Carol Tulpar, Simon Fraser University

download this essay: the-empowering-journey

…at midlife, the capacity for self-deception is exhausted.
James Hollis

Part I

The Intellectual Biography

For me, the journey through Graduate Liberal Studies has been a spiritual quest. At the beginning of this course, when we all gave our intellectual biographies, I was freshly struck by the realization that though one could tell this in many different ways, the essential threads of one’s life journey would always form the same tapestry. At various stages of life, prompted by different stimuli that evoke different memories, different stories may be imagined. Yet in some mysterious way, all these stories are one. From the composition of our class, and our program, it appears that following this narrative thread that goes back into childhood is a common task of the middle years. At this stage of life, it is fruitful to re-examine how the thread has been woven along the way into the tapestry of our intellectual and spiritual development.

The energizing years I have spent in this program, with its wealth of books, teachers and fellow-students, have enabled me to consciously attend to what would otherwise perhaps have remained neglected. Studying in GLS has allowed me to take time out of a busy life for the valuable work of re-examining my own journey. Within our community of scholars we raised the old, old questions, and examined them once again. The intimate contact with the views and attitudes of people of such diverse backgrounds and life experiences as I had the good fortune to encounter in GLS made it possible for us to see these questions from many different angles, and consider a wealth of possible responses.

Not long before I came to GLS, I was reading the journals of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and came across her framing of a question that had been in my own mind for a long time. When I first read these lines, the still-fresh memory of my daughter’s babyhood made Lindbergh’s question the more evocative, the more pressing. “What is there,” she asks, gazing at her baby, “in that pouting wriggling thing that is to remain constant—at twelve, at twenty, at forty, at seventy? What is the thread that is really he?” [1] For me, this electric question evoked my first look into the eyes of my newborn, when I felt her, calmly, curiously, intelligently regarding me. “Who are you?” her eyes seemed to be asking, as I was reciprocally wondering, “Who are you, and where did you come from?” Certainly, the eyes are the windows of the soul, and the light of her soul gazed upon me from her earliest hours.

“Who am I and why am I here?” In childhood I first grappled with this question while talking to my mother. One of the first such conversations I remember involved guardian angels. I was less than six years old, and was looking at an old calendar picture, on which a child about my age was playing outside in stormy weather, while behind her shoulder stood a guardian angel. My mother told me she had kept that picture because it reminded her of me, and she assured me I too had a guardian angel who was always with me. I found this idea comforting, and it has always remained with me, though, like so much from my early life, memories of this conversation with my mother were almost forgotten for a long time. What pushed these early impressions below consciousness, I suppose, was the business of the years of proving myself in the world: getting an education, finding useful work, making a life with my husband and, with him, providing for our daughter. During this time, I suddenly found myself living with an extended family that included my husband’s adult brother as well as his parents. When one is living with people who have grown up in a substantially different cultural and religious tradition, while none of the members of the family give up their own intellectual and spiritual heritage, it is secular humanism provides the essential common ground of understanding.

In another oft-repeated story from my childhood, my mother told us that before she married Dad, there was another man whom she could easily have married, since he was very fond of her. Thus arose for me the troublesome question of where I was before I was born. At that age, in my egoism, I was not prepared to entertain the possibility of a time when I had not existed…I did exist! And so I decided that if Mom had married Hartley, I would still have been born, but instead of having my father’s blue eyes, I would have had my mother’s brown ones.

When I was a little older, similar questions cropped up again in connection with my adopted cousin Johnny Logan. While we were visiting our relatives, my aunt told my mother the story of her son’s reaction to the news that he had been adopted. In those days, though it was not customary for adoptive parents to know much about the children they were about to take on, my aunt and uncle had been given a choice about which of two boys they would adopt, and were told that the other boy’s birth parents were French Canadians. When my Aunt and Uncle deemed John old enough to be told that he was adopted, my aunt took up the task. A natural storyteller, she included the detail that there had been a French Canadian boy, whom they had not chosen. In case John should be shocked to hear that he had been adopted, she reasoned that this would also emphasize that they had chosen him. John had been playing with his mother’s gloves and he had just told her he had put them in a certain drawer. When she told him the story of his adoption, he took the news with equanimity, only remarking practically, “It’s a good thing you didn’t take the French-speaking boy, or you would not have understood him when he told you where he put your gloves!” Hearing this story, I laughed indulgently, thinking myself very mature.

