Spiritual Thoughts on Spiritual Thinking

Where Is My Mind?

2010-08-03T12:24:00.005-04:00

In 1989, my father came and asked me how I felt about moving to England.

I was 9 years old at the time. I had no idea what "moving to England" really meant. Neither did my Dad really explain it to me because, I guess, he didn't really know what it meant either. Not that it would necessarily have made a difference anyway, since my father's mind was already made up, and (being 9 years old) I would have done anything to please my Dad. Our tendentious relationship hadn't yet started.

When I got to England, I ran into culture-shock, a broader and stricter pedagogy, and (I guess) my first real identity crisis. I didn't fit in. In an all-boys school, I didn't know how to play rugby or cricket, didn't know the football stars, didn't play football (soccer) as well as everyone else, didn't get the cultural references, didn't know the history of the place, didn't know the social tropes... worse still, I didn't know enough of the American things that the boys there thought I should know about: the rules of American football, for example (I could tell you baseball - I liked baseball - but I never learned American football because I never played it). I was the proverbial stranger in a strange land, only I also didn't know all that much about my own land either.

The experience was traumatic. I didn't fit in, but neither did I stick out. I was a blank, a background, an unnoticed entity. My father was at work most of the time, and my mother was busy with my (newborn) baby brother. I had to learn to handle the situation largely on my own.

Simultaneously, I was ill a lot. I had repeated tonsil infections on top of a good deal of allergies. This meant that I also didn't get out much. I had no friends, spent a lot of time at home and by myself, so I turned inward.

I guess this was the beginning of what I now call a "spiritual" life. I made up an imaginary friend, Julius Caesar, to play board-games against. I developed a rich imagination. The times when I was well, I would get on my bike and explore the footpaths in my town and the ones nearby, pretending they were other lands far away. I read a lot. I went to the movies by myself. I learned to cope with being alone, though I was none-the-less intensely lonely. I got by.

When I was 10 or 11, things began to change. I had my tonsils and adenoids removed, and the infections stopped. I was less ill, discovered what the sense of smell was, and put on weight. I began to acculturate. I started hanging out with kids in my class. I found a best-friend. I fleshed out an identity: I wasn't good at most sports, but I could run track. I liked computers. I became a bit nerdy. My grades, which had not been the greatest, began to improve. By the time I was 12, I was thinking about taking my GCSEs, going on in the English curriculum.

Then we moved again. To Minnesota.

There was less discussion, before this second move. My Dad kinda made the decision for the family: it was a good career move for him, and so there was a great deal of pressure on us all to accept the decision. My sister and I, having both learned to fit in finally, wanted to stay on in a boarding school or similar. We were talked out of it and/or given a categorical "no." I was more the former, my sister the latter. After talking with my parents, I thought that I could move, thought I could do it. Maybe it was "hubris," but I thought that if I could move to England and fit in - even if that was difficult - then I could move back to the United States and fit in, even if it was difficult.

Maybe that was the first big mistake of my life, because the transition back to the United States was even more traumatizing than the move to England. You have to remember: I was 12. Puberty had begun. Adolescence was starting. Suddenly social dynamics was everything. Hormones meant that girls were important, and if girls were important then social standing - being as close to "alpha male" as possible - was everything.

God's cruel joke being, of course, that at the same time we all go through this, He gives us growth spurts, acne, vocal changes, dropping testicles, menstruation and the like.

Shy, an outsider, not getting the cultural references (again), not understanding the sports (again) nor being particularly good at them, terrified of girls having gone to an all-boys school in England, having no clue about the (American) Civil War (I could tell you all about the English in detail) or Teapot Dome... I fell to the bottom of the pecking order. I was Omega Male, shunned by all around me.

Like the previous time, I retreated inward a great deal; but something - the hormones, I'm guessing - made the experience much more traumatic. It was... scarier. More lonely. More saddening. More... depressing. My chronic, lifelong fight with depression began around this time.

Then, one day, my 7th grade class was taken out ice-skating. I hadn't ever really been ice-skating before; while everyone around me (who had grown up in MN) whizzed about on the ice, I spent my time falling down consistently.

On the way back for a 7th-grade dance (a novel concept, to me), I sat alone on the bus. I doodled in the condensation on the window - absent-minded doodling. I drew a swastika. Now, I was not, am not, and never will be a fan of Nazism or white-power or the like. I'm a Muslim socialist who does human-rights work and is married to a Jew. Being around right-wingers gives me hives. I drew the swastika without any intent to cause harm. I just drew the damned thing because I was doodling in the condensation.

My cohorts didn't see things that way.

I don't blame them. We were 12 or 13 years old, play-acting at an adulthood that suddenly and for the first time seemed attractive and "good." And part of that adulthood meant not-liking Nazis. I didn't like Nazis either. Indiana Jones fought against them.

So at the dance - a traumatic experience for every 7th-grader anyway, I think - one by one, or sometimes in pairs, my classmates came up to me to register their disapproval of me. "How could you draw that?" "Do you know what that means to me, as a Jewish person?" "What you did was awful." "I can't be friends with you." "The fuck is wrong with you?"

It was my own personal middle-class American version of a Maoist "struggle session," where your friends and neighbors tear you apart, verbally and emotionally.

Coming on the heels of the recent move to the United States, this experience pushed me over the edge. I wasn't just excluded; I was shamed. I wasn't an outsider; I was a pariah. In this adolescent world where social status meant everything, I wasn't the omega male. I wasn't anything.

I took the lesson to heart. I am a bad person. I desperately want acceptance - but I don't trust that anyone will give it to me. More than acceptance, I want to be welcomed, but there is no "welcome" that can ever satisfy me. I am, and always will be, an outsider. I can never be a part of a group. When I become part of a group, I consciously or unconsciously edge my way to its edges; if I can, I try to leave it. I know that, soon, they will not just shun me, they will punish me. It won't be for anything I can prevent; it will be for something I do wrong without knowing it. I am bad by default.

In some moments, when I have fight left in me, it's not my fault. In those moments, it's you: it's your fault. You are cruel. You don't know the whole story, and punish people for things that aren't really their fault. You jump to conclusions, act rashly and irrationally. Here is the original of my do-gooderism. I jump to defend the defenseless, stand up for the victims, the little guys. I see, in them, myself. But it means that you and I are always at odds. It means you have no capacity for compassion, mercy, or good in you; or at least, not enough. And I will never trust you because of that.

I always need to know more than others. Knowledge is power: if I know all the cultural references, then you will never have any "legitimate" reason for ostracizing me. I will fit in, and the only way you exclude me is by disliking me. Of course, I can never fit in - my gut tells me I can't - and since everyone will or does tell me (on some level) that I am less-than, I will tell myself than I am more-than. I am smarter than you are, a better person than you are; and I am worse than you are and I have suffered more than you have. Because I am so vulnerable, I will become arrogant, aloof, a know-it-all. I'm desperate for your approval, needy for you to want to be around me, but I won't let you near me.

Since women (in this adolescent world) hold all the cards, women became my focus. I "need" to be accepted by them; preferably, desired by them. I was obsessed with having a girlfriend. When I had one, I was elated; when I didn't, I was catatonic. When I had one, I was looking for another, better one; when I didn't have one, I was looking for one, any one. At the beginning of a relationship, I was excited: here was potential, here was the possibility of finally being accepted, wanted, welcomed. The more time passed, the more than wore off and the greater the fear of discovery - of being "found out" - became. And so I would begin to preemptively pull away: become cruel first, before cruelty could be meted out upon me.

Meanwhile, that inner life that I had ripened - and rotted - into a spiritual life. God - or nirvana, or THAT - was and still is the ultimate Relief-with-the-capital-R. He is the All-Accepting, the Merciful, the Forgiver, the Compassionate. He is the Power and Strength that I need; if I have Him, then all the rest would fall away.

The problem was - and is - that I recapitulate all the same behaviors I employ towards women in my relationship with Him. The only difference is that He is the Absolute, and they are the relative.

I am compulsive and obsessive about my relationship to Him. I am desperate for any tidbit of information that will give me an "in" with the Almighty, and so I purchase and read spiritual literature like it's going out of style. I make spiritual life into a vastly more complex process than it actually is. As I grow closer to Him, I fear He will find me out, and so I begin to look elsewhere; when that "elsewhere" doesn't pan out (as the relative is wont to do), I drift back to Him.

I became a "God" addict. About 10 years ago, I had a moment of non-dual bliss, a taste of absolute love. I became obsessed with recapturing it with whatever cheap, easy, simple and direct method I could find. It has caused me a great deal of pain, both emotional and physical, and in spite of the consequences I have not stopped grasping after Him, hoping that this time, with this new insight, we can be reunited.

It has been the only really real and lasting relationship with anybody or anything that I have maintained, consistently, throughout my (admittedly brief) life. It has been a sick relationship, undoubtedly unhealthy for me and undoubtedly not of any benefit to Him.

Where I am now is a precipice.

I've seen... well, myself, or my self. I've seen a long-standing pattern of thinking and emotion and behavior, and I've seen how on the one hand it protects me, and on the other hand, it harms me. In a grosser, more obvious, more harmful form it has actually destroyed my life.

But do I get rid of it? Maybe that seems like an obvious question: if it's harming you that much, get rid of it. I don't know, however. The question becomes: if not that, then who? Meaning: if I let go of this set of behaviors, this identity, then who I am? What's left? What becomes of me?

And that's where the fear comes in. Because I have no idea what life without these behaviors - without this identity - would be like. Would it mean giving up my spiritual life? How about my collection of spiritual books? How is it going to affect my relationship with my wife? Any change in one person in a relationship has the potential to seriously destabilize the relationship itself. We just got married - what if this leads to a divorce? What about my relationships with women generally? Wouldn't it just mean being - once again - a stranger in a strange land who doesn't know about his homeland either?

Mostly, though, the fear is silent. It sits just below the surface. If I have something to do, something else to think about, then I don't notice it. The instant I have a quiet moment, though, there it is: a rim of fear around what seems like an entire ocean of loneliness and sadness. Or rather, like the fear is a dam, a barrier, holding back this ocean's worth of sadness. The dam is beginning to crack, and I'm concerned that the ocean will drown me, if the force of that emotion smacking into me like a tsunami doesn't crush me all at once.

Meanwhile, a woman has written me online. It's rather like throwing chum in the water. My mind, prodded by all that fear, went insane: here is a woman expressing an interest in, well, me. So obviously, here is the potential for the acceptance and welcome that I so desperately want.

In my head, a thousand permutations of the possible relationships we might have are being played out. They range from the ridiculous - a polygamous marriage including her and my wife - to the incredibly unlikely - I leave my wife, marry the new girl - to the very unlikely - we have an affair - to the possible though not likely - we become best of friends forever - to the possible - we become close friends - to the likely - we become friends - to the more likely - we become acquaintances - and so on, along with all possible combinations of these and more.

This crazy, fantasizing part of me knows it has been found out. It knows that very soon, it might be "killed off," after a fashion. So it's working overtime to repeat the pattern behavior, just this one last time. Like an addict about to go to rehab, it wants one last hurrah before it has to stop, and it's working furiously to make that happen. Just this one, last time. For old time's sake. Besides: maybe this new girl is the answer. Maybe she'll win out where all the others - and God Himself - have failed.

It's running around like crazy, trying to mortar the dam before it gives out. I'm sitting, leaning back against a tree, watching him. The world is about to end. Israfil is blowing the first blast of the trumpet, the mountains swirl like dust motes in late afternoon sunlight. My center cannot hold and I'm watching it all fall apart.

Last Day At Work

2009-08-08T08:14:00.010-04:00

Today is my last day at work. Next week I have surgery, followed by two weeks of recuperation, and then graduate school, internships, a new chapter in my life begins. Just: not before I close this one.

For the past year and a half, or so, I have been a mental-health paraprofessional in a group home for people with mental illness and co-occuring substance-abuse problems. When I started this job, it was exactly the line of work that I wanted to get into: helping people overcome their addictions, begin the long and slow process of rebuilding their lives, getting in on the ground floor of bottoming out and hopefully being helpful. I came to the work armed with personal experiences, healthy realism, and buckets of hope.

The last of these is the only thing I leave behind, now.

The reason, interestingly enough, isn't the clients I've had. That healthy realism that I had meant that I brought no expectations that they would be returned to health, give up their addictions, magically become 'productive' members of society. Mental illness, and substance abuse, can be oppressive; recovery from them is a long, ongoing process that likely consumes the rest of one's life. Add on to that poverty and the stark racial segregation of Connecticut which goes along with poverty in this state, and the difficulty is compounded exponentially.

I knew all this, though only dimly, when I started. I knew that my job would be to attempt to empower my clients as best I could by creating a relationship and an environment in which they could regain autonomy over the course of their lives, and accept responsibility for the actions they take. Both are, I think, the essential ingredients of the act of recovery: taking control and being accountable.

What I didn't realize, and the reason which led to my current state of burn-out, is the systematic way in which my clients have been, are, and will be disenfranchised. I came to the job with a naive optimism that the mental-health system, and mental-health advocates, worked for the recovery of their clients (the current preferred nomenclature is actually 'consumer', which I find dehumanizing; I shall stick to 'client'). That's not the case at all.

Mental healthcare is underfunded, I think it is fair to say. Mental healthcare is a part of healthcare, of course, and suffers from the same set of problems. I'm not entirely sure how insurance corporations, which are legally obligated to seek the highest return on investment to shareholders, are the best instrument for providing the best healthcare to those they cover. If I need a test which is expensive, insurance companies must perform some strange calculus to determine whether it is better to let me have the test or to add some profit to their bottom-line. Given the legal obligation to add profits, one cannot entirely blame them for choosing the latter. Insurance companies are not evil; they are simply a construct of the business world applied to the medical world.

But this does, of course, have impact on mental healthcare. Go check your benefits; you are likely to see that they will cover short-course, or 'brief' strategic therapeutic help. You shall have a limited number of sessions in which to deal with your mental health issue before coverage is up and you're on your own. Brief, strategic, targeted therapy or counseling sounds great, only some mental health problems are anything but brief with identifiable targets.

Substance-abuse is the perfect example. The most proximate goal of substance-abuse treatment is to reduce, or preferably eliminate use of a substance or substances. Detoxification, and short-course therapy, is usually covered under an insurance plan. However, substance-abuse is, by definition, a chronic relapsing disease. If people didn't use a substance in spite of negative consequences, substance-abuse would not be a concern. In fact, people would get better on their own, as the negative consequences of use, abuse and dependence mounted.

Substance-abuse is also simply the most overt symptom of a constellation of related psychological, social and other issues. Underneath it are issues of self-esteem, stress, family and other relationships, social and cultural mores, etc. Unless these are also addressed, a problem which takes time and effort, there is likely to be an eventual relapse or some other flaring into different symptoms.

That is with insurance, and to have health insurance, someone in the (legally-defined) family needs either an employer who can provide it or the financial resources to pay for insurance. Without insurance, an individual is left with state-run plans. In this case, poverty is a requirement. This means folks who do not have a full-time job including benefits - folks who work multiple part-time jobs, for example - must make so little money that the government is willing to pay for them. In such situations, it actually pays not to have a job in order to have medical, including mental health, coverage. Given the increasing reliance of companies upon part-time employees, so as to avoid the rising cost of providing health insurance (again, not because any given company is evil per se, but because that company is legally-obligated to seek the highest return to investment for its shareholders; or, in the case of small businesses, simply because the business cannot afford to cover the benefits that accrue with full-time employment), this is an increasing problem as well.

So if you have an illness - mental or not - it is better not to work in order to receive government benefits. One of the ongoing questions of my clients during my tenure has been: is finding a job worth it? What impact will work have on my benefits? Will I still be able to collect social security payments, access food-stamps, utilize housing programs, retain Medicaid health insurance? Given that my clients are 99%, poor, uneducated (high school or below), and unskilled, the answer is almost always a resounding "No."

Reagan, long ago, spoke about so-called "Welfare Queens." What he did not actually understand is that in my clients' situation, the rational economic consideration is to remain unemployed, as the resources to move out of poverty disappear beyond a certain point. There is poor, and then there is working poor, and then there is the very bottom rung of what you and I would call 'middle class'; rationally, for any given individual, it is better to remain poor until and unless one can jump to lower middle class than to become part of the working poor.

In fact, the only reason why clients such as those I have had should seek employment is to fulfill non-rational goals, such as an increased sense of self-esteem and self-efficacy. My clients have almost universally described employment as a goal for these reasons. Something we working people often forget until we are out of work is the array of non-rational and emotional securities that working provides. As I, myself, have become burnt-out from this job, I too forgot this. I feel shameful for doing so. Many, many people would be happy to have the job which I have, especially given current economic conditions, while I have spoken only ill of the job. Actually, I've been lucky to have it.

Of course, poverty does not decrease the desire for financial well-being, and social services provided by the government cannot, do not, and are not intended to fill that need. When you cannot become employed (or you lose your benefits), and the social welfare benefits you receive do not fulfill your needs, to what can you turn? Essentially, three options:

One can beg, or 'panhandle.' This is intensely degrading, and does not offer much financial return.

One can work 'under the table', for cash. Such opportunities do, sometimes, exist; though in areas of concentrated poverty (i.e., Hartford, Connecticut), it is usually more difficult to find someone with money who can offer such employment.

Or there is crime. One can steal, which carries a specific risk, but - for the morally conscious - is also degrading to one's sense of self. Or one can get involved in the production, distribution and sale of illicit substances: drugs. This is less degrading to one's sense of self. In fact, it is simply a black-market business carrying both increased risks (prison, murder by a rival outfit, etc) as well as increased reward. There is plenty of money to be made in the drug business for those with the right sort of business acumen suited to such an industry.

