Home » Articles posted by Brian Balke (Page 36)

Author Archives: Brian Balke

The Anti-Anti Christ

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I’ve been laid up with crippling muscle tightness for the last two days, spending most of my time lying on the floor and trying to stretch the inside of my thighs. I guess that no respectable masseuse will work there, so I had no idea how tight my adductors had become. Sunday night after Dance Tribe in Santa Barbara, I got out of the car and almost couldn’t stand up. My foam roller doesn’t have any instructions for that area, but I ended up laying on my side with the inside of my thigh on top of the roller, wiggling the muscle back and forth across its length, working my way between the knee and my groin. It wasn’t quite like the black-out pain that I used to get doing Bikram’s half locust posture, but it was close.

Yesterday I went in to work to push a customer release forward, but at two the pain forced me home. I spent the rest of the day watching movies between sets on the foam roller and trying to get back into cow pose. I caught the last half of Stigmata on Sunday night, and picked up the ending of The Vatican Tapes yesterday. The two movies captivated me, not necessarily because they were compelling, but because they characterize two of the central difficulties I have faced as I attempt to go about the work that I do in the world.

The dramatic tension in Stigmata revolves around the attempt by a Catholic cardinal to suppress knowledge of Jesus’ authentic teachings. This builds around a fragment of the Gospel of Thomas:

Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift a stone and you will find me.

This is consistent with the teachings of the four canonical gospels that the kingdom of God does not reside in institutional order, but is found by looking into our own hearts. That the Church is threatened by this teaching is evident from its conduct, but there are many explanations. One is that, as Jesus taught:

It is not what goes into your body that defiles you; you are defiled by what comes from your heart.

[NLT Mark 7:15]

To tell a sinner to look into his heart is to bear responsibility for the consequences of his struggle with sin.

This is a struggle, naturally, to which priests are not immune. Stigmata relates the experience of the saints that suffered from the stigmata – bleeding from the wrists and feet that reflects the depth of the spiritual bond to the cross.  The more nearly they approach to that perfect expression of love, the more they are beset by demonic influences seeking to enter into that power to work their will in the world. I would counsel any so beset to trust in love, and to do as Jesus did: offer your enemies forgiveness and a promise of healing. But what most stigmatics hold in their heart is a fear of sin, and it is that fear that runs amok as they draw to them the “demonic” spirits that seek healing.

Witnessing that struggle, many of their peers take refuge in religious institution. The institution becomes a substitute for Christ, and eventually of greater value to those that maintain it. This is not merely a point of theology: I was told as a child that a contemporary pope was torn from the throne of St. Peter because he was about to announce the return of Christ.

The Vatican Tapes explores the second great challenge to the return of Christ. This is the common teaching, drawn from the Book of Revelation, that Christ will be preceded by the Anti-Christ – a figure that manifests all of his virtues for the purpose of corrupting Christ’s purpose.

Then I saw another beast that rose out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and it makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose mortal wound had been healed. It performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in the sight of all; and by the signs that it is allowed to perform on behalf of the beast, it deceives the inhabitants of earth, telling them to make an image for the beast that had been wounded by the sword and yet lived.

[NSRV Rev. 13:11-14]

This echoes the words of 2 Thessalonians:

The coming of the lawless one is apparent in the working of Satan, who uses all power, signs, lying wonders, and every kind of wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.

[2 Thess. 2:7-9]

The interpretation by many is that the Anti-Christ is a man that will beguile the trusting with spiritual gifts, and lead them into corruption. In The Vatican Tapes, that ‘man’ is actually a woman, perhaps uniting both the anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon in a single figure.

The problem posed by this interpretation is that it leads us to mistrust the presence of Christ among us. Christ brought fire down from heaven – the flames of the Holy Spirit. If we experience that, might we fear that we are being deceived as predicted in Revelation? And Jesus was famously a wonder-worker. Following Thessalonians, would a man that came to perform similar wonders be recognized as an avatar, or condemned (as Jesus was by his contemporaries) as a false messiah?

The way out of this trap is to recognize that Christ is not the man Jesus: Christ is part of the triune God that was, is and will be. Just so is the Anti-Christ: an opposition to Christ that since the dawn of life here on Earth has struggled against the healing power of divine love. Just as Christ’s influence reaches out from the cross through the ages, so the anti-Christ has woven its thread through our history. In the Bible, it can be identified as the serpent in the Garden, Herod on his throne, and the dragon in Revelation that chases the holy mother into hiding.

