Of Such Is The Kingdom

I know I haven’t written here for a while. I know that I promised to. I’m sorry. But I have an excuse.

These days, I'm a PhD student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Right now, I’m sitting in a public park under trees that don’t grow in Utah. I’m not connected to WiFi. It’s warmer here than back home. This city is—generally—marvelous.  I walk along a street called Telegraph every day past milling crowds of students who join and part like schools of fish. I regularly step over chalk art that manages to be both political and whimsical. I never knew a city could be eccentric. I’m at home here. In the basement of what looks like a cathedral, I work in a library devoted to Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic whose works I’ve been reading since I was barely in college and whose life has directed mine more than anyone else’s. The library might even be haunted. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. I don’t know if I want to know. It’s a strange, colorful, wonderful world I’ve found myself in. I’m lucky to be here. Swedenborg believed that Divine Providence is at work in even the details of our lives, and I often swear I feel it brushing up against my neck.

But there’s a catch. Berkeley is expensive, I need to be on-site for the first two semesters, and I couldn’t afford to bring my family with me. So I have a small room in an arts-and-crafts house with yellow walls and a lamp on the wall instead of the ceiling. I fly back to see my wife and my daughter regularly, and I spend about two weeks in each place. It’s a good compromise. I get to dive into this magical city, and I get to see my daughter for weeks at a time. 


But boy do I miss her right now.

She’s two years old now. I’ve watched the lights turn on bit by bit behind her eyes. First on her back and then on her stomach, she went from crawling to walking to running and climbing. Like Eve and Adam, she pointed at things and spoke their names. Mamma gave way to Pappa gave way to dog and cat and more and hat and bee. She knows her own name now. She looks in a mirror and recognizes  herself.She’ll dance. She’ll play. She’ll run, and I’ll catch her. I’ll run, and she catches me. As if she hadn’t caught me from the very beginning. 

I look into her eyes and see what I can only call innocence. Swedenborg taught that the highest heaven—where God shines for everyone’s eyes like a sun, where it’s always springtime—is a world of innocence. This innocence isn’t naïveté. It’s not weakness or ignorance. It’s wisdom, and angels, he says, are wise only insofar as they’re innocent. This is an old doctrine: Socrates was wise because he knew that he knew nothing. Zen teaches that, while the expert sees few possibilities, the beginner sees many. The 93rd section of the Doctrine and Covenants explicitly says that we were innocent in the beginning with God and are meant to become innocent again.

Swedenborg writes that the angels in this “Celestial Kingdom” wear nothing and  they are not ashamed. They accept what is given to them, whether much or little, and they trust that it’s what they need. Their vowels are round and their consonants soft. From a distance, they even look like children. Children on earth, in fact, are innocent because of what flows in from this place. It’s not a projection of our nostalgia. Our nostalgia is a projection of this place. 

This sounds naive. I know. We live in a time of hatred and murder and genocide and trauma. I am terrified of the world my daughter will inherit. I came of age with the carefree, eccentric optimism of the early Internet. I remember the hope of that time. I mourn it. But it is also true that one of the worst sins of our time is its war on childhood. I am one of the last people to have an undocumented upbringing, where play outside was normal, where screens stayed put and loading took patience. I was bored. I’m so grateful I was bored. I’m terrified that my daughter won’t be.

You know what I mean. I won’t be condescending and pretend you don’t. You know that the stakes are high and the prospects are dire. There’s no use denying it. But cynicism is the wrong response here. Like with all assaults on the innocent, we need resistance and action. Not just protests—at least not in this case—but something bolder and more counter-cultural.

We need wonder. My daughter is full of it. I saw her touch a tree last week, and it was the only thing in the world for her. It was a world. I don’t need to teach her how to marvel like this. But I’m responsible for protecting that marvel. The celestial glow haloed around the world she sees will fade with time, and it’s up to me to keep that fire as lit as I can. For my daughter, yes, but also for myself. And for anyone I have influence over.

There are ways to do this. I taught “Ethics and Values” for five years at Utah Valley University, and—relatively unsupervised—I designed my curriculum around curiosity as a virtue. As philosophy professors often do, I began my class with the Allegory of the Cave: a prisoner in a world of shadows who leaves it and finds a real one full of color and dimension. The world is so much bigger than he thought: shape where there was only shadow, light the darkness couldn’t comprehend. But I taught my students that this story isn’t just a thought experiment. It’s real. The cave is everything you’ve learned to lock your eyes to. The cave is your screen, your looping thoughts, your filter bubble. But it’s not real, and you can leave it. It’s actually not that hard. 

