Sacred Madness

Our real choice is between holy and unholy madness: open your eyes and look around you—madness is in the saddle anyhow.
—Norman O. Brown

The old saying goes, When the world has gone mad, the sane appear to be mad. But it's not we who are insane, we're sane people in an insane world.

Of course, maintaining that awareness requires a certain degree of self-confidence, of belief in oneself and one's own inner compass. It's easy to get pulled off balance if you doubt your own sanity. As a character in a drama once said, though, I may act crazy sometimes, but I am not insane. Acting crazy is sometimes how you stay sane.

I propose that in the coming weeks you make an effort to get more accustomed to and comfortable with the understanding that the entire world is in the throes of utter lunacy. Once you are at peace with that, I hope you will commit yourself to the sacred kind of lunacy—the kind that bestows wild blessings and perpetrates unreasonable beauty and cultivates the healing power of outlandish pleasure.
—Rob Brezsny

Enacting sacred madness appeals to me just now. i've known for some months now, since the surgery, that making art is the one thing that has kept me alive, kept me sane, kept me going, even to the root level of having a reason to keep going, a reason to go on living and making art. There's a need for me to act a little crazy, just to stay sane. Of course, I get called crazy anyway, by the forces of mediocrity, merely for questioning them, and wanting to do things a little differently.

Sacred lunacy is just what the world needs right now. We all could use some sacred clowning by the heyoka spirits to get us back into balance, and get some perspective about how life has gone crazy these past few years. Truly, as the ancient Chinese curse goes, we are living in interesting times.

Loss of art is a social sin. With that deprivation our work life becomes distorted and violent, and so too does our leisure time. [Video] games that announce the killing of galaxies takes over. Or titillating sex. Or titillating news. Or titillating anything. Life can no longer be lived or celebrated in depth. Superficiality reigns.
—Matthew Fox

We live in a dangerously over-stimulating time. We are inundated with noise, loud advertisements, bright and brilliant flashing lights on billboards and theatre marquees. We're encouraged to sit passively before our TV screens, or our computers, and passively absorb the entertainment beamed to us. And of course the loud, bright advertisements interspersed between the things you actually might want to watch.

Performance is life. Entertainment is death.
—Hakim Bey

Entertainment is deadening. It is the opposite of life, because it requires no participation, merely passive absorption. Making art is performance, which is active. Even when listening to music, you can be an active listener or a passive one. Active listening engages with the music. Passive listening just lets it wash over you like a warm bath.

In addition to being overstimulated, we also live in times that are antithetical to art. Seriously, think about it. We are bathed in entertainment while at the same time fine art is disparaged as elitist and obscurantist. Some postmodern artists exacerbate this problem, of course, by indeed being elitist and obscure. Poets wonder why they have no audience, yet continue to write new work that requires specialist academic knowledge to comprehend: a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it's a chicken-or-egg dilemma, since for over a century now the lords of business have declared that only pragmatic, tangible products have any value, while other things have no value because they cannot be sold—and we've gone along with this belief, in our practice of monetizing everything, and determining value on sales. Great fine art of the past has sold for many millions of dollars. Art is only valued when it's a commodity, in this way of thinking. That's why entertainment is valued over fine art: it's easier to sell. And that's where the sin comes in, the social sin of losing art.

In this cynical climate, what could be more radical, what could be a more sacred act of madness, than to proclaim that beauty matters. Genuine beauty, not ironic, distanced, artificial beauty. The plasticized images of beauty seen in beauty pageants, pornography, or heavily-made-up icons of cinema are not what we mean by real beauty: those are all illusions. Real sex isn't pretty, because it's earthy. There is no airbrushing.

Beauty has to do with seeing all life as blessing, with returning blessing for blessing, with forging blessing of pain and suffering and tragedy and loss. Beauty needs to be made and remade. It is the vital work of the artist within ourselves. . . . I believe that beauty is better understood as an adjective than as a noun. Rather than pursuing the question, What is beauty? I believe it is more useful to ask the question, What are beautiful experiences you have had? And how can we forge more beauty from our common sharing of this planet? An inevitable consequence of asking such a question is the truth that beauty is simple and it is shareable.
—Matthew Fox

It is finished in beauty.
—Navajo chant

the Greening

In the 12th Century C.E. abbess and mystic Hildegard of Bingen coined the word veriditas, a blend of the Latin words for "green" and "truth." Verditas describes nature's divine healing power, the power under life that sustains all life. When we eat green plants, we take in veriditas. We re-connect with nature through veriditas.



