As I am becoming, I am
recognizing a relevant tension living in empire: the therapeutic defined
within the parameters of a dominant scripting embellished to provide services
while largely and complicitly promoting the same failing script of
“therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism” (ttcm) that permeates
every dimension of our common life.”
Thus, it keeps an illusion of safety and happiness before the masses with its network of advertisement (used broadly), a
huge culprit of collective discouragement, exploitation, numbness and is more
often absent of critical reflection on the existential level.
There is
no easy way out of this gravitational pull of empire’s script of ttcm. John
Vervaeke describes the totality of a present collective tumult as a “meaning
crisis”.
Understanding the meaning crisis begins by realizing the script or story you tell
yourself and live by.
Everybody
lives by a script—whether
implicit or explicit. We get scripted through the process of nurture,
formation and socialization, and it happens without our knowing it. The
dominant script in our society is one of technological therapeutic
military consumerism. It is a script enacted through advertising,
propaganda and ideology, especially in the liturgies of television, promises to
keep us safe and happy. That script has failed. The script of technological
therapeutic military consumerism cannot make us safe or happy. It’s
a story we choose when we have no story.
Resident
Aliens
echoes Jesus of Nazareth calling for radical awakening to empire: to nudge
some beyond the whelm of noise and plague of memes generating artificial sense
of safety, fears, and collective anxiety that are felt locally unto globally
due to empire.
*
PAUSE in
time allowing opportunity to take flight, suspend raw chance
(hap)
and remain self-making (poiesis).
Wendall
Berry, one in ten thousand, a truth-teller, wrote awoke of moments in the
cosmos,
Blessing
and blessed in this result
Of
times not blessed, now he has seen.
He
walks in quiet beyond division
In surcease of his
own tumult
1984, V
Why must the gate be
narrow?
Because you cannot
pass beyond it burdened.
To come in among
these trees you must leave behind
The six days’ world,
all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without
weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing,
remembering nothing
into the ease of
sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.
1985, V
I carry
a new unburdening and fortuate existence of one mourning, with the possibility of
being summoned, called a witness, invited and even encouraged to partake (poiesis)
in a realm, hence body where quiet reigns in attention and peacefully with pity;
persevere in small things allying the tumult
from within while “times not blessed” surround me.
*
Resident
Alian is a call to church (being called out of) much like the early chapters of
Apocalypse of John, where there is enough rebuke to go around for all of
us who have and may still consider themselves born into the Christian church[5], for
this is our mother-tongue[6]
and now perhaps forms a flexible, free space or niche where we work at looking
curiously into oneness that is genuine liberation rooted in a narrative
structure ,a story remembered, which lives on ana-theistically in one’s own
mind and adventure.
Breaking
free of the dominant story (ttcm), working out one’s own meaning crisis takes on
a form of imaginal work (wonder, awe)—creative work (poesis) that may
follow a Beatitudinal pathway or dark night of the soul [Rubedo)
viewing oneself in a narrative structure: a story, a part played in that story,
orienting oneself with learned pathways along a Way till hope is being realized,
always caring deeply of one’s self; taking
into account what Thích Nhất Hạnh remined us that it is this kind and quality
of inner work emerging from a ground within; for “The way out is in.”
From this
narrative structure realized necessitates a narrowing, purging via Rubedo.
Ennobled via the axial-aged tradition, Buddhism, is the symbol dukka in
“life is suffering” (first noble provocation). It means to undergo loss of
agency (not pain) being fettered by a threat of losing one’s freedom/agency, like
a misaligned wheel that’s’ weakening, ready to dismember unless we yield to a repair/change,
mending a limb out of joint, or the mind from self-deception and potential ruin
living among violence. A saying of Jesus of Nazareth when asked about a recent scene
of destruction or violence reported nearby, said, “Unless you have a radical change
of mind (metanoia) you too will come to ruin/destruction.
These
sources of wisdom emerge from rooted stories and their logos (study, word
about) with their ennobling provocations. If they are heard, seen beyond myopic
belief, i.e. beyond the propositional and anemic procedural (e.g., the liturgies
of American evangelicalism encumbered in southern racism, America’s original sin,
laced with fundamentalism);
they have potential to affect the ground within profusely over time infusing vitality,
reviving perspectival knowing leveling us through transformation—liberation.
