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Don’t Surrender Hope

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In the sleepy upper-middle-class haven of the Conejo Valley, true hunger for ideas is hard to find. That makes it hard to sustain attendance at the Monday read-and-critique. People come thinking that they want to share ideas, but what they discover under that veneer is a need for easy sympathy and attention.

The organizer, Mark, hews to a quorum of three. We both ordered a sandwich plate, and he sat politely as I finished mine. Mark agonizes over personal defects that might contribute to our inability to develop a third partner from the dozen or so visitors that have passed through the group since June. I’m not sure that he realizes that we’re both pretty demanding writers, high on technology and complex character dynamics. We may be fighting a “WTF” response.

Mark writes steam punk for young adults. He loves detail and the trappings of decadence, although his heroes and heroines usually preserve order and independence by exploiting the weakness of the nobility. His latest book, Red Jacket, has been out for several months. Steam punk is like a kaleidoscope: pick your favorite eras and personalities, mash them together, and imagine how they’d interact in the hot-house you’ve created. Perhaps recognizing the fecundity of the genre, Mark bought a block of fifty ISBN numbers when he set out to self-publish.

Mark also does his own illustrations, and his stereo-wheel viewer was out on the table when I sat down. I flipped through the series of trained elephants, most of which looked pretty miserable. After his remark that animals only survive as commercial assets, the conversation nose-dived into the nether reaches of bleakness. I tried throughout the evening to introduce a note of hope, but Mark resisted, reporting that Google had terminated is global climate stabilization research project after reaching the conclusion that disaster was inevitable.

The material facts are terrifying. As the northern hemisphere thaws, we’re going to have another 80 years of CO2 emissions released to the atmosphere from the decay of the tundra. When the Arctic ice melts, the Gulf Stream will shut down and Europe will freeze. Coastal waters around the world may stagnate, releasing clouds of hydrogen sulfide that will asphyxiate all of the larger animals. And then there’s the human sociology: drops in agricultural productivity will make many urban centers unsustainable, and when people start starving they’ll start shooting each other.

I argued that under these conditions, armed confrontation may be almost impossible to sustain. It’s one thing if you can grab land and live by hunting. It’s another when you have to ply the land with fertilizers and irrigation to get crops to grow, and then drive the produce 1000 miles to ranches where livestock can survive the weather. If the people with guns don’t sustain the people with know-how, they’re won’t be much of anything for anybody – including bullets to fire.

Given the prognosis, it seems better just to pull the covers over your head. I’m here to beg you not to. I’m actually going to go even further: I’m going to beg you to learn as much as you can about these impossible problems, because it’s only in understanding them at the finest level of detail that we can solve them.

But how, you ask? Well, now you’re going to have to have some faith.

For a long time, you probably were told that space was empty. We now know that isn’t true: it’s filled with something called dark energy. As I understand it, dark energy is a kind of foam lattice. It’s not completely solid; spirits can slip around in it. Spirits that fight for possession of things (you know, bodies and material goods) tend to just push the foam around without gaining any advantage over it. Spirits that commit themselves to mutual benefit, however, end up building energy in the fabric of space. Think of these bundles of spirit like water in a pressurized bladder. That energy is available for us to do work on the world around us. As it’s been accumulating for billions of years, it’s a substantial asset.

It’s not easy to turn that energy to destructive purposes, because the will of all the contributors to the reservoir works against its misallocation. In fact, in the primitive psychological conditions that rule Darwinian evolution, one aspect of building such reservoirs is the presence of guardians that prevent abuse. Pain and suffering pollute the reservoirs, which motivates the guardians to move the energy into safer locations.

These reservoirs exist, but they don’t have any specific purpose. Humanity has intelligence to successfully focus that energy in the service of all living things. That reduces pain and suffering, which brings the reservoirs more directly under our control, as well as enabling them to be refueled by healthy ecosystems.

I keep on telling people that there’s far more energy available to us than we require to solve the problems we face – it’s just that we’re not trusted to us it. Part of being trusted is to “pick up your cross” as Jesus did: to enter into the pain of the world so that we can diagnose its specific illness, and then commit every fiber of our bodies to channel energy for healing.

It starts with faith, faith swells into hope, hope rises into commitment, commitment is channeled to produce knowledge, knowledge focuses power, and power enables healing.

Now the scientists will tell you that this is all hooey: if there were spirits, they would have seen them. My response is: well, if a scientist told you that he wanted to take your brain apart so that he could understand your personality, would you submit to it? How about even a few neurons? Scientists understand things by taking them apart. If you had the choice to run away, would you submit? And after you did, what would it take to convince you that it was safe to come back?

Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you Jesus.

The Most Painful Choice a Woman Can Face

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My introduction to the trauma of unwanted pregnancy occurred one night when the women of our household disappeared at dinner time. I discovered them clustered in the front doorway, speaking quietly in frightened tones. A girl had gone to Mexico and not come back. When I asked my god-sister why she had gone there, I was told because she was afraid to tell her parents that she was going to have a baby.

Abortion is a procedure that yields no victors, only victims. For that reason, debating the matter yields no winners. But it’s important that the debate not be grounded in the evasion of lies, fear and death, but in the pursuit of truth, hope and life. So I’m going to offer my understanding of the issues from that second perspective.

Life is the integration of matter and spirit. I’ve participated more than once in the consummation of that binding during pregnancy, and it doesn’t necessarily occur at conception. Only a mother can be certain when the binding happens, and I would hope that makes a huge difference to her.

The nature of the spirit that is carried is important. We don’t fret too terribly much when a surgeon divorces us from cancerous tissue and the destructive spirit it anchors. In that light, insisting that a woman carry to term a baby that was forced into her by rape seems to be cruel. Similarly, the spirit of a child that gestates in a substance abuser might deserve relief from a toxic environment.

Does that mean that the infant spirit is guaranteed to depart following surgical removal of the fetus? Not necessarily. The womb is designed to anchor an infant’s spirit as much as to nurture its body. Of course, pregnancy isn’t necessary for a lady to suffer from spiritual pollution of the womb. I have rescued a young woman ruined by a single night of casual sex with a destructive man.

Cleaning up that kind of mess is done most effectively by offering the infant spirit a better alternative. Sometimes that is as simple as pointing out where other opportunities lay, but may include suggesting that it will have a better life if it hangs around until the mother gets into a stable relationship with a supportive and loving father. Such post-pregnancy tenancy happens more often than one might imagine, particularly when the mother desires to have a baby at some point in her life. Surgical abortion isn’t the only cause: 60% of all pregnancies abort spontaneously.

I’m the result of a union with such a hanger-on, who sits on my right shoulder. He came into the world to help me with a problem I’ve had in past lives. When somebody offered to remove him for me, I felt rather a sense of gratitude that God had provided me with such a companion. When a woman is too weak to resist the sexual demands of predatory males, she might find a similar benefit to have parts added until she develops the strength to say “no.”

That summarizes the theory and personal practice. What about Biblical injunctions? This is tendentious. In Genesis we are enjoined to “be fruitful and multiply”, but Jesus obviously didn’t feel a need to pursue that practice, and offered women non-traditional roles in his ministry. We should also not overlook the holy favor showed to Perpetua of Carthage, a mother still breast-feeding when she was martyred for her faith. Clearly the purpose of women in God’s plan goes beyond child-bearing.

“Thou shalt not kill” is also frequently invoked, but that’s not entirely consistent with the rest of the Judaic Law, which commands capital punishment for a number of offenses, including occupancy of a coveted territory or unrecognized Messiah-hood (the offense that allowed the Savior to prove his divinity). You can’t ignore the Father’s flexibility on this point. The inconsistency is resolved in Jesus’s observation that “all the law hangs” on love of the Father and our neighbors. That suggests that everything else in the law is conditioned upon circumstances.

So where, vis-à-vis abortion, does that leave us as Christians?

Well, first, we must invest in ensuring that women understand the sacred nature of their wombs. This goes well beyond motherhood. The womb is a place for the binding of spirit to matter, and that skill can be projected into the outer world as well. For this reason, Daniel 11:37 foretells the Messiah as “the one desired by women.” To anyone that has seen what happens to a woman when she is offered love to bind to the world, that obviously isn’t limited to emotional yearning. When a women uses her skill to bring unconditional love (which is Christ, of course) to a hungry world, the world vibrates with joy all through her. Yes, it’s incredibly sexual, and if we encouraged women to accept that joy then maybe they wouldn’t be so willing to let boys make a mess in them.

When we fail to encourage women to bind themselves fully to the unconditional love that is their due, well, they are going to face temptation, and some of them will submit. What happens in the eventuality of an unwanted pregnancy is between the mother, the infant spirit, and God. Whether a surgeon is involved or not is really incidental: a spiritually potent woman can manage the process without medical assistance. Among those not so gifted, some will find themselves encouraged to carry the baby to term by a supportive community, and some will be so enamored of the infant soul that they will bring the baby to term against all obstacles. Our job as Christians is to ensure that every expectant mother makes her decision in a supportive, loving environment. If she makes a choice that we disagree with, then our job is to provide love and counsel to help her heal and develop the strength to avoid a repetition of her error.

