Barak

Perhaps you did not know, but the name Barak comes from a Semitic root shared by both Hebrew and Arabic today. It means blessing, and is the word baracha (Hebrew) and baraka (Arabic) that is used all across the Middle East and in the Scriptures to speak of that blessing which flows from the divine Presence.

Rilke Again

Susan Cooper, from Calgary, sends this translation of the same Rilke poem posted below, but this time translated by Steven Mitchell. Compare and enjoy.

I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice
surging forth with all my earthly feelings?
They yearn so high that they have sprouted wings
and whitely fly in circles around your face.
My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
and stands alone before you: can't you see?
Don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe
upon your vision, as upon a tree?

If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star's vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time.

Gail Wiggin, from Connecticut, writes, "Rainer Maria Rilke is a new lover,"

I am, you anxious one.

Don't you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch?
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.
Can't you see me standing before you
cloaked in stillness?
Hasn't my longing ripened in you
from the beginning
as fruit ripens on a branch?

I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am that wanting:
I grow strong in the beauty you behold.
And with the silence of stars I enfold
your cities made by time.

Beyond Good and Evil

There is a place out beyond the limits of good and evil,
But this is no place for every young and naive novice.
For you, if you want to come there,
The price is to give up your life and sacrifice your heart.
--Rumi

The Soul of Suffering and the Human Condition

In his important text, After Prophecy, Tom Cheetham makes this extraordinary statement, “We are all idolators. One reason for this is that being human is the most difficult task there is” (24). He then goes on to build a case for this statement that rings true for our actual lived experience (sometimes our own individual personal experience, and certainly the lived experience of millions of human beings across this planet who struggle simply to survive). Closer to home, he says that “even a privileged life is full of confusion, pain, and suffering,” and that the lives of many of us are marked by unimaginable agonies. Why is this so? The answer, he says, is our strange disorientation.

The difficult task that we have is to exist along the horizontal axis without losing our way, but the fact is that we easily become disoriented. The word “orient” has a double meaning, of course. Obviously one is “East,”—the Orient (and is a noun), but the other has to do with direction and is a verb that indicates how we stand in and perceive the world (as when we say, “I got lost in that city, but was able to reorient myself.”). Suppose then, that spiritually speaking our inner orientation is designed to be toward the true “East” of our own being—the Source of Light, and without that inner sense of direction we become lost and confused.

Wisdom teaching makes this absolutely clear, the horizontal axis is a very confusing (dis-orienting) environment, and therefore it is a difficult task to live along it as a human being—perhaps the most difficult task there ever was. Think of it, here we are, and we are being asked to undertake this great difficulty. What makes it even more difficult is that the world around us is so insistent that this is the most important reality, if not the only reality. We wake up every day with its power surging all around us—offering us attractions, duties, privileges, and comforts that are all consuming. But the life we often experience is still full of pain, suffering, confusion and chaos. Cheetham explains,

The world is complicated in ways we can only dimly comprehended. Our best intentions cannot guarantee the consequences of our acts. It is so easy to become confused, disheartened, angry, and despairing, to feel abandoned, exiled, and homeless. It is easy to lose faith, to become at best an agnostic, at worst, a nihilist—and so then to become the poor, the maimed, the blind, and the lame.

It is obvious, then, that the only answer can be some kind of inner reorientation. I want to examine this process further in the next series of posts.

Hidden Treasure

God was aware of the Hidden Treasure--
the Beauty of the Divine Face
and so created the splendor of morning.
When the spirit awoke in that light, it said,
"To grasp God's beauty, you must become God."
So show me a house where the divine Light does not shine.
Show me a garden where the divine Grace does not bloom.

--Rumi

The Divinity Project—Part VI

There is at least one branch of western Christianity (the Orthodox Churches) who understood an essential revelation made to early Christianity. As old as this teaching is, as venerable and bedrock to early Patristic understanding, it still comes as a shock to most modern Christian ears—“God became human in order that humans might become God”. This phrase or something like it was repeated over and over in the early teaching of Christianity. It was called by another term that survives from that period of Christian history —theosis, meaning, divinization or deification. Let us be clear, what this originally meant is exactly as is stated here—literally. Human beings are meant to be (or become) divine beings, possessing all the same qualities, nature, and consciousness of God in full and without restraint.

