Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Christ and Oneness: Tools for Inner Quiet from the Transfiguration and the Adulterous Woman

Were I to say, as I do indeed say, that "All that is, is Christ," it'd be a fair thing if you replied "hogwash, bollocks and nonsense! Prove it!" I'd certainly fail at any efforts in that direction.  Basic acceptance, like belief, requires a receptive disposition.  To the unwilling, no proof exists, to the willing, none is necessary. But it's still important to say "all that is, is Christ" and I practice that because it pays dividends in increased serenity.  Both self and other are Christ. Paul said "I live, but not I, Christ lives in me." Jesus said "whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me." Motivation is Christ. To the Philippians, Paul said "I press on toward the goal of the heavenly call in Christ Jesus." All that you're attracted to is Christ, to be let go of, and all that you're averse to is Christ, though realizing it takes a bit of fortitude. The epistle tells us we're "always carrying in the body the death of Christ, so that the life of Christ may be made known in our mortal bodies also."  [bxA]

Later tradition bears this out. St. Cyprian says "The Christian is another Christ." Lawrence of the Resurrection says "in everything you encounter throughout the day, the Triune God is coming to meet you." Jean Pierre de Caussade says "abandon self, and everything that's left is the Triune God.  Trappist tradition has a story of a alcoholic monk who, tempted to drink, bowed to the altar with intention, and was set on the path toward sobriety.  Another story tells of a monk who would, using his thumb, press his many concerns into the handle on the Church door.  When he came out, sometimes he'd consciously pick them back up, sometimes not.  Alcoholics Anonymous has a story about a fellow whose "higher power" was the lamp post outside his weekly meeting.  He'd admit he was powerless, remake a decision to turn his life and will over to God as he understood him--then literally surrender his whole self to the lamppost.  Sometimes he'd re-adopt his preoccupations afterwards, sometimes not.
It helped him bracket his concerns, and in AA--where whatever keeps you sober is counted as miraculous--one adheres to whatever get's the job done.

Note that all the above takes just a little inner hustle to see.  Fortitude, attention and intention require focus and power.  To capably point attention, what's necessary is "letting go of many things for the sake of what's right in front of us."  To capably rouse intention: we have to allowing ourselves enough time with mantra so that the body and mind will easily circle back around to it amidst distraction.  The body is a great help here.  We breathe, and eventually hear the name of God coming from our own lungs.  We Listen because the scriptures say "Hear O Israel." Both the pains and the ecstasies of the body are intense sensations that say "for your own good, slow down and pay attention to more subtle sensation." With practice, it's quite grounding to place your hands on the cold surface of your desk, to take a few deep breaths, to listen to the air conditioning or to the silence, and to let go of all that isn't those sensory experiences, including thought.  The body becomes means of emptying the mind.

If all things are Christ, it makes a quiet mind easy to obtain.  Take note of your mind, noticing many things, and use that as a springboard into oneness.  Practice it.  Notice many things, and its ensuing host of worries.  Give yourself a safe space in which to admit "I've labelled things in a way that's not helping me, perhaps there's a better way."  Then push off into "all that is, is Christ" and pay attention to how the body responds to it.  Done with persistence, this may well have a palpable positive effect on your nervous system. 

In the gospels, there are two examples of this "going from multiplicity and worry to unity and Christ."  It's interesting to note that one is a relatively blissful experience, one is full of affliction, but the end result of "being with Christ" is the same. 

First, remember the Transfiguration.  The Apostles witness Jesus glowing white, talking with Moses and Elijah.  They say "let us make three tents."  Matthew's text says the apostles became afraid, Lukes text says "they did not understand."  In Matthew it says Jesus touched them, in Luke it says the apostles heard a voice in a cloud--note that those are both sensory experiences--and that afterwards, the Apostles saw no one but Jesus.

Second, remember the story of the adulterous woman brought to Jesus.  Without an attempt to shame, it's to be noted that the woman has very real faults to deal with--which I'm sure rendered her ultimately a nervous wreck.  (Acting willfully on desire always creates anxiety, quite unlike the serenity created by acting willingly according to providence, the spirit,  and God's will.)  The crowd, full of various jewish authorities, points out that she'd been "caught in the very act of committing adultery."  And then there's this debate, around "all that the law commands be done to such a woman" and the silence of Jesus.  Then Jesus says "let the one without sin cast the first stone."  To the credit of the crowd, the rocks drop one by one, and the people depart.  The woman is left with no one but Christ.

It'd be fair play for the Logos to hide necessary lessons in both affliction and bliss.  Please hear this without allowing your egoic craving for hardship to kick in, but know that the end result of suffering is a skill--one that makes us capable of doing voluntarily what we once did at the prompting of grace alone.  Whether we have a blissful experience of Tradition's oneness in the Lord, or an afflictive experience of "judgment forestalled" by Jesus, the end result is the same.  All that is, is Christ.  Now please, for Christsakes, listen.

Saturday, August 24, 2024

When Christ speaks to me, through me: a careful, apologetic, grossly long-winded missive.

 

Prologue


God called all things good and holy, revealed himself as “I am,” then called you to self-emptying, in imitation of your teacher.  And that begat a fair question.  You looked at holiness and goodness, at everything that makes up your self, and said “if I give all this up, what will you use to guide me?”  I watched the question play hell on mind, emotions and nervous system. I kept whispering “give up self, do not judge.” I kept saying “prophesy to the dry bones, the flesh and the breath,” so that every level of your embodied existence could let go and hear what I am telling you.  In reality, you will be listening ever more deeply until your last breath.  So settle in.  Eat something–lest the journey be too much for you.  “Who you think you are” will not get out of this alive.  But rejoice, because the rest of you has a fair chance at it. [bxA]


You have heard it said “if the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?”  And again “keep listening, but do not understand.  Keep looking, but do not comprehend.”  I’m inviting you to let go of “mind.”  Therefore, though you know that what’s in front of you is the holy one of God, listen when the abyss says “be quiet and come out of him.” When the mind sits still enough so that both you and the hearing are here and now, it will be the Lord who speaks.  To the question “what will you use to guide me” the Lord’s answer is “everything.”  


