[The following is taken in full from a blog post by Tony Equale]

As I begin my meditation on “matter” in search of what Edmund Husserl would call the “essence of the phenomenon,” I immediately realize that the traditional historical deconstructions already performed have amounted to an epoché, a bracketing, that has taken away all the specification and characterization with which my natural wordview had clothed the word “matter.”  First, the top layers of scientistic positivism were peeled away dismissing mechanistic reductionism as, mini­mally, a premature and prejudicial assumption, and acknowledging the validity of conscious experience.  Hence, the first conclusion: the experience of consciousness, despite the erstwhile claims of Daniel Dennett, cannot be dismissed as illusion.  Consciousness is real and its apparent incompatibility with its own material substrate is not sufficient in itself to prove the null hypothesis.

Subsequently, that first reduction revealed a sedimentation ― more layers underneath ― that also had to be held in abeyance.  This second deconstruction bracketed the age-old pre-scientific traditional assumption that the “self” was a substantial “spirit” (soul) able to exist without the matter of the body, and that consciousness was one of its sui generis operations.  It was precisely as spirit, i.e., not-matter, that the apparently immaterial characteristics of con­scious experience could be present alongside a material organism.  That view held that human beings were body and soul.

Effectively now, with both those worldviews suspended, I shouldn’t even use the word “matter” because its ancient traditional con­struc­tion in both cases had made its characteristics a cor­relate of spirit.  For even in the positivist reductionist view, matter was given its exclusively physicalist charac­ter with the distinction of body and soul in the background.  Once spirit was eliminated by the naive materialism of the modern era, the well established traditional inertness of matter was left to explain everything.  It’s no surprise that it could not do so.

Descartes claimed matter could be acted upon but could not act, because he was convinced that alongside dead matter there was also a living immaterial force in the universe.  All degrees of con­scious­ness as well as the ability to initiate activity were explained by that “second sub­stance.”  It was called spirit.  Without it matter was a dead mechanism.

Stripped by this double reduction of its correlative spirit, phenomenologically speaking, the word matter has become free floating and indeter­minate.  It has lost its exclusively mechanistic character.  Without these physical / metaphysical presumptions pre-empting the determination of meaning, the perception of matter is open to the meaning that I, in my first person experi­ence, can discern in it.  I am now free to ask the question: how do I expe­rience matter and what do I mean by it … or perhaps better, highlighting the inten­tion­ality that impels my enquiry: what does the matter I experience mean to me?

Asking the question of meaning emphasizes the restrictions that a phenomenological enquiry imposes.  There can be no question here of resolving the ultimate nature of the object that the phenomenon intends by introspective examination alone.  Phenomenology cannot deter­mine the nature of matter.  Further clarification of “what” matter might be, is the domain of science, where already vetted and purified phenomena are subjected to painstak­ingly thorough and detailed observation, measurement, analysis and mathematical represen­tation.

Erasure     Given the extent of the ignorance that the phenomenological bracketing introduces, If I continue to use the word matter (and I have little choice because as yet there is no other), I realize I have to use it under erasure, as Jacques Derrida would say, because its conventional meaning has been “deconstructed.”  He would represent this by writing it with a strike­through, like this: matter.

So in the first instance I am aware that the very word, “matter,” can no longer refer to the inert, mechanical thing of the Platonic / Cartesian dyad.  By matter I now mean something universal and utterly neutral ― an experience of “physical stuff” that makes no pretense of describing or defining physical reality beyond what is experienced, and especially not its traditional primary denota­tion: in contrast with and opposed to spirit.  Effectively for me, with reference to this “stuff” that I experience, the words and erstwhile concepts spirit and matter no longer exist.  I am already faced with the need to adjust the imagery associated with each word so that it includes that of the other.  Henceforth both words, spirit and matter will be erased with a strike­through; from now on, each word refers to exactly the same phenomenon which I experience meaningfully but whose “nature” remains to be determined by science.

the experience of matter

What is this experience that we have been calling matter? I have no trouble saying that I know this stuff.  I know it like the back of my hand.  Where and what is it?  It is every­where and everything, inside and outside of me, regardless how alive or how conscious, without exception.  My first encounter with reality is that it is a physical field ― a  totality in which I am immersed like a sponge in the sea.  It is my-world-with-me-in-it whole and undivi­ded.  I am aware that I have / am a body precisely because “I” am a material organism directly and conna­tur­ally in contact with my material matrix which is everything I can see, hear, touch, smell and taste.

This realization that the “I” that is doing the perceiving, and the “world” around me that is per­ceived, which might appear to present a clearly demarcated subject/object (S/O) polarity as the first item of observation, is immediately subordinated and rendered secondary because my initial awkening, like a newborn baby’s cry, is driven by unconscious connatural needs that straddle the S/O divide.  My mindless needs reveal that my “self,” my organism, perceives itself separate and distinct only through and after experiencing its own needs reaching out to the surrounding world for a presumed homogeneous sustenance in the form of food, shelter, emo­tional warmth and existential assurance.  Initially, all such needs are undefined.  I instinc­tive­ly know, however, that my “stuff” and the “stuff” around me are homogeneous: they are assumed to be compat­ible and complementary with me, for I reach out without hesitation or doubt, expecting to find there exactly what I need, and I have done so, apparently with uninter­rupted success, since before the dawn of my own self-awareness. 

