Thought 1: Isn’t the performance of this song an impossible beauty? Couldn’t we title earthly existence Beauty Impossible, an epic movie in which every character is doomed to suffer and die in exquisitely rendered detail?
Thought 2: An us-and-them attitude leads to endless might-makes-right conflict. This is its essential mechanics: THEY are evil, therefore WE are obligated to condemn THEM, change THEM to OUR ways or kill THEM. Because WE are necessarily right, God/Universe has OUR back. Battle will prove this. (Obviously the ‘enemy’ feels exactly the same way, only in reverse.) Christ represents the antithesis of this, or rather its transcendence through love: “Love thine enemy.” Could there be a more radical instruction? Could any other path demand more courage and humility?
Thought 3: If we want a healthier world, must we first learn to see beauty in evil?
Introduction
Could Pitou’s song have emerged from any other past? Were, in other words, our past’s particular suffering and horror, its violence and betrayal and craven dishonour all necessary for her song’s existence? Or for my reaction to it?
What we deem Good and Bad flow from every decision and act and happenstance that can be. Good and Bad are, ultimately, our actions and reactions, our deeds and perceptions. They are what reality is, especially because by “our” I mean All That Is. Good and Bad are not separate from us, because we are not separate from reality. Reality is made of us.
What is your capacity for suffering? How deft are you at transmuting evil into love, sickness into health? These questions are meant to direct your attention to the quality of your wisdom, by which you handle your reality with whatever grace is in your heart.
Why does ‘God’ ‘permit’ ‘evil’? This question has a more revealing twin: Why are we not puppets?
Could the answer be something as upsetting – as liberating – as “To create more beautiful music”? Could this “more beautiful music” be an unintended consequence we/God chanced upon, a beauty so impossible, so beyond our comprehension and control, it keeps us glued to karma like bewitched gamblers? The horrors of childbirth can kill, or cause the most terrible pain, but the women who survive it often come back for more. New life is too beautiful to resist.
Capacity. Acceptance. Transmutation. Impossible beauty. Beauty Impossible.
Tyranny dilates curiously
The easier our life, the less we develop our capacity to transmute suffering and evil into love. I believe wisdom-as-health-as love is this capacity. There is so much more to this than can be expressed in words. For example, I do not believe Pitou suffered horrors she was able to transmute into her song. My sense is that she enjoyed something of an idyllic childhood. Similarly, I have watched the four cats that bless my world grow up in a kind of cat paradise, all their needs met. And yet they each radiate the unarguable and unique beauty of what they are.
This entire territory, which is in fact reality itself, is not remotely straightforward. I am not relativising evil, nor am I even attempting to define it, and I am not saying individual suffering is required to write a great song. But suffering somewhere mysteriously adds melodies and qualities that could not otherwise come to be. Happiness grows richer after you have processed some suffering. If – bounding forwards greatly now – you can transmute evil into love, the melodies that can proceed from your being are miraculous!
One might ask, as we do in our many ways, “So how much suffering is the right amount, then?”
It is an ugly question. The fact of its ugliness has held my attention in article after article since 2020.
(How do I let go? What, exactly, must I let go of?)
I find myself turning slowly on a very large dime. Since those hideous lockdowns were disgorged over the planet, whereupon the rancid virtue signalling of the political and media classes leapt from unseemly to soul-gouging garish, my prior letting go has become a renewed clinging on to something I cannot quite identify. It seems to be something that thrives in the tension between potency and impotence, something utopian. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, they say. But so too is the road to Heaven. Perhaps they are the same road.
(Perhaps I seem hopelessly self obsessed. But my intuition says what’s happening to me is happening to us all. It’s just particularly loud in my mind.)
Everything is changing, and fast. The geopolitical world realigns as the West’s breakdown accelerates. Old ideas of what good governance is are forced into a corner by rapidly advancing technologies. People of every stripe cast about desperately for solid meaning while opening their hearts to alternative explanations and understandings of authority and power. For me personally, these changes feed a deep reassessment of how I perceive reality, an evolution I have been tracking here in fits and starts. But I sense this phase will soon end for me, and I will fall silent again. These paragraphs are an expression of this premonition.
What could it mean that we exist in a “virtual reality”, as some argue? To me it used to suggest, in part, that earthly existence is somewhat bubbled off, as if in a dome, that it could be, for example, rewound at grave need to an earlier time, restarted some months before we fluffed an inflection point, you know, to give us a second chance. It meant I needn’t reincarnate to participate in Earth’s fast-track karmic purging. I could take it easy for a century or two and incarnate whenever Soul That I Am deemed the potential benefit worth the risk. Many musings of this nature.
