Beautifully Broken Issue #23: A Utopia Of One
Beautifully Broken Issue #23: A Utopia Of One
IDEAS, ART & WISDOM TO REPAIR OUR BEAUTIFUL WORLD
Happy Saturday! Welcome to the new, compact format of Beautifully Broken.
IDEAS: A Utopia Of One
Have you ever been upset or discouraged? Why? The Buddha says that the first step towards freedom is the acceptance that life is suffering. We are trapped in a body, moving through material existence. We feel pleasure and pain, we age and die. That's not a surprise to anyone except a child. So why should we be surprised, shocked even, when things don't go our way? Suffering is natural, isn't it?
Perhaps it's because we have a built-in compass that points somewhere other than material existence. Animals exist, dealing with what life throws at them on a moment-by-moment basis. We, by comparison, tend to imagine that something should be a certain way. So then, how should the world be? A place of fairness, equality? Where you are respected? Have the space to live with a sense of naturalness and freedom? What does your utopia look like? Is it free from fear and desire, or weighed down by these attachments?
I suffer when I feel powerless, that life has no meaning. The game is rigged, the dice are loaded, life is shit and then you die as the saying goes. But nothing could be further from the truth. A great deal of time is spent by marketing experts trying to confuse people into believing that they are powerless to change the nature of their existence unless they purchase the right items or associate with the right people. It's not in their interests for you to realise that you can start to remake the world at any moment, aligning your internal and external environment to your internal compass. You can start to make your utopia of one immediately.
Start making something, building something that makes your experience in the world align with how you feel inside. Don't be fooled into thinking that your effort doesn't matter. Start creating a better world; each one of us is created and can in turn create. However you choose to express yourself may even inspire others to begin creating their own utopia. A seed sprouts, a new world is born.
HEADLINE FICTION #9: A Spiritual Home
Here's a new format for short fiction that I've invented. It's a 70-word story in three panels with a pattern of 7-16-47 words, where the first 7 words form a headline style title, the 16 serve to fill out the headline information a little more and the final 47 contain the meat of the story and resolution. I think I'll call it "headline fiction". These micro stories of mine are based on dreams (and nightmares!).
ART TO MEDITATE UPON
Utopia by René Magritte
Painted in June 1945, Magritte himself described the scene in L'utopie in his publication, Dix tableaux de Magritte précédes de descriptions, published the following year. There, he explained that, 'The rose is alone on an island'. This sense of the solitude of the flower, already emphasiz
sed by the span of the distant horizon and the vastness of the ocean, is thus reinforced by Magritte's statement and his own declared intention. How did the rose reach this island? This strange and solitary bloom is a glimpse of the poetic and the mysterious, even the miraculous, and is all the more striking as an image of hope in the wake of the Occupation of Belgium, which had only recently ended.
The promontory and the rose in L'utopie appear to have been painted in the mock-Impressionist style that Magritte referred to as Surréalisme en plein soleil…He thus introduced a tension between a style of painting associated with capturing a moment of fleeting 'reality' and his own Surreal, poetic universe, while also providing a glimpse of sunlight during the dark days of the Second World War. At the same time, he revelled in shocking even his most ardent followers by deliberately and irreverently adopting a style that was then associated with bourgeois taste. Magritte's Surrealism was intended to jolt his viewers out of a complacent understanding of the world around them, but he was aware that his own admirers and followers had developed expectations of his works. L'utopie and its sister-works of sunlit Surrealism shocked his viewers out of their complacent understandings of his pictures and of the universe alike.
WISDOM OF OTHERS
Excerpt from the Introduction to St Augustine’s City of God by Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton OCSO (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968), religious name M. Louis, was an American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist and scholar of comparative religion. In December 1941 he entered the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani and in May 1949 he was ordained to priesthood. He was a member of the convent of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky, living there from 1941 to his death.
Merton wrote more than 50 books in a period of 27 years, mostly on spirituality, social justice and a quiet pacifism, as well as scores of essays and reviews. Among Merton's most enduring works is his bestselling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). His account of his spiritual journey inspired scores of World War II veterans, students, and teenagers to explore offerings of monasteries across the US. It is on National Review's list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the century.
Merton became a keen proponent of interfaith understanding, exploring Eastern religions through his study of mystic practice. His interfaith conversation, which preserved both Protestant and Catholic theological positions, helped to build mutual respect via their shared experiences at a period of heightened hostility. He is particularly known for having pioneered dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual figures, including the Dalai Lama; Japanese writer D. T. Suzuki; Thai Buddhist monk Buddhadasa, and Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. He traveled extensively in the course of meeting with them and attending international conferences on religion. In addition, he wrote books on Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, and how Christianity is related to them. This was highly unusual at the time in the United States, particularly within the religious orders.
