Foolishness and The Kingdom of the Bad

THE FOOL

The archetype of the fool or the clown shows up in most every well-known story with a beginning, middle and end. This character appears in dramatic work in various forms from the “Wise Fool” of the Greek Tragedies to Shakespeare’s spritely Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Dori in Finding Nemo.

These “foolish” characters typically provide comic relief and serve as a foil or sense of conscience to the protagonist. They do not follow society’s ways, are usually not the most fashionable and always speak the truth. They are transgressive and free in sometimes dangerous ways. They invite us to wear masks — or to take off our masks and live a life without labels and ideals. The fool, according to Joe Bunting (The Write Practice) is usually a “lowly” character, and sometimes a blank slate, that will reveal the character of others based on how they themselves are treated. Sometimes an antagonist we thought was our friend will show their true colors by betraying or mistreating the fool, usually in the final act.

In Shakespeare and the Human Mystery, J. Phillip Newell writes, “The fool is calling us to be truly ourselves and points out the falseness of what we have become. He is not, however, over and against his hearers. Rather, he invites them to discover the fool within themselves. In All’s Well That Ends Well, when Paroles says that he has found the fool, the clown replies, “Did you find me in yourself, sir?”

In ancient Egypt (as early as 2400 BC), clowns served a socio-religious and psychological function in the court, with the role of priest and clown traditionally being held by the same person.

In many Native American cultures, the Trickster God is represented as Coyote, a sacred clown. During certain ceremonial performances, masks are made of clay and worn for each direction of the medicine wheel and a Heyoka (a mystic, medicine man or outsider) plays the role of the backwards clown, doing everything in reverse.

There is, within Christian circles, those known as “Holy Fools” or “Fools for Christ.” These are the ascetics, mystics and outcasts that give up their worldly possessions and flout society’s conventions. The Hindu equivalent would be Avadhuta (The Sanskrit word for people who “do not identify with their mind or body, names or forms, a person held to be pure consciousness.”). Elsewhere, in Islam there are the Qalandariyya (whirling dervishes) and Malamatiyya (Sufi mystics with a staunch belief in self-blame).

The first card of the Major Arcana Tarot deck is that of The Fool. It shows him in all his youthful innocence stepping off a cliff and into the unknown without judgement, but also without wisdom. He is the embodiment of a new beginning. He is actively sacrificing his past. And he is represented by the number Zero. 

As George Leonard writes in his classic Mastery, zero is “the fertile void from which all creation springs, the state of emptiness that allows new things to come into being.” The fool represents what is known in Zen Buddhism as shoshin or “beginner’s mind” — the attitude that makes real learning possible.

At the end of his life, when making his own funeral arrangements, Jigoro Kano (the founder of Judo), asked to be buried in his white belt. The white belt is the symbol of the lowly student just beginning their study. It’s what you wear when you know absolutely nothing. The world’s highest ranking Judo master asked to be memorialized with the marks of the beginner.

While the fool archetype continues to be used abstractly as a metaphor and a device in storytelling or Jungian psychology, the actual court jester has been replaced in modern society by professional comedians. Comedians such as Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., George Carlin and Bill Hicks allow us to laugh at ourselves and our society by holding up a mirror to the “falseness of what we have become.” This humor comes from speaking the truth and crossing cultural norms. In some cases (Carlin and Hicks) they speak truth to power in an attempt to shake up the political systems of the day.

THE CLOWN

And then there is the beloved clown.

According to circus expert Hovey Burgess, the most prevalent character clowns in America are the Hobo, the Tramp, and the Bum. The Hobo, in particular, is described as being “down on his luck, but maintaining a positive attitude.”

The fear of these clowns extends beyond “Pennywise” from Stephen King’s It or serial killer John Wayne Gacy. It is a deep-seated societal fear. A 2008 study at the University of Sheffield in England was conducted with 250 children ranging from 4 to 16 years of age. The children were shown various renderings of a hospital redesign, including a variety of wallpaper. Unanimously, the children rejected or showed aversion to wallpaper featuring clowns.  

Fear of clowns could be as simple as the fact that most clown behavior is considered to be transgressive or anti-social (the hobo, the tramp, the mystic, the saint). Would you want your child visiting with the old medicine man near the edge of town with charcoal and ashes painted on his face? 

Some behaviorists think that this aversion may be due to something called the “uncanny valley” (the dip in the graph of human reactions to other human-like forms — like androids, animatronics or computer animation — that ranges from acceptance to revulsion). It’s a measurable probability that the exaggerated features of a clown’s face (big red nose, huge eyebrows, exaggerated smiling lips), may be “lifelike enough to be disturbing, but not realistic enough to be pleasant.”

