Dear Friends and Family,
I am short of letter again this week because the reflections are meaty.
I do want to take this moment to recognize that you are nurturing these reflections through your comments and emails. My gratitude is utter for your participation and depth of reflection. I am left with a lingering sense of an unfolding amongst us. Please feel free to let me know what you want more of and less of, because—the most obvious thing I write today is this—I write these letters to you.
Ever in gratitude and with love,
Renée
Wind whispered softly in the night. Little seemed to stir. What did lend to the movement of wind did so little more than I, soon drifting back into the still of night. Ribbons, silken and sinewy, gathered force this morning with the rising sun. I pulled the blinds to look-see, and what caught my eye was an old swing swinging from an outstretched limb waving. It was not so at this hour and in this cold, but I could have sworn I saw two spindly legs dangling from the wood-plank seat, and around the spiral of rope young fingers wrapped, a head thrown back, long strands of hair dancing—bright red it was—and the sound of child’s glee wandering off wherever wind goes. Where does wind go, and where does it begin, I wonder.
Easy enough, they say: Out of the southwest today to the northeast tomorrow.
Yes, but where does wind begin?
I turn from my memory and speak to the wind.
Do you taste the touch of hilltops and the old sycamore trees who, last autumn, lost their leaves to you? Do you feel the brush of you across my cheeks? And when I let loose the final breath of me, will it come to you or you to it and whisk me away; and will I know?
It’s such a perfect arrangement for wisdom to hide away in death. Everyone runs from death and so everyone runs from wisdom.1
~ Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom
To know what of me when I go, I must unknow the who of me, which is a conundrum, you see, an altogether untraceable mystery in life and death, because the same task is given me today while on this side of the divide. And so for you, too, provided you want to know, and I suspect you do. What happens when we go is a question for all time. Only, it may seem too much to bear. Who would not wish to turn away? Ignore the fate? But something inside begs.
And I must tell you, ignoring and unknowing are second cousins. The first runs away, bargaining against knowing what we taste already deep inside. The second makes a plea, I forgot. Help me; help me unforget.
Let us say this unforgetting is the wisdom of which Kingsley speaks in the passage above—subjecting oneself with all sincerity to the all-out emptying of self . . . letting loose the contents of being back into the world. Death comes always on an out-breath. Surely, it comes with the dispossession of ‘I’.
Last week, we said this about ‘I’. . . .
Imagine, for a moment, living without knowing that I am. Imagine only am. In our present mode of being, it could seem that am without I is impossible. Yet, we have only to fall into the first sighs of sleep to know am is so without I keeping watch. Something stays awake, else the heart would not beat, the breath would not flow, the body would grow cold.
To this something, this am, we gave: the self-creating of being.
Life ceaselessly creates itself. We said that the activities of living create a self by enfolding these very activities into themselves, always ushering the world into and out of these activities.
No doubt, you’ve seen water draining from a basin organize itself into a spiraling tunnel. You’ve watched water enfolding into water, forming a hollow, and around this hollow, an inverted tube, water crafting a ‘skin’ around its own force of movement. As long as water pours through, it will turn itself through the enfolding tunnel of its own making—water informing water; structuring the hollow; animating what was latent before you pulled the plug on the bath.2 When there is no more water, the spiraling tunnel is no more. Even so, its potentia is always there.
Life is like that.
Only, Life has something more. Life transforms the world it enfolds into itself. We call this transforming, metabolism—the changing of world into animated being.
Whereas when water enfolds through a tunnel of its own making, it remains water, when the world enfolds into the activities of living, the world transforms into a self. For just this moment, let’s call this self a body that has a say. If this is so, then we might best say that self and world are not self and world so much as selfworld. Self cannot be without world; and world is not the utility of self so much as its essential substance.
And what is substance? Matter or the stuff underlying matter.
And what is matter? That which is the essence of mater—of mother,
of beginning,
of Am.
And so, we come to the murmuring deep of all that is, including you and me, the beginning before the beginning enfolding around itself as invisibly small and infinitesimally vast expressions of being.
We come to Am—the all-pervading giving way, always giving way, to am.
. . .
What is a self? And why does it matter? These questions were ours to wonder over the past week. Dear Friends, these questions are a riddle, something we can never know of our ordinary knowing. We have set the stage to explore them here, and going forward we will do so by circling around them. You will see words run into themselves, over themselves, and eclipse rational meaning.
Words become arational in riddles. This does not mean they are irrational.
Let loose any grip on trying to figure this out, and the words will signal something inside you that already knows.
Here goes:
A self is am, and in you and me, am gives word in the name of ‘I’. If this is so, this self that is me and the self that is you are but expressions of a vastness of I AM we can never know of ordinary knowing but sense behind every breath. Self is Real and not real all at once.
To be a human is to have a taste of the knowing that this is so and then to let go of what believe we know, because what we believe we know and what we know are not the same.
To understand why this is so, let us look at what we are simply by name to find our clue.
At face value, we have this: Homo, human; sapiens, a special kind of human, a wise human. We could dig a little deeper and come to something more. Homo winding way back to its Proto-Indo-European roots brings us to (dh)ghomon—earthly being. This designation set us apart from the gods in the eyes of those early humans who began to wonder about the cosmos and our place in it and to name us, the what of us. And this, our place in the cosmos, is where sapiens becomes so central to what we are.
