Whom do the sent-out follow?
“Religion is consistently treated as a source of intellectual and emotional insecurity, not as a challenge to complacency and pride.” — Christopher Lasch
Individuate. Be yourself. Become who you are. Now. Then. But when? How? In our bricolage culture of identity politics, micro-moralities, liberation and ‘progress’, the pressure to ‘be your own person’ has never had more weight. On the one hand, this is easy to welcome: our desires are our own, our truths ‘My Truth’, my life is mine to create. This stems from the gradual re-realisation since the Renaissance of our inner life as a hero’s journey, perhaps apotheosised by the likes of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. There is nothing nobler than the quest for authenticity. But there are two problems with this: first, our selves do not exist as indivisible; second, our inner horizon is largely inherited.
“Mullah Nasrudin walked into a shop one day. The owner came forward to serve him. ‘First things first,’ said Nasrudin; ‘did you see me walk into your shop?’
‘Of course.’
‘Have you ever seen me before?’
‘Never in my life.’
‘Then how do you know it is me?’” — Arabian Proverb
Blink. Be new. When even was the who you were then even now again? Change: your skin every seven years; your placement every moment; your habits and patterns every lifetime.
Christians have called it kenosis, or the self-emptying of God in the incarnation and the cross; Buddhists have un/named it akhanda paranibanna or the blowing out of the khandas, the various aspects of the coalescing miasma that makes our mind-body complex. Body, mind, tendencies and habits, volition and will, consciousness — we are any and all of these at different points in our lives. But never always all, never always.
We are not who we think we are not what we are. Living this realisation is the goal of the spiritual path, an effortless dissolving into the world-becoming-us-becoming-world. It’s what we see in those who seem to know, those uncanny people we follow — ancient and current.
But, even they didn’t invent the language they speak. That most basic inter-personal action, the passion of language-communication, is itself discovered not created. We follow our ancestors.
Follow? As the internet term compounds, it is better to be followed than to follow. Ancient appeals to the symbol of being part of a flock no longer appeal. ‘Wake up sheeple’: stand-out-from-the-crowd. Now, we can be our own shepherd, the world is reducible, definable, self-helpable.
This denies a basic fact: we follow our ancestors. We follow each other. We look up to. We look down on. The real and all-too-burning question for our current era is which pruning knife to use?
‘If a man knows not and knows not that he knows not, shun him
If a man knows not and knows that he knows not, awaken him
If a man knows and knows that he knows, follow him.’ — Arabian Proverb
By the same token, the conscious energy and mental expenditure required to curate the self in such a way is a singularly Sisyphean task. It does well to imagine Sisyphus happy, but he’s not of course. Perhaps we must imagine Tantalus happy, as Merton does in his satirisation of consumerism:
“How would they profit if we became content? We would no longer need their new product. The last thing the salesman wants is for the buyer to become content. You are of no use in our affluent society unless you are always just about to grasp what you never have. The Greeks were not as smart as we are. In their primitive way they put Tantalus in hell. Madison Avenue, on the countrary, would convince us that Tantalus is in heaven.” (Thomas Merton, Confessions of a Guilty Bystander)
Worldly success, the winning of people and things — these are of course not only the ‘followed’ of today, but of all time. It’s how we got to a place where we require infinite growth and finite resources.
All our action and passion are now only explicable in the ever-widening interpretative mix of our global village. We can crucify the Buddha and send Jesus a bonsai Bodhi. But the realising of any desire to somehow go beyond and behind these — beyond and behind to a pick-and-choose cliff-top where all worldviews and meanings are all equally and readily available — requires more mental effort to us pavement people than the intellectual giants who have taken us to this position realise. The MIT philosopher, Houston Smith, opens our eyes to this with frightening logic.
