Lens of an Elder

As I age and quieten, I see less and less need or desire for the filters provided (usually, but by no means always with good intent) by -isms, tribes, and thinkers that have come before me. Indeed, I increasingly see them as getting in the way of my having my own  full, face to face encounter with life.

I am an elder now. I have studied a lot of lineages in my time. That has been good, brought great value, in its time, in its way.

But I no longer need to know what the Buddhist view of circumstances might be, or what the Lakota labels as “holy.” I do not need or want elders who are well my senior to give me a “Jung-ian” take on, well, anything. Why are they still, after decades and decades on the planet themselves, still wearing Carl’s glasses? Why not just see for themselves? I doubt Carl wanted us to stop thinking for ourselves and just keep repeating his words. And for whatever reason, while most therapists do not name a name and tell you they are a devotee of that person, Jungians are different. They almost always want you to know they are Jungians. That tells me “my framework for working with people does not come from my own organic experience, but from some other guy, whose experience I am going to use to guide how I work with you.” Interesting.

I wonder too about Steiner and Waldorf, Jesus and so-called “Christianity.” Surely they did not intend for us to stop developing our OWN thinking and dedicate our professional lives to some variation of “what he said.”

You may have forgotten that Hesse’s Siddhartha met the Buddha on his journeys, and admired him tremendously. But he realized that Buddha’s light shone so bright precisely because it WAS the Buddha’s light, born of his own personal experiences and his own thoughts about them. Siddhartha did not want to try to adopt Buddha’s point of view, but like Buddha, cultivate his own. So while his friend Govinda switched camps to follow the Buddha, Siddhartha kept on moving to follow Siddhartha.

One Step Removed

What is lost when, rather than having one’s own close up and relatively unfiltered, intimate encounter with life, one instead pulls out a template from somebody else’s experience, and says “I will see it through the Existentialist’s lens” or “What would Johnny Cash do?”, or “Let me take a Rogerian perspective.” I would suggest a lot is lost.

Picasso did not want you to take a Cubist perspective, nor did Seurat want you to practice Pointilism. I think the point was “Take/Make your OWN perspective.” How many of us tried to write like ee cummings when we were 17? How did that work out for you? We once swung at wiffle balls from a Jeff Bagwell batting stance, which Jeff himself would have STRONGLY discouraged, oddball as it was.

Moving Forward

There’s not much time left.

I am here. The world is right here, too.

I no longer want or need an intermediary to presume to tell me what I am seeing, what means what, or to apply their favorite filter over my experiences here in my life. I can reach out and touch life myself. Please, “Practicing Buddhist”, no need to tell me one more time that “All is suffering.” If that is true for me, I will figure it out, and if it is not true for me (as it seems not to be), I will be all the merrier.

More Metaphors

I don’t need or want to see the game from the glassed-in pressbox. I want to be on the field.  I don’t need or want you to walk me through Beat Literature, or Eliot’s Wasteland with your notes from your long ago professor in your once-upon-a-time graduate studies. At this point in life, I realize what I want is to read Kerouac and Prufrock myself, and have my own experience. But genuinely, thanks for the generous offer. It is just not what I want or need anymore.

I also do not need or want to appropriate some White person’s already-at-least-once-appropriated Native ceremonies to inform my relationship to nature. Nature is equally available to me, and I can go have an experience and see what comes up, and what is inspired, and if I am drawn to create a ceremony–that’s cool…

I can make up my own prayers, my own personal views on the end of life in this body, my own story about where the universe came from. Other tribes and -isms have lovely and poetic versions that hold meaning for them, and that is wonderful, but they are not my own experience, not my versions. They are not less than mine, but what I realize as an older man is that neither are they any greater than mine.

Disintermediation

A woman named Connie Buffalo introduced me to the term “disintermediation.” It was an eye-opener. In my Catholic upbringing, you could not talk to the Creator about your “sins” and how you felt about them. The message was loud and clear—the Priest has God’s private cell phone number, and you do not. If you want to talk to God, you have to go through the Priest. He (always He) is the necessary intermediary.

You used to have to rely on the physician, because you had no access to information about your potentially torn rotator cuff. They told you that you do not have any direct “Way of Knowing” anything—somebody else is closer to the Truth, and you have to go through them.

But then Google. Boom. Game over.

Connie Buffalo told us that, increasingly,  people are not buying that arrangement any more. They want to fire the Intermediary. They want to talk directly to God, to the boss, to nature. They want a direct experience of James Joyce, Magritte, Dave Brubeck, or Pink Floyd. They do not want to be told how to experience them, understand them, what emotions to feel, what intellectual or cultural template to put over the art in order to understand it “correctly.”

Dis-Intermediation. Lovingly fire the interpreter. Let me touch it, feel it, hear it, be confused by it, be awed by it in the way I am organically and unpredictably awed by it. That experience is mine, not one I bought on Amazon. Not one I picked up in a weekend class with some Curandera, whose experience could not be further from mine if we tried.

Some Final Notes

Especially in a place like Santa Fe, I see a lot of people vying to put THEIR template or filter forth in hopes of gaining subscribers to their point of view. Natural Awakenings is a testimonial to this. There’s money in it. And Control. It’s not ONLY about money and control, but it would be quite naïve to not consider this aspect of what we are talking about here.

I see a lot of people willing to suspend their own experience and adopt that of the Guru, Native, Shaman, Therapist, School, “Healer” and so on. Euro/White people, disillusioned by, and/or ignorant of their own lineage, seem especially susceptible to this. You’ve seen it, of course. Cultural appropriation does not have to be an evil thing—it can just be a person’s inability or unwillingness to have their own experience of the phenomenological circus that is life. Perhaps the early filters they were given turned out to be not very interesting, or satisfying, or inspiring, and they want to try on the perspective of somebody or some group that seems more exotic, more colorful, more in touch. I get that. One hopes that is a developmental stage, and not a destination.

The -Isms and Tribes and Schools are happy to tell you how to think, what to believe, what to feel, what rituals to perform, what prayers to say, what gods to honor, which mountains are holy, which clothes to wear, what phrases to use (“Aho”), and how to move about in the world. That’s what dogma does. It is not dogma’s fault if we decide to stop experiencing for ourselves and adopt their point of view.

But this kind of thing keeps us one step (at least) removed from our own direct experience of the world—we are distanced from our responsibility to have our own take, think our own thoughts, feel our own feelings, cultivate our own aesthetics. It IS easier. I do not have to think so much, or be lost–I just do what you tell me to do.

Simon says…Hang a feather in your car. Or “Become a Pipe-Carrier.” Or say to your client “If you DID know the answer, what would it be?”

My Point

My point is that perhaps why we are here on the planet is to have our own experience, make our own sense, or be baffled in our own idiosyncratic way, by life.

Howl at our own moon.

Boom our own Shacka-Lacka.

The Final Invitation

I see this as my challenge, as an invitation to me as an Elder. “You have a few minutes left—you feel like seeing it clean, yourself, no filters, no Cliffs Notes, no “expert” guiding your senses or your cognitive or emotional experience?”

Yes, please. I think I would like to try that… I may miss some stuff, but the experience will be mine…

And finally, I would recommend you disregard everything I have said and go collect your own thoughts on these matters…

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