5 posts tagged “wisdom”
[New Mexico from my flickr photostream]
***
***
Consider this from Thomas Merton:
"There must be a time of day when the man who
makes plans forgets his plans,
and acts as if he had no plans at all.
There must be a time of day when the man who has
to speak falls very silent.
And his mind forms no more propositions,
and he asks himself:
Did they have a meaning?
There must be a time
When the man of prayer goes to pray
as if it were the first time in his life
he had ever prayed,
when the man of resolutions puts his
resolutions aside
as if they had all been broken,
and he learns a different wisdom:
distinguishing the sun from the moon,
the stars from the darkness,
the sea from the dry land,
and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.
*
"Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. Childlikeness has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage. When a man reaches this stage of spiritual development, he is a Zen artist of life."
- D. T. Suzuki
*****
"There is tremendous power in unearthing, in recognizing distracted, scattered mind, the mind which would rather be anywhere but here, and spending some time there, with that mind. Rather than being an anonymous voice from the dark bossing you around, scattered mind is someone you can sit down and hang out with."
- Jusan Ed Brown
*
Wheresoever you turn, there is the face of God."
~ Quran, II.115
*
"In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice. We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we're faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we'll do, but who we'll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging
shut behind us each time we select this one or that one should trouble us, but it doesn't. Nor does the fact that the doors often are identical and even lead in some cases to the exact same place. Occasionally a door is locked, but no matter, since so many others remain available. The distinct possibility that choice itself may be an illusion is something we disregard, because we're curious to know what's behind that next door, the one we hope will lead us to the very heart of the mystery. Even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary we remain confident that when we emerge, with all our choosing done, we'll have found not just our true destination but also its meaning."
from Bridge of Sighs
by Richard Russo
*
"When Moses conversed with God, he asked, "Lord where shall I seek you?"
God answered, "Among the brokenhearted."
Moses continued, "But, Lord, no heart could be more despairing than mine."
And God replied, "Then I am where you are."
-Abu'l Fayd Al-Misri
*
The 'guinea-pigging' of vast swathes of the population has, up till now, solved two problems: the 'time' problem (namely, how to avoid addressing the underlying reasons for mental health problems), and how to create new markets amidst the flourishing of generic drug production, particularly outside of the US and Europe. Clearly the interiorisation of unhappiness is far more profitable than the outward realisation that perhaps misery has nothing to do with you personally and everything to do with the world in which you live.
- infinite thØught
"There must be a time of day when the man who
makes plans forgets his plans,
and acts as if he had no plans at all.
There must be a time of day when the man who has
to speak falls very silent.
And his mind forms no more propositions,
and he asks himself:
Did they have a meaning?
There must be a time
When the man of prayer goes to pray
as if it were the first time in his life
he had ever prayed,
when the man of resolutions puts his
resolutions aside
as if they had all been broken,
and he learns a different wisdom:
distinguishing the sun from the moon,
the stars from the darkness,
the sea from the dry land,
and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.
*
"Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. Childlikeness has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage. When a man reaches this stage of spiritual development, he is a Zen artist of life."
- D. T. Suzuki
*****
"There is tremendous power in unearthing, in recognizing distracted, scattered mind, the mind which would rather be anywhere but here, and spending some time there, with that mind. Rather than being an anonymous voice from the dark bossing you around, scattered mind is someone you can sit down and hang out with."
- Jusan Ed Brown
*
Wheresoever you turn, there is the face of God."
~ Quran, II.115
*
"In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice. We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we're faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we'll do, but who we'll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging
shut behind us each time we select this one or that one should trouble us, but it doesn't. Nor does the fact that the doors often are identical and even lead in some cases to the exact same place. Occasionally a door is locked, but no matter, since so many others remain available. The distinct possibility that choice itself may be an illusion is something we disregard, because we're curious to know what's behind that next door, the one we hope will lead us to the very heart of the mystery. Even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary we remain confident that when we emerge, with all our choosing done, we'll have found not just our true destination but also its meaning."
from Bridge of Sighs
by Richard Russo
*
"When Moses conversed with God, he asked, "Lord where shall I seek you?"
God answered, "Among the brokenhearted."
Moses continued, "But, Lord, no heart could be more despairing than mine."
And God replied, "Then I am where you are."
-Abu'l Fayd Al-Misri
*
The 'guinea-pigging' of vast swathes of the population has, up till now, solved two problems: the 'time' problem (namely, how to avoid addressing the underlying reasons for mental health problems), and how to create new markets amidst the flourishing of generic drug production, particularly outside of the US and Europe. Clearly the interiorisation of unhappiness is far more profitable than the outward realisation that perhaps misery has nothing to do with you personally and everything to do with the world in which you live.
- infinite thØught
A Litany of the Person
image of God
born of God’s breath
vessel of divine love
after his likeness
dwelling of God
capacity for the infinite
eternally known
chosen of God
home of Infinite Majesty
abiding in the Son
called from eternity
life in the Lord
temple of the Holy Spirit
branch of Christ
receptacle of the Most High
wellspring of Living Water
heir of the kingdom
the glory of God
abode of the Trinity
God sings this litany
eternally in his Word.
This is who you are.
