Marijuana and Spiritual Growth

In what follows I can only speak from my own experience (and maybe that of Manly Hall).  Your relationship, both with marijuana and with spiritual growth may differ.  If after reading this, you have a different story to share, please comment below.

A few years ago I was spending a lot of time listening to lectures by Manly P. Hall while I worked (one of the few perks of freelancing from home).  I was also a somewhat more than occasional pot smoker.  I was in the middle of a talk entitled “Quest for Spiritual Teachers” when I heard something that stopped me cold:

… each individual must live out his own pattern of purposes.  There are rough instructions, however, and some of them are pretty rough, as to how this is done.

One of the first is to realize this set of four steps, and to realize that the life of sanctity begins at the bottom of these steps and ascends gradually.  […] the simple simple fact is that all growth begins with the proper development and integrity of the physical body.  […]

This means that any destructive habit which endangers the body BLOCKS THE ENTIRE PROCEDURE.  The individual cannot go along and have a little marijuana now and then and accomplish the things he wants to accomplish.

!!! That old fuddy-duddy! I thought.  I like a little marijuana now and then.  Destructive habit, my ass.  Who is he to say I can’t even begin a spiritual quest?  What does he know about it anyway?

There were things that I not only enjoyed about smoking pot, but positively relied on it for.  That thought gave me a little bit of pause.  Was I relying on marijuana to get by?  Surely not.  But.  I decided that before writing this idea off completely, I would give it a proper examination and, I hoped, a thorough rebuttal.

Major ways in which I benefitted from marijuana:

1. It made me more insightful, helped me think around corners, and expanded my sense of humour.

The first time I watched South Park stoned, I cried, I was laughing so hard.  What had previously seemed to be a relatively inane and vulgar cartoon opened up into a paragon of hilarious social commentary and fart jokes.  But the benefits weren’t limited to greater appreciation of low-brow cartoons.  I had great conversations, came to new epiphanies about my problems.  My boyfriend found me a lot funnier when I was high.

2. It allowed me to transcend physical limitations like fatigue and irritation.

One activity that brings me a lot of joy is to massage my partner’s back, especially when he is sick/sore/stressed/unable to sleep.  And a back rub from me after I’d had a joint was not — I thought — in the same ballpark as one performed straight.  I didn’t get tired or bored.  I didn’t get resentful of endless requests to move this way or that way.  I could go for an hour without batting an eye.  My fingers didn’t get sore and my arms didn’t get weary.   I entered a zone where my entire life’s purpose consisted of feeling out the smallest impulses of the body beneath my hands, chasing down knots and obliterating them with wave after wave of relaxation.  I didn’t want to give that up.  I didn’t know how I’d ever manage to recreate that level of meditation or immunity to pain without a little herbal assistance.  It also increased my alcohol tolerance and enabled me to party late into the night… or, even when alcohol wasn’t involved, just to stay up as long as I wanted to keep up with my partner’s nocturnal schedule.

3. It was a peace pipe.

In the first way-too-many years after moving in together, my partner and I argued.  A lot.  Difficult life circumstances, personality flaws, radically different upbringings and approaches to rituals and housekeeping, meant that we both built up a great deal of frustration and anger, and once one or two or three sparks hit that powderkeg, things could get pretty heated.  But we loved each other, and so after we cooled down, we always came around to see the other’s point of view, apologized for yelling, and offered to make what changes we could to make things better.  One great way to speed up the process, to make a 180 degree turn from fury to empathy, was to smoke a joint together.  It worked like magic.

Hard Questions

It was pretty obvious to me after writing out my reasons for needing marijuana that I was in fact using it as a crutch, a short-cut to deal with obstacles that, if I hadn’t had pot around, I might have had to develop actual character strengths to overcome.  The real kicker: If I hadn’t had marijuana to lean on, to get some distance from my rage and stress and depression, would I have allowed such an intolerable domestic environment to develop and persist for as long as it did?  Would I have taken more responsibility earlier?  Would I have been forced to draw better boundaries and be more honest about my own limitations?  Would I have left?

