Strife, Pain Is Love?
It’s amazing how much James-James’ chaotic world resembles Empedocles’ world of strife, and the Corpus Christi resembles the krasis formed by love – which brings me back to Aphrodite. And the krasis possessing one more dimension than James-James’ ‘horizontal’ world
[ image of sphere with a plane through it]
Is it even possible that ‘strife’ (plane) is ‘love’ (sphere) seen in one less dimension – i.e., imperfectly perceived? Only the sectioning perceived? The ‘spherical’ krasis viewed, in a limited sense, as section, and thus all changed? Add the mission dimension and you go from the seeming world to the symmetrical real. This added dimension has something to do with time – the horizontal quality of ‘strife’ may be linear time. The sphere is the plane perfected and hence outside (above) time. There is a mystery here: intersection at two points: Rome c. 70 A.D. and Fullerton c. 1974 A.D. ‘time is round. [1]
Philip K. Dick had a Gnostic dream of a demiurge with the name of James-James. As with other Gnostic representations of such a demiurge, there is something wrong with James-James and therefore something wrong with the world created or developed by it. Either the demiurge is evil and tries to create a world to live out its evil desires, or at least, it is deranged, crazy, mad and the world it generates is itself chaotic and mad.
The world in linear time comes together through the influence of some sort of demiurge; time cuts through eternity and in doing so, creates an imperfect perception of the real, one which is not whole, and so with this perception there is much pain and strife. Though PKD himself did not go this far, perhaps it is best to say that the world of linear time, of eternity cut up by James-James is the world created and constructed by our fallen ego, the world which prevents us from seeing the world in and through God. James-James is, in this way, our fallen self. The world which is real is good. Once we, however, follow the path of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, of duality which constructs the world based upon our thought-constructs, the self will read and map out reality based upon this dualism, and evil will be established, free to cause us pain and sorrow. This evil is based upon the real, for evil only subsists upon and in the good, but it causes pain and suffering because it is unable to be assimilated in and upon the world we have constructed. What pains us is that which is out of our control, of that which responds to us and tries to do to us what we do to it (karma!). It invades that world, it deconstructs it; as long as it is not properly integrated with the good, it is an annihilating force, destroying everything in its path, including itself.
Yet, pain and suffering, though it is evil when it comes from the evil we have created through our egotistical desire to control the world in and through ourselves, is nonetheless able to be seen as a part of something greater, of being the place of purification, of being transformative, if we give in to love. Pain and suffering, when the self tries to stay to itself, is a sign of evil in the world; pain and suffering, when the self dies in order to live in God, is a sign of love. It requires the self to stop its linear, simplistic existence and to thrive in the fullness of the real. What we see in a slice of a sphere is a part of the sphere, it is real, but it is not integral, it does not show the parts in relation to their whole identity, in the way in which they are meant to be and in the way they are to thrive. While PKD did not mention it here, but the icon of Christ revealing his sacred heart shows us both pain and love, and how what we see as pain, if we look at it under a conventional, fallen modality, is actually love, filled with joy and no sorrow whatsoever. Yet, he hints at this, by understanding how the Body of Christ, the Corpus Christi, reveals the real, of how it adds to us what our fallen self has cut out, so as to bring us out of the slice of the real and into the fullness of the real itself. It mixes to us all the graces needed to heal us from ourselves, to help transform us from would-be-demiurges to full, integral participants in the life of God.
Finally, PKD, in trying to understand why he believed his own experience had some connection to the experience of early Christians in Rome, came to believe that the spherical nature of eternity brings points of time in closer contact to one another when time is cut up by the demiurge. Thus, history not only repeats itself in cycles, but those cycles allow some sort of contact with other time periods, with people and places in those time periods, both in the past and in the future, if we open ourselves beyond our limited linear perception of time. This certainly is one way one could go about explaining the experiences of reincarnation without denying the uniqueness of each life.
[1] Philip K. Dick, Exegesis. ed. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2011), 213-4.
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“For in truth, human beings love each other spiritually only when they have suffered the same sorrow, when they have long plowed the stony earth, joined together by the mutual yoke of a common grief. It is then that they know one another and feel for and feel with one another in their common anguish, and pity one another and love one another. For to love means to pity, and, though their bodies are united by pleasure, their souls are united by pain.” ~ Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life
Henry,
Not to be punctilious, but isn’t Heraclitus the real genesis of the notion of all things being “strife” or “flux”??
It’s hard to know who was the first, though I think Siddhartha is the most important observer on this (not the first, though the one who took it to its limit).
I’m right now reading the (1/10th?) text of PKD’s Exegesis in my mornings and find it a good thing to comment upon (not always because PKD is right on particulars; if I comment, it is because I think he was right about something). So don’t look for my PKD commentary, when it is quoting PKD himself, to be accurate on particulars — PKD was trying to understand his experience and speculated on it, often turning to what philosophy he could find as a way forward, even if what he found was sometimes imperfect and so his comments /quotes will be such too.
