Failure

“You were wrong to count on me.” Who can speak in such terms? God and the Failure. — E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

[I]t is always important to choose rightly …. — Victor Eremita (Søren Kierkegaard), Either/Or

When a lifetime’s choices and compromises seem to coalesce in a dense, dark cloud that threatens catastrophe, popular wisdom may suggest a kind of soap opera psychology: “Put it all behind you and get on with your life.” But that’s not possible. Decisions never end: each day, already shaped by the past, demands more, and the new choices combine with the continuing consequences of the old in a tightly twisted rope of cause and effect. Tangling into an invincible knot that blunts the swords of power and wisdom, it mocks prophecies of mastery and promises of liberation and salvation.

Were I alone enmeshed in this knot, I might not desire to escape the weight of my choices, because only I would carry it. But I am not alone: my choices affect others whose lives are interwoven with mine, and therefore those choices are morally and emotionally fraught. Perhaps it was an inchoate understanding of that fact that attracted me, when I was much younger, to the eremetical life, a life from which others are excluded. Even now, that way of solitude sometimes sings to me siren-like, but I know that its song is the call of a daydream. I am inextricably interconnected with others. Complete isolation is not an option for me; realistically, it never was.

If isolation is not possible because I cannot exist alone, is cessation of existence my answer? To disappear completely, perhaps to swallow some pills and sleep into nothingness, would be to bear no further pain; to escape not only past but also, and especially, future; to make the only choice which, whatever its effects on others, can have no consequences for me beyond its actualization. But to take that way out would be to betray, not for the first time but more brutally than ever before, those who, to borrow the Buddhist image of “Indra’s net,” are like gems embedded in the web of relationship with me, each of us reflecting the others on many levels. Paradoxically, I am preserved from suicide by the very connections that would lead me to consider it.

Of course, there are many religious figures who would sell me a program of ego death, promising that I can shake off karma and live as a detached, enlightened being who does no harm, or offer me an Alexandrian sword such as sola fide‘s fantasy of instant immunity from moral responsibility. Simply pledge trust, troth, and tithe, they say, and “all manner of thing shall be well.” After almost half a century of study and practice, and after having taken the lure more than once, I know that sort of thing for what it is: a spiritual Ponzi scheme. Inka‘d egos selling egolessness? Pie-in-the-sky-mongers hawking cheap grace at a markup? No help there. The promises of religion, I find, are empty. I can’t regress to life as it was before darkness fell, nor can I move forward into something wholly new, beyond the reach of the past. The Garden of Eden never was, and the Kingdom of Heaven never will be. The children of the saints, pace George Fox, are not perfect. Nor, pace Buddha, can we save ourselves from karma: the dharma is a raft in a typhoon. There is no seaworthy barque of salvation: hopes of deliverance are always broken on the rocks; the only unsinkable vessel sails the Styx.

The inescapable fact is that there is no escape from the consequences of my choices. They, I, and others are inseparably interrelated. They travel with me, as it were, casting a shadow over present and future, obscuring the way ahead. Walking in that gloom, I try to be guided by the dim light of love — when I can see it. Sometimes I move in a thoroughly dark night. Having no Lord to uphold me, I often stumble and fall, taking others down with me. A time may come when I wander off an unseen edge, or when continuing through gloom and darkness becomes more than I can do. In any case, the time will certainly come when life itself fails. After all, failure is our human fate.

Until the finality of failure takes me, I can only try to love more mindfully, particularly in the ambiguous, precarious, and blighted circumstances that some of my choices have helped, and will ineluctably continue to help, create. Although others have graciously forgiven me many times, I know that I can’t hope always to be forgiven my part, which is sometimes most significant, in shaping those circumstances. Certainly, responsibility is not in question: regardless of the extent, if any, to which my choices are not free or are shared with others, ultimately they are mine — as are the failures of love and wisdom which many of them reflect.

There was a time when I believed in the possibility of success, but, at this point, any ambition for that, understood as the opposite of failure, would be patent delusion. In order to continue at all, truth by now being undeniable, I must unreservedly accept my failure. That’s distressing in itself. But knowing that my failings harm others tears my heart. That wound is reopened every day.

