What Does Wanting Know?

That which has always been called “God” is dependent on us for bringing “God” forth and establishing “God’s” reality within the physical world. We are dependent on “God” for bringing ourselves forth and establishing our reality within the physical world. Denying our dependency, and living as though we are the Captains of Our Own Ship, the Masters of Our Destiny, disrupts the natural flow, and creates the illusion that we can do whatever we want.

Apart from “God,” we have no idea of who we are, or what we are about, and are stuck with only our wants to guide us. The Will to Good is not fueled by the desire of the moment, and without a connection with the core of Life and Being within us, we are left with being blown about by the winds of attraction and repulsion.

We know what we want and what we do not want, but what does wanting know? How resilient, determined and disciplined in the service of what needs to happen is wanting? How long before we are disenchanted by, and bored with, what we wanted—and cast it aside to take up the chase for next must-have piece of technological innovation that comes along, with its shiny plastic housing and promise of lasting satisfaction? Or the next true love? Or the next hit of whatever box of smoke is handy?

Wanting must be sat aside in favor of Eros—not understood as sexual love, but as love of life and destiny that pulls us beyond ourselves into ourselves in fidelity, filial allegiance and service to the life that is our life to live, regardless of anything that might challenge or threaten that life or our allegiance to it. This is compatible with the idea of courtly love between a medieval knight and his lady, where loyalty and piety were foundational aspects of service and work.

It is this kind of dedication to the life that is our life to live that aligns us with The Will to Good (Which has always been experienced as God), and opens us to aspects of ourselves that were secret to us and had been hidden from us as long as we were off track and lost in a world based on having what we want.

We Do Our Own Work, Part 3

A purpose beyond our purpose

Works like gravity and time

To fill the sea

Regardless of what civilizations rise and fall,

Or which country’s Conquistadors

Wreak chaos and havoc on which countries.

Through it all,

The Purpose is at work,

Calling us back to the source and ground of our life,

To the Tao of Eden,

To the Eden of Tao,

To “the face that was ours before we were born.”

To our Original Nature.

To balance and harmony.

To spirit, vitality, life.

To what purpose?

As though there could be a purpose

Beyond knowing

And being

Who we are,

doing what is called for

In the here and now of our living,

Through all contexts and circumstances,

Incarnating,

Exhibiting,

Expressing

Who we are

And what we are about

In ways appropriate to the occasion,

All our life long!

We Do Our Own Work, Part 2

Every night our dreams show us how it is in our life,

As if to say, “This is how it is–what are you going to do about it?”

Every night, the same question:

“This is how it is.

What are you going to do about it?”

We grow up

By facing up to how it is with our life,

And doing what needs to be done about it.

Every night we get a mirror:

“This is how it is in your life.”

And a question:

“What are you going to do about it?”

Every day, we get another opportunity

To look in the mirror,

And work out our answer to the question.

And we have help with the work.

Our intuition is our best secret friend,

on our side from birth

to help guide our boat on its path through the sea.

We help it help us by getting out of the way

and being sensitive to the nudges and messages

we get through the day each day.

Between the two of us,

we have all it takes

to live the life that is our life to live

from birth to death,

which is something that has rarely been done

throughout the life of the species.

We Do Our Own Work, Part 1

Everybody is dealing with something,

Bearing some burden.

Each one of us is struggling

To come to terms with the way things are,

Making our peace with the truth of our life.

This is the work of maturity,

The singular task of the spiritual journey.

We are all growing up.

The more conscious we are of the process,

And of our place in it,

The better it is for everyone.

We do our part

When we put ourselves in accord with our life,

And live it as fully as it can be lived,

Anyway,

Nevertheless,

Even so.

I don’t mean lie down

And let it run over you.

I mean do what can be done

About what needs to be done

With the gifts that are yours to use–

I mean “get in there and do your thing”–

Every day for the rest of your life,

And let that be that.

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.