Mysticism and Militarism.
May 20th, 2007 by Christine Clear
Both these words do it for me. I read an article in the Irish Times during the week (I’ll post the date and writer) on sex trafficking in Ireland now. For some reason ( the most obvious - I’m a woman) the horror has taken the best part of a week to percolate. Words like suffering, justice, god and why, are part of my humanity. And part of my mysticism. I guess it slipped my mind, that if we live in heaven (as many of the mystics say…and that we just can’t see it), it’s true that we also live in hell. The question for me, beyond all other questions, is why should should one young girl be locked in a room and plundered while I can go off and play tennis? Where is the universe in that?
The psychoanalyst Eric Fromm wrote in ‘Psychanalysis and Zen Buddhism’ that life poses one question; “How can we overcome the suffering, the imprisonment, the shame which the experience of separation creates; how can we find union within ourselves, with our fellow man, with nature”.
There is of course a further question, still, (and Fromm would have be in on this) and that is how can do we overcome the suffering, the imprisonment, the shame which domination creates? Its the question of any self actualized, or ethical, or religious, or compassionate or imaginative person. I’m asking it on a Sunday morning, an bright, and very beautiful and quiet Sunday morning. I’m going off off to play tennis, to runaround after a ball, to play with (or is it against?) someone, to try to outwit them (and myself), to laugh and chat at the net about the BBQ last night, to shower and change and go about the sunny Sabbath. This is heaven. And still I know that there are prisons everywhere in the city, being manned and used by gangs of men for so what some might call sex (I don’t know what I call it), and this is as far as I can see is hell. So how come I get to be in heaven? What allowed that, enabled that, pushed that and why? Karma, evil, madness or exploitation, one way or another a mysticism without an investigation into imposed suffering isn’t gathering the full weight of life.