Every day, therefore, is a painful time of decision. If I choose to live, which I do today, it is in the knowledge that, despite my intentions and efforts, I will continue to wound others and, therefore, myself. I recognize that, my sincerity notwithstanding, I am not to be trusted, that I will inevitably create new suffering even as the harmful karma of the past continues to unfold. I try, and want to try better, to minimize the harm, but past, present, and future are strands in this one knotted rope, and my measure of love’s wisdom is compromised by myopia and fear: I know that my possibilities are limited. I know, too, though, that while I can do no more than I can do, I cannot assume that my limits — or others’ — are either obvious or fixed. In that I find hope: not for a new beginning, a bright future, an against-all-odds deus ex machina, but that those whom I harm can survive what I do to them in my ignorance and weakness, and that, by more diligently waiting upon and attending to the light of love, I can find the will and the wisdom to live less harmfully.

Standing still awhile, finding my balance between resignation and hope, I am acutely aware that survival, which for me means living with love and grace amid guilt and uncertainty, requires increasing courage, clarity, and care. Although the way ahead is dark, at least I know where I stand as I wait upon light.

A Nontheist’s Ash Wednesday Meditation

[F]or dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. – Gen. 3:19b

[A] man who dies is not a living man who enters into death. – Alain (Emile-Auguste Chartier)

Lent begins today. I will perform no acts of penance; not because I have not sinned, but because I have no fear of knowing divine wrath after death. I have, in fact, no fear, or hope, of knowing anything at all after death. The dead – to use an absurd but necessary expression – know nothing, for knowing requires a knower, and dying is the destruction of the knower. When one’s existence has ceased, one cannot know that existence has stopped, because one no longer exists: there is no one to know. The stopping itself may be horribly painful, and we fear it naturally. But, after the stopping, the actual absence of being: our fearing of that seems foolish. And yet we do fear it, perhaps because we cannot imagine not knowing that we have lived and died. Reflexively, we feel that “being dead” must be some kind of experience.

But to “be” dead, if it were possible, is to experience nothing, not even that one is experiencing nothing. Death is the inevitable actualization of the seemingly impossible: the sheer nonexistence of body, mind, soul, and spirit. The living mind can think in the shadow of nonexistence, but it cannot comprehend the reality. Death – the absence of presence, the absence of absence, the absence, even, of nothingness – is the absolute limit, the transcendent, the inaccessible infinite.

Zen master Bunan said, “While alive, be dead, be thoroughly dead. And then do what you will.” The good master must have been misled, or seeking to mislead: one cannot be thoroughly dead while alive. One can approach death; one can perhaps even die metaphorically. But not thoroughly. Not really. As monk Mamiya’s master said, “Dead men do not speak.” By speaking, Bunan belied his advice. He thought, perhaps, to show us an escape from life and death, but the door is trompe l’oeil.

One who speaks exists, and one who exists is not and cannot be dead, because death is the extinction of be-ing. We may say that one who is dead does not exist, but in fact no one is dead, no one does not exist. There is only a name, a memory, within those who continue, for a time, to exist. They who were do not somehow live in that memory: a memory is not that which is remembered; a name is not that which is named. Memories and names may remain, but beings cannot.

A being is but the opening and closing of a moment of time. “Afterlife” and “beforelife”: nonexistence. In a moment between them, in a brief irruption out of the eternal not, we exist. We may feel, to our horror, that we are trapped in time, but in fact time is what we are. When the time that we are expires, we are no longer. It is only now, in this moment between not and not, that I am. What do I do with this shrinking moment that is I?

One thing I need not do is worry about nonexistence: that would be to worry about nothing. Because I exist only now, because I will not exist after my last moment, and because there is no experience without existence, I am, for myself, eternal. Absurdly so, but eternal. But I do feel concern, because I know that I will someday be dead for others. I am not alone: my disappearance will cause enduring anguish for a few people. True, that anguish will vanish soon enough, as if it had never been, when those people, too, have ceased to be; but if, thrown into existence in this moment, I impart any meaning to life at all, it is in and through solidaric relationship and compassionate response to other beings. That everyone and everything is ultimately void does not mean that all is thoroughly void now. Our importance is not negated by our impermanence; on the contrary, it subsists there. For all of us.

