Ah, not to be cut off!

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner -- what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Centering Prayer

Centering prayer in the Oriental Tradition is focused on the heart. Indeed, a prime component has to do with the necessary detachment from the periphery of human consciousness (kenosis) and then moves inward toward an attentive watchfulness that is deeply aware at the level of the heart. The wisdom that is gained through detachment is balanced with the extraordinary experience of Presence that is not simply empty, but full. Kardial fullness is a characteristic of centering prayer in the Oriental Tradition. But what does that mean? Two quotes powerfully illustrate this experience. The first is from St. Hesychios and found in the Philokalia, Vol. I, and the second is from the text of the Masnavi and Rumi’s deep insight into centering prayer.

A heart that has been completely emptied of mental images gives birth to divine, mysterious intellections that sport within it like fish and dolphins in a calm sea. The sea is fanned by a soft wind, the heart’s depth by the Holy Spirit (190).

As I enter the solitude of prayer, I put matters before God, for only God knows. That is my prayer-time habit, to turn and talk, and that’s why it is said, “My heart delights in prayer.” Then through such purity a window opens in my soul, and God’s messages come immediately to me. Through that window the Word, the rain, and the Light all pour into my inner room from their gleaming Source. Hell is the room in which there is no window. The goal of all prayer is to open that window (Book 3:2400-4)

The Blessed Ones

We are troubled, perhaps, by the strange and counter-intuitive saying of Yeshua in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are those who mourn.” Equally difficult may be the injunction that whoever does not take up his or her cross and follow the Master, is not fit for the Kingdom of the Heavens. This last statement is weighed down with the theology of the atonement that insists we are all sinners, estranged from the divine by virtue of our very being, and that the only cure is to accept the blood sacrifice Jesus made on the cross as the way back to redemption. Together these two phrases may press heavily against us and into some perpetual state of remorse for being who we are, and justly so. There is, however, a different way of reading these things suggested by Pemo Chödrön in her work, The Wisdom of No Escape about not preferring Nirvana (escape from suffering) to Samsara (the experience of suffering).

She quotes Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun [Nirvana]. Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.

Then she herself goes on to say:

I was struck by [this] because when I read it I realized that I myself have some kind of preference for stillness. The notion of holding the sadness and pain of samsara in my heart rang true, but I realized I didn’t do that; at best, I had a definite preference for the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. My reference point was always to be awake and live fully, to remember the Great Eastern Sun—the quality of being continually awake. But what about holding the sadness and pain of samsara in my heart at the same time? The quotation really made an impression on me. It was completely true: If you can live with the sadness of life (what Rinpoche often called the tender heart or genuine heart of sadness), if you can be willing to feel fully and acknowledge continually your own sadness and the sadness of life, but at the same time not be drowned in it, because you also remember the vision and power of the Great Eastern Sun, you experience balance and the completeness joining heaven and earth, but really they are already joined. There isn’t any separation between samsara and nirvana, between sadness and the pain of samsara and the vision and power of the Great Eastern Sun [the Kingdom of Heaven]. One can hold them both in one’s heart, which is actually the purpose of practice. As a result of that, one can make a proper cup of tea.

One can also live properly bearing in this world the “cross-beams” of heaven and earth, which is the burden of the Master of spiritual life in the tradition of Yeshua. This is also the full support of the oneness of All Things, about which he spoke and taught so eloquently—and thus, “Blessed (in fact) are all who mourn.”

On Throwing Spiritual Weight

I am convinced that we play an inner, hidden role in the wheel of cosmic change. We are at a moment of just such a shift, and it is momentous. With the election and inauguration of Barak Obama not only has the political landscape changed dramatically, but there is change on other fronts and at different levels almost everywhere we look.

Prayer is the ability to “throw one’s spiritual weight” in a particular direction. If ever we needed to do this heavy lifting, it is now—at just this moment, when things everywhere are critical and yet the possibilities are open, if briefly.

We can throw spiritual weight in prayer, I am convinced. It makes a difference, and conscious intention is just such weight that also has the energies of Spirit behind it. I think particularly, of the Middle East. The world there is in tatters, but there is spiritual intention to change things. If you have the sense of it, then throw your weight there, at the very least—and everywhere else that your heart speaks.

I Am

I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
and who will remain standing when I die.

