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Ennui

On his excellent blog, my friend (teacher?) Dirk Liesenfeld recently posted an article discussing (in German of course) a question that we probably all have asked ourselves – what happens once you reach enlightenment?

As a child I asked myself a similar question – doesn’t heaven sound really boring? Of course that’s actually a bit of a different question since here we are talking not about individual life perpetuated after death, but about continued life before death when all striving is nonetheless over. Still these questions have in common that they both cast doubt on how hard one should try to attain salvation and, in particular, is there any great rush?

Dirk describes us two scenarios. One leads to physical death and/or insanity (that one is particularly unappealing), the other to living in an almost unnoticed state of bliss, as pure love. Statistically the former case seems to predominate – though that may of course just be because the latter cases make a lot less noise. You get crazy, he says, in particular when the whirlwind of enlightenment tears up the roots of your humanity. There is nothing wrong with that craziness, per se, but it must seem unattractive to a potential disciple and certainly it seems a bit of a waste that someone who could share so much with the world doesn’t end up doing so. Though whether the world has the slightest interest in listening is, of course, another question.

The problem I have is that to feel estranged from daily life really doesn’t require one to be enlightened. It doesn’t even require one ever to have experienced tantra or any other authentic spiritual experience. It requires no more than a certain sensitivity to the complete madness and cruelty that surrounds us and its shocking juxtaposition to what is truly of value and beautiful. One of the main obstacles to spiritual growth must be, surely, the unbearableness of that shocking realization of human suffering, Weltschmerz. How much of it, indeed, can one person bear without going crazy?

In the world I know, the one I know in my heart I mean, all things are sacred. The joy that we experience in contact with others and with the world around us is beyond words. People love each other. No one would hurt a child. And this is not some idle utopia, nor even confined to tantra workshops, it is a part of my daily reality.

A much greater part, though, is spent being painfully reminded of how much the few positive things I can bring into the world are massively outweighed by the brutality of the established order. That’s both depressing and a major weight around my shoulders. It seems likely that this great mass of deadly inertia affects me negatively much more than I affect it positively.

Although I do not think my views are exceptionally odd or unnatural, I do find it very difficult to make any connection with the way most people think. It tires and bores me to have to listen to their stereotypes, prejudices and hatefulness. It tires and bores me to have to explain that, no, I don’t think like that and, yes, life is quite fine without such ludicrous baggage around my neck (or is it, in fact? for it is also rather lonely).

My partner and I organized, once, a party in lingerie. Half of our friends were so shocked by the very idea of this that they haven’t spoken to us since (and that’s the ones we dared to invite – of course there were plenty who never even got onto the guest list). Of those who did come, some were convinced we intended an orgy. Others, a few, came and had fun. But not one has tried anything similar, and most have not even invited us back to anything at all.

Personally, I simply didn’t and still don’t get what the issue could be. Isn’t that just fun? And as for any sex occurring – isn’t that both very unlikely and not a big deal? So what exactly is going on? Why do the most varied people suddenly gang up against me whenever I want to be just, well, normal, honest, natural? And why is it so hard to find anyone else on the same wavelength?

I have frankly no answer to this question. The only thing I can say is that if even the slightest authenticity is so difficult for the world around me to bear, there seems little point in settling for half measures.

Relationship as therapy

“L’enfer,” said Sartre, “c’est les autres” (Huis clos, 1943). And yet, as he recognized, it is a hell we in fact make for ourselves – a hell which results from a lack of any other perspective on ourselves than that furnished by those around and close to us, and an inability to dissociate our own emotional state from theirs. Plenty of us find ourselves in this hell, with no means to escape it. And yet, we continue to seek intimacy and we freely subjugate ourselves to the disciplines of life in community for reasons which frequently cannot be reduced to merely rational, material considerations or the workings of the “Selfish Gene”.

The ways in which we go about making life a hell for each other, and some of the reasons why, are notably addressed in a debatable but still suggestive branch of psychoanalytic theory called transactional analysis, well known through the books Games People Play (1964), What do you say after you say hello? (1975) and I’m OK, You’re OK (1969). These present rather gross simplifications of character dynamics and certainly do not constitute a complete theory of the underlying psycho-biophysics of emotions (which is still very poorly understood). Nonetheless, transactional analysis captures in terms which are easy for a layman to understand the basic dynamics of emotional interaction in repeated games.

