12/15/7 - Mysticism, Compassion and Silence

Mysticism, Compassion and Silence

12/15/7

In the chapter “Angels and Demons” in my book Heart Wide Open, I briefly discuss the topic of “Mysticism” as defined in the Illuminati book called Neo-Tech.

The next time we were up in Salt Lake I had Brad take me to the storage unit to locate the infamous book.   We somehow found it.  It was a black inch-thick paperback with the title NEO-TECH DISCOVERY by Frank R. Wallace—Prosperity and Happiness through Personal Affairs and Relationships, Business, Finance and Investing, Art and Pleasures.  I was sure it was the same book talked about on the Illuminati Internet site as their Nouveau Tech book.  I turned to the inside cover, which sported a picture of the San Francisco Bay area with its impressive bridges and buildings with the subtitle “Nature Conquered” in bold letters.

“A bit arrogant, aren’t they?” I said to myself as I began reading the book in the car on our trip back to Las Vegas.

“Listen to this bullshit,” I told Brad as we drove.  “This is the whole underlying premise for the book.”

“Neo-Tech is a noun or adjective meaning fully integrated honesty.  Neo-Tech allows the guiltless creation of earned power, prosperity, and romantic love.”

“That doesn’t sound like bullshit to me—that actually sounds right on target,” Brad commented.

           

“Just wait a minute—let me go on.”  I continued reading from the large, black, Neo-Tech volume.

“Neo-Tech is a collection of ‘new techniques’ or ‘new technology’ that lets one know exactly what is happening and what to do for gaining maximum advantages in all situations.  That technology is needed to be competent—to guiltlessly and honestly obtain the wealth and happiness available to everyone but achieved by so few.  Neo-Tech provides the power to profit in every situation by nullifying neocheating and all other forms of mysticism, not only in others but within one’s own self.  Indeed, Neo-Tech eliminates mysticism—eliminates the harm of all mystics, false authorities, neocheaters, and their infinite array of deceptions.  Neo-Tech lets a person gather all power unto one’s own self while rendering mystics and neocheaters impotent…. Neo-Tech is the process of converting outmoded bicameral mind (the automatic, split mind as described in Neo-Tech III) guided by mysticism and external “authorities” to a new, independent mind guided by guiltless, rational advantages.

“Well, who can argue with that—I’ve always told you I have a problem with mysticism.”  Brad commented.

 “Do you even know what the word ‘mysticism’ means?”  I replied.

We then embarked on our age-old argument about mysticism—which is a subject that gets gnawed-on, chewed-up, spit-out but never digested.  I argued that most people didn’t understand the true meaning of the word, “mysticism.”  They thought it was something mysterious, incomprehensible and evil.  But if you looked up the word in the dictionary, the meaning implies “the process of obtaining a direct connection with God.”  This was the path of the proverbial mystic—to  obtain direct contact with God or Gnosis which means “to know for oneself.”  This book, Neo-tech, indeed discounted mystics and, by the same token, discounted the reality of God.  This was always the roadblock in Brad and my relationship as he discounted my “mystical” experiences as being psychotic episodes and impossible to prove.  I could tell he’d bought into this Neo-tech thing, hook, line, and sinker, years before we’d met.  Now we’d finally gotten down to the root of our problems.  I was a believer in mysticism—he was not.

       

I scanned through the pages to discover Neo-tech’s definition of

mysticism.

“Mysticism is defined as: 1. Any mental, psychological, or physical-force attempt to recreate or alter reality through dishonesty, rationalizations, non-sequitur, emotions, deceptions, or force.  2. Any attempt to evade reality or contradict life.

“Mysticism is a disease—an epistemological disease that progressively undermines one’s capacity to think, to identify reality, to live competently.  Mysticism is also a collective disease that affects everyone who looks toward others, or the group, or the leader for solutions to his or her problems and responsibilities.  The symptoms of mysticism are dishonest communication, out-of-context assertions or attacks, use of non-sequiturs, jumbled or non-integrated thinking.  Those symptoms are most commonly exhibited by neocheating politicians, clergyman, union leaders, media commentators, university professors, entertainment personalities.  Such public neocheaters are the Typhoid-Mary spreaders of mysticism.  In fact, through the ages, the most virulent spreaders of mysticism have been those neocheaters who wangle respect and values from legions of life-fearing, dependent people populating this world.  Mysticism is a disease.   But it is also the tool that neocheaters use to justify or rationalize the use of force, fraud, or dishonesty to usurp values from the producers.  For example, mysticism is used to create illusionary standards and false guilt designed to beguile individuals into surrendering their earned values and happiness.

