I have heard various versions of “Let God and Let God.”  from the time I was very young.  “Trust in God” I often heard.  “One will get what one needs- not necessarily what one wants.” “It is God’s will.”   The implied truth was always that the only way that one can find peace is to let go of one’s own wishes or will and trust that this mysterious God knows what she/she/it is doing.  Somehow this God, whom we are expected to obey, is in charge and, yet, we have the option of sinning/exercising free will.   Intermixed with these truth, in the Christian tradition was the riddle of somehow one must die in order to live.  I grew in the Christian church with lots of paintings and sculptures of this Jesus fellow nailed to the cross; the same Jesus who would emerge alive from the tomb. 
 
One was advised to study the Bible daily while trusting that God would give  one what one needed but apparently only if one quit sinning and when one did sin, ask for forgiveness.   In the tradition in which I grew up there was no limit to the number of behaviors which were likely to make God angry.  It seems as if one must daily die as this sinful person and momentarily – if that long – accept God’s grace.   I was well aware that I failed miserably and was destined to be cast into the everlasting fire of Hell for all of eternity. It was a frightening thought.   Although frightened, I seem both unwilling and/or constitutionally unable to refrain from sinful thoughts which contained the earnest desire for sinful behavior. The desire for the later always outweighed my fear or so it seemed.
 
Much later in life, I would be introduced to many philosophers and theologians who posited many ways to view this human existence and the purpose thereof.   It was at this period of my life that I began to truly understand the concept of death and resurrection. I began the slow and seemingly non-ending practice of accepting that I knew/know nothing. This body of so called knowledge had to be “killed off’/put aside/let go of.  There was no end to the “truths” which I had unwittingly accepted. Some of them were very personal truths about myself and others were more generalized truths about this life journey. This “truths” included:
 
·      Jesus is going to be really pissed if you do not acknowledge He saved you by dying.
·      At the very least one will be developed huge warts with will tell the world that one is a masturbator and ultimately those very same warts will prevent you from entering Heaven. It will take eternity to burn them off!  Oh my!
·      There is absolute knowledge
·      One will get rewarded in the next life for one’s good needs.
·      Good people lived on the right side of the tracks.
·      God loved all people but only if they stayed on their side of the tracks.
·      Killing in the name of God and Country was a good thing.
·      Killing if not sanctioned by the larger community was sinful.
·      If we are good and study we will have a good job, financial security and live on the right side of the tracks.
·      God made man and woman so that he could put his thing into her thing to make babies but it was not for enjoyment.
·      All good people lived in little house  with white pickett fences and kept a neat lawn.
·      One should be proud of and loyal to one’s country no matter how they behaved.
·      White Christians were good people although there was the occasional person of color such as my Aunt Pleasie (Cherokee Indian) who was an exception.
·      The United States was America – this one still confuses me.
·      Our way of government should be adopted by the rest of the world.
·      We should share our food and other riches with deserving people but make sure we are not communists or socialists.
·      Children should be eternally grateful for their parents even if parents were angry most of the time and very mean.
·      We should show our concern to the starving children of China by eating food on our plate that we hated.
·      If someone heard you crying when a parent was beating you it was your fault for embarrassing them.
 
One gets the idea.  The point  is, of course that we present information to our children as if we have absolute truths to impart.  Death and resurrection is a theological concept  but has not relevance for how one lives one’s life.   Then one gets introduced to philosophers and poets such as Rumi. 
 
 
 
TUESDAY, MARCH 19, 2013
[Sunlight] How shall we seek real knowledge?
 
~
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
How shall we seek real knowledge?
By renouncing knowledge.
 
How shall we seek salvation?
By renouncing our own salvation.
 
How shall we seek Existence?
By renouncing our existence.
 
-- Muriel Maufroy
"Breathing Truth - Quotations from Jalaluddin Rumi"
Sanyar Press - London, 1997
 
One may also be exposed to  the Socratic method.  If lucky one also meets folks such as Aberjhani
 
“A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmare
to the jeweled vision of a life started anew.”
― Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
 
Along comes Walt Whitman. What to make of the following which is attributed to him:
 
“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman
 
One might even be exposed to the clearly irrelevant “wisdom” of Mark Twain in such sacrilegious works as Letters from the Earth. To wit:
 
“Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.
 
Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.”
― Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings
 
I am again reminded of the quote from Rumi with which I started these musings:
 
How shall we seek real knowledge?
By renouncing knowledge.
 
How shall we seek salvation?
By renouncing our own salvation.
 
How shall we seek Existence?
By renouncing our existence.
 
The “truth” seems to be that I will to learn by accepting the contradiction of what Rumi and others continue to teach me.    Indeed it is by letting go and letting God that I have any measure of control.  It is only not attaching myself to living  that I can live.  It is only by being intentional about my breath that I can let go of any thoughts. It is only by  letting go of thoughts that I have the possibility of thought rather than memory.  For it is memory of what I have previously been taught that I want to let go of if I am to learn.
 
The student says I “I am going to try x.”  The teacher reminds the student, ”We cannot accomplish by trying but only by doing. If you try to pick up this dish you are not picking it up.  It is, thus, by the absence of  seeking salvation that we are saved. It is only by being open to death that we live. It is only by letting of love that we love.”  These are the paradoxes  which we can examine, meditate about, discuss, write endless about, just smile about or jut accept.
 
We laugh at the idea of the truth. We embrace those who we see as unworthy of embracing. We love the unlovable.  
 
We embrace the cup of coffee. We breathe.   We smile. We  accept that we are not which allow us to be.
 
Written  October 19, 2015
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
The above is a quote by the poet Mary Oliver.   She is talking with Krista Tippett on the NPR program, On Being.   She said this on the morning she found out that she won the Pulitzer prize.  After hearing the news she continued on with her plan to find more shingles to buy at the dump because she needed to repair her house.  When I heard her say that I was reminded of an old poem of mine (I think I wrote it down and stored it somewhere, but  who knows what is merely written in my head and what I might find on paper (carelessly put in some box or file) entitled “Kitchen Floor Politics.”   It was written at a time when I was living in a community house with a group of people dedicated to keeping life as simple as possible and, thus, leaving room for social action and other “important” work.   For me, the advantages of living with others had to do not only with or primarily with finances, but with the nurturing relationships which I needed to remind me why I was doing what I was doing. I also know I need to be emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually fed daily.   At any rate, at that time, the house was composed of males of various ages and backgrounds.   Even though dinners were not formal affairs with polished silver and the good china, there were certain tasks which needed doing. The bills had to be paid, small repairs had to be made, groceries bought and prepared, laundry done, and some amount of cleaning done.   In terms of cleaning, there was no need of a white glove test, but I did think that when one could not walk on the kitchen floor without the grime and spilled food  reaching out to cement one to the floor and, thus, preventing one from walking, it was time to mop the floor.  Some days it seemed as if I was alone in thinking this.   At times it seemed as though my “roommates” were fairly traditional males in the respect that they were much too busy doing “important” work to worry about mundane matters.  They seemed to be waiting for the woman of the house, of which there were none, to do the mundane work of maintaining the home. To be fair, one of the men had grown up with maids, was in graduate school, and could not seem to grasp the concept that, sans maid, one had to do some menial work.   It seems easy for we men – and some women – to get so busy doing “important work” that we forget to take care of ourselves, each other, and our home (a necessary part of taking care of ourselves and each other). We expect others to do this for us. Even when there is hired help, it seems as if we wait for the women in our lives to hire and supervise “the hired help.”    Interesting enough, even in the field of human resource professionals,  we tend to  rely on woman.  A brief google search revealed the following from a 2008 study:
The Feminization of HR.
By Claude Balthazard
Thursday, March 1, 2012
In the fall of 2008, the Human Resources Professional Association in Toronto, in conjunction with its partnerCanadian HR Reporter, conducted a survey on the gender imbalance in HR.
The latest statistics at the time had suggested that 72 percent of persons employed in HR were women. The accounting profession, which had the reverse gender imbalance, had recently undertaken initiatives to recruit more women into their profession.
 
Women, even when in a relationship with another woman, know that no one is going to take care of the home and the relationships in their lives if they do not. Mary Oliver is a woman, who was not and is not wealthy, and needed to make repairs to her house.  Her partner of many means was also a woman.  They could not hire others to do the work of maintaining a home even if some of the work was traditionally  considered masculine.  Thus, even the winning of the Pulitzer prize did not take mitigate the need to get more shingles.
 
