WHY WE DANCE, TWYLA THARP AND NEUROSCIENCE

Can we get to universal verities through the granularities of our everyday lives? Can we gain some deeper understanding of why we do what we do by subscribing to a course of inquiry, a course that weds science and the arts of thought and action? Can we learn something about this from someone such as Twyla Tharp, the choreographer? She wrote an engaging book in 2003 titled The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life: A Practical Guide. And so it is. The book is about adding “tools” to one's toolbox of creativity. She addresses not only the practicalities of time management and creative media, but also how one's attitudes and emotions play into the creative life. She writes about ritual and discipline and about commitment and exertion. She gives suggestions on how to stimulate the creative urge and how to fashion it by identifying themes and how to keep it fresh. She is honest about the slumps and blocks that are a natural part of doing anything. She tends to see even the most mundane and boring pursuits (such as one's job) as opportunities for creativity in ways that don't elevate the basic boring job beyond recognition or dismiss its banality. All of us live in a banal environment if we are conscious and awake to the details of life. But Tharp offers a way to use some tools in more structurally constructive and personally constructive ways.

The questions I have are: What does the toolbox look like? Where are we putting the tools? What comes before the tools? Wondering why we dance in the first place directed me into what the world of neuroscience has learned about human motivation and response. After all, isn't dance something universally human and isn't it all inclusively neurological, from brain to brawn? Aren't we also asking about how dance emerges from networks and contributes to others? What is now esoteric and exotic about these associations will one day be integrated into common parlance and we will be on the cusp of another discovery. We will know more about how we are constructed as humans and how we express ourselves in the wider and deeper expanding world. But that world and that knowledge will continue to expand, just as the cosmos is expanding after the Big Bang that has given all that is.

The Big Bang of cosmic explosion has delivered to us a miraculous set of interlocking systems that manifests in ways that includes dance. We are creatures that move, that have innate systems for motion. Dance is one manifestation. It figures in courtship behavior, in play, and in a non-verbal method of social bonding by way of mimesis, imitation and resultant improvisation. Perhaps these are the “first causes” Tharp refers to when she is writing about where dance comes from. Just as we might think of the brain as a toolbox that contains all we need to perform the tasks of being human, Tharp literally uses a cardboard box (my version is what I call mind maps) for each of her creative endeavors. Into that box she throws whatever comes to mind about what might conceivably be connected to her theme. She returns to that box as a first cause for her inspiration and also as a way to remember what connections she made earlier.

“That's how a box is like soil to me. It's basic, earthy, elemental. It's home. It's what I can always go back to when I need to regroup and keep my bearings. Knowing that the box is always there gives me the freedom to venture out, be bold, dare to fall on my face. Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box.”

“Sit alone in a room and let your thoughts go wherever they will. … Note that this activity is the exact opposite of meditation. You are not trying to empty your mind, not trying to sit restfully without conscious thoughts. You're seeking thoughts from the unconscious, and trying to tease them forward until you can latch onto them. An idea will sneak into your brain. Get engaged with that idea, play with it, push it around—you've acquired a goal to underpin this solitary activity. You're not alone anymore; your goal, your idea, is your companion.”

To learn something about dance and its motivations is to know more about first causes and the marvelous toolbox that is the human brain. Antonio Damasio is an experimental psychologist and author of The Feeling of What Happens (1999). In this work he describes the layers of self. The deepest layer is the protoself that is unconscious and deals with survival activities, systems homeostasis, wakefulness, attention, emotions, and learning. The next layer is the core self and this holds the representations of the protoself derived from internal organ systems and the musculoskeletal frame. Here there are maps of relationships between objects and perceivers and the mental images that describe these relationships. Here we are conscious of feelings and body-related maps. It is here that motion and emotion make up a dance. In the brain a network of neurons called the cingulate cortices provide the most integrated view of the body where sensory (including spatial orientation) and motor information is woven with emotional processes.

The self (and creativity, too) is an open system, meaning it is dependent on context. And context changes all the time, but adding up to a discernible box of tools. The final layer of Damasio's whole self is the autobiographical or extended self and this is our normally functioning self in the world, the self derived from personal history that depends on working memory. It involves constructing metaphors from memories and transforming them into art. The self then, and art, are about mimesis, about imitating and copying. Who we become is dependent on the contexts of our lives. How we dance is about our motor and somatosensory capacities. We become acculturated and we become human beings, evolving over a lifetime. Neurologically, in imitating we are enlisting the “mirror neurons” within the brain and we are making the distinction between self and other—and self in the other, as if we and they had merged. Mirror neurons enable us to mentally mimic and recall situations that generate empathy and compassion.

The most basic image in this mental map is a proprioceptive one of what it is like to move one's body. The bodily system becomes a system of reference and is shaped by gestures, physical signs, postures, and rhythm. In mimicking such motions we are rehearsing social roles and social orientations. This occurs predominantly in the right brain, quite opposite of the administrative and analytical functions found in the left brain. And the map is improvisational. It resembles a collage more than it does a portrait.

“Inspiration comes in molecules of movement, sometimes in nanoseconds. A quick combination of three steps is an idea. A turn of the foot coupled with an arm gesture is an idea. A new way of collapsing to the floor is an idea. A man grabbing a woman above the elbow is an idea. A quick combination of five steps leading into a jump is practically a mega-idea—enough to keep me going for hours.”

We are ordering beings as well as improvisational and contextual beings. Ideas that are disparate beg to be ordered into similarities. We move from the generation of an idea to retaining it. We study it and then transform it to suit our different purposes. We have engaged our left brain capabilities for order. And so it is with dance. In its initial stages the improvisational rhythms of dance activate our sympathetic nervous system and call upon our energy stores and the endogenous (native) opioids dopamine and serotonin as well as epinephrine and norepinephrine. There is an absorption of attention and the engagement of the ordering dynamics for play. Breathing becomes rhythmic and meditative. The emotional state produced is one of catharsis and emotional release with a rebound sense of tranquility. However, with continued energetic rhythmic dancing there is saturation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems (associated with amygdala, hypothalamic, and hippocampal processing) and a feeling of collapse into a state of ineffability and the disintegration of self, leading to a profound peacefulness. This is perhaps a simple explanation for the spiritual heightening experienced by Sufi dancers (Sufi whirling, a physically active form of meditation), the Jewish Hasidic-style dancers, and dance as experienced in other religious and spiritual traditions.

