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? [bxA] You have heard it said "The father knows what you need before you ask him." I am telling you that you don't know what you need until you ask him. Solomon was blessed because, in a dream, he asked God for wisdom. You will be blessed if, in prayer, you ask God to help you distinguish needs from wants. Enlightenment will overflow within you if you allow that dance--between the Father, the Son, the Spirit and me--to define what you need and want.

Your existence is a question, not an answer. You experience stress because you come at life with narratives of "this is who I am," and "this is what I need and want" looping in your head--and then maybe people understand you, maybe they don't. Maybe you get what you need or want, maybe you don't. What if each moment were an answer to those questions? What if you already are who you need to be, and already have what you need? What if the hardest part of wanting is, in fact, something no one taught you to expect: namely, evaluating what desire will cost you? Accepting all of this will require you to adjust, but in our learning, the student changes, not reality. 

What if the the truest thing about your grief were its malleability and impermanence? You will experience great loss and enormous tragedy. People will tell you "Never forget" until it becomes a chorus ringing inside you. But what if we switched the narrative? What if I told you "Always remember--"always remember, for instance, the way ego will use your legitimate sadness and anger to keep itself safe. Always remember that advertising companies, nation states and desire systems are waiting with baited breath to exploit the vulnerability, sadness and anger you feel to achieve ends they first defined for you, and then ennobled. "This product will make you happy" they'll say, when what it'll really do is numb what you're feeling. "People who are different than you can threaten your security" they'll say, hoping you'll forget the teacher's greatest lesson: that not even death can threaten you. "Satisfaction is a click away" they'll say, hoping you'll miss the way you're getting baited into thoughtless, emotionless loops of stimulus and response.

There's a truth to be told here. When I tell it, people get nervous, but I want you to know you're totally safe: you see, everything that you know of yourself is a lie. Every desire you have, every attraction and aversion and craving--none of this assists you in being who you are. And it's totally okay if that's something you don't understand on a guts level right now--if we continue to learn together, you'll be telling yourself "I don't know why it took forever for me to get that" over and over again. Even the most minor gurus of this age have a response for that: it didn't take forever. It required only now, and that you be here as the scales fall from your eyes.

I can anticipate you asking me "how do I get better at being here?" In order to become what you are not, you have to walk an unfamiliar path. Take the job that comes with less prestige, feel the emotions that break your heart, accept other people just as they are. The process will suck most of the time, but even the healthiest practice comes with suffering--because suffering is just an unkind word for the strange emotions an sensations that come with becoming. One more thing: in the midst of that unfamiliarity, you have to allow yourself to stop looking for support from others: instead, console, nurture and encourage yourself the way you wish others would. I know that's a hard thing to hear. But look: you will become who you are. It's unavoidable. Your needs will be revealed. Your true desires will clarify themselves. Your most important work in that process is letting go of how you want that to happen.

Just breathe.  How much of life do you miss because your attention fixes on shiny objects like television or stress or emotions?  How much more alive would you feel if you allowed life, and not your attention span, to tell you how vibrancy feels?  Look up: the first rays of dawn are emerging outside. Listen: the trash trucks are collecting.  The birds are singing.

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 [bxA] that "deserving" is an egoic calculation. Selves don't exist in the first place--and there is no self, in all the earth, that's entitled to a positive experience. This life is a clean up job. You are attached: attracted to some things, averse to others, learning to let go of both. You are learning, when life throws experiences at you, to choose which emotions to nurture and which to allow to die off. It's hard work, because your first instinct is to personalize and internalize what's painful, allowing it to fester.

You decided to drown out paradoxes by picking one side of them, and going with it. It was an expedient. You can't un-ring a bell, you can't turn in all directions and you can't un-choose an incarnation. But I saw the enormous vulnerability and the need for guidance, and it filled the choosing with fear, abandonment and anger. I need to be carefully honest with you: the so called "negative emotion" you feel, these all came from you abandoning embodied, unexamined existence for the sake of something you could mentally control. Fault is not the issue, but this resulted from choices you made. You would know the meaning of "paralysis by analysis" by the end, and it would leave you groping in the dark of your own body, searching for the center of yourself that you've strayed from, where you can hear hum of your own existence, the hum of everything being: that place where the hearing is both medicine and healing.  

You decided to eliminate the desire you felt by satisfying it. I wasn't concerned, and I am not now, about satisfying your needs. But all of this created enormous suffering. Craving and desire is the most toxic possible response to poverty.  When you realized you are poor, you called out to God.  You had realizations about where you went wrong that seemed to come from outside of you.  In reality, that was just You speaking to yourself.  More and more you were learning to listen to your own needs.

