Holmes in the AM

since getting back from retreat i've been reading the holmes meditations @ the back of the SOM text; the ones that start on p. 553
i shouldn't say i've been reading them because for the last 5 days I haven't got past the second one and today i'm still stoppped @

" I am conscious that this Universal IT (Spirit, God) is an ever-present being to me and to every person, because where the Universe personifies, It becomes personal. Therefore there is within me an immediate Presence, the Infinite of the (my) finite self, all knowing, all wise and forever perfect. (here is the part that really speaks to me) It is the REAL Me that I seek to vision with my thought, and I seek to embody in my consciousness."
Having written that ... what can I say about it except ... Daaaaaaaaaaaamn!!!!

I just have to sit with that for a while and so that's what I've been doing for two dayze now ... all the while waiting for the full import of what I'm hearing to sink in as well as waiting for the ... awe ... around the Truth I hear in that statement to release me from its grip. When I think of all of the years I spent wondering what was wrong with me and why my life didn't work ... it's kind of humbling to see that there never was anything wrong and that my life always worked according to my belief. All I've been doing and .. it's a pretty big "all" has been to try to catch a glimpse of myself ... my REAL self like a might if I wanted to pull out a detail of the landscape as I rushed by in a race car. I've been trying to slow my thought down just enough so that ... Divine Presence could intrude ... once or twice ... I've been trying to inhabit a essential beingness that Barker calls "I AM consciousness" that is a self-definition of me as complete in a realm of timelessness and spacelessness where time and space are lines of demarcation and measurement and NEVER of fact or limitation.

It is great to know that I am not bound by my past failures or success; that I am not limited by external conditions. Every spiritual system, Christianity is no exception here, was founded by one who knew this and groped his or her way toward the light of this Truth.

If ever there was a clear case of a teacher mentoring anyone who would "hear his word" into an open system, in the here and now and yet completely outside the limitations of the here and now, then, Jesus is the ONE

Holmes goes on in the meditation to reference the 1st Chapter of the Gospel of John, you know ..." In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God ..." in the light of his understanding of the "I Am consciousness ... BRILLIANT!!
... the Universal self is made manifest because the Word is made flesh and dwells in the midst of my physical me" (and by extension my physical, mine, my world, my affairs, my relationships, my country, and the list goes on) ... The word becomes activity and surrounds me with harmonious activity ... with happy action and perfect reaction." again Daaaaaamn!!!
What a way to start the day!

Sunday Morning

"Vision often Godward and live anew. So shall th body be like 'a tree planted by rivers of water, whose leaf fadeth not'. Vision often Godward so that affairs may go well. Gaze often toward the One Father, and all thoughts shall be like morning music. Lift up an inward looking now and then to a country whose ether winds ever raying forth their healing aura are fleet remedials for all the world's unhappiness."

Words from Emma Curtis Hopkins in High Mysticism .... What to do with this except to say 'Yes and ... " lie awake @ 3AM wondering how God is going to work through my life in the next 24, 48, 72 hours. When I have a profound experience like my latest retreat (Thank you Kathianne Lewis, Edward Viljoen, and David Bruner, and all of the praticipants and benefactors who make transformation possible) I come back to the real world firstly questioning how real it truly is and rocked to my very foundation about how my life can be about more than it has been about. Dont get me wrong ... there is nothing wrong with my direction, the choices that I have made and the vision I appear to have caught for my life and my ministry ... and then again, having learned what I learned this past week it feels small, like a suit of clothes I have outgrown or a house that suddenly can't contain all of the stuff I want to put into it or whose rooms feel to small, airless and without a view to the ocean.

Emma again ' the Divine eye or Vision ... It is the lifting up of this sense out of the network of materiality, the wheel of incessant grind, that takes man above his disasters and difficulties.

There is nothing left to do now except go and pray. No more words to read ... at least not for now. No more thoughts to think ... and certainly nothing to DO.

growth and change

it's finally 5 AM. I've been struggling to sleep ... or not to sleep since about 2:30. Surprise! when you get a group of ministers together in a room it is not always sweetness and light. No that is not true ... up to last night that is all that it has ever been and that is what is just NOT true. Put 'em together, monks, nuns, priests, rabbis, ministers doesn't matter and if they are ready to be honest they'll tell you a story of struggle and pain and of how their life life is an intersection of the two questions .... Who IS this person who is called to this level of compassion? and What is MINE to do?

Last night the question on the table was why dont we grow. well the answer is tied up in how you ask the question and who the "we" is. the Church?, the movement? the teaching (philosophy) the minister? the people?

I came out of a monastic tradition and a community of 120 monks, many of whom, if not all were good, loving and sincere and who have now shrunk down to about 40. I know they are asking why they cant seem to grow. I taught with a religious community of brothers who have not had one person join their congregation and stay since 1964. You can bet they are asking why. And now a group here is asking the same question. Until last night I thought the answer was easy... so easy in fact that I had it. Now, I dont know but I suspect that 36 ministers who sat and asked the question this week will return to Churches that will grow next week ... because they asked the question in the way we did last night. What was so special about last night? I'm not sure I know yet.