There were many such markers on my path, which I spontaneously recalled when we were asked for an intellectual biography at the beginning of this class. In an incident I have mentally titled “Above the Door,” I remembered being a young child with a notebook, climbing up and perching behind an open door where I could look down on the members of my family unnoticed, recording their remarks in my notebook as they conversed, and then climbing down to amaze them by repeating exactly what they had just said. “I am a writer,” I thought to myself with an inward knowing, both pleased and surprised. Recording these words now, I feel the truth of them, in a deep place in my body, and experience a thrill of mixed joy and terror at this inescapable knowledge, still with me now, after nearly fifty years. “Oh, you can write,” said a friend to me, over twenty years ago, “the only question is whether you will use your talent.”Recently one of my students said almost exactly the same thing. And though I still have published nothing, one of the gifts of the voyage through GLS has been the reassurance that indeed I can write.

The next tapestry threads I have given the title “Childhood morality.” Three incidents in particular come to mind. First, Pogo. We had always had cats and dogs, and one of the things my father had always instilled in us was never to be cruel to animals. One day, however, I saw him lose his temper and kick Pogo. Pogo was a German Shepherd, loyal to a fault, and to see my father kick him was quite a shock. Dad looked embarrassed when he realized he had been seen, but I never confronted him with my judgment of his behaviour, which, however I filed away as disillusionment. “He is a hypocrite,” I thought, “he doesn’t practice what he preaches.” And then, childishly judgmental, categorical, unforgiving, “I will do better than that. I will never do what I know is wrong, and I will always stand up for what I believe, and uphold it in my own life.”

The second incident also involved my father. In this case, on a long northern summer evening, I was outside playing “Cowboys and Indians” with my brother and his friend. I was perhaps eleven or twelve years old, and the boys nine or ten. We were shooting each other, and when I fell down “dead,” with a little too much suddenness and drama, I caught my hand on a root and cut it, and had to go inside to clean up. When Dad asked me what I was doing outside, I told him, and to my astonishment, he said I should not be out there with the boys, playing rough; it wasn’t right for a girl. I was shocked by the injustice of this. Why should the pleasure of physical play out of doors be denied to me because I was a girl? It made no sense. This was the first time I felt my father had been unfair to me, and though I didn’t argue, inside I felt intensely bitter. In an interesting twist of life imitating art, I carry the physical scar on my hand to this day, an eternal reminder of this fork in the road. What did I decide then? That I would not allow people to stop me doing anything simply because I was female. That I would never treat others unfairly because of inborn characteristics. I look back now at that childhood moment, and imagine I see in it the seeds of my future career, advocating for people who, because of their cultural difference, are in danger of being treated unfairly. During my years of teaching, I have worked passionately to inculcate in my students the words, gestures and attitudes that would open the doors of fairness to them in their chosen second home, Canada.

Then there was the incident with Charlotte, an elementary classmate, a new girl, whom the other kids called “Pig.” Initially unable to resist the pressure of my peers, I followed suit, even though inwardly I knew this was not right. Charlotte lived near me, and in time we began to walk home from school together. As we talked, I learned many things about her. Her mother was dead, and she was living with elderly foster parents, who were strict and not very warm to her. Inwardly, I vowed I would never again follow the crowd in singling someone out because they were a little different. And realized that I too was different, which was why the temptation to curry favour with the “crowd” had come over me in the first place.

In elementary school, I loved writing, both prose and poetry. My Grade seven teacher, not a particularly warm woman, praised my writing skill, predicting that one day I would win the Governor General’s medal. Though at the time I didn’t know who the Governor General was, or why one might get a medal from him, I still have a sense that I owe a debt of honour to the now-deceased Elaine Gregg. Irrational though this may be, a part of me still feels I owe it to her to win the Governor General’s Award before I die. Perhaps the sense of obligation to her arises out of the sense that she looked into my soul, seeing the real and essential part of me.

In high school, I began reading the work of Stephen Leacock. When first I read My Discovery of England, I was studying English Literature, and was thus steeped in the work of the many British writers and poets who comprised virtually the entire course. In this groundbreaking work, Leacock was setting out to “balance the trade in impressions.” British poets had made enough money on impressions of Canada, and now it was his turn to follow suit: he would gather impressions of England, and sell them at so many cents a word. His madcap fantasy of a writer traveling abroad for the first time revealed a naïve narrator arranging his new pajamas and his fountain pen for the British customs officer to see and admire. Only to be told tersely that there was no need to open his case! This was funny enough; but when the traveller insists they should look at his belongings, and is then asked, with a momentary flare of suspicion, “You’re not Irish, are you?” I burst into gales of laughter.