“This, to me, is the most interesting paradox of creativity: In order to be habitually creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative, but good planning alone won't make your efforts successful; it's only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts.”

Dance is relational and transactional. It is social and educational. It is engagement and release. It is individual and communal. It is elemental and innovatively developmental. Dance reflects the processes that are inherent in our neuronal circuits and networks and that contribute to our sense of a creative self. Recent studies support the idea that dance in all its manifestations contributes to brain plasticity, the capacity of the brain to adapt and even to establish new circuits. Tharp suggests we not forget the roles of timing and rhythm, discipline, commitment, pattern-finding, repetition, imitation, and order out of disorder. She writes about the importance of being open to surprises, to being grateful for mentors, colleagues, and one's lineage. As well, she focuses on the necessity of getting in and out of ruts, and of risk and failure. Dance is about making connections, just as the brain is in the background making connections. Dance is neuroscience made manifest. Motion and emotion are who we are and who we might become.

Tharp's conception of meditation as an emptying phenomenon is interesting. I think that has come to us as an exotic and mystical notion about what the final “goal” of meditation is when, in fact, meditation is attention training. It is a filtering out process. It is its own toolbox of materials and thoughts and the whole conglomeration of elements can be, like her cardboard boxes, a source of creativity. But just as she brings some order to her collection of things, so we are challenged to find some order or theme in our meditation spaces. Sometimes that happens and other times it doesn't. There is no success or failure either way. It is just us being mindful—if only an awareness of the mess before us. May we all have the patience to discover the hidden delights of our own toolboxes.

IMAGINING WILLIAM BLAKE, A WORLD APART

William Blake (1757-1827) was considered to be deranged in his day and treated as a social outcast. This suited him very well, as it conformed to his distaste for neighbors, rejection of social pressures, and personal stands against war, slavery, and the conformities of organized religion. Of course, this consigned him to a life of poverty and obscurity, a life which he devoted to his art. His is no romantic story of the artist sequestered in a tower toiling away at his craft. He struggled against the tides of the day, threw up insults to those he felt were compromised in their actions, and generally snarled at the world. And he was a visionary who to this day is not well understood or appreciated. But it seems to me that he offers us a different way to view the turmoil and confusion we see all around us at the beginning of the 21^st century. If nothing else, his life is worth exploring because of his own efforts to deal with a society that he found exceedingly banal and manipulating.

Viewed now from our perch in time he would be considered an artist of “outsider” art, a wholly intact genre of art that celebrates elemental aspects of craft and often appears primitive in its motifs, media, and styles of creativity. Blake had been apprenticed to a printmaker early in his life but developed his own styles and presentations for the body of his creative work. He combined his visual art with his prose and poetry, often adding narrative to his prints. His work must have emerged from his world view, as he was totally committed to it all his life. It is said that he was a mystic but that detaches him from the influences of the world in which he lived. He was not interested in transcendent experiences. I don't think he could have created his own world without being deeply embedded in all the causes and events he so detested. His work is in that sense a reaction to the world's convictions and prejudices and follies. He is instead more a visionary than a mystic.

Blake was convinced that it is from the particularities of life that we draw inspiration and apply that to our creativity. His was a bottom-up and organic approach to life. He saw stasis and frozen symbols in the generalities of religion and most organized institutions of his day. His approach was to activate creativity with imagination. He believed that imagination represented man as an acting and perceiving being. The development of imagination was a process of synthesis and syncretism, an attempt to reconcile different beliefs. He could not have constructed his allegorical world without pushing against all that he saw around him and creating an ordered cosmos that he could live within, a world apart from the one that gave him the fierce energy to rebel.

Blake's world, both visual and written, was allegorical. Of course, when viewed from what we think of as the world, his world is one of fiction and fantasy. His world became a reality for him. His characters spoke for him and were able to say things that he found no audience for (the capitalizations of names for virtues and vices personified them in his stories). In this regard, his work is no different from the work of the writer of fiction or the puppeteer who could insult the king without losing his head. It is all about creating from the imagination characters who think and act within a differently constructed world. They are symbolic figures that convey hidden or complex meanings woven from moral, spiritual, or political threads. For him, the Devil was truly in the details.

Blake was influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg, The Bible, and the French and American revolutions (especially the writings of Thomas Paine). He studied Michelangelo and Raphael and found there the heroic and idealized human proportions he included in his own prints. He was drawn to rebellion and those who demonstrated it in their own lives. His allegorical structure echoes the work of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, works of Shakespeare and Hawthorne, Orwell's The Animal Farm, Malory's Arthurian Legends, T. H. White's The Once and Future King, C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps even J. K Rowling's Harry Potter series. What all of them seem to suggest is that there is an attempt to create a world apart, a world ordered differently from the one most of us live in every day.

What do I make of this? Why has William Blake captured my attention over the years? I have tried, and tried repeatedly, to decipher his hidden codes and to learn his secrets. I have taken my anthology of his poetry off the shelf, read a few poems, then put the book back, returned to the few poems I thought I understood, only to discover that I had missed the point. What was the point after all? His world seemed so far separated from the one in which I had any connection. And perhaps that is the point after all. Perhaps it is his genius at constructing a different world that I had missed because my world was full of interruptions and distractions he filtered out of his. If one views all the work he produced and look back at his motives for creating it, perhaps it is possible to understand why they came to be in the first place. And could this not be a motivation for us to appreciate the creative works that have come to us in the same way—responses to a world fraught with confusion and contradictions and riddles that seem impenetrable. And isn't this a way for us to find a sense of order that helps us navigate the shoals of that teeming world?