This seems, perhaps, unbelievable to us now. How could this be? Aren’t we meant simply to be “like” God (or godly), but certainly NOT God? So in our later western dogmatic formulations we practice a form of theological reductionism, that diminishes the full blaze of this teaching down to something manageable and tame, instead of the robust, almost incomprehensible meaning that the early visionaries of Christianity saw.

In a blaze of light, they looked into the face of the Ascended One and saw that humanity is also being raised into the same light, the same place, the same reality as was Yeshua himself. He was paradigmatic for us—the model of what we are to become—fully God and fully human at the same time, abiding in such unity without confusion or contradiction.

This is the Divinity Project of early Christianity—to make this happen, to empower the process of such becoming, and to be the community of beings in which such a transformation is possible. Instead, we became an organization protecting our diminished theology of trying to being “like” Christ, but certainly not God or divine, and keeping that restriction severely under control by naming, later, such a doctrine a “heresy.” Yet it remained and remains to this day, the truth of early Christianity.

As Olivier Clement has said in his remarkable study of early Christianity (The Roots of Christian Mysticism):

”The human vocation is to fulfill one’s humanity by becoming God through grace, that is to say by living to the full. It is to make of human nature a glorious temple. ‘Do not forget that to live is glory,’ said Rilke on his deathbed. And it is a glory that overturns death, or rather, reverses it.” (and then quoting the early writers):

“The human being is an animal who has received the vocation to become God.” (Basil of Caesarea and quoted by Gregory of Nazianzen). “Every spiritual being is, by nature, a temple of God, created to receive into itself the glory of God. (Origen).

As intense and radical as this early teaching was, what we have received of it is not all there is to it. We must explore further.

Hauntings

These words from the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi have been haunting my thoughts as of late:

Know this well:
True lovers can never be devout Muslims
In the religion of love there is not room for faith
No room for heresy
No room for reason
No room for self, not even the soul.
Whoever does not know this
Is not a lover.

Hear this if you can:
If you want to reach the Beloved One
You have to go beyond yourself,
Beyond your words,
And when you finally arrive
At this land of absence
Be silent
Don't say a thing
For ecstasy, not words,
Is the language spoken there.

Santa Claus and Other Theological Tales

We tell tales to ourselves and to our children. Some of them are true (they conform to the complex reality of the world), but many are not. Recently I was listening to two of my grandchildren (ages 7 and 9) talking about Santa Claus, “Some people say that Santa isn’t real” one said, “its only our parents. Well, I believe in Santa Claus because mommy and daddy say he’s real and brings us presents at Christmas.” You could hear the children trying to work out the theology of a cultural myth.

I was struck by this conversation, but didn’t comment. Later, I reflected on that storyline and where it will eventually take my grandchildren, and the conundrum that will be created in them by such a tale. Sooner than later, they will know the truth—that friends and family are Santa, and they will have to adjust to a sense of betrayal and disbelief, and that they were allowed to live with an illusion. They will grow up, then, into more adult sensibilities.

So it is with contemporary religious language. We are given to believe time and again that “God will take care of you” (Like Santa). “Nothing bad can ever happen because God loves you…” It’s a fiction, of course. The “real world” and divine Reality is something quite different. In it, the Divine (as parent) indeed provides and cares, but also allows us to struggle mightily with evil, darkness, despair and tragedy. God is not Santa Claus, because love is not about our emotional security or comfort, but about our eternal maturity. We must grow past the fairy tale of God into the Reality of God, and that we ourselves are divine. And in the end, if there is ever to be a Santa (and there will be thousands of them), we are it—in a universe whose treasury lies everywhere.

Gnosis as Direct Knowledge

Direct knowledge—access to and the direct experience of something immediately present to us, is the form of knowing that is at the foundations of Yeshua’s teachings. It is a kind of knowing that is not propositional, but experiential. When Yeshua says, “The Abba and I are one,” he is not talking theologically or theoretically about a concept of non-duality. He is speaking about his own direct experience of knowing God from within.

