Thomas Merton told Brother David Steindl-Rast, shortly before Merton died: ” I do not believe that I could understand our Christian faith the way I understand it if it were not for the light of Buddhism.”
One of the ideas that Buddhists, Contemplative Christians and secular science seem to agree on is that time is relative and that eternity is always happening right now in the present moment. So let’s imagine we have written to the Buddha to ask him to give Buddhist insights into the parallels and differences between Buddhism and Christianity, so that we might deepen our own Christian faith. After all, we are all in this together at each eternal moment; and all three perspectives of Buddhism, Christianity and science agree that truth anywhere is truth everywhere.
The Buddha’s Response
Dear Contemplative Christian Friends,
Thank you for your questions. Let me start with the parallels on a basic level. Buddhism has three central ideas that are referred to as the three jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. Christianity has three similar pivotal ideas. Buddha nature is similar to the Christian understanding that everyone is made in the image and likeness of God; in other words, the Christian belief is that every person has this divine essence within them just as every person from a Buddhist perspective would have Buddha nature within them. The Dharma has a broad definition that is difficult to capture but certainly includes teachings and practices taught by me for Buddhists to follow. Dharma can be translated as Duty or Way, just as following Jesus has always been known as the Way. Thirdly, the Sangha refers to the community of fellow Buddhist practitioners. In Christianity you think of it as the Church, the community of fellow seekers following the Way of Jesus.
The central issue for these two religions, or any religion for that matter, is — how do we as human beings encounter the experience of existence? In my enlightenment experience, I realized the key issue underlying this question is how do we understand the nature of suffering and the cause of suffering. In Christianity the issue is of suffering and the cause of suffering is condensed into one idea — sin, or falling short (in Greek, harmatia).
The Human Dilemma of Suffering and the Nature of Reality
In his book Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton says: “Both Christianity and Buddhism show that suffering remains inexplicable, most of all for the man who attempts to explain it in order to evade it, or who thinks explanation itself is an escape. Suffering is not a ‘ problem’ as if it were something we could stand outside of and control. Suffering, as both Christianity and Buddhism see, each in its own way, is part of our very ego-identity and empirical existence, and the only thing to do about it is to plunge right into the middle of contradiction and confusion in order to be transformed by what Zen [Buddhism] calls ‘ the great death’ and Christianity calls ‘dying and rising with Christ’.”
In order to understand this human dilemma of suffering, and the responses to it of Buddhism and Christianity my enlightenment experience helped me realize that we must first understand the nature of reality. I experienced that the cause of all suffering (samsara) was appearance. You will understand this in modern terms as the fact that all human perception is filtered through ordinary ways of knowing based on one’s history, one’s culture, one’s biases, etc. We don’t directly see the world, we see a world of filtered form or appearances, and this filtering causes misperceptions which result in the attachments and aversions that cause our suffering.
Christianity sees existence in a very similar way; particularly as described by the temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness. Those temptations, as summarized in Welcoming Prayer, are: the need for power and control, the need for security and survival, and the need for esteem and affection. All suffering, or if you will sin, arises because we are seeing from our ego personality structure separated from seeing from the Ground of Being. Separated from seeing from unity with God, our personality structure filters and distorts reality through the lens of our personality structure’s instinctual needs. Shorthand: separation = (distorted seeing) sin = suffering.
Buddhism and Christianity present similar understandings of what to do with the problem of suffering or sin. Through the practice of meditation Buddhists learn to experience existence as not just form but also emptiness. When our capacity to be aware is clear, that is when the ego personality is not filtering existence then our inner experience of our perception is emptiness. When the world is experienced through this perspective, there is no suffering. Because all perception is relational (science shows us we only understand the nature of a particle depending upon the location from which the particle is observed), when we observe reality from the unity of our beingness what is experienced is the is-ness of everything without attachment or aversion.
Similarly for Christians, the answer to sin is to repent, or metanoia, which means to see in a new way. In other words, Christians are also asked to see without the mind filtering reality by the ego’s needs and instead to see from a state of unity with everything. This is described as seeing with the mind of Christ. Through Christian contemplative practices, the Christian seeker gradually becomes able to see through a less filtered lens, and not through a glass so darkly. This was the path of early Christians, who went to the desert where the very emptiness of the desert let the external reality of the landscape help illuminate the insight of being able to see with a clear mind, with the mind of Christ. This contemplative tradition was reinvigorated during the medieval years within the monastic traditions. It was during those years that the book The Cloud of Unknowing was written, which became the primary source for Father Thomas Keating’s development of the contemplative practice of Centering Prayer.
For both Buddhist and Christian as the human capacity for awareness becomes less and less filtered by the ego’s personality structure one’s Buddha nature is more readily experienced, or seeing with the mind of Christ, as the case may be. Both traditions would affirm that the totality of how a human being encounters existence is an experience through a personality structure, which filters reality causing suffering, or sin, and a Buddha nature, or image-and-likeness of God nature, which is pure.
The process of spiritual growth in both faiths is developmental, and so, as one reaches mid-life, Buddhist and Christian contemplative practices are designed to help the seeker live more from one’s Buddha nature or, more and from one’s divine image-and-likeness of God nature. As this developmental process unfurls a person becomes more and more able to experience peace, joy and the minute by minute unfolding of being-ness. The other thing that seems to happen, and Buddhist enlightened beings in the common era may be copying you Christians here, is that individuals who experience liberation from appearances, or suffering, are quite naturally called to be of service through self-emptying love to help others who are struggling on their life paths. In the Buddhist tradition this is known as striving to be a Bodhisattva. In the Christian tradition, this is striving to be Christlike. In both traditions what is essential is to use the energy of striving to focus on the practices that are going to allow for a clearer, freer mind, and at the same time to let go of any clinging to a goal of being enlightened or Christlike. In other words, not let the ego hijack the process of spiritual maturation.
This process of spiritual growth is difficult because as one becomes freer and freer of the personality the seeker feels like he or she is falling into emptiness. When there is no awareness of a self and no sense of identity as a separate self this can be terrifying. This is why in Christianity the spiritual path is called entering the narrow gate. In Buddhism it is exemplified by images of fierce animals guarding the entranceway to Buddhist temples. Because, as Merton reminds us, the change in perception is so profound both Buddhism and Christianity use the image of dying and being born again.
Each tradition also stresses the benefit — of changing the way one is perceiving reality — is to experience a new kind of life now. For Buddhists it is the achievement of enlightenment, or Nirvana, in this life. For Christians it is described as entering the Kingdom of Heaven now. This new way of seeing — being in the Kingdom of Heaven — was a central theme of Jesus’ preaching ministry. By the phrase “Kingdom of Heaven,” Jesus meant a particular level of human consciousness and way of seeing, not simply a place to which Christians were destined after death. Only later during the terrible conditions of life in the Middle Ages did the medieval church begin to focus on an afterlife destination. Both religions posit a continued existence after death.
Buddhists attack the problem of experiencing loss of identification with one’s personality straight forwardly and teach about an understanding of no-self. However, that doesn’t make the process of going through emptiness any easier for anyone to do. This journey requires a great deal of commitment. For a Buddhist this commitment comes from experiencing their Buddha nature, the Dharma and the love and guidance of a teacher and support of their sangha. For Christians this is faith in Christ, experiences of God’s love, and support of one’s church community.
The good news is that as this process unfolds emptiness itself begins to be experienced as not empty but the entry way to a life-giving source of unbounded beingness, from which arise love, support and intelligence. So as the ego structure, which one has always depended upon, is diminished the seeker gradually begins to experience that there is something even more powerful beneath the experience of no-self to illuminate and enliven one’s experience of life. This is an experience of presence generated through being-ness and the unity of perception.
The Gethsamni Encounter
Twenty years after Merton’s death, an interfaith dialogue was organized called The Gethsamni Encounter: A Dialogue on the Spiritual Life by Buddhist and Christian Monastics. In the transcript of the discussion which was later turned into a book, a Buddhist monk at the conference quoted with approval the following remark of Merton: “At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own world.”
Differences between Buddhism and Christianity: Practices, Ways of Knowing (Epistemology), and Spiritual Information
One of the biggest differences between Buddhism and Christianity is the greater focus in Buddhism on practices and epistemology. Buddhist meditation practices are designed to help a practitioner have a quiet mind and when focused in attention a curious mind. Buddhism like Christianity acknowledges that there are three different ways of knowing: sensate awareness through the body, emotional awareness through the heart and mental awareness through the mind. Buddhism does not ask its followers to take any of the tenets of Buddhism on faith. Rather Buddhism stresses practices which will help its followers go beyond knowing about Buddhism as learned information to experience the teachings of the Buddha directly.
Both traditions see the totality of a human being as containing a learned ego or personality structure whose limited perspective causes suffering or sin; and an eternal essence of Buddha nature or divine image-and-likeness of God from which arise truth, love and goodness. This is the point Merton is describing as a point of pure truth, that provides eternal connection to God. In both traditions practice is needed like an athlete going to the gym and doing a certain number of repetitions with weights so that when she is out on the field playing she easily taps into the capacity to play with strength and grace. To complete the metaphor contemplative practices allow Contemplative Christians in the ordinary day to day experience of life to access their divine essence which enables them to tap into the field of beingness from which arise truth, love, beauty and goodness.
The same experience would be true for the Buddhist practitioner, though she would call the experience tapping into her Buddha nature. Spiritual knowledge for Buddhists is not given much credence unless it is learned from direct experience. While Buddhism encourages all three ways of knowing, it stresses the need to inquire into the nature of the experience that gives rise to inner knowing. How do you know what you know? For example, say a practitioner has a deep meditation and thereafter has some insight about the meaning of his life, Buddhism urges the practitioner to inquiry into that knowing, how did it come about, what was his bodily, emotional and mental experience of it; what lies beneath it and so on.
Christianity on the other hand, but not Contemplative Christianity as Merton has given witness to, seems to rely for the most part on people learning information about the Christian faith. It does have rituals that are designed to allow a Christian to experience the meaning of Christian precepts; that is to know them directly. The celebration of the Eucharist or Communion is the most central of these rituals. Unfortunately, it seems for many to be a trite container that does not generally allow for a person to experience inner knowing. However, I understand from Contemplative Christians that after they have been on the contemplative path awhile, done their reps in the gym of contemplation so to speak, participation in what once seemed like tired worn out church rituals, especially Communion, may all of a sudden create opportunities for a direct inner knowing experience of Christ.
Finally, what wisdom would you offer to Contemplative Christian seekers?
I would suggest the take-home learning for a Christian from a Buddhist is: first, don’t neglect the practices that allow you to experience becoming empty of your ego self so you might experience the boundlessness of your Christ-like nature; and secondly, recognize that the mental function in the West has become largely a tool for planning, analysis and worry while its true gift is to curiously explore the nature of reality. Your human-ness, your separation from God, is not an enemy, rather it is the vehicle by which to open moment by moment to explore both emotionally, bodily, and mentally your lived experience. The more we experience our own lives as being grounded in and a part of the unity of everything the more we experience the support of beingness and its gifts of beauty, compassion and truth.
The Idolatry of Objectifying God
Experiencing Faith in Dynamic Growth
Spiritual Director (SD): Thank you for coming. Please sit and tell me what brings you to Spiritual Direction.
Seeker (S): I am a young Mom and I would like to bring my children up in the church, but I am struggling with what seems to me to be bad theology that children are taught in Sunday school.
SD: How old are your children?
S: Nine and eleven. I had no problem when they were younger for them learning images of God as a guy with a white beard up in the sky, who is a kind of Santa Claus figure. The messages were about love so I didn’t get upset, but these are not the right kind of images to use with young people are soon to be teenagers, who will begin to experience losses and hardships in their lives and most certainly will be questioning their faith. I am afraid that trying to indoctrinate them with creeds that don’t make any sense or teaching them the Bible discriminates against gay people will end up causing them to rebel completely against the church when they get older. I love the church and the church I know teaches love and includes everyone.
SD: You have an important insight which is that our spiritual growth is developmental. What works when you are five years old doesn’t work when you are ten or fifteen; and actually what works for you when you are twenty-five will not be serving you well when you are forty.
S: Thank you. I recognize that my own spiritual growth has been a continuous unfolding. I have learned to interpret Scripture as coming from God if it expresses love. However, much of the Bible is simply a history of the Jewish people and I view this history and parts of our creeds in historical context and often as helpful allegories or images but not literal truth.
SD: I can’t stress enough that faith is developmental. When we look around we see that one of the primary characteristics of God’s creation is that it is always changing, always unfolding. Recently we learned that the universe is constantly expanding. Some believe this reflects that God’s infinite love is continuing to expand. However, we all get stuck in our spiritual growth at times; our unfolding is never in a straight linear path. Grief, loss, major life transitions can all pause or accelerate our spiritual growth. When our faith is not life giving, we might check to see if we are believing in the same way we did ten or even five years earlier. Maybe we have taken a needed pause in our spiritual growth; or maybe our we are stuck in beliefs that no longer serve us. This is a question of discernment that often brings people to spiritual direction.
Our external circumstances can cause us to pause. Our spiritual growth may pause because we seek certainty in our lives, especially when the world around us is chaotic and uncertain. It is very important not to judge ourselves or others harshly when our beliefs no longer animate our lives. We usually become unstuck whenever we can experience being loved sufficiently that our faith increases so we no longer fear the uncertainty around us.
Often times we make a mistake by trying initially to discern our believes as ideas. The question is often set up — What do you believe in? This is rarely a helpful inquiry. We come up with thoughts about what we think we should believe or in opposition to beliefs that seem oppressive. A better way to start this inquiry is — What do my actions in life suggest my beliefs are? This way our inquiry starts from right where we are physically and emotionally, not just as a mental exercise. If we start our inquiry here often we see that we live more out of fear than faith. We may discover a childhood wounding that needs to be released in order for us to get back in sync with the flow of God’s love to animate our lives.
But let’s get back to your question: how to help children feel comfortable in a changing, unfolding spiritual journey during one of the most formative periods of their lives.
S: Yes, thank you.
SD: We start with teaching them how to use the tools of faith. Perhaps most fundamental is the tool of awareness. For children the age of yours it is a great time to teach them to be aware about how they feel about God, to encourage them to talk with you not only about their ideas about God, but how they feel they experience God. You wouldn’t use the big seminary word of epistemology, but you do want to encourage them to explore how they know what they know. For example — Do they relate experiences of serenity in nature with an experience of God? Do they relate experiences of being loved by their grandparents to being loved by God?
So often parents are afraid to discuss their ideas about God with their children because they fear bringing up the discussion will raise questions in the child’s mind and weaken the child’s faith. Let me assure you the child will always have questions. But questioning is inevitable for a healthy faith. And we must remember that growth is normally preceded by uncertainty, questioning and at times loss of faith for awhile. Children often have wonderfully simple and intimate experiences of love, beauty and truth and we can help them name the presence of God in their experiences. The idea of God then does not remain some abstract, easily questioned concept, but is a lived experience.
S: You are so right. I have not dared to act on my concerns and talk to my children openly about my ideas and experiences of God.
SD: Tool number one then for all spiritual pilgrims, young or old, is awareness. How can I be more aware of what I feel, think and believe. As we develop our capacities of knowing then we have greater insight into whether we are viewing our experiences in life from merely an ego perspective or whether we experience ourselves as participating in a reality greater than ourselves. A parent’s role is to give the child permission for the child’s awareness, curiosity and questioning to grow. Trying to pin God down in just one image is idolatry.
