Spiritual Mathematics and Technologies

Count on nothing, stop tallying misfortune, and forget your age. Be only here and now, staying with whatever you may choose to do, or must, until it’s done or you are. Stop dallying with unimportance. Let your impatience become equal to your patience and stand on the same footing.

From “Being Here”

None of this is on my time. I resent nothing and no one.
I share in the whole world by laying claim to none of it,
Tasting what is sweet and bitter even in my own life
Like a sample off a plate in someone else’s home.
I am not here to stay and know it, and I no longer have a care
Because I wish to stay sane enough to keep caring.
Care like you died and kept on caring.
Care without a care, almost in just the way so many other events
Happen with no reflection or without meaning to,
But only because you mean it so much
That you are willing to be as heedless as it takes.
Become as ignorant of the parts and the frictions between them
As you were once so conscious of them in relation to yourself.
Be aware of being who you are in the arms or in the teeth of what is.
Forget all that might have been or might not be and there you are.

- P.M.

The Spirituality of Basketball

In basketball everyone is looking up, reaching up, carrying aloft, and sending a ball cleanly through a circle. Basketball elevates our characteristically upright stature. It’s a game that demands a heightening in the grace and heroism of the human form. It’s play that takes flight – that takes place largely in the air. The ball is never still or grounded for long, downed no longer than the time it takes to rebound from a dribble.

Basketball is complexity springing from simplicity. A rectangle of air – that’s the simplicity of the space in which it’s played. Put a ball through a net – that’s the simplicity of the intent. Yet this simple purpose in this simple context generates a whirlwind of complex activities: feint and counter-feint, the explosive power of legs and the delicate calculations of fingertips; the desperate energy and sweep of an arm reaching to keep a ball inbounds and in play, and the balanced precision of the human body firing from three-point land. Like life, basketball is simple in its foundation and purpose, yet clever and complex in its execution because it has to be.

Next post: The Spirituality of Desultoriness

Spirituality and Nature: Native America

Imagine what it must have been like to wake up in the morning with the whole world yours! A land that was not yet divided up into parcels of private property was a land that belonged to no one and everyone. The land was as borderless and elemental as the sea or sky. It is hard for us today even to imagine this.

Part of America’s heritage is a strong identification with freedom. But we are no longer free to dwell within a whole world. This was a freedom enjoyed by Native Americans and by many other people around the world until only a few centuries ago. It was a freedom known by the ancestors of us all.

Still today, where we allow nature to stand here and there near enough to count for some part of our day to day lives, it relentlessly whispers its only word of how the world is one. The message can briefly overcome us in the smell of pine sap. It touches us when we lie in tall grass that leaves stuff stuck in our hair. It resounds in the simple refrain of a birdcall coming at dusk from across a pond or field. And it is written far and wide across the sky anytime we look up at night to be infinitely dazzled by the being of stars.

And it flashes back into our faces when we view our own photos of the earth as shot from space: a tiny, startling, and beautiful incandescence. A sacred space, as if one firefly were winking in a huge field of dark.

Colors. Air and light. The only place we all inhabit. The place we were created.

The wholeness that Native America knew close up and that we can spot from space, is something to which our divided world must return if we are to survive for long as a species.

Native Americans faced the only face of this one world for their whole lives, lost deep into the staring, steadied and unstartled. For they and those who came before them had always stood there.

We seem to have left, but it is only seeming and it is not forever. We will again live in a world made whole, this time by the willing help of our own hands, or we will finally shatter not the earth, but the possibility of our own long term future here.

__________

PS: As long as we’re on the nature theme, I just submitted an entry to the blog carnival Festival of the Trees for Aug. 1. If you haven’t done a “blog carnival” before, they’re easy to do – you just submit something you’ve blogged that’s relevant to the topic. Festival of the Trees has a link to the submission form. After you enter the permalink for the post you’re submitting, most of the rest of the form fills in automatically.

Spirituality in Action

It seems to me that if our spiritual or religious practices help us to act more constructively and creatively on the job, with our families, and in our lives generally, then that's a good sign that our practices aren't self-serving in a narcissistic or self-indulgent sense.


The imperative of every finite thing is to contribute to the creation of a world greater than the one it knows.

Hell is what you’ve left undone.

Lift up your life and love with it.

