Peaks and Vales

Brad Kochunas - 2007-03-11

Good Morning!

I take as my title for this occasion “Peaks and Vales” after an essay by archetypal theorist, James Hillman, in which he distinguishes the shadings between spirit and soul. He makes the argument that Spirit has quick, rising, detached, upward imagery associated with it while soul is much more languid, meandering, sinking, and brooding, in its imagery.

In the history of spirituality there is, I believe a predominance of images of ascension, a symbol which has traditionally reflected transcending the human condition. God is up there, on the mountaintop, in the sky, above the clouds, away from the dirt and grit of human living. We clamber up the mountainside, climb the ladder, take flight, ascend to the heavens to experience this loftiness of Spirit. Elevation, exaltation, ascension all reflect the qualities of Spirit.

Even contemporary humanistic psychology is in search of peak experiences where we discover levity and bliss, where we can see with clarity into the nature of things, be fully illuminated by the light, and experience a joyful heart. This sojourn is characteristically an ego driven strategy where we extend personal desire and effort to meet the challenges of this strenuous ascent.

Even in our dying which classically moves us toward the underworld, it is not uncommon to hear stories of near death experiences in which the person is ascending, moving up toward the light.

In excerpts from a letter by the Dalai Lama, he writes,

The relation of height to spirituality is not merely metaphorical. It is physical reality. The most spiritual people on the planet live in the highest places… I call the high and light aspects of my being spirit…. Spirit is a land of high white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers. Life is sparse and sounds travel great distances.

I might also add that the panoramic view from the heights is about as close to ‘all seeing’ that we will get to experience. Visionary, prophetic, and superior qualities are nuanced in such images. Many religions have holy Mountains such as Mt. Olympus, Mt. Meru, Mt. Fuji, Mt. Sinai, and the Mount of Olives, which all have sacred connotations. These geographic areas have long been considered as the abodes of the gods or places where hierophanies have occurred in various traditions. Believers engage spiritual imagery reflecting the climb toward communing and union with the Divine.

Let me avert my eyes from the heavens now and downshift metaphors… In the 6th chapter of the Chinese classic, the Tao Te Ching we read…

The Valley Spirit never ceases or expires,

She is called the Mother of the Abyss,

Her Gateway is the Root and Origin of all that is.

Enduring without end, limitless and unborn,

Inexhaustible,

Draw upon Her,

She will not be drained,

Her support is without fail.

I wish to offer for your consideration the possibility of a concurrent stream of spirituality that is poorly articulated and often ignored. This approach, like water, moves downward toward the lowlands, the lonesome valley, the shaded glade, the dark wood, the shadowed path, the vale of tears.

Often this path begins at a point of personal failure or catastrophe, when we don’t measure up, when we have quit the challenge of the climb. It is at this juncture in our lives when our resources are exhausted and we can’t go on that we are embraced by gravity and like the proverbial dung that rolls downhill, we begin an unwanted descent. This downward spiraling has less a feel of being ego driven and more a sense of being out of our control, it accompanies a feeling of resistance or surrender to something larger than our selves. In this plunge away from our well ordered, well controlled lives we are opened to the world, made vulnerable, wounded, and inferior. No longer rising and floating, but rather falling and sinking deeper into the solitude of our being and the flowing of life.

These moments mark occasions for affirming and embracing the realities that everything changes and fades, that suffering is an integral facet of existence, and that our expectations for love, success, and fairness will not all be fulfilled.

The poet and novelist, D. H. Lawrence wrote,

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing?

Are you willing to be made nothing?

dipped into oblivion?

If not you will never really change.

This ominous verse suggests that real change is only possible if one is willing to say yes to life, to let go and face the world without props. To be emptied, to suffer betrayals, to experience failure, to drown in sorrow, to have our hearts shattered, all of these are invitations to engage life more fully. Existence is both joyous and tragic and it is in these dark moments when we find ourselves walking in the valley of the shadow of Death that an opening presents itself. Harvard professor Kim Patton stated in her divinity school address that “the broken heart is not a regrettable symptom of derailment, but rather is the starting point of anything that matters.” These affairs are the pivot points around which our lives may change direction.

The poet John Keats wrote

Call the world if you please, “the vale of Soul-Making.” Then you will find out the use of the world…. I say soul-making. Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence. There may be intelligences or sparks of divinity in millions but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself….Do you not see how necessary a World of pain and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul. A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!