If one thinks that worlds apart, worlds of the imagination, are responses to this world of ours, then are we not open to limitless possibilities of how that world apart might look? It is said that all works of fiction are built on just a few universal themes and everything else is a version of them. Perhaps that is also true of allegories. Are there not personifications of Good and Evil, of Heaven and Hell, of Prudence and Patience, of Lust and Greed, for instance, in most of them, dressed up differently for each era's particular manifestations of human behavior? Do we not have our own era's figures and events that we could shape into an allegory? Would it do us some good to do this? Would the narrative help defuse the inherent angst that presently occupies corners of our minds? Could we imagine a new and different narrative about our lives that isn't dystopic or apocalyptic? Could such an allegory emerge from our minds as we sit in meditation? Doesn't this happen already as we characterize certain people in stereotypical ways in our daily lives? If we do this, can we imagine a world apart from them? Could an alternate world offer us respite from the problematic human behavior that now troubles us?

I imagine the world in which Blake felt most comfortable, given his peevishness about his external reality, was the one of Innocence (one of his allegorical figures in Innocence and Experience), of childhood. Childhood was a world of imagining and creativity, aspects of character given up when we grow up and gain Experience. Blake lived in one world of detested authority and dogma but returned repeatedly to the simplicity, fantasies, and allegories of a world apart where he could create the forces of good and have them defeat the forces of evil. This world is one of union and synthesis and entirely of his own making. Innocence is about unfettered belief and the experience of adulthood is about doubt. In this world of the imagination he created the particularities that made life comprehensible. It isn't a mystery to see why Blake was a dominant influence on the work of Maurice Sendak in our own times. Even Sendak's drawings of humans have a heroic quality to them that give them authority in the world of the child. And Sendak, too, dealt with nightmarish realities in his own personal life. He was haunted all his life with the specter of the losses of many family members in the Holocaust. His stories of childhood are complicated and not always the romantic versions others might have written. But, all the same, they were his efforts to find a simpler path through life. In doing so, he, like Blake, perhaps achieved a degree of clarity of vision.

For most of us, a return to childhood is a dream and a fund of memories. But, in fact, what we work at in our meditation practice is to return repeatedly to a mental state in which we get to choose the characters in our own allegory. We aspire to a state of greater simplicity in which we can leave the noise of the external world and all its tensions and confusion and enter a place (like the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) where the wonders and awe of childhood can be nourished. This childhood place is also where the disenfranchised (aren't children in this category?) can speak truth to power in ways children are not allowed to speak to adults in their world of experience. It is here, too, that we can find respite and peace, if not enlightenment.

Blake was able to create a world of innocence and dwell there off and on his entire life. I think he was able to do this successfully because he had a good idea about the exigencies and vicissitudes of the world he was leaving behind. He was an angry rebel but he was also a realist about the world of experience and a perpetual beginner in the world of innocence. Aren't we like this,too, when we meditate? Aren't we hoping to give up the constraints of adult experience for the freshness of childhood innocence? Aren't we hoping to bring greater simplicity and clarity to our thoughts? And aren't we hoping to concentrate our attention in ways that open up different ways of seeing and being? Can we bring innocence and experience closer together in our lives? Do we blur the line between fiction and reality? Are we open to what children have to teach us? What creations would William Blake give us today? How do we find this path through the thicket of tangled times?

REVISITING PROMETHEAN PEACE

Today's thoughts are focused on the life and legacy of Albert Schweitzer, almost a ghost from the past. He lived from 1875 to 1965, a very old age in those days. The context of his life includes accomplishments as a young adult polymath. He excelled in music (a scholar of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach) as an organist, in theology (he was the author of The Quest of the Historical Jesus), and later in medicine. He devoted the majority of his life to missionary medicine in Lambarene, French Equatorial Africa, now Gabon. To me, he was a Titan and a childhood hero, not your average off the shelf avatar. I don't know who the heroes are for young people today but Schweitzer came to me when I was young enough to be inspired and old enough to know what heroes were. Even then, Schweitzer was not a hero of popular culture but someone revered as much for surviving his many years as for the work he did in Africa, work not always understood or valued for what it was.

Indeed, in later life he was criticized for what some thought of as Neo-colonial oppression of the people with whom he had lived for decades and to whom he dedicated his life of medical service. He was criticized for being paternalistic and not cultivating advanced medical practice or training native Africans to be medical assistants. I was sufficiently enamored of his titanic accomplishments to read the criticisms and wonder if I understood his life as well as I might have. I don't have any evidence that the criticisms meant much to Dr. Schweitzer after so long a life of service. It is perhaps easy to see in the metaphor of Prometheus that he, too, was consigned to be chained to a rock and have his liver eaten by a raptor every day as punishment by the gods for being too cozy with human beings. Prometheus is the Titan who stole fire from the gods, gave it to man, and taught him how to use it, thus furthering progress and civilization. It was for his generosity that he was punished. How is it said these days? No good deed will go unpunished. Perhaps it is in the nature of retrospective review that we find faults measured against the social tensions and pressures of the times. It is important to dig as deeply as possible to understand the context of the life examined and the trajectory of events.

I can say why I was inspired by Dr. Schweitzer and not unduly persuaded by the criticisms. I suppose I was in the part of my life when I could be inspired. I had models of service in the caring professions and medicine was the realm in which I found the most exciting information and the most heroic individuals. Do children these days have heroes? Do they come from popular culture or are they sometimes people of more silent accomplishments and dedication? Dr. Schweitzer inspired me if only because he looked the part of a Titan: He had a flowing mane of white hair and a mustache of dramatic proportions. His face was a geography of gnarled care and woe, all the things one might imagine in someone who had labored greatly in the jungles of Africa. Yes, there was the romantic side of the sacrifice he had made. At so young an age, it was not part of my consciousness to imagine how difficult it must have been to build a village that contained a hospital run on unsophisticated generators used to power the lights used in surgery. It was part of my consciousness to understand sacrifice as heroic, titanic, risky, noble.

The context of Dr. Schweitzer's life was intriguing and almost mythical for a young boy caught up in adventure, romance, and admiration. But Dr. Schweitzer continued to accompany me as I aged and entered a medical world very different from the one he knew until the end of his long life. I never made the trek to any jungle but I always thought of my work in medicine as missionary service, albeit a truncated form compared to that of Dr. Schweitzer. Even so, now that I am in my own late stages of life, he continues to inspire me and so his life is worth revisiting, not so much as to emulate it but to find deep within it some themes that endure but which are often hidden now in our more clamorous and confusing world.