The only true barometer that distinguishes these two is our heart. Christ demands nothing of us but that our heart be filled with his love for others. Anti-Christ beguiles us with personal gifts that are twisted to command our fealty. Christ leads us because we trust him; Anti-Christ rules our thoughts with pleasures that cannot be sustained.

Here is the measure of goodness: not in what it offers us, but in the joy that it awakens through the boons received by those we cherish. Here science affirms that we are made in God’s image: if given a gift, our happiness lasts longer if we use it to benefit others.

This should be familiar to many of my readers. What may not be familiar is the allocation of spiritual gifts. This is the greater wonder, in my mind, and something tells me that it is an experience that others should now be encouraged to attempt.

Prior to Dance Tribe on Sunday, I stopped down the street at Hope. The pastor was just beginning his teaching, the concluding lesson in a series titled “A Freight Train Called Desire.” The lesson “The Loco-Motive” explored the damage we do to ourselves in seeking approval from others. I could feel a recognition in the congregation; they all knew this frustration. With that experience established in their minds, the pastor then reminded them that only one trustworthy source of approval exists: that of Jesus’ Abba (Daddy), the one that loves us without conditions, who welcomes our repentance with honor no matter how prodigal our sins.

In these moments prepared by a gifted teacher, I feel the congregants lifting their minds and hearts to the heavens. I am moved, recognizing the integrity of their desire, to guide it to the heavens with my hands, reaching up and up until I feel the angels’ responsive awareness. There is always a moment of surprise at this sense of being among the angels, and we pause there. As on Sunday there was nothing but gratitude in the experience, I raised my hands again to call them down.

Then comes the hard part: all the sorrows of this world come to the fore. Sometimes this is a defensive act – an attempt to protect ourselves from dissolving into love. But more often it is an act of healing. What comes to the fore are the experiences that must be surrendered if we are to hold on to the grace of the angels. So on Sunday, I found myself rooted to my chair as the tears rolled down my cheeks, heart breaking for the suffering of those I sat amidst.

Finally it cleared, just as the pastor completed his message. I don’t remember his closing prayer, for he had called the worship team up to lead the final song of praise. All the hours of practice focused in that moment. Sitting behind the rest of the congregation, I lifted my hands, imagining the stage cupped in my fingers, focusing the angelic presence. The introductory instrumental meditation resolved as a harmonic line, and the female lead sang directly into our hearts:

Oh, how He loves us, oh.
Oh how He loves us, how He loves us all.

Dave Crowder Band, How He Loves

It is an experience that I absolutely do not control. It is a relationship between angels and the congregation. It is something they do together when both see the possibility of service to love: us in manifesting healing in the broken world, the angels in amplifying God’s presence among us.

I am simply the witness to that possibility.

So I beseech you: open your minds and hearts to those possibilities. Do not allow fear to corrupt your love: have faith in Christ, immerse yourself in that security, and know that no power can stand against the strength of the healing we bring to the world with his angels. His love is the anti-anti-Christ. It erases the power of the anti-Christ. It makes the anti-Christ a lost, forlorn and confused figure – a withered shadow from our past that dissolves into the future we are creating together.

The Serpent’s Usurpation

Posted on by | Leave a comment

In reflecting on my spiritual work here, I try to honor my unique perspective in relating my experience to others. In considering how to relate recent events, I keep on coming back to St. Perpetua, the early Christian martyr who surrendered her newborn and was mauled by lions in the forum before impaling herself on a sword held by the centurion sent to administer the coup de grace. Before her martyrdom, she was granted a vision of a field filled with bronze ladders. Men and women climbing those ladders towards heaven were dragged down by a serpent below.

After writing Love Works back in 2005, I visited a number of spiritual book stores, looking for venues to talk about the work. One of the stores had opened recently, and I was the sole attendee at an event held by a spiritualist. She took a good look at me, and shared that I had a four inch gap in the flow of prana between my hips and rib cage. When she asked if she should fix it, I said “that’s the business of a woman that I haven’t met yet.” I considered that it was a useful characteristic, in that it kept people from using sex to get into my heart and mind.

Of course, it has its negative impacts as well. I have trouble grounding myself psychologically, a weakness that has been exploited over the years by domineering intimates both in my personal and professional lives.

