Out to Sea
Dear August,
I received a very large dose of the New Age philosophy about six years back.
Even though I walked out of there perplexed and licking my wounds, it was a much needed learning experience. There really isn’t any change, transcending or transformation that takes place. Somehow this peace-enchanting new-age mind-trance gives the illusion of arriving at our true destiny and no further work is needed. All is sweet and lovely as everyone is walking around with NOW written on their foreheads. Man’s true innate spiritual evolutionary journey has detoured from “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies” to a jolly grain of wheat that is peacefully existing in the NOW. The ego has made peace with itself. The chameleon even has tricked itself into believing its illusion. I’d appreciate any comments you might have. Thanks so much.
Mark
Dear Mark,
I’ve been a voice crying in the wilderness all my life, sailing like Ulysses between the Scylla of fundamentalism and the Charybdis of the New Age, and I’ve been attacked plenty for my trouble by both.
So much of what I loosely tie up in a bow called New Age Spirituality is appealing precisely because it is regressive and anti-intellectual. The problem, according to the New Agers, is that we are all tied up in knots thinking about things. We are not living in the NOW. Instead we are anxiously THINKING about the future and the past. We are divided against ourselves: wracked with self-doubt and second-guessing. We don’t live with passion and conviction because the bite of conscience is forever questioning our motives and our sense of certainty. We are torn in a million directions and into a million pieces by self-analysis. Oh how wonderful is the Siren Song of the New Age. Just “get in touch with our feelings,” find our “inner child,” relax, and “go with the flow.” So we line up for the latest mantra or technique promising to “quiet the mind” and “get us out of our heads.”
However, there is all the difference in the world between going BEYOND thinking through self -transcendence and REGRESSING to some infantile state. As Richard Rose, my first teacher liked to say: “It takes an immense amount of thinking to transcend thinking.”
Besides, regression doesn’t work. We can’t get back to the Garden. We can’t climb back into the womb. Millions of drug addicts and alcoholics have shown us the folly of trying to get rid of our selfish sense of self by temporarily “quieting the mind.” The mind comes back with a vengeance and bites down ever harder with guilt and self-loathing.
Instead, we MUST go FORWARD and rediscover the garden. As T.S. Eliot put it in his Four Quartets:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
The intellect has a critical role to play. Most of us don’t want to hear this because thinking is such hard work and authentic thinking is so often painful. Yet, only the intellect can discern SEEMING from REALITY. The feelings are easily tricked. Common sense is often wrong. Intuition is skewed by fear and unconscious motivations and it must be tempered by the counterintuitive intellect. Hells bells, modern physics is a veritable rogue’s gallery of examples telling us that what SEEMS to be going on in the universe is utterly different from what is REALLY going on. Only the intellect can lead to such knowledge. The emotions and intuition say the earth is flat. Only the intellect knows it is round. Thanks for your comment.
August Turak
Dear August,
What really got me the most about your site is the direct hit to my life about avoiding, through excuses, to launch out to sea and leave behind the deceptive false comforting boundaries that I have been “stalled in.” There is this still quiet voice that keeps on speaking this same message to me over and over and over again. Your message cornered me in on all sides with no escape from this TRUTH.
I can’t express enough how much this has meant to me. You hit the bulls-eye of the target. Everything you say hits me in a very personal, intimate way. Seriously, I am profoundly moved by it all. Thank you. I needed a good kick in the rear end.
David
Dear David,
I am deeply touched and whether you and I ever meet or even speak is immaterial. I have discovered someone who “gets” what I am trying so arduously to get across. It means the world to me.
I think this short chapter from Moby Dick sums up the point you so eloquently made:
Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, new-landed mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn. When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington!
I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington.
Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing – straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
I read this for the first time when I was just a callow youth and it hit me right between the eyes. Somehow I knew I would have to metaphorically eschew the comfort of hearth and home, “crowd all sail” and head out into deep waters if I was going to find what I was looking for.
I can’t tell you how many times I went back to this tiny chapter as a source of inspiration — even though I knew that Ishmael, the narrator, was telling me that this giant of a man, Bulkington, my hero, the very man I desperately wanted to emulate, would not survive the voyage. Isn’t all beauty a mixture of agony and ecstasy?
This short chapter holds so many truths. It is a hymn to the counterintuitive nature of all that is great and good. It SEEMS like the danger for the ship lies in the heart of the gale, out in the black sea amidst the swirling winds and lashing waves. But as Ishmael points out, for a storm racked ship in distress, (and aren’t we all in distress, like Bulkington?) the ACTUAL danger lies in getting in too close to shore where the ship will be dashed on the rocks. Despite the fear and dread, the ship MUST “crowd all sail” and head into the teeth of the wind if she is going to have a chance at survival.
And, as Ishmael goes on to say, it is the same with us. He calls all the creature comforts we mistake for security the “slavish shore.” He implies that we only FEEL like we want safety when what we REALLY want is “apotheosis” or transformation. We must steel ourselves, face our fear, use our terror, go against our instincts and fight our way into the teeth of what may LOOK LIKE doom, but is actually apotheosis.
There is no getting around it. We must “crowd all sail” and run from all the easy paths being peddled on the Lee Shore. We must give up the hope that we can find a teacher or teaching that will do all the work for us. This nonsense is just the “slavish shore” that leads to human shipwrecks. Self -transcendence must be found amidst the wind and gale. This is the voyage that will bring us at long last to our birthright. Our destiny. Our apotheosis.
Take care my friend and safe sailing,
August
Rose’s Kitchen
August Turak’s voyage of personal
transformation with his first teacher, Richard Rose
Download a PDF Version of this Post