S: Wow, I never thought of it like that.
SD: Once you have given your child permission to think and to feel freely about God and the implicit knowledge of the strength of your faith, you have given them a container for their faith to grow in. You can be sure the culture will challenge their beliefs. But your gift to them is a safe container where their own curiosity can let them explore. Then their own experiences will validate their understanding of God, they will rely more and more on their own inner knowing and not some abstract teaching. Our spiritual curiosity in its purest form is in reality our longing for God and God’s longing for us.
S: So I should try to tell my children what my ideas and experiences of God are like?
SD: You might tell your children about how your ideas about God have evolved and in this way you would be reinforcing the idea that change in our spiritual understandings is a natural part of our maturing spiritually. Most importantly you could share your experiences of God and this would re-affirm to them the importance of recognizing the reality of their own inner experiences of God.
S: What kinds of things should I share?
SD: Share what is real for you and your child will feel the strength in the authenticity of your sharing. One of my friends had a grandfather who was constantly sharing his experiences of God. Here are a few I remember: He would see a beautiful sunset and remark there was God; or he would see a horse galloping across an open field and exclaim with delight there is God; or he would enjoy the blue plate special at the local restaurant he frequented and say God was nourishing him in the meal. Basically anything that pulled him our of a limited ego experience of his life he experienced as God. His experience of God was not an esoteric mystery. He found God as that added mystery of beingness in objective reality and he took the time to name it.
S: I see the importance of giving my children examples of my experiences of God and a perspective of an open mind but how do I actually help them form meaningful beliefs?
SD: For the most part we don’t form our religious or spiritual beliefs on the basis of what we are told or information we are given, but based on our experiences. Spiritual readings can help put in words the meaning of our experiences and this is very helpful, but it is the experiences themselves that are the source of meaning. Information about bird habitat and climate change is interesting. This information per se does not give us a belief that we should go out and do things to save bird habitat and recycle. It is our actual experience of seeing and hearing birds at our feeder and experiencing their beauty and goodness that makes us believe we must work to prevent loss of bird habitat and slow climate change. Our animating beliefs about birds come from experiencing them.
S: What kind of experiences should I expose my children to?
SD: Look at where you experience God and let your children share in those kind of experiences. For example if you are an artist by vocation or inclination and your child has that characteristic create the setting for your child to experience the mystery of creativity in art and music that comes from God. If your child loves being outdoors create opportunities for them to experience the mystery of love and relationship with nature and non-human living things experienced by being in the natural world. If your child has a gift for caring take them with you to do volunteer work at the soup kitchen. In other words allow your child to find God in where their interests and gifts naturally draw them. And then help them name and treasure the reality of how this expression of Spirit is interacting in their lives.
S: You are saying I don’t need to teach them church doctrine. I just need to let them experience and name the mystery that gives meaning to being alive while interacting with God’s world.
SD: You are saying it better than me. God is not a thing but this unseen reality that infuses all of our interactions in the world. If you help your children become aware of this reality, they may surprise you. They may naturally be more tuned into the mystery of God’s presence than we are in our often jaded, ego driven lives. Church doctrine is a way to try to describe ideas that we only actually know through experience. We grow through awareness of our experience of God not church doctrine. Creeds help us celebrate common experiences of Christians over the centuries, they do not create the experiences.
S: I see what you were saying earlier. It is when I think of God as a thing that I fall into idolatry.
SD: We know from the Bible that God is love. Love is not a thing, it is an intimate connection, it’s an experience. Just as creation is an unfolding experience, God is both the unfolding cause and the effect of reality.
S: You are making me think I should examine my own beliefs about God.
SD: We all start off thinking of God in terms of our primary object relations growing up — our parents, or principal caretaker. And because all parenting is to some extent inadequate, as it must be for us to leave the innocence of infancy, we learn to think of God as supplying the love, affirmation and mirroring we did not get or got inadequately as a child. In the best of worlds this makes God into a gentle, loving parent. But that only suffices in the first half of life because we are still objectifying God, seeing God as a thing, a better parent. At some point to continue our spiritual growth we must experience God not as a thing. As the mystics would say, God is not this, not that. God is this beingness, this love that we are participating in all the time. If we look, not for a thing, but into our inner capacities for knowing to experience love, harmony, truth, goodness, beauty, etc. (any of the essential qualities of being) then we begin to find God.
S: The mind seems to always want God to be a thing.
SD: Yes, that is because the ego mind thinks we are a thing. Since the ego mind operates dualistically, it wants God to be a thing. When we become spiritually mature we realize that we too are not a thing. Rather we see that we are a part of the ground of being. Once we experience our beingness reflected back from participating in the beingness of God, we intuit immediately the truth of our being made in the image and likeness of God.
S: Thank you so much for your help.
SD: You are most welcome. We can learn a lot from children and young people. So often their spiritual gifts of awareness and curiosity are sharper than our adult ones and as they learn to internalize and treasure the gifts of their own experience then they become natural teachers for all of us.
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Spiritual Director (SD): Welcome, please come in and have a seat.
Seeker (S): Thank you, I have been thinking of coming to talk with you for a long time but only now had the resolve to show up.
SD: No one comes to spiritual direction without some desire beginning to flicker forth. The desire to know something more gives birth to curiosity. I give thanks to whatever allowed that desire in you to come to the surface. Has the desire given form to a question?
S: This seems like such an elementary question, but one where I am stuck — What does Paul mean in his letters to the early Christians when he proclaims to see with the mind of Christ? Paul says that believers in the Way are transformed by the renewal of their minds into the mind of Christ. What does Paul mean?
SD: A wonderful question. What Paul is saying is a hard concept for our ego mind’s to grasp. There is often an initial misunderstanding. Paul is not saying that seeing with the mind of Christ is equivalent to becoming a Christian or even to a person having a unitive spiritual experience.
S: By unitive spiritual experience you mean the kind of experience I’ve had looking at a beautiful sunset and suddenly realizing I am a part of and intimately connected to God’s boundless creation?
SD: Yes, exactly. One of the important distinctions to understand here is the difference between stages of spiritual growth and having a state spiritual experience, which the history of human spirituality shows has been available to human beings since the earliest historical records of shaman producing a mind altering experience through incantation, dancing or some kind of substance use as a part of a ritual. State experiences seem to be fundamental to human psychic well-being; and like you say we often have glimpses of these experiences when we slow down and are fully present in the moment.
S: I believe I have had more of these than I realize.
SD: Right, I think we all have more unitive spiritual experiences than we realize. One reason these experiences don’t stick with us often is the very reason they are unitive experiences, that is our ego self has slipped into the background and is not as present to claim the experience in an ego sort of way. In other words the state experience simply is, and it’s not something produced through our ego agency.
S: That makes a lot of sense. But still begs the question of what is Paul getting at when he talks about seeing with the mind of Christ.
SD: I’m not trying to avoid your question. State experiences when they occur in the context of a traditional church setting are often viewed as experiences of salvation or being born again and can incorrectly be equated with being transformed into seeing with the mind of Christ. The point I’m making is that being transformed into this new way of seeing with the mind of Christ is a stage of spiritual growth not simply a state experience, which can occur anywhere in one’s spiritual journey trajectory.
S: OK, I think I understand. You’re saying I shouldn’t confuse an unitive state experience, as sublime and meaningful as it might be, with what Paul is talking about when he talks about being transformed into seeing with the mind of Christ.
SD: Correct. Seeing with the mind of Christ is a mature stage of spiritual growth that usually does not occur until after many years of contemplative practices have allowed a seeker to become sufficiently aware of how his ego self operates so that a realization arises that his ego self identity is not who he is. When this type of awareness is present then there is an opening for Grace to transform the seeker’s way of perceiving into seeing with the mind of Christ.
Of course, the process of this transformation beginning to unfold can be triggered out of the blue by a state experience like it did for Paul on the road to Damascus. But even for Paul this new way of seeing was something that evolved in his life after his road-to- Damascus experience. Paul had many experiences of being persecuted and imprisoned. These conditions ironically created conditions for contemplative realization just as the conditions John of the Cross experienced when he was imprisoned or more recently in our own time Nelson Mandela.
Normally this new way of seeing evolves through a long period of contemplative practices. This is what animated many in the early church to go to the Egyptian desert or the caves of Cappadocia to engage in contemplative practices that created space for God to change their way of seeing. Paul’s unitive experience on the road to Damascus is what helped set Paul off on his new spiritual journey, but it was only from his years of spiritual growth as an itinerant minister that gave him the understanding to be able to articulate his insight that the new way of seeing Jesus called people to (metanoia) was best described as seeing with the eyes of Christ.
S: So what is the nature of this stage of mature spiritual growth where a normal way of perceiving is transformed into seeing with the mind of Christ?
SD: Perhaps the most significant part of this stage of spiritual maturity is that the seeker has begun to experience that who he or she is is not just an ego identity. There is a realization that the totality of conscious perception is more than perception from our psychic ego construct. The totality of the human awareness is that she is a psychic ego construct and also a divine beingness connected with the beingness of all creation which we call Christ. Her contemplative practices help open up a space to experience that she is more than just an ego identity and that she can perceive reality in a new way.
S: I think I understand what you’re saying but I’m not quite sure. How else would you describe it?
SD: The analogy that is most helpful to me is that of light. As we all know the nature of light is that it is both a wave and a particle and whether it is as experienced as a wave or a particle depends on its relationship to an observer. Human beings are similar to light — they are both a particle of ego identity from which they perceive as well as being a part of this infinite wave of divine beingness from which they can perceive. To be transformed into the mind of Christ is to be able to perceive the world from one’s aspect as a part of this infinite wave of divine beingness. Because our apparent identity depends on relationship, our ego identity pervades when we see ourselves only in relation to a job, our parents, or others — that is we are seeing ourselves as an object. When we see ourselves from within our relation with divine beingness we begin to see that we are, and everything is, connected as a part of this divine beingness. We are not separate from our own awareness. We see our neighbor not like our self, but the way Jesus asks us to love our neighbor — as ourself.
S: So what you’re saying is that human beings have two ways to perceive and that we get to this mind of Christ way of perceiving once we realize that we are more than our ego self identity.
SD: Yes, although it is a bit chicken and egg. Sometimes a realization that we are more than our ego identity comes first; sometimes a perception from the infinite wave of beingness precedes. Usually experiences of these understandings arrive in tandem. For emotionally mature spiritual seekers their contemplative practices and the intimacy of their relation with God allow these seekers to stabilize this ability to access this way of perceiving with the mind of Christ. There is even a name for the development of a stabilized way to access this boundless way of perception — sanctification.
S: I guess what you’re saying is if I want to be able to access seeing with the mind of Christ I need to understand the contemplative spiritual practices that I should be engaging in on a regular basis to open up this way of perception.
SD: Yes, and it is important to understand that being able to see with the mind of Christ is part of a maturing developmental process. It is quite natural to first just see from and identify with our ego identities when we are younger. People are not able to experience that they are more than their ego identity until after they have developed a healthy ego. The other important part of this stage of spiritual maturity is that by then we have developed an intimacy with God, whether through our contemplative practices or other ways of devotion we have reached a deep and abiding love relation with God.
S: I know a bit about contemplative practices like centering prayer and lectio divina but what are ways that I might develop a deep intimacy with God.
SD: Here is how Richard Rohr describes this process: “The only way I know how to teach anyone to love God, and how I myself seek to love God, is to love what God loves, which is everything and everyone, including you and including me! “We love because God first loved us” (1 John 4:19). “If we love one another, God remains in us, and God’s love is brought to perfection in us” (1 John 4:12). Then we love with God’s infinite love that can always flow through us. We are able to love things for themselves and in themselves—and not for what they do for us. That takes both work and surrender. As we get ourselves out of the way, there is a slow but real expansion of consciousness. We are not the central reference point anymore. We love in greater and greater circles until we can finally do what Jesus did: love and forgive even our enemies.” You can see from Father Richard’s description how integrally loving God and seeing in a new way are different sides of the same coin. He describes the way we love everything as something we do by getting ourselves out of the way” — that is by ceasing seeing only from our ego identity.
S: The Bible talks about being born again, is this what it means to be born again to realize one is not just one’s ego identity.
SD: This is true but perceiving with the mind of Christ is an ongoing developmental process. Its evolving nature means that this realization, or being born again, is something that must happen over and over again. An initial state experience of unity and boundlessness, a glimpse of seeing with the mind of Christ if you will, is often what puts one on a spiritual journey path, but it is the beginning of the path to experience the mind of Christ not the end.
S: Are their difficulties I need to be aware of as I try to more deeply engage with practices for the contemplative journey?
SD: A pitfall on our evolving spiritual journey is to become attached to a state experience and stay stuck there. When this happens rather than growing into being transformed into seeing with the mind of Christ we can develop a rigid ego self identity, with a religiosity like the Pharisees, so we think we have an exclusive experience of the truth. We reify our own experience rather than seeing it as a mere glimpse of the infinite. When we do that we reinforce our ego identity as a saved person or a spiritual person. In fact, the whole object of our our glimpses of the infinite, which do allow us to feel reborn, are for these spiritual glimpses to put us on the journey to become free from being a slave to our ego identity, not to serve as motivations to become more attached to an image of how we would like to see ourselves.
S: Seems there is always a way the ego will try to snatch back its way of seeing and its need to be in control.
SD: Precisely.
S: Are there other ways, apart from engaging in contemplative practices, that allow a human being to experience the totality of who one is and begin to identify more with being a wave of light than a particle, a thing.
SD: Yes, a very normal way for this to be experienced is the process of dying. When a person is dying naturally over a period of time because of an illness the person’s sense of themselves as just a physical body begins to diminish and the person often begins to experience that she is more and more her spiritual body, or to continue our analogy her light body. As anyone knows who has spent time with a loved one who is dying this is a deeply sacred experience to help hold the space as this emergence of a dying person’s light body grows. When we help hold this space as a loving witness our light body, the part of our beingness that is grounded in Christ also experiences a deepening.
S: Don’t the creeds talk about affirming belief in the resurrection of the body?
SD: I am sure there are many different views on this, but mine would be that what is being talked about being resurrected is the light body, the spiritual source that sustains our beingness and connection with all beingness. The creeds don’t specifically talk about a physical body being resurrected, though many assume that meaning. My view would be that a correct interpretation is an understanding that the life ever lasting spoken of in Christian creedal statements is about the eternal life of our spiritual body, the bodily part of us that sees from within the mind of Christ.
S: You are not saying that people who are terminally ill get to the point where they want to die are you?
SD: Not at all. The nature of life is that we all die. And no one normally wants their physical body to cease, but a natural part of the process of dying is the realization that one is more than just a physical body. When struggling with a terminal illness there can be both a strong will to stay in the physical body and a natural letting go of the physical body into the light body, the beingness of creation we call Christ. Being human is not about one overcoming the other, being human is about the paradox that both are there — our desire to remain connected with the physical experience of being alive and our desire to merge back into beingness itself, into the mind of Christ.
Spiritual Director (SD): Please come in. Thank you for reaching out.
