Percolate

“Judaism conceives of the universe as a vastly integrated system… The Torah insists that all the mechanisms of daily life are the hinges of holiness. So there is a vast system of sanctification of food, concerned with what is kosher and what is not. The Torah is also very concerned with the sanctification of time… Judaism has it worked out to a dance. And thirdly, it is concerned with the holiness of various kinds of actions and functions and objects of daily life. The whole purpose behind it is that a person must deal with the world as it is, and out of that can be distilled a true religiosity. Among the common people, it will produce an extremely high level of ethical sensitivity. For this, in Yiddish — Ehrlich-Keit — a high level integrity. That means a kind of purity…

Judaism is very concerned with the natural realities of life, like crying children, and the pulse of family life. It insists on family life… The Torah as a system compels one to do the exercises and guarantees the results. Guarantees it. And the result truly authenticates its nature as a religion; it produces a truly religious awareness that doesn’t force one out of the context of reality. 

Kabbala is the esoteric side, while Torah, is the exoteric… Judaism, is an Oriental tradition — not from the Far East, but Oriental… The Hebraic mind understood truth as essentially the face of God that is truly One presence in all knowledge and meaning — which we may have come to see in a fragmented form. We should not lose sight of the fact that this is only a spark in a bigger fire. We release the sparks of holiness. Meaning that holiness is inevitably hidden, in the kabbalistic frame of things, under the appearance of non-holiness… There is an abundance of texts in kabbala but they are really discussing something that can only be known in a direct, existential mode. It is only knowable in an inspirited, intuitive mode. The other things can stoke the engine, or turn up the gas, but they can’t light the fire. The fire can only be lit by the intuitive spark. All the rest is to bring the rational mind into gear and to disperse the process throughout the corridors of the being.

It uses practices that are deeply meditative in character. It has a vast array of meditative practices that are the equal of practices in the Far East. They are of all different sorts, different hues and colors, and there are a vast array of different steps in the process… True entry has to come gradually but with genuine commitment to the path of the Torah… A true teacher is necessary for the whole process — one who can contain and reflect the material and who is solidly and soberly linked to the tradition he represents…

The number of illuminated ones in any tradition — the people who really know what it’s all about — is a very minute minority… You cannot divorce kabbala from normative Jewish practice… To depart from the norms of the tradition is to do violence to its fabric. It is a bit of an arrogance. I don’t say that of the people, but of the intrinsic posture of a culture that empowers people to sit in relatively uninformed judgment on any great, venerable spiritual system… Now to cut away part of it, like Shabbos [the Sabbath], is simply the influence of contemporary America, which is afraid of commitment and discipline, and has justified that as an alternative position in a tradition that is obviously rich, profound, and has been created by many generations… If you’ve ever spent Shabbos in a religious atmosphere, then you’ve seen that Shabbos doesn’t have at all the restrictive character that people would suppose it does when they hear that you can’t do this and you can’t do that. You really don’t notice what you can’t do… The colors of the tapestry are much more important than the pegs holding the threads of it.

Judaism creates this space. It understands space and time as the sacraments of God in the universe. Now, what happens when a person enters Shabbos? Everything stops in terms of the feeling that I can hide from who I am or who God is becoming in me. And the next thing is that I am released. I am released from the necessity to do anything, and I’m therefore released from anxiety, because I know the character of the next 25 hours. It is simply whatever is. There’s no compulsion to do this or that; everything just is. This is the essential posture of a meditative stance. Judaism always wishes to understand that a meditative practice can never leave behind the physical component… The body must also be trained in the path of spirituality to contribute whatever it has to the process of meditation or contemplation. And that’s magnified many times over in the Shabbos, which is repeated week after week… For the common people that is a basic transformation of consciousness — at a level they are able to digest.

One gradually comes to see that there is a richer texture to events that otherwise would seem ordinary. And once that is seen, the next step is wondering what is giving them this greater depth. What is it but the presence of something supernal within? Then it is the question of growing with and nurturing that basic insight in moments of stress, using it even in times where it would suit the shortness of spirit to avoid it. That is hard work, but the supportive structure of the lifestyle does that for you. It doesn’t release you from responsibility, but it provides the oars for the boat by insisting on the sanctity of everything. Sanctity not because the thing possesses anything outside of itself, but because it is what it is. Since it doesn’t possess anything outside of itself, it can’t frustrate you; it can’t tantalize you with a vision of things being other than they are and then let you down when you see that’s not so. It insists that what is, is, but is deeper than it looks. You must invest the effort to seek that further, and when you do that, it in turn will support you. The frame of that is the lifestyle — the rhythm of prayer and observance and holiday. All of which are saying, “This is not just one more ordinary time after another. This is this moment and this particular enrichment, which even if you do it in a non-enriching way, still affects you.”

Gradually, as the spiritual process unfolds, a totally new dimension of being and awareness emerges. The truth is that this is a new metaphysical perspective: the prior state of the being was one in which the self formed the lens of perception. The self was perceived to be the subtle focus of reality and meaning. Now the being has been transformed by turning outward toward the cosmos and the divine presence. It cannot be adequately emphasized that this is not a romantic vision, but the description of a precise metaphysical process of transition.

I was born to Jewish parents, but I came to it myself… I knew Rabbi Schlomo Carlebach well, at a formative time, and Rabbi Zalman Schacter also. I don’t want to say that the formative time is over, but my position differs from that of some of my companions and teachers in that they have taken liberties with the ritual and orthodox belief structures. My own path is clearly aligned with a very traditional position. This is because I feel the Torah is oracular in nature. The path that I have chosen and teach my students seeks to restore the traditional patterns of belief and practice to the levels of their full and pristine integrity. This infers clearly, then, the problem with traditional orthopractic structures; they have maintained the forms but have fallen short of being able to sustain the deep inner spiritual content.

Nevertheless, the apparently secondary vessels of a secondary societal nature which characterize traditional Jewish lifestyles shouldn’t be dismissed; they have successfully translated the profound values of the spiritual inner core to the group as a whole. And they have passed the tests of cultural endurance, sustaining profundity of vision and context over centuries of remarkable adversity and difficulty.

I have many weaknesses of many kinds, but I have one strength — a very strong spiritual focus that is central, and it seems to always percolate…

The Ari, a very great kabbalistic master of the sixteenth century, taught that in the proverbial beginning, there was something like a tremendous explosion of Godness that at once created the universe and filled it; it sort of created it one moment before it filled it. Now, looked at one way this was a disintegration — as the language of the text says, “a descent of sparks of holiness into the outer darkness.” Looked at another way it was the expansion of holiness to enlighten the darkness. The difference between these two ways of looking at this is that one way it’s as if you are in the mind of the darkness; what you see is that the light is being fragmented. Now if you think it out calmly, and are patient with what’s going on, then you see that it’s not necessarily that the light is being fragmented; it is that the light is spreading, in order to redeem and reintegrate the darkness.

Now again we have to keep in mind the vast difference in cultures. The Ari was not really erecting some kind of quasi-scientific explanation of things, but it is perhaps the closest we can come to describing it. This was his grasp of a vastly intuitive mythos — a mythos that is a truth in cosmology, in sociology, in philosophy, in psychology. It was an attempt to locate the centrifugal process of meaning. In this way the Ari understood one of the mysteries of the presence of the Jews in the world as the presence of meaning in the universe. In one sense they have been scattered and dispersed and exiled; that’s the plain history of the thing. In the other sense, it’s only from the perspective of history that it is a tragedy; from a more ultimate transcendent perspective it is a redemption. What appears to be moving away is in fact gaining momentum in order to return.

Jews are a people of light — not by what they know, but what they are… Jews are a very spiritually conscious people… At the time of the Second World War, Judaism in Europe, just at the point when it might have produced an Aquarian Age of Judaism, was obliterated. So who was left on the scene? There were no Jews practically except in America… The generation that came after that wanted the deep things, but it did not possess the depths to search out its own storehouses. That I think is the practical answer…

Everything in nature is chosen… Everything is chosen to its purpose… Judaism says the same — Judaism is for the Jews. It’s not for anybody else. Not that we would throw people out, but we’re not coercing anybody to come in. Judaism is emphatic in saying that all men have a path to God. It will affirm and protect the right of others to go to God in their way. It doesn’t discount the other venerable traditions of mankind; it respects them. Judaism affirms that the Torah is the clearest focus on God… Judaism is adamant, almost fanatical, in its insistence on monotheism… The Torah is, however, adamant in its condemnation of idolatry because it senses that the idol is a projection of the “self” of man — sometimes a very dark or questionable aspect of his nature — and thus is a perversion of the religious process completely…

All the practices in Judaism are designed to take the person out of the arena of self-concern, into another arena. If not carefully understood this could also seem a platitude. It doesn’t simply mean that I shouldn’t be concerned with the self. The Torah understands that the implicit, unconscious illusion under which man operates is that he is the measure of the universe. It is an illusion on the existential, philosophical, metaphysical levels. I feel that I am the universe and therefore everything goes inward. I walk around my whole life thinking that’s how things are — “me” cars to drive, “me” food to eat, “me” things to do. The system comes and forces everything outward, which means that the unity that Judaism is looking for is the point at which, without losing this brain, a corridor of correspondence is opened between this brain — the individual identity — and the transcendent identity. But it isn’t that I become annihilated and flow into the great river; it’s that I am maintained in a scale model relationship to the transcendent. I stay here, but I grow outward. I stay here, but I use my here only to be positioned onto there. So I become that without ceasing to be this, and that becomes this without ceasing to be that. This sets up a perpetual interflow; both are the same and yet they are not…

Today, the only “Thou shalt not” is “Thou shalt not say no.” Everything is good, everything is cool, everything is wonderful, everything is fine — except don’t hurt the other guy, and even that sometimes. Why is it good? Because I want to do it, and my primary task is the fulfillment of my individuality. What that means is that we gear everything to the fulfillment of the individual self, and therefore we interpret and align all experience and all the inner workings of reality toward that unspoken end.

