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The IDEA of God as an Element of the Human Psyche, Part 1

This essay is not a statement of belief about the nature of truth or a creed. It’s rather an account of a long contemplation of and struggle with ideas about who or what it is that orders the universe. And it’s an examination of the possibility that the idea of a world-creating and world-governing power is an inherent part of the human psyche that evolved with our species. It’s a contemplation that continues to intrigue me which as far as I can see is impossible to answer. My ideas evolve and fluctuate and always leave me on uncertain ground, but it’s never stopped being an intriguing conundrum, fascinating but not needing an answer, much as the scientist who wonders about the beginnings of life or the origin of the universe, with an insistent desire to know and understand that’s more than a detached intellectual speculation. I don’t have any conviction about the existence of some supreme being at the helm of the universe, but the fact that as far as I can determine every culture on earth and every culture that has ever existed has had a belief in a god or gods and goddesses testifies to its fundamental place in the human psyche. I don’t buy the proposition that it’s the opiate of the masses – that it’s the comforting illusion of the weak-minded human race that can’t face the terrors of the world or the unknown world of the hereafter without it. Why is it such an ingrained part of human nature?

I wrote a poem in my 20s called "The Dream Glass", prompted by a meditative gazing at swirling wine in a glass, which expressed a vague yearning that I thought of as “spiritual.” It had nothing to do with religion or even the idea of God, but with something in my “spirit.” I couldn’t articulate what the poem was saying in rational terms and attributed its appeal to being mildly under the influence. But in a corner of my soul I felt like there was something right and true about it. I didn’t write poetry for another fifteen years until I heard poetry read aloud on a PBS series with Bill Moyers called The Power of the Word. A few years later I joined a poetry writing group. To my surprise I found myself writing occasional poems that were musings on the idea of God, of a higher power, higher self or higher consciousness, all terms that variously seemed to fit in a given moment. I already had a very personal take on what made sense to me, but the poems became an attempt to express what a deeper part of me thought and felt that didn’t necessarily correlate with what reason told me.

I was also reading a lot of Carl Jung at the time, trying to grasp what I intuitively felt was a profound understanding of the scope of the unconscious psyche and the relationship of human consciousness to it. Far from seeing the unconscious mind as only the garbage bin of the repressed and unacceptable dark side of human nature as Freud characterized it, Jung saw in it also a vast storehouse of human potentials that included mental-emotional networks built up over the course of human evolution around experiences that are largely universal. He called them archetypes and framed them as non-rational (as opposed to irrational) potentials in every human being to generate predictable patterns of behavior and powerful energies in response to certain kinds of universal experiences. He believed these archetypes have the potential for motivating behavior and channeling energy in either positive or negative ways, depending on how we relate to and direct those energies.

These networks are wired into our brains and bodies. They’re not learned. They’re the hardware of the mind – learning and culture are the software. In Jung’s belief, we learn only the forms we channel these archetypal energies through, at times consciously, often unconsciously (“I don’t know what came over me!”). How they get expressed is sometimes cultural, sometimes individual. But they will express themselves, or we are likely to become depressed – even ghostly shells of what we can be if they are choked off completely. Jung showed that the language of the archetypes is the language of symbols: that symbolic images, visual and verbal, are what archetypal energies are activated by, and he identified examples of symbolic expression for many archetypes in a wide range of cultures.

The process of writing poetry, the language of images, allowed me to give voice to things I felt and understood that I couldn’t express in prose that would make rational sense. It allowed me to express doubts and questions that ultimately led to awareness of things I think and feel below the level of what my reason will admit – things I feel are right and true in spite of my inability to explain why I believe them. In Jung’s point of view, the unconscious knows things we don’t know we know.

In 1935, a down-on-his-luck alcoholic stockbroker named William Griffith Wilson was visited by an old drinking companion named Ebby, now sober through the principles of the Oxford Group, a popular nondenominational religious group that espoused spiritual self-betterment through a process of acceptance of God, self-examination and confession, making amends, and helping others. Uncomfortable with the exclusively Christian orientation of the group and its perfectionistic focus on absolutes, the stockbroker went on to co-found Alcoholics Anonymous on similar principles and was the primary author of its early literature. A sentence in “We Agnostics,” the fourth chapter in AA’s basic book Alcoholics Anonymous, reads as follows: “

. . . deep down in every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God” (italics mine). Here is a striking correlation with Jung’s concept of archetypes. In fact, the man who brought the message of recovery to Bill Wilson’s former drinking companion was treated unsuccessfully for alcoholism by Carl Jung, who told the man after he relapsed that Jung’s methods were not enough to help someone whose alcoholism was as severe as his. Jung told the man, named Rowland, that his only hope was institutionalization. He then qualified that by noting that throughout history there were occasional recoveries by people who had profound spiritual experiences and recommended he seek spiritual help. Rowland acted on Jung’s advice and subsequently recovered from his alcoholism through the Oxford Group.

Jung and Joseph Campbell compiled extensive evidence for the universality of these archetypal structures (Jung) or mythological (Campbell) motifs across world-wide cultures, mythologies and religions, - primitive and civilized, historical and modern, and in all kinds of creative art today. So it is interesting that AA literature proposes the idea of God as something intrinsic in human nature. It’s indisputable that the idea of God or of gods and goddesses is universal in all cultures. It is easy to imagine that primitive humans tens of thousands of years ago who witnessed things beyond their control and more powerful than or incomprehensible to them (dangerous predators, violent thunder-storms and lightning, floods, fires, seasons, death, the sun and moon, the stars) imagined them as powerful spiritual entities – gods and goddesses, who could aid or afflict, even destroy them.

