Readings: Needles from the Haystack

Following are some brief excerpts which, to me, resonate truth. The quotes are taken from books I read over the winter of 2006-2007, during a period when I was chiefly engaged in the reading of The Notebooks of Simone Weil, The Book of Acts, and the Epistles of St. Paul:


“My generation wanted to shed unnecessary guilt, irrational respect, emotional dependence; but the process has become altogether too much like sterilization. It may be a remedy for one problem, but it has created another. We are saved from breeding relationships we cannot feed; but we are also prevented from breeding those we need.”

--John Fowles, Daniel Martin

“One of the monsters in my father’s seventeenth-century theological bestiary was quietism; it always sounded attractive to me when he denounced it…the notion that both virtue and vice were the enemies of grace.”

--John Fowles, Daniel Martin


--Allen Ginsberg, in the poem “Kaddish”; the concept: “sanity, a trick of agreement.”


“The joys of this life are not its joys, but our fear of climbing into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its torments, but our self-torment on account of this fear.

--Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

“The will of heaven cannot be conceived as though it were the will of earth. Heaven has very different views; what seems to us important is to it insignificant, and vice versa. What we avoid may, in its eyes, be useful, necessary; what we regard as central is to it peripheral; and what we fail altogether to discern is viewed by it, as the focal point of human life.”

--Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer

Reading: More Gita

Here is another short excerpt from Schweig's Bhagavad Gita to contemplate:

"Since nothing can exist apart from divinity, and since all living beings are eternally unique and constituent parts of the divine existence, it stands to reason that the only yoga Yogeshvara has yet to achieve is that yoga involving the hearts of humans. In other words, the only thing that God lacks is the personal union with human hearts." (p. 249)

There is an on-going controversy in Christianity as to whether or not God desires, or allows for, a Universal Salvation. It would seem from Schweig's "Textual Illuminations" of the message of the Bhagavad Gita, that God--known as Krishna-- definitely does desire all souls to achieve union with divinity.

Religion: His Yoga is Easy?

After pointing out the etymological connection between the Sanskrit word “yoga” and the English word “yoke,” Graham M. Schweig, in the “Textual Illuminations” section of his translation of the Bhagavad Gîtâ, goes on to speak of “four elements in the yoke” [which] are clearly present in the yoga of the Bhagavad Gîtâ.”

The first of these is Yoga-Maya, which he defines as “the power of yoga.” The second is Yogeshvara, a title of Krishna’s which means “the Supreme Lord of Yoga.” The third is characterized by Krishna’s command to Arjuna to “Be a yogi!”, that is, a practitioner of at least one of the forms of yoga revealed by Krishna to Arjuna as the Gîtâ unfolds . The fourth is Yoga defined as the union of the soul with divinity as a result of practicing yoga. Of the four, I am interested here in the first: Yoga-Maya, abbreviated as “Maya.”

Concerning Maya, Schweig writes: “This power can be seen as the potency found in all forms of yoga. Broadly, it is the power that both reveals divinity to souls and conceals divinity from souls. More specifically, it is the divine feminine power that either facilitates intimacy between the two entities of yoga or keeps souls who are not interested in this intimacy from discovering it. Yoga-Maya thus keeps secret all that is divine, and reveals that secret only to those who are ready to receive it.” (p. 247)

This concept of Maya as a revelatory power, similar, perhaps, to the Christian idea of the Holy Spirit, is a concept that I had not internalized. I had always thought of Maya as “illusion”—the beguiling aspect of material existence that serves as a kind of scrim between human perception, particularly sense-perception, and ultimate Reality. This function of this aspect of Maya is described by Schweig thusly: “When this divine power of union is not facilitating intimacy between the soul and the divinity, it is arranging a binding connection between the soul and this world of mixed happiness and suffering, in a state of complete forgetfulness of divinity.” (p. 247)

It is interesting that this power is feminine. I have noted in some Catholic commentary that the Virgin Mary, as a celestial being, sometimes seems to usurp the role of the Holy Spirit in the mediation of heavenly grace to her devotees. As for the Gnostics, Sophia is, of course, feminine. In Judaism, there is the concept of the Shekhinah, defined in a Wikipedia article as “a dwelling or settling in a special sense, a dwelling or settling of divine presence, to the effect that, while in proximity to the Shekhinah, the connection to God is more readily perceivable.” So the revelatory power of the feminine is apparent also in the Jewish idea of the Shekhinah.

All of this might be considered in light of our contemplation of an alternate interpretation of the role of Eve as a bringer of moral agency, and thus, free will and full humanity, rather than as the agent of sin and death.