Seeker: Thank you for seeing me. I don’t really know if I am the right person to come to Spiritual Direction since I am not a believer. The ritual in the church and its symbolic language doesn’t carry meaning for me, but I am intrigued by good things I see being done by people of faith working for social justice and fairness.
SD: You are at the right place. Spiritual Direction is not for those who have everything all tidied up and their beliefs in nice neat boxes. Just the opposite. I am reminded of a quote from Henry van Dyke’s “The Story of the Other Wise Man” — The enlightened are never idolaters. They lift the veil of the form and go in to the shrine of reality, and new light and truth are coming to them through the old symbols.
Seeker: I guess I am stuck with the veil of form and nothing is coming through the old symbols. In fact the symbols seem a little silly. Maybe you can help me understand how to lift the veil.
SD: Some traditions teach the name of God is never to be spoken. To refrain from naming God is to suggest that our inner exploration to discover the meaning of this word/symbol starts by admitting it’s beyond rational definition. Or put another way that our capacity for knowing is more than a mental process. The meaning of the word God is illusive in part because the word God is correctly a stand-in word for everything —Reality, truth, the nature of the universe. Our image of Reality, truth, God creates who we think we are— either opening up a path to open-hearted wisdom or constricting our capacity to grow in love.
Seeker: Are you saying that whatever someone, believer or non-believer, assumes to be truth, Reality, God defines how each of us perceives ourselves, the world and guides our interaction between them.
SD: Yes, let’s explore this deep connection between how we perceive Reality, truth, God and how we see ourselves and the universe. For many people God is Reality with a Face—which is the way most humans know how to relate to anything. Why does there have to be a face? Why are children most drawn to stuffed animals that have human like faces? The need for ultimate truth to have a face is both a problem and the beginning of understanding.
Seeker: I can feel how putting a face on something that is more than human is a problem, but not sure I understand why.
SD: This is a problem because with a face our idea of God, of ultimate reality, then also carries our object relations projections.
Seeker: I have had some psychology. But tell me what our object relations projections are.
SD: Object relations are the psychological term used to describe how children develop an ego identity based on how they learn to seek love, care, security and control. We unconsciously carry these patterns into adulthood and without awareness focus our energies on trying to meet these needs for love, care, security and control in ways that mimic our initially learned childhood patterns.
Seeker: Okay, I think I understand.
SD:The need for ultimate truth to have a face is developmental. The problem arises when this face reifies our object relations projections. How we think about out there is actually shaped by our own learned internal needs to feel comfort, safety and security. This is not all bad in that it opens us up, once we have an experience of being loved by our parents, to longing for a heart experience of truth, of God. We begin to intuit that knowing can occur in a non-mental way because our experience of seeing the face of a beloved parent, a lover, or our child allows us to experience falling in love with a particular piece of reality, which in turn makes it possible for us to intuit we might fall in love with all Reality. However, absent the mutuality of a relation of beloved-ness our perception of Reality will remain on the surface and we experience life only its appearance as random, disconnected often cruel events. No one can be in beloved-ness with arbitrariness.
Seeker: So it is important developmentally for children to put a face on God, in the same way they first build a love connection with their mother by seeing her face.
SD: Yes, this is essential developmentally. It is also essential that we learn at some point to go beyond the unconscious learning we attach to this symbol/face.
Because we give God a face, most people’s operative image of God, as we have said, is initially a subtle combination of their learned object relations patterns from their mom and dad, or other early authority figures. Without an inner awakening much of religion is largely reinforcement of this childhood conditioning that formed the ego self.
Seeker: So you are saying that in coming to see you and maybe unconsciously questioning why I disbelieve — I may be doing this because I want my idea of God to provide me a sense of being cared for by a loving parent?
SD: Maybe that is true. Recently I ran across a quote from Carol Ann Duffy, UK Poet Laureate, author of “Prayer” — I don’t believe in God, but one of the things that I think would be lovely about believing in God is this sense that somebody is listening.
The hope for someone to listen to us is an unconscious longing for God to have a face and our desire to be understood by a nurturing parent. Those who reject faith are often doing so because they are reacting against religion which seeks to reinforce childhood learned object relation patterns that don’t fit them as adults.
Seeker: Both of my parents are deceased. I miss them greatly and so I get a sense of how powerful this longing might be.
SD: We all must outgrow belief in a reality that is a reflection of a small child’s learned perceptions– the good-enough parent, God as Santa Claus or the not-so-good parent as a harsh punitive Avenger.
Seeker: That makes sense to me.
SD: With awareness we grow toward liberation from our learned object relations patterns. As these learned obstructions lift we begin to see life clearly. An aid to this is a mature religion which includes reason, faith, and teaches us how to trust our own inner experience increasingly illuminated by our deepening awareness of what is real. A mature view of Reality, truth or God emerges from such spiritually mature people.
Seeker: I have a friend who had a horrible abusive father and after a lot of therapy he is an outspoken atheist.
SD: If our mother or father were punitive, our God is usually punitive too. That is a good God to reject. Or we can spend much of our lives submitting to that punitive God (never getting enough of what we don’t want). If our mother or father figures were cold and withdrawn, we will assume that God is cold and withdrawn too — Biblical wisdom, Jesus, and the mystics notwithstanding. If all authority in our lives comes through men, we probably assume and even prefer a male image of God, even if our heart desires otherwise. Whatever is given is always received in the way the receiver filters reality. Ultimately, and here I refer back to the van Dyke quote, if we don’t experience the world through its is-ness all our religious views are a form of idolatry, in which we are worshiping our own unconscious ways of perceiving.
Seeker: Do we have the same object relations issues in our culture?
SD: Our patterns of perception are mirrored in our political world views as well. Good religion makes for generous politics and positive social relationships. Immature religion based on our object relations formed needy egos makes for stingy politics, a largely reward/punishment frame, xenophobia, and highly controlled relationships. Indeed the worst of man’s inhumanity to man has been effected under the banner of a weaponized grandiose, authoritarian ego image of God.
Seeker: That really helps me understand why I feel this visceral reaction to religious figures and churches which are anti-immigration or homophobic. Makes me want to throw out all religion.
SD: Unfortunately, many people often feel there are only two choices: immature objection relations formatted religion or the rejection of the need for anything outside of one’s self to sustain one’s humanity. The first alternative, as we have suggested, leads to a form of object relations idolatry. The second constructs a small self-built altar of ego grandiosity. Neither gives us a way to fall in love with truth, with Reality so that we can experience that we, that life itself is held by a dynamic energy, a wisdom, a love that sustains us as a part of everything.
Seeker: I can identify with what you are saying. It raises the question for me of how do I get out of an immature story I am telling myself about what is Real, what is God?
SD: Story an important word. We are each telling ourselves a story about who we think we are, which is also telling us a story about who we think God is; and these stories mirror each other. The Bible says we are made in the image and likeness of God. Meister Eckhart goes further and says, The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. In Ruth Ozeki’s novel, “The Book of Form and Emptiness,” she says: God is a story…. I believe in stories, and God knows this. Stories are real, my boy. They matter. If you lose your belief in your story, you will lose yourself. We all are living within a story, which is hopefully evolving over time to help us to wake up to how it is shaping us. Our story is either increasingly opening us to an expansive, authentic way of experiencing life or narrowing us down to a frantic search for security and control.
Seeker: Okay, so maybe I am in a broken or a dead-end story. What can I do?
SD: One way out of the immature religion versus ego self sufficiency polarity is the path of Contemplative Christianity. This unbroken thread goes back to the Sermon on the Mount, was practiced by the early Desert Mothers and Fathers and kept alive in monastic wisdom and Celtic Christianity.
Contemplative Christianity teaches that through silence and solitude we can experience freedom from the learned object relations pattern of youth and experience Reality exactly as it is. Not on the surface where it often seems random or only suffering, but in the depths of the is-ness of each moment. We experience ourselves as part of the created world, moving and being as a part of its flow not as a stranger observing from outside of reality. We don’t just see a symbol and understand it metaphorically, we see beneath the symbol and experience the reality on which it’s based.
Seeker: I am intrigued, say a little more.
SD: In the experience of reality at depth the small ego-constructed self recedes into emptiness, as do the learned object relations patterns on which it is based. Then from within emptiness an ever expanding universe unfolds the beauty, goodness and truth of each moment. In that experience we fall in love not with a never-to-be-satisfied object relation, but with Reality, truth itself, or what those humbled by the heart opening experience of the mystery of emptiness/fullness often choose to call God.
The tools of Contemplative Christianity are ancient and are shared in various forms by other wisdom religious traditions. What distinguishes the Christian Contemplative tradition is its focus on the heart way of knowing. The path of experiencing that God is love.
The shorthand expression for the result of breaking out of an ego based learned pattern of perceiving the world into greater freedom is called realization or enlightened consciousness. There are degrees of consciousness going from the occasional glimmers that we all have of a greater reality than that experienced on the surface of events to a realized enlightenment seen in the great wisdom teachers like Buddha and Jesus. In the Christian Contemplative tradition the focus is on stabilizing access to a higher level of conscious awareness. Stabilized consciousness is traditionally call sanctification. As our contemplative practices grow our awareness is not just fleeting but available through practiced ways of allowing the ego’s learned patterning to be surrendered. In the pursuit of consciousness we do our part through our practices to open the door to experience the unbounded dimensions of reality and then the dynamic unfolding process of life itself meets us in the manner and form of a greater wisdom, goodness and beauty. This way in which we are met is traditionally called Grace.
Seeker: I grew up in a church-going family, but what you are talking about I never heard about in church. Help me understand it a little better.
SD: An analogy might be to a beehive. We can be a bee and leave the hive and fly off on our own and experience the world as alienating with other creatures wanting to swat us. Or we can experience that we are part of a hive, we are part of something larger than our individual bee-ness and by opening to our experience as part of the hive we experience the flow of sweet honey. Traditionally the mystical expression for this would be — “you are not God, and you are not not God.” You are not the hive but you are a part of the hive and have both individual bee-ness and hive-ness.
Seeker: Tell me more about what realized consciousness is about.
SD: Consciousness is multi-dimensional. It occurs in all three centers of intelligence and perception: mental, heart and body. In the mental center when we access aware consciousness our mind is clear and open. There is space to be able to perceive and participate in the wisdom and truth of Reality. In traditional religious language we see clearly how God is leading us.
In the heart center, to have an aware conscious heart is to experience being a participant in a sea of love. Our hearts are open and vulnerable and we are able to experience that even in the worst personal and culture suffering there is a divine love that is sustaining everything.
In the body center experiencing aware body consciousness is all about being fully present in the moment. There is no anticipation of the future or clinging to the past. Awareness includes everything occurring in the moment.
In each center silence, solitude and simplicity are the lubricants for the conscious experiencing of reality and experiencing the revelation that everything is undergirded by love. We experience that we are living in a bigger story, that our life is participating in a bigger story than a small personal one.
Seeker: I think I have some inkling of what you are saying, but only as ideas. I don’t have any of this body or heart knowledge about them that you are describing.
SD: Yes, that is the problem with much modern religion; there is little teaching given about transforming consciousness. Instead it is fixated on reinforcing old authority-driven ego object relations patterns. If we are controlled by our object relations patterns, we are often unconsciously seeking the external authority of a parent figure, whether preacher or politician, to conform to or rebel against. This kind of religion does not produce people who are open minded and open hearted.
Seeker: How can Christian Contemplatives tell if they are freeing themselves from their object relations patterns and stabilizing their realization?
SD: In the Christian Contemplative tradition, Galatians 5 provides touchstones to access how we are progressing in stabilizing access to our realization — But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Three of each of these characteristics go with each center. The characteristics of someone with conscious body wisdom are self-control, love and joy. The qualities of the realized heart are peace, forbearance and kindness. The realized mind is full of goodness, faithfulness and gentleness.
Seeker: This path of Contemplative Christianity seems like a lot of hard work.
SD: It is and it isn’t. It requires being faithful to a set of contemplative practices. But we don’t realize our own realization. The path to God is always one of continually interacting with the unfolding reality of life in each of our three centers where by Grace we gain greater clarity, more open-heartedness and the immediacy of presence.
Seeker: Are you saying it is all process and that the process is not drudgery but continually animating us in its moment by moment unfolding?
SD: John 16:33 says, In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. I think what is being said is that the world is full of sickness, suffering and death and viewed from an either/or perspective it all seems like doomed struggle. But from a more unitive, realized gaze it is our human drama takes place in the context of an unfolding of love, beauty, goodness and truth. This new unitive perspective is what overcomes the pain and sorrow of the world. Or, again, as John puts it (John 15:11): I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. The gospel invitation from a contemplative viewpoint it to become a part of a larger story that sustains us because we actually experience that life is embedded in truth, goodness and beauty.
Seeker: So the contemplative path allows one to be joyful about life, despite all its problems, because we are actually experiencing and perceiving life differently, more fully and more truthfully.
SD: Yes, as we are on the contemplative journey, we are all bees opening more and more to (and falling more and more in love) with Reality’s sweet honey of love, goodness and truth in this hive that is our home.
Spiritual Direction about Community and Love
Spiritual Director (SD): Please come in and sit. Not often do I get a seeker from Texas.
Seeker: I come seeking spiritual help in regard to two specific concerns.
SD: Please tell me about these concerns.
Seeker: The first is about community. I been told that having a community is essential for emotional and spiritual growth and that this community should be intentional, self aware, and trusting so that its members can be safely vulnerable with each other. Turns out that is a very tall order, and neither of the groups I participate in meets those criteria. One is a friendly group of guys who like joshing with each other and venting about those of a different political persuasion. The other is willing to explore complex meaning-of-life topics openly, but are not eager to talk about their personal lives in encountering big questions. How do I find or create community that feeds me?
SD: Your question about community is an especially tender one to come from someone who lives in the only state that once was an independent country — it takes a lot of maturity before we realize that freedom is found in belonging, not in a fight against belonging. All that by way of saying that there are many forms and levels of community. I had a friend who moved from a small town in Maine to Florida to retire. After two years he moved back. I asked him if he moved back because he missed seeing his close friends. He said no. He kept up with this close friends. He moved back because he missed running into the postman and stopping to chat; going into the grocery story and talking to the check out clerk about each other’s family. In other words community, at what may seem at first glance a superficial level, is a very important layer of community.
Seeker: I have worked all my life as a counselor but I have never thought of the importance of different layers of community. What you have said is helpful but doesn’t tell me about how to find the most meaningful and intimate level of community.
SD: Fair enough! The most intimate level of community is with God. But let’s put that aside for the moment. You are talking about human community and in that sense our most basic community is with another person. Some people by their nature tend to bond very strongly with one person. Not just a life partner but their friendships tend to occur in the context of one-on-one encounters. For these folks the upper layers of community may be less important because they tend to put all their eggs in the basket of intimate relationships with one other person at a time.
Seeker: I see what you mean. But I don’t think I am a one-on-one kind of person. I am interested in the next layer of community just beyond the layers of a life partner, one-on-one friendships and family.
SD: Often a deep level of intimacy at the first layers of connection with one other person and family is necessary to build the more outer layers of community. We will usually not be successful in finding intimacy at outer layers of community, without some experience of intimacy at a partner, close friend or family level.
Seeker: I don’t think I neglect core relationships. I have been in a good long-term relation with my partner now for a number of years. We love and cherish each other. I keep up with family.
