The essential proposition of the spiritual path is that there are not just some, but many feelings you can feel, which you have never suspected. The Hindus and Buddhists, at least, list a long number of new sensations, new senses of the world, that you go through on the path to enlightenment and release.
These lists were compiled over thousands of years, by people without electric lights or TV’s, living with the stars, living with nature, living patiently and with no demand for instantaneous anything; who were taught from childhood that the universe is connected, and never given any reason to doubt it.
I think of the story of Hafez, at least one version. He fell in love with a woman, and kept a 40 vigil at the tomb of a saint to win her, but found that the feelings of connection with God which emerged were infinitely more rewarding than any mere love between a man and woman, even though parallels could be made.
I worked 15 hours yesterday. I have found that sometimes long days elicit interesting emotions. Driving down some back country road last night, I felt an antique emotion, that I have not felt since early childhood. It was my regenerative emotion, the energy that I let through myself when I was emotionally hurt, and which healed me, if I stayed with it.
This was beaten out of me. My parents have confessed, as I think they have come to feel some mild guilt over this–they are narcissists, not sociopaths, so they retain some sense of conscience–that I used to get very quiet and just play with myself in a sort of trance, and they used to spank me for this. This frightened them, no doubt because everything out of the ordinary frightens them. Only once they took this away were they finally able to break me.
But I can reclaim it. It will take time. I cannot demand it. I need to invite it back carefully, by creating a congenial environment, and letting it come back when it is ready.
On a related note, I dreamed that I visited Harvard last night. I tend to view Harvard as an epicenter of most of the bad ideas which have created so much suffering in this country and around the world, rightly or wrongly. Harry Dexter White, who more or less created the IMF and World Bank, which in my view have both worked consistently to make it easier for global banks and corporations to rape developing countries, got his Ph.D there. He was also a Soviet agent, who died before he could be brought to trial.
Alger Hiss, who played an important role in creating the UN, and who served time as a Soviet agent, got his Law degree at Harvard.
I could go on.
Be that as it may, I went down a hill, and the place was filled with the cafes, bars, book stores, and life and energy of a good college town. Then I went back up a hill, and was on the campus proper. In the middle of a central building I heard someone telling someone else: “Life is a meaningless accident”. Then I looked to the side and saw people who had been physically wounded, rehabbing.
As I say from time to time, one must assume that all dreams pertain in some measure to oneself. How this applies to me, perhaps it will be easy for a reader to surmise, but for myself I am not sure. Perhaps I am healing the idea that life is meaningless, although I have never consciously believed that. Perhaps I felt it.
On a larger scale though, I think it is readily interpretable. At the CORE, at the very heart of the Science departments of almost all universities, of which Harvard can stand for all, is this belief. Human kind was accidentally assembled, by chance and time, and means nothing. We are born, copulate, reproduce, and that is the sum of what is biologically, evolutionarily important.
To believe that no person matters is to believe, necessarily on some level, that one does not matter. Everything you do and say is nugatory. Everyone you love, you love because of impulses beyond your control, impulses put in place because of evolutionary necessities perhaps a million or 100 million years ago.
You do not “exist”. The sense of self is illusory. One sees many arguing this very explicitly, even if they are completely unwilling to act as if this were true. Logically, if nothing matters, then it does not matter if people are religious. It does not matter if we wage wars. Wars might in fact be good. Certainly, there is nothing to proscribe them. Why does it matter if humanity itself survives? We are no different in principle from the rocks of the Earth whose existence until the Suns expands seems certain. And even then, they will become a part of the Sun, and reblended with the universe in one way or another.
Now, college life is also social. People who believe themselves machines made out of meat all day long find relief and comfort drinking beer with their friends, talking about many topics, debating points within the paradigm they allow. They do not act as if their work is demeaning mankind, making it primitive, ignoring all that is good and expandable. This is how they write books arguing that the writing of books in inherently useless and meaningless. And write a lot of them.
What I would submit though, is that within this paradigm all of the emotions I mentioned, everything that has been passed down to us by people much wiser than us, are not possible. Emotional growth in large measure is replaced by intellectual growth. Intelligence becomes valued over emotional virtuosity. Abstraction becomes valued over love. Thought replaces connection.
And people become isolated and lonely without even realizing it. They substitute their work for authentic human connection. I don’t doubt that Richard Dawkins has many friends. But I think in the middle of the night, he feels alone, except when he is with his work, particularly the aesthetic aspect of it, the beauty of science, of theory, of CORRECT THINKING, of honesty and truth, of the moral perfection of good math.
Humankind: we can do so much better. We are infants. We know nothing.
Rather: we know a great deal, oceans of knowledge, but most of us ignore it. It is being swept away like trash into crowded corners, rather than valued as the treasure it is.
Ponder that substantially all the work going on in the sciences and Humanities is working to make human emotional and cultural life smaller, less fulfilling, and more dangerous.