Inclusivity, Exclusivity

As the SKS beefs up its online presence over the summer, I've been ruminating on inclusivity and exclusivity as factors in building a community. Inclusivity is a value normally associated with the progressive liberal: we want institutions and communities that are inclusive, that don't reject people out of hand, for all the wrong reasons (race, sex, gender, etc.). Inclusivity also happens to be one of those values with a certain amount of theological grounding to it: Jesus made a big deal about accepting those who were rejected, and sweeping aside the usual boundaries for who was worthy of your love and concern. So it seems sensible that a spiritual community (virtual or otherwise) would want to be reaching out and pulling people in. The power of radical inclusivity has been demonstrated by the likes of the Wikipedia. By rejecting all notions of "who's an expert," and letting the masses participate to whatever extent they feel like, the Wikipedia has become a staggeringly huge resource of scholarship, comparable in quality to the "exclusive" club of Britannica authors and vastly bigger.

"On the other hand . . ." (as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof might say) we are hard-put to define a community that has any meaning at all unless we draw certain boundaries. When examining the unbridled, innocent liberalism of his parents, Barack Obama's critique was: "If everyone is family, then no one is family." In a world of limited resources (especially our time and attention), we have to make value decisions, and that inevitably leads us to put some people ahead of others. St. Paul did an awful lot of work to cultivate the standards of the early Christian community. The Christians were supposed to love everyone, but they were supposed to really love (and help) their fellow believers. Exclusive standards exist in every major institution -- education, business, politics -- to insure that you don't waste your time on people who are not equally committed to the same values and goals that you are. Exclusivity is demonstrated in other online phenomena, such as social networks: we still pick our friends and mates, and we like to think that's a pretty exclusive club.

So how to we synthesize inclusivity and exclusivity as real values? I still don't have the answer, but I suspect the meta-rules for inclusivity and exclusivity do exist and are active in all communities. More on this later.

The real Symposium

When people hear "Self Knowledge Symposium," they usually think of symposium in its academic usage: a conference at which several speakers present on a given subject. But, from the beginning, we always intended it in its original Greek usage: a really good party with impassioned intellectual discussion. We had one of those last night: people from all three local student groups got together just to hang out . . . which is the best way to have the best conversations about things that really matter.

"I think Eckhart Tolle entirely misses the point," proclaimed Augie, beer in hand. "Five pages into his book, he says, 'I reached a point of utter despair that led to a catclysmic experience' . . . and then he spends the rest of the book talking about his meditation techniques! It was the despair that gave him the experience, not the mediation! Nothing wrong with his techniques, they're probably better than most, but that's not the essential part. That's the problem these days: nobody's talking about passion."

Well, not entirely true . . . there are some teachers and traditions that talk about passion. Andrew Cohen put "singleness of intention" at the very top of his teaching: "You have to want enlightenment more than anything else." And Nisargadatta was pretty explicit about it as well: "Earnestness is all." But his point is still valid, when you consider the spiritual landscape in general, especially in America. Everyone keeps acting like spiritual insight is the product of the correct techniques and practices, instead of the motivation and drive that brings the person to the practices in the first place.

But that was only just the opening argument for the evening. I talked with people about the dynamic tension of exclusivity versus inclusivity in spiritual communities . . . the virtues of different media for spiritual communication . . . the value of public communication for routing out egos . . . the creeping conservatism of age. I got enough to blog about for a week, from just a few hours with the right people. I only wish I could do it every night.

The Once and Future Blog

The Self Knowledge Symposium really needs a blog. For most of this past year I've been thinking about it, and I think the time has finally come to start making it happen.

Why does SKS need a blog?

