I heard a dream of Dalai Lama on YouTube the other day where he said he had been dreaming that in THIS CENTURY, the world would become one big happy family.
I thought, “Oh… Sounds like wishful thinking. Based on how this century began, I really doubt that the continuation will be any different. Humanity is too sick – just like most people it consists of, including me.”
But then he added something interesting. He said we would only need one thing for it to happen – a realization of the oneness of all humanity.
I scratched my head: “He’s on to something here.”
And then he said that this one realization would be enough to uproot the very cause of all war and conflict.
I found myself thinking: “Yes, of course.”
The problem is that I don’t see myself in anything except me. Then I thought, “Hm… often, I don’t even see myself in me either.”
Then, I thought, “How interesting – when I don’t see myself in others, I don’t see myself in me. And when I see myself in others, I see myself in me.” Serendipitously, a phrase by Jesus popped up in my mind that I had read recently,
“Most certainly I tell you, because you didn’t do it to one of the least of these, you didn’t do it to me.”
When I look at the other person, what do I see? How I treat them is secondary; how I see them is primary. Do I see God in them? If so, God is in me. If not, God is not in me.
In other words, if I didn’t recognize Jesus in another person, I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me. I miss out on Heaven, and I am in hell. Conversely, if I do recognize Jesus in the other person, I know him, and he knows me. I am in Heaven.
Recognizing God in the other is the ultimate litmus test for whether God is in me. The hell we are seeing around us is a sure sign that God is not in us. If he is not in the other one, he is not in me.
When there’s no sense of connection between me and the other person, I have lost God… and myself. But how do I recognize myself in the other? It happens when I start looking beyond appearances. If I start with an assumption that there’s more to a person than meets the eye, I will start getting glimpses of the Divine in them.
C.S. Lewis said in The Weight of Glory,
“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
There is divinity behind every appearance. Sometimes, it is distorted, but it’s there. If I see it, I have redeemed the appearance. I have glimpsed through. I have seen the divine spark.
Meister Eckhart says there’s only one way to attain this divine soul spark in yourself and in the other:
“Therefore, I say, if a man turns away from self and from created things, then – to the extent that you do this – you will attain oneness and blessedness in your soul’s spark, which time and place never touched.”
There’s no ethics before seeing this divine spark. All ethics flow out of it – ethics spring from esthetics. The moment we let go of self and all created things, we sink into the stillness and darkness that is brighter than light.
According to Meister Eckhart, we attain the divine spark not through any effort or “addition” on our part but rather through the process of gradual subtraction.
“Everything is meant to be lost so that the soul may stand in unhampered nothingness.”
To attain true knowledge and commune with the One, we need to recover our inner silence – the language of the primordial Void in which the worlds were made. Then, in this unhampered nothingness, we will start hearing the Music of the One incarnated in the many.
The fragmented world will disappear, and all things will become one, just as it says, “God will be all in all.”
“All that a man has here externally in multiplicity is intrinsically One. Here all blades of grass, wood, and stone, all things are One. This is the deepest depth.” Meister Eckhart
Until I let go of self, I can’t see the divine spark in the other. Holding on to self blocks my spiritual vision. But if I let it go, I exclaim like Bilbo Baggins after he had dropped the One Ring,
“I have thought of a nice ending for it [my book]: and he lived happily ever after to the end of his days.”
“My business is with Isengard tonight, with rock and stone.” Treebeard.
What can be more vulnerable than a gentle sprout springing from under the ground? You can easily step on it and trample it underfoot. You can knock it off with a stick or break it with your fingers. And yet, in Tolkien’s lore, the power of growing things prevails over the power of the Machine.
In The Lord of the Rings, The One Ring is the epitome of the ultimate Machine, a technology used to control other wills. In Tolkien’s philosophy, the Machine is an external technique or device designed to subdue reality to my will.
By the last [the Machine] I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents — or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognized. . . The Enemy in successive forms is always ‘naturally’ concerned with sheer Domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines.
Saruman didn’t believe in the power of growing. He didn’t care for growing things. He believed in the Machine. He believed in forcing. Forcing is the opposite of growing. Growing is allowing things to be as they are. Forcing is imposing your will upon another. As Treebeard says of Saruman,
He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for living things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.”
