Gemini (1): 'I Contain Multitudes'
GEMINI
.jpg) |
| Gemini, by Dan Hodgkin |
They
came to the other side of the lake into the land of the Gerasenes, and no
sooner was he out of the boat than a man with an unclean spirit approached him.
This man was living among the tombs in the graveyard and he was so out of
control that no one could subdue him or even chain him. In the past he’d been
bound hand and foot, but he’d pulled the chains apart and smashed the shackles.
Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was crying out and
bruising himself with stones. When he
saw Jesus in the distance he ran and fell on his knees, paying him homage and
shouting at the top of his voice, ‘What’s your business with me, Jesus, son of
God Most High? I beg you in God’s name don’t torment me!’ He said this because
Jesus was ordering the unclean spirit to come out of him. Jesus asked, ‘What is
your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; there’s a whole gang of us.’ He
kept begging Jesus not to send them all out of that region.
There was
a great herd of pigs feeding on the hillside, and the demons shouted out, ‘Send
us into the pigs! We want to go into them!’ Jesus gave them permission, and the
unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs, and the herd of about two thousand dashed headlong down the
steep slope into the sea where they drowned. The herdsmen ran off and told the
story so that people came from town and country to see what had happened. They
came to Jesus and they looked at the man who’d been possessed by the legion of
demons, and when they saw that he was now dressed and sane they were terrified.
Those who had witnessed it related what had happened to the possessed man and
to the pigs, and they began to implore Jesus to leave their neighbourhood. When
he got into the boat, the man who’d been possessed begged that he might go
along with him, but Jesus wouldn’t allow it, and said to him, ‘Go home to your
family and tell them what the Lord has done for you and how he’s taken pity on
you.’ But the man went away and began to announce in the Decapolis
what Jesus had done for him, and everyone was amazed.
The teacher asked the class: ‘If all the good people
in the world were blue and all the bad people
were yellow, what colour would you be?’
‘I’d be green,’ said Mary.
(This
sermon was delivered in late May 2007)
Last
week the Irish tabloids went to town on the case of a Catholic priest who had
been tricked into revealing details of his homosexuality to a journalist.
Pictures of the priest in his underpants appeared in the press midweek, and the
poor man has had to take temporary leave of absence, but it is doubtful that he
will ever be able to return to the parish that he has served so well for so
many years. ‘I’m so ashamed says gay priest’, runs the headline in the Irish Daily Mail, and inside there is
the regulation stuff about homosexuals in the clergy, and the Catholic Church’s
celibacy laws, plus conflicting views about whether a man who has broken his
vows is fit to minister. All perfectly predictable, of course, but the debate
was given an added dimension because this man (whom I refuse to name) had been
an exemplary pastor, much loved by his people, who, in a high profile incident
four years ago, had been a source of comfort and solace to a young family who
lost a child in tragic circumstances.
The Irish Daily Mail tried to be fair – in so far as devoting the front
page and two inside pages to a case like this in which no laws have been broken
can ever be considered fair – by printing an article by Roslyn Dee with the
headline ‘This man needs sympathy not sanctimony’ to balance the ‘I’m sorry but
his actions are sinful’ rant by Hermann Kelly. But the intention of this kind
of journalism is always to leave us shaking our heads as we pose the question,
‘Can a man with unusual sexual tastes be a caring and effective counsellor and
friend? Can a sinner be a good priest?’ ‘Is he this, or is he that?’ The answer
is, he’s both, and a good deal besides. He’s a complicated, flawed human being,
neither blue nor yellow, but green, just like you and me, just like the Sun
journalist who ‘exposed’ him and who now can, presumably, sleep comfortably in
his bed, secure in the knowledge that he has protected the community from yet
another sex fiend, while at the same time banking a sizeable cheque from his
editor.
How we long to sum someone up in a sentence or two, or
even a word or two. But the fact is that we can’t really give a comprehensive
definition of anybody. All of us, celebrity and nonentity alike, are a complex
mixture of contradictory features. Mother Theresa, champion of the poor, supped
with oppressive dictators; Gandhi, dedicated to celibacy, slept with young
women ‘to test his resolve’; Dickens, whose works relentlessly attack cruelty
and injustice, treated his first wife abominably; Hitler, the 20th
century’s most reviled man, was a vegetarian and would weep at the music of
Wagner; Martin Luther King, a contemporary saint and martyr, found it difficult
to keep his trousers buttoned, as did the influential theologian Paul Tillich.
