F*CK FEELINGS; WHY DARWIN JUMPED; THE CRETAN ZEUS WAS A DYING AND RISING GOD; NIETZSCHE: WHY WE CAN’T GET RID OF GOD

HALLOWEEN BIRCHES
                            for Sarah

Moonlight was silvering
the palm tree on my lawn.
It lit up the long arc of one frond.

After many years in California,
my first thought: A weeping birch?
I have a birch tree on my lawn?

And birch groves left behind a lifetime
ago came to me, bowed and flowed —
silver branches of that Celtic night

when the blindfold of time slips loose
and we see behind and to the side —
just as now that I can barely walk,

memories of mountain hikes
come rustling: Angel’s Landing,
Mammoth Crest, Red Cones.

Surprised by the brilliant crescent,
I walked on. The last of Halloween
children dressed as flame-red

devilkins or pink ballerina angels
were shooed by mothers into cars.
Only the souls of trees walked with me,

birches and beeches, pines and maples
joined sycamores and liquidambar.
Silently I whispered to them:

remember me. They replied:
It’s not important to be remembered —
only to be beautiful.

~ Oriana © 2015

This poem reflects the shift in my attitude from achieve! achieve! to less compulsive, relaxed productivity and more enjoyment of beauty. It took me a long time to understand that we belong to our moment — and that transience is fine. So what if we will be forgotten? That’s an excellent thing to remember whenever we catch ourselves putting a lot of effort into some dubious project — at the cost of making ourselves unhappy with stress and missing the beauty of existence. 

 

Love is not a feeling. Love, unlike pain, is put to the test. One does not say, “That was not a true pain because it passed away so quickly. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

 Being yourself — isn’t it over-rated? ~ Sarah L.

First of all, a static self doesn’t exist anymore than the soul does. The “self” is not a thing. Our consciousness is a process — different neural networks compete for dominance. I like the idea of a “higher self” — not that it exists as a fixed thing, but it’s an ideal of calmer, more rational function.

It seems that the tide is finally turning away from the idea of self-expression at any price. Thank goodness for the new book, F*ck Feelings — a much needed call not for emotional repression, but for a healthy measure of self-control. The authors, a father and daughter team, encourage the reader to stop and think about the consequences of simply emoting, especially when it comes to anger. Great ideas tend to have a stunning simplicity. Imagine, after decades of rhetoric glorifying feelings and putting them ahead of reasoning, here comes a therapist who says: STOP AND THINK ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES.  

 We’ve been told so long that we’re irrational beings that some have taken it as a license to dispense with what flickers of rationality may nevertheless lurk in the psyche. It’s strangely reminiscent of religion’s put-downs of human reason as impotent.

Now and then anger is positive because it gives us the energy to stand up to a bully. But most of our anger tends to be about things we cannot control, and ranting about them only keeps us focused on the negative. Worse, if we express anger without regard for consequences, we may end up harming ourselves and others.

Buddhism is wise here: “witness” your anger. Then ask yourself what good — or harm — might come from expressing it. Will your marriage be improved if you attack your spouse who’s probably under too much stress already? Is there perhaps some other action you could take?

If you focus on doing something productive, you are more likely to end up feeling proud of who you are, and others will enjoy being around you. No one likes an angry screamer.

FOCUS ON DOING, NOT FEELING
 
(Oriana: As friends go, I vastly prefer people who are "doers." A "feeler" may be good for giving you empathy, but a doer will often push for a solution, for action -- and that can be invaluable, to be given a kick out of merely feeling into doing something. And doers are often shining examples of success.)

“A profanity-filled new self-help book argues that life is kind of terrible, so you should value your actions over your emotions.”

“Michael explains that, when people act only on their feelings, it can lead to an unreasonable, knee-jerk response: ‘Thinking before you speak — thinking of the consequences and where it’s going to get you and how it fits with your values — is a lot better than venting and then regretting what you’ve said.’ When you don’t let your feelings direct what you do, you start thinking and seeing your problems from a much more practical point of view.”

~ Put down the talking stick. Stop fruitlessly seeking ‘closure’ with your peevish co-worker. And please, don’t bother telling your spouse how annoying you find their tongue-clicking habit—sometimes honesty is less like a breath of fresh air and more like a fart. That’s the argument of Michael Bennett and Sarah Bennett, the father-daughter duo behind the new self-help book F*ck Feelings.

The first step is accepting what you can’t control. So many people who come to [a therapist]  want something they can’t have. They want a happy relationship that’s never going to be happy, or they want opportunities that are not easy to come by.

So it's [about] accepting what you can't control, the factors that are out of your hands, and seeing what you can do with what you can control. And learning to be proud of yourself not just for accomplishing what you can, and not beating yourself up for what you can't. Not seeing yourself as a failure, when you haven’t really failed because it’s not something that you could have controlled in the first place. And admiring your ability to withstand a feeling of rejection, and the frustration and the pain, and keep going on towards a more reasonable goal while being a good person. That’s also what’s emphasized so heavily. Figuring out your own values and sticking to them.

You assume that your feelings are going to tell you, since you’re unhappy, that you did something wrong. But that if you can do an inventory based on your own values, you're really doing a good job. And you’re doing a good job in spite of the fact that you’re miserable. That deserves higher praise. I think that’s sort of a basic paradox—that to live with pain and still be a decent person and make a living is a much higher achievement. It’s what you do when you’re not happy that’s so telling.

Interviewer: One thing that surprised me—at one point you say, if you have an asshole parent, that as an adult you shouldn’t worry so much about forgiving them if you were traumatized by your childhood. Could you explain the thinking behind that?

Michael: If you find that your parent is one of those people who is really just a jerk, it's sort of like forgiving a cockroach for being a cockroach, or a snake for being a snake. Forgiveness tends to assume that people had a choice and made a bad choice. Whereas, what I think you run into more often is somebody who didn't really have a choice, they're just bad.