(Anonymous Trappist Monk from the Abbey of Gethsemani) October 10, 2007)
From Monastic Mumblings
**
“Freedom of choice is not, itself, the perfection of liberty. But it helps us take our first step
toward freedom or slavery, spontaneity or compulsion. The free man is the one whose choices have given him the power to stand on his own feet and determine his own life according to the higher light and spirit that are in him. The slave, in the spiritual order, is the man whose choices have destroyed all spontaneity in him and have delivered him over, bound hand and foot, to his own compulsions, idiosyncrasies and illusions, so that he never does what he really wants to do, but only what he has to do.”
--Br. Thomas Merton
from Monastic Mumblings
**
If I Were Paul
by Mark Jarman
Consider how you were made.
Consider the loving geometry that sketched your bones, the passionate symmetry that sewed flesh to your skeleton, and the cloudy zenith whence your soul descended in shimmering rivulets across pure granite to pour as a single braided stream into the skull's cup.
Consider the first time you conceived of justice, engendered mercy, brought parity into being, coaxed liberty like a marten from its den to uncoil its limber spine in a sunny clearing, how you understood the inheritance of first principles, the legacy of noble thought, and built a city like a forest in the forest, and erected temples like thunderheads.
Consider, as if it were penicillin or the speed of light, the discovery of another's hands, his oval field of vision, her muscular back and hips, his nerve-jarred neck and shoulders, her bleeding gums and dry elbows and knees, his baldness and cauterized skin cancers, her lucid and forgiving gaze, his healing touch, her mind like a prairie. Consider the first knowledge of otherness. How it felt.
Consider what you were meant to be in the egg, in your parent's arms, under a sky full of stars.
Now imagine what I have to say when I learn of your enterprising viciousness, the discipline with which one of your turns another into a robot or a parasite or a maniac or a body strapped to a chair. Imagine what I have to say.
Do the impossible. Restore life to those you have killed, wholeness to those you have maimed, goodness to what you have poisoned, trust to those you have betrayed.
Bless each other with the heart and soul, the hand and eye, the head and foot, the lips, tongue, and teeth, the inner ear and the outer ear, the flesh and spirit, the brain and bowels, the blood and lymph, the heel and toe, the muscle and bone, the waist and hips, the chest and shoulders, the whole body, clothed and naked, young and old, aging and growing up.
I send you this not knowing if you will receive it, or if having received it, you will read it, or if having read it, you will know that it contains my blessing.
from Epistles
by Mark Jarman
**
"In times of personal crisis our attention is caught up in private inner turmoil and in the urgency to find a resolution to the confusion or and escape from it. Rather than be hostage to your anguish, be attentive to the process as it is happening. Be attentive to the shame and fear, the emptiness and despondency, with which the ego greets the dawning wholeness. Take the middle course during the stormy period of transformation. Don't tamper with it. Let it happen. Let go.
Gregory Mayers "Listen to the Desert"
"One of the prime injunctions in the spirituality of the desert fathers is "be watchful," be attentive. The advbice is so central to the mystical teachings of the desert and so easily overlooked that it deserves careful consideration.
Saint Hesychius of Sinai says of attention that it is a spiritual method that, if diligently practiced over a long period of time, does three things: completely frees us from the bondage of ourselves, leads us to an intimate experience of the inapprehensible, and helps us to penetrate the divine and hidden mysteries. The work of "being watchful" progresses slowly but surely through four stage, according to Saint Hesychius. Fidelity to the practice of attention produces inner stability, which in turn effects a natural intensification of attentiveness. Intensification of attentiveness in due measure yields contemplative insight, which in turn opens out into a condition in which a person, free from all images, enjoys complete serenity. Attention draws to consciousness an authentic, mysterious wholeness, and original innocence that is the human yearning expressed by the Garden of Eden myth. It is a reunion with the source and substance of one's being, a reunion that transforms human consciousness."
Gregory Mayers "Listen to the Desert"
**
This is from Alive on All Channels, a post I wrote in November '07
**
Sleeping
Whether you think it's trampy or not,
when we are not awake,
we really are ALL sleeping together.
Sawing logs, snoozing,
getting a little shuteye,
some sacktime,
heading to slumberland,
doing the blanket drill,
the bunk habit,
having a siesta fiesta,
a pajama party
or just getting forty winks
and a good night's rest
We're all setting alarms, reading a bit,
warming our feet and spooning in,
stealing the covers, hogging all the pillows or
taking up the whole bed, grass mat,
hammock or our bit of dry earth.
Whether the satin sheets, fur or flannels
are on the futon, floor or igloo ice
whether we are naked, night gowned
or wearing what we wore all day.
We have been doing this a long time together, alot.
Terrorists and tyrants,
the embargoed, enemies and occupying forces
within a few blocks of each other
lay down everyday
not only their weapons but their bodies,
anger and ideologies.
They give up. They surrender,
not to overwhelming odds or power
but to being...tired.
They know they can't win against it.
Something much bigger says
"I don't want to hear another peep out of you.
Now tuck each other in and go to sleep!"
Daniel Sisco, from A Breath On Stone: New & Selected Poems by Daniel Sisco.
Self-published, 2006
*****
What is it Necessary To Do To Be Saved?
The deep self-trance is a story we tell about ourselves, built up from bits and pieces of memory, to explain, to ourselves mainly, why we did what we did or react in the way we do, feel as we feel, or think as we think. It’s a story with plots and subplots, characters, heroes, villains, and a host of minor bit parts. It gives us a sense of congruence through life’s changes, an explanation for our thoughts and ideas, a modus operandei, a justification for all that we see we are about. We play different roles at different times in the self-story -- some we play very well, others more or less so-so, and still others rather reluctantly. but it is just a story, and it always begins with “Once upon a time....” -- which is to say, it is a fairy tale.
