Despair-Work: part two
Tao Te Ching
by LAO TSU
Translation by Gia Fu Feng
and Jane English
Twelve
The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.
Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.
He lets go of that and chooses this.
Despair-Work: Validation
You can hold yourself back from the suffering of the world: this is something you are free to do…, but perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.
Elie Wiesel
The first step in despair-work is to disabuse oneself of the notion that grief for our world is morbid. To experience anguish and anxiety in the face of the perils threatening humanity is a healthy reaction. Living tissue is sensitive. This pain, far from being crazy, is rather a testimony to the unity of life, the deep interconnections that relate us to all beings.
Such pain for the world becomes masochistic only when one assumes personal guilt for its plight or personal responsibility for its solution. No individual is that powerful. Certainly by participation in society each shares a collective accountability; but to assume the burden of personal blame is unbearable, and furthermore it builds resistance to the acknowledgement of distress. It is also a kind of power trip. Despair, like faith, is a letting go of the manipulative assumption that conscious ego can or should control all events. Each of us is but one little nexus in a vast web. As the recognition of that interdependence breaches our sense of isolation so does it also free our despair of self-loathing.
Even so one can feel deep psychic disarray in internalizing the possibility of planetary demise. It is a prospect of such radical discontinuity as to unglue our minds. How to confront what we barely dare to think? How to think it without going to pieces?
It is helpful to despair-work to realize that going to pieces or falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed it is as essential to evolutionary and psychic transformations as the cracking of outgrown shells. Kazimierz Dabrowski calls this “positive disintegration.” It is operative in every global development of man, especially during periods of accelerated change, and, he argues, permits the emergence of “higher psychic structures and awareness.” For the individual, who, in confronting current anomalies of experience, allows positive disintegration to happen, it can bring a dark night of the soul, a time of spiritual void and turbulence. But these doubts and anxieties are, Dabrowski maintains, “essentially healthy and creative.” They are creative not only for the person but for his/her society, because they permit new and original approaches to reality to be made.
What “disintegrates” in periods of rapid transformation is not the self, of course, but its defenses and ideas. We are not objects that can break. As open systems we are, as Norbert Wiener said, “but whirlpools in a river of everflowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.” We do not need to protect ourselves from change, for our very nature is change. Defensive self-protection, restricting vision and movement like a suit of armor, makes it harder to adapt. It not only reduces flexibility, but blocks the flow of information we need to survive. Our “going to pieces,” however uncomfortable a process, can open us up to new perceptions, new data, new responses.
Our religious heritages can also serve to validate despair-work, offering constructs and symbols attesting to the creative role of this kind of distress. The Biblical concept of the suffering servant, as well as an array of Old Testament prophets, speaks to the power inherent in opening oneself to the griefs of others. In Christianity, the paramount symbol of such power is the cross where, through one’s very pain for the world’s ills and one’s acknowledgment of powerlessness, is found redemption and the grace to act.
The hero of the Mahyana Buddhist tradition is the bodhisattva, who turns back from the gates of Nirvana, vowing to return again and again to the world of woe until all beings are enlightened. He can hear the music of the spheres and understand the language of the birds. By the same token, by virtue of his extended sensitivity, he hears as well all cries of distress, even to the moaning of beings in the lowest level of hell. All griefs are registered and owned in the bodhisattva’s deep knowledge that we are not separate from each other.
“Let all sorrow ripen in me.”- Santideva
Again, if you can, comment. If not, I understand. If even one person reads this, then I'm happy.
[ part one, part three, part four, references and citations, Table of Contents]
by LAO TSU
Translation by Gia Fu Feng
and Jane English
Twelve
The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.
Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.
He lets go of that and chooses this.
Despair-Work: Validation
You can hold yourself back from the suffering of the world: this is something you are free to do…, but perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.
Elie Wiesel
The first step in despair-work is to disabuse oneself of the notion that grief for our world is morbid. To experience anguish and anxiety in the face of the perils threatening humanity is a healthy reaction. Living tissue is sensitive. This pain, far from being crazy, is rather a testimony to the unity of life, the deep interconnections that relate us to all beings.
Such pain for the world becomes masochistic only when one assumes personal guilt for its plight or personal responsibility for its solution. No individual is that powerful. Certainly by participation in society each shares a collective accountability; but to assume the burden of personal blame is unbearable, and furthermore it builds resistance to the acknowledgement of distress. It is also a kind of power trip. Despair, like faith, is a letting go of the manipulative assumption that conscious ego can or should control all events. Each of us is but one little nexus in a vast web. As the recognition of that interdependence breaches our sense of isolation so does it also free our despair of self-loathing.
Even so one can feel deep psychic disarray in internalizing the possibility of planetary demise. It is a prospect of such radical discontinuity as to unglue our minds. How to confront what we barely dare to think? How to think it without going to pieces?
It is helpful to despair-work to realize that going to pieces or falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed it is as essential to evolutionary and psychic transformations as the cracking of outgrown shells. Kazimierz Dabrowski calls this “positive disintegration.” It is operative in every global development of man, especially during periods of accelerated change, and, he argues, permits the emergence of “higher psychic structures and awareness.” For the individual, who, in confronting current anomalies of experience, allows positive disintegration to happen, it can bring a dark night of the soul, a time of spiritual void and turbulence. But these doubts and anxieties are, Dabrowski maintains, “essentially healthy and creative.” They are creative not only for the person but for his/her society, because they permit new and original approaches to reality to be made.
What “disintegrates” in periods of rapid transformation is not the self, of course, but its defenses and ideas. We are not objects that can break. As open systems we are, as Norbert Wiener said, “but whirlpools in a river of everflowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.” We do not need to protect ourselves from change, for our very nature is change. Defensive self-protection, restricting vision and movement like a suit of armor, makes it harder to adapt. It not only reduces flexibility, but blocks the flow of information we need to survive. Our “going to pieces,” however uncomfortable a process, can open us up to new perceptions, new data, new responses.
Our religious heritages can also serve to validate despair-work, offering constructs and symbols attesting to the creative role of this kind of distress. The Biblical concept of the suffering servant, as well as an array of Old Testament prophets, speaks to the power inherent in opening oneself to the griefs of others. In Christianity, the paramount symbol of such power is the cross where, through one’s very pain for the world’s ills and one’s acknowledgment of powerlessness, is found redemption and the grace to act.
The hero of the Mahyana Buddhist tradition is the bodhisattva, who turns back from the gates of Nirvana, vowing to return again and again to the world of woe until all beings are enlightened. He can hear the music of the spheres and understand the language of the birds. By the same token, by virtue of his extended sensitivity, he hears as well all cries of distress, even to the moaning of beings in the lowest level of hell. All griefs are registered and owned in the bodhisattva’s deep knowledge that we are not separate from each other.
“Let all sorrow ripen in me.”- Santideva
Again, if you can, comment. If not, I understand. If even one person reads this, then I'm happy.
[ part one, part three, part four, references and citations, Table of Contents]