The Pigeon Hole

2/12/2012 Reflections

2012-02-13T10:12:00.001-08:00

Prayer is open hands, open heart, and open mind to receive the everflowing graces of God. What can you ask of Love which Love will not more readily give you, if it be for your good? Pray not as though the Lord had withheld His Love, but pray as though you have already received both Love and Eternity from His hands, and from all the wounds of Christ. His gifts are in your possession, and you have only to open them. They are your own hands, your own heart, your own mind. Open them, and discover what was yours from the begining. Unfold your hands, to embrace the Christ in every soul. Unfold your heart, to discover the Love of God. Unfold your mind, to approach the mind of God.

When the elderly widow put her two coins into the poorbox, Christ counted her charity greater than the larger sums donated by those who have much. But, more than this, we should know that God puts those two coins to better use than the larger sums. It is the spirit of generous sacrifice, the spirit of Love, which carries them, like grass on the wind, to where they are needed most.

Just as we may cast our bread upon the waters, and it will return to us after many days, so may we cast our burdens on the Lord, yet shall they return to us more immediately, and in the form of gifts.

How deep is His wisdom? Francis de Sales has said, "The measure of love is love without measure." So it is with all the faculties of the Lord. Measureless is His wisdom, measureless His mysteries, and measureless man's ignorance of these. Who can fathom the works of God as they manifest, uniquely and personally, in the lives of every creature? Who can hope to discover His ways? We had better train ourselves to awe, than to inquiry; for, where divine matters are concerned, the only true inquiry is awe. To be aghast, astonished, overawed, and dismayed, yet carried ever deeper into the mystery of His peace: This is to take measure of the measureless.

God is a furnace of mystery, and all of Creation is burning with questions.

Lord, extinguish my mind and enflame my heart! Cover my transgressions and bring my good deeds to light. Uphold me where I am weakest and chasten me where I am strong. Be my compass, my path, and my place of rest. Turn my eyes toward your treasures. Harness my will with righteous instruction. Make my heart a garden of herbs and flowers. Consecrate the temple of my body with the blessing of Your holy name; let my heart cry out, "Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!" Let the word of "Christ" resound throughout my members, echoing light. O my reverend Lord, stoke the furnace of my soul, that I may burn in many colors!

More Praise For Idleness

2012-02-09T09:09:00.001-08:00

"Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns... Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin...... [Your] heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." ~ Jesus of Nazareth

"That the end of life is not action but contemplation -- being as distinct from doing -- a certain disposition of the mind, is, in some shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality. In poetry, in art, if you enter into their true spirit at all, you touch this principle in a measure... beholding for the mere joy of beholding. To treat life in the spirit of art is to make life a thing in which means and ends are identified... To witness this spectacle with appropriate emotions is the aim of all culture." ~ Walter Pater

Work receives more than its fair share of praise; every child born into Western Civilization is duly bathed and marinated in the unholy spirit of the so-called Protestant Work Ethic. Idleness is not yet praised enough. The ability to "laze about", finding rabbits in the clouds, and the world in a grain of sand, is near-universally stigmatized and disparaged. As I see it, this observation strikes at the very core of spiritual imbalance in our culture.

Mysticism has come to be associated with fuzzy-thinking, escapism, and ineffectuality. Even where the mystic is praised, he is routinely left out in the cold if he cannot exhibit the characteristics of a worldly man. Moreover, he is even expected to be more adept at worldly matters than those whose only concerns are worldly! If he exhibits "only" spiritual gifts, he is fastly pronounced a fraud.

We live in a time of cynicism, when faith is judged, not by works, but by dead works.

Who is more industrious than the cynic? Or what is more cynical than industry? And how are men of action (who are indeed cynical in their dismissal of the life of the mind) ever to understand those lazy romantics, sated on simple observation and the contemplation of what is readily observed?

The eye of the romantic captures all that it seeks, finds all that it sees, and is more than appreciative of the world which God and all of Nature have set before it; is, in fact, awe-struck and reeling beneath the inexhaustible mystery of Being. The mind and imagination of such persons are fired and fed by everything they come into contact with. Purely to dream is for them a pasttime which would justify any and all labors, no matter how taxing or strenuous, if not for the simple fact that dreaming, or the leisure required for dreaming, is possible only in the absence of labors.

Working for leisure is like fighting for peace, and fucking for virginity.

What are we to add to this work, which is not simply majestic, not merely profound, but rather the source of all majesty and profudity; this work which God has wrought, and man can only attempt to humble himself before? If we must add something, ought we not to at least endeavor, first and foremost, to appreciate the graces already granted by Providence; to discover what they are, as well as to share and distribute them (or the knowledge of them) to all men everywhere? How rash is the lust for acquisition, which leads men to overlook the honest treasure of the Sun, while desirous for some elaborate chandelier? Shall we really gut the mineral entrails of the Earth, in pursuit of resources from which to fashion the widest and most intricate variety of objects, and not revel in the glory of her outward garments; the lakes and vales, rivers, coasts, and trees? Shall we put all men to work, and not marvel upon the priceless miracle of rest?

What a Paradise we all could live in, if we could all just see it!

As it is, the ones who see must wear the thickest chains. In the words of Antonio Porchia, they are "chained to the earth for the freedom of their eyes". They are torn from the spectacle of God's perfect creation; exiled, and sent out in search of the very kingdom from which they have been exiled! All too often, they are made mad by the madness of it, which only they can see.

Understand, I do not doubt that faith may be judged by works; what I doubt is merely the ability of faithless, undiscerning men, -- of cynics, -- to judge which are the works of faith and which are not.

My friends, the one who prays with faith knows his prayers have already been answered. Likewise, the sort of works which must proceed from the highest faith are those works which have already been done. They are works which no man may assume credit for, because they are the works of God.

If you wish to know which are the true works of faith, you have simply to open your spiritual eyes and look out upon the world in a spirit of faith. Every blade of grass perking up to meet the sun is another work of faith fulfilled; every bend in the riverbed is perfectly placed; every breeze blows from God. For the truly inspired, the whole of Creation unfolds as the endless answer to prayers which are only just beginning to form at the very instant of their fulfillment. Here, asking and receiving, prayer and thanksgiving, the will of man and the will of God, have all become one.

What is necessary for the accomplishment of every good? Only this: that man should cease to do evil. All that is necessary for the accomplishment of God's will is that man should abandon his personal will, and, so, come into accordance with the way things really are. Ours is not to change, forge, hew, or fashion Nature in our own image. Ours is but to reflect, by the simplicity of our gaze, all the glories and wonders which the Lord God has so benevolently lain before us. Truly, only God is good, and only that is good which proceeds from God.

The proper function of mankind is to serve as both audience and participant in the Creation, but all participation, in order to be righteous, must proceed directly from God, in the form of divine inspiration. This is why the artist is a type of the holy; because he is, firstly, a fitting observor of God's work and, secondly, because he acts only when inspired by that work. The point where he ceases to observe, and begins to take part, is always obscure; shrouded in the mystery of union with the Beloved. In the ultimate experience of God, there is not one who creates and one who is created, just as there is not one who loves and one who is loved. There is only Creation. There is only Love.

Oscar Wilde On Romantics, Philistines, Jesus, and Self-Realization

2012-01-13T09:54:00.000-08:00

People point to [the prison] and say, 'That is where the artistic life leads a man.' Well, it might lead to worse places. The more mechanical people to whom life is a shrewd speculation depending on a careful calculation of ways and means, always know where they are going, and go there. They start with the ideal desire of being the parish beadle, and in whatever sphere they are placed they succeed in being the parish beadle and no more. A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it.

But with the dynamic forces of life, and those in whom those dynamic forces become incarnate, it is different. People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going... The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?...

Christ had no patience with the dull lifeless mechanical systems that treat people as if they were things, and so treat everybody alike: for him there were no laws: there were exceptions merely, as if anybody, or anything, for that matter, was like aught else in the world!... His chief war was against the Philistines. That is the war every child of light has to wage... He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind, mechanical forces of society, and who does not recognize dynamic force when he meets it either in a man or a movement...

Philistinism was the note of the age and community in which he lived. In their heavy inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability, their tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance... Christ mocked at the 'whited sepulchre' of respectability, and fixed that phrase for ever. He treated worldly success as a thing absolutely to be despised. He saw nothing in it at all. He looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man... He showed that the spirit alone was of value... he preached the enormous importance of living completely for the moment.

I see in Christ not merely the essentials of the supreme romantic type, but all the accidents, the wilfulnesses even, of the romantic temperament also... He saw that people should not be too serious over material, common interests: that to be unpractical was to be a great thing: that one should not bother too much over affairs. The birds didn't, why should man?... His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be... His justice is all poetical justice, exactly what justice should be...

Between my art and the world there is a wide gulf, but between art and myself there is none.

~ from: 'De Profundis' by Oscar Wilde

Love For Oneself and Love For Others

2011-12-09T12:02:00.001-08:00

Imagine being jealous of your own love; rather than being jealous of someone else's love for someone else, being jealous of your own love, for anyone but yourself. What if love for others were, in certain instances, and in a certain sense, infidelity to oneself?

While we often look for love from others, and not from ourselves, what we seek is the same loving validation which we cannot (or will not) give to, and receive from, ourselves. In seeking that validation indirectly, and outside of ourselves, are we perhaps committing an indiscretion? When we love and seek love from others, are we being unfaithful to ourselves?

Who would say so? We all feel encouraged to give our love to others, rather than be overly concerned with ourselves. We feel that love of self must be subdued, or else defended, justified and explained. At the same time, we believe that having love for oneself is somehow a prerequisite for loving others, and that self-love is redeemed, but only on account of that larger purpose.

So, is it that, before we have loved ourselves, our love for others is a kind of betrayal; a desperate, insecure and untethered love, which, not tied to ourselves, is loosely blown about by the wind, and loosely wrapping itself around people and things?

On airplanes, they tell people, in the event of an accident, to secure their own oxygen mask, before trying to help anybody else on with theirs. If you do not secure your own air first, you will not have the air you need to secure anybody else's. In a subtle sense, your air is also their air and your lungs feed into their lungs. Your love for others grows faint and disperses when it is not fed by a strong (i.e. loving) connection to yourself. You yourself grow petty with jealousy for your own love; for the love you tried and failed to give, and ought to have given yourself.

It is our responsibility to love ourselves, and begin with ourselves, before anything. Then we can allow our love to wander, -- or, more precisely, we can wander out together with our love, beyond ourselves, -- without experiencing a loss or diminshment to ourselves; rather, an expansion of self; for if, having sufficient love for ourselves, we harbor no resentment towards the love that is given away, then we wholeheartedly take part in the giving, and are a part of what is given.

Conversely, we can be open and responsive to the expressions of love coming to ourselves from others, and take part also in that love, inasmuch as we allow it; and thereby add our self-love to it, as one river giving into another.

Of course, we cannot forget, ignore, or deny the concurrent responsibility which society bears towards the individual. While we have a duty to love ourselves (and not to bake the poison of resentment into the bread of our love for others), so, also, does society have a duty to provide for us.

In fact, our duty to ourselves is the same duty we perform to others as members of society, just as their duty to themselves is the same duty they perform for us. In loving ourselves, and being responsive to the expressions of love from others, we help to create an atmosphere, an entire culture, of love.

How often do people reject our love, and how often do we feel rejected, simply because the ones we love do not yet love themselves, and, so, cannot or will not receive and respond to any expressions of love from others? They resent such overtures as an impertinence, as if to say, "Wait! I'm not ready," because they are entering the world, as it were, naked or half-naked; completely or partially stripped of self-love. It is the absurdity of refusing clothes because they have none, and, yet, if you are, at the same time, stripping yourself of love in order to clothe them, what sort of indecency, and what manner of absurdity, is that?

What disturbs me, though, is when we are fully clothed in love for ourselves and our expressions of love for others are still being rejected, out of some unreasonable pride or sense of propriety. In such instances, there is no shame in being naked, and the shame people feel must really be a distorted manifestation of an already distorted pride; pride which is itself a distorted manifestation, or symptom, of their lack of self-love; that is, their nakedness.

The shame of nakedness in this world, then, is a part of nakedness, just as it is impossible to be nude in the cold and not to feel chills. Moreover, the chilling winds of shame are felt, and felt more bitterly, by those who are too proud to clothe themselves with love, which they believe does not belong to them.

But, again, pride, like shame, is only a natural and necessary part, or adjunct, of lovelessness (inasmuch as a symptom of illness may be termed "natural", given that illness is itself unnatural, or indicative of some behavior or condition which runs at cross purposes to the designs of nature). Granted, it is a pride mingled with humility, but what a strange humility. And what is that, anyway? What does it mean to be simultaneously too humble and too proud to receive and/or respond to love? And how is it that there is a sense of propriety connected with not receiving and responding to love?

It is because our civilization still carries a Stoic thorn in it's pride; it still affirms the notion that each individual is 100% responsible, -- 100% to blame, or to credit, -- for his condition.

According to that way of thinking, accepting love from others is an admission of weakness and insufficiency, while expressions of love from others are not only charity, but moral displacements, the acceptance of which constitutes a form of theft.

What we require is a civilization rooted in the Christian conception of the free distribution of love; which views love not as a private possession, privately won, but as a public possession, which comes ultimately from God, and which is intended to provide for all the people.

No individual, and no family, would be shamed for giving or receiving love.

Consequently, nobody would be shamed into stockpiling or hoarding excess love originally intended to be shared; intended for others. Nor would they be encouraged to gorge and luxuriate on this soured love until they were incapable of distinguishing between the wholesome love which is theirs (that is, the love they need) and the putrefying love which they've merely become addicted to (that is, the love they still want, having been accustomed to want it by society).

Likewise, nobody would be forced to starve, unable to accept the love coming from others which is rightfully theirs, and wrongly convinced that all love, in order to be legitimate, must be manufactured directly from within.

Though it is true that love for oneself ought to begin from within, it is just as true that the love which comes from within cannot be separated from the love which comes from God. And, as true as both these things are, there is a third which is no less true than them: that neither the love which comes from within nor the love which comes from God can be separated from the love which comes from outside ourselves; as it also comes from within others, and from God. It is all the same love.

Only when love is withheld, or stored up, -- rather than consumed when it is freshest; consumed when it is needed, and by whom it is needed, -- does it become difficult to say to whom it belongs. If it has been either denied to or denied by it's rightful heir, then whose is it? Whose does it become?

A love shut out of doors, or shut in, is a breath of the Holy Spirit which has been cut-off from it's source and can no longer blow where it pleases; that which is locked out passes on, while that which is locked in collapses and dies on the floor. We must learn to open the doors and windows of our hearts to love. We must learn to break bread with love, allowing her to enter and to leave, to pass through, according to her own circuits; neither refusing her company, nor detaining her with vain conversation and excuse.

Love is a beggar, but she is also the richest person in the city.

She is a stranger, yet is known by name in every corner; she is a household name, with no home of her own. Or, rather, her place is mysteriously everywhere and nowhere. One day, she is perfectly at home with you, but the next she is restless for somewhere, and someone, else. Tonight, her bed is your bed, tomorrow it is another's.

Consider that you are twice-blessed; blessed to share your bed with her, and equally blessed to share her with someone else. She belongs to no one, yet her will is to come to everyone, when each has need of her.

She is the treasure of the city.

Sure, all of this must sound utopian. And the classic objection to the idealist or utopian thinker is that his ideal, his plan, being incongruous with the present order of things, is therefore impracticable.

But what is the truth?

In truth, the vision is the blueprint; the theory is the chief tool to be used in the formation of it's own realization in matter.

Must we begin with a faulty schematic, simply because the present structure is faulty? That is to remake the old temple, faults and all. It is renovating a thing which is faulty by design, and only made to be broken.

So, what is the proper conception?

Love, in its spiritual form, is fluid; when it enters a vessel, it spreads easily and evenly throughout the whole, only welling up in places of dryness or depression.

Love which enters an organism, according to it's purity, passes easily between the organs. If the love is impure, if it aggregates too much, becomes turgid and sticky, and bonds too tightly in places, while in other areas of the organism its presence is scarce or thin, then it cannot maintain the overall health of the structure.

Apply this to the case of civilization.

How is love permitted to work through the culture, and how is it diluted and made thick with impurities?

Relationships between individuals which do not increase their connectivity to the whole of humanity, but only to one another, must be recognized as calloused and cancerous tumors in the life of a society.

Monogamy is, in essence, a prescription for cancer; a treatment which seeks to heal the internal divisions of society (caused by lack of love) by completely fusing some of its parts, while allowing other parts to atrophy.

Rather than raise the vibration of love to where it is quicksilver-like, electric, and capable of touching every part of society precisely when it is needed, our paradigm demands that we slow love down, and attempt to sequester it in various places.

It feeds those parts for a time, then gradually isolates them from their environment, until the entire system collapses. And they in it.

Like their relationships, along with the value systems which form the substructures of those relationships, individuals themselves are manifestations of various energies and impulses circulating within the culture.

Prominent individuals are particularly extreme examples; gathering within themselves, and channeling through their own lives, those patterns of energy which are most ripe for manifestation in their cultures.

Individuals like Saint Francis are historically-sized expressions of self-love; an impulse arising within the culture which seeks the well-being of all its parts. To the extent that it is selfish, it is benevolent.

On the other hand, individuals like Hitler are expressions of self-hatred; an impulse arising within the culture which seeks the destruction of the culture itself. To the extent that it is destructive, it is self-destructive.

Homicide and suicide are two sides ((or "cides")) of the same coin; the former destroys society from the outside-in, the latter from the inside-out. Whenever a society shows neglect or contempt towards any of its parts, it shows the same for itself, and engenders in those parts a corresponding neglect or contempt for itself.

The conditions which give rise to a murderer are put into place long before the murderer himself is even born, to say nothing of when the murder is conceived. One could say, without being entirely unjust, that the great-great-great-grandfather of the victim is as guilty of the crime as any man alive.

Indeed, regardless of whether a man has been creating murderers or saints, the longer he has been dead, the more responsibility he shares; since the consequences, implications, and repercussions of his actions increase in direct proportion to the moment of his death.

Our good and evil actions posses the greatest significance for, and bear the greatest impact upon, people who have not yet been born. The fact is that we barely touch the people we impact directly, but we are like gods to creatures born light-years from now.

We must be idealists. Our thoughts eternal. Our ambitions absolute. For the worlds we imagine are the worlds we create, and the visions of today are the politics of tomorrow.

Impressions of 'De Profundis'

2011-12-01T09:01:00.001-08:00

I could not have known that the most touching and poignant depiction of Christ -- his life, character, and teachings, -- would come to me, not from an established mystic, saint, or interpreter of the Gospel, but from an artist in the midst of his first genuine encounter with the Christian legend. Oscar Wilde's 'De Profundis', truly written (as its title proclaims) "from the depths", is a book for the ages, if ever there was one. It is my most wonderful recent discovery, and all the more so as it came to me unexpectedly.

Some weeks ago, I had made a, more or less firm, resolution to read only books written by or about saints (in the wider, but not the widest, sense of the word). In the pages of St. Isaac the Syrian, St. Louis de Montfort, Dionysius the Areopagate, and St. Thomas Aquinas, I looked and expected to find that rarefied oil which would feed, renew, and revitalize the flame of devotion within me. Yet only when I relaxed myself, and took up the book of a secular man of letters, did I find what I so desperately sought. Here I discover the most profound and breathtaking meditations on humility, suffering, forgiveness, redemption, and the love which holds nothing back for itself.

Again and again, as I read, I am struck 'to the quick', and must stand back, breathe deep, and steady myself for reemergence into this work; into these depths. At times, I must set the book down, and step away, in the awareness that I am not fully present with it; that it is so much greater than myself, and requires so much more of me than I am able to give to it. I am too distracted to do it justice. I must come back to it when I am in a more mellow and reflective mood. I must not squander it on my careless or anxious hours, but preserve it for those times when I am equal, or nearly equal, to it.

So precious is this discovery. Having found it, not as a diamond in the rough, but ready-made, ready-cut, the task left to me now is only to recognize it for the treasure that it is. I must not treat it as a simple pearl or gem of lesser worth. I am to prepare a fitting setting into which this diamond may be placed, and I myself am that setting; I am the ring which must bear it. So I retire for a bit, to shape and polish myself for the honor, and to reflect on what I have found.

Quaker Teachings and Personal Beliefs

2011-11-30T07:29:00.001-08:00

Essential Teaching of Quakerism:

Quaker doctrine is minimal, while dogma is nil. We believe there is a divine inner light in every person (accessible through silent meditation and contemplation of higher ideas), which illuminates those who give priority to it, informing their thoughts and motivating their actions in the world.

This is the central tenet of the faith, and really the only doctrine, while other teachings are secondary and less than essential.

Secondary Teachings of Quakerism:

Pacifism, especially in the form of conscientious objection and nonviolent resistance, is encouraged, though every individual must decide for themselves if and when force becomes necessary or permissible.

Simplicity, or plainness, of lifestyle is likewise encouraged; materialism/consumerism is discouraged.

Truth and honesty are highly esteemed, and partly for this reason the taking of oaths is also discouraged, as it implies two standards of truthfulness; we believe that to swear or promise would be to suggest that one is less accountable to truth at other times (i.e. when one does not swear or promise), which we do not believe; moreover, that, because God is within, one is always in the presence of God (not merely when one places a hand on the Bible, for instance), so that a person who will lie without swearing is not likely to be prevented from lying by swearing.

Quakers may share various religious affiliations, though they have traditionally been Christians. In any case, the promptings of the inner light are accorded precedence over scriptures, and revelation is ongoing in the heart of every individual.

A Statement of Personal Beliefs:

I have found much to admire among the Buddhists, Hindus, Sufis, South American Shamans, and others, but Christ, along with the saints, mystics, ministers, and martyrs of Christianity, tend to be my primary religious influences.

Christ is, for me, the supreme manifestation and representation of God, though I recognize that God is ultimately formless and beyond conception.

This is in conformity with the Hindu practice of having a "chosen ideal"; an archetype or deity who carries the God projection, and therefor acts as a point of focus for religious activity. At the same time, I respect the rights of others to their own "divine projections", without considering that Christ is necessarily any more or less suitable for "the role" in an objective sense; only that he is more suitable for myself. Hence, if I call him "The Greatest" it is similar to when a child gives his father a "World's Greatest Dad" t-shirt, and should not be taken as a cause for strife; Christ is my spiritual father, Christians are my spiritual brothers and sisters, while deities of other faiths are spiritual aunts and uncles, and followers of other faiths are spiritual cousins.

Asking God for mercy and forgiveness is like asking the sun for light and heat; these belong to the incorruptible nature of divinity itself; and, though clouds of ignorance may cast shadows of guilt over the souls of men, the sun does not go black, nor does the Lord condemn. Nevertheless, there is some sense in asking God for mercy as a formality, and for convenience; as Paul says "I speak as a man", and as Christ asks to be baptized by John, because it is seemly, though he had no need to be baptized.

Moreover, the question of whether or not Jesus existed as an "actual" historical reality (in the same sense in which Gandhi existed, or in which you or I exist) or if he is "merely" mythical, is an irrelevant distinction. Christ is real without question, or we would not be speaking of him, nor having our hearts and minds inspired by the contemplation of him. The very idea of Christ has inspired more people to live virtuous lives than the actual physical presence of any other known being. If he does not belong to the material realm of fact, as our culture has defined it, yet he belongs undoubtedly to the archetypal realm of truth.

I believe that the ability to percieve how an idea or an archetype may be equally, or even more real, than a historical figure is a form of spiritual seeing, and only a person who can read "the spirit" as well as "the letter" of the law is prepared to receive this teaching.

"Who has ears to hear, let them hear."

Some Quotes From Oscar Wilde's 'De Profundis'

2011-11-24T09:36:00.000-08:00

"The supreme vice is shallowness."

"I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not laws... And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life. People must adopt some attitude towards me, and so pass judgment, both on themselves and me."

"If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots... The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me."

"The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being... a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and meaner minds. I became a spendthrift of my own genius... I grew careless of the lives of others.. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself... I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility."

"Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility. It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting-point for a fresh development. It has come right out of myself... It could not have come before, nor later. Had anyone told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had it been brought to me, I would have refused it... Of all things it is the strangest. One cannot acquire it, except by surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it."

"Every thing to be true must become a religion... I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum till one's finger-tips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and finishes, the harsh orders... the silence, the solitude, the shame -- each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience... I was so typical a child of my age, that in my perversity, and for that perversity's sake, I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good."

"To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development... It is no less than a denial of the soul. For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has cleansed, and converts them into swiftness and strength, into the play of beautiful muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the curves and colours of the hair, the lips, the eye; so the soul in its turn has its nutritive functions also, and can transform into noble moods of thought and passions of high import what in itself is base, cruel and degrading; nay, more, may find in these its most august modes of assertion, and can often reveal itself most perfectly through what was intended to desecrate or destroy."

"Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation... It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain. Where there is suffering there is holy ground. Some day people will realize what that means... [People] sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation... I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art... Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask... There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain. More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality... For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything... Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection."

"I must accept the fact that one is punished for the good as well as for the evil that one does. I have no doubt that it is quite right one should be."

"Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. when the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself' that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its duty towards him begins. It is really ashamed of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they cannot pay... I claim on my side that if I realise what I have suffered, society should realise what it has inflicted on me; and that there should be no bitterness or hate on either side."

"The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casualty, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it."

"When wisdom has been profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, the memory of [a] little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed for me the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world."

Smitten

2011-11-22T18:13:00.001-08:00

so now i am smitten

love-swollen

clinically insane

dropped into a second world created by you

stunned and sunburnt

sacred

disoriented

meditating on your presence in my life

tasting your name

your grace

all that happens to me

no sun and no moon

only the sudden radiance of you to discover

and this

God and Mammon

2011-11-07T13:51:00.001-08:00

What is man's will apart from God, and what is this that we call "free will"? Simply put: It is the condition of being divided against oneself; into a lower and higher self; with the higher self being an aspect or extension of God, and the lower self being an aspect or extension of evil. Moreover, it is the ability, arising from this condition of dividedness, to follow (or to allow one's whole self to be led by) either of these two parts. In all situations, whatever thought we entertain or action we perform, we are electing to align our whole self with one of these two sides; the good or the evil. In every moment, there is a choice, and in every choice there is both victory and surrender; one side advances, the other retreats.

"No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon."

This is the scriptural verse which most perfectly illustrates the principle. It appears twice, once in Matthew and again in Luke, where it is identical. It is the only saying of Christ's, that I know of, which is not worded differently by the different evangelists. Without being able to say exactly why or how this is so, I nevertheless believe that this lack of variation is not entirely coincidental. The importance of the verse, which is itself a categorical declaration, seems to be underscored by the insistence of one evangelist not to paraphrase the other. Indeed, those who heard this saying from the mouth of Christ may have heard and remembered it identically because Christ himself may have been careful to stress it, and not to vary his wording of it during his various discourses.

We must not shrink from stark distinctions between "God and mammon", good and evil, the spirit and the flesh, the divine life and the life of the world. While we might like to seamlessly weave together these two wills, to find a balance, or a compromise between them, so as not to push ourselves into some extreme, rigid asceticism, we must remember that it is only as a concession to our present weakness that we allow such an indulgent attitude. We must not compromise the ideal, or corrupt the truth, in order to make it fit our compromised and corrupted lives; it is better to be hypocrites and to accuse ourselves, than to distort the wisdom of God; but, of course, it is best not to shrink at all from that high calling.

While moderation deserves praise, we should remember that the moderation of saints is something very different from the moderation of worldly men. For a saint, moderation means eating only a dozen (or less) mouthfuls of healthy food, once or twice a day, rather than fasting for days on end, or eating only bread and water. If he partakes of alcohol, it is to drink one sip of wine during the Eucharist, or perhaps a glass or two at a wedding celebration, such as the wedding in Galilee. For him, this would be moderation as opposed to the strict refusal to drink any alcohol, ever. But to a man caught in the snares of the world, the saint's moderation appears altogether extreme. The worldly man believes he is being moderate when he intoxicates himself only a little, or on the weekend, and when he eats large, unhealthy meals, provided they are not "overly" toxic, or "very" expensive. The terms are relative, as we can see.

What is essential to the Christian approach towards moderation is that we are always making efforts to bring our will closer to God's. We may be excused from doing what is best, provided only that we endeavor to do what is better. In this sense, there is some moral relativity. Christ was more lenient with respect to the confessions of thieves and murderers, than he was to the pride of the Pharisees, who, though outwardly good, had become complacent. We must not compare ourselves to our neighbors, for there are always some who are better and some who are worse; but we must endeavor to be better than ourselves; to be more righteous tomorrow than we are today. This is all that Christ asks of us. For some, it means following in his very footsteps; renouncing the world, spending forty days fasting and praying in the desert, and/or laying down one's life -- even for the lives of one's enemies. For others, it just means drinking a little less, giving a little less time to superficial chatter, or not cutting somebody off in traffic.

We must understand that, in all cases, there is a division between the higher and lower will. What is higher to one man may be lower to another, but, nevertheless, each man has his own higher and lower will, and his own choices to make between them.

Now, some people teach that free will is a gift from God. My own understanding is that the gifts of God are such as to draw us into alignment with His will; that is, with our own highest will. To my mind, God is purely good; He is not the creator of evil, and He would not plant this division in our hearts. If Christ brings "a sword of division", it only so that we may finish the business, by cleaving away the lower will altogether. It is as Shakespeare's Hamlet has said it, when Gertrude cried out that he had "cleft her will in twain": "Then throw away the worser part of it, and live the purer with the other half." Gertrude accuses Hamlet of creating this division, when all he has really done is alert her to it; he has demanded self-honesty from her, while she has insisted upon remaining in denial. So it is with Christ. He does not make us enemies of ourselves, but he shows us wherein we are already divided against ourselves.

While we insist on healing this division through some form of compromise, Christ makes it clear to us that this is a false hope, and a denial of the true nature of the rift. We are like wounded soldiers, with gangrene eating away at one of our arms, who refuse to recognize the seriousness of our condition. We beg and plead with the surgeon; we want to keep both our arms. But a true physician will tell us strait that if we do not amputate the infected limb then the infection will inevitably spread to our whole body. Christ, who is, for all Christians, the greatest physician in the world, tends not to our bodies, but to our souls; which is to say, he tends not to where the symptoms manifest, but to where the disease has its root. His advice to us is the same, but on a much higher level: to bear up, to grit our teeth, and to amputate that sickly part of ourselves which we have already lost, though we continue to cling to it at our own expense; to amputate the lower will. Healing will come, and wholeness with it, only when we have been purified of the lower will; when we have consented to be small and clean, rather than large and contaminated; to serve in heaven, rather than reign in our own personal hell.

I ask again, what then is free will? If it is merely the freedom to make poor choices, as well as wise ones, -- to make choices influenced by ignorance, foolishness, weakness, and depravity, as well as choices influenced by knowledge, understanding, strength, and righteousness; -- well, then, it is more of a disability than an ability. Ought we to be so proud of this "free will"? It is like that same soldier being proud that he has two arms, and not one, despite the fact that his second arm is the enemy of his whole life! Is this what we call freedom?

Many people mistakenly believe there is something shameful in following another; in being a servant and having a master. The shame, however, is in that pride which honors its own foolishness rather than the wisdom of another. Though we may be intoxicated with a distorted vision of equality, the fact is that we are all inferior to the likes of Jesus Christ. We cannot fail to see this, provided only that we take an honest, humble, and objective look at the matter. We are equal, in that we are loved by God no less than Christ was, and that we, like him, may each become saviors of worlds. But we are not the saviors of this world. At best, we are the saved. At worst, we are the lost sheep, who insist on going their own way, proudly and ignorant of the dangers, only to be swallowed up by wolves.

Just as the blind cannot lead the blind, no man can shepherd himself. Those who are wise will light their own way only until they have found another whose light burns brighter than their own. They will know it when they have found it, and will not be blinded by their own light. As an expression of true leadership, they will allow themselves to be led by the absolute greatest of leaders. But a man who insists on leading himself is a man who consents to be led by a fool.

Vindication For Astrology

2011-11-01T06:53:00.000-07:00

This is all taken from Sydney Omarr's "My World Of Astrology".

First, and not at all insignificantly, Omarr names "five of the greatest scientists in all history" who were themselves astrologers: Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton -- the last of whom has been widely recognized, on account of his many contributions to both science and mathematics, as perhaps the preeminent example of unsurpassed scientific genius. To this day, he is the hero of scientists everywhere who, yet, still cringe to admit his long association with astrology, alchemy, and religion.

Next, Omarr passionately recommends the work of Evangeline Adams, a brilliant astrologer who published in the 1920's and '30's, and won a landmark court case in defense of astrology in 1914, when she was arrested and charged with fortunetelling. She could easily have settled out of court, but insisted on trying the case and, at even more risk to herself, further insisted on having her skills tested before the judge. She came equipped with a wealth of quotations from sources both modern and ancient, and impressed the hearers with her extensive learning and command of history. She was provided with a chart belonging to "Mr. X" and proceeded to interpret it to the glowing satisfaction of the judge. As it turned out, the chart belonged to his own son. Ms. Adams is responsible for making astrology legal in the state of New York.

Then we have John O'Neill's historic letter to Mr. Omarr in 1951. O'Neill was an accomplished astronomer, as well science editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and of the prestigious Clement Cleveland Medal. His letter is reproduced in Chapter 5 of Omarr's book, and significant portions of it may be found here: http://www.astrology-and-science.com/h-evol2.htm O'Neill expressed his own approval of astrology along with his regret and disappointment at the systematic stigmatization of astrology within the scientific community, and the failure of most scientists to accord it a fair hearing in conformity with the scientific method. He writes:

"For years I condemned it as unscientific and totally irrational. This was the usual formula for astronomers. Just as they have done for a long time, I condemned without making an adequate investigation of what I was condemning. Such a procedure is the utter negation of the scientific attitude, but I was quite blind to the fact at the time and mistakenly assumed I was rendering a useful service to science."

