My Road to Boston

-- By Tom Phillips  

After sixty years of puzzlement, I finally got it. The cartwheel logo of the Boston Bruins, with a capital B at the center, refers to Boston’s traditional nickname, the Hub. I talked to five Bostonians and to my surprise, none of them knew this.  This gives me the courage to analyze Boston for them.

I’ve been trying to understand this place since my first visit in 1952, when I was ten. My father brought me up from the New York suburbs to see a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.  I was excited to see Kenmore Square, which I envisioned as something like Times Square. Nothing prepared me or my father for its sepulchral drabness. After two days in Boston he concluded, “This is a small town.”

 

It still is, but not like any other small town. As the Hub, it is the biggest small town of ten thousand small towns that make up New England civilization. The wheel is not geographical but conceptual – showing the place Boston occupies not on the map of New England, but in its mind.  

Circumambulation #3: Turning Left

-- By Tom Phillips

 Whirling Dervishes in Turkey 

Last year I took up whirling as a physical and spiritual exercise. After a while I drifted away and forgot about it, until something jogged my memory this year and I began again.  It's different this time.

Last year I turned clockwise, recommended for beginners. Clockwise whirling can give you a groove, a feeling of centeredness and calm. But counter-clockwise is the real deal.  It takes you out of your "comfort zone." This is my new practice.

The 13th-century Islamic poet Rumi wrote: "Do you know what whirling is?  It is escaping one's existence continuously tasting the everlasting experience."  If that sounds like nonsense, remember what the Talking Heads advise -- "Stop making sense."

To whirl counter-clockwise is to stop making sense, to step out of the patterns your mind has made for your life.  We humans have a primitive area of the brain that if left unchecked will make sense of life by killing it  -- that is, reducing it to routine tasks rewarded with mindless pleasures. Anyone can fall into this.  Housewives are encouraged to do it, as are civil servants.  But professors can do it almost as easily. This is why Rumi says we have to escape our existence.

Turning left instead of right, against the ordinary drift of life, I feel my outstretched hand is wiping dust off the table, knocking objects off the shelf.  This dust and these objects are the detritus of habit and routine. What is beyond them? A whirling cosmos, spinning too fast for the mind to do its job of categorizing and judging, picking and choosing. In this state the mind has no choice but to move toward what Rumi calls the everlasting existence, i.e. the present moment.

I say "move toward" rather than "enter into" because I'm still a beginner, doing it wrong. I know there's an ecstatic spiritual continuum out there, but it will take practice, refinement, and guidance to whirl my way to it. These days I can turn for five or six minutes at moderate speed, and the effect is energizing, refreshing to body and mind and spirit. Taste and see...

To be continued.

-- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips




   

Believing in Truth

-- By Tom Phillips 

Rudy Giuliani: "Truth isn't truth"

It’s happening more and more these days – people saying things that just a few years ago would have been considered insane.  At a recent party, a young female stranger – a graduate student – asked me, “What do you think about the post-truth moment?”  My flustered answer: “I’m against it.” 

On the street and even in church, on hearing that I used to write for CBS News, people have cheerfully piped up: “Oh, fake news!”  Absolutely not, I tell them.  I never knowingly wrote a word of fake news.  Oh, they reply, but you’re retired.  How about the people writing now?   

I am a member of two establishments -- the press and the church -- that depend for their existence on the idea of truth.  Both are under siege by a new wave of old politics that values visions over facts, slogans over reason, personality over truthfulness.  The press is in danger of being discredited, the church of being co-opted.  And so far, the press is holding up better, more resistant and resilient.

I Liked It Better When ... #6

-- By Tom Phillips  

Beach Haven, 2018

I don't like to rail against modern conveniences and comforts – don’t want to go back to washing dishes or clothes by hand, or typing stories and correcting them with white-out.  But I liked it better before beach houses were air-conditioned.  