It is said that we now live in an era of hyper-individualism and over-technologizing. We have a stratified society in which we still entertain the idea of the self-made person who hacks his way into new frontiers of discovery. Perhaps that is what maintains our cultural biases and prejudices. Perhaps that is why we so easily escape into tribalism as a protective cover against those who are different from us. Perhaps we think we have much to fear and to defend. Is it really every man for himself now? Was it ever? Schweitzer began his work in Africa in 1913, just ahead of one of the greatest wars of all history for its brutalities and new killing technologies. He traveled to Europe and back during those years to raise money for his hospital, performing on the organ and giving lectures. He was not isolated in any way from the realities of war and its aftermath. And what he encountered every day in Africa was a reality of disease and suffering.

As I revisit his life now after all these years, the themes that I observe are all the more prescient for those of us in the 21^st century attempting to sort out purpose and meaning in our lives. There was the theme of polymathia and academic accomplishment transformed into his version of universal unity of thought. He came from a world of privilege and gave himself to a world emptied of advantages and teaching a version of humility and gratitude. He left a European world of gathering confusion and made a personal commitment to those whose lives were primitive by the standards of the time. He took a stand of self-abnegation in favor of an open source compassion for those less fortunate. He set aside the riddles of the world and focused on the small deeds of the everyday sacred. He modeled sacrifice and devotion. Life for him manifested from a deeper level of consciousness where service was emptied of self.

Dr. Schweitzer was a hero who emerged from the grittiness of life but whose legacy was a notion of the reverence for life. He won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1952, but he considered the commitment to a reverence for life to be his greatest legacy, and so it has remained for me all my life. A reverence for life has at its roots a widening stream of peace that surpasses our abilities to understand but which animates all of life. It is the stream that provides sustaining waters for all living beings and things equally from Lambarene to Lisbon. It is the stream that carries humans along from one century to the next, a promethean celebration of technology and science, but also of unsurpassable compassion and love. Here is Dr. Schweitzer telling his own story as he made his way upstream on his journey to Lambarene:

“Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase, 'Reverence for Life.' The iron door had yielded: the path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the idea in which world- and life-affirmation and ethics are contained side by side! Now I knew that the world-view of ethical world- and life-affirmation, together with its ideals of civilization, is founded in thought.”

And then:

“To have reverence in the face of life is to be in the grip of the eternal, unoriginated, forward-pushing will, which is the foundation of all being. It raises us above all intellectual knowledge of external objects, and grafts us on to the tree which is assured against drought because it is planted by the rivers of water. All vital religious feeling flows from reverence for life and for the necessity and for the need for ideals which is implicit in life. In reverence for life religious feeling lies before us in its most elemental and most profound form, in which it is not longer involved in explanations of the objective world, nor has anything to do with such, but is pure religious feeling founded altogether in implicit necessity and therefore devoid of care about results.”

“The world-view of reverence for life follows from taking the world as it is. And the world means the horrible in the glorious, the meaningless in the full of meaning, the sorrowful in the joyful. However it is looked at it remains to many a riddle. …. Reverence for life brings us into a spiritual relation with the world which is independent of all knowledge of the universe. Through the dark valley of resignation it leads us by an inward necessity up to the shining heights of ethical world- and life-affirmation.”

“The ethic of reverence for life constrains all, in whatever walk of life they may find themselves, to busy themselves intimately with all the human and vital processes which are being played out around them, and to give themselves as men to the man who needs human help and sympathy. It does not allow the scholar to live for his science alone, even if he is very useful to the community in so doing. It does not permit the artist to exist only for his art, even if he gives inspiration to many by its means. It refuses to let the business man imagine that he fulfills all legitimate demands in the course of his business activities. It demands from all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others.”

The myth of Prometheus has him chained and attacked by a terrifying presence in the form of an eagle. Perhaps this part of the myth is meant to teach us that we can celebrate our successes and our over-reachings—but at a price, the price of pain and suffering. The eagle ate at the liver of Prometheus each day but the liver was regenerated each night until he was finally freed from his punishment. Perhaps the story is meant to show us that there are conditions and causes as well as consequences to our best intentions but that we are also subject to a state of freedom that results from what we suffer. I imagine that pain and suffering were not foreign to Dr. Schweitzer, as they are not for anyone caring for someone else at any level of service. Yes, we rarely know the consequences of what we do or even the sources for our actions, but we act from a deep level of compassion for those in need. We see this all the time in our daily lives even if the media are focused on more dramatic phenomena.

So, I ask if you have heroes. What do they represent? Do you revisit them for the teachings they continue to offer? Have the teachings changed over time? Are the teachings more timely now? Do we even need heroes? Is it important for the hero to be celebrated or is it enough for them to be active in your own life? Do you offer them to others? I ask these questions to emphasize the importance of heroes in my own life but not as stand-alone soloists. I see Dr. Schweitzer as outstanding but also as someone who depended on countless others to give him resources and for him to receive them. In life there is giving and receiving. When we serve we also grow. We can lose some of our liver one day and have it reconstituted the next. We might not think of ourselves as titans in any form, but we can see that we are resilient and able to give in spite of what pain and suffering there might be in our lives. Prometheus shows us what this looks like. Our meditations and reflections may be visited and revisited by heroes and titans of different forms. Do we welcome these and are we curious about what they are doing there? And, in some ways, isn't meditation about self-emptying?

THE POVERTY OF THOMAS MERTON

I have been grappling with the presence of Thomas Merton (1915-1968) for many years. He is a most challenging person, not least because he is a puzzle. It seems that sometimes we are drawn to those situations and influences we just can't figure out easily. We can't pinpoint what it is about them that causes them to return to our consciousness over time. I have been reading Merton for over thirty years and he has meant something different to me at different stages of my life. I think this is the case for all of us. We are changing and so are the situations and people with whom we have relationships. I do think we can have deep relationships with individuals through reading their thoughts and ideas or through knowing something about their biographies. Isn't it wonderful that others are willing to share their lives in this way and to throw at us the puzzles, contradictions, and paradoxes of their own lives? We do the same with those in our lives as well.

