Paradise Lost and Re-Found
As preface to these remarks:
From the journals of William Stafford:
5 March 1991:
Recently a new serenity has touched me, and a feeling of wisdom. No, this is not a proud feeling, a feeling of being in control, but an acceptance of not being in control.
William Stafford, Every War has Two Losers, Milkweed Edition, 2003, p.70
A Shameful Dream
It was my oldest or most chronic dream of late middle age: married man and farmer John Proctor meets teenage temptress Abigail in the barn, kitchen or narrow hallway and feels his Puritan-buried youth restored. Only in this dream, Proctor was a teacher and Abigail a student. I awoke from the dream terrified of its sweetness and success, and that I had let it go on for so long before summoning restraint by noticing a picture of my wife and kids on my desk. My first words of waking were a petition: "Why do I provide such willing shelter to this dream?"
The answer was resumption of a deeper discourse, as if all this had happened in the blink of an eye and that the only non-temporary answers to be found were in this longer-lasting, more sustained flow of inspired speech. By the way, the voice did not speak in a loud "Field of Dreams" whisper. It spoke at room and lecture level.
What the Voice Said
"Pacifism is not a belief," the answering voice was saying. "It is a perception--a permanent, organic perception of unity, of wholeness, in which the soul abides." This unity, my own voice took up, as if everyone in that space was reciting a pledge of allegiance, is our body and the shared breath that sustains it. Pacifism is an affirmation of our deepest certainty--code word: God--as human beings and the conservator creed that is native and most natural to this being. Pacifism is to know that in being born God has made a promise for all of life and that you are its keeper and, by so knowing, assigned to its keeping.
Every day, as aspiring Sufi, I repeat at ritual times and random instants what Muslims call the Rahmat: "La illaha / Illallahu."
There is nothing but God; God alone is real.
The Rahmat as World of our Father & Fathers
Once you see that God is the deepest indwelling of truth and love and conscience, you know Him as Creator but also participant narrator and lead character in the narrative we live. God is autonomic consensus of right behavior--behavior bequeathed by residuum of mercy, compassion, love, justice and all the other blessed attributes which we are to embody and practice. In this way, the pacifist knows with every breath that he is a proof of God. So God is both monotheistic and pantheistic (I prefer pantheistic to polytheistic because pan allows His presence in everything while poly makes Him into personalities).
This morning, thanks to poet and conscientious objector William Stafford, I realize that the Rahmat is a pledge to pacifism, and that all men of non-violence know that it is the cardinal (as in bird-song) truth about life on earth, or anywhere, and that to be born is to affirm this unity and vow to preserve it. Once you experience this prime perception of unity, you can no longer frame the world in them/us, friends/enemies, even God/Man. Dualisms can not do justice to the unity we are here to proclaim. And proclamation, promulgation is just to live with conservator kindness, even if the kindness is more attempted than accomplished. Forgiveness means there is no failure.
No permanent failure.
Getting the hang of non-duality
Most of my fellow Sufis, and friends who are as deeply compliant with the unity as preached and perceived in Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, or any other faith, now know as positive all-conquering suspicion that we are One flesh and family. Pacifism is what Buddhists call "Original Mind." As such, it is the practice of unifying wholeness in thought and action. This unity "is intransitive without subject or object," as a college friend used to say.
Thus the idea of enemies is, as Jesus preached, something we must reject, or, failing that, resist, just as I had to reject this morning the "friendship" of Abigail for the lifelong friendship of my wife. To live with the idea of enemies as a constant framing mechanism of thought and action is to place other Gods before us. Dualism is the central code of (mis)conduct in the dis-unified world. It is to believe in a central Disunity, or the fallen nature of man. This is a preposterous and abhorrent thought.
Facing the angry mob of disbelief
Again and again, pacifists are told, "Your unity works only in a world where men are good. And men are not good."
Again and again, pacifists are seemingly silenced by the fact of Hitler and the necessity, if not justice, of the war against him. "What about Hitler?" they are taunted. "What about the 6 million Jews?"