Juan Ramon Jimenez

Transcending Duality

There is perhaps no more compelling (and perplexing) saying the Gospel of Thomas than Logian 22. In it Yeshua declares that the one who is able to make two become one (the inside like the outside, the outside like the inside, the higher like the lower—so male and female are no longer two separate entities, but a single whole, and in addition, a (new) hand emerges from the old, a new foot as well—one superseding the other) may enter the Divine Realm holding the heavens. These strange images suggest, at the very least, that Ultimate Reality transcends duality in a higher unity.

For the followers of Yeshua’s teachings, these images raise some practical questions: How does such a transformation occur, and can it be done here in this place, and now in this time?

It may be hard to imagine the answers, but perhaps such a transcendence entails something we might call “convergence” and also some form of “sacred androgyny.” I have been thinking about these two terms a lot recently. Sam and Sally Roberts gave me a book for Christmas by Daniel Pink called, A Whole New Mind. In it he reports that when tests of masculinity and femininity given to young people today, again and again the findings report that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their peers. According to one psychologist “A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses and can interact with the world in terms of a much richer and varied spectrum of opportunities (136).”

I found that statement interesting in light of the one made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge two hundred years ago that “great minds are androgynous.” Could it be that Yeshua is describing a new state of being in a whole new kind of human being where not only has the form changed, but the inner state has as well?

Convergence

Watching the inauguration of Barak Hussein Obama yesterday reminded me over and over again that we, in fact, may be experiencing a living laboratory of “convergence.” Polarities and dualities (left and right, black and white, conservative and liberal, East and West) are being transcended not by syncretism that destroys difference, but by convergence that recognizes their completion. Opposites are understood and accepted, but they need not become barriers to something else, something new, something higher in form.

What we see happening all around us is the capacity of people to joyously transcend old divisions for something new that recognizes “higher ground.” When we remain rooted to our old perceptions, it seems impossible, but when we move vertically, we see from a whole new perspective—we see the connections and the possibility that the divisions caused by being stuck in “flatland” are overcome by a new position and perspective that allows a new way of being to emerge.

Something like this may be occurring not only politically, but spiritually. Religious viewpoints that once seemed to be completely opposed, may now be seen as completions of a larger whole. This is the meaning of convergence. There are the opposites of black and white in the description of yin and yang, and then there is the single image of the whole circle which contains them both as a kind of harmonic convergence.

Meeting Mara

That which stops you becomes your god - Gurdjieff

For God has shut up all in disobedience so that He may show mercy to all -- Romans 11:32

Very often one of the things that one learns... is that the labyrinth, which blocks, is at the same time the way to eternal life. This is the final secret of myth - to teach you how to penetrate the labyrinth of life in such a way that its spiritual values come through -- Joseph Campbell

In Buddhist cosmology, Mara is the figure that mirrors the character of Satan in the West. He is the metaphor for all that blocks and serves to confuse the Buddha. Unknown to most of us, Mara not only confronts the Buddha on the night of Gotama's enlightenment, but continually arises throughout the life of the Buddha and is even in attendance at the Buddha's death. Each time Gotama met Mara, a basic refrain was used. "I know you Mara." From the perspective of the Paschal Mystery, the cruciform pattern is the same. We each meet and know Mara, hanging between the good and the bad, and we each are redeemed as we redeem.

Aging Body, Ageless Soul

To our egos, change is scary. "The kids have grown up." "My friends have started dying." "My body seems to have a lot more fat on it." "I'm forgetting things lately." What we're sensing is our lack of control over our universe at that moment, and if our identities are based on identification with all the stuff around us, then a threat to any of it is a threat to our existence, and so change becomes something to avoid at all cost. And yet change is inevitable. Interesting predicament.
It turns out that the solution to the problem of change is yet another change. But what we're changing this time is who we see ourselves to be. That is, we don't have to go on clinging to the past, buying into a cultural myth of The Youthful Me, hanging on to who we used to be. We don't have to go on identifying ourselves with that being who's changing, seeing the aging process through those eyes. If we can just quiet down and look a little more deeply, we see that right behind the identity that's so caught in the story line there is... someone else. Just behind all that drama is a place of mindfulness, a place of the witness. It is a part of us that is purely equanimous, that's just watching the whole story unfold. That's what I'll call the soul.

Ram Das

Praying the Psalms

I recently returned from a gathering in Seattle where we explored together the ancient songbook of the Hebrew peoples, the Psalms. For many people they are at once beloved and perplexing. The sense of them is that they are "uneven," at one moment exalted and expressing the best in the human heart as prayer, and at another expressing the worst of religious sentiment. Both are true, but perhaps for reasons that we may not completely understand--because that is the truth of things, not just for religion in general, but for each individual in particular. We are perplexing beings.

