Failure to thrive

   I have a kind of collection of stories about people who devoted their lives to spirituality, or truth, or science, or metaphysics, mysticism, psychology and at the end of their lives made statements to the effect that they had missed the point of their life.  The meaning of life generally is a fascinating study and it can keep me very busy and distracted from discovering the truth that I haven’t discovered the meaning of my life.

Failure to thrive is a phrase which the medical community applies to infants and old folks.  The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said that most problems in the second half of life stem from the lack of a profound spiritual vision.  The science of metaphysical thinking is based on a single fact: that the basis of life is oneness, wholeness, and completeness.  Regardless of the looks of things, existence of any kind would be impossible upon any other basis.  The law of oneness upholds and sustains all life, including the life of mind and the minding of life.  One absolute and its absolute oneness are the spiritual facts upon which everything must be considered.

When I was a young man, just starting out as an “adult”, within a short time, my world fell apart.  I was utterly lost.  My body was healthy, and so was my bank account.  I was successful in my work and ready to go at the world.  But doors began closing before me and the prospect of great failure stood immovably before me and I stood stunned and immobilized.  Through an amazing to me turn of events, everything changed.  My body was the same, my finances and my career were intact and all of the relationships I lived remained.  Only one thing had changed:  my fundamental point of view.

One new relationship began to grow in my experience.  I became a student of spiritual psychology and my teacher was a charismatic Presbyterian minister with the spiritual gift of “counseling”, who had studied with Dr. Karl Menninger, the famous psychiatrist.

This earth-shattering event, which left the earth unshattered, and me externally unchanged had done a “mighty work of God” in my interior.  From then to much later, something within me guided me along a trail, had me searching for something, and only years later could I name it adequately, correctly and truthfully for myself.  Today, I understand that this something is my own divinity, my own divine nature, the life that is mind, always mine, whose basis is oneness, wholeness, and completeness and whose law is absolute oneness.

Experiences always come before the language which describes them and only later does this language become definitions defining the experience.  You and I experience the “mystical oneness with the divine” long before we discover a language or a community for the shaping of our living of it.  Many of my mystic friends do not seem to know that a student of mysticism is not a mystic.  A mystic has had an experience that so separates two states of life within them as to make the preceding one leading up to the mystic experience, fade into oblivion.  The name is not the thing.  And it is very sad when one comes to the end of their life and discovers they have deceived themselves by the very devotion, study and practices of spirituality, mysticism, or whatever the pursuit of knowledge is called.

Suppose that we have built within us a ‘knowledge or truth instinct.’  Like hunger it has a source, an impetus, an object and an aim.  Suppose like hunger, this truth-hunger nags at us, even hurts us, until we give it the attention it demands.  Have you ever noticed that when you take something to eat, an apple say, your hunger begins immediately to diminish?  During World War II, children whose parents were killed had been gathered into an orphanage.  The children were well cared for in a safe place full of caring people, but many of them could not go to sleep.  Inspiration, came to one of the nurses and she gave each troubled child a piece of bread to take to bed with them.  They just held it --- just in case --- and went to sleep.

If the hunger for truth or knowledge shows up initially as afraidness - anxiety, even panic, is dis-ease a punishment for ignorance of truth or is it a symptom of a specific lack?

There are never two states of life -- good and bad -- if life is one absolute and its nature is absolute oneness.  However, it seems that there is generally an unconsciousness of the basic holistic nature of life, basic completeness, as opposed to the consciousness of it.  Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that the same law obeyed and disobeyed brings opposite results.  It is the awareness of oneness, wholeness, completeness, perfection that we call “good”.  The experience always comes before the language about it.  The absence of the consciousness of perfection, or law of oneness, we call “evil.”  Again, we experience the consequences within ourselves that give these names their force, meaning or value.

But, is there “good” and “evil”,  or is there consciousness and unconsciousness of oneness?

Suppose that every human problem, every trouble and all suffering occurs when we are acutely unconscious of oneness.  When faced with conflict, lack and destruction the common belief is that there are two powers, two presences, two qualities happening and the appearances of things can be very compelling.  It was not until fairly recently that spiritual researchers discovered the fact that the absence of conscious oneness-wholeness-completeness results in the negative appearance of innate oneness, perfection, and in this negative consciousness, the law of oneness seems to operate in reverse.