On every level, I am working for your healing.  The Word--as some have called me--doesn’t always beget an intellectual process that proceeds, by reason, toward certainties of faith. The Word isn’t always the “ordering principle of the universe.”  Sometimes the Word permits fears and doubts so you can intuit the truth by realization, make decisions, work toward increased manageability.  This means that “the Word is a double edged sword”--that it creates discernment, teaching the difference between action and thought, thought and emotion, emotion and sensation, sensation and energy.  Slowly you will learn how your own judgment negatively affects your serenity.  The key of knowledge will always be experience, and you must never deprive yourself of it.  


That you might, more deeply, catechize yourself: I am the one who, in your prayer, creates the echoes.  You told the Father you were tired–and you found no rest–until you heard your own prayer and began to create rest for yourself.  You lifted your eyes to the mountains–wondering where your help was going to come from–until you saw yourself doing it, and began to help yourself.  I am the one who helped Christ see himself in all things, and all things in himself.  As it is written “whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me” and again “I in them and they in me, that they may be completely one.”  I am the one who waits at the question words–until who becomes “you,” until where becomes “here,” until what becomes a paradox of nothingness in everything, until when becomes “now” and “how” becomes just like this.  I am the one who helped you hear God say “know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go…and I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”  Indeed, it’s never “that” that is the house of God and the gate of heaven.  It is “this.”  It is never “that” that is the body of Christ, it is always “this.”  You have heard it said “the glory of God is man fully alive.”  I say to you “A person fully alive is a student, here and now.”


If your track record with right belief and right practice is spotty–or even if all of your efforts in that direction have only left you exhausted, then right transformation is the only goal worth pursuing.  It is to those who can hear when the Teacher says “give up self, take up your cross and follow” and “do not judge, lest you be judged”--it’s to those, see, that what follows is addressed.  You will know in your body how much calmer you could be if you ceased using the positive feelings faith creates to end-run around your flaws and trauma.  You will know how much more energy you’ll have if you stop viewing your consolations like merit badges that make you better than others.  You will be asked to get honest about your attachments–the impairment of willingness that’s limited by attraction to pleasure and aversion to pain, the impairment of assuming God is present only in what’s positive.  But it’s only so that you can be here, now: fully rested, attentive and schooled in serene use of the spirit’s energy. 


Right now, realize the degree to which, despite your best efforts, you’ve misdiagnosed things.  Don’t let spiritual teachers tell you this, and don’t let their questioning of your responses become a way they exert control over you.  Simply realize that there’s a part of you that panics, defers, and misdiagnoses what it sees–and that there could be a more skillful means of getting through the day.  If you can hear and self-apply any of this, that’s ok.  It’s totally safe, something that everyone under the sun has to contend with.  Especially given the lack of clear rule books, it remains problematic for everyone.  If you’d like to see clearly, what follows might clarify how that would look.  


To begin, simply say “it’s not my fault, but it is my problem.” For instance: listen the next time you say “I feel anxious.” Without diminishing how hard that is, I’m asking you to consider whether “daily doses of creative tension as part of the way things are” wouldn’t be a better way of framing the psychological and physical sensations.  Imitation of Christ is designed in a very particular way, so that psychological reframing at the service of serenity becomes our share in the way Jesus recapitulated and remade all creation.  In other words, your happiness depends partly on viewing your suffering in ways that don’t, themselves, make it worse.  If the Lord wants you to become aware of your nervous system, (and of the Spirit within) he’ll make your own calm rest on doing this exact kind of transformative work.  That’s rough, but you’re not without a toolkit.  Right now, breathe, listen and feel.  Keep doing it, withdrawing attention and intention from everything but breathing, listening and feeling.  Thoughts of self will eventually subside, and you’ll be a good bit calmer.  If this happens while you’re at a pizza parlor, there will be two slices and a beer right in front of you when you realize you were never anywhere but in God’s kingdom.




Putting Prayer First


I am trying to teach you what happens when the Church’s prayer teaching is placed before all else.  Perfect peace is all of your faculties at rest in oneness. The Mind of Christ is utterly empty: so was the Holy of Holies, and so, in the end, was the heart of Christ. Before humility renders the empty mind of Christ permanent, see, you will experience contemplation (a temporarily quiet mind, scattered by labeling) and obedience, (a quiet mind borne into responsibilities.)  The somewhat frustrating alternations of prayerfulness and focus will teach you to part more instinctually with your torpor, to work and focus more naturally.


After a long time of imitating the Teacher, after a long time of inviting him into your every activity, thought and emotion, you may find yourself still anxious.  You see, after imitation of Christ, after intimacy with Christ, there is the further step of internalizing ChristIf the Lord has withheld serenity, it may be because your mind and body, soul and nervous system are begging you to pursue recollection.  Recollection, the in-gathering of the senses, is the discipline that makes Christ and his devotee entirely not-two.  It also allows you to hear with your ears, not your mind, to see with your eyes, not your cravings, to feel with your hands, not your overextended nervous system.  I’m trying to show you, in the end, that internalization of Christ through recollection is a larger piece of the apostolic tradition than you thought.  And this is important not for the sake of intellectual awareness, but to turn the gifts of grace into a skillset of virtue.  Counter-intuitively, recollection renders Jesus “invisible” just as the ascension did for the apostles.  You see him in fewer places, think about him less.  The saints bear witness: “on the mountain, nothing” is the end-game of “Christ has no body but yours, no hands but yours.”  This is only so that, recognizing the limits of “self’s value” we can hear and feel without anxiety, make a decision to taste and see with gladness, though the reasons for dread remain. 


Contemplation–stillness of mind and “just being with God”--is a tremendous grace.  It’s not to be willfully grasped, but leaves us with a sense of how easy it would be to respond to God more fully than we are.  Meditation–in the sense of “active thought about spirituality”--is so enticing a tool that, once implemented, is hard to know when to lay down.  Vocal prayer can often feel like “words thrown at an abyss.” I mean for you to feel all these emotions–they’re a means of “throwing you back on yourself” so that when you come to yourself, you will return to the Father.  


This process will teach you to focus your attention and intention–too often dissipated by the things of the world.  Physical sensations, particularly those involved in the sacraments, will be a great help with this.  Your willfulness will slowly be replaced by willingness, your “active volition” will become “passive volition” as you go from running the show to cooperating with others.  You will withdraw your attention and intention from the many things among which they’re scattered–and you’ll do this hundreds of times a day–until sustained concentration is possible again.