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence in favor of astrology is the work of John Henry Nelson of RCA (the Radio Corporation of America), who used astrology to predict weather patterns. Specifically, in the process of five years of experimentation, Mr. Nelson found that magnetic storms occur during significant conjunctions, squares, and oppositions, while trines and sextiles coincided with fair radio weather. Through the application of his findings, Mr. Nelson was able to save his company thousands of dollars in broadcasting costs.

Omarr mentions, -- but does not go into any depth, -- the work of Paul Flambert, who, he says, conducted statistical research into the scientific basis of astrology, yielding significant results. I have not yet looked further into the work of Paul Flambert.

Perhaps most compelling, and certainly most eminent, is Carl Gustav Jung's book, "The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche", wherein Jung presented the results of his own statistical research into which astrological configurations appear most frequently between the charts of married couples. Jung, who had utilized horoscopes extensively in his psychological practice for years prior to conducting this study, compared the data of 966 charts (483 couples). Jung concluded that the three best (or most common) interaspects for marriage are: Sun Conjunct Moon, Moon Conjunct Moon, and Moon Conjunct Ascendant -- the former two being stronger than the latter one. Jung's intention, or hope, was to corroborate the findings of astrological tradition, which he succeeded in doing. Most noteworthy would be Ptolemy's assertion that the absolute strongest correlation in marriage is when the man's Moon Conjuncts the woman's Sun. Also in conformity with tradition, Jung found that Mars and Venus are especially strongly placed, in synastry, when either conjunct or opposed, though these aspects tended to correspond to love affairs and physical attractions, and not usually to marriage. Other statistically significant interaspects, according to Jung, are Conjunctions between the wife's Ascendant and the man's Venus, and Conjunctions between the wife's Moon and the man's Ascendant. Jung writes:

"Had one wanted to falsify the statistical findings so as to bring them into line with tradition, one could not have done it more successfully."

And Omarr reiterates: "Jung's findings bore out classical astrological claims in relation to marriage."

Homilies and A Prayer

2011-10-30T12:01:00.001-07:00

A kind heart needs no instruction,
and is itself the source of all instruction.

Tenderness unlatches the door to gratitude.

Humility lays down its weapons, and lays itself down, in the field of peace.

Put on the spectacles of prayer, if you would read scripture clearly.

A man who worships a vengeful God will surely suffer vengeance in his turn,

just as a man who worships a loving God will find comfort in the presence of his Lord.

Only when the eyes of the body become clouded with tears,

do the eyes of the spirit perceive clearly the tenderness of God.

Scripture is interpreted by each man according to the quality of his understanding. A fool lacks discrimination, but the considerations of a wise man are careful and carry weight. It is well for him to reject some things while retaining others. Do not believe the fools who say you must accept everything or nothing. Must he who enjoys the flesh of the date swallow the pit as well? Must an orange be eaten along with its rind?

A proud mind clings to itself, interprets all things according to its own proclivities, and is biased in its own favor; but a humble mind is attentive to the thoughts of God.

Pride lays like scales upon the eyes. It is delusion. A proud man is as one lost in a dream, or caught under the spell of an evil sorcerer; everything he perceives is twisted out of proportion. Only the eyes of humility see things as they are, independent of the self.

We are lost, shipwrecked, broken, desolate, captive in a land of all evils. And the worst of it is that we believe we are home; that we are good; that all is well, and we will go to heaven; despite the fact that we spend our hours in bickering, brooding, apathy, and frivolity. We haven't the will to confront the reality of our condition, and to despair as we should, -- let alone the will to overcome such desperate circumstances. How shall we pray? We are not humble enough to lower our eyes, nor reverent enough to lift them. Depression would be more dignified, and only ecstasy would suit us, but we are weak, sickly, sinful, lukewarm creatures.

O Lord, may I persist in prayer, though I feel like a fraud on account of my insincerity and unworthiness. However often I may turn away from Thee, and squander Thy graces, which in the abundance of Thy charity Thou hast bestowed, yet suffer me to come again unto Thee, and receive me, as is Thy way, eternally and without condition. Purge me of my sins, I beseech Thee! Many as they are, yet are they as nothing compared with Thy great power to heal and make new. I beg Thee, with whatever humility I can muster, to take from me all lesser desires and fix in my heart an unwavering, unconquerable trust in Thee. Grant me the fortitude which is the hallmark of Thy blessed saints, who love Thee without ceasing.

The Demon-Haunted World

2011-10-30T11:58:00.001-07:00

How shall a man afflicted with cancerous tumors ever recover his health, if he believes he suffers from a mere cold? Or worse, if he believes that his condition -- his weakness, his lack of focus, his antipathy for great things, and his contentment with petty things -- is normal, "the human condition"? How shall he strive, if he considers his sickness a part of him; if he looks on healthier and happier men and thinks that they are blessed by nature, while his own nature is cursed? If he says to himself, "They have charisma, intelligence, talent. They have some inner light which I do not have,"? How shall he endeavor to uncover his own inner light, if he is convinced no such light exists in him? How shall he ever recover, unless someone suggests to him that there is a higher and better way; that nothing needs to be added to him, but that there is a light already within him, which can be revealed by the shedding of impurities, and that true health is something he has yet to experience?

A man will steer clear of a hornet's nest, without reflecting that the very world in which he lives, the places to which he goes, the people with whom he communes, and he himself, are all nests of demons. Pride, of which he often approves, is a demon. Pettiness and frivolity, which are as bedfellows to him, are likewise demons; fierce and hideous in the extreme. Self-concern, his constant companion, is among the most terrible minions of evil. And, yet, he is blind to them. They have become normal to him. The air he breathes; the atmosphere in which he lives, moves, and has his being. All around him, these same demons live and feed on everyone he knows. He sees their sins, sees them deteriorate in a thousand lamentable ways, and is not moved by the sight. It is, to him, no cosmic tragedy. It is life.

My friends, there is no surer sign that the devil has you right where he wants you, than that you yourself are apathetic to the fact. He is more than willing to provide you with creature comforts, so long as they satisfy you, and, in this way, to deny you the greater comfort of a holy life. He is gratified when you smile upon the field of carnage, which is the world under his power, and when you say to yourself, "It is a good life, with which I am content." For, while the devil most revels in your suffering, he also wishes to see you smile, if it means that he may lead you willingly, by many fleeting and superficial pleasures, into a far deeper morass of suffering and depravity.

Indeed, he rejoices with you, when you rejoice in foolish and wicked things. He loves to attend the most richly decorated weddings, and to give his "blessing" to the happy couple, for he knows that all these luxuries in which they indulge have been procured through the exploitation of the poor, -- or, at best, through their indifference to, and neglect of, the poor.

Most of all, he loves churches, provided they are ornately adorned with gold, silver, and brass; with oak which has been carved, or stone which has been chiseled, by master craftsmen at no small expense; by marble floors and painted ceilings, and all sorts of materials which have been painstakingly torn from the earth by the poor and carried half-way across the world in order to satisfy the materialistic tastes of the parishioners and priests. Nothing would disappoint him more than to see such churches dismantled, liquidated, and all the funds distributed to the needy and the sick. Most of all, he despises the simple meeting houses of Quakers, which are adorned only with the simplicity of the members, and the purity of God's holy presence.

So many of our pleasures are more pleasing to the devil than they are to us. We imagine that we are conquering dark spirits, when we laugh and lift our spirits with a frivolous conversation; or a rich meal; or a "harmless" film. We do not realize how these things work insidiously upon our souls. We do not think how wicked it is to be gratified with empty talk, when there are much loftier things to consider; or with heavy meals, which make us slow, sluggish, and dull, while they fail to satisfy our higher appetites; or with films which cost millions of dollars and a great deal of time and effort to produce -- all of which (money, time, and effort) could otherwise be directed to far nobler causes.

We think of ourselves as good, provided we do not lie, steal, or kill. And yet, our entire culture is founded on lies, on the exploitation and extortion of other lands and peoples, and on wars and socioeconomic conditions which result, daily, in the deaths of large numbers of people. This, the big picture, is effectively hidden from us by those dark forces whose sole occupation is to keep our attention on ourselves and our immediate gratifications. Our mirth is music to their ears, as it mingles with the cries of those whom we have enslaved for the sake of our pleasure, and as it pales before the glory we might otherwise experience, were we diverted to more sober and edifying pursuits.

My friends, the first step toward recovery is the recognition of our affliction. We, indeed, are sorely afflicted, demoralized and enslaved. What is optimistic about our predicament is only the extent to which it may be transformed by the grace of God; for a man who is deathly ill has the most to gain from recovering his health. The apostle Paul, who was healed of his sins, wrote that, "where sin abounded, grace did much more abound". We may be comforted by the reflection that God's justice is not punitive but merciful. While the karmic law demands that we repay all that we have taken, the law of grace, which is not subject to karma, -- any more than deep space is subject to the earth's gravitational pull, -- absolves us. But we must turn our backs on the world, and leave its "gravity" behind. Like the prodigal son, we have only to confess our weakness, truly and deeply, and to declare with equal force our great desire to be strengthened and led by the power of God, in order to be freed from the heavy bonds of sin which we have forged under the guidance of evil.

Do not be fooled, though, into thinking that such a conversion happens only once. It must be renewed, faithfully, at every moment, for if at any time we neglect to consider our foolishness and God's wisdom, then our enlightenment is not sincere, and the gifts of grace must wane. Even a formidable ascetic, after many years in the desert, engaged in the most impressive devotions and austerities, may one day succumb to temptation, having come to rely on himself, forgetting his weakness and God's strength. In that moment, he must recollect himself, and renew his conversion, or all is lost.

There are atheists who say that God, and religion, is a concoction of weaker people, a crutch upon which they must rely in order to be merely decent. What they do not understand is that they themselves are far weaker, and far less decent, than they imagine, and that the spiritual life exists not to make men decent, but to make them perfect.

The Soul In My Keeping

2011-10-30T11:56:00.001-07:00

Once, when it seemed to me that my will was altogether too weak, and too much divided, for me to hope of ever attaining blessedness, I thought to comfort myself by considering all those faithful, fortunate souls who now enjoyed God's favor and protection. Though I myself remained in exile, yet I supposed some vicarious peace might come to me if, in all humility, I could still be happy for the blessed.

However, it quickly occurred to me that I was simply not entitled to give up on myself so easily; that my soul was given into my care, and I had better learn to keep and to steward it; that it was, after all, not my own, but the Lord's. All that was good in me belonged to the Lord, and I could not allow that which was worst in me, -- the flesh, the dross, -- to keep me bound, and to bind up the spirit of the Lord in me.

So now I looked upon my soul as something precious and heavenly, though fallen; as a pearl dropped into the mortal clay. It was not me, nor any object belonging to myself, but, rather, something external and otherworldly, belonging to the stars. It was a messianic infant placed in my arms, whom no one would safeguard and raise up plainly if I did not.

In this moment, I cared nothing for myself, yet I cared for my soul more than all, as an emblem of all; for I knew I could bring no other souls to Christ before I had honestly secured the salvation of my own soul in him. As it was mine, so was it His, and everyone's. I looked upon my soul as something wholly other and better than myself, which God had, for mysterious reasons, entrusted to me (no doubt believing in me more than I believed in myself), and the salvation of which entirely depended on me, and on my diligence in offering it back to Him.

Now I know I must learn to care for this Christ-child soul; to cradle it more tenderly than I was able; to reassure it of the blessings of Father, and procure for it that peace which alone renders all souls receptive to the love, charisms, and graces of God.

This soul, I see, is a lamb bound to me, with no other to give her nourishment, nor comfort. Haven't I been a careless shepherd, tugging and dragging her around after me, as I rush off in pursuit of pleasures in which she has no part?

"My soul, my little lamb, my child of God, -- forgive me. I have fed on coarse stuff, and starved you. But now, as I pray over the words of the saints, I see you eating new grass from my hand. As I awaken to the gospel of Christ, I see you drifting to sleep in my lap. As I bury my will in the ground, I see you gambol and play, resurrected. And all my joy is in you."

The Soul In Flight

2011-10-30T11:55:00.001-07:00

The soul not bound to love in Christ is fallen, -- yet, not only fallen, but falling.

As a bird, when she ceases to beat her wings, must soon fall, so the soul, when she ceases to be ardently and intently fixed upon the love of God, cannot support herself in "flight".

Though the bird's wings may remain outspread, and though she may coast for a time on the wind, according to the momentum generated, nevertheless, without beating her wings, she will gradually begin to sink, and not to climb; likewise, the soul may retain her purity for a time, upheld by the breath of the Holy Spirit, according the karma generated by good works, yet, because she is no longer actively praying, she has already begun to exhaust her reserves and, if she does not resume her prayer, she most assuredly will fall.

Faith, trust, hope, and love in Christ are the very wings of the soul. Let them beat, and not cease before you come to rest in the perfect peace of God, which is your highest perch.

On Freedom From Self

2011-10-30T11:53:00.000-07:00

[Excerpted from
"The Royal Way of The Cross"
by Francois Fenelon]

So long as we are centered in self, we shall be prey to the contradiction, the wickedness, and the injustice of men. Our temper brings us into collision with other tempers; our passions clash with those of our neighbors; our wishes are so many tender places open to the shafts of those around; our pride, which is incompatible with our neighbors', rises like the waves of a stormy sea; — everything rouses, attacks, rebuffs us.

We are exposed on all sides by reason of the sensitiveness of passion and the jealousy of pride. No peace is to be looked for within when we are at the mercy of a mass of greedy, insatiable longings, and when we can never satisfy that "me" which is so keen and touchy as to whatever concerns it.

Hence in our dealings with others we are like a bed-ridden invalid, who cannot be touched anywhere without pain. A sickly self-love cannot be touched without screaming; the mere tip of a finger seems to scarify it!

Then add to this the roughness of neighbors in their ignorance of self, their disgust at our infirmities (at least as great as ours towards theirs), and you soon find all the children of Adam tormenting each other, each embittering the other's life. And this martyrdom of self-love you will find in every nation, every town, every community, every family, often between friends.

The only remedy is to renounce self.

~ Francois Fenelon, "On Freedom From Self"

Being Prayer

2011-10-30T11:52:00.002-07:00

The soul is always praying. True prayer is this: that we cease to do anything else but pray; that we become attentive to the prayers already being offered up in the silence of our hearts. When we pose no resistance, and do not attempt to manipulate the processes already at work deep within ourselves: only then can true prayer take place.

It is not ecstasy, it is honesty. Sadness is sadness, allowed to be sadness. Silliness is itself. Strangeness is free to be strange. Ignorance is not in conflict with itself. Mysteriously, it is wisdom.

You cannot make yourself what you are. You cannot tell the heart that loves to love. You cannot plant a seed that is planted, nor pick a fruit that is picked. The hunger you desire is already there. The sanctity. The fullness overflowing, welling up from within. The questing and the answer are both there, dancing.

This is purity: not to act, but to be.

Who is the enlightened man? He who does not thwart himself by attempting to be that which he already is. Only when we stop pretending, or trying to be something other than we are, will we become free to be who we really are.

Origins of Love and Hate (The Work of Ian Suttie)

2011-10-30T11:52:00.001-07:00

excerpted from
Houston Smith's 'Why Religion Matters --
The fate of the human spirit in an age of disbelief':

My wife recently reminded me of something I had forgotten. At a dinner for Aldous Huxley while he was paying a campus visit to Washington University, I asked him if there were any books he found himself returning to reread. Actually, he said, there were two. One was Sir Herbert Read's Art and Education, and the other was a book no one at the table had heard of, Ian Suttie's The Origins of Love and Hate. A psychologist herself, Kendra followed up on the second book, and this is what she found.

Its author, a Scottish psychiatrist, is something of a mystery. He died in midcareer in the 1930s, and his work was ignored until a student of his, John Bowlby (who became a recognized name in child development) took it up and brought out a second edition of his neglected book.

Like Freud and other psychologists, Suttie believed that people deal with anxiety by shoving worrisome thoughts and feelings into the unconscious. But unlike psychoanalysts, he became convinced (through his research) that our major repression is not of sexual or aggressive impulses, but of affection and openness. These repressions in individuals add up to a collective taboo against tenderness in our culture.

Beginning at the beginning, Suttie saw infants as born with two independent propensities. The one that is primary is a desire for the social give-and-take and responsive relationship that we call love. Sexuality, in his theory, exists as a separate and independent drive.

This is a radical departure from Freud, who likewise posited two independent drives, one of which was sex (the libido) and the other aggression (the death instinct). Freud described the infant's earliest state of consciousness as auto-erotic and narcissistic. In contrast, Suttie describes the earliest state (before an infant distinguishes self from others) as a state of symbiotic communion.

In the Freudian view the infant believes itself to be omnipotent, able to summon the mother magically with its cries. It cathects to the mother because she relieves its bodily tensions. To Suttie this was as preposterous as saying that the mother loves the baby because it is a breast-reliever who drains her swollen mammary glands.

In his years of careful scrutiny, Suttie became impressed by the early overtures that a baby makes to evoke a response from its mother. It fixes its gaze raptly on her face while nursing, and this often gets a loving gaze in return. Soon the baby starts smiling around the nipple as it sucks, often dropping the nipple and gurgling with delight if it gets a response. It is a mode of flirtation. In the harmonious interchange between mother and child, the baby gives the only thing it can, its love and its body as the first shared plaything. It is the beginning of the creativity that Suttie sees in play, which (he says) is the mother of invention, not necessity.

A critical period comes when the infant is able to differentiate itself from its mother, and its mother from other persons. It is only then that the baby can know separation from its mother, and this separation is the major source of human anxiety -- a fear of abandonment. At about the same time acceptance is no longer unconditional. Some of the baby's bodily functions and activities may not be welcomed or approved.

In baby or adult, hell hath no fury like rejected love. Here we have Suttie's understanding of the origin of anger, which he saw as a baby's desperate effort to reclaim a lost harmony. Depending on the degree of pain and hopelessness the small child goes through, intimacy may be renounced, and a quest for self-sufficiency (or power) may take its place -- the typical route in our individualistic West, Suttie believed.

...It is as Suttie says: tenderness is a cultural repression. Suttie cites obsessive, compulsive sex as another possible outcome of repressed tenderness, for (as the saying goes) you cannot get enough of what you do not really want. What is needed and wanted (but our culture denies, Suttie argues) is emotional closeness. Not sex, nor food, nor power, nor any other surrogate can satisfy that need.

Material Abundance and "Poverty Mentality"

2011-10-30T11:50:00.000-07:00

Popular today, particularly among enthusiasts of "The Secret" and certain channellers of the "Abraham Hicks" variety, is a belief that material wealth may be spiritually justified. The fundamental assumption here is that material resources are infinite, and that everyone may be materially wealthy without any one having to go without, or to do the dirty work of procuring and refining the resources necessary for an opulent lifestyle. It is, admittedly, a rather attractive proposal, especially to those of us who are very much attached to worldly possessions and to the dream of acquiring material wealth without having to step on the backs of the "less fortunate". What is required, they say, is merely a change in perspective, from one which views resources as finite, or lacking, to one which views them as infinite, or abundant. Again, the apparent optimism of this belief system is rather attractive, and especially to those of us who equate unbridled optimism with a spiritually evolved state of mind. Nonetheless, my own understanding of the matter is that this seeming optimism is very far from spiritual, that it is, in fact, deeply cynical and pessimistic, and that defining wealth in material terms is downright pernicious to the life of the spirit and the state of the world.

A number of terms have arisen or been tweaked in order to better articulate this belief system, chief among them being "abundance" and "poverty mentality". It is said that those who do not enjoy material wealth are suffering from a "poverty mentality", which inclines them to refuse material benefits which they see as incompatible with a spiritual life, or which they imagine themselves to be unworthy of. The millions who toil in sweatshops or languish in dry climates without proper nourishment, they say, are merely unaware of their own worth and of the infinite abundance available to them, and to all, through a simple shift in perspective.

Both poverty and abundance are almost invariably defined in material terms. No attention is payed to the sacred teachings of all ages, and to the saints and sages throughout the world who, with one voice, have decried material wealth, and urged us to redefine our conceptions of wealth along more spiritual lines. That is, to see material wealth as spiritual poverty, and to define true wealth as intimacy with God. Patience, calm, humility, generosity, compassion, inspiration, and joy which does not depend on, nor discover itself in, material things, are the true gifts of the spirit, and the primary consolations which any spiritually-minded individual has an interest in procuring.

In order to see through this latest craze in "spiritual materialism", it is necessary only to take an honest look at the matter, without a desire to justify our attachment to those things which gratify the senses of the body, rather than the higher senses of the intellect and the heart. It is helpful, but not essential, to reflect on the claim made by holy men throughout history that, when the soul leaves the body, those attachments we have made to sensory objects and gratifications will be useless and will only weigh our souls down (indeed, we will be like "hungry ghosts", groping at things which only pass through our fingers), while those attachments we have made to more abstract objects of contemplation will serve us well; -- although, at the very highest levels, attachment itself is, ultimately, to be renounced.

First, we should understand that, while the specific manifestations of this trend may be new and unique, the desire to find spiritual justifications for worldly attachments is at least as old as the world itself. No doubt, the rise of capitalism has done much to lend these teachings a semblance of respectability, to undermine many of the long-standing objections toward them, and to engender in people a stronger desire to see such teachings legitimized, -- but the essential thrust of the phenomenon is nothing new. Likewise, misguided teachers like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, or Osho (the self-styled "rich man's guru"), with his 90+ Rolls Royces, are growing bolder and acquiring an alarming degree of popularity these days, but there have always been, and perhaps there may always be, false prophets of a similar stamp.

The present wave of materialism, cloaked in spiritual garb, appears to have been originated and popularized by the Pluto in Leo generation,-- or, more specifically, by the shadow-side of this generation. The darker side of Leo has always been associated with opulence and excess, while Pluto's very nature is to bring up from the depths of the psyche the darkest impulses, and often to clothe them in language which makes them appear deeper or more spiritual than they actually are. While the positive side of Leo is one of enlightened self-interest, the negative side is one which equates self-empowerment with self-entitlement. Here we have a veritable definition of the expounders of the present materialism.

One book which brings these matters into stark relief would be Chogyam Trungpa's "Spiritual Materialism", but, provided we are honest with ourselves, we need not make a serious study of the matter in order to be convinced. It is enough merely to observe a few of the principles which the wisest of God's messengers have been uttering for centuries.

For instance: Did Christ have a "poverty mentality" when he defined wealth in spiritual terms, telling his followers, "sell all that you have and distribute the money to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven", or when he told them it is necessary to sell everything in order to purchase "one pearl of great price" (i.e. the kingdom of heaven)?

Gandhi writes: “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” I used to think this quote applied to those who were literally and materially starving, but now, it occurs to me that it has a far greater and deeper application. It must be applied, first and foremost, to those who are starved for spirituality, and to whom both wealth and spirit continue to be defined in material terms. It is to them that God appears in the form of "bread"; that is, in material form; in the form of material riches, luxuries and delicacies. In fact, what they are really hungry for is intimacy with God, and for those virtues and higher consolations which stem from a godly life.

In conclusion, let me quote just a handful of wise persons:

"Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants."
~ Epictetus

“The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.”
~ Voltaire

“Great abundance of riches cannot be gathered and kept by any man without sin.”
~ Erasmus

"We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women... When we arise in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge provided for us by a Pacific Islander. We reach for soap that is created for us by a Frenchman. The towel is provided by a Turk. Then at the table we drink coffee which is provided for us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African. Before we leave for our jobs, we are beholden to more than half the world."
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

“He has committed the crime who profits by it.”
~ Seneca

"[Eat from a clay plate as if it were silver, and a silver plate as if it were clay.]"
~ Seneca

"Prayer reveals to souls the vanity of earthly goods and pleasures. It fills them with light, strength, and consolation, and gives them a foretaste of the calm bliss of our heavenly home."
~ St. Rose of Viterbo

"The only true riches are those that make us rich in virtue. Therefore, if you want to be rich, Beloved, love true riches. If you aspire to the heights of real honor, strive to reach the kingdom of Heaven. If you value rank and renown, hasten to be enrolled in the heavenly court of angels."
~ St. Gregory the Great

“The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers... We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.”
~ William James

“Satan is wiser now than before, and tempts by making rich instead of poor.”
~ Alexander Pope

Some Sayings

2011-10-30T11:44:00.000-07:00

Be still; and behold the superorganic unfolding of the soul's potentialities in God.

How humble is the Lord, our God! His ways are not our ways. He does not clamor to be heard, but whispers to us in "a still small voice" out of the depths of our souls, and every man must put off his own will and listen intently if he is to hear the humble promptings of the Lord.

The Lord, in His goodness, teaches us gratitude for what we have and humility for what we have not.

In the world they are ashamed to speak of Christ, and in Christ they are ashamed to speak of the world.

The heart is a bridle for the intellect, that reason may serve the will in all simplicity.

Love forges a simple path through the forest of the mind.

Strait is the spirit of love in pursuit of the heart of God.

Clear as water is the spirit which cleanses of all superfluities.

The heart desires to be heard and not to conceal itself in a forest of clever words.

Simplicity charms the heart.

Gifts, like children, do not come out of us, but through us.

What I have loved in mortal natures is only the grace which proceeded from God.

In the time it takes to know a man he may become a different man.

The Ironic Generation

2011-10-30T11:18:00.000-07:00

I have recently been in one of those "cool" shops which showcases the irreverent work of local artists, and I must say that I was not impressed. In fact, I found myself thoroughly depressed by the experience. Nevertheless, I've come away with some reflections which I believe may be of some use.

First, let me provide a couple examples of the "art" which so disturbed me, and then attempt to interpret it so as to explain my reaction:

No doubt, you are familiar with those tall, cylindrical candles encased in glass and decorated with a depiction of one of the saints, or of the mother of God, or some other religious symbol. Well, a certain artist thought it would be clever to reproduce those candles and depictions, but in an ironic style. There were many variations, but, to give just one instance, there was a reverent-looking man, complete with beard and upturned eyes, holding a bong, and the caption read "So-and-So [I forget the name], The Patron Saint of Lost Brain Cells". I say that the artist thought this clever, and I must admit, it was clever. It even elicited a fleeting, ironic smile on my part. But the smile was quickly replaced by a strange sense of melancholy and even pity for the artist and for anyone who might be so delighted by the object as to purchase it and place it in their home. What disturbed me is that the object, though clever, was nothing more than clever, and while it awakened in me reflections of a higher nature, I could not help suspecting that the creator of the work, and almost certainly the admirers of the work, were not likely to be privy to its deeper ramifications; or, if they were, that these would somehow remain in the background, acting only to highlight the clever irony in the foreground, and to provide a chuckle, when they really ought to make us weep.

The second example is of an altar, rather elaborately decorated, and placed in the back corner of the shop. It was, as it were, an altar dedicated to nostalgia for an 80's childhood, and the direct subject was "Mr. T". There was an action figure, a lunch-box, and many other sorts of "Mr. T" paraphernalia. Again, it was clever. It was ironic. It was kitch. And it turned my stomach.

I know many people will think I am simply taking these things too seriously, and that I just need to lighten up and have a little fun. That's understandable. However, my objection is that this is precisely indicative of the moral, or spiritual, disease which has taken hold of our culture: We are afraid to take anything seriously. Any expression of true sincerity, in our culture, is regarded as highly suspect. Almost invariably, there is an immediate inclination to crack a joke, and to make light of whatever serious and sincere consideration happens to be tempting us into a deeper reflectiveness. The overwhelming message one seems to get, subtly or implicitly, is that "Life is a joke, and so is God, and so are you."

In fact, it is this very flippancy which makes the joke work, and though it may be healthful to laugh, it is a sure sign of disease when that laughter does not give way to a deeper period of reflection, in which one attempts to transform the situation into one which is not a joke. That we do not enter into a deeper consideration of the matter is symptomatic of the dire progression of the disease, for it shows that we are desperate indeed. We are like the madman who sees his madness and, yet, incapable of seeing any way out of it, is reduced to absolute hysterics. He cannot be reasoned with, but remains lost; trapped in a sort of self-referencing, self-satirizing condition. In essence, he feeds upon his own madness, -- or, more precisely, his madness feeds upon itself.

If we wished to be especially generous, we might interpret this condition as a last-ditch attempt to empower the self, which feels utterly disempowered, by reclaiming those aspects of experience which have been systematically co-opted by the culture. In other words, it is not unlike the situation of many members of the black community who have attempted to empower themselves by reclaiming the word "nigger", so as to remove the stigma of the word through a process of desensitization, making it instead a term of affection (i.e. "my nigger"). What we find is that the long history of it's use cannot be so easily dispelled. In consequence, the less controversial term "nigga" has taken its place, while the word "nigger" retains its original, derogatory connotations, and is perhaps more potent, and more taboo, than ever. Now we can only refer to it in polite society as "the N-word". So, in our present attempt to de-claw the beasts which threaten us, by making a joke of them, we have fallen into the very trap we wished to escape. What began as an underground movement, designed to satirize the mainstream consumerist culture, or the advertising machine which has co-opted every true expression of human experience and turned it into a marketing gimmick, ends by becoming that which it despised. Now, there is nothing more mainstream, nothing which has been so thoroughly co-opted, as this defiant, ironic distantiation which began as a defensive posture for those wishing to resist and distance themselves from the mainstream.

What the pieces discussed above really suggest to me is the utter spiritual poverty of our modern age, and the fact that many people, though clearly desperate for true, sincere tokens of spirituality, are not comfortable placing actual images of saints in their homes, -- but, still wishing somehow to access that strata, are settling for these pseudo-saints whose behavior benignly reflects their own, while only vaguely suggesting the discrepancy between their "lost brain cells" and the illuminated mind of those devoted to a higher path.

Now, the corporate juggernauts themselves are onto us, and have adopted our irony to suit their nefarious purposes. Like us, they are self-mocking, self-reflective, self-satirizing. Rather than make inflated claims which they know we are all too jaded to be moved by, they advertize like they don't care: "Insert Logo Here", or "Insert Clever Catch-Phrase Here", or "It's Just A Potato Chip", or "It's Just A Sneaker; It Won't Make You Capable Of Slam-Dunking Like Michael Jordan; But, Hey, Buy It Anyway" and so on. But it's just another marketing ploy. And we, in our self-referencing, culture-referencing attempts to take back the power, are merely succeeding in highlighting the dimensions of those cells in which we remain captive, along with our own hysterical hopelessness.

So what is the solution? How do we get free?

It's simple. We need to get real. We need to get serious, and reclaim sincerity from the cultural scrap-heap. But, more than this, we need to get serious about things which the culture cannot market to us. If you see a bumper-sticker advertising a message of anti-consumerism -- don't consume it, Stupid! And if you see a bumper-sticker advertising a message of anti-consumerism in an ironic, self-referencing fashion (i.e. "I Consumed This Anti-Consumerist Bumper-Sticker") -- definitely do not buy it.

All it does is play upon your sense of defeat. It's a hysterical madman, laughing at his own madness, and digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole with every clever, self-referencing, self-satirizing "joke". Isn't this, after all, the only thing truly ironic about it?

Get free. Get honest. Get serious. Get real. And don't be afraid to love God, or to make of Jesus Christ something more than a party gag; a "Buddy Christ". If you're a hypocrite, who hits the bong while harboring an ideal of perfect sobriety, then, dammit, be a hypocrite; have the courage to be a hypocrite; and don't attempt to make a joke of your hypocrisy by ironically lighting ironic candles to an ironic icon of an ironic patron saint.

No doubt, the instant you sincerely aim for the sublime, somebody somewhere will accuse you of being pretentious. No doubt they think having low aims makes them humble. But that's not true humility, and if you are going to err, then err on the side of the sublime. Don't be afraid to be pretentious; have the courage of your pretensions.

Don't attempt to ease your situation by making a joke of yourself, and calling it "having a sense of humor", or "being humble". There are better things to be than a clown, and there is still hope that you can be more than a clown.

Don't be a clown.

Be a man.

Art Is Dead

2011-10-10T16:19:00.001-07:00

Where's the crack of the unconscious? I mean the great gulf. Hammers strike here and there, feeling for the place. The old axes grind on the rusted, still turning wheels of artists' brains. Sharp enough to fork the squeamish folds, and drive a wedge between the hemispheres, in hope that some new daemon will scrabble out with his madness still intact. But nothing works to open the crevice wide. Maybe a puddle of insects wells up and spills over into somewhere, another corner of the brain, to feed on whatever's left. But there's no real passion. No beasts break forth. No wild bulls in the china shop where antique pleasantries line the shelves and stick out their pale, dull tongues.

If a man had an ounce of passion the whole world would hail greatness in him. Women in every country would howl again. Panties would drop, and get kicked to the side, all moist and crumpled like our minds are now. But nobody's got it. Still, you see the poets, or would-be poets (there are no poets left) whisper together in the cafés, leaning into each other's ears. "Where is it?" they want to know. Yeah, we all want to know. "Who's got it?" Man, don't bother. Don't you know, it would be front page news: ART FOUND

But we're all a bunch of third-rate Nietzsches, ringing our bells in the public squares, announcing the death of art. And wondering where are the true explorers of the unconscious. Not long ago we were feverish, hunting desperately for the new worlds, the undiscovered continents of the mind. Now, we haven't the vital breath left for desperation, but we're lazily still turning over rocks and mental blocks. Unaware that we are ghosts.

