A Clock Makers Convention

July 3, 2015
by Michael
comments 31
Poetry

At the clock makers convention
we arranged ourselves neatly
around a life-sized cutaway
of a gravitational escapement,
observing the pendulum
bearing the maker’s seal
that swung to and fro
behind a nest of hypnotic linkages,
together recalling
amidst polite chuckles
and knowing nods
the virtuous marriage
of metallurgy and time-keeping.
Not too many really understood
what we did…
Not too many could even fathom
the significance of what was on display…

Pretty cool, eh?
said the gentleman beside me,
nudging my elbow with his own.

The nude mechanism before us
enumerated the passing slices of our fate
with its ratcheting, circular logic,
and I found myself back
where I had been nearly a year before,
watching flames of cloud
fly sideways across the face of the moon
from a creaking porch swing,
unable to be certain whether
it was the moon’s movement
or the cloud’s that was giving me vertigo,
or if it wasn’t the sensation
that the whole sky was engulfed by holy fire–
an abyss of colliding powers
of which I had seen but a glimpse.
What else could have left me feeling
so weakened and foreign
to my own gathering potentials?

How to say, exactly,
to this one beside me
that the merits of time-keeping
now eluded me?
That jeweled mechanisms
seemed more of a misunderstanding
than a sophistication?
That the graceful swaying
of maple limbs in a spring breeze
seemed a clockworks device
for a polymorphous sort of time
we hadn’t yet considered,
and to whose workings
I had just last week pledged
my heart’s allegiance?

Birds don’t introduce themselves
without making reference to the sky,
you see.
They don’t think they
have anything
figured out
because they are the ones who can fly.
Likewise, my memories
have no meaning of their own.

Yeah… pretty cool… I said.

That night I drove to the sea
and collapsed near the edge–
famished and running slow.
I listened to the waves
and their shifting rhythms
as one by one, they wound
the spring of my heart.

It’s okay if you are most nearly
a slender line of light
in a forgotten corner of the barn,
or a stone under the ground
resting near to a great tree’s root–
a sweeping hand of indeterminate measure.
We are each a cosmic escapement–
a daily yielding to something beautiful,
a glimpse into an endless fire.

We forget sometimes that we
are what’s on display in this
planetary convention hall–
each of us a perfectly weighted movement,
and that our gentle nudging of elbows
is the very mechanism by which
the countless rhythms of eternity
are safely kept.

My Recovering Peperomia

June 25, 2015
by Michael
comments 23
Poetry

I read an article the other day
about some people
who did what all the books
said to do
and they were explaining
in very simple terms
how now their every movement
opens up before them
like a strawberry shortcake snack
at the Center for Incredibleness
and their every breath
brings with it some beneficent manifestation
like a phone call from some Swiss lawyer
representing a great uncle
they never knew they had
who made some fine investments in railroad steel
a century or two ago, then was lost tragically
in a hot air balloon disaster along with
most of his immediate relatives,
which meant it fell upon the
shiny happy ones from the article
to inherit
and manage
a hefty assortment of waiting monies.

Hafiz was staring with equanimity
at my wilting peperomia plant,
which I leveraged as an opportunity
to add neglectful to the growing list
of obvious flaws I would
one day need to surmount
in order to manifest
unsolicited telephone calls
from foreign barristers.

“Your great uncle died, too, you know.”

Yes, I know that.
Did he not think I knew that?

Then, while Hafiz watered my peperomia plant
in a very beautiful way,
a way I could probably never manage
in this lifetime,
a way that made my eyes water
and my chest swell up
with all the grieving I had never completed
for that great uncle I never met,
I looked at my own list of life circumstances.

I could see no strawberry shortcake snacks
laid out in a buffet line before me.
I could see, instead,
a phone call that needed to be made
to a disappointed client,
a sketch of an apple I had tried to make
that looked instead like a crepe
left out in the sun too long,
and a fresh sriracha stain on my favorite shirt.
I felt as if the past several decades
of sitting quietly beside lit candles
early in the morning or late at night
and listening to the hidden meanings
of my own breath had been a futile postponement
of the obvious conclusion: I was broken.

