The way we live exists apart from us, but it does not exist unless we live it. We always inhabit a story that others have shaped, but we also always participate in the shaping. Great poets have come before us, but we can still be the poets of individual lives. The gods are above us, but they need us to protect them from hunger.
When we have forgotten the latter portion of these paradoxes, when the way we live closes in around us, feeling like a web woven by strangers, a deadening pattern and not an enlivening one, then if we are lucky, the Monkey of the Mind will begin his mischievous chatter to wake us from our torpor. For those who are particularly thickheaded he will…show them how taking the code too seriously leads them again and again into a kind of self-torture.
…When we have forgotten that we participate in the shaping of this world and become enslaved to shaping left us by the dead, then a cunning artus-worker may appear, sometimes erasing the old boundaries so fully that only no-way remains and creation must start as if from scratch, and sometimes just loosening up the old divisions, greasing the joints so they may shift in respect to one another, or opening them so commerce will spring up where “the rules” forbid it…The Monkey of the Mind knows that human beings had a hand in articulating the world they inhabit and so knows that human beings can remake it when they need to. To wake that Monkey is to wake the possibility of playing with the joints of creation, the possibility of art.
– Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde
It seems that the level of contingency only increases as life progresses.
Somehow this all relates to Integration Research. It seems like the only people who get it are busy with their own entrepreneurial efforts. Those without visions of their own cannot find enough of the Monkey to accept our faith, as it were…and those who do have their own denomination already etc…
Sunday I wrote mostly to myself, i didn’t take the bread and wine…i need to get in the ring with god, not sit at the table with her/him/it.
As this prayer has yet to be answered, instead we explore others who have gone on before us, surviving in this spiritual world that disallows our attempts to ignore its contingencies and incongruencies.
…It seems that the struggle to journey along a path that ‘thinks’ and ‘sees’ is not just linked or similar to a ‘spiritual’ path, or the Gospels, or wisdom literature, or historical struggles for justice, freedom, and equality, it is as one with them as lovers locked in the sweaty, smelly bonds of intercourse.
…Wrecks Art Exhibit: Trickster Makes This World and the role of art in a spiritual life
It seems like we’re all in our own little echo chambers, mostly opaque shimmering spheres encircling us with their blissful ignorance. Above us are the vines hanging down (devine threads perhaps?) from a higher level and the Monkey(ies) swing, penetrating our chambers like in a sci-fi movie, anomolies in the Matrix. First shock at their appearance at the edge of our understanding, then puzzled observation as they make their way through our headspace, then just as we’re getting used to their idea they swing through the other side, out of sight.