An
Interview with Sam Keen
By
Scott London
Sam
Keen's personal odyssey from theology professor to countercultural
journalist to reluctant icon of the burgeoning men's movement to,
most recently, aspiring trapeze artist is the kind myths are made of.
It seems fitting, perhaps, that the leitmotif of his many books is
the idea of life as a mythic journey.
Keen
believes that our lives are shaped — and occasionally misshaped —
by the stories we tell about ourselves. It's only by becoming
intimately acquainted with these narratives — as they have been
handed down from our families, our cultural backgrounds, our
religious beliefs — that we can begin to live consciously and, as
the Sufi poet Rumi said, "unfold our own myth." Unless
we understand our lives as a kind of autobiography in the making,
we're likely to take refuge in other people's stories, in ready-made
ideologies, and in unexamined systems of belief.
Keen
admits that his philosophy is a deeply personal one that grows out
his own unique experiences and reflections. "The only life about
which I have inside information is my own and, therefore, I must find
the meaning of my life on my home ground," he insists. "If
I have a method that runs through all my writings, it's this habit of
returning again and again to the happenings that provide the raw
material and the stories that make my life uniquely my own."
The
stories of Keen's life — as documented in Apology for Wonder,
Hymns to an Unknown God, Beginnings Without End, and
the bestseller Fire in the Belly — are those of a restless
soul, a nonconformist, a lover of questions. Born into a deeply
religious family in the American south, Keen attended Harvard
Divinity School and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy of religion from
Princeton University. In the late 1960s, after a brief stint as a
professor of theology, he dropped out of the academic world and moved
to the west coast, becoming, as he put it, "engulfed in the
California madness." He took up freelancing for Psychology Today
and other magazines and quickly made a name for himself as a
trenchant participant-observer of the human potential movement and a
sharp-witted interviewer of some of its more influential therapists,
gurus, and religious leaders. He also began conducting seminars on
personal mythology with his friend and mentor Joseph Campbell.
But
in spite of his long-standing affiliation with the cultural and
spiritual frontier, Keen is notoriously impatient with the cliches
and false consolations that often pass for wisdom. To maintain our
sanity today, he says, we need a "spiritual bullshit detector."
In a world of cults, gurus, and self-help programs, we need to be
mindful of how accepted beliefs often get in the way of true
understanding. As he sees it, real wisdom is born of "epistemological
humility" — of bewilderment in the face of life's enduring
mysteries. The paradox of self-knowledge is that it's only by
confronting the depths of our own ignorance that we can begin to
glimpse the essential truth of who we are. Knowing, as the mystics
have always said, begins with not-knowing.
At
sixty-seven, Keen carries himself with the authority of age, though
he still hasn't lost his good looks and robust physique. When I met
him at his sixty-acre ranch north of San Francisco, he led me down to
his small writer's cottage next to a gurgling creek and overlooking
the oak-dotted hills of Sonoma County. Along the way, he showed me
the object of his latest passion: a full flying trapeze rig.
His
new book, Learning to Fly, details how he discovered trapeze
late in life — two months shy of his sixty-second birthday —
after seeing a television feature about the San Francisco School of
Circus Arts. "My emerging passion was not unlike falling in
love," he laughs. "A bit of ecstasy and a lot of
foolishness."
In
Keen's view, flying trapeze is more than a mere recreational sport.
Like archery, flower arranging and motorcycle maintenance, it can
serve as a vehicle of profound inner discovery and transformation.
Learning to fly involves cultivating equanimity, trust, and the
willingness to let go — in the real sense of the term. The
challenge and the thrill of trapeze lie in overthrowing our
resistances and becoming "connoisseurs of fear."
Today
Keen heads a local trapeze troupe and a program called Upward Bound
for troubled kids and abused women. He also hosts weekly classes, led
by professional instructors, for men and women who want to learn the
aerial circus art. The examined life of the philosopher isn't very
different from the lure of the trapeze, he muses. "They both
promise freedom, release from the mundane — a winged existence."
