Category: Spirituality

Whew. Time for a break

Jon2 Comments

Five six posts in five in six days. I need to take a break. Not because I’m tired or am running out of things to say, but I need to do some serious housekeeping on the blog here. It’s a little technical, but WordPress users and interested geeks should keep reading.

I love WordPress. I can’t imagine switching to any other publishing engine, unless I build one myself sometime . (Yeah, right). But WP has a serious problem: Neither of its Textile plug-ins work.

Jim Rigg’s plugin hasn’t had any new development for a long time. It works decently for most of the stuff I want it to do, but lately, with the newest version of WP, is wrecking havoc with my paragraphs, line breaks, and blockquotes, and even editing in HTML doesn’t fix it as long as the plugin is enabled. Since it’s based on Brad Choate’s excellent version of Textile for Movable Type, which I used for well over a year, its features are what I think of when I think of Textile.

Then there’s Joel Bennett’s excellent TextileWrapper for WP. Although this was updated and released just a few days ago, It’s even less acceptable to me. Bennett says that this truly is Dean Allen’s Textile for WP, no core code or features changed at all. Perhaps it does work just like that for Textpattern, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, and if it is the case, it’s Choate-style Textile I need.

For instance, one of the things I found most convenient about Choate’s Textile, is how easy it was to add a class to virtually any element, without going into the HTML. I use a class for indicating which links are external and producing a little “offsite” symbol, for instance. Not only is that not working in this build of of WP and Bennett’s release, but it doesn’t insert classes for a tags, inline styles for anything that I can tell, and freaks out when Textile markup is nested within other markup.

I have but one solution: Get rid of all the Textile markup, since I don’t know how any future release of WP or ported-over versions of Textile will play with together. This will not be fun. I have over two hundred 230 posts now, probably 160 or so with Textile code. But I need to do this now before it gets worse.

See ya.

Meditation on “Imagine,” conclusion

Jon1 Comment

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

No possessions. This is easier for me. For several years, I considered joining a Catholic religious order. I looked forward to the prospect of making lifelong vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. (Well, poverty and chastity, at least! Obedience? Say what?) The modern life of monks and nuns in religious orders isn’t completely free of possessions, but it comes close. It’s definitely a refutation of consumerism and greed. The Paulist Fathers more accurately call it a promise of Gospel simplicity rather than “poverty.”
After much “discernment” (the work that both the inquirer and the order do to find God’s will in the matter), it became clear to me that my mission is to live in the world, with all of its challenges, not in a monastery or friary designed to help me cultivate my interior spiritual life.

Well, the fact is I’m not a monk, and I no longer seek to have no possessions. In fact, I’m looking forward to upgrading the RAM in my PC and probably replacing my ailing DVD player. But I try to live relatively simply. I am very conscious of greed in our society, and its effect upon the soul and upon the world. “Freedom from want” is nigh impossible when nearly every marketing dollar goes is spent to increase wanting. And meanwhile, often because the very definition of the consumer society is that it can never have enough, the other kind of wanting—lack, deprivation, hunger ensues.

Idealistic top-down efforts have tried and failed to change this. Communism was a spectacular failure of idealism, which created horrific suffering for the world. What I can do, is work on the bottom-up approach. I can control my wanting. If I destroy the wanting engine within myself, someone else can have more. Imagine if more of us did the same, we would be doing the one of most revolutionary things possible.

Imagine!

Posts in this series: pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3, interlude, conclusion.

Drag

Jon4 Comments

Aerodynamic forces
Isaiah recently commented about how persistent the illusion is. It’s a constant. Except for those who live in a state of enlightenment or theosis, the instant you take your eyes off of the goal, off of the divine reality, the world returns.

Or another way of putting it is that the moment you stop pressing forward with your simple, unconditional, loving awareness, you experience something pushing you back, whether you notice it or not. I remember when I was taught about aerodynamics in junior high, that there are four “forces” acting on a airplane: weight, lift, thrust and drag.

What I’m talking about is spiritual drag. The very experience (or environment or phrase or thought) that helps us to see God better at one point, often hinders us from going on to the next. The instant I stop “letting the mind of Christ” be in me, “my” own mind fills me, with conflict, egoic fears, and all the rest. Jesus called the Path “the narrow Way.” The Katha Upanishad amplifies that narrowness, and calls it “walking the razor’s edge.”

