Spiritual Journey

Buber Part III

Buber Notes on Third Part -- Spiritual Journey Class

** P.123 -- begins the focus on the human-divine encounter. All relationships “intersect in the eternal You.�? Here, we come to know the ‘eternal You’ through other relationships. By the end of this section, we also come to serve other beings through the relationship with the ‘eternal You.’ He mentions that God has been known by many names through history; that the names can contain a holy quality because they have been used (and can be used) to speak TO God; and also these names can be misused.
** P. 124. It isn’t the attributes and qualities of God that matter (these are human notions, after all) but addressing God (using whatever name we use) that matters. We can encounter God, but not describe and explain God, or speculate on God’s intentions.
** P. 125 (from bottom of 124) -- begins the paradoxical dynamic of the God-human relationship: we choose, but are chosen; act but are acted upon, both at the same time. This resembles the ‘not-doing’ of Chinese mystical philosophy, but it’s different in Buber’s understanding -- because we aren’t withdrawing into some separate world in having experience of God, but are instead becoming unified in ourselves and connected to the actual world.
** P. 126 -- continues the discussion of meditation techniques, which he rejects as the appropriate approach to religious experience. The"‘one thing needful" is the “total acceptance of the present." (One might respond to Buber that this is precisely what many meditation techniques are aiming at helping us achieve.) Second section: how being in relation with anyone else feels: it is exclusive (leaves everything else in the world out); it is unique; it seems to fill up our consciousness. Think of first falling in love, and having everything you do or see connect to that central relationship -- or the way one experiences the world after having a new baby come into one’s life.
** P. 127 -- continues with relationship with God -- Buber rejects the idea that we need to withdraw from the world; instead, we bring the world WITH us into the relation with God. Trying to get out of the world to get to God is a delusion, ‘It-talk.’ Bottom 127: paradoxical language: God is “wholly other" AND “wholly same"; mysterium tremendum (power of the Universe) AND “closer to me that my own I."
** P. 128. Can’t withdraw to find God, because each step of the way, all other encounters are devalued and turned into things, just stepping stones to the Divine. Real encounter with God is, in a way, THROUGH finding the divine in all those other encounters along the way. More paradoxical language: “finding without seeking." We find the “wholly actual" of the divine out of the “actuality of the consecrated life of the world."
** P. 129 - second section: Buber describes and rejects an approach to God of cultivating a “feeling of dependence" or “creature feeling." He rejects measuring relation by whether the ‘right’ feelings are present -- because, in human psychology, feelings ebb and flow, and also contain some degree of their opposite.
** P. 130 -- more on feelings and their opposites. This is murky but an attempt at capturing something interesting, which is how in the encounter with God, the essential character is not one feeling or another, but the experience of coming to a point of wholeness, or fusion of the oppositions in our emotions -- a ‘still point’, as T.S. Eliot called it. One way of putting that stillness-within-tension is that it is paradoxical. Third paragraph: one is dependent AND free; created AND creative. This goes on: we need God AND God needs us -- needs us to be active in the world: “divine fate." We participate in creation -- through “prayer and sacrifice."
** P. 131 -- continues -- sacrifice is imaged as adding one’s little flame to the “supreme flame" of God’s work. This is contrasted to ‘magic’ which is the effort to expand one’s own will in the world, where sacrifice and prayer are an individual’s way of aligning action to the greater action of God. That’s much more complex than the ‘dependence’ understood by the theologians of his day.
** Bottom of p. 131 -- a fallacy of trying to find God by becoming self-immersed. There are two mistaken ways of doing this: erasing the self (‘ego’) or coming to believe that one is already unified with God.
** P. 132 -- both approaches are wrong, because the intimacy of relation with God is not found in either wiping out the self or in wiping out the sense of God being other than the self -- in both cases, there is no relationship. He brings two quotes in here: one from the Gospel of John, where Christ identifies himself with God, and one from the Hindu sacred text of the Upanishads, where a sage sees God as unified with his heart.
** P. 133 -- mentions that the Hindu fusion of self and divine leads to the Buddhist ‘no self.’ (Buber doesn’t see this approach very sympathetically -- we’ll go back after reading Thich Nhat Hanh and reconsider.) Then he discusses John’s Gospel as being about the nature of the ‘pure relationship,’ that is, the human-divine encounter, not a symbol of some inner “relationship of the I to the self," as he scornfully describes a modern reinterpretation.
** Buber’s imaginary questioner: But many mystics have spoken about this unity with God. Buber clarifies the confusion:
** One form of unity is SELF-unity -- that is, having the inner contradictions brought into a whole, through mystical experience. This is very much the idea in C.G. Jung’s notion of ‘individuation.’ However, this self-unity is an invitation to ‘destiny’ -- e.g. service -- or retreat into self-obsession.
**direction can tempt us (next page) to split ourselves in two: the ‘sublime’ self that becomes a kind of God-junky and the debased self still living on earth -- which is not the point.
** P. 135 -- continues -- the rapture of ecstatic mystics can lead to the temptation of self-eclipse, but that isn’t unity. This is a ‘marginal’ -- stretched, warped -- version of the “central actuality of an everyday hour on earth," where the eternal You can be seen in sunshine and twig.
