Don’t allow events
to leave impressions inside of you. -
Michael A.
Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself (New Harbinger/Noetic, 2007)
Singer’s following sentence
in the book reads, “If you find yourself thinking about them later on, just let
go.” I’m reading these sentences early on Sunday morning, less than 24 hours
after putting up a long post on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (well, Swann’s Way, the first volume of RTP), and while much of what I’m reading in Singer’s book
is a message coming to me at exactly the right time, just when I needed it, I
can’t help pausing over certain bits and asking, Really? I mean, had Proust been enlightened throughout his
entire life, we would not have his work at all, would we? Some people (and you
know who you are, S.C.!) might think that a good thing, but others of us can
imagine only deprivation, had Proust never written.
Singer’s basic message is
that we human beings are all psychologically paralyzed by fear, by what we
perceive as threats to our ability to control the world of our experience. We
react by constructing what we think are protections, but those self-protective
reactions actually function as walls requiring constant, vigilant monitoring,
and thus we become our own prisoners. This is undeniable for most of us, I
think, and I don’t fault the author for repeating his message in different form
from page to page and chapter to chapter. I for one certainly need the
repetition. It isn’t by hearing or reading this message once that I’ll
see how to relax my guard and stop trying to control situations that threaten
my sense of psychological well-being!
You will get to a
point in your growth where you understand that if you protect yourself, you
will never be free. It’s that simple. Because you’re scared, you have locked
yourself within your house and pulled down all the shades. Now it’s dark and
you want to feel the sunlight, but you can’t. It’s impossible. If you close and
protect yourself, you are locking this scared, insecure person within your
heart. You will never be free that way.
In our household, we refer to
the constant, endless, sleepless chewing over of unresolved issues or fears for
the future as “squirrel-caging.” It goes nowhere but around and around and
around. It’s wildly counter-productive, and it’s painful, too – paradoxically,
since its psychological object is to defend against pain. Let go of those thoughts? Escape the squirrel
cage? Good idea!
Of social situations, Singer writes:
When you approach
the edges [of the cage you have built to protect yourself] you feel insecurity,
jealousy, fear, or self-consciousness. You pull back, and if you are like most
people, you stop trying. Spirituality begins when you decide that you’ll never
stop trying.
This can be interpreted also,
I think, to say that “Freedom begins...” or “Growth begins....” Leave behind
insecurity, jealousy, fear, and the kind of self-consciousness that stands in
the way of forward movement and growth? Yes, I would like to do that, and this
book has given me some tools with which to begin the task.
One thing I can’t help
wondering, though, is where justice fits into all this.
Obviously, an acquaintance
who hurts my feelings by failing to failing to grant me the attention I desire
or feel I deserve is not doing me an “injustice,” and such an interpretation is
clearly one I need to let go of, to let pass through me and evaporate in thin
air, rather than clinging to it pointlessly. But what of true injustices that
exist not only elsewhere on the globe, in far distant countries, but within our own
communities? And what of very real and important issues threatening the future of
the earth for generations to come? None of this, as far as I can see, is
addressed from the high spiritual ground of detachment and spiritual enlightenment. Seeing the world as nothing but energy and determining to “let it
all go” – I can’t help thinking that while this might a sanity-saving strategy
for people who feel absolutely powerless (cultural origins of religions and
philosophies are always worth paying attention to: where did the idea of
enlightenment arise, and what were the social circumstances surrounding it?),
it can also be a convenient abdication of social responsibility on the part of
materially comfortable, physically and politically safe Westerners whose only
experiences of fear have been psychological and self-generated.
The emphasis on achieving endless,
uninterrupted happiness strikes me as
not only unrealistic but even a repulsive goal, given certain very real and horrible human (but inhumane) situations.
If they starve you
and put you in solitary confinement, just have fun being like Gandhi. No matter
what happens, just enjoy the life that comes to you.
When I reached these
sentences, I wanted to ask the author: What if you’re not put in solitary
confinement but thrown in among violent criminals and gang-raped, are you
supposed to “have fun” with that? If not only your house but all your family
are blown to smithereens by incendiary bombs, are you supposed to “have fun”
with that? To my mind, this admonition to “have fun” with whatever happens is a
slap in the face to those who suffer not through negative self-talk but through
the violence of others. I would also argue that neither Jesus nor Gandhi nor
Martin Luther King, Jr. practiced “nonresistance.” What they practiced and
taught was “nonviolent resistance,” which is entirely different and which does address issues of justice.
And if everything in
existence and process were already as it should be, what would be the point of
changing even ourselves?
As a philosopher,
argumentation is part of who I am, and critical thinking is not something I
want to give up. While I can see that putting energy into defending my own poor
little psyche is clearly a waste of time, I cannot and do not want to say the
same of putting energy into opposing injustice, violence, and destruction of
the natural world. “We must cultivate our gardens,” Candide says gently at the
end of Voltaire’s tale. Indeed. Inconsequential as our tiny planet is in the
midst of interstellar space (an image the book repeatedly asks us to contemplate), it is our only home, the nurturing environment in
which our flesh and blood evolved, and it requires our active care.
Then there is art, and
there is memory. Without memory, there is no art, and probably without art only
very short-lived memories.
Our intrepid Ulysses group’s Fearless Leader feels that immortality
consists in being remembered and that he, both as a lover of music and as a
musician, participates in the immortality of Beethoven. In the same way, all of
us who loved and read Swann’s Way
may be said (if you accept our FL’s view) to participate in the immortality of
Proust. What a privilege! To walk, in imagination, along that blossoming
hawthorn hedge and tarry alongside the beautiful waterlilies in the private
park of the Guermantes way! To feel in our own hearts, as we call up magical
place names in our own lives, an echo of what the name ‘Balbec’ meant to young
Marcel! I know that for several of my readers far from Leelanau County on this
cold November morning, ‘Leelanau’ itself is one of those magic names.
“Don’t allow events to leave
impressions inside of you”? Be empty of memories? Those beloved images of the
past? Wouldn’t that truly be to lose time, to lose one’s very life?
I would be overjoyed to
escape my foolish psychic walls but never to give up justice, art, and memory.
Doubtless, veteran seekers
after enlightenment will tell me I’ve misinterpreted and misrepresented the
practice. I’m open to that possibility. But I also reflect that no religion or
philosophy or system of thought ever devised by mankind was completely free of
contradiction, so even within my interpretation I can choose to embrace the
contradiction in the idea of enlightenment, and I can let go of what I want to
lose while holding onto what I value. It may not be everyone’s way, but it is
mine, and I am free to choose.
The book, anyway, is worth
reading and a potential springboard for wide-ranging discussion. I’d love to be
a fly on the wall, listening to what other people would say!