In Games People Play, a number of easily-recognized patterns of interaction in relationships are described, which can be readily observed in our own experience. Many of us know, for instance, the frustration of trying to persuade or encourage someone to do something eminently reasonable or desirable (lose weight, give up smoking, change their job and so on), and being met by an inexhaustible barrage of semi-logical objections to it – that is, objections which adopt the rhetorical form of logical argument but without any substance – which eventually cause us to give up. This is the game Berne called Why Don’t You? Yes But (YDYB). Other common games include those in which the interlocutor is invariably cast as responsible for the interviewee’s misfortunes, those in which self-pity trumps all other considerations, games of entrapment, of emotional blackmail, and so on. Contrary to what Berne believes or cares to admit, however, all of these games are clearly marked by infantile interaction and are easy to interpret in classical psychoanalytic terms. They all constitute a projection onto the interlocutor of motivations and properties attributed to a primal figure such as a parent and the acting out of the interaction in terms of the scripts learnt in childhood to defend against these motivations when they were threatening and to solicit them when they could be reassuring. In other words, they are resistances to the threat to the ego which the interlocutor poses by virtue of his or her otherness.

Although it does not seem to have been widely recognized, the scenarios which arise in a psychotherapeutic and in a relationship setting have a great deal in common. In fact, psychotherapy is essentially relational in nature and relies on transferences of the type referred to in order to decode the nature of the neuroses which derive from the infantile experiences. A psychotherapeutic relationship has, of course, a defined framework and a conscious directionality and motivation which are presumably lacking in most general-purpose relationships. It hopefully also rests on an asymmetry of roles and on a greater emotional maturity on the part of the therapist. The point I would wish to make is, however, that also the general relational context provides ample material and opportunity to decode and self-decode the nature of character neuroses. It does so at less cost and with more ubiquity and it can certainly be advantageous to deal with transferences, resistance and conflict in a relational setting in a way which affirms and develops the authenticity of the participants to the relationship rather than – as appears anecdotally to be the norm – by avoiding conflict and shutting down communication.

From a spiritual point of view we may go further than this. The search for a partner in life and love is the basic spiritual drive which we all share. It is rarely thought of as a drive for therapy but it is homomorphic to this drive because the direction it takes expresses our desire for completeness and self-transcendence, to find Otherness in the Other, l’alterité dans l’autre; to replace neurotically constructed, ego-defensive reality by the base of otherness in which our self finds creative and autonomous expression. Because it is so colored by our prior experiences and insecurities, and by the embedded psychosocial violence which underpins these, the search for a partner no doubt frequently results in the most inappropriate pairings which do nothing to advance the spiritual growth of the partners (or their offspring). Quite on the contrary, such relationships frequently constitute a mutual Faustian pact to avoid confronting ones tortured inner child. Yet we also see from our experience that relationship is the enabler of spiritual growth. The experiences that have helped us grow as individuals all have names and faces attached to them.

In the end it is up to us to allow our relationships and our personal spiritual growth to interact in such a way that they are self-reinforcing; and to be lucid enough to draw conclusions in those situations which have become unproductive for us as human beings and to make decisions in consequence. Regardless, though, of the prospective longevity of a relationship, relationships offer us at all moments the opportunity to learn about our resistances to change and to look beneath them to the elements of our psychic makeup which determine them – provided we can separate what is objective and reasonable in our assessment of the relationship from our subjective emotionality in connection to it. This is not easy because such emotionality takes many forms which are difficult to recognize, especially to ourselves. Emotionality can look very “unemotional” or it can take a disguised emotional form (such as compassion) – the form it takes depends on our character and how we learnt to manage existential threats when we were children. My emotionality is no better than yours, however convinced I may be that I am being reasonable and you are not. Both are windows into the psychic injuries which we have endured. Relationships are not a contest, and the almost universal search for power within them can only frustrate the potential they have to bring healing and self-development. This has, therefore, to be seen for what it is – behavior learnt to defend ourselves from infantile threats that no longer exist, and a violence against the integrality of the very other whom we cherish and seek.

Taizé

Taizé is coming to Brussels for its annual youth New Year celebration – I’m excited 🙂 (see http://www.taize.fr/en_rubrique45.html)

From tantra to Taizé? Or rather, in my case, the other way round.

