My profession, should you ask, is that of a life poet. You may not imagine what that is. The first thing a lifelong poet of humane living learns, takes a long, long time both in and out of schools. It concerns how language and mind work. Degrees are a matter of other people’s opinion. Either language works the mind or the mind works language. Poetry composition requires fluid interplay between both modes watching each other.
I see many people as puppets to the unconscious rhetoric of ill-grasped speech or badly managed languages. English is not a singular thing but many. Learning how to talk has been too much for some folks. They didn’t get all the way there because they have been governed by interests more partial than whole, more egocentric than socio-centric or humanely directed. They did not become viable specimens. Overly narrow experience, even with advanced education, left them short of human fullness. Each of them has immense suffering yet to experience, and being incomplete as they are, they will drag others into that suffering. Meaningful conversation can scarcely be accomplished with socio-semantic puppets. They answer only to their strings. We encounter them daily.
It has been explained many times and is worth repeating here, that the essential core of every religion is spirituality. Religion without spirituality is foolish mummery and often dangerous. In every religious body, the spiritual essence gets lost or overshadowed in many followers by the accidental features of that religion. Dogmas, unexplained ritual practices, rote pronouncements and external features such as interior arrangements and altar customs become elevated over humanity. People are subordinated to non-essential matters and the spiritual core is neglected. (Cf. my blogposts 52, 84, 118, 150, 166 & 171.]
Thus, in Christianity, Jesuarian wisdom falls beneath Paulist inventions, apologetics and indoctrination. Poorly understood spiritual needs, human needs, keep breaking through rigid crusts, often in nonsensical ways resulting in schism and multiplication of sects. As in Judaism, the same history of disagreement and division gone still further awry in Islamic societies, split into at least five, major movements, some highly bigoted and antagonistic to the others. These three “Book Religions” have been characterized by war and unrest as much as by peace and love amidst followings. The Near and Middle East are human nightmares of hatred and bloodshed directed as much inward as outward, toward western nations.
The path to human fullness and humane fulfillment is a spiritual path. It has been noted many times, that spirituality does not follow necessarily from religion, but accidentally. The path must engage with many walks of life and the people upon them. It is not to be found in a hermits cell high on a mountain-top, except rarely by accidental discovery. One falls into the metal of self beyond the faces and edge of one’s mental “coin.” Then, one remembers and knows there is something beyond all one’s illusions and more basic than what he had thought was real. This is from where the better sorts of literature rise.
Most of what passes for political thought that results in divisive discourse rises from the edge and faces of illusory experience, coined as real in con-games, public or private. It holds true that silence is golden in goodness but painfully slow in transaction. Sadly, silence also can have unintended, unforeseen consequences. As the old Commander-in-Chief of the Czar’s army mumbled in Tolstoy’’s War And Peace, “Ripeness is all.” One makes all sorts of plans, but must watch and wait for the spirit of one’s army to rise toward its crushing blow upon the enemy’s weak moment. So must it be for democracy. The people’s spirits must rise, and they will, to strike down the sharp edge and paper faces backed by no metal at all, when the coinage of sub-one percent illusion will vanish and justice rebalance the world, reversing the 18th Century sequestration of the English commons by the newly arisen, industrial-commercial bourgeoisie, whose interests infected gentry and nobility with greed. Or financial failures in the aristocracy infected the productive middle class with rapacious need for gain at any cost. These were abject failures of humanity. Failed humans are rampant around us. We need not join the mad dancers running toward common ruin.
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