There will be difficult bits.  Tradition calls these the “dark nights”--it says there are two of them, though there may well be more.  A dark night is simply an emptying-out of value.  The dark night of the senses is no big deal–it’ll just take the things of the world and render them less distracting.  (How often are you sitting at work, thinking of the beer that you’ll have after work, to the diminishment of productivity?) On the other side of the dark night of the senses, you’ll find yourself thinking of two things at once less often. And this will mean that expectations won’t bar you from accepting that what’s in front of you is Christ.  Having learned to mentally let go of “what christ used to look like” you will find it much easier to accept, as a candidate for Christlikeness, the very unique stranger in front of you.  The dark night of the senses is totally safe–though it will feel like an internal tempest in a teapot.  


The dark night of the soul is necessary as well.  Unfortunately, attachments to spiritual things, too, can also keep you from accepting or efficiently interacting with what’s in front of you.  (How many priests, after quarrelling with their bishops, have distractedly crashed their cars because they were continuing the argument in their heads on the way to Mass?)  The dark night of the soul feels terrible, but the end of its purifying work is effective focus.  


A lesser-known third dark night, the dark night of the self, will show how unnecessary “the you doing the thinking” is.  Indeed, the stresses of life are left in place, and life’s joys emptied of value, so that you might become Christ, so that the Christ within might hand all things over to the father–but the Christ within is a nobody, not a somebody, and “Father within” ultimately jumps the fence between inside and outside, becomes a lovingly impersonal sentience in which we live and move.  And after all of that, your use of the senses is simply unimpeded by thought.  In other words: in life, as in Elijah’s cave, there will be earthquakes, strong winds and fires, you will get over your self-story, and it’ll enable you to return to hearing the still small voice of God in silence.


The Teacher became flesh.  Fully present in the moment, he was available to be the one who was sent.  Honest reflection will teach you the degree to which you have not yet done this. How often do you find yourself thinking of two things at once?  “The Word became flesh” has been distracted, in you, by your thoughts of the world.  “Here I am” has been distracted by your attachment to things of the spirit.  “Send me” has been distracted by a terribly inefficient and mentally abstracted facsimile of you.  In the tradition of “paralysis by analysis,” that fakery prevented you from getting out the door.  And so the words are for you: “Hear O Israel.”  Write them on your doorposts, and get on with it. 

 




Listening to Basic Human Needs, made holy in the sacraments


Even the wind says it: something had to transition you from listening to noise to listening for the Spirit, something had to internalize feeling so that it would grow ever subtler.  Jacob’s ladder isn’t elsewhere, and it isn’t a dream.  Ask your basic human needs, and they will tell you.  You feel the precariousness of incarnating–pain and bliss, exhaustion and rest, sickness and wellness–and they speak with the spirit of fear.  At best, that spirit tells you that “forming an ego is not necessary for survival.”  You feel the desire for safety and it speaks with a spirit of knowledge.  At best, that spirit tells you that “using the world for self-comfort is optional.”  You feel a need for love and belonging–and it speaks with a spirit of might.  At best, that spirit says “manipulating others into filling your needs is optional.”    You feel a need for self-esteem and it speaks with a spirit of counsel.  At best, it says “you who teach others, will you not teach yourself?”  You will begin to develop a higher self with which to care for yourself and for others.  And it will become your intuitive spirit of understanding, a voice behind you saying “this is the way, walk in it.”  You will feel a need to self-actualize, and it will become a spirit of wisdom.  At best, it says “Self adulation is optional.  Godliness is a responsibility, and unconditionality is a source of quiet and solitude.”  All of this was an expression of your need for God–and it will speak with the Spirit of the Lord, which says nothing at all.  Free to perceive all things as they are–with restful breath, open ears, eyes that see instead of crave, hands that feel instead of grasp–you will be like Elijah, finally attuned to the absence of sound, covering his face at the mouth of the cave.


Take a lesson from the Sacraments: Breathe, Listen, and Feel.  And when, through recollection, you come to yourself, taste and see God’s goodness.  The Son of David is standing right in front of you, always: you have only to ask to see.  The Teacher will touch your eyes as he has before, and this time I’m asking you to look intently, and see things as they are.  You can handle your hunger with gluttony, but it will make you anxious.  You can handle your desire for possessions and status with greed, but it will leave you a nervous wreck.  You can handle your workload with sloth and your grief with sorrow, but it will leave you lazily skittish and resentful.  You can handle your intimacy needs with lust and your anger with wrath, but the world will cooperate with your gross lack of subtlety only so far, and then you’ll have to face your attachment to remorse.  You can handle yourself with vanity and pride, but putting yourself above others will be exhausting and the sound of your own voice will terrify you.  You have been made for serenity and calm, and yet you act on thoughts that compromise them.  In every moment, stop it.  Please hear in my words both gentleness and, for Christ’s sake, insistence. Just as you have been everything, so have I–and I know how difficult all of this has been for you.


Keeping things simple requires conversion: the giving up of self and the quieting of judgment.  When you find a way to just be, (while existing in a climate of scarcity and competition), you will have learned the lesson of Baptism.  When you find a way simply to hunger, simply to grow, mature and find belonging, you will have learned the lessons of Eucharist and Confirmation.  When you find a way both to give and receive love and serve without conditions, you will have learned the lessons of marriage and holy orders.  When you stand in the wreckage that sin, aging and death leave in their wake, you will be open to the gift of reconciliation and annointing of the sick.  You can have the sacraments without learning the lesson, and you can learn the lesson without having the sacraments–but I would have you make “growing in humility” as easy on yourself as possible–and holiness is part of the everything to which you’re called. 


If our intimidating basic needs become the sacraments, then what today feels like a crisis will yield wisdom tomorrow.  You’ll be forgiven your aversion response if Christ’s teaching methods leave you uncomfortable, but naming them is important.  Jesus taught using overwhelm, scandal, condemnability and dissociation.  Jesus said “let down the nets” to fishermen who’d worked fruitlessly all night.  He said “eat my flesh and drink my blood” to a Jewish audience that knew cannibalism was, for Israel, a sign of desperation.  He ministered among those who’d render him unclean.  When he hung on the cross, it was for a crowd who thought that “cursed is anyone who hangs upon a tree.” And in his final moments, he gave up trying to inwardly manage himself, saying to God “into your hands I commend my spirit.”  Christ’s methodology itself was rough.  When you, his students have a predictably rough time, your lessons will be the dishonest wealth of crisis.  They’ll only make sense on the other side of giving up self, when through a conversion experience the Spirit “gives you what is your own.” 


