thoughts on spiritual awakening in today's world
Here’s a remarkable photoblog of New Orleans taken by an employee of a downtown hotel. It covers everything from the storm preparations to his desparate escape four days after the storm passed. What’s really shocking when viewing the pictures, is that these areas were some of the most lightly damaged in the city.
I’ve wanted to say something about Katrina for some time, but there’s really nothing I can say. It’s just that simple. What can I say?
Rick, at a newlife emerging, had this to say in his a recent post
In other words, Jesus did not help folks find God?rather, as the face of God, he found people.
God went looking for us.
And when God found us, God did not chastise us,
God embraced us. God reached out and loved us
In a way that when we felt the true touch of God we could not deny
that we had just encountered the One.
Really, that was just what I needed to hear. It’s a consistent fault of mine that I’m so prone to do the “helping folks find God” thing, rather than simply offering God’s love to them.
I’ve been thinking about two powerful, life-changing spiritual experiences I’ve had. Both of them were encounters with Jesus. The first one was my “born-again” experience. Most people of faith, including most Christians, grow into faith gradually, and have nothing so dramatic as the “born-again” experience which immediately turns life right-side-up and changes _everything_. Some, from traditions where sudden, radical change is suspect, even doubt where the experience is real. I can only speak from my own experience, but what happened to me when I was thirteen was real.
It came to me after months of searching. When I was twelve, I came to wonder if the only reason I believed in God was that my parents had taught me to. I declared myself agnostic in an attempt to learn the truth. I didn’t know if God was there or not, but I reasoned that he could make himself known to me if he was, and so I began praying, and I began experiencing his Presence. However, the Presence (and the peace that came with it) seemed quite temporary. I was desperate for something that lasted, something that could change me. One day, as I was walking home from school, something broke, and since that day, I have never doubted God’s reality (although many times I’ve fought it!).
With that experience, I was also changedI was healed from deep fears, self-loathing, and given literally a new lease on life. I honestly don’t think I would still be alive here if that magnificent breakthrough of grace never occurred. Also from that time, (and actually a little before it) I became an active, passionate church-goer, an ardent Bible-reader, a dedicated (more often than not!) Christian who was a bit odd in having zero loyalty to denominational brands, and moved freely across all Protestant expressions of Christianity, and eventually into Catholicism.
The second one, which I have never publicly shared before, happened five years ago. Like the first, it also came after months of questing. I had recently discovered the teaching of “theosis”:/spirituality/union-with-god/, which seemed to me to be not only the forgotten core of Christianity, but of other religions too, and very simply the meaning of life itself. For some people that would have been enough, but with me, it opened a can of worms. Slowly, I saw many of the assumptions of Christianity come into question. It was like the warmth of the light was making the fabric unravel. Soon, it seemed that the “Gospel” as it had been taught, was grossly misunderstood, that Jesus came to teach us how to live; how to let God’s light transform us and bring us into “the Kingdom of Heaven” here and now, allowing the work of theosis to change us, and make us as divine as Jesus himself.
One night, as I was at the computer typing my journal, Jesus came to me, wholly unexpected. I didn’t see him, but his Presence was as real as anything I’ve ever experienced. He showed me his heart. He showed me scenes from his life. The beauty and power of his love was so intense, I melted and wept. I also saw he hated the religion of his day. There was something else, too. He showed me that he is completely misunderstood, that he began as a human being, and realized God is his Father and our Father, and allowed that realization to transform him into a walking manifestation of God’s love.
And there was nothing he desired except that we do the same.
To be free. Free human beings, free of the concepts and constructs that separate us and bind us. To become sons and daughters of God. To be one with him as he is one with the Father. To allow the Reality to so penetrate me, that “I” am gone, and only God can be seen. To be both innocent and wise, as sly as serpents but as harmless as doves.
It strikes me that the born-again experience is the experience of enlightenment, with the potential to bring people to full and lasting Awakening. In it, there is virtually no ego, God takes over, and everything changes. But sadly, that awareness and simplicity seldom lasts, although there are often lasting effects. Usually the religion subsumes it. What happened to me, was that I wanted to grow in it. I eagerly sought the advice of preachers and Christian books on how to be spiritual. I took the churches’ ideas of “right” and “wrong.” I put God behind the complicated concepts of religion, drawing curtains between myself and the light, although my “baby Christian” high lasted a long time.
