Doing the Work to Find Our Work, Our Life

Our life is uniquely designed to enable us to be who we are. You have heard that “Everything happens for a reason.” Well, the reason is to enable us to be who we are. You have also heard, “Everything is grist for the mill.” Well, we are milling ourselves. We are milling maturity. Grace. Compassion. Character. Qualities and values at the heart of life and being.

Or not.

We do not have to cooperate with our life’s invitation. We have ideas of our own about what is worth living for and how our life should be. The problem is how to get ourselves together with our life’s need of us?

The problem has different facets. There is the life that is our life to live, the life that exhibits and expresses the qualities and character, interests and abilities, aptitudes and inclinations—the combination of which is unique to us, sets us apart from everyone else, and makes us an individual who has never been, or will be. This is one aspect of how things are.

There is the life we wish were ours to live—the life of our dreams and happy fantasies, desires and ambitions, aims and goals. This is another aspect of how things are.

There is the life thrust upon us by situation and circumstance, by the nature and conditions of our living. Perhaps, we are born into poverty, or into wealth and privilege. Or, perhaps we are greeted by war, desolation, famine and suffering. Our life might be restricted in any number of ways—the expectations of our family, or the requirements of our caste, or the limitations of our available resources or physical, or mental, abilities… All of these are other aspects of how things are.

There is what we do to pay the bills, to hold body and soul together, to make it from one day to the next. There are the obligations, duties and responsibilities that come with meeting the requirements of living. These are other aspects of how things are.

All of this is how things are, and how things also are—and that is how things are.

We have to find our way through the things we have to work with to meaning and purpose, fulfillment and wellbeing. Where lies that path?

My bias is to say we have the best chance of achieving ends worthy of us if we throw in with our intuition which is in close relationship with heart and soul—with the invisible, unknown, unconscious (in the sense of our are not being conscious of it) world of spiritual reality—aligning ourselves with its sense of what needs to be done, and following its lead throughout our life.

How to do that should be the focus of church and culture. Until that happens, we have to assume the responsibility of finding our own way there. Help is available, particularly from Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, artists, poets, and others who have found the way of communing with the invisible world—including Parker Palmer, Robert Johnson, Helen Luke, Marie-Louise von Franz, Ann Weiser Cornell, Mary Caroline Richards, Charlotte Joko Beck, Rachel Naomi Remen and a world full of others.

We also know more than we know we know, and have only to make time—and find a place—for Dreamtime, walkabouts, listening to our dreams, feeling our feelings, and opening ourselves to the intuitive, instinctive guidance within. Everybody has the same access to the Invisible World. Anybody can perceive what is there for all to see, hear, know and understand. But, it takes being open to possibilities we often refuse to consider.

Developing our appreciation of, and our affinity with, emptiness, stillness and silence (One thing, not three) is a simple matter of setting aside twenty minutes a day to “drop into the silence,” and wait to see what arises, emerges, appears to meet us of its own accord, as “that thus come,” to gift us with its presence, guidance and direction.

If we need more focus than this, we can enter the silence with a photograph of some wild/natural place and the question, “How does this image relate to me?” “What connections, affinity, associations to/with this image come to mind?” And simply see where this goes.

Or, we can interview the silence with our “Questions of the Day”: What’s what? What is going on? What is called for here, now? How do I need to respond to it in ways that utilize my gifts of my original nature, my innate virtues (The things we do best and enjoy doing most), my inherent imagination and my intrinsic intuition? We do not think here in terms of what we can do that stands to benefit us in any way. We are not out for our own benefit, profit, gain, but of how we can be of help to each situation as it arises with the gifts we have to offer–for the joy of doing it and the satisfaction of having done it.

Doing the work of finding our work is the single most important thing we can do to unite ourselves with who we are and what we are about. And that is the union that transforms ourselves and turns the world around.

True Belief

We believe Jesus is going to save us from our sins

if we believe he will,

and take us to heaven when we die

where we will be happy forever.

We believe it because the Bible says so

and we believe we should believe whatever the Bible says

because it is the last word,

you know,

“the only rule for faith and practice,”

says the old book of church order,

and we believe the old books of order,

and the old confessions of faith,

the older the better,

if you ask us,

they knew a thing or two back then,

you know,

they knew how things are supposed to be,

never mind that they owned slaves,

and oppressed women,

and abused children.

Those old confession writers

knew what they were doing,

and all we have to do is believe it

and we’ll have it made,

if we are careful

to ostracize those who don’t believe it,

and maybe boycott them,

just to let them know

we’ve noticed that they don’t believe as we do,

and that we don’t like it.

We can’t be letting them think

its okay to not believe as we do,

that it doesn’t matter.

Jesus might be watching,

and might keep us out of heaven

for being slack,

and not insisting on the straight and narrow.

It turns out that getting into heaven

isn’t as easy as it seems at the start.

We have to believe that Jesus died

to save us from our sins,

and then we have to resist temptation,

and get everyone else to live like we do,

and have nothing to do with those who don’t

as a testimony against them,

and we have to oppose sin at every turn,

and pray,

and study the Bible,

and be entirely centered on doing God’s will,

and make sure that gays never marry,

because that would be the living end,

and we can bomb our enemies to oblivion

when loving them doesn’t work—

and when has loving our enemies ever worked—

and talk about WWJD?

in terms of getting prayer back into the schools,

and getting evolution out,

and getting the Ten Commandments

into all the court houses,

but not in terms of ending racism,

and poverty,

and war,

or in terms of living ecologically sound lives,

or having sustainable economies…

And, when it gets too complex,

we just get back to the Bible,

and believe in Jesus,

and look forward to going to heaven when we die,

without facing the fact

that we have been dead

to the truth of how things are,

and how things need to be,

and what is calling us to do it,

all our lives long.

The Path to the Authentic Self

The path to the authentic self is the path to heart, the path to soul, the path to That Which Has Always Been Called God. I say “That Which Has Always Been Called God,” because “God” presumes “The God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus,” and stands before us draped with the theology and doctrines, creeds and dogmas of the Christian religion (with a tip of the hat to Judaism). And we cannot get to That Which Has Always Been Called God, with our idea of God standing in the way.

To find our way to That Which Has Always Been Called God, we have to lay aside theology, doctrine, creeds and dogma, and step into our life as those who would experience our experience, see what we look at, hear what is being said (Including hearing what we are saying as well as what is being said to us and around us), know what we know, live out of our own authority, and trust ourselves to have what we need to find what we need in order what needs to be done in each situation that arises.

The way to this way of life is the path to the Authentic Self. As we find our way to the self we are born to be, we find our way to That Which Has Always Been Called God, and live from the heart in ways that make wherever we are a good place to be. Walking this path is the work of the spiritual journey, which is the hero’s journey, which is the high adventure of being alive.

Alice Miller, in The Drama of the Gifted Child, theorizes that as they get older, children face a choice between being authentic and honest or being loved. If they choose authenticity and wholeness—integrity—they are abandoned by their parents and significant others in their lives; if they choose to be loved, they abandon their true selves.

Reflecting on Miller’s observations, Mary Phipher, in Reviving Ophelia, says that parents are not responsible for the “loss of self” in childhood—it is the natural outcome of the process of being acclimated to one’s culture that replaces “the true self” we are born being with “the false self” we are expected to be.

Phipher argues that authenticity requires us to be aware of the process that separates us from ourselves and to embrace the work of “owning” all of our experience.

Jon Kabat Zinn’s work with Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction offers a method for this kind of “ownership of experience,” by suggesting that we learn to “hold everything in our awareness” without judgment, or even opinion—just knowing that it is there as a part of our life experience, and watching as we integrate/incorporate the “opposites” into our life without trying to, but by allowing it to “just happen” in its own way.

Joseph Campbell spoke of “the Primary Mask,” and “the Antithetical Mask.” The Primary Mask is who we are expected to be by culture and society and the Antithetical Mask is who we recognize/discover/know ourselves to be “just as we are,” as “the face that was ours before we were born,” as “one thus come,” saying, “The Antithetical Mask opens us to the realness of ourselves. When we put it on, we find our own zeal, we find our own life, and live it.”

Galen Rowell, reflecting on his path to becoming a professional photographer in his book Mountain Light, says that learning to see is a matter of recognizing and trusting our own sense of where to stand–where to put the tripod, how to compose the image, in the right kind of light, and when to press the shutter button. He says the heart of photography is the search for that which expresses our inner-most self, to incarnate and exhibit the truth of who we also are, by doing the work that springs from the heart of what we know to be right when we see it, feel it.

