“The struggle now and always is with the autonomy of ideas, their ability to invade the human mind, seize it and shape its formation into ideologies,” writes James Hillman in Kinds of Power.  “Do we really know what has moved into our minds—those ideas like furniture, that stand silently in the same place for decades determining every move we make in the interior habits of our thoughts and actions.  Ideas we have, and do not know we have, have us.” 

In America, the idea that power is force captures the imagination.  While in traditional British society, power was defined by subordination within an oppressive class system, America maintains that anyone can be powerful provided they have a big enough bank account or a big gun—provided they are BIG enough.  This idea is not something we arrive at individually—not something we consciously think: it is like heavy old Victorian furniture we inherited, creeping around it without seeing it anymore.  “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand,” writes W.H. Auden.  Constrained and oppressed by this heavy old furniture, many painful symptoms arise. 

Here is Hillman:  “I do not want to believe that we are essentially a people obsessed with security (and this was written in 1995, long before the age of terrorism)…nor that we are a people enslaved to consumerism; enchanted by the media, entertainment and celebrity; dependent on relationships; or that we are a narcissistic society in love with its own childhood to the utter denial of our national tragedies, unable to imagine a meaningful future.”

The deeper syndrome according to Hillman is “inertia of the spirit, a passivity that feels no vocation and shies from imaginative vision, adventurous thinking and intellectual clarification.  That we imagine ourselves today as a nation of victims attests to a vacuum in the spirit of the nation.  These are the symptoms of the soul in search of clarity.  Clarity is the essential.”

Clarity comes from seeing–but not from outside, not in the sense of outside surveillance, but not just from inside either.   The kind of seeing we need to discover a new kind of power—a power that comes from being with life instead of against it—requires that we sink deep into our lives.  This might seem a paradox, but it’s true:  to find larger ideas we must sink below our conscious ideas.  To connect with a view beyond our national obsession with the “inner child,” we to remember what was like to be a child, seeing the furniture clearly for what it was, obstacles to what we really are and can be, constraints to be surmounted, climbed over.  I remember climbing over the furniture as a child, imagining there was not furniture, just a vast forest full of gorgeous animals, and I was one with it…one with the beating heart of life.

To be continued….

There is one detail I can’t forget from that long-ago college seminar on Paradise Lost:  Fallen from heaven, Lucifer sees himself as huge and powerful…but he isn’t really.   Picture a vast and gorgeous rock star, the ultimate rebel angel towering above us all, back lit by a lake of fire, surrounded by a third of the angels in heaven.  But wait!  In the next scene, Milton pulls the rug out, backing up to show that Lucifer is really as tiny as an insect, looming large only in his own mind.

My tireless professor drove this one image—this one truth–through the fog of an adolescent depression so deep I couldn’t do much more than show up and listen (if there happens to be a Milton scholar reading this, please feel free to amend or add to this image).  

As I mentioned several blogs ago, Lucifer and Satan are not actually the same.  Lucifer is a fallen angel—he has a form.  He falls to hell because he is completely unwilling to be “subjugated” by God and his Son, unwilling to play a role in a greater whole, claiming that angels are “self-begot, self-raised.”

Lucifer dazzles, arguing against the tyranny of God, exhorting all the angels to claim their right to rule as gods.  In the end, a third of the angels fall with him. Like Lucifer, they are not the opposite of God like the ancient force of Satan, rather a split off, fallen piece of Him. They were capable of suppressing their righteousness, of turning their back on home, on wholeness.  Yet this was a torment to some of them, this longing for a wholeness they couldn’t forget because they are of that wholeness.  It is in them.

Some ideas (from the Greek root “to see”) are literally deep—they come from deep in the body.  The idea of falling and being fallen come from being in the body, and so does the idea of being part of a greater wholeness.  Certain embodied experiences remind us we are part of a larger cosmos: being alone in nature, for example.  Sometimes when we are sitting very still, the experience of breathing reminds us we tethered to a rhythm beyond our squirming, striving little selves. 

In those very still moments, we remember we don’t breathe—we are breathed. There is a reason why every tradition and way uses breath as an anchor to awakening.  At a depth we can’t touch, our minds and our bodies are unwaveringly and inescapably part of a greater whole.  In such moments, we experience the most important ideas as so obvious we can’t see them…we are like fish in water.  

Yet the impulse to be special, to make our mark—to be a self and a self who can do something, act with an independent will, not just sit there breathing—is also a deep idea, at war with the idea of wholeness.

In the Demons issue of Parabola, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy quotes William Law [in "The Spirit of Love"]: “You are under the power of no other enemy, are held in no other captivity, and want no other deliverance but from the power of your own earthly self. This is the one murderer of the divine life within you. It is your own Cain that murders your own Abel.” And [again, in "An Address to the Clergy"] “self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state…Satan, or which is the same thing, self exaltation…” If, indeed, “the kingdom of heaven is within you,” then also the “war in heaven” will be there, until Satan has been overcome…” 

It seems we are made to insist on our own desires, at least some of them.  No matter how bitter, their fruits must be tasted. 

