardly tasted while they flowed away.

As my understanding awakens by grace of right teaching, a change takes place in me. I see that I’ve had instinctive and unlimited yearnings. Nothing in this phenomenal world itself, however gross or subtle, could satisfy them. I see that what I’ve always wanted, while dreaming it into existence in this or that, is realization [“ce que le Zen appelle satori”]. I understand that this realization is not to be considered as an improvement, however you imagine it, on what I know now. It’s not a release from the play of dualistic forces, or the purging of all “evil” leaving only “good”. It is an access, beyond dualism, into something beyond dualism, a reconciliation of opposites. I don’t know how to depict this “something” to myself. I can only see it as something beyond representation, unimaginable, entirely different by its own nature, from anything I know today.

Hubert Benoit

Overall, I like the way it reflects the reality I know. I’ve felt all those things. The only parts I cannot swallow are the two references to “right teaching”, but that’s due to personal history.

What he says about looking forward eagerly to a better future, or regretfully to a lost past, reflects my own experience; as does his reference to “something beyond representation, unimaginable”. I’m inclined to agree that “I create an illusion of time”. I discover, taught by life rather than a particular teacher, that my dreams of the future—going back to Cowes, where I lived age 12 and 13—and of the past—reliving each moment with an intensity never realized at the time—are just additional ways to enjoy this moment. Time is an illusion and there is nothing I have to do. And yes, this is simply a belief, like anyone else’s; though I don’t attempt to defend it.

The organizing power of words

I write here to express my thoughts and it’s difficult because they branch out in all directions, and I struggle to find an organizing principle. My thought is a response to the interaction of myself with the rest of the world. It’s constantly dynamic, like the global weather system. If I manage to write anything worth publishing it is not as directed by will but the “dictates of the Muse”, when I can tune to them. They seem to mutate like clouds in the sky. It takes a title sometimes to help marshal those thoughts into order and give them a focus. But then, and here’s the snag, the title cannot arise from conscious will either. I don’t speak of general rules here, as in “how to be a writer” or even “how to be a thinker”, but as it strikes me personally.

“A Wayfarer’s Notes” has served well as a title, but has little organizing power over what I have to say. But now I’ve arrived at a phrase which really does help. Many times on this blog I’ve recorded phrases that just came, like “whispers from an angel”: phrases so pithy and suggestive that I’ve had to unravel their meaning through wandering highways and byways without conscious intent, till more words came, and gave visible form to the inchoate vapour.

In this instance, a phrase has gradually evolved, inspired by more books—I hope to mention them in due course—and more direct interactions, including all the comments on my last. I’ll pick out two in particular, first this from Ellie:

We ARE blessed and grateful.

Then this from Natalie (excerpt):

Your posts are always thought-provoking, Vincent, and sometimes, in my argumentative mind, argument-provoking...in a good way! In this case because I disagree with “Fingers Pointing Towards the Moon” but the reasons I disagree are too long to put in a comment box so I’ll be emailing you.

She has sent an email, a clarification more than an argument, a view from a different angle. It reads like an artist’s manifesto and a spiritual credo, rolled into one. Again, an excerpt:

The difficult task of being human, re-creating ourselves, is like alchemy: to transmute those emotions which drag us down into emotions which lift us up, give us metaphorical wings, thereby being able to love. Love being the element which both transforms and forms the Self (the gold, the “philosopher’s stone”). This takes hard work, and involvement in the realities that life presents us with. I see the Self as tool, a transformative tool. Like a brush in a painter’s hand, or a hammer in a carpenter’s hand: it has to work on something and it transforms the material it works on.

These two responses, from Ellie & Natalie, have inspired a phrase which has such an organizing power that it deserves airing as the title of something as yet unwritten, or even a science as yet unborn:

SCIENCE OF BLESSINGS, ART OF LIVING

Blessings are constantly on my mind. K & I, neither of us following any system of belief, use the word constantly during the day: “Bless!” often out of the blue. She got into saying “Bless the Lord!”, which didn’t sound right to me. “How can we bless the Lord? You must have it wrong. Surely it’s ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul’. She yielded for a couple of days, in the meek assumption that I knew better, then relapsed. I pointed this out. Quick on the draw, she whipped out her trusty smartphone, the weapon of choice these days for settling an argument, round these parts at any rate. There it was, Psalm 103:

Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name.

Anyhow, we’re agreed. We ARE blessed and grateful. Blessings fall like rain upon us. But then, “he sendeth rain on the just and the unjust”; which raises a question about the distribution of blessings. If there is a science of meteorology, which explains how, why and when it rains, can there not also be a science of blessings?