Hafiz came over and sat beside me.
He lit a candle and together we breathed
some air in and out for a little while,
resting in one another
back and forth
like ancient waves finally finding their shore
until there was only the sensation
of spaciousness and the sound of
two bodies breathing.

Then I retired for the evening.

I dreamed about a sea of faces
stretching in all directions
like pebbles strewn across the beach of history,
and of all of the countless teeth they had grown–
a ga-jillion perfect bones–!
every one of them incomprehensibly
arising in its rightful place.

The next morning my peperomia
was spread full and alert,
and I realized I was a holy tooth
nestled quietly
in the song-filled mouth
of Love.

We were all in there together,
lined up and gleaming,
and the whole world
around us was busily
blowing
kisses…

Where Every Road Leads

June 19, 2015
by Michael
comments 36
Christ / Course Ideas / Science

I’m not so naive as to think I fully understand my own beliefs and feelings, nor to assume they form an exactly rational system when laid bare by attempts at explanation.  But in making the effort, I discover things– inconsistencies in thought, many of them delightful(!); powerful feelings that cannot be explained, yet explain much; ineffable inner realms I realize are part and parcel to who I am; or the existence of ideas operating one level deeper within me than the level I set out to explain.  I discover, or at least contact, who I am, and by extension, who we are.

As an example, consider this treasured, albeit potentially indefensible conviction I hold, that the world is quite capable of behaving in ways not reconcilable with the past.  Equivalently stated, I believe my library of personal experience is a woefully inadequate indicator of what exists within the landscape of the possible.  Both of these statements efforts to describe a feeling I have in my heart.  It is a feeling that beckons to me from the unknown.  It is a feeling that something very real exists, right now, but not yet fully within the present frame of manifest experience.

Is this crazy?

Then I am happy to be called such.

Feelings are powerful resonators, and they call forth ideas that seem capable of elaborating on their contents.  Giving these ideas life can quite often seem an impossible task, however, particularly when they represent departures from past precedent, and it is at this point in the chain reaction of creation and consequence that one reaches an impasse.  It is as if an uncrossable divide appears in our way.  How does one reach across the gap from one frame to the other, from what is felt to what is apparent?

* * * * *

When I was in college I discovered the ideas of John Keely.  To some, he was construed as a crackpot and a fraud.  To others he was a genius.  One premise latent in his work is that every structure in the universe– from the smallest particle to the greatest galaxy– participates in a dynamic flow of harmonious forces that may be “sprung open” at any point in space, just as a field of invisible white light is capable of being released into a rainbow of visible colors on its passage through a drop of water.  These forces, once released, seek ever to return to their natural state of hidden balance.  The Earth and the Sun, as examples, are like two drops of that water, fulcrums of power who each spring open the cosmic reservoir, releasing forces who flow continuously from each to each in their yearning for balance.  It is as if a limitless field of neutral magnetic potential were torn in two points, creating a pair of openings, and those two openings were linked to form a continuously flowing circuit.  Thus, through relationship and mutual arising, a dynamic, but seemingly stable form emerges.

So far the story sounds rather like an impressionist, nineteenth century rendition of electrodynamics, in which electrons are bound to the nucleus of atoms by passing the electromagnetic force back and forth.  One of Keely’s distinctions was that he felt the human being was also such a drop of water, and he came to realize that the human being could “awaken” these forces in earthen materials.  Two examples from stories surrounding Keely’s legacy will reveal what is meant by this.  In one story, Keely placed copper spheres at various points in his laboratory, and by preparing them in ways that remain beyond concise explanation, he was able to cause them to form a miniature “solar system”.  They floated in orderly circles through the air of his laboratory just as planets float through the space around the sun.  In a second example, he constructed a large copper sphere that he “geared” to the existing circuitry of the Earth and Sun.  When activated, the sphere would rotate, just as a planet does, and would do so regardless of resistance applied to it– e.g. leather straps linked to really heavy objects.  He is said to have intended to apply this invention to the rail system, eliminating the need for dangerous steam engines in trains.

