The Angel Way


I was born animal and angel.

Two ways within me so seemingly at odds:

The scrappy fighter and the compassionate lover.

The incessant hunger that screams and hollers;
and the silent serenity of Being.

The craving and the caring.

The getting and the giving.

The ambitious and the helpful.

Every insecure, mean and selfish human quality;
and the way of truth, love and kindness.

These are the extremes we straddle.

Two souls, ensconced in one body, one mind, one heart.

I am caught between the two and celebrate this stormy adventure!

To be caught below in the animal soul is a hell I could never truly bear.

To be caught above — fully and completely above — is surely enlightenment itself…. Heaven on Earth? Probably so, but I don’t know who to ask for verification.

To be caught below is easy and simple. Easy because it requires very little effort, like gravity. Simple because it requires no choice. No choice at all. The animal soul chooses us, in fact, right out of the gate, before we can even conceive of choice. The animal soul is our ancestral lineage, deeply embedded in our DNA and later reinforced through observation, osmosis and learning. The animal soul is the system software of our human life from which all of our default settings are established. Settings that remain active for a lifetime, beneficial or not, lest we change them of our own accord.

To be caught above is pretty damn impossible. We like to think enlightenment is in our grasp, but fail to be honest about what is actually required. A life lived purely from the angelic soul demands nothing less than a complete, unwavering, lifetime commitment to letting go of everything — every single thing — the animal soul covets and hordes and fights to keep and protect. The animal soul will fight to the death to maintain its unearned supremacy.

The practical mystic knows that the way is to inhabit both souls, to walk with one foot in each world.

She does not reject the animal in her; she tames and regulates is impulsivities, she makes use of its strengths, she gives it important jobs to do. She takes care of it, feeds it, corrals it, and ever keeps it in a service role. Just as would a farmer.

She gives her passion, her interest, her curiosity to the ways of the angel in her. Just as there is the animal way of doing anything, there is the angel way. She wonders, often, throughout her days, “what is the angel way?”

The angel you see above is from a lithograph print, The Virtue of Compassion, by William Alan Shirley.

The Other-Worldly Beauty of Watson Lake


July 26, 2010.
Just back from a week in Prescott, Arizona, our favorite place (nearby) to escape the summer heat. Prescott is home to about a half a dozen lakes, each with a unique beauty and personality. Watson Lake is especially beautiful for its round granite rock formations, known as the Granite Dells.
Here are a few of the pictures I took:

Watson Lake Prescott Arizona









The Space Within Every Atom


“Within the atom

the electrons revolve about the central proton

with about the same comparative room the planets have

as they revolve about the sun in the space of our solar system.”

The Urantia Book

 the atom

solar system distance of planets from sun

pictures courtesy of SpaceStationInfo.com and Windows2Universe.org

Madness


Zorba the Greek

In Celebration of Marriage


It is more noble to give yourself completely to one person than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.

I love this quote. I was once a laborer, where I found refuge from my fear of deep, committed love. I said no to marriage many times, afraid of the box it would paint me in, and really, to the painful divorce it would inevitably end in. I had little trust in my ability to marry and remain married. A social defect inherited from my parents and reinforced by my culture.

That’s not to say I didn’t try. I did fall in love and I was engaged more than once.

In 1999, I ended a very promising engagement to a wonderful man who for several years patiently and painfully endured my wavering commitment to commitment. After our final conversation, I drove away in my car, parked in a secluded mountain field and cried uncontrollably for nearly an hour. I didn’t know it then, but I was grieving my incapacity to give myself to love.

I bumbled through an awkward period of despair, mourning, self-hatred, and finally, piercing honesty, the soul’s great liberator.

And this is what I learned: a long, long time ago I stopped loving but didn’t know it. I believed I loved, and as best as I was able, I did love – I loved many things and people and places. Once and a while I even felt love, which I savored like a rare dessert. I knew it would soon be gone and I may not taste it again for a long long time.

The normal everyday love I experienced was dry and dull, like a black and white photocopy of a beautiful sunset. Love as I personally experienced it was not the sunset itself, it was the photocopy, a second-hand representation. My capacity for love, it dawned on me, was so self-protectively withheld that it was little more than an idea in my mind. That’s where love goes when our heart has closed.

This was the truth that liberated me.

I didn’t come to this truth on my own. I found it with the help of a friend who I happened to meet during the self-hatred period (bad timing, it might seem). My friend was kind and free from guile and early on saw and understood my pain and flaws and all my misguided attempts to find love while avoiding true connection. My friend saw through me and loved me anyway. I had never been loved like this, not even by my self.

A friend like this is precious, and if you ever find one, don’t take them for granted, don’t let them go, lest a pearl of great price will slip from your hands. I, for once, didn’t let such a good one go.

Five years ago today, I married my friend. My love for him ignited in me a special type of fearlessness. And during these five years, I have dared bare open my heart. I dared to love and be loved, to see and be seen, to trust and be trusted, to grow and to be challenged. I am a changed and better person, all to love’s credit – a triumvirate of love: Bill’s love for me, my love for Bill and our love for Love itself.

