Some Rumi On A Sunday Morning

I haven't cracked open my daily readings of Rumi in awhile. I decided to this Sunday morning. Yesterday's poem resonates.

Now I return to the text.

And He is with you,
wherever you are.
(Qur'an 57:4)

But when have I ever left it?

Ignorance is God's prison.
Knowing is God's palace.

We sleep in God's unconsciousness
We wake in God's open hand.

We weep God's rain.
We laugh God's lightning.

Fighting and peacefulness
both take place within God.

Who are we then
in this complicated world-tangle,
that is really just the single straight line
down at the beginning of Allah?

Nothing.
We are emptiness.--Rumi (Pg. 216, A Year With Rumi, Coleman Barks translator)

The Golden Rule

The way you make love
is the way God will be with you.-- Rumi

(Coleman Barks says this is Rumi's variation on the golden rule.)

Quinn Related Quote Saturday

"By disembedding humans from The Community of Life -- the basis of Takerism and civilization -- the only way to reconcile this condition of estrangement is through a God who gives freedom with one hand and offers salvation with another."-- Doug Brown, Pg. 123, Roadmap to Sustainability

I'm coming to realize that James Hillman's work falls under the same tree as Daniel Quinn's work. Thats why I think quotes like this nourish my soul: "Myths that shape human lives become in humanism instruments which the mind invents to explain itself to itself. The inherent otherness of myth in an imaginal other realm, the creative spontaneity of these stories and the fact that they are tales of Gods and their doings with humans--all become something a man makes up. We lose the experience of their primary reality and of ourselves as passing through them, of being lived by them, and that 'myths communicate with each other through men without their being aware of this fact.' As the perceptive philosopher Charles Hartshorne has noted, the rise of humanism correlates with 'the downfall of primitive animism, which is the mythological form of man's fellowhip with nature.'"[Pg.190, Re-Visioning Psychology]

Finding Parallels

I knew I should've named this blog Understanding Ishmael. I'm reading A Blue Fire and of course I'm finding parallels between Hillman's psychology and Daniel Quinn's thinking.

"Where the daimones are alive polytheism, pantheism, animism, and even religion do not appear."--James Hillman, Pg. 42, A Blue Fire

"But to return to your original question, I have to say the faculty of belief has completely atrophied in me. It strikes me as foolish to believe in things that may not exist -- or to deny the existence of things that may exist. Nonetheless, I've peopled my own personal universe with gods who have a care for all living things. I don't pray to these gods or build shrines to them or expect favors from them or perform rituals for them. Nor do I expect other people to 'believe' in these gods or to people their own universes with them."--Daniel Quinn, Pg. 51, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways

Perhaps the daimones are alive for anyone that can write something close to the above paragraph.

"As I have spelled out in several later writings, psychological polytheism is concerned less with worship than with attitudes, with the way we see things and place them. Gods, for psychology, are neither believed in nor addressed directly. They are rather adejectival than substantive; the polytheistic experience finds existence qualified with archetypal presence and recognizes faces of the gods in these qualifications. Only when these qualities are literalized, set apart as substances, that is, become theologized, do we have to imagine them through the category of belief."--James Hillman, Pg.42, A Blue Fire


"Being a Martian anthropologist, I have to pull back from your question, have to take off the blinders you're asking me to wear. Believing in things that may not exist--or disbelieving in things that MAY exist--is a peculiarity of your culture, not a universal human activity. Because it's universal among you, you assume it's universal among humans in general."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.49, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways

The daimones are not alive in our culture.

The Outcast

A quote for anyone that has ever felt like an outcast:

"Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast."--James Hillman

A Question From An Aquaintance

Opened up my email this morning to an interesting question from an acquaintance. He is a practicing Catholic.

"Do you or your wife have any faith traditions in your family- either now, or in your upbringing? Maybe a topic for another day...."

Given the quotes I've shared the past couple of days this question comes at an interesting time.

Here is my answer: No, neither one of us have experienced or currently practice faith traditions. You'd have to go back to our grandparents to find family members practicing faith traditions. Personally, I don't believe or disbelieve in anything. Perhaps another day we could discuss this, I'm always open to listening to other's stories and viewpoints. I will say that my thinking and worldview have been heavily influenced and shaped by Daniel Quinn's novel Ishmael.

Same Theme as Yesterday

A follow up quote to the quote I posted yesterday. It's been well over ten years since I've read Providence, and these quotes still resonate with me to this day. Part of why they do, I think, is they get rid of the idea that God will somehow intervene and save us from the problems we've created for ourselves, especially environmental problems like: human overpopulation, overuse of resources, and climate change. The idea that humans can go extinct and nothing will stop it from happening is very real to me. Quote below:

"Don't misunderstand me. The fact that the gods don't take our side against others doesn't imply that we have to do the same. The horse doesn't wait for the gods to intervene when it's attacked by a puma; it uses all its strength and every weapon at it possesses to save its life. We're free to do the same - as free as any other creature. If a lion attacks us, the gods will not defend us, because they're no more on our side than they're on the side of the lion, but we're at liberty to defend ourselves with whatever weapon we can wield. Our best weapon of defense is of course our intelligence. If there's a cancer growing inside of you, the gods aren't on your side against it, but that doesn't mean you have to throw up your hands and allow it to destroy your life; defend yourself against it with every resource you can bring to bear.