When I spoke on this topic before – at the beginning of 2004 – the previous
day’s paper, rather coincidentally, furnished two more examples: an article
about Ronnie Biggs, the great train robber, written by his son, entitled, ‘My
Beloved Father, the Train Robber’, and a review of a biography of Carl Jung,
which appeared under the headline, ‘A Man in Two Minds’, told us that he was
‘never quite sure which of the two versions of himself he was most impressed
by, the inspired, tormented eccentric, or the respectable, assured, bourgeois
professional’. Jung, undoubtedly one of the most remarkable spiritual writers
of modern times, was called by Freud ‘a snob and a mystic’ and Freud was right
on both counts. Jung’s lifelong quest for God did not eliminate his equally
lifelong obsession with glamorous cars.
Tolstoy, whose novels delineate human motivation with
unparalleled sensitivity, was, we are told, quite indifferent to his wife and
family, and Tolstoy himself expresses this paradoxical quality of the human
being in his last novel, Resurrection:
One of the most widespread superstitions is that every
person has his or her own special definite qualities: that he or she is kind,
cruel, wise, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that.
We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than
stupid, more often energetic than apathetic, or the reverse, but it would not
be true to say of one man that he is kind and wise, and another that he is bad
and stupid. And yet we always classify
people in this way. And this is false........Every person bears within him or
herself the germs of every human quality, but sometimes one quality manifests
itself, sometimes another, and the person often becomes unlike him or herself,
while still remaining the same person. (page 211)
To
be human is to be complex and inconsistent, and one would expect that the
spiritual writers of the past should be alert to such a conspicuous – and
troublesome - feature of our nature. And so they are. Mark’s Gospel deals with
it in the third section, what I have called the Gemini section, which would
have been read and discussed at this time of the year, when the sun has entered
the sign of Gemini. Gemini is the Twins, the first of those signs which modern
astrologers call ‘Mutable’ – changeable – but which the ancient Greek writers
called ‘two-bodied’. These signs – Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces – come
in between the four seasons of the year and so each of them bears the qualities
of two states of weather. Gemini comes between spring and summer, and has
characteristics of both. Its symbol is the twin poles, joined at top and
bottom, expressing the duality of the season and, according to the old theory,
the duality inherent in all of us, but especially in those who are born at this
time of the year.
The two stars of the constellation Gemini are Castor
and Pollux which, in mythology were said to be the protectors of sailors. Homer
wrote a poem to the ‘great twin brethren’, who, he said, would swiftly come to
the aid of sailors in distress, lulling the storm and enabling the mariners to
‘plough the quiet sea in safe delight’. Now we can understand why Mark introduces
this third section of his Gospel with the story of the Calming of the Storm.
But this is not the story I want to concentrate on today (I’ll be dealing with
it next week). Today I’m more interested in the episode which follows it, the
story of the man possessed by 2000 demons, since this deals with the idea of
human inconsistency in a particularly vivid way.
This man,
often referred to as the Gerasene Demoniac, had been living among the tombs,
and no one could bind him or restrain him. ‘What is your name?’ asks Jesus. The
man’s reply is strange: ‘My name is Legion, for we are many,’ he says. Jesus
casts out the demons, sending them into two thousand pigs which go hurtling
down the steep bank and drown in the lake.
This
incident with the pigs always used to trouble me, especially in former times
when I believed that the Gospels were history of a sort; the story would
probably vex animal rights activists even now. But I no longer waste my
energies asking mundane, practical questions of spiritual stories. The story
has no historical basis, but it does have a psychological one: this man with
the demons is you and I. Each of us has a number of warring elements within our
psyche, and the pig, which, according to the Book of Leviticus (11:17) is
unclean to Jews because it has a split hoof, completely divided,
symbolises this fragmentation; the division of the pig’s foot mirrors the
multiple divisions in the human mind.
With the benefits of modern psychiatric knowledge,
we cannot fail to see in the man with the two thousand demons an example of
that most Geminian of conditions, schizophrenia, or split‑personality. In fact,
the term ‘multiple‑personality’ would be a better description. This is an
actual mental disorder, but we do not need to restrict the use of the term to
describe those in whom the symptoms manifest so dramatically. We are all ‘split‑personalities’,
since, as Aldous Huxley tells us, the complex human personality is made up of
‘a quite astonishingly improbable combination of traits’. He goes on:
Thus a man can be at once the craftiest of
politicians and the dupe of his own verbiage, can have a passion, for brandy
and money, and an equal passion for the poetry of George Meredith and under-age
girls and his mother, for horse-racing and detective stories and the good of
his country – the whole accompanied by a sneaking fear of hell-fire, a hatred
of Spinoza and an unblemished record for Sunday church-going. (The Perennial Philosophy, page 48)
 |
| Robert Maxwell: 'at least 20 different people at once.' |
The character and career of British
publisher Robert Maxwell (born 10th June, 1923) provide a spectacular example
of this. Following his death in November 1991, The Guardian newspaper
printed an assessment of the man by British journalist Geoffrey Goodman.