The existential anxiety from which I reach out reveals itself as an assump­tion of primordial non-polarity ― as if I were driven to reconnect with an originally prior unity.  The “stuff” in me and  my world is integral; it is the same.  That this assumption is quite unmistakably innate in my organism is itself a discovery ― the result of a learning experience beginning in infancy even before the advent of memory and continuing throughout life.  Even now my felt needs reach out and precede my awareness of them; those needs mindlessly assume they will be met.  I feel hunger first, and then the anticipation of its satisfaction.  Then, in a final step, I know and am able to say: “I am hungry,” and “I am thinking that I will find food in the world.”

It is this spontaneous reaching out that gives detail and meaning to my perceptions; my con­sciousness of an innate first person intentionality reveals itself as an expectation of a perfect correspon­d­ence between my organism and the surrounding physical field.  Concretely realized in the very early nurturing contact with mother and family, I discover I belong intimately and in an effective and satisfying way to the matrix into which I emerged.  Later I come to understand this global complementarity as mediated through separate but coordinated sensory connectors in my biological organism.  I experience light in and through my eyes as my capacity to see; events that vibrate air or water in and through my ability to hear, objects with weight and texture in and through my sense of touch, etc.  This is all part of the field of matter of which I am a part and reveals my body to be a mirror of the external side of the physical field, “the stuff” that surrounds me, matter.

The meaning of my experience of matter.

I can see that “total correspondence with my perceiving organism” accounts for the primordial structure of my most basic first person experience.  I can say without doubt that my interpreta­tion of the meaning of what I contact in the world is totally dependent on what my organism’s physical structure and needs demand from the physical stuff in the world.  That correspon­dence ― between my needs expressed by my organism’s structures and what physically exists in the environment ― determines my continued existence.

One simple need, the need for food, illustrates this interaction perfectly.  The sensory medi­a­tors that interface for the food connection are a clear example of this correspondence.  Identi­fy­ing food depends on my organs of sight which correlate quite narrowly with certain wavelengths of light.  Light will have the par­t­i­cular meaning I assign to it because my eyes make lighted objects intimately familiar to me, so familiar, in fact, that I can see and effectively iden­tify food in the environment.

I know and understand light innately; I cannot define or explain it in any terms other than itself.  If I had different organs of sight, like the fly whose 3,000 to 6,000 simple eyes arrayed within the composite organ on the top of its head, which may resonate with wavelengths of light beyond the red or the violet that constitute my range of vision, I suspect I would “see” some­thing different from what I see now, and it would have a corres­pond­ingly differ­ent meaning for me as I tried to locate and identify food in order to survive as a fly.

I may see things differently from a fly, but what I share with it is my need to survive in a world where patterns of light synchronize with my body’s needs.  My visual apparatus, like the fly’s, determines how I am going to interact with the lighted world other than myself, and what the result of that interaction will be.  It is clearly the specific homogeneity between my self and the objects of perception that allows this to happen.  The meaning of the experience of matter is limited by the organismic sensory connectors  ― my senses ― that interface my needs to the world.

This is true of all aspects of the physical world. I do not have eyes in the back of my head, so I cannot see what is behind me; I cannot walk on water like the skimming beetles whose foot parts are like outriggers; I cannot fly through the air for I have no wings. But I do what I can do because of the specific sameness of my body with what I encounter.  Clearly my species’ body, its structure and range of activities constitutes the specific meaning I impose upon the world, for my world can help me survive only to the degree that my human body corresponds to my world.  All I know of the world is what my body matches and tries to grasp and incorporate for its own survival.

The conatus sese conservandi

From my side of the relationship, the world l live in is exclusively made of matter and  it means everything to me, for it is by it that I, made of matter, survive.  For me surviving, being-here, is to die for. Why?  I don’t know.  I don’t have a rational answer to that question.  It’s not a choice, and I can’t help it.  I want to be here just because I want to be here; the desire is built into me;  I CANNOT NOT WANT it.  And it’s not a mere preference activated in serenity.  It is a passionate violent thirst, a hungry craving that will not be dismissed.  It is organic bedrock.  I’m inclined to say that insofar as I am totally matter and this implacable urge is innate, I assume that it is matter that “needs” to be here and my wanting simply reflects the ground that I am made of. 

Thus the first person experience of my “self” in my “lived world” provides me with a confirmation of what my “natural” worldview has claimed all along.  The word and concept “matter” has become indeterminate enough (through epoché) to discern the essential features of the experience; and for me everything I have is matter, and everything I don’t have ― every­thing I need and reach out for ― is matter.  Without making any claims for its ontological status, phenome­no­logically speaking matter for me is the transcendent and universal condition of my first person experience of being-here.  If there is something other than (different from or more than) matter in this universe, limited as I am to my “lived world,” initially I have no way of knowing it.  The meaning of matter for me, is identified with my survival.  Therefore it is fundamentally existential ― I experience it as inescapably connected to my being-here.

