Francis Berger's Blog, page 163

Jim Morrison and the Spiritual Backfire

I turned my back on the Catholic Church and Catholicism when I was sixteen. The drift had started a couple of years earlier when I refused the sacrament of Confirmation. My rejection of the Church and the Catholic faith had nothing to do with creeping atheism, but rather my growing discomfort with the increasingly visible hypocrisies I was seeing all around me. Put succinctly, by failing to live up to its own tenets and dogma, I felt the Church had let me down, and I had no desire to be confirmed into the folds of what I considered a corrupt institution.
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Though I had rejected my Catholic faith, I still believed in God and still possessed some form of spiritual yearning. I began seeking alternative approaches to the divine, and because I was sixteen, popular music was one of the first places I looked. The Doors was the first band to pique my interest in this regard. In one respect, the rock band was simply one of dozens that had exploded onto the scene at the height of the flower-power/hippie/sexual revolution era of the late-sixties. What set The Doors apart for me was the dark charisma of the band's lead singer, Jim Morrison.

Though I liked the band’s music, I felt a greater attraction to Morrison’s shamanistic persona and mystical lyrics. I immediately investigated the origin of the band’s name and discovered it had its source in a line from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
 
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Aldous Huxley took the title for his book The Doors of Perception, which details his attempt at psychedelic consciousness expansion via mescaline, from this line. In turn, Jim Morrison reduced the phrase even further by naming his rock-and-roll band The Doors after Huxley's book. At the age of sixteen, I considered all of this to be profound, and thus began my nearly three-year obsession with the life and work of James Douglas Morrison.

Looking back at it now, I realize what had fascinated me about Morrison was the dark spirituality he seemed to epitomize. Having turned my back on Catholicism, I was searching for another route toward the spiritual and, as silly as it sounds now, I was hopeful Jim Morrison could provide such a route.

In Morrison, I saw a kindred spirit who had an innate interest in consciousness. Like me, he had been a shy, sensitive youth drawn to poetry and literature. Like me, he sensed there was more to life than the material and had a keen interest in peak experiences and creative transcendence within which he believed the secret to life could be discovered. While other bands and singers of the era sang of incense and peppermints, Morrison crooned about breaking through the other side. His persona represented a raw, intense form of unbridled yearning for greater consciousness and experience that found no solace within conventional spiritual frameworks.

After reading No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, I regarded Morrison as an incarnated version of one of The Doors’ own songs - a wild child, full of grace, who offered the potential to be the savior of the human race. According to the biography, Morrison detested his lionization as a rock star and regarded his rocket ride to fame as a trap, one that kept him from pursuing his true calling as a poet and visionary. I took Morrison’s lack of interest in his eventual fame and material success as proof of the man’s dedication to higher things.

While the rest of his bandmates simply wanted to put on a show, Morrison aspired to elevate the crowd into a mass trance of transcendence with himself at the helm as the grand shaman. He began to mock his own celebrity altering the charismatic appearance that had made him a star. He grew a beard, gained weight, and began performing lewd and unpredictable antics on stage. Caught in a monster of his own making, he sought escape through alcohol and drugs, and his overindulgence eventually resulted in his premature death at the tender age of twenty-seven.

Convinced Morrison had been on to something, I spent a little over two years researching his life and work. I analyzed the lyrics to every Doors song, read every poem Morrison had written, and scoured countless secondary sources written by people ranging from his family members and associates to hardcore fans and academics. In 1990, I even made a pilgrimage to Mr. Mojo Risin’s grave in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in France.

What did I discover after my exhaustive research?

Well, nothing good.

The more I waded in Jim Morrison’s life, the more I realized he had been, at best, a minor mystic, but even that may a generous overestimation. In the end, I concluded Jim Morrison had been merely an intelligent and sensitive young man – an unexceptional poetic talent bolstered by exceptional charisma and stage presence who, rather tragically, happened to be in the right place doing the right thing when the tumultuous wave that was the 1960s deluged the world.

It did not take me long to realize that Morrison’s inherent spirituality was, at its core, quite base and material. Though he shared some brilliant observations during interviews and in some snippets of his poems and songs, Morrison’s spiritual insights rarely rose above the physical plane. Excess paved the road to wisdom, mystical experiences were the result of sex or drugs, and doors stood between the known and the unknown, but Morrison himself could offer no explicit revelation about what the unknown encompassed. Morrison obsessed with breaking through to the other side, but had been utterly indifferent to what the other side might actually contain.

Having written the above, I do believe Morrison possessed some level of spiritual intuition and occasional, non-drug induced moments of heightened awareness or consciousness, but I surmise he had no proper channels into which to funnel these. Rejecting Christianity, and every other religious tradition for that matter, Morrison directed his inherent, malformed spiritual energies in the only direction available to him – the tempestuous, chaotic, hedonistic 1960s counterculture he ironically professed to loathe.