Antoine de Saint-Exupry, writing in Wind, Sand and Stars, said, “Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”

If we are to find our way to an authentic self-hood and an authentic spirituality, we are going to have to “grasp ourselves by the shoulder while there is still time” and give ourselves permission to follow our true heart’s desire for our lives, regardless of how absurd that might appear to our peers or the culture at large. The path to That Which Has Always Been Called God winds through ourselves; we cannot hope to know That Which Has Always Been Called God, without being true to what is being asked of us, in each situation as it arises, moment-by-moment-by-moment–without knowing and being true to that which is deepest and best in us.

The disciples stand, peering up into the heavens as Jesus ascends, growing smaller and smaller in the distance, thinking, “Well, here we are—now what???” Now they are on their own, alone. What next? If they were more like we are, they would have quickly fallen into busying themselves with whatever they could think of until their lives were over. Being busy is one of the best ways, perhaps, the very best way, to not know that we don’t have a clue about what is going on and what we need to be doing.

Ask anyone what they need be doing and they will begin an immediate list: “I should be doing this, or that, or that over there.” And, in a blink, they start doing it, doing “this,” and “that,” and “that over there.” A case could be made for doing it all, so we do everything, to cover our bases, just to be sure–and, to hide from the anxiety of not-knowing what we actually should be doing.

Instead of becoming busy, the disciples lived with their anxiety. They became quiet. The worst thing for an anxious person to be is quiet! The disciples didn’t do anything. They waited. They did nothing because they understood the importance of doing nothing, and waiting while clarification is marinating, and vision is simmering, and purpose and direction are beginning to rise in the darkness, and emerge from the stillness and silence of waiting.

The old Taoists would call this “Dropping into emptiness, stillness and silence, waiting for the mud to settle and the water to clear.”

They did not know that we can’t stand waiting. We hate emptiness, stillness, silence (One thing, not three). We cannot tolerate not-knowing, and cannot bear the legitimate pain of our own life experience. We cannot bear our pain. Our world goes to the hell of our own making because we cannot bear the pain of our reality, our existence, our not-knowing—cannot bear the pain of birthing what is trying to be born in us, and through us, into the world of concrete and steel.

We all have desires, aims, ambitions, intentions that may well run counter to the direction our hearts would have us go. Our hearts have a life in mind for us that we are not interested in implementing. Our life has a life of its own. And our place is to realize these things and place ourselves in the service of our heart, of our life. This is the image of Jesus in Gethsemane and on the cross–it is the cross Jesus tells those who would be his disciples to bear daily. Here, we do what Adam and Eve refused to do, die to their idea of life and live the life that is their life to live, that is their heart’s idea of the life we are to live. This is the crucifixion that Paul had in mind when he said, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me!”

The real struggle for the birth of the authentic self—the self we are created and called to be—is an inner struggle; it is a struggle between what is attractive and what is essential, between what is desirable and what is necessary. The question is whether our lives will be directed by the “true self,” that is, our “heart of hearts,” which is connected at the core with That Which Has Always Been Called God and calls us to service beyond our own desiring, or the “false self,” which is the self of our own creation, with which we strive to achieve our agenda, and serve our purposes, and realize our ends. Att each point in our lives, we might ask ourselves, “Will our real self please stand up and step forward to guide the way, here and now!”

Who is the “I” that directs our steps; plans our day; makes our choices; decides our goals; lives our lives? Is that “I” invested in the service of our true best interest? Or, is that “I” concerned with the orchestration of a competing version of how our lives should be? How would our lives look if they had been under the control of our “heart of hearts” from the beginning? What great battles must be waged in transforming this life into the life of our true heart’s dreams? What must we recognize about the aims and purposes of this life in order to be willing to pay the price of abandoning it in favor of our true heart’s dreams?

There is a sense in which salvation is coming to the end of this life’s rope and realizing that there is another life waiting for us, the life of our true heart’s dreams. Salvation is comprehending, finally, that our true heart’s dream for us and the dream of That Which Has Always Been Called God for us is the same dream, it is knowing that what is being asked of us is what our true heart has wanted for us all along. It is nothing short of revelation to grasp the fact that our true heart beats in sync with That-which-has-always-been-called-God’s heart, that the aims of our authentic self are the aims of that God, that when we find our way to our truest self, we find the path to that God, and the difference between our true self and that God is too small to be weighed or measured. And we can be forgiven if we understand this is what Jesus understood when said, “The Father and I are one.”

We do not get to this place of realization—of being saved, of being restored to our true heart’s dream for us, easily. As long as this life seems to be working, to be leading us toward prosperity, success and happiness ever after, we have no interest in the other life. The price of salvation is generally the experience of disillusionment and lostness that comes with realizing the emptiness of the false self’s plans and ambitions. This life has to fail us in some deeply significant way before we can be ready to open ourselves to the possibilities of the other life, the life of our true heart’s dream.

We have to get to the end of our rope before we can change our mind about what is important.

Every experience with despair, then, has the potential of opening us to the possibilities of the other life. Depression is not only an indication that something is dying inside of us, but, also, that something is struggling to be born.  Ordinary “down times,” or chance meetings with “the blues,” can be quiet places where we can hear “the still small voice” of our heart of hearts, whispering to us from far away, hoping that we will recognize “the time of our visitation and know the things that make for peace,” so that we might take up the work of discerning the path with heart, and walking it, for the rest of our lives.

Living well in any age is about finding our heart, knowing our heart, living out of our heart. If we do that, we’ll have it made regardless of all the things in our lives that aren’t like we want them to be. Success isn’t to be measured by the degree to which things go our way, but by the degree to which we go the way of our heart, the way our heart has in mind for us, the way our heart is calling us to take up and live out, even though that may insure that things don’t go “our way,” and we have to proceed along the path with heart anyway, nevertheless, even so.

Here is the truth as clearly spoken as it has ever been told: We are all being led, how well we follow tells the tale. Listening to our heart and following its lead does not mean that we will make a lot of money, or be famous, or be successful as the word is normally defined. Trying to achieve these things may well cut us off from our heart, and render us incapable of knowing what has heart for us. When we live for prosperity and recognition, for instance, we cannot live for our heart. If we put all our energy into prosperity and recognition, we cannot put it into what has heart for us, and prosperity and recognition will then become barriers separating us from where our heart needs us to be, keeping us from living the life that is truly ours to live.

This is not to say that living from the heart is necessarily at odds with prosperity and recognition. It is just to say that prosperity and recognition are not the aim and intention of a life lived from the heart. If they come, they come as by-products, and are not embraced as being particularly wonderful in themselves. More than likely, however, doing what we love will not lead to fortune and glory, or even to an easy life. We may never get anything more out of it than having done what we loved. But what is prosperity and recognition if those things keep us from doing what we love? How much would we give to be able to do what we love? Our focus and goal has to be doing what we love while doing what we must to pay the bills, and letting that be enough. This is the most important thing: finding what we truly love and doing it, while paying the bills.

The trick is to run up the right bills—the bills that enable us to live the life that is our life to live. What are we paying the bills to do? What does paying the bills allow us to do? What are we doing that is life for us?

In order to live successful lives, we have to know what has life for us. We have to know the things about which we can say, “My heart is in that.” We have to know the things that we can put our hearts into, the things we can give our hearts to, the things we can do with all our heart, whether we get paid for it or not. We have to know the things we “have to do or else”—the things that resonate with us, draw us, catch our eye, call our name.

These are the things that ultimately “make for peace.” No matter how much the culture tout’s prosperity and recognition as necessary ingredients in “the good life,” we find our satisfaction, our peace, in doing the things we are built to do—in being the person we are built to be—and trusting that to be enough. When we live like this, we live from the heart.

 “Heart” has to do with the things we are built to do, the things we were born to do, the things we have to do or die (metaphorically speaking). “Heart” is about the life that is uniquely ours, about what has life for us, about where life is found for us, about what brings us deep joy and gladness.

Finding the paths with heart means listening to ourselves, to our lives, to the things that attract us, draw us, compel us to take them up. We do not think our way to these things. We realize them. They occur to us. They “just happen.” Pay attention to what occurs to you! We have to learn to listen like this to know where we must go with our life, what we must do. Finding the paths with heart means doing what we have to do for the sake of our soul, our true self, our heart, no matter what. And it is our life-long task to learn to live from the heart in all that we do.

On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples and those praying with them, and they began to communicate from the heart to one another in ways they could understand. The Spirit of a Community of Innocence is at work to connect us to the truth of our hearts by enabling us to say what is true about us to those who care for us. It is the freedom to be honest that creates, and is created by, community. It is the ability to say what is true about us to those who care for us that enables/allows us to hear ourselves what is true about us, and produces, and flows from, community.

The Spirit of that kind of community is Holy in the deepest sense of the word. A Community of Innocence is innocent in the sense that it is not exploitive or manipulative, and has no agenda beyond being present with one another for the true good of the other—without pretending to know what that good is, but is ready and able to live toward the good by listening and looking for clues and hints as to what might be at work within us and through us to connect us with one another and enable us to stand in the presence of each other’s truth—which is the essence of love, and the bedrock of community—and so that each person is helped to find the way for themselves individually–and for the group to find it for the community as a whole.

