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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Stephen Cope
Read between
January 6 - January 13, 2021
Read this way, Keats is a much more interesting character. He’s courageous. He’s tragic. He died at twenty-five—penniless and almost entirely alone in a foreign land—of a ravaging and wasting disease. He and his work were mostly unknown when he died.
Stubborn ambition and hard work. Just like the rest of us. Not a genius. A product, rather, of deliberate practice. Keats’s story is one of strong determination.
Difficulties arise. Some small. Some large enough to blow our boats out of the water. That’s life.
When difficulties arise, see them as dharma. Your dharma is the work that is called forth from you at this moment.
Hanging on is our first strategy.
Here’s the other approach: Instead of declaring war on Alzheimer’s, embrace it. Take the whole bloody mess as your dharma. Take it as your new calling. Name it. Claim it. Live the experience of Alzheimer’s consciously, fully. Talk about it. Investigate it. Look high and low for the meaning in it. Experience it. Open to the possibility—yes, even to the slim possibility—that this ordeal could be some kind of crazy initiation into wisdom. The Tao te Ching says, “If you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever.”
Mom his lesson about grasping. And then he’d reveal to Mom that yogi scientists discovered that grasping has a flip side. It is called aversion. Aversion is also known by its many other names, almost all of which Krishna uses at one point or another in his discourse with Arjuna. They are: hatred, disdain, anger, fear, revulsion, judgment.
The aversive mind, on the other hand, says, “I hate the way it is right now. This is very, very unpleasant. Get me out of here!” The aversive mind pushes away the unpleasant. Do you see?
What’s the problem? Well, you won’t be surprised to learn that yogis, looking closely at these difficult aversive states, found that aversion has exactly the same deleterious effects on the mind as grasping does. Remember our friends disturbance, obscuration, and separation? Yep. The aversive mind is visited by each of them.
It’s not hard to see how this happens. First, aversion disturbs the mind. Anyone can see this. Then, aversion obscures our capacity to see clearly. This, too, is obvious. When we’re hating something, we do not tend to see it clearly. We see the object of our hatred as all bad—not a mixture of bad and good and neutral as it really is. And finally, and probably most painfully, aversive states separate us from ourselves and from others. “I hate this moment. Get me out of this moment. I do not want it to be like this.”
Krishna details the inevitable movement of aversive states: The impulse to eschew the unpleasant leads to avoidance; avoidance leads to aversion; aversion leads to fear; fear leads to hatred; hatred leads to aggression. Unwittingly, the oh-so-natural instinct to avoid the unpleasant becomes the root of hatred. It leads to war: war within, war without. Entertaining aversion is a slippery slope.
The great Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche called this experience of aversion to the aversion “the pain of pain.” Pain is inevitable, of course. And aversion is a natural response to it. But aversion to the aversion? This is not inevitable, as it turns out.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
And what do you find at the heart of fear, dread, loathing, anger, hatred? You find a surprise. You find a gift. A gift at the center of hatred? A gift at the center of aversion? Could it possibly be? I am skeptical. Show me just one person who really lives this way—diving into the burning heart of aversion. This would be one person in a million.
Stand at the center and embrace death with your whole heart. Then you will endure forever
The “night sea journey” is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness. It is the night sea journey that allows us to free the energy trapped in these cast-off parts—trapped in what Marion would call “the shadow.” The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.
“The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived,” writes Marion. “Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin. Find gold there. Find an animal who has not been fed or watered. It is you!! This neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention, is a part of your self.”
Marion discovered an underlying theme in her clients’ dreams. She discovered that her addicted clients lived divided lives—lives split between body and soul, between perfection and imperfection, between light and dark. Healing came about through integrating these “pairs of opposites.”
Finally, the answer came to her. What aspect of herself had she exiled? Death.
Now her dharma—what she liked to call Destiny—would bring her to the final pair of opposites: Life and Death. Could she embrace both life and death at the same time?
terrified—begins “the wondrous dialogue” with Krishna. Krishna begins with a magnificent sermon (and here I paraphrase): “You see Life and Death as opposites,” he says to a befuddled Arjuna, “as if you had to choose one over the other. And of course you choose life. But don’t you get it? You have to choose both. Life and Death are not enemies. They are not opposites at all. They are inextricably bound to one another. You cannot really choose life without also choosing death.”
Stand at the center and embrace death with your whole heart. Then your work will last forever.
Marion—along with Jung, along with Krishna—chose a remarkable view of difficulties: Difficulties—even death—are not an enemy from the beyond. They are not an alien force. They are part of the Self. Therefore, what appear to be difficulties are really invitations. They are doorways into a deeper union with split-off parts of the Self. They are opportunities. But in order to make full use of these opportunities, one must be willing to undergo what Marion calls “the initiation.”
Marion’s awareness that cancer is an initiation—not an alien intruder—was a turning point in her journey. In her journal, she pondered the fact that many of the initiations in her life had come precisely through the body.
had heard Marion teach about all of this before, but none of it had come into such focus for me as it did now, reading Bone. Initiations are opportunities for us to grow larger. They are death channels. And they are birth channels. They allow us the opportunity to integrate more of our self—more possibility, more reality, more sensation, more feeling. They require everything we’ve got. They destroy us to re-create us.
Marion teaches that we cannot undergo initiation until we learn to live in paradox. She writes: “We learn to live in paradox, in a world where two apparently exclusive views are held at the same time. In this world, rhythms of paradox are circuitous, slow, born of feeling rising from the thinking heart. Many sense such a place exists. Few talk or walk from it.”
