The Displacement of Loving

I've finished a really mellow, spacious day at work, and somehow found myself reading criticisms of Wilber--oh, I know, I wanted to see if I could find any detailed analysis of Wilber's take on Hegel. Our friend Emily, up for the weekend, via London, is partnered with a Hegel scholar who said that Wilber is not right in his reading of Hegel, and this was a reason the Emily was reacting to a set of his CDs I'd given her years ago.

So. I found myself dipping into the blogosphere's Wilber critiques, and again found myself with this sad sinking feeling. I haven't got the primary-text background to make sense of some of the technical claims, but that wasn't what I was reacting to. I've seen critiques of Wilber's model and his personhood that feels much different than these comments--ironic, because what I see in these critics are essentially emotionally based complaints, not real critique. A lot of what I read was about an incident a couple years ago where Wilber supposedly blew up at his critics--the so-called "Wyatt Erpy" incident--telling them among other things to suck his dick. This "explosion" came after having his blog post reviewed by several hundred people, which seems pretty deliberate.

Anyway, he offended a lot of people, broke rules of "nice" discourse apparently. Frank Visser, a key critic and collector of critics (at integralworld.net), writes a response that's full of a kind of sniffy offense, and like his site in general, there's this sense of simmering, vibrating discontent.

Which brings me to my title. In these writings, though there may be valid critical points, there's this overall emotional quality of, well, pissiness, but like most activist groups I've encountered. "Something's wrong here, and we need to right it. And when we right it, then we'll have the world we deserve." A displacement of loving. My reading is, like these activist groups, people will get the loving they deserve when they follow the rules: be nice, be kind, be non-hierarchical, be non-offensive, be sensitive. If not, you don't get our love, acceptance, or appreciation.

It's oppressive to read, and as oppressive as I've found in these activist groups.

I just read the other day a letter from the previous CEO of Integral Institute (Wilber's organization), which though critical of Wilber's managerial style, was also loving and grateful for what he was doing right. But more so, there wasn't a magnanimity which I've seen in others associated with Wilber or with Integral, a commitment to loving that exists totally aside from what's being loved.

I remember Goenkaji saying one time that he gets lots of letters from all over, from people with different concerns or wanting advice. But he said that some came through with such negativity, which was noticeable from the outset, and with those he mostly just sent the writer metta (loving kindness). That feels the same with these folks.

Film as fallen worship

I was listening to David Milch's lecture to a religion and media class at MIT, on the way down to work after dropping Heather off. I'd been avoiding it, partially because I'd listened to a lot of him recently, but more so because I'd accidentally ejected the cd last week, and dreaded holding the fast forward button for several minutes. Anyway, I went back to it.

One thing he said that quite struck me was his comment about the film "National Treasure," which was released several years ago. He didn't exactly see it as a milestone in film making, but he did see it as an expression of humans' practice in submitting themselves to God as an act of worship. THAT I'd never thought of, but it kind of makes sense. As Milch says, as a "fallen" act of worship, but nonetheless something that keeps people in the practice of opening themselves to something larger.

This morning, I had thought I'd slip in some surfing before starting the work week, but after doing my morning sitting, just didn't really want to. What I wanted was to drift around in the half-dream state, and then when that tapered off, to watch NYPD Blue, Milch's cop show from the 90's. I wasn't at all sure why, but various bits of theory from recent readings spoke up to say that this submission to the dream states, in real dreaming, and in the surrogate form of film/television, was an act of reclaiming something that had long ago been displaced or projected.

Heather and I have talked about this, our particular version of a generic topic applicable to all couples: what lessons do we secretly desire our partner to teach us. You can spot them, because they are the parts of our partner that we generally fight and denigrate. For me, its Heather's ability to go into dream or dream-like states and not fight them at all. For me, they are like slipping down a gravel slope into an oily goo. And yet, whose are these states except mine? What are they except another expression of consciousness? And so pushing them away, emphasizing the intellect and rational, what is that if not a dissociation of a genuine, legitimate aspect of myself?

Advanced meditators and spiritual practitioners are reportedly able to remain in witness-mind through their immersion in dream and unformed sleeping states. There is not a loss of conscious as the person remembers what it is that is always awake through all states of mind. It would seem that somewhere along the way, I learned to see consciousness as antithetical to dream states, that it's either/or.

But this morning seems to be a shifting or softening of that dis-association--there was a willingness to stay put and legitimize what was actually happening. And then with the TV show, there was an attempt to remain conscious and aware as I descended into the story.

Milch's point seems to be that film/TV, even the worst of it, is an act of submission to a different state of mind, and that that submission is resonant with and a practice in worshiping God. Maybe a more or less bastard version, or perhaps the object of worship is (extremely) fallen, but he seems to be saying that nonetheless, it's a reaching for God.

Hearing that, something clicked, or perhaps rang. My family has been watching film since my earliest, earliest days. In high school, my career aspiration was film director, and I attended UCLA as an English major, but within rock's throw of the film department, and often spending evenings and weekends watching movies and listening to film makers talk. My longing was to be in there, making films, but I never had the courage to follow through. Maybe I never wanted to challenge my experience of worship by getting to know the priests?

As a family, we didn't have a religion, and certainly nothing like worship in any traditional sense. We were called "happy heathens," by my mother, neither term being very accurate. I think that film was a stand-in church, where religious longings were squirreled in the face of discredited institutions and teachings. Our ad-hoc solution to what Wilber describes as the disaster of modernity: that religion is identified as pre-modern, and science is defined as modern, rather than understanding that there is a pre-modern, a modern, and a post-modern expression of religion. Being a modern family, we were cut off from religion, rather than given a modern version. So not being even aware of this split, and not being able to kill off our religious longings (I recently found myself pining as I passed a van full of kids from a Baptist church), we seemed to find ourselves to the altered state of worship, in front of movie and TV screens.

Nothing is cast off by God, by Spirit. Not even "National Treasure," which Milch seems to see as proof of God's grace. Isn't it something of a redemptive move to see film/TV in this way? Isn't there something deeply gracious, generous, and true in seeing man's longing for redemption and communion in something so modern and so often corrupt. It's not that the products are clear voicings of Spirit, it's that the repeated act of submission to them is a thoroughly respectable stumble towards God.