"If you can be faithless /and therefore trustworthy"

It reminded me of Auden's poem
"Lay your sleeping head my love,
Human on my faithless arm."

AM wrote: "Oriah Mountain Dreamer explain[ed that this phrase means] that she trusts most someone who is prepared to let her down in order not to betray their own deepest truth, for she knows that she can then always trust them to be straight and authentic even if they will not do what she wants."
I’m sure this interp~ is the correct one, but I think it's also the case that a true (feeling) understanding of any particular quality only comes when we can clearly comprehend its polar opposite. We cannot truly appreciate love until we u/s the depths of not-love - that’s where kissing frogs comes in.
Similarly, in resolving our issues with the not-I we see the I (the ego) in 3D, and in truly encountering the I we see the not-I. An experience to which some wish to attach the god-language. Vedantic thought calls these the brahma (universal) and the atma (nucleus).

I’ve mentioned last year on this forum that I’m rereading the Bible in its entirety. It's so far taken about 14 months to reach the book of Judith - but it has raised a number of issues for me around language and experience.

When I had read & reflected on the Jews' experience of manifesting a cosmic energy-presence throu the agency of Moses I began to have an intuitive sense of the scope of the word shekinah (glory). I wrote about this but have not produced it anywhere because I decided to leave it until I had an overview of the experiential arc of the Torah /Haftorah.
I couldn’t get a handle on the idea of 'the fear of the Lord' however. This week I heard a doc about the rebuilding of Arsenal football club while driving, and a veteran player spoke lovingly of the place in the players' tunnel where he threw up 'every single match' [sic!] (- I’ve always wanted to write that.) Then I thought of Sarah Bernhardt's retort to an ingenue who said she never had stage fright: 'maybe not, but if you were any good you would have."
And this made me think of the idea of this fear arising from a primal encounter with the 'not' aspect of our dreams/projections. We *want* a certain thing so much that when we are actually confronting it it produces a tremendous void in us, and that void is a crucible in which our experience is fused into a transcendental reality. It is as-it-were an orgasm of the soul so aweful that we both desire & fear it as we desire & fear the first sexual encounter with someone with whom we are beginning to believe ourselves in love. (Could we bear it if it went wrong? Yet wrong could only be that it manifested not-love instead of love.)

So perhaps the couplet also means: 'If you can see the tremendous cost of both faithlessness /and trustworthiness ...' then you understand the power given to humans?
How does this play into 'the fear of the Lord'? We can perhaps comprehend this as an overwhelming encounter with a raw power in ourselves which we both desire and dread - a pure, holy self of unlimited potential, (perhaps) present in our dreams & (perhaps) absent in our waking life. Perhaps. Then we would have to conceive this as psychic feedback magnified to the point of overload throu the psychic amplification of a collective tribal experience which it's almost impossible for our post-scientific age to imagine. (Perhaps football crowds are the last bastardised trace of this kind of psychic amplification - the ball holding all consciousness in its trajectory? The player's fear that he would be worthy - in the crucible of the tunnel all outcomes are possible.)

And then perhaps there is the meaning: 'Only those who understand lying can tell the truth' ... because they have made a voluntary choice to tell it?
I used to know someone who Asst Deputy DG of the BBC under Alistair Milne. (Which dates me!) From him I first understood about how spin-doctoring worked. There is the truth about an incident - but this may not be as powerful, or indeed explicable, as the public expectation /projection of what the truth is LIKELY to be. The art of news management lies in understanding and manipulating the nuances between the principal perspectives that can be anticipated.
Indeed, as we know, the truth of spiritual reality/ies does not excite the mass of the population because it does not conform to their projections of material comfort. The art of the very greatest truth-teller is to manipulate that duality so as to make profound truth accessible to those whose capacities prejudice them towards shallow truths.
As I have watched the sad decade unraveling the promised Blairite dawn I have often thought of James Agee's eloquent remark: 'It is probably never really wise, or even necessary, or anything better than harmful, to educate a human being toward a good end by telling him lies.'

Being aware of choice, and choosing to serve the (inner) light - is surely the highest calling of humanity?

> reposted from MusicPsyche@yahoogroups.com