Parabola is beginning work on the Power issue.  We are think about the power of ideas we aren’t even aware of thinking—ideas we swim in like water, ideas that float up from the depths of our own God-given forms.  Strange unthinkable questions begin to tug at us.  Might the desire to make a stand, to be special, be a reaction to a deeper fear that we are powerless, without a true vocation…without a prayer?  Might we be living in an extraordinary time, when a new way of being heroic is taking form?

In Kinds of Power, James Hillman writes:  “The legendary heroes of the ancient world—Ulysses, Aeneas, Psyche, Persephone, Orpheus, Dionysos and even Hercules—all descended into hell to learn other values than those that rule the daily business of sunlit life.  They came back with a darker eye that can see in a dark time.”

And what do we learn after such a fall?  We learn we can find ourselves by forgetting ourselves–forgetting all about personal glory and fame and achievement to be part of a shared world.  Descending into hell can show us the way to heaven, to wholeness.  Think about what you care about when the chips are down, often a whole new realm of gentle desires are revealed, to be good, to be useful, to live.

Over time, most of us ordinary mortals get initiated into the depths of life.  These moments can be a little like those dreams where you discover a secret room in the house.  We discover that under the glossy ad-like surface of life there is a secret deeper world, with qualities that are invisible to you until you need them, qualities like patience, tolerance, persistence.   In such moments you walk into the secret room and discover the real power of being alive, showing up and lending a hand or just bearing witness, even when you feel like you are too slow and too talentless and have nothing to give, especially then.  In those moments, you learn the true power of humility and kindness.   Not nearly as glamorous as Lucifer, but it ages well.

Inspired by this, I went back and dug deeper into a search I undertook a month or so ago.  Even in our own experience, there is always a deeper truth to be uncovered.

“You would run for your life,” said my daughter Alex. “You would grab a few precious objects and run.” One rare balmy day in late March, we travelled by train from London to Scotland.  The sun was glinting on the North Sea and we were imagining what it would be like to see Viking ships on the horizon–a daughter studying abroad, her life open and shining before her and a mother, freshly bereaved from the death of her father months before and the moving away of her daughter to graduate school, to a happy relationship, and to England, the country of her dreams.  My future was also open, but like a villager or a monastic scanning the horizon for sails. 

My daughter arranged the train trip, understanding Scotland is bathed in a mythic glow for me, the unseen land of my paternal ancestors.  America is a land of immigrants.  Everyone–even Native Americans whose distant ancestors walked to America across the Bering Straits–came here from somewhere else.  Most of us (maybe especially the Indians, whom European-Americans brutally displaced from their adopted lands) feel a certain loneliness, a longing to find our true home.  Many of my British and American friends are surprised but struck by this, how lonely, displaced, restlessly pining America feels.

Growing up in the suburbs of New York, my daughter used to marvel that kids she knew identified with their “Old World” roots, proudly proclaiming their Italian and Irish t shirts.  “Maybe you should where a t shirt that says ‘Other,’” said her aunt. She is made up of so many diverse strains–Scottish, English, Maltese, Polish, Danish, a dash of Dutch–she claimed she couldn’t identify with anything other than American.  Yet ever since she read Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings, Britain–and what C.S. Lewis called “Northerness,” became her true spiritual home. 

Growing up in the north of England with a Scottish mother, thoroughly separating the landscape from the characters he regularly encounters there, Alex’s boyfriend Anthony was startled to hear bagpipes leading the procession in my daughter’s college graduation.  “It’s a tradition here,” explained my sister-in-law, a professor at the college.  But why? He recognized the song, he said.  But what was it doing here? Honoring roots, I explained. He would hear a battalian of bagpipes at any police or fire fighter’s funeral in New York City, and many other grave and august events across the land.   Anthony looked bewildered.

Completely unknown to me, Scotland represented a set of essence qualities I secretly aspired to possess.  “Any captain in any army is glad to have a farm boy as a soldier,” my father told me.  “A farm boy knows how to do practical things, build a shelter, hunt, find true north.”     The Scots I am descended from tilled the rocky fields of early America, sailed ships up the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes, fought in the American Revolution.  Secretly, I long to be like them, hearty and brave and capable of enduring great hardships. My own father was much more realistic about what they were probably really like, roaring with laughter to think they landed in America before the Revolution, free white men with a vast continent before them, and a special stubborn talent for staying poor.

“Actually, you’re part oppressed and part oppressor,” said my daughter, looking out the train window at the North Sea.  Edinburgh, our destination, parallels Denmark, the homeland of both my mother’s parents.  My mother’s mother’s family can be traced back Danish lord who established a vast estate in the 11^th Century.  When I first learned this, inheriting a leather-bound family history on my mother’s death, every excitable Amercan cell in my body danced: here were roots!