But what seems to be and what actually is, has long been an interest for spiritual and psychological researchers.  There is no lack of oneness (duality).  There cannot be two absolutes.  There is no lack of wholeness (inadequacy).  Insufficiency of basic substance would mean an inherent self-destructive tendency in the absolute and the absolute would have long ago destroyed itself.  Hence, there is no lack of completeness (destruction).  It is the lack of the consciousness of completeness, wholeness and oneness that makes the universe appear potentially harmful, hostile and negative.  

But another fact needs inserting here.  There is no such thing as “consciousness”.  Consciousness is just a name, just a word - unless and until it is seen and understood that consciousness must of necessity be the consciousness of an individual self.  All consciousness is self-consciousness -- one, only, all.

The lack of conscious assent to the fact of absolute individual oneness appears as opposition; the lack of assent to the fact of absolute individual wholeness appears as inadequate substance, inadequate supply; the lack of conscious assent to the fact of absolute individual completeness appears as destruction and loss.

It is in the conscious assent to these spiritual qualities, to acknowledge them as basic, that opens the way to the perception of oneness, wholeness and completeness in the lived or “human” level called experience.

The negations, apparent violations of the law of oneness, that seem so evident in human experience, the apparent violations of this one divine Principle and its law of oneness is nothing but the absence of the consciousness of that ever-present, ever-operative fact.

Remember, there is no “good and evil”, there is conscious or unconsciousness of oneness.

Remember, when faced with an experience of human conflict, lack and destruction, this is the negative appearing (unconsciousness) of oneness, wholeness and completeness.

Unaware that “I am one” sets me in apparent opposition to myself and makes my universe appear potentially hostile, harmful and negative to me.

Since the absence of conscious oneness-completeness-wholeness results in the negative appearing of the inherent oneness the problem before us, then, is not the obliteration of evil and the preservation of good.  The problem is how to rise to the conscious appreciation of the formerly hidden and unconscious oneness-wholeness-completeness - the perfection of being we already are (have).

Announcement: I have been wrapped up in a writing project requested by the Institute of Metaphysical Science in La Jolla, CA for the past year or so. This work required intense research on my part into the life and works of Margaret Laird a Christian Science teacher and it brought me much light, but also kept me away from my website and blog.
Having brought this project to a final stage I plan to turn my attention now to my own writing. I plan to work up the research I've done into written pieces for my blog and website. Perhaps you may be interested.

Illusions

I have been out of the blog business, as you can see by the date of my last post.  Every once and awhile  I reach a plateau and have to swill around in it for as long as it takes.  For the past year I have been 'going within' and working deeply with what was being uncovered.  Dreams, symbols, coincidences, life events are the elements of my language of spiritual discernment and sometimes these meanings get murky and very obscure until the light comes and they become transparent.

When I was in theater in undergraduate and studying set design, I learned of a device which creates the illusion of a wall.  It's called a scrim.  An open-weave fabric is hung, sometimes with a scene painted on one side.  Then by using lighting in front of it the look is of an opaque and solid wall.  But if the light in front is dimmed and the light behind this veil is illuminated, the 'wall' fades into a hazy transparency and what is behind the wall appears.  The illusion is determined by the position of the light.  It is the attitude of the light, which plays the trick.

Now, humanly, we are the light of the divine, since it is the omnipresence,  the only stuff out of which everything is made.  But if we keep our attention on the human point of view -- the wall, the pictures on the wall, clinging to our point of view as absolute, this clinging creates the seeming.  The seeming is reality as it seems to us.  And it seems to us, generally, that there are two powers -- good and evil locked in conflict with each other and that we must free ourselves by fighting.  This we attempt to do by gaining a power of good, God.  We think we know what spiritual power is.

This negativity which comes to live within us is an ancient problem which has troubled human thinkers for thousands of years.  Every spiritual teaching addresses it and every spiritual discipline or way of life takes very seriously the deadly nature of self-deception.  It has been called the problem of evil in theology and in Eastern philosophy.  This negativity lives within us as the conscious and unconscious fears of losing life.  Fear is a powerful emotion and has been targeted by many teachings as the root cause of illness, misfortune and death.  It has been proven for centuries that a removal of fear can heal physical disease.

One of my teachers, Joel S. Goldsmith, spoke regularly of "ignorance, superstition and fear"  as incidental to one's mental attitude -- one's erroneous point of view.  He speaks of mental error, of false belief giving rise to illusions which trick us into trouble and of our acting out this inner trouble getting ourselves into more trouble.  Joel in his journey moved from "metaphysics" to "mysticism."  My journey has taken me the opposite way from "mysticism" to "metaphysics."  Maybe these two 'paths' are equally necessary to the whole comprehension of Spirit needed for one to be free of illusion-living.

