Year: 2006

Teachers, continued

Jon6 Comments

I think I might have created some inadvertent confusion with my last post. I certainly don’t think that everyone who reads this blog should start looking for an enlightened teacher, although there are a few whom I know well enough to think that they might be at that point.

I think someone might be ready for a teacher when not only does learning “about” God no longer satisfies, but “spiritual growth” also no longer satisfies. When you’re sick of the ups and downs of spiritual experience; feeling close to God one day, not feeling there the next, and you must have Something beyond “experiences.” You want God, all of God, everything God has for you, and nothing else will do; you feel you must become enlightened or die. At least, that’s how it was for me…

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Find yourself a teacher!

Jon5 Comments

Every Thursday night, I go to my teacher’s satsang (gathering), with other local members of our sangha. (Most of Kitabu Roshi’s students are scattered around the world.) In recent meetings, I find the connection between him and myself growing stronger, communication clearer, and the “presence” increasing. To put it simply, being with him is probably what being with Jesus was like for the disciples.

A spiritual master, an enlightenment teacher, is a very different kind of instructor than any other. They are not self-help coaches, psychologists, or “spiritual directors.” They’re not interested in your subconscious or your dreams. They are there not to teach you things to “believe in,” to affirm your beliefs, or even to affirm “you.” Rather, they reveal the true You to you, and that means helping you to get your f%$@-ing self out of the way. It takes commitment, courage, perseverance, and humility from the student. Teachers are not always easy to understand, especially at first, and the teacher must stretch you and help you change your mind, to see beyond the appearances of things. And this kind of change is very threatening to the ego, which will resist it, as surely as the sun rises in the morning.

But a true teacher loves you like no one else does… because he or she knows what you really are. A teacher is committed to helping you overcome the barriers. When we saw that the martial approach wasn’t working well for me, Kitabu Roshi encouraged me to come to satsangs, which was exactly what I needed. What is a satsang like? Kitabu’s satsangs have a lot of teaching, then some time for either questions or meditation, followed by socializing and fellowship with delicious food.

There’s a saying in wisdom traditions around the world, that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. This is true. But more people need to become students and get ready. The world needs more people to see past appearances. Now is the time.

I have returned!

Jon5 Comments

Remember, I never said I was coming back on April 1st! But I am back now. Things became very busy for me, so that vision of free evenings spent in contemplation and so forth didn’t happen… and I think that blogging actually is one of my most important spiritual exercises now. The fact is, I need you guys–I really do.

A few changes to the site: A couple of you caught up with me today about “fatal errors” on my site. That’s fixed now. I’ve switched the blogging engine to WordPress, and although I had a false start, things are running smoothly. This afternoon and evening, you might have seen my home page completely unstyled, which was an observance of CSS Naked Day, a light-hearted and rather nerdy effort by Web coders/designers to promote interest in Web standards and CSS. Probably didn’t do much but to get you to think my “fatal errors” had morphed into “comatose mistakes!” 🙂

Also: Although I couldn’t be happier about the move to WordPress, it’s going to take me a while to modify the templates and style it to suit me. Be patient… (after all, I have to be!)

And lastly: The comments?the 500 comments that you left for me over the last two yearsdidn’t make it. Unfortunately the only script to import Haloscan comments into WP assumes that I’m also importing posts from Blogger, which of course I wasn’t–I’d been using Movable Type. After days of trying to find a way to move the comments into the posts, I’ve given up for the most part. When I have time, I probably will manually import a few “keepers,” but it’s going to be very few if any. I’d love to keep them all, but I’ve been presented with a lesson in non-attachment.

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I shall return…

JonLeave a comment

But not in March. I need a vacation from blogging, so I’m taking it now. I’ll be back in April. Blogging is wonderful, and I’m hooked. The best thing of all is getting to know people, even making close friends, from around the world, sharing insights, confusion, perspectives, laughs…

I had no idea where this would take me when I decided to add a blog to my site two years ago. Almost every day, I visit Singapore, Chicago and California! I travel the world in minutes, soaking up days of inspiration in seconds, from traditions around the world. I’m a spiritual junkie who got impatient with having the Spirit poured onto him, and has been mainlining It with a syringe the size of Norfolk.

It also takes a lot of my time. I can spend a lot of time writing a post, and I always spend a lot of time reading them. And the posts they’re linked to. And the posts they’re linked to…

I’m not the only one. My friend Mark has gone on a temporary blog sabbatical, Trev just came back from one, and Isaiah’s rest is (unfortunately) long-term.

Like them, I need to slow down a bit and digest more. I need to process some stuff privately before I can really incorporate it into my public writing. For example, the experience I wrote about in January is still changing my view of things. I can’t write about it when I don’t know what the heck I feel about it myself. And if you think I’ve probably written a dozens of pages about it in my private journal, think again. I need to, though, and I need to sit and meditate, write more poetry, organize what I’ve written, and just rest and relax a bit more, and interface more with “wetware.”