Following that, the danger would be that I would conceive of my spiritual practice as a means of achieving fulfillment. It sounds wonderful and just as it should he, but the truth is that it’s a tremendously false position. I would go around arranging my spirituality so that I get a charge from it all the time, so that I know that I’m being “fulfilled…” The deep essential truth of spirituality is present in the folds of other levels of reality — the cognitive and functional modes — which don’t seem at all as glamorous…

It’s to align me with God. That mode that I induce for myself, which could be made to sound very good, matches the kabbala’s essential understanding of evil, which is illusion. Illusion is the root of evil. The world is illusion, but it is, so to speak, a necessary illusion. It’s true, but it is ultimately not true. It is a functional necessity… Let’s say — God forbid — that someone kills someone else. In the moment that they pull the trigger, they have to be saying that this is good. In their twisted mind they are saying it is good that this person should be dead, and it’s such a good that I’ll do it. Now that is a very vast illusion…

Notice that the crossing point there is between what is good and what gives me pleasure; that’s the hitch in the train. When we want our mind-frame to be the universal mind-frame, we prevent ourselves from being at rest in who we are by nature, from seeing that we have to open to alignment. To avoid that we people our illusion with all kinds of things that will convince us that we are everything. It’s easy to extend yourself and say that the world should run according to what you say, but to return to the truth of one’s being in which one is at rest and therefore aligned is more difficult…”

~ Reb Dovid Din came to Judaism late in life. At first, he had been a student of R. Shlomo Carlebach, living for a while in the House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco. Afterward, he studied at Rabbi Shlomo Freifeld’s yeshiva Sh’or Yoshuv in Far Rockaway. He was also a student and friend of Rabbi Zalman Schachter, though he differed with Reb Zalman regarding Orthodox practice and commitment. After leaving Sh’or Yoshuv, he moved to Boro Park and gathered a small cadre of talmidim around him. There are almost no essays of his that remain. There were, at one point, hundreds or recorded lectures. (A number of his students are attempting to track down any remaining tapes and digitalize them. If anyone has tapes of R. Dovid, they should please be in touch Reb Shore.)

Gates of Wisdom

"Behold that before the emanations were emanated and the creatures were created,
The Upper Simple Light had filled the whole existence.
And there was no vacancy, such as an empty air, a hollow,
But all was filled with that Simple, Boundless Light.
And there was no such part as head, or end,
But everything was One, Simple Light, balanced evenly and equally,
And it was called “the Light of Ein Sof (Infinity).”
And when upon His simple will, came the desire to create the worlds and emanate the emanations,
To bring to light the perfection of His deeds, His names, His appellations,
Which was the cause of the creation of the worlds,
Then the Ein Sof restricted Himself, in His middle point, precisely at the center,
And He restricted that Light, and drew far off to the sides around that middle point.
And there remained an empty space, an empty air, a vacuum
Precisely from the middle point.
And that restriction was equally around that empty, middle point,
So that the space was evenly circled around it.
And after the restriction, when the vacant space remained empty
Precisely in the middle of the Light of Ein Sof,
A place was formed, where the Emanations, Creations, Formations, and Actions might reside.
Then from the Light of Ein Sof, a single line hung down from Above, lowered into that space.
And through that line, He emanated, created, formed, and made all the worlds.
Prior to these four worlds, there was one Light of Ein Sof, whose Name is One, in wondrous, hidden unity,
And even in the angels closest to Him
There is no force and no attainment in The Ein Sof,
As there is no mind of a created that could attain Him,
For He has no place, no boundary, no name."

~ Ari, The Tree of Life
Rabbi Isaac Luria -- Yitzchak (1534-1572) who was known as the "Ari', an acronym for Adoneinu Rabbeinu Issac [our master, our rabbi, Issac], was the greatest Kabbalist in 16th century Zephath (Safed), a city in northern Israel famed for its Kabbalist population. He was also one of the most influential individuals in the history and evolution of the wisdom of Kabbalah.

Kabbalists kept the wisdom of Kabbalah hidden for 1,500 years prior to the Ari. Kabbalists were reluctant to publicize their work because they feared it would be misinterpreted. "The generation," they said, "is not yet ready."

Humanity had been waiting for many centuries for the right guide to open the gates of the wisdom of Kabbalah to the public. Finally, with the arrival of the Ari in Zephath and the public's subsequent exposure to The Book of Zohar, it appeared that it was now time to introduce the secrets of Kabbalah to the masses.

Isaac Luria refused to commit his seminal teachings to written form. When his disciples pleaded him to do so, he replied: "It is impossible because all things are interrelated. I can hardly open my mouth to speak without feeling as though the sea burst its dams and overflowed. How than shall I express what my soul had received, and how can I put it down in a book?''

"There are not enough words to measure his holy work in our favor. The doors of attainment were locked and bolted, and he came and opened them for us. Thus, all who wish to enter the King's palace need only purity and sanctity, and to go and bathe and shave their hair and wear clean clothes, to properly stand before the sublime Kingship..."

- Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam), "Introduction to the Book, Panim Meirot uMasbirot,"

~ The Ashkenazi Ari Synagogue was built in the sixteenth century on the northern fringes of the Sephardic neighborhood in the Old City of Safed. It is named after Rabbi Issac (Yitzchak) Luria. He died at age 38, three years after he arrived in Safed.

Benedicta

“I wasn’t there during her last moment. Nobody was. The nursing home said she died at 1:45 PM, which is when the nursing-home attendants — underpaid women in practical shoes, with pictures of toddlers in their pockets — had gone about their routine bed checks, entered her room, and found she was no longer breathing. They called the family. We called the funeral home, who said they’d send someone over to collect the body. I went to be with her until the funeral-home workers showed up. I sat in a chair next to her bed and stroked her hair, which had always been expansive and gauzy. Until a few months earlier, the in-house beautician had regularly fluffed and poufed it, then misted it with hair spray, so it had resembled a dandelion puff ball before a gust of wind. But now it was straight, thin, and pretty. I liked it this way.

I waited in the room with its dark TV, flowers in a plain vase, and unplugged radio. In the corner a simple pressboard wardrobe contained clothes she’d never again wear, pastel knits from the Presidents’ Day sale at JCPenney. Through venetian blinds I saw the concrete courtyard two stories down, its empty lounge chairs and fountain, one spout of water shooting lazily from its center. It was too much to bear — the silence, the sterile room, my grandmother dead in her bed with the inflatable mattress designed to prevent bedsores. I decided to take a walk down the hall. She would have wanted me to take a walk, I thought.

As I approached the nurses’ station, I nodded to the women working there, then turned the corner and discovered a row of geriatric men and women in wheelchairs. They were lined up in the direction of the nurses’ station, each facing the back of another’s head, like a halted parade. There was low chatter from the nurses; otherwise no one spoke. I was walking by this row of silent elderly people toward the lounge at the end of the hall, thinking about how much longer I’d have to stay here and how I’d never have to come back again, when I felt a hand on my wrist.

The woman looking up at me from her wheelchair had pale, translucent skin, a delicate chin, and fine cheekbones. You could tell she’d been pretty when she was younger. “Hello,” she said, gripping my wrist. Her expression didn’t belong here; it belonged to a woman at a card game in a sunroom among friends, a tall drink set before her, a winning hand. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but do you know where I am?” She spoke the way a well-heeled person asks for the time, with no urgency. I said, “This is St. Joseph’s Home.” “A nursing home? Am I in a nursing home?” “Yes,” I said. “Say it again, please? The name of this place?” I said it. “A nursing home, correct?” “Correct.”

She nodded again and smiled, revealing excellent dentures, a golden fuzz over her lip. Her genteel air persisted, even as her questions became more pointed. Only her grip on my arm communicated anything like anxiety. “And where is this place, may I ask?” I told her the name of the town. The state. “I see. Yes. And the date? Do you know the date?” I told her the day of the week, the month, and the year. She gasped. “Really?” A flash of distress in her eyes made me wonder why I’d said it. “Oh, my! Are you sure?” She pressed a hand to her mouth. Then, her words slow, faintly giddy, astonished: “Why, I must be an old woman now!” I said I supposed she was. “Oh,” she murmured. “I must be old.”

