Thursday, July 31, 2008

Sacred pause

"I need to recover a rhythm in my heart that moves my body first and my mind second, that allows my soul to catch up with me. I need to take a sacred pause, as if I were a sun-warmed rock in the center of a rushing river.

– Dawna Markova

Bonhoeffer's Prophecy

In one of his last letters from prison, just before he was murdered by the Nazi regime, the Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote prophetically about the future of Christianity and the world. These are his words:

It is not for us to prophesy the day (though the day will come) when men will once more be called so to utter the word of God that the world will be changed and renewed by it. It will be a new language, perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming--as was Jesus' language; it will shock people and yet overcome them by its power. (Letter and Papers from Presion, 1967, p. 300)

That day may already be here, and my sense is that it involves the return of lost aspects of early Christianity and the non-dual, visionary seeing of Jesus, as well as the expression of that seeing in fresh, new poetic forms which also seem to be emerging in our day. Some of these are shocking to us because they come from other parts of the Abrahamic stream, while others come from the great body of Sacred Tradition which holds the world's treasury of traditional wisdom.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Consciousness and Yeshua--Part III

In the Axial Age, the Divine Reality is understood not just as a “super-being” in some far-off heaven, but primarily as Consciousness. For the prophets of the Abrahamic world that consciousness is a Presence understood as an immediate and personal “I Am” in the same way that each of us can say, “I am…” and know that we are engaged with another person.

When we think about consciousness, the deep awareness that makes us aware of ourselves as alive and present, we perceive it as being distinct and unique to each being who possesses it. There is “my consciousness,” and there is “your consciousness,” and they are different. We would say that each is “owned” by (or belongs to) each separate being, as though each person generates his or her own consciousness out of their own brains. We assume, of course, that there is similarity between us, but that consciousness itself resides individual and distinct “in” each person. That is our perception.

Yeshua appears to under it differently. For him, consciousness is something that he shares with the Father (Abba). Oneness is not simply the singularity of God (God is One and there is no other), but in the intimacy that he knows with the Divine, consciousness itself is shared—or is one. To say “I am,” then, is actually to experience the consciousness that is I AM. In other words, the sense of being an “I am” is a gift that does not originate in us, but flows through us. To finally know the true Source of one’s own sense of I am, and know that it is a shared experience with the divine—that in effect we are sharing the same I AM consciousness—is another breakthrough. It is, however, not only made in Christianity, in the awareness of Yeshua, but it is also made elsewhere, in Hinduism and Buddhism for example. It seems now, for the first time, to appear in the Abrahamic tradition in the awareness of Yeshua.

The same breakthrough can be made by any human being. Each of us can move from a position of being isolated in our own individual consciousness to the realization that we are aware because that gift of awareness is like an electric current flowing through us constantly, and that same current flows through and is shared by all sentient beings. This seems to be implicit in the teachings and prayer of Yeshua (John 17).

Monday, July 14, 2008

Immanence and Christianity—Part II

In the first post concerning “Christianity and the Axial Age” I briefly examined the primary revelation made to humanity during that extraordinary period of history (around 500 B.C.E). Christianity is a later manifestation of the revelation coming in Axial Age expressed in the Hebrew world through the Prophets. Yeshua’s teaching and insight extends that revelation, making available to every human person the Reality of that insight as a personal breakthrough.

The profound turn of understanding that occurs during this period makes Ultimate Reality truly transcendent to anything we might project upon the Divine as a “human form.” The gods are not merely “bigger version of a human being.” The Divine Reality is truly transcendent to us, breaking out of all our categories. Early Christianity, and certainly Yeshua agree, but the deep insight inside transcendence is the experience of immanence. It is an experience that was certainly known earlier. Witness the powerful prayers of the Psalms that speak of God as near, but Yeshua takes that insight and brings it even closer. He come to know this Ultimate, Transcendent Reality as a “Beloved Parent.” His word for it is Abba, a term of endearment and intimacy, and Abba dwells within, at the level of the heart. There one can commune deeply with what is utterly beyond us. It is a paradox, but it is nonetheless, true. Yeshua claims that he can lead us into such an intimacy, to the true heart-knowledge of the Father.