Another reason clowns might strike discord in the hearts of men and women might be the same reason that others love them — that they show us too much of ourselves, including the failure (or the monster) within.

Duncan Trussell and Johnny Pemberton on a 2015 podcast, discussed how some clowns-in-training are constantly berated and insulted, and live in what is called “the kingdom of the bad.” They are the physical embodiment of failure, living perpetually in moments of sadness and disappointment, and they are to live there without fear. They have surrendered and accepted their own utter vulnerability to the Cosmos.

Trussell compares this to when you are “working and getting dirty.” You may be making every effort to stay clean, but you keep getting dirtier. It isn’t until you surrender to the dirt, and accept that you will just “be dirty,” that you finally are able to release into the moment — into the flow of the work itself and be present.

A former colleague of mine, Matthew Belopavlovich, worked as a clown for Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Circus. He described specific clowning routines that were designed to communicate this futility of the human condition. 

In one routine, a clown was set up in an office-like setting, with two cubicles opposite each other. His task was to move boxes from one cubicle to the next. Once he had eventually, through repeatedly failed attempts, finally accomplished this, and without any further instruction, he realized that the next logical step was to move the boxes one-by-one back to the original cubicle. And therein lies the surrender to the moment, the releasing into the flow of life. 

The other routine was a female clown, seated in front of a vanity and applying her makeup. It was made clear to the audience that she was awaiting a potential suitor — possibly another clown. As she attempted to preen and style herself to unexpected and often hilarious results, it became clear that her beau was a no-show. The routine ends on a bittersweet note with her playfully wearing cooked spaghetti as a wig and undoing her glamorous makeup. At first glance, the female clown seems to have tried and failed to improve her appearance and attract this suitor, but upon closer inspection, here is someone who has surrendered not only to the moment of “now” but also to their own inherent perfection.

DUALITY

Trussell states that if the clown lives in the “kingdom of the bad,” that there must be a “kingdom of the good” and that both realms, the “good” and the “bad” are dependent on human attention. This duality depends on the “bad” being held in opposition to the “good” and in the clown doing things in the perfectly wrong way. 

“When you sit in it,” he says, “there is a redemption that happens.” 

There is a shift from the profane to the sacred once you finally stop resisting what you are. 

This level of surrender takes honesty and immense courage. Only the fool can be fully immersed in the tragic beauty of each moment.

In Tibetan Buddhism, this keeping-life-at-a-distance is called avidya or un-intelligence. It is when we choose to identify with space and time as solid and static as opposed to open and flowing. If space and time are made of consciousness, then avidya is ignorance, or ignoring the intelligence of the Universe.

Chogyam Trungpa describes this relationship as a monkey who is trapped in a house whose walls are held together by the monkey’s own attachment and desires. The monkey may “escape this self-contained cycle of imprisonment” by developing “panoramic awareness.” 

In Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, he writes, “Panoramic awareness allows the monkey to see the space in which the struggle occurs so that he can begin to see its ironical and humorous quality. Instead of simply struggling, he begins to experience the struggle and see its futility. He laughs through the hallucinations.”

How many are willing to laugh in the face of their own attachment — to laugh through their hallucinations?

Are we willing to (as H. Emilie Cady instructs) “let go of the lesser in order to grasp the whole in which the lesser is contained?” 

Are we willing to step off the cliff into the unknown without judgement and without wisdom? 

Are we willing to create a new beginning by actively sacrificing our past? And is this surrender what will finally make real learning possible?

Are you, in this moment of “now,” willing to greet the day wearing only your white belt and some cooked spaghetti? 

If the answer is yes, then you may be ready to find the fool in yourself.

The Birth of Ego, The Fall of Man

One of the key concepts in many religious traditions is the idea that man has fallen or broken away from God. It’s considered by some to be the “ascending” form of religion — where we reach up or return to a state of Oneness with the Divine, as opposed to “descending” forms of religion where God is present or manifest in Nature and heaven is on the ground at men’s feet. This state of “falling away” or brokenness is commonly illustrated with the idea of Original Sin, or as it is called in Tibetan Buddhism alaya-vijnana (translated as Store Consciousness or consciousness that “contains all the traces or impressions of the past actions and all good and bad future potentialities“). This is the birth of the ego and the point at which our mind itself starts to distance itself from its true (or original) nature.

We are born clean, perfect and brand new, filled with light and unwrapped for all the world to see. We are born without language, without memories, without bias and without prejudice. We are born fearless. It is the world around us that attempts to work its way inside our mind, bringing along with it the concepts (and in some cases contagious ideas) like fear and bias.