Gardening is an active participation in the lifeforce, in the mysteries of the universe, in creation, in management. When I garden, I feel connected to the earthpower. When I tour caves, deep underground, one of my favorite kinds of place to visit when I am traveling, I feel surrounded by the earth, by Earth, by Gaia, by the earthpower, by the element of Earth, the element I am naturally strongest in. When I re-connect with Earth, I come back to center, I find healing, I find solace and comfort. Earthworms constantly churn the topsoil: everything we love that grows, every ounce of soil, has passed through an earthworm's digestive canal, at one time or another, to be cleansed.

There is a spiritual capacity in carbon as there is a carbon component functioning in our highest spiritual experience. If some scientists consider that all this is merely a material process, then what they call matter, I call mind, soul, spirit, or consciousness. Possibly it is a question of terminology, since scientists too on occasion use terms that express awe and mystery. Most often, perhaps, they use the expression that some of the natural forms they encounter seem to be “telling them something."
—Thomas Berry

My purpose is to garden, to watch the cycles of life and death that spin the Yearwheel round. My purpose is to make art, music, poems, because to make is to participate with the Divine in Co-Creation. My purpose is to get out of my own way. My purpose is to keep going, to keep making art, even on the day I die.

Meister Eckhart compares the work of the artist with the Annunciation scene. The spirit that comes over Mary and begets the Christ in Mary. He says this is the same spirit that comes over the artist and begets the Christ. So this is the Cosmic Christ being born in you. And of course it’s Eckhart who says, “What good is it if Mary gave birth to the son of God 1400 years ago and I don’t give birth to the son of God in my own person in my own work.” That’s art. What you give birth to is the Christ, or the Shekinah the wisdom, or the Buddha nature. You are giving birth to it just like Mary.
—Matthew Fox



Everything that is, is alive. The world is alive with beauty, with grace, with seed. I make thousands of photographs of flowers in bloom: flowers, the sexual organs of the plant in question. The sexual display. The Divine's creative sexuality, fecund with the greening, with veriditas. My friend Al calls these photos bee porn.

There is no creation that does not have a radiance. Be it greenness or seed, blossom or beauty, it could not be creation without it.
—Hildegard of Bingen

Gardening is aprticipation, is co-creation. So is making art. But art-making needs to be done with the intention to co-create. Poets most praise, for poetry is either praise or masturbation. Art-making must be done with concentration, focus, and attention. It must also be done with intention. Not mere self-pleasuring, but in order to get something out, to get it down, to spell it clearly.

The mere process of fixing imagery onto surfaces or forms does not ensure spiritual development. It is the intention and awareness from which artists create that determine whether their work will serve mammon, ego or spirit.
—Alex Grey, artist

Intention does not mean fixing meaning. It does not mean interpretation, or programme. Intention does mean focused awareness, and thinking of the consequences of actions. Why is there so much ugly art in the world? Is it still trying to shock us with its newness?

I plant lilies, I plant hosta, I plant bulbs and rooted plants, and know they will eventually spread. Fecund and green, the rising life that emerges each spring from the soil in my garden is life itself, returning after winter's dormant slumber. In early spring the ferns grow from fiddlehead to full expanse, from mere fingers of light into long shade-shelters.



And there is an inner music. I hear the roots grow, ever so slowly. I hear the worms crawl inside the soil, rough and smooth, rasping and swallowing. I hear the scrape of cricket's legs on fallen leaves. I hear

Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.
—Hildegard of Bingen



The soul is a breath of living spirit that
with excellent sensitivity
permeates the entire body to give it life.
Just so,
The breath of the air makes the earth fruitful.
Thus the air is the soul of the earth,
Moistening it; greening it.
—Hildegard of Bingen

Beauty Arouses

My new home's previous owner once planted a ring of daffodils (Family: Amaryllidaceae, Genus: Narcissus) around the base of the crabapple tree out front (a dark pruneria that produces deep pink rather than pure white blossoms), that have now opened their yellow narcissus eyes onto the world. Since the four days of continuous gentle rain earlier this week, all my plants have emerged, at last, or have taken on sudden growth spurts. Many will flower in the next few weeks. Today's a day that anticipates summer: very hot and sunny, but also humid, intimating thunderstorms in the near future. It's still too early in the year for the summer storm cycle to kick in, but it's not too early for storms to spawn under these conditions. Windows are open all over town, to let the fresh air pass through.