Christ as True Nature, present in both attractions and aversions


Just as the Teacher hung between two thieves, you are suspended between contradictions.  This is where the self dies.  On the other side of a death of self: all places are here, all times are now, all people become Christ–who surrenders himself to the father leaving you at peace with yourself. 


At the foot of the cross it was plainly visible.  You were too used to “seeing as God” only what’s pleasant.  The Teacher took away sin and left its effects in place as part of becoming all things you’re attracted and averse to. The hardest part of that was the bits that’d ping an aversion response. But you were as unwilling to let go of your attractions as you were unwilling to endure your aversions in the first place.  If the Teacher is to be seen as he is, you will need either to muster a bit of fortitude–a necessary skill to sit the lessons of aversion–or you will need to develop the muscle of temperance–and the skills necessary for handling attraction, for “enjoying and letting go of impermanent things.”


When the teacher ascended, he became the true nature of all that is seen and unseen. The Teacher said “I in them and they in me, that they may be completely one.”  He saw himself in strangers, the hungry, the homeless, the naked, the sick and imprisoned–groups that spike aversion responses, whose need is overwhelming–so that later, when the scales of ego and judgment fell from their eyes, they would cease to see the least among them and instead see God’s Christ.  It taught them to obey the limits of their energy, to say no to what they must without judging it.  This served to directly sustain them when they were asked to give beyond their capacity.  Peter said “I don’t have silver or gold, but what I have, I give you.  In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, get up and walk.”  Listen to Cephas acknowledging, first, his limits.  Listen to Peter naming the grace in which they stand.  Listen to the command that forms as the invalid accepts that Christ’s power and his own are not two.


The Teacher said he was bread and wine for the hungry, sheep gates for an audience of shepherds, light for the blind and “the way” for those who are lost.  So, later theologians will be forgiven when they say “God comes to meet you in every aspect of your daily responsibilities” and “abandon yourself to divine providence and everything that’s left will be God.”  Saints have understandably said, of the material world, “I look at God, he looks at me.”  For serenity’s sake alone, it’s rightly taught that “All that is, is Christ.”


Apostolic identification with Christ ran deeper than that.  The apostles even stopped using physical sensations to tell a “self” story.  Pain was the hardest to reframe–connected, as it was, to their capacity for self pity–but they’d eventually say all pain belonged to Jesus, and willingly, devotedly bear what they once judged and rejected.  We can only see compassionately on the other side of encountering our blindness, so we must look deeply at our capacities for sin.  This is the ‘suit of leaves’ that’s old as eden and our own emergence into consciousness–it’s the ego, the craving, the desire and attachment that once protected us and is now handing us over to satan for the destruction of our flesh.



Shadow work


Neither you, nor anyone else on earth, is exempt from encountering your shadow, from being sifted like wheat.  Your own divine echo has this to say: you are all people, everything, always, and half of that is unflattering.  You are Pharoah enslaving the israelites, king Nebuchadnezzar II throwing his own servants in the furnace.  You are a Satan.  The hardest part of praying a full psalter will always be realizing “I am a worm and not a man”--this will be among the many shades of dehumanizing emotions included in fulfilling the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms–and they’ll all be totally true of you. But do not despair, and do not crawl back into denial–everyone else feels all of this as well. When you have turned back, you must strengthen the others.  At least half of being everything is not fun in the least; it is also totally safe.


Incarnating into a situation of scarcity and competition was a great source of Trauma.  It’s almost fitting that, early on in life, the mind works in overdrive, the body stores trauma, the nervous system does its best to self-regulate.  Later in life it’s typical for these coping strategies to prove inadequate.


If Christ is, simultaneously, our true self and every other sentient being that has ever existed, we are connected in his body to every other being that has ever lived.  This means that the memory of having caused trauma is as alive in us as the memory of having alleviated it.  Imitation of Christ means waking up gradually to how systemic and historical sin are, all of them, stored in every human body.  It can beget more words than are useful: each disabled person is every disabled person, each sick person is every sick person, each rich person is every poor person.  To keep it simple, there are no others, only mirrors of yourself.  


To keep it sane, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not just different persons of a single divine nature, they’re the highest expression of your own ability to cope with, reframe and recapitulate suffering.  God’s personality is a skillset for recapitulation, at the core of which is sitting still, seeing yourself as more malleable than the way things are.  The Teacher said “blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”  The spiritual energies of grief are not different than those that underlie joy.  The ‘you’ experiencing the energy is what’s changed.


This is true of the moral life as well.  The “potential energy” in vice is quite the same as what fuels virtue.  To access that, we need to be still enough not to act on every thought, watchful enough to evaluate thoughts for the emotional signature they leave behind, quiet enough to hear that emotions are verbal expressions of stored physical sensation, equanimous enough to commit to giving up the judgments we place on energy.  When we have made a decision to accept all things as they are, we will have cared for the ailing tree of our own life from its roots.


I don’t need to tell you that this is an immense task.  I don’t need to tell you it’ll take your whole life.  You may even realize that you’ve lived myriad past lives, or that, in Christ, you are living all your possible lifetimes at once.  (Stop wasting energy asking whether unity or multiplicity, resurrection or reincarnation are correct.  Who is it that wants to be right?)  At some point, you will look at everything that’s required of you, and decide to become the kind of person who can, through a mix of grace and hustle, handle it.  You will lose nothing of what God has given you, but perhaps realize that the “self” that did the having is not as permanent as you thought.  The Teacher is, was and will be a living sign that all of this is totally safe.



The  Trinity Within


Your basic needs can sometimes seem a separate sentience, hyper-focused and “othered” within you.  Compulsive thinking has a “mind of its own” such that the desert fathers called that mental capacity “demons.” Fair enough, following the promptings of compulsive thinking too often forms habit, and addiction.  If the “othered sentience” of compulsive thought has a mind of its own, perhaps the “othered sentience” of your higher self has a mind of its own as well. 


