Real Joe

David Brooks is turning out to be one of my favorite columnists. His column on the Pledge of Allegiance One Nation, Enriched by Biblical Wisdom is but one example:

The lesson I draw from all this is that prayer should not be permitted in public schools, but maybe theology should be mandatory. Students should be introduced to the prophets, to the Old and New Testaments, to the Koran, to a few of the commentators who argue about these texts.

From this perspective, what gets recited in the pledge is the least important issue before us. Understanding what the phrase “one nation under God” might mean — that’s the important thing. That’s not proselytizing; it’s citizenship.

I enjoyed Mitch Albom’s first book, Tuesdays With Morrie. But a few months ago, halfway through his second, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, I gave up and returned it to the library. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what bothered my about it or why it didn’t grab me like his first.

Now I know why, after reading this David Brook’s opinion piece in last week’s NYT: Hooked on Heaven Lite

All societies construct their own images of heaven. Most imagine a wondrous city or a verdant garden where human beings come face to face with God. But the heaven that is apparently popular with readers these days is nothing more than an excellent therapy session. In Albom’s book, God, to the extent that he exists there, is sort of a genial Dr. Phil. When you go to his heaven, friends and helpers come and tell you how innately wonderful you are. They help you reach closure. In this heaven, God and his glory are not the center of attention. It’s all about you.

“Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the ‘psychological man’ of the 20th century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it,” Christopher Lasch wrote in “The Culture of Narcissism.” Lasch went on to call the therapeutic mentality an anti-religion that tries to liberate people from the idea that they should submit to a higher authority, so they can focus more obsessively on their own emotional needs.

I’m drawn to the Perennial Philosophy, popularized by Aldous Huxley in his book The Perennial Philosophy. I’ve not read the book but keep coming across references to it by authors who interest me, including one of my favorites, Timothy Miller, in his book How to Want What You Have. Huxley summarizes the fundamental doctrines common to the world religions in his introduction to the book Bhagavad-Gita: The Song of God:

First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness — the world of things and animals and men and even gods — is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human Beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible foe a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.

More to come, including a long quote that Miller uses in his book from This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience by Alan W. Watts.

We finally got away for our 30th wedding anniversary last weekend — a mere two months late. We went to our current nearby favorite bed and breakfast, the Thorwood Inn in Hastings

and stayed in a room called the Annie Laurie, one of many with both a fireplace and whirpool a few feet from one another.

As we luxuriate in a B&B like this one, one of us usually says something to the effect of, “Gee, wouldn’t it be great to have a bedroom like this at home — or at least a working fireplace and a hot tub in the backyard?”

And it would be great, of course, but I can’t help but think that, like every other luxury in life, we’d soon take it for granted and it would lose much of its special appeal. And getting away from the house, especially when the honeydolist is seriously lengthening and the dust bunnies madly procreating, is one of main advantages of a romantic getaway.

So for now, I’ll just consider us damn lucky to be able to afford a night away once in a while. And even more lucky that we’re still having romantic fun at this advanced age.

I’ve started reading a self-hypnosis book. I suggested to Robbie a couple of weeks ago that she might try hypnosis as another tool for dealing with her severe tinnitus. It turns out that one of the authors, Kevin Hogan, lives in nearby Eagan where I grew up and has a whole book and a section of his website devoted to tinnitus, which he suffers from, too. She’s trying to get into see him.

The book, Through the Open Door: Secrets of Self Hypnosis, is a how-to for a number of problems typically treated by hypnosis, including weight problems, smoking, lack of exercise, and Uncategorized phobias. It’s a little too filled with hype lingo for my taste, as evidenced by the number exclamation points!!! But they deal with a few more generic problems, and two caught my eye: procrastination and self-confidence. I’ve realized that my self-confidence often goes out the window whenever I’m competing in sports against someone who’s at or above my ability level. There are other times, too – some public-speaking situations, some business meetings. Their description of a self-hypnotic technique has some appeal, ie, easy to learn and devoid of new-agey lingo. I started practicing it yesterday and as soon as my fucking back allows me to start playing racquetball again, I’ll try it. I may take a whack at the procrastination technique, too, as soon as I get a Round Tuit.