I spent time this morning reading Matthew Fox's book Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Lessons for transforming evil in soul and society. If I had been asked what the book was about, as I sat there waiting for the mechanics to finish changing my truck's oil, I would have replied, it's a book on the theology of embodiment. (Ignoring for the moment the raised eyebrows one sometimes gets reading such a book in such a place.) That's a dire oversimplification, of course, as everything Fox writes is multi-layered, multi-viewpoint, and pulls in a lot of thought from many different wisdom traditions in a kind of Deep Ecumenism. He has a knack as a writer for reviving the mystical viewpoint in the modern era, and showing how needful it is, more now than ever.

Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh is a deeply corrective book. Fox's message is that what we think sin is, or was, has become so corrupt as a concept that it has been reversed: what we thought was up has become down. This is a book about sin—but sin is not what we thought it was. As Fox writes:

Getting the context right is very important for dealing with sin. Too many theologians have derided our goodness in favor of railing about our evil. In doing so, they paint an inaccurate picture of who we are and what we are. And they pull us totally out of context, oblivious to where we came from, forgetting the creation story that in the Bible itself begins with praise. (Psalm 104 is all about the praise of creation, while Genesis itself begins with the stories of the goodness of creation and culminates in the very goodness of it.) My experience reading about the goodness of the body and its marvelous organs and capacities, then reading theologians about sin, confirms the methodology of this book. Consider, in light of reflecting on sin, the words of the poet Rilke: "Walk your walk of lament on a path of praise." The lament we rightly feel for our transgressions as individuals, as groups, and as a species must itself be contextualized by a deep meditation on our goodness. Praise what is good about us, then work on how to heal the imbalance. (p. 92)

Fox writes a little bit later, in a chapter on the fires of our human spirit:

To bring blessing back to our awareness of body is to bring power back—healthy power, not power-over or power-under but power-with. Because each chakra is about power—getting it right and taking it back—chakra work is very political. We are all meant to share in the power that chakras are about—we all have bodies with spirit-energy yearning to be unleashed in them. There is something democratic about this common unfolding of common power. (p. 98)

Some recent conversations have bounced between the poles of desire and rejection, appreciation and disdain, the distance between the poses of the aesthete and the hip ironic cynic, and the question of whether beauty is what we seek or if it's what arouses us to seek.

I rather think beauty arouses. I think it also makes us seek out more of it.

As an artist, I don't set out to self-consciously create beauty, I set out to say something true. I don't write to intentionally make beauty, but I often write in response to an experience of beauty. Beauty can be a trigger for contemplation. What turns me on and makes me feel fully alive: these experiences live to be shared. Poets praise because they want others to see what they have seen, and also be moved towards praise.

I rather think that the chic ironic bitterness, the elegant misery, so commonly on display in literary criticism makes this same mistake of railing about the negative and ignoring the positive. It's as though criticism is supposed to only be critical, rather than to critique, to tear down rather than be constructive, creating a context in which the beginning critic assumes that accentuating the negative is the one true road to acceptable critical writing. The entire milieu thereafter decomposes.

Some literary critics and reviewers have intimated that they find it hard to write in praise of those books they appreciate, even love. I don't find that difficult at all; I find it easy to praise. (Perhaps as a critic I remain a poet, having taken Rilke's advice, to praise, to heart.) I regularly write appreciations of books and writers that have given me deep life-lessons, deep experiences of embodiment, and more. Why should being honestly enthusiastic about what one likes cripple one as a critic? Why should harsh judgment be seen as more objective, while liking something is seen as purely subjective? These attitudes infest contemporary reviewing and criticism. They're the underlying assumptions behind most literary criticism, the elephant in the room no-one talks about it. What was up has become down.

Any writer who has been through a good writer's critique group, who has learned how to honestly and accurately critique writing, both their own and others, will be able to speak as clearly about what works as what doesn't, in a given piece of writing. Anyone who has graduated from such a critique group will understand that objectivity lies in clearly seeing all the elements of writing in play, without being filtered through an a priori ideology.

I think a lot of critics think they're supposed to be negative, even mean: as though rage were more honest than love, no matter how watered down those two principles are, with ironic distance thought to be more honest than sentimentality. In truth, both are false. Chic ironic bitterness is a corrosive pose. Yet so is sentimental nostalgia. Both the ironic hipster postmodernist and the nostalgic sentimental conservative literary critics do literature no good whatsoever; because their poses are ultimately passionless, detached for all the wrong reasons, and rarely say anything meaningful enough to risk being thought wrong. The sin here is disengagement, of whatever variety; the cure is to embrace.

