Twisted and leaning toward the backseat car window, I gaze at the magnificent cloudscape. Human voices chatter inside the car, but the sky’s silence calls me to leave the voices behind, and I strain against my seatbelt. The jet-puffed clouds break in places and the sun’s beams pass through. The sky’s grey blanket ends abruptly just above the horizon; it is fringed with a stripe of gold, this sky’s particular magnificence. It’s one of those afternoons that host a low flat body of clouds like another plane that extends for miles above the earth. The horizon is flat and wide and hugely distant from our vehicle speeding down 290. Why do the clouds call me to leave my backseat? I feel nostalgic. Does nature make me feel so, or am I drawn to the sky by my persistent longing for the home I have left? It is the Sunday after Thanksgiving and God is still preaching gratitude. He is preaching to the Christians an “aesthetic Christianity,” and God’s painters and poets, who are not all Christians, say, “We give you ‘beauty as a means to God’ (635).”
Beauty is large. When I am tense and contracted, beauty reminds me of this fact. I am small. I can’t explain away nature’s pull on both people who have always lived in bucolic areas and people who are enveloped by the concrete jungle. During high school, especially junior and senior year, I had a really difficult time being inside an overly air conditioned building with no windows and no connection to wind or sun or trees. I would often be late to my English class after lunch because I could not make myself leave the fresh air, even if it was confined by a rigid wrought iron fence. “Rural scene, a rural scene,” how I longed for a “Sweet especial rural scene” (635). My art became a medium through which I could contact the earth. I worked outside in the courtyard for three hours everyday, toying with one of my various unproductive processes – grinding stone, tearing paper, drawing parallel line after line after line. Maybe because I felt so confined by myself, trapped in a body and a mind I wish I weren’t. But for some reason, the fresh empty space beyond corners and ceiling tiles and plaster walls liberated me. “As a child walks and runs up and down the bed of a creek he is no more than dimly aware of the lure to which he is responding” (751). Do we really become more aware of the creek’s allure as we grow older? Do we identify the creek’s current appeal with our memory of the appeal the creek use to have?
I seem to remember a tender young Wiley, hopping from stone to stone, skipping rocks – bounce to bounce, swatting at minnows. I look down at the minnows – much farther down than I did ten years ago – and laugh, “Oh, if I were ten years ago, I’d be down on my hands and knees, and you’d be panicked, darting into the mucky aquatic foliage to escape my grasp.” My sight is colored by sights from my past. Every year adds another layer of tint to my vision until someday, I imagine, all I will be able to say is, “Oh, I remember… back when I was young, back when kids respected their elders, before a hooligan was only rowdy in cyberspace… we used to… those were the good ole days.” I suppose that it will be nice to, as Professor Bump says, “meet new people everyday,” but I don’t want to have enjoy things by remembering the pleasure they used to give me. So it is not necessarily nostalgia with which nature beckons us. What is it?
Sometimes people think that nature needs to be taken care of. I suppose if we don’t chain ourselves to trees then no one will. But who put nature in our nursery and demanded that we watch over it? Streams and winds and flower petals may be ephemeral, but this is one of nature’s greatest strengths. “Country is so tender / To touch, her being so slender” (635), yet we cannot destroy her. The natural world, the physiosphere as Ken Wilber would call it, it our foundation, the base blocks of our living pyramid. If we knocked even one foundation block loose, we at the top of the stop would surely topple. I wholeheartedly believe that we should care for the world which we inhabit, that we should be conscientious of our interactions with nature. But we should not separate caring for nature from caring for ourselves and for all that exists. “The Creek is an ever-visible manifestation of continuity, of life” (750), of which we are a part. Hurting our environment is hurting ourselves. I think this perspective can make our preservation efforts that much more passionate and real and effective. If life is to continue to possess beauty, and I believe it always will, nature must be a part of it.
I love not knowing why the clouds have such power over me.
November 26, 2007 Class Plan: Ramayana Discussion and Meditation
Why was the modern frame added to the Ramayana? What purpose does it serve? How effectively do the two stories, the two worlds – mystical and mundane, blend together? What is the transition like, and what is the tool that causes the transition?
Meditation is a tool for accessing another form of awareness and aspect of our being. It is very hard work. Part of this work is learning to be comfortable in a state of tension, which can be incredibly fructifying. Artists often try to create liminal, or threshold, states from which to work. Thomas Edison, for example, would sit in a chair with his arms hanging down. In each hand he would cup a heavy ball or rock. He would then let himself slowly drift to sleep. As he passed into the sleep-state, his hands would relax and then the balls would clatter to the floor, jolting him back to consciousness. He would write the first ideas that came to him or any that he could remember from this in between state. Edison’s threshold between awaking- and sleep-state is akin to the fuzzy line that divides Swallow’s story from the story of the Ramayana. Through meditation, Swallow learns to navigate between the two worlds, and she encounters aspects of herself (i.e. past-life aspects) she has never before known.
AGENDA: Ram Dass audio.
Discussion: Why was the modern frame story added? What is its function and how effective is it? How are the two stories integrated? What is the technique that Swallow uses to move between the two realms? How does this presentation of meditation seem to you – is it magical, fanciful, realistic? Do you believe that past life experiences can happen – are they real? Margaret’s comments on meditation, interpreting religious texts literally, and the collective unconscious. How is the Ramayana to be read? Do you connect to the story – could it be real? Is it romantic? Does your rational mind shut it down? Many people commented on nature in both Ramayana and As You Like It. What is nature today? Why is it so important to people?
Ram Dass.
Nasal breathing exercise to calm and center us.
Meditation attempt: focusing solely on one thing close to you (your hands, a pencil, the table just in front of you). Notice the difficulty of holding that clarity and tension.
Exercise in holding that tension by feeling and allowing it (rubber band exercise, close-finger exercise, closed-eye uneasiness, standing on one leg with the other just barely off the ground…).