Scott
London: You once described yourself as the sort of person who demands
"a repertoire of ideas, a collection of myths, and a map of the
path of life." Yet you've devoted much of your life to
challenging accepted ideas, reassessing collective myths, and forging
your own way.
Sam
Keen: I was brought up within the Southern fundamentalist-Christian
tradition, which was a very monolithic culture with an unbroken
mythology. So I grew up as a "believer." But there was one
fly in the ointment: I had a very questioning mind. The more
questions I asked, the more I disturbed people around me. The
questions that disturbed people the most became the ones I most
wanted to answer.
Most
of us are fear-avoiders. We worship the god of security. Instead of
facing our fears, we walk around with a kind of free-floating
anxiety. It's much more therapeutic to recognize that we have fears
and to try to separate out the ones that are reasonable from the ones
that are not. I think we have to become connoisseurs of fear.
I
gradually broke out of that narrow Christianity, and the experience
inoculated me against any form of "true belief." So even
though, as a journalist, I interviewed many well-known teachers in
the 1960s — Carlos Castaneda, Chogyam Trungpa, Herbert Marcuse,
Joseph Campbell — I wasn't drawn into their systems of belief. My
education and my practice of journalism allowed me to look
objectively at many different systems and cults and see how they were
put together.
London:
During that time, you began working in an area you called "personal
mythology."
Keen:
Yes, in the late sixties I started giving workshops to help people
discover their own stories or "scripts." I later came to
call this "writing your autobiography." I think we're
always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our
lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense.
Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural
myths — getting free of what we have been told about ourselves. I
think that critiquing the myths of our society and helping people
find their way through them is a very important thing. It's a theme
that goes through all of my work.
London:
Twenty-five years ago, you described the mood in America as a kind of
"national neurosis." "The human potential movement,"
you wrote, "is stirring up every conceivable emotion, and
everywhere advocates of a new consciousness are predicting the
dawning of a new age." Those words could just as well have been
written today. What's changed?
Keen:
I think the big picture has changed. The landscape today is more
confusing and more pluralistic. In the sixties, we had a groundswell
of interest in new-age religion, and we had a reactionary group
trying to preserve "traditional American values." Now there
are three major forces, with their associated beliefs, competing for
our allegiance. One is the secular "econocentric" or
"technocentric" view: a blind faith in the free-market
economy, in technological fixes to the world's problems, and in much
of the hype now surrounding the Internet. Information is seen as the
new Messiah. Like Jesus, it's absolutely pure and white and
univocally good. And, like the grace of God, information is
democratically available to all people and will soon penetrate the
dark corners of the earth. We again have the white man's burden, in
which it is our duty to spread the glories of the information age to
all the dark and "undeveloped" countries. Then, once the
flow of information is complete, everyone will be wealthy, because
information is infinite. That's the dominant secular myth today.
London:
The great dream of progress.
Keen:
Yes, the idea that things are always getting better and better.
It's interesting that the worse things get, the more we believe the
next technological fix is going to get us out of it. But it's like
being in quicksand: the more you struggle the deeper you sink.
The
second major competitor for our loyalties is religious fundamentalism
— of all types — emerging as a dominant political force. All over
the world we see a return to absolutism, to authority, to the desire
to have the word of God represented in government. We see it in
Islam, in Christianity, and in Judaism.
And
the third force is what I call the spiritual revolution. Part of it
is the old new-age movement — the searching, the transcendentalism,
the explosion of different gurus, and so on. Look in any big-city
newsweekly and you'll find hundreds of spiritual options advertised —
everything from UFOs to crystals to Zen meditation to gurus who have
all the answers. But the spiritual revolution is a lot more than just
the new-age bandwagon. It also includes the new physics, the
ecological movement, and "systems thinking." We now realize
that we're not living in a piecemeal world, but a world where
everything is linked together. If we don't preserve forest
habitat for spotted owls, for instance, then soon we won't have trees
to refresh the air we breathe. And we're realizing that this applies
to social ecology, as well.
London:
Many of the great themes that surfaced in the sixties have made a
comeback in recent years. I'm thinking of personal growth, Eastern
religion, right livelihood, voluntary simplicity, community values,
and so on. How is the environment different today?