From a
narrative structure we discover a nomological structure, a procedure (set
of rules and laws), e.g., natural law behind all things (vs. mechanism, procedural
without perspectival knowing). This is where practice and memory work come in. One
takes on e.g. the eight-fold noble path, a Beatitudinal transcendence (ideal
for living/occupied by empire);
something that makes sense overtime providing an intelligibility resulting in coherence
[vs the duplicity felt living among ttcm], an evolutionary backdrop that opens
up other disciplines and study contained in infinite conversations. Vervaeke
sees this kind of dynamic working with computer gaming devotees; for there is a
sense of coherence with rules and laws that provide a sense of order in chaos
as well as a normative structure which drives transcendence, that is,
one can level up—transcendence is available, and thus one gains “significance,
a normative staircase that gets you in touch with the really real.”
There’s
a generating of Imaginal wonder that takes on “courage to be” (Tillich, 1952)—flight at a
level where speech [language of logos] in whatever valid form presented provides
enough coherence to move up a level in art of dialectic—art of life
. . . Something matters!
This mattering
leads to feeling connected to something that has a reality and value beyond one’s
own individual existence, where “love and need are one, and the work is play
for mortal stakes” (R. Frost). The autotelic personality takes on greater
investment of practice via a quality of experiences that function in relationship
between levels of challenges and skills, an expansion of optimal performance or
Flow states (M. Csikszentmihalyi
1991, 1917). Hence, what is mattering translates into one’s livelihood and
effort bringing out what is uniquely yours to work out, a cultivation of
knowledge, skill and attitude that enjoys what one is doing regardless
of whether one gets external rewards from it—the work is/has its own reward.
It is no
easy path traversing from being externally driven toward a cessation of attachments
such as comfort, money, material things, power or fame, and illusory concepts
of success dictated by a dominant script, which one chose when one had no story,
to being dynamically coupled,
connected with an alternative environment, knowing where to cultivate wisdom,
to ameliorate self-deception, escape destructiveness and shun foolishness, and
eventually enhance connectiveness (religio) and living what the great
axial traditions left
for us as sources of wisdom and having ongoing access to the narrow WAY, logos,
and my favorite, a resurrection of death—"to live as if you are
already dead”.
Within this perspective then, the
question for everyone is:
where one will
stand, for what one will do.
“Church”, the sense
of how Hauerwas and Willimon use the term, it is specific to the Protestant
church broadly speaking in the US, yet offers clarity in responding to implications
of empire as a “called-out” community to work out a life of meaning within the
tradition of Christ [logos] with a critical gaze at pre-Christendom much
like a good philosopher studies Socrates from later sources [He too was killed
for his manner of living and offering a similar quality salvific advantage].
One
must reach back to its roots to find again the path forward of its logos, its
reach is to a depth of joint and morrow of the soul that summons to each their own
adventure with the sacred. I posit meaning out of one who is a seeker, a follower—one
who seeks the way each day and loses attachments to names, beliefs, dogmas,
persons until one is alone, dead—non-being, being stripped from the way of
world’s script taking on emerging new view, understanding, language,
leading to a desire for actionable, practical means and ways evoked out of a
profound need—even poverty—to care for oneself as primacy to being in harmony
with those outside—I am being called out!
Reddening in
alchemy; within Jung’s parlance, a spirit that was freed in the previous stage
needs to be united with psyche again. Spirit that has been awakened now needs
to be expressed fittingly and authentically in life/work. This is the stage of
adjustment and re-alignment with indorsed goals/pathways with its virtues and
practices in its narrowing, unique of purpose [8FNP absorption] that includes sublimatio,
mortificatio and ultimately coniunctio.
Karl
jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, Yake Univ. Press, 1952, 2
The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period,
Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese
philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and
a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran
the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to skepticism, to
materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging
view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the
prophets made their appearance, from Elijah^ by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to
Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers
Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes.
Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost
simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one of these regions
knowing of the others.