Under no circumstances should we use anger and shame to force an expectant woman into an outcome that she fears. For those that insist on that path: you assume the onus of ensuring that her child has all the advantages in life that yours do. After all, it was your will that brought the child into the world, so it’s really your child.

What about the innocent victim, the wounded infant spirit? That can be subtle. I knew a man with a really complex sexual identity. He served in the Navy for a number of years, and once spontaneously deciding to dress up in drag just before leaving port, creating a real stir on the aircraft carrier as the men raced about looking for a female stow-away. I ultimately came to understand that he was chaperoning the spirit of the daughter that he had sworn to protect, and who had clung to him in a past life as they perished in a shipwreck. She needed this life with him to restore her trust in living.

I could go on with examples, but the point is: don’t focus on how terrible the experience was, reach out to the infant’s spirit and show them how beautiful life can be. Don’t let them be trapped with someone not mature enough to raise a child. Open your heart to them, and help them find a home in a community that knows how to love.

You see, the moment of death really isn’t so long as compared to the span of our living. Dying is something that we suffer again and again. What’s important is that in each dying we come closer, step by step, to a life filled with loving.

We Can’t Say ‘Thanks’ Enough

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Life is the opportunity to participate in organizing spirit. Our bodies escort them about in clouds, and as we move amongst each other they enter into new relationships. Some of these are wonderful experiences: “Love at first sight” is a good example. Some of them are horrifying: consider the records of the carnival atmosphere at a public lynching.

At the core of our primary personality is a set of spirits that manage our survival. Through the mechanisms of our glands, organs, muscles and nerves, they coordinate the biological functions that allow us to control the world around us, and thus to sustain life. For most of the history of life on earth, this was as far as it went. Innovation in the integration of body and spirit was controlled largely by survival. With humanity, however, the possibilities exploded – almost without check. Using the mechanism of our brain, in each life we can explore and evaluate millions if not billions of spiritual relationships. We call these ideas.

How do we know which ideas work? Well, we put them into action. We seek to describe sources of pain (weather, natural disasters, disease and predators) and to create the means to avoid pain. We attempt to deny resources to those that bring us fear, or perhaps even better to use fear to take control of their resources. We gather and offer gifts to the people we love, when before we might have shared them more widely.

In the course of taking these actions, we integrate ideas into our core personalities. This can have terrible consequences for our bodies. If we accept a destructive idea, it can turn on us. Our core personality intuitively seeks to isolate its effects, but that may then cause stroke or cancer.

The other option is to vent destructive ideas on the people around us. For destructive ideas, that can be a successful strategy. One powerful individual can infect an entire society (witness Adolf Hitler, Mao TseDong, and Josef Stalin). In doing so, however, those ideas have to fight against the enormous mass of human experience, which proves that most of us survive best when we invest in the survival of others. The common man’s experience of the power of loving dilutes and even ennobles (see prior post) destructive behaviors.

In the beatitudes, Jesus promises solace to those that suffer most from this process. Implicitly, however, he also singles out those that serve most effectively in furthering its conclusion.

The poor in spirit – To be poor is often to be weak, but most directly what it means is to be missing something that you need. The poor in spirit need to be filled, and the world all around them offers them a multitude of destructive alternatives. To remain poor is to preserve yourself for occupancy by constructive ideas. Thank-you for your steadfastness.

Those who mourn – To mourn is to affirm the value of what is lost. This is not just the body of those that are lost to destructiveness, but the relationships that they offered us. In mourning, we preserve those relationships in our mind, and thus transfer to our care the souls that once found a home with the one mourned. Thank-you for your hospitality.

The meek – When we suffer a wrong, we often wish to lash out in revenge. The meek chose to suffer patiently. They do not propagate destructiveness, but struggle against it internally. In the course of that struggle, they transform it. Thank-you for your courage.

Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness – To establish complete control, destructive ideas need to isolate their victims, making it appear that the acceptance of destruction is the only option available. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness raise their voice in warning and offer hope to victims. They encourage them to organize in support of each other. Thank-you for your witness.

The merciful – A person raised up in love often struggles when confronted with a destructive relationship. They may make regrettable choices, such as that made by Cain. Mercy recognizes this, offers wise counsel, and supports the wrong-doer as they seek to heal themselves and their victims. Thank-you for your compassion.