Now we walk together in the light of a living sunset. I still experience black and white photocopy love now and then, but the rare treat of real love, deeply felt love, is an everyday reality. The bar of love has been raised. And I like it here.

To my darling Bill,

My best friend, spiritual ally, travel companion extraordinare, co-adventurer in growth, science partner in life’s Laboratory of Love, and co-explorer of the angelic planes,

Happy anniversary,

I love you.

Atop the Grand Canyon


A photo from a visit to the Grand Canon in July 2009

Related: Pictures








If God Lives in Me As Me


If I believe that God lives in me as me, then what do I do about that? How do I begin to make that real? Is this what “realizing God” really means?

Typically we look for God in a church, in a guru, in a marriage or a child, on a mountaintop, in a sacred text. And we’re right to look in all these places. God is meant to be found and experienced everywhere. Where we fail to look, though, is in ourselves. I have been wondering why.

When I consider the idea that God lives in me as me, there are no inner disagreements. Not so much at this point because I know its true, but that I believe it to be true. It strikes loudly the chord of truth in my heart. It feels true, all through my being and feeling and thinking. No part of me, consciously, disbelieves this idea.

Why then don’t I act by now as if it were true? What impedes the translation of the cognitive belief into living experience? There are times when I feel a divine quality in myself and times when I touch such an inner depth that I am filled for a moment with light. This is what every seeker longs for.

But the periodic taste of God is not enough. And though I know that I will not in this lifetime fully embody my divine essence, I am certain of my birthright to increasingly identify with the consciousness of God. This is my one real craving. All other cravings are mere substitutes and pointless distractions.

And here may lie a clue to the question, why don’t I more fully embody my divine essence? False cravings. Another word for this is addiction. I think that underneath every addiction lies our craving for God. When I first considered this idea years ago, I started looking for my addictions. There are the obvious, and these are the first to tackle. But dig deeper, and it’s startling to realize: we can be addicted to just about anything. And we are, I bet you, addicted far more than we acknowledge.

Addicted to love, to fear, to movies, to attention, opinions, routines, drama, adrenaline, worries. These subtle addictions are unconscious habits, and ultimately are points of identification that lure us away from our identification with God consciousness. Maybe it can be said that our unconscious patterns are obscurations to God.

If this is true, then one approach to knowing God is to clear away the obscurations. Clarify and simplify ourselves. Piece by piece, layer by layer. A lifetime endeavor that may never be done, but the beauty is in the unfolding realization, not the attainment of perfection itself. I’ve been trying this for awhile, and have never felt more alive and deeply satisfied.

There’s a catch though, the more of God I begin to know, the more I sense and see the obscurations that continue to conceal my divine essence. My craving grows, but my discernment of what the craving is really for grows sharper.

Clarity and Wisdom


Chinese characters clarity wisdom

Wisdom has been on my mind.


In my personal experience of growing older, and especially in the last year, so many of my naive notions of the world have been dropping like flies. One of them is the belief that adults will act like adults. Another is the belief that people will naturally act in their highest interest. An especially archaic one is the assumption that the people in charge know what they’re doing and can be trusted.

Childhood ideals will last a lifetime unless some internal or external agent challenges them. And when they’re challenged, it can hurt. Like a child’s security blanket, our ideals cover up insecurities, uncertainties and uncomfortable truths we’d rather avoid, forever if possible. Remove the ideals, and the insecurity, uncertainty and discomfort are exposed. As adults, we have the capacity to handle the truth, but how we resist the loss of innocence. The bliss of ignorance.

But there’s an upside that makes growing up a pretty sweet proposition. In place of our lost innocence, in the empty void that remains when a childish ideal is exposed as false, there is a movement toward clarity and objective perception. We grasp a bit more of reality as it is, not as we want it to be. Our awareness and perspective grow wider. We become a little more wise.

I once, not so long ago, naively believed that wisdom is a natural process that every adult readily attains through common sense and life experience. That lovely, hot chocolate childhood ideal lies also at my feet, shattered into pieces.

In place of that ideal emerged the sobering truth that the entire human race suffers from a kind of wisdom deficit disorder. Of epidemic proportions. I look and look, and only see tiny pockets of it here and there. In the places where wisdom is needed most, it is the most absent.

Where is the Wisdom?, I asked in my last post. But the question I’m really interested in is:

What is wisdom and how do we cultivate it?

A good starting point is to uncover why we’re not wise. Well, here’s one: the lack of clarity, objectivity, honesty and clear perception.

Human minds have a tremendous capacity for story telling. We tell ourselves all kinds of stories that we accept as truth, and we have the intellect to rationalize and justify them. How much of what we believe to be true seems true because we want it to be true? How dangerous is that?

Perhaps one reason for our wisdom deficit disorder is the fact that we’re not very interested in the truth. Yes, it’s inarguable that "we can’t handle the truth," but we are also quite inconvenienced by it. The truth, if we are even willing to perceive it, thwarts our interests again and again. It refuses to support our wishes, hopes, dreams, preferences, desires and sentiments.

Yet it is our very attachment to these things that make us unwise (and at times really stupid). Without clarity, without objectivity and a willingness to continuously expand our perspective, we cannot be wise. Though we refuse to accept it, truth really is in our best interest.