A coherent story, which includes all the major events and characteristics of our life, is a vital personal asset. The thrust of psychological therapy is to help us tell an accurate tale, not to leave anything out or to alter the fundamental facts, which are grist for the story line. For a good story gives some meaning, purpose, and use to our lives. Informal meditation is a common practice , an admirable human endeavor, an attempt to build a manageable story that we use to explain and justify our daily scenes.
The social environment and culture help, of course, because they are also stories that individuals in a group share among themselves. Society is a shared story built around the same structure and same plots as the self-story, a mirror, albeit a larger one, that reflects our inner theater. Our culture is competitive because our self-world is competitive. There are winners and losers, rewards and penalties, war and peace, ambition, cruelties, cultural biases and prejudices, and untold kindness and compassion. But these qualities are not “out there” in the dog-eat-dog world. They are reflections of the common experience of many individual self-worlds.
If we pay attention with a little bit of honesty, we’ll find the evidence for this playwriting and playacting ability in ourselves. Notice how you talk to yourself, argue, beg, or correct others around you, how you set up the scenes of encounter in your mind when feeling under siege from those more powerful than yourself. Notice the period pieces that you occasionally bring out onto the stage of your memory, how you rehearse scenes, replaying them again and again until you get them “right” to your satisfaction. Be aware of these little dramas and understand them for what they are, a defense against the immediate, unreflected moment, a contraction and a limitation of yourself into a manageable scene.
This storytelling ability, the deep self-trance, gives us the illusion of a separate self, a stage manager in the wings who directs the whole play of our lives. The sense of a separate self is a false sense. It feels real, of course, because we are so entranced by our “feeling” of independence. Our belief that it is real is only an assumption that we haven’t validated by our own experience. But it’s just an impersonation.
And like all imposters, it is very self-conscious about what it does, evaluating, measuring, assessing its performance, taking offense at rejections and criticism, glowing with self-congratulations at compliments and acceptance.
The sense of a separate and enduring self with its dramatics and story lines, this deep self-trance, is the aftermath of the tension between self-image and self-awareness. Self-image is the way we think, feel, sense, and perceive ourselves to be. In some areas we are very clear about ourselves. I like this and not that, I have this history and not another, these personality traits and moods and not other kinds of traits. In other areas we aren’t as clear or as sure about ourselves. Self-image is selective and to some extent fluid, changing to accommodate new experiences and new information. A healthy self-image is always updating itself. A weak or poor self-image tends to be rigid and unbending, dependent on outside support and affirmation.
Self-awareness is different. Whereas self-image has history, self-awareness is a-historical. Self-image is the way I see myself; self-awareness is the way I experience myself in various events of my moment-to-moment existence. When self-image and self-awareness are congruent, I sense a kind of background balance in my life. I’m not uncomfortable with the experiences that come my way, although most people are comfortable with themselves in a limited range of experiences.
Every so often, however, we are caught off guard and surprised by an experience of ourselves that doesn’t fit the picture. The contradiction between experience and image causes tension that can vary from wonderment, to self-doubt, to anxiety, to terror. Managing this tension between what I think and what I want, between my idea of myself and my unruly desires, between my self-bias and my experience, creates the deep self-trance, the sense of a separate and enduring self, the story line of my life. And it’s all driven by fear. The fear of falling apart.
The awareness of how fragile our sense of self is leads to a universal and potentially crippling trait: the temporality of our experiential human life. It is a given of human nature that the conditions of life are subject to change without notice. Thus, we are prone to worry. Change and worry go hand in hand. We try to prepare ourselves for the inevitable, for example, illnesses, transfers, retirement. We also habitually worry about it all, as it it’s important to train ourselves to worry well.
From one perspective we seem to be composed of a bundle of worry-questions, both spoken and unspoken. These worry-questions precede us like a leash dragging us through our day-to-day existence. We are barely aware of them, so routine have they become for us, yet they start when we awaken in the morning. “What am I going to do today?”
“What do I have to do?” “What am I going to wear?” “What shall I have for breakfast?” “What will people think of me if.....?” “Will I be liked?” “Will I be happy?” And so many other worry-questions that set the course of our day, questions that are just beyond the periphery of our awareness, silently steering us through the real and imaginary uncertainties of life.
Our lives are incidental. We hopscotch from incident to incident, event to event, accumulating as we go a bag full of strategies and defenses for our survival, hoping that we will never be caught off guard. We have all taken the Boy Scout motto to heart: Be prepared. But when we examine our personal history, we notice that despite our best efforts, none of us has lived the life we intended. And worrying has not changed that.
Of course, bad things can happen-- unfortunate misunderstandings, unexpected tragedies, and dreaded illnesses. No one is guaranteed a safe life. My life is out of my hands. It is not gong to work out the way I expect or hope it will. All of my knowledge, all of my experience, and all of my planning, do not adequately prepare me to live this moment. and in some fundamental sense I do no live my life. I live an I-don’t -know life. Rather, I am lived, and I am responsible for it.