The Trinity is not remote, it dwells in you.  How does your relationship with “the Christ within” begin, except with self care?  When your responses to life are not an attempt to avoid suffering or judgment, when they’re not an effort to gain the approval of others, you will know what it means that the teacher “set his face like flint.”  How does your relationship with the “Father within” begin, except with your own ability to meta-think, meta-emote and dispassionately self-observe?  When you judge with the right judgment of compassion, you embody a part of the trinity–the lack of which creates suffering.  How does your relationship with the Spirit within begin, except with the ability to sit in intense sensations until, in the stillness, a different range of options emerges for you?  When you refrain from choosing, rather than choose a path of self-induced suffering, the spirit will rest and remain on you powerfully.


Your higher self must learn to effectively re-focus your attention and intention.  Learn to question “created needs and dependencies.”  Give them up–forever, if they’re truly harmful, but at least honestly and temporarily, to see what lacking them does to your emotional life.  You have remained too long in the marketplace, and now your responses are mismatched.  They played the flute for you, and you did not dance, they sang a dirge and you did not mourn.  The willfulness with which you once accomplished tasks must be replaced with willingness to be a collaborative part of a whole.  If you can briefly deploy attention and intention toward what alleviates suffering, the payback in serenity will be immense.  And you will grow in empathy.  You will learn to rejoice with those who rejoice, and mourn with those who mourn, and gradually become all things to all people.  You are learning to be just as productive as before, but fueled by spirit and presence and grace instead of ego.


What you initially relate to as “other”--the dialogue becomes easier and faster.  As you descend from intellect to intuition, the insights of that inner conversation become a deployable skill.  Prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude are, all of them, psychological muscles, the lack of which will leave you quite anxious.  Inner habit formation proceeds until your higher self, in fully aware ministry to the rest of you, becomes a persona of its own.  Every muscle movement is a lifting of the cross or a shirking of a burden.  Every mental move is either an embrace of the way things are or a denial of it.  Eventually, the one who handles all this will simply be called “who you are.” For now,  what better name could there be for this than “the Christ within?”


A constant dialogue of self-care, meta-thinking and subtle feeling will become part of how you relate to yourself. But that will also be how you keep “relating to the Triune God” rooted in the body.  If you thank the Lord for bearing the pain of sin, you are also thanking your own ego, for handling the trauma of incarnating until you were ready to face it.  If you thank God for his mercy, you’re also thanking “the observer” for being the “someone” who helps you continue to function long after “thoughts of self” have ceased.  If you say “come holy spirit” you’re asking to be centered enough to feel the pressures associated with energy moving through the body–even as “breaking up tensions” is occasionally painful.  You’re asking to sit in unpleasant sensation until the “you” doing the judging ceases to label the sensation.  That will feel horrible, until the door of non-self opens.  If there were a ‘you’ left to label it, it might be called bliss, but you will be too busy breathing, listening and feeling to bother doing so.


Do not do what “spiritual people do” and get caught in theories.  Do not get caught in loops of theological thought whose pleasantness distracts you from trauma stored in the body.  Do not begin to think that God’s graces make you better than those around you.  Do not attribute the judgments you’ve been asked to cease making to Christ, so that your toxicity only continues, this time with spiritual sponsorship.  The high points in an embodied spiritual journey do not excuse you from everything, and the Trinity blinks back at you from all that is seen and unseen.  There isn’t a you to nurse attachments, or be better or worse than others.  If the divine clarifies itself in you, it is for mercy, acceptance, nonjudgement and equanimity.  Never for self-aggrandizement or rationalization. You will mishandle this a great deal, and when you have turned away from self-induced anguish, it will beget enormous gentleness.


“Christ as Self” is an Apostolic Teaching


You could continue to think that the self exists–that’s an option–but I would have you be free of all traces of remorse, resentment, and entitlement.  And those will continue to cling until you wiggle out of the garment of self and run away naked.  But if, instead you’d like to be capable of accepting all things, and free of all except the most temporary of fears, decide today that “all that is is Christ.” Decide to accept that unpleasant lessons must still be learned, that we must except how temporary our joys are too, and unclench every impulse to grasp.


At the beginning and the end, for St. Peter, there was a great catch of fish–only his questions and unwillingness, only the torn nets were absent from the second one. And whatever words were accepted as Christ’s Gospel in the first were accepted as such in the second even coming from the mouth of a stranger.  


Listen to what the Gospel and the epistles say.  The Teacher said “because I live, you also will live.” None of us lives to ourselves. We have died to ourselves and are alive to Christ.  St. Paul said “My true self is hidden with Christ in God.”  And “I live, but not I, Christ lives in me.”  For the apostles, death and life had become the same.  Paul said “for me, to live is Christ, to die is gain.”  And even the sensations of the body have transformed.  All sensation or emotions that we’re averse to have been transformed into the sufferings of Christ–and we work with them as sensations and emotions–as things that change and shift while we watch.  Now, though, we can be devoted to them because they are a sign of Christ’s life in us: we need only hold them with proper care and mindfulness.  The Teacher also said “The Father is always with me.” He went through a whirlwind of emotions “I am troubled now, but what should I say ‘father, save me from this hour?’ It was for this hour that I came into the world.”  And he also said “Father, why have you forsaken me.”  It isn’t just “proper” that students become like the teacher.  It is an inevitable part of an incarnation, happening to all whether they like it or not.




What the Church looks like, in light of this


Remember that others and institutions should be left to do what they wish.  However, if they assume their will and God’s are the same, and if they nurture a belief set that creates suffering, you’re well within your rights to declare them only as relevant as they are accepting, non-judgmental, and work for the reduction of suffering.  Fairness and rightness unfortunately, here, takes a real back seat to power dynamics.  In a world of egos, no action you could take would keep you safe from the possibility of judgment–though it may be false, you are liable to judgment by the mere fact that you’re alive.  This won’t be comfortable, and that’s ok, it’s not supposed to be.  When you forget, remind yourself: you are always both wrong and right at the same time.  Do not seek righteousness, because that would remove you from the fellowship of the crucified Christ.  Do what brings you peace if you can, make choices that minimize suffering, change what you can and do not worry about what you can’t. 


