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 Certain invitations were made, others withdrawn.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.

Advent Journal: At the Behest of Jesus

I am willing to be Utopian this Advent, at the behest of Jesus, who does not see the world any other way. That’s the stance we take – love is real and only love is real. Then you’re in a different space. It’s new and you have be new within it. It takes two to remember we are one.

One way to understand “back to the garden” is that it refers to our child’s mind before the distinction that is “I” occurs (e.g., T-2.I.3:1). Note that this distinction does not mean we are conscious of either the change or its effects. The state signified by “the garden” lies beyond the reach of both thought and perception. But we create it or, better, recreate it in certain relationships that are open to transcendence and subversity. A Course in Miracles calls those relationships “holy.”

Holy relationships are transcendent and subversive because they will not tolerate injustice and indifference and work actively to undo those experiences and their effects. The premise of holiness is inclusion – healing and inclusion are not separate. What else could wholeness be?

. . . exempt no one from your love, or you will be hiding a dark place in your mind where the Holy Spirit is not welcome. And thus you will exempt yourself from His healing power, for by not offering total love you will not be healed completely (T-13.III.9:2-3).

The suggestion – for those of tracking A Course in Miracles on the Road to Emmaus (because the Woman at the Well said to) – is that innocence refers to a way of seeing, not a way of behaving. It reflects a natural state of coherence rather than a moral state that can be gained or lost or comprised. We don’t have to do anything but be exactly as God created us – and this takes neither time nor effort, but it does take willingness.

Innocence does not involve projection and denial at all, but only forgiveness, sincerely chosen based on our acceptance of God, and of Love, as our Creator. Innocence lets go of what needs to be defended, seeking only that which can be shared without loss to anyone. But to understand and apply this – to live in this way – we have to explicitly reject the mind/body dualism so beloved of our Greek brothers and sisters long ago.

The ancient Greeks developed and practiced a form of deep thinking about the world and reality that was profoundly effective and durable. Reality is measurable, predictable, discoverable. Yet the only way one can only talk about that world and that reality is by removing the observing self from it. This is separation! The Greeks divided the world into the observer and the observed and made the split a formal condition of their thinking. On this view, separation is the price you pay to reliably understand and interact with reality.

This is a model of thinking that, once adopted, trains other minds to think like it because that’s how human minds work. We’re problem solvers and imitators – if something works for someone, we run with it too. And those Greeks (so beloved of so many in our ACIM community) solved a lot of problems, opened up a lot of paths to happiness, wholeness and health. In certain critical ways, the ancient Greeks invented our minds. And it’s not wrong to be grateful!

But Jesus invites us to a different way of thinking, and a different way of living, and it begins (in the Holy Instant) by noticing how separation is a move that we make, and thus can make differently. Why else choose again?

It’s hard to notice that move – the gap we make so that we can become observers who are separate from what we observe and evaluate and relate with. The move feels natural and even inevitable. It feels right. It begets a sense of certainty and confidence (that can easily morph into arrogance and authoritarianism). But remember! Wittgenstein said that certainty was kin to tone of voice. We speak with certainty in order to convey a sense of conviction but the truth value of our statement is not evaluated according to the tone in which it is uttered. I can say with great passion that it’s raining but my passion cannot turn sunlight into rain (though it might – this is where the trouble begins – convince you to not look out the window or otherwise think for your own self).

So an interesting question is, when are we convinced by truth itself? By the fact before us? And when are we convinced by a feeling – ours or anyone else’s?

And, in both cases, is there another way?

The suggestion is, yeah there’s another way. It’s called you follow Jesus, who was not a dualist like the Greeks, and who did not want the observer removed from the world but rather located in it, entangled and embedded in it, in loving relationship with it. We do have to work with the mind in order to undo the separation, but the result of that work is a level of connection – of happiness, creativity and peace – that transcends anything separation offers. Forget about inside and outside; forget about self and other. Just love.

Christopher Fuchs, who would probably deeply resent my doing this, makes a powerful argument that separation – this division into observer and observed, so central to the Greeks, and so pervasive in our own thought – does NOT conform to reality and therefore should be reassessed.

. . . it’s not that the world is built up from stuff on “the outside” as the Greeks would have had it. Nor is it built up from stuff on “the inside” as the idealists, like George Berkeley and Eddington, would have it. Rather, the stuff of the world is in the character of what each of us encounters every living moment — stuff that is neither inside nor outside, but prior to the very notion of a cut between the two at all.