Religion: On Beyond Sattva

Without pride or bewilderment
having conquered
the faults of attachment;
Constantly situated
in the ‘principle of self’
with desires turned away;
Liberated from
the dualities known
as happiness and suffering –
Those who
are not bewildered
attain that everlasting place.

Bhagavad Gîtâ, 15:5 (trans. G.M. Schweig)



“Either one has brought the contraries into submission with the help of grace, or else one is in a state of submission to them.
But the contraries in oneself are not brought into submission to oneself; the contraries in oneself are brought into submission to God.”
Simone Weil – Notebooks, p. 394

“God wanted to annihilate men, who are a discordant note in the universe. They either had to be annihilated or else saved. God’s power tends toward annihilation, but his love produces salvation. This opposition between the power and the love of God represents supreme suffering in God. And the reconciliation of this power and of this love represents supreme joy, and this suffering and this joy together make one.”
Simone Weil – Notebooks, p. 542

*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***

In the final chapter of his Republic, Plato provides a brief cosmological myth in which the axis of the earth (and also of the universe) is likened to a spindle which rests and turns on the knees of Necessity. The Fates—the three daughters of Necessity—are attendant at the throne of their mother. They are: Lachesis, who sings of things past; Clotho who sings of things present; and Atropos who sings of things to come. As stated in Francis MacDonald Cornford’s notes to his translation (Oxford University Press, 1961):

“The souls, as soon as they came, were required to go before Lachesis. An Interpreter first marshaled them in order; and then, having taken from the lap of Lachesis a number of lots and samples of lives, he mounted on a high platform and said:
‘The word of Lachesis, maiden daughter of Necessity. Souls of a day, here shall begin a new round of earthly life, to end in death. No guardian spirit will cast lots for you, but you shall choose your own destiny. Let him to whom the first lot falls choose first a life to which he will be bound of necessity. But Virtue owns no master: as a man honors or dishonors her, so shall he have more of her or less. The blame is his who chooses; Heaven is blameless.”

Here we see the Platonic conception of the law of karma and reincarnation. We also see a parallel to and a precedent for the Christian doctrine of Free Will, and how it may be reconciled with the Omniscience of God, or Necessity. As Socrates explains it:

“Here, it seems, my dear Glaucon, a man’s whole fortunes are at stake. On this account each one of us should lay aside all other learning, to study only how he may discover one who can give him the knowledge enabling him to distinguish the good life from the evil, and always and everywhere to choose the best within his reach, taking into account all these qualities we have mentioned and how, separately or in combination, they affect the goodness of life.”

We can understand that this applies both to the soul between lives, choosing the life that he will next live on earth, and to the living human being, making the life choices on earth which will determine his karmic debt and the character formation that will influence the type of life he chooses for the next round.

Socrates goes on to tell of a soul in “heaven” who, having drawn the first lot, hastily makes a bad choice of life:

“He was one of those who had come down from heaven, having spent his former life in a well-ordered commonwealth and become virtuous from habit without pursuing wisdom. It might indeed be said that not the least part of those who were caught in this way were of the company which had come from heaven, because they were not disciplined by suffering; whereas most of those who had come up out of the earth, having suffered themselves and seen others suffer, were not hasty in making their choice. For this reason, and also because of the chance of the lot, most of the souls changed from a good life to an evil, or from an evil life to a good. “

In this we can understand how the influence of the three gunas can determine the kind of life an individual chooses for himself. Socrates here shows why Simone Weil states that in order to achieve sainthood and escape the material plane, it is necessary, through attention aided by grace, to transcend even attachment to sattva. Living a “good” life, more by the luck of the draw, than by consciously choosing the good through the exercise of one’s free will, is not sufficient to the achievement of perfection. As indicated above, suffering is a necessary component to the development within the individual soul of the kind of wisdom that leads to the necessary detachment, beyond pleasure and pain, good and evil, tamas and sattva. Socrates continues:

“Yet, if upon every return to earthly life a man seeks wisdom with his whole heart, and if the lot so fall that he is not among the last to choose, then this report gives good hope that he will not only be happy here, but will journey to the other world and back again hither, not by the rough road underground, but by the smooth path through the heavens.”