The pure in heart – From the perspective of Jesus, a pure heart can only be a heart filled with unconditional love. As unconditional love seeks to enter all things, a pure heart is an infectious agent. It embraces destructive relationships and transforms them. Thank-you for your service.

Peacemakers – The peacemaker enters into a destructive relationship and offers peace to both sides. In offering respect and affirmation to both parties, s(he) creates a common experience of beneficial relation. When the warring parties finally accept that commonality, they have the opportunity to recognize that the energies that they have committed to mutual destruction can be liberated for mutual benefit. Thank-you for your persistence.

The persecuted – When a strong personality stands up for love, the forces of destruction rank against them. This is terrifying, but because the power of divine love stands with them, the persecuted person is not easy to destroy. The attentions of destructive personalities are distracted, which allows their victims to rally and heal. Thank-you for your light.

In Jesus’s name: thank-you, thank-you, a million times thank-you.

All the Vice of Jesus

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Proponents of chaos theory love the story of the butterfly in Kansas. The butterfly flaps its wing, and a bird misses its prey. The bird banks, and in banking cools a column of hot, rising air. That decreases the pressure ever so slightly at higher elevation, which causes a slight change in the direction of a breeze. That breeze joins with a northerly gust along the coast, rather than merging with a sea-going breeze. That sea-going breeze then isn’t powerful enough to prevent the formation of a wind vortex in the Gulf Coast, and so a hurricane is born.

Does the butterfly “cause” the hurricane? No way in hell. A hurricane is enormously powerful, and the energy it contains must be dissipated somehow. All the butterfly does, in combination with a huge number of other actors, is influence the place and time of its occurrence.

Our lives are much like that. We have a primary personality, the personality welcomed by our mother and united with our body during gestation, but around us swirl other personalities, many without bodies. Because people have powerful tools, these spirits, ranging along the spectrum from angels to demons, seek to influence us in an attempt to improve their habitat.

Imagine your body as a nectar. Like hummingbirds and butterflies, an entourage of souls surrounds you. Sometimes we blow the sweet zephyr of peace, but when the wings flap the wrong way, we become the gale of rage. Just as in the warm, steamy air of the Gulf, the greater the power stored inside of us, the harder it is to maintain control.

When you meet with someone else, your entourage mixes with theirs. You have a relationship. Sometimes that meeting is a struggle for control. It can be a war, which is what I often see happening between men and women when I go out dancing at a nightclub. In other situations, it can be a creative celebration, which is why I love so much to dance to live music.

Over the centuries, humanity has developed some lore regarding the dynamics of our relationships. Certain types of spirits tend to generate constructive relationships. We call these virtues: patience, prudence, chastity and others. Some types of spirits cause destructive relationships. We call these vices: sloth, greed, and lust are examples.

Now the advice of most religions is to surrender the vices and assemble virtues. The ascended personality seems to be above it all. They are free from petty human concerns. In the extreme, they go without food or clothing. The spirits that surround them provide them all the sustenance they need. What we have to ask about such people, though, is this:

Are they really still alive?

The gift of having a body is to have the ability to reorganize spirits. In the way that we touch and speak, through the things that we eat and drink, even in the way that we walk and gesture: everything that we do involves mixing of the spirits that surround us, whether consensual or coerced. (Yes, that is why it is called intercourse.)

Here, then, is the greatness of Jesus’s ministry. He didn’t surrender his vices. He suffused them with love, and so transformed them from destructive to constructive influences.

If greed is the desire to accumulate wealth, when mixed with love it becomes a restless seeking to find the place where we can create the greatest value. It was this seeking that took Jesus away from Nazareth, where he received no honor, to Jerusalem.

If pride leads us to undervalue the contributions of others, with love it becomes enthusiasm for the things that we do well. It was enthusiasm that led Jesus to surround himself with people and share the skills he had in loving.

If sloth is an attempt to acquire resources without effort, when mixed with love it becomes a surrender to the caring of others when we can no longer care for ourselves, and thus to give the affirmation of our gratitude. It was with this surrender that Jesus affirmed the woman that came to anoint him, holding her dearer than the men that called him to greater nobility.

If lust is the desire to reside always in those sensations that give us pleasure, when mixed with love it becomes passion for the source of that sweet stimulus, and thus a willingness to pour out our strength in service to its existence. It was this willingness that led Jesus to the cross, where he poured his blood out for humanity and the world.

This is the greatness of his Abba: by its nature, unconditional love doesn’t choose. It seeks for all things to manifest themselves in greatness.