Keen:
I think that in some ways we've been disillusioned since the sixties.
The sixties was a very optimistic and naive time. We hadn't really
confronted evil as a culture. Since then, we've been forced to look
at the dark side of things in a new way, with the AIDS epidemic and
Kosovo and Somalia and so on. So today there is a kind of realism
that I don't think we had in the sixties.
I
also think more people are working on real alternatives today than in
the sixties. Back then, we had people hoping and dreaming and going
off to psychedelic communes, but about all they created was a bunch
of beaded belts and Indian-bedspread dresses. Hippie culture really
wasn't fundamentally creative, because it was stuck in rebellious
phase. It was a good rebellion, but we thought we were going to
change the world by entertainment and rock bands and dances and acid,
and that's not serious politics.
London:
You pointed out that American culture is more confusing and
pluralistic today. Some feel that this diversity has deprived us of a
shared cultural narrative, a common story. Cultural critic Todd
Gitlin talks about "the twilight of common dreams," for
example, and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. complains about "the
disuniting of America."
Keen:
That's both good news and bad news. Cultures that have a unifying
cultural narrative are stable in some ways, but they are also
resistant to change. The fact that we don't have a unifying myth
today allows us to create new stories from direct experience.
For
the past several years, I've been leading groups into Bhutan, a
country that has probably the most intact cultural myth of any place
I've been. It's an agricultural society where more than ninety
percent of the people still own land. The government is a monarchy
with a Tibetan Buddhist mythology. For the Bhutanese, reality is
simply what it always has been and always will be. In that sense,
they are spared the kind of self-doubt that seems part and parcel of
our predicament in the West. They are brought up knowing who they are
and how the world works. And there is an innocent beauty in that. But
there is also a certain foreshortening of experience.
Since
the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the development of
Western thought has washed away more and more of the certainties of
our own religious myths. Our pilgrimage has led us deep into unknown
territories. We have to re-invent ourselves. That's a very tiring
process and anxious process, but it also grants us a kind of freedom
that no other culture has. So for all the chaos that comes from not
having an organizing myth, there is also an enormous opportunity for
creativity.
London:
Are there any good candidates for a new organizing myth?
Keen:
As far as I can see, the most likely one comes out of the
ecological movement, with its sense of the sacredness of the earth
and the interconnectedness of all things. But that is an emerging
myth and is still a long way from becoming dominant. The myth of
progress remains the strongest myth in the industrialized world. We
assume that, even if things are bad today, at some point in the
future, they'll turn around.
London:
So our optimism is rooted in that myth?
Keen:
That's right. We keep assuming that, eventually, we're going to find
the right road.
In
a way, human beings have never been part of the natural order; we're
not biological in the normal sense. Normal biological animals stop
eating when they're not hungry and stop breeding when there is no
sense in breeding. By contrast, human beings are what I think of
as "biomythic" animals: we're controlled largely by the
stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony
with the rest of the natural order. For a long time, our unnatural
beahvior didn't threaten the natural world, but now it does.
London:
When you travel across the country today and listen to people's
stories, what do you hear?
Keen:
A little of everything. The extremes are the most obvious. There is
the extreme of hopelessness and the inevitability of doom, a deep
despair that comes from the sense that our industrial, consuming
society is jeopardizing the planet. There is also a despair that
rises from what has become a perpetual underclass. Then there is the
splintering of national identities, which is creating more and more
ethnic warfare.
On
the other hand, I also find a lot of hope. There are many people who
have looked at the darkness of our history and decided to live
differently, to seek some kind of spiritual underpinning for their
lives. This usually involves a conscious quest for alternative ways
of understanding and living their lives.
London:
Like your own late-blooming passion for the trapeze. How did that
come about?
Keen:
I'd fantasized about flying trapeze ever since my dad took me to a
circus when I was a kid. The image of a man leaving the trapeze and
flying to the waiting grasp of a "catcher" really stuck in
my mind. It represented something profound, having to do with my
desire for freedom.