Similarly with images of signs on the ship requesting that poets were requested not to lie prone on the bowsprit, gazing into the foam looking for impressions, and the brilliant descriptions of cultural differences between the Canadian and the British man. You were not permitted to speak to your fellow-traveller on the British train, Leacock explained, since you had not been introduced. The way around this little impasse was to open the window so as to create a strong draft on his ear, thus forcing him to introduce himself. I laughed out loud, astonishing my family with the extremity of my mirth. Another piece of Carol in place: words are powerful. Words can move you to laughter as well as tears. Words can take you places you cannot otherwise hope to go, not only traveling, but inside other people’s experience. And humour is a wonderful way of bringing into focus the inequities, as well as the inanities, of the society in which we are immersed.

At the tender age of seventeen, in 1967, I set off for Vancouver, to attend U.B.C. My mother told me I would be homesick, and I determined that I would not be. Now that I was free of the constant interference of my troublesome first family, I decided, I would create the life I wanted. In first year, I studied Arts I, French Literature, and earned a seat in Creative Writing, for which one had to submit writing samples in order to be accepted. This course proved to be an eye-opener. Our professor, a published poet and former prison guard was called Mike, (though we called the other teachers Dr. So and So, or Professor So and So). Mike looked exactly like the villain of a film current at the time, in which a blind Audrey Hepburn was pursued by a shaggy-haired man in a black leather jacket, mirror sunglasses, and Beatle-length hair. Embarrassingly, Mike laughed at my unintended double entendre in a naïve poem I wrote about a beautiful Spanish flamenco guitar I had just bought. I was amazed and baffled when he told us we could assign our own marks, providing we had justification for why we had given ourselves the mark we felt we deserved. In this class I met the very mature, admirable, and independent Leonora. While I was living in residence, she lived way over on Main Street, which seemed as far as the moon to me then. As was common for students at the time, she hitchhiked everywhere and lived on a shoestring. Shabby in appearance, she took her writing vocation very seriously, and was already sending her work to publishers. Watching Leonora, I observed that she had decided and affirmed who she was, she believed in herself, and others believed in her.

I left university after three years in Arts, because I didn’t really know what work I wanted to do to earn a living, and being on the whole disinclined to follow what Carolyn Heilbrun, in one of her novels, called the “well-worn paths society has laid down for the use of the young.” Of course, the approved paths were very limited for women and I was determined on principle not to become a teacher or a nurse. However, a couple of years of working in a bank reawakened my desire for higher education, and I returned to university, with a new fervour, a new purpose inspired by the determination to find a real job. Now I knew that I wanted work that required some level of intelligence, provided some level of satisfaction, and contributed some level of “redeeming social value,” as my contemporaries called it. Plunging into 4th year Arts, majoring in English literature, I read Virginia Woolf, impressed by her spare yet hauntingly evocative prose. Became interested in her life and social milieu. Read her autobiography, just out, by Quentin Bell, and found out about her friend Vita.

The book by Vita Sackville-West that I chose to read, on the recommendation of a friend, was called All Passions Spent, and I found it dramatically impressive. The aging widow of a British member of parliament looks back on her life: her marriage, her child-raising years, her travels in diplomatic circles. She is still healthy, with sufficient material resources to retire how she likes. Amazed to find that her husband’s death has unexpectedly brought about a “sudden emancipation,” [2] she rejects all the trappings that are left for her from that life, preferring instead a quiet unassuming retirement that allows her time to sit and ponder. She connects again with a man she has known in youth, someone with whom she has a soul connection, whom she has met but rarely, yet remembers clearly. Now, all passions spent, they sit companionably together on a bench, their hearts fully open to one another. What they do, whether they converse, no longer matters. Both are now living the lives they have chosen, authentic lives earlier passed up as they bowed to the repressive strictures of their society. This book impressed me for many reasons. How marvelous, I thought, that a woman, young or middle-aged, could imagine herself into the mind of a woman of seventy or more! And how I ached for Lady Slane, “always at variance to the creeds to which she apparently conformed.” [3] Much better, I thought, to refuse to conform earlier, than to reach seventy before finding one’s emancipation, and being allowed to be oneself!

The world is full of wonderful books, and on the whole, it has not been my custom to read them more than once; yet, for this book I made an exception, reading it once more in my late forties, and again finding it profoundly interesting. FitzGeorge, who has seen Lady Slane in a moment of vulnerability, and “committed the supreme audacity of looking into her soul,” [4]  then departs from her conventional life, only reappearing when she is old, to become an understanding friend, one who “knew that standards must be altered to fit the circumstances,” and that it was “absurd, though usual, to expect the standards to adjust themselves to ready-made circumstances.”[5]

Part II
The Midlife Journey of Return

Here in Cosmos, a Greek restaurant with the name of the universe, I eat bean soup and observe the décor, as I try to grapple with the meaning of my experience in Graduate Liberal Studies. The wall I am facing is painted with a scene typical of those seen on Greek Attic pottery, the red and black variety. This pleasant tableau includes musicians, both seated and standing, playing harps or lyres, and of course, the men who are being entertained by this music.