Another attempt at a meditation exercise. Try to bring the tension you held in the previous exercise into your attention in this meditation. Can you feel the tension? Is it easier to hold that tension? Are you at least more aware of it? How does it feel?
Meditation is the boat that navigates the threshold between the two realms. The threshold is an uneasy place to rest – it is not here, nor there. It is difficult is be in the tension between the two realms. But if we can allow and inhabit the uncertainty of the in between, we can learn much; it is an incredibly creative state. Swallow learns to navigate this state through meditation and enters her past life. How can we learn to exist in a liminal state? How will we grow from doing so?
Learning to be a leader who lives from a solid foundation of self-awareness is the greatest benefit I can receive from my liberal university education. The accelerating evolution of society and culture in the modern world demands that liberal education evolve as well. New and innovative techniques are emerging to teach leadership, which increasingly entails a wide variety of skills, such as finding balance between emotional and interpersonal intelligences and communicating through multimedia technologies like Second Life. I strive to become a self-aware leader who lives a compassionate, balanced life, and who inspires growth in both personal relationships and the global society. By exploring my role model Ken Wilber’s life and teachings, I have been inspired to explore myself, which has helped me to realize these goals. From the previous role model assignments, I have learned that emulating a role model can be impetus for self-development; that our experiment with Second Life was valuable, though not effective as leadership training; and that balance is integral to both multimedia writing and my personal vision.
Through writing about my role model in P1, the first of this series of essays, I learned about the type of leader I want to become. I revisited Ken Wilber’s work and life story, which have been major inspirations for the direction I have taken during the past year or so of my life. During his twenties, Wilber began writing extensively and published several books of scholarly acclaim. He read everything from biochemistry and social theory, to Emerson and Lao Tzu, to enlightenment philosophy and Gestalt psychology, to mythology and medieval transcendentalists. When he is researching for a book he tries “to go through two to four books a day…. When I’m writing… I work at a very intense pace…. I’ll sometimes put in fifteen-hour days. I read hundreds of books during the year, and a book forms in my head – I write the book in my head.”[1] Ken Wilber’s piercing stare (Fig. 1) reflects the intensity with which he has pursued his personal vision. He has garnered immense respect for his theoretical writing and research, but his teachings are inspired by more than a global bookcase.
I have benefited from his intellectual work, but his approach to living has revolutionized my life. Being a true leader entails that one not be satisfied with mere ideas, and indeed Wilber is not. His academic achievements are the residue of his true pursuit – “self-awareness… the foundation for the rest.”[2] Wilber has cultivated self-awareness by embodying many intellectual, psycho-theoretical, bodily, and spiritual modalities. Yoga, weightlifting, Jungian psychology, Vedanta Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, Sufism, and contemplative Christianity (to name a few) have all cycled through his repertoire. Some teachers discourage this impure form of practice; but for Wilber it has been a crucial process of defining himself. “Cross training,” as he likes to call it, has built the unique wisdom of balance he shares with the world. Even this chart (Fig. 2), which depicts Wilber's comprehensive map of individual and collective evolution, employs color and design to communicate his multidimensional teachings.
For Wilber, successful living is founded on balance. His Integral Life Practices, which I practice daily, create awareness of the multidimensionality of being. By exercising my physical and mental self regularly, meditating, and doing psychotherapeutic journaling, I have progressed toward my goal of balanced self-awareness. Balance “communicate[s] the image of the whole to every separate portion, till that whole becomes in imagination like a spirit, every where pervading and penetrating its component parts, and giving them one definite meaning.”[3] That is, each portion transcends its partialness by contributing to a greater whole. Words can combine to form a sentence, and a sentence has properties and meanings that none of the words have individually. Similarly, exercising body, mind, and spirit creates a richer life than any one of these pursuits can alone. For example, Wilber has empirically demonstrated that people who meditate and lift weights progress through contemplative stages more quickly than people who only meditate. Since I have begun cross training, I have experienced the personal growth indicated by these results. Leading a balanced life will aid me in fulfilling my personal vision. Fig. 3. Ken Wilber peers into the Second Life night sky. The same moon reigns over both him and me, and when I look up at it I know how profoundly Wilber has affected my life.
Meditation has become an integral aspect of my personal vision since Ken Wilber has influenced me. An example of his contemplative virtuosity and the incredible transformative powers of meditation are demonstrated by his ability to halt all brain activity (see video). Two exercises from Ken Wilber’s Integral Life Practice have especially helped me to cultivate compassion, which is vital to my leadership and personal visions. (See below video of Wilber speaking on equanimity and compassion.) The first is a meditation in which you actively transform others’ suffering into love. Breathe in their pain and blow back to them waves of pure, unadulterated love. This is compassionate exchange. The second technique developed in Ken Wilber’s Integral training program is a writing exercise to sublimate negative unconscious drives. By acknowledging character traits in others who irritate us, we can learn to see those qualities as aspects of ourselves. Through this recognition we are able to inhabit and own the discordant characteristic. We learn to love fellow human beings by recognizing them in us and by withdrawing our projections from them. Compassion comes from inhabiting others’ perspectives. When you stand in another’s shoes, not only can you see yourself, you can commiserate with another way of life. Perceiving with other’s eyes provides understanding, the seat of compassion. I am motivated toward unconditional love by following Wilber’s example, and his techniques are helping me create what I seek.
