I haven’t really been slacking. I fact, I’ve posted three new reviews and have expanded the First Contact, 2005 page. The whole thing reads now like a four-page mini-site, with reviews of Surface, Invasion, and Threshold. I’ll be posting my review of War of the Worlds this evening.
Buy bewilderment
A friend recently asked me to explain a verse of Rumi:
Sell your cleverness,
and buy bewilderment.
I tried explaining it like this:
The heart of mysticism is realizing the Mystery of God. Realizing is not understanding in the intellectual sense. A young child realizes God’s beauty, order and perfection through their absorption, curiosity and naked openness to the world. Hence, Jesus said we must come as little children or we cannot enter the Kingdom of God (the realm where God is all).
You might also call it the difference between apprehending and comprehending. Luther says, “bewilderment is the true comprehension” to be lost in God is to be more “found” than anyone can be with a GPS!
“Lose your psyche for my sake, and you will find it.”
Rumi’s “sell your understanding” means do not attempt to seek the holy Presence through your mind. The mind has its own purposes, but that’s not one of them. It’s not knowledge, but emptiness, openness, spaciousness of the heart. Room for God, or Capax dei. The “capacity” toward God that Mary had, and brought forth Christ.
“Buy bewilderment” means that as you begin to see God anew, stop trying to constantly note distinctions and comparisons, and allow yourself to be amazed and even confused.
Isaiah recorded God saying “as heaven/sky is higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, my thoughts than your thoughts.”
We can not understand God’s thoughts, because he does not have them in the sense that we do. When God—the Source of all that is, moves in any way, the result is appearance in the manifest world we call Creation. If God thinks “tree,” a tree appears.
Encountering God’s presence is bewildering. It cannot be “understood” for it is beyond mind. Kierkegaard said, “if you think you understand, then it isn’t God.” In fact, it is the nature of the ego, what Paul called “the flesh,” to recoil from this Presence. It’s like dipping your toe in a swimming pool and deciding it’s too cold. But if you just jump in, after the initial “bewilderment,” you begin adjusting to the water.
In the same way, as we begin to rein in the egoic mind, we become more and more accustomed to this bewilderment, and start realizing it as our natural resting place.
In the Gospel of Thomas verse 2, Jesus is recorded as saying: “Blessed are they who do not cease seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. And being disturbed, they will marvel and reign over All.”
After being disturbed and marveling, the culmination of the process is “ruling over All,” which I believe is a reference to divine transformation, or theosis—a state of union with God, in which the human soul becomes so permeated by God’s Spirit that we become like Christ, fully human, yet fully divine. The imago dei (image of God), the essence of our being, becomes clear. Like Mary, we bring forth Christ’s presence into the world. With Jesus, we become “other members” of the Body of Christ, and yet no less Christ than He is.
When I read Paul now, I sense his dismay that this wasn’t happening to everyone in the Church. “How is it that you act as mere men,” he says, as though he expected Christians to become “gods with God” (as one of the Church Fathers put it). After all, that’s exactly what happened to him after his blinding, bewildering encounter on the way to Damascus.
For most though, it takes ongoing work to subjugate the ego. And it’s not by trying to do better, pray harder, believe more strongly, doing more good deeds, or anything like that, but by constant releasing and emptying. What Jesus called self-denial and “carrying the cross” (to die), and Paul called putting off the “old man” and “dying to self.”
Enlightened teachers talk about the “death” of the self or the dismantling of the ego, (although in fact there always is some egoic remnant that remains.) My own teacher told me that it is very bewildering to find yourself without a “self.” But it does happen, whether in ever-so-gradual stages, or in an unexpected blast of enlightening grace, as with Paul.
My greatest difficulty on the path is I keep buying understanding. Knowing stuff is SO comforting to my ego. I’m smart. I’m a Christian mystic. I’m somebody. And being “somebody” keeps me from being the nobody, the empty vessel ready to be filled.
Still catching up
I’m still catching up on reading these few blogs. Wow. What I miss when I don’t get to them for a couple of weeks. Your blogs demand thought, reflection, and inspire comments. This is not just a matter of reading a couple of screens of info on less than two dozen blogs.
When I come up for air, I’m going to begin writing about the “first contact” stories of 2005: War of the Worlds, Surface, Invasion, and Threshold. It seems to me that this year science-fiction has impacted television more than ever before, though all the stories are earthbound and tense. What are your thoughts?
What did I do to deserve you?
The last couple of days, my great intentions (ha!) of writing new pages for this site have been thwarted. I’ve been catching up on blogs. You, my blogger friends, have made me drunk. As I told Meredith in a comment. I literally feel dizzy after drinking in the ecstasy and realization of her last post Sadiq’s blog has largely the same effect. And Mark at Eternal Awareness has 2 posts on his front page that made my jaw drop.
Ron, my preacher friend at Symphonic, shares his ever-increasing mystic insights, questing, and love, as do all my other blog friends? Trev, Darrell, and Bob, Rick, Twyla, Larry , ?forgive me if I left anyone out!
I keep my list of bloglinks small because I really do read them, and hey, I’ve got a life. But what a life it is when you are surrounded by souls like these: geniuses of the heart?mystics. Angels with crooked halos and grunge guitars, laughing and crying at the mad, mad, glad, glad situation of being spirit in a body in a world like this. Writers with an honesty and humility that puts me to shame.
I think no one ever had company like this.
Although I live alone, I feel so incredibly blessed to have friends who aren’t just “blessings,” but are manifestations of Blessing itself.
What did I do to deserve you?
Sufi Dogs
Eckhart Tolle wrote in The Power of Now: “I have lived with several Zen masters, all of them cats.” Today I found this wonderful post on Sadiq’s blog about the qualities of dogs and saints.