“Matter,” the physical reality around me that impacts my body’s survival, is either the direct and originating energy source of being-here itself, or it is the thoroughly commensurate and transparent first-display (or vicarious agent) of some unknown wellspring which is the unper­ceived source of the the energy of being-here.  If that second possibility should be true (and in any case, it is science that has to determine that), then it means matter is the primordial emanate of the foundational energy of the cosmos.

NOTE: This hypothetical question has had many historical antecedents.  In one of them, the Christian worldview, following the Trinitarian innovations taken at the start of Christianity’s Roman Imperial phase in the fourth century, the primordial emanation ― the analog to Plato’s Demiourgos (“Craftsman”) of the Timaeus ― was called the “Son of God” and identified as Jesus of Nazareth.  Those who would pursue the effort to assimilate a materialist worldview to the traditional Christian imagery, would perhaps be inclined to see matter as the logos, the first-born Son of God, the creative agent playing the role of “Wisdom” of Proverbs 8, Philo’s equivalent of Plato’s Demiourgos, and the Stoics’ logos / fire / energy in which “we live and move and have our being.” The analogy is reinforced by the scientifically confirmed creative role of autonomous material energy.

That means matter is my only (necessary and sufficient) connection to being-here as far as I can see.  It is the matrix in which I live and move and have my being.  There is nothing else that plays that role.  If I want to survive, I must interact suc­cess­fully with the material reality that is my matrix.  If I fail at that endeavor I will die.  The matter of my body will cease to cohere as an organic entity.  But it is not my body that controls what successful means.  It is my lived world.  If I do not find out what, in the lived world, really, factually, objectively, unerringly corresponds to the matter of my body and can sustain its being-here, I will die.  Being-here, that is my ulti­mate, absolute and unsuppressible desideratum, the one and only proper object of my conatus, the exclusive and permanent guarantor/guardian of my self identity, depends totally on that submissive correspondence on my part.  I am subjectively constrained to hew objectively to the outside world.

This can be said to provide an inescapable and undeniable bridge from my first person (interior) experi­ence of matter to an external world that does not depend upon my perceptions for its reality.  Death is the final and ever-present, ever-active arbiter of the correspondence between my organism and the rest of the physical field, my subject and its objects, in which I live and move and have my being.

An imaginary world? An imaginary “self.”

The imagery that when I die I “go somewhere where there is no matter” (traditional and still common in our culture) must also be reduced out of the equation, for it is not compatible with what I experience.  Being a material organism, I do not know what experience I could possibly have in a world where there was no matter.  My survival or its equivalent (my body’s “meaning” to my intending self) depends totally upon the accuracy of the correspondence between the matter of my body and the matter of the world I live in.  Matter is what I am and therefore this material world is where I belong.  I can’t go anywhere else.  My very organism arose symbioti­cally.  My body was formed over eons of geologic time by living matter interacting with earth’s material environment.  We are like lock and key, hand and glove.  There is nowhere else I could go.  If there is another world where I can live as this material organism which I am, it must be made of the selfsame matter and in the same proportions.

Correlatively, one of the assumptions I have to suspend is that my own inner sense of my “self,” which feels to be totally mental and quite separate from my body because it can observe bodily functions and feelings as if they were “other,” is actually “other” than my body.  It is not.  A thorough and repeated examination of this “sense of self” in many and varied circumstances reveals that its very function is body-dependent.  In the various stages and levels of sleep, for instance, I see the imaginary nature of my sense of self with great clarity.  I dream, my identity morphs serially through various “selves,” often from exchanging places with antagonists, who perceive themselves undergoing experiences that upon awakening turn out never to have occurred and the “selves” that authored them equally unreal.  In conditions of illness or intense stress I expe­ri­­ence myself with my ability to judge reality impaired, even at times to the point of tem­p­orarily losing self-focus and becoming confused about my self-identity.  I see tragic situa­tions where serious damage to brain, spinal cord, horm­onal distribution result in signifi­cantly altered or even absent affective, cognitive and identity perceptions that could only be ex­plained by my “sense of self” being dependent on bodily functions.  Finally when the body dies, the self is no longer experienced by others as being-here.  Whether that is an accurate indicator that I, too, will not continue to experience “my self” remains unknown.  No one has ever re­turned to resolve the issue one way or the other.  Since the body no longer inter­faces with the material universe, my own conjecture is that my “experience” also ceases.  This suggests that my “self” was a function (an action or product) of the living body all along.  The living organism had produced a set of images to stand for a profound but inexpressible self-awareness, and then callsed those images its “self.”  It’s a narrative generated to characterize a lifetime of the events and choices of a particular biological organism. 

There is no ”self” apart from the biological organism.  My “self” is something I do, not what I am.  When I die and can no longer do anything, my carefully elaborated “self,” my story, disappears.

There is no “intelligence” apart from the body.  Intelligent awareness pervades the entire body.  This militates against the traditional imagery of a “soul” as a separable entity, made of some­thing different from what makes up the body and performing exclusively mental operations.  My experience challenges that.  For example, my ability to accurately “sense” the speed, dist­ance, weight, density and tactile properties of a moving object ― like a baseball ― that is clearly “other than” my own moving body, indicates that my ability to navigate within my lived-world is resident and functioning in all parts of my body in a coordinated fashion and not just in my mind.  The encounter between “me” (my moving body) and the baseball is precise and “meaningful” without any recollection of a “thought process” guiding the whole procedure.  I am able to achieve the desired result, “catching” the ball, without consciously thinking.  So, just as my “mind” and “body” are one thing, my “sense of self” is not an indication that the “self” is limited to the brain nor, as traditionally believed, that it is due to  the exis­tence of something other than the material body, like a spiritual soul traditionally identified with the mind.