I had a brief spiritual conversation with a man at a Burger King this week. After we talked briefly about mysticism as the direct experience of God, he got up to leave, and said that reading the writings of R. C. Sproul had shown him that he is a Calvinist!
It was all I could do to keep from saying, “I’m so sorry!”
I hurt a friend recently. A young woman, still in the “high” after her born-again experience, yet well on the way of having the pure, light of innocence-wisdom corrupted by the teachings, concepts, and prejudices of the religion. I tried to warn her about it, but it was the wrong thing to do… I got way ahead of the Spirit, and offended her, probably causing her to raise defenses and guards more.
Yet I wonder… If Jesus, why religion? We impose so much baggage on “being clear” on Christ’s nature, we have no desire to follow him into theosis, no concept that it’s possible. We bastardize his words until “the Gospel” means something about saying Yes to God and going to heaven when we die. Why did it take me 26 years from my first encounter with Christ till I was ready for what he’d show me in the second?
Here I’m making the same “why” question that I wrote about earlier forming here, the child’s why?, the spiritual why? I know the answer is in how I will live today. It just seems a damn shame, that’s all. That’s Jedi life in the real world.
I need to learn to use the “save as draft” function more. I found I had been way to harsh in something I wrote last night. (This ain’t the first time.)
The “personal” God is invariably a projection of the person’s ideals.
What I meant (and have changed it to) is that
The motives of the ‘personal’ God presented in quick answers are invariably a projection of the person’s ideals.
While I consider everything we can say of God as metaphor, including “person-ality,” for millions, the “personal” metaphor of God is an essential conduit of divine love. The next step, of course, is to love everyone as though they are also that embodiment of God. Challenging, especially when they don’t act like it!
When an awful disaster happens, it’s natural to ask why? This “why” comes from the heart, and has been there since we, as children, learned that life is often cruel and sad. As we grow older, the question becomes more refined–there’s the scientific analysis with a desire to prevent repeats of the disaster, such as studying global warming, the failure to raise and reinforce the levees, etc.
But on the other hand, there is that child’s cry in the heart, why? Many religious believers frame it as “why did God do this?” A natural question for someone who believes that all things come from God’s personal action, although I’ve come to believe it’s entirely the wrong question.
Far worse though, is the urge to eagerly provide answers to God’s supposed motives. The “answers” are already being slung about, as my friend Darrell reported in his blog. Answers seen on the Net claim that God socked it to New Orleans because of decadence, violence, or (horrors!) it was about to host a gay gathering. The folks with the answers to God’s mind have supernatural answers to everything, from why the terrorists struck on 9/11, to the tsunami of last winter.
As a panentheist, I’ve got to say that whenever I hear someone talk about God in extremely “personal” (in the sense of person-like), theistic terms, I have to translate what they say into what they really mean.
And it’s become screamingly obvious that whenever someone talks about “God’s will,” what they mean is what they believe to be their own highest will. The motives of the “personal” God presented in quick answers are invariably a projection of the person’s ideals. Fortunately, most persons identify their noblest ideals as God’s will.
Unfortunately, many of those who have been seriously damaged by religion or otherwise suffered severe spiritual malformation, identify the crueler parts of human nature (intolerance, rejection, punishment, torture), as “higher” than the simple longing of their own souls for love, beauty, peace, and compassion. This results in a wide variety of misery, from self-hatred, to dreadful “explanations” about why disasters occur (projecting what is hateful to the person as the object of God’s wrath), to bigotry and prejudice, to religious violence and terrorism.
So “why?” Although the scientific why? can be very worthwhile, there is no more futile spiritual question than asking “why” a specific event happened. Its immediate causes (if knowable) resulted from other causes which aren’t, and they, in turn, from others still. The spiritual questions to ask are How will I live today? How will I love today?
This is easily the best film I’ve seen this year. It’s a conspiracy thriller that breaks all the rules: there are no long chase scenes, no fights, no James Bond-esque heroics, no dramatic explosions, no wrenching suspense, and no pat happy ending. But it works, and works brilliantly.
Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) weaves languidly in and out of linear story-telling with stream-of-consciousness and flashbacks used in a unhurried, dreamlike way. It takes a little time for it to work, but the effect is that rather than just seeing the love that Justin and Tessa Quayle have for each other, we feel it, in meandering sequences of snapshots, home videos, and flashbacks lovingly photographed.
Interspersed in this intimate tangle of images and experiences, is the unfolding mystery: Justin (Ralph Fiennes), an experienced, middle-level British diplomat in Africa, is trying to solve the mystery of the murder of his wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz), whose activism on behalf of Africa’s poor has begun to make many enemies. Even worse, he began doubting her faithfulness to him shortly before she was killed.
Who’s to blame—the drug companies doing often-lethal tests on uninformed patients? The governments of Kenya and the UK? Arnold Bluhm, the African doctor with whom Tessa had been spending so much time alone?
Love, grief, and a fierce need to know the truth, no matter what it is, nor how painful it may be, fuel Justin’s dangerous investigation. We experience the story through the torment of his soul, and this immediacy makes The Constant Gardener riveting while it shuns all the standard tricks of the trade. As a love story concerned with a man doubting his spouse’s faithfulness, Gardener achieves what Eyes Wide Shut failed to, due to Kubrick’s inability to make us participate in the conflicts of the heart.
This movie is magnificently beautiful! Meirelles has a wonderful sense of beauty and shows it to us in the most original and tender ways, from admiring the beauty of the nude pregnant figure, to capturing flocks of white birds wheeling above their indigo shadows on the surface of a still lake. His love of humanity shines through the lens; even in the squalor of a hell-hole where kids play alongside sewage-filled ditches, Meirelles captures the beauty of the incorruptible imago Dei / Buddha-nature shining through their smiles.
However, I had initially planned to criticize Meirelles’ for his over-use of the hand-held camera. He makes the events literally spin around us, a technique I found quite distracting upon viewing. Strangely, though, that flaw dissolves after the movie is over. What remains is the ineffable hope, sorrow, and beauty of Africa, of love, and of life.
Gardener boldly advances the tradition of social-justice film. Although most of its particulars (based on the John LeCarré novel of the same name) are fictitious, the general outlines of the exploitation of the Third World by the First World are all too true.
Gardener gives us a look at an Africa quite different from the quaint one of picturesque villages that National Geographic persists in promoting. This is an Africa of shantytowns, rusting tin roofs, and omnipresent disease; of corruption beyond comprehension, and human suffering of an extent that is painful to even think about. It’s an Africa where the circles of political influence congratulate each other with martinis in lavish restaurants, and where the knots of de facto power determine the law of the moment by the barrel of an AK-47. It’s an Africa where magnificent scenic wonder contrasts with the horrific darkness of the ego-centered heart. Most of all, it’s an Africa that challenges us to respond.
“‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or naked, sick or in prison, and did not come to your help?’ Then he will answer,
‘I tell you solemnly, in so far as you neglected to do this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me.’—Jesus, Matthew 25:44-45
Movie stills © 2005 Universal Studios.
I’m still behind on reading my friends’ blogs. Today I just caught this beauty by Meredith at Graceful Presence.
I’m reminded of an experience of flying in a very small plane, and feeling very uneasy in the turbulence and rattling noise of the small engine. Fear kept coming over me, while I gripped, white knuckled, to the seat in front of me. And then, in a lucid moment laced with fatalistic humor, I realized that clinging to anything on that plane would be futile in a real emergency. There was nothing solid to hold on to. Finally, I just let my grip go, and relaxed back into the seat, and for the first time, noticed the amazing view. Aptly, it was the Grand Canyon!
My teacher once related the scene in Superman where the Man of Steel takes Lois Lane for a flight with him. When she screams in terror, he calmly says, “Don’t worry, I’ve got you!” She says, “Yes, but who’s got YOU?”
Both of these stories speak so eloquently of the fact that there’s nothing to hold on to. Only when we truly let go, can we truly fly.
Those of you who aren’t using Firefox as your browser really should switch. (Unless you’re on Mac OS X and using Safari, of course!) I’ve been using FF for nearly a year now, and I’ve never considered going back to IE for one second.
Firefox renders CSS amazingly better than Internet Explorer; it’s more secure, and it’s lightning-fast. Some pages on my site load nearly three times faster in Firefox than IE!
It offers “tabbed browsing” which allows you to have several Web pages in the same window, instead of a new window on the taskbar for every single page. That might not sound like much, but once you get used to it, you’re never going back! But the best thing of all is the array of extensions that are being written for Firefox, which are easily downloadable from the Firefox Web site, which automatically, painlessly install.
