We Must Lower Our Egos . . . For the Sake of the One

Each of the world's great religions and wisdom traditions has an esoteric and and exoteric component, notes Moslem cleric, Imam Faisul Abdul Rauf, "an inner and an outer path leading to the same Wholeness, the same Absolute, the same One."

"God, Baha, whatever name you want to call Him with," says Rauf, "Allah, Ram, Om (whatever the name might be to which you name or access the Presence of Divinity) is the locus of Absolute Being, Absolute Love and Mercy and Compassion, and Absolute Knowledge and Wisdom - what Hindus call Satchitananda. The language differs but the objective is the same."

Thus, Rumi, the great Sufi poet, writes (in part):

"What is to be done, O Moslems? for I do not recognize myself.  

I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Zoroastrian, nor Moslem.
I am not of the East, nor of the West, nor of the land, nor of the sea;
I am not of Nature's mint, nor of the circling' heaven.
I am not of earth, nor of water, nor of air, nor of fire;
I am not of the empyrean, nor of the dust, nor of existence, nor of entity.
I am not of India, nor of China, nor of Bulgaria, nor of Saqsin
I am not of the kingdom of Iraq, nor of the country of Khorasan
I am not of the this world, nor of the next, nor of Paradise, nor of Hell
I am not of Adam, nor of Eve, nor of Eden and Rizwan.

My place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless ;
'Tis neither body nor soul, for I belong to the soul of the Beloved.
I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one;
One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.
He is the first, He is the last, He is the outward, He is the inward;
I know none other except 'Ya Hu' and 'Ya man Hu.'
I am intoxicated with Love's cup, the two worlds have passed out of my ken . . ."

 

"There is only one Absolute Reality by definition," Rauf points out, "one Absolute Being by definition, because 'absolute' is by definition single, and absolute, and singular. There is this absolute concentration of being, this absolute concentration of consciousness and awareness, an absolute locus of compassion and love that defines the primary attributes of Divinity. And that should also be the primary attributes of what it means to be human."

"The human soul embodies a piece of the Divine Breath, a piece of the Divine Soul," Rauf notes. "This is also expressed in Biblical vocabulary wehn we are taught we are created in the Divine image," he points out.

"What is the imagery of God," he asks. "The imagery of God is Absolute Being, Absolute Awareness, and Knowledge, and Wisdom, and Absolute Compassion and Love. Therefore, for us to be human . . . in the greatest sense of what it means to be human . . . means that we, too, have to be proper stewards of the breath of Divinity within us, and to seek to perfect within ourselves the attributes of being - of being alive, of beingness -  the attribute of wisdom, of consciousness, (and) of awareness, and the attribute of being compassionate and loving beings."

"This," says Rauf, "is what I understand from my faith tradition, and this is what I understand from my studies of other faith traditions, and this is the common platform upon which we must all stand. And when we stand upon this platform, as such, I am convinced that we can make a wonderful world. And I believe . . . that we are on the verge, and that with the presence and help of people like you . . .  we can bring about the prophecy of Isaiah, when he foretold of a period when people shall transform their swords into plowshares and will not learn war, (or) make war, anymore."

"We have reached a stage in human history," he concludes, "where we have no option: We must lower our egos . . . control our egos . . . whether it is the individual ego, personal ego, family ego, or national ego. And let it all be for the glorification of the One."

Spiritual . . . And Religious

"If religion becomes a cause of dislike, hatred and division, it were better to be without it, and to withdraw from such a religion would be a truly religious act. For it is clear that the purpose of a remedy is to cure; but if the remedy should only aggravate the complaint it had better be left alone."

-- 'Abdu'l-Baha --

In a recent editorial blog on The Huffington Post (here), writer and educator, Laura Weingberg, makes an insightful argument for being 'spiritual and religious' rather than merely 'spiritual but not religious.' The crux of Ms. Weinberg's argument is that worship of an all inclusive God demands that we act in this world in a principled manner. Her critique of the SBNR folks (like myself), however, is that there is not necessarily an imperative for us to behave in a manner that fulfills our obligations to God.

"Spirituality can lead to a relationship with God," Ms. Weingberg notes, "but religiosity demands the fulfillment of obligations to God. Why is that desirable? Because committing to God changes who we are; we can no longer be what we are automatically, or even what we aspire to; we are obliged to push ourselves beyond that and to find our true selves, the "soul who is pleasing unto God.""

Ms. Weinberg's view can be critiqued on the grounds that what can be described as 'religious' may yet fall far short of seeking "our true selves." This transcendental search, one assumes, is the hallmark of being 'spiritual and religious' rather than merely and nominally 'religious." But is the search to find that which is transcendental and transformational in life not also the hallmark of being 'spiritual' but not necessarily 'religious'? Personally, I think it is. The quest for spiritual meaning, I believe, is the essential quest - even if it remains unrecognized and unacknowledged - of all persons.

Ms. Weinberg, a Baha'i (and thus a member of one of the world's most inclusive faiths), provides a compelling and all-encompassing vision of 'what' (not 'who') God is:

"I believe in a God who is the creator of the universe and all that it contains," she observes, "who established and operates through natural laws, and loves all that He has created. This great, unknowable Creator has not, in the Baha'i view, left humanity to struggle along without assistance or guidance. God is not watching us "from a distance" as we bumble around, laying waste to His perfect work. He is close to us, with us, actively intervening in human history, guiding us to our destined future."

