I felt that yesterday I made light of Jack Kerouac's suffering and unfairly glossed over what he really felt and what truly undid him: spiritual and emotional despair. That despair I see as the keynote of this age.
We're a people -- and by "we" I mean everyone on earth -- who have truly lost our way. I've alluded to it in a number of previous posts. It's easy to criticize a loose grouping of people, or even an entire culture, but the fact of the matter is, we've lost ourselves. All of us. Everyone. And speaking for myself, yes, I'm lost too. Lost and searching.
Although I got unwittingly launched upon the spiritual quest at the age of 17, my experience has largely been one of disappointment, failure, of imbalance rather than balance, tumult rather than equanimity. And despair and disillusionment as the flip side of every hope I ever harbored.
What rarely gets said in spiritual literature is that most often the spiritual quest/life is full of failure. You virtually fail at everything. Well, I guess I should qualify that statement: I have virtually failed at everything. Because the spiritual quest, whether we know it or not, assumes a desire to be perfect. Which is a virtual impossibility and literally inhuman. Yet that unconscious assumption often accompanies our spiritual hopes and aspirations.
The idea of aspiration itself begs the question: who or what aspires? The ego? Is that who we really are, our egos? Aren't we more than that? And to what are we aspiring? Freedom? What does real freedom even look like? Is it freedom from inner compulsion, so that we finally, truly have a sense of unfettered choice? Is it the classical spiritual ideal, to be utterly desireless (talk about impossible)? Or is it the naive New Age fantasy of "manifesting" everything you want in life, the fulfillment of every desire you could ever possibly have, endlessly repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Is it escape from the vicissitudes of life? As the near-contemporary spiritual teacher Meher Baba pointed out, such a desire is really a neurotic reaction and a recoiling from the demands of life, rather than an attempt to solve the gritty problems by which we're all beset.
It's pretty damned cheeky for anyone to write about the spiritual life at all. It's presumptuous and pretentious. Many look at the world today, with its endemic unfairness and inequality, a world in which the selfish and vicious seem to be endowed with power and control, a world in which ignorance, bigotry, hatred, sectarian violence, reactionary fundamentalism and nationalism all congeal into a poisonous concoction -- and people come to the logical conclusion that there is no over-arching "higher power" at work, no truth, only the brutality and banality of the human ego run riot. And people despair.
For me, if not for you, that's an unacceptable conclusion. That what is, this flood of debris in a monumental logjam, is all there is to life. But before I lose myself in the morass of hopelessness, let's bring this back down to earth.
Besides alcoholism, which was just the bad luck of the draw for Jack Kerouac -- his inherited biochemistry, over which he had no control -- there were two underlying problems in Jack's life which did him in: his inability to find love (which was rooted in the instability of his own nature) and his failed quest to attain to his own spiritual ideals.
It's those two characteristics of Kerouac's life with which I most identify: his failed quest for love and his failed quest for a higher spiritual life. I identify with his failures, because those are my failures. It's my story as well, and probably the same story for many others.
I could go on for pages about this but what I really wanted to acknowledge today was the reality of spiritual despair in today's world, and in the life of anyone who aspires for more. It's no use to be a Pollyanna. Life is tough, it's hard, and we often fail. Let's look that in the face and make no excuses about it.
On that note, my musical post for today is an instrumental which captures spiritual despair to a tee, at least for me. It's a piece by the guitarist Max Ochs. Max was another one of those guys in Baltimore and College Park, Maryland, some sixty-odd years ago, along with Robbie Basho, John Fahey, and Leo Kottke. The song is entitled "Hooray For Another Day." Because my maxim is: the way Up is Down; the way Out is In; and the way In is Through, let's go down, in, and through this despair and quit pretending it doesn't exist. Vedanta doesn't honor Kali for nothing. I'm going to give the dark its due for a day.
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