Broken Patterns, Whole Hearts

Perhaps we deserve a cheerful bit too, after all this gloomy plodding by the damp and wintery valleys of death. Although it often feels “not very well”, as a routinely understating Englishman would say, we do acquire some experimental knowledge of our real self too.

First, the real self is extremely difficult to offend, and impossible to destroy. Actually, what feels anger, guilt, fear, what feels hurt, unworthy, rejected, abandoned, fragile is the inner infant, because it knows no modus operandi beyond satisfaction/frustration dilemma. But the soul is all-inclusive, capable of integrating all contradictions; this is its greatest strength.

I am not saying that the suffering caused by the false self is imaginary – bloody really painful it is, if you ask me. Nor am I saying that we “mustn’t” feel these things – this is meaningless, because we can’t help it anyway. People who try end up in asylums with some unclear diagnosis… What I mean is that to feel (=hurt, abandoned, rejected) and to be (= idem) are very different things.

Nobody can avoid feeling hurt: you can't choose not to feel pain when you receive a blow, you just do that’s all. But being hurt is more than that : it is acting out of this feeling; nursing and cultivating the wound; responding with a blow or tears, or both; responding in a destructive way, be it directed against others or against yourself. And this is a choice indeed that we do have, although we can not see it if we identify too closely with our feelings, and rely too much on the acquired automatisms.

This is why no loving heart can ever be broken, in fact. Your false self may convulse and crack; your soul will be only watching it go into pieces. The real self can stand any blow, and does not need nor want any defence. It is just standing there in the open, just “being there”, holding the inner infant in a compassionate embrace, and waiting for him to pass.

That You Know

Building around the simple English verb "fall"... Feel totally obsessed by the melody, was almost whistling it in the middle of the St George's Mass this morning :). 

The dynamics of Falling Upwards II : The Valley of Death, routinely

And all shall be well and 

All manner of thing shall be well 

By the purification of the motive 

In the ground of our beseeching.

  T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

The false self has no reality of its own, because it is not rooted in God, but in our fallen human condition. Yet it feels awfully, acutely, sorely real. In fact, for most of our lives we have no idea of any other self than these acquired defence mechanisms and survival strategies. They define and circumscribe our horizon, they literally form our universe; they do feel like being “me”. 

From early childhood on, we learn to walk within limits set by the false self, thinking that they are all that exists. We learn to settle on little shaky comfort that the choice of a successful strategy offers, and under pressure of fear and guilt accept to be less than ourselves – our real glorious selves designed and created by God in love. People around us also think that this is all that exists, so everybody is happy - as long as we accept their parasite patterns too. This is no more than a collective hallucination, but we have absolutely no way to know it unless a disaster, a crisis, a heavenly vision challenge us.

This is why the encounter with our real self, if it ever happens, feels first like loss and deprivation, like an impossible bid  – we are indeed being torn apart from the only guide we have ever known, the only “I” we have ever called “I”, and often alienated from "public opinion" too. Total fog all around, and only an obscure intuition, a feeling, a whisper of inner voice to orientate you... The paralytic summoned by Jesus to walk was probably feeling exactly this : a blind helplessness at being asked to do something for which he had no functional ability, something clearly impossible in his situation. No wonder it feels like an agony. St Paul often calls the false self “flesh”; and he repeats it again and again: if ever we are to live in God, “flesh must die”. 

So that's what we all do, here falling: "die to sin", as our so cheerful St Paul puts it, and there is no way it feels nice and agreeable. Dear self dies hard: it will hurt and bleed, will send upon you fogs and fears - especially fears related to the imaginary dangers, - and your inner infant will wail and cry and beg to be spared. Yet you know why you keep going through these painful metamorphoses, stumbling at every step: because authentic love is only possible between real selves, free from all compulsion; and love is in fact the only objective reality that is worthy of our heavenly souls.

On Reality : Subjective vs Objective

Hold on. A side remark echoing some off line debate: anything we are discussing here can have any meaning at all only if we assume that there exists an objective reality given us through senses. 

If the reality is fully subjective, that is, existing only in our minds, then indeed there is no such thing as falling upwards, because there is no up or down, for these notions will mean utterly different things for different minds. There is neither understanding nor common ground between minds either – what do we share at all if not the real world, in other words, existence?

Of course I remember Kant (was fascinated!): no reality exists fully and solely in itself, without being subject to the influence of the perceiving mind; the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We do perceive reality in our unique ways, and our perception is crucially important, reality-altering.

But this does not seem to contradict the idea of the objective reality. To me, this interaction between the objective content given to us, and its subjective transformation by our minds represent the dynamic process by which God eternally creates His world – infinitely complex, dazzlingly beautiful, mysterious, puzzling. Our minds do matter; we are not just passively receiving the world as it is – we are really participating in its creation by exercising our subjectivity. God takes us very seriously - we are not His pets, we are keepers and co-authors of His reality!