The one you want to forgive is God, for having to live in a world where jerks have as many kids as anyone else. It’s less personal. I think in some ways it frees you up more to realize that [your parent] did what they did because they’re built that way.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/fuck-feelings/403792/?utm_source=SFFB
   
Feelings have become such a sacred cow, I'm glad someone is finally pointing out that expressing them can be harmful. On the other hand, it's also a wonderful pleasure to be with the kind of person around whom it's safe to be completely yourself, including whining and being infantile for a while. Usually the venting quickly self-terminates, because of the joy of being with the right person. Also, the complaints about what we can't control suddenly seem outrageously funny — so you vent in a funny, comedic way. But the listener has to be totally on your side, not someone who can suddenly attack you. That's what's wrong with most parents and spouses -- they have an agenda and are trying to "bring you up.” This is their mission from god. They assume they have the right to punish you.

And it’s not just you whom those parents and spouses can’t fully value. They don’t value anyone enough to just let the person be. They don’t see another person as a human being of great complexity, worth, and uniqueness. They may keep their mouth shut in front of the boss, but that’s only because of fear, not because they value the boss as a human being. But — “we are the victims of victims.” People who aren’t capable of valuing others were themselves not valued.

Imagine how different marriage would feel between two totally supportive adults. Imperfect, flawed adults, but ones who don’t wage marriage as warfare but as a cooperative project. Is it that difficult to be totally supportive? On the contrary, it’s a great pleasure.

One terrible thing about getting attacked and put-down is that you internalize it. Pretty soon, you don’t need another person; you become a master at attacking and demeaning yourself. When Louise Hay says, “Immediately stop criticizing yourself,” that alone is worth the price of her book.

Jan van der Heyden, View of Delft
From the website:

THINK BEFORE YOU VENT

    Think Beyond The Catharsis

Don’t ask yourself whether your statement will make you feel better, introduce more honesty into the world, or punish those who deserve it. All of those outcomes, while glorious, are fleeting, while the resentment, bitterness, and anger that follow can last a lifetime.

    “Nobody’s Ever Died From Bottling Up Feelings…

…but plenty of people have died from unbottling them,” is another saying we use even more frequently than the fart metaphor. Don’t think for a moment that suppressing your feelings will harm your health or fill your life with pointless frustration; venting your feelings, on the other hand, is a good way to get punched, evicted, and generally put in harm’s way.
If your marriage turns out to be sexless, you’ve been the victim of child abuse, or you’ve generally had and unlucky and unhappy life, then you certainly have the right to feelings of resentment. There’s no benefit from telling yourself that you should feel good about experiencing so many bad things.

On the other hand, as you’ve already guessed, we wouldn’t tell you to express those angry feelings unless they can do you some good in the long run, and, usually, they can’t. As we say in our fart metaphor, beyond the immediate relief, venting ugly feelings then poisons the air for you and everyone around you.”

“Thinking before you speak — thinking of the consequences and where it’s going to get you and how it fits with your values — is a lot better than venting and then regretting what you’ve said.”

“Goals take into account that there’s a lot you don’t control, and wishes don’t. Wishes are about what you want...whether you have any control or you don’t. When I ask somebody to think about their goals, [I’m] really asking them to think hard about what they do and don’t control.” 

**

Feelings are transient. They are typically are about the moment and not about “delayed gratification,” so they also tend to interfere with self-discipline. As one athletic man who's in great shape told me, “If I listened to my feelings, I'd never exercise.”

**

The great breakthrough of cognitive-behavioral therapy was the discovery that thoughts and emotions are connected. Wrong-headed thinking can lead to emotions that hurt us rather than help us. “I should be able to attain complete serenity by meditating” is a relatively minor example of thinking that can make you feel like a failure when traditional meditation turns out to be difficult for you — perhaps impossible. You SHOULD be able to attain complete serenity?” Says who? Once you get rid of this assumption, there is no reason to feel bad. Now you’re free to do something that effortlessly relaxes you — perhaps it’s swimming, or strolling in a park.

Therapists report that patients come to them saying things like, “I DESERVE unconditional love.” And the therapist is too polite to coo back, “Oh yeah?” — but perhaps that would save a lot of time. The miracle is that when you stop thinking idiotic thoughts, you stop being paralyzed by idiotic emotions.

Trouble is, a lot of idiotic notions are promoted by advertising and psychobabble. Sometimes it seems that the culture seems hell-bent on preventing people from growing up.

New Age drivel has added new fuel. “I used to be a prince in my past life,” a man once confided in me. “I don’t know how to cope with hardship. I'm just not used to it.” Poor ex-prince! What a handicap!

**

As with everything else, the “fuck feelings” movement can be taken too far. It’s a welcome corrective to unhealthy obsession with feelings, especially negative feelings, and its emphasis on action in areas you CAN control is sheer wisdom. Is it a call for emotional repression? Only if pushed too far. I see it as a call for emotional moderation and not spouting everything that pops into your head. That’s what children do and we forgive them because they haven’t yet developed rational thinking and self-control. But it’s actually more rewarding to be adults. You get to accomplish things, not just throw food at the ceiling.

WHY DARWIN JUMPED: DARWIN’S FAILED ATTEMPT TO OUTWIT HIS AMYGDALA

"At one point of his career, Darwin wanted to test his survival reactions and see if he could control them in the face of danger. He undoubtedly asked himself, “Just how strong are my survival instincts? Can my modern brain take charge?” He went to the reptile house at the London Zoo and put his face against the glass cage containing a puff adder, a highly venomous African snake, intending to provoke the snake into trying to bite him. He was determined, he wrote in his diary, not to flinch or move.

Suddenly the snake lunged at him, hitting the glass barrier. Darwin described his reaction: “. . . as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity.”

It made no difference, he wrote, knowing that the snake could not reach him through the glass. His thoughts were powerless; instinct propelled him with “. . . An imagination of a danger which [he] had never experienced.”

The snake’s attempt to bite Darwin launched a primitive reaction beginning with visual stimuli registering the snake’s movement and ending with a message to the brain’s AMYGDALA. The result was Darwin jumping or, put another way, survival behavior. The cortex had no role in the reaction. Darwin could not control the reflex, even though the glass between him and the snake meant the danger was not genuine. His instinctive jump backward was automatic, happening without thought or awareness of what he was doing."

