How does the search for higher meaning or “enlightenment” intersect with daily life and worldly matters? What’s it got to do with the world’s troubled moment?
Many seekers after wisdom say that we should just transcend it all. Most spiritual communities I know haven’t grappled with the question very deeply. They tend to stay lofty and above it.
Often they’re naive or unipolar around the cultural and political issues that are tearing us up. They typically don’t offer the world or their own practitioners a way to find one’s own way.
Long-term meditators or seekers can be like babes in the woods rather than “wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” as Jesus recommended his flock.
This staying-above thing goes by the name of spiritual bypassing. By definition it’s often hard to see that we do it. In the contrast between the two stanzas below, the Austrian poet Rilke (d. 1926) makes the distinction clear for me.
“Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom.
How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,
our season in our inner year--, not only a season
in time--, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil
and home.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus
I watched a video today that met an aspect of the intersection of the higher and the lower head on. It will be challenging as can be to many readers and viewers, pointing as it does to a neighbourhood of truth that’s on the wrong side of the tracks and typically shut out of western culture. It’s only 11 minutes - a clip from a longer video. I hope you’ll take a risk and watch this one and see what you actually think.
I think it points to a truth that can help the sexes get along better. I host intentional conversations between men and plan to extend them to intentional conversations between women and men. Understanding what Rachel brings here is a part of the landscape of the sexes and it needs to be reckoned with if we’re to go beyond.
But what do you think?
At first listen, they seem to be taking a shot at feminism, philosophies other than Christian, and the gender spectrum entirely. It is easy to select from the historical record in a manner to support your perspective,. And it is easy to find people who will grab the bit they want to put forward and run with. It is unfortunate that the teachings of Jesus, and subsequent wise ones, have been co-opted by the politico-economic creatures run by greed and fear in this dimension. We see that perpetrated by men, largely. Both men and women, and all genders in between, are still cursed by their human natures and design. We are easily led astray on account of our strong survival mandate. Many have tried to teach us that we can rise above fear and greed and survival instinct to embrace a Divinity, a share in the creator's power and sovereignty. Each one created beautifully and deserving of support to express their strengths and be nurtured beyond their weaknesses, in service to the whole of Creation.
Thank you for the Rilke excerpt and the understanding you bring to it of the merging of the heavenly and earthbound. That is indeed our task being here at this time, and the solution as you say, is not in 'bypassing'. However the leap into the new which is required goes beyond the divisions of gender. To sink back into that same old battle of the sexes, who's gonna be on top. 'why don't women just accept their femininity and enjoy the leadership of men?.'
It's not because they are men, that whole division between masculinity and feminity is false. We need both in partnership, a new partnership not based on one leading and the other following, however comfortable we have felt in that way of being. Equal partnership means we are free to choose however we want to be, not tied to gender. Both equally responsible and both equally happy to receive from eachother.