Goodman asked how it had been possible for Maxwell to fool so many people for
so long. He continues:
My own theory from
observations of the man at close quarters during the year and a half I worked
for him at the Daily Mirror is that he was at all times at least 20
different people at once. It was usually impossible to know which one I was
dealing with at any one moment ‑ and I later came to the conclusion that he
wasn't sure either. The 20 different personalities were in constant struggle
with each other..... (6th December, 1991)
The practitioners of Assagioli's system of
personality integration, Psychosynthesis, often refer to the crowd‑like nature
of the human psyche. And Geminian Salman Rushdie (born 19th June,
1947), writes:
O, the dissociations of which the human mind is
capable, marvelled Saladin gloomily. O, the conflicting selves jostling and
joggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused
on anything for long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping
devices. If we turned these instruments on ourselves we’d discover more
channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of. (The Satanic Verses, page 519)
Peter
Ouspensky, who was a disciple of the Russian mystic Gurdieff, likens the
ordinary human being – you and me – to a house full of servants without a master
or a steward to look after them. ‘So,
the servants do what they like; none of them does his own work. The house is in
a state of complete chaos, because all the servants try to do someone else’s
work which they are not competent to do. The cook works in the stables, the
coachman in the kitchen, and so on. The only possibility for things to improve
is if a certain number of servants decide to elect one of themselves as a
deputy steward and in this way make him control the other servants. He can do
only one thing: he puts each servant where he belongs and so they begin to do
their right work.’ This, says Ouspensky, is the beginning of the creation of a
‘controlling I’; until that time we are a great many disconnected I’s, divided
into certain groups, some of which don’t even know each other.
Walt Whitman (born May 29th) puts it more
succinctly than all of them:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
(Leaves of Grass)
 |
| Walt Whitman: 'I contain multitudes' |
We
can all say, ‘My name is Legion’ with the demon-possessed man, or ‘I am large,
I contain multitudes’ with Walt Whitman. ‘When a man lacks discrimination, his
will wanders in all directions, after innumerable aims,’ says the Hindu classic
The Bhagavad Gita. But the
spiritual writers do not stop at mere observation; the object of all spiritual
practice, whatever the tradition, is the transformation of Legion into Union , the reduction of the many to the one, the
fashioning of singularity and simplicity from duality and complexity. This
difficult movement towards simplicity, and not the pleasant cultivation of
‘nice feelings’ is what, in large part, any genuine spiritual practice attempts
to effect. Aldous Huxley maintains that the saint is characterised by
simplicity and singularity of purpose, qualities which are completely at odds
with the lifestyle and appetites of sophisticated and mentally active people
like us, who constantly seek novelty, diversity, and distraction. The actions of the saints, says Huxley, ‘are
as monotonously uniform as their thoughts; for in all circumstances they behave
selflessly, patiently, and with indefatigable charity’. Their biographies, he
goes on, are of no interest to us because ‘Legion prefers to read about
Legion’; complexity and contradiction fascinate us; simplicity leaves us
unmoved
Becoming
‘simple’, or becoming saintly, requires effort, and it may well be that, for
most of us, it is an unappealing prospect. I seem to be quite content in my
diversity, so I cannot recommend that you take inordinate steps to reduce your
own. I’m not ready to cast out my
demons, so maybe I’m not ready for sainthood yet! (It is important to point out, I think, that
we need to control our diverse
elements, not destroy them.) But
Ouspensky, who devised a complicated system specially designed to bring about a
psychic unity, tells us that the first stage on the way to transformation is
the realisation of one’s own fragmentation, and the acceptance of
it as a reality, and this can only come with constant self-observation. I am
certainly prepared to do this. Learn to become aware of your own inconsistency,
your own automatic reactions to circumstances, because each time we make
ourselves aware of these things, says Ouspensky, their hold upon us is
weakened. We may not wish to go further than observation, but this is probably
enough to make a significant difference to our self-understanding, and it will
certainly help to check our tendency to make simplistic, partial, unkind, and
hypocritical judgements about the behaviour of others.
My book The Gospel and the Zodiac: The Secret Truth about Jesus is available for a mere £6.89 from
.jpg){kind=link}
Comments
Post a Comment