At some point humans with a philosophical bent must have started to wonder about the source of creation and the meaning of their existence. And we do find evidence of creation stories and belief in an afterlife in remains of ancient cultures even before writing, and current and recent indigenous tribes all have such beliefs. Even Neanderthals buried their dead with objects they might need in the afterlife. Why We Believe by anthropologist Augustin Fuentes relates the discovery of human remains carried into an extremely difficult chamber to get to requiring squeezing through very tight passages in a cave over 200,000 years ago, as well as other examples indicating ritual burials, one from 400,000 years ago with an “exquisitely carved” hand axe that was never used thrown in. Why is the idea of God universal? Is it because it is an expression of something universal in human experience, therefore not only an idea, but a fundamental element of the human psyche? Even a mysterious reality that is ultimately beyond what we can fully grasp but can only form images of that are bound by the limits of our imaginations?

With that awareness lurking in my psyche, I wrote poems to allow what I intuitively felt to surface, and to wrestle with what I found. I was surprised that I was more clear about what I thought, or about the questions that I couldn’t answer, in a deep part of myself than I realized. Even though I had always thought of myself as a spiritual person, I had long abstained from the voting about what the spiritual and creative power of the universe was. I found it impossible to think about those questions in any way that was rationally satisfying. But I recalled Anselm’s statement “God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived”. It seemed evident that any concept of the creator and prime mover of the universe that I or the most brilliant human being can grasp is woefully inadequate to encompass that reality. I can’t even grasp the number one million, let alone grasp the creative force behind the formation of trillions of trillions of stars and living cells, and grains of sand on Earth that no scientist can likely even estimate the number of. Whatever force formed and forms a universe that even my galaxy is only a minute part of is simply beyond human comprehension.

OK – God as Incomprehensible Mystery – I can entertain that. But God as creator? What created God? What existed before the Big Bang? If it was an event in time that happened 13.8 billion years ago, which astronomers tell us it was, then what existed before that, unless you claim time was created then? But how and by whom or what? How can you claim time was created in a time where time did not exist? This is an insolvable riddle, (perhaps a waste of time?) that both science and philosophy still debate. Does that mean I can know nothing about the force that moves the universe? Perhaps it’s possible to experience and understand something, if only a small part, of the power which results in a creature who can sit here in this chair wondering what that power is.

My first awareness of something that felt spiritual, once I outgrew the jacket of religion that didn’t fit any more at age fifteen, was that sometimes I felt myself lifted into, dropped into or stumbling into an expansion of my consciousness that filled my heart and soul with deep feelings of love, awe, wonder, clarity, acceptance, contentment, or peace that I normally did not feel and rarely experienced. It was the depth of the emotion I felt that was so striking and set the experience apart. In that state I would feel more loving, generous, sensitive, appreciative, and uncritical and unafraid. I was awed by that. Then that state of mind would quickly disappear. The first time I read something that put this into poetic language, even though it was prose, was when I read William Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech as a college freshman. Faulkner believed that man

will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has

an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of . . . the courage and honor

and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.

I thought ‘Yes, I feel that intuitively – I do have a soul and spirit capable of reaching beyond my ego at times.’ I knew that there was a level of emotion and inspiration that I could sometimes rise to that was beyond my normal state of being. But most of the time I didn’t feel that. It was like a valve in my soul that I had no control over and no idea where it was, that unpredictably got opened by some unseen hand and just as unpredictably was closed. “The Dream Glass”, the first real poem I wrote, tried to put that experience into words.

The next experience that I would label spiritual was that of being relieved of an addiction to alcohol at the age of 32. After a few failed attempts, I was helped by feeling like I was really at the edge of a cliff and was sure if I went over that cliff I would fall into an abyss I could never crawl out of. That fear rendered me willing and teachable. But there was more to that experience than just getting scared sober and following a recovery process. Though I had no belief in God, I had to admit that my rational explanations of what got me sober didn’t explain how profound and thorough that transformation was, for which I felt a sense of wonder and gratitude. I didn’t attribute that to any supreme being and was even uncomfortable with and resistant to the words “Higher Power,” let alone the word “God.” But I did perceive a power in the community of people I had come to know and be supported by, a power in the capacity of human beings bonding together to support each other that allowed them to do what they couldn’t do themselves, which felt deeply spiritual to me. It was as if there was some sort of spiritual energy in the universe that is available to us if we are open to it – like the Star Wars blessing “May the Force be with you!” And that echoed Faulkner’s Nobel Prize address. So I tried to keep an open mind.

Another awareness I got from Faulkner came from his characters who had a kind of heroic capacity to endure and survive suffering, so movingly embodied in the black servant Dilsey who cares for the severely mentally disabled Benjy of the disintegrating Compson family in The Sound and the Fury, and in the escaped convict who rescues a pregnant young woman during a Mississippi River flood that they have to live with alone on the river for days before they can reach civilization again in The Wild Palms. It’s a conditional virtue predicated on the hope that there is something to endure for once the ordeal has been survived, but the appreciation of that quality has served me well personally. Sometimes we just have to endure something, without justifying it, until it changes or we realize it can be changed and can find the means to change it. Persistence in the face of difficulty and disappointment is a spiritual attribute, because it requires faith in better possibilities in spite no certainty about the outcome, whether that’s faith in God, in a higher power other than what we call God, in a higher self, in the support of a group, or in Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature.” It’s what gives us the capacity to weather life’s trials and to rebound from them – what we call resilience, the bounce-back factor.

But the question of what the source of this creation is, as for those first primitive philosophers, still hangs in the air. It’s pretty easy to ignore most of the time. But there it is, stubbornly hovering over our dismissal with no answer that even the best minds of the last century can find consensus on. How do I reconcile a godlike force capable of creating an incomprehensibly vast and powerful universe with the idea of a benevolent being that humans can pray to and receive what they pray for, like a cosmic Santa Claus? I couldn’t swallow the idea of a God who rewards virtue or punishes wrongdoing, or of crediting God with having a hand in fortunate coincidences in my life. I was very skeptical of the idea that a God might exist who would consider my life or that of any other individual human being important enough to attend to and intervene in. There are many who credit God for their good fortune without hesitation and with great certainty. Some people even view these sorts of events as rewards for righteous living, even as proof of their righteousness and God’s will that they are rich or powerful or famous. Don’t knock on my door with that one. But for most people the question of God’s existence or nonexistence is either a life-or-death matter, or it’s a given that they never question, as well as a bulwark against those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and a comfort to lean on.

