Yesterday evening Diane Otto, a Bible expert, came for tea and a continuation of our newspaper forum battle between Yoga and the Bible. Having invited Ms. Otto in my last forum letter, I was looking forward to the meeting with expectations that sitting face to face we could find some common ground upon which to move the war towards a peaceful yet expanded resolution. Not!

The meeting was a continuation of the forum battle. “Yoga is Hindu paganism,” she declared like a Supreme Court justice writing the majority ruling. And once that judgment was made there was no argument after the fact because absolute truth had already been declared. “And you want to believe you are god,” she said as she prepared to leave, somewhat upset that her attempts to save my wife and me from eternal damnation had failed. Both our expectations had been denied.

This experience has given me an understanding of what it feels like to be labeled evil and hung up for judgment before an unforgiving god. At one point my wife pointed out the New Testament warning against judgment. Otto then quoted an Old Testament scripture and said, “Yes, but this cancels that.” Once the judgment is made, reason is held hostage.

What have I learned? First, expectations are false weathervanes because they seek to prove a false judgment wrong. “I’m not a pagan. Just let me sit down and show my compassion, my goodness, and this sentence will surely be overturned,” said the expectation.

Second, while I thought I had no need to defend my position, Otto was able to dig deep enough to find a sensitive nerve and I got angry when she refused to listen to my argument, which, it turned out was after all a defense.

Third, Otto was good, very good in exposing my ego to me. Even now a day after the “inquisition” my belated ego defense goes on in my head trying to come up with what I should have said. Egos are made stronger in war and weaker in peace. Ego loves nothing better than the call to arms in a holy war against the infidels. Win or loose, the ego comes out stronger.

Last night was our first Tolle meeting held the first Wednesday of the month, and one person came, two called and canceled because of conflicts, a passing hitch hiker stopped for a chat, interrupting the session for 20 minutes, and three people called on the phone for various odds and ends. An evening with Tolle is just like any other evening where you sit with whatever is happening. There is no place to go but be here, and because you recognize that there is only this Now, you welcome it without resistance. When you are irritated with anything that interrupts your plan, you should use that as a marker that you are not here. You are waiting to get to the future where your plan is going to take you. Plans are like trains going to nowhere. We are always here.

Sitting with Tolle keeps you present. We are all just sitting in a unfolding present moment, an eternal moment that takes ever new shapes. Imagine a cosmic wave of energy manifesting itself in form, and we are part of that wave, only with one difference: we are conscious of that wave.

But before we can be conscious of that wave we must step out of our cocoon of time that wraps us in thought looking to the next moment when our plans will be fulfilled. The only way to Here is through meditation. The only way to Now is to dissolve our addiction to tomorrow. “Take no thought for tomorrow,” said Jesus, and tomorrow is the next moment.

So if a stranger walks in on your evening with Tolle and interrupts your plans, or the phone rings, don’t resist, don’t get irritated, welcome that interruption, because he/she or it is also part of this present moment and the unfolding of the universe as it is.

I just watched Obama’s victory speech in North Carolina and a single well formed tear ran down my cheek. I could feel the warm trail on my cheek as it slowly, slowly made its way down to the corner of my lip where it lay spent. Then the air cooled and dried the moist path of the tear, leaving my eyes moist and blinking. When was the last time a presidential candidate did that?

To sit in the early morning as the sun climbs over your shut eyelids and listen to the symphony of birds play about the yard and bushes is incredibly sweet. Just to sit with no thoughts interrupting and dissolve like a sugar lump in a cup of tea and sip nature’s sound brew is like meeting ones self in the moment of your creation.  Sit with no thought for the next moment, and if thoughts do pass by, treat them like a few birds in the sky. Nothing to bother about. Just let them fly. And if feelings come up, why they are no different then the cool breeze passing by your cheek with her skirts brushing your face. Nothing to get disturbed about. And if a car or truck passes and rides over the dancing sounds of the birds, it is nothing but a base violin with a few drums come to fill out the symphony.

When I walked into the waiting room of yoga students at the retired teachers’ conference last Monday, I didn’t know if it would be a large room with space for yoga asanas or a classroom. It was a classroom with thirty people sitting in chairs. One women coming in late said that if she had to get on the floor she was leaving. This was like teaching a photography class with no cameras or art without art supplies.

But yoga needs no equipment. In fact, yoga doesn’t even need movement. The practice of yoga is to go beyond movement. And the means to this end can be any posture you are in. Standing at the checkout counter in WalMart is a posture. To be fully conscious wherever you are, whatever you are doing, is to be present with no thought for the next moment. That is yoga. In fact, it is also the teaching of Jesus when he said take no thought for tomorrow. What he means is take no thought for the next moment. Be here totally.

So with the retired teachers we just learned how to sit and pay attention to the breath. It was fun. That’s all we did.