This sin of criticism furthermore expresses itself in how we give awards to books (and movies) we think are more honest in their depiction of our world—because they are more violent, more negative, more alienated, more brutal. We praise what shatters us over what heals and rejoins. We give awards to books that promote the pornography of despair, the minute analysis of the unthinkable, the piping of apocalypse. (And of whatever apocalypse is fashionable at the moment: the legacy of puritanism expresses itself as harsh critiques of beauty if making that beauty is seen as exploitative. The environmental preservation movement contains as many fulminating puritans as does the religious right; they even find common ground on occasion, mutually shaking their fingers in condemnation of the rest of us, those more fallen then they.) Many of these award-winning books (and movies) are crap. Well-made crap, perhaps, but crap. We sneer at books which don't try to make us feel worse than we already do. We give even more contempt to books that try to uplift. That Cormac McCarthy's deeply sado-masochistic novels are given more honor than Matthew Fox's creation-centered books whose purpose is to redeem theology gone astray is surely a sign that what was up has become down. (Of course, apocalyptic doom-saying has always sold better than praise-saying: it's more titillating.)

And this is why post-modernism doesn't really exist, because it's still Modernism that's being dealt addressed, not anything that might have come after. We've had just over a century of Modernism, and whatever we claim to be doing, artistically, that's still what we're responding to. The ironic distancing, the alienation, the isolation even in the midst of the crowd: that's the Modern condition, first recognized in and by the arts over a century ago, now, and still regarded as the core truth of life, still accepted as the new creation story, the myth of separation amongst the fallen. Even in cosmological astrophysics, where entropy is oft regarded as an ultimately unbeatable foe. We're still stuck in the poetic truth of World War I, that Wilfred Owen, poet fated to die in that war, stated as, "All a poet can do today is warn." I say post-Modernism doesn't really exist because it's a rebellion against Modernism—to be blunt it's often more anti- than pro- any given position—but Modernism remains its central focus and idea. If post-modernism were truly to be something after Modernism, it wouldn't use that "M" word in its very label. If anything, post-modern critical theory tends to push the questions raised by modernism to their ultimate extremes, highlighting and accentuating them, making more of them than modernism ever chose to, to probe without restraint into all the dead-end alleyways of alienation and totalitarianism.

There's something rather repellant about this project. Wilfred Owen told the truth of his time, of his life and death. But to continue the exchange of the context of uncreation for the context of creation is perhaps modernism's and post-modernism's defining sin: the substitution of praise with not lament, but annihilation. (A word I can never spell correctly without looking it up; perhaps some part of me doesn't want that word to invade my vocabulary.) Ironic detachment was never meant to become a permanent lifestyle, a totalizing filter through which to view all art and living. No more so was narcissism. Yet narcissistic self-regard is the flip side of ironic distancing: it reveals both a fear of getting hurt by becoming too attached, and a solipsistic tendency towards regarding oneself as more real than any Other.

And the answer is not to roll the culture back, reverse the clock, pine for a golden pre-modern age that never was, that never existed except in the dreams of conservative nostalgia. The answer is to back out of the dead-end alleys where we find ourselves, find that road that leads towards the omega point of un-alienation, and get back on it. Not looking back to see where we've been, but taking those lessons with us as we fly forwards. Literary conservatism is at its finest when it works towards conserving what is good, in the sense of "conservation," of preserving what tradition gives us that is of enduring value; it is at its worst when it becomes regressive and unfeeling towards the bodies and lives of its critics.

Back in confirmation class in the Lutheran church my family attended, I heard our insightful pastor state that the key part of the word "sin" is the letter "I" in the middle of everything. If writers suffer from an overabundance of personality-ego, of narcissistic self-regard, so also do their critics. Literary criticism is at its least convincing when the critic strives to raise his own self-esteem by tearing down the artist's work under review. The symptoms of narcissistic self-regard in literary criticism are fairly easy to spot: The need to always have the last, definitive word, on any subject; the defensiveness aroused when a critical assessment is disagreed with, which often leads not to dialogue intended to probe closer to the truth but to argumentative restatements of fixed opinions; and, the escalation of attack, from critiquing an interlocutor's logical inconsistencies, to ad hominem bullying. I read many critics who seem to have this near-pathological need to have the last say in every sort of discussion, even outside their admitted expertise; that I don't share this need to have the last word seems to be regarded as a sign of weakness (as though pit-bull aggression were the only acceptable style of discourse), or of myself being a lesser writer therefore. So be it.