Rather than rewards for virtue, which makes God seem like the stern but benevolent parent that some people conceive God to be, the idea that there might be natural laws of the spirit just as there are laws of nature and physics was a more plausible notion to me. Maybe spiritual nature was just an unseen part of nature, I thought, just as scientists have discovered mathematical patterns in plant life that are not evident to the casual observer. For Instance, Fibonacci number series show up in the petals on flowers and the spirals in sunflower seeds and pinecones. When I was in high school everything was assumed to be made of protons, neutrons, and electrons in varying combinations, which was an advance on the idea that atoms were the irreducible components of matter. Now it’s proposed that everything is composed of quarks, and what we thought of as the rock-solid laws of physics don’t operate at the subatomic level. More will be revealed, perhaps even on the spiritual level. Science keeps reminding us “Never say never.” (Part 2 next month)

Brett Nelson

The Bones of Story

There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of a sort, rhymed or unrhymed. Thomas Carlyle

Joseph Campbell, in his bestselling and widely influential book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, stated a startling proposition: that there is a universal structure in mythical stories in all cultures. It’s an intriguing idea, and he presented extensive evidence to back up his claim. How could it happen that mythic stories all over the globe and throughout history as well came to have a common skeleton? It’s extremely hard to imagine this pattern of stories spreading around the world through diffusion, since the pattern is found in cultures isolated from trade networks for millennia in places like the Amazon jungle, Borneo and precolonial Australia. It’s just as hard to conceive of some original person in Africa 100,000 years ago, when it’s believed language originated, passing a story on to another tribe and having the basic pattern spread throughout humanity until today. This universal pattern must be something that reflects something universal in human experience, based on how the neuronal wiring in the human brain evolved, that gives us a predilection to create stories with such a structure. It’s much like Carl Jung’s concept of archetypes, which there is also extensive empirical evidence for. If so, maybe it’s worth considering the idea with an open mind.

Campbell identified what he called the myth of the hero as the basic formula of stories since the dawn of writing – and who knows how long before that. He called it the “monomyth,” a term he apparently borrowed from James Joyce. Others had written about the hero myth before, but Campbell showed how this mythic structure appears in the stories of Isis and Osiris, Moses, Jesus, Inanna, the Buddha, and King Arthur, ad infinitum. We find it in Robinson Crusoe, A Passage to India, The Grapes of Wrath, The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, in Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Color Purple, Lady Bird, Places in the Heart, even in All the President’s Men. And he makes the point that we can also find it in our own lives. We think of heroes as figures who stand above us on a different plane of existence, having abilities, power and courage beyond our reach. Most of us see ourselves as ordinary, and so we are. But what is extra-ordinary, at least for us, is also in each of us, because it’s human too. Campbell at some point says the hero is the man, or woman, standing on the corner of the street waiting for the light to change – in other words, everyone.

Because it reflects universal aspects of human experience for at least tens of thousands of years, and therefore of our psyches, the same mythic structure forms the bones of any story of human struggle and growth, including the struggle of an inner city ghetto kid to get a college education and establish a place in the world, the struggle of an immigrant to learn a new language and find a place for themselves in a new country, working through a major conflict in a marriage, a scientific discovery after years of failure, or the fight to overcome the effects of a disabling illness. It’s also a vision of growth beyond the initial success, because it reflects the fundamental process of psychic development, a process we cycle through many times in our lives – “What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another.” (Campbell)

The basic hero myth in outline goes something like this:

Crisis – threat to main character or society, or deep dissatisfaction with life or the existing order

Call to action

Decision to begin the journey

Struggle – fight with the “dragon”

Helpers – often from an unexpected source

Final test and triumph

Return with the “treasure hard to attain”

The crisis might be a bout of depression, a serious family conflict, the loss of a job, the end of a relationship, or a volcanic explosion of anger. It may be just a growing dissatisfaction and recognition that you want something different. It can be the “Is this all there is?” of a midlife crossroads point, a sense that time’s running out to do something you’ve always dreamed of doing, or even the realization that a long-held dream must be abandoned. For an alcoholic or addict the crisis may be an arrest, the loss or threat of loss of a job or family, a major health problem. The significant element is that it no longer feels acceptable to go on living as you are.

Implicit in the crisis is a call to action. The call may come from outside oneself: demanding creditors, an insistence from one’s wife or husband on a change in the relationship, a challenging job offer or the recommendation from a friend of a good therapist or self-help program. For the young single woman Taylor in The Bean Trees it’s having a mute two-year-old girl handed through the window of her car by a frightened woman who says “Take this baby!” and warns her not to go back to the bar, then runs away. It could be a call from within of a voice urging you to “Take a chance!” Frequently the initial response is to resist the call, like Han Solo in Star Wars. Even Jesus asks that the cup be taken from him. We think “I can’t do that,” “It’ll never work,” “Don’t rock the boat,” or “I don’t want to get involved.” We may need a little time to work up to it. If we put it off too long, we may become depressed. If we are being called to make a change that’s essential to our development, however, it will return again and again in one form or another until we heed it.

The decision to begin the journey usually brings a heightened level of energy. When we set out, we enter sacred space, and powerful archetypal energies become available to us. It can feel like stepping off the edge of the world into the unknown Other World, with uncharted paths, dangers, and perhaps also delights: changing careers, going back to school, starting a new business, entering treatment or going to our first therapy session, getting married, or getting a divorce from a failing marriage. The decision can bring a sense of euphoria and release, or anxiety only outweighed by our unwillingness to stay stuck. With no inclination to be a mother, Taylor decides against all practical reason that she will take care of the abandoned child, leading to an adventure she could not have imagined.