~ Theodore George, M.D., “Darwin Tries to Outwit His Amygdala,” in “Untangling the Mind: Why We Behave the Way We Do”, 2013

I wish this book were more lively since it deals with important issues: subcortical reactions and the mayhem they may produce due to irrational fear and/or anger. T. George also discusses the brain's reward system, addiction, psychopathy, and depression (“shut-down”).


The fear of snakes is supposed to be hard-wired in primates, but I think in this case we have the primary subcortical reflex of moving back when we see something coming at us. Another example of a subcortical reflex is the automatic extension of arms when we are falling. Obviously it’s useful to break the fall with hands (and arms, if needed) in order to protect the head.


IN CRETE, ZEUS WAS THE DYING AND RISING GOD
 
“In Acts 17 Paul is walking through this city, Athens, and he sees idols there. This pisses him off so, naturally, he goes talk to the Epicureans and Stoics in the area, and they were all, “WTF?” Like, to them he was speaking gibberish. Look:

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols [the horror!]. So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.

So Paul starts talking about the God he‘s discussing. And as he’s defending it, he uses a couple quotes. Right here:

~ God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ ~

Who is Paul quoting there? In the original text…in whom do we live? In whom do we move? In whom do we have are being? We’re the offspring…of whom?

Zeus.

No, really.

Here’s the first quotation in context, in Epimenides’s Creatia:

They fashioned a tomb for thee [O Zeus], O holy and high one-
The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!
But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,
For in thee we live and move and have our being.

Let’s stop there. What is this tomb for? And why is Epimemides calling Cretans “liars”?

Well, it’s because the Cretans thought that Zeus was born, lived a mortal life, and died. They also had a tomb for him, and many apparently believed that he was reborn every year. But in saying Zeus was a dying god with mortality, they were pretty close to atheists for the rest of the Greek world, who insisted, as Epimenides did in this poem — that Zeus wasn’t dead, and that he will be alive forever.

Zeus. Literally talking about Zeus. About worshipping Zeus, about Zeus’ commands, about his laws and everything he rules over…Zeus. So, to the listening crowd, when Paul said, “We are his offspring,” he was literally saying “We are Zeus’s offspring.”

The weakness of the arguments — the argument for Zeus and the one for the Christian God — both seem transparent.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/barrierbreaker/the-apostle-paul-said-that-god-and-zeus-were-kinda-the-same-thing/

 

Oriana:

Poor Saint Paul. For him, everything depended on the “fact” of the resurrection. If we resurrection did not in fact happen, then “we are lost.” No we aren’t. We live as before, focusing on this life rather than worrying that one day we’ll die. It’s been observed that people who are most afraid of dying are those who’ve never really lived. When we live a full life, we feel such gratitude for the richness that there is no room to resent having to go when the time comes.

The fact that Paul was deeply influenced by the Greek culture — there’s nothing surprising about that. Apparently there is no such thing as an “original” religion. There are only variations on a limited number of central themes. And some eras are more hospitable to some variations than to others.

Paul Tillich seemed revolutionary when he promoted the idea that god is not a person — not an invisible man in the sky. Rather, god is being itself, and/or “the ground of being.” Here Tillich’s theology gets so abstract that it becomes useless, in my opinion. The average farmer will continue praying to the invisible man in the sky to send rain for his crops while the average child will pray for no rain so that the game will not be canceled. Will this continue for centuries, or will it come to a sudden end when enough people realize there is no one up there, and religion becomes confined to the lunatic fringe, waiting, as usual, for the end of the world?

Meanwhile the only sensible solution that combines the personal and impersonal idea of the divine is found in Hinduism. God is a pervasive spirit, but can have specific incarnations. If you want to pray to Kali or Aphrodite, you are welcome — just allow others to pray to Ganesha if that suits them better. And those who’d rather play with their pets are being pious too. In theory at least, this tolerance is beautiful — in practice, we know that any religion has its dark side, and it’s the most religious countries that are most backward and violent. Somehow there is no escaping the perception that the universe works just fine without a god or gods, personal or impersonal — and the end of religion might well be worth it if it results in the end of suicide bombings and other acts of hate committed in the name of a god of mercy.



“I FEAR, WROTE NIETZSCHE, “THAT WE ARE NOT GETTING RID OF GOD BECAUSE WE STILL BELIEVE IN GRAMMAR.” [“TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS”] The grammar of dream interpretation, whether Freudian or Jungian, is a crust of dead theology. We deaden the outer surfaces of our creative response to dreams in order to protect ourselves from the creative power the dreams bring back to us.” ~ Greg Mogenson, “God Is a Trauma.”

Mogenson is referring to the brain’s power to create reality — a power too often squandered on brooding over the past or fantasizing about the future — the negative and positive inflation of vicarious living, rather than actively creating our life in the present. To quote Mogenson: “The ‘right’ interpretation is the most daring interpretation. Dream interpretation is the space project of an ever-opening consciousness. Interpretations are trajectories, arrows of longing, satellites in the surrendered heaven of man’s creating will.”

Nietzsche both lamented and celebrated the death of god as a tyrant of the soul, an obstacle to soul-making and metaphor-making. “Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead’, as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectations.”

To Nietzsche religious faith meant “not wanting to know the truth.” Freedom is the opposite of belief. “If there is today still no lack of those who do not know how indecent it is to ‘believe’ — or a sign of decadence, of a broken will to live — well, they will know it tomorrow.”

But our belief in grammar, though weaker now, still holds and will hold as long as we need to communicate (although I’ve graded hundreds of essays which showed no belief in grammar — that was before the automatic spell-check and grammar-check). I think this is in line with “Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged. What you actually believe is not a decision you make for yourself. Your fundamental beliefs are decided by much deeper levels of consciousness, and some may well be more or less set in stone.”

True: we have evolved to see patterns even where there are none, to connect the dots. The belief in cosmic justice is our default setting — it takes skeptical thinking to see randomness and coincidences.