"Religion offers not only a close personal relationship with God," she notes, "but a sense of common purpose with Him, the hope that somehow our efforts to promote human well-being are in line with His plan."

"There is," she points out, "a path out of the mess we are in; we need to refer to His guidance to walk it."

I can agree wholeheartedly with all of the above, except that last line. One looks out at the multitude of religious faiths, philosophies and wisdom traditions and it seems plain to me that there are a plethora of paths out of the mess we are unarguably in. Does being "spiritual and religious" imply that we can utilize the insights and directions from only one path? If it does - and I suspect that most solely 'religious' people believe that it does - then you can still count me amongst the "spiritual but not religious crowd."

Personally, I will take what guidance I can from any and all of the world's great religious and spiritual traditions. Whether that wisdom comes from the Buddha, the Baha'u'llah or Bambi's mother is irrelevant to me, so long as it leads me out of my narrow self and into a unitive relationship with the God of my understanding, a God that it is wholly consistent with that described by Ms. Weinberg.

As Ms. Weingberg quotes 'Abdu'l-Baha : "(T)he purpose of a remedy is to cure." Thank God there seem to be a variety of cures out there. For one prescription may be more effective than another for a particular sufferer. And some may, indeed, require a combination of dosages.

Unfathomable Depth

"Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg."

-- Eckhart Tolle --
("A New Earth," page 25.)

 The depth of everything is a mystery, as Tolle notes, a mystery that is only obscured - or worse ignored - by our labeling it. The ultimate mysteries, the mystery of man and of God, are hidden deep within our own depths, and it is only the person who is willing to probe such inner depths who will ever come close to the source of these mysteries.

The great theologian, Paul Tillich puts it this way:

"The wisdom of all ages and of all continents speaks about the road to our depth. It has been described in innumerably different ways. But all those who have been concerned - mystics and priests, poets and philosophers, simple people and educated - with that road through confession, lonely self-scrutiny, internal or external catastrophes, prayer, contemplation, have witnessed to the same experience. They have found they are not what what they  believed themselves to be, even after a deeper level had appeared to them below the vanishing surface. That deeper level itself became surface, when a still deeper level was discovered, this happening again and again, as long as their lives, as long as they kept on the road to their depth. . . .

The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. . . . For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or an unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God."

[Paul Tillich, "The Shaking of the Foundations," Scribners, 1948, pp. 56-57.]

A Poem by Mother Theresa: Do It Anyway

Do It Anyway

People are often unreasonable,
illogical and self-centered;
forgive them anyway.

If you are kind,
people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives;
be kind anyway.

If you are successful,
you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank,
people may cheat you;
be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building,
someone could destroy overnight;
build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness,
they may be jealous;
be happy anyway.

The good you do today,
people will forget tomorrow;
do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have,
and it may never be enough;
give the world the best you've got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis,
it is between you and God;
it never was between you and them anyway.

-- Mother Theresa --

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Non-Duality and the Evolutionary Process

"God evolves as we do," observes enlightened spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen, a proponent of an advanced non-duality that he calls 'evolutionary enlightenment," an approach that places humanity's urgent and energetic drive for meaning and purpose in an evolutionary context that is at least 13.8 billion years old - i.e., at least as old as the universe as we know it, and perhaps co-extensive with the timeless aeons of eternity before that singular event.

In the attached three-part video interview, Cohen outlines his understanding of conscious evolution from a more theological perspective than is his usual wont. With host Iain McNay of Conscious.TV, Cohen explores God as the ultimate Ground of our Being, the 'Big Bang' as the creation event, and the expansion of our consciousness beyond the narrow confines of the ego as our evolutionary destiny.

What Is God? Eastern and Western Perspectives

"And being asked by the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God cometh, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo, here! or, There! for lo, the kingdom of God is within you"

-- Luke 17:20-21 --

In an interview with Michael Toms, the late Joseph Campbell, professor emeritus of mythology and comparative religions, had the following to say about the influx of Eastern religious traditions into Western culture, a synergy that continues to lift the discourse on humankind's need for the mysterious and sacred to unprecedented levels:

"You must remember," Campbell points out, "that when we have teachers from the East, we're getting the best. There are also crude traditions in the East; and we have the crude folk-traditions in the West; and our best teachers are not that ones that are most listened to."

"Now, the best teaching from the East is the one given by the Dalai Lama," says Campbell, "We also had it from Sri Ramakrishna, the great Indian Hindu teacher of the (nineteenth) century, namely that there is a common consciousness which is our own ground and so in consciousness we are one; insofar as you identify yourself with the consciousness that moves and lives in your body, you've identified with that which you share with me. And on the other hand, if you fix yourself, and your tradition, and believe you've got it, then you've removed yourself from the rest of humankind."

"What the Eastern teachers are telling us," Campbell notes, "is that the important thing is not what happened thousands of years ago when the Buddha was born or Jesus was crucified: what's important is what is happening in you now. And what's important is not your membership in a religious community: it's what that membership is doing to your psyche."

"The divine lives within you," he notes. "Our Western religions tend to put the divine outside of the earthly world and in God, in heaven. But the whole sense of the Oriental is that the kingdom of God is within you. Who's in heaven? God is? Where's God? God's within you. And what is God? God is a personification of that world-creative energy which is beyond thinking and beyond naming."

"We think," says Campbell, "not only that our God has been named and known, but that he's given us a whole system of rules. But this system of rules is not from God, it's from man, and the rules are man's clues as to how to get to the realization of God."

