Monday, August 14, 2017
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Monday, May 08, 2017
Wednesday, May 03, 2017
Saturday, April 29, 2017
Wednesday, March 08, 2017
Sunday, February 19, 2017
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Thursday, December 01, 2016
Monday, November 21, 2016
Tuesday, November 01, 2016
Monday, October 24, 2016
Notes and Quotes on the The Gaze
Who can fix a limit to the gaze? Who will
dare to define it scope, point out its center, or draw a circle around its
sphere? As far as I can see, everyone turns away. Where? To the gaze.
On the one hand, the gaze is limitless,
extending in all directions, further than the eye can see. “The self,” says Ibn
Arabi, “is an ocean without shore. Gazing upon it has no end in this world and
the next.”
On the other hand, the gaze is nothing,
nothing but itself, a zero through which only another I is looking. “All
creatures are absolutely nothing,” says Johannes Tauler, “That which has no
being is nothing. And creatures have no being, because they have their being in
God; if God turned away for a moment, they would cease to exist.”
Is my gaze my own? Yes and no. I look, yet
cannot see myself. I am seen, yet none sees me. Is that you, looking back at
yourself in the mirror? No and yes. The gaze is the mirror of the gaze, every
look a reflection of itself. Where would I be, what would become of you—everything—if
that which sees and is seen by seeing, vision’s own visibility, were blotted
out, blinded? If the gaze through which we gaze shut its eyes? “Do not separate
from me,” says Hafiz, “for you are the light of my vision. / You are the peace
of my soul and the intimate of my heart.”
I see that one is always turning toward and
turning away, turning away from what one turns toward, turning toward what one
turns away from. What an endless revolution, the restless conversion of the still,
ever-spinning eye. Zoom in on planet pupil, a little nothing meaning all,
suspended in its own universal reflection, projecting and filming everything
through the point, the navel of itself. Is your gaze born from you or you from
your gaze? “I believe,” says Dante in Paradiso,
“because of the sharpness of the living ray that I sustained, that I would have
been lost if my eyes had turned away from it.”
Admit it, the gaze is really too much. Who
can withstand it? No one shall see me and
live. That must be why Narcissus never stops spontaneously lying to himself
about his reflection, never ceases to fall in love with his own image, seeing neither
that it is an image nor his. If you are me then who am I? If I am me then who
are you? Perpetual predicament of the illusion that sustains reality. As Meher
Baba once rhymed, “Oh, you ignorant, all-knowing Soul / what a plight you are
in! / Oh, you weak, all-powerful Soul / what a plight you are in! / Oh, you
miserable, all-happy Soul / what a plight you are in! / What a plight! / What a
sight! / What a delight!”
How eternally precious those passing
moments, when the gaze opens itself a little more and sees, by some
unfathomable magic or trick of the abyss which if you gaze long into it gazes
back into you (N), that the image is no less in love with Narcissus. As Francis
Brabazon said, “And so one arrives at the painful conclusion that the Beloved
alone exists—which means that oneself doesn’t. And that’s a terrible
predicament to find oneself in—for one is still there! The only solution I found was to accept the position: ‘You
alone are and I am not, but we are both here.’”
Whose gaze is that? What eye calmly turns itself towards the gaze of the real,
penetrating the sight of life, which is death to the living? It would seem as
if the person who possesses this look also cannot sustain it. Are not saints,
or the truly beautiful, forever ashamed of their own eyes? Here is a passage
from Meher Baba to fall in love with: “A wali . . . has the power to open the
third eye and grant divine sight, if he is in the mood. He can do so by simply
looking into the eyes of the aspirant, even if the aspirant is at a distance.
When the third eye is opened, all is light . . . It is so powerful an experience
that the recipient either goes mad or drops the body . . . One type of wali is
called artad. They are very, very few, quite rare. They are very fiery, with
piercing eyes that break through anything, even mountains! Their gaze is
sufficient to cut an animal in two, hence they always keep their eyes on the
ground. That too is split apart.”
If the gaze splits, surely that is because it
is without number, because the manyness of our eyes only sees by reflecting one. Thus the individual neither sees
nor is seen by unity without being cut in two. Consider this as the principle
of honesty or natural self-discernment. I am only whole, authentic, truthful, when
I see how double, how dark to myself I am, when eye see myself seen by seeing itself. “Look not upon me, because I
am black, because the sun hath looked upon me” (Song of Songs 1:6).
Imagine a map of all vision, a long tracing
of its every line, individual and collective, from the beginningless beginning
to the endless end, from the earliest emergence of anything to its final
absolute evaporation. A one-to-one map scaled to the continuum of seeing
itself, all of its sleeps and wakings, every stop and start across the seas of
every kingdom of being, in short, from stone to human. What does it look like? In
his Dialogue on the Two Principle Systems
of the World, Galileo, in order to explain how “this motion in common [i.e.
the motion of the earth] . . . remains as if nonexistent to everything that
participates in it,” conceives the figure of an artist who draws, without
separating pen and paper, everything he sees while sailing from Italy to
Turkey: “if an artist had begun drawing with that pen on a sheet of paper when
he left the port and had continued doing so all the way to Alexandretta [Iskenderun], he would have been able to
derive from the pen's motion a whole narrative of many figures, completely
traced and sketched in thousands of directions, with landscapes, buildings,
animals, and other things. Yet the actual real essential movement marked by the
pen point would have been only a line; long, indeed, but very simple. But as to
the artist's own actions, these would have been conducted exactly the same as
if the ship had been standing still” (Galileo Galilei). Is not the real hero of
the story the hyper-saccadic story of the eye? Now raise that to the power of
itself ad infinitum. What a line!