Cultural Matrix

"We have a basic personality formed within a certain cultural matrix, and that cultural matrix supports us in certain ways. Now if that cultural matrix has a place for being spiritual, and isolates you from a lot of ordinary things in the course of doing that you may get some pretty fine development."
The quote is taken from a book called Halfway Up the Mountain and deals with issues around claims to enlightenment and spritiual leadership. It's a quote from Charles Tart. What I'm trying to do @ CPL is foster the growth of that cultural matrix. I think it is a mistake to think that as a society we have NO cultural matrix for spirituality. Comparing us to Tibet or native american cultures is nothing more than that ... comparison and ultimately what good is that? I'm curious why we are never compared to Italy or Portugal. Is there a bias in favour of cultures that are eastern as the ONLY ones what support spirituality. I think that in the west we tend to think of our cultural matrix as religious as opposed to spiritual. We tend to look at all of our religious practices as arcane and outmoded and based in superstition. I once invited a group of Tibetan Buddhists to do a prayer circle at my centre in California. I wasn't thoroughtly briefed in the protocols beforehand and made the mistake of having the service facilitated by my assistant minister ( a woman). The bulk of the service was spent in trying to get enough pillows under the rimpoche so his head would be higher than the presider's. This was a source of great embarrassment to the rimpoche's followers and once I realized what was happening .. . of great delight to me. It seems to me that if we are willing to overlook our cultural bias against our own traditions we will find plenty that is arcane and non-sensical in the foreign traditions we seem to hold in such high esteem. Religious Science, in its attention to the philosophy of a life well lived, may appear at first glance to be in support of ego as opposed to "true" enlightenment, and in fact there are many in our teaching who continiue to use the philosophy to got ego needs met ... and so ... so very well ... so what! Joan Halifax in speaking of her prison ashram and hospice projects says "Better these people should think of themselves as enlightened, which is a wonderful aspiration, that robbing stores or taking heroine or beating their wives. It's better to think you're awake than a lot of other things. Even pretending to be spiritual is better than intentionally harming others." the power of Ernest Holmes's thought like Joan Halifax's is that in the final analysis it is intensely practical and meets people where they are.

Lama Thubten Leshe on the western cultural (spiritual) matrix "When difficult circumstances arise, the negative energy overpowers the positive because they (westerners) have never built up within themselves the force of good habits and because they lack deep internal understanding of the nature of karma, (see Science of Mind pp 114, 204, 392 ) or cause and effect."

I'm happy to say classes are in full swing @ CPL and FULL and cause and effect of rather "causeffect" is high on the curricula. as challenged as I feel with respect to the outocme of the recent election in the US and the resultant maps that have been circulating, ( I rec'd the same map of the "United States of Canada and Jesusland" from 6 different sources on Wednesday) I am not as critical of the Christian right as I might be. A cultural matrix that includes the spiritual is better than one without it. I'm ready to follow the advice of Arnaud Dejardins spiritual teacher and french filmmaker "accept what is" , "say yes to life"

"Enlightenment is the knowledge that all things are transitory, including enlightenment." Lee Lozowick

Back on Track

Well ... about a week ago, on a Sunday ... I remember, I finished reading PDL. ... and on my way along the float to the ramp tossed it in the river. YUP! I did my best ... and ...well, that was that. I think that is what goes on for most of us who eventually choose to leave our "faith of origin" behind ... and even that is not accurate. I still have faith ... and VERY much the same faith as I always had but now my faith is in substance and not in form. WOW!! what does THAT mean? My impression in my last years in ... was that it was about how the events of the life of Jesus were interpreted by an external authority and how by means of an hierarchical structure and a cult (rituals and symbols) those intrepretations were maintained. On reading PDL, I got the same external intrepetation only this time the authority was not the structure, hierarchy and appeal to tradition but rather the written word of God. I recently heard someone ask ... quite ingenuoously @ an Alpha Class, "How do you know that is what Jesus said?" The answer, accompanied by a look of mild surprise and confusion ... "Why, It's in the book. SEE. It's written right here!.

I suppose more accuracy in the question was required, something like "No, I mean, how do you know that what is written there was recorded accurately?" I wonder if the response and the look would have been different. So there is the form part. Now onto the substance part. Are you still following me here?

I was at a Chamber Businessmans (womens) Prayer Breakfast. I was seated next to 4 Christians. I suddenly felt I was back in the first Century of the Christain Church when surrounded by the benighted and often hostile pagans (and Jews) the followers of Jesus aggressively stated their beliefs to all who would listen. In all i've read about the Church renewal process in the megachurch revolution, this is precisely the stance the leaders are taking and encouraging their adherents to adopt.
Gee! I wonder why I felt like I was one of the benighted.
Anyway, my interlocutors bagan to quiz me on my beliefs once they discovered I was a Pastor. "Do you believe Jesus was God?" hold on we're getting VERY close to substance now! "Yes I do." Damn ... If only I'd stopped there. You see substance is tricky, slippery stuff. It is the founadtion of all there is and so it keeps morphing into what looks like new stuff when really all it is a new form of the old ... So anyway I couldn't stop there ... I had to say, "Sure He is but not any more or less than I am." Well after that to quote ol Will "the game was afoot". Happily these Christians were not of the evangelisitc variety but more of the socially active ones and so I was kind of dismissed as a ...hmmm... benighted ...modern day pagan.

My faith in substance ... remains unshaken. I believe there is One, out of which all that was, all that is and all that will be is forever and ever proceeding. To misquote Meister Eckhart, "The father is continually bringing forth the only begotten Son."
... per omnia saecula, seaculorum .....