I have said that I basically do not trust  those who do not notice that the shingles need replacing, the kitchen floor mopped, the toilet paper purchased and put in the bathroom, the  refrigerator stocked, children need taken care of, and  the mood and general health of all  the family need to be noted and attended to.    This is the important work of living is it not?
 
It always amazes me that, invariably, women professionals who are parents make time for the children while often we men have been much too busy with “important work” (even when both are in the same profession).  Even  in those families where a decision has been made for the male to be the house husband and the female is  the primary wage earner, it is often the female who organizes and does much of the household work which would be expected to be done by the female if she as was the primary house person. 
 
From an early age we teach females to be caretakers. We encourage them to care for dolls, set up  and manage play houses, play house, and in other ways focus on learning to nurture.   Although this has changed and certainly in LGBT relationships it has to change, for the most part we raise boys and girls differently.    In anything, we have encouraged women to aspire to be more like we men except, at the very same time, we expect them to hold fast to a passion for nurturing.  Somehow, we seem to have often taught women to be more schizophrenic.  At the workplace, we expect them to be focused on “the important work” of making money, fighting the enemy, proving one’s mettle by working very long days, being as ruthless as ‘necessary” in competing for the prize (whatever that is)  and, on the other hand, to be this nurturing, present mom who is always available. These two roles obviously clash internally and externally.  Women may win the Pulitzer prize, but will still go buy the shingles.
 
Mary Oliver’s poems stay close to nature which, I suspect, has always kept her close to animals and the “souls” or the energy which is life.   It is not surprising that Mary Oliver reads the poems of Rumi daily.  I am reminded of this quote from Rumi, “Living things know the truth; you reap what you sow.  With life as short as a half-taken breath don’t plant anything but love.”   Then there is this poem of Rumi:
 
Only Breath
 
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
 
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
 
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
 
am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
 
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
 
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
 
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.
 
From Essential Rumi
by Coleman Barks
 
Ms. Oliver  also wrote about the influence of Lucretius especially when thinking of the permanency  of energy – the fact that we never cease to be. 
 
And now, since I have taught that things cannot
Be born from nothing, nor the same, when born,
To nothing be recalled, doubt not my words,
Because our eyes no primal germs perceive;
From “on The nature of Things” by Lucretius as translated by William,E. Leonard
 
It seems to be that poets, as do other artists, remind us of what is true; of what is essential.  It is not that the cleanliness of the kitchen floor is in and of itself important. It is not as if replacing the shingles on a house, which is very temporary in the scheme of things, is important.  They are important only in the context of creating a home which says welcome home, you are important, you are part of something; you are.  We find these truths in Mary Oliver’s poem, Wild Geese:
 
Wild Geese
 
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting 
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
 
from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
published by Atlantic Monthly Press
© Mary Oliver
 
Written October 17, 2015

Last night I was reminded of the advice of Jelalddin Rumi, the 13th century, mystic poet who was from what is now known as Afghanistan.  One of his 60,000 poems reads as follows:

         There is a community of the spirit.

         Join it, and feel the delight

         of walking in the noisy street

         and being the noise.

         Drink all your passion,

         and be a disgrace.

         Close both eyes

         to see with the other eye.

From Essential Rumi by Coleman Barks  found on web site, peacefulriver.homestead.com

The other eye or the third eye has been a metaphorical way of referring to the fact that we often hide from what we don’t feel able to see or to face.  “ According to WIKI, the third eye (also known as the inner eye) is a mystical and esoteric concept referring to a speculative invisible eye which provides perception beyond ordinary sight. In certain dharmic spiritual traditions such as Hinduism, the third eye refers to the ajna, or brow, chakra. The third eye is referred to the gate that leads within to inner realms and spaces of higher consciousness.” (Gregg Prescott. Waking Times)

I know: “The process of vision begins when light rays that reflect off objects and travel through the eye's optical system are refracted and focused into a point of sharp focus. For good vision, this focus point must be on the retina.” (Allaboutvision.com)

As soon as this information is transmitted to our brains we begin to label the patterns of light.   The labeling is based on what we have learned and what we have told ourselves about that particular pattern whether that be a leaf, a person, a landscape, an animal, or an object. The image might be as impressionistic as a Monet or as sharp as a Georgia O’Keefe.  