I could see clearly how any crutch of this kind was an impediment to spiritual growth, though the impediment had little to do with “endangering the body”.  The danger here was directly for the soul.  By escaping from my emotional reactions, I was escaping from reality, from facing the truth.  And without truth, there is no spiritual quest.  The procedure is, in fact, blocked from the get-go.

Aftermath

I wish that I could tell you that I kicked the habit immediately after performing this analysis, but in fact it took several more months for my use to taper off, and if it hadn’t been for pressure on my partner from his cardiologist to stop as well, I don’t know if I would have had the guts to draw a hard line on my own while he was still smoking at home.  Peer pressure is real, boys and girls.

However, we do now live in an almost-entirely marijuana-free home.  I haven’t sworn off it in principle, just as a habit, but I haven’t had much occasion even for a “now and then” toke since. A lot of challenges remain — for one thing, partner used to use pot to help manage his pain, and now he has one less crutch in that regard — but I’m happy to say that the sky has not fallen.

We lose our train of thought a lot less; it has been ages since we asked each other, “what was I saying?”

Call it coincidence, or grace, or maybe it was in fact a result of the increased clear-headedness, but we almost never argue like we used to.  We had enough of it.  We can’t take it anymore.  When we get angry we talk quieter, and when we can’t do that, we walk away… or he does, at least, and I’m learning to… and we rebound into forgiveness faster than ever before.

I have developed some tricks to keep myself focused and patient during long back rubs.  Along the way I’ve discovered some techniques that work way better than before. I discovered them through attentive listening, which I thought I was doing before when I was in fact too busy congratulating myself on my awesome attentiveness. I haven’t learned to rise above really sore thumbs yet, but I’m pretty creative with knuckles and elbows in the meantime.  It makes me quite happy to know that our intimacy isn’t dependent on a symbiotic relationship with the herb.

We haven’t watched South Park in years.

I should probably point out that I’m hardly a poster child for spiritual growth; I have a BIG list of other impediments to spiritual progress to tackle next, and it is more than a little depressing to realize that after all these years on earth I have scarcely a foot on the path.  Reality, Truth: these things are scary and painful and most of the time I’m not that fond of them at all.  But nothing on earth feels as good as the smallest moment of being straight with my heart.

———————————————
Manly P. Hall: a high-ranking freemason, author, and totally down with the Luciferian agenda (turning men into gods), which I find alternately hilarious and gut-wrenchingly appalling.

Paperman: Happily Ever After

Disney’s Paperman is a lovely little animated short, a modern take on the classic Disney style, set in mid-century Manhattan.  It really shows off how far traditional animation has come, artfully marrying 3d imaging with hand-drawn illustration (and using some fancy new tweening aides behind the scenes; more about the technology here).  This is it:

I respect the artistic decision to end the story right where they did, leaving the viewers to complete the moment and bring the story into context in their own lives. So what happens next?

From the brief snippets that play during the credits, we can see that our hero and heroine do take the next logical step — coffee together — and seem to be awfully sweet on each other.  When I first watched this, I admit that I was extremely skeptical about the likelihood of a happy ending, what with the hero now being unemployed and all.  My initial impression of the hero was pretty judgmental overall: not only did he have a lousy job, but this encounter at the subway seemed to be the most meaningful thing to have ever happened to him.  Damn am I bitter.  But then after a second viewing, it appears that the heroine is also in the middle of a job search, so she isn’t likely to judge him after all. They’re still young. In his favour: he was the only one in the office who wasn’t bald and requiring suspenders.  He doesn’t belong there.  He is a seed just waiting to be planted in the right place. And of course, he makes a mean paper plane.  He’s probably a budding artist or industrial engineer.  He probably listens to the blues and avant-garde jazz.  She probably reads Aldous Huxley, and this is the year they both take life by the balls and follow their dreams.

Oh, Disney, how did you do it again?  I wanted so badly to deconstruct the manipulative naivety at the heart of this love story, and only wound up learning that the crusty calcification of adulthood has already set in around my own heart.  Hope reigns eternal. For now.