No one gets out of this alive; therefore, no one gets out. But in our present, in the time that we are, we’re all in: whatever this is, however frightening and painful and pointless it may be, we are in it, we are it, together. Because our suffering, which is all the more intense and horrible for being meaningless, cries to a deaf heaven, we have only each other, and many of us have no ears to hear. But some hear, and some who hear respond. Otherwise, to be would be unbearable.

Deep in our hearts, we know that ultimately we are nothing. But the humane heart, because it also knows and responds to the reality of the present in its depths, says No – not now – to nothingness. And, cherishing living beings in their frailty and impermanence, moved by their plight, it says No to the suffering that it sees and feels. To be true to that heart is the best I can do. Moreover, because my every day is a kind of Ash Wednesday, a prolepsis of extinction, it is for me the difference between life and death.

Now, while I am not nothing, I make something of myself, something that is as real as a moment of consciousness can be, something that says Yes to life and, therefore, to acts of love that honor and harbor life and being. With eyes and heart open, I allow myself to live deeply and responsively; despite the pain, I will not attempt to live as if death were life. That would be to search for a back door, for a way out of the depths into dissociation and unreality; to indulge such delusion would be to waste this brief time that I am. Dead people do not know or speak, because there are none, but here and now I exist among other beings in the stark knowledge of life and death. Here and now I speak and hear, offer and accept, love, without which I would be nothing.

Days of Visitation

The wise one’s heart discerns both time and judgment. – Ecclesiastes

Opening the butsudan (Buddhist shrine) for meditation, I see among the Buddhas and bodhisattvas an image of Thomas Merton. The Trappist monk, who through his writings was a mentor for me from the time I was twelve years old, died almost forty-three years ago at the age of fifty-three, electrocuted during one of his few trips away from the monastery. I was nineteen years old then, losing my Catholic religion to reason and ethics, at loose ends in every way, a long way from making peace with my heart. And, although I could not have known it and would not have believed it in that time of war, I was a long way from death.

Nineteen then; sixty-one now. Almost a lifetime of seeking and struggling has passed, suffering of the sort that is lost unless it bears fruit for the future. Scripture tells us that there is a proper time for everything: now, I see, is the eschaton, the time of judgment, for me. However long it may last, this is my hour of krisis, the time for my life’s harvest to be gathered, weighed, and shared.

For most of my life, I have followed Jesus’ advice to allow tares to grow with the wheat. I have had little choice: tares and wheat are confusingly similar. I have never been adept at distinguishing them, even after the more differentiated fruits, or ears, have appeared. And now I am presbyopic as well. If I were to attempt alone to separate and destroy the weeds, little wheat would remain. With the harvest at hand, how will I manage?

Fortunately, the discerning is not my task. I can reap everything and reserve the sorting to an abler wisdom. In the years since Merton first described it for me, I have met that wisdom, whose name is agápē, in my own heart, have seen its discerning power working carefully and effectively there. By now, I know that I can trust its judgment.

Feeling agápē‘s strengthening power within me, I am learning to allow it to shine continuously on the fields of my soul. In its light, differences are clearly seen. Shining on the harvest, the light of agápē will show me the wheat and the weeds. That which it identifies as useful and compassionate, that which reflects the light, I will store as treasure for distribution; that which it identifies as useless or harmful, that which absorbs the light, I will burn.

I will fulfill the time’s imperative and promise, then, by means of recollection, mindfulness, surrender, and fidelity. I will gather the harvest of my life. I will attend to agápē as its unsparing light illuminates my soul and leads me to divide aright. I will accept agápē‘s judgments and act on them, saving and sharing love’s fruits while I still live. This is the task and opportunity that remains for me, and, with gratitude to Merton and others who have helped to guide me here, I vow to devote myself to it.

Beginning now, as I take my seat on the cushions before the butsudan, and continuing through each uncertain day that remains, I will live this vow as if there were no tomorrow. For the time that was coming is now, and there will be no other.

On Extended Wings

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. — Thomas Merton¹

On a Sunday almost twenty years ago, I traveled to New Jersey for the funeral service of a friend who had been something of a father figure for me. On the way, I stopped in Mount Holly for worship with Friends. As it happened, worship was held that day in the house in which the “Quaker saint” John Woolman had lived. After the meeting for worship, I would tour the house and read some passages by Woolman, noting that the phrase “living deeply” appeared more than once in the brief selections I’d found. From then on, that phrase would color my understanding of Quaker practice.

