We have to work the program. The program consists of listening, looking, watching, waiting, trusting, trying, asking, seeking, knocking—of learning the language of soul, being conscious, of waking up, of taking ourselves under our own wing and growing ourselves up over the course of our lives. We work each day to be more aware and alive than we were the previous day. To see what needs to be done and do it. To notice what winks at us and know the difference between an invitation and a test. Working the program will ask hard things of us and make us true human beings—and, of course, you know what that will do for us. Nothing. And everything. But no one can sell us on the idea. We have to decide for ourselves how important being alive is and if we are going to do what it takes to bring ourselves forth into the world. It’s our call all the way.
It is not easy. There is nothing I can tell you to make it easy. There is nothing I can say to make you want to do it. We are not here to make it easy for you. We are here to make it possible for you. We begin by telling you it isn’t easy, but it can be done.
Life is not easy. There is nothing easy about it. Dying is easy. Living is hard. If you want to be alive, you’ll have to pay the price, which is not doing or having what you want! The price is doing what has to be done, never mind what you want to do. The price is dealing with how things are, never mind how you wish they were. Doing what you want means not doing what you want!
If you want to be alive, you have to do the work. The work is done on two levels. We work to bring two worlds together. You have to learn to think of yourself as having a dual citizenship in two different worlds. One world is the physical world of outer, tangible, concrete reality. The other world is the spiritual world of inner, abstract, metaphorical, intuitive, instinctive, numinous reality. The inner world is the world of heart and soul. The outer world is the world of the body and the physical universe. We live in both worlds and our work is merging the two, bringing the spiritual into the physical, so that the two become, in us and through us, one.
We do this work by becoming conscious of our place in both worlds and working things out between worlds. What does the inner world require? What does the outer world permit? The work is negotiating the ways between the worlds. The work is being awake and aware. The work is seeing, hearing and understanding. Making connections. Bringing heart and soul to life through the body in the physical world. The work is constant, continual, eternal and unending. You never graduate or retire. You don’t get a plaque to hang on a wall declaring that you are awake. If you think you are, you aren’t. If you think you aren’t, you’re right.
We cannot take up the spiritual journey without deepening our relationship with the inner world. We have to learn the language of soul and intuit the leanings of soul, the intentions of soul, and serve them in the outer world. We also have to understand how our desire for safety and security and comfort creates barriers between ourselves and soul, and inhibits our bringing forth what soul intends.
We carry with us a collection of impressions, and memories, and assumptions, and ideas about our experience with life. We see the outer world through the filters of these memories. We interpret and react to the outer world based on the impact of our experience that is stored away within. We have to become conscious of how our memories restrict our living, our bringing to life the intentions of soul in our lives.
The more unconscious we are, the more difficulty we have separating what is happening to us from what has happened to us. We lose the line between inner and outer, and live here and now as though it were then and there. As we wake up, we wake up to our origins, to our history, to what happened to us and how we responded to it, and how that has impacted, determined, the way we live our lives. We wake up to the inner source of our being the way we are in the outer world.
Seeing things changes things. We don’t have to react to present experience as though we are eight years old, or twelve, or fifteen. We can become increasingly able to recognize what is needed and respond to it out of what we have to offer without being compelled to react out of the impact of past experience and its influence upon us. We can work to bring soul to life in our lives without having to always please, or refuse to please, our father, or our mother, or whomever it is that we think must be, or not be, pleased.
Knowing what we have to offer is a function of deepening our relationship with the inner world. Our life in the outer world is where we incarnate, bring forth, birth, the deep gifts of self that are latent and waiting in the inner world. Our mission, our calling, is to read, serve, and express the creative intention of our soul by bringing forth the beauty and truth of our nature, our “dynamic core of being,” and exhibiting it in the world of external reality.
We stand between the outer world and our soul. We decide what is called for in the world of external real-ity and what is being asked for by our soul, and choose what to do. We have to protect our soul from the outer world and we have to express, incarnate, reveal, exhibit our soul in the outer world. How well we do that determines how well we live, how alive we are in the time and place of our living.
Our ability to live well between the worlds hinges on our skill in making choices. We learn to make choices by choosing and being conscious of the outcomes of our choice. We teach ourselves all we need to know. At least, that’s the idea. We don’t have to do it that way. We can wall ourselves in, seal ourselves up, entomb ourselves until we die. We can avoid life, or we can live. Our choice.
How would you do it? How would you live your life, if it were your life to live? It is your life to live, you know. Who knows better than you what you have to offer and how you might make that available to your life? No one can tell you how to do it. You decide for yourself. What are you going to do? Whatever is pleasing. Who knows what that is better than you?
Ah, but, here’s where it gets tricky. We have to do what is pleasing, but we cannot live any way we please! There is only doing what is ours to do the way we would do it, but we can’t do anything we want. We do not do what is needed only if, and on the condition that, it provides us with what we want. We do what is needed and let the outcome be the outcome. And there, in the outcome, we do what is needed again. See? Get it? What does wanting have to do with it?
We are both guardians and servants of soul. We keep soul safe and live soul out in the world. That is our work. Soul is dependent upon us for its protection and expression. We are dependent upon soul for consolation and direction, and the wherewithal to do what is ours to do. It is a perfectly functioning system as long as we don’t wreck it by imposing our ideas about how things ought to be on it and wander stupefied and agog among the lights and action of Gay Paree.
It is all practice. We are practicing being who we are at the level of soul, bringing ourselves forth into the world. We are aren’t here to get anything, have anything. We are here to be who we are and bring ourselves forth into the world. To live the way we would live. To do it the way we would do it. To keep faith with ourselves. And to enjoy everything about the experience. Everything. And to want, when it is over, to do it all again.
We have to find what works for us, what assists us in doing the work that is ours to do, in doing what is asked of us, what needs to be done, what needs us to do it. We have to find what enables us to do that, what helps us engage our lives. This is where this gathering comes into the picture.
This gathering is here to equip us to be who we are, to be ourselves, to be who we are doing what is ours to do, to bring us forth, to birth us, individually, personally, to introduce us to ourselves, and invite us to come alive, not by stepping in the black footprints, but by intuiting the next step and the time to take it all the way to the Land of Promise.
We have everything we need, but we have to access it. We have to be open to it. When life calls for it, we have to be able to stand aside and bring it forth. We have to trust it and allow it to show us who we are, what we are capable of. In order to do that, we have to work the program, engage in the practice. We can’t play shortstop without having played shortstop. If you know what I mean.
What is helpful? What is useful? What do those questions mean in a world where nothing is wasted, where every experience has the capacity to open us to the truth, to connect us to ends worthy of us, to wake us up and re-store us to ourselves? Hitler and Gandhi were both agents of revelation, realization, enlightenment, so in that sense both were equally helpful, useful. One was the servant of suffering and death, the other the servant of grace and peace. What is truly helpful and useful wakes us up graciously, kindly with compassion and peace, smiles and says, “It’s about time you were waking up.”
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Sunday, May 03, 2009
05/03/09, Living Organtically
Our lives have an organic or an artificial base. We bring forth what is within, or we impose restrictions and align ourselves with what is without. Organically, we are seen as having everything we need, and are encouraged to incarnate what is within and find ways of exhibiting ourselves appropriately in the world. Artificially, we are seen as blank slates to be written upon, lumps of clay to be molded into who we ought to be according to some external conception of the Ideal Self. We meet encouragement and suggestions or commandments, restrictions and regulations. We become our natural selves or we become somebody else’s image of who we ought to be. Our inner peace and development depend on the luck of the draw, on the environment that receives us when we emerge from the womb, and on the environments we live in throughout the life that follows. We live in search of an environment that is conducive to life. Or capitulate to death and live out our days with hollow eyes and an aborted soul.
The outer world has to be conducive to the birth of the inner world. We need a world that is receptive to our coming forth. Vulnerable souls need a welcoming environment. Or, a protective presence that can deal with any environment. Enter Ego! An Ego that lives in right relationship with Psyche/Soul is exactly what we need to bring ourselves forth into the world. We might think of Ego as The Guardian. A Guardian whose task is to Protect and Serve the Soul, but a Guardian that can be seduced, corrupted, by the lights and action of Gay Paree (or by the fruit of a forbidden tree). A Guardian that is aligned with the world’s idea of what it means to live successfully is death to the soul. You see where this places us. “Is you is or is you ain’t my constituency?” Soul wonders. Whose side are we on?
Whose side ARE we on? How come we keep complicating things for ourselves and getting in our own way? Why are we always shooting ourselves in the foot? Refusing to cooperate with the deeper leadings of Soul? We’re burning daylight here. We have a life tied up at the hitching post while we peruse the sights and sounds of Gay Paree, or whatever passes for Gay Paree. We distract ourselves with Wonderful Nothings, console ourselves with comforting choruses of “Poor, poor pitiful me,” and wait longingly for deliverance while our lives stomp and snort impatiently, and the day drags on.
Oh, but it’s too late now, isn’t it? If we were going to live, we should have started in our twenties. No one can live with their best days behind them. Everyone knows that. After a certain point, it’s all over and you just have to hang it up and tie another one on. That’s what they make beer for. The white rabbits are dancing on the table and we are drinking to missed opportunities and lost dreams. There is a country song in here somewhere.
Figuring out what Soul is asking of us when we have an interest in doing something else is as diffi-cult as anything in the Book of Difficult Things. We are in our own way, and have to constantly decide whether to make way or give way. It is easy enough for us to read our dreams as indicating our opposition, even refusal, to engage in the work of soul, but to see where our cooperation is needed in our daily life—to understand where we are actually being obstinate and obdurate—is beyond the scope of ordinary awareness. And so, the need for developing our sensitivity to, our discernment of, the movement and whispers of Soul. But, why would we?
We don’t want to go where Soul needs to be. Soul seems to be a master of taking things in stride, of biding its time, of waiting things out, of keeping the pressure on, but it also seems to thrive on encouragement and the least amount will do. But without some indication of our willingness to recognize and express the leanings of our Soul, Soul breaks out of its bondage with explosions of Shadow-truth, and we are left with messes beyond imagining to clean up, if we can. If we don’t chase the white rabbit, she will come driving six white horses to run us down, and that will not be pretty.
But becoming who we are, in light of who we also are, is no picnic. This is no walk in the park. It is not for sissies. This is the Search for the Holy Grail, the task of life, the great adventure we all crave as children and shrink from as adults. The monsters, they be real. Who wouldn’t seek the safety of the womb, of Mother’s lap, of the same old same old, of fundamentalist religion, of the black footprints laid out before us to the grave?
No one would volunteer for this work. Or, volunteering, no one would stick it out. It has to be forced on us. We have to be conscripted. Dragged out of our beds at night and thrown into an initiation ritual against our will. This was the place of those primal rites of passage, to force growing up upon us, because not one of us would have what it takes to do it on our own. Yet, we have developed a culture in which we have to do it on our own. No one kidnaps is in the dark and thrusts maturity upon us. This is the task to which all are called but few are chosen. James Hollis says, “Childhood dependency must be relinquished for adult self-possession and creativity. The longing for a trouble-free existence must be put aside in favor of the mature meeting of responsibility. Such changes constitute not only the quickening of consciousness but a form of election. All are summoned to grow up, not all are up to the task.” And why would they be? What do “adult self-possession and creativity” have to offer against “the longing for a trouble-free existence”? Surely, you see the problem!
What exactly do we get out of growing up? What’s in it for us? Why not remain infantile forever? We are leaving Mama’s arms for what? What is better than Mama? Who thought this up? Besides, what’s a soul good for in this world? What’s a soul going to do for us? Get in our way! That’s what. Keep us far from that happy shore, storm-tossed, at the endless mercy of the wine-dark and trackless sea!
All we want is “that happy shore,” and it’s blissful promise of a trouble-free life. In other words, Mama. But the truth is: “We are born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.” That was Job’s take on things (5:7) 2,500 years ago, give or take. He couldn’t find any buyers then, or now. We don’t want to hear it. We want to hear, “Come to Mama, baby. I’ll take care of you.”
See how many surrogate Mamas you can identify roaming through the culture, promising freedom from worry, fear, and trouble. All we’ve ever wanted is freedom from worry, fear and trouble, and we’ve created a culture to provide it for us. Of course, there is one small catch. We have to believe The Lie: “I’m your Mama.” And, we have to hand over our lives. That happy shore is the land of the Sirens--another name for Mama. The terrible thing about Mama is that we can’t be safe in Mama’s arms and be alive. Mama kills the babies. Mama is a Death Eater in disguise, devouring the souls of those she shields from the worries, fears, and troubles of life, rendering us safe, soulless and as empty as gourds on dry ground.
We save our lives by realizing that we have what it takes apart from Mama. We don’t need a trouble-free existence. We have what it takes. If you are going to believe anything, believe that you have what it takes. Believe that you have what you need. Believe that you can stand naked and defenseless before IT, before the way things actually are, and be okay, and be just fine. Don’t hide behind your made up shields, clutching your contract with life, saying, “Look here, look here. It says right here if I do this and this and this, that will happen!” Life will laugh and say “That has no validity—it’s only a joke you’re playing on yourself! You don’t get what you deserve in this league. You get what you get. Now stand up and let’s see what you are made of.” So, stand up, and look Life in its ugly red eye, and smile. You have what it takes. All it takes is trusting that you have what it takes. And, you will never know what you have if you don’t live as though you have it.
How to enlarge ourselves and be true to ourselves is the trick. Enlarging ourselves pulls us beyond ourselves. Being true to ourselves chains us to our idea of ourselves that we have become accustomed to over time—an idea that has to be shattered again and again as we show ourselves who we also are by dealing with situations we have never encountered. We cannot restrict our idea of ourselves to who we have been, to who we have shown ourselves to be through the process of living our lives up to this point. We have to expand our idea of who we are and be true to more than we can imagine we are capable of. We surprise ourselves. We don’t know who all we are. We are here to find out, but it is not easy.
We need the help of Soul. “Look,” we say something on the order of, “Look, you have to speak up if you expect to get my attention. You have to make plain what you want. You can’t be coy and subtle and expect me to get it. I need your help here. What do you want? Signs and signals are crucial. Signs and signals. It’s the least you can do.” Of course, the least we can do is read the signs, and follow their lead!
The outer world has to be conducive to the birth of the inner world. We need a world that is receptive to our coming forth. Vulnerable souls need a welcoming environment. Or, a protective presence that can deal with any environment. Enter Ego! An Ego that lives in right relationship with Psyche/Soul is exactly what we need to bring ourselves forth into the world. We might think of Ego as The Guardian. A Guardian whose task is to Protect and Serve the Soul, but a Guardian that can be seduced, corrupted, by the lights and action of Gay Paree (or by the fruit of a forbidden tree). A Guardian that is aligned with the world’s idea of what it means to live successfully is death to the soul. You see where this places us. “Is you is or is you ain’t my constituency?” Soul wonders. Whose side are we on?
Whose side ARE we on? How come we keep complicating things for ourselves and getting in our own way? Why are we always shooting ourselves in the foot? Refusing to cooperate with the deeper leadings of Soul? We’re burning daylight here. We have a life tied up at the hitching post while we peruse the sights and sounds of Gay Paree, or whatever passes for Gay Paree. We distract ourselves with Wonderful Nothings, console ourselves with comforting choruses of “Poor, poor pitiful me,” and wait longingly for deliverance while our lives stomp and snort impatiently, and the day drags on.
Oh, but it’s too late now, isn’t it? If we were going to live, we should have started in our twenties. No one can live with their best days behind them. Everyone knows that. After a certain point, it’s all over and you just have to hang it up and tie another one on. That’s what they make beer for. The white rabbits are dancing on the table and we are drinking to missed opportunities and lost dreams. There is a country song in here somewhere.
Figuring out what Soul is asking of us when we have an interest in doing something else is as diffi-cult as anything in the Book of Difficult Things. We are in our own way, and have to constantly decide whether to make way or give way. It is easy enough for us to read our dreams as indicating our opposition, even refusal, to engage in the work of soul, but to see where our cooperation is needed in our daily life—to understand where we are actually being obstinate and obdurate—is beyond the scope of ordinary awareness. And so, the need for developing our sensitivity to, our discernment of, the movement and whispers of Soul. But, why would we?
We don’t want to go where Soul needs to be. Soul seems to be a master of taking things in stride, of biding its time, of waiting things out, of keeping the pressure on, but it also seems to thrive on encouragement and the least amount will do. But without some indication of our willingness to recognize and express the leanings of our Soul, Soul breaks out of its bondage with explosions of Shadow-truth, and we are left with messes beyond imagining to clean up, if we can. If we don’t chase the white rabbit, she will come driving six white horses to run us down, and that will not be pretty.
But becoming who we are, in light of who we also are, is no picnic. This is no walk in the park. It is not for sissies. This is the Search for the Holy Grail, the task of life, the great adventure we all crave as children and shrink from as adults. The monsters, they be real. Who wouldn’t seek the safety of the womb, of Mother’s lap, of the same old same old, of fundamentalist religion, of the black footprints laid out before us to the grave?
No one would volunteer for this work. Or, volunteering, no one would stick it out. It has to be forced on us. We have to be conscripted. Dragged out of our beds at night and thrown into an initiation ritual against our will. This was the place of those primal rites of passage, to force growing up upon us, because not one of us would have what it takes to do it on our own. Yet, we have developed a culture in which we have to do it on our own. No one kidnaps is in the dark and thrusts maturity upon us. This is the task to which all are called but few are chosen. James Hollis says, “Childhood dependency must be relinquished for adult self-possession and creativity. The longing for a trouble-free existence must be put aside in favor of the mature meeting of responsibility. Such changes constitute not only the quickening of consciousness but a form of election. All are summoned to grow up, not all are up to the task.” And why would they be? What do “adult self-possession and creativity” have to offer against “the longing for a trouble-free existence”? Surely, you see the problem!