When we are blown off course, knocked off our pedestals, derailed from our well worn and rutted track, these are the moments in which we are initiated into living, when hearts are broken and soul is forged deep in the furnace of our suffering.

Many people spend a lifetime seeking spiritual enlightenment but life is too precious and fragile to exhaust on this task. We have occasions for endarkenment almost daily; the onset of illness, the break up of a marriage, the loss of a parent, the growing and departing of children, sudden financial misfortunes, or the death of a dream.

In the tradition of alchemy, there is the darkening or blackening process that is the starting point for real spiritual transformation. That process often begins in despair, melancholy, sadness, disappointment, dejection, emptiness, or mourning.

Yet these are the very experiences that our culture tends to disdain and wants to be rid of as quickly as possible through either medication or therapy, or both. Acupuncturist, Dianne Connelly writes,

The symptom sits in the person’s history. It is a request for support; not support for simply getting rid of, or fixing it; but support for bearing it, for suffering it as an experience of life, support for seeing the wisdom and embraceability of the symptom. It may even be said that a symptom, no matter how awesome or terrible, is life requesting to be embraced in all its manifestations.

But we are uncomfortable with this personal darkness, psychologically or otherwise, not only in reference to our inner landscapes but to the outer ones as well. We try to save daylight and avoid the dark by manipulating our clocks. We light up our cities, our homes, keeping night lights and security lights on to keep the darkness at bay. We do similar things with silence, an increasingly rare commodity, keeping the television or radio on even when we are not watching or listening. Even during the lull in the action at sporting events music is played or chatter is produced to keep silence from seeping into our experience. We also do this with solitude often eyeing those who wish to be alone as being somewhat off track and in need of more socialization.

This reluctance to engage darkness, silence, and emptiness are symptoms of a diminished cultural soul and an arid spirituality, a spirituality that wishes to detach itself from life in the valley where everything is included, from all the messiness, weepiness, and coarseness which is so much a part of living, a spirituality that classically attempts to transcend the human condition through renouncing bodily desires via fasting, denying sleep, abstaining from sex, avoiding sensuous experience. It is an austere, ascetic life.

But if we are asked anything by Divine Life, it is not to be something other than human but to be fully human. The real juiciness of life, the lustiness and earthiness reside in the lushness of the valley. This is where we live a sensuous, bodied life, where we attach to and cherish the things of the world. The idea of detachment in spirituality should not be construed as withdrawing from the world but rather recognizing that it all goes go away and being able to radically accept this. In so doing, we can love the world fiercely in all its ephemeral radiance. This leads to a more soulful perspective, a spirituality of the vale, a spirituality that rather than lifting us above the human condition drives us ever more deeply into our humanness and plants us firmly in the bosom of an earthly life.

Spiritualities of height and depth echo the cultural polarity of brain above heart, mind superior to emotion, thinking over feeling. There is a valuation that again pulls us upward toward the brain where we become heady, intellectual, spirituous, and lightheaded. Thoughts are rational and the feeling world irrational and untrustworthy.

But I believe that it is in the move downward, toward the heart when it is heavy and weighed down with matters that are grave that soul is shaped. This requires an openness and vulnerability to life. The poet Rilke writes in “Sonnets to Orpheus” of the flower possessing an infinite muscle of reception in its capacity to be fully open to the world and describes the fragile magnificence of the rose (and life) that even in its blooming it has already begun to fade. In the end, Rilke laments that “we violent ones remain a little longer. Ah, but when in which of all our lives shall we at last be open and receivers.”

With Spirit we try to realize the pinnacle of our spiritual questing, to finish the journey and reach the solitary summit, but soul is a different matter, there is no summary statement to be made, no finality. The early Greek philosopher, Heraclitus wrote, “You could not discover the limits of Soul, even if you traveled every road to do so, such is the depth of its meaning.” Soul remains in motion, in mystery, animating the world, luring us to open fully in faith to the richness of life. Perhaps we can sense that a world without soul, (anima Latin for soul) is an inanimate world, lifeless and sterile. When the world is ensouled however, it is animated, living, vital, connected, a place in which we feel at home.

I’d like to close with something from “The Velveteen Rabbit”

“What is Real?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked. “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Can you hear the echo of soul-making here? Not only will you not be ugly, but you will not be a partial, unused, shallow, superficial person. You will have lived a life of use and relatedness, of attachment and loss, a life that matters, a life of fullness and depth. Can we ask for more?