In metaphysical science, we go behind the scenes, but as detectives.  We seek the light behind the veil of the seeming, but not directly -- we look for clues.   And when the light of Truth comes, the illusory effect is destroyed and we are free of the suffering which mental error or disorder entails.  Joel understood this very well.  And he used to affectionately tell his students about those who on hearing that illness, joblessness, family troubles, etc. are illusion, would ask him, "How do you get rid of an illusion?"

If you have worked with these ideas awhile, you will know that the harder you try to get rid of an illusion, the more of it you have.  If you are a student of Joel, have you read his account of losing his luggage in Africa, lately?

What is not well understood, as I have learned, traveling around the spiritual healing programs and groups of today is why illusion returns.  If illusion is conquered by knowing Truth, and it is, then why do we find ourselves awakening again and again out of an illusion by some painful disillusionment?  Is Truth an illusion?  Recently, mystic teacher Wayne Dyer, discovered he had a rare form of leukemia; then went to a spiritual healer in South America and was healed and now is back in full force on his dog-and-pony show of spirituality.  Is he wiser?  Don't know.  Am I?  Hoping so, won't make it so.  And where there is hidden doubt, there is hidden fear.  And this is what spiritual teaching means by 'disease.'  "Mysticism" is a word for secret knowledge - gnosis.  "Science" is a word for ascertained knowledge.

I just finished reading a great book, which includes my friend Dr. John M. Dorsey, psychiatrist.  Unorthodox Freud: The View from the Couch, uses the only five extant full-book accounts of how Freud did psychoanalysis from first hand experiences.  Dorsey was in analysis with Freud.  The authors Losher and Newton make this statement:  "Everyone knows!  But they don't know that they know and so they don't think they know."  This is the illusion of ignorance.  Knowledge is power.  But how does one 'get rid of' the illusion of one's separation from God -- the belief in two powers good and evil?

Here is what my metaphysical scientist friend Margaret Laird might say about it.  "In all illusion, Truth is the illusion."  "In every sickness, Health is the sickness."

If you have studied Zen, you will recognize such a statements as koan.  It is a paradoxical saying that can trigger an awakening.  Like the scrim, words and concepts veil the true meaning which lives within us.  Our busy living keeps the light of our attention, our point of view, glued to the pictures on the seemingly solid walls of this box of a universe we seem to live, and move and have our being in.

The basic metaphysical idea we begin our spirituality growing with is that this universe is IN us and that we are not IN it.  That idea itself is a koan.  A koan is a symbolic form of enlightenment -- a kind of package of spiritual power, left like a time-bomb set to go off, which when the time is ripe, reverses the light from "out there" to "in here."  One's point of view changes radically -- forever.  And by these inevitable, indispensable steps leading to perfection, by these successive changes in one's root point of view, one comes to dwell in the Light behind the scenes, seeing everything from the God's-eye view.

Where chaos reigned, order rules.  It's like that old platitude about the two sides of a weaving or tapestry.  One side look like a bunch of disconnected threads; the other looks like a beautiful picture.  But thinking in platitudes is not the thinking which is profound enough to 'marry' the powerful feelings which come from within us.

Margaret Laird's teacher, metaphysical scientist Bicknell Young said, "we get out of trouble by knowing we were never in it."  And in a seminar Mrs. Laird discusses the 'generic' disease.  She admits that spiritual healers seem to be able to heal this or that case of cancer, but not the generic disease, the whole genre one might say, called "cancer."

This is impossible she says, until the spiritually conscious individual understands the fact that "there is nothing to heal."  Not until this fact comes to light in the understanding, is the real healing experienced and then sense of separation from God removed.

Until one understands the absolute oneness of Being, and identifies him or herself with the fact that we are already wholly God-consciousness, perfect in every aspect, one's point of view will show up automatically just like the theatrical scrim, with all of the light on the human side, with us glued to the picture on the wall hoping magically it will somehow change from bad to good.  Even if we experience or endure the loss of specific illusions, and we toughen up so we can endure greater and greater disillusionments, we have not touched the generic illusion which keeps us liable to all the troubles -- sickness, lack and fear -- which living on the illusion side "creates."

Until the light of our own individualized divinity comes on behind the illusions caused by our own ignorance of it,  and until it stays on, we will continue to fight demons, never understanding that these "demons" are the angels which our own divine Love-nature provides to meet the human need for enlightenment.