On another wall, a cluster of ancient scenes is displayed in a range of bi- and tri-colour schemes, in red, white, black, beige. These too, look familiar now, similar to those I studied and discussed in Women in Ancient Greece and Rome, and those I saw in so many books while researching Artemis. Indeed, on a recent visit to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, I went out of my way to look closely at the Greek pottery. Here is a horseman, with plumed headdress, spear and round shield, and here, a profile of Achilles, posing powerfully with a shield and sword. On another scene, a kneeling warrior is using his sword and shield to try to fend off his attacker, similarly equipped. Displayed nearby on the same wall is a round life-size Greek shield upon which a red water carrier on a black ground balances two amphora shaped vessels on a pole.

As I have said, I was struck by Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s question inspired by looking at a baby, “What is there …that is to remain constant—at twelve, at twenty, at forty, at seventy? What is the thread that is really he?”[6]

I must now venture my answer, and it is not the body, of course. Clearly, the body, far from remaining constant, is in a constant state of flux throughout life. The physician Deepak Chopra tells us that over 92% of the entire body’s cells are replaced within a single year.[7]

There can be one answer, something invisible, which we may call the soul. A human being is a soul that has taken birth. And has the soul come with its own purpose, either assigned or chosen, from the place where unembodied souls live? It seems natural to believe so. Have come to refine the spirit through the flesh, or work out our karma? This too, seems reasonably possible. Without attempting to definitively resolve these specific quandaries, I wish to say that I hold with the crucial importance of soul in our lives, believing as I do in a teleological definition of soul as calling us to a certain path of unfolding, which we may apprehend by intuition rather than intellect.

Within my context, this culture of the West at the beginning of the 21st century, I am extremely conscious of the dubiousness of this suggestion that we are essentially souls. During our era known as modernity (whether or not it has given way to, is giving way to, post-modernity, which is something I have been, GLS readings notwithstanding, unable to finally decide) the soul has receded as secular humanism claims all. Indeed, in some quarters, it may be seen as a heresy. While it is true that modernity has permitted, encouraged, even necessitated the constant re-invention of the self, nevertheless there are boundaries, beyond which we children of secular humanism, by tacit, largely unconscious agreement, do not go. These limitations are not easy for us to discern, for the simple reason that we live within them, they are “in the air we breathe.”[8]

Just as before the Enlightenment, it would have been heretical to assume that everything could be without reference to God or the soul, in the twentieth century, it became increasingly heretical to resort to faith or religion to explain any aspect of reality. Belief swung from one imbalance to an opposite one. But as Doris Lessing, one of the 20th century’s great visionary writers, says, “Anyone who reads history at all knows that the passionate and powerful convictions of one century usually seem absurd, extraordinary, to the next.”[9]

I consider the twentieth century our century, since we inhabited it during our formative years, and thus are the natural inheritors of its thought. And yes, this is a nod to the social constructionist theory of the self, who certainly have some justification for their views. Our century was likely the most violent, as well as the most brilliant one in human history. But why was this so? What went wrong in the twentieth century? What was it that led to so much social breakdown, with violent war after violent bloody war, as promised utopias turned into their polar opposite, dreadful dystopias?

According to the Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, it is the lack of inner restraint that is the basis of unethical behaviour. But what destroyed the inner restraint of the brilliant idealists who turned into evil despots? For instance, what made it possible for ordinary Germans to abet the Nazi party as it both passively and actively carried out deeds of such consummate evil? Could these actions be connected with the modernist unfashionableness of the belief in the soul? Could the modern system of belief contain a crucial gap in the place that should be occupied by soulful virtue of compassion, the soulful sense of oneness with one’s fellow creatures and our common planetary home? I think this idea worth entertaining.

The emphasis on secular humanism, wonderful though it was for the external forms of progress, in the twentieth century undoubtedly placed discussion of the human soul in the shade. At great peril. To look through a psychological lens, here we face an abyss indeed. Nature fills a vacuum, and what is repressed returns in a dark form, just as Mary Shelley has chillingly foreshadowed in her novel Frankenstein. Studied in the Passion course, this novel brilliantly portrays the human out of balance. The man of reason is overcome by a passion for knowledge and its attendant power. He develops a hubristic obsession to discover the secret of life itself, which before the Enlightenment, was seen as strictly the province of the Gods. What would a Greek chorus have said to Victor, as he obsessively studied and worked in his laboratory, making the monster and bringing him to life? No doubt Euripides would have made short and tragic work of Victor Frankenstein, and the chorus would have reminded us why…And yet, how close we are still, as nations try to formulate laws about cloning, to the precise dilemmas and temptations Victor faced!

