The Material Mechanics of Spirituality

 

Hi Everybody.  This is Leo Volont with Part One of my four  Part Series “The Material Mechanics of Spirituality”.  

(1)I was re-reading that Classic on Spirituality, “Varieties of Religious Experience”, by William James (1842-1910), who had been a Harvard Professor at the turn of the 20^th Century.  The Book represents the first and the last time that Science has carefully looked at Religious Spiritual Phenomena.   I developed a few new insights and would like to share them with you. 

 

(2)Firstly, let’s understand what kind of experiences we’ll be talking about here.  

full blown Mystical Experiences including:     Enlightenment   God-Realization   Transcendental  One-with-All-Things kind of things      Kundalini Awakening   Satori   Nirvana    Samadhi   you might even say Psychotic .

So, yeah, that’s what we’re going to be talking about.   But I already know that some people will feel left out.  In both the Traditional Religious and the New Age Communities, we have, depending on how you want to say it,  “True Believers or Born Againers with Faith”  AND , on the New Age side, “those who feel that Enlightenment is an Attitude or just being in compliance with the New Age consensus on what they wish were True”.  Well, that’s not what we’re going to be talking about here.  Yes, if I were to take on a Blog such as that, well, I think I would first have to do a Public Survey asking the question “Do you believe there is a difference between Being a Thing and Claiming to Be a Thing?”, and see what kind of answers I’d get back from the Christian and New Age Communities. 

 

(3)We may think of these Real Deal Enlightenment experiences as being entirely Religious or Spiritual, but well, that’s not exactly their functional purpose according to James.  The inner psychological intent for so effectively impacting and changing the Personality is that the Body’s own Innate Wisdom fears that if left to follow its present course that the Body would die because of it.  So this sense of impending danger triggers some Survival Mechanism that stops any further destructive forward momentum.  Of course, we need to keep in mind two things, first, that our Innate Wisdom is more generally an Animal instinctual intelligence than Higher Human, and, secondly, that Human Beings evolved to live in Groups.  So our Innate Wisdom would consider Life and Death issues to be both threats to the person as well as serious threats to one’s social standing.   Yes, keep in mind that in Primitive times to be banished from the Group would have been tantamount to a death sentence.  I suppose that’s the reason why people can seem so “disproportionately” distraught if all that happens is that they’re not invited to some party.  Social “slights” really aren’t that slight…not that I’m complaining.    

 

(4)What the Survival Mechanism does is it triggers the secretion of a very large dose of some kind of neurochemical cocktail, which is probably heavy on Dopamine, the Happiness Hormone.  Well, THAT causes a complete “nervous breakdown” which effectively washes away the dysfunctional personality; and of course that must be followed by a rebuild of the Personality intended to make it much better adapted for surviving in the given circumstances.  Here we need to keep in mind that Survival Adaptation can go in one of three ways:  one can change the Environment to make it more accommodating, or one can change one’s own cognitive appraisal to make the environment SEEM more subjectively acceptable, or one can simply leave and find a more hospitable Environment somewhere else.  Yes, it’s either Fix It, beFriend It, or Flee from it.    

 

(5)So, yeah, when we do encounter people in the aftermath of their “Breakdowns”, we might prime ourselves to expect that they might react in any combination of those three ways.  The “Fixing it” option will present us with an energized Personality confident in his or her own ability to control people and events, and while their actual performance may be hit and miss, you can at least rely upon them to stay on the job because it’s kind of a hardwired obsession with them now. And it isn’t about money with these people, unless of course it’s money they’re focusing on.  But generally, if they obsess about some legitimate ‘calling’, they’re the sort that will accomplish a lot and still die broke, investing, investing, investing out of their own pockets and never thinking to cash out for the Pay Day.  The best model for this Adaptation Pattern, that I can think of, is Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891), the dynamic powerhouse that got the New Age Movement going, and the narrative quality of her writings have yet to be surpassed… you know, I honestly don’t know how they can sell ‘new’ New Age Books when you can get Madame Blavatsky’s practically for free since they are all in the Public Domain now.   But, yeah, when she died, with projects she developed going on on 3 Continents, well, they were hard pressed to find the money to bury her.          

 

(6)Those who Adapt by Fleeing the scene will  run away and you might never see them again.  But those who go the Way of the Cognitive Shift, well, the only thing that changes is their minds.  Their original dysfunction could’ve been with their inability to accept the ways of Society, or they never felt as though they belonged.  But the Cognitive Shift turns all that around. If you think that a “leopard can’t change their spots”, well, these Leopards are Cats of a different stripe.  The New Personality won’t think the Old Situation and even their Old Enemies quite so bad anymore and will probably even positively like everything and everybody now.  No, they’re not pretending.  Even if they still don’t fit in, they’ll no longer pick up on rejection cues the way they did before, and it’ll be even harder to make them go away.  It might be like you gotta friend whether you want one or not and, and since they seem so harmless now, well, most people will do as much boundary setting as they can and live with it.  Yes, their new cognitive shift “Rose Colored Glasses” will turn this old thorn patch into a Rose Garden, and they’ll be looking at us all like we’re all dressed in lace and silver buckles, being pushed on tree swings, up against a back drop of blue skies and fluffy white clouds, with ribbons rapped in our hair flapping in the breeze. Yeah, it’s crazy, because that’s clearly not who we are, or it’s Unconditional Love being taken to an uncomfortably irrational extreme, but it’s better than what they were before, right?  Yeah, getting past our own feelings and thinking empathetically towards them, we can only wonder at the depths of the depression and despair that had previously enveloped them and be glad for their new found happiness, keeping in mind that our own annoyance with their super sweet cloyingness is trivial by comparison. But also we need to keep in mind that their Delusionality and lack of True Discernment should prevent us from ever entrusting them with any real responsibilities; you know, Put them on the Decorations Committee.  Yeah, it does seem paradoxical but their being “Enlightened” may block them from seeing how the Real World works.   

Well, that’s it for Part One and now on to Part Two of our Series.

