Two weekends ago, I was one of 11 men who attended a weekend Quaker meeting at Temenos, a rustic gathering place of a few off-grid cabins and lodges on Mineral Mountain, across from Shuttsbury. We met there twice each summer until the pandemic canceled it a few years ago. The weekend of August 9-11 was the first weekend we were able to gather again in the silence of the tall trees.
Many of us are over 80 years old, some in our 90s. We are all aware that we will continue to lose members to the inevitability of death. This collective awareness quiets our “doing” and opens our inner selves. Some of us consider this inner search a spiritual quest. My own quest is to go beyond conventional, constrained understandings and find a connection with nature, what is “out there”.
I know and feel that I, and we all, am part of a larger life that we have only glimpsed for a moment (feelings are a portal into a greater reality than I have ever known).
In 1936, the year I was born, American author and broadcaster Lowell Thomas popularized the idea (myth) that humans only use 10% of their brains in the preface to Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. When I was younger, I believed that learning how to think and turning ideas into action was the path to “success.”
I was completely unaware of my “inner” life and how it guided the way I lived my life. The first church I attended was the theater where I worked and the playwrights there “spoke” to me and told me what I perceived to be good and bad, right and wrong.
Ageing, even amid the discomforts of our declining physical abilities, is a clearinghouse for our inner lives, which are often clogged by what the Irish-British philosopher and writer Iris Murdoch called a “bloated, relentless ego.” But by contemplating beauty in nature and art, she believed, we could deflate this ego (a process Murdoch described as “de-egoizing”) and open our eyes to reality.
I had to cut my Quaker training short because one of my declining physical abilities is my hearing loss. The latest high-tech hearing aids were ineffective and I couldn't hear 80% of what my companions were saying.
But I left with a fresh memory of what I saw, felt and heard the night before, curled up in my sleeping bag on the large screened porch at the end of the lodge. I was mesmerized by the way the towering trees danced with wind and rain as they enveloped the lodge, and I felt like I was immersed, even for a moment, in the larger reality of life that had eluded me for so long. Intuitively, I knew that everything was connected: us, the trees, the animals, the stones, the river. Gazing out over the screened porch wall, I felt like I was part of a conversation happening above me between the wind, the rain and the treetops.
I return to that experience in today's column because it deepens my conviction that we, the people, are part of a larger life and world, and that is also how I see our current political climate. Murdoch's idea of ”de-selfing” from his “inflated, relentless ego” shapes my vision. It feels like a pilgrimage from fantasy to reality.
Maria Popova writes that Murdoch describes the possibilities and limitations of defining our nature as follows: “The self, the place we inhabit, is a place of illusion. Goodness is linked to the attempt to see the non-self, to see and respond to the real world in the light of virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the concept of transcendence that philosophers have always relied on to explain good. 'Goodness is a transcendental reality' means that virtue is an attempt to pierce the veil of egocentric consciousness and participate in the real world. It is an empirical fact of human nature that this attempt can never be completely successful.”
No kidding! Trump and his supporters are 100% self-centered. “Self-denial” is in another galaxy, where there is a group of people with huge, powerful selves who are trying to destroy democracy and the environment. A network of six donors, tied to the fortunes of a handful of wealthy industrialist families, have been working for years to loosen environmental regulations and overturn regulations necessary to maintain a livable climate.
Or the broader environmental reality in which we can enter into a dialogue with nature.
As long as I can “connect the dots,” I will be posting a biweekly column for the Greenfield Recorder. I am also a contributing writer for the Greem Energy Times. Serious feedback, comments, and questions are welcome at [email protected].
