[Odd post] On moths and synchronicity

I am presently a bit swamped by intellectual endeavors so the frequency (and quality) of my blog posts are suffering.

Today I would like to share an anecdote, that I find fascinating (I don't need much apparently) and completely mysterious.

For the last 7 days, when I come home at night, I find one small moth on the backside of my front door. After a few minutes the moth flies right at me and lands either on me or, if I am working on my computer, on my computer screen. Strange, right?

Now what if I told you that it is not the same moth every time? More than that it has been a different moth every time! As the moth flies to me or on me I have been catching the moth/s with a small glass and a cardboard CD case. Glass covers moth and then cardboard case goes between me and my friendly, neighborhood moth. Said moth, is then accompanied to a window. Window is opened, moth is released, window is closed. Windows stay closed. Another day, another moth. Catch, release, repeat.

No other moths are in the apartment and I can't figure out where they are coming from...

Makes me think of a Sherlock Holmes mystery and, more relevant to this blog, to Jung's story of synchronicity and his patient's dream scarab.

Otherwise, I am still reading Chopra's Path to Love. Some very interesting insights, simple but effective, so to speak. One particular question he attempts to answer is how to preserve the devotion, faithfulness and love of a relationship, without giving in to neediness and attachment. He explains, quite well, that what is NOT needed is detachment, which he assimilates to 'not caring'. What he recommends is a 'state' (not the best word, but it is the one he used...) of nonattachment


A good summary of the idea in Chopra's words: "Attachment is a form of dependency based on ego; love is nonattachment based on spirit."

Earlier he explains the difference as follows:

Love allows your beloved the freedom to be unlike you. Attachment asks for conformity to your needs and desires.

Love imposes no demands. Attachment expresses an overwhelming demand - "Make me feel whole."

Love expands beyond the limits of two people. Attachment tries to exclude everything but two people.

So on that final note, I wish you much love without attachment, and if I resolve the "Mystery of the Recurring Moth" I will let you know...

[Commentary] 21 grams

One movie character that absolutely fascinates me is the role played by Benicio del Toro in 21 grams (2003). (a link to the movie's information on IMDB here).

Before I go into his story, allow me to pay hommage to the Director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Writer, Guillermo Arriaga, of this incredible movie (and a wonderful cast including personal faves Sean Penn, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Eddie Marsan (who plays the reverend)).

My personal take on just some of the many themes of this movie are destiny, crime and punishment, death, repentance, love, making good, doing the right thing, revenge, self-loathing, starting over, closure, the coincidences (serendipity?) necessary for two people to meet in this life, and the impenetrable nature of God...

The character's name is Jack Jordan, an ex-con who becomes a Born-again Christian and more than anything a deeply religious man. And although the themes mentioned above touch all of the characters in the film in one way or another as their destinies are intertwined, the role that crystalizes these 'issues' is Benicio's.

Here is the 'official' synopsis of the role:

Jack Jordan (Benicio Del Toro) is an ex-con that has spent more time in jail than out, but has reformed and is working in a church, spreading the gospel, and helping kids that are heading toward the same kind of trouble he's been in. He and his wife have two young children.

The movie does an incredible job at showing the incredible complexity of Jack Jordan as he struggles to come to terms with his life and the tragic events that happen to him despite his attempts to be a good man. Without attempting to recount the whole film, he unwittingly kills two young girls and their father in a car accident. Thereafter he cannot come to terms with the guilt, nor understand why he is being punished. He tries to commit suicide in jail and the pipe on which he tries to hang himself collapses. He is then released from jail on a technicality. Later Sean Penn intends to kill him to venge the deaths of the others and cannot go through with it. Not long after, Benicio goes to find Sean Penn and the mother of the children (played by Naomi Watts) and asks to be killed by those whose lives he hurt and it doesn't work out as expected. He even tries to take responsibility for Sean Penn's self-inflicted gunshot, admitting 'I shot him' to a sheriff, but again, he is released as the facts don't align with his story.

Having spent his years out of prison trying to atone for past behavior, through no fault of his own, he is now stuck in a bottomless well of guilt and no ability to atone. Deep conviction in God's wisdom crashes (more or less literally) into incomprehension of God's ways.

A tragic story and a tragic character, written, portrayed and directed with brio. And the brilliance was in part due to how much we come to care about and understand this character. Definitely not one of us, but at the same time one of us in the sense that the conditions of our lives are as fragile as Jack Jordan's and our (shared) incomprehension of why bad things happen to good people.