Throughout his short life, Yeshua provided us with a model for knowing (or a way of experiencing) God that is the transformational knowledge that alters the network of connections between the microcosm within and the macrocosm of the universe itself (understood as Ultimate Reality).

It is this powerful form of knowing that is designated by the Greek word Gnosis found everywhere in both the early canonical and oriental Christian texts. Without this “wisdom way of knowing” (as Cynthia Bourgeault has said), we are without a true spiritual foundation on which to build and are left with only a doctrinal theory (or even an ideology) of what it means to be a follower of Yeshua.

Wisdom is a way of knowing that goes beyond one’s mind, one’s rational understanding, and embraces the whole of a person: mind, heart, and body. Bringing the human organism into balance, and … making use of an ancient body of knowledge about the physiology of spiritual transformation and a time-tested methodology for increasing our “receptivity to higher meaning” by systematically raising the level of our being.” (27).

Yeshua invites us to walk with him upon a path into this form of direct knowing. This is wisdom’s way, and the epiphanies of that internal vision, (the kardial seeing of that path) exceed the words that any theology gives to them. When theology forgets the difference between its own language and the direct experience of the soul, when it identifies its language with that of the knowing soul, then it cuts itself off from the direct knowing that is its proper domain, and “puts such knowing in its dogmatic pocket.”

Heresy and Orthodoxy

We in the West have highly prized “right-belief” as the definition of orthodoxy. In fact, for us, orthodoxy is right-belief. We have made it a litmus test of faith. If you believe the right thing, if you can give assent to the list of right beliefs in the Creeds, then you are a true Christian, and therefore, orthodox. If you cannot (or don’t) then you are a heretic—outside the boundaries of Christianity. It is a harsh arbitration and has been used for centuries as the means of defining Truth.

It is clear that, by this definition, Yeshua was never a Christian, and certainly not one in personal practice. And neither was he an orthodox Jew. In fact, it is clear that his own tradition treated him as an outsider, and called him “a heretic.” He was martyred for that very reason, “He makes himself equal to God!” (A heresy, of course).

Looking deeper we see that for Yeshua the crucial matter was never about “right belief,” in the first place, but right being and therefore, right action. He did not teach doctrines, nor did he correct people’s beliefs. But over and over again, he did seek to change both the actions and the inner being of his followers. To Nicodemus he says, “You must be born from above.” To another he says, “Go and sell all you have, then come and follow me.” Born, go, sell, and follow," are all verbs. Yeshua wanted inner and outer action, not correct beliefs.

It was the same for his brother James. In his letter, he calls right-belief without action, “dead.” In our current theology we have turned even this statement into a theological premise about right belief (faith versus works for salvation). But the point Yeshua and James are both making is that right action (not right belief)—the doing of something versus the belief about something is at the heart of change. You can believe things all day long, but if you never take them into your being and act on them, nothing will change. If you dare not break free from the confining rules of religious dogmatism and live the life of a heretic, then nothing is transformed.

In this sense the heretic loves Truth more than religion. The heretic seeks to be truer to his or her own inner vision than to the established religious order. How strange that this path to God often seems to be blocked or criticized by the very institution that claims to champion that Reality. The moment religion forms a fixed idea of a thing, and successfully catches at least one of its aspects, invariably it suffers from the illusion of having caught the whole. To be a follower of the Master, then, we must act (and live) like a heretic, if we are ever to reach the wholeness of the truth of Yeshua.

Religion

Religion is about the responsibility we have as humans to become aware of the part we play in bringing to greater awareness the God-image of the psyche. -- Robert Romanyshyn

Inner Orientation

A fundamental characteristic of being human is to become oriented toward some reality. We say, for example, “I am an American, or a Christian, or a Buddhist. I am straight or gay. I am a liberal, or a Republican.” All these are ways of orienting ourselves in this world—meaning, my conscious identity is toward something that gives me a center or grounding to my life.

If we look at the list above carefully, we will see that they are all external. Our orientation is toward something outside ourselves. External orientation is the norm for human beings living along the horizontal axis of space-time aqnd the world of social reality. It is the way we both see ourselves and ground ourselves.

