Abstract ideas are all very well but unless you can feel them in your body or soul, you have no way of knowing if they are real. They might be the bastard children of human intellect mating with heaven-knows-what.
So when Raymond proposed that existential angst is a universal experience, it left me unmoved. I could only see circumstantial angst, the temporary distress that comes from everyday events. I might have suffered from an all-pervasive underlying angst in the past, but not now. I couldn’t even connect with that part of my past self which suffered continually. So I couldn’t try to determine whether this thing was, from my current perspective, a delusion; perhaps the same delusion that convinced our ancestors of Original Sin.
But Raymond is my friend. That provided enough emotional impetus to pursue the topic. I resolved to brood on it, in the open air, taking advice from Nietzsche:
“Sit as little as possible; credit no thought not born in the open air and while moving freely about.”
First I primed my head with a definition of existential angst from Wikipedia:
Kierkegaard believed that the freedom given to people leaves the human in a constant fear of failing his/her responsibilities to God.
. . .
While Kierkegaard’s feeling of angst is fear of actual responsibility to God, in modern use, angst was broadened by the later existentialists to include general frustration associated with the conflict between actual responsibilities to self, one’s principles, and others (possibly including God).
I parked the car beside St Bartholomew’s church in Fingest and went up to the hills. I found myself beside Cobstone Mill in Ibstone. It owes its well-maintained appearance to the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, for which it was given a face-lift; since when it has had many other starring roles. From the mill, I could look down on the village of Turville, and from the village, back up to the mill. None of these sights, or my determined trekking through meadow and copse, hill and dale, threw any light on existential angst.
Following a woodland footpath, I found the parish Church of St Nicholas in Ibstone. Despite its tucked-away setting, it’s left unlocked every day, so I went in. It’s tiny, bare, nine hundred years old. I put all the money from my pockets (pennies, alas!) in its collection box for building maintenance. I had hoped to feel something, if only a second-hand sense of devotion, from the centuries of parishioners flocking there on Sundays to wash away their original sin, mitigate their inborn angst. But I could feel nothing. Inside or outside the building, no difference.
When I ask a question, the answer always comes (by angel intervention, as I see it) within a few days. In this case it was “What is the feeling, that Raymond calls existential angst?” I got the first glimmer yesterday, on Sunday morning. I listened to Sunday Worship on Radio 4, from St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh. I often listen to this programme, to get a feeling for different flavours of Christianity as practised in the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. St Giles is part of the Church of Scotland, within the Anglican Communion.
In forty minutes of that programme, I seemed to revisit my entire childhood exposure to Anglican churchgoing. The theme of the service was the 450th anniversary of the Reformation, so there was lots of retrospect, but no evangelism. From the first hymn onwards, I was spellbound. The tune somehow reawakened all the conflicts I’d had about boarding-school, compulsory church attendance and my soul’s relation to religion. As it happened, the words sung in the Cathedral were not the words I was used to. I reproduce below the ones I used to sing, in choir or congregation:
Ye holy angels bright,
Who wait at GOD’s right hand,
Or through the realms of light
Fly at your LORD’s command,
Assist our song,
Or else the theme
Too high doth seem
For mortal tongue.
Ye blessed souls at rest,
Who ran this earthly race
And now, from sin released,
Behold the SAVIOUR’s face,
His praises sound,
As in His light
With sweet delight
Ye do abound.
Ye saints, who toil below,
Adore your heavenly King,
And onward as ye go
Some joyful anthem sing;
Take what he gives
And praise him still,
Through good or ill,
Who ever lives!
My soul, bear thou thy part,
Triumph in GOD above:
And with a well-tuned heart
Sing thou the songs of love!
Let all thy days
Till life shall end,
Whate’er He send,
Be fill’d with praise!
Each verse is imperative; each commands the impossible; each is obscurely painful to a boy preternaturally sensitive to the printed word. For it speaks of joy, love, blessedness, praise, in obnoxious and callous terms. For it is written to be sung by a congregation, regardless of their spiritual state; and thus requires their personal and collective hypocrisy.