I've had to laugh more than once when some fulminating moralist of a neo-conservative neo-formalist poet pointed in pulpit-pounding horror at one of my more experimental writings and proclaimed, That isn't poetry! I use the analogy to fundamentalist religious rhetoric quite deliberately here: the attitudes, and the theology of lament, are identical. To be sure, I have myself speculated at times if those experimental "new" poetries often lumped together taxonomically as "post-avant," notably Language Poetry and its affiliates, don't suffer from the sin of foregrounding the means more than the ends, creating a de facto theology of grammar and syntax while ignoring what grammar and syntax were born to praise; in other words, the sin of being surface-oriented and attracted most to shiny reflections, rather like magpies. If you were to look at the techniques used in some of my more exploratory poems, such as broken syntax, dream-grammar and dream-association, or the parataxis involved in unitary visionary states of consciousness, you'd probably ally those poems with the most current avant-garde poetries; yet I'm rejected by those camps for the sin, in their eyes, of violating their theology of grammar in favor of using words to convey actual meaning, to embody experience, rather than purely surface sensation. (Or sensationalism.) What was once up has become down, again. Critical vertigo is perhaps understandable.

In the eyes of fashionable, chic critical cynicism, and equally in the eyes of regressive neo-conservative criticism, I am guilty of the sin they define as caring about what I'm saying deeply enough to want to say it well. The neo-formalist attacks on my more experimental writings have never been able to decimate my program on technical grounds, so their attacks have been largely moral and definitional. They un-define the work as non-poetry. Likewise, I am not ironically distanced enough from life and its embodiment, rather I embrace it. I practically wallow in it, to be blunt.

But beauty continues to arouse. My ardor responds to beauty with art-making. I sing to praise the chants of other singers.

The true sin is not to praise. If a critic is ashamed to praise, has taken on the attitude that praise is amateurish and unseemly, not to be taken seriously, or has become so indoctrinated with this attitude that holds praise in low regard—that is the world fallen into its own egotistical self-regard, that is the Fall.

To authentically praise is not to ignore the flaws, the little toolmarks left over from the crafting and shaping, or the ways in which a book fails to engulf the reader. To authentically praise, as poets praise, is not blind sentiment, not nostalgia for some mythic time when literature meant Something More than it does now and authors were both more gifted and brilliant.

To authentically praise, as poets praise, is to see everything in the clearest sunlight available, as flowers turn to follow the sun, and neither disguise what fails nor dismiss what succeeds. There is no pose, no distancing, no chic turn of phrase, merely an unveiled eye staring steadily at what it sees.

And being allowed to praise what beauty we find is to bring blessing back, to bring original blessing back to a context that has veered too far towards seeing only original sin. And that is why it's not difficult to write about what we love, and why.



With thanks to Lee Lowe for the instigation.

Faith & Anti-Faith: Noble Enemies

When I was working as a typesetter in the mid-1980s in Madison, WI, I was the regular typesetter for the monthly newsletter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, headquartered in Madison. The monthly newsletter was mostly news articles, originals and reprints, the occasional opinion or op-ed piece, and legal updates on the cases the Foundation was undertaking via their legal defense fund: many cases about the constitutional separation of church and state, many of which overlapped with ACLU cases of a similar nature. Typesetting the monthly newsletter was always a treat for me, and often made me laugh out loud.

The FFRF was co-founded and is still co-led by Dan Barker, and the core group is the Barker extended family. It is a non-profit dedicated to freethinking, agnostic, and atheist principles and activism. The name of the foundation states their purpose rather clearly.

Now, let me just be clear about my position here: Although I am not a politcal animal, and rarely engage in political debate, I am often intrigued by the psychology behind religion. I support the basic concepts behind a lot of the FFRF's legal cases, as I strongly support the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. I think the religious right in the USA, nowadays, is quite out of control, aided and abetted by the current trend of neo-conservatism (which is a serious misnomer—but I digress), and I support the FFRF's stated goal to prevent the USA from becoming a de facto theocracy.

