What Everyone Forgets

Do you ever get the feeling that you’ve forgotten something? Not your keys, not your coat; this is stranger. You sense something like a thread coming loose in your belly, and with it, you spontaneously know that the whole world isn’t what you thought it was. It’s not even close. The colors seem drab, the scene like a cardboard cutout. But it’s not a bad feeling. Thinking it through, you will see the world’s new flatness as a sign: that what you knew isn’t the whole package of what is. You’ll think: there’s more here. And there is.

Everything you know is just a facade. All things hide something else within and behind them. What’s hidden there? An openness. An expanse. And it’s not dark but overpoweringly bright. It rushes between atoms and shines between the eyes of two people deep in conversation. Everything around you is just a nozzle for this bright open space. And you used to know this; you just forgot. A long time ago, you pushed that bright openness deep down inside and pretended it wasn’t there. The sun at noonday is just a shadow by comparison to the brightness in your chest.

For the whole world of things has fallen away from itself. So have you. All of it—stone to shrub, elephant to eggplant — used to rest in that inner light, but they don’t anymore. Each one fell down and out until it landed with a sharp “pft” in the rigid shape we know each one to be. We did this to them. By turning away from the light within everything, the light crashed into that pile of rubble we call the world.

Deep in your abdomen, you remember. As you move further into your own within, the nostalgia for that other place gets hotter and hotter until you burn with it. That fire flares up in those moments when you can’t tell longing and contentment apart anymore. The song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” does this for me. Someone once said that when Judy Garland sang it in concert, everyone forgot who she was, where they were, who they were. There was just a shared longing for something they could almost remember but not quite. “Birds fly over the rainbow. Why…oh why can’t I?”

The bright spaces between things and themselves, between you and yourself, are calling. The call is very soft, but at the same time, it’s a roar so constant that you’ve forgotten it’s there. But you can tune yourself to it. You can cock your head and close your eyes until you can just discern its sound. Align your sail with the wind. Follow the golden threads and pull on them until it all unravels into liquid light. This is life from death, light from darkness. You’ll know what I mean when you see it. A part of you does even now.

But you have to try to remember. I’ve tried, and yet it’s still like a dim dream. Any words I say about that call is like sprinkling confetti on an invisible man – you see the outline for a few seconds and then it’s gone. But I don’t think it’s a futile quest, trying to remember. It can come back; it will.

I’ll see you at sunrise.

Moana’s Call: Remembering the World

SPOILER WARNING: This post contains spoilers for the new Disney movie Moana. If you haven’t seen it, you really should, and you really shouldn’t read this post until you do.

Last night, I watched the recently released Disney movie Moana – the story of a girl who gets called across the ocean to save the world. It’s really important in lots of ways, I realized: not only does it have a strong female protagonist (Moana) with no love interest, but both she and the other main character (Maui) never overcome their trials using brute force. They always use cunning, acting more like an Odysseus than a Hercules.

But I immediately realized that Moana is one of the most important movies that has been released in the last few years. Not because of the movie’s cinematic qualities or even because of how good of a movie it is. The movie is so crucial to us because it helps us all remember what we’ve forgotten. What is that? If I could say it in a few words, the movie wouldn’t have been so necessary. So let me do it in more than a few.

The Soul of the World

The world has a soul. This Soul is the luster of all living things: the shimmer of fractured sunlight on a creek, the damp scent that hints of a thunderstorm, the virgin snow of the morning after a blizzard. Without the Soul of the World, the world gets shoved beneath our concepts. For the world is particular: never are there “trees” or “flowers” but always “that tree, the one with the bark like elephant’s skin,” or “that flower, the one with silky petals.” Our concepts generalize, but the world is never general. As Alan Watts once pointed out, even though we try to make it fit a grid, the world “wiggles.”

But we’ve forgotten it. The Soul of the World longs to be seen; its sheen and color are hidden in darkness unless they become appreciated, become noticed. To notice the world is to remember it. And by remembering the world in this way, the world remembers itself, through us. But we have shirked that responsibility. Because we push the world’s wildness into our conceptual framework, we’ve forgotten that the world has a soul. And so has the world.

Remember Her

This is the first thing Moana helps us remember: that the world is in peril. In the movie, a blackness spreads across the ocean, poisoning the coconuts, driving away the fish, making dead what was once alive. It seems like the end of the world, just as the real-life world seems to be ending. But in truth, the world isn’t dead or dying but only amnesiac. Like in Moana, the world has forgotten who she is. We’ve stolen the heart out of her chest, carrying it like booty to the only place we think something like a soul still exists: the prison of our own skulls. The aliveness of bark, dragonfly wings, and the scent of rain – what we should ensoul – has retreated into this bony globe. And deprived of soul – her very heart – the world becomes the soulless, indifferent thing we imagine her to be.

The world is scared and alone. She doesn’t even think she exists. I have tears coming to my eyes as I write this because I feel her pain, as I have before. We have beaten her, abused her, raped her. We must stop. We must return to her the heart we have stolen. Not for our sake, but for hers – the bruised woman trapped in the closet of our egoism.

Moana is a glimmer of remembrance. With this film, many people, if only dimly, see the plight of the World Soul for the first time. We must feed this spark. And so I urge you: remember. See the sky’s blueness. See the sadness in a dog’s eyes. Hear the stillnesss of a December night. We must let the World know that we see her. Look her – the very Soul of the world – in the eyes and say:

I have crossed the horizon to find you.

I know your name.

They have stolen the heart from inside you.

But this does not define you.

This is not who you are.

You know who you are.

How to Get Out of Saturn’s Belly

The visionary activist astrologer Caroline Casey often says on her radio show “The Visionary Activist Show” that it’s our job to help “inauguarate a guiding story” for the world. Without a vision of not just what events are happening in the world, but of what they mean, we’re caught by hidden patterns that control us.

The end result is something like this:

SNL CNN Skit

Without a guiding story, we’re just robots controlled by the news. But with a guiding story, we’re able to be “first responders” instead of the “first reactors” everyone is these days. This is my attempt to inaugurate, or at least nominate, a guiding story. Take it as you will, just try not to robotically react.