One thing is not going to happen

Perfect parents are not going to appear to us in our adulthood, healing us of all the wounds we suffered in childhood, picking us up and providing for every one of our needs for the rest of our lives.

or…?

The promise of Christianity seems to be exactly that: a Heavenly Father who cares, provides, disciplines and educates in His ways. I find it hard not to sympathize with those who see this as the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy, right up there with life after death. But if it works? What is the cost to find out? We are told that the cost is to love the creator of all that is with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. And if by doing so, we find that all our needs truly are met, is the cost too high? We don’t want to become slaves to dogma. We are asked to become slaves only to love. Could we imagine a better master?

It seems like a better plan of action than sitting around sulking and waiting for the great Parental Apology and Amends anyway… that one hasn’t worked out too well for me so far.

French vs. English coffee pot

The makers of my coffee pot seem to have a much higher regard for francophone coffee brewers than for us anglos.

French instructions:

Warning: If removed during filtering, replace pot within 30 seconds to prevent burns caused by hot overflowing coffee.

English instructions:

WARNING, TO AVOID BREAKING OR INJURY:
DO NOT BUMP, HEAT EMPTY OR BOIL LIQUIDS IN THIS POT
DO NOT CLEAN WITH MATERIALS THAT SCRATCH
DO NOT USE ON ANY RANGETOP OR HOT PLATE
DO NOT HOLD OVER PEOPLE
THROW AWAY IF CRACKED, SCRATCHED OR HEATED EMPTY

♥

Kierkegaard, loving what is, and perfection anxiety

Do you enjoy expressing yourself creatively? Have you ever become so concerned about whether what you are producing is good enough that you stopped producing altogether? I hope you haven’t, but I have.

I used to write a lot and create a lot of visual art. Compulsively, even. Some time shortly after leaving university, my creative output slowed to a trickle. I can blame many factors. Uncertainty about my life direction. Marijuana. A new relationship that led me to choose little alone time. The time I did spend “alone” was increasingly spent with the Internet, and I was spending less time exploring exciting uses for it, and more (and more) time consuming information, drinking in the creative work of others. I compared my work with that of others everyone in the world.

Eventually even the thought of writing something or painting something filled me with anxiety. Had it already been done? Did I have anything new to offer? I stockpiled art supplies and lined my walls with empty canvases. I shrank back into the dark corners of my mind, let old bad habits flourish and adopted new bad habits to keep them company. I filled journals with non-updates about my epic stagnation and general failure as a human being. And there was the biggest factor holding me back from expressing myself: I didn’t like myself. I felt sure that anything I produced would be fatally poisoned by my character weaknesses, and therefore a waste of everybody’s time.

Today a dead Danish philosopher gave me a resounding slap upside the head.

Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love is a deep and detailed set of sermons, if you will, on Christian teachings about love. In Christianity, love is a duty, a person’s highest and most important duty, in fact.  Works of Love emphasizes that loving one’s neighbour entails loving real people as they really are, not who we want them to be or think they could be with a few minor tweaks. This also means we’re misguided if we idealize our love as something so precious that it can only be bestowed upon the perfect object of our affection. This has nothing to do with the fact that certain people may be more compatible with you than others… it’s a warning against believing you’re devoted to the ideal of true love when in fact you’re just an egotist holding yourself back from truly loving. Kierkegaard uses the analogy of an “artist” who travels the world but cannot find any subject beautiful enough, worthy enough, for him to paint.  He contrasts this “artist” with someone with no pretensions to the title of “artist”, who nevertheless lovingly paints everything and everyone he sees around him.  Ahem.

He goes on:  “…when love dwells finitely on self, all is lost. Think of an arrow flying, as is said, with the speed of an arrow. Imagine that it for an instant has an impulse to want to dwell on itself, perhaps in order to see how far it has come, or how high it is soaring above the earth, or how its speed compares with the speed of another arrow that is also flying with the speed of an arrow—in that same second the arrow falls to the ground.”