Like Goethe’s Faust, and Berman’s bourgeois developers, who unleash market imperatives that they cannot control, [10] in Victor Frankenstein, Shelley portrays for us the early prototype of the mad scientist, a stereotype which reveals its validity by still being much exercised even long after its creator is dead. Victor Frankenstein harnesses the forces of life itself, but of course, unbalanced as he is, in a Faustian bargain, he has already sacrificed his own soul for knowledge. This in turn gives him power he cannot resist, which in turn unleashes forces that he cannot control. No, nor even understand, and herein lies the most brilliant irony of Shelley’s memorable tale. Victor has completely lost contact with the soulful place that would have made it possible for him to know his place in the universe, to avoid projecting his inner, denied darkness outward, where it becomes a mortal danger not only to those he “loves”, (though arguably he has forgotten the meaning of the word) but to the society at large. Power corrupts the fictional Frankenstein, and sadly, power still corrupts. Victor’s story is the story of the twentieth century. That century, like Victor, saw progress in entirely material terms, and looking at its history, it is clear that it would be madness to claim that humanity has progressed in a soulful sense.

So, from Passion and Reason, I moved on to Self and Society, where, when asked, along with my classmates, to give my definition of self, I became aware that my definition of self had a strong component of soul. Indeed, as Jack remarked at the time, I was the only member of that class of about twenty to give a spiritual definition of self.

During that course, I read an essay by a cultural anthropologist called Deborah Holland, entitled “Selves as Cultured, As Told by an Anthropologist Who Lacks a Soul.” Her anecdote, the tone in which she tells it, and her analysis of it, together provide an interesting reflection of the limits of secular humanism. Holland is, at the time, a member of an international research team of interviewers. She relates a conversation in which one of this team, a Korean woman, asks her what it feels like not to have a soul. The question is interesting, but more revealing, I think, is Holland’s response. She begins by admitting that “My friend’s stark cross-cultural inquiry raises both my anxiety and important issues in contemporary anthropology and so is a useful starting point for a review of the anthropological and other cross-cultural literatures on self and identity.”[11]

Retaining a carefully “objective” tone, she explains her dilemma:

Her question depended on a particular cultural idiom whose dimensions I was then only beginning to glimpse. It came across a gulf of meaning surely similar to those that often separate us self-researchers from those we study. What should we researchers make of these discourses about souls and other self-related concepts that we come across in fieldwork? The soul question had another disturbing aspect: it cast me as someone who had no soul, a presumably unflattering position…[12]

After going on for several pages about what may constitute the soul in various societies, Holland returns to the original incident, saying

My friend’s question placed me as a person who lacked a soul. In writing this paper, I position her as someone who self is constituted, in part, by her experience with Korean talk about and practices of the soul.[13]

From my perspective, this commentary is profoundly unsatisfactory, skirting, as it does, the very important issue raised by the Korean woman as to whether Holland actually believes she has a soul or not, which she neither confirms, nor disconfirms. Does Holland not take the question seriously? Does she wish to evade answering it? Or is she confounded by the serious limitations that her scientific posture places on her as she faces a cultural “gulf of meaning?” We get one further clue, as Holland expresses a vaguely hopeful assumption that, had she lived in the longer term among Koreans, she could have acquired a Korean-style soul by long-term participation in “the discourses and practices that have to do with the soul as a mediator of a person’s accumulated experience, present circumstances, and immediate or future social action.” [14] The suggestion that a soul might be different for members of different culture strikes me as absurd. If the concept that is being translated needs to be created by experience in action, then soul cannot possibly be the right word.

Upon reading this anecdote, I realized that, apparently unlike Holland, I was quite certain that I had a soul, one that had been and would be with me for life, irrespective of my accumulated experience, circumstances or action. My sense of soul came into what I had come to think of as my teleological definition of self, a self that nudges me back whenever I drift off my path, which paradoxically, is both prepared for me, and chosen by me, and which leads me toward a fulfillment as yet unknown. The soul within me signals, letting me know with a sense of unmistakable inner knowing, when I am on the right path.