The Wall, the Goat, and the Planets

Right now, the planet Pluto is passing through Capricorn, where it has been since 2008 and where it will be until 2024. Intepreted, that means that Pluto – the planet of intense change, evisceration, and upheaval – is doing its magic in Capricorn’s domain, which basically means that we’re in the middle of huge, cleansing transformations in what Capricorn governs. And what does Capricorn govern? Control, opposition, boundaries, and force. In other words, everything having to do with a defensive stance against an opposing sides, the boundaries between groups of people, and our attitudes toward control are lit up on Pluto’s radar. They’re due for a violent makeover, and it won’t be pretty.

This is exactly what we see in the world. If there is one thing Capricorn doesn’t do, it’s compromising, which is also something no one today does. We’ve all been snookered into opposition: if group 1 does something group 2 doesn’t like, the group 2 inevitably starts a protest. Trump supporters hated Hilary; Hilary supporters hated Trump. The solution is never to build bridges; it’s always to build a wall.

Snookered by Saturn

But this is all a style of consciousness that we’ve seen before. It’s always here, but normally too invisible to see. And that style of consciousness belongs to what the ancients called a god (what I’d call a divine aspect): Kronos/Saturn, whose planet rules Capricorn. Remember: Saturn is the god of time, fixed limits, boundaries, edges. He keeps the rhythm of the cosmos, defining its limits by standing just outside it. He swallowed his children, keeping all the gods’ energies safe and contained in his belly. With him, we’re locked inside a fixed vessel, but without him, we suffer the even harder fate of being lost in a vast expanse without definition.

So as the archetype that’s constellated in the world today, we can view Saturn in two ways: 1) as an enemy to freedom and love who hates outsiders and who moves back the clock of progress, or 2) as someone who reins in the world from getting lost and dispersed our world of polyamory and thirty-something unique gender choices. Moreover, we can make this observation: the political right is explicitly Saturn (since it promotes order, limits and walls), but the political left is implicitly Saturn. In Jungian language, Saturn is the left’s Shadow: while they may not explicitly want to build walls, they are just as if not more oppositional and rigid than the right. So essentially, Saturn is at work in both sides. He’s ruling the world again, like it or not.

Cutting It (Everything) Out

So whats’s the cure? Not to fight the other side – that oppositionalism is what defines Saturn as Saturn. I’d suggest that, instead of rigidly opposing (what we see as) light and (what we see as) darkness, we accept “a twilight state.” Only then can we give back to the gods what Saturn has swallowed. Let each thing, mood, person, and viewpoint be what it wants to be. Allow coexistence, not just on the terms of your ideals, but let ideals themselves coexist. And that would mean allowing viewpoints different from yours, or even wildly opposed to it, to exist without your interference.

But above all, the cure is to trust in the light that isn’t the harsh flourescent light of ego consciousness. The ego is the heavy-handed, rigid, literal miser that we all have in our heads. Let him die, not by killing him, but by letting him be no longer the only acceptable way to be. The light we should trust in is, again, a twilight: where the light of each god respects and does not fight against or try to swallow the light of every other god. You let consciousness be, neither claiming it as mine nor repressing it as unacceptable. And this twilight is not a dusk but a dawn. It would be where each style of consciousnes is always on the way toward union, none ever dominating the others as the harsh noon of a “complete” union (which is just Saturn swallowing his kids again). And as Swedenborg said, this means a lot more than just relief from strife:

Moreover, by “morning” is signified in the supreme sense the Lord Himself, for the reason that the Lord is the Sun from which comes all the light in heaven, and He is always in the rising, thus in the morning. (Arcana Coelestia 5097)

Trumptation

You’re suffering today. And you and I both know why: the world just changed. To everyone’s surprise, Donald Trump just got elected president, and now you don’t know how to think about anything. Nothing makes sense. Hope seems to have disappeared. But even though this is a time of grief, there’s a hope for the future that wasn’t there a few days ago. The world looks dark right now, but darkness only looks like darkness in contrast to light. That light – even though it’s hidden – is there. And now it’s set to illuminate our souls more than ever. The task now is to see it.

Let me tell you how.

Temptation

Emanuel Swedenborg was an eighteenth-century scientist, philosopher, and theologian who claimed that his mind was open to the spiritual world, which he could travel to at will. This sounds crazy, but apart from saying that he has helped me more than any other author, it isn’t important to talk about his sanity. His writings are valuable right now because of what he taught about temptations. And temptations are important because those of us in despair are going through one right now.

Swedenborg said that temptations are a state of mind that threatens what matters to you. When you’ve made up your mind to follow the commandments and you get an impulse to drink alcohol or watch pornography, this is a temptation. Temptations happen when you’re filled with impulses or thoughts that could lead you away from what you love, wedging you between the rock of your good desires and the hard place of the evil desires that lead you away from it. And it’s terrifying. You’ve made up your mind to do what’s good and believe what’s true, but in the middle of a temptation, you find that you might not want to do or believe those things anymore. Good seems to retreat. Evil seems about to conquer. But this is just how it seems.

According to a beloved quote from Swedenborg,

So long as temptation continues, man supposes the Lord to be absent…Yet the Lord is then more intimately present than he can ever believe. When however temptation ceases, then he receives consolation, and then first believes the Lord to be present. (Arcana Coelestia 840)

Temptations are actually a balanced fight between good and evil, not a slaughter of good by evil. If evil took over, you wouldn’t even see it as a problem. Evil and good are both ways of acting and seeing the world with their own “delights,” and if good vanished, you’d rush headlong into evil’s dirty pleasures without a second thought. You wouldn’t even remember things like peace of conscience or the love of God. In other words, when someone feels rotten, anxious, and miserable in times like these, that anxiety is a sign that they have a lot of good inside them. In fact, anxiety is a sign that God has big plans for that person. Someone who’s never felt any anxiety will maybe never reach the spiritual heights possible for one who struggles with and through it.