   

“Mysticism is also the leaving the mind open to irrational ideas as well as trying to impose irrational ideas onto others.  Mysticism is the fertilizer of deception.

“Mysticism is a rebellion against life, effort, values, and the conscious mind.  Mysticism brands people with government faces and is the neocheater’s tool for controlling others and plundering producers.

“Mysticism is based on a false and evil idea: the primacy of emotions.  Mysticism is the opposite of Neo-Tech.

“Mysticism is the only disease of the conscious mind.  But as with drugs and alcohol, mysticism is seductive—seemingly comfortable, like a warm, old friend…until the destructive consequences and hangovers manifest themselves.

“Neocheating is defined as: Any intentional use of mysticism designed to create false “realities” or illusions in order to extract values from others…Neocheating is the technique for expropriating unearned money or power by using mysticism to manipulate thinking defaults in others.  Neocheating is the means by which politicians, clergymen, union leaders, many journalists and the academe usurp power and values.”

“Okay, I do agree with one thing here—that there are a lot of mystics out there trying to usurp other people’s power by becoming a “medium” or go-between them and God.  But someone who is truly a mystic and receives direct communication with God would never try to interfere, but encourage each individual to obtain a direct communication with God.  But to deny that there is such a thing as authentic mysticism and authentic mystics is not being…what is it they called Neo-tech?…“fully integrated honesty.”

I knew I’d opened up the proverbial “can of worms” but I thought I’d give it one more shot.

“Well, you’ve yet to prove to me anything about your own so-called “mystical experiences” or direct connection with God.  All I have to go by is your own purported experiences with Patrick and your Kundalini experiences at Harbin.  I’ve never experienced anything like that myself so maybe they only exist in your own mind.”

“So what about Harold and Richard and Shantam?  And a whole lot of others who practice Eastern Mysticism?  Are we all experiencing a group hallucination of mysticism?  Or what about the other mystics who have experienced altered states of consciousness like Jesus or Buddha or Muhammad…or even Joseph Smith?  Are we all products of delusional experiences?  Just because we can’t prove our experiences to non-believers doesn’t mean they don’t exist.  It’s like telling a person who is color-blind that colors exist.  It may be beyond his scope of reality to comprehend them—but to others who have eyes to see—there is a verdant rainbow of color that defines our reality.  You can’t define your reality by someone else’s reality.  It’s all relative to the individual’s perception or belief system concerning life.  I love Brian’s statement on his e-mail address: We don’t see things as they are—we see things as we are.”

           

So now let’s look at the other side of mysticism as defined in Matthew Fox’s book, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ.

What is meant by mysticism?  Let us begin our exploration with the etymological meanings of the word.

The word mysticism comes for the Greek mystikos, which seems to have two basic meanings: to “shut one’s senses” and to “enter the mysteries.”  These two meanings are related because one is more fully open to the mysteries to the extent that one, paradoxically, has learned to shut one’s sense (i.e., has ceased projecting and is open-minded)…When a mortification-of-the-senses ideology links up with a distrust of body and nature, then we equate mysticism with an asceticism understood as control over passion, senses, and self.  Such denigration of the blessing that passions are, serves well a basic patriarchal ideology of “power-over-others: persons, creatures, Mother Earth, creation itself.  “You cannot undervalue the body and elevate the soul.” Wendell Berry warns.