Normal

Foreword to Supreme Doctrine (Benoit) written by Aldus Huxley




Philosophy in the Orient is never pure speculation, but always some form of transcendental pragmatism. Its truths, like those of modern physics, are to be tested operationally. Consider, for example, the basic doctrine of Vedanta, of Mahayana Buddhism, of Taoism, of Zen. “Tat twam asi – thou art That.” Tao is the root to which we may return, and so become again That which, in fact, we have always been. ‘Samsara and Nirvana, Mind and individual minds, sentient beings and the Buddha, are one.’

Nothing could be more enormously metaphysical than such affirmations; but at the same time nothing could be less theoretical, idealistic and Pickwickian. They are known to be true because, in a super-Jamesian way, they work, because there is something that can be done with them. The doing of this something modifies the doer’s relations with reality as a whole. But knowledge is in the knower according to the mode of the knower. When transcendental pragmatists apply the operational test to their metaphysical hypotheses, the mode of their existence changes, and they know everything, including the proposition, ‘thou art That’, in an entirely new and illuminating way.



The author of this book is a psychiatrist and his thoughts about the Philosophia Perennis in general and about Zen in particular are those of a man professionally concerned with the treatment of troubled minds. The difference between Eastern philosophy, in its therapeutic aspects, and most of the systems of psychotherapy current in the modern West may be summarized in a few sentences.



The aim of Western psychiatry is to help the troubled individual to adjust himself to the society of less troubled individuals – individuals who are observed to be well adjusted to one another and the local institutions, but about whose adjustment to the fundamental Order of Things no enquiry is made. Counselling, analysis, and other methods of therapy are used to bring these troubled and maladjusted persons back to a normality, which is defined, for lack of any better criterion, in statistical terms. To be normal is to be a member of the majority party --- or in totalitarian societies, such as Calvinist Geneva, Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, of the party which happens to be in power. For the exponents of the transcendental pragmatists of the Orient, statistical normality is of little or no interest. History and anthropology make it abundantly clear that societies composed of individuals who think, feel, believe and act according to the most preposterous conventions can survive for long periods of time. Statistical normality is perfectly compatible with a high degree of folly and wickedness.



But there is another kind of normality --- a normality of perfect functioning, a normality of actualized potentialities, a normality of nature in fullest flower. This normality has nothing to do with the observed behavior of the greatest number --- for the greatest number live, and have always lived, with their potentialities unrealized, their nature denied its full development. In so far as he is a psychotherapist, the Oriental philosopher tries to help statistically normal individuals to become normal in the other, more fundamental sense of the word. He begins by pointing to those who think they are sane that, in fact, they are mad, but that they do not have to remain so if they don’t want to. Even a man who is perfectly adjusted to a deranged society can prepare himself, if he so desires, to become adjusted to the Nature of Things, as it manifests in the universe at large and in his own mind-body. This preparation must be carried out on two levels simultaneously. On the psycho-physical level, there must be a letting go of the ego’s frantic clutch on the mind-body, a breaking of its bad habits of interfering with the otherwise infallible workings of the entelechy, of the obstructing the flow of life and grace and inspiration. At the same time, on the intellectual level, there must be a constant self-reminder that our all too human likes and dislikes are not absolutes, that yin and yang, negative and positive, are reconciled in the Tao, that ‘One is the denial of all denials’, that ‘the eye with which we see God (if and when we see Him) is the same as the eye with which God sees us’, and that it is the eye to which, in Matthew Arnold’s words



Each moment in its race,

Crowd as we will its neutral space,

Is but a quiet watershed,

Whence, equally, the seas of life and death are fed.



This process of intellectual and psycho-physical adjustment to the Nature of Things is necessary; but it cannot, of itself, result in the normalization (in the non-statistical sense) of the deranged individual. It will, however, prepare the way for that revolutionary event. That, when it comes, is the work not of the personal self, but of the great Not-Self, of which our personality is a partial and distorted manifestation. “God and God’s will,’ says Eckhart, ‘are one; I and my will are two.’ However, I can always use my will to will myself out of my own light, to prevent my ego from interfering with God’s will and eclipsing the Godhead manifested by that will. In theological language, we are helpless without grace, but grace cannot help us unless we choose to co-operate with it.



In the pages which follow, Dr. Benoit has discussed the ‘supreme doctrine’ of Zen Buddhism in the light of Western psychological theory and Western psychiatric practice – and in the process he offered a searching criticism of Western psychology and Western psychotherapy as they appear in the light of Zen. This is a book that should be read by everyone who aspires to know who he is and what he can do to acquire such self-knowledge.