I think PKD talks quite a lot about Heraclitus in parts of the Exegesis.
He does, but he talks about a lot of the different Pre-Socratics.
Even what we now have released is only 1/10th of what he wrote, though I expect it is, for the most part, the most interesting part [I might choose other entries if I produced the text, but that will be individual interest].
“Yet, pain and suffering, though it is evil when it comes from the evil we have created through our egotistical desire to control the world in and through ourselves, is nonetheless able to be seen as a part of something greater, of being the place of purification, of being transformative, if we give in to love. Pain and suffering, when the self tries to stay to itself, is a sign of evil in the world; pain and suffering, when the self dies in order to live in God, is a sign of love. It requires the self to stop its linear, simplistic existence and to thrive in the fullness of the real…”
Now, I get what Unamuno meant about people being better able to love when they’ve suffered together and felt pity, but saying that pain and suffering are a sign of evil only when the self tries to “stay to itself” just doesn’t seem to me to give pain and suffering, as objective realities, their due. Yes, a person can be transformed for the better by certain kinds of suffering when that person loves, but suffering can in itself just as easily beat him down and destroy what ability he ever had to love, not because his self is trying to “stay to itself,” but just because pain (and suffering) if intense enough, can have that effect. One person can be tortured, say, and survive intact, while another will suffer a psychotic break and never be the same, never fully able to love again.
Forgive me if I’m not being fair to PKD, but I have a problem with all claims to the “transformative” power of suffering, even when Christians make them; they so often sound like a form of crowing by someone of a philosophical bent who’s been lucky enough to make it through a rough patch. That’s undoubtedly unfair to a lot of philosophers, but like evil itself, it seems to me pain and suffering are too often rationalized by thinkers into the equivalent of thin air.
I agree — in many ways — people often use such logic to justify cruelty. I think the point is that some strife/suffering connects with love, for love is a self-giving and self-sacrificial, but I agree, some pain/suffering is certainly not love. But of those which are somehow connected, I think the idea here is valid
Ok, I am trying to think of how to explain this better.
I do agree, there are times when pain, suffering, cruelty and the like cannot be said to be connected to love. Abuse of someone else is not love. Saying “I am going to make you suffer so I can prove I love you by helping you after” is not love (and exactly the mentality some have with the poor; we need to make sure there are poor we can be charitable to so we can prove we are charitable is a kind of attitude I have seen with some people).
This is not what is being said here. Rather, it is also an acknowledgment that true love brings with it pain and strife; true love is self-sacrificial, and if you look at the self-sacrificial act of love superficially, it will look only as pain, suffering, strife. That’s the smaller vision of the act. But the greater sphere, especially in the eternal sense, shows that act is of love and actually is leading to something greater. Jesus on the cross is the picture of true love in this sense. The love of God, the love so large, that we get the cross.
“The man who sees someone in affliction and projects into him his own being brings to birth in him through love, at least for a moment, an existence apart from his affliction. …Charity like this is a sacrament, a supernatural process by which a man in whom Christ dwells really puts Christ into the soul of the afflicted.” ~ Simone Weil
I know of no thinker who wrote more (or better) about the connection between pain (which she calls “afflication”) and love, than Simone Weil:
“It is wrong to desire affliction; it is against nature, and it is a perversion; and moreover it is the essence of affliction that it is suffered unwillingly. So long as we are not submerged in affliction all we can do is to desire that, if it should come, it may be a participation in the Cross of Christ. …To bear one’s cross is to bear the knowledge that one is entirely subject to this blind necessity in every part of one’s being, except for one point in the soul which is so secret that it is inaccessible to consciousness.”
This supports some of Henry’s remarks above, I think. We must see the Cross in our own lives, and also recognize the Cross in the lives of others. It is the Cross that we have in common with others, and in this we find love.
If you have not read von Balthasar, you should; it is central to his works; Heart of the World is a good introduction, but his Theo-Drama (Books II, III, IV, and V — volume I is a discussion of drama) deal with this as well. He points to the suffering within the Trinity due to love. Of course, he does so with caveats, as is needed, but once past them, he says quite a bit which you might like. I think there is something in the modern age that many mystically attuned people got something on this theme in their experiences.
Thanks for the suggestion. I have a book of his writings. It is one of many used books that I’ve purchased and have not yet gotten around to reading. I don’t remember the title, and I’m not home to find what that title is. I’ll have to remember to move it up closer to the top of the stack.
Ok. Some of his books deal with this theme more than others (as does the writings of Adrienne von Speyr, who was often in the midst of a mystical experience as von Balthasar wrote down what she was saying).