In Yoke

Jesus is the icon of what Paul in I Corinthians 2:6-16 alludes to as Christ Consciousness --the unitive view of life that 'encompasses paradox'. He is :  human-yet divine; heavenly-yet earthly; physical-yet spiritual; possessing a male body-yet a female soul; killed-yet alive; powerless- yet powerful; victim- yet victor; failure-yet redeemer; marginalized-yet central; singular-yet everyone; incarnate-yet cosmic; nailed-yet liberated; in one person solving the great philosophical problem of the One and the many. Take this an a Christian axiom: (1) All statements and beliefs about Jesus are also statements and beliefs about the journey of the soul (birth, chosenness, ordinary life, initiation, career, misunderstanding, and opposition, failure, death in several forms, resurrection, and return to God); (2) All statements about the Christ are statements about the Body of Christ, too. We are not the Historical Jesus, but we are the body of Christ. "Christ...

As pure water poured into pure water becomes the very same, so does the Self of the illumined man or woman verily become one with the Godhead.  ~Katha Upanishad Easwaran notes that for some reason, it is very difficult for us to accept our divine nature. “This has always puzzled me. We pay money for books about how destructive we are. We stand in line to see movies that emphasize our capacity for making trouble.” Then, when Jesus comes to tell us that the kingdom of heaven is within us, we say, "There must be some mistake." It is to convince us that our real Self is always pure and eternal that men and women of God keep arising among us. More than anything, we need to hear their good news that the source of all joy and security is right within. In the Hindu scriptures there is a precise term for our real nature: the Atman. All it means is "the Self" - not the little self, the changing personality with which most of us identify, but the higher Self, our re...

Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose. -William Cowper We often think that if we go after what we want, we will probably get it; then we will be happy and secure. The mass media have latched onto this line of thinking and intone it like a litany: grab, grab, grab! Yet sooner or later the whole smorgasbord of things begins to lose its luster. Then the sensitive person asks, "If I go on grabbing and grabbing, at what point do I become secure and feel no more need to grab?" This question can lead to some far-reaching changes in our lives. Our needs are much too big to be satisfied with things, no matter how many we can manage to acquire. The more we try to get, the more acutely we feel those bigger, undeniable needs. Our deepest need is for the joy that comes with loving and being loved, with knowing we are of genuine use to others. The more we give of ourselves to others,...

"Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little." -Plutarch With every thought, we are working on our destiny. When a sculptor creates an elephant, each touch of the chisel shapes the stone. While carving an eye he barely strokes the stone, but those light strokes are as vital as the rough shaping blows. There is no such thing as an unimportant blow.  Similarly, every thought shapes our lives. There is no such thing as a little thought, no such thing as an unimportant thought. It may be heavy, it may be light, but it always should be well-directed, with discrimination and precision. ~Easwaran Sometimes I get a sense that the challenges that we are facing as well intentioned individuals are overwhelming. From time to time, as I survey and experience the anger, distrust and the issues that seem to endlessly cause separation between my friends at church, it affects me...

As an irrigator guides water to the fields, as an archer aims an arrow,as a carpenter carves wood, the wise shape their lives. -The Buddha The glory of the human being is our ability to remake ourselves. The Buddha is very rightly called the Compassionate One because he holds out hope for everybody. He doesn’t say our past has been dark, therefore our chances are dim. He says whatever our past, whatever our present,the sky is bright for us because we can remake ourselves. The Buddha says, be a good woodworker. Consciousness is the wood, and you can make it take any shape you like. Just as a carpenter works the wood to build a house or a fine piece of furniture, similarly we can fashion the responses and attitudes we desire: love, wisdom, security, patience,loyalty, enthusiasm, cheerfulness. _my teacher, Eknath Eswaran _____________________________________________________________ I confess--- this is not an easy thing to consider. It seems that the more I seek --in my own power--and acc...

Ah! would the heart but be a manger for the birth, God would become once more a little child of earth. Immeasurable is the Highest! Who but knows it? And yet a human heart can perfectly enclose it. -Angelus Silesius ____________________________________ May your heart be filled with The Spirit of Christ, so that you can truly worship The Son of God who became the son of man. Merry Christmas.

Manifest plainness, Embrace simplicity, Reduce selfishness, Have few desires. -Lao Tzu Detachment from likes and dislikes, habits and opinions, is not a sign of weakness. It is an enormously strong and positive quality. Nor does freedom from likes and dislikes mean that life is insipid for us, but rather that we are not driven compulsively by rigid ways of thinking. Even if we don't get what we want - or if we do get what we don't want - we can still function cheerfully and efficiently. Detachment from habits does not mean that we have no habits.Good habits can be very useful to cultivate in life. But we should be able to change our habits gracefully, or drop them altogether when necessary, especially if we learn that they are harmful to us or are not exactly endearing us to those around us. If we are used to a cup of coffee every morning with our breakfast and one morning we discover that we are out of coffee, we don't say, "I can't function without my coffee,...

"Like a ball batted back and forth, a human being is batted by two forces within." -Yogabindu Upanishad "As human beings we have a divided nature - partly physical, but essentially spiritual. We are constantly batted by two conflicting forces. One force is the fierce downward thrust of our past conditioning as separate, self-oriented, physical creatures. Yet built into our very nature is an inner drive that will not let us be satisfied with a life governed only by biological laws. Some inner evolutionary imperative is constantly exhorting us to grow, to reach for the highest that we can conceive." Eswaran I liken this ancient Indian spiritual teaching in the Upanishad to the concepts of the False Self and the Essential Self. "The Work" of Transformation would cast the dilemma in the terms of being open to an objective observation of the driving force within my life. Which of the polar opposite influences in my life do I follow? 1. The Holy Ghost , expansi...

I have been studying the works of Kabir Helminski , a contemporary Sufi mystic. His book, "Living Presence, has had a profound effect on me, and has profoundly impacted my own personal journey of transformation. The Sufi descriptions of the fundamental aspects of the Self as defined and utilized through Shaikh Helminski's teachings have been quite instructive. It applies to me, quite pointedly, and I believe in varied ways and from varied points of view, to all of us. What I believe I pursued for the first 45 years of my life, was a constructed, fearful and compulsive self, driven by ego and my own sense of "I, me and mine". I have become accepting of this the more I have grown in "The Work" of transformation. What the process has involved in my own sense of awareness and awakening is to become fully cognizant to what is contained within my Essential Self, where my own true, un-constructed soul emanates. This is where "Spirit" is manifest. Thi...

"Know One, know all." -from the Katha Upanishad To know others, you do not have to go and knock on four billion separate doors. Once you have seen your real Self, you have seen the Self in all. It makes it easy to understand and to forgive, and very difficult to quarrel. All of life springs from the same root. The Self in each of us is one and the same. For this Self, different names are given in different traditions. Christian mystics call it the Christ within. When a person ceases to identify with his perishable self, they say he has become Christ-conscious . The Hindu mystics speak of Krishna-consciousness, or say that such a person has attained complete freedom from the conditioning of time, space, and circumstance. The Buddhists call the same state nirvana, from nir, "out" and vana, "to blow." The ego has been extinguished; there is no more shadow to be mistaken for the real.