Advent Journal: It’s Okay to Love and Be Lifted

Christmas has to do with children. After all of this, given all of this, is that not clear? We are here for the little onesThe wind speaks to the lamb, and the lamb speaks to the shepherd and the shepherd speaks to all of us. The answer to all our problems is a gift, one that we only learn we have by teaching others how to accept.

The idea is, you write each day, and the rhythm carries you, and your control slips a little keeping up, and so here and there, God’s grace appears, and something interesting happens. Maybe.

Advent is the only liturgical season in which I have a consistent and dedicated spiritual practice. It’s hard to talk about, and hard sometimes to even recognize. I don’t know why. I think it’s connected to my pathological willingness to be disappointed, and maybe also to certain threads of optimism I can’t quite seem to destroy. It’s embarrassing how idealistic I am, how Utopian, apocalyptic even (in the sapiential sense). But mostly I’m dreamy and wordy. I think a lot and write a lot but not a lot gets done. Somewhere a child is born in conditions I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Did I say that already? These things don’t happen by accident.

Christmas is my favorite holiday so a season anticipating it always felt appropriate. Christmas is beginning again, but a little recklessly. Hope is a big river whose currents are no joke. Growing up, Christmas was my only experience of abundance – of enough, of more than enough even. There was a spaciousness to Christmas, a generosity. Nobody went without. Food, toys, games, rest, laughter – it was all sufficient. It was a dream but it was a good dream. It was a happy dream. The true self – content, cooperative, communal – broke through like a star and its light touched everything. In Christmastime I was content, not cynical or anxious. Attack and defense were meaningless. Briefly but undeniably the night that never ends, ended.

But I am stumbling this year in Advent. I am forgetting the prayer and forsaking the ritual. I asked to see Jesus, and over the summer I saw Jesus, and sister nothing has been the same ever since. Will he love me if I can only stumble through Advent? What if I ignore Christmas altogether? Why is this so hard still? Part of me wants to be unlovable in order to make others prove their love. It’s a trick I learned a long time ago, a move I’ve gotten regrettably good at. But Jesus doesn’t play that game. He doesn’t love the way you or I love but rather the way God loves. I have failed so often in this life – intentionally and otherwise – and yet here I am happier and freer than I ever dreamed possible. What does this say about God? About Jesus? About us?

I wonder if Advent – seen at last as a season emphasizing renewal and beginning again – has finally put the lie to my pathological fantasy of spiritual purity and religious perfection? I wonder if it’s time to let disappointment go, in favor of . . . what exactly? What is the world if we emphasize process and presence, not perfection? Jesus is clear: the practice of love always reveals the shallowness of our obsession with ideals and standards and rules. Everybody belongs; everybody is welcome. What else could love possibly mean? Of course it’s messy. Of course it’s more like a party than a mass. Have you read the gospels?

Advent is not contingent on a formal practice. You can’t do it wrong. The ritual this year – the prayer, the writing – has proven itself fragile and imperfect. It didn’t work, and I had to let it go. Doing so foregrounds my broken nature but brokenness is not a sin. It’s not a crime against God. You and I can be the beautiful selves we are without polishing up. You and I are no improvement needed. Jesus laughs a lot, in my experience. “You don’t need Advent, you need a hug.”

So in Advent this year I lean into the appearance of imperfection and the experience of fragility. It’s scary. I see it – and my fear of it – everywhere. In my heart, in the news, in this craft which is the means by which we connect. And yet somehow the imperfection and fragility – and the fear they beget – are without effect. When I look around I see a world into which the possibility of another way is about to be born yet again. It’s okay to begin! And begin again. The very act of preparing oneself to be born again is fraught and blemished and it’s okay. It’s more than okay. Love is always showing up in that manger, on that cross, on the road to Emmaus, and in an empty tomb we are afraid to approach. Welcome to my heart, which is lit up by your heart.

A few days before Christmas, something in me softens and unclenches and the road ahead clears. There is no separation anywhere. Do you hear what I hear? Do you see what I see? A song, high above the trees and hills, its voice as large as the sea? A sleeping child whose heart is full of goodness and light? Both are given.

