Time for another book review! Sailing Home by Norman Fischer is an excellent read. Norman dives into the ancient Greek epic the Odyssey and finds that it offers a map for how to navigate the territory as we find our way back ‘home’.
The Odyssey if by chance you don’t know about it is a famous Greek epic from a long time ago. In it, our hero warrior Odysseus sets sail for Ithaca, his home, after a successful campaign against Troy. He and his men get blown off-course and he spends a good 7 years trying to find his way back.
Along the way Odysseus and his men encounter all kinds of trials and tribulations and distractions too, some accidental, some of their own making. All through Odysseus keeps his goal in mind and eventually does make it back to be reunited with his sweet Penelope.
The central thesis in Norman’s writing is that we all have in us this strong desire to ‘come home’, just like Odysseus. There is great truth in that statement. It does seem that the first half of our life is spent leaving home, the second in finding our way back.
What is this home that we are trying to come back to? Norman does not fully clarify and I will come back to this later. It is the journey that constitutes the bulk of the Odyssey. Norman provides his own unique interpretation of what each trial that Odysseus and his men go through mean for us. Odysseus uses many clever ruses to get out of his troubles. Norman has an interpretation for these too.
For Odysseus is quite the cunning fellow and Norman is sympathetic. Or at least he is not antagonistic to this cunning. We all need cunning to get through life says Norman and this is where this book is fresh air amidst the sea of dull pious homilies you will often find in spiritual centers, especially here in new age California.
Some such pious homilies that I have encountered are:
Isn’t being good what we truly want over and above everything else? Not really and Norman thinks so as well. Being good is an empty exhortation and I suspect behind it lies a great fear. More on this in a bit.
We don’t really want nice things do we? It is all in the end just empty stuff isn’t it? Nope. While the call to be mindful of our consumption is well made most of us enjoy nice things, nice things help brighten out lives.
Our passions don’t matter that much do they? Again not true.
Sex really doesn’t matter does it? Oh please, sure when you are 80. But even then, if you haven’t lived, as Osho suggested, you may be 80 but your mind will be dreaming of sex.
Capitalism/the modern world is the source of all our problems, isn’t it? This is often said while on retreat at a gorgeous center with ample food, all the modern conveniences, with retreat participants who have traveling many miles in nice cars to get there. You get the idea.
Our passions are real and we have to answer to them, no matter how unruly, so says Norman. Our passions will take us into turbulent seas. That is the nature of desire.
I remember attending a OneTaste(yes the infamous OneTaste) workshop on this subject of our desires. The first thing the facilitator made sure people appreciated was that this was not a workshop about being good or feeling peaceful. Living your desire was nothing like that. Instead it was more like being in a washing machine. If you actually lived your desire without substitution, your life could very likely get turned upside down many times. And that would in the end, be the correct thing.
I sense that the pious exhortation to be good often comes out of a fear of this – fear of actual being in desire, of turning your life upside down, of being on fire.
So Odysseus has to leave home and go on his journey of conquest and have his life tuned upside down. We all have to go out there and make a career and fight for our space in this world and enjoy its pleasures. Our life energy will make us do so. If we suppress it we will suffer terribly.
Refreshingly, Norman also points this out. As a teacher at the San Francisco Zen Center a number of times he has had to ask students to leave because he could tell they were just ‘marking time’. Just living in the cozy habitual comfort of the retreat center instead of moving forward with the next steps of their life.
Having spent a good amount of time in Californian new age retreat centers I can attest to this danger. God knows I’ve tasted it myself. After a while you get accustomed to the place and it’s annoyances. It is a cozy nest, there is some community, food and ways to pass the time. Why not just stay there? The world outside the walls of the retreat center is daunting in comparison. Why not just stay in well worn habits. I know this temptation all too well.
You can see it in the eyes of a person. The eyes are usually the first dead giveaway to a person’s mental state. When someone is marking time, their eyes go dead. That’s really what marking time is – a death.
And then success matters, to suggest it doesn’t is folly. So of what value is spiritual practice? It is, Norman suggests, a set of tools to help us navigate the waters and not avoid them. So that we don’t get destroyed by the sirens, but can hear their song and then keep going towards home.
What’s the big deal about coming home anyway? Here Norman points out that as much we have this hunger to come home, we do have a bit of ambivalence about it too. A couple of times Odysseus come close to home but falls asleep at the last minute, and this lack of alertness sees him get thrown off course once again. Afterwords Odysseus laments bitterly his mistake and almost gives into despair.
Norman interprets this falling asleep as not being mindful, living out of unconscious habit energy. However Freud said that all mistakes are hidden desires and Norman acknowledges this too. This falling asleep can also be act of self-sabotage because we are conflicted about coming home. After all won’t coming home mean giving up our adventures? Settling down, giving up choices?