The insight, the mojo in all of this is said to have been love– whatever that is…  Keely is said to have initiated his experiments by playing a violin and using music as a carrier of his heartfelt knowing-feeling.  To simplify– temporarily eschewing the notion that the stories are simply absurd, because the feeling I have would suggest this isn’t necessarily so– Keely’s legacy suggests that love can awaken relationship, causing new circuits to form in the natural world through which harmonizing forces will flow.  I found this idea nearly intoxicating, and still do.

* * * * *

At this earlier time in my life, roughly fifteen years ago, I participated in a group of roughly twenty to thirty persons– (at our peak, though at times we were just two or three)– who had come together in an effort to recreate this phenomenon.  We failed to reproduce any physical reenactments of these stories, but the particular mode of failure did not really dampen my feeling that far more is possible than history would suggest.

One thing I learned was that I needed a result too badly.  I was desperate, hungry, and splintered within.  I was, truth be told, as scared of success as I was of failure.  I thought I would be different if events went a particular way, and I now realize how deeply erroneous this type of thinking is, and was.  I sensed this inherent cosmic braking system at work within me at the time, but I desired to somehow push through my littleness.  If we could invent light bulbs and space stations, why could we not research our way forward to this?  It was such a good dream.  Though the message we were given was that healing and love would need to precede any of the spectacular outcomes we envisioned, I was impatient, and I was pained at times by the handicaps of my own shortcomings.

I could see no real path forward, and the effort fell apart, but I decided to take the medicine.  I realized I would need to be free of projecting my wholeness onto specific forms, free of needing specific outcomes, and that what I needed above all else was to become a reservoir of peace and contentment with however life arrived.  In other words, I could apply this feeling of possibility to all that has already arisen, and thereby eliminate the gap.  What lies beyond the gap remains to be seen and experienced, but remains out of reach so long as one’s current field of experience is seen as broken.  What I think I understand deeply now is that the path to the new involves the transformation of our experience of what already is.

Removing the obstacles to one’s awareness of Love’s presence is the temporary purpose of life.  When the process is completed, it is no longer needed.  Rational or not, I accept this to be so, and I remain convinced of the validity of the feeling I have that beyond the embodiment of this realization there lies all sorts of beautiful possibilities.  Keely may have been a genius, or he may have been a crackpot.  We may never know definitively.  It doesn’t really matter at this point.  My path led to here…  I am pregnant with an idea of open-endedness I cannot shake, and I am protecting this child within me from the conclusions of history.  We whisper to one another at night, about all that we are becoming, and I find in each day emerging evidence of all that truly is.

The Welcoming Party

June 13, 2015
by Michael
comments 33
Poetry

When I see a leaf
as big as a baby elephant’s ear
bouncing in sunlight,
plunged like an open hand
into a river of life-giving rays
93 million miles deep,
and behaving so mysteriously—
responding to the way of things
with medicinal
colors and chemistries
only it can offer,
as if flush with a secret
I once discarded in favor
of concocted ideas of legitimacy
that involve passing out cards
with my name on them
in a clever font–
I sense,
by the contrast
to my own earnest reconnoitering,
that the edge of me is a boundary
where real magic
breaks down.

I am truest in the quiet–
when I dissolve into the world’s warmth,
and ten thousand spectra illumine my interior,
when my love for you seeps up
through cracks in the floor
I once concocted to limit my falling.
This blood,
this resin
that we are together,
has me on hands and knees,
ignoring the door bell,
contemplating the formulae
of this moment’s revelation,
wanting to draw still closer,
to fall fully into
what lies beneath.

Just beyond,
we have birds of color
who frequent our feeders.
They are what thank-you’s become
when they are freed to make a life
of their own.

The world is beauty
we are meant to don like a cloak,
a wholeness
whose patterns and memories
are meant to enfold us–
a river of sustenance
ten thousand years deep
leaking out through our smiles.

There are still, in my days,
too many moments when
I catch myself
trying to pass messages
through the boundary.

It’s okay,
the water is up to my elbows,
the front door is swinging
open in the breeze,
and one of magic’s
no-nonsense representatives
is standing on the threshold,
waving in the ocean.

