One
The Oneness, the perennial philosophy, the interconnectedness of all things, everybody knows everything all the time. For the last few months, this has been the conceptual object of my adventures on the spiritual fringe of America. Admittedly, it’s an odd thing to search for. By its nature (which is all nature), it's everything and everywhere. It's what is at any given moment, at all moments. It’s the Oneness. Any adventure that happens is already within its confines. “Finding” it, we can presume, doesn't require going anywhere, but just prying open the eyes to that truest reality beyond the veil of illusion.
Now, that’s all well and good, you might be saying, but questions remain. Where do the illusions come from? Why are they around? How can we make sense of the myriad complications and distractions of life, both in our individual lives and in this collectively singular and ridiculous world we live in?
I’ve said it once with regard to the questions I throw out on this blog, and I’ll say it again now: I really don’t know.
Possession
At the Threshold Society Sufi meeting in Louisville, one of the topics of discussion - in the midst of our entrancing group exercises - was possessions. Getting to an experience of God, of pure surrender to the Oneness - so the teachings go - requires losing one’s possessions, stripping away the excesses of external things to get to that mystical singular core of inner truth.
But losing external possessions alone is not enough to gain access to experiential Oneness. That would be too easy. Then we could just throw out our crap, nude down, and live free (…for the record, I’ll say that this really doesn’t sound half bad…). Ah, but this is practical mysticism, not a call to jungle utopia. And in any case, even a jungle utopia would require some dismantling of the other kind of possession: not what we possess, but what possesses us.
I’m talking about exactly what you think I’m talking about: Demons, jinns, dybbuks, fairies, ghouls, angry ancestors. Intelligent spirits that overcome us, control us, lead us into aberrant and destructive behaviors. These are nearly ubiquitous in the history of human folklore. In the book At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, Yossi Klein Halevi describes his attempts to bridge the religious barriers between Jews and Muslims and Christians in the Holy Land. One of his outreaches leads him to a Sufi Sheikh in Gaza, Ibrahim. Sheikh Ibrahim, a nascent peacemaker in perhaps the most difficult place in the world to be one, is also an exorcist. Halevi describes again and again the people who come to pay their respects to Sheikh Ibrahim, to thank him profusely, after he has cured them, dispossessed them, of their jinns. At one point, Halevi laments all the talk of jinns. He write that it makes him depressed, that what he really wishes the holy Sheikh would talk about is curing the hate that lives in the hearts of too many people in the land. What I'm saying is: I’m not so sure there’s really a difference between the two.
To be clear, I’m not saying that otherworldly beings are definitely the cause of hate and destruction and violence in the world. I have no specific answers on that subject. I am saying that, as shorthand, such ideas are not themselves to be tossed aside. Call them demons, call them unchecked passions, call them learned indoctrinations, lower consciousnesses, or inclinations with which we are born (the Hasidim of Eastern Europe were especially fond of talking about the yetser harah and yetser hatov, the good and evil inclinations, that do constant battle in the soul of every person). In the experiential quest for the Oneness, as articulated by the traditions of Sufism, these are all equal. They are possessions, the kind that overcome us, pulls us away from our deepest selves, and must be consciously scraped off of our hearts, whose pure beats match the rhythm of that singular substance of true existence.
Keep this in your head for a bit. First…
A Quick Thought on Smartphones, Technology, and Possession
When I began this project, my question was: what do Millennials believe in? How do the people of this era worship? I’m far from the first to ask this question (and I don’t believe there’s any set answer), and in my preliminary research, I found this article from the Boston Globe. It describes how Millennials seek spirituality in fellowship, gathering together, or, as we might say in the language of this blog, in Community. This is a similar sentiment to what I’ve been finding in the Communities that I’ve visited over the last few months.
Yahzoo for this project I suppose.
