CHRISTIAN AND BUDDHIST MORAL NONSENSE; PIKETTY: SUPER-INEQUALITY; JESSE OWENS; WE SEE DIFFERENT BELIEFS AS EXISTENTIAL THREATS

A photoshopped phantasmagoria, no doubt, but still . . .

**

We walked very slowly down the concrete
slabs near the Olympic Stadium
in Berlin, where the black star
of Jesse Owens had flamed in that prehistoric
time, and the German air
had screamed. I wanted to laugh,
I couldn’t believe you could walk
so slowly in the place he had run so fast;
to walk in one direction, but to look
in another, like the figures in Egyptian
reliefs. And yet we were walking that
way, bound with the light string
of friendship.
Two kinds of death circle about us.
One puts our who group to sleep,
takes all of us, the whole herd.
Later it makes long speeches to substantiate
the sentence. The other kind is wild, illiterate,
it catches us alone, strayed,
we animals, we bodies, we the pain,
we careless and uneducated.
We worship both of them in two religions
broken by schism. That scar
divided us sometimes when I had
forgotten we have two deaths,
but one life.
Don’t look back when you hear
my whisper. In the huge crowd of Greeks,
Egyptians, and Jews, in that fertile
generation turned to ashes, you walk straight
ahead, as then, unhurried,
alone.

~ Adam Zagajewski, “The Generation,” to the memory of Helmut Kajzar

For me, this is the poem:

We walked very slowly down the concrete
slabs near the Olympic Stadium
in Berlin, where the black star
of Jesse Owens had flamed in that prehistoric
time, and the German air
had screamed. I wanted to laugh,
I couldn’t believe you could walk
so slowly in the place he had run so fast

*

~ I don’t really need the rest of the poem. 


from Wikipedia:

~ “At the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, Owens won international fame with four gold medals: 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4 × 100 meter relay. He was the most successful athlete at the games and, as a black man, was credited with “single-handedly crushing Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy,” although he “wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either.” ~
Jesse Owens on the podium after winning the long jump, 1936
 
GOOD RIDDANCE TO MORAL NONSENSE
 
~ “Are you a caring person? What does being a caring person even mean? We all care about some things and not others. How could we do otherwise?

Are you a giving person? We all give and take.

Are you an open person? Of course — open to some things, and closed to others.

We humans have a funny way of turning things we sometimes do into things we should always do. We turn tactics into absolute moral truths, available options into absolute optimums.

Why don’t we live up to Jesus’s standard of universal love? Because it’s impossible. Love as more than mere lip service takes effort which we each have in limited supply. We can’t love everything. Jesus didn’t either, as is obvious when you read his many critical statements.

Why don’t we live up to Buddha’s standard of universal non-attachment? Because it’s impossible. Indeed, it makes a pure virtue out of the opposite of caring or loving. You’re attached to anyone and anything you love.

(Oriana: Nietzsche called such nonsense “hangman’s metaphysics,” designed to keep you guilty)

Let it be a load off your mind that you can’t and needn’t try to live up to these ridiculous moral absolutes. Don’t let yourself be bullied by them. There’s no virtue in treating tactics as truths. In fact, there’s deep vice in it. Nothing breeds hypocrisy quite like pretending to try to live up to morals we couldn’t possibly apply in real life.

The real moral questions are where to care and not care, what to tolerate and not tolerate, what to love and not love, what to be open and closed to, what to attend to and what to ignore.

Indeed, embracing such nonsense moral “truths” stunts growth on addressing such questions. For example, if you think that love is always the answer, you’re not going to get around to the question of what to love and not love. And you’ll mangle the difference between not loving and loving. You’ll fall into doublespeak like “Oh don’t get me wrong I love the things I hate. I love everything, even the stuff I don’t love.”

Divorce this moral nonsense and you’ll quickly start making better decisions and feeling better about the decisions you make.” ~ Jeremy Sherman

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ambigamy/201605/simple-insight-will-take-load-your-mind

Oriana:

I’ve discovered that one has to dismantle religious indoctrination lie by lie, sacred cow by sacred cow, never mind if it's the Sermon on the Mount or anything with the word lotus in it — or else the liberation is not complete. The brainwashing persists and makes us feel guilty and ashamed, forever stuck in self-condemnation. This is one of the most liberating articles I’ve ever read. 

There is of course some important wisdom in both Christianity and Buddhism. But anything becomes harmful when pushed to the extreme. It’s interesting that both of these religions developed the monastic ideal, which tries to deny the erotic side of being human. As Nietzsche said, “Religions are at bottom systems of cruelty.” Taken seriously, pushed to the extreme, they become truly harmful. They promulgate anti-human, anti-life ideals. Exposed to those teachings since childhood, we rarely stop to question them. I feel infinitely grateful to the author of this article — relief!

Religions are threatened by the huge importance of human connections and relationships. They want to present serving god — or the ideal of gaining personal enlightenment — as more important  than the human connections, especially the messy, demanding involvements like marriage and the family. Both the a-sexual Yahweh and Jesus present an anti-marriage ideal, and Mary is revered as a perpetual virgin. Buddha’s having abandoned his wife and infant son for the sake of pursuing enlightenment is not seen as blameworthy, but rather as a noble sacrifice, never mind the suffering he caused.

And that’s just it: the suffering caused by religion when it’s taken seriously needs to be looked at more closely.

Annibale Carracci, Purgatory

Purgatory was actually my best hope during my Catholic years. I was certain I couldn't escape the fire, but with luck it would be centuries of Purgatory rather than eternity of hell. My grandmother, a survivor of Auschwitz, would sigh and say that it would be perhaps ten centuries of suffering in Purgatory for her. To console her, one time I dared suggest that maybe just seven centuries, since she'd already suffered so much . . . She only sighed a very 
heavy sigh.
 

**

The Trinity — no attribution was given, but my guess is Italian, the international Gothic style (note the gold background). What interests me here is that the Dove doesn't hover, but seems perched on Christ's shoulder. A small thing, to be sure, but in all other trinity paintings I've seen he hovers. Also, it’s a dove with a halo — again, this is rare.

But then the earliest depictions (this dates back to 350 CE) of the Third Person of the Trinity show simply a man (the one on the right, I assume; God the Father is half-bald).