Every week I’d assign my UVU students to do a “random act of curiosity”: a little experiment in attention or action that they designed and wrote a brief report about. They climbed trees and found it harder than they remembered. They showered in the dark and noticed that soap had a smell. They found childhood blankets in their closets and counted the squares in their kitchen. They counted with the numbers they found and rarely made it past fifty. And—for every student who tried it, every one over years—fasting from social media dramatically improved their life in just a few days. All it took was a pulse of attention, a pinch of creativity, and a nudge from a professor. And it changed their lives. I have thousands of submissions, and the trends are clear. I’m writing a book about it.

But here I am staring at my screen with Berkeley spring around me on all sides. I stare at my screen too much. The shadows on the wall are tempting. They’re familiar, comfortable. And so I look up again. Just now a boy with a yellow shirt ran past me. There are bugs flying with twisting jerks, and they’re doing it everywhere. I look for purple, and I find it. I look for green, and I find more of it. The sun is shining through a tree I didn’t notice was there. 

Curiosity is a virtue, and like all virtues, it needs practice. I’m committing to that practice. I will cultivate that practice in my daughter. I implore you to cultivate it in yourself, your children, and in anyone who wonders why your eyes aren’t cast down. Look up. Please. This world needs it. Our time needs it. 

Jesus himself said that “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” He was speaking of children. I’ve since realized that—if we all learned to see like children do—the world would become heaven. That’s the world Swedenborg saw, the world children haven’t forgotten how to see. To them, Swedenborg marvelously said, all things “laugh and play and live.” They do for my daughter. They can for us too. That world—where it’s always springtime, always sunrise—is laid out all around us, and despite our blindness, It’s there. It’s really there. I promise you it’s there. All you have to do is open your eyes and look. 

So look.

See?

Fifteen Years as a "Mormon" Mystic

It’s been about five years since I posted anything here, and those five years have been anything but uneventful. The love of my life–a Swedish convert who I met online and who immigrated to America for me–married me in the Mount Timpanogos Temple on the cusp of the first pandemic lockdown. They only let us bring three guests, and it closed the next day. But the air was thick with spirits. We both saw the sealer’s cerulean aura. She and I have lived together. We’ve grown into each other. We’ve built a world together, and most importantly, we made new life together.

Long before I met her, though, fifteen years ago today, in 2009, I published my first post here. The blogosphere was still a thing. Smartphones were new, and the Great Recession was still very much in swing. I was in high school. A teacher had just introduced me to mysticism. He had me open the Doctrine and Covenants to Section 130, and he had me read this verse:

This earth, in its sanctified and immortal state, will be made like unto crystal and will be a Urim and Thummim to the inhabitants who dwell thereon, whereby all things pertaining to an inferior kingdom, or all kingdoms of a lower order, will be manifest to those who dwell on it; and this earth will be Christ’s.

The world, he said, is like glass. Polish it enough, look closely enough, and you can see through it to a hidden glow. This way of looking at the world became mine. It still is. Even after he left the Church and became a strident atheist, the magic he initiated me into still runs through my veins. I’m still in the Church. I teach as an adjunct professor at BYU. I’ve taught the Conference of the Birds to fluorescent-lit rooms full of wide-eyed undergraduates there. Fifteen years later, what I used to call “Mormonism” still animates my soul.

Not that I’m good at it, of course. I’m as likely to quote Swedenborg as Joseph Smith. I still talk about auras and chakras, about hidden realms and higher worlds. I’m peculiar. I’m weird. But my faith isn’t in institutions but in Mystery. That faith is why I continue to revere the Book of Mormon, a miracle which refuses to fit into any tidy narrative.  It’s there in priesthood blessings, where the words I hear thrum with a heavenly cadence. And it’s there in those moments in the temple that feel like you’ve stepped out of yourself and into another world.