Habit also plays a huge role in what I have trained myself to attend to.  That is part of the reason why if there are 50 people who “observe” the same incident, there is likely to be 50 different descriptions of what transpired. They are all accurate accounts of each person’s experience.

Let me give you another example from Shams of Tabriz, from the book “The Forty Rules of Love.”

         When a true lover of God goes into the tavern, the tavern becomes

         His chamber of prayer, but when a wine bibber goes into the same

         Chamber, it becomes his tavern. In everything we do, it is our

         hearts, which makes the difference, not our outer appearance.

         Sufis do not judge other people on how they look or who they are. 

         When a Sufi stares at someone, he keeps both eyes closed and

         instead opens a third eye-the eye that sees the inner realm.

(A word about Sufi for those not familiar with the term. Some connect it to the Muslim religion. Other claim:  “Sufi" is a unique word. "Sufi" is a unique Power. It does not relate to any particular religion. It belongs to all of humanity.

"Sufi" is a clear, pure Essence that has filtered and settled slowly, deep within.”  - bmf.org)

The point of which I am trying to remind myself is that if I continue to act as if I “see the truth” with my two eyes I will continue to miss the essential truth(s) about myself and others.   When Father Gregory Boyle works with gang members in Los Angeles with his third eye he sees an essential goodness. When that same gang member sees himself he or she sees a person without value or worth.  Some will eventually see with their third eye and come to accept the ‘truth” of their essential goodness.  This does not mean that the person denies all the ways he/she have hurt themselves and others.  It is essential to face ourselves as we are in all our humanness.  We humans can and do hurt each other – sometimes in very socially acceptable ways and sometimes in ways which land us in jail.     Once I have the courage to look at my own humanness in its entire rainbow of colors and shapes I can “see” my painful heart and how my behavior has disconnected me from me and from others.  Then I can “see” with my third eye the part of me that longs to connect with my own essential goodness/my heart and to the essential goodness of others. 

For some there may be a biological condition, which prevents them from feeling this connection.   People with autism spectrum disorder can understand on a cognitive level that they are part of this same human community, but may not be able to experience the feeling of belonging or connecting.  There are many other medical conditions which may prevent someone from experiencing the connection.  This is not something we need or should punish.

For many who have a long history of feeling disconnected, of believing that they are not worthy of connection or that everyone will mistreat them, allowing oneself to both see and feel with the third eye may be a long process.  However, once we have even one experience of seeing with our heart, we can never again be comfortable seeing only with open eyes.

I was just chatting with a young man via text.  It happens that this young man is a former client of mine.  I could elect to see him as a client.  I see him, however, as the loving, good young man who has much love to give others and me.   He is not this historic “runner” who used drugs to avoid being with himself.    For the first time he is finding that he can enjoy life just being himself.  The next step will be for him to take that self to work, the store and any other place he goes.  When he does every place will become as Shams of Tabriz suggests a chamber of prayer.   Others might look at him with their eyes open and see a young man working in a restaurant. He will “see” a young man (himself) leading with his heart, which is a prayer. He will know that he is there to show up with love and incidentally do all the tasks necessary to make the restaurant a success

All this requires us to overrule much of what we have learned about what we think we see or expect to see with others and ourselves.  It may feel as if this takes a great deal of courage.

Last evening I was talking to a young man who has learned to think of himself as mentally disabled and, thus, unable to retain a job.  I have always seen him as a bright, capable, strong young man.  True he has practiced some behavior, which has led him to abuse himself and others emotionally.  It will take time and much practice to change this behavior.  One of his habits has been to run from the pain of being with himself by drinking or using other drugs.   I am suggesting that he will find, if he can allow self to go beneath the pain, that loving, competent, good man who has been waiting to be seen and experienced by the third eye. I always found it interesting, but not surprising, that his young man often found it emotionally safer to be himself with animals.  When he called last night he was able to let me know that he is beginning to “see” that inner core of goodness, which is him.

I, too, have to practice closing my two eyes and opening the third eyes. If anxiety/fear pops up I need only notice it, not comment on it and wait for it to pass.