Having become conscious of the problem, I did try to manage it. My first attempt was to close the loop by routing the healing energy arising in my heart upwards through the crown chakra and then down into the earth before closing the loop up into my root chakra.

I first gleaned the sense that the gap was not entirely self-induced at the Buddhist Geeks’ Retreat in Rosemead in 2009. The kick-off speaker on Friday night spoke on the characteristics of the avatar that would usher in the era of peace foretold by all the world’s great religious. He cited compassion, all-embracing meditative focus, and out-of-the-box thinking. Hoping that I had finally encountered someone that might appreciate my experience, I went up after the talk to offer my insights. Upon receiving my assurance that the time was close, he looked up at the outside of my head and affirmed “I can see that it must be so” before turning his back to address a question.

On Sunday morning, having found their event to have been somewhat co-opted by my presence, from among that senior teachers an attractive little pixie stood forward to denounce me, saying that “my energy was completely out of control.” I won’t recount the rest of the conversation, because what was significant was my strong intuition that she was interested in managing my purpose. In the middle of her harangue, she leaned forward with desire in her eyes and wrapped her arms around a band of energy that cocooned my lower torso, a band centered on the gap seen by the spiritualist.

Something was pinching off the flow.

I first confronted this presence back in 2014 when – during a Dance of Liberation Workshop led by Parashakti at LA Ecstatic Dance – I tunneled down into my reptilian brain. In the vision that followed, I walked through the spiritual dislocation of the dinosaurs that culminated with a vision of their avatar sitting in the seats of military and political power in the modern era, feasting on the constructive energy generated by human compassion.

That survey of the human condition was not directly related to my personal infestation. The connection was only made recently, after Peter at Peace Place Massage had worked on me one Saturday night. Where Asia, my regular therapist, has a distinctly feminine healing touch, Peter just stirred things up. I went home that night and laid with my arms stretched across the bed and my heart open to the sky. Seized by a strong intuition, I found myself rubbing my hands down along my ribs, wriggling them under the spiritual bands around my waist, and sending energy along my fingers into the tissues of my abdomen.

Since that experience three months ago, I’ve been fighting tension and pain in my waist. Stretching and yoga helped, but I felt as though I was just chasing the problem from place to place. To a colleague at work, I actually used the words “things are really moving around.” I was focused on the pain and tightness, but the words expressed an important intuition.

We’ve suffered a lot of dislocation at work, and my supervisor has come under intense scrutiny as engineer after engineer disappears on short notice. He adopts an unusual posture in conversation with others, feet spread wide on the floor. I have a strong sense of energy flowing up into his pelvic floor. We continue to have our arguments, and as we discuss the consequences of decisions made in the past on the survival of the company, I find it hard to avoid bringing up ancient history. My association with him seems to drive me into remembered experiences of weakness in his presence.

In the midst of these two struggles, I was listening to praise music one night, a series of songs from WOW Worship that encouraged the faithful to surrender their hearts to God. A vision came upon me, a masculine presence that focused my attention to my pelvic floor with the words “You need to find my throne.” In response to that, I began poking at the base of the hip bone with my fingertips, until a point begin to glow.

This event was followed by a series of visualizations in yoga, visualizations centering myself around my pelvic floor, and building power around the point that I had discovered. This came to a head last night. I had a unsettling series of experience yesterday, either of co-workers claiming initiative on projects that I had instigated, or attempting to make me responsible for bringing closure to projects that I had heretofore been pointedly excluded from. I have been struggling to sleep at night due to the pain in my abdomen, and I was knocked off-balance psychologically.

Yoga was a struggle. Throughout the opening standing series, I felt weak, off-balance and beset by negative psychic energies. As we entered the balancing poses, I sharpened my focus to identify specific personalities, and tried to ground myself in my root chakra. Reversing the flow of energy leaking into them, I began to build power in the postures, with a new-found focus on the pelvic floor. Finally, in balancing stick pose, I arrayed them around me, one at my fingertips, one at my toes, and one on either side of my hip. They attempted to wriggle away, shifting and substituting others, but I just kept on pulling them back, using them as anchors for the pose.

The rest of the practice was a breeze.

