I watched Doctor Zhivago tonight. Keira Knightley as Lara. Hans Matheson as Yuri Zhivago. It’s a well done TV minis­eries from 2002. Moving, espe­cially at the end. It’s not David Lean. But it works in its own way. Expanded, because of the extra time. And updated to allow for more mod­ern depic­tions of the love affair.

Many things jumped out at me. But espe­cially this: brief, ecsta­tic joy in the mid­dle of a sea of sor­row. The embrace of that joy. Being con­sumed by it, per­haps because it is so brief. As is life. Especially life in the mid­dle of rev­o­lu­tion and civil war.

Some might respond: all life is brief. Yes. True. But in rel­a­tive terms, which is all we really know, it is shorter and has fewer moments of joy in the midst of vio­lence – vio­lence sur­round­ing you, tak­ing away your loved ones, your friends, your free­dom. And those brief moments are all the sweeter because of that con­trast. As if the word “con­trast” really could con­vey the extremes between danc­ing with your lover in a snow-​​covered house, away from the war and the mur­der­ers and the tyrants. Away from the slaugh­ter and the irra­tional hatred between human beings. Compared with, say, watch­ing a DVD and enjoy­ing it, in the midst of a peace­ful night, in a peace­ful town, and state, and nation. Relatively speaking.

Which brings me back to another form of high con­trast. Another field of extremes, and choices, and deci­sions. As men­tioned in my last post, mys­tics were and are the Olympian ath­letes of spir­i­tu­al­ity. They do things we mere mor­tals don’t gen­er­ally attempt. Ever. And they do these things daily. On their Way, through their gate­way of choice, to find, embrace and hold on to their vision of God, Nature, the Universe.

Most mys­tics, sim­ply by way of the process, because of its dynamic, go beyond names and his­to­ries and scrip­ture. They have passed through all the gate­ways most of us stop in front of. They pass through. They don’t accept the name on that gate­way or the gate­way itself as the end, the def­i­n­i­tion, the only way. They know “every­thing” exists beyond that human-​​made def­i­n­i­tion of the divine and their goal is to move beyond all goals and become one with everything.

Casper David Friedrick's The Wanderer

Casper David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. 1818

Nietzsche said that one rewards a teacher poorly by for­ever remain­ing a pupil. To me, when it comes to mys­ti­cism, the teacher is not just the man with the bam­boo stick. It is the sum total of all cul­ture, all sacred and pro­fane writ­ings, art and music, and all worldly mat­ters. Nietzsche’s apho­rism is a call to sur­pass the teacher. It could also mean to tran­scend every­thing worldly, though I doubt he meant it in that way.

It is pos­si­ble that some mys­tics wanted union with a god, or a god­dess, or some other hand-​​me-​​down def­i­n­i­tion of divin­ity. It is pos­si­ble that in the past and present and future this did occur and will occur. But, I think, it is impos­si­ble for a true spir­i­tual ath­lete to accept his or her rest­ing place on this side of the gate­way, instead of going beyond every name or sym­bol or sacred book.

If some­one seeks union with a god or god­dess who is more or less a tyrant, more or less like human tyrants, with the same hideous behav­ior and his­tory of destruc­tion and impe­ri­al­ism, then that goal is not a higher thing, or a noble thing, or some­thing to bless or admire. Seeking to be at one with a tyrant is the oppo­site of the sacred. It is the embrace of ugli­ness and the profane.

So we have choices. If we must choose to be at one with .… at one with some­one … we auto­mat­i­cally remain on this side of the gate­way … We can claim for our­selves a level of spir­i­tual ath­leti­cism that few can attain … but we can not claim to have gone beyond earthly, even pedes­trian def­i­n­i­tions of the sacred. Which means they aren’t really sacred at all. To achieve that, we must embrace the full kit and caboo­dle. The cen­ter with­out locale. The cir­cum­fer­ence with­out begin­ning. The radius with­out a cen­ter or cir­cum­fer­ence to tie it down to any­thing. We must embrace the para­dox of noth­ing and every­thing being one and the same.

Choosing to bond with that, mak­ing the deci­sion to leap into every­thing and noth­ing simul­ta­ne­ously, gives us the moment when the lovers dance in the mid­dle of a war zone, in their snow-​​covered house, away … for just a moment … from the par­ti­sans and the Whites and the Reds. But, unlike our vision of Lara and Yuri from afar, that dance lasts through­out eter­nity. Nothing but that dance. In a sense, in the mind of Pasternak, he must have thought, at least for a flash of time, that Yuri and Lara saw the dance as eter­nal too.


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