"(W)e're all from a mysterious trans-rational ground," Campbell concludes, "subatomic particles tell us that. We don't know what they are, and that's what we are. And of course our mind is in this world of time-space relationship; and the mind must open to the impulse and statements of this primary precedent of the general consciousness."

[Joseph Campbell,"An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in conversation with Michael Toms," pp. 64-65.]

"A numerous and elaborate society must have a consciously defined and clearly analysed technique, based on an evident empirical psychology" observed philosopher Gerald Heard, one of Campbell's notable contemporaries. "The psychology of any epoch must be at the same stage of advance as its economics and physics, if a serious regression is to be avoided. Our perennial challenge has been that our working psychology is always a whole epoch behind our physico-economic state."

[Gerald Heard, "Pain, Sex and Time: A New Outlook on Evolution and the Future of Man," p. 137.]

The Gospel of Fearlessness

Unlike many Christian ministers who preach the gospel of a salvation aimed at an idyllic rather than a horrific and tortuous afterlife, the Rev. Theodore (Ted) Nottingham, of Indianapolis' Northwood Church, preaches the power of a fierce present-moment spirituality that addresses at a deep psychological level the existential problems that all individuals face in this life. In the attached video, Nottingham addresses the principal psychological problem that we all suffer from, namely the self-centered fear that establishes and maintains the human ego.

"Every one of us has fears," Nottingham observes. "Fears of what people think of us, fears of what is going to happen tomorrow, fears of illness and unemployment. . . . What is this fear that is behind all of our distress, he asks, "this fear that keeps us from living in freedom and joy?"

"When you begin to realize that to live in those fears and anxieties that have tortured us for a lifetime is to live turned towards one's 'self.' You might," he observes, "call fear an exaggerated self-interest."

"There is power available in any situation," Nottingham notes. "We just have to get our head out of that which keeps us in the basement of our 'selves,' in our negativity, in our imaginations. Imagination," he notes, is just thoughts . . .  thoughts of what could happen if . . . of what that person is thinking right now about you."

"How many of you," he asks, "have had a whole scenario go through your head about what is going to happen at this meeting, and it was totally different and everything was fine? In the meantime, you have lost so much time, so much energy, so much forgetfulness of God. Learn the discipline of directing your thoughts," he urges, "of choosing not to go with the emotion of fear. Remember what you know, and not just what you feel."

"Remember," he says, "that negative thinking always lies, because it only gives you a little piece of the picture, not the whole picture, (but) just a little edge of it. Some of us," he notes, "get addicted to that . . . (and) enjoy our negative emotions."

"We are not our fear," says Nottingham, "and we have to learn from the Master who walks the way for us. Be willing sometimes to do it (while) afraid," he advises. "You are not your fears!"

William Samuel: An Unheralded Voice of Enlightenment

For every enlightened teacher - for each Krishnamurti, Ram Dass or Eckhart Tolle, say - there seem to be hundreds, perhaps thousands of enlightened men and women who carry the exact same message of personal liberation and spiritual awakening, albeit using different terminologies and emerging from different backgrounds and traditions. Yet due, perhaps in no small measure, to the advent of the Internet and the Information Age, these voices of spiritual freedom are emerging at a time when they are most needed. The late William Samuels is one such voice.

"There are no words we can read that will convince us of the allness of this now-consciousness," Samuel writes, "there is no one to whom we may listen or talk who can do more than persuade us intellectually. We know - and we know, we know - only when we find it and feel it in our heart."

"Reader," he assures us, "this will happen for you much sooner than you expect. Your "awakening" is inevitable, irresistible and certain, because the fact is - as you shall see and have been told many times - you are not sleeping to be awakened now. Despite the appearances on the world's stage, you are already all you could ever hope to become."

"The nearly unanimous pronouncements of classical theology and education to the contrary," he points out, " you are not a prodigal acting the profligate and wandering in the pigsties of a far country. The Identity you are this instant is Hamony's Now-Awareness being aware. Our heritage, effortless and divine, is to acknowledge this fact."

"Right now," he urges, "bring yourself from an overconcern with things within Awareness to Awareness itself. Here you will find that all bodies, all images, and everything Awareness includes, are aspects of your own Identity! Here you will find that you are happiness, completeness and joy itself."

[Wm. Samuel, "A Guide to Awareness and Tranquility," pp. 21-22.]

In the attached videos (taken from a lecture delivered in White, Georgia in 1993), Samuels discusses this concept of Now-Awareness in terms of ancient masters - including Lao-Tze, Jesus and the Essenes - and the current blossoming of science, information and consciousness.

(The story of William Samuel's own enlightenment experience while under shell-fire in the Korean war, "A Soldier's Story" is also a profound, must-read for the spiritually minded.)

Theodore Nottingham: The Knowledge of the Essenes

Bless the LORD, O my soul. O LORD my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour and majesty.  Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain: Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind: Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire: Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever. . . .

-- Psalm 104 --

For those seeking to understand the unity of the world's great wisdom traditions - the unity of religions and teachings that seem to be more and more related, the more we come to know of the ancient world - the attached video on the Essenes (creators of the Dead Sea Scrolls), by the Rev. Theodore Nottingham, a polymath scholar of the world's ancient and modern spiritual teachings, is a must-see.

"The Essenses were an advanced and highly evolved race of people," Nottingham observes. "Much of their time was devoted to the study of ancient texts, various branches of the healing arts, (and) there were also those who travelled far and wide through the various centers they maintained."