The meeting of these two forces proved to be short-lived and fatal. When his divine spark encountered the noxious, combustible fumes of 1960s, it resulted in a horrendous and tragic spiritual backfire. Embracing the sexual revolution and drug culture with open arms, Morrison embarked on a truly spectacular and pointless five-year journey of self-destruction that culminated in his mysterious death in a Paris hotel room in 1971.  
 
My interest in Jim Morrison waned after I turned nineteen. I continued my wayward spiritual quest in the works of Colin Wilson and P.D. Ouspensky and let Jim Morrison fade into the background. Though I still enjoy some of The Doors’ music whenever it comes on, I rarely think about the band or their tragic lead singer these days. I am certain my exposure to The Doors and Morrison was harmful to some degree, but with the exception of a few youthful drinking binges, I knew better than to follow Morrison down the paved road of excess in the hope of finding wisdom. Even as a teenager, I was averse to the idea of consciousness expansion through chemical means, and though I had turned away from the Catholic Church, it did not take me long to understand that the rock-and-roll, Lizard King shamanism Morrison offered was spiritual dead end that offered nothing more than an excuse for destructive, hedonistic indulgence.

Whenever I do think about Jim Morrison these days, it is from a speculative perspective. I imagine Jim Morrison would have made a formidable Christian had he chosen the path, and I wonder why he had seen no appeal in Christianity. Christ’s gift – the one and only true way to the other side - offers exactly what Morrison had longed for during life. All the right ingredients had been in place. Yet Morrison adhered to a hedonistic and rebellious worldview instead, which led to him a true Roman wilderness of pain, suffering, and early death. Though he had annagramatized his name to Mr Mojo Risin in the song L.A. Woman, Morrison had shown no real interest at the prospect of rising after death.

Sadly, his desire to break on through to the other side ended with a spiritual thud. I say this not from a position of judgmental scorn, but rather with a saddened heart. Say what you will about the man (and this despite the ample conspiracy theories about his being an agent of the establishment), I consider Jim Morrison to have been misguided rather than evil, and I cannot help but wonder what might have been had he seen the light in his own lifetime. 

In 1990, his father had a flat stone placed on Morrison’s grave in Pere Lachaise. The bronze plaque on the stone contains the following inscription in Greek: ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ.

This translates as "true to his own spirit" or "according to his own daemon.”

The second translation is more fitting in my opinion. It captures the tragedy of Jim Morrison and the lost spiritual potential he epitomized, a potential to which he himself was utterly oblivious as this short interview snippet, recorded less than a year before his death, clearly demonstrates.

Cucky Stuff and Categorizing Males Via the Greek Alphabet Leave Me Cold

I don't know. Maybe I'm too old to care, but I come across a lot of material online that focuses on calling turncoat conservatives "cucks" and ordering males into a heirarchies defined by letters from the Greek alphabet and, well, most of it just leaves me cold.

​Don't misunderstand, I am not criticizing those who write about these things because it obviously seems important to them, and perhaps it is important at some level. The observations these writers make do contain some truth here and there, but the constant rants about 'cuckservatives' and the endless fixation on men as alphas, betas, or gammas just does not interest me all that much. 

Once again, I am not claiming that writing about these subjects is necessarily bad; it's just I don't find either topic all that engaging. This obviously places me in the minority as it seems many blog readers derive perennial satisfaction from reading about the latest Cucky McFluffmuffin, or gamma soyboy, or whatever. 

Well, to each his own, I suppose. 

A Few More Rambling Thoughts About Foul Language

In a previous post I acknowledged foul language as a suboptimal and fundamentally bad thing, but also made a case for the acceptability of foul language within certain contexts. I suppose this comes down to my general view of profanity versus my approach to the topic as a fiction writer. To be clear, arguing for the acceptability of profanity from a contextual perspective does not imply that I am giving foul language a free pass, so to speak. Regardless of where or how it is employed, profanity remains corrosive to the Good, but its use within certain contexts seems necessary if for no other reason than to emphasize this point.

I will begin with my general views. As redundant as the following statement may sound, my big concern with foul language is the fact that it is language – in other words, one of the primary ways we interpret and comprehend the world and ourselves.  It is also one of the elemental ways we communicate these interpretations and comprehensions to others. At the most basic epistemological level this is serious business because the language we use to comprehend and define the world and ourselves also has tremendous power at the ontological level where we judge and infer the nature and relations of being.

