"We have no knowledge

and so we have stuff,
but stuff without knowledge
is never enough
to get you there."

Lyric from "Two Little Feet" by Greg Brown

Kabir on Consumerism

I was looking for that shop
where the shopkeeper would say,
"There is nothing of value in here."

I found it and did not leave.
The richness of not wanting
wrote these poems.

--Kabir (1440-1518)

C.G. Jung and the Hopi Elder

In 1925 Jung had an extended conversation with the Hopi Elder of the Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico. Ochwiay Biano tells Jung of the tribe’s reaction to the strange Europeans who have come from the East into their world. The Elder says:

See how cruel the whites look. Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces are furrowed and distorted with folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always shifting and seeking something. What are they looking for? The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think that they are mad.

Jung continues:

I asked him why they thought the whites were all mad. “They say that they think with their heads,” he replied. “Why of course. What do you think with? I asked him in surprise. “We think here,” he said, pointing to his heart.

Inside and Out

Without moving through the door to the outside,
you can know the whole universe.
Without looking through the window of the senses,
you can observe the Way of Heaven.
The more externally focused you are,
the less you know.

The sage, therefore,
comes to know without moving,
sees without looking,
works without doing.

-- Tao Te Ching 47

Gain and Loss

In my own experience, the period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period in one's life. ...Through a difficult period, you can learn, you can develop inner strength, determination, and courage to face the problem. Who gives you this chance? Your enemy.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama
(Courtesy of Elizabeth Chatterjee)

Inspired by Sam and Lynn

In their exchange (see the comments) about human being as a site where new wisdom is created, a surprised Sam wrote that he "always looked at it as if [he] were a 'channel' for God's Wisdom."

Even a channel, Sam, creates its own sound--think of the Red River rolling swiftly below the bluffs at Riverby, or the light-hearted gurgle of Navarro Creek, or even a stream of urine piercing the water's surface in the toilet at home.

Once a directee described an image I like: we are flutes channeling the wind of spirit, but our fingering of the holes determines the sound that results.

And that sound doesn't last; created at the intersection of the holy and profane, it wafts into nothingness: no record, no manifestation, no digital code. Here in one moment, gone the next, echoing only in memory.

Consolation

To experience God's consolation
embodied by others,
we must first become vulnerable
by showing our wounds.

Skillful Living

Govern large territories
the way you cook a small fish.

--Tao Te Ching 60

An Oriental Canon of Scripture

For some time now I have been pondering the creation of the western canon of Scripture, what we call, of course, the New Testament. Most of us know something of its history; how it was the compilation that was finally decided upon during the early Ecumenical Councils of the Church (at the Council of Laodicea in the fourth century).

Before then, there were many collections of sacred Christian texts, but as in other things Constantine demanded (and got) uniformity, and so one codified listing of Scripture was agreed upon by the participants in the Councils. It is not a bad collection, certainly, but the unfortunate result of its creation was that a multitude of important early Christian documents were forgotten, lost, or discarded. Many texts that were held to be sacred (Scripture) by many early Christian communities simply disappeared.

This is not the place to critique the present canon of Scripture that western Christians hold dear. In it, certainly, there are profound treasures. But my wondering is this. The oriental tradition of Christianity never made such a list. From historical record many other sacred texts were kept alive by the eastern communities even after the western Church had narrowed the list to 27 books. For example, the Odes of Solomon (a collection of early Christian wisdom hymns) were kept and read as a part of the scriptural tradition in the East (the Syrian Christians in Edessa), as well as the Gospel of Thomas.

We are a long way from those early days. Much has transpired. Among us now we read many texts in contemplative services (offices) that we feel to be sacred. Some of them come from traditions other than our own. The question I have (for myself, at least) is why I/we choose these? Is it simply because they are somehow sacred “to me,” or is there something larger at work here? Are we reading them, perhaps, because we sense that they too are “inspired” (moved and breathed by Spirit). One cannot read the visionary poetry of Rumi, for example, and not sense that the Spirit animates it. We sense that and read him because his poetry profoundly moves and teaches us.

If we were to create an “Oriental Canon” (one that stayed dynamic, flexible, and not static, as in the West). What would we choose, and why? It’s a question, perhaps, for us to ponder.

Notes on Praxis: Miracle

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

Act as if everything you think, say and do determines your entire life—because in reality, it does!