For this anxiety, this temptation, is how God frees us from evil impulses and false thoughts. When you’re in the middle of a temptation, the tension you feel means that you have the opportunity to make a uniquely powerful choice. You can go with the temptation and keep that evil with you, but you can also fight and freely choose the good. And when this happens – when you use your God-sanctioned freedom to “choose the right” – a huge change happens. Having chosen goodness, it becomes much more present in you than it was before. Since you chose the good in you even when it was hard, the organ of your “choosing” – your heart, your will, your inmost parts – get flooded with God’s love.

But there’s another important aspect here. For the root of all evil is the belief that you have power from yourself. It is the sin of the Fall, since by believing that we’re separate and self-sufficient beings, we “separate” ourselves from God and His love. Obviously, just as the Fall was necessary, this “love of the self” is also necessary. We would be divine robots without it. But any “love of the self” in us should be in service to a higher love, “love for the Lord,” just like the body obeys the head. Since all temptation has the end of getting us to choose virtue over sin, and since all sin comes from love of the self, the ultimate purpose of temptation is to attack that evil self-love. In other words, temptation is all about death: we die to our selfishness, pride, and worship of ourselves, and we’re reborn to togetherness, freedom, and love. We stop clinging to ourselves to not fall into the abyss, and find, to our amazement, that God has always been holding us safely. You thought that you were powerful enough to save yourself, but only when you realize your powerlessness do you see how safe you are

In fact, realizing your powerlessness gives you power. Swedenborg wrote that the angels in heaven lose their power to the extent they think it belongs to them, just as acknowledging their weakness makes them powerful. In fact, perfect strength is what the world considers weakness. Think of how water can burst dams even though it passively takes the shape of the reservoir. Think of how tense muscles get hurt more easily than flexible ones. Or think of how Christ, the most powerful being of us all, submitted himself to be humiliated and executed in a moment of what seemed like utter meaninglessness. This was a temptation – nothing made sense, and the promise of the Kingdom seemed lost. To everyone there, death had won. But it was just then, as Christ trusted and loved his Father in spite of all his despair, anxiety, and confusion, that the miracle happened. The strength of weakness won, and death died.

Trumptation

We’re in the middle of a temptation right now. It looks like the end of the world: Donald Trump, the bully, sleazy rapist, and xenophobe, won. But Trump’s victory is a wake-up call. Nothing we do will ever make a difference – no matter how many angry protests happen or how many celebrity videos Joss Whedon makes, evil will win. But hope isn’t gone. Hope might actually be here more than before, because now many of us realize that, when you only look at what we ourselves can do, the future IS literally hopeless. But the real hope for our future doesn’t come from us. It comes from God, and only when we realize that we’ve sinned by attributing his power to ourselves will that change happen.

God wants to give us blessings beyond number. But we desperately cling to our own sense of power, and since God will never violate our agency, He can’t give us the greatest blessing of all: the peace of trusting Him. Only now, as we’re being shown our utter poverty, we have the opportunity to choose something more than ourselves. We can turn away from the darkness of ourselves and toward the overpowering light of God, who is love itself, the very essence of trust, faith, and the strength of weakness

So what do we do now? That’s the question, isn’t it? You could resign yourself to give up to God, but then you are trying to give up, which is a disguised kind of pride.  We have to stop trying, and what’s more, we have to stop trying not to try! Luckily, the temptations we’re talking about are the best (and only) way we can get there. Like someone in full-lotus meditation who relaxes her muscles to stop her legs hurting, it will get easier and easier for us to give up and give in to God as we go along. That is our hope: that what becomes darker and darker to our egos is actually the dawning of light for love.

Throwing Away Your Shot

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a genius. This goes without saying: he was the the author, composer, and leading man of the Broadway musicals In the Heights and Hamilton, and he can come up with jaw-droppingly clever rhymes in the spur of the moment. Just give him a beat. But what does it mean to say that someone is a “genius?” The word comes from Latin, where it meant “an attendant spirit present at one’s birth,” what the Greeks called a “daimon.” The genius is like the angel on your shoulder: a little ghost that whispers inspiration to you. When we say that Lin-Manuel is a genius, we mean that he has a genius. And he’s no stranger to it.

On the Genius

But isn’t this just a bunch of old Roman hooey? It isn’t. Here’s my evidence: Lin-Manuel is very talented at doing things “on the fly.” Not only can you see this in the talk show episodes where he cleverly does freestyle raps with only a few seconds to prepare, but it shows up in the musicals he writes too. Most of the songs in Hamilton have rhymes, rhythms, and meanings so well woven together that they bear the character of something whole. No part of My Shot‘s lyrics can be separated from the other parts without the whole thing losing its meaning. This organized whole – what psychologists would call a gestalt – can’t be assembled piece by piece. Its living kernel needs to come all at once, and as such it needs to have been given. The one who gives this whole is the genius. The genius is where inspiration begins.

The concept of the genius is another way of saying that works of art aren’t just a collection of notes or drops of paint. Hamilton isn’t a collision of billiard balls on a musical pool table. As a gestalt, it’s more than the sum of its parts. If you took the parts away and considered them apart from each other, it would lose meaning and its life. And this life is the genius: what organizes these parts into something whole, something significant. Without the genius, the work is contrived, uninspired, or even dead.

The genius of Lin-Manuel is what caused a sensation in the nation, what kept “the ten-dollar founding father” on our bills. Without it, all of that would fall apart into brittle, dissociated pieces. It’s time we learned more about it.

Hamilton’s Shot

“You have married an Icarus. He has flown too close to the sun.”

Hamilton isn’t just a product of genius. It’s about genius…in more ways than one. Not only is its main character a prodigy, a Mozart of letters, but its ultimate message is about what happens to genius when it pops into the world. In Hamilton, the genius announces who he is and tells us about himself. It’s a tell-all, a full disclosure.

