Labyrinth

This beautiful images comes to us from artist and photographer, Diane Walker in Washington State.

Heresy or Self-Deception

This comes from Bill Woosley.

“…self deception is the chief source of corruption in religious thinking, more deadly than error. Hypocrisy rather than heresy is the cause of spiritual decay. ‘Thou desires truth in the inwardness’ of man (humanity).” (Psalm 51:8)

--Abraham Heschel

Christians are the Most Human People

Christians in their relationships should be the most human people
you will ever see. This speaks for God in an age of inhumanity and
impersonality and facelessness. When people look at us, their
reaction should be, "These are human people" -- human, because we
know that we differ from the animal, the plant, and the machine;
and that personality is native to what has always been [human]. If
they cannot look upon us and say, "They are real people", nothing
else is enough.
... Francis A. Schaeffer, "The God Who is There"

Practical Enlightenment

We often think of Enlightenment in passive terms, as a passive affair, a future event for which we must wait. God or Spirit or Divine Mind will enlighten us when we’re ready. Until then, we must be patient, that’s all that we can do. This approach to Enlightenment denies the deepest insights of the Abrahamic traditions.

The notion that we cannot do anything about becoming enlightened beings is, in fact, in opposition to everything that the Abrahamic faiths teach. The truth is, we are given the task of doing everything about it. The insights of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are: Enlightenment comes through embodiment. One must embody Light (incarnate Light) to become enlightened. Or to say it in the way that the Christian Scriptures state it: we must learn to “Walk in the Light” in the same way that God is in the light (I John 1:7).

Walking, of course, is not a passive act. It is a deliberate act of conscious will. We choose to get up and walk somewhere. We are not being carried into Light; we are walking into and by Light. To become Light one must “do” Light. To be God one must “do” God (who is Light). One must act like God to become God-like. As an example, to become a master of the violin one must play the violin, and playing is not a passive activity.

And what is the “play” of God and of Light? The answer is fairly direct: God is (Light is)—the primordial Source, the generosity that never stops giving, humility and the strength to yield, compassion, grace, patience, unconditional love, truth, loyalty, complete dependability, forgiveness, tolerance, restraint, kindness, releasing, letting go, and holding no grudges. These (and many other qualities) are the essence of God and of Light. To become them one must do them. By doing them one begins to embody them and embodying them one becomes them. This is called "Practical Enlightenment."

The Basis of Religion

It is in love that religion exists and not in ceremony-in the pure and sincere love in the heart. Unless a man is pure in body and mind, his coming into a temple and worshipping Shiva is useless. The prayers of those who are pure in mind and body will be answered by Shiva, and those who are impure and yet try to teach religion to others will fail in the end. External worship is only a symbol of internal worship, but internal worship and purity are the real things. Without them, external worship would be of no avail.

-Vivekananda

Convergence

We often hear that there is a perfume to Divinity -- that in fact, our hearts are attracted and we are pulled towards God as if by an irresistible fragrance. The evidence suggests that He is a master strategist, always seeking new ways to capture our attention. Well, those of you who found yourselves at Easter's altar rail with functioning olfactory senses may have noticed a certain something along the lines of "Holy Smoke, Kapowey and by-George-How's-About-Those-Lilies!"  Interestingly, we learn that in nature, the fragrance of flowers serves real purpose. At its simplest, it tells insects two things: that food is available nearby and, that there's a real possibility of snagging a mate at the same time. This is good news for the bee. Wonder if it works the same way for us. We enter a room and catch a whiff of something, our eyes instinctively looking for its source. When they make contact with, say, a potted lily, we go to it straightaway. If no one is looking, perhaps we thrust our noses deeply into its embrace and emerge betrayed by a telltale yellow dusting from its anthers. Perhaps as with the bee, perfumed flowers call out to us, "Come closer. There is Nourishment and Love nearby. Yes, God is. Here. Now."

Admit something: 

Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me." 

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise 

someone would call the cops. 

Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. 

Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye 

that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, 

what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?        - Hafiz

Wisdom's Practical Goals

- Transmission of wisdom outside dogma
- Independent of words and the rational mind
- Pointing directly to the heart
- Seeing one's True Self
- Attaining our Logocentric Nature

Reincarnation

Artist: Sharon Grimes

Gethsemane

The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.
Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.
The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.
Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did, maybe
the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn't move,
maybe,
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.
Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.