George Leonard in his book Mastery, writes that a baby learning language for the very first time exists in a state of playfulness, a state of nonsense — throwing every manner of random sound against the void — until certain sounds are positively reinforced by the community around them. If there was no positive reinforcement, language would not develop as it does. He also states that the opposite is true, that by trying to control or negatively reinforcing sounds created from this state of blissful awareness, we instill self-doubt and fear in the child, and slowly begin to chip away at this state of blissful awareness. This sense of playful exploration, of pure creativity and imagination is eroded away by those around us simply through the act of (sometimes unconscious) positive and negative reinforcement.

It is only when we reach the post-conventional stage of psychological development (adolescence into adulthood) that we have the opportunity to unlearn this conditioning.

There are those who read scripture and sacred texts literally (33% according to Pew Research). Those that think Jonah literally lived in the belly of a whale for three days or that Noah was able to corral two of every living animal onto a boat. And, there are those who think that a piece of fruit may have contained all the knowledge of the world. Picture an apple packed tightly with not only the sugary flesh of the fruit itself and all its nutrients — its DNA — but also with the entire alphabet of your respective language, the entire number line in both directions all the way to infinity, entire systems of knowledge like law and medicine, potential systems of knowledge (that didn’t yet exist) like physics and astronomy. There are those who believe that when Eve took a bite of the apple, it was this knowledge that infected her. That she now possessed a download of ethics — a framework for interpersonal relationships, when according to myth itself, interpersonal relationships beyond that of our two protagonists weren’t yet known. This moment according to scripture was a transgression of spiritual law, attempting to take knowledge from the tree, the source of life, from higher spiritual planes, from God himself and use it for human ends. However, there are hundreds of ways to interpret this scripture.

There are those who may read it politically, and as an attempt for the patriarchal structure of the time to control the existing (and still very much emerging) storehouses of knowledge in the world. There are those who may read it as a fable to their children, encouraging them not to overreach their boundaries or expectations or not to elevate themselves above their spiritual station or social class.

There are also those that, in an attempt to frame this story biologically, view it as partial at best when considering our homosexual, bisexual, and transgender sisters and brothers. Is this a story that they can identify with? And, if this is a partial picture of the biological diversity and sexual/gender identity — if it’s not “true” biologically, then what else might it be about? Maybe it’s the polarity of the male/female or masculine/feminine drives in all of us. Maybe it’s about the battle being waged by God and the devil over the souls of our illustrious couple in that garden paradise. Maybe it’s all of the above.

Some interpret all scripture figuratively. There are those that perceive the whale as a construct of Jonah’s unconscious mind or a symbol of something larger than himself. There are those that perceive the initial bite of that apple as the first appearance of what we have come to call Ego. Eve was immediately self-aware, and immediately perceived herself as something other, something other than perfect, something that needed work. And this is one of the many effects of the ego, it convinces us that we are not our true or original nature. It convinces us that our mind can fix it, that our mind is in control, that there is a “self” to be preserved in an impermanent world.

We must find a way to inoculate ourselves against these effects. Fear and self-doubt and attachment are all viruses of the mind and highly contagious. And unless we have in place a rigorous practice that is constantly renewing and strengthening our spiritual and psychological immune system, we are at risk of being infected by the idea that we are broken or sinful, that we are anything less than connected directly to God, anything less than apertures of light and energy and Christ Consciousness, of formless Buddha Mind, energy that as it evolves, assists God himself in becoming self-aware.

A Brief History of Integral Spirituality

Matrimandir (Shrine to the Mother) at Auroville, India

1883 – German philosopher and critic, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), begins proposing, in Also sprach Zarathustra, that a new post-metaphysical, pro-body spirituality for the whole planet must be produced by people who have traversed nihilism, romanticism and relativism and discovered the valuing-principle common to all perspectives.

1906 – Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), an Austrian philosopher and architect influenced by Goethe, Theosophy and Esoteric Cosmology, comments on the “integral evolution of man” during a lecture in Paris.

“The grandeur of Darwinian thought is not disputed, but it does not explain the integral evolution of man… So it is with all purely physical explanations, which do not recognise the spiritual essence of man’s being.”

– Rudolf Steiner (Eighteen Lectures delivered in Paris, France, May 25 to June 14, 1906)

1912 – Russian philosopher and journalist P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947) publishes Tertium Organum. This book proposes to initiate a spiritual revival of humanity through the uniting of all disciplines and perspectives using a “higher logic” of both/and.