PIKETTY, “RENTIERS”, AND SUPER-INEQUALITY
 
~ “As you’ll recall, if you watched the movie Titanic, the U.S. had a class of rentiers (rich people who live off property and investments) in the early part of the 20th century who hailed from places like Boston, New York and Philadelphia. They were just as nasty and rapacious as their European counterparts, only there weren’t quite so many of them and their wealth was not quite as concentrated (the Southern rentiers had been wiped out by the Civil War).

The fortunes of these rentiers were not shock-proof: If you remember Hockney, the baddie in James Cameron’s film, he survives the Titanic but not the Great Crash of ’29, when he loses his money and offs himself. The Great Depression got rid of some of the extreme wealth concentration in America, and later the wealthy got hit with substantial tax shocks imposed by the federal government in the 1930s and '40s. The American rentier class wasn’t really vaporized the way it was in Europe, where the effects of the two world wars were much more pronounced, but it took a hit. That opened up the playing field and gave people more of a chance to rise on the rungs of the economic ladder through talent and work.

After the Great Depression, inequality decreased in America, as New Deal investment and education programs, government intervention in wages, the rise of unions, and other factors worked to give many more people a chance for success. Inequality reached its lowest ebb between 1950 and 1980. If you were looking at the U.S. during that time, it seemed like a pretty egalitarian place to be (though blacks, Hispanics, and many women would disagree).

By the time you get to 2010, U.S. inequality, according to Piketty’s data, is quantitavely as extreme as in old Europe in the first decade of the 20th century. He predicts that inherited property is going to start to matter more and more in the U.S. as the supermanagers, the Jamie Dimons and so on, bequeath their gigantic hoards of money to their children. 


The wrong-headed policies promoted by libertarians and their ilk, who hate any form of tax on the rich, such as inheritance taxes, have ensured that big fortunes in America are getting bigger, and they will play a much more prominent role in the direction of our society and economy if we continue on the present path.

What we are headed for, after several decades of free market mania, is superinequality, possibly such as the world has never seen. In this world, more and more wealth will be gained off the backs of the 99 percent, and less and less will be earned through hard work.” ~

http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-pikettys-bombshell-book-blows-libertarian-fantasies?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

From another source:

~ “The United States had rich and poor, too, but the wealth was still spread around a bit more widely. In 1910, for example, the one per cent in Europe owned about sixty-five per cent of all wealth; in the United States, the figure was forty-five per cent.

In recent decades, the roles have been reversed. The U.S. monied elite has outstripped its counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic, and wealth has become even more concentrated in the United States than it is in Europe. In 2010, the American one per cent owned about a third of all the wealth: the European one per cent owned about a quarter. Citing figures like these, Piketty warns that “the New World may be on the verge of becoming the Old Europe of the twenty-first century’s globalized economy.”

The twentieth century, far from representing normality, was a historic exception that is unlikely to be repeated, Piketty argues. In the coming decades, he says, the growth rate will most likely fall back below the rate of return, and the “consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying.”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequality-story-in-six-charts

and from yet another source

~ “Piketty argues that “the past tends to devour the future”—wealth accumulated in the past becomes more dominant and commands more power and attention than wealth being created now. In France, for example, where the inheritance data is best, the wealth of the dead amounts to nearly twice that of the living.

First, the rosy picture that economists have painted about the nature of inequality has been displaced. The idea that labor’s share of the economy is more or less fixed, an essential element of the mantra that a rising tide lifts all boats, has been dealt a serious, if not fatal, blow. We can no longer take for granted that that growing inequality is a necessary evil for a better economy.

Second, the debate over wealth and taxes is back. Tax policy needs to go beyond raising revenues. Capital argues that high taxes can direct income towards more productive and less economically harmful uses, such as keeping incomes within in a firm rather than enriching super-managers; or inheritance taxes can help direct large fortunes toward use for the public good.” ~

http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/mike-konczal-thomas-piketty-capital-studying-rich?utm_source=Newsletter%3A+May+6%2C+2014&utm_campaign=May+6%2C+2014+Newsletter&utm_medium=email



Dali: The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1954

Oriana:

It was Reagan who began to reverse the gains of the previous decades. He and Thatcher in England were a disaster. Reagan came up with “trickle-down economics.” Unfortunately, money trickles up, not down. Giving huge tax cuts to the rich only makes them richer. It’s not been shown to create jobs. What creates jobs is consumer demand. But consumers need sufficient income before they feel confident enough to spend. 

**

“Without tenderness, a man is uninteresting” ~ Marlene Dietrich

 

*

WHY WE REACT SO STRONGLY TO PEOPLE WITH DIFFERENT BELIEFS
 
~ “The abhorrence we feel when encountering beliefs that contradict our own is so universal and so powerful that it's hard to imagine it's the result of anything other than natural selection, programmed into us by evolution because it gives us some kind of survival advantage. Even if we're able to tolerate beliefs that are different than our own, remaining so creates a tension from which we can never quite become free.

Even if you believe it's going to rain today and I don't, we'll both need to work, however subtly, to tolerate the fact that we have different views. When we start talking about more important beliefs then, like whether or not it's okay to spank children, we really may find ourselves biting our tongues. When we get to politics, anger over any disagreements is typical. And when we talk about religion—well, people kill one another over disagreements about that.

I've long wondered why, even when we posture tolerance on the surface for beliefs different than our own, encountering beliefs that contrast with ours seems to leave us feeling so uncomfortable at a deeper level. We could argue any such difference represents a threat to our ability to believe as we do—and in some cases I'm sure that's true—but our reaction seems to be the same even when we believe as we do with certainty.

Perhaps sometimes we lie to ourselves about how certain we are and the niggling doubt that encountering a contradictory belief stirs up in us is enough to remind us of it and rattle us. But sometimes we really are certain we're right and still find ourselves struggling to reconcile the fact that another person doesn't agree with us. I remember well my interaction with an acquaintance years ago who simply held the most bizarre beliefs (in a non-psychotic person) I'd ever encountered. I found myself having to constantly suppress the urge to correct almost every sentence that came out of his mouth.

I've since found myself wondering if the strange sense of defilement I felt in having my mind invaded by what seemed to me to be a profoundly deluded thought process explains why so many of us prefer to associate with people who think just like we do, who believe just what we do, and feel simultaneously repelled even from people we profess to love when we discover they hold beliefs radically different from our own.