• The website needs content. We've got some cool stuff on the site, but cool stuff is usually only enough for one or two visits. If you want people to keep coming, and remain engaged in what you're doing, you need to give them a reason to come. Nothing wrong with having a cyber-brochure, but that was never our vision. We really wanted something that reflected the nature of our community: dynamic, participatory, something with a spine and an organizing principle but still open-ended and continually emerging.
• Alumni need a way to engage. We've had many, many students come through our student communties, and then go on to remarkable lives . . . usually somewhere else. We try to keep tabs on our alumni, send them mailings and announcements, make them feel like a part of what we're doing, but when all your contact is one-way and group-initiated, it's extremely time-intensive and inefficient. We need to give the alumni a way they can really participate in what's going on. As both readers and guest writers, a blog gives them that avenue for active participation. We've had some remarkable email threads in the past that accomplished the same end, but they were sporadic and ephemeral.
• Student groups need visible center to look towards. The campus groups tend to become isolated from one another unless something pulls them together. Sometimes it's easy to forget that there's a larger world of fellow-seekers out there. A blog could keep students engaged on a daily basis, too, which helps supplement weekly meetings to keep students constantly engaged.
• Bite-sized content. The virtue of blogs (good ones, anyway) is that they provide "snack" content. It's small and easily consumed. Our current content is usually much longer: essays and white papers of several thousand words. As good as that content may be, it doesn't lend itself to online consumption, especially by newcomers. Blogs give a glimpse of style and content, enough to intrigue and engage, without overwhelming the reader.
• Bite-sized contributions. Big content takes a big time investment. When we published The Symposium magazine, we discovered that getting people to write 3000-word articles required extreme forms of torture and duress. The end product was good, but it was always hard-won. We burned out a lot of good, creative souls bringing that magazine to press. Blogs, however, can (and should) be written in a single sitting. It's something small enough that even a busy person can contribute to it. And publication is instant, automated, and entirely non-centralized . . . so we can both produce content and get it out the door without meetings, budgets, and other pain-in-the-butt logistics. Low-threshhold contibution might seem like a (literally) small thing, but the vast wealth of content in the Wikipedia was built the same way: small, incremental additions by a distributed network of interested parties.
• Leveraged effort. Of course, the usual reasons for putting stuff on the web still apply: the world gets to see it. If people are talking about good books, sharing experiences, planning their lives, arguing about weighty issues, and doing all that SKS stuff, I'd like to can it and get it out to whomever might find it.
• Very cool. I'm excited about it. When I started blogging I didn't know where it would take me; I just knew I needed to start writing. But I did expect it to take me somewhere, and ultimately tie back into the spiritual work. This feels like the next step. Stay tuned.

Not So Big Life

Today I heard Sarah Susanka, of The Not So Big House fame, on the local NPR station's talk show, "The State of Things." I had read her books before, and like many, many people I alternated between marveling at the profound simplicity of her advice ("why build a house with rooms you don't use") and the sheer beauty of her home designs.

While I resonated with her philosophy of making our surroundings conform to our real values, I had no idea she was as spiritually-minded as she had turned out to be. Her latest book, The Not So Big Life, looks like so much of the SKS work: hard-core contemplative philosophy, stripped of its cultural baggage and packaged for a mass audience. As I listened to her on the radio, I thought, "This is classic Vedanta. This is awareness meditation. She might as well be reading Eckhart Tolle on the air." I was surprised she was getting as much traction as she was, with such bona fide spiritual content. There was a small voice inside me griping about how she wasn't citing her sources; it seems untruthful to not acknowledge that these ideas have roots in other places, and didn't just emerge wholly formed from one's own head. But it was a small voice; she would not be the first person to take universal truths and present them as, well, universal.

I called into the show and asked her if she came upon these ideas in the context of a spiritual path. She said that she had, and that she considered herself a "spiritual mutt" because she had explored many spiritual traditions without identifying with any one. (At least, I think that's what she said -- they cut off my phone connnection the moment she started to answer the question, so I missed the first part of her answer.)

Mostly I was just deeply impressed with how well she articulated the ideas, and how she spoke with personal as well as theoretical understanding. I will be very interested to see how well this book does, and how it's received.

Divining purpose from talent

I started listening to The Purpose Driven Life again. I had started in on Frank McCourt's Teacher Man a while back and got distracted. So much for finding my life's purpose in 40 days.

One of Rick Warren's premises for the book is that a person is specifically shaped by God to serve a specific mission on the planet. Your talents, personality, and circumstances are (literally) designed to make you fit for a specific ministry. So, if you study yourself carefully, you should be able to discern what it is you're supposed to do.

That sounds reasonable, especially since it's approximately what every parent and high school guidance counselor ever said: "Find something you're good at and that you enjoy, and do that." But the fallacy of finding your purpose from your talents is shown somewhat in one of the stories in the Millenium episode I wrote about earlier. One of the devils, Blurk, tells of how he hitchhiked one night with a young man, Perry, who confessed to be interested in true crime and serial killers. The devil, seeing all the signs, pointed out that the young man was probably interested in the subject because he himself shared all the attributes of a serial killer:

Blurk: White male in his 20s; the abused product of a broken home who spent
his youth setting fires and/or torturing animals; an early addiction to drugs
and/or alcohol. Inability to hold a steady job or relationship with women.
Spending all your free time thinking about turning your masochistic/
mutilation/sex fantasies into reality! To say nothing of the fact that you
drive a van, and keep a roll of duct tape in your glove compartment!"

Perry: How the hell did - ? What are you trying to tell me?

Blurk: Play the hand you've been dealt.

And so Perry goes on to become a serial killer . . . just because he would be good at it. That's an extreme example, but it illustrates the point: talent alone is no guide at all to divine purpose. You still have to discern what's the right thing to do. And the right thing might, in fact, be entirely opposed to one's nature.