And also: “Beware of comparison!  Comparison is the most disastrous association that love can enter into; comparison is the most dangerous acquaintance love can make; comparison is the worst of all seductions.”  …Here follows quite a poetic rant about the deadliness of comparison,  culminating with “Comparison is a loathsome rash that turns inward and is eating at the marrow. Therefore beware of comparison in your love!”

Ok.  So, idealism and comparison are death to love, and I would argue, by extension, to creativity.  But surely this wisdom is available on a million self-improvement websites already.  I probably read similar advice several times a week.  Yet this time it resonated with me in a way that none of those other authors managed to accomplish.

I never – seriously, that is – considered that my problems could be symptoms of a lack of love.  In the light of Kierkegaard’s discourses, it seems clear to me that they are.  Also, the concept of duty brings an immediacy to the teaching that is completely absent without it.  For a very long time, I have been shirking my duty to love, and the consequences have really caught up with me.  I should also add that my unwillingness to create implies a lack of faith as well, in that I should trust by now that if I feel impelled to create something, there may be something in it which does not come from me, which maybe comes from those around me, or somehow otherwise through me, which is inherently good… Even my outrageous blunders may have a value in provoking others to some insight into their own blunders or opportunities for growth.  I might learn something important from them! Further, none of the work that I consider my best ever came from me-in-a-vacuum.  Rather, in every case it was either a collaboration, a loving meditation on something outside myself, or some other kind of interaction with the great Other.  These shared creations far outshine anything I’ve ever come up with sitting alone, trying to channel genius.  Which only drives home the point for me that the core engine of creativity is love.

Some possible objections:

1. Even if you allow that you have a duty to love, that doesn’t mean you have a duty to write or create art.  The two are not necessarily the same thing.

This is true.  All the same, at least in my case I feel that the creative activity follows as a corollary to love.  When I am tapped into the flow of life around me, i.e., when I am loving, ideas flood me to the point that I can hardly keep track of them.  I feel compelled to give back in any way I can, which definitely includes artistically.  It also, of course, includes kindness, patience and less glamourous pursuits like keeping the house clean enough so that my partner doesn’t lose his mind from the disarray.  In fact, those things come first.  But this insight hit me initially with respect to creativity, so here it is.

2. I’m not religious, so I don’t accept that I have any such inherent duties as a human being.

My own relationship with religion is rather confused these days.  I’ve gone from an intensely Christian upbringing as a child, through atheism and a lengthy tour of world spiritual traditions in my teen years and beyond, to a point where I now feel a need to give Christianity every benefit of the doubt, with a rational questioning mind and an open heart.  However, I do wrestle with questions like:  if I accept that I have a duty to love, do I also have to accept the possibility of eternal damnation?  (Kierkegaard certainly thinks I ought to… )  In this particular case, though, it is enough for me that when I ask my heart if it believes it has a duty to love, the answer comes back unequivocally yes.  That duty gives meaning to life in a way that makes it real, and worthwhile, and I’m a little mystified that I went so long without keeping it first and foremost in my mind.

3. It sounds like you’re just beating yourself up again for your failings.

Maybe so, but my previous guilt was sterile, putrefying even, giving rise to nothing but more misery. This new guilt is fertile, prodding me to do more.  See, I wrote this post!  More to the point, I take great inspiration from the reminder to love people as they really are.   This lesson stretches a lot farther than just to other people (not that loving other people isn’t a huge, lifelong task on its own).  First of all, we’re people too, and we don’t get off the hook – we have to love ourselves as we really are, even when we don’t like ourselves.  And I think that spreads to loving the work that we produce.  It may not necessarily make the cut and be considered worthy of sharing, but it has worth in being produced.  All of it.

Please feel free to share your own experiences or thoughts.  If you’re someone close to me who I haven’t loved enough day to day, know that it is way more important to me to make things right between us than to engage in any kind of creative expression, and that will be first on my agenda.

♥

(p.s.: in honour of blank canvases…)

Reflections on Kathleen Winter’s Annabel

Annabel focuses on a child born a hermaphrodite in small-town Labrador. When I picked up this novel from a local used&new bookshop, the cashier put her hand over her heart, said “oh, that is a beautiful book,” and lapsed into a smiling-eyed silence while she rang up my purchase.