The genius comes from somewhere else. It strikes us unawares – while sitting on a park bench, walking, or reading a biography – but the genius isn’t confined to the book we’re reading. It only appears by means of it, as if Ron Chernow’s book were a mirror the genius used to see itself. In itself, it exists beyond the bounds of things and definite ideas. It breaks through; it “bursts” into awareness.

Hamilton (the character) is a lot like that genius. Like a flash of inspiration, he comes from somewhere else (the Caribbean), and he comes here (the colonies) to shake everything up. Both Hamilton and the genius affect everything they touch. They’re both a bundle of fiery energy just waiting to explode. And fire can’t easily be held: he commits adultery, he gets into fights, and he spills his private secrets out into the world without any scruples, just as inspiration doesn’t lend itself easily to the real-life projects that can contain it.

But I’ll argue that Hamilton isn’t just similar to the genius. Hamilton is genius announcing itself. He is the promise of a new idea, the openness of a gestalt and all the ways you can understand it. He is the possibility of curiosity, intuition, and ambition. In every flash of insight, Hamilton’s ship is in the harbor. See if you can spot him.

But the genius often isn’t received well. New ideas and fresh perspectives are all well and good, but many people are scared by the thought of any change. The inevitable resistance that rises up against social progress is a case in point. Hamilton threatens the establishment. That establishment says: “if you talk, you’re gonna get shot.” And he often does. Look at John Lennon or Martin Luther King Jr.: both shot at the height of their path toward change.

It goes without saying at this point that the establishment gets personified in Hamilton through Aaron Burr. He “keeps out of trouble,” and “keeps his cards close to his chest”: both motions of closure as opposed to Hamilton’s radical openness. Hamilton is soaring freedom; Burr is enclosed restriction. Hamilton is the liberal; Burr is the conservative. Hamilton is yes; Burr is no. These are opposites, but they need each other. You can’t have open without closed, after all. But neither of them see this until the very end. With Hamilton’s and Burr’s dueling pistols loaded and pointed at each other, the opposition that defines our culture – ambition and pessimism, idealism and realism, liberal and conservative – goes into its final showdown. Who will win? Who will lose? What actually happened, at least in the musical, surprised everyone: Hamilton threw away his shot.

Hamilton, who fought against tyranny and restriction his whole life, decides to let it have the last word. He points his pistol at the sky, like his son, knowing that he would probably die. Why? I think it’s because, at that last moment when he saw the “other side,” he saw the secret behind the world’s deceptive appearance: that when Burr and Hamilton fight, both lose. So instead of pointing his pistol at his enemy, he points it at the sky. He sees that “whoever takes the sword perishes by the sword” and that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” And he perishes by a twitch of Burr’s finger.

But this act, where the genius points himself back at the sky instead of fighting the limitations of the earth, doesn’t count for nothing. It leaves everyone dumbfounded. As the genius returns to the beyond where he came from, we – like the centurion at Christ’s crucifixion – can tell that something more-than-human has just happened. The air is pregnant with unsayable meaning even as there’s “wailing in the streets.” And it leaves people changed.

Likewise, every time we realize that our high-flying ideals, ambitions, and insights don’t belong on earth, we point its pistol at the sky and it returns home. We don’t lose the insight, but we remember that it comes from something fundamentally other than me: the genius. For the genius will return home sooner or later. With the geniuses in history like John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, or Mozart, it could only ascend by killing the person. But a person – realizing that he’s “only human” – puts down the burden of “being the genius” and can work with that inspiring spirit productively.

This is crucial for our culture today. As liberals fighting conservatives and conservatives fighting liberals, we don’t realize that these political ideals which Hamilton and Burr show so well don’t belong on earth. They come to us from somewhere else, somewhere divine and not human. By acknowledging that and realizing that they aren’t our own, we point our pistol at the sky and let the conflict so bitterly played out on the national stage lose its life-or-death quality. But this is true of every ideal, every cause, or even every emotion that carries us beyond ourselves. It’s not us: it’s something greater than us, and only by acknowledging that can we end the cycle of pain that getting possessed by these forces inevitably causes. Let the gods be the gods; let humans be humans. Only apart can they work together.

Will you throw away your shot? Will you plant seeds in a garden you never get to see? More depends on these questions than you could ever think.

The Dumbing-Down of Truth

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle with 25 pieces. It would be pretty simple to solve, right? It might be fun for a 5-year-old, but probably not for you. Now imagine dividing each of those 25 pieces into 10 pieces, making a grand total of 250 pieces. A little more complicated, but basically still for kids. But imagine you divided each of those 250 pieces into another 10, making 2500. That’s more like it. But imagine that when you’ve finished your 2500 piece puzzle, your five-year-old cousin comes up to you and says “I could have done that, easy!” You’re confused for a bit, but then you realize that your cousin can’t see the 2500 pieces but, instead, only the outlines of the initial 25. He can’t tell that each one of those larger pieces is actually a collection of 100 smaller ones!

This is like the nature of truth. Like the meta-puzzle in my parable, each true idea implies the millions/billions/+ of other true ideas that make it up. There are nuances and new revelations to eternity; truth in itself is more complicated than a human being can ever grasp. Swedenborg said this a lot: like how a human body gets more complicated with the higher level of microscope you use, he says truth gets more and more nuanced the deeper you look. There is no bottom here.

We need truth – that isn’t up for negotiation. It’s the only thing that saves us from our ignorance and our dangerous misconceptions – “the truth will set you free.” But if we can’t grasp truth in itself, what does that mean for our salvation? Absolutely nothing; God makes up the difference, and he does this by dumbing down the truth for us.

This is a lot like teaching Sunday School lessons to young children. If you were to teach them out of the Gospel Doctrine manual, you’d get nothing but blank stares and cheerios all over the floor. It’s only by using really simplified truths – the “Sunday School” answers – that you can make an impression on their young minds. And this is, crucially, true even though those Sunday School answers are relatively untrue compared with the more advanced “meat” of the Gospel. We’re all like those little kids. Every doctrine we receive from a church (or even scripture) is a simplification that adapts truth to our ability to understand. If doctrine didn’t get simplified like this, we would be just as confused as those little Sunbeams.