By learning from Wilber's example, I hope to find the balance between introversion and extroversion. Wilber has demonstrated that these two qualities can coexist. His years of practice have taught him to love all beings equally and yet not to attach to any of them. The bodhisattva vow calls him to the aid of others while preserving a profound sense of equanimity. This balance between active love and detachment (not dissociation) is a struggle for me. I have a tendency to fall deeply into introspection and neglect the world, which is problematic. Of course the opposite extreme is equally troublesome. But Wilber has shown me that introspection and extroversion are really two poles of a spectrum and that by acknowledging both opposites, we can strive to find the middle. We can elect “the conscious generation of creativity by dwelling on the interdependence of apparently mutually exclusive opposites and the larger whole which contains them both.”[4] Finding balance is a process, not an end. “Personal vision is not static,” and this balance, as both a personal goal and a guiding characteristic of my leadership vision, “should continue to evolve.”[5]
Filling the leadership role I envision for myself involves learning from my exemplar, but it involves learning from others as well. It is valuable to recognize what many leaders from various backgrounds and in various domains of life have contributed to improving societies. By reviewing my fellow classmates’ writings about their respective role models, I have gained insight into what makes an inspiring and invaluable contributor to the world. Gandhi is such an important historical figure not only because he “tried extremely hard to bring the different people of India together,” but also because he “inspired [other] leaders by ‘…creating resonance and moving [them] with a compelling vision or shared mission’[6]” (Avni Mody). By reminding people of a greater purpose in life – one that large numbers of people could connect with – Gandhi was able to mobilize a peaceful movement for human rights and unification that would immeasurably improve Indian society. A true leader, one whose acts will continue to benefit society even after he is gone, knows how to empower those around him. Mary Kay Ash, for example, improved the lives of fellow employees by choosing “to bring morality to the work place and thus empower women to succeed in a balanced manner” (Hannah Chesser). Both Gandhi and Mary Kay motivated other people by promoting principles they believed necessary to a fulfilling life. I can learn from them, among many things, strength, certitude, and the courage to proceed with a vision.
But becoming the leader that I want to be also involves emulating people close to me. Gandhi and Mary Kay Ash have inspired thousands, but they have not impacted my life in so personal a way as friends and family have. Danielle’s role model is her father. His “unending enthusiasm and love for each member of his family” (Danielle Oxford) are sources of utmost admiration. I aspire to become a leader who shows as much compassion as Danielle’s father does. Compassion and unconditional love are also qualities I practice by integrating Ken Wilber’s work into my life. Just as Danielle finds warmth and caring in her father, I too find these qualities in my mother and father. The effort they have put into supporting me and guiding me toward my current place in life cannot be overstated. Their lives inspire me personally, as though I could touch their stories, in a way Ken Wilber, Mahatma Gandhi, and Mary Kay Ash cannot. Becoming the leader I want to become entails heart-to-heart relationships. Mass societal movements may be the ones recorded in the history books, but every single one of them begins with an individual relating to others the best way he knows how.
All of this talk about emulating great leaders is significant for our potentially constructive, though unsuccessful, experiment with Second Life. Second Life is a multimedia program for a multimedia world, an attempt at integrating many necessary skills, such as computer skills, communication skills, leadership abilities, creativity, and discovery learning. This process is in accord with the core purpose of a university education, which is to train individuals who will benefit society. As Peter T. Flawn announced in his annual address to the UT faculty, “public universities exist to serve society,”[7] which means producing people who know how to live and lead in the contemporary, ever-developing world. Graduates must be fluent in the language of technology and computers and be able to communicate with facility and tolerance. When they can, “the doorway to rapid, intentional evolution of liberal education opens.”[8] Reaching others through multidimensional means – intellectually, emotionally, visually, aurally – is a skill that must be taught by universities if they are to fulfill their goal of benefiting a society now constituted of people who are “creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.”[9] Second Life reality, however, does not translate directly into this life reality, and it will never be able to transcend its virtual limitations. This is Ken Wilber's second conversation in Second Life, an example of SL's attempt to simulate reality.
I say our trial was unsuccessful because it did not fulfill its leadership-teaching objective. Second Life is not an effective means of embodying traits exemplified by our role models and necessary for the success of contemporary leaders. Each of us had to know our role model well enough to converse as he or she would, and I believe we all did. Unfortunately this didn’t mean that we actually behaved as them. At the conversations’ start, I strongly intended to speak as Ken Wilber would. But as the interactions heated up, the mask would melt away, and the puppeteer’s own prejudices would be revealed. I periodically forgot that I was Ken Wilber. This, however, did reveal an interesting tidbit about the degree to which I have absorbed my role model’s teachings. If I were to relive one of the conversations and remember to remain Ken Wilber throughout, I don’t think much of what I said would have changed at all. Though I had unconsciously fallen out of character, I still managed to quip, “interpersonal relationships are vital to a strong leader… the mind cannot blossom ‘by itself’” (Sprinkles Timeless, Chat), a particularly Wilberesque phrase. So while Second Life may not have actually forced me to play virtual Ken Wilber, it did show me that Wilber has become a regular part of the way I think and act. With the Tower in the background, Wilber says, "Wiley, you are my avatar at UT. I can help you find your path, but you must realize that your path must be your own. Once you find it, let nothing compromise your vision. Stay strong!"
This has led me to the conclusion that our Second Life experiment was valuable because I am convinced of the “sympathetic imagination’s” potential to encourage personal growth. By acting as our Second Life-replicated role models, we sought to create a virtual world in which we could practice being leaders. We attempted to embody our exemplars’ characteristics in our behavior and interactions. “By actually entering into the object, so to speak, [one can] secure a momentary but complete identification with it” (the sympathetic imagination), which was precisely our practice with our exemplars. Though my body is in Parlin Hall, I am attempting to enter into my virtual role model. This is worthwhile because temporary states can, if they are entered frequently enough, become traits. That is, by temporarily adopting our role models’ characteristics we can learn to live as they do. By embodying characteristics that I do not possess but that I admire, I practice creating the life I want to live. So although I believe that our particular SL experiment did not teach applicable leadership skills, I did learn that by engaging the “sympathetic imagination,” we begin to make our aspirations our reality.