Oh another morning writing with coffee, love in attendance. How grateful I am! How sustained this morning by the gift you showed me was mine to accept. Humming and muttering a carol I am learning it is okay to love and be lifted by.

Advent Journal: The Holy Spirit Will Not Deny You

The Holy Spirit will not deny you. Only the ego ever denies you.

If you feel anything less than perfect peace – perfect happiness, perfect rest, and perfect holiness – then you are listening to ego, who never means you well. This is not a crime against God or nature but there IS a better way: listen only to the Holy Spirit, who will not deny you.

II

The Holy Spirit will not deny you perfect happiness, rest and holiness. If you are experience anything other than perfect happiness, rest and holiness, then you are listening to the ego, whose only wish for you is suffering and death.

In other words, these things that cause you anxiety and worry, these things that you dread and resent, these things that take you so high and so low – work, money, sex, family, art, magick – are not the problem. The problem is the way you look at them.

The problem is that you don’t look with the Holy Spirit. You refuse its gift of Christ Vision. You still insist on ego – on chaos and violence. This is not a crime against God or nature but there is another way, which is the way of peace, the way of joy, the way of holy relationship.

The way of peace means looking at everything in our lives with the Holy Spirit. Nor will the Holy Spirit refuse to look with you. The Holy Spirit does not deny you ever.

III

The Holy Spirit refuses us nothing; when we ask it to teach us how to accept the Vision of Christ, it teaches us, and its teaching is perfect. Only the ego will refuse us; only the ego will deny us; only the ego will insist we dwell in houses of pain and confusion forever.

The Holy Spirit loves you and teaches you love by teaching you how to be grateful for Your Self, and for your brothers and sisters, without whom love would be less than empty.

Ego teaches you hate by insisting that you fear your self, and others too, and then counsels you to ignore every voice that tries to suggest otherwise.

If fear is your companion in any way, shape or form – here in this body in this this world – then you are looking at life with ego. This is not a crime against God or nature but there is a better way, and that way is to look instead with the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit remembers Love for you, and its remembering is your remembering. When you remember, you become willing to forget ego and its shifting lesson in uncertainty and doubt.

The ego cannot teach you hate because there is no hate – there is only fear. And the solution to fear is to remember Love. Love accepts everything unto itself, including fear, and thus undoes everything in itself, including you. Including this.

IV

The Holy Spirit brings you to the present moment where there is only Love, and nothing else. This experience undoes the value of every other experience, and so we release them. Who needs illusions when the truth is right here? When love is literally given to us and all we need to offer in return is fear?

Advent Journal: Now and Then Singing

I woke up all at once, under a great pressure: decide. But for what? What was the problem I was solving? Or the choice I was making?

It was raining when I fell asleep close to midnight, but while I slept, the rain turned to snow, a light dusting of which spackled the world while I went about my chores in the dim light of six a.m..

Driving to the transfer station, I pulled over by a field that becomes a marsh, abutting low hills off Flat Iron Road. This is where I go to visit red-winged blackbirds but they are gone for the winter. Yet a gold light spilled over the hills, radiating across the already-thinning veil of fallen snow. Nothing is missing; nothing is really gone. You can see it that way.

Choose God, actually. Decide for God, actually.

Chapter Five, Section Seven of A Course in Miracles – The Decision for God – is a kind of mini-Rules for Decision. Ken Wapnick thought the repetition in the material was kin to Beethoven’s evolving thematic emphasis across the duration of a symphony, but for me it mostly reflects a mind that wasn’t sure what to say or how to say it, and was learning as it went. The material which comprises ACIM is an exploration of a certain relationship, and an attempt to bring that relationship to coherence. In nontrivial ways we are bystanders to the course! But also, there are no accidents and everything is shared.

. . . the first step in the undoing is to recognize that you actively decided wrongly, but can as actively decide otherwise. Be very firm with yourself in this, and keep yourself fully aware that the undoing process, which does not come from you, is nevertheless within you because God placed it there (T-5.VII.6:3-4).