Seen from this perspective, profanity has the potential to distort our thinking and deaden and desecrate the outside world. I surmise that delineating everything in both the outer world and inner world as an effin this or effin that cheapens being and renders it less vigorous and intense. Debasing the world and our existence through the habitual use of execration could prevent us from perceiving the world and ourselves as they truly are. We may become desensitized to some of the truth, beauty, and goodness the world contains.

A second concern with obscene language is its sources. Commenter Epimetheus noted that profanity tends to “encourage a basic attitude of contempt, pride, and wrath.” I believe this is correct and would be quick to other negative emotions such as scorn, mockery, and hatred. Even good natured or seemingly innocent cursing seems to spring from rather dark places. Regardless of where it emerges from, profanity has the tendency to denature and dehumanize. Though anger may be justified at times, verbally reducing people to the level of reproductive organs or animals or sexual objects or other unseemly things serves as a dangerous first step to permanently objectifying some individuals as such things in our minds.

Finally, foul language often desacralizes and falls into the realm of blasphemy. The sole purpose of certain words and phrases is to disrespect and divest the spiritual of sacred and religious significance. Applying the profane to that which is unprofane is the ultimate expression of irreverence.

How then could I possibly argue for the acceptability of profanity within certain contexts given what I have noted above? In my first post on the subject I argued the existence of foul language within certain works of art might be acceptable and used the example of the gangster film Goodfellas to back up my point.

On the one hand, allowing the characters in the film to curse lends them a quality of realism. On the other hand, depicting these characters as realistically as possible with their foul language intact allows us to see the close connection between their language, motivations, and actions. Goodfellas is populated by mostly vile, vulgar, and violent individuals whose vileness, violence, and vulgarity are perfectly projected through the language they use. These characters are essentially predators motivated by ruthless materialistic desires. Removing the foul language from Goodfellas may have rendered the film unbelievable; it also may have made the characters appear less evil and ruthless. Anyone who admires or even emulates the foul language the film contains misses the larger point the inclusion of the profanity might be trying to make.

When I write fiction, I allow certain characters to use foul language within the context of the narrative not because I wish to glorify profanity itself, but rather to provide insights into a character’s personality and motivations. As in real life, cursing does not immediately render a character evil and beyond redemption, but characters that use foul language consistently reveal much about themselves and their attitude toward the world.

Of course, an argument could be made that all of this can be accomplished without the inclusion of cursing and swear words. I would be quick to agree, but writers who choose to include profanity in fiction should not be callously dismissed as profane, which puritanical types often tend to do.

Become Reaquainted With the 'Magic' World

I am currently reading William Arkle’s A Geography of Consciousness. The book is slim, and I could have read in a few days, but I have resisted the urge to plow through it and have instead chosen to take my time and read only small sections every day. I believe this slow, meticulous approach is the right one to take with a book like A Geography of Consciousness because the concepts Arkle presents demand digesting and contemplation. Too much would fall by the wayside if I read it with the same pace I usually apply to other books.

I vowed not to write anything about the The Geography of Consciousness until I finished it, but earlier today I reread a part of the introduction and was struck by the obvious and simple observation Arkle makes there, and how this obvious and simple observation truly is the cause of so much of our current ills – that a great deal of our misery and suffering in this world stems from our inability to perceive the world as it truly is. Arkle writes:
   
You could say that ‘magic’ is a recognition that you have been underestimating the world, assuming that it is boring and limited when it is your own mind that is bored and limited. And this is important, for it brings the great fundamental insight, the insight that has come to all mystics and poets : that a large part of man’s misery and pain is his own fault. For nearly three thousand years, cynical philosophers have been declaring that human life is disappointing and brief and miserable, and that the wise man has no objection to dying. But moments of ‘magic’ bring a clear recognition that the world ‘out there’ is infinitely interesting – so interesting that if we could ‘turn on’ the magic at will, we would probably live for ever – or at least, want to. The magic doesn’t get in past our senses, which have thick filters on them. Blake recognised that it is as if man lived in a cold, damp cave, when outside there is warm sunlight and fresh air. ‘Five windows light the caverned man, through one he breathes the air . . .’

Once this recognition has been grasped, there is only one important problem : how to get out of the cave into the sunlight. For Blake also recognised that through one of the ‘windows’ man can ‘pass out what time he will.’

Of course, William Arkle was not the first thinker in the world to understand the truth contained in the passage above, but I found the simple and clear manner in which he reveals the fundamental problem inherent in consciousness in this passage rather striking. (Other parts of his book are far more difficult to get through; hence, the slow reading approach.)