The greatness of a spirit is evidenced by the willingness of other spirits to associate with it. How much faster can the eagle of passion fly than the worm of lust can wriggle? It is because passion is welcomed by the recipient that it moves so freely, while lust must push through against resistance.

So the call of Jesus is not to stop being human. It is rather to surrender to the yoke of love, and enter into the greatness of your humanity.

The Solution to Sin

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The Bible documents the human struggle with sin. It begins with Cain, who was forgiven for slaying his brother, and ends with Jesus, who forgave those that placed him on the cross. In between, we have a number of object lessons in failure. Each intermediate step serves the divine purpose in preparing human nature for the manifestation of Christ, but each step hits a dead end.

Each of these stages presents sin in terms that reflected the mechanisms used to control its expression. Prior to Noah, sin was a violation of intimacy with God – a choosing to seek our own path in the world, and thus to allow external influences (the serpent or the presence “crouching at the door”) into the sacred relationship. With Moses, sin took on a legalistic tone: only a chosen few were allowed into the divine presence, and forgiveness was something bought by sacrifice. With entry to the Holy Land, the sin of placing temporal over spiritual authority led to the destruction of the nation.

By Jesus time, the existence of sin among the people had become a profit center for the priesthood. For most, redemption was out of reach. The priesthood had built a wall of shame against divine forgiveness. The mantra of that era would have been “sin sells.”

What is wrong with this picture? If the divine presence is unconditional love, then its goal upon encountering sin must be to bring healing. If we are preconditioned to believe that we are unworthy of receiving the divine presence, our free will prevents us from accepting healing. Thus Jesus died “for the forgiveness of sins.” Not forgiveness by God, who understands our frailty and always forgives us, but forgiveness of ourselves so that we may receive healing.

As humans, though, we know that when we receive power, of which healing is a form, we consider it to be part of us. If we do not forgive each other, we turn that power against those that have wronged us in the past, and perpetuate sin and so wound ourselves again. We take unconditional love and use it to create harm! So the next step is for us to forgive each other. In doing so, we allow the lessons of the past to be carried into the future. We prevent sin, not by regulating against it or creating fear of it, but by giving strength to those that have sinned so that they can heal themselves and make better choices in the future.

This is the path of Christ. This is what it means to “take up your cross and follow me.”

Are we there yet? No. It takes a lot of strength to make the choice: “Sin against me so that I may infect you with my compassion. Force your will upon me and find the divine presence of healing.” But when enough of us do, he returns, not to pass judgment, but to work his healing upon us and bring us home.

The Middle Ways

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In broad terms, the liberal versus conservative divide also characterizes the difference between Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. This is not to say that Western traditions focus on institutions while Eastern traditions focus on freedom. Rather, it is that Western traditions invest power and authority in exemplars, while Eastern traditions tend to focus on advancing the ability of the individual to manage his or her interior life.

The focus on personal truth generated oscillations in Eastern – and in particular Indian – speculations. Starting at one end with a focus to learn how the world operated, the Indian philosophers would examine the reality around them, and then realize that the senses and psychology of the investigator influenced their observations. Delving ever deeper into theories of human experience with the goal of eliminating bias, the investigator would encounter levels of interior truth, until a deep mystical connection to a benevolent presence was encountered. The mystic’s desire to bond permanently to that presence would lead them into deeper and deeper introspection, and eventually a complete withdrawal from society. This led to irrelevance, vulnerability and ridicule, which would cause a shift by later generations back towards concern with material realities. The cycle would repeat over the time-scale of centuries.

It was through the lens of this philosophical context that I first interpreted the Buddhist concept of “The Middle Way”. It was a set of practices and principles that helped the investigator to maintain a presence in both worlds. The principles include compassion for all sentient beings and mindfulness. The most widely known practice is meditation, although tantra expands more broadly into human sensory experience. Less well known is “emptiness”: the skill of relating to reality without imposing a personal agenda upon its unfolding.

I am bemused by the way that this wisdom is being repackaged for consumption in modern Western culture. It appears that there is a cycle being created within the cycle. I don’t know whether the teachers are conscious of the program they are constructing, or whether they are simply focusing on what makes sense to them in the context of modern psychology.

In this new framework, the “middle way” is a path between narcissism and social engagement. The focus is relation with each other, and in particular removing the impediment of aggression against human bonding. “Mindfulness” is a method for being conscious of and therefore maintaining some influence over our reactions to events around us. Meditation is first and foremost a means of developing mental discipline.