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Hi Everybody, This is Leo Volont with part Two of my four part series “The Material Mechanics of Spirituality”

(7) In Part One we introduced the idea of seeing the Spiritual Enlightenment Experience more in the worldly terms of being like a One-Two Combination Punch of Breakdown followed by Adaptive Rebuild, and we focused largely on the Adaptive Determiners and the three main Orientations for Adaptive Response… you remember: ‘The Three F’s”: Fix It, Befriend it, or Flee from it.  But now let’s take a closer look at the initial Breakdown experience.  Of course, high-minded hard-core Spiritualists might have a problem with the starkly materialistic terminology we’re using.  Well, remember that when William James, the Harvard Psychologist, uses the word “breakdown”, well, that’s him insisting on using his own clinical jargon, his “Shop Talk”, and, yeah, it’s not the word we would’ve used.  We would’ve wanted to say ‘Meaning of Life Crisis’ or something like that.   But the word “Breakdown” does fit the Bio-Psycho Model we are discussing so let’s not waste time trying to think up a euphemism just to smooth down our ruffled feathers.  Let’s just lean into it and get used to the word “breakdown”. 

 

(8)Yeah, we hear of people having “nervous breakdowns” but most of what we personally know about these ‘breakdowns’ probably isn’t all that much, and might just be limited to the events that lead up to the breakdowns, that is, the extreme crisis plot line that precipitates the Breakdown and not the Breakdown Experience itself.  If we do hear of anything about the actual Breakdown Phase, well, obviously they are very cathartic and we hear of these people being described as going into fetal positions and sucking on their thumbs, or whatever, and we think, well, that’s not OUR Spirituality, where we would imagine ourselves attaining Enlightenment in a dignified ramrod-straight Lotus Position with our fingers twisted into exactly the precisely correct ‘enlightenment’ mudras and intoning Om the whole time.   But keep in mind that those broken down “Normal People” may not actually feel all that broken or all that ‘down’.  In the same way as a ‘good cry’ might actually feel good, well, a tremendously profound “cry” might feel all that much better, right?  Probably shot through with Dopamine, right?   And then remember what happens to us during our blissfully ecstatic rapturous experiences, you know, with drugs or whatever, and, yes, our rigorous sense of decorum might also take a slip towards the Wild Side and we’d probably also be sprawled on the floor in a fetal position with our thumbs stuck in our mouths.  It wouldn’t be that much fun if we weren’t, right?  

 

I can think of an example.  Do a search for Bernini’s “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” and look where the arrow’s pointing.  Look how she’s slumped.  Look at her  Face.  Peggy Wren, a beautiful Blond Girl, an older student who mentored me back in College, well, when I told her I was getting into Spirituality she showed me an Art Book Quality Photo of a Painting based on Bernini’s Sculpture and said “Yeah, Go For It! Looks like fun to me.”  I suppose she was making the point that I should remain grounded and not Idealize the process, whatever it would turn out to be.  And I never knew Peggy to be wrong about anything.  So, yes, Normal People and Spiritual People are the same People, aren’t they?   And so are the Experiences we have. They just go by different names, depending on whether you’re an Insider or an Outsider.   

 

(9)Oh, we also see these Breakdowns for apparently other reasons than that the person is living a dangerously unhealthy lifestyle or having a disastrously abysmal social life.  It might just be the product of severe depression, mental conflicts, thoughts of guilt or shame, or some, yeah, Meaning of Life crisis.  What I think is happening with these is that the body’s Innate Wisdom is sharp enough to discern when the Self is on the brink of suicide.  For instance, Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910) had such a transformative experience.  He had fallen into an almost debilitating depression, which they called ‘melancholia’ back then… and this was after he had finished his book “War and Peace” (published 1869).  Yeah, it’s understandable that there can be a sense of emptiness after achieving a much sought after goal, you know, the “what am I supposed to do now?” feeling.  But anyway, I think Tolstoy’s Innate Animal Wisdom stepped in before he could harm himself.

 

(10) Oh, by the way, for those who think that Enlightenment might make a difference with our objectively appraised performance levels, you know, actually BEING GOOD FOR SOMETHING, well, just refer to Leo Tolstoy where we have very good Before and After references: “War and Peace” for Before, and the novel “Anna Karenina” [An-uh Kr-i-nuh-nuh] (published 1878) for the After.  Yeah, some critics think that “Anna Karenina”  is the greatest novel ever written. 

 

(11)Oh, wait, before finishing up on this Part, we need to understand that James himself recognized that there were some “Religious Conversion” experiences that could not be accounted for using his Nervous Breakdown Model.  Well, that gives me an opening to bring up my favorite pet idea, the Collective Consciousness, and That brings to mind my favorite YouTube Kundalini mentor, “Susu Ro”, a beautiful young Spanish Woman, now working as an Artist, who had made, among her other videos, a short video a few years back, which she took down, and I’ve been unable to talk her into putting it back up, maybe because she can’t prove any of it, but it presented a beautifully intriguing idea that each individual on Earth is a Hologram of the World.  To understand that you need to understand how Holograms work, you know, that if you have a big Holographic Glass Plate that contains a picture and then smash it into thousands of pieces, well, each shard of that broken glass would contain the WHOLE COMPLETE ORIGINAL holographic image, but in miniature.  So in Susu’s Vision  we all have that Holographic relationship to the World, that each of us is a microcosm, in exact precise detail, of the Whole.  So, when we think it’s we ourselves who are becoming Enlightened, well, it’s actually the World becoming Enlightened – through us and all around us.

 

(12)So, yeah, THAT could account for the Spontaneous Instances of Enlightenment we hear about, that unless there’s a lot of Synchronicity going on, well, the personal details of one’s life may have nothing to do with becoming Enlightened, but rather that the effective impulse is a kind of Planetary Life Force Eruption and one just happened to be the one who got struck by its Lightening.  Really, we need to think about this, that our believing in our own Personal Destiny  may help us to get out of bed in the Mornings, but may ultimately be delusional and that the World, if it does have its own Consciousness, would consider its own far larger affairs to be almost infinitely more important than anything we’d have going on for ourselves, right?  That’s to say that our becoming Enlightened may not even be about us.   

 

Take the Enlightenment of Joan of Arc for instance.  Joan of Arc (1412-1431) lived during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453).  Impressed with her Mission from God, given to her at the age of 13 (and that’s too ‘early’ to be Early Adult Onset Schizophrenia), well, she effectively saved France and was instrumental in throwing Evil England off the “Continent” and therefore perhaps substantially changing the direction of Human History, saving us from the Devil, but for herself, she ended up being burned at the stake, which can hardly be considered much of a “Survival Mechanism”.  But then, being Burned may have been the most pivotal of her influential contributions, even after she had already set the King of France on his Throne.   You see, France, collectively outraged and priorly divided by Provincial Loyalties, now for the first time united as a Nation and did for martyred Joan’s memory what they wouldn’t do for their King.  They fought!  So, yes, this whole Episode was way bigger than just the angst of a Teenage Peasant Girl.  Now wouldn’t that lead us to believe that Holographic Mother Earth knew all along how this would all play out?      

