*Maya Angelou Crackers Sometimes

"When they go, Ghana will be here. They are like mice on an elephant's back. They will pass...He is just part of Africa." --All God's Children Need  Traveling Shoes by Maya Angelou

The American writer and poet, Maya Angelou was among the last of a generation who were raised under the full weight of segregation. As a child in rural Stamps, Arkansas, Ms. Angelou was privileged to be the grand daughter of a land owning woman with an independent business in the village of Stamps. From her relatively secure position, she became educated and an inveterate reader of all types of literature.
Steeped in the ways of the old South, by necessity, Ms. Angelou's early life formed a resolute character that later supported her as she forged forward to New York's Harlem in the 1950's. A supporter of Martin Luther King and later of Malcolm X, she earned her "radical" stripes early.

Reading her work chronicled together as an autobiography is an eye-opening journey with a brave and determined woman. But she also shows herself to be like anyone anywhere; Ms. Angelou is not perfect.
She repeatedly retorts with prejudices of her own youth and despite her extensive literary style, does at times pejoratively refer to some as "crackers". For the casual reader of Ms. Angelou, this may come as a surprise. She, these days, is perhaps equally well known as one whose words accompany Hallmark greeting cards. Yet a more thorough reading of her works reveals a woman who is complex and honest enough to admit her thoughts and what she learns.  
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes has many nuggets; one in particular is when as the focus of the tale, Maya emigrates to Ghana, intending to leave all the strife behind in America. In Ghana she is surprised and repeatedly confronted with the unexpected:

"Professor, why you let them disturb your heart?"
 I stuttered... 

"They were insulting my people. I just couldn't sit there." 

His smiled never changed. "And your people, they my people?"

"Yes but--I mean American Blacks."

"They been insulted before?"

"Yes--but..."

"And they still live?"

"Yes, but... they also insulted Ghana, your country."

"Oh Sister, as for that one, it is nothing..." 

He said, "This is not their place. In time they will pass. 

Ghana was here when they came. When they go, Ghana will be here. 

They are like mice on an elephant's back. They will pass."

She is then astonished that a simple Ghanaian man could be so secure in this knowledge that he could ignore another's rudeness. 
He concludes his thought with the observation, that even that man, he is also a part of Africa, a place made of many nations, peoples and cultures. Despite many false starts, Ms. Angelou comes to learn that she too has a place while not as a returned African, but as a living, breathing "Black American" in Africa.
This story tells her tale. Spiritually it is poignant in her struggle for understanding of herself and others; she makes sense of the precept of meeting one another on level ground, neither better no worse, telling her experience as she perceives it.

*Ms. Angelou observed her 86th birthday April 4, 2013

In Praise of the Holy Fool

"The soul prospers in the failure of perfection."--Thomas Moore

While we may perceive events either as immanent or as transcendent, the soul of a person knows no time but its own. When relating to others, it isn't always easy to open the soul to another, to risk opening the self, hoping that another person will be able to tolerate its sometimes rationality, and sometimes irrationality. It may also be equally difficult to be open, or receptive to the revelations of others.

The light of Oneness not withstanding, there is great temptation to separate, to judge, to make comparisons of these oddities of soul. Yet this mutual vulnerability is one of the great gifts of love. To give another sufficient space in which to live and express one's soul in its reason and unreason, and then to further risk revelations of your self, in all its potential absurdities may be perceived as quite loving.
The courage required for this process is not easy; it is infinitely more demanding than either judgment or comparisons. While most of us contain ourselves fairly well, the soul and its ways eventually surface bringing forth the unexpressed that we sense stirring inside.

We all have to some extent, a sense of the fearfulness of such an enterprise. Oneness by its nature asks that we move aside, that we move beyond with others to a place that may ask a share of soul in its completed form.
 In the story, In Praise of Folly, Erasmus says, "it is precisely in their foolishness that people can become friends and intimates. For the greatest part of mankind are fools... and friendship, you know, is seldom made, except among equals."