(As an aside, I saw a story in the News & Observer about former state agriculture commissioner Meg Scott Phipps returning home after serving four years in federal prison for extorting campaign contributions from State Fair vendors. Her local community was supportive of her, but they didn't talk about her actual crimes much because, as on business associate put it, "they accepted the fact that that was the hand she was dealt." I couldn't help but think of Blurk's promptings . . . people really do use that phrase to excuse all kinds of things.)

In fact, I would go so far as to say that divine calling is more visible precisely when it opposes one's own natural inclination. In a documentary on Mother Theresa and the Sisters of Charity, a number of the sisters confessed to feeling completely unmatched to their calling: "Every day I got up with the intention of leaving. But God wouldn't let me go." After her death, some of Mother Theresa's writings indicated that she herself suffered profound and lasting doubts about the nature of her ministry; she had an initial inspiration to work in Calcutta with the poor, but afterwards she went her entire life with no divine affirmation for her work. Far from seeing this as a problem, the Chuch officials overseeing her candidancy for sainthood see her doubts as evidence of a miracle: "How could she do so much, without the benefit of any divine revelation?"

Poor me

Whenever I am driving off to some job I am dreading, or maybe even off to some routine chore but I'm obsessing over some other problem, I will experience the EEHIETM effect: "Everyone else has it easier than me." I'll see a guy riding his bike on the sidewalk, or a pair of blondes in Carolina sweatshirts running (and there are always, at any time of day, multiple pairs of blondes in Carolina sweatshirts running in Chapel Hill) and I'll think, mostly unconsciously and barely articulated: "They have it so easy. They don't have the worries I do. I wish I could be one of those normal, untroubled people." The effect is nearly universal; everyone I see gets the same reaction. Only the homeless or the profoundly ugly prompt the opposite response: "Jeez, I'm glad I'm not them."

These thoughts don't stand up to a moment's rational analysis. I know that I'm one of the luckiest SOBs on the planet, and I wouldn't trade places with anyone. I know that no matter how carefree someone else may seem, they have their own seething cauldron of anxieties. That guy throwing a frisbee in the quad is probably putting off doing his thesis. Those girls maybe trapped in dead-end relationships with guys with dead-end jobs. For all of my worries, I don't have any real problems: my family is healthy, I have enough money, I enjoy my job, I am hopeful for the future.

And yet, in the moment of anxiety, everyone else seems to be better off. A self-righteous narrator screams in my head: "Why can't these idiots understand how much stress I'm under!?!" Nor am I alone in this line of thinking. No matter how busy I am, every single person I meet, be they college student, housewife, or CEO, seems to think they are busier than me. "No, I couldn't possibly, I'm way too busy for that, maybe some other time."

So, it's become a mindfulness exercise for me:
If other people don't have the worries and troubles I do . . . that's ego.
If nobody understands how hard I have it . . . that's ego.
If the stress of my commitments seems unbearable . . . that's ego, too.

Everyone has worries. Everyone is busy. Nobody is appreciated as much as they ought to be. You will bear up under the stress.

Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me

At last night's SKS meeting, Kenny showed an episode of Millenium, a supernatural/crime TV show from the mid-1990's. The episode is entitled, "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me," and it's been a staple of SKS meetings for the last ten years because it is one of the most extrordinarily philosophic pieces ever to appear on television. If you've never seen it, I would strongly encourage you to do so -- you can rent the Season Two DVDs from most video stores or NetFlix.
It's sort of a Screwtape Letters story -- four demons, disguised as old men, gather at local coffee shop to discuss their techniques for damning souls, and gradually realize that their is at least one person who can see their true essence. Follow the links to read a synopsis, if you can't stand to wait, as other fans have made much better descriptions of the episode than I could.

(Warning: Spoilers follow.)

I could write at length about each one of the demon's stories and it's implications, but I'll stick to what struck me about the stories last night:

• Kierkegaard, among others, have been critical of modern Christian churches for their relative apathy in regards to sin and salvation. The bar for salvation is set remarkably low these days: a simple profession of belief is all that is required to win eternal life, and while virtue is seen as a result of a lifetime's development, salvation is considered a gimme. Such casualness about salvation is in direct contradiction to Jesus' teaching, which stressed that it was a rare thing: "Many are called, but few chosen," (Mathew 20:16) not to mention "Straight is the gate and narrow the way that leadeth to salvation." These stories were the first suggestion I've seen in a long time in the popular culture that saving your soul might require extraordinary means. All the humans discussed by the devils led live dominated by inertia, continuing unvaried in their path until they met their untimely end. It was only those who made a conversion (literally, "to turn around"), who escaped the damnation awaiting those who live ordinary lives.
• This story almost trumps C.S. Lewis' vision of devilry for sophistication, because it has the audacity to actually sympathize with the demons as well as their victims. When Frank Black sees the demon Toby for what he really is, the most cutting, most true thing he can say is, simply: "You must be so lonely." No burning lakes, no hellfire and brimstone is required to punish these beings; their punishment is eternal isolation. The devils try to brush off the comment: "See? He just took you for the grieving boyfriend." After all, humans are the lonely ones. But when Toby repeats it again, "You must be so lonely," all the devils are silent. They all slink off, one by one, into the darkness, trying to forget.
• Most people who come to the SKS would not initially consider themselves to be "spiritual seekers." They usually have to sit through a semester or two before they start to see their life through a spiritual lens. What is it, then, that brings them to the meetings? "They want to know that they are OK, and that they belong," Lauren said. In some ways, you could define the spiritual impulse as an ever-deepening attempt to connect, to be accepted by God and man. This show takes the same position, seeing damnation as isolation, and salvation as communion.
• One of the demons' techniques is that of minor annoyances: he throws newspapers in puddles, gives undeserved parking tickets, verbally abuses coffee shop clerks. I thought it was ingenious to take such things seriously; it doesn't really take that much frustration to make us prone to evil acts ourselves. Most of my own unkindnesses are the direct result of "losing my cool," being overwhelmed by minor adversities just long enough to forget what's really important. I have often devalued disciplines like yoga or transcendental meditation that deified relaxation as a spiritual state, but there is a lot spiritual value in being able to remain calm.

The music of poetry

The Self Knowledge Symposium is developing a track record for filling up Duke Chapel with unlikely events. Ten years ago we packed in a standing-room-only crowd to hear Father Francis Kline play "The Spiritual Bach" on Duke's renowned organ. And tonight, the echoes of that event were felt again, as over 700 people turned out to hear Dr. George Gopan read T.S. Eliot's "The Four Quartets."

How rare and wonderful when all the random factors align to make a perfect event. A string quartet played a Beethoven (Or was it Bach? Jeez, where did I put that program? . . .) piece to begin the evening. That was nice, but only nice . . . until Joanna Childers delivered an introduction that put the music in perfect perspective and connected the music to the poetry. A little "aha!" bubble quietly exploded in the audience's mind, and suddenly everyone was in the right place to listen to a very long, very demanding poem.

And, thankfully, George Gopan delivered the goods. He has been reading the poem aloud, once a month, for several decades. His scholarly understanding of the poem was impeccable and perhaps peerless . . . and made all the better because he was in love with the music of the poem. And you could tell that he was moved, to have an audience of that size. "I would say it's a pleasure to look at all your faces . . . but there are so many of you, going so far back, I can't even see all your faces."

And all that was perfect before we even listened to the poem. I was struck again by how many different lines of the poem had worked their way into the SKS theology and tradition:

A condition of complete simplicity
(costing not less than everything)
...
Humankind cannot bear very much reality
...
Distracted from distraction by distraction
...
Raids on the inarticulate
...
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
...
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
...

Damn, but we've taken a lot out of these poems, over the years. I'm so glad we got the chance to share it, so well, with so many.

And all shall be well

THE FOUR QUARTETS
A reading of T.S. Eliot's spiritual masterpiece poems, with live music
Tuesday, April 17
7:00 pm
Duke Chapel(Duke University campus, Durham)

* * *

"A condition of complete simplicity(costing not less than everything)"
-- from The Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot

* * *

You haven't lived until you've heard The Four Quartets.

In the world of spiritual poetry, T.S. Eliot is right at the top,rubbing elbows with Lao Tzu and Rumi. Not only are his four linked poems beautiful and profound, they are packed with hidden meanings and a lifetime's study of philosophy and religion. No wonder the dude won a Nobel Prize.

Like most great poetry, you need to _hear_ it to fully appreciate its power. Dr. George Gopen, Senior LecturingFellow in the English Department at Duke University,combines both depth of understanding and dramatic energy in his reading. A reception will follow, so youcan hang out and talk poetry afterwards.

If you really want to impress your date with your how cultured and deep you are, you can't go wrong withthis event. Go on, just try saying it: "Would you careto join me at a reading of T.S. Eliot?"

More Secret-Bashing

Readers chimed in on my pan of The Secret. Kenny rightly pointed out that action is not only the primary means of changing your mind, it is also the primary measure of determining whether you really did change your mind:

If you say "I really want to (lose weight / help the poor / find God)" enough,
you may start to believe that you really want that. But do you really want it,
or are you fooling yourself into thinking you want it? Once you ask that
question, you start into an endless cycle of self-questioning, re-examining, am
I being too easy on myself, am I being too hard on myself, is that my mother's
voice in my head, blah, blah, blah. The way to cut through all that is to watch
and see what sacrifices you are willing to make: are you (eating right and exercising / giving money and time to the poor / praying, reading, meditating, joining a group)? That is the easy way to see how much you *really* want it.