Given all of these circumstances, it is no wonder that any individual would seek to continue receiving welfare and turn to a life of crime, most especially drugs. The cruel circumstances of poverty, and the lack of supports as one transitions out of poverty, make the rational individual choose such a life.

Now add mental illness to the mix.

In 1963, the Federal government passed the Community Mental Health Act. The idea: get the mentally ill out of state-run psychiatric facilities - places straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - and into the community, and treat them there. Let psychiatrists in the community provide psychiatric services; let social workers in the community help them to find stable housing, employment, etc and connect individuals with other social supports; let counselors and therapists provide ongoing treatments; let patients reconnect with their families, perhaps even live with them; let patients adapt to society and - not mentioned at the time - societies adapt to the mentally ill. Let newly-created Local Mental Health Authorities (LMHAs) provide all of these services through Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs).

A wonderfully well-intentioned idea that went horribly wrong. Now sanctioned to shut down expensive state-run hospitals and trim their budgets accordingly, states did precisely this without getting community mental health centers up to speed. Patients left the hospitals without adequate supports for living in the community, and communities were left without preparation to handle such a sudden influx of individuals with chronic mental problems and everything that went with them. Families suddenly had to care for sick individuals who sometimes needed 'round-the-clock care on top of the increased financial burden of an additional member of the household who, perhaps because of the severity of their illness (or the nature of their medication -- see below) could not add to the household income.

Mental illness is tricky; it is not something fixed by anodyne bromides. Talk to an individual who has successfully recovered from mental illness, and they are likely to talk about a variety of conditions and responsibilities which allow them to live with their conditions: medication, talk therapy, proper diet, exercise and sleep, a positive social milieu, etc. The constellation of factors which create success is often built up over a long period of experimentation, with frequent 'relapse' (or 'decompensation') a prevailing characteristic of this learning period. Each of these factors is different for different individuals; there is no single solution.

Most medication for severe mental illness comes with a long list of side-effects and contraindications. Thorazine and Haloperidol, for example, are notorious for reducing individuals to near catatonia. Thought and movement are slowed down so much that the experience is a living hell. Some medications cause tardive dyskinesia, a series of physical tics that appear like Parkinson's and are just as non-reversible. Akathesia - the inability to stay still - is another problem, as individuals are simply unable to remain in one place. Obesity is nearly always a concern, as most medications cause significant weight gain; and along with obesity come diabetes and cardio-vascular diseases. One medication, clozapine, carries the danger of agranulocytosis, which is potentially fatal.

Given the severity of these side-effects - as well as the fact that in many cases, the medications do not work, or only reduce symptoms to some degree without alleviating them entirely - is it any wonder that the mentally ill do not want to take them?

Many people - including several clients - watch a movie like A Beautiful Mind, and wonder about dealing with mental illness without medications. While I would applaud John Nash for his recovery, as well as raising questions about antipsychotic medications, I have seen this as a danger for many clients. Delusions are a priori fixed, false beliefs. You know something is a certain way before you look at any evidence. One client I had believed the NSA were tracking him with sattelites; no amount of rational argument or evidence could convince him otherwise; just as with all conspiracy theories, evidence that the theory is wrong is proof that the conspiracy is covering up the truth. Given this, it is hard for a delusional person not to act or react to their delusion. It is, after all, more real to them than what you and I call reality. Medications, can (and I stress 'can', and not 'do') help to reduce the potency of delusions. So in deciding with a doctor whether or not to take a medication, I think it's important to weigh the side-effects of the medication versus the benefit of not having to wear tinfoil to stop Major League Baseball tracking you through dental implants.

So I find it no large surprise that mentally ill individuals would not want to take medications. The side effects are too painful and the benefits too minimal for the drugs to seem in any way useful. At the same time, lacking the (minimal) anchor that the drugs might provide, a mentally ill individual is likely to forget to pay bills, go to work, make appointments, clean his or her home, shower, etc. The illness becomes all consuming.

And illicit substances become appealing. I could not tell you why illicit substances, many of which exacerbate symptoms of mental illness, should be so appealing to those with mental illness. In the case of marijuana, there is some evidence that the chemical cannabidiol acts as an anti-psychotic (it's mechanism of action still unknown); however, the active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is known to produce psychotic symptomology itself. Mentally ill individuals may smoke pot because the cannabidiol helps to alleviate symptoms of mental illness, but the varying ratio of cannabidiol to THC makes any single joint a crap-shoot.

As for cocaine, especially in the form of crack, the substance can only exacerbate mental illness to a large degree; however, since the drug overloads the brain's reward circuitry to such a high degree, any given individual is likely to feel compelled to use more whether they like it or not. As for alcohol, we still barely understand how it affects the brain of those without mental illness.

The only drug, actually, which I have seen reduce symptoms of mental illness is nicotine, perhaps the most deadly and addictive drug in existence. ALL clients that I have worked with have been smokers, usually heavy smokers if not chain-smokers. In one case, I could visually see a client with severe mental illness calm down and become more settled as he smoked.

All of these things create the image of the crazy homeless man which has become an accepted part of the urban landscape, a trope of it if you will. Unclean, raving about sattelites following him, probably smelling of alcohol or the peculiar "burnt plastic" smell of crack cocaine, begging for change. Or the crack-whore, an unattractive woman in hideous clothing too small for her body, bitter, nasty, reminding you in some not-so-small way of a rabid rodent in human form...

These were my clients.

I do not mean to deride them by my description. I am not entirely willing to accept that their fate is the outcome of their decisions, just as I am not entirely willing to blame the rest of us for creating them. Since I am not the severely mentally-ill, I cannot speak to their willingness or responsibility to effect a recovery and 'join society'; I can, however, speak to the various obstacles we put in their way.

The mental health system, to put it bluntly, is overwhelmed, underfunded, undertrained, and designed seemingly to obfuscate. It is not designed to move people from illness to health, but simply to move people. Perhaps the clearest example I can give of this is that of an obese diabetic alcoholic with some variety of schizophrenia. Through the program for which I worked, she was able to stabilize symptoms of her mental illness, develop social skills necessary for leading a good and decent life, navigate the medical and mental health systems with some competence, and to obtain a few precious months of sobriety.

The local CMHC, using state-funding, moved her into a third-floor apartment above a liquor-store that could be reached only by stairs. This was not a move designed to place her in housing that supported her continued recovery; this was a move designed to add a tic-mark in the agency's "success" column. Numbers do lie: just because her level-of-care dropped does not mean that she is on the road to no-level-of-care. Given those circumstances, it is a matter of time before she is once again utilizing more and more supports - and the state's resources, and more of the taxpayer's money.

Politics - and therefore government - is about the short-term, however. Lower taxes for my term in office, and let the next guy worry about the budget deficit I create. Democratic governments, as a rule, do not invest in long-term projects without being able to present some evidence to their electorate of benefit, the more immediate the benefit the better. Given that the poor and disenfranchised are less likely to donate to your campaign - and that the working poor, saddled with multiple jobs and responsibilities, are even less likely to donate or even vote - government is not likely to address issues important to such communities. When you're mentally ill and poor, forget about it.

The government and its agencies are therefore likely to look for programs that provide immediate 'results' that can be shown to an electorate that is, after all, not entirely selfish: we want to do something for poor people, even if we put our own needs first. Those programs must not only be 'effective' on paper, but should be as low-cost as possible, else the electorate shall accuse the government of wasteful spending.

The criminal justice system is a good example. It is easier to warehouse criminals in prisons than to provide rehabilitation and the necessary community development to reduce recidivism. The electorate responds well to the idea of locking up prisoners and throwing away the key; it is easier to politically justify the expense of building more prisons than finding ways to make productive members of society out of criminals. Mental health works in a similar fashion.

For a state, the most cost-effective way to deal with the problem of mental health for poor individuals is Medicaid. Medicaid is a program whereby the federal government provides matching funds to the states to provide medical care for poor individuals. The Fed pays half, the state pays half, and poor individuals are provided with a (very) minimal level of medical attention.

Given the constellation of additional issues that go along with mental health, however, and the fact that the Fed only pays out for certain treatments (usually those that have known courses of treatment with known outcomes, just as insurance companies are only like to pay for such), states are in a bit of a bind when it comes to illnesses of a chronic relapsing nature, such as mental illness and substance-abuse, or those which require an indeterminate amount of time to treat, such as mental illness and substance-abuse.

Tucked away in the Medicaid legislation is something known as 'Medicaid Rehabilitation Option', or MRO. MRO allows the states to receiving matching funds from the Fed for certain courses of treatment, such as a group-home for people with mental illness and substance-abuse problems to receive housing, food, and some treatment services. This is the piece of legislation that allows for the group-home in which I worked.

Of course, the state is still under pressure to keep costs to a minimum. The Fed may foot half the bill, but the state is responsible for the other half, and both governments want things to run as cheaply as possible.

The solution: contract out to local agencies to provide these services. Find the agency able to provide the best service at the cheapest cost. Use the strength of market capitalism, in other words, which is to find the best product at the cheapest cost. The types of agencies which usually provide such services may be non-profit agencies; never-the-less, they are looking to utilize the money they earn to provide additional services through additional programs. A non-profit, though less driven by the profit motive, is never-the-less driven by profit motive. The program in which I worked, for instance, loses money routinely; the deficit is made up by other programs of the agency, while the program in which I worked provides a service to the state and the community and allows the agency to demonstrate competence in handling such an assignment.

Keeping costs down is never-the-less incredibly important; that means the physical plant - the 'house' part of the group-home - needs to be cheap. Cheap, in Hartford, means "in a bad neighborhood." The group home is situated in an area of Hartford that - while not absolutely horrible - is known for drug activity, petty theft, and rape. For all of the clients, recovering as they are from substance-abuse, the drug activity constitutes the most prevalent environmental concern, while for female clients the rape is a strong concern as well. Various clients have commented on the difficulty of recovering from drug abuse when it is possible to walk across the street (literally) and score crack.

It also means that employee salaries must be sufficiently low. Although I would be grateful to have had a higher salary, it is the side-effects of low pay on services that concerns me more. Low pay, for example, means a higher turnover rate of employees. If there is an opportunity to earn more, an individual is more likely to consider it. This was a part of my own decision to leave: I could seek further education in order to earn a higher salary, as well as pursue advancement of my career, for which a graduate degree is necessary. A higher turnover is problematic when dealing with mental illnesses, as stability and structure are usually necessary components of recovery, and relationships with counselors have a high turnover as well - one is always starting new relationships with people, and never able to benefit from more long-term continuity of care with a single person.

It also means that people with little to no interest in mental health and/or substance abuse are likely to take the job. It is, for them, simply a way to pay the bills, and they have no personal investment in job-performance or their clients. I left a training early yesterday, when individuals with which I was partnered chose to ignore the exercise we were given in favor of making sarcastic and nasty comments about their clients. They did not want to be there; they did not want to know how they might perform their jobs better; they just needed a paycheck.

Low-pay comes with something else, and that is low education and training. Most individuals working in my program are in school, but in unrelated fields. They lack practical or even theoretical background in severe mental illness or substance abuse (unless they have dealt with such issues in their personal lives; however, such experience is very much different from formal training). Though the agency for which I work seeks to educate its employees as much as possible - for example, through the training I received yesterday - it nevertheless runs up against the fact that it can only provide brief trainings; and such training means nothing to someone who simply doesn't care.

This means that the interventions we as counselors provide to our clients is suboptimal. Though we provide, in the eyes of the state mental health agency, some of the best services throughout the state, I cannot help but observe that our work falls far below the current standards in the field. That isn't because we, as staff, are not driven, inventive, compassionate hard-workers; it is simply because we don't have the training and tools to perform the job well.

Low pay also makes us expendable. We can be replaced. That factor makes organizing for better pay, better training, better anything, much less likely. I mentioned that I suffer right now from burn-out as a result of this job; I believe, actually, that all of my co-workers suffer from some degree of burn-out as well. I have felt that an enormous burden has been placed upon me not by the clients with which I have worked, but by the agency and the state. I am required, for example, to obtain a certain minimal number of contact-hours with a client over a given month, or the agency is not payed for services rendered. However, in some cases - many cases, actually - clients have not wanted to meet with me, or indeed any other individual on the staff. I cannot force a person to talk with me about their substance-abuse problem; yet if I do not achieve that minimal number of hours, I receive official reprimand. I am punished for someone else's decisions: what better way to create a feeling of impotence, and thus burn-out?

Burn-out, I know, is best treated by time off, allowing an individual to regain perspective, composure, optimism and compassion. When you work with mental illness and the people who suffer from it, it is necessary to have the time and resources to maintain your own mental health. But when you are a mental health paraprofessional, such as I was, time and resources are scarce, and because you have no organized recourse to demanding better pay or more time off, the chances of burn-out increase. Add to that the fact that my own position was shift-work, and you can add problems of getting adequate sleep some nights, and a general disconnect with the rest of the world working the 9-5, Monday through Friday schedule. You become further disconnected with your family and friends simply because of the hours you work, and these supports for your own mental well-being lose some of their strength.

Burn-out, seems to me, is pretty much par for the course in mental health. My clients' clinicians usually seem to have some degree of burn-out too, often to a worse degree than I have experienced myself. I've heard Mobile Crisis workers, individuals trained to provide over-the-phone counseling to folks with mental illness, yell at the people they were supposed to help (and no, yelling is not an effective form of therapy, especially to those in crisis). Psychiatrists, too, seem to prescribe medications without consulting their patients, often telling their patients to deal with the side-effects rather than attempt to work with them to find the optimal medication(s) at the optimal dosage. Everyone seems to be working in their own crisis mode, in a panic, at a frantic, unsettled and unsettling pace. The result is a deep, pervading bitterness and cynicism that provides an unattractive backdrop to the field. There are often a few individuals, full of enthusiasm and optimism, who appear to the rest of us incredibly naive: there is no hope. We watch and wait for their cheer to die an agonizing death with obvious schadenfreude.

Worst of all, however, and the largest problem with which I have grappled over the course of the past year and a half in this job, has been the utter hopelessness of my clients. They seem to have no hope for the future, no interest in recovery, no desire to do what they can to improve their lives. I don't blame them: in their shoes, I would feel the same way. There is no point in finishing their education, seeking employment, addressing their symptoms... none seem like objectives which would significantly alter their lot in life. They have become 'institutionalized', used to saying whatever people in authority think they should say in order simply to get those people off their backs, whether they be police, judges, social workers, doctors, therapists, counselors, or any other social-service provider, and then doing exactly as they want to do.

This, perhaps more than anything, is the reason I leave the field: I simply do not have the constitution to hold out hope for these people when they cannot do so themselves, and the reason that I cannot hold out hope for them is that I know they are hopelessly outnumbered in any such struggle. I feel as they do: powerless, the play-thing of forces larger than me. The people who work in this field and manage to avoid burn-out have my respect.

Though, this job has been beneficial in that it has shown me something of the nature of poverty and disenfranchisement, things which I did not understand much before (and about which I very obviously have a great deal to learn). I'm leaving the job in order to go to school to receive the training I need to work at a more systemic level. Recovery is about creating an environment in which natural health is able to take root and flower. Create the environment, and it will happen in its own good time. In order to create that environment, though, the 'System' needs to change, and that requires a certain shift of perspective.

Government's role needs to adjust to a more long-term perspective. We need to be willing to invest in our future, and I believe that we the electorate know this, though we would prefer to ignore it. In the long-run, the costs of ongoing treatment of the symptoms of the mental health problem exceed the cost of changing treatment to the underlying pathology. Investment, now, in better treatment, now, means less treatment - and therefore less cost - in the future.

For one, we could require mental-health paraprofessionals to have minimal certification for the job. Certification means that we have an established baseline level of training amongst those working in the field. It helps to weed out individuals who aren't looking to do the job as part of a larger career, people who don't care and are just working for the money. Why invest in training and passing a certification exam if you're not going to use it down the road?

It also creates the incentive for workers to organize, as they cannot be as easily replaced, and to demand better pay and/or benefits - such as enough time-off to be able to cope with burn-out. Better pay necessitates more professionalism: workers have to demonstrate that they are worth the better pay. And professionalism means better interventions provided to clients, who then have a better chance of effecting recovery.

That means additional costs to the government, federal as well as state. It will not be popular with the electorate. But it does mean that over the long-term, hopefully, there are less crazy homeless drug-addicts on the street, reduced crime, and reduced use of other social services. The benefit is distributed in a systemic way, so that no politician can point to the change and point to the benefits; and yet society will be better. That, of course, requires a courageous politician: a politician who works for the benefit of the community, and not the aggrandizement of his or her own ego. In itself, that's a tall order.

Of course, it is only a part of the problem. Also needing to be addressed is the way in which our society helps people out of poverty - provide incentives to people to transition into work, rather than remain in poverty because of the benefits of the social safety net that classification provides. And other issues.

Until these are addressed, though, I will not be the last mental-health worker to quit in frustration at not being able to help his clients to recover from their illnesses.

Fuck You Day

2008-06-09T08:18:00.002-04:00

It was eight years ago today that I was paralyzed.

Eight years. A lot has happened, in those eight years; a great deal of growing up was done. Five of those years were some of the hardest living I've ever done, some near-constant struggle for sanity amidst a hell of a lot of seductive madness - to most of which, I gave in, because I'm not as morally strong as everybody seems to think I am. I seem a decent guy, but I'm a right fucker and I know that.

