The Sorrows of Old Goethe

When he was 57–years-old Goethe published Faust, the closet drama of an aging polymath who has studied it all, medicine, law, theology, philosophy…the works. And he has found then all dissatisfying. He is post (i.e. beyond, subsequent to, separate from) metaphysics…it has no meaning. Nothing has meaning. He considers suicide, he considers going into magic; both are ways out of his spiritual crisis.

So I have questions for the members of this merry band: Is Faust (who might have been Goethe’s alter-ego) really in a spiritual crisis? And if you believe this to be the case how would you counsel the man based on the post-metaphysical spiritual values developed so far on these boards? This is the post-modern era so we know alchemy/magic will be as hollow of meaning as the rest, so we will suggest such a choice is not much of an option. I don’t think suicide is the way to go.

I’m at a loss…Faust/Goethe needs your help…please use the comment box below.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Perhaps Goethe gives us the answer at the end of Act V, Part II:

“He who strives on and lives to strive/ Can earn redemption still.”

It's not so much that we ever arrive at a complete moment of liberation but that we remain continually open to what is to come in a never-ending “play?” And then you die.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

To go with my first comment, when Faust is dying he utters:

“He alone deserves liberty, like life, who daily must win it.”

This reminds me of what Gregory said I think in the Derrida thread, that enlightenment isn't an end state but rather something that one must prove anew with each telling or argument or act. Faust is frustated at first because it's a never-ending process, we never fully arrive. But he finally accepts this. And then you die.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Edward,
I think you should get a prize for introducing the word “liberty” to these boards. Where did Faust find liberty? And was it beyond moksha or mukta? Was it beyond enlightenment?

For many years the mantra that introduces all entries into my journal reads, “Strength, Lucidity, Liberty.” The first two words were vamped from hexigram #14 of The Taoist I Ching, but the third word is just instinctual.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Nickeson,

Your writing reminds me of things that were central to my life about 15 years ago – wilderness and literature – but which now seem removed from me…distant but still redolent memories.  Of the two, I miss wilderness more. 

I like your question.  I doubt you are really at a loss, but I like how you set up the problem.  I don't think I can answer it in the terms you prescribed, though.  I don't think a philosophical answer or a reasoned argument is what will satisfy him. 

I agree with Greg (in the other thread) when he says human beings have a philosophical streak – a love of knowledge, a love of story…a propensity for storying the world.  Even describing the world as riddled with ambiguity and mystery, as skillfully eluding all of our attempts to stalk it with words, is a story about the world that in-forms our living.

Post-metaphysics, to me, doesn't entail giving up on story telling and philosophizing altogether; it isn't just a condition of disillusionment, though that may precede it.  It means recognizing the limitations of metaphysics…but also its enactive power.

I would advise Faust to do what he ultimately did: step out of his study, head out into the world.

Look at the story that came out of that … surely a tale worth telling.

Best wishes,

Balder

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

I resonate with Faust's dilemma.  I don't think there is an answer, but there are many responses.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Nickeson: So I have questions for the members of this merry band: Is Faust (who might have been Goethe’s alter-ego) really in a spiritual crisis? And if you believe this to be the case how would you counsel the man based on the post-metaphysical spiritual values developed so far on these boards?

Nickeson: won’t you come into my parlor said the spider to the fly?

“Okay,” said Desilet, innocently. “I'll give it a go.”

But if we play by  the rules you've set up, we'll need to appeal to the “spiritual values” developed thus far on these boards. That would mean that there will have to be some “value” lodged there that will ultimately entice Faust out of his “spiritual crisis,” his despair in life (“nothing has meaning”). But what value could entice the one for who everything has lost all value? But it's not quite true that Faust has lost all value. He values something beyond “joyous earthly lust.”

Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my earthly breast,
And either would be severed from its brother;
The one holds fast with joyous earthly lust
Onto the world of man with organs clinging;
The other soars impassioned from the dust ,
To realms of lofty forebears winging.
Oh, be there spirits in the air
Who 'twixt the earth and heaven reigning hover,
Descend ye from the golden fragrance there,
To new and changeful living lead me over!

There's a part of Faust that wants more than this earthly world has to offer. And the two things that spoil this earthly world for Faust are its imperfection (lack of purity) and its ephemerality (lack of permanence). Thus, in his pact with Mephisto (for short) he says,

If the swift moment I entreat:
Tarry a while! You are so fair!
Then forge the shackles to my feet,
Then I will gladly perish there!

Faust wants a moment that will last but it must be a moment “so fair,” so perfect that he would want it to endure.

Here Faust sets up the dualist hierarchy of classic metaphysical tradition–a binary pairing in which the valuation is fixed and one side is clearly better than the other, as in this case pure/impure, heaven/earth, lasting/changing. Through the lens of this fixed hierarchy earthly life appears as the shadows in Plato's cave.

How does Goethe himself solve Faust's problems? There is a great deal of interpretation over the ending but I think Edward points to the passage that gives the best take:

Wisdom's last verdict goes to say:
He only earns both freedom and existence
Who must reconquer them each day.
And so, ringed all about by perils, here
Youth, manhood, age will spend their strenuous year.
Such teeming would I see upon this land,
On acres free among free people stand.
I might entreat the fleeting minute:
Oh tarry yet, thou art so fair.