The worry-questions, these anxieties, are expressions of our egocentricity. Their parent is self-bias, the compulsive need to preserve, at all costs, the comfortable sense we have of ourselves. And how fragile that sense is. Change a routine, we are threatened and respond with anger, pouting, or playing the martyr.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be free of this theater! It does get tedious, taking up so much of our time and energy in posturing and dramatizing and arranging our lives into some mildly satisfactory coherence. It is so tiresome servicing the hidden agenda of the deep self-trance, which gives everyone else their due to keep them at bay, because it expects everyone else to give it its due, independence. That’s the hidden agenda, self-preservation at all cost.
At some point in life almost everyone gets weary of managing the tension that keeps the fiction about the self alive. The story and strategies begin to fail, and people suspect that the meanings that explain their lives, the purposes they’ve dedicated it to and the use they’ve put it to, don’t match up with an elusive sense of life that is beginning to trickle through to consciousness. It is time to go behind the story to the fundamental facts of life just as they are without protective interpretations. The task is quite daunting, for it requires the loss of self, the loss of the sense of a personal history and a hoped-for future, the loss of everything that we’ve built up around ourselves. We are required to lose the self sheathed in its protective trance.
The anonymous desert saying poses a question, but a question that is radically different from the anxious annoyances that glue self-image to self-awareness forming the deep self-trance. It isn’t an easy question to formulate, much less to ask, but it is the fundamental question of life.
No one can help another person in this task, for all individuals must find a meaningful way of asking it for themselves. There is only one question worth asking, one worthy of an answer, one that drives the evolution of consciousness: How do I face life? In the story someone asked an old man, a hermit in the desert, the question this way: “What is it necessary to do to be saved?” Whoever this person was in the story, he or she paid an enormous price to ask this question, which was formulated out of personal experiences, doubts, and humility.
We hope that the right person, the right reputation, the right physical conditions, the right psychological experiences, will result in our contentment. We aren’t looking for genuine happiness. We are looking for its counterfeit, relief and satisfaction. In other words, we believe in the “and-they-lived-happily-ever-after” syndrome. We might laugh at it on the surface, but at a deeper level no one can really convince us that it is just a fairy-tale ending. It takes years of life experience to erode our infantile faith. Again and again, we mistakenly build our hopes on the same optimistic assumptions, only to be disappointed again and again. For happiness is independent of, and prior to, any and all of life’s circumstances and conditions.
Our immediate tendency is to overlook our present experience, in search of an ideal formula for happiness.
We neglect to see in the current conditions and circumstances of our life the happiness we pursue under the camouflage of contentment. As a result, the unavoidable, unexpected, and unwanted fruit of our search is doubt, a doubt that, if allowed to work its magic, will focus a glaring light on our own inadequacy. We live a gray and bland existence peppered periodically with excitement. If we are prepared to learn from our experiences and to bear the burden of doubt, then we will be led to humility. Humility is the simple and keen awareness that we cannot help ourselves in any fundamental way. We cannot make ourselves happy. We cannot make ourselves good. We cannot save ourselves from our foolishness. But we might be able to learn what we
can do.
An uncommon honesty was behind the question this unknown person asked: “What is it necessary to do to
be saved?” It was a question that welled up from the depths of his being like a groan. It drove him to
despair, but it also drove him to the desert.
Just as it is rare to ask this question, so it is rare to have it answered so clearly and compassionately . In
the current religious climate those who are prepared to ask such a personally challenging a question too
often encounter stock religious answers with all the life drained from them. The old man’s response was neither trivial nor flippant. Nor is it as simplistic as it at first sounds. The old hermit had done his work,
which burned away the opaque filter of his self-bias so that he saw vividly and keenly life just as it is. One with the Divine, he was free to find himself and the Divine in whatever happens to be happening. Another anonymous desert saying has it, “God investigates three things in us: mind, word and deed.” This old man had penetrated to the heart of nondual consciousness, had gone past the contradiction between emptiness and mental content appreciating the rightful place of the intellect, and expressed his liberation in the everyday ordinary events and obligations of life. In a later century another anonymous spiritual master would express this liberation for one of his troubled students this way:
What is it necessary to do to be saved? The old man “was making rope and without looking up from the work, he replied, ‘You are looking at it.’” It doesn’t sound like a very profound answer. However, the answer fitted the question perfectly. The old man took the measure of the person before him and compassionately revealed the obvious, and the almost obvious, to this young seeker on the verge of liberation from the conflicts and fictions of an independent and separate self.
It is so tempting to set religion apart from the ordinary, making of it a sort of fairyland amusement part.
This is a modern-day rendition of an ancient heresy, Manicheism, which tried to separate reality into spirit and matter, the sacred and the profane. Salvation is healing that illusory split. How do we do that ? We don’t . It is already done. It already always is. The “split” between God and man, the ordinary and the holy, the
sacred and the profane, is a prop in our imaginary self-story. It does not exist and never really did. Our
task is to realize that fact.
Salvation is an everyday ordinary experience. If Christianity really does proclaim good news, then the good news is that everything is redeemed. Nothing is condemned. All that is left to do is to realize it. No condition of life precludes happiness. No condition of life increases it. For a given individual making rope is as holy and effective and expressive as any ritual religious act. The simple act of making rope, or washing dishes, or walking to the office, or talking on the phone, does not imply anything other than itself. Nor is it meant to. Everything is as it should be. Give up the search. It is right here. It is obvious.