Sex is blown up. There's no discovering it now. It's everywhere before you've got whiskers on your balls or curls on your cunt. It used to be something you went looking for down dark corridors with a lit torch between your legs. Now it's just the way to hawk a hamburger. At least, in its prudishness, the world had reverence for it once.

The Prayerful Soul

2011-10-10T16:07:00.000-07:00

What is the experience of a soul, once practiced in the art of prayer?

The prayerful soul, taken up into the spirit of a higher aspiration, gently ascends, as if through deepest space, toward the great hierophany of God. Silent, expectant, reverent, triumphant, and overcome with awe for what is holy, she relinquishes, imperceptibly, her long attachment to the vestiges of lower nature.

Replacing every coarse element of her being with the tenderest lineaments of light, all her qualities newly bathed in warm, ineffable luminescence, she draws to herself, and draws into herself, the wondrous substances of divine life. Softly transformed, she commends herself entirely to the singular experience of Christ.

This love, whose perfection she never could have anticipated or even quite imagined, has become, for her, the secret wellspring of all things tender, blessed, glorious, and good; a beacon of incomparable majesty, in whose presence she flutters, angelic, imbued with all the wisdom of simplicity; partaking of that blissful communion which is the sustenance of saints.

Now she herself has become as a particle of God's love, almost inseparable from the rest, golden and white, half-lost in the effulgence of His most glorious emanation; joyous to discover herself a darling of the godhead; beloved and cherished beyond all human comprehension; a lustre in the infinitely opulent penumbra of cosmic light.

Who can imagine the fullness of love, which waits, attendant, upon the prayers of a willing soul? Who can perceive, in the hidden depths of an inward life, such heavenly elevations?

The snow-capped mountains, which tower over man, and over-awe the capacities of mortal imaginations, are less than specks of dust, swept back into distant space, immaterial before the presence of His love; the one takes your breath away, the other takes your heart. While souls, which seemed so meager, so unfit to behold this brilliance, are suddenly revealed to be the dearest twinkles in the eye, -- the bluest eye, -- of Christ.

My brothers, my sisters, how dearly we must cherish the slightest devotional stirrings, which beckon to us from deep within, as echos of angelic choirs; as a summons to be honored before the throne of the King of Angels.

Monastic Activism

2011-10-10T16:06:00.001-07:00

Seemingly the greatest, and certainly the most common, objection raised against monks, is that the monastic life represents a retreat from worldly duties, and an abdication of social responsibility. In fact, this could not be further from the truth. On the contrary, while the monk does retreat to some extent from the mundane affairs of humanity, he or she does so only in order to wage a confrontation of far greater magnitude and importance.

By natural methods, worldly science has revealed knowledge concerning operations in nature which remain hidden from the naked eye and inaccessible to less sophisticated observation. In the same way, yet through supernatural methods, spiritual science has revealed wisdom concerning operations in supernature which remain hidden from the naked eye (as well as from the biologist's microscope) and inaccessible to less sophisticated observation.

For example:

The experiments of worldly science have shown how trees absorb carbon dioxide, which is harmful to the biological life of humanity, and, by a process of chemical transmutation, exude oxygen, which is healthful to it. In like manner, the experiments of spiritual science have shown how monks absorb demonic energies, which are harmful to the theological life of humanity, and, by a process of alchemical transmutation, exude angelic energies, which are healthful to it. By the testimony of worldly science, we know that trees are responsible for preserving the quality of the air upon which our bodies subsist. Likewise, by the testimony of spiritual science, we know that monks are responsible for preserving the quality of the spirit upon which our souls subsist.

A monk, sincerely and diligently active in the realms of spirit, transmuting, by his presence and effort there, all manner of foul energies, acts simultaneously like a great sponge, or vacuum, sucking up all that clouds and dirties the spiritual atmosphere of humankind, and like a great generator of spiritual warmth and light.

Although many activists in society believe they alone are confronting social ills directly, the fact is that they are merely chopping at the branches, and pruning the leaves, of evil in the world. The monks, engaged in spiritual warfare, are busy digging up the very roots.

Those with little or no comprehension of subtle (i.e. spiritual) energies must find this difficult to understand. Nonetheless, it is the case, and they would do well to consider it.

The Weeping Prophet (a parable)

2011-10-10T16:05:00.001-07:00

There was once a man so inspired with the wisdom of God that, whenever he would begin to meditate, another insight would flash before his mind. So profound were these insights, or "openings", and so taken was he with their brilliance, that he would immediately break-off his meditation in order to record them, lest they be forgotten and lost forever.

In this manner, he proceeded for many years, writing many books, and drawing many souls into the mysteries of God. Yet he himself never experienced the deep and abiding peace which, in his heart of hearts, he sought to receive from the Lord, and which unbroken meditation would have procured for him.

Then, one day, after he had become old and feeble, and could see his own death approaching from not far off, he finally came to give priority to silence over even the most exalted speech. It was then that he dismissed the fine thoughts which clamored for his attention, and sank into a truly blissful union with the mystical God.

From such an incredible state of oneness, he came at last to see that his words, and even the most precious sayings of his lord, Jesus Christ, were as nothing -- specks of dust -- in comparison with the inner experience of God's love, light, truth, presence, and peace. He wept bitterly for all the time he had lost.

What he did not know then, was that the insights he dismissed were never lost, but mysteriously found their way to another vessel, ready and willing to record them.

Forgiveness, A Formality

2011-10-10T16:00:00.001-07:00

When I ask God to forgive me, "I speak as a man" (to borrow the expression of Saint Paul the Apostle); it is said for convenience, and does not adequately or literally convey my understanding of God's mercy, which is infinite and freely given before I desire it. To be precise, it is not God who must forgive me, for God has never judged me; it is I who must repent.

Confession is for my own benefit, and for the purification of my own soul. It is something I owe to myself, and not to God; for God was never compromised or corrupted by my sins; I have only hurt myself. I have only myself to blame, and only myself to forgive; for all of the choices were mine.

Therefore, an appropriate and conscious way to speak would be to say:

"Lord, I know that You, in Your great love, have already absolved me and called me back into Your fold. Nevertheless, for my own edification, let me confess my transgressions and repent of them as I may. Though You have compassion for my sins, still I must do all that I can to disown them. And though you have never judged me, I know You will forgive me now as a matter of form, seeing that we have a precedent in the baptism of Your Son by John the Forerunner."

For, when Jesus had no need to be baptised, and John was unworthy of baptising him, yet, because it was seemly, the annointing took place: 'Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.' Christ, being perfect, had no need to humble himself in this way, but, had he not done so, he would have ceased in that moment to be the Christ; and this could never happen.

So, if even Jesus, who was faithful concerning the greatest things, did not neglect the smallest, how much more so ought we to observe these things? If Christ, who understood the reality of justification by grace better than anyone, remained faithful to "the last tittle" of the law, then how much more so ought we to perform the works prescribed? And if he who is exalted above all things still humbles himself, how much more so ought we to humble ourselves?

Truly, to be alert, one must stay alert. The watchful are only watchful because they keep watch; moment after moment after moment, day after day after day. The righteous continue to be righteous, and the perfect remain perfect.

No Knowledge Is Objective

2011-10-10T14:56:00.000-07:00

[Author's Note: I could be wrong.]

It is my conviction (and I do not believe I am presumptuous in supposing it ought to be yours as well) that nothing is self-evident, and nothing -- no logic, proof, or experience of inner validity, -- however honored by tradition or convincing in itself, is sufficient to qualify any statement, doctrine, or position as incontrovertibly true.

No doubt, I myself will contradict this conviction, and betray my negligence of it, time and again, for the mind (or, at any rate, my own mind) is a fragmentary and undisciplined thing, frequently unconscious of its own most well-established pronouncements. We are habituated to a million foolish and commonplace figures of thought and speech, many of them manifested merely for convenience and expressing a kind of shorthand which, if we had infinite time, space, energy, ability, and inclination, we might still never succeed in clarifying by the process of articulation. Absolute clarity is not only ineffable, it is unachievable, for, though we may not often be conscious of it, we are perpetually and inextricably engaged in the act of refining and questioning our own views. It is only by ignoring these considerations that we come to demand consistency of thought and expression from ourselves or from others.

Nevertheless, I proclaim it now, as strange as it must sound, and as foreign a thing to my own mind, that there is ultimately no foundation solid enough to support the claim that any perception is undeniably more true than any other. There is always some larger vision, always some angle which transcends our perspective and eludes our notice, so that we are finally constrained to admit the limitations of our knowledge, and the intrinsically specious foundations upon which it rests.

We have seen with what stark and inscrutable verisimilitude the fantasies of pure lunatics may be imbued, so that reality itself (or what we call reality) cannot by any means be distinguished from a fiction. At last, we cannot deny the possibility that we, too, are mad, and that what seems to us true beyond any shadow of doubt may in fact be the most outlandish fabrication of delirium.

In saving a life, we may (unwittingly) be shattering a soul, or in saving a soul, we may be striking a formidable blow against the spirit. Whatever we do, we do according to the light which is given, understanding that light, wherever it plays, plays tricks.

More Aphorisms and Fragments

2011-09-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

The sins of a humble man are always before him; therefor, he judges no one
But a proud man overlooks his own sins in order to look upon the sins of another.

If only one minute of your day is given
to the contemplation of higher things,
be thankful for it; it is the Lord's.

To seek God is to find Him; not to seek God is to lose Him;
the more you seek Him, the more He dwells in you.

The best sayings of the wise always sound so perfect, so simple, and so obvious, that we can hardly believe we have not heard them before, or that they have not been uttered since the beginning of the world.

When a man's hands are often in his pockets, very likely,
he is in there too, slipping through his fingers like loose change.

Love your weaknesses: they keep you humble.

We ask God to humble us, and to show us to ourselves, "warts and all". We don't realize that it is our vanity which causes us to believe we are strong enough to bear the unmitigated sight of ourselves, nor that it is God's mercy which permits us our delusions until such a time as we may dispel them more gradually and with less pain.

Whoever dies to the well-lit world of the living,
comes alive to the darkness and speaks with the dead.

Buried deep within the unconscious of every person,
there is a hidden reservoir of courage, hope, and love,
to which only the name of "God" provides access.

God's love being infinite, there is no adequate way to measure it,
nor to articulate it, so that mortal minds may begin to form an idea of its greatness,
other than to say that God's very nature is to love, and that God Himself is Love.

The Gospel is not about Jesus, as you have been taught to understand Him. It is about the idea of Jesus triggering a sudden awareness in the reader of a loving presence, which is accessible whenever we remember to call it to mind. This idea is Jesus. When you understand that an idea can be holy, and even divine, then you have understood Christ's divinity. As a man, because of his divine works, may be rightly called a God, so, also, an idea, by the divine works it inspires, may rightly be called the Holy Spirit of Our Lord. To deny that an idea (if it is the idea of Love) is worthy of ultimate reverence, is to deny the savior because He is humble. Christ is "just" a metaphor for the idea of love. When the idea is embraced and given its due, the kingdom of heaven will reign in men's hearts and upon the earth. In order to bring this idea into full manifestation, we must honor it as though it were already a reality for us and for all men. We must think it into being. We must rid ourselves of distracting concerns, all of which are chaff and dust, so that we may allow "Love" to be. Really, it is the simplest thing in the world. Do you think it is difficult? It is only difficult because you are resisting it. Before you imagine reasons to resist love, ask yourself, "do you really want to do that?" You will find that you do not. You have always been Love's disciple. Many times you have strayed from the path, but you always return when the master calls.

Return to Love. Love is the only reality. If only you stopped there!! But you are restless creatures. You need it set before you elaborately. You need it complicated and obscure. You need Bibles. It is not enough that the Bible is contained in the Lord's Prayer, or that the Lord's Prayer is contained in the first line, "The Lord is my Shepherd," and this is itself contained in that one word, which says more than all other words combined; "Love". My friends, what is there to do, but to moisten our lips, and speak the word, "Love," or to think it, and listen as it sinks to the bottom of our hearts, is arrested by something hard and, like a red-hot stone at the bottom of the sea, sizzles, steams, and burns through, to reach a depth as yet unknown? This word, "Love" is the philosopher's stone, which burns through all things, and is untouched. But it must be spoken, it must be thought, it's presence must be felt everywhere and at all times. We are all approaching this superior concentration. All our missteps, all our wrong turns, lead us back to this quiet, unassuming Word.

If I were a conqueror, I might write about the glory of Alexander, who perfected the art of conquest. But I am a lover, so I write about the glory of Jesus, who perfected the art of loving.

Remember, Jesus is a symbol. He represents all of us. Like Him, we are all tested, we all die and are reborn, and, in the end, we will all realize our divine nature; our Oneness with God. Like him we shall all say, "I and the Father are One". We are the children of God, destined to carry the cross of flesh, until we are ready to transcend our earthy lives. There is no shortcut. This is the only Way. This is what is meant by "Jesus is the only way". Jesus is the symbol, the model, the prototype, and the pioneer. He is the "first fruits", but we shall all become ripe.

True Christianity is not about sin, but grace. Grace is not exclusive, but inclusive. It is not dependent on actions, or even beliefs. It is for everyone. You don't even have to know about it. You are forgiven, you are innocent. The reason faith is important, is not so that you may be forgiven (you already are forgiven - "it is accomplished"), but, so that you might be spared the distress of imagining yourself guilty in the eyes of God.

Religions form around a nucleus, which is the "religious experience". An individual attains a high level of spiritual comprehension, and speaks to others from this place, probably never intending to inspire the creation of a religious system, but aware that it is inevitable. When a person is illumined, life becomes religion. There is no need for empty rituals, to pour the spirit into them. The spirit is everywhere, and every action, however small, is imbued with the significance of ritual. For others, ritual is like a set of training wheels, used to hold them up in the religious feeling, until they can learn to pedal, balance, and hold themselves up by their own speed. All religions forget their source in time. All religions become empty forms. They may still contain the spirit, but, at a certain point, the spirit grows and desires to overflow the rituals, and even the religion itself. When people cling to the rituals and the religion, this moment is lost, and even the rituals begin to lose power to invoke the spirit. Just as the body of Christ had to incarnate and die, religions have to "incarnate", to contain the spirit for a while, and then die. But, the moment when the religion dies, it actually attains itself, and accomplishes its greatest triumph. It will resurrect itself in spirit, it will come to people in spirit, and, in time, it will incarnate in another form. When Christianity dies, and is replaced by something else, something which resembles what Christianity was in its beginnings, that will be a second coming of the Christ.

If we only knew what supernatural wonders surround us, -- if we could see that angels, with their great wings outspread, protect us, bless and watch over our inauspicious activities, -- we would be stopped in our tracks, and our hearts, overcome with awe before their beauty, would render praise at all times to the majesty of God.

Nothing is more godly than humility, or more humbling than God.

Vanity is the single greatest source of cowardice. How often do we speak and act, or prevent ourselves from speaking and acting, merely from fear of what others might think? Pride, on the other hand, has to do with what we think of ourselves. It cuts much closer to the bone. People will adopt virtues for the sake of their pride, but for vanity they'll adopt only an appearance of virtue. Pride covets Virtue, vanity covets her appearance.

Prefer a faith in the divine to an education in the ordinary.

Knowledge trembles, but faith is fearless.

Faith is the beginning, humility is the center, and peace is the end, of prayer.

Lift up your eyes, and stretch out your minds, towards God.

Rinse your hearts out with tears, and hang them up in holy light.

Number your words, measure your movements, and do not squander your thoughts;
fools squander from a wealth of hollow words, empty thoughts, and aimless actions,
-- but wise men are frugal and poor.

It is possible to be too deep, and to know too much.
Many a man is too deep for us to get at what is within him.
Many a mind is too quick to keep up with itself.

People talk about going inside, not outside. What "inside"? What "outside"? No such thing. In order to make use of something "out there", you first have to be open to it "in here". That's all that means to me. Close your heart and mind, and the world really is "out there".

Do not be so identified with a cause that you identify everyone who does not share it as an opponent. And if any man opposes your cause, remember that he is a man first, and an opponent second. If you do not wish him to mistreat your cause, you must not mistreat him.

Prefer a noble cliché to a novel distraction.

Fill your hours with noble deeds and reflections, so that pettiness will find no foothold.

When we abandon God, when we abandon the contemplation of holy things and the attitude of prayer, we abandon ourselves to the forces of degeneration.

We endure and overcome evil by fixing our attention on the good which transcends it.

What to the fool is a stumblingblock, to the wise is a steppingstone.

Too often, we pride ourselves on being hardhearted and immovable. We must learn that it is better to be tenderhearted and easily moved. Clay must be soft in the hands of the Potter.

It is better to lose one's object through tenderness than to gain it by being overly strict.

There are many ways to pray. Do not force yourself, but allow yourself to be led along those paths which inspire you, provided that they awaken in you a devotion to higher things.

Even the smallest virtues are worthy to be encouraged, while the smallest vices should be overlooked.

People sometimes adopt greater vices in their efforts to eradicate lesser ones.

Schools are to education what religions are to spirituality. You don't need school to be educated, or religion to be spiritual. Structures, which can help to preserve and organize the wisdom of the past, also tend to become rigidly locked into ways of seeing which ultimately thwart innovation and pose resistance to progress. Only a religion which receives as well as dispenses prophecy, like a school which corrects itself even as it corrects others, is truly alive.

Consider the spirit and not the letter of the law: One is not a Christian merely because one calls oneself a Christian, and one who does not call oneself a Christian may yet be more a Christian than many who bear the name. Christ is love. If a religion has love it has Christ. Though it may never speak his name, it bears his spirit. Regardless of its outward forms, if it is compassionate it is Christian.

Ego is treading in a sea of awareness. Branches floating by are thoughts which ego clings to in order to remain afloat. Ego strings these branches together so as to make a raft which can separate him from the water. If he accomplishes this, he will be completely unaware. Drown yourself in the sea of awareness and be reborn as pure spirit.

Depths, which sparrows do not suspect the existence of, make up entire environments, which salmon take for granted. Who knows if there may not be some, among the spirits, who disbelieve reports of incarnation?

The corrupt man promotes his own interest in the world,
while the spirit of corruption destroys his interest in the soul.

The fool imagines himself victorious when the sage cannot move him to relinquish his folly.

Relax to discover your talents. Relax into your gifts.

You will never know peace until you humble yourself.
Pride does you no good. It only riles you.

Let your heroes be saints, not pundits.

Humility is the key to Heaven. Be humble; be at peace; have a warm heart.

Humility, love, and peace are mysteriously related;
each depending upon and increasing the others.
Whenever one of these is spoken of,
know that the others are understood.

A proud man has no peace, and a peaceful man has no pride.

Pride smothers spiritual gifts,
like sand shoveled onto hot coals;
but humility is a breath of the Spirit, igniting them,
and fanning the flames of God's glory in the world.

Humility is wide-eyed, expectant, braced for anything, overcome by a godly ideal. She is cautious, breathless, grounded, and aghast. Humility watches in respectful awe; waits, listening for the step of God. Humility has patience because she is slower than the world, and more deliberate. Humility has affection, feels connected to all things, is not insulted or indignant, as if anything were beneath her.

Love fuels the lamp of prayer.
Fill your prayers with the oil of love,
that they may light the way to heaven,
and may light heaven.

Do not think it degrading, to liken a monk to a dog. The dog, for his loyalty and devotion, is called 'man's best friend'. In the same way, it may be instructive to think of the monk as 'God's best friend'. Just as the dog sits and gazes expectantly at the door through which his master will enter, so does the humble monk sit and pray faithfully before the cross or icon of his Lord. And just as the animal leaps for joy when his master returns, so does the heart of the monk leap in his breast, and rush out of itself to meet the Savior when, at last, the Holy Presence is felt.

We must be in agreement with a truth,
in order to be in a position to refute it.

Seek with one eye, find with the other.
When you grasp it, let it go.

God is talking over himself to himself.
Everything is true. Every truth is incomplete.

If you are not contradicting yourself,
you are only telling half the story.
The end should find you back at the beginning.

The sense in which it is true
is not the sense in which it is false.

The best teachers don't say too much,
or teach too well.

I thought I was the teacher.
That will teach me.
Will I ever learn?

The closer you are to getting it,
the less sense you make.

My God,
where have you been?
You never left me.
I missed You all day.
I did not know what I was missing.
I thought about You.
I did not know what I was thinking.
I sought You in the place where You sent me.

Grace

2011-09-20T19:53:00.001-07:00

"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me."
~ Saint Paul (Galatians 2:20)

The Christian makes bold to claim that Christ is in him, while he is yet in sin. How is it that one, who is frequently unwilling to carry the cross, considers himself worthy to carry the name, of Christ?

It is because within him there is a spark of divine love which, having once encountered, he cannot resist declaring his allegiance to. Even in spite of his weakness, and knowing that this love, which is Christ within him, will continually be scorned, sacrificed, and betrayed by others, as well as by his own crippled will, -- yet, he cannot withhold his admiration and deep intention to be won over completely by this golden aspect of himself, and seed of his highest potential.

This is as if one were suddenly to discover a precious pearl in an old and long-familiar earthen pot. The humble condition of the pot becomes a thing of little consequence, for it is overshadowed by the good thing which resides within.

To all appearances, a man may be corrupt, but every man, no matter how ill-fated, has yet something noble within him; something which cannot be corrupted; which speaks for him, and lovingly assures him that, although presently he may be caught in a web of evil energies, by himself he is never evil, and the life of God within him is purely good. This is the voice of Christ, the Good Physician, who reproves the affliction, but justifies the afflicted.

For if a man be stricken with a disease of a moral and spiritual order, then he ought to be pitied and treated like any other victim of disease. His illness may be of the most dire sort, but no matter how progressed it may be, -- no matter if it has blackened his breast, and spread into his uttermost extremities, -- we must never make the mistake of identifying the afflicted with his affliction. Even if we cannot preserve his health, we must preserve an idea of the man as he might be, were he to be healed of all that contaminates and corrupts his higher self.

To call a man Christian, especially when his thoughts and actions are anything but Christian, is to declare a lofty spiritual truth in the face of fallen nature. It is to say that sin, which may overtake his body and every earthly part of himself, can never take possession of his soul. It is to say that his soul belongs irrevocably to God.

A man who is deathly ill, who cannot arise from his bed, nor speak, nor take solid food, is still a man. There is a dignity which cannot be stripped bare, for it does not depend upon any action, nor success. It is the simple birthright of every child of God.

The doctrine of the inner Christ, here described, honors this fundamental dignity because it justifies by grace, and not by outward signs or accomplishments. While the world honors, above all others, the soldier who defeats his enemies, the spirit honors all soldiers alike; those who have triumphed, as well as those who have fallen in the line of service.

In the sense in which I have understood the term, "Christ" is a noble spark and seed of divinity present in everyone. A person does not need to recognize it, nor to believe in it, nor to name it Christ. It is there nonetheless, as Christ's love is there. What we do with it, -- how we conceptualize it, -- is our business. For my part, I call it Christ, and call everyone a Christian. My hope is that none will be offended, but that all will receive this name, along with the honor it bestows, as a symbol of brotherly love. Not from a desire to convert, but to include.

What, then, does it mean, to call a man Christian? It is, in essence, to call him brother; a fellow child of God. It is to love and recognize him as a member of the body of Christ, even when that member is afflicted, bloodied, broken, or bruised. Even when he seemingly has no love in him, or no power to manifest the love that is in him, he is not cut off from the love that is in Christ. What is necessary is only that he is loved, -- not that he loves.

Christ, having loved us, has fulfilled this necessary part. We are united by his love, whether or not we love. We are called "brother" and are entitled to every good thing. We are treated with great compassion, not because we have loved greatly, but because we are greatly loved.

Is this not precisely what it means, when we say that, "Through the love of one man, the entire world has been redeemed,"? Because one man did not judge, no man was judged. When we allow ourselves to see through Christ's eyes, to see without judgement, we know that it is so.

Spiritual Antinatalism and Dualism: The Stone That The Builder Refused

2011-09-11T23:09:00.001-07:00

My theory, simply put, is that the desire to incarnate in a body, for any purpose other than that of liberating other souls from the prison of bodily incarnation, is essentially materialistic, and that, where the vast majority of incarnate souls are concerned, bodily incarnation is ultimately a failed experiment. Likewise, that procreation is an error which ought to be abandoned with all speed, not by force of will but through personal election.

Everywhere, we see evidence of the cult of life, -- and by "life" is commonly meant only that aspect of the soul's expression which constitutes bodily incarnation; beginning with the birth and ending with the death of the physical vehicle.

Incarnation, we are taught, is a school and testing ground for young souls. And so it is, for we are here, and we must learn and be tested in accordance with the terrain as we encounter it. But the greatest lesson we learn is not to incarnate, and the only exam worth passing is the one which proves our devotion to values transcendent of the material realm. In truth, only the most mature and most flexible souls are prepared for the challenges and pitfalls of material incarnation. Younger souls incarnate through foolishness, because they know, and care to know, nothing better. It is on account of their desire to gratify the senses, rather than the nobler faculties of the soul, and to see themselves and their creations manifested in gross matter, that they remain bound in the vicious cycle of death and rebirth. Older souls, if they incarnate at all, do so only in order to liberate younger souls from the bonds of incarnation by revealing a higher way. If a curriculum surrounding incarnation is prepared, it is only because the obstinacy of foolishness demands it. When a student refuses to take the higher path, the teacher has no alternative but to indulge the refusal, and to lead the student by lower channels; gradually, and according to his willingness.

Many a practical occultist disdains the "merely" speculative philosopher. But while the former actively pursue the paths of initiation laid out for them by adepts whom they implicitly trust, the latter frequently casts his gaze into deeper spaces and thereby attracts the fellowship of even greater, though more obscure, tutelary spirits. For all the rigor, discipline, and persistence of the practitioner, it is the theorist who, by his willingness to entertain the more radical, out-of-the-way possibilities, discovers the shortcut to illumination. Never doubt that shortcuts do exist, even in the spiritual worlds (as above, so below). Indeed, the relationship of grace to works is one such shortcut, and the most incredible. If and when the ascetic opens the door to grace, it is almost always in spite of, rather than because of, his asceticism.

It is a spiritual law that we will regard only what we are prepared to see, and we will attract spirits whose perspective fundamentally mirrors our own. While we are fond of defending our doctrines by such words as "all the sages agree", the fact is, the very first thing which these people, whom we call sages, share in common is that they each fit the definition which we ourselves have conceived or agreed upon of a "sage". To declare that all the sages are in agreement with a particular precept is not to give a proof of its validity, any more than it is a proof of their "sageliness" that they all agree with a particular precept. We ourselves have only defined them as sages on account of the beliefs they espoused and the actions they performed, so it makes no sense to conclude that those very beliefs and actions are necessarily wise because the ones we call sages espoused or performed them.

In the same way, when we find reports of encounters with seemingly highly evolved spirits, we learn more about the person delivering the report than we do about the spirits. Those spirits may only be reflecting back to the person teachings which both share a predisposition to accept, or which the spirit knows the person will be able and willing to accept at the given time. Regardless of what credentials the spirit may possess (miraculous siddhis, an etheric body or disincarnate presence, peacefulness, dignity, love, -- or merely the ability to create a powerful impression of these qualities in the mind of the viewer), there is always a chance that, by opening one's mind to a different strata of possibilities, other spirits, equally or more impressive, may be attracted. Or, that the very same spirit may manifest itself radically differently, expressing itself in ways which appear to contradict or negate its earlier expressions.

I have in mind certain accounts, received and reported by the noted hypnotherapist Dr. Michael Newton, of disincarnate realms and spirits encountered by patients undergoing hypnotic regression therapy. I do not doubt the accounts. In fact, it would not be far from the mark to say that I affirm all that they affirm. But, what is more to the point, I believe I affirm all that they affirm and more.

Specifically, the accounts provide us with descriptions of spiritual realms which our souls (or aspects of our souls?) inhabit between incarnations. While it is fair to say that the evidence is largely, if not merely, anecdotal, the degree to which the accounts corroborate one another, along with certain other indications of their veracity, provides compelling indications of the existence of life outside the body. But while the regressed patients, as souls, find themselves in realms which they understand to be spiritual schools, where former incarnations are reviewed and future ones prepared, and while incarnation itself is purported to be the setting for the most intensive studies, my own suspicion is that these spiritual schools, teachers, and lesson plans are arising in response to preconceptions which the souls who visit them have formed, consciously or unconsciously, in regards to incarnation and its usefulness.

That is to say, if one is convinced at a very deep level that incarnation is necessary or good, this conviction will naturally be reflected in a spiritual world which exists to encourage, foster, and make sense of material existence. If one has already decided at some level to return to materiality, possibly because one is addicted to some aspect of sensory experience, then one's soul will naturally gravitate to these realms after death. Looked at in this way, these realms are not especially removed from materiality, but, rather, are simply more subtle extensions of it, which exist, in large part, to provide justification for the experiment of incarnation; justification which the souls who encounter them desperately want and demand.

If, however, a soul were deeply convinced, or deeply prepared to consider the possibility, that incarnation is a trap, and not a divinely ordained university, a necessary prerequisite for admittance to the higher realms, that soul might encounter very different teachers and worlds beyond. But, this requires a fundamental shift in point of view with respect to the world of matter, -- namely, one must consider that it is not "the creation of God". Moreover, if the world is not God's, then this shift must also include a revision of what is understood by the name of God; for if God is not "The Creator", what is God?

When we consider that God, and spirit in its subtlest expressions, is essentially alien to matter, we begin to get a very different picture. We begin to perceive a duality within the nature of existence, and the notion of duality is something which many people find very difficult to entertain. Something within us desperately wants to believe in unity. We want to believe that the world is God's, the world is good, and everything is going according to plan. We don't want to choose. We don't want to have to accept that life as we know it, life on earth, is pointless. We don't want to imagine that anything in the universe is superfluous. We want to believe that every speck of sawdust has its divine purpose. That every difficulty is necessary to make us strong, or to bring us closer to God. That no child suffers needlessly. That God is in complete control of everything, and if we are here it is because "He" put us here and "He" will take us home just as soon as we are ready. Duality suggests something painful; a rift, a division, an abyss. For this reason, we reject the notion of duality before we truly begin to understand its finer implications.

First, we must understand that, however much we may cling to the illusion of "a world under God", each of us implicitly, if only unconsciously, feels that the world is fallen, and that something other than our own perception of the world as fallen is to blame. While we tell ourselves it is only our ignorance, our weakness, foolishness, or sin which prevents us from seeing God's providence at work in all things, the reality is that, deep down, we know full well, in the words of the tender Prince Hamlet, "something is rotten in the state of Denmark".

And, yet, it needn't look so bleak, for there is unity, -- not in the world, but in God, who transcends it.

Let us try, if we can, to conceptualize this God, who is only good. We will personalize "Him" in the form of an archetype, if only to make the divine mysteries more readily perceptible to the mind's eye. But let it be understood that the notion of a personalized God is adopted only as a matter of poetic license, -- or, more correctly, religious license.

Before continuing, some words must be included here to explain my meaning, and they are as important as anything else which has preceded or will follow them in this discourse.

One needs only to understand that religious language speaks to, and from, a different level of reality; it is figurative, rather than literal, but is no less real. It's realm is foremost the realm of Truth, not Fact. Though spiritual pronouncements may also and incidentally be factual, what matters is only that they are truthful. Gods, angels, and saints, whether or not they possess some external, cosmic or historical reality, possess archetypal reality within the mind, or soul (which, for our purposes, might only be a word describing deeper, unconscious layers of the mind).

To my mind, God does not literally, or necessarily, take on a personal form and respond to our prayers, just as gravity does not literally hold us down (having no hands with which to hold), nor does it act upon us any differently when we jump than when we stand still. Gravity is simply a natural law which we are subject to and which, if we are remotely intelligent and informed, we make conscious use of. In much the same way, when I pray, I am not petitioning God to do anything, as though God were an actual person who listens and responds to my prayer. Rather, it is I who must listen, respond, and approach, by aligning my inner life with that divine presence and essence which I understand by the figurative name of God. In doing so, I make use of a law no less practical than the law of gravity.

As long as one understands that any attempt to conceptualize God, or to perceive "Him" in any form, is strictly tentative and provisional, then there can be tremendous value in seeing God as a personal entity, and in dialoguing with this entity, as one might dialogue with an imaginary friend. Here, the imagination must be respected. It must not be reduced to a mere plaything, nor elevated to a lens for perceiving things concretely; as they are in themselves. In dialoguing with an imaginary God, one may "only" be dialoguing with another aspect of oneself (ideally, with the better, or best, part of oneself), and thereby bringing it out of the depths of the unconscious, into the light of consciousness.

Naturally, our perceptions of God, just like our perceptions of everything else, will be distorted and determined by our own level of development, for we are nothing if not the lens through which we see; or, to be precise, the lens through which seeing itself takes place. For this reason, it is all the more important to remember that our concepts are provisional, inasmuch as we ourselves are provisional; which is to say that, as long as we are imperfect, so will our conceptions of God be equally imperfect, and just as we must remain open to revision, so must our conceptions of God remain open to revision.

Therefore, let it be understood that when I invoke the name of God, and particularly when I seem to speak of God as a personal entity, -- male, female, or hermaphrodite, -- I am speaking figuratively, but not flippantly, of a reality which is more in the nature of formlessness than form, more projection than object, and more law than lawgiver, but which it pleases (and, I believe, edifies) me to understand in this way. So, then, it is not to be wondered at, when I understand God now one way and now a very different way; for, to me, He is essentially mutable, and must, in a manner of speaking, "take the form" of whatever object or idea intuitively serves to illustrate my present purpose.

Even the name of "God" is adopted; for the theist who understands what this name means knows that he is no different from the atheist, apart from the fact that his peculiar form of reverence demands that he articulate his experience in highly colorful and religious terms. In other words, he finds something present within, or behind, all the good things of this world, shining out of them, as it were, and binding them together as one good; something undeniably sacred, which commands his attention and his reverence, and which, due to his theistic orientation, he can understand by no lesser name than "God".