This is not enough to convey what I felt. I’ve lately started reading Nabokov’s Lolita, a tale of obsession, within which delight and damnation are inextricably mixed. Suddenly, I saw a fiendish parallel between Lolita’s prepubescent situation and my own. Lolita was debauched by Humbert because she had no choice: was constrained by threats and bribes. Her mother had died: now her guardian was all she had in the world. There was another side to the bargain, if the narrator’s testimony is to be trusted. She was sexually precocious and he was devoted to her. It wasn’t mere rape, but something more insidious, in that she collaborated in the seduction. In body and mind, she strove to go through a normal adolescence, despite the assaults upon it.
I was sent to boarding-school from an unhappy home situation. There was no question of sexual abuse in either location: all the threats and bribes came from within religion itself, which sought to debauch my mind and soul. My only escape route was in secret resistance. I’m not even going to say there was anything abnormal about my upbringing: only that it took a long time to recover from it.
Then yesterday I watched the Baz Luhrman film Moulin Rouge. The courtesan Satine is caught in a bond as tight as Lolita’s. Living from hand to mouth herself, she succumbs to the charms of the Penniless Writer who represents True Love; but she must pretend to love her patron the Rich Duke. Though dying of consumption, she remains under compulsion to the message of her Impresario: “The show must go on.”
So why doesn’t she just walk out? Leave the Moulin Rouge, leave Montmartre? Go off with her mythical lover? For he is Orpheus, descended into the underworld. Why can he not bring his Eurydice back up to the world of daylight and freedom? It is because she must stay with what she knows. To go beyond that is the horror of emptiness. This is her existential angst, to know she is in the wrong place, but be unable to leave its familiar warmth so as to strike out into the unknown. This is how countless women stay with abusive husbands or pimps.
I feel I am beginning to understand the prevalence of this existential angst. As if these symbolic answers were not enough, in response to question, I had a dream.
I’m working in an office on the fifteenth floor. I spend the entire morning absorbed in a magazine. At noon, I suddenly realize I ought to be working. But I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know who my boss is. I feel that I might be called to account at any moment, to explain what I’ve done to justify my employment. But I can’t reveal my ignorance by asking anyone. The stress gets to me. I light a cigarette. Disapproving looks remind me that this is now banned in public places. I hide it in my pocket, still alight, and descend fifteen flights of stairs to the open air. As I approach the bottom of the stairwell, it gets smokier and more crowded, as others act in the same way. I emerge to a crowded courtyard, billowing with smoke. Bales of straw are provided for smokers to sit on, but they easily catch fire.
I wake up. Putting the dream into words, I see an angst-ridden view of life unfold.
Now I can feel the bind that Christians call original sin and others call existential angst. Now it makes sense: the inability to choose freedom. I see how long it takes to shake oneself free. Perhaps it needs favourable circumstance as well as time and awareness. And angelic assistance.
I don’t suppose Raymond will agree but this may be the nearest I can get to feeling what he means.
a wayfarer’s notes 
Woof! Another wild ride, sir! Lovely. You startled me with “I had hoped to feel something, if only a second-hand sense of devotion,” and I was struck with “what the devil would that feel like?” and a sort of vague sense of sliding into a counterfeit world where even one's emotions are not reliably their own. Then when we hit ” For it is written to be sung by a congregation, regardless of their spiritual state; and thus requires their personal and collective hypocrisy” I was breathless – the very few times I've attempted to join in with a church song I've felt – sometimes a semblance of emotion, but most often a counterfeit emotion – but I never suspected the congregation of feeling that way! To me, it was the response of an interloper —
and then the profound statement ” I’m not even going to say there was anything abnormal about my upbringing: only that it took a long time to recover from it.” which left me nodding eagerly – yes, yes, that's precisely IT. No ogres, no monsters, just the awful monotony of trying to heal from utterly unintended, mundane wounds that cut deep.
omg! IS THIS what they're yammering on about when they say 'original sin?'
I don't yet understand the connection. I trust your intelligence to have found sure footing (although I may argue the path and it's destination).
I will return, and perhaps then this puzzle box will yawn open with clearer answers. (But, as yet, I don't perceive a connection between the intention of my post, and yours. I think we're riding different wings of the angel.)