Throughout
my life, I've had different metaphors for freedom. At one time, it
was skin diving. In the ocean you feel weightless; you escape from
gravity. I also love to ride horses and used to own a ranch in a
remote part of the Cascades. There has always been a part of me that
saw wilderness and risk-taking as the path to freedom.
I
think the trapeze is just the culmination of that. It's a discipline
that keeps you on the edge all the time. For instance, just yesterday
I tried a trick I haven't done in a year, and I fell and bruised my
ribs. So I'm kind of tender today. It reminds me that, if you want to
be free, there is always a little bit of risk, and that you have to
remain alert.
London:
In Learning to Fly, you describe trapeze as a model for a new kind of
sport — or "public liturgy" — that emphasizes beauty
and cooperation rather than violence and competition.
Keen:
Yes, I think trapeze could provide an excellent liturgy for a new
society. Our present public liturgies, like football and baseball,
are a kind of ritualized violence. One side has to beat the other. In
trapeze, men and women cooperate to create something of transcendent
beauty. A great trapeze act is a kind of performance art. Like a
Navajo sand painting, it shows you something of exquisite beauty and
perfect form that lasts only for an instant and then is gone.
Aristotle
said that philosophy begins in wonder. I believe it also ends in
wonder. The ultimate way in which we relate to the world as something
sacred is by renewing our sense of wonder. That's why I'm so opposed
to the kind of miracle-mongering we find in both new-age and old-age
religion. We're attracted to pseudomiracles only because we've ceased
to wonder at the world, at how amazing it is.
London:
You say in the book that trapeze has taught you more about yourself
than psychotherapy.
Keen:
Well, that's probably an overstatement, because psychotherapy has
been a wonderful help in my life. But you come to a certain point
where you can no longer learn from that interior mode. Trapeze is a
physical mode where every day I have to face fear, limits, trust, and
the exhilarating feeling of living at the edge.
London:
Living at the edge?
Keen:
Taking risks and trying new things.
London:
If that's so exhilarating, why don't more of us do it?
Keen:
Most of us are fear-avoiders. We worship the god of security. Instead
of facing our fears, we walk around with a kind of free-floating
anxiety. It's much more therapeutic to recognize that we have fears
and to try to separate out the ones that are reasonable from the ones
that are not. I think we have to become connoisseurs of fear.
London:
You've started a program that teaches trapeze to troubled kids and
abused women. What can they gain from "learning to fly"?
Keen:
The same thing as anyone else, essentially. Many of the abused women
in the program were afraid of loneliness and of not being able to
take care of themselves, so they stayed in abusive relationships.
Trapeze helped them to discover that being alone and independent is
less frightening than an abusive relationship. They also learned
something about trust. One woman said to me, "I don't trust men.
I think they're after me all the time. But having people on the
safety lines, helping me on the board, and catching me has made me
reevaluate my attitude."
Troubled
kids typically talk about getting high: "I never knew there was
another way of getting high except by drugs." They talk about
how much better trapeze is because they don't get hung over and feel
ashamed. They also increase their self-esteem by doing things they
didn't think they could do.
London:
In Hymns to an Unknown God, you ask: "Is it possible in this
chaotic day and age to have a sense of the sacred in everyday life,
or do we have to check our spirits and our god at the workplace
door?" Much of what we call spirituality today takes place on
Sundays, after work, when the kids are in bed, or when we're off
meditating on our own. Is it possible to make it an integral part of
everyday life?
Keen:
I think there is a deep yearning today to figure out how to make a
real connection with the sacred. I hear many men say, "I have a
good job and make a living, but it doesn't mean anything to me; I
want something with meaning, something I have a reason for doing."
But our society has been eaten up by the economic view of things,
which routinely forces us to work at jobs that don't mean anything. I
think we're inevitably going to be depressed when we focus the major
part of our energy and attention on something that doesn't give us
meaning, only material things.
We
have to return, I think, to the difficult idea of right livelihood,
which Buddhists talk about, or the Christian idea of vocation. The
first questions we must ask ourselves are "What's my life
about?" and "What gives me meaning?" Only after that
should we ask "How do I make a living?" and "How do I
provide for myself?"