This weekend I downloaded a Firefox feed reader extension called “Sage”. If you don’t know what a feed reader is, allow me to explain. Blogs and other frequently updated sites have “news feeds” in one or more formats?Atom, RDF, or several versions of RSS. (All Blogger blogs come with an Atom news feed, for example.)
A news reader takes the news feed and displays it on screen, and can manage your subscription to all your favorite blogs, let you organize them as you like, and show you when there is a new post.
When you open up Sage in Firefox, It will display all of your subscribed blogs in the sidebar of the browser, along with the titles of the posts. The posts themselves appear in the main window, allowing you to see at-a-glance what’s new. If the feed is summarized, the post, only a short digest will be seen (allowing you to see even more at-a-glance). If you want to leave or view comments, or read the full text of a summarized post, just click on the title of the post. If you just want to view the page in your browser as normal, click on the title fo the blog.
Here are the links and step-by-step instructions.:
1. If you haven’t already, download Firefox
2. Install Firefox, import bookmarks, etc.
3. Install Sage
4. Close and restart Firefox.
5. To start Sage, click on Tools, and click on Sage.
6. To subscribe to feeds, go to a blog you want to subscribe to, and you’ll see a blue “RSS” appear in the right-hand side of the bottom status bar. Click it and it will ask if you want to subscribe to a feed on the page. If there is more than one feed available, it will show. you. My blog is published in two feeds, Atom and RSS. The Atom version will feed the entire text of each post, with pictures; the RSS version will just present the first sixty words, and no pictures, unless you click to read the entire post. Click on the feed you want to subscribe to.
7. A small window will ask what you want to name the feed, and where you want to create it. I recommend clicking on the dropdown and choosing Sage Feeds.
7. Do this for all the blogs you track. You can then organize them however you want, rename them, etc.
Miracles never cease! Some Christians are actually having second thoughts about the spiritual credentials of Robertson. Here’s a report that Finland’s Christian station has decided to drop the 700 Club after Robertson’s remarks about “taking out” Chavez.
Personally, I wonder why any serious Christian stations air it at all, since Robertson’s connections with former Liberan dictator Charles Taylor (responsible for about 200,000 deaths) and Freedom Gold are a matter of public record. As my friend Isaiah said, it’s sad to see anyone crash and burn, but Robertson’s spiritual crash happened years ago; now it’s in plain view.
Perhaps more people will start going back to the words of Jesus to see what really was the Good News he proclaimed. It’s far different from what most preachers proclaim he proclaimed. Read it yourself!
(Pour yourself a cup of coffee and relax. This is a bit long, but you might like it. Or you might hate it! In a response to my previous post, a friend of mine commented that I seem very different from Pat Robertson, after I had said “I am Pat Robertson,” even as I strongly criticized him. What gives? This is my attempt to explain a little more clearly what is sometimes called the “non-dual” (not-two) perspective… which is more and more how I sense, underneath all appearance, the world actually works. Pay close attention, and you’ll even get to see me use the word “Lethe” in a sentence!)
When I said that I am Pat Robertson, I meant it fairly literally. What I’ve come to believe, is that we identify with a very illusory beast that we call our “self.” When I believe that I “am” a “self” that is unique and different from all the billions of other “selves” out there, many, many things naturally begin to follow from that. Among them: that there are things that others do which I am intrinsically incapable of doing. Also, that I have “unique” gifts, talents, abilities, and knowledge that makes me different from others and, so I would like to think, (even if I won’t admit it) superior.
Also, because I am a “unique person,” I need to protect myself. If “I” go, Frimmitude could be lost forever, at least from earth, and shucks, Heaven is supposed to be so frimmin’ that I’m not going to make a positive impression there at all, to put it mildly!
But none of these assumptions survives a close examination. What is true, is that I have a personality, a frame of reference, a developing “story”, and deeply-ingrained ways of relating to myself and my environment. It is universally assumed by those who have successfully developed personality, relational habits and a coherent POV, that this IS them.
We think: this is me! I’m unique! Well, these attributes?personality, frame of reference, “story” and patterns are unique. But are they really ME? Most of them are constantly changing in various degrees. My personality is not what it was when I was a kid, or even ten years ago. There’s some commonality in the way I relate to the world with how I did in the past, but there are many, many differences as well. My “story” not only keeps developing as I rack up experiences, thoughts, days, and years, but other things fall off. I recently spent a long time going through old high?school yearbooks, straining to remember people and things forgotten and almost forgotten. And as for forgetting, most of the 84,000 seconds I lived today are already well-drowned deep in Lethe.