In very modern terms, Nottingham explains how, "(l)ike many of the ancient gnostic groups, the Essenes believed that humankind was made up of three aspects: the body, mind and emotions."

"The ultimate goal of the individual," he explains, "was the evolution, not only within him or herself, but also in regards to the planet and universe as a whole. The body was the  outer means through which this was expressed, while the mind was seen as the inner manifestation, and creator of thoughts and emotions, which the body then responded to and acted upon. Thought was therefore considered to be the highest, most powerful force in the universe, as it was seen as the instigator of both feeling and action.

"The Essenes," Nottingham points out, "therefore trained themselves to harness this power in a positive way, knowing that each thought effected  the lives of everyone on the planet through the vibrations they sent into the collective unconscious."

(The Rev. Theodore Nottingham is a theologian, television producer and author of many books exploring the esoteric teachings of Christianity and other wisdom traditions. He is currently the pastor of Northwood Christian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana.)

On Yoga, Religion and the Ground of Being

The word for religion in the East is "yoga." It refers not just to the outward form of hatha yoga that we are all familiar with from the proliferation of yoga studios here in the West - which is just one of the "six limbs" of yoga - but, more fundamentally, it refers to the inner, esoteric path of religion. Derived from the same Sanskrit word as the English "yoke," it means to "tie" or "unite." In this instance, to unite one's being (the atman) with the Ground of Being (Brahman, or God).

Similarly, the word "religion" has an inner, esoteric aspect as well as an outer, exoteric one; albeit, when we talk of religion in the West, we refer almost exclusively to this latter meaning, denoting the various creeds, rites, rituals and observances that characterize the Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In practice, and common usage, the word "religion" has lost the "inner" aspect of its meaning.

The word "religion" - like "yoga" - also means to "tie" or "unite" (or, more accurately, to "retie" or reunite"). It is derived from the Latin root ligare, which means to tie, just as a 'ligature' is a stitch that ties up a wound, or 'ligament' is the tissue that ties the muscle to a bone. Thus, the inner meaning of "religion" is also to "retie" or "reunite" one's inner being (the soul, or spirit) with the Ground of Being (God). Unfortunately, the concept of "religion" no longer seems to refer to this inner, esoteric process of reunification, and is almost exclusively used to denote outer, exoteric forms.

In the West, at least, as Aldous Huxley points out in his classic work "The Perennial Philosophy," this loss of meaning demeans religious practice and obscures the inner path to spiritual awakening.

"Nobody," writes Huxley, "has yet invented a Spiritual Calculus in terms of which we may talk coherently about the Divine Ground and of the world conceived of its manifestation. For the present, therefore, we must be patient with the linguistic eccentricities of those who are compelled to describe one order of experience in therms of a symbol-system, who relevance is to the facts of another and quite different order."

[Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," Perennial Classics: 2004, p. 35.]

One of the most respected modern theologians, Paul Tillich, in his memorable sermon "The Depths of Existence," notes that a true spiritual seeker may be prejudiced by what he knows of "God" and may, in fact, have to forget all that he knows about that term in order to find the Ground of Being within him or herself.

"The wisdom of all ages and of all continents speaks about the road to our depth," Tillich notes.  "It has been described in innumerably different ways. But all those who have been concerned - mystics and priests, poets and philosophers, simple people and educated - with that road through confession, lonely self-scrutiny, internal or external catastrophes, prayer, contemplation, have witnessed to the same experience. They have found they are not what what they  believed themselves to be, even after a deeper level had appeared to them below the vanishing surface. That deeper level itself became surface, when a still deeper level was discovered, this happening again and again, as long as their lives, as long as they kept on the road to their depth." 

"The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being," he continues, "is God. That depth is what the word God means. . . . For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or an unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God."

[Paul Tillich, "Shaking The Foundations," Scribners, New York: 1948, pp. 56-57.]

 This misunderstanding of what the words "religion" and "yoga" originally referred to is illustrated by the misunderstanding I initially had about one of the most famous passages in the New Testament. (Although I am not Christian, per se, the only fully enlightened man I have ever met, once urged me to study all religions until I could see "the sameness" in them all.)

In Matthew 11:28-30, we read:

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest upon your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light."

 Originally, this passage invoked in me an image of Jesus shouldering the cross, much like Atlas struggling with the whole world upon his shoulders. I assumed that the burden Jesus was talking about was in actuality, a literal burden. When I re-examined this passage, however, having learned that the "yoke" he talks about is his esoteric, inner religious teachings (i.e., his "yoga"), I got a wholly new meaning.

Here he first says he is "meek" meaning he is free of the small, egoic "self" which is the common burden of duality that virtually all men and women labour under. Then he notes that he is "lowly in heart," also signifying he is free of the ego and exists wholly within the Ground of Being alone.

Next, he notes that his "yoke" is easy, meaning that the process of his religion (his yoga) is simple and consists of the prayer and meditation that will free one from the bondage of the egoic "self" and its duality. Then, he describes what the fruit of his esoteric religious practice is - i.e. what the essence of his teaching consists of - and that is "light." And, of course, light - the clear light of Being - is what all inner religious practices refer to, in one form or another, as the source of our Being.

Indeed, perhaps one of the most famous passage from the Holy Quran, is the "Light Sura" Chapter 24, Verse 35 which reads:

"Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The Parable of His Light is as if there were a Niche and within it a Lamp: the Lamp enclosed in Glass: the glass as it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed Tree, an Olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it: Light upon Light! Allah doth guide whom He will to His Light: Allah doth set forth Parables for men: and Allah doth know all things."