I didn't know that then. Or didn't want to know that then. Doesn't matter - I was a right fucker and pretended I wasn't, and that's pretty sick.

But last night as I was falling asleep I prayed for something for which I haven't prayed in a long, long time: for health. I prayed to be healthy again, to have at least the mobility I used to have, even if I cannot get back the sensation. I want to be done with physical therapists and doctors, Western or Chinese, with orthotics and prosthetics, with scalpels and blood and calluses and the pain - the never-ending pain.

I don't mean the emotional pain. Emotional pain is easy; I can handle that. Three years ago I broke, and when that happened I unleashed a tidal wave of emotional-type pain. I made it through that, so I know I can handle it. I've been given the tools to handle that sort of thing. I'm mentally and spiritually prepared for that kind of awful.

No, I mean the physical pain. I mean waking up to hurt first thing in the morning, going to bed with hurt the last thing on my mind, waking in the middle of the night to some kind of obnoxious hurt that will not let me rest.

I tell myself: this is the price you pay for the fun you had. This is the price you pay for the way it felt, then, to escape. You pay for what you did, and if you know what's good for you you'll find a way to turn that hurt to some good use. You'll use the pain to help somebody else avoid the mess you got yourself in. That's the good you can do, that's how you can give the whole fucking ordeal enough meaning to make it alright.

But it doesn't seem to help much, because I still end up falling asleep, every year, dreaming about waking up to it being gone, waking up and finding out that the past 8 years were all some shadowy morality play in my dreams that night, long ago, in India.

I try to make deals with God, promise Him the life I'm already supposed to have given Him in exchange for health. I dream about going back to India with tears streaming down my face in thanksgiving. I'd give almost anything - maybe anything - to have it back.

I wonder what sort of devil I would be willing to cut deals with in order to make it come true, and grow afraid I may have already done so and lost it all, unwittingly.

I wish... I wish it were all over. I wish this stupid fucking anniversary stopped popping up, waylaying my mind for one day of the year, and reducing me to this sniveling pathetic piece of shit.

Fuck you, June 9th. Fuck you.

At Home in the Madhouse

2008-04-03T09:56:00.002-04:00

I started my new job last week.

I now work in a group home for substance-abusing individuals with co-occurring mental disorders. The overwhelming majority of them have schizophrenia, along with depression and post-traumatic stress - I have yet to see any bipolars, but I know that they are out there.

I love it. I've learned an amazing amount in a short period of time, and I've been able to actually use all the skills I've accumulated and learned in the past to be able to help someone, and been fortunate enough - alhamdulillah - to be given the chance to see the results of my work, how well they have turned out.

The first thing I noticed working there, though, was simply how terrified I was, am, at chaos. Meaning: I'm not so much scared by mental illness itself, as when it manifests in a chaotic, disorganized, non-sensical manner. I can handle disorders of mood, I can understand paranoia. What I can make neither heads nor tail of is, well, gibberish.

I have one client who, more than the others, exhibits the classical schizophrenic symptoms of disorganized speech, and who suffers either from a degree of social anxiety, or else is suffering tremendously from the akithisia which is a side-effect of all the medications he is on, because he finds it enormously difficult to sit still.

In certain ways, he frightens me more than the others. It isn't that his illness is 'graver' than the others, because in all likelihood I doubt it is. I think there is also a great deal of intelligence just below the surface. It's more the surface itself, its chaos, disorganization, gibberish. I don't know how to act or react or interpret and understand what is going on. I have a hard time... well, reading his mind.

We all read each other's minds all the time. We may attention to a thousand small little cues in behavior and speech - both content and affect - which allows us to perform that singularly human and incredibly powerful act of placing ourselves in one another's shoes. With this client, I cannot do that. I cannot tell what is going on within him. And it terrifies me.

(I am led to understand, though I could be wrong, that this is rather what the autistic experience is like, which only heightens my appreciation for the bravery and perspicacity of autistic individuals)

Lacking knowledge of what else to do, I took this client out yesterday to get some coffee and play chess. As it turns out, we were pretty evenly matched at chess, though I beat him; that itself was a mistake, though, since I think he may be more averse to playing against me again in the future, therefore providing yet another obstacle for me to see how to connect with him. I am supposed to be working with him - with all my clients - on achieving rehabilitation/recovery goals, but I am unclear about how to proceed with this particular client. I am hoping that something, anything, will come along to point the way.

The more I work with all my clients, though, the deeper my appreciation for both their resiliency and bravery as well as the profundity of their illness. Most powerful of all, though, has been a growing understanding and recognition that really, they are not so different from myself, illness and all.

As I've begun looking into severe mental illness and psychosis, I've been pounded with two voices, one of which says that mental illness of this sort is organic and demands both organic - meaning chemical - solution as well as some degree of skills training. It says that the illness has no progressive order or makes any sort of underlying sense. Any view which postulates underlying order is merely imposing such a system from without.

The second set of voices says that there is an underlying order to mental illness of this sort, and that talk-therapy can both find this order and provide a framework for recovery without the need for a chemical solution, which is often a blunt-force-trauma instrument when it comes to attenuating the positive symptoms of psychosis, such as hallucinations and delusions. In fact, this view says, 'mental illness' is, in fact, sanity in a world gone mad.

I'm unconvinced by either voices entirely. My own battle with depression has been enormously aided by chemical solutions. In all likelihood I would not be here, functioning as I am, without the help of chemicals. I don't believe other solutions would, in fact, make a dent in my own problem. Nor am I willing to see my depression as 'sanity' in a world gone mad. Claiming that my suffering is some sort of political and social critique is really attempting to use my suffering to further one's own political and social agenda. Sorry, I am crazy.

Rather, as I learn from my clients as well as other case-study sort of materials, I'm discovering that what they experience is, perhaps, simply a more intense, actualized version of the inner dynamics of all minds; or at least my own. That's why there can be 'drug-induced psychosis' - the drugs do not cause the psychotic material per se, but rather heighten the latent material of the mind.

Which means, to me, the insane are no more, nor less, sane than the rest of us. The capacity for sanity is within them - and the capacity for insanity is within each of us. All it takes is the appropriate stimuli to activate these things.

The good news of this, to my mind, is that it means recovery is possible. These people, all of them, can live happy and healthy and meaningful lives. It requires effort, perhaps medication, and almost undoubtedly sacrifice, but it is possible.

The problem psychosis-prone individuals face, I think, is that we 'sane' people don't want to make the effort, and they do not want to make the sacrifice. Coping with my own mental illness(es) has required that I give up a lot of concepts that I once cherished - the prime example being that I should be able to live medication-free. I have had to accustom myself to the fact that, simply put, it is not my life when I choose to eschew medication, but a life which involves all the people around me. To go off-med is to cause suffering in far too many other people. Side-effects be damned - I have a responsibility to others.

Such sacrifices are rife in mental illness. Giving up paranoia means giving up the idea that one can ever be entirely 'safe'. Giving up delusions means giving up the idea that one is 'special' enough to be chosen by demons or angels. Accepting that one is crazy means accepting a degree of humility that is often hard to swallow.

Simultaneously, though, I think we 'sane' people are all too often eager to avoid working with the mentally-ill in a mutual effort towards greater sanity. Because, really, it is an enormous effort. It is not simply a matter of finding the right pill to cure the symptoms, or sending them off to 12-step meetings and expecting them to be able to cure themselves, but it takes something of us: courage to face the chaos, to overcome fear of being harmed, of treating these individuals as... well, human and sane.

At least, I know that's something with which I struggle.

An Appeal for Help

2008-03-18T16:52:00.006-04:00

I've recently, unwittingly, become embroiled in an out-of-country dispute related to my religious community at large. As mentioned in a previous post, the Harabati Baba Teqe in Tetovo, Macedonia, is under siege by armed Sunni extremists, who want to bull-doze these grounds:

Beautiful, no? Since I came across photos of the place on Google Earth, I've wanted to go and visit. The fact that it is a Bektashi teqe made all the difference, too, as it the buildings belong to my religious community.

But the Sunni Muslim majority in the country want to tear down these buildings and build a 'mega-mosque' on the site instead; something totally unnecessary in a town with 24 mosques already. But Macedonian law recognizes only one religious organization per religious community, and it chooses to recognize the Islamic Community of Macedonia - all Sunni - and not my community, the Shi'i Bektashi.

Never mind the fact that it recognizes Roman Catholics and Macedonian Orthodox, rather than just one 'Christian' community.

My willingness to jump into the fray and do whatever I can to try to save the teqe has pushed me into some sort of ad hoc leadership role in the fight for the teqe. Some friends have been requesting the chance to bring Alevi supporters down from Germany to physically throw the Sunni invaders out of the teqe, but I have been trying to insist on a more Gandhian approach. Most of the invaders are young, poor, unemployed ethnic-minority Albanians - people without power, looking for people with less power to bully around, in an attempt to feel big about themselves. They're just puppets, really, of the Islamic Community of Macedonia in their bid to gain unfettered control over the entire Muslim community in Macedonia.

Meanwhile, the Slavic, Christian Macedonian majority is unwilling to interfere. Of course not: this is a squabble between Albanians and Albanians, Muslims and Muslims - the minority fighting with itself, leaving the majority to consolidate it's power.

The international community is no more open to helping. With the legal situation in limbo, journalists have no interest in it. Macedonia's relative stability by comparison with the rest of the Balkans has earned it favorable reports from the U.S. and E.U., and the country will likely reap the reward of NATO membership early next month. The U.S. Ambassador has, meanwhile, diplomatically refused to meet with the Bektashi community spokespeople - a shameful shunning on her part.

All of which leaves my little community with no real friends. I am trying to generate an interest in the Alevi diaspora community, as they share many features of Bektashi belief and are likewise shunned by the Muslim majorities, but running into a language barrier. I am remiss to appeal to traditional Twelver Shi'a in the United States, Iran, Lebanon or the like out of fear that doing so will either replace armed Sunnis with armed Shi'a, or that it will result in a violent confrontation. The Bektashi community appears to have asked that a non-violent solution be found, and I am in total agreement with them on this. The invaders may take our teqe, but we are refusing to let them take our honor.

They do seem to be taking our hope from us, though. Apart from my Macedonian counterpart and I, we seem to be poor on pure gumption.

So... I guess I'm turning here for some help, as well. I know that there may be a few Quakerly types who read this blog; can I appeal to that of God in you to lend a hand? We do not ask much: we are trying to organize an appeal to an authority, any authority that will listen, and all we are asking for that authority to do is to help us get our teqe back, and pressure the Macedonian government to grant us our autonomy as a religious sect.

It's weird; I've never been much for political activism. Yet here I am.

Sunni Extremists Besieging Macedonian Religious Heritage Site

2008-03-12T19:36:00.008-04:00

On August 15th 2002, and group of Sunni extremists besieged the Harabati Baba Tekke, a traditionally Bektashi Sufi lodge. In spite of documentation attesting to their ownership of the lodge, the Macedonian Bektashi community is locked in a legal struggle to maintain their right to the tekke. More recently, the extremists have laid claim to more of the lodge, and have begun firing their weapons inside the tekke grounds.

If you are an American citizen, we the worldwide Bektashi community ask that you please write to your congressmen in both the House as well as the Senate, to express your strenuous objection to such a gross violation of religious freedom.

You can write to your representative, and your senators . You may also wish to write the Department of State, or just plain ol' President Bush, or Vice President Cheney. You might also try using FaxZero.com to send up to two free faxes a day to your congressional representatives, the Albanian American Civic League (914-762-5102), or others. I recommend that you state the following in your fax:

"I write to you in strenuous protest of invasion of the Harabati tekke in Tetovo, Macedonia by armed Sunni extremists, and ask you to call upon the U.S., E.U., and U.N. authorities in Skopje, who monitor terrorist threats in the Balkans, to pressure the Macedonian government for the immediate removal of the extremists from the Harabati tekke, by legal force if necessary, and protect the tekke from further interference.

The extremists are currently besieging the Sufi dervishes inside the compound, have threatened or intimidated visitors, and have been discharging their weapons around the compound. I feel this is unacceptable, and ask you to address the issue immediately.

Naim Frasheri, poet-laureate of the Albanian national cause and Bektashi Muslim himself, said of us: "Let them be peaceable, let them remember the poor, let them shun evil and folly, let them cast into the Way all works that are needful for mankind and for religion, and let them forward all things good. Together with the chiefs and notables let them encourage love, brotherhood, unity, and friendship among all Albanians: let not the Muslims be divided from the Christians, and the Christians from the Muslims, but let both work together. Let them strain towards enlightenment, that the Albanian, who was once reputed together throughout the world, be not despised today."

Our brothers in Macedonia have been seeking recognition from the government since 1993, to no avail; we ask you to help us in calling upon the United States government, the European Union, and the United Nations to press the Macedonian government to recognize our religious freedom, and restore to us our Sufi lodge."

Also, please write an email to the United States Embassy in Macedonia.

If you are a European - or just plain outraged - you can also write to the EU Mission in Skopje and voice an objection about Macedonia's prospective entry to the EU while this matter goes on. Brits, please email Andrew Key, the British Ambassador to Macedonia and voice your complaint.

Within Macedonia, you might try the president, Branko Crvenkovski, or his ruling party, the VMRO-DPMNE, or the Macedonian mission to the United Nations. You can also try Arben Xhaferi, former head of one of the major ethnic-Albanian political parties in the country, or Menduh Thaqi, current head of one of the major ethnic-Albanian political parties in the country.

Human Rights Watch might want to know about it, and the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, and the International Association for Religious Freedom, who consult with the UN.

Finally, if you have any contacts with media outlets, please let them know.

You may wish to use the following when you write to these individuals and agencies (included in some of the mailto links above):

"I write to you in strenuous protest of invasion of the Harabati tekke in Tetovo, Macedonia by armed Sunni extremists, and ask you to call upon the U.S., E.U., and U.N. authorities in Skopje, who monitor terrorist threats in the Balkans, to pressure the Macedonian government for the immediate removal of the extremists from the Harabati tekke, by legal force if necessary, and protect the tekke from further interference.

The extremists are currently besieging the Sufi dervishes inside the compound, have threatened or intimidated visitors, and have been discharging their weapons around the compound. I feel this is unacceptable, and ask you to address the issue immediately."

And finally, all prayers are, of course welcome, especially for our beloved brothers who are being harassed.

Ashk Olsun.

Theologie Gastronomique

2008-02-08T12:42:00.000-05:00

Karen Armstrong once said that good theology should be like poetry. It's a fine analogy: both are, or at least should be, used to describe qualities which are beyond empirically quantifiable measures. There is nothing dryly 'scientific' in good poetry. It has a numinous aesthetic. And an appropriate theology should likewise reveal a numinous aesthetic.

That said, I am perhaps more amenable to science than she is. That is to say, I think good science has a numinous aesthetic all of its own. Mathematicians will tell you that an explanatory equation that isn't 'elegant' is probably wrong, which I think betrays the fact that even in a field such as mathematics the human need for beauty is present. Personally, when I read about, say, the functioning of the brain I find in myself a sense of awe and wonder at the contraption by which I apprehend the universe. There are more synaptic connections in our brains, for example, than there are stars in our galaxy: if that thought doesn't produce in you a sense of the mysterium terrible et fascinans then I'm not sure what will. Certainly not direct revelation of God.

Therefore, I would propose that instead of good theology being 'like poetry', that good theology is like cooking.

I'm biased in this proposition - I like to cook. I haven't a creative bone in my body unless I'm in the kitchen. Everywhere else I stand on the shoulders of giants to glimpse the Ineffable, but in the kitchen I stand between their legs: not as great as any, but at least standing on my own.

Good cooking, to my mind, is predicated upon three things: science, craft, and art.

To cook - to cook well, that is - one needs to know what one is doing. Why does grilled food possess a flavor unique to it, and therefore different from, say, boiling it? Well, the answer is in the science. Grilling causes the Maillard reaction, an interaction between an amino acid and sugars capable of being reduced to an aldehyde or ketone. A chemical reaction between these two in a relatively anhydrous, hot environment produces a variety of molecules responsible for odors and flavors, all of which are dependent upon and characteristic of the food being grilled. Additionally, you have molecules from the grilling materials (charcoal, for example) which adhere to the grilled material producing additional flavors and interacting with those produced on the grilled material by the Maillard reaction.

Boiling, because it occurs in a hydrous environment (amongst other factors), does not produce the same chemicals responsible for odors and flavors associated with grilling.

Of course, you don't need to know exactly what's occurring when you grill versus boil in order to grill or boil a food. Most cooks don't, they just know that these two methods produce two different results. Knowing it, though, allows you to understand why you would want to a certain food in a certain way, and that can affect what you do creatively later on. It is the basis, the backbone, of good cooking, and only heightens one's ability to produce good food.

Theology - good theology - similarly needs a strong 'scientific' background. A theology which is not grounded in reality is not a good theology. For example, a theology that denies or minimizes the basic fact of human suffering, that strives to cover it over or evade it, does not work.

It seems to me that all the religions, all of the faiths, have both the good and the bad of these. It is understandable to want to evade the reality that suffering exists, but that does not make it beneficial to do so. "God wants it so", "It is their karma", "Suffering is inevitable, therefore to act doesn't really change anything": such pat-answers are unacceptable because they are simple and simplistic attempts to avoid a fundamental truth, rather than address it.

Good theology doesn't attempt to avoid reason, empiricism, or science. Science has demonstrated that the Earth is millions upon millions of years old; scripture does not abrogate such an independently-verifiable truth. Sticking fingers in our ears and denying something which can be repeatedly demonstrated does not make it vanish.

