Twisted

Okay, I can't be serious all of the time. From the twisted mind of yours truly comes the following observation on the bleakest of Monday's on the NYSE: I was looking at the big board listings on CNBC (all red down arrows) and noted with a giggle that turned into a raucous belly laugh (or is it gallows humor) that aside from the safe haven of gold which soared above the $900 mark, the only stock that went up today as the Dow fell 777 points was Campbell's Soups!!

I looked for Kraft Macaroni & Cheese but it isn't a stock symbol.

It's All Good

I have been haunted by memories of late. I guess when one is approaching a full six decades there's a lot the inner haunter has to choose from. But don't hear that as a bad or a good - it just is what is happening. In fact, that is the problem: what is showing up in retrospect is how what seemed good, wasn't (or may have been) and what was a horror has become the foundation of a towering strength today. So these reviews are more like movie watching - scary scenes and fun scenes but both just some screen event with no real power over me anymore. The take-away here is that each event held within it the power to be positive or negative depending on how I chose then or see it now.

The Greeks had a word for spirit, daemonae (my Greek is 40 years old so sue me if it's spelled wrong), which was not just the demonic (evil) as it is known today. It was actually the force within that could be good (rightly used) or bad (improperly used). It was the root of happiness (eudaemonika) as well. I think they nailed that one. Life is like that - each moment is rife with the power of good and bad. However I see it, however I choose, it becomes that. Moreover, after the fact, it still maintains that power to morph from good to bad or bad to good. And, think I, if that is so of life, is it not also true of my experience of god? My belief in god (should you not have read others of these blogs of mine - god is a word of convenience but not to be confused with the bearded, robed, grandfatherish thing of lore) is that god is in through and a part of all life and movement throughout the cosmos - and that includes me and my tiny little corner. God holds that same daemonic power - the source of joy and the fear of destruction (remember, you and I can be taken at anytime). What if god were not good or bad (those are human terms), what if god just was/is; all powerful, meaning just that - the power to source everything and be channeled to good or bad?

Then that puts the responsibility squarely on me to choose (right and wrong) and to interpret the past (good and bad). Thanks god! It would be so much simpler if the rules were just spelled out, I mean beyond the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. But of course that is impossible - 6 billion people times a lifetime of living an infinite number of moment-by-moment choices - it would not be possible to write the rule book for that. Se we - I - have to think and choose, and who is to say what is good or bad? Life is just rich - filled with the spirit of it all, with the daemonic, the yin and yang of all-in-one richness.

Yesterday I got a note from a friend of long ago - someone who in the good and bad of it all I thought I had hurt. In telling her life story to her 18 year old, she had reflected warmly about our years together. Well - there you go! It's like Glenda asked, "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" I dunno - which witch is which? I guess to me it's all good!

Theology of Words

I don't have the words right yet to deal with what is tumbling around inside me. I am in this class with a magnificent professor - brilliant and pedigreed - and of course I find myself debating with him in class. It is sport and my own unique way of learning (if I can dialog with him the words and concepts have a better shot of sticking in with the cobwebs inside my cranium). And then it happens: this brilliant man says something that leads me to think that what he calls theology - a legacy of concepts from Niebuhr to Tillich to Stackhouse - a sound and well honed discourse, is in fact light years away from my personal theology. My beliefs are borne of those and other readings but then lightly tossed in a big bowl with a lot of vinegar, or more like dust and blood and events and dark nights alone in prayer. And as a result my "theology" if it can be called that, is not only personally defined but quite different.

Belief - that is the operative word - is something that I have because there can be no evidence for what I name god. (Sorry but I use that word/name for convenience because Voldemort stole "He who cannot be named"). Anyway faith and belief is what appears in the void not what happens when some Sunday School Teacher says "cuz the Bible tells me so." I believe in and follow what Joshua (aka Jesus the Nazarene) preached - a somewhat radical and reverse logic that in order to be filled one must be empty, in order to save your life you have to lose it, that the rich are poor and the poor have abundance. He told us that what we think is good is what is in the way and that when we embrace what is bad (our faults and defects) we are made whole and filled with compassion for others. This practical but counterintuitive logic seems to be quite different from the teachings of my church and certainly this classically educated professor.