Thus, when one begins to look to the inner, esoteric core of all Eastern and Western religions - to the yoking of one's depth of being with the the ultimate depth which is the Ground of Being - one begins to find the lightness of being free from the ego and the small sense of "self." This realization, it seems, is at the heart of all yogas and all religions.

Describing the Ineffable: What is God?

"We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meanwhile within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson --
("The Over-Soul")       

How we ceaselessly struggle, and inevitably fail, to describe in words the ineffable! Rumi tells the story of how the small fish came to the big fish inquiring about something called "the ocean." "How," the big fish thinks to itself, "can you describe the ocean to someone who is already in the ocean?"

In the attached videos, masters from the world's great wisdom traditions try and describe the Whole. In essence each of these great practitioners try to describe the same unitive reality they experience, and which others have blindly fought over since time immemorial.

"The fight in the world is not between good and evil," observes Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev. "Even today the wars in the world (are) not between good and evil, it is always between one man's belief and another man's belief. The moment you believe something that is not a living experience for you, you are already in conflict with somebody else who believes something else."

"God is beyond even our idea of the beyond," observes Sufi author, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. "We all come from God," he has written elsewhere, "but when we are born into this world we forget. We forget from where we have come and that we are children of light. We take on the clothing of this world, leaving behind the "clouds of glory" of our true Home."

[Vaughan-Lee, "Love is a Fire," p. 21.]

The Expansive Universe

Rabindranath Tagore
(1861-1941)

BRINK OF ETERNITY

In desperate hope I go and search for her
in all the corners of my room;
I find her not.

My house is small
and what once has gone from it can never be regained.

But infinite is thy mansion, my lord,
and seeking her I have to come to thy door.

I stand under the golden canopy of thine evening sky
and I lift my eager eyes to thy face.

I have come to the brink of eternity from which nothing can vanish
---no hope, no happiness, no vision of a face seen through tears.

Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean,
plunge it into the deepest fullness.
Let me for once feel that lost sweet touch
in the allness of the universe.

-- Rabindranath Tagore --

Who has not gazed in rapt attention at the night sky and not had a sense of his or her own smallness against the background of the stars? Throughout history sages and poets, alike, have wondered at the depths of the heavens, but only now do we know how deep and expansive the depths of the heavens truly are.

For the pantheist, the spiritual but not religious, the agnostic and the non-dualist, alike, the depths of the cosmos may testify to the breadth of the manifest and non-manifest aspects of Unity and Wholeness, or what might be a single, unitary G_d.

Light, one of the few constants in the universe, travels at a mind boggling 186,000 miles per second (or 300,000 kilometres per second). At that speed, it still takes three-quarters of a second for sunlight reflected off the moon to reach our eyes, and a full eight minutes for sunlight to travel the approximately 93,000,000 miles (149,000,000 km) from the Sun itself.

Every star we see when we look up into the sky lies within our galaxy, the Milky Way. And, yet, the closest star system to us, Alpha Centauri, is 4.35 light years away - that's  25 trillion miles, or 40 trillion kilometers away. The Milky Way, itself is a more-or-less average sized galaxy containing approximately 200 billion stars, and stretching across 100,000 light years of space.

There are approximately 80 billion other such galaxies in "the observable universe" - some larger, some smaller than the Milky Way - in which there are anywhere from 30 sextillion to a septillion different star systems (i.e., 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,0000 to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 separate stars), and who knows how many countless worlds.

At the largest scale, as the video clips below illustrate, superclusters of galaxies (each stretching across hundreds of millions of light years) weave themselves into a fabric of knots and threads that can be billions of light years long, with the density of this fabric stretching matter uniformly out throughout the heavens.

And, yet, as incomprehensible as such distances and numbers are to us, it is indisputable that amidst all this "we live and move, and have our being," (Acts 17:28).

Thomas Merton: An Encounter with Buddhism

According to the Lotus Sutra, one of the most revered of the Buddha's teachings, "If there are living beings who hear the Law, believe and accept it, and put forth diligent effort, seeking wisdom that comes of itself, taking solitary delight in goodness and tranquility, and profoundly understanding the causes and conditions of all  phenomena, they shall be called pratyekabuddhas," or the independently enlightened.

Thomas Merton
at Abbey of Gesthemani
circa 1968

In 1968, the Trappist monk and prolific writer, Thomas Merton would journey to Asia, furthering his comparative study of Bhuddist, Jain and Hindu teachings. In the end, it was a short trip, as Merton was accidentally electrocuted in his Bangkok hotel room. Before his death, however, he would meet with a host of ardent spiritual seekers and contemplatives like himself, the most famous of these being the Dalai Lama.

Yet, the most influential contact he made was with the Buddhist teacher, Chatral Rinpoche, a monk who had spent more than thirty years in the solitary contemplation that was Merton's only real home in this world. It was Chatral Rinpoche who identified Merton as a pratyekabhudda, and with whom Merton would take a variant of the Boddhisatva's vows, in which he dedicated himself to do all he could to reach enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, in this lifetime or the next.

Merton was already far along that path, as the following entry written in his journal several months before he set out to Asia demonstrates:

"I am the utter poverty of God," he wrote. "I am His emptiness, littleness, nothingness, lostness. When this is understood, my life in His freedom, the self-emptying God of me, is the fullness of grace. Love for all, hatred of none, is the fruit and manifestation of love of God, peace and satisfaction."

