Writings and Ideas of SAM KEEN

Sightings--Private Epiphanies

Each person has a unique way of seeing and being in the world that reflects the myriad events and life experiences that make one person’s autobiography different from another’s. Even if we are adherents of an orthodox religion, the sacred often appears to us in odd and intimate ways that may seem meaningless or trivial to an outsider. Those pivotal moments when we are wonder-struck, love-struck or terror-struck tend to be so private, so idiosyncratic that we don’t know how to talk about them. We stutter in an effort to put into words an experience that is ineffable.

But what cannot be said straight can be told on a slant. The experience of the sacred can be sung, chanted, danced, put into a poem or embedded in personal narratives, autobiographies and stories. We may point to ways, places and times in which we have glimpsed the Infinite in some finite disguise. Poets have caught a fleeting glance of it in “a flower in a crannied wall” or in a ‘tiger, tiger burning bright in the forest of the night” Norman McLean’s family found in fly fishing the enacted metaphor of grace and love. It has appeared as a holy man or woman--shaman, prophet, healer, avatar, Bodhisattva--or as a snake, bear, cow, pig, horse, river or spring. An Indigo Bunting no less than Jesus or the Dali Lama may become a living metaphor of the Divine.

This brings me to the feathery messengers who have been my private angels. As I explore the epiphanies and metaphors that have been central to my life I often turn back to an enchanted time in childhood when I wandered freely in the woods. It was in these wild places that the love of birds and the quest for G-- in twined to fashion the double helix that has informed my journey.

I have not always been swept off my feet by the appearance of a Black and White Warbler or a Bald Eagle. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a bird is just a bird, not a metaphor. But the sightings of some birds have opened new vistas, inspired my mind to ask new questions, my imagination to soar, and my spirit to expand.

The Quest & Other Quarks

The Quest

One day, out of nowhere, you realize you don't know who you are, and none of the cards in your wallet provide the slightest clue to your real identity."

To go on a quest is nothing more or less than to become askers of questions. 

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Love. Men and Women.

We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly"

                                                      ***

Anger is a necessary part of the dance of love. Think of clean anger as the voice of the wise serpent on the early American flag who says, "Don't tread on me." Without anger we have no fire, no thunder and lightning to defend the sanctuary of the self. No anger = no boundaries = no passion.

Honour your anger. But before you express it, sort out the righteous from the unrighteous. Immediately after a storm, the water is muddy; rage is indiscriminate. It takes time to discriminate, for the mud to settle. But once the stream runs clear, express your outrage against any who have violated your being. Give the person you intend to love the gift of discriminating anger.

                                                    ***

Good men and good women have fire in the belly. We are fierce. Don't mess with us if you are looking for somebody who will always be "nice" to you. ("Nice" gets you a C+ in life.) We don't always smile, talk in a soft voice, or engage in indiscriminate hugs. In the loving struggle between the sexes we thrust and parry.

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When men who have spent their formative years in extroverted action first turn toward the unknown country of the soul, they soon reach a desert -- the vast nothingness. Before rebirth comes the painful awareness that we have long been dead. Before feeling comes the dreadful knowledge that we have been anesthetized and are numb.

                                                      ***

In a time when my life had gone off track my friend Howard Thurman said to me “A man has to ask himself two questions-- First. Where am I going? Second. Who will go with me? If you ever get the questions in the wrong order you are in big trouble"

The crisis modern men face is that we have gotten our questions in the wrong order and forgotten to ask ourselves where we want to go.

Myth and Story.

In a way, human beings have never been part of the natural order; we're not biological in the normal sense. Normal biological animals stop eating when they're not hungry and stop breeding when there is no sense in breeding. By contrast, human beings are what I think of as biomythic animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order. For a long time, our unnatural behaviour didn't threaten the natural world, but now it does.   

                                                 ***

We are the first generation bombarded with so many stories from so many "authorities," none of which are our own. The parable of the post modern mind is the person surrounded by a media centre: three television screens giving three sets of stories; fax machines bringing in other stories; newspapers providing still more stories. We are saturated with stories; we're saturated with points of view. But the effect of being bombarded with all of these points of view is that we don't have a point of view and we don't have a story. We lose the continuity of our experiences; we become people who are written on from the outside.