What is obvious about Merton's life from his biography is that he felt abandonment as a young boy when his mother died and then later in his life when his father died of brain cancer. Abandonment and loss were part of his psychic orientation. It seems possible that this loss of familial orientation led to a life of loosened rigging and an escape into a life of sexual pleasures, alcohol abuse, and profligacy. It isn't clear to me even after reading his popular autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, how he managed to find the path he did to his eventual life as a Trappist monk. Certainly, he had relationships with others that served as important influences (Mark Van Doren, the poet; Robert Lax, another poet; Daniel Walsh; Catherine De Hueck). His path was also broken by influential writers: Etienne Gilson (The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy), Aldous Huxley (Ends and Means), Augustine of Hippo (Confessions), Gerard Manley Hopkins (his poetry and path into priesthood), Aelred Graham (Zen Catholicism). While I think of Merton as one of my own friends, he, too, had what might be considered friends among his teachers and authors.

Whatever the deciding factor(s), Merton made his way to a commitment to a life of monasticism. Among the many tensions in his life that I have been able to discern were those of freedom/constraint, knowledge/innocence, abandonment/belonging, a life of the mind/social activism, ego/no-self, and means/ends. Even as he was leaving a life of untethered sensual pleasures, he was caught in the conundrum of needing to be a writer and feeling that he was indulging an excessive ego. He was leaving a life of sensual riches for a simpler, stripped-down life of contemplation and commitment to a religious community. What might have seemed like an escape from a life of confusion and uncertainty morphed into a life of contradictions and more uncertainty. Within the walls of Gethsemani Abbey he encountered the tensions of ego/no-self once more. He remained a writer with activist passions, even though he was restricted by his order in where he could travel and what he could publish. It wasn't until later in his short life that he became more involved in exploring spiritual traditions outside his Catholic faith. One of his last books was Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968, the year of his death). This book is a wonderful guidebook to some of Zen Buddhist thought and practice seen through the eyes of someone ensconced in the Catholic tradition.

Grappling with Merton is difficult because there are so many available sources he left behind from which to pull threads. I wanted to focus on one thread in particular to highlight his explorations and experiments with faith. I thought it might be useful to write about his life's changes and diversions or about his devotion to his community. I thought about the tensions mentioned above and wondered if any of them held some clearer teaching for someone just acquainted with him from his writings. What finally seemed timely and appropriate was to explore what poverty means and how that might have played out in Merton's life in ways that can open new ground for us, householders and citizens of a very complicated world. I do think he can show us a different way of looking at our lives and that is always a mark of a very good writer who is dedicated to a life of the mind. Merton, of course, had a very different path as a monk but he was insightful about his life and its intersections with the lives of the majority of us.

Webster says that poverty is: The state or condition of being poor, lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts: Lack of something necessary or desirable; insufficiency, paucity: Deficiency in amount, scantiness.

In one sense, then, poverty is about lack, about need, about a state that one is dealt by fate. But Merton and his predecessors in monasticism saw poverty as a positive frame and as a choice. This remains a very contrary notion in our times when we are bombarded by how we can overcome the deficiencies, deprivations, absences, and missing ingredients in our lives. We are offered remedies that only more consumption can provide. We are caught in a mental web of achievement, success, striving, gaining, climbing ladders, maneuvering, spending, sensual pleasures, and in so many ways driven by ideals of living and consumption rendered by society and culture. But there is a noticeable gap between this way of life and the life that I (and Merton, too) believe most people are missing. This is the life of poverty. It is the life of self-emptying, of discipline, commitment, hard psychic work, of giving up what are considered advantages, and seeing within poverty not a sense of lack but an open field in which our energies can be offered to others in an infinite number of ways. This life of poverty is about humility and caring.

It occurs to me that every time we sit to meditate we are choosing this poverty. We show up, we sit or kneel, we leave our material possessions behind, and enter a realm of silence and it is within that space of silence that we lay open our hearts and minds to a limitless terrain. Merton explored these possibilities in his book on Zen and this is what he wrote:

“... they [Christianity and Zen Buddhism) have … the same kind of limitlessness, the same lack of inhibition, the same psychic fullness of creativity, which mark the fully integrated maturity of the 'enlightened self.'”

Merton continues by saying that it is only when we empty ourselves of our wants that we make room for something more vast and deeper. It is by choosing poverty and a greater simplicity in our material lives and in our minds and hearts that we can arrive at new ways of being in the world. It is clear to me in my own experiences and experiments with meditation that meditation itself is a poor container for what we ask it to hold, and that is all possibilities. Meditation is a poor vehicle for the actions we are driven to as humans. Meditation is a preparation for compassion. Compassion is what emerges from the silent spaces that we inhabit in meditation. Meditation is a great poverty that we choose to help us slip out of the daily rat race and oppressions of social pressures and tensions. Our souls want to be so poor that we can cultivate the creativity that brings us closer to deep relationships with others in our lives, if not with a power that we feel animates us in miraculous ways.

And can the poverty we have chosen and practice meet the poverty that has been dealt to others, the poverty of lack and deficiency? Can we bring together in one shared space the compassion that lets us know at a deep level the poverty of another? Do we not all want to be lifted beyond our poverty into some relationship that brings joy and belonging to everyone? What will fill the large space of cleared ground we have prepared in our meditations? What happens next?

JEAN VANIER/ ABOUT THE IMPERFECT

In some ways all of us live our lives against the backdrop of history, societal, and cultural change. If everything we observe changes, then we humans change too. If species evolve, then humans can't escape the same evolutionary pressures that Charles Darwin began to explore on his expedition aboard the Beagle. He was able to document changes in species variations, arriving at the conclusions he did about each variation being a step in the progression of change among the individuals of given species. But did each variation represent a pinnacle of development or did each step precede the next change? Wasn't every change imperfect in its expression, leading to yet another change?

