Christian mystic who's digging on existence while tripping a little light fantastic! I really enjoy seeing the universal and cosmic through the Christian frame.
Joined April 2011
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If you listen you can hear the eternal song of the universe. Singing out:
🎶 Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
We can tune into this at anytime. Drinking deeply the sweet succor of our simple being. Our very molecules dancing
Watch your thoughts. We're creatures of habit and so even our thoughts can be habitual. Like "It's 2pm time to think about how everything sucks!" And that can go unnoticed. So it's kinda like carrying a turd in your pocket and taking it out for a whiff periodically. Then being convinced it smells like shit everywhere.
This whole dynamic can happen unnoticed. We can have crappy moods that are unknowingly spawned from our crappy views and ideas that carry around.
It's not that the world sucks or life sucks, it's 9/10 that your thought suck. Don't harbor a shitty world view! Look around take it in and at least reach for a neutral view. Trust me even that can feel like a stretch when you've been hanging out in such a negative mind.
It’s a fine line you know… I’m not trying to preach or convert anyone to Christianity. I’m a Christian mystic so I enjoy that language that gives and I enjoy speaking non-dualistically from within this frame.
However I worry sometimes it may sound more exclusive when I’m wanting to be inclusive. I also want to show what’s cool at the heart of a Christ centered path.
I’m just trying to communicate something universal through a language that many people have learned to hear as exclusive.
We tend to imagine that our independence is what secures our dignity. Thus, to receive our existence from another, or to locate our identity in relation to God, sounds like a diminishment of the self.
So when we talk about God's will, the language surrounding it can rankle, particularly when people hear "God's will" through the familiar framework of domination and submission. Our conventional picture is hierarchical, with God as sovereign and humanity as subject. Thus, to surrender to God's will can sound like forfeiting our own.
Yet at the heart of the Christian frame is a rather radical inversion.
In Christ, we see revealed a God whose greatness does not require our diminishment. The Highest of the high kneels to wash our feet, even willingly suffering and dying for us and our folly. Perhaps this is the cosmic order all the way down, from heartbeat to molecule. Love is holding it all together, sustaining us and making our very existence possible.
In this, I am seeing that the Father's will includes my own. Not alien or imposed upon me, but of and for me. So thus the more I come into alignment with it, the more fully I become myself.
Scandalously, this idea runs counter to our usual conception of ourselves, which implies a sort of self sourcing. We imagine that to be truly ourselves, we must somehow originate ourselves. We conceive of the self as something that stands apart from everything else, insular in both experience and nature.
Yet existence doesn't actually work like that.
No one chooses to exist. The very language we think in was handed to us well before we could ask for it. My sense of who I am was formed and galvanized in the faces of people who looked upon me, who either delighted in me or did not. Even my next breath isn't something I author.
I am received, all the way down.
So perhaps surrender isn't handing one's will over to be crushed or discarded. It's more like turning toward the source we've been drawing from all along, finding and delighting in the discovery that the life flowing from there was always meant to become my own.
God's will is cosmic. It is that from which all existence derives. Thus, to surrender to it is not to disappear, but to discover a kind of freedom, a revelation of self.
I find it quite interesting and perhaps radical how Christ doesn't merely announce that we're participating in existence. He demonstrates what it looks like to live from that recognition.
"Of myself I can do nothing." (John 5:30)
"The Father who dwells in me does the works." (John 14:10)
Jesus provides the model for sonship, AKA being wholly yourself while living entirely from another. Receiving your life rather than manufacturing it... A posture of beginner’s mind that's held forever the Son only does what he sees the Father doing.
In Christ our relationship to the father isn't an isolated self attempting to produce righteousness, lover or even life through sheer personal effort. Instead He consistently exemplifies one of unbroken communion, receptivity, and participation.
Thus mystical realization doesn't erase individuality and rather it transforms our understanding of what individuality is.
The invitation is to discover that the one who's long imagined themselves as carrying existence is infact being held and carried all along.
In feeling ourselves as seperate from existence, we liken ourselves to Atlas. We carry the burden of our own existence. With the scalpel that is our discernment of "what is me, and not me" we cut ourselves off from the flow, defining ourselves by/as effort itself...
Yet everything we are stands upon a rhythm that arrives unbidden. A constant thrum that shakes atoms and beats hearts. And as we see ourselves as apart from this rhythm we can never know rest.
