Searching for the Will of God

Buddhism states that reality is singular, never dual. Christians attest to this, sleepily, every Mass, by reciting, "I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth -." This implies one God, not duality.

But the human mind is based irrevocably on duality; it - and our language that dominates so much of thought - can conceive of nothing but the play of opposites. At best, this is delight, dance, drama, and paradox; but at worst it is doubt, anxiety, guilt. Modern man seems to have drifted more and more into the Hamlet state of suffering over duality. He hangs so often in the torture and paralysis between two opposing possibilities.

How to discern the Will of God?

I was exhausted with this split world and decided on a series of exercises. If reality (God) is singular, how can I restore that unity in my everyday life?

I settled on the simplest example of my split world and decided to look at it without making any judgment. Later I could express this simply; use my ego consciousness as observer but not judge. I watched for as long as necessary and was delighted to see the split gradually dissolve and one of the two warring possibilities grow clear while the other lost energy. This brought a workable solution to my paralysis.

I can’t formulate a description of this process but it seems that 'it' decided if I looked quietly enough at the split without trying to judge it.

This worked only on the simplest possible examples; I could not keep my anxiety, fear, and guilt out of the picture on larger decisions and had to resort to the usual ego solution of disciplining myself to choose one possibility against the other. This yielded a decision but left uncertainty and guilt.

I spend some years at this exercise and found that the 'no decision' technique began to work on larger issues as well. I still cannot be quiet enough to bring this exercise to bear on large issues. But I think I see a principle at work that may be useful.

But wait! I started out by saying/believing that reality is singular and here I am trying to work out a technique for choosing between two possibilities! This is an untenable contradiction.

I watched this process more carefully and discovered that there was a level in back of the split that was of a different character than the consciousness seeing the split. Was I projecting the appearance of duality from my own consciousness onto a non-split world? Does this imply that I can find a non-split consciousness if I will quiet my split consciousness?

So it seems that my efforts to find the Will of God by searching out the 'right' way is badly based from the beginning. The search is for that consciousness which is not split in the first place. The solution to the problem is not to solve it but dissolve it.

Rilke: the Terror of the Angel

Who if I cried out, would hear me then, out of the orders
of angels? and even supposing one suddenly took me
close to the heart, I would perish from that
stronger existence. For what strikes us as beauty is nothing
but all we can bear of a terror's beginning,
and we admire it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every angel strikes terror.
And thus I restrain myself and swallow the luring call
with dark sobs. Whom then, alas, are we able
to use in our need?

--R. M. Rilke

The Ubiquity of Unlived Life

Your unlived life, sometimes called your “shadow,” is the repository of everything that has been split off, everything that is unrealized and every potential that has never been developed. We all carry with us a vast inventory of abandoned, unrealized, and underdeveloped talents and potentials. Even if you have achieved your major goals and seemingly have few regrets, there are significant life experiences that have been closed to you. If you are an only child, then you will never know the experience of having a brother or sister. If you are a woman then you are not a man, and some of the masculine experience is foreign to you. If you are married you are not single. If you are a black man you are not a white man. If you are Christian you are not Muslim. And so it goes. For every thing you choose (or that has been chosen for you), something else is “unchosen.”

Consider for a moment something in your life that you cannot do and, as a result, you feel diminished in some way. What do you resent about your life? The endless demands of children or your job? The inattention of your spouse? The limitations of an illness? Whatever seems to be missing – that is part of your unlived life.

A woman may decide to pursue a career only to wake up one day, years later, and realize that some part of her always longed to stay home with the children and be a housewife. Or she may discover an aspect of herself that would have chosen a religious life, an existence of reclusive meditation. In the same way a man may feel he has the makings of a poet, but he also has a talent for business and he finds himself climbing the corporate ladder, organizing his life around the business world and supporting a family. Still, the poet in him lives on as a potentiality that he hasn’t had time to experience externally.

Perhaps you are short and you always wanted to be tall. Perhaps you wanted to be thin, or to have a different body type, or to explore a musical talent, or to be more athletic. What is unlived yet still has some urgency in you? How is it expressed? As discontent, or anger, or depression?

Reclaiming unlived life is a difficult but noble task that confronts us in the second half of life.

How Heavenly Organ Music Is Made

I (Robert) wrote earlier about my love of Bach and the musical discovery of the pipe organ.

The organ has gone through a very long history of development from the small cathedral organs of Europe limited in size by the fact that they required human labor to pump the "wind" required to sound the pipes. There is a bit of insight into this evolution in the story of the great organ in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It required nine strong men to man the pumps for the wind required to operate the several thousand pipes housed in the west end of the great gothic building. In 1914 World War I demanded all the men available and it required 18 women to "man" the pumps. It was only in 1927 that electricity was allowed in the Cathedral and electric motors replaced the hand operated bellows.