We experience separation because we choose to experience separation. But we can choose a different experience – we can choose to remember to God, and God’s Love, and the perfect joy and peace that abide there, awaiting our remembrance. Doing so is our will because it’s God’s Will. (There is no separation anywhere).

But we have to go slowly. This is not a questions of having a different experience – a new partner, a new path, a new perspective. The suggestion A Course in Miracles makes is that our thinking rests on an error and happiness and peace – ours and the world’s – depends on healing that error. We have to see – really see – that we “chose” suffering because we believe something is true that is in fact not true. That’s what we need to see – that’s where we need to be – in order to meaningfully choose again. This is what the course means when it says that our “part” in the Atonement is “merely to return your thinking to the point at which the error was made, and give it over to the Atonement in peace” (T-5.VII.6:5).

For me, the “error” that gave rise to separation was my belief that mind and body are separate, and that this division reflects something unconditionally true about reality. But when I saw that there was no separation anywhere, my understanding of reality shifted in a structurally deep way: it became possible to become responsible for projection and denial. It became possible to love in a way that was not contingent on anything personal or private.

Being responsible for projection and denial is another way of saying that we must become responsible for our feelings and behavior, and not blame anyone or anything else for the way we think and act. There is no blame anywhere in the system; thinking and acting like there is upset and agitates all of us. It pits us against one another in a winner-take-all competition in which even the winners lose eventually.

For me, the solution – there is no separation anywhere – came when I realized that I wanted the peace of God more than I wanted conflict and accepted that I had no earthly idea how to make that happen. But “no separation anywhere” brought me – like in a whale to the shores of Ninevah – into the terrifying simplicity of relationship with Jesus.

As you share my unwillingness to accept error in yourself and others, you must join the great crusade to correct it; listen to my voice, learn to undo error and act to correct it. The power to work miracles belongs to you (T-1.III.1:6-7).

The problem isn’t that we see sin and error in the world – everybody does. The problem is the underlying – deep and hard to see – conviction that sin and error are natural, right even, and just the way things are. Accommodation, not resistance, is the answer. We might be a little more generous, a little slower to judge. But we’re not challenging the whole underlying structure.

Yet that is precisely the work to which A Course in Miracles call us. That is the work to which Jesus calls us. And it is the only work the Holy Spirit can actually help us with. We are “the work of God,”, Whose work is “wholly lovable and wholly loving” (T-1.III.2:3). Why not act like it? How else will we teach one another what we are in truth?

I still get scared sometimes. Sometimes I stumble. No red-winged blackbirds this morning, but on a bent cattail I saw a junco, puffed up against the cold, now and then singing. More than anything I wanted to share it with you. Or were you sharing it with me? Truly, what would the difference even be?

Advent Journal: Pinballing

Last night, sitting quietly doing nothing, pinballing between memories, arguments and fantasies, I remembered something Chris Fields said, and it settled me. It quieted me.

Fields points out (in his commentary on “Excavating Belief About Past Experience: Experiential Dynamics of the Reflective Act” by Urban Kordeš and Ema Demšar) that human experience obviously includes both first- and third-person perspectives. We have a subjective, this-is-what-me-feels-like experience, but we also have the ability to reflect on on what we think and say and do, analyzing it, and making modifications. Relationship is contingent on both perspectives.

Field is talking about science. We have objectively measureable data (e.g., gravity) but also theories about those facts (e.g., how do black holes affect gravity). We move between those perspectives, as if they were in dialogue. “Your theory doesn’t meet the facts.” “Okay but what if we change the experiment?” “Now your theory and the facts are now more harmonious.”

The suggestion is that this works in relationship as well. We are both in relationships – experiencing them in a felt, personal way – but they are also objects that we stand apart from and observe. “We need to learn how to talk better” or “we need to get away together” or “I’m not talking about this anymore until you take your meds.” Et cetera.

In order to be in relationship, we have to approach it from (or with) both perspectives – first and third-person. Per Field, this allows for constructive analysis and informed shifts in the relationship (e.g., from fear to love).

Having two first persons induces a third: the one that “hears” and judges their critical wrangling. The sociality of science is thus enacted within each individual, as well as between the different individuals that must be assumed to exist if the practice of science is to make sense.