I agree that it takes a cognitive effort to see that much depends on mere chance — though we can make the best of whatever chance brings our way. And we can still reject an immoral, outdated religion, and venture to find and/or create our own journey.

ending on beauty
 
THE BLUE WIND-FLOWERS

To be spellbound — nothing’s easier. It’s one of the oldest tricks of the soil and springtime: the blue wind-flowers. They are in a way unexpected. They shoot up out of the brown rustle of last year in overlooked places where one’s gaze never pauses. The glimmer and float, yes, float, and that comes from their color. That sharp violet-blue now weighs nothing. Here is ecstasy, but low-voiced. “Career” — irrelevant! “Power” and “publicity” — ridiculous! They must have laid on a great reception up in Nineveh, with “pompe” and “Trompe up!” Raising the rafters. And above all those brows the crowning crystal chandeliers hung like glass vultures. Instead of such an overdecorated and strident cul-de-sac, the wind-flowers open a secret passage to the real celebration, which is quiet as death. 

~ Tomas Tranströmer

WILLIAM JAMES: THE ONCE-BORN

Blake: Pity


I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part
   and tag of me is a miracle.

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy
   whatever I touch or am touched from;
The scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer,
This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.

~ Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass,” 24

We still marvel at Whitman’s self-confident faith in his own divinity. When I say “we” I mean those spiritually brave or insolent enough not to be outraged by his assertion “Divine am I inside and out” — these days students tend to be more religious and conservative than the faculty. And to think that in the sixties and seventies young people boldly blasphemed about the “cleansing the doors of perception.”

How was Whitman seen in his own times? As a radical to be sure, but mostly because, with few exceptions, his poems did not rhyme. Unlike Baudelaire, whose Flowers of Evil made him endure an obscenity trial, Whitman’s problem was getting any attention — that’s why he wrote reviews of his own work using a variety of pen names. In a chain store in Los Angeles I found his book in the Gardening section. I placed it in the slim Poetry section (consisting almost entirely of Rumi). The next time I was in the same store, Whitman was back in the Gardening section.
 
Once Whitman would have been burned at the stake, but he lived in more lenient times, eventually becoming known as the “good gray poet.” He was raised as a Quaker, a believer in personal contact with the Holy Spirit rather than in any dogma. In his poems he worked out his own spirituality, simpler by far than Blake’s or Yeats’s.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James makes Whitman the epitome of the “once-born.” Let me quote James:

“God has two families of children on this earth,” says Francis W. Newman, “the once-born and the twice-born," and the once-born he describes as follows: “They see God not as a strict Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as well as Pure.”

. . . The advance of liberalism in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness over the morbidness of the old hell-fire theology. We have now preachers who ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible.”  

   
 Let’s pause for a moment to digest this. Francis Newman was the younger brother of the famous Cardinal Newman, but far less orthodox. He objected to infant baptism. There were also rumors that he did not believe in eternal punishment, implying (horror!) that god would not be so cruel. Since hell and the crucifixion as the “bloody ransom” from Satan were the very foundation of organized Christianity, Francis Newman was mocked and criticized, a writer of fine but now forgotten essays. I am thrilled that William James brings him and his concept of the “once born” out of oblivion.

The “once-born” are those rare (at least in the 19th century) individuals who do not see god as a “strict judge.” Shockingly, they believe in a kind, merciful deity, “the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious world.”

Must we be “born again”? No, the once-born would reply. We need only to see that we are good, the world is good, and god is good — and that the best way to worship is to feel joy.

It’s clear that James does not really approve of the once-born. They are too cheerful to crave religion. They don’t seem to need it. Let again me quote James:

“As examples are better than descriptions, I will quote a document received in answer to Professor Starbuck's circular of questions. The writer's state of mind may by courtesy be called a religion:

        Q. What does Religion mean to you?
        A. It means nothing. Praying, singing of hymns, and sermonizing are pernicious — they teach us to rely on some supernatural power, when we ought to rely on ourselves.
        Q. What things work most strongly on your emotions?
        A. Lively songs and music; Scott, Burns, Byron, Longfellow, Shakespeare. I greatly enjoy nature.
        Q. What is your notion of sin?
        A. It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, incidental to man's development not being yet advanced enough.

If we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need not look to this brother. We have in him an excellent example of the optimism encouraged by popular science.”

*

Let’s stop here again. James announces that in the once-born we find no “broken and contrite heart” that seems a prerequisite for salvationist religiosity. Earlier in the book James describes the once-born as those “whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden.”

This is a somewhat (?!) patronizing description of a child-like person “whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions.” They stroll about looking at flowers rather than thinking of the hell under the thin flower-bearing crust of the earth. Can such an innocent even be a poet? Where is the trauma, the storm, the Byronic and Nietzschean torments that drive the compulsion to be creative? Not, apparently, in the once-born.

Yet Whitman’s achievement severely undercut James’s dismissal of him as pathologically optimistic. Though James doesn’t use the word, the reader can sense the severe censure of the word “shallow” trying to push through terms like “enchanting innocencies.” But then it’s only in the later decades of the twentieth century that both Whitman and Emily Dickinson were pronounced to the be greatest American poets — both completely unorthodox when it comes to religion (Anna Akhmatova would have called them “heresiarchs,” along with Tolstoy and Dostoyevski). 

“CUDDLING UP TO GOD”
 
In a footnote, James even quotes a woman who told Newman that it gives her great pleasure to think she “could always cuddle up to God.” And then there was of course that great heresiarch, Whitman: “The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman. “His favorite occupation,” writes his disciple, Dr.Bucke, “seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds.”

Imagine! Cuddling up to god instead of thinking of one’s sins and praying for mercy . . . (dog chin

“NEW THOUGHT,” THE FORERUNNER OF NEW AGE
 
I find James quite relevant even today, so let me quote further:

“To my mind a current far more important and interesting religiously is that which has recently poured over America and seems to be gathering force every day, to which I will give the title of the 'Mind-cure movement.' This 'New Thought,' is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power.

Let me pass to some concrete accounts of experience with the mind-cure religion. One of them, a woman, writing as follows:

‘The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or depression is the human sense of separateness from that Divine Energy which we call God.’

