Author Note: There’s a moment here where I say I was pretty dogmatic in my early life and then seemingly cite my theological studies as an example of my dogma. I was rather dogmatic in my early life and as a result of that dogma I needed to study theology (paradoxically) to unwind it, however I do not hold that theological studies are inherently dogmatic or that religious scholarship is in necessary opposition to an authentically spiritual life.
Transcript
Everywhere else in life words are a left-brained endeavor, where we are naming the world as a means of gaining power over it. But in this process of conquering the world with the mind, the unspeakable truth of existence- the Tao- dies. What takes it’s place is religion. Lao-Tzu tells us in the Tao Te Ching: When the Tao is lost, there is goodness. When goodness is lost, there is morality. When morality is lost, there is ritual. Ritual is the husk of true faith, the beginning of chaos. Now I’m not saying that all religious people are lacking faith, I believe all religions can be doorways to the Tao…to God. But I will say that religion does easily lend itself to the illusion of faith which is, instead, just…dogma. A thorough and attached conceptual knowledge of the words and ideas that point to Truth…without really touching the Truth. I love that the book of Genesis in many english translations says of that sexual union in the Garden of Eden that Adam knew Eve. This is the kind of knowledge I’m interested in! Would a marriage survive if a husband and wife based their intimacy upon scientific probing and conceptual understanding of each other’s bodies? Where every night they strip naked and each take a flashlight and magnifying glass to the other, mapping every muscle and mole…would they really know each other then? No. That is conceptual knowledge, not relational knowledge.
The entomologist can tell you everything there is to know about a butterfly from studying it’s desiccated remains pinned to a felt board. That’s dogma. You could say I was pretty dogmatic in my early life.
I got a degree in Historical Theology and Philosophy, because I loved dissecting the ways in which the human mind makes meaning, embedding thoughts and words in the container of culture to hold and express the concepts that create our realities. But ironically it was studying philosophy which ultimately brought me to a paradoxically deep understanding of the limits of understanding. It brought me to the edge of a rather wide gap that stands between what is real (or True) and what is conceptually knowable.
And while I would preserve my love for the written word and my respect for the power of ideas to shape our realities, I was slowly beginning to feel like my over-examined life was going by un-lived. And I was beginning to realize that reality was not a fixed thing outside myself to be studied until I understood it, it was something I was somehow in the middle of…participating in. I began to see life as a co-creative endeavor, and started taking more responsibility for whatever it was I was creating in the world.
But the slow-moving cataclysm of existential crisis that would lead me to where I am today, started with the feeling that I was somehow both the scientist, knowing the butterfly in its form but not its essence, and the butterfly…lifelessly tacked under quarter-inch glass. I had to start asking myself: how would I relate to myself if I was truly alive? How do you come to know a butterfly still in flight? There are no words, pictures or diagrams that can be drawn to impart gnosis of that wildly alive being. Similarly, my relationship to the truths of the universe, and to life itself, shifted in the direction of the butterfly in flight. It shifted from thinking to feeling…from knowledge to gnosis. If we are to interact with the deep truths of the universe- truths that are not understood so much as they are lived, felt…embodied- then we must humbly loosen our grip on understanding.
The first line of Chapter 1 in the Tao Te Ching is: The truth that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The Unnamable is the eternally real. So if we cannot name it, how then do relate to it? How do we talk about it? How do we touch it? This is why I love poetry. Because it’s the only place where the use of words is under no delusion that these words have the capacity to capture Truth in any form still in flight. Poetry is the language of the Tao. It uses words with respect for the unknowable, so that rather than trying to define the truth, those words are simply used to point to it in all the ways it is formless and pulsing just beneath the skin of our mundane experiences as embodied consciousness. Ultimately, the deepest truths of the Universe are in the body, and so the way to them becomes the way in. With poetry we use words not to understand truth, but to experience it…inside our own beating hearts in ways we could never name.
It is my deep belief that there is a way of being in the world that is coming to an end, a way which seeks out lifeless delusions of certainty that are more hungry for power than for beauty…this is the path of dogma and its time has expired on this planet.
So for anyone out there more interested in touching, in becoming the deep and wild embodiment of the nameless truths of existence through the devastating vulnerability of life in a body; through sensation and emotion, through embracing uncertainty and primal impulse…I’m writing to release this beast of beauty, this ecstatic being who is in love with the dance of the Universe…I’m writing for you. Join me in this cosmic conversation that is the co-creation of a more beautiful reality than the one we’ve inherited.