The Gordian Knot
Carved on the St. Madoes Stone in Perthshire, Scotland
A Celtic knot from one continuous line
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.
20 Comments:
I take Jesus to have been commenting on the divisive nature of his message, as he did many times (prophet without honour in his own land, you must leave family house and land to inherit the kingdom of heaven, and so on). He wasn't wrong. The outcome of most idealist creeds has been violence. Yet the alternative is a sunken worldliness that turns rancid.
The Gordian knot is a great image for the power and limitations of language: if it is not a bludgeon, if it is even as precise as a sharp sword, yet still, a word cuts the knot of nature, it doesn't untie it. Lovely to read this. And to be enchanted by the healing myth of that extract from Sleeping Beauty.
Yes, the following verses in St Matthew do support your reading, and we were told that by our lay-reader Scripture master Mr Guppy, of vivid memory. But I've never been convinced, nor able to tune in to the sayings of Jesus in many instances. I probably should not have seized on this quote as a facile way to round off the above piece.
I'm finding more and more that comments, whether on the page or sent by email, are a kind of collaboration. Readers are in effect editors, quick to point out what does not quite hang together; a gift even more precious than the kind remarks. Thanks for both.
What is also wonderful is when direct experience shows there is no Gordian knot to 'cleave in twain,' that the supposed knot is an illusion created by our thinking. I did enjoy this post. Thank you.
This reminded me of a conversation we had in these comments many years ago about leaning towards an optimistic viewpoint, and how it can have a sort of self-fufilling placebo effect. The idea of taking a leap towards positivity even though the rational justification for doing so only manifests itself ex post facto in these self-fufilling results.
So I scoured your archives looking for this conversation, feeling that I couldn't really remember it well enough or do it justice trying to recap it. Unfortunately I came up empty handed.
One way I think of faith is the attempt to align oneself with unseen forces. Simultaneously the force field is giving body to the seen world. It is futile to attempt to describe the unlimited in limiting terms, or the immortal in transient figures. Myth, metaphor and images are the language which can intimate the infinite.
Hebrews 4
[12] For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
Thanks, Tom. Yes, the Gordian knot can also be a symbol of wholeness, a world that's already complete in its oneness, a Zen koan resisting dualistic thinking, but as you say its knottiness can only disappear when our direct experience no longer sees its illusoriness. Which you've said much more succinctly.
Yes, Bryan, I believe you are right, that we had a specific conversation like that. Did you also check here? I may look there.
Thanks, Ellie, you have expressed faith in the unseen better than I was able to do. As for Hebrews 4:12 it's as foreign to my understanding as Matthew 10:34 as quoted in the main piece, and reminds me I am neither Christian nor Hebrew and want nothing from their doctrine, only their literature for its beauty & expressions of the human condition.
I had almost forgotten a site which Bryan & I set up as a joint enterprise four years ago, called "Strangers in Paradox", which ended rather bitterly, like a messy divorce; but such is life, and there have been pop groups for example which have torn themselves apart with emotional strain but produced beautiful music all the same. The recording of Rumours by Fleetwood Mac springs to mind.
Anyhow I lit upon this post at random http://strangeparadox.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/more-notes-on-bryans-posts.html and it seemed as good a place to link to as any.
Found it:
http://perpetual-lab.blogspot.com/2011/12/scintillating-scotoma.html#comment-form
Yes, well done! I just went through the post and comments again, wondering what has changed since then. When I complete the task of putting all the posts (bar a few) into an e-book, there'll be an index. It will make these searches easier. I'm currently half-way through the editing. The total document, including posts up to 12th May this year, comes to half a million words. I haven't included comments (too hard to make a selection) but each post has a hyperlink to the online blog, which will also show the images and original version of the text, along with all comments.
Further to "wondering what has changed since then", I might have a clearer answer to the question you asked three years ago: "What is this resentment that you have against reason?"
It's just a surmise but it might be a mild brain deformity, visible in left-handedness and peculiar-shaped head. And the reason I particularly mention this now is to tell you (in advance of any post that might speak more on the topic) about a new book by Sam Harris, whom I've avoided like the very devil till now on the basis that he seemed more of an activist atheist than Richard Dawkins or the late Christopher Hitchens.
It's called Waking Up: searching for spirituality without religion. With his doctorate in neuroscience, he has insights (right or wrong, I'm in no position to judge) about brain function and in a chapter on "The Mystery of Consciousness", harps on about the left and right hemispheres and the different aspects of personality & functioning which they represent. Making no mention of left-handedness and how this would affect things. Makes one feel like a black man in a white woman's world, or some such analogy: not actively discriminated against but ignored altogether.
Well I'm left-handed as well (although I haven't yet measured my skull for any abnormalities in its shape.)
I think one thing that came out of that discussion in that comment thread was that I very much understand where you're coming from, more than you might think, but I've just differed in the conclusions I've drawn about the matter. I spent so much time defending reason against you mostly out of necessity, mostly because I felt that SOMEONE had to offer a counterpoint to what you were saying, and of course in the end I did it just because I disagreed with you. But aside from that, I really just go about my business without giving it much thought. Reason occupies its place in the world, just as the sun occupies its place in the sky. I don't dwell on it or rage against it. It is what it is. I'm not beholden to reason, and I have no special fascination with it. But neither do I see it as some gate-keeper that needs to be toppled on the road to enlightment, and I think the only point I was ever really trying to drive home was that it's a horrible mistake to get tangled up in thinking that it is. Like the song says, let it be, let it be.
As for Sam Harris, I'm somewhat familar with him. I know of some of his arguments against free will. But there again is another subject where eventually I reach a point where I go, "Well what are you gonna do?" It's not like you can LIVE like you don't free will. Again, you'd just wind up getting all tangled up and driving yourself crazy over it. In the end, I just shrug and go back to my stories.