(pause)
SD: Excellent, a core partner relation and good family relationships create a layer of trust and love that help make us more able to risk at the next layer — trustworthy friends. After the intimate friendship layer of community, the next layer up is usually small social groups of connection, then the next layer up might be a church or a community or civic group, above that your town, then your state or region and finally your country and/or the planet. All these different levels are important to us from an ego perspective to be able to identify with others to help discern who we think we are and to get affirmations of being seen for who we think we are.
Seeker: That is a good and helpful overview. Thank you. Between the family layer and identification with humankind, the planet, is where I feel lost.
SD: The good news is that it sounds like you have a core relational foundation. You very importantly also wish to be in groups of people where there is the opportunity for finding deep, meaningful friendships and with whom you can be intimately vulnerable about who you most truly are. Let me come back in a minute to this need to be seen in a group by who you are.
As you correctly intuit many groups provide some level of social community even though it’s for the most part just on a superficial level. In other words you could be in a group of guys that just talks about sports all the time. That is not bad if you enjoy it and in the process of that superficial engagement you might come to really connect with one person where the possibility of a deeper intimate friendships could unfold. Still I understand from what you have said that this more intermediate level of community has not been fulfilling in providing you with close new friends or with a sense of deep connection as a part of the group.
Seeker: Okay. Now we are getting to the heart of my concern.
SD: The fact that you are in two groups that had to be organized to bring people together reflects how our historical cultural patterns of group intimacy are frayed and tattered. In the example of my friend from Maine — none of his wider circle of friendships were organized in an intentional way, they just occurred naturally. The benefit of community that occurs naturally is that you usually get a much more diverse group of people and the more diverse a community the stronger it is. In this context being a part of a more diverse group allows you to grow in the experience of truly being yourself and not simply trying to enhance an image of yourself in a group that is already so like you that all it can do is reflect this image back to you. But the big challenge of being in a diverse group or what me might call in the context of our discussion a superficial group is that in order for the group to reach a more intimate level of sharing someone has to set the example of being more vulnerable. Because it is your wish for greater intimacy at this level of community maybe it should be you.
Seeker: Yeah, I was afraid you might say that.
SD: I don’t mean to minimize the difficulty here. Because of the appalling lack of cultural cohesion this quest is hard. But remember all that is at stake is our ego getting hurt when we open up and are not understood or made fun of. From a spiritual point of view this is good spiritual discipline to practice — not allowing our ego to run the show when we are being open and honest with others. Their responses are about them and not us. But if you try to be more open and vulnerable with one of your existing groups and it doesn’t go anywhere find another group. The difficulty is you don’t want to find a group that sees the world exactly like you. If you all see the same way the group will probably stay at a superficial level. The ego self loves that kind of reinforcement. It creates a stronger sense of ego self which is itself an obstacle to intimacy. The challenge we face individually and as a culture is to be willing to be vulnerable and share with those who are different. It is from this kind of vulnerability that real intimacy occurs.
Seeker: Very helpful. I can see how my ego wanting a level of acknowledgement that I am a deep, thoughtful person has reinforced me being unwilling to risk.
SD: If we see the world from a non-dual viewpoint and not an ego perspective every event, every interaction no matter how superficial is a deeply luminous, beautiful event.
Seeker: So the answer is not in me finding the right group; it is me surrendering the need for ego reinforcement and reflection and being fully present in the reality of each moment.
SD: (Smiles) I couldn’t have said it better. When we do that our levels of social connection take care of themselves. Our essential personhood emerges. Our ego is not in need of reinforcement. We naturally attract people to us because they pick up on our energy of self acceptance and our acceptance of them. This acceptance creates the trust where deeper levels of sharing naturally emerge.
Seeker: So the answer is not about me finding the right group, but more about me not letting my ego’s need for affirmation and approval run the show.
SD: Correct. All the levels of social connection we have talked about are important not because we need those levels of ego affirmation, although that is the way it feels to the ego. They are important because ultimately we realize in our essence we are all related and connected. In the commandment to do unto others as you would do to yourself, the little word “as” is important. It is not “like.” From a non-dual perspective we relate to others as ourselves because we are all essentially a part of each other.
Seeker: Okay, can I shift gears and ask another question?
SD: Certainly.
Seeker: I am not sure exactly how to ask it but the topic is the
meaning/expression of Love. I may ramble a bit to try to get clarity.
SD: No problem.
Seeker: I know this is a huge subject and has been thoroughly intellectualized about as well as trivialized. Nevertheless this topic has always obsessed me and eluded me. Recently, I heard a guy define love as “wishing other people well, with no strings attached.” That intrigues me. I had always presumed that love required me to be interacting with someone, instead of generating energy of kindness by word or deed and simply offering it. My payoff, of course, has always been the other person or the audience responding positively toward me. That has made me feel I was loving but maybe I am totally off base. Does real love have to be something where we are not seeking anything back? What do you think of this framing? What are your favorite “channels” for expressing love ?
SD: Love — what a great thing to be obsessed about. I hope you always stay obsessed by its meaning and expression and never find “the answer.” I hope this doesn’t sound too cavalier. I had a good friend who from the time he spent a summer in Paris when he was young always dreamed of living in Paris. But after he got married and had a family and commitments the opportunity to move and live in Paris become more and more remote. However he has always been this person, who a part of who he is — is a guy who wants to live in Paris and the fact that he has that desire and outlook on life has changed much of his experience of life. So what I’m suggesting is that your journey to know and understand love and how to express love is a beautiful part you. And one to be celebrated.
Seeker: You mean it is enough to long to understand love not to actually understand it.
SD: While you have not found an answer and that is frustrating, the desire to know the answer has I am sure meaningfully shaped your life. Part of how you experience life is as the kind of person who wants to continue to search deeper and deeper for the meaning of love and the experience of that meaning.
Seeker: That is sure true.
SD: Recently I had a friend tell me that her 14-year-old daughter had told her that she, the daughter, had decided that she was a pan-sexual. I have no idea what a pan-sexual is. But something very interesting culturally is this breakdown in gender definition. This suggests that eros may have a whole spectrum of attraction, which may reflect a similar kind of spectrum for love that the Greeks parsed with their three different names. So to always be searching for a deeper experience of love in all the messiness of life — what a noble way to live.
Seeker: I appreciate the encouragement, but that doesn’t overcome the frustration.
SD: You know better than I do, from your studies in psychology to become a counselor, that part of growing up emotionally and maturing is to have good mirroring. So we all want to be seen and acknowledged by others. We all need early in life to build and have a healthy ego. And in some way the mirroring we get is always deficient or too much, but if it is “good enough” we manage okay and our love-wound becomes a part of us shadow and light.
Seeker: So you are saying that my desire to understand love is part and parcel of the object relations patterns I developed when I was young and that these patterns are still running my life — that the wound of not feeling loved as a child is why I am seeking to understand love now.
SD: You are right that the object relations patterns we learned as a child run the ego’s need for love, approval, control, power, security all of our lives. And part of emotional maturity after reaching adulthood, is coming to be centered less in our ego and more in our own inner essential authority. As we mature spiritually we become less dependent on how the ego’s objects relations patterns need us to be seen or understood. And yet there is a way in which how others see us is also how we continue to grow and an ongoing part of our unfolding.
Seeker: I don’t quite get it, are you saying as we mature emotionally we need to let go of our ego object relations patterns but we still need others to reflect back what they see?
SD: Yes, I am saying both are important. We need to not be attached to external affirmation from another. In this sense we are detached, but we are not un-attached. When we are detached we are free of the ego’s need for affirmation, but we are not disconnected or un-attached, we are engaged and open to learning from what we see reflected from others. I’m suggesting the idea of trying to be a pan-lover, being increasingly open to the broadest possible spectrum of caring and intimacy, of where love can be found and how it can be expressed.
Seeker: Do you mean love is not something I do but it’s more a perspective through which I experience life?
SD: Yes, this is how your questions today are connected. Love is the willingness to take the first step into being vulnerable, just opening that door of possibility for a deeper depth with another person whether it’s the grocery store clerk you don’t really know or someone you’ve known for years. You take the risk not because your ego needs a pat on the back. You take the risk because who you most truly are in your essence wishes to express love and caring into the world and your expression of love and caring will unfold when another person welcomes the door of intimacy and love being opened. What you are participating in then is really not your love but the Love that holds all life together.
Seeker: Could this expression and interchange of love also be true with animals and nature?
SD: Absolutely, St Francis taught about the joy of being in the field of love with other creatures. And you would be amazed at what happens when we allow ourselves to be open-heartedly vulnerable to a tree, especially a wisdom tree that has reached a certain age. But don’t give up on humans. Be a pan-lover of each experience and you will feel connected intimately in an interwoven web of relations and you will taste the beauty and joy of each moment.
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Spiritual Director (SD): Thank you for coming. Please sit down.
Seeker (S): I didn’t really want to come see you, but I thought one time wouldn’t hurt and maybe you could point me in the right direction.
SD: What are your concerns and questions, my friend?
S: I don’t want to be coming to a person for spiritual guidance, I want to be getting my direction directly from God. I want to hear God in my own life. Why should I make it even more difficult by inserting another person?
SD: The role of a spiritual director is not to tell you what God is saying to you. Rather it’s to provide you the best tools to be able to discern what God is saying to you about your life. For that matter, if you are agnostic, what your life is telling you about your life. So you are right, I cannot discern for you how God is leading you in your life, but what I can do is help you understand how you know what you know and how to be most open to knowing from God. Because we are all unique this varies individual by individual. As a spiritual director my job is simply to enhance the opportunity for someone like you to be able to hear God’s leading in your life.
S: Fair enough. But I don’t want to sign on to be coming to see you on some regular basis, I just want to know how I might best know.
SD: Spiritual direction is grounded in trust. As your ability to trust in your ongoing interaction with your spiritual director grows, your ability to access and trust how you experience God leading you will also grow. In the abstract just reading a book about spiritual direction or me giving you ideas on how to discern God’s leading is like drinking water without a glass, you might get a splash or two, but you won’t be able to drink deeply.
S: Don’t you think that is for me to decide?
SD: Of course, and lots of time an overview is helpful and I am glad to give you that. Just don’t confuse the map of the moon with the moon.
S: (smiles) Right about that.
SD: Okay, here goes, but this is more a lecture on discerning God’s will than a spiritual direction session.
S: I understand.
SD: Let me start with describing the phrase: A Rule of Life. This term is most associated with a man named Benedict who came to Rome to study as a young person around the year 500 A.D. He was so appalled by the immorality of life in Rome that he left Rome and later founded a monastery where other young men, encouraged by his example, followed. Benedict was concerned about the needs of those living together in community and about the same desire you have expressed to me today — how each could learn to understand God’s will in their lives. To that end Benedict devised a Rule of Life for his fellow monks to follow to help ensure harmony in their community and openness to hearing God. Many spiritual seekers in the next 1500 years have followed a Benedictine Rule of Life. In modern times Spiritual Directors help their directees fashion a Rule of Life for themselves that most fits their personalities and where they are on their spiritual journeys.
A Rule of Life defines patterns we put in our lives to help us listen to God and to listen to our own life — to create conditions under which we are most able to discern how God and the gifts of our own life are leading us to be free, open and loving in the world. We start with understanding important spiritual capacities we have as human beings. When these capacities are combined they help us to be able to discern God’s leadings and support in our lives.
Spiritual Capacities
Awareness. To be able to discern God’s will we need to be non-attached to our own. So first and foremost we need awareness. What is the energy/perspective from which I am seeing choices in the world. Is it my ego false self’s attachment to power and control, esteem and affection or security and survival or does it come from a deeper place we call True Self, our Inner Light or the Divine Indwelling Spirit.
Know How I Know. We need to know how we know. As we become aware of the capacity to see clearly without attachment or aversion, we become more able to see how we are perceiving reality — we see how we perceive the choices before us; we discern our means of knowing. Of course, our ego/false self is all about trying to know. It is how it maintains our sense of ego identity. So our task is to discern the ways our ego/false self prefers to know and to distinguish them from the means of knowing most in tune with the True Self, the Divine Indwelling Spirit.
Faith. How are we faithful to the inner knowing that comes from the True Self, the Divine Indwelling spirit? We ask, “How is the Divine Indwelling Spirit Leading Me?” and then we need to be in a mode of knowing that is most open to connection with the True Self. Then we wait for an answer. We try not to allow the ego’s aversions or attachments to cloud decision-making and let our soul’s intentions be compromised. We wait patiently so God can have time to form the answer in our hearts. We will all go through periods of uncertainty and unknowing when we must rest in our faith until an answer comes from the Divine Indwelling Spirit.
Love. God is Love. The ego/false self never operates out of love. It derives its energy from its needs for power and control, esteem and affection and security and survival. So to reduce the chance that we are listening to our ego/false self, our discernment must always ask how does my leading grow love in me and others; how does what I might decide serve love?
Change and Curiosity. Our ego/false self is afraid of change. Change threatens its self image, its need for security and survival. We open to God’s leading when we lean into change. Our True Self does not fear change. Change is one of the constant’s of the universe. Life, all of us, are constantly changing and evolving. The best antidote to fear of change is curiosity. We stay open to change in our life with the same gentle loving gaze with which we watch children and grandchildren growing and changing. Some say God is change. Be curious about how a God of change is unfolding your life.
Focus and Commitment. There is much to do in this world and only a few of us come into life knowing early on what we are called to do. For most of us, our focus evolves and changes over different seasons of our lives. Be aware of these shifts; they may be a part of your transformation. Spiritual growth is about our evolving a larger and larger perspective, a deeper and deeper way of knowing — which makes us more and more less self referenced. We become less focused on our selfs and our needs and more focused on others and the world. A focused commitment opens us to the kind of inner transformations that come through service to the world.
Presence/Beingness. In this digital world it is hard to stay present and grounded. Yet, it is only in the moment of pausing to truly taste that food tastes best. And so it is with everything. Only in presence do we experience the presence of the Divine. Most importantly, presence is what brings healing and expands our hearts as well as the hearts of those we are present to.
Gratitude. Awareness of gratitude for everything from our next breath to the majesty of a brilliant sunset keeps us grounded in both humility and the aesthetic pleasure of beauty and goodness. Gratitude attunes us to the splendor of creation and the interconnectedness of everything. In gratitude I remain humble, open and grounded.
Non-harm. Not using plastic and lowering my carbon footprint, buying food from community farmers, simply being aware of the impact of my actions on others are all ways to practice non-harm. Non-harm is a way to live peacefully on the planet in a way that allows all God’s creatures to thrive.
Community. Create community wherever you go. The two primary impulses behind all religions are a search for meaning and a search for community. As the pandemic has taught us, we are deeply social creatures. In community we begin to know who we truly are. Every community we participate in brings meaning to our lives and the lives of others. In community we learn to be open and accepting, a good listener and team member. Seek out and support communities important to you.
