If you believe that everything should be “out in the open,” you’ll probably admit to a certain impatience with concealment and secrecy. We’ve heard the old saw: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” and up to a point we believe it. Particularly in the U.S., we equate openness with being “aboveboard” and honest. “Don’t beat around the bush.” “Say what you mean.” “Be upfront about it.” We admire “straight talk.”
The Freedom of Information Act helped make at least some government activities more transparent, and we often welcome “full disclosure” in a variety of situations. We still think of ours as an “Open Society,” and the current practice of large and anonymous campaign contributions from corporate sponsors has some American citizens up in arms. We’re wary of the con, and we tend to suspect anyone who doesn’t “tell it like it is.” We’ve got talk shows where people “spill it all,” and public figures starting at least with Jimmy Carter who began a confessional politics by admitting he had “lust in his heart.” But not all secrets are sinister. They do not automatically concern information anyone else needs to know. Each of us has some things that are innocently private. And in fact, well beyond this concession, secrecy can serve remarkable purposes that conspiracy theorists and even regular citizens rarely acknowledge.
Some secrets, of course, appear to be built into the stuff of the Cosmos. Robert Frost captures this in a brief two-line poem, “The Secret Sits”:
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
We circle the thing we’re after, all the while convinced it’s there, that something will answer to our seeking, but somehow we still persist in missing it. In spite of a couple of hundred years of scientific exploration, and prior to that, millennia of religious and spiritual investigation, existence and meaning and purpose often remain mysterious and not easily accessible. What matters most to us springs from sources and energies we can’t simply subject to laboratory scrutiny and then write up in learned journals and magazines. As some of the Wise have put it, “the eye sees, but cannot see itself” (at least not without a mirror). Something about the nature of consciousness blocks us from easily comprehending it.
In our search, we reduce matter to atoms (literally, “unsplittables”) and think we’ve arrived at the true building blocks of the universe, only to learn that atoms can indeed split, and that they’re composed of subatomic particles. Quantum physics further reveals that these particles are probabilities and exist only with the help of an observer. Space-time itself is generated by consciousness. We live in a “nesting doll” universe, worlds inside other worlds, an onion-like cosmos of endless layers. True secrets, it appears, can’t be told. They’re simply not part of the world of words. As the Tao Te Ching wryly has it, “The Way that can be talked about isn’t the real Way.” If that doesn’t have you pulling your hair out, it can at least cast you down into a terminal funk. Where can a person get a clear answer?
Serious seekers in every generation come to experiment with some form of solitude, and if they persist, they may discover some very good reasons that underlie the practice of removing themselves even briefly from consensus reality and the web of communication we’re all born into. This web helps us live with each other by building enough common ground that we can understand each other and cooperate in achieving common goals. But it also builds our entire world of consciousness in ways we may not always want to assent to. However, solitude by itself isn’t reasonable for most people as a lifestyle. As my mother liked to remind me, “You have to live in the real world.”
But this “real world” runs surpassingly deep and wide in its influence. Author, blogger and Druid J. M. Greer notes,
The small talk that fills up time at social gatherings is an obvious example. There might seem to be little point in chatting about the weather, say, or the less controversial aspects of politics, business, and daily life, but this sort of talk communicates something crucial. It says, in essence, “I live in the same world you do,” and the world in question is one defined by a particular map of reality, a particular way of looking at the universe of human experience.*
We need maps – there’s a reason we developed them. But they limit as much as they guide. We could even say that this is their genius and power – they guide by limiting, by reducing the “blooming buzzing confusion” of life to something more manageable. Advertizing does this by simplifying our desire for meaning and connection and significance into a desire for an object that will grant us these things. Trade one symbol – money or credit cards, paper or plastic – for another symbol, a status symbol, an object sold to us with a money-back promise to grant wishes like a genie’s lamp or the cintamani, the “wish-fulfilling” gem of the East. (If that’s not magic, and a questionable kind at best, I don’t know what is. How much more wonderful it would be – how much closer it would come to “true magic” — if it actually succeeded in quenching that original desire, which is merely sidetracked for a time, and will re-emerge, only to be distracted again, by another “new and improved”** model, spouse, diet, house, product or lifestyle. We need a remarkably small minimum of things to flourish and be happy. In a territory far beyond the blessed realm of that minimum, the market survives, yes, while the heart slowly dies.***)
Greer continues,
We thus live in an extraordinarily complex web of communication, one that expresses and reinforces specific ways of thinking about the world. This is not necessarily a problem, but it can easily become one whenever the presence and effects of the web are unnoticed. To absorb the web’s promptings without noticing them, after all, is also to absorb the web’s implied world-view without being aware of the process – and what we do not notice we usually cannot counteract.
The very common habit of passivity toward our own inner lives, a habit that is responsible for a very large portion of human misery, shows itself clearly here. It’s one thing to accept a map of the world as a useful convenience, one that can be replaced when it’s no longer useful, and quite another to accept it unthinkingly as the only map there is—or worse, to mistake the map for the world itself.*
A secret breaks the web. It remains something apart, the fragment that doesn’t fit. It’s the puzzle piece left over that doesn’t match the gap in the nearly-finished picture staring up at you, that one annoying bolt or washer or other component remaining after you’ve put together the “easy to assemble” appliance or device. It’s the hangnail, the sore thumb, the mosquito bite of awareness that something’s off-kilter, out of whack, out of step, no longer in synch. We have words for these things — we can name them, at least — because they happen to us frequently enough to break into the web. And we struggle to fix them as soon as we can, or barring that, ignore them as much as possible, that uncomfortable fact, that inconvenient discovery. As Churchill quipped, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.”
I’ll continue this topic in Part Two.
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*Greer, John Michael. Inside a Magical Lodge, pp. 114-115. I reread this book about once a year, and its lucid style makes this pleasurable apart from its subject matter. In addition to being a “guided tour” of the workings of lodge dynamics (fraternal, magical and social) and group magical practice (with an example magical lodge that Greer examines in considerable detail), the book is a clear, demystifying meditation on group consciousness, secrecy, and the magical egregore or “group mind” at work in all human organizations, institutions and collectives, including families, churches, political parties, companies, clubs, sports teams — the scope is immense.
**As comedian Chris Rock says, “Which is it, new or improved?!”
***As a teacher at an expensive private school for students whose parents expect them to gain admission to the top colleges and universities in the country, I here acknowledge that I myself participate in another kind of wish-fulfilling enterprise marketed to a considerable degree to that now widely suspect 1%. In defense of the school, however, if not of myself, every year scholarship students are admitted solely on merit. They succeed out of all proportion to their numbers in earning top class rankings and coveted admission letters to the best schools.
A Druid Way 