** P. 136 - back to the other doctrine of immersion: unity of divine and self. He revisits the Upanishads where the nature of this unity is described as annihilation of all “lived actuality," and rejects this in favor of the “holy treasure of our actuality." This discussion shows very starkly a central difference between Hindu and Jewish understanding of the world: the first sees it as an illusion, and the second sees it as a divine creation, good at its core (remember Huston Smith quoting Genesis: and God found it VERY good). Hellenistic Christianity sometimes misses the goodness of creation in an emphasis on afterlife or spirit contrasted to materiality.
** P. 137: We need reciprocity -- relationship -- for ‘effective activity’ -- especially where the ‘unified’ human connects to the ‘boundless You’ of God. By ‘unified’ he means bringing the whole self to God, not leaving out the sensual or emotional (another temptation of some historical Christian spirituality).
** P. 138 -- continues his rejection of the possibility of immersion into the Divine -- as being ‘It-language.’ Then, interestingly, he brings in a long example of how Buddha tried to steer people away from trying to figure out what ‘post-immersion’ would be like -- the entire focus on the question was a distraction. Buddha tried to “teach not a view but the way."
** P. 139 -- But ‘we’ aren’t Buddhists -- we have a truth that “has been inspired in us and apportioned to us" -- this refers, I am assuming, to the Biblical tradition, which has a different goal in mind than what Buber understands to be the goal of Buddhist practice as ‘the annulment of suffering.’ He understands Buddhists to be trying escape from the ‘wheel of rebirth’ as a primary goal, and to have basically rejected the world as only made up of suffering. For his part, whether or not there is rebirth, the point is that there is a possibility in this life of true encounter with God, which means that life is NOT essentially suffering.
** P. 140 -- he acknowledges that the Buddhist path leads to the initial goal of the unified soul -- but beyond that, the Buddhist path leads away from seeing the reality of the world and the body, thus limiting the possibilities of “You-saying;" he acknowledges that there is this element in Buddhist teaching, but it doesn’t have the centrality it needs to have (though he claims that later Buddhists have named Buddha as a ** P. 141 -- More on the fallacy of immersion: the delusion that a human spirit is IN us as individuals. Instead, the spirit is what is BETWEEN us and that to which we relate.
** P. 142. Self and world really are separate. What matters is actual relation. ‘Experience’ is a delusion of encounter where the world isn't really touched.
** P. 143. Rejects the dualism that splits the world and the spirit -- where the world (matter, body, etc.) is seen as debased. In contrast, real relation with the world leads to God.
** Bottom section: brings in paradoxes of the ‘religious’ situation (this is pretty obscure for a bit). There are lived contradictions in our attempt to understand and live a religious life; we can’t resolve them, only live them.
** P. 144 -- a primary example is the essential paradox, in a religious life, of being dependent on (‘surrendered to’) God and taking action (‘it depends on me.’) Both are true -- and can’t be split into two different worlds (the spiritual world and the debased world). Also, he rejects any ‘theological artifice’ -- some formula of doctrine that would annul the real tension of this paradox we are called to live.
** Bottom of 144 and 145 -- begins another series of attempts to characterize the differences between ‘It-world’ and ‘You-world,’ starting with his cat. The animal is on its way to spiritual existence, but we take it further because we have language. In our relation with the cat, it comes close to self-awareness in relation -- all in the experience of a single glance. I read this as an actual experience Buber has had with his cat and is trying to make sense of. He addresses the nature of human-animal relations again in the Afterward.
** P. 146 -- nature of the You-world to pass -- as the experience of the cat-glance passed. Another experience he had is mentioned: that of holding a piece of mica and contemplating it (147) -- brings again the notion of the ebb and flow of the sense of the You-world. However, it is only our own SENSE of the ebb, as we move from the ‘actuality to latency’ of Love -- the eternal You is ALWAYS actual -- it is only that we can’t sustain the connection.
** P. 147 -- finite relationships of the world are contrasted to the non-finite relationship with the eternal You.
** P. 148-149 -- more differences between ‘It-world’ and ‘You-world’: the ‘It-world’ has time, sense, and distance; the ‘You-world’ is one of a continuing Now. The duality, however, is apparent, not real; we move through a rhythm of being able to sustain timelessness and falling back into time.
** P. 149-151 -- three spheres of relation: nature, humans, and ‘spiritual beings’ -- by which he doesn’t necessarily mean God. All three spheres can be ‘It-ized’ or gateways to relation with the ‘eternal You’ -- there isn’t any ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ levels here, though there is something special about the sphere of human relationships, because we can speak and answer each other (lovely quote about marital closeness). At the bottom: imaginary questioner pressing again for seeing mysticism as a matter of solitude, not something found in social life.
** 152 - Buber’s answer: we can’t relate to God if we haven’t had some practice of relating as You with other people, because otherwise, we live in a world where we have made others (people, nature, and spirit-filled creations) into Its. There is a place for some solitude in the rhythm of life, but we can’t live in a “castle of separation" -- that’s self-indulgence and delusion. We don’t CONTAIN God within us, though God “embraces us and dwells in us" -- because God is beyond us (and in the world outside us) as well.