Laurelle Adrian

-- provided through the courtesy of Gary O'Connor

The Strangness of the "I"

In a recent email, Gregory Thompson writes...

I have been focusing on the "presence" beyond the "I" in prayer and reflection. And trying to stay with God as a "Thou" (certainly, I reason, God is no less a subjective "person" than myself, if absolutely more than personal, too). There is something deeply mysterious about this connection--this "I" in me that is objectified by something beyond it--some part that says "I am I, but more than I.... So the prayer goes "Lord, this "I" presents itself to "Thee", in space and time..." Weird. eh?
--gt

Sweaty Palms

Kasan, a Zen teacher and monk, was to officiate at a funeral of a famous nobleman. As he stood there waiting for the governor of the province and other lords and ladies to arrive, he noticed that the palms of his hands were sweaty. The next day he called his students together and confessed he was not yet ready to be a true teacher. He explained to them that he still lacked the sameness of bearing before all human beings, whether beggar or king. He was still unable to look through social roles and conceptual identities and see the sameness of being in every human. He immediately resigned his post as a teacher and became the pupil of another master in order to devote himself to greater practice.

--A traditional Zen story

Curiosity and a Real Question

"I am neither especially clever nor especially gifted. I am only very, very curious." -- Albert Einstein

Without curiosity sustained by a real question we will never, ever move forward in our explorations of new territory, but only in circles getting our own needs met. Jacob Needleman has suggested that without a “real question” (one that is existentially grounded in a personal need to know), we flounder in a self-referential bog of egoic-desire. By asking a real question that we sense must be answered before we leave this planet, we put ourselves in dialogue with Higher Mind that has perhaps urged us toward the question, the asking, and the search for answers transcendent to the ego. But is this “urge to know” merely a reflection of the ego’s need (in which case we are in a catch-22), or is it some inner response to a vocation to transcend the self in its present configuration? Spiritual tradition asserts the latter, which it believes is the only way out of the vicious circle.

The Path Through This World

We are always rushing somewhere else, to some other, better world. We are uncomfortable here, in this complex, confusing, plural mess. We want out. Escape. Speed. Distraction. Entertainment. Suicide. Our desire for escape gets easily confused with spirituality--the desire for Heaven, the other world. This confusion is itself archetypal: but the path to the other world must lead through this one. Our struggle is first and foremost in this world. We cannot escape by ignoring it. Corbin, and many others, say we must be born again, but I think we must be born in the first place into this world, that we may, perhaps, be born again beyond it.
--Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel, 25

Henri Nouwen on Silence

Being silent seems like doing nothing, but it is precisely in silence that we confront our true selves. The sorrows of our lives often overwhelm us to such a degree that we will do everything not to face them. Radio, television, newspapers, books, films, but also hard work and a busy social life all can be ways to run away from ourselves and turn life into a long entertainment (which means, in the Latin, “to keep someone in between.”) Entertainment is everything that gets and keeps our mind away from things that are hard to face. Entertainment keeps us away from our fears and worries. But when we start living entertainment, we lose touch with our souls and become little more that spectators in a lifelong show. Even very useful and relevant work can become a way of forgetting who we really are.

Silence is the discipline that helps us go beyond the entertainment quality of our lives. There, we can look at our sorrows and joys emerge from their hidden places and look us in the face, saying, “Don’t be afraid; you can look at your own journey, its dark and light sides, and discover the way to freedom.”

Wherever we find silence, we should cherish it. Because it is in silence that we can truly acknowledge who we are and gradually claim ourselves as a gift from God.
--from Can You Drink the Wine
(Courtesy of Eddie Nichols)

Rumi on Origins

You think of yourself
As a citizen of this universe.
You think you belong
To the world of matter and form.
Out of form
You have created a personal image,
But you have forgotten
About the essence of your true origins.

Enthusiasm

Etymologically, the English word enthusiasm comes from the Greek word enthousiazein, "to be possessed by a god." Isn’t this exactly what is meant by the title we use for Yeshua? He was “the Christ” (Christos), anointed or saturated by Spirit. To say he was “spirit possessed” is a connotation we want to avoid in modern English, but to realize that he was “possessed by Spirit” is more precise, and very close to the original meaning for enthusiasm. Tolle, in his new book, A New Earth, points out that anyone possess by God (or by Spirit) is sustained or empowered by a wave of creative energy, and what one must do is “ride” that wave (302). Is this not what we are meant to experience as followers of the Messiah, the Anointed One? As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Nothing great has ever been achieved without enthusiasm.” Without Spirit, there is nothing of significance that we can do “by ourselves,” but to be christianos (followers of the Christ), and possessed by the same Spirit, we can experience the flow of deep spiritual energy that lifts us like a wave, and which we can learn to ride.