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I want my children to read the Bible, the Tao Te Ching, and the fundamental Buddhist texts. The great spiritual values are still stated in the religious traditions. Forget The Celestine Prophecy, Embraced by the Light or A Course in Miracles. Get it straight from the source.

The Life of the Spirit

Aristotle said: “philosophy begins in wonder," It also ends in wonder. The ultimate way we relate to the world as something sacred is by renewing our sense of wonder.

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 If human beings are going to survive, we must never cease wondering. The attitude of wonder is a prerequisite of authentic humanness.

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The Greeks invented the idea of nemesis to show how any single virtue, stubbornly maintained gradually changes into a destructive vice. Our success, our industry, our habit of work has produced our economic nemesis. Work made modern cultures great, but now threatens to usurp our souls, to inundate the earth in things and trash, to destroy our capacity to love and wonder.

                                                  ***

The basic religious perception is this: my life is a gift for which I feel a sense of gratitude and respect. It's not an accident.

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The task of authentic religion is to keep this world a sacred place, to remind us to wonder, to tread reverently on the humus and be compassionate to all sentient beings. I believe we do this best by remembering: In the beginning was Silence.

The Word is still spoken in sparrow song, wind sigh, and leaf fall. An electron is a single letter, an atom a complex word, a molecule a sentence, and an indigo bunting an entire epistle of the sacred. The ocean whispers its mystery within the chambered sea shell. Listen quietly to the longing in your heart for love and justice and you may hear an echo of the holy word that addresses you. Hush for a while. Be still and know.

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Try this. Proclaim a linguistic fast and a feast of imagination. For Lent give up using the familiar ways in which you speak and think about G--. Allow the old words to be replaced by silence. Force yourself to create new ways of speaking. The thirteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart called G-- "the wilderness where nobody is home." In this century, philosopher Charles Hartshorne named G-- "the self-transcending transcender of all." Tillich substituted "the Ground of Being" or spoke of the G-- beyond G--. Invent new names, use them once and discard them. Stretch language to its breaking point. There are no literal truths in the realm of theology, so get wild and excessive.

For instance, instead of God: The Quantum Leaper, Being-Becoming-Itself. The Whence and Whither. The Subject that Encompasses All

Predicates. The Great Whomever or Whatever that is Within-Without-Beside-Before-After-and-During. The Verb that Activates All Other Verbs. The Cosmic DNA. The Erotic Whole. The Source from Whom All Longing Flows. The Black Hole Where Love Embraces Death. The Creative Destroyer. The Alpha and Omega Helix. The Mad Experimenter. The Eternal Not Yet. The Dissatisfied One. The Creating. The Sustaining. The Abiding Etc. without End.

Notice what happens when your imagination is forced to coin new language? It becomes poetic, makes a raid on the inarticulate and returns with new metaphors. It must consult raw experience and ask "what exactly do I mean when I speak about G--? What kinds of experience make me want to use this word?"

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The spiritual mind is always metaphorical. Spiritual thinking is poetic thinking. It's always trying to put a very diaphanous experience into words, realizing all the while that words are inadequate. So if you have an idea of God you think is adequate, it's not. I think we have to trust ourselves in the darkness of not knowing. The God out of which we came and into which we go is an unknown God. It's the luminosity of that darkness and that unknowing that is the most human, the most sacred, place of all.

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A wise old man once told me never to go to sleep immediately after going to bed. "Simmer" he said. "Lie quietly and review the events and experiences of the day and sort out what has been important and what has been trivial" It may be the best advice I ever got. Our society, already flooded with information, might act with greater wisdom if we individually developed the habit of simmering.

Spirit and Justice.

Authentic spirituality leads from the sanctuary of private emotions into the chaotic arena of political life. Compassion-seeking -justice is compelled to gird its loins and battle the sources of injustice - the psychological predisposition to greed, indifference, lust for power, the myopic economic ideology that ignores everything but the bottom line, and the corruption of government by the few for the few.

Far from being optional, the quest for justice is central to a worldly spirituality - as it should be to institutional religion. Otherwise we are left with disengaged religion, Gnostic mysticism, and a god let dedicated to strengthening the ego's illusions of self-sufficiency.

Considering the escalating poverty, anarchy, violence, and ecological destruction in the contemporary world, I believe the central vocation that will define authentic spirituality in the 21st century will be a new quest for justice.

