The Hereafter Here

We have a language for describing common human experience. When I say the words "happy", or "sad", or "peaceful", or "suspicious", you feel like you know exactly what that feels like without ever having been inside my head. By virtue of being human, you know what these feel like.

Religious experience is different from that. For starters, not everyone even has religious experiences. Some have them so rarely that they count them as anomalous malfunctions of the otherwise smoothly operating mind. Others might have them but not recognize them as such. So you may say, there aren't words for that experience because it is uncommon. It is unclear to some extent what experience the terms "religious experience" might refer to, or it might refer to many different things.

It is much more than that, however. No matter how much religious experience is part of your life, every time it is to some extent new. When something is completely new, there is no possibility that language already exists for it, since the event is prior to finding words for the event. An event has to be common, identifiable and reproducible, before there can be words for it.

Think about the most significant conversation you ever had, with the most interesting person you ever met. Did you feel like new worlds were continually unfolding before you? Interacting with God is a continual unfolding, and unlike with people, there is never a point at which there is no more to unfold. The revelation constantly regenerates, it is always new. Even if the experience were to last an hour, a day, 100 years, or 1000 kalpas, it would be continually new, because its source is inexhaustible. It's source is also outside time, so it is not that it is new in time and later it would not be new. It is new inherently, although all religious experience shares its source and so they all have the same subject, as it were. But these are all words. The loved one looks into the eyes of his beloved, and time stops. How much more, when the beloved is God?

I often speak of the world as a trap we have to escape from, and so my focus is often on not coming back. Not reincarnating here. And I do think that is important, but how could we achieve that if not by experiencing God here and now? So the distinction between hereafter and here are not as absolute as we might think they are. We have to already be walking the path out of the World while we are in it, in order to keep walking it after.

Clarification

You may notice that I don't have comments enabled on my blog. That is not because I don't want to hear from my real readers, my proper readers, I think that would be lovely. Unfortunately, since my real readers are a miniscule minority of the human population, I think that my comments are unlikely to be used for that purpose, so I have turned them off.

I thought I sort of covered this in a previous blog post, but maybe not, so I am going to clarify. I am not interested in debating anyone or converting anyone to my point of view. And unless you are one of that miniscule minority, I am frankly not interested in what you have to say about what I write. I have heard those words my whole life. It speaks with many voices, but always says the same thing. I hear its droning all day long.

Would that there were someone who would speak to me with other voices, I would cherish that. But since there is not, I will be that other voice for you, my real reader.






Consider me a book on your bookshelf. If you want to read the book, you pick it up and read it. If you don't want to read it, it stays on the shelf, or in the trash bin. You don't argue with the book, you read it or not. Debate is overrated.

The difference between this blog and a book is, book publishers have to publish books that they believe will be read by enough people to cover the costs of publication and give them a profit. In my case, if only one person believes that what I wrote here has value to them, that is sufficient reason for me to continue writing it. I am writing it for you, that one person, or two. For everyone else, I can almost guarantee that they won't like what I am writing, because it was not written for them. I don't say they need to hear what I am saying, it is their choice to make. As it is my choice not to bother to debate them.

Meno's Loop

Help is available.

"Let me help". A hundred years or so from now, I believe,
a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme.
He'll recommend those three words even over "I love you."

-Star Trek TOS, City on the Edge of Forever

In Plato's dialogue Meno, Plato's old teacher Socrates is challenged by Meno with what has become known as the sophistic paradox, or the paradox of knowledge:

Meno: And how are you going to search for [the nature of virtue] when you don't know at all what it is, Socrates? Which of all the things you don't know will you set up as target for your search? And even if you actually come across it, how will you know that it is that thing which you don't know?

Meno is saying that you have to know about virtue already in order to discover virtue. If you don't know anything about it, you won't recognize it even if you are staring it in the face. Conversely, if you already know about it, you don't need to find out about it. This is called the Paradox of Knowledge.

In response, Plato (or Socrates) develops his concept of anamnesis. He says that individuals are reincarnated, but before they come back to the world (and this is part of the larger Greek mythology), they are somehow compelled to forget what they have learned. In Greek mythology, souls drink from the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, before they return to this world. So for Plato/Socrates, learning is not so much the acquisition of new knowledge, as the remembering of knowledge you already have in some sense, but forgot.

While Plato might have a point, it begs the question of how the knowledge ever got into anyone's head to begin with. At some point, someone has to know something they never knew before, and that no past life of theirs ever knew either. Of course, Meno's paradox is a false dichotomy. We can know enough to know that we don't know as much as we would like about something, and we go seek that knowledge from someone who does know more. Happens all the time.

And yet, in a larger sense we can very easily get stuck in Meno's paradox. We know what we know, and what we know shapes what we can know. Certainly, people willfully choose only to believe what they want to believe; only learn what they already think they know. Meno's Loop, as I would like to call it, threatens to enclose everyone.

In spiritual matters, the only way to break Meno's Loop is to realize that you don't know what you need to know. That you need help. You have to realize that you don't have the answer, and you have to realize that on your own you will never have the answer.

You have to realize that you yourself don't have the resources that you need, and open yourself to help from above. The information I am speaking of is not information from this world. Information from this world can help a great deal, and people can help (and also hinder), but ultimately we need information from God or God's agents (angels) or something of that nature. We need help. We need to surrender to the fact that we need information that we ourselves cannot get to alone.

How do we ask for that help? In a way, the Christians have something to teach us in that regard:

"Dear God, I am a sinner. I have tried to run my own life and I have failed.
I have tried being in control of my life and I only screwed it up.
I turn my life over to you."

This kind of statement is very common in Christian circles, and it expresses a real truth. A truth that Christians themselves far too often fail to heed. As long as your greatest good is your own self, you will always believe what the Self wants you to believe, and there will be no room for God's truth. You will be too full of your own truth, to see the truth. You have to irrevocably give up on the idea that you can save yourself by your own unaided efforts, from the fate you are in. You have to surrender yourself to something higher. You have to find a God outside of your default god, which is the Self. Otherwise you will be thoroughly trapped in Meno's Loop.

After that, you can get help. Knowledge from outside yourself, knowledge from outside this world. Knowledge to one day free yourself from the trap of this world.

I don't know exactly how that help works. What I do know, is that there is help.

Who is God? Why are we here?

God is absolutely, unconquerably, supernally, good, true, beautiful and loving.

Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon;
and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated
and there was no longer any place for them in heaven.
-Book of Revelation

What is God, to us? While a lot of people will deny this, God is everything that makes existence in this place remotely meaningful. God is not limited to being that, he is not only that which gives us meaning, but without God you might as well exchange the Sun for a black hole. God is all meaning, all good, all truth, all real beauty (beauty in itself not beauty of appearance), all love. God is that which endows meaning to existence, without which we are merely absurd monsters, or machines without a valid function. A reality without God would be a reality that morally ought not to exist. It would be suffering without purpose, a cosmic mistake. God is radiantly, absolutely, superlatively without shadow, without evil, without lies, without wrath. God is perfectly absolutely good. God does not get mad, God does not hate, God does not judge, God does not strike anyone down or cause any bad to happen to any being. We do that.

And yet the three major Abrahamic religions portray a God that is implicated in some pretty seriously heavy shit. First off, he is directly responsible for creating this world, a place full of horror, fear, death and suffering. He wiped out the vast majority of the human race in a flood, making God directly responsible for one of the most appalling genocides in human history. He commanded Moses and his successor Joshua to perpetrate what can only be described as crimes against humanity, including the murder of defenseless women and the rape of girl children. Moses bears more resemblance to Pol Pot than to a prophet. The Abrahamic God supposedly smites people pretty regularly. Last but not least, there is hell. A place where the Abrahamic God demonstrates His extreme vindictiveness. Even the Inquisition only tortured people over a limited time period. The Abrahamic God does much better: you can be tortured f o r e v e r. This in itself is proof enough that the spoiled monster that is the Abrahamic God is not worthy of being called God. Abraham's god may very well be the chief of all devils, but he is not God.

What all religions have to address in one form or another, is why the perfectly good God allows this extremely messed up world. The Abrahamic religions only give lip service to this concern: "why is it this way? You did it." Which is to say, Adam and Eve did it, but God holds you responsible. It is like a parent with an untidy child saying, "it's your mess junior, clean it up!" Except of course this mess is on a planetary scale, committed by 2 illiterate naked people who would not have been able to write their own names, had paper and pencil even existed. Yet we are all somehow responsible. How members of Abrahamic religions can even believe that there was an Adam and Eve in this day and age is beyond me, and yet their explanation for why God allows suffering absolutely hinges on it.

Buddhism doesn't even touch this issue at all. Nowhere does the Buddha speculate on why existence is suffering. He doesn't even look at the problem. How did things get so screwed up to begin with? He just took it as a given that things suck, and went on from there. As with everything, Buddhism is very practical and analgesic in focus: it only cares about making the pain go away, not why it is there. Why the world is full of suffering was never in the scope of its interest.

And make no mistake, this world doesn't just have some random suffering here and there. It runs off of suffering. Suffering is part of the operating system of existence, the screaming gasoline in the engine of Life. Not just suffering of human beings, but of all creatures capable of feeling pain.

I think this world exists in the way that it does, because the creation of something extremely important and good created the possibility for it existing, and that thing was so very important that it was worth allowing a world full of suffering to exist, in order that this wonderful thing would exist. What was that thing that was so important that its existence took precedence over the existence of all the suffering in this world?
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Souls.
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An automaton has no soul. It cannot make its own decisions. You cannot love it, nor can it ever really love you. A soul on the other hand is sort of like a micro-god, a tiny piece of God. With souls comes a terrible possibility though, the possibility that you would go your own way. The possibility that you would be god to yourself, instead of loving the real God.

The first ensouled being that went its own way, might not have been a human being. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, there is a war in heaven and some of the angels went their own way (became god to themselves) and others didn't. Curiously, there is mentioned very little connection between the fall of the angels and the fall of Man, as if they were unrelated facts. The Serpent in the Garden of Eden was never referred to as other than just that; a snake, not a fallen angel. To the Gnostics, these fallen angels (Archons) are directly responsible for the existence of the Creation. The chief Archon, called the Demiurge, created the World which we subsequently became trapped in (or our wayward souls voluntarily entered). Not only that, but they believe that the god of the Old Testament and of Islam is the Demiurge. Which would explain some of his aberrant behavior.

Whether the universe exists because the Archons made it, or for some other reason, the very existence of souls entails the possibility of their (hopefully temporary) fall into ignorance and evil. What was the greater good for which God was willing to risk the existence of this suffering world? We are. God wanted us to exist, and implicit in our existence is the possibility that this place would exist.

This world is the only hell that exists, and we only stay here until we can break our addiction to it and realize who God is. In the meantime, we are subject to the demonic rulers of this realm, whether those rulers are the gnostic Archons or our own evil will, desires and cravings.

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Hymn of the Pearl

Lovely, truly lovely. The Hymn of the Pearl or Hymn of the Soul is from the gnostic text Acts of Thomas. I would like to memorize the abridged version of it sometime, the full version is rather longer.
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selfworld

Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.

-Henry Van Dyke, The Prison and the Angel (Poem)



For whoever wants to save their life will lose it,
but whoever loses their life for me will save it.

-Luke 9:24

This is a long post but an important one, please bear with me.

Psychologists think of the "self" as a structure of human psychology. Others think of their "selves" as their whole being, body and mind. Some people speak of inner selves, outer selves, and even multiple selves. These are individual trees in a much larger forest.

Self is the fundamental operating system of all life on Earth. It is the software of life. The cell is hardware, DNA is hardware designed to store information. The information itself, how that information is encoded on the DNA, is what makes you different from a cow, a lamb, or an elephant; and different from every other human being on Earth. This system is the underlying process of this stage of existence, which I call the Selfworld.

Now, by self I most specifically do not mean soul. Self does not have anything to do with soul, self is information. Information is an interesting and even mysterious substance sometimes, but it pertains to this world. Nevertheless, people mistake selves for souls all the time, because they are dominated by the selfworld, which is centered on selves.

"The Selfworld is a system, Neo...."

If you will excuse a computer simile, the information encoded in DNA is like the ROM (Read Only Memory) of our systems, in this case containing the operating system. What we normally call the Self, the psychological self, is merely the contents of our RAM (Random Access Memory), our brains. When the computer is turned off, the information stored in RAM goes away unless it is stored in a more permanent external memory. For computers, that might be a hard drive or other external media. For humans, this external memory is the knowledge stored in books, on the internet, in computers and elsewhere. When we die, what we think of as our “selves” may go away, but the instructions encoded in DNA continue on, changing slightly with each new generation.

The dominance of this Self is so great, that very often one animal will fight another of its own kind, a creature that is 99.9% identical to it, for the right to pass on that .1% difference. It is willing to kill the other creature, its genetic brother. It is willing to be killed. Why? DNA demands it. The Self demands it. The story and drama of life on Earth is pretty much the story of each species, defined by the information in DNA, and each individual of that species, attempting to dominate and survive at the expense of other individuals and species.

I am not bringing all this up because I am particularly interested in wild moose butting heads in some forest somewhere. The point of all this is to understand us.