Even more significant, though, was my experience of worship there. As we sat together in a small room, the sincerity and depth of the silent worship lifted me up. And when another visiting Friend spoke of seeing a rare hawk soar over his home in Delaware, I was touched by his love and concern for the natural world. I had joined the Friends in Mount Holly in sadness, but in waiting with them upon the spirit of love, and in hearing words spoken from the heart of another, I was strengthened, even enabled to soar above the “ocean of darkness and death.”² I was put in mind of a poetic passage from the Book of Isaiah.

They who wait upon the Lord shall have their strength renewed; they shall mount up on wings, as eagles; they shall run and not stumble; they shall walk and not falter.³

Sitting in worship this morning with the gentle Friends of Little Falls Meeting, I thought back to days when, forgetting the lesson of Mount Holly and the “they” of Isaiah, I had experienced myself as a lone eagle, propelling myself upward, toward the light, on powerful wings. But time has a way of dispelling delusion. I am much older now: winging heavenward, even with help, is beyond me; on mere feet I falter. Retiring from full time work, I stumble into an uncertain but certainly briefer future as I struggle daily with frailties of body and soul. Observing those memories in the familiar peace of the meetinghouse today, I understood that I am a different person now, and that I need a different kind of poetry. And I smiled as an appropriate passage came to me, lines from Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”⁴

And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

No soaring eagle now, I am an anonymous old bird among the many flocks of pigeons – “rats of the air,” I’ve heard them called – known as “baby boomers,” my existence increasingly a burden to others, my vanishing traces ambiguous, my trajectory drawn “downward to darkness.”

But if these wings, weary yet still extended with the strength of worship, carry me downward now at evening, I can speak only of change, not of loss or gain. For soaring toward the sun is beautiful, but one must descend to go deep, and darkness need not be deprivation: after all, darkness is where the light shines. It may be that the darkness into which I sink is, in Merton’s words, “blazing with the invisible light of heaven.”

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.⁵

The emptiness of me is the name of God, written in the void of my heart. And the name of God is Love. Descending into the darkness of spiritual poverty, I may vanish into the hidden spark of love that is “in everybody” – not the isolated glory of a soaring eagle, but the pure and invisible “glory of God” shining in the nothingness that, in essence, we all are.

However I may be known to the world⁶ within and without, Love is my true identity. Sinking into darkness, I sing my Nunc dimittis. Love is my name.

——————————-
NOTES

1. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 60.
2. George Fox, Journal, p. 80 in Vol. I of his Works.
3. Isaiah 40:31.
4. “Sunday Morning” is in the public domain and can be read in its entirety at Wikisource.
5. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 158.
6. Friends sometimes signed in such a way; e.g., “Given forth by me, whom am known to men by the name of MARMADUKE STEVENSON, but have a new name given me, which the world knowns not of, written in the book of life.” (Stevenson, one of the “Boston martyrs,” was hanged in 1659 “for conscience sake”: for being a Quaker. The execution date, October 27, is now International Religious Freedom Day.)

For the original journal entry about my experience at Mount Holly, scroll down to “March 24, 1991 – Homewood Friends Meeting” after clicking here.

Sunyata: an Unorthodox Experience

Increasingly, I live in emptiness.

To live in emptiness, I find, is not a deprivation, nor is it an attainment, nor is it salvation. It is simply to be surrendered to reality.

To live in emptiness is not deprivation, although it is disillusionment. As my friend Gary G. has pointed out, to be dis-illusioned should not be a bad thing for a sincere soul. Disabused of beliefs and notions, even against my will, forced into freedom, I am no longer abused by illusions and lies. When I do not confuse dream and reality, I am free to dream.

To live in emptiness is not an attainment, although it is in each moment a kind of kensho. It is an awakening to and in perfect darkness, the inability to deny my nothingness, the discovery of freedom from the desire for light and the need to be. When I do not require light or being, I am open to their transient graces.

To live in emptiness is not to be saved but to be lost, to be so thoroughly, irretrievably lost that all directions are equally perilous and promising. It is to see that the hope of salvation—of any sort—was a denial of life and death, a betrayal of my humanity, a soul-smothering resentment. If I find any salvation at all in emptiness, it is this unsought liberation from hope.

