Inexhaustible Wells

The return of an old thought of mine, reading Etty Hillesum tonight on the metro: the only thing you can really do with evil and suffering is to absorb them and turn them into kindness. Not to fight it or to wave it away, but to actively transform all forms of evil you encounter into warm and all-embracing love. And I think that maturity of a human being means the ability to do so without being destroyed by the evil absorbed, a kind and degree of inner stability, freedom and sturdiness that makes the worlds spin around your love. (This, I understand, is the meaning of the turning of the cheek business). But if that is to be, then I have to learn to contain, that is, to forgive and accept and be kind with my own pain and aggression and evil first of all, so that they are not spilled and projected all around. And I actually have no idea of the way to do it; for the wells of grief are deep, inexhaustible and mysterious, and I have not found a way yet to touch the bottom and return back unharmed. 

Does meditation help?

To the question « how does meditation help you? » I can only answer by a shrug – it doesn’t, and I did not ask for help when I started to meditate. I asked for freedom and for conversion, I wanted enlightenment and experience of God. These things now are all coming about, but saying that they “help” sounds to me grotesquely, comically absurd. They don’t, honestly. They make my life more complicated than ever, they confront me to the questions I really do not want to face, they lead me to the places no one in their right mind would choose to be. Meditation set in motion forces and processes that I cannot control and only partially understand. Whatever wisdom I acquired thereby, it is the wisdom of insecurity. No, clearly, meditation does not “help”; God is no-thing, and cannot be summoned to fix my life…  What emerges instead is a sense of happiness which does not depend on events and circumstances of my chaotic life, a touch of the fundamental joy of being that lies deep within and can be shared with others in a simple act of presence. That's what it is about, really.

On fulfilment, or "Babette's feast"

It seems absolutely incredible to me that there are people who do not understand what it means, "to be fulfilled in and by doing" something; who cannot believe that some things are done for the mere joy of doing them. Not to be approved, not to be thanked or appreciated, not to be praised and accepted, but simply because just doing it fulfills us and makes our craving for approval redundant… 

I am reminded of Babette, in the awesome film "Babette's feast", sitting in the kitchen after having cooked a gastronomic meal for a bunch of strangers. Nobody thanked her, and she did not expect or need thanks: because she represents the lavishness, the ever-abounding bounty of God who does not care about approval. 

I agree with a sigh: these things that are done with no desire for approval are rare, and it is debatable how much of this inglorious motivation we conceal from ourselves when we think we have none. But they do exist; in them we participate in the abundant, luxuriant divine life, where being and doing are absolutely unconditional, therefore absolutely free. 

The running away is what you know

Sorrow is not to be ended by the action of will. Do please understand this. You cannot get rid of it. Sorrow is something that has to be embraced, lived with, understood; one has to become intimate with sorrow. But you are not intimate with sorrow, are you? You may say, "I know sorrow", but do you? Have you lived with it? Or, having felt sorrow, have you run away from it? Actually, you don't know sorrow. The running away is what you know. You know only the escape from sorrow.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Bombay, 10 January 1960, in On living and Dying, HarperSanFranciso, 1992, p. 88. 

Krishnamurti is extraordinarily ruthless. He won't have excuses, fantasies, wishful thinking. He doesn't want you to follow him -- he wants you to wake up and see, take up your bed and walk, "go into" the heart of the matter and understand with your own heart and mind what it is to live, to die, to love, to be alone, to be in communion. That requires ruthlessness. What he is asking us to consider here is properly a liminal experience, something terribly revolting to the common sense -- everyone knows that we must avoid pain by all means, it is unhealthy not to… But I am thinking of Liz's St Francis facing the wolf, and of the Greek word metanoia, usually translated as "conversion", and which literally means "turning around" -- turning on your heels, going in the opposite direction.  

Yes. Going there is an ambitious plan. Just to stop and meet what we are fleeing would be enough. 

Tyranny and fear of impotence

Virtue is happy to pay the price of limited power for the blessing of being together with other men; fear is the despair over the individual impotence of those who, for whatever reason, have refused to "act in concert"... Fear as a principle of action is in some sense a contradiction in terms, because fear is precisely despair over the impossibility of action. 

 Thus the common ground upon which lawlessness can be erected and from which fear springs is the impotence all men feel who are radically isolated. One man against all others does not experience equality of power among men, but only the overwhelming, combined power of all others against their own... Out of the conviction of one's own impotence and the fear of the power of all others comes the will to dominate, which is the will of the tyrant. 