Furthermore, our role model experiment in Second Life confirmed my belief that the skills required for virtual life do not translate directly into real life competences. I believe that our SL experiment did exercise certain leadership skills, such as the assertiveness needed to maintain germane discussion. But by no means did SL exercise the comprehensive range of skills needed to be an emotionally intelligent leader as proposed by Goleman et al. I exercised no self-awareness, nor did I apply any emotional intelligence. In fact, emotion is nearly impossible to convey in this format. A leader in SL influences a cardboard world that is predictable, safe, and completely intellectual. Even so, I think that Second Life taught me some valuable lessons. I learned that I strongly dislike competitive, one-sided interaction, and I further confirmed my desire to find a balance of intelligences in my own life and in my interactions with others. “We should take care not to make the intellect our God. It has… no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve,”[10] and unfortunately it was the only intelligence employed by Second Life. Ken Wilber’s work has helped me to discern imbalance in environments such as this one, and it is to his work that I return, rather than to the glitches and artificiality of a simulated world.
Besides the aforementioned benefit of emulating my role model and leaning from my Second Life experience, processes of creating P1 and P2 taught me the value of balanced multimedia presentations and techniques by which I can improve my own writing. I have had to articulate the weaknesses in others’ papers and learn to incorporate suggestions into my own. Drafts and reviews lay strewn about my bed as I attempted to edit and integrate P1 and P2 into a balanced P3. By grading other students’ P1 and P2 papers, I saw the benefit of seamlessly integrated text, images, and video. Both of Danielle’s papers incorporated well-placed images that clearly related to the text. With graphically depicted ideas, Danielle’s papers were accessible, persuasive, and generally more effective. Will cleverly integrated his captions into the images themselves, which subtly contributed to his P2’s polish. From reviews given by my peers, I have learned that I can improve my writing most by smoothing transitions between paragraphs, excising superfluous verbiage, and better integrating images and captions into the textual body of the paper. An essay is more effective if its paragraphs cohere smoothly. Arguments can be convincing if they are seen but cannot be if they are hidden. I am learning the balance between the occasional poetic flourish and unnecessary ornamentation, between extending ideas and hindering them with excess baggage. The importance of balanced writing is analogous to the advantage of balance in any endeavor. A balanced multivalent approach to both writing and living is more successful and fulfilling than a monochromatic one.
A liberal education can teach essential leadership skills that are widely applicable, even in virtual domains such as Second Life. SL is an interesting approach to producing leaders for the benefit of a changing society, but it is not effective. I learned much less about leadership from Second Life than I have from editing P1 and P2 papers. For leaders in our forward-racing world, virtual interactions may enhance their leadership capabilities, but they will never match the importance of an emotionally aware and balanced human being. I have learned that self-awareness is the foundation for strong leadership in all endeavors. Ken Wilber has helped me to realize my leadership vision, and as I learn from him how to embrace balance, self-awareness, and compassion, I increasingly create the type of life I want to live.
Word Count: 2457
Endnotes 1. Ken Wilber, One Taste (Boston: Shambala, 2000), 14. 2. Daniel Goleman et al, “Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence,” in Composition and Reading in World Literature, ed. Jerome Bump (Austin: Jenn’s, 2007), 64. 3. John Henry Newman, “The Idea of a University,” in Composition and Reading in World Literature, ed. Jerome Bump (Austin: Jenn’s, 2007), 310. 4. Jerome Bump, “Dualism and Creativity,” in Composition and Reading in World Literature, ed. Jerome Bump (Austin: Jenn’s, 2007), 189. 5. Robert J. Lee, “Discovering the Leader in You,” in Composition and Reading in World Literature, ed. Jerome Bump (Austin: Jenn’s, 2007), 78. 6. Goleman et al, 68. 7. Peter T. Flawn, “Annual Address to the Faculty, October 16, 1984,” in Composition and Reading in World Literature, ed. Jerome Bump (Austin: Jenn’s, 2007), 306. 8. “Daily Report from The Chronicle of Higher Education,” in Composition and Reading in World Literature, ed. Jerome Bump (Austin: Jenn’s, 2007), 328. 9. Daniel Pink, “Revenge of the Right Brain,” in Composition and Reading in World Literature, ed. Jerome Bump (Austin: Jenn’s, 2007), 331. 10. Goleman et al, 62.
List of Illustrations Fig. 1. http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/1/e/5/3/highres_67763.jpeg Fig. 2. http://www.thegreatstory.org/charts/spiral.jpg Fig. 3.
Spirals are archetypal forms often found in petroglyphs. The spiral connotes a continuous process that grows and expands as it revolves in a circular motion. It can signify renewal and rebirth.
I came into this world on September 23, 1988. Chances are that I will pass from this life before the twenty-third of September 2088. I have a birth certificate and it is likely that I will a death certificate. But each of these documents only tells of my physical entrance and exit. During my time here, I will have died and been born many times. And though it may sound hokey or new age-y or falsely profound, this cycle is not mere melodrama (though it may be that, as Shakespeare reminds us, “all the world’s a stage” (1089)). We are always visiting some stage of the monomyth, always part of a transition between stages of life. It is a continuous cyclical process. Moving from home/childhood/high school to college and adulthood is a fulcrum upon which all of us, as freshman, now sit. I am learning new skills that I need in order to grow into my new more responsible and independent self. I am shedding remnants of dependence and am dying to my previous self. I have experienced the pain of separation from my home and family and familiar past. I have cried and still I do not feel like I have a home at this point in my life. But I have also experienced the thrill of independence and shared excitement with my peers as I could not have done at home or in high school. When I return home, people tell me that I look taller.
Some transitions, of course, are much weightier than others. My junior year of high school really smashed me into the ground. I became completely inverted for a year and a half. But I was fortunate to live in an environment conducive to the sort of healing I needed. I learned much about the value of ritual and approaching pain and discord consciously. In the Ramayana, Sita does precisely this when she faces her fear and potentially her death (of a major sort) as she attempts to prove her innocence by walking through fire. “Sita made a ritual circumambulation. Then she addressed the fire in these terms: ‘Fire, I commit myself to your safekeeping” (1068). This is the final test before she can free herself of Ravana’s snares. Sita is frightened, but because she has already decided to enter the flames, she chooses to do so in faith. She has been living in a dark spirit world and in order to reintegrate into the mortal realm, she must be reborn. “She was swept up, or outwards or inwards, for it was impossible to define precisely the sensation of so complete a departure, nor to be sure whether it was she that was going or the scene that was being blown away like smoke” (1069). Is it a departure or an entrance? What a tumultuous trip birth must be for the infant.