Faust has learned to love life with all its perils, strenuous striving, and teeming chaotic mix of dischord and fleeting harmony. In other words, he has reconciled himself to its imperfections and its temporality sufficiently to find value there where there appeared to be only valuelessness. Faust dies and the chorus responds “It is all over.” Mephisto doesn't understand. He says,

All over and pure nothing–just the same!
What has the constant doing ever brought
But what is done to rake away to naught?
So it is over! How to read this clause?
All over is as good as never was,
And it whirls about as if it were.
The Ever-empty is what I prefer.

For Faust, what ends, what passes, is as good as never was. And that has been the verdict of many religions and individual judgments throughout history.

But the spirituality we have been discussing here undoes the fixed vertical hierarchy of dichotomies like pure/impure, heaven/earth, lasting/changing and displaces these with a more horizontal structuring where whatever hierarchy of value may emerge is challenged and reconstituted in every passing moment, is not fixed in our judgment so that the temporal no longer appears as a mere shadow of an imagined timeless, heavenly realm. This displacement leads to a “metaphysical” orientation toward being that can rightly be described as “not one, not two”–achieving a more balanced tension, reducing the tendency to reject one for the other as if one were essentially “worthless.”

I think Goethe gets it right. Faust may be a “tragedy” but as Aristotle maintained not all tragedies end badly. Here “tragedy” is more like Nietzsche would have it: “The highest art in saying Yes to life, tragedy”–because here we affirm imperfection and ephemerality while not tossing out as worthless the telos in striving for perfection and stability.

Greg

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Greg,

If for no other reason than your equation: Mephisto = Plato(+/-), I believe we’re on the right track here.

But I sense there is something in the order of an “Other” here that we haven’t burrowed into. Unfortunately I don’t have time for much contemplation on in over the next few days.

I have a bit of a problem on these boards with the lack of personal and perspectival context within the posts, a problem that perhaps you might share. (That was a nice  sponateously alliterative sentence, que no?) Anyway here is some of my own that is behind this thread…including my agreement with your professor who said literature beats philosophy all hollow.)

I have never considered myself to be spiritual and I find myself always to be a little bit disdainfully aloof of the whole spiritual enterprize from organized religions and theologies to The Reformed New Paradigm Church of the Spiritual But Not Religious, and even to Taoism with whom I share some solid phenomenological observations. Yet I have encountered a steady, almost life-long stream of experiences that are widely regarded as “Spiritual.” But to me they were just another part of the whole thing that with a little effort could be pushed, like all other things, into the void where the all of it blends into the entropy with such ease that it is all just a joke, one more satisfying than anything that preceeds it.

Goethe was using Faust as a vehicle to burrow into the Other, like Derrida used deconstruction. But somewhere along the line he stopped, or like Edward said, “And then he died.”  I can see where Derrida could find a source of the spiritual in the Other, but did he stop there and turn it into “the weak god?” Is it a legitimate “spiritual” quest to not stop somewhere? To not stop pushing, not stopping to bask in false fulfillment, until the Other and Integral and all the other rest stops are shoved into the entropy so one can have the last laugh?

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

I would counsel Faust to follow the example of another scholar who lived before him, and go in search of his guru, to get slapped across the face by his guru's slipper… or even a wet fish… the rest, of course, would be hagiography.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

As a fictional character, what advice one should give him would depend on the genre of story he is in… or maybe even wants to be in.  In a trajedy, suicide would be satisfying storywise as long as he gave a lamenting monologue beforfehand.

However, for a real person, genre would be less important and suicide probably less satisfying.  If he were a real person alive now, I'd recommend that he go to a psychotherapist and look into taking meds… but that might sound like a boring answer to his melodramatic dilemma.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

marmalade, i think you're on the right track. is there a “right” answer? so much depends on what Faust really wants. Do we know?

peace,

nicole

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Marmalade, Nicole,

Thanks for the advice, but according to the set-up the conversation you would propose to have with Faust needs to be confined to your comprehension of the spirituality that has been developed or elucidated on these boards and I don’t believe anyone around here has been discussing therapy or prozac. I find it a little strange, based on the spirituality developed and elucidates here, that no one suggested that he check into the ashram, or the stupa to spend long hours sitting in practice and short hours scrubbing rice pots. And the suggestion that he find the guru misses the mark a little in that Faust himself was something of a guru…kind of like Rumi. But unlike Rumi, one gets the idea through Foust’s initial dealings with Mephisto,  that he had a deeper sense of his own presence and self-possession than to fall for a guru’s guru like Rumi fell for Shams and his well-side parlor tricks. You can see as Faust developed, he didn’t want to desciple to a magician, he wanted to be one. (This always puzzled me; so many people want to be Rumi—Andrew Harvey comes to mind as being typical—but Shams of Tabriz doesn’t rate much of a fan club. Somewhat in line with that inelegant bumper sticker/T-shirt that reads “If you ain’t on a Harley you ain’t on shit,” my take on the matter is “If you ain’t Shams, you aint”)

There is something spiritually indicative of Faust and what he really wants, and what the spiritual seekers in these venues might be wanting, in Faust’s choice of the exact portal through which he will enter the magical realms. This is his solution to the problem of his own enui and is most in concert with what Balder suggested. Faust needs to invoke the power of a magical symbol to make the passage. He has the old alchemical text…

 —(He opens the Book, and perceives the sign of the Macrocosm.)