Vision Quest

"Vision quest" remains one of the primary aspects of aboriginal, North American spirituality. It involves retiring alone to a remote location in the natural world in search of a life-guiding vision or a gift of supernatural power ("medicine") for healing or some other action among one's peoples. An individual goes without food or sleep for three or four days seeking after a vision. In an excellent article in Fortean Times reseacher, Paul Deveroux, explains in detail the tradition of vision quest--something that we have explored as part of our own work in Wisdom Tradition.

The Nexas Point

Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has sat in silence long enough to experience the stillness of the mind behind its apparent noise, is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer attractions of life in the world, there exists at the center of human consciousness something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself, a beauty without features. The mystery is not so much that these two dimensions exist—an outer world and the mystery of the inner world—but that we are suspended between them, as a space in which both worlds meet…. as if the human being is the meeting point, the threshold between two worlds.

- Kabir Helmisnski, from The Knowing Heart
(Courtesy of Gary O'Connor)

The Danger of "Single Vision"

The world of the horizontal axis is in peril. Some 200 years ago, at the beginning of the Industrial Age, William Blake spoke of this danger, penning these words,

Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s Sleep!

More than thirty years ago (1972), Theodore Roszak wrote a breakthrough book based upon William Blake’s visionary poetry and prophetic voice, which foretold where, as a society, he felt certain we were heading. We are either there now, or dangerously close. In Where the Wasteland Ends Roszak warned that western society (and American society, in particular) was moving in a direction in which some form of the “Single Vision” might overtake and so dominate us that it would begin to ruthlessly stamp out any other way of seeing or being, destroying all pluralism and the rich diversity that makes life itself possible—crushing real creativity.

Whether natural, scientific, political, or religious, we see evidence everywhere of the fulfillment of the double warnings (Blake’s and Roszak’s), and the rise of Blake’s “Single Vision and Newton’s sleep.” We live, it seems, in a world where tolerance toward diversity and pluralism is suspect and in danger of being trampled out by various forms of fundamentalism. Fundamentalist forces (the Single Vision) have joined together to assert themselves. This is particularly true in the current marriage of religion and politics so prominent today in American culture, where the religious right has made bed-fellows with the political establishment.

At the hands of Neo-conservatism, religious Fundamentalism, Scientism, Capitalism, and all the other “—isms” that stalk our social landscape, we are at risk of succumbing to the Single Vision that Blake so feared and becoming a kind of social “mono-culture” where only politically correct doctrine is allowed public space, and behavior is controlled by emphasis on national loyalty. Beginning in the Greco-Roman world as the religious agenda of imperial Christianity under the auspices of the Emperor Constantine, uniformity and conformity became the hallmark of western society. Ever since, the institution of the Church, in league with the State, has been governed by this overarching principle. This “psychology of single vision” which was carried forward by Christian civilization in the West entered into the Scientific Revolution, says Roszak, where it achieved cultural supremacy in the modern world, betraying its brightest ideals (107). Now under duress and the threat of terrorism, even democratic institutions and ideals, which the American republic was founded upon, have begun to fall prey to this same ideology. So, Roszak wrote his own critique and warning, in which he says,

… I will be calling the orthodox consciousness of urban-industrialism by the name William Blake gave it—single vision. It was his term for the narrowing of the sensibilities we often refer to as “alienation” today. My main interest is in the cultural transformations from which this psychic style stems and the force it exerts upon our politics (76).

Thomas and the Tao

It seems to me, from reading the Gospel of Thomas and the Tao Te Ching carefully, that what the latter is to Taoism, the former is to Christianity. Each is a collection of profound wisdom sayings from the tradition of the Sage, and the sayings themselves (the logia) must be carefully read and prayerfully pondered if they are to be understood. In much of their content they are similar as well, but their sense of inspiration seems, to me at least, to emanate from a single spiritual Source.

Living in the Occident

Quite literally, and also, metaphorically, we live in the Occident, the geographic and spiritual West. According to sacred geography, Yeshua himself was born in the West, but as an infant was visited by three practitioners of oriental light—the Magi. So what does it mean to live in the West as followers of an Oriental tradition? Clearly, many things, but perhaps most important among them is to accept our present dwelling place and interact with it fully, all the while remembering our origins—where we are from and to what place we are returning.