Lord Rama (center) with wife Sita, brother Lakshmana and devotee Hanuman. Rama and Lakshman are always shown to be ready for battle (with bow and arrow) as it is their Kshatriya dharma to fight. Rama is shown having blue skin which is a characteristic of Vishnu (www.payer.de/ somadeva/soma024.htm).
Lives are cycles of births and deaths. From time to time we must enter into the unknown. We often obtain the most brilliant of our lights from the depths of our descents. During my junior year of high school, I truly felt my self. My ribs and hips protruded and my cheekbones bore my pain. “In the passage all the things I was carrying were scraped off me” (730). I denied myself much during this year and a half, and there are many things I could not admit to myself. I could feel bodily sensations that many writers, especially Joseph Campbell, used as metaphors to describe going under. I felt submerged. As Campbell says, “Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials” (Joseph Campbell). I lost my ability to swim and “suddenly cold water closed round my head, and I seemed sinking down for ever” (730). Introversion is a self-baptism: submerge, cleanse, rebirth. Hindu gods incarnate many times in multiple forms. Life is not defined in an individualistic sense; it stretches and continues between mortal, physical manifestations. This is Vishnu in the form of Satyanarayana.
Meditation may seem like an escape or a denial of the world. But our job here on earth is to participate in life and its many cycles of birth and death. I think meditation can actually enhance this participation by increasing awareness and sensitivity. Through meditation we learn to live in the eternal present. When we live, we are participating in a process. Sometimes we think that we would be better off if we could reach one extreme of the experience spectrum and just rest there. But we are meant to hold the tension between the two poles, and when that tension falls limp, it is time for renewal. For if “thou prunest a rotten tree, / than cannot so much as a blossom yield” (1083). A blossomless life would be fruitless indeed. A renewal calls for a form of rebirth. One stage of life has grown flat and stale. Luckily, “they have their exits and their entrances; / and one man in his time plays many parts” (1089). And when one exit is taken and a new entrance made, it is as though one “kill’d the deer?” but still have the same “leather skin and horns to wear” (1092).
I am interested in past-life regression. The Master on the mountain revisits a life in which he was Rama. Through meditation, Sita finds the life she shared with Rama. This past bond between Sita and Rama forges a bond between Swallow and the Master as they stand on Wu Shan. Sita and Swallow are both manifestations of the same God or energy or spirit and are not, therefore, completely distinct lives. The many commonalities between the past and present relationships of Swallow and the Master show the continuity of reincarnated life. I do not discredit all such past-life experiences and I certainly do not believe them all, but I won’t feel strongly either way until I experience a regression for myself. How much is metaphor? How much feels substantial? How shall I perceive the experience – through sense, intuition, emotion, thought? This is a depiction of the Aboriginal dreamtime. In Aboriginal culture, geographic space encapsulates time. Landmarks represent ancestors and everything feature of the land has some meaning. Going back into past lives is a matter of stepping out into the Australian bush.
“Epama epam – nothing means nothing” (Aboriginal proverb)
“I would be everywhere, as I am right now, a thin tone like the wind, a sip of blue light – no source, no end, no horizon” (William Stafford)
There is ( ) beyond things. ( ) between, around, and through all things. ( ) before things, before time, and ( ) right now, right here. Do you know the sound of one hand clapping? I sit. Effortlessly, I feel the cool air against my forearms. Effortlessly, I hear the sounds of the air conditioner shifting gears. Thoughts meander across my mind, I see them; I am not them. My cramping knee draws my attention. I travel down my chest, winding along ribs and then weaving through intestines, and seeping through my thigh, I attend to the tightening muscles in my bent knee. Name it: cramp. I notice that cramp, I am not that cramp. My breath raises my chest and is then pressed upward. My belly sinks and, if I can hold my attention there, I notice how deep my belly is. More thoughts wander through my mind. Observe. I see those thoughts; I am not those thoughts. If I can find the state of concentration in which I release concentrated effort, then I can follow by breath as it moves throughout my body. It is so peaceful. I woke up early this morning to try to reestablish my morning sitting routine. Morning is much better than night, I have discovered. At night, I totter between sleep and rambling daily stresses. In the morning I am fresh, and if I sit I can maintain some of that freshness through my day. I am a complete novice, in many ways a dilettante. The typical monk rises sometime between three and five and begins his day in reverent silence. Ken Wilber awakes at four each morning and meditates, lying in corpse pose, for one to two hours. It is a practice to which few, especially in the West, commit themselves fully and which few maintain. Not that everyone should, of course. It most certainly is not the path for everyone. When Ho asks Swallow to reveal the secret to her vision, she tells him that she attained an altered state of absorption by practicing the breathing exercises the Master taught her. Ho replies: “Oh that… I know; his Honour one day offered me instruction of the sort but it was so hard and long and wanted such effort that I gave up, and asked him would he not show me a short cut” (1070). Ho thinks that his Honour gains wisdom by some occult art, not by sitting quietly and merely concentrating. William Stafford portrays the inability to see freedom just in front of him by comparing the life in which he has blind faith to a self-imposed prison: “I bent my skill to keep my cell locked” (William Stafford). If only Ho knew that this is what he is doing. His practice seems unspectacular compared with powers there obtained. But the reports of experiences along the meditative path are of a different order than the experiences most of us have in our daily lives. Contemplation is a way to discover ultimate degrees of many conditions E 603 seeks to hammer home: unity, connection and connectedness, self-discovery. Contemplation is a tool used by many great sages. Jesus retreated into the desert for forty nights during which he faced Satan’s most odious temptations. He persevered and grew stronger in certitude and self-knowledge. Delving into the self can lead to a place outside of time, to a place that is not really a place and that cannot be described by words or thoughts or feelings because it is “outside” all of those. “The Ramayana… questions the boundaries between reality and eternity” (Charlotte Beall) by telling a tale that fades between realities, bending in and out of trance and myth, describing states of meditation. Sita steps into the final fire, what Joseph Campbell describes as “the crossing of the return threshold.” She reaches a state outside of time “a state of perception of immense spaces, vast blue horizons, distances incalculable, as between star and star.... There was no trace of fear or strangeness, as though all she contemplated was herself” (1069). This state could have saved the existentialists from their malaise and may have utterly consternated Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, for who “there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure” (Rosencrantz or Guildenstern – Clip). In a literary mythological sense, “the hero… is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died” (Joseph Campbell). And this is precisely how his Honour, while journeying through his past life vision, appears to Ho , who says, “wherever I touched him he was cold like an image and as stiff” (1012). The princely hermit is not dead, though “the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation” (Campbell). He has merely found “the higher silences within” (Campbell), the silences that Ho disdains in hopes of finding fireworks. Long-time meditators might tell you that they have reached a state of constant consciousness. They maintain awareness continuously through the waking, dreaming, and deep sleep states, and find states beyond those as well. Contemplatives would tell you that what most call reality is a “wide and universal theatre” (1088). In a state of constant consciousness it is possible to “hold death awhile at the arm’s end” (1086), to witness the mortal fear of dying and to transcend that fear. It is odd how when I look for themes – especially transcendent ones – in literature, I always find them. I discern the message I want to hear in the Bible and in modern physics and in Emerson and in our English class. I’m sure Campbell would admit the same disease. His life taught him, “It will be always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find” (Joseph Campbell).