 

Yes, that’s it for Part Two and now on to Part Three.  Thanks everybody.        

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Hi Everybody.  This is Leo Volont with part Three of my four  part series “The Material Mechanics of Spirituality”

 

(14)The term ‘Enlightenment’ seems to suggest a sense of fullness and completeness which is misleading in this context.  We should remind ourselves that James sees the “Conversion Personalities” as simply being ‘emergency constructs’ and that they’re always simplistic cartoonish caricatures and done in hard outlines.  This is why James recommends NOT being Enlightened because it robs us of our subtlety, deadens our sense for nuance, and would shipwreck us if we should try to navigation through Life’s deep fathoms of Complexities while having made ourselves fit only to be shallow.   Ironically, no Intellectual should ever be “enlightened”.  

 

(15)Yes, in the section of James’ “Varieties…” that discusses Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) we learn that emissaries from the Vatican, rather than locking her up, decided that despite her innovative changes to the traditional Monastic Rules she was actually in full compliance with basic Church doctrine.   And so Teresa was so grateful to her Inquisitors, for their reasonableness, that she offered to take them under her personal tutelage so they could also attain to Mystical Union with God.  Well, they didn’t need more than a moment to contemplate her offer.  They instantly replied “No thank you. God can wait until we’re dead but until then we have our jobs to do.”  I think what they meant was that they needed to stay sharp.  And remember, this wasn’t their first rodeo and she wasn’t the first Saint they ever met. We need to assume that they knew what they were looking at and didn’t want to find themselves in a position where some day they’d be looking at the same thing looking back at them from the mirror, probably with some silly “Enlightened” smirk on their face.    

 

(16)But while the Personality Reconstructions may all be simplistic, that doesn’t mean they’re all the Same, and James’ “Varieties” pops the bubble of delusion that maintains that ‘All Religions Are Basically the Same’.  They’re not.   You see, the Mind’s Randominity admits to no uniformity and so the Restructuring Personality will Rebuild to form the best fit to any troublesome and unique Life Situation.  If there is ever any Uniformity, it must be imposed using strict controls.   Manifestations of Personality Recrystallizations  can cover a frightful range of bizarre Beliefs.   On the evil extreme, both Military and Criminal Organizations use the Breakdown and Buildup Model, probably straight out of James, to train Special Forces, Spies and Assassins.  The first “assassins” were from some crazed Sufi Religious Order that covered its expenses by hiring out very competent and very expendable assassins who went joyfully on their suicide missions expecting to wake up in Paradise.    Then there are the Martial Arts that pretend to be Spiritualized but aren’t they just the Idealization of Belligerent Machismo?  It’s the Rebuild Response of those who grew up dysfunctionally unable to fit into normal peer status hierarchies and therefore saw everybody as “Bullies” (“ohlook!theBullieskeeppickingonmesoI’m thekaratikid”) and so they reoriented their lives making Reactive Violence their Religion.  

 

(17)Yes, for training programs based on the Breakdown Rebuild Model of Personality Restructuring,  the Rebuild Phase must be strictly controlled.   But what about spontaneous breakdowns, you know, if it should happen to you or I while living our ordinary lives outside of any kind of cognitive structuring?   Well, the results could end up being really strange.  The way I would imagine it working is that during the Meltdown Phase the sense of “normal” would go into reset and all the old rules and safeguards would go into flux or hang in suspension.   Then as a new ‘Better Adjusted’ personality crystalizes, well, I think it would be a very delicate time where even just passing thoughts and impressions could be imprinted with the weight of Divine Imperatives.  

 

(18)One example in “Varieties” illustrates this point well: a young man had just emerged from his Breakdown State of Bliss and he was regaining the use of his faculties and so he reached for his pack of cigarettes and lit one up when his sister barked  “I thought I told you to quit that nasty habit”, and so that’s what he immediately did… never touching another cigarette for the rest of his life, which, of course, we’d think is a good thing, but it seemed insanely disproportionate that he spent as much time then onwards in preaching against tobacco as for the Kingdom of God.  Imagine what might have happened if he had scratched himself instead of reaching for a Smoke! Those would have been some pretty interesting Sermons, huh?    

 

(19)I myself ran across an example of radically extreme bizarreness:  I saw a book being promoted and its title was “Screw Everything”, but the author used the F word.  Yes, the author tells a story of having had a complete nervous breakdown in the course of which he gets a Quasi-Divine Revelation.  This Vision would be the basis of his New World Order.  We would only have to sneer at whatever we had previously considered important, and then in all future actions be dismissive and not care in the least whether we meet our objectives or not.  Then Utopia would automatically roll out before us, shining in all its splendor and glory, which of course we shouldn’t care a Fig about, as, yeah, I think this is from his stupid book:  “Caring is just Worrying wearing a Pretty Lace Veil”.  Really!?   But, yes, it’s easy to see the footprints of his own personal Innate Wisdom in all that.  His new disdainfully amoral Personal Ethos absolves him of all responsibilities, relieves him of performance anxieties and makes a virtue of his naturally sour and hateful disposition.  Yeah, let me write a book.  I’ll call it “Screw Him!” but I’ll use the F word.   

 

(20)But, anyway, many of us in the Spiritual Community have been zealously striving for Enlightenment for years or even decades.  We’ve been Meditating, doing Yoga, intoning Mantras or being Devoted to whatever the last book we read said we needed to be Devoted to.  We’ve been chasing Gurus, signing up for Seminars, using our precious Vacation Time to go on Pilgrimages to foreign 3^rd World hell holes, and following really stupid dress codes. And for What!?   We find out what really works best is just to go into a spinning nose dive and hitting ‘Rock Bottom’!?  Learning that Enlightenment isn’t some Noble Quest after all but just some visceral response to really rotten luck!?  …… Yeap, that’s about the size of it.  Unfortunately, if we can cope with our life situations, then Enlightenment is not only unnecessary but functionally unattainable.  