I call this a “cycle within a cycle” because it appears that establishing these skills is an important precondition for entering into the greater “Middle Way” that leads to participation in the evolution of spiritual principles. This is terribly momentous and psychologically hazardous work with “infinite” dependencies, as Ethan Nichtern pointed out in his last lecture. It is not a place for people that are confused about the boundaries of their personalities.

What bemuses me is the conflation of the “Middle Way” and the “middle way”. I am concerned that the leap between the two is far greater than is suggested by the casual use of shared terminology. Between the surrender of the self and entry into negotiation between principles is a long, confusing and often blundering exploration of how the principles are arrayed about us. They penetrate into material reality with subtle and non-local manifestations. Upon being uprooted from one location, they drift – almost literally – on the wind until they find a place to root in sympathetic circumstances. When excluded, they gather in concentrated form, which is why our avatars, both good and evil, tend to arise in paradoxical circumstances.

One of the practices upheld in Bodhisattva teaching is that of patience. As Ethan emphasized, those that adopt the path are doing the work of generations. Given that insight, I am hoping that a practice of shared spiritual cartography would be offered to those trying to make the leap across the “middles”.

The Absolute Theory of Relatives

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At this summer’s Buddhist Geeks conference in Rosemead, I was impressed in particular by two of the presenters: Diane Hamilton and Ethan Nichtern.

Ethan was until recently the head of the InterDependence Project in New York City. IDP offers a certificate program in Buddhist studies, so when Ethan sent me a notice that he was starting a lecture series on the Bodhisattva path, I signed up for the study-at-home program.

As I understand Ethan, the Bodhisattva path is the pursuit of Bodhichitta, or compassion for all sentient beings. Achieving a consistent expression of that perspective requires that we consciously dissolve the separation between ourselves and the other. On this path, the seeker is offered four reliances to guard against a descent into narcissism. Trust the teaching more than the teacher. Trust the meaning, not the words. Hold ultimate guidance above provisional guidance. Trust wisdom (with Ethan characterizes as the melding of understanding and intuition) above knowledge.

From the recorded discussion, both Bodhichitta and the final reliance are difficult to grasp. They define states of being, rather than describing the transformative potential of achieving those states. That means that we don’t know how those states will influence behavior, nor how to interact with or support the work done by people that achieve those states.

One of the most powerful concepts in Buddhism, although it takes several formulations, is the distinction between absolute and relative forms of truth. I first encountered these concepts in the chapters on “Other Buddhist Teachings” in Thich Naht Hahn’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching. Ethan observes that there is a slippery correlation between “ultimate” and absolute. I’ll start by explaining my understanding of the nature of absolute and relative forms of truth, and elaborate from there.

This axiom is fundamental: Life is the co-evolution of material and spiritual forms. The ultimate goal is the acquisition of spiritual power. That power can be used for two purposes: to gain influence over material reality, or to liberate the self from attachments with the goal of returning to the realm of the Divine. There are two kinds of attachments: entanglement with selfish personalities that seek to tie us down, and material concerns, which are driven by pain.

The paradox of this reality is that to separate ourselves from selfish personalities, we either have to brace our spirits against matter or purge our intimates of their selfishness. If we choose the former, we expose our selves to pain, which leads us naturally to question our choices, and so to enter into the trap of suffering. If we choose the latter, the only way to establish buy-in to the program is to express with complete authenticity our concern for the other.

Now it seems like we’re almost to the end, as in that last sentence we can almost see the principle of Bodhichitta in action. But let’s backtrack a bit: spirit did not start out knowing the endpoint. In the early, highly dynamic stages of material evolution, patterns of spirit that were universally applicable to their needs would have been the only patterns to survive. These would be patterns that we would now characterize as principles. Examples might be “stability”, “consumption” and “proliferation”. Association with “stability” facilitates the survival of a spiritual pattern, adding “consumption” facilitates coupling to material forms that acquire resources to support growth (undermining stability), adding “proliferation” extends access to resources while limiting physical growth (harmonizing stability and consumption).

So here is the realm of the absolute truths, in the realm of spiritual principles. They are persistent resources that various and diverse biological forms can draw upon to more effectively organize and acquire spiritual power. The problem, of course, is that the principles themselves are in competition. It’s amusing here to recall the challenge of competition in Tolkein’s words:

One ring to rule them all. One ring to find them. One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

In other words, competition is itself a principle. It’s action is to force principles into intimate and self-corrupting engagements that eventually squeeze the life out of them. A benefit can be rationalized: competition is one way of breaking stasis, and thereby producing new principles.

