No Victory Without Struggle

“There is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”
  
--Martin Luther King, Jr. 

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle."   

--Frederick Douglass 

 

"Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy.  In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon . . . suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration.  Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic.  A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.  It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs.  It (should be) his task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crises."
"To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium.  However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health.  There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life.  In the Nazi concentration camps . . . those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive.  I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, 'homeostasis,' i.e., a tensionless state.  What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.  What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him."  

--Viktor Frankl

Skipping Stones

I was skipping stones over a remote mountain lake with Grant today, and I thought of a poem I wrote years ago about such an event.  Juvenilia, for sure, but I like the rambling rhyme scheme, the wilderness imagery, and the metaphors of opportunities gained and lost, the endurance of hope, the resiliency of the human spirit, the blessings of a short memory.

Or it's just a poem about a dude skipping a rock.

After skipping rocks, Grant and I built a campfire and then watched the sliver of moon set and the stars emerge, which reminded me of a similar moment several years ago.  My boy is growing up.


The Perfect Skipper


The wilderness traveler
happened upon the stone
and stooping, seized it so to skim
out over the slow bend in the river.
The canyon walls were growing dim.
The silken blue sky had kept
for a day's time
the stratus clouds bound
that now ignited and burned
rose and apricot into their native lime
then began to unravel or
sublimate into forever
for without so much as a sound
they surrendered to higher winds and dissipated.
He was alone
and out along the river he casually stepped.
In his hand the thin flat rock turned.
Such a skipper as this
he anticipated
seven or eight times might kiss
the green and silver surface
yet still reach
the purple shale slides strewn
along the opposing beach.
And if there on impact it should splinter?
This was of no concern, for by then
it will have fulfilled its purpose.
He grinned
cradled and gripped
his perfect skipper
then with precision let it fly.
But the downstream rapid's din
disguised the kerplunk.
It skipped
not once before it sunk.
Were it winter
even late autumn
it would have skated across like a hockey puck.
But swollen with warmer waters in June
the deep river bend
offered no such luck.
Its green elbow
absorbed the stone like a coin
compelling it to join
the rolling gravel at the bottom.
He stared out
at where the skipper had gone.
It's just as well, he thought,
then looked to the deepening night sky
taunting with its iridescent Dipper.
He looked at his feet
stones all around
but none quite so sweet
could just then be found.
He recalled a trout--
a rainbow--
he once had caught.
He spit, ambled on
and soon forgot.

Transitioning from Self to Soul to Spirit

“In the archeology of the Self, we are at the point where the soul has emerged from the interior depths of the mind and pointed the way to a greater tomorrow.  But, like Moses, the soul can see from afar, but never actually enter, the Promised Land.  As Teresa would say, after the butterfly (soul) emerged from the death of the chrysalis (ego), so now the little butterfly must die.  When the soul itself grows quiet, and rests from its own weariness; when the witness releases its final hold, and dissolves into its ever-present ground; when the last layer of the Self is peeled in the purest emptiness; when the final form of the self-contraction unfolds in the infinity of all space; then Spirit itself, as ever-present awareness, stands free of its own accord, never really lost, and therefore never really found.  With a shock of the utterly obvious, the world continues to arise, just as it always has.

In the deepest within, the most infinite beyond.  In ever-present awareness, your soul expands to embrace the entire Kosmos, so that Spirit alone remains, as the simple world of what is.   The rain no longer falls on you, but within you; the sun shines from inside your heart and radiates out into the world, blessing it with grace; supernovas swirl in your consciousness, the thunder is the sound of your own exhilarated heart; the oceans and rivers are nothing but your blood pulsing to the rhythm of your soul.  Infinitely ascended worlds of light dance in the interior your brain; infinitely descended worlds of night cascade around your feet; the clouds crawl across the sky of your own unfettered mind, while the wind blows through the empty space where your self once used to be.  The sound of the rain falling on the roof is the only self you can find, here in the obvious world, where inner and outer are silly fictions and self and other are obscene lies, and ever-present simplicity is the sound of one hand clapping madly for all eternity.  In the greatest depth, the simplest what is, and the journey ends, as it always does, exactly where it began.”

--From Integral Psychology:  Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy by Ken Wilber, pg 108

Quite lovely.  Please excuse me now as I go sublimate into ether and actuate my Oneness with the Source. 

If only it were that easy . . .

But I am in full mystical mode right now, typing this at a remote Colorado cabin with nothing to do but read, write, hang out with my boy Grant, ride four-wheelers, and think deep thoughts.  (And with the way the wind is gusting at the cabin, I just may blow into the Kosmos somewhere.)

I'm sharing this, because I find this book to be so empowering, and this paradigm of human psychological/spiritual development to be so resonant.  In the context of what Wilber is describing, the crimes of psychiatry begin to look even more dehumanizing, because first we are labeling symptoms and development stages/crises as disease, explicitly subdividing the self from itself and worsening the dissociation with ultimate Oneness; and second, we are numbing--or worse, obliterating--self's and the soul's spiritual sensitivities, which exist in order to gently guide us back towards that Ultimate Oneness, where the journey both begins and ends . . . and begins again.