(From the remarkable book, Listen To The Desert; Secrets of Spiritual Maturity From the Desert Fathers and Mothers by Gregory Mayers)
**
"It is because one antelope will blow the dust from the other's eye that the two antelope walk together"
**
"To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you."
--Theophan the Recluse
"From the heart arise unknowable impulses as well as conscious feelings, moods and wishes. The heart, too, has its reasons and is the center of perception and understanding. Finally, the heart is the seat of the will: it makes plans and comes to good decisions. Thus the heart is the central and unifying organ of our personal life. Our heart determines our personality and is therefore not only the place where God dwells but also the place to which Satan directs his fiercest attacks. It is this heart that is the place of prayer. The prayer of the heart is a prayer that directs itself to God from the center of the person and thus affects the whole of our humanness."
--Henri Nouwen "The Way of The Heart"
**
"Love and rationality, therefore, rather than being enemies of each other, must be all of a piece. Reasoning about another person, about God, and about ourselves is only reliable when it is grounded in love. Moreover, really loving depends upon our ability to see and know another person, God, and even ourselves as more than an extension of our own needs, desires, or fantasies."
--Roberta Bondi "To Pray and To Love"
**
**
Sleeping
Whether you think it's trampy or not,
when we are not awake,
we really are ALL sleeping together.
Sawing logs, snoozing,
getting a little shuteye,
some sacktime,
heading to slumberland,
doing the blanket drill,
the bunk habit,
having a siesta fiesta,
a pajama party
or just getting forty winks
and a good night's rest
We're all setting alarms, reading a bit,
warming our feet and spooning in,
stealing the covers, hogging all the pillows or
taking up the whole bed, grass mat,
hammock or our bit of dry earth.
Whether the satin sheets, fur or flannels
are on the futon, floor or igloo ice
whether we are naked, night gowned
or wearing what we wore all day.
We have been doing this a long time together, alot.
Terrorists and tyrants,
the embargoed, enemies and occupying forces
within a few blocks of each other
lay down everyday
not only their weapons but their bodies,
anger and ideologies.
They give up. They surrender,
not to overwhelming odds or power
but to being...tired.
They know they can't win against it.
Something much bigger says
"I don't want to hear another peep out of you.
Now tuck each other in and go to sleep!"
Daniel Sisco, from A Breath On Stone: New & Selected Poems by Daniel Sisco.
Self-published, 2006
*****
What is it Necessary To Do To Be Saved?
An old man was asked, “What is it necessary to do to be saved?”
He was making rope, and without looking up from the work, he replied, “You are looking at it.”
The deep self-trance is a story we tell about ourselves, built up from bits and pieces of memory, to explain, to ourselves mainly, why we did what we did or react in the way we do, feel as we feel, or think as we think. It’s a story with plots and subplots, characters, heroes, villains, and a host of minor bit parts. It gives us a sense of congruence through life’s changes, an explanation for our thoughts and ideas, a modus operandei, a justification for all that we see we are about. We play different roles at different times in the self-story -- some we play very well, others more or less so-so, and still others rather reluctantly. but it is just a story, and it always begins with “Once upon a time....” -- which is to say, it is a fairy tale.
A coherent story, which includes all the major events and characteristics of our life, is a vital personal asset. The thrust of psychological therapy is to help us tell an accurate tale, not to leave anything out or to alter the fundamental facts, which are grist for the story line. For a good story gives some meaning, purpose, and use to our lives. Informal meditation is a common practice , an admirable human endeavor, an attempt to build a manageable story that we use to explain and justify our daily scenes.
The social environment and culture help, of course, because they are also stories that individuals in a group share among themselves. Society is a shared story built around the same structure and same plots as the self-story, a mirror, albeit a larger one, that reflects our inner theater. Our culture is competitive because our self-world is competitive. There are winners and losers, rewards and penalties, war and peace, ambition, cruelties, cultural biases and prejudices, and untold kindness and compassion. But these qualities are not “out there” in the dog-eat-dog world. They are reflections of the common experience of many individual self-worlds.
If we pay attention with a little bit of honesty, we’ll find the evidence for this playwriting and playacting ability in ourselves. Notice how you talk to yourself, argue, beg, or correct others around you, how you set up the scenes of encounter in your mind when feeling under siege from those more powerful than yourself. Notice the period pieces that you occasionally bring out onto the stage of your memory, how you rehearse scenes, replaying them again and again until you get them “right” to your satisfaction. Be aware of these little dramas and understand them for what they are, a defense against the immediate, unreflected moment, a contraction and a limitation of yourself into a manageable scene.
This storytelling ability, the deep self-trance, gives us the illusion of a separate self, a stage manager in the wings who directs the whole play of our lives. The sense of a separate self is a false sense. It feels real, of course, because we are so entranced by our “feeling” of independence. Our belief that it is real is only an assumption that we haven’t validated by our own experience. But it’s just an impersonation.
And like all imposters, it is very self-conscious about what it does, evaluating, measuring, assessing its performance, taking offense at rejections and criticism, glowing with self-congratulations at compliments and acceptance.
The sense of a separate and enduring self with its dramatics and story lines, this deep self-trance, is the aftermath of the tension between self-image and self-awareness. Self-image is the way we think, feel, sense, and perceive ourselves to be. In some areas we are very clear about ourselves. I like this and not that, I have this history and not another, these personality traits and moods and not other kinds of traits. In other areas we aren’t as clear or as sure about ourselves. Self-image is selective and to some extent fluid, changing to accommodate new experiences and new information. A healthy self-image is always updating itself. A weak or poor self-image tends to be rigid and unbending, dependent on outside support and affirmation.