Pass the Jesus, Please

June 9, 2015
by Michael
comments 42
Christ / Poetry

Jesus
is a condiment
you can sprinkle
onto any moment,
to give it life.
This is, I think,
his greatest miracle.
While most condiments
come in glass jars
or plastic bottles,
Jesus comes
inside of people.
He’s a salt
that melts the ice
around the heart.
He’s a sauce
that turns every pain
into delectable mystery.
When you dunk
those french-fried ideas
of who you are into him,
they become something
else entirely…
Lotus blossoms.
Sea glass.
Abandoned buildings
filled with columns of moonlight.
Cello music over the water.

Like that.

There was a man
who took a breath, held it,
then Loved so completely
he became a tear.
He fell into the world,
diving down and down
until he reached the point
where every being merges,
and there the tear landed.
Now something is growing there,
spreading its roots through everyone.

I kept wanting to heal specific things.
To mete out my prayers tactfully.
I wanted to see at least one bulb replaced
in a city of darkened corners.
But there’s something missing in this approach…
I mixed some parsley into this need,
and a drop or two of his holy tears,
and I remembered:
the sun…!
But not just the sun…
If you picture a sun with countless human faces,
and the power to whisper back and forth
across the dimension where all beings meet,
and the inclination to stand in the drive-thru window
on rainy days, holding out crumpled bags of eternal life
to anyone bold enough to order the special sauce,
that would be a closer approximation.

Healing is what happens
when you stand alone in an empty room,
and tell your entire story to the walls.
Because at some point in the telling,
you’ll reach the place where
everyone
is listening.

You’ll become a curious flavor
in the Beloved’s holy broth.

The Necessity of Considering Time… (and Meaning–?)

June 7, 2015
by Michael
comments 29
Book Reviews / Science

I took some time off to visit my mother for a few days recently, one minor consequence of which was the necessity of making an eight hour drive twice in a relatively short period of time.  My answer to this dilemma was to download the audio version of physicist Lee Smolin’s book Time Reborn.  It has been a while since I’ve had the chance to dig into this type of book, and as one very much interested in the ideas of physics, I thoroughly enjoy Smolin’s writing.  This was the third book of his that I have read.  It is a pretty rare physicist who takes the time to provide carefully constructed glimpses into the field for non-specialists, and I very much appreciate the efforts of those who do so.

The central premise of the book is that the treatment of time as an illusory phenomenon has produced a variety of physical theories of cosmology that cannot be evaluated meaningfully through the scientific method, and whose outcomes often describe universes quite different from the one we see.  Regarding the former, efforts to further these theories have led to vast families of solutions to the basic laws of nature– the laws we have now, anyway– without providing any insight into how the specific solution that represents our universe might have been “pulled from the hat”.  This is akin to a situation in which we have a theory that predicts the way a thrown ball will travel through space.  We can find an infinite number of trajectories that satisfy the requirements of the theory, but only one of them will represent the specific path of the Randy Johnson pay-off pitch that whistles past the batter on the inside corner and ends the inning.  Our world is just such a pitch.  Something marvelous relative to all possible thrown-ball scenarios we could imagine.

Some physicists have resorted to the anthropic principle to explain how a universe like ours was selected from all the possible universes that could have arisen in perfect satisfaction of the known laws, which basically means: we’re here aren’t we–???  And given as we’re here, certain things could only be as they have been.  For Smolin, this is not physics, because the anthropic principle is not an idea that can be tested or that leads to any new and meaningful insights into the nature of the universe– (as of yet, perhaps).

The other problem with the treatment of time as an illusory or emergent phenomenon is that it results in the conception of universes unlikely to produce novelty and complexity, given the laws of nature as we know them today.  Smolin argues that complexity and novelty are the products of histories, and that universes in which time is not a truly active ingredient simply don’t possess the characteristics necessary to spawn the creative complexity and non-uniformity that we see in our own.  In fact, by all known rights contained in the laws of thermodynamics and probability, universes with complexity and novelty ought to be the exception and not the rule.  Attempts to offer cosmological theories without the inclusion of time often rely upon some mechanism or argument for suggesting that in a field of possibility grand enough to include just about anything, then a world such as ours will be in the mix somewhere.  Physicists, you see, are very clear on what the term infinite means.  Such an astoundingly vast domain could surely include at least one lone point within it representing this…

