Friday, February 27, 2009

Our Republic

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." —Alexis de Tocqueville

Other Gates

A basic trouble is that most Churches limit themselves unnecessarily by addressing their message almost exclusively to those who are open to religious impression through the intellect, whereas ... there are at least four other gateways -- the emotions, the imagination, the aesthetic feeling, and the will -- through which they can be reached. ... A. J. Gossip

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Backstage at the Theater of Wisdom

The Lenten season can bring forth a deep sense of sacrifice, deprivation, and austerity. Rather than fostering the aspiration of letting go and self-emptying, our efforts can add yet another layer on top of our conditioned selves. As a result, we become less authentic and even less human. A wonderful metaphor serving as an antidote for this type of self-obsessed activity comes from Ramakrishna, the 19th century Indian mystic. Theater of Wisdom is the term he uses to describe how our relative existence is the stage upon which Mother Wisdom directs Her endless scenes and scenarios. Our task is to play the role we are assigned but realize our true identity lies backstage with Divine Unity, the real Director, Playwright, and Producer.

With the steamroom so hot it hurts,
we get no relief until we leave.

If you put on shoes that are too tight
and walk out across an empty plain,
you will not feel the freedom of the place
unless you take off your shoes.

People at a distance see you walking there
and wish they were out in the open like you,
but as the saying goes, They are not in your shoes.

Your shoe-constriction has you confined.
At night before sleeping, you take off
the tight shoes, and your soul releases
into a space it knows. Dream and glide deeper. Rumi

Old Language--New Language

It is hard for us to live with the old and the familiar and to see them as anything but mundane--hardly new. But we must. This is particularly true of our old, familiar religious language that now seems strangely quaint, perhaps, but hardly compelling. Take for example the term used for Yeshua (which was the term he used for himself), Son of Man--suggesting perhaps that he was just an ordinary man in every way, like us, and now, we imagine, after the years of dogmatism, not to be deified any longer.

All of this has nothing to do with what this term originally meant. It was a revolutionary idea understood by the early Jewish visionaries to mean something like, Son of the Macrocosm. If we could imagine that there exists an Eternal Being of Light as the Macrocosmic Man (Human), then Yeshua is claiming to be its representative and manifestation in time, on earth, in an embodied form. The full nature of this vast cosmic phenomenon is held within, and for most it is hidden like a treasure buried in a field, but he uncovered the treasure, set it on a hill, where it beam with burnished light as a beacon for all to see. He became for us the "Son" of the Macrocosmic Man.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Outer Work

During the Order retreat I wanted to read the following quote from Maria Jaoudi's book Christian Mysticism East and West several times and never quite found a place for it. So I want to put it now into your thoughts as you ponder your outer work more fully in the days and weeks ahead. It is very significant, I think.
Each of us has a mystical social gift gained through our prayer life. It is vital to have social commitments, whatever form those commitments may take for each of us. Someone may picket to protest an unfair law; another might be a Wester-trained anesthesiologist who decides to learn about Chinese acupuncture so as not to administer as much anesthesia during surgery, someone else may become involved in hospice work to counter our culture's inability to cope with the reality of dying. Social action that lasts, according to the Bhagadvad Gita, and does not become uninspired, is directed from within as an integral part of our total human development: "great is the person who, free from attachments, and with a mind ruling its powers in harmony, works on the path of consecrated action" (52).

Sunday, February 22, 2009

The Labyrinth of Practice

Spiritual practice is a mixture of struggle and integration, of confusion and clarity, of discouragement and aspiration, of feeling failure and going deeper. Don't imaging that the spiritual path is a straight line to a fixed goal.
Ezra Bayda

Often times our path work can get very cluttered and chaotic. Sometimes the best antidote that keeps us afloat are the two wings of humility and humor. Many Wisdom traditions have a crazy trickster figure that helps us see, in a humorous way, what is of true value versus what we're really up to. In the Sufi tradition, this Jerry Lewis-guy is Mullah Nasruddin. The following story helps to remind us to see what's really going on:

One night Mullah Nasruddin awoke to hear a thief entering his house. Mullah went downstairs and began to help the thief load possessions into a bag.
"What are you doing?" asked the thief.
"It looks like I'm moving, so I'm helping you!" said Mullah.