Our guest blogger Linda Given makes the case for a salty air and the sound of surf:  

My parents both grew up in New Jersey and as a result, I’ve spent time at the Jersey Shore since I was a very young child.  One of my first distinct memories being there is of sleeping in a little bedroom under the stairs of a rental house, with my window open, feeling the ocean breeze and listening to the waves rolling back and forth along the shore.  In the morning, I heard seagulls and footsteps and the occasional car. Some sixty years later I’ve just returned from a beach vacation and things have changed!

Pinker's Paradise

-- By Tom Phillips

Harvard professor Steven Pinker is out with another of his weighty books about how the world is getting better all the time. This one's called "Enlightenment Now." Readers should appreciate his contrarianism; his mass of statistics about the world's rising prosperity, improving health, reduced violence and increasing personal satisfaction is a welcome antidote to studies that show humans growing more lonely, pessimistic and frightened.

There's a fly in the cream, though. While Pinker's global stats generally show that happiness rises along with income, here in the United States, the pursuit of happiness has ground to a halt.  In recent decades, Pinker reports, American men have gotten no happier, while women have actually grown less happy. This could simply reflect the stagnation in middle-class incomes since the 1970s.  But happiness is not an isolated phenomenon -- it reflects much broader societal trends.

My Road to Germany

--  By Tom Phillips

Gestapo Prison Cell -- Koln 

Among my must-see destinations on the road to dotage are some I've spent my life avoiding --  places in the world that frighten me. And the scariest has always been Germany.

Born in 1942, my first idea of Germans was just "the enemy," the ones who started this all-consuming war. Then in 1946, right after the war, we moved to London and I learned what was meant by blitzkrieg. Bricks and half-bricks were scattered everywhere, cranes were excavating craters where buildings had been. An army manual showed how an incendiary bomb pierces the floors of a home, then blows the place up. I drew picture after picture of planes dropping bombs, blowing homes and people to bits.

Back in America at age twelve,  I read the diary of Ann Frank and felt her terror of the Gestapo. It seemed incomprehensible that anyone would want to kill such a peaceful, brilliant child. Germans struck me as uniquely ruthless and sadistic people. And as I grew up, my fears were intensified by my affection and admiration for Jews, who were my best friends, teachers and mentors.

Still, it was clear that Germany did not equal Nazism. History showed it was the very center of western civilization, the seat of philosophy and the arts. How it turned monstrous was a conundrum without a clear answer. Some of my fellow students had no qualms about visiting Germany, but many, like me, were afraid.

Still, I was amazed to learn that some Jews actually went back after the war, to live in the nation that had tried to exterminate them. And recently I read about Jewish writers, artists and intellectuals  thriving in Germany, despite continued incidents of anti-Semitism.

If they could go, I should. So this summer, on vacation in the Netherlands, we planned a short side trip -- a weekend in Koln (Cologne) on the Rhine. The prospect filled me with violently mixed emotions. What would we see?

In a Spin (Circumambulation #2)

-- By Tom Phillips

A few years back, just starting out on the Road to Dotage, I wrote about the benefits of walking around in circles -- the spiritual practice of circumambulation. That essay described walking around various holy sites in India, and later circumambulating an elephant sculpture in New Jersey. As one's dotage advances, the circles get smaller. And so it is that this year I have ended up in the most minimal of all circular paths -- turning on a dime, AKA whirling.

I had only whirled once before -- in the 1970s, at the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in Poona, India -- where a friend and I were visiting out of curiosity.

My most ecstatic time was in the whirling class, where we learned the basic technique of the Sufi Dervishes. Contrary to all my previous learning and experience, I found if you keep one foot in the same place and your eyes on a level plane, it’s possible to spin around indefinitely. We beginners did it with one foot planted and the other pushing around in a circle, as if we were riding a scooter on a dime. We held one arm straight and looked out over the fingertips. I felt no dizziness at all. The world, trees, buildings, clouds and sky, just rolled around over and over again like the walls of a whirlpool. The picture was not blurred at all, just moved faster and faster, round and round.

This experience was so deep and inexplicable that I never tried it again after we left the ashram, and to this day don’t know if I could repeat it. It seemed like a magical window, opening on an area of truth that could not be set down in words...  (from "A Beginner's Life.")