The cut – the separation – is the cosmic equivalent to the distinction that occurs in the innocent child when “I” appears. The universe cleaves itself in two, into a seer and a seen, and a lot of functionality and information was gained thereby, but at the expense of considerable suffering. We lost our shared innocence and the peace and joy that are its natural effects.

What does Jesus say we are in truth? Something like, we are the site of division prior to the cut, the state of uncertainty or unknowing before it resolves into this particular experience. We are connected – are one – so act like it.

If we are still and quiet, we can see these moves – the division of self and other, self and world, self and God. You can glimpse it as a structure giving shape to what it holds, the way water in a vase assumes the shape of the vase. But what if there are other structures? Other shapes?

In Advent this year I am willing to be Utopian. I am willing to learn how to “love in a loveless place” (T-14.IV.4:10), so that together we can regain the order and harmony of holiness. There is no separation anywhere. Let’s you and I be proof together.

Advent Journal: If the Cross Comes

The cold breaks overnight, may I never forget to be grateful. Morning arrives gray but with a little mist. The river murmurs beyond the pasture, a language I love but never learned to speak.

Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it.

There was a phase in my study and practice when, had somebody said that to me, I would have responded instantly with, “well, something is going to happen, that’s true, but whether it’s good or bad is up to you. Are you looking with ego or the Holy Spirit?”

And then I would’ve launched into a combination theological lecture / psychological pep talk about the role interpretation plays in experience. Just look with the Holy Spirit!

I don’t do that anymore. Or I try not to, anyway.

Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it. In the back of my skull – near the atlas and axis vertebrae – there’s a pressure, like a storm front gathering. It’s hard to describe. There’s an emptiness in me – there has always been an emptiness in me – and sometimes it grows teeth and wants to eat.

There was a time when, had somebody said that to me, that way, I would have said, very dramatic language! Great image! And then gone off a longish soliloquy about how ego loves drama, uses it to keep the stakes high, and the pressure on, and there’s a better way, et cetera.

I don’t do that anymore.

I’ve learned that sometimes the Holy Spirit uses that kind of language in order to help me go deeper, so I can see the error, the pathology, more clearly, so that the letting go – which is all healing is, in the end – can be authentic and as close to total as possible. I’m not saying it has to work that way for you but there’s a reason you’re reading this. Yesterday I called it all a Derridean play of signs; today I just seen distant lights, like fireflies, all of us lost in the lonesome valley hefting out lanterns. I’m here – find me!

I carry a flake of hay to the horses, pause by the hemlocks to see if I can hear the cardinals waking up. A few flakes of snow spiral through the air.

More and more I don’t want the metaphysical arguments – am I a body, is the world real, how does God intervene, et cetera. I indulged those questions a long time. They’re fun and interesting. And certainly all that work became the rich turf Sawicki used to teach me how to see Jesus. But still. Something in the abstraction no longer appeals. I want to hold something; I want to be held.

But wait – aren’t we talking about letting go? About healing as letting go? What’s this “hold me” cry? Are we channeling John Denver all of a sudden? Rihanna featuring Mikky Ekko?

What is going on today? In the writing and in my mind? Why is my heart so quiet, as if hiding or disowned? What’s wrong?

Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it. I’m going to have to just take it again, because of who’s giving it, aren’t I. I don’t have a choice; it doesn’t matter how I define or explain or poeticize it. It’s going to happen; it’s going to be bad; it’s going to hurt. I’ve been here before; I know how it goes.

I sit quietly in the hay loft with coffee, neither writing nor praying. The room lightens slowly; the cat paws the door. I can hear passersby on Main Street.

The world is waking up.

I wrote yesterday that we can’t avoid the cross. The crucifix says something specific and true about love, and we have to face it. But what does it say? Does it have to do with what you give? Or the way in which you give it? The extent to which you give it?

We don’t talk about it a lot but a Cynic, contemporaneous with Jesus, said to his fellow Cynics, look, if the cross comes for you, then the cross comes. Accept it with the same equanimity as you do everything else.

That was how Cynics rolled – you didn’t get worked about the vicissitudes of life, you accepted them. Food, no food, shelter, no shelter. It was all the same. You reached a state of coherence in which there was neither resistance nor reaction, only relationship. Of course that balance applied to whatever beef the imperial class has with you, and whatever form of death they decided to deal.