Standing in the presence of each other’s truth enables us to explore our experience in the company of those who care—about the truth and about each other, and about the truth of each other. And through that process, we come to see clearly and live well, from the heart, reconnected to the authentic self, and take up the task of becoming the people in the service of That Which Has Always Been Called God in following the path with heart, the path that leads to and flows from That Which Has Always Been Called God.

Seeing, hearing, understanding, knowing what we know and what can be known is awareness, and awareness is everything. It all depends upon, and flows from, seeing, from being aware. Being mindfully aware (Watch all of the Jon Kabat-Zinn YouTube videos, the shortest ones first!) of what is, as it is, enables us to respond appropriately to whatever is. Appropriate response depends upon right seeing, right hearing, right understanding, right knowing. We cannot know how to live in the world until we can orient ourselves, and know when and where we are, who we are, how we are, what is being asked of us, and what matters most in each situation as it arises. We have to see clearly in order to live well.

And the secret of seeing is saying—speaking with awareness of what we are saying. We cannot see what we cannot say. There are times when we cannot see what is, or how it is with us, until we can say it, until we can put it into words. We see in the act of saying. When we hear ourselves saying how it is with us, we see it—perhaps, for the first time. Thus, the way to the Way is to ask the questions that beg to be asked and say the things that cry out to be said, and go where that leads us in the service of seeing, hearing, knowing, doing, being (Seeing , hearing, knowing what’s what, doing, being what is called for in each situation as it arises all our life long–with nothing in for us beyond the joy of doing it and the satisfaction of having done it, world without end.

This is what good friends and good therapists do for us. This is what a supportive Community of Innocence does for us. They listen us to the truth of who we are. They enable us (sometimes force us!) to see how things are by having us say it, by asking us questions and encouraging exploration, and sitting with us while we struggle for words to say accurately what is trying to be said. Once we can say exactly what is going on in our lives, and how it is impacting us, what to do about it is practically automatic. Saying leads to seeing, and seeing leads to acting and living with awareness and understanding, intuitively, spontaneously, in living a life that is better by far than the one that said nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing more than “I want!”

We increase our ability to live from the heart by talking in depth about the things that are true for us, that matter to us—by saying what is on our minds, in our souls, in our hearts. If we are to see clearly and live well, from the heart, we have to learn to speak from the heart, about the things that are important to us, so that we might see them for what they are, and know them for the first time.

Living honestly means knowing how it is with us and being able to say that out loud to those who can be trusted to hear what we have to say without condemnation or ridicule. Living honestly is about experiencing what we are experiencing, experiencing how we are reacting to what we are experiencing, and saying what is true for us to those who are with us and care about us. Living honestly is the key to it all. We can’t find what we love if we aren’t honest with ourselves about what we love.

Jacob Bronowski said, “We cannot know the truth unless we live in certain ways.” We have to live truthfully. We have to live truthful lives. A community that keeps us from living in ways that are truthful is not a Community of Innocence.

We need a community of two or more people who can listen to us and serve as a caring presence in our lives. The freedom to be honest is the foundation of community. Community is where we are free to explore, express, and experience how it is with us in the presence of those who care enough about us to listen to us—without interrupting, changing the subject, or stopping us short; without attempting to fix us by giving us tips, answers, recipes or recommendations; without commandeering the conversation by telling us how much worse they have it than we do. Community is where we are free to explore our experience with those who listen and help us articulate what we are feeling, thinking, perceiving, believing, seeing, etc., and how that impacts us for better or worse. In community, we become who we are—we recognize who we are, know who we are—by saying who we are.

Communities of Innocence provide us with the space to discover our deeper self by providing us with relationships that can take us as we are and love us for who we are. Few of our relationships can withstand the test of realness. In maintaining those relationships, we give up the essential connection with the truth of who we are, and have to protect those relationships at the expense of our deeper self.  We have to guard those relationships to such an extent that we are afraid to be real, because we cannot trust those in relationship with us to love us if they know who we are. We need a Community of Innocence that respects us and loves us enough to let us be real in expressing the deep truths, and confronting the deep questions of our souls.

In a Community of Innocence, the happiness and peace of the community does not depend upon our being, or not being, a certain way. This is crucial, because we can’t find what we love if we allow our happiness to depend upon someone else’s happiness. If we can’t be happy until someone else is happy, or until they are happy with us, we won’t be happy very often for very long. 

Two things flow from this. The first is that we need the right kind of community to let us be who we are without having to make us different, without having to mold us into the community’s idea of who we ought to be. And, the key question here is “How different can we be from the ideals, values and purposes of community without destroying the community?” A community cannot accept every possibility of being as though one way of being is “just as good as” another way of being. Community must accept our differentness and enable us to be real; and community must challenge our extremes and confront our lack of conformity to the core values of the community. Finding the balance between acceptance and confrontation is the art of community. It is also the art of living well, of being alive in the deepest, truest, sense of the word. Living our contradictions, integrating our polarities, bearing the pain of opposites, is walking two paths at the same time—which is the spiritual journey, which is the hero’s journey, which is the path of maturation, of growing up–which is the path to life and being, and death and resurrection, which we all walk as best we can, moment-by-moment-by-moment.

The second thing that flows from the fact that our happiness cannot depend upon someone else’s happiness is that we have to learn to be happy no matter what others are feeling. Let them be disappointed in us if they want to be. We aren’t here to see that someone else is happy with the life that is ours to live. We are here to live the life that is ours to live. If they are happy with that, fine. If they are not happy with that, fine. Trying to make others happy with us by shaping ourselves according to their expectations separates us from our heart and keeps us from doing what we must to find peace with ourselves. We cannot tie our happiness to that of others, or let them tie their happiness to us. But again, this is true, only to a point. We have to listen to what others are saying to us. We cannot just walk away and live any way at all. Finding the balance between living out of our values and living out of the values that are at the heart of community is the art of living in relationship with other people, and the art of being alive.

Usually, however, it is the case that we listen too much to “them” and too little to “us.” One of the things that prevents us from listening to our heart and following its lead throughout our lives is that we live cut off from ourselves to varying degrees, and do not know how it is with us much of the time. We have learned not to feel what we are feeling—not to experience what we are experiencing. We are, by and large, not comfortable with discomfort, and have earned early on to save ourselves the grief of feeling our feelings by cutting them off, or by distracting ourselves from the experience of our experience by shifting our attention to food, drugs, alcohol, or any one of the ten thousand addictions and diversions the culture so conveniently provides.

When we shift our attention to something that takes our minds off our discomfort, we cut ourselves off from the experience of how things are with us really in the present moment of our lives. When we are cut off from our experience, we are cut off from ourselves, and do not know the things that make for peace, because the things that make for peace are the things that we love, but, some things that we love conflict with other things that we love! This is the Collision of Loves, the Collision of The Good! Which has to be recognized, experienced, borne, and lived! We have to suffer it through! Cut off from our experience, from our feelings, we do not know what we know, and cannot say what we are here to do, have to do, no matter what.

We can kill the authentic self—the self That Which Has Always Been Called God would have us be, the self we are built, created, to be—by ignoring its voice and listening instead to the voices of others, the voice of the culture, or even our own ideas regarding how our lives ought to be. We can restore our authentic self to life by learning to be honest about how things are with us, and speaking from the heart about our experience with life. In order to reestablish connection with our authentic self, with our hearts—in order to live out of our hearts, and follow our hearts, and find the paths with heart, and do what we deeply love with all our hearts—we have to begin living honestly.

Living honestly means to live knowing what it is like to be who we are. It means to live knowing what it is like to live the life that we are living. Knowing what we are feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing, sensing, fearing, knowing, doing… It means knowing what we know. It means knowing when we are tense and when we are relaxed; when we are easy and when we are disturbed; when we are ashamed and when we are humiliated; when we are energized and enthusiastic, and when we are down with the blues, depressed and dejected, or simply tired. To live from the heart, we have to know how it is with us, and be able to say how it is with us on a regular basis!

It is particularly important that we know when we are hurting. There are some important questions that we have to know how to answer: “What hurts so bad about being you right now?” “What is hard about your life right now?” We must learn to ask these questions. And others as well: “What’s killing you?” “What are you suffering from?” “What’s eating you?” and “What’s the cure?”

These are the questions, the basic questions, the essential questions. They enable us to “name our demon,” to say the name of the particular pain that is ours, the peculiar suffering that has come our way. We have to know what is eating us if we want to avoid being devoured. We have to say what it is. We have to articulate our experience, saying what it is like to be us. We have to find the words to describe what we are feeling in every moment during our day and say them, say the words, write the words, bring the actual words to describe our experience into existence because it is the discipline of saying specifically how it is with us that enables us to see how it is with us.