“That lord was definitely a Viking,” said Alex, who is England studying medieval history and literature, reminded me.  “In  that period in Denmark that was how you amassed a large estate.”  I tried referring to myself as “Tracy the Terrible” and to her as “Alex the Awful,” but Alex cautioned me that Viking raids were no joke to my Scottish, Welsh, and English ancestors.  

All humans carry the DNA of ancestors  who travelled a long way from where they started, who were pushed from their lands by force or by scarcity or yearning for something they couldn’t find, all humans are made up of oppressor and oppressed.  I thought of this while standing in a checkout line in tourist shop in the old part of Edinburgh, buying a little booklet about the Cochrane clan.  “Well, hello Mrs. Cochrane!” said the hail man behind the counter. I realized he probably greeted New World tourists like this all day long.  Alex flipped through the booklet and quickly discovered the Cochrane Clan (my grandfather dropped the “e”) was founded by a Norseman.  “Congratulations, you’re Viking on both sides,” she said.  And guess what?  An early member of your supposed clan invented an early weapon of mass destruction, nerve gas, and also the smoke screen.

The next day, Alex and I climbed to the top of Arthur’s Seat, the main peak in a group of hills surrounding Edinburgh, so named because it is claimed to be the location of King Arthur’s Round Table (not likely, according to Alex). “Do you feel anything?”  Alex asked as we climbed, and I told her I did.  At first, I felt a pang of loss.  I wouldn’t be telling my father about this trip.  My father was gone and my mother was gone, and my daughter had grown up and gone off on her own quest to a distant land.

Alex and I discovered there is a steep way up to Arthur’s Seat and an easier, pastoral way, following winding lanes.  Accidently, I chose the more arduous climb. “This perfectly describes the difference between our lives, said Alex as we trudged along, using our hands to climb at times.  Some people just have to learn things the hard way.   Yet I felt my heart lift as we climbed. My attention opened to receive–not just the craggy, spectacular beauty around us but also the experience of being in a body, alive on the earth.  

At the summit, Alex and I sat and listened to wind and the human sound of the climbers all around us (“What a view!” “It would be much more dramatic if you fell off,” said a boy with an unmistakable American accent).  As I sat with my daughter, I had the sense of taking off armor, putting down my burdens, ending a quest.  This is what I really wanted,I realized, not some new and deeper identity, not some Scottish feeling or Viking feeling but a  chance to go beyond all my memories and imaginings and conceptions, to take a seat. 

Alex explained that if there was any truth in the legend of Arthur, he wasn’t a knight in shining armor or a king in a grand castle, but a much earlier kind of warrior chief, living a life that was much more simple and elemental.  I sat and listened, my grief and longing stilled. I pictured Arthur sitting quietly, rooted in the experience of his own body, open to the elements, sensing a connection to something deep and essential.

Sunday, July 21, 2013 from 10 am – 5 pm.

“There is just one contribution which every one of us can make,” writes Dorthea Brande in Becoming a Writer. “We can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us.”

The Buddha left the known for the unknown, striking out on his own to find a path to awakening, to a deeper and larger sense of what it means to be human. Everyone must walk their own path, yet we can support each other on the way.  Join us as we create a safe community, pooling our diverse experiences, exploring together how we can gain confidence, reach further, go deeper, moving past fear to find the buried treasure of truth in our own lives.

No previous writing experience (and no reading out loud) is required.  This workshop will include many new exercises, so previous participants and experienced writers are very welcome.

For more information on how to attend, please visit the New York Insight Meditation Center website.

 ‘We are lived by powers we pretend to understand,’” writes W.H. Auden.

Do you remember when you realized a particular idea was a power, when an inkling become a new perspective, a door swinging open or inward, revealing a reality you never knew existed?  As I shared in this blog last time, the Greek word for “idea” is eidos, from idein, “to see,” and is related to a noun meaning two things: a) something seen like a form and b) a way of seeing like a perspective.  Our minds are formed by ideas and we see by means of them.      

In recent years, the discovery of mirror neurons reveals that the brain literally is formed by what we see.  When I was in school we were told our brains stopped growing at a certain improbably young age, that by fifteen, sixteen, eighteen or twenty-one we had the final number of brain cells that we would ever have.  Sixteen, seventeen years old, I received this idea being as a grave and scary warning in high school “health” class and also in biology class.  Unlike the rest of the body, brain cells lacked the power of regeneration—they could only be destroyed. 

This always struck me as inexplicable and cruel, if the rest of the body could heal after an injury, even grow stronger in the broken places, why not the brain?  How and why was the head subject to different laws than the body?  I received no satisfactory answer from my teachers (earlier in this blog, I mentioned a kerfuffle in the same biology class, involving the asking of difficult questions). 