What exactly do we get out of growing up? What’s in it for us? Why not remain infantile forever? We are leaving Mama’s arms for what? What is better than Mama? Who thought this up? Besides, what’s a soul good for in this world? What’s a soul going to do for us? Get in our way! That’s what. Keep us far from that happy shore, storm-tossed, at the endless mercy of the wine-dark and trackless sea!
All we want is “that happy shore,” and it’s blissful promise of a trouble-free life. In other words, Mama. But the truth is: “We are born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.” That was Job’s take on things (5:7) 2,500 years ago, give or take. He couldn’t find any buyers then, or now. We don’t want to hear it. We want to hear, “Come to Mama, baby. I’ll take care of you.”
See how many surrogate Mamas you can identify roaming through the culture, promising freedom from worry, fear, and trouble. All we’ve ever wanted is freedom from worry, fear and trouble, and we’ve created a culture to provide it for us. Of course, there is one small catch. We have to believe The Lie: “I’m your Mama.” And, we have to hand over our lives. That happy shore is the land of the Sirens--another name for Mama. The terrible thing about Mama is that we can’t be safe in Mama’s arms and be alive. Mama kills the babies. Mama is a Death Eater in disguise, devouring the souls of those she shields from the worries, fears, and troubles of life, rendering us safe, soulless and as empty as gourds on dry ground.
We save our lives by realizing that we have what it takes apart from Mama. We don’t need a trouble-free existence. We have what it takes. If you are going to believe anything, believe that you have what it takes. Believe that you have what you need. Believe that you can stand naked and defenseless before IT, before the way things actually are, and be okay, and be just fine. Don’t hide behind your made up shields, clutching your contract with life, saying, “Look here, look here. It says right here if I do this and this and this, that will happen!” Life will laugh and say “That has no validity—it’s only a joke you’re playing on yourself! You don’t get what you deserve in this league. You get what you get. Now stand up and let’s see what you are made of.” So, stand up, and look Life in its ugly red eye, and smile. You have what it takes. All it takes is trusting that you have what it takes. And, you will never know what you have if you don’t live as though you have it.
How to enlarge ourselves and be true to ourselves is the trick. Enlarging ourselves pulls us beyond ourselves. Being true to ourselves chains us to our idea of ourselves that we have become accustomed to over time—an idea that has to be shattered again and again as we show ourselves who we also are by dealing with situations we have never encountered. We cannot restrict our idea of ourselves to who we have been, to who we have shown ourselves to be through the process of living our lives up to this point. We have to expand our idea of who we are and be true to more than we can imagine we are capable of. We surprise ourselves. We don’t know who all we are. We are here to find out, but it is not easy.
We need the help of Soul. “Look,” we say something on the order of, “Look, you have to speak up if you expect to get my attention. You have to make plain what you want. You can’t be coy and subtle and expect me to get it. I need your help here. What do you want? Signs and signals are crucial. Signs and signals. It’s the least you can do.” Of course, the least we can do is read the signs, and follow their lead!
Sunday, April 26, 2009
04/26/09, We find the way by getting out of the way.
We have to do the work of becoming conscious of, making our peace with, reconciling ourselves with, squaring up with, becoming comfortable with where we have been and what has happened to us and how we have responded and how that has impacted our life, for better or worse. The work is to make our peace with the life that is ours to live. It’s called growing up. It’s also called the spiritual journey. It is a continuing process of coming to terms with our lives that covers the entire span of our lives.
This process of growing up, of the spiritual journey, of coming to terms with our lives, involves us in living out our idea of ourselves, of who we are and what we are about. We have to keep faith with ourselves by living in ways that are commensurate with our idea of ourselves, of who we are and what we are about—even as we do the work of aligning our idea of who we are and what we are about with who we actually are and what we actually are about.
We aren’t free to just make something up here. We have to be true to ourselves. There is an essential reality, a specific, individual identity that we have to take into account and accommodate ourselves to. We have ourselves to consider. We have to be who we truly are in the world, and live so as to express the proclivities and inclinations, aptitudes and abilities, the calling and gifts that are ours to express. We have to do the work that is ours to do. We have an appointment with our life. No matter where we have come from, we still must live our life. Part of that work is continuing to deepen and expand, to clarify and express who we are, so that our idea of who we are increasingly coincides with who we actually are, and we live with integrity and are at-one with ourselves in the world. This is growing up, the spiritual journey.
At every point along the way, we have to be confident in our own ability to know what is right for us in any situation, to know what the next step is here and now. And, we have to be patient with the process of clarification, of knowing what we know at that point, with the information available to us. We can only act on the basis of what we know at the time. As we gain experience and our perspective expands, deepens, enlarges, we may well change our minds about what is right for us, about what needs to be done. We may misstep all along the way. But we remain confident in our ability to make the corrections necessary to get back on track and in the center of life as we need to live it, one step at a time. “We know when we are on the beam and when we are off it” (Joseph Campbell).
When something “rings true,” when something resonates with us, we know it. That is foundational, essential, knowing. That is the knowing that guides us through our lives. Yes/No is the fundamental choice. “Is you is or is you ain’t my constituency?” Soul wonders. Whose side are we on? When we stand apart from ourselves, from our agendas and aspirations for our lives—when we get out of our own way—we know what is right for us. That’s the knowing we need to know.
This knowing suggests that there is an unchanging essence about us all, an unshakable foundation of goodness and life, which can be counted on as a reference point through deep nights on churning seas. The truth abides: we have what we need and will not be left bereft, abandoned and alone. There is “a very present help in time of trouble” that we can trust to see us through dark times and difficult places. In seeking the stability we yearn for in the external world, we are like a woman holding her car keys looking for her car keys.
That being said, there is something attractive about lives with a comfortable, and comforting, sameness about them. Marriages that remain vibrant through the years, houses with flowerbeds that have been tended over time, places we return to for their continuing ability to nourish, nurture and sustain. We need actual, tangible, physical reminders of that which is stable, reliable, durable and dependable within. “As above, so below.” “As out there, so in here.” We have what we need, but that doesn’t mean that our lives will be smooth and easy with nothing but “ups, and ups, and ups” (Lucy in the comic strip Peanuts). Soul doesn’t care about smooth and easy.
What does Soul want? Not very much, it seems. We have our, Ego has its, eye on the displays of success, achievement and arrival, on wealth, prosperity and having it made. Soul is happy with the aroma of fresh bread and digging in the dirt of spring. Soul wants the simple experience of being alive and the straightforward expression of its interests and gifts in the world. Neighborliness. Conviviality. Grace. Compassion, Hospitality. You know the list: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Gentleness, Generosity… Doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. Living in the service of life. Bringing life to life in the time left for living. Walking the straight and narrow.
Oops. Now I’ve done it. Walking the straight and narrow. We’ve always understood this as the way of moral rectitude. Being a straight arrow. But the straight and narrow is exactly the way of compromise between Ego and Soul/Self/Psyche. It is the fine line between the interests of both sides of ourselves. It is the Third Way between submission and defiance. It is the way of working it out. Of deciding together with ourselves what is being asked of us and how we will respond, of knowing what is needed and what must be done. We do not know this beforehand, intellectually, rationally, apart from the anguish and agony of the struggle with anxiety, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Sometimes we only know it well after the fact, and have to repent, turn around, redeeming what can be redeemed, and bearing the pain of the burden of what cannot be redeemed. Not being sure about what needs to be done or what to do about it is the cross of life, borne by all who would be alive.
Oh, but, we want more than being alive. We want to be rewarded. We want to be recognized. We want accolades and commendations and prosperity. We want the effort to be who we are to be worth our while. We want to get something out of it beyond being ourselves, alive and open to the wonder and glory of life. We want something to show for it. We can’t settle for being awake, aware, and alive. We want to be rich and famous. Celebrity status. We can’t just be who we are. We want to be Somebody. You see the problem.
What does wanting know? We can want what we have no business having. We are in the mess we are in because of wanting. Wanting, and doing what we wanted, got us here, now. And doing what we want will lead us on. What are we going to do? What we don’t want? That puts us in the position of wanting what we don’t want. We are still doing what we want, even when we do what we don’t want. Even when we do what someone else wants. We have to do what we want whether we want to or not.
Wise wanting is wanting that remembers, imagines, anticipates, intuits. Growing up means honing our wanting, discerning what to want and what not to want, getting better at wanting the right things. We want to avoid investing ourselves in the wrong things. What are the wrong things? There you are: The task of life, discovering what is worth our time. The surest way to find out what the wrong things are is to invest ourselves in them. We figure out how to live by plunging into our lives and experiencing our experience. But, we prefer lectures and books on experience. We want to do it right. We want to avoid investing ourselves in the wrong things. We can imagine our way around some things, but some things we have to live with for a while in order to avoid them in the future.
Wisdom is known by her children, and what is right becomes apparent over time. In the moment, however, there is only feeling, sensing, intuiting, hunching, guessing. We can be wrong, and often are wrong, and we cannot let that keep us from guessing again, from going again with what feels right, even though it may be wrong. The hope is that we will guess our way to becoming better guessers.
Being wrong can lead to the deepening and expanding of our perception of truth and self as surely as being right can restrict and limit our perception of truth and self. We can be wrong in the right way and right in the wrong way. Impact and outcome have to be assessed over time. Sometimes, wisdom is known by her grandchildren. Sometimes by her great grandchildren. The jury, as they say, is out.
What works is the question. What does it mean for something to work? Works in light of what? Does it increase the level of grace, mercy, and/or peace in the world? Does it lighten loads, enhance joy, produce gladness? Does it bring life forth? Does it work to make the world a better place to be? Does it make you a good place for others to be? Is anyone blessed by it? Does it serve a good that is greater than your own good? Do the things that infuse you with life, bring you to life, enable you to be alive. Live so as to be alive in the time left for living. Evaluate the life-potential of your choices, and go with life wherever it takes you.
This process of growing up, of the spiritual journey, of coming to terms with our lives, involves us in living out our idea of ourselves, of who we are and what we are about. We have to keep faith with ourselves by living in ways that are commensurate with our idea of ourselves, of who we are and what we are about—even as we do the work of aligning our idea of who we are and what we are about with who we actually are and what we actually are about.
We aren’t free to just make something up here. We have to be true to ourselves. There is an essential reality, a specific, individual identity that we have to take into account and accommodate ourselves to. We have ourselves to consider. We have to be who we truly are in the world, and live so as to express the proclivities and inclinations, aptitudes and abilities, the calling and gifts that are ours to express. We have to do the work that is ours to do. We have an appointment with our life. No matter where we have come from, we still must live our life. Part of that work is continuing to deepen and expand, to clarify and express who we are, so that our idea of who we are increasingly coincides with who we actually are, and we live with integrity and are at-one with ourselves in the world. This is growing up, the spiritual journey.
At every point along the way, we have to be confident in our own ability to know what is right for us in any situation, to know what the next step is here and now. And, we have to be patient with the process of clarification, of knowing what we know at that point, with the information available to us. We can only act on the basis of what we know at the time. As we gain experience and our perspective expands, deepens, enlarges, we may well change our minds about what is right for us, about what needs to be done. We may misstep all along the way. But we remain confident in our ability to make the corrections necessary to get back on track and in the center of life as we need to live it, one step at a time. “We know when we are on the beam and when we are off it” (Joseph Campbell).
When something “rings true,” when something resonates with us, we know it. That is foundational, essential, knowing. That is the knowing that guides us through our lives. Yes/No is the fundamental choice. “Is you is or is you ain’t my constituency?” Soul wonders. Whose side are we on? When we stand apart from ourselves, from our agendas and aspirations for our lives—when we get out of our own way—we know what is right for us. That’s the knowing we need to know.
This knowing suggests that there is an unchanging essence about us all, an unshakable foundation of goodness and life, which can be counted on as a reference point through deep nights on churning seas. The truth abides: we have what we need and will not be left bereft, abandoned and alone. There is “a very present help in time of trouble” that we can trust to see us through dark times and difficult places. In seeking the stability we yearn for in the external world, we are like a woman holding her car keys looking for her car keys.
That being said, there is something attractive about lives with a comfortable, and comforting, sameness about them. Marriages that remain vibrant through the years, houses with flowerbeds that have been tended over time, places we return to for their continuing ability to nourish, nurture and sustain. We need actual, tangible, physical reminders of that which is stable, reliable, durable and dependable within. “As above, so below.” “As out there, so in here.” We have what we need, but that doesn’t mean that our lives will be smooth and easy with nothing but “ups, and ups, and ups” (Lucy in the comic strip Peanuts). Soul doesn’t care about smooth and easy.
What does Soul want? Not very much, it seems. We have our, Ego has its, eye on the displays of success, achievement and arrival, on wealth, prosperity and having it made. Soul is happy with the aroma of fresh bread and digging in the dirt of spring. Soul wants the simple experience of being alive and the straightforward expression of its interests and gifts in the world. Neighborliness. Conviviality. Grace. Compassion, Hospitality. You know the list: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Gentleness, Generosity… Doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. Living in the service of life. Bringing life to life in the time left for living. Walking the straight and narrow.
Oops. Now I’ve done it. Walking the straight and narrow. We’ve always understood this as the way of moral rectitude. Being a straight arrow. But the straight and narrow is exactly the way of compromise between Ego and Soul/Self/Psyche. It is the fine line between the interests of both sides of ourselves. It is the Third Way between submission and defiance. It is the way of working it out. Of deciding together with ourselves what is being asked of us and how we will respond, of knowing what is needed and what must be done. We do not know this beforehand, intellectually, rationally, apart from the anguish and agony of the struggle with anxiety, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Sometimes we only know it well after the fact, and have to repent, turn around, redeeming what can be redeemed, and bearing the pain of the burden of what cannot be redeemed. Not being sure about what needs to be done or what to do about it is the cross of life, borne by all who would be alive.
Oh, but, we want more than being alive. We want to be rewarded. We want to be recognized. We want accolades and commendations and prosperity. We want the effort to be who we are to be worth our while. We want to get something out of it beyond being ourselves, alive and open to the wonder and glory of life. We want something to show for it. We can’t settle for being awake, aware, and alive. We want to be rich and famous. Celebrity status. We can’t just be who we are. We want to be Somebody. You see the problem.
What does wanting know? We can want what we have no business having. We are in the mess we are in because of wanting. Wanting, and doing what we wanted, got us here, now. And doing what we want will lead us on. What are we going to do? What we don’t want? That puts us in the position of wanting what we don’t want. We are still doing what we want, even when we do what we don’t want. Even when we do what someone else wants. We have to do what we want whether we want to or not.
Wise wanting is wanting that remembers, imagines, anticipates, intuits. Growing up means honing our wanting, discerning what to want and what not to want, getting better at wanting the right things. We want to avoid investing ourselves in the wrong things. What are the wrong things? There you are: The task of life, discovering what is worth our time. The surest way to find out what the wrong things are is to invest ourselves in them. We figure out how to live by plunging into our lives and experiencing our experience. But, we prefer lectures and books on experience. We want to do it right. We want to avoid investing ourselves in the wrong things. We can imagine our way around some things, but some things we have to live with for a while in order to avoid them in the future.
Wisdom is known by her children, and what is right becomes apparent over time. In the moment, however, there is only feeling, sensing, intuiting, hunching, guessing. We can be wrong, and often are wrong, and we cannot let that keep us from guessing again, from going again with what feels right, even though it may be wrong. The hope is that we will guess our way to becoming better guessers.
Being wrong can lead to the deepening and expanding of our perception of truth and self as surely as being right can restrict and limit our perception of truth and self. We can be wrong in the right way and right in the wrong way. Impact and outcome have to be assessed over time. Sometimes, wisdom is known by her grandchildren. Sometimes by her great grandchildren. The jury, as they say, is out.
What works is the question. What does it mean for something to work? Works in light of what? Does it increase the level of grace, mercy, and/or peace in the world? Does it lighten loads, enhance joy, produce gladness? Does it bring life forth? Does it work to make the world a better place to be? Does it make you a good place for others to be? Is anyone blessed by it? Does it serve a good that is greater than your own good? Do the things that infuse you with life, bring you to life, enable you to be alive. Live so as to be alive in the time left for living. Evaluate the life-potential of your choices, and go with life wherever it takes you.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
04/19/09, Life is the origin of all that is.
You Are Your Only Problem
You are there to catch yourself when you fall. You have to believe it to know that it is so. When you are on the edge of the abyss, hanging onto the cliff side with bleeding fingertips, dangling at the end of your rope, despairing, having lost all hope and at the point of the end of it all, it is only your idea of how things ought to be that is slipping away. You are only being asked to change your mind about what is important. And, who is asking you to do that? YOU are! When you have run out of options, then you have to trust yourself to yourself. To The One Who Knows. You are never alone. You always have exactly what you need at every point in your life. You just don’t have what you wish you had. Things just aren’t what you want them to be. That’s your only problem. Make your peace with that and let your Self lead you along the way, and you’ll have it made.
The inner world is more important than the outer world. The only value of the outer world is its place of expression for the inner world. The inner world is to be incarnated, birthed, made visible, tangible, actual and real in the outer world. If we aren’t doing that, we are dead, or dying and soon to be dead. Of course, we aren’t doing that because we are distracted by the lights of Gay Paree, and think the outer world is the living end.
