By John Cowan
A decade or more ago I sent a poem to our Quaker Journal. It was soundly rejected. Here is the poem:
The Quaker Poet
Is there such a thing
As a Quaker Poet?
Can Quaker Poets
Scream?
If not,
Should they not
Weep?
Has the gray
Of the cloth
Leached into
The soul?
Leaving no pigment
Named rage or grief,
Despair or triumph
To splash its shaggy glory
Over the pallid page?
Can Quaker Poets
Weep?
If not,
Should they not
Scream?
Is there such a thing As a Quaker poet?
I have just read The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms and find it an indication that I am correct about Quaker poets. However, while I have gleaned a few understandable truths from its pages, I must admit that Solms leaves me in his dust much too often for me to claim the level of understanding required for a serious review.
I have seized on one fact, a central fact, that supports my poem’s accuracy, and that is that there is a hidden spring, and it is my thought that most Quaker poets are missing it. At least the ones who write for our journal.
Solms is a leading brain scientist. The main purpose of his book, The Hidden Spring, is to lay the intellectual groundwork for creating a conscious machine. A very limited machine that would be preoccupied with providing for its own well-being, somewhat like humans but limited to that task, and not allowed to wreak her own will on her surroundings. Solms says, once she is plugged in and shows her consciousness capacities, she must be unplugged quickly, before she escapes her boundaries. If conscious, she is at least an animal, and given her intellect probably more than human. Therefore, she deserves Caring as well.
I defer to the better educated on that score and focus on what should be of great interest to chronic meditators, the existence of the hidden spring.
According to Solms we are driven by seven meta-emotions. They are: 1) Lust, 2) Seeking, 3) Rage, 4) Fear,
5) Panic/Grief, 6) Caring, 7) Play.
These emotions are routed from the body to a gray box entangled in the brain stem located in the back of the skull and then are forwarded to the cortex, that is the big calculator in my head, for final sorting prior to action.
Like any other calculator the big one in my head is slave to the data. It decides what the data tells it to decide. Now that is no small matter. Without the calculator’s work we would be paralyzed from choosing from the seven-fold turmoil a priority, or a mix of priorities, leading to action. But after all, the cortex is only sorting the meta-emotions to describe and pursue the required outcomes. It is the meta-emotions themselves that arouse the sense of feeling, the sense of priority, the strength of the action. They arouse the subject from silent inaction. “Lust” being the most obvious example of this process with its obvious physical results.
For many meditators meditating is becoming conscious of the cortex. As well, the religion centered meditator is expected and expects to speak moderately, kindly, without offending tender ears. Not for her or him the crash and thunder of emotions. So I ask, is there such a thing as a Quaker poet? If a poet’s poetry is never aroused by the meta-emotions but only the cortex’s mumblings is the poet a poet?
Think of the shake up to the meditation world if some of the time we oriented our efforts to awareness of the pressure of the meta-emotions. Solms refers to the meta-emotions as “arousers.” They are the initiators of the power that results in action. They arouse us from our passivity. But they are not on the side of the gray box easily available to our consciousness.
Here is an approach I am trying: e.g. There is something I am very angry about. In my meditation time I am daydreaming about some dangerous ways to remedy the situation. But now I experiment. The seven meta-emotions are on the other side of the gray box, unseen. But I have good guess, that the pressure I feel is Rage, pulsing at the exploding mark. But why am I not doing something? Because Fear of the consequences to me of intemperate action is blocking me. The advice in most religions is to suppress either the Rage or the Fear or both.
Instead I am going to allow both to blossom to fullness. Now the job shifts to the cortex. How to indulge my Rage with a Fear respecting response? And at this point I feel relief. I am sill angry but a more moderate plan is cooking. I am still frightened but instead of quaking I am building in some defenses. My heart is beating faster but I am aroused, not a lump. I have respected both my anger and my fear. Standard Quaker Advice, cf. Penington “Sink Down.” To where?
Do you say, “But I am trying to listen to God? Not fiddle with my nervous system.” Could this not be God where God speaks? This type of religious meditator, God’s servants who consistently flow through a Rage/Fear/Care cycle have been on the scene from forever. We call them “Prophets.” You could be one. The seeds are in the little gray box.
The Hidden Spring, A Journey to the Source of Consciousness by Mark Solms