And, in order to speak honestly, from the heart, about the things that truly matter to us, we have to have a community that will listen to us and love the truth of who we are and what we are experiencing here and now into being. We have to have a community where That Which Has Always Been Called God is at work to connect us to the truth of our hearts by enabling us to say what is true about us to those who care for us.

We are always being led. We follow best when we return to the silence on a regular basis, sit still, be quiet, and wait, watching and listening, for what occurs to us, for what emerges from the stillness, for what arises in the silence, for what realizations await recognition—and rise to do what needs to be done, in each situation as it arises, moment-by-moment-by-moment. Knowing that we aren’t trying to get anywhere, but to go everywhere seeing, hearing, knowing, doing, being, “with the wind of the spirit that blows where it will forever in our hair!”

Don’t Believe in God–BE God!

We take up the work of doing better by looking around. If this is the best God can do, God should be ashamed. And if this is not the best God can do, God should be ashamed. Or, letting the way things are work their magic on us, it could be that we have a twisted view of God. Maybe God isn’t who we have always heard it said that God is. You know, Omni-everything, Almighty, All Glorious, etc.

Think of God is that which is with us, within us, as The Will To Good—as that which needs our collaboration and cooperation in bringing The Good forth into physical existence. Think of God as that which needs physical help in actualizing The Good within the sphere of space and time—not from the standpoint of implementing commandments, and laws, and eternal standards of righteousness, but from the standpoint of having the freedom to do what needs to be done as it needs to be done in each situation as it arises.

Jacob Bronowski said, “If you want to know the truth, you have to live in certain ways.” He meant we have to live truthful lives. The same thing applies to knowing God: If we want to know God, we have to live in certain ways. Specifically, we have to live a godly life—a life that incarnates, expresses, exhibits and brings God forth in the world of normal, apparent, reality—in each situation as it arises, in ways appropriate to that situation.

In order to know God, we have to BE God. In order to be God, we have to be who we are, doing what is ours to do, when, where and how we need to do it.

As we live in this way—serving the good as it needs to be expressed in each situation as it arises, out of the gifts, art, genius that are ours to bring forth in our life, we are aligning ourselves, not only with The Will To Good, but also with our own secret life—the life that is hidden from even us until we actualize it by living it out in the world. As we bring God forth, we bring ourselves forth. As we bring ourselves forth, we bring God forth. In this comes true for all of us: “The Father and I are one,” and, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”

It has long been held that we accumulate merit, and receive heaven as a reward for our diligence, by cultivating virtue. Integrity has no use of either merit or virtue. When we live to integrate ourselves with ourselves and with that which has always been thought of as God, we have no need of anything on earth or in heaven. When “The Father and I are one,” what else is there to have, or want, or need, or aspire to?

All of us, each of us, are born with an original nature unlike anyone else’s original nature, with innate virtues–the things we do best and enjoy doing most–which are not identical with anyone else’s innate virtues, with an inherent imagination which is unique to us, and with an intrinsic intuition which connects us with the intrinsic intuition of, not only of the species, but also with the intrinsic intuition of sentient life throughout the Cosmos (We are all one on the level of our intrinsic intuition–we all know what we know and those who know know what everyone–what life everywhere–knows and have always known.

Heinrich Zimmer said, “The best things can’t be said, and the second-best things cause arguments and confusion by trying to put into words what cannot be put into words, which leaves us with only the third-best things to talk about, news, weather, sports, politics, gossip and opinions” (Or words to that effect).

Ditching Theology and Doctrine, Part 2

Christian theology and doctrine are grounded upon the assertion that Jesus died for our sins, erasing the supposed debt we owed to God for the original sin of the original parents of us all.

None of which squares up in any way with what we know about the origin of the species. The Garden of Eden did not have latitude and longitude—was not an actual, physical, fact—simply did not exist. Adam and Eve were not the original parents of everybody on the planet. Christian theology from the start is empty of any substance and depth.

Even if we pretend this is not so, Christian theology disintegrates with its thesis of the substitutionary theory of the atonement. Jesus’ death is purported to square us with God, prove God’s love for us, and welcome us all into the glory of the Father. Well, not quite.

Christian theology and doctrine also proclaim that Jesus’ death just gives us another shot at the glory of the Father. In order for his death to change anything, we have to cooperate with our own transformation. We have to believe all that is said of Jesus: That he was sinless and that he died for our sins. We have to repent of our sinful, sordid ways, and live lives that are pure and unstained by the world—toeing the line, walking the straight and narrow, resisting temptation and remaining true to the ways and will of God, cultivating virtue, accumulating merit, and receiving our eternal reward when we die.

In other words, nothing has changed. We still have to keep God happy, or else. Before Jesus died for our sins on the cross, we had to keep God happy. After Jesus died for our sins on the cross, we have to keep God happy.

We are right back where we started. We have to earn our way into heaven by appeasing our Father Who Art In Heaven, Hallowed Be Thy Name, or it’s hell to pay for the lot of us, in spite of the death of God’s Only Son, Jesus Christ Our Lord.

There is no ground to Christian theology and doctrine. It is a house of cards with no foundation. But, the Christian Church of all denominations would have a hard time admitting it. The Christian Church cannot begin to justify its existence apart from its theology and doctrine. Could be a bit of conflict of interest at work here.

Which came first? The Church or doctrine and theology? Here’s a better one: Which came first? The Church or the Bible?

The Church invented all three. Doctrine. Theology. And the Bible. And it killed, tortured and persecuted those who protested and opposed its actions. That’s a fine way of securing unanimous agreement to the things you propose.

As we might expect, the Church has quite a bit riding on its Bible, its Doctrine and its Theology. And, if burnings at the stake were still legal, I wouldn’t be writing this, and you wouldn’t be reading it. But, I am writing it, and you are reading it because we can do a better job of finding our way to the heart of God and to the life with our name on it than has been done for us in the name of the Church.

Ditching Theology and Doctrine, Part 1

Christian theology and doctrine—orthodox, reformed, or evangelical—are put forward in different ways by all variations of the Christian church as the way things actually are, with no alternative views allowed.

The thing that makes us a Christian, according to Christians, is embracing Christian theology and doctrine—in a form expressed by a particular version of Christianity—believing what the authorities of that version tell us to believe, asking no questions of their doctrines that they can’t answer with their theology, and not thinking anything they don’t tell us to think.

This is not the way of being a proper disciple of one who was an iconoclast to the core—who was officially accused of heresy and blasphemy, and of being a son of Satan. But it is the only way for the church to continue being the church the way it has always been the church: Speaking for God to the people as the very Voice of the Almighty.

Never mind that the people are as capable of discerning the voice of God for themselves as anyone who has ever discerned the voice of God—and of deciding for themselves what is godly and what is not—and of living out of their own understanding of what it means to keep faith with themselves and with God. And the fact that they do not do that, and do not want to do that, says more about their laziness and disinterest than it says about their ability to sense the things that are of God, and put themselves in the service of those things.

The church does the people no favors when it lets them off the hook, and gives them the Hail Mary and the Our Father to say, or the Apostles’ Creed to recite, and the Westminster Shorter Catechism to memorize—as though that does anything to help the people in any practical way, or helps to enhance their ability to align themselves with the things that are of God, and serve those things with their life.

The people need the church to show the people how to live their life aligned with the things of God—not to tell them things about God, but to demonstrate God before them—by living the life of God in the midst of the people–which is all Jesus did. The spokespersons for the church must begin talking to the people about the things they have learned by living the life of God themselves, and not about things they have heard people say that they heard people say about people they heard knew God.

In order to be the church in the midst of the people, the church has to throw away its theology and doctrine, and live its way into godliness. The church has to stop talking about God and start living as God—to stop believing in God and start being God in the midst of the people.

A Short Reading List for the Spiritual Journey

A list of “suggested books,” when it is available, always comes at the end of the book. But. There is no beginning or end to this Handbook, because the spiritual journey itself has no beginning or end. The journey is a trip back “to the face that was yours before you were born.” Your physical existence had a beginning, and it will have an end, but the unconscious, invisible, spiritual side of you was around before you started, and will be around long after you are finished. Your journey is unending, which means it is always just beginning.

This Handbook is a series of observations and tips to help you make your journeying conscious. Consciousness is our only tool. Without consciousness, the journey becomes tedious and repetitive—a bad karma trip that lasts through eons of timeless rounds of reincarnated attempts at waking up. But, apart from consciousness, who is awake?

