The Tao of the Apocalypse (#sr190119)

In universal consciousness, being is the reflection of the absolute. Such is eyewitness and inner voice—

attention and intuition are all the same. In fact attention, intuition, and the absolute unknown is the trinity of knowing—

or Revelations. Everything appears in consciousness. Being doesn’t do but is spontaneously happening. Nothing is revealing.

The Tao of the Apocalypse is like this third eye talking in tongues. Evolution is the new myth of self-awareness.

Self-awareness is the old myth. What happens in the dream stays in the dreaming. Spirit isn’t of the dream

but only in the dream. The dream is dead, long live the dream! Awareness is being self-aware, forgive me my chaoses.

there is something like a wave (#sr190117e)

Of course the absolutely nameless ground, call it Self, is, in its absolutely isless omnipresence, eternally Self-aware—

and something like a wave is Self-awareness, call it spirit, being, consciousness, the universe or God.

For consciousness begets a reflexively forgetful and socially-conditioned consciousness focused by a body-mind

(but that's another name and story)

whose sole conscious intent is to understand itself. This mythic process is what Self-awareness appears to be within divine imagination

yet on a more experiential note after personal deconstruction, there remains this singular and certain actuality—I am

and its intuitive revelation. Is is. Lastly the is-that-is is contemplating this silent business of an isness like wildfire and mirrors

like the reflection of the moon in a whitewater river seeing it's the full wolf moon in a winter sky seeing true the sun inside the black whole

Thomas Merton on Contemplation

Contemplation is the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes both beyond reason and beyond simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire, by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete. Yet contemplation is not vision because it sees "without seeing" and knows "without knowing." It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words, or even in clear concepts. It can be suggested by words, by symbols but in the very moment of trying to indicate what it knows the contemplative mind takes back what it has said, and denies what it has affirmed. For in contemplation we know by "unknowing." Or, better, we know beyond all knowing or "unknowing."

Poetry, music and art have something in common with the contemplative experience. But contemplation is beyond aesthetic intuition, beyond art, beyond poetry. Indeed, it is also beyond philosophy, beyond speculative theology. It resumes, transcends and fulfills them all, and yet at the same time it seems, in a certain way, to supersede and to deny them all. Contemplation is always beyond our own knowledge, beyond our own light, beyond systems, beyond explanations, beyond discourse, beyond dialogue, beyond our own self. To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.

And so contemplation seems to supersede and to discard every other form of intuition and experience—whether in art, in philosophy, in theology, in liturgy or in ordinary levels of love and of belief. This rejection is of course only apparent. Contemplation is and must be compatible with all these things, for it is their highest fulfillment. But in the actual experience of contemplation all other experiences are momentarily lost. They "die" to be born again on a higher level of life.

In other words, then, contemplation reaches out to the knowledge and even to the experience of the transcendent and inexpressive God. It knows God by seeming to touch Him. Or rather it knows Him as if it had been invisibly touched by Him. . . . Touched by Him Who has no hands, but Who is pure Reality and the source of all that is real. Hence contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness, an awakening to the Real within all that is real. A vivid awareness of infinite Being at the roots of our own limited being. An awareness of our contingent reality as received, as a present from God, as a free gift of love. This is the existential contact of which we speak when we use the metaphor of being "touched by God."

Contemplation is also the response to a call: a call from Him Who has no voice, and yet Who speaks in everything that is, and Who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being: for we ourselves are words of His. But we are words that are meant to respond to Him, to answer to Him, to echo Him, and even in some way to contain Him and signify Him. Contemplation is this echo. It is a deep resonance in the inmost center of our spirit in which our very life loses its separate voice and resounds with the majesty and the mercy of the Hidden and Living One. He answers Himself in us and this answer is divine life, divine creativity, making all things new. We ourselves become His echo and His answer. It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question, so that the contemplative is at the same time, question and answer.

The life of contemplation implies two levels of awareness: first, awareness of the question, and second, awareness of the answer. Though these are two distinct and enormously different levels, yet they are in fact an awareness of the same thing. The question is, itself, the answer. And we ourselves are both. But we cannot know this until we have moved into the second kind of awareness. We awaken, not to find an answer absolutely distinct from the question, but to realize that the question is its own answer. And all is summed up in one awareness—not a proposition, but an experience: "I AM."