More locally, the gaze concerns the
duration and depth of seeing, the extensity and intensity of its time and
space. Gazing not only looks but looks beyond looking, exploring the very
surface of vision as a dimension otherwise than surface. The gaze sees by
seeing into seeing itself, in both senses at once. No need for a map, the gaze
directs itself. As Merleau-Ponty explains, the focus of the gaze, through which
we establish the qualities of objects by interrupting them from “the total life
of the spectacle,” operates through an essential reflexivity: “The sensible
quality, far from being coextensive with perception, is the peculiar product of
an attitude of curiosity or observation. It appears when, instead of yielding
up the whole of my gaze to the world, I turn toward this gaze itself, and when
I ask myself what precisely it is that I
see; it does not occur in the natural transactions between my sight and the
world, it is the reply to a certain kind of questioning on the part of my gaze,
the outcome of a second order or critical kind of vision which tries to know
itself in its own particularity.”
So we are led back, willy nilly, to the
essential gravity of the gaze as an exponent of will, to looking as the weight
of the love of a being who is its own self-consuming question. But what of the
one whose will is annihilated? “To those in whom the will has turned and denied
itself,” says Schopenhauer, “this very real world of ours, with all its suns
and galaxies, is—nothing.”
What does the gaze that sees nothing see?
“And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw nothing”
(Acts 9:8).
I trust that both Dante and Hafiz agree
that this gaze sees not only nothing, but everything. As their contemporary
Meister Eckhart says, “A man who is established thus in God's will wants
nothing but what is God's will and what is God . . . Even though it meant the
pains of hell it would be joy and happiness to him. He is free and has left
self behind, and must be free of whatever is to come in to him: if my eye is to
perceive color, it must be free of all color. If I see a blue or white color,
the sight of my eye which sees the color, the very thing that sees, is the same
as that which is seen by the eye. The eye with which I see God is the same eye
with which God sees me: my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one
knowing and one love.”
This makes me want to see what these two
poets might see looking into each other. For both are so well versed in the mystery
of the unitive doubleness of vision experienced in the gaze, wherein the
two-ness of the eyes becomes one. As Hadewych explains, “The power of sight
that is created as natural to the soul is charity. This power of sight has two
eyes, love and reason. Reason cannot see God except in what he is not; love
rests not except in what he is. Reason has its secure paths, by which it
proceeds. Love experiences failure, but failure advances it more than reason.
Reason advances toward what God is, by means of what God is not. Love sets
aside what God is not and rejoices that it fails in what God is. Reason has
more satisfaction than love, but love has more sweetness of bliss than reason.
These two, however, are of great mutual help one to the other; for reason
instructs love, and love enlightens reason. When reason abandons itself to
love's wish, and love consents to be forced and held within the bounds of
reason, they can accomplish a very great work. This no one can learn except by
experience.”
And I am looking forward to this encounter all
the more, not only because, as Vernon Howard says, “Anything you look forward
to will destroy you, as it already has,” but because what is seen between the
gazes of these two poets will no doubt be something neither could see—the beauty
of a spark leaping between the eyes of two no-ones.
As Hafiz says, “اهل نظر دو عالم در یک نظر ببازند” [Men of sight can lose both worlds in one
glance]. Or as Love tells Dante in the Vita
Nuova, “Ego tanquam centrum circuli . . . tu autem non sic” [I am as the
centre of a circle . . . you however are not so].
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Friday, June 03, 2016
pNEuMenOn
A spontaneous telegrammatic lyric sequence. Undersea ditties of love and despair.
Split into one like all else | There’s nothing special | About a lost heart that melts | The fires of hell.
The alternate universe | Where this is published | Is probably worse | Than this one—I wish.
"I imagine a reading of pNEuMenOn on a rooftop in New York City. Jozef van Wissem playing his lute in the background, seated next to a statue of the Virgin Mary. An audience standing in an oval around the poet and lute player, and twelve rows of cushioned white seats—no one sitting in them—garnished with silver cords reaching into the heavens." — Brad Baumgartner
Sunday, May 08, 2016
The Miracle of the Sigh
If I sigh for the miraculous, for the beauty
that takes breath away in wonder, maybe it is because the sigh itself is a
miracle. And if it is not, if as the song says, a sigh is just a sigh, perhaps
that is the miracle, that a sigh, to
be miraculous, need not be anything other than itself.
The miracle of this
gathering is that we get to hear and speak the sighs of Dante and Hafiz
together, to have them, side by side, in the same room.
Dante died in 1321.
Hafiz was born in 1325. So this is something that could never have happened.
Or, in light of the mystery of reincarnation, properly identified by one
anonymous author as “in no way a theory which one has to believe or not believe
. . . a fact which is [to be] either known through experience or ignored” (Meditations on the Tarot), this may be something
that could never have not happened. Thus who knows, this gathering might be
both and something better than either, the miracle of a third thing, the event
of the presence of one in whose name two or three gather.
The impossible is
inevitable. And in this case, there is also lightning, a striking resemblance.
Above all, the greatness of these two poets, the height and depth of their sighs,
belongs to the sphere of intense experience, ecstatic and torturous, of the
intersection of human and divine love, more specifically, the noble love of a woman
and the love of God. For Dante, it was the death of Beatrice which marked the
center of his poetry’s turning toward the divine. Only from the abyss of sorrow
and the poet’s death to himself within it does there spring the miraculous
vision of the Commedia, the
potentiality of a truly new poetry, of a word that authentically writes itself
now, in light of the eternal present. As Dante states near the end of the Vita Nuova, “And to arrive at that, I
apply myself as much as I can, as she truly knows. So that, if it be pleasing
to Him for whom all things live that my life may last for some years, I hope to
say of her what was never said of any other woman.” For Hafiz, the death of his
beloved instead takes place virtually, in experience, upon the imminence of the
long-sought moment when he could finally realize his desire. Where the death of
Dante’s beloved is the ground of seeking her in God, Hafiz’s earthly love is
eclipsed by desire for the divinity that grants him the opportunity to fulfil that
love. With uncanny complementarity, the two poets’ experiences appear as
different as they are similar. Hafiz’s story is recounted by Meher Baba as
follows:
Once
in his youth, Hafiz encountered a very beautiful girl of a wealthy family. That
very instant he fell in love with her; it was not in the carnal way, but he
loved her beauty. At the same time, he was in contact with his Spiritual
Master, Attar, who himself was a great Persian poet. Hafiz, being Attar's
disciple, used to visit him daily for years. He used to compose a ghazal a day
and sing it to Attar. . . Twenty years passed and all this time Hafiz was full
of the fire of love for the beautiful woman, and he loved his Master, too.