I didn't even scratch the surface of all the contradictory notions that were present just in the short section of the book from which I quoted. For instance, Rhonda Byrne doesn't stop to question the nature of the desires people are trying to fulfill in the first place. Why, exactly, would I want to ask the Universe to make me a "perfect weight"? Why, because people believe that changing their physical circumstances (lose weight, get rich, find a mate) will change their state of mind -- that is, make them happy. But if someone had the perfect mind control that Byrne prescribes, loving their body completely and accepting it totally, then they don't need a "perfect weight," because they have already achieved the thing that they sought to get by having a "perfect weight."

It's rather like the old saw about investing: "How can I make lots of money in the stock market? Well, start by putting a lot of money into the stock market." You can only get what you want by already having what you sought to get. Oddly, people immediately see the contradiction with material things, but don't see it when something as intangible as the Mind is invoked.

My new guru Puppetji cuts straight to chase: "It is true: you can have anything you desire. But ask yourself: who is desiring?"

The dirty secret about The Secret

Everybody's talking about how everyone's talking about The Secret. Occasionally a spiritual fad sweeps through the cultural landscape -- the last one in recent memory was The Celestine Prophesy -- and suddenly it seems everyone is talking about it. Thankfully, this time it is more culturally acceptable to talk trash about it.

I have not read Rhonda Byrne's self-help book, beyond a short exerpt online. That was enough. I had already gathered from the media buzz that the Secret was another variation of "your mind controls your reality" New Age philosophy. Ok, I thought, there's enough truth in that to perhaps do someone some good. Lots of genuinely useful self-help gurus have affirmed the power of focusing the mind upon one's desires. Napoleon Hill had done essentially the same thing with Think and Grow Rich 70 years ago. Richard Rose once told a group of his students: "If you just read [Think and Grow Rich], and replace the word "money" with "God," you'll have the formula [for a spiritual path.]"

Such self-help gurus usually attributed certain mystical attributes to a focused positive mindset: somehow the universe would hear your request and, through a series of synchronicitous events, conspire to give you what you want. But it was, I think, used more metaphorically than literally. Most gurus knew that the reason controlling your mind was important was because your mindset determines your habitual actions, and it is your actions that determine the outcome.

Byrne, however, skips right over that "mind controlling action" bit, and goes straight to the payoff:

Food is not responsible for putting on weight. It is your thought that food is
responsible for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight.
Remember, thoughts are primary cause of everything, and the rest is effects from
those thoughts. Think perfect thoughts and the result must be perfect weight.

Such "magical thinking" formulas contradict everyday experience and common sense so drastically that only someone who has mastered the art of suspending rational thought could begin to believe them. That is: people who buy diet pills, respond to get-rich-quick spam, and every other form of infantile wish-fulfillment.

What people who crave such "mind over matter" powers don't understand is that Mind is actually a hell of a lot harder to manipulate than matter. We actually have very little, if any, direct control over our minds. Almost all traditions aimed at true transformation of mind and spirit do just the opposite: use the world of matter and circumstance to change the mind. Music, prayers, chanting, incense, artwork, quiet words, posture, breathing, the company of others, the absense of others . . . all spiritual disciplines are attempts to structure circumstance to affect a transformation. Of course, as Augie would say, "The arrows go both ways": mind affects matter, and matter in turn affects mind. But let's not kid ourselves here. Alcoholics Anonymous also preaches the power of a transformed mind . . . but the whole process is useless if you don't actually stop drinking.

So, when someone declares, "I've got it! I've found the secret! Just change the way you think and everything works out!" I am not inclined to disagree with them. I would just ask, "So . . . how exactly do you go about changing the way you think?" And suddenly you are right back to where you started: daily discipline, habitual action, hard work.

Peace and carrots

I stayed up late last night working on my long-neglected financials so I'll be able to file in time. Quicken fulfills a need for compulsive orderliness, and I couldn't bring myself to stop until I had reconciled the last transaction.

Anyway, I'm running behind today, so I'll just do what I thought I would never do: share a YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0wQnVy5lqE&mode=related&search=

Puppetji is a rare creature: a parody that understands the truth and is still able to make fun of itself.

Fantastic wealth can be yours

Actually, fantastic wealth already is yours.

I heard a segment on NPR about the lives of the those in "the other India," the 80% or more in the rural parts of the country that are still living in absolute poverty while the urban economies are racing into the world scene. Phillip Reaves travelled down the the length of the Ganges River, interviewing what he hoped would be a cross-section of the population. He spoke with a Muslim woman who makes her living scouring the beaches for coins tossed in by Hindu pilgrims. Her take on a good day is about 25 rupees, or 50 cents.

Ok, just let that soak in for a moment. Loose change that you would throw away is someone else's day wages. What's more, this woman knows about the other world, the world with television sets and cell phones and automobiles.