When I reread the paragraph above, I clearly recognized that so many of our ills and suffering stems from our inability to perceive the world as it truly is. Removing the filters from our senses really is the critical first step. Most of us live exclusively in cold, damp caves utterly oblivious to the warm sunshine and fresh air beckoning a short distance away. Many who catch glimpses of the sunlight refuse to accept it as real, or are perhaps afraid to leave the cold comfort of their caves. One thing is certain, however you choose to look at it – we should not resign ourselves to living our lives out in cold, damp caves when we are perfectly capable of living in the sunshine. A change of attitude and perspective is required, followed by a dedicated effort to peel the filters from our senses.  

This is what the initial steps in consciousness development boil down to in the end. The first step is recognizing we are in the cave. The second step is acknowledging the sunshine beyond the cave. The third step is the most difficult, but the most crucial. It requires the refinement and realignment of consciousness so that it can tune into the magic again. Perceiving the magic and understanding its reality will dissolve any and all metaphysical doubts and denials.

Epiphanies: Don't Expect Singing Angels and Rainbow Skies

When I contemplate epiphanies, peak experiences, or revelatory manifestations of the Divine, I assume these materialize solely in some sort of grand and magnificent form. After all, if the clouds don’t part in rapturous delight above my head to reveal a shimmering rainbow-colored sky filled with soaring angels all singing Beethoven’s Ninth, then it really doesn’t count as an epiphany, does it?

As desirable as this kind of peak experience might be, my humble experience with what I sense to have been epiphanies shows that these moments usually appear in far subtler and far more delicate ways. The few epiphanies I believe I have experienced have been fleeting and barely perceptible. They have appeared primarily during moments of creativity; through the reading of blog posts, literature, or Scripture; through the appreciation of natural beauty; a movement within a piece of music; strange synchronicities and coincidences; or snippets from nearly forgotten dreams.

I recognize these moments through the meaning they embody. This meaning immediately transcends the physical from which it springs and communicates through sudden insights or deeper intuitive comprehension. Yet these unexpected insights or intuition-based moments of understanding are often so faint I barely become cognizant of them.

I imagine I have been utterly oblivious to many peak experiences I may have had in the past – dozens, perhaps hundreds of moments of meaning have likely passed by me unnoticed. Maybe I failed to experience these epiphanies precisely because I was expecting parting clouds, rainbows, angels, and the glorious movements of Beethoven’s Ninth.

As with most things in life, it seems epiphanies start small, but with the proper effort, dedication, and patience, you might experience more of them and perhaps work your way up to “bigger or deeper” experiences over time.      

So What's the Deal With Foul Language?

When I was seven years old, I experienced the immaculate horror of watching a strict and enraged nun wash a kid's mouth out with soap.

It all started in the religion lesson. The whole class was sitting on floor mat waiting for Sister Mary Frances to select that week’s religious story. I was sitting next to some kid whose name I have forgotten. Though I can’t recall the kid’s name, I distinctly remember not liking him. He had an annoying voice, always had food stuck between his teeth, and smelled of cheese.

Anyway, while Sister Mary Frances perused the bookshelf before her, good old Cheese-Smell next to me was entertaining himself by pounding another kid on the thigh with his fist. The other kid quietly told Cheese-Smell to knock it off a few times, but all he got in return was grin speckled with what appeared to the remnants of a chocolate chip cookie. After the fifth punch, the kid gave Cheesy a firm shove and ceremoniously told him where to go in the bluntest and crudest way possible. The book Sister Mary had pulled from the shelf slipped through her fingers and thudded to floor. She turned around and looked at the kid who had sworn as if he were some brimstone demon that had just emerged from the fiery depths of hell.

Sister Mary exploded into a sudden blur of movement after that. Before anyone could even blink, she had the offender firmly by the ear and was dragging him from the classroom, much to the delight of Cheese-Smell whose Chips Ahoy grin now spanned the width of his face, as endless and mocking as a desert horizon. Three microseconds later the whole class had piled into the boy's room and was standing next to the sink breathlessly awaiting Sister Mary Frances's next move.
 
“I’ll teach you about using such filthy words!” the nun seethed into the foul-mouthed kid's ear. “A good washing-out of the mouth with soap should do the trick!”
 
She darted her eyes about looking for a bar of soap but found only the liquid soap dispenser screwed to the tiled wall. Next thing I knew, Sister Mary was ramming the poor kid's head against the tiles and ordering him to open his mouth. Rather than resist, the kid opened his mouth and allowed the good Sister to pump the dispenser a few times and scrub the remnants of offense from the inside of his mouth with her bony fingers.
 
Sister Mary Frances’s soapy exorcism did not traumatize me or the offender, but I have held mixed and conflicting feelings and beliefs about profanity ever since that day. On one hand, I know foul language is base, vulgar, and unnecessary, and I go out of my way to use it sparingly because I do not wish to be boorish and uncouth. I know language is a big part of consciousness and base language tend to keep one locked in base consciousness. On the other hand, I don’t really think swearing is such a terrible sin, and I see no problem in indulging in a little earthy language once in a while if the circumstances warrant it.
 