So to me, all reality is objective, that is, given to us through senses as a dynamic content to which we have shared access and which we subjectively transform, being in this co-creators of God's world.

Oups! A Leffe please!:))

Falling Upwards as a Sport, or Taste the Space

Not covered by your insurance. Up you go, up, up, up! Careful there! Hoist sail and breath in, out, in, out! You'd better be light and winds-wise, and have a solid grip. 

Photo is courtesy of ©Rijselman, 22/01 2012 Dieppe

Selving - the True Self as opposed to the False Self

This is really a reply to the last post on 'The Dynamics of Falling Upwards', which I found very helpful and with which I completely agree. I found, on the same day, Richard Rohr addressing the topic of what we are meant to be via the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I reproduce his meditation here:


Day 257 – Thisness

We must not plunder with mere concepts and abstractions what is the unique mystery of each act of God. As Blessed John Duns Scotus taught us Franciscans, God creates only individuals. Universals and categories exist only in words and the mind. Each thing that exists, exists in its ‘thisness.’ And God maintains each and every thing in creation by an ‘immediate sustaining attentiveness’ in its uniqueness.

No surprise that the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the American prophet Thomas Merton considered themselves Scotists. Hopkins gives the best poetic description of ‘thisness’ that I can imagine, in the following excerpt from ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me; for that I came.
I say…
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

(Richard Rohr – ‘On the Threshold of Transformation’ , p. 266)

'What I do is me; for that I came' seems to me to be the original creation intended by God and that our journey is to move beyond the false selves created by our surroundings when we were building the container of the first half of life in order to find the true essence within.

In regard to how we relate to the world around us, this seems to demand a realisation that each being is unique and that we must not pre-judge anyone or anything. We must do all we can to get out of the way of each person’s development – to gently lead or guide by suggestion, if that is our intention at the time, but not to mould into smaller (and meaner) versions of ourselves. Grace abounds if we allow it to, for ourselves and for each of us in our own unique story. To get in the way of this is to play the role of the devil.

The Dynamics of Falling Upwards - I : The Beauty and The Beast

It is a fearful thing, to fall into the hands of the living God... Hebrews, 10:31

I often use the expression "false self", or "dear self", or "shadow", and I wonder if I am making clear what I am speaking about. So I will attempt to explain it, because this notion is important for our understanding of who we really are, and where (more or less) we start when we find ourselves falling upwards. 

Here is a helpful clear description of the notion of “psychological complex” from the book by Dr Polly Young-Eisendrath, “Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to be Wanted”. The author is an American Jungian psychanalist. Italics are mine.

“Psychological complexes compel us to repeat the emotional themes from childhood, especially in our adult partnership and parenting. Unless we become conscious of these complexes, they rule us through subjective impulses and images that seem to be reality. Complexes are the psychological karma that we bring with us from our families of origin. We came by them honestly when we were dependent on others for survival and sustenance.”

This is what Fr Thomas Keating in his book “Open Mind, Open Heart” calls “a false self”: emotional and behavioural patterns set in motion in infancy and childhood, when the needs determine and shape our existence. He distinguishes three main “centers” of the false self: the need for security/survival; the need for power/control; the need for affection/esteem. Around these – legitimate! – needs the false self is constructed by the ways we find as children to adapt to the world in order to have them satisfied, and to cope with frustration when these needs are not satisfied. For Fr Keating, the task of our life is to grow out of these patterns, to surpass and integrate our needs in order to reach our full human maturity which alone enables us to stand in direct, real, reciprocal, free relationship of love with God and fellow-creatures.

“When our complexes are hidden from our awareness, they can become monstrous, dampening our vitality and motivation. The experience of pervasive discontent and a futile kind of inner emptiness are symptoms of hidden complexes in their uglier forms. Unacknowledged longings and fears manifest themselves as strong drives that may appear in dreams and fantasies as demons, snakes, floods, earthquakes, threatening intruders or hungry ghosts who could consume us. They may appear in waking life as addictions and compulsions that make no logical sense”.

We often think that complexes are symptoms of mental or psychological illness. When we say that such-and-such is “full of complexes”, we imply that he/she is not normal, and sometimes secretly congratulate ourselves that we are not “like this”. In fact, being “full of complexes” is either pretty normal, or we are all sick: complexes, shadow, false self, patterns, whatever we call these parasites, are present in all humans just because… Yes: here comes the dreaded notion of the original sin. Just because we are all born under the spell of the original sin, the false self, like a tumor, envelops and strains our true identity, our soul – Godlike, mighty, free. 

This happens in all of us, although not to the same degree nor with the same violence. There is nothing abnormal or exceptional about it, and nothing shameful either – although the Church “helpfully” promoted this feeling and maintained people in a state of guilt for ages… But in reality, this is just the way it is, that’s all: a fact of life.

