In time of permawar

So you are a reader, a writer, in this, the time of the permawar, searching, among other things, for empathy, for transcendence, for encounters that need not divide us into clans, for stories that can be told around a campfire generous enough for 7 billion, stories that transcend divisions, question the self and the boundaries of groups, stories that are a shared endeavour not at the level of the tribe, but of the human, that remind us we are not adversaries, we are in it together, the great mass murderer, Death, has us all in its sights, and we would do well not to allow ourselves willingly to be its instruments, but instead to recognise one another with compassion, not as predatory cannibals, but as meals for the same shark, each with a limited, precious time to abide, a time that deserves our respect and our wonder, a time that is a story, each of us a story, each of them a story, and each of these other stories, quite possibly, just as unique, just as frightened, as tiny, as vast, as made up as our own.

Mohsin Hamid


Image via here

'Being wrong can be a wonderful thing'

Spiritual bravery is the willingness to go beyond what is traditionally perceived as “right| or “wrong” so as to discern the correct action at each moment…It means to live each moment by balancing head, heart and hand not by the day-to-day dogma that keeps you “in the right’, but being wiling to take the risk with each step that you may be wrong. Being wrong can be a wonderful thing. It’s learning. It’s growth. It is the kind of vulnerability that opens up the space of solidarity. It’s connection

Gehan Macleod of GalGael quoted by Alastair McIntosh and Matt Carmichael in Spiritual Activism

Flowing waters and blowing winds

God...showed me a hundred thousand many coloured flowers. Then He open up the parts of the flowers and showed me a hundred thousand green herbs and flowing waters and blowing winds, and He opened up the winds and showed me a hundred thousand freshnesses.

Baha Walad, quoted in Sufism: A Short Introduction by William Chittick (2000)

Image: Fay Godwin

Songs of green wonder

Groovy tracks from the 1100s

O Nobilissima Viridatas by Hildegard of Bingen (listen here)  translates from Latin as follows:

O most noble greening power,
rooted in the sun,
who shine in dazzling serenity in a sphere
that no earthly excellence can comprehend.
You are enclosed
in the embrace of divine mysteries.
You blush like the dawn,
and burn like a flame of the sun.

Shen Khar Venakhi by Demetrius I (listen here) translates from the Georgian as follows:

You are a vineyard newly blossomed
Young, beautiful, growing in Eden,
(A fragrant poplar sapling in Paradise.)
(May God adorn you. No one is more worthy of praise.)
You yourself are the sun, shining brilliantly.

Image via wiki

'Core features of spiritual experience'

According to one account, spiritual experience across history and culture has these core features: 

• A degree of aliveness and intensity that makes ‘normal experience’ seem vapid and attenuated. 

• A sense of belonging and connectedness, of being part of a larger whole, of being naturally ‘at home’, that highlights a common background feeling of loneliness or alienation in normal experience. 

• A sense of caring and compassion towards other people in general, and even aspects of nature and the environment, that makes their well-being matter in a non-possessive way, and compared to which normal experience seems apathetic or of less meaning. 

• A feeling of depth; of calm connectedness and open involvement with mystery and uncertainty without any insecurity, compared with a rather anxious dogmatism – a need to feel right or certain – that attends normal experience. 

• A feeling of ease and lightness, of peace, acceptance and harmony, that contrasts with a background sense of agitation, restlessness or unsatisfactoriness that seems often to accompany normal experience.

from Science and Spirituality: ‘Effing the Ineffable’ by Guy Claxton (2013) quoted in Spiritualise by Jonathan Rowson, RSA (2014), which also quotes Oliver Robinson:

Science and spirituality are streams of culture with a common source in the progressive, rebellious ethos of modernity. They are both premised on the values of exploration, questioning, continued innovation, and of never-ending search.

Photo: Douglas Griffin

'In this place the world is revealed to you'

She found a most precious necklace under her garment; and as she gazed closely at it, it seemed to spread such a blaze of light that it filled all Britain with its gracious splendour. [1] 

In this same time our Lord shewed to me a ghostly sight of his homely loveing. He shewed a littil thing the quantitye of an hesil nutt in the palme of my hand, and it was as round as a balle. I lokid there upon with eye of my understondyng and thowte, What may this be? And it was generally answered thus: It is all that is made. [2] 

What does it feel like to be dormant for a thousand years? Perhaps it feels like being dormant for a million years. Or for the twinkling of an eye...[3]

References:
[1] Breguswith's dream, Bede (7th Century)
[2] Julian of Norwich (1342–1416)
[3] Things That Are by Amy Leach (2012)