Now I am not a suck for a grade, and I can go to the mat with the best of them, but I do feel this dilemma. How am I to explain and justify that which is only my journey? Each of us has a personal spiritual journey and most likely none of those will fit within the structure of any classic theology. It can't. Textbook theology is perhaps what we are supposed to think and espouse, but the experience of spiritual contact cannot be defined, or bottled up or very often spoken. Then what am I to do? Argue my points from a textbook definition which no longer lives for me? Or struggle to place my experience in some conceptual framework knowing that it may never make "real" sense to anyone but me?

The Groundhog

We have a groundhog in our neighborhood - that I think lives under my tool shed. - and who helps himself to our herbs and flowers as well as the apples that fall over the fence from my neighbor's tree. He is big, and fat, and as it appears to me, quite happy in life.

I was watching him this morning at breakfast. He sat peacefully on the hillside, alternating munching on well watered grasses and observing the occasional joggers going by. I wondered what I could learn from him. First of all, he wants for nothing, yet he did not plant it, care for it or invest anything in it. If he could speak I am certain that he would view this world as his idea, his garden, his tossed salad on a silver platter! Yet I worry so much. How will I pay for this or that? Will I be able to feed my family? What about the leak I always get in the cellar after a heavy rain? How can I start seeing the world as my garden?

But he is also serene. Nothing seems to hurry my rather annoying visitor. He knows where his safe places are - the nearest bush or tunnel to escape me or another neighbor who has had it with his confounded eating our precious flowers. But he is calm and, yes, serene. he eats peacefully, looks up and surveys his world peacefully, and returns to his apple slowly and calmly. He isn't rushed - as I am - running from pillar to post, from one client to the next. Where is my peace, my pace, in this hurry-up world in which I live.

So I have declared today as Groundhog Day! And maybe tomorrow too. But unlike the movie of the same name, it will not be reliving the same events to get it right. It will be to see the world as my salad plate, to take my time, to know where my safety really is and to observe everything with a calm serenity. I have despised the little bastard, for always showing me up and outsmarting my attempts to stop him. But now he has the audacity to become my teacher!

Rest

Weird day. I awoke in a rush and did my usual routine but somewhere in the zoom lost my phoneberry. (unrecalled by my conscious mind - I had put it in my briefcase). In a panic and rush I left home (I thought) without it. I found it though when it vibrated in the silence of my car. I had been meditating on the fact that the world I am in is whirling much too fast and I want to get off. Calling home I told my compassionate wife that I needed to have a day of grace and relaxation - I just wished I could have a mini sabbatical.

I got to my first appointment and found that she wasn't there - she had just been called into an emergency meeting and left apologies for the missed meeting. Cool! Found time called wife again and found myself saying, "gee god sure answers quickly." So I checked in with my next two appointments just in case it was a divine plot to answer my request. 11AM said, I just can't meet today, let's reschedule," and my 1PM confirmed. It was now 9:30 and I went home to write and reflect on how wonderful it was to ask for time to rest and have it appear so quickly.

I remember Carolyn Myss saying once that things show up in a timeliness that is equal to your living in the present. Wow! Good connections, eh! And now I am contemplating going to bed at 9PM. I need some rest, thank you, God!

Abundant Life

First of all, thanks to my Pastor for his sermon last week (noting the true definition of the "abundant" life that is our birthright) and to my magical eldest daughter, Pastor B, for her notes from a recent trip back to the barrios of Ecuador which re-frame once again my understanding of abundance and scarcity.


So here is the question: Why is it that those who have the most (wealth, toys, land, holdings) suffer most from a feeling of scarcity and wanting, while those with so little are so giving and seem so willing to share ALL that they have? Isn't that backwards? Doesn't that strike you as, if not impossible, at the very least improbable? But that is the truth. And it is the core message of the sacred texts. Give it away and you have more. More what? Simple: more abundance.