Blackstone (and Nottoway County) put its theater talent front stage this past weekend with the performance of Annie. Despite its minor flaws of timing, the play brought a glow to my heart as I watched the magic of theater plant its seed here in my town. How many of those orphans on stage would someday perform in the arts because of this play? How many adults who discovered the joy of surrendering to a performance will be ready to sign up for the next play that comes to our town?

Who is Annie but the transcendent optimism and a spirit that finds joy and hope in every circumstance? As the Greeks discovered, theater is healing. Theater shows us how to step out of our worldly egos that become a prison of despair and suffering. Theater helps us discover that our egos and the stage they play on are not real but just another play. Theater makes us realize that we choose our roles and our plays, and because we choose them we always have a choice on how we experience our world.

Do we experience the world as the ever-optimistic Annie or as Miss Hannigan, the miserable child-hating woman who runs the orphanage? Theater is a living metaphor that frees us from ourselves.

In 1968, 40 years ago I awoke one morning after going to sleep listening to a tape of Krishnamurti and I knew who I was. I looked in the mirror and laughed out loud in recognition. I was I, not the ego-I that went to sleep the night before but the I am I that existed before I was born and will exist after the body dies. The myth of the tiger who looked into the pond and saw that he was not a sheep but a tiger was me!

But in a few weeks the pond scum of my ego conditioning covered the water and my soul, my Beloved, began to fade.But, while I didn’t realize it then, I had many years in the wilderness to live through, many years of peeling back the layers of ego structure that encased my soul. All the dramas in my life, my divorce, my many jobs, and my spiritual wanderings were all just my trials and tribulations trying to find my soul again.

But the great secret is—one that is given to each of us to discover anew—is that the soul never leaves and we are never separate from God. It is only the ego that stands amid this truth trying to keep the search alive. The truth is that the ego is the search. The ego is that which looks for fulfilment. The ego is a knot of dissatisfaction in the consciousness. But how can I find God if I don’t search, the seeker asks? How can I untie the knot if I don’t try?

Here is the paradox. We are doomed to search until we realize the futility of searching. And we can only realize that futility through seeking and suffering. Suffering is essentially being separate from God, from our source. Finding God is not a matter of belief, but of being who we already are. When we are who we are, the wilderness disappears. Each of us is destined to some day, in some lifetime, to look in the mirror one morning and say: “Hah!”

Whoever controls the metaphor controls the world. (Just made that up) This is obvious in today’s politics and the Republicans wait hopefully for Obama to fall doing something he’s not good at, like ice skating. Kerry fell victim to the metaphor of wind surfing and Dukakis got lost in his tank helmet. But metaphor has deeper levels than politics.

Many people don’t realize this but the Age of Reason that gave birth to our American revolution also wiped our collective minds clean of cultural myth and metaphor. In the Middle Ages man lived in his religious myths. The sun did revolve around the earth. Heaven really was up there beyond the clouds and hell really was beneath the corn fields. But, and many people don’t realize this, science didn’t remove all myths, it just replaced one with another, and that myth is still living. The way you discover a living myth is to notice that you can’t see it. We can see that there are no God and angels up in the sky. But we can’t see that we are not separate from God. The myth of secular materialism is that man is separate from the source of his existence. Even the Bible is interpreted this way. God is separate from His creation. Science depends on this myth for its control over nature.

We are now in an age when new metaphors are being called forth, metaphors that bring us home to our source. The Kingdom of God is within, said Jesus. But no one took him literally. The church said he was speaking in a metaphor, but he was not. He really meant that God dwells within us as us and that we can be that. But we can’t discover that because we believe the myth that He doesn’t.

Change you metaphor and you can transform your world.

To grow our life we must make space for new growth. Every gardener know this, but when it comes to our own life we lose our green thumb. So, what do we have to get rid of to make a new space? Fear. Fear is the cover that cuts out the light for new growth. And what do we fear? The future.

But what is the future but the belief that we won’t grow. What kind of gardener would plant a seed and then believe that it wouldn’t grow? We can tell when fear is our gardening tool because fear make us try to grow our soul seeds. Life takes no effort.

Remember that line? Well, it’s true, but not in the way we think it is. That space, that last frontier, is within. And to go there we must get past the pull of thoughts, the gravity of the ego. Ego or our thinking mind and the feelings we clothe our mind in is our inner atmosphere, and it takes intention, which is our rocket, to break through it. When we break through our inner belt of thinking, just like astronauts we enter a timeless boundless space. That space is pure awareness, and awareness says with the voice of God: I AM

Yoga/meditation is the rocket that can give us lift off, but the rocket can only take us so far. Then it must fall off so we can be free. That moment of separation comes not from our effort or the rocket, but from grace. Grace comes, separation from suffering comes, only when we are ready. But to get ready, there must first be the rocket and the effort. We must get to the outer edge of our thinking mind before we can separate from it and be free.