Buddhists, we know, are atheists. Yet, they are religious, and are no strangers to the experience of God. For whatever reason, they see fit to understand and experience Him in more impersonal, though no less reverent, terms. Though it is true they have their gods, their demons, and bodhisattvas, ultimately, they understand all of these personal forms as symbolic and subordinate to something numinous, which they scarcely dare to name. Even the historical saints, to the extent that they fulfill their purpose as emissaries and representatives of a reality transcendent to themselves, must be transfigured, as it were, into symbolic manifestations of that truth. And this is no less the case with demons than with saints, for the Buddhist, at the very highest level of understanding, recognizes no essential difference between the demon and the saint; each is simultaneously a stepping stone and a stumbling block in the way of the ultimate revelation of Nirvana.

Perhaps the Hindus, in their Vedas, say it best: "God is and is not."

While many argue there is no evidence for God, it is enough for the theist to consider the love a mother bears her child, or the victorious gush that overwhelms his heart when he hears his favorite song, or the whiff of the freshly mown grass in springtime, or the calm he feels late at night when, deep in reflection, the whole world breathes cool and collected. "If these things are not sacred," he asks, "what are they?" To the spiritually minded, they are holy, and to the theist, taken as one, along with all other good things, they indeed deserve the name of God.

But, to continue my description of God as alien, it is nearly enough to say that He is not the creator of this world, not the creator of evil, and not some omnipotent being who, having the power to free us from our afflictions, instead excuses Himself behind the specter of "free will", and allows us to suffer generation after generation. What, after all, is free will, if not the ability to choose the lower path, through weakness, ignorance, or both? Is this not, in fact, more of a disability than an ability? My God, were He omnipotent, would not allow it. And any god who would allow it, omnipotent though He may be, will not be mine.

As I say, it is nearly enough, but it is not yet enough, to define my God by what He is not. I must tell you more of what He is. Foremost, He is love. And when I say that He is love, I mean that He is love, and all that goes with it. Mercy, understanding, and forgiveness -- are not these members belonging to love? Of course they are, and if they were not it would only be because love had transcended any need of them; for what is there to pardon, if no judgement has been passed; and what is to understand, if there is love without conditions?

Asking God for mercy and forgiveness is like asking the sun for light and heat; these belong to the incorruptible nature of divinity itself, and though clouds of ignorance may temporarily cast shadows of guilt over the souls of men, the sun does not go black, nor does the Lord condemn. God's justice is not like ours. God's justice is mercy. He does not punish, because He reforms and makes perfect. If we suffer it is largely because we refuse to believe this, and to accept His love for us. We imagine that He refuses to answer our prayers when, in fact, our prayers are not even addressed to Him, but to some unforgiving despot unworthy of His name. What's more, He does not want our prayers so much as He wants ourselves. I have said, God cannot be moved by petitions; it is up to us to go where He is. That is true prayer. It is not a letter one sends, while oneself remains behind, but a pilgrimage one makes. God dwells in perfect love, and anyone who calms their spirit enough to receive that love must naturally approach His throne. For this reason, an angry person cannot approach, though God has only love for him. It is we who judge ourselves, because we do not, cannot, understand His love for us.

But how many strange and circuitous sophistries must be conjured up before we can believe in a God who gives us, not only solutions, but problems as well; not only saviors, but devils to tempt them? People who think this way must say that God gives us troubles so that we may learn from them. But they neglect to account for that primordial ignorance which causes us to have anything to learn in the first place. One might as well say that God beats us over the heads for the sake of the relief we will feel when at last He stops!

No, my God does not give troubles to make us strong, though He does make us strong. He is what turns our troubles into lessons, if troubles there must be. But isn't this simply the way it is? Do not all things lead naturally enough to God? Consider: If something is good, we want more of it, and so it leads us on to God. If it is bad, we want less of it, and, again, it leads us on to God. Even the feeling of God's absence drives us to seek His presence. And, so, there is something positive to be made of the negative, -- but the negative itself must not for that reason be understood as a positive. God forbid! Yes, His absence drives us to seek His presence. But so does His presence! And God would a thousand times rather give us His presence. He does not want us to have to suffer. He wants only to give us all of Himself, right this minute. Always, He is trying to show us shortcuts, while we foolishly go the long way.

It is ignorance of God, and pride in our own labor, which causes us to see industriousness as an essential part of the spiritual life. We imagine the task must be difficult, or else nothing worth. We do not realize that God's grace does not depend on our works. We believe our selfless acts are only truly good if they require some terrible straining on our part, when, in fact, straining is a sign that our will is divided and not wholly given to God. We must reflect that a sacrifice is only truly noble when it is no sacrifice at all; but an honest and undivided desire to leave behind what does not serve the Lord, and to ascend to God without a backwards glance.

This is what God offers us. Yet we are blind; too restless, proud, rebellious, anxious, and distracted to see. If we only knew what supernatural wonders surround us, -- if we could see that angels, with their great wings outspread, protect us, bless and watch over our inauspicious activities, -- we would be stopped in our tracks, and our hearts, overcome with awe before their beauty, would render praise at all times to the majesty of God. Alas!, the world is dark, and we are blind. But it is no fault of God's that the world is dark, and no fault of ours that we are blind.

His light would shine brighter in the world if only it could, but His light is not of this world; it is the light which transcends this world, and only dimly, dimly shines through it. Yet, the more we attune ourselves to peace, love, tenderness, and broadmindedness, the more we see Him, and the higher our souls rise toward heaven. In the meantime, we must continue to incarnate in these dense material realms, fumbling around where the light is so hard to see that sometimes we even imagine it does not exist.

The one who believes that God is already manifest in the world must rely on faith because the God he sees (in the world) is just too cruel to be accepted. But the one who understands that God transcends the world must rely on faith only because the world he sees is not of God, and is not meant to be accepted. This is the difference. The former denies the evil he sees in order to accept it as good, while the latter accepts the evil he sees in order to deny it as evil. The one corrupts his conception of God, and of good, in order to justify the world, and the other condemns the world in order to preserve his conception of God, and of good. The choice is simple enough.

The Mysteries of Eleusis

2011-09-09T10:38:00.000-07:00

For two thousand years, the Mysteries of Eleusis, a sacred, bi-yearly ritual performed just outside of Athens, served as the central impetus for the creative output of the great sages and poets of the ancient world; from Plato to Sophocles to Ovid; all were initiates, inspired by and given to praise the secrets revealed during these ceremonies in honor of the Goddess Demeter. The following is a brief excerpt from "Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution" by the visionary scholar Terrence McKenna:

It is an incredible testament to the obtuseness of the scholars of the dominator society that not until 1964 did someone make bold to suggest that a hallucinogenic plant must have been involved. That person was the English poet Robert Graves in his essay 'The Two Births of Dionysus':

"The secret which Demeter sent around the world from Eleusis in the charge of her protege Triptolemus is said to have been the art of sowing and harvesting grain... Something is wrong here. Triptolemus belongs to the late second millennium B.C.; and grain , we now know, had been cultivate at Jericho and elsewhere since around 7,000 B.C. So Triptolemus's news would have been no news... Triptolemus's secret seems therefore concerned with hallucinogenic mushrooms..."

This was the first of many observations Graves made on the underground tradition of mushroom use in prehistory. He suggested to the Wassons [who then "discovered" psillocybin mushrooms and brought them back to the "civilized" world] that they visit Mazatecan Mexico for evidence supporting their theories on the impact of intoxicating mushrooms on culture.... Graves readily grants that "you are at liberty to call me crazy," but then goes on to defend his thesis very well.

Progress Vs. Conformity

2011-08-23T12:56:00.000-07:00

Are you on the right side of history?

Every time period has overthrown and disproven the prejudices of the centuries preceding it. Yet, every time period continues to cling tenaciously to the contemporary models as if they were the final word. What can we learn from this? Only that one should not dare to consider oneself a critical thinker unless one is equally as skeptical of the mainstream as of the alternatives. The methods and models of the future have always arisen, and will continue to arise, from the margins. History has shown that nearly every significant discovery was first disparaged and rejected by the established order of the day. Will we ever learn?

How is that, in the face of the sweeping historical perspective mankind has achieved, the vast majority of people still sacrifice their skepticism in the face of a university degree, and embrace cynicism as a response to anything not already approved by the established order? The fact of the matter is that at a university, one is far more likely to be indoctrinated than educated. True scholarship is an independent effort requiring a passionately inquisitive mind. Practically all that is necessary for a university degree is the ability to memorize and to regurgitate the views of the past and present day. In such an environment, progressive thinking is a hindrance, not a help. We must realize that the ability to unlearn is often a prerequisite for the ability to learn. We can learn nothing new when we are fixedly convinced of a falsehood.

The Problem With (Bill Maher's) Religulous

2011-08-23T10:40:00.000-07:00

[Note: For the most part, I'm a fan, whose views are largely in sympathy with Maher's own, but the following piece is highly critical of his documentary, and even takes a quick jab at his lifestyle at the end there.]

"I, for one, do not wish to make the mistake
of blaming Christianity for what men have done to it."
~ Carl Gustav Jung

Have you noticed that Bible-thumping fundamentalists and atheists who reject the Bible have this in common: both prefer to focus exclusively on the worst elements of scripture; the former to promote it, and the latter to refute it? Neither is remotely interested in what is best in the Bible; both callously dismiss, as more or less irrelevant, passages of the most breathtaking profundity, which rival anything our world has to offer. The fact of the matter is that cruelty and stupidity abound in all fields, yet atheists reject religion by focusing only on the stupidity and cruelty of its worst adherents, and fundamentalists reject atheism by doing the same.

The main fault with Maher's documentary is its utter one-sidedness. No attention is paid to the atrocities committed by atheist organizations like the Communist Party, -- presumably because the argument which blames religion for the horrors of the Inquisition might just as easily be used to blame atheism for the horrors of the Russian Gulags; in either case, a specious, if not entirely moronic, argument. Conversely, Maher never once gives attention to the shining stars of religion -- the saints, monks, and activists who, all throughout history, have served as living monuments to what is best in the human spirit and, indeed, in religion. Nor does he so much as mention movements like Quakerism, a religion which eschews arbitrary dogmas (and indeed all doctrine whatsoever, aside from the one which states that there is something sacred, and deserving of encouragement, in every person), but which is based firmly on common sense, moral reflection, silent meditation, and political activism.

If anyone wishes to formally criticize the evils of religion, it would be wise to offer an alternative (apart from the flat negation which atheism represents) in the form of at least one affirmative example of religion.

Quakers, in particular, deserve some notice as forerunners in the promotion of civil rights for minorities and women -- including fair dealings with Native Americans, the abolition of slavery and the boycotting of goods produced through slave-labor, the equal right to vote, and better treatment for prisoners and mental patients. Not to mention, their ongoing work in favor of nonviolent resistance, an aspect of which includes the successful institution of a law (as early as 1672) which rejected the military draft in favor of freedom for conscientious objectors. And, lastly, a modest -- as opposed to materialistic, consumption-driven -- lifestyle; a position which perhaps has the most significant ramifications of all, particularly now that such stark class divisions exist between wealthy nations and the third-world countries upon which they prey; exploiting their indigenous resources, not the least of which are the lives, labors, liberties, and livelihoods of human beings.

Neglecting this, one wonders how anyone can take Bill Maher's documentary, his atheist views, or his mansion in Beverly Hills, seriously.

On The Relative Nature Of The Good

2011-08-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

A Discourse On Karma, Grace, and Spiritual Gifts

It is no shame for a child to behave like a child. The shame is only when an adult falls into equally childish behavior. Likewise, when a child behaves maturely, this is something which ought to be commended, whereas maturity is not much to the credit of an adult, and ought hardly to be remarked upon. Yet, having said this much, it is now positively essential to make clear that we are all in some respects children, just as we are in other respects quite advanced. While it may be popular to label some individuals "old souls" and others "young souls", the truth of the matter is that every soul has matured in some ways and has yet to mature in others.

We've heard the adage, "With great power comes great responsibility," and it follows that one's level of responsibility must be relative to one's power for good. To the degree that one is capable of doing good, and in the manner in which one is capable, one is responsible for exercising that given capacity. Each of us has certain strengths and weakness; gifts we are given and gifts we are not given. Seeing that we can only give to others what we have ourselves received from God, and that we cannot give something which we have not first received, the standard of virtue to which we are held must necessarily vary from virtue to virtue.

A person born with a naturally temperate disposition has very little excuse for bouts of temper. Conversely, when this person exhibits gentleness, it is no great accomplishment in the eyes of God. Moreover, if such a person, in addition to having received a calm nature, has also been fortunate enough to grow up in the care and with the instruction of equally moderate parents and teachers, then, not only is there scarcely any excuse for failing to exhibit this trait, but, such a person ought to consider him/herself called upon to perfect it.

In contrast, a person who is by nature hot-blooded, and particularly if the environment in which he/she has been reared was not especially conducive to the development of even-temperedness, should not be expected to exhibit nearly the same degree of self-possession as the type described above. The two are different, and God, who weighs each person's actions against that person's heart (and not against the heart of any other person), knows well how to adjust the scales of justice in order to discover the extent to which each person's outward behavior balances with their own inward proclivities.

Similarly, to provide just one further example, a person whose nature is characterized by a rare depth, -- or an inclination to penetrate relatively deeply into the heart of things, -- deserves no special reward or congratulations for having exercised that perspicacity by making some shrewd discovery or delivering some unusual insight upon the essence of a matter. This much is only to be expected. Such a person ought to be singled out only if they exhibit an uncharacteristic shallowness of thought, or shortsightedness of vision.

Bearing these reflections in mind, the question naturally arises, "How then ought we to judge?" If the outward appearance is insufficient to distinguish the degree to which an action is truly virtuous, or truly vicious, for the one who commits it, how then are we to assess the "karmic condition" of the individual? The answer is that we are not. We are, in fact, in no position to judge the degree to which a person is making progress, falling short, or merely expressing their natural tendencies. God alone has insight into the poverty or abundance of the heart, and into the manner in which these correspond to the operations of the will.

The truth is that we can make only the vaguest appraisals, whether of ourselves or of others, and in order to conduct our business in the world it is sometimes necessary to rely on these loose approximations, imperfect as they are. What is imperative is that we recognize the numinous character of our judgements; that they are, at best, proximal, and, at worst, entirely wide of the mark.

If we are honest, we will confess that we are in a perpetual state of doubt with respect to the karmic significance, for good or ill, of every action, and that, if there is one thing we can know for sure, it is that we must endeavor to give ourselves and others the benefit of this doubt. That is to say, "When in doubt, love." And one is always in doubt.

Perhaps the most important point to reflect upon here is that all the virtues we have, we have received as gifts from God, and that our job is to give, or make use of, those gifts; withholding nothing which it is in our power to give. We are simply the vessels and channels of God's grace, and our function is to "pay it forward".

In fact, the way we overcome our vices, and develop more virtues, is precisely by making use of the virtues we already possess. Whenever we make use of our gifts, releasing them into the world, we make room within ourselves to receive more gifts, and the gifts we receive correspond directly to the vices overcome. Put more simply, the overcoming of a vice is also the developing of a virtue; or the receiving of a new and well-deserved gift.

The Lord gives us all that we have, and is not done giving. Open the gifts of the Lord.
For by means of gifts, more gifts are discovered. Always, the gifts of gifts!
~ Unio Mystica

Humility and Taming the Passions: The Jesus Prayer

2011-08-14T20:18:00.001-07:00

"Let us cry to him to come, and he will cure us by his coming. Let us moan like a sick man, and he like a doctor will come lovingly to our aid. Let us cry like the one who fell among thieves, and the good Samaritan will come to clean our wounds and guide us to the Inn; that is, to theoria (vision) of the Light which consumes all our being. When God comes into our heart, he gains victory over the devil and cleanses the impurities which the evil one has created. The victory, therefore, over the devil is the victory of Christ in us. Let us do the human part; that is to invite Christ. And he will do the divine part; he will gain victory over the devil and cut him off. So we should not want to do the divine part ourselves and expect God to do the human one. We should understand this well: We do the human part, the prayer of Jesus, and God the divine part, our salvation. The entire work of the Church is the collaboration of human and divine."
~ A Night In The Desert Of The Holy Mountain: Discussion With A Hermit On Jesus Prayer

"Lord, Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!" ~ The Jesus Prayer

This is the Jesus Prayer, practiced for centuries by Christian mystics in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. The constant repetition of this prayer engenders deep humility within the soul and places it in a devotional relationship to Christ, the teacher of God. First, the prayer is recited almost mindlessly. When the voice grows tired, it is repeated silently, and when the mind grows tired it is spoken again. In the beginning, it is only a method to block out evil and inferior thoughts, leaving no room for them. In time, one begins to reflect on the deeper meanings and implications of the words. Finally, they migrate from the intellectual center to the heart of the aspirant. When this happens, it is no longer necessary to think of them or to recite them, because they go on repeating themselves automatically within the heart. This final stage produces an experience of profound and abiding bliss, which is an echo of Paradise.

"This prayer has filled Paradise with holy men and women."
~ Elder Amphilochios of Patmos

In "The Ladder of Divine Ascent", St. John Climacus, in addition to outlining stages in the soul's ascent to God, lists four stages by which the soul descends. The first is when an unworthy suggestion arises in the mind, in order to tempt us. The second is when we enter into dialogue with that suggestion; whether to dispute or to consider it. The third stage is when we consent to encourage and obey the suggestion. It is not until this third stage that one has yielded to the temptation. Finally, in the fourth stage, we become bound; the sin becomes habitual and compulsive. With the practice of the Jesus Prayer, one learns to be watchful, so as to dismiss the suggestions of the devil the very instant they appear. One neither disputes nor considers them, but merely retrains one's conscious attention on the prayer. In this way, the passions are cut off before they have an opportunity to take root.

"The cunning enemy knows very well how to hide behind passions and weaknesses.
So, in order to strike him, you must fight and mortify yourself -- all your passions, that is."
~ Elder Joseph the Hesychast

The first task along the spiritual path is the silencing the lower self. Before anything great may be accomplished, the lower self must be brought into submission. Silence lays the foundations for patience, which, in turn, lays the foundations for a deeper experience of silence. These two, working together, alternately and simultaneously, encourage each other. But since it is not possible to enter immediately into silence or patience, the first task is one of distraction and redirection. When the attention has been sufficiently fixed on higher matters, and the lower self has undergone a corresponding mortification, the true dance between silence and patience may be practiced. This is because the guarding of the lower self does not allow the passions to take possession.

Humility is the foundation. Without humility, one rushes out, at the mercy of the passions, hastily approving without qualification this, and disapproving without qualification that. No care is taken to discriminate, or to seek the grace of God before taking thought, speech, or action. What is needed is a thorough recognition of the soul's dependence upon the grace of God. By our own power, we can do nothing. Our attempts to reflect and reveal the gifts of the spirit fall flat if proper care is not taken to first receive those gifts, and to acknowledge our own position as one of receptivity to the blessings we wish to impart.

"All the eagerness you have for spiritual things is due to grace alone. Nothing is your own."
~ Elder Joseph the Hesychast

In order to purify ourselves, to prepare the ground, and to clear a channel for grace, we must first develop a fairly accurate assessment of ourselves in relation to God. The key phrase here is "in relation to God". While it stands to reason that we must be mindful of our faults and challenges, it is equally important to reflect that even our strengths are poor and miserable things beside the power of God, who looks down even on miracles and things too lofty for mortal eyes to see.

It follows that one ought to regard the words of a flatterer as more to be feared than the bite of an asp, for a snake can only strike at your flesh, but a flatterer strikes at your soul; even at the very foundation of your soul, which is humility. Therefore, when you anyone praises you, and you feel yourself puffed up, quickly purge the venom through prayer, lest it seep into the blood, and from there into the heart. Suck it up into your mouth, "Lord, Jesus Christ," and spit it out into the dirt, "have mercy on me." In this way, you will be rescued from the trap of vainglory, by the grace of God.

Conversely, one may regard insults as salutary, and enemies as one's greatest benefactors. The more they burn and reduce us to bones and ash, the more quickly and thoroughly do they humble us, and so make way for the grace of God. Without humility, repentance is impossible, and without repentance, we rely on our own strength, and refuse to acknowledge the power of God, beside which our greatest talents are as dust.

Mind you, it is not enough simply to pulverize the self. If we were to stop there, we would merely be left feeling self-hatred, anguish, and despair. The key is to raise oneself up, not by one's own strength, but by the power of God. If we merely exchange a favorable opinion of ourselves for an unfavorable one, we merely remain fixated on ourselves. We must use the opportunity to redirect our attention to something greater than ourselves; to God; or Christ, His avatar.

Grace and Karma: Ends and Means

2011-08-14T20:08:00.000-07:00

"Let no man say when he is tempted, 'I am tempted by God':
for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man..."
~ James 1:13

"The Old Testament is to Karma as The New Testament is to Grace."
~ Valentin Tomberg

Karma is earth's gravity,

and grace is outer space;

grace is not subject to karma.

As long as we remain focused on karma,

even "good karma", we won't be in grace;

we'll remain bound to the earth and incarnation.

Love the earth as your mother,

the womb, then leave her.

God does not want to give lessons,

God wants to give pure light.

He is the end, not the means.

But we try to find "Him" in the means;

we search instead of find.

New Reflections

2011-08-14T18:56:00.000-07:00

Lord, fashion my prayer. Teach me what you will, as you will.
I am vain to think I can instruct you in the ways to instruct me.

The heart is a treasurehouse, where the sweetest things are preserved.

In the heart of every sentient being, there is a fragment of the heart of God.

Unless you doubt everything you will believe anything.

Light is not positivity and darkness is not negativity. Light is awareness and darkness is its absence.

The center is wherever you are. If you feel you are in the dark, that is where the center is. Don't move from there. Say to yourself, "I feel I am in the dark". In this way, you shine light on your present. It is not holding the darkness, nor resisting it, but holding a light up to the darkness. Just be aware of it, as it is, and you will see it change.

The soul is only partially dependent upon God for its survival, but wholly dependent for its perfection. The greater our desire for perfection, the more completely we must abandon self-will and wait upon the grace of the Lord.

It is a sign of respect, when entering a church, or entering the prayerful chambers of the heart, to remove one's hat. In the same way, one ought to remove, as it were, and inasmuch as this is possible, one's own self and self-will, becoming receptive only to the divine presence and will of God.

Scripture can only be interpreted by the spirit which inspired it. If you could not have written the Bible, you could not have read it.

In every mind are vain and righteous thoughts, but the vain clamor and crowd and compete for the chief places in the heart, and one must dismiss them, turn them away, in order to discover the better; which are meek and audible only to one who has listened.

Glory to the blessed ones of all religions, and also to the blessed ones who serve God without religious structure. They are proof that all God desires is a pure and loving heart, humbly devoted and entrusted to the noblest impulses of the spirit. Glory to the many forms and names of God, and to the formless and unnamed divinity. Praises to the eternal source of love, hope, charity and healing. God makes saints of Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, and all who are full of humility and compassion. Boundless is His goodness. Praised be His graces, for ever and ever. Amen.

Wisely was it said, 'There is no companionship with fools.' Silence is a stranger to them, and peace has no part in their conversation. Neither do they speak by turns, but each, desiring his own hearing, clamors over the voices of his neighbors and is not edified. The more fools speak, the more confusion spreads; but a wise man instructs even by his silence.

A downer is someone looking for something deeper.

Give attention to the good, and the evil will swallow itself up.

All artists thirst and hunger for inspiration, and bear their craving like a prayer.

Don't forget music.

It is as if one is standing beside a heavy stone door, and one can hear God calling from the other side of the door, bidding one to enter. Alas, the door is too heavy to open. Still, there, just beside the door, is a set of weights. It appears the only thing to do is to lift the weights until one is strong enough to open the door. But this is difficult. This takes persistence, and persistence is the only true mark of faith. So, instead, we imagine that God has said "Don't come in. You are not ready." Or we leave and go searching for Him elsewhere. And the sound of His voice, still calling us to enter, fades into the distance as we wander off in search of Him. How sad. We ought to know by now that it is not a search. It is a practice.

The sun cooks food as it grows on the vine, on the tree, or in the earth. We call this process "ripening", but really this is cooking. The food is cooked, sun-cooked, when it is ripe (and raw). The truth is, we don't cook; we overcook. This is just one more example of a principle we see everywhere in human behavior. What nature has done, man wants to overdo.

Nothing so astonishes me as the popularity of the belief in an unconditionally loving God who will yet condemn you to an eternity of hellfire for the sin of thinking with your own mind and seeing with your own eyes; that God must be infinitely cruel to be infinitely kind. And nothing provides such palpable proof of the subtle depths to which human foolishness and impressionability may sink. Never imagine that simple men are insensible to paradox, or incapable of holding two contradictory notions in the mind at one and the same time. On the contrary, they have a genius for precisely this!

There is nothing like life in a war-torn country to make one amenable to the sentiments of anarchists.

Truth, like the sun, must not be gazed directly upon.

People always ask me the same question: "If you are against earthly life, why do you not kill yourself?" And my answer is always the same: If you discovered you were aboard a sinking ship, would you immediately abandon ship, or would you first attempt to rouse the other passengers and alert them to the impending catastrophe?

When you reach the point where you no longer need to reincarnate, you will choose to reincarnate "by default", for the sake of others. To transcend the world is not to escape from the world, but from one's attachment and aversion to it; as long as you desire to reincarnate or to escape reincarnation, you remain bound.

War is slavery, and the military man is a whip in the master's hand. A soldier is the personification of misguided service, who murders in the name of peace. He is the tragic figure par-excellence. All the more tragic because he not only dies in vain, but dies while making the world a more violent place. Generally, a brave, self-sacrificing soul without the sense to question the motivations of a government bent on war. And to think how many soldiers consider themselves Christians, as if it were possible to be a follower of the Prince of Peace and a professional killer. Judas betrayed Christ because, like so many, he was waiting for a worldly messiah, who would lead the Jewish people in a bloody revolt against their Roman oppressors. But Christ forbid Peter to defend him with force (when Peter cut off the Centurian's ear), and chose rather to allow himself to be crucified than to resist violence with violence. The entire message of his words, his life, and his death was to return good for evil; love for hatred. This was not some impractical ideal for which he wished to be honored, but an example which he demanded all his self-proclaimed followers to follow. "Why callest me 'Lord, Lord,' and do not the things which I say?" Though I have tremendous respect for the courage and the noble intentions of these soldiers, the fact remains that there is nothing sadder or more absurd than a person wearing a cross and holding a machine gun; praying to Christ while slaughtering the children of God, whom Christ came only to comfort, instruct, and forgive.

Nothing is as controversial, or as twisted, as the truth: Parents give their children cancer-causing poisons, and both the parents and the children think it's nourishment; Doctors torture children who have cancer, and both the doctors and the kids think it's helping; Soldiers devastate whole countries for the cause of peace; Believers in a loving God condemn Gandhi to hell. Any questions?

Are you on the right side of history? Every time period has overthrown and disproven the prejudices of the centuries preceding it. Yet, every time period continues to cling tenaciously to the contemporary models as if they were the final word. What can we learn from this? Only that one should not dare to consider oneself a critical thinker unless one is equally as skeptical of the mainstream as of the alternatives. The methods and models of the future have always arisen, and will continue to arise, from the margins. History has shown that every significant discovery was first disparaged and rejected by the established order of the day. Will we ever learn? How is that, in the face of the sweeping historical perspective mankind has achieved, the vast majority of people still sacrifice their skepticism in the face of a university degree, and embrace cynicism as a response to anything not already approved by the established order? The fact of the matter is that at a university, one is far more likely to be indoctrinated than educated. True scholarship is an independent effort requiring a passionately inquisitive mind. Practically all that is necessary for a university degree is the ability to memorize and to regurgitate the views of the past and present day. In such an environment, progressive thinking is a hindrance, not a help. We must realize that the ability to unlearn is often a prerequisite for the ability to learn. We can learn nothing new when we are fixedly convinced of a falsehood.

Silence is spiritual research.

Consciousness is paternal/maternal. The operations of consciousness are like children playing in a field of awareness. Consciousness watches from the background, tenderly observing the play of consciousness, like parents observing their children at play.

I am not a wise man dispensing his own wisdom, but an inspired man dispensing wisdom which is as much for his own edification as it is for others.

Who is the Mother? She is the one in whose lap we are cradled and tenderly held. She it is who, with boundless love and infinite tenderness, protects our innocence and receives the blessing of our devotion. In this way, we are nurtured, and mature into the saviors of the world.

The New Testament did not arise from the Old Testament and is not a fulfillment of it. The Grace of Jesus Christ did not arise from the Law of Moses. Christ emerged from the lap of Mary, not from the finger of Moses. The Goddess-worshiping cultures of prehistory are the true soil from which the Truth has sprung. She is the first part of the book. How can you understand the second part of the book, if you have not read and understood the first? Conversely, if you only read part one, your understanding remains incomplete. Seed begins in the earth, and only indirectly receives the sun. So, focus on the Mother, and see Christ peripherally. Once the seed has sprouted, grown roots, and pierced the soil of the earth, then it is ready to receive the direct rays of the sun. If it remains in the earth, it cannot reach its full maturity. First the Mother, then the Master. Worship the forms of God until you are ready to worship the formless God. When you have fed upon the wisdom of the earth, you will ascend to receive the manna from heaven. Understand this, and will you understand the mystery of reincarnation.

Rice scattered on water;
stars in the night sky.

Birds shining behind branches;
the moon singing behind clouds.

The moon perched on a cloud.

Birds dart thru branches,
like shafts of light,
shook loose by the wind.

The Substance Of A Dream

2011-07-29T06:38:00.001-07:00

I'm in love with Miranda July. Don't tell my girlfriend, she may not understand. But it's okay to fall in love with a famous person. People do it all the time. You can love them in secret, and it's okay. Because you'll never meet them, your love has the quality of fiction. And you know it's not even them you love. It's some beautiful projection, corresponding more to your own conscious and subconscious wishes than to who they really are. Maybe something in them, or about them, unlocks a door inside you. But the door is you, and everything behind the door is you.

Some people never meet, even when they do. They stand outside each other's doors, knocking. Barely hearing the voices inside. Their destinies entwine, but their souls won't mix. They share bodily fluids like they're sharing emails. Then, I suppose, some people can share emails like they're exchanging bits of soul. Slipping letters through the slots in each other's doors. Sometimes fanmail is like that. You can put so much of your soul into a letter and never know if it was read. Maybe it went straight from the mail into the trash with your soul sealed up inside of it. Scrambling around inside, struggling for air.

Some people, maybe most, live their whole lives that way. Souls sealed up in bodies, scrambling around. Nobody cracks open their chests to pull them out. They write letters to lovers they'll never meet. Lovers who don't exist anywhere but in their dreams. Seal them up and drop them down some dark slot, through a door without a key, into the depths. But those letters always pop back up, the address wrong, and stamped "return to sender".

Some people have entire rooms inside of them, full of unsent letters, because they get the address wrong. Because dreams don't have residences. Dreams wander. They sleep on sidewalks and in random backyards until someone calls the cops and they have to scram. Dreams aren't welcome anywhere. If you met one, you wouldn't recognize it. You'd make something up. Say, There must be some mistake. And shut the door in it's face.

But you can lay in bed, or in the bathtub, with a book. You can read it slowly, and hold it carefully like an ancient letter, dropped from a dream. Tell yourself it was written to you, for you. Because you'd understand it. You'd never dog-ear the pages, or leave it on the radiator to burn and turn brown.

Outside, you could hear the birds announcing morning. They wouldn't break the spell. Only now there would be birds inside the book, and you inside the book. No difference.

And you could even put the book down, close the cover, and still be reading it. Making breakfast like a protagonist would. You had become beloved, a character in the author's mind. Or in a larger mind, which you both shared. Maybe you always had been, but hadn't known yourself. Now there was symmetry. The world made sense, and you made sense, because everything was art. Nothing was excessive. Nothing without form.

This is how you wanted to start your day and every day.

There was never any need to meet the author, or to send letters full of soul. This love was not something you could prove or disprove by dragging it down to earth. Heaven was heaven still. Just because a dream dies upon waking, doesn't mean it never lived. How foolish we can be, in our eagerness to awaken. Is an angel unreal, because she is cloaked in feeling, not in flesh? Is heaven not heaven, when it comes crashing down to earth, unable to support the weight of sins? But purified souls can dance on tippy-toes, and the clouds easily sustain them.

Why do we take such sordid pleasure in squeezing dreams until they pop, like children crushing frogs in their fists? Why do we demand that faith withstand the rash assaults of reason? We don't test crystals with hammers. Yet we test confidence with insults. The spirit which can be broken, we say, never had integrity.

Love is sometimes torn out by the roots, and leaves the heart gaping like broken soil. And someone says, It was never love. It never grew. As if a heart were made of stone, and love could grow from this.

I am learning to carry love, and faith, and dreams, as gently as a bowl of water. To fill my soul to the brim with these, and never spill a drop. The trick is to walk slowly. Being present. Going nowhere.

The Song of Raphael ("God Heals")

2011-07-16T07:33:00.000-07:00

The heart is a treasurehouse, where the sweetest things are preserved.

Peace, Love, Wisdom, and Purity

are different names and actions of the one God.

God is a healer, and the greatest of healers,

for he is the source and fountain of all healers and all healing.

God heals by leading us into his divine presence.

His presence is a boundless light

which transforms us utterly into light.

Many are the ways by which he leads and heals us.

His peace heals us, his love heals us,

his wisdom heals us, and his purity heals us;

all of these, working together,

alternately and interdependently,

are his tonics.