My favorite Platonic dialogue is the Gorgias, in which Socrates asks, "is it better to be an orator, who professes to know the truth and tries to convince everyone else of it; or is it better to be a philosopher, who knows he may not know the truth, but spends his whole life seeking it?"

The real beauty of the Gorgias is Socrates’ description of the philosopher:

A lover of truth who is willing to be wrong in order to be clear.

This is my first understanding of wisdom and how to cultivate it.

Life in Soft Focus


psychological denial

A psychology professor once told me that despite all its bad press, denial serves a very useful and necessary purpose, a purpose he called good.

Denial is essential for our survival and sanity. If your mind didn’t soft focus the harsh edges of reality once in a while or yield up a blind spot altogether, you would, sooner or later, go insane.

This was probably less true centuries ago, but now, in our 24/7 electronic age where advertisements and news and every other conceivable piece of information wallpapers our world, we have to filter some of it out. It’s just too much for any human mind to take in and metabolize.

So, while I don’t agree that greed is good, I do believe that denial is good. Not indiscriminate denial, but a type of selective denial that functions from a basic understanding that we tend to dwell too much on things that don’t really matter while we ignore the things that do.

I’ll say that again because it’s so pervasively true, unrecognized and influential in our lives.

We think and worry too much about the trifles of living and don’t think enough about that which really matters.

It’s dysfunctional denial, and we do it unconsciously. And if you think about it, it’s very bad for the evolution of our species. It’s at the root of so many of the messes that never get cleaned up or sorted out. Personal messes, social messes, political messes, economic messes. When our problems and troubles get too gnarly or overwhelming, we often turn the other way. Or simply soft focus. Blur the raw facts of the matter and the painful implications. This is why politicians and lobbyists and news pundits and advertisers have fantastic job security. They have a lot of work to do. They are very busy, night and day, orchestrating the soft focus that keeps us all going, relatively sane, in this very messy world.

They understand and service that deep human tendency for pain avoidance.

They understand and capitalize on the fact that we don’t want to deal with the really tough stuff of life. We don’t want to know everything, we hate being uncomfortable, we loathe moral complexity, and we will fight to the death any piece of reality that might shatter our ideals. We refuse to accept the unacceptable. Soft focus the unacceptable and life is made bearable. Soft focus is an opiate we all lean on.

The problem with our 24/7 info-wallpapered world is that others are doing our soft focus for us. They’re choosing where to put our attention and where to put our denial.

Denial is good, but only when we’re choosing it for ourselves with some degree of wisdom and a desire for clarity. And really, we don’t choose what we deny. That’s an unconscious process. We choose what we look at.

Another way of saying that is that we are generally in a soft focus state most of the time. Denial is an involuntary defense mechanism there to ensure our survival. It is our default setting. The act of paying attention is a willful, voluntary motion. It is a choice, an effort, a commitment to what is real.

Don’t worry about denial. It will always take care of itself. Worry about not paying attention.

Look at what you’re not paying attention to that you otherwise should. In your own life and in the world. We mature and evolve to the extent that we’re willing to see what we fear, and then deal with what we thought we were afraid of.

This is how neglected messes get cleaned up.

After all, not doing anything is usually a much scarier prospect.

Direct Experience


bug nebula

Hasn’t it become the way of the spiritual seeker to travel from church to church, teacher to teacher, picking up pieces of truth and wisdom here and there, in search of that elusive magnificence we can’t really know or understand until we find it?

We are looking for Truth, we are looking for Wisdom, we are looking for Love, we are looking for Liberation. We look and look and look, and often only find the uncapitalized, humanized, cognitized versions of our Divine Essence.

We might be temporarily satisfied with crumbs of God, and the most tiny crumbs can move us to our core and even change us in some way. But isn’t it true that when the crumb dissolves and the effect has passed, we find ourselves back in the desert, parched and hungry? Those of us who are most fortunate recognize the crumbs as crumbs and hunger for the meal. We want to sit at the table with God. We want the experience, not the words.

This is my constant angst. The words don’t nourish, but words are the medium I have known. More words, better words have not changed this (I have tried). The road to God, the place at the table, is not of words or even the mind. As Eckhart Tolle says, the words merely point. In this sense, the words are valuable. For human beings, they are essential. Initially.

The great teachings, the best of words, point us to the road to God, but they don’t get us on the road. They are not the vehicle. They can’t truly take us anywhere. The vehicle, the direct access point to God is experience itself. The better teachings talk about Direct Experience. That is what will satisfy our hunger. And the mystics know that that is the only true happiness in this world.

Since understanding this, I look to teachers and teaching who are experienced in Direct Experience, who have themselves been at God’s table and sat with God. Finding these souls in such a spiritually barren world is quite a thing. How do we know who really Knows? There are those who say they Know, and what do they have to say? They say, get quiet, be still, meditate, go deep into nature, chant the name of God, worship — do any practice that will move you beyond the words in your mind into the expanse of your Heart. God’s table is not far from us. It is in our Heart. God waits patiently there for you.

Image: View of the Bug Nebula from the Hubble Space Telescope. See an enlarged view
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