Ha! what a sudden rapture leaps from this
I view, through all my senses swiftly flowing!
I feel a youthful, holy, vital bliss
In every vein and fibre newly glowing.
Was it a God, who traced this sign,
With calm across my tumult stealing,
My troubled heart to joy unsealing,
With impulse, mystic and divine,
The powers of Nature here, around my path, revealing?
Am I a God?—so clear mine eyes!
In these pure features I behold
Creative Nature to my soul unfold.
What says the sage, now first I recognize:
“The spirit-world no closures fasten;
Thy sense is shut, thy heart is dead:
Disciple, up! untiring, hasten
To bathe thy breast in morning-red!”

(He contemplates the sign.)

How each the Whole its substance gives,
Each in the other works and lives!
Like heavenly forces rising and descending,
Their golden urns reciprocally lending,
With wings that winnow blessing
From Heaven through Earth I see them pressing,
Filling the All with harmony unceasing!
How grand a show! but, ah! a show alone.—

All seems to be harmony, rapture, balance and the call to be the disciple…if Faust surrenders to the creative power of Nature then samahdi is assured.  What else can one do in the “not one, not two” macrocosm except surrender? But it is only a show. So Faust looks through the book again.

 (He turns the leaves impatiently, and perceives the sign of the
Earth-Spirit.)

How otherwise upon me works this sign!
Thou, Spirit of the Earth, art nearer:
Even now my powers are loftier, clearer;
I glow, as drunk with new-made wine:
New strength and heart to meet the world incite me,
The woe of earth, the bliss of earth, invite me,
And though the shock of storms may smite me,
No crash of shipwreck shall have power to fright me!

And so Faust makes his choice and the rest is literary history. There is no apparent harmony in the Earth-Spirit, but there is power and in as much as this is clearly not just physical strength one has to assume Faust will be dealing with “spiritual” power. Rather than surrender to rapture of the Not One, Not Two, Faust chooses personal power and the chaos. I don’t think this would sit all that well with the nice,  liberal, North American Middle Class, integral sense of spirituality. But that option is just as open and just as authentically spiritual now as it was for Goethe. Why not take it?

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Nickeson, the division you've drawn between the “rapture of the not-one, not-two” and the spiritual power of the Earth Spirit is artificial.  If I had the chance to talk to Faust in the next world, after he is snatched up by God, I would ask him what he sees now – if he still finds his second choice to have been fundamentally different from the first.  If he wasn't sure, or if he still didn't think so, I would argue that both had been given him by the same mystic sign; that both visions were appearances, one passively observed, the other actively engaged.  The woe and bliss of the earth, personal power and nondual rapture, the pungent soil of the world and the openness of space: all find their resolution in the 10th Oxherding Picture.  Just this – and a heart's willing, Yes.

If he still thinks “personal power” stands in opposition to not-one, not-two in any fundamental way – if he is attached to the personal, rather than free to embrace the personal – then I would ask him if he'd like to take a little journey with me.  I'd point to a smoldering crevasse in the floor of his comfy Christian heaven, with traces of vermilion flickering at the bottom of that apparently bottomless hole, and ask him if he'd care to accompany me into its depths.  I know someone living at the heart of that darkness, underneath the pleasure dome of his dualistic God.  A former magician, Nagarjuna.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Balder,
You have a good point…up to the point where we have to confront the possibility that in Faust, God and Heaven, if not Mephisto, were literary devices. Goethe was not a Christian.  Remeber, Faust, in my set-up, and maybe even in Goethe's mind, is a post-metaphysical play. We are dealing much more with an existential spirituality where the Whole is always in The Moment and the duality/non-duality illusion doesn't play.

Wish I had more time for this, I'll have to get back to it later.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Great, I look forward to it.

Nonduality is in no way opposed to existential maturation; this realization is where it leads.  The moment is fully here and yet cannot be grasped.

After taking Faust to meet Nagarjuna, I take him even deeper into that hole to meet another fellow riding around fierce-eyed through the charnel grounds on the back of a tiger.

For a little fun, we might then pop by and visit Lama Kunga Legpa:

