Story
When I attended college I fell in love with learning. I loved expanding my mind and learning about a variety of topics.I became a teacher because I wanted to expand the minds of others so that they too would experience the same joy of learning.
After I graduated from college I had further academic aspirations. I intended to get my Masters Degree and later my Ph.D. I believed by doing this I would know the world better, and as a result, know God better. I believed rigorous intellectual study would deepen my relationship with God. As I began to learn more, however, I realized that learning itself didn't deepen my relationship with God. I could study the Scriptures and know Christian history and theology and not truly know God in the end. I began to question whether God could even be understood. My will to understand God grew and grew. I would come to realize that my mind was not the access point to the Divine. In order to find this access point, I had to dis-identify with my mind and embrace God in the Mystery.
The Mind: The False Access Point
17th century French philosopher René Descartes, widely regarded as the father of modern philosophy, once famously said, "I think, therefore I am." This proclamation brought to the Western world left-brain rationalism and the merging of mind with spirit.
Rationalism was a much-needed development in the West, ending the Dark Ages which were dominated by absolute monarchs and the fixed dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. Through rationalism, an individual was able to reason for themselves what truth is, known as individualism, instead of blindly trusting political and church institutions to dictate truth to them. This intellectual revolution opened the door to new political, economic, and religious drives that began to dominant the world. The primary drive became colonialism, motivated by gold, glory and God, or the desire for individuals to get rich off land and resources, achieve worldwide fame, and to convert native populations to Christianity. Genocide was widely accepted as indigenous peoples were seen as primitive and less than human, allowing dominant groups to force their objectives without much guilt. Rationalism and individualism became the official gods of the West.
Rationalism and individualism still dominate Western culture today. The school system is a prime example, placing the greatest value on the left-brain functions of language development and mathematics and comparing one student to another. We are taught very early in school that success is determined by high academic performance and getting ahead of others. College for their children is the prime goal for many parents. College isn't a bad goal to strive for, but going farther down the path of the educational system one discovers that academic learning doesn't guarantee future success. I discovered this myself after graduation. I was knowledgable and academically prepared for my teaching career with all the latest teaching jargon, philosophies and strategies. I wasn't prepared, however, for real life.
Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding I had was believing I was my mind. Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle said it best:
The philosopher Descartes believed he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identify with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind.”
By equating thinking with being, as Descartes had done, the individual experiences themselves as separate from others, separate from the world, and sadly for the spiritual seeker, separate from God. If it wasn't for my depression and gaining the ability to detach from my mind, I would've been isolated from God and the love that He is. Before we know the depths of God, we have to reexamine our preconceived notions of who God is. To do this, we must identify our egoic triad.
The Egoic Triad: Our Human Vessel
The mind, the body, and emotions drive our experience of the world. Our mind enables us to make distinctions and form different neural connections to a vast array of information. Our body allows us to experience the fullness of those various distinctions through our five senses. Our emotions enable us to feel the depths of these distinctions and their interconnectedness. All three aspects form our individual human make-up, a unique combination that gives us a sense of identity. This mind-body-emotion triangle is called the egoic triad, our specific spirit vehicle used to navigate this world.
While the egoic triad is necessary to be human, it creates a major problem for us. The problem isn't the triad itself, which is necessary for a fulfilled life; the problem is attachment to the triad. As soon as you attach to any element of the triad, be it your thoughts, feelings or sensations, you set blind yourself from God and open yourself to immense suffering.
I remember having a very strong attachment to my mind. I believed our thoughts and memories were the element of ourselves that carried on with us to the afterlife. I came to discover quite the contrary watching my grandmother die. My grandma was diagnosed with dementia, and over a period of five years I watched as her mind was eaten away. Nearing the end of her life, most of the memories she once possessed had disappeared. It was absolutely heartbreaking for me and my family to watch. Nevertheless, although her mind was dying, she showcased her eternal spirit through growth in love like I’d never seen before.
The spirit cannot suffer, but our egoic triad can. Suffering can be physical; it can cause great pain. Suffering can be mental; we’ve all been victims of our own negative thinking. Suffering can be emotional; our feelings are perhaps the most difficult to handle. The Buddha teaches that the cause of all suffering is attachment. Said another way:
Suffering is identification with and attachment to your egoic triad that’s beginning to lose itself.
If you want to end your suffering, you must cease to identify yourself as your thoughts, sensations, and emotions. You must let go of all attachments to your egoic triad. This isn't an easy task. The more you try to detach from your egoic triad, the more it fights to remain your identity. Your old patterns will suddenly become more attractive during a potential transformative experience. In order to break through, however, the old self must die. The old wine skin must be thrown away. It’s only by losing yourself that you fully enter the mystery of God, wherein lies your true essence. As one famous saying goes:
You are not a human being having a spiritual experience; you are a spiritual being having a human experience.