Yet, neither - I would say - does science possess the single and sole route to truth. Mathematics may be able to tell us that the construction of a minor chord is dependent upon logarithmically-related sinusoidal waveforms, but that still does not explain why minor chords appear 'sad' to us. There are some things not dreamt of in science's philosophy.

Primarily, however, cooking is craft. It is taking raw materials and transforming them into usable - edible - substances. Craft is a matter of skill and technology, the application of usable science in a skilled manner to create a desired end. In cooking, we grill (technology) to both decrease the likelihood of parasitic or otherwise-pathological contaminants entering our bodies, as well as to produce odorous chemicals which heighten the flavorful nature of the foodstuff.

(An interesting scientific question would be: which came first? The flavor or the safety of the food? Are we drawn to the flavor of cooked foods, or are we drawn to the safety of cooked foods because of a learned or genetic association of 'safe food' with those flavors?)

There is skill involved in the appropriate utilization of cooking technology, because we may apply too much technology, which decreases the bioavailability of the substances we eat in order to metabolize them. There is a world of difference between a well-charred steak and a steak that has been burnt to the point that it is nothing more than charcoal: one tastes good and is nutritious, the other tastes awful and offers little but carbon.

This is a skill, something learned - when cooking steak it is necessary to know how much heat for how long, whether to move the meat (which disrupts charring), the importance of resting the meat so that fluids present are able to re-enter cells and maintain the 'juiciness' of the meat but not resting it so long that it goes cold, etc. We usually learn these techniques in a couple of ways: first, we follow recipes, utilizing the guidelines by which others have produced the food we are trying to produce. Secondly, because no circumstances are ever exactly the same, we discover our own methods through having to make necessary adjustments to differing conditions. Some ovens are hotter than others (no matter what the temperature gauge may say); stovetops can be gas or electric; climatological conditions, including ambient air humidity, can be different in different parts of the world at different altitudes on different days.

Like all skills, we begin making conscious changes based upon conscious observations, but over time we learn to make changes based upon gut-instinct. We flip a steak based upon countless observations of time passed, sounds made, colors apparent in countless like-situations, all of which lead us to act in a certain way at the correct moment now. Craft, skill, becomes ingrained; we are well on our way to becoming a real cook.

Similarly, the absolute vast majority of spiritual life is this sort of training. Usually at first we follow ritual forms, acts and behaviors of which we are highly conscious. Over time, the consciousness of the action begins to slip away; the skill becomes ingrained; we begin to act upon some form of instinct and intuition.

Prayer and meditation are both premier examples of this process; because I have more experience with the latter, allow me to use it to demonstrate.

At first during meditation, we are highly conscious of our actions. We scatter our minds, trying to monitor a number of different variables: am I sitting straight? How is my breathing? Where are my eyes? Am I using a soft-focus? My mind won't shut up! The largest mistake I, and every other meditator I know, makes in the beginning is believing that they must stop their thoughts to 'achieve' meditation. It's only constant practice that begins to teach one that the point isn't to 'stop thought', but simply to observe it without engaging in it.

Over time, with practice, the act of sinking into meditation becomes more automatic, requires less conscious effort. It becomes something closer to second nature, and at this point we begin to learn how to carry that method for experiencing the world into other areas of our lives, which is the point at which, I would say, meditation really begins. This all comes, of course, through repetitive practice. The goal of practice is to practice.

(Very Zen that, isn't it?)

In my experience, all of spiritual life is just that: practice. We practice carrying prayer with us at all times; we practice meditating through dinner; we practice kindness, patience, tolerance and love. The point isn't to get these things right all the time, every time; it's to practice, to develop the skill to be able to carry these around with us more often. There is no 'end' to the spiritual path, only continual practice.

At a certain point, though, we've practiced enough to be able to do new and different things with our skills. This is art. This is also the point to which everybody - and I mean everybody - wants to get. For cooks, it's when you get to be a chef, when you are creating meals entirely on your own, off the top of your head. You're able to combine different foods and techniques in different ways in order to create unique recipes, unique meals, on your own, without anybody else's aid. It's having the ability to go to a market, look at what's there, and begin picking out the ingredients to make a meal that exists nowhere but in the imagination. It's where we become fonts of creativity and beauty; it's where people admire us for the things we can do.

The spiritual life isn't a whole lot different: we want to be able to take the skills we have practiced and apply them in new and creative ways to the dilemmas around us. It is being able to see the unity behind Reality (with the capital 'R'), have boundless compassion, unassailable optimism, a pure sense of humor; to tread lightly, speak with wisdom, become a source of beneficence to all those around us. It is the supreme art of living well.

The trap - for me at least - is thinking that art is the goal, both in cooking and in spirituality. It is not. Every time I make conscious efforts to produce 'artful' cooking I fail miserably; similarly, every time I try to be a 'spiritual artist' (or even artiste, with the fanciful final French 'e'), I end up a right jack-ass trying to be somebody, something, I am not.

Art, in this sense here, is simply a byproduct of the practice of craft. It happens to us maybe 2% of the time, while the other 98% is simply practicing craft. Now and then, purely on a whim, I'll concoct something new in my kitchen - a tomato sauce, a chicken stew, a mushroom soup. I'll come up with the idea in my head, try it out, and I'll have some success in making something new, something tasty, something flavorful and yummy. Almost inevitably, in these circumstances, I won't be able to repeat it. I won't be able to remember quantities, timing, the amount of heat, the proper order. I'll have vague memories of what I did, but... nothing definite, nothing concrete. The next time, it'll be different and, maybe, not as good. Though sometimes, the next attempt to re-create the original will end up better: it's truly hit-and-miss.

Most of the time, though, my efforts are more along the lines of a craft. I'll find a recipe for something I want to try and incorporate a little creativity of my own: a tequila-lime chicken cous cous, a black bean chili, a soy-sauce steak. I'll take a basic recipe as a rough draft and change things here and there to suit my needs; but ultimately, it's not my idea. I'm doing little more than paraphrased plagiarism. I'm OK with that; these sorts of cooking attempts almost invariably end up far better than my attempts at artistry, and I wouldn't call them my own, not really.

Similarly my spirituality. Every now and then I'll do or say something truly loving, truly wise. These seem to happen a great deal less than my 2% of actually-creative cookery, some minuscule little percentage of the time. Those moments occur and I'm blown away by them, amazed, wonder how the hell they happened and how to recreate that more of the time, all of the time; and then I'll try to do such a thing, and fail. Never the less, I don't want to give up trying, because those moments are so incredible to watch unfold.

I don't think that they necessarily happen to anybody all of the time, no matter how 'spiritual'. I prefer to think of those as moments when God picks us as an instrument for His action, and when He has completed acting through us, He no longer uses us. So it's not really a matter of developing our skills to the point where such a thing can happen all the time; it's more that we develop the skills so that when it does happen, it's subtler, more powerful, more effective - like cooking, our dishes become understated, we pile on fewer herbs and spices and restrict ourselves to those that highlight and complement the ones that exist in the meats or vegetables or oils already. Perhaps, as well, we learn something from them, and if we are lucky, can repeat such acts again.

Maybe equating theology to cookery isn't the best analogy. Maybe another, different analogy will make more sense to more people; certainly, people treasure cooking less than I do. Good groceries give me a thrill I don't think others necessarily share. Trying new flavors also gets me excited: certainly I seemed to be the only person thrilled to try artificial bird's nest soft-drink with added white fungus flavor (it was disgusting, by the way, but I'm glad to have tried it).

So make your own analogy. Maybe, for you, spirituality is like painting; music; theatre; sports; chess; skydiving; whatever.

I'm willing to bet, though, that at its core you'll find it's all the same: grounded in reality, a long-term practice with sometimes, though not always, spectacular results.

The View From Halfway Up the Mountain

2008-02-05T18:26:00.000-05:00

A little while ago now, I had a mystical experience. I 'saw' God.

Before I get going, I want to say this: yes, the experience happened on a psychedelic drug. No, I don't really care if that means it wasn't 'real'. I'm not interested in the ontology of the experience, whether it was real or not. I don't know if it was real. Hell, I don't know if the love I feel towards my girlfriend is 'real', but to my mind it's pretty damned useful to talk about it as if it does. It explains things for which I could not otherwise account, so even if it isn't real, I'd go on pretending that it was. That's just the product of chemicals in the brain too, anyway.

So even if you don't think my experience is real, pretend with me for a second.

For me, the more important question is whether it was useful. Just like what I, at least, think is love, the important thing isn't whether it's real, but whether it's useful.

I can say that it meant a hell of a lot to me. I felt an infinite ocean of light and bliss; it seemed like several mysteries of the universe were revealed; it removed a bit of the fear of death so that when I experienced a life-threatening situation a little while later, the memory of the unitive experience was able to calm me down out of hysterics. I feel like I can really understand when people talk about their unitive experiences, about God or the Tao or whatever; it makes sense, because I think I've had an experience of the non-duality they're talking about. I feel like the experience has carried me further in my spiritual journey.

Lately, though, I've been questioning that outlook. It's not just that, after the experience, my spiritual life became a disaster. It did. I began to take drugs more compulsively, looking to recapture the experience. I kind of re-captured it when I did so. The bliss was nowhere near as intense, and the unitive insight definitely wasn't as clear, but the basic themes were the same: we are all One, that One is God, there is meaning and purpose behind life etc, etc. In fact, I became bored with drugs as a result of the fact that I was never really able to repeat the experience. Didn't stop taking them, for quite a while, but definitely got bored with the repetition.

More insidious and dangerous, though, was the pride with which I began to bloat. The experience gave me some insights, sure, but I took those insights to be the end-all and be-all of the spiritual path. I started to think I had the answers – all of them – so that when other people around me raised legitimate spiritual questions, I figured that I already had them answered.

(I just realized I'm saying all this in the past tense, but that's not accurate – I still do most, if not all, of these things)

I also started to think that the insights I had entitled me to something. For example, a few months after having the experience, I was lucky enough to meet the Dalai Lama. Before meeting him, I had visions in my head of him seeing me, of the two of us exchanging laughing, knowing glances, of sharing some sort of 'special connection' with the man. Didn't happen. I spent all of two seconds shaking hands the (I swear) 4'8” fella before I was shunted off with a red cord and he moved down the line of Westerners. Some of the folks around me said that they saw this incredible aura around the guy, that they felt something huge and powerful move through them when he touched them, and I wondered what was wrong with me, why I felt nothing, why I got left out.

So I decided that the folks around me were spiritual bobble-heads who saw auras around anybody. They didn't really understand.

Time passed, and the situation didn't get any better, really. I went to a college that sees regular visits from all sorts of spiritual gurus, masters, lamas, rimpoches, yogis, what-not, and I worked as a sound engineer for these people, running their events from 'back-stage'. Some part of me, I bet, was thinking that they would notice me, and although I have no memory of it I'm sure that I had fantasies of being trotted out by them as their successor, their equal, in terms of my spiritual development.

That experience wasn't all bad, really, because I did notice something about all the gurus, which was the fact that most of them were really pretty simple, ordinary, down-to-earth people. The only noticeable difference between them and 'normal' people was that they seemed more relaxed, like they were enjoying life a bit more than average. They seemed a little happier. But that was about it. Some of them were even a little neurotic, a little bit crazy, a little bit un-guru-like. One – I'll refrain from naming names unless you ask me personally – made a pretty wild demand on me and was unhappy when I wasn't able to fulfill it, which seemed kinda mean-spirited.

I noticed the gurus' followers more so. They seemed patently crazy. They were more likely to make wild demands, and would throw temper-tantrums when I either couldn't or wouldn't fulfill them (I'm not about to allow fire in my space, especially when I have only two staff for 500 people in a 350-capacity building). I remember – distinctly – not wanting to be like those nut-jobs. I felt more in common with the gurus than I did with their disciples. By far.

Of course, I chalked that up to my mystical experience, my magic jewel that changed everything.

As time passed, I began a slow descent spiritually, socially, emotionally, morally. More and more – and more and more and more – I began to see myself as separate from, and better than, the people around me. As I did, I also felt increasingly lonely, because of course I had no equals. I got bored more easily, much more easily, because of course I already knew everything that was important to know in the first place. I got more and more frustrated with other people, especially when they wouldn't pay attention to my (entirely reasonable and perfectly sensible) advice. Didn't they understand how right I was? If only these people would do what I told them to do, everything would be fine!

Whatever joy, delight, wonder and compassion I had within began to flicker out. I started to go to bed at night with an unstated prayer that I wouldn't wake up, and a curse when I did. I snapped at people, I flew into uncontrolled and unprovoked rages and would come out of them wondering what the hell had just happened, only to bury the entire thing in a cloud of denial and misunderstanding.

All of this ended eventually. My life fell apart completely, and when one final piece gave way it was like the veil had been lifted and I saw what an absolute mess everything was, how horrendously I had destroyed my own life and, to some degree or another, bits and pieces of the lives of those around me.

I've been rebuilding, on a firmer foundation, ever since.

Well, I don't like the re-building metaphor; it's more like I'm squatting where there used to be some money-pit mansion I tried to build myself that collapsed, and instead now I'm sort of stewarding the land, letting whatever nature was there before reclaim it and helping it along by picking up the detritus of what's left and disposing of it properly. I'm trying to leave a smaller footprint now.

One of the pieces of that old life that I've left is the mystical experience. I've been loathe to pull it up because it meant so much to me, and it reminds me of God, the God that has made this entire new life possible. But I'm beginning to think it's time to uproot that experience once and for all.

The reason I value that experience – really the reason why – is that it felt good. I dare anyone to have the same feeling of infinite bliss that I did and not value it immensely, not think and try with all their might to recreate it, not to think “This is it! This is how I want – no, should – feel all the time.” But just because something feels good doesn't make it meaningful and valuable. Crack cocaine, heroin: by all accounts they feel really damned good, but that doesn't mean they are positive, beneficial experiences, it doesn't mean that we should feel that way all the time (or even any of the time). Trying to recreate the experience of crack cocaine or heroin, also, is seriously detrimental one's wellbeing, as well as the wellbeing of those around us, so why should a mystical experience be any different? Just because it is mystical? Just because in that moment we feel closer to God than we might at some other moment?

More-over, I've since found that some of my more valuable life experiences to be ones of pain. One of the things I lost in my downward spiral was a woman that I loved, truly and deeply loved. Losing that love – undoubtedly one of, if not the most, painful experiences I've had – has been vastly more useful because it broke me out of the spiral and started me on a newer, slower ascent. Not being able to rebuild my life afterwards has been horribly painful, but has forced me to relate to living differently, to value different things. I try to concentrate on process now, instead of results: live well, rather than have [possess] a good life.

I don't mean to imply, and hope you don't take me to mean, that pain is good. It isn't. I've had people tell me this, and all I can think in response is “... then you haven't really hurt before, have you?” I know why people say these things: they're scared of hurt, they want it to have some inherent meaning behind it because they can't stand the absurdity of suffering so they need to give it some sort of 'positive' spin. Believe me, I've done it myself, and still do it, though I'm trying my damnedest to outgrow the habit. I'm just saying that, looking back, I've gotten a lot more out of my painful experiences than I have out of the blissful ones.

Moreover, the mystical experience has created spiritual pride in me, which horrible: from what I understand, spiritual pride is one of the more difficult things of which to rid oneself. Like I mentioned, because of this mystical experience I've thought I was on par with a lot of spiritual masters. I've thought that I deserved other people listening to what I have to say on spiritual matters. I've thought I'm better than other people. Since my life is such a mess, though, and since I still lie and still cheat people of things I don't need but which they do, amongst many manifold other sins, I'm obviously no great master.

But then, neither are the masters. I'm inclined to trust my experience of them, the fact that they seemed so normal and average and not-at-all special. I'm especially inclined to trust one of the experiences where I felt that one of them was rude to me. I don't buy that 'gurus' are on some plane above us, necessarily more in tune with God or whatever. I don't believe for a second that they have gotten rid of their egos; at best, I think they've learned to live with their egos. I think they still make plenty of mistakes and do plenty of things wrongly; but maybe they've gotten past some of the grosser errors, maybe they're a little more familiar with their sinful natures, maybe they've even befriended some of their demons. Maybe, like Ram Dass said, they've become 'connoisseurs of [their] neuroses'.

So why follow them? Well, I dunno about you, but I'm no connoisseur of my neuroses. Yeah, I've gotten to know some of them pretty well, and I've learned to laugh at my own depravity a bit more and therefore take more compassion on this delicate little sinner I am, but I certainly wouldn't pretend to be familiar with my grosser defects of character, or – dare I say it – love them in spite of the pain they cause. I'm deathly afraid of my anger, my pride hurts my self-esteem, and I still bang on the prison-bars of neurotic fear, whining about when I'm going to be free even when the door is wide open. So I've still got something to learn from my elders.

What eats me up most about my spiritual pride, though, is that it has cut me off and still cuts me off from other people. My girlfriend, for instance: she's not a believer. Or maybe she is; I can't tell. The entire enterprise, I know, turns her off a lot of the time. My gut instinct with such people is to write them off as 'just not getting it', but I love her and that means I'm stuck with her. Which is a good thing, because she calls me on the bullshit I don't catch, which is to say, all of it. I'm sure she's fuming about something I've said here already, in fact.