 

(21)The real qualifier for Enlightenment is to FAIL, and to fail BIG.  Yes, the Books talk of finding Enlightenment by RENOUNCING the World.   Well, first, we need to understand that if it’s a ‘Guru’ telling you to ‘renounce the World’, well, generally the Guru wants to be the recipient of all your renounced goods, and then with nothing of your own left to live on, well then your last refuge would be the Guru’s Cult, right?   All very convenient for the Guru, isn’t it?   He’ll be saying “Caught That Fish”.  But if it’s a Book telling you to Renounce the World, well, yeah, that would really work, wouldn’t it?  But not the way we’d intuitively think.  Renouncing the World is effectively Planning to Fail and inviting the Crisis that will precipitate our Breakdown.   Think about it for a moment:  you quit your job, ditch your smart phone, give away all your money, change your name and walk away from all the friends and family that could save you from yourself, and, then, where would you find yourself?  Well, you can’t get any more “rock bottom” than that, can you?  First one’s health would go into decline because of malnutrition and the stresses of homelessness, and then the psychological snap! would soon follow.

 

(22) But, then  remember the Adaptive Second Step to the Enlightenment Experience.  These Enlightened Individuals, the Followers of the Path of Renunciation, well, if the Pre-Breakdown Crisis doesn’t kill them, then they rise up and become, for the sake of survival and as an exact and precise adaptive response,  well, they become quintessentially the most skilled and adept Beggars on the face of the Earth.  Just look at India… at the most acclaimed Super Star Gurus.  Aren’t they just Super Specialized World Class Major League Beggars?  Yeah, instead of bowing at their feet we should just toss a dollar on the floor and say “Hey Swami, how ‘bout a little Song and Dance”.  That’s basically what we get from them anyway, right?   

 

Well, that’s it for Part Three.  Now on to the final Part… Part Four.    Thanks everybody.  See ya later. 

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Hi Everybody.  This is Leo Volont with Part Four, the final part, of my series “The Material Mechanics of Spirituality” 

 

(23) When I first read James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience” back in College, well, the materialistic analysis of the schema stunned me. It probably took me decades to thoroughly work through the denial and digest what I’d read.   I suppose one of my first insights in this regards occurred to me when I came across a Buddhist Monastery in the Far East during my earliest stint of World Travels.  I found that in the whole establishment there wasn’t a single monk who had himself voluntarily enrolled into the Monastery.  They had all been there since infancy, having either been left on the doorstep in a basket or been endowed for life and then walked away from.  You see, they were largely illegitimate children born to girls who had committed youthful indiscretions, and if the resultant babies could be taken off their hands then perhaps they could once again pass for virgins, marry, and enjoy a normal life.  But, anyway, essentially these Monasteries were, in functional terms, warehouses for people who had no place in the larger society.  

 

(24)But, yes,  I had read of both Monastic Traditions in Catholic Europe and Monastic Traditions in Asia, where it really had seemed that the pursuit of Religious Enlightenment had been the point of it all.  Was there along the line some change in Mission or a reordering of Purpose? Or are both aspects true in their separate contexts?  Well, yes, I suppose we need to take a closer look.    

 

(25)Okay, first, how do you even run a Monastery?   Even if some of the children are dropped off with endowments, we could expect most to depend upon charity.  Food, clothing and firewood would always come at a cost.   Also, we must wonder about the convenience of the Caregivers.  Yes, children would be easy enough to manage, because if they misbehaved they could literally be handled.  But what about regulating the behaviors of the adults?   Remember that these Monks are not just orphans as children, but orphans for life.   So, no, they couldn’t be allowed to grow into adults full of self will, with their own opinions on how to run everything, arguing, talking back, and even bursting out into angry violent fits of rage in reaction to their lives of tedium, privation and endless frustrations. No!...that kinda stuff’s not permitted.   

 

(26)So the whole system would be impossible if a way couldn’t be found to contain and pacify these inmates.  Remember that back in Ancient Times they didn’t even have Jails or Prisons because of the prohibitive expense of supplying food and maintaining guards.  So they simply killed criminals.  But surely the Ancient World would  draw the line at killing babies, right?  Well, let’s look at it.  We read of “nose pinching” babies that don’t pass their initial Health and Heartiness Inspections and that some cultures would put off birth registration ceremonies  until the seventh day in order to determine whether or not the infants qualified as “keepers”… but what happens to the Non-Keepers, right?   So, yes, the Ancient World was NOT above killing babies.  So these Monastic Babies we’re talking about, being allowed to live and grow to be Adults, well, what made them so different that the Cruel Hard Cold Heart of the Ancient World softened for them?  Well, the way I figured it is the compromised but still beloved Daughters of Good Families would have been outraged if their “babies” had been snuffed out by those “nose-pinches”.  I imagine that these Young Girls would only agree to return to Virtue and play their parts in reflecting well upon the Honor of their Families if their Babies were given a respectable place somewhere in Society, and Religiously oriented Monasteries would fit that bill perfectly, and from that there developed the Religious Monastic Ascetic Ideal.

 

(27)Now think about how convenient the Ascetic part of the Religious Monastic Ascetic Ideal is for the Monastery’s Management. First we have the Vows of Poverty.  Well, poverty’s easily arranged.  Then in regards to boarding, the food budget would be easier to handle if Vegetarianism and periodic Fasting became the norms.  To cover for self will, arguing and talking back, well, there we have the Vows of Obedience and Humility.  Many Religious Orders had Vows of Silence, which is effectively “Shut Up! We don’t wanna hear it”.  Finally we have the Vows of Celibacy.  Of course they couldn’t be allowed to reproduce.  But they needed to be given some excuse to cover for their inevitable sexual frustrations, and so they literally made a Virtue of Necessity.     

 

(28)Now, let’s think about these “Ideals” for a moment.  Imagine if any one of us were to be put into a situation like that, subjected to rules that seemed designed to make our lives utterly miserable, well, how do you think we would cope?  Well, most likely we wouldn’t.  The body’s autonomic nervous system would be dysfunctional if it didn’t click in to provide some kind of an accommodation to make a hell-hole like the typical Monastery seem in some way bearable.  And so, of course, these places are the Source of all of our classically described Religious Spiritual Realizations, our Enlightenments, our Nirvanas and Satori’s.  Monasteries were the Nervous Breakdown Capitals of World.  That they weren’t just veritable Insane Asylums manufacturing their own Insanity is attributable to the care they took to structure the adaptive rebuilds around a respectably ideal Religious Model.   

