SHRINKAGE
Most sages I have met were featherweights who didn't need asceticism to lose their girth. As things became clearer, needs became fewer--and the lightness of being became bearable, beautiful, blissful.
In my ashram days, I was both a wait and a weight watcher. God was somewhere “inside” or “outside,” waiting to be found if I struggled hard and long enough. He was that pinpoint at the end of one of those fabulous Robert Frank photographs of American highways that stretched forever. I was convinced pain was a part of revelation. I didn’t need a bed of nails. I was nailed to my ideas of transcendence.
Once I left the God-goaled life, things became lighter, but I was engulfed in anger at the person I had been and the beliefs he had held. Soon I realized I was a Sisyphean sucker, imposing punishment on my self and refusing parole from it. To give up rock rolling seemed cowardice and betrayal. Then I let the rock roll down the hill and come to rest at the bottom. I no longer felt impelled to roll it back up the hill. It was a dead weight I had needlessly carried. That was the beginning of my diet from religion and spiritual path-ology. I began fasting from mosque attendance and then left Islam entirely. The Islamic state was a tortured state of mind I had to renounce and transcend. I began to realize all religions shared the same goal of mental enslavement.
I won’t say recovery from religion and spirituality hasn’t been tough. And I don’t recommend it for anyone, the way I might a great recipe for chicken or cake. Atheism is, for me, a form of mental maturity and psychological well-being. It involves some days, months, maybe years of cold turkey. You have to stop cherry-picking scripture to find guidance that suits you. You have to stop feeling the guilt of withdrawal from tradition. You have to learn to spot the symptoms of recurrence. You have to see yourself as the best source of understanding—an origin found in solitude and diminution of incompleteness. When, as Gary Snyder says, “the road ends under your feet,” there is no more interminable distance, separation and, above all, goals. The road disappears and the frantic search for any falsely external or internal source of strength. You are all there is. Let it finally be enough.
SHRINKAGE
for Johnny One-Note
1
Outgrow the world.
On your work desk
there’s a slab of picture jasper
that re-minds of geological vistas
you will never see again.
See in the midget magnitudes
preserved in this rock
irreducible resemblance
to your origin
and imperishable souvenir of its splendor.
2
World enough for one
and others who have learned
to make do with the less
needed each day.
The time for making memories
is over and now you must find
past-times past time
of any world
that is dark or endangered.
3
You do not have anything to show
other than what you show now.
You have no choice
but to be summation
worthy of summoning others
to the constant edge
of circumstance
with room only for itself
and those who might share it.
4
You have changed every story worth telling
to fit present need.
The narrative pretends to age
but is new born in its infidelity
to any time but here and now.
So many lives have been lived
to give space to many more to come.
As long as sentience allows
let me welcome you
to the future
without a past.
Permit me
to welcome you to seizure
without ceasure.
5
Saving yourself from habitual despair
is more salvation than salvage.
Call whatever bird song and insect sound
just filled your ears
another second coming
back to your senses.
Rise, poet,
and perform the rescue
of clearance and clearness
only you can perform.
6
You feel carried from day to day
like a leaf in the breeze
like a cry of crow or howl of coyote.
You feel weightless
as if lifted by cue
to take to skies
where birds learn to disappear.
Nothing left of you to yearn
now that there is no sight or sign of your life
but the vastness where it took refuge.
7
Where was I?
Walking a bridge of sighs
to the picture of my kids and first wife.
To its side
are twin pictures of me and my second wife
on our first date.
Let them serve as ligaments
of happiness in a turbulent life.
Let them serve as sightings
of land after long stormy voyages.
—David F. Federman, 8/23-24/2024
You have reached Ground Zero regarding the issue of faith. As you describe it, it seems a form of palliative care. For me, such care is, at best, intermediate because it gives a sense of security and well-being but does not do more than temporarily address or cure the foundational duality and existential bifurcation of Man and God. In other words, it sets a noble goal that can become its own worst enemy.
Yes, we have emotional intelligence that gives us conceptual linkage of consciousness and instinctual behavior. And, yes awareness of this connectivity brings comfort. But it does not get one beyond a certain degree of subject-object cognitive understanding into the realm of ongoing practiced indivisibility of perception. Worshipper and worshipped must be one and the same. Otherwised Gof and Man are both indeterminates.
My worry has always been that worship can be a double agent for belief and alienation by maintaining a separation between believer and believed in. We beg God; we bargain with Heaven; we are bullied by religion. Why? Because God is still “other” and must be "reached" or "realized." How many of the sages we have studied had to give up trying to find masters and methods to achieve enlightenment. They, like us, found answers in solitude?
If Zen taught me one thing, it is this: God is experienced as the self-sustaining ground of being on which we stand as conscious beings. I believe in the use of psychedelics because they can produce a transformative morphological experience where one’s whole being becomes conduit of cosmological perception and union. During this experience, God takes "form," as our guru said, as indivisibility in a heightened state. God is no longer associated with any longing because He has become belonging. He is not Creator or Judge or anything that is not intrinsic to ourselves.
What I am trying to say is that the ultimate consolation for all suffering is a permanent change in consciousness that leads to a non-icorruptible continuously interactive awareness. While religions and yogas espouse this organic unity, they rarely culminate in experiencing it in full, final realized form. For me, "God" is a vanishing point of all separation. As Rinzai said, "Searching for Budha is like putting a head on top of the one you already have." Atheism is a rigorous spirituality in which one switches from routes to roots. I no longer want a Sabbath Day God. Sabbath is all of time itself. I want to live nowhere else but in deeply felt sidereal space and time.
I used to think that belief in a higher power was superfluous, unnecessary for health and well being. I then became a therapist and worked with folks who had been touched by suicide (attempting themselves or surviving a loved one) and I discovered that when one is faced with despair (in themselves or others) faith is not optional. Despair creates a blackhole that can engulf and destroy everything around it. The only way to generate light in that vortex is through faith - in oneself, in the goodness of those around them, in a benevolent force in the universe but most powerfully of all, in God. Interestingly, science bares this out: human beings are wired for belief in a higher power.
Is religion important? No, but having community is a powerful protective factor towards mental and physical health.
I am not a conformest and tend to chafe around organized religion but if you can look past the assholes, morons and lunatics there is something practical and healthful in the practice of faith.