To live in emptiness confers neither uninterrupted happiness nor imperturbable inner peace. To the contrary, it cuts the root of the desire for those goods, of the illusion that happiness and peace are worthy of my seeking and holding. Nor, however, does it bring unrelenting sadness or turmoil. But it opens the heart, deepening the experience of compassion, and to be so opened is to feel the joy and the agony of the world. Happiness is but half of life, if that, but in emptiness is the fullness of feeling. I am joy and sadness, peace and turmoil, acceptance and horror, alternately, simultaneously, intensely. Seeing as I do, feeling as I do, I cannot be otherwise.

To live in emptiness is to live in death—not in the shadow, but in death itself. When I walk in the shadow of death, alone or with God, I am a shade, a half-alive being wandering in the half-light of an unreal world. But to walk in the perfect death-darkness of emptiness is to live fully in perfect light, because, perfection being completeness, darkness and light are an interpenetrative whole.

To find myself living in emptiness was not initially a welcome experience. The condition is not a desirable one, not something that a seeker would want. Nor is it a saleable commodity, perhaps especially in the religion/spirituality market. Who would pay for it? It seems, in fact, to possess no value whatsoever. And yet I would not trade it now for a life of happiness. I would not abandon the insecurity of emptiness even to be cradled in the arms of an omnipotent god. No, not would not but could not, cannot. For as I had no choice but to come into this condition, I have none but to remain. When one’s eyes have been opened, one may close them again, but the light shines in the darkness, and darkness is darkness no matter how bright.

How did I get to this here that feels like nowhere? I can’t say; I don’t even know where I am. This is neither home nor wilderness, here are no landmarks or signs, and roads I walked no longer exist. Nor can I recommend this condition to others: for all I know, being here could appear to turn out badly. In speaking or writing about it, I can only try to describe how it feels to be lost as I am lost, wandering in the noonday dark with a sad heart and a happy smile for little ones, irreversibly awakened to my essential and existential nothingness and learning to live more deeply in the emptiness of that deepening realization.

Miracle and Sense

Today’s post, a complement to my recent “Saving Selving,” is a meditation developed from a little verse that I wrote more than fifteen years ago. Back then, I titled the verse “Dogen’s Miracle” because it had been inspired by a reading of Zen master Dogen (13^th century C.E.).

walk on water
second water
carry water
first

The verse refers to a classification used in the gem business. A diamond of the highest quality, one that is as clear as pure water, is said to be of the first water. A diamond of lesser purity would be rated as of the second or even third water. So the verse asserts that to walk on water, as Jesus is said to have done, is a miracle of the second water, of lesser quality. The finest, purest miracle is that we carry water, that we exist and that we can and do care for ourselves and others. The verse also carries the implication that one who would walk on water must first perform the taken-for-granted activities that sustain and express our existence—the unnoticed quotidian miracles of human life. Those, after all, are the truly important things.

Of course, many of us no longer carry water. We have accomplished the miracle of having water come to us, even into our dwelling places, at our demand. In one sense, that’s surely a tremendous gain. But does it make us even more likely to forget about the mundanely miraculous, more likely to require walkings on water for the meaning, the sense, of our lives?

Reading Jean-Luc Nancy last night, I was struck by his reference to “sense beyond sense.”¹ Tradi­tion­ally, what some call “ontotheology” has posited, believed in, a sense beyond the world: the world makes sense because God exists and transcends it. The world makes sense because, as it were, Jesus walked on water: sense does not inhere in the world but is derived from the world’s subservience to the divine. To go beyond such wishful thinking is often to move into nihilism, or “non-sense.” But Nancy offers a different perspective. For Nancy, the world no longer has sense; it is sense.