“One more epistemic bugbear needs to be laid to rest: the charge that belief in absolute Truth lands one in dogmatism. The truth is almost the opposite. Logically, it is fallibilism that is absolutism’s corollary, for with the absence of a concept of the way things are, it is impossible to be mistaken about them…” — Houston Smith, ‘Methodology, Comparison, Truth’ in A Magic Still Dwells
Actually, we live and breathe doctrine every day, in the form of ideology. Zizek gives us an intriguing parabolic parallel in the story of Niels Bohr’s horse shoe. Bohr kept a horse-shoe above his study door. Horse-shoes are associated in folklore with the warding-away of evil spirits. When asked what a world-renowned physicist was doing with a horseshoe above his desk, and whether he believed in it, he answered, ‘No, but I heard that it works even if you don’t believe in it.’
This, says Zizek, is ideology. Not just the monomanias of the politically-obsessed, not merely the tired maxims of theorists and economists, not only the feather-in-the-cap of the bloody comrade: doctrines frame our world and make experience possible.
‘The most satisfying and ecstatic faith…trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.’ (H L Mencken ‘Quid Est Veritas’ in The Vintage Mecken p.69)
All of us live as if there is a perspective where it all makes sense, even if we can’t make it ourselves. One of the great ironies of early Christianity is that Christ-followers were those who were ‘sent-out’ — apostolein. But with the wideness of the world in front, they only had their inner resources to rely on. While they believed, followed, loved and lived in what they believed to be the earthly body of God, Christ, they faced a brave new world — a cosmos to whom their message was quite alien: this surrender of power exposed power’s addictive cruelty.
The first Christian martyr, Stephen, was responsible for giving food to the poor in the community. On trial by local religious authorities for asserting a materialised divinity, he argued that God is not limited to locality: God appears to all who have the courage to listen out. His forgiving of those who threw sharp rocks at him in response (which killed him), in a mutated attempt at justice, exposed the heart of such self-will.
Nietzsche satirised it as a slave-morality. But in so doing, Nietzsche neglected the will to the other’s-power. His performed reliance on his own ability to uphold and define his reality cannot be disconnected from his eventual insanity: he trailblazed the postmodern condition.
“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, people and ages, it is the rule…One loves ultimately one’s desires, not the thing desired… ‘Good’ is no longer good when one’s neighbour mouths it.’” (Beyond)
Four years earlier, in his Joyous Science Nietzsche nevertheless admitted, ‘man kann nicht durch alle Wände sehen’. This has been beautifully translated idiomatically by Kevin Hill as, ‘not every wall has a window’: one cannot see through every wall. No one person has it all. Taking life into your own hands, not doing what others tell you, that’s one thing. Sussing life in all its mystery and complexity — that’s something on which we are absolutely reliant on something Other.
The notion of apostlehood, of being sent-out, is akin to Heidegger’s notion of Geworfenheit, or ‘thrownness’, which characterises the human condition. We are thrown into a world which we have to scramble to understand from the word go to the whirling stop. And in order to understand it we necessarily stand on giants’ shoulders. But we also stand on giant shouldn’ts. That’s the frightening thing.
“Faith is by no means a mere act of choice, an option for a special solution to the problems of existence. It is birth to a higher life by obedience to the Source of Life. To believe is thus to consent to hear and to obey a creative command that raises us from the dead… We believe, not because we want to know but because we want to be.” (Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander)
Whom do the sent-out follow? Our minds, bodies, our hearts? To follow only ourselves to the neglect of the sacrifice by which we are caused would be to adopt the position of the cor curvum in se, or ‘heart turned in on itself’: a lonely ego, orbiting itself. To follow just ourselves is to debase the solitude which we all need as our spiritual food: we cannot love ourselves unless we love others unless we love ours-… ad infinitum. To follow just ourselves is to deny that we sometimes exceed and fall short of our expectations: there is an inner other, which moves beyond prediction and without expectation. The universal heart of the unconscious process is the beat of love. This rhythm looms, reigns, beckons.
Each of us is called. Open your ears. Heed what is asked of you in this life: it will have something to do with where you can be good.
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