Observations that dive deep into life and come up with treasures for all

As a lover of God and the path of liberation that reveals itself in all the major and not so major religions I find myself back in the Old Testament when Yahweh was angry with the Jews for worshiping false idols. I’ve been reading Karen Armstrongs History of God and I had no idea such struggle went on during the 1000 years before Christ as the God of the Jews began to find its definition in the vision of the prophets. There was this on going fight between the gods of the area—mostly feminine— and the warrior god of Israel. Only Yahweh seemed to be the jealous God. The pagan gods had a live and let live attitude. Only Yahweh had a chosen people, and he would punish them when they were bad.

So here we are today and not much has changed. For many God is still that jealous God that hates idols, like yoga and New Age and anything that does not fit the ritual of church doctrine. While Protestants threw out the rich drama of Catholic ritual, thinking they were getting back to the purity of the Word, what they ended up with was a ritual of the word, or a ritual of the mind. Instead of the body conforming to ritual patterns, now the mind must conform.

That leaves me, a free soul having difficulty finding the religious words that have not been highjacked by ritual. Fortunately there is one thing left in the Bible that cannot be confined in ritual use of words, and that is the teaching of Jesus. Somehow the power of his person comes through the history of the Jews, through the history of man like a beam of light. Just as in our own life when we stand in the power of a miraculous moment when everything is clear and we know that we are larger than we think we are, our history is pierced by the sword of truth. Christ kills ritual and brings the mind to its knees.

Our mind is a time-line of history, but Christ is who we are before we got named and framed. But somehow Christ got highjacked by history and imprisoned in time. Christ has become a ritual. From this perspective it is the God of current religion that has become the idol—and Yahweh is still angry.

Posted under General Observations

The road to Jesus Christ is a parallel course, one objective and one subjective, one outer and one inner, but in our culture the objective road is a  paved highway while the other is a seldom traveled dirt road almost hidden by weeds. We could name the objective road Jesus and the inner road Christ. We need to travel both at the same time if we seek liberation from the suffering of our history. The objective path sees Jesus as a person, an IT that is a form or an image or thought. The subjective path doesn’t see Jesus at all; there is no IT or even idea; there is only the I that sees form, and this eye can’t see itself. This is the eye that sees our image in the mirror and feels a disconnect from the history of the image.

But to walk the subjective path we must give up walking the objective path, for awhile anyway. After the subjective path is revealed and we no longer need a compass, then we can enjoy the sights on the objective path—but until we stop seeing Christ as an IT, we need to take a break.

The objective path of ITs is also the path of history and time. The subjective path of I is always right now, and in this moment there is no time, no psychological time, that is. When you are really here, like when meeting a loved one or trying to avoid a car crash, you are not worrying about your tomorrow. You are absolutely here in no time. Consciously you are just saying I AM this moment. Then the mind comes in and starts thinking, and you are back in your history.

The path tof liberation and the Kingdom of Heaven is both horizontal and verticle at the same time. Without one or the other you don’t have a cross. Time and eternity can meet in you. One can call the verticle path meditation and the horizontal path contemplation of scriptures. One path is for the heart, the other is for the head.

Posted under meditation help

I have had the good fortune to have met three realized masters in my life. While I have always thought these connections (and with Swami Satchidananda only a hello) were all too brief and inconsequential—I had no flashing lights and attained no ecstatic states—with time they seem to be much more than they seemed. Lets put it this way: a realized being is like vast outer space. Once you have been there, so they say, you never forget. You reach into space with your eyes and touch nothing. You reach into a master eyes and keep falling. You suddenly come to the edge of your so-called identity and then keep going. It’s scary. You become acutely aware that with this guy you are not in control, and yet he is doing absolutely nothing.

This is the difficult thing for us mind’s to grasp. A realized master is doing nothing; he is just being here. It’s like the universe is doing him, so in his presence you begin to feel this vastness. A master being allows you to spill out of your You. A master teacher is like death to your idea of who you are. And this is scary.

Now years after these masters have gone from my life, that relationship with space and its mystery that I found in their presence is being freed from history and the past. The relationship with the master is no longer back then but now, and the master no longer has a human form but is just this present moment in whatever form it chooses to take. My sleeping cat, the hot coffee cooling next to me, the morning light cutting across the living room rug, my breath, these thoughts and words crawling like ants across the laptop screen…so vast and mysterious, so empty and yet so full. The master is here.

Posted under meditation help

We often read time is an illusion, and when we look in the mirror and see an aging face but the looker inside doesn’t feel old, then we experience a disconnect between the observer and the observed. “I don’t feel old,” we say when asked our age, and we don’t, In fact, this witness of the body is the same since our earliest memories. I have always been here, this I that is aware of my body and my thought. This is the only absolute truth I know as all the images of history come and go. I am always here.

But we forget this I, this pure subjectivity, and believe we are the image, the thought, and the body that we observe. But how can I be what I observe? Who is the observer? Who am I? Am I the unborn? Am I the unmoved mover? Am I the still point around which the cosmos revolves? And if I am not an image or any physical point, not even an atom or an electron, then do I have any physical existence at all? Maybe I am just space, just pure consciousness—just an I without an it.

So if this is true, and I am prior to the physical world and the thoughts about it, then I am prior to the space/time field in which all physical objects exist. I am before time, and that’s why I don’t feel old even though my body is old. I am timeless. And when death comes, will not I still exist?

I think this is what Jesus Christ was trying to tell us, and continues to tell us through his teachings in the Bible. The Bible is time, history, a story of the Jews, but Christ appears in the middle of it like a hole in time. He invites us to look at time, at our personal history, through his timeless eyes, through and as his subjectivity. So in order to know Christ, one has to look through his eyes, be his eyes looking from the inside out into the world of time and objects.

To look at the mirror and say I’m not that image or even thought of that image is to peer at the world through a hole in time. Christ is a knothole in the wall of time.

Posted under meditation help

A friend of mind, almost 40, gets rushes of panic occasionally when he fears he is not where he should be at his age, and then he gets either down or looking frantically around the map for a location where his fortune might be better. “I’ve got gypsy in my blood,” he would say to explain this sudden and recurring wander lust.

“But this panic, the urge to arrive as some imagined goal, while a necessary energy, can also be your very obstacle to your so-called arriving,” I told him when an opportunity window opened for a little insight. “The shovel we pick up to dig our way out of our history is the same shovel that buries us in our history. The same load of dirt is going both ways. We think we are emptying the grave, but we are also filling it at the same time. The result is that we go nowhere, and this creates more panic. A classic double-bind,” I said.

His eyes were saying, “so what’s the answer?”

“Well, when you see this pair of opposites, this shovel going in both directions at once, really see it with the heart and not just the mind, the shovel just drops to the ground and you are free. You realized that you have already arrived. You are here in this moment, and when you are really here then opportunities suddenly appear at your feet as if sleeping seeds had suddenly sprouted. As long as your eyes are on the future you won’t see that you are standing in a garden full of growing flowers. Everything you need for happiness is already here.  No matter where you are, you are always right here. Even if you go someplace else, you will still be here in this present moment.”

About an hour later he was cleaning the fall leaves off the Buddha pond, and he called me over to let me know one of my larger koi had died. “Fish come and go,” I said as he threw the fish over into the deep brush behind the pond.

And now as I look back with a wider angle, maybe something had died in my friend as well. Fish are a deep symbol of liberation in Christianity. The sign of the fish was a way of letting others know that Christ, or a Christian,  had been here.

This, perhaps, was Christ’s way of indicating and celebrating the resurrection of His brother and friend from the painful grave of his history.

Posted under current events