Many Paths to Wholeness

In my realm, the metaphysical, wholeness refers to the totality of reality, whatever that might include and whatever name we might give it. The whole enchilada – God - Infinite, Compassionate Intelligence – Allah; it is bigger than all of our labels put together.

My handy pocket dictionary defines wholeness as an organic unity. That feels right to me.

How do religions reveal wholeness in ways that people can relate to and practice? We feel like observers of life so much of the time, separate from others and from this huge, magnificent universe we live in. 

The Science of Mind philosophy benefits from being a synthesis of several, powerful world wisdom traditions. We teach that the cosmos, seen and unseen, is a singular consciousness which has complexified and ordered itself over time into billions of things within a vast web of interdependence. Or, as Sri Aurobindo put it, “Existence that multiplied itself for sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so it might find itself innumerably.”  

We come to Sunday services where we practice affirmative prayer, meditate, sing together, and hear uplifting talks. Like other faith traditions, we have both outer and inner forms through which to come to grips with the immensity of reality. For most people in any religion, following the outer form is enough to enrich their lives. Mystics of all traditions feel a deep urge to go beyond the forms, to comprehend this immensity intimately – now there’s a contradiction in terms!

 One of my favorite aspects of the Science of Mind philosophy is our delight in learning from other groups. I am very much an interfaith kind of person. From time to time here, I’ll showcase the brilliance of some other tradition than my own.

Today, I’m looking at the oldest known faith tradition, that of Australia’s First Peoples. Originally spanning 400 or more languages and at least as many spiritualities, I share here are a sprinkling of insights from that vastness of time and culture.

We are cautioned that humans are prone to exploitative behavior if not constantly reminded they are interconnected with the rest of creation. We are told that we are spiritual beings here on earth having a human experience. And we can deepen our intimacy with the cosmos and each other by following an Australian First Peoples’ 10 commandments, a set of dos rather than don’ts. They are:

Express your individual creativity.

Realize that you are accountable.

Before birth, you agreed to help others.

Continually mature emotionally.

Entertain others with positive energies.

Be a steward of your energies.

Indulge in music.

Strive to achieve wisdom.

Learn self-discipline.

Observe without judging.

Truly, fine guidelines for living; rich enough to sustain any follower of the forms and deep enough in practice to satisfy the mystic in me. In you too, I hope.

Late Entry Tonight

My weekly entry is a few days late this week. I have been focusing on a favorite spiritual practice for the past 5 days or so - utter relaxation!
After an intense summer in both academic and heart awareness terms plus the ongoing development of my own ministry direction, I was ready for a break. I took the Labor Day holiday literally - there are many forms of labor, as a friend said - and extended it by a couple of days.
I visited several friends, talked and laughed, spent a joyful hour on the phone with my son on the other side of the US, listened to great music (thanks again to Phish and a techno-savvy pal), went out to lunch, sipped margueritas under the coolness of the misting system another friend has hooked up at her place, went to the movies, toured a Greek Festival with yet another friend...
I mainly ignored email, school or dishes... even this blog.
I read a whole novel and I slept in once or twice.  Ahhhh. Good practice.

About my developing ministry, it is called The Wisdom Bridge; A Home for Intercultural/Interfaith Harmony and Celebration. I am interested in promoting dialogue across different belief systems. The inaugural Wisdom Bridge events are a series of workshops and classes exploring the realities of Muslim life and religion in the US and abroad while exposing the huge amount of misinformation currently being circulated.
Next iteration of this work takes place this Sunday, Sept. 11. After my Sunday noon talk for Center for Spiritual Living, Davis titled "Many Paths to Wholeness" I'll facilitate a two hour workshop called "Embracing Muslim Lives." We'll read and discuss several scenarios from real Muslim American lives, using these as vehicles to understand various human levels of meaning as well as some metaphysical inplications.
Next, this Wisdom Bridge work will show up as a 3 week course in October through the Experimental College, the student-run independent learning institution on the University of California, Davis campus. This expanded presentation will have time to explore the many cultures of Islam globally.

The one unifying idea I can find between the two sections of this blog entry is this. Take time off. Have lots and lots of fun doing things that you won't regret later. That spiritual practice will nourish the helping and healing work you do the rest of the time.