At such heated moments, the pacifist seems tongue-tied and defeated but these are koans he/she has already solved. And the solution is the permanent, organic perception of unity. Not a belief in the unity, but its practice in everything he or she does as Christ practiced unity in silence at his inquisition. The Pacifist is ceded from that world of warring clans, tribes, communities and states. War is now unthinkable. Everything he makes is now in some way a ploughshare or intended to be. He cannot help it if someone uses the ploughshare as a blunt instrument to kill. The Cain in us is able to use anything at hand to prosecute the delusion of disunity.
Again and again, the pacifist is told about the rapist and the murderer, for which each morning's paper serves as sufficient proof that violence is the true norm, north and death star of human nature. To the pacifist, they are creases, even rips, in the fabric, understandable cracks in the dry earth. The pacifist resumes his ceaseless prayer and unshatterable perception of unity. This morning's news is as, always, a Micky Finn slipped in his coffee or orange juice. To 'find' God is to resume life in, as in immersion, the unity. Some of are spending our whole lives learning the art of unity-resumption.
The faltering step is already forgiven
Pacifism was, for the first time this morning, the world restored to its original purpose: a paradise of teaching, gratitude and praise. If I plunge back into darkness, or seek comfort in the Abigails, then I have broken my vow of non-violence. If this happens, I must pray for the lightning-strike and blessed disruption of remembrance which is restoration of my true self. Ergo, it is forgiveness, which is paradise found.
Thank you William Staford, dear brother and friend, American Taoist-Christian. Nine bows of grateful affirmation.
13 October 1991, In Vienna:
For years these lined faces have told me how it was, and then said, with a shake of the head, "You don't understand." They look farther away and sigh. What they went through, in a war, in a depression, or when the city fell, has given them something. They pity those who lack these occasions for being pitied. "You will never know," they say. "You weren't there. I'm sorry, but there is no way [for you] to attain this knowledge I have." And they look off into that long corridor where heroes line up for their centuries of patient eminence.
"Did you see the massacres?" I ask. And they stare back at me:
"It wasn't like that."
"Was that the year of the potatoes?" I ask.
They life their shoulders, they spread their hands. "You don't see it. You don't get the picture." They straighten their napkins and look out a window. What they see is an avenue only they and their kind, gifted by a certain pain, can have.
William Stafford, Every War Has Two Losers, Milkweed Editions, 2003, p. 73
From the journals of William Stafford:
5 March 1991:
Recently a new serenity has touched me, and a feeling of wisdom. No, this is not a proud feeling, a feeling of being in control, but an acceptance of not being in control.
William Stafford, Every War has Two Losers, Milkweed Edition, 2003, p.70
A Shameful Dream
It was my oldest or most chronic dream of late middle age: married man and farmer John Proctor meets teenage temptress Abigail in the barn, kitchen or narrow hallway and feels his Puritan-buried youth restored. Only in this dream, Proctor was a teacher and Abigail a student. I awoke from the dream terrified of its sweetness and success, and that I had let it go on for so long before summoning restraint by noticing a picture of my wife and kids on my desk. My first words of waking were a petition: "Why do I provide such willing shelter to this dream?"
The answer was resumption of a deeper discourse, as if all this had happened in the blink of an eye and that the only non-temporary answers to be found were in this longer-lasting, more sustained flow of inspired speech. By the way, the voice did not speak in a loud "Field of Dreams" whisper. It spoke at room and lecture level.
What the Voice Said
"Pacifism is not a belief," the answering voice was saying. "It is a perception--a permanent, organic perception of unity, of wholeness, in which the soul abides." This unity, my own voice took up, as if everyone in that space was reciting a pledge of allegiance, is our body and the shared breath that sustains it. Pacifism is an affirmation of our deepest certainty--code word: God--as human beings and the conservator creed that is native and most natural to this being. Pacifism is to know that in being born God has made a promise for all of life and that you are its keeper and, by so knowing, assigned to its keeping.
Every day, as aspiring Sufi, I repeat at ritual times and random instants what Muslims call the Rahmat: "La illaha / Illallahu."
There is nothing but God; God alone is real.
The Rahmat as World of our Father & Fathers
Once you see that God is the deepest indwelling of truth and love and conscience, you know Him as Creator but also participant narrator and lead character in the narrative we live. God is autonomic consensus of right behavior--behavior bequeathed by residuum of mercy, compassion, love, justice and all the other blessed attributes which we are to embody and practice. In this way, the pacifist knows with every breath that he is a proof of God. So God is both monotheistic and pantheistic (I prefer pantheistic to polytheistic because pan allows His presence in everything while poly makes Him into personalities).