Converting Demons with his Thunderbolt

The Lama Kunga Legpa decided to go to bind the Demon of Wong Gomsarkha (in the Thimphu district), who was threatening to exterminate the people of that area. From an inaccessible hiding place high up the valley, this venomous Serpent Demon had terrorized the inhabitants living on the terraces by the river, carrying them off at night, until only one old woman remained. Kunley entered the demon's territory and lay down using his bow and arrows and long sword as a pillow; he placed a pot of tsampa beside him, sucked in his stomach, smeared tsampa on his behind, and gave himself an erection. Lying on his back, he relaxed and awaited the demon, who was not long in coming.
    'Adzi! Adzi! exclaimed the demon. 'What is this? I have never seen anything like it! But perhaps it's edible.' He called loudly to his Elemental Slaves, who immediately descended upon the area in inconceivable numbers like flies on rotten meat. Some of them thought the body was dead, and others thought it was still living.
    'We had better not eat it if we don't know what it is,' said the Phuya Fiend. 'The body is warm, so it cannot be dead; it isn't breathing, so it is not alive; there's tsampa in that pot, so it can't have died of starvation; its belly is empty, so it couldn't have died of over-eating; there are weapons under its head, so it's unlikely it died of fear; its penis is still erect, so it must have been alive recently; it has worms in its anus, so it couldn't have died today. Whatever it is, it looks unhealthy for us. We should leave it alone.'
    'Whatever we do,' said the Serpent Demon, 'we should eat the old woman today. Let's meet at her door at nightfall.' Agreeing upon this plan, they dispersed.
    The Lama arose and went straight to the old woman's house. 'How are you, old lady?' he greeted her.
    'You are welcome,' she replied, 'but I am desperate,'
    'What's the matter?' the Lama consoled her. 'Tell me about it.'
    'Once I was wealthy,' she told him, 'but since no Buddha or Adept has ever set foot in this poor outlandish valley, the demons have run amuck and devoured both men and cattle. I myself do not expect to live through this coming night. You are a holy man and need not stay here. Go away while you can or you will be eaten alive. Tomorrow, if I am not here, you can take anything of value from the house to support yourself or to distribute amongst the poor.' Thus she made her will.
    'Things aren't as bad as they seem,' the Lama told her. 'I will stay with you here tonight.
    'Do you have any chang?'
    'I had a little but the petty gods and demons stole the moisture,' she replied. 'I don't know whether there is any taste remaining in the grain.'
    'Bring the grain and I'll see,' he said.
    He was drinking when night fell and the demons arrived at the door. When they began pounding upon it the old woman began screaming in paroxysms of fear.
    'You stay up here,' the Lama directed. 'I'll take care of this. Down below, he took his erect penis in his hand and thrust it through the hole in the door which was big enough to take a fist, and as a Flaming Thunderbolt of Wisdom it rammed into the Serpent Demon's gaping red mouth knocking out four teeth above and four teeth below.
    'Something hit me in the mouth!' screamed the demon wildly, and fled down the terraces of the river valley until he came to the cave called Lion Victory-Banner, where a nun called Lotus Samadhi was sitting deep in meditation. 'Naljorpa! Something weird hit me in the mouth,' he stormed breathlessly.
    'Well, what was it, and where did it come from?' she enquired.
    'It was at the old woman of Gomsarkha's house. A strange man who was neither a layman nor a monk hit me with a flaming iron hammer,' panted the demon.
    'You have been hit by a magical device,' the nun told him. 'That kind of wound never heals. If you doubt me look at this.' She raised her skirt and opened her legs. 'This wound was caused by the same weapon. There is no way to heal it.'
    The demon put his finger to it and raised it to his nose. 'Akha! kha! This wound has gone putrid, and I suppose mine will go the same way,' he moaned. 'What should I do?'
    'Listen to me and 1 will tell you,' the nun told him. 'Go back to the man who hit you. He will still be there. His name is Drukpa Kunley. Offer him your life, and vow never to harm living creatures again. Then perhaps you may be cured.'
    The demon took this advice, and returned to the house where the Lama awaited him. He prostrated before the Lama, and said, 'I am yours to command. I offer you my life.'
    The Lama placed his Thunderbolt upon the demon's head and ordained him as a layman, binding him with the lesser vows.' He gave him the name Ox-Devil, and invested him as a Reality Protector. Even today he is the Master of Gomsakha, and offering' is still made to him.

Ascending from the Lhangtso river valley, the Lama saw the terrifying form of the Lhadzong Demoness approaching him dressed in absurd, unconventional clothing. He immediately erected his Flaming Thunderbolt of Wisdom in the sky and she, unable to bear the sight of that magical tower, changed herself into a Venomous Serpent. The Lama stepped upon her head and the creature was petrified. It can still be seen today in the middle of the main road.

Finally Choje Drukpa Kunley arrived at Topa Tsewong's house, where his arrow had fallen, and stopped to piss against the wall.
    'What an enormous cock and balls he's got!' shouted some watching children.'
    The Lama sang them this song:

'In blue cuckoo summertime your cock is long and your balls hang
      low;
In the purple stag wintertime the head of your penis grows long.
Throughout the year it's a long hungry beast,
But that is the difference between summer and winter!' [pp.95-98]

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Balder,
Thanks for the excellent story. It reminds me of some of the adventures from Journey to the West.  And, of course, there is a deeper significance to your last two posts on this thread. They show that you too are leading Faust on a great fantastical tour, something Mephisto did in the play. Are you two running competition or are you in partnership; “Balder and Mephisto's Magical World Tour Agency?”  Is there something the rest of us need to know about where these boards are headed?

Still too short on time, but I'll be back.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Nickeson - you said:
Thanks for the advice, but according to the set-up the conversation you would propose to have with Faust needs to be confined to your comprehension of the spirituality that has been developed or elucidated on these boards and I don't believe anyone around here has been discussing therapy or prozac.

Your welcome, but according to your set-up you had two questions.  I didn't say what my answer was to the first question.  Only if I answered yes to it being a spiritual crisis, would the second question apply.

However, even if I answered yes to it being a spiritual crisis, how would I counsel him?  I don't know that I would counsel him at all.  What could I tell polymath like him that he hasn't already thought himself?  And if I were to limit myself to topics discussed on this board, I'd have a hard time counseling as I've barely participated in the discussions here and so I dont even know what has been disussed.  Furthermore, if I wasn't allowed to give him any simple practical advice such as going to a therapist, then I might not say anything at all.

Okay, let me switch tracks.  As he sees two choices, I probably wouldn't argue with him about it.  It doesn't matter if its a false choice because it surely feels real to him.  If he believes that going into magic is the only path that would make his life worth living, then I'd counsel him to go into magic.