Glimpses of Spiritual Psychology

Spiritual psychology, what is that? It is a helping profession dedicated to relief of human emotional suffering, grounded in the idea that all persons begin life as shining lights of holistic integrity, seeking to guide clients back to that awareness of wholeness; long the realm of the shaman. Spiritual psychology is like the old joke quoting Gandhi as saying about Western Civilization, “It would be a good idea.” 
Spirituality - that misty field of esoteric somewhat unknowables. Psychology - awash in neurochemistry, still desperate to be thought of as a real science. Can it be that we are perhaps on the way to a blending of the two, without fear of one swallowing the other – of psychology drowning in a sea of superstition or spirituality disappearing under the weight of materialism?                                                                                                            Humanist and transpersonal branches of psychology have initiated dialogue with the psychologies of emotional healing and actualization from other cultures; Sufi, Zen Buddhist and Yoga come to mind. A rich world of indigenous practices await our acceptance.                                                                                                            From the perspective of Religious Science, all this cross-fertilization of ideas and practices, including the development of psychology itself, is the expansive creativity of God manifesting Itself into form. Awareness or consciousness is a property innate to all matter; one of its qualities is increasing order amid expanding complexity. I believe that out of the wealth and breadth of theories and practices blending in the West, from psychoanalysis to the Science of Mind to Sufi practices that open the heart, humans are cooking up the consciousness to advance to the next step, the marriage of psychology and an intercultural spirituality which can utilize the insights from all the world’s wisdom traditions.                                                                                                               This spiritual psychology will effectively address the stresses of the modern world. It will celebrate people’s yearning toward the transcendent and see the whole person. It will honor all paths to wholeness and readmit the idea of the sacred into the search for emotional health. Spiritual psychology will help us remember we are Divine beings when we forget, as the yogis teach; will encourage us to detach from our yearnings and judgments in order to find relief from suffering, as the Buddha taught; and will playfully dance and chant us into love and peace the Sufi way. And, in mixing together the powerful and peaceful practices of the world, spiritual psychology will develop a global heart tank (rather than think tank), a United Nations of spirituality. 

Befriend Yourself

You can nurture a healthy friendship with yourself. It’s a sure way to build inner security, inner trust. Listening within ourselves with an attitude of friendship is an essential spiritual practice.Two others are key to true security - gratitude and forgiveness.

Gratitude has been mentioned by enlightened masters of all the world’s wisdom traditions as the royal road or fast track to an inner sense of security. Be grateful for every single thing you can think of, many times a day. Make a game of it.

Feeling bored sometime? Make a list, mental or written, of all the things you are grateful for at that moment. It's a fine way to pass the time while waiting in line, for example. When we express genuine gratitude to another person, we build a sense of two-way trust. It is the same inside us as it is between us.

As for forgiveness for ourselves and for others, it is never about forgetting damage we have suffered. We take care not to move toward more of that. It is not about condoning.

It is only about dropping the righteousness we may feel, the victim or aggrieved stance. We stop manufacturing emotional heat about the event or the person. We forgive ourselves for the part we have played in the situation, we bless the other participants and we move on. We acknowledge that each element of the event and each person is God participating in the playing out of life. There is nothing but God, anywhere. That includes you and me. Humans blend transient, mortal life with eternal, immortal life. So, allow the Divine in you to forgive the human imperfection in you and in all others. It's the healthy thing to do.

What we do not forgive we waste our energy carting around; at the same time, we school ourselves to be on guard against that same judgment being leveled at ourselves. Criticism of others is a sure sign of self-judgment, of keeping ourselves walking on eggshells – in other words, self-fear. This is stress. 
What we think about others is we think about ourselves too. What a sad thing for God to do to Itself.

We can befriend ourselves and feel much more secure with ourselves, in the world and with God.

It’s a lifelong process of learning to love and trust – an essential foundation for expanded awareness of God within, speaking as intuition.

Spirit, as you, deserves no less.

Is Beauty Meaningless?