It was like a scene from a Disney movie unfolding before my eyes: the sweet young heroine transformed to crone, waking in a shriveled body, astonished by her whiskered lip and rheumy gaze in the mirror. Where are those beautiful breasts? Where have the apple cheeks gone? The woman was probably ninety. She said softly, “I’m old,” but did not seem to fully believe it. Finally she said, “Just one more thing, sweetheart, since you’ve been so kind. Would you mind telling me where I am?” She was living in a sixty-second loop that kept erasing itself. I replied, “St. Joseph’s Home,” and felt the urge to reassure her, so I added, “It’s a particularly nice nursing home.” “Is it?” “Oh, yes.” This was not a lie. Row of wheelchairs notwithstanding, it was a well-kept facility, and the staff had taken good care of my grandmother. “And where is this nursing home?” Again I told her. “And today’s date?” Again the startled, wondrous response.

We repeated this sequence once more. Her tone was patient, and I tried to match it. Four, five times. It was oddly soothing, this pattern. I remember thinking I could do this all day. “And my name,” she said finally. “Do you know my name?” I said I didn’t. “I can’t remember it.” She shook her head, the mildest sadness passing over her face. “Are you sure you don’t know my name?” I told her I didn’t, then offered to find out. Glad to have a chore, I unwrapped her fingers from my wrist.

At the nurses’ station I found an aide busily writing reports. I pointed to the woman, last in the line, and explained that she was having trouble remembering her name. The aide squinted down the hall. “Her? Oh, that sweet lady be Jean,” she answered in a Caribbean accent. “Jean Peterson.” “Jean?” “Jean,” the nurse confirmed. I returned to Jean, who smiled at me. Reporting her name was a small favor, but it felt nonetheless like charity, something a less decent person wouldn’t bother to do. Next to grief and whatever assembly of feelings swamped me in the company of my grandmother’s body, this was preferable.

“Your name is Jean,” I said. I expected relief on her part. “Jean?” She looked truly distressed. “Jean Peterson.” “Jean, you say?” I said it louder. Then I said, “It’s a very pretty name.” She scrunched her nose. “You think so?” She repeated it several times. Finally she sighed. For the first time I saw fear in her eyes. “No, I’m afraid it does not ring a bell.” Her voice was fraught, an octave higher. “And where am I? What is this place?” I told her everything I knew. “And you say my name is — what is my name? What on earth is my name?” She grabbed my wrist once again. “Jean,” I said, then, more cheerfully: “Jean!”

She shook her head, her eyes damp. “That name doesn’t mean a thing to me.” She seemed unsure what else to say. I wanted to console her, but how? Besides, it wouldn’t last, neither the injury nor the solace. I said, helplessly but grandly, as if it were wisdom, “Well, Jean, we are more than our names.” She seemed to consider this, then frowned. I stood with her, this woman whose own name meant nothing to her.

Consciousness eventually leaves us all. It goes in a burst or it goes slowly, it sinks, it clogs, it vanishes, it departs however it wants with no regard to will or hope. Why are some relegated to this terrible purgatory of no-one-ness? Or does it seem terrible only when seen from the vantage point of someone so sure of their someone-ness? I wanted to step away, but Jean was still holding my arm. I would never again see my grandmother smile, I thought. My grandmother would never again touch my cheek.

Jean asked, “Where are we?” I told her again and again. Each time I answered, I felt as if I were launching a paper airplane, and each time it immediately crashed to the ground. “And what is the year?” The staggering year, the name she did not know — they left her stunned. I had tried to soothe an old woman and failed. I told her I was sorry she didn’t recognize her name. I told her she was a lovely woman in a high-quality nursing home. I told her I wished her all the best. She said again, almost pleading, “It just doesn’t ring a bell.” I wanted to go back to my grandmother. “I’d better be going,” I said. She looked sadder. I reminded her once more of the place and the date. Then I said goodbye. She repeated, “It just doesn’t ring a bell.” I couldn’t help but think there was no bell to be rung.

That’s when the Caribbean aide, in a voice both musical and antic, cried out over the heads of the residents, “Oh! That lady? That lady not Jean! That be Benedicta.” At the sound of this other name — Benedicta — the old woman raised her head. Her eyes brightened. “I believe my name is Benedicta!” she cried. The aide came to us and explained that she’d thought I’d meant the resident in front of Benedicta. Benedicta! I crouched down and told her how sorry I was to have confused her, how awful that must have felt. But she didn’t want to hear any of it. She gripped my wrist tighter, so tight it almost hurt, and said, “I am Benedicta.”

I returned to my grandmother’s room and sat with her body. I stroked her cheek. I spoke aloud all that I remembered about our lives together: the long days at the beach; cornstarch powder on clean, hot skin; raspberry-lime sodas; her bright coral lipstick; the extravagance of her cookie cabinet, with its Mallomars, Lorna Doones, and cardboardy zwiebacks — all those memories that felt like they might be permanent if I kept saying them. And then the workers from the funeral home arrived and took her away, my grandmother. Her name was Norma.”

~ Sarah Braunstein is the author of the novel The Sweet Relief of Missing Children and was selected as one of “5 Under 35” fiction writers by the National Book Foundation in 2010. She lives in Portland, Maine, where she teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine and is raising a four-year-old son.

Amazing Presence

"One of the best ways to avoid awakening is to let the idea of awakening be co-opted by the mind and then projected onto a future event: something that’s going to happen outside of this moment. Of course, something may happen in the next moment — something’s always happening in the next moment — but the truth lies right here and right now; it is right here and right now. This looking to the future isn’t really the fault of the spiritual practices themselves; it’s the attitude with which the mind engages in the practices — an attitude that is seeking a future end and seeing that end as somehow inherently different from what already exists here and now.

The role of the spiritual practice is basically to exhaust the seeker. If the practice does what it’s supposed to do, it exhausts our energy for seeking, and then reality has a chance to present itself. In that sense, spiritual practices can help lead to awakening. But that’s different from saying that the practice produces the awakening.

The spiritual practitioner is like someone who’s running and is really tired and wants to rest. You could say, “Well, just stop, then.” But they have this idea that they have to cross a finish line before they can stop. If you can convince them that they can just stop, they’ll be amazed. They’ll say, “I didn’t know I could stop and rest.” Or maybe they won’t hear what you’re telling them, and they’ll have to go all the way to their finish line. And after they cross it, then they’ll stop and say, “Wow! It feels really good to rest.” So awakening can come after you cross the finish line in the future, but it’s also possible to find it at any point along the way if you stop for just a moment.

As I see it, reality is always looking for that moment of vulnerability, when we let our guard down. It’s not looking for good people or bad people. Clearly some real scoundrels have had amazing experiences of reality, right? Some are transformed by them, and some aren’t. Reality is not operating on any moral principle. It’s looking for a moment when the seeker is exhausted. It can be prompted by some tragic event: an illness, or the death of a loved one, or a divorce. Reality rushes into the crack and presents itself...

I’m always trying to unsettle the seeker in people, instead of give it something it can feel comfortable engaging in. I’m not saying that my way is right, and the other way is wrong. But what I have found is that spiritual seekers will fall into the routine of the practice, and if it happens to resonate with their deepest yearning, their deepest passion, then that’s great. But often it doesn’t. That’s why I like to connect first with a student’s passion.

People will ask me, “How often should I meditate?” I’ll say, “You know what, I have no idea. What are you here for? What do you want? Can you connect with the part of you that will let you know? And then will you follow it?” Most people are so disconnected from their deepest intentions that it takes them a while to find out what they are. They’re afraid to let go of routine and find out what’s really important to them. They’re not sure they’re allowed.

Spiritual awakening doesn’t happen because you master some spiritual technique. There are lots of skillful meditators who are not awake. Awakening happens when you stop bullshitting yourself into continual nonawakening. It’s very easy to use disciplines to avoid reality rather than to encounter it. A true spirituality will have you continually facing your illusions and all the ways you avoid reality. Spiritual practice may be an important means of confronting yourself, or it may be a means of avoiding yourself; it all depends on your attitude and intention...

Years ago a woman wrote to me and said her mother was dying of Alzheimer’s, and it was tearing her up. The mother she knew wasn’t there anymore. I wrote her back and said, “Why don’t you sit down next to the bed where your mother is and just reflect on the fact that the person you knew is gone. Her mothering function is gone. The way she used to interact with you is gone. Her personality is gone. It’s all gone. Just sit there for a moment and allow all that to be gone, and see if there’s not anything else. Maybe that wasn’t all there was to your mother.” The woman wrote me back about a week later and said she’d sat next to her mother and let her disappear and thought, Is there anything left? All of a sudden, she knew there was an amazing presence that only took the form of her mother. And she knew that’s what her mother was; that’s what she’d always been. It brought this woman great relief.