“And you discover where music begins / before it makes any sound, / far in the mountains where canyons go / still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.” (William Stafford)
The golden deer flits by and you cannot help but be enticed. No longer are you satisfied with where you sit, and the light of the jewels you only just held in your hands has been captured by the passing fancy. You must have it back! Of course this is a moment we have all experienced and all struggle with. We do not desire things before we know of them, but once that “gazelle… of gold splashed with silver, its flanks speckled as if with jeweled moons” (1031) prances by, our thirst for more or else cries out. “As the Tao Te Ching says, ‘The truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing’” (147). It is a difficult task of letting go of our desires, of belief that we require external stimulation, that moves us beyond this grasping. Daas compares this awareness to a leaf drifting through the mind: “If you are standing by a river and a leaf floats by, you have your choice of following the leaf with your eye or keeping your attention fixed in front of you” (148). This takes years of practice just to learn to let things float by. You must learn to know yourself in new ways. “Exploring our identity, though, can be scary (just as Swallow fears) as we enter into a world of newness” (Hannah Chesser). Even if we cannot “imagine so exquisite a creature to be dangerous [or] that it [is] other than a real gazelle” (1031), we must somehow try to see beyond. It is a kind of faith, though I do not like the idea of blind faith, and we must brave the dark unknown. Without darkness, light cannot manifest.
This form of learning of and deepening the self is a gradual though not always gentle process. Ho’s teaching of Swallow reminds me of the way that my knowledge of myself grows, the way the he “seemed eager to draw out her response” and “[impart] to her his thoughts rather than [instruct] her” (1017). We all have it, whatever it is, only if we can learn to lead it out. Michael Meade, a leader of the men’s movement, speaks about education and what it is to have genius. He condemns contemporary standardized education for trying to pound students into a frame, discouraging the discovery of each individual’s unique genius. It is the genius loci of the individual, a spirit that is unique and essential and that animates all of us. The task of education should be to lead it out. This type of individual instruction facilitates self-awareness and self-knowing. If we are pounded into a mold, then we seek anything shiny that flits out of reach, anything that could possibly differentiate us from others. If we know ourselves, then we are able to let “the leaf [float] out of [our] line of vision.” We are aware that soon “another leaf enters… and floats by” (148). (The generative lotus flower. One such bloom rests in the Brahma's naval, from which other God's were born.)
Charlotte wrote about what it is to see and respect others as people who do not necessarily share with her many beliefs and perspectives she previously took for granted. It is true that part of knowing others is knowing one’s self, for “self-awareness… is the foundation for the rest” (64). It is difficult to respect others if we do not respect ourselves. As the ever sagacious Goleman tells us, “If a person is oblivious to his own feelings, he will also be tuned out to how others feel” (64). At some time or another we all must learn “to accept people’s reasons for having certain beliefs without questioning them as part of respecting our differences” (Charlotte Beall). (I wonder how Brahma reconciled his disparate qualities - or heads.) In seeing what is foreign to us, we gain valuable insight into what and who we are. “If you must torture me, so be it,” says Sita, “but I cannot change my nature and my deep feelings” (1046). And we cannot change the nature or deep feelings of others either. I want to continue to improve my ability to let others be. I often judge people based on my false preconceptions, and just as often I find myself later wishing I hadn’t. I have rarely (if ever) met anyone who remained as empty and impersonal as people sometimes seem upon first acquaintance. By expanding my compassion – especially through practicing self-love and unconditional love of others – I can learn to remain open and warm loving to others because of their differences and because of the unity we can find in these differences.
Long golden grasses bend in concert as I gaze out the bus window at the dwindling afternoon. The light lengthens as the sun descends in the sky. The wooden farmhouses shed shadows upon the fields over which they watch. A water tower breaks the flat line of the horizon; it would pierce the sky if it weren’t so awkward and bulbous. Inside the bus it is silent. The Greyhound station last hour was loud. I sat against a wall on the cracked concrete floor because the metal ribbed chairs looked less appealing. A man was yelling at the television anchorman about date rape drugs and strangulation, but on the bus it is quiet and cool and dark. We pass through a small town. A gas station, a couple of Mexican restaurants, and a church. It’s silent here too, but outside, in the town, everything is bathed in yellow light, soon to fade.