The following little-viewed videos tell the story of Merton's journey to South Asia, his meeting with Chatral Rinpoche, and Chatral Rinpoche's identification of Merton as an independently enlightened being. In doing so, they highlight the Buddhist acceptance of ultimate teachings, irrespective of what religious or spiritual tradition in which they arise.

The Buddha consistently said that his path was not the only path to enlightenment, and that every being must find his own path. His teachings, he noted, were meant only to be guides, and he encouraged all to investigate for him or herself the truth of what he said, rather than merely taking his word for it.

Emerson: On 'Experience'

The definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson --

In his essay on "Experience," Emerson, the dean of the American Transcendentalist movement, observes that life is led in succession, with one moment following another, seemingly blindly.

"God delights to isolate us every day," he remarks, "and hide us from the past and future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws behind us purest sky. 'You will not remember,' he seems to say, 'and you will not expect.'"

"But," he notes, "it is impossible that the creative power should elude us. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powers we awake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract to so base a state."

"The secret of the illusoriness," Emerson says, "is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si muove. When at night I look at the moon and the stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry."

However, he observes: "Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects."

"Dedication to one thought is quickly odious," Emerson notes. "We house with the insane, and must humor them; then conversation dies out."

John Shelby Spong: A Rejection of Fundamentalism

Bishop John Shelby Spong (Retired),
Episcopal Church Diocese of Newark, NJ

"We've reached a point in our society," remarks retired Episcopalian Bishop, John Shelby Spong, "where the message that comes out of the church doesn't make contact with the world where people are living. So religion, Christianity in its traditional form, is more and more a relic of yesterday. And I don't think you can revivify a corpse."

In the attached video, Spong, a very 'controversial' figure of what might be called "the religious left" in America, brings his wide and ecumenical knowledge of biblical history and interpretation to bear not only on the story of Jesus as recounted in the Gospels, but more so on the dominant refrains of fundamentalist Christianity that are emanating from America's "religious right," alienating whole generations in America and abroad who rarely, if ever, attend church services - even for weddings and funerals.

Born into a fundamentalist evangelical culture, Spong (who was raised and schooled in North Carolina) rejects the literalist interpretation of the Bible which seems, today, to be the dominant feature of Christian life in America, going so far as to say that traditional theism itself may have to be rejected.

"The two movements that I see - at least in America, today - in religion," Spong says, "are a rush back to a fundamentalistic, pre-modern mentality that reminds me of simply an hysterical response to the death of religion. . . . And the other response, which is even bigger but doesn't make the press, is the response of those who say 'if that's what religion is, this fundamentalistic, pre-modern thing, I don't want anything to do with it.'"

Spong criticizes both "the Church" in America for promoting a form of pre-modern theism which focuses primarily on sexual matters that it knows little about, as well as the political right in America which has embraced a fundamentalist and militaristic tradition that panders to the population which embraces such fundamentalist religious views.

"God is a mystery into which we walk," Spong observes, "and the more deeply you walk the more that mystery just surrounds you."

"I consider myself today a God-intoxicated person," Spong says, "almost a mystic; but, I have no idea of what human words I would use to articulate 'who' God is, or 'what' God is; I can articulate (however) what my experience of God is."

Spong's informed but inevitably controversial views should perhaps be "required viewing" for the spiritual but not religious who are sick of the debate between fundamentalists and scientific rationalists and are still in search of spiritual teachings which are relevant to their modern, post-rationalist lives.

What Is Our Essence?

"As a man thinketh . . . so he is."

What is the "essence" of a "human being?" It is a question that has haunted philosophers, metaphysicians and psychologists for millenia.

Etymologically, or looking at where our words come from, we can see certain similarities between the two concepts. "Essence" and "being" have similar roots in Latin, Greek and Old French (discussed below); whereas "human" is related to ancient words for both "man" and "ground."

The word "human" is related to both the Latin 'homo', meaning 'same,' and to 'humus' meaning 'ground.' Is this a reference to so many creation myths that have G_d forming the first man from clay, and then bringing the clay model to life; or is it a recognition that all humans are a part of the same "Ground of Being" that has been used to denote the Absolute throughout the history of the "perennial philosophy"? I prefer the latter, but it is probably an admixture of both meanings, and other factors that are not clear at first blush.

The origins of "essence" is much clearer. "Essence" means at once 'substance,' 'existence' and 'being.' It means "that by which a thing is what it is;" and its Latin root is 'esse,' its Greek root 'ousia' - both of which mean "to be."

Hamlet's immemorial self-scrutiny led him him to observe: "To be, or not to be? That is the question." And, like all good questions, the answer is implicit in it: a triumphant "to be!". The "essence" of a "human being" is simply "being," his or her "essence" within the "Ground of Being." And the sages and seers of all ages have spoken to this truth.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
(1920-1996)

The Buddhist master, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, remarked:

"Buddhas become awakened because of realizing their essence. Sentient beings become confused because of not realizing their essence. Thus there is one basis or ground, and two different paths."

[Tulku Urgyen Rinpoch,"As It Is," vol. 2, page 43.]

In the same vein, the great Sufi teacher and polymath, Idries Shah, observed:

Idries Shah (1924-1996)

'. . . (A)ll dervish teaching is based not on the concept of God, but on the concept of essence. . . "He who knows his essential self, knows God." Knowledge of the essential self is the first step, before which there is no real knowledge of religion.'

[Idries Shah, "The Sufis," page 309.]