Ironically, Isengard was defeated by “the things that grow” – the Ents and Huorns (trees) who were roused enough to unleash their hidden power. But where does this power come from?
There are two types of magic in The Lord of the Rings. One is black magic called the Machine, and the other one is Art. The Machine is using external means to bulldoze reality into my mold. Art is the magic that grows out of who I am. Hobbits and elves love “all things that grow” because they are attuned to the “deeper magic.”
For all hobbits share a love for things that grow.
Saruman wasn’t attuned to the “deeper magic,” the magic of growing – the magic that grows slowly and is rooted in the soil.
Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Gandalf
What does Aslan say about the “deeper magic”?
C.S. Lewis mentions this “deeper magic” in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when Aslan says of the White Witch:
The Witch knew the Deep Magic…but there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation.
In Magician’s Nephew, we see this deeper magic unfold in the way Narnia springs into existence from the primeval darkness — as an echo of The Song. The deeper magic of Aslan’s Song makes all things grow. All living things literally spring out of the ground, from the soil of the earth.
Who is Father Time in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia?
When someone asked Augustine, “What is time?” he answered, “When you don’t ask, I know. When you ask, I don’t.”
We all know what time is, and yet it’s hard to say what it is.
To understand time, the Greeks personified chronological time as Chronos/Khronos (Χρόνος), who later was mixed with a Titan Cronus – the one who devours his own children. And this conflation is quite understandable since we are all born into this world in chronological time and, eventually, chronological time will consume us.
The Romans called Chronos Father Time. Chronos, the chronological time, gives life and takes it away. That’s why the Romans associated Chronos with Saturn, the god of the underworld.
The first time we meet Father Time in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia is in The Silver Chair. He is a bearded giant asleep in the underworld. He is the largest of all giants.
“Who’s that?” asked Puddleglum…
“That is old Father Time, who once was a King in Overland,” said the Warden. “And now he has sunk down into the Deep Realm and lies dreaming of all the things that are done in the upper world. Many sink down, and few return to the sunlit lands. They say he will wake at the end of the world.”
Father Time is sleeping. When I first read that years ago, something stirred in me and I thought,
“Hm… we don’t yet know time for what it is. We only know the Time that sleeps. I wonder what it’s going to be like when it awakens?”
What is polarization? Is it possible not to become polarized? Whether it’s politics, gender, religion, or parenting, sometimes not taking sides seems impossible.
In his book The Wisdom Pattern, Richard Rohr says there is a “third way.”
“This is a position that refuses to become polarized. This is a position that recognizes the ego at work both in excluding and oppressing the other, as well as in claiming moral superiority through a continuous victimhood narrative.”
Two like charges repel each other. But if I reverse one of them, they will attract. My ego will always push away the other ego. They are too alike. I need to reverse my charge to start attracting.
What is polarization and what causes it?
To explain the phenomenon, Peter Kreeft, the philosophy professor at Boston College, gave the following illustration.
Imagine two people standing on top of two opposite hills, each at the farthest possible distance from each other. Even if they shout at the top of their lungs, they won’t hear much.
But the more each one descends into the valley, the closer they will get to each other. The closer they are to each other, the less they will need to “shout.” The closer they become, the less they will need to second-guess the meaning of each other’s words.
Eventually, they will reach the lowest point in the valley, where they won’t even need to whisper. Silence is more than enough for communication. The closer you are to God, the closer you are to the Other.
This does not mean that there are no more differences between them; it means they are above them. When we go down we go up. The differences are still there, but they are not all that important.
There, at the deepest depth, all differences are transcended, not eradicated. Overemphasizing differences is a symptom of superficiality – not going deep enough. There can be no mutuality or understanding on the surface. Only isolation and polarization.
When Frodo stabs a Ringwraith at Weathertop with his sword and cries out in Elvish, “O Elbereth Gilthoniel!” he doesn’t know what he is doing. Later, Aragorn explains what happened at that moment,
More deadly to him [the Witch-king] was the name of Elbereth.
But why is the name of Elbereth (Varda) so deadly to the Witch-king? Isn’t it just a sound?
It turns out, it’s not. In our divided consciousness, we tend to separate the name from its bearer. We do so subconsciously because modern consciousness perceives everything in fragments. We think that the name is merely a sound, and the thing it denotes is a physical object that exists separately from its name. But that’s not what we find in the Inklings.
