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The TAT Forum
Essays, poems, opinions and humor on seeking
The Paradise We Seek, by Cynthia Bourgeault
The meaning of Jesus' metaphor of the seed falling into the ground and dying is creative and generative. And it is the heart of the Christian path. Indeed, within this particular teaching of Jesus is the notion of kenosis, or "self-emptying." Kenosis is roughly parallel to the classic spiritual teaching of nonattachment or nonclinging, but kenosis has an intrinsic warmness to it: it means to actively and willingly relinquish that which you're clinging to so as to give something else the space to be. This was Jesus' practice, his path, and his unique vision on how consciousness is transformed. It's a practice of letting go.
For true spiritual masters, of which Jesus was certainly one, dying is the letting go, or kenosis, of your "egoic operating system," that which keeps coughing up a sense of self as a different or distinct person with its own qualities, uniqueness, specialness, personal history, and agenda. To die to this self means to die to all self-talk and the projection of your self out in the world. In fact, the big goal in this life is not to prepare for your physical death but to assist in the germinal act of laying down your egoic operating mechanism and be born again as the flower of full presence--the True Self. This self always knows what to do; it always knows when we are true and when we're not true, when we're free and when we're not free. Virtually all the spiritual teachers of the world say that when you've died and been reborn in this way, physical death is essentially something you don't even notice.
In order to manifest the True Self, though, you have to completely clear the playing field of the usual language. Because in the usual egoic syntax the True Self is something you "have," and therefore you have to "find" it. But the True Self is not something you have; it's what you are. Think of the flame of a candle; the flame is only a flame so long as it's burning. It's a process, and there would be no flame if it stopped and tried to have its "flameness." Likewise, as soon as you stop and say, "I want to measure my true self--I want to define it, I want to list its characteristics, I want to compare it to my false self"--you've "bought the farm" because you've downloaded it into an operating system that can't possibly do anything other than caricature it.
The false self is like a veil that hides the paradise that we're seeking. At the very end of his life, Moses was granted a glimpse of the Promised Land. They took him up onto a rock, and he could see it. He even had an experience of it, but he couldn't enter. That's a kind of analogy for what I'm talking about: as long as you process everything through the ego, you merely "have" mystical experiences. But when you die to the false self, that's when you enter paradise. And you can't enter paradise, raid the mystical insight, and come back to write a book so that people will say, "Oh, what an awesome mystic." You have to disappear so that there's nothing left that's going to take the experience back somewhere else. Then you finally begin to live at the speed of the mystery that we are. That's the fruit that Jesus spoke of.
Excerpted from "Silence is the Language of God" by Elizabeth Debold and Maura O’Connor.
Reprinted with permission from Cynthia Bourgeault and from WIE Unbound; February 2006.
© 2006 EnlightenNext, Inc. All rights reserved. http://www.wie.org. Click here for an audio clip of the interview. The Reverend Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault has spent the last three decades following the Christian contemplative path as a student, Episcopal priest, and hermit. The principal teacher at the Contemplative Society in British Columbia, she has worked closely with Christian spiritual masters such as Father Thomas Keating and Friar Bruno Bamhatt She currently divides her time between the Rocky Mountains, Maine, and British Columbia.
Falling leaf photo is by Vietnamese student Trang Chap Cheng.
True Love
There were a dozen or so of us, about evenly split between males and females. We fell into a pattern of doing things together in smaller groups during the day then meeting at the pool around dusk. After indulging in relaxed merriment and comparing notes about our adventures while apart, we'd all head out to some public place where there was music or a private party that someone knew about.
