We know how the Stock Market is a kind of sensitive register of mood in the world. Its graphs record the sweep of emotions that determine choices whether to buy or sell, in a completely unpredictable manner. The pandemic thus becomes just one more data point ( i.e. NOT a cause) in these wild fluctuations, quickly obliterated by the next data point—as we can see with the latest riots in the USA. Social distancing, e.g. in New York of all places, is completely swept aside by rage as cries for justice rend the airwaves. Was it just a day or two ago when Twitter’s decision to monitor Trump’s tweets became the newest “ignition point” for the media? It is now just another data point.
The wildness of these turbulent chaotic moments, following one after the other with accelerating force surely cannot be trusted to be a basis for any “right action”. This consideration leads me to the question. Can any still point be found today, the only point from which right action can come? The captain of a ship must indeed fully engage the stormy ocean in the immediacy of each moment of unpredictability and uncertainty. But the captain must also have an unswerving eye on the distant still point of the horizon where a beacon of light is glowing, warning all of the dangerous rocks. Everything depends on the captain’s steady long-term vision, while the ship navigates in the storm in its immediacy. And everything depends on the lighthouse keeper keeping that flame alive while the storm buffets both ship and tower.
Around the early 90’s of the last century, I was assailed by the storm—yes, the same storm that is now visible to most people now. At the time it was still mostly invisible, as Leonard Cohen wrote, around the same time, “… we’re in the midst of a Flood of biblical proportions. It’s both exterior and interior. At this point it’s more devastating on the interior level, but it’s leaking into the real world…”
I was one of those individuals caught up in the storm on the interior level. I struggled to find a still point. Everything had turned upside down, inside out. I was drowning. And then I had a dream in 1995:
I go to visit A. and she tells me she is dying with cancer. Very tender, very sad moment. We go to a very busy bookstore where she breaks down and tells me that she has never been able to read books because she has never been able to find a still place inside. She has a boy friend who becomes threatening at one point. Also, I see a lighthouse at the end of a long narrow peninsula and I feel excited about it. We must go visit it, I say.
The lighthouse had became a living symbol for me in my hour of need, and for the next couple of decades. My story of the lighthouse can be found in my book, Living in Uncertainty Living with Spirit or can be read in the third movement of my thesis.
A poem also emerged in response to the dream:
I had found a symbol of the still point—the lighthouse, in its capacity to withstand the storm while casting its light out into the unknown future, the horizon. Over the next decades the storm intensified but also began to “leak into the real world”, as Cohen says. Now we all see it, one way or another. But we are also seeing how many people are so buffeted and broken by the power and intensity of the storm that they have lost any connection with a still point from which right action could spring, and so the chaos deepens.
Those individuals who may want to engage in right action rather than merely becoming more fodder for the chaos must first find their lighthouse, their still point. This alone is no small task today. But it is the only task that can lead to a true vision of what is to come (the horizon) and thus to right action in the real world. The true vision, which is offered up to us as a gift from the still point, if we each can arrive there, is the only basis for any subsequent right action.