Here are a Sampling of Practices that might be included in a Rule of Life:
Daily Centering Prayer — to support awareness, devotion, presence, inner knowing and openness to change
Welcoming Prayer — to support love by allowing false self blocks to be dissolved
Wesleyan Contemplative Order — participation to build community of seekers in loving support of each others’ journeys
Prayers of gratitude — to support appreciation of wonder and dependency on others
Lectio Divinia — to support non-dual knowing
Sabbath — to support beingness, presence and love
Daily Examen — to support focus and commitment
Physical Exercise and walking — to support body knowing and appreciation of natural world
Recycle and plant based diet — to support non-harm
How our Spiritual Capacities Interact with How we Know what we Know
Much has been written about each of these capacities and their importance in spiritual transformation. They are all important, but here we will explore one of particular importance. To achieve our purpose of building a Rule of Life in order to best discern how God is leading us, we start with recognizing that a Rule of Life and access to our ways of knowing are inexorably linked. We must know how we know in order to design a Rule of Life that supports building a greater capacity to know how God is leading us and what our own life is saying to us. The reason this is so important is that we don’t all have the same gifts or strengths in ways of knowing. Depending on how our own ego/false self evolved, we each developed different patterns of knowing. We need to recognize the ways of knowing most entangled in our ego/false self and those ways of knowing most connected to our True Self.
Ways of Knowing
Intellect: The lens that we most associate with knowing is intellectual knowing. It’s the result of formal education and it has to do with science, reason, logic, and what we call intelligence. Most of us are trained to think that it is the only way of knowing or the superior way of knowing. Yet that isn’t necessarily true. Seeing intellectual intelligence as the best or only way of knowing is actually a great limitation.
Strengthening Practices: Book study, studying the lives of deeply spiritual people we admire. e.g. Thomas Merton, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, John Wesley, Henri Nouwen, C.S. Lewis
Will: The second way of knowing is volitional knowing. It comes from making choices, commitments, and decisions, then sticking with them, and experiencing them at different stages. Anyone who has made and then kept vows understands this. This knowing comes from the very process of struggling with choices and then making them. This knowing is a kind of cumulative knowing that emerges over time.
Strengthening Practices: Daily Examen, Having a Rule of Life, Being in Spiritual Direction, Being in Year Long Programs of Spiritual Growth like School of the Spirit, Being a WCO member
Emotion: Our emotions are especially powerful teachers. Love, ecstasy, hatred, jealousy, fear, despair, anguish: each have their lessons. Afflictive emotions like anger and rage are great teachers, if we listen to them. They have the power to reveal our deepest self to ourselves and to others, yet we tend to consider them negatively and our ego/false self tries its best to avoid our experiencing them. People will live and die much more because of their emotional knowing than they ever will for intellectual, rational knowing. To deeply experience our emotions is often to live in a new reality afterward, with a new ability to connect to ourselves and God. The emotional power of love is what has powered so much of the work to connect people across differences and to be of service in the world.
Strengthening Practices: Centering Prayer, Welcoming Prayer, Sabbath, Devotional Rituals, Making/Listening to Music, Silence and Solitude Retreats, Plant Based Diet Practices, Caring for animals
Senses: Bodily or sensory knowing comes through the senses, through touching, moving, smelling, seeing, hearing, breathing, tasting. Until we develop access to it, this way of knowing often remains at an unconscious level. Becoming aware of our senses in a centered way allows us to awaken, to listen, to connect. In addition to bringing awareness to our sensory knowing, the body itself is a center of intelligence. We often hear people say, “I knew it in my gut.” An expression that is shorthand for body knowing. Our body intelligence allows us to know reality more deeply, on our body’s terms instead of our brain’s terms. It is no surprise that Jesus touched most of the people he healed. Something very different is communicated and known through physical touch, in contrast with what is communicated through mere words. Bodily knowing is essential for us as creatures to feel the essential compassion needed to steward the natural world and to connect with each other.
Strengthening Practices: Walking Meditation, Labyrinth Walking, Tai Chi, Yoga, Gardening, Silence and Solitude Retreats, Plant Based Diet Practices, Foot Washing, Blessing Ceremonies, Healing Services, Chanting, Taze
Images: Imaginal knowing is a way that unconscious knowing can move into consciousness. It happens through fantasy, through dreams, through symbols, through nonlinear stories, through pictures, and experienced events. It happens through poetry, where well-chosen words create an image that, in turn, creates a new awareness—that was already there but unconscious. We knew it, but we didn’t know we did. We must be open to imaginal knowing because the work of transformation will not simply be done logically, rationally, or cerebrally. Our intellectual knowing alone is simply not adequate to the greatness and the depth of the task.
Strengthening Practices: Soul Collage; Icon writing, Dream Diaries, Ignatian imaginative prayer and exercises, visio divinia
Aesthetic: Aesthetic knowing is a profound way of knowing. The experience of beauty can lead to true changes of consciousness. People’s lives have been changed in response to a novel, a play, a piece of music, or a movie. The experience of beauty can soften the ego/false self so God can get in through the right metaphor at the right time. We can experience profound grief and sadness through artistic expression which can open us to the healing of our own grief and sadness. Artistic expression can illuminate profound suffering in the world in a way in which we can experience insight into how Christ experienced the suffering of the world. We can see our own goodness, our own beauty and our own stories reflected in the beauty of the world and artistic expressions.
Strengthening Practices: Prayer Time in places we find aesthetically holy and healing — in nature, certain church sanctuaries; having a beautiful cross or icon on our personal altar; practices of reading beautiful poetry like John O’Donohue or beautiful Scripture like the Psalms as translated by Nan Merrill; experiencing great literature
Negative Capability: This term was first used by John Keats to describe the pursuit of truth beyond reason and is now more generally defined as a way of knowing from an other’s perspective. The experience of negative capability comes when we open ourselves to others not like us and deeply listen to them. Any process of deep subjective understanding, of seeing the world through the eyes of another allows us to access truth and wisdom in a way that can be transformative.
Strengthening Practices: Trust Circles, interfaith dialogue, service (which includes many ways of knowing)
Epiphany: This is a way of knowing religion often emphasizes — epiphanic knowing. An epiphany is a parting of the veil, a life-changing manifestation of meaning, the eureka of awareness of self and something much larger than self. There are no formulas which ensure its unfolding. It is always a gift, unearned, unexpected, and larger than our present life. It is an experience of radical grace which we cannot manufacture or orchestrate. We can only ask for and be open to this experience. Then we wait expectantly, keep out of our own way and thank God afterward.
Strengthening Practices: Centering Prayer, Silent Retreats
Ways of Knowing Summary
How we know what we know dictates how we design our Rule of Life. Often those ways of knowing most under-used are the clearest ways to discern God’s leading, because the least used ways often have the least ego/false self baggage. Often our Rule of Life needs to simply be about having more balanced ways of knowing so we are drawing from a larger source to discern God’s will for us.
Richard Rohr says, “I have to imagine that Jesus’ consciousness was developed by all ways of knowing. Scholar Christopher Pramuk describes how Jesus engaged his listeners and followers in ways far beyond their minds. He writes — When Jesus of Nazareth prefaced his enigmatic sayings with the words, “let those with eyes to see, see, let those with ears to hear, hear,” scholars tell us he was speaking as a teacher of Jewish wisdom, appealing not just to the head but to the whole person of his listener: heart, body, mind, senses, imagination. Like a lure darting and flashing before a fish, Jesus’s words dance and play before the imagination, breaking open our habitual assumptions about “the way things are.”. . . To be “born again” is to break free of the stultifying womb of conventional wisdom. . . .”
Knowing from God is what we call wisdom. Wisdom is clearly more than mere intelligence, knowledge of facts, or information. Wisdom is more synthesis than analysis, more paradoxical than linear, more a dance than a march.In order to grow in wisdom, we need to move beyond cerebral, rational knowing. As wisdom teacher Cynthia Bourgeault puts it: “Wisdom is not knowing more, but knowing with more of you, knowing deeper.”
The Enneagram and Ways of Knowing
The Enneagram perspective of ways of knowing focuses on three primary ways of knowing: mental, emotional and bodily. Enneagram wisdom suggests that among these three we all have a preferred way of knowing which we default to. This default way of knowing is the way of knowing most tied to our false self; since that is what has acted unconsciously and automatically most of our life for us to make sense of our perceptions. The second way of knowing supports the default. The third way is repressed and because it is less used it is often the way that is most free of false self energy and therefore more likely to allow us to know from our True Self, from the Indwelling Spirit within. Our Rule of Life needs to encourage the integration of our ways of knowing. As Cynthia Bourgeault discusses below that integration is key to our spiritual transformation.
Here is how the Enneagram stacks these ways of knowing.
Dominant Support Repressed
1.Take Action Feeling supports action Mental clarity – Buddha mind
2. Have Feeling Take Action Mental Clarity – Buddha mind
3. Mental Idea Take Action Feeling Values – heart knowing
Take Action Have thought to support Feeling Values – heart knowing
4. Get Feeling Think about feeling Action – body knowing
5. Get thought Have feeling about it Action – body knowing
6 Take Action Have feeling to support Mental clarity — Buddha mind
Have a Feeling Take Action Mental clarity — Buddha mind
7. Get thought Take Action Feeling Values — heart knowing
8. Take Action Have thought to support Feeling Values — heart knowing
9. Have a Feeling Think about it Action — body knowing
Have a thought Have a feeling about it Action — body knowing
Accessing the Repressed Center
To develop the repressed way of knowing, the way of knowing most connected to True Self :
1,2 and 6s need a centering prayer practice to develop capacity for mental emptiness and clarity, known as Buddha mind, to experience wisdom from their minds
3, 7 and 8s need to develop devotional practices to allow their feeling values and heart to be more open to experience wisdom from their hearts
4, 5 and 9s need to develop their bodily engagement through practices like yoga and Tai chi in order to experience wisdom from their body
How Three-Centered Awareness—heart, mind, and body—allows us to be fully present to ourselves, our lives, and God by Cynthia Bourgeault
When a person is poised in all three centers, balanced and alertly there, a shift happens in consciousness. Rather than being trapped in our usual mind, with its well-formed rut tracks of issues and agendas and ways of thinking, we seem to come from a deeper, steadier, and quieter place. We are present, in the words of Wisdom tradition, fully occupying the now in which we find ourselves. Presence is the straight and narrow gate through which one passes to Wisdom.
This state of presence is extraordinarily important to know and taste in oneself. For sacred tradition is emphatic in its insistence that real Wisdom can be given and received only in a state of presence, with all three centers of our being engaged and awake. Anything less is known in the tradition as “sleep.” It is like the disciple Peter suddenly sinking beneath the surface of the waters [Matthew 14:30].
Everybody has all three centers (head, heart, moving) in them. Most people are born into the world favoring one center or another. We learn to make one our dominant center for our own orientation to the world. And in the Western culture, I would say that’s overwhelmingly, shockingly, the intellectual center. In traditional schools, that’s the capacity we train, with maybe a little bit of space left for the kinesthetic moving center through sports programs, and virtually nothing for the emotional center. Any budget cutback and what leaves? Arts and music, the primary channels through which the emotional center is still trained. So in the West we’re formed as heavily lopsided intellectual-center-oriented beings. That’s how most of us get our start.
In pop culture, we say, “Well, find your center, acknowledge it, and live in it.” But the inner tradition work calls us to develop our under-utilized centers. If we over-use the intellectual center, then our work lies in bringing the emotional and moving centers fully online and integrating them.
The “work” is to discover our starting position and reach out to incorporate the other two so that they are fully—and in a balanced way—part of our perceptual center. Whatever center you may find yourself to be, don’t detain yourself on it, because it immediately sets out your job of discovering where the other two are hiding inside yourself and bringing them forward. It’s only when you have balanced the three centers—kinesthetic moving center, emotional center, and intellectual center—and integrated them that you become conscious. We’ve got to have all three. We may think of prayer as thoughts or feelings expressed in words. But this is only one expression. Prayer is the opening of mind and heart—our whole being—to God, the Ultimate Mystery, beyond thoughts, words, and emotions. Thomas Keating has said that through grace we open our awareness to God whom we know by faith is within us, closer than breathing, closer than thinking, closer than choosing—closer than consciousness itself.
Those who can keep all three spaces open at the same time will know The Presence that connects everything to everything. Surely this us what Jesus is talking about in his several parables that warn us to stay awake! (See Mark 13:34-37; Matthew 24:40-44 and 25:1-13) Being awake is a prerequisite for true prayer. This way of knowing has little to do with belonging to any particular denomination or religion; it is found at the headwaters of all the world’s major religions. Each has its own piece of Wisdom, its own techniques and teachings that urge us to bring our whole selves to the job of growing and “wising” up.
Devising a Rule of Life to Unlock Love
Because God is love and living in and through love is both the process and destination of our spiritual journey, in devising our Rule of Life it is helpful to be aware of how our false self in our type structure can block love. This helps us discern the practices for our Rule that open us more to love.
How we block giving and receiving love by type:
Mental
5 — giving: by not embodying our feeling, which we may be out of touch with because we are afraid we will be overwhelmed by them
receiving: by analyzing to figure out a way not to be overwhelmed
6 — giving: by judging and evaluating that takes one out of presence
receiving: by not having embodied presence, not being patient in the moment
7 — giving: by over analyzing the other to see if they are safe enough to trust
receiving — by mental preoccupation which prevents taking love in deeply for fear of losing freedom to identify with ego self
Heart
2 — giving: by giving to create ego image of helpfulness which blocks authenticity of giving
receiving: by being out of touch with heart needs and protecting from vulnerability
3 — giving: by allowing ego self image of competence to only give competently not authentically
receiving: by performing to protect heart which creates ego image of competence which blocks vulnerability to receiving love
4 — giving: by being self absorbed in such a way that cannot genuinely see the other
receiving: by escaping into feelings to feel uniqueness which creates ego image that blocks receiving love; by comparing in mind of what seems sufficient one doesn’t receive
Body
8 — giving — by being in the ego’s need to control such that cannot give from authentic innocence
receiving — by pushing against love to sustain ego sense of self
9 — giving — by not embodying our passion
receiving — by withdrawing to avoid being fully present
1 — giving — by holding back out of fear of not loving right
receiving — by judging how the other is extending love which blocks receiving it.
SD: Well, this lecture on a Rule of Live and Ways of Knowing ended up being longer than I ever imagined. Thank you for hanging in there. One final thought — the spiritual path with all its meanderings is best traveled slowly and consistently. Let your life and the beingness of the world speak to you, and if you need help don’t hesitate to find a spiritual director.
S: Thank you for all the teaching. I am overwhelmed. And I am happy I pushed forward with what is so important in my life.
How to be Empowered in the World
The Search for Inner Authority
Mary Oliver (MO): Please come right on in. I don’t get many people requesting spiritual direction and I am not sure what spiritual direction is, but I am touched by your telling me how much my poetry has helped you in your spiritual journey.
Seeker (S): Thank you so much for seeing me. For some reason, I feel you are someone I can be totally honest and open with. I believe you see reality more clearly than most.
MO: If you have read my poems then I guess we should start with my asking you: what are you doing with your one, wild and precious life?
S: That does get to the heart of it very quickly. I guess my struggle is around not feeling empowered in my own life.
MO: You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
S: I love “Wild Geese” and that poem has helped me tremendously with shame but it still doesn’t tell me how to feel empowered in my life.
MO: Let me quit quoting poetry and be a bit more discursive to see if I understand what you are asking. What does it mean to you to be empowered?