What does this look like practically? Well, it means that scripture is always “clothed” in details appropriate to the time and place it was written. That’s why Genesis talks about a firmament (basically an upside-down bowl that’s also the sky) dividing the ocean from heaven: that was a commonsense belief to Semites of the time, and God would have done nothing but confuse them if he’d mentioned dinosaurs, quantum fields, and primordial ooze.

We’re just as naive as those ancient Hebrews were, and we are just as convinced that we’re not. We know just a little more than we did then, like a fourth-grader coming home and bragging to his parents how smart he is after winning his science fair. This is as true with our doctrine as it is with our science. Does it upset me that there was a doctrine prohibiting black people from receiving the Priesthood in the LDS Church for a long time? A little bit, but not much; racism was a political institution in the United States for centuries, and if God didn’t adapt himself to that racism, He wouldn’t have been received. And yes, that does mean God can consecrate immoral acts to be done to worship Him. He doesn’t like it, but He does it often to help people trapped in widespread cultural immorality to come to Him. Swedenborg said that animal sacrifice was like this: the earliest people hated killing animals, but when they developed a taste for blood, he co-opted that grossness toward a good purpose. The violence in the Old Testament done for God was like this too. If people can’t help doing bad things, God might as well “bend” it toward a good purpose. Otherwise they’d reject the good outright and dive headlong into their evil.

Something else follows from this idea: the differing doctrines of the world’s religions don’t mean that one is true and the rest are false. It just means that the same truth “put on” the different assumptions and biases of the peoples who received it. It’s not surprising that India – with its repressive caste system – developed religions preaching the eternal insignificance of an individual personality (like with reincarnation). And it also makes sense that the Judeo-Christian God was portrayed like a Persian or Babylonian Super-King: that’s what mattered at the time. This works with the Book of Mormon too: so what if it was written in King James English with New Testament idioms all over the place? That’s what people in 1800s white America thought of as sacred; they wouldn’t have accepted anything else. The Book of Mormon is weird enough as it is without the immense weirdness that a direct translation of 4th century Native American culture would have brought.

And you can think of the “planet” weirdness of Mormon teachings like Abraham 3 in this way. The worldwide spiritual mindset from the eighteenth century till the early twentieth century was “planet-crazy”: Swedenborg spoke of “the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter” (who, oddly enough, resemble humans pre-Homo-Erectus in his descriptions), Rudolf Steiner said that human souls originally lived on the Moon, and Gurdjieff taught that the Sun and the planets in our solar system are spiritual organisms we “grow out of.” So if you’re a Mormon and you’re self-conscious about your weirdness, don’t be. “Planets” were exciting at the time; God facilitated our obsession and bent it toward a good purpose.

But what does all this mean about the people who stubbornly stick to the literal meaning of Genesis or who insist, despite everything, that every General Authority is infallible? According to Swedenborg, it’s the intent that counts, and I believe him one hundred percent. If it works for them and they’re in a good place, you have no right to claim that they’re doing anything wrong. God speaks unto people “according to their language, unto their understanding” (2 Nephi 31:3), and that includes the language of concrete, literal-minded people. In the words of people who make fun of Christians for sticking with Bronze-Age nonsense, I hear nothing but pretentious intellectualism and more than a little contempt for the general mass of people. That’s why you’ll never hear me furiously raise my hand in a Sunday School lesson about Noah’s Ark: let people believe in whatever relatively untrue truths work for them, since that’s a luxury God gives to all of us.

The Play of Love

Now because every single thing remains in being from the Divine, that is, is constantly coming into being from Him, and every single thing from that source is inevitably a representative of the real thing by means of which it has come into being, the whole visible universe is therefore nothing else than a theatre that is representative of the Lord’s kingdom. And this in turn is a theatre representative of the Lord Himself. – Emanuel Swedenborg, “Arcana Coelestia,” 3483

Have you ever noticed that things in your life happen just the way they’re supposed to happen? You meet that person, you read that book, or you run into an idea at just the right time? Or maybe things don’t happen so easily; your boyfriend might break up with you or maybe you fail a class. But have you still discerned the way those painful events are good for you? I have. The world is on my side; if I’m on the wrong track, it will remind me in blunt or sometimes painful ways. But if I’m going in the way I’m supposed to go, things will happen in surprisingly easy ways. I’ll meet the right people, I’ll find the right books, and I’ll say the right things.

But though the world is on my side, the world isn’t what’s really on my side. The world is a theater. Every person, book, website, idea, or tree is a part played by something more real than it, something spiritual. The relationship between the spiritual world and our lives is the same relationship as between an actress and the character she plays.

‘Each grain of sand,

Every stone on the land,

Each rock and each hill,

Each fountain and rill,

Each herb and each tree,

Mountain, hill, earth, and sea,

Cloud, meteor, and star,

Are men seen afar.’ – William Blake, “To Thomas Butts”

In each “tender mercy” that pops up in your life, whether a smile from a stranger or a book that tells you just what you need to hear, there are “spiritual actors” doing their work in it. When that person smiled at you, they may not have known what they were doing, but you can bet that angels were subtly pushing her to help you in that way. Even chance meetings on the sidewalk are managed by those angels working together to help you. This means that you play a part in the “spiritual drama” as well. Though your conscious mind doesn’t know even a tenth of what’s going on, it “portrays” the purposes of angels in the actions you deliberately choose to do. Your good deeds are the deeds of higher, wiser beings than you.

And even these angels are “characters.” Like a play within a play, the angelic actors that play in our skins are also “acted out” by a higher being: the divine fire of love, what some call God.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces. – Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

Your life is a dance. This dance shows up in each “role” you play; it is the dance between you and the fire within every being, the fire you are, but which you have forgotten you are. This fire of God is like the man who, flinging you out as the woman, separates itself from you only to see you better. This fire loves you – it delights in you, finds every part of you infinitely wonderful. And the to-and-fro movement of that dance helps each rejoice in both the ecstasy of union and the delight of the gaze that can only come when you stand apart. Both positions are needed. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a dance.