But the spiritual and psychological shift was more significant. All of the personalities that I engaged are domineering. I have previously identified one in particular as “the tip of the spear” for the whole pattern of control that we struggle with as a society. As we wrestled spiritually, I had a strong image of him sitting on a throne, a throne nestled in my hips. Pushing him aside, I focused on the throne itself, and discovered a kaleidoscope of personalities shifting on it, until finally I broke through and discovered the dragon that rules them all.

Tech Anti-Experience

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Jon Evans at TechCrunch offers an analysis of the value of experience in software development. My reply:

From the time that the electric motor was offered as a flexible method for distributing mechanical power, it was nearly 40 years before belt-driven machines were replaced. According to historians, the controlling factor was establishing a community of technologists that understood how to leverage that flexibility.
Information technology has upended this constraint. Differentiating technologies are created and distributed to self-organizing tribes that use their specialization to gain competitive advantage over established peers in months.
This is fed by the industry’s rock-star economics: nobody knows where the next Apple or Facebook or Twitter is going to arise, so they find the most exploitable source of labor (young men with raging hormones) and set them to churning out code on unreasonable schedules.
The more thoughtful among “experienced” developers might look at the proliferation of technologies and draw parallels to youth counter-culture and slang in society at large. That would be to ignore the mature centers of the industry that serve to continuously remove impediments to the creation of distributed solutions. Younger developers have fewer things to think about – at least until the infrastructure begins to creak under the burden of their unanticipated success. Today, cloud-based SaaS and PaaS is eroding even that bulwark for experience.
So the author is correct, although maybe for the wrong reasons. My fear is that the real reasons also erode the value of the advice in the last two paragraphs. With the disruption of the “old boy’s network” by the world-wide-web, trying to keep up with technology may be a fool’s errand.

God’s Bargain

Posted on by | Leave a comment

One of the charms of Democracy is the barren privilege of our belief that we can bargain with an incredibly powerful being – our government – that knows almost nothing about us. We have a vote, and we hang on the words of candidates, hoping to hear a promise that we can bind with our vote. Those that draw upon other resources (whether the free market or faith) to garner security tend to wish to limit the role of government. Those looking at success from the outside often wish to draw upon governmental power to avert personal calamity. In most of the electorate, those two impulses join in incoherent combination. Witness, for example, the Floridian retiree who pronounces that entitlements must be cut to reduce the federal deficit, but insists that Medicare and Social Security are sacrosanct.

Entitlements for the elderly were established as a “New Deal” during the Great Depression. At that time, the elderly were the most impoverished segment of society. Since that time, the elderly have become the wealthiest segment of the population, being replaced on the lowest tier by our children.

The challenge of loving people unconditionally – of saying that you will invest in the survival of others without regards to merit – is to create conditions in which the loved ones may choose to use their power to hurt themselves and others. In our modern democracy, the elderly – the community with the most time for political organization – have used that opportunity to steal power from those without a political voice – children. That hasn’t happened directly, and any specific senior citizen would be angered by my characterization. But governments are aggregates, and my statement, in aggregate, is irrefutable.

The Bible, of course, is the story of Unconditional Love’s attempt to enter into and glorify the world. It celebrates episodes of human grace, but for the most part it is a record of iniquity – of the rejection of unconditional love in favor of material possessions (land, wealth or political alliance) that provide security. Inevitably, the strategies of material possession create competition between individuals and communities, often culminating in violence.

How does God deal with this problem? Well, in the Old Testament, generally by disassembling the nation. In the record we have Noah’s Flood, the subjugation of Egypt, the culling of the Golden Calf, the jealous threats of Exodus and the exile to Babylon. So we have this paradox: the gifts of Unconditional Love are showered on the people, but when they abuse them, they suffer terrible punishment.

Unfortunately, the power of this rebuke was projected onto individuals. If the nation should suffer as a whole for sin, so must the individual. Personal misfortune was interpreted as a consequence of personal sin, when in most cases it occurs as a result of sins committed by others. The hungry child sleeps at her desk while the septuagenarian on social security tees up on the golf course.

Jesus rails against such hypocrisy in the opening verses of Luke 13. He speaks of Galileans whose blood was added to the Hebrew sacrifices, and the people killed by the collapse of a tower, and warns that they were not alone in their sin. To the audience, he proclaims twice:

Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.

But then Jesus tells a strange little story about a landowner that planted a fig tree in his vineyard. When it bears no fruit, he orders his gardener to cut it down as it was “wasting the soil.” To this, the gardener replies [ESV Luke 13:8-9]:

Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put manure on. Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.

