Never Not Broken

Akhilandeshvari as a black cat

It seems the fundamental law of being human, that we are never not broken. Of course, we can become more broken, or less broken, it seems. But always broken, nonetheless. That is-- somehow falling short of perfection, as it is conceived by us, or somehow with a flaw or defect always, or in some way suffering, always suffering, even in the face of joy or whatever equanimity we can access for however long. 

Nobody's got the broken loops like Basinski's broken loops

Or to think of it some other way, maybe it's what TS Eliot wrote in East Coker-- "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."

Back to having no idea how to do what I am doing. Back to admitting powerlessness in radical and essential ways. So many different experiences take me to this place these days. The feeling is of admitting complete defeat, as Bill W asks in his treatment of Step 1 in the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions. "Who cares to admit complete defeat?" he asks. "Practically no one," he answers himself. 

And yet, there is not one area of my life where I am not powerless. I am powerless over others, I am powerless over my emotional comings and goings, I am powerless over the functioning or non-functioning of all the things I rely on, I'm powerless over the inevitable entropy of all things, even as I continue to show up to work creatively with it all. I was powerless over the story long before it was even a story and I'm powerless telling it and revising it and I'm powerless to get free of it. 

This-- that is, "Thisness,"--is unmanageable by me. 

These truths are not acceptable to most people. "Practically no one," said Bill W, and he ought to know. 

My first AA sponsor used to talk about what complete defeat looks like from the perspective of the ego, of one's attachment to one's "look good," and what complete defeat looks like from the perspective of the Self, the whole self. For the look good, complete defeat is of course catastrophe-- the very last thing we'd ever want to experience, the thing we fight against with so much might for so much of our lives. For the Self imagined or experienced as a whole, however, it is no different from complete victory. The Self is whole already-- for it, there is no gain nor loss. It is complete unto itself. Nothing can be taken away from something whole, nor added to it, by definition. In fact, complete defeat is a kind of homecoming for the Self or soul, an opening to the end of delusion, to connection with one's essential nature. In theory. And in my experience-- when I get to good old endless humility (or when I'm humiliated), there's a sense of vast and unshakable serenity and reassurance, running right alongside the wound to my ego. 

It must have been from the very bottom of the constant fall into endless humility that Julian of Norwich conceived the central idea of her philosophy. "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." That feeling absolutely does not come from my look good or my ego, at least not in any sustainable way. 

Also from East Coker:

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again,
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
  You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
  You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

Is there a Book of Defeat? A Book of Failure? It looks like there are a few, but they don't seem to catalog the kind of failure I mean-- the sense of an absolute failure of life purpose that must be part of the experience of anyone who attempts something personally meaningful. It would be an oddly reassuring task, to research and write such a book. A run down of anything one could find where people considered to be great successes, or at least highly significant achievers, talk frankly about their failure. It would also include, of course, people who are now viewed as rousing successes in certain fields, but who actually cared about something else and were failures at it. Isaac Newton, for example, who is of course the archetypal Enlightenment scientist and mathematician, who went to his grave disconsolate over the failure of his exegesis of the Bible. 

“I have failed in my foremost task, to open people’s eyes to the fact, that man has a soul and there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state. Why indeed should I continue to exist?"-- Carl Gustav Jung, in a letter he wrote in 1960.

Of course, a year later, he was dead, so I guess be careful what you wish for. Which Jung himself would warn. 

There's a well known story about Jung that involves him being visited at his house by a dear friend. The friend is in tears and says, "Well, Carl, I have been fired from my job!" And Jung exclaims, "Congratulations!" and breaks out a magnum of champagne. 

The temporarily crushing collapse of my last partnership-- I am quite sure Jung would have wanted to celebrate that.