 

(29) In these Monasteries Religion permeates everything and no other cognitive distractions are permitted.   Prayers are scheduled morning, noon, and night and there are Chapel Services several times a day.  Religious Iconography is all over the place.  So of course when they finally ‘Melt Down’ they’ll naturally pour themselves into the Religious Molds that sit waiting for them.  Yes, in reading of these Saints we are expected to suppose that they were speaking and writing from Divine Revelation, but now we find it much more likely that they only ‘reveal’ what had been echoing in their ears since childhood. 

 

(30)Yes, this Medieval Monastic Model explains a lot.  Decades ago I read a book about Zen Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki (1870 to 1966), and he was talking about a Zen Buddhist Conference that had recently been held in Japan, a big one that convenes only once every Generation, and he remarked that everybody was collectively embarrassed to find that nobody attained Satori Enlightenment this time around.  So, yeah, he wondered what went wrong.  Well, duh! These are modern times and Japan was becoming prosperous with a high standard of living.  There were no longer any Monastic Warehouses with their pressurized Privations and Miseries to react to.   So of course nobody at that swanky resort conference could be expected to have some quasi-spiritual  “nervous breakdown”.  The kind of Satori Experience they wanted could only be accessed through a bio-psychological  Escape Hatch.  And Optimistically forward looking Japan, tracing its upward arc to having the highest standard of living in the World, well, that was Not the Kinda Place anybody would want to escape from…well, not unless they were a live fish flopping around on a table in a Sushi Restaurant. 

 

(31)So, yes, when the Status Quo of Normal Life is already like sailing on pallid blue waters, then isn’t an Obsessive Goal Oriented Spirituality only making waves and rocking the boat?   So shouldn’t we all just focus on learning to cope well with Life and just be Happy.  But if things ever do go sour, well, we can assume that Spirituality would automatically assert itself, wouldn’t it? Crisis and Breakdown would be our Silver Linings around any significantly Dark Cloud, right?

 

 (32)But, yes, as a kind of an Insurance Plan it probably would be wise to recommend that we educate ourselves  in the Social Moral and Aesthetic Ideals in order to give one’s self the proper Cognitive Foundation so that if Crisis ever did Strike and we were to be broken down and reduced to Enlightenment, well, our Adaptive Response would turn out to be a commendable one and not just either some bazaar transcendental nihilistic dress code fashion embarrassment or some Idealization of Reactive Hate.             Maybe Our Ideal should be to make each other happy by making our World a better place to live in.

 

Well, that’s it for the Series.  Thanks everybody. If I can think of anything else, I’ll let you all know. Bye!

The Virgin Mary and a Love Story

 

 The Virgin Mary and a Love Story

 

Hi Everybody, this is Leo Volont with Part One of my three part Series “The Virgin Mary and a Love Story”.  This is from a Blog I wrote back in 2008.  The “Love Story” content I found in the journals of a canonized Saint, Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774 to 1824). Some interesting stuff in there.

 

So Let’s get started.  

 

(1)First things first!  No, don't worry about this being some kind of a sloppy personal devotional.  Yes, there's the word "Love" but I assure you that everything will  be contained within Historical context and there will be no personal feelings on display  to make anybody feel squirmy or uncomfortable. However, if my subscriber demographic has any overlap with the population that goes for Romantic Narrative Fiction, well, they would not find this Series entirely disappointing, though that particular content must wait for the Third Part.  Until then we need to work on context and backstory.  

 

But even before we can begin with that we should find out why I started researching all this to begin with.  As with many things, it started with the Angels.   

 

(2)One sometimes needs to wonder what exactly is the purview of a Guardian Angel.  Most practically they should keep us from danger, right,  but if our lives are already sufficiently sheltered, then do they extend their mandate toward guiding us morally or intellectually?  If we are prone to foolishness then do our Angels try raising the Alarm before the Event, and if we persist and find ourselves with a problem, then do they help with the Damage Control?  But if we’re relatively of sound judgement, then is the Angelic Task more along the positive lines of opening up new venues for Understanding? I think that is what I’ve experienced here with this.  

 

(3) I’ve noticed that the Angels like to work in riddles.  Yeah, there are instances where an Angel will simply come and directly flat-out tell me something, but then it’s so hard to grasp the implications that it might as well have been a riddle.  So the impression I get is they don’t just give out the answers.   And that is why they like to work in riddles, that is, asking those puzzling questions, giving nothing directly, but only planting seeds, not giving Knowledge but arranging so that it should grow.  

 

(4)Not more than just a few years ago, an Angel came to me with one of those riddles – “Why is it that the only religious garb Our Lady has ever worn is that of a Carmelite Nun?”  He was referring to Our Lady of Mount Carmel who has made repeated Apparitions throughout Her History wearing that particular habit.  Ordinarily Our Lady appears in fashionable clothes, of Her own style, but suitable for each particular occasion – She obviously treats elegance as an important factor in Her considerations, and the Queen of Heaven doesn’t need to keep any vows of poverty.   So it is a bit curious that She should ever choose to dress in the plain clothes of a Nun.  And, then, when she does, it is only as a Carmelite.  And it became my task to figure out why.

 

(5)First, I did some research.  I had been brought into the Catholic Church by the Carmelite Order.  The clerics of my first parish Church were all Carmelites and my God Mother was a Tertiary Order Carmelite, you know, 3^rd Order, a kind of Secular Nun.   So I already knew something about the Carmelites as though by osmosis.   One particular Tradition of theirs is uniquely intriguing – that of the Brown Scapular.  It presents a kind of loophole in the ordinary Christian Procedures of Salvation.   I myself acquired a Brown Scapular before I was even officially all the way a Catholic. There are no restrictions and anybody can pick one up, but, well, the commercial ones you find are mostly cheap and flimsy, and so I bought a few of the best I could find and got some brown wool yarn and with a sewing kit, the only thing I have left from my mother… besides her good looks, and I sewed together the couple of scapulars over a hand braided cord to make a single Brown Scapular sturdy enough that you could use it to strangle a horse if you wanted to.  Priests gasp in wonder when they see this thing… they’ve never seen one so heavy duty before.  Oh, look!  I got it right here.  See!