His peace calms our restless spirits.

His love softens, warms, and opens our hearts.

His wisdom illuminates the way to him.

His purity encompasses and protects these three;

keeping us close to him, and undefiled by lesser things.

How simple, yet how abundant and inexhaustible

are his gifts; which combine to produce and to protect

the perfect health of our souls!

What surer signs could there be of his great love for us?

ESSENTIAL Nutritional Information

2011-07-13T21:54:00.000-07:00

INTRODUCTION (you can skip this and scroll down to the information)

Less than a week ago I realized I was out of control and it was time for a change. I started eating healthier and it's now been three days on raw foods. Yesterday was only liquids, and today mostly liquids (a salad for dinner). Despite the expected detox/withdrawal symptoms, I'm already seeing profoundly positive changes in my attitude, emotions, outlook, and physical well being. So far, I've already lost ten pounds, had better sex, and felt more awake, more hopeful, gentler and happier than in a long time.

Two years ago, after overdosing on an unfamiliar drug, I landed myself in a coma for a week. While in the hospital recuperating I drank juiced veggies and fruits (which my father prepared for me), and confounded the doctor with my speedy recovery. When I got home, I went raw for about two weeks in order to further recuperate and during that time I never felt better in my life (happier, calmer, more energized). But it didn't stick. I relapsed back into my addiction to toxic foods and self-medicating substance abuse. This happened several times. However, the "false starts" I've made in the past have only prepared me to make the real push, and I'm hopeful now that this time it will stick. Last week seems so long ago, and I feel confident that I have officially entered a new, higher stage in my life. :)

The authorities I take seriously are the ones getting the results I want. It's not a question of mystifying credentials or diplomas on the wall, but of common sense requirements: vibrant health and quality of life. While mainstream medicine is great for treating sudden emergencies (wounds, overdoses, etc.), they know practically nothing about preventing and treating chronic disease. They treat symptoms; they treat the surface, while the disease rises, again and again, to the surface. So I don't listen to fat, pasty, uninspired doctors, who only know how to pump you full of toxic drugs and cut you up. Their methods are medieval, and will soon be widely recognized as such. Instead, I listen to radically fit, joyful, loving, purpose-driven, and energized people who walk their talk.

Here's just a bit of what I've learned:

THE BASICS:

Real Food = RAW Food
There are 3 classes of essential foods: Green Leafy Vegetables, Sweet Fruits & Good Fats

Green veggies build the cells, sugary fruits fuel the cells, and good fats/oils lubricate the cells
(good fats are mostly nuts and nut oils, seeds and seed oils, coconuts and avocados)

[An Important Note: When people think they're craving meat, or animal protein,
they're actually craving fats; this is why giving up meat is so much easier than giving up dairy]

Taken in roughly equal amounts, these 3 types of food (i.e. medicine) lead to optimal health.

Pretty much everything else you put in your body makes you sick and stunts your potential.

Perhaps the best thing to do in the morning is to drink as much as two liters of water, and especially lemon-water, before taking in anything else. This flushes out your system. Lemon is unique for its anionic structure (containing more electrons, or negatively charged ions, than cations, or positively charged ions), which resembles the structure of digestive juices (saliva, hydrochloric acid, and bile). Lemon has a remarkable ability to stimulate enzyme production in the liver, detoxifying and alkalizing the body.

One of my teachers is Philip McCluskey: http://www.philipmccluskey.com/

‎"Philip McCluskey is a raw food expert who motivates hundreds of thousands of people worldwide to become healthier, happier, and fitter by trading in their standard diet for a raw food lifestyle. Philip’s journey began in 2006, when, at a morbidly obese 400 pounds, he discovered raw food and shed 215 pounds, gaining vibrant health, energy, and a renewed passion for living. His story has inspired countless others who have seen him on CBS’s The Doctors, Jack LaLanne (the Juiceman) commercials, have heard him speak at events like the Raw Spirit Festival, or have followed his journey on YouTube and on his website. He is also the author of three published books, including Raw Food Fast Food."

Philip has lots of great videos on YouTube.
This is him, telling his story and introducing his video blog:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kbKL8KKBJk

If you took the time to read this and watch Philip's video, Thank You. <3

Why I Believe The Cancer Conspiracy

2011-07-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

"And they say, 'Who is Moloch? Never heard of him' as out in the dark Moloch belches and grows redder and redder and fatter and fatter as he eats the children. Who dares to leave the pool of light?" ~ Allen Ginsberg

If nothing else, please watch the first three and a half minutes of this film:

Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa_KhPlvudk

The reason this isn't common knowledge is because 99% of the population just assumes that if this were true it would already be common knowledge. So they never even look at the evidence. The irony here is catastrophic.

As a serious skeptic, and not a person likely to believe in conspiracies, it took a lot of evidence to convince me that there are far more effective cancer treatments than those found in mainstream medicine. I assumed that, if these treatments worked, they'd be all over the news and in every hospital in America. It seemed ridiculous to suppose that this information, if it was indeed correct, was somehow being prevented from receiving the attention it deserved. How could it be kept quiet? Why wasn't it printed in the most respected medical journals, or taught in every medical school? I did some digging and some critical thinking, and discovered that there is a lot more to the big picture than I ever could have imagined. For one thing, more than half a TRILLION dollars was at stake. And in a society with a hierarchical economic structure, where a mere handful of individual billionaires control huge industries, and pull the strings, it's possible to hide just about anything -- even a cure for cancer. At first, I couldn't believe that anyone could be so devious and cruel, but I later came to understand that the traits which make a person cruel, or sociopathic, are precisely those which are necessary to allow him or her to amass a multi-billion dollar personal fortune in a world where a child starves to death every five seconds.

I don't know about you, but every history book I ever read was full of intrigues, behind the scenes dealings, and people in power manipulating their subjects through lies. Hindsight is 20/20. No doubt, you'd find it hard to believe that 9 million people were being murdered in concentration camps in Germany during World War II -- that is, if you hadn't learned it in school and heard it from the authorities you trust. Imagine if you were living in Germany during the Third Reich, and somebody tried to tell you what was going on. You might laugh in their face and refuse to "waste your time" examining the evidence. If you never look outside of that box, all you'll ever know is what's in that box.

Don't just talk to your doctor. Your doctor received his/her education from the very institution that is killing you. He will tell you the same lies he was told. If he knew anything, he wouldn't be practicing mainstream medicine. Listen to the doctors in these videos. Get in touch with them if you can. "Go to the pine, if you want to learn about the pine. Go to the bamboo, if you want to learn about the bamboo." (~ Basho)

Surgery, Radiation, Drugs, Chemo = Medieval. The body needs infusions of vitamins and minerals, and not to be flooded with toxins. The greatest medical invention of the 20th century is the JUICER. As you put less poisonous food into your body (processed and genetically modified food, refined carbohydrates, high-fructose corn syrup, pesticide-ridden, and, yes, cooked foods), and more raw foods and vegetable juices, especially dark leafy greens, you'll be amazed at your uncovered potential.

The evidence is right here for anyone open-minded enough to examine it:

Healing Cancer: From Inside Out
http://ravediet.com/caDVD.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGJYQ5E5T7Y
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Healing_Cancer/70095421?tr

The Gerson Miracle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpVJSnxGw4U
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/The_Gerson_Miracle/7011361

Dying To Have Known
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSlO5WuL4-4
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Dying_to_Have_Known/701107

Food Matters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vxq-ptogg8
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Food_Matters/70123196?trki

Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead
http://fatsickandnearlydead.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv3vEXy_EwU
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Fat_Sick_Nearly_Dead/70173

Eating
http://ravediet.com/whatsinfilm.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wZendyXhU4

When Healing Becomes A Crime
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd3hxJbrBiI

Run From The Cure
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0psJhQHk_GI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O6oqIbfD6s

EAST & WEST; Hesychasm & Aristotle; The Schism of 1054

2011-07-11T13:11:00.000-07:00

[I apologize for the somewhat disorganized presentation of this information. I'm really out of my comfort zone here, attempting to understand and articulate the particulars of these historical movements, so please forgive the difficulty of the text and any errors I might have made with respect to the historical record. Thank you.]

When we think of the popular distinction between Eastern and Western thought, it is common to place Greece, and indeed everything west of India and north of Mongolia, in the western camp. Because the scholastic tradition, called Western, has its roots in Aristotelian logic, and because monotheism (whether Christian, Judaic, or Islamic) dominates Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East just as surely as it dominates Western Europe and the Americas, the tendency is to lump these areas together, in contrast with the presumably more mystical Near and Far Eastern religious traditions of India, Nepal, China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. But this is a mistake.

While I do not know enough to speak of the Judaic and Islamic traditions, both of which do appear to reverence, consciously or unconsciously, the Aristotelian methodology, -- though, like Protestantism, Catholicism, and Anglicanism, they too contain an underground, esoteric strain (in the forms of Cabalism and Sufism), -- I do know just enough to conclude that the champions of Aristotle were not entirely successful in bringing Christianity under the dominion of rationalistic, scholastic, and hierarchical philosophical tendencies.

Too many of us in the West (and I am referring now to much of Europe and the Americas), being somewhat familiar with the Protestant Reformation and the history of the Catholic Church, both of which seem to have sprung from the soil of the Early Christian Church, but which really have their roots, due primarily to the work of Augustine, Barlaam and Aquinas, in the scholastic and rationalistic philosophy of Aristotle, -- too many of us somewhat familiar with Protestantism and Catholicism (and to a lesser extent with the Protestant-Catholic hybrid Christianity of the Anglican Communion, or Church of England) yet remain embarrassingly ignorant of the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the development of Christianity to the east of Italy.

More specifically, we have very little, if any, knowledge concerning the Great Schism of 1054, when the philosophical and scholastic approach of Aristotle, which was becoming more and more dominant within the Christian tradition, came up against a much deeper strain of mysticism; one which might, with some liberality, be traced as far back as Heraclitus and the Pre-Socratics, but which, at the time of the Schism, was championed by the Thessalonian archbishop Gregory Palamas and the Hesychasts, or quietists.

This ignorance is remarkable when one considers that the "blindspot" essentially encompasses the entirety of Eastern Europe (including Greece; the birthplace of Aristotle and Aristotelian logic) and Northern Asia, all of which are primarily aligned with (Eastern) Orthodox Christianity, and the fundamentally monastic tradition of seeking God, not through philosophical arguments or scholarship, but, through the meditative experience of the Uncreated Light.

With Palamas's victory over Barlaam, and by implication over Aristotle, the Hesychasts' beliefs of the path of the Threefold Way survived and were preserved for posterity in ancient monasteries like those of Mount Athos. Interestingly, leading transpersonal theorist Ken Wilber, in his masterful critique of Western thought, claims that Western Civilization lacks a "yoga", or a method of acquiring knowledge beyond the senses and the intellect. Western thought remains therefore trapped within its intellectual and scientific constructs. Wilber, like most transpersonal theorists today, finds this "yoga" in Eastern philosophy and religion, particularly Zen. Nowhere in his work is there any mention or awareness of the Hesychast tradition or the concepts behind the Threefold Way.

~ Kyriacos Markides, The Mountain of Silence (p.235)

The Great Schism of 1054 epitomized the distinction we now hear so much about, between East and West.

What is essential to grasp is that the form of Christianity which survived within the Orthodox Church has far more in common with the mystical and intuitive religions of the Far East, than it does with the more scholastic and intellectual forms of Christianity familiar in the west. While the former are properly theological, the latter are more typically philosophical in orientation, and it is only by a stretch of the imagination that their doctrines may be regarded as true theologies.

Within the Orthodox Church, the writings of the saints, or Ecclesia, take precedence over any doctrines or mandates produced by more worldly, less mystical, authorities. Orthodox Christians are far more likely than their Catholic or Protestant counterparts to flock to meet holy men and women, often unassuming elders who have been meditating for many years in obscurity. While they do not have a rigid hierarchical structure with a worldly dictator at the top (such as the Catholic Pope), considering Christ the only head of the Church, the clergy that does exist is far more willing to recognize the visions and messages reported by various holy men and women in the laity, despite these people having no clerical credentials, but only the grace of God, to recommend them.

Moreover, the concept of vicarious salvation through faith in the mediation of Jesus Christ, while retained within the Orthodox tradition, is not allowed to eclipse the ultimate goal of theosis, or divinization, as articulated in the words of St. Athanasius: "God became man so that men might become gods."

The Tree of Souls

2011-07-09T22:51:00.000-07:00

The Lord was passing through his garden one day and he came to bask, as he often did, in the shade of his favorite fruit tree.

There it stood in the very heart of the garden, in the midst of so many marvelous creations, powerful and tall, and vibrant with the sap of life pulsing through its mighty trunk and its proud, luxurious limbs. Nothing in the world so commanded his admiration nor his care. It was a glorious tree.

Now, the Lord's habit was to pick only the very ripest specimen. So he cast an examining eye over each piece of fruit, to see which would be the one. And as he admired them, each in turn, blessing them so that they might grow confidently into the fullness of their strength, something strange yet profoundly beautiful began to happen, as it always did whenever his divine presence drew near.

All at once, the fruit began to perk up, to blush, and to glow with a curious inner light. As his warm gaze slid over one, and then another, they shimmered gold and rose, and trembled as if to burst. Even when he was not looking directly upon them, they shined and brightened as if to attract his attention, and his love.

This light, the beauty of which can scarcely be imagined, was really a mysterious and ambivalent longing within the fruit; ambivalent because the longing was tinged with humility. Each fruit felt deep within itself that it was not yet ready, not yet ripe enough to be picked. And though each desired more than anything to be chosen, and at times felt as though they would even fly suddenly from the tree, like birds into the Father's hand, -- humility held them close to their perch.

Only in the sweetest fruits was the longing so incredible as to make them bold. Then, even despite the great humility they felt, their attachment to the tree grew tenuous. Yet it was not until the last trace of bitterness had gone from them, that they did begin to fall.

As if responding to the closeness of his reach, the chosen fruit, now fully ripe, broke free from its slender perch, just as the Lord was about to take hold of it, and dropped softly into his open hand. From there it would be carried easily to his lips, soon to merge its gentle spirit with his own.

Thoughts

2011-07-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

It's not a search. It's a practice.

Perhaps the key insight of Jungian psychology is that mental illness is not a purely individual phenomenon, but that it is a manifestation of much larger imbalances within the culture and the psyche of mankind as a whole. In other words, schizophrenics are, in some sense, the scapegoats of a culture which clings tenaciously to it's own superficial certainties, refusing to confront the contradictions and questions bubbling up from it's own depths; they are the receptacles of all the psychical garbage which has been denied and has yet to be dealt with in the culture. It may even be that they are the aborted saints; the ones who, in their "dark night of the soul", received no shepherding, but were given up as madmen, when in fact they were the chosen of God.

In order to know one thing, we must be ignorant of many things, and in order to know God, we must be ignorant of all. In meditation, opposites dissolve; past and future have no place. There's no thought of incompleteness, or taking action for any purpose. This is the way to samadhi. But this is not a philosophy for living in the world. (In the world, good and evil do not cancel each other out.) Observe it in meditation, and for moments throughout the day when detachment is needed. The sages did not attempt to apply this teaching to all aspects of life.

A teacher wants a student,
no less than a student wants a teacher.

The greatest teaching is "how to be a student".

I need to see myself as more of an artist than a sage. I am not a sage. I may want to express pure truth, but I can only express the obscure visions of my process, my confusion, my questions, and the mysteries that yawn like so many wild abysses on all sides. I straddle a thousand thresholds, describing the visions I see within. And trying not to block the way.

The two faces of a stained-glass window reflect the two faces of virtue;
for they obscure the world outside, while revealing the kingdom within.

Compassion cannot arise in a heart that sees only good. The will is paralyzed. We cannot do good if we think God has it all in hand, and all suffering magically produces good by itself. We must have a genuine experience of horror, in order to respond with compassionate action. The Magician doesn't make way for the blind, circling will of many gods, but makes himself an instrument of the One.

By the will of God, the angels are revealed to the prophets. But magicians must exercise their own wills, through the practice of ritual concentration, to accomplish the same results. A prophet who is also a magician is rightly called a master, for to him is given not only the ability to perceive angels without effort, but to manifest them as well.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the soldier is the one who paves it; for he is the epitome of misdirected service; the one who murders his family, and believes he has defended his home. For all his courage, fortitude, and faith, he hasn't the sense to know when his very virtues have become weapons of the devil.

The saints are not above us, by any means. But our ceiling is their floor.

It's always been the case:
They can lock you up for being interesting.

Delusions of candor.

Gnosticism and The Split-Personality of Jesus Christ

2011-06-30T16:25:00.000-07:00

"All the forces in the world are not so powerful
as an idea whose time has come"
~ Victor Hugo

Perhaps the greatest and most common error people make in attempting to interpret the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is the assumption that there is such a gospel to begin with; that Christ himself was entirely clear and consistent about his own beliefs.

On the contrary, provided we are not determined to reconcile them at the expense of reason, -- even the most intuitive and indulgent reason still worthy of the name "reason", -- we can see some glaring inconsistencies and contradictions with respect to his most fundamental conceptions of God; in particular, His Law and His Grace.

In one saying, Christ asserts that sin is sickness, for which men deserve healing, and not judgement. In another, he tells us God will only forgive us to the extent that we forgive others; and judge us to the extent that we judge them. He says God makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust, without distinction; for He is perfect. Elsewhere, the sinner will in no wise see heaven. He warns us not to cast pearls of wisdom before swine, lest they turn and rend us. Then he tells us to take up the cross and be martyred for those very "swine". He says the least in the kingdom is greater than John the Baptist, then tells the thief on the cross that, for an instance worth of repentance, he shall be in heaven before the day's end.

Are there two Christs? Confounded as one? Was the man who went into a rage in the temple and whipped the merchants and money-changers, the same who said, "Turn the other cheek?" Or has the Church twisted the true teachings of Jesus? On purpose or through simple foolishness? What other explaination could there be, but that Christ himself was unsure of what he thought, -- and what he taught?

Could it be that Jesus was trying to reconcile the legalistic God of the Old Testament with the unconditionally loving Father in Heaven disclosed to his higher vision? Could it be that he was incapable of confessing the discrepency? Was the man, Jesus, only partially and occassionally possessed and inspired by the god, Christ?

And are not the Christians of our time equally confused by the notion of a God who would create both the Devil and the Christ; the problem and the solution?

Indeed, this dilemma is not unique to Christianity, but is found wherever men seek to proclaim the universe (which houses both good and evil) good. Wherever unconditional love is attributed to the creator, along with omnipotence and omniscience, so that he is both aware of suffering and perfectly capable of ending it, we find the infection. No religion, no spiritual vision, can be entirely healthy and pure which posits a God who simultaneously loves us and causes, or allows, us to suffer; not when He has the power to make us happy and righteous without recourse to the cruel and unusual.

How much more reasonable, and in harmony with itself, is the doctrine of the Gnostics, who attribute to the creator neither omnipotence nor omniscience, nor the virtue of an unconditionally loving nature; but, making a clear, dualistic distinction between the God The Creator and God The Father, -- between Matter and Spirit, -- conclude that Law and Grace are irreconcilable; that The God Who Creates is of a low and inferior type, while The God Who Loves dwells in a realm which utterly transcends the physical, and is anathema to it?

Here, we see a doctrine thoroughly rational, for it explains that men have access to God, and He to them, only to the extent that His Grace is present in their hearts; having withdrawn them from the trappings of the temporal realm (form and change), and aligned their attention with the formless, immutable, and eternal nature of their Father in Heaven. If He only could, He would deliver us from this prison. But His light is dim in this place, and we must seek for the source of it most carefully.

How much more faithfully does this vision correspond to the noblest impulses of the Christ; to the call for mercy, charity, healing and instruction? Compassion cannot arise in a heart that sees only good. The will is paralyzed. We cannot do good if we think God has it all in hand, and all suffering magically produces good by itself. We must have a genuine experience of horror, in order to respond with compassionate action. The Magician doesn't make way for the blind, circling will of many gods, but makes himself an instrument of the one God.

"Eternal Hell"

2011-06-24T06:36:00.000-07:00

excerpted from:
"Meditations On The Tarot:
A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism"
by Valentin Tomberg
from: Chapter VIII JUSTICE (p.180-181)

[To] live without love -- this is hell. And to live without love in the region of eternity -- this is to live in eternal hell.

Hell is the state of the soul powerless to come out of itself,
absolute self-centredness, dark and evil isolation, i.e. final inability to love.
(Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny Of Man)

This subjective state of soul is neither long nor short -- it is as intense as eternity is. Similarly, the blessedness that a saint experiences in the vision of God is as intense as eternity -- although it could not so last, since someone present at the ecstasy of a saint would time it as a few minutes. The "region" of eternity is that of intensity, which surpasses the measures of quantity that we employ in time and space. "Eternity" is not a duration of infinite length; it is "intensity of quality" which, if compared with time and thus translated into the language of quantity, is comparable with an infinite duration. Concerning this, Nicolas A. Berdyaev says:

In our life on earth it is given to us to experience torments that appear to us to go on for ever, that are not for a moment, an hour or a day, but seem to last an infinity... Objectively this infinity may last a moment, an hour, or a day, but it receives the name of everlasting hell... When Origen said that Christ will remain on the cross so long as a single creature remains in hell, he expressed an eternal truth.
(Nocolas Berdyaev, The Destiny Of Man)

What can one add to this, if not "amen"? Eternal hell is the state of a soul imprisoned within itself, where the soul has no hope of coming out. "Eternal" means to say "without hope". All suicides committed through desperation bear witness to the reality of eternal hell as a state of soul. Before committing suicide, the person who commits it experiences a state of complete despair, i.e. eternal hell. This is why he prefers nothingness to the state of despair. Nothingness is therefore his last hope.

Eternal bliss -- "heaven" -- is, in contrast, the state of soul which is filled with boundless hope. This is not a blissfulness which lasts for an infinite number of years; it is the intensity of hope which gives the quality "eternal". Similarly, it is the intensity of despair which imparts to the state of soul designated "hell" the quality of "eternal".

The anguish of Gethsemane which gave rise to perspiration of blood was eternal. This night, the night of Gethsemane, was not measured in hours. It was -- it is -- immeasurable, therefore eternal. It is due to its eternity that he sweated blood, and not because of the temporary, and therefore passing, trial. He knew eternal hell through experience, and as he came out of it, we have the "good news" that not only death is vanquished by the Resurrection, but also that hell is -- through Gethsemane. .... Origen himself knew with certain knowledge that there would be no "damned" at the end of the world and that the devil, also, would be saved.

Did Jesus Really Mean What He Said?

2011-06-22T07:40:00.001-07:00

This is excerpted from the book "My Religion"
(also translated as "What I Believe") by Leo Tolstoy:

The least that can be required of those who judge another man’s teaching is that they should take the teacher’s words in the exact sense in which he uses them. Christ does not consider His teaching as some high ideal of what mankind should be but cannot attain to, nor does He consider it as a chimerical, poetical fancy, fit only to captivate the simple-minded inhabitants of Galilee; He considers His teaching as work – a work that is to save mankind...

It is incompatible with the nature of man, they say, to turn the other cheek when he has been struck; it is incompatible with the nature of man to give up his property to another – to work, not for himself, but for others. It is natural to man, they say, to protect himself, his own safety, that of his family, and his property – in other words, it is the nature of man to struggle for life...

We need only for one moment to cast aside the idea that the present organization of our lives, as established by man, is the best and most sacred, and then the argument that the teaching of Christ is incompatible with human nature immediately turns against the arguer. Who will deny that it is repugnant and harrowing to a man’s feelings to torture or kill, not only a man, but also even a dog, a hen, or a calf? I have known men, living by agricultural labor, who have ceased entirely to eat meat only because they had to kill their own cattle. And yet our lives are so organized that for one individual to obtain any advantage in life another must suffer, which is against human nature.

The whole organization of our lives, the complicated mechanism of our institutions, whose sole object is violence, are but proofs of the degree to which violence is repugnant to human nature. No judge will ever undertake to strangle with his own hands the man whom he has condemned to death. No magistrate will himself drag a peasant from his weeping family in order to shut him up in prison. Not a single general, not a single soldier, would kill hundreds of Turks or Germans, and devastate their villages – no, not one of them would consent to wound a single man, were it not in war, and in obedience to discipline and the oath of allegiance. Cruelty is only exercised (thanks to our complicated social machinery) when it can be so divided among a number that none shall bear the sole responsibility, or recognize how unnatural all cruelty is.

Some make laws, others apply them; others, again, drill their fellow-creatures into habits of discipline – i.e., of senseless passive obedience; and these same disciplined men, in their turn, do violence to others – killing without knowing why or wherefore. But let a man even for a moment shake off in thought the net of worldly institutions that so ensnares him, and he will see what is really incompatible with his nature.

If once we cease to affirm that the evil we are so used to, and profit by, is an immutable divine truth, we may see clearly which is the more natural to man – violence, or the law of Christ. Which is better – to know that the comfort and safety of my family and myself, all my joys and pleasures, are obtained at the price of the misery, depravity, and suffering of millions, by yearly executions, by hundreds of thousands of suffering prisoners, and by millions of soldiers, policemen and sergeants torn from their homes and half stupefied by military discipline, who protect my idle pleasures by keeping starving men at a distance with their loaded pistols; to know that every dainty morsel I put into my mouth, or give my children, is obtained at the price of all this suffering, which is inevitable, in order to obtain these dainties; or to know that my fare is my own, that nobody suffers for the want of it, and that nobody has suffered in procuring it for me?...

It is sufficient to understand the doctrine of Christ in all its high significance and with all the consequences it entails, to see that it is not inconsistent with human nature, but that, on the contrary, His whole doctrine throws aside what is inconsistent with human nature – the delusive human teaching of resistance of evil, which is the chief cause of all human misery...

When once we clearly understand the teaching of Christ, we see that it is not the world given by God to man for his happiness that is a dream, but the world such as men have made it for their own destruction that is a wild terrifying dream – the delirium of a madman – a dream from which it is enough to awake once, never to return to it...

God’s words are so simple and so clear. He says, ‘Do no evil to each other, and there will be no evil.’ Is it possible that the revelation of God is so simple? Can this be all? All this is so familiar to us... They are very simple, but they contain in themselves the sole and eternal law of God and man. This law is eternal, and if in history we find any progress made toward the annihilation of evil, it is due to those who truly understood the doctrine of Christ, who suffered evil without resisting by violence. The progression of mankind toward good is brought about by martyrdom, not by tyranny. Fire cannot extinguish fire, no more than evil can extirpate evil...

Men may turn aside from it or conceal it from others; nevertheless it is the only path that leads to true happiness. Each step that has brought us nearer to this great end was taken in the name of the doctrine of Christ: ‘Do not resist evil.'... And if the progress is made slowly, it is only because the clarity, simplicity, and rationality of the teaching of Christ and its inevitable absolute necessity are concealed from the eyes of men in the most crafty and dangerous manner; concealed under a spurious teaching, falsely called His.

Silence And Speech

2011-06-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

"Words may be deeds." ~ Aesop

I was reading the Talmud, and one said he'd grown up among the wise and lived among the wise his whole life, and he believed there is nothing better than silence. He says "If silence is good for the wise, how much better is it for the foolish?" But I say silence is the wisdom of the foolish and folly of the wise.

These teachers who praise silence and deeds at the expense of words and teachings -- I don't agree with them. I cannot. Words are stones, to me, and I am a builder of cathedrals, hospitals, and statues; out of joy, and for the purpose of evoking the noblest states and aspirations. Words are grains, and I am baking spiritual bread with which to feed the people. Hypocrites; how can they speak to disrespect speech?

Censure of speech is speech, and praise of action is action. Even to censure speech is to admit its power. And if righteous words were not also righteous works, then neither would vain words be works of vanity.

Not all speech is vain, but there is vain speech, which seeks to impress with emptiness; to dazzle and bewilder us with the shallowest splash of shimmering surface-light.

Too many writers, and far too many readers, have taken hold of a strange notion: that good writing must be obscure to the point of meaninglessness; that sincerity and substance are small change to pay for an inexhaustible novelty of expression.

Yet no style has been so consistently elaborated, while edifying so little, than this method of writing which relies on parading before the mind's eye one scantily glimpsed, invariably askew, object after another, with no conceivable relation between them, -- rather, with only the self-indulgent caprice of the writer, in his efforts to eschew coherence and replace it with the purest randomness and confusion.

The result is a "stream of consciousness" colorfully polluted with every curious image at the writer's disposal. No object, no suggestion, no word, is too insignificant or lacking in relevance -- for, as we've seen, the absence of relevance is precisely what these writers appear to find most charming, even going so far as to regard it the cutting edge in the crowning jewel of literary exploration.

Needless to say, I refuse to consider this post-apocalyptic wasteland the frontier of modern prose.

Has it become such a bore, to have a point? Has everything been said, and said again? And if so, must we revel in saying nothing? I know I would rather be a broken-record, repeating the loftiest sentiments we have heard since time immemorial, than a tinkling symbol, delighting in the slightness of the slightest.

But to keep silent is a choice I could never make.

Zeitgeist: Why This Is IMPORTANT

2011-06-07T06:16:00.000-07:00

"Simply put, what The Venus Project represents and what The Zeitgeist Movement hence condones, could be summarized as: ‘The application of The Scientific Method for social concern.’" ~ http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." ~ Edmund Burke

It's easy to imagine that what matters in life is the small circle of family, friends, and colleagues surrounding us, and to narrow our focus so as not to detract from the attention we wish to give them. It's harder to imagine how this inner circle is ultimately affected by much wider issues and concerns about the culture as a whole. When we do attend to larger issues, they are entirely, or almost entirely, confined to the political arena as it exists within our present culture. Perspectives which transcend the culture altogether, and propose sweeping, foundational changes to the culture, tend to be summarily dismissed as irrelevant and unconnected with "the real world". In fact, the opposite is true. While we try to keep our careers and personal lives afloat, and lend our support to political movements (or simply empty promises) which involve making various adjustments to the current system, we lose sight of the bigger picture. The fact is that our system is not "broken" -- rather, it is flawed by design. There's nothing we can do to reestablish equilibrium in the economy, because it never existed to begin with. It is not a question of rooting out threats to our economy; our economy IS the problem.

The following films are not merely informative. They are game-changing, world-changing films. Your understanding of human nature, and how environmental conditioning affects the "free will" of individuals, will be utterly transformed and updated. Your belief in what is possible will likewise be radically revised. In light of what you know now (or imagine you know), it must be impossible to suppose that our civilization now has everything needed (in terms of technological advancement) to establish a world in which the material abundance you enjoy may be maintained at approximately 3% of the labor now exerted. Also, that this may be done is such a way as to eliminate, not only labor, but also famine, war, poverty, waste, and environmental collapse. In light of what you know now (or imagine you know), such a concept must seem like an absurd utopian dream, which may at best be attained in some thousand years or so. Well, that's because you haven't seen these films. Instead, you've been listening to the people who are trying to preserve our outmoded system, and the traditional values you've assumed are those which aim to support this system. It's time to open your mind to the possibility of a very different way of seeing the world. All that is necessary is the flexibility to allow your most rigid and deeply ingrained beliefs to be challenged, not by another opinion, but by science.

It is science which will ultimately convince you (if you will only take the time and make the slightest effort to listen objectively) that within a monetary system, which relies on the profit motive, true advances in civilization are not only inhibited, but are actively resisted because they reduce profits. Presently, the well-being of a nation, and its progress, is measured by a country's GDP (Gross Domestic Product), or how much money is being made -- particularly by the richest 1% of the population. But once you understand that money is made by manufacturing needs and desires, and not by satisfying them, you will see how backwards this model is. The healthcare industry makes money, not by curing disease, but by treating it; hence, the more sick people there are, the higher the profits. And this principle may be seen to exist at every level of our economy; not merely in the healthcare industry. In other words, this is not an aberration in the system -- THIS IS THE SYSTEM. And the sickness, suffering, poverty, servitude, oppression, war, and death engendered by this system, and required to maintain this system (which is ultimately doomed to devour itself anyway, because it depends upon an infinite supply of resources; and no such supply exists) are not merely the "facts of life" -- they are not necessary evils with which we must contend. Rather, they are the inevitable by-products of the present system. Moreover, they make the Holocaust look like a wet dream, and Hitler look like a hot date.

You are hereby cordially invited to discover the real real world:

Zeitgeist 2: Addendum
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EewGMBOB4Gg

Zeitgeist 3: Moving Forward
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w

Future By Design
(Jacque Fresco, modern-day Leonardo Da Vinci)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxe7tlr-2I4

The Venus Project
http://www.thevenusproject.com/

Thank you,

Valus

The Busy Philosopher

2011-06-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

What is left for a philosopher to do, when a society is preparing for war?

When Philip threatened to lay siege to the city of Corinth and all its inhabitants hastily bestirred themselves in defense, some polishing weapons, some gathering stones, some repairing the walls, Diogenes seeing all this hurriedly folded his mantle about him and began to roll his tub zealously back and forth through the streets.

When he was asked why he did this he replied that he wished to be busy like all the rest, and rolled his tub lest he should be the only idler among so many industrious citizens.

-- Kierkegaard

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http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Ekstglm9Zuc/SIs-UlxA4VI/AAAAAAAAAI8/Z1-k-79Eikg/S1600-R/diogenes3.jpg

Having conquered the world, Alexander The Great, an admirer of Diogenes The Cynic,
asks the latter to name a gift with which the emperor might honor the philosopher.

Diogenes replies, "Get out of my sun."

A Message To The "Christians"

2011-05-31T00:55:00.001-07:00

Many of you who believe yourselves to be Christians,
have never heard preached the true word of Christ.