That said, what’s pertinent to this blogpost, to the topic of possessions and possessors, is not the conclusion but the very first sentence. Casper ter Kuile, a divinity student and one of the subjects of the article, begins his sabbath worship by turning off his phone, and unplugging his electronics. Talk to the over-connected people of the Millennial era and this is a pretty common scene. The beginning of spirituality comes from leaving the world of technology behind. Those devices that hold pieces of ourselves within them, which hold our schedules in them, and the connections to the people we love who are far away within them, the ones that we search through absently when we feel awkward at parties, when we feel lost and yearn for the quick fix to find ourselves (this has rarely worked for me). These are the devices we feel we have to turn them off to get closer to the Oneness. Why? Because, like jinns and dybbuks, they possess parts of us.
It’s so nice to turn them off.
This seemed worth mentioning.
But…
Aha! This (disjointed) post is not (solely) to be a rant about technology, and not solely a reflection on losing possessions in pursuit of experiencing the Oneness. It’s also about the importance of possessions, in order to experience what I'lll call the Twoness. Because, like Virginia Woolf wrote in To The Lighthouse, “Nothing is simply one thing.” And that includes the Oneness.
Two
During my conversation with Pastor Neil at the Root and Branch Church in Chicago, he mentioned that he found it was important, virtuous even, to conceive of God as an other. To not get carried away in searching for God only within oneself. What does this mean? In the context of this blogpost, I’ll posit that making room within oneself for an otherness means keeping space available for possession. Truthfully, I think this means not experiencing the Oneness as the be-all end-all of spiritual pursuit. And this leads us to ask again and again: what is the other? Who is the other? What is me that’s not me?
The Golden Rule on One Foot
The most famous story of the Rabbis Hillel and Shammai is this: A person from another country decides that he wishes to move to the Holy Land and become a Jew. But he is impatient. He does not wish to go through the years of learning, the struggles, the confusion of trying to understand what it means to be a Jew. He wants the quick answer. So he conceives a plan. He goes first to Shammai and says to him, “I wish to be a Jew but I have very little time. Can you teach me everything I need to know while standing on one foot?” Shammai, malcontented misanthrope that he is (and brilliant sage, of course), slams the door in the man’s face and returns to his dinner of noodle soup and Torah study. The man is not deterred however, and he travels on. He finds Hillel. “Please, I cannot wait so long!" he says, "Can you teach me everything I need to know to be a Jew while standing on one foot?” With a pious smile on his face, Hillel raises one foot in the air. “Of course,” he says and then quotes the verse of Torah that shares a message with cultures across the globe, “Ve’ahavta L’re’echa Kamocha, And you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” Hillel tells the man, “the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
Jesus said it (check Mark and Matthew and Luke). Confucius taught it. The "ethic of reciprocity," is expressed in Hinduism’s Mahabharata, and in Buddhism’s Udanavarga. It's in Islam’s Hadiths, in the Bahai and Zoroastrian and Taoist faiths. It comes from as far back in history as Ancient Egyptian religious texts. We call it the “golden rule” for a reason.
It also requires an understanding of existence beyond the Oneness (which is, of course, part of the Oneness). To truly treat another individual person as you wish to be treated, indeed to love another individual person as you wish to be loved, you must cultivate an ability to conceive beyond yourself, to leave that separate space within to be possessed and filled by the Other. This is the only way to see that Other as his/her/gender-non-specific own holistic Oneness. And this is to experience the Twoness, to love existence and God and the Universe (and Almig), through another.
This, it seems to me, is the better goal than simply chasing the Oneness. It’s also the one of the ways in which the existing religious traditions hold the most power, where the continuities of tradition resonate. For thousands of years, so many human minds have been working on conceptualizing and understanding this Otherness of the great mysterious unknown, and whether that’s the God of the Torah, or Jesus and the Father of the New Testament, or the Hindu Atman, or the quantum particles that make up all of the energy in the Universe, they are all doorways into the simple arithmetic that One + One = Two (...and One).
Coming Up
I’m reaching the end of this blogging journey. In the next few weeks, I’ll be writing on my final three stops: the Maharishi Vedic City near Fairfield, Iowa, transcendental meditation capital of America; Arcosanti, the arcological urban city of stone in the Arizona desert; and the Grange Farm School, providing a window into one of the oldest rural fraternal agricultural organizations in America, in Mendocino County, California.
Stay tuned.