There was enough, and needs were satisfied, and you were who you were, well before your system of choice and preference limited you in the making of them.  I was present: everything sufficed, before there was gospel and salvation and messiahs of all types.  Before buddhas, bodhisattvas and dharma, I was there.  You don't have to become any of it, or choose anything, to make reality more or less real.  

You'll see the steps that you skipped: to get away from vulnerability, your sensations jumped the fence of your body--suddenly, not only did you identify with your body, you mislabelled as needs the cravings and desires anesthetizing that pain. You were not gentle with yourself--you did not take food as a gift or celebration, and you did not allow touch to free you from ego. You need to reset your definition of enough. Once, remember, it meant "enough for today." But having more than you need for too long, and having too long sustained the effort to overwhelm your vulnerabilities with craving--this has made times of poverty a necessary corrective. The anxiety you feel is withdrawal. If you bear and bear with it, it'll end shortly.  Just like everything else.

Listen: As gently as I can, I need to tell you this. The impermanence of your feelings and thoughts is the core of the Gospel. This is what Gethesemani's stones cried out; it's what Rabbouni heard while the need for sleep silenced his students. All pleasure and pain is momentary. And it doesn't commit you to a personal narrative--it's not necessary to ennoble your pain to justify enduring it. You don't need to explain anything to anyone. You become free of cause and effect by not running from it. All flesh is like the grass--your flesh, the Teacher's flesh, the carcass rotting in the field.  The letting go will feel like self immolation, but that's not as fearful as you think.

If I could make these words feel, each of them, like a hand on your shoulder, I would: vulnerability is totally safe.  Eternality is more like a paradox than it is a long wait.  The paradox of existence and non-being, of work and non-doing, of knowing and unknowing--these never go away, no matter how our focus shifts, no matter how we might think our perception changes reality.  The question's been asked "if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"  I'm telling you that you can't answer the question with your ears or your ego, and if you were listening that way to anything at all, this moment would be the answer to the question.

If I am glib, if I say to you "shut up and listen," the humor of it will get you caught in acting with your ego.  But I suppose that's part of of what I'm saying.  Beyond that, figure out how being limited feels.  Choosing and preferring, craving and desiring and nursing opinions--these are all optional.  Everything changes, when the poetry of their absence liberates your breathing.  You and I are one.  We are an openness speaking to a vulnerability: the flower of manifestation whispering that it's high time to bloom.

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. [bxA]  Listen: you can perhaps hear me speaking.  You have perhaps had spiritual experiences.  You may even have given all that you have, many times over, in an effort to find answers.  But you still have a great deal to learn about how to encounter your needs consciously.  All of the unmet yearnings (for others, for comfort and for egoic transcendence) that those things provide--their deficiencies are a great poverty, and that poverty is neither a problem nor a crisis.  Remember: I am asking you to see what you lack as cause for a kind of "celebratory finding the others"--because the bounty of the infinite cosmos makes beggars of us all.  I'm asking you to treat your suffering with curiosity and fascination rather than dread.  

You are still learning how to notice the dread in the first place.  You need a great deal more work in being able to watch non-judgmentally as that dread changes to opportunity and the energy runs its course.  You are by no means a realized being.  You are a student, and a student works with a curriculum.  Get over yourself.  Of the Teacher, you have heard it said "his yoke is easy and his burden is light."  Asking to bear nothing will simply increase suffering.  But if you work at it patiently, you might perhaps find serenity.  

Celebrating your poverty is a wedding feast of empowerment and joy.   You must wear the festal garment of non-self to enter.  And you keep entering the party and then leaving again--that's okay.  In and of itself, it's not a big issue.  You are in a world of people who wear their egos like winter coats in summer time: you will have to learn to assume your ego when you need to, and to drop it when you can.  But you come and go compulsively, in a way that's driven by fear and insecurity.  Remember the book: it said I will go forth from God's mouth and not return to him empty.  I am teaching you to come and go, to wear your ego and be humble, as God wills, not as you will.

And don't worry: that process is supposed to feel like whirlwinds in your chest and burning coals in your throat.  You are every prophet that was ever martyred in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem is your own body.  I'm asking you to be so attentive to the sensations that, like the teacher before his accusers, you get quiet.

I don't know.  Maybe egos just need to know what "spending all you have fruitlessly" feels like, before the hem of the teacher's garment looks appealing.  Maybe using blame and resentment and defeatedness to cope needs plenty of space to get old before you're willing to try something else.  Maybe there's a yoga to the years of sitting lame before the Teacher tells you to take up your mat and walk.  The patriarch Joseph wasn't given all the power in his prison on the first day.  Before the end, you will realize you love the time you have to practice, and you'll suspect you've spent lifetimes thinking it only just occurred to you.  As the upa-gurus of this generation say, "You didn't need a long time to realize this.  You only needed now."