On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between the mind-cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements. To the anxious query, "What shall I do to be saved?" Luther and Wesley replied: "You are saved now, if you would but believe it." And the mind-curers come with precisely similar words — “You must awaken to the knowledge of your real being.”

Let’s pause again. This real being, this essence, is the divinity of man, rather than his “total depravity.” Divinity, not depravity. This is a revolution in perception! Speak about culture wars and the rise of the opposite of Calvinism . . .  It saddens me to think of the slower evolution of Catholicism, mired as it was in the cult of suffering.

The “divinity of man” is a term embraced by New Age devotees, but avoided by those who see themselves as secular; they see it as tainted with religion. A century after James’s famous
book was published, the most frequent term for this “divinity” is “human dignity.” The acknowledgment of human dignity presupposes that human beings are essentially good by nature rather than “fallen.” Ideally, they are also “healthy-minded,” as James calls it: optimistic and full of the joy of life. To quote that king of the healthy-minded, Walt Whitman:

I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self contained;
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied-not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is responsible or industrious over the whole earth.

 

 Here is one family no one would call dysfunctional

JAMES ON THE “SICK SOUL”

In contrast to the healthy-minded (it’s striking that James doesn’t call them “healthy souls”), the sick souls seek to “maximize evil” and magnify the sense of their own sinfulness — perhaps somewhat the way the depressed seek to increase sadness. It’s the sick souls that “lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins” — or for their failure to live up to mother’s expectations.

Let me continue to quote from James; what he says deserves renewed attention, since hell-fire theology is by no means dead.

“The healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery line; the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension. Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other?

What single-handed man was ever on the whole as successful as Luther? Yet when he had grown old, he looked back on his life as if it were an absolute failure.

A Catholic philosopher, Father Gratry, writes:

        “I thought myself, in fact, rejected by God, lost, damned! I felt something like the suffering of hell. Before that I had never even thought of hell. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows less real than the earth.”

So much for the incapacity for joyous feeling. A much worse form of melancholy is positive and active anguish. I quote from a patient in a French asylum.

        “I am afraid of God as much as of the devil, so I drift along, thinking of nothing but suicide, but with neither courage nor means here to execute the act. Oh, if he would but kill me, devil take him! Death, death, once for all!”

At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have moments of perplexity he calls arrest, as if he knew not “how to live.”

        “I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested. Behold me then, a man happy and in good health, no longer going shooting, lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end to myself with my gun.”

When disillusionment has gone as far as this the happiness of Eden never comes again. We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy in John Bunyan's autobiography.

        “If now I should have burned at the stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for me. My original and inward pollution, was my plague and my affliction. I was sorry that God had made me a man.”

Neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called healthy-minded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste.

Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these. But the deliverance must come in as strong a form as the complaint. Buddhism and Christianity are are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life.”

 Michelangelo, The Damned Soul 

“NO MORE NEED OF SALVATION THAN A SQUIRREL”

~ The feeling that one is worthless and a total failure is of course known excruciatingly well by anyone who has suffered from repeated episodes of serious depression. This feeling of of being a worthless failure lies at the core what William James calls the “sick soul.” It doesn’t matter if the guilt and worthlessness are imaginary; the sick soul feels it doesn’t deserve to live. It’s the sick soul that is open to the idea of “salvation.” The healthy soul “has no more need of salvation than a squirrel,” as George Elliot put it in Middlemarch. 

NATURALISM VERSUS SALVATIONISM

The “once-born,” James says, tend to live in peace and contentedness; they feel in harmony with nature and don’t worry about metaphysical issues. “Their impulses are consistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the guidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their lives are little haunted by regrets.” 

(I am not sure if Whitman’s passions were “not excessive,” but let that be.)

The healthy-minded, the “once-born,” do not deny the existence of suffering, but they would not say that life IS suffering. Life is both suffering and joy, with the balance leaning to joy. Nor would they call themselves “miserable sinners”; they’ll admit they made mistakes, but they don’t sit in judgment on themselves. On the whole the once-born feel that they are good, and that most humans are good. From the point of view of the sick souls, what nerve!

AMERICANS DON’T SEE THEMSELVES AS SINNERS
 
(A shameless digression: Coming from a Catholic country, I was immediately struck by the perception that Americans don’t think of themselves as sinners. The average American does not label himself a sinner, much less a miserable sinner. He has no habit of beating his chest, saying Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa — something that I, along with other children in my religion class, was taught already at the age of eight. As a Catholic, at eight you were already a sinner; only radicals within the church thought that the age of moral responsibility should be raised to twelve.)

(Another shameless digression: Even American Jews don’t seem to know how to suffer properly. I witnessed a worried young woman ask a rabbi if it’s OK to eat pizza on Passover. Yes, he replied, because that’s unleavened bread; he also OK’d enchiladas. True, that still leaves a reservoir of available guilt over the minutiae of observance, but when Passover has devolved to pizza, we don’t get the right quality of self-torment.) 

THE TRAUMATIZED, SELF-TRAUMATIZING SOUL AND OPENNESS TO CONVERSION

Those meant to be “twice-born” are more complex, their mind a battlefield of competing selves (today we might refer to “competing neural networks”). Here is more James: “If the individual be of tender conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and of standing in false relations to the author of one’s being and appointer of one’s spiritual fate.”

Nietzsche would undoubtedly agree: to be a devout Christian, you first must be made to feel guilty, especially in relation to an unrealistic ideal of saintliness. That’s the essence of “the hangman’s metaphysics” — the commandments were created to be broken, so that people would feel perpetually weak and guilty. Then in your unhappiness over your vile self you will seek “salvation.”

If you don’t feel you’re a sinner, there’s little hope that will take organized religion seriously — though you may, like Whitman, construct your own maverick happy spirituality whose main mode of worship is joy. Imagine, instead of becoming a self-flagellating nun, you go on for a walk like Whitman, perfectly happy with the world and with yourself.

