“There are two BuVu Precepts: Be Truthful and Be Kind.” Niels Holm, Founder
That should be enough foundation to build any church on, but there was something else Niels loved to talk about when two or three BuFoons were gathered together:
Soulfulness
I hope what the Church of BuVu and its BuFoons can offer, to each other and to our own small worlds, and thence to the bigger world, is Soulfulness. Whatever that is. We’ll get into it.
Thinking about this sent me googling for what I recall of Carl Jung’s take on the human condition, what he called the “spiritual problem:”
“Small and hidden is the door that leads inward, and the entrance is barred by countless prejudices, mistaken assumptions, and fears. Always one wishes to hear of grand political and economic schemes, the very things that have landed every nation in a morass. Therefore it sounds grotesque when anyone speaks of hidden doors, dreams, and a world within. What has this vapid idealism got to do with gigantic economic programmes, with the so-called problems of reality?
“But I speak not to nations, only to the individual few, for whom it goes without saying that cultural values do not drop down like manna from heaven, but are created by the hands of individuals. If things go wrong in the world, this is because something is wrong with the individual, because something is wrong with me.
“Therefore, if I am sensible, I shall put myself right first. For this I need—because outside authority no longer means anything to me—a knowledge of the innermost foundations of my being, in order that I may base myself firmly on the eternal facts of the human psyche.”
(Carl Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man)
Would you agree that America has a spiritual problem? More specifically, I think we have a Soulfulness problem. And, in my very humble opinion, we have a leader who is the least spiritual, least soulful we have ever had.
I know political action and activism, especially voting, is indispensable. But, if it’s possible for something to be “more indispensable,” I think that something is Soulfulness.
As BuFoons, talking with Niels about Soulfulness, we weren’t very good at describing it to each other. Mostly we would just offer our own candidates:
Art, Dance, Humor, Literature, Music, Nature, Sports … i.e. Beauty, Creativity, Imagination, Performance. If we were having this discussion this morning (that makes me melancholy) we would add the Women’s March.
(Not on anybody’s list: Business, Capitalism, Economics, Politics, Religion. Not on my list: Christmas, Winter.)
There were musicians, of course: Jimmy Hendrix, Bob Marley, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, James Taylor. Many others, obviously.
Some comedians: Lenny Bruce, Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams. Many more of these, too.
Leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, or JFK.
Lots of writers and poets. For me, Tom Robbins. For others, Maya Angelou, Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, Mary Oliver, Margaret Atwood. This would be a really long list.
Who and what would you add to these short lists? Think about it, get stirred up about my lists vs. your lists. Have some fun.
Speaking of Tom Robbins, I’m going to step aside and let my personal Soulfulness guru speak:
“If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.
“To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.
“Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.
“But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.
“More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.”
Tom Robbins in Esquire
Here’s more from the same vein in his last novel, Villa Incognito. This is Stubblefield talking to a rapt audience of Buddhist villagers about soul, something of a foreign concept to them:
“… Religion is the wrong, if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort – the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They are mistaken.”
…
“How then does soul differ from spirit? … “… soul is connected to Mother Earth just as spirit is connected to Father Sky. … Generally, if spirit is the fresh air vent and ambient lighting in the house of consciousness, if spirit is the electrical system that illuminates that house, then soul is the smoky fireplace, the fragrant oven, the dust wine cellar, the strange creaks we hear in the floorboards at night.”
…
“In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that’s being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke, my friends. The soul is its punch line.”
…
“Let’s not chisel that last remark in stone. Okay? It may be high wisdom, it could be pure bullshit.”
(It’s worth noting that Niels’ idea was to add soulfulness to Buddhism by adding his impression of Vudoo as a nitty gritty, earthy, funky, down home way of turning curses into blessings and dealing with shame. BuVu.)
The entire passage from Stubblefield’s teaching is set out below.
My new resolution (it’s still January) for 2018: I want to become more soulful.
Steve Gillard