[Neither do] we have to orient ourselves in a state of complete blindness, nor [is it] a matter of indifference that we are disoriented, and that there is no difference between the best and the worst. On the contrary … there is no sense given anywhere that could make us tolerate the intolerable, no more than there is non-sense in virtue of which we could disqualify or annul existence. In other words, this means that ‘nihilism’ dissolves every bit as much as any ‘idealism’ (or ‘metaphysics’ in this sense) because it, too, remains in the final analysis submitted to the regime of supposition. It dissolves at the touch of the absolute point of existence.²

“The absolute point of existence”: reading that, I think not so much of Eliot’s “the still point of the turning world” as of the immediate encounter with life—the life of community in which alone we exist—that is signified in Zen’s simple image of drawing and carrying water for self and others. This is radically different from the totalizing idea of community that we find incarnate in party, state, church—the kind of herd mentality or “Church patriotism” that Simone Weil feared would infect her if she joined the church:

I am afraid of the Church patriotism existing in Catholic circles. By patriotism I mean the feeling one has for a terrestrial country. I am afraid of it because I fear to catch it. It is not that the Church appears to me to be unworthy of inspiring such a feeling. It is because I do not want any feeling of such a kind in myself. The word want is not accurate. I know, I feel quite certain, that any feeling of this kind, whatever its object, would be fatal for me.

There were some saints who approved of the Crusades or the Inquisition. I cannot help thinking that they were in the wrong. I cannot go against the light of conscience. If I think that on this point I see more clearly than they did, I who am so far below them, I must admit that in this matter they were blinded by something very powerful. This something was the Church seen as a social structure. If this social structure did them harm, what harm would it not do me, who am particularly susceptible to social influences and who am almost infinitely more feeble than they were?³

Those saints had succumbed to the totalizing claims of the walking-on-water lie, the myth of the miraculous. Community for them was imposed, artificial; it was far from, even a denial of, the simple, natural community of those who need water. Their community was bound together by the “making sense” that their belief gave them, a sense by which they sought to “tolerate the intolerable” rather than allow the raw experience of the intolerable to awaken the transforming compassion of being-with. Their world made sense only in light of the closure of their belief in God and his ecclesial system, and, warned by the story of Peter who sank when his belief faltered, they fought tooth and nail to preserve that sense. They wanted to close the world within their system and to feel safe—saved—there. But some of us want to open the world, or, better, to recognize and enter into the openness of the world, opening ourselves to the sense of the world itself.

As soon as the appearance of a beyond of the world has dissipated, the out-of-place instance of sense opens itself up within the world (to the extent that it would still make sense to talk of a ‘within’).⁴

That is not, of course, to move the “out there” to the “in here,” but to recognize that the world itself is sense. It is to stop imagining that one could walk on water—or that someone has done it for us—and to pick up the pail. Then we may find that to carry water is much more useful and meaningful than to walk on it. And we may find ourselves in a first-water community that is not bound and tyrannized by the frantic effort to force life to “make sense,” a community in which we can acknowledge and support each other in what we actually are, terribly temporary beings who not only are radically contingent but who also know that we are.

A community is the presentation to its members of their mortal truth (…). It is the presentation of the finitude and the irredeemable excess that make up finite being: its death, but also its birth, and only the community can present me my birth, and along with it the impossibility of my reliving it, as well as the impossibility of my crossing over into my death.⁵

It is said that when confronted by a rival who claimed that his teacher could walk on water and could make his signature appear on a paper on the other side of a river, Zen master Bankei replied, “My miracle is this: when I’m hungry, I eat; when I’m tired, I sleep.” Commentators sometimes seek to add to the master’s statement, opining, for example, that he was actually boasting of his single-mindedness in every activity. I don’t think so; I think that he was pointing directly to life, to nothing more or less than eating and sleeping, carrying water and chopping wood. I think that he was pointing to the sense that the world is (rather than makes or has)—to the unspeakable, breaking-open sense that we sense at the “absolute point of existence.”

I can’t speak for Nancy, and I can’t claim to have read much of his work with understanding. Nor can I speak for long-dead Bankei. I hope I will be forgiven if I have misinterpreted either or both of them. For myself, though, long past belief in divine beings, and lately shaped by an ever-deepening intuition of the non­existence that is death (“the impossibility of my crossing over into my death”), I can trust no one who walks on water, nor any whose master does. I hope for no miracles, now or after death, beyond the present miracle of our shared existence. I simply want to carry water for as long as I can, and then as now to accept graciously that which other, stronger people carry to me, we all the while resisting together the victory of the intolerable, until I am no more.