I guess more than anything the role is about the flip side of Serendipity, the negative coincidence, which I will now term derensipity.

And on that creative note, I will end this post. Be well.

Spirituality in the face of evil

It is difficult for me to get my head around how to feel/act/react in the face of evil. It is easy to be spiritual in a protected environment but how do you deal with evil people? In Conversations with God and other spiritual books, the question you are suggested to answer before you act/react to anything or anyone is "what would love do now?" And I don't know what love does in those cases when you are faced with a truly bad apple...

I just saw a scary documentary about the rise of the extreme right throughout many countries in Europe. According to the documentary, in 16 different countries in Europe the extreme right has recently obtained the highest electoral scores since the second world war. There are several Euro deputies which are extreme right. In a nutshell, post 9/11 anti-muslim sentiment is being used as justification for anti-immigrant attitudes, laws and prejudices. Fascism seems to be gaining traction.

So in the face of people who dislike other people without knowing them but based only on their race, creed, color or religion, what does spirituality have to say? Or more generally in the face of "socially unacceptable behavior? Turn the other cheek is a tough credo to accept. Love and compassion for them is also tough... What is a proper response to aggression, violence, hate or any of the negative '-isms'?

Possibly the greatest insight of the golden rule - Love thy brother as thyself - is that no matter how someone behaves you are similar to some degree. That is brother = thyself. Not an easy thing to admit, maybe THE major difficulty of the golden rule. And that is probably part of spirituality, recognizing that no matter how despicable or ugly we might find someone's actions, we have the potential for thinking or acting similarly (or worse) given the proper context.

As fate would have it (see post on synchronicity : )) between the time that I started the first draft of this post and the time of this writing I listened to some music and a very appropriate song manifested itself out of the iPod ether: U2's God Part 2. Here are the lyrics:

Don't believe the devil, I don't believe his book
But the truth is not the same, Without the lies he made up

Don't believe in excess, Success is to give
Don't believe in riches, But you should see where I live
I...I believe in love

Don't believe in forced entry, Don't believe in rape
But every time she passes by, Wild thoughts escape

I don't believe in death row, Skid row or the gangs
Don't believe in the Uzi, It just went off in my hand
I...I believe in love

Don't believe in cocaine, Got a speed-ball in my head
I could cut and crack you open, Do you hear what I said

Don't believe them when they tell me, There ain't no cure
The rich stay healthy, The sick stay poor
I...I believe in love

Don't believe in Goldman, His type like a curse
Instant karma's going to get him, If I don't get him first

Don't believe in rock 'n' roll, Can really change the world
As it spins in revolution, It spirals and turns
I...I believe in love

Don't believe in the 60's, The golden age of pop
You glorify the past, When the future dries up

Heard a singer on the radio late last night
He says he's gonna kick the darkness, 'til it bleeds daylight
I...I believe in love

I feel like I'm falling, Like I'm spinning on a wheel
It always stops beside of me, With a presence I can feel
I...I believe in love

There is a lot we could say about these lyrics (what a great song!) but the main reason the lyrics of this song resonated with me for this post was the passage "I don't believe in violence, I don't believe in rape, but every time she walks on by violent thoughts escape." My feeling is that no matter how nice we try to be and how nice we act, how 'spiritually evolved' we may be (or believe ourselves to be) our thoughts are a bit more tricky.

Now one thing that comes out of almost all spiritual and pseudo-spiritual lit' is that thoughts become reality (which could be a brief condensation of the law of attraction). So the thinking of the thought is equivalent on some (meta-physical) level to the acting of the act. Kind of like the aphorism attributed to Jesus, let he who is without sin cast the first stone (after a quick search it would seem that the exact phrase is "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her"). I doubt anyone reading this blog believes in violence, or rape, or murder, but certainly violent thoughts escape. We can hide from them or recognize them but there they are. Sometimes, as Oscar Wilde knew, we are all murderers... In the Ballad of Reading Gaol an epic poem he writes:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young, And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust, Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long, Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a sigh...

"Each man kills the thing he loves..." Which probably means none of us can cast the first stone...