Once, Attar asked him: “Tell me what you want.” Hafiz expressed how he longed
for the woman. Attar replied: “Wait, you will have her.” Ten more years passed
by, thirty in all, and Hafiz became desperate and disheartened. . . . Hafiz
blazed out: “What have I gained by being with you? Thirty years have gone by!”
Attar answered: “Wait, you will know one day.” . . . Hafiz performed chilla-nashini, that
is, he sat still within the radius of a drawn circle for 40 days to secure
fulfillment of his desire. It is virtually impossible for one to sit still for
40 days within the limits of a circle. But Hafiz’s love was so great that it
did not matter to him. On the fortieth day, an angel appeared before him and
looking at the angel’s beauty, Hafiz thought: “What is that woman’s beauty in
comparison with this heavenly splendor!” The angel asked what he desired. Hafiz
replied that he be able to wait on the pleasure of his Master’s wish. At four o’clock
on the morning of the last day, Hafiz . . . went to his Master who embraced
him. In that embrace, Hafiz became God-conscious. (Lord Meher)
Following love’s infinity in the face of
the finite, through the domain of death, the poetry of Dante and Hafiz fills
the space traversed by longing, the degree
or mode of love which moves between desire and surrender, the form of eros that
at once insists on satisfaction and grasps the futility of that insistence. As
the word of the word of love, the tongueless articulation of the heart before
and after speech, a murmuring of the heart as mouth around the spiritual limits
of language, the sigh is the proper expression of longing, of desire across
distance and the hopelessness of separation. Thus the sphere-piercing
spatiality of the sigh, its mapping of the paradoxical parameters of the heart as
something both excluded from and already established within its own home. Like
a breath at the edge of the universe which is no less one’s own, the sigh
traces the heart as no less exterior than interior, as both trapped within and
containing what holds it. Augustine defines the heart as “where I am whoever or
whatever I am [ubi ego sum quicumque sum]”
and love as “my weight [which] bears me wheresoever I am borne [pondus meum, amor meus; eo feror, quocumque
feror]” (Augustine, Confessions).
So the sigh, echoing simultaneously one’s first and last breath, both the
spirit which animates you in the first place and the expiration which becomes no
longer yours, pertains to an essential openness and mobility, the unbounded wherever
and wheresoever of things.
This for me is the
sigh’s miracle—not anything supernatural, but that it marks the miracle of
reality itself as infinitely open, as spontaneously expanding without limit or
horizon into more and more of itself. Hear how, on the one hand, a sigh
resonates with the sense of the weight of facticity and necessity, the crushing
gravity of that (that things are as
they are, that anything is, that something is not) and hear, on the other hand,
how a sigh floats in the space between
the actual and the ideal, in the sky of its own indetermination and freedom.
The suspension of the sigh, its hovering, pertains to the paradox of freedom as
realizable yet unpossessable, the necessity of freeing oneself from oneself,
from one’s own freedom, in order to be free. As Meister Eckart says, “The just
man serves neither God nor creatures, for he is free, . . . and the closer he is to freedom . . .
the more he is freedom itself.” The sigh is the dialetheia of freedom and
necessity, the joy (and sorrow) of knowing that nothing is fixed and the sorrow
(and joy) of seeing that it everything is—that thank God there is absolutely
nothing and everything you can do
about it. As Vernon Howard said, referring to yourself, “you want to take that to Heaven?”
The admixture of
joy and sorrow found in the sigh reflects the miraculous fact, the light weight
and grave lightness, of reality’s paradoxical openness. As Agamben says in The Coming Community, “The root of all
pure joy and sadness is that the world is as it is.” The intimacy with
separation spoken in the sigh likewise manifests separation as a special order
of intimacy. As Mechthild of Magdeburg, a Beguine of the 13th
century says, “O blissful distance from God, how lovingly am I connected with
you!” Or as Meher Baba once spontaneously rhymed, “Oh, you ignorant, all-knowing
Soul / what a plight you are in! / Oh, you weak, all-powerful Soul / what a
plight you are in! / Oh, you miserable, all-happy Soul / what a plight you are
in! / What a plight! / What a sight! / What a delight!” (Lord Meher).
We are indeed in a fiX,
in a spot marked by a great, unfathomable X. Such is the order of the truth of
the sigh. That the mystery of the world is more than metaphysical. That not
only is there something rather than nothing, but that one is. That there is not
only eternity but time, not only good but evil, not only truth but illusion,
not only oneness but separation, not only the universe but the individual, not
only you but me. These are astonishing things, stupendous facts pointing to a
reality more stupendous still. All is somehow more infinite for being finite. In
other words, there is something about the sigh that turns everything inside
out. I hear Levinas sighing as he writes, “Time is not the limitation of being
but its relationship with infinity. Death is not annihilation but the question
that is necessary for this relationship with infinity, or time, to be produced.”
The opening of the
world, in both senses, is poetry, the miracle of the word which takes you aside
and makes one hear its silence and speak what one cannot say. Thus the singular
story in the Gospel of Mark of Jesus’s sigh: “And they brought to him a man who
was deaf and had an impediment in his speech; and they besought him to lay his
hand upon him. And taking him aside from the multitude private, he put his
fingers into his ears, and spat and touched his tongue; and looking up to
heaven, he sighed, and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’ And his
ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly” (Mark 7:31-4).