Having now read the book and let it resonate with me for almost a month, I concur that this is a very special piece of literature. Some reasons why:

• It resists categorization. You could call it a coming-of-age tale, I suppose; it is that, and more.
• All the characters, including, from the first paragraph, the land, are integral elements of the story, and they are allowed to have full personalities, to change, and to grow. Though the characters occasionally judge each other, the author never seems to judge any of them. True, we never get to find out what drives certain bit-part assholes, but the way that the other characters’ lives move on without and despite these would-be villains is a joy on its own.
• There is nothing sensationalist in this book. The issue of sexual identity, so fascinating in its own right, and such ready fodder for tabloid gossip, is experienced so vividly in context of the full lives of real people, that it becomes rather a mirror on which anyone can project one’s own identity issues.  Surely we all have things we don’t know how to discuss with others, things that keep us from “fitting in” (as much as anyone could ever “fit in” to a changing world in any way other than by living one’s own truth – this was one of the points the novel strongly illuminated for me).  Certainly all the main characters here have their own such issues.
• It contains abundant passages of breathtaking beauty. Treadway’s conversations with the birds (and Treadway’s character as a whole) were some of my favourites.

When I closed the book I found myself longing to know more about everyone inside it… a sequel? A prequel? A spin-off or two or three? …and then I accepted ruefully that the story as it had been told was complete. The final movement of the novel took me smack-dab into the Now, into this moment of awkward beauty, pain and completeness.

And I am grateful.

♥

Re-reading The Glass Bead Game. Also, synchromystics and schizophrenia.

1. Joseph Knecht’s final act

It started to gnaw on me a few years ago that I never really “got” the ending to Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game when I first picked it up in high school... the book enchanted and stimulated me, but its ending hit me with a wallop that I failed to resolve into real understanding.  I began to look for interpretations online, but none of them were very emotionally satisfying, not even the author’s own explanations from his letters.  In the author’s defense, I think it’s a fair assumption that a book is written by much more than the conscious writing mind, and if anyone liked to let meanings charge and simmer in his subconscious, it was Hesse!  I also probably missed a great deal the first time through.  There was only one thing left to do: re-read the book.   Well, I finally got around to it this spring, and guess what — it worked!

(I would summarize and spoil the book here if I had any idea how.   If you like Hesse’s books but you haven’t read this one, I think it’s worth the journey — I’ll see you back here in a couple of weeks!  Or, if you don’t care and are just wondering what all this has to do with schizophrenia, skip to part two.)

I see the ending now as a kind of koan.   The intellectual solution to the koan is spelled out thematically throughout the novel…  it has to do with transcendence, and “stages”, and how developing yourself to the fullest means outgrowing yourself and giving life to something that is no longer you.  Not entirely unlike the Orpheus riddle.

When I first read The Glass Bead Game I felt that Knecht’s end was a painful waste of the life that had gone before… he had spent all that time learning and growing and I expected his next act to dazzle in a way that, sure, would be different from what he had done before, but I expected it to still be understandable from the same perspective.   The novel takes care to present a dichotomy between the ivory tower life of the mind and the hard-knocks life of subsistence in the “real” world.  I guess I expected his final act to synthesize the two in, well, in a glass-bead-game kind of way… virtuosic and artistic… something new but not that new… something that would make a good movie of the week.  I became quite attached to Knecht, and wasn’t prepared to see him go, to see him planted as a seed in history in such a very human way.  For that matter, I was attached to my own identification with Knecht’s quest up to that point.  But I missed the big point about overcoming attachment.  What we are attached to ultimately holds us back from flourishing, every time.   And even worse… it ain’t all about you.  Not easy lessons to live!

Anyway, kudos to Mr. Hesse for writing something so powerful that it stuck in my craw long enough to provoke me to go back some 18 years later and figure it out.

2. On being so open-minded that your (wife’s?) brain falls out

While researching Hesse to get a better understanding of The Glass Bead Game, I tripped across an unknown (to me) bit of history that stopped me in my tracks: Hesse’s first wife, Maria Bernoulli, developed schizophrenia while married to him.  Wow, where to begin?