Our negative reaction is consistent with a response to a threat. Not a threat to our ability to believe as we do, but rather a threat to our very existence. At some level, coming into contact with contradictory beliefs seems almost to trigger our fight-or-flight response, as if the existence of contradictory beliefs might threaten, if not our lives, our personal way of life.
 
Perhaps because, in fact, this is often the case. We live in the midst of a sea of other people whose beliefs do impact our lives. It does matter what others around us believe. Which is perhaps why contradictory beliefs create such overreactions in people (far too often tragic overreactions).

As a physician, I've learned to tolerate all sorts of bizarre beliefs and cognitive distortions in my patients. I still feel, to this day, in some sense "contaminated" when I encounter significantly distorted views, as if I need to separate myself in some way from the people who hold them. But I now recognize that true tolerance of beliefs different from my own doesn't require me tolerate the different beliefs themselves but the feelings that encountering such beliefs engenders in me. I believe it's intolerance toward those feelings that leads to radical intolerance of the people who believe them and which is therefore responsible for untold horrors—man's inhumanity to man—throughout human history.” ~

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/happiness-in-world/201112/belief-contamination
 
Oriana:

This special kind of distress we feel when encountering a presentation of reality that’s radically different from our own may also explain why we feel so uncomfortable around the demented or the mentally ill when they start talking in a delusional manner. We understand that it's the illness, but we still have the automatic stress response. 

** 

ATHEISTS POSE AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN THE AFTERLIFE

~ "People don’t like death. They fear it. They’ll do anything they can to avoid thinking about it.

It’s one of the reasons religion is so powerful. Because you never really die when there’s a wonderful afterlife awaiting you… Religion, in many ways, functions as a defense mechanism against fear of death.

And according to new research published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, the fear of death contributes to distrust of atheists, since we pop that bubble of hope." ~

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/05/06/new-research-shows-the-existential-threat-atheists-pose-to-believers-no-wonder-were-so-disliked/

Oriana:

I’ve been on friendly terms with theists, but never close friends. I need kindred minds who help me carry the questions, especially “How do you deal with mortality?” I have my answer, with help from Epicurus and Rilke, but I'm always curious about other people’s answers. 

*

Everything has been figured out, except how to live. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Photo: Adrian Campfield

**

The “lost painting” by Caravaggio: Matthew and the Angel, 1602. It was rejected as impious (note Matthew's “scandalous” feet) and ended up in Berlin, where it got destroyed in 1945 during a bombing raid. For a while all we had was black-and-white photographs. Now technology makes it possible for us to enjoy it in color.

Funny, the painter's contemporaries rejected what we find endearing, e.g. those un-idealized feet.


*

SPHAGNUM MOSS [AKA “PEAT MOSS”] SAVED LIVES DURING WWI
 
Field surgeons seemed to agree [that spaghnum moss makes an excellent wound dressing]. Lieutenant-Colonel E.P. Sewell of the General Hospital in Alexandria, Egypt wrote approvingly that, “It is very absorbent, far more than cotton wool, and has remarkable deodorizing power.” Lab experiments around the same time vindicated his observations: Sphagnum moss can hold up to 22 times its own weight in liquid, making it twice as absorptive as cotton.

This remarkable spongelike quality comes from Sphagnum’s cellular structure, says Robin Kimmerer, professor of ecology at SUNY-Environmental Science and Forestry and the author of Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. “Ninety percent of the cells in a sphagnum plant are dead,” Kimmerer says. “And they’re supposed to be dead. They’re made to be empty so they can be filled with water.” In this case, humans took advantage of that liquid-absorbing capacity to soak up blood, pus and other bodily fluids.

Sphagnum moss also has antiseptic properties. The plant’s cell walls are composed of special sugar molecules that “create an electrochemical halo around all of the cells, and the cell walls end up being negatively charged,” Kimmerer says. “Those negative charges mean that positively charged nutrient ions [like potassium, sodium and calcium] are going to be attracted to the sphagnum.” As the moss soaks up all the negatively charged nutrients in the soil, it releases positively charged ions that make the environment around it acidic.

For bogs, the acidity has remarkable preservative effects—think bog bodies—and keeps the environment limited to highly specialized species that can tolerate such harsh environments. For wounded humans, the result is that sphagnum bandages produce sterile environments by keeping the pH level around the wound low, and inhibiting the growth of bacteria.
 
As the war raged on, the number of bandages needed skyrocketed, and sphagnum moss provided the raw material for more and more of them. In 1916, the Canadian Red Cross Society in Ontario provided over 1 million dressings, nearly 2 million compresses and 1 million pads for wounded soldiers in Europe, using moss collected from British Columbia, Nova Scotia and other swampy, coastal regions. By 1918, 1 million dressings per month were being sent out of Britain to hospitals on continental Europe, in Egypt and even Mesopotamia.
 
Communities around the United Kingdom and North America organized outings to collect moss so the demand for bandages could be met. “Moss drives” were announced in local papers, and volunteers included women of all ages and children. One organizer in the United Kingdom instructed volunteers to “fill the sacks only about three-quarter full, drag them to the nearest hard ground, and then dance on them to extract the larger percentage of water.”

At Longshaw Lodge in Derbyshire, England, the nurses who tended convalescing soldiers trooped out to the damp grounds to collect moss for their wounds. And as botanist P.G. Ayres writes, sphagnum was just as popular on the other side of the battle lines. “Germany was more active than any of the Allies in utilizing Sphagnum … the bogs of north-eastern Germany and Bavaria provided seemingly inexhaustible supplies. Civilians and even Allied prisoners of war were conscripted to gather the moss.”

The moss bandages worked. Their absorbency was remarkable. They didn’t mildew. And from the Allies’ perspective, they were a renewable resource that would grow back without much difficulty. “So long as the peat underneath [the living moss] was not disturbed, the peat is going to keep acting like a sponge, so it enables regrowth of Sphagnum,” says Kimmerer. However, “I can imagine if there were bogs that people used very regularly for harvesting there could be a trampling effect.”

So why aren’t we still using moss bandages today? In part, because the immense amount of labor required to collect it, Anderson says (although manufacturers in the U.S. experimented with using the moss for sanitary napkins called Sfag-Na-Kins).

That’s a good thing, because the real value of this plant goes far beyond bandages. Peatlands full of spaghnum and other mosses spend thousands of years accumulating carbon in their underground layers. If they defrost or dry out, we risk that carbon leaking out into the atmosphere. And while humans are no longer picking them for bandages, scientists fear that bogs and swamplands could be drained or negatively impacted by agriculture and industry, or the peat will be used for biofuel.

