From a letter to a friend on spiritual reading

Thanks for the long email and the discussion of spirituality. More on that in a moment. I have been so long to write because the last chemo went after my stomach and lower GI. First diarrhea, then constipation, all accompanied by stomach discomfort (as in rice and apple sauce sound about the best for this meal) and weak legs. I was reminded of the ditty in Steve Martin’s Parenthood where the kid sings When you’re sliding into home and your pants begin to foam—diarrhea.

Tomorrow it is the oncologist and then chemo again on Wednesday. How often do you meet your doctor(s)? Today I had a blood test to determine my PSA level. Down from last time is good, up is really bad. I find it quite stressful to wait around to hear the number. It often reminds me of the time I opened the letter to tell me whether I had passed my qualifying PhD exam.

To offset the side effects I have begun acupuncture once a week.  I enjoy the sessions but I am still not sure that the procedure is working. One nice thing is that after the needles are inserted, I am left alone in a darkened room with woo-woo (as I call it) music, usually something that sounds like South American flutes. I find it easy to drift off into a quiet revery.

Well, on to spirituality. I have a way to go I can see. I read some of Honest to God by John A.T. Robinson, some of the Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, the Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton and the material you sent me including the last half of Life After Death and the excerpts from the Gita that you sent me. Merton’s story is an interesting one of the long experience of conversion and the difficulty of finding something to commit to, but, lord, it is old school Catholicism. All the world is evil and only the God experience is worthwhile.  I am not there. (Merton though seems very close to your view of the world as hell, the abode of senseless suffering.)

What I see in all the others is the sense of two worlds (or orders of being?) that are actually one, or can finally, with work in most cases, be perceived as one. Well I am not there yet either. I can understand the perception, the sense of meeting something other, of entering a timeless, noetic world, but I guess I have no faith. If faith is the evidence of things unseen, and if on the basis of that evidence, you commit, well, fine. But I have a ways to go, a long ways.

As I read I became more aware that spirituality can be active or passive. Passive is the openness to the experience of awe and wonder (as a good friend put it). So it is the sense that beauty, say the pattern of clouds yesterday, that engages not just an “oh pretty” or even a metaphor of some kind, but just that sense of wonder. Active is to seek the spiritual experience. That seeking appears to run the gamut from saying prayers or having some kind of regular thought/action about the spiritual world, to doing the kind of extreme actions designed by saints and recorded in various Ways of the Spirit rules.  So I got that far. But all the intellectualization of the issue seems to me to be the wrong path. I am still looking for the something inside me that will make itself known and that I can feel comfortable with, or at least willing to explore more. I have to reflect on the Upanishad excerpt you sent me.

Thanks for listening to that. I know you have worked on this part of your life for years. I am so impressed by that.

You mentioned in an earlier letter or email that you have started to write about your life, a memoir or an autobiography. I hope you are continuing with that project. You have so much to tell the world.