And yes, the loss of ritual, and earned trappings from a successful quest to better one’s self has been systematically stripped from our societies. I think it has been done deliberately to create more docile proles, to borrow Orwell’s term for the common man.
The quest before us then is how to re-establish the striving to become more than we are? In Japanese terms, which do you see as your path? The adventurer, testing themselves by increasingly difficult physical challenges, or the householder, testing themselves through meditation and koans?
I have always thought we needed some of both. Our bodies and spirits seem to demand action to bring us part way, and time to think about the action afterwards to grow from it.
Even the passage from the surety of childhood into the uncertainty of adulthood is being denied to the most recent generations. How many of the activities and rituals that the Baby Boomers held dear are still treated as such? From a man’s perspective, first crush. First call to a girl from the phone on the kitchen wall. First kiss. First heartbreak. First love.
Then there were the external tests. Getting your first job. Your driver’s license. Your first adult purchases like clothes, beer or flowers for a girl. Each time you took a step forward, you were more accepted as an adult. Each step brought you closer to who you are.
The push for homogeneity from the limited thinking of the big business ‘community’ has sought to eliminate it all to make better consumers, who look and act more like mushrooms. But that is by design.
The ugliness of modern life is almost unbearable. In my city, we have buildings that are in the neo-classical design from the early 1900’s. We also have some red granite facade with green tinted widow office towers. The architectural details on the older buildings are often porcelain plates mortared onto brick structure. Some are done in dressed stone, often quarried an hour away. The workmanship is exquisite: all the cuts are laser straight, the courses plumb and level, even after 120 years of harsh -30F winters and 100F summers. The builders poured their lives into these buildings. How many buildings put up in the last 50 years will be around in 50 years? How many in 120? There are cathedrals from the 1200’s in Europe, temples in Japan, China and India where the feet of people have worn the floor stones down by many inches.
One of the failings of North American public education has been the refusal to teach the history of the continent. From Clovis people, most likely descendants of European walrus hunters from the the Bay of Biscay who got caught on the North Atlantic Ice and shuffled to North America, to the first Nations peoples who emigrated here following the animal herds off the northern coast of Alaska, and down the West Coast by boat, to the contact between Columbus, Cartier, and Cabot, the Virginia colony, slavery, etc… It is messy, brutal and often bloody.
PS: I look forward to your next post. I am using braincells that have been dormant for a very long time and it is making life far more interesting. Thank you.
Jim — this is exactly the kind of reply that makes writing worth doing. You've brought your own architecture to the conversation, and it deserves a real answer.
Your Japanese framing — adventurer or householder — is a beautiful way to put the question. But I'd push back gently on the binary. The tradition I work within, which is Shaivite non-dual — Kashmir Shaivism and Advaita Vedanta — recognizes four yogas, not two paths: Jnana (the way of knowledge), Karma (the way of action), Bhakti (the way of devotion), and Raja (the way of contemplative discipline). The great insight of that tradition is that these are not alternative routes for different personality types. They are four faces of a single ascent, and a complete human being engages all four — in different proportions at different seasons of life.
You're right that we need both action and reflection. The body demands testing. The spirit demands stillness. What the wisdom traditions insist on is that neither alone completes the passage. The adventurer who never sits with what he's passed through accumulates experience without transformation. The householder who meditates without ever being tested by the world produces a very refined form of self-deception. The integration is the point.
At 68, I can tell you my own proportion has shifted. More Jnana now. More sitting with what thirty years of framework-building actually means. But the Karma years — the years of making things, building things, fighting for things — weren't a lesser path. They were the ground on which everything else became possible.
Your observation about the deliberate stripping of initiatory passages is, I think, exactly right — and the word deliberate matters. Scruton said something similar about modern architecture: that the ugliness isn't accidental. It is the built form of an ideology that decided transcendence was a lie and comfort was the highest value. Your neo-classical buildings versus the green-tinted glass towers are the same argument in stone. One was built by people who believed they were building something that should outlast them. The other was built by people optimizing for the next lease cycle.
The Clovis point is fascinating — and the suppression of that complexity in public education is itself a symptom of the disease the piece diagnoses. A society that cannot bear the full weight of its own history — the messy, brutal, bloody truth of how we arrived here — is a society that has chosen the costume over the passage. History, like initiation, costs something. And we have decided, as a civilization, that cost is the one thing we will not pay.
I'm glad the braincells are firing. That's what this is for.
God is love. Love is Truth. Love is consciousness.
Now I have to re-read The Republic too.