We ourselves are very ready to subject creatures that are 95% genetically identical to us to grossly inhumane conditions for our own food. The conditions that prevail in factory farms for many of the creatures we eat, make Dachau look like a kiddie park. We don't usually have too many qualms about it (with some notable exceptions) because, well, they aren't us. They aren't even human. We hear the voice of the Self, and close out compassion for creatures who feel fear and pain much like we do. I am not done yet however.

We subject creatures that are 98% genetically identical to us (primates) to medical experiments because, well, the corporations want the results and they are not us. They are not human so their lives do not matter. But this is not yet the kicker.

We wage wars with other human beings, 99.9 percent genetically identical to us, by any count our brothers, because they are another race of human being than us. Or even just a different national origin. Or they speak a different language or worship a different God.

Lest you think that genetics have a monopoly on this, the short-term memory banks of Self do even more terrible things. We wage war on people who have pretty much the same culture, the same color of skin even, because they think differently than us. Maybe even we just think they think differently from us. The most terrible wars in history were between groups of people who were culturally very similar. We want something, they stand in our way.

We are very ready to think of other human beings as sub-human beings, as a prelude to killing them. The Nazis were all-time champions of this. They killed people who were born German, who for the most part looked like Germans, who spoke German. Yet these Germans were subhuman scum that had to be exterminated. If the people responsible had to face the truth, that these were Germans and human beings just like them, it would get in the way of what they wanted to do. What they wanted to do, no matter how many innocents would be killed.

Why do we do it? Because we value that .01% difference in us, completely and totally out of all proportion. It may not even be a genetic difference worth mentioning, it may be a difference in the information in our heads. In other words, we are so dominated by our Selves, that we would do anything, any horror, and justify it until doomsday. We would rather see thousands die, than disadvantage ourselves by even a tiny amount. It has happened time and time again.

We would rather see 100,000 foreigners die horrible deaths
rather than miss our morning tea.

We justify these things by twisting the language, among other things; human language can become very malleable when self-interest is involved. Here is one example - I am not talking about politics here, I am talking about human beings. We invaded Iraq to give the Iraqi people “freedom”. Freedom is one of the most abused of these words in the United States, used to justify American self-interest, or rather the self-interest of those who control powerful commercial entities in the United States.

So lets see. Approximately 100,000 civilians have died in the Iraq War, according to most sources, and all of them are directly or indirectly tied to the presence of US forces in that country. So One Hundred THOUSAND people were deprived of the freedom to continue living, in the dubious hope that Iraq might some day be a “free” country?? And what kind of “free country” are we talking about here? Is America a free country?

No, the kind of freedom meant here is the freedom of US corporations to access Iraqi markets and resources. This is the kind of perversion of language that takes place, when the Self gets involved.

Again, I have no interest in talking politics whatsoever. My point is that people will go to the greatest extremes, they will kill, they will mangle the language and their own minds, they will even risk death, for this “Self”.

Before we take our leave of this little cavalcade of evil, we need to talk about the Milgram Experiment.

An experiment started in 1961 at Yale University, to see to what degree people would obey authority figures and ignore their own conscience. Basically, there was a person in charge of the experiment, a person (the teacher) who asks questions and administers electric shocks in response to wrong answers, and a person (the student) who was actually an actor in league with the experimenters who would act like he was being shocked at the appropriate times. The shocks would increase by 15 volt intervals up to a lethal 450 volts. As the voltage increased, the actor would pretend to be in more and more distress, complaining of a heart condition and finally beating on the walls and begging for mercy before falling completely silent after the supposedly fatal voltage was applied.

Every “teacher” did in fact show signs of great distress when applying the higher voltages, offering to refund the money they were paid, asked to go in the next room to check on the “student”, ect., but most elected not to disobey the experimenter. Most, 65% of them, elected to shock to death an innocent person rather than disobey the experimenter. Milgram summarized the experiment in a 1974 article:

“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

This has been explained as a resistance to disobey an authority, but the matter is much deeper than that. The truth is, the participants were more willing to kill an innocent person, than they were to bring personal consequences on themselves. Even minor consequences, even if the only consequence is having to alter their own ideology or dissent from their peer group. Like I said in a previous paragraph, people will let others die rather than give up their morning tea, or disadvantage themselves in any significant way, as long as those persons are sufficiently different from themselves. To bring up the Iraq example, people will willingly submit to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians: overtly in the name of a “freedom” that has been emptied of all real meaning and distorted into a slogan; unconsciously for significantly less abstract reasons.

The Milgram experiment has been repeated many times, and always with essentially the same results. People are more willing to hurt other people than they are to resist peer pressure or authority, and more willing to hurt other people even in violation of the moral codes they think they believe in, than to question themselves and their actions. Further confirmation of this effect, if any were really needed, comes from the Abu Graib scandal. Ordinary people, reservists, not even regular military personnel, were willing to do the most atrocious things once they found themselves in an environment which approved of torture. Perhaps we can even think of examples from our own lives, when we did the wrong thing because we put the opinion of the group or avoidance of consequences above ethics. The only way to resist such things, is to be armed with knowledge about how easily they can occur. In other words, not to blindly believe the best about ourselves and other people, but to understand the very worst. The behavior of ordinary Germans under the Nazis was not some strange abberation, it was reprehensible but not at all incomprehensible. The Milgram experiment shows that the majority of average Americans, or Europeans, or anyone else under the same conditions, would do the same thing.

Here we come to the heart of the matter: if people will kill to avoid relatively mild consequences to themselves, what will they do to avoid truths they would rather ignore? What will they do to shore up belief systems that they (unconsciously perhaps) consider to be in their own best interests? Can anyone see the truth, so long as self-interest is so dominant?

This is the fact that we have to accept, going into this. For the vast majority of people, self-interest is a far more dominant motivation behind what they think and believe, than goodness or truth or any other such desire. Most people will defend their thoughts like a fortress. Some are even willing to kill for them.

It is important to emphasize the negative aspects of the selfworld, simply because most people are very much mired in it to the point of not even being able to see it. How you view it, very much depends on where you are in your journey into it or out of it. It is both a path and an obstacle. The selfworld is evil from the point of view of someone trying to counteract its negative capabilities. The selfworld is also the sphere in which we can evolve into something better.

I spoke earlier in the "Existence Loop" that some people will choose to return to the selfworld, return again and again to it. For them, it is what they want. The people I am really speaking to, are people who want out of it. To them, the selfworld must inevitably be viewed as evil. To say that it is evil in itself, is to say that are viewing it from a higher state of mind in some sense, and from that viewpoint, it is indeed evil. When the Gnostics said that matter and the world were inherently evil, that spoke more to their own state of spiritual evolution than to the world. Most people choose to return to the selfworld; for them it is much desired. Those like us who want to leave it, can find our way out.

