A Libertine Takes Communion With Darkness
My 42nd year here has been epic, and I'd be remiss if I didn't tip my fancy new hat to Douglas Adams. I turned 42 just three days shy of 10/10/10, which is 42 in binary notation.
I was not seeking enlightenment in 2010. And at some point I realized it had begun to find me despite myself. I started to know the Middle Way as never before. And despite that, I also know just how ego-attached I still am and how far I have to go.
My path of liberation began with shedding my attachments to the past. I've done so much processing and reprocessing over the years that at some point, it all just dropped away. I still have a story, but my story doesn't own me anymore.
I found some liberation from the madness of money. I gave away most of my possessions and am happier for it today.
I found some liberation from my attachment to ideas and especially from my need to always be right.
I found some liberation from my need to be loved or even liked. I've stopped nurturing my persona and started nurturing my authentic being.
I found some liberation from my fears, especially my fear of death.
I can't claim to be free of any of those things, but I've got a better sense of how strong the chains of my beliefs really are.
When I talk about the "Middle Way" I'm talking about a kind of atheistic buddhism that manifests as "christ consciousness". I've never liked that phrase much until recently. I had a flash of insight that when you stop seeing the world as separate from yourself, you experience christ consciousness. In that state of mind, you are able to see that all mutual enemies are already reconciled and are working to teach and improve each other constantly. Aristophanes: "The wise learn many things from their enemies".
This goes to my life purpose: To create harmony by bringing opposites into concordance so that our differences become a source of our strength.
To a degree this concordance isn't something I am manifesting as much as something I am witnessing. It's not in my power to create it. It's simply what is, and by witnessing it I give others the opportunity to share in my liberation.
I also hold with Heraclitus, that strife or conflict is essential to existence, and universal peace would probably spell the end of us. Balance doesn't mean that conflict ceases. It means that conflict creates peace which creates conflict, and so on.
I see the most fundamental conflict as being between individual and community, between selfishness and generosity. I've learned how to give selfishly and take with generosity. This is also part of what christ consciousness means to me, as a heathen and apostate.
The last week has been particularly moving and more complicated than usual, which is saying a lot given the level of complication I create for myself. On December 15th I listened to David Swanson give a talk in Charlottesville, VA about his new book War is a Lie. He addressed questions from the audience about whether he could support the Revolutionary War, or Civil War, or WWII. His responses were interesting. To sum them up: Canada didn't fight a revolutionary war and is arguably not worse off for it; many other countries ended slavery without a bloody civil war; and the reasons given today to justify WWII (ending the holocaust) were not the actual reasons for fighting the war at the time (plus, Wall Street was heavily invested in the Nazis).
Swanson was talking about the relationship of lies about war and propaganda so I queried him about Hitler's chapter on War Propaganda in Mein Kampf and how he cites the U.S. as an inspiration for the way we portrayed Germans as savage huns in WWI. I also noted that our indian reservations served as models for the concentration camps. We seem to create our own enemies, from Hitler to bin Laden to Saddam. No wonder we spy on our friends, and our friends spy on us.
I headed for D.C. after Swanson's talk, and on the way I listened to Andrea Gibson's CD, When the Bough Breaks. I just happened to pick it up a week ago and had no idea what to expect. For Eli and several other poems directly spoke to concerns heavy on my heart. I am painfully aware of how many of the homeless are veterans.
On December 16th I awoke to the news that the Afghanistan Review was "favorable" and that the troops would begin coming home in July of 2011. I cleaned myself up and went to a demonstration sponsored by Veterans for Peace in front of the White House. I debated all morning whether I'd get arrested in the protest or not.
I went to the protest with joy in my heart, not because of the "good" news about the review (what's so good about another 7 months of escalation and mayhem?) I went with joy in my heart because I had a great opportunity to witness something beautiful. I went because I live in a country where I can exercise my rights to free and peaceable assembly and petition for redress for grievances.
In the end, I left before the arrests started, when my fingers and toes went numb from the cold. I felt ashamed for not braving that weather longer and at least standing by as witness to the people who were committing civil disobedience.
I also left because there was nothing in particular for me to do there that many others weren't doing too. If getting arrested had meant saving a life, I would have done it in an instant. It could be only a symbolic action. I would have added one to the 135 arrest total.
On my way back to Stanley I listened to When the Bough Breaks again. The title track had great resonance for me. In particular, these lines caught my attention:
doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who aren't there
it's that we ignore the ones who are
On Sunday December 19th I went to a solstice service at the UUbridge church in Sperryville. That poem was on my mind and I listened to it again on the drive. I thought about my friends in Denver and how one year ago I was there on Solstice for a memorial of the homeless who died in 2009. There were 154 casualties on the streets that year, and they ranged in age from 3 months to 73 years old. I've since learned that in 2010 it was 140 dead, who ranged in age from 2 months to 81 years old. Who are we that we let the infants and elderly die on our streets amidst so many empty foreclosed homes?