Another time Mullah woke up to hear the same thief breaking in again. This time Mullah hid in the closet and listened to the thief banging around, trying to find something to steal. Finally the thief came to the closet and opened it to find Mullah there.
"What? Have you been there all along?" said the thief, afraid that Mullah would call the police.
"Yes, " said Mullah. "I was so embarrassed that I had nothing to steal that I thought I should hide."

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Imaginal

The Rilke poem submitted earlier put me in mind of an interesting phenomenon in nature. Most of us are familiar with the progression of caterpillar to butterfly, and with the significance of the chrysalis (cocoon) in Christian symbolism. I was surprised to learn earlier this year that the nature of the progression from caterpillar to butterfly was considerably different from what I had assumed. It seems that when the caterpillar, which has its own fully formed organs and circulatory system, determines it is time to form the cocoon, the process within is not a progression of form similar to a tadpole forming legs and losing the tail in the process of becoming a frog. What happens within the cocoon is much more complicated and much more amazing. Once inside the protective layer, the substances that formed the caterpillar turn to an amorphous “soup” with no structures whatsoever. Within that soup are specialized cells called imaginal cells, and they begin to reassemble the molecular soup into the totally new structure that will become the adult butterfly which is called the imago. These imaginal cells were present but inactive within the caterpillar, much as our kardia or spiritual GPS is present but often inactive in us.

The details of this process make the chrysalis an even more apt metaphor for spiritual growth. Significant spiritual growth involves repositioning and/or “dissolving” the ego and with it the sense of primary identity we have built for ourselves on the physical plane. We have to move from perceiving ourselves as physical bodies which have a spiritual dimension to understanding that we are souls having a human experience. We have to change from identifying with the physical body and its attachment to the material world to identifying with our souls or higher selves and ultimately with God.

What a marvelous metaphor! Completely dissolving the attachment to the earthbound caterpillar body and rebuilding with imaginal cells to be free to navigate the “heavenly” realms ever closer to identification with God.

Ancient String Theory

The Vedas compare creation to a spider's web, that the spider creates and then lies within. God is both the container of the universe and what is contained in it.

-Ramakrishna

The Journey

This quote comes from Rosemary Shirley, a new postulant of the Order.

I am not sitting, I am on a journey. Every Christian may apply these words to hinself or herself. To be a Christian is to be a traveler. Our situation, says the Greek Fathers, is like that of the Israelite people in the desert of Sinai: we live in tents, not houses, for spiritually we are always on the move. We are on a journey through the inward spaces of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch, or the days of the calender, for it is a journey out of time into eternity.

--Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (7)

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Transition

You are not surprised at the force of the storm
—you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit;
now it becomes a riddle again,
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.
The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

From one lover to another

I haven't come here to settle down.
I've come here to depart.
I am a merchant with lots of goods,
selling to whoever will buy.
I didn't come to create any problems,
I'm only here to love.
A Heart makes a good home for the Friend.
I've come to build some hearts.
I'm a little drunk from this Friendship --
Any lover would know the shape I'm in.
I've come to exchange my twoness,
to disappear in One.
He is my teacher. I am his servant.
I am a nightingale in His garden.
I've come to the Teacher's garden
to be happy and die singing.
They say "Souls which know each other here,
know each other there."
I've come to know a Teacher
and to show myself as I am.

--Yunus Emre
from "The Drop That Became the Sea"

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Sacred place of money and the role of personal gain

"We come to the conclusion that money is so central in our lives because it now embodies most clearly the central problem of man's life on earth-the dominance of the principle of personal gain. The great teachers of the world have always spoken of this as man's main weakness. The ancient and timeless doctrines tell us that we human beings are meant to serve something greater than ourselves--in that alone consists our happiness and our well-being on earth and beyond the earth. But through some profound misperception or inner weakness--what the East calls illusion, or what the West calls sin--mankind continually lives to favor only the bio social aspects of his nature. He has been given ideas that convince him he is meant for something greater, but in fact he lives in opposition to that conviction. Man is not aware that the principle of personal gain is much subtler, much more powerful than he imagines. He is not aware that it concerns far more than outer behavior alone. He is not aware that what he wrongly identifies as his ruling principle, his ordinary mind, is not the real instrument to the Higher."

