Developing Spiritual Strength and Flexibility with Verticalisthenics

We're discussing The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. Again, although the word "intellectual" is perfectly acceptable if you already know what the author means by it, a more precise title -- at least for our time -- might have been something like Knowing and Being: Conditions and Methods for the Realization and Transmission of Spiritual Truth.

A key point is that if you are not living the truth, then you aren't really knowing it. It would be analogous to knowing all about light but still living in darkness.

Note that one of the two or three central principles of Christianity is that ultimate truth is a being, a person. This places it in direct contrast to, say, Islam, in which the central principles are God and Koran. The Koran is the word of God -- literally -- whereas the Bible is only word about God, who is a person.

The ontological implications could hardly be more dramatic. Just ask yourself: what kind of knowledge is a person? You could spend your whole life trying to answer it. And even then, the point is not to know the answer but to become it -- or to participate in the being of personal (or personal being of) Truth.

The beingness of this Truth could never be explicated in the linear form of a book, not even the Bible, especially if one approaches it with the wrong (intellectual) being.

Recall what we were saying yesterday about the cultivation of vertical memory in order to attune ourselves to the Divine. Sertillanges writes that it is necessary to be "receptive in every direction, and in a state of perpetual discovery. In its content there is nothing 'ready made'; its gains are seeds of the future, its oracles are promises."

In short, you simply cannot obtain real theo-logy "off the rack." If you try, then it will be either too loose or too tight, or the fabric will not breathe, or it will chafe just where you need some extra growing room.

In a way, you could say that tradition provides you with the material -- the fabric -- but it is still up to you to make it into an appropriate suit of clothing. Importantly, you could never manufacture the fabric yourself, but no one else can make the suit for you. Another man's suit just won't look right on you, even if it looks great on someone else.

Now, about this vertical recollection, or turning our third ear to the Ground. Sertillanges says that "Listening to oneself is a formula that amounts to the same thing as listening to god." It "is revealed to us only in the silence of the soul," which necessarily involves some means of excluding and shutting out all that pulls us away from this center. (Please note that the "center" is anywhere the vertical is, which is everywhere, but only if one is aware of it; it is always at a right angle to the present.)

There are two forces that take us out of this center, or ground. They essentially fall under the headings of dispersion and compression, which can in turn take on endless forms.

Think, for example, of the numberless varieties of dispersion, which, you might say is the opposite of con-centration. There is nothing wrong with dispersion as such, as it is a natural part of the rhythm of being. In its absence we would be in a permanent state of frozen attention, nor would we be capable of growth.

Think of the relationship between catabolism (destructive metabolism) and anabolism (constructive metabolism) that makes metabolism as such possible. In other words, metabolism -- or, let us say, life -- could never be a result only of building up, for this would make us more like a crystal or a fungus than a man. And more minds than you know are a kind of crystalized fungus.

It is more clear that life and mind could never be a result of pure catabolism. Nevertheless, without a little death tossed into the mix, life would be strictly impossible.

Down here there is life and there is death, but only continuously. Just like the complementarity of anabolism <---> catabolism, the two are a function of a higher third which we might call Life. Yes, it is Life, but again, it is also Person. If it weren't the latter, then human persons simply wouldn't be possible. No. Way.

So, human beings can become too hard or too loose. We may even caricature the two types and not be too far from the truth, i.e., the typical loose and lazy liberal with a mind so open that his brains fall out; or the dry, desiccated and up-tight conservative church lady.

Our founders were well aware of this existential/ontological dichotomy, which is why they were so careful to steer a middle course between a loose and anarchic democracy and a sclerotic and entrenched oligarchy.

It is the same with capitalism, which is constantly creating and destroying. It "works" simply because it mirrors living reality.

And the irony, of course, is that the application of loose and lazy liberalism eventually leads to its own sclerosis and institutional deadness, as embodied in the dead-from-the-neck-up and chest-in Obama. No one is more fearful of change than a progressive. A classical liberal is simply someone who steers this middle course in order to properly metabolize reality at every level: physical, psychological, intellectual, economic, political, and spiritual.

Here is a pithy little wise crack by Sertillanges that goes to exactly what we're talking about: To be long multiple is the condition for being richly one. Say it again: To be long multiple is the condition for being richly one.

Do you see why? You don't want to be only multiple, but nor do you want to be only one. "Unity at the starting point is a mere void," but so too is multiplicity at the endpoint.

I was once one of those "loosely crystalized" leftists, and all I can say about that is -- let's sing it together -- "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

For "higher than the brain is the object of its devotion," which "carries the mind into vast spheres that it would never of itself have known" (Sertillanges). And this requires a great deal of flexibility, but also strength. Which yoga provides.

For we demand of knowledge that it shall unite; the knowledge that divides must always be a partial knowing good for certain practical purposes; the knowledge that unites is the knowledge. --Sri Aurobindo