I don’t see/feel it that way any more. Coming in more strongly now, in line with my weakly evolving ability to see no enemies Out There amongst The Great They, is a sense that earthly existence is like all evolution: part willed, part organic, mostly organic. It is a little like conspiring: We all do it, but however fervently we will and however diligently we lay our plans, life wills otherwise. Life’s plans undo us all in the end. It’s the whole point.
I’m arguing God is subject to this like we are, albeit on a far vaster scale. God, All That Is, includes that which is His own undoing, what the Old Testament draws to our attention as the seventh part; that which can only escape control. It is healthier, or wiser, or more loving, to honour the seventh part than to fight it, to demonise it, to see it as an unwanted, separate evil. But how we respond to it is always our choice.
Perhaps earthly existence, then, is an emergence from consciousness as a tree emerges into a forest from a forest, nothing like a different realm on the other side of a separating dome. Of consciousness necessarily, earthly existence is far more intricately entangled throughout us as soul than we, as humans, can imagine. It cannot be excised, rewound, or ‘perfected’. We are entangled in each other under the soil, just as roots, decaying leaves, insects, and mycelium networks are. All of it together is what soil is.
Where does tree end and soil begin? Just like you cannot step outside nature, so you cannot step outside the soil of this metaphor to act from a wholly outside place on ‘the tree’ in some unaffected way.
I have said too many times to remember: As you do unto Other, so you do unto Self. How is it that we can be blind even to the very things we say? “None is so blind as he who will not see.”
Our capacity, as I paint it above, determines what we can see. The more you become a home for love, the more you see. Hurt attenuates us, if we allow it. The ‘wrongs’ of the world bore shrilly and noxiously into me as hurt. I tighten, become blinder than moments ago. This repeated over and over again in multiple stabbings, my hands wrapped around the dagger’s hilt. I suspect this pattern moulds us all, individually and severally. And while there is no meaningful or lasting blame in any of this, it is our responsibility as ‘individuals’ to grow our capacity to give love a home in what we are as best we can. Should we so choose.
Evolution is not circular, it spirals. What marks its progress – if we want to call it that – is our capacity to manage the very worst of what we do to each other, with love, wisdom and health. It is as simple as that, but so easy to forget when we are in pain. In pain, love is often the very last thing we want to hear; it requires forgiveness and letting go. In pain, we can easily turn our back on God. Doing so is a sad but powerful act.
I have been shouting this: Humanity is handling its ever increasing complexity badly. Power/governance systems draw low-wisdom types (let’s say narcissistic/sociopathic/psychopathic) to the ‘top’; they are attracted by power and better able to handle the pressure. Being about the power governance systems feel they need to enforce the management processes they deem necessary on a necessarily clueless (specialisation) and recalcitrant population (becoming global because technology), governance systems corrupt over time. This clusterfudge is the systemic antithesis of authority. It is Lord Acton’s Dictum of power corrupting in a compounding manner, with those at the nominal top (‘elites’) very likely to be exactly what is not needed to sort things out. Add endemic scarcity to the mix because money as measure of value requires scarcity. Add in self-hypnotising propaganda and consequent and compounding inter-group enmity and suspicion. Add in materialism as cynicism, which is a kind of soul-pain, which attenuates our capacity to love, to become wise, to become mindful, and…
…You get today’s world.
Which is exactly as it should be. We have guided ourselves here, into the exact situation that is the perfect constellation of challenges for what we are. Our world is exactly what we need. And this includes the terrible horrors of war, the hatred, the rage and despair, the cruelty and injustice.
Science in the sense of narrowly dogmatic materialism is not the way through. Wisdom, love and health as new guiding principles are the way through; they accommodate science as open-minded skepticism, as noble humility.
Human nature is, I argue, as susceptible to this mysterious trinity of wisdom<->love<->health as it is to cynicism and the sort of perma-competition and perma-enmity it has been singing to itself these last few millennia. Seeing as it has indeed been millennia, and seeing as decisions are compounding-entangling investments in the future, humanity’s current predicament, especially in a West that has been ascendant for about 500 years, represents an almighty challenge.
Health will out one way or the other. To then one day decay into its next crisis, one way or the other. This is how reality grows richer. Accepting this makes it easier to bear, and, more importantly, impossibly beautiful.