And on the other hand, I need to learn more PHP and improve my abyssmal programming skills, and stuff like that. I also want to redesign the site and maybe convert the MT blog to WordPress or something else, perhaps.

But I will return. And unlike 2003-2004 when I vanished for months, I’ll be back next month. That’s a promise. When I do, expect the site to look a bit different. And who knows? Maybe those long-awaited reviews of Harry Potter and Star Wars might manifest!

Please don’t think I’m on retreat or quitting electronic communications. You can keep in touch with me by email, and I’m still reading blogs, (though I might ease up on that slightly). Also, I’m still facilitating the WisdomReading group, and you’re still invited to join!

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Emptiness, clarified

Jon

A friend of mine left a comment on my post on The Mystery of Emptiness and said that the term emptiness bothers her, and she’d like for me to clarify it. Well, how could I resist?

In the past, I’ve used the word “God” quite liberally on this site… in plain and simple language, That is what it’s about. Yet, I find after this latest glimpse, whch I wrote about in, The Suck, I want to write more carefully, and avoid words which easily give false impressions. False impressions are unavoidable, but “loaded” words like God can’t come to anyone without years of conceptual and emotional baggage that prevent communication.

So when I want to write carefully, I make up pronouns like This and That, and It. Eckhart Tolle usually uses the words “Being” or “the Unmanifest” instead of “God.” Other teachers say “the One,” “Consciousness” or “Awareness.” Kabbalah calls This Ein Sof, Endlessness. Zennists speak of Emptiness, the Void, and No-Thing. I agree with Julie–there is something unsettling about those last three. Our mind wants Something, not Nothing.

In that poem, I tried to show something of how wonderful pure Emptiness is. All Creation streams from It, like an empty glass that you can drink from forever without it running dry! Yes, it doesn’t make any sense, and that’s what’s so amazing!

Emptiness cannot be clarified, because it is the essence of clarity.
Emptiness writ large, is spaciousness.
Emptiness writ small is no-Thing.
Emptiness held by a form is capacity.
Emptiness holding a form is boundlessness.
Emptiness explored is void.
Emptiness manifest is everything.
Emptiness loved is God.

Emptiness can be quite frightening when you’re attached to Somethingness. As that falls away, It feels very different, like a white movie screen the Universe is projected upon. Or it’s like an empty canvas holding all possibilites, which you approach with a brush, whittling away the potential images until the one you paint is the one it presents.

Meister Eckhart wrote that when our soul is pure and empty, God cannot fail to shine in it, just as the sun cannot fail to shine on a cloudless day.

I’ll stop with a thought from Lao-Tzu:

Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole which makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that maks it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

—Tao Te Ching, 11

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Something there is…

Jon

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
?Robert Burns

israelwall.jpgThe Wall. If there was a receipe for fueling the resentment that in turn fuels terrorism, this is it.

I’m thinking of how enlightenment teachers emphasize that waking up is necessary for us to stop the madness of war, violence and oppression. Karma is rather simple to understand; you don’t have to be enlightened to see it. Resentment unresolved leads to violence, which leads to violent responses, which lead to more resentment. . . and the wheel keeps on turning on the axis of attachment, hatred and ignorance.

Sarah Walker, a Columbia seminary student created a beautiful, thought-provoking, photo essay on the wall from a Christian point of view: The Gospel according to . . . The photos are by Adam Cleaveland, a Princeton seminarian who spent last summer in Bethlehem, and whose blog pomomusinngs

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End of the Spear

Jon

End of the Spear picEnd of the Spear isn’t a masterpiece on a par with The Mission, but in spite of its low budget and naive manner, it is a very moving story of the power of love to conquer fear, hatred, and violence.

It’s based on the true story of the missionaries who made first contact with the Waodani people of Ecuador, at a time in which they were so involved in revenge killings they were in danger of annihilating themselves off the map. Soon after their initial contact, all five of the missionary men were slaughtered by the Waodani. Yet two years later (in the movie it looks like a few weeks later), Dayumae, a Waodani girl who had lived with the missionaries’ families, returns to the tribe, and brings with her some of the wives of the men who were killed.

Dayumae presents the Gospel in the most simple and profound words:

Oenagongi had a Son: Even though he was speared, he did not spear back.

I love this gospel! I would like so much to hear it proclaimed in America! (In fact, Mincayani, the leader of this Waodani band, eventually came to America with Steven Saint (the son of the missionary he killed) telling how their tribe renounced violence. Are we listening?

I found the “path of the spear” timeline on the official site to be almost as good as the movie itself (and more informative). (Note also the link to Beyond the Gates of Splendor, a documentary of this story which has received better reviews from critics.) Another excellent stop is the Wikipedia article on the Huarani/Waodani people.