In the Christian development of the teaching stemming from the Axial Age, we are designed for intimacy with God. Everything in us and about us yearns for this deepest form of relationship. It is not a sentimental one experienced only at the level of our emotions. Instead, it is a deeply dialogical one at the level of heart, far deeper than the emotions, yet touching them.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Christianity and the Axial Age--Part I

Christianity, along with Rabbinic Judaism, and later Islam, is, as Karen Armstrong says in her new book on the Axial Age (The Great Transformation), a manifestation and extension of that earlier era. Each of these later faiths and revelations bring the vision of the Axial Age a step closer to the individual person. A person in his or her ordinary life, say these later traditions, can be influenced by the transformative power that was disclosed to humanity in the Axial Age. The insights of the Axial Age are meant for everyone, not just the seers and the prophets. This is their inherent message, cloaked often under creeds, doctrines and systems of belief, but nonetheless, offered to all.

I would like to examine some of the central, core issues and teaching found in the wisdom of Yeshua and the teachings of early Christianity in a series of posts. In this first post I want to outline what I feel are the key insights brought to humanity in the Axial Age which, in the Semitic world at least, are the gifts of the Prophets, and then carried forward and extended in new ways through Yeshua.

The key breakthrough concerns the Divine Reality itself. God is not a capricious, provincial God, belonging to a few (or a supreme "god" who has superior privilege over a pantheon of gods), the Ultimate Reality is transcendent beyond all categories, unnamable, beyond words, images and language, and yet present to all.

That Reality is a conscious Presence—a great I Am Presence that suffuses all things and is the Source of all. In Creation (Being) and yet beyond-all-Being, this Reality makes “the many” and is the inclusive Oneness in which all things continue to exist.

Everything that is flows out of this Reality, and nothing else than this can ever be. This is a visionary breakthrough into a mystical seeing that envisions the undivided wholeness of Reality, seen and unseen.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Heaven & Hell

Wherever the delusion of your selfhood appears — there's hell. Wherever "you" aren't – that's heaven.



-Abu Sa'id in Ibn Munawwar

Heaven & Hell

Wherever the delusion of your selfhood appears — there's hell. Wherever "you" aren't – that's heaven.

-Abu Sa'id in Ibn Munawwar

Monday, July 07, 2008

The Gabriel Tablets


The release of inscriptions from a three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing quiet a stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it appears to speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days. If this turns out to be an accurate rendering, and the date holds, this shows that the idea of resurrection did not come from Christianity per se, but was part of a larger, Jewish world of anticipation and thought. The Jewishness of early Christianity is more positively confirmed by this extraordinary finding.

link

Sunday, July 06, 2008

The Luminous Gospels


The very first week of this summer, and the opening of the Wisdom Schools here in Texas, saw the publication of The Luminous Gospels authored by myself, Ward Bauman and Cynthia Bourgeault. This has been a years' long project to finally bring into being a text that contains three of the early Oriental Christian Gospels: The Gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalene and Philip in a single volume. As part of a family of eastern (Oriental Christian) texts, these Gospels illustrate the stream of perennial wisdom that flowed from the teachings and tradition of Jesus; a stream that was subsequently lost or moved underground in the western worlds of dogmatic Christianity. These three Gospels live and breathe the world of images and imagining that come from the interior vision that formed in the Jewish, Semitic, Oriental worlds of the Christian East (East of Jerusalem). This volume of new texts invite us to begin a fresh dialogue with the roots of our faith that will balance the emphasis on exterior conformity to doctrine and creed in the West with the need to practice an interior realization of the singular Presence that is our true Source that was the vision of the East.

Copies of this text may be obtained from PRAXIS PUBLISHING online at praxisofprayer.com.

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Mindfulness

Feelings, whether of compassion or irritation, should be welcomed, recognized, and treated on an absolutely equal basis; because both are ourselves. The tangerine I am eating is me. The mustard greens I am planting are me. I plant with all my heart and mind. I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath. Nothing should be treated more carefully than anything else. In mindfulness, compassion, irritation, mustard green plant, and teapot are all sacred.

-Thich Nhat Hanh