Besides their role in global climate change, peatlands are rich ecosystems in their own right, boasting rare species like carnivorous plants. “The same things that make sphagnum amazing for bandages are what enable it to be an ecosystem engineer, because it can create bogs,” Kimmerer says. “Sphagnum and peatlands are really important pockets of biodiversity.” Even if we no longer require moss’s assistance with our scrapes and lacerations, we should still respect and preserve the rare habitats it creates.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-humble-moss-helped-heal-wounds-thousands-WWI-180963081/#Y0VMTze5ZlxSQOIv.99
peat moss, Mer Bleue Conservation Area near Ottawa, Canada
 
ending on beauty:

THE END OF THE STORY IS NOT

Eurydice’s silence and the severed head
of Orpheus uttering
prophecy and song.
Look: as real as a dream,

or as bodies of the wind,
Eurydice and Orpheus,
not lamenting, not grieving,
not stretching shadow arms

to clutch at the emptiness,
but like flowers among flowers,
leaning to each other —
on the bank of Lethe, but not 

drinking of it, still human
through memory and love,
in meadows of immortal
amaranth, they walk

forever now. And they
are holding hands.

~ Oriana

amaranth

“Who are the muses but the Maenads, repentant, clothed, and in their right minds.” ~ Jane Ellen Harrison

Gustave Moreau: A young Thracian woman carrying the head of Orpheus on his lyre, 1864

POWERLESS? SHIFT HAPPENS



I think I’m really not interested in the quest for the self anymore. Oh, I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that you really must make the self. It’s absolutely useless to look for it, you won’t find it, but it’s possible in some sense to make it. I don’t mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and to choose the self you want.”

~Mary McCarthy, The Art of Fiction No. 27

An important disclaimer:
This post is not meant as a criticism of 12-Step programs, which have helped millions. Rather, it is an exploration based on my personal experience, reading, and conversations with others.

I’m surprised my hand didn’t tremble when, browsing in my town’s one remaining bookstore, I reached for Allen Carr’s The Easy Way to Stop Drinking. The moment I saw the title, I thought, riding a paradoxical undertow of excitement and fear and calm certainty all at the same time, “You decide not to drink.” You decide not in the sense of a New Year’s resolution; rather, your perception shifts radically, and there is no going back.

My hand should have trembled, just as, back in 2009, I should have trembled all over when I decided not to be depressed. After all, this goes against the accepted belief that we are powerless over depression, drinking, overeating, anxiety, hostility, compulsive shopping, and so forth. The list goes on and on. We are powerless and need to take very expensive drugs and/or stay for years in very expensive therapy. Or else we have to spend most of our leisure attending 12-Step meetings for the rest of our life, being endlessly reminded that we are powerless and it’s pointless to decide not to engage in a problem behavior: it won’t work. 

And you definitely can’t use your intelligence to try to figure out how to deal with whatever it is you finally feel sick of doing. The use of intelligence might lead you away from feeling powerless. Verboten.

But let me get back to Carr’s book. “Many people believe that quitting alcohol is about as difficult as climbing Mt. Everest,” Carr states. “If you find it difficult, then you are not doing it the easy way.” But he forbids the reader (presumably an alcoholic) to jump to the final chapter when the secret of  easy quitting will be revealed. No, first you have to reads several hundred pages of explanation of how alcohol destroys your brain, your body, and your life.

Naturally, I jumped to the final chapter right away.

I have never been an alcoholic. I don’t have the genes for it. Had alcohol ever worked for me as a stress reducer rather than a migraine-inducer, then given the compound stress of my teens and twenties, I’d be a goner. I mean it literally: I’d be dead by now, either of liver disease or by suicide.

When P, an alcoholic, shot himself at 28, I had the oddest feeling that he did it instead of me -- I was the one meant to commit suicide at 28. But I can’t take pride in having survived my youth: if it had been possible for me to drink, I would have embraced alcohol with a passion, and nothing would have stopped me from drinking myself to death. Instead, thanks to a genetic accident, I was sentenced to life.

But back to Carr, with that marvelous double r as in Starr. The reason I was fascinated by the topic was my instant intuition that the “easy way” would be similar to the way I ended decades of depression. I experienced a shift in perception and made the decision that changed my life. Carr calls that shift in perception (also known as “paradigm shift”) a “moment of revelation.” After absorbing all the information about he devastation and evil that stem from alcohol, the successful quitter will experience the holy hush, the moment of revelation when he knows he will never drink again.

Reading this, I felt that holy hush envelop me again, just as in the moment when I knew I’d  never be depressed again.

“Never doubt your decision,” Carr advises. As if that were possible. As if the previous neural configuration had not been deleted forever.

Powerless? Yes. I discovered that I was powerless over my decision not to be depressed. Powerless to reverse the insight that led to the decision (“decision” may not be the right term, since it came automatically with the insight; “paradigm shift” may be a more accurate term). My brain had rewired itself, and a different neural network was ruthlessly in charge. Again, I was sentenced to life.

I knew I should be feeling the rush of ecstatic liberation, but I just stood there dazed. Worse, now and then I couldn’t help feeling mournful. So now I had to work. Now I had to cope. Now I had to be strong. I had to be rational, slow down and keep calm. Now I had to count my blessings instead of my misfortunes. Now I had to see also the positive side of things (this was especially revolting to me; I always loved darkness and abhorred sunlight). I had to stop complaining. I had to take a  moderate view rather than an extreme one (this too was revolting, since I loved the extremes).

I could go on, but you get my drift. The first weeks of my emotional sobriety I felt tired, worn out by all this maturity. But there was no going back. And gradually I began to remember positive experiences (positive memories are blocked by long-term depression) and enjoy just looking at the world. I discovered that I loved my “quiet life” -- that was another shift in perception. And that quiet life has indeed become much more pleasant.

The first time I experienced the turn from powerless to empowered had to do with the “th” sound. In my teens, I thought I was powerless over “th.” Here is a poem that describes my struggles (I’m offering in the spirit of comic relief):

KEY TO THE WORLD


I stand in front of the mirror,
trying to place everything
correctly: tip of tongue against

upper teeth, right hand checking
vibrations of the larynx –
“This is your key to the world,”

states my English for Today,
a book of secrets where Tom and Jane
carry on their cracked romance:

Tom, is this a girl?
No, this is a lamp.