Indeed, perhaps it was a whiff of soul that pulled me into Women in Ancient Greece and Rome, a course I did not originally intend to take. At the course presentation evening, I made the decision to change, feeling, as I listened to Christine talk about her background (Jane Austen!) and her course, that I would like to study with her. It was during this wonderful course that I found the thread that drew me into the study of the Goddess, starting with Artemis, and was drawn on to look at many other manifestations of goddess worship and goddess energy, over a wide range of times and places. It was as a result of conversations with Christine that I conceived the idea of connecting the ancient rituals concerned with goddess worship to the ritual shrines of our own time, which had been a kind of intellectual irritant for me since the 1970’s. “What was this all about?” I used to wonder, as these impromptu shrines proliferated, feeling ruffled each time I drove by a new one. And so, the idea of the Project was conceived, and proposed, and accepted, and worked on. I would find a connection between the impromptu shrines of today and the rituals performed in ancient times for the Goddess Artemis, at the first marble temple ever built for a goddess, in Ephesus.

Meanwhile, I moved on to Len Berggren’s Math course, where I discovered the “missing half” of my basic education. In my undergraduate education, and in my abiding study of literature, which had long since become a lifetime habit, I had always felt that the story was our international human language. I knew very well what a vast range of human experience was made accessible through narratives, which reflected all the other social sciences, by showing the historical, sociological and psychological settings. Though I had not been consciously aware of its absence, I now joyfully embraced the poetic, the truthful, the beautiful as well as the mysterious aspects of Mathematics. In Mathematics in Science and Society, my mind was opened to much that was new to me, and I soon concluded that the position of Math among the hard sciences corresponded to that of literature among the social sciences and arts, in the sense that it posed the questions and entertained the mysteries, while it increasingly cast light into various corners. For the sheer love of their subject, I learned, mathematicians over the centuries had beavered away, working at what were sometimes amazingly successful attempts to cast new light on their subject. As they engaged in thought experiments, they used extrapolated formulae to imagine heretofore unknown shapes into being, which could then be physically constructed afterwards, thus expanding the map of the known. They speculated about the shape of the universe, using their marvelous poetic imagination, along with their elegant formulae, to define a shape that would satisfy what is actually known from empirical observation.

Generations of designers and workers, filled with faith in their own inner vision, created the beautiful stone cathedrals of Europe, though they knew well their work would not be completed in their lifetimes. In a similar fashion, 17th century Mathematicians lay the foundations for the communications revolution that really began only in the 19th century, and did not reach the spectacular peak of today’s instant information transfer until the late 20th. In Len’s course, we saw how those who sought mathematical knowledge for its own sake, doing something that seemed utterly impractical at the time, made the most profound differences to the lives of generations still far in the future. Equally impressive for me was the profound love and respect mathematicians held for the universe, and their willingness to embrace its mysterious aspects as much as what was known, and could be, known. Einstein had many aphorisms in which he acknowledged mystery. Robert Osserman quotes this one, which promotes balance and acknowledges soul: “Religion without Science is blind. Science without Religion is lame.”[15]

At the same time as I studied Math, I was taking another course called Domestic Spaces, with Kathy Mezei. Here I discovered how the humdrum ordinariness of domestic spaces, humble and unconsidered as they were, held many keys to history and sociology, and could even be seen as an expressions of modern and perhaps post-modern thought. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, I became aware that the uncanny, which, like the abyss, could be found throughout the thought and literature of the west, had taken up residence cheek by jowl with the cosy and the known, in domesticity. Mystery is all around us, even at home. My term essay in this course centred in part on a story of Edith Wharton’s in which the soul of a dead wife reclaims the husband who has been disloyal to her memory by remarrying.

Following Math and Domestic Spaces, I was attracted to the Pilgrimage and Anti-Pilgrimage course offered by Don Grayston, but had to re-assess my plans. Having struggled unsuccessfully for some time to narrow and tame the Goddess topic, (indeed, far from being tamed, it kept growing new tentacles!) or to find an effective way to connect the goddess lore with our present experience, I decided to rescue myself from these impossible necessities by hiving off a part of the topic to wrestle with. Accordingly, I decided to do a self-directed study which would address my interest in the roadside shrines, and was delighted to learn that the Pilgrimage instructor, Don Grayston, would be willing to work with me on this.

