One of the self-care things I did for a small chunk of August was slowly reading a treatise or several in Plotinus’ Enneads. I’ve read the Enneads less systematically than one might expect, as I tended to tackle the treatises as they came up in footnotes while doing my first read-through of Proclus. It was a lovely morning practice, especially as things got hectic at work. Using my Kobo for it prevented me from accidentally looking at phone notifications or the news — crucial for cultivating stillness in the mornings — and it really started the day well.
Things are still hectic at work. I slept in yesterday and today because I was so exhausted, getting up at 7:30ish instead of 5:30 AM. Overusing screens gives me cybersickness and has since midway through the lockdown phase of the pandemic, so I’m increasingly relying on audiobooks/podcasts and my Kobo for keeping up when I’m not at work. The cats help because they love playing. However, this does make me slower at digital things in my personal life.
This is a quick post about some things I’ve read recently, so let’s go at it.
For a year, I subscribed to Tricycle Magazine (a Buddhist publication) to learn more about how Western Buddhism presents itself and what is going on within it. It has been fascinating, and I’ve reached my last issue in that year-long dive. There are one or two books I might read in the future, but the general investigation channel is closed.
One piece that I thought was apt to pull a quote from here was “Right Speech, Left Speech: Practicing Meaningful Dialogue in a Time of Polarization,” an interview with John Wood Jr. and Mónica Guzmán conducted by Emma Varvaloucas. Here’s something that John Wood Jr. said in a response to a question about polarization (bolded emphasis mine) —
You can appeal to that as a basis for understanding the practical urgency of depolarization. But there is a moral urgency to it too. We live in a country where we genuinely don’t understand each other all that well across certain lines of difference, and that can obscure the fact that people are good. And even though we make mistakes and misunderstand things — with severe consequences — we are redeemable. But we have to find ways to work together toward that redemption.
There is a tension between wanting, on the one hand, to break down the walls that divide people, and, on the other hand, to be relentless in the pursuit of justice and truth. These projects are not altogether separate. The question, though, is how we can allow everybody to show up and be fully heard in conversations about justice, fairness, equity, and truth in a way that makes it safe for us to bend and change our minds. That has to happen at some point. We can’t go forward being so rigidly bound to our positions on every single thing that we think that the very existence of my opinion means that yours cannot exist.
This dovetails with something in the Platonic teachings about virtues and about beautiful things like Truth Itself, Justice Itself, and so on. Everything proceeds out into spatiotemporal multiplicity; it’s highly unlikely that someone will be 100% correct about everything in their life as a result, since that spatiotemporal “tension” results in heterogeneity that often comes into conflict. The article from Tricycle focused on political and partisan division in our times, which is a tremendous and tricky problem for thinking about how we live on this wide and infinitesimally small Earth together. It’s not that nobody is wrong — there are plenty of errors — but gathering all of the fragments of truth requires listening to one another and helping one another evade the chasms sucking us down to the worst of what we are capable of.
As an aside, and based on some recent on-vid conversations, I think one of the reasons I stand so harshly against exclusivist monotheisms is that they ignore this reality of life, insofar as embodiment does extend what is above out in a way that will by necessity have a lot of variation, and we should take delight and joy in celebrating others’ spiritual journeys. Some of the Christian girls I went to primary school with had panic attacks at night about nonbelievers going to an inferno where we would be tortured for all eternity. I’m not initiated in a lot of mystery traditions, but I can appreciate those who are; I expect that people should be equally happy for me. People should be genuinely happy for others who find a God or Gods they really like worshipping. Instead, what happens in these particular religious cases is that they rip families and communities apart over enforcing a homogenization (you must worship x deity) that is alien to the reality of what is going on with the phenomenon of embodiment and the reality that our souls are connected to different Gods.