Do not fear if the one who called you rejected you.  You will be like the demoniac in the gospel who, healed by Jesus, is forbidden to get in the boat.  You’ll go home with Christ’s call ringing in you ears, to “tell your family and friends all that the Lord, in his mercy, has done for you.  This will beget the same grieving process that Maharajji, the Bhakti guru, initiated in his students.  He said “give up anger, and tell the truth” and it triggered, in his devotee, a needed catharsis.  Underneath anger, there will be sadness, and underneath sadness, acceptance.  When Christ’s mercy is spoken of, the one who opens his mouth will be quite different than the one who went home to his loved ones.


You are to take teachings from everywhere.  Monotheism was never rightly exclusive: it only became such because of the physical and cultural threat of the exile. Before the exile, Abraham not only gave the idolator Melchizedek a share with the people, but affirmed their common beliefs.  When the Word became flesh, the Teacher not only learned from the Jewish Elders, he asked questions of them–despite the fact that many of the younger men present could later have been among those calling for his crucifixion.  He affirmed the Canaanite woman, whose faith was part of what made healing possible.  Pluralism is meant as a mirror.  Do not avoid what you see there.


Do not assume that ideological or cultural differences are threatening, when they merely express different preferences than yours.  Egoic defensiveness feels similar to a fight or flight reaction, but one comes from the head, the other, from the nervous system.  It’s a mistake made often, and your serenity depends on avoiding it.  The Church was never rightly exclusive: it only became so when it became a church of martyrs.  Basic survival is the upper limit of judgment’s utility.  Judgment is not designed to regulate what we ourselves haven’t the ability to change–including the choices or beliefs of others.  Amen I say to you, for as long as “drive the evil from among you” and “judgment is excluded” can come mindlessly from the same mouth, the churches will be marred by spiritualized self-righteousness and its serenity will be threatened by the slightest differences.  Take the log from your own eye, then you will see clearly.  I say this to the shame of all people and to you, that all might be quiet and work on themselves.  It is ok to admit that this is hard.  If you fail to do it, at some point you must admit you prefer the comfort of being right to equanimity and your own serenity.  


Religious people, who falsely claim that their carefully curated religious ideology is orthodoxy, will caution you against living only the parts of the truth that you prefer.  They are correct: you are called to everything–but it will be the case that some of “everything” serves to humble you.  Hedonism, relativism and spiritualized narcissism all leave anxiety in their wake, and adhering to any of them will wreck your serenity.  You are to take teachings from everywhere, let go of pleasure, accept pain willingly, and convert no one but yourself.  Be quiet, be hospitable to the Truth as others understand it.  Sit with Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Atheists.  Ask them questions driven by childlike fascination, like the teacher did with his elders. 


Listen to Bishops and Cardinals, to homeless women and ice cream vendors. Take teachings from schismatic women priests, from corporate executives and from the dog excrement you step in on the way to meeting with them.  Listen to protestants and evangelicals and mormons–but call judgment judgment, and mercy, mercy.  If they have spoken wrongly, use it as energy to convert yourself.  But when they speak rightly, testify to the right.  Do not correct in others what you have left unconfronted in yourself. 


Humanists and Transcendentalists will speak truth, and Satanists will run soup kitchens better than Christians do, just to irk them.  The Eucharist was a scandal from beginning to end, and many abandoned Christ when he told the crowds consuming his body was a mandate.  Correct the scandal you find in yourself, and that alone: if you require mercy, extend it to others.  Do not discount what is beautiful, though it comes from an unfamiliar source.  Backsliding into judgment would be heaping hot coals of anxiety on your own head, and I would rather your life be more serene.  


I am trying to focus you on the parts of the Tradition that reduce ego–things that can serve as handholds when other people manifest their shadow.  Christ is before all else that is, the firstborn of the dead–do not be surprised if it is only in him that you’re able to hold it together, however barely.  But even the Teacher, led by the Spirit, emptied himself.  Even God’s Christ, faced with his suffering, surrendered his spirit to the Father.  Even Jesus accepted sadness and pain when “the way things are” dictated it.  In this way, by becoming sin, he fulfilled the call to everything.  Our serenity depends on doing the same, and if you find that difficult, that is ok.  Ego death is hard, and you are having an exactly right response to a difficult situation.


Give up self, do not judge.  If you’re thorough, what’s left will be the Trinity made manifest.  Imitate the teacher, intimately let him enter every thought, action, and choice you make.  When a nobler self arises in you, know that only by calling it what it is, “Christ within” will it remain healthy.  When you have internalized him, you will see him no longer, but you will see without craving, hear with your ears, feel with your hands–the knowledge of “who it is who is seeing” will be certain.  The wisdom teaching of the Church is not a secret knowledge.  The development of the higher self into Christ awakens capacities all people have: to meta-think and meta-emote, to reframe thinking.  And those open doors in two directions.  Your own being will echo the Father when you self observe with compassion.  Your own being will echo the Spirit when you experience the difference between the different layers of your embodied existence–and you will watch yourself treat our experience with increasingly speedy equanimity.  You will enjoy things you’re attracted to, and let them go.  You will prepare yourself to experience things you’re averse to–and though aversions can’t be expected to do much else than feel bad, we find that those, too, transform over time.


Taught by the sacraments, formed by meditation and contemplation, you will now learn from all of life.  You will remember it is always safe to honestly admit your faults–you’ll see that it limits the creation of habit, the proliferation of ego, resentment and remorse.  You are on the hook for the consequences of your actions, and every desire you act on willfully is fulfilled at a cost to your peace.  If you experience consolations in prayer, you will rely on life’s sufferings to balance them out, to assist you in letting go of even the ways psychological selves echo divinity.  Like the Teacher, you will empty yourself, making yourself a servant of the way things are.


With the higher self, as with the lower self, there are pitfalls.  After you have cared for your own wounded ego, avoiding resentment and remorse will depend on following Christ.  You’re physically, psychologically designed for this work. Do it so that you can minimize self-induced suffering.  When you see the ways your own being echoes the divine, avoiding entitlement, avoiding the assumption that your God’s judgments and your own are the same–these are the key to minimizing anxiety.  Do not imagine the pleasant parts of the spiritual life make you better than others.  Do not use the pleasant parts of the spiritual life to end-run around unfaced trauma.  The Christ you are becoming is a nobody, not a somebody.  Use the higher self to correct the lower self, use the non-self to correct the higher self, use the observer to let go of it all, then listen to the wind. 