Which brings me to Richard Hamblyn’s book, The Invention of Clouds. For centuries philosophers from Aristotle onwards had speculated what clouds are made of, how they get into the sky, what shapes them. In this blog, I’ve made a fetish object of clouds, along with blackbirds and slugs. “Fetish: something irrationally reverenced”, says the dictionary. In his book, Hamblyn recounts the life and times of Luke Howard, “the father of meteorology”, whose most notable contribution to science was to name the clouds in 1802. Cirrus, Stratus, Cumulus and Nimbus, singly and in combination, have been used the world over, ever since. Goethe, scientist as well as writer, never ceased to sing his praises and wrote a poem in his honour.

It is possible to doubt the existence of God, but not blessings, if one has been their recipient. A phenomenon is experienced. It has a recognized name. What’s to argue away? It’s meaningless to dismiss a felt blessing as imaginary. And what is science, if not discovery? It is the process of discovering universal facts, naming them, finding out what makes them happen, and ultimately gaining predictive power. Meteorology matures as a science when it can accurately predict the rain. Can there not, in the same fashion, be a science of blessings?

There’s a widely recognized difference between arts and sciences. When I quote Natalie above it’s notable that she herself is an artist, by every definition. Here she is not speaking directly about art but “the difficult task of being human”. This is what I call the art of living. Reading her email, I tried to understand the nature of the disagreement she had with Fingers Pointing to the Moon. Perhaps there are differences in belief, but these we do not argue about, not in England, where you can believe what you like. No, I think her serious point is that the book is anti-life. It says all this is illusion. But as she says, this is what we’ve been given to work with! This is the clay, these are the pigments, the Self is the artist, and we, singly or as humanity, transform ourselves into a work of art.

Her argument is compelling. I put forward nothing to oppose its simple clarity. I don’t speak on behalf of the author of Fingers Pointing, except to say that his book is actually not about the art of living, in Natalie’s terms. It might seem so, especially as he calls it “reflections of a pilgrim on the way”, implying a process of transformation. I think it fits better in my new classification, as an essay in the newborn “science of blessings”.

There is a great deal more to say, but for the present it’s your turn.

From out of silence

I was dumbfounded: confounded and struck dumb at the same time. It was a congenial place to be, I discovered, being content to stay there a while, sheltered in the dignity and grace of not knowing, that is, shedding false knowledge. But now I find myself wanting to speak, for which I must pay the inevitable price of emerging from silence. For there is a contrary current in me, perhaps a less noble one, which demands expression at any cost, even when I have nothing to say, and no planned utterance ready. This inner movement, like an activist spokesman on behalf of quietism, has an even more exigent demand, that I consider speaking here daily, and make it into a proper diary. That way, it suggests, I could save time: just set aside an hour, and write. Indeed one faithful reader proposed I set myself a deadline to publish at least once a week. That was two weeks ago. We shall see. At any rate we have started. This blog has always seemed like a journey with no destination. A day will come where “the rest is silence” as in Hamlet’s final speech. “Not yet, O Lord!”, pleads St. Augustine. The sun still shines: there is hay to be made. Silence will end us all, for that which is born must die. There are those who would argue otherwise, but there we enter the territory of Ernest Becker, whose Denial of Death got him a Pulitzer Prize and remains in print, while its author remains dead. (For reasons unknown to me, my review of his book published 21st October 2010 remains the most-read post on this blog.)

So I shall just start, my purpose being to address a reader who will understand. With any luck that person will be myself. With even more luck someone else will encounter my words and find meaning or sustenance in them. The addictive ingredient of blogging is to enter into relationship with readers. The visible part of this is to receive responses, whether in public comments or private emails. These responses are invariably encouraging, regardless of content. Conversations spring up, the project is validated and invigorated. My silence has not been inert but strenuous, like wrestling with an angel:

And he rose up that night, and took his two wives and his two womenservants and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok.
And he took them and sent them over the brook, and sent over what he had.
And Jacob was left alone, and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.
And when the man saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint as he wrestled with him.
And the man said, “Let me go, for the day breaketh.” And he said, “I will not let thee go, unless thou bless me.”

Well, I have been blessed, again and again. If I know anything at all, I know that. Everything else may be false knowledge. The hollow of my thigh has seen better days, but my doctor says it’s “age-related”. That too is in doubt. But the day breaketh and I can let the angel go, and agree with him and myself to break silence and speak.