Most, if not all, of these little essays related to meditation/mindfulness will be about identity. They will highlight some aspect of what it is to live an individual life interwoven into the fabric of a larger piece of cloth. They will be about individuals against a ground that describes different aspects of what it is to be a human being. Charles Darwin moves silently amidst the shadows in the scenarios we will explore. In this essay, our protagonist is Jean Vanier (1928-2019), one whose bulk of adulthood was devoted to the obviously imperfect (aren't all of us imperfect in many ways?) among us. Jean was born into a life of privilege and drift. He joined the British Royal Navy during the Second World War and eventually served in the Royal Canadian Navy. He said that he enjoyed being in the navy, as it gave his life structure and he liked the challenges it presented to a sailor/soldier. In the course of his service, he received some survivors of Nazi concentration camps and he was touched by their destitute condition. He left the navy and entered a contemplative community and achieved doctoral degree in philosophy through the Catholic Church. Unsatisfied, he visited several institutions for the mentally disabled and responded to the appalling conditions of the men he saw there by inviting two of them to live with him. This was the beginning of L'Arche (the Ark) that has grown to 154 communities in 38 countries, all of them serving mentally and physically challenged people.

In his early years, Jean was dealing with a widespread stereotype of a disabled person as being flawed and in some respects disposable. At least, many of the disabled were secreted away in institutions in which they were treated as potentially dangerous animals. They were left to age and die in places where human connections and healthful conditions were mostly absent. Families were pulled apart by these people thought to be imperfect and irretrievably broken and better left forgotten and out of sight. Vanier's life was a testament to what became a dedication to the welfare of the forgotten and lonely, society's castoffs. By taking in disabled people, he also lived a model of how it might be to integrate the disabled into a community of love and care in which each individual was embraced for specific gifts of character and personality. Not only was he modeling what it was to be a loving human being in service to “the other,” he was bringing into the light those who had populated the background and underscoring their humanity, pointing out in his own way that there is perfect imperfection in all of us and only its manifestations differ.

I think Vanier was demonstrating with his own life many aspects of moral and compassionate conduct that we face in our times. He was solidly grounded in practical ways that were important in dealing with individuals with many physical and emotional needs. He no doubt discovered important expedient means that allowed him to meet the needs of his residents. We can guess that he met substantial community resistance and had to deal with permits and clearances, local and state regulations. He had to enlist people with an orientation like his own to assist with the care of individuals who could do only limited things for themselves. But, not just in spite of but perhaps because of these challenges, he was able to forge an evolving community, always in flux, but stabilized and shaped by compassion for those less fortunate. He moved from what he witnessed as an imprisonment of human capacity to a model of love and compassion and service.

Not only did Vanier model what a loving and open community of acceptance could be, he also showed how disabled people could thrive in their own rights. He gave them hope and a sense of personal worth. None of this could have been easy, knowing what we know about how the disabled have had to depend on advocates to advance their rightful places in society. There have been incalculable emotional and practical physical barriers to deal with. Learning that all humans have idiosyncratic rhythms and pacing widens our realm of acceptance of the “other.” Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, has a chapter on disability in which he says:

“For people who must accept a fixed external reality, the only way forward is to adjust internal reality. Many coping strategies have a Zen simplicity. Instead of resolving chaos, find beauty and happiness amid chaos.

“Empathy and compassion work best in concert with the belief that you are still capable of shaping a meaningful life for yourself and your family. The technical term for this is internal locus of control, wherein one determines one's own trajectory, rather than external locus of control, wherein one feels entirely subject to outside circumstances and events. To achieve an internal locus of control, people actively seek to match their lifestyles with their priorities …. Paradoxically, however, parents of disabled children often achieve a feeling of control by making a firm and positive affirmation of their lack of control. The most important thing, often, is a belief in something bigger than one's own experience. The most common source of coherence is religion, but it has many other mechanisms. You can believe n God, in the human capacity for good, in justice, or simply in love.”

Inherent in the relationships with the disabled is often a lack of reciprocity that one expects from others of normal capacities and this challenges our egos. But do we not become impatient when we don't get what we think we deserve from our normal interactions? Aren't we challenged to understand more deeply what it is to give and serve? Aren't we challenged to explore our own identities and perceived needs? Don't some of these issues arise in the silence of our meditations? Can we train our attention to recognize what it is that we are feeling in the first instance?

In our times we are moving along with shifts in social structures and finding ourselves sometimes at a loss to know just what it is that is happening and how we feel about it. It creates a climate of uncertainty and unease. When we experience this, we often default to hard-edged positions and prejudices because it takes less energy and takes the contradictions and ambiguity out of the equations of an easier everyday life. It is easier to secrete away our own dread and confusion and fear than it is to see ourselves as imperfect and perhaps broken. Without overlaying any of the political burdens that now infuse so many aspects of our communal lives, we are facing challenges of identity—our own in relation to the “other;” whether those individuals are mentally or physically challenged, or perhaps identify as an alternative gender, or suffer mental conditions that are difficult for us to comprehend, or are natives of a culture we don't easily understand. Social trends often become legislated dicta that strain what we might think of as unjust or inequitable or oppressive.

We are also challenged in our social lives to work with what science has developed in the arena of genetic engineering, raising many ethical questions about genetically selected offspring and the possibility of picking and choosing traits as well as eliminating undesirable or potentially harmful genetic components. Recent debates about legislating reproductive rights and declaring when in the cycle of pregnancy life actually begins in the womb are other examples that challenge us to work through the difficult issues that have implications for our existential well-being and concepts of right and wrong. It seems as if legislators have jumped ahead of the philosophers who can assist us in understanding some of the deeper considerations. Science and politics are impatient and restless worlds.

It seems that segregating groups of individuals imprisons everyone. When we draw boundaries out of suspicion or fear, or categorize individuals as less-than in one way or another, we have drawn ourselves into a realm in which we, too, draw back from expressing our most generous human traits of acceptance and kindness. We retreat into the background of the social fabric instead of opening ourselves and others to an expression of what we most long for and that is to belong. Exclusion is painful and creates many instances of a more constricted and diminished world that all of us have access to as humans.