Therefore,
to close my opening of this gathering, to thank the sigh for making possible
our being side by side with these two poets, I will read a poem by a third poet,
one Pseudo-Leopardi, on the same theme:
Unable to swim
the ocean of each other’s eyes
We must sit side
by side, gazing at a blind world
Whose dumb mouth
has lost all taste for silence.
Heads dizzy as
ours naturally lean together,
Kept from falling
off only by the golden sighs
Suspending these
bodies like puppet strings.
The soft tautness
of the secret lines is thinning us,
Sweetly drawing
all life-feeling inward and up
Into something
pulling strongly from far above.
There is no doubt
that the sigh-threads will one day
Draw our hearts
right through the tops of our heads,
Eventually
turning everything totally inside out.
Already my body
is something much less my own,
As if the thought
of your form is my new skeleton
And your memory
of my flesh your new strength.
If I embrace you
my own power would crush me
And if you cling
to me I would surely evaporate.
Dying lovers do
not touch without touching suicide.
Side by side we
float and stand. It is our way of lying
Bound together
across space on this lost world
Whose eyes will
not survive seeing us face to face.
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory
Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory (Mimesis, 2015). 300 pp. (sewn binding)
CONTENTS
Introduction: Mystical Black Metal Theory
Black Sabbath’s ‘Black Sabbath’: A Gloss on Heavy Metal’s Originary Song - Nicola Masciandaro
Leave Me In Hell - Edia Connole
What is This that Stands before Me?: Metal as Deixis - Nicola Masciandaro
Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya - Nicola Masciandaro
WormSign - Nicola Masciandaro
On the Mystical Love of Black Metal - Nicola Masciandaro
The Missing Subject of Accelerationism: Heavy Metal’s Wyrd Realism - Edia Connole
Silence: A Darkness to Ward Off All Spells - Nicola Masciandaro
Les Légions Noires: Labor, Language, Laughter - Edia Connole
Black Metal Commentary - Nicola Masciandaro and Reza Negarestani
Interview (Miasma) - Nicola Masciandaro
Interview (with Dominik Irtenkauf, Legacy) - Nicola Masciandaro
Interview (with Domink Irtenkauf, Avantgarde Metal) - Nicola Masciandaro
Interview (with Nina Scholz, Jungle World) - Nicola Masciandaro
Metal Studies and the Scission of the Word - Nicola Masciandaro
Reflections from the Intoxological Crucible - Nicola Masciandaro
Interview (with Dominik Irtenkauf, Legacy) - Edia Connole
What is Black Metal Theory? - Edia Connole
Monday, June 22, 2015
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Friday, May 29, 2015
'Dark Wounds of Light' in VESTIGES_00: Ex-Stasis
VESTIGES_00: Ex-Stasis
beauty as an experience of the limit
Featuring: Daniele Bellomi, Louise Black, Gabriel Blackwell, James Brubaker, Mauro Javier Cardenas, Ryan Chang, Erin Fleming, Tristan Foster, Michaela Freeman, Róbert Gál, Evelyn Hampton, Anton Ivanov, M Kitchell, Sam Kriss, Emily Laskin, Robert Lunday, Stéphane Mallarmé, Nicola Masciandaro, Elizabeth Mikesch, Rebecca Norton, Yarrow Paisley, Andrei Platonov, Alina Popa, Tom Regel, Forrest Roth, Jacob Siefring, George Szirtes, Colin James Torre, Chaulky White
via Black Sun Lit
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Monday, March 23, 2015
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
Bask in the Glory of Bewilderment
- To perish with every breath in overwhelming astonishment.
- To be so far gone that you never arrived.
- Have no idea.
- To be so clueless that every clue is itself eternally stunned by its own inexistence.
- Obliterate multiverses by means of bewilderment.
- Become so lost in disbelief that everything is absolutely, unintelligibly true.
- Wonder so deeply why anything is happening at all that it never did.
- Mercilessly send all your questions back to the omnipresent front lines.
- Fail to meet me for fear of being swallowed alive by an enormous question.
- Fall into the gaping abyss under your feet until you shoot up out of the ground.
- Writhe in unknowing.
- Live in the midst of continual well-coordinated all-out attacks upon everything you ever felt or thought was true.
- To always already be inexplicably pierced by yet another incommunicable arrow.
- Watch the world vanish like mist before the glorious sun of secret maximal confusion.
- Leave me behind so fast that you bump into me in infinite regress.
- To give everyone a look that shows what they are in for.
- Lay your life aside in favor of becoming a cosmically autophagous query.
- See human knowledge for what it is: a messy mass of poorly formulated search terms.
- Drink wine of bewilderment until the tears wash away your face.
- To erase every trace of yourself with a free lifetime supply of the Ointment of Mystification.
- Think about something by evaporating the thought.
- Act in way that effectively accuses everyone of insufficient astonishment.
- Follow yourself off the cliff of total bafflement.
- Leap for joy into spontaneous senseless distress like a child into the arms of its mother.
- Indulge profoundly in the pleasure of forgetting everything people say.
- Offer everything as a reward to anyone who successfully steals all your answers.
- Infinitely reverse the ontological order of answer and question.
- Immediately become incapable of following any directions other than the irrepressible hunch that you are absolutely and hopelessly lost.
- Dive into delightful epistemological despair past the point of really needing to do away with yourself.
- Abandon inner connection to all persons who actually think they know what they are talking about.
- Exploit your friends to bust all of you out of the prison of knowledge.
- Deliberately refuse to know, no matter what the world offers you.
- Develop courage for greater and greater bewilderment by remembering all who have died in the depths of ignorance.
- To wonder why one ever bothered to . . .
- Fail to believe how you ever fell for it.
- Make no difference between small and great matters that do not make sense.