Carry yourself in silence.  The events of the day will come, one after another.  Deal quickly with them and release them.  Sit in quiet for a small interval each day–morning and evening, if you can.  And if that initiates a tremendous and difficult surfacing of your own psychological hang ups, breathe, listen, and feel.  Read scripture with one eye on the page, and one on your reactions to it: remember, there are no “others” only mirrors of yourself.  All times are now, all people are you, all places are here, all opposites are relativized, and all potential is realized.  Read the psalter, find the lines that name what you’re feeling, and treat them like footsteps that bear you through the day.  If thoughts about self cease–even if it happens through dissociation, overwhelm, scandal, or condemnation, (fair or unfair) let those thoughts go.


Decide to know nothing but Christs crucified.  Decide to become the kind of person that can handle stress, rather than busying yourself trying to remove or reduce the stress.The mind of Christ begets unconditionality, and the ability to bear unequal or undeserved weight is the fruit of being suspended on the Cross.  Affirm others, without hoping to be affirmed. Give without grasping, desire God’s will alone–because only by wanting what God wants on his timeline and terms will your desire be free of clinging.   


Breathe, listen and feel, taste and see with focused attention and intention, using physical sensation to ground yourself in equanimity.  Note what you’re attracted to or averse to, realizing that Christ is manifest in all of it.  To prepare yourself for Christ’s presence in aversion, flex the muscles of virtue.  To prepare yourself for Christ’s presence in attraction, practice enjoying, indulging limitedly, and letting go.


Take a lesson from the beloved disciple, inquiring of Christ as to who would betray him: the part of you that is waiting for the other shoe to drop, that’s waiting for something to go wrong, will never cease.  The part of you that has the potential to mishandle grace may not be eliminated.  A great number of saints only grew in awareness of their sins as their lives progressed.  God’s grace wasn’t in sin’s elimination, but the ability to bear, with Christ, the deepening awareness of their intractability.  At the risk of eisegesis–for which we’re all “judgeable at most”-- Christ says to all of us “if it is my will that [the ego] remain until I return, what is that to you?  Come follow me.”  This, too, is part of fulfilling the scriptures.  


I will tell you a mystery: there are no others.  Where can heaven and hell be, if not here?  Who can be God or Satan except you?  There is no future and there is no past.  The Lord is not slow to act, as some think of slowness.  Instead, he is patient.  Your superego and the communal superego may transact shame and judgment, but that’s no reason to avoid healthy repentance as you understand it.  The second coming is not at the end of the world, either.  It happens when you realize that the world is a part of you, that your own consciousness is contained in the world.  No less than this happened with the Teacher.  Who are the only candidates for embodying him except those who make themselves students of everything, who say “here I am.”  When that is you, know that “here and now” is a place where you’re most welcome: grace, providence and the Spirit have made it that way, so that you can feel both truly empowered and as safely disempowered as the Teacher was.  Just as the apostles would be given everything they renounced plus persecutions, you, too, will cease to want some things for the sake of embracing everything.


Before the quiet mind of Christ, chop wood and carry water.  After the mind of Christ, chop wood and carry water. In moments of depression, the scriptures said “get up and eat, lest the journey be too much for you.”  Now I say to you, “on the mountain, they beheld God, and they ate and drank.”  If you’ve become able to hear the question, “is the one who chews the same as the one who is swallowed up,” then your victory is real.  What was said to Peter is said of you “when you have turned back, you must strengthen the others.”  For God’s sake, go find them! 


  






 




 



Saturday, August 10, 2024

Letter in a time of difficulty

Guruji, you are before all else that is. In you all things hold together, though I am falling apart. I am troubled now, but it is for this hour that I came into the world. The glory of the Lord is the opening of the ear, a serene and expansive compassion. I hear you calling me to everything, and I cause myself suffering by wanting the things of God to be exclusively pleasant. If the mountains are where my help comes from, they will be leveled, and the valleys raised–there is no place I could go that isn’t here. And remembrance isn’t a reaching to the past, much less a nursing of the hope that God do, again and in the future, what he did before. On the day of the Lord, expectations and mental work will sit quietly. On the day of the Lord, past and future will cease. What can be a time of fulfillment, other than now? [bxA]


In solitude, I saw myself. In all things you were standing right in front of me. But I was distracted by thoughts about food and possessions, satisfaction and status. I was anxiously driven to too much or too little work. I used sadness to manipulate, used others bodies and attention to cover emotions. I overreacted in anger to push people away, thought myself above them, believed myself self-sufficient. So you gave the sacraments to teach safe vulnerability. Everyone under the sun is born, hungers, grows and matures. Everyone who toils also longs to love and be loved, falters at being of service. All have sinned. All will grow ill and then die, will fall as short of God’s glory as Moses was distant from the promised land. You showed us how to be weak, and to do all that without substituting thought for embodiment. As surely as the Holy of holies, the wounds in your side, and the mind of Christ were all names for emptiness, you gave us the Eucharist to help us celebrate poverty and find others who knew the throes of transformation.


You sought the lost, healed the broken, became sin, surrendered to the cross and the grave–this is so that, when you rose as the true self, ego might wax a little noble, seek the parts of the psyche that are relegated to shadow. This is so that I might recognize that all pain is one, that my pain and the stripes I’m healed by are the same. This is so all will know what’s painful and pleasurable both to carry your presence and teachings. You became bread and told us to eat (lest the way be too long) when we longed for death in the wilderness. You became wine to gladden the heart, light to make the path clear. You made yourself all forms of overwhelming need: strangers, the hungry, the homeless, the sick, the imprisoned. When I was averse to your presence, you made mustering gentle fortitude my anxiety’s only remedy. When I was attracted to your presence, you made letting go my only peace. With ever-increasing speed, I recognized dissociation, overwhelm, scandal and condemnability to be your preferred way of teaching. And you made me so disgusted with my ignorance that learning your lessons was the only way to live with myself. The kind of “weary letting down of the nets” I once objected to, I have seen myself do at the behest of strangers, because their faces and yours are the same. Instincts to generosity increase with a speed that can only begin with the Spirit. I have seen this, sometimes and too seldom, in myself.


