May 25th, 2008
Mwahahahaha! Just had to let the cosmic laughter resonate, no, reverberate in my body…
Everything is grace! Even when shit happens… Divine piss, holy shit!
I have always been wary of spirituality/religiosity that denied/denigrated the body. Non summus angeli! (We’re no angels!)
Here are some works that I liked/loved that also touches on the ugly/unpleasant:
1) The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)- Teresa’s stomach grumbles in hunger upon seeing her love Tomas. (I don’t know, maybe it’s just me but I thought it would have been funnier if Kundera made her fart instead. Kundera was pointing out the seeming incongruence between the loftiness of our emotions/ideals and the embarrassment caused by our leaking, smelling bodies. Also, the son of Stalin (who thought of himself as “the son of god”) dying in protest against being treated like shit. (The sacred and the profane.)
2) Leolo (Claude Lauzon) – a French-Canadian film. You have here a family obsessed with taking laxatives. (“A shit a day keeps the doctor away.”) There is a little nudity, masturbation, bestiality, violence. But it’s a very touching, poignant story of a boy who tried to rise up from the constraints of his environment, only to fail in the end because he wasn’t true to his love. My favorite movie of all time!
3) It Is Here Now, Are You? (Bhagavan Das) – an autobiography by Beat spiritual guru Michael Riggs, a.k.a. Bhagavan Das. In one instance, Bhagavan Das awakens to find the very walls of the small room where he stayed in India alive and breathing. Everything was God! He couldn’t move. He pissed in place, and drank his own piss in awe and reverence. He had to be taken cared of for three days, he just couldn’t move in that state of spiritual awe for God present in all things.
4) The Lady Presidents (?) – This is a German play translated to English and performed by Dramatis Personae in 1998 at the Goethe Institute. In one scene, (I don’t know if I remember correctly) one character (played by Joan Boyles) talked about an incident when it rained shit, and the holiness that was simply present in all that shit.
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One of the ways of looking that have prevailed have resulted in the denigration of masks, disguises, appearances as forms of lying and inauthenticity. (The latin “sine cera” — without wax, i.e., without mask — gave birth to the word “sincere.”) Deception/illusion/revelry may indeed be some of the goals of the wearing of masks but we tend to lose sight of the fact that masks were also used in religious rites, to reveal deep truths that go beyond the commonplace and ordinary.
But even when the mask has been removed, and the face has been revealed, have we reached the “truth” of the person? (Note that even the word “person” comes from the Greek word for “mask.”) Of course, we realize that even the face is a mask. And what we have is an endless play of masks.
There is no core to the self. Anatta.
What does it mean then to be “authentic” if there is no “self” to be true/faithful to? My provisionary answer: (to be verified by experience someday) to be authentic or “true/faithful to oneself” would then mean to follow one’s ideal/image of the best a person can be, which itself undergoes changes as one walks that path. The self is a necessary illusion, but it is precisely fluid (not solid and rigid) and not absolute. Overrated. Ultimately not the most important, and not the most real.
Perhaps it’s just a matter of semantics. Transluscent metaphors evoking the reality beyond words. “You are most true to yourself when you lose yourself.”
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Anicca, Anatta, Dukkha! (Impermanence, No-Self, Suffering)
If there’s one thing that I’m rather reluctant to accept in these three, it’s “Dukkha.” Seems to me rather pessimistic.
The world is full of suffering.
Yes, but it’s also full of beauty. And grace, if one knows how to look.
On second thought, it’s a very keen, realistic observation. You’d more readily see beauty and grace if you’re a poet, mystic, romantic, fool, all of the above. And even then, it could just be the denial of a very real experience of pain and suffering.
Yes, the world is full of suffering. And in spite of that (or perhaps because of that), it is full of beauty, and grace. And can give birth to love and compassion.
The realization that everything is grace is founded on an empowering change in the way of looking at things. That we could never be who and what we are if not for everything that we’ve experienced. That we may not be totally masters of our destiny and yet neither are we passive victims of fate. That we are where we need to be at any given time. That we are always being led and guided to where we need to arrive.
We’ll get there. (Aabot din tayo.)
And perhaps, what’s more important, we are here. Now, living, breathing, loving.
How can we not give thanks?
best regards,
michael ian
(“who is like god in his graciousness?”)