In Memory

Memorial to the slaughter of the Cathars at Montsegur

In memory of the Cathars of Montsegur
who were murdered for opposing evil,
tyranny and hypocrisy

It's 1206, the High Middle Ages.

The place: Languedoc, in what is now Southern France. At this time however, Languedoc is not under the authority of the French king but is under the control of various nobles. It is an area of high culture, a melting pot of travellers from other places and their ideas. The troubadours and their tales of courtly love originated from here.

The various independent nobles who occupy this region are very resistant to interference from the nobles of Northern France under the French king, and just as resistant to interference from the Pope. There is good reason for this: in Languedoc, the majority religion is no longer Catholicism. The Cathars, a Christian sect with dualist and gnostic tendencies, are rapidly gaining popularity in the face of Church hypocrisy and corruption.

The Cathar elite, the Perfecti, did not believe in violence, not even to animals. They didn't eat meat. They did not believe in war or capital punishment. They didn't believe in hell or purgatory. They did believe in reincarnation. They believed in the equality of the sexes. For every one of the Perfecti, there were dozens of lay people who looked up to them, but who did not have to live to as high a standard.

To the Catholic Church, it is no exaggeration to say that these were the most dangerous men (and women) alive. The Cathars were not only a heresy, they were a heresy supported by the local nobles. They were not only a heresy, they were spreading rapidly. They were the largest heretical sect since the first centuries of the modern era. The Church called them by some of the names of their old enemies: Paulicians, gnostics, Manichaeans, Bogomils, Albigensians.

When Pope Innocent III (highly ironic name, that) ascended to the throne of St. Peter, he was determined to rein in this heresy. At first, he took the path of peaceful conversion. He sent priests into the Languedoc to debate the Cathars and try to bring them back to Rome. Some independent monks tried to do the same thing, such as St. Dominic. What all of them say, is that the Cathars were highly resistant to being converted. One cleric appeared before the Cathars, dressed in all his wealth and finery, and started preaching to them. Whereupon they laughed him to derision, telling him that he needed to either "give up his wealth or give up his sermon." This was in an era when the wealth of priests and monks could be conspicuous, and when they made crucifixes of Jesus on the cross with a money bag at his hip, symbolizing that it was okay for clerics to handle large sums of money. Monasteries at this time were like major multinational banking corporations today: repositories for vast amounts of capital.

The Pope responded to this failure by removing the local bishops or stripping them of some of their authority. The local bishops were tolerant of the Cathars and intolerant of papal interference. The Pope sent papal legates to act directly for him. One such legate, Pierre de Castelnau, tried to bully the powerful Raymond IV of Toulouse into cooperating by threatening excommunication and even military intervention. Raymond sent him packing and was excommunicated, and the next day Castelnau was murdered, presumably by Raymond's men.

Thus begins the 20-year-long Albigensian Crusade, a crusade not against foreigners but of Christians killing other people who also called themselves Christians.

The Pope, who was not able to raise an army just for the "glory of God", wound up appealing to rather baser motivations. He told the nobles in Northern France that they could seize the properties of the nobles in Southern France if they were willing to fight in this crusade. Of course, nothing appeals to a nobleman like stealing property.

In 1209, the "crusaders" took the city of Beziers, utterly annihilating its population. The estimates of the dead vary between 15 and 60 thousand.

The city of Carcassonne fell without much of a fight, and the crusaders magnanimously allowed the population to leave.... wearing their underwear only. All their property was seized.

Several towns after this fell without a fight.

In June 1210, the heavily fortified town of Minerve fell. Everyone was given the opportunity to recant, but 140 persons refused and were burned alive.

After a universally successful first year for the Pope, the crusade stumbled a bit but the native population didn't do a whole lot better. Pope Innocent (lol) died, and the crusaders were briefly in disarray.

Finally the King of France, who had been more or less sitting on the fence this whole time, got involved. He raised a tax and raised an army to go conquer the Languedoc and defeat the Cathars. One by one, the fortresses fell. Finally the crusaders turned to the remote and well-defended stronghold of Montsegur. After a siege of 9 months, Montsegur surrendered. Approximately 220 Cathars refused offers to convert and were burned alive. There were so many of them, they had to build an enclosure, stack firewood in it, put the Cathars in it and burn them all at once. The Cathars were gone. Wiped out. Exterminated. The last recorded Cathar in the Languedoc was Guillaume Bélibaste, who was executed in 1321

People who believed in peace, were systematically exterminated by a Catholic Church which believed in war, by way of mercenaries which believed in money. It must have seemed like the devil himself was waging war on them.

Which probably wasn't that far wrong.


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c l e a r

"God is not a man, so he does not lie. God is not a person, he does not change."

-Numbers 23:19



"Before He gave any shape to the world, before He produced any form,
He was alone, without form and without resemblance to anything else."

-The Zohar, a text of Jewish mysticism (kabbalah)



"Any name of God which is found in the Bible can not be applied to the Deity prior to His self-manifestation in the Creation, because the letters of those names were produced only after the emanation. . . . Moreover, a name implies a limitation in its bearer; and this is impossible..."

-Judah Ḥayyaṭ



On its surface it is opaque,
In its depths it is clear,
A continuous thread beyond description...
Its form, formless,
Its image, imageless,
Its name, silence

-Dao De Jing, chapter 14

For unknown millennia, human beings have been making their gods to be like them. Deities such as the Greek gods (the dysfunctional family on Mount Olympus) and other gods of the ancient world, are easy to see as human analogues, made to play out human dramas. While almost anyone would accept this as true for some ancient religions, not everyone is prepared to point that critique closer to home.

Some would have us believe that God not only condones but commands war crimes and genocide, as in the military campaigns of Moses and Joshua. Some would have us believe that God is wrathful. Some would have us believe that God issues irrevocable condemnations, to send people to hell. Some would have us believe that God would torture a person to satisfy a bet with Satan (Book of Job). It is human beings who do such things.

It is human beings, who commit war crimes, atrocity and genocide. It is human beings who torture. It is human beings who condemn other human beings, and who say that they will burn in hell. It is human beings who will torture someone out of curiosity (Dr. Mengele for instance). The only intelligent entities with a proven ability to do these things, are human beings. We are that malign intelligence.

It is not possible to ascribe any negative human attributes whatsoever to God. God is stainless. GOD CANNOT DO EVIL.

Moreover, positive human attributes such as mercy, compassion, hope, forgiveness, love, are not positive enough to attribute to God. These names all refer to human attributes, and every human attribute is mixed and changeable. Even a mother's love of her child, often considered the highest form of love, is mixed with human neurosis, possessiveness, self-interest and inadequacy. Even a friend's love of a friend, is mixed with this. Romantic love even more so.
Pure love is beyond a human being's ability to emulate, and in some sense beyond a human being's ability to understand.