As such, I don’t want answers. I don’t want certainty. I don’t want to know more. I want to know less. I don’t want the world I’ve been taught about. I reject it. Give me the world the way it was when I first opened my eyes, the primal Garden shimmering at the edge of my earliest memories. Give me toy red trump trucks and shimmering lakeshores, dust motes in a sunbeam. Give me what Wordsworth called a world “apparelled in celestial light.”  I want a world without words, colors fresh as the first day I saw them, a world undimmed by concepts or associations. This is what Zen masters call “beginner’s mind.” It’s what G. K. Chesterton meant when he said “we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” And so I worship God with a nostalgia for childhood, for infancy, for what Swedenborg would call “divine innocence.” For the light you can see in a newborn’s eyes.

I’ve seen them. I’ve seen eyes that saw mine first. It was last February, and when I saw the doctors pull that purple foot from that gash in my wife’s belly, when I heard my daughter’s first wail, when I touched her skin, when she looked at me, I got it. I understood. I understand. God goes backwards and forwards from the beginning to the end of time and beyond. I am a part of a tree of human bodies born and reborn whose roots stretch down to eternity. The Doctrine and Covenants calls it the Tree of Lives. I am a part of it. So is she. And we are part of each other.

My reverence for God is reverence for her. She is my world even as her little fingers point beyond it. My reverence for God is for the warmth that seeped from her skin to mine when I first held her to my bare chest. That warmth was heaven’s warmth, and it connected me to the little pilgrim in my arms who’d just left it. I felt close to God, then. I know God loves me, now, because I’ve loved my daughter with His love. I don’t doubt that when I see her, God is peeking out from behind my eyes. And even in the dark and colorless moments I know will come, I also know that He will always be–as the Qur’an masterfully says–closer to me than my jugular vein.

I believe in God. I do, and that faith is both stronger and stranger than it was in 2009. It’s not that I can prove He exists. It’s not that I have more evidence. It’s that I cannot imagine a world without Him. My belief in God shapes my life, and my life is richer for it. For me, it sparks an insatiable wonder: the world is richer, after all, when there’s something shining behind it. I don’t know. I have no certainty. But I’m grateful for that. If I stood on solid ground, there’d be no need to try to walk on water.

So, for me, the unknown trumps the known. I long to lose myself in it. I don’t want to be rich in knowledge or anything else. I want to pass through the eye of a needle. I want to become nothing. And I have learned that God appears in nooks and crannies that seem like nothing to us. It no longer bewilders me to think that God chose a backwoods hill in upstate New York to hide his buried treasure. I sometimes wonder if all hills are Cumorahs for those who know where to look.

And so if the last fifteen years have  taught me anything, it’s taught me this: don’t believe them when they say that magic isn’t real. The world isn’t just stranger than we suppose: it’s stranger than we can suppose. The earth, says the hymn, will appear like the Garden of Eden. It does to those with eyes to see. It sings to those with ears to hear.

And even though Blogger has become irrelevant and obsolete, I’ll keep looking and listening with my writing here. You can expect more posts in the (hopefully near) future. My life, after all, is written here. It made me me.  I’ve met lifelong friends and gotten jobs with this blog. My wife matched with me on Mutual because of it. And so that first post–fifteen years ago–was the most important thing I’ve ever done. I’m not exaggerating. I owe it to this corner of the Internet–with its labyrinths of experimental and sometimes self-indulgent posts–to keep that flame alive. It’s lit up my world. I hope it’s shone at least a little for you too.

"By the Water" Third Episode: On Religion, Nothingness, and True Reality

Here's the latest episode!

In this episode, Christian and I dive into the work of the Japanese philosopher, Keiji Nishitani, of the Kyoto school. We discuss his book, Religion and Nothingness. In this episode, we address nihilism, the meaning crisis, the Buddhist notion of nothingness, the subject object divide, its role in religious experience, and practices to free oneself from the burden of self.

"By the Water" Second Episode: "Prayer, Authenticity, Time, and the Multiplicity of Self"

 Here you go!

https://anchor.fm/mackenzie036/episodes/Prayer--Authenticity--Time--and-the-Multiplicity-of-Self-eat7l8

"By the Water" Podcast First Episode

Hello! I began recording a podcast with my friend Mackenzie. It's called "By the Water." Here's the first episode. Enjoy!