Would you care to know the Truth?

I confess a faith for Christ one hundred times greater than your own.
Even so, I cannot dare to call myself a Christian.

I cannot honestly believe that being a Franciscan,
and following the monastic rule of Saint Francis,
requires more of you than being a Christian,
and following the rule of Christ.

Can the student be greater than the teacher?

(But you call yourselves "Christians".)

I am sure that to be a Christian is to be an anarchist,
who believes no man should use force to govern another.

(But you call yourselves "Christians".)

That it is to preach the abolition of all courts of law,
and of any form of judgement whatsoever.

(But you call yourselves "Christians".)

To preach the renunciation of private property,
and the life of a wandering beggar.

(But you call yourselves "Christians".)

To preach the refusal to participate in war,
or in any form of violence whatsoever.

It is to be a martyr for peace,
devoted to the service of truth.

To believe otherwise is pure delusion.

But you call yourselves "Christians".

How can you go straight into being a Christian?
There ought to be a word for what you are.
We might call you "Christians-In-Training."

What does Nietzsche say?

'Before one can fly,
one must first learn to walk and run.
One cannot fly into flying.'

If you want to call yourselves Christians,
while owning property and supporting war,
please call yourselves hypocrites as well,
and make some little effort in His direction.

But, for Christ's sake,
don't disagree with everything the man stood for.

The Road Not Taken

2011-05-30T14:37:00.001-07:00

"Father Maximos laughed as he recalled an incident with a fellow monk at Mount Athos. 'He was always very forgetful, he claimed, but fortunately for him the moment he began to pray, the devil would always remind him of all the things he forgot to do during the day.'" ~ from: The Mountain of Silence by Kyriacos Markides

"Modern people lack silence. They no longer lead their own lives; they are carried along by events. It is a race against the clock... If your life is chock-full already, there won't be room for anything else. Even God can't get anything else in. So it becomes essential to cut something out. I'm putting it as simply as I can." ~ Paul Tournier, psychoanalyst and Christian mystic

The common obsession with career advancement, place-seeking, and the accumulation and maintenance of material goods, consumes so much time and energy. Most people have little or nothing left for themselves, their families, or God. They complain of being overworked, yet are forever looking to increase their workload by getting a promotion and a raise. Success is not utilized as a means of providing more liberty and time for reflection. Rather, with every advance, they continue to make material investments and to live beyond their means, and in debt. The work they do, from a global and historical standpoint, is almost always detrimental to the true welfare of society.

When they get home (usually late), all they want is to pacify their minds, which have been occupied all day long with largely trivial, yet highly demanding, concerns. They stuff themselves with rich, stupefying foods and drinks, crack a beer or pour themselves a glass of wine, plop down in front of the "boob tube", and watch some mindless sitcom or feel-good romantic comedy, or they watch the "news" and hear about the latest child murder or political scandal, or they turn on some nerve-wracking criminal or medical drama with ominous music and a plot replete with child rape, incest, and bone-saws cutting ligaments, or, if they pick up a book, it is some shallow pulp fiction of espionage and intrigue which they have heard told a thousand times before.

They say two relatively careless words to their spouse or child; whom they barely know, yet think they know too well. Then it's off to bed, to get up and do it all over again. And while the promise of a coming vacation sustains them in their work, when they get it they are generally under so much pressure to fill the time with enjoyments, that it goes by in a kind of blur of sensory gratifications and idle chatter; not having learned anything, they have little to say, as does the company they keep. Vast sums are exhausted, and then it's back to work!

One day they fall ill and feel like their prayers have been answered. Bedridden, they are forced to take it easy, to get off the hamster wheel and relax. At this point, they may revue their lives, full of guilt and regret. Or maybe the habit of superficiality has become so ingrained that even this is impossible for them. Then they die, wondering what went wrong.

It is rare than anyone organizes their time and resources so as to be in a position to learn about the very systems of which they are a part; about the corruption which infests nearly every aspect of the culture which they have come to trust implicitly and to see as "the real world". Attention to social causes and spiritual well-being are, likewise, entirely or near-entirely absent. And the realization of the vanity and emptiness of this way of life is held continually at bay by keeping oneself perpetually engaged and distracted with the very things which only deepen that inner void and disconnectedness to the sacredness of being.

This is a call to relax and simplify our involvement with commerce, while simultaneously intensifying and enriching our awareness of matters of true importance. It is a call to the path "less traveled by", as Robert Frost put it. But not, as Frost understood it in another poem, to a path with "promises to keep" and "miles to go before I sleep". Rather, one is invited to reflect upon the foolishness of "promises" made which only scatter our energies and spread us thin; and to regard fidelity to oneself and one's deepest voice as the only promise worth keeping. It is a reminder that there is nowhere to go; not until one has stood still enough to honor the very place where one is in this present moment. It is a call to the inward path of self-exploration and self-discovery, for that is truly "the road not taken".

FRUITS: Some Green, Some Ripe

2011-05-20T21:02:00.001-07:00

"The Formless Absolute is my Father,
and God With Form is my Mother." -Kabir
We are the jewel which completes the Trinity;
every one of us a facet.

All things perish.
How much quicker do your models break down?
No vision can encapsulate the mystery.
Sell your cleverness and purchase love-simplicity.

The Lady cradling, and gazing lovingly
upon the Christed Child.
His face is round like the Earth,
His Mother's is round like the Sun.
She beams Love and He receives.

Love is sweetness, joy, compassion, sympathy; all of these.

Do not scrutinize the sayings of the wise. A cup turned over cannot hold water; truth cannot perform its function in an atmosphere of doubt. The wise know their insights are precarious steps, which crumble beneath all but the lightest feet. It is with the quickness of faith that they carry their message, and do not fall.

She drinks wine. She said to me, "Everyone deserves one vice. Everyone is allowed one vice." Has the ignorance of virtue attained to such abyssmal heights? Her entire life is vice! Yet she believes the wine alone prevents it from being viceless. How can life be anything but vice, when one is not on the path of virtue; devoted to God and His most miserable creatures? How can we speak of virtue with our own lips? Saints do not open their mouths; God opens them. Yet we think we can count our vices, -- and on one finger!

Of the healthy and unemployed, it is justly expected that they commit themselves to the revelation of mysteries; -- be they worldly or more directly engaged with the life of the Spirit. If they did not seek and reveal these things, their liberty would surely be license, and a disgrace. Whereas, for those entangled in the world and its labors, such seeking and revealing becomes a badge of true merit, and neglecting these things, though unfortunate, would not be disgraceful.

The sayings are not arranged; which is to say, they are arranged purely by Providence. God Himself will direct the reader, providing what is needed, and not merely what is sought. Read in order or at random, they jump from topic to topic, so as to awaken a consciousness of the whole, without undue attention to its parts.

God ordains that some, by His grace, observe a perfect and minute order in their daily lives, while others He leads by seemingly chaotic channels, more intuitive than anything. Each one must discover Him anew.

The original sin is procreation. God loves His Children too much to see them in the world. And while His Love makes everything good, His Fullness makes great. Bodily incarnation conceals from us the fullness of His Presence. Though it may be possible to build a heaven on earth, we know -- by faith and for certain -- that His Heaven is ready-made in the sky. Non-action is sometimes the wisest of actions.

It is said that God chooses the weakest, and the lowest of the low, in order to exhibit the fullness of His power. But are they not the ones made weak with alienation; brought low by the misunderstanding scorn of their communities? Are they not simply the most maligned? Those who, before God illumined them, struggled to interpret their prophetic wisdom, and almost believed it when the people called them mad?

The source of wisdom is mysterious.
Even the wise are shocked by what they know.

Conspiracy Theory, The Pathology of Institutions, and The World Situation

2011-05-18T06:59:00.000-07:00

"Every true secret must of itself exclude the profane. Whoever understands it is of himself, by rights, an initiate." ~ Novalis

A Democracy is a tyranny of the majority, in which 51% of the population can take control the other 49%. Americans do not live in a Democracy. We live (at least, in theory) in a Constitutional Republic, in which even 99% of the people do not have the right to take away the rights of the remaining 1%. However, since our nation's founding, and long before, there have been power struggles between those who want to ensure our rights and those who want to use and manipulate us as commodities; namely, the bankers and those in league with them. At present, we live within a system which is somewhere between a Constitutional Republic and a Plutocracy, leaning heavily toward the latter. This is a situation in which the richest 1% are, frequently, in a position to take away the rights of the remaining 99%.

In such a system, not being a victim means somehow being smart and/or skeptical enough to realize the profound effects that money (and those who care for little else) has on our institutional structures -- particularly media and government. It means waking up to the many ways in which you are being lied to. It means seeking out alternative, independent news sources, and ultimately acquiring a sweeping, historical vision of what's going on here. Having a vote means nothing if the information you are heeding is bull, so you have to be smart and self-motivated enough to find the truth. Not everyone can do that, -- let's face it, even some of the most savvy people are so overworked and distracted that they haven't the time or energy for this search (and, undoubtedly, it could be argued that this lack of time and energy is by design) -- but those of us who can search have a responsibility to the rest, to spread awareness and to find ways of subverting the flaws in this system.

The corruption actually extends to our medical institutions and practically all areas of the sciences. First, you need to understand that these systems are composed of individuals who need and want to keep their jobs, and many who want to make names for themselves. All of that creates bias, but it's how our world works. What happens is, a dispute arises between two or more factions, and people stake their careers on the particular theory or model that they support... A theory or model gains supremacy, not because it is more accurate, but, generally, because it has more influential supporters, and can make more money. Eventually, yes, the truth comes out, and the better system triumphs, but usually not before it is stigmatized and consigned to the scrap heap. When one theory gains dominance, the "anomalous" evidence in support of the contrary theory (or theories) is buried, and those in support of it are ostracized into obscurity. Some social theorists have called this process "knowledge filtration". Basically, they lose funding, lose their jobs, etc., if they don't tow the line.

Of course, most people tow the line because they implicitly trust the prevailing paradigm. If the dominant view, for example, is that drugs and surgery are the best treatments for Cancer, and that radical changes in diet are less effective, they will assume that this view is grounded in solid research. Books like "When Healing Becomes A Crime" and "Forbidden Archeology" can help shine light on the bigger picture, but they are not located on the beaten path, and most people will scoff at the premise without even hearing the arguments and evidence. In fact, most people are so entrenched in their cultural programing, that they have no idea how thoroughly they are being manipulated and victimized, and they will adamantly defend those structures which victimize them; stigmatizing anyone who attempts to pull back the curtain as a paranoid conspiracy theorist nut. So it goes.

History moves at a snail's pace. Innovations which require the abandonment of enormous institutions, and the restructuring of entire fields, like medicine, education, economy, etc., are not easily accepted. Just imagine it: Suppose a radical discovery is made in medicine which undermines the entire system. Do you think the medical schools will gut their curriculum overnight? That diplomas will be revoked from doctors everywhere? That billions, maybe trillions, of dollars worth of equipment will be destroyed? That organizations (and the thousands they employ) will gracefully bow out in light of the emerging evidence? Of course not! People will resist such sweeping changes; consciously or unconsciously, they will scramble to defend the structures in which they are ensnared.

And all of this is visible to a relatively miniscule percentage of the population. Though history illustrates these truths again and again, only a small number of people, far in advance of their times, have been in a position to grasp them. Like the legendary prophetess, Cassandra, they speak the truth and are not believed. The lyricist, Kurt Cobain, wrote: "A little tribe it's always been. And always will, until the end." Is this statement lacking in optimism, or does it just about sum up the historical predicament? Many believe we are coming into a time of greater awareness, when larger numbers of people will be receptive to these truths. I'm not so sure.

In Defense Of Everything Emo

2011-05-08T06:56:00.001-07:00

Do we love our misery? Our defeats? Our angst? Do we revel in it? Of course we do. But, then, what choice have we got? The human creature is of such a frail constitution, that it must, and will undoubtedly, find something to love even in the most deplorable of states. We need to find things beautiful, and the more horrific they are, the more power we experience over them in beautifying them. Yet, ultimately, nobody wants to dwell on loss, and, however much sympathy may sweeten a bitter condition, we'd all prefer admiration to sympathy, and triumph to tragedy.

It irks me when anyone suggests that we love, and choose, our misery. If we choose it, it's only after the choice has been made for us, and because we need to retain some semblance, albeit illusion, of freedom; also, because it is easier to "go with the flow" than to wage an endless, fruitless struggle against it, even when that flow leads to the tears and consolations, rather than the laughter and applause, of the crowd.

We are who we are, and we have little choice but to find something beautiful in it. We form our arguments in accordance with our dispositions, and not the other way around. The free spirit will always advocate a positive outlook, not because the outlook uplifts him, or is more "true"; but because it is natural and congenial to him, and he may even be incapable of taking a darker view. The industrious man praises industry and prides himself on his fidelity to it, while deriding all others. The reflective man praises leisure. And so on. We play our parts.

If your part is a sad one, then, at least, do not be ashamed to lend style to your character. So long as we feel ourselves or our fates to be tragic, then let us revel in them nonetheless, as we would in victory; let us glory in our misery and find beauty in our disintegration. Who, happier and healthier than we are, would presume to begrudge us this carrion comfort?

The Dreamer (A Manifesto)

2011-05-08T05:53:00.000-07:00

"Who looks outside, dreams;
who looks inside, awakens." ~ Jung

"Mark this well, you proud men of action!
You are, after all, nothing but the unconscious instruments
of the men of thought." ~ Heine

In this very brief essay I have attempted to defend a specific type of human being, alternately referable to as "the dreamer", "the visionary", "the philosopher", "the poet", and a multitude of other names directly or loosely associated with a common theme, typified by the internal compulsion to seek and explore the mysteries of man's inner psycho-spiritual realms. In the past, it has been wise to speak of these archetypes separately or, at least, with some eye toward discriminating between them, but, it is my conviction that, in the present age, these individual types are better served by an appreciation of their commonality in relation to another, drastically different type, which I will call, among other things, "the man of action", or "the man of the world".

Clearly, I am not the first to make this distinction, which many will recognize as belonging to the tradition of classical dialectic. My purpose in taking up this theme is not to "put new wine into old wineskins", but, just the opposite; to say again what has been said from the beginning, and must be repeated until all men are free. No doubt, it has been said before, and better, but I will believe my efforts here are not entirely without merit, provided only that they may contribute in some small part to maintaining an awareness of the profound importance of this dialectic in the minds of some modest number of my contemporaries. In a time when philosophy is almost universally devalued, even derided, it would appear that even a clumsy philosopher is better than none.

The first thing to consider is that a discussion of types ought not to be taken literally. Just as there is no such thing as a pure Leo, or a pure Capricorn, though astrologers may still speak of Leos and Capricorns, and may make more or less absolute statements concerning these signs, with the stipulation that they are always speaking in the abstract (i.e. speaking of signs, and not actual people). Jung's primary division of men into the two types, introvert/extrovert, is a parallel example of what I am attempting to do here. Yes, everyone is a combination of the two, but everyone is primarily one or the other, and some people are more polarized than others.

I am primarily concerned with the polarized ones, the marginalized ones, the unsung ones. Those who are not balanced, by any means, but who may be imbalanced in such a way as to off-set the imbalances of our culture. The Apostle Paul makes a simple yet powerful argument, using the metaphor of the body of Christ (in 1 Corinthians, Chapter 12). "To some it is given to minister, to others the gifts of interpretation... and so on. We needn't make demands upon the dreamer, that he must be some perfectly well-rounded renaissance man. For he is, ultimately, just one member of a larger social body. An ear, not meant to be an eye, or foot, or hand. Is it really incumbent upon him to develop in himself those qualities which already exist in overabundance in our culture?

Nietzsche writes:
"I speak for the exception, so long as he does not wish to become the rule."

It is not possible to give one's full, concentrated attention to philosophy while going through the menial motions. What most people call deep thoughts are generally just the surfaces of deep themes. And of course, it is possible to skate over these surfaces while performing an unrelated job. But one cannot pursue philosophy in earnest while mopping a floor any more than one can mop a floor while mowing the lawn; or play the piano while dancing the waltz. Sure, you could try it, and even fool yourself into thinking you are doing a decent job of it, but, in reality, both the thought and the floor would suffer, and the delusion works only for people who cannot tell the difference between real philosophy and simply kicking big ideas around. The notion that a person can sincerely and seriously philosophize while doing the dishes and other things is insulting to me, as a vocational philosopher. To me, it suggests that anyone who could suppose such a thing must hold a very flippant attitude toward philosophy.

Schopenhauer wrote a lovely essay about Noise, and the need of a philosopher for absolute silence and an undisturbed atmosphere. As he understood it, there is perhaps nothing which demands one's full attention so much as the work of thinking deeply. Because the business of thought is so removed from the world, the thinker must withdraw him/herself from the sense impressions and preoccupations of the world, in order to enter fully into the mind; which is, properly regarded, a world unto itself.

Moreover, it is my experience that, when you go deep enough into philosophical questions, you strike a veil of golden oil, which erupts and effectively inundates your life, making it almost impossible to concern yourself with anything else. This is because, when you are working at the deepest levels, the shifting of your perspective (even just to take a peek into another possible way of seeing things) must trigger a chain reaction with consequences extending into nearly every, if not every, area of life; you can hardly confront even the most mundane situation without having to check the continual flood of habitual views; each of which is now called into scrutiny by the deeper question which has been glimpsed, and which effectively undermines them all. The one who deeply understands and deeply experiences this truth has been marked; claimed, as it were, by Philosophy. Does this mean that, if you are not the type to commit yourself utterly to philosophy (to the more or less unflagging pursuit, interpretation, and reinterpretation of visions and ideas), then, you must be prepared to confess to a relative superficiality in your thinking? Yes it does.

"In the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, a genius is someone in whom intellect predominates over "will" much more than within the average person. In Schopenhauer's aesthetics, this predominance of the intellect over the will allows the genius to create artistic or academic works that are objects of pure, disinterested contemplation, the chief criterion of the aesthetic experience for Schopenhauer. Their remoteness from mundane concerns means that Schopenhauer's geniuses often display maladaptive traits in more mundane concerns; in Schopenhauer's words, they fall into the mire while gazing at the stars."
~ Wikipedia, "Genius"

The deepest questions are cultivated in the underworld, and the loftiest answers are harvested in the spheres; therefore, the one who’s job it is to tend and deliver them must necessarily be estranged from worldly matters to the extent that he is successful in his work. That this principle is so universally misunderstood may help to explain society’s hostility toward the visionary type. He is stigmatized and maligned for being different, while his differentness is precisely that which qualifies him to take a detached perspective on the affairs of men, of nations, and of ages. Expected to abide by a conventional standard, he is constantly inhibited from pursuing his true calling, and the only thing capable of securing him a tolerable position in the world. Nor is it generally understood that the seemingly immaterial contributions he makes are of a subtle enough substance to reach and nourish the very roots of mankind. In the final analysis, he is the exception which exists in order to support their rule; the more oppressed for all that he upholds.

The dreamer is a fixed and distinct type of human being. In the most extreme examples, he is a species unto himself. While our modern society may not recognize the dreamer as a definite type, incapable of altering its fundamental disposition, nature does. And while it is true that nature is no less unforgiving, and makes even fewer allowances for the weaknesses of this type, yet, this is precisely why society ought to extend itself in support of these fey and (at least, from a worldly perspective) insubstantial creatures. Instead, the dreamer is stigmatized perhaps worse than any other classification of persons. Time and again, he is admonished, disciplined, and enjoined to perform according to the standards of majority rule -- to which he is nothing if not an exception.

The constant effort to "reform" the dreamer and subject him to the responsibilities of worldly life is not unlike the effort to force homosexuals to adapt to straight lifestyles. Always, the majority believes it is in the right, and that it has the right to impose its will upon the minority, despite the overwhelming evidence of history; for the record shows that individual types have never been extinguished, and it has been societies and entire civilizations which have been forced to change themselves, becoming more tolerant and inclusive. Moreover, it is frequently, if not always, the character and contributions of the stigmatized minority which serve to correct some excess, or imbalance, in the larger community.

As Jiddu Krishnamurti tells us,
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

More and more I see that psychology cannot be separated from history (and I don't mean the history of the individual). More and more I am drawn to consider the larger picture. The diseases of individuals are the mere symptoms of cultural and historical disease. We need healers who are willing to think big, with the courage to diagnose and prescribe treatments for the whole "civilized" world. Our wounds are deeper than we know, but so is our power to heal; not just one person at a time, -- rather, all of us at once. And while it is popular in our day to place attention upon the individual, and to see it as a definite weakness, a cop-out, to blame the larger framework of society, it seems clear to me that, until the imbalances of the collective are addressed, the dreamer will continue to be disenfranchised and scapegoated for his inability to conform with that larger whole. G.B. Shaw was voicing no minor witticism when he remarked that, while "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Is it perhaps true, as Nietzsche suggests, that everything great and good we know and hold dear was once derided as an evil. The sensitivity of the dreamer is one such buried virtue, which has yet to make its full and unabashed appearance upon the stage of human history. It is this sensitivity, near universally scorned as mere weakness, which will, perhaps, in the "last judgment", spiritualize and gentle the conditions of all men, putting an effective end to superficiality, greed, and the senseless, ignorant acts of animal brutality, common to those who have all but lost the power to dream; and surely lost the power to dream deeply. For, if the competitive and acquisitive instincts of so many "men of the world" were not quite so insistent on their own gain, and if a greater appreciation for dreams infused our culture, there would be more than enough to care for all of us; without making unrealistic demands on any of the types. The imbalance arises when the dominant type uses its influence to exploit the gentler and/or less numerous types in order to seek ever greater power and advancement for itself.

Marcel Proust gives us some interesting words on neurotics, and by neurotics I feel safe in assuming he means dreamers, for a dreamer in our Western Civilization is nothing if not a neurotic. Proust writes: "What keeps most people from suffering very much is lack of imagination.... Everything great that we know has come to us from neurotics. It is they and only they who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor, above all, what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts upon it."

And William James perhaps puts the matter more brilliantly than anyone when he writes, "In the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one's interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn't a single morbid fibre in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors? If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity."

Evolution, on some levels, may promote the strongest class of men, but not always the best. That which is most worthy of preservation is sometimes small, fragile, and not yet sturdy enough to defend and assert itself against a hostile environment. Those of us who are strong must be careful and not stride too far ahead, or stride over the heads, of this finer and more tender brood of souls. For we who are strong will die out, -- or, if we do not die out, what is best in us will still die, -- if we cannot be bothered to honor and preserve what is gentlest and most tender in ourselves and in our neighbors.

Hard doctrines of self-reliance do not impress me with their disdain of what is still tender and small. What is claimed here is not an entitlement to some position of privilege or authority, but, rather, the right to exist; to exist in harmony with one's own nature (which, in the case of sensitives, is anything but hard and self-reliant); and not to be stigmatized at every turn for being that which one cannot help but be; namely, oneself (or one's type).

What is lacking in the worldly man is precisely that empathy and objectivity which belongs to the dreamer, and which allows him to see through the eyes of other men; or gods, or stones, for that matter. But the worldly man interprets everything through a narrow screen, and therefore thinks that, if he can be comfortable taking up his worldly duties and pursuing his worldly aims, then, so can everyone else. Of course, he acknowledges and makes the "necessary" allowances for obvious physical handicaps, because he must, because he cannot ignore or deny them, but he never goes so far outside of his own subjectivity in order to sympathize, let alone empathize, with the condition of his fellows; in particular, the more eccentric and socially awkward or unacceptable types among them. To do so, he fears, would severely limit his effectiveness in the world. To some extent this is true; uncertainty stimulates and opens the mind, while ultimately paralyzing the will. But it is my basic assertion that this will, because it inhibits the operation of reflection -- and, ultimately, the operations of sympathy, empathy, and compassion, which flow therefrom, -- ought not to be so heavily guarded anyway.

There is a gap between these two types wider than that between any two generations which have ever cohabited on the planet. In some cases, where the two types are particularly pronounced, or "pure", -- in other words, when we have, for example, an especially obvious representative of the dreamer contrasted with an equally obvious representative of the worldly man, -- we find two people who are more dissimilar than any two generations, or any two cultures, that have ever existed on the earth, at whatever times. Depending upon the purity of the two types, the discrepancy between them can be severe well beyond our power to imagine it. Nonetheless, it is a reality, and a very formidable one for anyone born with a markedly dreamy or markedly worldly disposition, since, any attempt to impose a one-size-fits-all morality on the whole of society (and such attempts are frequent; anything imposed is "one-size-fits-all") is bound to leave one or the other, or both, of these extreme types in the cold. In our time, it is the dreamer for whom society has no ears. Jung's interpretation of Merlin, from the Grail legend, is particularly applicable here:

"In the twelfth century, when the legend arose, there were as yet no premises by which his intrinsic meaning could be understood. Hence he ended in exile, and hence 'le cri de Merlin' ['the cry of Merlin'] which still sounded from the forest after his death. This cry that no one could understand implies that he lives on in unredeemed form. His story is not yet finished, and he still walks abroad. It might be said that the secret of Merlin was carried on by alchemy, primarily in the figure of Mercurius. Then Merlin was taken up again in my psychology of the unconscious and remains uncomprehended to this day. That is because most people find it quite beyond them to live on close terms with the unconscious. Again and again I have had to learn how hard this is for people."

One hears the objection that there must not be a double standard; that the dreamer must not be held to different responsibilities, or, god forbid, to a different level of responsibility, than the man of the world (and vice-versa, though this is seldom heard). But, is it so unthinkable to these objectors that certain people are fundamentally, in accordance with their deepest natures, different, and that the standards and purposes to which we hold them ought to reflect their differences; their own individual gifts, and the unique destinies to which God has evidently entrusted them, -- rather than reflect society's, or someone else's, narrow expectations for them? And, for God's sake, do not throw "free will" at me. Even the trite objection, "they have free will", does not translate into "they should do as we will them to do".

Notes Of Spiritual Instruction

2011-05-08T05:40:00.000-07:00

How easy it is, to read,
and reflect on the beauty of,
the holiest thoughts.
And, again, how easy it is
to forget them.

We must learn to realize the moment;
the gravity of a suggestion; the importance
of some seemingly random thought or word;
inspired by God and almost unsuspected.

You go a little deeper. There's just a cry, and a question. A reproach, and the call that keeps repeating; for silence. "My child, where have you been from yourself? Return, and hear news!" Gravity in your guts, like a fetus; impending responsibility; the weight of the newborn world; the soul, when you sanctify it, and you've got to follow thru. Where is attention? Wandering, exploring like a child, unaware that it is lost. By and by, remembering Christ, the center, and the magnificence of Being. And, with Christ, remembering the masses, in need of consolation; starving infants, and crowds too ignorant, frightened, paralyzed, preoccupied, amused, indoctrinated, to care.

Chissel and chip,
sand and polish, my heart, Lord;
and I will bear it in patience.

This world is not my home.
This self is not my Lord.

Oppose what is excessive,
and affirm what is deficient;
there are no higher absolutes;
every truth lives for a season.

If not for Christ, I might have been
a Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh; but
my heart was stolen by the thorn-crowned
thief on the cross.

Christ is:
To love unreservedly; drunkenly;
sober to all things, save Love.

Christ is:
Love in action; vitalized;
made perfect, and made flesh.

Christ is: Salvation; The Creation, created; suffering, and surrendering in prayer; the eternal crucifiction unto life; joy in the accomplishment of immaculate intent; our solace, virtue.

Jesus, good genius, enlighten us! Devoted rebel, liberate us from the fallen world; -- not the natural world, but the world as governed by man; culture; tradition; heresay; speech.

Every individual inhabits a world of her own, with laws entirely unique to itself, only ostensibly resembling the laws of other worlds.

If you seek it, you have it.

If you are not open to receive the message,
the message is not for you.

Having embraced my brother,
I go to my God.

Charity is the highest sacrament,
and the only ritual worth keeping.

Your comfort? Or your Lord?

What is the essence of Paul's interpretation of the doctrine of Salvation By Faith according to The Law of Grace? It is this: Inwardly, I am allied to Christ in the purity of my ultimate intention, but outwardly, I obey the law of my fleshly members, against my higher will. Recognizing, by faith, this perfect "inward man", I am absolved of responsibility for my sins. Absolved of responsibility, I serve the Lord by choice, without obligation, and for the sake of the greater glory of God; not my own.

God is good! His righteousness upon us! All praises to the Lord God!, who heals the sick and lifts the sinner up from out the pit. He chaperones the upright, who are privy to His presence, and works wonders in the depths of earth and soul. Lord God, who is within us and without, hidden and revealed, present and, yet, still drawing near, be praised! Be honored according to Thy goodness, which is endless and eternal. Thou Love, be blessed.

We bless God, as God blesses us.
We bless God, and magnify His light.

If the world were not a masterpiece, the choice for God would have no meaning. Who would cling to a deplorable miscellany of superficial phenomena, when there is God? And, yet, however magnificent the world may be, it is as nothing before the Lord. What makes our choice for God momentus, is equally the wonders, or temptations, of the world, and our ignorance of the greater majesty of God, -- the awareness of which can only be received on faith and by grace; the latter meaning grace proper, which is the ascending impulse, and not the more general grace, which is the descending power, permission, or given Word, that animates the whole of Creation.

The error of atheism:
You cannot prove that something cannot be proven.

Shallow meditations on deep themes:
what generally passes for deep.

As actions may be a form of communication, so, words may also be a form of action; thus it is that the one whose actions do not confirm her words, or whose words do not confirm her actions, speaks from two sides of her mouth.

Only one of the disciples, when asked, "Who do you say I am?", replied, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God", and, yet, the other eleven were still counted disciples. Yes, even Judas. But, how can this be so? It is so, because the Lord is salvation, not for the few who know him by name and recognize His ascendancy, but, for all. As the sun shines on us all, and as gravity holds us all to the earth, just so, the Lord is Lord of us all. Only by love and self-renunciation, may we enter into communion with God.

The Lord made His will known for us in the person of Jesus Christ, and we crucified him! How, then, shall I say to my Lord, "Lord, make Thy will known to me,"; for, if He makes known His divine will, what shall I do? Follow Christ, and be crucified? Or crucify our Lord, consciously and deliberately, in full awareness of my transgression?

Lord, humble me; be my only strength!

Even the words of the saints
may distract you from the still voice
of your own inner truth.

Sing a new song. If God wanted you to say
only what has already been said, He would
have made everyone identical.

If we are not edified by the silence of God, we will not be edified by His Word, -- and if we are not edified by the Word of God, we will not be edified by His silence. In spite of this truth, the Incarnation of the Word has profound significance as a testament to the greater glory of God. As it is written, "John forbade him, saying, 'I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?' And Jesus answering said unto him, 'Suffer it to be so now: for it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness.'" Without silence, the Word could not sound, and without the Word, silence would not be silence; for the Lord is neither silence nor sound, but both of these are equally expressions of His Will.

God the Father has driven all things together out of chaos; suns and worlds to encircle them, and saints to inhabit the worlds. The name of the Lord is Order, but chaos is of the devil. Everywhere, we see the tension of these opposites; how we are constantly tempted to abandon the straight and narrow path to God, the summit, and, instead, to wander by our own imperfect lights in wayward paths down below. So well-ordered are the lives of saints and monks, the devil can find no way in. The personal will has been drawn within the gates of the spiritual life, lain at the foot of God, and exchanged for holy obedience.

We desire nothing for ourselves, nor even for the sake of others, -- nor even that we may reflect the grace of Our Lord, if it be not according to His will.

The soul can cling to a pin, as easily as to a treasure; the rich man will cling to his castle, and the poor man to his pot. For this reason, the true saints have abandoned everything for the sake of God. True poverty, such as was practiced by the Desert Fathers and Mothers, is to abandon all things, even God, for the sake of God. It is the Lord's will, that we cling to nothing, not even to His Word, in order that we may partake of the true and perfect freedom which is His.

If someone slanders me,
I should call myself blessed;
and if I judge any person,
I should judge myself cursed.

Have I been free, even for a moment?
Or always the slave of some impulse,
appetite, energy, or irritation?
Lord, show me a free man!

Not the cross, but the flesh, is burdensome.

Truth is always and everywhere the same, but the paths by which men seek to justify the mitigating of truth are various, and unique to them. It is believed that the ideal, though irreproachable, is beyond approach, and that, in order for perfect truth to be brought down to earth, it must pass through successive stages of compromise on the way to manifestation. Limits must be imposed, for that is the nature of manifestation. With this last part I am in agreement. But the ideal is not the thing which must be subjected to limitations, so that we may give license to the flesh; rather, it is the flesh which must submit. The greatness of Jesus Christ abides in this: That he chose rather to submit his own will to limitations than the will of God. And to justify the Lord's command, -- that it is indeed workable and just, -- and not to seek arguments in support of the flesh.

Silence, and abstinence from evil, shall prepare the ground wherein the higher virtues may be cultivated. We must cease to do evil, in order that we may do good without ceasing. Not indulging in, and thereby accustoming ourselves to, dissipating luxuries. Not partaking of substances or activities whose twin purpose is to stupefy the conscience and muffle the symptoms of dis-ease. Not giving way to idleness, or to preoccupation with idle concerns. Not giving expression to anger, whose only true consolation lies in peace and freedom from discord. Not frequenting those places and people liable to tempt us beyond our strength. But, hearkening to those things whereby our souls may receive true healing and edification. Seeking our joy in those simple pleasures which readily present themselves; sunrises and sunsets, and not costly representations of these. Accustoming ourselves to the fruits of the earth; unadulterated, uncontaminated, and uncomplicated by the greed of corporate men. And to the clear words of wise teachers, undistorted by the justifications of the fallen. Keeping ourselves active, that we may establish and fortify habits of activity in the service of God and man. Speaking words of love, understanding, sympathy, encouragement, and reconciliation, whereby we and our brethren are edified and purged of sinful affections. Visiting holy places and holy people, whereby the loftiest and most charitable impulses within us may be awakened and roused to action. This is how goodness is achieved.