God is like a great light concealed in a dark shroud. It is hidden, in the words of a 14th Century Christian mystic, behind a cloud of unknowing. Present here and now, every day, and yet beyond words. Beyond sight, beyond sound, beyond touch. It is not possible to speak for God, those words cannot be spoken by a human mouth. We can speak of God, to those who are ready to hear of God, but the words themselves are just gestures, containers of something and nothing. Containers both of knowledge and ignorance. Emanations of God, perhaps, but only temporary rafts which fulfill their function when they are no longer needed.

"They should recall that in teaching spiritual truths the Buddha
always uses these concepts and ideas in the way that a raft is used
to cross a river. Once the river has been crossed over, the raft is
of no more use."

-Diamond Sutra chapter 6

Does this mean we should all remain silent about things that are more humanly accessible? Absolutely not! Things that are at the intersection of the human and the divine should be spoken of and discussed. They should be discussed more. That is altogether a different thing than delivering an "authorized" biography of God, complete with a white paper on exactly what it is that God thinks.

No one, including the human writers of the Bible or the Quran, should do that. They especially shouldn't attribute the worst of human failings to the only holy and eternal God.

God is clean of human evil. He is completely clear, too clear for us to see.

The Unconscious Alarm Clock

"The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable."

-Italo Calvino

This post is not about anything particularly philosophical. In fact, it is about something that millions of people experience all the time. Science has not spent a lot of time trying to understand it, or even proving or disproving its existence, although it is a common phenomenon.

After dinner on Monday night, I had a chore I had to finish that night, but I was extremely tired. Much too tired to do it. So I went to bed to take a nap, and as I often do, I mentally set a time for me to wake up. In this case, I was planning to nap for one hour, then get up and do my chore. I didn't set an alarm clock, I just depended on my mind to wake me up at the correct time.

I learned to do this decades ago, and at first I would mentally repeat the time I needed to wake up over and over again. Nowadays I just tell my mind a couple times, and in the majority of cases that is enough. This was not the particularly interesting bit, I do that all the time.

What was interesting was what happened when I did in fact wake up. I had been so tired when I went to bed, that I fell asleep more or less instantaneously. When I woke up, I was still asleep. My conscious mind did not have a clue in this world why it had woken up. All it knew is that one minute it was having lunch with Abraham Lincoln and a pair of talking zebras, the next minute it was staring into the dark, not sure where or even who it was. For at least a couple minutes, I was still dreaming - even though I was sitting up with my eyes open. I didn't even know at first why I was awake. All I knew is that some force, a force that was very much in control at that moment, had compelled me to be awake and was giving me an imperative command to get on my feet.

Some part of my mind, some part of me, was ticking off the minutes all that time. While myself as I know me was off sipping consomme with Abe and the talking zebras, myself as I don't know me was waiting, awake, on guard. Ready for the clock to run out, so it can take over my body, sit me up and get me conscious enough to function.

I think if you had asked me while I was dreaming whether I wanted to get up and do the dishes, I think the answer would be an emphatic no. "No thank you, I am chillin with my homeboy Abe and the zebras. Go away." But I, the playing, dreaming, conscious self, was not in control. I, the bearer of my pre-sleep instructions, was. I say that the conscious mind was dreaming, I think that when we dream our conscious minds are not so much absent as unfocused. It no longer has to engage reality, it is free-associating. Playing, in other words. That also explains the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, when we are aware of dreaming while we are dreaming. It is the conscious mind that dreams, IMO. When I woke up, I was conscious but still dreaming, and it was that mind that was so confused by what was going on. My unconscious mind was the one that had it all under control. My dreaming conscious mind on the other hand, never got the memo that said we were supposed to be waking up now. It was surprised to be waking up.

The unconscious mind, according to Freud, was the playground of the Id, the primitive unrestrained drives and impulses. The Id has no sense of responsibility at all. If that is true, my unconscious mind is seriously messed up or something. In this case, it was my unconscious mind, not my conscious mind, that was being responsible. My conscious mind was off playing games.



In the classic 1956 movie Forbidden Planet, alien technology allows an isolated scientist to unleash all the monsters of the Id, the hidden demons of the unconscious, in material form. His unconscious mind creates real physical monsters that kill. I guess my unconscious mind then would be puttering around like a housewife, waking everyone up and reminding them to floss between teeth. ;)

Carl Jung thought that underneath the normal unconscious mind was the collective unconscious of all living things. I don't have any reason to believe that this is true, but if it were, it would not surprise me either. My unconscious mind acted like a good conscientious guardian while my conscious mind was off partying brains with dead Presidents. I guess what I take away from this is, we are more than the mind we think we are. And that our unconscious mind is no more the primitive unthinking ape than our conscious minds are. Sometimes less so.

Yi Peng Lanna Festival

I am just posting this because I like it so much. This is the Yi Peng Festival in Thailand. Thousands of "sky lanterns", mini hot air balloons, are released into the sky. Fire hazards notwithstanding, I think this is really beautiful. Really evocative of many things.

Levels of Communication

Levels of Communication

"Enough now with teaching what only with difficulty I reached.
This Dhamma is not easily realized by those overcome
with aversion & passion.

What is abstruse, subtle, deep, hard to see,
going against the flow --
those delighting in passion,
cloaked in the mass of darkness,
won't see."

-Ayacana Sutra

The problem with any form of mysticism is that you wind up wanting to talk about something that you cannot talk about. A longstanding solution to this problem is very simple: don't try. Write some poetry maybe, like the Sufi saints, and just leave it at that.

As related in the Ayacana Sutra, Gautama Siddhartha hit this problem like immediately after the experience he described as his enlightenment. Basically, he thought that what he had discovered was far too difficult to even attempt to teach, so he was about to just blow it off. So, no Buddhism, just one Buddha enlightened all on his lonesome. The End. Brahma Sahampati managed to talk him out of taking that course of action, telling him that some would listen, even if most would not.

Adding to the inherent difficulty of the whole enterprise, is that mysticism pretty well excludes being too wrapped up in worldly priorities. There is the classic story of Mary and Martha, a story that is at the very core of Christian mysticism. The anonymous 14th Century monk who authored The Cloud of Unknowing makes mention of this story early on. For anyone unfamiliar with the tale in Luke, here it is:

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

-Luke 10:38-42

Basically, Mary has chosen to focus on God, whereas Martha is more concerned with feeding her guests. The implication is, it is more or less impossible to do both things at once. The Cloud author says that while even Martha is doing her part, as worldly people in general play a needed role, obviously it is preferable to be Mary.