London:
We have to ask the questions in the correct order.
Keen:
Right. It's perfectly possible to spend forty hours a week on a
job that's meaningless, as long as you know what your real vocation
is and find some way to express it. Then you won't confuse your job
with the meaning of your life. Furthermore, when you get those things
clear, maybe you can begin to better express your true vocation in
your workplace — by insisting on the importance of making moral
decisions, for instance, or by doing business in a way that
recognizes the reality of the human spirit and not just of the bottom
line.
London:
In Fire in the Belly you wrote of the "absence of an abiding
sense of meaning" as the central source of men's alienation
today. Isn't this equally true for women?
Keen:
Yes, men have experienced this dilemma for a longer time, but as
women have begun to define themselves increasingly according to the
values of the marketplace, it has become a dilemma for them, as well.
Fire
in the Belly was an effort to look at gender and the problems that
confront men in this society. It was an attempt to chronicle the
spiritual — or, at least, the psychological — path that men have
to travel to get rid of some of the disastrous ideas and feelings
that go with being a man today. My society and my parents gave me a
certain myth of maleness that I imbibed unconsciously from the time I
was born. Now I have to demythologize that; I have to dig up that
unconscious conditioning and decide how much of it is congruent with
who I think I am, and how much of it has to be thrown away. I think a
good therapist can help with that. As a matter of fact, a good
therapist did help me.
But
there are some things that are part of the human condition, whether
we are male or female. When we deal with spirituality, for instance,
we're dealing with something that doesn't involve gender.
London:
But aren't gender questions also part of our spiritual search? After
all, we can't truly understand ourselves unless we understand our
roles within the community, within the family, and within intimate
relationships.
Keen:
Absolutely. I think people too often embark on spiritual journeys
before they have taken what I call the "psychological journey."
To use Freud's metaphor of the house with three stories, such people
want to skip the first two floors — the id and the ego — and go
directly to the third story: metaphysics and the spiritual. You can
always tell who these people are because they act very angelic and
overly spiritual. They're more interested in things like "archetypes"
than in the body, or politics.
So
we have to develop good, strong egos by exploring the unconscious,
gender roles, and so forth, before we can begin to let all that go.
But a spiritual question like "What is death?" has nothing
to do with gender. We all have great mythic questions to answer that
don't have anything to do with gender: "Where did I come from?"
"Where am I going?" "What is of value?" "How
am I wounded?" "How am I healed?" "Who are my
people?" "What is my place?"
London:
Fire in the Belly grew out of your long-term experience in a men's
group.
Keen:
Yes, we've been getting together every Wednesday night for more than
twenty years. It's more than just a men's group; it's a community, in
the sense that we're relating to each other on a continuing basis.
What's most important is that we just show up for each other.
Sometimes it's an evening of complete hilarity, or it can be very
serious. It's not even that we all like each other. There are people
in the group I wouldn't particularly be with for an evening. But
there is something valuable that happens when people just show up for
each other.
London:
My sense is that personal relationships have become so loaded today —
particularly for men — because we look to them as our sole source
of intimacy. When we can't turn to friends and to our larger
communities for caring, trust and support, we tend to burden our
intimate relationships with more than they can handle, which makes
them prone to failure.
Keen:
Exactly. Our men's group started out because two or three of us were
having trouble with the women we were relating to (or, rather, not
relating to). A few of us got together and each invited someone else,
and pretty soon we had a group of eight or ten men. Over the years,
we began to experience an intimacy with each other. We realized that
there were a lot of things we had demanded of women, in terms of
understanding us, that they couldn't give, but that othe men could
give. And as we began to explore the kind of intimacy that friendship
gave us, we found it relieved a lot of the pressure on our
relationships with women. There are all kinds of intimacies that we
need; sexual intimacy is only one. When we load too much onto it, we
can destroy it.
London:
So we need to deepen our understanding of intimacy.
Keen:
In our society, we've become myopic and obsessed with one particular
kind of love: dyadic love, which takes the form of romance, sex, and
marriage. As a result, we end up asking all the wrong questions.