 

(6)Oh, Perhaps we could use a bit more detail about the Brown Scapular, which really brings up the story of the Carmelites themselves since the two stories can hardly be disentangled.   It seems that a thousand years ago, when Christendom rallied its Knights to protect the Holy Land from the first waves of the Barbarian Invasions coming from off the Eurasian Eastern Steppes, as much protecting Islamic Civilization as Christendom itself, well, many good Frankish men found themselves far away from home.  A certain few Crusaders, being from a Land where every Church was called an “Our Lady”, you know, a “Notre Dame” of this or a “Notre Dame” of that, well, they had been surprised to find a Marian Devotion already in place when they arrived at the Holy Land.  It was under the charge of a local Religious Order of Monks that called themselves the Carmelites, named after their main Monastery situated on the slopes of old Mount Carmel.  The Crusaders had been shown a Shrine in the Mount Carmel complex, which even back then had been more than a thousand years old.  That Shrine had once been Our Lady’s cottage when She had come to Mount Carmel seeking refuge during one of the earliest Persecutions. 

 

(7)Some of the Crusaders were so impressed by this Marian Devotion, that they joined the Order and became Carmelites themselves.  But later, when they returned to Europe, they ran into the problem of their local Bishops questioning their affiliation in what was not then a recognized Catholic Religious Order.  So petitions were forwarded to the Pope asking for approval of the ‘new’ Brotherhood, but the paperwork dragged on slowly.  The Leader of the Carmelite’s Petition Movement, Simon Stock, was imprisoned for safe-keeping, probably so he could not drum up any new support for the Carmelites before anybody could be certain whether or not the Order would be ratified.  Apparently being incarcerated, probably in some dark damp dungeon, a was very demoralizing for him and so, in order to console him, Our Lady came to Him as an Apparition.  Strikingly, she was wearing Carmelite garb. As a special token of Her regard She presented him with the first Brown Scapular saying “Those who die wearing the Brown Scapular will never know the Fires of Hell”, and went on to say that on the First Saturday of each month she would personally fetch from out of Purgatory all those found wearing a Brown Scapular.

 

(8)I can only guess that Our Lady has always been a bit uncomfortable with the General Doctrines of Christian Salvation.   These Doctrines posit the necessity for Murdering Her Son and then of having everyone agree, as a matter of Faith, that it was a good and necessary thing that He had to be murdered.  Then how disturbing it must be for Her that they positively celebrate Her Son's murder on Easter, when you think they should be able to find some fitter theme for a Spring Festival.  But, yes, Our Lady presented a Brown Scapular that could save without being rooted in murder, blood and misery.  And the  Devotion of the Brown Scapular was both sentimentally idealistic and practical at the same time.  You know, the brown doesn’t show dirt… or, well, almost doesn’t.  

 

(9)Well, right after creating this first Brown Scapular, Our Lady transported Herself hundreds of miles away, appearing on the same evening to the Pope in Rome, telling him “If you will not be the Pope who gives approval to the Carmelite Order then the next Pope SOON shall be”.   Well, as we all know, Popes, after their appointments,  serve for life and are only replaced by new popes for being dead, and so the subtext of what Mary Mother of God was saying was probably not lost on him.   So of course, the Pope immediately did the right thing and granted official recognition to the Carmelites.   That is how the Order was accepted into the Catholic Church.   But, really, our understanding of the History of the Carmelite Order should go back to its true beginnings – back to the times of the Prophet Elijah.  And on to Part Two!

 

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(10)Hi Everybody.  This is Leo Volont with Part Two of my three part Series “The Virgin Mary and a Love Story”.  In the First Part we discussed the beginnings of the Carmelite Order in the Catholic Church, but in this Part we discuss how the Carmelite Order began for the Jews.

 

(11)Now it’s a fact of History that the Messianic Mission of Jesus almost exactly some 2000 years ago had failed.  Of course we can impute this failure to widespread moral decadence, but isn’t that always very much the case?  If we should wish to be charitable, then we might notice that perhaps the historical timing had been all wrong.  Jesus, if he had lived to face them,  would have been confronted by strong Empires on every point of the compass.   But looking back to less than a thousand years before Jesus, well, then we notice a period when Civilizations all about were in decline and no new Empires had yet risen up to take their place, and this is when perhaps a serious Messianic Mission might have been mounted.  This was the time of King David.  And, yes, we can see, when we look at the History, that without any competing Empires to intimidate them, that first King David and then, afterwards,  King Solomon seemed to flourish, and this despite themselves.  David would dance drunk and naked in the streets, killing men to steal their wives. Do you think that the People must have been somewhat leery of that?  Solomon, next in the Line after David, was also a playboy, and he bankrupted his Kingdom to build a Temple for a Religion that the People knew wasn’t his only interest.  It was as though it were Solomon’s plan to make his People either resentful of a Religion that would bleed  them dry, building a Temple that could only appeal either to God’s Vanity or his own, or to make them resentful of himself for being too morally unfit to even go near such a Temple.

 

(12) This Davidic dynasty, soft with decadence and corruption, did not continue long past Solomon, as first a Tax Revolt disintegrated into Civil War, and then the nation was finally dismembered by the rising Assyrian and Babylonian Empires.   It had been like a wasted Life.  The brief window of Messianic Opportunity had already closed.  But why had there not been a Messiah when a Messiah might have been successful?  Good question.  I suppose it was a matter of being ill-prepared – there had not been any preparation in Righteousness, Piety or Purity.  For instance, the Prophet back then, just before David, he was a lecher named Samuel.  What Samuel had done was that he had demanded Saul be appointing as King, but this was when Saul had been a young good looking boy, but then 20 years later found a new Pretty Boy in David whom he now pressed to be King. But it could only happen through a Civil War!  Saul wasn’t going to go anywhere just because an Old Pervert got tired of him, right?  So yes, if the Prophet Samuel was any kind of a fair representation then it seems that a disgusting moral decadence was a characteristic of the time.   And that seems to have been the opinion of Elijah, a Prophet who came about a Century after Solomon, who seemed to have been aware of the Lost Messianic Opportunity and who made it his Mission to see that if there ever should be a Next Time, that the proper preparations in Righteousness should be taken.   

