Lost in Translation

     Today is Martin Luther King Jr Day. Dr. King was murdered for the things he said & stood for. He was calling for a qualitatively different way of relating to ourselves, others, & life which a large proportion of Americans found & obviously still finds impossible to understand, disturbing & intolerable.

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.
We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Our hope for creative living lies in our ability to reestablish
the spiritual needs of our lives in personal character and social justice.
Without this spiritual and moral reawakening
we shall destroy ourselves
in the misuse of our own instruments."                     Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 

“Our goal is to create a beloved community and
this will require a qualitative change in our souls
as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”            Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

     Why on earth would roughly 40% of Americans - most of whom claim to be Christians - find such words intolerable? Maybe Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopal priest, provides perspective:

     “I became more and more intrigued and disturbed about why it was that Christianity, a religion that clearly has one of the most loving and inclusive gurus that’s ever walked the face of the planet, at its epicenter, should tend to develop itself in formats that were so rigid, exclusive & non-generous. And why didn’t people walk the talk? It became more and more of a heartbreak to me.
     So it was actually through reading Jacob Needleman’s “Lost Christianity” in 1980, that the first pieces began to come together. He said at one point, ‘telling people to wake up and be conscious, is like telling stones to pick themselves up, sprout wings and fly to the sea.’
     There’s a missing piece, and until you can get that missing piece online, you can’t do the teachings of Jesus. ‘If one aspires to live the beatitudes or any Gospel teaching it is necessary to establish the level of consciousness from which they emerge.’ is virtually a direct quote from Symeon the New Theologian in the 11th century, who was the first one to be on to the fact that the Jesus teachings emerged from a very high level of consciousness, and that until you could basically run that program, you are going to be constantly dumbing it down to a place where it’s basically an inversion of itself. So Needleman was onto the fact that something is broken in the way that we pay attention that keeps our consciousness scrambled, low, distracted, and not under our free command, and it's this that is constantly making hash out of the Gospel that Jesus was teaching."
     Cynthia Bourgeault - Oct 23, 2017 interview: https://batgap.com/cynthia-bourgeault/

      There are at least 2 levels of understanding anything: literal & metaphorical. Literal refers to an objective fact that can be observed & agreed on by any number of observers eg she was crying. A metaphor uses a comparison to make a point eg her tears were a river flowing down her cheeks. Our present industrialized consumer society is materialistic & literal, almost exclusively focused on the production & acquisition of material goods: digital devices, clothes, cars, houses, property, alcohol / drugs etc. "The one who dies with the most toys wins" is weirdly funny and the philosophy of a LOT of people. Discussing non-material matters - which requires metaphor - very often creates confusion, smouldering anger, up to & including violence & murder, among those who are simply not capable of understanding at this level.

"One of the great liabilities of history
is that all too many people fail to remain awake
through great periods of social change.
Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions.
But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake,
to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant
and to face the challenge of change."              Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Individual Responsibility and the Herd

     “Only too often the cultural man kills his natural man and nature replies by making the cultural man impotent. What more accurate statement of our modern dilemma can be made?”
     Robert A. Johnson. “The Fisher King & The Handless Maiden. Understanding the Wounded Feeling Function in Masculine and Feminine Psychology.” HarperOne, 1993.

     Our dominant culture removes not only the antisocial aspects of our wildness, but sadly, also the prosocial, animal wildness we require to be fully, vitally human. Each of us is influenced far more by our culture than we realize. The prevailing self-concepts & worldviews of our culture gradually become our own by default. But the present culture's worldview & our self-concept is mechanical, materialistic & meaningless - the universe and everything & everyone in it, according to this perspective, are essentially machines, composed of nothing more than bits of matter, that inevitably break down due to the law of entropy. And we wonder why there is so much loneliness, cynicism, depression, anxiety, burnout, misogyny, racism, suicide, violence, poverty, starvation, war, etc, etc.

     Einstein said that the most important question a human being needs to answer: " 'Is the universe a friendly place or not?' ... If we believe that the universe is unfriendly ... peace will be elusive at best."
     Joan Borysenko. “Fire in the Soul. A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism.” Warner Books, 1993. 

     Before our current mechanical / materialistic culture, with its hyper-rational way of thinking & speaking, which alienated us from the world of direct experience, "natural" human beings felt intimately connected to Nature.
     Today, most of us were born & raised in cities - a situation as bizzarely unnatural as wild animals being bred & raised in zoos. And yet, we settle for a steady income, a roof over our head and dreamily shuffle along with our robot herd.

     “The Greek word mechane, which is the origin of our term machine as well as the root of machination, has a very sober connotation. Its root means to trick, and everything concerned with it has a dark character. Dreams of mechanical things failing in their purpose often alert the dreamer that he or she is using devices or attitudes that are unworthy of his or her best interest. It is commonplace in the dreams of people who are capable of high consciousness that mechanical things do not work well. …
     It’s true that our overly complex outer way of life needs reappraisal, but it is the inner form of trickery that is the most deadly. We could abandon all our cars and computers and airplanes as advocates of simplicity advise but still keep the inner trickery that is the real source of the infamous devil’s bargain. It is not necessary to give up the outer things to avoid the devil; but it is necessary to abandon our nefarious struggle to get something for nothing.
     Whenever you trick, psychologically speaking, you amputate the hands of your most tender feeling function, a price far too great for any outer advantage.
     … a mechanical view of life is wrong and extracts the feeling price. If an excess of ‘thing’ in life is eroding away one’s peace, it is the attitude that is wrong, not the things. Trickery as an attitude always involves getting something and refusing to pay the human, direct price for it.”
      Robert A. Johnson. “The Fisher King & The Handless Maiden. Understanding the Wounded Feeling Function in Masculine and Feminine Psychology.” HarperOne, 1993.

     “The naïve man often doesn’t know that there is a being in him that wants to remain sick. Inside each man or woman there is a sick person and a well person: and one needs to know which one is talking at any moment. But awareness of the sick being, and knowledge of how strong he is, is not part of the naïve man’s field of perceptions.”
      Robert Bly. “Iron John. A Book About Men.” 25th Anniversary Edition. Da Capo Press, 2004.

    “When Dr. Jung was asked the question ‘Will we make it?’ he always replied, ‘If enough individuals will do their inner work.’ There seem to be no collective solutions to this problem of wounded feelings, only individuals brave enough to take the problem personally. This is the new heroism.”
     Robert A. Johnson. “The Fisher King & The Handless Maiden. Understanding the Wounded Feeling Function in Masculine and Feminine Psychology.” HarperOne, 1993.

      “Modern science has come to understand that matter is only condensed energy. Sooner or later, science will also discover that what it calls energy, is only condensed psychic force, which discovery will lead in the end to the establishment of the fact that all psychic force is the condensation, purely and simply, of consciousness ie spirit. In other words, there is an energetic continuum running through all of creation, beginning in the virtually vibrationless awareness of pure consciousness, and ending in the solid world of rocks and tables. In contrast to the more traditional theological model, which views God and creation as rigidly separate, the wisdom model stresses the fluidity of movement along this energetic continuum, and the presence of divine consciousness at every level, regardless of the outward form.” Valentin Tomberg
      Cynthia Bourgeault. “The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming An Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart.” Jossey-Bass, 2003.

      Concise instructions for continuous meditation practice:

               "There is silence everywhere,
                     you just have to listen for it.
               I am surrounded by love,
                    I just have to stop looking for it.
               Trust opens both,
                    If I let it."                                         Joan Benner