 It is thus no mere cryptic abstraction that the words "Know thyself" were said to be carved over the doorway to the Temple of Delphi; for he who comes to know his higher "Self," beyond the lower "self" of the ego, comes to know much about his own "essence," the essence of G_d and how to "be" in the world.

Musings . . . . Poetic and Otherwise

       No matter what your body's appearance is on the outer level, beyond that outer form it is an intensively alive energy field.
       If you are not familiar with "inner body" awareness, close you eyes for a moment and find out if there is life inside your hands, your chest, your forehead.
       Body awareness not only anchors you in the present moment; it is the key that opens the doorway out of the prison that is the ego.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Each breath we take
is an exhalation of G_d.
And, from behind each face
and set of eyes,
G_d looks out unnoticed
on this world of our creation.

The rising and falling tide,
the blowing and listing wind,
the verdant or withered grass,
the songs of birds,
and the felt breath of angels,
are each an exhalation of G_d,
and an expansion of G_d's Being.

Everything rushes away from everything,
yet the expansiveness of G_d fills all.

There is no falling from Grace or Favour,
only the oblivion of unseeing
and the acceptance of a mundane world,
where life is taken for granted
and all else feared.

Surely the miraculous is frightening
and we pine for explanations.
Yet, this inexplicable Whole
falls short even of description,
let alone an explanation.

It is only when each exhalation
becomes an inspiration
that we might know.
Until then, we can only know in part
and intuit predictions.

Let them not be based on our fears.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

What a small place the world is,
       yet how large it seems
       as foreground to the stars!
Who amongst the ancients
       could fathom such immensities
       amid which we exist?
If the rishis had known,
       or could foretell, this
       star-vault's near infinitude,
       would they have not told us,
       and, this, explicitly?

Why would the Buddha speak
       of a mere ten-thousand worlds?
Thus, even the Tathagata could not sense,
       in neither time nor space,
       the Ocean's width once crossed.

How, then, will you or I
       plumb the depths of these star-fields
       from our too small perspective.
Is it not far better to forego
       contemplation of the heavens altogether
       then to hurry from our outward introspection
       with neither moment's wonder
       nor sense of humbled awe?

"I need more Grace
       than I thought," Rumi said.
Perhaps, however, we need more Grace
       than even Rumi could foresee.

Why Intellect Alone Cannot Attain Higher Consciousness

David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.

One of the most unheralded and "under-the-radar" enlightenment teachers is David R. Hawkins. Hawkins experienced what by any measures was an authentic enlightenment experience as a young man, as recounted in his first book, "Power vs. Force: An Anatomy of Consciousness." Moreover, as a medical doctor who enjoyed a long and successful career as a psychoanalyst while staying mum about his spiritual awakening, Hawkins brings a critical and scientific perspective to bear on the discussion of higher states of consciousness and spirituality.

The author of a four general, yet in-depth, books about the nature of higher states of consciousness and "enlightenment," together with several more scientific treatises on the same subject matter (including,  "Ortheomolecular Psychiatry," authored with multiple Nobel-laureate chemist and peace activist, Linus Pauling), Hawkins explains the long silence on his own enlightenment in the following manner:

"In this case, nothing was said about it for more than thirty years during which time there progressively arose the capacity to dissimilate as normalcy and function in the world. There was no one to whom such a condition would be comprehensible. Only twice were there meetings with known sages who comprehended the condition. The first was Muktananda, and later, Ramesh Balkesar. There was another such meeting on the streets of New York City that was mutually anonymous but total and complete."

The path of enlightenment is, as has been said, a lonely path. "The harvest truly is plentiful, but the labourers are few." (Matt. 9:37)

Like Swami Muktananda, Ramesh Balkesar and the long-line of sages that preceded them (Vedantists and non-Vedantists, alike), Hawkins points to the inherent dualism and illusion of the small "self" or "ego" as the impediment to the attainment of our true nature, what he calls the "I" that underlies our supposed 'reality.' And, in order to shed the dualism of the ego and achieve a consciousness of God, he (like all other enlightened seers) stresses that it is imperative - and possible - to sever the ego's attachhments:

". . . (A)ttachments can be to either content or context, as well as to intended or hoped-for results. to undo a difficult positionality, it may be necessary to disassemble it and then surrender its elements. the payoff that is holding an attachment in place may be that it provides a feeling of security or pleasure; the pride of 'being right'; comfort or satisfaction; loyalty to some group, family, or tradition; avoidance of the fear of the unknown, etc.

 When belief systems are examined, they turn out to be based on presumptions that are prevalent in society, such as right versus wrong or good versus bad. For instance, "I have to have chocolate ice cream" (content) "and then I'll be happy" (context) is based on another positionality, that the source of happiness is outside oneself and has to be 'gotten' (in overall context). All these propositions indicate a series of dependencies (e.g., the Buddha's Law of Dependent Contingencies or Dependent Origination), and when they are surrendered, the source of happiness is found to be in the joy of existence itself, in this very moment and, beyond that in the source of one's existence - God.

Attachments are to illusions. They can be surrendered out of one's love for God, which inspires the willingness to let go of that which is comfortably familiar."
        ("I: Reality and Subjectivity," Veritas Publishing, West Sedona, AZ: 2003, pp. 352-353)

Hawkin's detailed analysis of the enlightened state, and the path to enlightenment, is not for the casual aspirant or dilettante - flouting the "presumptions that are prevalent in society" is not for the casual spiritual seeker, but rather for those who are, indeed, fully committed to their own liberation and to reaching the 'other shore' of the vast expanse of ordinary consciousness. Yet Hawkin's works are an insightful, reassuring, psychologically sound and invaluable trove of insights for the dedicated, modern aspirant on that oft-times lonely path.

