Image of the Tree

In a book by a Jewish physicists, Gerald L. Schroeder, The Hidden Face of God, that was recently given to me, there is an image that is profoundly important concerning the Tree of Life which a Kabbalist, Nadine Shenkar, uses to describe our work and the analogical relationship between heaven and earth, matter and spirit. It is this:

A tree lifts its leafy branches toward heaven and embraces the blessing of rain. If we didn't know better, we'd expect that the rain enters the tree's leaves and fruit directly from above. It would seem that the growth was from the top down. But not so. The rains must first enter the ground, and only then can they carry nutrients to the leaves and the fruits. In this world, reality is rooted in the material. It flows from the bottom up.To reap the beauty of this world, we too must work from the bottom up. The spiritual must first enter the physical before life can flourish.

This image precisely describes a perspective within the Abrahamic traditions that says Spirit must be embodied before it can become realized. This is the essential feature of the traditional doctrine of the Incarnation in Christianity that we most often miss. Whereas western theology puts the emphasis upon the unique manifestation of Jesus in history, this teaching says, it is not uniqueness which is critical, but the continuous expression of "incarnation" that must be realized in every human being.

This Being Human

This thing called "being human" is indeed a strange, strange thing. I've been reflecting on time and its "bookends"--the one that we definitely know about (our birth date) and the one that is not yet apparent or known (our death date). Strangely, we human beings live with an awareness of both, and the time (our time on earth), is bracketed by both ends. Do the other creatures on earth live with this same realization? It seems not. Perhaps that is what makes us, in some ways at least, different and strange--even to ourselves.

An awareness of death and the "time before birth" is a very troubling awareness for us, if we pay any attention to it. Usually, I suspect, we push that awareness aside. But nonetheless, it is always there if we will but turn to it. Now if we believe that "beyond" the time-frame of space-time is actually something and not nothing, or absence, then we live in a religious milieu. If we believe it is simply nothing, non-existence, then, of course, we live differently--and one could not say that it is a particularly religious existence. So our awareness of death and what either follows it (or does not, as the case may be), determines how we live now, and that impacts us directly in how we perceive our lives and their purpose. This perception is an amazing thing to me. It changes the way we learn to live.

In this light, I am struck by one of Rumi's poems:

Separation from You threatened my life and was planning to kill me.
Time opened my eyes at last and I saw mself as an empty shell
standing in front of You.
I saw that, strangely, death is life for you
and that poverty and absence are wealth and abundance for you.
I saw that love never hesitates to draw blood
and that it has neither friends nor children.

Rumor of Angels

With the guidance of Tom Cheetham in his remarkable text, After Prophecy, I have been meditating on the role of the angelic realm, the presence of archetypes, and and the face of the Angel in our lives. It is an area not only of personal interest, but since it plays an important part in Yeshua's early teaching, it also constitutes a fundamental dimension which we have lost in contemporary Christianity. Here is my own paraphrase and rendering of one of his powerful passages on this subject.

There is something powerfully transhuman about the cosmic Face of the divine. It is the face of the sublime--the mysterium tremendum--and it is not without danger. In the Islamic tradition, the Names of God fall into two grand categories, the Names of Majesty and the Names of Beauty. The cosmic Face of the Angel (or archetype) is the Face of Majesty. It is not inhuman, as is the demonic, but it is trans-human, and far from the scope of our understanding.

The other Face of the Angel is more anthropomorphic: the Face of Beauty. But it is not the figure of the Angel that is the object of anthropomorphosis--it is us, we are the face of that Angel. At the roots of the Abrahamic faiths is the deep intuition that we are mde in the image of our Lord--that is the rumor of Angels. Only in secular society is it assumed that the relationship runs the other direction--we project God, and that God does not project us. The Angel as archetype is the divine projection and the face of beauty, which ultimately makes an encounter with another person so potentially powerful as to rupture the fabcric of human life (taken from 121).

Myth and the Prophetic Voice

If we think of the prophetic voice to be that which declares a reality other than the "common sense" of space-time, and which is typically expressed through mythic narrative, poetic speech, and iconic image, then the following quotes suggests why human beings, as Yeshua said, "cannot live by bread alone."

Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human culture.
--Joseph Campbell

Myth is the ark which carries the knowlede of what it takes to remain human, set loose upon the vast sea of time.
--William Sullivan

Beauty

And all those in love with beauty...

What can I do?
Amazing beauty just comes to me
and I'm left feeling dizzy and drunk.
So what can I do?
I used to be so devout and serious on this straight path,
but what can I do now that beauty
has given me its kiss?
--Rumi

Predictions on the Future

Many years ago the Club of Rome put out a statement about the possibility of future economic and ecological collapse. Though dismissed at the time, now it seems that we facing that possibility. This article is of interest.

link

Passages

This morning, as is my habit, I was working on the Psalms. A section of Psalm 31 which speaks so deeply and eloquently of the passages we make through the dappled shadowlands of life struck me. Our journey is one of import and poignancy. It leaves us with traces of the divine Presence all across the patterns of our lives.

Your good, O God, how great, how infinite it is,
a vast unbounded treasure,
it awaits all those who make their home in you.
For from the storms you take us in as refugees.
Your presence is a sheltered place
safe from the strife of human tongues.
I bless you God, for now I see the hidden face of love
which you have shown me even in my pain.
I was besieged and like a city in the midst of civil war,
in panic I cried out:
"I see nothing now. You've vanished out of sight!"
But you heard this desperate cry,
you answered my despair.
So to all I say, "God's love is never wasted, never fails."
God loves you first as guarantee for everything you are and have,
both good and bad.
Be strong of heart,
and wait in patience before the presence of your God.
(--Psalm 31:21-27 Ancient Songs Sung Anew)

Dilemma

Those who argue and discuss without understanding the truth are lost amid all the forms of relative knowledge, running about here and there and trying to justify their view of the substance of ego.If you realize the self in your inmost consciousness, it will appear in its purity. This is the womb of wonder, which is not the realm of those who live only by reason.Pure in its own nature and free from the categories of finite and infinite, Universal Mind is the undefiled wonder, which is wrongly apprehended by many.