One cosmological theory developed by Julian Barbour suggests that all possible “moments” that ever could exist, do so simultaneously, in a multi-dimensional landscape of static snapshots.  There is no time in the sense that all such moments exist simultaneously, but there is some mechanism by which a path of “moments” is selected from the field of possibilities.  A world is a line traced through the possibility landscape– called by Barbour Platonia— that connects one moment to the next.  Our memories as beings, the buried fossils we discover in the ground, and the historical artifacts contained in a particular snapshot are all explained simply as being the contents of a particular snapshot.  They are not there because of a causal relationship to a past, per se, but because in a vast enough ensemble of possibilities there quite simply will exist moments that contain objects that we would describe as dinosaur fossils.  Barbour also wrote a book accessible to non-specialists, and I found his imaginative thinking also to be insightful and intriguing.  While the simplified version of his story I have given here may seem absurd, it is not.  I simply don’t have the time or space here to do it justice.

I enjoy thinking about all of these things, and whether  a theory is ultimately right or not is hardly the point.  None have been yet.  The ideas and insights that are gleaned from asking questions and following them to their logical conclusions are well worth the effort.  They open the mind and periodically lead to insights into the natural world that, like a good poem, pulse through my entire being like the single, aha! drumbeat of the ineffable.  Such insights are not all of the world, but they provide hints of its character that resonate with me, and bring me to a state of wonder and appreciation.  For me, this is the beauty of science– the moment when insight reminds us we are part of something beautiful, profound, and perhaps beyond ultimate definition.  Also, perhaps paradoxically, the power of science is that it isn’t just fantastic imagining.  Not every idea holds up to the test of scrutiny and examination.  The false must be rooted out and discarded.

In his epilogue Smolin wrote of his dedication to the ethic of science, by which I believe he meant the formulation and testing of assertions, the need to validate them through evidence, and the need to be honest about what isn’t working.  This is a great ethic, and one I believe we would all do well to adopt, for it requires that we accept neither our experience nor our motivations at face value, and that if things aren’t working, that we revisit our most basic assumptions.  This is profoundly difficult for us to do, yet in doing so my experience is that we discover there is something deeper at work that rewards the effort, patience, and imagination required to reveal it.  I am going to propose that I, too, adhere to such an ethic, the difference in our two approaches being the scope of what we consider to be real, and suitable for study.

I believe, for instance, that such an ethic applied to the definition of what we call “God” would radically shift our religious and spiritual thinking, which is too often stifled by the past, and by unquestionable definitions and assertions.  Such a courageous and creative approach would, I think, ultimately allow for a greater consilience between all fields of human inquiry.  Smolin’s universe remains, at its most fundamental, an unconscious unfolding of energy in accordance with inescapable laws– a self-contained and finite, physical process influenced only by its own energetic contents, that gives rise to novelty and complexity.  But what about meaning?  One great challenge I see with isolating science as a route to knowledge is that meaning, too, must be considered an unnecessary and late-arriving phenomenon, being an artifact of an emergent consciousness.  Just as a universe without time seemed, at least in Smolin’s view, to lead to unfertile areas of scientific inquiry, I wonder if the models of universes without meaning won’t one day be viewed as arbitrarily limiting in their predictive and explanatory powers.

Perhaps this is a question outside of the field of science, but I don’t think it is outside of the scope of what it is to be human.

Puppy Love

June 2, 2015
by Michael
comments 29
Poetry

Hafiz picked me up
and drove me out into the countryside,
aiming the right front tire
for every mud puddle he could find,
and filling the rearview mirror
with volley after volley of clay starbursts.

Then, much to the relief
of both my kidneys and
the vehicle’s suspension,
we came across a dog breeder
and popped in to say hello.
After a cup of tea
and a profound discussion
of canine nutrition,
she invited us to see the stock.
We stepped outside
and she whistled like an old school
basketball coach.
All the little pups came running.
They lined up in a row
and plopped down on their
well-trained haunches,
head up, chest out, and eyes wide.
As we went down the line
they smiled ear to ear
like they couldn’t stand it anymore
and made puppy growls and yips
and bounced in place or fell over sideways
and licked our hands and knee caps
and lifted their front paws to touch us
and whined with the delight of being near
and created a small dust storm
with their flapping tails
until our own hearts felt like
they were going to burst.