_______
NOTES
1. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bergo, Malenfant, and Smith (New York, Forham University Press. 2008), page 126.
2. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Librett (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. 1997), p. 79; quoted in “The Sense of Being(-)With Jean-Luc Nancy” by Ignaas Devisch in Culture Machine 8, 2006.
3. Simone Weil, Waiting for God (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Capricorn Books Edition. 1959), p. 53.
4. Nancy, The Sense of the World (quoted in Devisch; see note 2, above), p. 55.
5. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. 1991), p. 15. Quoted in “The Community according to Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis” by Anja Streiter, Film-Philosophy 12.1, April 2008.

Wrestling with Nothingness

The intuition of nonexistence, which I wrote about recently, continues. It has a definite Buddhist flavor, as in these lines from Ryōkan (1758–1831), a Zen Buddhist poet and hermit.*

This is an old truth; don’t think it was discovered recently.
“I want this, I want that”
Is nothing but foolishness.
I’ll tell you a secret:
All things are impermanent.

But given my bi-spirituality, I acknowledge a Christian aspect as well. Zen and Christianity come together in the religious experience of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who, through his writings, was my spiritual guide for many of my younger years, and who in the latter part of his life studied and wrote about the Zen experience. Here is a statement from an interview with Brother Paul Quenon, a Trappist who studied under Merton at Gethsemane Abbey.

[Merton and I] were talking about prayer and that prayer is like a struggle with God. It’s like Jacob struggling with the angel in the night, and when you’re encountering God God is not a thing, and so God is more like nothing, so when you enter into the depth of prayer it’s like entering into nothingness.

Wrestling with nothingness seems to be a good description of where the intuition leads me. If I possessed the kind of theistic faith that sustained Merton, I might be able to frame the intuition as apophatic mysticism. When I am just coming out of the experience, I can sense how easily my perception of it could be changed by such faith. But while I don’t rule faith out on a priori grounds, each time I consider it I see that the world makes less, not more, sense from the perspective of theism. And so I wrestle, trying to come to terms with the experience, learning to accept the unacceptable and to allow this reality to shape my remaining time.

For without God, emptiness is truly empty. In Buddhist thought, the term “voidness” is not always reframed as “plenitude”: sometimes it is permitted to mean what it says, and that’s how I must use it now. This all seems most ironic to me, that a man who is grasped by the moral vision of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus comes, as he approaches the end of his life, to this Buddhist-like experience of voidness, of emptiness — without even the escape hatch of a substantialist interpretation of the doctrine of Buddha-nature, sometimes used to pretend that emptiness isn’t really empty.

Ryōkan again:

The village has disappeared in the evening mist
And the path is hard to follow.
Walking through the pines,
I return to my lonely hut.

When I was young, the Catholic Church was my village. (See “The Making of a Quaker Atheist.”) Leaving there discouraged, I found this poor heart-hut at hand and stayed here, thinking that it would be but a temporary shelter. It became my base for exploration. After wandering about and staying awhile among other communities, I discovered the Quaker village, and it is there that I continue to visit when I leave my inner hermitage. But that village, too, is swallowed by mist at the end of the day, and I see no path elsewhere. In the obscurity of age, I return to my lonely self. I will visit the village again, but I understand now that this temporary hut is my spiritual home. And I am beginning to understand that no one lives here. But if that truly is the case, I wish I could learn it fully while no one is still someone.

When you encounter those who are wicked, unrighteous, foolish, dim-witted, deformed, vicious, chronically ill, lonely, unfortunate, or disabled, you should think: “How can I save them?” And even if there is nothing you can do, at least you must not indulge in feelings of arrogance, superiority, derision, scorn, or abhorrence, but should immediately manifest sympathy and compassion. If you fail to do so, you should feel ashamed and deeply reproach yourself: “How far I have strayed from the Way! How can I betray the old sages? I take these words as an admonition to myself.” — Ryōkan

In the physical house in which I bide my time, there is a beautiful, although damaged, Buddhist shrine, in which reside images of the Buddha, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and Thích Quảng Đức (who immolated himself in Saigon when I was 13 years old). For a couple of years, the shrine, facing a space too small for sitting in meditation, has been closed. The shrine is something like my heart: beautiful, intricate, Bodhisattva-harboring; broken, misoriented, latched. Today, I think I will turn both of us around and open the doors.