It was unfair and cruel beyond the particular cruelty of injury.  How could we be finished so soon, finalized, frozen and incapable of growth and recreation before we knew anything of life? How and why would we be doomed to be diminished by the experiments with beer and marijuana and random psychedelics that were adolescent rites of passage in the 1970’s?   Yet certain and irredeemable destruction of brain cells was presented in a fire and brimstone way: one sip, one toke, even one night without sleep and we were less than we were. 

How could the fate of the adult be trusted to the child?  I remember looking out a classroom window at an icy winter sky, picturing my poor benighted young brain trudging down into the sad grey hell of self-inflicted stupidity.  It was challenging enough to be raised Protestant in a Northern New York,  where even in a religiously tepid family there was the shadow of predetermination, the sense of being doomed for no good reason, now here was biological doom. 

I remember one line of an unfinished adolescent sonnet I wrote back then:  “The sky is like the icy eyes of liars.”  With every doomed and finite cell, I rebelled against the idea that any of us doomed before we started—or even really finished.   There was a secret shaman in me who sensed the way out of hell might be through it—or at least through the body.  Definitely, in high school I was influenced by the counter-culture, and a group of high school friends and I did our best to recreate it.  But the shaman came from childhood.

As a child, I knew we need the body to know truth, knew the real truth cannot be thought, sterilized and sealed away from life in the hermetic chamber of the head.  I sensed the truth must be lived, to know it we must enter the wild territory of the body. 

In high school, in my own private counter culture, I remembered being eight or nine, padding around the living room with my imaginary black panther Striker in the living room in the depths of winter.   I remember the pleasure of the game was deepened by a sense of contrast—how good it was to be warm after playing outside in the snow, how wonderful it was to move freely on bare feet after being encumbered by a bulky snowsuit and boots.  How nice it was to be indoors and away from the boys next door, careless creatures who smashed snow tunnels that took hours of labor, who put snow down innocent people’s backs.   I remembered being alone but not lonely.  Somehow, in a child’s way, I sensed the enormity of life. I was a solitary pilgrim on a quest that none of the adults around me seemed to be able to see or sense.   Without being able to comprehend it in thought, decades before the reports came in from neuroscience, I skirted a new and ancient idea:  we are not closed and finished but open to the whole of creation.  Our minds and our hearts and bodies can change form, can grow and become more flexible.  We are made to live in relation.

“To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness.  Human beings came out of that wholeness.”

–Gary Snyder

We come from wilderness historically and as children.  Spring reminds me childhood.  As trite and obvious as that statement can seem, it points to something important and not-at-all obvious.   The gorgeous leafing and blooming and greening now happening in the greater New York area, the scent of fresh cut grass and lilacs, can literally take us back—back in time, back inside ourselves to the wild pure joy of being in a body, part of a vast and mysterious living world. 

Up until I was about 10 years old, I loved being a wild, indigenous child.  I remember running around the big backyard in bare feet (no deer ticks), loving the cool touch of the grass, the soft thud of my feet on the earth.     

“Ancient thought could not even conceive of the individual’s soul life apart from the soul of the world,” writes James Hillman.  Children are more soulful than many adults in the sense of living closer to the body, knowing the visible body is just the tip of the ice berg, sensing their connection to the soul of the world.

I remember climbing the Butternut tree in the backyard, loving its smooth cool bark, knowing every limb by heart, hanging by my knees from a low limb, then somersaulting around backwards and dropping to the ground.  I loved feeling being in a body, living entirely from the inside out (not caring what I looked like or what impact I had).  I was limited but I didn’t feel limited.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.  Thinking like a child included imagining I was a jungle princess in a primordial forest in ancient India, traveling everywhere with a sleek, deadly, preternaturally intelligent black panther named Striker.   Sometimes Striker padding along beside me, telepathically updating me about lurking dangers, and sometimes there was no separation between Striker and me.  I was not a little girl in a backyard in Northern New York.  Sometimes, I was a panther.

In the spring and summer, all the kids in the neighborhood would play this long shapeless game we called Ghost in the Graveyard.  This is a variant on a game I think all kids or most kids play, Werewolf, Vampire, or today, possibly, “Zombie Apocalypse.”   We would take turns being ghosts or various kinds of unnatural creatures, agents of Satan, chasing one another shrieking and growling all over the neighborhood until it was dark and our mothers called us in.  It was a game about the thrill of being alive, of being healthy little animals.  But the game was also about a vaster, darker drama.  We children knew there are fates worse than death.

 Sometimes the game involved guerilla warfare and Striker was called in as a secret weapon.  When I told people Striker was present among the shrieks increased because although he was basically good and very intelligent, you could never really tame an invisible panther, only I was safe being his mother.   When I said Striker was attacking a kid, they were dead and they knew it.  I never thought of this as having an unfair advantage, because my cause felt so pressing and so just.    My cause was to serve a greater cause.  A striker is an attacker but also the clapper in a bell.  Welling up from an unconscious depth, there was this wish to resonate like a bell.

