Category: Spirituality

Douglas Harding is an enlightenment teacher who attained freedom in the Himalayas when he realized he had “no head.” As he famously puts it, “I lost a head and gained the universe.”

Headlessness is simply the childlike, experiential fact that we can’t see where This awareness is coming from. We’ve been conditioned to think it comes from our heads, but we’ve never seen this alleged “head” we’re supposed to have. We see heads on others, heads in mirrors, but strip away the assumptions, and all there is is a space on top of our bodies that experiences everything. There’s much more on the subject at: Harding’s website. Especially valuable is the collection of short movies which demostrate the headless insight and suggest some great practices for awareness.

The Bible says, “Lean not on your own understanding.” I agree. Use a cane, it’s much more substantial!

Seriously, I just came home from a few hours at my teacher’s weekly satsang. It’s hard to describe it, but… stuff came together. I laughed, I cried, I even clapped with my feet!

Something that had impressed me the last few days was Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness. Not once does Jesus ever say specifically, “I forgive you.” Rather, he proclaims forgiveness as a fait accompli; “Your sins are forgiven.” And in teaching us to forgive, he says “forgive each other’s sins, so that *you* may be forgiven.” This can be seen as a principle, that the open-heartedness of extending forgiveness allows forgiveness itself to be experienced, but I think there’s something else going on.

Rather, it’s that feelings and thoughts are simply illusory phenomena, including the thought of the seperate self, and feelings like guilt, depression, loneliness, whatever. Forgiveness is already the reality, or more realistically, in This divine presence, there is no separation from God, no guilt, no “right” or “wrong” as we think of them, any more than there is the separated self. If I feel something else, I’m simply experiencing a human feeling, but not my reality, since that reality is eternal, luminous, divine. So how to heal it? Go to someone else who is experiencing it and forgive them. Loneliness? Go to someone who is also lonely and be with them. The illusory feeling is shattered by embracing one who is distressed by the feeling. Anyone with a smidgen of awareness of the illusion, can help dispel these false emotions from themselves by setting others free.

The death of “self” that Jesus, Paul, and other enlightenment teachers speak of is so profound, but I saw such a simple and plain aspect of it tonight… If I realize that I’m not really “here”… if I know that this isn’t my world, that somehow I’ve never left God, then I’m “dead” to the world in a significant way. I can then recognize the needs that I perceive I have are really reflections in the world, and can minister to myself, by putting others first.

And if I’m “dead,” then there’s no fear of death. It’s like if I’ve got a week to live, I’m not going to be afraid of going skydiving! Or speaking up to a dictator. Or anything. There’s nothing to lose because I am nothing! And yet, still I am.

No, I didn’t suddenly become enlightened tonight. But some things… just came together.

A friend recently asked me to explain a verse of Rumi:

Sell your cleverness,
and buy bewilderment.

I tried explaining it like this:
The heart of mysticism is realizing the Mystery of God. Realizing is not understanding in the intellectual sense. A young child realizes God’s beauty, order and perfection through their absorption, curiosity and naked openness to the world. Hence, Jesus said we must come as little children or we cannot enter the Kingdom of God (the realm where God is all).

You might also call it the difference between apprehending and comprehending. Luther says, “bewilderment is the true comprehension” to be lost in God is to be more “found” than anyone can be with a GPS!

“Lose your psyche for my sake, and you will find it.”

Rumi’s “sell your understanding” means do not attempt to seek the holy Presence through your mind. The mind has its own purposes, but that’s not one of them. It’s not knowledge, but emptiness, openness, spaciousness of the heart. Room for God, or Capax dei. The “capacity” toward God that Mary had, and brought forth Christ.

“Buy bewilderment” means that as you begin to see God anew, stop trying to constantly note distinctions and comparisons, and allow yourself to be amazed and even confused.

Isaiah recorded God saying “as heaven/sky is higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, my thoughts than your thoughts.”