There it is. First, be here now.  Then, put on some music.  And go clean your messy apartment.

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. [bxA]

Somehow, admitting that you're vulnerable has to come first.  After that, understand that the spirit acts in the body as it acts in the world.  Within you, it flows where it meets no resistance; outside you, it blows where it wills.  Wisdom makes every person on earth a hermit; facing your needs without manipulating to get them met is the only real solitude.  You alone can search your heart to know what's holding you back: the work is to become your own remover of obstacles.  You alone know how you have failed to cooperate with and harness the universe's power: the work is to "read the distance" between you and empowerment and take small steps toward whatever's more manageable.  Be wary of cycles of desire and fulfillment.  They never have, and never will adequately address your needs.   And they can distract the attention and sap the energy you might otherwise use to help yourself.

I am not here, nor are you, so that you'll start desiring spiritual things. Calling out for divine help will not gain you support.  The Teacher is a sign of contradiction--crucified so that the inner thoughts of many will be laid bare.  In the beginning, thought and emotion and sensation and energy were a free flowing stream within you, and it would slake your thirst as often as you drank it with remembrance.  But God help us, we forget--we forget, and can neither breathe and nor weep as we wish, and we live in such fear of our mortality that the sight of our own blood causes aversion.  The absence of divine assistance can teach the attentive to survey the wreckage, to more effectively distinguish what can be changed from what can't. I am here to restore calmness of breathing, to create openness to the gift of tears, to help you find the power in your own blood.

For the sake of living without anxiety, please be still...poverty is an absolutely miserable spiritual tool, and you will go through a hell of withdrawals as you learn to live with fewer stimuli, as you let go of your own petty manipulations.  But for the sake of your own serenity, identify what's worth more to you than stillness and let go of it.  If you are not able to sit in the center of your own body, the whole world will confine you.  If, even for a moment, you can calm the inner impulses seeking to chase one shiny object after another--if you can do that, the world will open inside you like the lilies of the field.   Then you will see: you are splendor within splendor within splendor.  But it will be no big deal--because you will be free, and that will be enough.

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. [bxA]

If you're any kind of intellectual being, know that mind, in the end, is ego.  It's extremely helpful, until it's not.  A vulture is Christ.  One hand claps.   This will seem contradictory, and will shake (to its core) the part of you that's addicted to logic.  The Teacher lived Isaiah's words: he gave his back to those who beat him, his cheek to those who plucked out the beard.  He turned to you and said "if anyone strikes you on the one cheek, turn and offer him the other."  This isn't an instruction manual in being a push-over.  When you are actively trying to accept sensations you're viscerally averse to, there's very little room for self, for preference, for finely tuned opinions.  It's true, you are immensely valuable: you're a member of God's people, and you share his name.  But you are also impermanent.  God said "You are not my people and I am not your God" through some fairly loud prophets.  When the legion is cast out of you, when sitting finds you fully clothed and in your right mind, it will be because you have ascended the cross within you--the one that brings reality out of the tension between who you are, and who you are not.  The day on which that happens will be as all days are: great and terrible.

Beware the false bottom, the "lowest point possible."  Explanations about how it couldn't get any worse often have an implied "you" at their core.  Whoever this "you" is, it's not who you are. 

If you're any kind of a spiritual being, know that your superego will co-opt everything you value, and every bit of wisdom it's yielded.  A time will come--and it may be today-- when looking for God won't work.  Listening for God won't work.  The quantity of ego in seeing and hearing make it inevitable.  The Father asks the prophets: "Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.’"  When superego uses religion to reengage our attachments, aversions, attractions and cravings, it's building a tower that not only risks collapse, but is inevitably bound for destruction.

Remember: Job, having been deprived of everything, demanded explanations.  Elijah, facing the threat of death, talked about his own zeal and complained that his life was at risk.  Neither received a fantastic and blinding divine manifestation.  Both were rendered silent.  In a whirlwind, God told Job: the reason for suffering none of your business.  Elijah heard the still small voice of sheer silence.  In other words, the two men had their egos reduced.  All incidents of non-self are spiritual experiences, but not all spiritual experiences have non-self at their core.

Humility is an important movement.  Non-self is the muscle you'll use to rise, take up your mats and walk.  Don't ask me how to do this.  Don't ask me what this looks like.  The mind's unable help with the question or supply the answer.  I am unwilling to help.  God cannot do for you what you're unwilling to do for yourself.  Jesus ascended, and I know how hard his absence is.  I know that leaves you crucified between two sides of a paradox.  It's okay.  First, breathe.  Then, clean your home.  When you see the sunlight on the walls, and hear the room's quiet, rejoice: you have become the teacher.