Anyway, my spiritual pride definitely cuts me off from her now and then. I'll talk to her like one of the guys I teach, and she'll have to remind me that I'm not a teacher to her (and neither should I be acting like one to my guys). Or, more simply, she thinks that I feel better than her for having the spiritual life that I do, which my gut instinct is to deny but is probably true, and never fails to send me searching for ways that I'm acting out of pride on this level. I figure a really real spiritual person isn't likely to cause that sort of reaction in another. I could be entirely wrong, but I don't doubt I have at least some spiritual pride going on in me, and it can't hurt to hunt around for that to work with it.

The last thing I want is to be cut off from people – a real life, a good life, spiritual or not, should be one of real, deep and loving relationships with others, I would hope. If I'm setting myself apart from a whole lot of other people because I've had some experience that I think sets me apart from them, what's the point in that? It's lonely at the top, being all alone, being 'God'. You have no equals, no one with whom to share yourself.

Looking back, all in all, the experience hasn't been nearly as valuable as I want to believe it has been. So... time to hopefully finally let the damned thing go. I mean, I now want to let it go on some conscious level; whether other parts of my brain are going to let that happen, though, that's another story. I'm pretty sure that's why I was crying in Meeting on Sunday – I knew this moment was coming.

And of course, I'm doing all this because part of me thinks that doing is will earn me some 'spiritual maturity', which sounds rather nice and good to have. Really, I'm just trading one misconception about spirituality for another.

Which shows you just how little I really understand anything.

Guilt for Crying

2008-02-03T13:29:00.000-05:00

In Meeting this morning I burst into tears, and spent most of the Meeting crying.

The husband of the head librarian where I work was diagnosed with leukemia last week. Of the four kinds, his was the most likely to steady, or go into remission. On Friday, though, he contracted a secondary infection; Saturday morning, he died.

I'm not particularly close to my head librarian; I never met her husband. For some reason, though, this news has been hitting me pretty hard and I can't figure out why that is. So this morning, when a gentleman in Meeting shared about the death of a homeless individual and asked us to hold that person in the light, I started to crack. Even though others shared about more 'positive', uplifting topics later, I couldn't keep myself from crying.

Thing is, though: it felt really damned good to cry. And in my head there was some voice saying "Good, good, get in touch with that sadness", because I happen to have an enormously difficult time crying about anything. Like, I couldn't squeeze a tear if you shot my dog in front of me. It's not that I don't want to cry, it's just that I can't do it.

But I felt - feel - guilty as hell for that. Because these are awful circumstances, and there I was, capitalizing on the opportunity to get in touch with my own feelings of sadness. I'd feel worse if I actually did it willingly; the fact that the tears came unbidden helps.

I'm amazed by emotions, really. I don't understand them in the slightest.

A Walk Down Identity Lane

2008-01-24T12:47:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been asking myself questions about identity: can I call myself as 'ashiq of the Bektashi path, even though my connection with the tariqa is just at the beginning? Could I, equally, apply for membership to the Religious Society of Friends and call myself a Quaker, even if my personal beliefs are not traditionally Christian? Would that even be appropriate, or would I be diminishing the value of Friends' Christian heritage and equally diluting my own Bektashi faith? Could I say that "There is one, even Haji Bektash, who can speak to my condition"? Can I bear witness to the Peace testimony while remaining affiliated with the official order of the Jannisaries (even if they dispersed in 1826)?

The question has been reflected in my, er, reflection up a blog post about koans on a 'conservative' Quaker blog, as well as questions raised in Cat Chapin-Bishop's post on what it means to be a Christian in her, er, also Quaker (but from a pagan point-of-view) blog.

In the former, the blog-author questions the utility of words used by other Friends that are outside the purview of Quakerism, especially when terms exist within Quakerism that convey the idea. Can one speak of a 'Christian koan', for instance?

My gut feeling was to jump in with 'Well sure you can', but as I turned the idea over in my head I realized there was a problem. Beyond the idea of co-optation and cultural imperialism that would represent, it's a misuse of the term 'koan', which is deeply embedded in Zen Buddhism and, in fact, represents a particular outgrowth of the pairing of Yogacara and Madhyamika within Zen thinking. Trying to divorce the idea from that background cheapens it, makes it senseless, in the same way that 'meditation for relaxation' is like using a diamond-tipped saw-blade to slice bread. Or...

... New Age pseudoscience. Like: What the Bleep Do We Know?, The Secret, or Masaru Emoto's water crystal 'work', including the idea that Eastern mysticism somehow 'explains' quantum physics, or at least that they draw the same conclusions. To me, this is equally - if not more - insidious than meditation for relaxation; it's backdoor Creation Science, only because it's 'Eastern' and 'mystical', which somehow makes it OK. The Vedas, I am sorry, are no more scientifically valid than Genesis.

The great human tendency is to try to unite disparate pieces into a consistent whole. The desire for unity, cohesion, is a good thing: I do not mean to denounce it, but instead suggest that believing there is a connection between two disparate things does not mean that such a connection exists.

Which presents a certain problem, or at least a certain tension, when it comes to dual membership in religious bodies, which is what the latter blog post seems to be about (to me).

Can one be, as it were, a 'Christian pagan', or a 'Pagan christian'? Being neither myself, I can't speak about such a question with experience. So instead, I ask myself the question of whether I can be a 'Muslim christian' or a 'Christian muslim'.

The short answer - the answer the beloved Prophet, peace and blessing upon him and his family, would most likely give - is that the two are in fact the same. A true Muslim is really a true Christian, and vice versa. The Qur'an, which as a Muslim I take to be the Word of God (in the same way a Johannine Christian takes Jesus, peace be upon him, as the Word of God), says:

2:62

إِنَّ الَّذِينَ آمَنُواْ وَالَّذِينَ هَادُواْ وَالنَّصَارَى وَالصَّابِئِينَ مَنْ آمَنَ بِاللَّهِ وَالْيَوْمِ الآخِرِ وَعَمِلَ صَالِحاً فَلَهُمْ أَجْرُهُمْ عِندَ رَبِّهِمْ وَلاَ خَوْفٌ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلاَ هُمْ يَحْزَنُونَ

"Inna allatheena amanoo waallatheena hadoo waalnnasara waalssabieena man amana biAllahi waalyawmi alakhiri waAAamila salihan falahum ajruhum AAinda rabbihim wala khawfun AAalayhim wala hum yahzanoona"

"Those who believe - and those who follow the Jewish, [or] the Christians [or] the Sabians - who[ever] believes in God and the Last Day, and does good, shall be rewarded by their Sustainer: no fear shall overcome them, nor will they grieve."

But such universalism seems to fall into the same trap described above; also, taking this particular ayah (verse) of the Qur'an out of the context of the entire Qur'anic message would belittle or completely ignore much more numerous Qur'anic ayat which serve as polemic against Judaic and Christian doctrine, such as excluse salvation in Judaic doctrine and tripartite Godhead and the theory of incarnation in the Christian.

In other words, by saying that Christian and Muslim are, in fact, interchangeable terms, then neither have any real meaning. They become empty, hollow concepts. Which would seem to render the idea of a 'Bektashi Quaker' or 'Quaker Bektashi' meaningless as well, doing disservice, ultimately, to both.

That led me to another question. I identify myself as an 'ashiq of the Bektashi tariqa; the 'definition' of an 'ashiq, however, is broad. According to J.K. Birge in his The Bektashi Order of Dervishes, an 'ashiq "... is attracted by and feels a certain loyalty to Bektashi principles and practice but who has not actually taken the nasip [sic]". (The nasip is formal initiation)

Such a definition is pretty wildly open; in fact, it felt too open for my tastes. By such a definition, it would seem, anyone could consider themselves an 'ashiq, even if that person were not Shi'i, nor Muslim, nor even a monotheist, nor even a theist! How in the world could that make sense?

I took the question to some Bektashiyya I know. Could one speak of a pagan 'ashiq? The reply I got:

Brother- the answer to your question is most certainly "Yes". All "Ashik" really means is "Lover"- in this case of the human orientated and liberal outlook- as well as deep mysticism - of Hunkar Haji Bektash Veli. We revere all truths of all religions and philosophies. Anyone who fixes their belief has put the Truth (Hakkikat) in a little box of their own imagination. They can never directly see the truth..Mohammed said-"Those who are blind in this world will be blind in the next." & " Seek knowledge, even in China". Look up al Khidr a.k.a. hidir a.k.a. hizir to see that a knowledge exists outsıde of any holy book (of pagan roots probably.) outside of all prophecy.

Not precisely the sort of wanted, if I'm to be honest. My affiliation with Bektashism is incredibly precious to me; it is where all the crazy mixed-up notions and beliefs I hold in my head and heart finally feel as if they have found expression. It feels as if I finally have not only a name to give to that inchoate mess, but an identity, and with that, a path and a community. It's not something I want to 'share' with anybody and everybody who, on a whim, affirms an affiliation like some Spiritual Scout merit badge. I feel like that cheapens something incredibly precious to me. How dare they!

Looking at that, then, I can see from where fear and discomfort with universalism comes. You've found something deeply precious to you; perhaps you don't even mind sharing it; but if you're going to share it, you want to set rules and limitations on what can be done with your precious.

I've cautioned against just that to those who see me as their teacher. I tell them that if they're going to give something, anything, to somebody else, they cannot set limitations. You don't 'give' expecting something in return: that's an exchange, a contractual transaction, an economic interaction. It implies that: idem, if the party of the second part should fail to comply with the terms of the transaction as stipulated by the party of the first part, then the party of the first part has recourse to redress of said grievance with the party of the second part. Such transactions have their place in the world, but they are not conducive to fostering a loving relationship between people.

... And, of course, there's the rub. Love.

Because in a relationship predicated upon love, such as that which exists between God and humankind, the fundamental principle is that of giving wildly without thought of return. God gives to us... well, this: the incredible and majestic universe, and furthermore to each of us individually this precious life, without any desire for return.

On our end, we have the choice of giving what we have to God. Doing so is its own reward, as the reward of love is the happiness of the beloved, and nothing more.

Now, if I really believe what I believe - that there is 'that of God' in everyone, to phrase it Quakerly; or, that God is expressed through everyone, to phrase it (clumsily) in a Bektashian sense - then in order to be an 'ashiq (meaning 'lover', you'll remember), I should be willing to give the name and identity of 'ashiq to anyone. Everyone. Being a lover requires loving.

In fact, to refuse to give the name and identity to anyone is to refuse to give to God - to set requirements - which means that I do not love God, which means, really, that I'm not an 'ashiq.

Couched in such a way, that'd mean that I'm definitely not an 'ashiq right now, since I definitely do not love each and every person as I love God. Which means the whole point is moot.

Because really? It's by doing that one is. Not vice versa.

A Silly Goofball Pome

2008-01-23T15:28:00.000-05:00

From the tongues of children
to the wombs of mothers,
from the eyes of lovers clasping hold
to the smiles of friends:
I find my home.
in the four books,
the 124,000 blessed ones,
the heart of the Seal,
the soul of the lion
the five, the twelve, the forty...
by justice shall ye know me,
in laughter do I find voice;
be still, and know my name is
Love.

My 'Christocentric' Identity

2008-01-16T10:14:00.000-05:00

I have a confession to make: I'm afraid of my Meeting.

I've received a warm reception in Hartford Monthly Meeting, and I get a little thrill every time I park outside, early, to drink my coffee. The normal amused smirk on my face turns something beatific when I get to sit in silent dhikrAllah (that is, Remembrance of God) surrounded by others doing likewise. But I'm afear'd, often, of speaking with others, spending time around them for any definite period.

Some of that is a question of diversity: I'm the youngest (of the adults) sitting in Meeting. Always. While I'm remiss to blame a lack of youthful vitality for my personal reticence, there's a certain feeling of being of the wrong age-group to find social cohesion. Part of my decision to regularly attend Meeting was, in part, due to the hope of finding people of a similar age engaged in spirituality of a similar flavor to my own; and while I doubt my ability to find many youthful Bektashis worldwide, let alone in Connecticut, I felt more confident of finding some Quaker youth locally. Guess not.

Secondly, the WASPishness, generally, of the Meeting: all-white, dominantly Anglo, and, er, Protestant by definition. Again, I'm remiss to blame ethnic centrality to my uncomfortable nature (especially given that I'm a rich white educated heterosexual American first-born male), but I do feel conscious of a lack of diversity in the group which serves to make me feel very, very white. Odd how white people make me feel more white than non-whites. Huh. Anyway...

... but the reason I feel especially out of place is the fact that I'm not actually Christian. I'm an Ithna'ashari Shi'i Bektashi Muslim.

So what am I doing in a Quaker meeting? Well, the reasons given above: feeling a need for spiritual community, folks with like-values and a similar way-of-life. I ended up deciding upon a Quaker meeting at least in part because of their theological liberality as well as - for me the biggest draw - corporate silence. I liked the idea, and ended up loving the practice, of sitting with other people and not talking. Or not much talking. The various Quaker testimonies served only to cement things for me.

Never-the-less, I do feel an intruder, someone spying on and/or stealing someone else's home, society, culture. The result of that is an ongoing personal fantasy, in which I am called upon to demonstrate why I should be allowed to become member of the the Religious Society of Friends. It's not a grand fantasy; it's not a fantasy in which I stand before, say, Yearly Meeting and am called upon to defend my position, but it is a fantasy in which I am called to do so in front of Monthly Meeting, at least, and of course involves some grand speech and ministering, during which I state my creed, as best I know it: the short poetry by Yunus Emre to the right

Mystic is what they call me;

Hate, my only enemy.

I harbor a grudge against none:

to me, the whole world is One.

Such a credo (or more appropriately, aspiration, since I do not dare to claim to live up to such sentiment fully) is of course the basis of my path, my tariqa, but also the path of Jesus, I should think.

Like most Muslims, of course, I would claim that Jesus was a prophet of God; I would also say that he was the 'Spirit of God', the RuhAllah, as the Qur'an states unequivocally. I challenge the idea of a virgin birth, though, as well as the other miracle stories: I see them as allegory and metaphor, symbols of deeper spiritual realities. I would also challenge a belief that Jesus was God exclusively; I wouldn't deny him divinity, but I would deny Jesus was, is, and will be the sole human manifestation of the divinity, or that he might claim the totality of the Divine expression (there is more to God than His form in the world, exalted is He above all we might ascribe to Him).

In other words, Jesus was a teacher, neither the first nor the last, but an important one none-the-less.

I would argue, then, that what was important was not who Jesus was, but rather how he was, because while we can never really know what it was like to be Jesus, certainly we can attempt to act in the way he acted and espoused in order to what that is like.

My understanding - though I admit it could be wrong - is that this was part of the original design of Quakerism, the various testimonies, the core values of this quiet but active corner of Christianity. I know, certainly, that such was and is the path of the Pir of my order, Haji Bektash Veli, and the quiet but active corner of my Muslim faith. In this, we share the same values and even beliefs, to a certain degree.

These are my 'Christocentric' credentials.

I do not want or wish for controversy; my sole desire is to live, worship and serve amongst a community of fellows aspiring to the same calling.

Am I welcome still? Probably; at least by some, I think I would be welcome. But fear still sits inside, the fear of not being allowed a place at the table, fear of being the Outsider all over again.

All I can do, really, is to sit in and befriend that fear, until it changes - like all other fears - into a palpable excitement. Then, maybe, I will find what I seek.

Meaning, Faith, and the Absurdity of Suffering

2008-01-15T10:17:00.000-05:00

After being turned away from a potential job yesterday, my mother told me that "these things happen for a reason." Working with people who go through a lot of suffering both vocationally and avocationally, I hear that a lot: things happen for a reason.

I bristle a little bit when people say that, including when I say it myself. There's a somewhat visceral reaction to it, as if something isn't quite right. I've been trying to put my finger on it, and I just recently realized what the problem is.

A while back, I became physically disabled. The event was physically painful and deeply humiliating; it radically altered the way I would live the rest of my life, barring me from some activities which I had come to love deeply, and therefore was emotionally and psychically crippling as well. Faced with these circumstances, I struggled to find some meaning behind it all. I needed to know the reason why I had had so much that I had known and loved snatched away from me. I needed it to have some sort of deeper purpose. I should state unequivocally now that there was a definite and described causal link between my personal actions and the paralysis; actions I had taken quite literally caused the condition which I am now in. I knew this deep down, no matter how much I attempted (and sometimes succeeded) to lie to myself about what happened. Rather, I needed some larger purpose behind it beyond 'learning my lesson'. I desperately wanted the entire experience to mean something larger than simply that.

To me, this is the root of faith, spirituality and religion: searching for meaning or purpose behind suffering. If we are able to ascribe meaning to painful circumstances, it becomes easier to handle, in the same way that we are able to delay receipt of a bit of chocolate now for receipt of a whole bar of chocolate later. The ability to delay reward is, perhaps, a uniquely human trait, a foundation of the capability of our mind to operate within the environment. The same trait, I'm willing to bet, becomes the foundation for religion in that we are able to handle suffering (not receiving chocolate immediately) if we can see useful purpose in it (receiving more chocolate at a later time).

After wrestling with the issue for some time, I eventually came to the unsettling conclusion that there was no deeper purpose or meaning behind my paralysis. As horrific as it was to think this, eventually I realized that it was the explanation that made the most sense. It has been ever since that I have felt uncomfortable when I or other people say "things happen for a reason", or "God works in mysterious ways" and such.

I've been coming to the conclusion that I, at least, usually say these things in order to avoid the lack of control I have over suffering. I'm uncomfortable when people hurt; my gut reaction is to try to address and fix the situation. But in situations where I don't really have control, I try to ascribe meaning to the circumstance, which in some way gets me off the hook by making the suffering seem, in some way, necessary or purposeful.