Also, just to be clear: I am not an atheist, I am not an agnostic, and I am not a practicing member of any established, institutionalized religion. While I agree with the basic concepts behind the FFRF, I don't agree with all of their means and tactics.

Here's why:

Dan Barker, along with others in his family, had been a born-again hellfire and brimstone preacher prior to his embracing atheism. Apparentally it was a quasi-religious anti-religious conversion experience for him. I find that deeply ironic. What was most interesting and fun for me about reading through the FFRF newsletter was that the rhetoric was still very apocalyptic—but now the cause was atheism rather than born-again Christianity. The Cause was still the Cause, only the subject itself had changed. It was like looking at a mirror-image of a religious fundamentalist.

Frankly, it seemed to me that the only difference between Dan Barker the tent revival born-again fundamentalist preacher, and Dan Barker the crusading atheist, was the subject matter. The man had apparently exchanged one belief-structure for another, but his personality and rhetorical style had altered not a whit.

So, if Karl Marx and Mao Tse-tung were right about religion being the opiate of the masses, how is this not a clearcut case of one opiate being substituted for another? How is this not a clear case of one addiction being subsituted for another. In a very parallel dynamic, most twelve-step groups substitute an addiction to a quasi-religious system for an addiction to a chemical substance; no matter what language they use, most twwelve-step groups are based on religious belief-systems. Barker now spends 100 percent of his time fighting for atheist causes. But the rhetoric still has exactly the same tone, the same sense that "anyone who believes differently than me is an idiot." The Cause is still the Cause.

The problem with most atheist rhetoric, which is pointed out clearly by the example of the FFRF, is that it is "noble friend" or "best enemies" rhetoric: it actually reinforces the arguments of those with blind faith, because it attempts to make a negative proof based on the same beliefs and ideas as those of its opponents. Most atheistic rhetoric is denial rhetoric, attempting only to contradict and disprove its opposing rhetoric. It doesn't engage, typically, even with the agnostic idea that there might be some mysteries we don't and can't understand. At heart, most hardcore atheists are dismissive of agnosticism, even as they ally themselves with agnostics for political purposes.

Personally, I have never seen much psychological difference between atheists and fundamentalists. The mindsets are often nearly identical. Both seem to me to be identically emotionally and mentally committed to their positions. At their worst, they both maintain rigid stances with zero flexibility, and no one really convinces anybody of anything, because everyone is too busy shouting out their own positions at deafening volume. Truly civil discourse and dialogue are pretty much nonexistent.

Madelyn Murray O'Hair, the original crusading atheist, whom I met when she once visited my elementary school in Ann Arbor, struck me as being an authentic fanatic; she had given up everything for her cause, and devoted her total existence to that cause. Her work was an irrational pursuit of an extreme form of rationalism. The Cause was was the Cause. The delicious irony of this logical contradiction struck me even at age 9 or 10.

Eric Hoffer made the point brilliantly in his short, essential book The True Believer, that one may be a fanatic regardless of what one purports to believe, that fanatics of all faiths and causes have remarkably similar psychological and emotional states of being. Hoffer defines a “true believer” as “the man of fanatical faith who is ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause.” The cause is irrelevant: it could be anything. What matters is that the strongly-held belief-system be held up as the answer to all of life's problems, with the corollary that those who disagree with you are wrong, and need to be convinced of the rightness of your beliefs over all others.

But this is still a binary polarity: two sides of a coin; two polarized positions that appear to be in contradiction, but in fact whose underlying assumptions about the true nature of reality are deeply shared. Noble enemies are those enemies whose resistance is fuel for clarifying one's own position. Best enemies are those antagonists that you can't do without; fighting them helps you keep your edge; without them, you flail around with no true purpose or goal in life.

In the ongoing argument between true believers and scientific atheists who view all religious ideas as delusions, it strikes me that much of the scientific-atheistic rhetoric is the rhetoric of fanaticism and the noble friend.

Matthew Fox, among others who include such notable scientists as Rupert Sheldrake, describes "scientific rationalism" as a quasi-religious belief system that has many of the functional earmarks of a religion, including: received dogma that may not be questioned; an aura of reverential Mystery around the pursuit of knowledge (which in this case means lab-coated researchers rather than frocked theologians); the worship of saints, many of whom were theoreticians and technologists (Darwin, Einstein, Edison, etc.); the de facto attitude that its own internal belief-system is right while everyone else is wrong; and so forth. What we are left with is an irrational pursuit of rationalism—another "noble friend" rhetorical trope that I find highly ironic.