Then she took it to the next level and thought, If that’s what my mom is, I wonder about me. And she found she wasn’t the person she’d been pretending to be. She was the same presence. Death is like that: it takes away appearances. It’s OK to grieve the loss of appearances, but it helps to recognize the presence that’s beyond those appearances."
 
~ Adyashanti, Interview in The Sun 2007

Worship Each Other

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the Divine. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. ~ Thomas Merton

Skin

"A participant writes: I am a 56-year-old black woman, and a particular feeling of unworthiness appears in the form of internalized “racism.” It is often/mostly subtle these days.  For example, going into predominantly “white” spaces and relationships (which in the Pacific Northwest is pretty much everywhere), I find myself going out of my way to present myself as nonthreatening to make others feel comfortable with my presence.  You spoke about unconscious choices in the exercise. I don’t know how to look at this because in some way it feels like “whiteness” and “otherness” in the form of culture, institutions, and people are to blame for this particular feeling of unworthiness.

Adyashanti: Thank you for your question. It brings to mind an incident I had many years ago in my early twenties. I was traveling out of town with a friend of mine to compete in a bicycle race. Late at night we pulled into a roadside motel hoping to get a room. I went in and booked a room from an elderly white woman who was working at the desk. Just as I was about to leave, my friend came in and asked if I was able to book a room. As soon as the woman behind the desk saw that my friend was African American she suddenly looked very disturbed and claimed that she had made a mistake with the booking. She claimed that actually there were no rooms available and tore up the paperwork that I had just given her.

I was so shocked and dumbfounded that I didn’t know how to respond. It was the first time that I had encountered such overt racism first hand. It was deeply disturbing. We ended up leaving and driving to another motel where we booked a room without incident. I was enraged at the woman’s racist behavior and when I talked to my friend about what had happened, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “When you’re black you encounter this sort of behavior all the time. It’s part of what it is to be black in this culture.” I wanted to go back and confront the woman, but my friend convinced me to let it go and go to bed -- we did, after all, have to get up early the next morning to drive out to the race. This was my first personal encounter with a form of overt racism that shook me to my core.

I can only dimly imagine what it is like to be so defined by the color of one’s skin and the effect that has on one’s sense of self-worth. To internalize such a painful and destructive cultural shadow is painful indeed. It does however seem as though anyone’s experience of unworthiness, whatever the color of their skin, begins in great part as an internalization of outward influences that are sustained by identifying with the images in one’s own mind of an unworthy self. In this sense, at least, we are dealing with a universal phenomena of incorrect self-identification.

If in fact our true identity originated in some outer influence, we would all be destined to be unavoidably impoverished by the limitations of perspective and love of those around us. Fortunately this is not the case. And because this is not the case, it is up to each of us to seize upon the fierce power of discernment and love, and begin to bear the dark light of our solitude where we encounter the unformed nature of our presence. For as long as we choose to remain defined by either inner or outer images, no matter what our race, upbringing, or gender, we end up only imprisoning ourselves within the profound limitations of our own internalized self-image.

That is why it is up to us, and only us, to cast aside everything that is false, painful, and limiting, by facing into the profound mystery of our being. We must take that one profound step beyond everything that we think we are (no matter where it came from), begin to face the formlessness of our presence, and open once again to the invisible and silent ground of our being. It is there that all of our masks will be stripped away by the great impenetrable silence, if only we can bear its voiceless command to surrender all that we know of ourselves and embrace the benevolent light of our unborn nature. We must throw out of our consciousness everything that is not essentially our own, by being absolutely willing to be a light unto ourselves where we -- not someone or something else — encounter the fullness of our nothingness.

Then, and only then, can we embody the fullness of our own skin, and be a clear and benevolent presence in this often confused world. Then we in our humanity embody the sanity, freedom, and love that is the only hope for humankind, and can consciously and lovingly participate in the outer work of healing the cultural wounds of racism (and all forms of division) that distort the indistinct unity of our shared human and spiritual nature."

The above Q&A is excerpted from an online study course with Adyashanti. ©  2015

Emptiness

“When emptiness is still, that is eternity.
When it moves, that is love.”

~ Adyashanti

My Secret Is Silence
http://bit.ly/1WArz2a

Love of Wisdom

“Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.”
~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“In this multicultural world emptiness is in the air. Physics tells us that matter isn’t as solid as we thought. We see widely diverging views from different cultures on TV news programs. The Sunday newspapers inform us that, according to neuroscience, no such thing as a self can be found in the brain. We think that studying emptiness will come naturally to most readers. It doesn’t require that you subscribe to any particular religious or spiritual viewpoint. You don’t have to become a Buddhist. You don’t even have to be particularly “spiritual” to benefit from these teachings. Many of the Western thinkers whose material we use certainly haven’t considered themselves to be spiritual…

Irony is life lived with no landing, no foundations. As in poetry, your thoughts, words and language take on a new meaning, which is different from the literal and habitual interpretation. Held in emptiness, even common human predicaments, such as current suffering, worries about the future and death, are not the same anymore. The openness and non-solidity of phenomena give rise to hope, because you know deeply that bad things are never intrinsically so, and they don’t have to stay the way they currently are. They can change, and very often you can make things better. Joyful irony is thus an antidote to helplessness, hopelessness and the victim mentality. Joyful irony is certainly not non-dual quietism, passivity or escape…

An empty world is neither dull nor bleak. On the contrary, it is experientially rich, full of meaning(s) and a source of continuous wonder and beneficial activity. Love and Compassion Studying emptiness is never just about you. It radiates outwards, to others. Actively cultivating an attitude of love and compassion is an important part of any successful emptiness study project, whether you are using a traditional approach or looking at the way we present it here. The more love and compassion you develop, the easier and more joyful will be your emptiness realizations. It’s as simple as that. And when the illusory walls that kept you trapped inside your skin dissolve, then your heart will naturally open towards other living beings with a greater sense of caring, benevolence, love and compassion. In a significant way they are you, and you are them.

For most people, the times when they are deeply filled with love are high points. Similarly, a major source for the joy of the joyful ironist is the love and care you feel. Realizing emptiness multiplies this. You realize that a better life is not just a possibility for you, but, at least in principle, for all other people. And it is often a highly practical, achievable possibility. In many cases, you will not just contemplate positive change, but also be sincerely motivated to act on it. Joyful irony is thus open, loving and engaged…

One of the most important insights along this Western path is to realize the emptiness and ultimate unfoundedness of your own most cherished beliefs. The hallmark of a joyful ironist doesn’t consist of seeing that other people’s views are not ultimately grounded in the nature of things. Rather, it is a global insight about emptiness that sees through the structures that make inherent, objective truth and falsity seem possible in the first place. The most radical and meaningful effect of this realization comes about when you see that even your own beliefs are not objectively grounded. They function, but they are empty of inherent existence and truth. This realization is another way that love and compassion are fostered by the emptiness teachings.

You realize that you do not occupy a position any closer to the absolute truth of the universe than anyone else. There is a great tenderness and humility that comes with realizing how similar we all are in this respect. Being an ironist about your own views tends to work wonders as a self-correcting device.
The stoic philosopher, Epictetus, observed that, “People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.” Thus when emptiness meditations open up the rigid notions of fixed meaning, everything else in your life and world experience opens up with it!

“Liberating Yourself from Rigid Beliefs” targets beliefs – those attitudes and statements that we cling to, defend or staunchly refute. The insights apply to any belief whatsoever, but we have chosen to focus on beliefs about spiritual teachings, for instance: “The highest teaching is emptiness,” or “I am (am not) enlightened”. These beliefs are often unnoticed, and yet at the same time, they carry a strong charge for people. Clinging to statements like these prevents a global realization of emptiness.

The method inspired by the Ancient Greek school of Pyrrhonism, also known as skepticism, is one of the greatest Western examples of philosophy used for human freedom. In “Living a Joyfully Empty Life,” the last chapter of the book, we discuss what life is like after you have done many emptiness meditations. Where does the emptiness journey go? What are the results and benefits? How does it affect your ordinary life? What new possibilities open up?

We say more about joyful ironism, the fruition of these teachings, and present a range of examples for empty lives, such as being a regular person, or an artist, a mystic, a Buddhist, a social activist, or spiritual teacher. Such vignettes are meant to inspire, rather than to privilege any one particular way to be. The emptiness teachings, at least as we are construing them, do depend on a compassionate frame of mind. But beyond that, they do not require a commitment to Buddhism or to any other particular notion of the good life. To grasp this is one way of realizing that the good life is itself empty, open-textured and not universally agreed-upon.