At its most fundamental level, I know using foul language is wrong. At the very least, it’s suboptimal. Readers of this blog have surely noticed that I seldom employ profanity in my posts. I apply the same behavior in my day-to-day life as well. I do this mostly in the name of common decency, politeness, and courtesy. Refraining from profanity in public is also my way of demonstrating my self-control. The world is crude and vulgar enough on its own without me adding to it unnecessarily. Besides, I am forty-seven years old, and I have always been put off by the site of other mature men, or women for that matter, pointlessly cussing up a storm in public. I find all of that rather obscene – it's like watching and listening to mischievous adolescents trapped in middle-aged bodies.
 
Nevertheless, I don’t have a problem with profanity when it appears in films, books, or real life as long as it seems appropriate to the subject matter. This does not imply that I condone glorified profanity for its own sake, but there are certain genres in art and situations in real life where I feel vulgar language is not only acceptable, but perhaps even necessary.
 
Take films, for example. I doubt the characters in a gangster film like Goodfellas would be believable if they didn’t speak the way gangsters speak. In fact, I have always found films in which the profanity has been censored or dubbed out to be far more offensive than the original profanity-laden versions. For instance, I once watched a version of The Usual Suspects that had all the swearing dubbed over to make it fit for primetime television. In the famous police line-up scene, the crooks in this dubbed version all step forward and repeat the line, “Give me the keys, you fuzzy socksucker!”

Fuzzy socksucker? Now I implore you, which is more obscene, the original – which I am sure you can infer – or its dubbed replacement? I mean, what kind of sick individual sucks fuzzy socks for crying out loud? I faced this challenge when I wrote my novel, too. Should I let my characters swear in the book? I decided I should if the scene in question called for it. Doing otherwise would render the narrative ridiculous and unbelievable.
 
I feel the same way about goody-goody types who scream words like “Fudge!” after they have banged their thumbs with hammers or have dropped thirty-pound cement blocks on their toes. Maybe these people believe not swearing makes them more divine and maybe it does, but I suspect something almost inhuman in such stern, puritanical behavior. Nonetheless, I understand some people are just not wired for cursing. I have been married to my wife for nearly twenty years, and in that time I cannot recall a single trace of foul language coming from her mouth. This is not because she is a saint or because she consciously restrains herself. She simply seems incapable of swearing. It doesn’t seem to be in her DNA.
 
Unfortunately, the profanity strand is quite thick in my DNA. Though I use foul language infrequently, there are times and places when I let loose a little, so to speak. I have a weak spot for ribald humor (mostly of the Shakespearean variety) and often enjoy banter during which indelicate matters are discussed in an off-color, yet good-natured and funny manner. I also tend to assign rather colourful names to people who attempt to kill me or damage my car while I am driving. In addition, I never yell fudge after I whack my thumb with a hammer. And though it happens very rarely, I am not overly squeamish about telling off people who are rude, disrespectful, or cruel.
 
I repent the foul language in most of the cases cited above, but I feel the deepest pang of conscience when I include the Lord’s name in the obscenity. On those occasions, I know I have trespassed on the sacred. Though I engage in this kind of cursing less frequently than I used to, it still slips out occasionally. Whenever it does, I take immediate notice of it and vow to do better in the future.
 
Overall, I regard profanity as a suboptimal form of communication, yet I recognize that there exist times when cursing remains, paradoxically enough, the most optimal form of communication. To me, profanity boils down to a matter of time and place. Some situations and circumstances seem to warrant it, but even then, I know it is not the best option. Regardless, I personally do not think profanity is a horrible, unforgivable sin. We shouldn't overindulge in it because that could be habit-forming and keep us locked in a lower level of consciousness; however, obsessing over profanity seems unhealthy and counterproductive to me.
 
Of course, I could be wrong about all of this. If so, I welcome your views regarding the subject.  If you believe I am totally off-base, you could always find Sister Mary Frances and have her pay me a visit to give my tongue a good scrubbing. Who knows? Perhaps it would cure me for good. 
 
Oh . . . one last thing. Though I generally disapprove of cursing and make a conscious effort to reduce foul language in my day-to-day life, I would have no issue telling Cheese-Smell-Chips-Ahoy-Smile where to go were he ever crossed my path again . . . and I would do it with a clear conscience to boot! 

With a Sober Peasant Mind

Angelus - Jean Francois Millet - 1857-59 Józan paraszti ésszel, which means "with a sober peasant mind” is one of my favorite Hungarian expressions. The expression sometimes omits the peasant in favor of the simpler "with sober mind." In either case, the saying is the Hungarian equivalent of the English common sense or mother wit. Though I understand why many Hungarians omit the word peasant from the phrase today, I much prefer the variation that includes this word; the addition of peasant not only deepens the phrase’s meaning, but also serves as a kind of gentle reminder of the danger of substituting common sense and wisdom with abstract or factual information and data.  
 