This Handbook is for those who are awake enough to know the importance of waking up, and are wondering how best to go about doing that. The Handbook itself is my offering to that end, but I would be inexcusably remiss if I didn’t point you to those people, and their books, who have been most helpful to me. If you start reading somewhere, and you wouldn’t be reading this if that process had not already begun, the synchronistic principle applies: “One book opens another,” and before you know it, you are spinning around on the wheel of fortune, seeking the next realization, and the one after that, and “where it stops, no one knows”!

The overarching rule governing the spiritual journey is simple, straightforward, always certain and dependable: Mindfulness leads the way. Your heart, soul, body, mind know all you need to know—all you need to do is know what you know. Then, you only need to do what needs to be done about it.

Mindfulness is the way of tuning into heart, soul, body, mind—within the context of the time and place (The Here/Now) of your living. It is the way of knowing what you know, and what to do about it, in a way that is fitting to the occasion in each situation as it arises.

Mindfulness implies no judgment, no will and no opinion, just awareness, just seeing, just hearing, just knowing: “This, too. This, too.” When you catch yourself responding to your situation with judgment, willfulness and opinion, simply be aware of that emptying yourself of agenda, ambition, judgment, opinion, emotional reactivity, and all the filters and blinders that prevent you from just seeing, just knowing, here/now. We have to know what we know without judgment, will or opinion. Mindfulness practice does that for us—it helps us see what we are looking at, to know what we are doing—without a prejudicial bias that would blind—or bind—us to any aspect of the situation.

We live with direction and preference, but we cannot will a particular outcome—or will to avoid one—without losing sight of some aspect of the situation. We cannot lose sight of any aspect of the situation, and respond to it in ways that are fitting and appropriate to that situation.

Our place is to be what the situation needs us to be, and let nature take its course–and trust nature to take its course! We are to offer our art, genius, gift, perspective, values, personal qualities and character in the service of the needs of life in each situation as it arises, in a “Thy will, not mine, be done,” kind of way–without imposing our way on the situation. To do that, we have to get ourselves with our preferences, desires, interests, fear, anxieties and concerns out of the way in order to just see, just hear, just understand, just know what is happening, and what needs to be done about it, and just be who we are in dealing with the situation, and doing what needs to be done about it.

Every good thing starts with mindful awareness, and requires courage. Get those two things going for you and you are off on your adventure. One of the 10,000 Spiritual Laws is: “When you take everything into account, what to do about it is automatic.” The short version says, “Seeing Is Doing.”

Mindfulness is being transparent to ourselves, and aware of the situation unfolding before us, without judgment, agenda, will or opinion. We live knowing, and thus, know what to do. Then it is only a matter of having the courage to do it.

What do we pay attention to when we pay attention? Every. Single. Thing. We are to be mindful of everything it is possible to be mindful of in every situation as it arises. When we take everything into account, we become aware of all the ways our Self is attempting to communicate with us. As we open ourselves to the validity and reality of the our unconscious (because we are unconscious of it) Self, everything shifts.

To live mindfully is to start paying attention to what we are ignoring, discounting, dismissing, discarding, overlooking, missing each day. Too many people of all ages fail to live mindfully, fail to be aware without judgment, agenda, will or opinion of what is happening and how they are responding to it. We cannot wait until we are 70 to start practicing being mindfully aware of our life without judgment, agenda, will or opinion. We do that over time. Being mindfully aware of things inner and outer, without judgment, agenda, will or opinion, is a life skill practiced, and developed, over the course of our life.

Start being aware of your breathing. Breathe in and breathe out normally, being aware of the act of breathing. Pause for a count of five between the out breath and the in breath, and attend the silence and the emptiness of that space between breaths. That is the emptiness you seek for periods of openness to the moment in your life–without expectations, agenda, plans, will, or opinion.

Continue being aware of your breathing and expand your awareness to include the moment of your living—and your reactions to the moment of your living. Take everything into account. Practice seeing everything just as it is without embellishing it with judgment, will or opinion. Just see. Just hear. Just know what is happening and what you are doing in response.

The experience of our direct, personal, experience, both inner and outer, is knowing on the deepest possible level. That is mindfulness. We cannot experience our experience if we are making judgments, living willfully with some end in mind, and/or forming opinions about what we are experiencing.

Just see. Just hear. Just feel. Just sense. Become curious about your experience, about where our attention goes, focuses, remains, rests. What is directing your attention? Watch your attention as it wanders, looking for an attractor—become intently curious about what your attention is seeking, and why.

Consciousness is the transforming, transcending, integrating agent in living in accord with life. Being mindfully aware—conscious—of all facets of our life brings up the conflicts and contradictions that have to be reconciled, and integrated. It is the mindful work to reconcile and integrate our conflicts and contradictions that grows us up, and makes us whole. If you have a problem, become mindful of it. Get to the bottom of it. Allow it to bring up your conflicts. Ponder them. Examine them. Let your imagination play with them. Listen to them! Be mindful of them. See where it goes.

Everything is improved with conscious, mindful awareness. This is the essential orientation. It all flows from there. Thus, developing and practicing mindful awareness is the most important thing, and Jon Kabat-Zinn leads the way on my list of recommended reading.

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of the Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness is the manual of Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness Based Stress-Reduction program, and is an excellent guide and resource for those seeking to deepen their awareness of what is happening and how they are reacting to it.

Kabat-Zinn’s other books include:

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment—And Your Life

Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

Learning to attend and decipher the signals from our body is a crucial step in living attuned to “the inner guide.” We sense, feel, intuit, “Yes!” and “No!” before we think them—and our thinking may be directly opposed to our body’s reaction. We come at “Yes!” and “No!” through head, heart, and body, and the idea is to have all three aligned, in agreement and acting as one. Consciousness, or mindful awareness, oversees and coordinates the inner communion, and implements the will of the whole. A method for achieving this is explored through Focusing.

Ann Weiser Cornell has expanded the application of Eugene T. Gendlin’s work on Focusing (The title of Gendlin’s book), with her books,

The Power of Focusing: A Practical Guide to Emotional Self-Healing,

The Radical Acceptance of Everything: Living a Focusing Life

Power of Focusing

Robert A. Johnson explores additional approaches to integrating inner with outer in his book

Inner Work

Parker Palmer offers his take on the matter in his book

A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life

Joseph Campbell has written a number of volumes dealing with the mythological connection between visible and invisible—physical and spiritual—modes of existence. I recommend starting with his and Bill Moyer’s book

The Power of Myth

I also recommend:

A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living compiled by Diane K. Osbon

Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphors

The Flight of the Wild Gander

Carl Jung’s work explores the matter of integrating our inner self with our outer life, and his influence is reflected in books by Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hollis and Anthony Stevens. Checking their titles and letting your interest guide you is the operative procedure here.

Thomas Cleary has translated a number of ancient texts on Taoism, Zen and Buddhism.

Ray Grigg’s book The Tao of Zen is a valuable text and wonderful guide for entering the worlds of Taoism and Zen.

Martin Palmer has translated and written books on Taoism.

The one that stands out for me is The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity. This may be out of print by now, but should be available through used bookstores, and is well worth the effort it takes to find, purchase and read.

Once you start reading, all you have to do is follow your interests along the way that a calls your name to the next book, and the next book after that all the way to the end of the line that never ends! Happy reading and adventuresome trailblazing!

The Moral, the Good, and the Bible

What is good? How do we know? Those are the foundational questions of existence. They are right up there with “Who are we? What are we about?” You answer those four questions correctly, and there is nothing but a long easy glide for you through the rest of time. You will, on the spiritual level at least, have it made.

What is good? How do we know? Where do we go for answers? Ah, The Bible! The Bible lays it all out, right? The Bible tells us so! There are those who would have us believe morality is grounded in the Bible, and that we cannot hope to be moral apart from the Bible, and that we have to do it the way the Bible says do it, because if we don’t, there will be hell to pay. So, no stem cell research, no abortions, no gay marriage, no gay rights, no teaching evolution, for a few examples, because the Bible says so. The Bible is the basis of our morality, and if it isn’t the basis of our morality, then our morality is tainted, and we are un-Christian, and out of favor with God, and we are going to hell when we die.

Not so fast. What right do the people who flaunt this point of view have to tell us that their view of the Bible and morality is the Right View? To tell us that their reading of the Bible is the Right Way to read the Bible? How many of the people who say these things are divorced, for instance, and why do they highlight in pink highlighter those passages in the Bible that decry homosexuality, yet neatly leave unmarked those that condemn divorce? If you are going to throw the Bible at me, throw the whole thing at me! But, that’s not my real problem with viewing the Bible as the source of morality.

My real problem is this: What made slavery wrong? It wasn’t the Bible. The Bible was used (by the Religious Right of the day) to justify slavery, support slavery, excuse slavery–and to condemn those who didn’t! The Christian churches of the Confederate States of America preached the Bible as surely as any church anywhere has ever preached the Bible, and they found the Bible saying, “Slaves, obey your masters!”

