Dialogues with Mystery 12

When you rise in the morning: realize that part of you sees the day as a crisis. And part of you is looking for behaviors and substances and circumstances that will soothe that sense of crisis. This could be coffee, lust, the distraction of mindless internet strolling. (Make no mistake, you’ll choose when and where to indulge those crutches, and when and where to forgo them, and that’s ok—it’s just a matter, knowing that all indulged desires take a toll, of choosing your cost.) Absent security and comfort, you will begin to blame others. It’s often those who, bound to you by some personal affection or professional responsibility, definitely SHOULD kick in and help. Blame is fruitless too, and provides short term cold comfort at best. Better not to indulge it, but if you don’t know it’s fruitless from experience, give blame some time and energy—learn where the dead ends are early, so you can move on.

Here’s the work:...

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Dialogues with Mystery 11

You have been shown the beginning. Satisfaction isn't the end end of desire, and even if it were, there isn't enough of what we desire for everybody to get enough. You've begun to grieve the massive loss of self, to admit you're powerless. You've been shown the end. Rabbouni has shown you that plain things like bread and prayer and weeping can be celebrations. Because of it, you can see all those around you who are in desperate need of rejoicing.  You have begun to find the others. 

 Somehow that fell short of real serenity. ...

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Dialogues with Mystery 10

We are in a hard spot together, you and I. Rabbouni died. Your grief over losing him--well, that's the easiest part. As you grieve he will descend into your self-made hells, rise again, then ascend. When that happens--and it will happen inside you--you'll no longer see him. Don't worry, this is how grief goes. You're not supposed to be able to see the one who has chosen to see the world through your eyes. True, no one told you that internalizing Jesus would involve grief. If they had, it wouldn't have made that measure of loss any more bearable. ...

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Dialogues with Mystery: 9

Listen: experience is a parable. From the beginning, I've been trying to get you to hear this: incarnation comes at a cost. When I said "you will be like God, and your eyes will be opened" I wasn't lying. I couldn't tell you...

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Dialogues with Mystery: 8

I have to ask you: what if the truest thing about this moment isn't a desire, a story you're perpetuating about yourself, or an attempt to bamboozle someone into providing for what you need or want? What would life look like if the day led you, instead of the things you lacked? ...

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Dialogues with Mystery: 7

I remember the enormous frustration you felt, taking this incarnation. I may well remember it more accurately than you do.  It was so intense that it soaked into every pore of your body. I knew--because incarnations are lawful and that's just how they work--that your body would remember. At first glance, anyway, you appear not to "deserve" some of what existence saddled you with.  I don't have access to the reasons for all that, and reason is overrated anyway.  All I can tell you is ...

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Dialogues with Mystery: 6

There's a spot we'll meet in, together, more than once.

You'll admit all of the compulsivities: using relationships, psychedelic chemicals, spirituality, sex and food to self-soothe.  You will cop to being a people pleaser, and realize that you modify your consciousness more to comfort a sore ego than to learn how to use it differently.  You'll fess up to seeking heaven because you can't deal with earth, to looking for God because you shirk personal responsibility.  You'll admit that you use sex to end-run around truly internalizing the teacher's power, and feel bad about subtly asking your lover to cooperate in your self-deception. You will face the fact that you eat your feelings. You'll feel silly and immature and ashamed and simply exhausted.  And you'll ask me to give you the resources to quit the whole business.

But I won't. ...

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Dialogues with Mystery: 5

Listen: creating a mentally abstracted "self" is not a shortcut to self-discovery.  Ego is psychological sleight of hand: it paints a smile on reality while our thirst for control blows up in our face.  Nothing finite is in a position to control the infinite.  Your life is not a hostage negotiation, and you are not in a position to present Divine Mystery with terms of surrender.  Craving, attachment, attraction and aversion, shame and blame and resentment gain ground every minute you buy into the lie that your will can change reality.  How many of your opinions are simply inward attempts to force, persuade or cajole others into thinking as you do?   Every attempt you make at that kind of control will demand its pound of flesh: anxiety is the cost of consenting to that illusion.  It is like unwittingly mixing ashes in your own food. ...

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Dialogues with Mystery: 4

This isn't my message.  It's what the crumbs on your dirty coffee table are telling you.  It's the voice of your own numbness.  I know you're tired--but so long as you're seeking to be excused from weariness, you'll find no relief.  The Teacher first bore the Cross, then he died on it: rest is found on the other side of acceptance.  