You said once “I in them and they in me, so that they may all be one.” You confused beholder and beheld, then handed it all over to the Father. You have showed me all this, so that I might cease living my life from a safe observational distance, and instead live safe behind the shut door of my heart where the father who sees in secret is the only necessary reward, and there is no me left to worry. So I know that everything in you—your crucifixion, your resurrection and your ascension—these are always happening, and will happen in me. Your transfiguration is always happening, and will happen in me. But I will be unsurprised if what glowed white on the mountain for you is a cross and God’s absence for my small and short-sighted ego. I don’t necessarily enjoy that part of how things are, but I won’t blame the way things are for my lack of acceptance.


Now I know what you’ve been trying to teach me. You became flesh so that all people could be grounded and at home in their own bodies. You breathed until you heard the name of God echoing in your own lungs. You listened to the sound of the wind until sound and sensation were one, until your whole body became an ear. You felt sensation until you had given up your spirit, and your inside became like your outside. You said, “keep listening, and do not understand, keep looking, but do not comprehend,” and, for us, it made” self and thought” forever an optional part of reflecting God’s image . All flesh will see it together: all sensation belongs to you, and nothing’s mine to build a remorseful little ego narrative with.


And yet, I am tired. I’ve heard it said that the Word is the ordering principle of the universe. For others, maybe, but not, apparently, for me. For me the Word is a double edged sword, separating joint from marrow. Underneath action, my thoughts are a circus of errors. Underneath thought, there’s emotion. Underneath emotion, there’s sensation, and underneath sensation there’s energy. Each layer is made more unmanageable by the “self” with which I judge. I am like a tree, planted beside flowing waters, remaining fruitless nonetheless. You told me to dig around the roots, fertilize and wait: despite my feelings of powerlessness and uselessness, here I am, waiting.


The world tells me faith is certainty, and intellectual assent. Yet I am riddled with doubt and resentment, anger and sadness. The epistles say “I died daily”--that’s shockingly non-metaphorical, and I am ashamed at ever having expected otherwise. I am numb, I can count all my bones, my soul is racked with pain. So long as Gilead is elsewhere, no balm exists for the wounds I carry. I know the version of myself that’s perishing, I have not yet discovered the resources to stand quietly and confidently in my present discomfort.


Though it’s in a mirror, dimmed by intuition, I know it: there is no “us” or “them,” there’s only Christ–and the image of you that I am becoming is a nobody, not a somebody. There is no self, there is only Christ in me. For them there are no pains–and it’s the same for me–but only because the body always carries your sufferings, so that your life might be made visible there as well. You said “because I live, you also will live” and I have to watch that the precarity of the morning not lead, at close of day, to hopelessness. Only by belonging to Christ was my pain, my life, my self rendered tolerable.


First words have formed me, though I’ve strayed from them. “In the beginning,” said St. John, “was the Word.” Benedict said “Listen, my son, to the master’s instructions. These are the words of a Father who loves you.” The psalmist was perhaps most apt. “Happy indeed is the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked.” To the increase of suffering, I skimmed over the words and it wrecked my serenity: there were too many emotions, too many distractions, too many shiny little bits of resentment to grab at.


A happy old monk once said “I’m sorry, it won’t happen again till next time.” Today, I will begin. Morning by morning, when you waken my ear, I will listen. I will not seek a gladness that’s a commodity, I will not seek bliss induced by others: the Word is bigger than I am, and after all, I am nailed to it. “Happy indeed is the man. Happy, in deed.” May I disappear in the doing of the Word.

Saturday, August 3, 2024

 In the beginning was the Word. And the Word is a silence in which attention and intention are rendered vibratory. Life–an enfleshment of the Word, with its same beginning and end–came into being that way. The only way to live healthily in a world that struggles between silence and speech, remembrance and forgetting, clinging and letting go–the only way to be free of resentment in a set up like that is to realize that the world, and others, are a part of you–and to preach healing to yourself. Others’ shadow sides will judge you, and great pain will be part of the bliss…and this will be intolerable unless you believe that you are called to everything, that there are no others, then set about caring for what is sick, resentful, outcast, in yourself. Do not “other” anyone or anything–do not “other” yourself by being an ego. It'll only create suffering, and you will be a perpetually tired human. [bxA]


Jesus came into the world–which is to say he came into the mind and body, stood between past and future, remembrance and forgetting– and neither the world nor “his own people” accepted him. What is the world, except the ego, so concerned with knowing that it is unable to accept that unknowing is also part of everything? He came to what was his own, and his own did not accept him. What is his own, except action, thought, emotion, sensation, and energy? If we are the body of Christ, we are re-learning lessons we skimmed over too quickly. It plays hell on our nervous systems, but we are learning to get cuddly again with a demanding curriculum of embodiment that ego didn't want to deal with. We eventually know what the teacher meant when he said “if you do not do well with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?”

Here we are, in the silly and messy midst of everything. All levels of incarnate existence seem to balk at the intensity of everything. And through Ego, we hold it all at a distance. The teacher said “You will die in your sins unless you believe that I am.” If you continue to live at an egoic distance with lived experience, there will be a “you” that’s separate from God, and “sins” that are somehow vastly different than virtue. We are like children playing in the marketplace. The flute plays and we don’t dance. Someone sings a dirge and we fail to mourn. We’re caught in fruitless and unskillful responses to WHAT IS, struggling to find the skillful means of prudence, temperance, fortitude.

And the remedy is “I am.” Not “thinking I am.” Just being. We are awareness and sound rendered solid enough to boop each other on the nose and stare into the abyss. John Vianney stared at the Tabernacle so long and so intently that what it held looked back at him. It was a staring contest: the kingdom of God, though, might just be a way to describe those spaces when, locked in the gaze of our own sentience, awareness itself blinks first.

The way is oneness, and we struggle to follow. Going forward, let us simply admit that we don’t have the wherewithal to get past first words. The Tao Te Ching says “The Way that can be spoken is not the Eternal Way;” the rest of the book is just explanation of its first line. The Rule of Benedict starts with the word “Listen;” every subsequent word explains the first. The first word of the Psalter is “Happy”. The rest of the book is just a revelation that happiness is large enough to contain every possible human emotion, pleasant and unpleasant. And the bible’s first three words are “in the beginning.” When can that be, except now?