So why do so many people feel like they are poor, like they are "struggling to keep up?" Perhaps it is because we, too, have our super-rich with whom to compare ourselves. Larry Elison, CEO of Oracle Corporation, would have to spend $11 million a week just to keep his fortune from growing. He, also, would likely throw away our day wages.

On Easter, we are supposed to remember how much God has given us. While you contemplate the supernatural miracle of grace, don't forget the material blessings as well. In the context of the larger world, we are kings, millionaires, lottery winners all.

11th Commandment

When I was giving my "world religions quiz" to college students, we discussed whether the Ten Commandments were still relevant, and what if anything we would add or take away from them. Some students made some half-hearted calls to strike the first commandment ("No Gods before me" and, depending on how you count them, "No graven images") and the fourth ("Keep the Sabbath"), but with only a modest liberality of interpretation we immediately made good cases for keeping them. While literal idolotry is not a big concern in our culture today (I can't remember the last time I saw a golden calf), we do see lots of people putting things other than God at the center of their lives. The Sabbath was not voted off the island, either, once people decided to interpret it as "dedicate specific time to thinking about spiritual things." Everything else -- the prohibitions against lying, stealing, murdering, screwing around -- were still seen as self-evidently good.

Very few people had anything to add to the commandments, which speaks well of the original ten, I suppose. Jesus' summation of the Law ("Love God, love thy neighbor as thyself") was included, but in a Christian nation that's a gimme anyway. Some attempts were made to enshrine liberal values ("Don't hurt others" or "take care of the earth"), but those generally fell apart as people realized they were so vague as to be almost useless.

I could only think of two that I thought deserved to make the list. I don't think the ancient Jews ever felt the lack, because these principles were so engrained in their world view that they hardly needed saying:

1. Keep your promises.
2. Honor and love your children.

"Keep your promises" didn't make the list because it was embedded in the Law from the very beginning. The Law itself was a covenant, a commitment, between God and man. But today the world needs a very explicit reminder that everything in our society hangs on our ability to commit ourselves to good things and then keep those commitments.

Loving, protecting, and forwarding the interests of your children is not only obvious, it's even built into the stereotype of the Jewish mother. But again, it seems like the world needs reminding. We've had generation upon generation of people growing up both loving and hating their parents, spending half their lives (if not more) trying to transcend the physical, psychological or sexual abuse they endured. How much evil could be removed from the world, if people understood and kept the commandment, "Thou shalt not fuck up thy children?"

Service (with or without the smile)

When he spoke to the SKS last week, Fleet Maull had said that "service work is an essential part of a spiritual path -- not just a good idea, not just a by-product, but an essential part of the path." I think most spiritual practicioners would agree . . . in theory. But the only question is: what qualifies as "sevice work"?

Say "service work" to the average American college student and their minds jump to one of three or four categories of charitable activity: soup kitchens, homeless shelters, Habitat for Humanity, and maybe hospice. They think Mother Theresa: helping people at the absolute bottom of the heap. And why not? Isn't it just, that our impulse is to serve "the least of these?" And the people working in those realms, the Mother Theresas and Fleet Maulls of the world, have testified to the powerful experience of making a human connection to people radically different from oneself. When you serve those who you aren't even especially likeable, you discover both the unity of the human condition, and the divinity of love that transcends mere preference.

But I can't help but notice that so much of the charitable service that has sprung up in the world is not about serving people far removed from our circumstance. It's usually just the opposite: we spontaneously want to serve those who are most like ourselves. If (God forbid) my son was killed by a drunk driver, I will feel instant solidarity with anyone and everyone else who has lost a child, and spontaneously want to help them in their need. No medical charity ever sprang into existence without someone's child or spouse falling gravely ill. The recovering alcoholics reach out to other alcoholics. We can't help ourselves: once we see ourselves in other people, those are the ones we want to help.

If you are serving others, and transcending your own egocentric perspective in the process, then I suppose that's spiritual. Fleet would certainly agree that mindfulness and compassion should be manifesting in your everyday life, and changing the way you relate to your spouse, your kids, your coworkers. But is it really spiritual to "serve your own?" If you're kind and helpful to to the people who surround you . . . is that enough? Complacency could so easily creep in . . . I sense that its called service work for a reason: it ought to be stretch, going beyond the bounds you normally live in.

Thou Shalt Not . . . Um . . . Wait a minute . . .