The contemplation of which I speak here is not philosophical. It is not the static awareness of metaphysical essences apprehended as spiritual objects, unchanging and eternal. It is not the contemplation of abstract ideas. It is the religious apprehension of God, through my life in God, or through "sonship" as the New Testament says. "For whoever are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. . . . The Spirit Himself gives testimony to our own spirit that we are the sons of God." "To as many as received Him He gave the power to become the sons of God. And so the contemplation of which I speak is a religious and transcendent gift. It is not something to which we can attain alone, by intellectual effort, by perfecting our natural powers. It is not a kind of self-hypnosis, resulting from concentration on our own inner spiritual being. It is not the fruit of our own efforts. It is the gift of God Who, in His mercy, completes the hidden and mysterious work of creation in us by enlightening our minds and hearts, by awakening in us the awareness that we are words spoken in His One Word, and that Creating Spirit (Creator Spiritus) dwells in us, and we in Him. That we are "in Christ" and that Christ lives in us. That the natural life in us has been completed, elevated, transformed and fulfilled in Christ by the Holy Spirit. Contemplation is the awareness and realization, even in some sense experience of what each Christian obscurely believes:

"It is now no longer I that live but Christ lives in me."

Hence contemplation is more than a consideration of abstract truths about God, more even than affective meditation on the things we believe. It is awakening, enlightenment and the amazing intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God's creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life. Hence contemplation does not simply "find" a clear idea of God and confine Him within the limits of that idea, and hold Him there as a prisoner to Whom it can always return. On the contrary, contemplation is carried away by Him into His own realm, His own mystery and His own freedom. It is a pure and a virginal knowledge, poor in concepts, poorer still in reasoning, but able, by its very poverty and purity, to follow the Word "wherever He may go."

`Thomas Merton from 'New Seeds of Contemplation'

Jesus' Nondual Way of the Heart

As we set out to consider the teachings of Jesus as an integrated spiritual method, we are entering territory that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Most people growing up in the Western cultural stream will have had some exposure to these teachings (if only as ethical precepts), but the apparent familiarity of the subject matter can blind us to its radical strangeness and difficulty. Perhaps more than any other spiritual teacher, Jesus requires a real beginner’s mind, a willingness to unlearn what one already presumably knows and start with a completely clean slate. In this spirit, then, I would like to begin by describing what seem to me to be the three constitutive elements of the path Jesus discovered; then, on the basis of these characteristics, I will propose to identify what branch of the spiritual stream it most properly belongs to. I will of course be making use of not only of familiar reference points in the canonical gospels but also the new resources opened up in the Nag Hammadi gospels that we began to explore in Part I of this book.

These three constitutive elements are kenosis, abundance, and singleness.

Kenosis

Kenosis comes from the Greek verb kenosein, which means to empty oneself. It was Paul who first applied this term to Jesus. In a moment of intuitive brilliance he grasped the essential element in Jesus’s methodology, and described it in his immortal words of Philippians 2:9-16:³

Though his state was that of God,

yet he did not deem equality with God

something that he should cling to.

Rather, he emptied himself *

and assuming the state of a slave

he was born in human likeness.

He being known as one of us

humbled himself obedient unto death,

even death on a cross.

For this God raised him on high

and gave him the name

which is above every other name

So that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.

And so every tongue should proclaim

“Jesus Christ is Lord!”

To God the Father’s glory.

(* this is the place where the verb kenosein appears)

As Paul so profoundly realizes, self-emptying is the touchstone, the core reality underlying every moment of Jesus’s human journey. Self-emptying is what brings him into human form, and self-emptying is what leads him out, returning him to the mode of glory. The full realization of his divine selfhood comes not through the concentration of being, but through a voluntary divestment of it.

We have already seen this same self-emptying motion described in that brilliant “divestment” metaphor of Logion 21 in the Gospel of Thomas. When asked to describe his students, Jesus responds:

They are like small children living in a field not their own.

When the landlords return and demand, “Give us back our field!”

the children return it by simply stripping themselves

and standing naked before them. ⁴

“Stripping oneself and standing naked:” this is the essence of the kenotic path. And it is, in fact, is precisely the strategy that Jesus employs during the famous temptation narratives of the canonical gospels. In each case Satan asks him to take (feed yourself by turning stones into bread; display yourself by drawing on your divine powers; advance yourself by letting me set you up as ruler of the entire world). Jesus responds by simply letting go of the bait being dangled, being content to rest in his emptiness.

It is also the methodology he will reaffirm during his ordeal in the garden of Gethsemane (“Not my will but yours be done”), and which will carry him through the crucifixion, the harrowing of hell (if my reading of Dialogue Three in the gospel of Mary Magdalene is correct), and the final forty days of his time on earth following the resurrection.