- Know not what to do, think, feel, or say.
- Place no secret hope in your absolute bewilderment.
- Figure out a way off the island of being that does not involve figuring it out.
- Suspect everything.
- Renounce your bewilderment for nothing (except greater and greater bewilderment).
- Know so little that the whole universe flocks to your for meaningless questions.
- To let no light ever escape the black hole of your non-knowledge.
- Offer no explanations, give nothing away.
- Die of unknowing.
- Remain unintelligible, especially to omniscience.
- Thrive by robbing yourself in the apophatic alleys of radically immanent auto-blindness.
- Eclipse all knowing in the perfect pitch blackness of your pupil.
- Wonder why until why itself never made any sense in the first place.
- Expose your whole system to the plague of inexplicability.
- Hypothetically blame everything on everything in order to be even more astonished by all that remains unaccounted for.
- Crack open your skull like lightning on the stone of pure astonishment.
- Bask in the glory of bewilderment.
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Essay on Forgiveness
[written, in 2011, for Don Stevens]
Looking for a way to begin—a chance to start
without knowing how—I take a ‘fal’ or sortes
from the poetry of Hafiz. My finger finds this line:
When there is no
purity, one are the Ka’ba and the idol-house.[1]
Encountering these words immediately suggests
two insights. First, that forgiveness is a work of purification on which rests the very
possibility of authentic religion, that is, religion as the practical love of
Reality as opposed to the mere veneration of self-projected idols, what Meher
Baba defines as the religion of life.
The Religion of Life is not fettered by mechanically repeated formulae
of the unenlightened, purblind and limited intellect. It is dynamically
energized by the assimilation of Truth, grasped through lucid and unerring
intuition, which never falters and never fails, because it has emerged out of
the fusion of head and heart, intellect and love.[2]
Second, that the work
of forgiveness, for all of its difficulty and seeming impossibility, proceeds paradoxically, not unlike the act of taking a ‘fal’ from a text,
through the freedom of an essentially negative
condition, in the midst of the experience of not knowing, not
remembering, not worrying.[3]
Real forgiveness is necessarily on the way to forgetfulness, a state of being
that, rather than leading to oblivion, proceeds by the mind’s own perception that there exists an infinitely
important unknown what at once beyond and
essential to itself. As Meher Baba explains, such forgetful forgiveness
arrives at real remembering.
[W]hen the same mind
tells him that there is something which may be called God, and, further,
when it prompts him to search for God that he may see Him face to face, he
begins to forget himself and to forgive others for whatever he has suffered
from them. And when he has forgiven everyone and has completely forgotten
himself, he finds that God has forgiven him everything, and he remembers Who,
in reality, he is.[4]
Here we must consider the relation between
these two dimensions of forgiveness, between what it is and how it is. The
necessity of the act of forgiveness
defines the identity of forgiveness and its act. Over and against the narrower
impulse towards forgiveness as project, towards what can be accomplished by
means of it, what matters here above all is that
one forgives, regardless of the result. The external power of forgiveness, its
ability to open ways out of intractable individual and collective problems,
rests wholly within its intrinsic value, in its being its own ‘reward’. This
means that forgiveness is not simply a virtue or something good to do, but a true value in the sense elaborated by
Meher Baba.
Mistakes in valuation
arise owing to the influence of subjective desires or wants. True values are values which belong to things in their own right. They are intrinsic,
and because they are intrinsic, they are absolute and
permanent and are not liable to
change from time to time or from person to person. False values are derived
from desires or wants; they are dependent upon
subjective factors, and being dependent upon subjective factors, they
are relative and impermanent
and are liable to change from time to time and from person
to person.[5]
So forgiveness demonstrates the truth of its
value by virtue of being itself an exercise in freedom from subjective factors.
In these terms, the impulse to forgive is to be understood as something
different than a desire or will for
something. Instead, forgiveness is ordered toward the actualization of its own
truth, the making real of its own potential to be.[6]
One forgives, not so much by aiming at some concrete end, such that one could
definitively arrive at the success or completion of forgiveness, but rather by staying within the truth of forgiveness,
by not transgressing the imperative to forgive. Thinking of forgiveness in this
way, as the activity of remaining inwardly free from (and not necessarily rid
of) the forces that cannot forgive, helps to clarify the deep relationship
between forgiveness, spontaneity, and forgetfulness. Meher Baba’s words on this
relationship are inextricably linked with the idea of freedom from results. With
regard to the practice of forgiveness as a kind of good work, we find the
general principle that service or work bound to the objective good of others,
though “of immense spiritual importance,” is from the perspective of the goal
of life, a kind of interminable dead-end.
[A]s long as the idea
of service is . . . tied to the idea of results, it is inevitably fraught with
a sense of incompleteness. There can be no realisation of Infinity through the
pursuit of a never-ending series of consequences. Those who aim at sure and
definite results through a life of service have an eternal burden on their
minds.[7]
The principle of freedom from results is
defined more absolutely in Meher Baba’s description of the purposelessness of
divine, infinite existence, our arrival at which is the very goal, or purpose,
of everything.
Reality is Existence
infinite and eternal. Existence has no purpose by virtue of its being real,
infinite and eternal. Existence exists. Being Existence it has to exist.
Hence Existence, the Reality, cannot have any purpose. It just is. It is
self-existing. Everything—the things and the beings—in Existence has a
purpose. All things and beings have a purpose and must have a purpose, or else
they cannot be in existence as what they are. Their very being in
existence proves their purpose; and their sole purpose in existing is to
become shed of purpose, i.e., to become purposeless. Purposelessness is of
Reality; to have a purpose is to be lost in falseness. Everything exists only
because it has a purpose. The moment that purpose has been accomplished,
everything disappears and Existence is manifested as self-existing Self.