** 153-155 -- discussion of ‘idolatry’ -- responding to and rejecting a position of Max Scheler. Buber seeks idolatry not as having the wrong OBJECTS of devotion, but of having the wrong SORT of connection to them, one of ‘It’ rather than ‘You.’ These objects ‘possess’ a person unless the right attitude or association is undertaken. Bottom paragraph of 154 and further: examples of true and unholy associations.
** Mid 155-157 -- Presents a false view of religious life as transcending social life, as somehow better than social life. He answers this by the metaphor of rivers running into a sea: social life is made up of those rivers, all moving into the larger sea of relation between human and God. One can’t be true to God and USE humans, see them as ‘It’. He also combats a view that sees true religious life as transcending ethics (as if the Biblical commandments of charity and justice were burdens). Humans are seen by this false view as paralyzed by the conflict between what they can do and what they ought to do. The ‘religious man’ is one, in this false view, who lets go of this tension and becomes passive, no longer striving (presumably confident of having been redeemed, though the theology he is contesting isn’t very clearly outlined). In contrast (top 157), Buber says that obligations to love and serve the world are an outgrowth of “stepping before the countenance." In the light of the eternal You relation, what was before an anxious duty becomes one’s own desire. There is still the need to decide, over and over, to act in accord with this reality, but this action grows FROM the central encounter. (This section on 157, while obscure, is something worth pondering.)
** Bottom 157: Buber sees the core truth of the Biblical heritage (“what we call revelation") as the human transformation from the encounter with the eternal You. Top 158: In this encounter, something really takes place (image of Jacob’s wrestling match). Something changes in us -- not a “content" but a “presence as strength." There are three outcomes worth pulling out here (158-159):
-- “abundance of actual reciprocity" -- a richer and also more challenging life, in the light of this ongoing presence
-- “confirmation of meaning" -- not the details, but the certainty that life is meaningful
-- and the location of meaning in “this our life" -- not displaced into an afterlife.
** P. 159 -- Buber makes the point that the outcomes of this encounter are very individual -- different people will have different actions called forth. Each person takes away unique meaning, and can give no universal message for everyone else.
** Mid 160 -- the only revelation is that God is available for relation (referring back to Exodus 3:14: “I am that I am" -- in his interpretation, “I am there as whoever I am there."
** Bottom 160-162 begins the discussion of how God-encounter turns into religion, which can spark more God-encounter, or which can devolve into the ‘It-world,’ where religion is a thing. We turn religion into a thing when individuals become uneasy with the ebb and flow of ‘pure relation.’ (Note the “profiteer’s assurance that nothing can happen to him because he has the faith that there is One who would not permit anything to happen to him" -- a harsh depiction of a kind of self-satisfied religious person who thinks he has bottled up truth.) The natural human desire to bond together and share the You relation can lead to a cult, which can actually help sustain that relation (ritual), or which can “gradually become a substitute" for the You relation, supplanting the originating impulse with a dead It-thing.
** P. 163 -- continues this thought -- the You relation has to be actualized in the world. Thus, the ‘It-world’ becomes permeated and radiant. True community is made possible by individuals all relating to their ‘true You,’ as spokes in a wheel, radii leading to the same center. Through this, a ‘human cosmos’ comes to be -- finding and creating a spirit-centered community (as was discussed in the earlier section).
** P. 164 -- true encounter with the eternal You is always outward in direction -- but we want to hold on to it, greedily, and turn backwards in an attempt to hold onto God, and in so doing, turn God into an It. We can “converse with" God but not turn God into an object of understanding or definition. (In this view, theology would have very little utility for spiritual life, though common ritual with other God-encountering individuals could help them all sustain and kindle the You-relation).
** P. 165 - bottom - 166 -- how religions get started: from some individual encounter with the eternal You, which help kindle and sustain you-relation of other individuals (another description of the role of the prophet or religious ‘mouth’).
** In this work of founding and sustaining religion, humans are co-creators, not just passive conduits of divine revelation. (This connects with the description of the experience of creating art in the first section.)
** P. 167 -- the person encountering God can bring some of that encounter to the world in both ‘beholding’ and ‘forming’ God’s form. (This is similar to the Eastern Orthodox understanding of the religious icon, an image of the divine that is imbued with the spiritual experience of the artist who made it.) More on this page about the dynamic between living faith and dead religion. When religion (the form) becomes more important to followers than the “movement of return," God is removed from the “form" and the “cosmos crumbles" (that is, when the You-relation is missing from the form, the meaning goes out).
** P. 168 -- More on how religion can move from a living faith to a dead form. A new revelation leads to a renewal of “association of I and world"; that leads to an active period where this understanding is preserved; and then a period where the ‘I and the world’ are alienated (I am assuming here that the religion has taken the place of real You-relation with God). In closing, he points out that this rhythm of the ages isn’t circular (as it is understood in Hinduism) but a spiral -- moving through history in a direction of both greater risk of alienation/doom and also of greater potential ‘theophany’ -- showing of God.