If you solve the problem of living then the problem of dying takes care of itself.

Spirituality: What Is It Good For?

Contemplatis Profundis

I like to think I’m spiritual
I like to think I’m smart;
But sometimes when I meditate
I make a little tart –

Pop Tarts, that is, my favorite kind,
And when I’m finished one
Sometimes I have another
And count each little crumb.

For me, each one’s a mantra
To me, I am a saint;
I’d ask me for my autograph
But maybe I would faint.


Is spirituality about being realistic – or narcissistic? What’s the difference between “spiritual practice” and “self absorption?”


Wrestling with a... Demon?! A Really Really Annoying One...

PS: Why does this post say "Posted by Paul 8:25 PM" on the right? Do you guys see this too? I never saw that before... Could just be another of those troublesome "visions" I suppose...


No kidding, this is spooky. I added the PS above, but then the time posting disappeared. So then I edited this post again, removing the "PS." But then the time read out came back so it needed the PS after all and now I've put it back.

OK, I'm just leaving it this way now whether or not it says "Posted by Paul 8:25 PM" over on the right.

No... I am NOT being self-absorbed. It’s just Blogspot or Blogger or whatever this thing is that’s absorbing me and my time. OK, deep breath... now where did I put that meditation pillow…?

Thomas C’s Faith Crisis Continues…

{...along with certain technical difficulties referred to at the start of the previous post. By now, I think I’ve figured out that at least part of the problem is my computer. “O, to be Technically proficient!” I cry out in the spirit of Carlyle. “But alas, the universe is one Unfeeling toolbar or Whatever, persisting in doing weird Stuff when I betakest myself to poke around on it. But at least I still have the power to Type, and Type I will though the pangs of Tophet smite me." From The Temporary Glitch - Book First, chapter I}

Anyway, taking up again from the post before last of June 27, let’s look at the remainder of my excerpt from Thomas Carlyle’s spiritual autobiography, Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Re-tailored). This abridgment also consists of direct quotations presented without commentary and in the same order in which the lines appear in Carlyle’s text.

From The Everlasting No - Book Second, chapter VII:

… even now, when doubting God’s existence. “One circumstance I note,”… “Genuine Love of Truth {was behind} all the nameless woe {that} Inquiry {had brought me.} I nevertheless still loved Truth, and would bate no jot of my allegiance to her. ‘Truth!’ I cried, though the Heavens crush me for following her…”

… the very Devil had been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.

Often… there was a question present to me: Should some one… blow thee suddenly… into the other World, or other No-World, by pistol- shot, - how were it? {I.e., “What of it?” or “So what?”}

So had {my despair}... lasted, as in bitter protracted Death-agony, through long years...

What about that One Far-Off Divine Event?

Again, it seems to me that hopelessness is the essential feature of Carlyle’s despair. Here we also see what for Carlyle was at the bottom of it: his rejection of the beliefs he’d grown up with. In all honesty – he refers to his love of truth – he couldn’t believe these things anymore.

Comments on the prior two Carlyle posts emphasized present centeredness vs. dwelling too much on the past or future. Notice, however, that what Carlyle dwells on isn’t his loss of hope for future career advancement or roomier living quarters or even fixing a technical glitch on his computer. He’s lost Hope with a capital H – Hope, to borrow the words of another 19th century writer whose name has come up, for that “one far-off divine event/To which the whole creation moves.” (Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam)

It looks to me that here Carlyle sees death as the end of everything for us in a pointless, lifeless, material universe. Is this a problem that can be solved by present centeredness? Is it a problem at all? Why or why not?

Update Sat. July 7: And What Kind of Hope are we Talking About?

Raffi’s comment, the first on this thread, brings to mind what may be a basic distinction between how people think about their hope or faith. Maybe this could be termed the “specifically hopeful” vs. the “generally hopeful”?

Specific Hopers: They have definite ideas about an afterlife. I think, for example, about Catholicism’s heaven and hell with purgatory in between. Personal immortality and reunion with loved ones are usually major features of the specifics.

General Hopers: Tennyson’s line cited above could be inserted here too. He writes of hope for that “one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.” Unity is a big theme with general hopers and they don’t talk much about specifics.

Grass Hopers: They only feel hopeful when… OK, bad joke, but I find the similarity to grass hoppers irresistible…