 

(13)Even the Bible gives us some hint of Elijah’s Mission.  We are told of a drought, and that day after day for seven days Elijah had asked a servant to climb Mount Carmel and look for any cloud.  None was seen until when, on the seventh day, there was a small cloud.  Elijah had taken that to mean that there would pass Seven Dynasties or Ages until the Next Opportunity.  So Elijah went to work to put together an Organization, a Brotherhood, that could stand up to Seven Ages of Work, which would turn out to be the better part of a Thousand Years, building a Social and Religious Purity from which it could be possible to raise up a plausible Messiah.

 

(14)Well, most importantly, the Family of the Messiah would have to be especially monitored and protected.  It seems that Elijah, and then his successors were as able to resort to magic.  They had the Rod of Aaron from the Arc of the Covenant.  The Rod was kept in his old Cave at Mount Carmel ( Oh, by the way, for those of you who Dream, well, that Cave is the same Cave as the "Dark Cave of Prayer", you know, the one you might encounter in your Dreams, and the Old Man you find there, you know, the guy that always gives you some kind of good advice, well, that's Elijah).  Okay, the Rod’s magic was such that every time a new Female Baby was born in the line of the Messiah it would temporarily come to life blooming forth in leaf and flower.   The Monks of the Order would then scurry forth and find among the new babies in the land  one with a special birthmark.  One big hint was that they expected the Messiah to come out of the House of David.  And then, of course, after the first Generation, the Monks knew exactly where to look for the new babies… the baby of a previous “baby”.   Kept with Aaron’s Rod was what appeared like a small artificial “Tree”, to which branches and segments were added to record the births and the Genealogy that would lead to the Messiah.

 

(15)And, yes, it was always the girls.  The Rod would not bloom for boys.  Maybe this was at first surprising, as the Hebrews were a Patriarchal Society.  But this was not a matter of inheriting power or passing down property.  Besides, mothers have babies and fathers only have maybes. 

 

(16)Anne, who would be Mary’s mother, appeared by all signs as being near that prophesized 7^th Age and the formation of the branches and segments of the Record Tree were approaching their Culmination Point.  So when she reached maturity, got married  and became pregnant, the Brotherhood seemed to hold its breath and wait for the Seventh Sign and the Birth of the Seventh and Final Generation of Purity.  But it didn’t happen.  Anne had a baby, and it was a daughter, but the Rod stayed lifeless.  Of course Anne loved her baby, but, still, she knew it was not all that special.  And then afterwards Anne remained barren for the next 19 years. It must have seemed very puzzling.

 

(17)But the Angels intervened.  Now, this is where our History becomes a bit even MORE peculiar.  No materialist will like what comes next.  I refer to the published notebooks kept on the accounts given by the Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774 – 1824), Catholicism’s foremost seer and visionary, who looked back on Biblical Times and saw what had really happened and wasn’t afraid to tell about it in extensive detail.  I decided to trust her insofar as her views were almost always at variance to the traditions she could have been supposed to uphold had she simply been a mouthpiece for Church Propaganda.  Anyway, the way she tells it, there had been "The Holy Thing" from the Old Arc of the Covenant, now lost, but before it had been lost, by being  too well hid, the Holy Thing, along with Aaron’s Rod,  had been removed for safe keeping… the wisdom of that decision being obviously well vindicated.  This Holy Thing is reported to source all the way back to Adam and then having been passed to Abraham by an Angel and then passed down, from father to son, until it finally rested with Joseph in Egypt.  But then, however much longer afterwards, we have Moses raiding Joseph’s Crypt and taking possession of it and then bringing it along on his 40 Years Exodus, placing it among the other Sacred Objects in the Arc.  This Holy Thing was said to be the Spiritual Core of Purity from Adam himself, snatched out of him by an Angel just a moment before his First Sin and subsequent Fall from the heights of Spirituality to the depths of just being but a mere man.   Just think about it: one moment he had been on a par with the Angels and the next not much more than a monkey.  I suppose we can all commiserate at least a little bit with that, huh?  

 

(18)An Angel, coming to address the problem with Anne, asked that this Holy Thing be passed into her by her husband, who just so happened to be a Priest in the Temple and could therefore be expected to understand the situation.  Yeah, one wonders about the details regarding  how such holy things can be passed back and forth into people, but as it worked out, the Holy Thing from Adam became Mary inside of Anne.   Whatever the biological details were, as far as the Holy Thing was involved, Mary comes to us as effectively the Pure daughter of the still Spiritual Adam from Paradise – the Girl Child Eve would have had, had they not fallen from Grace.  Yeah, we can see how Anne Catherine Emmerich fills in a lot that the Bible leaves out, can’t we? 

 

(19)So, of course, nine months later, on the occasion of Mary’s Advent, Aaron’s Rod in the Cave of Elijah burst forth in its greatest floral profusions yet………   And in the next, 3^rd, and Final Part of our Series we will finally get to those Episode’s in Mary’s earthly career that we’ve been so curious about.  Thanks everybody… see you soon.

 

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(20)Hi Everybody.  This is Leo Volont with the Third and Final Part in this Series “The Virgin Mary and a Love Story”.  This is the Part you’ve all be waiting for.  So let’s get started.

 

So Mary was the Culmination.   She was the Cloud of Elijah’s Prophecy come to end the Drought.   And the Messiah would not come completely unbeknownst or entirely in secret.  The Gospels do us a bit of a disservice here, presenting the view that Jesus had to convince everybody of His Messianic Pretensions.  But a great many people knew exactly who Jesus was and exactly what the design was for him.    And they all knew who Little Mary was and she was treated accordingly.  While other little girls played with dolls she was taught  Hebrew and was expected to study.  The Temple library was thrown open to her and Little Mary learned of all Jewish Law and Lore.  Concerning Little Mary nothing was left to chance and the Messianic Plans could at times become quite elaborate.   Which leads us finally to the little love story I had promised you.

 

(21)Little Mary was to be mother to the Messiah, and so She needed a husband, if for no other reason than to preserve appearances.  Although She Herself was of the House of David, it was thought that Her husband should also be of the House of David, though from a more remote branch of the Family.  The Priests, in league with the Brotherhood, arranged to find an acceptable husband. 