What follows is the struggle. Heroes and heroines encounter obstacles, pressures to stay the same, conflict about what they want, doubt about their direction, even danger. The struggle is often with a part of oneself – “wrestling with our demons.” This stage can be a long one with many ups and downs, doubts and conflicts. Sometimes it seems like nothing but a long string of defeats, prompting us to say “I knew I shouldn’t have started this” or “I bit off more than I can chew.” Lincoln considered himself a failure for most of his presidency, and the Union troops only turned the tide late in the war. The Odyssey is story of ultimate triumph after seemingly endless obstacles to overcome as Odysseus takes twenty years to find his way back to Ithaca from Troy. Alcoholics and addicts sometimes have many temptations and conflicts and often relapse before they solidify their recovery and establish lasting sobriety. During this time our egos get deflated and we often lose confidence. We may feel so hopeless that we sink into a despair even worse than the original crisis.

But this can lead to a surrender to the realization that our usual way of doing things isn’t going to work, and we need help and guidance. We may have to let go of our ego’s cherished self-sufficiency and certainty that we’re right about everything. This is a hopeful point, because in this frame of mind we can become willing to change and open to new ideas. We become teachable. Helpers often appear when we become open to assistance, or we recognize the help that has been there all along. A coworker tells you they went through the same thing you’re going through and what helped him. In All the President’s Men, “Deep Throat” shows up just when Woodward and Bernstein reach a dead end in their investigation. You’re talking about your depression to a coworker, and she tells you how she overcame hers.

This lesson is woven through stories as far back as we can go: heroes don’t do it all alone, not even Herakles. They’re wise enough to get the help they need. The struggle with their weaknesses allows us to identify with and care about them. Read the biography of any important historical figure and you will find the same fallibility and vulnerability as well as courage and brilliance, and how they were aided by others. More struggle and even failure may follow, but the knowledge that help is available brings hope and renewed commitment.

Eventually the final test and triumph are reached, as in The Color Purple when Celie stands up to Albert during Thanksgiving dinner and then leaves him. It may be the honest talk between a wife and husband that leads to an expression of true feelings and understanding that resolves a conflict and deepens or even saves a marriage. It’s usually the climax of a story, the high point of emotion and drama. But in real life it can be subtle, and only later do we realize what happened or what it meant. Sometimes, when we think the battle has been won, there is another little test that can undo everything if we have become overconfident and let our guard down. In Field of Dreams Ray’s resentment at not being invited to go with the baseball players threatens to rob him of the treasure he doesn’t know is waiting – reunion and reconciliation with his father. Alcoholics sometimes have relapses or close calls when they become too confident they’ll never drink again.

The culmination of all of this is the return to the everyday world with the “treasure hard to obtain”: the Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece. It’s a rebirth into a transformed self. It may be a college degree, a new career, self-worth, business success, making the last debt payment, a book written or peace of mind. Besides being a personal treasure, it is also a “boon to the community.” We have something to offer to others: knowledge, wisdom, our example and inspiration. It’s our story: of how we made it, and that we made it. Campbell stressed that the “return” means coming down from the elevated state of the hero journey and resuming ordinary life – “Before enlightenment – chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment – chop wood, carry water.” But we also have the awareness of abilities and strengths we didn’t have before, or didn’t know we had, capacities that can be called on again when needed.

We may think we’re ordinary, but if we look closely at our lives, we can recognize things we’ve done that were out-of-the-ordinary for us, adventures and accomplishments that contain the whole hero cycle with all of the elements. The only difference is the scale – mythologies are “writ large” to get our attention. Starting first grade, going on our first date, getting our first job, and getting married are the beginnings of hero journeys in that accepting the challenge and completing the task involve the same psychic machinery that Jonah, Buddha, Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, and Black Elk required for their struggles. Winning a championship, succeeding with a business, recovering from a gambling addiction, carrying and delivering a baby and raising a child are all heroic tasks. So is accepting the limits of what we can do and making our peace with that, whether we’re an alcoholic accepting our inability to control our drinking or Peyton Manning recognizing he’s at the end of his career. It can take wisdom and courage to give up a fight, as well as to wage one, to stop banging our head against that wall. It frees us to pursue goals that can be reached.

Anything difficult we have done, that stretched us and left us different than before, confirms that the hero machinery is alive and operative in us. The machinery is the same whether the journey is small or large. If it’s there, it can be tapped into again when needed and developed further. None of us is heroic all the time, but the capacity for that is part of our psychic and evolutionary inheritance and always available when it’s needed. We are all heroes and heroines – “heroes with a thousand faces.” It helps to know how the machinery works and how to operate it. It only takes a certain amount of willingness, courage, and effort to pick up the tools and use them again.

Brett Nelson

The IDEA of God as an Element of the Human Psyche, Part 2

When I experienced things that were so uncannily opportune and coincidental that they feel benevolently “spooky” to me, and when they have happened many times in my life and in the lives of people I know, I had a hard time dismissing it outright as just coincidence, even though any other explanation made no logical sense to me and went against every instinct in me that tells me there’s no scientific basis for it. Carl Jung called it “synchronicity,” which he defined as “an acausal connecting principal” and gave extensive examples of it. Even more strange is my repeated experience that fortunate coincidences often seemed to follow soon after I reached the end of my rope trying to make things happen the way I so intensely wanted them to. And I hear many other people relate similar experiences. It’s like the universe is telling me I can’t force my will on it, but if I go with the flow, things work out all right. I have even looked back at a situation in hindsight feeling thankful that I didn’t get what I wanted, because what I got was better than what I thought I wanted.

It seems that even at my age I still don’t always know what’s best for me. I had to consider the idea that there might be a different way to approach life, one more in the spirit of the Van Morrison song “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River.” I still need to steer the boat, but going with the flow works better than battling against the current. I can choose a direction and have goals and make plans, but I need to adjust my course when the current shifts or rocks appear dead ahead.