Our information-saturated world is suffering through a harsh common sense and wisdom drought at the moment. This is rather ironic because never in the history of the planet has so much data been available too so many people. The West has never had so many schools, libraries, and degrees. Literacy rates are virtually one hundred percent in every Western country. Never have so many people held so many university degrees. The vast bulk of the Western Canon, the very foundation of our civilization is accessible online without charge. On top of that, the internet drips with more information than a city of ten million could collectively sift through in a century. So much data and information. So many enlightened, sophisticated individuals. Nonetheless, the readily available facts, crisp university degrees, and gleaming techno gadgets have created a paradoxical world of abundant information and scarce wisdom and common sense, which in turn has made our contemporary world a veritable breeding ground for stupidity.  
 
What is the source of our current wisdom/common sense famine? Put bluntly, the substitution of Reality with unreality. Factual information can be absorbed from books, schools, and the internet, but wisdom and common sense can only be gained through learning from lived experience. Unfortunately, the lived experiences of many today are nothing more than virtual experiences lacking a solid grounding in Reality. This lack of contact with the Real signifies a lack of true experience, which in turn creates callowness. A world without wisdom becomes a world ruled by theories, ideologies, systems, and political correctness credos.
 
This is exactly why I love the expression józan paraszti ésszel (with a simple peasant mind) so much. As I mentioned above, the word peasant must be included in the phrase for it to have full effect. Of course, as it is everywhere else, peasant is a pejorative here in Hungary. Among the disparaging connotations are simplemindedness, boorishness, and uncouthness. Peasants were also uneducated, unrefined, and unsophisticated. All of this is technically true. Pre-industrial agricultural workers certainly did not need a degree in agricultural engineering to raise crops and tend livestock. Yet I would posit the world of the peasant is the inverse of the world we inhabit now – that is, the peasant’s world was one of scarce information but abundant wisdom.
 
Why made peasants wise? I imagine peasants had an abundance of life experience; they lived their lives immersed in Reality. They understood nature, the Earth, the weather, and the elements. The seasons and the movements of the sun and the constellations in the sky measured their days. They possessed a keen awareness of their place in the world and lived in close contact with their families, friends, and foes alike. Peasants also had an intimate relationship with the life cycle – they witnessed the births and deaths within their communities. They probably possessed a simple but surprisingly thorough degree of self-knowledge. Most importantly, peasants knew God. Peasants were certainly ignorant of many things, but I surmise most were not stupid.
 
It is not my intention to romanticize or idealize peasant life, nor advocate for a return to some primitive form of agricultural living for I am certain a great deal of this life was rather harsh, monotonous, and mundane. Nevertheless, whatever peasants lacked in material wealth or scholarly information they more than made up for in wisdom and common sense, which was essential to their very survival. Peasants knew imposing unreality on Reality was not only foolish, but also foolhardy. We in the contemporary world, on the other hand, do not. Residing firmly in the Real, peasants wasted little time on theories or abstractions. I imagine their wisdom and common sense also made them quite obstinate. In other words, if a peasant knew something to be true, there would be no way of convincing him otherwise, especially if all you offered him as proof were theories and abstractions. He would equate a denial of Reality with stupidity, regardless of how persuasively it was presented or through what authority it was commandeered.
 
This brings me back to my fondness for the expression, with a sober peasant mind. Though there is a vital and necessary need for us to evolve our consciousness and aim at higher things, our efforts to reconnect with Reality should not ignore or discard the sober peasant mind.The source of many of the ills plaguing us today emanate from our willingness to entertain and make compromises with obviously false abstractions that not only challenge Reality, but forcefully try to convince us that Reality does not exist at all.

​For example, when a grown, bearded man dawns a tutu and declares himself a woman, the faculties of thousands of universities across the West rise up in defense of the man’s claim and demand we recognize something we know to be false. To back up their defense of tutu man, these university faculties will present studies, research reports, and clinical tests all designed to persuade the world of the unreality of Reality.
 
Sadly, in our world of information without wisdom, the forces of unreality are succeeding. Yet, if the faculties of the West attempted this on our peasant friend, he would merely smirk, and then turn back to tending his crops. He might not have enough data to understand the arguments supporting tutu man’s claim, but he is wise enough to understand that they are all false, regardless of the authority supporting them.
 
We should all work toward developing consciousness as we strive to reconnect with Reality, but perhaps part of this development involves approaching challenges and problems with nothing more than a sober peasant mind.