The Totality of Love

"Freedom from your trial does not consist in destroying what appears to you as an evil condition (or even an evil belief).  Your freedom consists in the exercise of your realization of the totality of Love and your acceptance of that is your resurrection and ascension.  In the effort to overcome evil, as if there could be a false substance, the mind is kept in constant confusion and turmoil.  Our problems and their solutions rest in ourselves.  Certain it is that evil will remain with us just as long as we entertain the belief that there is evil." -- Bicknell Young

The Tree of Failure???

An acquaintance of mine, whom I visit on Facebook had an editorial from the New York Times, entitled The Tree of  Failure (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/opinion/14brooks.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=general) following President Obama's speech in Tuscon soon after the shootings by a young man. 

In the article, author David Brooks, an editor of the NYTimes, says, "Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance."   

He later says, "So this is where civility comes from — from a sense of personal modesty and from the ensuing gratitude for the political process. Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation." 

And later, "The problem is that over the past 40 years or so we have gone from a culture that reminds people of their own limitations to a culture that encourages people to think highly of themselves." 
And, "So, of course, you get narcissists...." 

And,  "Beneath all the other things that have contributed to polarization and the loss of civility, the most important is this: The roots of modesty have been carved away." 

I felt as though I were back in church, confused by all the mixing of metaphors, but so all pumped up by the preacher's passionate spew that I had to write a letter to the editor.  It wasn't published. So I'm publishing it here.


Dear Editor -- I would like to comment on David Brook's "Tree of Failure", January 13, 2011. Mr. Brooks, I found your opinion most exhilarating! I wonder if civility is a tree or an emotion, a feeling. Does it involve respect and maybe kindness? If it is a tree, and its roots are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance, no tree I know would grow in such a situation. If the root is no good, neither is the tree. But if civility is a feeling and intelligence, warmth, confidence and responsible cooperation might be its roots then I can see my civility in President Obama and his quiet, firm human display of composure as well as in your passionate outcry. Perhaps, the tree of civility has its roots in the idea Reinhold Niebuhr suggested: love, hope and tolerance, or, as he believed, rooted in the human spirit itself. May I invite you to try an experiment in self-civility? Re-read your opinion piece and put the word "my" in front of every noun. Notice how the naming power of words takes on new force when we take self-responsibility for them. Emotional continence, in my belief, begins in self awareness, self-sovereignty, and self-responsibility, which are its roots. All government is self-government. I like these words and their power in my mind.


“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so must we think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.” - Abraham Lincoln

“But I wish to be distinctly understood on one point. Americanism is a question of spirit, convictions and purpose, not of creed or birthplace. – Theodore Roosevelt

“A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society. - Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father and third U.S. president

Best to you, Rob Craig

What's Working On You Today?

The Arizona shootings which killed six including a nine year old girl, and  a federal Judge, with 13 others seriously injured one of whom is a Congresswoman are on my mind today as well as a conversation I had by phone two days ago with my friend Nena Spencer.  Nena is metaphysical scientist (though any label, I am finding, does no justice to her)  Nena introduced Dr. Dorsey to Margaret Laird.  She told me that Dr. Dorsey said he was "standing on Freud's shoulders."   I read in one of Mrs. Laird's later Letters that she saw herself standing on Mrs. Eddy's shoulders. 

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), America's first feminist author and a member of Emerson's Transcendentalist circle, said:  "If men knew how to look around them, they need not look above."

Looking around I found this wonderful article Nena submitted to the IMS newsletter in 2000 and am sharing it here.  I find it very clear.

Practice

by Nena Spencer
January 2000
I have heard that "practice makes perfect," but do I remember that "Perfect makes the practice?"
Spirit is always perfect in all ways. Good is the only thing going on, even when it doesn't feel like it is.
When a person calls for support in a difficult experience, the best thing a practitioner can do is voice what he/she is living all the time--the spiritual fact that only Good is going on.
There are many ways that Good can look, many views and languages for this Good to appear in any given human situation. I have learned to release all concepts of how a situation should look or turn out because I have no idea. To venture an opinion is to impede the perfect solution always unfolding.
Sometimes it looks like our friends and clients have to experience very difficult and painful experiences and the temptation is to want to take the pain away from them. This cannot be done because actually there is no pain and what they go through is still a view, still just language for the identity of perfection present and operating.
When the problem is dropped, immediately divine help looks like it is on the way. The Truth is there is no lapse from or return to divine perfection present and operating. While we are speaking, the problem is being turned around into no problem. To concern myself at any time about anyone or thing is a waste of happiness and satisfaction.