This study produced a lengthy paper entitled “What Lies Behind the Ritual Shrines?” In preparing to write this paper, I researched the obvious things, who places the shrines, what rituals are carried on there, what function the makers of the shrines see them as carrying out, and so on. Also, I did some research into public attitudes and reactions to the shrines. I delved into various works on Ritual Studies, including the fascinating work of Rupert Sheldrake, a renegade biologist who talks about the science of field theory in a radically spiritual way. Sheldrake explains how modern thought excludes the sacred, and relegates it to private, individual experience which people feel pressured to keep quiet about, as they clash with “modern secular life”:

Nowadays we live in a desacralized world…Thanks to the advances of science and the growth of rational understanding, we now know that nature cannot be influenced by spells and incantations, by rituals and mumbo jumbo. Rather it is governed by impersonal laws that operate uniformly at all times and in all places. Many things also happen by chance, but such random events have nothing to do with the activity of spirits or divine interventions. We can have no power over nature by magic, or through mystical forces, and we cannot hope for miracles. What we can do is gain ever-increasing mastery through science and technology.

These familiar opinions, the doctrines of secular humanism, are closely related to the mechanistic theory that has dominated scientific thinking since the 17th century.
…
Despite all this, a vague sense of the sacredness of nature, an unarticulated nostalgia, persists in many of us…In traditional societies, there is a collective recognition of sacred places and times, and a mythic framework that gives them their significance. But modern secular life has left such beliefs behind; deprived of the possibility of expression in religious forms, such feelings are most intensely experienced in solitude. They are “merely subjective” in the sense that they correspond to nothing in the inanimate physical world of scientific theory; nor can they be recognized collectively through appropriate ceremonies and observances. They can be categorized as ‘poetic’, ‘romantic’, ‘aesthetic’, or ‘mystical’. But as such they can only be part of our private lives.[16]

Ronald Grimes was another important author whose thoughts on ritual resonated with me. Grimes believes it is important for people of our times to re-connect with their soul stuff by re-establishing powerful, convincing rituals that penetrate “deeply into the bone”. Willing to take on the social institutions, he says, “Reinventing death rites…requires not only experimenting with less conventional ritual attitudes but also a wrestling match with institutions that control them.”[17]  In the pursuit of ritual truth and efficaciousness, this writer expresses himself willing to “dance into the abyss that comfortably separates the spiritual from the social scientific, the personal from the scholarly, and the narrative from the analytical.”[18]

Grimes emphasizes the importance of rights that go down to the marrow, and warns of the “yawning abyss” that a major life passage can become when people fail to assuage their souls with the necessary rituals, fail to give their souls their mysterious due:

In the long haul…people often regret their failure to contemplate a birth, celebrate a marriage, mark the arrival of maturity, or enter into the throes of a death. The primary work of a rite of passage is to ensure that we attend to such events fully, which is to say, spiritually, psychologically, and socially. Unattended, a major life passage can become a yawning abyss, draining off psychic energy, engendering social confusion, and twisting the course of the life the follows it. Unattended passages become spiritual sinkholes around which hungry ghosts, those greedy personifications of unfinished business, hover.[19]

When I finished the Ritual Shrines essay, I was still no closer to a plan for wrestling the goddess material into a manageable form. Graciously, she receded to her shrine in Western Anatolia, but not without inviting me to a future rendezvous before departing.

Thus, I decided to take the Capstone course, and finish GLS. Most of my cohort had already graduated, and the time allotted by the university was winding down. Furthermore, Bob, you were doing the Capstone once more, and I thought this a good sign. I began with you, and would finish with you. Looking at the course outline and seeing there the title of Edward Said’s Orientalism removed any vestige of doubt that may have remained. While studying in Jack Martin’s class, I had read a little Said, as well as hearing him interviewed on CBC, and found him fascinating, the more so perhaps because of my long years of dealing with people of different cultures. The thought of pulling some threads of Edward Said into my growing GLS tapestry felt perfect.

During this course, I was greatly struck by Marshall Berman’s description of the bourgeoisie, direct descendents of Goethe’s Faust and Shelley’s Frankenstein, which he calls “…the most violently destructive ruling class in history.”[20]  I wondered: could these people who “would tear down the world if it paid” exist, and be socially respected, or at least not maligned, in a society where soul had not been sorely neglected? Would they be left free to “hurtle masses on men, materials and money up and down the earth, and erode or explode the foundations of everyone as they go”?[21] Berman’s book is full of references to the abyss: a partial list includes his own, Rousseau’s, Marx’s, Goethe’s, Baudelaire’s, Gogol’s, as well as those of the Italian Futurists and those of the modern orthodox Marxists. And what is it that can lead us to the abyss? We must not suppress or deny any aspect of our nature, certainly not our own souls; it is not only foolish, but gravely dangerous to do so.