Matter is existence

The utter transcendent universality of matter in our universe ― that everything that exists is matter ― raises the suspicion that “being,” which Plato and the dualists claimed was comprised principally of a kind of invisible stuff along with matter called “spirit,” is really only the one thing I encounter everywhere and in everything ― matter, spirit.

Even within Plato’s lifetime, Aristotle saw clearly that there is no evidence for the independent existence of immaterial ideas as “forms” or “essences,” and that fundamental matter (without form) was not a “thing” but a metaphor for the reality of an apparently infinite “potential” in the physical field of the universe.  Matter, for Aristotle, was a kind of energy.

At the same time, what Plato was calling pre-existent forms (to which he assigned a kind of parallel substance, called spirit) are really only our a posteriori concepts ― generic ideas drawn after-the-fact from the examination of a multitude of similar singular examples.  The concept “horse,” for example, does not reside as an independent spiritual “entity” somewhere, as Plato thought, ready to be utilized by a divine Craftsman who will insert a carbon copy of the “idea” of horse into a heap of formless matter in order to create an individual horse.  There is no “formless matter.” There is only matter in its multitude of forms.  Prior to formed matter there is only the infinite potential of material energy able to take on new and unexpected forms forged by the insistence of the living conatus to be-nere.

“Matter” before it is “formed” is pure potential: an unidentifiable energy; it doesn’t exist as an entity, a thing.  And the concept horse is our human distillation of a multitude of experiences of individ­ual horses.  It Is an idea, but it is our idea, a temporary configuration of the electric and chemical interactions of neurons in the human brain which we use to interface accurately between the subject and object of experi­ence.  There is nothing “substantial” about ideas.  The human organism exists as an entity, but its ideas do not; they are only temporary mental states.  Ideas are not entities.  They are not “things.” They are real, but temporary and do not exist on their own.  In Aristotle’s terms, they are not “substances” they are “accidents.”  They are something we do. And if we stop doing them, like the “self” they stop being-there.

Even DNA as a template that encodes the processes for making horses and “communicates”  them to the molecules that are used for building horses, is itself an a posteriori development of matter, and is totally explainable as the result of matter’s incremental deep-time evolutionary adaptations.  Equine DNA is not an idea or a rational plan; it only becomes an idea in our human minds after we have encountered it in the real world and conceptualize (make an abstract representa­tion of) it.  What brought the first horse into existence was not an idea, it was the insistence on being-here that drove its ancestors evolving a mutating DNA that eventuated in that of the present day horse.  All this appies to human beings mutatis mutandi.

The obvious plausibility of Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s theory immediately entails another. If Plato’s concept of the human form, what has come to be known as the “soul,” was imagined to have a spiritual composition by being a form, an essence which defined and gave purpose to man, then, since ideas are not entities that exist apart from the brains that think them, “ideas” cannot ground the alleged self-subsistent substantiality of the “soul” which Plato imagined pre-existing its entrance into the human body at birth and surviving its decomposition at death.  The very reason for assuming the self-subsistent character of the soul ― that ideas are substantial entities ― has disappeared.

We have to realize there is no direct evidence of the continued existence of the disembodied “soul” after death, so the only source of “knowledge” for claiming such a phenomenon is the reasoning process by which Plato assimilated the human essence or form to an idea; in his view ideas were self-subsistent and resided in a World of Ideas, hence the “soul” which produced ideas was self-subsistent and came from and would return to its true home in that other world.

The fact that Plato’s theory was debunked within his lifetime by his own chosen successor did not in the least deter the Mediterranean world, in large measure, from embracing the notion of the soul as a disembodied spirit that survives the decomposition of the body at death.  The added anomaly that the fledgling Christian movement of the early second century rejected Plato’s theory as contrary to Christian beliefs, similarly, did nothing to prevent the Roman Catholic Church, even before its absorption into the Imperial State machinery, from embracing it as the linchpin of its religious practice: the fulcrum around which all its doctrines and rituals turned.  For “salvation” came to mean only one thing: that the disembodied individual human soul would not suffer the eternal torment it deserved as punishment for its sins and the sin of its primaeval ancestor.

I believe that the concurrence in ancient times between the far-from-proven belief in the immortal, immaterial, separable “soul” and the cultural, moral, social and political benefits of its universal internalization by the variegated populations of the Empire, impelled both Rome and then its Sacred Consort to embrace, promote and dogmatize that belief.  From a philosoph­i­cal / theological theory, it became an indisputed cultural meme, eternal truth.  We are the inheritors of that culture and religion.  We can try to subject it to epoché for our thought ex­peri­ments, but once the roaring of intellect has stopped, in the quiet of night, it will come creeping back.

On Januray 22 the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, died in Hue.