So what keeps the illusion in place? Why am I always “me?” The language we were taught about “The enemy” seems so apropos. Mara, Maya, Tempter, Satan, Devil, Demiurge. Drag. In every moment, Drag seems to be an invisible force, pushing us back, in every place, ready to thwart, diminish, skew or cover up our awareness of God’s reality. Everywhere we are, the enemy seems to be, too. Yin matches Yang.

Or so it seems. The fact is, physicists laugh at the “four forces” of aerodynamics. With their higher level of understanding, where others see weight, thrust, lift and drag, they only see one: Inertia, the tendency of an object to resist change?whether being put into motion, or to change its motion.

Drag is just one more part of the illusion. And the source is simply our little selves.

And they aren’t even here, either.

Welcome back, Mark!

Jon3 Comments

There’s at least one good thing about a wonderful blogger taking a hiatus from Web: like all things it tends to be impermanent.

Mark Walter of Eternal Awareness is back. Mark’s blog has struck me as one of the wisest and most honest personal expressions on the Web, and one of the most beautiful as well.

Please stop by and treat your soul to the company of this fellow traveler. And it might be nice to leave a comment?especially since his last 100 comments have been spam!

At peace in a world of conflict

Jon7 Comments

So much drama in the world! The strange thing is that, other than a very strong wish for peace, I’m very unmoved by it. I feel in a way, almost like Ashtavakra: The world and all its swirling storms are illusion, there is only peace. It’s like the posts that I’ve written against “belief” in countries, and “identification” with religions and other distinctions, are starting to take hold here.

Not to long ago, I would’ve rejected a peace like this on principle (interesting how our principles destroy peace, __nicht wahr?__): How dare I not get worked up! The world’s aflame from Israel and Lebanon to Afghanistan, “my” country’s in the thick of it, and Syria and Iran add major fuel to the fire. With that state of affairs, surely I’ve got a _responsibility_ to be disturbed, don’t I?

What about the other side of the coin? Should I dance and sing because a major terrorist plot was foiled? (Yes, I _am_ very glad that more massive suffering was apparently prevented. But I’m not fooled into forgetting where the _real_ battle is.)

So mostly I’m unmoved. I see the dramas that the ego’s identifications, defenses, aggressions, resentments and so forth make on the grand scale, and I can recognize them for what they are. And now, instead of feeling guilty about refusing the invitations to lose focus, I feel more certain that this _detachment_ from the blame game, the “me” game, the “us” game, the “them” game, and all the mess, is a significant key to peace.

Detachment isn’t a lack of love. It’s non-reactive love, or rather, the environment that allows natural love to flourish. Ego-based love falls easily into the karmic traps. (The bastards killed my sister on 9/11 ? I’m going to Afghanistan to pay them back!)? As natural as such a reaction is, it is a reaction. And at least one result is that al-Qaeda has gotten a lot more battle experience as the drama of action and reaction continues.

How to stop the drama? Shall I organize massive protests and marches for peace? Sometimes, and in some places, that seems to work. More often than not, I suspect, it creates more conflict, and hardens people into defending the positions they’ve already taken.

In ??A New World??, Eckhart Tolle discusses how personal awakening contributes to global awakening. One person is at peace, he can dampen the reactivity of others. Presence ? deliberate, calm, presence, extends outward, and not just through natural means, either. The butterfly effect can happen. “(ext)Kitabu Roshi”:http://soulsword.org writes in his new book, ??Soul to Soul?? that while you enjoy a cup of coffee, you can influence a vote in Congress between your first sip and your last.

Nonduality seems madness to those who haven’t had a glimpse yet. Who is dying in Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq? Me, just me. But even more than that, no one. Nothing has happened. Things are not as they appear. There is no world to disturb my peace. And there is no “my” peace, anyway. Hell, I’m not even here!

Want a non-mystical explanation? Chris Dierkes is back and blogging, and has written an insightful essay on the Integral World website: Dr. Persianlove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Iranian bomb.

Meditation on “Imagine” pt. 3

Jon2 Comments

Imagine there?s no countries
It isn?t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

“And no religion too” has a been a difficult part of the song for me until recently. One of the key points is understanding what is meant by “religion.”

It’s often pointed out that “religion” comes from the Latin for “to bind again.” In a positive sense, this is _repair_, binding us together again, making us whole, building community, creating moral underpinnings, providing purpose and hope, establishing a base upon which to reach out to others, and at its very best, providing an entrance through which one can experience the numinous.