It’s the sick, self-tormenting soul (“The traumatized soul is self-traumatizing” ~ Greg Mogenson, “God Is a Trauma” — yes, this is the book with which I executed an insolent fly) — the human being who feels utterly flawed and worthless, who is open to conversion. But, based on my own experience and that of many others, the relief may be also be obtained by dropping the religion that makes one feel sinful and worthless. As James himself says, “Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child’s small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.” And that “wider intellectual life” may be reached by breaking out of the prison of toxic religion. When religion undermines your already fragile sense of self-worth, losing faith is a glorious liberation from both the invisible bully in the sky and the quite visible social bully, the church. 

I wonder how James would react if he somehow guessed that in our times religious conversion, or conversion to more devout religiosity, would become the less frequent version of adolescent being “born again.” Losing the childhood faith during adolescence is almost a cliché. 

One’s childhood faith is an accident of birth rather than a deliberate choice. A hundred years after James, discarding the accidental religion of childhood is how we step into the wider life. For me the great change of the “born again” sort came only when I decided not to be depressed. That was the true yes to life and to myself, to real “no-excuses" adulthood. But the FIRST STEP TOWARD ADULTHOOD, the one that took the most courage, was leaving the church. Julia Sweeney’s words instantly resonated with me:

“It took me years, but letting go of religion has been the most profound wake up of my life. I feel I now look at the world not as a child, but as an adult. I see what's bad and it's really bad. But I also see what is beautiful, what is wonderful. And I feel so deeply appreciative that I am alive. How dare the religious use the term 'born again.' That truly describes freethinkers who've thrown off the shackles of religion so much better!”  ~ Julia Sweeney

COLERIDGE AND RILKE: THE STRING THEORY

The optimistic “once-born” mentality and the torments of the “sick soul” can be found outside of mainstream religion. Furthermore, they can be found in the same person at different stages of life. Coleridge sounded “once-born” when he wrote “The Eolian Harp”:

O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere—
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so filled;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument.
. . .

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

~ Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp”

*

By contrast, here is Rilke’s “string theory”:

Things are violin-bodies
filled with murmuring darkness:
in it dreams the weeping of women,
in it the resentment of entire
generations stirs in its deep . . .

~ Rilke, “At the Edge of the Night,” Book of Images

Coleridge imagines not just a collective Logos, but also a collective Eros. This collective consciousness (“at once the Soul of each, and God of all”) is a kind of psychic wind, an “intellectual breeze” that sweeps over each eolian harp — each being, that is, producing a corresponding music.

For Rilke, the instrument that inspired similar thoughts was the violin. In one poem he even questions “Strange violin, are you following me?” His years of wandering from one rented room to another seemed to have their own soundtrack, including the violin being played next door where another lonely tenant would soothe himself by playing, finding home in his music.

Rilke too concludes that “things are violin-bodies.” But instead of a happy mood and evocation of pantheism, from this audible world-soul we get human suffering: the weeping of women, the resentments of whole generations that thought they didn’t get what they expected from life. Instead of an amorous melody we have “murmuring darkness.” Rilke’s years of genteel poverty show their imprint here.

Both Coleridge and Rilke seem to agree on this: a person is not just an isolated individual with an isolated consciousness. They are instruments of a collective consciousness that speaks through each. But at least in his youth, Rilke was far from being “healthy-minded.” There is a great consciousness of suffering in his poems. He too formed his own system of spirituality, but it could be argued that to the end, though he strained to say yes to life, he was rarely joyful.

James would classify Rilke as a “sick soul.” But Rilke’s journey did not take him to belief in a loving god — Rilke regarded all religions as human invention, and detested Catholicism in particular. Nor could he accept Nature as all good, as the Romantic poets seemed to do. Rilke tried and tried: with the “neighbor god” who is pathetically dependent on man; with the magnificent but overwhelming angels who would not hear him; with Orpheus as the spirit of poetry, the “greater poem behind each poem.” But we don’t get the sense of a nurturing, fully supportive life philosophy. We get the longing.

Coleridge, too, was ultimately a “sick soul.” But for a while at least he was buoyed up both by the happiness of the early years of his marriage and the supportive philosophy of nature that he shared with Wordsworth. In the end his “life support” crumbled. The sick soul doesn’t necessarily experience a religious conversion or form his own supportive spirituality. Sadly, quite often the person prone to suffering and pessimism simply keeps on suffering. 

MY “LUTHER MOMENT”

I like William James's pragmatic (of course!) stance on faith and the need for evidence. James said that if a particular religion works for you and helps you live a better life, just go ahead and don't worry about the lack of objective evidence. The pragmatic evidence (your life is better) is reason enough to believe whatever you believe. I think that may indeed work for a lot of people, and I have a friend who “chooses to believe” in a benevolent god on that basis. “I only believe that which makes me happy,” she told me.

I did not burst out laughing. I even felt somewhat envious of her. I am in the perhaps unfortunate group that needs some objective evidence. Once even the appearance of evidence fell apart, I could not believe, benefits or not. In what I see as my "Luther moment," I did consider the possibility that I was wrong, and that rejecting the existence of god and ceasing to pray and go to church would result in eternal damnation. And I realized that "ich kann nicht anders" — I cannot do otherwise" — even if that's the horrible price. I will not go through the motions of belief out of fear, but have to act according to what I see as truth. I admired Luther's courage the moment I first heard about him. I was still a Catholic but Luther instantly joined my pantheon of heroes.

Here is a section of a poem of mine that describes my personal greatest moment of courage:

At fourteen I said, “If God exists,
let him strike me with lightning.”
I waited, trembling with terror.
For five minutes I could hardly breathe.

Pigeons cooed, fragile sunlight
redeemed the rain-streaked masonry.
I began to walk fast, away
from that first-communion girl,

lilacs in her arms, moist and heavy,
veins crossing the silk of leaves.

 no, that’s not me

“Sometimes there is a delay,” Adam Zagajewski quipped when I recounted the experience. In retrospect there is a comic element here: I was expecting a fictitious being to strike me dead for daring to think he’s fictitious. But I really did tremble with terror. What if I was wrong? Then I was putting my whole eternity on line. Those who believe in the validity of Pascal’s wager would counsel the opposite action: try to force yourself to believe just so you don’t end up in hell as punishment for non-belief. But I was ready to accept eternal damnation rather than worship a sadistic god who consigned the great majority of his alleged children to never-ending torment, primarily because they didn’t happen to be born Catholic. I felt that to worship such god was worse than worshipping Hitler.