*

I rehearse the sacred chant:
Thelma threw thistles
through the thick of her thumb.

Thistle while you work!
A tooth for a truth,
a thigh for an eye!

“They lisp,” the teacher
explains. “Maybe because
of cold wind.”

“Your r’s are too guttural,”
teacher warns. Guttural,
that’s me. What’s the meaning

of the, I ask. Where’s the tip
of your foreign tongue?
Between Thelma’s teeth.

Tom, is this a mouth?
No, this is a hoof.

Today the the;
tomorrow I open the world.

 
~ Oriana © 2012

**

The shift happened when I discovered that I need to leave a little air space when I put my tongue between my teeth. Suddenly something close enough to “th” lisped in the room. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I started practicing.

And there was no going back to saying “fank you.”

This may sound awfully small in the scale of things, but believe me, Bewildered Reader, even the tiniest shift from powerless to empowered is a pearl of a great price.
 
*
Pondering other shifts, the one that led to my leaving the church was perhaps the most important. I was fourteen and reading about universal themes in mythology. A thought like a white cloud drifted through my mind: “It’s just another mythology.” The thought turned into a tornado that sucked out my religious belief. As of that moment, I was no longer a member of the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, for a while something remained: I did expect to be struck by lightning. The god I’d  been taught to worship was exactly the kind who’d exact a terrible punishment for a thought crime. (I told Adam Zagajewski about this waiting to be struck by lightning. He replied, “Sometimes there’s a delay.”)

VICTOR FRANKL AND THE WIDOWER

Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is on my short list of the books that influenced me most. What I remember most is Frankl’s session with a recent widower.

The widower was very distressed. He carried on about his suffering, which struck him as unfair: he’d always assumed that he’d be the first one to die, and instead his wife died first. Frankl asked: “What would it be like for your wife if you died first?” -- “Oh, she would suffer terribly,” the man replied. Frankl said, “Then perhaps the meaning of your suffering is to have spared your wife from going through it.”

After a moment of silence, the widower stood up. Without a word, they shook hands and the man left the office.

I myself remember catalyzing a perception shift in a distant friend. She kept  mentioning how much she hated her job. One time she began a really long lamentation about how miserable she felt because of the job, and how it prevented her from doing things she’d love to do instead. I asked, “Do you need that job for financial reasons?” “No. Not at all,” she said. The answer didn’t surprise me since I knew she was quite affluent. She was also around sixty, so I asked, “How much longer do you think you’ve got?”

She fell silent, and I saw a change in her face. Without a word, she walked away from me. The next news I had from her was that she was training her replacement, and would soon be free. A few months passed, and I learned that she was now playing with a local orchestra.

Yes, sometimes someone else can catalyze a paradigm shift. Cognitive therapy is pretty much based on that principle. According to what I’ve read, those who profit from it experience a life-changing insight fairly quickly. Those who keep coming week after week repeating their lamentations are not likely to improve. 

SHIFT SEEN AS COGNITIVE THERAPY                          
                                                          
In Richard Noll’s book about Jung,  The Aryan Christ, I found a description of how effective cognitive therapy works. In this case the therapist was the notorious but apparently also gifted Otto Gross, and the patient was the anarchist writer Erich Mühsam, in 1906. Mühsam writes:

The task  of the physician would be mainly to make the patient himself the physician. The patient is induced to diagnose his illness. On the basis of the diagnosis discovered by himself, he therefore carries out his own cure. He is brought to the point where he is no longer interested in himself as a sufferer but in the suffering itself. He objectifies his condition. He does not put the importance anymore upon himself as a pitiable patient, as the emotionally martyred, as a hysteric seeking cure, but as a physician, as someone who does not feel the sickness anymore but perceives it. (p.75)

This really struck home: the transformation from the pitiable victim, the emotionally martyred, the hopeless depressive -- to being your own physician! From “powerless” to owning your power over your behavior. From “emotionally martyred” (how well I know the seduction of perceiving yourself as the wronged one, a martyr . . . ) to a responsible adult who knows that she can make herself happy or unhappy: the choice is hers.                                     

But it takes time to arrive at the place where insight can happen. “Ripeness is all.” 

**
WHAT ELSE ARE WE NOT POWERLESS OVER?

Currently I’m considering the problem of sometimes being more anxious than I want to be, beyond what the situation warrants. While not exactly as terrified as in those minutes when I literally waiting for the avenging lightning, I’d like to be more relaxed, secure, serene, sagacious, cool.

“Some of us did not have the kind of secure childhood that builds a foundation for serenity,” a friend told me. But that doesn’t help me. Am I powerless over anxiety? So far I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to define being anxious not as a feeling but as a BEHAVIOR. A behavior can be changed. “My behavior is my choice.”

And a little voice in my head says “You slow down.”

Maybe that’s the closest I can come for now. Wait! -- now the voice says, “You slow down and practice being strong.” I have already decided to be strong, basically at the same time when I decided not to be depressed. I also hear a dear friend’s voice saying, “There is always a solution.” Again -- wait! -- now I hear my father’s gentle voice telling me not to worry about the universe. And this reminds me of the time I first read “Desiderata” and the sentence that affected me deeply: “You are a child of the Universe. You have a right to be here.”

Sometimes (probably most of the time) a lot of tiny cognitive steps are taken before that powerful change that seems instantaneous -- that burst of neural activity that creates a new configuration. Baby steps, baby steps -- and then, va-va-va-voom! Shift happens.

IF it happens. Stay tuned. 

POSTLUDE: PERCEPTION SHIFT = COGNITIVE AWAKENING

One of the important objections to a cognitive approach to changing self-destructive habits is that without a “spiritual awakening” (admitting that you are powerless but a higher power can remove your “character defects”), you are just going to substitute a new addiction for the old one, the way an alcoholic can shift to becoming an overeater. 

There are indeed plenty of examples of alcoholics who stopped drinking but substituted overeating, and vice versa. (In fact, I knew a woman who did just that, and ended up dying as a result of obesity. She was also an example that becoming spiritual doesn't always work. Maybe she didn't go into her practice -- mostly meditation -- deep enough. Maybe it was her bipolar disorder. And yet in Vermont I met a woman painter who made the decision not to be bipolar -- she self-monitors and regulates her mood with music.) In my own case, someone could argue that I quit doing depression only to become a workaholic. 