One of the group was a young woman from Boston who I noticed would always be sitting quietly next to me but with whom I'd had no direct interaction. On what may have been our second evening together, the whole group moved from our hotel to a club in one of the large, colonial-era hotels, which had a dance floor and live music. The quiet girl, Lorna, again sat silently next to me when our group spread itself among available tables. So I asked her if she'd like to dance. She said yes, or possibly just nodded her head, and we moved onto the small dance floor. It was a slow dance, and as soon as we embraced, there were no longer two minds. There was one mind encompassing two bodies, each of which was experiencing the same thoughts and feelings, knowing that the other body was experiencing the same thoughts and feelings, and knowing that the other body also knew the same: almost like an infinite regression between two mirrors. As soon as we had embraced, it was as if a wave went out from us and radiated across the room. It was felt by one of the musicians in the combo behind me who said, sotto voce, "True love."
That diminishment of separation is an indicator of what we're intuitively looking for, which is to escape our painful identification with a separate creature that was born, is under constant threat of annihilation, and is inevitably going to die. But it didn't last. When the dance was over and we returned to the table, so was the rapport.
The next evening when we gathered at the pool and saw each other again, it was almost as if Lorna and I didn't like each other. George, a hotel employee whom we'd become friendly with, volunteered to take our group to a local club, and we all jumped on the offer. It turned out to be in the boondocks and was populated strictly by local folks, who looked unhappy to see us there. But they became friendly after the initial shock wore off, and we had a good time. After that we returned to town (Nassau) and found a crowded, disco-type club. Lorna and I were still avoiding each other, but I eventually spotted her in the crowd when a slow dance started and asked her to dance. As soon as we embraced, we were again one mind. It was even more intense this time. We ignored whatever music was playing, barely moving our feet as we held each other tight for what may have been an hour or more, until the club closed. Then we walked back to the hotel arm in arm, silently.
The next morning, the entire group assembled outside the hotel to say goodbye to Lorna and her friends when the taxi came to take them to the airport. She and I didn't exchange information to keep in touch. Altogether we probably hadn't said more than ten or twenty words to each other.
Is it possible to find the complete and full satisfaction that experiences like the above point to? Ironically, what we're looking for -- love, security, permanence, meaning, or however it becomes represented in the mind -- is what we find when we recognize our true identity. Seeking conscious awareness of our essential being, and helping others do the same, is the real purpose and meaning of our lives. Our real identity is that which we're seeking: True, never-ending Love.
Nearly five million Americans served in World War I and 117,000 of those perished during the war. Their death waited in the cold, the mud, the water and the air -- death from disease as much as steel. My great uncle survived the fighting, but was killed by a simple infection on his way back from Europe -- such was the state of medicine. So long ago that books and black and white photographs are all that is left: ninety years; four generations.
Yet Ernest Pusey, age 111, passed away only a few weeks ago. He was one of the last living U.S. veterans of World War I. Only twenty-three of five million remain -- young men grown ancient.
What did five million lives mean?
Today and ninety years past are no different. Right now, a young soldier lies dying on a beach. Ninety years and a thousand miles away, traffic is stopped at a red light. A woman taps her hand to the beat of the radio. The waves carry away the soldier's blood as fast as it leaves him. Traffic begins to move, flowing toward a multitude of destinations. Aren't you at the beach, even now -- bleeding into an eternal rhythm?
How will you hear the voice of God, except by training your ear (your heart and mind)?
Each of us will eventually be washed into the sea. We can drift like derelicts or be carried to the still depths by unraveling.
What is this unraveling?
Unraveling is questioning, never being satisfied with speculation, allowing (not demanding) our selves to fulfill our real desire, honesty in the face of our ignorance, and determination borne of desperation.
Tired of Speaking Sweetly, by Hafiz
Shams-ud-din
If you had the courage and
Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
Causing the world to weep
God wants to manhandle us,
The Beloved sometimes wants
Hold us upside down
But when we hear
From The Gift,
translated by Daniel Ladinsky
"Our studies must begin with our selves and not with the heavens." - Shawn Nevins
There comes a time when our search into the possibilities of our nature must become personal. We must step out of the safe kingdom of our imagination and begin to actually observe our own mind. Now this is a tricky business. Getting personal about our search can mean many things. It does not mean it's all about us, that we are out to become big or perfect, or to focus only on our self-pity, but it means we must become capable of looking at ourselves without the filters of imagination and identification, while at the same time leaving the study of the universe until we know for sure who is studying it.