 Just as virtue is love of the equality of power, so fear is actually the will to, or, in its perverted form, lust for power... Power itself in its true sense can never be possessed by one man alone; power comes, as it were, mysteriously into being whenever men act "in concert", and disappears, not less mysteriously, whenever man is all by himself. Tyranny, based on the essential impotence of all men who are alone, is the hubristic attempt to be like God, invested with power individually, in complete solitude. 

Hannah Arendt, On the nature of totalitarianism, in Essays in Understanding, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1994, pp. 336-338. 

Hannah Arendt comments here on the political theory of different forms of government (monarchy, republicanism and tyranny) formulated by Montesquieu (and "virtue" as love of the equality of power is his concept). But beyond political theory, this is one of the deepest insights into the nature of abusive relationships I have ever met... With a terrifying clarity this text makes the point: lawlessness that the one in control practices towards the weaker partner is the expression and consequence of his or her utter isolation beyond loneliness and despair over the impossibility of action. Sounds only too familiar. 

Can one deal with it, be it on a personal or on a political level? Can the destructive power of fear be reversed, healed, can a tyrant be reconnected to the Body in a meaningful way, so that the real power coming from participation, not from domination, is restored to him? Hannah Arendt leaves the question open, and personally, I have no clue. "Leave it alone" (= "emigrate")  has been the only advice I have ever received, and it does not aim to deal with the abusive partner but with the abused one. 

Thinking vs Rationality

"Oh nooooo! That's too intellectual!"

(from an offline discussion) 

Just a moment! People very often mix up thinking and rationality, reason and logic. That's why intellectuals are seen nowadays as cold-blooded creepy creatures playing with ideas in a rational and/or abstract way. The very word "intellectual" has become a kind of insult, and poor kids who happen to like thinking more than say, basket, are clearly heading for trouble... But thinking is much more than mere rationality, and is not at all necessarily abstract. 

The idea that reason equals rationality is a very Enlightenment one, and I think it is a tremendous impoverishment, a haemorrhage of meaning out of the word. Thinking is an attempt to engage with reality in a meaningful way. It is a method we (especially those for whom thinking is their main function - sorry I am into Jung again these days :) use to approach life. Thinking does "happen" in our brains, and it does use rationality, logic and abstraction as its instruments -- not always, nor universally: despite our Western education based mainly on rational reasoning, much of our thinking is  still intuitive, imaginative, even sensory, and Eastern cultures developed thinking based on entirely different assumptions than ours... But wherever efficient and authentic thinking takes place, it involves the entire person, body and soul, mind and heart, the whole human being standing in the midst of his or her experience to find out its meaning. 

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?

A friend told me a couple of days ago the story of Virginia Woolf's suicide: she was losing her mind; one day she put in her pockets a ballast and walked into the sea, and died drowned. She did it, I was told, because she loved her husband immensely (that was the word my friend used), and wanted to spare him the pain of watching her become insane.

And I thought, arrested by a sudden weariness: good Lord, there is no end to this... Here is, again, someone taking a decision that does not belong to her, here is someone deciding for someone else what is good for him, assuming that she knows, assuming she can control life and death, as if she had the whole picture; here is a perfect self-sufficient pride born of self-loathing enacted...

Later, trying to find sleep, I thought that what Virginia Woolf was dealing with by her suicide was her own inability to bear the thought of another person loving her so unconditionally as to accept her insanity; so fully as to value her life and presence, however disrupted, however incomplete and diminished, more than his own happiness... You cannot bear this if deep down you feel you wouldn't be able to love in the same way -- so you conclude that others cannot either. And this is a logical conclusion if you live with the idea and feeling of alienation, of our existence being only and desperately individual, fragmented, disconnected from the whole and thus ultimately insignificant. But not all of us live with this idea and feeling; or not all the time.

But of course, my understanding is as partial and one-sided as anyone's, and I am as good at projecting my feelings as anyone... so perhaps, Mr Woolf was, after all, relieved to be rid of his crazy wife, and we may be totally mistaken about her real motives, and I may have no clue to what it means, losing your mind. I can see a grandeur in her decision too -- the irresistible impulse to "lay down your life for your friends", to put the well-being of another person, however misunderstood this well-being may be, before your own. I do not know, and she is not there to explain. All I know is that for a short while that night rage and grief of a loving heart left onshore became mine. Nay -- they are mine each time a person assumes he or she knows what is good for me or how I feel about this or that, each time a unilateral decision is taken to spare me something I do not want to be spared. And to the joking question "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?", I find myself answering with Martha, in Edward Albee's play, shivering on a cold morning just as the curtain is about to go down:

- I am, George. I am.