Change “sociality of science” and “science” to “relationship” and reread that paragraph. Do you see the breadth and depth of what Field is saying?

The suggestion is that accepting the viability, the functionality, the utility of both first and third-person persepctives enables us to relate better, and to live together with greater peace and happiness. We cohere. Indeed, that state of coherence is more “us” than the so-called separate selves that struggle to cohere.

The labels “first-person” and “third-person” seem of little use in this more “communal” view of cognition. Science in this view is both first and third person, whatever its domain or focus. None of the perspectives involved is “objective” and all can and do confabulate, but by negotiating amongst themselves, they can correct or at least refine one another’s confabulations to produce useful guides to their mutually interdependent activities in their collectively specified world.

Francisco Varela (lauds and praise, lauds and praise) takes this another step further. He suggests shifting our focus away from subjective and objective as stances at all in favor of “participation and interpretation, where the subject and the object are inseparably meshed” (“The Creative Circle: Sketches on the Natural History of Circularity”).

For Varela, the world is “neither subjective nor objective, not one and separable, nor two and inseparable.” This insight . . .

. . . shows, indeed, the fundamental groundlessness of our experience, where we are given regularities and interpretations born out of our common history as biological beings and social entities. Within those consensual domains of common history we live in an apparently endless metamorphosis of interpretations following interpretations.

Varela concludes – and Field agrees – that this is a call to abandon the illusion that one can be “right” or “true” in any objective sense, but that it’s effectively “participation and interpreation” – i.e., relationship – all the way down.

We should do better to fully accept the notoriously different and more difficult situation of existing in a world where no one in particular can have a claim to better understanding in a universal sense. This is indeed interesting: that the empirical world of the living and the logic of self-reference, that the whole of the natural history of circularity should tell us that ethics – tolerance and pluralism, detachment from our own perceptions and values to allow for those of others – is the very foundation of knowledge, and also its final point. At this point, actions are clearer than words.

Fields and the late Varela are brilliant thinkers, whose devotion to science (biology and physics, mainly) is coherent with their spirituality (non-demoninational meditation and Buddhism, respectively). Beneath the academic jargon, beneath the intellectuality, lies a familiar mode.

Whatever reality is – whatever the word “God” and “Christ” point towards – it’s clear that “Love” is nontrivially entangled in it. Prior to culture, prior to language – prior to any separation at all – is relationship and the ethics that sustain and ground relationship. We are built for cooperation; we are made of and for communication.

Before it is described, Love is enacted in and through bodies which are in relationship, especially relationships that seek truth, clarity and coherence. When we seek love, we find love. Our very being is designed – is created, if you prefer – to ask what we are in truth and to remember together the answer, which is Love.

Three Brief Essays on Abhishiktananda

Notes on a Christian Vedanta

I The Ass and the Heart are One

I want to think about something Abhishiktananda said in Ascent to the Depths of the Heart. He said that Christianity could not possibly sugar out only as “concern for one’s brothers” because that failed to fully compass “the experience that Jesus had of the Father” which Abhi considered “an explosion of the Spirit” (342).

For Abhi, to think of Jesus merely in terms of a social or political program was an error. Prior to that – upstream of that – was Jesus’s knowledge of God, his relationship with God, his oneness with God. How did that happen?

Abhi was fascinated that the Christian tradition includes no real reference to how Jesus became Christ. There were no steps to follow. In the Hindu tradition so dear to him, there were actions one could take – sit this way, chant that way, breathe this way et cetera. But Jesus is silent about “methods.” The early followers who resurrected him weren’t focused on technique either. It’s a different kind of path.

Abhi wondered if this relative silence reflected Jesus’s understanding that any encounter between oneself and God is ultimately impossible because “both oneself and God cause all Dualism (dvandvas) to disappear” (342). To know God was to know the self, and vice-versa, and to know either was to undo the separation that produces otherness in the first place.

I do wonder. Jesus taught his followers to be itinerant and nonviolent because those human actions perfectly mirror on earth God’s love, justice and mercy. In my experience, even trying to live that way requires a radical shift in one’s understanding of reality that – surprise surprise – requires undoing the illusion of separation. It’s not mind or body; it’s both. The ass and the heart are one.