The game was a way of playing with the energies and capacities we sensed in our wild child bodies.  We could be fierce, sleek, swift, savage, animal. With Striker beside me, I stood up to the forces of darkness, fighting fire with fire.  Later in life I realized that having an imaginary black panther is a little like wearing a black leather jacket, which I did in my twenties.  Striker was a crucial accessory, covering up a secret longing to be good, to live in accord with a greater wholeness.  

When I was a child I spoke (spake) as a child, I understood as a child, I thought like a child.  I thought I was alone in my great quest, and this is important for a child.  I remember lying enclosed in a ring of lilac bushes in my backyard, experiencing the kind of fertile solitude that Rilke said was necessary to be an artist– “to be as solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grown-ups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing.”

Rilke pointed out that children see how grim and shabby most adult doings really are.  Children see that most adults are disconnected from their bodies, from the true vast potential of the body that connects us to the whole.  They sense we need the body to know truth, because the truth cannot be thought—it must be lived.   But children understand like children.  When I was a child, I sensed I was powerful but I didn’t know how powerful—in the sense that I didn’t know in what way I might be powerful, that true power comes from the Whole, from learning to allow ourselves to be like bells, to resonate with impressions, to be struck by life.

In time I put away Striker and other childish things.  I searched for and found ways and ideas beyond my childish understanding.  “’The Greek word for ‘idea,’ eidos, comes from idein, ‘to see,’ and is related to the noun, which means two things: a) something seen like a form and b) a way of seeing like a perspective,” writes James Hillman.  “We both see ideas and see by means of them.”  The strange thing is, at least it strikes me as strange right now, the greatest of the greatest of the ideas I encountered, the greatest ways of seeing– Love God and Love Your Neighbor as God, the Eight-fold Path–  drew on what I sensed as a child: the Truth cannot be thought, it must be lived in the body. 

“Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”   In Paradise Lost, Milton gives Lucifer great lines.  But after all, he is the most beautiful and brilliant of all the angels—in Hebrew his name means “to shine” or “to bear light;” in Latin it means “morning star.” 

One January in college, I elected to read Paradise Lost (yes, as an elective course).  As snow and cold blanketed the campus, a thick, wintery depression descended on me.  I discovered I couldn’t read the epic in any analytical literary way, just picture some of it, feel the consequence of it, the possibility of doom.  Lucifer was like the glamorous college roommate off drinking wine in sunny Italy, challenging my puritanical belief in the power of hard work and good intentions, seemingly revealing that being gorgeous and having a fabulous life had more to do with a sense of personal entitlement than with any boring old objective truth—who could say what that was anyway?  

Lucifer was bursting with pride and vanity, just like my rich roommate.  But he was also heroic, struggling to overcome his doubts and weaknesses to wage revolution against what he presents as the tyranny of God.  Milton draws us to him, making evil seem attractive (at least at first).  Lucifer s just so damned bold and confident, more dazzling than the coolest person you ever met, completely unafraid of being damned eternally. 

Milton’s great epic poem has two narrative arcs (and thank you to Wiki for the help): the journey of Lucifer and the comparatively plodding progress of Adam and Eve.  It begins after Lucifer and other rebel angels have been defeated and banished to Hell (Milton also uses the term for Hell used in the Greek myths, Tartarus).  Employing dazzling rhetorical skill to rally his troops, Lucifer  personally volunteers to poison the newly-created Earth and God’s new creation, Mankind.  He braves great dangers alone, arduously traversing the Chaos outside Hell to enter God’s new material World, and later the Garden of Eden—his journey has been compared to Odysseus or Aeneas.

At several points in the poem, a great Angelic War over Heaven is recounted from different perspectives. The battles between the faithful angels and Lucifer’s forces take place over three days. The final battle involves the Son of God single-handedly defeating the entire legion of angelic rebels and banishing them from Heaven. Following the purging of Heaven, God creates the World, culminating in his creation of Adam and Eve.  The rest, as they say, is history. God gave Adam and Eve total freedom, but one explicit command: do not eat from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  They will meet Lucifer again in the Garden of Good and Evil, this time as Satan.

Here is my chance to clear up a common misconception: Lucifer and Satan are not actually the same.  Lucifer is a fallen angel—he has a form.  He falls to hell because he is completely unwilling to be subjugated by God and his Son, claiming that angels are “self-begot, self-raised.” Lucifer is dazzling, charismatic, able to rally other angels, arguing that God rules as a tyrant and that all the angels ought to rule as gods.  Lucifer is pure ego, but not the opposite of God, rather a split off, fallen piece of Him.