This dance plays out in every moment of your life. Every time you are shown a tender mercy – in each smile, each synchronicity, each inspiring word – the divine fire is revealing itself to you. The parts are becoming transparent to the love that plays them; you are remembering who you are, or, to put it in another way, who you belong to. The dance is to and from that fire: toward the ecstatic oblivion of love and from it to the consciousness of being yourself. For we can’t be under any illusions: the life you are living – with all its faults, flaws, and weaknesses – is desired. The divine fire within you wanted it. But since that fire also wants what you want, and since you long for its flame wherever it shows itself, the divine shows itself to you.

Like two lovers meeting, the love within our heart merges with the love within the world. And in this meeting we realize that it is the same love: we are a part of the same oneness flowing into different forms and yet remaining one. Love shows us the illusion of separation and reveals the meaning of the interconnectedness that is all around us. Love can show us the patterns within life and what they mean. As love flows from form to form it leaves a trace of its source, a trace which we can see with the eye of the heart. This trace is the meaning of his love, the underlying purpose of life. When we recognize it, we become awake and directly participate in life’s knowing of itself. -Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, “Spiritual Power: How it Works”

There is a love deeper than words, deeper than thought, deeper than perception. We long for it in all our desires, though we almost never realize what we want. That love is our Being, and that Being desires us as the flawed people we are. But that love isn’t just in your heart. It is within everyone, in everything, but it hides itself from you both inside and outside because it doesn’t want to hurt you. But if you purify yourself, making yourself a clean and bright vessel, the fire of love can show itself to you in a way you never thought possible. Your Being will become transparent to you. You will see the love in all things that loves you more than life itself. And you will realize the innocent, blissful joy that plays in everything that happens to you.

“The Softer It Is, The More Firmly Does It Stand.”

Now that I’ve started grad school at BYU, I’ve started using their library to read everything of Swedenborg that before I lacked access to. One of the best things I’ve read is his Spiritual Diary, his private record of his private spiritual experiences over many decades. I found a passage in it that I felt impressed to bring to your attention:

Swedenborg Muses, and I Muse in Response

I was thinking about forms, and indeed about the form of the more interior things, which is the spiritual form. It is of such a nature that it resists every assault; and its properties are such that by means of anxieties and straitnesses, it can be reduced into all possible, thus infinite forms; it can be applied to all forms, even to those in a lower sphere, and indeed, as if it cared nothing about them, however much those who dwell in the lower sphere may suppose otherwise because they reason from themselves, and also because the more they are confirmed, so much the more are they straitened. One thing consisting of an indefinite number of things concurs and unites itself for the defense of another; for there is nothing in the general which is not defended by the single, indeed by the most single things, even to what is indefinite, yea to what is infinite; and many more things, deduced according to order from the constancy of that form, can be deduced in regard to its perfections. Its general defends the particular, and every particular conspires to the firm establishment of the general; and indeed the more it yields, or is yielding, and as I may say, the softer it is, the more firmly does it stand: for then the inmost in the universal and in the single things, which is its universal, binds together and so forth, etc.

This passage says that “the spiritual form” is itself free from assault by anything else. The spiritual form is the way everything in heaven appears, what makes heavenly things heavenly, so to speak. Just like everything red shares in a red form, everything spiritual shares in a spiritual form. This spiritual form “can be reduced to into all possible, thus infinite forms,” meaning that this spiritual form tries to manifest in everything else that exists.

It can only show up in things “lower” than itself “by means of anxieties and straitnesses.” This means that the spiritual can only manifest itself in “the natural,” or the world we live in, by painfully re-creating that natural world in its own image. For instance, when I undergo temptation, God – through this spiritual form – is “loosening” the way my bad habits and other things “out of place” in my mind are formed. Once loosened, those “natural” things can live from “spiritual” things instead of bearing their own weight. These “anxieties and straitnesses” are like healing a tense muscle: only by putting it under stress does it get exhausted enough to relax.

However, as Swedenborg points out, we often assume that we solve the problem on our own, when actually it is God working within us that solves our sin. The more we give up and accept his help, the easier it is to give up the unconscious tension we experience by holding onto ourselves in sin.

Next, Swedenborg says this:

One thing consisting of an indefinite number of things concurs and unites itself for the defense of another; for there is nothing in the general which is not defended by the single, indeed by the most single things, even to what is indefinite, yea to what is infinite.

This paragraph shows Swedenborg’s vision of the universe in very broad strokes. Every “thing” – every person, Ferrari, plunger, angel, political doctrine, or thought – is made up of an “indefinite” number of things. By indefinite, I take it that he means “infinite,’ but with a qualification – that however far you “go down” in terms of something’s parts, there’ll be more. Infinity is just a sign everywhere that says: “there’s more to see here.” The things that make up a plunger are the wooden handle and the rubber bit, yes, but also the trees that made the handle and the rubber, the nutrients that made those trees, etc. But each of those things is composed of other things, and each of those things by yet other things, and so on forever.

As a side note, as far as I can tell, Swedenborg says that each of these things is real both as a cause and an effect: an effect by virtue of its being formed by something else (a plunger as a product manufactured in a factory) and a cause by virtue of its forming something else (a plunger as a way to clean a toilet). Causes can be both spiritual or hellish, but by nature they exist in the spiritual world; the spiritual world is a world of causes. Insofar as I am in the act of doing something like plunging a toilet, I am in the spiritual world. But as long as I’m just “in the motion” of impulses toward action, I’m in the physical world. In other words, to intend what you do puts you in the spiritual world; to be acted on by what you do puts you on earth. And moreover, each cause-effect pair expresses a higher reality called the “end” or “purpose.” If a plunger changes a clogged toilet into an unclogged toilet, the plunger and the unclogged toilet are both expressions of the single “purpose” expressed by that action. The cause-effect pair of “plunger cleans toilet” is the physical evidence of a single reality of intention, purpose, and love (maybe cleanliness, helping the other people you live with, getting points with your wife, etc.) If a cause is a verb or action, a purpose is what “brackets” that action by linking cause and effect in the first place. Do you ever wonder why you light a match and fire comes about instead of something else? To avoid deferring the point to chemical explanations, the purpose explains what links cause to effect in the first place, how causes can cause effects at all. What links past and future, now and then? Simply the purpose: the timeless, love-based reality in which time exists.

