Wise Word Reply to 'Solitude, Loneliness, and Sharing Convictions'

Someone I know very well and who is wiser than me gave a reply to one of my posts that was too long to be a comment.  I give it a full post here:

During a recent visit with my only son, who I admire greatly, he encouraged me to stop being a passive observer of the world and start writing.  Despite turning the big 6-0 next week, I have decided to get out of my comfort zone, follow his advice, and set aside for a few minutes my normal routine of blog surfing for an hour or two before starting work, then stewing in the angst of simply observing the seeming deterioration of the state of the world, in general, and my country, in particular.  This Comment represents my first attempt to actually string a few words together after my early morning coffee (and a modicum of blog surfing, I admit).

I have read WarriorPoet with interest since its resumption in early June.  I’ve even moved it ahead of Instapundit, my previous favorite blog, in my browser Bookmarks.  As The Dude from ‘The Big Lebowski’ might say (featured in your 6/24/15 post, ‘The Dude’), if he read and grokked Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ (the subject of your 6/5/15 post): “Keep forking the f***’in’ lightning!” Since I’m probably more like Sam Elliot’s character (The Stranger) in ‘The Big Lebowski’ than The Dude, I will leave that fourth word to the reader’s imagination. I was raised, after all, as a good Southern Baptist boy in West Texas.

‘Solitude, Loneliness, and Sharing Convictions’ struck a chord with me, as I have recently experienced a bit of solitude myself over the last month and a half.  My wife and love of my life for over 35 years has been in a distant city for 50 days or so, during her 8-week summer work hiatus, caring for a loved one in need.  I did a little math and figured out that the span represents about how much time she and I have spent apart for the past 6-7 years!  I’ve realized, in her absence, how much she helps me deal with my own demons, in addition to my own “wits and grit.” So while I admire your confrontation of the challenge of solitude, don’t refrain from seeking some solace in your family and true friends, no matter how far away they might be.

If you asked me to recite my own convictions and moral code, they would be nearly identical to yours, although I would not be able to articulate them nearly as well as you have.  One minor difference might be that I usually refer to your moral code “that in general is a live and let live philosophy, a do unto others as you would have them do unto you mentality,” as the Golden Rule.  I’m a failed Southern Baptist for almost 45 years, but that Rule, as posited by Jesus, still hits the nail on the nail on the head for me.  I would be glad to discuss the technicalities with you over a beer, or a dram or two of Laphroaig, over and over, if necessary!

Before my only son was born, I worried how I could pass along my convictions and moral code to him (and his sister born seven years later), on my own, despite having rejected organized religion.  I read a lot of books (no Internet back then!) and, among others, discovered C.G. Jung.  He wrote the following in ‘Man and His Symbols,’ which I believe whole-heartedly:

“When life runs smoothly without religion, the loss remains unnoticed; when suffering comes, however, people begin to seek a way out and to reflect about the meaning of life and its bewildering and painful experiences.”

“Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life.  He can stand the most incredible hardships when he is convinced they make sense.”

“It is the role of religious symbols to give a meaning to the life of man.”

I also discovered Joseph Campbell, one of the world’s foremost authorities on mythology, during that phase in my life.  He documented the parallels between the mythologies of ancient cultures around the world, and wrote, among seemingly millions of other words, in his ‘Masks of God’ series:

“Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth.

“Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. There is a real danger, therefore, in the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of technological research into the foreground of modern life, joining the world in a single community, while leaving the anthropological and psychological discoveries from which a commensurable moral system might have been developed in the learned publications where they first appeared.  For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man’s place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse!”

In ‘Myths to Live By,’ Campbell wrote the following:

“... Carl G. Jung, in whose view the imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends.... Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums. Thus, they have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep.”

“The mythologies, religions, philosophies, and modes of thought that came into being six thousand years ago and out of which all the monumental cultures both of the Occident  and the Orient derived their truths and lives are dissolving from around us and we are left, each on his own to follow the star and spirit of his own life.”

“The first condition, therefore, that any mythology must fulfill if it is to render life to modern lives is that of cleansing the doors of perception (Aldous Huxley, anyone?) to the wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of ourselves and of the universe of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind.”

Shortly before his death, Campbell worked with George Lucas on his first Star Wars trilogy.  Say what you will about George Lucas (yes, I know he couldn’t write dialog if his life depended on it), but he revered Joseph Campbell and wanted above all, I think, to provide a new mythology that would help provide the benefits of mythology to modern children like my own, raised outside of the traditional religious fold.  I have no problem with Lucas becoming a bazillionaire from it.  Just read how dicey it was to actually make and fund the original ‘Star Wars’ and ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ films.  Lucas took enormous risks.

To make my point, take my favorite Star Wars character, Yoda, from ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’ who said the following while training his young Jedi apprentice, Luke Skywalker:

“... for the Force is my ally,
and a powerful ally it is.
Life creates it, makes it grow;
its energy surrounds us ... and binds us.
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
You must feel the Force around you ...
here ... between you, me, the tree, the rock.

Does that not sound markedly similar to Jesus, as quoted by Thomas, in his Gospel:

“The Kingdom is within you and it is without you.”
(Aside: the Kingdom as symbol of transformed consciousness)
“When you make the two one, and
when you make the inner as the outer
and the outer as the inner and the above as the below…
then shall you enter [the Kingdom]
Cleave a piece of wood, I am there;
lift up the stone and you will find me there.”

How about this from the Upanishads, stated a little more succinctly:

What is within us is also without.
What is without us is also within.

I will reveal now that this is really WarriorPoet’s Da .  Your Mom and I truly celebrate the remarkable, complex, sometimes profane, man that you are today.

Keep up the blog posts.  As Glenn Reynolds would say, “Faster, please!”  Thanks for encouraging me to flex my long dormant writing muscles.

WarriorPoet’s Da