The counter-acting principle, and it’s no accident that its avatars shed light, is unconditional love. It involves the intelligent and conscious practice of helping principles organize themselves in ways that strengthen the aggregate. The primary advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t eat itself as competition does (one of the truths that informed the choice of the title “Love Works”). It tends to view differences through the lens of comparison.

In contrast, the realm of the relative is full of events dominated by dumb matter. This includes things like supernovae and volcanic eruptions, but also many of our autonomous functions (breathing and hunger). Obviously, experience is often a composite of the relative and absolute. Principles influence our concrete behaviors, and our behavior injects energy (either supportive or corrupting) into the principles.

While I wouldn’t claim to be a Bodhisattva, so the suggestion is “provisional” (Ouch! Not enough words!), I believe that the action of a Bodhisattva is to participate in the organization of principles. Their formulation of ultimate guidance express that work. The Bodhisattva’s engagement affords them a certain clarity of perception regarding the relationship between relative behaviors and intimacy with absolute principles. They make suggestions to students intended to improve their associations, which are presented to the student as provisional guidance. Once the student achieves intimacy, of course, the provisional guidance fall away.

At this point, I think that we have arrived at one of the aspects of “wisdom” described by Ethan, but there’s more to be said. This is less well supported here – Chapter 4 of “Love Works” describes a class of physical theories that support this perspective – but my experience is that spiritual forms have a different experience of “time” than do material forms. This has to do with the “relative” (Ouch again! Take the mathematical sense) speeds of signal propagation. When we enter into collaboration with the principles, the future becomes visible to us through the lens of their evolution. I have taken to saying that “holy moments join the past and future through a conduit of love”. That’s the basis of the old adage about “women’s intuition”. I’m hoping (closer to expecting?) that people like Ethan find it readily available to them.

Perfect Love, Imperfect Justice

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Seeking fuel for criticism of religion, there is no better place to look than the old testament. When presented the contrast between the simple message of forgiveness in the New Testament and the corporal punishments of Leviticus, the best I have been offered is the tortured logic that “Christ’s sacrifice satisfied the desire of God for perfect justice.”

The contradictions in this message drove me from Christianity. Perfect justice? Dear God, who created us, with all of our flaws and weakness? What right has our maker to pass judgment on us?

To the atheist, these debates lack any merit. The books of the Bible are clearly an amalgamation of myths and histories from different cultures and eras. What kind of consistency would we expect to find?

But to the fundamentalist, these are central issues. If murder is justifiable in the eyes of the Lord, then there are principles that justify state-sanctioned execution, and even warfare. More moderately, social repression of “deviant” behaviors has a holy sanction, regardless of the psychological and political consequences to the oppressed class.

As I implied, resolving this contradiction was critical to the acceptability of Christianity in my mind. Given the obvious justification of the atheist’s position, I was ultimately astonished that there should be any coherence in scripture as I sought through it for answers to the problem. That coherence I found is evidence that the work of Divine Love on human nature involves transfers of focus from one culture to another as the opportunity best presents itself to heal our separation from the Almighty.

Let us trace the history of justice since that separation was first recognized. It begins with fratricide, a crime certainly more horrific than adultery, for which Leviticus demands death. What was the response of the Divine to that act? Not murder, but banishment. Not rejection, but protection.

What is the purpose of this program? As God had counseled Cain earlier “Evil crouches at your door. But you can master it.” Cain lost that struggle with evil. His jealousy overcame him, and he murdered his brother. So God sends him away with his personal devil, knowing that the display of mercy and concern will give Cain strength as he struggles for the rest of his life to civilize the spirit that bound itself to him through his brother’s murder.

This is the work of an engineer, using humanity as a tool to heal brokenness in the realm of spirit.

Then we come to Noah and the flood. Here we see God, in an act of desperation, attempting to purge the world of human evil. Several historical events have been proposed as the precursor of this story: an asteroid impact, the release of flood waters from glaciers on the Asian steppes, and rising sea levels fed by Ice Age melt that eventually flooded continental shelves. There seems to be no lack of material mechanisms to explain the myth, but this doesn’t let God of the hook: why didn’t He intervene to remove His creatures from the path of destruction?

The simple answer is that nobody was listening. But God still regrets the consequences, and this is central to the thread of the history of justice in the Bible. He announces that no longer will He intervene to dispense justice over men – the cost to the rest of reality is too great. From this point forward, men will maintain their own courts of justice.