Going back to our passage, Swedenborg says this:

Indeed the more it [the general or the single] yields, or is yielding, and as I may say, the softer it is, the more firmly does it stand: for then the inmost in the universal and in the single things, which is its universal, binds together and so forth, etc.

Like I said above about natural things obeying spiritual things, the more the general and the particular “yield” to each other, the stronger they are. Though he didn’t know it, Swedenborg was restating the main theme of the Tao Te Ching, like how it shows up in the 78th chapter of that book:

Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water.

Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;

It has no equal.

The weak can overcome the strong;

The supple can overcome the stiff.

Under heaven everyone knows this,

Yet no one puts it into practice.

Therefore the sage says:

He who takes upon himself the humiliation of the people

is fit to rule them.

He who takes upon himself the country’s disasters deserves

to be king of the universe.

The truth often seems paradoxical.

Be soft, be yielding, and you’ll be stronger than anything “solid” or “strong.” You know this in human bodies: the more supple your body, the more flexible it is. The more tense, the more easily injured. But why is this the case? Just because by doing this, you’re letting your being as an effect obey the causes that make up that being. The natural man – your body and your thoughts about this and that – are not meant to be in charge. By doing this, they don’t yield but instead cling onto themselves with fearful tension. But if you obey the higher thoughts in your mind – not a sentence you can utter but instead an intangible principle from which come many utterable thoughts – you begin to let the natural man obey what is higher within it. As an effect it begins to obey its cause instead remaining under the delusion that it can direct itself with any intelligence. For as a cause, my natural man drags my being into hell; submitting itself to be an effect, it helps raise it to heaven.

Why Does This Matter?

So, what’s the practical use of this paragraph? It’s actually very simple: obey what is higher within you. Don’t direct yourself. Instead of just bouncing around between natural impulses and thoughts, by obeying the stirrings of higher thoughts within you, you can let those higher thoughts organize your natural thoughts and impulses to become something better. Those natural thoughts loosen like exhausted, tense muscles, realizing that they were never meant to work so hard. Don’t obey effects – the already concretized things we see in our minds and the world. Don’t obey what “has become”; obey the becoming of those effects.

Imagine! Seeing the world not as a chess board of fixed pieces but as how the future of those pieces unfolds from the way they are now. See the lines branch out from any given thing to any other thing: see the moving, not what has already moved. Thus you don’t submit to whatever happens to move you at a given moment but instead move from that higher aspect of yourself in the fountainhead of your thoughts. So doing, you become a “thing to act,” not a “thing to be acted upon” (a paraphrase of 2 Nephi 2:14 in the Book of Mormon). In doing this, we then obey what expresses itself in both cause and effect, both in my higher thoughts and their results in the natural man: the purposes which compete to fill the whole of time with their presence. And above all, by being conscious of what moves you, you obey the purpose for which every other purpose works as a means: “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”

Imaginal News, August 28th: Vesseling a Water Monster

Islamic Scholar Henry Corbin described the Imaginal World, what the Persians call Na-koja-Abad, as “a climate outside of climates, a place outside of places, outside of where (that Persian name literally means “a land of No-where”). He says “spiritual reality [this world] is not ‘in the where.’ It is the ‘where‘ that is in it. Or rather, it is itself the “where” of all things…” This “Imaginal World” isn’t situated on our maps. It is what situates places on maps in the first place! As such, events happen there before they happen here. They “grow out” from that world like a growing plant.

This is what’s happening there, based on spiritual impressions, meaningful coincidences, and a bit of divination:

Right now the world is getting chased by a monster. This monster is from the water: our unfathomable fears, envies, and lusts. If it had its way, it would drag us under the water of our day-to-day moods and emotions and keep us there just under the surface, blindly suffering from the shifting and ever-changing nature of those moods without ever expending the force of will to put our head above the surface. 

But we’re becoming cunning. Many of us, so close to the surface, can see the monster’s face. And it is afraid. It wants to drown us so we don’t burn it and dry it out with the blazing light and persistent heat of our rational, analytical mind. So it drown that light so we can never use it. It would hold on forever, but it is not the monster that will change, but us. We are learning the Water Monster’s tricks. And because we can thus see it, we move out of the water to meet its monster face to face.

But there’s a dilemma here. Leaving the water, we can move toward dry, sterile analysis and a focus on consciousness as opposed to the unconscious. Or, we can return to the water, only without getting drowned in it. If we do the former, the monster will dry up, and so will we. We will become cold, arrogant, and cynical. But if we put the water in a cup, the (orange) monster will turn into a goldfish and tell us the water’s secrets. This is the way to go.

Getting Your Captors Drunk

The Book of Mormon has a cool story about halfway through. The civilized Nephites in their enclave among the wild and ferocious Lamanites eventually became “bound” and “captive” to their Lamanite hosts. These Nephites are laden with taxes, and they want nothing more than to return home to their own country.

But after a group of scouts sent from their home country finds them, they hatch a brilliant plan to escape:

10 And king Limhi caused that his people should gather their flocks together; and he sent the tribute of wine to the Lamanites; and he also sent more wine, as a present unto them; and they did drink freely of the wine which king Limhi did send unto them.

11 And it came to pass that the people of king Limhi did depart by night into the wilderness with their flocks and their herds, and they went round about the land of Shilom in the wilderness, and bent their course towards the land of Zarahemla, being led by Ammon and his brethren.

12 And they had taken all their gold, and silver, and their precious things, which they could carry, and also their provisions with them, into the wilderness; and they pursued their journey.