I attended the new year meetings in Prague in 1992 and Budapest in 1993. On both occasions there was an electrifying atmosphere – a combination of the still-new feelings of freedom after the Cold War, so much youthful energy, and so much love.

I would have been the last person to believe anyone could breathe new life in the 20th century into the moribund, authoritarian, patriarchal irrelevance that was and is the catholic church and other mainstream Christian denominations.

Yet without any particular knowledge or analysis of Brother Roger’s theology and pastoralism, it was clear to me, and immediately tangible, that here was an authentic spirituality.

I had the same experience, very much later, with Thich Nhat Hanh (http://www.plumvillage.org/).

Although the symbolic world of Taizé is entirely Christian, and of Plum Village entirely zen Buddhist, Taizé, Thich Nhat Hanh and Tantra all have a lot in common and all, ultimately, lead to the same place. This is because all liberate themselves from dogma and the ego in favor of encounter, love, awakening and transcendence.

My experiences in Prague and Budapest were an important stepping stone in my moving beyond the narrow evangelical fundamentalism in which my spirituality as a teenager had initially been expressed towards the beginning of a far more generous spirituality.

Cultivated within the neo-pentecostal tradition, and at the same time by disposition a rationalist and skeptic, ecumenism was for me an anathema – either there was only one, revealed truth or there was not, as I could conceive, any at all. Ecumenism was the thin end of the wedge of relativism and spiritual and moral disarray. And I do not have a lot of interest, still today, in baroque efforts to reconcile the irreconcilable and achieve doctrinal unity amongst Christian denominations. I simply couldn’t care less about the unity of the church or the church as an institution at all. I believe that even to persons within a Christian spiritual tradition, the church has become largely or totally irrelevant – it is the last place one would expect to find persons sharing your own sensitivities to the spiritual insights achieved by Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton or John of the Cross.

Yet I now see that whilst this may be an obsession or the source of painful heart searching for many within the Taizé movement, it is neither its point nor the source of its strength and the movement cannot be contained within it.

The beautiful songs of Taizé with their prodigious multilingualism and sense of community and of the possible energize the spiritual nature of those who witness and participate in them regardless of their denominational self-identification. I am sure they speak at a deeper level to persons having been brought up in a Christian tradition or at least in a post-Christian culture than to other persons who may find their language unfamiliar and difficult to relate to. Still also such people will recognize and identify with the love and energy they find.

There is a good reason why Taizé is a youth movement. It speaks to the deepest motivations of young people – to discover the real meaning hidden within the sterile forms of religious practice; to reach out to the other; to experience love and union.

Taizé, in other words, is driven by, and is a sacred celebration of, sexual energy.

By itself this is sufficiently evident merely in the rituals and in the music. It is, of course, much more evident in the interactions which surround such an event and primarily motivate the participants who, much as Jérôme in Gide’s La Porte Etroite or Renzo in i Promessi Sposi, naturally find their romantic and spiritual quests intertwined, indeed inseparable.

I remained standing next to her, whilst she continued kneeling. I was quite unable to express this new longing of my heart, but I pressed her head against my heart and against her forehead my lips, through which my soul slipped away. Drunk with love, with pity, with an uncertain mixture of enthusiasm, denial and virtue, I appealed to God with all my strength and made an offering of myself, unable to conceive of any other purpose to my life than to shelter this child from fear, from evil, from life. Finally I fall myself to my knees, full of prayer, I hold her against me…

My Lord, you know that I need him in order to love You. Give him to me, so that I may give unto You my heart. Forgive me this impardonable prayer, but I am unable to remove his name from my lips, nor to forget the suffering of my heart. Even were I not to formulate my prayer, would you be any less aware of the burning desire of my heart?

If these young pilgrims believe they can bring something of this passion back to their church communities, reinvigorate them and through them reach out to the world, they will be almost invariably disappointed. But if they allow the passion which they discover to change them from inside, to lead where it may lead, then there is hope for the world, for true religion must always lead to authenticity and love, and love knows no doctrine, dogma or bounds.

Will the real me please stand up?

My working assumption until recently had been that the pseudo-erotic services referred to in Brussels as “tantric massage” were merely a poor imitation of the real thing by people with no tantric training and frequently severe character armoring (typically psychopathic Mannenhass or extreme orality – leading to unpleasant transferences during the massage for those not themselves so armored as not to receive these transferences).