In Tolkien’s legendarium, the Elvish languages seem to represent the one proper language, or “language as it should be.” It is the primal proto-language not yet divided by the curse of Babel. It proceeds from the consciousness that perceives the world as a Whole, and in it, words are always one with what they name. In fact, words contain what they name as in a “house.”
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger spoke of words as “the house of being,” not labels or tags on things. He said,
For words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are.
So, what is a name according to the Inklings? It is a portal that ushers the invocator into the invisible realm concealed behind the sound.
For the Inklings, the name and the named are one. The named one is IN the name. The Lord of the Rings was written from a different consciousness than ours as Tolkien himself seems to indicate – it was the consciousness of participation, not separation. Tolkien said,
I have long ceased to invent… I wait till I seem to know what really happened.Or till it writes itself.
For a participated consciousness, there is no difference between the name of a thing and the thing itself. The thing exists in its name. That’s why words always effect what they name. The name is not a denotation; it’s an invocation. That’s why Elbereth was really there at Frodo’s call. There is no other explanation for Frodo’s survival – if Varda wasn’t there, Frodo would have been consumed by the Darkness. But she was there fully present in her name.
Recently, someone sent me AI-generated art and said, “How cool is that?” I looked at it, showed it to my wife, and we both said, “It looks kind of dead.”
It’s so mathematically perfect that there’s no life in it.
I immediately imagined myself seeing that picture in an art gallery hanging next to Monet. No comparison.
No doubt, AI-generated art is okay in the sense that it looks like art. But it’s not properly art. Because art is not created mathematically. It’s created inspirationally. It has a soul.
AI-generated “art” may look perfect, but it’s dead because it’s soulless. It cannot have a soul because no one inspired it.
It takes inspiration to have a soul. AI-generated content may read fine, even perfect, but is it food for the soul?
I experimented with ChatGPT, asking it to create a short story based on Russian folklore. It came out fine, readable, passable, recognizable characters that I knew from my childhood, but it was drab and meaningless.
But why? What is the fundamental flaw of AI?
The answer is deeply philosophical and spiritual – not technical or mathematical.
The “I-It” model is seeing the world as separate from myself. It’s literally “I” and “It.” There’s no connection. I am a subject, and the world is an object out there.
I can only observe it from the outside, gather data about it, measure it, and conceptualize it.
In the “I-It” pattern, we believe we only know something when we have studied it externally by amassing data about it. If I gather all the data about the Sun, I know what the Sun is. If I gather all the data about that person, I know what that person is.
But do I really know that person by collecting data about them? No. I have only created a mental concept of that person based on the data collected and mistaken that concept for reality.
As I got off the phone with an old friend this morning, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being under some spell.
He had shared a video with me from 12 years ago when we were much younger, my daughter was 10, and my son was 6.
We had a picnic around a fire, cooking hotdogs, chatting, and enjoying a warm summer evening in Siberia.
As I watched my daughter’s cute chubby face chewing on the hotdog and my son’s frantic hopping and jumping over the fire, I teared up.
“This is Paradise,” I thought. “Why didn’t I see it then?”
“Paradise,” echoed my friend on the other side of the conversation.
“Hmm…,” I thought to myself after I hung up. “Why is it that we tend to see an experience as ordinary when we are in the middle of it? And when there’s some distance between us – whether it’s time or geography – it transforms into something else.
Why didn’t I see all that before? It was an ordinary evening. Yes, I enjoyed it very much, but now I almost see it as a doorway into some inexplicable magic. A picture of another world.
Is my memory playing a trick on me, so am I imagining something that wasn’t there?
Or maybe it’s the other way around – my memory shows me something that was there, but I was too close to it to see it for what it is.
“You can’t recognize a person’s face when you are too close to it,” said the Russian poet Sergey Esenin.
But how do I know that my memory is not deceiving me?
Owen Barfield said in his poem The Tower:
But many times, the secret-breathing world Whispers to thee, yet whispers with a voice Which memory shall warehouse as a shout.
The magic of Lothlórien in The Lord of the Rings is a fine example of how the Inklings use the power of vertical speech.