I am fully aware that a high-energy person is prone to becoming over-aroused and compulsive. My instant attraction to the “non-doing” of Taoism when I first encountered it in my late twenties had something to do with my dawning awareness that “effortless effort” can yield better results than overwork. And I’ve been spiraling around that insight ever since. I hope that I’m close to the point when it becomes a ruling principle of my behavior. I happen to be intense, so it’s not easy for me.

But “it’s too late for depression” -- my cognitive awakening -- started unfolding a whole set of insights that start with “it’s too late for.” It’s too late for any self-destructive behaviors, including overwork. Carpal tunnel lets me know. Chest pains let me know when there is too much adrenaline in my system, and force me to remember that heart disease and stroke run in my family. “Too late for depression” was a kind of “Yes to life,” its full meaning unfolding gradually. That’s why now I am so interested in becoming more peaceful and relaxed. I’ve been thinking and writing about the power and beauty of doing less for some time now, but it takes self-monitoring and practice.

Depression simply vanished, gone as soon as I had my perception shift. It took no effort. My brain did it for me. But I admit that I have to put some conscious effort into not getting over-intense and wanting to do too much at once. But I do turn off the computer earlier now. I am able to say, “Enough for today.” I have noticed the pleasure of working slowly, doing a bit at a time. I am shaping a different, more relaxed self. It’s an unfolding story. That’s why I say, “Stay tuned.” 

For me, being cornered by mortality and “it’s too late for” formula seems sufficient. But if someone finds it useful to join a Buddhist temple, for instance, or even to go to mass everyday, I say, “Whatever works.” I’m glad it’s not me, but I can see how a “spiritual awakening” might work for others. And no, I’m not going to lend them my copy of Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct, with its brilliant demonstration that god is a cognitive illusion. In fact Jesse Bering keeps saying that a cognitive illusion can be beneficial. 

Hyacinth:

Love the cat. Remarkable that you were able to use your intellect to liberate yourself from depression. I believe it can be done. The perception shift. I remember having that moment when after months of emotional turmoil I said to myself "You don’t have to love this person." And I got well and went on with my life. 

Oriana:

Love the cat too. He’s really into perception -- that’s my excuse for using him for the opening image.

It was more than the intellect. I had a whole-brain experience, I think. The understanding of how little time is left -- and it may be even less than we estimate -- probably had an emotional component. For one thing, I was finally feeling ashamed of what I was doing to myself (especially the self-hatred part of depression) and how I was wasting my one precious life. I had to clearly see how idiotic that was. 

And I love your perception shift. Psychologists/therapists call it “paradigm shift” -- from Greek paradeigma, pattern. The pattern/matrix changes in such a profound way that you just would have to work very hard to try to go back to past behavior. And it might be impossible. Anyway, who’d want to go back to anything self-destructive. 

Charles:

That cat, that’s me.

I don’t know if you’d call it a perception shift, but Obama had a moment of revelation when he understood that black politicians don’t appeal to white voters because they are angry. So Obama made the decision not to be angry.  He acquired his “cool” manner of not losing his composure. 

Oriana:

We don’t have to insist on “shift.” Let’s just call it a new perception. An insight. And if you make a decision based on that insight, it’s not like a typical New Year’s resolution. An insight-based decision rewires your brain. I think that’s why it has such great power.

I knew a man who reached a very high rank in his field, and a bit of his story. He came from a poor Italian family, worked as a waiter to put himself through college -- yes, that story, but here comes the twist: in his early twenties, he made the decision never to raise his voice. “The foundation of my success in life was that decision never to raise my voice,” he said, quietly but with great authority. 

That’s pretty similar to Obama’s decision, and reminds me of “Anger is the emotion of a victim.” You can refuse to see yourself as a victim. 

Lucrezia:

Abraham Lincoln said, “ A man is about as happy as he makes up his mind to be.”

Oriana:

I’ve been familiar with that quotation for a long time, and it did haunt me at times. But I’m still not that eager to decide to be happy. I need to make it more specific, e.g. No complaining, or, to quote Jack Gilbert, “It’s too late for discontent.” By the way, the latter did influence me and no doubt contributed to my perception shift.

To return to the theme of making an insight-based decision, I’m struck by a similarity in the various stories: it’s the refusal to behave like a victim.

Now, as long as I remember, throughout my childhood and teens, I heard my mother say, “Don’t be a victim of fate. The worst thing is a victim of fate.” But she’d say it in such a sarcastic way that it sounded like “How can anyone be such a schlemiel!”

This is a very rare instance when English proved more effective for me than the Polish version, or call it my mother’s version. In English, “Don’t be a victim” or “a victim’s mentality” or “anger is the emotion of a victim” -- these phrases resonate for me in an inspiring, empowering way.

Darlene:

I remember a guy who used to comment on your blog. He really disapproved of your decision to get rid of depression.

Oriana:

This reminds me of something I saw on TV after the Aurora shootings. A girl in early teens, one of the survivors, was being interviewed. She was remarkably composed and focused on what can be done now to help the bereaved families. The male interviewer interrupted her and said, “It’s OK to cry.” She replied, “I don’t want to cry. I want to be strong so I can help people.” So the interviewer didn’t get what he apparently wanted, a dramatic display of sobbing, falling apart, being a victim. And I wondered how many educated viewers were going for his point of view, and worrying that the young girl was just “repressing” and would later pay the price -- perhaps even end up on the mental ward.

I happened to admire her. I don’t mean to judge those people who did fall apart in front of the camera. Most people would, given the circumstances. But the girl reminded me of my grandmother’s strength.

Back to depression. Some Jungian analysts believe that depression is good for you, a holy state in which the psyche reveals some profound truths. What’s even more scary, there are those who believe that schizophrenia is good for you, and even more holy than depression. 

I can’t speak about schizophrenia, though I know a remarkable schizophrenic/alcoholic who is doing quite well. I suspect that the secret is that through incredible luck he has acquired a valuable skill, and when the right circumstances came, he managed to use that skill to start making money. His motivation to make money is making him act remarkably rational and keeps him sober (he needs to drive) -- even though, for all I know, he may still think he’s Jesus. It’s perhaps the most amazing transformation from victim to -- well, if not hero, then a successful small-scale entrepreneur -- the most spectacular crawling out of victimhood that I’ve ever witnessed. And it also reminds me of Dostoyevski’s observation of his fellow inmates in a Siberian prison: some of them were skilled craftsmen who became quiet and content when busy with their work (aside from the forced labor, they were allowed to produce small articles they could sell to people in town).