Satan is a spirit of evil that has lived in the world for thousands of years.  He promises that one day he will make himself visible.  He will be the Beast but proclaim himself God.  He is the opposing resistance to God, the murderer and “father of lies” from the beginning.  Lucifer was perfect until he succumbed…to Satan.

There are certain truths that take a long, long time to unfold—the length of a book, decades of life.  Lucifer was cool, gorgeous, like a rock star or your rich and decadent college roommate. How can the seemingly humble Son of God—or even the admittedly human Buddha compete with such glamour and charisma?  Buddha grew old and sick, according to the legend he was poisoned, in what sense did overcome death and suffering—the tyranny of creation?  

This is how: Lucifer degenerates, becomes incoherent, confused, finally slithering off.  The spirit that is Satan has always been portrayed as a serpent, a snake, a dragon—and in the end Lucifer is completely identified with Satan.

This is the fate of addicts.  They don’t age well.  Rock stars usually don’t age well.  Entitled people don’t usually age well.  Lucifer was addicted to his own raging ego, his own pride. He wanted to be the center of his own self-begot world, to rule rather than serve as part of a greater Whole.  He waged war, volunteered to poison the Earth, proved willing to do anything to keep the domain of the self safe, to shore up his bottomless feeling of lack.  The rest, as they say, is history.   The spirit of evil took over.  Lucifer became Satan.  He wasn’t pretty and brilliant anymore.

Years later, working in the first of several Dickensian jobs in publishing, my literary agent boss gave me a ticket to a special show at the New York Public Library.  Among the first editions on display was a tiny threadbare copy of Paradise Lost.  Blind and about 60 years old when it was published, Milton made a whopped twelve British pounds on it in his life time (maybe twenty-four, I forget), but very little money.  He hoped for a few but fit readers.  I was not among them.

Still, a few ideas seeped through the thick cold fog of my depression:  better to serve than reign in the hellish kingdom of your own ego…to know the true self, forget the self.  

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,” writes John Milton in “Paradise Lost.”

Recent brain science and ancient spiritual practice reveal that the mind is wired to make heavens and hells moment after moment. We perceive and almost instantly we react, overlaying experience with a feeling tone—it is pleasant or unpleasant or neutral, worth grasping or pushing it away.  These almost instantaneous primal judgments, evaluating all our experience in relation to ourselves, almost always make little hells of our endlessly changing experience—there an aspect of imbalance or unease imbedded in almost everything that happens—the food isn’t quite hot enough or too hot. 

“Almost” is the key heaven.  There is a tiny but real open space—a space of possibility–between perception and reaction.  Noticing this open space—usually by turning the attention back to ourselves rather than to the object of our perception and (usually) our craving—brings a new possibility.  It offers a path towards heaven instead of our usual, habitual hell.  

It takes a long time to realize that the gate to a deeper, richer, higher, finer life—to paradise–swings inward.  The kingdom of heaven, the farthest reaches of cosmos, the beating heart of life, is not “out there” somewhere—it isn’t in the South of France or Asia or anywhere but here—it is right here, within the experience of each of us.  We don’t need special equipment to find it, no accelerator, no telescope, not even a better brain.  We need a new kind effort and intention–not aimed at something big (and most of us pine for sizable accomplishments and things, book deals, deeds of sale, wedding rings).  We need to aspire to something very small, to be willing to pause before we react, to be with our experience, to wait and see what arises.

This sounds like something an old rural person would do, not someone young and hip and urban. Decades ago, a wildly ambitious, glamorously urban college friend of mine jabbed a finger at me after a few cocktails:  “Do you know what your problem is?  You always hesitate. You always hesitate.”  This criticism stung deeply.  I wanted to be like my friend, wild and impulsive, a woman who went to Paris and Rome on a whim.  I wanted to be a woman of daring, a woman of action—surely taking risks attracted the notice of the gods, drew down life.  At last, however, I’ve come to see that hesitation can be daring.  The right kind of hesitation—not over thinking but the opposite, daring to unclench the fist of thought, relinquishing whatever object is in its sweaty, insistent grasp—is a way of being brave, of daring to be vulnerable.  Nobody can see what you are doing (this is the beauty of it) but for seconds at a time we can open up to the true wild, uncharted region of the present moment.   Hesitation can be generous.

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear.”

Dante gave us an incomparable masterpiece about what it can mean to be lost, to perish, and what it can mean to find paradise.  Yet it’s extraordinary to see how we can be lost in a moment, to be carried along passively, never guessing we miss as we went charging and lunging about.  Paradise is waiting.

How to enter? (He who hesitates may not be lost.)

Recently in London, my daughter and I watched talented film actor James McAvoy play the Scottish warrior king Macbeth as an extraordinary young man trapped in delusion.  Set in a grim post-apocalyptic Scotland (looking very much like the grungy East Village the 80’s, when I lived there, or many other places in the world today), the production hurtled along, showering the actors and those closest to the stage in fake blood. 