Catherine Bell, who writes about ritual, credits Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890-1950) and Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883-1959) with identifying the phenomenological dimension of religion, including the common elements that underlie all religious experience, and, along with others, postulating the notion of the human being as homo religiosus. [22] In other words, the sacred is an inborn element of human consciousness. Clearly, it has not been in the ascendancy, but I believe it will rise again.

I believe that this new century will see a return to the sacred. This is not to be confused with the violence that has sometimes tried to masquerade as spirituality. We must view ourselves, one another, and our planet in a more inclusive and holistic way than we have done in the past. For spiritual progress to match material progress, humanity must rise to the dual challenge of learning that, amazingly varied though we remain, for the purposes of soul value, we are one, and behaving accordingly. And after all we have learned, why should we not learn this? As mathematics teaches us, extrapolation is not as simple as it seems. Coming developments are hard to predict. Of what has happened in the past ten or fifteen years, in terms of politics, economics, who could have foreseen that things would turn out just the way they have? Perhaps, in the same way that writing was developed in several places on the earth at once, soul and unity are rising, and we are now in the midst of another evolutionary leap. Perhaps soul is rising, social consciousness is being transformed, and at any moment, the proverbial mathematical tipping point is coming, to tip us at the last moment away from the ecological and social abysses we are facing now. I consider it both my responsibility and my pleasure to hope so.

A respected international figure, Tenzin Gyatso speaks about the need for us, at this time and place in history, to learn and practice the knowledge the we, the people of the earth, are one. He talks of practical attitudes and actions that lead to our own fulfillment at the same time that they help our neighbours and our planetary home. Here are a few of his words on achieving the happiness that he says all humans want and deserve:

According to my experience, the principal characteristic of happiness is peace: inner peace…The peace I am describing is rooted in concern for others and involves a high degree of sensitivity and feeling…I attribute my sense of peace to the effort to develop concern for others…
…if we can develop this quality of inner peace, no matter what difficulties we meet with in life, our basic sense of well-being will not be undermined. It also follows that though there is no denying the importance of external factors in bringing this about, we are mistaken if we suppose that they can ever make us completely happy.

…altruism is an essential component of those actions which lead to genuine happiness.[23]

Recently, I have perceived the biblical phrase “the peace of God which passes all understanding” in a different light. I now think that rather than simply expressing the largeness of the peace of God, this speaks to us of the fact that understanding (read rationality) is not the faculty through which we perceive peace. The peace of God may be known only directly, cannot be apprehended in any other way.

When examining nature and the universe, instead of looking for and finding objective qualities, the physicist Werner Heisenberg is credited with saying that, “man encounters himself.” [24]  In the same way, after the siren call to GLS, and the years of combing through the ideas that humans have developed about our mental, physical and spiritual world, I have come home to myself, finding as much passionate strength, confidence and optimism, I think, as it is reasonable for one person to have, in a soulful universe that is ultimately mysterious.

NOTES

1. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Locked Rooms and Open Doors, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich [1974] p 307

2. Vita Sackville-West, All Passions Spent, Virago, 1983, c1931 p 80

3. Ibid, p 135
4. Ibid, p. 115
5. Ibid, p 260

6. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Locked Rooms and Open Doors, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich [1974] p 307

7. Deepak Chopra, Perfect Weight, The Complete Mind/Body Program fro Achieving and Maintaining your Ideal Weight, audiocassette, Harmony Books, 1994.

8. Peyman Vahabzadeh, Articulated Experiences: Toward a Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Movements, Ph D Thesis, Simon Fraser University, 2000, p. 38

9. Doris Lessing, “When in the Future, they Look Back on us,” Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, Montreal, 1986, CBC Enterprises, CBC Massey Lectures for 1986, p 13-14

10. Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air, Peguin Books, New York, 1982, p 102

11. Dorothy Holland, “Selves as Cultured, as Told by an Anthropologist who Lacks a Soul,” Self and Identity, Fundamental Issues, eds. Richard D. Ashmore and Lee Jussim, p. 161

12. Ibid
13. Ibid, p 184
14. Ibid, p 185

15. Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe, Anchor Books, New York, 1995, p 127

16. Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God, 1990: London, Century

17. Ronald L. Grimes, Deeply into the Bone: Reinventing Rites of Passage, p 281

18. Ibid, p 4
19. Ibid, p 281

20. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity, Penguin, New York, c Simon & Schuster, 1982, p 100

21. Ibid

22. Catherine Bell, Ritual Perspectives and Dimensions, p 9-10, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997

23. Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ancient Wisdom, Modern World: Ethics for the New Millenium, London : Abacus, 2000, p 55-6, 63

24. Quoted by Len Berggren during the Math course, Jan – April 2000.