He was a friend of Martin Luther King, Jr. and he came to the U.S. in 1965 after a Buddhist monk in Vietnam burned himself to death protesting the war in Vietnam. It was that sacrificial suffering that turned King against the war. 

It was Tich’s teaching that there is no birth and no death, according to the heart of Buddhist teaching that made the monk’s immolation a sacrifice like Christ’s, and not a simple suicide. Tich taught that our awareness of life is eternal, had no beginning and has no end. Thus he can end with:  

This body is not me. I am not limited by this body. I am life without boundaries. I have never been born,   and I have never died.

Here is the direct quote from Thich Nhat Hahn:

“The Buddha has a very different understanding of our existence. It is the understanding that birth and death are notions. They are not real. The fact that we think they are true makes a powerful illusion that causes our suffering. The Buddha taught that there is no birth; there is no death; there is no coming; there is no going; there is no same; there is no different; there is no permanent self; there is no annihilation. We only think there is. When we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear. It is a great relief. We can enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way.”

This body is not me. I am not limited by this body. I am life without boundaries. I have never been born, And I have never died.

After writing Christmas letters for almost a half century, I am compelled to continue communicating with anyone who will listen, that Christmas is the greatest proof of the existence of God that we have in this world. Last week we attended a live stage play of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” It was maybe the 25^th time I watched “A Christmas Carol” since I was in the fifth grade at Oliver Hazzard Perry School in South Boston, MA at the age of 9, in1938

At 9 I had gotten over a long time ago my belief in the existence of Santa Claus. I was too young to question the existence of God at that time, and watching “A Christmas Carol” being played by my fifth grade classmates, I somehow knew that only someone as powerful as God could turn a miserly Scrooge into a giver of Christmas gooses. The ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future were wonderful stand-ins for the God behind Bethlehem.

 And now in this year of climate collapse, and millions of infections and deaths from covid, thousands of gun wounds and deaths, drought and fires, and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and the “Divided States of America”, where is that God who turned over Scrooge’s hardened heart?

 “Silent night, Holy night, All is calm, all is bright” and the streets and homes, and stores and skyscrapers are lit with the multicolored energy of the universe. Why?

Only you can look for the answer to that question.

I found one answer last week during a zoom meditation on famous paintings of the Nativity. The one that struck me was on the Annunciation by Roscoe Tanner (1898), from the Phila. Museum of Art. It showed Mary as a 16 year old sitting up in bed while the angel, as a blinding pillar of light, appears to her. “ Thou shalt conceive.” What is Mary thinking?

I like to think Mary is a Jewish girl of deep faith who has experienced God in her own heart, and now hears that God chooses to take flesh in her and bring Peace to Men of Good Will.   Men (and women) of Good Will, please listen.

Merry Christmas and a Happier New Year than this one.

The conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, wrote a magnificent article in the New York Times Sunday Review, “How to Think Your Way Into Religious Belief,” in which he answered the atheist Daniel Dennett’s book, “Breaking the Spell”. Douthat argues against Dennett’s statement that religion prevents believers from seeing the world clearly. Douthat masterfully replies that maybe atheism prevents non-believers from seeing the world clearly. I love the very long article Douthat writes in which he gives a two thousand year argument for the existence of God. But I had to reply to Ross Douthat as follows:

I am a 92 year old priest/ psychotherapist who admires Ross Douthat’s constant and consistent scholarship.  But at my age, I no longer try to use intellectual arguments about God, faith, or religion. I have painfully traveled the continuum from theism to atheism, to pantheism, to pan-entheism. Panentheism means finding your bodily center in the Ground of Being, as described by Paul Tillich. Or as Tillich himself says: “finding the God above the God of theism” . Or in a material way I would say we need to find the God BELOW the God of theism.

I have never been able to give an intellectual argument for the existence of God.  I have only found God in my heart and especially in my guts through experience, especially the experience of grace. Back in the 40’s,  the holocaust survivor Franz Werfel’s “Song of Bernadette” began with “For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary, and for those who do not believe in God, no explanation is possible.”  I would say now “for those who have experienced grace and love inside themselves, no explanation of God is necessary, and for those who haven’t, no explanation is possible.”  Many have  experienced grace or love, but never stopped long enough to feel it or become aware of it.

As the song says: “You’re nobody until somebody loves You,  so go and find somebody to love.” Maybe even an animal. I know my dog is more in  touch with unconditional Love than many people. He’s an enthusiast. I remember the English author Monsignor Knox saying that enthusiasm comes from “en-theos”, being in God. There you have it. Being in God/ Love/Grace, instead of talking about Him/Her/It.

In Chapter 18, of Entering Eternity with Ease, I talked about the new age interpretation of St. Augustine’s famous prayer: “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts will never rest until they rest in thee.” For 1600 years, millions of Christians have taken this prayer as an infallible formula for peace of heart in both time and eternity. But the problem is, today in the 21^st Century, our ideas about who this God is who has made us for himself, have changed so radically, that we are at a loss to understand what that prayer concretely means today. Who IS this God who made us? WHAT is this God, and HOW did he make us?  