If we saw the Psalms as a kind of spiritual archaeology--a layering in the "tel" of human experience where we could go back and discover upon what the "city of God" is built, it might be a wondrous exploration. Perhaps, even more personally, we could look at the Psalms as layerings that lie buried deep inside of each of us. In that way we "rediscover" the foundations of our own prayer and praise. We are encouraged to pray the Psalms, not as history, but as we might pray our own memories and dreams.

The Quiet, Hidden Chamber

If we want to hear something we must prepare ourselves to perceive by being still. If we ourselves are talking, or if our own thoughts, wishes and concerns are speaking within us, the noise they make will render us unable to hear. Hence directions for meditating always begin by requiring us to create inner stillness and emptiness as a means of making room for what is to be received. Mention is made of "turning off," of "concentrating" the scattered consciousness, of entering upon the "mysterious path inward" and so forth. It would, however, be reasonable to doubt that such efforts, in their mere negativity, belong to that positive readiness to listen that distinguishes Christian meditation from other kinds in which this readiness is superfluous because no Word comes from God.

The silence required of the Christian is not fundamentally and primarily of human making. Rather, believers must realize that they already possess within themselves and at the same time in God the quiet, hidden "chamber" into which they are to enter (Matt. 6:6) and in which they are with the Father...

Our earthly cares and preoccupations are always on the lighter side of the scale, while the other, which sinks and is just as much ours--our being in God--possesses an "unimaginable weight" in comparison (Cor. 4:17). We need not first pave for ourselves an approach to God on our own; already and always "our life is hidden with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3). Accordingly, preparation for meditation does not first necessitate lengthy psychological adjustments but only a brief realization in faith of where our true center and emphasis permanently are. We seem to be far from God, but he is near us. We need not work our way up to him. Instead, our situation is like that described in the parable: "From a distance the father already saw him coming and was moved with pity. Running up to him, he threw his arms around his neck and kissed him" (Luke 15:20). And the son's rehearsed speech--"Father, I am not worthy to be called your son. Regard me as one of your day laborers"--is rendered useless by this gesture of the father, who calls into the house: "Quick, fetch the best garment and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet."


Hans Urs Von Balthasar
Swiss Roman Catholic Theologian

Peace of Mind

I have been blessed and strengthened by the work and writings of four contemporary Jewish sages in particular. One I know personally, Rabbi Rami Shapiro. The second is Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, the third is Rabbi Arthur Green, and the fourth is Rabbi David Cooper. Each of these have greatly expanded (and sometimes exploded) my understanding of historical and contemporary Judaism--a great gift. Recently Rex Spear sent me another extraordinary text from David Cooper's work, Ecstatic Kabbalah. I would like you to hear just a small section from this wonderful text:

Peace of mind does not result from the attempt to control our lives. In fact, it is just the opposite. It comes from the wisdom that is illuminated when we learn how to relax in a way that allows us to "be with what is." In our practice, we learn how to engage in something when it is appropriate and how to disengage as well. Peace of mind comes from recognizing how one fits into the scheme of things, the degree to which all life is interconnected, and the realization that nobody is ever alone (15).

The Messiah

I want to share with you a wonderful story about a monastery that had fallen upon hard times. Although once a great order, waves of anti monastic persecution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the rise of secularism in the nineteenth, decimated its membership to the extent that there were only five monks left in the decaying mother house: the abbot and four others, all over seventy in age. Clearly it was a dying order.

In the deep woods surrounding the monastery there was a little hut that a rabbi from a nearby town occasionally used for a hermitage. Through their many years of prayer and contemplation the old monks had become a bit psychic, and they could always sense when the rabbi was in his hermitage. "The rabbi is in the woods, the rabbi is in the woods again," they would whisper to each other. As he agonized over the imminent death of his order, it occurred to the abbot at one such time to visit the hermitage and ask the rabbi if by some possible chance he could offer any advice that might save the monastery.

The rabbi welcomed the abbot at his hut. But when the abbot explained the purpose of his visit, the rabbi could only commiserate with him. "I know how it is," he exclaimed. "The spirit has gone out of the people. It is the same in my town. Almost no one comes to the synagogue anymore." So the old abbot and the old rabbi wept together. Then they read parts of the Torah together and quietly spoke of deep things.