Slavery was an institution throughout biblical times. Jesus never once condemned slavery. It was assumed to be a natural-even-though-brutal part of how things were. Conquering armies made slaves of vanquished nations. That’s how the world worked. The Bible is a product of the world and the way the world works. It reflects who the people were who wrote the Bible, and what they thought was good–and nothing more. But that’s a radical, heretical, blasphemous, obscene, sacrilegious thought that desecrates all that we hold dear!

I’m just getting warmed up.

The Bible never says that slavery is wrong. The Bible simply assumes slavery is the way of life, and does not even hint at an incompatibility between believing in Jesus and holding slaves. “Let everyone remain in the state in which he (sic) was called!” is the sage advice of the Bible. Nothing about turning upside-down the cultural trends of the day. “Let everyone be subject to governing authorities!” says the Bible. Nothing about opposing the Emperor, and holding abolition rallies. So, how did slavery get to be wrong, with the Bible, that bastion of morality, so supportive of the practice?

Thinking people found nauseating discrepancies in the, yes, Bible. And could not bear the weight of the contradictions. And said, “Hey! Wait a minute! This can’t be so if that is! And they went with their innate, felt, sense of what was right in light of all they knew about the situation before them, and said, “Slavery has to go!”

People began to have problems with loving their neighbor as themselves, and treating their neighbor as a slave—as less than human. People began to use the Bible against the Bible to change the way the Bible was interpreted and understood. “Scripture interprets Scripture,” is an old Reformed position, but it is rarely brought forward today. It means that if you insist on squaring new statements of faith, or modern ways of thinking, as pertaining to homosexuality for example, up with what the Bible says, by the same logic, you have to square the Bible up with what the Bible says. How many new statements of faith were issued throughout the scriptures? How many new ways of thinking about God, and what God would have us do, are reflected there, where a new view of God was at work in opposing and supplanting a previous view of God?

Jesus is a perfect example of an idea of God being opposed and supplanted by a new idea of God. Abraham’s refusal to sacrifice Isaac is another example of an idea about God being replaced by a new, never-before-imagined way of thinking about God. Square the Bible up with the Bible. See where that gets you. Square the book of Revelation up with Jesus’ command to love your enemies, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Or, stop worrying about squaring anything with the Bible, and tell the Bible to wake up to the fact that slavery is wrong, and homosexuality, for example, is right.

Let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that the Bible condemns homosexuality outright, across the board. The question is: Should it? Is it right for the Bible to condemn homosexuals and homosexual practice? Same exact question as: Is it right for the Bible to condone and support slavery? And same exact answer: No indeed! The Bible simply doesn’t know what it’s talking about with either slavery or homosexuality—or divorce, for that matter. Is the Bible right in its position on divorce? No indeed! We’ve said, “No, indeed!” in our treatment of divorce and divorced people, refusing to be bound to the practices of a 2,000 year old culture, and rightly so, because the context of that culture has practically nothing in common with the context of this culture.

The church was before the Bible, remember. The church wrote the Bible, and the church can—and if the church refuses, we can—rewrite the Bible to say what it should have said all along! For instance, we cannot very well expect that Jesus would say, “The last will be first,” and then say, “But that doesn’t apply to gay people. They are last, and will always be last, and will never be first ever, so help me God.” Nope. The saying, “The last will be first,” means “Those least likely to be counted among the favorites of God will be the favorites of God—including gays, lesbians and transgender individuals.”

Jesus communicates the same thing when he says, “In as much as you have done it to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you have done it unto me.” Jesus sees an established connection between God and those whom the world cites as having no value, as being in last place, as being at the bottom of the pile, as being the very least and inconsequential of all human beings—even gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals. And immigrants, people of color, Muslims, etc.

Each age has its list of least likely ones. Gay people head the list in our age. If the Bible is to be trusted to show us anything about the ways and heart of God, we have to know that gay people are God’s favorites, and we have to start treating them as though they are. And, if that means we have to re-interpret, re-understand, and even rewrite, certain portions of the Bible, that is no different from what we had to do with regard to slaves and divorced men and women. And it’s high time we took up the project.

What was it that made witch hunts wrong? Here’s a hint for you: it wasn’t the Bible. The Bible was used to make witch hunts possible and popular. What was it that made denying women the right to vote wrong? Here’s a hint for you: it wasn’t the Bible. Suffrage suffered mightily at the hands of those who wielded the Bible to keep women in their place. What was it that made Jim Crow laws wrong? Here’s a hint for you (I’ll bet you know what’s coming): It wasn’t the Bible! What made relegating the handicapped and special needs population to the backrooms, and to the status of second-class citizens of society wrong? Here’s a hint for you: It wasn’t the Bible!

The Bible, that wonderful source of morality, goodness, and truth, without which the world would fall into degradation and ruin, has been invoked to oppose every social advance—one might say every good new thing—throughout the ages. Don’t take my word for it. Do your own research. Conduct your own interviews. Draw your own conclusions. But don’t let the Religious Right catch you doing it. Drawing your own conclusions is strictly forbidden by those who flaunt the Bible. If you are caught thinking for yourself, it’s all over for you. You’ll be consigned to the depths of the fiery pits of hell forever, starting right now. Never mind that Jesus asked, in the Bible, “Who do you say that I am?”(Luke 9:20), and “Why don’t you decide for yourselves what is right?” (Luke 12:57).

Until you take your life in your hands and do your own research, you’ll have to take my word for it that the Bible is not the ground of morality, not the source of all that is good, that we have been told it is. But if we take the Bible out of the picture, what is left? What is good then? How do we know?

Let’s cut to the chase. We don’t know. We all take our chances in living in light of the best we an imagine.

Jesus said, “Wisdom is justified/vindicated/made known by her children” (or words to that effect). In other words, time will tell. What is good will be validated as good in time by the majority of those who weigh in on the matter. It will be recognized as good by practically all people everywhere. Of course, slavery is evil. Of course, women are human beings. Of course, homosexuals are to be granted all the rights and privileges heterosexuals enjoy. But in the moment of decision, in the situation as it arises, all we have to go on is instinct, intuition and the best guess we are capable of making at the time.

When it comes to knowing what is good, we alone decide, but we aren’t just making blind stabs in the dark. When it comes to how do we know, we have no problem knowing. I know immediately when you treat me in ways that are good, and when you treat me in ways that are not good. I only have to have reached the level of emotional development that allows me to empathetically identify with others—to put myself imaginatively in their place—in order to know what is good for them.

What does “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” mean to you?

This is what it means to me: Once I reach the point of being able to take myself entirely out of consideration, so that I am not impacted by concerns that what is good for others might be bad for me, I am able to see clearly what is good for them. Then, I can, along with them, work out the implications that their good has for my bad, and come to some kind of compromise solution so that our over-all good is served.

This, however, is the kink in all moral systems. I can serve your good only to the extent that it doesn’t raise—too much for me to tolerate—the level of my bad. If there is only one waterhole, and if there is only enough water in the hole for me and mine, and, if it is my waterhole, then you and yours are going to have to win the fight to get the water. I may have no problem seeing that it would be good to share the water with you, but if there isn’t enough water for me to comfortably share, you aren’t going to get any water at all.

If my survival, and the survival of my family, and my tribe, is the highest good, I will serve your good as long as mine is not jeopardized by that service. Yet, the spiritual journey is getting to the place of seeing there is a higher good than mine alone–that “mine” and “yours” is one good, Our Good. The spiritual journey is expanding what is “mine” to include what is “yours,” not in the sense that “you belong to me,” but in the sense of “Thou art that.” In the sense that you and I are One, and we serve the good of the other to the exact same extent that we serve the good of the self, and so comes to pass the directive, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

Until we reach that place in our spiritual development, we will only be so good. Until then, the good that we know to be good will be the good we know to be good for us. The more generous we can be in making that good available to all others, the better, the more moral, and the more spiritual we will be. The more narrow and restrictive we are in offering good to anyone but us and “our kind,” the worse, the more immoral, and less spiritual we will be.

Empathy and compassion are the rock solid foundations of moral/spiritual development. We will be moral and spiritual to the extent that we can be empathetic and compassionate—to the extent that we can connect ourselves with all those who share the world with us, put ourselves in their place, imagine what it is like to be treated as they are treated, and adjust our treatment of them to reflect how we would like to be treated ourselves.

In wondering what is good and how do we know, we can do no better than the Golden Rule. If you are going to throw anything at me, let it be that. If you need to wonder how moral you are, ask yourself who is safe in your presence, and who is not, and how unsafe are they? The more people you can tuck under the banner of your safe, protective, compassionate presence, the more moral you are, and the better the world will be.