As for the supposed profound truths revealed by depression, I had a choice of channels. One was the “I hate America” channel, often activated during driving since I detest the hideous advertising billboards. My sane thought was that capitalism made America both great and ugly. The depression channel showed only “ugly.” Another channel turned on when I was working on a poem and wasn’t happy with my lines. Then the message was: “You are not a real poet and should commit suicide.”

Skeptical Reader, I’m not making this up for the fun of it. I could go on, but I realize that it’s best not to persist in this vein. The delusional nature of depressive thinking is dreadfully embarrassing from an emotionally sober point of view. Of course I can always say that it wasn’t the “real me,” which is radiant, bright, energetic, creative, generous, and other good things. We can judge the person by her worst or by her best -- but the wise thing is simply not to judge. As Spinoza said, “Not to weep, not to laugh, not to ridicule, not to be full of anger -- but to understand.”

And I’m not even sure if it’s necessary to “understand.” All understanding is partial at best, and sometimes it hurts rather than helps move us on. Cancer patients who are in denial of how bad their condition is do practically as well in terms of survival as the “activist” patients who take charge of their health. Whatever works. The point is to keep building on our strengths, keep developing our talents and to share our gifts with others. 

WE HAVE MORE CONTROL THAN WE THINK

Scott:

Your post raised some interesting thoughts; I wish I could find the quote but I recall the poet James K Baxter saying that we all had more control over things than we think. Just reflect on so many areas of our lives; are you overweight, then start eating less, eating right and exercising, simple walking is a good start. Are you in financial straits, control your spending, find ways to make more money. Lonely? Get involved with a charity, contact family and friends...you get the idea. A cynic would say, 'it's not that simple' and yes, for the chronic depressive or someone with a medical condition it may not be so but for the vast, vast majority of us, it truly is. And every day, no, every second is new; we should not beat ourselves up for living up to some standard, either self imposed or set by others; everything will turn out all right. I have found out that most of the things I have worried on in my life either never come to pass or if and when they do it's seldom as bad as I think and many, many times not even bad at all...sometimes even a great positive thing I never saw coming.

We all fail and fall short of what we should do or become but the constant beating oneself up is a horrible waste of time; when we fall short, shake it off and endeavor to do better. I know that sounds incredibly simplistic but the alternative, to wallow in guilt and remorse is just....well, nonsensical. Melville intrigues me as a writer but his life is hardly one to emulate; unhappy in his family, always fleeing them to chase some dream. Tolstoy is even worse, a man who truly had everything; wealth, fame, loving family, title, lands......and was miserable. No no, better to be a Tolkien; career he enjoyed as a professor, a writing career he had as a separate enjoyment, family, friends and with the exception of serving in France in WWI I don't believe he ever left Great Britain. I've been around the world, seen exotic locales but am happiest in my home with my girls. My armchair, 'in a river of books and black coffee'....my 'New Nantucket' if you will is my sanctuary.

Oriana:

So much wisdom in what you say. One reason people’s New Year’s resolutions fail is that the motivation and the focus aren’t strong enough. It’s just not important enough. We resolve to do what we think we should do, but the brain remains wired as before. After that moment of revelation, that shift in perception, we KNOW what we must do.

Take weight. My experiment with being a low-fat vegetarian made me feel chronically hungry, so I became an eating machine, with predictable results. The more “healthy” I tried to eat, the more weight I gained. But it took that one minute of standing in front of a mirror -- I remember the exact life-changing spot -- when quite involuntarily I had the thought, “A fat pig.” The next moment I decided to lose weight, and went to the nearest bookstore to browse through diet books. I came across Atkins, instantly knew that he was right (in my case, the carbs created the bottomless hell of hypoglycemia), and sure enough . . . Lost 25 lbs so easily, I was euphoric.

But that’s not the only way. I knew another formerly obese woman who decided to fast during Lent. No, it didn’t lead to anorexia. Basically she eliminated sugar, and thus stabilized her blood glucose, which is crucial for preventing insulin spikes (insulin is the fattening hormone). Others may do it through portion control. Whatever works. The motivation has to be strong enough, and then you’ll discover what works for you. Knowing that you need to lower and stabilize your blood sugar helps, but is not essential.

Happiness . . . Now that’s a complex issue, but one can tackle one aspect at a time. Not “beating up on yourself” is an example. Louise Hay considers this an essential first step. And not beating up on others. The odd thing is that I had this “non-attack on others” insight already at 19, when I sensed that somebody expected me to scream and maybe call him a klutz for making a mess -- and I said nothing, just reached for a paper towel. I acquired the motto: Everyone can make a mistake. The awful thing is that I didn’t apply that kind of sensible compassion toward myself. I continued to beat myself up for decades. Don’t ask. Some weird blindness. (a big sigh . . . )

Darlene:

If I remember correctly, you see depression as an addiction.

Oriana:

I think I may have said it that way in email to a few friends. I know I said, “I no longer do depression.” It was important for me to view depression not as a feeling but as a BEHAVIOR since I don’t feel powerless over my behavior (I classify brooding as a behavior).

Different people have different responses to stress and to certain triggering stimuli. When the going gets tough, some go shopping, others drink or gamble; I did depression. I wouldn’t want to write an essay on “Depression as an Addiction.” There are some traits that depression has in common in addiction; the reinforcement is withdrawal from even trying to cope. Another similarity is overreacting, overdramatizing versus “emotional sobriety” (or call it rationality). But I wouldn’t want to put serious time into analyzing this matter; for me it was a pragmatic definition. “Whatever works” is on the short list of my favorite mantras, and the pragmatic definition worked me for. I don’t mean to universalize it.

I’ve met a few others who also made a decision -- and at an earlier age than I did, which makes me so envious! Now, those few people did it without going to a therapist, but cognitive therapy has been proved in clinical trials to be effective in ending depression. Not for everyone. Those who succeeded were the ones who experienced their shift in perception early, in a matter of weeks.

I have a friend who is a therapist, and she said, “You did cognitive therapy on yourself.” 

IF THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION WERE CLEANSED

Lucrezia:

I think depression is mainly biological. What works best for me is exercise.