This morning, thanks to poet and conscientious objector William Stafford, I realize that the Rahmat is a pledge to pacifism, and that all men of non-violence know that it is the cardinal (as in bird-song) truth about life on earth, or anywhere, and that to be born is to affirm this unity and vow to preserve it. Once you experience this prime perception of unity, you can no longer frame the world in them/us, friends/enemies, even God/Man. Dualisms can not do justice to the unity we are here to proclaim. And proclamation, promulgation is just to live with conservator kindness, even if the kindness is more attempted than accomplished. Forgiveness means there is no failure.
No permanent failure.
Getting the hang of non-duality
Most of my fellow Sufis, and friends who are as deeply compliant with the unity as preached and perceived in Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, or any other faith, now know as positive all-conquering suspicion that we are One flesh and family. Pacifism is what Buddhists call "Original Mind." As such, it is the practice of unifying wholeness in thought and action. This unity "is intransitive without subject or object," as a college friend used to say.
Thus the idea of enemies is, as Jesus preached, something we must reject, or, failing that, resist, just as I had to reject this morning the "friendship" of Abigail for the lifelong friendship of my wife. To live with the idea of enemies as a constant framing mechanism of thought and action is to place other Gods before us. Dualism is the central code of (mis)conduct in the dis-unified world. It is to believe in a central Disunity, or the fallen nature of man. This is a preposterous and abhorrent thought.
Facing the angry mob of disbelief
Again and again, pacifists are told, "Your unity works only in a world where men are good. And men are not good."
Again and again, pacifists are seemingly silenced by the fact of Hitler and the necessity, if not justice, of the war against him. "What about Hitler?" they are taunted. "What about the 6 million Jews?"
At such heated moments, the pacifist seems tongue-tied and defeated but these are koans he/she has already solved. And the solution is the permanent, organic perception of unity. Not a belief in the unity, but its practice in everything he or she does as Christ practiced unity in silence at his inquisition. The Pacifist is ceded from that world of warring clans, tribes, communities and states. War is now unthinkable. Everything he makes is now in some way a ploughshare or intended to be. He cannot help it if someone uses the ploughshare as a blunt instrument to kill. The Cain in us is able to use anything at hand to prosecute the delusion of disunity.
Again and again, the pacifist is told about the rapist and the murderer, for which each morning's paper serves as sufficient proof that violence is the true norm, north and death star of human nature. To the pacifist, they are creases, even rips, in the fabric, understandable cracks in the dry earth. The pacifist resumes his ceaseless prayer and unshatterable perception of unity. This morning's news is as, always, a Micky Finn slipped in his coffee or orange juice. To 'find' God is to resume life in, as in immersion, the unity. Some of are spending our whole lives learning the art of unity-resumption.
The faltering step is already forgiven
Pacifism was, for the first time this morning, the world restored to its original purpose: a paradise of teaching, gratitude and praise. If I plunge back into darkness, or seek comfort in the Abigails, then I have broken my vow of non-violence. If this happens, I must pray for the lightning-strike and blessed disruption of remembrance which is restoration of my true self. Ergo, it is forgiveness, which is paradise found.
Thank you William Staford, dear brother and friend, American Taoist-Christian. Nine bows of grateful affirmation.
13 October 1991, In Vienna:
For years these lined faces have told me how it was, and then said, with a shake of the head, "You don't understand." They look farther away and sigh. What they went through, in a war, in a depression, or when the city fell, has given them something. They pity those who lack these occasions for being pitied. "You will never know," they say. "You weren't there. I'm sorry, but there is no way [for you] to attain this knowledge I have." And they look off into that long corridor where heroes line up for their centuries of patient eminence.
"Did you see the massacres?" I ask. And they stare back at me:
"It wasn't like that."
"Was that the year of the potatoes?" I ask.
They life their shoulders, they spread their hands. "You don't see it. You don't get the picture." They straighten their napkins and look out a window. What they see is an avenue only they and their kind, gifted by a certain pain, can have.
William Stafford, Every War Has Two Losers, Milkweed Editions, 2003, p. 73
posted by David Federman @ 6:34 AM
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