New Spiritual Musing" "The Essence of Cool"

The Essence of Cool

I really didn’t want to, but I jotted the idea down in my notebook just in case I ran into a dry period (which happens rarely) and needed an idea to explore just to keep the creative juices flowing, and I forgot about it until this morning when I noticed the highlighted passage in David Brooks’s opinion piece in the folded newspaper page that I had on my desk which I intended to explore but never got around to until it caught my eye this morning.

Brooks’s piece is titled “What Has Replaced Cool in America” (The New York Times International Weekly, Wednesday, July 30, 2017), and I highlighted in blue marker the passage that inspired the idea for a short spiritual musing on the essence of cool: “The cool person is stoical, emotionally controlled, never eager or needy, but instead mysterious, detached and self-possessed. The cool person is gracefully competent at something, but doesn’t need the world’s applause to know his worth. That’s because the cool person has found his or her own unique and authentic way of living with nonchalant intensity.”

How cool is that? Given that description of what a cool person is, I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to be cool; but that’s why the idea for a spiritual musing on cool seized me, because not everyone can be cool. That’s what makes one cool, if one can appreciate the irony. But just in case, let me explore the irony of cool in today’s musing…

For some reason known only to the omniscient guiding principle of life (which I’ve come to recognize as my oracle, or guiding inner light), I was nudged to browse through one of the bookcases in my writing den yesterday morning, and as I sorted through the top shelf I came upon The Seasons of the Soul, a collection of poems by Hermann Hesse previously unpublished in English, translated and with a commentary by Ludwig Max Fischer, with a forward by “spiritual activist” Andrew Harvey, and even though I had read it already I felt  strongly nudged to read it again, which I did throughout the day in the pleasant comfort of our front deck; and this morning I was called to read My Belief, essays on life and art also by Hermann Hesse, which I had read two or three times already, and only upon reading the introduction again did I make the connection with Hesse and the idea for my spiritual musing on the essence of cool, and I had to smile at the remarkable “inspired” coincidence.

I had highlighted one more passage in David Brooks’s article, a single sentence that summed up what I felt to be the essential quality of a cool person, which popped into my mind while reading the introduction to My Belief, and I knew instantly why I was called to re-acquaint myself with the writer I had read many years ago while on my own spiritual quest like Hermann Hesse. The sentence that I highlighted said it all: “The cool person is guided by his or her own autonomous values, often on the outskirts of society.”

That was Hermann Hesse, a man guided by his own autonomous values and on the edge of society, a definition which, at the risk of sounding immodest, applied to me no less than Hermann Hesse, because my whole life I’ve always lived by my own guiding inner light which set me apart from everyone; so, there it was then, my reason for being called to write a short spiritual musing on cool—to demystify the je ne sais quoi of this elusive quality.

In truth, I already have a gnostic awareness of what constitutes the essence of cool; but it would be presumptuous to state this up front without providing the context that gave birth to my realization of this alluring character trait, because it’s in the context of my own quest for my true self that pulled Hermann Hesse into my life with his book Journey to the East first and then his novel Magister Ludi, also known as The Glass Bead Game.

I had already highlighted the passage, in yellow this time, but it jumped out at me again as I read the introduction to My Belief this morning: “Hesse maintains that the idea of the underlying unity of all being is a synthesis that can be achieved only through a reconciliation of conflicting opposites. This dialectical process shows up over and over again in Hesse’s novels.” This passage speaks to what C. G. Jung called the “individuation process,” the founding premise of his psychology (it can’t be a coincidence that Hermann Hesse underwent Jungian therapy during his most trying period); but not until one learns how to reconcile the conflicting opposites of their personality can one achieve what Jung called “wholeness and singleness of self.” That’s why Hesse became a cult figure for the mind-expanding, paradigm shifting counterculture movement of the mid-1960s, because his novels spoke to the longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness.

Hesse’s best-known works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946; and it was his search for a way to synthesize the conflicting opposite aspects of one’s ego/shadow personality that preoccupied both Jung and Hesse their whole life.

This is the context that awakened me to the secret way of life that both Jung and Hesse had become aware of, which Miguel Serrano alludes to in his short memoir C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse, A Record of Two Friendships; and like Jung and Hesse, I came to the same realization that self-reconciliation is the only way to one’s true self, and I embarked upon this perilous journey to authenticity that essentially makes a person cool.

In short, the more true one is to oneself, the more cool one will be; but it wouldn’t be cool to reveal this, and that’s the irony of being cool.

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