There was a related piece, “I Am This Chaos,” where the author, Christopher Rivas, wrote (again, I bolded something):
We have to be brave enough to not look away. Brave enough to not push it away. If we keep pushing this narrative of difference, we get exactly what we have now — a rift that gets larger. If we resist these parts in us, we get war, we get violence, we get left versus right, this versus that, us versus them, me versus you: aka separation. Liberation dies in division.
War begets war, hate begets hate — that is always the formula. You bomb me; I bomb you. You hurt me; I hurt you. You dig a line in the sand; I make it fatter. We can’t dehumanize others without dehumanizing ourselves. It’s all connected.
Liberation dies in division seems very Dionysian, and in my mind, it links up beautifully with what Damascius wrote in his Phaedo commentary — the soul is divided in the image of Dionysos’ division at the hands of the Titans, and our liberation consists in unifying ourselves back together. The remainder of the quotation reminds me of things that I have said elsewhere, specifically about reincarnation and the choice of lives. Many souls will make decisions about their future incarnation driven by avoiding what happened to them before, and they will inadvertently choose a life where they themselves become the aggressor. To stop that cycle, someone needs to say enough to it. We will always have problems in embodiment. We all have the capacity to act in a way that does not make them worse.
That’s enough from Tricycle.
A few weeks ago, I clicked on a link online to something that made me reach for some mental steadiness, so I was looking up YouTube videos on asceticism in religions with many Gods — that’s where that prior post came out of, when I saw that feature on young Jains who are going into monastic orders. Another video that I started watching — and finished watching in pieces — is from a Harvard Divinity School program where religious ascetics from Hinduism go to the school to study for a year, and at some point, they give presentations. I finally finished watching it, and it was a really good experience. Their ardor and the immersive rigor of their education as ascetics is something that I’ve noticed about a lot of grounded traditions, and indeed Plato even has Socrates say something to this effect — those pursuing spiritual cultivation tend not to shy away from doing a lot of work over a long period of time to get to a place of knowledge, and in healthy traditions, this involves periods of study as well as teaching, humility as well as authority. YouTube immediately showed me videos about what is happening to Dalits who attempt to engage with sacred places and rites or styles of dress — often lynchings — and while some readers might think that the algorithm is biased against Hinduism or something, this is actually a House of Atreus-style enagēs cascade that will not resolve until Dalits are welcomed into the Gods’ temples and can perform pious acts (and their daily routines) without harassment. The only time I haven’t quickly encountered media about Dalit oppression after engaging with books and other media about Hinduism is when I read the anthologies of bhakti poets that included Dalit women.
This fills me with such delight: Robin Wall Kimmerer is coming out with a new book soon, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. I greatly enjoyed her Gathering Moss, which I listened to in audio format and relished for a month-ish of commutes into the office and back home; the hard chapter towards the end about the wealthy man who tried to call her in as a moss consultant still haunts me. It’s nearly as poignant as the story of Erysichthon. I learned that she wrote a piece for Emergence Magazine several years ago with the same name as her upcoming book and deeply enjoyed reading the article.
Finally, I have been contemplating the variant of Erysichthon’s myth in which it is Demeter’s grove, not a nymph’s grove (as in the poem I wrote), that he cuts down. I have still been thinking of it in terms of our society’s hunger for material goods and our forgetfulness of the sacred, especially when it comes to consumerism and how we are devouring Earth’s resources relentlessly. There are definitely things that advertising and emotion have pushed me to purchase that I ought not to have; arguably, getting my ears pierced was as much about trying to find an outlet for my emotional pain while Yoyo was dying as it was about proving to myself that I could sit still for a needle. Demeter is not a Goddess I have prayed to often in the past. I can’t even consume the main ingredient of her mystery drink. But it has made me think about ways to infuse resisting advertising with something more theurgic than trying to adhere to minimalist or keeping Simplicius-commenting-on-Epictetus’ words to heart. Those are things produced by humans. Thinking of moving through our world in terms of honoring the sacred grove is much more stable.
That’s it for now.
KALLISTI 