Perhaps; and so this is a good time to go deeper, what is this home we want to come back to anyway? Is it the actual place we were born? Our source family or our source culture? A setting for our life that we find ‘ideal’ (the ideal money, career relationships etc). A deep mystical feeling of oneness? Something else?
Certainly all of these have a place in our lives. While Norman does not fully clarify what home is he seems to be suggesting it is a quality of presence, a rooted, at-ease presence with all that is. That’s got to be a big part of it and Integration is another way of describing it. In the integral model this means moving into the second tier levels(or being moved into by our natural growth.)
A fellow Zen practitioner once suggested that coming home is about putting things into boxes where they belong. This is another good metaphor. We have many things that need to be put properly into the appropriate boxes.
Our source family is a big one. In today’s open world, unlike Odysseus the actual physical home we grew up in may not even be there anymore and our source family may well have moved far away. However our source roots are burnt into our psyche and we can never remove them completely.
Osho had a good story about this. An Indian friend of his emigrated to Germany. There he learned the language, married a German woman, raised a family and integrated himself into the German life. India got more and more distant for him. For all intents and purposes he had become German. He forgot his mother tongue Marathi, the language he grew up speaking. Yet, on his death bed he remembered it and burst out speaking in Marathi.
I’ve heard this from others too, a homing instinct that brings them back to the town they grew up in, if not the actual home. A longing to speak again the language they grew up speaking. A desire to not be a foreigner.
So, while we don’t want to be crawling back into our mother’s wombs as it were, we must make peace with our source family and integrate it back in. This Norman reminds us, usually requires a great deal of forgiveness.
Volumes of books have been written on this topic. In his delightful little book on this subject, Osho suggests that our parental leave taking should be done with a deep gratitude. Thanking them for all they have given as we leave their conditioning behind and step into our own lives.
Oh would we be so mature! In Iron John Robert Bly suggests that this is not possible, at least to begin. Such presence might come later in life. For a young man to step out of his parents shadow, he has to steal the key to his inner authentic life from under his mother’s pillow exactly where Freud said it would be! (And perhaps the young woman has to steal the key from her father’s briefcase!)
In a funny anecdote, Bly describes how when he presented this idea to a group of new age men they protested. Why does the key have to be stolen? Can’t we just go ask Mom for it?
Ha, good luck with that! Which mother would give away the key? No, it takes some level of cunning to get going on our journey, like the cunning that Odysseus has.
A good career matters too and volumes of books have also been written about finding your career, maximizing it and so on. Though even here too we have to make peace with the mistakes we have made, the bad choices we have made, the limitations of our skills, sometimes the bad luck we encountered and much more.
All the other important aspects of our lives, relationships, community, service, wealth, they all need tending to. We can’t skip steps and go straight to enlightenment!
So yes, coming home does imply accepting limitations. And no, these limitations are not necessarily due to the failings of society, the Patriarchy, the Man something something something blah blah blah, which if removed would finally see you reach the great heights you were always destined for. This blame game is yet another aspect of new age Californian life btw.
Limitations are built into the nature of things. Every choice we make requires the forgoing of roads not taken. Impermanence is the only permanent reality, that is of course the essential Buddhist teaching.
Still, is it really that bad to have limitations? Making choices and accepting the ‘rootedness’ that the choice gives us may have limitations but also has redeeming qualities. We get the depth that comes with making definitive choices, for example the definitive choice of a partner. How will we ever get to know someone well and go deep if we only serially date, looking for that perfect euphoria? How will we ever have someone we have a long history with, whom we have shared significant moments of our life with?
Same goes for everything else. Indeed, Norman warns of the dangers of professional seeking, of being addicted to the act of seeking, so not wanting to actually find anything. These are the ‘yes, but’ people – ‘yes’ it is good, ‘but’ maybe there are some problems so I’ll just remain in a holding pattern for now.
Many enabling fantasies of our romantic new age allow for this as Norman points out. Noble thoughts like what do I really want to do, what do I truly love, as if there is any meaningful definition of ‘really’ and ‘true’ here. Still, human nature is vast and various and there indeed may be some people whose home is the high seas. Constantine Cavafy’s famous poem about Ithaca (Odysseus’ home) comes to mind. Don’t be in such a rush to find it says Constantine. You might be disappointed. There is that ambiguity about coming home again. As it is evident in this meandering review too! I’m not in such a rush to get home either!
So where does that leave us? Hey we all have to take our own odyssey, books/lectures can only reveal so much. Hopefully experience will teach us well enough and we will come to a good place that we can call home, wherever that is. Enjoy the journey too! And check out this book, especially if you are a new age Californian.