Hold conflict in psychic utero. This is a skill that can be learned. But it requires a host of collateral skills that most of us in the West have not nurtured: the capacity to stand in mystery; the capacity to tolerate the unknown; the courage to live in the wilderness for a while; the love of the dark and the night and the moon; the wisdom of the circle, not the line. (How can we not hear echoes here of John Keats’s Negative Capability?)
Marion teaches that part of our problem is that we try to speed things up—to foreclose them too early; to make them linear; to choose one side over the other.
Marion’s view allowed her experience with cancer to be full of meaning, to be replete with possibility, and it enabled Death to bring her more deeply into Life. She got the initiation.
As I think back, I realize that unlike Mom, Dad actually did not go to war with his experience of Alzheimer’s. He surrendered gracefully to it. It occurs to me now that somewhere along the way he had learned Marion’s lesson. Stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart.
Initiation by cancer became for Marion a new birth canal. “Cancer has made me sadder and wiser,” she wrote, “and therefore richer. Because death is an essential part of life, to be fully alive is to be prepared for it. The gift of cancer is the gift of NOW.… Through failures, symptoms, problems, we are prodded to renounce attachments, redundant now. With the breakdown of what has gone before, the possibility of rebirth comes.” 16 Toward the end of her initiation through cancer, Marion and Ross were at a friend’s fiftieth birthday party. Everyone was dancing. Marion was glued to the couch.
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Work performed in the thrall of dharma has a life of its own. It has an existence strangely independent of its author.
Ludwig van Beethoven is the apotheosis of the dharma project. If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. If any man was ever saved by his dharma, it was surely Beethoven.
Beethoven was an emotionally wounded, profoundly neurotic man, who was tortured by inner conflicts throughout his life. He suffered from the very kinds of internal divisions that Marion had described—split between his massive idealism about human nature on the one hand and the misanthropic, angry, spiteful man that he could be on the other. He was split between the ecstatic and spiritualized writer of the Missa Solemnis and the solitary man who wandered the streets of Vienna at night in search of prostitutes. And as with most neurotics, he was tortured by his own behavior. Beethoven was
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He several times wrote, in effect, I would have killed myself, but I had work to do. “Before my departure for the Elysian fields,” Beethoven wrote to a friend, midway through his life, “I must leave behind me what the Eternal Spirit has infused into my soul and bids me complete …”
By the age of twenty-eight, Beethoven had discovered the idea of a holy dharma—a holy work that would save him. He realized that it was imperative that his life be spent manifesting his gift.
Bhagavad Gita into his personal diary: “Blessed is the man who, having subdued all his passions, performeth with his active faculties all the functions of life, unconcerned about the event … Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward. Perform thy duty, abandon all thought of the consequence, and make the event equal, whether it terminate in good or evil; for such an equality is called yoga.”
authentic dharma turns suffering into light. Dharma did not end Beethoven’s suffering. He suffered until the end of his life. I have at home a picture of him on his deathbed, a man utterly worn out by his suffering. But through his dharma, Beethoven transformed his suffering. By the middle of his life, he had learned to plumb the depths of his agony, and to use it. He had learned to open his many wounds—his deafness, his craziness, his paranoid suspicions—to the full view of humanity, and to let a strange light pour from them.
“Arjuna, you do not know how to act because you do not know who you are.” You do not know who you are.
Unborn? Undying? What does this really mean? Well, it’s not easy to grasp. It means that those aspects of our lives that we take to be our True Self—our personality, our body, our career, our house, our stories—are not our True Self at all. Our True Self is our soul. This soul is immortal, and is not limited to present forms. Our present bodies and personalities are only temporary shelters, fleetingly inhabited by our souls.
The True Self, however, is immortal. It cannot be destroyed. [The Self] is not born, It does not die; Having been, It will never not be; Unborn, enduring, Constant, and primordial, It is not killed When the body is killed. This is really quite a speech. But its import is lost on our friend Arjuna.
Human beings throughout the ages have spent their lives seeking. But seeking what? Seeking God? Seeking consciousness? Seeking the Truth? Krishna’s teaching cuts through this seeking: “We are,” he says, “what we seek.” Tat tvan asi: Thou Art That. You are already That which you seek. It is inside. It is already You. It is a done deal. Call off the search! as one great Hindu scholar has written.
To put them in ordinary words, we could say that we manifest from lifetime to lifetime in particular forms: particular bodies, personalities, stories. But these forms—these lifetimes—are transitory.
Have you had an experience like this? In these moments of Oneness, we often feel as if we had dropped in from outer space, and just for a moment are inhabiting our real lives. These are moments of waking up from the dream of separation in which we ordinarily live.
So, Krishna tells Arjuna that his most perilous problem is that he has forgotten who he is. Do you relate to this? I think it’s one of Krishna’s best metaphors.
In the yogic view, as in Wordsworth’s, it’s through remembering who we really are that we are liberated. The transformation of the self is not about adding anything. It is about finding what was already there. In the epigraph of her fine commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, Columbia University scholar Barbara Stoler Miller appropriately quotes T. S. Eliot’s lines on memory from The Four Quartets.
Knowing who we really are liberates us from both the past—our overidentification with past experiences of form—and from the future, our hopes and fears about future forms.
Krishna, my delusion is destroyed, and by your grace I have regained memory I have regained memory. I know who I am. By the end of the story, Arjuna will have been restored to the direct, immediate knowledge of who he is. Then his choices about action will be utterly clear. You will know how to act when you know who you are.
He is much more than a charioteer. To his astonishment, Arjuna begins to see that all along he has been in the presence of a Divine Being. Egad! Krishna is God!!
(Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted it in 1945, when he was reaching for words to describe the first controlled explosion of the atomic bomb over the desert in New Mexico.)
