Benji

• The question of goodness permeates Murdoch’s entire body of work, but she plumbs this particular aspect of it — its bearing on truth and morality, lensed through Plato — in greater depth in an essay titled On “God” and “Good,” also included in Existentialists and Mystics.

• With an eye to the relationship between the good and “the real which is the proper object of love, and of knowledge which is freedom,” she considers what it takes for us to purify our attention in order to take in reality on its own terms, unalloyed with our attachments and ideas.

• What it takes, she suggests, is “something analogous to prayer, though it is something difficult to describe, and which the higher subtleties of the self can often falsify” — not some “quasi-religious meditative technique,” but “something which belongs to the moral life of the ordinary person.”

• Half a century after the existentialist and mystic Simone Weil liberated this raw mindfulness from the strict captivity of religion with her lovely observation that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” for it “presupposes faith and love.”

• Our collective psyche is defined by a sense of separation that is wreaking havoc with our health and environment. Tarnas makes the compelling argument that our split into alienated masculine consciousness was a deliberate prodigal departure. We became separate so that we could learn individual power and conscious agency. We can now reunite with the feminine from a position of greater strength. But this reunion requires an ego death for the masculine to surrender control. We’re dropping to one knee in a deliberate proposal of alchemical marriage. Because the present power of our masculine energy is unlike anything we’re aware of in our prior history, the unfolding reunion with the divine feminine will produce something more complex. At a societal level, this isn’t a backwards step towards magical thinking, but a new integration of the powerful intellect into a broader field of intelligence.

• A recent piece beautifully articulated the central role of “feminine” containers in this transitional moment:

• I must confess something that feels almost embarrassing after years of intensive training, studying countless modalities, living in a monastery, and devoting an unreasonable amount of time to understanding human transformation: it really is this simple. The essential movement of healing - creating safety for what's been fragmented to emerge, and meeting it with the qualities of secure attachment - is the essence of every approach to transformation I've encountered.

• For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its being. The driving impulse of the West's masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally, to recover its connection with the whole, to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life: to differentiate itself from but then rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul. And that reunion can now occur on a new and profoundly different level from that of the primordial unconscious unity, for the long evolution of human consciousness has prepared it to be capable at last of embracing the ground and matrix of its own being freely and consciously. The telos, the inner direction and goal, of the Western mind has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself freely and consciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation.

• Richard Tarnas