After the town there are more fields and some cows. I see a roadside billboard that says, “Serengeti.” A gazelle prances across a full African sunset, one of those that fills the entire sky with red and orange the way sunsets must have done when man was new. I am going back. Everywhere I look, things are going back. Jet trails in the sky tell me that businessmen are flying home to see their families for the weekend. Small shops lock their doors and their owners load into pickups, turning onto roads that lead to kids and spouses. Calves congregate around their mothers, and even the grasses bend back toward the earth. I’m going back. Going back means slowing things down. It means that washing dishes and listening to daily stories is important again. It means a full-size refrigerator and dependence on other people. I am returning to these things, but they aren’t the same things that I left when I moved to school in August. Once you leave something you create a break. The continuity you once felt isn’t there. It’s time to develop new relationships with both the new and the old. It doesn’t mean I can’t be here, it just means that I can’t be where I was. I have risen and fallen through cycles of nostalgia quite regularly this year. Leaving my home and family has been difficult. I am very close to my mother and father and tied to the space, neighborhood, and atmosphere in which I grew up. Breaking these ties has at times released strong outpourings of longing and sadness. Going home is hard. It is in some ways much harder than just staying at school. When I see my house, my dog, my sister, my neighborhood, it reopens old springs that temporarily were dry. Returning to school is then very hard. It is when my longing is most poignant. When I am home I am connected. Re-breaking that connection is like re-breaking a bone: it’s painful but hopefully it will help to reset the pieces so abruptly fractured at first.
People talk about pure emotions – pure joy, pure happiness, pure love. Pureness connotes that there are no adulterating materials or essences adulterating. Pure gold would contain no other metals; if it did, it would be an alloy. Maybe it is possible to find a pure emotion – pure love would certainly do our world good – but nostalgia is most definitely an amalgam. Remembering home swirls forth desires and pains and youth and peace. Stockings used to hang over fireplaces, I know they did. Mothers and father used to cook favorites foods and serve it on real ceramic plates. There used to be stability in the mundane variations of daily routines. I was little. But then I remember the present. I remember that I am no longer really there, that I am here, I am at school, casting out on my own. And I remember that I can’t just remember this; I have to live this. All this is my nostalgia. Home, warmth, yellow light, family; pain, toil (I make them fond pain and toil); now, school, new relationships, the future. What will be? I am going home this weekend. This weekend doesn’t have to be a weekend in the past. I don’t have to be living a forty-eight-hour memory. This weekend can be in the now: old things, familiar places, but new perspectives, new relationships. The light outside the bus has faded. Thin wisps of clouds stretch the sky like a thin blue bed sheet. The road ahead presses the hills flat and extends far out into the distance, at last converging at a point. The girl in front of me is giggling incessantly, and the girl beside is talking on her cell phone. I can feel home so concretely. Is this what nostalgia is? It doesn’t feel like a single emotion. But it makes me so sensitive to all emotions than arise. Nostalgia is a sensitivity evoked by the awareness of change. I certainly feel that. Maybe this weekend will help me to feel at home in this change.
D’Souza opens the lecture: “I was considering using the podium, but then I realized that I had remembered to wear pants.” D’Souza attacks a flawed question: “I’m like the mosquito in the nudist colony… just trying to decide where to begin.”
I don’t know that our generation – the World War II generation – is the greatest generation, as it has been called. But I think it’s the last generation. From the time of the founding fathers of America to the WWII generation, there had been a consistent form of morality. Call it external morality. Everyone – believers, nonbelievers, Protestants, Catholics, Jews – believed in some sort of greater order that guided your life. Not necessarily God, but there were very few people who did not hold this conception. There was some sort of outside force that guided our conscience. It pulled against us when we wanted to do something. It acted as a guide that tells us something is wrong even if it might be to our Darwinian or economic personal advantage to do it. There is a standard that regulates our behavior. Starting in the sixties, there came about this new, internal morality. Some form of guiding inner voice that would speak to us and lead us along our personal paths. I remember going to my father in Bombay and telling him that I wanted to become a writer. He told me to do something useful with my life. No, but you don’t understand, I said. I’m being called to be a writer, I have this calling. The idea of personal fulfillment was foreign to him. I rejected the Harvard business school to be a writer? It sounds to me, said my father, like you have this little creature inside of you. And this little creature talks to you, tells you what to do, and you talk back. It wasn’t that my father was necessarily opposed to my proposition. It was that he just didn’t understand where I was coming from. This inner guiding morality is new. And it’s easy to get caught up in this inner-outer polarity. The “outer” morality is an inner morality as well, in that it is inner decision making and that it is guided by an individual conscience. The difference is in the source of the two moralities. The source of the outer morality is God, or a higher order, some outside force. The inner morality is cut off from the outside. It’s purely individualistic, rather capricious in this sense. What I’m getting at is that this new model makes absolutely no sense anywhere in the Muslim world. It just doesn’t fit with their model of reality. We need to reconsider the terminology we use when are talking about the War on Terror. First of all, it isn’t a war on terror any more than World War II was a war on kamikaze-ism. Terror is a tactic, not the enemy. Suicide bombers: suicide is a term that implies a desire to end life. Someone who jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge is sick of life, despises life. This is not true for the suicide bomber. The suicide bomber wants to live. He is, however, willing to sacrifice his life for a greater cause. If the enemy is threatening to destroy his way of life, his family, his moral values, his religion, then the afflicted is willing to take desperate measures. Also, fundamentalism is a Western term, a Western idea. It is meant to deal with the Western ways of life, Christianity, and Western problems. It is not an appropriate term to apply to Islam. A fundamentalist Christian is someone who believes that the words of the Bible are the literal truth. That, however, is something that all Muslims believe, that the Q’uran is the literal word of God, to be read literally. If you don’t believe this, then you are not a Muslim. I’m not implying that all Muslims are extremists, I’m just saying that fundamentalism doesn’t apply to Islam the way it does to Christianity. We need new terminology. The