1914 – Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) publishes Synthesis of Yoga and The Integral Yoga, in which he intended to harmonize the paths of karma, jnana, and bhakti yoga as described in the Bhagavad Gita. It can also be considered a synthesis between Vedanta and Tantra, and even between Eastern and Western approaches to spirituality. Aurobindo also proposed a concentric hierarchy consisting of the physical, vital, mental and supramental bodies.

1914 – In Russia, Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968) began referring to the emergence of a future, spiritually-based integral society and began using phrases like “integral philosophy” and “integralist.”

1915 – Following his break with Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) over spirituality and the collective unconscious, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung (1875-1961) begins to record his experiments with trans-rational mysticism in his famous Red Book.

1922 – French philosopher and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) introduces the concept of the “noosphere” (an emerging layer of consciousness that envelops the Earth) in his Cosmogenesis. According to Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945), the noosphere is the third stage in the earth’s development, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition will fundamentally transform the biosphere.

1922 – G.I. Gurdjieff (1866-1949) sets up his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man outside Paris. It is an internationally renown spiritual training facility which deals with multiple lines of development and perspectival multiplicity of the human psyche. It employs a special language organized by “evolution” and “relativity.”

1926 – The Mother (Mirra Alfassa, 1878-1973) becomes the spiritual leader of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Auroville, India.

1940 – Indra Sen (1903-1994), a student and devotee of Sri Aurobindo, first coins the term “Integral Psychology” (contrasted with Western Psychology) and develops themes of “integral culture” and “integral man.”

1945 – British writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) releases The Perennial Philosophy, an attempt to present the “highest common factor” of all theologies by assembling passages from the writings of saints and prophets who approached a direct spiritual knowledge of the Divine.

1949 – The Ever-Present Origin is published by Swiss linguist and philosopher, Jean Gebser (1905-1973), describing human history as a series of mutations in consciousness. The book introduces the idea of “structures of consciousness” – archaic, magical, mythical, mental and integral/aperspectival.

1951 – Theologian and Stanford University Professor Frederick Spiegelberg (1897-1994) along with British-born poet philosopher Alan Watts (1915-1973) reach out to Sri Aurobindo in India to recommend someone “well versed in Eastern and Western philosophies with a deep knowledge of integral yoga” to help them found the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Aurobindo appoints Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri (1913-1975) to travel to San Francisco. Integral Spirituality is officially planted in the United States.

“Spiegelberg’s phrase “the religion of no religion” had deep existential roots. It was based on a mystical encounter with the natural world he experienced as a young theology student. He was walking in a wheat field on a bright day when, quite suddenly, his ego vanished and what he calls the Self appeared. Through this altered perspective, he began to see that God was shining through everything in the world, that everything was divine, that there was nothing but holiness. As he reveled in this revelation, he came around a corner and found himself confronting a gray church. He was horrified. How, he asked himself, could such a building claim to hold something more sacred, more divine, than what he had just experienced in the poppies, birds, and sky of the now divinized cosmos? It all seemed preposterous, utterly preposterous, to him. From the theological scandal of this initial altered state, Spiegelberg developed and theorized what was essentially (or non-essentially) an apophatic mystical theology that approaches religious language, symbol, and myth as non-literal projective expressions of some deeper metaphysical truth that, paradoxically, is simultaneously immanent and transcendent—a kind of dialectical or mystical humanism, if you will. It was just such a comparative mystical theology grounded in the natural world, and just such a critical but deep engagement with the religious traditions of the world, that inspired Murphy and his colleagues in their new venture.” – Jeffrey Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion

1955 – Teilhard de Chardin posthumously publishes the controversial The Phenomenon of Man. Borrowing from Huxley, Teilhard describes humankind as “evolution becoming conscious of itself.” The book also introduces the concept of the Omega Point – a culmination of Supreme Consciousness.

1957 – Alan Watts publishes The Way of Zen, a synthesis of Eastern and Western spiritualites as well as General Semantics and Cybernetics.

1960 – Teilhard de Chardin releases The Divine Milieu to synthesize theology and science and demonstrate that “secular (scientific) work was an integral element of creation.”

1962 – Influenced by Huxley’s studies of “human potentiality,” Michael Murphy (1930-), Dick Price (1930-1985) and Spiegelberg establish the Esalen Institute (a retreat center and intentional community) on 120 acres of the Big Sur coast in California.

1967 – Hungarian-born author and journalist Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) introduces the concept of holons (something that is simultaneously a whole and a part) in The Ghost in the Machine. Holons exist as self-contained wholes in relation to their sub-ordinate parts, and dependent parts when considered from the inverse direction.