He’s not dead, he’s pining for the Fjords.
Rupert Sheldrake was a reputable plant scientist. He enjoyed a good reputation in his field, and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals until 1978, and published articles in Nature in 1973 and 1974. He has links to his published papers on his web site. According to his own Web site, he went to India and worked his academic field from 1974 to 1978. After that he studied in an ashram, and then began to publish more spiritually oriented writings.
Author: Tony Dalmyn
Fakirs
When I was six, my parents gave me three books by Rudyard Kipling. There was The Jungle Book, and a book called Stalky and Company which was a fictionalized account of Kipling’s teen years in an English “public school” which was actually a private boarding school. My mother had been the Akela in a Cub Scout pack in Holland and she was encouraging me to join a local Cub pack. The Cubs and the scouting movement in England and Canada used the Jungle Book as their organizational metaphor. (Mowgli was raised by wolves in the Jungle Book, and Cub Scouts are wolf cubs).
The third and best one was Kim, the story of an Anglo-Irish orphan abandoned in Northern India, who lives on the street and becomes recruited into the Great Game of military and political spying, while also finding his own integrity in acting as a helper, disciple and friend to an elderly Tibetan Buddhist monk on a pilgrimage in India to seek the River that sprang forth where the Buddha’s arrow fell. Kim is a rich, complex and enjoyable novel by an undervalued writer, and I have re-read it several times.
In the book, we find several encounters with fakirs. Fakir has a rich sound to an English-speaking listener. It sounds like faker, and it sounds like an obscenity. In the Oxford World Classic Edition of Kim it is spelled faquir and explained in a footnote referring to a religious mendicant, properly a Muslim but including other ascetics, such as Hindu Saddhus. Kipling and his character Kim see a clear distinction between true holy men, like Kim’s Lama, and a variety of yogis (holy men) and pundits (learned men) and other self-serving and corrupted religious characters that they encounter.
Dictionary definitions of fakir inform us that it has an Arabic root, in the word for poverty, and that it refers to the voluntary practice of poverty within the Sufi tradition. It goes back to the early middle ages and corresponds to the radical poverty of St. Francis and his followers in European Christianity. The religious traditions of voluntary poverty inform and inspire socialism, the Christian social gospel, and modern liberation theology. It also seems to inform the creation of communes and alternative communities and movements for voluntary simplicity in modern living, such as Duane Elgin’s Voluntary Simplicity books and teachings.
The Skeptic’s Dictionary brings us closer to Kipling’s observations:
The term is also used, however, to refer to itinerant Indian conjurers and alleged god-men who travel from village to village and perform “miracles” such as materializing vibhuti (holy ash) or jewelry. They do other conjuring stunts such as walking on hot coals, laying on a bed of nails, eating fire, sticking their hands in boiling ‘oil’, piercing their faces with long needles, putting large hooks through the flesh of their backs attached to heavy objects which they pull. Some conjurers are even said to levitate or to have performed the famous Indian rope trick.
I think there are many fakirs in our time and place. I include many inspirational/motivational speakers and writers, personal coaches, self proclaimed counsellors, therapists, and healers, teachers of personal growth, leaders of cults and vendors of enlightenment.
It has been said that modern writers and thinkers see farther because we stand on the shoulders of giants. I don’t mean to imply that the evolution of ideas and culture is progressive or that we are being taken anywhere on the wave of history. I think modern writers and thinkers are able to work with the wisdom of the past in their own work. This gives them a new vantage point, and of course it gives them the opportunity to appropriate terms and ideas from the great traditions.
I believe that modern fakirs have been able to strip mine the religious, spiritual, philosophical and scientific traditions of many cultures to manufacture a variety of pleasing psycho-spiritual stories. Some of the fakirs are true pilgrims, devoted to finding God or enlightenment. However many of them are selling junk, for their own financial gain or to gratify their inner child’s need to be the center of attention.
I see a powerful and healthy tension in the word. I would like to use it as a critical tool, rather than as an insult, but I don’t plan to walk on eggshells.
April 7, 2004
I had a short and nasty meeting with n. after dinner. I picked him up at the hotel where CFS (the Child Welfare Agency) has parked him. He forgot that I was picking him up, and then began to hint, suggest, request, demand, bargain and threaten. He wanted a pack of cigarettes. My position on cigarettes and other such items is that I don’t subsidize his wishes. If he wants to have those things, he will have to decide how to get the money for them by making other choices like getting a job.