Thoughtsea
Isn’t it amazing, that we live in a sea of ideas, interpretations, associations, and identifications?an ocean of superflous thoughts?when all we need is to live?
And I probably do it more than most. How wonderful are those moments when the noise falls silent, and I just am.
Being human being
My teacher often points out that the Spirit seeks embodiment. “Being a human is such a wonderful thing, everyone’s trying to do it, even God!” Tonight, he said that all God wants is a human being. That’s what the Creator created. Unfortunately, God got a little less than what was ordered!
In his book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle puts it this way:
You are a human being. What does that mean? Mastery of life is not a question of control, but of finding a balance between human and Being. Mother, father, husband, wife, young, old, the roles you play, the functions you fulfill, whatever you do?all that belongs to the human dimension. It has its place and needs to be honored, but in itself it is not enough for a fulfilled, truly meaningful relationship or life. Human alone is never enough, no matter how hard you try or what you achieve. Then there is Being. It is found in the still, alert presence of Consciousness itself, the Consicousness that you are. Human is form. Being is formless. Human and Being are not separate but interwoven.
Life really is so much simpler than almost anyone would have you believe.
Citizen of a country or a Kingdom?
It occurs to me, that practically speaking, the Church has neither the interest in, nor the ability to further Jesus’ mission of helping people to realize the Kingdom of the Father. No matter what its stated purpose is, the de facto purpose of the vast majority of churches is to create “good citizens” strongly anchored in a belief system that Jesus never taught.
Today at work, our websites took down our Red Cross donation buttons. This is when the focus shifts from the American Katrina disaster, to the South Asian earthquake disaster. It’s now estimated that 80,000 people are dead, unknown numbers homeless, and reconstruction can’t even begin until summer next year. But our websites aren’t going to encourage you to donate to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and there will be no prime-time fundraising concerts on our TV channels. No matter how much greater the need is. Hey, they’re not Americans, are they?
I think of the media, dutifully honoring every single American soldier who dies in Iraq as a hero, regardless of the circumstances of their life or death (and some undoubtedly are — don’t get me wrong). But no newscast is going to spend 5 minutes reporting and mourning the life of an Iraqi mother, father, son, daughter killed by the insurgency—or by our fire. Being an American is what counts.
Some people’s beliefs cause them to join terrorist groups, and wreak havoc in isolated attacks. Some people’s beliefs cause them to join massive armies that wreak havoc by trying to remake the world in its own image. And the Church, with certain exceptions, applauds the latter. The institution forsakes Christ, and serves Caesar.
I can’t imagine that the myopic culture of Americanism — imagining America simply to be the world, or the only part of the world that counts—would have developed if the Church had kept the Gospels paramount. But “coming as a little child” is hard work, and becoming a good citizen believer is so much easier. But there’s a difference: Jesus told us we must become as little children again, or we miss this Kingdom of heaven.
Little children don’t care about national boundaries —at least not until their parents and teachers brainwash them into think that imaginary lines we superimpose on the trees, hills, rivers, and seas actually separate the world into “us” and “them”. To the little ones, there is just one realm, one Kingdom to live in. And we miss it.
I had a spiritual conversation with someone recently, who’s been conditioned to hear the voice of God in one place only, speaking only certain approved things. He’s a good citizen. And a believer. A really great guy. But, he’s missingthe Kingdom.
Call me a Christian, a Buddhist, a mystic, a heretic, an apostate, an unbeliever. Your labels are your business. All I want is to know God’s heart, and reflect it. What is really is there, but God’s divine love, underneath and within all things, causing them to be? And what purpose is there except to realize it?
Show me a national boundary that God respects, which neither the wind nor the Spirit cross. Then I’ll take countries seriously. Till then, enjoy the dream. Or wake up.
Tolle does it again
Eckhart Tolle, 
author of the spiritual bestseller The Power of Now has a new book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, on the bookshelves. I’ve just started it, so it might be a little while before I can review it in depth, but my initial impression is that this book is very powerful. So powerful, in fact, that I’ve often had to put it down after reading a couple of pages. The teacher’s presence is felt through his words.
It seems that in this book, Tolle will go more deeply into what he’s taught in the The Power of Now, as well as describe in much greater detail the nature of the ego, and the social and global consequences of awakening and unconsciousness. I greatly look forward to reading this.
i is imaginary
It’s a strange quirk of the English language that we capitalize the pronoun I. We don’t capitalize we, nor you, as the Germans do with Sie. Capitalization is a degree of honor in English. We give names the honor of being distinguished from mere words, and we give I tons of symbolic honor, the only word (not a name) that’s capitalized on every single occurrance.
But that’s nothing. I is a number as well, and not just any number, but the number, number one. 1. Numero uno. The beginning. The reference point. In probability, 1 represents total and complete certainty. In logic and Boolean algebra, 1 represents truth. In set theory, 1 represents everything.
How interesting that we call I the first person. And how interesting that what “I” perceive is my reference point, my beginning. And how interesting that we all confuse the view of “I” with the Truth. Certainty. Everything.
But the same letter also expresses a very different reality. In its abstract way, the relationships of other realms are reflected in mathmatics. And as mystics know that there is something beyond the material universe or “real world,” mathematicians denote a realm vastly larger than that of “real numbers.” It’s the world of i, not I.
When I is written in the lower case, i, it no longer represents 1, the truth, the whole, and certainty. Instead, it symbolizes the basic unit of a completely different framework, strangely called the imaginary, although the imaginary number i is just as real (and just as imaginary!) as the “real number” 1.
Spiritually, When the ego is shifted to the lower case, it no longer confuses its perceptions with the truth, the universe, and certainty. Instead it sees clearly, the “real world” and the _real_ world, which is “imaginary” in the viewpoint of those who are closed to the Spirit.
What’s it like?
1 / 0 = x
X = you.