Once this internal shift happens, you'll begin to see your thoughts, sensations, and emotions objectively, creating space between you as the eternal observer and the human vessel you inhabit. Perhaps a rephrasing of Descartes famous saying is necessary:
God as Stillness
In the beginning was God and only God. Nothing else existed. If there was no-thing, then God has to likewise be no-thing. God is, was, and always will be God alone. When God created out of nothing, God could only radiate what He was in his essence: Love (1 John 4:8).
A Christian mystic living in the 14th century who penned The Cloud of Unknowing said:
For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love He can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens.
God cannot be conceptualized. As soon as we attempt to conceptualize God, we reduce God to the level of our own egoic triad. Our very concepts about God become the idols we worship. We officially make God into our own image. People have tried to conceptualize God through the use of various words and symbols, but neither words nor symbols can reveal God's essence. This is why Scripture alone fails to describe God, because God can't be described! Every word or symbol is but a human expression of their own limited understanding of God. God cannot be put in a box or located in one place. As soon as you declare God as a single concept, location, or personality, you belittle God as an object in an even greater universe that contains both God and what God is not. God cannot be the Creator of something larger than Himself.
To see God, we must allow ourselves to be molded by the mysterious presence that only He is.
Be still and know I Am God.
Psalm 46:10
To know God's essence, you need to move beyond your personal thoughts, feelings, and sensations and experience God in the stillness of the night. In the stillness between all things created, God can be found alone. If God can be found here, God can be found everywhere. He can be found in a tree or a rock. He can be found in the most repulsive human being. He can be found in great chaos. He can even be found in suffering. As 14th century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich said, "The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything." This is the discovery of the mystics. You cannot know the light of God until you experience the darkness of yourself first. Stillness only requires the willingness to surrender completely to the Divine Mystery. Once you have successfully shifted away from conceptual self-centered consciousness and laid your foundation on the consciousness arising from the Mystery, you will be led in the healing and the transformation of your egoic triad to better house the Spirit of God.
How we view God determines how we view others, how we view the world, and how we view ourselves. How we view God determines every action we take and every reaction we have. May you free yourself from a fixed mindset and embrace the eternal growth in the Mystery.
Practice: Be Still and Know I Am God Meditation
The practice of inner silence can be initiated by the meditation Be Still and Know I Am God.
Find a comfortable place where you're free from distraction. Close your eyes and begin by observing your breath. You don't need to alter it in any way. Just observe it with no judgment. Then begin to recognize your egoic triad when it arises. As the various thoughts, emotions, and sensations show themselves, observe them too without judgment and let them go. Don't attach to them. If you receive a certain image of God, thank the image and release it. When you get to a place of inner calmness, repeat the following words in your heart:
Be Still and Know I Am God.
Make this a daily meditation. Once this practice becomes habit, your inner and outer worlds will see a radical transformation, and you will clear room within yourself for God to speak directly to you and through you.
Quotes:
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."
Albert Einstein
"Jesus replied, 'Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being reborn again."
John 3:3
"If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God."
St. Augustine
"Father, Son, and Holy Spirit mean that the mystery beyond us, the mystery among us, and the mystery within us are all the same mystery."
Frederick Buechner
"Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand."
Neil Armstrong
"The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts. While I understood both why and how the early church had decided to wrap those mysteries in protective layers of orthodox belief, the beliefs never seized my heart the way the mysteries did."
Barbara Brown Taylor
"The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything."
Julian of Norwich
"In the faces of men and women I see God."
Walt Whitman
"If you are patient in a moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow."
Chinese Proverb
"When feeling is lost, I find meaning in the inner silence of my soul that was unfelt before."
Saumya
"Knowledge is learning something everyday. Wisdom is letting go of something everyday."
Zen proverb
"Only the inner silence is yours. No-one gave it to you. You were born with it and you will die with it. Thoughts have been given to you. You have been conditioned to them."
Osho
"Inner silence is the event horizon to a vast ocean of wisdom and wonder."
Amy Larson
"Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places."
C.S. Lewis
"Just as you cannot understand the path of the wind or the mystery of a tiny baby growing in its mother's womb, so you cannot understand the activity of God, who does all things."
Ecclesiastes 11:5
"God is a question without an answer; God is a mystery without a solution."
Unknown
"No eye has ever seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love Him."
1 Corinthians 2:9
"The mystery of God's love would not be a mystery if we knew all the answers."
Billy Graham
"You are encircled by the arms of the mystery of God."
Hildegard of Bingen
"Knowledge is knowing what to say. Wisdom is knowing whether or not to say it."
Unknown
"Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life."
Eleanor Roosevelt
"Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty."
Will Durant
"To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe."
Marilyn vas Savant
"Wisdom is the daughter of experience."
Leonardo da Vinci
"Knowledge talks; wisdom listens."
Jimi Hendrix
"The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation. When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then come the new life and all that is needed."
Joseph Campbell
"Only those willing to walk through the dark night will be able to see the beauty of the moon and and the brilliance of the stars."
Archbishop Socrates Vilegas
"In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God."
St. John of the Cross
"Silence is God's first language."
St. John of the Cross
No comments:
Post a Comment