I did another SKS meeting at NCSU with the religious traditions quiz: write down as many of the Ten Commandments, Five Pillars of Islam, and Four Noble Truths that you can remember. (They actually did a little better on the Commandments than the UNC kids, but they totally wiped out on Islam and Buddhism.) Things I noticed:

• On more than one occasion, I've had students put "Love thy neighbor as thyself" with absolute confidence on their list of the Ten Commandments. I suppose Jesus would be glad that his summation of the Law is sticking in their heads better than the nitty-gritty details of the actual Commandments, but it also shows that they have no idea how revolutionary Jesus was in his universalist approach.
• We had an argument early on about how to divide up the commandments: some people thought "No god before me" and "No graven images" were one commandment, and broke out "Thou shalt not covet" into two pieces, while others did the opposite. It turns out that we were replicating an old argument: whole churches have disagreed on that point. Some people started to get a little heated on the point, until it became clear that everyone was merely repeating what they had gathered from what they assumed to be an unquestioned authority. It only served to emphasize the point that even when you've talking about the same set of rules, differences of opinion will erupt immediately.
• We talked a lot about the nature of the positive versus negative framing of the commandments. Lots of people have carped about the Law being a bunch of "thou shalt nots," just authoritarian dictums instead of real wisdom. But the more we talked about it, the more apparent it became that you need to avoid a lot of evil in order to make room for the good. Most of the commandments could be seen as just the beginning of the spiritual work, the establishment of a life and society within which the real work could begin.
• One of the students had a good spin on the Tenth Commandment. "Not coveting" is something most people can understand, but he went on to reframe it in an affirmative statement: "Be content." I had always thought of simplicity, contentment and gratitude to be spiritually wholesome states, but I had never considered them as Biblical commandments.
• We did have the usual argument about generalities versus specifics. Most people wanted to believe that it was more important to have internalized the core message or attitude of the law (love God, love thy neighbor) and to let that manifest in the specifics, rather than adhering to a very specific set of rules. But at the end of the meeting, they reported in on how they were doing on their "Zen Challenges" (an SKS tradition of making public resolutions to improve oneself), and many people reported missing their goals, largely because they had defined their goals somewhat vaguely and then started rationalizing about it. (E.g. "I said I would exercise every day; gee, I walked to class really fast, that counts.") They found out through experience that you need hard-and-fast, detailed rules in order to live according to your abstract ideals.

I Am Not a Strange Loop

I've been lingering on the theme of non-intuitive truths for the last couple of days, and just by strange coincidence Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop, goes on sale on Monday. Hofstadter did more than anyone to popularize Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which is a widely-accepted proof that there are some truths that cannot be proven (or disproven) within the realm of any formal logical system. Ever since he won a Pulitzer Prize for Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Hofstadter has been the patron saint of head-twisting paradoxes, especially those related to consciousness.

Good news! Hofstadter is finally going to get down to business and really drill into the question of consciousness.

Bad news! Hofstadter calls consciousness a "mirage." D'oh!

I suppose I should read the book first before passing judgement. (I just placed my order.) But I find it aggrevating when people use such ephemeral language to describe what is actually the most obvious truth which we can directly apprehend. The one thing that we know for sure, more than anything else, is that we are aware. Another Douglas H. spent most of his life demonstrating to people that our apprehension of awareness was more fundamental than anything else we knew. Mirage, my ass.

Faith and the unintuitive

I've been mulling over the role of faith in spiritual life. "Faith" is an irksome term for pretty much everyone. Skeptics see it as the religious person's "get out of jail free" card, a blanket justification to believe whatever you please. The esoteric, mystical spiritual traditions tend to see faith as the consolation prize of religious life; you can take God on faith, but if you're really hard-core you'll seek out a direct, personal, unmediated experience of the divine. And even the contentedly religious have trouble with the concept, since it is never directly addressed in the scriptures, and used to cover a range of sentiments and intuitions.

Faith can, in fact, be used in almost entirely contradictory ways. Some people refer to faith as the core, inexpressible intuitions of their being, the a priori revelations of their consciousness: "I believe in God, I have faith in God, because it just seems right to me. I can't imagine a universe without a God." But, when the rubber hits the road and the shit hits the fan, exhortations to "have faith" are usually implying that the object of faith is unintuitive and not at all obvious: "I know it seems right now like life has no meaning and God is absent, but you have to have faith that things will work out." So . . . is faith the recognition of the intuitively obvious, or the conscious acknowledgement of truths that aren't obvious?

C.S Lewis was wise enough to point out that the answer was: both. We have occasions of beatific revelation, when God is obvious and real, when peace is tangible, and truth is easy. And yet, those moments don't last. Then we are struggling to remember what it was that we experienced, and to carry on with our lives as if that point of view were still present. Even if you decide to only trust your own experience, you will be struggling to remember and live by your insights from day to day. "Faith" is really "faithfulness" -- that is, being true to what you've already found to be true. "Faith" is when vague intuition and aspiration are put to work in the real world.

Who is Fleet Maull?

The Self Knowledge Symposium will be hosting Fleet Maull, a Buddhist priest who served time in federal prison for drug smuggling, and who went on to found the Prison Dharma Network and the National Prison Hospice Association. It's going to be unusual because we are showing a documentary film that some SKS students produced about Fleet, The Prison Sutras, and then do a videoconference with Fleet to answer questions from the audience. It's our first big experiment with distance learning, and I'm really excited about the possibilities it could open up for us.

