Sam Keen discusses Hymns To An Unknown God

Can a sense of the sacred survive and grow in modern life, or in Sam Keen’s words, “Do we have to check our spirits and our god at the workplace door?” This very readable, inspiring, even poetic book explores the landscape of contemporary spirituality: where we are, how we got here and where we are headed. The author also shares the ups and downs of his journey through life while posing questions to stimulate the reader’s own explorations. Keen then speaks of how we can integrate new views of self and spirit into our love relationships, work and communities and concludes with rituals for affirming the sacred in everyday life.

 

What follows is an abridged version of Sam Keen’s presentation (reprinted by permission).

 

Angeles Arrien: In Africa, they say the mark of a healthy person is a person who has three faces intact: The face of the child that’s connected to wonder, awe and curiosity; the face of the young lad seized with creative fire, the adventured/explorer; and the face of the ancient one-the face of rude magnificence, the face that carries benign kindness and fierce strength. Sam Keen is a prolific writer who caries these three faces. Every one of his books and in every one of his deliveries, whenever he speaks, you have the holy privilege of watching those three faces come forward at different times: the face of the child, the face of the young lad and the face of the ancient one. I respect this man’s courage, his curiosity and his capacity to constantly come forward and speak the truth of what is so.

 

Sam Keen: Thank you, Angie. I'm beginning this marvelous and awful period when after writing a book I have to explain what it's about. People always ask writers "Why do you write? Why'd you write that?" "How long did it take you to write that?" and "What's it about?"

 

It took me 62 years to write this particular book. It's about what I've been doing all of my life which is looking for the meaning of the life of the spirit. As to what it is about, the first thing I can tell you is that it’s not simple but complex. It's like a Persian rug: it's all interwoven with themes. It's about the life of the spirit and about the particular crisis of the spirit that we all find ourselves in our relationship to what’s going on in our modern world.

 

Twenty-five years ago I wrote To a Dancing God and that's been continuously in print for twenty-five years and in that book I started the revolution about telling stories, our own stories, and the realization that the spiritual treasure that each one of us has is wrapped up in our own autobiographies. Our dignity is found in terms of mining the authorship of our own stories. At that time, I was just at the very beginning of that process myself. I'd broken away from formalized religion to start off on the quest of the spirit. The difference between that is really simple. My mother told me a joke the other day. My mother's very conservative and I was brought up in a conservative religious house and she said, "Did you hear about the little boy in Sunday school and the Sunday school teacher asked him, 'What's a little gray animal that has a long bushy tail and it climbs trees and it stores acorns for winter?' The little boy thought a little about it and he replied, 'Well, it sounds like a squirrel to me, but I know that the answer is either Jesus or God!’” That's the difference between a religious approach where the answers are given before you're invited to ask the question and the life of the spirit which is really, in Rilke's words, about coming to love the questions themselves. To realize that there are never definitive answers. "Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is the meaning of my life? What ought I to do? Who are the models? How close should men and women be? What about death?" These great unanswerable questions.

 

Maybe the best thing to tell you is what my book is not about so that you can know right away if you don't want to pick it up. I should say first of all, it is not about angels or any other unidentified flying objects of the spiritual world. It is not about extraordinary experiences. It is not about miracles. As a matter of fact, it starts with the basic assumption that the quest for miracles is a sign of a degraded sense of wonder. We need angels only if we haven't seen hummingbirds and blue flowers and the world around us. It is not about out-of-body experiences. My book is exactly the opposite--it's about into-body experiences and about how we get deeper into our body. In a very real way, it's an exploration of one of the greatest spiritual affirmations ever made: That the life of the spirit is the life of flesh.

 

It's also not about near-death experiences. It's written much more in hope that you may have a near-life experience. It is also not even about what my dear friend Joseph Campbell talks about of the heroic journey, where we go into the forest where it's darkest and each goes alone because it would be a shame to go in a group. There is a point of the spiritual journey where we all do have to go alone, but in the modern world, where it is that you and I are hurting most, we better find a way to go together or none of us will go at all.

 

In that sense, it's more about community and compassion and how the individual search has to lead out into the forming of relationships with others. It's not about self-esteem or building self-esteem. The essence of the life of the spirit has never been about self-esteem--to the contrary, it's been about losing the illusion that I'm the center of the world.

 

It's also not about prophecy or any kinds of extraordinary experiences. Rather, it's about very ordinary experience, and how we find the sacred in the middle of our very, very ordinary life.

 

Fundamentally, the life of the spirit as I understand it, is not about extraordinary experiences but where we realize it's extraordinary that we are here. It's extraordinary that we're in a world where the Logos of God has come forth in all of this incredible multiplicity. What we need to understand is the sacredness of this world and try to learn to preserve that sacredness by being sensitive to what it means.

 

I can tell you a little bit what the book is about. It is about forming a spiritual bullshit detector! From the time of Plato forward, all sensitive people who have dealt with a life of the spirit know that there is a creative Eros and a destructive, demonic Eros and a demonic kind of a spirituality. There is a demonic kind of surrender that destroys the integrity of the human spirit. We've seen it so much in cults. We've seen it in the tragedies of Jonestown and Waco, Texas, but we've also seen it in California in almost every kind of guru group that encourages a surrender of the life of the mind.

 

This book deals with rules of the road. How is it that we prevent ourselves from surrendering to the wrong thing and prematurely? And how is it that we surrender to that which really makes us whole?

 

Fundamentally, it's about how do I, as an individual, and we as a culture, discover again our depth, our purpose and our vocation. What it is that we are called upon to do and to be? It's about all of these things. It's also about that which is unnamable and unknowable, the "spiritual instinct" that always drives us towards transcendence.

 

The point where we are right now in Western culture is where the problems we face are larger than the solutions we can articulate or even think about. What we're about is the beginning of a cultural spiritual quest. My book, far from being a "one minute spirituality," is a "one century spirituality." It's looking at the way we have to change the economic order, the way we relate to family and friends - and the Earth - in order to create some kind of culture which will be on-going.

 

Finally, I would like to explain the title. Why is it "hymns" and why is it for an "unknown God"? It's "hymns" because, although the life of the mind is very important, there is something else in the life of the spirit, which is too deep for words. But it always comes back to me in the old hymns--even the hymns whose words I don't quite believe. There's something that moves, as the drum moves us and as the music moves us. Here we are this incredibly diverse community and yet if I ask you, you could sing, [SINGS:] Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saves a wretch like me. [AUDIENCE JOINS IN] I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind but now I see. Despite everything, there is a community. There's a community of longing, of hope, and a community that's the beginning of a journey. That community comes out of the deep song of the spirit, which is in us. That song of that spirit, however, is not addressed to the old gods who we know, because they are all owned by somebody. For most of Western civilization, men owned them and it was "He" and now the feminists call it “She.” It shouldn't be "She" or “He” Because the real truth is the unknown god, out of which we all came and into which we all go, remains unknown and unknowable. It is in the movement toward that unknowable end of human history that we find our dignity and that we each find our ultimate purpose of life, fulfillment and the ultimate passion of our lives. There is a way of traveling that doesn't cheat and yet moves deeper and deeper into that mystery.

 

We are going through a dark time in human history. But, there's luminosity in that darkness. And there's also some spirit. If we trust it, it will carry us through the darkness. Thank you.