Notes on Afterword: written much later, in 1957, Buber clarifies some issues about the differences between ‘I-you’ relations between humans, relations between humans and nature, and relations between humans and forms in the ‘spiritual realm’ -- which are both religious and artistic creations. An example of a real encounter with a ‘spiritual realm’ is really listening to the voice behind the writings of a long-dead spiritual master (perhaps the way he modeled trying to listen to Buddha in the last section). Another is connecting to the spiritual form of a Doric column. ‘Spiritual beings’ come into form through inspiration, which is the same in creative (artistic) work and religious inspiration. (176).

Point 5: (177 and following) talks about special ‘I-you’ relationships that have particular purposes (teacher-student, therapist-patient, pastor-parishioner), which are by nature not fully reciprocal. They are all genuine encounter, but the roles of the two are not the same. The teacher, therapist, and pastor have a responsibility to carry the emerging self of the student, patient, parishioner in a way that can not be reciprocated within the existing relationship. ( P. 179: He does a nice job of characterizing the job of a therapist: “the regeneration of a stunted personal center . . . the buried, latent unity of the suffering soul" -- which requires a ‘I-you’ approach, never turning the patient into an object.)

Point 6: Points out some paradoxes -- one being the apparent conflict between loving God exclusively and loving other people. Again, Buber reiterates that we embrace all others THROUGH our primary relation with God. Another paradox is that we describe God as a person, though of course God is much more than that. Buber says we do this because we relate to God AS IF God were a person, and that relationship is real and mutual, which for us can only happen between persons. God is more than a person, but
‘it is permitted and necessary to say that God is ALSO a person." The paradox lies in the assumption that a person is limited (because there are other persons too) -- he answers this by the “paradoxical designation of God as the absolute person, that is one that cannot be relativized." We bring all other relationships into our relationship with God, where they are “transfigured." Finally, Buber reiterates his point that conversation with God doesn’t take place outside the world, but this conversation
“penetrates the events in all our lives and all the events in the world around us. . . and turns it into instruction."

This word “instruction" is his word for Torah -- the Jewish word for Scripture, the living word of the law of God, which in Buber is widened to an ongoing revelation that we contribute to in our own conversations with God. The purpose of this instruction -- of Torah -- is that we live our lives in the world in response to this ongoing and living conversation.