I can trace my dumbfounded state to a book, Fingers Pointing towards the Moon: Reflections of a Pilgrim on the Way, referred to in a couple of recent posts. In some mystical sense it has been the spiritual companion of my wayfaring for fifty years, though it’s only in recent weeks that I’ve held it in my hands once more. I first came across it in November 1963, by accident, so to speak, as I entered the bookshop on a different quest.

There are turning-points in life. Chance encounters, you become lovers, then nothing remains but fond memory; or you marry, found a dynasty, and live happily ever after. I’d gone into the shop to see Christina. We’d met in July of that year* & subsequently from time to time. She told me she’d got a job in the department which specialized in philosophy & oriental religion.

Anyhow, she said she could not speak to me now, as her supervisor was looking for any excuse to fire her. I should go and browse, and she’d let me know when the coast was clear. So I browsed and saw the book and knew it was for me, a kind of love at first sight, before her very eyes; which brimmed, as I did not realize at the time, with unrequited love for me. I went on to marry someone else, and so in due course did she.

I blocked her from my mind—it was necessary—to the point that I no longer associated the book’s acquisition with that moment in our relationship, but revered it on its own terms, and allowed its contents to sink into my unconscious mind. I see now that I was in no position to understand it. And because I was a wanderer of no fixed abode, it remained among the books I regularly packed in boxes and unpacked at the other end, until one fateful day in May 1972, when my wife and I, infected by one another’s craziness and hype about a certain alleged guru, left the bohemian commune where we’d been wintering and gave away our worldly goods, all except what we could carry in our battered van. They have a name for this kind of thing: folie à deux, though there were four of us, we had two small children to accompany our adventures. That’s what made it such a folie.

The author of Fingers Pointing towards the Moon is not to be blamed. Now that I have it again, and have read it all through, with an increasing grasp of its essence, I try to unearth any careless or inflammatory doctrine that could have inspired the eccentric direction we took. In vain. It’s the same book, in exactly the same first edition, but I hardly recognize it. Only this sentence leapt out as familiar, for some reason:

When a beggar renders you the service of accepting a shilling he thanks you for giving him the opportunity of rendering you that service.†

The most striking idea I discover in the book now, reading it afresh, is his repeated assertion that Time is an illusion, generated by the human animal who can think. We are trapped in the Unreal, which he sometimes calls the “plane of seeming”. This is our everyday life, in which we discern chains of cause and effect, which he refutes:

There can be no such thing as a Cause, for the idea of causation presupposes the objective existence of Time. Cause-and-effect therefore are an illusion appertaining to the plane of seeming.

He says that freedom of action is also illusion. If time is illusion, how can the future be uncertain? How can it depend on actions performed in the present? Yet there is freedom of reaction. He quotes Hui Neng‡:

From the beginning, nothing exists.

The whole created world is illusion, according to this view: all except Consciousness, much of which is also illusion, especially our sense of a separate “I”. So what are we? Cogs in a machine we call Universe? He makes it clear throughout that our joy and freedom comes from ceasing to invest hope and expectation in the “I”. Does this sound like what Aldous Huxley calls “the perennial philosophy”? As viewed by mathematics, science & reason, the machine operates pretty much consistently, leading us to call it Reality. But it’s just a fairground attraction, which may sometimes seem like a nightmare. The author doesn’t mention it, but I’m reminded of the Hindu concept of Lila§, or Divine Game.

It’s in our nature to ask “why?”, to assume there is a cause for every effect. Accordingly, I had assumed my urge to buy the book again was pure nostalgia, a time-travelling device to waft me back to unfinished business of fifty years ago, when I made choices I’ve later regretted as “mistakes”, if not worse. But those posthumous Fingers, pointing towards their postulated Moon, have helped achieve far more than nostalgic indulgence. They have pointed me to a different way of seeing, in which no mistake was made, no regret or sense of guilt due. Scary as it seems at first, I find it a comfort ultimately to view my past life not as a series of misadventures best forgotten, but part of a fixed destiny, in which I was almost as helpless as the little children my first wife and I dragged along to witness the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Could I have done better, or is there indeed a destiny that shapes our ends, in spite of all the rough-hewing we inflicted on our own selves? I know not, only that I listened at last like Jacob to the wrestling angel and let him go before the break of day, and accepted his blessing. Herewith, I release the memories of those past loves from my grasp. In a timeless universe nothing goes away, but in this “plane of seeming” where you and I connect, they died, while I’m still here, in health and thankfulness.
-------------
* See this post. I’ve written a long memoir about Christina, and her widowed husband wrote another. Neither were intended for publication. She was born in 1944 and died in 1982.
† Some of the book is available online, here
‡ Hui Neng was the 6th Zen Patriarch.
§ Lila: see e.g. this article