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Yes, I realize that I haven't delivered an answer to your post on Protection. I haven't explained an actual way of gathering power to cleanse one's soul from “a huge collection of garbage – everything from thrown negative thoughts to spirit riders”.
What I put together here was a collection of recent experiences which pointed me towards the kinds of circumstances in which that garbage was accumulated.
I'm rather uncertain about this, but I think the garbage itself is what we accumulate as a coping mechanism to defend ourselves from impossible situations, such as coercion and incompatible emotions.
Our pain is not the mundane wounds but the reconstructions we are forced to attempt: the scabs, stitches, poorly aligned bone-setting, to extend the analogy.
In particular I was exploring the role of religion as being a form of childhood abuse: not just in its coerciveness, but in messing with fundamental notions of divinity, love and fear. This I felt was probably connected with your shamanic notion of soul retrieval.
I don't feel I can reject shamanism just because it doesn't resonate with me. I can no more enter into it on its own terms than I can enter into Christianity. The nearest thing I can do is see if it is a different expression of what I know personally.
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I also have a wariness of shamanic approaches in so far as they derive from age-old traditions of societies very different from our own. I'd apply the same critical criteria to, say, Buddhism.
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Vincent, I stay clear off very difficult sounding words such as existential whatever, even though perhaps their underlying ideas are simple.
I would not have gone very far to discover the secret of getting rid of any sort of angst. It is right there in those pictures. The beauty of Turville is striking and the blessings of nature upon turville by surrounding it with lush green fields and forested hills yonder are certainly is a sure sign that nature agrees.
The secret to getting rid of angst lies in the very lifestyles and attitude of an average turville resident. No better fate or future can be expected on this planet than theirs. If someone wants more, he would have to go for pansmeria and a life on another planet.
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Vincent, the key difference is that you see these things symbolically, and I see them literally. The practice of soul retrieval understands that parts of oneself can literally split away and must be rejoined to the main soul in order to have full health. Yes, a traumatic childhood or relationship with religion might cause the problem, but not necessarily.
I'm not asking you to believe or endorse shamanism's understanding of the world, I'm just pointing out the differences.
Shamanic practice is, at it's core, mostly the same in every culture. I say at it's core, because different cultures emphasize different aspects. There is no attempt in today's core shamanism to recreate or use tribal or indigenous culture, in the core work that I've trained in this is actually discouraged.
Of course sometimes there is overlap. We go, we look, we learn the same things as our brothers and sisters in the jungle and on the mountain top. The worlds we visit aren't exclusively 'owned' by any particular culture. Some travel to the lower world through a hole in the corner of the home, others by following tree roots, streams, caves. But all are journeys to the lower world, and once we arrive the differences are few.
Reasons I accept soul retrieval? Well, hard not to when a shaman I've just met tells me things about myself they could not know, and describes where the soul part was found and the age. As part of my training I've done the same for others, and seen the shock and disbelief on their faces as I explain what I've seen.
We like to think that things like this are elaborate deceptions, with investigations done ahead of time. But when you've just gathered with and met a circle of people for the first time and know nothing but their name, you know that the deception theory is improbable to the point of absurdity.
One could turn to some form of telepathy or mental eves-dropping for an explanation, but it seems clearer to simply report what is seen and understood than to construct an elaborate edifice around it.
So – still I think, we are talking about different things.
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May I suggest Vincent, an early friday evening visit to the Bull and Butcher, Break the ice with some locals by enquiring sbout Lord Sainsbury's ;ast visit to the pub and about the sleeping girl of Turville and of Queen Victoria's secret visit of laying on hands for the awakening 🙂
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ashok – how enigmatic you are!
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Thanks Hayden 🙂
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“she collaborated in the seduction.”
Wow. What an exquisite metaphor!
So religion might have started in the ancient world when humans consciously notice that they exist, and soon after notice that it won't be too long before they as individuals will not exist. (Apparently). Or at least they don't find a lot of concrete evidence that they will exist after death.
So some of the smarter humans get together and decide death is not right. Death renders life meaningless. It causes me anxiety. It does not seem to make sense that I, an amazing creature, should die just like the beetle. Certainly my life is more significant than that!