In many other parables, Jesus speaks of himself as a landowner, prince or bridegroom, but in this case, I see him renewing his role as a tender of life, most familiarly through the parables of the shepherd. To those familiar with the story of the Golden Calf, it might come to mind that God threatened to destroy the entire Hebrew nation, and relented only when Moses assumed responsibility for their future conduct.

Here Jesus says that the problem is not with the Hebrew people (the tree) but with the ground they are planted in. He vows to spread his loving spirit on them, and counsels that they will flower and bear fruit under his care.

And if not, then God may destroy them. Note that: the landowner orders the gardener to cut down the tree, and the gardener offers to care for it another year, building a bond of caring that means that the landowner must do the work of clearing the ground.

In disobeying the owner the following year, will the gardener himself by cut down? Is Jesus offering this assurance to his disciples: “I will care for you as Moses did, and if you fall, I will fall with you.” Recognizing both that sin must not be allowed to take root in the land, but also committing himself without reservation to preservation of the tree of human spirit that will eventually spread Divine Love over the entire world?

Ultimately, the only stable security is in knowing that we are loved. God is the only perfect source of that love, but his restless seeking to heal the world means that we cannot take that love and hide from the world. We cannot “retire” in comfort. We must go into the dark places where people hunger and live in fearful ignorance and bring them love. If we do not, love will pass round us seeking another way, and the sins of others will overwhelm us.

God’s purpose is pure, and embraces everything. It can serve us only if we serve others.

God loves us, but he cannot be bargained with like we can bargain with a government.

But why would we want to?

Intelligence and Creativity

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Joseph at Rationalizing the Universe explores the modern formulation, rooted in Goedel’s Theorem of logical incompleteness, of living with uncertainty. The following discussion ensued:

Brian

You point out correctly that Goedel’s theorem is restricted to a fairly narrow problem: proving that a proof system is “correct” – i.e. – that its axioms and operations are consistent. In other words, we can’t take a set of axioms and apply the operations to disprove any other axiom.

This seems to lead to the conclusion that we can’t trust our proofs of anything, which means that there are no guarantees that our expectations will be met. Unfortunately, expectations are undermined by many other problems, among them determination of initial conditions, noise and adaptation. The last is the special bete noir of sociology, as people will often violate social norms in order to assuage primitive drives.

At this point in my life, I am actually not at all troubled by these problems. Satisfaction is not found in knowing the truth, it is found in realizing creative possibilities. If we could use mathematics to optimize the outcome of social and economic systems, we would have no choices left. Life would become terribly boring. So what is interesting to me is to apply understanding of the world to imagine new possibilities. Mathematics is a useful tool in that process, particularly when dealing with dumb matter.

This brings me back to the beginning of the post: you state that “mathematics is the unspoken language of nature.” If there is anything that Goedel’s theorem disproves, it is precisely that statement. Mathematics is a tool, just as poetry and music are tools. At times, both of the latter have transported my mind to unseen vistas; mathematics has never had that effect.

Joseph

You raise a very interesting point; if we could optimise everything then would we take all of the joy out of being…. you may well be right. I know I get a lot of my satisfaction from the quest to know more. Although I disagree that Godel’s theorems disprove my original statement in this sense; language is essentially about describing things. That is why you can have different languages but they are easily translatable…. bread/pan/brot etc…. we all know what they mean because they all describe the same thing. In exactly the same way, mathematics describes things that actually exist; that isn’t to say nature is mathematics at all – mathematics is the language of nature but it is just as human in its construction as the spoken word. But is matter not matter because a human invented the label? Matter is matter.

To be, these theorems don’t break down all of our proofs; but what they do show is a vital point about logic. One which I think is going to become and increasingly big issue as the quest to understand and build artificial intelligence increases – can we every build a mind as intelligent as a humans when a human can know the answer to a non-programmable result? We hope so! Or rather I do – I do appreciate it’s not for everyone

Brian

I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I must caution that the mathematical analogies in classical physics cannot be extended in the same way to the quantum realm. Richard Feynman warned us that there is no coherent philosophy of quantum mechanics – it is just a mathematical formulation that produces accurate predictions. Ascribing physical analogies to the elements of the formulation has always caused confusion. An extreme example was found in the procedure of renormalization, in which observable physical properties such as mass and charge are produced as the finite ratio of divergent integrals.