13 And after being many days in the wilderness they arrived in the land of Zarahemla, and joined Mosiah’s people, and became his subjects.

14 And it came to pass that Mosiah received them with joy; and he also received their records, and also the records which had been found by the people of Limhi.

This is more than just a history, though it is that. More than an account of events, it’s also a pattern for how one escapes from the captivity brought on by one’s own stupidity and sin. This pattern is simple: get your captivity drunk.

Let’s say you suffer from anger problems. In this story, the Nephites’ captivity is the way you lose control in that anger. Both the Lamanite captors and the Nephite captives are worked into your anger, and the problem isn’t that you have anger, but that you’re unable to distinguish these two parties – captor and captive – within you. For when the Nephites try to fight back, they just make their captivity worse. When captives try to fight captors, both sides are defined by their relation to the other; both are poles of a single archetype called “captivity.” This is always true. But when you break the way the define themselves by the other – that is, when they try to gain freedom by some other way than fighting – then freedom can actually come.

Notice how  the narrator Mormon says this idea in the previous chapter’s text: 

And now all the study of Ammon and his people, and king Limhi and his people, was to deliver themselves out of the hands of the Lamanites and from bondage.

They have given up fighting; they want to slip through their captors’ hands and go to freedom, their former captors be damned. In the anger example, that person has decided that they can’t fight against their anger anymore. It just bottles up the rage and leaves them more prone to losing their temper later. And it is only by giving up the fight like this that we can escape evil’s captivity. Evil -whether anger, hatred, or lust – wants us to fight it. That keeps it alive; it keeps us locked in those twin poles of captivity. By giving up fighting, we no longer define ourselves by our captivity. And this doesn’t mean we give up all efforts toward freedom. We just do it in a much cleverer way.

The key is to define ourselves in a way unrelated to our soon-to-be-former captors. This is what it means to get them drunk. You can do this by saying to the captor that is your anger: “You can have me! Come and get your fill!” You give yourself to the feelings you have tried to push away and immerse yourself in the fury and the rage. But here’s the catch: by doing this, you simply let the anger or whatever feeling do what it will and, crucially, you do it without fighting it or acting it out. This will make the anger acting like a parasite in you get so excited that it will forget your ego entirely. It will just do its thing in your body and get itself drunk on its own feelings. It will then be satisfied and, in the moment where it no longer oppresses you, you slip away. In other words, you let the anger, lust or whatever define itself by its own effects and not by you. It becomes its own captive, so to speak. And when this happens, you’re free to define yourself some other way.

Three notes before I finish: one, this is basically a process that scholars like Henry Corbin, James Hillman, and others call “ta’wil,” “epistrophé,” “psychologizing” or even “seeing-through.” This process involves “returning” each phenomenon to its source in higher worlds and the divine. When you let your anger and your lust get drunk on its own energy, this is what you’re doing: returning the fire of that rage or passion to its source, leaving you out of its way. There are more concrete ways you can do this too. In the book Making the Gods Work For You, author Caroline Casey talks about how you can solve a problem by making that problem bigger…in the form of a ritual:

The Odyssey provides a Neptunian initiation tale. After fighting the Trojan War, Ulysses’ single goal is to reach home. But because Ulysses has angered Neptune by blinding the one-eyed Cyclops, one of Neptune’s children, the sea god sends disorienting winds and extravagant, weird, erotic adventures to distract Ulysses and blow him off course. Who can’t relate? Finally, Ulysses consults Tiresias, the blind Underworld prophet, a kind of Pluto figure, who says, “You have angered Neptune. Here’s the ritual you must perform. Take an oar, a symbol of the sea, and walk it inland. When you get to a place where no one has ever seen the sea, there you must build a temple to the god who has been oppressing you.” So Ulysses does this, walking inland until somebody asks him if the oar is a piece of a windmill, so he knows he has found the right place. He builds a temple to Neptune, the god who has been oppressing him, and it works. In an act of reversal magic, Neptune becomes his ally and sends him sweet winds. Ulysses sails for home, where he reclaims his kingdom. Our task is to reflect upon what it might mean to build a temple to the god who has been oppressing us. What kind of oar do we take inland? The Neptunian part of us says that to liberate ourselves, we must carry our vision inland to where nobody has ever heard of it before, and give our gift there. It is easy to hang out in a homogeneous neighborhood; go somewhere new.

Let your obsession, fear, or anger get drunk on itself as much as you like within a “ritualized container”: maybe set a timer and get as afraid and as angry as you can within that stretch of time. But the key is to do it for the sake of the “god” in the fear or anger, dedicating it to the energetic frequency has staked its claim on you, like it or not. By doing that, you revert the god’s energies to the god himself. You let him get drunk on his own essence.

Second, this principle should work just as well on a large scale. Just as someone can be imprionsed by lust or anger, whole societies can be imprisoned by either unfortunate series of events or unfortunate states of mind, which those events play out. Likewise, the key to solving shootings, racism, or coporate greed isn’t fighting it. That will only make it stronger and more entrenched, which is what has happened again and again. The key is to get those collective events and tendencies drunk on themselves. Like with Caroline Casey’s suggestion, maybe we can try doing what greedy Mylan CEOs or racist Trump supporters are doing, only in a ritualized container. We can honor the god playing out in Trump or mass shootings and thus give the god its fill so we can slip away from its grasp. 

Third, this doesn’t mean that fighting is always bad. Since there are many wars by righteous people in the Book of Mormon, this should be obvious. Instead, fighting is always bad when you’re doing it as a captive, that is, in response to a captor. You’ll notice that there are no revolutions in the Book of Mormon, at least none that lead to anything good. Instead, fighing is always done from a place of freedom and as such is done to preemptively get rid of threats to that freedom. Captain Moroni and his brilliant strategizing is a case in point. In those cases, the fighters are defined by their relationship to the freedom they already possess, not by their antagonism to another group opposing them. To aim at freedom is freedom. To aim at captivity is captivity. And likewise, if we leave it to itself, captivity always drunkenly cleans itself up.