Can Art Provide a Pathway to the Divine?

“Above all else, art is one of humanity’s highest callings. It is a higher thing than politics or economics. It marks the total expression of the creativity and freedom of the human spirit and is one of the few paths through which mankind can transcend its earthly circumstances and approach the Divine. This is the essence that makes art eternal.”
​
I took this excerpt from a fictitious book called The Art of the Ages that I included in my novel The City of Earthly Desire. I wrote the paragraph above to explore the concept of art as means through which to approach the Divine. Though I embrace the concept theoretically, it has been my experience that art has more commonly been utilized to achieve the opposite objective – that is diverting and turning people away from the Divine. Regardless, I feel if art has the power to turn people away from the Divine, then it must surely also contain the power to turn people toward the Divine.  

In the following, I present some my observations and conjectures regarding art and its possible role in establishing a potential path toward the Divine. As with anything in the domain of thinking and writing, many of these observations and conclusions have invariable been drawn from other works of art, theology, and philosophy I have engaged with over the years.   

To begin with, art resides in the realm of Beauty, one of the three transcendentals, yet beauty alone is not enough to establish the potential of drawing closer to the Divine. As Dostoevsky notes in his novel The Idiot, the phrase “Beauty will save the world” reveals a partial truth, at best. Beauty alone is a fine thing, but in art, as in life, beauty alone is insufficient. Thus, only art that successfully incorporates all three transcendentals simultaneously into a seamless unity creates the potential for a pathway toward the Divine.

In other words, art must manifest a unity of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty to be truly higher than politics or economics. It must also contain this unity to serve as a total expression and freedom of the human spirit, one that offers us the potential to transcend our earthly circumstances and draw nearer to the Divine.

Art that fails to unify the transcendentals or purposively eliminates one or more of these transcendentals from its form cannot succeed as a pathway to the Divine and remains firmly in the material realm where it may serve some utilitarian function such as propaganda, décor, or mindless distraction/entertainment.

This lower sort of art can serve both harmful and beneficial utilitarian purposes. On the beneficial side, it can provide mild distraction or trivial satisfaction, and perhaps induce certain levels of relaxation or stimulation. On the harmful side, non-unified art offers a perversion of the unified transcendentals by giving the appearance of a unified work while hiding the transcendental element or elements it lacks. Non-unified art can also invert the transcendentals and offer their opposites in their place instead. Propagandist art, for example, may offer some partial good, but its inherent lack of Truth inevitably renders propaganda harmful.
 
Therefore, only art unifying the transcendentals can advance the potential for contact with the Divine, which entails that only artists possessing, at the bare minimum, a subconscious understanding of the transcendentals can produce such art. Nonethless, I feel artists who produce unified art  through a subconscious comprehension of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness may only manage to do so through some source of Divine inspiration. Otherwise, unified art seems to precondition a level of consciousness that matches, or at the very least, orbits the art it has created.  
  
Art offering the potential to step closer to the Divine cannot evolve beyond potential if it does not encounter an appropriate level of consciousness that can perceive the transcendental unity the work of art offers. Put another way, only heightened or deepened consciousness can fully appreciate the path to the Divine a unified work of art makes potentially available. The encounter between a unified work of art and the heightened consciousness recognizing the unity within the work of art may also make approaching the Divine possible.

I have shared these observations and conjectures because I intuitively feel art will have to play a minor yet important role in moving people away from what Bruce Charlton has identified as the twin problems of modern people – atheism and alienation - and moving them toward a renewed and reconstructed metaphysics in conjunction with a development of consciousness. Professor Charlton defines this as Romantic Christianity, which he considers the only viable way forward for individuals and, perhaps society in general. The more I understand Romantic Christianity, the more I am drawn to it, and I am curious to see what role, if any, art may play in its development/unfolding. I might be wrong, but I have a feeling art has the potential to play a quite significant role indeed.

So, if you fancy yourself an artist, what are you waiting for? Get to it. There's work to do!
      
Note: I do not profess to be an artist of heightened consciousness; nor am I promoting my own artistic endeavors as successful examples of unified art (I sincerely believe my one and only novel falls well short of this ideal). Having said that, I do aspire to be a writer of higher consciousness whose work may inch a little closer to the ideal of unified art as time goes by. 

A Charming Collection of English Country Dances (Seventeenth-Century Music)

I recently came across a delightful collection of seventeenth-century music simply titled English Country Dances. The musicians featured on the record include David Douglass, Paul O'Dette, and Andrew Lawrence-King. I am no expert in English music, but I found the collection particularly charming and pleasing to the ear. Perhaps you will, too. 