S: I grew up in a household, not nearly as abusive as I understand yours was, but it was always father knows best. The patriarchy was in full operational mode in my growing up. After college I went to work for a large bank and a few years into that, I was getting very depressed. I went to a therapist who suggested that the male authority figures in the bank had become father images for me. I was working twelve hour a day seeking to get their approval, and in the process becoming burned out and resentful.
I believe I bought into the patriarchy in order for me to feel accepted and loved. Now I want to reject my subservient role, and I still want to feel loved. There are not many female role models I see out there besides you who speak truth from lived inner authority. You have not created a personna for yourself to make yourself into an authority figure. In other words, you have not become a feminized version of male ego authority.
MO: You are asking a developmental question. Our childhood ego needs approval in order to feel loved. Developmentally we gradually learn that our self worth and who we are is not dependent upon external approval from outside of ourselves. Slowly we learn to embrace our own unique essence or what is often called the true self from which inner authority comes.
Let me see if I can sketch out how this process gets off track. We all grow up initially under some power structure our parents create. It is essential and is intended to provide a safe, nurturing space for us to grow up in. The father’s role is traditionally to bestow safety and security; it is necessary but in the process it creates a power-over structure that, like any power-over structure, can be abused. Sometimes the mother will be in this power-over role.
My childhood as you seem to know was a very abusive and dangerous place. I got out of it as soon as I could. Yours was probably much safer.
S: Yes, I never feared for my personal safety.
MO: Developmentally we move from hopefully a safe nurturing power-over structure to one in which we find our own inner authority. During our teenage years we try to find who we are through our peers and often later, like you did, through work. In this developmental process, everyone tries initially to find a sense of who they are by getting approval outside themselves.
S: That is where I am. I have rejected seeking approval from a male corporate structure, but I don’t know where to turn. I see many female empowerment models offered but they all seem to be about getting a big ego, whether it is females who are leaders in the corporate world or females who are gurus in the self-help world. I don’t see many women who just seem to be themselves and speak their truth like you.
MO: You have a desire to have security and a sense of self identity and that is all wrapped up in how you relate to power. When young, we want and need safety. We want external authority because that is both where the threats seem to be and also where the approval is. Later on it is quite essential, as you are doing, to push against external sources of validation and come to a place of owning our own authority. I have to tell you frankly it’s not a journey many women or men make, because it requires an inner refinement of how the world is perceived.
S: This is where I am stuck. By not knowing how to relate to external authority, I don’t really know how to relate to myself and have my own sense of joyful identity.
MO: Your uncertainty and confusion is for good reason; it is complicated. When we rebel against our family power structure we initially try to compensate in one of two ways. We either try to recreate the family structure and seek power-over to feel okay; or we seek connection with others to feel okay.
S: I am not sure I understand.
MO: Women traditionally have been better at seeking connection rather than power-over; but today you see a lot of ego energy by women going into having power-over because they want to participate in a work world that largely thrives on power-over structures. Or, as a way to have some power, we see women obtaining power through connection in a subservient role in a male power-over structure. Sometimes a woman will find power by interpreting the un-lived emotions of men, who have lost touch with their own inner emotional terrain. A man cannot be in touch with his true nature without emotional intelligence since it’s our emotional intelligence that gives the necessary feedback to make good decisions in the world. Emotional intelligence makes empathy possible. Empathy arises from a mini-field experience which leads to what the Buddhist call right action. Patriarchal power particularly devastates women who get caught in a subservient role with men who have withered emotionally and compensate by making their power-over structure even more rigid. Male cruelty becomes a way to compensate for loss of the capacity to have genuine feelings.
A third way for both women and men is neither power-over, nor subservient power through connection, but a form of non-ego connection that gives rise to communion.
S: How have you experienced connection giving rise to communion.
MO: You know if you have read my poems. My poems are one long paean to my experience of connection and communion with nature.
S: Yes, I sure see that.
MO: But what may be touching your heart is the sorrow which comes with the hurt we often encounter as we grow emotionally.
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
What I am trying to say in the lines of this poem is that many women like me never had the luxury of being able to go on a journey to find themselves. We were thrown into the world in an environment where we had to learn to be empowered by something greater than ourselves to survive. In my case it was with nature and with writing about my experiences of the natural world which saved, consoled and enlivened me and manifested communion for me with the aliveness of the earth and its creatures and engendered my own aliveness. This sense of aliveness is another way to describe what feeling empowered means that is not power-over or subservient power.
S: Are you saying all ego efforts to feel empowered are doomed?
MO: The ego can be very helpful to create disciplines that can make one skillful in the world. For me it was the discipline of daily walking in nature and daily writing that helped me develop some skill as a poet. But skill itself does not make great poetry or a great life. What is needed is a source of connection with the real, unfolding dynamic of life itself and we have been given one great tool to do that.
S: What is that?
MO: Another few lines of poetry.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
S: You are saying that in order to be empowered and connected in the world all I need to do is pay attention.
MO: You are right it sounds too easy, too simple. It is not. However, our capacity for awareness is one of the most fundamental tools we humans have. The gifts awareness brings are caught in these lines.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
S: Reading your poetry often does often shift me into a feeling of amazement.
MO: How to live in this place of amazement depends upon how we perceive and our ability to control where our focus of attention habitually goes. After I left home, at first, it was easy for me to continually get caught in thoughts about how badly I had been treated by my father. Gradually I learned that all I had to do was to change my focus of attention from that inner turmoil, that I could do nothing about, to the natural world around me. Over time I found that the natural world around me returned my attention. It gave me energy and a sense of connection and eventually allowed me to regain a sense of trust in life that had been taken from me early.
S: It is that simple. I just focus on good stuff.
MO: It is little more complex than that. You let your innate desire to know the truth about the meaning of your life keep your curiosity alive and focused on what is happening, what is unfolding in each moment regardless of whether your ego value-judges it good or bad. In other words, you have to stay awake. And that is harder than it seems. It takes practice.
Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.
S: Yes, it is very easy for me to get caught up in hurt feelings and wake up an hour later wondering where I have been.
MO: We as human beings have the ability to focus our attention and to stay awake or conscious. The extend you employ these capacities will shape how you experience your life. If you stay asleep you will, as the Buddha reminds us, be caught in suffering in the trance of attachments, aversions and cravings. In other words your small ego self will run your life. It is only when you are fully awake do you realize you are not your ego construct and your awareness has a chance to free you from the causes of suffering.
S: I am interested in the truth of my life, that is why I came to see you, but I am stuck.
MO: Well, if you went to a spiritual teacher they would probably tell you to develop a centering prayer or meditation practice; a practice to allow you to strengthen your ability to hold your focus of attention and let go of conflictive thoughts and emotions. That might be good advice, but all I can share with you is my own experience.
S: Yes, your honesty is why I wanted to talk to you.
MO: My experience has been that because I found the natural world fascinating I learned to be quiet and to see and to hear. I learned through the energy of fascination to strengthen my ability to hold my focus of attention. I also learned that while there are many external power-over structures, I need not let them supplant the development of my own inner authority. Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in a horrific concentration camp, yet he remained free within himself. From an inner perspective nothing really has power-over anything, the entire world is dynamically interrelated and unfolding and I am a part of this unfolding. By connecting with this natural unfolding I came to be in communion with and to feel loved and strengthened by the natural world. When we are empowered, we are not trapped in our pain and neediness. Our own brokenness and the brokenness of the world can either imprison us or set us free. Inner freedom arises from communion. If we are not trapped in a tribal identity or a need to belong to a limited group, we do not create our own inner power-over structures. Belonging to something small traps us; belonging to everything sets us free.
S: Can you give me an example of how to see from this perspective of empowered communion?
MO: Suppose you are a small animal on the floor of the forest and one day you come to realize that the oxygen you are breathing is coming from the trees around you, that the water you drink is coming from rain and streams, that your food is coming from plants you can munch on. Because you as a human have the capacity for consciousness you perceive each of these particularities of existence when you are focused on each just as the small animal might. However, as an aware human you also have the capacity to experience that the world around you is this vast complex interrelatedness that actually allows you to be supported and cared for in a way humans might call love. The first way of perceiving is called dualistic, the second non-dual. With practice we learn to strengthen this second way of perceiving.
S: Okay that helps. I think you are saying that the empowerment I believe I need does not come from an ego project of having power-over. Or being a subservient part in someone else’s power-over structure. You are saying that society uses these structures all the time, but on an individual level ultimately power-over or subservient power structures cut us off from the source of real power that comes from an awareness of ourselves as part of an unfolding field of life. You are suggesting that if I really become aware I can experience the sense of belonging and empowerment I desire. My empowerment is already here and comes from the fact that I already belong. All I need to do is wake up to my belongingness.
MO: Let me try another example. Suppose each human has the ability to perceive the world as both a remote and a tv screen. You can hang out mostly as the remote and spend all your life changing channels, that is focusing object attention on one feeling after another, or on some external task you hope will be approved by others. Or, you can be this screen of awareness that is constantly witnessing life unfolding. The more fully you are the screen the more you experience your belonging to the unfolding of life. You have a sense of inner authority which gives you agency in the world. In our totality we are both the remote and the screen, but most people stumble through life believing they are only the remote.
S: I think I am getting it; do you have another example?
MO: We perceive visually from light. Light itself is both a particle and a wave. Thus, our ability to perceive visually depends upon a medium that is two things at once. You could say light has its dualistic properties as a particle and its non-dual as a wave. Light is neither just one or the other but both depending on how it is perceived. We as humans perceive with and like light. As we grow spiritually we gain in our ability to perceive life not just as many discrete objects — object consciousness, but as a wave — an entire field of experience.
S: Is there some spiritual tradition that affirms this understanding of power through communion you are talking about?
MO: All the great religions in their mystical branches have this understanding that their purpose is to bring us into communion, with ourselves, other people, and the natural world. In the Christian tradition the Sermon on the Mount is all about developing this non-egoic kind of empowerment. The Sermon on the Mount asks us to embrace an openness, a vulnerable humility that allows for relationships to flourish flowing out of communion. The Beatitudes describe the blessedness of human beings who have ways of seeing the world which belong to those who are awake, who experience life through the screen that sees the interrelatedness of everything. Jesus describes those who perceive in this way as being in the Kingdom of Heaven.
The result of seeing with Kingdom eyes is to connect us with the “communion of saints.” This is a phrase found in Christian creeds, which is rarely focused on, but embodies this idea of a deep quality of vulnerability and openness among those, living and dead, who have lived from a place outside of power-over structures. Rosa Parks and John Lewis are two of those very recently with us, who exemplify this sainted communion. From communion, this sainted place, the love from belonging we all seek always flows. In this place you are free. Rosa and John would say you are a part of the Beloved Community, which are their more modern words for the communion of saints and what I experience as communion through intimacy with the natural world.
S: Slowly, what you are saying is sinking in. But where do I start.
MO: First, you start with some practice that is going allow you to develop a capacity to perceive the world outside of the perceiving apparatus of a small self, ego structure. For many it is centering prayer or some form of meditation. For me it was slowly, gently and deeply exploring the natural world. Second, you begin to be conscious of where your focus of attention habitually goes. Does your focus of attention habitually go to what is wrong or what is missing? When your attention rivets on a thought or feeling, it’s almost like you become that thought or feeling. Your attention fuses you with the object of your attention. You have entered a trance of non-awareness or object consciousness.
Object attention is not necessarily bad. Early on I often fell into object attention just watching a creature in the wild, like an otter feed in a stream. But it takes you out of a larger field of awareness and in this sense it is disempowering. I became entranced with the otter and my experience of the world became more intense but more limited.
S: Does this intensity help you write better poems?
MO: Good question and many writers get hung up on feeling they need an intensity of experience to be able to write well, and there is no question intensity can help one write deeply about an experience, but ultimately the great poems come from experiencing both particularity and an awareness of one’s true self in the field of experience at the same time. In my poetry I have to be able to witness not just the natural world but also bear witness to an inner experience of the natural world and the bridge between them. When this occurs the trance of object consciousness has been broken and I am back experiencing from a field of consciousness. I am aware of both my outer and inner experiences. I am not in a trance to an object or to my own thoughts or feelings.
S: Wow, can you really do that? Can you experience the external world and your inner world at the same time.
MO: Sure, it is called being present. It just takes a bit of practice. Like driving and looking where you are going but occasionally glancing up at the rearview mirror. You learn to witness what is happening in the external world and in your own psyche in a continuing unfolding. This is what presence is — the experiential awareness of the field of existence of which you are apart. Creativity and great poetry occur when we experience our life from this deeper place. Witnessing consciousness allows us to experience reality from the perspective of a non-personal self, as part of a field of experience in which we are interacting. When this occurs we are present. When you are there it’s effortless.
S: I think of how I perceive as a mental process, but you are saying that there is in addition to a mental perception another way to perceive reality.
MO: You are getting at what makes this hard to talk about — words by themselves are insufficient. The field experience is a whole body process of head, heart and body awareness, it is not linear or simply cognitive and so cannot be described easily in words. This is, of course, the boundary poetry tries to push. Poetry tries to describe the particular so that you experience the universal — that happens when the tools of poetry, not just words but rhythm, tone, and images combine to give a universal field experience. The poem is on one level about a grasshopper and at the same time it’s about the meaning of life. Poetry and music, great art and natural beauty all entice us into the possibility of being nudged, maybe ever so slightly, out of a linear perception to a field perception, to an experience of something greater that underlies and sustains what we experience as literal reality.
Here is a little more poetry:
Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
S: I believe I am getting it. Walking into a beautiful medieval cathedral in Europe or listening to the Messiah, I feel like they change my experience.
MO: When we are completely perceiving from being a part of the field, because perception is not from the personality the experience is perceived non-locally and the the personal self disappears. This is why a mystic will look at a sunset and experience that she is the sunset, the personal perceiving apparatus is offline, she is just the screen of witnessing consciousness and so it feels like she is what is on the screen. This is a non-dual experience and it happens only when there is such a sense of belonging and trust that the personality feels free to slide into the background. So real empowerment for anyone comes from tapping into the source of energy and nurturance that experiencing being a part of the field brings. This is not a personal power, we are empowered by the field, by life itself.
S: Now I think I am getting it, you are saying that authentic power comes from experiencing our connection with everything through field or non-dual perception and that ego attempts to be powerful usually are about power-over or subservient power structures, the dead-end forms most associated with the patriarchy.
MO: Let me quote again the lines of poetry I recited earlier:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
You could say these lines from my poem are about how love and body awareness can help us break through linear perception to field of non-dual perception.
That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt,
if not exactly understood.
S: Is there a danger in object consciousness if the focus of attention is on something bad.
MO: Of course, a great danger. If your focus is intense externally, say on following a particular route, or internally on hurt feelings, you may not see a car coming when you cross the street. If your focus is too intense on a feeling of inadequacy, rather than witnessing that feeling and letting its energy pass through, you give the feeling of inadequacy more energy and staying power. In this sense object consciousness prevents us from witnessing the bigger field of where traffic might come from or that a feeling of inadequacy is simply a momentary feeling not who we are. We find out we are not the egoic personality that appears immediately to be who we are, but also this dynamic process of awareness that unfolds in the field of being moment to moment. Being awake to that field is powerful and creates communion. It takes us out of the personalities’ self-preoccupation that blocks our entry into communion with another, life, and the realness of the moment.
S: This is very helpful. Do you have any other suggestions for me.