 

(22)In selecting a husband for little Mary they would again rely upon magic, but a somewhat more plausible magic than Aaron’s dead Rod blooming in flower.  What would happen this time was that all of the eligible bachelors of the House of David were assembled and given fresh cuttings from some tree or bush.  The one who would be destined to wed Mary – well, his cutting would vivify and bloom while all the other cuttings remained dormant. Well, expectations were frustrated when all the cuttings remained dormant.  The Priest in charge of the ceremony was perplexed and inquired if every bachelor on the list was present.  Well, an old bachelor, Joseph David, who did not wish to be married anyway, thought that those who preferred to remain single should be exempted, and so he just didn’t show up.  So, he was immediately summoned and was compelled to come quickly – free or in chains would be his only choice in the matter.   And no sooner then when he arrived and they pressed a cutting into his hands, well, it shot forth blooms like White Lilies, which then as now symbolize Purity.  So, voila!  We had a winner!  It was said that Our Lady, then a 14 year old girl, asked for one of those Lilies, had it pressed and saved it as a souvenir that She kept close by for the remainder Her life.  Yeah, you know it is quite possible that She really had loved that Old Guy, no, not so much for his Passion but maybe especially for his Purity.  Remember, Jesus was to be Spirit’s Child, not Joseph’s.

 

(23)Now in regards to the real beau of our story, well, most of the bachelors were there only because they had been asked to be, and few had entertained any great expectations for themselves, suspecting of their own unworthiness.  But there were a few who considered themselves in serious contention, and they to various degrees emotionally invested themselves in the process, not the least reason for which may have been that Little Mary, well, we should start calling her “Miss Mary” now, because she was then renown to be quite a beauty.   One young man in particular thought he stood a particularly good chance.  He felt he had all the best qualifications: – noble breeding, wealth, capacity, and he lived as uprightly as can be expected of any young man with red blood flowing through his veins.  So yeah, what wasn’t to like about this exemplary young man?  So he was at first stunned and then heartbroken when Mary went to a reluctant old man who didn’t seem very eager to have Her anyway.  This young man became so disconsolate that he ended up by selling off his properties and becoming a Member of that Brotherhood.  Disgusted with Life, he would go into Religious Retirement and leave the world and all of his disappointments behind.   He would have been happy enough to grow old and die without another word ever being spoken of or to him, but such would not be the case as we shall now see.  

 

(24)It was correct that our Young Man had plenty of capacity, and with the World shut out to him he had nothing left but virtue.   At the Monastery on the Mountain he proved himself to be a skilled and dedicated worker and then an inspiring leader, and after 30 some years found himself the Superior of that Order.  Well, by this time Jesus had been born, had grown up, had His Ministry and had finally been Murdered.   The once solid Following of Jesus split into violent factions even while they were attacked from the outside by persecutors such as Paul.  It was feared that Mary Herself could be a target in the midst of all the trouble.   So, to preserve Mary’s safety our ‘young man’, now an old man, in charge at Mount Carmel, with many men at his beck and call, well he sent a covert delegation to quickly rescue Her from the intrigues and conspiracies of Jerusalem and its environs.   Our history doesn’t go into much detail on this, so we can only guess what transpired.  Did they offer Her a polite invitation which She graciously accepted, or did they crash Her doors and ride away with Her folded over their saddlebags?  Don’t know.   We only know that when She arrived at Mount Carmel She was ready to appreciate Her stay.

 

(25)But what a life-punctuating moment it must have been for our young man, now an old man, after so many years with a broken heart he was finally face to face with that Girl, now a well advanced Lady, whom he had fallen so much in love with decades before … really, a Lifetime before.   A lot of water had passed under that bridge.  Who knows what thoughts played in his mind.   It’s said She recognized him instantly and asked him whether it didn’t seem just like ‘yesterday’ when they had met for the first time.  Well, apparently it was exactly the best thing She could have said.  It made him entirely forget for the moment all those years of disconsolation, loneliness, and heartbreak, and he became his “young” self again for just an instant. She made him smile and their eyes sparkled.  

 

Well, that’s Love enough for us.  Isn’t it?    

 

(26)Which brings us back to the question the Angel had asked me, why Our Lady chooses to dress as a Carmelite.  I thought maybe the answer was that She was showing Her appreciation for the Protection which that Order had given Her during Her lifetime, as well as in gratitude for the Care the Order had taken of Her Family for those Seven Ages since the time of Elijah.  That all seemed like a reasonable enough answer, but it was far too 'surface', to obvious ...it lacked elegance.   I felt no validation from my Angels, and my dreams were still being stirred up with hints and doubts which I knew would have stopped if I had gotten the 'right' Answer, right?  So I kept The Riddle on my mind and continued to think it over.  And then after I don’t know how long the answer came so instantly that I am not at all sure whether I thought of it, or my Angel finally just gave up and simply put the answer in my head  – THAT  Our Lady wears the Habit of the Carmelites because the Carmelites pre-date and transcend the Catholic Church.   Then I could say it is a Jewish Order, but that too is limiting after we consider that Elijah himself was not exactly Jewish.  Elijah had simply wandered in one day from the hills, with bears trailing behind him.   He came to live with the Hebrews who didn’t have either the strength or courage to make him go away.   He wasn’t a member of any one of their 12 tribes.   Anyway, so Our Lady’s wearing that Carmelite Habit is expressive of Her first loyalties which go beyond any particular Religion or Ethnicity while recognizing the confluence of all those other Religious Traditions.   We are reminded that the Blessed Virgin is a Jewish Girl and a Catholic Girl, both at once, as well as carrying forward whatever Religion it was that Old Elijah had brought down with him from out of those Hills and the Caves of Bears.      

 

(27)Well, the Answer is one thing, but after the Answer, well, what was the Lesson that I was supposed to have learned?  What was the Angel’s Guiding Purpose?  How had I been changed by it all?  Well, certainly, so much thoughtfulness can never go entirely to waste.   And what I came to feel might have been something akin to what the first Crusading Carmelites had felt, that Religion is supposed to contain elements more Universal, and more Ancient than just their own particular Religious Traditions.   But then there was also the Lesson from that little Romantic Story I just told you about, you know,  that perhaps any True Religion needs to have some little bit of a Love Story behind it.  Just think about it:  there She is – Queen of Heaven and Matron over Millions Angels and Thousands of Saints and She still wears the dress given to her by a rejected suitor who had still cared enough for Her to ride off to Her rescue.  And maybe that too is Religion.   

 

Thanks everybody.