Quoting Max Picard from The Worlds of Silence,Peter Kreeft said that in modern writing, words have lost their vertical static quality:
The architecture of the Hebrew language is vertical. Each word sinks down vertically, column-wise, into the sentence. In language today we have lost the static quality of the ancient tongues. The sentence has become dynamic; every word in every sentence speeds on quickly to the next … each word comes more from the preceding word than from the silence and moves on more to the next word in front of it than to the silence.
In modern writing, words are used primarily as communication tools. People use words to get their message across. This type of speech is message-driven, not meaning-driven.
You look for words just to move the reader along as quickly as possible from one word to the next horizontally. Words are whips to get the reader going.
The Inklings use words vertically, not horizontally.
For them, each word is alive. Each word speaks through a particular sound shape – and needs to be heard.
When you “hear” the word’s speech, the curtain of the world is drawn for a second or two and you see… what the words dimly point to.
The Inklings use words to allure the reader to the silence around the words – not to get the message across. As Treebeard said:
You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.
To use words vertically means to find words that make the reader spellbound for a second or two. Preferably longer.
The right words are inspired by Mercury himself – they descend from heaven like fire and become “proper names” in the mouth of the herald.
Like a piercing line of poetry, they make you stop breathing the air of the world and plunge into a meditative reverie as you breathe in the fragrance from beyond the walls of the world.
Tolkien’s description of the magic of Lothlórien is a case in point.
How does Tolkien describe Lothlórien?
Just like Tom Bombadil, Lothlórien could easily have been left out of the plot. Linearly speaking, nothing “happened” there except that the fellowship felt the magic of Lothlórien and got some rest.
Technically, the chapter about Lothlórien is just as extraneous as the chapter on Tom Bombadil.
But it’s a fine example of vertical speech that introduces the reader to the perilous realm of Faerie.
The effect of entering the realm of the Lady is such that all the company feels the presence of some inexplicable magic.
For some, it is a delight. For some, it is torment.
Tolkien seems to suggest that the whole land was Galadriel’s mirror – not just the stone mirror itself. As the fellowship walked through the enchanted wood, they saw their secret thoughts and desires revealed as if in a mirror.
Some liked it; some hated it. But they couldn’t hide from it.
They stepped into a land of the Last Judgement unfolding 24/7.
When I first read C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra years ago, I was a bit confused at the end. Especially, when I got to the part about the Great Dance, in which “there seems no centre because it is all centre.”
As Ransom was listening to the Eldils delivering long speeches about the nature of the Great Dance, I thought these speeches sounded more like doxologies than explanations – as if the speakers didn’t care about making anything clear but rather were weaving songs of praise out of thin air.
And then, Ransom actually SAW their speech turn into SIGHT. The speeches of the Eldils became The Great Dance before his eyes:
“He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties.”
C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
What a strange ending, I thought. But somehow, at least in Ransom’s mind, it was a fitting resolution to the plot.
Why did Arda become round? Originally, it was flat. It was made round only after the fall of Numenor.
Its roundness was its curse. The consequence of leaving the “Straight Way.”
Thus in after days, what by the voyages of ships, what by lore and starcraft, the kings of Men knew that the world was indeed made round…
Is there any significance in this roundness?
Deceived by Sauron, the Numenorians craved immortality. They rejected the strange gifts of Iluvatar given to Men – the gifts of mortality – the ability to leave the Circles of the world through letting go.
The Númenóreans began to murmur, at first in their hearts, and then in open words, against the doom of Men…
Why did Arda become round?
The downfall of Numenor led to the reshaping of Arda. Around the year 3319 of the Second Age, the world was changed. It became round. A circle. A ring.
Like a ring, the world became closed upon itself. Thus ended Men’s desperate search for immortality. It ended in creating bad infinity, the non-stop repetition of the same, a rat race of life, never coming to the destination.
People were still trying to find the Straight Way to the Blessed Realm but soon found that all roads were now bent. There was no longer a Straight Way to the blessed realm geographically. All roads were going in circles.
Their great mariners would still search for the Isle of Meneltarma because many believed that from the summit of the Meneltarma, the Pillar of Heaven, one could still see a glimpse of the Deathless shores.
But they found it not. And those that sailed far came only to the new lands, and found them like to the old lands, and subject to death. And those that sailed furthest set but a girdle… and they said: ‘All roads are now bent.’
With bad infinity, no matter where you go, you come to where you started – to the old lands, subject to death. It is the curse of the Ring.