What we discover, as we progress in the spiritual life, is that certain sins, or unhealthy and unprofitable behaviors, are prohibited, not because they are inherently wrong (although this is surely the case), but, because when a person is fully committed in devotion to God and His Word, there is not time left for sin! Who, giving proper attention to the purification of her own soul, and surrendering her personal will to this end, has the time or liberty to judge the spiritual condition of another?

Spiritual truth is easy to grasp, but hard to hold. Not the intellect, but the will, is confounded by the precepts of the wise; for it is easy to apprehend the highest truths, but difficult to practice them.

How strange it is, to regard the gifts we have received by the grace of God, and not the cross to which we are called. "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required." Indeed, the man who is first shall be last, if he squanders the most precious gifts of the Lord; and the last shall be first, if he only makes good use of what little has been given him. Our gifts do not mark us out as spiritually progressed, so much as the use we make of them.

Responding at once and without delay to "the call of nature", as it has been delicately named, is just one way to train ourselves to respond to the promptings of the Word of God. We must be prepared to sacrifice our will, and to leave unfinished whatever work we have taken in hand, in order to take up the cross, and follow the Christ.

We punish ourselves for our lack of virtue because we expect ourselves to be virtuous without making any great effort to be so; we have not understood that great effort is necessary; also, time, patience, perseverance, and pain. Saints are not born saints.

Consider yourself a ghost, observing the activities of the living, without power to intercede or give censure. Imagine that the world and those who inhabit it have lost all relevance for you. Pass by without attachment.

Bear humbly the insults of others and regard this as their proper use; as the business of a wheel is to roll, or a chair is to be sat upon, so, the business of insults is to be endured.

Be angry with no one, but always reflect that sin is a sickness, and endeavor to feel compassion for all who suffer from it; the more offensive their sin, the more progressed their disease, and the more dire their condition.

The empty room is still, but the one who enters it then fills it with the agitation of a restless soul. Humble yourself to the stillness of the room before you enter therein.

Whosoever understands, has already forgiven,
but whosoever loves, has already understood;
love is the end and summary of all that is good.

We are forgiven when we confess,
not because we ever deserved to be judged,
but, because it is then that we affirm, or reaffirm,
our submission to the tutelage of God;
and the very first lesson He would have us learn,
is the lesson of forgiveness.

Mercy is God's justice;
for whosoever is unfit to receive
(and so reflect) God's love will,
secretly or openly, desire His judgement,
and weep to find himself forgiven.

Where God cannot lead you,
the devil can whip you.

Led by God, or forced by Satan,
we all make the same journey.

All strive.
But only those who strive
for what is holy, succeed.
Strive as to succeed.

Whatever is not a revelation of God's love,
is a distraction from it.

Peace is not the absence,
but the fruit, of struggle.

All year long we curse this tree,
only to bless it when the harvest comes.

As difficult as it is to be disciplined by another,
it is a thousand times harder to discipline oneself.

Who does not regret the lightest transgression,
cannot truly repent of even the heaviest sin.

We would never forget to put on our clothes, but somehow we forget to "put on" the armor of Christ, and we go into the world spiritually naked; subject to the chill of every temptation, and vulnerable to spiritual disease. We spend time every day trying to appear beautiful or handsome to others, but we don't prepare our souls to reflect the true comeliness of God. Who would deny that we are fallen?

Goodness is (also) a feeling.

"It is not I", said the saint,
"but only the company I've kept,
and the books I've read, which
have brought me any grace."

The zeal of the convert:
Only those who have been outside a nation,
may know what it is to enter into it;
only those who have been without a thing,
may make the decision to have it;
and only those who have not been told,
may learn, for themselves, to believe.

Humility is one with Grace. In humility, we move gently, deliberately, imposing ourselves as little as possible upon the sanctity of silence. In this way, our eyes are openned to the quiet meaningfulness of our surroundings. Every object, especially every religious object and every work of Nature, is imbued with a subtle, yet potent, spiritual force. Only in humbling ourselves, may we come to witness the exalted state of others, of Nature, and of God.

Free Will: In abandoning Christ, we also exile Him from our hearts, forcing Him to abandon us as we have abandoned Him. Like a simple reflection, the one coincides with the other to the degree that they are not really two, but one. As we embrace Christ, faithfully keeping His statutes, so do we let down our guard, allowing Christ to embrace us, as we have embraced Him. We are always loved by Christ, but it is only when we love that we may open to receive His love for us.

Metaxu

2011-05-08T05:36:00.000-07:00

Mystic and philosopher, Simone Weil, spoke of the world as a "metaxu", comparing it to a wall which divides two prisoners (the soul and God), yet, which they may make use of in order to communicate with each other, albeit in a relatively primitive way, by a series of signals, or taps, as it were, upon the wall.

I'd like to borrow this great word, if I may, to suggest a slightly different image, of the crust temporarily overlaying a pond in wintertime. As the world is in a ferment between order and chaos, so, the ice is frozen and rigid, while undergoing the dynamic chemical reactions of melting. With the coming of spring, like a grace, this conflict intensifies, or "heats up", as the rays of God's love and wisdom enter the ice, and cause it to split into water, on the one hand, and steam, on the other; the water molecules dropping, like bodies, back into the ubiquitous pond, while the molecules of steam ascend, like liberated spirits, up into the sky.

Understood in this way, the metaxu, and the world, is not clearly distinct from the life and soul of man, nor is it something which divides man from God. Instead, the soul exists bound, as the freedom of water molecules is bound, within the icy corporeality of the world, in the body of a man. And by the light, heat, and grace of God, we are freed to ascend in a more airy and ethereal form, out of the prison of the metaxu.

Did I say prison? But the metaxu is also that ultimate ground of being out of which man is taken; man being the self-evident jewel and fruit of the world; just as man's soul is the luster and sweetness in the heart of man. The marriage between God and the soul takes place in the light of time; which is also the light of wisdom; or truth, as it is capable of being perceived by man. This consecration is the accomplishment and fruition of the nature of metaxu, as well as its own negation, and the sacrificial dissolving of its own substance into something distinct and, yet, akin to itself.

Ultimately, for souls trapped in the world and clouded by sin, there is no clear boundary between what we are, what the world is, and what God is, -- but we may approach an intuitive understanding of these truths by the convenience of analogy.

Lower Chakra Imbalance: The Key To "Success"?

2011-05-07T22:40:00.000-07:00

This is a great book:

Eastern Body, Western Mind:
Psychology and The Chakra System
As A Path To The Self by Judith Anodea
http://www.amazon.com/Eastern-Body-Western-Mind-Psychology/dp/0890878153

"The chakras start with
survival (at the base of the spine),
followed by sexuality (lower back),
power (solar plexus), love (heart area),
communication (throat), intuition (brow),
and cognition (crown)."
~ editorial reviews

LOWER CHAKRA IMBALANCE -
THE KEY TO "SUCCESS"???

One interesting thing this book talks about is how easy it is for people with an emphasis on the lower chakras to achieve worldly success. According to the author's research, there are many, many people in this world who have a significant chakra imbalance which actually promotes a life of self-reliance, outward achievement, and financial success. This is actually a serious illness, but, since the society we live in is sick in the same way, these people actually excel in our present society despite their illness.

"It is no measure of health, to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Nevertheless, the ultimate result of all this "success", is that these people, despite all the security and comfort they have accrued, the respect they have earned from their contemporaries, and the (often prodigious) fruits of their labors, -- despite all of this, -- these people end up feeling alienated from humanity, empty inside, and completely unfulfilled by their success. In the latter part of their life, they begin to see the value of developing the upper chakras, but, by then, it is often too late. A life of goal-oriented thought and action, which recognizes only appearances and results, has left them with no time to form meaningful relationships, to question and examine all the perspectives which they have swallowed whole out of the hands of whatever culture they were born into, or to dream all the wandering dreams they have repressed for the sake of taking a narrow path to arrive at a preconceived goal.

The flipside of this would be people who tend to be thinkers and dreamers, and who have over-developed the upper chakras. These people are stigmatized by this society, and frequently end up homeless, locked-up, self-annihilated, or dependent on others. In the past, and in less "modern" societies, they would tend to become the shamans, artists, story-tellers; the central movers and organizers of society.

Can we imagine a society in which both types are equally honored, while an ultimate balance of the chakras is sought by both?

What Is Hypocrisy?

2011-05-07T22:31:00.000-07:00

There are two quotes from Abba Poemen (who may be one of the early Christian hermits, or merely an invented name under which many of their sayings were collected; "poemen" comes from a Greek word meaning "shepherd"), which I wish to call attention to here, concerning the matter of hypocrisy. The first shows deep sympathy for the hypocrite himself, while the second makes a very important distinction in defining hypocrisy. Both, I believe, may alter our view of what it means to be hypocritical.

"Someone who teaches without doing what one teaches resembles a spring, which cleanses and gives drink to everyone else, but is not able to purify itself."

Here we see that a hypocrite may yet be a formidable teacher, capable of inspiring the hearts and souls of others, though unable to inspire himself to true devotion. Looked upon in this way, we may conclude that it is better to be a hypocrite, and to speak the truth without practicing it, than to neither speak nor practice. Nevertheless, we may turn some people away from the truth if we cannot exhibit it by our actions, as well as our words. They will disbelieve the teaching, and not merely the teacher, when they see that it has not been fully embraced by the very one who presumes to teach it. Nevertheless, this may still be more commendable than the effect of a man who neither speaks nor enacts true wisdom. For even the words of such men are crooked, and the truth is already compromised by their speech, to say nothing of their actions.

"A hypocrite is one who teaches one's neighbor to do something without making any effort to do it oneself."

The key word here is "any". We tend to think of a hypocrite as one who does not live up to the bar he has set for himself and for others. But, in truth, a hypocrite is one who does not practice what he preaches, and to practice a teaching is not the same as to fulfill it. We practice in order that we may fulfill.

Moreover, it is supremely difficult to judge whether or not a man is practicing virtue, just as it is difficult to tell if a person who plays the trumpet terribly is in fact practicing or merely fooling around. If he is capable of a great deal more, then it is clear that he is just making noise. But if he is truly a beginner, then, for all we know, the noise we hear may be a sincere effort on his part, and a real improvement on his last "performance".

For this reason, and for other reasons as well, we ought to refrain, as much as possible, from judging, and leave the matter to God, who can see the things which we cannot, and who alone is fit to judge the spiritual state of another. For the Christian teaching assures us that the true virtue of a man is not evidenced in the virtue he possesses, but in the virtue he endeavors to possess. It is not the height to which you have ascended on the ladder of virtue, which indicates your true stature, but, rather, the effort you are making in order to ascend. And, as stated above, this is not something which human eyes can ascertain. The most we can do is to try our best, wherever we find ourselves. And remember that what Tolstoy called "the stationary righteousness of the Pharisees" is ultimately further from God than the confession of a repentant sinner.

Hidden In Plain Sight: Why The Surface Is The Deepest Thing

2011-05-07T22:30:00.000-07:00

A young man who calls himself "spiritual, but not religious" says, "I do not believe in Christ, -- or, if you prefer, I do; -- since I believe in Love, and Christ is merely a personification of Love. But, rather than focus on the manifestation (in this case, Christ), which is only the projection of a self-fetishizing human consciousness, I penetrate into the deeper truth, which is pure and naked Love."

The words are commendable, for the most part, but we know that there is nothing "mere" about Christ, or about the form in which God's Love has made itself felt and known to men. A form which men can learn from, not because it is a familiar and convenient symbol, but, because it is exemplary. In the words of St. Athanasius, "God became man so that man may become God."

Love may be at the root of Christ, but Christ Himself is the flower. My friends, we should question this tendency to always devalue what is on the surface. The surface is not like a wrapping which must be torn off and tossed aside, if we are to enjoy "the present". The surface, if we are receptive to its secrets (hidden in plain sight), reveals all things. Beneath the surface, there are only analogues of the surface. Christ is Love, yes. But, if we do not see Love when we see Christ, we will not see it "on the other side" of Him either; if we do not see Love when we see Christ, we can see neither Love, nor Christ. If we are not receptive to the surface, no "deeper" discoveries will satisfy us.

This youth, who so hastily dismisses religion as a "mere" surface phenomenon, imagines that he is like a man unmasking someone in disguise, but, really, he is like a man who digs up a flower in order to exhibit the roots as "proof" of the unreality of the flower; or as something "more real" than the flower itself. What could be more foolish than this? And, yet, this is symptomatic of a form of arrogance which has all but taken possession of the modern world. People in our age actually believe they are arriving at a deeper reality when they dissect, reduce, and deconstruct the world as it appears, -- in short, when they dig up the flowers.

Love is perfected in Christ, as the seed is perfected in the fruit; and Christ is perfected in Love, as the fruit is perfected in the seed. Without Christ, Love is just a gift without a giver; without Love, Christ is just a giver without a gift.

Above, I wrote: "if we do not see Love when we see Christ, we will not see it "on the other side" of Him either". This is a strong clue to the esoteric meaning of faith in Christ. Those who believe that Christ is the Son of God, in an esoteric sense, believe that Matter is the manifestation of Spirit, and what is unseen is revealed by the seen. To truly see, -- to see things, -- and not through, into, under, over, around, or behind them -- is to experience the Divine. And because it is an experience of things as they are, -- not in their essence, but in themselves, -- it is not something which may be communicated to one whom God has not prepared to receive it. To attempt to describe this experience in words would only undermine it; since words can only point through, into, under, over, around, or behind things. Words can also point at things, but only by naming them; and to name an experience is not the same as to communicate it, -- except to one who has been initiated; who has had the experience and will know it by name. The only word capable of describing the experience of a flower is "flower". But if, when you look at a flower, you see only the connections it makes to other things, then you do not see the flower. Not really. To see the flower is to see only the flower.

The Japanese poet, Basho, once wrote: "If you want to know about the pine, go to the pine. If you want to know about the bamboo, go to the bamboo." How beautiful, how profound, and how true are these words! My friends, if we desire to know about the life of a monk, we should ask a monk; and not ask one who has chosen an entirely different path. What can the forest tell you about the sea? And when we go to the monk, the sea, or the pine, what do we look for? Only the monk, the sea, or the pine; the thing as it is. We do not uncover the roots of the pine (not unless we want to know about the roots, and not the pine). We experience the thing. We receive the impression of it by a kind of spiritual osmosis. That is all.

Consider how many billions of years have passed, in order that a flower may stand in the fullness of her bloom. Or how much space was needed -- a universe so immense, our heads ache to imagine it, -- so that her petals might spread themselves some few auspicious inches. Has all the time, all the space, and all the care of Creation labored together in order to produce this delicate miracle, just so that we might dissect, reduce, deconstruct, and, -- in a word, -- rape her? How presumptuous are we, when we rush to do all the things which God has (for good reason) left undone? And we have not yet succeeded in seeing what He has done. What is the only thing left to do? What is the one thing which has not been done? Only this: To see. To see what God has done. And, having seen, to know.

The Psalms say, "Be still, and know that I am God!" This stillness is precisely what is necessary for seeing. Indeed, the stillness is the seeing. When we wish to see what is directly before us, we do not need to look in this or that direction, but only lift our eyelids. In the same way, we have only to be still, in order to see and know that God is God. "Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." ~ Luke 24:23

The Evolution Of An Archetype

2011-05-07T21:52:00.000-07:00

The following thoughts were written in response to an article on Ancient Gnosticism. In particular, the role of a Gnostic Demiurge called "Lord Archon", said to be a false god, or impostor, believed to have impersonated God in the form of the Hebrew deity Jehovah. The article may be found here: http://www.metahistory.org/gnostique/telestics/GnosticLens.php

My response:

It sounds like the story of the Archon could easily have arisen as a reaction to the "false god" of the Hebrews. It would have been a way to characterize the Jehovah of the OT as evil (which he clearly was in many instances; regardless of whether or not he actually existed as something independent of the imaginations of men). The story/myth of the Archon would have arisen naturally. It could have been deliberately invented, or arisen directly from the unconscious. Archetypes like this can arise in the mind as a response, or an interpretation, which makes the former way of seeing more palatable, or more rational, and psychically "digestible". This is somewhat difficult to explain.

In the documentary "Matter of Heart", we hear an account of how C.G. Jung told a story about a woman on the moon. The listener thought, at first, that either this man, Jung, is crazy, or she, the listener, is too unintelligent to understand his meaning. She protested, "You mean, the woman imagined, or believed, herself on the moon." But he insisted, "No, she was on the moon." As it turned out, Jung was trying to indicate a subtle truth about the nature of consciousness. Namely, that the moon we see in the mind is, in a very immediate sense, much more real than the rock that orbits the Earth at a great distance. The mental image of the moon is the real moon. Certainly, for the woman who was "on the moon", it was a very real experience indeed. These archetypes are in the mind, and "in a mysterious way", as Jung says, they are in the world.

The esoteric scholar, Manly P. Hall, tells us that, in antiquity, everything was (and/or was understood to be) ensouled. Every object had a kind of consciousness, and every idea was merely the representation of an anthropomorphic entity. Wisdom was a woman, named Sophia. This is how the ancients understood the world. Hence, the notion that Jehovah is not God would automatically result in the arising of an archetype of the false god, or impostor god. Because negating Jehovah does not make "him" nonexistent to the ancient mind. It doesn't reduce him to a wrong idea, a fiction. Rather, he is still a being (as all ideas are beings), but now he is an impostor. And since Jehovah (or what we would now call "the idea of Jehovah", or "the belief in Jehovah") was so popular, so powerful, clearly exercising tremendous influence on the affairs of men, -- it makes perfect sense that the archetype of Jehovah, for unbelievers, would be transformed into a demiurge.

The idea of Loki, the idea of Maya (goddess of illusion, in Buddhism, who rules the material realm), and the idea of Archon probably all arose as a response to a god worshiped by other sects, in order to refute that god, and disempower their hold on consciousness. We should not underestimate the influence of a god, or an idea of god, even on the mind of one who consciously disbelieves in his/her existence. In order to sever that hold, it is necessary to supplant the notion of the god with another notion. Hence, Archon is not merely envisioned as a false god, but, in fact, as the false god whom the Jews knew as Jehovah. No doubt Maya and Loki resembled their counterparts as well.

Moreover, the archetype of Lord Archon may be said to be another, higher, incarnation of the archetype of Jehovah. According to Hall, not only is everything ensouled, but everything grows and evolves. The idea or ideology of capitalism, he says, is a spirit seeking wisdom. It is a god of wealth, and it will continue to incarnate until the possession of wealth poses no threat, and does no harm, to any sentient being. The impostor Archon, then, could be seen as a step up from the jealous, angry god, Jehovah. In a sense, it is as if the god, Jehovah, is realizing, through the medium of history, that he is false. Even as men are realizing it. The two are one.

I'm sorry if I can't make this more clear, but it's one of the subtlest things (if not the most subtle thing) there is, and not easily described or understood. The fact may actually be that what we are discussing is fairly simple, but is made extremely difficult and complicated on account of all our preconceived categories of thinking. We cannot merely communicate the truth; we have to somehow subvert the notions which are inhibiting its realization. What's more, we can only use the terms and categories with which we are already familiar -- or with which we mistakenly think we are familiar. There is much to untangle.

In the final analysis, it is my present belief that we cannot know the reality of these things. They are hidden in history. Not only that, but, even two thousand years ago, when these events were occurring, pains were taken to conceal the truth. Lastly, we have to suppose that every sect had its own version of "the truth", and probably its own exoteric cover story, as well. For one sect, Jesus was a mushroom. For another, he was a man of great wisdom. For yet another, he was the one true Son of God. And for still others, these terms might be used, but only symbolically. The difficulty for us is to conceive of the possibility that all of this is true. Just as the woman spoken of by Jung really was on the moon, Jesus really was a mushroom, to the ones who saw it that way. He was also the Son of God. He was also just a man, a mortal teacher, a guru. And, yes, he was also just another symbol for the Sun, and for spiritual awakening (or the inner sun). Whatever you think he is, he is.

To imagine that we can discover one explanation, one true idea of who or what Jesus is or was, is really just absurd. Even back then, the search was ambiguous, and perhaps no less ambiguous than it is to us now. Even then, he was many things to many people. Even then, there was no right answer. Only a choice. Who do you think he is? Who is he to you? Who do you want him to be? Because what you think is really what matters. It doesn't matter if "the second coming" never happens. If you believe in it, then it is always a reality; albeit a reality which (always) has yet to happen.

This ambiguity must be accepted and embraced. Ultimately, our own desperation in the face of the unknown must be embraced. We must be able to admit that we do not know, and that we probably never will know. And we must admit that any hypothesis we form will be just that -- a hypothesis. Again, probably not one which can ever be sufficiently confirmed. What matters is the effect our notion of who (and/or what) Jesus is (and/or was) has on our inner life. Does it make us better people? Does it lead us onward towards the actualization of a righteous life? Does it make us more compassionate, more intuitive, more rational? And so on. These are not questions we can put to history. In any case, they are not likely to be answered by history. We must put them to ourselves. We must hold these notions (of Jesus, or whoever) in our hearts and minds, and see how they feel, how they fit, how they hold up against scrutiny, against misfortune, and against the world.

At the end of the day, we must understand that even the most exalted image of Christ -- that is, even the most exalted image of Christ of which we are capable of imagining, or communing with -- is something to be transcended. If we go with Manly Hall, then it is not a something, but a someone, an entity, who desires even to transcend himself, and to be re-envisioned at every successive evolutionary stage of consciousness. In this sense, Christ does not want to be known, and will overturn and overrule all our attempts to describe him. Because what he wants is always to be rediscovered. Just as, what we want is always to rediscover him. These two processes are one. We are not so much evolving an idea of him -- neither is he evolving himself, -- but, rather, it is the relationship, as depicted in consciousness, between us and him, which is evolving, and continues to evolve. We might go so far (and certainly some have gone so far) as to say that there is no us, and no him. Only this numinous relationship of one ephemeral reflection to another.

Psychology And Shamanism

2011-05-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

The history of psychology, and then psychiatry, is particularly interesting. Prior to the theories of Freud and Jung, mental patients were dismissed and not listened to at all. All sorts of means were used to "silence the voices", and perhaps the most common was the method of completely ignoring the symptoms. For instance, when a patient would begin relating their delusions, the doctor would attempt to change the subject with something perfectly banal, like, "What nice weather we're having,".

Then came the explorers of the unconscious. In the 60's, R.D. Laing took a revolutionary position when he advocated meeting the patient half-way; actually entertaining the delusions of the patients, and discovering an inner logic to them (however removed from the logic of normal consciousness), and leading them out of the darkness by validating the illness as a genuine shamanic journey of purgation and (as Jung would say) individuation.

Laing was especially controversial in that he related the illness, not merely to the individual, but to the family, and to the culture. These sensitive individuals were merely the litmus tests, so to speak, indicating a much larger problem in the culture. Rather than turn them into scapegoats, he attempted to learn from them about the defects of the family unit, and the society as a whole.

These advances were overshadowed in the following decades, when doctors began turning more and more to drugs, and explaining (or, rather, explaining away) the illness as a mere "chemical imbalance". This was a reassertion of the dominator mentality which underlies Western Civilization; a mentality which was threatened by the spirit of the 1960's, when the culture had it's first major encounter with the shamanic medicines of the natural world.

The feeling now was to again suppress the symptoms, -- which may be delusions or visions, depending on a number of variables, including the doctor's perspective. The "one size fits all" mentality of the western mind is here evidenced in full effect. In order to get on with "business as usual", anyone who challenged the popular conceptions of reality was to be dealt with as sick, and the "cure" was to be a flooding of untested chemicals into the brains of these patients, with the effect that they would be, once again, rendered impressionable to the popular mores of the day, or (if this could not be achieved), rendered almost entirely unconscious. This is what we call treatment today.

So, how do we distinguish between mental illness and visionary health? This is perhaps the hardest question for any of us to answer, being, as we are, securely embedded in a culture which is itself rooted in delusions of conquest, competition, acquisition, hierarchy, and slavish devotion to the Protestant work-ethic. The words of Jesus apply here, "Physician, heal thyself!" We must heal our own psychic fragmentation before we can attempt to see clearly into the mind of another. Ultimately, the question is too subtle for an answer. It is something we will always be wrestling with, as long as we continue to incarnate here.

Anyone who challenges the basic, fundamental assumptions upon which their own culture rests, will automatically be seen as a threat, and probably as mentally ill. The problem is compounded by the fact that, as I've already indicated, anyone who challenges these assumptions is stigmatized, and subject to all sorts of pressures, which can result in mental illness. Furthermore, to challenge one's culture is also to challenge oneself, for we have internalized the views and expectations of our culture on such a deep level, and the division goes, not between the visionary and his community, but right through the heart of the visionary himself.

This split is a form of mental illness, but it is also a process in the journey to a higher synthesis. Unfortunately, because the culture is so backwards, it is at a loss as to how to treat the patient. His confusion is only increased, and he remains lost in the underworld of his fragmentation, unable to complete the shamanic journey. Or, the journey is aborted, and he is sequestered in a state of false security, where the great problems of the human condition do not occur to him -- often, this is the best we can do.

The rare exception is the person who is given permission to explore his visions and his madness; the two appear to go hand-in-hand (every vision is also a message alerting us to a corresponding madness). As in shamanic cultures, the individual is supported by the culture even as he cuts himself off from it. Shamans tend to live at the outskirts of their villages, and although they are positively instrumental in the governing of their communities, always remain somehow above, beyond, and outside of the nucleus of their communities. This "otherness" is not something to be "cured", or done away with, but honored and deeply respected.

Arrogance And The Spiritual Life

2011-04-19T20:06:00.000-07:00

Meditations on the Tarot:
A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism

by Valentin Tomberg

Letter VII, The Chariot

The seventh Arcanum is that of mastership understood in the sense of temptation as well as accomplishment...

The charioteer of the Arcanum "The Chariot" is the victor over trials, i.e. the temptations, and if he is master, then it is thanks to himself. He is alone, standing in his chariot; no one is present to applaud him or to pay homage to him; he has no weapons -- the sceptre that he holds not being a weapon. If he is master, his mastership was acquired in solitude and he owes it to the trials alone, and not to anyone or anything external to himself.

The victory achieved in solitude... what glory and what danger it comprises at one and the same time! It is the only real glory -- the real radiance of the aura become luminous. It is, however, at the same time the most real and the most serious spiritual danger which exists. "Pride" and "vaingloriousness", the traditional names which one gives to it, do not suffice to characterize it in an adequate way. It is more than this. It is, rather, a kind of mystical megalomania, where one deifies the regulating centre of one's own being, one's ego, and where one sees the divine only within oneself and becomes blind to the divine above and outside of oneself. The "higher Self" is then experienced as the supreme and unique Self of the world, although it is only higher in relation to the ordinary, empirical self, and it is far from the supreme and unique being... far from being God, in other words.

It would be well, now, to dwell on the problem of identification of the self with the higher Self and of the higher Self with God.

C.G. Jung who, after having explored the sexual or "Freudian" layer, and then that of the will-to-power or "Adlerian" layer, of the unconscious (i.e. latent or occult consciousness) of the human being, encountered a spiritual (mystical, gnostic and magical) layer during the course of his clinical and psychotherapeutic experience. Instead of drawing back from it or extricating himself from it through a corrosive "explanation", he had the courage and honesty to set himself to the laborious study of the phenomenology of this layer of the unconscious. Now, this work proved fruitful. Jung discovered here not only the causes of certain psychic disorders, but also the profound and intimate process that he designated as the "process of individuation", which is nothing other than the gradual birth of another self (Jung called it the "Self") higher to oneself or one's ordinary ego. The discovery of the process of the "second birth" prompted him to extend the range of his exploratory work considerably, notably to include symbolism, mystery rituals and the comparative study of contemporary and ancient religions.

Now, this broadening of his field of exploration also proved fruitful. Jung's arrival at his discovery (which at first racked him, preventing him from speaking of it to a living soul for fifteen years) had its train of consequences, including the knowledge and description of some dangers or temptations belonging to the way of initiation and the process of individuation which corresponds to it. One of these dangers -- which are at the same time trials or temptations -- is that which Jung designated by the term "inflation", which signifies the state of consciousness of the self inflated to excess, and which is known in psychiatry in its extreme manifestation by the term "megalomania".

Therefore, here we are concerned with a range of psychic phenomena, which to begin with show up in relatively innocent forms -- such as a high opinion of oneself which is not entirely justified, or the somewhat exaggerated desire to have one's own way -- which become quite dangerous when they manifest as disparaging negativity towards everyone... the faculties of appreciation, gratitude and worship being concentrated upon oneself; and which eventually signify a catastrophe that is rarely curable, when they reveal themselves as obsession with easily recognizable illusions, or megalomania, pure and simple. Here, then, are the principal dangers of inflation: exaggerated importance attached to oneself, superiority complex tending towards obsession and, lastly, megalomania. The first degree signifies a practical task for work upon oneself; the second degree is a serious trial; whilst the third is a catastrophe.

What is it a question of in the process of inflation? Let us look first at what Jung himself says about it:

The "superordinate personality" is the total man, i.e. man as he really is, not as he appears to himself. To this wholeness the unconscious psyche also belongs, which has its requirements and needs just as consciousness has... I usually describe the "superordinate personality" as the "self", thus making a sharp distinction between the ego, which, as is well known, extends only as far as the conscious mind, and the whole of the personality, which includes the unconscious as well as the conscious component. The ego is thus related to the "self" as part to the whole. To that extent the self is superordinate. Moreover, the self is felt empirically not as subject but as object, and this by reason of its unconscious component, which can only come to consciousness indirectly, by way of projection. (C.G. Jung and C. Kerenyi, Introduction to a Science of Mythology; trsl. R.F.C. Hull, London, 1951, pp. 223-224)

Now, this "way of projection" is living symbolism -- traditional symbolism as well as dream symbolism manifesting itself in dreams, "active imagination" and visions. Dreams, when observed in a series (often running into several hundreds), show that they obey a kind of plan. They seem to relate to one another and to be subject in a profound sense to a common goal:

... in the deepest sense... they seem... to be subordinated to a common goal, so that a long dream-series no longer appears as a senseless string of the incoherent and isolated happenings, but resembles the successive steps in a planned and orderly process of development. I have called this unconscious process spontaneously expressing itself in the symbolism of dream-series the individuation process (C.G. Jun, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche...)

The process of individuation is "the spontaneous realization of the whole man". For the formula that is henceforth valuable for the notion of the soul is: "psyche = ego-consciousness + unconsciousness". With respect to the role of the unconscious in this formula, it is necessary to take account of the fact, principally, that in every child consciousness grows out of the unconscious in the course of a few years, also that consciousness is always only a temporary state based on an optimum physiological performance and therefore regularly interrupted by phases of unconsciousness (sleep), and finally that the unconscious psyche not only possesses the longer lease of life, but is continuously present (i.e. it ensures the continuity of being). (C.G. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy)

Now, the process of individuation is that of the harmonization of the conscious self and the unconscious in the psyche. But the "conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is suppressed and injured by the other" (C.G. Jung, Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation). It is a matter of a harmonization which is only realizable by way of the re-centering of the personality, i.e. the birth of a new center of the personality, which participates in the nature of the unconscious as well as in the conscious self -- a center, in other words, where the unconscious is perpetually in transformation into consciousness. This is the aim of the process of individuation, which is at the same time a stage of initiation.

The process of individuation operates, as we have said, by establishing a collaboration between the unconscious and the conscious. The domain of symbols affords such a collaboration and it is here, consequently, that it can begin. In the process of individuation one meets -- or rather one awakens -- the symbol-forces that Jung designated, in consideration of their typical character, by the name "archetypes".

The archetype -- let us never forget this -- is a psychic organ present in all of us. A bad explanation means a correspondingly bad attitude towards this organ, which may thus be injured. But the ultimate sufferer is the bad interpreter himself. Hence the "explanation" should always be such that the functional significance of the archetype remains unimpaired, i.e. that an adequate and appropriate relationship between the conscious mind and the archetypes is insured. For the archetype is an element of our psychic structure and thus a vital and necessary component in our psychic economy... There is no "rational" substitute for the archetype any more than there is for the cerebellum or the kidneys. (C.G. Jung and C.Kerenyi, Introduction to a Science of Mythology)

Now, one must not take archetypes lightly. They are formidable psychic forces which can also invade, inundate and engulf consciousness. This is what happens in the case of the identification of consciousness with the archetype. Then it produces, more often than not, an identification with the role of the heroes (and, sometimes -- when it is a matter of the archetype named "the wise old man" or "the great mother" -- an identification with a cosmic figure).

At this stage there is usually another identification, this time with the hero, whose role is attractive for a variety of reasons. The identification is often extremely stubborn and dangerous to mental equilibrium. If it can be broken down and consciousness reduced to human proportions, the figure of the hero can gradually be differentiated into a symbol of the self. (ibid.)

And, let us add, if this does not succeed, the figure of the hero takes possession of consciousness. Then the "second identification" -- or the "epiphany of the hero" -- takes place:

The epiphany of the hero (the second identification) shows itself in a corresponding inflation: the colossal pretension grows into a conviction that one is something extraordinary, or else the impossibility of the pretension ever being fulfilled only proves one's own inferiority, which is favorable to the role of the heroic sufferer (a negative inflation). In spite of their contrariety, both forms are identical, because unconscious compensatory inferiority tallies with conscious megalomania, and unconscious megalomania with conscious inferiority (you never get one without the other). Once the reef of the second identification has been successfully circumnavigated, conscious processes can be cleanly separated from the unconscious, and the latter observed objectively. This leads to the possibility of an accommodation with the unconscious, and thus to a possible synthesis of the conscious and unconscious elements of knowledge and action. This in turn leads to a shifting of the center of personality from the ego to the self. (ibid.).