A couple small examples: at the age of 36, for the first time in my life I had a career that was satisfying and rewarding, and it was yanked out from under me when my position was eliminated in a mega-corporation downsizing. I had been successful in it for several years, but I found only one job opening in ten months to apply for in that field, so I reassessed my direction and ended up going back to school to get a graduate degree that led to the work I loved for thirty-one years until I retired. When I finished my last semester and asked the program director where I worked if she had any interest in starting a program like I was contemplating, she said she’d been wondering for a year how she could do that! Then after four successful years as an adjunct program to the treatment center, my program aroused the hackles of the hospital’s behavioral health department who felt I was encroaching on their territory, and it was dropped. It was deeply disappointing, but I was given some options: to stay and do other things, work part time, or leave for full-time private practice. I quickly decided on the latter, and I was even allowed to take my clients with me. When I left with the last boxes from my office in 1991, I turned on the radio, which I never listened to in the car (preferring tapes in the years before CDs), and it was playing a song from the sixties that was never put out as a single and I had never heard on the radio when I did listen to radio – Bob Dylan’s “I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More.” Synchronicity!

Everyone has seen examples of what are called “optical illusions.” One classic example is a black and white image that looks to some like a white vase on a black background and to others like the black silhouettes of two identical faces over a white background. When people look at it long enough, they start to see the other image. M C Escher’s drawing of stairs is another example. Science has taught us even more dramatically that appearances are often not what they seem, or never are. We are told that the human body is mostly water and that the steel in the hammer you drive nails with and the steel girders that form thousand-foot skyscrapers are mostly empty space with infinitesimally small particles called electrons whirling around clumps of protons and neutrons. And quantum physics says electrons are not particles but fuzzy potentials that are more like probabilities. I’ve experienced ample evidence that my mind holds far more than I am or can be conscious of, as depth psychology shows us. The universe is a mystery that elicits awe and wonder. Is God the universe? Is the universe God?

The universe is pervasive with things that cannot be seen with ordinary sight. This is true in a scientific sense, but also true in a psychological sense – in both the outer world and the inner world. I’ve repeatedly had the experience of things not being what they seem to be on the surface. Sometimes my perceptions of people and the world are accurate, but often they’re not, especially when motivated by fear. I can be certain that a friend felt hurt or angry at me about something I said and find out that they were angry at someone else or just very thoughtfully reflecting on what I said instead of responding, even appreciative. I can get a medical bill that makes it look like I owe $800 and better pay up soon or it will be sent to a collection agency when it’s only a record of what was billed to my insurance (some provider’s bills are harder to decipher than others, I’ve found).

Our fight-or-flight response, something that was essential for survival for over 99% of the history of our species when we lived in a world rife with potential life-threatening physical danger, gives us a natural tendency toward paranoia. We don’t die if we think there’s a tiger in the bushes when there’s no tiger, but if we don’t think there’s a tiger in the bushes when there is, we’re dead meat. So being a little bit paranoid had a lot of survival value when we were living outdoors with predatory animals and potentially hostile tribes perhaps waiting over the next hill. But most people, at least in developed countries, rarely if ever experience life-threatening physical danger in today’s world, even with the alarming rise off gun violence in this country recently. So the fight-or-flight response for many is becoming more a hindrance than a help.

For most religions, including those of primitive cultures, God or the Goddess or the gods and goddesses are the makers and the movers of the universe and its inhabitants. It’s the First Cause, for which no cause is presumed needed. Why? For the astrophysicist, everything begins with the Big Bang, the scientific First Cause. But the very idea of causation prompts the question of what caused the Big Bang, and what was there before the Big Bang? To say that there was nothing before the Big Bang or before God doesn’t end the conversation. The question that presents is ”How can it be that there was nothing, and then there was something?” If God created the universe, what created God? He (or She or It) always existed? How do you know? What was God doing before 13.8 billion years ago?

No matter how you frame it, God or Big Bang, it ends in a mystery that defies explanation and logic, that requires some sort of mystic acceptance of a belief about the nature of the mystery at the core of everything. It seems that “God” simply refuses to be pigeonholed and nailed down. Whether you are a scientist, a Christian or a Jew or Muslim or Buddhist, or agnostic or atheist, you have chosen to put your trust in a view of reality that makes sense to you without the possibility of proof; in other words, put your faith in some belief that defines the mystery, in some explanation – scientific, religious or philosophical – or in something you look to for guidance, wisdom, support, strength, and/or meaning. If you believe something I do not believe, I have no assurance that you are wrong.

For many of us the experience of beauty is evidence of a spiritual dimension in the universe. We find it in nature, in literature, art and music, in the joyfulness of a child, in religious services and practices, in love, in the form of the human body or the grace of the athlete. Some find it in science and the pursuit of knowledge, even in the elegant beauty of mathematics. I feel it physically as an expansion in my chest or a gasp, and variously with awe, joy, love, gratitude, delight, excitement, wonder – most especially wonder. I literally gasped the first time I saw the Rocky Mountains as I was driving toward Denver when I broke through the haze and they suddenly appeared large and full blown from thirty miles away, as if they were formed in that instant. For me the experience of beauty is perhaps the deepest of all spiritual feelings.

Twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous are spiritually-based, and members frequently talk about their relationship with and reliance on God or a Higher Power of some sort and refer to it in conversations about how they live their lives. It’s commonly mentioned in reference to a specific situation they are coping with, and then usually in a brief and almost offhand way, never proselytized and never paraded as a mark of virtue. They never probe subtly to check if you believe what they do and rarely even mention what their religious orientation is or if they attend a church or house of worship. And there‘s complete tolerance for anyone who is agnostic or even atheist. Although no one ever professes outright atheism, people who do talk about their difficulties with belief in a higher power in meetings are never addressed directly about it, other than someone saying how they dealt with having the same difficulty, but never offering it as a should. It’s simply recommended that members choose a higher power that suits them, even if it’s just the group or AA as a whole.