We are in the same boat. The beauty and the beast in you will fight until you die; but at least, you can choose to fight for your life on the side of the beauty. This is not simple nor easy choice, because your true soul and your loving heart are hidden from your eyes; just like the Saviour, who changes forever the face of the world, is concealed in Bruegel’s “The mill and the cross” in the middle of the crowd, and for the same reasons.

A Home Away From Home

Sunset

Reading a book by a Benedictine nun at the moment called 'A Tree Full of Angels' in which she sees a vision of said tree early one morning. Tonight I saw it too. Feeling opressed by a day inside, I was urged to go outside and walk, late though it was. The sun was about to dip behind the western mountains, and it broke through the low cloud and streamed across the natural bowl of this city, striking the sides of the skeletal trees dead from the past drought and the beautiful bark of the living ones, burnishing them in gold. The leaves looked like dripping fire and the spirit of God moved across the whole and filled the scene with intense beauty. Here it is, behind every scene that appears moribund, if only we would search into its depths. Let us not forget this truth.

Sweet taste for you

A Familiar Stranger

I never, never, never open this door. I pretend it does not exist, and sometimes even believe it. 

But tonight, slowly drifting through my  last on-call evening, looking for a distraction, I came across a pile of papers. 

Poems. In Russian. Written mostly in 1997-1998, in Moscow and Paris.  Written by someone struggling with memory, fear and suffering, attachment and loss. Someone looking for God and gasping for life in the meaningless maze of an after-death. 

Me, actually. These poems are mine. 

I cannot convey how strange it is to read your own words when you have forgotten that they had ever been yours. It is like looking in a mirror and seeing another face. Like meeting someone you faintly know, yet struggle to recognise. Could these images, these rhymes, this meter be really born in my mind?! Was I really living through this? 

In fact I liked most of these poems -- rather well done. She had some undeniable talent, much passion and coherence. There is much rubbish too, of course. But... not bad, on the whole. I could shake hands with this familiar stranger. I feel as if I did, in fact :). I might even go as far as to publish them under my own dear maiden name! 

And now on to bolt the door. 

Church in exile

Found a church locally - well, it is the local Anglican church, so it is nominally my breed. I am done with being negative because it doesn't serve any purpose but to draw out and foster further bitterness, but it is a culture shock after 'my' churches in Oxford and Paris. This is such a young country, with a naive and sometimes brash face. They were friendly, welcoming people and we will keep going from time to time, but it is so far from contemplation. Still, these are first impressions and there is much room in the future for other realisations. The apparently very dynamic priest and her associate priest husband (Susanne and Nikolai) are on Aussie holidays until tomorrow and there seems to be a movement in the future towards traditional contemplation according to the church bulletin. From February there is to be a new 'Contemplative Church' group starting on Saturday evenings, and there are regular meditation groups on a couple of weeknights a week, so this may help my exiled heart. Oh God, keep my fragile heart alive throughout this time of desert life.

Sister Wendy Beckett on Love

This subject has been exercising my mind greatly and I have been dipping into a little book I have called 'Sister Wendy Beckett's Meditations on Love'. If you don't know her, she is an 82 year old contemplative nun who lives in a hermitage in Norfolk and became a 'consecrated virgin' (brave soul) in, I think, her 60s. She has a 1st class honours degree from Oxford in English literature and allows herself two hours of work per day on contemplating the many meanings to be extracted from art works. Yesterday's meditation, on Gainsborough's 'Chasing the Butterfly' spoke powerfully to me. I'll try to find an illustration to post here before you read her thoughts.


'Parental love is potentially its purest form, and may be the most painful. Gainsborough, whose marriage was unhappy, adored his two daughters, whom he called Molly and the Captain. Their mother's flawed psyche was inherited by both girls and their father agonised over them all his life. Neither was to know happiness, and his many pictures of them show a sad foreknowledge of this. To leave those we love their independence, to accept that we cannot make their choices for them, that they cannot live by our own hard-earned experience: this is part of love. We have to allow those dear to us to chase the butterfly, however convinced we are that it is uncatchable. We can never give the butterfly of happiness to another: each must catch it alone. For some, it will be ever elusive, and love must work within that painful understanding.'

The Last Drop

Amazing grace! Behold and rejoice! 

You will never believe me:  an English pub,  The Last Drop,  just opened its doors in my native Le Voilà! 

They have grace to be situated just a block away from my place.  They DO have English beer, though not The Old Speckled Hen. But that's comforting too -- I will still have to cross the Channel! 

 

Nice interior design, screens for watching foot (shrug), and - prick your ear, Liz! - a fumoir!  Though I do hope you won't need it in the near future. Also Wi-FI connection and comfortable chairs.

Looks like I found my place of hiding.