Books about relationships talk about how to "get" the love
you need, how to "keep" love, and so on. But the right
question to ask is "How do I become a loving human being?"
When you ask that question, it changes the way you think about and
pursue love, making it much more complex.
Another
way to think about love is in terms of what I call "co-
autobiography." To really love a person completely is to come to
a point where your stories are intertwined. For instance, I can't
tell my story without telling the story of my wife; we've created a
common narrative.
London:
You once described love as appreciating the mystery of another
person. In that sense, to love somebody means to accept that we may
never understand him or her.
Keen:
That's true. When we really look at the people we know best, we
discover that, despite the time we've spent with them, they remain
utterly mysterious to us. The deepest mystery comes not when we don't
know somebody well, but when we do. For instance, my wife and I have
been together for a long time, and in some ways I know her very well.
But there is also a way in which she is utterly mysterious to me: I
don't understand why she is the way she is, or why she does things
the way she does.
I
think that is one of the discoveries you make in sexual
relationships: something happens between you at a deep level, far
beyond what you're physically doing together. You don't come out of
the deepest kind of sexual loving knowing any more about the other
person: you come out wondering, Where did this come from?
I've
betrayed plenty of people by assuming I knew them. And I did know
them well. But by "knowing" them, I confined them to a kind
of box.
London:
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has a different view on this. He
believes that you can't truly love unless you understand the other
person.
Keen:
Well, both perspectives are true. In To Love and Be
Loved, I talk about the importance of knowledge,
understanding, and empathy, so that you essentially become the
biographer of the person whom you love deeply. In that sense, the
collecting of knowledge is very necessary. It's entirely different
from the romantic myth, in which you don't know somebody and
therefore idealize him or her.
London:
I would think that this applies to self-knowledge, as well.
Encountering the mysteries within ourselves is an essential part of
knowing who we are.
Keen:
Absolutely. When I was young I thought I knew who I was and what I
believed: I was a Christian. I believed in God the Father, the
Almighty Maker of heaven and earth, and so on. I thought I knew
exactly who I was. But it turns out I was wrong!
Since
then, I've spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the
more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become: Where did I
come from? Where do these capacities come from? Where do these tastes
come from? Where did the liveliness of my life come from? Where did
the Sam Keen-ness of me come from? I can tell you all about my past,
but that is no answer to these questions.
Sometimes
I look at myself in the mirror and say, "How can it be that I
fetched up such an incredibly privileged position in human history? I
live with a kind of comfort and privilege that not one percent of one
percent of one percent of human beings have ever had. I get to do
what I want to do. I have friends who love me, a wife who loves me,
children, a farm. How come?"
The
new-age answer is something like, "You deserve it, you've worked
hard." Well, that's bullshit. I know people who've worked ten
times harder than I have and suffered a thousand times more, and who
don't have anything.
The
more we chase away the false mysteries — those things we think we
know about ourselves and others — the more mysterious our existence
becomes.
London:
You once said that you understood yourself better at thirty than you
do today.
Keen:
That's right. But it is exactly the things that I was certain of at
thirty that turned out to be wrong. For instance, at thirty I knew
that I would never be divorced — that experience simply wasn't
morally permissible in my world. But I did get divorced. At thirty I
also didn't have any concept of real depression. But that didn't stop
me from becoming depressed in my mid-thirties, following the death of
my father. At thirty I lived in a world where death wasn't
immediately real; it was always something "out there." My
deeply held illusions of immortality — a product of my very
conservative religious upbringing — were still pretty much intact.
The
philosopher William James talked about the difference between the
"once-born" and the "twice-born" — the
difference between the sunny-minded and those who dip into the
darkness. I'm one of those who are "twice-born." I'm one of
the latter, a creature who believes in the darkness. Darkness is the
place you find renewal.
London:
But isn't that true for everybody?
Keen:
I'm not sure. I think there are families that are very kind and
supportive of people's ability to change. People who come from such
families may go through life without dipping into the dark night. But
I think it's becoming increasingly difficult to be "once-born"
and also explore the path of the spirit, because our secular society
has such a hold on us.