The biggest mistake that scientific rationalism makes is to place itself in the position of being the One True Faith—which seems exactly parallel to what happens when a born-again Christian becomes a born-again atheist and continues to fulminate his views as the Only Truth—and it is in these circumstances that atheism itself seems most similar to a religious creed itself. Functionally, in terms of psychology, atheism is a religion.

It often seems to me, in these continuous arguments between polarized camps, that the only people who still keep open minds any more, who give third or fourth options, who think in genuinely different directions, who are willing to wait and see, and who are comfortable with uncertainty and mystery, are agnostics and mystics.

Agnostics are unsure of the answers, and unwilling to be placed into fixed belief-systems full of received dogma and imposed doctrine. Agnostics tend to want to look at the evidence, and decide for themselves. As Graham Chapman once said at the conclusion of one of my favorite Monty Python skits, "I've always said there isn't anything an agnostic can't do if he really isn't sure if he believes in anything or not." As the line from Richard Marx' song The Prayer goes, "Isn't faith believing that all powers can't be seen?" So, agnostics are seekers, but not true believers. They are willing to believe, but not willing to believe blindly. I've met a number of declared agnostics who are skeptical seekers, who respect the faiths of others while at the same time are uncomfortable with proselytization and missionary zeal, and who generally prefer to find personal answers rather than institutionalized ones.

Mystics are those who seek out, and experience, direct contact with spiritual realities that transcend yet infuse everyday life. Mystics, like agnostics, want to look at the evidence of their experiences, and decide for themselves. Mystics tend to explode all dogmas, and their belief systems tend to be based primarily on their personal experience, and very much not on received wisdom. This is why most mystics are routinely condemned as heretics in most of the world's organized religions. Mystics are chimera, not sheep. They take strange, unknown shapes, and report back visions of the divine as they experienced them, sans interpretation. Mystics are spiritual reporters, and spiritual technologists. They might seem otherworldly, but in fact they tend to be deeply pragmatic.

Mysticism tends to envelop and overarch binary-polarized arguments about faith and anti-faith. Mysticism is not "either/or" but instead is "both/and." Mystics are comfortable with paradox—the very paradoxes of opposition that drive the atheists against the religious. A paradox, rather than being resolved, can be maintained in dynamic tension: the same sort of dynamic tensions that the universe seems to be built on, for example, whether light is wave or particle or both.

As Hoffer says, the need to believe in something can supercede the rational assessment of what the belief is. It can make us be irrational about rationality. Rationality needs to be reasonable, rather than extreme. That seems so obvious, yet it is so rarely encountered.

Visionary Poetry 7: Orders of magnitude

There is perhaps a distinction between the infrequent Big Vision, which can be life-changing, and the ordinary visionary experience, which can be of lower dramatic content, but no less life-changing, over time. There are many legitimate mystics whose visions are quiet and personal. We hear most often about the dramatic experiences of the mystics, because in part we are addicted to drama, and think that all life-changing experiences have to come as rupture. Well, they might, but they're not required to. They can be slow and quiet, and grow over years into a restlessness that makes a person change his or her life because there is, finally, in the end, no other choice.

I think that the distinction being made between the Big Vision and the little vision(s) is a false one, an illusory one, because it it not in fact a difference in kind, but merely a difference in scale, intensity, volume. Either path of vision can lead us to where we want to arrive. And I think it also to be a mistake to think that little visions can give us only consolation (such a condescending word!), while only the Big Visions can be life-changing. I think that's a real misunderstanding that requires clarification at this point.

I am reminded of the tradition of quietism in contemplative meditation, which, over time, can lead to visionary experiences. But the root of the practice is to let all things rise, and let go of them, and let them pass on, without getting attached to them. This is Meditation 101, and forms of it appear in all of the world's sacred traditions; because it is so universal, it is not limited by or tied to any one religion, but in fact is fundamental to the human birthright. So, we can refer to it as spiritual technology.

Not everyone is temperamentally suited to having Big Visions, and in fact Big Visions can distract us from the Way, because they take up too much energy and attention, especially when other people start oohing and ahhing over them. The quiet mystic, who keeps seeing golden light in the garden of a calm afternoon, is no less a mystic, and the vision is no less a vision, for being less dramatic than having a blinding white light knock you off your horse (St. Paul), or angels dictate to you visual maps of cosmology (Hildegard of Bingen).