Within the stream of wisdom Christianity flowing from Yeshua, however, there is an understanding about this issue that is quite different from the human norm. Yeshua speaks not of external orientation, but of inner orientation—toward something that lies at the center of one’s being instead of the periphery. One’s true “orient” is not external, but interior. It has nothing to do with the public space or time around us. In fact, external orientation is ultimately “disorienting,” because it takes us from our "true North," our Original Self. The essence of what it means to be a human being lies, therefore, within. Lacking inner orientation we become lost in the kosmos, the world of human making.

Once we find the center, and stand up out of this world at that center (as Yeshua says in the Gospel of Thomas), then the process of interiorization has begun where we find, not only our ground, but also our “original face”—the image of the divine which the first gift made to us.

But what about the outer world? Is it something that we must reject? Ultimately not. The outer world also has a soul, and an interiority. It has a deep meaning, and an inner essence, just as we do, but we can only know it when we begin the process of own interiorization. Once we know that interiority within ourselves, then we are ready to begin to know the world’s soul. In truth, “the human soul and the soul of the world are revealed as inextricably linked. A violation of either is a violation of both,” says Tom Cheetham (After Prophecy, 5). But, “the birth of the human person, and the revelation of the soul of the world are accomplished by a kind of ‘turning-inside-out’ of each, giving the outer world the interiority of the personal soul and the inner person the confident reality of the outer world” (5).

This is why Yeshua refers constantly to the priority of the inner reality over outer religion, interiority (the inside of the cup) over external appearance of any kind. This wisdom’s way of knowing—from the inside out.

Poetry and Technology

I used to think that it is the kind of knowledge pursued by science and technology that sets constraints and limits on us, that tells us what we can and cannot do, that gets to the hard-nosed, rock-bottom facts of the world; and I used to think that poets and artists inhabited a realm of unconstrained freedom of imagination. Poets, in this view, are the ones who flee from the harsh realities of the real world revealed by Reason, into the happy lands of fantasy and imagination.

I was wrong. It is science and technology that refuse nothing. For the dogmatists of secular rationalism, Knowledge is Power. There is nothing in the universe that cannot be, that should not be, unveiled. Nothing is inviolate.

And what of the poets then? They are the refusers. It is they who set limits, who disclose concrete, particular, and personal worlds. They speak to us out of intimacy. They are the guardians of the inviolate individual, of the mystery of the Person. (--Tom Cheetham, After Prophecy, 5).

Christianity and the Incarnation Project--Part V

Qualities of Heaven from the Source in God can be manifest through the instrument of a human consciousness that is turned toward and tuned to the divine Presence. This is the visionary seeing of Yeshua and the teaching of early Christianity. Human beings need not be barriers to these qualities, but their direct “site” in the temporal order. However, for this expression to become full and free something else must occur. These qualities must be embodied. This is the Incarnation Project that becomes central to Christian teaching.

Christianity’s central metaphor is Incarnation. This doctrine is well known in all forms of Christianity. In the West it becomes a formal doctrine and an established dogma that says once and for all time God became human in the person of Jesus Christ. He, and he alone, was the true Incarnation. Nothing like it before or since has ever occurred. This expresses the uniqueness not only of Christ, but of Christianity. It also demonstrates its superiority to other religious traditions. While expressing a truth, it is my view that this formal doctrine took the wrong path, and as a result, has made it almost impossible to recover the true doctrine of the Incarnation and the Incarnation Project that Christianity has at its center.

In the most real way imaginable the central project of Christianity is not the unique incarnation of the divine into one man alone, but the possibility of “embodied Reality” in all beings. Incarnation is a verb, which means the making real in an actual body the knowledge and reality of God. Christian truth is, therefore, embodied truth or knowledge—carnal knowledge that is enfleshed in a human being. For truth to be fully known, ultimately, it must be embodied and lived. This is the secret of Incarnation and it is a project for every one of us. The truth of the Incarnation is the way that God becomes known and realized in human affairs.

The Incarnation is, therefore, a shared project. What Yeshua experienced, every follower must know—true embodiment. That is Christianity’s secret. Humans can embody truth in just the way that Yeshua did. His path is to teach us embodiment and incarnation as a verb. He is not unique, though he may be the first to know it—for it is a shared reality and a reality to be share. A reality he makes come alive within each of us.