This has many sources, among them the writings of the astonishing anti-essentialists Martin Heidegger and Richard Rorty, as well as the English mystical poet Thomas Traherne. Do All Our Sources Agree with Each Other? We are using a wide variety of approaches to what we’re calling emptiness. Although they have something important in common – a challenge to certain notions of inherent existence – we don’t mean to imply that they agree on everything else. If you look more deeply into the approaches presented here, you’ll find differences as well as similarities. You’ll find that social construction, neurophilosophy, deconstruction, modern Western analytic philosophy or ancient Pyrrhonism don’t all talk about the same things, and where they do, they might disagree…

This is perfectly fine. In fact, diversity and variety are part of the openness that one finds in any facet of human inquiry. We are not suggesting that you settle on a view presented here. Rather, we are offering an open-ended toolkit that may be helpful in dispelling certain fixed and rigid views. You may already have an approach to inquiry that these sources can help with. Or you may grow fond of the sources presented here. In fact, we think that this exploratory aspect is part of the fun.”

~ Greg Goode, Emptiness and Joyful Freedom
Greg Goode is known for a unique combination of penetrating insight, comfort with both Eastern and Western sources, and a down-to-earth sense of humor.

Heart of Flesh

"A few months ago, in the heat of the tragic teen suicides that came about from intolerance of homosexuality, I saw a man on television who was apologizing for wishing death on gays from his facebook page. This member of an Arkansas school board was contrite for the violence in his words, but maintained that his values pertaining to homosexuality would remain, as he felt homosexuality was condemned in the bible. This concept, while foreign to me, is interesting, as it used to justify so much judgement and separation in our society. When my daughter came home from school one day saying that a classmate had two mommies, my response was, “Two mommies? How lucky is she?!” What does it actually say in the bible that will cause some people to be upset by my line of thinking?
Happy pride.Love, gp"

"How you answer this question depends hugely on what you take the Bible to be. IF you believe that the Bible is a single, timeless, internally consistent teaching on matters of human morality dictated by God himself, then yes, the Old Testament book of Leviticus is definitely uncomfortable with homosexuality. But it is also uncomfortable with menstruating women, shellfish, and pigskin. (And for the record, it has some very harsh words to say about lending money at interest, a prohibition that even Biblical literalists seem to find it perfectly permissible to disregard!)

Like most other critically thinking Christians, I see the Bible as a symphony (sometimes a cacophony!) of divinely inspired human voices bearing witness to an astonishing evolutionary development in our human understanding of God (or God’s self-disclosure as we grow mature enough to begin to comprehend it, another way of saying the same thing). The Old Testament, whose 46 books span well over a millennium in their dates of composition, also straddles what scholars call “The First Axial Period,” when spontaneously, across the entire globe, human spiritual consciousness seemed to take a huge evolutionary leap forward. In the same time frame that the Biblical psalms were being composed, the planet was also being graced with the Buddha, Lao-Tse, Zoaroaster, and Plato: a quantum leap in human understanding and ethical vision. It simply defies credibility—my credibility, anyway!— to believe that the early Old Testament teachings on animal sacrifice and “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” are at the same level as Ezekiel’s luminous axial prophecy, “I will take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” or Jesus’ stunning “Love your enemy; bless those who revile you.”

This is not in any way to demean holiness of the Bible, but only to affirm that God reveals Godself in time, through process and dialogue, not in unchanging monolithic statements. This does not make the Bible less sacred; it makes it more sacred, for it grounds God’s divine presence in the lived reality of our human experience.

As a Christian I am bound, when I listen to this diversity of Biblical voices, to set my compass by the teachings and the path walked by Jesus himself. Where Biblical testimony is internally inconsistent (and even Jesus experienced it this way!), I am bound to honor Jesus as my final court of appeal. And thus, the bottom line must inescapably be that nowhere does Jesus condemn homosexuality, and certainly nowhere does he wish harm upon anyone, even those whom the religious culture is so quick to condemn as sinners. His harsh words are reserved entirely for those whose certainty about their religious rectitude causes them to condemn others, or to block the Spirit’s persistent attempts to open up new channels of forgiveness and hope. Jesus is all about inclusion, forgiveness, and empowerment. In the light of his compassionate presence, people are set free to live their lives in strength and hope, regardless of whether they be considered outcasts by those in the “religious know.”

Thus, as a Christian, when confronted by a tension between a religious certainty which leads me to violate the law of love and a deep unknowing that still moves in the direction of “loving my neighbor as myself,” I am bound to choose the latter course. Was it not the Pharisees, those so sure that they had “the law and Moses on their side,” who were the first to condemn Jesus to the grave? And make no mistake: The word Pharisees does not mean “the Jews”; that utterly reprehensible piece of scapegoating was a product of the early Christian church. Rather, “Pharisee” names the spiritual sclerotic in each one of us who would prefer the certainty of an unchanging rulebook to the radical open-endedness of God’s ongoing self-revelation in love.

If I really follow what the Bible teaches, it seems to me that I need to be constantly laying my human arrogance (and in Latin, this word comes from “a-rogo,” or “I have no questions”), upon the altar of God’s constantly demonstrated delight in new beginnings. “I will be what I will be,” is the name he asked Moses to know him by in the book of Exodus. With that as one line of bearing on my thinking, and the steadily increasing revelation of God’s mercy and compassion as the other, I am compelled by my Christianity to refrain from any behaviors or judgments which arrogantly demean the dignity of another human being, or cause him or her to lose hope."

—Cynthia Bourgeault is an Episcopal priest, writer, and retreat leader. She is founding director of the Aspen Wisdom School in Colorado and principal visiting teacher for the Contemplative Society in Victoria, BC, Canada. Her most recent book, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, is now available.

Child of God

“Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask.

I explained that when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people. And I told them that, contrary to popular belief, we can’t be won back with hipper worship bands, fancy coffee shops, or pastors who wear skinny jeans. We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, so we can smell b.s. from a mile away. The church is the last place we want to be sold another product, the last place we want to be entertained. Millennials aren’t looking for a hipper Christianity, I said.

We’re looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity. Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we’re looking for Jesus—the same Jesus who can be found in the strange places he’s always been found: in bread, in wine, in baptism, in the Word, in suffering, in community, and among the least of these. No coffee shops or fog machines required. Of course, I said all this from the center of a giant stage equipped with lights, trampolines, and, indeed, a fog machine. I’m never entirely comfortable at these events—not because my words are unwelcome or untrue, but because I feel so out of my depth delivering them.

I’m not a scholar or statistician. I’ve never led a youth group or pastored a congregation. The truth is, I don’t even bother getting out of bed many Sunday mornings, especially on days when I’m not sure I believe in God or when there’s an interesting guest on Meet the Press. For me, talking about church in front of a bunch of Christians means approaching a microphone and attempting to explain the most important, complicated, beautiful, and heart-wrenching relationship of my life in thirty minutes or less without yelling or crying or saying any cuss words. Sometimes I wish they’d find someone with a bit more emotional distance to give these lectures, someone who doesn’t have to break herself open and bleed all over the place every time someone asks, innocently enough, “So where have you been going to church these days?”… 

~ Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“When you’re aware of your history and how the Bible, for instance, has been used to justify things like slavery, you start to ask yourself if we’re still using the Bible to justify violence, cruelty, and exclusion of LGBT or to justify some of the racism or other things that plague our society…. There’s so much security in thinking of America as this Christian nation, founded upon Christian principles that justified all of our decisions and makes us feel better about our patriotism and allegiances. I think there’s a security in thinking of Christians as people who have always been in the right. Then you can be assured that you are also, presently, in the right.

That’s a dangerous way to look at it because there are few things more dangerous than someone convinced they are always right, or that their people or their country or their religion has always been in the right. Most of us are a mix of sinner and saint and most of our religions are a mix of good and evil and that’s just reality. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with acknowledging that.

What was so powerful about the Gay Christian Network conference was just worshiping with a whole room full of people, many of whom had been kicked to the curb by the church. They were being church with one another in a way that I had never experienced before. There was so much grace and forgiveness and room for people coming from different experiences and convictions. It wasn’t just because they were gay, but because there was so much grace. You’re with people who have been hurt by the church and yet still want to be part of this community, to gather around the table and break bread. They still want to confess and tell the truth, heal and anoint.

I wrote that LGBT people have a lot to teach Christians about sexuality and culture, but also how to be decent Christians. I had already committed to being a good ally, but what the conference changed for me is that I am not looking to people like Justin [Lee, founder of the Gay Christian Network] or other leaders in the LGBT community to be just teachers to me about sexuality. I’m looking to them to be teachers about what it means to be a Christian. It’s hard to storm out of your church because you don’t like how the worship is going when you know people who have stuck with church even when they’ve been called horrible names and treated terribly. That challenges me.