Sapientia is the Latin sister to the Greek Sophia, wisdom. But through time and space, the meaning of these two developed different flavors. Sapientia finds its footing in sapere, to taste. Sophia, it could be said, is the ever-creating force in Life. Some say Sophia is the feminine face of God.
To be a human, then—a fully becoming human—is to taste from inside the marrow of us, the ever-creative force of Life—not ‘my’ life or ‘your’ life only but the largesse of Life out of which we come to be moment by moment.
Before the human got a whiff of who we are, there is every reason to believe we had a taste of what we are—abiding moment by moment as Am, the endlessly mysterious largesse of am always and everywhere am-ing us and all that is into being.
Why this matters is for each of us to come to. It could even be said that coming to this why is the Great Work of our time. The challenge and urgency of our time is that, unlike any other time, we are now asked to know before we go.
I asked the wind what I would know when I go. The wind said I would need to die to what I know. I then asked the wind, How do I die? And the wind said, Every breath you let go of what you believe you know is a death and a birth and a beginning without end.
And then the wind came real close and whispered a final word before wandering off, There is no end to am, only what you believe of ‘I’. When you unknow ‘I’ you will come to what you came here to be.3
Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (Point Reyes, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 1999) p. 64.
Water tunneling through a drain is an example of an “open system.” A tornado or hurricane are other examples. A simple Wikipedia explanation of open system is: An open system is a system that has external interactions. Such interactions can take the form of information, energy, or material transfers into or out of the system boundary.
These reflections, contemplated over some time, are inspired and informed by numerous sources, some of which I am sure to forget to name, but here are a few for your erudition and consideration, some I call on frequently but a few that are newer here: Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry, Bolt, and Co, 1911); Thomas Berry, The Great Work (New York: Bell Tower, 1999); Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Julian Huxley (Harper, 1959); Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1949/84); Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003); Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom and Reality (Golden Sufi Center, 2003); Olga Louchakova-Schwartz, “The Symphony of Sentience, in Cosmos and Life: In Memoriam Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka,” in W. S. Smith et al. (eds.) Analecta Husserliana: Eco-Phenomenology—Life, Human Life, Post-Human Life in the Harmony of the Cosmos (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2018). https://doi.org/10.1007.978-3-319-77516-6_1; Olga Louchakova-Schwartz, “The Self and the World: Vedanta, Sufism, and the Presocratics in a Phenomenological View,” in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.) Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research—Phenomenology/Ontopoiesis Retrieving Geo-Cosmic Horizons of Antiquity: Logos and Life, Vol. CX, Part II (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011); Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell (New York: Putnam, 1985).
"There is no end to am, only what you believe of ‘I’. When you unknow ‘I’ you will come to what you came here to be." Reneé, this is the stuff of mysticism; of the deepest spirituality we can experience in these forms. I so appreciate you going here, for it is the Great Work, as you put it, of being a human being. All the mystics ultimately are addressing this question I believe. The wind gave you the answer. Now, it's the doing of it; the identification only with the am, not the I. What a challenge we have as humans! We use the I to let go of the I; what a paradox truly. It's pretty good I think to even know the question and have an answer that works. I have to trust that as I approach death, there will be a shedding of the I; as the body is letting go, I hope that the mind/ego/I will also be letting go of itself. I think we know that the mind/ego/I is a construct that allows us to live in the world as a human being. We're pretty identified with that being who we are. I think that the best strategy for me to stop identifying with it, is to identify with the heart, with love, with compassion, with beauty. These are the gifts of amness. For me, that is an essential part of the Great Work. To live in gratitude for everything; including of course our mind/ego/I. To be so thankful that we're here to experience the Whole Catastrophe, which must include illness and suffering and death; but as you know, death of the body/mind/ego/I; and not the death of am. How can that die? Where did it come from and where does it go? Unanswerable with the mind. Perhaps as Donna said, at the moment of our death, we get the glimpse of an answer. That's such a cool thought to hold onto. Until then, all I can do is practice letting go of all thought that keeps me identified with thought. And marvel at the paradox that is at the root of it all. And most of all, be love. As my "friend" Mary Oliver says: "...When it's over, I want to say to myself, that all my life I was a bride married to amazement; I was the bridegroom taking the world into my arms." And then letting go of all of it, peacefully and gracefully.
Such exquisite reflections Renée (which for reasons of the mundane kind I always read but don’t always have the time to digest in sufficient proportion to the replies they warrant) I could pull many of your words, to humbly add my own quiet reflections but those that I have read and reread are these;
“Do you taste the touch of hilltops and the old sycamore trees who, last autumn, lost their leaves to you? Do you feel the brush of you across my cheeks? And when I let loose the final breath of me, will it come to you or you to it and whisk me away; and will I know?”
These touch the deepest part of my soul… they speak to me in a language I understand. I feel the whispers of our greatest and most important work. Not that I have answers, perhaps not even the becoming of them… but I am learning.
Thank you Renee, for always drawing me into a few moments of the mystical I ordinarily have to leave in the wind… with love xxx