The suggestion is, Jesus was saying something similar. He and his followers knew that some form of religio-political persecution – up to and including torture and death – was possible, even likely. Following Jesus is no joke, then or now. But his take was, look, maybe crucifixion happens, maybe not. Either way, it doesn’t change our work – loving, forgiving, feeding and healing. And we’re not alone. If one of us goes up on the tree, the others carry on. And you can see the wisdom of that, and you can let the wisdom of it calm you. Yeah, a bad thing might happen but it’s okay – it’s more than okay. Deeper than the personal harm and suffering is a love that will make this all okay. This work didn’t begin with Jesus and it sure as hell didn’t end with him. There’s something important in that – a coherence, a continuity, a communion.

You remember theold Buddhist story? The farmer’s horse runs away and everyone is like, oh, that’s too bad. The farmer says, maybe good, maybe bad. The next day the horse returns and everybody says, great news! To which the farmer says, maybe good and maybe bad. On and on it goes. It’s the “on and on” we want to notice. Life happens, change happens, and what all that means is . . . kind of beyond us. Not really the point? Remind me again there’s another way?

The writing goes slowly; morning begins before it’s finished. Here and there – between breakfast, phone calls, chores, meetings – I scribble and jot. Notes for later, sentences I want to remember. Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it. But I’m not afraid of it. And anyway, there’s work to do. I’m going to let the writing end here. Sometimes you have to let go. Sometimes you do.

Advent Journal: Stars Then

The stars were so bright this morning, the air so still and cold. Imagine craving diamonds or a lover when a sky like this is just given to you! Or am I confused again about God?

Laughing at myself in the darkness – my wordiness, my devotion to inquiry, my goofy knack for stumbling into moments of clarity and bliss. Shivering under the hemlocks, loving myself in the broken way that is yet to fully heal.

It’s okay. It’s more than okay.

I come inside and make coffee and sit down to write. I am finding I am not finished with A Course in Miracles, nor with the difficulties it poses for all my relationships. It points to the Sermon on the Mount, which points to a way of being in the world that is so radical I had to have a love affair with Buddhism in order to understand it (and still, from time to time, need that serene and grounded reminder what’s what).

In the toy store Saturday, I lingered in the rocks section – the crystals, the geodes, the shark teeth, the fossils. I felt such a longing for a piece of amethyst! But typically in my life I don’t purchase crystals, they are gifted to me, or show up in odd transactions that include music. It was just funny to be in the presence of the desire to possess something, to own it, have it, keep it, call it “mine.” It’s harmless enough (buy the amethyst or don’t but for the love of Christ get on with it), but desire scales up quickly. War and oppression are not accidents but predictable effects of refusing to accept that the present moment, presently constellated, is enough. It’s not fun to trip into the parts of your mind that are insatiable, that don’t care what havoc or hell their appetites unleash. To crave is to suffer, yes, but also, to crave is to cause suffering for others. And there is – my God there is – another way.

The woman at the well showed me how to find Jesus and so I instantly made the familiar move: I forgot about Jesus, put the woman at the well on a pedestal and began writing poems for her. It’s so easy to remain confused! Jesus gives himself away but we don’t want the gift. We don’t want it because he comes not giving but asking – that we love the way he loves, forgive the way he forgives, and heal the way he heals. You get the inner peace, yes, and you get the bliss, yes, but you also get the crucifix. You understand? The crucifix isn’t literal – all of this is just a word game, a Derridean play of signs – but it points to something deep and true about the nature of love that we just don’t want to see. You have to give up everything, including giving up everything.

I remember many years ago in Burlington, Vermont throwing away a packet of love letters, thinking it was a way to let go of the pain of losing the relationship. I hurt terribly; the loneliness was indescribable. I remember looking at the letters in the dumpster where I’d tossed them – the red, white and blue of the “par avion” envelopes – and knowing instantly that nothing had changed. But in the end, that was what helped – learning that what I did with the letters didn’t affect the interior suffering at all. That insight let a little light in. It allowed me – or helped allow me – to see the relationship differently and thus, eventually, become open to new relationships, new ways of being wordy, and new ways of living together in love. I have no memory anymore of the content of those letters; I can’t recall a single sentence. We were young, under the sway of Keats and Austin, and there is nothing new under the sun. But I can still see the script – the handwriting – and something in me softens accordingly, becomes happy in a kind of reckless flowing way, and I want to share that with you. Show that to you? Is it clear then? Becoming clearer at least? What matters and what does not? I’m not asking for myself alone, and I am asking.