For most people the question of God’s existence or nonexistence is either a life-or-death matter, or it’s a given they never question, as well as a bulwark against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and a comfort to lean on. All cultures throughout the history of humankind, including hominid species other than ours, show evidence of belief in supernatural powers. Anthropologist Augustin Fuentes, in his book Why We Believe, cites evidence of spiritual beliefs going back over 100,000 years. Maybe it’s not an intellectual inheritance passed down through millennia by culture, but instead something our wired into our brains by some accident of evolution, inherent in us like the capacity for language. That we have a need to explain the unexplainable, especially things that affect our safety, I can easily accept as a fundamental part of the human psyche. So we have always created stories about the arcs of the sun and moon and the seasons and the weather, the rumblings of the earth in earthquakes and volcanoes, and the miracle of birth. That doesn’t necessarily require attribution to superhuman beings driving chariots across the sky. Stories about such things as natural phenomena could do the job as well. But I do understand the experience of things being more than what meets the eye. How is it that a caterpillar turns into a butterfly? How is it that an acorn can become an oak? So I try to live by Rilke’s advice to a young poet:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves

like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Rainier Maria Rilke

Everyone dies but life goes on. Is life eternal? What does that mean? What is eternal? The eternal is a mystery. The mystery of it is what has power for me. It awakens wonder, interest, hope, curiosity, excitement, awe, delight. That is the essence of spiritual, and for some religious, experience. It asks us questions: What inspires and awes you? What is the source of the order in the universe? How was the world created? Where do we come from? Where are you going? What is your purpose for being here? What gives you strength, hope, direction, guidance, meaning? So what seems inescapable is that uncertainty and mystery are pervasive aspects of life that we may as well make our peace with if we don’t want to live in a fantasy of dogma that we have to fight continually to defend against contradictory evidence. If I can let go of the need for certainty and “learn to love the questions themselves” as Rilke recommended, the mystery of existence can become intriguing and exciting, awesome and inspirational, which frees me to trust the universe as it is. “Bad things happen to good people,” as the old book title says, but that does not mean the universe means to do me harm.

everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar

of the tornado swears there was no mention ever

of any person, or reason – I mean

the waters rise without any plot upon

history, or even geography. Whatever

power of the earth rampages, we turn to it

dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever

the name of the catastrophe, it is never

the opposite of love. Mary Oliver

Poet Robert Bly told a story at a 1990 conference of an adolescent boy whose father didn’t like his long hair, so he held the boy down on the floor and forcibly cut it off. The boy was enraged. The boy’s grandfather didn’t take sides in the conflict, but instead took the boy out to the ocean and told him “See this ocean? This ocean is going to be here for you, whether you have long hair or short hair.” Wonder is the emotion of excited and loving curiosity. For me, the wonder and mystery of the universe, which I can continue to explore and discover more about as long as I live, is going to always be waiting at my feet, no matter what hardship, grief or tragedy I may experience. So the Idea of God becomes a Great Mystery that I can never fully comprehend, but I can continually explore and perhaps gain more understanding of, and trust that it does not mean me harm. That’s as good as I can come up with, and it suits me fine. My Creed, if I would need to define a creed: I believe in the Idea of God, the wonder of the Universe, and in living my life in the act of exploring the mystery. But then I don’t believe in the dogma of creeds.

Brett Nelson

Over Troubled Waters – Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge

This is my latest effort to chronicle the music of my generation, a reminder of some of the best of it before it gets lost in the archived records of musical history. I don’t know if I would be still here on this planet if I hadn’t had that music to lift my spirit, expand my mind, and show me where to anchor my values, and I learned a lot about how to survive and live from the music.

Simon and Garfunkel seemed to hover in the background behind the musical headlines of Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and the Rolling Stones – in spite of a string of major hits with “The Sound of Silence,” “I Am a Rock,” “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” “Homeward Bound,” “Mrs Robinson,” “Bridge over Troubled Water,” “The Boxer,” and “El Condor Pasa,” as well as other superb album cuts that weren’t released as singles for the radio. That was perhaps a predictable result of their soft-spoken and reserved personalities, I’d guess. They made news only with their music. When I go over their albums I find a rich playlist of thoughtful and expressive lyrics backed by complex music, stirring and dynamic rhythms, and beautiful melodies. From 1966 to 1970 they made four albums, not counting a forgettable first album, that gave us a bridge over those troubled times with trenchant social commentary that spoke to the heart, rock and roll with a rhythmic energy, satiric humor, and delightfully whimsical songs that could ease our minds and lift us out of the seriousness of the Vietnam war, riots in the cities, and volatile intergenerational antagonism.

I first heard Simon and Garfunkel as a college sophomore when a guy down the hall was playing Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. The title is from the song “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” which sounds like an old English ballad about a man asking someone to remember him to someone who “once was a true love of mine,” blended with an antiwar song – “Generals order their soldiers to kill/And to die for a cause they’ve long ago forgotten.” Written by the two of them according to the record label, the antiwar song is a chilling undercurrent behind the straightforward love ballad. It subtly echoed the ominous background of the Vietnam War that clouded the rosy love song of the Great Society’s progressive social agenda, with evidence that Americans were being lied to about the body counts and how we were "winning" as troop deployments continued to increase. Garfunkel’s tenor carries “Scarborough Fair” with Simon’s baritone under it singing the antiwar “Canticle”, accompanied by acoustic guitar and what sounds like a harpsichord. It’s a beautiful song as both voices trade lines from the two songs and weave in and out around each other.

Simon and Garfunkel had already had a hit the year before with the sobering critique of what Nixon would later praise as the silent majority in “The Sound of Silence” on their Sounds of Silence album.

And in the naked light I saw

Ten thousand people, maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never shared

No one dared

Disturb the sound of silence

“Fools,” said I, “you do not know

Silence like a cancer grows

Hear my words that I might teach you

Take my arms that I might reach you”

But my words like silent raindrops fell

And echoed in the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed

To the neon god they made

It expresses a kind of grief that those who try to tell the more unpleasant truths and plead for a more compassionate world feel, and calling to account those people who don’t dare to disturb the silence. The song was released in multiple versions, one of which Simon was not informed of and was “horrified” at. Dylan himself had high praise for the poetry of the song, and there are videos on YouTube of Simon and Dylan singing and playing it together on a joint tour in 1999. Sounds of Silence also included “Leaves That Are Green,” a lament about the good things of youth passing away with time, and a dynamic and driving acoustic guitar instrumental by Simon titled “Angie,” attributed to Englishman David Graham on the cover, though the LP disc itself credits Bert Jansch. It shows how great a guitarist Simon was.

