Thank you for bringing alive a rich and surprising evening and being willing to say how you were caught in those universally familiar personal traps of 'I know what this is' and 'it's not me' and the tendency to reject what seems 'other' and then the possibility of nevertheless continuing to listen and be open and what can then occur... It sounds a delightful and illuminating evening
For me it is less about story telling, than learning to listen deeply, profoundly, past all the noise and urgency to hear something deeper, truer and older. And to learn how we might learn to harmonise with whatever it is we hear.
That’s my narrative.
And I’m sticking with it!
Perhaps the story is only apparent when we look back. And then we call it wisdom and try to re-live it, out of time…
Thanks Mike. Yes, I wonder if these are parallel points and processes. I didn’t mention time alone, or on retreat and and so on, but clearly deep listening to the world moving through us part of how we figure out what we’re meant to do. I wrote the post because I’ve been feeling - ever so slightly - that I need to do such listening myself.
_Who_ we are? Only God can answer that (Augustine, I think).
Loved the line about the personal and universal. Stringfellow makes the point about how we want/need biography (our personal story) to overlap or resonate with a bigger story (Revelation). When I was 18 I was given a book, Journey of the self as expounded in the Qur'an, which fleshes that out...
Ibn Arabi was once riding with a friend when he fell off his horse. His friend rushed to his aid. "Are you okay, you seem bewildered". Ibn Arabi replied, "I was wondering where in the Qur'an that was written."
When I first read that many decades ago I laughed. I now, after falling from my high horse, think it's a lot more profound.
Nice! There's a question of whether, or how much, to lead from the narrative. That is, are we using our narratives to describe the directions we're going in, or having narratives, do we use them to give ourselves directions, as if the narrative-giver aspect of self were superior to all else we can feel and see. There, we enter straight into McGilchrist's hypothesis that we've yielded overmuch to the speaking side of self as director, rather than as emissary. And we ignore Panksepp's and Damasio's evidence that feeling is the fundamental basis of selfhood.
Once we have populations leading themselves by narratives, rather than illuminating their paths, the political struggle becomes one of trying to edit the narratives they have given themselves up to, however failingly. So we get ideological "culture wars," as if political or religious correctness, by one narrative book or another, were the true path of virtue.
As Robert Hunter said, the storyteller's "job is to shed light, and not to master."
love what you mention about reaching down into yourself also producing wider and deeper connection.. this is what happens when the heart starts to get involved. the self is both the barrier and the door... the heart holds the key.
the self has one foot in eternity and another in the sludge (I was going to say mud, but mud is really something quite high!)... it contains multiple potentials... the tragedy of modern individualism is that it tends to strenghten the lower ones and almost completely obscure the higher ones.
I'm all for doing stuff and letting stories emerge from the doing. I mean in a sense that's what my work is about. Transgress and see what you make of it.
I very much like that line "The sacred lies in the revelation of the uniqueness forged through interdependence". I ended up cutting this quote from my recent essay but I think it speaks directly to that. It's from Nigel Dodd writing about George Simmel;
"Simmel contrasts the '*perfect* society' with the 'perfect *society*'. The former contains what he calls a conceptual perfection, whereby each member of a society has a unique place within it. The latter consists of ethical perfection, wherein everyone is treated the same (Simmel, 2009: 51). To each form of perfection corresponds a form of equality : the *perfect* society favours individualism, the perfect *society* favours socialism."
Thank you for bringing alive a rich and surprising evening and being willing to say how you were caught in those universally familiar personal traps of 'I know what this is' and 'it's not me' and the tendency to reject what seems 'other' and then the possibility of nevertheless continuing to listen and be open and what can then occur... It sounds a delightful and illuminating evening
For me it is less about story telling, than learning to listen deeply, profoundly, past all the noise and urgency to hear something deeper, truer and older. And to learn how we might learn to harmonise with whatever it is we hear.
That’s my narrative.
And I’m sticking with it!
Perhaps the story is only apparent when we look back. And then we call it wisdom and try to re-live it, out of time…
Thanks Mike. Yes, I wonder if these are parallel points and processes. I didn’t mention time alone, or on retreat and and so on, but clearly deep listening to the world moving through us part of how we figure out what we’re meant to do. I wrote the post because I’ve been feeling - ever so slightly - that I need to do such listening myself.
This is what we are exploring in Follow The Thread.
https://mikechitty.blog/%f0%9f%8c%bf-follow-the-thread/
Also, I'm so sorry to hear about your brother. May his soul rest in peace.
Fascinating post.
_Who_ we are? Only God can answer that (Augustine, I think).
Loved the line about the personal and universal. Stringfellow makes the point about how we want/need biography (our personal story) to overlap or resonate with a bigger story (Revelation). When I was 18 I was given a book, Journey of the self as expounded in the Qur'an, which fleshes that out...
Ibn Arabi was once riding with a friend when he fell off his horse. His friend rushed to his aid. "Are you okay, you seem bewildered". Ibn Arabi replied, "I was wondering where in the Qur'an that was written."
When I first read that many decades ago I laughed. I now, after falling from my high horse, think it's a lot more profound.
Nice! There's a question of whether, or how much, to lead from the narrative. That is, are we using our narratives to describe the directions we're going in, or having narratives, do we use them to give ourselves directions, as if the narrative-giver aspect of self were superior to all else we can feel and see. There, we enter straight into McGilchrist's hypothesis that we've yielded overmuch to the speaking side of self as director, rather than as emissary. And we ignore Panksepp's and Damasio's evidence that feeling is the fundamental basis of selfhood.
Once we have populations leading themselves by narratives, rather than illuminating their paths, the political struggle becomes one of trying to edit the narratives they have given themselves up to, however failingly. So we get ideological "culture wars," as if political or religious correctness, by one narrative book or another, were the true path of virtue.
As Robert Hunter said, the storyteller's "job is to shed light, and not to master."
Should that be "a fixation with the individual in denial of our inTERdependence"?
love what you mention about reaching down into yourself also producing wider and deeper connection.. this is what happens when the heart starts to get involved. the self is both the barrier and the door... the heart holds the key.
the self has one foot in eternity and another in the sludge (I was going to say mud, but mud is really something quite high!)... it contains multiple potentials... the tragedy of modern individualism is that it tends to strenghten the lower ones and almost completely obscure the higher ones.
Alex Lockwood wrote about the same event in the Absurd Intelligence Newsletter today https://www.absurdintelligence.com/narratives-need-enacting-otherwise-theyre-just-words/
I'm all for doing stuff and letting stories emerge from the doing. I mean in a sense that's what my work is about. Transgress and see what you make of it.
I very much like that line "The sacred lies in the revelation of the uniqueness forged through interdependence". I ended up cutting this quote from my recent essay but I think it speaks directly to that. It's from Nigel Dodd writing about George Simmel;
"Simmel contrasts the '*perfect* society' with the 'perfect *society*'. The former contains what he calls a conceptual perfection, whereby each member of a society has a unique place within it. The latter consists of ethical perfection, wherein everyone is treated the same (Simmel, 2009: 51). To each form of perfection corresponds a form of equality : the *perfect* society favours individualism, the perfect *society* favours socialism."