I do and I always will (have hope for Christianity). I get frustrated sometimes and I get angry and cynical, but I still believe that there are healing properties in breaking the bread of communion together, in baptism declaring that someone is a beloved child of God. I still think there is power in anointing the sick and acknowledging that suffering can be holy. In all of these sacraments, I still feel like they are important and they pull us into community and that community is important. All the theology and all the stuff we’re supposed to believe and all the politics and drama makes it hard sometimes, but at the end of the day, there’s still something powerful about those sacraments and a community coming together to practice them…”

~ ~ Rachel Held Evans (born 1981) is an American Christian columnist, blogger and author. Her first book, Evolving in Monkey Town, explores her journey from religious certainty to a faith which accepts doubt and questioning; the title is based on the Scopes Monkey Trial. Her second book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband Master, recounts how she spent an entire year of living a Biblical lifestyle literally. The book also garnered national media attention for Evans as she appeared on The Today Show. Evans is an Episcopalian. In 2016, Evans published an editorial for Vox lending her support for presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Bruised

"I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security... More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us, “Give them something to eat.” ~ Pope Francis

Train Tonight

Even if you are going to die tomorrow,
you train tonight.
~ Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

I Am Here

“On this night I choose to claim myself in full liberation of the structures of man that were claimed in fear. And as I say yes to this, I lift myself above the walls that have been perpetuated by others, agreed to by my small self. And as I lift, I claim a new world into manifestation. The light that I am, uninhibited by these structures, will be in broadcast, and my world and all I see will be claimed in alignment to the truth of what I am. I know who I am in truth. I know what I am in truth. I know how I serve in truth. I am here. I am here. I am here.”

-- Paul Selig, The Book of Truth (a channeled teaching)

Photo -- Sammy Hagar with Paul Selig

“Paul Selig absolutely blew my mind the first time I saw him. When you ask him about someone, and he goes into being that person he will make the biggest of nonbelievers believe on the spot. Goosebumps included. I’ve had two sessions with him, and he nailed it 100%”

—Sammy Hagar, Musician

This

Whatever and Whomever You Meet is the Path.

Lulu

Our beloved friend and founder Louise Hay transitioned this morning, August 30, 2017, of natural causes at age 90. She passed peacefully surrounded by loved ones.

Louise was an incredible visionary and advocate. Everyone who had the privilege to meet her, either in person, or through her words, felt her passion for serving others.

“Meeting Louise changed the direction of my life,” said Reid Tracy, President and CEO of Hay House, Inc. “Her passion for serving others translated into everything she did. Simply by working alongside her, an analytical accountant like me transformed into someone who became aware of the power of affirmations and self-love. Being able to learn from her has been one of my life’s greatest blessings. The beauty of Louise was that you didn’t have to work alongside her to learn from her, you felt like you were there with her, with every word you read or heard.”

Hay House will carry on Louise’s legacy and continue to publish products and online learning courses that align with her message of self-improvement and self-love.

Louise Hay’s estate, as well as all future royalties, will be donated to The Hay Foundation, a non-profit organization established by Louise that financially supports diverse organizations which supply food, shelter, counseling, hospice care and funds to those in need.

We invite you to share your Louise stories with us in the comments below. Together, we honor her through our memories and the continuing of her unforgettable legacy.

We love you, LuLu.

In the infinity of life where I am, all is perfect, whole, and complete. – Louise L. Hay

Read more at http://www.hayhouse.com/louise-hay-legacy

Make Yourself Ready

"I will put to you the question my therapist put to me once, which is the same question Jesus put to the lame man by the pool at Bethesda: “Do you want to be healed?”

Of course I do, I said.

No, said my therapist, look deeply within yourself. Because for someone who wants to be healed, you sure are falling back into old patterns of thinking and reacting, patterns that work against your healing.

He was right. I wanted healing, but I did not want to commit my will to the hard work of overcoming barriers between myself and wholeness. I wanted healing to descend like a dove. It rarely happens that way.

You may be given the gift of faith like that. But you have to be prepared to receive it. If your will is predisposed to rejecting faith as incredible, you will find a way to rationalize every manifestation of the divine presence. Hey, I’m a believer, and I struggle with this too. In fact, looking back over what happened to me in the past year and a half, I see that my priest’s decision to impose a strict prayer rule on me was absolutely key. He told me recently that he knew from the beginning that my weakness is living in my head, in the realm of the Ideal. This is how I got myself into trouble by idolizing the Family and the Land, and then by idolizing the Church.

Father Matthew had me pray 500 Jesus Prayers each day. If you pray it in the Orthodox way, you center yourself, and allow no thoughts to enter into your mind. It’s really hard to do at first, but over time, once you get used to it, it gives you an hour each day when you are not thinking, and reacting mentally to what’s around you. It trains you to feel, and to detect the presence of things — even the presence of God — that are always there, but that the busy-ness of your mind prevents you from experiencing.

It was all very subtle, but I see in retrospect how much that helped shake me out of the bind of my rationality. Giuseppe Mazzotta, a Dante scholar at Yale, says that in the end, the Commedia insists that our conversion must be a conversion of the heart, or it won’t be real. The heart is the seat of the will.

If you’re anything like me, faith will be born in you with an experience of awe, of wonder. For Whittaker Chambers, it was awe over the perfection of his infant child’s ear. For me, it was the Chartres cathedral. Who knows what it will be for you? But you have to make yourself ready to receive it. God will not force Himself on you." -- Rod Dreher, The American Conservative

Playing with God

“Religion isn’t for me,” announced my eight-year-old daughter, Alexandra, as we ate dinner together one January night. “I think of it like an old spider on the wall. I know that it’s there but I try to ignore it.” Alexandra took a bite of pasta and studied my reaction. “When I pray it’s usually just for ordinary things, like ‘Please, please, let me get an A on this test,” she added.

Since Christmas, Alexandra had been making provocative statements about religion and prayer. “I don’t believe in God, I believe in Nature,” my daughter continued. “Everything comes from Nature. We are Nature, Mommy. Church makes everything seem boring. Even a nice song like ‘Jingle Bells’ sounds really slow in church.” “Jiiiinnnnglllle Bellllls…” Alexandra lowered her voice and sang a kind of funeral dirge to underline her point.

On Christmas Day, my husband and I had taken Alexandra to Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. We rarely took Alexandra to church, but we had wanted her to see thousands of people from around the world praying together and solemnly rejoicing about the appearance of the miraculous earth. I was trying to delicately engineer an impression that would lead her to suspect there is a finer intelligence or reality behind the world of appearances. But Alexandra hated the cathedral that day. She found it crowded and cold, and wailed that we were ruining Christmas for her by bringing her there.

A wise man once said that trying to impart your understanding to others by talking is like trying to fill them up with bread by looking at them. Since Christmas, Alexandra has been struggling to give me bread. She has reminded me that kids know how to touch this finer world inside themselves although they rarely call this intimate connection prayer.

That January night I asked Alexandra if she ever thought about where the universe came from, big questions like that. “Of course, but that’s science!” she exclaimed. “I love science so much I would rather go to school naked than not be able to study it.”

It is becoming clear to me that “science” to my little daughter isn’t a strictly intellectual discipline but a license to explore with all her senses and imagination. The “scientific” ideas and questions that catch fire for her—“Is every atom made up of matter?” “What if you could make a machine that could look into a dog’s brain? Would it even be worth it?” —are fresh and generative. Shot through with a sense of wonder at creation, Alexandra’s “science” is akin to our most ancient way of being spiritual. Like other children who speak but aren’t yet too adept at arguing for their own feelings and beliefs, my daughter has been inhabiting her body and the natural world with a sense of deep connection and curiosity. In his collection of essays, Living By Wonder, the educator Richard Lewis describes this childhood state as the time of “the incandescent virtues of ‘why?’”

At the Christmas Mass, a big stern-looking priest, one of many serving Communion that day, came and stood in the aisle a few feet from our pew. The faithful flowed forward, including Alexandra’s grandmother, who had accompanied us. A young Mexican wearing a red hooded sweatshirt over a battered leather jacket followed by Alexandra’s grandmother. He was followed by a willowy matron in a fur coat, who was in turn followed by a tiny old woman dressed in black.

“The Body of Christ, the Body of Christ,” the priest repeated as he held up the Communion wafers. Some people reached out with cupped hands like small children. Others opened their mouths to be fed in the traditional infant-like pose of surrender to a greater power. Alexandra slumped at the end of the pew and sighed and glowered. “It’s just that I don’t really feel comfortable anywhere there aren’t plants and animals,” she explained to me later. After the Mass, I took her up to inspect the life-size creche near the altar. I told her the Christmas story again, picturing it as a kind of time-release capsule of higher truth that would take effect in the future. I was providing Alexandra with a cosmic vision, with food for prayer. She asked me how the wise men picked Jesus to be this “big deal baby.” I told her the wise men followed an unusual star that shone over the manger.

“I know about the star,” said Alexandra. “But a star is as big as the sun, so that’s like saying the sun is over your house. It’s not really over your house, it’s over the whole earth.” As we walked up an aisle toward the cathedral’s main entrance, my husband pointed to a gaunt, haunted portrait of Christ above the altar tiered with flickering candles. He explained to Alexandra that this face was based on marks that were left on the Shroud of Turin.