            St. Augustine spent the first 30 years of his life as a Manichean. This was a sect that believed that there were two Gods:  The spiritual God of goodness, and the material God of badness, or evil. Augustine had inherited the Greek philosophers’ disagreements over matter and form. Many believed that only matter existed, while many believed that only form existed. By form, the Greeks meant the concept, or idea, of a thing. The materialists thought that only matter existed, and contained its own form as part of its physical existence. The idealists, especially the strict followers of Plato, did not believe in the physical existence of matter. They believed that everything existed only in the mind as an idea, a concept, a form. The Christian Scientists who follow Mary Baker Eddy are idealist, although why they call themselves scientists is lost on me, because scientists are the first ones to accept the reality of matter as opposed to idea.

            Now in Augustine’s day, the Manicheans tried to solve the problem of matter and form by postulating two Gods: the material God and the spiritual God. Augustine seems to have finally settled on the spiritual God, after, of course, “sewing his wild oats,” by having a child out of wedlock with a concubine. He named the child “Deodatus”, that is, “given by God.”  Guess which God he was named after?  Finally, Augustine became a Christian, and embraced, presumably, the spiritual God. Although he spent a couple of years praying: “God, make me pure, but not yet.” Eventually, Augustine seems to have totally rejected the material God, and wholly embraced the spiritual God, when he made his famous quote that God had created us with an emptiness that only He could fill. 

            As the French standard of the seventies sang: “What now my love, now that it’s over. How can I live for another day? “Yes, that infinite emptiness is inside of each of us, and it can only be filled by some infinitely higher power.  Where is that God of infinite fulfillment today in this screwed up century? The answer to these questions is in Chapter 11 under “The Experience of Limitless Belonging.” That is where I draw upon some of the greatest meditation/mindfulness teachers of today.

            I sense that many in America today are becoming overwhelmed by the infections and deaths that keep rising every day, along with the stalled economy which is hurting the most vulnerable in our society the most. Not to mention millions of parents and grandparents who are frightened to death of the loss of a successful continuing education for their children. 

            Thus we are slipping into the longest and hardest of the five stages of mourning: depression. Many do not seem to realize that depression is a serious disease.  It is not just a mental illness, but is what we call psychosomatic, that is, it involves both the psych and the body. Depression can lead to death or disability. This is the real danger of the perfect storm we find ourselves in today. As a psychotherapist for 49 years, I have to say that I have never seen anyone come out of depression by using anti-depressant drugs. What I have seen, however, is people coming out of depression through  mindfulness and meditation. It is up to each of us.

The Poet Marianne Moore on Life and Eternity

My dear friend, Patricia Willis, was Director of the Marianne Moore  Library at Yale University, and sent me this poem by Moore to add to the collection of great poets on this ultimate of subjects.

“Moore didn’t much address life/death/eternity except when she wrote about war. The following is a poem written during World War II. She was far from a pacifist; her brother, John Warner Moore, was a Presbyterian Navy chaplain stationed at Pearl Harbor just before the destruction there and then assigned as Pacific Fleet Chaplain, serving aboard Admiral Nimitz ship. So, this is not what you were looking for but I thought I’d send it anyway.”

In Distrust of Merits

Strengthened to live, strengthened to die for

medals and positioned victories?

They’re fighting, fighting the blind

man who thinks he sees,—

who cannot see that the enslaver is

enslaved; the hater, harmed. O shining O

firm star, O tumultuous

ocean lashed till small things go

as they will, the mountainous

wave makes us who look, know

depth. Lost at sea before they fought! O

star of David, star of Bethlehem,

O black imperial lion

of the Lord-emblem

of a risen world—be joined at last, be

joined. There is hate’s crown beneath which all is

death; there’s love’s without which none

is king; the blessed deeds bless

the halo. As contagion

of sickness makes sickness,

contagion of trust can make trust. They’re

fighting in deserts and caves, one by

one, in battalions and squadrons;

they’re fighting that I

may yet recover from the disease, My

Self; some have it lightly; some will die. ‘Man’s

wolf to man’ and we devour

ourselves. The enemy could not

have made a greater breach in our

defenses. One pilot-

ing a blind man can escape him, but

Job disenheartened by false comfort knew

that nothing can be so defeating

as a blind man who

can see. O alive who are dead, who are

proud not to see, O small dust of the earth

that walks so arrogantly,

trust begets power and faith is

an affectionate thing. We

vow, we make this promise

to the fighting—it’s a promise—’We’ll

never hate black, white, red, yellow, Jew,

Gentile, Untouchable.’ We are

not competent to

make our vows. With set jaw they are fighting,

fighting, fighting,—some we love whom we know,

some we love but know not—that

hearts may feel and not be numb.

It cures me; or I am what

I can’t believe in? Some

in snow, some on crags, some in quicksands,

little by little, much by much, they

are fighting fighting that where

there was death there may

be life. ‘When a man is prey to anger,

he is moved by outside things; when he holds

his ground in patience patience

patience, that is action or

beauty,’ the soldier’s defense

and hardest armor for

the fight. The world’s an orphans’ home. Shall

we never have peace without sorrow?

without pleas of the dying for

help that won’t come? O

quiet form upon the dust, I cannot

look and yet I must. If these great patient

dyings-all these agonies

and wound bearings and bloodshed—

can teach us how to live, these

dyings were not wasted.

Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron

iron is iron till it is rust.