After this weekend’s experience in Prague, however, at the new Tantra Spa (www.tantraspa.cz) opened by my friends Denisa and Richard (of www.tantraworld.com), I am more inclined to see the difference as one of polar opposites.

In a city with possibly an even more extensive erotic industry than Brussels (though thankfully at least less of a tendency to misuse the word “tantric” to describe it), the Tantra Spa positions itself amongst legitimate massage services as a “life-changing experience”. From a marketing standpoint I have my doubts about this positioning for at least three reasons – firstly, however good it might be in reality it could only come across as hyperbole; secondly, it goes against the classic and wise admonition in services marketing to underpromise and overdeliver; and lastly do people really want to change their lives? I think this is frequently the last thing they want, and their sexuality would be the last place they would want to start even if they admitted this goal.

So even though I had had a truly amazing and unforgettable experience with Denisa herself a couple of years previously, which awoke parts of my body I didn’t even know existed, and probably could fairly be called life-changing, I was unsure what to expect this time.

It is difficult for me to describe the massage I received. It was tremendously attentive, full of presence and love, slower and gentler than one could imagine, as if all possible nuances of touch and presence somehow became infinitely more subtle still. Had it been only slightly slower, it would have been as if not only the massage but the whole universe had come to a place of standstill, just vibrating outside of time. Zuzana’s presence was also the perfect counterpoint to my own process during the massage and for this I also have a tremendous admiration – it was love without transference, a presence which, treasuring me, invited me into myself. She did not activate in my mind any erotic scripting or indeed any other interpersonal scripting, so I felt I was only in that moment, with her presence not reminiscent of anyone else. Because there was no erotic scripting, there was also no Todestrieb. This gave me access to an altered state of consciousness – one in which the limitations of my energetic body were transcended.

Freud coined the concept of Todestrieb (death drive) to explain the clinically observed departure from the earlier posited pleasure principle, the id-driven drive to gratify the senses. He noted that individuals had a tendency to replay traumatic experiences (which he called repetition compulsion), without however this repetition actually serving to heal the individual from the trauma: a bit like a record getting stuck (with apologies to those who may not remember this technology!).

In a later development of Freud’s thought, the death drive is Θανατος, opposed to Ερος, which represents the pleasure principle. This certainly distorts Freud’s thought as I’m sure he never connected the sexual drives with pure animalistic pleasure. On the contrary, he was all too aware of sexual perversion and its origins in early childhood experience, and probably never viewed natural sexuality as anything other than a teleological abstraction. The all-too-evident “impurities” of realexistierend eros lead Christian thinkers to substitute for it agape, courtly love, or caritas as it is rendered in the Vulgate.

In reality, of course, eroticism in our culture is profoundly intertwined with the death drive. And this brings us back to the point of departure. In Barthes’ ontology, la petite mort is identified not only with (male) sexual release, but elevated into an organising principle of aesthetics.

I beg to disagree. The ejaculatory drive – as the term petite mort implies – is thanatos, not eros. As a matter of descriptive fact, at least, it has a marked tendency to be nihilistic in character. As such, as I have argued previously, it tends to anchor rigidities in the body. Any release it affords is illusory in character – a fuite en avant which refuses to recognize – indeed relies on – the fundamental neurosis of the personality. The ejaculatory drive is thus employed in defense of the ego. It represents triumph, subjugation of the other, whatever, in fact, the neurotic character requires of it. The neuroses embedded in erotic scripting which serve the defense of the ego are what are activated by tantric massage, Brussels style. This drives the alienation of self from basis only deeper.

This is not what I experienced in Prague. And this is why I speak of a polar opposite.

The acceptance of self and nature is not, however, by any means without peril. On the contrary, as an affirmation of life, power and virility (or let us say, more gender-neutrally, Lebendigkeit) it violently confronts the embedded death drive which defends the ego. This led me in Prague, besides the most exquisite pleasure, to experience symptoms of bodily rejection which were frankly extreme in nature and, in such a context, not just unexpected but dramatic and somewhat frightening, notwithstanding even my intellectual understanding of them.

As always – and I cannot imagine how it would be otherwise – only the presence of the other could lead me through this turmoil. This too is part of the paradox of what tantra massage really is. It is a deep experience of the self, and at the same time it relies on the undifferentiated presence of the other. This is the union which dissolves the ego. It is eros in the true sense.