Photo: at Bradwell Shell Bank by author

The cosmos seen as a bubble

Moving through this crowded space, the pilgrim enters into the underlying “emptiness” — really a kind of infinite spaciousness—that is the stuff of Tibetan Buddhist reality. It may be strange to think that a universe so densely populated is actually, in some profound sense, empty. Judging by the literary sources we have available, to take this spaciousness into oneself, momentarily clearing heart and mind of the detritus that normally clogs our perceptions, provides a sense of vast psychic relief. The seemingly empty space is, however, a highly active arena within which our minds weave the web that we take to be the world—a world filled with objects such as Maitreya’s towers and manifold creatures and, of course, these same Buddhas and Bodhisattvas continuously emerging out of empty space and dissolving back into it.

— David Shulman

The description in the Gaṇḍa-vyūha of Sudhana's vision of the towers of Maitreya could almost be from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities:

He saw the tower immensely vast and wide, hundreds of thousands of leagues wide, as measureless as the sky, as vast as all of space, adorned with countless attributes; countless canopies, banners, pennants, jewels, garlands of pearls and gems, moons and half-moons, censers giving off fragrant fumes, showers of gold dust….Also, inside the great tower he saw hundreds of thousands of other towers similarly arrayed; he saw those towers as infinitely vast as space, evenly arrayed in all directions, yet these towers were not mixed up with one another, being each mutually distinct, while appearing reflected in each and every object of all the other towers.

View of the Tabo monastery by Christian Luczanits

A taxonomy of transcendence

Russell Brand [has] moved... from the downward ego-transcendence of drug addiction, to the false transcendence of celebrity, to the perennialist transcendence of Transcendental Meditation, and now to a sort of spiritual version of historical materialist transcendence. 

A young Jihadist, by contrast, may move from traditional religious transcendence towards the downward transcendence of extreme violence, mixed with the millenarial utopianism of historical materialist transcendence.

from The Varieties of Transcendent Experience by Jules Evans

Image: Gesture dance by Oskar Schlemmer (1922)

"A world in which everything matters"

I noticed something about Angelico’s paintings that I hadn’t before. It had to do with the way his figures used their hands. His is a vision of the world as it might appear through the eyes of a compassionate God: a world in which everything has existential value and nothing is without meaning. What makes his paintings so moving is that the people in them share that vision. You see this in the way they reach out for one other, and touch everything gently, with infinite care, as though it were priceless. With every touch they seem to affirm the sacredness of the world. Henry James had understood this from the start: ‘No later painter,’ he wrote in Italian Hours, ‘learned to render with deeper force than Fra Angelico the one state of the spirit he could conceive – a passionate pious tenderness … his conception of human life was a perpetual sense of sacredly loving and being loved.’ 

...It struck me that this is what faith is – not a set of propositions you hold to be true, or a set of rules you follow, but an atmosphere you live in, that changes your experience of the world, your sense of what and how things are.

—  Pelagia Horgan

Image: detail of Fra Angelico's The Last Judgement (1425-30)

Luminous consciousness, pure awareness…

[In Tibetan Buddhist belief] “subtle consciousness” …isn’t an individual consciousness: it’s not an ordinary “me” or “I” consciousness. It’s a sheer luminous and knowing awareness beyond any sensory or mental content. It’s rarely seen by the ordinary mind, except occasionally in special dreams, intense meditation, and at the very moment of death, when one’s ordinary “I” or “me” consciousness fall apart. It’s the foundation for every other type of consciousness, and it’s believed to be independent of the brain. [Western] neuroscience can’t conceive of such a possibility, while for Tibetan Buddhists it’s unthinkable to dismiss their accumulated experience testifying to the reality of this primary consciousness.

— from Waking, Dreaming Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy by Evan Thompson (2014)

Image: dead oaks (detail). Blenheim estate, Oxfordshire, November 2014 by author

"Surfing for the sublime"

Volunteers for Isis are surfing for the sublime and all that is lacking in the jaded, tired world of democratic liberalism, especially on the margins where Europe’s immigrants mostly live. Many are just “vacationers” for jihad, going to Syria over school breaks or holidays for the thrill of adventure and a semblance of glory. The beheadings are doing what the images of the collapsing twin towers did for al-Qaida, turning terror into a display of triumph over and through death and destruction. In Burke’s sense, a display of the sublime. As philosopher Javier Gomá Lanzón recently mused: is this sense of the sublime part of Isis’s attraction? Is the west’s failing its cynicism about a visceral rather than purely intellectual quest for meaning?

-- from Jihad's Fatal Attraction by Scott Atran

Update 15 Jan 2015: interview with Atran in Nature.