It took a long time to write the preceding paragraphs – an hour or so, Colin Vallon’s Sisyphe on repeat, may I never forget to be grateful. Night fell as I wrote, or finished falling. Christmas tree lights reflected faintly in the tea. The tea is cold, but I am happy, content, at odds with noone. All the ways that things can go wrong – and all the ways they did – and still. Look at me writing; look at the writing looking back.

II Into An Experience of Darkness

Near the end, Abhishiktananda said that what distinguished Jesus was the way he claimed his “freedom as a human being.” Most of us cannot bear this freedom – nor the responsibility it entails – so we project it onto God. But Jesus didn’t project it. He accepted it as God’s gift, as God’s will.

I want to understand this better. Abhi is saying, Jesus knew who he was. He accepted with total grace and humility his humanness. He set himself above nobody. The depth of his acceptance – especially in its unconditional nature – brought him to God. There was nothing left to project, nor another on whom to project it. In that state, death on a cross is no harder to accept than a cup of tea from a friend. What else could freedom possibly be?

But Abhi is not cherishing crucifixion; he is not making light of suffering. He is pointing a way beyond all of that, knowing full well that when Jesus attained moksha, his practice – the yoga he left his followers – was a pure form of service that was only possible in the transformative light of divine love. Feed the hungry, welcome the stranger are not practices that lead to God. They are practices that remember God is here now in the form of the hungry, the lost, the forsaken.

In those days, Abhi was also reflecting on the way consciousness of one’s sins deepens awakening by plunging us into an experience of darkness “in the midst of which the Light springs up” (372). I want to understand this better. What is awakening that it should include an awareness of sin? And, in what way does this awareness plunge us into an experience of darkness?

A Course in Miracles suggests that what we call “sin” is better thought of as an “error” (e.g., T-19.II.1:1-3). Whatever you think of that translation, Jesus invited us to actually reflect on our failures to love others – to be kind, gentle, forgiving, merciful, generous, humble and welcoming. But not in order to harm ourselves through judgment or punishment. Nobody does this perfectly! Rather, to see the failure to love so clearly that it undoes itself on the spot, making perfectly clear what we are in truth.

I have sinned. I’m not afraid to say that anymore, and I’m perfectly happy with its Old Testament connotations. When I looked at my sins I hated myself and wanted to die. I believed I deserved to die. But something else happened. I was forgiven; I was taken back into the fold; my inheritance was remembered and restored. A light did spring up – first faintly, but with ever more brightness, until I forgot that all of this had once been a cause for grief and a site of pain.

When you no longer bear the judgment, and no longer fantasize punishment-as-virtue, then you are free. You are free to remember who you are, and to share what you learn with your brothers and sisters. Sharing is awakening, and awakening is shared.

III To Redeem is to Make Free

Near the end, around the time he was musing about Jesus and freedom, almost as an afterthought, Abhi wrote these words: “Redeeming the present. Free it from past and future, embrace its perfect fullness” (372).

That’s it. That’s the journal entry. And on the one hand, it’s kind of meh. But on the other, it points perfectly at what I’m trying to say. In the present, what A Course in Miracles calls the “holy instant,” the separation naturally dissolves and our sins are forgiven. There is a peace and happiness in that space that cannot be forgotten. Even when we slip from it, it calls to us.

The suggestion Abhi makes is not religious. In many ways, the integration of Advaita with Christianity perfected itself in him (hence his applicability to serious ACIM students). The work he suggests is, stop focusing on past and future and instead embrace the reality that is present here and now. Nothing to understand or explain, defend or support, endorse, create or approve. Just the present, presently noticed. Find it, lean into it. Let it be, and be with it.

It’s interesting he calls this “redeeming” the present, isn’t it? One of the older, almost archaic now, meanings of “redeemed” is to save somebody from sin or error or from captivity. To redeem is to make free. I wonder if he was subtly pointing at our spiritual dependence on the present – as a concept, yes, but also an accomplishment or attainment, both of which merely reinforce ego and separation. I wonder if he was gesturing at an even more radical letting-go – that of the self altogether, as if past and future and the present are illusions. I wonder.