-Lankavatara Sutra

Iconic Life

As pilgrims across the horizontal landscape of space-time, we are being summoned to an "iconic life"--to live as icons, not as egos. Egoic life is the polar opposite of iconic life, for an icon and an ego stand at opposite ends of the human spectrum.

An icon, as we know, manifests in visual form the essence of a person. Whereas an icon shines with it own unique inner light, which is the non-constructed and eternal nature that was present from its eternal origins, the ego is merely an externally constructed form made up out of the stuff of human society and manifest as the "mask" of its deepest nature.

To discover the icon in ourselves is the inner work required of us. It is our highest vocation to ourselves, but also the greatest gift we can ever give to one another.

The Green Man

There is a tradition that is universal around the world and it involves a mysterious figure that is known in both Europe and the Middle East as "the Green Man." His visage appears all over Europe, above doorways in churches, chapels and cathedrals. He is not as well known in the Americas, except by native people where he is called, Coyote, Raven, and Kocapelli. Very mysterious indeed. In Islam he is known as al-khidr, translated as the Green Man. But he has an even older name in the Hebrew tradition, Melchizedek. Rumi says of him:

There is no one like him in either world.
He's neither secretive nor open, neither up nor down.
He has no peer.
Every arrow is shot from his bow,
Every subtle word that has ever been spoken
Comes from his mouth.

We need to renew the work of this figure in our own lives. Yeshua calls him "the Paraclete," or Sacred Spirit. It is interesting how distant that term has become.

Reality

This is a short poem on Reality directly from the Persian text of Rumi. The original is beautiful and cannot be adequately translated, but the meaning is profound in any language.

Seek the art of loosening the knots.*
Quick! Before your soul leaves your body.
Leave behind that nothing that seems like reality.
Seek the reality that seems like nothing.

* Interestingly, one of the terms for forgiveness in Greek (apoluo) means to undo knots.

Yes We Can!

Leadership

I came across this quote in the recent issue of "Science News" (Oct. 25, 2008) which I subscribe to. It is from animal ecologist Hanna Kokko of Finland's University of Helsinki in response to a question and answer discussion held September 9th. I thought it had important implications not only for the vote occurring on this day across the United States, but also for all men and women in leadership, political or spiritual:

There is always an applied side to thinking deeply. In any society there are many complicated issues that unfortunately get simplified to the point where short-sightedness wins.... Science teaches us to think more broadly than that. If we really had wise leaders, they would take the long-term perspective seriously precisely because we are so prone to ignore it. They should listen to scientists and philosophers much more than economists who tend to be interested in what happens in the next annual quartile.

Spiraling Progression

We are familiar in our work with the concept of spiritual progression being helikos tropon (in the manner of a spiral), as the ancient traditions assert. But as helpful as this term is, there is more to it.

Let’s begin with the simple equation of balance. Spiritual traditions speak of the necessity of balancing “yin” and “yang” forces (positive with negative, masculine with feminine, etc.). It would be a mistake, however, to perceive such an achievement of balance as ever static or unchanging. Just as in nature or the physical body, such balances between opposing forces are always dynamic, ever changing and needing continual readjustments to the flux of energies within the inner and external environments and at work at every level of existence within temporality. In spiritual progression nothing stays the same or is static, it too is dynamic.

But there is a further element. Dynamic equilibrium is a spiraling movement. The continuous play of opposing forces in spiritual experience has the effect of moving the entity or person that experiences it forward in an ever expanding spiral in the direction of transcendence and its corollary, immanence (both up and down the vertical axis). This means, then, that the progression of spiritual awakening, growth and transformation is always open-ended in a “lively infinity” of possibilities. Maturity and transformation are not simply the integration of opposing forces achieved as a delicate balance, but a series of continuous “unveilings” into the always-new. The Kingdom that we yearn to know is not spherical and self-enclosed, but is itself open-ended, alive and growing in surprising ways as we enter and interact with it.

Believers

Much in made in the Christian faith of the term “believer.” Christians are often called “believers” (as are Muslims in their faith), because they have accepted Christian doctrine that Jesus as their Savior, for example. Aside from the fact that in the original language of the Christian faith (Greek), the term “believe” does not mean exactly what it connotes in English (to believe in something), but to come to trust someone or something, to have confidence in someone, and thus to act in a trusting way—the whole notion of “belief in” (and being a believer) is mute when we realize that trusting someone (believing in them) is not about a theology or a creed or a belief system of some kind, but comes because we know them (and not because we have heard about them, or have been told that we ought to trust in them because someone else says so).

In truth, the knowledge that saves us (saving knowledge, or salvation) can never come from believing things about someone (in God, or Jesus, for example), but only from knowing that person directly, individually and personally.

Lovers of God are, by definition, knowers of God by force of direct acquaintance. The knowledge that saves us is accomplished by the soul’s actual birth into and knowledge of the hidden realities of the spiritual world that are experienced on the inside, and not accepted as beliefs about something on the outside. The inner truth, known and experienced directly, is knowledge of the reality of the divine Presence as lover and as friend. It is therefore “individual” because it comes to consciousness in each person which brings about the spiritual birth of that person into the divine Reality. By definition, then, spiritual truths are salvational truths, because they mean that a person is a knower and lover (a gnostic in its truest definition) and not simply a believer.