Blessings,
Marmalade

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Marmalade,

You wrote:
1. Your welcome, but according to your set-up you had two questions.  I didn't say what my answer was to the first question.  Only if I answered yes to it being a spiritual crisis, would the second question apply.

Impeccable logic. Touche.

2. What could I tell polymath like him that he hasn't already thought himself?

I think we all have that problem with Faust.

3. If he believes that going into magic is the only path that would make his life worth living, then I'd counsel him to go into magic.

In light of your #2, there might not be any other intellegent options.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Hi Nickeson,

You wrote (up-thread) ”Rather than surrender to rapture of the Not One, Not Two, Faust chooses personal power and the chaos. I don’t think this would sit all that well with the nice,  liberal, North American Middle Class, integral sense of spirituality. But that option is just as open and just as authentically spiritual now as it was for Goethe. Why not take it?”

I'm curious as to what you mean by this “.. rapture of the Not One, Not Two“… and what it means to you. Could you clarify? For example, are you suggesting that the non-dual state is a state of rapture in which one becomes enrapt? or even enwrapped? And are you speaking from an experience of tasting *one taste*? … or perhaps of tasting a state of rapture that you might have conceived of as being “not one, not two”?

And you say ”Faust chooses personal power and the chaos … [twhich] option is just as open and just as authentically spiritual now as it was for Goethe.”

What to you qualifies his choosing personal power as something that can be described as spiritual? Balder may have been wondering the same with his “.. if [Faust ]is attached to the personal, rather than free to embrace the personal ..”

You say in a later post ”There is no apparent harmony in the Earth-Spirit, but there is power and in as much as this is clearly not just physical strength one has to assume Faust will be dealing with “spiritual” power.” Why does one have to assume this? And if indeed he is, what defines this power as “spiritual”? What does spiritual mean here?

And later you write: ”We are dealing much more with an existential spirituality where the Whole is always in The Moment and the duality/non-duality illusion doesn't play.”

I like this image or description, of “the Whole in The Moment”… to me it captures the meaning symbolised by a name for Dzogchen, namely Total Tigle… roughly paraphrased, infinite potentiality 'contained' in a sphere of infinite size, all within instant presence… so I don't get your seeming to hold non-duality as an irrelevance, because Dzogchen, this inseparability of infinite potentiality and primordial purity (sunyata/emptiness) in instant presence is also called … the non-dual state.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Marigpa,

Good questions.

You asked: I'm curious as to what you mean by this “.. rapture of the Not One, Not Two“… and what it means to you. Could you clarify?

I was going off the first few lines of that passage where Faust is contemplating the symbol of the macrocosm:

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Hi Nickeson,

Liked your reply.

You wrote: ”If one abstracts “the moment' to the extent that one can say the “non-dual is in play here” then the pure experience breaks down, it  ceases to be the unnameable Tao.  …. Naming it kills non-duality.”.

So I take it that for you the “.. duality/non-duality illusion ..” you mentioned earlier is to do with talking about it, having concepts about it, naming it… and that's why ”it doesn't play “, yes?

But if one has experience of, or at least has had a taste of, “the non-dual” then even though words describing or pointing towards “it”, or metaphors of “it”, aren't “it” … they can so easily naturally invoke “it” in the moment, wouldn't you agree? … and then those same words are redundant (and/or)  “.. irrelevant, don't play, shouldn't play.”

I don't know anything about what access German mystics or alchemists might have had to “the non-dual”, or what methods they might have employed to help them arrive *there*. But I did enjoy reading this quote in Wikipedia of Jacob Bohme

””When thou art gone forth wholly from the creature [human], and art become nothing to all that is nature and creature, then thou art in that eternal one, which is God himself, and then thou shalt perceive and feel the highest virtue of love. Also, that I said whosoever findeth it findeth nothing and all things; that is also true, for he findeth a supernatural, supersensual Abyss, having no ground, where there is no place to dwell in; and he findeth also nothing that is like it, and therefore it may be compared to nothing, for it is deeper than anything, and is as nothing to all things, for it is not comprehensible; and because it is nothing, it is free from all things, and it is that only Good, which a man cannot express or utter what it is. But that I lastly said, he that findeth it, findeth all things, is also true; it hath been the beginning of all things, and it ruleth all things. If thou findest it, thou comest into that ground from whence all things proceed, and wherein they subsist, and thou art in it a king over all the works of God.” [The Way to Christ, 1623]”

 – the descriptions resonate well for me.

You wrote:  ”I am especially centering on:

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Nickeson (from several posts below): I have never considered myself to be spiritual and I find myself always to be a little bit disdainfully aloof of the whole spiritual enterprize from organized religions and theologies to The Reformed New Paradigm Church of the Spiritual But Not Religious, and even to Taoism with whom I share some solid phenomenological observations. Yet I have encountered a steady, almost life-long stream of experiences that are widely regarded as “Spiritual.” But to me they were just another part of the whole thing that with a little effort could be pushed, like all other things, into the void where the all of it blends into the entropy with such ease that it is all just a joke, one more satisfying than anything that preceeds it.

Bob Dylan: “Life is but a joke.” There's something to be said for this “nomad” point of view and certainly Nietzsche and Deleuze would have liked much in what you are suggesting here.