The Oneness, the perennial philosophy, the interconnectedness of all things, everybody knows everything all the time. For the last few months, this has been the conceptual object of my adventures on the spiritual fringe of America. Admittedly, it’s an odd thing to search for. By its nature (which is all nature), it's everything and everywhere. It's what is at any given moment, at all moments. It’s the Oneness. Any adventure that happens is already within its confines. “Finding” it, we can presume, doesn't require going anywhere, but just prying open the eyes to that truest reality beyond the veil of illusion.
Now, that’s all well and good, you might be saying, but questions remain. Where do the illusions come from? Why are they around? How can we make sense of the myriad complications and distractions of life, both in our individual lives and in this collectively singular and ridiculous world we live in?
I’ve said it once with regard to the questions I throw out on this blog, and I’ll say it again now: I really don’t know.
Possession
At the Threshold Society Sufi meeting in Louisville, one of the topics of discussion - in the midst of our entrancing group exercises - was possessions. Getting to an experience of God, of pure surrender to the Oneness - so the teachings go - requires losing one’s possessions, stripping away the excesses of external things to get to that mystical singular core of inner truth.
But losing external possessions alone is not enough to gain access to experiential Oneness. That would be too easy. Then we could just throw out our crap, nude down, and live free (…for the record, I’ll say that this really doesn’t sound half bad…). Ah, but this is practical mysticism, not a call to jungle utopia. And in any case, even a jungle utopia would require some dismantling of the other kind of possession: not what we possess, but what possesses us.
I’m talking about exactly what you think I’m talking about: Demons, jinns, dybbuks, fairies, ghouls, angry ancestors. Intelligent spirits that overcome us, control us, lead us into aberrant and destructive behaviors. These are nearly ubiquitous in the history of human folklore. In the book At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, Yossi Klein Halevi describes his attempts to bridge the religious barriers between Jews and Muslims and Christians in the Holy Land. One of his outreaches leads him to a Sufi Sheikh in Gaza, Ibrahim. Sheikh Ibrahim, a nascent peacemaker in perhaps the most difficult place in the world to be one, is also an exorcist. Halevi describes again and again the people who come to pay their respects to Sheikh Ibrahim, to thank him profusely, after he has cured them, dispossessed them, of their jinns. At one point, Halevi laments all the talk of jinns. He write that it makes him depressed, that what he really wishes the holy Sheikh would talk about is curing the hate that lives in the hearts of too many people in the land. What I'm saying is: I’m not so sure there’s really a difference between the two.
To be clear, I’m not saying that otherworldly beings are definitely the cause of hate and destruction and violence in the world. I have no specific answers on that subject. I am saying that, as shorthand, such ideas are not themselves to be tossed aside. Call them demons, call them unchecked passions, call them learned indoctrinations, lower consciousnesses, or inclinations with which we are born (the Hasidim of Eastern Europe were especially fond of talking about the yetser harah and yetser hatov, the good and evil inclinations, that do constant battle in the soul of every person). In the experiential quest for the Oneness, as articulated by the traditions of Sufism, these are all equal. They are possessions, the kind that overcome us, pulls us away from our deepest selves, and must be consciously scraped off of our hearts, whose pure beats match the rhythm of that singular substance of true existence.
Keep this in your head for a bit. First…
A Quick Thought on Smartphones, Technology, and Possession
When I began this project, my question was: what do Millennials believe in? How do the people of this era worship? I’m far from the first to ask this question (and I don’t believe there’s any set answer), and in my preliminary research, I found this article from the Boston Globe. It describes how Millennials seek spirituality in fellowship, gathering together, or, as we might say in the language of this blog, in Community. This is a similar sentiment to what I’ve been finding in the Communities that I’ve visited over the last few months.
Yahzoo for this project I suppose.