So I was trying to tune up our verbiage for him for the marketing:

For years, Fleet Maull lived a double life. Half of the time, he was a Buddhist meditator, attending intensive retreats and seeking enlightenment. The other half of the year he was a drug smuggler, moving cocaine from South America into the U.S. When he was caught and sentenced to 25 years in federal prison, his spiritual practices of mindfulness and compassion was galvanized by witnessing the suffering of his fellow prisoners. Fleet went on to found the National Prison Hospice Association, to provide dignity to those dying alone in prison, and the Prison Dharma Network, to provide Buddhist mediation instruction and support to
inmates.

Come see The Prison Sutras, a documentary film produced by two SKS students about Fleet's life and work, and talk with Fleet Maull himself via videoconference after the showing.

Final Exam

I had a dream, and it felt significant:

I was a student of some kind, and I was going through the library near the end of the term. I think I was returning textbooks that I would no longer need. I run into my German instructor, who happens to be Ms. Amelie, the kindergarten teacher at Emerson Waldorf school. She says "hello" in a bustling, business-like sort of way, and informs me that I need to take two exams right now, in the library. The first exam is very hard, she said, and she said it in such a way that implied she thought it was unfairly difficult. The second one was longer, she said, but not so bad.

So I have to take these tests . . . but I realize that my three-year-old son Malcolm is here with me. How am I going to manage this? Mal is sitting at a table, totally absorbed in some books, so I think that maybe I have a chance. I start into the first test, and it's the sort of test where they give you entirely new material to learn and then test you on it. And it's all local dialect stuff -- weird alternative vowels for things you knew before. The new material keeps going on, and I never seem to get to the actual questions.

Then I realize that it's nearly noon, and for some reason I need to make an appearance at chapel for some kind of brief service. (I guess it's that kind of school.) And so I'm racing down the halls to the chapel, realizing that Malcolm is still in the library, and who's looking after him? I realize at that moment that I haven't eaten, either, and I'm facing the prospect of a long set of exams on an empty stomach. The entrance to the chapel seems to go through the buffet line of a cafeteria. A woman minister of some kind is near the front of the line, and she suddenly turns around, grabs a male student by both hands, and launches into some kind of prayer for his soul. The student, spooked, pulls away and dashes into the chapel. The minister says, "Nuts. Lost another one." As I push passed her into the chapel myself, I say something like, "Yeah, you can't just grab 'em."

Somehow I'm back at the library, ready to begin the big exam. Rupert Giles, the Watcher from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is handing me the big heavy leather-bound "Vampyr" tomb. Evidently this is supposed to be my test. The way he talks and looks at me, I can tell that if I'm the Chosen One, I'm supposed to be able to read this, and if not, I won't. I open to the title page and I can read it, though it seems more like a personal scrapbook, with pictures and ticket stubs, than any kind of mystic lore.

Exegesis:

Richard Rose always said that the meaning of dream was in the mood of the dream. In this case my attitude during the dream was half panic, half resignation. It was obvious that I wasn't going to be able to get through all these challenges without failure, so I just braced myself for whatever was going to happen. I think that's becoming more typical of my stance toward life right now: I'm overwhelmed, but I'm just going to muddle through. I even thought of the Kobayashi Maru, the test which you are doomed to fail, which is all about testing your ability to perform in the midst of failure.

The dream touched on the conflicts and tensions between my work (the German exam), my family (Malcolm) and my spiritual duties (the chapel). My work feels like an endless series of learning exercises, localized and perhaps trivial in scope, which never seems to reach a resolution. Clearly I thought I might be able to swing work and family together, as long as family didn't act up. But spiritual duty called me away from both. In retrospect I feel a little guilty that I left Mal to go to chapel, even though I knew it was a prefunctory appearance on my part. That, too, seems typical of my current attitude towards the Work: I can't even remember, sometimes, why I do it, and yet I keep doing it.

The minister grabbing at the student . . . well, I guess my own group work with the Self Knowledge Symposium feels about as awkward and ineffective. Or maybe I think that I ought to make a lunge, take a risk to put pressure on the students, and risk them just walking away. I was sympathetic to the minister, I understood her absolute desperation to try to make some kind of meaningful contact with people, but I also understood why the student was freaked out.

And Rupert Giles . . . I think this was supposed to be an affirmation of my spiritual life. In the TV show, when Giles heaves out the tome and slams it before Buffy, it was symbolic of the heavy role that Buffy did not want, and yet was destined to undertake. And that's kind of how spiritual life feels to me right now. I didn't ask for this calling, didn't seek it out, and yet it found me. On the one hand, it's a pain in the butt. On the other hand, it is the fulfillment of a destiny. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. And (surprise!) it is so much more personal than I anticipated.