Regarding human and digital intelligence: one of the desirable characteristics of digital electronics is its determinism. The behavior of transistor gates is rigidly predictable, as is the timing of clock signals that controls that propagation of signals through logic arrays. This makes the technology a powerful tool to us in implementing our intentions.

But true creativity does not arise from personal control, which only makes me loom bigger in the horizon of others’ lives, threatening (as the internet troll or Facebook post-oholic) to erase their sense of self. Rather, creativity in its deepest sense arises in relation, in the consensual intermingling of my uniqueness with the uniqueness of others.

Is that “intelligence?” Perhaps not – the concept itself is difficult to define, and I believe that it arises as a synthesis of more primitive mental capacities, just as consciousness does. But I doubt very much that Artificial Intelligence is capable of manifestations of creativity, because fundamentally it has no desires. It is a made thing, not a thing that has evolved out of a struggle, spanning billions of years, for realization. Our creativity arises out of factors over which we have no control: meeting a spouse-to-be, witnessing an accident, or suffering a debilitating disease. We have complex and subtle biochemical feedback systems which evolved to recognize and adjust to the opportunities and imperatives of living. We are a long way from being able to recreate that subtlety in digital form, and without those signals, meaningful relation cannot evolve, and thus creativity is still-born.

Love Purifies

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Ecstatic Dance is demanding, and we get injured every now and then. I came away from this afternoon’s session with a strain in my lower back. It loosened up as I was pedaling back from the train station, but I know it will hurt again tomorrow morning.

Some people find the best way to deal with a nagging injury is just to dance more. I find this to be particularly true with the injury occurred off the floor. The quotidian world is full of angry energy, and the tension that results from stress allows it to tunnel its way into our bodies. Dancing with people that really love to dance is a great way to chase it away.

But it doesn’t always work.

My way of ministering to people with deeply rooted psychic wounds is to stand ten feet away and imagine touching the wound with my finger tips. I don’t push or pull forcefully. Instead, I caress it, until it willingly wraps itself around my fingers. Drawing it loose, I gather it into my heart.

Now it’s a little different when the wound is generated consciously. That’s a case of possession, which often can be mild, but in some cases can be disabling. Then it’s a little different. I usually end up with my heart pressed against a shoulder or back, patiently waiting for them to relax until I can reach the source of the trouble. Then I inhale it. What is good seems to end up in my heart; what remains is expelled into the air.

What you might guess from this is that I consider smacking people on the forehead to be useless. You have to send love in to fill the spiritual void.

Now taking in all this negativity probably sounds a little scary, and I do have resources that are unusual. But at root, it all boils down to this: if your make your heart God’s tool, there is absolutely nothing that can get into it that will hurt you. And what comes out of it is guaranteed to be helpful to the injured party.

So to be clear: I’m really not doing anything except to provide sensory input. Love does the work.

The same holds true in psychic conflict, which is an important part of physical violence. Violence is a way of imposing our will upon others, but that imposition has no support. The spirits don’t want to feel the pain of the victim, unless they are deeply wounded themselves and just trying to spread misery. Even in that case, what they really want is healing. So I offer it to them. I vacuum them up into my heart.

But what if the person is genuinely trying to love people? What if I am mistaken in my judgment? Well, then I am actually completely impotent. The psychic energy is happy where it is, and chooses to stay there. The conflict is therefore rooted in simple misunderstanding, and what usually ends up happening is affirmation that builds strength in both of us.

Ultimately, then, I can’t take anything from people that love themselves and others.

Dying in Peace

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Standard Christian theology is that Christ died so that God could forgive our sins. But I think that Jesus said something a little more subtle: that he would die for “the forgiveness of sin.”

As I understand it, God is not about choosing those worthy to live in his presence, he is concerned with healing. A sin is a sin because it leaves a wound in the soul. That wound cannot be healed until we are ready to forgive the sin – to let it go so that it may be displaced by love. When that occurs, even the most vicious criminal becomes qualified to enter paradise.

Even better, though, is to hold on to the sin. It is to do as Jesus did – to allow the sin to take hold of us, and then to forgive it so that it may be suffused by love, and so made noble.

Death is a sin because is separates things that cherish one another. That cherishing reflects a mutually beneficial relationship. So for death to enforce such separation is to deny the parties those benefits, and thus to wound them.