There never was a war that was

not inward; I must

fight till I have conquered in myself what

causes war, but I would not believe it.

I inwardly did nothing.

O Iscariot-like crime!

Beauty is everlasting

and dust is for a time.

For the past two years, one of my friends, Charlie Wilkinson, of Evanston, IL, has suffered the excruciating pain of his wife of 50 years, slowly slipping away into dementia. On this Mother’s Day, he and his children and grandchildren are facing the gut-wrenching pain of wishing a Happy Mother’s Day to a beautiful mother/grandmother who no longer recognizes them.

Charlie long ago introduced us to John O’Donohue, an Irish poet, who wrote “Anam Cara” which is Gaelic for “dear soul.” Charlie himself is a poet and a dear soul to all of us, and in his own inimitable voice he sends out a poem of grief and lament about Kathy, dear soul, his wife.

Dementia:

These Long, Sad Days

These long, sad days twist through the heart of me,

Endless, they seem, even early on.

My breathing measures minutes as I see

The embers of a mind that fade to gone.

Her eyes once bright with life are dull as mist,

Her memories elusive like her smile,

Her mouth a line of lips so often kissed

Holds tight to feelings, all the while

She sits in silence through each day

Reading, it seems; it’s difficult to know;

Her thoughts all inward and so far away

Unreachable, like stars that lost their glow.

There must be meaning somewhere in her dying.

But even while believing that, I’m still left crying.

cw/2021

Charlie’s favorite poet John O’Donohue once said that “poetry is a language against which there is no defense.” That is why my response may be a plea against which I have no defense:

Charlie, Your ‘cris de coeur’ is echoing in our hearts.

It is the language of languishing.

It is about birth and death

About knowing and not knowing

About remembering and forgetting

About Resurrection and Eternal Life

About always was, and forever will be.

O my God, our prayer can only be today

‘the lips we so often kissed in song,

We will forever kiss in silence.’

This Mother’s Day we kiss in silence the lips of mothers gone in dementia, and all mothers gone for many years into that silence of Eternal Life. May all of us rest in peace. Amen

Easter Sunday, April 4, 2021

This is the season of death and resurrection.

Wednesday, the man next door killed himself. His wife was taking a shower, so he took an old rifle his grandfather from Asturias, Spain had left him, went out into the driveway and shot himself.

Nine months ago, when I finished “Entering Eternity With Ease,” I brought a copy next door and we sat down for an hour’s conversation with husband and wife. I tried to explain how suicide had gone up exponentially because people were severely depressed by the covid lockdown, and I wrote the book to console both victims and survivors that life is meant to be joy-filled, and not anxious and depressive. I emphasized Kubler-Ross’s stages of dying and how we had to go through depression to finally accept death, and we could end up with joy.

Then the man next door immediately blurted out, “I often want to kill myself.” When I asked him why he said that life was too painful for him. I already knew that he had a severe heart condition, and was depressed by the covid lockdown which was now about five months into our community life. I have no idea if he ever read it, but Wednesday when his wife came stumbling into our house screaming that he killed himself, and blood was all over him, she kept repeating, “He promised me that he would not kill himself, and he waited till I was in the shower to go out and do it.”

To be or not to be, that is the question. To live or to die, that is also the question. Death or resurrection, that is the question. Or is it?

To be AND not to be- maybe that’s the question. To live AND to die-could that be the question? To die and also to rise from the dead, maybe that’s an answer.

Evolution tells us that every atom in our body was born 13 billion years ago in the big bang. Biology tells us that every atom in our body is replaced by other atoms at least once a hear. Science also tells us that all the atoms are eternal and go on forever throughout the universe. 13 billion years of time up till now are but a drop in the ocean of eternity/forever.

That is why I believe in a God, a higher power, who is the Soul of this mystery. As a young man, I used to joke that to believe in God is to believe that there is someone out there who isn’t stupid. (That is why I loved it when President Obama said that international relations consist in not doing anything stupid. Now that is Godlike!)

This super-intelligent ISNESS,  this infinite, transcendent power which energizes the universe is symbolized by Jesus on the Cross. The Crucifixion symbolizes for me the vertical and the horizontal, the temporal and the eternal, the impermanent and the permanent, both death and resurrection at the same time.

Good Friday was not called Bad Friday by the first followers of Jesus because somehow they intuited that out of evil comes good, out of death comes eternal life. To die is horrible. To die is unjust. To die is not right. To die is hopeless, heartless, loveless. But for Jesus and his followers, death was the door to divinity. No matter what you may believe about the true nature of Jesus, you have to admit that Jesus is the most admired person in the history of the planet, despite what the Beatles said about themselves being more famous than Jesus. (Hopefully, in jest.)

The Christ of the Resurrection has been called by Father Richard Rohr “The Universal Christ” with the subtitle: “Another Name for Everything.” The universe, according to Rohr is a “Christ-Soaked Universe.” I would say that because of the Risen Christ, every atom in the universe is finally tinged with divinity. So, we have all been graced as infinity incarnate as symbolized by Christ.

This is also true of the man next door, who in despair could no longer bear the existential pain of his humanness. Now he is alive in eternal reality.  Amen

There Is No Self – Nothingness Becomes Wholeness

“Buddha is right – there is no self – but he is not helping people, poor people, because they cannot figure out all the implications of the statement.