S&G were praised for their harmonies, and for lyrics written by Simon, but the complex, pulsing rhythms in their songs and the musical accompaniment are wonderful. “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall” is an expression of identity confusion in a rapidly changing world.

My mind dances and leaps in confusion

I don't know what is real

I can't touch what I feel

And I hide behind the shield of my illusion

The mirror on my wall

Casts an image dark and small

But I'm not sure at all it's my reflection

I’m blinded by the light

Of God and truth and right

And I wander in the night without direction

So I'll continue to continue to pretend

My life will never end

And flowers never bend

With the rainfall

No matter if you're born

To play the King or pawn

For the line is thinly drawn 'tween joy and sorrow

So my fantasy

Becomes reality

And I must be what I must be and face tomorrow

The song gallops through the verses with a pulsating acoustic guitar but slows with a different rhythm on the chorus that ends with “flowers never bend/With the rainfall.” The album also includes the popular ballad “Homeward Bound” about life of a solo musician on the road.

One of the tasty pleasures on the album is the satiric “A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission).” Accompanied by a raucous organ and a heavy drum beat, Simon goes through a droll and teasing litany of all the cultural icons of the time he’s saturated with as if he’s tired of the media obsession with them and perhaps of being compared to some of them, from the Rolling Stones and the Beatles to Norman Mailer, Andy Warhol, Lenny Bruce, and Phil Spector, but distancing himself by having it voiced by someone who complains

I knew a man, his brains were small,

He couldn’t think of nothin’ at all.

He’s not the same as you and me.

He doesn’t dig poetry. He’s so unhip,

When you say Dylan, he thinks

You’re talkin’ about Dylan Thomas,

Whoever he was.

The man ain’t got no culture,

But it’s all right, Ma,

Everybody must get stoned.

I been Mick Jaggered, silver daggered

Andy Warhol, won't you please come home?

I been mothered, fathered, aunt and uncled

Been Roy Haleed and Art Garfunkeled

I just discovered somebody's tapped my phone. Folk rock

He seems to be sending up the media frenzy of celebrity cults rather than putting down Dylan and the other cultural icons. The other satiric delight on Parsley, Sage is a blast at consumerism titled “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine.” It’s the ultimate consumer product:

Do people have a tendency to dump on you?

Does your group have more cavities than theirs?

Do all the hippies seem to get the jump on you?

Do you sleep alone when others sleep in pairs?

Well there's no need to complain

We'll eliminate your pain

We can neutralize your brain

You'll feel just fi-ine now

Buy our big bright green pleasure machine!

You'd better hurry up and order one

Our limited supply is very nearly gone

It’s sung with a jumpy rhythm backed by a tambourine and organ, fun to listen to and comical. Their next album was Bookends, which included the catchy “Mrs Robinson,” written for the movie The Graduate. It’s a lament about the loss of stability and certainty of the 50s and early 60s before the JFK assassination, with Joltin’ Joe as the symbol of a more comforting time, with the “woo woo woo” undercutting the rose-colored glasses the previous generation saw that time through.

Hide it in a hiding place where no one ever goes

Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes . . .

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you, woo woo woo

What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson?

Joltin' Joe has left and gone away, hey hey hey

But after all, that generation weathered the Depression and WWII, enough instability and trauma for any generation. Simon’s always been the chronicler of the deterioration of mainstream culture in America as well as the voice of failed relationships as in “The Dangling Conversation.” One of the best songs on Bookends is “Save the Life of My Child” about the reactions of spectators in the street to the prospect of a boy contemplating a jump to his death from the ledge of a building. It starts with a frantic “Good God! Don’t jump!” followed by

A boy sat on the ledge

An old man who had fainted was revived

And everyone agreed 'twould be a miracle indeed

If the boy survived

The woman from the supermarket

Ran to call the cops

"He must be high on something" someone said

Though it never made The New York Times

In The Daily News, the caption read

"Save the life of my child!"

Cried the desperate mother.

A patrol car passing by

Halted to a stop

Said officer MacDougal in dismay:

"The force can't do a decent job

'Cause the kids got no respect

For the law today (and blah blah blah)" . . .

When darkness fell,

Excitement kissed the crowd

And it made them wild

In an atmosphere of freaky holiday

When the spotlight hit the boy

And the crowd began to cheer

He flew away

"Oh, my Grace, I got no hiding place

Oh, my Grace, I got no hiding place"

The song has an urgent pace reflecting a combination of anxiety and excitement until it gets to the last two repeated lines voicing the boy’s thought in a dreamy, slower cadence. It gives an impression of a boy unable to voice his pain, others unable to sense his desperation to ask, and a crowd treating the situation like a spectator sport.

“Old Friends” captures the sadness of two old men surviving with not much of a life sitting wordlessly on a park bench, then shifts to the observers, perhaps Simon and Garfunkel, as Garfunkel sings in his high tenor

Can you imagine us years from today

Sharing a park bench quietly?

How terribly strange to be seventy.

The song’s a sensitive, slow, and melancholy contemplation of a young man imagining himself at seventy, written by a twenty-something Simon. I’m well past seventy, and it is strange, though not at all terrible, but when you’re in your twenties . . . The song is preceded by the poignant voices of old people recorded at two rest homes by Garfunkel. Another contemplation on the passage of time is the anxious and brooding “Hazy Shade of Winter.”

Time, Time, Time

See what’s become of me

While I looked around for my possibilities

I was so hard to please

Look around leaves are brown

And the sky is a hazy shade of winter

Look around leaves are brown

There’s a patch of snow on the ground

The light touch comes with the delightful and contagious, “At the Zoo,” which runs repeatedly in my head when I’ve listened to it again or when it pops up unexpectedly out of nowhere. Clearly written before we knew how intelligent elephants are, its acoustic guitar, piano, and drums create an irresistible rhythm after the quiet opening lines.

Someone told me

It’s all happening at the zoo.

I do believe it, I do believe it’s true . . .