The problem with this scenario is a fundamental inequity of the two roles. To take an example from the 14th Century when the Cloud author was alive: ordinary people paid lots of money to the church to support monks like the Cloud author, who was afforded the opportunity to bliss out on God and write books. ;) It's a pretty nice gig for the 14th Century, but definitely not equal. The mass of ordinary people would never have read his books, even if they could read. They weren't in contact with him, he was in a monastery. He wasn't doing any evident benefit to them, except for giving them a warm fuzzy for supporting holy men.

It is easy to see that Mary needs Martha. Without Martha, Mary doesn't get dinner. What is less easy to see is that Martha needs Mary. In the parable, it is also clear that Martha herself doesn't see any benefit. In her mind she is pulling all the weight, getting the real work done, while Mary is lying around, spacing out on Jesus. ;)

The problem with not talking to Martha is, the World needs the Sacred. Without it, everything begins to fall apart. Practical knowledge is not enough. Practical people need the Sacred, even if they themselves do not always think so. One example of this need is the practice of many hospitals to hire medical ethicists: people whose job it is to think about ethics. They realize that normal medicine is not equipped to handle these issues, which are both more numerous and more difficult than many people ever have to think about. Ethics sort of stands in between the purely sacred and purely mundane: it isn't mysticism, but there are more than simply practical matters involved.

In ethics, the environment, human and animal rights, living and working conditions and many other issues, Martha needs Mary, but Mary has kinda fallen down on the job. In many circles, talking about spiritual matters is considered to be in bad taste, or even casts doubt on your general character as a human being. And when you ask whose fault that is, a big part of the answer is "our fault". It is Mary's fault. For starters, the recognized spiritual traditions we already have are pretty moribund or even diseased. The stuff that is going on these days in many organized religions makes you want to projectile-puke. The would-be Marys there have dropped the ball, if they ever in fact had it. Between the failure of organized religion to actually be spiritual, and the incessant unavoidable onslaught of materialist values, the path for Mary is very difficult and full of potential wrong turns. Meanwhile Martha sinks further and further into consumerism, and doubts more and more that there actually is anything else.

So, while we cannot talk about everything to everyone, the spiritual things we can talk about we ought to talk about. Things like ethics (the way we treat humans, animals and the world) are reasonably accessible to the thinking process of almost everyone. Even for those things that perhaps only Mary knows, and perhaps only Mary cares about, we have to assert a claim to their importance. These things too have their place in the overall order too, every bit as much as the practical work of practical people does.

Mary can't fall down on the job, and can't opt out of engaging Martha. If Mary fails, eventually Martha will fail.

The Existence Loop

"Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission,
and for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service.

It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I'd never want another."

-Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now

Anyone who has not read the Preface to this post should go ahead and read that first.

In programming terminology there is a wonderful little thing called a conditional loop. I remember loops of various kinds vividly from my BASIC programming days, they were essential to any kind of structured programming. I remember back in like the Eighties when I was first exploring the wonderful world of computers, I didn't know initially that there was such a thing as a conditional loop. As a result, my primitive little programs were full of GOTO statements, resulting in code that was almost impossible to read, even for me. It was what the programmers call "Spaghetti Code", unstructured code. Can you tell I am a geek from way back? ;)

Anyway, getting back on point, a conditional loop is a block of instructions nested inside a conditional statement. In generic terms, while a certain condition remains true, the instructions are repeated. At such time as the conditions no longer remain true, the program drops out of the loop, and potentially continues on to other parts of the larger program.

The relevance of this programming structure to our topic today might seem a little obscure, but bear with me.

What happens to people after they die? Of course many people would say, there is no after. You die, you become worm food, that's it. That's all well and good, but I am not addressing those people. See the Preface.

Some people, such as Christians and I guess Jews and Muslims too, believe that you get one lifetime and after that you go to heaven or hell. I think that most people who belong to one of the Abrahamic religions are okay with that outcome for a couple reasons. First, they think they will be one of the ones to go to heaven. Secondly, they may think that only really bad people go to hell, and the majority of people go to heaven. For Christians, that latter point of view is clearly doctrinally untenable, please reference Matthew 7:13-14. Jesus clearly thought that heaven as a final destination after this life was the exception to the rule. What then is the rule? What happens to the majority?

This question was brought home to me by my Dad's recent brush with death (he's okay now). During all this time I am thinking, "what happens to him?" He is absolutely not a spiritual person in any way, so probably we can rule out heaven. I don't think he would even like heaven. It would just totally not be his thing. Does he then deserve hell? I didn't think that, either. What, then?

Another major branch of world religion derives from India: Buddhism and Hinduism. Unfortunately, talking about what Buddhists and Hindus believe is a little like talking about what red-haired people believe, they are very diverse religions. For the purposes of this blog post, I will mostly restrain myself to Buddhism, and only to the form of Buddhism (Theravada) that is frequently considered to be closest to Gautama Siddhartha's original teaching. *
(*Mahayana Buddhists obviously deny this, but in terms of documentation, the scripts from the Theravada school are the oldest)

In both Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism, we are condemned to repeat this life as a result of karma: more bad deeds, and you may be reborn as a mudskipper or a marketing exec or something. Be nice, and your next incarnation may bring you to being born in a palace with nice things and lots of pleasurable activities. The mechanism here is essentially negative and external: be bad, and this impartial external karma will poop on your parade. It is not actually very different from the Abrahamic idea of God's punishment, except that it is recurring and proportional instead of final and absolute. The idea of a final heaven, just like the idea of a final hell, is not really a part of Hindu thinking. Your afterlife is here, in other words. The Hindu afterlife in structure is not like a conditional loop, but more like a program with a lot of GOTO statements. Do bad, and you might get reincarnated as a shrubbery. Do good, and you start slowly heading towards all the good stuff; successful career, vacation home, good looks, nice teeth, or whatever.

Here, Buddhism and Hinduism go their separate ways. In Buddhism, any human being no matter how low on the Karma totem pole they are, can become enlightened and hence leave this world. So for Buddhists, Karma governs rebirth but not escape. If Adolf Hitler gets reborn as a human being, he could bail out of this rebirth scheme even if his karma is atrocious. So in Buddhism we begin to see the makings of a conditional loop structure (apologies for my sketchy BASIC):

Dim enlightenment As Integer = 0
Dim karma As Integer = 100,000,000,000,000
Dim goodness As Integer = 0

Do
GOSUB incarnate(karma)
' Live your life, the pleasantness of which is
' dictated by the karma of your previous life.
If goodness=1, ' Were you good?
Then karma = karma - 1 ' Less bad karma for you
Else karma = karma + 1 ' more bad karma for you
End If
If karma < 1 ' Minimum bad karma level is 1
Then karma = 1
End If
Loop While enlightenment < 1 
' If you aren't enlightened, you have to do it again

karma = 0 ' Enlightenment trumps karma
GOTO NIRVANA 

Now, when you ask who exactly it is that goes to Nirvana, and who exactly it is who is going through all these incarnations to begin with, you run into all sorts of problems since according to Gautama there is no self or soul to get reincarnated or to go to Nirvana to begin with, and not really any Nirvana either, but I digress.*
(* the reality or non-reality that the concept Nirvana refers to, is not considered to be capable of being expressed in concepts. One can consider the Buddhist idea of Nirvana to be sort of like training wheels on a bicycle.)