All I know about her is that she came from a family of famous mathematicians; she was a freelance photographer, a musician, an introvert, and she married a mystic.  Those facts may well have been enough to do her in!  (No offense to mathematicians, freelancers, photographers, musicans, introverts and mystics, all of whom I love).

I couldn’t help but recall a favourite anecdote from Carl Jung.  Here it is, quoted in another blog (…which looks great, bookmarking it now…):

I once made the acquaintance of a very venerable personage — in fact, one might easily call him a saint. I stalked round him for three whole days, but never a mortal failing did I find in him. My feeling of inferiority grew ominous, and I was beginning to think seriously of how I might better myself. Then, on the fourth day, his wife came to consult me . . . Well, nothing of the sort has ever happened to me since. . . . Any man who becomes one with his persona can cheerfully let all disturbances manifest themselves through his wife without her noticing it, though she pays for her self-sacrifice with a bad neurosis.

I haven’t the foggiest idea how much Maria’s psychological troubles were inherited from her husband, or how much they stemmed from her own intellectual pursuits, from her upbringing, or an unfortunate roll of the genetic/physiological dice.  I do, however, recognize mental illness as a potential trap for anyone who chases after synchronicities and deeper meanings — at least for one who is “ill-dignified”, by which I mean not well supported by one’s environment — and the danger is not just that society may label one a nutcase, though there is that too.

Maria’s schizophrenia raises a red flag for me to be somewhat wary about following too closely in Hesse’s footsteps … “By their fruits ye shall know them” and all!  Aleister Crowley had his first wife institutionalized for alcoholic dementia while at the peak of his own intellectual prowess (and she was only perhaps the first in a huge line of mangled psyches left in his wake).

No stranger myself to jumping down rabbit holes, I’m concerned about living in a way that doesn’t externalize the costs of my choices onto those around me.  I’ve already messed up in this regard in a few arenas, and I see further dysfunction in and around me whose origin remains a mystery to me.

I find it encouraging that there seems to be a growing appreciation in mainstream psychology for a more holistic view of wellness, whereby we consider the health of our families and our societies as a whole, rather than make largely futile attempts to change only the individuals with the “presenting problems”.

We can work toward such a goal, anyway!

♥

The logic of language (All stories are true)

Logic — at its most basic, the rule that a statement and its negation cannot both be true at the same time — is a feature of our language, an unavoidable consequence of the fact that we like to name things, invent categories to represent our experience, then use those categories to talk with each other and ourselves.

Outside of language (say, in a world of direct experience, unmediated by concepts of any kind), logic is meaningless. Negation is not a feature of reality per se. That which is “not” can never be perceived; “not” is just a word that helps us communicate more easily by directing our attention.

Whenever people argue about whether a given statement is true or false, the first step in resolving the argument is to clarify exactly what the statement means. Once the debaters clearly agree on the meaning of the question, the debate often disappears. If it doesn’t, then new facts may be brought forward, or gathered where evidence for a contention is lacking…

Because our languages change so quickly, and because each individual mind approaches each word with a different set of associations, our entire body of written and spoken knowledge is continually being re-invented and re-imagined every time the words are read, heard, or spoken anew. Likewise if we wish to hold on to the wisdom of our ancestors, we must regularly retell it in terms that are meaningful to modern, local minds.

When looking for meaning in the symbols provided by myths, fairy tales and wisdom texts, one may use the same approach that one takes to learn the meaning of any word when no dictionary is at hand… look at every instance of use and seek a common thread. This may be called the “All Stories Are True”* approach… we assume that every storytelling conveys important truth, even and especially when stories contradict! If one experiment tells us that light behaves as a wave, and another tells us that light behaves as a particle, we consider (after ruling out experimental error) that our understanding of waves and particles may be incomplete. And so rather than hold to one version of a story and throw stones at proponents of another, we dig deeper, past the surface meanings, until we find a harmonious interpretation and our web of concepts, and our universe itself, grows.

