My last post notwithstanding, I seem to be calming down. I am getting more moments of relative peace.
I have spent most of my adult life just trying not to die. It’s not a very high aim, but emotionally that is the truth. At any moment in the past thirty years if you asked me my goal in life I would have told you something else, but that was the underlying emotional reality.
When I say intelligent things on this blog–and that is my aim, and I leave you to determine if I am succeeding, although if you spend more than 30 seconds here more than once, I have to assume something useful to you is happening–it is a result of an emotional pain tolerance that is extraordinary. I just have a mulish ability to hurt and keep going. As one therapist put it once–and I know I’ve shared this–it is “unnatural.” People who hurt the way I do don’t make it. But I do. I have. I will continue to.
So for me, continuing to try and see my world accurately will no doubt continue to be an important part of my world. But I am getting enough space to be able to think a little beyond this.
And here is what I feel today: most of the art of living, most of the most important tenets in most good and useful religions, consists in learning to calm down, and tame chronic fear of change and difference.
I am tempted to say–and obviously I just succumbed to the temptation–that religion as I would like to conceive it is roughly the sort of world that Mary Oliver and Wendall Berry learned to live in. Berry still lives there.
“Natural” religion, as I might call it, consists in wonder, and connection to nature, and a fundamental openness to experience.
And of course most people think of religion as moralizing, but in my own view honest religion has loose rules, most of which are common sense.
Here is the thing: if you are happy, if you are content, if your life makes sense to you, there is no reason to be cruel to others. You don’t need to be told not to lie, cheat and steal. And if you do lie, cheat and steal, no one needs to tell you it is wrong. No sacred text is needed.
For my own part, the only “religious” work I return to again and again is the Tao Te Ching. It contains everything only because it often claims to contain nothing, and certainly does not tell anyone how to spend their Saturday morning, or how many cattle to sacrifice on feast days, or what specific meditational posture you need to use, or what mantras you need to recite. None of that.