The Buddhists for all their advanced thinking still inherited Hindu ideas of karma, even though they thought it didn't have the last say anymore. Karma is still functionally equivalent to divine punishment for misbehavior. Even if there is no deity in charge of that punishment, it has the same effect as an angry god except that unlike the Abrahamic God, that punishment is only for the next turn of the reincarnation merry-go-round, not forever.

Getting back to the Abrahamic religions particularly Christianity (because I know more about that one), the problem with hell is that it seems a bit disproportional to its cause. It is hard to see how any merely human badness, however bad, could be justly punished by eternal torture. In Christianity in particular, not only is hell vastly disproportionate as punishment for any human evil, but you don't even have to be outstandingly bad to go there. (referencing Matthew 7:13-14 again). On the other hand though, there seems no reason to think that the majority of people who are not particularly good either, should go to heaven. That is a disproportionate reward just as hell is a disproportionate punishment.

And, frankly, while everyone hates the idea of going to Hell, not everyone is terribly keen to go to Heaven. A common expression of that is people who will say something like: "What do you mean, there's no {sex/beer/cars/porn/cheeseburgers/television/barbecue/rock-and-roll} in heaven?? To heck with that!" ;)

Some people have tried to approach hell as a sort of structural issue with heaven - that it is not so much that God wants to torture all these folks, but that hell is implicit in the nature of heaven or God, or even that the damned ARE in heaven but it feels like hell to them. Sounds like bad planning on God's part if that were true, IMHO. "Oops guys, I am real sorry, but we had sort of a logistics issue while building heaven, so you have to spend eternity in agony. Sorry!" ;)

Let's suppose God has delegated the design of the afterlife to us. What should we look for in a well-designed afterlife?

1. It should be consistent with the mercy of God. (That rules out hell.)

2. It should not send to heaven (or to more spiritually illuminated realms) people who have never expressed any real interest in spiritual things. Heaven might indeed be hell to certain people.

3. The person's afterlife should ideally reflect what they in fact desired in life: in other words, there should be a 1=1 symmetry between what was in that person's heart and their next life. You can argue with karma, but you can't argue with what you yourself wanted.

#3 coincides very well with a recent mantra of mine, which is limited as all such things are, but I think it is very appropriate here:

EVERYONE GETS WHAT THEY REALLY ACTUALLY WANT

What they want means, what they truly want, not what they said they wanted. What comes out of your mouth is not important, what is in your heart is what is important.

In terms of what we have been discussing here, if you want earthly things, maybe you reincarnate back here. If your heart's desire is hot babes, cheeseburgers and corvettes, you are going to find those things on Earth. Not that you will necessarily get them or that you will keep them if you have them, because a transitory nature is part of this realm of existence, but you are free at least to pursue those things. If you want spiritual things, maybe you leave this realm of existence for a more spiritual one. So, from a next-life standpoint, you really do get what you really want. Want to stay here in this world or one like it? Stay! Want to get out? Is that truly your heart's desire, not just what you say? Pack your bags!

So using the conditional loop as a simile, the block of code is this type of existence. Existence on this Earth or somewhere like it. The conditional question is, "Do you want what this world has to offer?" If the answer is yes, you go back and do it all over again, and you keep on doing it all over again until you see through the world, see through its basic principles, and you answer "no". "No", I don't want to stay here. With all my heart, I want to leave this place and go to a place that is closer to God."

Now, someone might say that there isn't really any punishment for evildoers in this scheme. They would be right to say that, in a sense. Vengeance is a human desire. God does not wreak vengeance on the evil, the evil do that themselves. If your heart loves evil, you are already in hell.

Lets do a thought experiment right quick. Suppose we have Joe, a homocidal psychopath, and Jane, who is a college girl. Joe tortures Jane in unspeakable ways and then kills her.

Now Jane, in her life and in lives before, had an option as we all do: she could set her heart on material and worldly things, or on divine things. If she set her heart on divine things this time around, she will leave this world and everything in it behind her, to go to a better world. If she does not do that, she chooses to come back to this world with all that this implies. Including the risk of being murdered again at some point. Either way, she doesn't really have a lot of room for complaints. She is doing what she wants.

Now what about Joe? Well he is a homocidal psychopath, and he may choose to return to being a homocidal psychopath. That is actually not such a kindly fate. And when his turn comes, he too will return to where he really wants to be, so he really cannot complain. Everyone gets what he really wants, and we don't have to attribute the very human quality of vengeance to God.

So the conditional loop is, do you really want to stay here?

.
.
I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar
With angels bless'd; but even from angelhood
I must pass on


-Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī), Sufi poet

The Existence Loop: Preface

Before I get into my main topic, I need a brief preface. I vowed to myself that I would steer clear in this blog of setting a critical or negative tone at any point, if at all possible. This is not such a situation though. I am being critical but the point is not to tear an alternate point of view down. I am not in the business of telling people what to think. These posts are for those who want them, not for those who don't.

(Concerning my "avoid being negative" rule: There are very often unpleasant truths that need saying. Sometimes the understanding of these truths are imperative, even morally imperative. However, I think that a person presented with too many harsh truths or statements at once tends to shut down and refuse to process any further. To an extent, everyone has to deal with unpleasant realities at the time they are ready. The best way to write of such truths, is often not dwell on them, but to sort of point to them in passing and let people decide themselves whether to probe further.)

Everything in my blog follows from the precept that there is a real spiritual reality and that this life is not the end. This is not a belief that I am interested in proving to anyone, as if I could. Everyone is, in the end, as they wish to be: and I could not and don't wish to change what anyone wishes to be. You will follow what is in your heart to follow: no one can change that but you.

That said, I need to spend a few minutes talking about the alternative. What if I am dead wrong? What if there is no spiritual reality at all?

Atheism is an evaluation that removes any pretext for valuation. For a logically consistent atheist, morality is in the end, only an opinion; truth only a means to an end; life only a mindless instinct to survive. An atheist is condemned to putting Self as the center and measure of all things - a terrible fate in truth, though he may not see it that way. As will unfold in further blog posts, I think that Self is both the characteristic mechanism of our existence here and also a potential obstacle to our leaving this realm of existence for somewhere better. So it is logical that a point of view that denies the spiritual would essentially have to put the Self in it's place by default.