Purpose presumes a direction and since Existence, being everything and
everywhere, cannot have any direction, directions must always be in nothing and
lead nowhere. Hence to have a purpose is to create a false goal. Love alone is
devoid of all purpose and a spark of Divine Love sets fire to all purposes. The
Goal of Life in Creation is to arrive at purposelessness, which is the state of
Reality.[8]
Forgiveness enters this purpose-enflaming
fire. Rupturing the chain of never-ending consequences, it relieves beings from
the burden of results and opens the way into actually living within the
inherent purposelessness of Reality. Far from fleeing life, forgiveness gives
life back to itself as the very place of freedom.
This realisation must
and does take place only in the midst of life, for it is only in the midst of
life that limitation can be experienced and transcended, and that subsequent
freedom from limitation can be enjoyed.[9]
Felt from the perspective of this goal,
forgiveness is less a duty or responsibility than the radical activation of the
seemingly passive power of not-worrying, a very difficult and profoundly enjoyable
exercise in the freedom of one’s inherent divinity. The exercise of forgiveness
accordingly has a spontaneous character or style. Practicing it might be called
a form of immediate cooperation between the impasse of experience and the
ultimate independence of reality.
[B]y virtue of being absolutely independent it is but natural for God to
exercise His infinite whim to experience and enjoy His own infinity. To
exercise a whim is always the mark of an independent nature, because it is
whimsicality that always colours the independent nature.[10]
Meher Baba thus
places forgiveness within the broader category of positive forgetfulness, a happy state combining awareness of and
non-reaction to both adverse and favorable circumstances that flowers in
conspicuous creativity.[11]
Positive forgetfulness . . . and its steady cultivation develops in man
that balance of mind which enables him to express such noble traits as charity,
forgiveness, tolerance, selflessness and service to others. . . . Positive
forgetfulness, although it lies at the very root of happiness, is by no means
easy to acquire. Once a man attains this state of mind, however, he rises above
pain and pleasure; he is master of himself. This forgetfulness, to be fully
effective for the spiritual life, must become permanent, and such permanence is
only acquired through constant practice during many lives. Some people, as a
result of efforts towards forgetfulness in past lives, get spontaneous and
temporary flashes of it in a later life, and it is such people who give to the
world the best in poetry, art and philosophy, and who make the greatest
discoveries in science.[12]
The practical crux of positive forgetfulness lies
in this developmental relation between steady cultivation and spontaneity, in
the fostering of an impulse not to react that bears abiding and unforeseeable fruit,
what Meher Baba calls “manifestations of genuine spontaneity of forgetfulness.”[13]
The doing of forgiveness resides in dynamic relation to the inevitable
unfolding of perfect, universal individuality.
The limited individuality, which is the creation of
ignorance, is transformed into the divine individuality which is unlimited. The
illimitable consciousness of the Universal Soul becomes individualised in this
focus without giving rise to any form of illusion. The person is free from all
self-centred desires and he becomes the medium of the spontaneous flow of the
supreme and universal will which expresses divinity. Individuality becomes limitless by the disappearance of ignorance.[14]
The imperative to forgive
must thus be understood in the broader phenomenal context of the paradoxical
correlation between habit and freedom. Forgiveness is spontaneous, but its free
exercise is a development of habitual practice, the liberating result of ongoing
intentional action.
The life of true values can be spontaneous only when
the mind has developed the unbroken habit of choosing the right value.[15]
The crucial distinction to be drawn, the distinction
across which the decision to forgive operates, is thus between habits that bind
and habits that set free, between, on the one hand, actions whose impressions [sanskaras] limit life and intensify separateness
and ignorance, and, on the other, actions whose impressions liberate life and
generate knowledge and enjoyment of its inherent unity—a spontaneous state of
being also known as love.
In love . . . there is no sense of effort because it
is spontaneous. Spontaneity is of the essence of true spirituality. The highest
state of consciousness, in which the mind is completely merged in the Truth, is
known as Sahajawastha, the state of unlimited spontaneity in which there
is uninterrupted Self-knowledge.[16]
The core of this distinction (between binding and
liberating actions) lies in the inevitable deconstruction of the ego, “the
false nucleus of consolidated sanskaras.”[17]
The restrictive and ultimately eroding ego is the recurring obstacle on the
path of experience, the imprisoning framework that each and every action works
to reinforce or destroy.
Any action which expresses the true values of life
contributes towards the disintegration of the ego, which is a product of ages
of ignorant action. Life cannot be permanently imprisoned within the cage of
the ego. It must at some time strive towards the Truth.[18]
As a mode of relation to this inevitable
disintegration or decay of the limited ego—limited because it persists only in
ignorance and active denial of the inviolable unity of all life[19]—forgiveness
is definable as a movement of giving experience over to the unitive gravity of
spiritual reality. Taking direct action against the very constraints of action,
against the psychic chains that would determine it as re-action, against the
interminable self-condemnations encapsulated in the separative rallying cry of never forget!, forgiveness forcefully
and non-violently asserts the absolute spontaneity of reality, the inescapable
freedom of which the pseudo-whims of personal interest are a pale shadow.
At the pre-spiritual level, man is engulfed in
unrelieved ignorance concerning the goal of infinite freedom; and though he is
far from being happy and contented, he identifies so deeply with sanskaric
interests that he experiences gratification in their furtherance. But the
pleasure of his pursuits is conditional and transitory, and the spontaneity
which he experiences in them is illusory because, through all his pursuits,
his mind is working under limitations. The mind is capable of genuine freedom
and spontaneity of action only when it is completely free from sanskaric ties
and interests.[20]
Forgiveness is an act
of relinquishing interest, not for the sake of becoming disinterested, but on
behalf of a deeper interest that absolutely exceeds the framework of determined
interests. The one who forgives is not uninterested in the particular problem
that forgiveness addresses. The one who forgives is instead hyper-interested in the problem,
interested to a degree that is totally uncontainable by the relation to the
problem as object of worry or negative concern. Forgiveness puts into play a
profound need to relate to reality in a non-reactive way, to become more
intimate with it precisely by remaining outside
the confining and ultimately uninteresting patterns of self-interest.
