Easily Amazed

[kang]

Hey All.....


Dark Emotions….. thoughts after reading… Healing the Dark Emotions
by Miriam Greenspan

“Despair is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality… it is a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.”
( Earthwalk, Phillip Slater )

Well… I find myself fairly recently on a different path. Not exactly sure how or why I have found myself here. Nevertheless, I am here.

This path, into the dark seems to be a path you find yourself on rather than one that you pick. It is a path that if followed, and I seem to be drawn down here for some reason, takes one into a place that for me is best described as “dusk”.

I have learned that in times of confusion or un-clarity, to use those times to direct where I
try to focus what I read about. It occurred to me late, my mid-thirties, that other people have probably had similar experiences and wrote about it. It is somewhere around here that I discovered my desire to read. I have also learned that trying to write helps me to clarify my own muddled head.

According to Greenspan, and I agree with her, despair is a combination of desperation, dread, hopelessness, emptiness, helplessness and sorrow that forces us to look inside the dark side of life. It is a more cognitive emotion then grief or fear.

Despair, although not something our culture want to look at or talk about, is a legitimate human emotion. The emotion of despair… contains core elements of grief, anger and helplessness.

Depression as Greenspan makes the slice, is unalchemized despair. It is what happens when despair becomes stuck in the body… it is “chronic, toxified despair.”

More than grief and fear, DESPAIR HAS A MORAL DIMENSION AND A SOCIAL DIMENSION…. It calls us to wake up and pay attention to human suffering… but it also is asking us to attempt to MAKE MEANING OUT OF THAT SUFFERING.

“Enter this dark night of the soul, insists the voice of despair. Look at the worlds pain without your usual protection. Descend to the place of near- annihilation.”

Despair asks us to make meaning out of apparent meaninglessness. Despair moves us, without our choosing, to a still point… “a deep frozen pool at the center of everything”.

Despair asks us to “stop with business as usual, pause from the daily routines of our lives, to reflect on the meaning of our existence”.

“The voice of despair says; go deeper… it is a voice that can barely be heard above the din of the world… which impels us to go faster, go faster, go…go… do…do…..”


Christy recently posted a poem by David Whyte,( how cool she actually got to meet him ) that speaks to me about this place……


It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
Or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need to change you.
If you can look back
With firm eyes
Saying this is where I stand.
I want to know if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing
to live day to day, with the consequence of
love and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.
I have heard, in that fierce embrace,
Even the gods speak of GOD.



What is your experience in this place????????

Be well... mike

[ashley]

Good morning Mike and others.

Only moments before I head down and Awaken the dreamer...

[kang]

Hi Ashley and everyone else... hope this finds you well...

Are "WE" a society that has lost its way?

Some rambling......Thoughts......

Gandhi warned against what he called the 7 social sins:
* Politics without Principle
* Wealth without Work
* Commerce without Morality
* Pleasure without Conscience
* Education without Wisdom
* Science without Humanity
* Worship without Sacrifice

An interesting list !?

SO I ASK MYSELF...WHAT AM I FEELING AND WHY???

More than grief and fear, DESPAIR HAS A MORAL DIMENSION AND A SOCIAL DIMENSION…. It calls us to wake up and pay attention to human suffering…

To regain a sense of the sacred and to match are actions to that sense….


In his Book Race Matters, Cornell West calls despair or nihilism the number one issue of black America. Nihilism is the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness and lovelessness.

The result …. Nothing seems valuable to us anymore. This over time leads to numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world.

I think I would expand West’s circle to include much of what I experience in our country and our world. It is what I see as I watch pictures from Iraq and from our inner-cities.
This sense of numbness, meaninglessness, hopelessness ….. is linked to our culture.

Outside our urban areas I feel a sense of nihilism in the midst of plenty. In our suburban lands of plenty there is a feeling I get that it is never….. ENOUGH.

There is a sense of what Matthew Fox refers to as…. ACEDIA.
Acedia is listed as one of the 7 deadly sins.
( I like the definition of sin as “missing the mark.”)

According to Fox, acedia feeds on despair and despair feeds on acedia. Acedia has two roots… “not caring” and “sour.”
There is a lack of passion and an underlying cynicism to acedia. There is no fire, no passion and NO JOY.

Acedia was defined by Thomas Aquinas as the “lack of energy to begin new things.” According to Fox… “It is a kind of ennui, depression, cynicism, sadness, boredom, listlessness, couch-potato-itis, being passive, apathy, psychic exhaustion, having no energy.