With buffers, imagination, and identification, among other things, blocking our path to truth, how can we even start to get a glimpse into our own mind? Anything that slips past the buffers can be explained away with imagination, and we can always use identification with our spiritual ego to smooth over any discrepancies. The study of our mind might have to first be an indirect one until we become convinced of our own self-delusion. By looking within in an indirect manner, we can come to see our contradictions in a way that isn't immediately shut down by the ego's defenses. The study of our dreams is one such way. "Possibly the most interesting first impression of my life came from the world of dreams." This quote from Ouspensky shows how dreams can give us that first step into the mind.
As soon as the observing part of us is convinced that there is work to be done in our own head, we can move on to a more direct study. The art of self-observation is a direct, tricky and absolutely necessary task. The chief trap we can fall into is that of projection. We may think we are observing ourselves by describing or commenting on the actions of our body as we go through the day. This is only the mind projecting a labeling process, after the fact, and then identifying with it. Observing oneself starts with looking for the underlying motivations to these body-actions. Why do we do what we do? Can we see through to the reasons for our actions rather than just describing them? When we can see, in real time, the emotional motivators for our thinking processes that lead to action, then we can say we understand self-observation. Why you do what you do may lead farther within than simple description of your body language.
See Bob's web sites The Mystic Missal, the Nostalgia West photo site, and The Listening Attention.
She went to Edna and said, "I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you're being discharged because you responded so rationally to a crisis. By jumping in the pool to save the life of another patient, you displayed sound mindedness. The bad news is that Jim, the patient you saved, hung himself in his bathroom with his bathrobe belt right after you saved him. I am so sorry, but he's dead."
Edna replied, "He didn't hang himself. I put him there to dry. How soon can I go home?" (Author unknown.)
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Letting go over and over is a kind of perceptual tool. It isn't just to make you feel like a freer and finer person--it actually enables you to see from the deepest recognition what the One is. Letting go is not an attitude; it's an inner gesture, and it's completely visceral. So when teachers keep telling you to let go, it's not in order for you to become nicer and more useful to the planet; it's because this is a kind of spiritual aerobics that, if you perform it faithfully, steadfastly, and patiently in all life's situations will literally transform your sense of self.
Life took ninety years to pare five million to twenty-three. Every one ate and slept and hoped and feared. Every one passed away whether young and full of dreams, or old and full of memories. Every one of those bodies was like you. As a friend said to me, with each passing you move up a rank.
Imagination can lead us far astray. We will tend to find whatever helps to compensate for our undeveloped sides, while remaining blind to the things we do not like about ourselves. The trick of identification will aid in this hypnosis by helping us to say "I" to every voice that pops up in our crowded head. Here, we find another obstacle to our path in what Ouspensky and Gurdjieff called "buffers." Buffers are strange but effective blocks in our mind that keep us from seeing our contradictions. They serve to separate the sides of ourselves that live in opposition to each other. This serves to keep us fast asleep and living in imagination, identified with whatever voice is currently active, and keeps this voice from seeing the other fellows who might have been in control of our machine both before and after he came along. Now this might seem like the stuff of science-fiction, especially if we have an inflated view of ourselves, having perhaps been on the path for a while, but a little observation of our fellow man will show us differently, and we are built the same as he. If we can muster a bit of courage, we can even ask our fellows on the path to do us a favor and tell us about ourselves.
Jim and Edna were both patients in a mental hospital. One day while they were walking past the hospital swimming pool, Jim suddenly jumped into the deep end. He sank to the bottom of the pool and stayed there. Edna promptly jumped in to save him. She swam to the bottom, pulled Jim out and brought him to his room. When the hospital director became aware of Edna's heroic act, she immediately ordered that Edna be discharged from the hospital because she now considered Edna to be mentally stable.