Kenosis is not the same as renunciation. Renunciation implies a subtle pushing away; kenosis is simply the willingness to let things come and go without grabbing on. For all intents and purposes it is synonymous with non-clinging or non-attachment. But unlike a more Buddhist version of this spiritual motion, kenosis has a certain warm spaciousness to it; to the degree one does not assert one’s own agenda, something else has the space to be. The “Letting go” of kenosis is actually closer to “letting be” than it is to any of its “non-” equivalents (non-clinging, non-attachment, non-identification, etc.); its flow is positive and fundamentally creative. Between the “let it be” of kenosis and the “let it be” by which biblical tradition envisions Creation itself as having come into existence, there is a profound resonance.

Abundance

This second pillar of Jesus’s teaching is often seen but rarely recognized. The kenosis Jesus has in mind is not a stoic stance against a pitiless reality; rather, it is a direct gateway into a divine reality which can be immediately experienced as both compassionate and infinitely generous. Abundance surrounds and sustains us like the air we breathe; it is only our habitual self-protectiveness that prevents us from perceiving it. Thus, the real problem with any constrictive motion (taking, defending, hoarding, clinging) is that it makes us spiritually blind, unable to see the dance of divine generosity which is always flowing toward us.

In this sense, then, kenosis is first and foremost a visionary tool rather than a moral one; its primary purpose is to cleanse the lens of perception. Letting go is not in order to get something better (the point Paul misses in the second half of his Philippians hymn); in and of itself it is the something better. For it immediately restores the broken link with the dynamic ground of reality, which its very nature flows forth from a fullness beyond imagining.

Since this point is so fundamentally counterintuitive for our anxiety-prone minds, little wonder that Jesus takes every occasion to hammer it home. In virtually all his teachings the fundamental leitmotif is an “over-the top” generosity that leaves its recipients not only satisfied but bedazzled. Think of all those well-loved gospel stories— the prodigal son, the good samaritan, the loaves and fishes, the water turned into wine, the woman with the alabaster jar, the fishing nets cast in the Galilean Sea—and you’ll see what I mean. It is not a question of “adequate,” or “barely enough,” but of a fullness “filled up, pressed down, running over” (Luke x:xx).

In exactly the same measure, his implacable stance against any kind of greed or hoarding is because these motions lead to constriction, or in other words to spiritual and physical death. Life is an exchange, and in this exchange the Mercy of God is made real (I am indebted to Helen Luke, in her marvelous book Old Age, for pointing out that the linguistic root of the word “mercy” is in fact the Old Etruscan merc, which means “exchange” ⁵). The modern spiritual teacher Michael Brown succinctly summarizes the core principle at the heart of Jesus’s practical teachings: “‘Giving and receiving’ is the energetic frequency upon which our universe is aligned. All other approaches to energy exchange immediately cause dissonance and disharmony in our life experience.” ⁶

To experience abundance is essentially to see from oneness. It is to know, intimately, the wholeness that underlies and belies our surface impression of separation and scarcity. In the Eastern traditions this realized oneness is known as nonduality, and while Jesus knew it by another name (we’ll see what it is very shortly), he was clearly familiar with the state itself and yearned to impart it to his followers. “Do not be afraid, little flock,” he urged (Luke 12:32)—“it is my father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom!” But this gift can only be received in a state of deep inner emptiness, for any grasping and self-assertion will shatter the unity of which abundance is the mirror. Between kenosis, abundance, and oneness there is in Jesus’s methodology an unbreakable connection.

Singleness

This unitive realization of the fullness ushers a person into a state which Jesus calls “singleness.” In the canonical gospels the term does not stand out, but a whole series of teachings in the Gospel of Thomas (5, 15, 18, 22, 23, 61, 75, 84, 106, 114 makes its meaning indisputably clear. It is Jesus’s term for the attained state of nonduality. Logion 5 succinctly describes this state, in which one sees from the wholeness and lives from the abundance:

Come to know the One

In the presence before you

And everything hidden from you will be revealed…⁷

It is fascinating how closely this idea resonates with what the Eastern traditions would call “enlightenment.” Breaking through the egoic mind’s compulsive need to divide the perceptual field into paired opposites (inside and outside, male and female, subject and object, and so forth), consciousness simply coincides with its source and looks at the world through a single lens of wholeness. To be able to “make the two become one” in this fashion is to reunite with the creative principle of the universe itself:

When you are able make two become one,

the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside

the higher like the lower,

so that a man is no longer male, and a woman, female,

but male and female become a single whole…

—then you shall enter in.

(Logion 22)

When you are able to transform two into one,

then you too will become “Sons of Man,”

and it will be possible for you to say to a mountain,

“Move,” and it will move.