And yes, the loss of ritual, and earned trappings from a successful quest to better one’s self has been systematically stripped from our societies. I think it has been done deliberately to create more docile proles, to borrow Orwell’s term for the common man.
The quest before us then is how to re-establish the striving to become more than we are? In Japanese terms, which do you see as your path? The adventurer, testing themselves by increasingly difficult physical challenges, or the householder, testing themselves through meditation and koans?
I have always thought we needed some of both. Our bodies and spirits seem to demand action to bring us part way, and time to think about the action afterwards to grow from it.
Even the passage from the surety of childhood into the uncertainty of adulthood is being denied to the most recent generations. How many of the activities and rituals that the Baby Boomers held dear are still treated as such? From a man’s perspective, first crush. First call to a girl from the phone on the kitchen wall. First kiss. First heartbreak. First love.
Then there were the external tests. Getting your first job. Your driver’s license. Your first adult purchases like clothes, beer or flowers for a girl. Each time you took a step forward, you were more accepted as an adult. Each step brought you closer to who you are.
The push for homogeneity from the limited thinking of the big business ‘community’ has sought to eliminate it all to make better consumers, who look and act more like mushrooms. But that is by design.
The ugliness of modern life is almost unbearable. In my city, we have buildings that are in the neo-classical design from the early 1900’s. We also have some red granite facade with green tinted widow office towers. The architectural details on the older buildings are often porcelain plates mortared onto brick structure. Some are done in dressed stone, often quarried an hour away. The workmanship is exquisite: all the cuts are laser straight, the courses plumb and level, even after 120 years of harsh -30F winters and 100F summers. The builders poured their lives into these buildings. How many buildings put up in the last 50 years will be around in 50 years? How many in 120? There are cathedrals from the 1200’s in Europe, temples in Japan, China and India where the feet of people have worn the floor stones down by many inches.
One of the failings of North American public education has been the refusal to teach the history of the continent. From Clovis people, most likely descendants of European walrus hunters from the the Bay of Biscay who got caught on the North Atlantic Ice and shuffled to North America, to the first Nations peoples who emigrated here following the animal herds off the northern coast of Alaska, and down the West Coast by boat, to the contact between Columbus, Cartier, and Cabot, the Virginia colony, slavery, etc… It is messy, brutal and often bloody.
PS: I look forward to your next post. I am using braincells that have been dormant for a very long time and it is making life far more interesting. Thank you.
Jim — this is exactly the kind of reply that makes writing worth doing. You've brought your own architecture to the conversation, and it deserves a real answer.
Your Japanese framing — adventurer or householder — is a beautiful way to put the question. But I'd push back gently on the binary. The tradition I work within, which is Shaivite non-dual — Kashmir Shaivism and Advaita Vedanta — recognizes four yogas, not two paths: Jnana (the way of knowledge), Karma (the way of action), Bhakti (the way of devotion), and Raja (the way of contemplative discipline). The great insight of that tradition is that these are not alternative routes for different personality types. They are four faces of a single ascent, and a complete human being engages all four — in different proportions at different seasons of life.
You're right that we need both action and reflection. The body demands testing. The spirit demands stillness. What the wisdom traditions insist on is that neither alone completes the passage. The adventurer who never sits with what he's passed through accumulates experience without transformation. The householder who meditates without ever being tested by the world produces a very refined form of self-deception. The integration is the point.
At 68, I can tell you my own proportion has shifted. More Jnana now. More sitting with what thirty years of framework-building actually means. But the Karma years — the years of making things, building things, fighting for things — weren't a lesser path. They were the ground on which everything else became possible.
Your observation about the deliberate stripping of initiatory passages is, I think, exactly right — and the word deliberate matters. Scruton said something similar about modern architecture: that the ugliness isn't accidental. It is the built form of an ideology that decided transcendence was a lie and comfort was the highest value. Your neo-classical buildings versus the green-tinted glass towers are the same argument in stone. One was built by people who believed they were building something that should outlast them. The other was built by people optimizing for the next lease cycle.
The Clovis point is fascinating — and the suppression of that complexity in public education is itself a symptom of the disease the piece diagnoses. A society that cannot bear the full weight of its own history — the messy, brutal, bloody truth of how we arrived here — is a society that has chosen the costume over the passage. History, like initiation, costs something. And we have decided, as a civilization, that cost is the one thing we will not pay.
I'm glad the braincells are firing. That's what this is for.
God is love. Love is Truth. Love is consciousness.
Amen. Namaste.