It’s a Mess Out There–Or Is It?

It’s a mess out there, AND patterns are everywhere. Is it order or is it chaos? It depends how we see what we look at. Life is an optical illusion. Look, and it’s a mess. Look again, and patterns are everywhere. We see chaos until we look closer, and then we see order, meaning and purpose.

Perspective is everything. Perception is the heart of meaning. Interpretation makes sense (or nonsense) of anything. We frame reality to suit ourselves. Apart from the frame, from what we say something is when we look at it, from how we frame it to talk about it, there is nothing we can say about what is there. Reality takes shape around what we say it is. Nothing means anything until we decide—until we say—what it means. Reality is what we perceive it, how we interpret it, understand it, to be.

Well, not really. The world does operate independently of our perception of the world. The ice caps are melting, regardless of what we think, believe, perceive. But the meaning we ascribe to the melting of the ice caps and the action we take in response to it does depend exclusively on our perception of the event—upon what we tell ourselves about it.

The response we have made to the transportation problem is to build more roads. More roads aren’t the solution to the problem that is generated when people pack together in suburban condominiums at night and try to drive to work in the morning. We can fill up any road in about fifteen minutes. The more roads they build, the more cars they make. You can see without looking that it isn’t going to work. The ice caps are melting and you can’t drive to work at 7:45 in the morning, or home from work after 4:00 in the afternoon. More roads? Not the answer. Yet, our perception of both the transportation problem and the ice caps melting problem determines the meaning we ascribe to it and the response we make. How we see determines how we live.

How we see is the critical element in everything that follows, and everything follows, so, everything hinges on how we see. We have to see our seeing. The rest hangs on it. We cannot assume that the way we see anything is the way the thing is. We have to consider that our seeing might be skewed by ten thousand things, most of which have to do with how we have seen things up to this point. And, what stake we have in things being as we say they are.

Perhaps there are different ways to see. We owe it to ourselves to find out. We owe it to ourselves, and to all that is yet to be, to see what we see from as many angles and distances as possible, so that our response is as informed and as wise as possible. But, if we are the fossil fuel industry, you can understand why we would look the other way and say the carbon imprint has nothing to do with the polar meltdown.

Information enlightens action. And, intention skews information. We don’t know what to do until we know what’s what. Ah, but, here is the kink in the chain: The most objective fact has to be interpreted subjectively. Information does not exist in pure form anywhere. We filter everything through our experience, interests, dreams, desires, fears and anxieties—until, before we know it, our interpretation of the fact, our impression of the fact, the implications we think the fact has for us, cannot be separated from the fact itself. We are always filling in “the rest of the picture” with our prejudices, inferences, and presumptions.

It is difficult for us to detach ourselves from our experience of life in order to view it as disinterested observers. Information is instantly interpreted and linked to meaning–and what something means is always what it means to/for us. What something is exists in relationship with what the thing means for us personally. Information has implication. We get to the information through the implication—which is to say that the information we receive is restricted or enlarged by the questions we allow ourselves to ask, and is limited or expanded by our ability to deal with the implications the information has for us. We will hide from ( deny, discount, ignore) anything we cannot handle. We have to practice handling things we don’t want to deal with. You can guess how popular that idea will prove to be.

The work of Thomas Kuhn suggests that not even science is immune to the rule that we get to information through implication–the implications the information has for us and our life and the way we want things to be because it is in our best interest for them to be that way.

Kuhn holds that science is not a smooth and steady progression based on the accumulation of knowledge. There are scientific presumptions that limit the kinds of questions scientists ask. Innovation comes about when scientists begin to wonder about things that lie outside the bounds of their specialty. We can truly experiment only when we are free to question the foundational assumptions regarding which questions are proper to ask. We generally have to get beyond our specialty—outside of our commonly held views—in order to see things freely—in order to not know what inquiries we are not supposed to make.

If science is that way theology/religion is doubly so. My work in the church was to champion ways lay people wanted to “do” church over against the denominational standards of how church is supposed to be “done” (For instance, why cannot church members be members of more than one church at the same time?). The hierarchy can only see how things are supposed to be from the point of view of the hierarchy—how members are to be received, for instance—and it cannot see any value in doing things differently from the way they have always been done. In order to create a future that is different from our past, we have to see the value in doing things differently than they have been done—and do them differently. And when doing comes to thinking and believing, the church begins to look for the exit or the eject button in order to get away from this conversation NOW!!!

We are not going to create a future that is different from our past until that is forced on us by a present that allows no alternative. Those of us who see that present coming, can prepare the way of transformation by taking up the practice of seeing ourselves seeing.

Nothing has the creative potential of a perspective that takes itself into account. We develop this kind of perspective by saying what we see and wondering what else there might be to see—by asking ourselves what we are not seeing and how our seeing impacts what’s there. We can enhance our chances of developing this kind of perspective by being quiet on a regular basis. There is nothing like silence—solitude—to enable us to see. We assist the revelation potential of silence by emptying ourselves of everything we carry with us into the silence—fear/desire/duty are the big three, but the first thing we notice when we sit in quiet stillness is how noisy it is. We bring noise with us into the silence and have to empty ourselves of all that creates the heaving waves and clashing rocks within us. The practice of being quiet is the practice of being empty in order to be quiet!

One of the things we might see when we are quiet is that the universe is not entirely separate from us. We interact with the universe at the level of perception. Internal and external engage one another and are connected to one another by invisible bands of perspective. There is a sense in which the “in here” and the “out there” are one experience, one thing.

The resurrection appearances of Jesus are a beautiful illustration of the way the “in here” merges inseparably with the “out there.” I have no doubt that the resurrection appearances were real. The disciples, and others, including Paul, actually perceived the resurrected Jesus as “out there,” as “other than” themselves. C. S. Lewis is reported to have appeared to William Barclay after his—Lewis’—death (Or, was it the other way around?). It happens frequently enough for us to have complete confidence that after death encounters with those who have died are real. And they are created with the power of perception.

There is a (perhaps apocryphal) story about a group of scientists going to India to study paranormal phenomena. They heard of a rope-climbing guru and went to interview him. They set up their movie camera and asked him to demonstrate his ability. He took a rope out of a basket, coiled it on the ground and began to play a flute. The rope uncoiled straight into the air. He put down the flute, climbed up the rope, down the rope, coiled it up and put it in the basket. The scientists were astonished, and couldn’t wait to watch the film. When they ran it through the projector, they watched as the swami got the rope out of the basket, coiled it on the ground, played the flute, put the flute down, paused a moment, picked up the rope and put it in the basket. What they saw wasn’t what the camera recorded. The “out there” and the “in here” dance together all the way to the grave, and perhaps, beyond.

We have to be aware of the dance. We have to be aware of the role perception and perspective play in the world in which we live and to which we respond. We do not have to react the way we do to the way life is. The way we react influences and transforms the way life is. Perspective is the power of creation at work in the world and in our lives. We wield the power to impact the dance for better or worse. Everything hangs on our realizing the power that is ours and learning to use it wisely. This is where community—the company we keep—comes into play.

As we talk with one another about what’s going on in our lives, how it impacts us, how we respond to it, and how we wish things were instead, we bring our perspective into focus. We become aware of our perceptions by talking with one another about the way we see things and what they mean to us, for us. We enlarge our perception, our perspective, by being aware of it. We deepen it, develop it and become, thereby, responsible and trustworthy agents of creation within the turmoil and chaos of life.

All of this hinges on the quality of the company we keep. It takes the right kind of company to form the right kind of community. Communities of innocence have a straight-forward agenda: To be what is needed in the lives of those who are in need of what the community has to offer. Communities of innocence exist to receive us well and do right by us. They listen to us at a level that enables us to hear, see, and understand ourselves—to know who we are and also are—and imagine ways to bring ourselves forth within the context and circumstances of our lives. They provide us with order in chaos, peace in turmoil, and direction in the trackless wasteland. All we ever need for the low, low price of being innocently present for good in the lives of one another.

Life Unfolds According to Its Own Good Pleasure

I don’t know why we can’t just live appropriately in each moment, with respect for each other’s ways. I don’t know why we cannot draw appropriate lines, honor appropriate boundaries, and allow things to be what they need to be apart from our ideas, interests, wishes and wants. We have our ways, it seems. We think we can choreograph life without listening to the music. We know how we would like for things to be, but have no sense of how things need to be, and attempt to force our way upon the world regardless of its impact, in a “Damn the shoreline! Full speed ahead!” kind of way.

Life unfolds in its own time, according to its own pleasure. I learned to ride a bicycle when I was in the third grade, in spite of my father’s willful efforts to make me learn to ride it throughout the two previous years. He did not understand, then, or ever, the importance of asking: “What are you ready for? What are you trying to push before its time? What are you delaying well past its time?” We do not do not have a natural affinity for these questions. We do not have a curiosity about what time it is. One time is as good as another, with us. We declare what time it is. We do not inquire. “It’s time for you to learn to ride a bicycle!” we say, when it is actually two years early.