But it is one thing to admit that we have violent thoughts and another to accept the violent actions of others. Even if we are able to admit that we all have our monstrous sides to us, what then? To admit that you could have done something does not mean that you need to accept, condone or turn a blind eye to someone else's improper behavior... But what do you do? The parenting metaphor in which a parent can love a child without accepting improper behavior seems too easy in the face of psychopaths, criminals, deviants or just mean people. Bono, seems to come up with a spiritual answer, I believe in love. But how do each of us, which together makes 'society', deal with these issues?

I am not coming up with any answers or insights. I will have to revisit some spiritual literature to see if I can find the topic discussed. I have a vague recollection of the subject being mentioned in the Course in Miracles and/or Conversations with God but I can't be sure.

So it looks like I will have to complete this post at a later date, after I do a little research. If you know of any place I should be looking or have your own personal opinions on the matter please let me know.

PS If you were curious, the Goldman reference in the song is to the guy who wrote a scathing biography about Lennon that apparently Bono did not really appreciate...

Synchronicity

According to Wikipedia:

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which are causally unrelated occurring together in a supposedly meaningful manner. In order to count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance.

It really is a great word/concept! One of my favorites. There have been a few synchronistic events in my life, which I guess is the norm for most of us - often attributed to that infamous lucky star.

Anyway, the origin of the word, according to lore, which I hope is correct because it is a good story, the word was coined by Carl Jung after working with a patient who was telling him about a repetitive dream she had had about a golden scarab. Just then Jung heard some tapping on the window behind him and when he opened the window to see what it was a bug flew in and he caught it in his hand. To his dismay, it was a rose-colored scarab!

Jung apparently also described the term, in the 1920s, in the following terms at different times: an "acausal connecting principle", a "meaningful coincidence" and as an "acausal parallelism." I personally like the meaningful coincidence best of the lot...

What is interesting is that this concept apparently baffled Jung to the point that about 30 years separated his coining of the term and his actual publishing of a complete treatise on it. Another quote by Jung, written apparently around 1950 shows the evolution of his thinking on the subject and the importance he accorded it:

Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist. But if they do, then we must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.

I love this notion of "creative acts" which sounds like creative acts of the universe, and his reference to "a pattern that exists from all eternity" sounds a lot like a reference to God or a God-like intentionality of the universe. Hmm...

Otherwise, the same notion has sometimes been explained (even by Jung) as some form of collective consciousness (like two people making the same invention at the same time on two sides of the world), while others place it in the realm of divine intervention, of destiny or some form of determinism, predetermination, or that heavily-charged and hard to accept notion (for me at least) called fate.

Synchronicity has also been popularized recently by books like The Secret, in which magical thinking is assimilated to the law of attraction, which says your thoughts create your reality. I believe that is true to a certain extent, but more in the sense that you are free to interpret what happens to you any way you like. I don't know how much control we have over what actually happens, even though I would like to think we have some influence, but we can all control how we live and experience everything that happens to and around us. There is the classic example of seeing potential obstacles as stepping blocks, and of there are others, like simply feeling gratitude for whatever happens... For many, the good and the less good are both good, i.e. it's all good.

I read a fun story today in a French novel on art in which a couple is in a museum and the woman is in ecstasy in front of the painting. The husband can't take it any more as his wife is always positive, always sees things in a positive light. He tells her something like "I can't stand your positiveness any more - when the alarm rings in the morning you are thankful, when it's time to go to work you are thankful for having a job, you see art and it makes you joyful, I can't take it." What does she say? "I am so happy that you feel comfortable enough with me and all of these strangers to express such deep sentiments in public." Personally I understand and feel sorry for him, but somehow I am jealous of her...

So when does being positive look naive, ingenu or silly? Like Voltaire's Candida, who in the face of every possible disaster repeats what his tutor, Professor Pangloss taught him, that "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." And when is it spiritual and enlightened? And how did I get so far adrift of the subject of today's post? I don't know...

To get back to the subject and to close this post, let me just say that several books have referred to synchronicity or made it part of their plots. Those I seem to recall that made direct or indirect references to it were Lewis Carroll , Douglas Adams, Philip Dick and one Russian author I discovered thanks to a Russian friend (imagine the coincidence : )) Alexander Green (aka Alexandre Grine in French). He wrote one particularly beautiful book called the Scarlet Sails, which was given to me the aforementioned friend several years ago. According to Amazon it is only available used. Beautiful story. If you can find it. Maybe with a little help from synchronicity...