MO: As children we need caring power-over structures to feel safe and secure. As adults we encounter power-over structures that are barriers to inner growth. Some women respond by fighting the power over-structure or creating their own power-over structure. Many find subservient roles in a power-over structure and give up some part of themselves to feel they belong and have some power. A few, like me, are fortunate and avoid the power trap by finding meaning and belonging in communing with life itself. When we are in communion then our hearts are open and we experience the depths and heights of what being a human being is all about. We are truly alive.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
Katie Cannon (KC): Please come and sit down. Not many people your age come seeking spiritual direction from an academic theologian like me. I am glad to see you.
Young Seeker (YS): I am not sure why I am here. Maybe it is because you grew up in Kannapolis, North Carolina, not far from where I was raised, if that is the right term for what mostly didn’t happen. Or maybe it is because I am once again despairing for people of color in our country — this time because of the murder of George Floyd, but even more so the murder of Breonna Taylor, because she was a medical worker trying to help keep people alive in this time of pandemic. It is that cadence in my mind of —Oh! No, once again. I am ready to abandon all hope that there is a God who cares or that there is any force for good in this world.
KC: Welcome, I have spent most of my life in the academic culture of white privilege, which did its best during my time at Union Theological Seminary in New York to inculcate me with the idea that a cold, abstract approach to faith was the only permissible path of understanding. I managed to survive that indoctrination and have become more and more convinced during the rest of my life that only an embodied knowledge of faith is a perspective that rings true, particularly for women, and especially for women of color. My intuitive feeling is that this will be a good conversation for us both.
YS: Thank you, for your kind welcome.
KC: As that wonderful Native American poet, William Stafford, once wrote,
“the darkness around us is deep,” and that makes the clarity of conversation even more important. Start by telling me about yourself.
YS: I grew up in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina the county adjacent to where you grew up. My mother tried to do the best she could but she was a single mom, who only ever had low wage jobs that barely allowed her kids to have a roof and occasionally a full meal. I would go to school but often hardly saw her because she was working late shifts, which no one else wanted, at a nursing home. I never knew who my father was.
The schools in Mecklenburg County were desegregated in 1970’s after the Swann case broke the barrier by which historical, legally required housing segregation always resulted in segregated schools. Swann allowed kids to ride the bus to integrate schools. But by the time I went to school the schools were already being re-segregated and selectively re-underfunded because of the charter school movement. I did finish high school and went on to Piedmont Community College to get trained as a nursing assistance. Seems like I am following in the limited, dismal path of my mom. I am not hopeful about my life or about things ever getting better for people like me.
KC: My great grandmother was born in slavery in 1832. Her last child my grandfather was the only one born free because he was born a few months after Lee surrendered in the spring of 1865. She had to walk from plantation to plantation after the Civil War looking for her children that had been sold away from her. My grandmother was born in 1882 just as the white privilege of those who had lost the Civil War was being restored by violence and lynchings. My mother had me in 1950 and when I was five I could not legally go to the public library in town. So I think you are asking a question that black people in this country have been asking for generations — where is God in the face of the evils of racism and its horrors, which so many have suffered firsthand.
YS: I don’t have much hope and yet I don’t want to fall into the pit of resentment and bitterness. I know I suffer the material disadvantages of racism. I don’t want to suffer the emotional and spiritual ones also.
KC: The trauma of black women is carried in our DNA and passed down to our children. This began with the trauma of the horrors endured on slave ships and continued for centuries in human bondage where women and men were beaten, raped and lynched. This terror came from the god of economic privilege, not the God of the Bible. Not the God of Jesus who brought a message of love to the world.
YS: I know that horrible history, but what I don’t understand is why after providing free labor to develop this country before the Civil War and after the Civil War free labor through the suffering of peonage in the South and the cheapest labor for the worst jobs across the country for over a century and a half — why are people evil to us? Why didn’t Breoanna get a civic award for her helping the sick instead of being murdered. Why after all of our blood, sweat and tears are we not embraced in gratitude? Instead we are given second class housing, education and healthcare. This is why I despair.
KC: My beloved child, let me see what lifelines I can offer you into the possibility of internal freedom — the kind that Nelson Mandela achieved, despite the fact he was in a jail cell for decades because of his skin color. Our spiritual and social fore-bearers teach us that its hard to fight for external fairness and justice unless there is internal freedom.
YS: What is strange is that almost all the hourly paid staff at the extended care facility where I work are black or hispanic and most of the patients there are old, white people. Sure I can banter with and care for these elderly white people as individuals, but at the same time this setting reflects with startling immediacy the have and have-not disparity caused by white privilege. My mother died very young simply from the stress of trying to feed her kids by working two jobs and not having the time or means to care for herself. I don’t want the same fate. I need a major lifeline.
KC: Thank you for your honesty. This is always the place where we must start. And with that candor we must begin by understanding who we are. Without a sense of our own identity it is impossible for us to begin to have a sense of agency in our own lives. I am fortunate. I have a lineage of strong matriarchal foremothers. I have known all my life that I am never alone that there have always been with me the spirits of these strong women who managed to have good inner lives through the most horrendous outer circumstances. In theological terms these are the communion of saints. These women that you need to rely on to give you a sense of your own identity need not be your own family members. They are the people we are drawn to that become our spiritual family of mentors. Who are some of the women that are your heroes?
YS: I love reading Toni Morrison, and in school I did a paper on the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks.
KC: That is a good start. What you are attracted to in these two women are parts of you. You can claim your identity from them. You can see that your spirit embodies the spirit that you admire in them.
You might also want to read Alice Walker in her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. She led black women theologians like me to examine the threefold oppressions black women suffer of racism, sexism and classism — and for black women how these three forces have created a particular Christian meaning template for black women.
YS: Okay, so I see how I have some work to do about claiming my own identity, but even if I do, how do I find anything hopeful in this country we live in where so many of those in control seek to enforce ever more racist’s policies.
KC: Let me give you a few thoughts on hope. What can be helpful is to frame a discussion about hope around the difference between ego hope, which is either a positive or negative expectation of the future that pulls one out of the present, and soul (essence) hope, which is a state of being that comes from knowing that there is an intelligence, a love, a beauty, something bigger than our small self to meet us when we are open and present to our own indwelling Spirit in the midst of what is before us.
YS: I want to believe with all my heart as Martin Luther King said, that the arc of history is in the right direction, toward justice, but I have to have something greater than a hope attached to the future to sustain me in a world rife with racist’s policies. I can see the distinction you are making about hope and it sounds important, but I want to have some ego hope that things can get better, that I can get a middle class job and have children who have a chance to grow up without being killed or put in prison because they are black.
KC: Paradoxically the most hopeful way — and I use that word without irony — for those ego hopes to materialize is for us to develop the inner hope that comes from our ability to be present and open and in touch with the experience of our own beingness grounded in a greater reality of beingness (the theological expression for this understanding of God is the Ground of Being) that includes the spirits and souls of those in our spiritual family that came before us.
YS: I was afraid you were going to say that.
KC: I wish it were different, but for a people who for the first couple hundred years on this continent were in profound bondage and for the last two hundred have been caught in the vice of systemic racism the only possible freedom has come from being able to escape interiorly and more particularly to escape within in the context of the community of the black church. For hundreds of years our worship services have been both to praise God and to claim if just for a couple of hours an inner experience of freedom that no external circumstances can take from us.
YS: No offense, but that might be good enough for your generation, but I am not sure it is for me.
KC: None taken. Here is the thing, it doesn’t work to get to this place intellectually. That will not make you feel free. The only way to meaningfully get to this place is with an embodied sense of your divine goodness before God and to feel you are able to be constantly in the stream of Her love so that you hold inwardly to a Light much brighter than the slings and arrows of racism around you. This inner peace will then allow you to engage in the action that is your gift to bring to the world, whether it be through healing ministry, music, or marching. Always when we engage our divine gift we bring more love, more social love — which is justice, to the world.
YS: So you are saying don’t chuck this idea out of finding inner freedom within community without trying to live in it.
KC: Correct, I am saying you are of a lineage that has the most rich inner heritage of embodied faith that has ever existed on this continent, at least since the coming of Africans and Europeans to this land. That heritage is mediated by some of the strongest deeply spiritually grounded black women who have ever lived and this communion of saints, is a part of your identity, is there pulling for you at every turn in your life. This heritage wants you to have the self-care and all the mental health and emotional support you need. Claim your heritage, my beloved, and the love you will receive from it will allow you to fall into the power and agency God has given to empower strong, loving black women in America. Then my dear you will be one of those chosen to help take down the self defeating, heart breaking barriers that centuries of racism have created around us. As the author Michael Eric Dyson recently said, you will be a part of how “black women repeatedly save America. Period.”
YS: [smiles] I don’t know exactly why, but for the first time in a long while I am feeling hopeful. Thank you so much for taking time to talk with me.
KC: Bless you, my child. Go in Peace with the knowledge of how deeply you are loved and how strong is the heritage that supports you.
Howard Thurman (HT): You wrote me to ask if I was the right spiritual director for you as a multiracial person. That is a question you will need to decide. Thank you for coming. I am always glad to see young people seeking to embrace their spiritual life.
Multiracial Person (MP): Thank you for being willing to see me. Maybe my worrying about my multiracial background is the wrong starting point for our conversation.
HT: Nothing is ever the wrong starting point. Whatever is most on your mind is the best place to begin.
MP: Thank you for your understanding. I came to you because I know you began the first interracial church in America and my hope is you might understand my dilemma.
HT: Yes, Alfred Fisk and I started the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in 1944 on Russian Hill in San Francisco. Not only was it interracial it was also interfaith. Our focus was not on theology as much as the experience of love in community.
MP: Well, I have never been to California, but I understand the church you founded is still going. Barbara Holmes in her book Joy Unspeakable talks about the moving experience she had there during the opening meditation in the service.
HT: Word of Professor Holmes’ work has gotten around. I am glad you have read her.
MP: Her book really impacted me in a way that exacerbated the tension that brings me here. My father is white and my mother is part African American. She has wonderful caramel skin. I land somewhere between my father and mother in complexion.
I grew up in integrated schools in an integrated neighbor. When I hang out with my white friends and their charter school white friends, everyone accepts me as white. When I hang out with my black friends in their homes, they accept me as black. In a way it is wonderful. I know that. But it is also a bit schizophrenic. I can deal with it in my everyday life. As my mother and father tell me it just is what it is. Where I am having difficulty is my spiritual life. I need wholeness in my spiritual life, and I feel I am somehow splintered spiritually by the choices before me.
HT: Martin Luther King, Jr. observed decades ago that one of the most segregated hours in the United States occurs on Sunday mornings when we attend church services. I am afraid that is still true all these years later.
MP: I understand from your writing and Barbara Holmes that worship is a community affair and while white churches are more oriented toward individualistic salvation, for the most part they have a community focus also.
HT: So you are having trouble finding a church home that accepts you for who you are?
MP: The problem is a bit more complicated than that. I can be accepted at a mainline white church or in the black church. But in either one it seems I have to leave a piece of me behind. There are black people, at least a few, in mainline white churches and white people are welcome in most black churches. It is not that. Rather it is that the format, the liturgies, the kind of community created in each is different. The white church is more head centered. The black church more in the body and heart. There doesn’t seem to be a format that speaks to all of a mixed race person like me.
HT: We tried to do that at the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples.
MP: From what I have read I believe you did, but there are not any churches like that around where I live. I can get carried away on good old fashion black spirituals or a Bach pipe organ piece. I don’t know where to get both.
HT: (chuckles) What a good problem to have. People of color were still sitting on the back of the bus when we started the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. The truth of the matter is most people in this country are mixed race and, unless they are from outer space, the origin of each person leads back to the heart of Africa.
MP: I understand that there has been much progress and there is so much further to go for there to be true equality in this country. But I am longing to find a spiritual home now.
HT: I believe we always have to start with what is. Like your parents have told you. What exists right now, with a few exceptions, are parallel church formats, a white and a black. We don’t have a format that addresses the multicultural reality that you are a part of and, truthfully, we all are.
MP: Right!
HT: Both the white church and black church have a formulas for a worship service and community. They don’t want to give up these to become the white and black church, even though their theology is the same Christian theology that says we should all love each other. For the black church to survive slavery, Jim Crow, and white privilege this need to hunker down together in community was not an attempt to isolate it was necessary for survival. On the other hand, progressive white churches’ failure to adopt a more multicultural worship service stems from the implicit bias of white privilege. It allows the white church to say we are open to all, but take no actions to dismantle the form of service of a segregated white church. By leaving in tact barriers to a multicultural church, only serving religion up in a starched white format, many African Americans, like you perhaps, are never fully able to relate and never attend.
Now the biggest irony of all is that in these voluntarily segregated white and black churches there is never any opportunity to learn, not just in the head, but in the body and heart what it means to obey God’s commandment to love. This can only be done by being deeply in community with diverse people. Otherwise we are not learning to love another as much as being like Narcissus admiring his own reflection.
What do you like most about either the white church or black church form of service?
MP: I like the music and body movement of the black church, it can take me to an altered space of deep centeredness. And I like the Centering Prayer practices offered in the white church. These, too, can take me to a deeply centered place where I experience God’s presence.
HT: Wonderful, you have experienced two of the primary ways to connect with God, through bodily movement, music and chant, on the one hand, and silence and stillness, on the other. Both allow for the false self, the part of the ego that is seeking for power and control, esteem and affection or security and survival, to drop away and the present moment to be experienced in a way that allows us to interact with God’s presence which is actually part of what we call the present moment. Both paths are enhanced when they are done in community.
MP: So you are saying I am stuck with my original problem.
HT: No, I am saying that these two paths to God are always going to attract two groups of people and that I don’t think these two groups are easily divided by race. Black church and white church have adopted their worships service formats differently primarily because of other factors. The black church had to rely on chants, call and response and other more bodily and heart openings because pre-civil war, reading was illegal in the South. Mainline white Protestant churches became more head centered because Protestants as protestors were trying to distinguish themselves from their Catholic origins. Interestingly, the Catholic church has tried to retain a more bodily focused service with its emphasis on liturgy, bells and smells being the shorthand reference. But for many, particularly African Americans, Catholic rituals seems too wedded to a system of religious hierarchy and breaking free of white hierarchy has always been a quest of African Americans.
MP: Are multiracial people always going to be outside of the religious forms in our culture?
HT: No, not really. You used the right word — form. Everyone can get stuck inside or outside (in opposition to) a religious form, a type of worship, a type of religious community. This problem is also your opportunity. Since there is no form that lands just right for you as a multiracial person, you have a head-start on going deeper into your spiritual journey not to be hindered by form. We need the form to deliver the content, but the form is not the content, the form helps lead us, especially initially, but it is not the Spirit which cannot be contained in any form.
Once you have done your inner work you will be in a place to create the new forms so badly needed in your country in order for people to actually learn God’s commandment to love.
MP: I am still feeling like I am stuck.
HT: Only in the sense that, at a younger age than most, you are being asked to go deeper in your spiritual life. From what you have told me you have already made a good start with your contemplative practices.
MP: So you are saying it is good for me to feel spiritually not at home, restless about where the spiritual community is that suits me best?