key point is how to move forward in the War. Christians have much in common with traditional Muslims. Our belief in a single god, in family values, in various currently controversial marital, sexual issues – we should be supporting the traditional Muslims. It’s the extremists that are the danger, yet they are so small a sliver of the Islamic population. A problem is that the extremists are quickly converting many traditionalists to their views. Caught in between siding with what is essentially seen as the Devil – the West, America – and a fellow Islamic sect, traditionalists side with the people are promoting their own religion. They don’t like the extremist violence, but it seems that they have little choice. The Jews have all stopped believing, the Christians no longer believe; the Muslims are the only ones left of the Abrahamic traditions that believe. They must fight to preserve their way of life. So the problem is that if we kill one hundred extremists, well there are a thousand traditionalists who just converted to extremism. What we need to do is drive a wedge in between traditionalism and extremism. The traditionalists are not our enemy. Islam is not the enemy. A problem is that the image that most of the non-European world has of America is one of shameless debauchery and materialism and immorality. That is the image broadcasted across the world by television and pop culture. In America, we know that this gross pop culture is not America. It is merely pop culture. We see the underlying values. We have morality and decency. But in the East, there is no representation of this. They know no other side of America – how would they? All they see is MTV, and when they do see an American politician trying to speak to the Muslim world, he doesn’t deal with their problems. He purports this sort of fake judicious equality. America says it’s the umpire, but that’s a lie; that’s not how the Iraqis see it. America is a player. So to many Muslims in the East, America is the devil. America is seen as an entity that is threatening, even preventing, the Muslim way of life. An important question for Americans to think about is, Is this true? Is America an Eastern poison? So how do we deal with this awful representation of America abroad? We can’t and we shouldn’t sensor our culture. We need intelligent representatives and politicians to speak in the East, people who directly debate their problems. The East needs Westerners who understand them, what they want, not just Westerners who think they can solve Eastern problems by applying a glib Western panacea. Why do Muslims seem to point out America as the root of all-evil? Why is America being attacked and not Europe or Russia or China? Aren’t they just as materialistic and wealthy and against Islamic sentiments as we are? Well yes. But that is because they are sporting the Western values that have become so contagious, that are spreading throughout the world and perverting preexisting paradigms. And the Islamic world does not hate science either. Many of their extremist leaders were scientists. Bin Laden was a petroleum engineer. The motto in much of Asia right now is “Modernization: yes. Westernization: no.” They want American technology but not the value structure that comes with it.
I worked for a landscaper during the spring of my junior year in high school. I remember being captivated by the array of colors and shapes and the play between order and chaos in the bedded jungle of his front yard. It was a rather chance occurrence, my finding work with this man. But I learned so much from him and a world of dirt opened before my fingertips. Building a garden can be deeply moving. Stalks and shoots sprout because of the care we give them and “we suddenly glimpse what the world would look like if it were the work of a single hand” (721). The power of creation is profound. I am the author of a verdant genesis in my backyard in which I cause “to spring up from the soil every kind of tree” (741C), vegetable, and flower that delights me. My very own backyard jungle.
It is a human instinct to try to perceive God in the world around us, and I believe also that it is our natural tendency to occasionally perceive ourselves as God. I see myself as at least a co-creator of my garden. “It’s a human instinct to try to create perceptual order wherever we look,” (721) that is, to find a kind of visual, aesthetic God in the natural world. When we do not read meaning into objects, situations, places, we tend to instead find callousness and mechanism operating our world. Without beauty or order or God we choose the darker interpretation of Forster’s words, “It means nothing but itself” (731). Our right brains want to find patterns and to make connections, so perceiving objects that have no greater meaning than themselves is disheartening.
Forster satirizes the constant race toward, well, we don’t really know where, a race accelerating on the well-greased axels of progress. We may be chasing our tales for all we know, but it doesn’t matter as long as we continue to become “better… better… better” (732). Alice runs a mad caucus race, which is of course done in a circle. It is a satire of political races in nineteenth century Britain. Forster makes the same comment about modernity in which “everyone is always trying to out-distance [his] companion,” yet admittedly there is “no advantage in doing this if the place [leads] nowhere” (731), which it doesn’t. This same absurd race is being run in our world literature class. Our Professor disseminates regular reminders about points leaders and proudly signs each of his emails with “The Caucus Race Supervisor.” The points go nowhere, the heat of the race is certain to keep you dry, and if one were able to witness the race from the outside, I’m certain it would be as laughable as any Wonderland race run by French mice and skeptical ducks. An adobe wall that one of my friends built in Memorial Park specifically as a space to find one's self in nature. A retreat semicircle to sit and feel the earth.
Meditation is one way that we can find peace amidst the caucus race mayhem, and a way, if we desire, to bring God, or order, into our daily lives. I have often had my most meditative experiences in nature, wandering the sandy pine tree woods north of Houston, walking the red earth of New Mexico, or sitting cross-legged on a bolder breaking the fast current of a mountain stream. Nature meditation is a “bulwark against chaos” (251). Visiting Pied Beauty Ranch was one such fortification against the mounting stress of classes. With my back against a young leaning cedar back in the dead woods, I was able to release. Simply holding in my awareness the elegant simplicity of an overhead arching branch deepened my breath and refreshed my love for the beauty of this world. Finding intimacy in such a place is “a fundamental human defense against loneliness” (263). The sweeping New Mexico topography, a land who's idyllic rawness touches me deeply.
If we forget to see the garden that blooms around us, if the caucus race sweeps us up and runs us over, the importance of self-love, release, nature, and meditation grows even greater. Find a quiet beautiful place to sit and admire it, feel gratitude for this place and all that you have. There are always more points to try to score. But where are you, the person who thinks it so vital that these points be had? I am on a patio outside a campus café, squinting my eyes at my laptop screen and feeling the hard concrete of the bench beneath my butt; thank you, thank you, thank you. And breathe.