My kind of “conversion” is often called “de-conversion.” At fourteen, I did enter that wider intellectual life of which James speaks. The new life would be impossible if I’d stayed within the rigid bounds of Catholicism which forbids questioning, free discussion, and any thinking on one’s own. (As for the argument that Catholicism has become more liberal and now you can raise questions, I answer, “Sure, now you can raise questions. But the answer is No.”)

Did I automatically become “healthy-minded”? Was I completely sure that the monstrous god of punishment really did not exist? That Jesus is never, never, never coming back to hurl me or anyone into hell? No — the journey to a strength-giving certainty took years.

THE NIAGARA FALLS MOMENT (NOT MINE)

Each person’s journey to atheism is different. For some it begins only in college, when they are exposed to powerful secular worldview. Others experience a moment in church when they realize that the uplift they used to get in their early teens has turned to sheer tedium, and can no longer fight the perception that their inherited religion is indeed archaic nonsense.

The process of parting with belief may be gradual, or it may be traced to a particular event. My favorite story of “de-conversion” is one man’s account how in his youth he went with his girlfriend to visit Niagara Falls. Impressed with the sight, he began to speak about the Creator. His girlfriend gently nudged him to the plaque that explained how the falls were formed (Wisconsin Glacier, hello). He found it fascinating.

After returning home he began to read about geology. Next came paleontology and astrophysics (talk about the expanding universe, in this case the mental universe!) He found himself more and more interested in scientific explanations of the origins of what we see in the world, and found these explanations much more convincing than anything he’d learned in Sunday school. But it all started with a plain little plaque explaining the origin of Niagara Falls. 

FOR ME, THE GREAT CHOICE WAS STILL AHEAD
 
But right away, as soon as I left the church, I felt happier than before; stress caused by ridiculous scrupulosity and the fear of eternal damnation was largely gone. Largely, but not entirely. Somehow I too had drunk too deeply from the cup of bitterness and the habit of harshly judging myself. Ahead lay many years of depression. My “conversion experience” to healthy-mindedness came only when I realized more vividly than ever that life was limited, and that I had a choice: to judge myself harshly and remain depressed, or to try to be productive.

Once I saw what the choice was, there was really no choice except to be productive. The door to depression, once so readily opened by the thought, “I am a total failure,” slammed shut in an instant. In fact it was more dramatic than the closing of a door. The door vanished. Now I couldn’t enter depression even if I wanted to. It wasn’t my first experience of a life-changing shift in perception, so I knew I had no choice. Nothing had the power to restore the former state of mind. From now on, instead of brooding and having crying fits, I’d have to cope. A small part of me didn’t like that at all.

I didn’t dare expect happiness. But work works; for me and many others, it’s the best therapy. By focusing on work, I gradually recovered from anhedonia and found myself more contented than ever before.

I found three others who also “decided” (if that’s the word) to give up depression in a moment of insight. But the story I love best is that of Steven Hawking. After being diagnosed with ALS, an incurable neurodegenerative disease, he became depressed and started drinking. According to what I’ve read, one of his professors said to him, “You still have a few years left. Do you want to drink yourself to death, or would you like to try to make a contribution to physics?” And simply being presented with that choice was enough.

**


SPIRITUALITY WITHOUT RELIGION

Let me close with a quotation not from James, but from Sam Harris, in his newest book on spirituality without religion:

I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer, I believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous and divisive doctrines — such as the idea that Jesus will return to earth and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or that death in defense of Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying and debasing fictions. But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is.

But wait, Whitman already talked about the full range of human experience in a way free of dogma, so the last words must be his. This is the final section of The Song of Myself:

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab
      and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.



 
DOES RELIGION DEPEND ON UNHAPPINESS?
 
Hyacinth:

The Once-Born remind me of Mary Oliver's "you do not have to good ...you only have to let the soft animal of your body love  what it loves"....  a great blog
 
Oriana:

Yes! that important question of happy versus religious.

But then catholicism has never been about being happy. It never encouraged happiness, only guilt and suffering — because then who’d want to spoil the happiness of a Sunday morning by going to church to beat your chest and repeat, “My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault”?


The message: you have to be unhappy now in order to be happy in the afterlife, after centuries of purifying punishment in the purgatory.

All food is “devil’s food.” If you eat chocolate now instead of fasting, you’ll regret it as you burn in a lake of fire.

The “once-born” have no need for religion, which brings us to this: does religion depend on unhappiness? It’s addicts who are most devout, and other people who have deep emotional wounds and problems. Those who struggle, those in the trenches of life.

The once-born already have a supportive life philosophy. They take a walk and are happy. Trees mean more to them than altars, and much more than the crucifix (isn’t it time to finally get rid of the crucifix?)

Actually I hate Oliver’s poem because of that first line, but you, dear Hyacinth, have just shown me an interpretation I haven’t thought of: that it’s not really “good” as a synonym of “kind to yourself and others,” but only good in the sense of obedience, as defined by various churches. Of course old-time catholicism could never accept the body, much less letting it love what it loves.

For me it’s more about what my mind loves. "My body” (so to speak, since sensation is also the mind) loves coffee and chocolate, but it would not be wise to eat only that. But it might be an interesting experiment: would there come a time when an aversion to coffee and chocolate would arise?

If the poem started, “You do not have to go to church,” I would find it completely inoffensive. Or, “You do not have it be perfect.” Yes, especially “You do not have to be perfect.” That idea would have helped me enormously when I was younger.

I think the culture is evolving a collective supportive philosophy. Take the concept of a “good-enough mother.” You don’t have to be a perfect mother, just “good enough.” It’s of monumental importance, this allowing young mothers not to be perfect, to have a laid-back approach that’s not fraught with anxiety. The times, they are a-changing. 

Hyacinth:

I believe that if religion gives someone who is in extreme pain some relief it's a good thing and I am careful not to let my beliefs interfere with theirs. Whatever works to give them hope. It is not necessary for me to interfere but to listen and nod.. and believe what I believe.