This little essay is intended to be an example of how one might encounter the everyday-mindful on the meditation cushion. I like to think that the meditation space is full of all possibilities and that we are not always able to sift and filter to the extent we desire, but we can train our attention to see what comes to us and to keep the objects/individuals/issues in the foreground, as difficult and troublesome as they might be. One might think this is a sure formula for taking on burdensome baggage but, paradoxically, it is a way to escape being manacled to the concrete walls of a personal mental prison. We can only find this out by being curious and open and by experimenting with possibilities. In many ways, we can be grateful for Jean Vanier for what he was able to do to free many individuals imprisoned in imperfections, disabilities, and differences, and to offer all of us a way to escape our own manacles.

5-19-19

SULPHUR YELLOW

Do you think that how you think affects what you think? I have been pondering this for a little while recently as I wonder what might be useful for the meditation classes I am leading. I have tried to emphasize that meditation is merely a form, a container, in which our minds get to wander and, at some point, settle. I point out what master gurus in meditation say about meditation being all about training attention. While it is somewhat difficult to construct such a container, it seems far easier than to confront what gets to fill it. When we let our bodies achieve a comfortable posture that is upright and true for us, and when we focus on following our breath or touching one hand against another without conceptualizing that touch, then our minds are available and open and it is common for that space to be filled with unpredictable thoughts, ideas, and emotions. It is almost as though we have prepared a random playground for our minds. And that is when some of the hard work of meditation begins.

I do think that it matters how we think. Is it spacious or cramped? Is it easy or difficult? Is it superficial or deep? Is it critical or passively accepting? However one might set one's mind to think makes a difference. I have made the point in class that meditation is one part of the meditation/mindfulness continuum, with mindfulness being the extension of a certain mindset in our everyday lives. The same idea about how one thinks in meditation being the portal to what one thinks applies equally to mindfulness. For instance, one can begin on the surface of things, noticing this or that, and then thinking can shift into deeper and deeper layers of thought when one becomes more curious about what it is that the senses have detected. Then, curiosity and inquiry engage and one is drawn into a realm where connections and interdependence of phenomena manifest.

So it was recently that I was attracted to all the early blooming flowers in the fields and the roadsides. I noticed that so many of them were bright yellow and blooming in large patches. When I looked more closely, I saw that there were dandelions in profusion and also smaller patches of Thermopsis rhombifolia, also known more commonly as the round-leaved golden pea (pictured nearby). It is one of the earliest flowers we see here in central Montana. I wondered why so many of them are such a bright yellow color and guessed that it was a property that attracted pollinators to them but I also discovered that the yellow color absorbs certain wavelengths of light energy for photosynthesis and also protects green chlorophyll from photodamage.

And I wondered how one would describe the penetratingly bright yellow color. I remembered reading about the history of color cataloging, most beautifully in a work by Patrick Syme based on the color schemes of Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749-1817), The Nomenclature of Colours (1814). A sheet of his book documenting yellow shades is pictured here. I learned that this little book was one of several hundred that accompanied Charles Darwin (1809-1882) on his voyage of the Beagle. These efforts to categorize and name colors and to document their geological origins (most pigments were originally derived from soil and rock sources) was akin to what Darwin intended to do on his journey of exploration. Naming and identifying has a long history in botany as well, most famously exemplified by Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). Linnaeus was a botanist and physician who had a particular interest in mosses and lichens but managed to develop a system of binomial taxonomy for the nested hierarchy of kingdoms, classes, orders, genera, and species for all living things. It is important to point out that, just as I had been drawn to the pea flowers, so he had developed his systems of classification on what he could observe about the organisms he studied. Observation, noticing, is where most of us begin our thinking.

Naming and categorizing fits in nicely with our idea about how the world works. It is useful to have lists of things by which to order the observable facts, but sometimes drawing lines around things doesn't serve every purpose. Naming is a way of defining identity and it is certainly the route most of us enlist in our communications with one another and it is, in part, how we identify ourselves. So, categories establish boundaries and differences but they also box up our thinking in ways that hobble how we think. For instance, Linnaeus grouped man with the monkeys and apes in his taxonomy because that is how he observed their shared characteristics. But in his day that implied certain things about a world view that knocked humans off their exalted pedestal of exceptionalism and made what was considered an animal form close to God no more important than the primates.

Drawing lines around things, making borders and boundaries, is not the same thing as drawing lines from one thing to another across borders to demonstrate connections and cross-connections and what I think of as interdependence of all phenomena. I have found it useful to scatter words and phrases around a piece of paper and to see what relationships they have to one another. I call this a mind map and it is almost a random assortment of ideas, names, concepts—things I have noticed in the course of my travels and reading. It is a scatter of observations. From the scatter I attempt to see if there are any connections that make any sense or that might uncover a new way of seeing them. It is the new ways of connecting that are the most exciting and, for me, the most creative. The mind map is a different way of thinking. It is an attempt to reproduce in real time, in everyday life, what happens within the meditation container when the mind is let loose of its borders and boundaries and allowed to wander. It is an attempt to picture what I have observed in a different way. It is an effort to see things differently. It is a way to stretch my own thinking into new avenues and away from the rigidity that my routine thoughts usually assume.

It is often said that meditation as a form is useless. One sits and sits. But if one thinks of mindfulness as the creative offspring of the staid and quiet parent, meditation, then there is use to be made of the forms and borders of the meditative space. But there is also a shifting between parent and child, one changing in relationship to the other that is generative and powerful. There is an interdependence and cross-pollination. It is what is observed between a bright yellow flower and the bee. One partner is fixed and the other moves to and away, both depending on the other for life. And so it is for us and the bee when we eat an almond or other crop made possible by pollination. But just think of all the associations we can make in our rich lives that remind us of our privileges and our interdependence and for which we are not as grateful as we might be.

So, there is more to the Thermopsis rhombifolia than meets the eye, but what meets the eye is a magical and still undiscovered depth of existence gifted to us every spring. What do we call it that is more than a yellow flower?

MYSTICISM AND TIME

I am somewhat preoccupied with the idea of time and how we perceive it in our lives. I am fascinated by how time sometimes seems to slip by unnoticed and at other times becomes the focus of our most immediate thoughts. When we are young, summers unfold endlessly into the future, but when we are older, summers are of such short duration that we wonder where time has flown. We are enveloped by our perceptions of time. Our lives are lived in time. We experience our livelihoods and our retirements in a sequence of time. We measure our productivity and our leisure in terms of time. We dwell in memories and anticipations of future times alike—all wound and bound up in perceptions of time. We have individual and family histories. We study history in school with the idea that we might find some wisdom in the untidiness of how other people lived their lives and how time treated their behavior and activities. We identify ourselves in a relationship with time, a relationship that changes as we age.

