Connecting the Dots: ‘Unselfing’ myself to join in flow of world

Two weekends ago, I was one of 11 men in a weekend Quaker retreat at Temenos, a rustic compound of several cabins and a lodge sans electricity on Mineral Mountain on the other side of Shutesbury. We have been meeting there twice each summer until Covidcancelled us out a few years back. The weekend of August 9-11 was the first time we were able to gather once again in the shelter of tall trees and silence.

Many of us are over 80, some in their 90s. Collectively, we are all aware that we will continue to lose members to the inevitability of death. This collective awareness quiets our “doing” selves and opens us to our inner selves. Some of us, attribute this inner seeking to a spiritual quest. My own seeking is to find a connectedness to nature, to what else is “out there,” beyond the conventional constrained comprehension of what is.

I know, and feel (feelings being openings to a reality larger than what I have always known), that I am — we all are — somehow part of a life larger of which I have only had momentary glimpses.

In 1936, the year I was born, American writer and broadcaster Lowell Thomas popularized the idea (myth) that we only use 10% of our brains in a foreword he wrote to Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” In my earlier years I believed that learning how to think and put actions to ideas was how one became “successful.”

I had no awareness of an “inner” life and how it guided my way of living. My early church was in the theatres where I worked and whose playwrights “spoke” to me about what I perceived as good and bad, right and wrong.

Aging is, among the discomforts of diminishing physical capacities, a clearing house for what Irish-British philosopher and writer, Iris Murdoch, described as our inner lives too often clogged by the “fat, relentless ego.” However, by contemplating beauty in nature and art she believed that we could deflate this ego (a process Murdoch describes as “unselfing”) and open our eyes to reality.

I had to leave my Quaker retreat early because one of my diminishing physical capacities is hearing loss. The new high-tech hearing aids weren’t effective to the point that I could not hear 80% of what my fellow travelers were saying.

But I left imbued with what I saw, felt and heard the previous night in my sleeping bag on the large screened-in porch at one end of the lodge. I was mesmerized by watching the towering trees embracing the lodge as they danced with the wind and the rain, I felt that I was momentarily inhabiting that larger life reality that has so long eluded me. My gut feeling was that we, the trees, animals, stones, rivers — you name it — are ALL connected. And I felt I was a part of that conversation the wind, rain and treetops were having above my head as I looked through the screened porch wall.

I am revisiting that experience in today’s column because of the deepening belief I have been given that we, the people, are part of a larger life and world. And how it allows me to view our current political climate. Murdoch’s view of “unselfing” ourselves from our “fat, relentless ego” is shaping my vision. It feels like a pilgrimage from illusion to reality.

Maria Popova writes that Murdoch describes a possibility and limitation that defines our nature with “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. ‘Good is a transcendent reality’ means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.”

No kidding! Trump and his acolytes are 100% about themselves. “Unselfing” is in another galaxy. In that world there are covens of people whose enormous and powerful selves are working to destroy democracy and our environment along with it. Six donor networks, linked to the family fortunes of a handful of wealthy industrialists, have spent years working to loosen environmental regulations and overturn regulations needed to maintain a livable climate.

Or a larger environmental reality in which we can be part of nature’s conversation.

As long as I can still “Connect the Dots,” my bi-weekly column will be published in the Greenfield Recorder. I am also a contributing writer for Greem Energy Times. I value serious feedback, comments and questions at john01370@gmail.com.