Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Learning To Love

To love is good ... love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving for a long while ahead and far on into life, is--solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate--?); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake; it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives as yet scarcely suffice.

--Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters On Love

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Stream of Life

The same stream of life that runs through the world runs
through my veins night and day and dances in rhythmic measure.
It is the same life that shoots in joy throught the dust of the earth
into the numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of flowers.

Rabindranath Tagore

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

The Widening

We are experiencing the dizzy disorientation of the widening out of our sacred tradition at its base. The new texts of early Christianity, which are now in our possession, force us to expand our understanding of what the original wisdom of Yeshua consisted. The canonical Gospels with which we are already familiar were the necessary limitation of that teaching based upon the authors’ limited ability to hear or understand the original depth. So now we struggle to expand and include texts like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and the Gospel of Philip—all containing fresh and powerful streams of understanding that were said to have originated in the insights and vision of Yeshua.

One small example of this is the following text from the Gospel of Thomas:

Yeshua says, “Give attention to the Living Presence while you are alive so that when you die and have the desire to do so, you may have the power to attend.”
--Logion 59

In this saying Yeshua introduces the practice of attention as a means of establishing the power of Presence in ones current life as necessary for making the transition to the next. This concept and teaching is entirely missing from the Gospels with which we are familiar, but it appears to be an early and important teaching of Yeshua. To miss it or fail to understand it, is to misunderstand the practical nature of Yeshua’s instructions. He instructs us to learn here, in this world, the practice of attending to Presence (or the “Power of Now” as the popular writer, Eckhart Tolle, has expressed it). Our views of early Christian wisdom are widening out in new and important ways.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Balance and Harmony

John Duns Scotus taught that the perfection of a moral act was not to be found by pushing it as far as possible on the "selfless" scale (which is the form of morality that has largely formed the West, and almost everybody reacts against because it is impossible 99.9 percent of the time). With his usual subtle wisdom, he says that the perfection of a moral act is to find the proper balance between the focus inward and focus outward, which he calls the "two natural affections" or metaphysical desires. Satan's fall, he taught, was not merely self-love, a certain degree of which is required and necessary, but disordered self-love! How different the history of Christian morality could have been, if we had only been taught this. It is balancing love of self with love of the other that makes for moral integrity, just as in true love making. It is holding my own boundaries, while also going beyond them for the sake of the other.

The issue, as the East and most Native religions have always intuited, is to seek harmony and balance instead of mere obligation and moral requirement. Most people would be willing to try that, whereas this "total selflessness" ideal only backfires and ends up ironically making many Christians actually quite selfish. Basically, they give up on the gospel, thinking it is asking them to be martyrs every minute.

Richard Rohr; From Wild Man to Wise Man, Reflections on Male Spirituality

Monday, January 22, 2007

Attachment

According to Buddhist psychology, most of our troubles are due to our passionate desire for, attachment to things that we misapprehend as enduring entities. The pursuit of the objects of our desire and attachment involves the use of aggression and competitiveness…These mental processes easily translate into actions, breeding belligerence. Such processes have been going on in the human mind since time immemorial, but their execution has become more effective under modern conditions. What can we do to control and regulate these “poisons”—delusion, greed and aggression? For it is these poisons that are behind almost every trouble in the world.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Experience

A king asked a sage to explain the Truth. In response the sage asked the king how he would convey the taste of a mango to someone who had never eaten anything sweet. No matter how hard the king tried, he could not adequately describe the flavor of the fruit, and, in frustration, he demanded of the sage "Tell me then, how would you describe it?" The sage picked up a mango and handed it to the king saying "This is very sweet. Try eating it!"

-Hindu teaching story

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Spiritual Current

WE EACH HAVE a spiritual current that runs through our lives—a river. Connected to that current, our work, our life, has power. I constantly ask myself: What is my relationship to that current? Am I letting it guide me or am I forcing my will upon my life? It is so easy to lose touch with that current. When I am connected, my life has a flow. The most amazing things happen. Help comes my way, I meet “fellow-travelers,” people whose energy supports mine, and we both come away reinforced. Doors open. Bills get paid. In a good month, I spend about a third of my time in that state of synchronicity.

When you turn your back on the current of your life, you are on your own. You are coming at life believing that you are strong enough, powerful enough on your own. The other way is to come at life from a place of humility.

Roderick MacIver

Monday, January 08, 2007

Mystery and the Marfa Lights

The line between mystery and the mundane is fairly thin. We live in a world of human construction, where mystery is relegated to the edges, and sometimes missing from the map altogether. Yet, in the larger world, especially in the world of nature, mysteries abound—meaning, those elements of reality that fall outside our explanations and normative conventions exist. I experienced one such mystery this week in West Texas.

I saw the Marfa lights this past week with my own eyes for the first time. I had heard about them, and from credible witnesses who had seen them, but now they are part of my own lived experience. Amazing! Twelve of us on a trip to the Davis Mountains drove to Marfa and after visiting the “must see” bookstore and the Judd modern art museum, went to the viewing location beside Highway 90 five miles West of town.

The sun had set, but it was quite light out. No sooner had we adjusted to the location and the direction of viewing, the lights appeared and continued in profusion throughout the next forty-five minutes and the deepening darkness.

Cast against a backdrop of low mountains twenty-five miles away, and an empty plain except for a lone railroad track, the globes of bright white (and sometimes red) light would appear alone or in groups, drift together, split apart, fade or wink out, and then suddenly reappear again. Sometimes they were as many as five-to-ten at once, sometimes one or two. Their intensity varied. They seemed to move about staying close to the horizon. At times they would blink on, appearing in the mountains, at other times they appeared to arise from the earth, but they were active, obvious and bright.

So what are they? Though scientific studies by various professionals and physics departments as well as the government have been made, there is no consensus. Some believe them to be an anomalous form of electro-magnetic energy, yet they continue to defy explanation. Known by the native peoples and the early settlers, they have been observed from airplanes as well.

We all went not expecting to see much. The sight overwhelmed our expectations as we burst into a chorus of exclamatory amazement. The world at times exceeds our conceptual norms. On the unassuming plains of West Texas, it pushed them to the edge and beyond.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Love and fear

"Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. To experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us."

Marianne Williamson

Monday, January 01, 2007

Prophetic Religion and the Personal Guide

We are inheritors of a prophetic religion in the tradition of Abraham. Typically the significance of this is lost on the average Jew, Christian, or Muslim—meaning that they simply follow a prophet or a messenger by convention—because they were born into it. The true significance of prophetic tradition, however, is that the universe we inhabit is full of an Active Agency, which awakens us and becomes our personal guide through the cosmos back toward “home.” Prophecy, therefore, is not about some event in the future, but about an unfolding in the present moment within our own being when the Guide shows up and we begin, personally, our own journey home under the influence of the Guide.

It is at that moment (that “new year” as a beginning point), that the content of any specific prophetic message becomes the very teaching that the Messenger brings into our own personal consciousness. When we “obey” the Messenger, listening to that guidance from within, then we have begun the journey home. “ … this is also the moment when the spiritual energy latent in this imperative allows the (person) of the Messenger to be ‘embodied’ in the personal form of the guide or Angel, at the horizon of (our own) inner vision” (Henry Corbin).