Christ is the revelation of our participation in that which we call a lifetime.
Perhaps it could be said that our conventional ideas and frameworks for who we are and what this life is do not begin to begin to exhaust the truth of that.
Yet, if we rely on them to be fully comprehensive and relegate what a lifetime is to their accounting of it then we ourselves will become exhausted.
It is very easy to become disillusioned with the world, with life. Especially when we feel confident in our knowledge of it.
The good news is that often what we are dismayed about isn’t life itself, but our idea is about it. It is possible to remember how to look and see, to receive the world as it is, instead of how we imagine it to be.
One of my favorite teachings is in Matthew 7:5, to first remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will be able to see clearly enough to remove the splinter from your brother's eye. There is deep wisdom in this teaching. It's basically a map.
The first thing anyone wants to do after having some spiritual insight is apply it to others. It's a natural impulse. However, half the time we haven't fully integrated the insight ourselves, and so we end up wielding it like a bludgeon at the next person.
This teaching is about clear seeing, and in order to see clearly, we must first attend to ourselves before we can genuinely help others.
The plank in our own eye is made up of all the ways we live out of alignment with our true nature. It's our fears, our attachments, and our misguidedness. These things distort our vision, coloring how we perceive ourselves, others, and even God.
To remove the plank, we have to do the spiritual work.
In a Christ-centered path, that looks like repentance, prayer, forgiveness, humility, and surrender. But it also involves something more intimate. It involves coming to know ourselves as we are known by God.
Like a loving father, God speaks to us from the truth of who we are, even when we cannot yet recognize it ourselves. We learn to hear, to trust, and to heed that voice, gradually growing into the truth being revealed to us.
This is a relational path, so it's less a matter of trying harder to become a better person and more about cultivating a willingness to receive what we cannot manufacture for ourselves.
That all takes work and time, and it exposes us to our own failings, shortcomings, and most importantly, God's forbearance and steadfastness in the face of them.
I think it's a process that naturally engenders humility. And as we begin to see ourselves more clearly, we're in a much better position to see someone else. We can recognize our own folly, our own hurt, and our own belovedness reflected in other people.
Then, instead of merely seeing sinners and sin, we can borrow the gaze of the Father and see people in their wholeness.
We can recognize someone whose identity is not exhausted by their mistakes, their wounds, or the ways they've gone astray.
We begin to see others in light of the same love by which we've come to recognize ourselves.
Without the more contemplative and monastic aspects of Christianity I think you can end up very knowledgeable about the faith without being touched by it. One can end up being religious in their beliefs, as if pure mental assent was enough.
The funny thing I’ve been finding about reducing my baseline suffering is realizing how much I was suffering and didn’t even notice. Regular waves of anxiety weren’t even registering other problem. Healing made me more aware of these patterns of suffering.
Can I interest anyone in some…
~☆Scripture & Mysticism☆~
Lets dive into one of the core tenets in Christianity and perhaps see a little of what's been hiding in plain sight.
Eternal Life
John 5:24: Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.
This is perhaps the primary invitation in the faith. The heart of this invitation is often lost in dogmatic and legalistic interpretation. Many hear this as a quid pro quo agreement. "If you believe in Jesus, then you will be given Eternal life" However such an interpretation robs us of the heart of what's being offered here, as well as veils how we can come by it. We end up anxious thinking that salvation lies in holding correct beliefs, as if intellectual assent is what unlocks the gift. Such a view places the power in doctrine rather than it's actual source.
What Jesus is pointing to here is not some divine transaction and rather a revelation that leads to true transformation. The key here is the word eternal, which doesn't just mean never ending, or a long time. He doesn't say we will be granted an immortal life some day in the future. Eternal speaks to timelessness, it means beyond time, outside of time, untouched by beginning or end. Thus the grace of the offering is that it happens within/during our lifetime rather than after. This is not a future promise it is a present reality. This is about communion with that which is already eternal within us, it is participation in the divine life.
A life in which judgement is no longer feared, because love has already embraced you.
The path to such peace isn’t gated behind harboring the correct beliefs. It isn’t a test of theological precision or perfect doctrine. Rather, it is a shift in awareness; a reorientation of the heart. In fact if we were to drop all beliefs, to let go of every concept, every grasping for mental certainty and simply sink into the stillness of our own being, we might find that this truth becomes glaringly obvious. Not as something we figure out and rather a living truth to behold.