We think the Outer world is where life is to be found—in the lights and action of Gay Paree—and neglect the Inner world, which connects us with life, and is life, and live draped with beautiful rags, wearing glass beads, admiring ourselves in our silver mirrors, oblivious to the death that would point us to the path of life if we could only wake up and know how dead we are. Death is the path to life to those who realize they are dead. And, it is only death to those who think they are alive.
Life is conditional upon the inner work that is necessary to connect us to life, bring us to life and enable us to be alive in the outer world of normal, apparent, reality. Outer calls forth inner which blesses outer, and all things are complete, and one. But, in order for that to be the case, we have to do our inner work.
We have to reestablish our connection with the inner world by learning the language of soul—image, metaphor, dream, symbol, symptom—and bringing soul to life in our lives, living to incarnate soul, to give it concrete, tangible existence. Soul work is the work we do to bring soul to life in our lives.
Carl Jung says we have to find the image tucked away in our experiences. What has become of the dragons and monsters, the demons and ogres? The path? The journey? The magic? We don’t live magical lives, lives that are attuned to the inner world because we think it’s all about concrete and steel, and what you see is what you get. We have forgotten that there is more to life than meets the eye. In order to recover the sense of “more than eyes can see,” we have to rekindle our imagination and curiosity, and see the outer world with the “inner eye.” We have to live with a foot in each world and know which world is home.
We also have to connect our experience of the spontaneous images that arise in our minds with our experience of the concrete world of tangible reality—making the experience of the mental images concrete and tangible in the outer world of daily experience. What does it mean that I dream of snakes? How does the image of the snake connect with my lived experience? How do I translate the image of the snake into the tangible world of concrete and steel? Where are, who are, the snakes (dragons) in my daily life? It is the work of consciousness to make the connections, to find the meaning, and live with a foot in both worlds.
As it turns out, I hate snakes. Whenever I encounter a snake in a dream, I, the dreaming dreamer, say in the dream to whomever is in charge of production, “You know I hate snake! I’m going to always hate snakes, and you keep throwing snakes at me!” I hear the producer laughing. The dream is indicative of my waking world in which I encounter an endless stream of things I hate: trips to the dentist, to the auto repair shop, income tax preparation, balancing the check book… You have your list, you know what I’m talking about. The snakes at night are the hated list by day. The dream producer seems to be saying, “Get used to it. Get over it. Take doing what you hate in stride. Life is full of stuff like that.” Image becomes reality. Another snake dream underscores the truth of the way it is, invites me to accept it, live around it, and get on with my life, with doing the things that bring me to life, the things that I am here to do, in and around the snakes, the things that must also be done.
Inner prepares us for Outer, for life in the world of normal, apparent reality, offering images which reflect and shape experience, enabling us to live in the external world as those on a mission from the internal world. The mission is to bring forth who we are in spite of the context and circumstances of our lives. The mission is to be alive in a world that is not always conducive to life. Life is an inner reality to be brought forth in the world of physical experience.
Two things here. One is that the physical experience of life is not the only experience of life. Life is experienced on more than the physical level. Life is expressed physically, in the world of outer reality, but it does not EXIST physically! Physical existence is not the only form of existence! The inner world connects us with another world—who knows how many worlds there are—and life is the source of all worlds. This is a switch from the normal way of perceiving reality, which scratches its head and ponders the origin of life, as though life is produced by the physical universe. Reverse that train of thought. The physical universe is produced by life as a means of expression of life, of experiencing life. It is one of the ways life exists.
From the standpoint of this view, an end of life, of LIFE, is out of the question. Life is the foundational reality, the absolute, the given. If you are going to believe in anything believe in life beyond life, on-going, unending, eternal, beautifully, wonderfully, mysteriously, real. Life is not bound to the physical expression/experience of life. When physical existence ends, life continues. It only takes being a little bit alive to know this is so, and we are here to be alive in the time of our living. Being alive is exactly the work of soul, the work of bringing ourselves forth in the world of normal, apparent reality.
The second thing is that this past week I made my annual spring pilgrimage to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. For three days, I walked among the flowers and alongside the streams with camera in hand honoring the rebirth of the world. This year, my wanderings took me to the Ephraim and Minerva “Nervy” Bales place in the Roaring Fork region of the Smokies. Ephraim and Nervy raised 9 children in a two room log house, and one of the rooms was a kitchen. They farmed about 30 acres of four inches of low grade topsoil covering granite rocks and boulders from 1890 to 1930. Think about bringing soul forth under those conditions. Think about bringing soul—yourself—to life there, then. Well, we’ve had it worse for thousands of years, and a large portion of the world’s population has it worse today.
In spite of that, life finds a way. We can count on life. And, we can join life in the work of finding a way by getting out of the way, by standing aside, by not interfering with life by imposing our judgment, evaluation, commentary—by keeping our terms and conditions and expectations from adding to life’s burden. We are here to assist life, to help bring life to life, not to impose more restrictions and limits. Even hope gets in the way when we misunderstand hope and think it is “for” something, or “that” something will happen or not happen. “I hope the Cubs will win the World Series,” is not hope. Hope is what water has when it finds its way to the sea no matter what obstacles it encounters along its path. Hope is the hard-headed, resolute, determination to find a way, when there appears to be no way, when there IS no way. Hope is life at its best, which we trivialize by hoping it doesn’t rain on our day off.
The challenge is the same in every time and place: Honor the inner world and be alive in the time and place of our living. Bring soul forth. Do what is ours to do, what we came to do, what we are here for. And that is not to achieve some great work in the world of outer reality, but to unfold what is within, to bring forth the inner into the outer, to express what is ours to express, to exhibit what is ours to exhibit, to make known what is ours to make known, namely who we are, who we are capable of being. “What I do is me,” says Gerard Manly Hopkins, “for that I came.” In order to know what that is, we have to attend the inner world, learn its language, and assist the unfolding of what is within.
To attend the Inner World, we have to feel the feelings stored there, and honor their place in our lives as we find ways to express them appropriately and consciously. Inner work is not intellectual. It is experiential. It can be wrenching. Like dying. The dead have to die if they are to come to life and be alive. It is easier to remain dead. And so, we have to do what is hard and bring soul forth in the time and place of our living, assisting Inner in the work of transforming Outer, and saving the world.
You are there to catch yourself when you fall. You have to believe it to know that it is so. When you are on the edge of the abyss, hanging onto the cliff side with bleeding fingertips, dangling at the end of your rope, despairing, having lost all hope and at the point of the end of it all, it is only your idea of how things ought to be that is slipping away. You are only being asked to change your mind about what is important. And, who is asking you to do that? YOU are! When you have run out of options, then you have to trust yourself to yourself. To The One Who Knows. You are never alone. You always have exactly what you need at every point in your life. You just don’t have what you wish you had. Things just aren’t what you want them to be. That’s your only problem. Make your peace with that and let your Self lead you along the way, and you’ll have it made.
The inner world is more important than the outer world. The only value of the outer world is its place of expression for the inner world. The inner world is to be incarnated, birthed, made visible, tangible, actual and real in the outer world. If we aren’t doing that, we are dead, or dying and soon to be dead. Of course, we aren’t doing that because we are distracted by the lights of Gay Paree, and think the outer world is the living end.
We think the Outer world is where life is to be found—in the lights and action of Gay Paree—and neglect the Inner world, which connects us with life, and is life, and live draped with beautiful rags, wearing glass beads, admiring ourselves in our silver mirrors, oblivious to the death that would point us to the path of life if we could only wake up and know how dead we are. Death is the path to life to those who realize they are dead. And, it is only death to those who think they are alive.
Life is conditional upon the inner work that is necessary to connect us to life, bring us to life and enable us to be alive in the outer world of normal, apparent, reality. Outer calls forth inner which blesses outer, and all things are complete, and one. But, in order for that to be the case, we have to do our inner work.
We have to reestablish our connection with the inner world by learning the language of soul—image, metaphor, dream, symbol, symptom—and bringing soul to life in our lives, living to incarnate soul, to give it concrete, tangible existence. Soul work is the work we do to bring soul to life in our lives.
Carl Jung says we have to find the image tucked away in our experiences. What has become of the dragons and monsters, the demons and ogres? The path? The journey? The magic? We don’t live magical lives, lives that are attuned to the inner world because we think it’s all about concrete and steel, and what you see is what you get. We have forgotten that there is more to life than meets the eye. In order to recover the sense of “more than eyes can see,” we have to rekindle our imagination and curiosity, and see the outer world with the “inner eye.” We have to live with a foot in each world and know which world is home.
We also have to connect our experience of the spontaneous images that arise in our minds with our experience of the concrete world of tangible reality—making the experience of the mental images concrete and tangible in the outer world of daily experience. What does it mean that I dream of snakes? How does the image of the snake connect with my lived experience? How do I translate the image of the snake into the tangible world of concrete and steel? Where are, who are, the snakes (dragons) in my daily life? It is the work of consciousness to make the connections, to find the meaning, and live with a foot in both worlds.
As it turns out, I hate snakes. Whenever I encounter a snake in a dream, I, the dreaming dreamer, say in the dream to whomever is in charge of production, “You know I hate snake! I’m going to always hate snakes, and you keep throwing snakes at me!” I hear the producer laughing. The dream is indicative of my waking world in which I encounter an endless stream of things I hate: trips to the dentist, to the auto repair shop, income tax preparation, balancing the check book… You have your list, you know what I’m talking about. The snakes at night are the hated list by day. The dream producer seems to be saying, “Get used to it. Get over it. Take doing what you hate in stride. Life is full of stuff like that.” Image becomes reality. Another snake dream underscores the truth of the way it is, invites me to accept it, live around it, and get on with my life, with doing the things that bring me to life, the things that I am here to do, in and around the snakes, the things that must also be done.
Inner prepares us for Outer, for life in the world of normal, apparent reality, offering images which reflect and shape experience, enabling us to live in the external world as those on a mission from the internal world. The mission is to bring forth who we are in spite of the context and circumstances of our lives. The mission is to be alive in a world that is not always conducive to life. Life is an inner reality to be brought forth in the world of physical experience.
Two things here. One is that the physical experience of life is not the only experience of life. Life is experienced on more than the physical level. Life is expressed physically, in the world of outer reality, but it does not EXIST physically! Physical existence is not the only form of existence! The inner world connects us with another world—who knows how many worlds there are—and life is the source of all worlds. This is a switch from the normal way of perceiving reality, which scratches its head and ponders the origin of life, as though life is produced by the physical universe. Reverse that train of thought. The physical universe is produced by life as a means of expression of life, of experiencing life. It is one of the ways life exists.
From the standpoint of this view, an end of life, of LIFE, is out of the question. Life is the foundational reality, the absolute, the given. If you are going to believe in anything believe in life beyond life, on-going, unending, eternal, beautifully, wonderfully, mysteriously, real. Life is not bound to the physical expression/experience of life. When physical existence ends, life continues. It only takes being a little bit alive to know this is so, and we are here to be alive in the time of our living. Being alive is exactly the work of soul, the work of bringing ourselves forth in the world of normal, apparent reality.
The second thing is that this past week I made my annual spring pilgrimage to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. For three days, I walked among the flowers and alongside the streams with camera in hand honoring the rebirth of the world. This year, my wanderings took me to the Ephraim and Minerva “Nervy” Bales place in the Roaring Fork region of the Smokies. Ephraim and Nervy raised 9 children in a two room log house, and one of the rooms was a kitchen. They farmed about 30 acres of four inches of low grade topsoil covering granite rocks and boulders from 1890 to 1930. Think about bringing soul forth under those conditions. Think about bringing soul—yourself—to life there, then. Well, we’ve had it worse for thousands of years, and a large portion of the world’s population has it worse today.
In spite of that, life finds a way. We can count on life. And, we can join life in the work of finding a way by getting out of the way, by standing aside, by not interfering with life by imposing our judgment, evaluation, commentary—by keeping our terms and conditions and expectations from adding to life’s burden. We are here to assist life, to help bring life to life, not to impose more restrictions and limits. Even hope gets in the way when we misunderstand hope and think it is “for” something, or “that” something will happen or not happen. “I hope the Cubs will win the World Series,” is not hope. Hope is what water has when it finds its way to the sea no matter what obstacles it encounters along its path. Hope is the hard-headed, resolute, determination to find a way, when there appears to be no way, when there IS no way. Hope is life at its best, which we trivialize by hoping it doesn’t rain on our day off.
The challenge is the same in every time and place: Honor the inner world and be alive in the time and place of our living. Bring soul forth. Do what is ours to do, what we came to do, what we are here for. And that is not to achieve some great work in the world of outer reality, but to unfold what is within, to bring forth the inner into the outer, to express what is ours to express, to exhibit what is ours to exhibit, to make known what is ours to make known, namely who we are, who we are capable of being. “What I do is me,” says Gerard Manly Hopkins, “for that I came.” In order to know what that is, we have to attend the inner world, learn its language, and assist the unfolding of what is within.
To attend the Inner World, we have to feel the feelings stored there, and honor their place in our lives as we find ways to express them appropriately and consciously. Inner work is not intellectual. It is experiential. It can be wrenching. Like dying. The dead have to die if they are to come to life and be alive. It is easier to remain dead. And so, we have to do what is hard and bring soul forth in the time and place of our living, assisting Inner in the work of transforming Outer, and saving the world.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
04/12/09, How Many Easters in Your Life?
Stream Theory
I operate out of the stream theory of life: Sometimes we flow fast and sometimes we flow slowly, sometimes we have to find our way around barriers and obstacles, sometimes we are sluggish, sometimes we are stagnant, waiting. But the path takes us to the sea. We follow the path in different ways at different times, but always the path. Different streams have different paths, but always the sea. It's good when we flow close enough together to call out encouragement from time to time, and share the joys and sorrows of the journey.
How Many Easters?
How many times have you died and been resurrected? How many personal deaths and resurrections have you experienced? How often have you been reborn? The Easter story is about you, don’t you see? “As above, so below.” As with Jesus, so with you. “(We) once were lost, but now we’re found, were blind, but now (we) see.” How many times has that happened to you? How many Easter mornings have you risen from the dead?
Ah, but. To get to those Easters, our Easters, we have to get beyond That Easter, and understand Easter is every time we wake up and come alive in our lives. We get there by understanding that the idea of “the Christ” is more important than the person of Jesus. We confuse the Christ with Jesus and close ourselves off from the ongoing experience and expression of the Christ in our lives and in the world. The Greek word, “Christ” and the Hebrew word “Messiah,” mean the same thing: “ the anointed,” or, “the anointed one.” The terms reflect the Jewish idea that God would send “the anointed one” after the manner of King David, to right wrongs and restore Israel to her place of leadership among the nations, in ordinary, historical time.
Clearly, this did not happen with Jesus, and the New Testament writers, with Paul leading the way, had to rethink Messiahship, Christhood, and come up with a new spin on an old concept, which they did with the idea of the resurrection and return. Jesus is coming back, they said, to fulfill the role of the anointed one and establish his kingdom of peace and prosperity upon the earth, in ordinary, historical time, for those who believe and are faithful. They further declared that their spin was the only authoritative and acceptable spin (because they knew Jesus personally and who was better positioned to say what he was about) and if anyone else tried to spin the idea of the Christ, the Messiah, they were to be treated as anathema and shunned, or worse. The question for us, of course, is do we buy their spin? If we don’t, is there a spin we can buy?
Here’s mine: The Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, is anyone, everyone, who lives so as to bring forth God into the world. Ah, but, then we have to talk about God. God is the source of sense of the rightness of things, the right order of things, the meant-to-be-ness of things. God is the mystery at the heart of life.
God is the mysterious, numinous, source of the awareness of the rightness of things when they are how they truly ought to be, when we are how and who we truly ought to be, when our life is how and what it ought to be. Our place is to align ourselves with the rightness, the ought-to-be-ness of things—as Jesus did—in a “Thy will not mine be done” kind of way. When we do that, we live as those whose food “is to do the will of the One who sent us and to accomplish his work.” As we do this, we are the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, living to bring forth what truly ought to be in our lives and the world. As we live to be who Jesus was in this way, we are Christians, or “Little Christ’s.”
Our lives are our practice. We practice bringing forth what ought to be. We practice being The Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, who brings forth what is truly right and needs to happen. As we bring forth that which is deepest, best, and truest about us, as we live aligned with the ought-to-be-ness of things, we grace the world with caring presence and dance with our lives.
Understanding the Christ in this way turns New Testament theology on its ear, of course, but it is quite compatible with Jesus’ treatment of the kingdom of God as metaphor, not political fact.
Jesus’ statement, “My kingdom is not of this world,” establishes the fundamental rift between him and the Jewish notion of the Promised Land and the messianic return of King David. The Messiah the Jews were looking for would establish a Kingdom with geographical and political boundaries, latitude and longitude, and all the spoils that go to the victors. But Jesus understands the kingdom in a spiritual, not political, way. The kingdom that is “not of this world,” is the one envisioned by the prophet Jeremiah: But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more (Jeremiah 31:33-34). A kingdom in which all are the Christ.
Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom as being “not of this world” stands in opposition to the Jewish understanding of the Messiah and in opposition to the Apostles’ view that Jesus would return and establish his kingdom within the historical world of space and time. Jesus is the denunciation of those expectations. The Christ who Jesus is is not the Christ anyone expected or desired.