We are attached to Big Visions simply because we are attached to drama. Ego likes drama. Psyche does not require it, however.

Meditation, or contemplation, or quietism, is spiritual practice via several practical techniques of meditation practice, the gradual calming and silencing of the mind and the ego's need for drama and self-display. This is a variety of visionary experience: but it is, in the words of Meister Eckhart, "a sinking and cooling," an experience of the void of nothingness, of silence, of non-action. It is the opposite of Big Visions, but no less life-changing. The experience of nothingness, the Void itself, was one of my own key Big Visions, and it was truly horrifying, at first, to feel such emptiness. It was the loss of meaning, of the roots of everything I had believed to that date, and I struggled for years after that vision of the Void to try to find or create a meaning for my existence. (I wrote three Sutras about it, in that series of spiritual-exercise poems.) But the Void is also the place where there's nothing to be done, no big agenda, no great missions or purposes—and that is a relief, as well. The second vision of the Void that was given to me, was of a place of rest, calm, and tranquility. Nothing exists, and there is not meaning, so there is nothing to be done. What a relief!

I think it's possible to get too attached to the Big Vision, and the big dramas around big visions, and come to think that only Big Visions can be life-changing. Experience, and the mystical record, have shown us otherwise. Hollywood is very attached to the Big Vision; yet how much more profound are most small visions, such Little Mysteries.

Now here's a paradox for you: I personally am prone to Big Visions; I've had several in this lifetime, and written about them in various poems over the years; and yes, they've been life-changing experiences. Two of my spiritual teachers, who I view as much further down the path than I, and both of whom are very wise individuals—neither of them have Big Visions. They're both very intuitive, even clairvoyant, if you will, but neither experiences the drama of Red-Sea-parting visions that I experience. So, what's the lesson here? The lesson is simple: intuition is a birthright of us all; guidance is ordinary; visionary and mystical experiences are common and no big deal; they happen to everybody. My Big Visions, which I still get, are no longer so life-changing; they're cumulative, for one thing, and while the first few can seem like a Big Deal, after awhile they're all No Big Deal. The Big Vision becomes the ordinary, everyday little vision.

The whole purpose of practice, according to some visionaries, is to let go of the Big Visions, as well, and realize that visionary experiences are all very ordinary. The secret of enlightenment is really very plain and simple: chop wood, carry water. You don't need to do anything different after the Vision. You don't need to go announce it in the streets, and proclaim it from the hills. You can quietly create ripples of mindful action that have, in the end, perhaps more power to make the world a finer place, because it all goes on quite normally, behind the scenes, below the radar, out of the spotlight. The divine has in more than one tradition been described as "the still small voice," after all the Big Drama has passed on. And you can write poems about your experiences, and the ways your life has changed as a result: quiet, creative responses that create ripples that spread in all directions.

A good sourcebook for reading the mystics and visionary poets, as well as a guide to the mystical pathway, is Matthew Fox's Original Blessing. Each chapter is prefaced by lengthy quotations from various mystics from various traditions, and the annotated bibliography itself is worth the price of admission, and can serve as a reading guide for anyone who wants to pursue this topic. Numerous poets are included in Fox' listings, too, including but not limited to: Rilke, Yeats, Whitman, Vallejo, Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, D.H. Lawrence, Dante, others.

The first stage of the experience of the Void, the experience of Nothingness, is letting go of images and letting silence be silence. Silence doesn't need to be filled: not by our clamoring voices; not by anything. I have noticed, after all I've been through, that I am quite comfortable being silent with my friends; when we are looking at a beautiful sky, just being silent is enough. The vast majority of people can't bear the silence, and need, it seems, to fill that void with chatter.

Meister Eckhart:

God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.

The ground of the soul is dark.

Nothing in Creation is so like God as stillness.

Tao Te Ching: The Tao is beyond words and beyond things. It is not expressed either by word or in silence. Where there is no longer word or silence Tao is apprehended.

The paradox, then, is that behind the veil of drama that is the surface of every Big Vision, which we imagine must be life-changing in order to be authentic, is the quiet, even silent, slow absence of drama, and that is where the truly life-changing truthes lie, and are activated.

It is possible to become enlightened while peeling an orange. It is possible to achieve true mindfulness while doing nothing special. It is possible to find such inner stillness that Spirit floods in, with no hindrances made by oir filters and assumptions. All these things happen, every day.