Self-awareness is different. Whereas self-image has history, self-awareness is a-historical. Self-image is the way I see myself; self-awareness is the way I experience myself in various events of my moment-to-moment existence. When self-image and self-awareness are congruent, I sense a kind of background balance in my life. I’m not uncomfortable with the experiences that come my way, although most people are comfortable with themselves in a limited range of experiences.
Every so often, however, we are caught off guard and surprised by an experience of ourselves that doesn’t fit the picture. The contradiction between experience and image causes tension that can vary from wonderment, to self-doubt, to anxiety, to terror. Managing this tension between what I think and what I want, between my idea of myself and my unruly desires, between my self-bias and my experience, creates the deep self-trance, the sense of a separate and enduring self, the story line of my life. And it’s all driven by fear. The fear of falling apart.
The awareness of how fragile our sense of self is leads to a universal and potentially crippling trait: the temporality of our experiential human life. It is a given of human nature that the conditions of life are subject to change without notice. Thus, we are prone to worry. Change and worry go hand in hand. We try to prepare ourselves for the inevitable, for example, illnesses, transfers, retirement. We also habitually worry about it all, as it it’s important to train ourselves to worry well.
From one perspective we seem to be composed of a bundle of worry-questions, both spoken and unspoken. These worry-questions precede us like a leash dragging us through our day-to-day existence. We are barely aware of them, so routine have they become for us, yet they start when we awaken in the morning. “What am I going to do today?”
“What do I have to do?” “What am I going to wear?” “What shall I have for breakfast?” “What will people think of me if.....?” “Will I be liked?” “Will I be happy?” And so many other worry-questions that set the course of our day, questions that are just beyond the periphery of our awareness, silently steering us through the real and imaginary uncertainties of life.
Our lives are incidental. We hopscotch from incident to incident, event to event, accumulating as we go a bag full of strategies and defenses for our survival, hoping that we will never be caught off guard. We have all taken the Boy Scout motto to heart: Be prepared. But when we examine our personal history, we notice that despite our best efforts, none of us has lived the life we intended. And worrying has not changed that.
Of course, bad things can happen-- unfortunate misunderstandings, unexpected tragedies, and dreaded illnesses. No one is guaranteed a safe life. My life is out of my hands. It is not gong to work out the way I expect or hope it will. All of my knowledge, all of my experience, and all of my planning, do not adequately prepare me to live this moment. and in some fundamental sense I do no live my life. I live an I-don’t -know life. Rather, I am lived, and I am responsible for it.
The worry-questions, these anxieties, are expressions of our egocentricity. Their parent is self-bias, the compulsive need to preserve, at all costs, the comfortable sense we have of ourselves. And how fragile that sense is. Change a routine, we are threatened and respond with anger, pouting, or playing the martyr.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be free of this theater! It does get tedious, taking up so much of our time and energy in posturing and dramatizing and arranging our lives into some mildly satisfactory coherence. It is so tiresome servicing the hidden agenda of the deep self-trance, which gives everyone else their due to keep them at bay, because it expects everyone else to give it its due, independence. That’s the hidden agenda, self-preservation at all cost.
At some point in life almost everyone gets weary of managing the tension that keeps the fiction about the self alive. The story and strategies begin to fail, and people suspect that the meanings that explain their lives, the purposes they’ve dedicated it to and the use they’ve put it to, don’t match up with an elusive sense of life that is beginning to trickle through to consciousness. It is time to go behind the story to the fundamental facts of life just as they are without protective interpretations. The task is quite daunting, for it requires the loss of self, the loss of the sense of a personal history and a hoped-for future, the loss of everything that we’ve built up around ourselves. We are required to lose the self sheathed in its protective trance.
The anonymous desert saying poses a question, but a question that is radically different from the anxious annoyances that glue self-image to self-awareness forming the deep self-trance. It isn’t an easy question to formulate, much less to ask, but it is the fundamental question of life.
No one can help another person in this task, for all individuals must find a meaningful way of asking it for themselves. There is only one question worth asking, one worthy of an answer, one that drives the evolution of consciousness: How do I face life? In the story someone asked an old man, a hermit in the desert, the question this way: “What is it necessary to do to be saved?” Whoever this person was in the story, he or she paid an enormous price to ask this question, which was formulated out of personal experiences, doubts, and humility.
We hope that the right person, the right reputation, the right physical conditions, the right psychological experiences, will result in our contentment. We aren’t looking for genuine happiness. We are looking for its counterfeit, relief and satisfaction. In other words, we believe in the “and-they-lived-happily-ever-after” syndrome. We might laugh at it on the surface, but at a deeper level no one can really convince us that it is just a fairy-tale ending. It takes years of life experience to erode our infantile faith. Again and again, we mistakenly build our hopes on the same optimistic assumptions, only to be disappointed again and again. For happiness is independent of, and prior to, any and all of life’s circumstances and conditions.
Our immediate tendency is to overlook our present experience, in search of an ideal formula for happiness.