Nickeson: Goethe was using Faust as a vehicle to burrow into the Other, like Derrida used deconstruction. But somewhere along the line he stopped, or like Edward said, “And then he died.”  I can see where Derrida could find a source of the spiritual in the Other, but did he stop there and turn it into “the weak god?” Is it a legitimate “spiritual” quest to not stop somewhere? To not stop pushing, not stopping to bask in false fulfillment, until the Other and Integral and all the other rest stops are shoved into the entropy so one can have the last laugh?

What you suggest here is, I think, the danger, the possible downside, of putting anything into words. Words can help us but once something is in words, as Derrida has shown so many times, we lose control of it (if we ever had control!) and the words have a life of their own. It's so easy when anything is put into words to transform those words into a formula and an institution. Once institutionalized we (communities) lose touch with how to keep the sentiments of the words alive. Over time they begin to evoke something other than what they were intended to evoke. They can move from the magical to the montrous.

But despite this process we should not lose faith in the power of words. What we need to do instead is what Derrida has advocated and demonstrated with deconstruction. We need to learn how language works–which is to say how it also can fail to “work”–how it can mislead. We need to teach the wiles of language alonside the wiles of life. There's no getting away from having to learn how to dance and then continuing to dance; there is no rest (perhaps not even in death). “Ease” and “rest” are the illusions of the well-crafted dance.

As for Derrida, and your question: I can see where Derrida could find a source of the spiritual in the Other, but did he stop there and turn it into “the weak god?” I don't think we can fault a man for finding words to talk about why we must stay in the dance, the spiritual quest. Derrida claimed that he “rightly passed for an atheist.” I think part of what he meant by this is that his spiritual quest was not over, his belief in any “god” not fully taken up or embraced. This is spirituality “on the road,” “nomad spirituality.” Giving it this name does not kill the spirit of it, so long as you “see” the steps that lead to the name.

Greg

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Greg,
I'm going to indulge myself here with reprinting from my blog a little disquisition (complete with contexts) that came to mind as I read your excellent words about words such as “…this “nomad” point of view and certainly Nietzsche and Deleuze…” It starts out about maps, but that soon passess…

“To goddamned hell with maps!”
B. Traven, Treasure of the Sierra Madre (a paraphrase)

The cartographers of the Integral Province have never produced a foil of certainty or a certifiable map of any territory I have ever crossed. In fact, despite the claims that such a thing has been generated I have never seen an Integral Map, for a map is a painstakingly illustrated and (by comparison) sparsely annotated report on a particular portion of physical terrain, but the Integral Canon is only synthesized out of words and most often words about words and not about anything one can touch with their hands like the line of pavement across the land that directly corresponds to the line of ink across a sheet of paper. It is fashionable in scholarly prose to use “map” as a verb as in “to map.” An author might write for example, “It is thus possible to map the countervailing suppositions across a broader foreground…” But once that deed is said to have been done the result is not a map. Instead the reader is left with another arrangement of selected words on a page and a vague suspicion that the writer’s flawed sense for effective metaphor indicates an author who would rather mimic than imagine.
It is my understanding that “integral” (the adj.) connotes the full solid picture of all. My experience with the full solid picture of all, my apprehensions of the Whole, however, have taught me that it is inimical to words. Any ecstatic worth the title will testify that words compound the inevitable decomposition of just that very apprehension. There is a direct correlation between the number of words applied to the cognizance of the Whole and the speed with which it wastes away. Yet my experience of Integral (the noun) consists of nothing but encountering words, the heirloom seeds of media.This puzzles me…and then to have it called “a map?”

There is a speciousness to the language here and I go a little on edge in its presence as when I overhear securities salesmen talking municiple-bond-shop in the jargon they’ve vamped from war movies and cop shows. (It has been said that Wilber’s AQAL sub-genre of Integral contains a map but all I have seen is an inorganic, Bauhaus-style, diagrammatic prop (as in theatrical properties) that serves as a cue on how one might generalize their way through a presumptive taxonomy that is functional in neither the streets nor the studio.)

Maps are drawn to implement the itinerant’s way across the unknown and in the extant case the purported Integral Map is sold as one especially designed toward the rehabilitation of both the deconstructed wilderness on one hand and a wantonly debased pilgrim on the other; a subjugated soul whom disparate academic specialists have abridged to a one-dimensional reduction. While these Integral Maps that aren’t maps sustain their primary entertaining and preoccupying functions as media qua media, they fail at their secondary tasks. Instead of being the truth bearing meta-antidote to postmodernism’s validation of the world truthless incoherence, or the reconstituting juices for the devitalized pilgrim, standard Integral approaches seem to be a broad-spectrum auto immune disorder congenital to both the alleged offenders. On one end they boost the postmodern effects by tangling a kind of white noise into the rest “where every something, being blent together, turns into a wild of nothing.” For the other end, the specialists’ technical, flatland “nothing buts” are countered with the Integral “nothing but” of the partially metaphysical (somewhat technical) proposition that the cosmos and all “within it,” including the pilgrims, is constituted (but not really) by a nothing but set of something like nested dolls that may or may not be mismatched, may or may not be infinite, may or may not be concentrically structured as the Great Holonic Totally Whole Toy Box-Doll. (Footnote re: Holons – I recall my sister and I in pre-school years shuffling icons of our imagination around in her doll house when one of us remarked that this toy was a house inside a house. We paused in play to consider this observation that everything was inside something else, going in, in, in and out, out, out. “for ever and ever.” Of course since we were just children we didn’t realize the staggering philosophical implications of our little realization. In fact I still can’t.)