https://anchor.fm/mackenzie036/episodes/By-the-Water-eai0gh

The Zookeeper's Manifesto

Archaic Cultures also kill animals on the altars of the gods. Of course: like unto like. By taking the animal to the altar, we are not ridding ourselves of it nor making it more pure and holy. It goes to the altar to feed the animal in the god, the divine that is partly animal, thereby keeping the god alive, and alive there in that temenos, that altar. The altar is an animal's keeper, keeps the god from roaming, its dreadful power tethered to a concentrated location. Get back, stay there behind the smoking candles and the grillwork. Don't cross over suddenly. The altar is a cage, each cathedral a great zoo." - James Hillman, "Going Bugs"

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the dearth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. - Isaiah 11:6-9

 Oh Newt. You never met a monster you couldn’t love. - Leta Lestrange in The Crimes of Grindelwald by J. K. Rowling

Have you ever been to a zoo? What am I saying, of course you have. You’ve walked the sticky pavement, heard the vaguely ethnic music playing the background, seen the bears, the giraffes, the crocodiles. But have you really? That’s a better question. Do you just walk past the kangaroo exhibit, do you maybe just stop and pay the minute or so of attention that justifies your money, or do you really, truly, pay attention to the animal?

It’s worth it. You’ll see that the kangaroo, the boa constrictor, and the elephant are not something that you just passively look at. You can’t: these beasts are lumbering, crawling, hopping, swimming beings.  They transcend one space and find themselves in another. You have to track them, follow them with your eyes. For the animal is not an animal unless it moves. And it is the movement that makes the animal.

Nowhere is this more the case than in your inner zoo, the zoo of the mind, the ecosystem of your thoughts and feelings. See how rage thumps its way along, dashes out toward the periphery only to be pulled back by the leash you’ve set it on. Watch the sadness droop, folding its wings. See the mania thump the tree crazily. You are not one but many. There is a thriving ecosystem in your head, your heart, with both a food chain and a circle of life. But this inner zoo isn’t “inner,” not exactly. Just as much as anger throws itself against the glass of your soul does it do so in the soul of you neighbor. You can see it in their eyes. They bear traces of the animal passing behind them. They are animated by extra-human presences. A good psychologist is therefore a good zoologist: they will watch these animals in the zoo of the mind, notice them, and let a reciprocal acknowledgement pass between them and it. The person whose heart is their stomping ground need not even notice. The animal has seen itself in the other’s eyes, and it rests content.

The psychologist does this by listening, watching, and remaining curious. By doing so they give the animal a habitat, gives it a bigger enclosure, gives it space. This is a kind of dreaming, a kind of rapid-eye movement that darts between chaos and order, a way the unformed data in the brain’s right hemisphere can can embody itself in the left. Categories loosen. Cramped legs stretch themselves out. But we are bad at this, I daresay. For what is Facebook, what is Twitter, what is the entire political spectrum but a great velt, a great savannah, where these beasts hope to take up a place? Scroll through your feed and you will see them. The conservative mood, the right, is itself an animal. As is the left and its mood. And they are both a sight to behold. Their extended necks and delicately placed paws gives you goosebumps when you see them. What immortal hand or eye dare frame either one’s fearful symmetry?

But their fur is a little disheveled of late. Both of their eyes have a gleam of manic desperation in them. They jump at the slightest noise. They lash out when touched. They are on edge, scared. And for good reason: the other has encroached on its territory. Each one is constantly wounded by the other. So they attack, preemptively, to protect themselves. They both do this. And so they both feel a need to do this, and it gets worse and worse and worse.

For they have forgotten that they are not unlike each other. Both are protecting what they think is under attack. Both feel that life would be better without the other. Both launch their attacks with a sneer, a desperate manic certitude, that somehow believes every time the other will just fall down dead. And both fail to see that their defense is perceived as an attack by the other, and that their defense in turn will strike you as an attack, and so on ad infinitum.

This is the apocalypse that threatens. Two animals, two great lumbering things, who long to annihilate the other. If they do, we will be their casualties. You’ve already felt it, haven’t you? The rage you feel on Twitter that is not quite human, the compulsion you feel that comes from a presence not your own, the weird belief you feel that somehow, this time, they’ll learn? You are a pawn in a battle of the beasts. You know that it feels like drowning, that you post in a manic rage more than anything to be free of that manic rage. It’s getting harder and harder to breathe.

This is the Flood. For when Noah built the ark, he was not just saving the animals. He was saving us from them. For each animal needs its space, needs its stomping ground, needs a home. This is its right. When he built the ark, when he made the compartments large enough for the giraffe and small enough for the gecko, he was attentive to those spaces. He knew that not every animal can live with another. Some spaces are incompatible. But each animal is priceless.