London:
In what way?
Keen:
I notice it every time I go into a mall, for instance, beautiful
things reach out and grab me. Buddhists say, "Desires are
endless; I vow to put an end to them." But when I'm in a
gorgeous shop, I can't — I want to satisfy them all! We live in a
pornographic culture that is constantly trying to stimulate us to
desire things. Society tells me, "You can satisfy all your
desires; you can have it all." Being pretty successful, I can,
of course, afford some luxuries. But I realize again and again how we
have to disillusion ourselves of the idea that these things are going
to give us real satisfaction.
So
even if we come from good families where we have been supported well,
there is a disillusionment we have to undergo in terms of the
culture's values. We have to get beyond our cultural mythology to
find out who we are. "Writing my autobiography," as I call
it, necessarily involves demythologizing my family's history, my
culture's history, and even my own history to get to this deeper
layer. So I think it's increasingly hard to have deep self-knowledge
without entering the darkness in some way.
London:
There's an interesting cartoon in one of your books with a caption
that says: "Going beyond a shadow of doubt." It depicts
doubt as a peak in the desert casting a long shadow. Beyond the
shadow are two landmarks: "certainties" and "convictions."
Beyond these is the abyss "where all certainties must be
abandoned." One must cross the abyss to reach the green grass of
wisdom on the other side.
Keen:
That's right. When you genuinely lose your illusions, you begin to
marvel at things, because you don't have the answers any more. So,
yes, the abyss beyond our beliefs is something we have to pass
through in order to see the world anew, to see it in terms not
dictated so much by our culture, our parents, or our religious
convictions.
London:
Do you think a lot about growing older?
Keen:
Yes, sure. When I started learning trapeze, for instance, everybody
kept telling me, "You're too old to be doing that." So I
had to break through the mythology of age.
London:
Do you mean ageism?
Keen:
Yes. In America, age is a time of obsolescence. To a large extent,
the aged in our society are ghettoized. Old people are seen as
useless, bypassed by history, old-fashioned, in the way. So, not
surprisingly, when we reach the official mark of old age, we're
supposed to go gently into that good night, to get off center stage
and hand over the spotlight. Old age is also surrounded by shame —
the myth of impotence and inability.
But
contrast the American view of aging with the Chinese view. For the
Chinese, age is a time of great honor. Tai chi, for instance, is a
metaphor for age. You're supposed to be more flexible as you grow
older. You're supposed to slow down so you can be conscious of every
movement and live in greater awareness. That is a very different view
of aging than we have in America.
London:
So how does an old dog keep learning new tricks?
Keen:
I think you have to keep asking, "What is unfulfilled in me?"
"What haven't I done?" It's the idea of a calling: what is
it that appeals to you, that calls to you? Look for the vacuum in
your life and move into those areas. It takes some courage, but there
comes a point where you have to make that leap.
I
have a wealthy friend who was vice-president of a large bank. Eight
years ago he had $2 million, but he told me he couldn't possibly
retire until he had $3 million. Anything to postpone that leap.
London:
You've said that the path to personal freedom involves two steps. The
first is to question authority. The second is to overthrow authority.
Keen:
For some people, the third step is to become an authority! [Laughs].
London:
What about the authority of great teachers, the authority of
tradition, the authority of those with more experience than
ourselves? How can we overthrow someone with the spiritual authority
of the Dalai Lama, for instance?
Keen:
The word authority comes from the word author: an authority is
someone who authors our collective story, telling us what is true.
But I don't care if it's the Dalai Lama or the Pope or Einstein: When
I come to an authority, I'm going to listen to them, but I'm also
going to ask questions.
I
think the Dalai Lama is a marvelous person with an enormous amount of
wisdom and spiritual depth. The same is true of Thich Nhat Hanh. But
I also think there are things they say that are nonsense.
London:
Nonsense?
Keen:
Yes, I think that the suspicion of sexuality that runs through their
tradition is an old and unseemly prejudice: it's a hidden fear of
women, and a rejection of this world.
