bleak compassion

Another fine day, but caught in smog that has moved in from the continent, so maybe no long trips out today. But even though I am retired, I still like Fridays.

Many mornings I wake up with a slight sense of dread or unease. No specific reason, I think it is just part of life, and you feel better as you wake up and get into your day. But I like to meditate on the feeling, and why I am feeling it (or anything else), in that time immediately after waking. Not analysing it, but feeling back to its associations.

I have a quite bleak view of life, which is to say part wonder and sheer immersion in the beauty of embodied existence, and part bleakness as to any of the moral and spiritual narratives we invent and choose to believe (though I have nothing against make believe in itself, I can assure you). It’s good if you make it good, but no, you’re not hanging there, suckling on God’s tit, and I really don’t think it’s a “school” of any sort. If existence were moral, it would be the creation of an immensely skilled psychopath, but I don’t think there was any “creator”, so we don’t have to bother with that too much. It’s in that sense that I still appreciate parts of Buddhism, for its appreciation of the ubiquity of suffering. I used to be very taken with the whole “bodhisattva” principle, deferring a posited liberation for when all beings could be liberated¹; but I have to say now that I just want people to have as much choice as possible. Be free to learn your own truth, and live accordingly. Though I would not subscribe to it in its fullness, Theravada Buddhism still has some appeal, in its stripped down unsentimentality:

“Theravada Buddhism emphasises attaining self-liberation through one’s own efforts. Meditation and concentration are vital elements of the way to enlightenment”

entry on the BBC Religions page

I might not go by the teachings, but I like the “life is suffering – here’s how you stop it – all up to you” approach. It’s like Exit for the human condition.

As you get used to the bleakness of things (which doesn’t preclude pleasure, enjoyment and creativity), you actually find people, society, life, easier to put up with. No point whining, and they’re all suffering anyway. And no, that doesn’t mean I’m going to put “trigger warnings” on my life, or “check my privilege” (get a grip people, the situation is much much worse than that), but seeing as the game is over and it’s all up to you, you notice more.

Compassion is not an absolute virtue, and certainly not an emotional one in the way we often imagine. In the qabalah the two sides of the tree of life are termed the pillar of severity and the pillar of mercy. It is possible to be merciful from a position of strength, and it is the strength (or severity) that defines the possibility of mercy. This is what people forget when they talk about “religions of peace and mercy” – they’re not talking Godspell (so don’t be surprised when they turn out to also be violent*). Compassion is not born of good intentions and gentleness, and if it is ineffective, then it is an emotional or intellectual indulgence. But there is such a thing as unsentimental empathy, and it can make life considerably more at peace with its reality, which is to say make us more at peace, which also makes us rather more effective.

Blissed out it ain’t, but it is aware of the bottom line, and just somewhat clearer.

National Museum of Crime and Punishmen – Hangman Rope from Don Jail 1915 – by David from Washington, DC (_MG_5867) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

¹ There is actually a broader definition of the bodhisattva, but the meaning I learnt when I was younger had greater reference to the vow to reincarnate until all beings were liberated, probably I think from the Mahayana school.

* I’m not saying people should accept religious violence, quite the opposite, just don’t get taken in by the rhetoric of religious “peace”.

the pure Spirit

Another of those words that sometimes gets people, that catches, like “God” or “Truth”. Understandable, because I don’t really deal in the term “God” anymore myself, I don’t believe in it in a personalized sense of a being – and lord knows I believe in all kinds of things, personages and entities. The big One though, I don’t engage with in that way, and the neopagan fudge of an imagined female gender making it any different gives me the feeling you used to get sitting on those tiny chairs that were actually a little (ok, a lot) too small for you at the one size fits all Sunday school. I’m glad if you enjoy it, I enjoy lots of things, but you may as well say that Superman made the world.

I do believe in spirituality though. I value reason but I’m not a rationalist. I value the body, desire, sexuality and pleasure, but I’m not a denier of there being anything else of value. In part I do get what people mean when they talk about “God”, at least I believe I do (at the risk of presumption), in terms of an experience. I associate it with the Oneness of Being, and a liberated, blissful state of consciousness which I have experienced at times (sometimes extended times), and with love and with a very profound, released peace. It is awesomely freeing, and calling it “God” proved quite counter-productive after a while, as well as landing me with some really whacked out but sincerely conventional company. But it’s amazing stuff, when you can get it out of the tin.

I don’t know what to call that. Free consciousness? Consciousness-Existence-Bliss (from Hindu traditions)? Spirit? that last I am probably plucking from my long gone Christian upbringing, with its “Holy Spirit” milky bar pigeons of light, or maybe little tongues of magic luminosity. The esoteric idea of “spirit” can actually be quite different to that, more like ether, akasha, or some astral, amorphous source matter. Culturally when we say “spirit” we don’t mean that stuff, and I don’t think I do either here. And we’ve often been lectured by our good counter-cultural pioneers about the sins of dividing spirit and matter. You know, body, sex, the world, stuff = bad; transcendence, denial, ghosty stuff = good. And how that doesn’t work, and indeed it doesn’t. But that’s not to say there isn’t a valid question there, arising out of an experience, which maybe got hijacked.

If it comes to a question of “what is matter?” and “what is spirit?”, I would probably say they are qualities of experience. The former is characterized by separation and a binding at the physical senses and brain consciousness. The latter has a unitary, continuous, re-united quality, and does not feel bound by the senses, nor by separative location in space and time, within bodies, and thus intuitively feels closer to a source of consciousness which is not sourced in the brain as such. I hear people talking about spirit and matter, and matter and energy, as if spirit and energy were the keys to each other, but that is not what I intuit here. That would be materialism by an extended back door.