Our perceptions of time continue to influence how we observe our lives unfolding. In a previous blog post, I worked with the idea of linearity and how we see the world and construct our own cosmologies according to our concepts of linear time. We have come to feel that cause and effect in most things should connect point A with point B in a straight line. This is the scientific method incorporated into our perception of all things. Yet, it has been shown that creativity and the flow of time are often punctuated by what are termed paradigm shifts, jumps in insight that lie outside what we assume are normal ways of thinking. But linear thought has not always been the norm. Fragmented time sequences have been part of older cosmologies. If artistic trends can reflect social norms, then art history has had periods in which reality was broken into thousands of mosaic pieces, each reflecting some smaller aspect of a total picture. Stained glass windows were constructed of hundreds of brilliant sources of light, each transmitting a different color and intensity. Early textual writings were composed by multiple anonymous authors, each contributing to the whole. The whole was the point and not who had written which part.

So, my fascination with time and its expression in all aspects of our lives has taken me in different directions, not the least of which is to contrast notions of time and its influences with what it might be like to live with a sense of timelessness. What would it be like to adopt a world view that allows for a mental space in which there is no time? What would that feel like and what would it mean? In these times of so much chaos and fast living, such a feeling might offer us some peace and calm we can't find in the commotion all around us. In an old book, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (1957), D. T. Suzuki (pictured nearby), a Buddhist scholar, examines the idea of mysticism in the works of Meister Eckhart (also pictured here) and compares and contrasts his ideas with his own understanding of it. It is an examination of the idea of “emptiness” that is typical of Buddhism and of “infinity,” which is the Christian term for the same thing, he says. In both cases, the idea is that there is a place, a mental concept at least, where time does not exist. It is immovable and fixed but serves as the ideal space in which to dwell. Accessing this space is a matter of chance and circumstance and is described as insight or enlightenment, depending on one's orientation.

We are living in times that have invited exploration of what is termed “mindfulness.” This seems to be a response to the pressures of our time-focused lives. I am not certain that its full meaning and implications are realized by those who are looking for a quick fix to their confusions and fears. It is a beginning to some sort of relief but it has also become a somewhat superficial approach to a matter that begs for greater depth and commitment. Mindfulness is easy or difficult, depending on one's view. It represents a short-term pause in activity, but it is also a long-term commitment to changing one's perception of time. Mindfulness can be a suspension of time. Isn't that, after all, what is hoped for as a refuge from the pressures of time management and demand? There is in the minute point of time suspended a perception of infinity. It isn't necessary to posit a space outside daily reality that represents this unmoving and stable mental place. If one thinks of infinity as a place above earthly activity, somewhere in a “heaven,” then it becomes an ideal and unavailable to most of us as we go about our daily toil. However, if mindfulness is another face of infinity, then one only has to pause and connect with it in the course of a life full of distractions and interruptions. It is a place where time can stand still, if only for a brief sequence. Is this useful?

I think it is useful to think of mindfulness in this way. It avoids having to subscribe to a place that is so very remote for most of us to imagine. We are less attached these days to the religions and spiritual traditions that have in their dogmas ideas of heaven and hell or their equivalents. Suzuki writes about Meister Eckhart's notion of the Godhead, a static and immovable source from which emanates the spiritual energy he calls God. Suzuki equates the essence of the Godhead with the Buddhist idea of egolessness. He says that our time consciousness will never be abolished because that is the way we as humans perceive our lives in this world. However, he says that it is useful to have a concept of empty space with potential to realize a freedom we don't receive in the activities of our surface and relative lives. And it is useful to have some relief from our own egos, if only for brief periods. We benefit from this interruption personally in being reminded of our humanity and, in the ways mindfulness can be taught and shared with others, we cultivate a deeper sense of community. This is no small thing in times when we are faced with the consequences of individual power and the sense of entitlement that we derive from it. The more we are separated from each other, the greater the chances that our biases and prejudices will lead to tribalism and despotism. We will be divided from our best selves and from all those on whom we depend for so many aspects of our lives. Infinity is for everyone.

Yes, that small point of eternity in the moment can yield up to us benefits that are outside of time and all its tyrannies and joys alike. We can experience a deep freedom that gives us courage and strength to continue along the timely path until the next mindful moment. We are reminded that we are not alone in this effort of historical motion but we see ourselves differently in the process. We see that we are capable not only of continuation in our efforts along our paths, but also capable of participating in minute paradigm shifts and punctuations that lead to greater creativity and deeper relationships. We are not victims of time so much as actors in its long sequences, participants in the process of its flow. If we were to imagine a new metaphor for time in our lives, then the idea of a stream would be a good one. A stream is ever-changing and continuous with energies that vary. There are straight channels of flow and there are eddies and pools. There are rapids and there are indolently slow movements. No part of a stream remains static and unchanging, yet its substance is defined and characteristic of it. We are in the flow of time but our human agency and our talents at conceptualization open us to the possibilities of imagining the stream as a still point, a point of mindfulness in which there is the freedom of its motion and direction. We are given the capacity “to see a world in a grain of sand. And a heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand. And eternity in an hour.” These words of William Blake echo what both Christianity and Buddhism share in their concepts of mystical freedom brought down to how we might conduct our lives in our desire for shared freedom from the tyrannies of time.

We will not escape history and we won't escape time. We will continue to move in a stream from birth to death and we will continue to age, get sick, and eventually die. But I suggest that within that process of streaming time there are moments of infinity and emptiness that bring to us refuge in dark and troubling and distracted times. This is no escape maneuver but a conscious effort of mindfulness that can lead to the hard work of deliberate self-care and the sharing of self with other. What do we have to lose in the effort? What do we have to gain? Are we not interested in a more fully whole life in which all people can participate? Are we not able to share infinity? And isn't infinity easily accessible to all of us?