Oriana:

Depression can stem from hypothyroidism, PMS, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, the use of certain Rx drugs, and so on. And yes, exercise has been clinically found to be a mood lifter and de-stressor. I don’t mean gentle strolling, since that still lets a person engage in brooding. For some people qi-gong can work, but it didn’t for me. I did experience temporary mood lift from strenuous exercise back when I was still doing depression. Intense exercise kills thought -- I think that’s the secret. But if you have enough motivation to go to an exercise class, then your level of depression is relatively mild.

To summarize my case: I experienced a perception shift (also known as paradigm shift or cognitive shift; my guess is that “intuitional revelation” refers to the same experience). The decision not to be depressed was essentially simultaneous with the perception shift, and automatic; I chose to reinforce it with conscious commitment, but I suspect that the shift did all the work (rewiring the brain, that is). I also switched from intense self-absorption to an intense external focus (“the answer lies outside”). 

As my brain normalized, I discovered that my external focus didn’t have to be as intense, just as my physical exercise could become more gentle and pleasant. I also gradually regained access to positive memories and regained the ability to experience pleasure (chronic depression produces anhedonia). The doors of perception were cleansed, and the world enlivened.

Again, an insight-based decision is not like a New Year’s resolution. It stems from a radical change in perspective, a new understanding. And there  is no going back. 

NOT MISSING A MISSING GOD: CORDING, WEIL, ZAGAJEWSKI

The serpentine cross sculpture (the Brazen Serpent Monument) atop Mount Nebo. The sculpture was created by Italian artist, Giovanni Fantoni, and is symbolic of the bronze serpent created by Moses in the wilderness (Numbers 21:4-9) and the cross upon which Jesus was crucified (John 3:14) 

Robert Cording’s Against Consolation is one of the best poetry volumes I have ever read. Common Life is fine too, and I'd recommend it also, but it's not quite as strong as Against Consolation, Cording’s “magical volume.” (I have noticed that many poets have one book that’s a quantum level above the others. In the case of Mark Doty, for instance, it’s his third book, My Alexandria; in the case of Carolyn Forché, it’s The Country Between Us. The odd American phenomenon is that in many cases it’s the poet’s first book [e.g. think of the luminosity of Olga Broumas’s Beginning with O ] that is the best.)

Cording is a serious poet. The poems are finely crafted, but it’s their content, so opposite of vapid, that makes them stand out. He deals with the perennial great questions, such as the problem of evil, and the difficulties of belief.

I'd hesitate to call him a "Catholic poet," with his carefully cultivated doubt and questioning -- but he is a metaphysical poet, one who keeps asking the great questions, and never settles for a nihilistic stance. You cd say that he is on the side of life, in awe of life, and could even be called a worshipper of life -- but with full awareness of human suffering and no easy assurance that we'll be recompensed in heaven, where it will all make sense.

His God is Deus absconditus -- the hidden God (note the similarity of absconditus to Escondido -- yes, it means "hidden"). In one poem, he ruthlessly ponders how we don't really miss a missing God. It’s a minor poem, and yet because of its content it has stayed in my mind (one of the criteria for evaluating poetry is memorability). 

READING DONNE

Reading Donne again, I’m reminded I know nothing

About death, nothing save that one irrefutable fact:

I will die. And that means I’m bound to project

My sorry thoughts beyond death, cheerfully imagining

The self I call my own as still alive – though dead

Of course to everyone who knew me – jubilizing

With family and friends in a sunny field, hardly missing

At all a missing God. It’s immortality I crave instead,

That museum of ten thousand things stockpiled beyond

Our fleeting earthly hours. Why keep on with talk

Of flesh made spirit? – Donne already knew we balk

At anything less than ourselves, the one ground

Of all our hopes not God and eternity, that unseen end,

But the self curled comfortably around itself again.

*

(– the couplets are mine – I can't resist the fun of breaking the monotony of those single-stanza poems.)

One reason that Cording is so interesting is that he is acquainted with the work of Simone Weil, an outrageous theologian, possibly mentally ill (anorexia). I am fascinated by her idea that beauty is a trap, an ambush that God lays for the human soul as part of the "divine invasion" (she saw herself as having been "captured by Christ"). Beauty, the most common means by which God captures the soul, is a manifestation of the divine, "Christ's tender smile toward humanity" – but beauty is not to be equated with the divine – that would be idolatry.

I am also struck by this (with apologies for not having the source):

**

On the love of religious practices, the thought most associated with Weil's contribution to spirituality is that "one of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that “looking is what saves us.” She offers this illustration: "The bronze serpent was lifted up so that those who lay maimed in the depths of degradation should be saved by looking upon it.

**

(You may remember the politically incorrect [idolatry? “graven images”?] story of Moses raising the "brazen serpent" in the wilderness so that those bitten by a snake could look at it and be healed).

What Weil praised was the act of looking, really looking, since it was intense attention to something outside of oneself. To her sin was "looking at the wrong thing," the way neurosis can be defined as paying attention to the wrong thing. Weil advocates intense attention as the best kind of prayer. And I get the impression that, to her, intense study of mathematics was as worthy as intense listening to a sufferer, or intense reading of a difficult text.

I must say that 1) beauty is for me the best argument for the existence of something I might call the divine (but the existence of beauty does not prove the existence of god; it shows only that beauty exists)  2) I know that the more I concentrate, the deeper I go into something, the more intense my mental work, the greater the satisfaction, even bliss. This is the opposite of the attention deficit disorder that characterizes our manic culture as a whole (manic = shallow).

But Weil is a partial guide at best. One of my indispensable texts is Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

Weil claims that God uses both beauty and affliction as an “ambush for the soul” – the means to draw a soul to himself (for Simone Weil, God is definitely male; He lives not exactly in the sky, but in the space just beyond the atmosphere). Weil’s notion that God uses both beauty and affliction to attract a soul to the divine ties in with a fascinating paragraph in Adam Zagajewski’s Two Cities (p. 134). The speaker is someone who resembles Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn, a writer who has experienced the brutality of a totalitarian regime.

“Where is God – in suffering or in joy, in a beam of light or in terror, in a rich, free city or in a concentration camp? I knew, of course, unfortunately I knew, that it is not difficult to answer the last part of this question. What does it mean, however, when God prefers the dark and terror-filled places? Why? I have also felt the divine presence in beauty, but it seemed to me that it was not the same God.”

**