~Mary Oliver, from her collection of poems, "Thirst"

Descent into Light

The statements, “The way up is the way down” (and its converse, “The way down is the way up.”), serve to illustrate the paradoxes and mysteries of travel and exchange along along the vertical axis. As practitioners of traditional wisdom we are invited to learn the mysteries of ascent into darkness and descent into light. It seems contrary, perhaps, but as we saw in the last contribution, darkness is only a word to describe the human mind’s inability to grasp the divine essence in its totality.

While the mind “goes black” in unknowing as one ascends beyond its capacities into God, the heart becomes light as one descends deeply to rest in the stillness of its own intimate spaces. There in communion one tastes the mystery of essence as Presence. As T.S. Eliot expressed this paradox in the Four Quartets “The darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.”

The deep interiority that is the heart is (to borrow a word from modern physics) “non-local.” It does not exist in space-time as such, but participates in and is entangled with the Heart of Ultimate Reality. The two (the human heart and the divine heart) share the same “space”--they are expressions of the same reality.

It is in that space that one comes to know both “light” and “dancing” (light in the darkness and dancing in the rest). The Presence of God is hidden in that secret place that is invisible to the mind’s eye (the eye of reasonable and rational knowing) but experienced in the heart, and it is descent into this hidden chamber that a soul is introduced to the imaginal dimensions of Paradise and to the hierarchy of the presences that inhabit it in worlds that unfold as “light upon light.”

Ascent into Darkness

We must ask ourselves, where does a human being meet God? And the answer has to be, not ultimately in or with the human mind, but in the darkness. This is called “apophatic knowing,” knowing through darkness which is not the absence of God, but the experience of full Presence.

It is hard, perhaps, to imagine that the word darkness could mean anything other than annihilation and death. But in terms of the deepest sapiential teaching, it means something that is quite opposite. To ascend into the darkness is not a descent into disintegration, but to transcend the “lesser lights” of human reason and understanding, and to move into the mystery beyond our capacity to grasp God intellecutally but to experience the “dazzling darkness of God.”

One cannot grasp God (for God is, by definition, beyond the human mind), but one can experience God by moving into that Presence beyond the visible and reasonable into the invisible “Cloud of Unknowing” where human consciousness meets the divine Consciousness as one living Presence. It is there, beyond human forms of cognition, that we enter the invisible Cloud of Divine Consciousness to discover, as Gregory of Nyssa once said, “the dark obscurity where God is.” One cannot call this ascent into darkness anything else but communion with God, which is not some seizure of God by the mind, but the deepest of relationships between living persons. It is here, paradoxically, in the depths of the heart, that one ascends into the sanctuary of divine darkness which becomes the passageway, called resurrection, from death into life.

The Tzaddik

As we enter the “season” of Holy Week, it is hard sometimes to get past the trauma of Yeshua’s martyrdom and the subsequent theology of the atonement as it has been taught in the West to the heart of the matter understood in a different way.

Rabbi David Cooper in his Ecstatic Kabbalah makes the case that the defining principle of a Tzaddik (that is a Righteous One because he or she is inwardly aligned to the Divine and therefore in right-relationship) is

the choice and willingness to take on suffering in a way that will relieve others. Whenever anyone is able to bring clear awareness to one’s own pain in a situation and is able to say, “May my pain be such that it helps at leas one other person to be free of such pain,” we have achieved a level of consciousness that is identified with a tzaddik (63).

Although we honor martyrdom, the acts of a tzaddik, must be seen to occupy a higher level of conscious compassion because he or she is, as Cooper says, “the living representative of the heart of compassion. This state of being can only be accomplished when one has vanished into Presence and there is no longer a separation of oneself from all of humanity” (63), nor, perhaps it should also be said, from God.

Yeshua’s consciousness was clearly that of a tzaddik in its full meaning within this understanding of Judaism. And (as also understood within Judaism), his work must be seen to be one of restoration (tikkun) as a primary acts of conscious self-sacrifice for the good of all. As in the Buddhist tradition of the bodhisattva, the work of the tzaddik is to mend and restore the human self, the world, and ultimately the manifest “face of God” to the harmonic levels of completion and balance (78). This fundamental state of consciousness and its ultimate outcome, in solidarity with all who have brought compassionate self-service to the world, is what we remember as we enter Holy Week.

Water from the Stream

C. G. Jung tells this story:

There is a fine old story about a student who came to a rabbi and said, "In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. Why don't they any more?" The rabbi replied, "Because nowdays no one can stoop so low." One must stoop a little in order to fetch water from the stream.