Afterwards I felt truly (even if only temporarily) transformed, flowing over with love, power, compassion and authenticity. I caught a glimpse, more consciously than ever before, of who it is that I really am. Freed of all the neuroses I have inherited. A strong, charming, compassionate and loving person. And, really curiously, not just a person I could have been, but actually the person that, notwithstanding the depth of the neuroses and the passage of time, I actually still remain. My authentic self. And this was a hugely self-liberating insight, more than justifying the apparent hyperbole of life-changing experience.

Tantra massage is perhaps this then: a magic mirror which also opens the eye of the beholder to the truth it reflects.

In the end, though, eros and thanatos, as all dualities, are reconciled. This goes to the heart of what it is we are talking about in tantra and why it is we do what we do. But this is a subject for another day.

Meditation

I am wondering whether this is one of the most uselessly misleading words in the English language.

Latin meditari comes from the PIE root med-/mod- meaning to measure, limit or consider (German messen, Dutch meten, cognate with meter), with, for good measure, the Latin frequentative infix -t-

Much more active, mental and ego-driven than this it doesn’t come.

Yet what we mean by meditation is nothing like this at all. This is such a widespread misconception that I really wonder whether this word is actually useful at all, or whether we should not abandon it and find another one.

Although this is true enough of meditation in any spiritual sense, the Osho so-called “active” meditations are particularly obviously nothing to do with measuring, limiting or considering anything whatsoever.

What is a meditation? It seems to me that the Osho meditations are something like a physical embodiment of the Zen koan, a little trick, a seeming paradox to short-circuit the mind and realize a gestalt switch, a momentary discontinuity in the fabric of the personality through which the force of nature can reconfigure it.

Doesn’t anyone have a better word for this than “meditation”?

Identity crisis

This is so true…

The Zen people say: Before one meditates, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. When one goes deep in meditation, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers. That is a great crisis when mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers. You are passing through an identity crisis. The old is lost and the new has not been found. You have left the old shore and the new shore is not even visible. And the Zen people say: When the meditation is complete, when you have entered into no-mind, mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers; of course on a totally different plane, but things are again things. Everything settles again, crystallizes again, but now with a difference.

First others had told you that mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers, now YOU know — and that makes the real difference. Information is never transformation.

OSHO
The Dhammapada Vol 5

Bioenergetics

I just finished reading Alexander Lowen’s autobiography. Certainly a remarkable man, who has understood Reich as few others have and taken his insights to a new level. It is a curious book nonetheless, disarmingly personal, honest about his failures, long on anecdote with no seeming purpose, extraordinarily understated prose that scarcely conveys what the adventure of his life must have felt like.

In relating the Reichian orgasm reflex to bodily vibrations and rigidities and in devising exercises which attempt to release those rigidities and anchor psychotherapy in the body, he is undoubtedly right.

What strikes me about the book though (perhaps I would see it differently if I read some of his others) is the lack of a theory of the emotions and of transference and countertransference; of the interpersonal dimension of human experience and of what this can bring to the transformation of character structure.

Lowen seems to see Bioenergetics as essentially palliative – he does not believe in its ability to change the character structure, and presumably has therefore never experienced this in his practice with patients, or recognized it in himself. Perhaps this is partly semantic. However, I certainly believe the character structure can not only be loosened, but really changed.

When I was in London last weekend at the tantra festival, it was educational to observe people’s bodies during the belly-dancing session that was organized. The essential identity of body and psyche and the different character types were very clearly on display.

Yet at the same event there was at least one person whose body – and presence – clearly expressed a grace of character that she cannot have had in childhood. There was no mistaking this. This was Sarita, and it made a big impression on me. I am certainly not a big fan of all the New Age stuff she proposes (www.schoolofawakening.com). But this is not important; all I want to observe is, that when you are a vehicle of grace, you are transformed organically.

So what is Lowen missing? I believe this starts in the psychotherapeutic paradigm and in his adherence to the Reichian model of charge and discharge, which I have discussed elsewhere. In rehabilitating the body, Lowen has displaced the primacy of the intellectual in therapy, but he has not realized that this is still only a partial vision. Thought has been complemented, supplanted, or subordinated by feeling; but emotion remains, in his worldview, poorly understood, maladaptive, merely a mechanism which imprints the mind’s neuroses on the body; and therapy consists of releasing emotions, as if they were only to be abandoned, overcome, transcended. And Lowen’s book indeed is disarmingly emotionless, though he himself was obviously an emotional man.