Look at it like this:
I don't know anything about fixing cars. I know next to nothing about what goes on under the hood. I care about where I'm going in the car. I care about the wind blowing in the windows and the sights I'm going to see along the road.
But to me, raging against reason is like harboring some kind of resentment against all that greasy technical stuff going on under the hood and thinking that you're going to accomplish something by pulling off to side of the road, popping the hood, and tearing out every hose, gasket, and wire you can get your hands on. I get that innerworkings of the car are very dry and ugly and prosaic compared to the whole wide wonderful beautiful world besides, but yanking out engine parts in frustration is only going to leave you stranded with a big smoking pile of junk of the side of the highway, and you won't be able to get anywhere or see anything.
And me, while I'm most certainly no mechanic, all I was ever trying to do was be the guy that pulls up behind you and goes, "Wait! What the HELL are you doing!?"
And then you go, "Well I'm trying to make a car that will run on moonbeams and dandelion spores scattering in the breeze, because I think that would be a lot prettier and suited to my temperament."
And that point I scratch my head and say, "Well, that does sound kind of nice, but I don't think that's going work. But ... you know ... you don't HAVE to be a mechanic. I have a number you can call for roadside assistance, and you can let THEM handle it. And while we wait we can go sit on the banks of that pond over there and skip rocks across the surface and watch the sun goes down behind those trees over yonder and listen to the frogs croaking in the tall weeds. That would be nice too, right?"
Yes, all points well made and taken, Bryan. This is where Harris comes in. He has an equally low opinion of cars that run on moonbeams & dandelion spores, and has never hesitated to express it.
For my part I have never hesitated in feeling empathy for a certain class of people, as referred to in my post above in these words:
“Faith provides much-needed comfort to those who have little or none to warm their days.”
Historically, this need and this faith have provided sufficient justification for religion in general, no matter how its tenets have been taken apart piecemeal by modern scientific & historical knowledge. Nowadays, if you are literate enough and secure enough in the basics of survival, both physical and psychological, you can discard such comfort-blankets with impatience and disdain, but not everyone has got there yet. Those exceptions, in their millions, appear to be the biggest problem in the world today. (Apart from those who ignorantly or knowingly collaborate in the degradation of nature’s natural balancing mechanisms.)
What Harris does, and I am not organized enough to ever consider doing, is make a rational case for spirituality, using the knowledge of his specialist field neurology and also his personal experiences of meditation, meeting gurus, taking drugs and by any other means looking beyond the the "I" awareness to what lies beyond.
Which is why I commend his book.
I watched a few minutes of Harris on youtube, but cut that cord quick to get back to season 3 of 'Black Blooks' (funniest show ever so glad you mentioned it!). Don't know what that says about me that I would choose Bernard over Sam... as far as overly complicated men go.
Anyhow, for what it's worth I think Loren Eiseley's more romantic view of science is sound in reason and is good enough for me. If there were more Loren Eiseley on people's bookshelves than the complete works of Freud etc., maybe the world would be a better place.
"The risk is there but the indomitable human spirit will cry 'assume the risk'. By it alone man has survived. And only those who know what it is to risk can understand compassion." - Eiseley
Thank you for your compassion, Vincent. It means the world!
“Loren Eiseley's romantic view of science is sound in reason and is good enough for me.” Yes, because he exemplifies an important thing about scientific discovery, that it takes place in the story of someone’s life and reflects that person. He writes autobiographically, as does Darwin; for discovery is to make observations and think about them. And then, in proper science, as I understand it, one proposes a theory, which one never confuses with being a fact.
Actually Sam Harris is like this too, in his Waking Up. He sees things as perhaps nobody else would or could, and uses his powers of reason to persuade fellow-sceptics that “the self is an illusion”.
On your point about compassion, in the last few days I’ve been reading, either in a book or online somewhere, someone quoting Darwin about animals and the possibility of their empathy, which is the sine qua non of compassion. And I’ve spent the last twenty minutes trying to chase up who it was, fruitlessly until I remembered that it was me in a comment to a post I wrote five years ago, and revisited in the course of editing the "book of the blog".
This was the post: http://perpetual-lab.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/lifes-predicament.html
And this was Darwin:
“If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.”
THANK YOU for adding the link to "Life's Predicament"! It's beautiful and not only bone warming, but heart-warming as well. So exciting for me that you are publishing a book of the ENTIRE blog!
I don't have anything against Harris. There's just a vibe I get when I look at his eyes that tells me to not go there. I have a weakness for ruthless people like him and I try not to feed it. Be it him taking down sacred cows like Mother Teresa or the sacred duty of worker-bees to kill their brothers, something is always attacking something else and I'm very battle weary. Yeah, if people were raised under the same conditions as bees mothers would kill their daughters. Ha I remember my mom telling me once that she should have pinched my head off when I was born. Don't know that it was fear of punishment or her own nature that stopped her. I'm just thankful to have not been born a bee. Hey, but who knows maybe Darwin's bees were saved by grace and not works so they're up in heaven with Mother Teresa making millions of healthy and happy bee babies while human babies are down here still suffering as a form of prayer.
Oh I don't know. I don't faith in anything or anyone. Let people make their arguments from within whatever method suits them. I don't give a hoot. I'm just trying to get through each day without others pinching off my head.
Thanks WBM. Did I tell you about The Secret Life of Bees? It's a lovely book and movie about a white girl who runs away from home and meets some sisters who keep bees & have an idyllic life, where she discovers some important secrets that touch her very personally and change her life. I'm vague to avoid plot-spoiling but also because I can't remember the details.
As for the publishing, yes, but I'm not thinking of that too much at present, as there is a great deal of writing to do, which will take a long time. But it feels right to work on it.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home