We neglect to see in the current conditions and circumstances of our life the happiness we pursue under the camouflage of contentment. As a result, the unavoidable, unexpected, and unwanted fruit of our search is doubt, a doubt that, if allowed to work its magic, will focus a glaring light on our own inadequacy. We live a gray and bland existence peppered periodically with excitement. If we are prepared to learn from our experiences and to bear the burden of doubt, then we will be led to humility. Humility is the simple and keen awareness that we cannot help ourselves in any fundamental way. We cannot make ourselves happy. We cannot make ourselves good. We cannot save ourselves from our foolishness. But we might be able to learn what we
can do.
An uncommon honesty was behind the question this unknown person asked: “What is it necessary to do to
be saved?” It was a question that welled up from the depths of his being like a groan. It drove him to
despair, but it also drove him to the desert.
Just as it is rare to ask this question, so it is rare to have it answered so clearly and compassionately . In
the current religious climate those who are prepared to ask such a personally challenging a question too
often encounter stock religious answers with all the life drained from them. The old man’s response was neither trivial nor flippant. Nor is it as simplistic as it at first sounds. The old hermit had done his work,
which burned away the opaque filter of his self-bias so that he saw vividly and keenly life just as it is. One with the Divine, he was free to find himself and the Divine in whatever happens to be happening. Another anonymous desert saying has it, “God investigates three things in us: mind, word and deed.” This old man had penetrated to the heart of nondual consciousness, had gone past the contradiction between emptiness and mental content appreciating the rightful place of the intellect, and expressed his liberation in the everyday ordinary events and obligations of life. In a later century another anonymous spiritual master would express this liberation for one of his troubled students this way:
Put the strict way on one side and the lax way on the other, and look instead for what is hidden between them; once you have found this you will be free in spirit to pick up or leave any of the other things as you wish...What, you may ask, is this hidden something? Quite simply, it is God...God is hidden between them, and you cannot find him with your intelligence...So choose him, and you will be silently speaking, speaking silence, eating in fasting, fasting in eating, and so forth....This loving choice of God, knowing what to set aside in order to seek him out with the steadfastness of a pure heart, being able to put both opposites aside when they present themselves as the be-all and end-all of spiritual aspiration, is the best way of finding God you can learn in this life.
What is it necessary to do to be saved? The old man “was making rope and without looking up from the work, he replied, ‘You are looking at it.’” It doesn’t sound like a very profound answer. However, the answer fitted the question perfectly. The old man took the measure of the person before him and compassionately revealed the obvious, and the almost obvious, to this young seeker on the verge of liberation from the conflicts and fictions of an independent and separate self.
It is so tempting to set religion apart from the ordinary, making of it a sort of fairyland amusement part.
This is a modern-day rendition of an ancient heresy, Manicheism, which tried to separate reality into spirit and matter, the sacred and the profane. Salvation is healing that illusory split. How do we do that ? We don’t . It is already done. It already always is. The “split” between God and man, the ordinary and the holy, the
sacred and the profane, is a prop in our imaginary self-story. It does not exist and never really did. Our
task is to realize that fact.
Salvation is an everyday ordinary experience. If Christianity really does proclaim good news, then the good news is that everything is redeemed. Nothing is condemned. All that is left to do is to realize it. No condition of life precludes happiness. No condition of life increases it. For a given individual making rope is as holy and effective and expressive as any ritual religious act. The simple act of making rope, or washing dishes, or walking to the office, or talking on the phone, does not imply anything other than itself. Nor is it meant to. Everything is as it should be. Give up the search. It is right here. It is obvious.
(From the remarkable book, Listen To The Desert; Secrets of Spiritual Maturity From the Desert Fathers and Mothers by Gregory Mayers)
**
"It is because one antelope will blow the dust from the other's eye that the two antelope walk together"
**
"To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you."
--Theophan the Recluse
"From the heart arise unknowable impulses as well as conscious feelings, moods and wishes. The heart, too, has its reasons and is the center of perception and understanding. Finally, the heart is the seat of the will: it makes plans and comes to good decisions. Thus the heart is the central and unifying organ of our personal life. Our heart determines our personality and is therefore not only the place where God dwells but also the place to which Satan directs his fiercest attacks. It is this heart that is the place of prayer. The prayer of the heart is a prayer that directs itself to God from the center of the person and thus affects the whole of our humanness."
--Henri Nouwen "The Way of The Heart"
**
"Love and rationality, therefore, rather than being enemies of each other, must be all of a piece. Reasoning about another person, about God, and about ourselves is only reliable when it is grounded in love. Moreover, really loving depends upon our ability to see and know another person, God, and even ourselves as more than an extension of our own needs, desires, or fantasies."
--Roberta Bondi "To Pray and To Love"
**
{From "Time and the Soul" by Jacob Needleman}
"I soon realized that being busy meant that I was always in a hurry. Memories of my experiment with the dictum of Aristotle came back to me, especially the inner "taste" of being in a hurry. Judging by that "taste," almost the whole of my life was being lived in a hurry. When I was speaking to someone, I was inwardly in a hurry to have him finish so I could speak; when I was hurt by someone or resentful, I saw, by the "taste" of it, that my emotions were in a hurry to have their satisfaction, if not in action, then in thought.
Perhaps it was an obvious truth, but it only gradually became clear to me that being in a hurry had to do with my relationship to my mind and that the outer expression in how I moved and acted was only a result of my inner condition, as was the continuous muscular tension in my neck, back and shoulders -- and elsewhere. If I was too busy, it was because I was a plaything of the thoughts and images that automatically came in and out of my mind without my "permission."