I may well be dead wrong about there being a God, but in that case it wouldn't matter, because then nothing whatsoever would matter. Any assertion as to meaning would merely be an opinion. To a consistent atheist (of which there are few), the only measure of meaning would be the desires of that particular self.

Even though atheists often take the rhetorical position of positing a lack of belief rather than a belief, they are wrong about that. A negation only has meaning in the context of that which negates it. A disbelief in God only makes sense in context of an alternate position. And that position, functionally, is a subset of nihilism. If Man is the measure of all things, then there is no real measure. Fortunately perhaps, most atheists I think don't worry too much about how all that works out, not unlike many people of religious persuasions who don't look too closely at what their founders actually said. And doubt is only natural and to an extent even healthy. Every sane person doubts some of the time.

At this point some well-meaning person will say that their best friend is an atheist, that they know atheists of impeccable ethics and humanitarianism, none of which I necessarily doubt, nor do I even care. Those same persons will no doubt mention religious persons who are evil, hypocritical, intolerant and lacking in mercy, which I do not doubt in the slightest. In fact I could point some out myself. That is not the point. It is a poor debater who regresses from talking about ideas to talking about the people who have them. There is a logical fallacy called Ad Hominem, which attempts to link the truth of a position to the character of the person who holds it. That is an equally erroneous way of thinking, regardless of whether you are trying to disprove a position by defaming its advocate, or whether you are trying to promote a position by lauding the virtues of a person who holds it. I honestly don't care one whit how many honorable atheist friends you have. May they live long and prosper, they are not the issue.

The point of my critique of atheism is not to change anyone's mind about it. I assume most atheists won't spend their time reading this blog, nor should they. It is not written for them. The point is to set the groundwork as it were; to stake out the positions. Every chessboard has two sides, light and dark, and to an extent we can only see one or the other by way of contrast.

All that aside, the things I am about to discuss in the next post are to some degree speculative. To me, what I am about to discuss follows logically from the assumption that there is a God, that there is a continuation after death, and that such a God is not arbitrary, senseless or wrathful. No one should consider this authoritative, I don't even consider it that. Based on those assumptions however, I have not found any other conclusions to be as convincing.

Next up: The Loop

Cemeteries as Sacred Spaces

St. Louis Cemetery #1. New Orleans Louisiana

"And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."

- T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," from "Four Quartets"

Sacred spaces are not always those spaces that are intended to be sacred. Without spiritual insight, all the capital and planning in the world cannot succeed in making a space sacred. That is why designed sacred spaces so often fail. That is why so many churches and temples seem about as sacred as a shopping mall. Inversely, spaces never designed to be sacred, can be.

And sometimes, a sacred space is a place that most people avoid. Sacred spaces need not attract people; sometimes they can make people uncomfortable. They smile kindly on those who will learn from them, and they will deter the unready. They will not be user-friendly or fit in with our designs or our modern consciousness. They will not accommodate.

My favorite sacred spaces are like that. They are cemeteries.

Carl Jung spoke of the shadow, which consists of the parts of ourselves we repress. Unpleasant truths we would rather not face. Any person who spent any time in a cemetery honestly meditating on what it represents, would soon come to grips with something most people would rather not think about a great deal. The vanity of worldly objectives, the foolishness of the human species, the total effacement of our dreams and goals in the face of impassive Time.

And yet, somehow, I feel happier in cemeteries than I do in almost any other place. When you erase what is false, what is true must soon come into view. When you erase what is transitory, what is eternal has room to make its presence known. Cemeteries are a reminder of eternity beyond this mortal life. For some people, it is an unpleasant reminder. For me, it is like coming into a beautiful private garden which is hidden in a ghetto. The air of cemeteries feels cleaner, the dead for me more pleasant company, than I usually find in the land of the living.

When you compare the attention that previous ages gave to the abodes of the dead, with the attention that we give now, it is clear that we have actually regressed in our ability to face the unpleasant truths that cemeteries have to teach us. This is not completely our fault: in Victorian and earlier times, people had their faith in God to act as a buffer between them and the grave. This was a faith that was held with far greater conviction than is common today. With the advent of a more secular and scientific society, most of us are actually less able to assimilate the truths that graveyards can teach us.

As a result of our evasion of the meaning of death, cemeteries themselves become less of an intentionally sacred place and more like an industrial field of identical grave markers, like a field of corn waiting for the mechanized combine harvester, or like transistors on a computer chip. But modern cemeteries, no matter how much they have tried to extract every drop of soul from them, still fulfill the ancient function. Even the most dispirited modern cemetery is an unpleasant truth, a lacuna in the mind of modernity, an albatross around the neck of the perky modern consumer unit.

Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for you.





Antique postcard of the Pere Lachaise cemetery columbarium, Paris.
(A columbarium is a place for the storage of cremation urns)

What is evident from the picture is that people visited these places,
the majority of the niches have flowers

The Flower and the Sun

I want you to empty your mind of all preconceived notions of God. I only use the word God because I have to use some word.

We do not so much understand God as we are understood by God. Our minds cannot be too terribly illuminated about God; they can however be illuminated by God.

An anonymous mystic in the 14th Century wrote a book called The Cloud of Unknowing. He explains that while religious people generally love God through the mediation of things in this world (statues, crosses, incense, the Eucharist, prayed words), they often are insufficient in their desire to love God as He actually is, veiled from our eyes by a “cloud of unknowing”. The unknown, unknowable God. He said that all the meditations on the crucifixion or the Virgin Mary or our sinful condition and so on, were worth less than this, to seek to love God as He actually is. Which is, to some extent, unknowable.

God is primarily known through His/Its intersection with our lives. Even when we leave this reality to go to the next one, this may still remain more or less true. And most of the time, we only understand God's intersection with our lives in retrospect, only rarely at the time it is happening.

Our situation relative to God is rather like that of a little flower and the Sun. A flower does not have any idea what the Sun is in itself. It does not know that it is far away in space. It does not know that the Sun has a diameter of about 1.3 million kilometers, or that it weighs 1.9891×1030
kilograms. The flower does not know that the light it receives is the product of nuclear fusion. The flower does not know any of these things.

And yet, every day the flower turns its face towards the Sun, and follows the Sun through the sky. It does not have to know the Sun, for the Sun to be the source and focus of its life. It knows the light, as it illuminates its own petals and leaves.

Following that light is a matter of the heart first, before the mind has anything to do with it. You love God, without exactly knowing what or who God is. Because you know the direction the light is coming from, like that flower. You turn to follow that distant light, not because you understand its Source, but because you understand what light is and what darkness is. How it manifests where you are. How it illuminates you.