McAvoy’s lithe, muscular Macbeth charges on stage, machete in one hand, axe in the other, in rags, bloody—in the words of a Time Out London critic “he has the damaged glare of a man who has been fighting all his life.” Today, I can’t help thinking of the grainy photos of the killers at large, and about each of us watching this violent story unfolds.  With our thoughts we make our worlds.  As I write this, the police go door to door in Watertown, Massachusetts.  I think of Macbeth charging headlong towards his fate, showing us how our helpless way of imagining—not just our thinking but our instantaneous envisioning, our preconscious assumptions–create the worlds we inhabit, create hells, create us.

The critic Harold Bloom describes the terrible power of Macbeth’s imagination. “He scarcely is conscious of an ambition, desire, or wish before he sees himself on the other side or shore, already having performed the crime that equivocally fulfills ambition.”   The minute the three witches (who wear gas masks in the London production we saw) tell Macbeth he will be king, he pictures slaughter.  He doesn’t have the space inside to question the prophesy and his inner reaction to it–his fellow warrior Banquo does.  And for all his savage skill in battle, Macbeth lacks the inner confidence that allows Banquo to to bid the weird witched peak to him, “who neither beg nor fear/Your favors nor your hate.”  Macbeth is paralyzed, transfixed.

Banquo seems to have a notion of happiness based on something higher than its most primitive meaning–the ancient root of “happiness” is “hap,”as in “happenstance,” literally what happens to us.  For Banquo living a happy life means being in alignment with a higher order.  Indeed, Macbeth ultimately has him murdered because he fear Banquo’s inner freedom, his nobility of nature. 

Isn’t it interesting that this mighty man lacks confidence, lacks will?  At the start, he is terribly ambivalent—his wife goads him into committing murder.  Unlike other Shakespeare villains who delight in their wickedness, Macbeth suffers horribly from knowing that he does evil: Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murder sleep” –the innocent sleep,

Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care….”

With every horrible deed he commits, Macbeth grows less ambivalent—he grows less.  Because he is larger than life, his diminishment is truly horrible to behold. What is confidence based on?  The word breaks down to mean “with faith,” but faith in what?   

Driven by his fearful and terrible delusions, Macbeth can’t know the source of Banquo’s confidence—that maybe we are meant to participate in a greater reality—that possibly our happiness in the primitive sense of always getting what was want.   The mother root of all our delusions—the root of all evil—is the tendency to enthrone ourselves at the center of the universe.    

“Macbeth” is awe-inspiring proof that humans are not just nouns but verbs, as we think, imagine, assume, so we become.  Here is Bloom:  “So rapid and foreshortened is [the] play…that we are given no leisure to confront their descent into hell as it happens.  Something vital in us is bewildered by the evanescence of their better natures…”  Macbeth is like someone acting out of night terrors, except that he knows what he is doing, and for a time he seems to know what it is doing to him.

But in the end, he is dead inside: “I have almost forgot the taste of fears…I have supped full with horrors…”  The news that his queen is dead unleashes no wail of sorrow or regret (and he was deeply in love with this woman, he followed her to ruin!), just this chilling immortal statement of nihilism:  

 “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.  Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more.  It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.

Signifying nothing.”

McAvoy stretched out “no…thing,”  staring off into the distance, unseeing, unfeeling.   We have stunning proof that living a life with meaning requires feeling.  By the end of the play, under siege (the only state that feels familiar to him) Macbeth has become fully a robot, a killing machine, his heart drained of every last drop of humanity.   Life means nothing to him. 

Yet Shakespeare’s heroic villain ultimately achieves a terrible gravity and ferocity, a horrific majesty — many great critics have explored the depths and stature of Macbeth and his play far better than this lowly blogger.  But I know the horror is that he is no longer really alive.  I came away from the play in London—and from the news in Boston today—knowing that humanity is something that is practiced, or not, day by day.

“Watch your thoughts; they become words,” teaches Lao Tse. “Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”

  “You would run for your life,” said my daughter Alex. “You would grab a few precious objects and run.” One rare balmy day in late March, we travelled by train from London to Scotland.  The sun was glinting on the North Sea and we were imagining what it would be like to see Viking ships on the horizon–a daughter studying abroad, her life open and shining before her and a mother, freshly bereaved from the death of her father months before and the moving away of her daughter to graduate school, to a happy relationship, and to England, the country of her dreams.  My future was also open, but like a villager or a monastic scanning the horizon for sails. 

My daughter arranged the train trip, understanding Scotland is bathed in a mythic glow for me, the unseen land of my paternal ancestors.  America is a land of immigrants.  Everyone–even Native Americans whose distant ancestors walked to America across the Bering Straits–came here from somewhere else.  Most of us (maybe especially the Indians, whom European-Americans brutally displaced from their adopted lands) feel a certain loneliness, a longing to find our true home.  Many of my British and American friends are surprised but struck by this, how lonely, displaced, restlessly pining America feels.