The monkeys stand for honesty

Giraffes are insincere

And the elephants are kindly but they're dumb

Orangutans are skeptical

Of changes in their cages

And the zookeeper is very fond of rum

Zebras are reactionaries

Antelopes are missionaries

Pigeons plot in secrecy

And hamsters turn on frequently

What a gas! You gotta come and see

At the zoo

Bookends was followed by Bridge Over Troubled Water, the best-selling album of all time until Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The soaring title song is one of the most covered songs ever, an expression of the devotion of deep friendship, even though Simon and Garfunkel were having a lot of conflict and both told each other that they didn’t know if they wanted to continue recording together. Garfunkel’s angelic tenor rises to a passionate level not reached in any of their other songs. It’s orchestral arrangement doesn’t satisfy as well as their Concert in Central Park version or the beautiful live recording with the Jesse Dixon Singers. Besides "Bridge," one of the most beautiful songs on the album was “The Only Living Boy in New York,” another ode to their friendship – Simon’s send-off to Garfunkel as he headed for Mexico to film Catch-22.

Tom, get your plane right on time

I know that you've been eager to fly now

Hey-ey-ey, let your honesty shine, shine, shine

Like it shines on me,

The only living boy in New York

It's a beautiful melody, with a choir adding a lilting, high-pitched "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah" in the fade-out. The album also had a big hit with “The Boxer,” recorded by Simon alone. It’s one of my favorite songs, a tribute to resilience and survival.

I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told

I have squandered my resistance

For a pocket full of mumbles – such are promises,

All lies and jest.

Still a man hears what he wants to hear

And disregards the rest.

When I left my home and my family

I was no more than a boy, in the company of strangers,

In the quiet of the railway station, running scared,

Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters

Where the ragged people go,

Looking for the places only they would know.

In discouragement he’s “laying out my winter clothes/And wishing I was gone, going home/Where the New York City winters aren’t bleeding me,” but

In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade,

And he carries the reminders of every glove

that laid him down and cut him ‘til he cried out

In his anger and his shame “I am leaving, I am leaving!”

But the fighter still remains.

It’s beautiful poetry. Between some verses and at the end he sings “Lie-la-lie, lie-la-lie-lie-lie-la-lie, lie-la-lie.” I don’t know if it’s just a sound he wanted, like Van Morrison’s la-la’s, or if it’s a referral to a deceptive promise of the city unfulfilled, but it feels somehow like an integral and essential part of the song. In the version on his 1974 live album Live Rhymin’ and in the Concert in Central Park version he adds a verse I’ve always liked:

Now the years are rolling by me,

They are rocking evenly.

I am older than I once was

And younger than I’ll be,

That’s not unusual, no it isn’t strange –

After changes upon changes

We are more or less the same

After changes we are more or less the same

Another big hit from the album was “El Condor Pasa,” a 19th century Peruvian folk song with simple poetic English lyrics by Simon, a wistful and somewhat melancholy tune accompanied by a beautiful Peruvian flute.

I'd rather be a hammer than a nail

Yes I would, if I only could, I surely would

Away, I'd rather sail away

Like a swan that's here and gone

A man gets tied up to the ground

He gives the world

Its saddest sound

I'd rather be a forest than a street

Yes I would, if I could, I surely would

I'd rather feel the earth beneath my feet

Yes I would, if I only could, I surely would

Besides the album’s other hit with “Cecilia,” and the wistful “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright,” there’s the delightful “Baby Driver,” a rock and roll number about a young race car driver with a sexual metaphor:

My daddy was the family bassman

My mama was an engineer

And I was born one dark gray morn

With music coming in my ears

In my ears

They call me Baby Driver

And once upon a pair of wheels

I hit the road and I'm go-o-ne ah

What's my number?

I wonder how your engines feel

Ba ba ba ba

Scoot down the road

What's my number?

I wonder how your engines feel . . .

My daddy got a big promotion

My mama got a raise in pay

There's no one at home, we're all alone

Oh come into my room and play

Yes we can play

I'm not talking about your pigtails

I’m talking 'bout your sex appeal

I hit the road and I'm go-o-o-one

What's my number?

I wonder how your engines feel

Ba ba ba ba

Scoot down the road

What's my number?

I wonder how your engines feel

It's galloping rhythm and race-track sound effects make it fun to listen to, with acoustic guitar and drums plus a raucous sax solo in the middle. There’s also “Keep the Customer Satisfied,” a marijuana dealer’s lament about how rough a time he gets from the law when he’s “Just tryin’ to keep my customers satisfied” like any good businessman, and “Why Don’t You Write Me?” – a rocking complaint of someone stuck “out in the jungle” called who keeps worrying why he hasn’t heard from his lover.

Why don't you write me

A letter would brighten my loneliest evening

Mail it today if it's only to say

That you're leaving me

La, la, la

Monday morning, sitting in the sun

Hoping and wishing for the mail to come

Tuesday, never got a word

Wednesday, Thursday, ain't no sign

Drank a half a bottle of iodine

Friday, woe is me

I'm gonna hang my body from the highest tree

Why don't you write me?

Sounding like an early 60s rock-and-roll number with a bouncy reggae beat and a melody that has humor in it, it’s a fun listen. The album also has a rousing live recording of “Bye, Bye Love,” the Everly Brothers’ hit by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant with a dynamite band.

Bridge was their swan song as both decided the increasing conflicts between them made making music together too hard. Garfunkel went into acting and Simon launched a solo career that saw the release of albums with big hits and a willingness to experiment with different musical directions. But Simon and Garfunkel's’s songs were a big part of the soundtrack of our lives, from the social commentary and humorous satire, to laments, to lighthearted fare like “Cloudy” and “At the Zoo,” to slice-of-life contemplations like “The Boxer,” and odes to friendship. They carried us over the turmoil of the times to the end of the sixties as the Democratic Party fractured and the Nixon years ushered in a different world, with the Vietnam War like a bad hangover. But Simon and Garfunkel gave us a bridge to walk over the turbulent waters.

Brett Nelson (Paul Simon's solo career next month)