Then what is this abundance and this so-called abundant life. It is a freedom - freedom from the addictions of the ego and its petty righteousness around things and symbols. The ego, it would seem, needs to count and to measure. It needs to believe that it means something. But ego, like Kubrick's computer HAL, is a tool gone bad. The mind is an organ of the human body designed to make sense out of nonsense, to make order out of chaos. That's its sole purpose. But along the way it begins to distinguish (in its task of ordering things) self from other, and in doing so begins to count. "I have more of this than he does." "I am not the same as he." "I am different, special, unique, and therefore uniquely loved by my maker." OOO-yeah, I slipped that last one in there as a sucker punch. See that's where it goes of the deep end. And we cannot seem to call it back at that point, "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that!"

And so god points us to the poor among us, to the children among us, to the widowed, outcast, disenfranchised; to those who HAVE nothing, as the examples of how and where to access abundance. That is not a non sequitur. It is simply that devoid of the entrapments of stuff, spiritually-inclined people are able to access an abundance of the meaning and meaningful stuff of life - love, aesthetics, charity, compassion. They are able to "get it" because their identity is not so wrapped up in the structures and counting of their ego. As a matter of record, I would contend that their egos have been relatively smashed. All-in-all not a bad thing.

How then do we access this abundant life? It may not be, as Jesus instructed the rich man, to sell of all our possessions and give the proceeds to the poor, unless, of course (as was the case with the rich man) our identity is all wrapped up in that stuff. But can you become, as the Buddha instructed, detached from it? What would you or I need to do to get us to the point of smashed ego-function, and live free from any - ANY - attachment to the stuff and the accomplishments and the numbers in life? Most importantly, how do I teach my son that value (I am confident both adult daughters live there)?

Abundant life is a discipline - a way of being - that practices detachment to stuff and acts with charity in all times and places. It is not a state one can achieve (yes, that would be ego talking again) - it is only a path, a discipline that eventually shapes the mind and soul. Freedom is the state of being that results from the discipline of abundant living. Freedom from counting, freedom from worry, freedom from scarcity, freedom from oppression (can you dig that? - you cannot oppress a man who is ego-less, you cannot take anything from one who holds on to nothing).

Do You Suffer Enough

The Buddha says that it is suffering that moves us to change toward enlightenment and I must agree. I have written about pain before (Purposeful Pain, 7/14/08) but that is purely on an individual level and of the nature that prevents me from further hurting myself. What I am thinking of now is actual suffering and grief.


On a personal level the suffering in the dark night of the soul is the place where we discover real faith and hope. In truth, it cannot exist anywhere else. Seriously, what kind of faith is it if you have all the evidence in the world that god has provided for you. That is evidence. Faith is only evident when there is doubt, or as Carolyn Myss is fond of saying, "In order to have faith you need to have an experience that demands you find it." So a real purpose of our pain suffering and doubt is that it forces us to develop deep faith and the endurance of a distance runner.


But in the transformational journey, the waves of darkness keep coming. (Oh you thought it was over and that the lesson was learned - wrong!) Each time we dip into the dark night, another layer of ego is stripped away, and another door or window to the world is opened. We gradually evolve from self centered living to allocentric living - other centered. The Buddha calls these outer layers of consciousness a movement toward oneness. As the illusion of separateness is eroded by spiritual suffering (sometimes it is more like being ripped away), our consciousness opens to the global experience of what it means to be human. 'I' becomes 'we' and the limited awareness of one's "sheltered" thin slice of humanity widens to include many others. This is good and right, right?

Wrong! Not good! Because with this awareness comes the suffering of 3-4 billion of the world's population. Not spiritual suffering alone: not just hunger - but starvation; not just sickness - but plague; not just pain - but torture. Human suffering is the awareness of the transformed soul. And what can we do with that level of awareness? The answer is not in turning away, or in numbing our brains with drugs and alcohol. No, the answer is, feel it, let it course through your body and rip out the last vestiges of an ego that thinks it has the power to solve the problem, and then sit with the grief! (O, fun, sign me up for that ride!)

The price of admission to the transformation ride is awareness - disturbing, painful, awareness. The kind that wakes you up at 3AM in the question of, "What am I going to do today that works toward the side of justice and mercy?" And so I sit here with the question (I have gotten used to living in the question) wondering at what point will the suffering be so unbearable that I chuck the roles I currently have and take greater action; global action. At what point will I no longer be able to silence the voice that wants to scream out at the profitability machine, "Enough!" When will I have suffered enough for that? Do you suffer enough?