[Living the now] On pain (and pleasure)

Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now) and Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddha, and so many others exhort us to live the now, live the present moment without anticipation, expectation, reservation, preconceived notions, fantasy, judgment, etc.

Just be. Don't name the sunset, don't describe the sunset, don't even watch the sunset, just be with the sunset. Some say be the witness, some say be the observer, some imply detachment, others immersion. Tomorrow does not exist, yesterday is gone, all that we have is the eternal now.

In a recent blog post, I mentioned that Thich Nhat Han (TNH) even says that hope is tragic as it is a projection into the future, which means that we are not correctly living the present. You can't change the future, you can only effectuate change in the present.

Most of these writers, thinkers, spiritual leaders, philosophers who exhort us to live in the present, usually imply that living the present brings us close to bliss, which we imagine to be joyful.

Eckhart Tolle tells us, probably rightly so, that "the mind creates an obsession with the future to escape from the unsatisfactory present." Or "die to the past every moment, you don't need it." That "There is no salvation in time. You cannot be free in the future."

I also find an interesting link between Tolle and TNH and the idea of hope (and goals). The former says, "There is nothing wrong with setting goals and striving to achieve things. The mistake lies in using it as a substitute for the feeling of life, the Being."

And a final quote from Tolle on hope and expectation and waiting for a better day:

When you catch yourself waiting... snap out of it! Come into the present moment.
Just be and enjoy being.

Now all of this sounds nice from the top of Maslow's pyramid, but I have always wondered how being in the now handles things like hunger, cold and, especially, pain.

I am sure that much has been written about it but I don't seem to remember much writing about being in the now which concerns pain management. Pleasure and pain have often been mentioned together as the two river banks in between which we navigate our lives, trying to row our boats closer to the bank of pleasure and inevitably being thrown against the shoals on the banks of pain.

In particular, I do not recall having seen any discussion on the spiritual nature of pain. Why do I call pain's nature spiritual? Well it seems to me like the only time that we are able (or condemned) to completely live in the present moment, a moment that seems like the eternal now.

Take a migraine headache for example. When you have a migraine attack (or just a bad headache) it seems nearly impossible to think of anything else but the present moment (even just thinking is difficult). You just live the present moment and all concentration is on the present moment and the pain. It seems like the pain is so strong that we cannot think of anything else and we cannot imagine a world in which this pain does not exist. It is all consuming, it is blinding, and it does away with the past and the future quite effectively. So is this a spiritual moment? I doubt that anyone would say so... and I haven't seen it written anywhere.

However, it is interesting to read in the lore of many mystics and yogis the mention of bouts of intense, all-consuming, all-body, pain from which the person (I think I have only heard of men having these experiences) emerges enlightened. In one account of a yogi that I read in "What is Enlightenment?" magazine, the yogi says he felt like he was replaced within his body with another entity, i.e. he really was changed by the experience.

So these extreme situations can be enlightening, but what about the migraines?

[Thich Nhat Hanh] Hope as an obstacle

Ever since Barack Obama has come on the scene 'hope' has been bantied around liberally and seems to be back on everyone's lips. An interesting take on hope comes from Thich Nhat Hanh who says:

"When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic."

Not exactly what most of us would have said spontaneously. I mean many people around the world were happy to see one president leave and another come in on the basis of hope, hope for a better future, hope for a better world, hope for a new day, hope for less inequality, hope for less hate and violence, hope for peace in the Middle East, hope, hope, hope. And what could be wrong with that?

Well, TNH explains, still and always in his Peace is Every Step (link), that this is an example of clinging to a future that might never come, rather than focusing energy and resources on now. If I can paraphrase, his idea is not to hope for a better day but to make a better today.

More specifically he says:

Western civilization places so much emphasis on the idea of hope that we sacrifice the present moment. Hope is for the future. It cannot help us discover joy, peace, or enlightenment in the present moment... I do not mean that you should not have hope, but that hope is not enough.

TNH warns us that if we put our energy into the energy of hope we are robbing the present moment of our energy, and reminds us that we don't need the future, since it is only in the present moment that we can make a difference.

He also quotes AJ Muste of the American Peace Movement who once said, "There is no way to peace, peace is the way," and goes on to explain that we can contribute in our own way to peace with our actions, smiles, attitude, words and each and every step that we take. "Each step we make should be joy."

A wonderful idea. Let's hope he's right. : )