David McLellan, in his excellent critical biography, Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist, puts Weil’s use and treatment of contradiction in the elucidation of her understanding of Christianity within its larger context:

“Weil had been in dialogue with the great philosopher of the West (often as refracted through the teaching of Alain) for fifteen years before she started to think seriously about Christianity. Thus when she did so think, she expressed herself in categories largely unfamiliar to those brought up in a Christian milieu. Moreover these categories are often apparently contradictory: Weil purposely used contradiction as a method for transcending a particular and limited perspective, for (as she put it) ‘emerging from a point of view’ (Notebooks, p. 46). Nevertheless this metaphysical background, revolving around the concepts of necessity, God, creation, evil and freedom is essential for an understanding of her religious outlook.” (McLellan, p. 197)

A bit further on, McLellan states:

“For her, creation was itself a contradiction: ‘It is contradictory that God, who is infinite, who is all, to whom nothing is lacking, should do something that is outside Himself, that is not Himself, while at the same time proceeding from Himself’ (Notebooks, p. 386). …Whereas traditionally creation was thought of as being ‘outside’ God, for Weil the world was what separated the two parts (or persons) of God. It was between the two pincers of God as Power and God as Love. But it was not being as such that was an obstacle between the two pincers of God. For necessity…could be conceived of as a mirror of God. It was human autonomy that constituted not a mirror but a screen between God and God.” (McLellan, p. 199).

There we have, I think, Original Sin: Man, not as a happily thoughtless pet, but as a moral free agent, charged with the task of choosing his own life, or state of being, either according to the dictates of perfection (God’s will, the dharma), or according to influence of those worldly qualities of material being (the gunas).

McLellan continues:

“This again resulted in a contradiction, which together with is solution, Weil expressed with her customary logic: ‘If one believes that God has created in order to be loved, and that He cannot create anything which is God, and further that He cannot be loved by anything which is not God, then he is brought up against a contradiction. The contradiction contains in itself Necessity.’ (Notebooks, pp.330f). This was the process that Weil referred to as ‘de-creation’. Quoting Jacques Cabaud’s study, Simone Weil. A Fellowship in Love(p.471), McLellan goes on: “De-creation was ‘the transcendent completion of creation; annihilation in God which confers the fullness of being upon the creature so annihilated, a fullness which is denied it so long as it is existing.’ It was this approach that lay behind her antipathy to concepts such as that of the person, of imagination, of individual perspective – all of which seemed to her to enhance the distinctiveness of the individual over against God. For Weil, the vocation of human beings was to be nothing so that God might be all in all.”

Well beyond even sattva, then.

As for contradiction, Weil saw it as a necessary condition for the propelling of the human soul in the direction of enlightenment: “For wherever there is the appearance of contradiction there is a correlation of contraries, that is to say there is relation. Whenever the intelligence is brought up against a contradiction, it is obliged to conceive a relation which transforms the contradiction into a correlation, and as a result the soul is drawn upwards’ (Simone Weil, Science, Necessity and the Love of God, p. 110 – as quoted by McLellan).

That about sums it up. What do you think of the Serpent in Eden now?

IN MEMORIAM

This is a photograph of my friend, Carol Richard. Carol was a dancer. I took the photograph in the living room of my apartment in the Bronx, sometime in the 1970s. Carol would have been in her mid- to late-20s. I was with Carol for the last time not too many months after this image was made.

This past winter another old friend, who had looked me up on the internet, gave me Carol’s email address. After a hiatus of 30+ years, Carol and I exchanged two emails. I received the final one on February 28th. Carol died on August 21st, her life taken by the cancer of which she had told me via email.

This morning, I googled Carol’s obituary as it appeared in a couple of Chapel Hill newspapers. Then I dug into a box that was stacked in a closet among other dusty boxes of memorabilia, to find this photograph. Because I am a poor photographer, this image captures little of Carol’s stately elegance and dancer’s grace. But it does project her smile. Even I could not miss that.

The obituary said that Carol was 59 years old. I would have thought her a few years younger than that. The obituary does not mention that Carol lived for some time in New York City, studying dance, prior to moving to North Carolina where she enjoyed a long career as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher of dance.

I visited Carol in North Carolina not long after she began teaching at Duke University. During that visit Carol turned me on for the very first time to yogurt and to the jazz of Eric Dolphy, two tastes that I have continued to enjoy until this very day. I have no doubt that each and every person who has had the good fortune to know Carol has had his or her life similarly enriched by her, and much more so. In the years during which Carol and I moved in the same circles, I never heard a single word said against her. Carol was loved by everyone who knew her, and everyone who knew her is diminished by her loss.

In that last email, Carol said of her life, “I enjoy it very much when I’m not freaking out about dying.” May God bless you and keep you, Carol; your words express the best that any of us can hope for from this life.

I will always remember you with love.

Religion: Gravity and Grace

On page 304 of the Notebooks, Simone Weil presents this other aspect of duality:

“God gives himself to Man under the aspect of power or under that of perfection: the choice is left to Man.
[Krishna’s army – is it not the Prince of This World?]”