As modern thinkers, we may present to the world a well developed intellect, a sense of proportion, but the soul is more fertile in its own imagination, in its own earth, finding value in sometimes irrationality. Perhaps this is in part why great artists and inventive minds seem a bit eccentric or mad to the average onlooker. At times when seized by strong passions, our greatest anxieties often comprise the fear of being seen by others as foolish.
We fear in love, in Oneness that we appear irrational, foolish, but that is just the point. The soul is not the least concerned with reason or intellect. It operates more deeply, and more persuasively. So then, love in Oneness calls for acceptance of a Soul's less rational outposts, a recognition that a heart may contain both love and contempt.

We need not only to know more about ourselves, but also we need to love more of ourselves, in an unsentimental way; that is the way to oneness. Tolerance, "honoring that aspect of the self that may be irrational or extreme is the basis for intimacy," writes Thomas Moore.
We have fewer expectations of perfection, less judgement; less and less are we separated by these notions. We come to recognize that the soul, in its meanderings, tends to move into new and positive areas in spite of, and because of the oddities expressed.
In Oneness a beloved may be surprised by these developments, but not be undone by their unexpected appearance. The soul, the creative being, does prosper within the failures of perfection.

Moral Return and the Problem of Good and Evil

"On the mixed egoism of human nature there can be no safe or positive reliance... " --Sri Aurobindo writing about good and evil

The problems of human life are myriad, but the of the most persistent and perplexing of difficulties lies with the perception and response to the nature of good and evil. It is to oversimplify the issue by dividing the world into two camps, the good and the evil. In maturity we see that bad things do happen to "good" people. But how, and why? What type of response may we mount in the face such a situation?

The idea of moral returns supposes that like begets like; that by positive intention, or positive self talk, one may garner positive rewards. This is thought by others to be an egocentric philosophy, not borne out by everyday experiences. And while there exists in the intellectual marketplace many such advocates of these types of ideas, there are the others such as Sri Aurobindo who examines the issue more closely, writing a part in the book, Lights on Life's Problems by Kishner Ghandi.

The rule of moral returns, or more commonly called the 'golden rule' is pervasive in human philosophical systems, especially those dealing with ethical systems, and ideas of faith and belief.

Aurobindo writes, "The rule is true to a certain  extent... but it is not true all the way and all the time. It is evident enough that hatred, violence, injustice are likely to create an answering hatred, violence and injustice... and I can only indulge those propensities with impunity if I am sufficiently powerful enough and prudent enough to provide against their natural reactions. It is true also that by doing good and kindness I create a certain good will in others... but this good and evil are both of them movements of the ego, and on the mixed egoism of human nature there can be no safe or positive reliance. An egoistic, selfish strength, if it knows what to do and where to stop... if it is strong and skillful, cunning, fraud, many kinds of evil, do actually pay in man's dealing with man hardly less than in the animal's with the animal, and on the other hand the doer of good... finds himself as often as not disappointed." paraphrased

Why? asks Aurobindo: "It is because the weakness of human nature worships the power that tramples on it...return[s] to every kind of strong imposition, belief" crouching and fawning admiration, flattery of self and others, even in moments of hatred and terror, possesses a singular and unreasoning loyalty to me, myself and I. "And its disloyalties too are as unreasoning, or light and fickle; it takes just reasoning and beneficence as its right, and forgets or cares not to pay." paraphrased

"Even', says Aurobindo, 'Christ on the cross or Socrates drinking his potion of hemlock are not very clear evidence for any optimistic notion of a law of moral return in the world of human nature. Actually in the cosmic dispensation [Aurobindo thinks] "evil comes out of good and good comes out of evil; there seems to be no correspondence between the moral and the vital measures." In summary Aurobindo concludes that good does tend to beget good, "the total power of good in the world and the greater this grows, the greater is likely the sum of human happiness" and that evil tends towards its inverse. Eventually surmises Aurobindo,  man or nations doing evil will have to pay in a theory of a harmonious cosmos, equal and balanced by its opposite. Though he notes, "it is not often in any intelligibly graded or apportioned measure, and not always clear in translating terms of vital good fortune and ill fortune."