The time came when the abbot had to leave. They embraced each other. "It has been a wonderful thing that we should meet after all these years," the abbot said, "but I have still failed in my purpose for coming here. Is there nothing you can tell me, no piece of advice you can give me that would help me save my dying order?"

"No, I am sorry," the rabbi responded. "I have no advice to give. The one thing I can tell you is that one of you is the Messiah.

When the abbot returned to the monastery his fellow monks gathered around him to ask, "Well, what did the rabbi say about our dilemma?"
"He couldn't help," the abbot answered. "We just wept and read the Torah together. The only thing he did say, just as I was leaving was that the Messiah is one of us. I don't understand what he meant."

In the days and weeks and months that followed, the old monks pondered this and wondered whether there was any possible significance to the rabbi's words. The Messiah is one of us? Could he possibly have meant one of us monks here at the monastery? If that's the case, which one? Do you suppose he meant the abbot? Yes, if he meant anyone, he probably meant Father Abbot. He has been our leader for more than a generation. On the other hand, he might have meant Brother Thomas. Clearly Brother Thomas is a holy man. Certainly he could not have meant Brother Elred! Elred gets crotchety at times. But come to think of it, even though he is a thorn in people's sides, when you look back on it, Elred is virtually always right. Often very right. Maybe the rabbi did mean Brother Elred. But surely not Brother Phillip. Phillip is so passive, a real nobody. But then he does have a gift for somehow always being there when you need him. He just magically appears by your side. Maybe Phillip is the Messiah. Of course the rabbi didn't mean me. He couldn't possibly have meant me. I'm just an ordinary person. Yet supposing he did mean me!? Suppose I am the Messiah? 0h God, not me. As they contemplated in this manner, the old monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one among them might be the Messiah.

Because the forest in which it was situated was beautiful, it so happened that people still occasionally came to visit the monastery to picnic on its tiny lawn, to wander along some of its paths, even now and then to go into the dilapidated chapel to meditate. As they did so, without even being conscious of it, they sensed this aura of extraordinary respect that now began to surround the five old monks and seemed to radiate out from them and permeate the atmosphere of the place. There was something strangely attractive, even compelling, about it. Hardly knowing why, the townspeople began to come back to the monastery more frequently to picnic, to play, to pray. They began to bring their friends to show them this special place. And their friends brought their friends.

Then it happened that some of the younger men who came to visit the monastery started to talk more and more with the old monks. After a while one asked if he could join them. Then another. And another. So within a few years the monastery had once again become a thriving order and, thanks to the rabbi's gift, a vibrant center of light and spirituality in the realm.

How different would our lives be if we treated everyone as though they might be the Messiah? Dorothy Day wrote, “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.” What a great thought on which to meditate.

Cracking the Koan

It strikes me that life itself is the Great Koan and we are here precisely to crack it--to break the code, as it were. (Something of this was brought up in Rex Spear's recent posts, and I'm glad for it).

Earth experience in the space-time dimension is in fact koan-like (a life-koan), and we have to live it and carry out the practice of it under the auspices of duality and its contradictory opposites. We live into the contradiction, the paradoxes we experiences, the opposites, and the questions until, through living and learning, struggle and search, we are able to somehow break the code, or "crack the koan."

Such a breakthrough does not happen through the logical or rational mind, nor does it become through conventional religious language, analysis or terminology (theology--where there always only more paradox), but through insight into the mysteries of existence which is a transcendent understanding that supercedes space and time at the kardial level. That breakthrough leads to wonder and awe, reigning and rest (as Yeshua says in Gospel of Thomas, Logion 2).

Once we crack the code, we are then able to leave this dimension--which has been our purpose for being here all along. Perhaps we were sent here (into space and time) exactly so that we might have "koanic experience."

Shift?

This morning during meditation I contemplated the promise of the new year in the context of "the Great Age, the Aeon" from the Gospel of Mary Magdelene and of the increasing amount of light from the gradually lengthening days as we cycle towards spring. We have a new President who seems to be confounding many of his critics by choosing an administrative team with a centrist point of view and who at least expresses willingness to listen to all points of view. Ken Wilber and Don Beck describe gradually evolving levels of stages (and/or states) of consciousness or spiritual consciousness which give me hope that perhaps we are on the verge of a significant shift in the leading edge of predominant consciousness/spirituality for our nation and perhaps the world. We can hope and pray that the Great Age, the Aeon, the coming of Christ Consciousness, the Age of Aquarius is in fact dawning and that hope and substantive change in the way humanity interacts with itself and with our earth is on the horizon.