An egg that hatches before, or after, its time is not a good thing for the bird. Some things, like a stuck door, have to be forced. Most things, like eggs hatching, and tomatoes ripening, have to be allowed to happen in their own time. Our life is one of those things.

Kairos is the opportune time, the favorable moment. The fullness of time. The time to act. The time to refrain from acting. Chronos is clock time, calendar time. It was the time my father had in mind when I was in the first grade, and he declared that it was time I learned to ride a bike. That would be like my father looking at his watch and telling me it was time for me to go pee.

Our body, and our life, work on the basis of kairos, not chronos. Our body, and our life, know what time it is, and listening to them, we know whether it is time for a cup of coffee, or a glass of wine, and when it is time to learn how to ride a bicycle, and swim. We only have to know what we know.

We have to stop pushing: “How much L O N G E R R R???” “Is it time yet? Is it time yet? Can we go now? Can we be there now???” We have to relax into the arms of kairos, into the eternal flow of the Tao, And wait, watch, trusting that we will know when the time is at hand—that we will act without thinking, when the time is at hand, like the bird cracking the egg, or leaving the nest.

Boris Pasternak said, “When a moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.” How do we develop the perception of heart and soul that sees, that knows, what time it is? How do we teach ourselves, and our children, to listen to—and with—our heart? How do we become attuned to the unfolding of life, within and about us? How do we learn to assist what is coming to be, what needs to happen, instead of imposing our ideas for the world upon the world?

Can we trust our life to have an organic quality about it? An inner character? An innate drift to the good? Can we trust our life to carry us where we need to be? Can we believe in the capacity of our life to know what it is doing? How long do we wait to see evidence of it? Waiting faithfully, believing in our life’s ability to unfold according to its own timetable, in its own direction, in spite of an abundance of evidence to the contrary, is the real work of soul.

What do we do while we are waiting, to hold body and soul together? Whatever is at hand. Whatever we do to hold body and soul together, on a deeper level we are listening, watching, waiting with intention and deliberation. On a deeper level, we are conscious of serving our life, of assisting our life, of helping our life in its own unfolding. This is called walking two paths at the same time.

We do that knowing, trusting, believing that our life emerges over time—that our life continues to emerge over time, taking different shapes, assuming different forms, following different paths, according to its own interests, and the opportunities available for them to be realized. There is never a moment in which our life has said all it has to say, in which it has done all it has to do. Our life always has something more in store for us, if we have eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart to understand—and the willingness to align our will with our life’s will for us.

Too often, we give up on our life because it seems there is nothing to be done within these sorry circumstances, with these worthless possibilities, and we add our voice to the chorus of those who have whined through the ages, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Too often, we allow our experiences with life to separate us from ourselves, and cut us off from our heart—and live a plastic, cardboard, inauthentic, robotic existence throughout our days upon the earth. Too often, we have our own purposes to serve, our own desires to realize, and allow nothing to interfere with the realization of our dreams. We do not give our life a chance, because it would only get in our way if we did, and we don’t want anything untracking us from the glory that we have in mind for ourselves.

We have to trust ourselves to our life! We cannot be alive and loving it on some narrow little frequency range where everything is just right—exactly like we want it to be. We have to wade into the ocean! Embrace it all, and love every bit of it.

James Hollis quotes Homer, who has Odysseus say, “I will stay with it and endure through suffering hardship—and once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces, then I will swim.” That’s the spirit! We commit ourselves to the journey, the path, the beam with our name on it, no matter what, and see where it goes. That’s it. There is nothing more to it than that.

We have to do the thing, the thing that is ours to do, the thing that we don’t know what is, but that we may have a hunch about—yet, we fool ourselves so often that we can’t be sure if this isn’t another one of those attractive missteps like our first marriage, and our second one, so what chance do we ever have of getting it right, of ever getting on the beam with our name on it, and seeing where it goes? And, all the while, that is the thing that is ours to do, and sitting here coming up with all these reasons for not doing it isn’t getting it done!

All of the catch phrases of Orthodox Christianity are inviting reinterpretation here. With just a bit of a shift in focus, we can see that “God’s will” is our life’s own built-in, organic, inner design. It is who we are, how we are built to be. “Sin” and “disobedience,” “alienation” and “bondage,” are our refusal to listen, to see, to wait, to serve our lives—to be servants of life. They are our rush, instead, to develop the life of our own choosing—or to give up on our life altogether as being too little, too paltry, too hopelessly disappointing to be worth having. “Deliverance,” “salvation,” “resurrection,” “restoration,” and “the return to the Promised Land” are terms for our waking up to the presence of the unobtrusive Messiah within each of us—which is the kernel of divinity, numinousity, integrity, truth, goodness, hope, purity, and beauty that is the inner shape and form of our own life: Our destiny, waiting to be recognized and served.

The Spiritual Path is the path back to where we started, back to who we have always been. The Spiritual Journey is the journey to our Inner Self, the inner Other, the two million-year-old person whom Jung said “We do not know.” The Spiritual Quest is the quest for who we also are—who we are built to be, and called to become. We seek reunion with the genius within, with the gift that is ours to share with the world, with the art that ours is to develop and present to all. The religion of our experience is geared to separate us from the very thing it should be helping us find.

In order to take the Spiritual Path back home to the self we are built to be, we are going to have to let go of certain things, and take up certain others. The hardest thing is to stand apart from the way we have always seen things in order to see things differently. This perspective shift is the experience of death and resurrection. It is a lot easier to remain dead than to be born again. In order to be born again, we have to make the transition from the literal to the metaphorical, from the external to the internal, from the inorganic to the organic. And, we have to be able to understand the power of an idea whose time has come as the very voice of God.

Think of God in two ways. There is the external God we created as protection against the forces of life and nature—death, disease, devastation; earthquake, wind, fire, flood, famine, etc.—which we could neither understand or control. We imagined a Omnipotent, Almighty God in control of the forces of life and nature, who could be appeased, who could be charmed, who could be cajoled into granting us immunity, and keeping us safe—with the right kind of faith, the right kind of service. We developed elaborate systems of religion to control the God, who would control life and nature in our behalf, and grant us peace, prosperity, and life everlasting.

Now, think of God as the Stream of Life flowing through all of life—the internal God of the “still, small voice.” The God of the Idea Whose Time Has Come. The God of right seeing, right hearing, right understanding, right knowing, right doing, right being. The God of the listening ear, the seeing eye, the understanding heart. The God who perceives, and knows, and acts at the right time to shift the world to the good. The God who unfolds, emerges, evolves, becomes. The God who is hidden within, tucked away in the unfurling of our lives and the opening of each moment, is also the Transcendent God, the Sacred Source of Life, Being and Value.

If we can think of creation as the coming out, the coming forth, of God, as the becoming of God, as the self-expression of God, we can say that God is limited by a number of factors, perhaps an infinite number of factors. One of the things that the story of Jesus opens up for us is the “vulnerability of God.” In Jesus, some of the Biblical writers say, God was born in a manger and died on a cross. This view of God is in complete contradiction to the idea of an invincible, omnipotent all-powerful, almighty, Master and Commander of the Universe and Beyond God that we have been told is the right idea to have of God—but, it is completely compatible with the idea of the Stream of Life flowing through life.

Creation can be seen as a vulnerable act of a vulnerable God, who is at the mercy of possibility and opportunity, is restricted by chance, and just keeps trying until there is a breakthrough. God, from this point of view, is more of an urge toward itself, of Life toward life, toward expression, exhibition and realization, than the Architect and Constructor of Everything Out of Nothing. The “urge of Life toward life” is not independent of, and external to, creation, but is integral to creation as the very heart of the ongoing process of creation, and is, itself, the creative act. It is what creation is “all about.” There is nothing beyond “the realization of the life,” beyond being fully alive in the time and place of living, to have, acquire, possess.

We literally grow into God, as we expand our consciousness, deepen our awareness, and exercise our imagination. We join God in the act of bringing God into being as we consciously, with intention and purpose, awareness and imagination, live toward our own life, and bring life forth within the life we are living—offering ourselves, the genius, the art, the gift that is ours to give—in doing what needs to be done in each situation as it arises.

Whose good is served by the good we call good? The good that we serve has to be good for our enemies as well as for us; has to be good for those who are not like us as well as for us. When we love our enemies, there is God. When we love our neighbor as ourselves, there is God. When we do unto others as we would have them do unto us, there is God. As we do these things, we join God in the realization of the good, in the expression of life, and live in tune with the heart of creation, and swim exuberantly in the Stream of Life and Being.