I am asking you to hit bottom. ...

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Dialogues with Mystery: 3

I am here to tell you that, like the teacher, you are Word made flesh.  Sound and substance mirror each other, and your body is an echo chamber.  Ego has left you addicted to pleasure and wholly unable to accept pain.  You may only see contradiction--selfishness blinds even the sighted--but existence is a paradox: you are the infinite cosmos, learning the curriculum of limitation.  ...

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Dialogues with Mystery: 2

Listen...I am saying this to you so that you can become "one without a second."  I am saying this to you so that you'll relax--not "stop being attentive" but instead "stop being willful."  Work, attention, and even the very thoughts that pop into our head--these are all laced with force.  You exhaust yourselves by peddling the primordial lie--that you are your thoughts--as if it were true.  Never, more than now, has it been important to rest.  Past and future, after all, only exist in the mind.

I want to tell you that the universe is alive. ...

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My name is Legion: Introductions on Returning to School

I have been leaving parts of myself out of the spiritual journey.  It represents bits of the curriculum that I've got to go back and spend more time with.  If my life lacks peace, it's because there's some small instance of neglect in my own formation.  Each chakra has a toxic "persona" that it creates and stores inside me.  At times, I've identified, totally and haphazardly, with every one. The Chakras have vulnerable personas, and often I've bypassed those entirely for lack of knowing how to defend them.  Any self that ignores those different bits of masquerade etiquette will, at best, see through a darkened lens. ...

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Tantra and the Anatomy of Recollection

What I have to say, ultimately, is this: Tantra, as a philosophy and a discipline, is just Catholicism that has centralized the discipline of recollection.  It was a conversation with Hanuman Dass, my brother and guru, that helped the words emerge.  He'd been asking "What's your way in?"  He meant "what's your way into the interior life?"  ...

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Grief: Soliloquies and Sequels

Some time ago, I wrote a post saying "broken heartedness is the bride of the logos."  It's been a while: I don't even know what I said and I'm unmotivated to reread it.  But I've become more convinced that it's true, so I need to give it some time.

A little while ago, a question formed itself in my head. "How do emotions transform when the logos is active?"  My heart chakra's been a dance floor lately, and all my emotions have shown up wearing polyester leisure suits.  I'm a sucky dancer, so sitting with all of it hasn't been comfortable or fun.  But here, for what it's worth, is what it's yielded: ...

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Grief: the Prayer of Impermanence.

Because of the Logos, when Rabbouni lives within us: our bodies are the only place infinite divinity dies.  We turned our eyes to the mountains in hope of help.  It turned out that the mountains were inside us. Waiting for the redeemer made us prudent, taught us how to help ourselves until we realized the redeemer had moved inside as well.  Eventually, as Job did, we see God in our own flesh: we have a whole body worth of trauma to face, an entire psychological maze full of dark turns to befriend.  Open ears reveal that silence has a message: the stones preach in the absence of gospel-loosened tongues.  Science says that the limbic system has a message: as trauma surfaces and heals, the body preaches.  The story of salvation, and the story of your own deep healing are One.  ...

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Seeking the Still Point

I've talked about the theonoias--units of mental activity, where the goal is the first theonoia, or mental stillness--and I've talked about the "layers"--the fact that every thought has an emotion, every emotion has a physical sensation, and every physical sensation has an energy (and our job is to witness the interconnectedness of it all.)   I've also talked about suspension--the way we are most at the disposal of the spirit within when we are beholden to two opposite sides of a paradox, without resolving the tension.

The fact is, the first theonoia isn't just mental. It has an emotional corollary, a parallel in physical sensation, an energetic equivalent.  And knowing what these are is an important part of cultivating curiosity and playfulness with all the many layers of our experience. To that end: a bit of an "umbrella concept."  I call it "the still-point." ...

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The Program of Christian Tantra: Objectives, Ways and Means.

Words and logic may reveal a great deal about God and Christ, but if these were silent, so would the stones.  It is possible to get obsessed with our egotistical plans for spirituality, (and at some stages of the spiritual life it's more likely to happen than not,) so a practitioner should be silent and listen.  The words I am writing were straw before I wrote them.  Don't get caught up in saying silence or words are better or more necessary.  Every incarnation is a grieving process within a paradox, and the task of an incarnation is to learn to use both words and silence (indeed, all that's seen and unseen) for the acceptance of reality. ...

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