Augustine of Hippo (13 November 354 – 28 August 430), also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. His writings influenced the development of Western philosophy and Western Christianity, and he is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers of the Latin Church. His many important works include The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and Confessions.
According to his contemporary, Jerome, Augustine "established anew the ancient Faith". In his youth he was drawn to the Manichaean faith, and later to the Hellenistic philosophy of Neoplatonism. After his conversion to Christianity and baptism in 386, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and perspectives.
The difference between the two cities is the difference between two loves. Those who are united in the City of God are united by the love of God and of one another in God. Those who belong to the other city are indeed not united in any real sense: but it can be said that they have one thing in common besides their opposition to God: each one of them is intent on the love of himself above all else. In St. Augustine’s classical expression: “These two cities were made by two loves: the earthly city by the love of self unto the contempt of God, and the heavenly city by the love of God unto the contempt of self.” (Bk. 14, c. 28.) The earthly city glories in its own power, the heavenly in the power of God.
But there is a deeper psychological explanation of these two loves and of the way they contribute to the formation of two distinct societies. The love which unites the citizens of the heavenly city is disinterested love, or charity. The other city is built on selfish love, or cupidity. Now there are two reasons why only one of these loves—charity—can serve as the foundation for a happy and peaceful commonwealth. The first reason is metaphysical: charity is a love that leads the will to the possession of true values because it sees all things in their right order. It sees creatures for what they are, means to the possession of God. It uses them only as means and thus arrives successfully at the end, which is God. But cupidity is doomed from the start to frustration because it is based on a false system of values. It takes created things for ends in themselves, which they are not. The will that seeks rest in creatures for their own sake stops on the way to its true end, terminates in a value which does not exist, and thus frustrates all its deepest capacities for happiness and peace.
The second reason is psychological and moral. Those who love God love a supreme and infinite good that cannot be diminished by being shared. Those who place their hopes on the possession of created and limited goods are doomed to conflict with one another and to everlasting fear of losing whatever they may have gained. Hence the city that is united in charity will be the only one to possess true peace, because it is the only one that conforms to the true order of things, the order established by God. The city that is united merely by an alliance of temporal interests cannot promise itself more than a temporary cessation from hostilities and its order will never be anything but a makeshift.
St. Augustine has left us a famous illustration of the way the citizens of the heavenly city are united in their knowledge and love of God. At the beginning of his De Doctrina Christiana he calls to mind the audience in a Roman theater. He shows us the spectators, coming together, strangers, from different places, to sit and watch the play. Soon one of the actors begins to arouse the admiration of individuals. They like him and they begin to applaud. Then, finding their own enthusiasm reproduced in others, they “begin to love one another for the sake of him that they love.” A bond is established; they begin to encourage one another in applauding their favorite. Anyone who has been to the opera in a large Italian city will appreciate St. Augustine’s description. The enthusiasm spreads through the crowd, and a “society” is spontaneously generated by this common bond of love for a common object of contemplation. At the same time, those who do not share this admiration and love are, by that very fact, excluded and divided off into another, contrary society. So it is with the two cities of heaven and earth. Their two loves divide them beyond reconciliation. They are traveling in opposite directions and thus it is impossible that their roads should ever reach the same term.
Nevertheless, the fact that the two cities are opposed to one another does not mean that they cannot peacefully co-exist here on earth. It is not impossible that they should agree upon a modus vivendi (manner of living; way of life). They can come to terms, and it is well that they should do so. The temporal advantage of worldly society is well served when the citizens of heaven still living in the world are protected by the temporal power. And although the Church as a whole can only profit by persecution, nevertheless temporal peace is a greater blessing, and one to be prayed and worked for, since it provides the normal condition under which most men can safely expect to work out their eternal destiny.”
-Thomas Merton, Abbey of Gethsemani, 1950
PHOTO HAIKU
Creating The World
Here, a perfect shell
amid countless grains of sand -
bring it into being.
Ideas To Live By In The Coming Week
When we feel unhappy with our relationships or with the state of society, it's because we feel that things are other than they should be. That something's not right. Instead of seeing that as a negative, a failure of the state of things, instead ask how is it that you have a sense of the right thing?
What is that vision of functional happiness that's imprinted in your heart and mind? How can you bring it into being in the world to make human existence better for you and others?
Being upset is the same as accepting your powerlessness in any situation. Instead realize that you have the power, by way of your material existence, to reshape the material world and align it to the vision of harmony that you feel within.
Peace Now,
Morgan ,
3rd August, 2024