I stopped at home before going on to my meeting. I discovered that he had already phoned my wife Jan and complained about my failure to fulfil his wish. Old pattern. If I gave him something that Jan didn’t want him to have (if I told a joke or played a prank or expressed a view that she did not support) he would rat me out and she blamed me for corrupting him. If I supported her articulated values and wishes, and denied one of his requests, or disciplined him, he unloaded on her about how mean I was. In fact he didn’t have to say a word. She would react to protect him. What she has always heard, felt and seen and then thrown at me is that I don’t respect and love him, and that his pain and her pain are my fault.
This is not a conscious process with him. He has been trying to protect himself and to meet his needs with the resources available to him. In plain terms, he has been using his parents’ attachment to him – our need to feel good about ourselves and our connection to him – to get what he needs and what he feels or thinks he needs. If parents can’t manage themselves, if either parent can’t stand the bad feeling that comes from setting and enforcing rules, then they let a child’s feelings rule the family. One of our problems was that both parents needed to feel good about ourselves with n., while we had different beliefs and ideals and differing ideas about how to raise him.
That’s the history. I can’t change it.
N. still wants me buy stuff, and reacts the old way when he doesn’t get stuff …. It’s a learned behaviour and he can’t stop. If I contact him, he will react. He will ask for stuff and then accuse me of trying to control him when I don’t get him what he wants. Does this mean I shouldn’t contact him?
Do I have to be afraid of what Jan will feel and think or what Claire will feel and think? I am afraid, and I can’t manage their reactions. I have to respect my judgment and integrity now. Right now, all I can do is listen to him, support him, love him.
Tonight, I listened to him rage about his smokes and I left him at the hotel.
After that I went to a meeting. When n. ran away Jan and started going to meetings of local group of Families Anonymous. I still go. Jan has stopped. I think I know the flaws of a 12 step approach, but it is still helpful for me to go to meetings and share and listen.
Then, a new day.
Cycling log
Steve has started to post 2004 cycling notes and photos on the Bike with Mike page. I have edited my recent posts in this blog to link to his site. Last year Steve posted his own log as Bike with Mike. This year he is giving Mike that log, published in a subdomain of Steve’s domain. I think he will continue to keep his own log and publish it on the web. He tinkers with his site. I will have to check my links to the cycling page on his site and to Mike’s cycling log periodically.
Lost Boy
I reached my n. by phone. He is not living at home. He ran away last fall, just before his 16th birthday to try to find independence, drugs, anarchy, metal music, sex and friends who appreciate his interests. He tried living on the street and he has settled down in a placement through a child welfare agency – at least for now. I have been visiting and talking to him over the last three weeks, after a long estrangement. He seems to have worked out some of his angry sense of having been forced out of school and out of his home by intolerable parental and societal rules.
Registered domain
I got an email from Steve who asked me if if I had registered Sea of Flowers as a domain name. That wasn’t a bad idea, and I registered sea-of-flowers.ca. I haven’t set up the web page redirector yet.
Dispossessed
In looking at some old email in an archive folder, I recollected that I used to sign my email with quotations. For several months or years in the mid 90’s, I used a quote from The Dispossessed, (Harper & Row, 1974) by Ursula K. LeGuin:
It is the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
When I checked Randy’s blog, his entry for April 5/04 mentioned his sf fanzine, Winding Numbers. I wrote several articles for Winding Numbers, including a sercon (that was fannish talk for serious and constructive) or critical, literary review of The Dispossessed. LeGuin has remained one of my favourite writers, for her honesty and intellectualism. I also agree with some of Thomas M. Disch’s comments about LeGuin in his book The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of. Disch considers that LeGuin has been made into a feminist icon by literary critics, and that some of her ideas and themes have been appropriated and misrepresented by critics and imitators. Disch is not particularly enchanted with feminism and magical realism in fiction. His critique becomes sour around these matters of taste, and I part company with him while agreeing that LeGuin has become associated with superstitious lyricism.
April 6, 2004
After supper, Mike, Steve and I took a bike ride of about 26 kilometers through Assiniboine Park, over the bridge on Moray, through Woodhaven, to Grant’s Mill in front of the Grace Hospital. The Assiniboine River and the creeks flowing into it are high with spring run-off. Mike took pictures. Steve has reactivated the Bike with Mike site, and he is trying to get Mike to take it over. The pictures are there. Go to the 2004 log, and click on April 6 in the date column. I have a beard and I’m wearing a a red helmet and blue fleece in these pics. In other pictures this spring I may be seen in a brown camoflage pattern fleece or an orange windbreaker. Steve tends to wear a yellow shell on colder days.