Oriana:

William James, the father of pragmatism, would agree. If believing something helps you live, don’t worry about objective evidence. Subjective “pragmatic evidence” is good enough. (I don’t know if James held the view that reason would always reject religion; catholic apologists insist one must “rise above reason.”)

My mother knew my intense nature and warned me not to argue about religion with people who needed it. “You never know,” she said, “perhaps religion is what keeps that person from suicide.”

Milosz, who was an alcoholic, asks in a late poem (“Prayer”):

What sort of adorer of Majesty am I,
If I consider religion religion good only for the weak like myself?

~ and elsewhere in the same poem:

. . . when out of pity for others I begged a miracle,
The sky and the earth were silent, as always.

It’s more difficult to cling to faith in the face of that silence, but a great emotional need will somehow find an answer. For one thing, we have coincidences and an ability to see patterns and create narratives.
 
Christianity began as the religion of the oppressed. It should be no surprise that as it declines and draws to an end, it should became mainly the religion of the oppressed again.

FALLING INTO LIFE
 

Michael:

My vessel of belief shattered after years of observing minute cracks spreading over its surface. Perhaps the final tap (a gentle one) that caused it to crumble came from a well-known theologian with whom I was corresponding. Responding to an epistemological question he wrote, "If Bach doesn't resonate, try Mozart." Really? I thought. Like I have an option? I could choose? It was a freeing notion that took years to fully appreciate. And “resonate” — what the hell did that mean? Give up my incessant quest for reasons, intellectual explanation, knowledge, certainty for something that simply resonated? It seemed and seems appropriate he used music to make his point. Subjective. Fluid.

Lately I've fallen pleasantly into life--I plant and harvest (great tomato crop this year), work on a trail through the forest, cut wood for winter, drive over an hour through the beautiful Columbia Gorge to work on a job, enjoy good food (actually tasting) ...  For the first time I find no need to solve anything. I've been pleasantly numbed by life itself. This resonates with me.

Just reflecting on your thoughts and thinking about journeys and distances...

Oriana:

Glad to hear you are happy. Columbia Gorge is one of the most beautiful places in the world — it would be a sacrilege not to be happy.

I love hearing people’s stories of how, after decades of misery, they arrived at contentment. Needless to say, I identify. Everyone’s story is different, but there are certain central themes. Mozart or Bach? That reminds me that there are many “selves” — many competing neural networks, and we don’t need to give priority to the one that keeps going over the failures and suffering of the past. We are not that “self.” Other selves are available. I “chose” (this is done without any conscious cogitation) the one that was second most dominant: the hard-working, productive self.

The conscious part was my decision not to question if the work makes sense, especially if it leads anywhere, e.g. recognition. That’s when I became “posthumous” — thanks to being cornered by mortality, I realized that nothing I do is a “stepping stone” to something bigger and better, and that I’ll be rewarded only in the future (“your reward will be in heaven” — the same kind of thinking). The work really is its own reward.

Buddhism is also a salvationist religion, but the huge difference from Christianity is that its ideal is bliss NOW, not in the afterlife. It states we suffer because we want something, and because we are not fully in the present. We become more Buddhist with age. It’s interesting that ALL studies have found that older = happier. Older people want less and live in the present. It happens gradually and without effort, without necessarily the drama of the moment of enlightenment. I'm glad I had mine because it was an interesting experience, but I can see that there are ways to get there.

And past a certain point and to a limited extent, there are indeed options. We can choose a Bach self or a Mozart self, and happiness will take care of itself. Growing up in a mono-Catholic or mono-anything country is a disadvantage because it’s more difficult to become aware of options and the relativity of belief. You eat what you are given. You mean there is something other than meatloaf??

Plants are wonderful. It’s the power of beauty, the power of an external focus, but also something else: when we are nurturing a plant, we are nurturing ourselves. But even that may be too much cogitation — and I haven’t even mentioned cleaner air and negative ions. When I am in a place where there are lots of plants, I feel happy. And that is enough. 

Darlene:

You said this particular blog is getting quite popular. Do you have any idea why that is?
Oriana:

I think it’s in part the drawing power of William James, and in part the startling phrase “once-born.” We’ve been brainwashed to believe that we need to be “twice-born.” Even William James condescends to the “once-born” — those who allegedly haven’t suffered enough and spent enough sleepless nights agonizing over their failures and/or sins. “Happy” and “shallow” are often thought to be synonyms, alas.

The notion that the “once-born” are the healthy souls, those who don’t need salvation, being already happy, was quite an eye-opener to me. Maybe that’s indeed the church’s biggest hush-hush secret: you don’t need to be saved. You already live in paradise. You only need to slow down, and then you will enjoy life much more.

You need to drop anxiety and trust that things will be fine even if you do lie down and rest. For an introvert, it helps enormously if the alpha male is removed so you can slow down and discover the best ways to live and work without disruption.


Darlene:

Do you mean meditation?

Oriana:

Not necessarily in the traditional sense of “sitting.” My salvation — alas, I started out as a sick soul — has been work. My gospel is “Don’t brood. Work.”

But you need to work in a way that doesn’t cause stress. That means working slowly, and not attempting too much at once. “We manage best when we manage small.” That compulsive greed to get as many things done as possible — we must stop and ask ourselves, “Why?” Most of the things we do are not important in any larger sense, but the doing itself can be enjoyed. Slowly sewing, rather than finishing the project as quickly as possible, only to rush into another project.

I think my compulsiveness developed partly mainly because of insecurity. Something in me acted as though there’d be no tomorrow, so it all needs to be done now. I realize that one day that will be it, literally no tomorrow — but by then brain function is different and there is a peaceful surrender. Right now I'm practicing peaceful surrender to the fact that there WILL be tomorrow — so not everything needs to be done today.

And the quality of whatever you do slowly improves. Haste really is waste.

And I don’t mean just creative work in the traditional meaning. All work can be creative to some degree. It’s wonderful to have the house to yourself, but if that’s not possible, make just one room beautiful.