The creation-centered tradition does not traffic in “mortification of the senses” because it recognizes passion, body, senses, and sensuality as part of that divine gift, that original blessing, that touches the depths of awe and gratitude in our lives.  There is no regret for being body in the creation tradition and no need to punish the body or to seek mastery over it or over others.  Compassion is the basic energy force and indeed moral norm of this tradition and, as Meister Eckhart put it, “compassion begins at home with my body and soul”  How can we be compassionate toward others if we are not compassionate toward that basic gift we have all received, namely our bodies?...One might say that the “shutting of senses” means to pull the plug regularly on the television set or to go out occasionally to the desert, into the woods, or to the sea to just be.  There is no moral imperative for shutting down the senses because they are evil or “out of control.”  Rather we let go of sensory input because the input itself may be poisonous or polluted, or simply overwhelming to soul and body.  Thus one does “shut of one’s senses” as a kind of purification—not because the senses are evil but because they are such blessings that they deserve a housecleaning in order to be renewed and restored.  The purification is not so much of the senses as of the sensory input to which they have been subjected….They are means and not ends.  The end is to awaken rather than deaden the senses…It calls for a spiritual awakening to the mystery of the universe and our existence in it.  Reentering that mystery is a fundamentally holy and a sacred discipline.  We must call upon the spiritual athlete within ourselves to enter that mystery fully…The creation tradition understands mysticism primarily as our entering the fullness of the mystery of our existence, the gift and blessing of creation itself.

Quite the contrast—wouldn’t you say?  It’s no wonder the Illuminate has gained control over “The Matrix.”  Their whole goal is “to gain maximum control in all situations.”  They are doing a fantastic job as witnessed in politics, religion, economics, the media, healthcare, education, the environment—the list goes on and on.  And we simply sit back and succumb to the control that they have imposed upon us thinking we have no other choice.  But we do have a choice.  There is another Matrix—a Divine Matrix—that we are all apart of.  And what is the power that runs this Matrix?  Thank God it isn’t learning control over others, but it is learning compassion.  Compassion?  What about compassion?  How can compassion yield against the “powers that be” so that we are able to “be the power that is.”  In Gregg Braden’s book, The Divine Matrix, he speaks about the power of compassion.

“What connects us with one another, our world, and the universe?  What’s the ‘stuff’ that carries our prayers beyond our bodies and holds the world together?”  The abbot looked directly at me as our translator echoed my question in Tibetan.

Instinctively, I glanced to the guide, who was our go-between for the entire conversation.  I wasn’t prepared for the translation that I heard coming back to me. “Compassion,” he said.  “The geshe (great teacher) says that compassion is what connects us.”

“How can that be?” I asked, looking for clarity in what I was hearing.  “Is he describing compassion as a force of nature or as an emotional experience?”  Suddenly, an animated exchange broke out as the translator put my question to the abbot.

“Compassion is what connects all things” was his final answer.  And that was it!   Following nearly ten minutes of intensive dialogue involving the deepest elements of Tibetan Buddhism, all I got to hear was those six words!

A few days later Gregg had the opportunity to ask another Tibetan monk the same question.

            Just as I’d asked the abbot only days before, I posed the same question (through the translator) to the monk: “Is compassion a force of creation, or is it an experience?”  His eyes turned to the place on the ceiling where I’d been looking only seconds before, taking a deep sigh, he thought for a moment, collecting the wisdom of what he’d learned since entering the monasteries at the age of eight.  (He appeared to be in his mid-20s now.)  Suddenly, he lowered his eyes, looking at me as he responded.  The answer was short, powerful, and made tremendous sense.  “It is both,” were the words that came back to me from the monk.  “Compassion is both a force in the universe as well as a human experience.”

            After hearing Gregg Braden speak about this same topic during his weekend seminar last month, I was increasingly curious about some of the deeper meanings of compassion since compassion is such a powerful force and profound experience.  Again, God supplied me with the answers to some of my deeper inquiries through another dynamic author, Matthew Fox in his book, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ.  I’d like to share those with you.

The Hebrew word for compassion is derived from the word for womb.  Womb love, mother love, creative love are all part of the power we know as compassion.  It is here that Jesus’ teaching to be “compassionate as your Creator in heaven is compassionate” (Luke, 6:36) is explicitly a maternal revelation of divinity.  Jesus seized elements in his Jewish tradition that were most maternal—the wisdom sayings and the call to compassion.  This invitation to divine motherhood seriously challenged the religious system of his day.  The crucifixion of Jesus was the logical result of his frontal assault on patriarchy…There is a promise of maternal eros in all this—the eros of food and drink, of common banqueting, and of returning to a lost mother love—that of divinity itself…

Religion and culture that represses and distorts the maternal will also repress the ancient tradition of God as Mother and of the goddess in every person.  Jesus came to restore that truth to the patriarchal and militaristic culture of his day.  He also came to awaken the creativity in every person, i.e., every mother, male as well as female…

True redemption is always about compassion—an awakening of passion with God and all God’s creation and children, especially the suffering ones.  Compassion is not about pity or feeling sorry for others.  It is born of shared interdependence, an intuition of and sense of awe for the wondrous fact that we all live and swim in one primordial divine womb, we live in fetal waters of cosmic grace!  Not only must we celebrate this, but we must struggle for those who are drowning in our midst because they are so deeply wounded by poverty of soul, body, or both.

The mark of the true Church, the believing Church, will always be as Jesus said it ought to be; wherever compassion is found.  In the future it will be compassion making—celebrating, healing, justice making—the living out of shared interdependence that will define the Church and its leadership.  For it is there that royal personhood is celebrated and the kingdom/queendom of God that Jesus promised was already among us…

Compassion is another word for the unitive experience and therefore another name for mysticism.  Compassion is the “keen awareness of the interdependence of all living things which are all part of one another and involved in one another”…In truth, compassion is the very origin and goal—as well as the process—of creation mysticism.  “The first outburst of everything God does,” Meister Eckhart says, “is compassion.”  This means that all creatures as children of God hold compassion in common.  Compassion is our universal heritage, our God-origin and our God-destiny.  Compassion unites us, it forms the common “field” that all creatures share.

Compassion is the thrust of Jesus’ message about the kingdom and about our role in it.  The summary to his Sermon on the Mount as presented in Luke’s Gospel is, “be you compassionate as your Creator in heaven is compassionate.”

If compassion is both a force in the universe and a human experience—isn’t that a perfect description of “God?  Could it be that John the Beloved’s definition—God is love—be the simplest and most succinct definition possible?  Often, when we see God as being outside of ourselves, we question whether or not God truly is love and loves us.  But it seems that when we are in “sinc” with God, or are completely surrendered to his/her will, then life seems to fall into perfect harmony.  It’s as if God, or the Holy Spirit, or the-spirit-that-moves-in-all things has a “prime directive” and that is to enfold us in the arms of holy, compassionate love.

There is a belief system heralded by the Mormon Church which I whole-heartedly embraced—and still do.  It is the beautiful concept that “Families are Forever.”  This, in essence, is their impetus for building temples and doing temple work.  Whether or not these “sealings in the temple for time and all eternity” are efficacious after we die (perhaps belief makes it so) the whole idea that we are sealed to those we love forever is a compelling concept.  I truly believe that a “sealing of one heart to another heart” happens each time we feel compassion for one another and see each other as “brothers and sisters,” “sons and daughters,” “mothers and fathers” and intimate lovers.  Could this “sealing or binding of each other’s hearts to one another” happen before we die rather then waiting until afterwards?  Could this truly be the compassion that could bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth?  

In the first chapter of my book, Becoming One—The Journey Forward to God, I explain this concept of what some have described as “Oneness.”

In the beginning we were all one.  That’s right, all of us were together—you and me; grandpa and grandma; Uncle Arthur and Aunt Hazel; your neighbor, Burt; the guy down the street who you can never remember his name; the bum on the corner who asked you for a hand-out yesterday.

We were all there together in one vast exquisite oneness we call heaven or “God.”  (Yes, even God was there, whatever you conceive him/her to be.)  And Mary, Jesus Christ, Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Enoch, etc.—all the big league heavy-hitters that helped to make up what the earth is today.  We were all together in the beginning like myriad pieces in one vast gigantic jigsaw puzzle.  The only thing different about what it was like then and what it is like now is that we were all put together in the right places (integrated, so to speak) so that the picture was perfect and we all knew who we were and where we belonged.

But as all jigsaw puzzles go, we were taken apart, piece by piece, and thrown down to this planet we call Earth to try and figure out just how that perfect picture we call “heaven” looked like and just how our piece of the puzzle fit in.

You see, we lost our recollection of the big picture, and sometimes we forget exactly how we fit into that picture to make it whole or complete.  Now it’s our job to remember how we fit in so that we can find our way back to that oneness known as God.  That’s what we call “re-membering.”

Sometimes it takes a dramatic shift of consciousness or an “awakening” before we “remember who we are.”  Kind of like Neo in “The Matrix” after he’d taken the “red pill.”  But there are other kinder ways of waking up and sometimes that means unplugging from the artificial “Matrix” and plugging into the “Divine Matrix.” 

When I was living up in the backwoods of Montana for nearly 15 years, it was easy for me to live a natural lifestyle of “what is real.”  Everything around me was real—the mountains, the trees, the plants, the animals, the water, the air—all these things validated the reality of God—his love and perfect grace for me.  Even so, there were times when I needed to go inside for some deep introspection.  I would often stay up at night, after a busy day of housekeeping, childcare and homeschooling, take out my spinning wheel and the rollags of wool I’d carded, and spin by the light of a kerosene lamp.  It was like a silent meditation for me and it made me feel so connected with source.  It was at these times I became the most open and creative.  I was often inspired to write poetry and the following poem is a tribute to my time spinning at my spinning wheel.

            Ode to My Spinning Wheel

When the world becomes too much for me…

I come to you.

And you take me on a long, thin, strand

To another land…

Where dreams come true.

Where clouds

Like unspun cotton lay,

Just grab ahold…

And spin away.

To where the broad

And crooked paths we trod,

Spin to straight and narrow ones…

Leading back to God.

Sometimes it’s good to take a “time-out” when life becomes too much for us.  That’s why winter is such a good time to follow what nature does—die to oneself and go inward.  In the silence of deep introspection, we can truly “wake up” to the true mystic within us.  To quote Matthew Fox once again:

The mystic approaches reality from a “both/and” rather than an “either/or” perspective.  While the mystic is passionate about imaging and sensitive to language, its death and its possibilities for rebirth, the mystic is also a befriender of silence.  Returning to the source of one’s being is rarely an experience that can be expressed in words.  Kabir says, “Anyone who has had a taste of this love is so enchanted that he is stricken with silence.”  Have you ever been “stricken with silence”?  If so, you have tasted the ineffable; you have had a mystical experience.  Silence is too often defined as “the absence of something” when it is much more than that.  Silence is also a search for something, a search for the depths.  For the source.  Many of the mystical awakenings experienced by astronauts and cosmonauts in space have been triggered by the cosmic silence they have encountered there.  Similar things happen to persons swimming in the depths of the sea or spelunking in the caves of Mother Earth.  Silence moves people.  That is why it is so essential to meditation practices, including the art of listening to our images.  Being, one might say, is silent.  We must embrace silence in order to experience being.  Then—and only then—does it speak deep truths to us…

That power from which the dance or the painting or the music or the struggle or the love or the lovemaking comes is silence.  A left-bran culture will be ill at ease with silence.  It will be excessively wordy.  Words can obscure the presence and power of the Divine as they so often do in worship services that have lost touch with their mystical roots and have succumbed to secularization.  The fear of silence runs deep in a culture void of mysticism.  Gregory Bateson celebrates the need and power of silence when he says:

Noncommunication of certain sorts is needed if we are to maintain the “sacred.”…There are many matters and many circumstances in which consciousness is undesirable and silence is golden, so that secrecy can be used as a marker to tell us that we are approaching holy ground.  Then if we had enough instances of the unuttered, we could begin to reach for a definition of the “sacred.”

In a previous Newsletter entitled “Community” I quoted M. Scott Peck as saying:

The overall purpose of human communication is—or should be—reconciliation.  It should ultimately serve to lower or remove the walls and barriers of misunderstanding that unduly separate us human beings from another.  The word “ultimately” is important.  Confrontive, even angry communication is sometimes necessary to bring into focus the clear reality of those barriers before they can be knocked down.  In the process of community-building, for instance, individual differences must first be allowed to surface and fought over so that the group can ultimately learn to accept, celebrate, and thereby transcend them.

When “confrontive, even angry communication” loses its focus of creating community and simply becomes combative and antagonistic, it’s time to take a break from this type of toxic communication altogether.  Perhaps it’s time for all of us to “leave off words” and simply go inside to find that mystical place of Godhood lying dormant within us.

And so, as one of my favorite movie characters, Forrest Gump, so raptly stated, “And that’s all I have to say about that.”  I’m signing off the air and allowing someone else to express themselves if desired.   Peace, love and joy always—Janae aka Jesse Christian alias “The White Buffalo Woman”