Later on (p. 436), she writes:

“Timaeus. God cuts in two the Soul of the World. This represents duality (in the Hindu sense). The Cross is this duality. In order to find the One, we have to exhaust duality, go to the very extreme of duality. This means crucifixion. We cannot arrive at this extreme without paying the price in full.”

Paying the price in full means personal crucifixion; the death of the guna-entangled Self. On page 502, she merges this Christian concept of the ultimate sacrifice with the message of the Bhagavad Gîtâ:

“God making evil pure – that is the idea behind the Gîtâ.”

It is also that which makes the Crucifixion a Necessity.

On page 388, Weil describes this mechanism:

“Creation is made up of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace, and the descending movement of grace raised to the second power (is it this perhaps which lies beyond the gunas, and therefore sattva itself, in the Gîtâ?”

Thus, we see how Weil synthesizes Christian theology with the Platonism of the Timaeus and the religious philosophy of the Bhagavad Gîtâ.

In what I find to be the most beautiful of all passages in Gravity and Grace, the extraordinary compilation of Simone Weil’s writings, gleaned by her friend, Gustave Thibon, from manuscripts left in his possession after her death, Weil describes this “descending movement of grace raised to the second power”:

“God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightening flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has come entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.”

On the next page we have this:

“I have to be like God, but like God crucified.
Like God almighty in so far as he is bound by necessity.”

Paradox. Contradictories. Beyond sattva.

Religion: Don't Contradict Me

On page 252 of Rebecca Goldstein’s excellent novel, Mazel, we meet a young Jew, Maurice, living in pre-War Warsaw, who has found no vocation in life. His older brother, Jascha, is a composer of music, considered to be a genius by many. In Jascha’s life, music provides a definite focus and meaning, accompanied by self-conscious movement in the direction of existential authenticity.

As opposed to Jascha’s focus, we see in Maurice a constant and unresolved vacillation between various imagined lives, each of which he projects as potentially desirous. This we can understand as the interplay of, and tension between, the influences of three gunas in the psyche of Maurice. In fact, these contradictory urges are pulling him apart:

“When Jascha was sixteen, it had already been obvious that there would be no life for him outside of music. But Maurice could imagine himself easily into a great number of mutually exclusive lives.
“He would have liked, at one and the same time, to be both a talmid chachem, a disciple of the wise, and also to be one of those bright lights who danced away every night at the Astoria Hotel, buying drinks for the prettiest and fastest girls in all of Warsaw.
“He would have liked to be a thorough-going rationalist, a professor of physics or philosophy at some famous German University, and a the same time to be a Cabalistic mystic, seeing divine emanations in every puddle.
“He would have liked to be an American millionaire, but also a kibbutznik living in collective penury in Palestine.
“Every single one, and more, of these imagined lives called out to him, and he would, if he could, gladly take hold of them all. But the thing was simply impossible. The talmid chachem’s existence would run counter to the bright light’s. The rationalist and the mystic would trip each other up. The millionaire and the kibbutznik could not possibly keep house in the same puny precincts of his person.
“One life is definitely not enough, which is why the Cabalistic idea of reincarnation had always appealed so much to him.”

Regarding the nature of, and opposition to, such contradictions, Simone Weil writes in the Notebooks (p. 387):

“Contradiction is not conceived by the mind without an effort on the part of attention. For without this effort we conceive one of the contraries, or else the other, but not the two together, and above all not the two together in the character of contradictories. Moreover, contradiction is that which our mind tries to get rid of and is unable to. It comes to us from outside. It is real.”

… “Either the mind maintains real within itself the simultaneous notion of the contradictories, or else it is tossed about by the mechanism of natural compensations from one of the contraries to the other. That is what the Gîtâ meant by ‘having passed beyond the aberration produced by the contraries.’ It forms the very basis of the notion of dharma.”

In other words, in order to fulfill one’s existential destiny, one must focus the attention on one’s every act, in the moment that it is undertaken. One must complete the act without reference to the imaginary ends of the action taken. As we have seen below: “Action for action’s sake, not for its fruits” which is achieved by “Ordering of finite means with a view to an infinite and transcendent end”. In this way, one forges for oneself an authentic existence, in complete accordance with one’s dharma. And one acts without the accretion of ever more karmic debt. One dispenses with the need to live another life on the material plane in order to achieve that perfection required of every human being by God: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." (Matt 5:48 KJV) It is not enough to be a Good Joe; one must be a Saint Joseph.

We shall see how Weil relates these ideas to those of Christian salvation.