rationality, spirituality, and emotions

From: Vida
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 22:50
my feelings about the reunion are deeply entangled with my feelings about Ken... As I recall, my Freshman year at St. John's included a few suicide attempts. There was something about the era, the isolation and other vulnerabilities involved.

Hi Vida and All,

What a pleasure to have something other than the reunion to talk about -- like suicide and death. (Sorry, just a joke -- on myself -- for calling it a pleasure.)

My first year (in Annapolis) was very hard -- my second year was worse. (Things got better when I got to Santa Fe, thanks.)

With a brief break in Alaska after St. John's (teaching school in a remote Indian village, a disastrous experience for which I was totally unprepared), I soon ended up in Berkeley, exploring pop-psychology and spirituality (officially in Unitarian theological school, partly to avoid the draft). That led to a year of serious work with autistic children at Napa State Mental Hospital (kids who had been virtually abandoned until a psychologist had gotten funding to start a program for them), then to a fairly serious zen practice for awhile, and identification as a Buddhist. Back in Alaska after 1975 I continued exploring various kinds of therapy and self-help groups, even taking all the courses in the graduate counseling and community psychology program at UAA, and working for a couple of years with street alcoholics for the Salvation Army. (Intermittently I also had a series of progressively more responsible bookkeeping jobs that eventually led to my being -- or at least calling myself -- a self-taught accountant, while manager of an international economic development consulting firm in D.C., which led to my studying economics, which is where I'm at now.)

But the point I want to make is that, at least for me, St. John's was very one-sided. It was what I wanted, don't get me wrong -- even though I wasn't very good at dealing with it. But I often thought later that concurrent meditation practice would have helped me. Or maybe some kind of concurrent encounter group. Maurie reminded me recently that she and some others were in a Christian prayer group, and I can imagine that that was very helpful for them.

That's not to say that, if mediation and/or encounter had been available, I would have participated, or been able to benefit. Possibly I had to find those things in my own time, in my own way. And in that, I'm sure that St. John's helped.

I'm convinced that we're living in a very difficult transitional period -- possibly getting worse before it gets better. Surely it will get better?

An historian I like (J.H. Plumb) referred to "the end of an epoch", by which he meant that the basic social institutions which have supported us since the beginning of the neolithic age (the beginning of agriculture) about 10,000 years ago, and the beginning of civilization (cities) about 5,000 years ago -- the family, state, religion, school, and cities themselves -- are breaking down under the stress of the scientific/technological/industrial revolution. Lots of other writers also identify a similar structural break occurring now.

So we had that too. And of course we were young.

But what I'm wondering about is whether the St. John's program (and St. John's students) would benefit from some form of "elective" (dare I say the word?) meditation, or group-encounter, or both?