And our practice is to bring that Christ forth into the world. We begin with our lives because our lives reflect our alignment, or lack of alignment, with the source of the rightness of things. We are at odds with ourselves, remember? There is no better definition of sin. To overcome our at-odds-ness and live in synch with who we are is the practice that brings the Christ forth into the world.
The question is how well does our life exhibit who we ought to be, disclose “the face that was ours before we were born”? To what extent are we living our life, the life that is ours to live, the life that brings us forth into the world? Where are we not keeping faith with our life? What are we going to do about it? Our work is to know and do what is ours to do, to live the life that is our life to live. We have the rest of our lives to learn how to live the lives that are ours to live. Our work is to be reconnected with ourselves and our lives. To be restored to our life. To be resurrected from the dead. To wake up and live.
There is no instant recipe for waking up. See what you are seeing. Hear what you are hearing. Feel what you are feeling. Know what you are knowing. Think what you are thinking. Taste what you are tasting. Love what you are loving… Experience what you are experiencing in every moment for the rest of your life, including how what you have experienced impacts what you are experiencing, and you will be more awake at the end than you are now. But, you’ll never be all the way awake. Waking up is a process, not an achievement. Here are some steps in that process:
(1) Strong feelings are indicators of stirrings of soul. Something is stirring up something. Check it out. Sit with the feeling and interview it: “What is this touching in me?” “What does this remind me of?” “When did I first feel this?” “Where does this come from in my history?” “What is being remembered that my present situation is triggering that arouses this feeling?” “What is behind the feeling?” “What is beneath the surface of this feeling?” “What are the ideas around the experiences that give rise to this feeling?” “What wound is being exposed here?” “What do I need to make conscious in order to begin healing the wound?” “What am I being asked to remember that I would like to forget?” “What does this feeling have to say to me? What do I have to say to this feeling?”
(2) When you find yourself resisting something, dig in at the point of resistance. This doesn’t mean become more resistant. It doesn’t mean “stick to your guns,” “stand fast,” “hold your ground.” It means examine your resistance, explore your resistance. It means find your fear. What is the threat? Where in your experience have you felt that threat, have you been threatened in this way? What does this threat remind you of? What is being asked of you that you don’t want to do? That you don’t what to surrender? What is at stake for you personally at the point of your resistance? What do you stand to lose?
(3) Reflective conversation is the highest value. Conversation that doesn’t encourage reflection doesn’t engage the soul, and cannot bring us to life. Conversation that is restorative wakes us up and connects us with our-selves and our lives. This kind of conversation is the dialectic. The primal soup. The birth place of the clash of contraries. The seat of consciousness. The origin of life. The pathway to soul.
(4) The ultimate conversation is with our soul. To speak with soul, we have to learn the language of soul: metaphor, image, story, dream, symbol, symptom, intuitive sense, persistent drift toward or attraction to, disinclination or resistance… Soul comes at us in different ways with the same message until we wake up and get it and live aligned with soul’s idea of how life is to be lived. Generally, we can only do that when our idea of how life is to be lived has lived itself out, and we have nothing much left to loose. But soul keeps talking, on the chance that we are ready to hear what it has to say.
Soul is a white rabbit appearing momentarily in our peripheral vision and disappearing down holes and around corners while we try to decide if we saw anything and what to do about it. And soul will be “driving six white horses when she comes,” and it will be impossible to miss her. She will run us down, run us over, and demand that we get on board or else. That’s the way it is with soul. If we don’t give chase, we will be chased. Better the rabbit than the horses. Take my word for it. You do not want to find out the hard way.
I operate out of the stream theory of life: Sometimes we flow fast and sometimes we flow slowly, sometimes we have to find our way around barriers and obstacles, sometimes we are sluggish, sometimes we are stagnant, waiting. But the path takes us to the sea. We follow the path in different ways at different times, but always the path. Different streams have different paths, but always the sea. It's good when we flow close enough together to call out encouragement from time to time, and share the joys and sorrows of the journey.
How Many Easters?
How many times have you died and been resurrected? How many personal deaths and resurrections have you experienced? How often have you been reborn? The Easter story is about you, don’t you see? “As above, so below.” As with Jesus, so with you. “(We) once were lost, but now we’re found, were blind, but now (we) see.” How many times has that happened to you? How many Easter mornings have you risen from the dead?
Ah, but. To get to those Easters, our Easters, we have to get beyond That Easter, and understand Easter is every time we wake up and come alive in our lives. We get there by understanding that the idea of “the Christ” is more important than the person of Jesus. We confuse the Christ with Jesus and close ourselves off from the ongoing experience and expression of the Christ in our lives and in the world. The Greek word, “Christ” and the Hebrew word “Messiah,” mean the same thing: “ the anointed,” or, “the anointed one.” The terms reflect the Jewish idea that God would send “the anointed one” after the manner of King David, to right wrongs and restore Israel to her place of leadership among the nations, in ordinary, historical time.
Clearly, this did not happen with Jesus, and the New Testament writers, with Paul leading the way, had to rethink Messiahship, Christhood, and come up with a new spin on an old concept, which they did with the idea of the resurrection and return. Jesus is coming back, they said, to fulfill the role of the anointed one and establish his kingdom of peace and prosperity upon the earth, in ordinary, historical time, for those who believe and are faithful. They further declared that their spin was the only authoritative and acceptable spin (because they knew Jesus personally and who was better positioned to say what he was about) and if anyone else tried to spin the idea of the Christ, the Messiah, they were to be treated as anathema and shunned, or worse. The question for us, of course, is do we buy their spin? If we don’t, is there a spin we can buy?
Here’s mine: The Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, is anyone, everyone, who lives so as to bring forth God into the world. Ah, but, then we have to talk about God. God is the source of sense of the rightness of things, the right order of things, the meant-to-be-ness of things. God is the mystery at the heart of life.
God is the mysterious, numinous, source of the awareness of the rightness of things when they are how they truly ought to be, when we are how and who we truly ought to be, when our life is how and what it ought to be. Our place is to align ourselves with the rightness, the ought-to-be-ness of things—as Jesus did—in a “Thy will not mine be done” kind of way. When we do that, we live as those whose food “is to do the will of the One who sent us and to accomplish his work.” As we do this, we are the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, living to bring forth what truly ought to be in our lives and the world. As we live to be who Jesus was in this way, we are Christians, or “Little Christ’s.”
Our lives are our practice. We practice bringing forth what ought to be. We practice being The Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, who brings forth what is truly right and needs to happen. As we bring forth that which is deepest, best, and truest about us, as we live aligned with the ought-to-be-ness of things, we grace the world with caring presence and dance with our lives.
Understanding the Christ in this way turns New Testament theology on its ear, of course, but it is quite compatible with Jesus’ treatment of the kingdom of God as metaphor, not political fact.
Jesus’ statement, “My kingdom is not of this world,” establishes the fundamental rift between him and the Jewish notion of the Promised Land and the messianic return of King David. The Messiah the Jews were looking for would establish a Kingdom with geographical and political boundaries, latitude and longitude, and all the spoils that go to the victors. But Jesus understands the kingdom in a spiritual, not political, way. The kingdom that is “not of this world,” is the one envisioned by the prophet Jeremiah: But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more (Jeremiah 31:33-34). A kingdom in which all are the Christ.
Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom as being “not of this world” stands in opposition to the Jewish understanding of the Messiah and in opposition to the Apostles’ view that Jesus would return and establish his kingdom within the historical world of space and time. Jesus is the denunciation of those expectations. The Christ who Jesus is is not the Christ anyone expected or desired.
And our practice is to bring that Christ forth into the world. We begin with our lives because our lives reflect our alignment, or lack of alignment, with the source of the rightness of things. We are at odds with ourselves, remember? There is no better definition of sin. To overcome our at-odds-ness and live in synch with who we are is the practice that brings the Christ forth into the world.
The question is how well does our life exhibit who we ought to be, disclose “the face that was ours before we were born”? To what extent are we living our life, the life that is ours to live, the life that brings us forth into the world? Where are we not keeping faith with our life? What are we going to do about it? Our work is to know and do what is ours to do, to live the life that is our life to live. We have the rest of our lives to learn how to live the lives that are ours to live. Our work is to be reconnected with ourselves and our lives. To be restored to our life. To be resurrected from the dead. To wake up and live.
There is no instant recipe for waking up. See what you are seeing. Hear what you are hearing. Feel what you are feeling. Know what you are knowing. Think what you are thinking. Taste what you are tasting. Love what you are loving… Experience what you are experiencing in every moment for the rest of your life, including how what you have experienced impacts what you are experiencing, and you will be more awake at the end than you are now. But, you’ll never be all the way awake. Waking up is a process, not an achievement. Here are some steps in that process:
(1) Strong feelings are indicators of stirrings of soul. Something is stirring up something. Check it out. Sit with the feeling and interview it: “What is this touching in me?” “What does this remind me of?” “When did I first feel this?” “Where does this come from in my history?” “What is being remembered that my present situation is triggering that arouses this feeling?” “What is behind the feeling?” “What is beneath the surface of this feeling?” “What are the ideas around the experiences that give rise to this feeling?” “What wound is being exposed here?” “What do I need to make conscious in order to begin healing the wound?” “What am I being asked to remember that I would like to forget?” “What does this feeling have to say to me? What do I have to say to this feeling?”
(2) When you find yourself resisting something, dig in at the point of resistance. This doesn’t mean become more resistant. It doesn’t mean “stick to your guns,” “stand fast,” “hold your ground.” It means examine your resistance, explore your resistance. It means find your fear. What is the threat? Where in your experience have you felt that threat, have you been threatened in this way? What does this threat remind you of? What is being asked of you that you don’t want to do? That you don’t what to surrender? What is at stake for you personally at the point of your resistance? What do you stand to lose?
(3) Reflective conversation is the highest value. Conversation that doesn’t encourage reflection doesn’t engage the soul, and cannot bring us to life. Conversation that is restorative wakes us up and connects us with our-selves and our lives. This kind of conversation is the dialectic. The primal soup. The birth place of the clash of contraries. The seat of consciousness. The origin of life. The pathway to soul.
(4) The ultimate conversation is with our soul. To speak with soul, we have to learn the language of soul: metaphor, image, story, dream, symbol, symptom, intuitive sense, persistent drift toward or attraction to, disinclination or resistance… Soul comes at us in different ways with the same message until we wake up and get it and live aligned with soul’s idea of how life is to be lived. Generally, we can only do that when our idea of how life is to be lived has lived itself out, and we have nothing much left to loose. But soul keeps talking, on the chance that we are ready to hear what it has to say.
Soul is a white rabbit appearing momentarily in our peripheral vision and disappearing down holes and around corners while we try to decide if we saw anything and what to do about it. And soul will be “driving six white horses when she comes,” and it will be impossible to miss her. She will run us down, run us over, and demand that we get on board or else. That’s the way it is with soul. If we don’t give chase, we will be chased. Better the rabbit than the horses. Take my word for it. You do not want to find out the hard way.
Sunday, April 05, 2009
04/04/09, Dance with what scares you
We stand between different perspectives, different points of view, different ways of seeing, different interpretations, different theories, different hypothesizes, different spins, different theologies and philosophies and decide which one to embrace, agree with, espouse, profess. We decide which one is right for us. How do we know? However we do it, decide, know, how do we know that’s the right way to do it? This gets us to the heart of the prob-lem of knowing what to believe, of deciding how we are going to see something, anything. Golf, bread pudding, Jesus. By what authority do we say “this” or “that”? What moves us to one position or another? How do we know?
Most of the time we don’t think about it. We just buy what someone else, someone we admire and trust, is selling, or has bought. We think, “If it’s good enough for Mama, it’s good enough for me,” and let it go at that. We are influenced by the example of someone we trust to do our thinking for us. Saves us the trouble. We have enough to worry about. It is our life, of course, but we don’t mind if someone else lives it for us. We just fall in line, do as we are told, follow the black footprints to the grave. What’s the difference? What do we care?
We have one life to live and we opt out of it. We live a nice, well-rounded, cookie cutter life, that is some-body else’s idea of how life ought to be, that looks remarkably like everyone else’s life on the block. We tell ourselves to just tell them what they want to hear and show them what they want to see, because what difference does it make anyhow and it’s so much easier that way. We ignore whoever it is that’s screaming inside, locked away in a back room, away from the light and what passes for life, wishing it would leave us alone, and in time it does. And we are left with a life that everyone is happy with and is a complete waste of our time.
When we die and go to heaven, we will meet our lives there, and have to explain to them why we didn’t live them. And that will be hell. So, we need to take a Quality of Life Assessment on a regular basis. How alive are we? How interested, and interesting, are we? How invested are we in our lives? Do we have dreams for our lives that weren’t realized, that aren’t being realized? Are we living in the service of our dreams? If not, what keeps us from living in the service of our dreams? Are we living the life we wish we could live? If not, what keeps us from living the life we wish we could live? Have we put our dreams away, shutting them up in a back room perhaps? Are we living in the service of our fears? What fears keep us from living? What stands between us and being alive?
Here’s a bumper sticker for you: Walk confidently in the direction of your fear. Here’s another: Run to embrace your fear. Here’s another: Step into what makes you most afraid. Marsha Truman Cooper has a poem about this very thing:
Fearing Paris
by Marsha Truman Cooper
Suppose that what you fear
could be trapped,
and held in Paris.
Then you would have
the courage to go
everywhere in the world.
All the directions of the compass
open to you,
except the degrees east or west
of true north
that lead to Paris.
Still, you wouldn’t dare
put your toes
smack dab on the city limit line.
You’re not really willing
to stand on a mountainside
miles away,
and watch the Paris lights
come up at night.
Just to be on the safe side,
you decide to stay completely
out of France.
But then danger
seems too close
even to those boundaries,
and you feel
the timid part of you
covering the whole globe again.
You need the kind of friend
who learns your secret and says,
“See Paris first.”
Two of the things we fear most, that would surely be locked away in Paris, are our own thoughts and our own feelings. We will think anything to keep from thinking what we think. We will do anything to keep from feeling what we feel. We embrace bad religion to save us from ourselves, but it is the connection with ourselves and the life that is our life to live that is at the heart of good religion. You see the problem. We cannot get to good religion without going through the heart of Paris.
We need to think our own thoughts, and feel our own feelings, and live our own lives. In order to live our own lives, we have to be able to make a case for the life we are living. We have to think it out, think it through, think. But how do we know that what we think is what to think? We don’t. We can’t. We can only think what we think, and think it out, and think it through, and be able to articulate our understanding of God and life and what it means to be alive and what we are here for and how we are working to incarnate, express, bring forth, all of that into the life we are living. It will be good practice for when we stand before our lives in heaven.
Another of the things we fear is being wrong, being exposed for being wrong, being shown to be wrong, we have to be right. Okay. Here’s the question. Is it worse to be wrong or to be right? And, here is the catch, we have to risk being wrong in order to be right. When Jesus quotes the proverb, “Wisdom is known by her children,” he’s saying “time will tell.” He’s saying we can’t know beforehand how right we are. He’s saying “Truth will out. Truth will shine through. Truth will show itself to be what it is.” In time, but maybe not in our lifetime. We cannot live knowing we are right about the life we are living. We have to take a chance. We have to risk everything with our lives on the line. The idea gives us the willies.
Our panic fails to take into account the truth that we have what we need. We are afraid of being overwhelmed, undone, exposed, obliterated. We are afraid of the complete dissolution of soul. We are afraid of nothingness, and have nothing to worry about. All it takes is imagination, curiosity, and courage. Those things come packed into each of us at birth. We only have to sit loose in the saddle and enjoy the ride. We are only along for the ride. But we cannot ride casually, unthinking, unfeeling.
The catch is that something can feel right and not be right, so the constant need for examination and exploration, observation and inquiry. What are the contraries at work in our lives? How do we reconcile ourselves to them? How do we square ourselves up to the contradictions in our lives? Where are we not keeping faith with our-selves? How do our lives need to change to be better aligned with who we are? How are we blocking the way of soul, the expression of Self, in our lives? In what ways, and from what, are we hiding? What does what we are thinking about keep us from thinking? What does what we are doing keep us from doing? What are we avoiding? Where in our lives is the deep water calling our name?
The problem, of course, is that we can justify anything. Which makes it impossible to know if what we are doing is right or a spin job. And leaves us quite up in the air about everything. Maybe we are doing what needs to be done, and maybe we are fooling ourselves. Is it clarity, or is it self-deception? How can we be sure? We make our choices and live our lives, and that’s that. Time may tell if we were right, but after enough time it won’t much matter. But, we could be a little less smug and certain about our way being the way. That would help.
We can justify anything. When we wake up, we wake up to our ability to justify anything. The only differ-ence between being awake and being asleep is that awake we question our justifications and wonder if we are telling ourselves what we want to hear or actually making the choices that need to be made. Are we kidding ourselves or living soulfully? How do we get to the bottom of that one? Isn’t this great? I wouldn’t be anywhere but here for anything. I mean anything. This is so it. So perfectly, wonderfully, crazily it. We’ll never think our way out of it. If you can’t love this, you can’t love anything, because everything is going to test your ability to love it over time. And, if you can’t live with ambivalence, and ambiguity, and anxiety, and anguish, and angst, and agony, you better not come out of the womb. That’s just the A’s.
Most of the time we don’t think about it. We just buy what someone else, someone we admire and trust, is selling, or has bought. We think, “If it’s good enough for Mama, it’s good enough for me,” and let it go at that. We are influenced by the example of someone we trust to do our thinking for us. Saves us the trouble. We have enough to worry about. It is our life, of course, but we don’t mind if someone else lives it for us. We just fall in line, do as we are told, follow the black footprints to the grave. What’s the difference? What do we care?