So how are we to house the lion and the lamb together? Or better, how are we to house the lion and the tiger together? Noah’s answer was simple: give each one a mate. An animal with a partner will be occupied. Like in the therapist’s gaze, it will see itself. It will already have a home. This partner in the ark, moreover, is its space there. An animal that feels itself in the outside world, that has a mirror for its feelings and its thoughts, exists in both the brain’s hemispheres, so to speak, is able to stretch itself into into a form appropriate for it. It exists as a pair, as all things should, and as nearly everything in the body does.

This bipolarity is the ark. It is the space that prevents catastrophe. It is the thing that delimits the flood. And this is our quest too. You know the feeling of being triggered. We all do: that is the spirit of our age. To live in 2019 is to be offended, to be scared, to be irritable. Often, you lash out to protect yourself, and this too is something you have often had no choice in doing. The animals roosting in you are trying to join themselves, to stake their territory, to win their mates, and they are rending you in the process. But choice enters, as with Noah, when you give each animal its mate. Crucially, it is when you give the other animal its mate. The one that threatens you.

Try this sometime: when someone threatens you, when someone triggers you, imagine them getting everything they want. You, at this point, have little to do with this fantasy, and if you appear in it, it is just their manic caricature of you. Feel the way they triumphantly defeat that caricature, the joy they feel in defeating their enemy. Without even having to do anything physical, this will register with them. And then watch, almost magically, as their expression softens and their eyes relax their manic openness.  For you have given the animal its partner. If you are braver, actively agree with your enemy. Say, yes, you’re absolutely right. There’s no need to abandon your own position when you do this. Even if their contention is that you’re devilishly wrong, there’s no reason you can’t be devilishly wrong and right at the same time. The law of excluded middle is a misguided antique from ancient history.

And if you are braver still, have radical faith in your enemy. Believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that if you let them finish their sentence, if you actually listen, if you listen as if you could learn something, that they can become more than they are now. For most people just want to talk. They are using you as a tool to flesh out the thoughts that they can’t flesh out in their journal (if they have one). You have very little to do with it. But you could gain much from the beauty in the thought once it’s allowed to blossom. And this is true even if it’s ugly, pathological, or hateful now. Wouldn’t you like the other to give you the same courtesy?

All this is boat-building. And we must build a boat, for the flood is coming. It is up to our waists, and we doggedly refuse to notice. This boat is a temple, a temple to the god, to each god, to each animal. It is a great zoo. We all feel this. Many of you will have had dreams about a flood in the past few years. J. K. Rowling, who, for all her faults, is tuned in to the archetypal realm of being, has articulated this with her modern-day Noah and his suitcase-ark. We must each be Newt Scamander. We must each love the animals, especially the ones that are the most unlovable. We must soothe them, pet them, watch their fur slowly relax and their tight shoulders droop. For, as Heidegger said, we are shepherds of Being. And Being is furry.

Drop out of "School"

"[The "school" mindset] speaks with immense authority not just about itself, but about life in general. It is sold to us as a preparation for the whole of existence. But of course, the main thing it does is to prepare us for yet more school; it is an education in how to thrive within its own profoundly peculiar rules - with only a tenuous connection to the world beyond. Knowing all this, we might do a very strange-sounding thing, finally work up the courage to leave our inner school, be it at 28, 35 or 62 - and enter the wider boundless world we have been in flight from for too long."

What they identify as the mindset that "school" drills into us is, I feel, the demon of abstraction, which sells us the lie that a thought's "what" is more important than it's "who," the pretend authority of a thought (you're fat, you're stupid, you're evil, etc.) that desperately doesn't want you to look behind the curtain. This demon, these thoughts, this authority, is the moment when you think you'll be miserable forever when you were laughing uproariously just yesterday. It's the obsessive, myopic focus on the part at the expense of the whole. This abstraction, this tyranny of accuracy, forgets that what a thought does is far more important that what it says. Would you trust a person who told you that you're stupid, evil, etc.? Why would you trust your own thoughts that say the same thing? We give our thoughts the authority of schoolmasters. But you shouldn't. Be a rebel. Graffiti the walls of their classrooms. For they are *not* the real world.