If I'm honest, though, I realize that suffering actually doesn't serve some purpose. It is meaningless, pointless and absurd. Moreover, as I think about it, to ascribe meaning to certain sufferings is to cheapen and demean that suffering. One wouldn't tell a rape victim that her or his rape "happened for a reason." One wouldn't tell a starving child that they are hungry-to-death "for a reason." Of course there are proximate causes to these things: women are raped at least in part due to societal perceptions of the value of women as human beings. Children starve because of structural socio-economic realities that prevent them from having food. But to tell the rape victim or the starving child that these are the reasons why they suffer is, in effect, to ignore the individual, to treat them as simply the symptom of a large disease.

Interestingly enough, the disease which causes rape or starvation is ignorance of the humanity of other individuals.

What I do know, though, is that it is possible for one to ascribe meaning to suffering post facto. Although suffering may be pointless and meaningless, it is possible for an individual to give that suffering meaning and definition. I've given my own paralysis some sort of meaning and purpose by using it to look at the absurdity and pointlessness of suffering generally, and thereby learn something about how I want to approach others who suffer and treat their own suffering and misery with respect and compassion. But I ascribe that meaning post facto, and I do not believe that such a meaning is inherent and necessarily a part of the paralysis, a priori.

Where is God in all of this? All of the above would appear to challenge the notion that God is either omnipotent or beneficent: the old theodicy problem, yet again. How can there be an all-loving, all-powerful God who allows suffering? The answer most often given to this question, I've found, is that God allows suffering for a reason, for a purpose.

I would disagree. I don't have an answer to why there is suffering in the world if God is omnipotent and beneficent. I hold belief in the primary absurdity of suffering and the omnipotence and beneficence of God in the necessary tension of holding two mutually-exclusive, paradoxical positions. I think such is a necessary condition of religious or spiritual belief, as well.

As far as an answer goes, the best I can manage is to relate a Sufi story:

Once, a dervish was walking along the streets of a town toward the tekke of his shaykh. As he moved down the street, past vendors and princes, his attention was drawn not to the clink of gold coins or the laughing shouts of the merchants, but instead to the silent faces of the hungry orphans, the mumbled pleas for alms from the beggars. As he moved along, he grew sadder and angrier as he watched the rich townsfolk totally ignoring the suffering around them. Finally, at the end of the street he saw a beggar-woman crying over a dead child, and he began to cry and cry and cry, full of fury at the situation. How could God allow this, he thought. How could He let there be so much pain in the world? Bitter, he went into the tekke and sat with his shaykh.

"Shaykhiyy, habibiyy, I passed a beggar woman crying over her dead child on the way to see you. It broke my heart, and I am angry! How could almighty Allah allow this? Why doesn't He do something about it?"

"Oh my dervish... don't you see? He did. He made you cry. Why didn't you do something about it?"

The Missing Class; or, No Country for Honest Men

2008-01-14T10:00:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, I moved to Connecticut and began looking for a job. I thought that I would be fairly successful at this; although my work record has some holes, it's not all that bad, and anyway, I'm a college grad and I interview well and I'm a good, hard worker.

It took me 9 months to successfully find work, and only part-time at that. In the intervening period I ended up blowing through most of my savings to survive, to pay back various people and companies for the goods I had stolen from them, and to help out others who were in even more dire straits than I was.

It wasn't that I hadn't spent those nine months furiously searching for employment; on the contrary, I spent those months repeatedly applying to every job that I could find, only I kept being turned down. I was even turned down for a position as a cashier at a local health-foods grocery store.

I'm not sure if I was turned down because of the gaps in my employment history; I can only really guess as to the reasons why I was never hired. If so, I've discovered a little injustice there, namely, that if you don't work for a period of time because of health reasons - which is what led to those employment history gaps - then our society makes it that much harder for you to find gainful employment again. One is being, as it were, shunted off to the margins.

Alternatively, in some cases, it could have been my physical handicap. I might have been able to find physical labor, at the very least, if I weren't physically disabled. Or, I might have been better able to find work if I weren't a student, and thus needed blocks of time free in order to be able to attend class at a minimum.

Regardless, eventually I was able to find part-time employment at the very least; however, shortly thereafter the health insurance I received through school lapsed as I became a part-time student rather than a full-time student. Suddenly I could no longer visit the doctor without paying exorbitant amounts of money, and my medications - one of which is still on-patent - cost $350 a month, a significant portion of my paycheck.

I've taken on other part-time work, since. I have a per diem job which gives me the chance to work now and then, and I have another 'job' which adds minor income to the pot whenever I'm able to get that work. But the search for a full-time job, one with health insurance benefits, goes on.

On the advice of a friend, I applied to a position as a bank teller in a local bank. Part of the application process included a test designed, apparently, to determine one's customer service skills. Having worked in customer service, with some skill, in my previous jobs, I felt that I should know the answers to the questions fairly easily. One question, however, concerned bothering a customer via telephone in order to sell a product: telemarketing. I, like most people, have a visceral reaction to someone bothering me in my home in order to sell me something; it is uncouth, a horrible practice, which has little to do with satisfying the customer than with hoisting petard products upon them. I chose, in the multiple choice options, to make excuses and hang up.

Wrong answer. My application was instantly denied. Not even an interview.

A few days later, swallowing my pride and my honesty, I decided to retake the test and give them the answer that they wanted. Glory of glories, application accepted. Interview scheduled. Yearly check-ups, here I come.

This morning I put on the monkey-suit and headed downtown to the HR department for this bank, in a foul mood. I had, and have, no interest in 'selling products', be they financial service ones or not. I think that viewing business in such a manner dehumanizes the very real practice of providing goods and services to meet peoples needs, rather than generating wants to sell goods and services made in excess: I'm more of a capitalist (in the Adam Smith mold) than a neoliberal consumerist. Supply is meant to follow demand, not the opposite.

Never mind the monkey-suit. I've never been a fan, ever since having to put on tight, uncomfortable, unflattering shirts with iron-starched collars, necktie nooses, tapered-leg pantaloons that only highlight my chicken legs... let me wear something comfortable, something more me instead, for the love of God. Dress casual I can do, and even wear a tie now and then if I feel like it, but don't force me to wear something I despise.

Of course, I try to justify this with the old Quaker testimony of simplicity and plainness, but that's just show. Really, I'm big kid who doesn't want to wear grown-up clothes.

So anyway, I get down to the office, and am told that I should not have come down; in fact, they cannot interview me because I am not allowed to retake their customer-service quiz less than 6 months after I failed it the first time. Thank you very much; you can have your parking ticket validated on the way out.

In some ways - many ways, actually - I'm glad. Me being me, I despised the thought of having to do the sort of work I would have to do in banking, what with numbers and selling things people didn't want and dressing in monkey-suits and similar. A part of me, the part of me that I really like and try to nourish, jumped for joy at not having had to 'sell-out' to the Man. Integrity: saved.

But then: I am still without health insurance, and still quite poor. With several large and major life changes approaching - moving to Hartford, getting married next year, insh'Allah - I rather need steady full-time work. And this job is only meant to be interim work, something to tide me over until I can take on full-time work as a substance-abuse counselor, the real sort of job I've always wanted to do.

Stepping back further, though, getting out of my own shoes for a second, I have to wonder how people in my situation deal with just this sort of thing. I'm spared a great deal of the degradation because I have a car, rich parents who help me out, and I know there are many, many people like me who do not have such safety nets.

I think about what happens to them, and I realize: of course. They are all those people who look so incredibly miserable at their jobs. They're telemarketers, DMV bureaucrats, bank tellers, supermarket clerks... people who work to survive and for little other reason. They're barely able to make ends meet, surviving just above the poverty-line, ineligible for a lot of the programs which are meant to service people in need but unable to purchase or otherwise receive the same benefits those programs are meant to cover for those without them.

It makes you wonder how many are out there, working multiple part-time jobs with all sorts of variable hours during the day which prevents them from seeing their kids, making appointments with doctors or banks (or to find another, better-paying or more full-time job) or other professionals who have the benefit of definite and clear working hours. People without health insurance, frozen in fear of getting sick at all because of the enormous expenses. And because every penny must be saved in order to make various ends meet, they have no room for 'luxury' items, and so probably find credit cards alluring, with their promise of deferred payment, in spite of 25% or more interest rates.

Of course we're a debtor nation.

I suppose none of this seems terribly 'spiritual', and so does not seem as if it belongs in such a blog as this one, but... these are the injustices and inequities I see in our society. Sure, we have a class of terribly poor, but I think much worse is the class of indentured citizens we have created here, able to survive but little else, without any friends or compassion.

There is something rotten to the core about the American Dream.

Power Corrupts...

2007-12-24T16:28:00.000-05:00

In my fellowship, as in many spiritual communities, we have a master-disciple relationship going back in chains of lineage to our fellowship's founding members. The teaching of the original 100 are carried on through these lineages, and have reached out to well over two million people across the world.

But as with any society where there is this master-disciple relationship, there are problems.

Master-disciple always implies a power-structure, a relationship based upon a fundamental inequality of power. In spiritual paths, theoretically, it is the duty of the master to raise the disciple up to his or her own station; the goal is to extinguish the power-structure entirely, so that all may be equal. The goods which the master has are to be shared without fearing diminishing returns.

Often as not, however, the master grows accustomed to power; or the disciple becomes accustomed to impotence, so that when the disciple attempts to exert himself or the master attempts to shake loose his needy student, conflict arises.

In the realm of spirituality, this is an incredibly dangerous game. Gurus have used the submission of their students for personal gain; disciples have used gurus as crutches, abject excuses to avoid responsibility for their selves and their lives. The central premise of trying to bring everyone to an equal plane, at least in wisdom, is somehow lost in the shuffle.

In my fellowship, this is often more of a problem than usual, I feel. The central teachings can be transmitted within the space of a few months, weeks, or even days; and once the central teachings are passed along, one is authorized to teach. There is no long period of study; there is no subtle gradation of teaching. One is plunged immediately into the role of teacher while still being... less than perfect, shall we say.

I am an authorized teacher in my fellowship; I have, at least nominally, several students. I know and practice the central teachings, and additionally I have - I think - somewhat extensive knowledge of a variety of teachings from other lineages. I am always seeking to learn more, knowing that the more wisdom I have, the more I can pass on. Maybe some understanding of the Gita will allow me to reach a Hindu better; perhaps I am aware of a Christ-based meditation of Loyola's that will help some Catholic. Although I, personally, considering myself a Sufi of the Bektashi way, I want to be a polyglot of spirituality, able to speak to the need in each person.

In spite of all this, I rarely know what to do. I have knowledge of the basic teachings, and I can pass these along, but there are situations and circumstances that arise in the lives of my students that, quite frankly, I have no experience in handling. I try to listen for some answer within, some knowledge picked by the divinity inside, to give out. Usually, though, I think these are like suggesting band-aids for arterial wounds. Any healing that might come of my suggestions is purely voluntary.

I'm aware of the power dynamic in my relationships, as well. It sits in the background, a temptation ever present, and I fear it. There are times when it seems to take over, when I seem to think that I know what my student really should do. Other times it's easier to acknowledge that at best my answers are pathetic.

I am no guru.

And in fact, I dread and loathe the responsibility. The price of receiving the teachings, I was told, was that I teach them to still others; but now, having the teachings, the last thing I want is to teach. The lives of my students always strike me as being so infinitely and unnecessarily complex, such a mess of misunderstanding and petty feeling, that I don't understand the purpose of the great majority of their thoughts and emotions. I wonder why they willingly make such heavy-going of things.

My problem is that I want a teacher of my own to be able to ask all these questions, someone removed and apart, a person I feel I can trust. I don't trust even my own teacher, though. We've grown apart over time; I feel like there is less to share with him, fewer questions. And I've come to see, more and more, his faults rather than his wisdom. The power dynamic in our own relationship has come to seem more and more burdensome. I distrust the whole system, but am remiss to set it aside lest the teachings themselves, so important, become lost in the struggle for equality and equity.

I try my best to hold to bar that dynamic from entering my own mentor-disciple relationships. I try to stress my humanity and frailty and lack of knowledge; I've learned to accept the fact that I have no power to compel others, and also attempt to stress to my disciples that I hold no real power over them. I want them to know that we walk together, as equals, through this process, and that I am no better than they are.

I fear it is the best I can do, the only thing I can do.

The Inner Critique

2007-12-24T00:58:00.000-05:00

I did a good deed today. I went to my grandparents' home this afternoon, armed with a DVD, and I sat and watched it with them. In Spanish, with the English subtitles (because my Spanish is, sadly, not as good as I would hope it to be).

I came up with the idea to do this last night, in a bout of ill-advised self-righteous guilt, condemning the rest of my family for the way in which they treat my grandparents but not doing anything myself to make their lives a little bit better. Condemning my mother and sister and father for trying to get them to eat more healthily at 80+ years of age, for trying to get them to exercise, or even just get out of the house more, for trying to uproot them and change long-standing patterns and habits. My family does this out of love, but the simple answer is that my grandparents do not really want to change. Otherwise they would.

So the question is how to make them happy, and the simple answer to that is: just be there.

Hence the movie, and going to see them.

Of course, I feel guilty because I don't particularly want to spend time with them. I had no innate desire to hang around them. I wish I could see them as repositories of wisdom, elders with insight, to be admired and honored. Only: I don't. Folly of youth, I guess.

But what does it mean, to honor your elders, when they are so clearly fucked-up themselves? How do you do that, when they are patently insane, in that geriatric sort of way? It's one of the odder, and more difficult (in my opinion), of the commandments. Because if I listened to everything my elders said, then I would probably not drive a car. Ever.

But somehow, armed with the knowledge that they are not long for this world, I find it a little easier to show my grandparents a degree of patience, tolerance and love I would not ordinarily have for them. The previously difficult-to-swallow now rolls easily off my back, if I may mix my metaphors.

And in the midst of all this, I felt as if I had something... something good inside of me. Something real, and pure, a desire to do something genuinely right for the world. And that is an odd position for me, because normally I don't think of myself that way, and so this good felt, in fact, alien, foreign, not of me but bestowed to me as a gift to bring to other people. Of myself, I am nothing, just this selfish, pathetic little thing, but this good... this good is something better.

Maybe it's some residual Catholic guilt, there, a twinge of original sin. Or maybe it's because after the awful things that I've done in my past, I feel irredeemably stained and forsaken. I don't know; I just know that I have a difficult time thinking of myself as being a genuinely good person. Some inner critic is always present, pointing out everything that is wrong, questioning every kind gesture I might make, but also holding out some idealized sainthood as bait.

Deep down, that's what I've always wanted to be, of course: a saint. I've wanted to be good, noticeably good, genuinely good, but I've always fallen short of the ideal and therefore, I guess, figured that I must not be good at all. Sort of like wanting to be an Olympic athlete and giving up the sport entirely once realizing that no amount of training or determination will allow this to come true. Which begs the question of why one entered that sport in the first place.

I'm tired inside, so very tired of this struggle, that I don't even want to be good any more. I want to be selfish and I want to lie and I want to have whatever I want whenever I want it because what I want seems so bloody reasonable anyway, only... only I fear the critic inside, whom I presume to be (in reality) external critics, telling me that I have to continue, that I can't take time for myself or give something to me.

I want to be good without having to do anything.

Lately, the only thing that's been saving me has been this inkling that it's OK, that I'm alright, that I don't need to be better and I don't need to improve, because I'm loved and accepted as I am. Now and then I feel that in my prayers, feel like I'm alright and I don't need to worry, and that helps.

Because the rest of the time, I grind my bones into flour over this worry.

I'm really far from being very OK, mentally.

2007-12-20T13:21:00.000-05:00

Both Christmas and my birthday are coming up shortly, and I was surprised to discover this year that when I was asked what I'd like for either, I didn't have anything.

It's not that there is nothing that I want; rather, it's that the things which I'd like are intangibles: a full-time job with health insurance. The chance to go to the tekke in Michigan this Spring. More time with my girlfriend, most especially the chance/ability to move in with her more permanently.

Not so much with the physical things. I mean, I've asked for a suit, because I'll need one at some point, but I dislike suits; I'd rather not bother with formal wear. I casually, and off-handedly, asked for a iPhone, but that wasn't serious: it was simply the fact that I can't think of anything I particularly want.

Never-the-less, I generally just don't want anything, and that's odd to me.

It's not a spiritual thing, either; it's not like I'm curbing my appetite for material objects in some sort of bid for spiritual glory and immaterial satisfaction. Really, I just don't care.

I suppose there must be some sort of benefit to this, but right now I just don't care.

Like a Kid in an Office-Supply Store

2007-12-14T22:14:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, in a place a little far away, and not too long ago, I was alone.

I was alone, and friendless, and I had almost nothing. I lost everything I had, and everything that I knew, or thought I knew, was suddenly no longer worth anything because it no longer made sense, or worked. I was tired, and very scared, and while in this state, I stumbled (by chance or Providence, I cannot say) upon a group of people who took me in.

They were, and hopefully still are, a motley bunch. They accepted me unconditionally, only asking that I might come back to see them again, which I gratefully did. They offered me a place to go, and their charity, care, and compassion, and a way to get in touch with an unsuspected inner resource that would enable me to meet every challenge I might ever face - if I wanted that way, that is. Lonely, and scared, and tired, I wanted it. Quite desperately, in fact.

