Tell me why I quit my job…do you know why I quit the Messiah job?
Crowds you said. Everybody wanting you to do their miracles for them.
Yeah…it’s the kind of crowd that doesn’t care about what I came to say. You can walk New York to London on the ocean, you can pull gold coins out of forever and still not make them care, you know?
Well, you asked for it…If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.
This passage is from Richard Bach’s “Illusions”, a delightful little book about Jesus’ return to modern life as one Don Shimoda, a free-lance pilot making a living flying a small plane about the Mid West, landing in fields, and taking people for a short ride for $3. The book highlights conversations with the author and we gradually learn why Don has returned. His task was not complete! As the back cover says, “Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive it isn’t.” Don learns of his unfinished business from Richard. Don is trying make people care about his message! And they don’t. They want the miracles, the entertainment, the theatre, but not the message. Don’s final attachment to life is to his own message and once he lets go of that attachment, he can leave.
I read this book way back in the 70’s, and loved it. Being of service to a higher power meant a lot to me. I was even drafted into such service through such dreams as this one:
I am India as an advisor to Gandhi. We are in Benares, the Holy City. He doesn’t know what to do. I didn’t know either but I acted on an intuition: “What do you do at any time in Benares?” He smiles and nods. He now knows what to do. Later on, I am asked to leave, take my things, go. As we leave the house, the others scatter and I am alone in a foreign city. A feeling of being utterly isolated. No longer advisor to Gandhi who has his own destiny. No longer associated with the Man of Destiny, alienated, in a foreign country. Separated from the one who is to become the GREAT SOUL, Mahatma. I experience great alienation. I need to attend to my personal effects. The Man of Destiny goes off to do great things. I remain behind, alone, isolated, not much of a personal life left. But I do now have one, in contrast to being his advisor where I had none.
I have learned over the years what it takes to be in service to the other. The effect on one’s personal life can be devastating. Yet, through my writing I kept going, for twenty-odd years as fresh language poured into me from “behind the veil”. My body paid a price too, as I was pounded daily by huge energies that belonged to the living language I was receiving, culminating in a physical break-down.
So, I have lived as a servant or mouthpiece for decades and then, recently, I had this strange dream:
I am in a landscape of fields, like the Mid West. There is a small Cessna I have to fly back to the airport, or to another field.`I am with other people in a kind of ranch house. A storm is gathering, dark clouds. I will have to wait til tomorrow to fly the plane. It has the feeling of a task to do. And as I get engaged in other activities, such as dealing with a live wild bear in a group. It is threatening others and I raise it up and drop it on its head which calms it down, or I am with a young girl walking through the city, taking care of her, or with a young woman, anticipating we will be lovers. As I do these things, I have a background anxiety about getting back to my task of flying that plane. It’s always there as a background anxiety. I must get back to my task. I am walking to a train station to get back to the field, but slowly and increasingly I begin to become conscious that I have no idea how to fly that plane and furthermore I have no idea of where it is and how to get there. The task simply dissolves. There IS no underlying task any more. There is nowhere to go, nothing to do in the way of a task.
Upon awakening I get a strong association to Bach’s “Illusions” book and so I had to revisit it, read it again. I found the quote above and began mulling it over. The word “care” stood out. Don tried to get people to care about his message. Caring can mean a psychological act, meaning concerned or being attentive to, affectionate, kindly disposed, etc. but there is another meaning altogether that gives a very different reading to Don’s and Richard’s discussion. In existential phenomenology, there is a “care structure”—a way of describing our fundamental orientation to the appearances of the world, long before we think about them or psychologically care about them. I’ll give an example from a movie I once saw, Running with Wolves.
An old shaman, in the middle of the tundra found what he needed to make a large drum—skin, flexible wood to make a hoop, rawhide as thongs, etc. He then beat on the drum, there in the middle of a vast empty terrain. When he finished, he casually threw the drum down and walked away. Whereas for us the tundra is filled with detritus—animal bones, old skin—for the shaman these things disclosed themselves as available equipment, to be used for making a drum. Moreover, whereas for us the drum could show up as a museum piece or memento of our trip to Canada, for him it was to be used equipmentally for song and then simply returned to “the Source”.
We are “thrown into the world”, as Heidegger says, in such a way that the appearances show up as available in certain given ways and not others (the shaman’s equipment and our detritus), before we do any conscious thinking about them. For a baby everything shows up as “explore me”, a wonder and curiosity, nothing being excluded. But once we get inculcated into the dominant background cultural practices, some appearances prevail while others recede. The shaman’s drum emerged from the tundra as equipment and then receded back into the background. It could never appear as such to us moderns.
We live in a different world.
Care in this sense is the way other things “get to me”, show up as important, or pull me towards them in some manner (e.g. to use, or to behold), or are to be overlooked completely. With this sense of existential care in mind, I realised the difficulty for Don (Jesus) in getting others to care about his message. In our modern world, appearances show up mainly as entertainment or to deliver a “wow”, as “time fillers”, or to attract us enough to consume them, and then to be thrown away as obsolete. These are the given appearances of our technological civilisation. This is the world we are “thrown” into. The world Don Shimoda was “thrown” into, previous to his latest incarnation as pilot, was the world of 2000 years ago, when prophetic messages, auguries, signs, magic, etc. were privileged. Language then had a holy power and was rightly feared or sought after. That potent “speaking” now has been replaced by rhetoric that manipulates for purely secular human ends. Don the prophet and miracle worker was thrown once more into a (now technological) world in which the things of the world just don’t appear that way, i.e., as miracles and prophecies. They appear as resources to be used by us and then thrown away, or overlooked altogether, perhaps like Don Shimoda is used for purposes of entertainment and then thrown away. They could not hear his message. The background care-structure had changed!
I reflected on all this after my dream. My “task” is shown to melt or dissolve away, leaving me somewhat stranded. Over the thirty-odd years of writing I worked so hard to learn the language of the available pools of knowledge in order to persuade others to my particular point of view (soul perspective) and how that view can light up the real world in another, often revelatory way—persuade by speaking traditional language but meaning something new (new wine in old bottles). In other words, I came to grief in much the same way as Don Shimoda. People read my language literally and I was dismissed on the basis that I did not know the tradition (the experts and what they really said). They were right but I was asking them to read that prosaic language freshly, poetically, in the spirit of what may be called psychological hermeneutics—to perceive soul movements within that traditional language.
This, and other dreams, “forewarned” me that my efforts are drawing to a close. My desire to get my message across had shifted. Putting it this way brought me up sharply. Maybe this desire was not mine to begin with. Maybe I was participating in the desire of the other, just as my Gandhi dream says. That desire is satisfied and so moves on, leaving me stranded as the Gandhi dream also says.
It’s hard to be cast aside like that but I am familiar with that joy/sorrow. I’ll finish here with a poem I wrote around 1994 where I was used pretty hard in order for some poetic speech to incarnate in an art form:
my body a trembling leaf
all aquiver
you reach for me stretch me
anchor me to the four quarters
tune me
you accept my unconditional surrender
tightening stretching
all knots released
pure vibrations flowing
steady streaming harmonics
i can die now
breath returns
current coursing easily
your instrument now ready
you play
and how you play!
music pouring out
nectar honey
filling every pore
pause
vibrations sounding into infinity
you listen
you are hearing for the first time
and you needed me to do it
silence comes
you sit there in repose
awake in utter and complete stillness
awake!
my body an instrument of perception
through me you experience your creation
done
your fingers loosen
casually drop me to the floor
clattering
i lie there
my body a trembling leaf