One can so easily go to sleep in the western world. It is easy to nod-off or be mesmerized. This is an “occidental” condition. There are powerful soporific forces in the West very much alive today. In religious circles they manifest as certainties and demands that we conform to the norms imposed by external authorities in exchange for eternal or institutional security. Under this regimen, the options are limited, and much that is necessary is excluded. To be an orientalist means, therefore, that we begin to open ourselves to a wider diversity of spiritual and physical life, fully engaging the world of the West in which we live. To quote Tom Cheetham, a recent commentator on the oriental tradition:

We are always rushing somewhere else, to some other, better world. We are uncomfortable here, in this complex, confusing, plural mess. We want out. Escape. Speed. Distraction. Entertainment. Suicide. Our desire for escape gets easily confused with spirituality--the desire for Heaven, the other world. This confusion is itself archetypal: but the path to the other world must lead through this one. Our struggle is first and foremost in this world. We cannot escape by ignoring it. Corbin, and many others, say we must be born again, but I think we must be born in the first place into this world, that we may, perhaps, be born again beyond it.

--Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel, 25

Eckhart Tolle's New Book

For the past several months I have been reading through Eckhart Tolle's new book, A New Earth. I have enjoyed it, as I have all of his previous texts. He is a good writer, and his teaching, I believe, is solid. Though he seems uncommitted to any particular tradition, he has a good understanding of many, particularly Christianity, and uses references to the teaching of Jesus well.

This text is particularly helpful on daily spiritual praxis, in fact I would say it is invaluable. Spiritual practice is its main focus. It also seems to me to be a deeper, more universal counterpart (for folks like us) to the very popular, The Purpose Driven Life. It says so much more.

Here is the Amazon link that you can use to see more about it, or order it if you choose.

The following is a sampling of a fine paragraph from Tolle's work:

When you say, I enjoy doing this or that, it is really a misperception. It makes it appear that the joy comes from what you do, but that is not the case. Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world from deep within you. The misperception that joy comes from what you do is normal, and it is also dangerious, because it creates the belief that joy is something that can be dervied from something else, such as an activity or thing. You then look to the world to bring you joy, happiness. But it cannot do that. This is why many people lives in constant frustration. The world is not giving them what they think they need (298).

Congratulations to Ann Johnson

Ann Johnson, one of the Monks of the Order, is graduating today from the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas, after completing a year of study there. She will soon be ordained a deacon in the Diocese of Arizona, and later a priest to serve in various ministries and parishes in Northern Arizona. Needless to say we are proud of her, the journey she has taken, and glad for what lies ahead of her. She's one special woman!

What Makes Us Oriental?

From an historical point of view, there is much to commend the term "oriental" in relationship to the Order. Obviously the Order's origins in the Eastern Church (Syrian Orthodox) has a lot to do with why it is in the name of the Order. More specifically, it designates those forms of Christianity that grew up outside the Roman empire all the way East to China. That brings a whole other viewpoint forward, and a very important one when you think of the cultural significance of its contrast--the Occident.

There is, however, another and in some ways a more significant meaning, and that is the Order's interior orientation to the vertical Orient. In contrast to the geographic orient (the East), this significance points us toward the homeland of Light, the Source at the apex of the vertical axis. We seek this inner orientation (which is what the term "orientation" itself means: oriented towards light).

Vertical oriention means fundamentally that our pathway seeks out light wherever we can find it, and the inner light it receives is not primarily about external realities (though those have their place and light is shed upon them as well), but about seeking to understand the inner dimensions of things--their deep-structural realities. Oriental wisdom, then, taught us by the Spirit (the same Spirit that infused Yeshua), teaches us about the interior of things (essences, qualities, meanings) verses the occidental exteriors concerned primarily about facts, histories, objects, and human agendas. The longing to know the inner axis at the heart of all reality is, I believe, what makes us oriental. -- L. Bauman

Thoughts on the Contemplative Path

Life is complex. Each one of us must make his (or her) own path through life. There are no self-help manuals, no formulas, no easy answers. The right road for one is the wrong road for another … The journey of life is not paved in blacktop; it is not brightly lit, and it has no road signs. It is a rocky path through the wilderness.
--M. Scott Peck