“I say to you: You don’t have a self because you are part of a great self, the whole. You cannot have any separate, private, self of your own. This takes away the negativity, and this does not give you the positive desire for becoming more and more egoistic. It avoids both the extremes and finds a new approach: The universe is, I am not. And whatever happens and appears to be in me, as me, is simply universal.” Osho

The Way of Unknowing

Descriptions of the “dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic John of the Cross (1542–1591) have become the marker by which many Christians measure their own experience of unknowing. He fits an entire life spent exploring God’s mystery into memorable poetry, and even dares to call unknowing “an ecstasy”! Here are several stanzas from his poem “Stanzas Concerning an Ecstasy Experienced in High Contemplation”:

1. I entered into unknowing, Yet when I saw myself there

Without knowing where I was. I understood great things;

I shall not say what I felt,  For I remained in unknowing

Transcending all knowledge.

4. He who truly arrives there,  Cuts free from himself;

All that he knew before,  Now seems worthless,

And his knowledge so , that he is left in unknowing

Transcending all knowledge.

6. The knowledge in unknowing,  Is so overwhelming

That wise men disputing,  Can never overthrow it,

For their knowledge does not reach To the understanding of not-

understanding,

Transcending all knowledge. [1] 

John’s poetry is exquisite in its humility—knowing that he does not know, can never know, and doesn’t even need to know! He goes so far as to call this dark night “a work of His mercy, / To leave one without understanding.” [2] John’s teaching contains paradoxes that are difficult to absorb, but modern readers have the good fortune of many good translations, including that of Mirabai Starr. Like the other friends whose work I have shared this week, Mirabai knows the via negativa, the way of unknowing, personally and intimately, and describes what happens between the soul and God in the “dark night:”

The soul in the dark night cannot, by definition, understand what is happening to her. Accustomed to feeling and conceiving of the Beloved in her own way, she does not realize that the darkness is a blessing. She perceives God’s gentle touch as an unbearable burden. She feels miserable and unworthy, convinced that God has abandoned her, afraid she may herself be turning against him. In her despair, the soul does not recognize that God is teaching her in a secret way now, a way with which the faculties of sense and reason cannot interfere.

At the same time that the soul in the night of spirit becomes paralyzed in spiritual practice, her love-longing for God begins to intensify. In the stillness left behind by its broken-open senses and intellect, a quality of abundance starts to grow inside the emptied soul. It turns out that the Beloved is longing for union with the lover as fervently as she has been yearning for him. . . . God will whisper to the soul in the depth of darkness and guide it through the wilderness of the Unknown until it is annihilated in the flames of perfect love [3]

---

[1] John of the Cross, “Stanzas Concerning an Ecstasy Experienced in High Contemplation,” The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Institute of Carmelite Studies: 1979), 718–719.

[2] John of the Cross, Collected Works, 719.

[3] Mirabai Starr, introduction to Dark Night of the Soul, by John of the Cross, trans. Mirabai Starr (Riverhead Books: 2002), 20. [Richard Rohr: The best translation in my opinion.]

Last Sunday the NY Times published an article by Pope Francis which is Linked below:

It is so good that I would like to summarize the high points here. Pope Francis points out that the way we are responding to the Corona Pandemic reveals what is in our hearts. He says:

“In this past year of change, my mind and heart have overflowed with people. People I think of and pray for, and sometimes cry with, people with names and faces, people who died without saying goodbye to those they loved, families in difficulty, even going hungry, because there’s no work. 

“These are moments in life that can be ripe for change and conversion. Each of us has had our own “stoppage,” or if we haven’t yet, we will someday: illness, the failure of a marriage or a business, some great disappointment or betrayal. As in the Covid-19 lockdown, those moments generate a tension, a crisis that reveals what is in our hearts.”

“What is revealed is what needs to change: our lack of internal freedom, the idols we have been serving, the ideologies we have tried to live by, the relationships we have neglected.” 

Francis goes on to talk about the illness that almost killed him when he was 21, and they had to remove part of his lung. He named too nuns, now deceased, who saved his life by nursing that went beyond what the doctors could do for him.

Francis mentioned all the doctors, nurses, and other health care workers who gave their lives to treat the sick. ” their choice testified to a belief: that it is better to live a shorter life serving others than a longer one resisting that call.”  ” They are the saints next door, who have awakened something important in our hearts.”  ” They are the antibodies to the virus of indifference. They remind us that our lives are a gift and we grow by giving of ourselves, not preserving ourselves but losing ourselves in service.”

It is impossible for me to adequately summarize Pope Francis’s beautiful words. They are so rich, and full of spiritual meditation that you have to read them yourself. I’ll just close with the last paragraph of Pope Francis:

“To come out of this crisis better, we have to recover the knowledge that as a people we have a shared destination. The pandemic has reminded us that no one is saved alone. What ties us to one another is what we commonly call solidarity. Solidarity is more than acts of generosity, important as they are; it is the call to embrace the reality that we are bound by bonds of reciprocity. On this solid foundation we can build a better, different, human future.”

As they say in Italian: “Cosi sia,” Let it be. Amen.