Something settles, grows still.

Lately I’ve been practicing not being here. Phone off, nobody in the house. Mostly I sit quietly, but sometimes I sweep the stairs or straighten a painting. I don’t have to think about anything in particular. I don’t have to come up with something to say about it later. I’m not here! Do you know what I’m talking about? How clear and beautiful the world becomes when nothing and nobody is in it?

Advent Journal: The Way Narrows

Suddenly the way narrows. It’s okay – I asked for it. The Upanishads say that only once in a thousand times a thousand years does a soul awaken. But something is happening now that doesn’t neatly map to traditional religious expression. Jesus would not recognize the man on the cross in our churches. Nor why the cross is so prominent. But this is not an argument.

The crescent moon at six a.m. yesterday was beautiful, a thin bright crisp of light just over the gap in eastern hills the river pours through. Who needs a lover? Who needs diamonds or a Cadillac? I mean this: what is enough? How will you know?

For a long time, happiness was conditional, and those conditions enabled me to indulge an interior control addict whose Narcissism is legion. I want it this way! I won’t accept it any other way! If life was a party, then I was its host. Certain invitations were made, others withdrawn. But when you track Jesus through A Course in Miracles along the Road to Emmaus, then eventually you realize that happiness isn’t actually what you’re after. Nor is unhappiness, by the way. Nobody really wants to suffer.

Rather, you’re after a distraction from the truth of what you are. There is something you don’t want to see and that something is you. It sounds simple – and, in a way it is – but we’ve complicated it quite a bit. It’s a human move – not a Greek move or an Aramaic move. It’s not Catholic or Hindu. All of that is downstream of the fear of self-realization because all of that emerges as a solution to that fear. Right identity – right tribe – right practice. We’ve all been there. But if you’re not clear on the problem, if you think the problem is simply you’re not happy – and if you think it’s your job to fix it, which you do – then the many solutions will only make things worse. I wanted to be distracted from the truth, because I thought it would disappoint me. I thought that God and my self – whatever those words point to – would disappoint me. And I couldn’t bear disappointment so I joined the resistance. You know.

A world appears, lives appear within it, wars and famine, peace and plenty. The kids grow up and move away, the horse goes blind, the goldfish spirals to the bottom of the tank. Years pass. Lifetimes, even.

We cannot truly follow Jesus – because we cannot truly respond to Jesus, be in relationship with Jesus – without healing our mind of the disease of separation. But we cannot heal the mind without living – in a clear intentional way – the life that is right here and now uniquely ours. “I” is an effect of a split that is ancient and embedded but not inevitable. We know the truth – it’s given – but we’ve hidden it. Ignored it? Forgotten, in a way, and the forgetting itself forgotten. But even kids get bored of hide and seek eventually. What if the way is stop seeking? What if the way is, just be helpful, in whatever way you can? What did Jesus mean when he said that the Kingdom of God was already among us? Really try and answer that!

Advent is, are you ready to follow Jesus? Advent is, will you travel into the space of readiness? Even if it’s costly? Even if it seems impossible or irrational? Even if it seems ridiculous? Bethlehem is a state of mind in which our potential for redemption – for reconciliation and repair – realizes its divinity. This is the way. You have to trust the signals you’re sending.

Advent is, are you ready to heal your mind? Are you ready to help create a world in which healing is all that matters? Discipleship is that and nothing else – the study and practice of love in a place and a community that has forgotten love. It cannot be done alone.

Did you see the moon yesterday? Or a flower maybe or a smile? Briefly – before concepts of beauty arise, before the impulse to write, before the desire to possess – is a wild interior joy that (without any input from “you” or “me” or “I” at all) is a natural effect of the presence of beauty and clarity. It happens in us the way flowers blossom or chickadees sing. Happiness is a gift, not an accomplishment. Yesterday, that luminous crescent fit perfectly a soul that longs only to be perfected. The way narrows – it’s okay, I asked for it – and every step along it is Heaven.