“what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous”
Parmenides
Burnt Norton
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Tag Archives: love
Thou Joy
All is not as it seems; in fact – better than we fear or even hope. Much. All the world’s a stage; a set to hold and enable connection. Reality is not within us – our self – but in relation. Which is itself movement, whence relationship arises.
It is our attachment to our unfertilised ego that binds and imprisons us. Sentenced thus to solitary confinement. Magic shimmers when synapses between us crackle with the vibrancy of what lies beyond.
Relation to, with, through. Nature, others, creativity, ideas. Anything in fact except the non-existent “I” (Ich-Es) and its bedfellow materialism; which is literally stuff and nonsense.
The language of love is movement and acceleration. Relationship is evanescent motion, choreographed by joy. The word existing beyond time.
Experience deceives. It is built from the the rubble of the dry concretised and digital past. It is history, always outmoded. As Eliot and Buber put it:
“In the act of experience Thou is far away” (Buber)
“In the knowledge derived from experience, the knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies, for the pattern is new in every moment. And every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been” (Eliot)
“just as prayer is not in time but time in prayer, sacrifice not in space but space in sacrifice, and to reverse the relation is to abolish reality.. I do not experience the man to whom I say Thou. But I take my stand in relation to him .. No deception penetrates here; here is the cradle of the Real Life” (Buber).
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” (Eliot)
As we flow, we shine
We, the story continously told
Thread, wed and meld.
Warp, weft and fold.
Crescendo thus lovingly held
Widthless I, boundless Thine.
For as we flow – we shine.
Fire, Energy and Love
.. these are, I think different expressions or facets of the same thing (thing because as Einstein tells us matter is simply condensed energy)
“In the beginning was Power, intelligent, loving, energising. In the beginning was the Word, supremely capable of mastering and moulding whatever might come into being in the world of matter. In the beginning there were not coldness and darkness: there was Fire.”
The Mass on the World, 1923 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.”
Little Gidding, 1942 TS Eliot
“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”
Albert Einstein
“Love is the real power. It’s the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower.”
Marion Woodman
“But what is passion, what are emotions? There is the source of fire, there is the fullness of energy. A man who is not on fire is nothing: he is ridiculous, he is two-dimensional. He must be on fire even if he does make a fool of himself. A flame must burn somewhere, otherwise no light shines; there is no warmth, nothing.”
Psychology of Kundalini Yoga Carl Jung
When poetry collides with physics
“The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual, Here the past and future Are conquered, and reconciled,”
The Dry Salvages T. S. Eliot
“In quantum mechanics, wave function collapse occurs when a wave function—initially in a superposition of several eigenstates—reduces to a single eigenstate due to interaction with the external world. … Significantly, the combined wave function of the system and environment continue to obey the Schrödinger equation.”
Wikipedia “Superposition collapse”
TS Eliot, after the despair of The Wasteland, came to his realisation that the only way out of the endless cycle (“when is there an end to it, the voiceless wailing”) is the intersection between now and infinity -the Incarnation. The universe does not revolve around humans. Neither are we apart from all-that-is. Rather we are here to bear witness; or as quantum physics might put – to be observers – and thus to crystallise actual from the infinity of potential. What they would call observation collapsing the wave function, is what Eliot calls The Incarnation.
Science, Christ, Mysticism
“Science alone cannot discover Christ. But Christ satisfies the yearnings that are born in our hearts in the school of science… Science will, in all probability, be increasingly impregnated by mysticism.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (My Universe, 1924, IX, 83)
Intimate Language
My father remained at heart a rural Yorkshireman. He used address form “thou” to distinguish his intimates from the wider world – “you”. English has this in its roots, similar to the French “tu” and the German “du”.
That it has fallen from use – diminishes us a little. I remember what it is to be addressed as thou. Intimate, warm, enfolding. “Eh, lad thou art…”.
The Jewish existentialist Martin Buber uses the form brilliantly in German. Distinguishing between Sie and Du, Ich und Es. He said “To man the world is two-fold .. the attitude of man is two-fold .. the one primary word is the combination I-Thou, the other is the combination I-It”.
I-thou is a relationship of inner to inner, an authentic encounter that is the touchstone of existence. (I-thou creating “our”).
Of course, Buber wrote in German and Du has currency in contrast to Sie or Es, whereas in English we now reserve intimate addressing for our relationship with God. How ironic!
In our English language how can we now mark the transition in relationships between the formality of “you are” and the caress of “thou art”? And when and why did we lose the rich language of intimacy?
Surely thou-ness was clear in the minds of the scholars constructing the King James Bible in 1611. Perhaps the slow death of this way of celebrating friendship is linked to the four hundred year rise of materialism since the reformation?
Perhaps as the smoke clears and we see the I-It debris left by capitalism and atheism a new expression of thou-ness will appear.
Let us pray so.
Harnessing Love
“The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – The Evolution of Chastity,” in Toward the Future, 1936, XI, 86-87)
Trust in the slow work
“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The human phenomenon
De Chardin’s work is scintillating – a brilliant piece of philosophical science. But, oh how difficult to access! It appears as a work of nineteenth century charismatic spirituality, language calculated to repel a positivist scientist. Yet it deals with concepts and theories that bring together quantum mechanics, relativity, geology, evolutionary biology and anthropology. One struggles to absorb the width of his landscape.
And he distils some compelling concepts.
Material evolution started at the big bang with occasional phase-shifts from plasma to atoms, from giant molecules to cellular life, from complex organisms to the birth of ideas. Evolution within the geosphere (the crystallising and polymerising worlds) leading to the biosphere and now the noosphere.
A duality of material and spiritual, which he calls the “without” and “within”. He traces the development of the “within”, an evolution of consciousness. He names man as a stage in that process associated with the phase-shift from the evolution of biology to the evolution of ideas.
He shows that everything, both material and spiritual in each phase has common properties – plurality, unity and energy.
His ideas have of course been widely adopted, but almost by stealth and by others. He was a Jesuit priest, and the church tried to gag him. He bowed to pressure, because of his vows of obedience, and much of his work came to light after his death. . De Chardin’s work gloriously and selflessly witnesses the growth of God within and between us. What an irony that the entombed treasury of his ideas was pillaged most famously by Richard Dawkins (memes? Noosphere…), who is of course the Ian Paisly of atheism.
It is meat and needs to be chewed, but it is rich meat and will repay the effort.