Lowen’s exercises have become very popular in tantric circles, though he himself shows no signs whatsoever of having encouraged this or even known about it. In this context, however, their therapeutic consequences are, I believe, completely transformed. By embracing love, acceptance, and sexual transcendence in the moment, complementary mechanisms of healing come into play which genuinely loosen and can ultimately resolve the pattern of neurosis embedded in thought, feeling and emotion. This resolution restores the whole woman or man. It is what we mean by satori, enlightenment; not a mystic concept but the very real end of therapy as in the Freudian tradition it can only be understood – not merely as a palliative treatment for distinct, severe mental disturbances, but as the individual resolution of socioculturally endemic patterns of neurosis and the recovery of healthy human life.

Царство Божие внутри вас

“The Kingdom of God is within you” is the title of a work by Lev Tolstoy in which he grapples, as he did his whole life, with the disparity between the truth he found in the Christian gospel and the reality of the church. It is a literalist (but of course selective) reading of the gospels designed to foment social change; quite akin (though very different) to liberation theology. Tolstoy’s work is particularly problematic in that he appreciates that change must take place in the heart and disowns the method of revolution while at the same time envisioning a revolutionized social order which, of course, has not come to pass (and certainly not by the methods he advocated).

There are, of course, any number of works of this kind in a variety of spiritual traditions. Typically, in this literature the current order is viewed as inferior to an envisioned order, reasons for this inferiority are advanced, and a method is advocated to realize progressive or apocalyptic change towards the pristine, Platonic, intended order of things. For a full understanding, this inner, discursive logic proper to the text must of course be placed in counterpoint to its social context and, subsequently, to its social history.

It’s easy to be dismissive, and necessary to be very critical, of any offered normative foundation for social change, which invariable instrumentalizes, desubjectivizes, its foundation in the individual perception and drive for social justice. At the same time, however, doing so distances us from the imperatives that we, too, recognize as such; cut off from the framed call to arms, our moral sense wanders and entropy prevails. Blinded by its contingency, we have no means to know or acknowledge the truth.

Gurdjieff’s message, as I perceive it, is to change only yourself. Go ever deeper and, when you believe you are finally fit to take up arms in the social arena, stop, and go deeper still. This counsel, which is widespread in oriental spiritual thought, appears, zen-like, to offend us, for to abnegate any effort to change society is the ultimate manifestation of non-violence and easy to portray, including to oneself, as narcissistic.

The first stage in spiritual life, it seems to me, is reached when All is Clear, But Nothing is as It Should Be. Of course, what is clear is destined to and must become clearer still as turbulence settles in the mind. Yet fundamentally, deep down, all is clear. In fact, if it is clear, it has always been clear, but now it is more conscious. Yet precisely this is seductive – you have acquired power, but you have not yet abandoned goals. You are waking, but you are more dangerous than when you were asleep – to me and to yourself.

To me, all is absolutely clear. I understand the “meaning of life”, I understand why we are as we are, I understand (though it is hard to implement) the way out of it, and I understand how the world should be, if it lived according to natural law. It is not like this at all, however; it falls catastrophically short. This does not only impact on the sustainability and quality of life on the planet. Much worse, it impacts painfully on my own ability to live freely. I have thrown off my own chains; but I cannot throw off those in which society has bound me. Like Prometheus, only eternal torture awaits me in the twilight space between God and Man. The Kingdom of God may be within me, but that is not where I want it; and so I am under pressure to act, to change my environment; to remake it (violently) according to this partial image; or, of course, to be driven insane by the frustration that this new order fails to materialize.

To renounce the impulse to change things, and to live with their scandalous imperfection, to live without a Heilgeschichte, is hard because the truth burns within me, too. I do not very well know what is the answer. I feel only that this passion and rage must be allowed to burn itself out. Only in this way will my environment work with me in synergy, and feed, not consume me. At some point the veil will be lifted and I will see that, even if humanity is fallen and suicidal, all that touches me is perfect.