Over a period of time, I found that inner resource. I carry it with me all the time, 'closer than my jugular vein', you might say; like looking around the corner at another life behind ordinary life. A subtle art of seeing, an intimate intuition of the way things should always be.

Never before, really, have I had it so good: never before have I been so in love, with my girlfriend, my God, and my life. I've discovered the fine and simple art of not-taking-yourself-so-damned-seriously, how to be a better child in and of this world, and I'm earnestly practicing it, trying to improve the skill with which I employ it in daily living. I've found out how to stop caring about so many, many things, and instead to really live with a certain simplicity and simplistic joy. I feel... wonderful.

Yet... alone. Apart. Different. From just about everybody and everything. Like a kid, surrounded by grown-ups, talking about really boring self-important things, silly gossip and petty rivalries and witless self-aggrandizement, people taking everything so bloody serious, taking themselves so bloody seriously, playing make-believe so hard that they've forgotten it's a game and aren't having fun any more.

Everything about the way I was taught, the training I got in how-to-remember-it's-not-important-and-neither-are-you, says this is all my fault. Not the other people, mind, but the feeling alone, apart, different. If I feel like a child surrounded by grown-ups, this way says, that means I'm the one doing something wrong.

Only, it's been about two years, now, and I've tried everything I can think to do to fix the problem, and none of it seems to work. Again and again, and again and again and again, I seem to keep coming to this place.

I'm starting to wonder, now, if maybe the problem isn't me; I'm starting to wonder if, perhaps, I'm just the only child in this room full of adults, and the problem is, instead, that I need to find the rest of us kids.

I mean, I've found one. My girlfriend is a kid, such as I describe. She knows not to take things so damned seriously. It's one of the things about her which I adore: the silly songs she sings, the way she wiggles her butt and dances around, the way she pouts and wants to help with the cooking and all the rest.

I guess I fear, sometimes, like now, that we're the only ones around.

I don't think we can be, really; there have to be more of us.

Just.... where?

Striking Ordinariness: Redux

2007-12-02T13:40:00.000-05:00

There is a line in the central text of my Fellowship which reads: "Deep down in every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God... in the last analysis, it is only there that He may be found."

I've found that, as a part of my spiritual path, that has been perhaps the single most difficult notion to remember - 'God' is within, an inner experience, not without, an outer, objective experience.

My tendency in spite of abundant experiential and indirect knowledge to the contrary, is always to assume He's 'out there', that if you found the right apparatus or the right methodology you could see Him in a physical sense. And this of course leads to all sorts of problems, all the problems (in fact) that come from anthropomorphism: what does God look like? Is He really a he or a she or an it (which sounds too impersonal) or does God appear to each individual as he or she wish to see God? What does Heaven, or Paradise, actually look like, or Hell for that matter? What is the metaphysic of the soul, and how does it relate to the body, etc etc.

Such questions can be interesting in that how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-end-of-a-pin way, but the reification of spiritual concepts and realities becomes problematic when one starts to take such things too seriously. One runs the danger of 'eating the menu', as it were, treating Heaven and Hell as actual physical localities rather than concepts, notions, or states of mind.

Thankfully I tend not to make that mistake with these things; but sitting in Meeting this morning, I realized that I've been making a rather continuous mistake in the way I think about spirituality and the spiritual life, period.

I sat in Meeting for Worship, trying to find that 'light within', holding this mental construct of a layer of thoughts and thinking on top, a layer of subtler, quieter thoughts underneath, a layer of moods and emotions below that, and my 'self', trying to sink lower and lower and see this light...

... and while I was thinking about all this, for some reason the following phrase from a Qur'anic ayat floated into consciousness and got stuck on a loop:

Qaf (50):16

وَلَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا الْإِنسَانَ وَنَعْلَمُ مَا تُوَسْوِسُ بِهِ نَفْسُهُ وَ نَحْنُ أَقْرَبُ إِلَيْهِ مِنْ حَبْلِ الْوَرِيدِ

Wa laqad khalaqna al insana wa na-'alamu ma tuwaswisu bihi nafsuhu wa nahnu 'aqrabu ilayhi min habli alwareedi

And verily We created humanity, and We know what whispers in [humanity]'s essence, [for] We are closer to [him] that [his] jugular vein. (My own translation/interpretation)

... and that's when it dawned on me that I once again was turning spirituality and the spiritual experience into something other, something other-worldly, rather than something very simple and direct and here-and-now. I was separating out the experience of God from the experience of day-to-day life, treating it as something special and different, reifying that experience, setting it on a pedestal in a fiberglass case and setting an alarm to go off if anyone tampered with the case, and then standing back and looking at it and thinking "Man, I wish I could get inside that case and touch that thing again."

Which is when I began to smile, and realize that the alarm, the case, the pedestal and the thing didn't exist: I had just thought them all up. What I was looking for was right underneath my nose.

Out of that grew a deep appreciation for my immediate experience, what was happening to me in that moment. I opened my eyes and stared at the whorls in the wood of the bench in front of me, and felt real gratitude for it. Then I began to think about my life, this life, all the experiences that I've had and everything that I've learned and done and felt and seen, and I felt love for that. I saw it as a gift, or more precisely, an offering to Allah, something for which - because He is me and I am Him - He also felt love and gratitude. Life, my life, was not a gift from Him to me, as I had previously thought; instead life, my life, was my gift to Him, the eternal Watcher.

So I was able to feel God's love for me, and my life; which is something I have been missing, something I seem to omit from my day-to-day experience usually. Intellectually I enjoy and love my life, but for quite a while now it's been a hollow statement, just something you say because you're supposed to say it.

And this brought back memories of one of my more primary and wonderful 'root' spiritual experiences, which happened during and after I had suffered a major illness. I was in the hospital for it, and in the recovery process, and I felt so alive, so full of real joy, as if I were truly blessed. During that time, which lasted about six weeks, I woke up in the morning with thankfulness and fell asleep with gratitude. Being kind and compassionate, forgiving the few faults I saw and utterly overlooking the rest, connecting to other people in a very simple and basic way... telling the truth, letting wants and desires and needs and cravings slip by, intuitively handling conflicts within myself and without... it was a grand ol' time. It was only after discharge, when I returned to 'normal life', that I for the first time began to notice what I did not have, latched onto that thought, and sank into one of the deepest pits of depression I have ever faced (and, being a severely depressed person normally, I want to stress how much of a doozy this one was).

I think, now, that was the character of that experience, a certain sense of knowing that living my life, and the way in which I lived my life, was a gift, a present, an offering to Allah. This precious, tenuous thing called an 'existence' was both something given to me and something which I could give without ever giving-away. Or, to paraphrase Terry Pratchett in one of my favorite books, Small Gods: to die for a cause is easy. To live every day of your life for one, that's the real challenge.

Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. What is enlightenment? Chopping wood and carrying water.

Modern Day Manichaeism

2007-11-30T09:41:00.000-05:00

I work part-time in a library, and bits of news items regarding books float around all the time.

This morning, I received one regarding The Golden Compass.

If you've been to the movies in the U.S. recently, you've seen the trailers for this film, probably: polar bears in armor, a little girl with a, er, golden compass (actually, an alethiometer), Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman. It looks like a good film, Lord of the Rings style; what the Narnia film could have been if they had strung out the whole sequence of Narnia books into a film franchise.

Which is why I read the children's book.

Actually, that's not entirely why I read it. I read it because, while working in the children's room, I happened across some reviews of the book(s), which discuss the background of the story as a loose re-telling of Milton's Paradise Lost, and discuss some of the metaphysics and such in the book. After reading these, I got the sense that there was a complex of ideas underlying the story which sounded, quite frankly, fascinating, in the same way that the film Spirited Away's child-like story belied a complex of mono-mythic, ecological, and Shinto-based archetypes and tropes.

I wasn't disappointed, either. The author, Philip Pullman, does a wonderful job of blending a complex of different ideas and themes together in the book behind a rather simplistic-seeming facade of a children's literature. Complex theological issues, such as theodicy, dualism, the interaction of science and faith, issues of identity in the adolescent maturation process etc. are all blended together in a lively way.

I'm now curious to see how these things play out in the film.

I was a bit shocked to discover, then, that Bill Donahue and the Catholic League has set out to boycott and protest the film. Not terribly shocked, mind, just a little: the surface of the books/films contains a rejection of, and attack upon, organized religion and most specifically the 'Catholic Church'. When Protestants joined the fray, however, that's when I began to wonder what the hell was going on.

I know I shouldn't be surprised; religious whack-jobs love themselves a protest almost as much as atheist whack-jobs love to wear that smug expression of self-satisfaction or left-wingers love to make papier-mache heads of George W. Bush and dance around to 'We Shall Overcome' and such.

But the more I thought about it, the more their ire made sense - historical sense.

Because the idea advanced in the books, actually, is simply a version Gnostic heresy recast. In the Gnostic worldview, the personal god of the Church is actually a 'demiurge', the creator God, who rules this world and is responsible for pain and suffering. Through gnosis, however, human beings can reunite with the True God, who is wholly transcendent and somewhat impersonal. Gnostic Christianity was based upon the idea that Christ Jesus was a representative of this transcendent deity who descended into this world in order to teach liberation from it.

Gnosticism, and its attendant faith based upon the teachings of Perso-Iranian prophet Mani ('alayhi salaam?), Manichaeism (from the early Persian Mani Khayy, or 'Mani lives') were of course serious contenders for the hearts and minds of Roman Empire roughly in the same time-frame as [now-considered-Orthodox] Christianity's growing popularity. St Augustine, for example, was originally of Manichaean bent, until (interestingly enough) conflicts between rational and scientific understandings of nature conflicted with the faith, turning him towards Christianity (in his Confessions, Augustine specifically relates that it was the Manichaean faith in astrology, which did not jive with his experience, that turned him, especially in light of the inability of Manichaean preachers to explain this disparity to him accurately).

One can trace this idea of dualism in religious thought back to Prophet Zarathushtra ('alayhi salaam), the Central-Asian/Proto-Persian who began the collapse of many deities into a single One (Ahura Mazda), and introduced to the world (as best we can tell) the concepts of good-and-evil, eschatology, angelology and demonology, and possibly theistic dualism etc.

This strain of thought has always had latent, indirect influence upon Western/Christian thinking (as indeed upon all thinking in all Aryan-based cultural thought), and to some degree is reflected in Milton. It isn't for nothing that Satan is the most interesting (and perhaps most human) character in Paradise Lost, while God is more indirect, impersonal and transcendent. Although himself Puritan-Protestant, as evidenced by his support for the English Commonwealth, his religious views place him at the far end of a spectrum from John Calvin, and Calvinist views of hard predestination, total depravity, and the authoritarian, patriarchal, arbitrarily cruel anthropomorphic deity, and in a way one could view Paradise Lost as descriptive of the competing strains of Protestant theology which existed during Milton's time (the 17th Century, by Christian reckoning).

Pullman's stories in the His Dark Materials trilogy, from the Miltonian verse:

…Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mix't
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage...

... are thus a rather complex discourse on Christian theology.

The Catholic League, and Focus on the Family (through their monthly magazine Plugged In), however, appear to miss all this entirely. To wit, from Focus on the Family's website:

"... messages woven into this story exalt witchcraft, evolution, divination, homosexuality and premarital sex. Accompanying them are smoking, drinking, occasional mild profanity and moments of visceral violence.

That Pullman's message is blasphemous and heretical goes without saying."

While the Catholic League has it that:

"While Roman Catholicism is the evil force in Pullman's writings, his real goal is to put a positive face on atheism, getting children to buy his message."

I know, I know; I shouldn't be surprised. Metaphor, allegory and parable are lost on these people: I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they took Jesus ('alayhi salaam) literally when he said that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard (Mark 4:30-32; Luke 13:18-19; Matthew 13:31-32. See also - funnily enough - the gnostic Thomas 20).

I also shouldn't be surprised, because the ideas of God proposed by the gnostics - and Milton, who appears to have espoused Arianism, Socianism (Unitarianism), and mortalism - are all outside of the scope of modern mainstream Christianity, both Catholic and majority Protestant views.

It's more the fact, though, that this is what religious discourse seems to have been reduced to, these days; or more properly, the fact that protest against His Dark Materials lies at such a simplistic, reductionist, absurd level. Like the books themselves, protest against them would have the potential to educate individuals regarding early Christian history, including the multiform and various doctrines, why they arose and how they came about and why such-and-such is now considered orthodox and favored while others are considered heterodox and heretical.

Because the gnostic theories do have some major faults: dualism, and especially the radical rejection of 'this world' leads to thorny moral and ethical issues, such the responsibility for ecological stewardship, social justice and interpersonal compassionate action (not that these are well catered by either mainstream Catholic dogma or evangelical dispensationalism, but still).

Of course, I base this supposition upon the theory that individuals who espouse certain doctrines understand them, believe them, and are willing to defend them.

Maybe that is where my disconnect lies.

In the mean-time, though: the film looks good, and I recommend you see it; more fully, I recommend you read the books, enjoy the story, and perhaps ponder the theologies.

Dignitectomy Personality Disorder

2007-11-29T10:13:00.000-05:00

Once, a long time ago, I lost my dignity.

Nobody had explained to me what to do when one lost one's dignity; mostly, it seemed, they stressed that one was never supposed to lose it. Dignity was sort of like your passport, your social security card, your PIN - something you're supposed to keep close to you and never let out of your sight or control.

One thing you can do when you lose your dignity is to hide the fact that you lost your dignity. Problem is, dignity is one of those things you don't really notice until you've lost it. So what you end up doing is imagining what having dignity must have been like when you had it, and then pretending to be that way. Only, it doesn't really work. It's like losing a leg: you can pretend all you like that you've still got it, but the more that you pretend like the leg is still there, the more noticeable it becomes that you don't have it. The instant you try to walk on the non-existent leg, the whole charade comes crashing down. Literally.

But dignity is a totally different matter. Dignity is supposed to be intangible, invisible; if you lose it, you should be able to hide the fact far more easily than hiding a missing leg, right?

What I discovered, though, is that pretending that one still has one's dignity is just as noticeable as a lost appendage. There are tell-tale signs and characteristics - symptoms, if you will - of dignitectomy personality disorder (DPD). In DSM-IV style, DPD is characterized by two or more of the following criteria:

Seriousness of affect and complete lack of humor, as demonstrated by the utter inability to take a joke;
Heightened sense of self-importance, including transient, stress-related delusions of grandeur;
Belief that one is being purposefully humiliated by inanimate objects;
Pervasive inability to admit lack-of-knowledge or inferiority-of-skill in any area of expertise or life-experience;
Affectation of a maturational level beyond one's actual maturity;
Indirect conflictual or harmful behavior towards others, such as gossip, backbiting, slander, theft, cheating, etc.;
Deep-seated fear of being just like everybody else.

To the best of my knowledge, DPD is incurable, though treatment may create a remission of symptoms.

DPD can be treated, I've found, by confession of one's fault(s) to another, maintenance of a sense of humor, and most especially by the ready willingness to recognize and accept the utter absurdity of human existence and one's place in the grand scheme of things.

The interesting thing about DPD, I've found, is that treatment does not necessitate the restitution of one's previous dignity or the acquisition of new-found dignity; in point of fact, proper treatment requires the relinquishment of all of one's dignity, a further abasement of one's self, as it were, to the lowest possible levels of humiliation, foolishness, degradation, and patheticalness.

The more interesting thing, though, is that the treatment has the potential to heighten the perception of one's dignity in other people's eyes, and that the further down the ladder one is willing to go, the higher the estimation of one's self, one's virtues, one's honor and one's dignity in the eyes of witnesses about you. Of course, to act in a manner by which one wishes to gain an estimation of dignity in the eyes of others immediately renders treatment ineffective, and therefore a willful abasement and loss of dignity is the key.

'Tis an interesting paradox, is it not?

Acceptance

2007-11-28T00:01:00.000-05:00

I have one student in my lineage, who consistently fails. I've tried again, and again, with every skill I have, with every bit of knowledge that I have, with every shred of kindness I have, to help him along the Path; but he never seems to make it. When all is said and done, I can only do so much; I cannot walk the Path for him.

It has gotten to a point now where I don't even want to help him. Facing him - no, facing my inadequacy, my inability to find an answer - disturbs me. Here I am, one who has tread the Path before him, the teacher, the one who is supposed to have answers for him, and I have none left. Nor, if I did, would I want to give them to him, because I feel that if I gave them to him, he would use them and fail, and I wouldn't have anything any more.

But I cannot give up. That Imam Hussayn (sa) taught me, by his martyrdom. I am not allowed, by creed or conscience, to stop trying.

I'm worn out, though. I want the problems to go away. I want to stop looking at people and seeing this problem or that issue; I don't want to think in solutions or answers. I've created the situation myself. I stopped looking at people, I started looking at their problems, and so now, to me, the whole world is a mess of problems.

And I've cracked. I think. Something inside of me has given up. Something inside has begun to accept that it's a fucking mess without a solution and so fuck it.

There's liberation in that, of a sort. Because there aren't any answers, and nothing is ever going to get better, I feel free to be happy with things here, things now. And maybe I can start speaking with people again. Maybe I can let their problems be, not get involved, just live my own fucking life without having to be the answer-man.

Which means: I'm not a good person. I'm not a wise person. And that's OK. You know what? I accept that. I'm a liar and a cheat and a thief. I'm selfish and not very nice. I don't care any more. Because God made me this way, and obviously He did so for some reason, and more importantly, I like who I am. Because I know that in spite of all that stuff, I'm honest and good and generous and loving.