Growing up in the suburbs of New York, my daughter used to marvel that kids she knew identified with their “Old World” roots, proudly proclaiming their Italian and Irish t shirts.  “Maybe you should where a t shirt that says ‘Other,’” said her aunt. She is made up of so many diverse strains–Scottish, English, Maltese, Polish, Danish, a dash of Dutch–she claimed she couldn’t identify with anything other than American.  Yet ever since she read Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Britain–and what C.S. Lewis called “Northerness,” became her true spiritual home. 

Growing up in the north of England with a Scottish mother, thoroughly separating the landscape from the characters he regularly encounters there, Alex’s boyfriend Anthony was startled to hear bagpipes leading the procession in my daughter’s college graduation.  “It’s a tradition here,” explained my sister-in-law, a professor at the college.  But why? He recognized the song, he said.  But what was it doing here? Honoring roots, I explained. He would hear a battalian of bagpipes at any police or fire fighter’s funeral in New York City, and many other grave and august events across the land.   Anthony looked bewildered.

Completely unknown to me, Scotland represented a set of essence qualities I secretly aspired to possess.  “Any captain in any army is glad to have a farm boy as a soldier,” my father told me.  “A farm boy knows how to do practical things, build a shelter, hunt, find true north.”     The Scots I am descended from tilled the rocky fields of early America, sailed ships up the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes, fought in the American Revolution.  Secretly, I long to be like them, hearty and brave and capable of enduring great hardships. My own father was much more realistic about what they were probably really like, roaring with laughter to think they landed in America before the Revolution, free white men with a vast continent before them, and a special stubborn talent for staying poor.

“Actually, you’re part oppressed and part oppressor,” said my daughter, looking out the train window at the North Sea.  Edinburgh, our destination, parallels Denmark, the homeland of both my mother’s parents.  My mother’s mother’s family can be traced bacy Danish lord who established a vast estate in the 11^th Century.  When I first learned this, inheriting a leather-bound family geneolgy on my mother’s death, every suspectible, excitable Amercian cell in my body danced: here were roots!

“That lord was definitely a Viking,” said Alex, who is England studying medieval history and literature, reminded me.  “In  that period in Denmark that was how you amassed a large estate.”  I tried referring to myself as “Tracy the Terrible” and to her as “Alex the Awful,” but Alex cautioned me that Viking raids were no joke to my Scottish, Welsh, and English ancestors.  

All humans carry the DNA of ancestors  who travelled a long way from where they started, who were pushed from their lands by force or by scarcity or yearning for something they couldn’t find, all humans are made up of oppressor and oppressed.  I thought of this while I was standing in a check out line  in tourist shop in the old part of Edinburgh, buying a little booklet about the Cochrane clan.  “Well, hello Mrs. Cochrane!” said the hail man behind the counter. I realized he probably greeted New World tourists like this all day long.  Alex flipped through the booklet and quickly discovered the Cochrane Clan (my grandfather dropped the “e”) was founded by a Norseman.  “Congratulations, you’re Viking on both sides,” she said.  And guess what?  An early member of your supposed clan invented an early weapon of mass destruction, nerve gas, and also the smoke screen.

The next day, Alex and I climbed to the top of Arthur’s Seat, the main peak in a group of hills surrounding Edinburgh, so named because it is claimed to be the location of King Arthur’s Round Table (not likely, according to Alex). “Do you feel anything?”  Alex asked as we climbed, and I told her I did.  At first, I felt a pang of loss.  I wouldn’t be telling my father about this trip.  My father was gone and my mother was gone, and my daughter had grown up and gone off on her own quest to a distant land.

Alex and I discovered there is a steep way up to Arthur’s Seat and an easier, pastoral way, following winding lanes.  Accidently, I chose the more arduous climb. “This perfectly describes the difference between our lives, said Alex as we trudged along, using our hands to climb at times.  Some people just have to learn things the hard way.   Yet I felt my heart lift as we climbed. My attention opened to receive–not just the craggy, spectacular beauty around us but also the experience of being in a body, alive on the earth.  

At the summit, Alex and I sat and listened to wind and the human sound of the climbers all around us (“What a view!” “It would be much more dramatic if you fell off,” said a boy with an unmistakable American accent).  As I sat with my daughter, I had the sense of taking off armor, putting down my burdens, ending a quest.  This is what I really wanted,I realized, not some new and deeper identity, not some Scottish feeling or Viking feeling but a  chance to go beyond all my memories and imaginings and conceptions, to take a seat. 

Alex explained that if there was any truth in the legend of Arthur, he wasn’t a knight in shining armor or a king in a grand castle, but a much earlier kind of warrior chief, living a life that was much more simple and elemental.  I sat and listened, my grief and longing stilled. I pictured Arthur sitting quietly, open to the elements, sensing a connection to something deep and essential.