So I went to that UUbridge service with a need to see and be seen and that was exactly what I got. The solstice circle at the close of the service was a beautiful ritual that helped me to reflect on the dark times in my life, so I can appreciate better how those experiences have given me chances to grow.
My solstice celebration didn't end with that service. Early in the morning of December 21st I took a small dose of the hallucinogenic mushroom, Psilocybe cubensis. I spent much of the prior day contemplating a ritual to celebrate the first lunar eclipse on a winter solstice in 456 years, since 1554. It seemed pretty clear to me that there was some magic to this event.
I waited for the start of the eclipse in the hottub, my skin shriveling up and my wet hair freezing in the cold. I lost track of time and eventually forgot why I was out there. This is when I had my realization that christ-consciousness happens when you stop seeing anything else as enemy or separate from you. My mantra and song became: there is nothing that is not me. I had a further revelation that the christ consciousness is in the recognition that being an individual necessitates finding community and that being in community necessitates greater individuation, and so on. The consciousness is in seeing that neither individualism (selfishness) or communalism (generosity) is better than the other and that they necessitate each other.
And then as I was lost in these thoughts singing my mantra, the first darkening of the moon. I questioned to myself whether it had actually begun or was just a cloud. The sky was covered in a thin veil of clouds that only let me make out the rough shape of it. A dog on the next ridge over from me erased all doubt with a lone cry. I responded: "sing it, brother!" and was treated again when he cried just as clearly as before.
I settled in to watch the show and for the next hour that seemed like an eternity, I noticed all the tricks of light that the moon would play on my eyes. I had begun my little ritual with the thought "we are all light, in love with making shadows so we can play little puppet games with ourselves". I particularly love this little disappearing act that the moon puts on.
As the penumbra crept across the moon's face, I kept thinking "surely she will give it up now" and still the moon kept surprising me, refusing to let go of that last sliver of light. She seemed to hold onto that last edge for an eternity.
It was at the moment of final and total eclipse when the phrase tricks of the light clicked in my mind and I realized how clearly I could see the moon without that glare of reflection. For the last hour I'd watched as rays sprung forth and that crescent seemed to hold some kind of triune Goddess or trident-bearing God. It was a crescent pendant and necklace and earring all at once. It was shimmering jewel and I couldn't tell what I was really looking at.
And then the face went dark and I saw the moon as I've never seen the moon before. I've watched plenty of eclipses. I've even watched a few tripping. Maybe I got the right dose of moon and shrooms this time. That yellow yolk assumed a palpable third dimension to my sight. It hung in the sky with an unbearable constancy I couldn't wrench my eyes away from.
After some time it became clear that a new age of endarkenment might be dawning again, and that I might be present for the Christening of it. This is a deliberate choice of words on my part. I, an avowed atheist and blasphemer, steadfast champion of Enlightenment values, would actually and deliberately "Christen the Endarkenment".
It was the darkest night of the year, made even darker by the passage of the earth between the moon and the sun so as to create an eclipse. I found true communion in the darkest hour of the darkest day of a very dark era in human history.
I woke the old man with a lie: You'll never forgive me if I let you sleep through this. Of course that's a lie. He'd never know not to forgive me if I had let him sleep through it. And, there is nothing that is not me--so he might know after all.
When he joined me in the hottub I told him of an encounter I had earlier that day. I was in the post office in Luray, preparing some packages of revolution for export to foreign countries (Israel is in great need. Spain ordered some too, but not nearly so much and I liked that fact because I think Spain is more practiced at it).
But this isn't about the packages of revolution. It is about the old woman who was next to me at the counter while I worked. I gave her space, and at one point she dropped a quarter. I was happy to have an opportunity to help and snatched it before it could finish rolling across the floor and handed it back with a "Merry Christmas!" on my tongue. She thanked me. She wished me a Merry Christmas. And then she broke into tears and told me that it was hard for her because her husband had just died and she was 72 years old and alone.
And my heart broke for her in that moment and I recognized my utter powerlessness to give her back what she'd lost. I said I was sorry and I knew how little those words could possibly do to ease her grief. I finished packing up the revolution, wondering if I should hug her or offer her some money or do something else. I just didn't know what to do in the face of such a loss. We hung out for a short time together as we prepared our packages and wished each other Merry Christmas one last time before parting.
I know that I could have done more, and maybe I did enough.