Notice the ending of this verse "but has passed from death to life." This isn't poetic flair, it is spiritual diagnosis. Jesus is saying that apart from this awakening, we are not truly alive. We may be breathing, thinking, building and even believing, but until we are aware of the eternal, we are still in a kind of death. A sleep walking existence. Life lived as separate from God, from others, from our own true self.
This “death” Jesus speaks of isn’t about punishment, it’s about forgetfulness. It’s the fog we live in when we’ve forgotten who we are and whose we are. When we lose sight of the love that holds us, we begin to feel separate from existence, from others, even from our own hearts.
It’s not about agreeing with a set of ideas. It’s about something deeper: a shift, a crossing over, a sense that we’ve stepped out of fear and into love. Out of confusion and into clarity. Out of sleep and into a life that feels full, connected, and real.
This is what it means to pass from death to life. Not someday. Now.
So perhaps the question isn’t do you believe the right things? but rather have you tasted the life that is already yours?
Eternal life isn’t waiting for you.
It’s already whispering within you:
“Wake up, beloved. You’re home.”
If we want to know God, we will invariably reach a point where we must set down our favored heuristics as the final arbiters of what can be known.
Recognize that we aren't merely hoping to believe in God on the strength of airtight logic and inference. We're seeking an entirely different kind of knowing, and with it a different kind of satisfaction.
A satisfaction not born of compelling evidence or impeccable reasoning, but of direct apprehension.
Not merely knowing about God, but knowing God.
God’s hiddenness resembles our own. We can go our whole lives feeling as if we know who we are all the while only having some idea. Or one can be entirely unsure even as they inhabit the self they don’t recognize. The sort of hiding that is done in plain sight.
It's a hiddeness that greater self knowledge can't quite resolve, only deepen the mystery. Mystery sits at the center of this, and I think it helps to have a mystical understanding/appreciation for mystery. Mystery doesn't mean unknown, it means infinitely knowable, like an unending horizon receding at each step, ever revealing more to see.
For the mystic "I know" can become a dead end, a case closed. "I don't know" is an open window, an invitation look and seek to know more. This kind of open ended posture is what's needed to seek God, and to see God within the details of what is known.
We are most intimate with ourselves and yet the self can remain what is most hidden from our sight. And part of that is because we are not within our own sight, we see through our own existence. Hiddenness and intimacy aren't opposites. It is intamcy that tends to reveals how much remains hidden.
God's hiddenness is like this. We cannot step outside what God is doing to inspect God from a distance. Yet just as we can come to recognize ourselves from within our own existence, we can come to recognize God's character through His works, which include our very being.
Mystic Axiom #57
Don't make dissatisfaction the engine of your life!
When our attention is perpetually fixed on what's wrong or missing, we can become extraordinarily accomplished without ever feeling fulfilled. Our powerful problem solving minds can give us a kind of tunnel vision that only lets us see what needs doing.
The good news is life needn't be approached as a problem awaiting a solution.
Goodness is its own reward. We can be moved not merely by what's wrong and needs correcting, but by what's good and worth nurturing. Once we acquire a taste for this it can become self perpetuating. We can become solution oriented, fixing our sights on what's good and what's working.
The mystic knows this is life giving. It is possible to cultivate the eyes to see silver linings, overlooked aundance. Not to deny what's wrong, but to recognize that what's wrong is never the whole story.
We needn't be driven by what's missing when we can be drawn by what's good.
Coming back around to Christian mysticism after developing my Zen sensabilities I have really come to love the implications of grace working upon us. That is it's a practice/path that implies & anticipates divine action. Someone other than me making the first move. I think thats pretty radical.
So much of my prior practice was built around my own abilities and attainments, my own efforts. That has all served me well but within Christian mysticism I find this invitation to put all that down for a moment. An invitation to stop working on love, and to instead let love work on me. A paradigm shift from I - it/subject-object, to I-Thou/Subject-Subject.
All thats been asked of me.. of perhaps anyone isn't to do more, perfect this or that... just to be still and know, to taste and see, to ask and recieve. I have found this to be fairly disruptive to my usual form, expectations and posture. I love it.