Christianity and Loving Presence--Part IV

If the insight that Yeshua is bringing forward is truly a profound teaching of non-duality (oneness) expressed in a Semitic way in the first-century world, then Yeshua, is truly (as Cynthia Bourgeault has recently said), one of the first non-dual teachers in the Abrahamic tradition. The Gospel of Thomas, of course, expresses these truths directly and openly in a manner that the other canonical Gospels do not.

Yeshua’s understanding is powerful and broad. It includes transcendence, immanence, Presence, and direct access to the I AM consciousness that fills and floods all things. We as human beings can know this conscious Presence that is ultimately transcendent to all things, directly, personally, intimately and immanently. As he says in John’s Gospel, “I pray, Abba, that they (my students) may be one, just as you exist in me and I exist in you, that they may also be one in us… I in them, and you in me, that they may be made perfect in oneness, so that the world may know that you have not only sent me, but have loved them, as you have loved me.” (John 17:20, 23)

It is a profound statement of prayer, expressing everything that matters to Yeshua. So, then, we reach another step in our understanding. Oneness is not just some private affair that is secretly known by the knower, but also becomes available in some way to the world around us. The world too begins to know. But know what? Here, in this prayer, the outer knowing is cast in the language of love, and love is a divine quality that this prayer says flows through the beings who begin to have such direct perception and access to it. Love is the side-effect of having an experience of union with the Divine Reality (the Source). But perhaps we could say that love does not “happen” (nor is it truly perceived in the world around us) if that active energy is not infused in us through direct experience.

The I AM Presence is not some abstraction. Like all presences that we know in one another, it is filled with qualities, aspects of being that are unique, gifts that are perceived and received by each of us (in this realm) from one another. All qualities are said to reside in that Presence, and these become available to the “lovers.” As we receive direct access, we also receive direct transmission of that which is always “more than ourselves”—those divine qualities that we “channel” through our own being into the world, and Love leads the list. This is a deep insight in the revelation made available to us through Yeshua. He spoke of it powerfully as being able to “overcome” in a world like ours where hatred and violence are often at the head of our list of human behaviors. The I AM Presence has impact through love and compassion as it comes to reside in us.

Living in the Now

We can never live in the past as if it were our true home…. And it is a good thing that God draws this veil over the past even without our asking. In so doing, He allows us to live today for tomorrow with just the few memories we need of what was.

-Karl Barth

Living in the present moment is always a challenge for me because I seem to spend a lot of time planning for the future-either mine or someone else's. Fortunately living in the past holds little temptation for me. My challenge is in figuring out how to live in the present while planning for the future!

The Distinction Between the Ego and the Person

At our most recent gathering in the Wisdom School in Minnesota, Helen Daly, one of its participants was concerned that we not overlook or demean the role of the ego in the overall structure of the human person. I agree with her, and find that "ego bashing" can sometimes be a sport that the spiritual community takes delight in--though without one, no one could "sport" at all. So what is the role of the ego, and how does it fit into the overall structure of the human person?

To be sure, the ego is the "narrow bandwith" of the human self that is limited to (and limits itself self-understanding to) the social conditioning and expectations of the world around it. We define and identify ourselves by our ego-structure. We need, however, the ego as the "manager" to act as the interface between the soul and the external world around it. As such, it is only a tool, and sometimes an ally. However, for the "tool" to become the whole show, and dictate to the "hand" that guides it (the higher and deeper Self) would, in the end, be counterproductive.

The Higher Self is the "broad bandwidth" of the human person that includes its own celestial archetype (in the parlance of the wisdom tradition). In this understanding the ego does not "reign supreme" but is only a servant to a greater Identity, the Identy of the Whole Person, that includes all the dimensions of a human being. At the heart of reality is the entire Person with its many dimensions (including the ego-as-servant), but with the "master control" being in the hands of something far larger and higher than the ego itself. That entire Person is the concrete and not abstract individual, the unique gift the divine has made to the fullness of creation and to the entire Body, which is the Completed Human whose crown is the Anointed One.