This is the aim of the process of individuation.

Now, inflation is the principle risk that attends each person who seeks the experience of depth, the experience of what is occult, which lives and works behind the facade of phenomena of ordinary consciousness. Therefore, inflation constitutes the principal danger and trial for occultists, esotericists, magicians, gnostics and mystics. Monasteries and spiritual orders have always known this, thanks to the immense pillar of experience which they have accumulated over millenia in the domain of the profound life. This is why their whole spiritual practice is based on the cultivation of humility by such means as the practice of obedience, the examination of conscience and the reciprocal brotherly help of members of the community. Thus, if Sabbatai Zevi (1625-1676) had been a member of a spiritual order with a discipline similar to that of Christian spiritual orders and monasteries, his illumination would never have led to his revealing himself (in 1648) to a group of disciples as the promised Messiah. Neither would he have had to become a Turk in order to save his life and continue his mission ("God has made me an Ishmaelite-Turk; he has commanded, and I have obeyed -- the ninth day after my second birth", he wrote to his followers in Smyrna). Because he would have been spared positive inflation, just as he would have been spared the negative inflation of which Samuel Gandor, his disciple, gives the following description:

It is said of Sabbatai Zevi that for fifteen years he has been bowed down by the following affliction: he is pursued by a sense of depression which leaves him no quiet moment and does not even permit him to read, without his being able to say what is the nature of this sadness which has come upon him. (Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism)

The history of the illumined Cabbalist Sabbatai Zevi is only an extreme case of the general dangers and trials which all practicing esotericists have to face. Indeed, Hargrave Jennings expresses this danger and trial in a successful way concerning the Rosicrucians:

They speak of all mankind as infinitely beneath them; their pride is beyond idea, although they are most humble and quiet in exterior. They glory in poverty, and declare that it is the state ordered for them; and this though they boast universal riches. They decline all human affections, or submit to them as advisable escapes only -- appearance of loving obligations, which are assumed for convenient acceptance, or for passing in a world which is composed of them, or of their supposal. They mingle most gracefully in the society of women, with hearts wholly incapable of softness in this direction; while they criticize them with pity or contempt in their own minds as altogether another order of beings from men. They are most simple and deferential in their exterior; and yet the self-value which fills their hearts ceases its self-glorifying expansion only with the boundless skies... In comparison with the Hermetic adepts, monarchs are poor, and their greatest accumulations are contemptible. By the side of the sages, the most learned are dolts and blockheads... Thus, towards mankind they are negative; towards everything else, positive; self-contained, self-illuminated, self-everything; but always prepared (nay, enjoined) to do good, wherever possible or safe. To this immeasurable exaltation of themselves, what standard of measure, or what appreciation, can you apply? Ordinary estimates fail in the idea of it. Either the state of these occult philosophers is the height of sublimity, or it is the height of absurdity. (Hargrave Jennings, The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries)

Let us say absurd as well as sublime, because inflation is always simultaneously sublime and absurd. This is what Eliphas Levi says about it:

There is also a science which confers on man powers apparently superhuman. They are enumerated thus in a Hebrew manuscript of the sixteenth century:
ALEPH - He beholds God face to face, without dying, and converses familiarly with the seven genii who command the celestial army.
BETH - He is above all griefs and fears.
GHIMEL - He reigns with all heaven and is served by all hell.
DALETH - He rules his own health and life and can influence equally those of others.
HE - He can neither be surprised by misfortune nor overwhelmed by disasters, nor can he be conquered by his enemies.
VAU - He knows the reason of the past, present and future.
ZAIN - He possesses the secret of the resurrection of the dead and the key of immortality.
(Eliphas Levi, The Dogma and Rituals of High Magic)

Is it a matter here of programme or of actual experience? If it is experience, it is one of inflation pushed very far. If it is a programme, he who takes its realization seriously cannot fail to fall prey to inflation, be it positive (superiority complex) or negative (inferiority complex).

Whatever it may be, the experience or programme of this Hebrew manuscript of the sixteenth century quoted by Eliphas Levi shows a remarkable similarity to the experience of John Custance, described by him in his book Wisdom, Madness and Folly: the Philosophy of a Lunatic. It is as follows:

I feel so close to God, so inspired by His Spirit that in a sense I am God. I see the future, plan the universe, save mankind; I am utterly and completely immortal; I am even male and female. The whole Universe, animate and inanimate, past, present and future, is within me. All nature and life, all spirits, are co-operating and connected with me; all things are possible. I am in a sense identical with all spirits from God to Satan. I reconcile Good and Evil and create light, darkness, worlds, universes. (John Custance, Wisdom, Madness and Folly: the Philosophy of a Lunatic)

The state described by John Custance is characteristic of that acute mania, and the author himself in no way denies it. But would he still look at it in this way, one can ask, if he knew that his experience is found described exactly in the Brhadaravyaka Upanishad, which says:

He who has found and awakened to the Soul that has entered this conglomerate whole -- he is the maker of everything, for he is the creator of all; the world is his: indeed, he is the world itself. (Brhadaravyaka Upanishad)

Can one say with certainty that this text quoted from the Upanishads is based on an entirely different experience to that of John Custance?

Thirty-eight years ago I knew a tranquil man of mature age who taught English at the YMCA in the capital of a Baltic country. Now, he revealed to me one day that he had attained a spiritual state which manifests itself through "the eternal gaze" and which is that of consciousness of the identity of the Self with the Eternal Reality of the world. The past, present and future -- seen from the pedestal of eternity, where his consciousness had its abode -- were an open book for him. He had no more problems, not because he had resolved them, but because he had attained the state of consciousness where they disappeared, having become of no importance. Because problems belong to the domain of motion in time and space; he who transcends this and arrives at the realm of eternity and infinity, where there is neither movement nor change, is free of problems.

When he spoke to me of these things, his beautiful blue eyes rayed out sincerity and certainty. But this radiance gave way to a dark and angry look as soon as I raised the question of the value of the "subjective feeling of eternity" when one is not aware of or one is unable objectively to do something more towards helping humanity, be it in spiritual (or other) progress, or in the alleviation of spiritual, psychic or bodily suffering. He did not forgive me this question and he turned his back on me, which was my last impression of him in this world (he made his way to India, where soon after he died as victim of an epidemic).

I recount this episode in my life only so that you may know, dear Unknown Friend, when and how the very serious problem of the forms of, and the dangers of, spiritual megalomania were awakened in me, and how I owe it to this objective experience that I began work on this problem, some of the outcomes of which I am in the process of showing.

Spiritual megalomania is as old as the world. Its origin is found well beyond the terrestrial world, according to the millennial-old tradition concerning the fall of Lucifer. The prophet Ezekiel gives a most moving description of this:

You were the signet of perfection,
You were full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
You were in Eden, the garden of God;
You were covered with every precious stone:
Sardonyx, topaz, and diamond,
Chrysolite, onyx, and jasper,
Sapphire, carbuncle, emerald, and gold,
With which you were adorned,
And which were prepared for you
On the day that you were created.
You were a guardian Cherubim, with outspread wings;
I placed you, and you were, on the holy mountain of God;
You walked in the midst of the stones of fire...
Your heart was proud because of your beauty,
You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.
I cast you to the ground;
I exposed you before kings, to feast their eyes on you...
(Ezekiel xxviii)

Here is the higher (i.e. celestial) origin of inflation, superiority complex and megalomania. And since "that which is below is as that which is above", it is repeated below in human earthly life from century to century and generation to generation. It is repeated above all in the lives of those human beings who are detached from the ordinary earthly setting and the state of consciousness belonging to it, and who transcend it, be it in the sense of height, or in the sense of breadth, or, lastly, in the sense of depth. He who aspires to a plane higher than that of the terrestrial setting risks becoming haughty; he who seeks breadth beyond the normal circle of earthly duties and pleasures risks considering himself to be more and more important; he who is in search of the depth, beneath the surface of the phenomena of terrestrial life, runs the greatest risk: that of inflation, of which C.G. Jung speaks.

The abstract metaphysician, who arranges worlds according to an order that he has chosen, can lose all interest for the particular and for the individual, in such a way that he comes to consider human beings to be almost insignificant as insects. He regards them only from above. Seen from his metaphysical height, they lose all proportion and become for him small or almost insignificant -- whilst he, the metaphysician, is great, since he participates in great metaphysical things, which clothe him in grandeur.

The reformer who wants to correct or save humanity easily falls victim to the temptation of considering himself as the active center of the passive circle of humanity. He feels himself as the bearer of a mission of universal significance therefore he feels himself to be more and more important.

The practicing occultist, esotericist or Hermeticist (if he is not practicing, he is only a metaphysician or reformer) experiences the higher forces which work beyond his consciousness and which make their entrance there. At what price?... Either at the price of worshipping on his knees -- or otherwise at the price of the identification of the self with these higher forces, which results in megalomania.

One speaks often of the dangers of occultism. Black magic is usually the supreme danger against which the beginner is put on guard by the "masters"; others (above all those who know more or less about medicine) see it as disorders of the nervous system.

But experience during forty-three years of practical occultism (or esotericism) has taught me that the danger of occultism is neither black magic nor nervous disorder -- at least, these dangers are met no more often amongst occultists than amongst politicians, artists, psychologists, believers and agnostics. I am not able to cite by name any black magician amongst the occultists that I know, whereas it would not be too difficult to name some politicians who, for example, have nothing to do with occultism -- and who would even be hostile to it -- but whose influence and impact agree very well with the classical concept of that of the "black magician". Indeed, is it difficult to name politicians who have exercised a deadly, suggestive influence on the popular masses, blinding them and inciting them to acts of cruelty, injustice and violence, of which each individual, taken separately, would be incapable... and who, through their semi-magical influence, have deprived individuals of their freedom and rendered them possessed? And is not this action to deprive men of their moral freedom and to render them possessed the aim and very essence of black magic?

No, dear Unknown Friend, occultists -- including those amongst them who practice ceremonial magic -- are neither masters nor disciples of black magic. Truth to tell, they are amongst those who have least of all in common with it. It is true that they -- above all the adepts of ceremonial magic -- often fall prey to illusions and mislead themselves and others, but is this black magic? Besides, where can one find a class of human beings who never make mistakes? Even Doctor Faust -- who made a pact with the devil (and this concerns all "pact-makers" of this kind, ancient and modern) -- was only the naive victim of a prank on the part of Mephistopheles (who is a rogue well-known to all those who have knowledge of the "occult world"), because how can you sell something which in no way belongs to you? It is his soul which would have been able to sell Doctor Faust, but never would Doctor Faust be able to give away his soul, however solemn his pact was and no matter whether he wrote and signed with blood or with ordinary ink.

It is Mephistopheles' way of giving a lesson to those who want to be "supermen"; he brings to light the puerility of their pretentions. And whilst wholly deploring the naivety of poor Doctor Faust, one is led to consider the "method of roguishness" of Mephistopheles as, in the last analysis, salutary. Because what Mephistopheles does (and other examples of this method of a more recent date could be cited) is to show the ridiculousness and absurdity of the aspirations and pretensions of so-called "supermen". "Of all Spirits who deny, the rogue is the least burden to me," says God concerning Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust .

Let us therefore not condemn the rogue of the spiritual world, and above all let us not be afraid of him. Nor let us condemn Doctor Faust, our brother, by accusing him of black magic -- it is, rather, childish credulity of which he can be accused, if he must be accused. In any case, he was one-hundred times more innocent with respect to mankind than our contemporaries who have invented the nuclear bomb... as good citizens and scientists.

No, neither black magic nor nervous disorders constitute the special dangers of occultism. Its principal danger -- of which, however, it has no monopoly -- is designated by the three terms: superiority complex, inflation, and megalomania.

In fact, an occultist (who is not a beginner) who has not attained this moral illness, or who has not at some time in the past undergone it, is rare. The tendency to megalomania shows up all over the place amongst occultists. Decades of personal relationships, as well as reading occult literature, have taught me this. There are many levels of this moral defect. It manifests at first as self-assurance and a certain informality with which one speaks of higher and sacred things. Then it expresses itself as "knowing better" and "knowing-all", i.e. as the attitude of a master towards everyone. Lastly, it manifests as implicit or even explicit infallibility.

I do not want to cite passages from our occult literature, nor to name names, nor to mention biographical facts concerning known occultists, in order to prove or illustrate this diagnosis. It would not be difficult for you, dear Unknown Friend, to find them yourself in abundance. What my intention is here is to refute the false accusations concerning occultism, on the one hand, and on the other hand to show up the real danger that occultism presents -- so that one is put on guard against it. But what should one do against this danger, in order to guard one's moral well-being?

The ancient saying "ora et labora" ("work and pray") constitutes the only answer that I have been able to find. Worship and work constitute the only curative as well as prophylactic remedy that I know against megalomaniacal illusions. It is necessary to worship what is above us and it is necessary to participate in human effort in the domain of objective facts in order to be able to hold in check the illusions concerning what one is and what one is capable of. For whoever is aware of raising his prayer and meditation to the level of pure worship will always be conscious of the distance which separates (and at the same time unites) the worshiper and the worshiped. Therefore he will not be tempted to worship himself, which is in the last analysis the cause of megalomania. He will always have in sight the difference between himself and the worshiped. He will not confuse what he is with what the worshiped being is.

On the other hand, he who works, i.e. who takes part in human effort, with a view to objective and verifiable results, will not easily fall prey to illusion with respect to what he is capable of. Thus, for example, a practicing doctor inclined to overestimate his power of healing will soon learn to know the real limits of his ability through experience of his failures.

Jacob Boehme was a shoemaker, and was illumined. When he had had the experience of illumination ("... the Door became opened to me, so that in a quarter of an hour I observed and knew more than if I had attended a university for many years... " he wrote in a letter to the tax collector Lindner), where he "recognized the Being of Beings, the firmament and the abyss..." (same letter), he in no way concluded from it that he, in so far as he was a shoemaker, could henceforth do more than his colleagues in the trade, or that he himself could do more than before his illumination. On the other hand, through his illumination he learned to know the greatness of God and the world ("... of which I was highly astounded, without knowing how it had happened to me, and thereupon my heart turned to praise of God" -- same letter), and this filled him with worship.

Therefore, it was work and the worship of God which protected the moral well-being of Jacob Boehme, and I allow myself to add here that my experience in the domain of esotericism has taught me that what was salutary in Boehme's case is also so, without exception, regarding all those who aspire to supersensible experiences.

Worship and work -- ora et labora -- therefore constitute the conditio sine qua non for practical esotericism in order to hold in check the tendency towards megalomania. This is in order to hold it in check, yet in order to obtain immunity from this moral illness, more than this is necessary. One has to have the real experience of concretely meeting a being higher than oneself. I mean by "concretely meeting" neither the feeling of "higher Self", nor the more or less vague feeling of the "presence of a higher entity", nor even the experience of a "flood of inspiration" which fills one with life and light -- no, what I mean by "concrete meeting" is nothing other than a true and really concrete meeting, i.e. face to face. It can be spiritual -- face to face in vision -- or more physically concrete. Thus, St. Teresa of Avila (in order to cite only one of many known examples) met the Master, conversed with him, asked and received from him advice and instruction on an objective spiritual plane (yes, spirituality is not exclusively subjective -- it can also be objective). And certainly Papus and his group of occultist friends met Monsieur Philip of Lyons on the physical plane. Here are two examples of the concrete meeting that I mean.

Now, he who has had the experience of a concrete meeting with a higher being (a saint or righteous individual, an Angel or another hierarchical being, the Virgin Mary, the Master...) becomes through this very fact immune with respect to the tendency towards megalomania. The experience of having been face-to-face with a Great One necessarily comprises complete healing and immunity from any tendency towards megalomania. No human being who has seen and heard will be able to make an idol of himself. More than this: the true and ultimate criterion for the reality of these so-called "visionary" experiences, i.e. with respect to their authenticity or falsity, is given in the moral effect of these experiences, notably whether they make the recipient more humble or more pretentious. The experience of her meetings with the Master made St. Teresa more and more humble. The experience on the terrestrial plane of the meeting with Monsieur Philip of Lyons also made Papus and his occultist friends more humble. Now, these two experiences -- quite different though they are with respect to subject and object -- were authentic. Neither Papus was thereby mistaken about the spiritual greatness of he who he recognized as his "spiritual master", nor was St.Teresa any less mistaken about the reality of the Master, whom she saw and heard speak.

Dear Unknown Friend, read the Bible and you will find there a great number of examples of this law, which may be expressed as follows: authentic experience of the Divine makes one humble; he who is not humble has not had authentic experience of the Divine. Take the apostles who "saw and heard" the Master and the prophets who "saw and heard" the God of Israel -- you will not find amongst them any trace of tendencies towards pride such as you can certainly find amongst many gnostic teachers who (consequently) had not "seen and heard"...

Humility is therefore a quality which must be due to the action of grace, i.e. it must be a gift from above. Now, the "concrete meetings, face to face" of which it is a question here are always, without exception, events due to grace, being meetings where a higher being voluntarily draws near to a lower being. The meeting which made Saul, the Pharisee, into Paul the apostle was not due to his efforts; it was an act of the One whom he met. It is the same with all meetings "face to face" with higher beings. Our part is only "to seek", "to knock", and "to pray", but the decisive act comes from above.

Let us now return to the Arcanum "The Chariot", whose traditional meaning is "victory, triumph, success"....

The Chariot... warns us of the danger of megalomania and teaches us the real triumph achieved by the Self.

The real triumph achieved by the Self -- this means to say the successful outcome of the "process of individuation", according to C.G. Jung, or the successful outcome of the work of true liberation, which is the fruit of catharsis (purification) and which precedes photismos (illumination), and which is followed by henosis (union), according to the occidental initiation tradition.

The "triumpher" on the Chariot can therefore signify either a sick person suffering from megalomania or a man who has passed through catharsis or purification, the first of the three stages on the way of initiation.

The thesis that I am advancing here is this: that, just as with all the other Cards of the Arcana of the Tarot, the Card of the seventh Arcanum also expresses a double meaning. The personage on this seventh Card signifies at one and the same time the "triumpher" and the "Triumpher" -- the megalomaniac and the integrated man, master of himself.

The integrated man, master of himself, conqueror in all trials -- who is he?

It is he who holds in check the four temptations -- i.e. the three temptations in the wilderness described in the Gospels as well as the temptation which synthesises them: the temptation of pride, the centre of the triangle of temptations -- and who is, therefore, master of the four elements which compose the vehicle of his being: fire, air, water, and earth. Master of the four elements -- that is to say: creative being in clear, fluid, and precise thought (creativity, clarity, fluidity, and precision being the manifestations of the four elements in the domain of thought). It means to say, moreover, that he has a warm, large, tender and faithful heart (warmth, magnanimity, sensitivity, and faithfulness being the manifestations of the four elements in the domain of feeling). There is, lastly, to add that he has ardor ("man of desire"), fullness, flexibility and stability in his will (here the four elements manifest themselves as intensity, scope, adaptability, and firmness). To summarize, one can say that a master of the four elements is a man of initiative, who is serene, mobile and firm. He represents the four natural virtues of Catholic theology: prudence, strength, temperance and justice; or rather Plato's four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance and justice; or yet again the four qualities of Sankaracharya: viveka (discernment), vairagya (serenity), the "six jewels" of just conduct, and the desire for deliverance. Whatever the formulation may be of the four virtues in question, it is always a matter of the four elements or projections of the sacred name YHVH - the Tetragrammaton -- in human nature...

The four columns supporting the canopy on the chariot drawn by two horses, in the Card of the seventh Arcanum, therefore signify the four elements taken in a vertical sense, i.e. in their analogous meaning through the three worlds - the spirit world, the soul world, and the physical world.

And what is signified by the canopy itself that the four columns support?

The function of the canopy, taken as a material object, is to protect the person who is found beneath it. It therefore serves as a roof. Taken in its spiritual sense, at which one arrives by way of analogy, the canopy above the man wearing a yellow royal crown expresses two contrary things: that the crowned man is a megalomaniac in the condition of "splendid isolation", separated from heaven by the canopy, or else that the crowned man is an initiate in the mystery of spiritual well-being and that he does not identify himself with heaven, being conscious of the difference which exists between himself and that which is above him. In other words, the canopy indicates the facts and truths underlying humility as well as megalomania. Humility, being the law of spiritual health, implies consciousness of the difference and distance between the center of human consciousness and the center of divine consciousness. He has a "skin" -- or a canopy, if you wish -- in his consciousness (just as the human body has a skin), which separates the human from the Divine, at the same time uniting them. This "spiritual skin" protects the spiritual well-being of man by not allowing him to identify himself ontologically with God, or to say "I am God" (Brhadaranyaka Upanishad "aham brahmasmi" = "I am Brahama"), but at the same time allowing him the relationship of breathing, coming together and separating (which is never alienation!), which together constitute the life of love. The life of love consists of coming together and separating always with the consciousness present of non-identity: this is analogous to the process of breathing which consists of inhalation and exhalation. Is this not found expressed in an unparalleled way in the extract from Psalm 43, which is the sixth phrase in the Mass: "Oh send out thy light and thy truth; let them lead me, let them bring me to thy holy hill and to thy tabernacles." Yes, the light of your presence (drawing near) and the truth that I receive in me through reflection (separating), this leads us towards the tabernacle.

Tabernacles... are these not tents, baldachins, canopies under which man is united in love with the Divine, without identifying himself with it or being absorbed by it? Aren't these the tabernacels made of the "skin of humility", which alone protects us against the danger of killing love through ontological identification -- i.e. the identification of the human being with the divine being ("this soul is God" -- "ayam atma brahma", Mandukya Upanishad, "consciousness is God" -- "pragnanam brahma", Aitareya Upanishad) -- and therefore protects us from the danger of spiritual megalomania (i.e.e from arrogating to ourselves the very being of God instead of his image)?

There are three forms of mystical experience: the experience of union with Nature, that of union with the transcendental human Self, and that of union with God. The first kind of experience is that of the obliteration of the differentiation between the individual's psychic life and surrounding Nature. It is this which Levy Bruhl calls "mystical participation", which notion he coined whilst studying the psychology of primitive peoples. This notion designates the state of consciousness where the separation between the conscious subject and the object of the outside world disappears, and where subject and object become one. This kind of experience underlies not only shamanism and the totemism of the primitives but also the so-called "mythogenous" consciousness, which is the source of natural myths, as well as the ardent desire or poets and philosophers for union with Nature (e.g. Empedocles threw himself into the crater of the volcano on Mount Etna in order to unite himself with the elements of Nature). The effect of peyote, mescaline, hashish, alcohol, etc., can sometimes (but not always, and not with everyone) produce states of consciousness analogous to that of "mystical participation". The characteristic trait of this form of experience is intoxication, i.e. the fusion of oneself with forces exterior to one's self-consciousness. The Dionysian orgies of antiquity were based on the experience of "sacred intoxication" due to the obliteration of the differentiation between self and non-self.

The second form of mystical experience is that of the transcendental Self. It consists in separating the ordinary empirical self from the higher Self, which is above all motion and all that which belongs to the domain of space and time. The higher Self is therefore experienced as immortal and free.

If "Nature mysticism" is characterized by intoxication, that of the Self, in contrast, has the characteristic trait of progressively "coming to one's senses", with the aim of complete sobriety. A philosophy based on the mystical experience of the Self, which represents it in the purest way and is least distorted by the addition of hazardous intellectual speculations, is that of the Indian school of Sankya. There the individual purusha is experienced in its separation from prakriti (i.e. all movement, space and time) as immortal and free. Although the same experience is found at the basis of Vedanta philosophy, its followers are not satisfied with the immediate experience which teaches nothing more, and nothing less, than that the true self of man is immortal and free, but they add the postulate that the higher Self is God ("this soul is God" -- "ayam atma brahma", Mandukya Upanishad, 2). The Sankya philosophy, in contrast, remains within the limits of the experience of the higher Self as such and in no way denies the plurality of purushas (i.e. the plurality of immortal and free higher Egos), nor does it raise the individual purusha to the dignity of the Absolute -- Which has resulted in it being considered an atheistic philosophy. It is so, if one understands by "atheist" the frank confession: I have not had experience of anything higher than the immortal and free Ego; abiding by the experience, what can I say in good faith? Sankya is not a religion and therefore does not merit being classified as "atheistic" any more than, for example, the modern psychological school of Jung does. On the other hand, can it be considered as proof of belief in God to attribute to the higher Self of man the dignity of the Absolute?

The third sort of mystical experience is that of the living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the God of St. Augusting, St. Francis, St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross in the Christian tradition, the God of the Bhagavad-Gita, Ramanuja, Madhva and Caitanya in the Hindu tradition. Here it is a matter of union with God in love, which implies a substantial duality being essentially at one.

This experience has as its principal characteristic trait the synthesis of the intoxication of Nature mysticism and the sobriety of mysticism of the higher Self. The term coined by tradition to express the state where ardent enthusiasm and profound peace manifest themselves simultaneously is that of "beatitude", or "beatific vision" (i.e. beatitudo, or visio beatifica). Beatific vision implies the duality of the seer and the seen, on the one hand, and their union or intrinsic oneness in love, on the other hand. This is why this term expresses in a wonderfully clear and precise way the essence of the theistic mystical experience: the meeting fo the soul with God, face to face, in love. And this experience is all the more elevated the more complete the differentiation is, and the more perfect the union is. For this reason the Holy Cabbala puts at the center of spiritual experience that of the Holy Face (arich anphin) of the Ancient of Days, and this is also why it teaches that the supreme experience of the human being -- as well as the highest form of death for a mortal -- is attained when God embraces the human soul. This is what the Sepher Yetzirah says:

And after that our father Abraham had perceived, and understood, and had taken down and engraved all these things, the Lord most high (adon hakol) revealed His beloved, and made a Covenant with him and his seed...
(Sepher Yetzirah vi, 4; trsl. W. Wynn Westcott, London, 1893, pp. 26-27)

And St. John of the Cross spoke of his experiences of the divine Presence in the tabernacles of love only in the language of love.

The three forms of mystical experience have their "hygienic laws", or their "tabernacles" or "skins". They fall under the law of temperance or measure. Otherwise the rage of acute mania, megalomania and complete alienation from the world menace, respectively, their adepts. The breast-plate, the canopy and the crown are the three symbols for the salutary measures pertaining to the domains of experience of Nature mysticism, human mysticism, and divine mysticism.

Now, the "triumpher" of the seventh Arcanum wears a breast-plate, stands under a canopy and is crowned. This is why he does not lose himself in Nature, why he does not lose God in the experience of his higher Self and why he does not lose the world in experiencing the love of God. He holds in check the dangers of rage, megalomania and exaltation. He is sane.

Pilgrim Soul

2011-04-09T01:03:00.000-07:00

i would relinquish my pilgrim soul
to curl over thought and thing
like a spacious tongue
and return...

i am Void

severe spectre of occult industry

solemn am i
sombre long before the world
shrouded in myth and song

i am Ocean

deep in splendor
storyteller with salted breath

i do not decry the sober dark
i give birth to agitative visions

i am Awe

inscrutable light
whom the fibrous eye of the poet covets

i am Solitude

disconsolate
modest juggernaut of Saturn

just beyond the ornamental throne of Jupiter
the stillness of fate inside of fire

Light Breaks The Sky

2011-03-19T12:22:00.001-07:00

We dwell in half-light, disbelief,

a frenzied puzzling over things,

while ghosts draw close;

cloak themselves in flesh

to speak a word.

Our hearts,

more furtive, invisible,

disclosing less than silence,

do not decry

from their indifferent posts.

They have no stake.

Only sometimes strange wonders stir our sleeps,

and for those moments we seem to awaken.

Light breaks the sky

and beauty is miraculous.

Determinism, Responsibility, and Free Will

2011-03-14T07:53:00.000-07:00

See Also: http://www.determinism.com/quotes.shtml

I'll be talking about a very basic principle of logic here, -- perhaps the most basic and primary. It is so obvious, it is overlooked by nearly everyone. Schopenhauer explores it admirably in his "The Four-Fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason". As one philosopher articulates it: "Everything that happens has a reason for being such as it is, and a lack of reasons for being other than it is."

The arguments to support this are endless, because it is the very foundation of all argumentation. Logic itself assumes connective links between what has been and what is now, and between what is now and what will be. Every cause is also an effect, as every effect is also a cause. When we seek to locate a cause within the individual we are denying this fact; imagining that the individual, his choice, or his will, somehow exists within a vacuum, as a causeless cause; something godly. It's a form of hubris, and it's a denial of our dependence on the natural order.

What is remarkable is that we admit the power of our internal and external environments only in extreme cases: We see that a madman is not responsible for his choices, but we fail to see what is more subtle; that all men are mad; all operating from various levels of unconsciousness, and basing their decisions on whatever material arises from the unconscious.

We say that one man is innocent of murder by reason of insanity, while another is guilty, but we overlook the flaw in our logic, which essentially tallies as: "murder is sane". We say that we do not expect everyone to be a saint, effectively confessing that there is a difference between the "free will" of saints and that of average men, but we still have expectations for the man; more or less arbitrary, based as they are on observations of others (whom we expect the man to resemble), on idealized fantasies of how people in general "should" be, and not on the subject under consideration; the man himself.

Determinism, the philosophy most firmly rooted in observation of the law of cause and effect, proposes that we cease to hold people responsible only in the sense that we do not hold a hurricane responsible for devastating a town. We do what we can to prevent hurricanes, and to protect the town, but we do not add insult to injury by blaming, and holding a personal grudge against the hurricane.

We can see this principle everywhere in nature, as it relates to our use of language.. We say that the leaves rustle, but the leaves dont really do anything; they are moved by the wind. We say that the wind blows, but the wind is moved by atmospheric pressures, which have their origin in still more distant causes. All things, including human beings, obey the same laws of dynamics.

Nietzsche gives attention to this tendency of our language to confuse matters when he writes of our tendency to say "lightning strikes". He argues that the strike is a part of what we call lightning, and not a function of it. The same, he says, is true of the choices and actions of men. They cannot be separated from us (that would be to separate the cause from the effect), just as we cannot be separated from our environments and upbringings. The strike is the lightning, and our choices are an extension of us. If we are imbalanced, our choices will be too. If we are balanced, so with they be. A sick man coughs, while a healthy man breathes freely.

More examples of how we neglect to observe causality:

We say that something could have been different, but, if we take just an instant to reflect upon this statement, we will be shocked by its absurdity and superficiality. In order for things to have gone differently, some factor, some cause, would have to have been different, -- but, in order for the cause to have been different, it would have to have been proceeded by another different cause, and so on, ad infinitum. In fact, what we're really saying is that the entire universe could have been, and could be, different. Very simply, determinism is about seeing and accepting what is; without imagining that what is could have been otherwise; or that it suggests what might have been, rather than what has been.

While this way of seeing admittedly turns our assumptions about people and the world on their heads, it is, nevertheless, factual; founded on pure logical observation, and not any personal desire to escape from responsibility. Whether or not the Determinist's motive in promoting this view is personal, and less than noble, is secondary and debatable. The fact remains that the logic is sound. And you will find that, if you are, by nature, a healthy-minded, responsible person, then this philosophy will not deter you from fulfilling what you see as your obligations. History is full of socially-conscious determinists.

Only someone who prides him/herself on being a hard-headed pragmatist, but who is really just impatient with subtlety, would object that the root of selfish action may be reduced to plain selfishness. There is nothing plain about the root of things. Concluding that selfish action arises from selfishness is giving may be called "an operational definition". It is really to say nothing at all. Its like saying the sky is blue because of the color blue. Selfishness is the very thing you wish to understand, but you abort the process of understanding selfishness as a behavior when you are satisfied to arrive at selfishness as an orientation. The question still remains, "what is the cause, or root, of the selfishness?"

The great diagnosticians of the soul of man have placed the causes for these things deep within the constitution of the individual; in psychological or physiological imbalances, inherited from nature and largely encouraged by culture/environment. But we must have an eye for detail, or we will refuse to admit these causes.

For instance, we will see that one man attributes his deplorable condition to an unloving mother, while another man is able to rise above far greater adversities, and, without taking their differences into account, we will interpret the success of the latter as a refutation of the "excuses" of the former. In fact, the two men are different.

Likewise, we will have sympathy for a child, but not a man, under similar circumstances, without regard to the real differences between that man and that child; because we judge according to assumptions and probabilities, and without observing the unique factors of each particular situation. External appearances notwithstanding, the most important determinants of behavior are internal. Internally, it may be that the man is more of a child than the child.

Forced by frustration to admit the reality of this, many people will agree that the man is indeed a child, but not without a feeling of superiority, scorn, and revulsion; and not without judging the man somehow more responsible for his childishness than a child would be. Rare is the person who sees this reality in its depths, and who is moved to compassion for the man, and to consider him much as he would consider a child; as innocent.

Could we force him to "grow up" by making him answerable to grueling circumstances? Perhaps. But we can do the same thing to a little child, and it would be, perhaps, no less of a tragedy, or a hastening of natural processes for the sake of unnatural ends.

For all these reasons, we are encouraged to love the sinner, while despising the sin, and to see sinfulness as an affliction, rather than a choice. Crucified, Jesus cries out, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do!" He is giving evidence of the rarest objectivity, by recognizing the subjectivity of his torturers.

It's something to which we should all aspire.

My Soul

2011-03-11T07:07:00.001-08:00

somewhere

a rifle discharges

and larks trade wheat

for the open sky --

but on the horizon

floats

a thin scarf of fog

where my soul is thickest

and lingers

and is gone