And thus the conflicts regarding narratives and evolution and structures along the frontiers of the Integral Province and the next ones over and a couple on down the peninsula plod along like border skirmishes in the Balkans. Of course I am playing here Gilles Deleuse’s game that supposes all traditional philosophies, especially those that work to remain within their disciplinary frameworks—with the notable exception of Nietzsche’s “nomad thought”—tend to assert a distinct type of territorial sovereignty, their partisans dead set on constructing expandable boundary walls of validated conjectural pilasters, occupying territory, cultivating legends as warriors in the van guard, seeking tribute from newly annexed populations. Gore Vidal used to have great fun panning those academic novels that were written to be taught and often featured the university as universe. Deleuse was making a similar assessment about philosophy as steadily anabolic nation state or burgeoning province, as the case may be, which regulates for domestic peace and accord while seeking to wrest turf from both the brutish antithesis and from discredited neutral nations that are slipping into eclipse, by keeping the defining framework, as fashionable scholastic jargon has it: robust…a word that conjures sweet dreams of special ops and preemptive strikes like nothing else can.

Once the new lands are occupied and the metes and bounds measured and walled and the rules and injunctions promulgated then the maps-not-maps can be authored. Next the space is seeded with all the colonizing believers and every civilian who can be conscripted with erudite evaluations of “humanity” or “western man” or the chummy, but too often insincere synonym, “We.” One of the perks of drafting a new map—even if it isn’t a map—is the right to name the expanse it describes and to stamp that name as the largest word across the full, fan-pleated page of smaller words and to claim all those within as one’s minions: We…

Deleuze first wrote of Nietzsche and Nomad Thought when it seemed there was still room in the world. But it looks like he ignored the fact, a performative contradiction, that to define is to border and a border is not a border unless it is closed, even though he could see as he wrote that borders all over were closing up like rat traps against the likes of his school of thought. The thoughtful who were were not building their own protective custody as Traditional Wisdom State’s men, or Scientist State’s men, or Enlightenment Project State’s men, were claiming to be Nomads, rowdy huns of barbarous, blitzkrieg, aphoristic, out-of-framework disquisitions and deconstructions. But they haven’t a prayer to carry on as such; those who survive will be refugees because as they were being defined they were being annexed as civilians in the State of Nomadland. Deleuze wrote the boundaries as such that the steppes are now posted and closed and the frontier declared. And no matter where the subdivisions are placed the kids will have to color only inside those scripted lines, subordinated to the words, the heirloom seeds. They will have to stay put in Nomadland or call themselves Nomads no longer.

Context: The Fork
If there were still room in this world for Nomads, M and I would neither have been playing with the word vagabundos nor running spec-analysis on the noun “refugee,” nor feeling the invitation to perpetual displacement, flirting with randomly sensed alienation that scales between vague and acute; nor would I have been singing now and again my grandmother’s favorite “This world is not my home, I’m only passing through…” while staying waist-deep and ecstatic in this moldy little crumb of mud.
There is a web site flogging U.S. topo maps that defines “vagabond” as an individual who travels without a map. We can rest assured, though, there is a cure for “vagabondism”—Order Now…Secure Site…Phone or Fax…operators are standing by. If only it were that easy for “refugeeism.” There are raging differences between those two words and their corresponding conditions and deep subtle similarities. The term appropriate to how M and I way-fare out seems to change with a simple glance from east to west. The usage is context dependent of course and the context is always evanescent.
We were waiting for a flight to Rome in the shopping mall that is also, secondarily, the international terminal at Heathrow in London. M bought a pre-packaged salad at a W.H. Smith and therein we found The Fork. It was sealed in a cellophane envelope; a folding plastic fork. It could be locked at full extension with its mite of mortise and tenon. The Fork was half the size of an ordinarily functional one. It was black.
“What luck,” I said, “the perfect fork for refugees. The como se dice…?
“Tenedor.”
“Right…tenedor perfecto pa’ vagabundos.” We’d better take it with us.”

M agreed that it was a treasure essential to our needs; almost weightless, dark, plain, obscure, compact, functional; and if worse came to worse it could be secreted inside a body cavity capsule and muled through the next customs check. What made The Fork totally invaluable was the fact that if it were confiscated it would be the loss of nothing of value…that is if we were refugees at that particular moment. Refugees should not have to be further burdened by worries regarding value and so remain untroubled for instance with the need to smuggle jewelry past the check-point guards in an infant’s dirty diaper as M’s grandmother did in her son’s (M’s father) when the family was forced across the strait from Asia Minor to Lesbos. With that event and her mother’s family misfortune of being Greek too far east in Thrace 85 years ago, M comes by “refugee” honorably, she was to that manor born and is clearly the one to carry that distinction for our footloose junta. My lineal claims and talents tend more to be on the vagos side, a little shadier though but with a cum se, cum sa similarity. I was a teenage drover over the highways, through a town or two and across the open ranges; working as a semi-nomadic herdsman of the type who know the ambiguous qualities of titled lands and so keep their wealth always poised on the verge of mobility. Never having taken substantial root there is nothing to be uprooted when circumstances say “go now.” But there is no space left open for that in these times. Luckily, I don’t miss for a minute being wind-burned or frozen, saddle sore and bored. The open range has been closed by words and the classification Nomad is no longer even an authentic state of mind. Now Nomad is only a word with an ersatz Vagabundo air, a state’s man’s word with an inflated agenda and too much weight immobilizing the baggage and nothing of the Vagabundo edge.