But then there was one
down on the end, off to the side,
with narrow eyes like chiseled stone,
fixed and unmoving,
like he was a sentry posted
outside of Caesar’s spear closet.
He wore a mask with an elastic strap
to which there was attached
a tiny, pointed granite beak.
Also a harness from which there hung
a pair of wing-like contraptions.
His tail was hidden by a fan
of discarded feathers from various songbirds,
and he made little high-pitched squeals
out of the side of his mouth
the way a ventriloquist would,
from which I intuited the muffled cries
of a would-be falcon.

The owner shrugged her shoulders
and made a dismissive wave of her hand.
There’s one in every litter, she explained.

I wanted so badly to tell this one
about all of the beauty and promise
I saw behind that macabre ensemble of props,
how there was so much joy hidden behind that mask,
but when I put my compassionate hand close
to touch his head, he made one of those squeaks
I was just mentioning to you
and then tried to peck a hole through me
with the business end of that strap-on beak.

Hafiz leaned in to whisper something in my ear.

Don’t even say it, I said,
still smarting from the little bastard’s assault,
holding up my hand like a traffic cop,
and thinking of smacking Hafiz one
right in the shoulder
if he got any closer
with that ha-ha twinkle in his eye.
I know I know… I said…
(rolling my eyes)…
that’s how I look
to the Beloved when I go around all day
acting like a very serious man.

He chuckled.

What I was going to say, he offered,
is that falcons don’t particularly enjoy
being patted on the head,
but you might offer him a piece
of this bloody steak instead.

So I did.

He flipped his toy beak up
like a jeweler’s lens
and pecked the meat right down,
then went back to his
razor-like vision,
though unable to totally suppress
a devilish twitch of his tail.

On the way home
Hafiz put the top down
and our newfound friend sat in the backseat
on a stack of old books
with his tongue dangling in the breeze
and his wings cranked out either side
to their maximum extents,
their pasted on feathers shimmying in the wind,
his eyes wide and watery,
and in his heart…
he was

flying…

An Insight… A Cliché… A Knowing…

May 30, 2015
by Michael
comments 35
Christ / Course Ideas

I’ve been thinking lately about things I have no business thinking about, like how to reconcile the capital-‘S’ Self from A Course of Love with what I’ve glimpsed of the Buddhist teaching of anatta, or no-self.  Let me say right at the outset that this is not purely an intellectual exercise.  One of the great miracles of starting this blog has been the dialogue with people whose words, and possibly (though it remains hard to say conclusively) their points of view, may differ subtly from my own.  The question of whether or not we really differ in points of view needs no answer, for friendship does not require such clarity, relying instead and far more beautifully upon the careful offering of gifts to one another– gifts that are pulled out from that sacred mystery that both links and stands between.  The gap, perceived or real, is also sufficient to compel reflection, which leads to the discovery of one another, and to insight.  For these, I am grateful to each one of you who have engaged me here.

Much has been said and continues to be said about non-duality, the existence and/or non-existence of an eternal self, the existence of a soul, of a little-‘s’ self, an ego, a capital-‘S’ Self, and so on and so forth.  I really like this article that comes up when you do a web search on the Buddhist doctrine of no self, because it suggests the question did not lend itself to a meaningful answer the Buddha could offer, and that he may have chosen not to muddy the waters with needless arcana that don’t need to be understood in order to provide us with a path out of suffering.  I like this answer because it is helpful to me.  Every time I try and understand the mechanics of phenomena over my pay grade, I end up suffering.

Having said that, I am going to delve into two inter-related nuances of this topic I have found it important to wrestle with, and from which a smoothing of experience has begun to emerge.  There is a way in which I’m holding in my heart a finding–one that I will suggest is becoming a new home.  As background, my understanding of the Buddha’s teachings is that their primary aim is to assist us in perceiving correctly, such that we might end, or at least be relieved from, our suffering.  (I do not mean to disrespect through over-simplification, so feel free to shed light on this thought in the commentary below.)  I find that this is true of the many forms in which non-dual teachings are offered, and also feel this was in some respects the principal aim of A Course in Miracles, which has been described by some as a non-dual teaching dressed up in particularly Christian or theistic guise.