"People have written to me to ask: 'What can I do about the spiders that invade my house? May I kill them or do I just have to put up with them?' Such questions can always be safely referred to our neighbors in the community of life. A dog or a chimpanzee or a sparrow cannot be mistaken in such matters; they cannot mislead themselves with false, convenient arguments. Ask your dog what he does with the fleas that invade his coat, and he'll show you: He does his best to kill them. You can do the same, without apology. The gods will not take your side against the rest of the world just because you're human, but they will also not take the side of the rest of the world against you just because you're human." Daniel Quinn, Providence

Finding God?

The other day our 12 yr. old son mentioned that one of his friends asked him if he believed in God. While he was explaining his answer to me I remembered a moment a few years back when a friend of mine asked me over the internet if I was agnostic. I said I didn't think so. I wasn't familiar with agnoticism to give him a definite answer at that time. So what did I do? I visited the Ishmael Community. And I went to the question and answer section of the website and typed in agnostic. Here is what I read:

I'm simply saying that I'm unable to put myself in any camp with regard to the existence of God. I can't join the atheists (who assert that there are zero gods), I can't join the monotheists (who assert that there is one god), and I can't join the polytheists (who assert that there are many gods). Nor am I an agnostic; I'm not saying I DON'T KNOW whether God exists, I'm saying this knowledge is UNOBTAINABLE. It's not that I don't HAVE it, it's that it's NOT THERE to be had.

Or you could put it this way: God's existence is an object not of knowledge but of belief. It's possible to BELIEVE that there is no God, one God, or many gods, but it's not possible to KNOW any of these things. I should add that, while it's POSSIBLE to believe one of these things, it's not NECESSARY to believe one of them. One is to FREE to choose one of these beliefs to embrace, but one is not COMPELLED to choose one. --Daniel Quinn from Question #538

I put the quote above in my own words and answered my friends question. Why? Because it makes sense to me.

More on God

More childhood question answered. Lewis Mumford on God:

"For mark this: if one puts God at the beginning, as the creator of all things, he becomes a monstrous being, as the God of the Old Testament in fact seemed to the sensitive Manichees, who took note of his irrational angers and his bloody commands long before Voltaire. That God is a god of matter, bestiality, darkness, and pain: not a god of love and light. If, on the other hand, one attempts to unbind deity from responsibility for having produced a world half lost to the powers of darkness and death, by promising some redemption, at least for man, in an eternal future which will balance up accounts and make love prevail: if one does this one seems to turn a brutal god into a demented one, a creature capable of condemning human beings to an eterneity of torture for sins committed in the briefest of lifetimes: a savagely disproportionate system of punishment repulsive to reason and justice. If the God who permitted the slaughter of the innocent in the Lisbon earthquake shocked Voltaire, what would he have said to the God who permitted his creatures to invent the insane horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz?

Neither faith nor reason could bring such complete defilements and miscarriages of life within the compass of human acceptance, if a divine purpose actually presided over all the occasions of human life. Plainly, if there is a loving God he must be impotent: but if he is omniponent, truly responsible for all that happens within his domain, capable of heeding even the sparrow's fall, he can hardly be a loving God. Such contradictions drive honest minds to atheism: the empty whirl and jostle of atoms becomes more kind to human reason than such a deity." [Lewis Mumford, Pg. 71, The Conduct of Life]

Competent Gods

"In fact, the real gods of the world--if there are any--are competent gods. They created a world that functions perfectly, without divine oversight or intervention. If we don't curb our population growth, the built-in processes of the world will take care of it." [Daniel Quinn, Pg. 61, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways]

Answer

Part of an answer to some of the childhood questions I've asked (related to yesterday's post).

"If God is willing to prevent evil but unable to do so, then he's impotent. If he's able to prevent evil but willing to, then he's corrupt. And so, since evil certainly exists, God is either impotent or corrupt and therefore cannot be God."[Daniel Quinn, Pg.163, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways]

Some Childhood God Questions

Growing up through the eighties and early nineties (I was born in 1974) I was always concerned about our impact on the environment. I mean it was twenty some odd years after Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring", so the message was out there for all those that wanted to see. Of course, being a typical kid, I wanted to see anything and everything I could lay my eyes on. And it was obvious that we were destroying the planet. So some of the questions that I asked on occasion were: Why are we destroying such a beautiful place? And why, if God created it all, is he allowing it to happen? And, also, why if he created us did he program us to do this? You'd think an all-seeing and all-knowing God would know better.