Brad then told me of his friend Sam Price who died just two weeks ago after a long period alternating as an active alcoholic and in recovery. As he told the story I had the thought "some of us die of our alcoholism, and some our sobriety, and who is to say which is the easier or better death?". Sam's death didn't sound easy or peaceful.
Death was on my mind through most of this darkest of nights. I thought of William Burroughs in Ah, Pook where he says: Death needs time for what it kills to grow in. I spent much of the night envisioning death as a kind and patient gardener. I told Brad about this and what I liked in Michael Dowd's book Thank God for Evolution. I like the idea of the Great Story, of how the death of first generation stars creates the heavier elements needed for successive stars and eventually, planets like ours; of how the extinction of other species enabled the eventual evolution of Homo sapiens; and of how, without death, we simply could not exist. Death is arguably the greatest and most essential part of existence. Without it, natural selection has no meaning or purpose. Sexual selection also couldn't evolve without natural selection preceding it.
Brad went inside and found Dylan Thomas reading And Death Shall Have No Dominion and we listened to it for three or four times and I still hear his voice ringing in my ears and it fills me with joy.
Why 1554?
I have been a little fixated on this date. The last lunar eclipse to occur on a winter solstice was 456 years ago, in 1554.
It also happens that one of my favorite beers is called 1554 and bills itself as an "Enlightened Black Ale". So I pondered what that year might have meant, historically, to justify the name. Wikipedia shed little light. I could see no one I knew as an Enlightenment figure who'd been born or died that year, nor anything else of interest that could justify it.
So I went to my source, the New Belgium Brewery, and learned little of use. All their page says is that their original recipe had been destroyed in a flood in 1997, and that they'd traveled to Belgium in order to re-learn the style.
I know something of the flood that destroyed that recipe, as it turns out. An embankment that was meant to protect against 100 year floods met a 500+ year flood, and that meant that the trailer park it was protecting saw all hell break loose. Gas lines ruptured and the rescue workers faced flood and fire. It was almost unbelievable that only 5 people died given the conditions.
Picasso noted that Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction and I like the tie-in here to the recreation of the enlightened black ale out of the destruction of that flood. But I still lack an answer as to what makes 1554 important enough to name a beer after, and what that has to do with another solstice eclipse, 456 years later. I wasn't able to acquire that beer for my ritual, so I had to make do with some Magic Hat Howl, a Black Lager, that rose to the occasion quite well. I did let out one howl of my own at the fully eclipsed moon.
I consider that perhaps in 1554 that winter solstice eclipse was admired in awe and understanding of the nature of the sun and earth's shadow. If so, it was perhaps rightly the beginning of the Enlightenment and no further explanation is needed. For now, that is all that I have.
Before I retired for the night, Brad inquired if I'd heard of the Carmina Burana. I'm shamefully ignorant, so he educated me, explaining how the monks preserved this bit of literacy through the dark ages at the peril of death. He read O Fortuna and then we listened to it and celebrated the dawning of the age of endarkenment.
O Fortune,
like the moon
The state constantly changing,
always growing
or decreasing;
Detestable life
now difficult
and then easy
Deceptive sharp mind;
poverty
power
it melts them like ice.
Fate—monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
stand malevolent,
vain is the help
and always likely to fade to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game,
my bare back
I bring to your villainy.
Fate, in health
and in virtue,
is now against me,
driven on
and weighted down,
always in the vale of tears (Angaria).
So at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating string;
since Fate
strikes down the strong,
everyone weep with me!
I continued to have further revelations over the next day, and the year is not out and they continue to come. At some point, one has to say "enough" with the interpretations and stories and stop revolving and just take communion. I close now with a few final thoughts that I'm mostly preserving for my own future use:
* I wondered what it would be like to see an eclipse without understanding it. I thought of how you might happen to see the fully eclipsed moon disappear behind clouds and then not see the moon again for days or weeks. When she finally reappeared, would you suspect that moon was an imposter? Could you ever trust the moon again?
* The mushrooms are a kind of literal communion for me. They engender the thought "There is nothing that is not me". This is their mode. It is much more satisfying and true communion to me than the Catholic eucharist ever was.
* Sappho got it backwards. The Gods did die, and have proven forever that death is a good too.
* I appreciate those monks for carrying the light of literacy and flame of reason through the dark ages. Maybe it's science's turn to perpetuate compassion and love in this new dark age. Or maybe it is always the mystics' task to carry light through dark ages and dark through the light ages.
From the 2010 Winter Solstice Photos
Note: I plan review Darkness, the Power of Illumination soon. It strongly influenced my experiences.
Mike Lewinski
Stanley, VA
December 24, 2010