The first half-crazy notion I would like to offer is that while there is a time and a place for teachings on the escape from suffering, such a time will pass.  We should, in fact, be thankful this is inevitably so.  Both individually and collectively, suffering will cease.  It is not a question of if, but when.  And if we view the cessation of suffering as an accomplishment– though not an accomplishment of a fictitious or transitory self– we can see that life on the far side of it is likely to be radically different in emphasis and practice than life on the near side.

A key tenet of A Course of Love is acceptance that we are the accomplished, which means we are not beings in need of anything beyond what we’ve been given in order to fully embody and express the deepest truths of who we are.  What’s been missing has been the recognition that this is so, and thus the expression.  We’ve been missing.  We haven’t shown up.  But who exactly has been missing?  And who is it that has been subject to the seeker’s condition of suffering?

I ask you to bear with me a moment while I wander.

While I do not know if the same is true of other paths such as Buddhism, the teachings of Jesus I have found most helpful– such as A Course in Miracles, Dialogue on Awakening, the Way of Mastery, and most recently A Course of Love– have contained a certain progression.  There is movement within them– a direction if you will.  Their emphasis shifts as the healing progresses.  I experience this direction as the calling to return to our authentic and natural place within the singular cosmic act of Creation.  This return is the end of suffering, for suffering is itself the result of separating from this cosmic, holy and endless movement.  This separation is made most manifest in the trumping up of a misplaced identity– what we often call the ego– which would like to appropriate the full rights and privileges of Creation itself for its very own.  It’s a great idea, until one discovers it simply doesn’t work.

Clearly this unanswerable question of identity is bound up deeply in both the onset of suffering, and its ending.  The most recent teachings from Jesus with which I am familiar are contained in A Course of Love, and they feel like a bridge from one side of this divide to the other.  Their stated purpose is to speak directly to the heart, bypassing the mind and all of its tangled trespassing upon the ineffable, so that we might recover and then move on to the expression of our true identity.  According to A Course of Love, it is this healing of misplaced identification that not only ends suffering, but releases our true power as integral nodes of Creation.  We become, in other words, actively present.  We show up.

If the ego is gone, as it surely is at this point, who or what remains?  Who exactly is now showing up?

I am not going to be so bold as to offer an answer I do not have, but the particular approach taken in A Course of Love has been very helpful to me in achieving a comfortable insight that I can live from.  I’ve found it is not an idea that I’m always referring to my mind to clarify for me every time I wish to feel its presence, but rather an easy, flowing comprehension.  This idea is that we share an identity in Love.  At our very root, we are the same.  We can see this in one another if we look for it.  We can see the Love that peeks out through every pair of eyes, every creature, every stone, every blade of grass…  Thus, our ultimate identity, the one that never changes, is Love, and it is one we share.

We feel this identity at the point of our going forth, at the point of our mutual differentiation, which is our heart.  And yet this sameness does not require that we turn in our guns of distinctness and individuality.  We arise uniquely as differentiated expressions within Creation, and the heart is our tether to what is the same in all of us: everything.  Whether as differentiated beings we have permanent souls or not, I don’t know.  The recognition that we share an identity in Love, and that Love desires to express itself indefinitely and unabashedly through an ensemble of distinct beings who may or may not at all times manifest physically has made this point moot for me.  It simply doesn’t matter.  It is not the case that I lack a “self”, however, by which I mean an identity.  I’m not nothing at all.  Who I am is as close to me as me.  It is my heart.  Whenever I need a reference point for who I am, it is there.  It is not something I can define very well, or into whose cosmic mechanics I can offer any particular insights.  It is enough to know that the experience within me which is closer to me than me, which is most natural and free, is safe, endless, and true.

I don’t know if I have a self, or a Self, or neither.  But I have an identity.  It is vast and seemingly without boundary.  And it is not an impostor.  I know this because whenever I truly see another through my heart, they feel like me.  This identity is reinforced by universal recognition.  Somehow, the greatest gift we offer to one another is the manifest experience of the identity we share.  Increasingly, I feel this identity returned to me everywhere that I look, and so oddly enough, even a well-placed wall of stone can engender the sublime experience of who I am.