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, but I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now
Nor any more youth or age than there is now
And will never be any more perfection than there is now
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe.

This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just same as the righteous

Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has.

I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.


Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Religion and Society

In the aftermath of the dissemination of the film Fitna by maverick Dutch politician Geert Wilders, La Libre Belgique, a Belgian newspaper, published an article containing certain reflections from teaching staff on the difficulties they claim they encounter on a daily basis with children from Muslim backgrounds in Belgian schools. This article claims that Muslim children reject certain “values” which are supposedly “core” to European society, and then goes on to make an amalgam between eating pork and celebrating Easter, and rejection of the principle of liberal education itself. It’s not a very enlightening piece, but it set me thinking.

Apparently “Islam is invoked as a value above the law”. And what is the Western canon of natural law based on? What did Thomas of Aquinas say? Are we sure we are in a world of positive law and value-free jurisprudence? Do we want to be?

I think it is fine and a good idea to defend some values. But certainly not by confusing what is important with what is necessarily culturally colored and doubtless – if it was spelt out – would include a lot of “values” that I categorically reject myself.

One contributor to this article is surprised that there is a “lack of demand for assimilation”. I wonder where in the world there is any such demand. Don’t we all want to be recognized for what makes us unique? Isn’t a minimum level of respect a precondition for dialogue and social life?

Finally, one Maroccan lady is cited as believing that society is giving up on the very values that motivated her to emigrate to Europe in the first place. This is banal apocalypticism, but hers is the only voice that evokes a certain sympathy.

This article is marked by a profound hatred of which its authors are certainly entirely unconscious and probably insufficiently self-critical to understand. It is not characterized by any of the values I suppose to underlie a liberal society. And this, precisely, is the problem – the problem the article identifies is in the minds of the ruling class, the established bourgeoisie, not in the minds of the rebels, who respond mechanically. There is, indeed, nothing to emulate or to respect in this type of attitude, and thus it is not surprising that it be rejected. I reject it myself; the only difference may be in what I would like to see in its place.

My position on this is as follows: trying to counteract the so-called (with vast exaggeration) “islamization” of society is not possible by opposing to it the weak compromises that humanism has historically made with religion in Europe and the New World and now is unable any longer to perceive. These compromises have led to a system of practical values which is far from universal in nature and, thus, unless we are prepared to revisit them, a certain level of conflict is inevitable. However, I am not against compromise between humanism and religion. To achieve this compromise we need to know what religion is. When we know what it is, we can respect it, and when we respect it, we can pass beyond it.

In this regard, we have to admire the French. The unrelenting doctrine of laicism in public life seems like a mantra at times, but when you realize that to get a decent education in Belgium you need to put up with crucifixes on the wall – a potent symbol of the one force in society that has systematically placed itself above science and debate and done a lot to hinder both – you start to appreciate what is at stake.

I would like to state that I am rather certain that Islam is, on balance, a positive rather than negative force in the life of Muslims by defending values that are worth defending and that we only fail to perceive because we take them in our society for granted. This blindness is devoid of historical perspective. Islam in the life of the state seems to be another matter entirely, as does Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and (perhaps even) Buddhism in the life of the states that have given these religions a privileged position.

There are very good reasons why religion performs better in private piety than in institutions with coercive power. Religion plays a role as a repository of spiritual values, the values which are truly universal, like wonderment, respect, love. As a repository, it is opposable to the individual. This provides a corrective to other forces which may pull him or her in the direction of brutality. But it presupposes power, authority, bureaucracy; and thus at a certain point, for a certain individual, it hinders rather than assists spiritual growth and access to the source of the values from which religion itself springs. This trade-off occurs at different points for different religions in different places at different points. But it remains a trade-off. If we have no respect for what is true in the world’s religions, we have absolutely no position of moral authority from which to construct a social framework to support greater individual liberty and a more truly moral society.

If we want to achieve a better society in Europe given the fact of multiculturalism (and its indisputable benefits), there is only one thing to do, which Geert Wilders appears to have no inkling of. We need systematically to criticize, with immense love, feeling and respect, the role of the church and of Christianity itself in the making of our social institutions, both formal and informal, and make this criticism as public as we can.

In other words, we can only criticize our traditions, we cannot criticize others’ on their behalf. Only then are they likely to respect us and to perceive, in the construction of a just society, a common labor and a common goal.