Hand blown organs were limited to very low wind pressure (wind pressure was described by the inches of water the wind pressure could contain in a U shaped tube of water. The maximum for hand bellows was about two and a half
inches, (approximately the air pressure of human lungs) thus the limit of air for a pipe. Voicing on this low pressure produced a very gentle sound for any sized pipe, from two inches to thirty two feet in length.

There is virtualy no limit to the air pressure available by electric motor. Experiments took air pressure to a hundred inches on the water gauge. and the roughness of sound increased proportionately. Dr. Schweitzer made his famous Bach recordings on a small two keyboard organ in St. Aurelie, Strasbourg, France, built about 1725 by Bach's organ builder, Jacob Silberman. The wind pressure of this organ was approximately two and a half inches of wind and produced the ethereal light sound characteristic of low wind pressure. To make a comparison, the organ I played as a young man in a Portland church was voiced on twelve inches of wind and sounded accordingly.

A large adventure of my life took me to Europe in 1948 and my devotion to fine organ voicing and playing brought me to Strasbourg. That could mean only one thing by association, the organ playing of Albert Schweitzer and the organ where he made his famous recordings of Bach, the Church of St. Aurelie. Those two associations were so powerful in me that finding a hotel in this badly war damaged city was secondary to finding the Church of St. Aurelie. I asked about for the location of the famous church with no success. Finally, someone took me to an old part of town and pointed out a very small church which in no way fitted my expectations of the great resonant building I had expected. Only then did I remember that Dr. Schweitzer had written that he chose that church - of all the organs of Europe that would have been offered to him - because of its unrestored Silberman organ and, second, because of the near perfect resonance pattern of the building's acoustical structure. That is to say that the reverberation quality of that building aided the clarity of the sound more perfectly than any other that Dr. Schweitzer examined.

At various times I have heard the reverberation of different buildings such as St Paul's Cathedral in London with an eighteen second reverberation period (it is not difficult to think you have blundered into Heaven when you hear that sound) to the new Festival Concert Hall in London built to welcome the newly approaching era of the post war world, that is so dry and devoid of reverberation that one cannot escape the feeling of being naked accoustically. No matter how loudly officials argued at first that this was the ultimate of "clear" sound, they made alterations in the architecture several years later to warm the sound and provide some relief from the starkness that affronted one's ears at the musical inauguration. I have never heard music in the altered building, but have most vivid memory of its first dry concerts.

Finding Our Hidden Gold

Some of our very best characteristics, the gold in one’s personality, are the most difficult of all for most of us to cope with. It is often our noblest energies that our hidden most assiduously, such as our capacity for love, generosity, relatedness – these turn out to be equally difficult to express in one’s outer life. For example, you simply cannot go up to someone you see on the street for the first time and say, “There is something about you that is enchanting, and I love you.” It doesn’t work. It is frowned upon by our society, and would create havoc. And yet that capacity for love is one of the finest characteristics in the potentials of any human being.

Inner work provides a means to live out the gold as well as the dark – all those unlived potentials that have not found an adequate place in the practical, every day affairs of one’s life. The aim of such efforts is to relieve the neurotic pressure of these unlived things and the anxiety of choice, transferring it to the level it really belongs, the celestial dialogue of the pairs of opposites, the song of Heaven.

The Opposition of Love and Power

People think that hate is the opposite of love. Actually power is the opposite of love. Love is identity with the other, while power is the desire to control the other for our own purposes. Where there is unconditional love there is no issue of power. From the spiritual point of view, love is much preferred. “Love knows all things, love conquers all things, and love endures all things.”

Some of our very best characteristics, the gold in one’s personality, are the most difficult of all for most of us to cope with. It is often our noblest energies that our hidden most assiduously, such as our capacity for love, generosity, relatedness – these turn out to be equally difficult to express in one’s outer life. For example, you simply cannot go up to someone you see on the street for the first time and say, “There is something about you that is enchanting, and I love you.” It doesn’t work. It is frowned upon by our society, and would create havoc. And yet that capacity for love is one of the finest characteristics in the potentials of any human being.

Inner work provides a means to live out the gold as well as the dark – all those unlived potentials that have not found an adequate place in the practical, every day affairs of one’s life. The aim of such efforts is to relieve the neurotic pressure of these unlived things and the anxiety of choice, transferring it to the level it really belongs, the celestial dialogue of the pairs of opposites, the song of Heaven.

The Cost of Ignoring Our Shadow

Despite the moral imperatives that we learn as children, it’s sometimes not enough to just say, “I won’t do it,” to banish all thought of a forbidden thing. This creates inner conflict. Who knows how much physical illness is the battleground of unlived life? You may well get a nervous stomach, back pain, headaches or some other type of ailment when you try to practice a moralistic “just say no” policy.