Jacob Needleman "Money and the Meaning of Life"

Love-Sorrow

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,

what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so

utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment

by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,

as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.

-- from "Red Bird" by Mary Oliver

Monday, February 16, 2009

Being Open

Some people live closely guarded lives, fearful of encountering someone or something that might shatter their insecure spiritual foundation. This attitude, however, is not the fault of religion but of their own limited understanding. True Dharma leads in exactly the opposite direction. It enables one to integrate all the many diverse experiences of life into a meaningful and coherent whole, thereby banishing fear and insecurity completely.

-Lama Thubten Yeshe, "Wisdom Energy"

Creating a Wisdom Culture

It is quite clear that if we as a modern culture are to survive the chaos that we have created, we must help bring into being a different kind of culture with wisdom at its heart. We are awash in information, technology, commerce, science, entertainment, and the trends of pop culture. We have lost our wisdom--that powerful integrative force which can see and balance the whole. Men and women open to this force are a voice and "site" to carry this neglected element back into the world in whatever ways are possible and available to them. As wisdom carriers, then, we do not act alone, but in solidarity with every other individual and gathering of such souls who seek to bring balance, wholeness and a clarifying vision of the sacred to a secular world that is in disentegration. We carry this inner seeing gently, humbly--knowing we only bear a portion and not ourselves the whole of it, and with respect for what is emerging from the spiritual energies arising from saints and sages around this planet, in every culture, people and tradition.

Thursday, February 05, 2009

The Arc of Descent

It is absolutely clear that we each, in our own way, are completing the Arc of Descent, what Sufism calls the "Arc of Creation," and that we must if we are ever going to be able to complete the Arc of Ascent, which is the Arc of mystical quest and Transformation. We have been called/sent into the created order in order to do our Work here--the work of loving compassionately the Other. What we experience in this world is a confusing complexity, a plural mess in space and time, and we would want to escape it all if we could, but embodiment is our Work.

Escape gets easily confused for spirituality, but it is not. To be here we must not escape but descend into the confusion and the mess of it, for the knowing that we desire, the knowing of God and of the Divine Presence, must first be experienced here in time through the revelation of its multiple theophanies before we can fully know the Oneness and Wholeness of Divine Reality. This is a true paradox in the monotheism of the Abrahamic faiths. Descent-Ascent is the other paradox. We are always descending and ascending through the gracious Presence of the Son of Humanity, who is for us both templar, and universal prototype.

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Love in the Land of Longing

In the land of duality, which is our current residence, it is absolutely necessary to experience love as and for "Other." Love is the force, the energy, that will move us out of the narrow confines of the self, and propels us upon a journey to the Other which is not one's self (but paradoxically, the root and core of one's Self) This journey outward to the Other, is the quintessential element and primary mode of the Abrahamic story, whose core teaching is: "You shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as your Self."

On this level of existence, one cannot learn union (or oneness) without duality, otherness, longing, journey and love. They conspire together in a "going-outward" into the expansiveness of our own capablities and potential to love, which is the essense of the "first commandment." This "way of love" is the steady criterion of faith and spiritual growth within the Abrahamic traditions, expressing complete trust in the Beloved. But as Pema Chodron reminds us:
It all starts with loving-kindness for oneself, which in trun becomes loving-kindness for others. As the barriers come down around our hearts, we are less afraid of other people. We are more able to hear what is being said, see what is in front of our eyes, and work in accord with what happens rather than struggle against it (Start Where You Are).
This "spark of knowing" in the darknesses of space-time becomes a steady aweareness rather than merely a sudden shock of infatuation.