Nietzsche, Sartre, and the rest of such minds,then claim the following: Since I the human don't like death and meaninglessness, I make up stories to deny that is my fate. And to make this stories stick, I need “Lolita” (in fact all of us Lolitas) to collaborate; to subscribe to the story.
What is interesting is that there are apparently other quite effective ways to remedy existential angst. To speak in religious terms, there are other ways to deliver our minds from the suffering of existential angst.
But that subject and those methods would bring us far afield from Vincent's exquisite literature which seems to me is like Eliot's, who finds more efficacy in firmly rooting himself in the natural world and “waiting without any (metaphysical) hope.”
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(I meant analogy, not metaphor. Or maybe it is an analogical metaphor?)
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Ashok, you have been researching Turville! You know more about it than I. The Bull and Butcher looked quite tempting as I passed but I don’t feel too comfortable in Turville, actually. If I could afford to live there, I would still want to live elsewhere. I suggest waiting till you meet some Turville residents before deciding that they have the secret of getting rid of angst! There are places much nearer where I prefer to live, including the house I presently occupy! But when you are next in England, let’s go together to the Bull and Butcher and do the research. What do you like to drink?
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Analogy is near enough metaphor, Raymond, we need not split hairs. I see that to you, the existential angst is bound up with death, which isn't mentioned in my Wikipedia quotes. I like what you quote from Eliot though. My theory is that fear of death is for one reason only: the unconscious conviction that one has wasted one's life, that is, one has not yet attained the habit of enjoying it simply, in the moment, like a small child or animal.
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Hayden, I accept that we are talking about different things, because I have not discovered in shamanism what you have. My investment in the subject has been small. I admit to having tried to equate it with other things and explain it symbolically. Well there is time yet for more experiences. If a shamanic revelation knocks on my door loud enough for me to hear it, I'll open, and make it welcome.
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Vincent – the perfect response and everything I could ask for!
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Raymond, what a wonderful image, of some “smarter” person in the ancient world saying “Certainly my life is more significant than a beetle's!”
This to me defines Original Sin far more credibly than the Garden of Eden and the forbidden fruit. For that Genesis story is merely proof that God has stitched-up Man, knowing full well that he won't be able to resist eating the apple, then blaming him for anything that goes wrong with the bungled Creation. The Flood – proof that things have got so out of hand it is necessary to start again. Etc etc.
But let's consider this mythical man, some Greek with too much time on his hands due to the bad habit of getting slaves to do all the work. He has this brilliant thought: “Certainly my life is more significant than a beetle's!” In this one thought, he brings down upon himself the wages of sin.
For why? Because here he is, already in Paradise, but it's not good enough. He seeks significance; or what is even worse than that, to be more significant than some other part of the creation.
I suggest that in that moment he doesn't just fall from Grace. He goes instantly to Hell.
But you flatter too much with your talk of “exquisite literature”. You know the answer to the angst problem as well as I do. It's to let go of this phoney idea of significance.
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Hayden, oh, that's good! But not being one to stop when I'm apparently winning, I've put a comment on your post “Protection” which describes a shamanic journey I took once.
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Well there's the paradox Vincent. It is a significant accomplishment to see what a joke significance is.
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Yes, I also think of that as original sin. I look around and find out I am going to die. This is a major flaw in my world! I or some other fool must have done something really bad and disastrous.
I love the Manicheans. They got a good God and an evil God. The evil God messed up the works. So they don't have to take the blame for a messed up world. And their good God gets away with no blame either. Very handy. All we have to do is fix the blemish and then we can live forever.
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Vincent, I will drink anything the occassion demands. However I suspect I am past the age fro any long distance travel now. Thanks for the invitation though. I might take you up on that just in case I do travel to England again.
How right you are Vincent when you say
“He seeks significance; or what is even worse than that, to be more significant than some other part of the creation.
I suggest that in that moment he doesn't just fall from Grace. He goes instantly to Hell.”
Another problem lies in asserting ownership over what has been borrowed or given for temporary use and one such is our present life or bodies. It shall be taken away by the the one who gave it (nature) when the time is up.
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Vincent, I like this idea of Original Sin and am in accord!
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