Forgiveness thus partakes of the “divinely human life” embodied in the Avatar whose
appearance, like the advent of forgiveness itself, takes place in the middle of
seemingly terminal conflict:
The Avatar appears in
different forms, under different names, at different times, in different parts
of the world. As his appearance always coincides with the spiritual birth of
man, so the period immediately preceding his manifestation is always one in
which humanity suffers from the pangs of the approaching birth. . . . There
seems to no possibility of stemming the tide of destruction. At this moment the
Avatar appears. Being the total
manifestation of God in human form, he is like a gauge against which man can
measure what he is and what he may become. He trues the standard of human values
by interpreting them in terms of a divinely human life. He is interested in everything but not concerned about anything.
The slightest mishap may command his sympathy; the greatest tragedy will not
upset him. . . . He is only concerned about concern.[21]
This does not at all
mean, however, that forgiveness should be conceived as a solely individual
process of human spiritual self-development. Like the unseen work of the
God-Man that occurs on all levels of being and is only partially perceivable to
humans,[22]
the mystery of forgiveness is that it is radically for the other and the world
itself. One does not ring the doorbell only for oneself, for the ringing of it effects
a real alteration in the objective world, in oneself and others. This fact is essential to the meaning of Meher Baba’s
description of the “charity of forgiveness”:
People ask God for forgiveness. But since God is everything and
everyone, who is there for Him to forgive? Forgiveness of the created was
already there in His act of creation. But still people ask God's forgiveness,
and He forgives them. But they, instead of forgetting that for which they asked
forgiveness, forget that God has forgiven them, and, instead, remember the
things they were forgiven—and so nourish the seed of wrongdoing, and it bears
its fruit again. Again and again they plead for forgiveness, and again and
again the Master says, I forgive.
But it is impossible for men to forget their wrongdoings and the wrongs
done to them by others. And since they cannot forget, they find it hard to
forgive. But forgiveness is the best charity. (It is easy to give the poor
money and goods when one has plenty, but to forgive is hard; but it is the best
thing if one can do it.)
Instead of men trying to forgive one another they fight. Once they
fought with their hands and with clubs. Then with spears and bows and arrows.
Then with guns and cannon. Then they invented bombs and carriers for them. Now
they have developed missiles that can destroy millions of other men thousands
of miles away, and they are prepared to use them. The weapons used change, but
the aggressive pattern of man remains the same.
Now men are planning to go to the moon. And the first to get there will
plant his nation's flag on it, and that nation will say, It is mine. But
another nation will dispute the claim and they will fight here on this earth
for possession of that moon. And whoever goes there, what will he find? Nothing
but himself. And if people go on to Venus they will still find nothing but
themselves. Whether men soar to outer space or dive to the bottom of the
deepest ocean they will find themselves as they are, unchanged, because they
will not have forgotten themselves nor remembered to exercise the charity of
forgiveness.[23]
Forgiveness is charity, not only because it expresses
divine love, but because it actually gives
something to the other, something better than all other possible gifts. What
does forgiveness give? The answer lies in connection to the question of sanskaras or impressions, the very of
medium of conscious experience.
There are two aspects of
human experience—the subjective and objective. On the one hand there are mental
processes which constitute essential ingredients of human experience, and on
the other hand there are things and objects to which they refer. The mental
processes are partly dependent upon the immediately given objective situation,
and partly dependent upon the functioning of accumulated sanskaras or impressions of
previous experience. The human mind thus finds itself between a sea of past sanskaras on the
one side and the whole extensive objective world on the other.[24]
Forgiveness gives a
new past. This is not only a metaphor, but a literal and actual fact.
Forgiveness effects a real and palpable alteration in the impressional stuff through which the limitations of
past actions remain operative in the present. It accelerates the decay of dead
forms and clears new pathways to “the Present, which is ever beautiful and
stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future.”[25]
More than the violence and suffering to which it most characteristically responds,
forgiveness participates in and attests to the struggle of life itself.
All life is an effort
to attain freedom from self-created entanglement. It is a desperate struggle to
undo what has been done under ignorance, to throw away the accumulated burden
of the past, to find rescue from the debris left by a series of temporary
achievements and failures. Life seeks to unwind
the limiting sanskaras of the past and to obtain release from the mazes of
its own making, so that its further creations may spring directly from the
heart of eternity and bear the stamp of unhampered freedom and intrinsic
richness of being which knows no limitation.[26]
For no less than
evil, goodness must be also be forgiven.
[1] The
Divan-i-Hafiz, trans. Wilberforce Clarke (London: Octagon Press, 1974),
216.3.
[2] From a message sent by Meher Baba to Mildred Kyle in
1948, published in Seattle by Warren Healey, and cited in Bal Natu, Glimpses of the God-Man, Volume VI: March
1954-April 1955 (Myrtle Beach: Sheriar Foundation, 1994), 87.
[3] Such a relation between forgiveness and unknowing is
suggested by Jesus’s “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”
(Luke 23:34), which presents forgiveness as grounded in the knowledge of
ignorance, in the recognition of not knowing. Nor is it necessary to read the
line as predicating forgiveness on intellectual superiority and/or better
knowledge of the other. My knowledge that the other knows not what he does can
very well include and in fact grow from recognition that I also know not what I
do. So the words might be rescribed into a general imperative description of
the act of forgiveness: do not what you
know.
[4] Meher Baba, The
Everything and the Nothing (Beacon Hill, Australia: Meher House
Publications, 1963), 69-70.
[5] Meher Baba, Discourses,
6th ed., 3 vols. (San Francisco: Sufism Reoriented, 1967), 3.139,
original italics elided.
