Clarity for Teachers: Day 17
‘Even happy moments and good times with friends don’t make you clearer. Don’t hold on to them.’
Another day, another warning: we’ve had profit and respect, we’ve had praise and fame, now it’s even happy moments and good times with friends. Is this really the price of clarity, to forswear all these things? I can hear the hecklers from The Life of Brian: ‘What’s he got against friends? He’ll be having a go at the lilies of the field, next!’
As so often with this advice, though, the wording is subtle. Don’t pursue profit or respect. Ignore praise and fame. Don’t hold on to the good times. Each of these instructions has its own implications; they are not just variations on a theme.
I spent three years at Oxford and it took about as long to puzzle my way back from that experience, like following a thread out of a labyrinth. When I talk about it this way, it’s not out of hostility or ingratitude for what I got from the journey into the labyrinth. But I would have been lost in there a whole lot longer, if it hadn’t been for a particular friendship made during those years.
The friend I’m thinking of was the first person I knew well who talked about esoteric traditions. She had grown up in a Steiner community, taken parts of that tradition without swallowing it dogmatically, and gathered material from other traditions where she found it. I started out as ignorant as I was sceptical about all this, but gradually I came to recognise that there might be something here: that these mysterious diagrams and ways of speaking could function as a particular kind of conceptual tool. The tools that modern Western culture likes to use to do its thinking are like hammers: they do one job well, you know what they are for, and when you’ve got one in your hand, the risk is that you see the world as made of nails. The tools of the esoteric traditions — and most human cultures have had such traditions — are like conceptual Swiss army knives, each with a hundred different functions.
The Tree of Life of the Kabbalistic traditions is such a tool, a multidimensional thought-object, most of whose functions I know nothing of, because I’ve never made a disciplined study of Kabbalah. But based on what I’ve picked up from people who have, you can think of the tree as a map, a set of stations, corresponding to different states of being. Think of the journey of bringing a project or an artistic work into being, from the first spark of possibility — the glint in someone’s eye, the moment when a conversation quickens — through the various kinds of work by which you end up with a material object, or an organisation with staff and stock and taxes to pay. Or think of the journey of a relationship between two people, stretching from that first encounter in which something sparks, to the everyday realities and responsibilities of marriage and parenthood. These are examples of the journey between different states of reality — from its high, dreamlike, undifferentiated branches, to the muddy groundedness of roots — and the rigorous poetic language of the esoteric map can offer a way to trace and talk about the patterns that such journeys have in common.
The bit that got my attention, the first time my friend talked about the Tree of Life, was the concept of Qliphoth: if each of the stations on the tree, each of those states of being, was a fruit, then Qlipoth was its shadow side, the dried-out, lifeless husk of that fruit. ‘It’s when something becomes it’s opposite by staying the same,’ she said, ‘by missing the moment when it was time to move on.’ I knew immediately what she meant, though I’d never had a name for it before. I thought of every institution I’d encountered that had gone on doing the thing it did while forgetting why it had been doing it in the first place. And the suggestion here was that this happens when we hold on, which is why today’s card has me thinking back to that conversation, nearly twenty years ago.
How much of the skill of living lies in learning to let go? If you hold on tight to that first magical glimpse of possibility in the dreamlike beginnings of a relationship, you’ll never get to the place where you meet its reflection in the familiarity of a shared everyday. Take joy in the good times and happy moments, but recognise that like any beautiful living thing, if you close your grip around it, there will be no life in what you’re left with, only the lifeless shell of what you treasured.
Don’t hold on to them, the card says — don’t hold on to anything, I whisper back.
Västerås, 22 March, 2020
This is the seventeenth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