In my nearly four years in graduate consciousness studies I've repeatedly been reminded that, amid all its glorious insights, modern science insists that existence is meaningless. As someone who has come to my current appreciation of the Science of Mind philosophy through my love of science, I have always taken this with caution. After all, scientists vary in their spiritual beliefs like the rest of the population.
But this week, the starkness of that existential nihilism, that life has no meaning or intrinsic value, hit my heart full blast.
I'm in the habit of searching through the DVD collection at a local library and found there a film I've been wanting to see, the science fiction drama, Sunshine. As a sci-fi buff for over 50 years deeply enamored of our star, I just had to see the effects used to depict a mission to the sun. And they were glorious. While the film is largely a psychological drama about the stresses of the mission, the sun was a main player - gorgeous, awesomely powerful and horribly dangerous without any intention to be so.
As is my habit, I played both of the film's commentaries while puttering about and doing chores. The first commentary was a normal one with the director, Danny Boyle. I enjoy hearing about the creation of a film; it is such a totally collaborative mix of arts. The second commentary was more unusual, with Dr. Brian Cox of the University of Manchester, England, the science advisor on the film. What a treat, I thought, to hear about the dance between drama and fact from the perspective of the scientist. And it was a treat I recommend to anyone fascinated by physics and astronomy.
Amid the details of compromise, scientific rigor and personal insight Dr. Cox repeatedly spoke of the beauty of the universe and it's intrinsic elegance. He confided that this beauty is what motivated him as a scientist and stated his not so surprising belief that this beauty motivates most of his colleagues, whether they are physicists, biologists, astronomers or specialists in other sciences. Over and over again, he spoke of the beauty of nature, the beauty of the sun, the beauty of the universe. I could hear the passion in his voice, the aliveness of his words.
Then, somewhere amidst all that, he "reminded" the listeners that, of course, all this beauty is meaningless, just happened that way. He went so far as to proclain human life as meaningless too. I found myself speaking aloud to his voice on the TV. "Hey, Doc, all that beauty? Is beauty meaningless, Doc? Is elegance of no importance?" The beauty is certainly meaningful to him; he had gone on and on about it, to my delight. What about the elegance which mathematicians and experimental scientists rely on as evidence in the absence of more grounded data?
I submit that Dr. Cox and all those who insist that life is meaningless are missing the messages of their own hearts. Beauty is more that the familiarity with our surroundings down through the ages. Those who lived in Nazi concentration camps for years probably never came to see their barracks and barbed wire as beautiful.
While at some level, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, at another level it is an ultimate value. Dr. Cox never had to explain why he thinks the universe is beautiful; we all get it.
It simply is so, just as love simply is so. Those who say human life is meaningless would do well to compare the love they carry for their children, parents or life partners to their motives for being scientists. Love and beauty always will transcend the cool rationality of their work.
Quantify that love, Doc. Dissect it. Show it to me. Where is it? Do you dare to say it is meaningless? If so, I wish for you an awakening to the precious, awesome magnificence intrinsic to life, the universe, the human heart and everything.

Sit to Sense Inner Wisdom

First, thanks are in order to Rev. Betsy Elliott whose Sunday message today brought me back to my inner self.
Over the years, I developed a subtle form of meditation in which I found the silence behind and between experiences, a rich world embedded in the ordinary world. Because I spent so much time aware of the silence that always is going on, I could meditate deeply while doing other things, at least for moments at a time - in check-out lines, in waiting rooms, in airports, while listening to music, while doing chores. Joy and peace accompanied me throughout my day. I felt grounded almost effortlessly, at least for a while.
All that has been put in the past tense because I have lost that ability during ministerial school. The way I see it, I have become too focused on doing, loving all the doing brought to me by my classes. I have also discovered the thrill of service to others when it springs from my authentic core of gifts, more doing. All those joyful doings have taught me that my life has purpose and that I can dare to do what my heart says yes to. This has been very good for me. I am less selfish and less fearful of life.
Along the road to uncovering the joy of authentic doing, I let my meditation practice languish. I forgot that the ability to find the meditative sweet spot within experience was actually rooted in many years of sitting. The capacity to find the silence behind experience came from those years of disciplined sitting.
In Rev. Betsy's talk today she said "sit and sense the Presence" and I really heard her. I came home and sat. I found moments of silence intermittently between my mind's now mostly undisciplined chatter. I have much to recover. I am glad to be reoriented to the Presence of Joy, Love and Peace within. My outer experience of life will again flow with abundant harmony as I reclaim this great gift.

The Scripture of Nature

The phrase "the scripture of nature" comes from then Atlantic Monthly writer Fitzhugh Ludlow. I heard it in one of the lovely PBS National Parks films by Ken Burns. A perfect phrase for the profound feelings and healing energies of spending time in nature.

Go out into the natural world. When I started doing that as a child, I noticed the deep stillness behind the rustling leaves and gurgling stream, behind the sounds of birds and insects. The profound, awesome still presence of nature has always been my favorite experience.

Going out into nature was my way to meditate as a young person, though I did not have those words. I felt it though, much the same way I now also feel the calm witness presence in me when I meditate.

We live in the world. We are it and it is us. We are as beautiful as the Eagle Nebula. We are as powerful as the sun. We are as eternal as consciousness.

Lift your perspective to the birds in flight. Be as tenacious as a green shoot pushing up between slabs of concrete. Live in the flow like a river winding its way through obstacles. The Tao Te Ching says “The highest good is like water. It flows in places people disregard. It does not strive.”

And as for diversity – oh my! How lovely if humanity could live like a forest or meadow – many species of trees or wildflowers living in dynamic harmony. Each one claiming its space but without need to eradicate the other kinds around it.

Truly, whether we thinks of ourselves as spiritual or religious people or not, being in nature restores something essential to the human spirit.

Or, as the Seer of the Sierras, John Muir put it (also found in one of the National Parks films):

 “The eye of the poet or seer never closes on the kinship of all God’s creatures and his heart ever beats in sympathy with great and small alike as Earthborn companions and fellow mortals equally dependent on Heaven’s eternal Love.”

Go getcha some Love out in nature this week!