The Honesty We Crave

May 26, 2015
by Michael
comments 46
Christ / Poetry

Everything you see is a trick.
And Love is the punchline.
These skins are just the charade we need,
to remember what can never grow old.
Children with eyes overflowing—
they don’t tire of hearing it
over and over and over again.
All those goo goo gah gah faces we make—
so certain of our personal contribution to their pleasure…
They’re not even listening.
It’s what’s in our eyes they crave,
that punchline peeking through our earnestness.

The world is one great eye for those
whose only desire is to peer inside it.
Every day is a slipping over the edge,
a falling into the lens,
admitting that our deepest hunger
is the need to be utterly seen.
We are the trick and the punchline, both.
We’re not being honest about our needs
if we’re not walking out into the open at dawn,
in the company of one another and the sky,
begging only to be unmasked.
Together.
All at once.
Show us who we are…
It is the only honesty that matters.
All the other forms are barbed.
Lovers are never far
from the delicious feeling
of being surrounded.
Even when they’re apart,
they don’t know how to be.
So they’re not.
The air is their conduit.
The light is their bridge.
Every face is a reminder of the other’s.
The ache of longing is a sublime trick.
And Love is the punchline.

If the world seems perfectly obvious,
that’s because you’ve forgotten
you once asked a question
for which there is no answer,
and so you made one up.
If you’re tears and your laughter
still feel like opposites,
you are confused
about the language we speak here.
Stop trying to break the code
of your own gobbledy-gook.
Realize you might have invented some rule
to keep you safe, forgetting
there is only one true form of safety: revelation.
What hurts you the most, is your hiding.

Dare to look in your own eye,
that Christ may be revealed.
Join with Hafiz at dawn,
down at the square,
to screech provocatively at the roosters
and watch them strut around the yard in response,
defiant in their chest-puffing, neck-stretching glory.
Discover in their unflinching absurdity,
the only authenticity you need.

Who’s Counting Anyway?

May 23, 2015
by Michael
comments 18
Poetry

When Hafiz
had invited me over
for a treatment,
I guess in my excitement
I had imagined
a gamut of therapeutic practices
slightly more sporting
in scope and dexterity
than what he’d ultimately
prepared.

Because after
sitting on lounge chairs
all day under the shade canopy,
sipping iced teas to stay alert,
and listening to him
chuckle whenever a caravan of clouds
sauntered past the revealing sun,
or mumble an appreciative syllable
when the wind changed direction
and the butterflies zig-zagged
every which-ways momentarily
like beings freshly zapped by wonderment,
and all the while reconnoitering
the digital comings and goings
of inscrutable turtle faces
from a contingent of shells
spread along a log in the pond
by order of increasing diameter,
like a Pythagorean display of keratin,
wondering if some sort of Planckian Code
wasn’t in the offing, or if we weren’t seeing
in the appearance and disappearance
of the turtle-faced keys
some pantomimed rendition of a Miles Davis’
trumpet solo in painstakingly slow motion–
the whole nine yards of which
ultimately boiled right down
to watching the grass grow–
I was by the end understandably confused
about where it was all going.

When’s it gonna’ kick in, Hafiz?

It should be already, he said,
mildly surprised.
Maybe you’re just not sure
what you’re looking at.
Try this:
pretend we’re turtles,
and all of existence our shell.
Every time… every place…
Realize it is all
a most intimate form
of protection.

For a delicious instant, I vanished.

But then I came back fairly quickly
because I couldn’t help myself.
Because I had swallowed an inconsistency
without realizing it–
(Full disclosure?
Hafiz is very tricky sometimes
vis-á-vis the fine print)–
and I was afraid it might
actually stay alive and
grow inside of me like
an apple seed and become a tree
whose branches would snake
through my organs while I slept
at night and then one day
stick out between my ribs
and require a most difficult surgery
from which I might never recover.
So I had to ask.
But Hafiz,
how could two turtles
share the same shell?

He thought about this for a moment.
Did I say there were only two?