Wind

This new Haiku-like poem from David Stringer. Thank you, David.

The cadence, the verb
acting up, enters our

body. A shiver follows,
the spine filling with wind.


--11 February 2006, Christchurch, New Zealand

The State of Prayer

This state of prayer within us is something we always carry about, like a hidden treasure of which we are not consciously aware--or hardly so. Somewhere our heart is going full pelt, but we do not feel it. We are deaf to our praying heart, love's savor escapes us, we fail to see the light in which we live.

For our heart, our true heart, is asleep; and it has to be woken up, gradually--through the course of a whole lifetime. So it is not really hard to pray. It was given us long since. But very seldom are we conscious of our own prayer. Every technique of prayer is attuned to that purpose. We have to become conscious of what we have already received, must learn to feel, to distinguish it in the full and peaceful assurance of the Spirit, this prayer rooted and operative somewhere deep inside us. It must be brought to the surface of our consciousness. Little by little it will saturate and captivate our faculties, mind and soul and body. Our psyche and even our body must learn to answer to the rhythm of this prayer, be stirred to prayer from within, be incited to prayer, as dry wood is set ablaze. One of the Fathers puts it as tersely as this: "The monk's ascesis: to set wood ablaze."

Prayer then, is nothing other than that unconscious state of prayer which in the course of time has become completely conscious. Prayer is the abundantia cordis, the abundance of the heart, as the saying goes in the Gospels: "For man's words flow out of what fills his heart" (Matt. 12:34; Luke 6:45). Prayer is a heart that overflows with joy, thanksgiving, gratitude and praise. It is the abundance of a heart that is truly awake...

Each and every method of prayer has but one objective: to find the heart and alert it. It must be a form of interior alertness, watchfulness. Jesus himself set "being awake" and "praying" side by side. The phrase "be awake and pray" certainly comes from Jesus in person (Matt. 26:41; Mark 13:33). Only profound and quiet concentration can put us on the track of our heart and of the prayer within it.

All the time watchful and alert, therefore, we must first recover the way to our heart in order to free it and divest it of everything in which we have encapsulated it. With this in view we must mend our ways, come to our senses, get back to the true center of our being.


Andre Louf
French Cistercian abbot

Yeshua's Primary Question - Conclusion

On a practical basis , a modified technique for koan work is the following:

• As a supplement to your sitting practice/centering prayer, hold the question "What love is this?" (or some other koan/question), feeling your way into the full spectrum of the voices of love. This holding is not a mantra with constant repetitions. Rather, give yourself wholeheartedly to the questioning, yet without any expectation of an answer.

• Let any thoughts that arise evaporate on the red hot razor edge of the question.

• Hold the question more in your heart and belly than in your head.

• Maintain a beginner's mind of curiosity and humility of not knowing.

• Remember that koan work is more about intimacy than control or intellectual certitudes.

• Beyond sitting, lace your day with a generous peppering of the question. Try to propose the question at stressful times, especially before the internal monologue kicks in.
  

• This questioning is a tool to aid in awakening, by uncovering and making explicit the mercurial essence of our core beliefs.
  

The Work of the New Year - I

Reading through Tom Cheetham's After Prophecy, this quote strikes me as being particularly significant as we begin the Work that is our task this New Year, 2009. His quote reflects so much of what has been previously posted here in the last days and weeks:

Rilke says: "Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window," but we must speak these names with more intensity than the things could ever have by themselves. The language of imagination is the bridge between the worlds. The divine and the ordinary are fused into one reality in which the immanent and the transcendent are part of a continuous whole. The whole is "mystical" in some sense, but at the same time "purely earthly, deeply earthly, blissfuly earthly." It is Imagination that opens out the ordinary into its "widest orbit," into the realm of the imaginal. It is language that guarantees the existence of these Things: Here is the time for the sayable, here is the homeland. ...The Things that we might experience are vanishing, for what crowds them out ... is an imageless act. It is the imagination, actualized by a person in an imaginal act of personification, that can stand against the imageless act that threatens the existence of Things. The essence of the speech and the witness that exalts the imagination and reveals the angelic function of things of the world is praise: "Praise this world to the angel ... Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished .... (145).