“Excuse me?” asked Alexandra. “Has anybody seriously looked at this man? Like maybe he could use a shave or something?” I knew Alexandra was trying to provoke me, but there was a visceral question under her words that galvanized my attention. I wondered how any child could feel a connection to this tortured-looking man who lived two thousand years ago.

I thought of telling her that Jesus loved children, or that she could try to feel a connection by saying his name in her heart. But these answers felt cheap. Alexandra regarded me with a calm, grave expression. She looked very small and very present in this cold, cavernous, crowded place.

“They kept calling Jesus ‘the king,’” Alexandra continued. “How can one baby be the king of the whole world?” “He didn’t call himself a king,” I said. “He called himself the son of man. He wanted to show us that we all can be like him.” “Then why did he want to be worshipped in a huge, fancy place like this?” “I’m not sure he would have wanted to be worshipped like this,” I replied.

“Then what are we doing here?” Brought to a full stop, I asked Alexandra where she would like to celebrate Christmas. “In the African savannah surrounded by animals,” she said. “Only I wouldn’t make the animals celebrate. They should be what they are and I would observe them.” Alexandra lit up as she spoke of this. It occurred to me that I had been too busy trying to teach Alexandra to stop and listen to her. As she talked, I remembered that the heart of prayer was the experience of being seen and heard by a loving, boundlessly accepting attention.

Months before Christmas, while spending a weekend at the wooded upstate New York community of Omega Institute, I had watched from a distance as a young camp counselor led Alexandra and a group of other children through the woods blindfolded. They were identifying different kinds of trees by hugging them and smelling them. When Alexandra took her turn she looked so radiant, so deeply engaged in the life around her that I knew, as I had the first moment I laid eyes on my daughter, that she was already part of that other world that I was trying so hard to lead her to. She knew innately how to feel her way into the heart of things.

In Living By Wonder, Lewis describes how children are able to “fuse with the object of their play.” According to him, children innately seek to understand the world around them by drawing on their own sensations and feelings, their own bodily understanding of growth and change. Imagination in children, according to Lewis, is their ability to project their inner images and experiences on to the world as a way of sympathetically knowing.

“Did the tree hug you back?” I had asked Alexandra. “I don’t like when you talk that way,” she’d answered, although she knows that I’ve caught her saying hello to things as if they were alive.

In the Spell of Sensuous, philosopher David Abram describes the way indigenous people have preserved our innate “carnal, sensorial empathy” with the natural world. More in touch with their bodies and “animal senses” than modern city dwellers, indigenous people are more aware that the natural world around us is awake and speaking. I have seen that children also have this capacity to listen to the world around them with their “animal bodies,” and they don’t stop at the natural world. They fuse their sensations with their earliest feelings of well-being (and fear of abandonment) to know the One behind the world.

Although Alexandra would never use these words, there’s a chance that when she was hugging trees she was finding God in the flesh of life. I know this because once I was a kid and risked playing at prayer.

When I was a little girl, there was a game I played when I couldn’t sleep. Although, I never thought of it as a prayer or used those words, it was my way of seeking God. I would peel off my blankets and slip down to the cold hardwood floor (I remember doing this mostly in the winter). The first few moments on the floor were my leap of faith. Freezing and feeling utterly exposed and alone, I thought of all the people and other beings who had no beds, no blankets, not shelter at all. These thoughts were a ritual that always made me feel gratitude or a stab of empathy. They made me feel connected to the rest of the world. I would also feel brave in a special way, as if I were daring to venture out on my own. I was not only dipping into dangerously big subjects, I was risking being seen by the unknown.

As I lay there a shift always took place. The labels I had about “cold” and “hard” gave way. I noticed that the polished hardwood was soft in its own way, more giving than stone or steel. As I listened to the wind blowing outside my bedroom window (the winter temperatures in Watertown, New York often hit twenty and even thirty below zero), I imagined what it was like outside, and truly valued that I was in a warm, life-saving shelter. As I broke through the isolation of my thoughts and sank into the experience of my body, I began to sense that everything in the world had emerged from a mystery. Why was there a world and not nothing? As a child I couldn’t help but ask the question with my whole being, and as I asked it I felt vibrantly alive and present in a living world.

I would scramble back up to my bed and experience its incredible softness, wondering how I could have been numb to it before. I would pull up the sheet, savoring its smoothness. I would pull up the blankets and quilt one at a time, feeling unimaginably rich and relaxed and provided for. Even the air that touched my face was luxurious. I felt cradled in a benevolent, listening silence, and I knew without words that I had drawn closer to God by going deep within myself. It was a state that I would recapture many years later in moments of meditation and prayer.

Not all imaginary play expresses an impulse to prayer, of course. I played other games in which I was a deadly, superintelligent black panther named Striker. Striker liked to crouch in trees and stalk the other kids who came to play in my backyard. Like a fairy tale, this game let me play with some of my wildest energies. My prayer game, on the other hand, harbored the wish to see and be seen by finer, larger intelligence.

Recently, Alexandra and I heard Kaddish recited for the first time. The prayer was so exalted, so utterly above sentimental condolence that it occurred to me that, as tradition says, it really may have been given to man by the angels. I resolved to read Alexandra the Beatitudes and the Psalms, and to teach her the Lord’s Prayer.

I still have to restrain myself, in other words, from the impulse to drag Alexandra to the threshold of sacred truth. Yet on a deeper level I know that I have to let her find her own way. I try to remember now that what becomes truly meaningful to any one of us are those truths which we have discovered inside ourselves.

A few nights ago, there was a new development. I found Alexandra curled up in bed with a book of Bible stories.

“I’m not religious, you know,” she said, studying me over the top of the book. “But could you just let me read for five more minutes?”
~ Tracy Cochran, Playing with God

Confirmation

“What on earth am I doing here?” Merton asked himself in a journal entry, mid-November 1957. I have answered it a million times. “I belong here” and that is no answer. In the end, there is no answer like that. Any vocation is a mystery and juggling with words does not make it any clearer.

“It is a contradiction and must remain a contradiction. I think the only hope for me is to pile contradiction upon contradiction and push myself into the middle of all contradictions. Thus it will always remain morally impossible for me simply to “conform” and to settle down and accept the official rationalization of what is going on here. On the other hand it in no way helps matters for me to replace the official statements with slightly better rationalizations of my own…. If you want to find satisfactory formulas you had better deal with things that can be fitted into a formula. The vocation to seek God is not one of them. Nor is existence. Nor is the spirit of man.”

Early in 1958, Merton was inwardly in motion. “I am obscurely convinced,” he noted in his journal, “that there is a need in the world for something I can provide, and that there is a need for me to provide it. True, someone else can do it, God does not need me. But I feel He is asking me to provide it.” This is both a declaration of independence and an acknowledgment of interdependence—of a world to which he is bound, though by a still somewhat unclear duty. He was speaking with Dom James from time to time about a South American foundation and longing to be part of any such venture. James put him off—the moment hadn’t come to think seriously about the project, though an offer of land had been received from a wealthy Colombian. We could “grow corn and frijoles,” Merton speculated. There was ever a child in him.

Everyone who cares for Merton’s life and writings is likely to remember something of his dream about a young Jewish girl who gave her name as Proverb, and likely to remember in detail his spontaneous visionary experience at “4th and Walnut” in Louisville. Proverb appeared to him one night at the end of February. “I am embraced with determined and virginal passion by a young Jewish girl,” he recorded in his journal. “She clings to me and will not let go, and I get to like the idea…. I reflect ‘She belongs to the same race as St. Anne.’ I ask her name and she says her name is Proverb…. No need to explain. It was a charming dream.” A charming dream, easily dismissed—but almost at once Merton felt drawn to write a letter and within a few days drafted it into his journal. “Dear Proverb,” he demurely began what must be his first love letter since entering the monastery in 1941,

"How grateful I am to you for loving in me something which I thought I had entirely lost, and someone who, I thought, I had long ago ceased to be. And in you, dear, though some might be tempted to say you do not even exist, there is a reality as real and as wonderful and as precious as life itself. I must be careful what I say, for words cannot explain my love for you…. I think what I most want to say is that I treasure, in you, the revelation of your virginal solitude … yet you have given your love to me, why I cannot imagine.”

His encounter with Proverb in late February-early March was renewed in the incident at 4th and Walnut two weeks later. Here again, famous ground. “Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, suddenly realized that I love all the people and that none of them were, or, could be totally alien to me. As if waking from a dream—the dream of my separateness, of the ‘special’ vocation to be different…. Thank God! Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them. I have the immense joy of being a man!” And he concluded the entry with a second letter to Proverb, as if they had met at 4th and Walnut.

“Only with you are these things found, dear child sent to me by God!” In a letter to the novelist Boris Pasternak later in the year he was clearer still: “I was walking alone in the crowded street and suddenly saw that everybody was Proverb and that in all of them shone her extraordinary beauty and purity and shyness, even though they did not know who they were.”