For
instance, the other day, I was writing about the first noble truth of
Buddhism — that life is suffering. The Buddha was absolutely right:
life is suffering. And in America we don't acknowledge that.
Unfortunately, Buddhism doesn't teach us the equally important truth
that life is pleasurable. We have to develop not only compassion, an
awareness of suffering, and the will to do something about it; we
must also develop our sensuality, our utter enjoyment and celebration
of the beauty of this world. The Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh are
both good on suffering, but they don't teach me much about the sacred
vocation of sensuality.
London:
There is a certain sensuality to Thich Nhat Hanh's practice of
mindfulness, though. He says that mindfulness is a way of heightening
the sensation of grass under one's bare feet, for example, or the
taste of food as it is being eaten.
Keen:
That's true. There is a sensuality in Thich Nhat Hanh's philosophy —
but no sexuality that I find. I just read his recent book, where he
talks about his attraction to a nun, and there is (as in Roman
Catholicism) a kind of a priori assumption that a religious life is
incompatible a sexual life.
London:
You have said that the real challenge today isn't to attain spiritual
mastery in some far-off monastery, but to do it right here in the
midst of everyday life. Yet this idea runs counter to what many of us
have learned from Eastern religions and Christian mysticism, which is
the idea that we have to withdraw from the world in order to
experience the sacred.
Keen:
I put the paradox this way: the spiritual journey is one that we must
take "alone together," in the same way that a good marriage
involves a dance between solitude and communion. The life of the
spirit entails a continuous alternation between retreating into
oneself and going out into the world: it's an inward-outward journey.
There is a solitary part to it, but that solitude helps us to develop
richer and more in-depth relationships with our friends, our
children, our community, and the political world. It's always a
back-and-forth.
London:
It also seems to be a dance between knowing and not- knowing, between
believing and wondering.
Keen:
Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. I believe it also
ends in wonder. The ultimate way in which we relate to the world as
something sacred is by renewing our sense of wonder. That's why I'm
so opposed to the kind of miracle-mongering we find in both new-age
religion and old-age religion. We're attracted to pseudomiracles only
because we've ceased to wonder at the world, at how amazing it is.
London:
How do we recapture that sense of wonder?
Keen:
I try to steer away from high metaphysical beliefs because I think we
humans do best when we realize that we don't know all that much. So
much violence and hatred is caused by people having to know the ways
of God and then force them on their neighbors. Wonder, to me, is that
spiritual stance or disposition which renders us humble in the face
of things, and also thankful. In my mind, to try to live that way is
what it means to follow a sacred path.
London:
The great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart observed that "the
idea of God can become the final obstacle to God."
Keen:
Yes, our ideas about God are always pathetically inadequate. There is
no way that the human imagination can fathom the Ultimate.
I
remember when I took LSD back in the sixties. One of the things it
made me realize was that even the psychedelic imagination doesn't
touch the edge of true reality; it's just a slightly different form
of the human imagination. So when we imagine God, what are we
imagining? The great mystics all recognized that you've eventually
got to throw all images away.
One
passage I love in Thomas Aquinas is where he talks for some thirteen
pages or more about how you name God. At the end of it, he quotes
Dionysius the Areopagite: "But in the end we remain joined Him
as to one unknown."
How
can we think about that which is ultimate and that which is sacred in
ways that don't hinder our being open to that reality? I think we
constantly have to erase the images we have. Thinking about the
sacred is a process that has to be poetic rather than dogmatic. The
great mistake of dogmatism is that it latches on to an idea of God
and says, "That's it!" Now, if you believe in that idea,
you have to conform to it, no matter what else you might learn or
experience.
The
spiritual mind is always metaphorical. Spiritual thinking is poetic
thinking. It's always trying to put a very diaphanous experience into
words, realizing all the while that words are inadequate. So if you
have an idea of God you think is adequate, it's not. I think we have
to trust ourselves in the darkness of not knowing. The God out of
which we came and into which we go is an unknown God. It's the
luminosity of that darkness and that unknowing that is, I think, the
most human — and the most sacred — place of all.