It’s been suggested that anything you can observe changing must be separate from you. You can watch a television, but you’re not the TV. You can observe your body, so you’re not your body, although you’re closely associated with it. In meditation, and other kinds of stillness, you can observe the comings and goings of your thoughts, and you see that you are not your thoughts.
That leaves point-of-reference. This is consistent. I seem to be “here,” and not “there,” and I only seem to experience things through this body/personality that walks around with the name “Jon Zuck.” The point-of-reference is always there, whether I’m conscious of it or not. If anything is “me,” this is.
Once I realize that I simply seem to be a sort of vantage point, I can see that everything else that I tend to identify with is a circumstance or experience or set of such, of some kind or other. My fears of death become baseless, because you can’t destroy a point. And my “story”?born here, named this, did that, felt thus?is simply the record of experience as far back as this body goes. The patterns of relating and “personality” are simply the dominant themes of what Jon has been like, and is likely to be like in the foreseeable future.
So what am I? Just a vantage point, made of either God-stuff or whatever stuff God made stuff out of… and I’m not talking about the body or any physical material.
What is Pat Robertson? Exactly the same thing. What is Hugo Chavez? Mother Teresa? Adolf Hitler? Genghis Khan? Sakyamuni Buddha? Points of view, and a point is nothing, or nothing definable, at least, although it is real. Hence, the phrase “no-thing.” Yet somehow everything is really this No-thing!
What we really mean when we say things like “if it had been me, I would have done such and such,” in thinking that we would have done something differently than another person is really this: “If I were able to transport my knowledge, viewpoint, personality, feelings, beliefs and experiences, into this other body, viewpoint, personality, feelings, beliefs and experiences, I would like to think that something different would be the result.
Of course, it’s impossible, and not just because of physical laws, but because as soon as you would put your “self” into the “other’s” situation, your “self” is no longer that “self” you’ve identified with, and the “other is no longer “other.”
Thich Nhat Hahn wrote that a key in forgiving is to realize that apart from the things that shape our bodies, experiences, and stories, there simply is no difference between us whatever! I may like to think that I could never commit mass murder, and that’s true (pretty sure!) of the superficial Jon, this walking point-of-experience who traces his story to beginning a whopping 44 years ago in a dusty city in Texas.
But if I had been born in Hitler’s birthplace, in his time, to his parents, and had the same experiences, and all the same influences he had, genetic, environmental, past-life, cosmic, whatever and what-have-you, I would not be “me.” “I” would not have the conscience that I do. I wouldn’t be “me” at all? I would be Hitler, and I would have done the horrific things he did.
This isn’t a matter of false humility. I am essentially (in essence? important word!) no different from Robertson or Hitler or Teresa or Christ. What is different is how I act, and that comes from my choices, and my will has been shaped by all my experiences, including things I’m sure I cannot even begin to understand.
So, with so much darkness in the world, how do we bring more light? I believe this is the key issue. The natural thing to do is to react out of our “personality” and story. However, in so doing, we bring its fears, anger, desires and identifications to the situation.
For thousands of years, people have attempted to change the world by reaction. If A is bad, then B is the answer?when B is no longer desirable, let’s fight for C. Barry Long wrote that every problem was once someone’s idea of a solution to a different problem. In many respects progress does get made, but in other respects, it is highly questionable. A quick example: on the one hand, we live longer, and have better standards of living than we did before the rise of civilization and the ego-mind. On the other hand, much, if not most, prosperity comes from the exploitation of others, and while we live longer, we have more anxiety, and we can snuff out millions of lives at once instead of one at a time. As Sonny and Cher said, “the beat goes on.”
The teachers we call “enlightened,” “anointed,” or “Sons of God,” say that realizing our true, pure, emptiness is itself the answer. Jesus said we should not to try to get specks out of other’s eyes, for we have logs in our own. As long as we identify ourselves with what are mere circumstances, all our efforts will be nothing more than trying force more circumstances to come about, as if that could give us a lasting freedom. Our first priority should be to empty our own eyes of foreign matter first, (our false identification with the needy, greedy “self”) and then we’ll see clearly enough to help others. We’ll act from our true nature, instead of our identifications, and live from a center that is beyond circumstance, which he called “the Kingdom of God.”