Let those stars, then, be my gift to you. But you’ll have to use these sentences to find them, dear. How else will I possibly remember the way?

Advent Journal: When the Light Passes Through

Yesterday was funny. I bought four pretty little glass mugs at a tag sale for two dollars. All four together fit in the palm of my hand. I love colored glass and anything else that becomes even more beautiful when the light passes through it. How easy it is sometimes to be happy!

In the morning, out back doing chores, just past the blackberries, I remembered this sentence in Gerd Theissen’s The Religion of the Earliest Churches: Creating a Symbolic World: “The historical Jesus revitalized Jewish religion” (41).

Everything I understand to be true or at least correct about Jesus crystallizes in that sentence. Its light is blinding.

I thought about it for a few minutes, standing still in the cold, each breath a gust of snowy air. You can let go of Jesus; Abhishiktananda makes pretty clear at some point you have to. I worked on this over the summer but didn’t get far – that cross is no joke. But Theissen – by reducing perfectly Jesus to a sign – shows the way. Jesus reflects – points to – a certain cultural religious understanding of right use of power. If that resonates, great! But don’t linger at the sign – go directly into that to which the sign points. Follow the instructions, follow the directions, and see what happens. That’s what Jesus did.

Does that make sense?

For me, the thing about becoming serious about Jesus – about being in actual relationship with him – is that he’s not in A Course in Miracles (which, paradoxically, is how I was finally able to see him). A Course in Miracles makes ontological claims that the historical Jesus did not make. It’s okay to make a different ontological claim than Jesus made! It’s less okay to make one he did not and pretend that he did. That’s just garden-variety projection, and there’s a better way.

In my experience (under the rubric of Marianne Sawicki more than anything else) it is possible to get very close to Jesus. But doing so doesn’t place us in the sphere of oneness in which ACIM operates and about which so many of us fantasize. Its emphasis on unconditional love is not theoretical but applied. Anybody can do it, and everybody does do it from time to time. It’s a different kind of practice arising from a different kind of study.

But if you do follow that path – have that relationship, accept that discipleship – then you will remember oneness and you will remember the Love of God and share it with all of creation. You’re just getting there on a different path. There is no separation anywhere.

Back of all of this wool-gathering is David Carse, who cheerfully indulges U.G. Krishnamurti’s “monstrous nihilism,” though he prefers more poetic expressions, like this from Nisargadatta Maharaj.

When you are very quiet, you have arrived at the basis of everything.
That is the deep, dark blue state
in which there are millions of stars and planets.
When you are in that state, you have no awareness of your existence.

Carse will not let you bypass nihilism. “Being and Nothing are the last concepts, and the last experiences, available to us,” he writes in Perfect Brilliant Stillness (386). You cannot possess or know or hold – you cannot keep – anything, not even awareness. Not even love. And certainly not Jesus.

Which, great. That’s absolutely a way to look at it.

But later, at the coop and the library, I ran into all these signs of Zen Buddhism, leftover decorations and so forth from Bodhi Day. The library even had an anniversary edition of Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen on display. I read that cover to cover seven times in my early twenties and didn’t learn a thing. Clearly the cosmos was signaling me, all but beating me over the head. Do you want to begin again? Even Carse had to laugh.

Now it’s Sunday, a day of rest. I’m writing while pea soup simmers. The Christmas tree lights are on, and the house is very quiet. I’m happy in a shy way; I know how much can be taken from us, often without warning. But also, there is a great love in the cosmos, and from time to time it remembers itself in my heart. How grateful I am to sip from this cup, hold it to the light, and bathe in its rays of blessing and grace.

Advent Journal: A Piece of Bread

Differences appear, right? This shirt is blue, that one is red. Sunflowers are not bluets. When you fall into the lake, I don’t get wet.

Differences are not a problem. The problem is when you and I say, “this difference is me.” When we talk about separation, that’s what we’re talking about – that subtle interior claim to possession. This is me, that is not. It seems harmless enough – even natural – but it’s the source of all our suffering.

The move to separate shows up inside us as the reflexive need to judge, evaluate, defend and attack. It’s the reflexive longing to avoid criticism and receive praise. But the world begotten by thatpractice is not a world of love and connection, but of fear and disorder.