(Logion 106)

In the Aramaic language of Jesus’s immediate followers, one of the earliest titles given to hims was Ihidaya, “ the Single One,” or the “Unified One.”⁸ In context, it speaks unmistakably of this state of inner oneness; it designates the anthropos, the fully realized human being: the enlightened master of Eastern tradition, or the monad or “undivided one” of hermeticism.

The “great identity theft” to which the title of this chapter refers is that in remarkably short order this term which was so clearly intended to designate Jesus’s attained state of inner oneness should come to be interpreted as “singleness” in the sense of being unmarried, “the celibate one.” ⁹ (This is not, of course, intended to argue the case one way or the other as to Jesus’s marital status, but simply to insist that the primary reference point for the “singleness” described by the Aramaic ihidaya and Greek monachos refers to a state of unitive, or non-dual consciousness and not a state of voluntary celibacy).

© Cynthia Bourgeault, June 2008

(excerpted from Chapter 8, “The Great Identity Theft”)

from http://diversejourneys.com/?p=1093

Two Zero Love One Seven

The fact that truth is not knowable doesn't mean truth does not exist but love! Call it silent knowing, intuition, feeling, inspiration, apperception, divination, third eye, love. But one shall know it by not thinking.

Being is all there is. Thus, the only practice is being being. And seeing through all thought is thus instructive—postmodern deconstruction sees through thinking but seeing through the thought of thought, ah fire!

If self-awareness is the only understanding and its one deductive myth is evolution, then the current turning is the seeing through the modern meta-paradigm of scientific materialism

as well as other more traditional fundamentalisms. In other words, free will is just another name for god's plan as self-awareness says it all. Be it love, confessional, or contemporary heartbeat, before all thoughts

of pollen, which comes first, the flower or a bee? Seeing through belief is like looking without eyes—scary at first, but one evolves. Like an insect is an orchid on this lonely avenue, all is unbelievable.

Acid Sunlight Nativity Gospel

Take the energetic I Am interstate from non-stop thinking to enlightenment but you can't get there from here—a person is a thought wrapped in belief inside a meta-paradigm.

Practice is to meditation as deconstruction is to sutra as being is to tantra as self-awareness is the absolute is the absolute. And suffering teaches me there is no you

but it doesn't necessarily stop anyone from just enjoying two. For the one becomes two to know itself by loving itself and nine moons later, self-awareness.

Expecting Three Chord Mary Eastern White Pine Redwoods Ouroboros

If consciousness is the immaculate conception, birth is an afterthought, this daydream, this nightmare, reverie!

for everything appearing to be personal is just a memory, and thought is not exactly high fidelity, because emotion.


To the Tao of Transformation, the Bodhisattva of Impermanence, the Vanity of Ecclesiastes, The Jimi Hendrix Experience,

money doesn't talk but swears it's said and consciousness is not talking to consciousness but in the name of self-awareness.


The earth is not as much a planet as it is third child of the sun and I am not as much a body-mind as the only child of god—

feel my inner Eve, swallow hallucinations Adam, yeah yeah yeah.
 

Love Sonnet to Manifestation

Love is not political nor mathematical.
And love is never speakable nor unspeakable.
Love is earliest direct transmission
received from someone loving as oneself.
Thus, love is never personal but individual
and love is never intellectual but love's intelligent
and consciousness and bliss.

Yes, love is often caustic deconstruction in this further era
but love is always the germ of truth—
as love is never two but frequently is manifesting three.
Although all manifestation appears to be non-existent like a dream,
enlightenment is like a quantum universe of dreams,
great wisdom.
Deconstruct a dream but love a fever.

Reflections On a Desert Moon

There are no others; there's just projection. So coyotes are not howling at the moon but face to unoriginal face.

And as one sees the world is one's reflection, there's no longer any need to think you’re two.

For when I thought there was a world, I acted like the world, but as I know the world is me, I am.

Literally, figuratively, and experientially, consciousness is consciousness is consciousness.

Peak deconstruction isn't speaking in tongues but knowing the valley of the dawn is singularly speechless.

There's nothing like a desert for enlightening intent. And self-awareness is intent, is it not?

Individually Universal

As if division is a thing or separation an objective, the world can't stop the world from doing worldly things, but an individual can deconstruct and be.

Like the resurrection, deconstruction is the wilderness. Although the personal is objectively divided, the individual is subjectively universal. You already have what you want, but give yourself your need.

Coyote instant karma, visionaries as preservers of the status quo, come forth sweet democratic despots of the individually universal! Real meditation is intentional being.

Belief is a terror, the terrible twos. Mysticism is aurora borealis at the boundaries of the status quo. But individually universal is my mantra for the absolute.