Peterson Versus Zizek: Exactly the Kind of Debate Our Perishing Society Deserves

Currently being billed as the most anticipated and significant philosophical event to occur this century, Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek are scheduled to square off against each other in a debate promoted under the title Happiness: Capitalism versus Communism set to take place in Toronto in April.

I had three thoughts after I stumbled across this announcement. Firstly, I was struck by the oxymoronic and incongruous attempt to project the doctrines and beliefs of two opposing economic systems onto the nebulous screen of happiness. Secondly, the limited and tragic scope of what these two thinkers will determinedly discuss represents the core sickness of our contemporary malaise. Lastly, Peterson versus Zizek is exactly the kind of debate our spiritually depleted society deserves.

Although I am certain armchair philosophers and political aficionados relish the opportunity to watch and listen as these two "rock star" thinkers from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum go head-to-head, I view the upcoming debate as nothing more than an opportunistic moneymaking venture for those involved. In addition, I believe the debate will amount to nothing more than a mundane and infuriating waste of time.

Here’s why. Peterson and Zizek are both materialists who believe human happiness resides purely in the physical realm. Of the two thinkers, Zizek is the more sincere. An avowed atheist who sees humanity’s suffering and salvation solely within the framework of Marxism and Lacanian psychology, Zizek is both upfront and straightforward concerning his denial of the transcendent and the metaphysical. Peterson, on the other hand, presents a far more slippery position. Lauding the current ruling from of global corporate capitalism as a force for good, Peterson makes occasional forays into the realm of the metaphysical by citing Bible verses and ancient myths, but he presents his erratic interpretations firmly within the framework of materialism. Thus, happiness resides purely in the material world for both Peterson and Zizek; the only bone of contention between them is which system is superior in terms of providing for humanity’s material needs and wants, which for both Peterson and Zizek remains the only possible realm within which human happiness can be discussed or realized.

The debate will be blandly predictable, in my humble opinion. Peterson will undoubtedly cite the great progress and improved standards of living the past and current forms of capitalism have ushered into existence. He will reference UN reports and research papers from organizations such as Human Progress to emphasize the tremendous rise in quality of life around the world, particularly in underdeveloped regions. He will speak of personal freedoms and material improvements and hold recent generations up as the most fortunate yet least grateful ones to ever have existed in history. He will attack Zizek by launching into tirades denouncing the horrors of communism and cite Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn ad nauseum to back Zizek into a corner. He will then hotly inform Zizek that all the myths and religions of human history support the superiority of capitalism and the divine individual, roughly speaking, of course.

Zizek in turn will sputter and spray on about mishandled and misinterpreted communism, the hypocrisy of liberalism, and the increasing disparities global corporate capitalism has created around the world. He will attack capitalism as fascism, censure creeping totalitarianism, and praise future collectivism as humanity’s only hope. Many arrows will be released into the sky, and I am certain some interesting points may be made by both parties, but in the end, none of the arrows will find their mark because the debaters will speak past each other. In the end, the entire foundation of the debate will be pointless because it will purposefully neglect the real causes of human happiness and unhappiness.

In fact, if I had been the debate organizer, I would have called the event Blind Spot: How Both Capitalism and Communism Fail to Create Human Happiness. Peterson and Zizek both deny the significance of the metaphysical – the former, elusively; the latter, directly. Regardless, both men are acutely aware of the iceberg the West struck long ago; both know the ship is sinking, but neither is willing to accept the one thing that could save everyone on board.

Rather than recognize the metaphysical solution to the sinking ship problem, Peterson and Zizek will both stand near the bow rearranging the deck chairs. As they do so, they will be perfectly content to quibble over that evening’s dinner menu in the ship’s opulent restaurant. Peterson will offer a pseudo-mystical Jungian filet covered in capitalism and responsibility sauce with a side of archetype word salad while Zizek will insist upon a sticky Lacanian stew topped with crispy Hegel bits and a stale piece of Marxist bread.

Neither menu offering will prove to be particularly appetizing. Both offerings are destined to leave the ship’s passengers unsatisfied, yet the diners will flock to the restaurant all the same. Afterward, the diners will suffer from indigestion as they trudge back to their cabins. Once in their own rooms, they willful ignore the icy water sloshing around their ankles as they argue over which menu selection was superior. In the morning, the passengers will awaken to water levels above their knees, but even then, very few will consider manning the lifeboats.

Simply put, arguing over material concerns and material distribution of wealth will not stop the ship from sinking. The only thing that can save us is acknowledgment and acceptance of Reality – the only solution to our dilemma rests in the development of our consciousness toward this metaphysical Reality.

Until we awaken from our slumber and its resultant alienation and realign our consciousness with Reality, debates featuring the likes of Peterson and Zizek will be deemed the only ones worthy of being held. They will also remain the only kinds of debate we deserve.