Toward the end of the year Merton was able to articulate his new insights and feelings at a moment when he was looking back over his published poetry in a measured but critical frame of mind. He could see the good in what he had written, yet he had become a different person, as fervent as ever but in a wholly new way. “The new fervor will be rooted not in asceticism but in humanism,” he wrote in his journal.

“What has begun now must grow but must never seek to become spectacular or to attract attention to itself—which is what I unconsciously did in those days, proclaiming that I was a poet and a mystic. Both are probably true, but not deep enough, because then it was too conscious. I have to write and speak not as the individual who has cut himself off from the world and wants the world to know it, but as the person who has lost himself in the service of the vast wisdom of God’s plan to reveal Himself in the world and in man. How much greater, deeper, nobler, truer and more hidden. A mysticism that no longer appears, transcendent and ordinary.”

From Proverb by night and the streets of Louisville by day to his new sense of purpose there is little distance; those encounters gave rise to it. Merton wrote into his journal paragraphs from Buber that he described as “among the wisest religious truths written in our century.” Buber was drawing out an implication of his fundamental insight:

“Meeting with God does not come to man in order that he may concern himself with God, but in order that he may confirm that there is meaning in the world… All revelation is summons and sending…. God remains present to you when you have been sent forth; he who goes on a mission has always God before him: the truer the fulfillment the stronger and more constant his nearness. He cannot concern himself directly with God but he can converse with Him.”

Responding to this passage, Merton continued, “Ten years ago I would have been perplexed and scandalized by [these thoughts], but in the depths of my heart I realize how true they are. And I realize how monumentally we fail, in this monastery, to understand this!”

In early June 1964 Merton received a letter from D. T. Suzuki’s secretary telling him that, were he able to come to New York City a little later in the month, Dr. Suzuki would be extremely happy to meet him. Not long before, Merton had been examining the consequences—yet again—of the absolute travel restriction imposed on him. “As I go on,” he wrote in his journal,

“the ways of escape are progressively closed, renounced, or otherwise abandoned. I know now that I am really committed to stability here, and that even the thought of temporary travel is useless and vain. I know that my contacts with others of like mind by mail, etc. are relatively meaningless, though they may have some raison d’être. I know that my writing solves nothing for me personally and that it has created some problems which are still unresolved…. That my position is definitively ambiguous and my job is to accept this with the smallest possible amount of bad faith.” Along this familiar path of thought, he had reached a familiar destination, though cloaked in darker light than usual: the resolve to accept his circumstances in the monastic spirit of obedience, with a minimum of what the Rule of St. Benedict, a document for the centuries, calls “murmuring.”

Some days after this journal entry, the letter arrived. “I thought about it,” he wrote, “and since it is probably the only chance I will ever have to speak to [Suzuki], I thought it important enough to ask Dom James’ permission. I certainly did not think he would give it, but, somewhat reluctantly, he did, and a flight is booked for me next Monday 15th.” What was Dom James thinking? Unknown. It seems very unlikely that he had time to consult with his superior, the abbot general; the decision must have been his own.

Replying promptly to Dr. Suzuki, Merton expressed his grateful acceptance of the invitation and alluded to the conditions set by his abbot:

“I must ask you not to let this be too widely known…. It should not become generally known around New York as this would cause difficulties…. I hope to see you in the best of health and spirits.” Merton was to come and go with a sole focus. Living in a dormitory at Columbia University, his alma mater, saying Mass at the nearby church where he converted, eating in local restaurants many of which hadn’t changed since he knew them, he willingly accepted the anonymity James had asked of him.

It goes nearly without saying that as soon as he reached New York—even from the air as he approached—he was altogether happy; no further anxiety. The recognition we need here is that he met in Dr. Suzuki, at last, a living spiritual father—an abbot in all but name with whom he felt instinctively at home. Merton was once a Columbia graduate student exploring the poetry of William Blake, the nineteenth-century poet, graphic artist, and mystic. “Damn braces: Bless relaxes,” Blake had memorably written. The conversations of Merton and Suzuki were in that spirit. There are several homages to Suzuki in Merton’s writings, among them this:

"One had to meet this man in order to fully appreciate him. He seemed to me to embody all the indefinable qualities of the “Superior Man” of the ancient Asian, Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions. Or rather in meeting him one seemed to meet that “True Man of No Title” that Chuang Tzu and the Zen Masters speak of. And of course this is the man one really wants to meet. Who else is there? In meeting Dr. Suzuki and drinking a cup of tea with him I felt I had met this one man. It was like finally arriving at one’s own home. A very happy experience, to say the least…. I did feel that I was speaking to someone who, in a tradition completely different from my own, had matured, had become complete, and had found his way.”

“The tea, the joy,” he wrote in his journal after the first of two visits with Suzuki. One joy, “profoundly important to me,” was “to experience the fact that there really is a deep understanding between myself and this extraordinary and simple man.” Another was to feel so magically at home with him and with his secretary, Mihoko Okamura. “For once in a long time felt as if I had spent a moment in my own family.” Both experiences were crucial. In dialogue with Dr. Suzuki he could measure how far he had come through his years and struggles and strivings in the monastery—so much farther than he thought. A confirmation of this order would occur just once more, but few are needed: in conversation with the Dalai Lama in the fall of 1968. As for feeling profoundly at home with the ancient sage and his young companion, this too was a confirmation: that the orphaned child, the monastic misfit, remained undamaged. His heart was intact.”

~ James Fox, Make Peace Before the Sun Goes Down: The Long Encounter of Thomas Merton and His Abbot

Yogaswami

"One hot afternoon, not long after our arrival in Ceylon, I found myself outside a modest thatched hut in Jaffna, on the southern shore of Ceylon, to keep my first appointment with Yogaswami.

I knocked quietly on the door, and a voice from within roared, “Is that the Canadian High Commissioner?” I opened the door to find him seated cross-legged on the floor—an erect, commanding presence clad in a white robe, with a generous topping of white hair and a long white beard. “Well, Swami,” I began, “that is just what I do, not what I am.” “Then come and sit with me,” he laughed uproariously.

I felt bonded with him from that moment. He helped me to go deeper towards the discovery of who I am, and to identify less with the role I played. Indeed, like his great Tamil contemporary, Ramana Maharshi of Arunachalam, in South India, Yogaswami used “Who am I?” as a mantra as well as an existential question. He often chided me for running around the country, attending one official function after another, and neglecting the practice of sitting meditation. When I got back to Ceylon from home leave in Canada, after visiting, on the way around the planet, France, Canada, Japan, Indonesia, and Cambodia, he sat me down firmly beside him and told me that I was spending my life-energy uselessly, looking always outward for what could only be found within.

“You are all the time running about, doing something, instead of sitting still and just being. Why don’t you sit at home and confront yourself as you are, asking yourself, not me, “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?” His voice rose in pitch, volume, and intensity with each repetition of the question until he was screaming at me with all his force.

Then suddenly he was silent, very powerfully silent, filling the room with his unspoken teaching that went far beyond words, banishing my turning thoughts with his simple presence. In that moment I knew without any question that I AM; and that that is enough; no “who” needed. I just am. It is a lesson I keep having to relearn, re-experience, for the “doing” and the “thinking” take me over again and again as soon as I forget.

Another time my wife and I brought our three children to see Yogaswami. Turning to the children, he asked each of them, “How old are you?” Our daughter said “Nine,” and the boys, “Eleven” and “Thirteen.” To each in turn Yogaswami replied solemnly, “I am the same age as you.” When the children protested that he couldn’t be three different ages at once, and that he must be much older than their grandfather, Yogaswami just laughed, and winked at us, to see if we understood.

At the time we took it as his joke with the children, but slowly we came to see that he meant something profound, which it was for us to decipher. Now I think this was his way of saying indirectly that although the body may be of very different ages on its way from birth to death, something just as real as our body and for which the body is only a vehicle, always was and always will be. In that sense, we are in essence all “the same age.”

Although I had met Yogaswami many times, I learned to prepare my questions carefully. One day, when I had done so, I approached his hut, took off my shoes, went in and sat down on a straw mat on the earth floor, while he watched me with the attention that never seemed to fail him. “Swami,” I began, “I think…” “Already wrong!” he thundered. And my mind again went into the nonconceptual state that he was such a master at invoking, clearing the way for being.

Looking at the world as it is now, thirty years after his death, I wonder if he would utter the same aphorisms with the same conviction today. I expect he would, challenging us to go still deeper to understand what he meant. Reality cannot be imperfect or wrong; only we can be both wrong and imperfect, when we are not real, when we are not now!" ~ James George, Hinduism today

~ Jnana guru Siva Yogaswami of Jaffna (1872–1964) was a 20th-century Sri Lankan spiritual master, a śivajnani and a natha siddhar revered by both Hindus and Buddhists mainly, however he had a number of Catholic devotees as well. Yogaswami was trained in and practised Kundalini yoga under the guidance of Satguru Chellappaswami, from whom he received guru diksha (initiation).