We have one life to live and we opt out of it. We live a nice, well-rounded, cookie cutter life, that is some-body else’s idea of how life ought to be, that looks remarkably like everyone else’s life on the block. We tell ourselves to just tell them what they want to hear and show them what they want to see, because what difference does it make anyhow and it’s so much easier that way. We ignore whoever it is that’s screaming inside, locked away in a back room, away from the light and what passes for life, wishing it would leave us alone, and in time it does. And we are left with a life that everyone is happy with and is a complete waste of our time.
When we die and go to heaven, we will meet our lives there, and have to explain to them why we didn’t live them. And that will be hell. So, we need to take a Quality of Life Assessment on a regular basis. How alive are we? How interested, and interesting, are we? How invested are we in our lives? Do we have dreams for our lives that weren’t realized, that aren’t being realized? Are we living in the service of our dreams? If not, what keeps us from living in the service of our dreams? Are we living the life we wish we could live? If not, what keeps us from living the life we wish we could live? Have we put our dreams away, shutting them up in a back room perhaps? Are we living in the service of our fears? What fears keep us from living? What stands between us and being alive?
Here’s a bumper sticker for you: Walk confidently in the direction of your fear. Here’s another: Run to embrace your fear. Here’s another: Step into what makes you most afraid. Marsha Truman Cooper has a poem about this very thing:
Fearing Paris
by Marsha Truman Cooper
Suppose that what you fear
could be trapped,
and held in Paris.
Then you would have
the courage to go
everywhere in the world.
All the directions of the compass
open to you,
except the degrees east or west
of true north
that lead to Paris.
Still, you wouldn’t dare
put your toes
smack dab on the city limit line.
You’re not really willing
to stand on a mountainside
miles away,
and watch the Paris lights
come up at night.
Just to be on the safe side,
you decide to stay completely
out of France.
But then danger
seems too close
even to those boundaries,
and you feel
the timid part of you
covering the whole globe again.
You need the kind of friend
who learns your secret and says,
“See Paris first.”
Two of the things we fear most, that would surely be locked away in Paris, are our own thoughts and our own feelings. We will think anything to keep from thinking what we think. We will do anything to keep from feeling what we feel. We embrace bad religion to save us from ourselves, but it is the connection with ourselves and the life that is our life to live that is at the heart of good religion. You see the problem. We cannot get to good religion without going through the heart of Paris.
We need to think our own thoughts, and feel our own feelings, and live our own lives. In order to live our own lives, we have to be able to make a case for the life we are living. We have to think it out, think it through, think. But how do we know that what we think is what to think? We don’t. We can’t. We can only think what we think, and think it out, and think it through, and be able to articulate our understanding of God and life and what it means to be alive and what we are here for and how we are working to incarnate, express, bring forth, all of that into the life we are living. It will be good practice for when we stand before our lives in heaven.
Another of the things we fear is being wrong, being exposed for being wrong, being shown to be wrong, we have to be right. Okay. Here’s the question. Is it worse to be wrong or to be right? And, here is the catch, we have to risk being wrong in order to be right. When Jesus quotes the proverb, “Wisdom is known by her children,” he’s saying “time will tell.” He’s saying we can’t know beforehand how right we are. He’s saying “Truth will out. Truth will shine through. Truth will show itself to be what it is.” In time, but maybe not in our lifetime. We cannot live knowing we are right about the life we are living. We have to take a chance. We have to risk everything with our lives on the line. The idea gives us the willies.
Our panic fails to take into account the truth that we have what we need. We are afraid of being overwhelmed, undone, exposed, obliterated. We are afraid of the complete dissolution of soul. We are afraid of nothingness, and have nothing to worry about. All it takes is imagination, curiosity, and courage. Those things come packed into each of us at birth. We only have to sit loose in the saddle and enjoy the ride. We are only along for the ride. But we cannot ride casually, unthinking, unfeeling.
The catch is that something can feel right and not be right, so the constant need for examination and exploration, observation and inquiry. What are the contraries at work in our lives? How do we reconcile ourselves to them? How do we square ourselves up to the contradictions in our lives? Where are we not keeping faith with our-selves? How do our lives need to change to be better aligned with who we are? How are we blocking the way of soul, the expression of Self, in our lives? In what ways, and from what, are we hiding? What does what we are thinking about keep us from thinking? What does what we are doing keep us from doing? What are we avoiding? Where in our lives is the deep water calling our name?
The problem, of course, is that we can justify anything. Which makes it impossible to know if what we are doing is right or a spin job. And leaves us quite up in the air about everything. Maybe we are doing what needs to be done, and maybe we are fooling ourselves. Is it clarity, or is it self-deception? How can we be sure? We make our choices and live our lives, and that’s that. Time may tell if we were right, but after enough time it won’t much matter. But, we could be a little less smug and certain about our way being the way. That would help.
We can justify anything. When we wake up, we wake up to our ability to justify anything. The only differ-ence between being awake and being asleep is that awake we question our justifications and wonder if we are telling ourselves what we want to hear or actually making the choices that need to be made. Are we kidding ourselves or living soulfully? How do we get to the bottom of that one? Isn’t this great? I wouldn’t be anywhere but here for anything. I mean anything. This is so it. So perfectly, wonderfully, crazily it. We’ll never think our way out of it. If you can’t love this, you can’t love anything, because everything is going to test your ability to love it over time. And, if you can’t live with ambivalence, and ambiguity, and anxiety, and anguish, and angst, and agony, you better not come out of the womb. That’s just the A’s.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
03/29/09, We live between what is right for us and what we want.
The Dream
“Have you cut the tip of your finger?” she asked. “What?” I replied. “What’s that got to do with it? How many fingers do I have to cut?” She paused, thinking. “At least four,” she said, somewhat hesitantly, as though there could be more. “Four!” I said. “Why four?” I ask all the right questions. I should get credit for that. But, it seems that she thinks I’m putting off the inevitable, that I should just cut four fingertips and get it over with. Easy enough for her, seeing, as she does, from her point of view. Take a peek from mine, I say. If I’m going to cut four of MY fingertips, I want to know the ins and outs. I want to know why and how that’s going to help and what’s the point. Surely, by now, she has to understand what she’s up against in me, and would gently explain how it is. Seems to me, I hold the trump cards. All of them. I don’t want to swim in icy water anyway. Why cut four fingertips to do it? What does one thing possibly have to do with the other? All I can imagine is that the pain of the finger slicing would take my mind off the pain of the cold water. Which is completely stupid, and much less wisdom than I would expect from the Wisdom of the Ages. I think she is making fun of me, laughing. I’m shrinking back from the cold water, and she is making fun of me, laughing. I HATE cold water. And she knows it. And she’s laughing.
We have to go where we don’t want to be and do what we don’t want to do. If we can make our peace with that, we have it made. Which is to say that what we want has nothing to do with it. What needs to be done is the question. Where do we need to be is the other question. Forget wanting. Wanting got us in the mess we’re in. We see what wanting will do for us. We create a good many of our problems by choosing to have what we want at the expense of what is right for us.
What is right for us has nothing to do with what we want for us. If you are ever going to hear me, hear me here. Learning to listen within in order to know what we know, in order to know what is right for us, past all want-ing it to be otherwise, and to have what it takes to do it, to live in the service of what is right for us, no matter what, day in and day out for the rest of our lives, ah, there be the nature and scope of the spiritual journey.
The way to wholeness, to integrity of being, is awareness, paying attention, waking up. It’s the way of knowing how things are and how things also are (which includes the truth of how we feel about how things are, and also are—the truth of how we wish things were). It is the way of putting truth on the table, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, the truth in all its conflicting, mutually exclusive, cacophonic glory. And letting truth trans-form truth, and wake us up, so that we live in light of all the truth that is true. That is the way of integration. It is not exactly what you would call pain-free. But it is exactly what you would call life lived to the core.
One of the truths that goes on the table is fundamental, foundational: We are at odds with ourselves. We relax (ignore) the tension within ourselves at high cost to ourselves. We have to live consciously within the tension of the opposites within, and choose what we will do each time a choice is to be made. No dismissing. No discounting. No denying. No Ignoring. No running, hiding, escaping, pretending. We bear the pain of our own contrariness as we carry out the business of life on the boundary between Yin and Yang.
Of course it is hard. We’re here to ride the bull. If it were easy they would call it riding the hen. We are here to do what is hard: Face ourselves and our lives and bring to life in ourselves and our lives that which is deepest, best, and truest about us—that which is truly right for us and the time and place of our living.
There are no black foot prints on the spiritual path. We find our way alone, but in the company of those who are finding their way, alone. There is no substitute for personal experience, yet, experience has to be experienced, and it cannot be experienced without being expressed. We have to talk about our experience with those who can receive well what we have to say. In so doing, we see better what is to be seen, become increasingly awake, and find our own way, the way that is truly our way, the way with our name on it. We could not find the way that is our way apart from those who listen to us, enabling realization, discovery, understanding, enlightenment—enabling us to know the truth of who we are (and also are) and how it is with us (and how it also it with us). But, once we find the way that is our way, we discover that it has a cross attached.
The cross was the price Jesus paid for living the life he lived. We all pay a price for living the life we live. The trick is to realize that, and bear consciously the cross and the responsibility for living the life that called it forth—and to know that if we choose to live differently we will bear the cross of living differently. We can’t get away from the crosses with our name on them. The best we can do is bear them consciously, responsibly, smiling along the way, because we get to live the life we are living for the one low price of cross bearing. Of course, that means we better feel right about the life we are living, else the cross will be a bear to bear.
Bearing the pain of our own choices, the weight of our own lives, means paying the price of living the way we live or changing the way we live, but then we have to pay the price of that choice. We have to take what comes from doing what we do the way we do it. If we run up a bill, we pay the tab. But we only pay our tab. We refuse to bear the pain of other people’s choices, the weight of other people’s lives. It’s the Robert Frost line about “good fences making good neighbors.” We have to know where we stop and other people start. We take care of our business and they take care of theirs. And, when we help one another, we help one another help themselves. When we help one another, we help one another bear the pain of their own choices, the weight of their own lives. If we won’t bear the pain of our own choices, the weight of our own lives, we can’t be helped, we can only be carried, mothered, babied, and live as a burden upon others all our lives long.
We have to bear the pain of our own choices, the weight of our own lives. When we do not, we neglect our duty to the tribe and pass on to others the responsibility of carrying us along. Then, we become an excessive bur-den on the social structure and undermine the good of the whole. Compare this to our calling to live as a boon to the world, a blessing unto all who come our way, and you quickly see the scope of the damage we bring to life by refusing to bear the pain that is ours to bear. Not only are we not a source of good in the lives of others, but we also deplete what little good there is by requiring them to do what is ours to do in taking care of us. When we grow up and shoulder our own cross, bear the weight of our own life, everyone is relieved and released to live the lives that are theirs to live, and joy comes to life in the world.
We have to do our part. And, we have to prop one another up. No one does it alone, yet we all have to help the others help us. This is called community building. We encourage one another in the tasks of life. We are a compassionate, abiding, presence. Urging each other along. Cheering each other on. Just being with someone who has the right spirit about her, about him, makes all the difference. Joseph Campbell says, “The influence of a vital person vitalizes.” Our individual task is to cultivate the right spirit within, to be vital, alive, and to live as a compassionate presence in the lives of others.
To be connected at the level of truth is the essential connection. To see truth truthfully together is to create a “weness” that forms a lasting bond between us, among us. This is the basis of the community we seek, and must have, to make it. It is not enough to say the truth, to say what is true, we also have to be heard, we have to say the truth to those who can hear us with understanding, who can stand with us as witnesses of the truth we know to be true because we experienced it. The truth must be told, but not only told. It must be told until it is heard, until it is received with understanding, until it is recognized as the truth that it is, by someone, anyone.
The most abusing thing about child abuse is not the abuse itself but the silence that surrounds it. The secrecy. The "explanations." The dismissals. The denials. "Oh, you know your Daddy, Uncle, Brother really loves you, really wouldn't do anything to hurt you," etc. The displacements. "It's your fault." The most abusing thing about child abuse is the refusal to hear the truth of the child, the refusal to stand with the child, and bear the truth with the child, knowing what the child knows, knowing that the child knows we know, refusing to look away, but bear-ing the truth with the child, bearing the child’s truth, the truth of the child, the child, all the way to the heart of truth, and saying, “Yes. That’s the truth. That’s how it is. And it is very wrong for that to have happened, for that to be the way it is. And I am very sorry, and I am with you to bear witness to the truth, and to help you bear the pain of the truth, because two sets of shoulders are much better than one.”
To bear the truth alone, when the world is saying, "That isn't true. That couldn't be true. You know it isn't true," is to risk losing our bearings, to split off from that part of us that knows, and to deny ourselves what we know to be true as a way of surviving in a world that does not believe us. To hold on to the truth and to know what we know and to know that we know what we know in the face of the constant refusal to hear/believe/know is the hardest thing. We need help bearing the truth of our lives. We need those who can witness the truth of our lives with us, to corroborate the truth, affirm it, and thus ground us in the reality of that which cannot be real but is, and provide us with a reference point for navigating through the madness of the world, reminding us that the world is mad, but we are not.
The more truthful we are, the crazier we sound in a world that is not geared to the expression of truth. And so, the need to create communities of truthfulness where we can say who we are (and also are) and how it is with us (and how it also is), to those who can hear us and serve as reference points for the long journey home.
“Have you cut the tip of your finger?” she asked. “What?” I replied. “What’s that got to do with it? How many fingers do I have to cut?” She paused, thinking. “At least four,” she said, somewhat hesitantly, as though there could be more. “Four!” I said. “Why four?” I ask all the right questions. I should get credit for that. But, it seems that she thinks I’m putting off the inevitable, that I should just cut four fingertips and get it over with. Easy enough for her, seeing, as she does, from her point of view. Take a peek from mine, I say. If I’m going to cut four of MY fingertips, I want to know the ins and outs. I want to know why and how that’s going to help and what’s the point. Surely, by now, she has to understand what she’s up against in me, and would gently explain how it is. Seems to me, I hold the trump cards. All of them. I don’t want to swim in icy water anyway. Why cut four fingertips to do it? What does one thing possibly have to do with the other? All I can imagine is that the pain of the finger slicing would take my mind off the pain of the cold water. Which is completely stupid, and much less wisdom than I would expect from the Wisdom of the Ages. I think she is making fun of me, laughing. I’m shrinking back from the cold water, and she is making fun of me, laughing. I HATE cold water. And she knows it. And she’s laughing.
We have to go where we don’t want to be and do what we don’t want to do. If we can make our peace with that, we have it made. Which is to say that what we want has nothing to do with it. What needs to be done is the question. Where do we need to be is the other question. Forget wanting. Wanting got us in the mess we’re in. We see what wanting will do for us. We create a good many of our problems by choosing to have what we want at the expense of what is right for us.
What is right for us has nothing to do with what we want for us. If you are ever going to hear me, hear me here. Learning to listen within in order to know what we know, in order to know what is right for us, past all want-ing it to be otherwise, and to have what it takes to do it, to live in the service of what is right for us, no matter what, day in and day out for the rest of our lives, ah, there be the nature and scope of the spiritual journey.
The way to wholeness, to integrity of being, is awareness, paying attention, waking up. It’s the way of knowing how things are and how things also are (which includes the truth of how we feel about how things are, and also are—the truth of how we wish things were). It is the way of putting truth on the table, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, the truth in all its conflicting, mutually exclusive, cacophonic glory. And letting truth trans-form truth, and wake us up, so that we live in light of all the truth that is true. That is the way of integration. It is not exactly what you would call pain-free. But it is exactly what you would call life lived to the core.
One of the truths that goes on the table is fundamental, foundational: We are at odds with ourselves. We relax (ignore) the tension within ourselves at high cost to ourselves. We have to live consciously within the tension of the opposites within, and choose what we will do each time a choice is to be made. No dismissing. No discounting. No denying. No Ignoring. No running, hiding, escaping, pretending. We bear the pain of our own contrariness as we carry out the business of life on the boundary between Yin and Yang.
Of course it is hard. We’re here to ride the bull. If it were easy they would call it riding the hen. We are here to do what is hard: Face ourselves and our lives and bring to life in ourselves and our lives that which is deepest, best, and truest about us—that which is truly right for us and the time and place of our living.
There are no black foot prints on the spiritual path. We find our way alone, but in the company of those who are finding their way, alone. There is no substitute for personal experience, yet, experience has to be experienced, and it cannot be experienced without being expressed. We have to talk about our experience with those who can receive well what we have to say. In so doing, we see better what is to be seen, become increasingly awake, and find our own way, the way that is truly our way, the way with our name on it. We could not find the way that is our way apart from those who listen to us, enabling realization, discovery, understanding, enlightenment—enabling us to know the truth of who we are (and also are) and how it is with us (and how it also it with us). But, once we find the way that is our way, we discover that it has a cross attached.
The cross was the price Jesus paid for living the life he lived. We all pay a price for living the life we live. The trick is to realize that, and bear consciously the cross and the responsibility for living the life that called it forth—and to know that if we choose to live differently we will bear the cross of living differently. We can’t get away from the crosses with our name on them. The best we can do is bear them consciously, responsibly, smiling along the way, because we get to live the life we are living for the one low price of cross bearing. Of course, that means we better feel right about the life we are living, else the cross will be a bear to bear.
Bearing the pain of our own choices, the weight of our own lives, means paying the price of living the way we live or changing the way we live, but then we have to pay the price of that choice. We have to take what comes from doing what we do the way we do it. If we run up a bill, we pay the tab. But we only pay our tab. We refuse to bear the pain of other people’s choices, the weight of other people’s lives. It’s the Robert Frost line about “good fences making good neighbors.” We have to know where we stop and other people start. We take care of our business and they take care of theirs. And, when we help one another, we help one another help themselves. When we help one another, we help one another bear the pain of their own choices, the weight of their own lives. If we won’t bear the pain of our own choices, the weight of our own lives, we can’t be helped, we can only be carried, mothered, babied, and live as a burden upon others all our lives long.
We have to bear the pain of our own choices, the weight of our own lives. When we do not, we neglect our duty to the tribe and pass on to others the responsibility of carrying us along. Then, we become an excessive bur-den on the social structure and undermine the good of the whole. Compare this to our calling to live as a boon to the world, a blessing unto all who come our way, and you quickly see the scope of the damage we bring to life by refusing to bear the pain that is ours to bear. Not only are we not a source of good in the lives of others, but we also deplete what little good there is by requiring them to do what is ours to do in taking care of us. When we grow up and shoulder our own cross, bear the weight of our own life, everyone is relieved and released to live the lives that are theirs to live, and joy comes to life in the world.
We have to do our part. And, we have to prop one another up. No one does it alone, yet we all have to help the others help us. This is called community building. We encourage one another in the tasks of life. We are a compassionate, abiding, presence. Urging each other along. Cheering each other on. Just being with someone who has the right spirit about her, about him, makes all the difference. Joseph Campbell says, “The influence of a vital person vitalizes.” Our individual task is to cultivate the right spirit within, to be vital, alive, and to live as a compassionate presence in the lives of others.
To be connected at the level of truth is the essential connection. To see truth truthfully together is to create a “weness” that forms a lasting bond between us, among us. This is the basis of the community we seek, and must have, to make it. It is not enough to say the truth, to say what is true, we also have to be heard, we have to say the truth to those who can hear us with understanding, who can stand with us as witnesses of the truth we know to be true because we experienced it. The truth must be told, but not only told. It must be told until it is heard, until it is received with understanding, until it is recognized as the truth that it is, by someone, anyone.
The most abusing thing about child abuse is not the abuse itself but the silence that surrounds it. The secrecy. The "explanations." The dismissals. The denials. "Oh, you know your Daddy, Uncle, Brother really loves you, really wouldn't do anything to hurt you," etc. The displacements. "It's your fault." The most abusing thing about child abuse is the refusal to hear the truth of the child, the refusal to stand with the child, and bear the truth with the child, knowing what the child knows, knowing that the child knows we know, refusing to look away, but bear-ing the truth with the child, bearing the child’s truth, the truth of the child, the child, all the way to the heart of truth, and saying, “Yes. That’s the truth. That’s how it is. And it is very wrong for that to have happened, for that to be the way it is. And I am very sorry, and I am with you to bear witness to the truth, and to help you bear the pain of the truth, because two sets of shoulders are much better than one.”
To bear the truth alone, when the world is saying, "That isn't true. That couldn't be true. You know it isn't true," is to risk losing our bearings, to split off from that part of us that knows, and to deny ourselves what we know to be true as a way of surviving in a world that does not believe us. To hold on to the truth and to know what we know and to know that we know what we know in the face of the constant refusal to hear/believe/know is the hardest thing. We need help bearing the truth of our lives. We need those who can witness the truth of our lives with us, to corroborate the truth, affirm it, and thus ground us in the reality of that which cannot be real but is, and provide us with a reference point for navigating through the madness of the world, reminding us that the world is mad, but we are not.
The more truthful we are, the crazier we sound in a world that is not geared to the expression of truth. And so, the need to create communities of truthfulness where we can say who we are (and also are) and how it is with us (and how it also is), to those who can hear us and serve as reference points for the long journey home.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
03/22/09, We have to soothe ourselves somehow.
On the One Hand
We seek justification, redemption, affirmation, validation, because we think there isn’t much to us. We are afraid we don’t count, that we don’t add up to anything, and have no real business being here. We think we are just taking up space, breathing someone else’s air. We live frantic to convince ourselves that our lives are worth the effort.
And on the Other
Who has it down? Who is doing it right? The Dali Lama? I hear he wants to retire. He’s had enough of being the Dali Lama. Wants to tag out. Stop doing it. Quit. Quit being the Dali Lama. Walk away from the job. Since when did it become a job? Let a seven year old kid take his place. So he can just hang out for a while before he dies. How’s that for being grown up? Nobody has it down! Nobody is doing it right! Yet, we are all over our backs for not having it down, for not doing it right. Give me the name of someone who does! No! Wait! Give me the name of the person who thought this up. We need to talk.
We want to be justified and we want to quit. And, the longer we are at it, the more we want to quit. We all know about wanting to quit, wanting to hang out, free of responsibility, and obligation, and duty—to live freely, joyfully, at peace with ourselves and our lives without life getting in the way. Life is hard. We hate it. Want to check out. Quit. But quitting has its hard side. Everything does. Hard is how it is.
Of course, we have this happy fantasy of being able to do whatever we want, whenever we want, for as long as we want, with no repercussions or side effects, and everyone loving us always and forever. It’s called having Mother take care of us. We run up the tab, Mother pays the bill—not our biological mother, who was never the mother we needed her to be, but the Idealized Mother of Fantasy Land who will take care of us the way we want to be taken care of forever and ever, Amen! When it gets hard, we long for Mother.
Life without Mother is the hardest thing. The hardest thing is growing up, bearing the truth of life, making our peace with how things are (and also are), being our own mother, being responsible for doing what is to be done, every day for the rest of our lives, and doing it with gentleness, kindness, compassion and grace. Who do you know who lives like that? See? I told you it was the hardest thing. But we don’t cut ourselves slack or treat our-selves gently for wanting to quit, for wanting to avoid life without Mother.
We were raised on John Wayne and James Bond. They had no weaknesses and did everything single-handedly. Yet, John Wayne smoked himself to death, and James Bond has no friends. Even the actors who play James Bond can stand him only so long. He hates himself. And has to run, or drive, or fly, or swim from one action packed moment to the next. Make him sit still for an hour. Give him our life for a week. He couldn't handle it. His life is one big collection of distractions. But we think he is the master of all things. We think we should be John Wayne and James Bond. We were raised to believe we should stand there and take it. No one can stand there and take it, not even John Wayne or James Bond, but we can’t allow ourselves to get out of the way. We can’t take it and we can’t take not taking it. Who thought this up?
Col. Nathan P. Jessup (the Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men) put us all in our place with his "You can't handle the truth" declaration. No one can. Not all the time. We have to put some distance between ourselves and the truth to have a chance. But then, and this is the part I really don't like, what we do for distance becomes part of the truth we're trying to get away from, and we have to get away from it. Distraction becomes addiction. And we have to distract ourselves from our distraction. We have to deny our denial. Escape our escape. Reality keeps shifting on us, becoming something else, tracking us down, breaking in. Who thought this up?
Ignorance is bliss. Denial is ignorance. We will do anything to feel better about our lives. Or to feel nothing. Consciousness is pain. To know is to suffer the fear and anguish brought on by the pain of existence. How much can you see before covering your eyes, looking away? How conscious can you be before you run to Mama? Uncon-sciousness has its place, else it wouldn’t be so popular.
We can only handle so much truth. So much mindfulness. At some point we have to give ourselves over to mindlessness and watch a football game, or play with the puppy, or swing a grandchild, or have some ice cream. We have to set life aside and live from time to time. Really. I’m serious here. We have to get out of our heads and into our lives. If your thinking disconnects you from living, keeps you from living, stop thinking. If you can’t think and enjoy pizza and a beer, stop thinking. Better to be mindlessly alive than mindfully dead. A lot better.
The religions of the east boast of their consciousness quotient, but how alive are they is the question? What is their life quotient? They dismiss the truth they cannot bear to acknowledge as illusion. Dismissal is another form of denial. They live in the midst of horrendous suffering and see it only as Maya brought on by desire, without see-ing their desire to ignore suffering and their responsibility for relieving it. Nobody can be conscious without a break, but to be unconscious of our unconsciousness is bad religion.
Bad religion exists to enable us to feel better about our lives. Good religion exists to enable us to see, hear and understand—to know how things are and how things also are—to feel what must be felt, and do what must be done, and to call time out and step away when that must be done. The pain of the truth of life will be borne, experienced, expressed, either consciously or unconsciously, either by ourselves or by our spouse, or our children, or society, or the world. The pain of the truth of life will be suffered by someone. What we do not bear consciously ourselves will be borne by others, perhaps over long generations. Pain that is not felt, experienced, and appropriately expressed, will be passed along, and the world will suffer from our refusal to suffer our portion of what must be suffered. We always increase the corporate pain level in the lives of those around us when we refuse to bear our personal pain consciously.
But, we cannot bear it all the time, and we cannot bear it alone. We have to have relief at regular intervals. No one can stare down reality. We step in and step out to restore our souls and have what it takes to step back in and do what must be done. Stepping out is one of the things that must be done, but there is a fundamental difference between stepping away from reality to nourish, nurture, and restore our souls, and running to the safety of Mama’s lap.
There is more to us than we can imagine. We are always giving up on ourselves. We don’t know who we are or what we are capable of, but we think there is nothing to us. We think, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that, or that, or that. I couldn’t possibly survive on those terms, under those conditions. I must have my bon-bons and my telly.” The Hero, the Heroine, within doesn’t get a chance to show us what we are made of because we are always collapsing in the dust, writhing, whining, moaning, calling for Mother, saying, “Help me! Save me! Won’t somebody help me! Mama! I want my Mama!”
We all have a resilient core that is more than capable of making its way in any world. Look at where we have been—both individually and as a species. Look at what we have dealt with. Hairy Mastodons. Genghis Kahn. Life cannot give us anything that is worse than the things life has already given us. We have what it takes. It only takes trusting that we do. We are the only thing we cannot handle, and stand blocking our way by not having what it takes to trust that we have what it takes, crying for Mama.
What is the pain, the fear, the anxiety? Abandonment? Overwhelm-ment? Isolation? Exclusion? Aloneness? What is it that we think we cannot bear? Too-much-ness? Is the all-ness of life, the truth of life, too much for us? What exactly do we think growing up entails? Growing up means looking our life in the eye and saying, “Show me what you got.” Until we can do that, we are children seeking Mother’s lap. And, the hope is that we will find those who can accept us, lovingly, as we are, even as they repeat the saving mantra, “I’m not your Mother!” and exhibit its truth in their way with us over time, while we grow up and become who we are capable of being.
We cannot bear the weight of our lives without a corroborating witness, or witnesses, standing with us, knowing what we know. We cannot know what we know alone. We have to share the burden of the knowledge of the weight of our lives. Souls sustain souls. That is the work of community. It is the work of sustaining one another in the knowledge of who we are (and also are) and how things are (and also are).
It takes two or more standing together to know what we know. We cannot bear the weight of consciousness alone. We cannot see (or hear, or understand) by ourselves. And, we cannot allow one another to run, hide, deny, pretend, excuse, justify, soften, or otherwise ease the atrocity of truth. The truth goes on the table. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. And we live in light of the truth of the table. As we live, we uncover more of the truth, and put that also on the table. We are constantly adding to the truth of the table, and our lives change as truth transforms truth, and perspective shifts, and understanding deepens, and worlds expand.
The ideal community is one in which we draw one another out. Bring one another forth. Birth each other. Enlarge each other, deepen each other, expand each other’s perspective, extend each other’s conscious awareness, wake each other up, enable each other’s coming to be in the world, and help each other bear the pain of the truth of life and become increasingly whole and alive. The work of consciousness is communal to the core.
We seek justification, redemption, affirmation, validation, because we think there isn’t much to us. We are afraid we don’t count, that we don’t add up to anything, and have no real business being here. We think we are just taking up space, breathing someone else’s air. We live frantic to convince ourselves that our lives are worth the effort.
And on the Other
Who has it down? Who is doing it right? The Dali Lama? I hear he wants to retire. He’s had enough of being the Dali Lama. Wants to tag out. Stop doing it. Quit. Quit being the Dali Lama. Walk away from the job. Since when did it become a job? Let a seven year old kid take his place. So he can just hang out for a while before he dies. How’s that for being grown up? Nobody has it down! Nobody is doing it right! Yet, we are all over our backs for not having it down, for not doing it right. Give me the name of someone who does! No! Wait! Give me the name of the person who thought this up. We need to talk.
We want to be justified and we want to quit. And, the longer we are at it, the more we want to quit. We all know about wanting to quit, wanting to hang out, free of responsibility, and obligation, and duty—to live freely, joyfully, at peace with ourselves and our lives without life getting in the way. Life is hard. We hate it. Want to check out. Quit. But quitting has its hard side. Everything does. Hard is how it is.
Of course, we have this happy fantasy of being able to do whatever we want, whenever we want, for as long as we want, with no repercussions or side effects, and everyone loving us always and forever. It’s called having Mother take care of us. We run up the tab, Mother pays the bill—not our biological mother, who was never the mother we needed her to be, but the Idealized Mother of Fantasy Land who will take care of us the way we want to be taken care of forever and ever, Amen! When it gets hard, we long for Mother.
Life without Mother is the hardest thing. The hardest thing is growing up, bearing the truth of life, making our peace with how things are (and also are), being our own mother, being responsible for doing what is to be done, every day for the rest of our lives, and doing it with gentleness, kindness, compassion and grace. Who do you know who lives like that? See? I told you it was the hardest thing. But we don’t cut ourselves slack or treat our-selves gently for wanting to quit, for wanting to avoid life without Mother.
We were raised on John Wayne and James Bond. They had no weaknesses and did everything single-handedly. Yet, John Wayne smoked himself to death, and James Bond has no friends. Even the actors who play James Bond can stand him only so long. He hates himself. And has to run, or drive, or fly, or swim from one action packed moment to the next. Make him sit still for an hour. Give him our life for a week. He couldn't handle it. His life is one big collection of distractions. But we think he is the master of all things. We think we should be John Wayne and James Bond. We were raised to believe we should stand there and take it. No one can stand there and take it, not even John Wayne or James Bond, but we can’t allow ourselves to get out of the way. We can’t take it and we can’t take not taking it. Who thought this up?
Col. Nathan P. Jessup (the Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men) put us all in our place with his "You can't handle the truth" declaration. No one can. Not all the time. We have to put some distance between ourselves and the truth to have a chance. But then, and this is the part I really don't like, what we do for distance becomes part of the truth we're trying to get away from, and we have to get away from it. Distraction becomes addiction. And we have to distract ourselves from our distraction. We have to deny our denial. Escape our escape. Reality keeps shifting on us, becoming something else, tracking us down, breaking in. Who thought this up?
Ignorance is bliss. Denial is ignorance. We will do anything to feel better about our lives. Or to feel nothing. Consciousness is pain. To know is to suffer the fear and anguish brought on by the pain of existence. How much can you see before covering your eyes, looking away? How conscious can you be before you run to Mama? Uncon-sciousness has its place, else it wouldn’t be so popular.
We can only handle so much truth. So much mindfulness. At some point we have to give ourselves over to mindlessness and watch a football game, or play with the puppy, or swing a grandchild, or have some ice cream. We have to set life aside and live from time to time. Really. I’m serious here. We have to get out of our heads and into our lives. If your thinking disconnects you from living, keeps you from living, stop thinking. If you can’t think and enjoy pizza and a beer, stop thinking. Better to be mindlessly alive than mindfully dead. A lot better.
The religions of the east boast of their consciousness quotient, but how alive are they is the question? What is their life quotient? They dismiss the truth they cannot bear to acknowledge as illusion. Dismissal is another form of denial. They live in the midst of horrendous suffering and see it only as Maya brought on by desire, without see-ing their desire to ignore suffering and their responsibility for relieving it. Nobody can be conscious without a break, but to be unconscious of our unconsciousness is bad religion.
Bad religion exists to enable us to feel better about our lives. Good religion exists to enable us to see, hear and understand—to know how things are and how things also are—to feel what must be felt, and do what must be done, and to call time out and step away when that must be done. The pain of the truth of life will be borne, experienced, expressed, either consciously or unconsciously, either by ourselves or by our spouse, or our children, or society, or the world. The pain of the truth of life will be suffered by someone. What we do not bear consciously ourselves will be borne by others, perhaps over long generations. Pain that is not felt, experienced, and appropriately expressed, will be passed along, and the world will suffer from our refusal to suffer our portion of what must be suffered. We always increase the corporate pain level in the lives of those around us when we refuse to bear our personal pain consciously.
But, we cannot bear it all the time, and we cannot bear it alone. We have to have relief at regular intervals. No one can stare down reality. We step in and step out to restore our souls and have what it takes to step back in and do what must be done. Stepping out is one of the things that must be done, but there is a fundamental difference between stepping away from reality to nourish, nurture, and restore our souls, and running to the safety of Mama’s lap.
There is more to us than we can imagine. We are always giving up on ourselves. We don’t know who we are or what we are capable of, but we think there is nothing to us. We think, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that, or that, or that. I couldn’t possibly survive on those terms, under those conditions. I must have my bon-bons and my telly.” The Hero, the Heroine, within doesn’t get a chance to show us what we are made of because we are always collapsing in the dust, writhing, whining, moaning, calling for Mother, saying, “Help me! Save me! Won’t somebody help me! Mama! I want my Mama!”