In this context, the words of Jesus take on a different weight. Asked to identify the commandments, he replies “Love thy God with all thy heart and mind and soul. And love thy neighbor as thyself. All the rest of the law is derived from these.” But derived by who? Clearly, in the post-flood context, by men. Elsewhere, Jesus asserts “I came not to overthrow the law, but to restore it.” Reading his proclamations and efforts to the reclamation of sinners, clearly Jesus is referring to the law of unconditional love that granted mercy to Cain.

The Law of the Torah is a human construct, serving human ends, motivated by divine principle, but expedient where human patience reaches its end. Jesus did not die to satisfy a Divine need for Perfect Justice. He died and rose again to demonstrate the imperfection and ineffectuality of human justice, and give us the courage to struggle against the tyranny of misguided enforcement.

In the end, then, there are no just wars, because wars perpetuate and strengthen the spirit of violence. There is no just persecution, because persecution always separates us from those that we are intended to heal. Any pronouncements to the contrary contradict the teachings and acts of Jesus. They are not the teachings of Christianity.

The Rude Chakra

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I would imagine that readers of this blog might be asking “Why?” Not just, “why are you writing this”, but also “why do you think you have the authority to undertake this work?”

Bear with me while I explain:

Among the methods for spiritual development are practices that focus on the activation of “energy centers” in an ascending sequence from the hips to the crown of the head.

My orientation to the seven chakras, an Indian categorization, occurred simultaneously with reading of Cozolino’s The Neuroscience of Human Relationships. I was stunned by the close parallels between the personality traits manifested at each stage of chakra activation and the development of the seven neurological centers involved with socialization. Clearly, the investigators of chakra had captured something fundamental about human personality.

So what, then, to make of the parapsychology of the chakra system? The capacity for healing obtained through activation of the heart chakra? The gifts of divine knowledge and wisdom? Why would the investigators have corrupted their careful study of human psychology with unfounded assertions such as these? My sense was that it would be unlikely – that in fact the assertions are based in fact.

The principal hazard in exploration of the chakras is the sequential order of the activation. The theory is that the root chakra, located at the base of the spine, is the conduit for spiritual energy (prana) that arises and activates subsequent energy centers. Of course, that energy is tied to fundamental life processes, including, at the root level, our sexuality.

In adults, once control of that energy is established, a common tendency is to engage in sexual self-gratification. Some people never tire of that game. Worse, kundalini energy, once turned on, becomes an extremely powerful tool in the hands of manipulators interested in controlling our will.

Having gotten past that stage, I am now mortified when the response to an offer of heart or mind energy is sexual energy. It’s usually driven by simple greed: the simplest way to ensure access to knowledge and power is to grab on to the source at the root level. In the process, energies that are designed to support our basic life processes are raised up and set loose in the more delicate structures of personal discipline and social imagination. Generally, a mess results.

It is, indeed, rude, in the sense of both “crude” and “insensitive”.

It was with some interest, then, that I reacted to being told by a reader of auras that I have a gap of four inches in the flow of prana up my spine, located just above the root chakra. I was told at the same time that “[I] keep on losing parts of myself” in the course of the sequence of my lives. I therefore assumed that the gap was a prophylactic step taken before entering this life, as a means of keeping people from getting into my heart energy through sex.

There’s some truth to this, but recent events counter that interpretation. When I finally decided that I needed to stop investing energy in people that were unable to reciprocate in kind, I went through a period of several weeks in which I felt at times that the top of my head was going to come off. All the energy I had been laying about was seeking an outlet through the crown chakra.

At the suggestion of a friend, one night I began experimenting with alternative channels for the flow. In a few minutes, I found myself directing it down through my spine, bridging the gap. In the following days, the transformation in my personal energy was unexpected. In yoga classes, problems with alignment of my spine began to evaporate. And in interacting with peers and family members, I have become more direct, to the point, well, of being “rude”.

In terms of the activation of the chakras, though, I need to emphasize the reversal of sequence. I am reorganizing my root chakra with energy originating from the heart, rising through the crown, and now being directed downwards.

And this brings to mind the Native American theory of energy centers. In that theory, there are twenty total stages of development. The first ten are similar to the Indian chakras, rising along the spine and blooming from the body through the crown. The pattern of personal development is also similar. One the tenth stage is activated, the subsequent stages repeat the sequence, with the subject of the work being the community served by the practitioner.

So, to the original question: the reason I am doing this is because it is the only thing that works for me at this time. A consequence of that program, I am beginning to realize, will be the injection of discipline into the pool of prana drawn upon by Human Nature.