In dying, Jesus allowed the servants of Death (the priests that slaughtered innocent creatures on the altar) to have their way with him, and forgave them. He suffused death with love, and so became the Prince of Peace.

How does that work? Because warring parties need to be separated. That can be accomplished in death, but what Jesus does is offer a spiritual refuge in which we can reflect until we figure out how to share strength with the ones we war against.

Sometimes, of course, that is our selves. Peace starts within, and when we accept Jesus, we allow him into our hearts and minds and grant him loving dominion over the conflicts that rage within us.

As Cain learned, it isn’t easy, but God understands that sin cannot be healed unless we wrestle with it. Terrible things happen: Cain murdered his brother Abel. But even then, that most heinous of sins was not punished with death. Instead, Cain was sent away to think, reflect, and become stronger.

Private Property as a Principle of Social Terrorism

Posted on by | 2 Comments

James Radcliffe offers a UK perspective on Trump’s presidential candidacy. I offered this context.

There’s an aspect of the American political trajectory that is perhaps worth highlighting to those outside the country, because it is developing steam in other places.

Fundamentally, government is concerned with negotiating the rules that control the distribution of power in a society. For all of human history, it has been either at odds with or coopted by the concept of “private property,” which most often is allocated arbitrarily from the commons, and held by force even when mismanagement of resources leads to preventable social suffering.

What has happened in America is that, since the ’80s, the conservative branch of our political system has adopted an extremist view of this conflict supported by the economic proposition that the only legitimate means for redistributing power is the free market. That actual markets, with their privileged knowledge and contractual Arcana, are by no means “free” in the theoretical sense has not impeded the propagation of policies, laws and political planks that uphold this principle as the foremost goal of all governmental action.

They are blind to the contradictions of their program: the use of government to supplant government with the free market. Karl Rove, conservative talk radio, the Koch brothers and Grover Norquist are the political terrorists driving the implementation of this program. The consequence is that conservative candidates for president have become progressively less qualified to run the government. Their understanding of government has become atrophied because they actually question its legitimacy.

Trump is simply the inevitable consequence of this divorce from reality.

The Zen of Jesus

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Upon waking up to the reality that self-serving does not bring joy, the seeker after comfort tends to a superficial sampling of religious wisdom. The sophisticated teacher needs to avoid becoming involved in blame-shifting for the seeker’s miserable state. In the traditions of Abraham, that begins with a vow of submission, formulated in Christianity as “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” In Islam, it is stated as the Shahada:

There is no god but God alone; he has no partner with him; Muhammad is his prophet.

The dissatisfied acolyte is then made responsible for his own condition, in that all wisdom is found in direct relation with the godhead.

Lacking a divine center for its practice, Buddhism takes a different approach, epitomized by the Zen koan. A koan is a cryptic one-liner that organizes an inward meditative journey. The most notorious is:

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

The obvious answer is “nothing,” but that certainly doesn’t point the way to wisdom. The student still needs to grasp that the “hand” being referred to is themselves, and that in seeking after spiritual glory, they earn no lauds.

The story of the rich young man in Matthew 19:16-22 shows Jesus ministering to the problematical seeker. The poor fellow grasps at eternal life as a guarantee that joy can be secured. Calling Jesus “Master,” he then asks what good he must perform to earn that grace.

Presciently, in Matthew 7:21, Jesus had pre-empted the Christian vow of submission:

Not everyone who says to me “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my father.

Consistent with this warning, Jesus immediately deflects the proffered authority:

Why do you ask me what is good? There is one alone who is good.

No man needing anything but faith to draw upon the strength and wisdom of the Father.

But the teaching does not end with the Zen master’s edict to seek inwardly. Jesus lists the six commandments of human relation: edicts against murder, adultery, theft, and lying; and encouragements to honor our parents and love our neighbors. The latter build intimacy with those closest to us; the former prevent those bonds from sundering. Through this practice, Jesus suggests that his protégé will “enter into life.” In avoiding the drama of struggle, adherence to the commandments allows to blossom those quiet moments in which we gain the subtle and sublime assurance of security in our knowledge of the compassion that embraces us.

We are no longer a hand trying to clap alone.

But the seeker is not just young; he suffers another handicap, one known in Islam as Allah’s greatest test of character. He is rich. Thus, while meaning well, others see him as a potential source of material security. They seek a bond with his money, not his heart. And so Jesus offers him this final advice: give your wealth to the poor and follow!