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*Note: passages from Ryōkan are from “Zen Poetics of Ryokan” by Meng-hu, reprinted at The Hermitary.
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[Related post: "I Know What It's Like to Be Dead"]

“I know what it’s like to be dead”

My title is from the Beatles’ song called “She Said, She Said”: a couple of the lyric lines are relevant to my topic. When I attempted to describe to my friend Gary G. the change in my experience that I will attempt to describe to you now, he immediately recalled the song.

“She said, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.’”

Back in May, I decided to tell my relatively new acquaintance, John C., too, about this significant change in my life. I’ll use some of what I wrote to John to help me introduce it here.

Not long ago, something “clicked,” and suddenly I understood the ineluctable reality of evolution as a soulless and self-contained process. From then on, I have awakened many mornings in a kind of near-death experience, a strong intuition of what it means to really not exist at all. That experience returns to me a few times during each day as well. As a result, my felt sense of the world has changed, and I have more compassion now about people’s desire to remove the fear of the unknown. Another positive result seems to be that I no longer fear the dark so much, metaphorically speaking. But I understand first-hand now how dangerous that experience can be, because time is telescoped and, in a real sense, I already do not exist. I seem to have more respect for and yet less fear of death now. Maybe one function of religion has been to protect us from such knowledge — to serve as a kind of socially-inculcated defense mechanism?

That last sentence raises some interesting issues, but I’ll leave them for future musings. Today I want to focus on the experience.

I remember reading many years ago a Zen dialogue (which, if I haven’t imagined it, I may be able to locate later). In the story, a monk is challenged with something like this: “You can conceive of nonexistence, but can you conceive of the nonexistence of nonexistence?” The question itself is subject to a variety of interpretations. For example, one may read it as implying that nonexistence does not exist, that there is no such thing. Well, yes, nonexistence is not a thing: it’s a predicate. One could even go on to say that the Zen master must be teaching that nothing ever ceases to exist. But I don’t think that the master was teaching that: Buddhism attributes only conditional reality, if that, to things. My reading of the question was more like this: do you understand what it means, in terms of your life, that “nonexistence” not only is not a thing, but also is a characteristic that cannot be predicated of any thing? My answer then was, “Yes, but I’ll need to think about that.”

Thinking more about it didn’t give me a useful understanding then, but now the ongoing intuition of nonexistence is helping me to think (and feel) differently. No thing can be said not to exist, I see now. I cannot not exist: not because I am eternal, but because nonexistence is not a characteristic of any real — existing — thing, and I am such a thing. (“Existing” as a thought in someone’s mind is not the existence I require for myself.) There is no time when I will not exist, and yet there will be a time when others can rightly say of me, “He no longer exists.” Contemplating that paradox, I begin to understand “the nonexistence of nonexistence.”

And the reality of death. I might say that death is unconsciousness that never ends, but only with the proviso that no one is unconscious — and that unconsciousness can be predicated only of an existing being. Analogies can’t be of much help here. But this I can say: there are dead bodies, for a time, but no dead persons. I will die, but I will never be dead.

“And she’s making me feel like I’ve never been born.”

And yet, in a sense I am dead now, because to intuit nonexistence is to feel past and future in the present. As I told John, time is now telescoped. Seeing beyond existence allows me to feel the timeboundness and momentariness of our existence. Knowing now the eternal reality of nonexistence and the relentless relativity of time, I begin to understand that already I do not exist. And I see, too, that, from the perspective of eternity, I have never been born.

I’m reminded of a kind of prelude experience that I had in 1990, on the day that my adult family’s first pet dog died. Below is a paragraph from the entry I wrote that day in my journal. (Click here for the entire entry. At the time, I was thinking of Zen Master Bankei‘s notion of “the Unborn,” thus my reference to “Mind” in that entry, but my experience now is different, beyond the reach of doctrine — as, for all I know, Bankei’s was, too.)

A line seems to have an origin and an end, but I come from nowhere and go nowhere. I am an imaginary series of points between two deaths. Each point is drawn on the plane of emptiness; each point of life is a point of death. In perfect stillness I pass through them all. If I could enter that stillness, I would know peace. I would know death in life and life in death; I would no longer want to deny what I am. I would live, at last, as a free man.

I now know death in life. And, because of that, I am learning to know life in death. It may be that freedom is at hand.

[Follow-up post: "Wrestling with Nothingness"]