We all have a resilient core that is more than capable of making its way in any world. Look at where we have been—both individually and as a species. Look at what we have dealt with. Hairy Mastodons. Genghis Kahn. Life cannot give us anything that is worse than the things life has already given us. We have what it takes. It only takes trusting that we do. We are the only thing we cannot handle, and stand blocking our way by not having what it takes to trust that we have what it takes, crying for Mama.
What is the pain, the fear, the anxiety? Abandonment? Overwhelm-ment? Isolation? Exclusion? Aloneness? What is it that we think we cannot bear? Too-much-ness? Is the all-ness of life, the truth of life, too much for us? What exactly do we think growing up entails? Growing up means looking our life in the eye and saying, “Show me what you got.” Until we can do that, we are children seeking Mother’s lap. And, the hope is that we will find those who can accept us, lovingly, as we are, even as they repeat the saving mantra, “I’m not your Mother!” and exhibit its truth in their way with us over time, while we grow up and become who we are capable of being.
We cannot bear the weight of our lives without a corroborating witness, or witnesses, standing with us, knowing what we know. We cannot know what we know alone. We have to share the burden of the knowledge of the weight of our lives. Souls sustain souls. That is the work of community. It is the work of sustaining one another in the knowledge of who we are (and also are) and how things are (and also are).
It takes two or more standing together to know what we know. We cannot bear the weight of consciousness alone. We cannot see (or hear, or understand) by ourselves. And, we cannot allow one another to run, hide, deny, pretend, excuse, justify, soften, or otherwise ease the atrocity of truth. The truth goes on the table. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. And we live in light of the truth of the table. As we live, we uncover more of the truth, and put that also on the table. We are constantly adding to the truth of the table, and our lives change as truth transforms truth, and perspective shifts, and understanding deepens, and worlds expand.
The ideal community is one in which we draw one another out. Bring one another forth. Birth each other. Enlarge each other, deepen each other, expand each other’s perspective, extend each other’s conscious awareness, wake each other up, enable each other’s coming to be in the world, and help each other bear the pain of the truth of life and become increasingly whole and alive. The work of consciousness is communal to the core.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
03/15/09, A Poetry Reading
Introduction
I had a poetry phase once, in which I wrote poems every day for a year. And then I quit because it seemed to me that I was a poem, and that everything I said or did was poetry, and I could no longer tell where the poem ended and I began. The more I listened to me, the more I found myself saying, “You’re talking poetically again! Cut it out!” But, I could only shrug and say back, “You cut it out—if you can!” Over time we gave into it and allowed ourselves to splash around uncensored in poetic shallows, occasionally getting in over our heads, sometimes swimming in the waves, or floating with the current, laughing.
Mama
She wouldn’t actually have to be Mama. Mama wasn’t Mama. Not the Mama I have in mind. Not the Mama who would take care of me the way I want to be taken care of. So, any reasonable facsimile would do. She could wear a wig, a badly fitting wig, and heavy make up, and have on a red dress cut down to here, and combat boots. Combat boots would be good. You wouldn’t want a Mama who wouldn’t go to war for you. And bangle bracelets, and a turquoise broach. And, she could lie. Who cares. “I’m your Mama.” I’d buy it. For a while. I get desperate sometimes. Don’t you?
Explanation
Lemme ’splane this to you. We are fragmented, splintered, disjointed and ache to be whole, centered, stabilized, safe and secure. We seek a grounding connection with the core of being. Something to help us make sense of things and find the way forward through all that is in our way. The deck appears, more often than not, to be stacked against us. Or, if you would prefer a different metaphor, the deck is always pitching and rolling. No one can stand upright, and we’re always in danger of being lost at sea. There are times when it is difficult to imagine that anything, or anyone (including ourselves), is on our side, has our best interest at heart, and stands ready to help us toward that which is good. During these times, we have to be glad it isn’t worse yet, and do what is ours to do amid circumstances that come and go according to forces that don’t even know our name.
On Our Own
We are on our own in this place, and make it as well as we do on the strength of our associations and friendships and the luck of the draw. Genghis Kahn, or the US Cavalry, is always just over the hill, and Hitler is waiting in the wings, and we deal with them like we deal with the rest of it, by getting out of the way and making the best of it to the extent that we are able. We think we have a leg up until the phone rings with the lab report, then the structure that held our world together collapses and we are left with making the best of it, to the extent that we are able.
Lab Report
We are never more than one lab report away from the complete loss of life as we have known it, the demolition of our world and all it’s shiny structures. Then what? The task is always the same: Do the best we can with what we have to work with, and do it with as much grace and compassion and good humor as we can muster. We do that by what we tell ourselves, by what we say, about the present experience of our lives. The task is always the same: we are to interpret experience in ways that do not deny experience but, at the same time, enable life. If we get that down, we have it made, as much as we can have it made. That’s as grounded as it gets.
Grounded
The bad news about being grounded is that the core itself is not grounded! The core is a heaving swirl of possibility, a rolling boil of potential. No wonder the deck is pitching and rolling! We are riding breaking waves of chaos, looking for solid ground! This doesn’t mean we are at the mercy of a mad, mad world. It means we have the responsibility of providing the stability and structure we seek for our lives. We are the organizing principle of existence. We shape our lives according to our reading of what needs to happen and what can happen within the context and circumstances of our living. We work out the details. We make the compromises. We produce the foundation, create the form, provide the meaning we long to have. We make life livable via the perspective we adopt riding the waves churned up by the vital, dynamic core of being.
Hermeneutics
We cannot look for steady—we provide steady! We are the source of steady! We are the basis of the constancy, the consistency we seek! We bring sanity to life in the world. We are the stabilizing influences in our lives. If we internalize the outer pandemonium, we become the bull—the wave—we are riding and go over into madness, disintegrating beyond reconstitution. The work of integration is the work of interpretation, translation—the work of hermeneutics (Hermes was the messenger of the gods. His work is our work. We bring the messages “of the gods,” of our life experience, to ourselves in a way that makes sense of the experience and enables life in the face of it. We interpret, translate, experience so as to make life possible in the midst of experience. The trick is to do that truthfully).
The Power of Meaning
We have the power of meaning, the power of making meaning, the power of perception, the power of looking meaningfully at our lives, the power of ascribing meaning to our lives, the power of finding meaning in our lives. We have to learn how to use our power to see, and hear, and understand in meaningful ways, in ways that enable us to live well in the time left for living.
The Power of Interpretation
Who says what the dream means? We do. Get it? Therein lies everything. We say what our experience of the dream means. We say what our experience of our life means. We say what life means. We hold the power of interpretation, of translation. We make sense of it all. And we know when we are right, and when we are wrong, when we are on the beam and when we are off.
Trusting the Internal Guide
What is this “beam-knowing”? This sense of rightness? What do we know and how do we know it? Enter the mystery. We are guided by our sense of the rightness of our movement, of our resonating with the direction we are taking, but where that comes from, we do not know. Trust it. Unknowing. That’s the task. And, if it leads you to a dead end, or into the abyss, trust it to lead you out of the abyss, beyond the dead end.
Spin Doctors
Our work is the work of finding meaning in experience, of making experience meaningful by way of interpretation. We spin experience to produce the steadiness we seek. We are the source of stability, the stabilizing influence, bringing life to life in our lives. And, of course, we can tell ourselves what we want to hear. Which is to avoid the work of interpretation and settle for denial and pretense. We have to interpret experience, not deny experience. That’s the challenge of integration, of integrating experience truthfully into our lives.
We Are What We Seek
We take this and make that. We are Alchemists, making gold out of lead, transforming common experience into the elixir of life. We are what we seek. We are the Philosopher’s Stone, the Universal Solvent, producing the aqua vitae, the water of life, from ordinary, hum-drum, events and from the crushing, devastating disruptions of life as we know it. We do that through the magic of interpretation and resonating with the rightness of the spin we give to experience.
The Rule of Life
The rule of life is follow the resonance. Go with what resonates with you. With what moves you. Follow the movement. Go with the flow. Not with the flow of life around you, but with the internal flow making contact with something, someone, in your environment. With the flow of energy connecting you with some aspect of the external world of normal, apparent, reality. And be open to the possibilities, aware of the choices that are yours to make.
Questions Worth Our While
We are after a sense of rightness about our lives. What has to be changed for us to feel right about the way we are living, about what we are thinking, feeling, believing, doing, wanting, having, being… ? Where is the incongruity most pronounced? Where do we feel most inauthentic, disingenuous? Where are we ignoring the voice of opposition within—the voice of what is opposed to our living the way we are living, to doing what we are doing, to the way we are being in the world? What price are we paying to deny how it is with us, to pretend that things are “just fine” with us, to embrace the false sense of rightness that characterizes our lives? Faking some things keeps us from making anything of ourselves, of our lives, of our one shot at being alive. What are we not seeing, not noticing, in order to feel good about our lives? What are we not willing to give up in order to feel right about our lives?
To Know Is to Be Afraid
People who wonder what they are to do with their lives know. We all know, on some level, and are afraid. We are afraid of what it might mean to us to know what we know, and we cannot conceive of paying the price of living the way we would have to live to feel right about our lives. So, we don’t let ourselves know what we know, and wail loudly saying, “Oh, if I only knew what to do with my life!”
Courage
It isn’t knowledge that we lack. It is courage. We lack the courage to live the way we have to live in order to feel right about our lives. We all know how we should be living, what we should be doing with our lives. We just can’t imagine doing that and paying the bills—the bills we want to pay—the bills for the things we don’t need to live the life we should be living, but want, and think we need. We try to hang onto the life we want to live, and that’s the problem. We would have to pay different bills to live the way we have to live in order to feel right about our lives, and that’s the problem.
The Table.
Facing the problem is the first step toward living the way we have to live in order to feel right about our lives. The journey consists of putting truth on the table. We have to put the truth on the table. All the truth. The truth in all of its contradictory, mutually exclusive, convoluted, contrary, discrepant, discordant, dissonant, cacophonic, glory. Including, be sure you don’t forget this part, the truth of ourselves. The truth of who we are, and also are.
True Human-Being-Hood
When we get it all on the table—every last bit of it—we have to step back from the table, walk around it, observe it, nod, and say, “Yes. That is so. And that is also so. And that is so as well. All of it is so. That, too. That, too.” And, let it be because it is. And, then we have to decide what we are going to do—what’s next, what’s the next step to take—based on our knowledge of the truth on the table. If you can do that, you have what it takes to be a True Human Being, but you won’t take much pleasure in that achievement, because you know the price of True Human Being-hood.
Living in Light of Truth
The work of the rest of our lives is learning to put the truth of ourselves, the truth of our lives, the truth of life, on the table and live in light of it. This is how it is. What are we going to do with it, about it? How shall we live in the knowledge of the truth that is on the table? To what extent are the lives we are living designed to help us avoid/deny the truth of our lives? To what extent are they designed to acknowledge and serve that truth? The challenge is to wake up and to bear the burden of being awake. To see and not look away. To breathe, knowing the truth. And to live (knowing the truth) in ways that bring life to life there, amid the truth of life as it is.
I had a poetry phase once, in which I wrote poems every day for a year. And then I quit because it seemed to me that I was a poem, and that everything I said or did was poetry, and I could no longer tell where the poem ended and I began. The more I listened to me, the more I found myself saying, “You’re talking poetically again! Cut it out!” But, I could only shrug and say back, “You cut it out—if you can!” Over time we gave into it and allowed ourselves to splash around uncensored in poetic shallows, occasionally getting in over our heads, sometimes swimming in the waves, or floating with the current, laughing.
Mama
She wouldn’t actually have to be Mama. Mama wasn’t Mama. Not the Mama I have in mind. Not the Mama who would take care of me the way I want to be taken care of. So, any reasonable facsimile would do. She could wear a wig, a badly fitting wig, and heavy make up, and have on a red dress cut down to here, and combat boots. Combat boots would be good. You wouldn’t want a Mama who wouldn’t go to war for you. And bangle bracelets, and a turquoise broach. And, she could lie. Who cares. “I’m your Mama.” I’d buy it. For a while. I get desperate sometimes. Don’t you?
Explanation
Lemme ’splane this to you. We are fragmented, splintered, disjointed and ache to be whole, centered, stabilized, safe and secure. We seek a grounding connection with the core of being. Something to help us make sense of things and find the way forward through all that is in our way. The deck appears, more often than not, to be stacked against us. Or, if you would prefer a different metaphor, the deck is always pitching and rolling. No one can stand upright, and we’re always in danger of being lost at sea. There are times when it is difficult to imagine that anything, or anyone (including ourselves), is on our side, has our best interest at heart, and stands ready to help us toward that which is good. During these times, we have to be glad it isn’t worse yet, and do what is ours to do amid circumstances that come and go according to forces that don’t even know our name.
On Our Own
We are on our own in this place, and make it as well as we do on the strength of our associations and friendships and the luck of the draw. Genghis Kahn, or the US Cavalry, is always just over the hill, and Hitler is waiting in the wings, and we deal with them like we deal with the rest of it, by getting out of the way and making the best of it to the extent that we are able. We think we have a leg up until the phone rings with the lab report, then the structure that held our world together collapses and we are left with making the best of it, to the extent that we are able.
Lab Report
We are never more than one lab report away from the complete loss of life as we have known it, the demolition of our world and all it’s shiny structures. Then what? The task is always the same: Do the best we can with what we have to work with, and do it with as much grace and compassion and good humor as we can muster. We do that by what we tell ourselves, by what we say, about the present experience of our lives. The task is always the same: we are to interpret experience in ways that do not deny experience but, at the same time, enable life. If we get that down, we have it made, as much as we can have it made. That’s as grounded as it gets.
Grounded
The bad news about being grounded is that the core itself is not grounded! The core is a heaving swirl of possibility, a rolling boil of potential. No wonder the deck is pitching and rolling! We are riding breaking waves of chaos, looking for solid ground! This doesn’t mean we are at the mercy of a mad, mad world. It means we have the responsibility of providing the stability and structure we seek for our lives. We are the organizing principle of existence. We shape our lives according to our reading of what needs to happen and what can happen within the context and circumstances of our living. We work out the details. We make the compromises. We produce the foundation, create the form, provide the meaning we long to have. We make life livable via the perspective we adopt riding the waves churned up by the vital, dynamic core of being.
Hermeneutics
We cannot look for steady—we provide steady! We are the source of steady! We are the basis of the constancy, the consistency we seek! We bring sanity to life in the world. We are the stabilizing influences in our lives. If we internalize the outer pandemonium, we become the bull—the wave—we are riding and go over into madness, disintegrating beyond reconstitution. The work of integration is the work of interpretation, translation—the work of hermeneutics (Hermes was the messenger of the gods. His work is our work. We bring the messages “of the gods,” of our life experience, to ourselves in a way that makes sense of the experience and enables life in the face of it. We interpret, translate, experience so as to make life possible in the midst of experience. The trick is to do that truthfully).
The Power of Meaning
We have the power of meaning, the power of making meaning, the power of perception, the power of looking meaningfully at our lives, the power of ascribing meaning to our lives, the power of finding meaning in our lives. We have to learn how to use our power to see, and hear, and understand in meaningful ways, in ways that enable us to live well in the time left for living.
The Power of Interpretation
Who says what the dream means? We do. Get it? Therein lies everything. We say what our experience of the dream means. We say what our experience of our life means. We say what life means. We hold the power of interpretation, of translation. We make sense of it all. And we know when we are right, and when we are wrong, when we are on the beam and when we are off.
Trusting the Internal Guide
What is this “beam-knowing”? This sense of rightness? What do we know and how do we know it? Enter the mystery. We are guided by our sense of the rightness of our movement, of our resonating with the direction we are taking, but where that comes from, we do not know. Trust it. Unknowing. That’s the task. And, if it leads you to a dead end, or into the abyss, trust it to lead you out of the abyss, beyond the dead end.
Spin Doctors
Our work is the work of finding meaning in experience, of making experience meaningful by way of interpretation. We spin experience to produce the steadiness we seek. We are the source of stability, the stabilizing influence, bringing life to life in our lives. And, of course, we can tell ourselves what we want to hear. Which is to avoid the work of interpretation and settle for denial and pretense. We have to interpret experience, not deny experience. That’s the challenge of integration, of integrating experience truthfully into our lives.
We Are What We Seek
We take this and make that. We are Alchemists, making gold out of lead, transforming common experience into the elixir of life. We are what we seek. We are the Philosopher’s Stone, the Universal Solvent, producing the aqua vitae, the water of life, from ordinary, hum-drum, events and from the crushing, devastating disruptions of life as we know it. We do that through the magic of interpretation and resonating with the rightness of the spin we give to experience.
The Rule of Life
The rule of life is follow the resonance. Go with what resonates with you. With what moves you. Follow the movement. Go with the flow. Not with the flow of life around you, but with the internal flow making contact with something, someone, in your environment. With the flow of energy connecting you with some aspect of the external world of normal, apparent, reality. And be open to the possibilities, aware of the choices that are yours to make.
Questions Worth Our While
We are after a sense of rightness about our lives. What has to be changed for us to feel right about the way we are living, about what we are thinking, feeling, believing, doing, wanting, having, being… ? Where is the incongruity most pronounced? Where do we feel most inauthentic, disingenuous? Where are we ignoring the voice of opposition within—the voice of what is opposed to our living the way we are living, to doing what we are doing, to the way we are being in the world? What price are we paying to deny how it is with us, to pretend that things are “just fine” with us, to embrace the false sense of rightness that characterizes our lives? Faking some things keeps us from making anything of ourselves, of our lives, of our one shot at being alive. What are we not seeing, not noticing, in order to feel good about our lives? What are we not willing to give up in order to feel right about our lives?