With the change to daylight savings time last weekend we can ride for more than 2 hours after dinner which gives us time for riding and some rest and photography stops.
Meeting Sister Jane
A little over two years ago, in the early months of 2002, I started a court proceeding for a woman who ran a drop-in center at Higgins and Main, in the very deepest, poorest, most alcohol and drug addled part of Winnipeg’s inner City core. (I am, by the way, a lawyer by day). Sister Jane was, at that time, 50 and had been a Catholic nun since she 20. She was living alone, without the support of her religious congregation, and she had terminal cancer.
She had been raised in New Hampshire and joined her congregation as a young woman just at the time that memberships in the Catholic Religious Orders was plummeting. Soon after she joined her Order, she accepted an invitation from a Canadian nun, a self-styled visionary reformer, to move to Edmonton and then to Winnipeg to be part of an innovative spiritual commune.
It didn’t work for Sister Jane. The project tried to fuse transformational psychology with Catholic spirituality. It became the leader’s personal project, and became whatever the leader wanted it to be. Jane found that her leader was controlling and grandiose. Jane swore in Affidavits that the leader introduced a purported therapy in which she initiated naked hugs which progressed to other sexual acts. Jane submitted sometimes but started to resist and react, which angered her leader, who disciplined her within the close confines of their communal life, and expelled her from the commune. She was then marginalized in her own Order because of her alienation from the leader and the rest of her Sisters who were connected to commune and the project.
Sister Jane had remained a member of her Order, but had started to live on her own. She received a little support to find a building and start a drop-in place but she had to recruit a board and to find funds for operating expenses and her own needs from a very early stage. She made friends, and her friends supported her and her ministry.
When she found that she had cancer, she sought some support from her superiors in the Order. In that process she described her personal experiences in the new movement, and she found that she was getting very little support. The Archbishop of Winnipeg listened to her and helped her personally with some other needs, but he did not intervene in the affairs of Jane’s autonomous Religious Order.
When I met Jane, her cancer was in remission and she was trying to understand if she could continue in that Religious Order, or if she had to leave. We started Court proceedings to recover compensation for the harm caused by illegal acts, her cancer came back in the winter of 2002-2003 and she died last summer. Her ministry was curtailed by her illness, and it closed for a while after she died. Her friends have been trying to revive it.
I visited her last spring, before her last hospitalization. Her ministry was based in an old three story bank building. The drop in was on the main floor and she lived in a suite on the upper floors. It was a small apartment, with a little chapel or prayer room. It was small oasis for her in a tough area of town and Jane lived with anxiety and fear.
When I had been discussing her evidence with her, I had tried to understand what she did at a drop-in. Did she provide a social service? Counselling? Teaching? Referrals to other agencies? Some kind of therapy? She explained it as living out the Church’s preferential option for the poor. I recognized that as an articulation of liberation theology, but I don’t think I started to understand it until later. What she did was to be present for people and to listen to them, providing them with a safety and respect. The theologian Rowan Williams, in his book Christ on Trial, How the Gospel Unsettled our Judgment
wrote:
God’s transcendence is in some sense present in and with those who do not have a voice, in and with those without power to affect their world, in and with those believed to have lost any right they might have had in the world. God is not with them because they are naturally virtuous, or because they are martyrs; he is simply there in the fact that they are ‘left over’ when the social and moral score is added up by the managers of social and moral behaviour.
What strikes me about Sister Jane’s work is that she was able to carry on while she herself was deeply wounded. I think I have only been able understand the value of her ministry as I have begun to experience my own pain and powerlessness over the events and the people in my life, and when I have needed to have people listen to me.
Last week a common friend of Jane’s and mine told me that Sister Jane had seen that I was going through some changes – as I certainly have been. I was simply moved to tears that she had the compassion to see me clearly while I thought I was helping her.
Bike with Mike
Last year my friends Mike and Steve started to ask me to ride with them. We started to ride, almost every Sunday and one or two evenings a week through the spring, summer and fall. Steve began to log and journal his trips, alone and with Mike, Robbie and me on a web page called Bike with Mike. Steve’s log says that I rode with him on April 20 last year. I don’t clearly remember that trip. I remember joining them for evening rides in early May and then for Sunday rides.