The Tavern of the Soul

In Sufism, the most mystic branch of Islam (and perhaps a wisdom school that predates Islam's greatest Prophet), 'wine', 'alcohol' and 'the tavern' are symbolic of the highest spiritual and/or religious experiences. Perhaps, not unrelatedly, the renowned Swiss psychologist noted that the Latin for the "highest religious experience," spiritus, was the same as the Latin word for alcohol.

Paradoxically, the English word "alcohol" is derived from the Arabic name for the "kohl" tree, the bark of which was ground up and then distilled to produce collyrium, a fine metallic powder that was used as an eye shadow and made the wearer's eyes glisten. Islam, of course, prohibits the consumption of alcohol (as does Buddhism, which says we should refrain from intoxicants that dull the perceptive qualities of the mind). And turning "water into wine" was, of course, the first "miracle" that Jesus performed.

Jalalludin Rumi (1207-1273)

One of the first of Jalludin Rumi's mystic poems that Coleman Barks includes in his anthology of "The Essential Rumi" is the great Sufi poet's ode to the power of "wine" to transport the imbiber to this 'tavern of the soul.' In his poem, "The Many Wines," Rumi, the 14th century Afghani poet and Sufi teacher who has become one of the West's most popular poets in the past several decades, describes the transcendental power of "spirit" or "wine" in the following way:

"God has given us a dark wine so potent that,
drinking it, we leave the two worlds.
God has put into the form of hashish a power
to deliver the taster from self-consciousness.

God has made sleep so
that it erases every thought.

God made Majnun love Layla so much that
just her dog would cause confusion in him.

There are thousands of wines
that can take over our minds.

Don't think all ecstasies
are the same!

Jesus was lost in his love for God.
His donkey was drunk with barley.

Drink from the presence of saints,
not from those other jars.

Every object, every being,
is a jar full of delight.

Be a connoisseur,
and taste with caution.

Any wine will get you high.
Judge like a king, and choose the purest,

the ones unadulterated with fear,
or some urgency about "what's needed."

Drink the wine that moves you
as a camel moves when it;s been untied,
and is just ambling about."

". . . a power to deliver the taster from self-consciousness." Is that not the power that every wisdom tradition points to in 'the tavern of the soul' which exists within us all? Perhaps the most essential message from Rumi is that the human thirst for truth and meaning - for what "glistens" - can only be quenched in the 'tavern of the soul' and not in lesser taverns or in ordinary wines and spirits.

We must recall that it was the alchemists who determined that "all that glistens is not gold." And, that the greatest of alchemists were the Sufis, who were concerned only with the "alchemy of the soul."

Finding the Deepest Part of You: Butterworth, Tolle, Tillich and Synergy

The very first book of a "spiritual" nature that I didn't wholly reject out of hand (and I had read and rejected quite a view beforehand) was Eric Butterworth's Discover the Power Within You. (I believe this is the book that Maya Angelou gave Oprah which, in turn, kick-started Oprah's spiritual quest.) Shortly after that my therapist suggested I read Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now.

I was blown away. I took the book to my friend, the deeply spiritual man who had given me Butterworth's book in the first place. "Look," I said, "Here's a book that's exactly about what we're talking about. And," I added, "he doen't use the word 'God' because he says its already too freighted down with too many old meanings."

"What book is that then?" he asked in his Scottish brogue. When I showed him Tolle's Power of Now, he sort of leaned back in his chair and said, "Aye, I've been meditating on that book for eight years now." Together we would spend many days discussing these books (and many other "spiritual, but not necessarily religious" material I found) over the next few years until he passed on.

Shortly after my friend had passed away, I found a two-volume paperback set of sermons by Paul Tillich. They were sitting on a table marked "free" after a book sale. In reading one sermon of this Lutheran scholar - perhaps the most renowned Protestant scholar of the 20th century - I was so struck by the following passage that I had copies made and laminated to give to friends with a similar bent of mind to mine.  The passage talks about God from the viewpoint of one who has devoted a lifetime to plumbing the inner depths of his being in search of the Absolute:

"The wisdom of all ages and of all continents speaks about the road to of our depth. It has been described in innumerably different ways. But all those who have been concerned - mystics and priests, poets and philosophers, simple people and educated - with that road through confession, lonely self-scrutiny, internal or external catastrophes, prayer, contemplation, have witnessed to the same experience. They have found they are not what what they  believed themselves to be, even after a deeper level had appeared to them below the vanishing surface. That deeper level itself became surface, when a still deeper level was discovered, this happening again and again, as long as their lives, as long as they kept on the road to their depth. . . .

The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, what you take seriously without any reservations. Perhaps to do so you may have to forget everything traditional you have learned about God, perhaps even the word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or an unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God."

The kicker is that about three years after my friend's death, his dog-eared and worn copy of Butterworth's Discover the Power Within You, fell happily into my possession. It was only in re-reading his copy that I realized that this underlined, highlighted and notated passage from Paul Tillich and quoted by Butterworth was the exact passage I'd been handing out to friends - even the ommitted paragraph was the same.

I will not acknowledge that "God works small magics, his wonders to perform," But, I will say karma (or the law of cause and effect) works in an attention-grabbing manner to demonstrate the synergies ever present in the wholly interrelated, interwoven inter-being of our synchronystic cosmos.