Action and meditation

In dark night live those for whom the world without alone is real; in night darker still, for whom the world within alone is real. The first leads to a life Of action, the second to a life of meditation. But those who combine action with meditation cross the sea of death through action and enter into immortality through the practice of meditation. So have we heard from the wise.

- Isha Upanishad

The Chosen

I have been reading through the Gospel of Thomas once again, and each time I do I make new discoveries—or, perhaps its better to say, Thomas “unveils” itself to me in some new way. Reading this time, among other things, I noticed how the word “chosen” is used quite frequently and in such interesting ways.

For example, in Logion 23, Yeshua says that he chooses us from a multitude, and the choice is made in order that we might stand, like him (L28), on our own two feet, single and whole. It is a choosing for a purpose. If you’re a follower of Yeshua, then the Master has one purpose for the choosing—a mind, a will for you.

Then, in Logion 49, a beatitude is spoken… any who is chosen and unified (becoming single and whole) already possesses the Realm of the Kingdom. So this awareness is experienced in a state of knowing that comes from an actual process of unification (the healing of the split in duality) that has occurred. Perhaps, also, this is a choice we participate in. It is our choice that makes this happen.

More importantly, though, there seems to be another choice having been previously made, and this is suggested in Logion 50, about finding ourselves “here” and “where we came from” and “how we got here.” It is clear from a reading of this text that there is a progression: we came from “out of the Light at its source” into manifestation as Icon or Image, and then we are somehow “chosen” for something more, and find ourselves here learning to manifest “movement and rest” as a complimentary opposite.

So the point seems to be this: if you find yourself in space-time learning to do this, then you were “chosen” for space-time and for this learning. A choice was made that you might come here for this crucial, vital learning.

Three kinds of choosings, all related but a part of an eternal unfolding in time in which we are embroiled.

Mystery and Metaphysics

Sometimes its important to be reminded that our individual and particularized experience of life here in space-time is but a tiny sliver of the total experience of Transcendence which lies at the core of our deepest existence. By that I mean, our present awareness, though real in its own way, is a dimmed light of consciousness. The Fullness of Consciousness can hardly be spoken, but to remind us, there are the works of the great metaphysicians of Spirit, among them Meister Eckhart in Christianity, Ibn al-‘Arabi in Islam, and Shankara in Hinduism. A contemporary writer, Reza Shah-Kazemi has written a text comparing these three thinkers called Paths to Transcendence. In it he writes to remind us of the Transcendent ground of our being in words that are hard to grasp, but “true food” nonetheless. Here is a sampling:

To say “transcendence” is to say “union”; a union in which consciousness persists, but in a mode which nullifies the individual condition. If consciousness itself were nullified, then the mystics would not be able to assert that duality was in fact transcended; and if the individual condition is not nullified, the claim to have attained the degree of absolute transcendence is undermined.

According to Eckhart: if there is to be a true union, one of the two agents so unified must lose its “whole identity and being”—failing which there will be “united-ness” but not union; this crucial point must be seen in connection with the claim … that he “breaks through” in his “return” to the Essence, for it is there—and there only—that … the “whole identity and being” of Eckhart as individual is lost, and what is found is transcendent identity and being in and as the Godhead: the identity attained is so completely one that Eckhart is able to claim, again most elliptically, that he “begets his begetter.” (205).

This language is just at the edge of “thought,” but it represents something of Yeshua’s own words that “I and the Father are One,” and anyone who follows him, Yeshua says, must, in the end, “lose” him or herself. Yeshua was also speaking “on the edge of language.”

A Tree Full of Angels

All summer long we have been working on imagination and the imaginal. In English the word imagination has multiple meanings, but the way we were using it in our summer's work was to focus primarily on our ability to "play with images." At the various wisdom schools and academies the question was on how we do this using the earliest and original images found in our sacred texts. Playing with images is a distinctly different activity than analyzing words or ideas rationally. One is a kardial function, and the other is a logical function. Using the heart we can begin to extract truth from images. We can move dimensionally "higher" than the rational mind not only to detect truth, but to ingest so that it becomes soul-food.

This morning I was "taken" by the word-pictures in Logion 20 of the Gospel of Thomas where the students ask Yeshua to describe the Realm (Kingdom) of the Heavens. He does so by using a series of images. He says that the Kingdom is like a tiny seed being placed into prepared soil which then grows up into a great tree able to shelter the birds of the sky. Its an innocent enough image until you see that "heavens" and "sky" (cognate words in Coptic) are talking about the same realm (transcendent to earth) and that the "birds" may in fact be the "birds of heaven" which, using the imagination, are more likely its winged messengers. So imagine that in us, the divine seed comes to rest and then as it grows out of the ground of being here, it moves vertically until it becomes a habitat for Angels.

Could our own soul-work contain such possibilities? Using our capacity to "play with these images" what would it mean to us?

Reality

As for those who seek the transcendental Reality, without name, without form, contemplating the Unmanifested, beyond the reach of thought and of feeling, with their senses subdued and mind serene and striving for the good of all beings, they too will verily come unto me.

- Bhagavad Gita