These atmospheres which were our first birthrights helped frame out Heathrow conversation. They are estates that work as gravitational pulleys in the positioning of the First Perspective that like the first thought is the Right Perspective. And the two styles maintain a good balance between us: refugees are cautious, vagabundos are unconstrained. It is not as if we are on the run from any manifest government or similar protection racket.We stay mostly in this little raw land with its comfortably loose enforcements. Our papers are in order when they need to be, our records are clear or non-existent and our style obscure; we have few worries here and few worries on the road. Actually the sense of being stateless, this wariness of La Migra, is hardly a geo-political issue, nor one that is by any standard serious. We are at play with what could be called a Post-Deleuze-Post-Nietzsche-Refugee-Vagos-Glance. (Glance: a swift, dynamic perspective, a flash of recognition, a signal, as in “a respectful glance toward Nikos K.”)

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Nickeson: Deleuze first wrote of Nietzsche and Nomad Thought when it seemed there was still room in the world. But it looks like he ignored the fact, a performative contradiction, that to define is to border and a border is not a border unless it is closed, even though he could see as he wrote that borders all over were closing up like rat traps against the likes of his school of thought. The thoughtful who were were not building their own protective custody as Traditional Wisdom State’s men, or Scientist State’s men, or Enlightenment Project State’s men, were claiming to be Nomads, rowdy huns of barbarous, blitzkrieg, aphoristic, out-of-framework disquisitions and deconstructions. But they haven’t a prayer to carry on as such; those who survive will be refugees because as they were being defined they were being annexed as civilians in the State of Nomadland. Deleuze wrote the boundaries as such that the steppes are now posted and closed and the frontier declared. And no matter where the subdivisions are placed the kids will have to color only inside those scripted lines, subordinated to the words, the heirloom seeds. They will have to stay put in Nomadland or call themselves Nomads no longer.

Yikes! Beware he who draws boundaries! Spoken like a true anarchist. But I don't really buy into this logic. Everything can be made into an “ism.” The direction there lies in the hearts and hands of people and their skill at making or setting boundaries. Boundaries, I think, are necessary for us all, especially kids (as mammals go I think here of the documentaries on young elephants who, removed from their parents, turn into angry, destructive, rogue elephants–we humans and our young are little different).

The problem lies in keeping necessary boundaries from becoming nihilistic deathtraps. Once again, an invitation to the dance. We don't need to make of anything an “ism” or a religion. We need to be more clever than that. And I think that's possible. If nothing else, we humans are very clever. We need to tell ourselves better stories. The one Bruce offered several posts below was pretty good. It showed a way to conduct the art of war without hating or killing your enemy. Persuasion is the key–but to effectively deploy persuasion one must also become vulnerable to being persuaded. If it isn't a “jungle” out there, it's still dangerous. For some, the world of persuasion seems even more dangerous than the jungle (and here I am not alludiing to anyone within these discussions).

Greg

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Greg and lol,

Please excuse a brief delay in getting back to both of you. I'm behind on two other undertakings plus the politico-geeks have replaced the techno-geeks in the recently nationalize ISP and quality has suffered (we're racing to upload emails, posts etc. in the breaks between service outtages), so the responses aren't exactly running on time.

SN

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

I ran across this quote from Goethe and found it interesting:

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Is this kind of thing “mere translation?” Does it need to be “supplemented with samadhi?” Or does it constitute an authentic approach to wisdom on its own?

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

In my opinion, it could be either.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

In which case, we really can't tell.

Can we ever actually tell?

There's another quote from Montaigne, which probably originally comes from Cicero:

“Show me man who thinks himself wise, and I'll l show you a man who still has something to learn.”

Or something to that effect.

This tradition, the so-called humanist tradition, which Montaigne inherits from Plutarch, Cicero, and Isocrates, stands in rather sharp contrast to other traditions based on self-certainty, particularly adaptations of Asian traditions that tend to emphasize “enlightenment,” “awakening,” “realization,” and so on.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Does it need to be “supplemented with samadhi?”

It's about time this question showed up on this thread…it's the underpinning of almost everything else that has happened on this board for the last month. Balder and I are dancing around that very idea on the (Mis-)Communication thread and I was just about to head into it directly when I saw these new posts were up.

I wonder how many other dead threads can be disinterred (this one had a good run…no?) and addressed with the question above.

Re: Or does it constitute an authentic approach to wisdom on its own?

I vote both, Goethe's wisdom is the proft one works for and the samadi is the bonus that shows up when the times are right.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

Does it need to be “supplemented with samadhi?”

It depends what you're after.  Samadhi is not essential for all of the types of transformation that Wilber describes; it is a component of a particular form of transformative enactment.

Re: The Sorrows of Old Goethe

A most fascinating thread!

As Goethe is one of the strongest examples for me for German beginnings of evolutionary spirituality.

Faust is the strong crystallisation of Goethes own life-long impulses.
And Goethe was a man of Action AND contemplation. Of fully engaged in life AND its diverse metamorphoses…

And I would balance the sorrows with strongest engagment and producive explosions even when he was over 70! Anticpating even future of America, Writing the East-Western Diwan.

And certainly shaping the thinking of the pioneers of Atom Physics.

Faust and the Physicists