That said, what’s pertinent to this blogpost, to the topic of possessions and possessors, is not the conclusion but the very first sentence. Casper ter Kuile, a divinity student and one of the subjects of the article, begins his sabbath worship by turning off his phone, and unplugging his electronics. Talk to the over-connected people of the Millennial era and this is a pretty common scene. The beginning of spirituality comes from leaving the world of technology behind. Those devices that hold pieces of ourselves within them, which hold our schedules in them, and the connections to the people we love who are far away within them, the ones that we search through absently when we feel awkward at parties, when we feel lost and yearn for the quick fix to find ourselves (this has rarely worked for me). These are the devices we feel we have to turn them off to get closer to the Oneness. Why? Because, like jinns and dybbuks, they possess parts of us.
It’s so nice to turn them off.
This seemed worth mentioning.
But…
Aha! This (disjointed) post is not (solely) to be a rant about technology, and not solely a reflection on losing possessions in pursuit of experiencing the Oneness. It’s also about the importance of possessions, in order to experience what I'lll call the Twoness. Because, like Virginia Woolf wrote in To The Lighthouse, “Nothing is simply one thing.” And that includes the Oneness.
Two
During my conversation with Pastor Neil at the Root and Branch Church in Chicago, he mentioned that he found it was important, virtuous even, to conceive of God as an other. To not get carried away in searching for God only within oneself. What does this mean? In the context of this blogpost, I’ll posit that making room within oneself for an otherness means keeping space available for possession. Truthfully, I think this means not experiencing the Oneness as the be-all end-all of spiritual pursuit. And this leads us to ask again and again: what is the other? Who is the other? What is me that’s not me?
The Golden Rule on One Foot
The most famous story of the Rabbis Hillel and Shammai is this: A person from another country decides that he wishes to move to the Holy Land and become a Jew. But he is impatient. He does not wish to go through the years of learning, the struggles, the confusion of trying to understand what it means to be a Jew. He wants the quick answer. So he conceives a plan. He goes first to Shammai and says to him, “I wish to be a Jew but I have very little time. Can you teach me everything I need to know while standing on one foot?” Shammai, malcontented misanthrope that he is (and brilliant sage, of course), slams the door in the man’s face and returns to his dinner of noodle soup and Torah study. The man is not deterred however, and he travels on. He finds Hillel. “Please, I cannot wait so long!" he says, "Can you teach me everything I need to know to be a Jew while standing on one foot?” With a pious smile on his face, Hillel raises one foot in the air. “Of course,” he says and then quotes the verse of Torah that shares a message with cultures across the globe, “Ve’ahavta L’re’echa Kamocha, And you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” Hillel tells the man, “the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
Jesus said it (check Mark and Matthew and Luke). Confucius taught it. The "ethic of reciprocity," is expressed in Hinduism’s Mahabharata, and in Buddhism’s Udanavarga. It's in Islam’s Hadiths, in the Bahai and Zoroastrian and Taoist faiths. It comes from as far back in history as Ancient Egyptian religious texts. We call it the “golden rule” for a reason.
It also requires an understanding of existence beyond the Oneness (which is, of course, part of the Oneness). To truly treat another individual person as you wish to be treated, indeed to love another individual person as you wish to be loved, you must cultivate an ability to conceive beyond yourself, to leave that separate space within to be possessed and filled by the Other. This is the only way to see that Other as his/her/gender-non-specific own holistic Oneness. And this is to experience the Twoness, to love existence and God and the Universe (and Almig), through another.
This, it seems to me, is the better goal than simply chasing the Oneness. It’s also the one of the ways in which the existing religious traditions hold the most power, where the continuities of tradition resonate. For thousands of years, so many human minds have been working on conceptualizing and understanding this Otherness of the great mysterious unknown, and whether that’s the God of the Torah, or Jesus and the Father of the New Testament, or the Hindu Atman, or the quantum particles that make up all of the energy in the Universe, they are all doorways into the simple arithmetic that One + One = Two (...and One).
Coming Up
I’m reaching the end of this blogging journey. In the next few weeks, I’ll be writing on my final three stops: the Maharishi Vedic City near Fairfield, Iowa, transcendental meditation capital of America; Arcosanti, the arcological urban city of stone in the Arizona desert; and the Grange Farm School, providing a window into one of the oldest rural fraternal agricultural organizations in America, in Mendocino County, California.
Stay tuned.
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