Week 2: 1
The Storied Self:
Religion and the Depth/Vertical Dimension
Horizontal Dimension
Time: Past --> Present --> Future
Agency and “Victimicy”: Past <----> Present <----> Future
Counter-story: Critical Mass: Community of choice Found community
Vertical Dimension: Religious experience
Religious depth/transcendence intersects Socio-historical time
Daoism (Zhuangzi): Story of Harmony and Disharmony with Nature/Cosmos
Time: Momentary, Rhythmic, Cyclical
Reality: Myriad Appearances and Wordless Dao (Way)
Zen Buddhism (Shukman): Story of Oneness, Awakening, Liberation of suffering
Time: Momentary, Episodic, Epic/Mythical
Reality: Form & Emptiness; Words & Beyond Words; Manyness & Oneness
Protestant Christianity (Morton): Story of Belief in God, God’s love: agape/eros
Time: Historical, Transcendent/Mythical, Intervening
Reality: Profane & Sacred; human sin & divine perfection
Week 2: 1
The Storied Self:
Religion and the Depth/Vertical Dimension
Zhuangzi: Early Daoism (ca. 4th century BCE)
The Book of Zhuangzi: 33 Chapters: inner, outer, miscellaneous
Philosophy, Stories of Daoist Adepts, Mythical Beings
Human Dilemma: Individual: Too much thinking, wrong-headed thinking (p. 32).
Communal Dilemma: Complex, intellectual, centralized urban society
Lost connection with body, intuition, rhythms of nature
Creative Response: Individual Intuition in Nature; Oneness with Nature
Embodied Awareness, Decentered, Periphery as Center, Yin-Yang, Useless-Useful
Decentered: Perspectivalism Dissolution of Boundaries Oneness in the Dao (40-41, 44, 38).
Decentered: Multiple characters populating the Dao: Cripple & Madman (60-62), Woodworker Qing (129).
Living in the Dao: Living in the moment rather than living for the moment
Love and Death: Zhuangzi’s wife and his own death (115-117).
Dao as the Way of Undoing, the Way of Natural Flow
Lindswell Kwok: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNapnG37f8c
Week 2: 1
The Storied Self:
Religion and the Depth/Vertical Dimension
Zen Buddhism
Henry Shukman (b. 1962): Zen Buddhist teacher, Jungian psychotherapist
Zen Buddhist philosophy, hidden undercurrents, limits and power of stories
Human Dilemma: Individual: Attached thinking, dead-end stories
Communal Dilemma: Everyone caught in attachments, dead-end stories
Lost connection with body, emotions, intuition, rhythms of nature, cosmic oneness
Creative Response: Nonduality of form and emptiness, words and beyond words
Embodied Nondual Awareness of mind, heart, and body: subject & object, self & other
Initial Story: Oneness of inner & outer, self and cosmos (15-16)
Koan: Zen puzzle: “How do you realize oneness with the pine tree?”
Requires embodied response, realized in zazen, seated meditation: Pure awareness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4c_r3l2C9I
Everyday world: form, words; World of awakening: emptiness, oneness wo/ words (16)
Broken story: family background (17); Broken feelings (21).
Healing feelings & stories, liberation of unknowing. Love, death, & rebirth (22-23).
Dreams on the way. Dropping into timeless, spaceless reality (23).
Week 2: 2
The Storied Self:
Religion and the Depth/Vertical Dimension
Protestant Christianity
Michael Morton (b. 1954): Innocent yet Convicted of Murder
Themes of Justice, Love, Redemption, Belief/Faith.
Human Dilemma: Sin & Injustice – human brokenness
Communal Dilemma: Everyone caught in sin & injustice
Lost connection with emotions, esp. love, faith
Creative Response: Faith and Religious Experience of God
Body, Heart, and Soul/Spirit Belief and Faith
Love I & II: Eros & Agape: human, attached, partial; Divine, unconditional, universal
Unjust conviction: Final straw: Disowned by son Eric (142-4, 151).
Hard labor while in prison (152-155).
Depth of despair to the light of the Divine (167-170).
3 Truths: God’s exists. Divine wisdom. Divine love.
https://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/articles/forgiveness-and-three-powerful-truths.aspx
Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otde4bHTpao
Forgiveness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfaKeNuafGA