I first encountered death as a child

I first encountered death as a child with a beloved parakeet discovered at the bottom of his cage. I buried him in a wooden jewelry chest under a cherry tree.

Then, a neighbor who had given me a toy top died. I cried alone in my bedroom when I heard my parents discussing the news downstairs. Before I was ten years I saw a man riding a bicycle fall over in a school yard. His pants were wet and he did not move. I learned later that he was the father of a classmate -- I had watched him die, not knowing what I was seeing and not knowing what to do.

I've known at least six suicides. Some were dear friends. Joe killed himself when I was 20, as had a college friend the Christmas before. Laurel died on railroad tracks and another hung himself. They all died violently, each death a disaster.

Peter was murdered when I was 26. Peter's wife Linda had died in a car crash the year before when she was thrown though the windshield after a tire blew out and the car tumbled. I was with my sister-in-law as she was dying from cancer four years ago. Mario, bigger than life, taught me the trick of selling anything to anyone. He died from Lou Gehrig's disease two years ago.

I watched my father die of coronary disease in a hospital when I was 28. Last year my mother died of old age in my home while I was giving her a last drink of water.

Last month I went to the funeral of a good friend who called me for help shortly before his unexpected death. There was no help that anyone could give, for there was no help that he would accept. Is an alcoholic a suicide or a victim? For him, for others, and for myself I have done what I can to fight death, to slow it down, and to hold it back. From this I have learned that death is patient and relentless.

I have also learned that every death leaves the Universe smaller and diminished beyond our capacity to see. The people of my parent's generation have completely gone and those of my generation are beginning to pass away. Funerals are more frequent. Each time the Universe is left smaller.

But I am blessed by my long life. These blessings include courage and perspective. Tonight, as I changed my daughter's diaper, I kissed her and she smiled at me through her large sleepy eyes. I felt that the Universe had expanded with her arrival. My beloved adopted daughters in their diapers have confirmed that God's Mercy exceeds God's Wrath.

However, until tonight I did not know the extent by which Mercy exceeds Wrath.

Now I see the difference is infinite.

Goodnight moon.

"Let there be light"

The first commandment is not about photons or the luminous images of vivid imaginations. It is not a prohibition of improper behavior. It promises no wrath.

Instead, "Let there be light" is a description of the path to Divinity. It is a recipe for action.

It is a demand for the energized output of goodness.

This first commandment is not aimed at the void, it is aimed at our hearts.

Polish the mirror

Perhaps you are an atheist. That is an honorable approach. But don't stop now. Go further and clean your path to the Real.

Sufis say when you know yourself you will know God, and when you know God you will know yourself.

I trust you will do both. You are the great soul who has the wisdom to douse your atheism with the same bucket you washed away old notions of Divinity.

The method of enlightenment, they say, is to polish the mirror.

I see the scouring cloth in your hand.

God was watching her, agape

It does not matter in the least that she could not hear God.

God was watching her, agape.


From the page: "Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, "Listen and do not hear" the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me" that I let Him have [a] free hand."

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction "that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared."

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html

The dream

When we are not feeling love we are wandering aimlessly in a meaningless dream.

While it may be entertaining, mundane, or at times filled with terror and anguish, without feeling love, it does not mean anything at all.

"It's not a dream" you say. "Certainly I am more than nothing! Clearly, my actions make a difference."

"Prove it" I kindly reply, pointing to the inescapable relativity of all things and thoughts and the impermanence of every structure.

You respond, "Life has unspeakable cruelty and insufferable pain."

Bouncing a crying baby on my knee I suggest, "So does a nightmare"

So here we are thinking about ethics, poverty, compassion, war, and nonviolent action, while stuck with tools made from frothy relativistic dreamstuff.

Is there an ethical framework that works here, there, and everywhere, even in dreams, even in nightmares?

Please don't be afraid

The salvation argument presumes there is something that needs to be saved. There are several problem with that view. First, of course, it requires that something needs to be broken. That "something" happens to be you, me, and everybody else. Using a standard monotheistic definition of God as Creator, we might ask, would God create something that was broken or susceptible to breakdown? I suggest a good answer is "no." God is not a clumsy oaf and nobody around here is broken.

The second problem with worries about salvation is the presumption of the existence of a "plan." Unless somebody is using some sort of special "secret" dictionary, "plan" means a series of staged actions over time, or a scheme, or a map or diagram, or an intention that has not been fully executed. Is time God's master? Would God wait to act? Does God need to write things down or tie a string to an anthropomorphic finger? Again, I think not. Just as bandits "don't need no stinking badges" God does not need a plan. Also, I respectfully direct your attention to the preceding paragraph, which points out that nothing is broken, so nothing needs fixing.

Third, there are often worries about whether the "plan" will "work." Will "the plan" really move someone from a state of being broken, to a state of being unbroken, over time? That's the heart of the worry. After all, some structures are lovingly built with the best of intentions but they fall down like the famous Tacoma Narrows Bridge or the World Trade Center. Here again, the fear collapses into anthropomorphic nonsense. After all, there is nothing to fix, no plan to fix it, and no new action needs to be taken.

So, if asked the question, "Have you done enough to be saved?" I would have to respond as did Marisa Tomei's character in My Cousin Vinnie:

"Answer: It's a bullshit question."

A good way to work through those kinds of "you may be going to Hell" questions is to take them apart and see the limits placed upon God. Throw out the limits you know are goofy and smile at the limits your version of reality demands of you today.

Another good way to respond to just about any version of the "is everything okay? worry, is to direct the question to a baby, who will give that straw man all the consideration it is due while she fills up a diaper and reaches for a hug.

So informed, I have a few more questions . . .

Whence the Light?

When the tree branches wave in our dreams, we would do well to remember there is no wind inside our skulls. We create and animate every detail for our own amusement, enlightenment, or terror.

Likewise, when the light shines it comes from you, not to you.

"Opaque curtains, translucent veils, clear windows, open doors, bright mirrors, brilliant lamps, windowless and doorless barriers that open mysteriously, bridges of radiance over precipices and oceans, broad highways of sunlight, narrow paths of moonlight. beams of radiance emanating from the breast of holy beings on moonless nights, lightning flashes prolonged in ecstasy, angels of Light, ladders of Light. and stairways of Light--these are the landscape of the mystic way. Spiritual travelers encounter these forms of Light. which take form temporarily and change form instantly, as they traverse the infinite dimensions of the unified field of Light in bodies of Light drawn to the single goal of Light."

-Lex Hixon, Atom from the Sun of Knowledge at 162, Pir Publications (1993).

"There was never a time when I did not exist, nor you - nor will there be any future in which we shall cease to be."

-Sri Krishna, the Bhagavad-Gita


We may wish to consider the implications of that quotation given a chance that it may happen to be accurate. If this is eternity, is it hell for heaven to you? Would you like to see everything rattle and hum along like this forever?

Do we have choices about our perceptions and experiences in the universe's longest-running road show? If so, what are they and how do we put them into action?

Why do we suppose we are awake?

Bawa Muhaiyadden - Dreaming While Awake - Taken From Lex Hixon's, Coming Home

"'. . . Our intentions become like vows, our vows become like ideas, our ideas become like sleep and our sleep turns into dreams. These are the dreams seen in the time of darkness.'

. . .

'Desire becomes lust, lust becomes delusion, delusion becomes the mind, the mind becomes dark, glitters come in the darkness as the appearance of mental visions. Mental visions become the world, the world becomes men, the men become actors. This act becomes a man's life. Man's life becomes an act which he is acting. This act is the daydream. This is the dream seen in the day.'" . . ."

escapefromwatchtower.com/bawadreaming.html [escapefromwatchtower.com/bawadreaming.html]

Emerson - Divinity School Address

Emerson explains why nonviolence works the way described by Dr. and Mrs. King, even though Emerson was not addressing the exquisite power of nonviolent action in the manner developed in the 20th Century:

From: Emerson - Divinity School Address


"The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus; in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie, -- for example, the taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance, -- will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell.

These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed, that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that will, is everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise. Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death."

Complete surrender works

For those who don't like to plow through 19th Century Emerson to get the gist of the Law he lovingly describes, here is a handy cartoon clip that explains the same principle. Complete surrender works the first time, every time. Indeed, it's the only thing that works.

Easy to say, hard to do.

What does this clip have to do with that idea? Watching it a few times will answer the question.

Even for those who eventually settle upon this answer, the presumption often is that the winning strategy of complete surrender only applies to inner torments, such as fear, depression, addiction, compulsion, and the unfathomable demons of the mind. Does the strategy of surrender apply to external events, such as conflicts in the workplace and home, or more dramatically, nations and war?

Jesus, Gandhi, Buddha, and Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrated the power of peace. So did Mohamed, who pardoned his enemies when he took Mecca. Did these great souls intend we should drop the internal knives we use to hurt ourselves and others, but cling to the tangible weapons of defense and offense?

Are there different love and fear rules for inside and outside? Is there an inside that is not the outside?

The secret of secrets

If you could get rid
Of yourself just once,
The secret of secrets
Would open to you.
The face of the unknown,
Hidden beyond the universe
Would appear on the
Mirror of your perception.

- Rumi

http://www.nuradeen.com/ASK/ASKConferences/ASKConference2004/IslamOfTheMind.htm