HT: Absolutely. One of the many things my wife and I learned out of our experience with Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples was that it makes no sense to talk about God’s commandment to love one another unless a community also creates a chance for people to experience loving one another. I learned that preaching about or talking about racism with progressive white people soon finds us all in agreement about its evils, but does nothing to break down the barriers of implicit bias we all have until there is a shared community experience of a common life together.
Our worship experience at Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples increasingly became not a white church form or a black church form but simply a celebration of life among a widely diverse range of people.
MP: So what is the best way for me to learn about the Commandment to love.
HT: What I have learned about God’s commandment to love is that it requires us to not just accept others who are different, but to open ourselves to understanding them and being understood. We learn to see from the heart. This is hard because it requires a significant degree of vulnerability. We all have experiences in our lives where we vulnerably sought understanding and acceptance and were rebuffed. These rebuffs created barriers to love. We all have them. In His commandment to love, God is asking us to take our barriers down. This is not easy, but it is contemplative practices that allowed me to know “[s]omewhere deep within was a ‘place’ beyond all faults and virtues that had to be confirmed before I could run the risk of opening my life up to another. To find ultimate security in an ultimate vulnerability, this is to be loved.”
We are not trying to teach people to be compassionate to those less fortunate, this simply reinforces our perception that we are better, smarter or whiter than another group. This is the opposite of love. Rather we must learn to be with others different from ourselves in all our vulnerability and accept our and their brokenness as fellow human beings and in that instance the relationship itself transforms into love.
MP: So you are saying the form of worship doesn’t matter, it is whether a faith community provides the kind of safety for me to open up and be vulnerable to people different from me — this will teach me and them God’s love in a way it can actually be experienced.
HT: The form is important if it encourages the kind of contemplative practices that allow you to feel grounded in God’s love so that you can be secure in being vulnerable with others about who you truly are. In that experience each of us is unique and in the tonic of God’s love we are all beloved.
MP: Thank you for letting me come talk with you. I am not sure which church I will attend, but I believe I see more clearly what I am looking for.
HT: You will come to realize what you are looking for can be found within any form as long as that form allows people to truly open to seeing and understanding each other with the eye of the heart.
Thank you for coming. I hope you will come back. Peace and God’s blessings on you in your journey.
Dorothy Day (DD): Please come and be seated. I am glad you want to visit. Not many social activists would think of seeking direction from an old-time labor activist like me, especially an old Catholic one at that.
Social Activist (SA): You became a Catholic social activist, but you started out as simply a social activist anxious to help those burdened by an unfair labor system, poverty, and social neglect and I am coming to you because you never gave up.
DD: Tell me, my sister, where does this concern about giving up come from.
SA: All the social activists that I know, who I think are all wanting to do good things, are unhappy and angry. Some of them have egos so large it is hard not to trip over them when you meet them coming down the hall. I have already seen some of them burn out. I want to know how to follow in your footsteps in 2019. You had a combination of humility and perseverance that seems missing today. How in the world did you do it?
DD: Well there is certainly a lot to be unhappy about out there in 2019. I don’t see anger as bad as an energy. It wakes us up and gets us into action, but you are asking an important and deeper question which I might phrase like this — What is the source of energy for change and transformation that is going to be most effective to bring justice to heal our world? Would that be fair?
SA: Yes, very much so. Things really do seem bad. We have leaders who are racist, misogynist, and rapist and who turn their back on first world causes of global warming, which will most harshly affect the lives of the poor and those in third world countries. There is a lot to be angry about.
DD: As I say, anger is good if we use that energy to get us into the game, but it is not a source of energy to heal. Too many well-meaning people today come from a place of judgement and social superiority, that goes something like — everyone should be doing something to make the world better, especially the things I think they should be doing.
SA: I might fall into the well-meaning, judgmental group. Everyone doing something to make things better may be a judgement, but it sounds pretty good to me.
DD: Yes it does sound good at first blush, but when you look at it more closely you see that it is often coming from a place of critical superiority. Yes, it is very important to discern injustice and unfairness and right to be angered by any form of mistreatment of human beings. However, if you start from that judgmental place of superiority, then you will end up being an angry person whose ego is all tied up in changing the world in the way you think is right. Usually our ego-fueled projects, if they are not accomplished quickly, lead to burn out.
Ego driven activist are good people, who get parodied by right-wingers who project their assumed superiority on these people trying to do good by referring to them as limousine liberals. Sometimes there is some glimmer of truth in this accusation, that is the reason it stings. The other reason it stings is because those on each side of modern social justice issues often are both coming from a judgmental place of superiority and projecting their judgmental superiority on the other side — the much more burnt pot is calling the kettle black.
SA: Wow, I do feel that sting. You admitted things are really bad, so what energy do we harness to change things if being judgmental about unfairness is wrong. I can’t believe you want us to give up?
DD: You know from my life that giving up is the last thing that I would suggest to anyone. Our desire to do good simply needs to start from a different place. We all landed here on this beautiful earth without doing a single thing to make that happen. Our life and this creation are all given to us. We did nothing to cause ourselves or the planet to come into being.
Regardless of your religious faith, or lack thereof, we are recipients of the most incredible gifts imaginable, our lives and this beautiful earth. Our task is to show our appreciation and thanks by giving the earth and life, including all plant and animal life and human life, honor and respect.
We all are dependent upon thousands of other people for the things we eat, the clothes we wear and the many material things we enjoy. All those people who make these things possible are entitled to our respect and honor. When we start from this place, we are starting from a place of love and not a place of superior judgement. The causes we work for may look the same, but how it is done and the way it effects other human beings in the process is vastly different.
SA: Hmmm. I think I see what you are saying. But what about protesting racism and discrimination against women. Isn’t that being judgmental about past unjust treatment? Shouldn’t we be doing that?
DD: Yes, of course, that is simply a natural way of honoring women and all people’s humanity and dignity. We simply do it in a way that does not dishonor other parts of humanity. Seeking fairness is about as respectful as one can be to oneself and to others.
SA: Is there a theological base for this distinction you are making on where the energy comes from to work for social justice — between energy coming from I-think-I-know-better and working on a cause in order to honor the dignity of creation and every human being.
DD: In 2019, according to Contemplative Christian thinking, the former would be a dualistic approach to addressing a problem; it judges and divides. The latter would be seen as a non-dual approach, that tries to see in wholeness. Theologically you could say the second is an attempt to see with the eyes of Christ, to see through the eyes of love rather than seeing through the filter of what one’s ego thinks is bad or good.
Let me be quick to say I am not suggesting some relativistic morality. We must discern good and evil in order to know how to honor creation and humankind, but we don’t start from a place of judgement and superiority. We start from a place of goodness, gratitude and wholeness.
SA: I don’t know anything about Contemplative Christianity. Is it something new?
DD: Yes and no. It has been around a long time. It probably reached its zenith in the Middle Ages in the lives of mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. Contemplative Christianity is now in resurgence, so in that sense it is being re-discovered and is something new.
Thomas Merton might be seen as one of the modern teachers of the contemplative way of seeing the world, as well as current teachers like Franciscan Father Richard Rohr and Episcopal priest Cynthia Bourgeault. Significantly, it is also one of the main vehicles for interspiritual dialogue, which is beginning to grow among people of different religions and people who are deeply spiritual but do not identify with a particular religion.
SA: That is interesting. In the Middle Ages there were all these monasteries and convents. Would you want these revitalized to help energize this perspective of Contemplative Christianity?
DD: Yes, but I would retread them in a very different way. The church didn’t require celibacy of priests and monks until the Middle Ages. It was done then for economic reasons, as a way to be sure that the church and not a priest’s family inherited the priest’s property. At this time the church was as much a secular power as a religious one, and it was eager to increase its economic power to preserve its influence over secular society. Required celibacy to lead a religious life is a bad idea. We all see the perversion it has led to in the church. It is truly a horrible sin against the Spirit, against our very life force.
I think there is a place for monasteries and convents today, but not for people to become celibate and certainly not to be there for life. Monasteries and convents in Christianity should function in the same way they do in certain Buddhist traditions and Zen Buddhism. Most people don’t go to these monasteries for life, rather they go there for a few formative years to grow up emotionally in a safe place and to have a place to learn the contemplative practices and disciplines that foster a non-dual way of seeing the world.
SA: Wow, giving young people a refuge sounds like a great idea. I have become aware of so many people under the age of 25 attempting suicide. The psyche wards are full of young people. Something in our culture is really toxic to the young.
DD: Going to a monastery would not be for everyone obviously, but for those sincere spiritual seekers — wouldn’t it be great if you could go to a Christian monastery for a couple of years just like young Zen monks do? We need to have places where a young person feels free to find out who he or she really is and learn basic tools to emotionally and spiritually become that person. Young people need a safe place where they can ask in healthy ways the kind of ultimate questions that, when not asked and discussed, make self-inflicted death for a young person seem a viable option.
SA: I mean it sounds crazy good. Do you think the Catholic church would listen to you now if you were here to suggest it?
DD: Probably not, they didn’t do much listening to me when I was alive. But as rusty and leaky as those old pipes of religion are sometimes there is life giving water in them.
SA: What should I do to be the kind of social activist you are talking about?
DD: This is where the idea of a couple years in a monastery is so attractive. You would need to learn basic contemplative practices, such as Centering Prayer, to begin to experience seeing the world in a non-dual way. Once you have this radically different perspective on life you are ready to start bringing dignity and integrity to human beings in whatever social cause you feel led to.
Contemplative practices initially require a lot of self focus and discipline, but the result of the non-dual experience is that we realize we are not simply isolated human beings randomly moving about. We experience that we are all connected. Contemplation quite naturally leads to community and then social activism arises out of the community as a way to honor and respect the earth and all people because we are connected to everyone. So if the Catholic church did take my suggestion and turned monasteries and convents into opportunities for young people to mature in a contemplative atmosphere, before long we could have tens of thousands of young people, graduating from their monastic experiences and becoming social activists. I am giddy at the thought.
SA: So social activism, in your view, is not about learning how to help the poor, which is a judgement and movement right at the start, to a perspective of superiority. Rather it is learning to be in touch deeply enough with one’s true self that you realize we are connected to everyone else, as well as to all the natural world, and then your social activism simply is a product of showing honor and respect to all things.
DD: You are quick. You have it. The important thing to note is that this shift is not a matter of intellectual learning. You don’t make this shift in perspective by studying a text book. Quite the opposite. You only make this shift in perspective by having the actual experience of connection with the natural world and others. Such experiences of connectedness are the product of contemplative practices. These create a non-dual perspective from an internal shift in sensibility. Then your focus becomes one that is less about doing for others and more about the connectedness of being-ness.
SA: Well, right now monasteries and convents are closed to would-be activists like me wanting to come by for a period of time to bone up on contemplative practices. How should I start?
DD: In 2019, there are many centering prayer groups and workshops where you can learn about contemplative practices. Take your time. You want to figure out who you are first before rushing out to try to fix someone else. Only when you really know who you are will you feel the rightness of bringing your gifts into the world to honor others and the earth. Gradually you move from this place of feeling angry about all the injustice in the world to being in solidarity with everyone, especially those unfaired against.
All of the great religions recognize that in growing up, to be psychologically healthy, one needs to develop a sense of separate self. This occurs naturally. The next stage of development, however, takes time and effort and that is to realize one is both separate and an inseparable part of the whole mystery of creation. This second unfolding process is admittedly self-focused for a period of time, but the maturity it brings always creates a wider more connected and inclusive vision.
Most of the great religions teach the ideals of the second stage of growth, but they do so in a way that the ego feels it needs to learn them and achieve them through ego self-will. This way of trying to achieve emotional and spiritual maturity doesn’t work, because it relies on the ego to get there, when the whole object is to move beyond experiencing the world as an individual ego self. Fortunately, another process for this second stage growth is also taught by the mystical, non-dual traditions of all the great religions. Humankind is at the stage now where we all need to grow in this way, if the planet is to survive. Another way to summarize all this is to say that even if anger wakes us up, at some point if our social activism is to be truly generative and healing it needs to flow from gratitude and love, love that is vulnerable, open and inclusive.
SA: Thank you so much for our conversation. You have given me a lot to think upon. As I sift through what you have said, it seems there is no down side to giving contemplative practices a try. If I find they work I will know from the experience itself.
DD: If you can do your social activism work grounded in contemplative practices you will be ahead of the game. As Jesus said, your yoke will be an easy yoke. You are not the superior being trying to change the world for good then, rather you are connected to everything and you are simply trying to honor this amazing gift of creation and human life. On the other hand, not to do anything would in my mind be worst.
SA: So you thing it is okay to plunge in even though I know nothing about contemplative practices.
DD: Many a good thing has been accomplished by the efforts of a young ego that later matured into a person of greater consciousness. Transformation in the trenches is just as good as in the monastery. Any path that allows a person to thrive in a non-judgmental, deeply spirited way brings healing. On the other hand, ego driven activism leads most often to burn-out.
Let me emphasize there is no single template for how best to be a healing force in a social justice cause. Anger, which turns into judgment and hate from an outraged ego, may be precisely the booster rocket needed to get one propelled into a life of honoring others. Nothing wrong with that. But to make it for the long haul the energy of activism must mature to a genuine love and caring for others. Ultimately the work we are called to do is not so much about solving social problems — that is the superiority perspective — as it is to be transformed to become loving human beings.
SA: So even though I don’t know anything about contemplative practices, if I do social activist work in a manner grounded in honoring the earth and others I am starting from the better place.
DD: Quite right. I believe Jesus came, as he said, to give us life more abundantly. A more abundant life is all around us, just like God’s presence is always there. Having it is a matter of inner work that gives us a new perspective, seeing with the mind of Christ. In this way we see Christ in the homeless person and realize we have more to learn from her than we can ever hope to give.
SA: What does a more abundant life look like?
DD: To have an abundant life, it is our job to open our awareness to a deeper and more abundant perspective from which to experience life. The tools are contemplative ones that teach us how to honor all people by allowing for the transformation of our consciousness so we see in wholeness, act with love and do not get lost in thinking we are superior to those we are helping. The abundance comes not because we solve all the social injustices, but because we participate deeply in our human community in giving and receiving love.
As we have discussed, those tools were taught in the monasteries and convents in the Christian church in the Middle Ages and are taught today in small pockets, especially by followers of Father Keating, a leader of this contemplative understanding, who died just recently.
SA: Do other religions have a similar contemplative perspective as a part of their social activism?
DD: Yes, as we have discussed other mystical religious paths have much the same perspective as Contemplative Christianity. Much has been gained in the West from learning about Eastern religious perspectives over the past fifty years.
Back in the sixties a number of young spiritual seekers, a lot of them Jewish, went to India seeking spiritual answers. Many became Buddhist. They returned to the United States and brought with them meditation experiences and practices that had helped them to acquire the ability to see with a non-dual perspective.
So the perspective that I am suggesting to you, which is so important if your social activist work is to be healing and create solidarity, is not one limited to Christianity. I talk about it from that perspective because that is my faith.
The good news is that this perspective is out there anchored in the mystical perspectives of all world religions. As such it is the secret sauce of these perspectives, which will provide the opportunity for people everywhere to address with respect, honor and love the problems of man’s inhumanity to man and wanton destruction of the earth.
SA: Thank you for your insights, sister Dorothy. (hesitates) I hope it’s okay to call you sister? I am very encouraged by what you have told me.
DD: (grins) I see you are getting it already. We are all related. Thank you, sister.