At the collective level, we see every day in the headlines what happens when the shadow is not recognized. It is projected onto neighbors who are defined as enemies, carrying “the other” for us. In the socially driven process of becoming legitimate and gaining credentials for success in the world, in the experience of wielding power, through our hunger for certainties in a universe filled with paradox and mystery, we don’t want to face our shadows and question our assumptions. It is easier to split off the “bad” onto our neighbors, whether they are down the street or across the ocean, to fear the “other” rather than face the “otherness” within.

If you are drawn to a “bad boy,” or a "temptress blue angel," this is probably a sign that you are too diligent and dutiful in your life. Perhaps you try so hard to be good that the other side needs to be heard to balance your life. (This is a frequent problem for pastors, politicians, families of prominent people, and anyone who feels they must appear as all “good.” One day their “bad” side is acted out in some unconscious manner).

In this example, you must ask yourself how you might break the rules a bit, be more spontaneous, own some of these “bad” qualities in yourself. How is it you became undernourished in this quality? Are there core beliefs that keep you from expressing what is unlived?

To individuate in the second half of life you must fill in the missing pieces of your personality, to become more aware and more whole. It includes both the gold and the dark side that gets projected, so we see it on the outside first and we want to reclaim it. A good part of the first half of life is about that. We probably would never leave home if we didn’t project. We project heroism and all kinds of idealism onto the world. We go out and find we really need to reclaim it, but in the beginning projection is what propels us into the first half of life. Yet, at some point, at mid-life, we gain enough strength or we get frustrated enough at the cycles we keep repeating trying to fulfill these unlived potentials on the outside that we say: “Maybe I need to sit down and do my own work.” That is reclaiming the projection and seeing that this is part of my own likeness that I need to take back.

Memories of Schweitzer

I recently received a set of CDs of Albert Schweitzer playing Bach on organ in 1935. This touches some of the happiest memoriess of my life. Independent of his international renown as a humanitarian, Schweitzer is well known as a great musicologist; a reputation that rests largely upon his book, "J. S. Bach." Its influence on the subsequent performace of Bach's music was enormous, and there is scarcely a later work on Bach which does not acknowledge a deep debt to Schweitzer.

My love of Schweitzer and Bach began when I quite suddenly was old and sensitive enough to hear the grandeur of the organ in my church. I am unaware why or how these things can happen so suddenly to a youth, but it was an opening to the heavens for me. Why? How? A total mystery to me but certainly one of the greatest blossoming of MEANING that has ever happened to me. It was nothing less than the sound of heaven opened up to my adolescent ears.

The next Sunday I approached the organist and asked for instruction to play this great instrument. When he learned that I was missing one leg from a childhood auto accident he dismissed me with a sentence and sent me off feeling as if I were disconnected from the greatest beauty in the world. I sulked for a week not having any idea how to face this negation, but thought it worth another try when the following Sunday I saw the assistant organist playing the service. I presented myself to her after church and got a puzzled reply that it might not be possible to play organ with only one leg but she was willing to try.

Not only did I acquire an organ teacher at that moment but gained a Godmother who immediately began filling in the great vacuum in me left from an inattentive mother.

Organ lessons began and I learned quickly that I was ill equipped both physically and mentally for playing the organ but also that both in music and the impact of a fine teacher I was launched into the beginning of adulthood.
Few people are aware of how deeply important a Godparent can be if one's parents are ill equipped to raise a child.

There are few organs available for students to use, but my father rose to one of his infrequent generosities and found a funeral parlor next to my high school where I could practice for half an hour before school. Two years followed of some of the most complicated physical learning tasks.

Organ requires skill with both hands and both feet simultaneously. For me, this required improvising for a missing leg and also training a mind not easily able to accomplish the multiple coordination required.

I worked very hard at organ practice and soon was able to play some of the organ works of J. S. Bach, my favorite composer. One day I discovered the famous set of organ recordings by Albert Schweitzer, the world authority on the music of Bach recorded in 1935 and 1936. The records were at 78 RPM, scratchy, divided up into two minute sides, and the extreme range of pitch and volume characteristic of organ tone badly overtaxing the recording capacity of the equipment. But I loved those records with a passion and learned every composition included in the album.

Later, I was appointed as organist/choirmaster of the second largest church in Portland Oregon in 1942 , an adventure very painful to me. I had the musical skill for the job but was hopelessly deficient in the art of relationship and social ability. I left the job at the end of the year and never again tried to make a profession of music. This was both a severe failure on my part but also gave me the impetus to explore the psychological world which became my true profession.