Enemies.

We first kill people with our minds, before we kill them with weapons. Whatever the conflict, the enemy is always the destroyer. We're on God's side; they're barbaric. We're good, they're evil. War gives us a feeling of moral clarity that we lack at other times.

Fear.

The practice of trapeze provides me with a daily occasion to become a connoisseur of my fears, to see where they reside in my body, and to separate the rational from the irrational. When I stand on the pedestal poised to throw a trick, I pause and take an inventory of my body - eyes squinting, hands sweating, chest narrowing, knees trembling, stomach jittering, mind filling with catastrophic images. Then, I breathe deeply and invite my muscles to release their burden of fear. When I neither force myself to be fearless nor run away from the danger, an area of freedom opens up within which I discover new options. I cease to be a victim of my fear and I break the hypnotic cycle of dread, the vicious feedback loop, and the self-fulfilling prophecy of failure that shrinks my world. A fear a day keeps the psychiatrist away. We learn to fly not by becoming fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.

Death Myths.

In modern mythology death arrives by accident or disease, humiliates us by making obvious the failure of our medical technology and reduces us to the status of victims. We avoid thinking about it until we are terminally ill or are faced with the passing of a loved one. The wisdom tradition advises us to practice dying throughout life, to build our ship of death. How might the practice of conscious awareness of death sculpt our lives? What is to be gained by inviting death to be our daily companion? By ending the conspiracy of silence? What would happen if we divorced our thinking about death from illness or accident? What if, instead of centering our thought on the question "What did he, or she, die from?" we focused on the question "What did he, or she, die for?"

Quarks.

Goldfinch.

Sun flower.

Love at first sight.

           ***

Cloud banks.

No rain.

Parched earth.

What are they saving for?

            ***

Today.

Empty.

No thing

to say.

Thank God.

       ***

Three blue birds

on a wire.

Do. Re. Me

     ***

Today

the wind

whispered

to me.

Where

have I been

so long?

   ***

On Loving The Questions

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves"Rilke

"Always the beautiful answer. Who asks a more beautiful question?"Ee Cummings. Introduction to Collected Poems.

“Why are you always asking questions?”My mother or yours.

I question; therefore I am.Questioning is not something I do but something I am.

I seem to be a traveller on a journey to an unknown destination. Some longing, some missing X... keeps me searching for a holy grail that is hidden just beyond the mist.

That we are mindful or spirited animals means that we are animated by a quest for something more that bread and shelter. Our reach always exceeds our grasp. The great mono-myth of the quest---the hero with a thousand faces-- converts the process by which we become self-transcending--- the transition from brain to mind --- to a dramatic narrative of conquest in the external world. But the greatest travellers may never stray more than a few miles from home. Indeed they may be confined to a wheelchair as Steven Hawking. The road is not clay or asphalt, the path is not through oaks or elms. The grail is no cup that once held wine or hemlock. All of these metaphors and mythic images may be spoken about in less pictorial language. The heroes and heroines are the men and women who ask new questions and send us forth on a new quest. The essence of the quest is the Question. Your question is the quest-your-on.

Nothing shapes our lives so much as the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think of asking. The question is the helmsman of consciousness. The mind, the body, the feelings, the intentionality, the consciousness, the style of relationship, the character armour are all in-formed by the question. What makes me Sam Keen rather than Alan Greenspan is the questions that give shape to my life. I do not spend each day, wake up and end each day thinking about interest rates, the consumer price index or the ratio between the dollar and the yen. Were you to dissect our brains you would find

that our electronic circuitry, the complex networks of neurons was as individual as our fingerprints.

The questions we ask determine whether we will be superficial or profound, acceptors of the status quo or searchers. The difference between Einstein and Hitler depends on the questions they asked. What you ask is who you are. What you find depends on what you search for. Imagine the different type and quality of life you would have if the main question you asked when you got up each morning was each of the following: Where can I get my next fix of heroin? How do I serve God? What will the neighbours think? What happened during the big bang when the world was created? Who will love me? How do I get power? How can we destroy our enemy? How can we end violence? Where will I spend eternity? How can I make enough money? Who are my friends? How can I be comfortable? Is my cancer curable? How can I become famous? How do we heal the earth? Where can I get food for my children?

What is your quest? Your question?