But it was possible at any given moment to become free of this puppetlike submission to the endless chain of thoughts and images that steal our time from us. It was not so much a matter of organizing one's activities, but of what the early Christians called "guarding the mind."
These thoughts and images in endless procession steal our time because they steal our attention. We give them more attention than is necessary -- in this consists the essence of our helplessness in front of all the demands that life makes upon us and all the opportunities (or temptations) that it offers us. what is necessary, so the ancient wisdom advises us, is to confirm for ourselves that we have the power not to be swallowed by our thoughts.
This will not be easy. Our culture, since the age of the Enlightenment, has tended to consider thought the highest principle of the mind -- and so it is, no doubt, but only when it is the kind of thought that emerges from the whole being, the kind of vision and mentation that is a property of the Self. What we experience as thought when our minds are on automatic is worlds apart from the intelligence that resides in the Self.
****
No man or woman can be too busy when there is even the beginning of a calm relationship between the mind and the body. When the mind and body quietly move toward each other, a man or woman begins to become a grownup. And, whatever it may mean to be a wise man or woman, surely the first step is to become a grownup. A grown-up man or woman may have to move very fast and do many things, but he or she is never in a hurry. Ah, so that is what Aristotle meant!
Jacob Needleman
Time and the Soul
More at
Alive On All Channels
"I soon realized that being busy meant that I was always in a hurry. Memories of my experiment with the dictum of Aristotle came back to me, especially the inner "taste" of being in a hurry. Judging by that "taste," almost the whole of my life was being lived in a hurry. When I was speaking to someone, I was inwardly in a hurry to have him finish so I could speak; when I was hurt by someone or resentful, I saw, by the "taste" of it, that my emotions were in a hurry to have their satisfaction, if not in action, then in thought.
Perhaps it was an obvious truth, but it only gradually became clear to me that being in a hurry had to do with my relationship to my mind and that the outer expression in how I moved and acted was only a result of my inner condition, as was the continuous muscular tension in my neck, back and shoulders -- and elsewhere. If I was too busy, it was because I was a plaything of the thoughts and images that automatically came in and out of my mind without my "permission."
But it was possible at any given moment to become free of this puppetlike submission to the endless chain of thoughts and images that steal our time from us. It was not so much a matter of organizing one's activities, but of what the early Christians called "guarding the mind."
These thoughts and images in endless procession steal our time because they steal our attention. We give them more attention than is necessary -- in this consists the essence of our helplessness in front of all the demands that life makes upon us and all the opportunities (or temptations) that it offers us. what is necessary, so the ancient wisdom advises us, is to confirm for ourselves that we have the power not to be swallowed by our thoughts.
This will not be easy. Our culture, since the age of the Enlightenment, has tended to consider thought the highest principle of the mind -- and so it is, no doubt, but only when it is the kind of thought that emerges from the whole being, the kind of vision and mentation that is a property of the Self. What we experience as thought when our minds are on automatic is worlds apart from the intelligence that resides in the Self.
****
No man or woman can be too busy when there is even the beginning of a calm relationship between the mind and the body. When the mind and body quietly move toward each other, a man or woman begins to become a grownup. And, whatever it may mean to be a wise man or woman, surely the first step is to become a grownup. A grown-up man or woman may have to move very fast and do many things, but he or she is never in a hurry. Ah, so that is what Aristotle meant!
Jacob Needleman
Time and the Soul
More at
Alive On All Channels
Deeply Shaken
Advent is a time of being deeply shaken, so that man will wake up to himself. The prerequisite for a fulfilled Advent is a renunciation of the arrogant gestures and tempting dreams with which, and in which, man is always deceiving himself.... The shaking, the awakening: with these, life merely begins to become capable of Advent. It is precisely in the severity of this awakening, in the helplessness of coming to consciousness, in the wretchedness of experiencing our limitations that the golden threads running between Heaven and earth during this season reach us; the threads that give the world a hint of the abundance to which it is called, the abundance of which it is capable.
***
"Every light that comes from Holy Scripture comes from the light
of grace. This is why foolish, proud and learned people are blind
even in the light, because the light is clouded by their own pride
and selfish love. They read the Scripture literally, not with
understanding. They have let go of the light by which to Scripture
was formed and proclaimed. "- Catherine of Sienna -
**
THE IMITATION OF CHRIST
- by Thomas a Kempis -
A Prayer for Cleansing the Heart and Obtaining Heavenly Wisdom
Strengthen me by the grace of Your holy spirit, O God. Give me the
power to be strengthened inwardly and to empty my heart of all vain
care and anxiety, so that I may not be drawn away by many desires,
whether for precious things or mean ones. Let me look upon everything
as passing, and upon myself as soon to pass away with them, because
there is nothing lasting under the sun, where all is vanity and
affliction of spirit. How wise are they who thinks thus!
-------- Bk. 3, Chapter 27
***
Be here now in love, and all shall be well.
- http://shalomplace.com
***
He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a
long head or a very short creed.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
***
I sleep, but my heart is awake.
-Song of Songs 5:2
***
Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its
terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit's arms -- and our hands encounter
the hands that hold it.
-Martin Buber
***
For I tell you this; one loving blind desire for God alone is more valuable in itself,
more pleasing to God and to the saints, more beneficial to your own growth,
and more helpful to your friends, both living and dead, than anything else you
could do.
-The Cloud of Unknowing
********
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