We have so much potential for a gentler, kinder way. We are creative, compassionate, playful and kind. Waking up doesn’t mean LOSING those qualities. It means letting go of the imaginary center that claims that potential as uniquely its own. Waking up dissolves the sense of ownership – the sense that something is personally at stake in every moment.

The suggestion is that the appearance of differences is useful in terms of communication and cooperation. It takes two to be one. The differences that appear aren’t absolute. They’re more like suggestions. Try the one relationship this way; now try itthat way.

When we insist on separation, we feel shame, anger, guilt and fear. Those feelings lead to narratives about scarcity and trauma, the need to take care of ourselves over and against others. Those narratives become cultural, political, religious. They harden into borders. “I’ll never speak to you again,” or “we don’t want people from shithole countries.” Eventually it scales up to war and genocide, and the torturous logic that attempts to justify evil. If the outside world is the picture of an inside condition – and that is not an unhelpful way to frame it – then we have a lot of work to do, you and I. A lot.

The end of separation is just the end of our attachment to – our investment in – separation. Again, the appearance of differences is not the problem. Differences happen. But they can be used to isolate ourselves and instigate conflict or they can be invitations to join and collaborate in recreating the Edenic promise. What do you want? Really and truly?

In my life, this insight came first through eastern religious traditions being filtered through western culture and commerce. The Gospel According to Zen, Alan Watts. I was in high school when that stuff appeared for me. I had no idea what it meant but I liked it. I spent years trying to be Buddhist, and then even more years trying to understand why I couldn’t be Buddhist. I have great respect for those traditions, and profound gratitude for the folks who helped me discover and learn from them.

But my path is the following Jesus path, and Jesus doesn’t make those kinds of claims. He doesn’t ask is the world real or what am I in truth. He doesn’t care about projection and denial or whether forgiveness makes the error real.

Instead, Jesus talks about justice, and how practicing justice is the way to fully realize our potential for love. We are fully God’s children when we love the way God loves. For Jesus, perception of difference is simply an invitation to practice remembering that love does not do borders or hierarchies or conflicts. Justice is not an argument to be won or lost in a classroom or a court or a temple. It’s a practice that we take into the world and live.

Last night I was thinking about Therese of Lisieux. Therese is a good example of what I’m talking about in the drafty itinerancy essay mentioned yesterday. Itinerancy is not about the absence of possessions. It’s about the undoing of the one who claims a right to possession in the first place.

Therese made a commitment to being less by having less. She actively sought deprivation and hardship. If there was a nun she didn’t like, she made a point of sitting with that nun as often as possible. If a piece of bread fell on the floor, Therese volunteered to eat it. When she realized she had tuberculosis, she lit up with joy.

There is a lot of Catholic dysfunction in that. And, deeper, there is a lot of confusion about the relationship between suffering and virtue. I hear that, and I see that.

But also, Therese discovered something that Jesus had also discovered – you can let the false self go by actively refusing its claims to specialness. Therese put her body into the undoing of ego. And honestly? When you do that? Ego doesn’t stand a chance. That crucifix is no joke.

Putting our body into the undoing of ego means bringing it to the cushion, a meeting, therapy, a writing nook, whatever. But it also means – it has to also mean – actively working with each other to create together a world in which all bodies can bring themselves to the undoing of ego. We leave nobody behind. Heaven is all of us or it’s not Heaven.

A Course in Miracles is one way of packaging nonduality for consumption. How grateful I am for it! But it’s not special. It’s just another eddy in the brook, like you and me, and like Buddhism and Catholicisim. Is it helpful? Yes? Okay then. Work it.

Whatever path we’re on, it’s downstream of the work which is simply to notice the subtle interior movements towards possession – this is mine, this is not, I have a right to feel differently, you have an obligation to treat me differently, et cetera et cetera.

Notice the inclination to possess the experience and then ask – what is going on here? How is it going on? What is the inclination after? What beliefs does it depend on? What effects are produced by its activity? Are they fitting to a Child of God?

I found that once I could see clearly that inclination to possession, I did not want to align with it. I wanted another way. I wanted to align with something simpler and gentler, and given to coherence rather than conflict. And that other way is given – it was always right here. But it’s obscured by the error of separation.

We are nearing the middle of Advent, bearing down on Bethlehem and its as-yet empty manger. There are gifts at the end of this journey; there is new life. Here in the cold dark – frantically trying to finish writing before chores (the blind horse is crying out) – I thank God for you and for the way you showed me was the way.