“In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory.”
— Alfred North Whitehead

More to come on that particular topic, probably with respect to Kali vs. Raktabija.

* Thanks to Neil Gaiman (via, if I recall correctly, Rick Green’s amazing Prisoners of Gravity) for first introducing me to this phrase.

♥

Unhappy? endings: Orpheus and H.C. Andersen’s Littlest Mermaid…

Why can’t I stop thinking about these stories?

In each one the protagonist is on a quest to do something insanely ambitious, probably impossible, in the name of love.  The mermaid wants the love of a human, so that she can get an immortal soul.  Orpheus wants his bride back from the dead.  …And our heroes proceed to accomplish amazing feats!  The mermaid transforms into a human and walks on land!  Orpheus descends into the underworld and sways the hearts of the gods!  Our hearts are in our throats; we think they just might win after all; we start preparing for a Disney ending; we are ready to throw the confetti…

Ultimately,  these heroes are thrown gut-wrenchingly off course, resolving their quests in unexpected ways.  Bluntly, they fail.  But they are also completely transformed in the process.

What are we supposed to learn from these crushing defeats?

Orpheus

The tale of Orpheus is often spun as a lesson about resolve, or faith… as if we are supposed to learn from his mistake and not repeat it if we find ourselves in similar circumstances:  don’t second-guess the gods; don’t look back!

Really?

This explanation rings hollow to me.  First of all, Hades doesn’t strike me as a particularly trustworthy fellow.  More critically, the lesson just doesn’t feel proportional to the emotional impact of the story.  What if Orpheus had succeeded?  Wouldn’t the happily-ever-after be a big letdown?  Resisting the temptation to check on Eurydice would certainly be impressive… but not heroic exactly.  Nor would it be consistent with the overwhelming passion which has driven our hero up to this point in the story.  His very human vulnerabity is the hook that grabs us (she, on the other hand, is only human — and, ahem, dead — by virtue of his obsession with her; she was a carefree nymph before he came along).  Also, his troubadour personality is great for the wooing and sacrificing aspects of romantic love, but I can’t help but feel that however wonderful and numinous Eurydice may have been, before long she would have put a serious kink in his groove.  As it happened, the first guy to hit on her at a party was her complete undoing (ok, via a snake bite, but come on… a snake bite?).  Hardly the basis for a great marriage.

I suspect we’re supposed to learn something about the nature of romantics and enchanters and what happens to them and to the world they live in when their passions are played out to the limit.   Hint: they end up disembodied and spiritualized.  The Littlest Mermaid becomes a ministering wind; Orpheus gets ripped apart by the Bacchante, and his severed head becomes an oracle on the isle of Lesbos.  (!)

I’ve also seen Eurydice described as a metaphor for the soul.  I am even further away from understanding that interpretation, but enticingly, it does bring us back around to the Littlest Mermaid chasing her soul.

If you have some light to shed on these stories, or this story-structure in general, please share!

Thanks for reading.

♥

The Bhagavad Gita in one paragraph

Do your duty.
Don’t know what your duty is?
Ask your heart.
Follow no authority but your heart.
Can’t hear your heart?
Get away from everything that makes more noise than your heart.

……… in a nutshell!

The Bhagavad Gita sat on my bookshelf for a long time before I was brave enough to read it. I had picked it up once and was put off by the lists of mega-syllabic Indian names at the beginning of the text. As it happened, my fears were unfounded: once I made it past the roll call in the opening pages, the Gita charmed me completely. I recommend it to anybody.

The message above is what I took home from my first reading of this lovely text. Maybe you get something different (…do tell!). If you are looking for a good read, try it; it’s not that long.

It’s a conversation that takes place between the young warrior Arjuna, and Krishna, as Arjuna’s charioteer, as they are just about to plunge into battle against an army that includes members of Arjuna’s own family. Arjuna is in crisis: he doesn’t know whether the right thing to do is to fight or abstain. The two discuss the meaning of life, from a whole bunch of different perspectives; along the way Arjuna sees God and figures out what to do.

♥