Within popular Paganism, what I mainly see is materialism garnished with psychology. There is a level at which those things are valid, especially where there are things to untangle personally or culturally. But it’s only as relevant as say health food is. If your diet is screwed, it is a good idea to sort it out, but as someone once said (I think it was in a Reshad Feild book): “I’m sorry but no, you can’t eat your way to enlightenment”. Well, you can’t therapize or politicize your way there either.

Spirit (if we want to keep using that word) isn’t just a tool, or a method, or an optimization. It isn’t even just a healing process, it is a whole other world. And compared to here, it’s the real world. I don’t mean that we should blacken or demonize this world (come on now, it’s bad enough as it is), nor that we shouldn’t appreciate the overlap and interaction (the other world is the real source and cause as far as I am concerned in any case), and certainly not that we shouldn’t work to improve and heal life here. But if you’re going to try and find everything here, you’re going to have to fudge things to make the picture look anywhere near complete.

When that other world impinges on this world positively, that’s when we often feel “spirit”, because of the contrast, the release. And if “Spirit” is an experience, and a world, it is also an influence. It’s an influence which human beings generally need at some time or other, and collectively we need. We may seem to screw up the whole thing over and over again in the guise of “religion”, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a real thing there. I think mystics understand that and get on with it, trying to alleviate the suffering that springs from being apparently, separatively incarnated in these bodies, on this wildly, apparently travelling wheel, and who knows what else, in all the permutations of apparent being, material and otherwise. That is why spirit is associated with compassion and healing. It’s not a sentimental impetus arising from within a predicament. It is a radical act of seeing and responding I reckon.

What to do with it, or be able to do with it, in a “world” such as ours, that is the fool’s choice, but it is at least not a lonely choice, not any more.

Living statue as Neptune (god of water and the sea) at the promenade between San Agustin and Playa del Ingés (Gran Canaria) – by Wouter Hagens (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

a Pagan home for everyone

Paganism has grown and developed over time to accommodate groups large and small, with particular interests and wants, often as a countercultural movement, sometimes “progressive” or modernizing and sometimes “conservative”, sometimes a mixture of the two, but rarely with the need to actually be a representative, accessible, equable religion for all people. And as people’s religion we may have had some aspirations and claims, and real work from some, but in a lot of cases we are relatively untested and under-challenged.

I do feel this is the nature of a unique and diverse beast that has grown rather than been designed, and that needs to be understood, but there’s two questions came out of it for me:

1) what form does a real people’s religion take, ie one that seeks to serve the people as a whole, and be accessible to all, and not disadvantage any person or group, whether they are male, female, intersex, transexxed, of any gender (and not just binary), hetero, bi, gay, lesbian, queer, asexual, of any race, age, or form of physical ability, fertile or infertile, poor or rich, etc etc. Not so much thinking here about a battery of “equality and diversity” provisos, but what form does such a religion take, in terms of the inward stuff of religion? And further, because Paganism is such a diverse collection of quite particular religions or religious forms, how would that inclusiveness reflect on all our constituent parts? Because truthfully, if any religion as a whole excludes part of the people, does it deserve the title “religion”, or is it a specialized cult? I don’t think the term “cult” need be derogatory here if it is entirely conscious and recognizes the admission of limitation and specialization involved, but I don’t believe we should claim the term “religion” if we use it to turn our backs on part of humanity, and I don’t believe spirituality can truly have exclusion clauses. Similarly, I would question if some mainstream “religions” actually qualify for the term under this definition.

2) I appreciate the need for specialized cults, I feel the need for them myself in many ways, certainly I have no intention of my family religion being other than what suits me and my husband and our gods. But in a religious world made up of so many cults, what responsibility do we have towards the whole?

How can we reconcile so many specialized cults with a more inclusive status as religion open to all, and serving all. Is this not where “Paganism” actually comes in? We often say that Paganism is an “umbrella term” covering the great diversity within the religions of modern Paganism, but does this umbrella actually offer wholeness and acceptance to all, or just a convenient label with little but fragmented special interests behind it? I think this is important, because we need to look after people and offer them a spiritual home.

I feel we need to look at how people are excluded from our community, and what excludes them, not in order to make one universal form, but in order to engage in the work of alleviating suffering, and bring about the real fulfilment of lives. Because we might talk about “unity in diversity”, but there still needs to be some kind of union in there somewhere, and if this is any kind of spiritual unity in diversity, then there needs to be a moral aspect to it.

One of the things I heard repeated a few times in the wake of the “Lilith-gate” transphobia controversy, was that trans-folk should simply form their own groups, and surely that would be best for them? Which is an astonishing sentiment frankly, tantamount to telling them that they should just go away and disappear. Like a tiny, scattered, disempowered minority compared to cis-women and men can easily do that, and benefit from finding themselves excluded once again. No, that’s acting like a bunch of self-serving cults, and to assert that would be a moral failure I feel. I think we need to stop feeling so entitled as cults, and be serious about a wider and more compassionate vision.

I understand the need to have all manner of specialized forms, practices, liturgies, iconographies and functions. I feel that need myself, though as part of “eclectic Paganism” with what is basically a personal, family religion, I have it very easy. But we seem to circle round that “umbrella term”, keeping it carefully empty, while we look after ourselves and our own. We close the door on it and avoid the question that lies there. Can we not look deeper and broader, and get our feet collectively wet in universal ethical concerns for our fellow human beings?

"Enso" - calligraphy by Kanjuro Shibata XX - used under creative commons 3.0 license