In a negative sense, though, binding is bondage, creating vast arrays of mental garbage that prevents many _from_ discovering God, themselves, and full human life. It also implies separation.

Imagine (no pun intended) a stick bound in a bundle with other sticks. They become a group, a unit. Yet, in being bound together, they are also bound away from everything else. A single stick loses its fractured “identity” as a simple stick, and becomes a part of something larger than its small broken self, yet smaller that the whole it is inherently part of (all the wood on Earth).

This, in miniature, reflects the deficiency of “identity” given by the rebinding of religion. It’s excellent as far as lifting the individual to the next higher step, yet the very bonds that lifted him up to that point might inhibit him from being able to reach the next step beyond that. If so, he may identify with the religion, and create an identity from it. Our religious identities are as flimsy as our national identities, though they seem not to be at first. After all, I can have an experience of God, but does anyone have an experience of “country?” I don’t think so.

At times in my life, I have imagined (pun intended) that I was a Baptist, a Methodist, a Charismatic, a Lutheran, a Messianic gentile, a member of the Christian Church Disciples of Christ, or a Catholic. Since my first experience of Christ, I’ve imagined I was “a Christian.” Yet Jesus only asked people to follow him, not to “become Christians!”

The truth is I am a human being, and as far as I can tell, even that apparent condition is only in effect until I die. I am spirit, or consciousness, or life. In Judeo-Christian terms, I’m made in “the image of God,” imago Dei. Other religions have other terms. Whatever it’s called (and it’s important to not attach to any particular language), that is the only thing that is unchangeable.

Yet the identification with a religion has nothing to do with the knowledge of God. The former gives the language and interpretation, the mental filling, that comes before and after those sacred moments of knowing. And the labels are purely products of the mind. No doctor has ever identified a Muslim headache or a Catholic T-cell. The Baptist gene remains stubbornly beyond discovery, and the Daoist dermis seems to be a myth! Yet there’s no shortage of people to tell you that you “are” Shi’a or Anglican or Jodo Shin Buddhist, or whatever.

Imagine there’s no religion…

Since the experience I had in January, I can. It’s much simpler than religion. Simpler than any concept of God or nirvana. Simpler than a single word It’s just:

.

Posts in this series: pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3, interlude, conclusion.

Is the Buddha a recognized Christian saint?

Jon8 Comments

Saint Siddhartha Gautama, pray for us!

Sure, I’ve recognized the Buddha as a saint for years, but imagine my surprise when I received an email from a reader today pointing out that “Saint Josaphat” is a figure derived from the story of Siddhartha Gautama.

I decided to check it out, and found these links:

Check out the Wikipedia article on Saint Josaphat.

Still, I was wondering if this might be Christo-Buddhist wishful thinking, until I saw this article in the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia, which simply affirms that the story of Josaphat is a Christianized version of the Buddha’s story. The article nowhere calls Josaphat a saint, which leads to the question, did he actually become a Catholic saint or not, and if so, is he still?

The email I received stated that the Catholic Church “proclaimed” him a saint, and he was later reaffirmed as such by St. John of Damascus (aka the Hermit, aka Damascene) who died in the mid-8th century. Technically speaking he certainly wasn’t “proclaimed” a saint. Proclamation, the culmination of the rigorous process of canonization, had not yet been developed by the Church. Saints in the first millennium were recognized by popular acclamation, and it does seem he was regarded as a saint, with a feast day of November 27. And here at the Online Medieval and Classical Library is the story of Barlaam and Ioasaph, attributed to St. John of Damascus.

Apparently his feast day was removed from the Catholic liturgical calendar in 1969, but that technically does not “de-saint” a saint—it merely de-emphasizes them. (And sometimes not very successfully; just google St. Philomena or St. Christopher to see that devotion to those saints persists contrary to Church efforts.)

Of course, all this ultimately is irrelevant. Is the Buddha a saint? Duh!

Peaceful Warrior

Jon2 Comments

I just got out of the Naro’s showing of Peaceful Warrior, based on Dan Millman’s novel, Way of the Peaceful Warrior. It’s simply *perfect.* Finally, a film with overt teaching on the path, that succeeds on all levels and by any standards. I’ll write a full review this weekend.

In the meantime, let me say, SEE THIS MOVIE! Bring your friends. Bring your enemies. Just don’t miss this.