To Know Is to Be Afraid
People who wonder what they are to do with their lives know. We all know, on some level, and are afraid. We are afraid of what it might mean to us to know what we know, and we cannot conceive of paying the price of living the way we would have to live to feel right about our lives. So, we don’t let ourselves know what we know, and wail loudly saying, “Oh, if I only knew what to do with my life!”
Courage
It isn’t knowledge that we lack. It is courage. We lack the courage to live the way we have to live in order to feel right about our lives. We all know how we should be living, what we should be doing with our lives. We just can’t imagine doing that and paying the bills—the bills we want to pay—the bills for the things we don’t need to live the life we should be living, but want, and think we need. We try to hang onto the life we want to live, and that’s the problem. We would have to pay different bills to live the way we have to live in order to feel right about our lives, and that’s the problem.
The Table.
Facing the problem is the first step toward living the way we have to live in order to feel right about our lives. The journey consists of putting truth on the table. We have to put the truth on the table. All the truth. The truth in all of its contradictory, mutually exclusive, convoluted, contrary, discrepant, discordant, dissonant, cacophonic, glory. Including, be sure you don’t forget this part, the truth of ourselves. The truth of who we are, and also are.
True Human-Being-Hood
When we get it all on the table—every last bit of it—we have to step back from the table, walk around it, observe it, nod, and say, “Yes. That is so. And that is also so. And that is so as well. All of it is so. That, too. That, too.” And, let it be because it is. And, then we have to decide what we are going to do—what’s next, what’s the next step to take—based on our knowledge of the truth on the table. If you can do that, you have what it takes to be a True Human Being, but you won’t take much pleasure in that achievement, because you know the price of True Human Being-hood.
Living in Light of Truth
The work of the rest of our lives is learning to put the truth of ourselves, the truth of our lives, the truth of life, on the table and live in light of it. This is how it is. What are we going to do with it, about it? How shall we live in the knowledge of the truth that is on the table? To what extent are the lives we are living designed to help us avoid/deny the truth of our lives? To what extent are they designed to acknowledge and serve that truth? The challenge is to wake up and to bear the burden of being awake. To see and not look away. To breathe, knowing the truth. And to live (knowing the truth) in ways that bring life to life there, amid the truth of life as it is.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
03/08/09, Optimizing Our Lives
We are here to optimize our lives. Primarily, this means learning to trust ourselves, our own sense of what is right and what needs to be. It also means learning to nourish our souls and express the truth of our deeper Self (that which is deepest, truest, and best about us). It means learning to see, and hear, and understand—to know what is truly important and do it.
There are two tables. On one table we are asked to put our ideas about the way things are, the way we think things are. On the other table, we are asked to put the way things are. Then, we are asked to live in light of the truth of both tables. That is all there is to it.
Our perception of truth keeps us from perceiving the truth. We come into the room (any room, every room) with ideas about how things are, about the structure of reality, about what is in control of our lives and how we can manipulate the controlling forces by giving them what they want. If we figure out the hoops to jump through in the proper sequence in the right frame of mind (we have to be true believers, you know), then the gods, or God, or the stars, or the Universe, will smile upon us and life will be, finally, grand.
We think it’s all about our arranging grand lives. Life is pretty stinky. And, if it is not stinky yet for us, it is stinky for a lot of people and we want to guard against the stink settling in on us. We want to avoid the bad and amass the good, and so the search for the right hoops to jump through, and the right steps to take in the right se-quence, and the right recipe to follow to the life of our dreams, and if not quite our dreams, at least close enough.
So, we come into this room, into every room, with ideas. Motives. Agendas. Interests. We come into the room with something in mind. You know what you want to hear. You know what I’m supposed to say. And that limits what can go on here. There should be a sign for us to check our baggage at the door. Wouldn’t that be nice? Com-ing in here with no baggage. Completely open. Free to ask any question. Free to examine all of our ideas, motives, agendas, and interests. Free to put everything we think about reality on the table, and take everything off the table, and bring back to the table only those things that are truly helpful in growing up, waking up, seeing, hearing, and understanding, as those who are increasingly awake, aware, and alive. Wouldn’t that be something?
Where do we get the idea that our personal comfort is the idea, or that we know what to want? What is there really beyond living knowingly with compassion? Beyond doing unto others as we would have them do unto us? Beyond bearing the cross of realization, awareness? Beyond living in the searing tension between how things are and how things ought to be and working endlessly there to make things more like they ought to be than they are for all people, for everyone, even the least of our brothers and sisters around the world? And, what do we need for that work beyond clarity and courage? Yet, we look for what? Not for clarity and courage, but for assistance from the gods, or God, or the stars, or the Universe in avoiding the bad and amassing the good for ourselves and those we love alone, and if there is any extra good left over that we don’t need, perhaps it will trickle down to the poor masses who have failed to please the powers. We have a long way to go. And it begins with putting what we think about how things are on the table.
We have to step back from our seeing in order to see. But, isn’t that the trick, though? Seeing how we see things is the first thing to see. When we see, we see that the way we see things is just the way we see things, and it has no necessary connection with the way things are. What are the statements we call truth? The things we believe to be valid? We have to put them on the table, and step back from the table, and consider the table and the things on the table. And the things on the other table.
We have to square ourselves with who we are and who we also are, and how it is with us. What are all the things that are true about us and our lives? These are the facts of life. Put them on the other table. The work of wholeness is the work of recognizing the truth of who we are and who we also are, and how it is with us (the truth of all the things that are true about us), and living in the light of that truth as we make our choices in the time left for living.
It is difficult to face the truth of ourselves and it is difficult to bring forth the truth of ourselves within the truth of our lives. It doesn’t get easy. If you are looking for easy, don’t wake up! Dying is easy. Living is hard. The disparity, discrepancy, between how things are and how things ought to be will take your breath away, and not give it back. We cannot breathe knowing the truth. The first task is breathing, knowing the truth.
What nurtures, nourishes our soul? Expresses, exhibits our Self? We have to do more of those things. We have to live to nourish our soul and express our Self. And the two are likely to be one. We have to be true to our-selves within the context and circumstances, terms and conditions, of our lives. That’s where we run into trouble. We have competing, contradictory, mutually exclusive truths at work here. We are torn within with conflicting mo-tives and agendas, and we are faced with the impossibility of living in the world, on the world’s terms, in light of the best we find within.
We also have to bear the contradiction between what we experience as true and what we have been told is true. We have to bear the weight of our experience without the comforting buffer of what we have been told is true. Reality is a hard pill to swallow. The Way is about consciously bearing the tension between who we are, and who we also are, and what is required by, and allowed in, the context and circumstances of our lives. We have to walk slowly along that way, knowingly, with compassion, every step along the way. It is amazing how difficult this is. Dying is easy. Living is hard.
There is a price to be paid for waking up. It’s the price of a new pair of shoes. Jim Hollis is always quoting Carl Jung’s statement, “We walk in shoes that are too small.” By that he means that we live lives that are too small. He means that as people we are too small. We are small people who need to become large. Who need to grow up. We grow up by waking up. We wake up by seeing, hearing, and understanding how things are with us. We wake up by living consciously, by being conscious, being aware, of the life we are living, and of the lives we are not living. We wake up by being attentive to, paying attention to, and aligning ourselves with what Jim Hollis calls “the soul’s summons.” But to live like this is the most subversive life imaginable. This is a problem.
The problem is that the life our soul would have us live is not the life the culture, and our parents, and our peers, and anyone who matters in our life, including us, would have us live. From the beginning it has been this way. In the old story about the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve ignored the life their soul had in mind in favor of that which “was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise (but not really)” (Gen. 3:6). And, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus exemplifies the struggle of those who follow their soul’s leanings when he prays, “Not my will, but thine, be done!” (Mark 14:36).
This is the price we pay in waking up, in living between the life soul would have us live and the life we wish we could live—the life the culture wishes for us to live—and choosing to go with soul more often than not. Our task is to nourish soul, to express the Self’s true desires, within the terms and conditions of our lives.
Waking up means waking up to the need to be responsible for our own lives. It means being uncomfortable, and disturbed, and squaring up to the way things are (and the way things also are), and finding our way, over, un-der, around and through the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our living to the deep truth of our-selves, in order to relish and express the wonder of who we are, and be alive in the time left for living.
“The facts” resist us, oppose us, enlarge us, deepen us, expand us, and grow us up as they challenge us to be who we are within “the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our lives.” We are bigger, better, people for having lived our lives with an eye on “the facts” and an eye out for our own hearts (which is one of the facts) serving the interests of our souls (still more facts) within the limitations and restrictions of space and time.
We have to adjust ourselves to the realities of our lives. That’s the work of maturity, of consciousness, and grace. The world is not how we would have it. Life is not lived on our terms. We have to square ourselves with “the facts,” all of them, internal and external, and live in and around them, finding ways to express the contrary truths of our core values within “the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our lives.” To be awake and alive we have to consciously bear the pain of living, and live as fully as we are able within “the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our lives.” That’s all there is to it. No diversion, no distraction, no denial. Life in the raw. Life on life’s terms. Without capitulation or surrender. We live with the facts of life in ways that are true to our own hearts, souls, selves. And our lives are works of art.
The work that is art is squaring ourselves with the facts governing our lives and living to bring the good to life, anyway, nevertheless, even so. It is to blow on the coals of love, joy, peace, etc. and ignite a roaring blaze of ex-ceptional worth and unaccountable value in the time left for living. Our task is to know exactly what the deal is and live as though we don’t know, or knowing, don’t care. Our task is to be an enigma, to not make sense, to be an anomaly, to stand as a stark contradiction to all that we cannot deny. To explode in a mighty burst of goodness, and generosity, and mercy, and grace. To let no opportunity to express compassion and exhibit kindness pass unseen or unseized. To live as life should be lived. Without worrying about the outcome, or thinking things are invalid if they don’t last. Fireworks don’t last. No one ever boos and hisses at fireworks. Live like fireworks. Make them oou and ahh at your passing. And, don’t forget to wink on your way out, as though you know something.
There are two tables. On one table we are asked to put our ideas about the way things are, the way we think things are. On the other table, we are asked to put the way things are. Then, we are asked to live in light of the truth of both tables. That is all there is to it.
Our perception of truth keeps us from perceiving the truth. We come into the room (any room, every room) with ideas about how things are, about the structure of reality, about what is in control of our lives and how we can manipulate the controlling forces by giving them what they want. If we figure out the hoops to jump through in the proper sequence in the right frame of mind (we have to be true believers, you know), then the gods, or God, or the stars, or the Universe, will smile upon us and life will be, finally, grand.
We think it’s all about our arranging grand lives. Life is pretty stinky. And, if it is not stinky yet for us, it is stinky for a lot of people and we want to guard against the stink settling in on us. We want to avoid the bad and amass the good, and so the search for the right hoops to jump through, and the right steps to take in the right se-quence, and the right recipe to follow to the life of our dreams, and if not quite our dreams, at least close enough.
So, we come into this room, into every room, with ideas. Motives. Agendas. Interests. We come into the room with something in mind. You know what you want to hear. You know what I’m supposed to say. And that limits what can go on here. There should be a sign for us to check our baggage at the door. Wouldn’t that be nice? Com-ing in here with no baggage. Completely open. Free to ask any question. Free to examine all of our ideas, motives, agendas, and interests. Free to put everything we think about reality on the table, and take everything off the table, and bring back to the table only those things that are truly helpful in growing up, waking up, seeing, hearing, and understanding, as those who are increasingly awake, aware, and alive. Wouldn’t that be something?
Where do we get the idea that our personal comfort is the idea, or that we know what to want? What is there really beyond living knowingly with compassion? Beyond doing unto others as we would have them do unto us? Beyond bearing the cross of realization, awareness? Beyond living in the searing tension between how things are and how things ought to be and working endlessly there to make things more like they ought to be than they are for all people, for everyone, even the least of our brothers and sisters around the world? And, what do we need for that work beyond clarity and courage? Yet, we look for what? Not for clarity and courage, but for assistance from the gods, or God, or the stars, or the Universe in avoiding the bad and amassing the good for ourselves and those we love alone, and if there is any extra good left over that we don’t need, perhaps it will trickle down to the poor masses who have failed to please the powers. We have a long way to go. And it begins with putting what we think about how things are on the table.
We have to step back from our seeing in order to see. But, isn’t that the trick, though? Seeing how we see things is the first thing to see. When we see, we see that the way we see things is just the way we see things, and it has no necessary connection with the way things are. What are the statements we call truth? The things we believe to be valid? We have to put them on the table, and step back from the table, and consider the table and the things on the table. And the things on the other table.
We have to square ourselves with who we are and who we also are, and how it is with us. What are all the things that are true about us and our lives? These are the facts of life. Put them on the other table. The work of wholeness is the work of recognizing the truth of who we are and who we also are, and how it is with us (the truth of all the things that are true about us), and living in the light of that truth as we make our choices in the time left for living.
It is difficult to face the truth of ourselves and it is difficult to bring forth the truth of ourselves within the truth of our lives. It doesn’t get easy. If you are looking for easy, don’t wake up! Dying is easy. Living is hard. The disparity, discrepancy, between how things are and how things ought to be will take your breath away, and not give it back. We cannot breathe knowing the truth. The first task is breathing, knowing the truth.
What nurtures, nourishes our soul? Expresses, exhibits our Self? We have to do more of those things. We have to live to nourish our soul and express our Self. And the two are likely to be one. We have to be true to our-selves within the context and circumstances, terms and conditions, of our lives. That’s where we run into trouble. We have competing, contradictory, mutually exclusive truths at work here. We are torn within with conflicting mo-tives and agendas, and we are faced with the impossibility of living in the world, on the world’s terms, in light of the best we find within.
We also have to bear the contradiction between what we experience as true and what we have been told is true. We have to bear the weight of our experience without the comforting buffer of what we have been told is true. Reality is a hard pill to swallow. The Way is about consciously bearing the tension between who we are, and who we also are, and what is required by, and allowed in, the context and circumstances of our lives. We have to walk slowly along that way, knowingly, with compassion, every step along the way. It is amazing how difficult this is. Dying is easy. Living is hard.
There is a price to be paid for waking up. It’s the price of a new pair of shoes. Jim Hollis is always quoting Carl Jung’s statement, “We walk in shoes that are too small.” By that he means that we live lives that are too small. He means that as people we are too small. We are small people who need to become large. Who need to grow up. We grow up by waking up. We wake up by seeing, hearing, and understanding how things are with us. We wake up by living consciously, by being conscious, being aware, of the life we are living, and of the lives we are not living. We wake up by being attentive to, paying attention to, and aligning ourselves with what Jim Hollis calls “the soul’s summons.” But to live like this is the most subversive life imaginable. This is a problem.
The problem is that the life our soul would have us live is not the life the culture, and our parents, and our peers, and anyone who matters in our life, including us, would have us live. From the beginning it has been this way. In the old story about the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve ignored the life their soul had in mind in favor of that which “was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise (but not really)” (Gen. 3:6). And, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus exemplifies the struggle of those who follow their soul’s leanings when he prays, “Not my will, but thine, be done!” (Mark 14:36).
This is the price we pay in waking up, in living between the life soul would have us live and the life we wish we could live—the life the culture wishes for us to live—and choosing to go with soul more often than not. Our task is to nourish soul, to express the Self’s true desires, within the terms and conditions of our lives.
Waking up means waking up to the need to be responsible for our own lives. It means being uncomfortable, and disturbed, and squaring up to the way things are (and the way things also are), and finding our way, over, un-der, around and through the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our living to the deep truth of our-selves, in order to relish and express the wonder of who we are, and be alive in the time left for living.
“The facts” resist us, oppose us, enlarge us, deepen us, expand us, and grow us up as they challenge us to be who we are within “the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our lives.” We are bigger, better, people for having lived our lives with an eye on “the facts” and an eye out for our own hearts (which is one of the facts) serving the interests of our souls (still more facts) within the limitations and restrictions of space and time.
We have to adjust ourselves to the realities of our lives. That’s the work of maturity, of consciousness, and grace. The world is not how we would have it. Life is not lived on our terms. We have to square ourselves with “the facts,” all of them, internal and external, and live in and around them, finding ways to express the contrary truths of our core values within “the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our lives.” To be awake and alive we have to consciously bear the pain of living, and live as fully as we are able within “the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our lives.” That’s all there is to it. No diversion, no distraction, no denial. Life in the raw. Life on life’s terms. Without capitulation or surrender. We live with the facts of life in ways that are true to our own hearts, souls, selves. And our lives are works of art.
The work that is art is squaring ourselves with the facts governing our lives and living to bring the good to life, anyway, nevertheless, even so. It is to blow on the coals of love, joy, peace, etc. and ignite a roaring blaze of ex-ceptional worth and unaccountable value in the time left for living. Our task is to know exactly what the deal is and live as though we don’t know, or knowing, don’t care. Our task is to be an enigma, to not make sense, to be an anomaly, to stand as a stark contradiction to all that we cannot deny. To explode in a mighty burst of goodness, and generosity, and mercy, and grace. To let no opportunity to express compassion and exhibit kindness pass unseen or unseized. To live as life should be lived. Without worrying about the outcome, or thinking things are invalid if they don’t last. Fireworks don’t last. No one ever boos and hisses at fireworks. Live like fireworks. Make them oou and ahh at your passing. And, don’t forget to wink on your way out, as though you know something.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)