We can not understand God’s thoughts, because he does not have them in the sense that we do. When God—the Source of all that is, moves in any way, the result is appearance in the manifest world we call Creation. If God thinks “tree,” a tree appears.

Encountering God’s presence is bewildering. It cannot be “understood” for it is beyond mind. Kierkegaard said, “if you think you understand, then it isn’t God.” In fact, it is the nature of the ego, what Paul called “the flesh,” to recoil from this Presence. It’s like dipping your toe in a swimming pool and deciding it’s too cold. But if you just jump in, after the initial “bewilderment,” you begin adjusting to the water.

In the same way, as we begin to rein in the egoic mind, we become more and more accustomed to this bewilderment, and start realizing it as our natural resting place.

In the Gospel of Thomas verse 2, Jesus is recorded as saying: “Blessed are they who do not cease seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. And being disturbed, they will marvel and reign over All.”

After being disturbed and marveling, the culmination of the process is “ruling over All,” which I believe is a reference to divine transformation, or theosis—a state of union with God, in which the human soul becomes so permeated by God’s Spirit that we become like Christ, fully human, yet fully divine. The imago dei (image of God), the essence of our being, becomes clear. Like Mary, we bring forth Christ’s presence into the world. With Jesus, we become “other members” of the Body of Christ, and yet no less Christ than He is.

When I read Paul now, I sense his dismay that this wasn’t happening to everyone in the Church. “How is it that you act as mere men,” he says, as though he expected Christians to become “gods with God” (as one of the Church Fathers put it). After all, that’s exactly what happened to him after his blinding, bewildering encounter on the way to Damascus.

For most though, it takes ongoing work to subjugate the ego. And it’s not by trying to do better, pray harder, believe more strongly, doing more good deeds, or anything like that, but by constant releasing and emptying. What Jesus called self-denial and “carrying the cross” (to die), and Paul called putting off the “old man” and “dying to self.”

Enlightened teachers talk about the “death” of the self or the dismantling of the ego, (although in fact there always is some egoic remnant that remains.) My own teacher told me that it is very bewildering to find yourself without a “self.” But it does happen, whether in ever-so-gradual stages, or in an unexpected blast of enlightening grace, as with Paul.

My greatest difficulty on the path is I keep buying understanding. Knowing stuff is SO comforting to my ego. I’m smart. I’m a Christian mystic. I’m somebody. And being “somebody” keeps me from being the nobody, the empty vessel ready to be filled.

It’s a strange quirk of the English language that we capitalize the pronoun I. We don’t capitalize we, nor you, as the Germans do with Sie. Capitalization is a degree of honor in English. We give names the honor of being distinguished from mere words, and we give I tons of symbolic honor, the only word (not a name) that’s capitalized on every single occurrance.

But that’s nothing. I is a number as well, and not just any number, but the number, number one. 1. Numero uno. The beginning. The reference point. In probability, 1 represents total and complete certainty. In logic and Boolean algebra, 1 represents truth. In set theory, 1 represents everything.

How interesting that we call I the first person. And how interesting that what “I” perceive is my reference point, my beginning. And how interesting that we all confuse the view of “I” with the Truth. Certainty. Everything.

But the same letter also expresses a very different reality. In its abstract way, the relationships of other realms are reflected in mathmatics. And as mystics know that there is something beyond the material universe or “real world,” mathematicians denote a realm vastly larger than that of “real numbers.” It’s the world of i, not I.

When I is written in the lower case, i, it no longer represents 1, the truth, the whole, and certainty. Instead, it symbolizes the basic unit of a completely different framework, strangely called the imaginary, although the imaginary number i is just as real (and just as imaginary!) as the “real number” 1.

Spiritually, When the ego is shifted to the lower case, it no longer confuses its perceptions with the truth, the universe, and certainty. Instead it sees clearly, the “real world” and the _real_ world, which is “imaginary” in the viewpoint of those who are closed to the Spirit.

What’s it like?

1 / 0 = x
X = you.