[6] Insofar as
forgiveness is constituted by a negative movement, a decision not to be angry, hate, seek revenge, and
so forth, and more deeply, a decision in some sense not to decide, it participates in the negative essence of freedom
or potentiality, which resides not in the ability to do as one wants, but in
impotentiality, or the ability not to
do. As Giorgio Agamben explains via Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, it is precisely impotentiality that
preserves ethics from reduction to law: “Our ethical tradition has often sought
to avoid the problem of potentiality by reducing it to the terms of will and
necessity. Not what you can do, but
what you want to do or must do is the dominant theme. This is
what the man of the law repeats to Bartleby. When he asks him to go to the post
office (“just step around to the Post Office, won’t you?”), and Bartleby
opposes him with his usual “I would prefer not to,” the man of the law hastily
translates Bartleby’s answer into “You will
not?” But Bartleby , with his soft but firm voice, specifies, “I prefer not” . . . But potentiality is
not will, and impotentiality is not necessity . . . To believe that will has
power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a
decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always
potentiality to do and not to do)—this is the perpetual illusion of morality”
(“Bartleby, or On Contingency,” in Potentialities:
Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
[Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999], 254). Impotentiality is
proportionally essential to Meher Baba’s cosmology with respect to the infinite
whim that causes the created cosmos: “Whim after all is a
whim; and, by its very nature, it is such that “why—wherefore—when” can find no
place in its nature. A whim may come at any moment; it may come now or after a
few months or after years, and it may not come at all. Similarly, the original
infinite whim, after all, is a whim, and too, it is the whim of God in the
state of infinitude! This whim may not surge in God at all; and, if it surges,
either at any moment or after thousands of years or after a million cycles, it
need not be surprising” (Meher Baba, God
Speaks: The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose, 2nd ed. [New
York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1973], 83-4).
[7] Meher Baba, Discourses,
1.133. Cf. “Worrying about the results is no good and of no use. If a person
wishes to do anything for others, he must do it sincerely. And having done it,
he should not worry about the results, for results are not in human hands. It
is for humans to do, for God to ordain. To remain aloof from results is
not difficult, but men do not try. Because it is human nature to think of the
results of one's actions, however, it does not mean one should worry! Man must
think, but he must not worry” (Meher Baba, cited from Bhau Kalchuri, Lord Meher, 5.1866,
).
[8] Meher Baba, The
Everything and the Nothing, 62.
[9] Meher Baba, Discourses,
III.12.
[10] Meher Baba, God
Speaks, 83.
[11] “One who is not equipped with this positive forgetfulness becomes a
barometer of his surroundings. His poise is disturbed by the slightest whisper
of praise or flattery, and by the faintest suggestion of slander or criticism;
his mind is like a slender reed swayed by the lightest breeze of emotion. Such
a man is perpetually at war with himself and knows no peace. In the exercise of
this positive forgetfulness, not only is non-reaction to adverse circumstances
essential, but also non-reaction to favourable and pleasurable circumstances.
Of these two the latter is the harder and is less often described, although it
matters just as much” (Meher Baba, God
Speaks, 213-4).
[12] Meher Baba, God
Speaks, 213-214.
[13] Meher Baba, God
Speaks, 214.
[14] Meher Baba, Discourses,
I.41, original italics elided.
[15] Meher Baba, Discourses,
II.64
[16] Meher Baba, Discourses,
II.192
[17] Meher Baba, Discourses,
II. 66.
[18] Meher Baba, Discourses,
II.65
[19] “Only spiritual freedom is absolute and unlimited.
When it is won through persistent effort, it is secured forever. Though
spiritual freedom can and does express itself in and through the duality of
existence, it is grounded in the realisation of the inviolable unity of all life, and is sustained by it” (Meher Baba, Discourses, III.101).
[20] Meher Baba, Discourses,
II.162.
[21] Meher Baba, Discourses,
III.15, my italics.
[22] “It is very difficult to grasp the entire meaning of the word ‘Avatar.’ For mankind it is
easy and simple to declare that the Avatar is God and that it means that
God becomes man. But this is not all that the word ‘Avatar’ means or conveys. “It would be more
appropriate to say that the Avatar is God and that God becomes man for
all mankind and simultaneously God also becomes a sparrow for all sparrows in
Creation, an ant for all ants in Creation, a pig for all pigs in Creation, a
particle of dust for all dusts in Creation, a particle of air for all airs in
Creation, etc., for each and everything that is in Creation. When the five Sadgurus
effect the presentation of the Divinity of God into Illusion, this Divinity
pervades the Illusion in effect and presents Itself in innumerable varieties of
forms—gross, subtle and mental. Consequently in Avataric periods God mingles
with mankind as man and with the world of ants as an ant, etc. But the man of
the world cannot perceive this and hence simply says that God has become man
and remains satisfied with this understanding in his own world of mankind”
(Meher Baba, God Speaks, 268-9)
[23] Meher Baba, Everything
and the Nothing, 69.
[24] Meher Baba, Discourses, I.54. The situation is not,
of course, exclusively human. Rather, human consciousness is itself the last stage
in the evolution of individualized consciousness through the various pre-human
kingdoms (stone, metal, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, animal), the form through
which the soul exhausts all impressions: “It is the evolutionary struggle that
enables the soul to develop full consciousness as that in the human form, and
the purpose having been achieved, the side-issues or by-products of
evolutionary travel (the nuqush-e-amal
or sanskaras) have to be done away
with, while retaining the consciousness intact. The process of reincarnation
therefore is to enable the soul to eliminate the sanskaras by passing through the furnace of pain pleasure” (Meher
Baba, God Speaks, 29 note).
[25] Meher Baba, cited from Bhau Kalchuri, Lord Meher, 5809,
).
[26] Meher Baba, Discourses,
I.113, original italics elided, my emphasis.
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