I'm tired of thinking. Today, I went throughout my day just doing each little task. I tried not to think about anything beyond the task. Got up. Got dressed. Made my bed. Checked email. Ate lunch. Went to work. Did each task at work. Came home. Just little bits, one by one, checked them off in my mind, doing each as each arose and checking it off, not thinking about the next one on the list, not thinking about the last one.

And I found the tiniest, the smallest bit of peace. And then I realized that I had a practice to, well, practice. Do each little thing. Don't think about it. Just do it. Very zen, 'n' all, just like doing dishes or folding laundry. Chop wood, carry water.

Practice, practice, practice.

Striking Ordinariness

2007-11-26T22:28:00.000-05:00

There was a moment, tonight, when I was sitting with my friend in our Fellowship, and he kicked his cup of coffee by accident. It spilled over the floor, and very quickly I got up, went to the kitchen, got some towels, came back, and cleaned it up while our meeting continued.

There was something about that activity, though, that was so... so precious.

Maybe this sounds crazy, but it was perfect. Beautiful. There was no thought involved. I wasn't angry with him because he had spilled his coffee, and I wasn't trying to 'prove' myself with service by cleaning up after him. I just enjoyed the act of cleaning up the coffee, wiping until it had been sopped up by the towels and then disposing of them properly.

I wish all things, everything, could be like that.

I think of the Zen saying "chop wood, carry water"... and how wonderful just the simple acts in life are. I remember, a while back, when I discovered how wonderful it was to do the dishes, to feel the warm and hot and soapy water, to learn how to apply just the right amount of pressure to scrape the pan without hurting it, smelling the water and the soap scents, feeling the little aches in my feet and back... folding laundry while it's still warm... bathing a dog.

So much of life now, it seems, is lived in the head. We spend time thinking. We spend time talking. Less and less do we go about simple daily tasks with simple daily rewards to them, like making the bed, taking out the garbage. We don't do these things any more, really.

The more I think about it, though, it's precisely in those things that the joy lies. It always has been that way; I just never looked for it.

So here's my dream: to have a job I leave at work. No working my job at home.

To have a garden to tend, dirt for my fingers to dig in.

A kitchen where food is prepared, cooked, recycled.

To make beds, clean dishes, fold warm laundry. Listen to the radio.

Clean up coffee spills.

Think less about complicated things. Center my mind on the simpler bits of living, like food.

I'm tired of high-falutin'.

I want to sweep.

The Art of Being Humiliated

2007-11-24T13:56:00.000-05:00

Lately, I've had simplicity on the mind; how I wish my life were simpler, how I wish that my schedule were steadier, more stable, how I wish I could plan this, or that, or th'other, and know with something approaching a sense of certainty that X, Y, or Z were likely to transpire. I wish it all made more sense, I wish it fit together; I wish I had a job, and a garden, and my avocation were a simpler bit of work as well, steady and certain too.

And then, last night, I heard someone speaking about how she had been hoping and wishing to learn something new, something more, and how she was coming to realize that there really wasn't anything new, or more, to learn. That she had been taught all the secrets long ago, and the key was now to practice them. At least, that's what I think I heard: I could be wrong. We were in a basement, and the heating system was rumbling with life, and I couldn't really hear everything she said with perfect clarity.

But it became apparent to me, in some way, that although I've been seeking simplicity as something out there, something external to myself, what was really needed was simplicity in here, in my head and my heart. I've been collecting all these books, these methods, these spiritual practices, just accumulating them one after the other, hoping that the next one is going to unlock some mystical secret that I can't seem to pin down, and - Bam! - I will have a gnostic glimpse of the Good and all will be well.

Only, I don't think it works that way.

I feel resigned, as it were, to the thought that I will never be very good. I will never be very wise, or charismatic, courageous or compassionate, no matter how much I want these things. I will never achieve Single-Pointed Concentration or All-Embracing Awareness, or anything else with capital letters you can hear spoken.

I will never be famous; nor will I be a part of something greater than myself, some Greater Good, let alone an integral part of it.

I shall always be, more or less, a poor, ordinary shlub; a breathless spectator of giants, wishing dearly that I might one day be one of them.

But rather than feeling at all good about this, humbled and realistic, I just feel... depressed. I feel as if I struggle for a breath of hope. I wonder what difference I can truly make, what the point is, as it were. I feel humiliated, not humbled.

I know this is a good thing, but... right now, all I feel is emptied of childhood dreams.

Answering That of God in Everyone

2007-11-23T13:07:00.000-05:00

Last Sunday, I went to a Quaker Meeting, my first.

And I liked it. A lot. It was held in a simple, small building, the inside furnished with wooden benches (with cushions, alhamdulillah). There was no iconography, no paintings, just the bare walls. Someone was kindling a fire in a large fireplace, which turned to a full blaze shortly thereafter. We all sat in silence, for one hour, except for three times when someone stood and spoke. I don't remember what they said, I just remember the silence, the simplicity, and also the warmth of my welcome, when it came time for me to speak myself and tell everyone my name, and why I was there ("Curiosity... thank you" was what I said, to plenty of laughter).

Where, exactly, the idea to go to a Quaker meeting came from, I cannot say. Perambulations (if I might use that word) on the Internet led me to it, and I decided to give it a shot; I figured I might as well go, and see. Nothing to lose. There was a small measure of fright involved - I hadn't set foot in a church for worship in years - but reminded myself that I had set foot in meetings of my own Fellowship with greater trepidation, after which the fears subsided.

I now feel a calling - I guess you could call it that - to go back, to go regularly, to become a member. I remember, especially, the feeling of lightness, calm and joy I carried with me when I left, a sensation I haven't felt in a long time.

I used to feel that way in my own Fellowship. It used to be a place I could go where I felt a sense of community, of shared effort in a common goal, a place I would visit and from which I would return to the world with a springier step. Now that I think about it, actually, I haven't felt that way about my Fellowship in a long time. Why that is, I don't rightly know. I'm willing to guess, though, that it's the repetition; hearing the same things spoken by pretty much the same people, watching the same melodramas unfold again and again and again. The feeling arises that there is nothing new under the sun, and I'm tired of the lack of... I want to say 'success', but it would be more accurate to call it, simply enough, 'change'.

Maybe that's why I look forward to getting up early on a Sunday morning (unheard of, for a person like me) rather than meeting with my own Fellowship tonight.

Meanwhile, I begin the very indefinite and hazy plans of a trip to Michigan this Spring, on or around Nowruz, to meet with another community, another Fellowship, another path. I'm hoping to pay a visit to the Bektashi tekke in Taylor, to become acquainted with some dervishes in the tariqah, and perhaps to pay a visit to Baba Arshiu. I'm hoping to begin my association with the Bektashi tariqah in a more formal manner, this way; at the moment, it's a very loose connection simply because of the limits of time, space and linguistic barriers, though not from a lack of desire for more proximate affliliation.

One thing which does concern me, however, is that I'd like to formalize my ties to both the Quaker Meeting I attended as well as the Bektashi tariqah, and I'm unsure as to how either will accept this dual affiliation. I find "that of God" in both homes; I find the fellowship of seekers I seek in the Meeting, and the path towards realization I seek in the tariqah.

We shall see what happens.

A Blurb in Honor of You

2007-11-16T10:44:00.000-05:00

I saw you that night, long ago, in the mirror.
Ever since, I've been trying to claw my way back there.
I ate to get back there, I drank to forget, but I couldn't. You wouldn't leave me alone.
All I want is to see you again, and I'm not worthy of your face.
I miss you, my love.
I miss you.

A Poem from Kaygusuz Sultan

2007-11-07T22:15:00.000-05:00

High above the highest ones, I have seen,
You are the skillful Artisan, Great Allah.
The world reads with words;
You read the syllable, God.

Thou hast created rebellious slaves,
saying, "Let it ever be thus";
You have placed them there.
You have reached the edge, Allah.

You have created a bridge of a hair,
saying "Let the slaves come and pass over."
Rather, let us stand here.
If you are a hero, you pass over it, O God.

Those who are heroes are known
as so-and-so, son of so-and-so.
You have no mother or father:
You look like a bastard child, Allah.

I am Kaygusuz. From the door of the Friend,
From the three hundred thousand cups in a day.
Lift up the curtain from between,
Let us look within, God.

The Library

2007-11-06T09:51:00.000-05:00

During a recent bit of soul-searching, I came to the unhappy conclusion that I'm not a spiritual person.

I did not like this.

Over the years I've been systematically removed from conceptions of who I am and what my 'specialty' is. I'm not good at sports; I'm not good at math, or science; I'm not good at literature, history, the humanities, psychology or philosophy; I'm no artist, nor a musician, nor a pop-culture afficianado.

It's made looking for a career a very disconcerting affair.

Since about 18, when a personal crisis launched my 'spiritual life' (such as it is), I've always tried to think of myself as a spiritual person. I've wanted to do so; I've needed to do so. Without that definition of who I am and what I do well, I have no personality, nothing that is distinctly 'me'.

So when it came up in the routine inventory and confession of sins and defects that the underlying cause of many of my current problems was spiritual pride and thinking that I was a 'spiritual person', I had to face the fact that continuing to think that I was somehow the spiritual type had to be cut away, or I could expect to go on being miserable.

And so I cut it away.

Yet, the allure of spirituality still has me. I still think about it a lot, read about it almost exclusively, am fascinated by the subject. Also, by the natures of my vocation and avocation, I have to deal with spirituality all the time: there is no way for me to entirely avoid it. In light of the topic which I wish to specialize within (trauma, grief and loss), also, I am going to be dealing with spiritual topics and discussions. So I haven't given up spirituality, so much as my personal investment in it, my self-identity through it.

I've become now, instead, a person who knows about spirituality, rather than someone who is spiritual; I have acquired knowledge of spiritual topics, but not a great deal of personal experiential knowledge. I know far more than I have put into practice; in terms of practice, I am just a beginner, really.

As a result I've been changing my approach, especially in my work with other people, towards being a 'librarian', if you will: someone who may not have personal experience, but who will be able to provide others with reference materials for their own spiritual paths.

Hence, the library.

The idea with the library is pretty simple: to collect spiritual literature from the world's religious traditions, dealing with any topic. Of course, it reflects my own personal point of view, and is likely to include materials with which I am familiar at least, preferably something I have read and/or practiced myself at some point.

At the moment, most of my materials are, of course, Islamic; the library as it stands reflects my own personal spirituality and religious beliefs. But I have a small collection of Christian materials, such as from C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton (the latter of whom is one of my more favorite writers; I find his work highly challenging, almost daunting). I have some small amount of Buddhist materials, leftovers from my days as a Buddhist, which I had originally intended to divest but am now keen to hold onto; and I have begun looking to expand the sections on Hinduism, and I've just purchased the first Judaism book (by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi).

Also, of course, are the ones dealing with spirituality from a broad overview sort of perspective; The Perennial Philosophy, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and such. At the moment I'm looking to find books that deal, most especially, with the building and creation of a spiritual life outside of organized religion, as I think that such a topic will be especially useful to the folks that these books, ultimately, are intended to reach and hopefully help.

The process of building a library of spiritual materials has presented some interesting challenges, though. Do I include 'New-Age' materials, such as Conversations with God? I wasn't terribly impressed with those books, or Eckhardt Tolle's The Power of Now; I found them too fluffy, too shallow, for my personal tastes. What about Wicca, or neopaganism? I know that I have my own personal biases against these. Do I include magick, hermetic or otherwise? Theosophy? What about the Baha'i?

When I look at these, I realize where my bias lays: to me, the expression of spiritual belief always revolves around the Sophia Perennis; anything which lays outside of this conception is, to my mind, beyond the pale of spiritual thinking and belief. Even systems of belief such as that expressed in Conversations with God or The Power of Now are too watered-down a version of this theory for my tastes.

The question I find myself facing is: since this is my library, do I constrict myself? Do I focus only on books that align with my personal worldview? Or, because the purpose of the collection is to have materials which I can use, or provide, to others in their spiritual path, do I broaden it to include those materials with which I may have some personal disagreement?

I haven't yet decided.

The God Thing

2007-10-30T11:47:00.000-04:00

In spite of outward appearances, including this journal, I actually really dislike speaking about God.

I don't mind reading plenty on Him; sometimes, if a person knows what they're talking about, I even like to listen to others discuss Him. The vast majority of the time, though, whenever people bring Him up, I become uncomfortable and edgy.

This happened last night in the meeting of the fellowship to which I belong. He was the topic, and I instantly began to bristle.

I especially bristled at two specific types of comments:

(1) God is not some sort of psychological construct or conception;

(2) You must believe in a God of some kind.

The reason I bristle at (1) is simple: I don't know if my God is or is not some sort of psychological construct or conception. He very well may be. For all I know, I'm completely deluding myself, or tapping into some Jungian archetype, or I've deified mother/father categories and idealized latent memories of uterine bliss from my prenatal experience. Perhaps I've adopted the concept in order to 'fit in', or as a safeguard against some raw experience of the meaninglessness of existence.

I don't particularly give a shit.

I can't prove God exist, just as others cannot prove He doesn't, because God, by definition, is indefinite, or supradefinite, if you like. His one definite attribute is His inability to be defined. And one cannot logically or empirically say anything, positive or negative, about something that cannot be defined.

I believe in God, meaning that presupposing a lack of evidence of the Big Fella, I choose to go ahead and think He's around. He's a working hypothesis, of sorts; I suppose His existence and act accordingly and see what happens. And since supposing His existence and acting accordingly has improved the quality of my life considerably, I see no reason to give up that supposition.

I know, though, that it's just a supposition.

As far as (2) goes, I take a great deal of issue with the idea that anybody must believe anything. Allah, subhana wa t'ala, said, "la ikraha fiyy ad-din": "there shall be no compulsion in religion." I stick to that.

My First Guide taught me that in our Way, we don't compel anyone to believe anything; we instead remove the stuff that stands between themselves and their natural belief. We don't tell anybody that they have to believe in God or anything of the sort; instead, we gently remind them of the moments in their lives where they felt swept up in things bigger than themselves, where they had courage or compassion or love or wisdom beyond their day-to-day means. That's all.

Because God, as our book describes it, is just an 'unsuspected inner resource'; like a pool of strength upon which one can draw. That's all. What you want to call that? God or Higher Power or whatever? I don't really care. We don't really care. The idea, the only idea, is to help you gain access to that resource within yourself.

Whether that inner resource is a psychological construct or a genuine Supreme Being, I can't say.

But again: I don't care. My life is better. Who, or what, makes that happen, I don't care.

When Others Get In the Way

2007-10-24T18:06:00.000-04:00

I went, today, to go drop off a book at YCC, a youth alternative-corrections house. One of my boys has had serious depression lately, mostly tied up with the fact that he's stuck in a youth alternative-corrections house and the woman he loves is in the outside world. So I bought him When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, since he's not going to be getting out of his situation any time soon and he needs to learn how to be comfortable in that situation, how to handle all that fear and anger and sadness and put it to good use.

I began walking up to the house, when a guy, who obviously worked there, came up. He said that we shouldn't just stop by any more, because it disrupted the schedule for the kids who were in there: their days were highly scheduled, and when we stopped by it caused all sorts of problems.

I said "OK", and then explained that I was just stopping by to drop off a book. He told me everything had to be screened, which I said was fine; I didn't want or need to see my boy, I just wanted to drop off a book. It's not like I was looking to smuggle drugs or something else in to him.

Just then a larger-looking black woman came walking up hurriedly, purposefully, angrily. She then said, in a low but furious voice, that we were not allowed to come back, ever. Not just to not stop by, but ever - at least, that's what it sounded like, though I'm hoping such is not the case.

This seems to be a theme, lately. I find myself in situations where I'm just looking to be helpful. To the best of my knowledge I'm being quiet, kind, polite. I'm not being gruff or stepping on anyone's toes, I'm just there, trying to help, be helpful, aid others to live their lives. And I'm greeted with anger, intolerance, bitterness, usually not by the recipient but rather by someone peripheral, someone indirectly involved.

My training, what I've been taught, is to look for causes, to move as quickly as possible towards compassion. Responding to anger with anger, to intolerance with intolerance, only exacerbates the situation and causes it to escalate into something bigger, more annoying. In this particular situation, the best I could come up with is burn-out. Most of the people working at YCC seem to be suffering from massive burn-out, which is understandable: I wouldn't want to work in that sort of capacity, with young criminals, all the idiocy of teenagers with all the stupidity of criminal behavior with all the cretinism of drug-and/or-alcohol abuse.

But lately I seem to have difficulty dragging up the required compassion, or at least understanding. I look around, and it seems as if people make heavy going of life, make it heavier and more of a pain-in-the-ass than it truly needs to be. And this goes especially when someone is trying to help - I'm trying to help a kid to get along better with others, encouraging him to cooperate with and respect authorities, to lead a better life.

I still don't know how to handle such situations. I know that, at some point, a situation will arise where I need to help, but someone is in the way, angry. Do I put my foot down? Do I become more forceful? Or do I back off?

I don't know.

Preliminary Thoughts

2007-10-19T09:31:00.000-04:00

For reasons yet beyond my understanding, I started this as a new blog specifically to deal with questions of spirituality and religion. I have another blog, which I've had for ages, and in which I used to write this sort of stuff, but it's actually become too public now: people know who I am, know where I work, and in my line of work there is, of necessity, a high degree of secrecy and confidentiality to protect.

So this exists more to be able to post about things that might occur there, where I need to protect the confidentiality of the people involved, rather than one exclusively devoted to spirituality.

Never-the-less, I'm going to try to stick to that topic, for the most part.