“Hildegrad of Bingen talked about the soul being weakened by the coldness of indifference and neglect.” It is a numbness that postpones doing good. ( Fox. pg.168 Sins of the Spirit )


Nihilism is a disease of the soul. It is not just a problem of individuals but is a problem of societies as a whole. Wilber’s “WE” quadrant has an effect on everyone’s “I” quadrant whether the “I” is conscious of it or not.

There is a certain restlessness to the sense of acedia that is often covered up by “busyness.” As I look at my world people are all very busy…. But underneath that busyness is what??? I find myself in agreement with Fox:
“Many people today are channeling their restlessness of spirit into consuming the variety of goodies that our consumer culture promises, making uncountable visits to the shopping malls and watching uncountable television programs.”

Aquinas taught that omission of a good that needs to be done- especially in the area of justice-making-is a moral action.



So… what are we missing??? How do you experience a sense of joy? What provides the "fire" in your life??? How do you keep it going???
How do we spread this fire?
Other? ??

Be well…. mike

[fiz]

This language you're pointing to Mike is essential for me. I've been holding the word "acedia" in mind for weeks, since learning about it from you here.

Despair is a particularly lovely word in my own existential arsenal. I first began to think in terms of despair after reading an epigram by Kierkegaard kicking off one of Walker Percy's novels. It was a quote from K's short, dense later work, Sickness Unto Death, an analysis of despair.

For Kierkegaard, despair is a kind of internal navigating system with a quirky paradoxical twist: the closer we come to feeling it, the closer we get to resting in a condition of transparent authenticity. Such transparency is only possible when our infinite nature as pure spirit and our finite nature as embodied, mortal creatures come to conscious rest in relation to each other. Kierkegaard suggests that just as we can be in despair of our own infinite nature, so can we also exist in despair -- as spirit -- of the finite world. It goes both ways....

Existential psychology, as articulated by Rollo May, is about embracing despair, and the feeling of anxiety that informs it, as nothing other than the portal of our own deepest individual authenticity. This for me has always been an incredibly powerful and empowering idea.

So much for individual despair -- what about the mean old world, steeped in systemic habits of acedic nihilism that leave us pitched on the edge of our current collective abyss?

When I carry around your presentation of Cornel West and Matthew Fox in my mind, I'm left wondering where the balance lies between the work of attending to my individual despair versus the constant challenge and demand to face the world as a site of collective despair, inertia and even potential systemic collapse if we don't collectively learn to change. Hell, I'm usually just left wondering how not to just be overwhelmed by the world at all.

I think for me, our collective crisis at present in the entirety of its active, lethargic, bullshit nihilism is, as existential psychology would put it, a given to be confronted as such, and both accepted, as it is possible to accept it at all -- and, at the same time, suffered, as it is uniquely given for any of us to do so.

Whether the big picture ever gets any better or not is not really my concern. It may be that systemically, things are so out of control that catastrophe is the inevitable result, at one level or another, and that it's just a matter of time. (Subjective jump cut to Thomas' recent description of his current project regarding the Wizard and the World*....) And: it may simultaneously be the case that just as the whole is beyond our control -- and perhaps even beyond our despair, as it were -- individually we are uniquely so much a part of things that we face a kind of unbounded potential for transformation at the very same time.

In other words, the big picture may be so fucking scary to look at that it winds up activating my own deepest engines of individual transformation that might not ever turn on otherwise. And here words fall away for me...for what might it mean to endure the times for what they are at a feeling level, as a catapult into "full catastrophe living" of an unprecedented kind?

I guess this is why I like to read my hard-core existential philosophy next to my high-quality new age fringe literature: because I need the full-range of possibilities to inspire my imagination to fire into its fullest potential in the face of such a gaggle of unknowns....

Also: I wonder to what extent such unprecedented inspirations of imagination can infuse the connections between us at the level of shared caring for the whole. Could a handful of us find a unique communication of care on such an ordinary place as this humble message board? What might that make possible in relation to the world?

Be well my friend.

Chris

* "In the wake of the Wizard's illness a gradual onset of gravitational anomalies threaten to crush entire communities. All creatures are beginning to feel the weight. Trees, with the silent guidance of a council of stone buddhas, are the living beings most capable of finding the Shaman, the Wizard's best hope for healing. A motley crew of driftwood branches and roots are sent into the world to uncover his whereabouts. Luminous Edge is a playful, hopeful exploration of the environmental and social problems facing our world today, a call to integrate the wisdom of science with the heart of soul and community."