The young man departs saddened. We can only guess at the cause: was he responsible for managing money that ensured the well-being of the community, wealth that he could not trust others to manage responsibly? Was he simply unable to imagine survival without the perks of wealth: the daily bath, the satisfying meals? Or did he arrogantly perceive his wealth as a sign of divine approval, and so Jesus’ pronouncement as proof that hope had been invested with just another false prophet?

Whichever it may have been, we as readers should recognize the advice not as some generic one-size-fits-all formulation, but a direct response to the needs of this troubled young man. It is the mark of the greatness of his compassion that Jesus does this again and again throughout his ministry: offering just the words that the listener needs to hear to bring solace and healing, even to the point on the cross of:

Father: forgive them. They know not what they do. [Luke 23:34]

Jesus was not concerned with self-preservation – he was devoted to his ministry to the lost. Thus, while his teaching encapsulates the wisdom of the Zen and Christian teacher, it then surpasses it. None can doubt that he does the best that he can for them, although they might not be able to respond fully. Yes, it is this I believe that gives the young man sadness: his realization that salvation was offered him, and he was unable to grasp it. It foreshadows Jesus’ struggle in Gethsemane:

The spirit is willing; but the flesh is weak. [Matt. 26:41]

and:

My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. [NIV Matt. 26:38]

Sunday Heat

Posted on by | Leave a comment

While Amtrak trains have air conditioning, the stations don’t always. That may just be my stops: I’m riding along the coast from Oxnard to Santa Barbara. It was getting warm this morning when I left, so I just puttered along on my bike, hoping to keep from arriving at the station as a walking swamp. I did all right, but still found myself hiding out under the Highway 1 fly-over. All that concrete made the air cooler than in the station.

One of the best parts of taking the train out to Santa Barbara is having the chance to put on my noise-cancelling earbuds and really let the praise music I’m listening to work its way through me. Listening at work during the week, I’m just cancelling mental noise – the music doesn’t really sink in and produce meaning.

I found myself looping over “Draw Me Close to You” by the Katinas. I kept on tearing up on this passage:

You’re all I want.
You’re all I ever needed.
You’re all I want.
Help me know you are near.

I finally realized that it would be natural for Christ to feel the same way about the flock that seeks for him. I was picking up that reflection.

Santa Barbara was pretty hot – 87 F when I got off the train at 10:20.  I went past puttering to dawdling. Even so, I got to the Dance Tribe early, and enjoyed those first ten minutes with the dance floor nearly empty – those that entered with me still needed to warm up their muscles. The early numbers are also meditative, allowing me the freedom to vary pace and attitude as spirit moves me. When the second piece finished, one of the organizers caught my eye and shared “Wow. Great job.”

And then the frenzy. We had fun – I’ve been in attendance long enough that the improv group recognizes me as a trustworthy partner. I got caught up in a couple of multi-person scrums, although in one case I ended up crying out “Squish!” from the bottom of a pile of bodies.

The tempo began to wind down in the last half hour, and I made a really joyful discovery. I’ve been struggling with left-right imbalance in yoga for the last five years, and on Thursday I finally got into full locust posture with a sense that I was pulling into the center of my body, rather than listing to the right. I was working that into my dance when suddenly I realized “My wings are back.”

For the last couple of months I’ve been a little sad that, as the music winds down, I haven’t been able to find a lady to dance the last number. This time I decided that I was just going to claim someone. So I walked through the middle of the floor until I caught her eye, and started leading her through some travelling ballroom dance turns. When we finally locked together, I took her up into some rotating shoulder lifts.

Then I began to listen to the music: it was a plea for forgiveness from Great Spirit. I tried to fight it off, but she felt what was going on and just stood still, encouraging me. I ended up making two windmill sweeps through the air with my right arm, just pulling in all of the sorrow emanating from the natural world while choking out “Oh, God! Oh, God!”

When I opened my eyes, I found that she hadn’t run away – in fact, she had stepped closer. We ended up winding ourselves together and rolling onto the floor, she eventually inside my body as I went up into a shoulder stand. She surprised me by continuing to curl through into a reverse somersault.

God, I’d forgotten what that was like: to be affirmed by a woman’s touch as I do the work that seems to be mine.

So I’m exhausted tonight, but it’s a good exhaustion.